In a conversation with Nikunj Dalmia for SmallCap Spotlight, Dr. Aniruddha Malpani reflects on why the most meaningful learning comes from real-life experience—and why every entrepreneur must embrace contrarian thinking. From cultivating a T-shaped approach to skill building and honing a specialised niche to leveraging AI as a transformative learning tool, he underscores that the entrepreneurial journey holds greater value than the outcome itself. He also delves into founder success and failure stories, the emergence of community microschools, and the urgent need to shift from “just-in-case” education to student-first, just-in-time learning.
Nikunj Dalmia: You know, I must start with sharing a perspective here and Mubina set the tone here, but you know Being a professional television anchor in the first act of my life I always used to ask questions for my stomach. I would go on television and ask questions. Imagine what a job you ask questions for your stomach.
But sometimes when I would ask questions apart from a yes and a no, I would get stories and facts and here’s one story Here’s one individual. Here’s one personality who has lived many lives And you know, while a lot of great people have lived one life sir, Sachin Tendulkar, great divestment, Prime Minister Modi, great politician Mr. Malpani has lived many lives and he’s in his third innings right now. First inning, doctor, second inning, great investor, third inning when he’s giving it back.
He’s on a mission to really make sure that the entrepreneurs today can really become the captains of tomorrow. That is such a great point where he’s giving time, money and even effort. So thank you very much for what you do.
Aniruddha Malpani: You know what? I’m doing it for selfish reasons and I’m doing it for selfish reasons because when they make money, I make money too. But much more important than that is that the amount I get to learn. What I really loved about what Mr. Haribhakti says is the only one thing which keeps you young is curiosity and your desire to learn.
So it’s never your calendar age which really makes a difference and these guys teach me so much on a daily basis because the best way to learn is not to go to a classroom. The only way to learn is real life and like you correctly said, you know, I can’t be in multiple places multiple times. But all these guys absorb so much and because they’re entrepreneurs, they have to be contrarian.
They have to say whatever is in the world today, the incumbents are broken. They’re not doing a good job. This is the contrarian insight which I have and I can use that contrarian insight in order to provide more value to my users.
I think that’s so exciting that they come up with such stuff and some of them fail. Some of them do well. I’m not so fussed about the outcome, honestly, but I think the process by having the guts, by having the courage to say, you know what, this is what I’m going to do.
It just gives me so much inspiration.
Nikunj Dalmia: So tell us about your Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3.
Aniruddha Malpani: You know, I always remind people I’m still a practicing IVF doctor. It’s not like I’ve stopped.
I’m very good at what I do. I do it with my wife, who’s actually a far better doctor. So I’m more the supporting actor, but it’s much easier being a supporting actor.
And the good thing about doing IVF is there are no emergencies. Everything is by appointment. Everything is scheduled.
I must tell you, I’m trying to make myself redundant. So there are two things doctors do. One is they do consultations where they talk to the patient, make a diagnosis, formulate a treatment plan.
And the second is they actually treat the patient. I want the consultations to be done by my AI chatbot. My whole point is, why do you need to commute to Bombay to meet me when my chatbot can provide you exactly the same quality of information in the comfort of your home? It’s free.
It’s documented. It doesn’t get grumpy. It doesn’t get hangry.
It talks any language you want. So that’s something which really excites me. So I think that’s the other thing.
The good thing about being a doctor and being an angel investor is that you can arm twist your founders into using technology in order to provide a better service to my patients. So I think that’s been a lot of fun. To your second point, a lot of what I learned about investing, I learned because Rakesh Jhunjhunwala was such a good friend.
You know, it’s fun reading and reading books is great. So you read about value investing and stuff. But when you actually see it play out in real life, I think it’s just transformational because theory is theory, practice is practice.
So I think that was great. And then I think thanks to him. Now I have the confidence to be able to say, great, now I need to move on to the next step.
But you know what? There will be a fourth inning. There will be a fifth inning. I haven’t stopped yet.
Until, of course, the umpire upstairs say, OK, boss, it’s done. Give someone else a chance. OK.
Nikunj Dalmia: When, what is that one thing which you’ve learned from Rakesh Jhunjhunwala as an individual, as an investor? And where is that you have added another layer of original thinking to the way you invest?
Aniruddha Malpani: I think what is really remarkable about Rakesh is that he was willing to be optimistic. And, you know, we all talk about trillion dollar economies and stuff, but a lot of that wasn’t true 30 years ago, as Mr. Haribhakti said, you know, this used to be a place where you would still cry out about the brokers would share. And you’ve seen so much of that transition.
And Rakesh’s favorite line was India has done so well, even though we’re running barefoot. Just imagine what happens when you put shoes on this runner. So I think that sense of optimism, that sense of growth, that’s great.
And I think the more important thing also is the patience, because, you know, you can’t really go with the ups and downs of the market. You know, there’ll be good days, there’ll be bad days. But Rakesh had the courage of his convictions.
And I think that just makes such a big difference to the way I look at things. And to your point, I think, you know, I’m never going to be as wealthy as Rakesh. I can’t do stuff in the listed space, take the kind of bets he did.
But I can do that for startups. And I think that’s what really gives me lots of joy. So the one thing which any investor will tell you is the most important thing in life is having goals and then using asset allocation to decide which of your goals are important.
So in the first phase, it’s usually accumulation. It’s saving. And doctors are great with cash flow when you’re in the prime of your profession.
But they’re all daily wage earners. You know what happens when you stop practicing? And that’s one of the reasons why doctors don’t stop practicing, because they need to earn that daily income because they’ve not utilized their assets well. And that’s one thing I’m so grateful to Rakesh for is that, you know, there’s enough that I now practice medicine because I enjoy doing it, because I’m good at it.
And to your point now, I can pay it forward. So the one thing which gives me great joy is the entrepreneurs I work with. You know, they have a worldview.
You learn so much about the business because otherwise, you know, as a doctor, you’re very, very good at what you do. But this is what I call the T-shaped model of life. The vertical stem is you become very good at one particular niche so that you know everything there is to know about it.
But the more exciting thing is apply what you’ve learned from that vertical niche, the vertical stem to the horizontal stem, because all of us are human beings. All of us have the same incentives. All of us behave in a particular way.
And when you start seeing the world through that lens, I think it’s remarkable. And as Mr. Haribhakti said, thanks to things like ChatGPT, there is nothing which I can’t learn more about. You know, when we were young, the only way you would learn is you would go to a library.
And most libraries in my time were, you know, pretty badly stopped. India was still a poor country. So you had to go to the British Council Library.
You had to go to the USI in order to read stuff. And I always used to have an inferiority complex as a medical student, because when you went to Harvard from an Indian medical college, you would always feel so much in awe because your professors were the guys who wrote the textbooks. The machines actually worked.
They actually did the research in KEM. You know, sometimes even to get an ECG machine to work was not always a trivial exercise. And there was always that, oh, God, these guys have so much.
And today I actually think we have a lot more. And I completely agree. So to talk about what Mr. Haribhakti, our goal is to give every student in India their own AI tutor.
You know what? We’re actually doing it. If I start, I won’t finish in 30 minutes. Let me warn you.
We have all the time. Lunch is on the house. No, but, you know, guys, just tell me, because once I get onto one of my hobby horses, I don’t stop.
But it’s interesting. So one of one of and a lot of what I I dream a new dream every few years because you need to reinvent yourself. So I think, you know, you understand the importance of education and learning.
And the reason this started, because a lot of people say, what the hell does an IVF specialist know about education? You know, why the hell are you giving us gyan? And it started in that sense for all the wrong reasons, because I thought what Baiju’s was doing to the Indian education system was so toxic that all you teach kids is how to cram for exams and pass those exams. And everyone agrees, you know, that these kids are great at passing exams, but they can’t think for themselves. So I was very vocal about it.
Got lots of flack, got kicked out of LinkedIn because I was so vocal. But the point was, it’s all very well to criticize. You know, that guy’s a billionaire.
You’re just an idiot. You’re greed. You know, you’re jealous of his success or your startups aren’t doing well, all that kind of stuff.
So I said it’s not enough just to criticize. I need to provide a better solution. And this was in those days when AI tutors were still not allowed.
Let me tell you that. But still, you know, you understood that having a PC just transformed everything, having the Internet change things. So great.
But a mobile phone is not a great pedagogical device. I think it’s great for consuming content passively. It’s not great for interactivity.
It’s not great for actually doing things yourself. Big lacuna. So then the dream was, how do we make sure that every kid has access to an education PC, which is affordable, which is made in India, which is accessible? So I funded this startup.
Shut down in two years for various reasons. But that was that entrepreneur’s dream. How do we make an education PC available? So he shut up.
So I said, you know, I need to make sure that dream doesn’t die. So that’s what we’re doing at multiple different levels. I think I need to emphasize that just the PC by itself does nothing.
You know, people tried the one laptop per child model, and that’s destined to break because learning is a social activity. You don’t do it in isolation, sitting in a room. You do it because you want your parents to be proud of you.
You do it because there is a teacher you care for, inspires you. You do it because your friends tell you how to learn and what to learn. It’s a social activity.
But it’s also equally important that you need the tools in order to be able to learn. You can’t give people a chalkboard and a classroom and say, OK, go learn. Listening to lectures is passive.
Watching videos is passive, which is why we’re now creating an alternative ecosystem. At some point, we’ll start making our own apna PCs. Make could very well be assembled.
I’m not fussed about that. We will create a high quality product, but it’s not the box which matters. It’s the educational software which powers it.
So now we run a hundred and twenty apni patshala pods all over the country. This number is going to grow over a thousand. And the good thing is I fund these experiments for myself because I believe they’re going to work.
It makes a lot of intuitive sense for me. I want these kids to have the same quality of education. My granddaughter will.
My granddaughter won the O’Hare lottery. She was born with a silver spoon. Of course, she will do well.
What credit? But if I can get my driver’s kids to be able to do as well and we think that magical source is going to be what we call community micro schools, I think schools are broken for multiple reasons. Very large classrooms, very impersonal, still using the same rigid curriculum, forcing kids to learn when Aurangzeb was born and when Aurangzeb died. And who really cares? Does any of you remember? Sorry, just kidding.
I don’t. But that’s the problem with all the standard curriculum. This is called just in case learning.
Just in case you need to know this, just in case. How is that possible? We need to do what is called just in time learning, which puts the student first. And I think that’s the beauty.
So now we have these pods which learn all the time and we are now creating smart educational PCs. So we’re giving them the AI tutors. But again, that’s not enough.
So now we’re tracking their learning journey. Which kid in Manipur is learning what? Which kid in Dharavi is learning what? So now we have a real time dashboard of what kids are learning. Because a big worry parents have is how do I know what the kid is doing? Is the kid just wasting time? Are they just playing games? We’re monitoring that.
We’re providing what we call a student safety solution. Could I have predicted any of this four years ago? Absolutely not. But we’re actually trying and it’s working in real life.
So I’m very optimistic. Will I be doing the same thing four years from now? Honestly, I hope not. I hope I’ll be doing something else.
But so we’re quite happy to run these experiments and let people who are younger and brighter than me take the ball and run with it. Now Mr. Haribhati spoke about that. Look, 141.4 billion Indians.
Well, they have a lot of problems. Entrepreneur needs to identify the problem. The investor needs to look at the entrepreneur who’s identified the problem.
And then perhaps with capital and leverage solution of their problem. Tell me three problems in India which are on your face and you think it’s a matter of time somebody will identify it or somebody’s identified it. The answer to that is education, education and education, because I think until we teach our kids how to learn to think critically for themselves, all these problems are just going to multiply.
I think we talk about a demographic dividend. We talk about a young population. We’re wasting their brains, you know, and that’s the reason why you’re forced to give freebies.
That’s the why you see so much hooliganism. These are all second order consequences of the fact that they’re not being able to think for themselves. And I think if we can do that, then and who identifies these problems? You’ve got to get these kids to get that can do spirit.
I can figure it out for myself. And Dr. Malpani sitting in an ivory tower in a little bubble coming up with solutions to problems, they’re never going to work. What do I understand? But it’s these kids who experience the problems on a daily basis, whether it’s at the farm level, whether it’s in the electricity level or whatever else.
And they will then come up with small solutions. So I’m a big believer in a bottoms up solution. You know, first fix your own problems.
If you fix your own problems, you know what? Most surely your neighbor has the same problems, fixes problems. You fixed your neighbor’s problems. Then go fix them at the village level.
These are what I call made in Bharat solutions by made in Bharat students. Because, you know, honestly, like I tell everyone, my job as an investor is simple. I just signed the check.
You know, it’s all the guys that the team which does all the due diligence, which does the hard work. They’re the ones who really need to bear the brunt. You’ve got to say, you know what? I believe in this entrepreneur.
I think he’s found. And what do you want from the entrepreneur? Just one thing, a contrarian insight, an insight with a focus that, yes, I can convert this insight into something which I can implement, which will add value to the user. I think if you’ve done that, the money will follow.
OK, my last but one question to you really would be being a doctor. Some would say that, OK, Dr. Malpani has identified a lot of problem points in the health care system, in the health delivery system. Are there any problems that you can identify where you’ve invested, let’s say, in the core suit, which is health care? So I, you know, I love investing in medical technological devices and we’ve done that.
So the good thing about being a doctor is you understand what a patient goes through because you do that on a regular basis. And quite honestly, our health care system is completely broken. So right now, for example, we have this company called Nisa MedTech, which makes this medical device to treat women with fibroids non-invasively.
And that’s often a world first. Just to give you an example, we have a device which we funded about 10 years ago, which improves air quality so that it actually produces medical grade air quality by killing the bacteria in the air. We just got its FDA approval.
The thing about medical devices, it takes at least five to 10 years. So it really requires patient capital. But I think all this is we’re quite happy to do that because we understand I’m not I’m not doing this in order to make money.
I’m doing this because I’m trying to give the next generation a far better future than they would have got otherwise. So that gives me a lot of joy. So, you know, I break it up into three compartments.
One is the financial ROI. Obviously, you need the financial ROI. The money doesn’t come from nowhere.
You need to generate it. But a lot of fun is actually on the learning on investment that gives you so much excitement because there’s so much new to learn every single year. You know, as an IVF doctor, I can say what the hell.
I know everything there is to know about IVF, but I know zero about Zip, FinTech. I know zero about AI. So I get to learn.
But the most joy I get is what I call my emotional ROI, which is where the the the Aapni Pathshalas, the Aapna PCs, you’re actually changing lives of students on a daily basis, one student at a time. You can’t measure that in financial terms. You know, before I happen to meet Dr. Malpani, I think we met on Tuesday and I was sharing the second innings, which I’m now trying to build up.
And he said, Nikunj, just one piece of advice, suggestion or a bro bond, which we share, which is that don’t underestimate yourself. And I think that’s the message for everybody here before we wrap that don’t underestimate India, your potential and what you can bring on tape. I think you summarized it so well.
People ask us, what do you teach in Aapni Pathshala? What’s your curriculum? How do you know the kids are learning anything? What’s the exam? I said we teach them only one thing. We teach them self-confidence. We teach them confidence in their ability to be able to figure out stuff for yourself.
Stuck? Ask the AI tutor. Still stuck? Ask your friends. Still stuck? Ask a coach, a mentor or a guide.
And I think that transforms the way they look at the world. And I think if you have enough of those self-confident students who feel they can figure it out, you can completely change the world. Final question, and just be ready for this one.
It’s going to bounce easier. If Dr. Anirudh Malpani of 2025 meets Anirudh Malpani of 2022 or 20-25 years ago, but time machine, I take you back. BSE is the same, but I have the time machine, I take you back.
What will Anirudh Malpani of 2025 tell Anirudh Malpani of 2000? He will say, count your blessings. You don’t know how many blessings God has given you. And I think sometimes we underestimate the fact that we’re born in the right country, in the right time, in the right place.
You meet the right friends. You know, if I had a time machine, I wouldn’t take it backwards. I’d take it forwards.
So I’d love to know what Anirudh Malpani in 2050 is going to be like. That’s such a great answer. Should we play the ABCD with him before we wrap? A for Apple, B for Bitcoin, C for Crypto, D for Drone.
People are hungry. Come on, give them a break. They’ve had enough of Dr. Malpani.
You should always leave on a high. You should never leave a… When is this guy going to get off the stage? Sir, A for Apple, B for breakfast, everyone says, L for lunch, there’s still time. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much. Thank you, guys. Let’s put our hands together for Dr. Malpani.
Thank you very much.