Zarir Marfatia
@Zarir · 0:45
In conversation with Arish Ali, the co-founder of Swell!
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Hello, everybody. This is Marfatia Marfatia. And this is my first call, a small introduction about myself. I'm a lawyer by qualification, having worked in financial services. But now, as I go to pursue my MBA, I'm looking to explore different industries and media and entertainment is at the forefront of them. So on that note that I'm very touched and honored to have Irish Ali, the Cofounder of Swell join me for this first twelve task
Hi Zarir, thank you for having me on your cell cast. I'm happy to talk to you about my background. The journey that brought me here started with a children's magazine in India when I was in 7th grade. It was a magazine called Target. I don't know if you're familiar with with it. It was a monthly magazine that had cartoons and stories and articles and was meant for children in middle school age group. They started a series on computer programming in GW Basic
The next phase of my journey was my startup phase. I met Suda, my wife and partner in crime at Microsoft, and we both moved down to San Francisco to join a startup. Our timing could not have been worse. We joined in 2000, right before the dot com crash. We spent a few years working with some really smart people in that startup
Zarir Marfatia
@Zarir · 0:59
If I was reading correctly that Scawa actually started out as a game development website where you guys built some games and apps and sold it on other local mobile stores. Just wanted to know when was the right time to pivot from this model? When was the time that you, as a founder, decided to let go of what was your first golden idea and then identify the needs of the market, the needs of the current situation, and then make that switch
Zarir Marfatia
@Zarir · 0:20
And as a follow up question to that as we transition from Scawa to Swell, you've now successfully built two businesses, both of which have been centered on technology but operate in different industries. While Scala was in the Ecommerce segment. Swell is, of course, in the media segment. So what are the different approaches you take to tackling these different industries, if any
But instead of trying to sell the platform itself to other game developers and other companies which might use the platform, we built our own games on our platform, and we sold those games through the app stores of those days, which used to be decks maintained by the carriers Verizon, Sprint, next Till, Singular attentive Wireless. Some of these companies are not even around anymore. They merged or gone somewhere, but they used to run those carrier decks, their own app stores
So I've had to learn a lot of new things, and it's been fun and challenging at the same time. You have to build very different types of organizations. Sales team and enterprise company is very different than kind of a customer acquisition and growth team that you have to build for a consumer facing company like. So that has been the bigger kind of transition for me or the difference that I notice in these two startups
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Zarir Marfatia
@Zarir · 1:19
And coming to your second point on B two B and B two C, I think that's a very important distinction that you made on how the different cultures, how you build a team out what qualities you look for in people, because I know a lot of B to B salesmen who have never actually used their product first time. So it's very hard to sell when you don't believe in what you're selling. And like you said, you guys use swell every single day
Zarir Marfatia
@Zarir · 1:04
So far, I've been using Swell mostly for conversations with my friends on a variety of topics, so it definitely has that social element to it. But I've also seen, although, to be honest, not explore as much as I'd like to a lot of different well casts on homepage. Right? So you have a couple of influencers that you may be getting. I think so far organically as well as anything from anybody else, is that the future?
Naval Ravikant, who is a very famous Silicon Valley Angel investor, had said that what the rise of Clubhouse has taught us is that in real time video, chat, video is a bug and not a feature, and we agree with that. But we also believe that the real time part is also a bug, not a feature. And that is why
The convenience of this really makes it easy for you to start these kind of conversations and have them go on over a period of time where both the people and there's not really two people, it could be more than three, four more people having that conversation. It's really very convenient to do that as well
Zarir Marfatia
@Zarir · 0:26
Thanks, Arish. I'm looking forward to trying the picture and audio combination myself. My last question about Swell is the company's business model. If you could shed some light on that. So most technology companies that use user generated content end either follow an ad supported model or some sort of premium hybrid and others follow a subscription model. So what is the revenue model that, well intends to choose it's
Zarried. That's a great question. We do not plan to use ads. The reason is we believe they are one of the biggest culprits in terms of what is wrong with traditional social media platforms. Ads created the wrong incentives for the type of content and conversations that get prioritized and shown. Our motivation for Swell was to engage and foster authentic connections. And we believe that an ad driven platform does not encourage that type of engagement to really thrive
Zarir Marfatia
@Zarir · 0:45
Thanks, Arish. I think that's definitely the more sustainable approach. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. And I, for one, I'm going to keep a very close eye on your journey with sue. I wish you the best of luck for that. I think we've covered quite a bit of about swell your life, your journey and we've learnt a lot in the process
So that, I would say, is the most important trait, that combination of independent thinking and ownership, to be able to stand for what you think is right and argue for it when it is needed and not just do some things because somebody is asking to do and do it blindly, but do it because it's the right thing to do. The second trade that I look for is humility. A startup is nothing but a collection of mistakes
Zarir Marfatia
@Zarir · 0:17
Thank you, Arish. Thank you so much for your time. I hope you have as much fun doing this as I did. I've certainly learned a lot and will be sharing my learnings from our conversation with as many people as I can. I wish you all the best in your journey as well and I'll definitely be there faithful consumer throughout. Thank you. Bye
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