The principal focus of this podcast episode is the exploration of ambition, identity, and the dynamics of building a significant career, particularly for women navigating traditionally male-dominated spaces. We engage in a profound dialogue with Ashumi Sanghvi, a distinguished entrepreneur and founder of Future Plus, who articulates the importance of continuous learning and the cultivation of human relationships in achieving success. Ashumi shares her personal journey, reflecting on the challenges and triumphs she has encountered as an "insider-outsider" within various cultural contexts. Throughout our conversation, we delve into the necessity for women to assert their presence and the impact of community support in fostering empowerment. Ultimately, this episode serves as a call to action for listeners to embrace their curiosity and invest in the relationships that will propel their aspirations forward.

Takeaways:

• The significance of operating in stealth cannot be underestimated in competitive environments.
• Continuous learning and the expansion of knowledge are pivotal to personal and professional growth.
• Maintaining human relationships is essential for success in navigating complex industries and opportunities.
• Ambition often entails sacrifices, and understanding this duality can lead to a more meaningful career.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Future Plus
• Cambridge University
• Exceptional Indian Women

Operating in stealth.

Yes.

He put the stars in my eyes and really allowed for me to dream even before I knew what that could look like or feel like.

You kind of believe that the brain is always expansive, so you're constantly learning and feeding in information all the time.

You know, I never want to be the smartest person in the room.

It's part of your confidence.

You just take up space.

This is who I am.

If you like, perceptive, if you like, don't.

I think I've always been an insider, outsider, even when I'm in India, to be able to not just educate and bring people together, but also inspire them.

These are the role models that you could look up to.

This is what it could look like.

I mean, now there's so many, and.

Especially now, a lot of women are getting into tech.

And you're a champion for diversity.

It is really about alignment.

It's about how do we actually meet the right people who are doing the right things, how do we have proximity to that, and how do we actually move capital in ways that it actually really matters?

For me, I think it is about purpose, an impact, and I don't take those things lightly.

Hey, before we dive in real quick, if you're watching this and you're not yet subscribed to Always off the Record, what are you doing?

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Okay, now let's get into it.

Ashumi Sanghvi is not someone who fits neatly in a box.

And that is precisely what makes her one of the most riveting guests to sit across from.

An alumna of Cambridge University's Judge Business School, she has spent 15 plus years at the intersection of luxury, culture and technology.

She's the founder of Future Plus, a global network and strategic advisory for leaders, founders, and visionaries.

She is a TED Ambassador, a Milken Institute Young Leaders Circle member, a keynote speaker, and the founder of Exceptional Indian Women, a private network elevating women across the Indian diaspora.

She has navigated the personal and the professional in ways that will resonate deeply with everyone in our audience.

This is a conversation about power, identity, loss, reinvention, and what it truly takes to build something that that matters.

Ashumi Sanghvi, welcome to Always off the Record.

Thank you so much for having me, Amanda.

Yeah.

I'm so excited to have you today.

Because there's so many things I want to talk to you about, you know, especially being a personal friend and looking at your dynamism and all the amazing things you've done.

But firstly, what I want to ask you.

Before Cambridge, before the boardroom, the brand names, who was Ashumi Sanghavi and what was your world like?

So I grew up in India, and a lot of my childhood was spent, I would say, a little bit with my head in the clouds.

I was always a deep thinker, a dreamer, and I was allowed to and have the freedom, really, to do and express myself in ways that I think maybe a lot of times my peers weren't able to.

I didn't really have, like, a linear sort of way that I thought about life.

It was always.

I would figure things out and most of the times land on my feet.

And I think that's what has sort of, like, allowed me to always think outside the box.

Let's just say I never sort of fit within, like you said, neatly, any sort of lines.

Yeah, it was, you know, very much an exploration.

You were in India, you were busy exploring.

Was the version of yourself, what your family expected of you?

That's a hard question.

I think that's a question I would probably have to ask them.

No.

Yeah.

Because, you know, I'm asking because we all have these expectations from our families that the version of ourselves we become is sometimes different, but eventually it comes back to that one thing where you become the full human, and then they finally see the vision you had, which they couldn't see in the beginning.

I had somewhat.

Well, my grandfather was my biggest champion and mentor since I was basically a little girl, like, probably since I was born, and for as long back as I can remember, he was the one who quietly, but also very actively championed everything for me.

He put the stars in my eyes and really allowed for me to dream even before I knew what that could look like or feel like.

And I think that really allowed for me to step into what that version of me could be.

Definitely.

Growing up, as with probably all Indian parents, education was a huge part and hugely important part of my upbringing.

And it was much more about not the grades or, like, you know, you have to, you know, be at the top of your class every single point of time in life.

But it was more about, like, you have to put everything.

And education matters no matter what, because that is something that no one can take away from you.

And that's something, until today, I still carry forward into my life.

You know, just even if, you know Having this professional career, that, that curiosity for knowledge and that thirst for knowledge is something that was instilled in me at a very young age and that still carries through with me.

So I think that expectation has almost like, translated into something that has become very intrinsically a part of me.

Yeah.

So you coming from the Indian diaspora and, you know, moving to Europe, moving to London, creating this career belonging to two cultures simultaneously, how did that shape your path, you know, moving forward?

Did it feel like an advantage, attention, or both?

I think I've always been an insider, outsider.

Even when I'm in India, I'm an insider outsider because I have this outside perspective now, having spent more of my time and more of my life away from India than I have actually growing up there.

You know, I have a life in London now.

I've been here for long.

I've been in London longer than I actually lived in India.

I feel like I have very much an Indian perspective on things, but I'm still.

And I.

So I feel like a foreigner basically everywhere I am.

It's hard to explain.

I don't know if it's an advantage or a disadvantage.

I always see things from the positive side of things.

You know, I have a very worldly view.

I look at things always from a macro sense, and I hope it gives me a bit of an edge because I bring perspectives that not a lot of people have, and my life experiences are shaped by lots of different.

Lots of different worlds.

Yeah, I guess it's very interesting because, you know, having grown up somewhere else and then coming somewhere else with a totally different perspective and then infusing that into your business and everything you do.

And I know you also went to business school at Judge, at Cambridge.

And how was that for you?

You know, because that's no small thing.

Was that a conscious decision you made, or was that something you just decided, I'm going to go for it, or is that part of your continuous learning journey that you just talked about?

Absolutely, part of my continuous learning journey.

And before I enrolled in the Judge business for the executive education, I was actually part of the CISL program which was Cambridge, the Cambridge University's Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

And when I did both of those.

Well, firstly with cisl, it was just before COVID so I had to do the programs when remotely.

And it was something that I definitely made a very conscious decision.

It was something that kind of intuitively came to me.

You know, like, I leaned into it and it intuitively came to me.

And it's something that I'm so Happy that I did, because as with all things education, you know, these days, I feel like what I got so much from was the perspectives of other people, the other people that were in the class, in the cohort, and the learnings from people from different industries.

That also helped me across that learning journey.

Because it's not all just, you know, what you learn in your classes and through the curriculum.

It's also how that is shaped through the perspectives of other people.

So I would 100 actually, just, you know, on the way here, I was talking about looking at doing something again and, you know, going back to school, and it's something that I will always continue to do.

Yeah, so you're a constant learner, and you're.

You kind of believe that the brain is always expansive, so you're constantly learning and feeding in information.

But also, at the moment, you work at the intersection of luxury culture and technology, and those are quite different.

So what I want to ask is, how do you bring them together?

So I guess I look at things like Venn diagrams, really, and there's this, like, intersection with the way I think things are moving in life as well and moving.

And industries are changing rapidly with the pace of technological change.

Absolutely outpacing how quickly industries and governments and institutions and individuals are able to keep up with that base of change.

My background has always been in fashion and in luxury, and I had my own agency before Future plus, and we worked with a lot of brands.

I would say, always push the boundaries and guide them through what the sort of next iterations of their industries would look like.

Even though we were sort of, like, creating campaigns, we were always pushing the boundaries on how those campaigns were not just produced, but also delivered how, you know, and our best sort of briefs were allowing us to play in a sandbox, so to speak, to sort of really kind of bridge what was happening across frontier and emerging technologies to how those could be applied across the innovation at the luxury houses.

And I think that's a really sweet spot for me, you know, being a consumer myself and very much someone who really enjoys the nicer things in life and also loving all things technology.

I think that's a part of my brain that I wish actually growing up, I was given the guidance to lean more into stem.

You know, I think that's something that, if I had a mentor or, you know, I don't know, perhaps a school teacher or, you know, someone who kind of said girls could have a future in stem, and that's what these are the role models that you could look up To.

And this is what it could look.

I mean now there's so many.

Exactly right now that you have like incredible, like women who are astronauts and bioscientists.

And I loved all of those things when I was in school, I loved biology, I loved physics, I loved maths until a 6th grade math teacher told me I wasn't very good at maths, even though I loved it.

So those things really shape who you think you are and who you think you should be.

And yeah, I just, I don't look at things in any sort of linear way.

I always find red threads across industries.

Culture is something I have always believed shapes.

Everything that we do, shapes all the industries that we work in.

And when I say culture quite broadly of course that also forms the soft power.

Right.

It's the arts, the music, the film, the creative industries.

That's soft power.

And the soft power is really what is going to shape all industries in the world, including technology, including the luxury industries.

You know, luxury is all about craftsmanship.

And you've been ahead of every wave.

When we're talking about NFTs, the metaverse, generative AI, spatial computing, how do you see what's coming up before most people see it?

I think it's the curiosity.

I find myself asking questions all the time.

You know, I never want to be the smartest person in the room.

I really push myself out of my own comfort zone to find myself interacting and surrounding myself with people who are far more intelligent and just know way more about topics that I don't know.

And I think the curiosity for learning and continuous learning always allows for me to have, I would say, well informed understanding of how things are.

And then I, you know, my, my, my perspectives just shape a lot of what I, what I kind of like feed into me and then what comes out of that is just, I don't have obviously a crystal ball, but I have, I do have an understanding a little bit more maybe than most people as to where I see the world going.

Yeah.

So now.

Cause we're talking about the future.

I, I think it's a good time to segue into Future Plus.

Right, so Future Plus, a global membership network and a strategic advisory.

What problem were you solving, you know, when you built it and was there a gap that you personally felt?

Absolutely.

I mean, I think I saw it so black and white as well.

Three, I would say about three or four years ago before AI and generative AI and ChatGPT as we know, has completely transformed how everyone really has kind of, you know, it's opened up this whole Pandora's box and it's really kind of become so mass consumer now.

I saw this huge wide and this gap with these two sides of the spectrum where people and leaders really across a lot of these industries were finding it quite hard and quite challenging to navigate what was happening across a very rapidly evolving technology landscape.

And that of course we know was accelerated by all of the lockdowns.

And with COVID and you know, having to find new and novel ways to stay connected as humanity.

I started Future plus really with the simple premise of bringing those two sides together.

I mean, it's interesting.

I actually got asked a lot of times like, what is Future Plus?

And at the time I didn't really have an answer.

I was like, well, I don't know.

And we launched with a huge invite only event that we did in New York about three years ago.

It was really, really well received and I think that validated for us how important and for me how important it was to be able to not just educate and bring people together, but also inspire them and shape what was happening with bringing thought leadership into the equation as well and really talk about it.

Because I think that space to come together, to think about things, to talk about things and bring like an editorial thought leadership perspective to it is so important with where we're going.

I mean, you've spoken at lots of conferences, including at the House of Lords.

You've spoken at south by Southwest as a keynote speaker.

What do you think audiences need to hear?

I mean, right now you're talking about thought leadership.

What is thought leadership to you and could you explain that to our audience?

I think thought leadership is having a distinct perspective that you're bringing and distilling and sharing with the audience in a way that shares your knowledge about any specific subject.

For me, it's always been about sharing how technology and emerging technology can shape cultural and creative industries and really accelerate, I wouldn't say the pace of change, but really bring, and this is a topic that comes up more and more now, like current day, for how important it is to actually lean into the humanity of it all.

And that could not have been more important today than ever before in your mind.

Thought leadership is more about giving a personal perspective on a subject or a thought and relaying that to an audience of people in your own unique way and seeing how it affects change in them.

I think it also has to be shaped a little bit by having sect or knowledge expertise within the subject that you're speaking about.

And sometimes that could be shaped by professional Expertise, maybe not just always personal.

Okay, yeah, that's probably true.

And especially now a lot of women are getting into tech and you're a champion for diversity in spaces for everyone.

Is the tech world actually changing and do you think more women are coming into this space even though they are, or do you think there's enough women coming into this space or is it still predominantly a boys club?

I think both.

I do think both because there's, I mean we do find ourselves at the confluence of technologies today which have become the great leveler.

Right.

Like now you have all of those tools for free.

You have a lot of people who are able to self teach themselves and come into some of these industries which were previously gated, you know.

But do I think it's a boys club?

I do think it's a boys club.

I do think that to have a seat at the table and to actually move the needle on making real impact and having real decision making power is reserved for a few select men.

Yeah, probably, probably.

You're probably right.

But what I love about what you're describing is that you've never tried to fit into someone else's box.

You've built your own.

So let's talk about what that looked like in practice, you know, how you built this extraordinary career as we do that I want to know because I feel like building careers especially for women always comes at a cost, you know, there is always a cost.

So I want us to talk about some things and you know, we'll go some to some real places.

When you're the most impressive person in a room, for example, what does that do to your personal life, to your relationships?

Well, like I said, I try not to be the most impressive person in the room occasionally, you know, when I am in places and spaces where perhaps on paper I'm more accomplished than others in the room, people are quite standoffish.

They don't really know where to sort of like put me or place me.

You do sometimes.

You know, I always feel like sometimes people can get quite territorial and take a step back because they don't know how to sort of warm up and open a conversation.

That can feel quite isolating, I think at times.

Because then, I mean, for me personally, I feel like I've been misunderstood without even actually having to do anything, you know, without people actually making the effort to get to know me or the image that is behind me and they just form their own judgments.

Yeah, I think the judgment part is something people do anyway, because I get that as well.

You know, I walk Into a room, people form their judgments.

They, they form into little clusters.

You feel like all of a sudden it's like a wall, you know, and you almost feel like it's your duty to break down, to break the ice.

Exactly.

You know, and it's sometimes kind of exhausting because you're like, I'm not coming in here with any intentions.

I just, hey, it's just me.

You know what I mean?

Like.

But I get it.

I really, really get it.

It can be very challenging at times.

And I'm actually interested in that because I, you know, I think for me personally, for years it was something that.

It almost drained me because you become conscious of it.

I mean, I don't know about you, but I became conscious of it knowing that I could walk into a room at any time and I'd have to fight.

Fight the good fight, basically.

Really letting them see beyond this or beyond your qualifications and to get to know you and just allow.

And I think that can be challenging at times.

It is a journey though.

I think, I think where I was probably five years ago and fighting that fight and internal fight, obviously, and trying to over explain myself is I've come a very long way from that where now I just walk into a room and I take up space and take it or leave it, that's a very important thing.

I love if you leave it.

I think taking up space is very important, especially for women.

It's part of your confidence.

You just take up space.

This is who I am.

If you like, accepted.

If you like, don't.

I don't really, you know, I care, but this is me.

And, and that's very, very important.

That's how I feel about you because also your personal friend.

So I feel that when you walk into a room, you do take up space, but you do it so elegantly and so eloquently and so stealthily.

Operating in stealth.

Yes.

But you know, it's interesting because that has sort of like shedding off that judgment and you know, not really.

Yeah.

And really not caring what people think has come because of the spiritual practice that we are both very much involved with.

Exactly, exactly.

And that has given me an immense amount of just internal peace, but also a sort of like unwavering confidence, which.

And it's come a lot with the study of the practice as well.

Yeah, I think it's this internal peace which I haven't been able to actually.

You know, and it's, it's, it's okay.

It's a work in progress.

It's, you know, it's not like from one day to the next.

Of course I'll have those days where I'm like questioning everything, but that's just being.

That's having a human experience.

Yeah.

If it works, it works.

If it doesn't, it doesn't.

That doesn't mean I'm not going to take action.

It's not going to mean I'm not going to move forward.

It's not going to mean any of those things.

I'm not going to be fatalistic and just sit around and not do anything.

I think that judgment layer of me judging myself has shut off.

And because I don't judge myself so much, I don't care if other people judge me or not.

It's also opened a lot more doors for you because I feel like the moment we release everything just absolutely.

And I think actually saying no to more than I say yes to has made.

It's such a game changer.

It's absolutely been.

I would say it's a huge learning.

It was a huge learning for me because I think also maybe it's a subconscious thing, but maybe as women and maybe as, you know, having to fight that good fight and always having to prove your myself, I've always had to felt like I've had to prove myself.

So I was very much a yes person.

I was like, yes, yes, yes.

I don't want to lose that opportunity.

I will do it at any cost.

I don't want to let go of anything that potentially might work.

And I realized that I was filling my time in my life with all of these things which weren't necessarily like getting me anywhere closer to my personal or professional goals.

It was like peeling a lot of layers of that and starting to teach myself that it was okay to say no.

And the more I started to flex that muscle and be okay with that because it's very uncomfortable at first when you're a yes person to get comfortable with saying no.

I actually now thrive.

Oh great.

In that I thrive with saying no because I've realized that also energetically how much it opens up within you because you're.

It's all.

Again, it's about space.

It's about creating that energy.

It's about taking the time to think, which is a luxury, just having space, time to think and attracts things that actually align.

And I think that's a really powerful thing that some things that people maybe don't talk about enough.

Obviously, you're a very ambitious woman now.

Do you think ambition has ever cost you anything?

Be it A relationship, a chapter, a version of yourself.

Because I know, especially for us as women, ambition can cost sometimes and sometimes.

Costs all the time.

Ambition costs all the time.

You just have to make the sacrifices if you want to sort of push forward and challenge yourself and always be putting yourself out of your comfort zone.

And I'm someone who thrives and operates best when I'm outside of my comfort zone.

If you put me into a box and give me a routine and tell me I have to do something nine to five every single day, I will probably wither and die.

Okay, so what's your relationship with failure, then?

Has there been a moment where something you've built or believed in genuinely fell.

Apart all the time?

It falls apart all the time because I think that having ambition and having certain standards that you have to constantly push yourself to be able to reach, you have to be failing to be able to constantly be in this reinvention, a process where you're being agile enough to.

Maybe I'm not failing, like, to the outside world, but to my own self and to my own goals.

I feel like I could be always doing better.

I'm always like, oh, well, you know, sometimes maybe I feel like it's a little bit of a.

There's a downside to that because, you know, when you're constantly in the pursuit of perfection, you're pushing yourself to always be better than you were yesterday.

It's a constant reinvention and a constant challenge.

So I'm always challenging myself to do better.

Yeah.

And I guess, you know, that's something that we all have to do daily.

You know, like, we always have to challenge ourselves and recognize those patterns.

Yeah.

And get out of those patterns, and it helps improve us.

But also, at the same time, it.

I think it can be a reflective process because when you move forward and you.

You have growth, you can kind of look back and see the things that you change and the patterns you change that got you where you are today.

So I think that's very important.

But you built something remarkable.

How did you do it?

I would say in the early days, it was a lot of trial and error.

When I was starting my agency about 17 years ago, didn't have a playbook.

I didn't start the agency with a big business plan and go out and talk to a lot of people about.

Was shaped by some of the experiences that I had had up until that point.

And then I did actually just wake up one morning and say, you know, this could be a real business, and I'm going to Start an agency.

And I had a lot of naysayers at the time.

I had a lot of people who were very close in my life who said, oh, well, you know, you can't do this.

And, oh, you know, it's going to be so difficult to do that.

And I like solving complex problems.

So I was like, I think I can figure it out.

And that's essentially what I set out to do.

And along the way, it was a lot of figuring it out.

It was a lot of knocking on doors, a lot of doors, until a few people answered.

And then it sort of, you know, built on from there and snowballed.

And, you know, I've really actually, from day one, believed in the power of human relationships.

And I would say that's what I've spent most of my personal and professional life doing, building relationships.

You know, people have to trust you and they have to like you to want to work with you.

And that doesn't come easily.

That comes with really investing.

And maybe it also comes with saying yes to a lot of things that.

What I find most fascinating is how you're pivoting from one thing to the other.

For example, right now, generative AI is changing the landscape of how things are working.

And how does that affecting luxury culture and all the things you're doing, how's it affecting it and how do you implement it?

That's actually a really hard question because it's baby steps.

There's a lot of education.

There's a lot of things that are constantly changing every single day.

I do genuinely believe that the technologies have always been there.

But to really change across institutions and governments and businesses, you need mindset change.

You need cultural change within organizations.

You need people to adopt things and have different ways of behaving that they did not used to do in the past.

You know, I was in India for the AI Summit in February, and I had some really interesting meetings with some of the largest Indian conglomerates and retail groups about the same exact thing.

How do we actually integrate some of these technologies?

How do we use in generative AI?

How do we kind of.

And I think what always came back to was, yes, we can do that.

Yes, we have the best consultants.

Yes, we have all the technologies, and yes, we have the budgets to be able to implement them.

But to be honest, if it's a behavior change within the organizations and a cultural change for people to adopt those technologies, like technology's moving so fast, but if people are not able to sort of meet it, no matter what industry you're in, you're going to fall short.

Yeah.

This is the kind of conversations I've been always wanting to have since we started the show.

Let's take it into the future because that's where you live.

So let's talk about Future Plus.

You know, it has 2,500 plus people in its ecosystem, 2,000 people on the wait list.

What does the community stand for that the world is clearly hungry for?

So we bring people together and we place them in proximity to each other in a very velvet gloved way, I would say.

And Future plus operates as a convener of the most intelligent, the most connected, the most powerful people in the world to build bridges and move needles and really creating impact across industries.

And that is across the board.

From whether that's biotech or that's the cultural, creative and cultural industries, to philanthropy and the arts, to media, to hospitality.

There's an entire spectrum of people that we have within our ecosystem.

And also of course, the leaders across the industries that we advise want to be able to have alignment.

It is really about alignment.

It's about how do we actually meet the right people who are doing the right things, how do we have proximity to that and how do we actually move capital in ways that it actually really matters?

I mean, for me, I think it is about purpose and impact and I don't take those things lightly.

I like what you talk about purpose and impact there because I think business or in the world sometimes there's a lot of fluff, a lot of PR marketing of both individuals and brands and those people that are, that get the eyes on them, get the opportunities where there's so many people building amazing things that don't get the opportunities.

And it's about building communities where the networks are more integrated.

And it kind of sounds to me like what Future plus is doing because you're trying to build something on.

Even though it has the word future in it, which sounds very AI and futuristic, it's also very human humanistic.

I mean, I always say that I am in the business of human relationships because that is what I do and that is the very core of my being and how I operate best.

We do talk about all of these incredible technologies that are shaping the worlds that we live in more.

This tech renaissance which is happening since the Industrial Revolution, something that's really going to transform and touch every part of our lives and also our children's lives.

And I think we have a responsibility to be able to shape that with the humans at the center of it.

So it's 100% everything.

And at the core of what we do at Future Plus.

Yes.

And in regard to exceptional Indian women, tell us what that community has meant to you personally and has building it taught you something about yourself?

I called a friend of mine, a really powerful Indian CEO in New York.

I'd met her quite a few years prior to me calling her a few years ago, and she was running one of the largest American retail brands at the time.

And she then went on to a luxury Italian brand, and then she's now the CEO of her own brand as well.

And I was going to be in New York and I said, you know, I have this, like, nudge.

This, like, feeling that.

This sort of, like, nudging feeling.

You know, we have, like, African American communities that support African Americans and they want to, like, they have built out these platforms and they want to be able to champion and uplift people from their own community.

I said, why do we not do this for Indian women?

Because I genuinely have felt along my own career and my own personal and professional life, I think.

I think I've been always kept at an arm's length because subconsciously, I think we were always wired into believing that there was only place or space for a few of us at the top.

And if not, you have to.

And because you have to elbow your way to get there, you quite naturally become territorial.

Because if you've reached there, then you don't want to give anyone else that spot on that podium.

Because, you know, it's not the concept of, oh, well, a rising tide rises all ships.

That's not the sort of mentality that most people grew up with or that are subconsciously conditioned into thinking or believing.

So I called this friend of mine and I said, why don't we just host a lunch and we'll curate the room and we'll bring the most exceptional Indian women across industry to just have lunch and actually be real, share experiences and talk about what it took for them to get where they are.

And that was that.

It was that one phone call and it became a huge lunch.

And we were covered in Vogue India and it became an entire, I don't want to say a huge movement because it's still very, you know, it's a small community.

We want to keep it that way because there's a lot of, you know, when we bring new people into the community, everyone has to boat the new women in.

We want to make sure it's a safe space for women to be able to share and talk about what they're experiencing or what they're going through or, you know, any events that they're having or different ways of connecting with people in the community.

So that's really what the premise was.

I hope I can bring more people into it and, you know, allow for more Indian women to connect and share their experiences and really uplift each other, because I think that's really important.

There's not a lot of, you know, we need all the help and support.

I think we need as much help as we can get generally in life.

And I think I also agree with you on the fact that people sometimes gatekeep or they feel threatened when other people come into the space.

And it's not about that, because actually, you can grow further just by having other people in your space and not being threatened by them, and maybe you can collaborate with them instead.

So if we're looking at your life in 10 years and I said, what do you want your legacy to be?

What would you say?

I think I would definitely want to lean more into social impact and philanthropy.

I always refer back to Ray Dalio's book Principles and how he very sort of clearly has outlined, you know, looking at life in, like, three parts.

The first part is, like, very messy.

It's very building, like, really.

So it's the yes part, saying yes to everything, doing as much to build, as much to connect, as much to build those relationships.

I would say I'm in my second part of that life journey and phase.

I'm kind of established.

I really love what I'm doing.

I want to be able to grow it and really put the roots in, deeper into all of the things that I have spent the first half really kind of getting to.

And then the third part and the finale I think of my life would be way more into giving back, into giving back into, you know, which I think I do a little bit now already.

You know, mentoring young people, allowing them to have new opportunities and chances.

It's not just about work.

I think it's also just about life.

You know, how to kind of, like, help young people navigate life.

I think leading more into the social impact and philanthropy side of things, especially in India, is something that I want to spend my next after, you know, 10 years doing.

Yeah.

So final question.

What's your advice to the person who is listening to this right now who feels like he or she is meant for more but doesn't know how to start?

Curiosity is the most important skill and muscle to develop and to lean into.

And for everyone listening to this podcast, I would just leave you with leaning into learning.

And being on a continuous learning journey will never, you know, fall short for anybody because knowledge never goes to waste.

The second thing I would say is really lean into building human relationships.

You know, invest the time in people.

Invest the time in not just getting to know people, but supporting people, helping them, mentoring them, working with them.

Like support time in actually human relationships.

That is definitely two of the most important things.

Keep learning and invest time in human relationships.

Yeah, that's great advice.

I do agree with that because I think investing in people is one of the most satisfactory things one can do.

Thank you for coming.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you.

So Assumi has just given us the kind of conversation this show is made for.

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