Shailesh Haribhakti shared how curiosity, constant learning, and purpose-driven entrepreneurship shaped his journey—from self-teaching science and AI to championing sustainability and social impact. He highlighted India’s right to win across AI, biotech, agriculture, and energy, urging young innovators to solve real problems with bold, future-ready thinking.
Nikunj Dalmia: What makes Shailesh Haribhakti, Shailesh Haribhakti?
Shailesh Haribhakti: Three things, Nikunj. One is my curiosity, because that is something that has stayed with me and today I’m perhaps more curious than I ever was before. To give you an illustration of that, at age sixty-three, I felt that I had not learned science.
After eighth standard, I had stopped learning science. And so I taught myself physics, chemistry and biology because I wanted to pivot to the field of sustainability. And that was perhaps the most intense period of my life when I went into self-study purely out of curiosity.
And then in twenty-two, I made another pivot to artificial intelligence because that I saw was how the world would play itself out. And so today, the two things that I am fully focused on are these two, sustainability and AI. The other thing that makes me feel happy is interaction with the young generation.
I changed the business model completely. At one time, I was overseeing fifteen hundred people and I was chairman of one of the largest firms in the country. But I said, this country needs a completely new model.
So the model that I believe that all of you are actually participating in is the model I’ve adopted, which is I work only with co-founders. And I have no staff. I don’t pay a payroll every month at all.
Everybody is a partner, entrepreneur and person who completely shares in whatever is made. So that is the second thing that is very important to me, has been very important to me, that it’s not as if you should be there because of the money that you’re going to make. It is you’re there because you’re solving a problem that you know is important for the world to solve.
And in India, there is no dearth of problems that our 140 crore people have. And therefore, the opportunity that India presents is absolutely stunning. And the third thing, which is very important for me, is that at some stage, it is important to give back.
And that has become a very large obsession. So I spend about 20, 25 percent of my time in absolutely not for profit activities. I chair the board of the Watershed Trust of India and of Bharat Clean Rivers, where water has become at the center of my thinking.
We’re also working with water credits. Just as you have carbon credits, we are trying to create what are called water credits. And so that’s where I’m spending a fair amount of my time.
Nikunj Dalmia: For the entrepreneurs here and for those who really want to understand from your expertise, you’ve seen the peaks and the turfs and the twists and the turns. I’m sure when first time you came here, mill companies or the textile companies were the high growth companies.
Shailesh Haribhakti: Absolutely. It was the era of the Moffatlals and who else? Finlay and Goldmoher were the gold standard in terms of quality and they are no longer there. All of them are gone. And the big revolution came as Reliance brought to our attention Polyester.
And that story has played out dramatically. Then we all learned the story of backward integration and forward integration. And then we learned the story of scale.
And then we learned the story of global reach. And I think today, Indian industry represents all of these amazing structural changes. And that’s what makes India today have a seat at every important table.
I must say this is incredible. This morning I was listening to Balaji who has written a fantastic bestseller on crypto and the whole crypto economy. That was my old friend.
And he talks about branded democracy. One of the four branded democracies that he pointed out was India. He said there is the democratic part of US, the blues, the reds.
Then there is the Indian democracy and then there is other kinds of forms of democracy. But India now has a voice at every table. G20, we were… I think people didn’t notice it and maybe a lot of you would have forgotten.
I’d love to remind you of it. We gave the world attention to DPI, digital public infrastructure. That was the biggest outcome of the last G20 that India actually hosted.
And the other thing that India did is without warning, we brought the entire African nations into the center stage. And that, I think, went unnoticed. But it has made a huge impact in retrospect in the minds of the whole world that India could, without permission from anybody, just bring the entire African nation, which is a continent, which consists of so many nations into the mainstream of thinking and given them a voice.
These are things which really make you feel that our time has come.
Nikunj Dalmia: Now, Shailesh Haribhakti rarely speaks, but when he speaks, everybody has one expectation that he’ll either give us a business idea or a money-making idea or something which he’s able to identify from which the young audience and the entrepreneurs could benefit from. You said that entrepreneurship is finding a problem, identifying a solution, and then perhaps scaling it up.
Absolutely. Your own words, something which you’ve always said. So let’s look at a problem which you think is real, which our entrepreneurs could solve, and a solution which is up for grabs, which you’ve identified.
Shailesh Haribhakti: So I was chatting with the young person who is into protein. Is he here somewhere? Yes. One of the things I’m very fascinated by is, and it’s a problem that all of us have, and in two contexts.
So take a typical classroom in any school in India. If you were to actually measure the learning ability of all the students in that class, you will find that if you’re examining the fifth standard, there would be some children who have third and fourth standard abilities, and others who have sixth and seventh standard abilities. But to all of them, you’re teaching the same thing.
The problem to solve is to actually give every person an AI tutor in order that their learning can happen in the most effective manner. And going to protein and medicines, just imagine, how can we believe in this room all of us are sitting here, that the cell tablet will have the same effect on each one of us? Whereas the genomic disposition of each one of us is unique, and the gut biome of each one of us is absolutely distinct. So what we need to look for and search for and find is hyper-personalized nutrition, which speaks to your protein idea, and hyper-personalized supplements, which will make sure that you can live a healthy life.
These two problems now can be solved because we have the abundance that AI provides us and that sustainability provides us. At the cusp of both these are solutions to these very large problems. And I’m totally excited by two things, the fact that the entire protein folding exercise that the world might have taken multiple decades actually got solved last year when Dennis Hassabis got the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
And now they have created a absolutely stunning set of possibilities of very fast drug research to bring out hyper-personalized medicines for each one of us to cure diseases. So today there is a true belief. I was in a virtual seminar out of Los Angeles and Peter Diamandis was running it, Abundance 360.
He asked, there were about 500 people in the room, and he asked people to put up their hands if they believed that they would live to 112 years. And 60% of the room put up their hand because there is the absolute certainty today that the entire reckoning of healthy life for a human being, longevity, the whole concept has changed. They are saying that dying is a curable problem.
Yeah. So it was absolutely fantastic.
Nikunj Dalmia: And like I promised at the beginning of the session, Mr. Haribhakti’s knowledge and understanding is so deep that every time I start the session and when I end the session, I said, oh my God, how could he think like this? How many years did you study? What did you study? I mean, for somebody to talk about AI and protein, these are the words which a young friend should be talking about, right?
Shailesh Haribhakti: I mean, to answer your question practically, average learning time for a day for me is a minimum of three hours.
And on an average, I must read five books a month because otherwise you simply can’t keep up.
Nikunj Dalmia: Before I move into the other aspect, and since we’re talking about books, reading, learning, networking, community building, which are the books which you would advise to the young audience here and to me also and to our viewers? You know, those three or four must-have, must-reads and perhaps re-reads.
Shailesh Haribhakti: So the first book that made a deep impression on me was Ray Kurzweil’s – The Singularity is Near.
It’s a seminal book which changed my whole perspective about the universe. So Ray Kurzweil’s – The Singularity is Near, and he’s just finished writing a book called The Singularity is Nearer, so you should read both. The second book that totally turned me into a very different mindset is Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger’s book called Genesis, which talks about the rapid way in which the world is now moving into AI.
A fourth book is Peter Diamandis’s The Future is Faster Than You Think, and he’s coming up with the next version of that, which I think is a must-read for everybody. And of course, all his books are worth reading, beginning with Abundance and many others that he has written. And finally, I would point to, he’s not written a book that I know of, but every podcast that you can find of Imad Mushtaq, you should look at.
That man is putting together the governance framework to drive artificial intelligence. He’s combining with three or four others, including Peter Diamandis, to create the SAGE framework. So Imad is a guy who did stable diffusion and then gave it up and moved over.
Multimodality is Imad’s real gift to the planet. And if I may add one more, please Google Shailesh Hari Bhakti once in a week. Every time he speaks, please read that.
Every time he speaks, we understand from it. So over the years, I’ve really benefited a lot from his wisdom, and I would propose that everybody should learn from him.
Nikunj Dalmia: Shailesh Haribhakti, they say that there are some areas where India can prosper, some areas where India has the right to win, somewhere they don’t have a right to win.
The good old comparison is, China is manufacturing, India is services. India is consumption, China is the factory. Are those old school thoughts getting vindicated, challenged, and rebooted? Absolutely.
That’s your favorite question. Very.
Shailesh Haribhakti: You know, India has a right to win in what its majority population is engaged in, which is agriculture.
And we have absolutely the right to win with scaled up agriculture, scaled up nutrition, scaled up access to protein. One of the biggest thing that India lost out on was we did not have identified sources of protein which could become part of our diet. And that is now getting enabled.
I must share with you a fantastic actual experience. I went to a watershed, and I was talking to the farmer, wholly natural farming, no artificial fertilizers, no artificial pesticide. And he tells me that my farm is an ATM.
I can withdraw money from it whenever I want. So productive. You should have seen the output of natural farming.
It was absolutely astonishing. So we have an absolute right to win. But we need to do three things.
And these are very mundane things, but these are things that will enable it. We must make sure that every drop of rainwater is harvested. Number one, absolutely essential.
We must make sure that our aquifers are recharged and that water becomes available naturally for agriculture. That is fundamental to life in India. Second thing that we must make sure is we should separate our garbage.
The extent of recycling and reuse and conversion of the appropriate quantum of the garbage that we produce to energy is of such high consequence that not separating it and not making it available is an absolute crime in my view. And that’s another place where we have the right to win. Completely new differentiated sources of energy, making energy abundant.
That is somewhere where India can win. Third important thing that we need to do is we need to have the mindset of responsibility for our environment. All of us, we upstream on, there are 13 rivers that actually pour into Mumbai.
And on the banks of each of them are people who believe that cleaning their house is good enough and the river can be the dump yard. That is the kind of mindset that we need to change. So I’m talking about these basic things because from there will emerge massive agricultural opportunities and the right to win.
In manufacturing on the other hand, I’m most struck by factories that are being built today in India. TVS, whose board I serve on, has absolutely high quality manufacturing. The bicycle or the two-wheeler that they make will be sold anywhere in the world and anybody will label it their brand.
It is so high quality. Same goes for almost every, we have lighthouse factories which are coming up in India across the board. And so that’s where we have the right to win.
And in services, take AI-led services. We can absolutely stun the world. We were amongst the best in software.
Now we can become amongst the best in the world in generative software and APIs which will run our world most effectively, including the creation of one-on-one tutors for each one of us. No matter whether you’re a student or you’re an industrialist or you’re a service provider or investor or analyst or whatever, you need something that is your narrow AI. The large language models are there and they’re going to be there and they will be invested in.
But what we need to look at is narrow AI and SLNs or small language models, which are our own and we create value from them.
Nikunj Dalmia: Okay, I’ll shamelessly extend this interaction by another five minutes. In Marwari, it is said that the interest is more dearer than the principle.
Now, why am I bringing this up is because Mr. Hari Bhakti is in that stage of his life where he’s spending a lot of time with his grandchildren. And I’m sure with his grandchildren, he will talk about A, B, C, D, E, F, G. So let’s put some alphabets on top and then we’ll ask your view. A, A for Artificial Intelligence, bubble or trouble?
Shailesh Haribhakti: Absolutely, I mean, I’ve started a series of grandpa stories.
Nikunj Dalmia: So A is for Artificial Intelligence, bubble or trouble?
Shailesh Haribhakti: It’s real? It’s real, absolutely real. There’s never been an era in my life which has been more exciting because we are now creating intelligence.
Nikunj Dalmia: B for Biotechnology, bubble or trouble?
Shailesh Haribhakti: Absolutely real, no question.
The singularity of recurse while will happen at the cusp of Information Technology, Biotechnology and Nanotechnology.
Nikunj Dalmia: C is a difficult one. I won’t ask C for Cat, I’ll ask C for Crypto.
Bubble or trouble?
Shailesh Haribhakti: Crypto is coming. Don’t get scared by this fall in the value of the Bitcoin. Bitcoin will need to become a very important store of value.
Nikunj Dalmia: Okay, now D, what is about for D? It’s not dog or donkey, it is drones.
Shailesh Haribhakti: Drones, that’s where India has the right to win. And I think our people, all warfare today is drone driven.
The entire war in Ukraine and Russia is being fought through drones.
Nikunj Dalmia: E for not elephant, sir? E for Energy Transition?
Shailesh Haribhakti: Absolutely mandatory. You know, it’s historical accident, Nikunj, that we discovered coal and oil before we discovered the sun and wind.
Today, the energy that we can harness and supply to the last mile from the sun is so abundant that energy can be delivered to all our endpoint of usage at one paisa per unit.
Nikunj Dalmia: F is easy, FinTech. FinTech is everywhere, it’s all around us.
Shailesh Haribhakti: You just mentioned all about the analytics that you do and what it can derive as both structured mathematical output and non-mathematical output. FinTech, I have seen now going deep into HR tech and treasury tech and ed tech and biotech. There’s a company in Pareo, which through a blood test can give you projections of whatever large disease lies within you.
And they are about to get their clinical trials completed and we will see a very major new paradigm coming out of India for the first time.
Nikunj Dalmia: And I’ll stop at G, because after G, in the next session, in the next Small Cap Fundra, we’ll play ABCD with them. G is something which everybody wants to know and that is gold and gold.
Shailesh Haribhakti: I’ve advised everybody that I can over the last three years to beef up on gold. So I believe you should have in your portfolio a certain quantum of gold, it’s absolutely essential. I’ll extend the gold into golden words.
Nikunj Dalmia: Let’s put our hands together for golden words, what we’ve heard from Mr. Shailesh Haribhakti today. Thank you very much, sir. It’s a pleasure and our honor to really host you here.
I mean, like I started the introduction, if a pedestal of great original thinkers has to be made, if a pantheon has to be made, his name would be on the pedestal. Original thinker, great human being, innovator, and always charitable. Thank you very much, sir.