Cardlytics CEO Amit Gupta - transaction data and commerce media

Amit Gupta is the CEO of Cardlytics (NASDAQ: CDLX), a global commerce media platform that powers rewards programs with card-linked offers and enables brands to strengthen customer loyalty. In this episode of World of DaaS, Amit and Auren discuss: How card-linked offers strengthen customer loyalty Identity resolution and retail mediaCardlytics' view into $5.8 trillion of annual consumer spendingThe limitations of traditional loyalty programs Looking for more tech, data and venture capita...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Auren Hoffman?

  Hello, fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello, fellow donors. My guest today is Amit Gupta. Amit is the CEO of Cardlytics. Ticker symbol is CDLX on NASDAQ. Cardlytics is a commerce media platform that leverages its publishers' first-party transaction data to power rewards and programs. Before Cardlytics, he held leadership roles at Stripe and served as Director of Strategy for Google's Geo Division,

• 0:45Auren Hoffman?

  which oversees Google Maps. Amit, welcome to World of DAS.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Thank you, Orin. Great to be connected. Huge fan, so looking forward to our conversation today.

• 0:54Auren Hoffman?

  Maybe not everyone knows, if you're not like deep in the ad tech world, what Cardlytics does. So can you just give us like a super quick overview of what it is?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  So as you said, Cardlytics is a commerce media platform, and within the platform, we run two ecosystems: the financial media ecosystem and a retail media ecosystem. On the financial media side, we run arguably one of the largest financial media networks in the US and UK through our unique positioning and partnership with most of the largest banks in the country. And on the retail media side, we bring to market a leading identity resolution capability. And same, we partner with the largest retailers and also, based on our IDR capability, bring our own retail media and data network called Ripple.

• 1:41Auren Hoffman?

  So you just said a whole bunch of things. I don't think anyone would know what they mean. Most people don't know what retail media is. No one probably has ever heard of the acronym IDR. I've been in ad tech for my entire life. I've never heard that acronym before. What is that?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  IDR is identity resolution.

• 1:55Auren Hoffman?

  That's funny. I come from the identity space. I've literally never heard that. Is that like a common acronym that everyone says and stuff?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I think you're right. When you kind of get in the weeds enough and are nerdy and geeky enough in the identity space, it becomes a popular acronym, but.

• 2:09Auren Hoffman?

  Is that like well-known, like even at LiveRamp and stuff?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So for a bricks and mortar retailer, they want to know the in-store shopper and they have different ways to connect with them that are not on their loyalty network.

• 2:23Auren Hoffman?

  You're taking like the last four of the card plus the zip code and the name and then you kind of like help identify that person or something?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. The first six, last four, and a few other attributes that are part of our secret sauce. We help identify the individual so that retailers can then form a loyalty relationship.

• 2:41Auren Hoffman?

  And you say, okay, we have 100% confidence, we're 80% confident that it's this kind of consumer type of thing or?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. That's part of the secret sauce where we can actually come back and the retailer partners who had anywhere from like 30 to 40% of their customer base known and we bring it to 90% and you're right, or we give a confidence ranges. In some cases, we can actually come to the point where we can say it's deterministic or close to it. And in some cases, we'll say it's highly probabilistic and we give high confidence levels. So yes, we give confidence levels with our output.

• 3:17Auren Hoffman?

  And what else can you tell about that person? Like they may have seen that person a bunch of times and not known it, but what else can you tell them about that person?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Knowing the person by themselves is valuable, but we also believe attributes and behaviors are important. So each of that individual or identity graph of ours comes with over 140 attributes. So the socioeconomic, behavioral, is it a pet family? Is it a sports family? Is it a family?

• 3:46Auren Hoffman?

  I've seen the data from all these different places and they're like maybe directionally right, but almost always wrong. Half of them have my gender as a woman. How would you know these are correct? Or does it matter? Is it just fine if it's directionally correct?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  This is what we pride ourselves on. It's more than directionally correct and it's either in some cases deterministic. Our core of the business is based on first-party data. And the second part is we thrive on scale. On the bridge side of the business, we process over 12 billion transactions. And that allows us a lot of scale, a lot of rinse and repeat. And then on the financial media side, we have a view into over 5.8 trillion dollars of spend. So the scale really helps us get a highly probabilistic and in some cases a deterministic point of view.

• 4:35Auren Hoffman?

  You're also getting these like transactions that are coming in from banks. You partner with banks to give them like offers, right?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 4:43Auren Hoffman?

  There's kind of like a crypto crow where they give you some transactions and stuff like that. And you have certain rights on the transactions. I assume can't just like sell the transaction data like an affinity or a Yodlee or something. How does it work? What's the deal that you have with these banks?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  The best thing is our financial partners, our bank partners are very aligned with us to deliver the maximum value to their cardholders. Part of that process is we integrate with the banks. We get their transaction data, very uniquely positioned company, very privileged that we get that large amount of transaction data. As I mentioned, 5.8 trillion dollars of annual spend in the U.S., which is more than half U.S. cardholder, all debit card and credit card transactions. And that allows us to give a lot of insight into their own cardholders at an industry level, but also allows us to bring advertisers so that they can actually get a micro-targeting capability to reach out to these audiences in the bank channel.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  So when a user goes and logs into their bank app, then they are able to redeem these offers.

• 5:49Auren Hoffman?

  This is where you see those offers, hey, you can get like 10% off of Best Buy when you spend your card there and stuff like that.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. That's the powerful thing. I think the other thing you mentioned about rights. So the rights are very much focused on things that we can do, products that we can bring to market to again, deliver the most value to the cardholder. So you're right, we can't take some of that data outside in the open web, but that does allow us to bring more innovative products. So more recently, We have, as I mentioned, two businesses, the retail side and the financial side. We have now started to connect those two businesses in a privacy safe way. That gives us the ability to bring a CPG level offer, a product level offer, a brand level offer, so that there's more value for the consumers for even their everyday spend. And that becomes more interesting for the banks, for the advertisers, and for the consumer.

• 6:40Auren Hoffman?

  With each bank, do you have like different rights? Like for some, you can only do certain products. And then for some, maybe after you earn their trust, you can do more things with them? Or how's that work?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Each bank, as you can imagine, is different. And each bank partner is very important to us. They're placing a lot of trust by giving us access to their data. Banks are different by definition, so there are some banks that are leaning forward and going into more forward looking things and products that we can bring to market. But there's a core set of data rights that cuts across all banks that allows us to run a network at scale, and that's consistent through all our bank partners. So maybe, let me ask you, what's your favorite snack?

• 7:18Auren Hoffman?

  My favorite snack of all time?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Of all times?

• 7:22Auren Hoffman?

  I'm a donut person, so I love donuts.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  What was the last place that you got the donut?

• 7:27Auren Hoffman?

  There's this place locally near where I live in DC that's just like amazing. Just has these incredible donuts.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  So let's say the Amazing Place Donut. And if you share a bank that you like, you may not want to share the bank that you bank with, but a bank that you like.

• 7:42Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, there's lots of banks, let's say Bank of America or something.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Bank of America. So next time you go in, you get your favorite chocolate donut from the Amazing Donut Place in Bank of America.

• 7:52Auren Hoffman?

  They won't know I got the chocolate donut. They'll know I spent $8 at the donut store.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  So that's the beauty of it, Orin. So you're right, the bank transaction would know that you spent $8 at the donut place. But our new capability where we're able to connect the SKU level data with the basket level data allows us to get to the chocolate donut.

• 8:11Auren Hoffman?

  You're trying to build relationships with the merchants where they're like sending you the SKU and then you connect it up just like the same way you're doing before with that identity management solution. And then you can say, okay, this happened with this transaction or something like that. What does the merchant get for that? The merchant gets like ways to get better offers and stuff?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Merchant gets to have Orin, their favorite customer, to try the new chocolate donut.

• 8:34Auren Hoffman?

  Better marketing or something?

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Better marketing, more targeted, more efficient spend.

• 8:39Auren Hoffman?

  And is there a data co-op? Because like I spend a lot of and probably like way more money than I should on donuts, but I also spend a lot of money on like pickleball stuff and whatever. And there could be like a pickleball donut combination or something. Yeah.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  So I think you can imagine, because we also know a little bit more about Orin, that Orin's probably a sports family and specifically around pickleball. So yes, we can actually bring the connection of the right partners. So in addition to the donut people, we could bring Fanatics to making sure that Fanatics is offering your favorite pickleball player jersey to you as well.

• 9:15Auren Hoffman?

  Are you managing like a second party data sharing? Or is it like, okay, we're putting this data in a co-op? And based on that, we're going to like build profiles on people and stuff like that.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Cardlytics acquired this company called Bridge a few years ago. And Bridge is where we have the identity resolution capability. And also that is part of our retail stack where we use to connect with the retailers. And in that, we do have a co-op of grocers and mid-market retailers and convenience store operators. So in that, we have over 130 million unique shopper profiles. That allows us kind of what you're saying, alluding to, that is in a way a data co-op. And that allows us to build deep profiles that advertisers can access and reach out to across the internet.

• 10:02Auren Hoffman?

  Is there like data you wish you had the rights for like, ah, if you could only do this, you would unlock another billion dollars of potential or something?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  I think the ability to connect both the data sets, both data sets are the financial data set and the retail data sets, both are very, very rich, both are powerful, they have scale and ideally we want to connect the two data sets and only recently we have kind of cracked the code and we're piloting with one of our bank partners to connect the two data sets.

• 10:33Auren Hoffman?

  Cause they have to agree?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  They do, yes. This is trust business and we take this responsibility very seriously. So we get approvals from banks whenever we are doing something new with their data. One of our forward-thinking bank partners and one of our merchant partners we've connected. Now we're able to kind of show the power of data. It's an interesting next step in the company's evolution that does unlock a whole bunch of ability for a new set of advertisers to connect with their customers in a different way.

• 11:03Auren Hoffman?

  There's a few other companies do these like card linked offers and stuff like that, like Cardlytics. So let's say a bank like Bank of America or something like that is thinking about doing this. Do they have like four different vendors in there and they're just trying to understand like which are the best? First they give like 25% to each vendor, but then over time they like reallocate it to people who are making more, how does that work? Do you get like an exclusive to this particular bank or something?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I think the interesting thing is sophisticated marketers really are doubling down on card linked offers as a unique ad format. Cause this is one of those ad formats or and you know this better than I do, this gets direct value instantly to the end consumer, right? So it's a very unique ad format and it's actually gathering more speed. The leading marketers are creating a budget line for CLO and we're excited about that. And they're actually leveraging some of the new products.

• 11:56Auren Hoffman?

  CLO is card linked offers?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yes, card linked offers. That becomes a major channel. Some of the marketers are really testing out the new products. So we brought in things like multi-tier offers. Some of our airline advertisers are using our product to help customers upsell and by broader fares or even our gas advertisers are using our products to upsell to premium levels. The whole ecosystem benefits. Now to your point, there are competitors who are in the market because it is a vibrant market. It is a growing market. The way the banks think about it, in some cases, they love the fact that we have an end-to-end platform and they really leverage our platform as the core way to run these offers.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  And at times, they'll get content from some of the other partners. On the flip side, there are banks that have their own platform, one or two banks that have chosen to kind of think about their own platform. And then they still value our premium content because in the industry, maybe I'm biased, we do have the most premium offer content with some of the leading advertisers and that differentiates us in a major way.

• 13:03Auren Hoffman?

  You see so much data about transactions. So I assume you have like all this like super interesting data about consumer behavior, about the economy. I haven't seen you like publish a lot of that data. Do you not have the right to like publish that or maybe you do, I just haven't seen it?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  We do have limited rights in how much we can publish because there's a data lag that we get subject to. Because of the size of data, some of this data can, as you can imagine, be market moving. There's not that many entities that see $5.8 trillion of spend and we see that spend on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a recurring basis. So there are limitations in terms of rights. We do publish and, but this is good feedback. We need to do a better job in publishing our insights more often. So just to give you a few interesting anecdotes, despite the market sentiment we see, retail spend is up 6% if you think about like March, April this year versus last year.

• 13:55Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, wow. 6% year-over-year.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  6% year-over-year. Same thing for home improvement. For example, for gas, we see trips are up, but the spend is down because of the reduction in the gas price.

• 14:07Auren Hoffman?

  And trips are basically just number of times you go to the gas station.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And in terms of delivery and restaurants, the third-party delivery, we see increase of about 13% year-on-year, but the in-restaurant.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  There's a reduction of about 3% year on year. So there are very interesting trends that are happening. Some of these, especially around home improvement or retail, there are some tariff effects that we can see where consumers might be front running just to get ahead of potential tariffs.

• 14:37Auren Hoffman?

  So consumers are actually thinking about it and they have the knowledge enough to spend, okay, I gotta buy that German or Chinese product now type of thing?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  I think we do see some spike in the March-April timeframe. But overall, the everyday retail, everyday spend is still holding steady. As I mentioned, like 6% year on year. So there is some front running, but generally the spend is holding steady, both for just everyday retail and home and garden, home improvement. So we see so far the consumer is trying to find deals. So people wanna spend, people wanna make sure that their needs are getting taken care of. And they are more interested in finding deals that helps them meet their needs at times at a slightly lower checkpoint.

• 15:18Auren Hoffman?

  What would you see that would make you worried about the economy? Like what type of stat would it be like, whoa, I gotta get out of the market or something?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I think there are two or three indicators that start to get us a bit worried about. So discretionary is discretionary because that kind of goes up and down and it impacts certain parts of the demographic more than others. But when everyday spend or food and restaurant spend.

• 15:44Auren Hoffman?

  Restaurants, kind of like things that you could cut.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. They're kind of border at the level of discretionary and everyday spend. When those start to go flat and start trending down, that means the consumer is hurting. And we don't see that at this point. As I mentioned, it's a very good thing that we see in gas. The spend is down 11%, but the trips are only down 3%. So the consumer is actually holding pretty steady. And that spend is down mostly because of reduction in gas prices.

• 16:13Auren Hoffman?

  Nowadays, every company it seems like has some sort of rewards program. Are there some sort of like basic principles that make these programs work well?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Actually, that's so true. The reward program have become in some ways table stakes. For any large consumer platform, loyalty is important because consumers have a lot of choice. And it's a good thing, right? Because it gets the competition brings more value to the consumer. The core elements that we see as we work with different kind of partners, there's a clear differentiated value proposition that needs to be there. It needs to be easy to redeem, earn and redeem. And it needs to have value to the consumer in some cases for their everyday, in some cases for the discretionary spend. Depending on the vertical, right? So you can imagine like airline and hotels are more in the discretionary side.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  And the everyday platforms like the retailer loyalty programs are more in the everyday side. But the perception and the feel of reality, feel of value has to be important for the end consumer to truly get on the wagon.

• 17:16Auren Hoffman?

  Most airline loyalty programs are now worth more than the airline. A lot of these airlines are actually like they've got this money losing airline. And then they've got this loyalty program and credit card that's making all the profit. How do other businesses learn from the airline so they can monetize those customer relationships? Or is that just too hard? So the airline is its own weird, unique thing.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  The airlines and hotels are in a unique place for a couple of reasons. As you can imagine, there's a fixed cost to the inventory. You know, the empty seats or the empty rooms. Once the plane flies or once the night is gone, that fixed cost is still there. For the business to monetize those fixed costs in a profitable way, that is something very differentiated for the airline and the hospitality industry. Secondly, banks and card companies have realized there is a high switching cost for the consumer. So the loyalty element, the stickiness with an airline program and a hospitality program is pretty high. And so they're willing to buy these points, generating substantial amount of revenues for these companies.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Right? So there's real value that is ascribed to them. In some cases, it's actually delivering equal, if not more, revenues to some of these companies, which is absolutely fascinating. And thirdly, from a consumer standpoint, for a vast majority of consumers, this is actually helping them defray their discretionary spend. Their vacation travel or their vacation hotels get significantly reduced or significantly comped, so to speak, through their loyalty programs, and that creates a stickiness. Now, you also see some of these loyalties have started to fray now because there is question about the loyalty points or the value of these loyalty programs. And that's where our platforms come in as a great complement to both some of the non-airline

• 19:08Speaker 01

  and hotel programs, but also to some of these programs as well.

• 19:11Auren Hoffman?

  Chirem is likely going to go public this year. Do you track how these neo-banks are doing?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  We do, and actually, we are increasingly partnering with not only the large banks, but also neo-banks. I'm happy to share that as we start to grow our neo-banks footprint, both in the US and UK, we're also seeing different spend patterns and we're bringing, as you can imagine, neo-banks are a bit more forward-thinking, forward-leaning in terms of trying on new products. So as we develop new products, new offer categories, neo-banks love to try them because it does bring instant value to their consumers, and that's the feedback we hear, which is really gratifying. It's a good point. It's a combination, and also depends on the user. So for ORN, we need to have, what I would say, more exciting offers in terms of either a bigger percentage back or a bigger dollar value back.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  For some consumers, they like the fact that there is, even if it's a smaller amount, but there's everyday spend reduction, so their everyday, the check size for their spend for everyday purchases increases.

• 20:13Auren Hoffman?

  After they spent money at Best Buy and they saved 10 bucks or something like that, do they get like a text or an email somehow from the bank saying like, hey, you just saved 10 bucks and we're now like debiting that or putting that back into your account or something?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Depends on the bank. Some banks actually do give them, here's your statement credits. You saved X dollars. In some cases, they actually get a notification as well. So it depends on the bank. So neo banks are a lot more comfortable with sending more frequent notifications. And then some of the traditional banks for lower number of emails or lower number of communications because they have different internal standards.

• 20:48Auren Hoffman?

  I would see it on my statement. I spent $179 Best Buy and then later here's $10 that I got put onto my account because of that or something.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  So you go to your monthly statement, you'll see that credits appearing on your statement.

• 21:00Auren Hoffman?

  And does those credits only happen after I paid back my minimum balance or does it happen like immediately?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  It depends on the offer. In some cases, it appears right away. So you can imagine like a hotel offer or an airline offer, you may have spent right away, but it waits till the flight is flown or the user actually stays in the hotel. So in some cases it's delayed, but yes, it shows up right away on the credit card. This is something we know or since the conception of the company, we've given over $1 billion in rewards. We are very proud of the fact that we've become part of the journey as different partners of ours are looking for new ways to give rewards back.

• 21:38Auren Hoffman?

  It seems like every brand is launching their own retail media network right now. Like every brand is becoming an ad tech company, every retailer, whether it's Internet One, like Instacart, or even just random ones that are out there. What are the characteristics of successful media network that they should be focused on?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  There's always flies when there's honey, right? And retail media is the new flavor du jour ad format for sure. And that's why we have a lot of these new ad formats popping up left, right and center. And that's creating a lot of fragmentation. Frankly, as I speak with CEOs and CMOs who are in our network, they actually talk about that it's way too much. And, you know, there was the initial excitement about, hey, can we actually now leverage these new retail media networks? But we are already starting to see consolidation and we expect that consolidation is going to continue. First-party data is what makes these networks impressive. And that has to be offered at scale for sophisticated advertiser, or frankly, even smaller advertisers to take true advantage of retail media networks.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  The first-party data at scale is super important. The second part is, there has to be ease of execution and ease of activation. We come across certain networks where people have to sign on, and then they have to go get the data out, and then they have to go somewhere else to activate. That's too much friction for either an agency or marketer that is trying to rapidly allocate money. So both the scale of the first-party data, the extent and richness of the first-party data, and the ease of activation, all those are important. Those are the characteristics of the large retail media networks. And that's what we pride on ourselves as well. In Ripple, which is our retail media network, that offers exactly this, right? Offers a lot of scale in terms of over 130 million unique shoppers.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And then the ease of execution or ease of activation, people can actually get audiences directly at one of these large DSPs like Trade Desk and others who are our partners, or your former company as well. And then also license the data. And they can also log into our platform, do sophisticated queries, and activate it right there and activate it anywhere on the open web like Google, Meta, or anywhere.

• 23:51Auren Hoffman?

  You're now the CEO of a super-small-cap public company. I imagine it's super challenging. Walk us through some of those challenges.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  I think it's both a combination of challenging and an adventure. The key word I would probably put here is balance. There is amazing ability for us to move fast as a tech company and develop new products.

• 24:14Auren Hoffman?

  But I assume you would have more ability if you were private, right? You would be able to move much faster if you're a private company than if you're a public. Or am I wrong about that?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  The ability to do rapid change and not worry about short-term quarter-by-quarter performance.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Significantly is better as a private company. So you're exactly right. The goodness that the public company or the public stature brings us is openness about our capabilities and receptivity with some of the leading advertisers and leading partners who we work with. Because everything is open. So there's the transparency element that allows them to place a higher degree of confidence in us as a company. But yes, I think it is a challenge. It is a balance. But I'm very gratified to be able to serve in the role.

• 25:00Auren Hoffman?

  There are definitely some other companies that went down like dramatically and was able to come back. Maybe most recently like Carvana, they lost ninety plus percent of their value. And then they were able to actually come out of that. Do you study some of these companies that are out there and stuff?

• 25:18Speaker 01

  It's interesting. You mentioned Carvana. We have a very good relationship with Carvana as a company. Huge fan of what they've been able to accomplish in a very short amount of time. There are definitely companies that we look at and study and get both inspiration and lessons from. The key part, I consistently tell my teams, we have to really stay focused on the customer. And that's what Carvana did. They made sure that they're delivering value to the end customer. And that's what we stay focused on, making sure that we're delivering the maximum amount of value to the end consumer with our partners, both on the financial media side and the retail side. And that's really helped us kind of weather through some of the storms in the past.

• 25:56Auren Hoffman?

  Couple of questions we ask all of our guests. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

• 26:01Speaker 01

  I think maybe this is me growing up as a Trekkie. I believe in the UFO conspiracy theory. I feel that there is something out there. Or UFO now, I think they've recently pointed as aerial phenomenon. So if you think about like the recent Pentagon tapes or congressional hearings and now setting up of ARO. There's something there. And I think as we get newer technologies and in a new capabilities, hopefully we'll be able to detect and connect with.

• 26:31Auren Hoffman?

  It's literally like three years ago, it was like complete conspiracy theory, like only the craziest people. But now like it seems like the average person believes it. It's moved just because of all this congressional testimony and other stuff that's out there.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  That is true. I think it's starting to become at least more mainstream than before. That's an interesting one.

• 26:49Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  I have a college kid who's a freshman, so I end up finding myself giving him advice more often. I don't know if he listens or not, but

• 27:02Auren Hoffman?

  Probably not.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. But I dispense it frequently. One of the more recent conversations he and I were having, I think he had heard from somebody that if you love your work, the work is then not a pain and it becomes a pleasure and it becomes something different. I tend to think about it differently. So my advice would be to him and advice generally is you got to figure out what you're best at. Once you figure that out and hopefully that is monetizable and the market values that, then it's hard work and making yourself better and more differentiated at that special skill. And work is work. We've got to go through the slog. We've got to go through the hard times and get through the other side.

• 27:41Auren Hoffman?

  How does one figure out what they're best at? Like a college kid, like your son or something who may have a lot of strengths. Maybe they know like clearly they're bad at certain things and decent at certain things, but how does one narrow it down?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  I think it's an iterative process. There are people who might hit the bullseye right up front, but it's an iterative process. As you said, at times it's easier for us to know these are things we're not good at. So for example, I knew I was not going to go become a doctor.

• 28:09Auren Hoffman?

  Why did you know that?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  That was not an area of interest.

• 28:12Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. So you just weren't interested in it, but not necessarily you weren't good at it. Like you probably had decent memory and stuff, right? And I don't know, whatever doctors need.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  There's a correlation to it, right? Interest starts us, gets us to spend more time in the area. More time, more at-bats starts us getting a higher level of proficiency or understanding. And then the ball starts rolling from there. Now, there are probably a correlation to, I remember my dad getting me a Commodore 64. I'm dating myself by saying that.

• 28:38Auren Hoffman?

  Cause I assume you have Indian parents who like, all they would want is their son to become a doctor, right?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  I do have Indian parents and they definitely did. I was very fortunate. They allowed me three choices and not just the doctor choice. So

• 28:52Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. You could be engineer as well or something.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Fortuitously, I think we live in a time when kids have a lot more options. We're in an interesting place for sure.

• 29:01Auren Hoffman?

  Well, this has been great. Thank you, Amit Gupta, for joining us on World of Das. I follow you on LinkedIn. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been really interesting and a ton of fun.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Thank you, Arun. Great catching up and wonderful conversation.

• 29:16Auren Hoffman?

  Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review. And check out worldofdas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren. That's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.