How to See the Future Before Others Do

Some Futurists have a knack for spotting the future before it occurs.??As someone who has mentored start-ups like Delhivery, Nykaa and Lenskart amongst others, Anjali Bansal, Founder, Avaana Capital sees more clearly around corners than most. Read carefully – she breaks down exactly what she looks for and how she senses what will happen even before it does.?

What skills do you think people who want to see the future more clearly should sharpen?

Anjali:?One thing that sticks out for me in my professional journey is my curiosity to learn. A lot of changes that I?have made in my career have been around this continuous desire to learn. So unlike people who think about?professional growth in terms of salary and job profile,?I think about what I have learnt today and what have I contributed today.?

Secondly, it is about self-awareness and knowing what your strengths are. For example,?I did engineering and went on to work for ISRO and then very quickly realised that this is not what I would like to do for the rest of my life, much as I like science. So, I changed my stream and went on to get a scholarship and study finance, of all things, at Columbia University, and then joined McKinsey.?

Thirdly, it is the courage to take decisions and take risks. Remember, we will miss a hundred per cent of the shots we do not take. So, take the shot.?Do not fear failure. Things do work out if you apply yourself.

You are constantly looking for ideas that will create outsized value and impact in the future. When looking for such ideas, whether in their own business or as an investor, how should they approach them?

Anjali:?It is incumbent on every individual and hence every business to think not just about their personal or corporate bottom line but also the society and the communities they operate in.

Innovation needs to play a significant role beyond creating commercial value. It needs to change the lives of people and solve a real problem.

Do you actively look for a certain degree of selflessness across your portfolio companies, or is it just a bonus?

Anjali:?It is a bit of both. When we look at companies, we first try to see if it is solving a real need. Secondly, we try to understand if the entrepreneur realises that this is not just about creating valuation but also creating real business value.

Most of our entrepreneurs are also folks who want similar things as we do. Take Urban Company, for example. Urban Company is a very successful unicorn, and its founders, Abhiraj, Varun, and Raghav, have formalised the dignity of work for a segment of workers - home workers, carpenters, plumbers, and beauty workers. That otherwise did not have it. All these people now have bank accounts and insurance coverage, and that is the positive externality of doing good business.

You have often signalled that the future is about sustainability. Not merely as an offshoot or a CSR, but as a platform. Could you speak about your perspective on that?

Anjali:?I spend a lot of time with my teenage children and their friends, and quite honestly, I enjoy it much more. There is so much to learn from them. One of the big takeaways has been that this generation is worried about the planet and climate. As a result, they are making choices, life choices, career choices, consumption choices, what they eat, how they want to travel, and what kind of work they want to do in the future in a more responsible and more planet-friendly way.?

Consumer preferences are shifting and consequently, enterprise priorities are shifting.?

Today, technology is available that was not there even ten years ago, and we cannot imagine life or our business without an element of digital. It is no longer vertical, and it is horizontal. Sustainability will be something similar. It will no longer be a neat vertical of CSR or ESG but integrated into business models.?

Have there been decisions, choices, or forecasts since we are talking about the future bets you have made that may not have played out the way you had imagined, and what did you learn from that?

Anjali:?Oh, absolutely! The pace of change is something one has underestimated. Yet, I think we have also been quite agile and recovered very quickly.?Two to three years ago, the D2C brands were not quite as apparent as we think of them today.The shift in digital channels happened within one year. As a result, we have likewise shifted our investment strategy.?

The pandemic has been a great learning experience. It has accelerated digitisation in a way that probably would have taken another five years as a society. Segments and sectors like education and healthcare, which were very slow to digitise, now have doctors consulting "telemedicine". We now have regulation, and we have the National Digital Health Mission. We are currently experimenting on the back of India stack UPI. These are innovations that are very dramatic, very world changing. They take time for adoption but absolutely shift the paradigm.?

You are curious about so many varied areas - fintech, space, sustainability, illiteracy, entrepreneurship, micro-finance etc. How do you keep your knowledge about the future sharp in all of these areas? What advice would you give to others to hone their abilities similarly?

Anjali:?I read a lot. I talk to a lot of people about all the various work I do, and most of the learning comes from here. From 16-year-olds who have created the first-ever youth-led think tank called Youth Policy Collective and just hosted a climate summit to people who are at the highest levels of policymaking or part of my corporate boards, there is a lot to learn from everyone.?

Keep your eyes and ears open. Spend as much time as you can with youngsters. You will learn a lot from them. When youngsters thank me for mentoring them, in my mind, I am saying thank you for giving me this opportunity because I have learnt more.?

What areas or ideas do you see as being undervalued or relatively undervalued today but one that could emerge in the future?

Anjali:?It is not about the entry value but the value that can be created...We have a company called Intello Labs. Intello created a computer vision tool for quality?assaying,?and they very quickly realised that large staples and grains are a big market and hard to break into as a young, small company. So, they decided to do fresh produce and picked up a harder-to-do problem and cracked it. As it turns out, it has turned into a digital platform. COVID happened, all the auction houses that do commodities and spices etc., closed down. Almost 70 per cent of the trade shifted to their platform, "Praman."?

Out of crisis came an opportunity. They were agile, and they kept moving forward. Could we have known two years ago that they will be in a digital trading platform that will become the value driver? No. Yet, that is how it has turned out to be, and a great team has spotted the opportunity, and a good set of investors have supported it.?

We are entering a golden decade where a lot of these forces are coming together in a very positive way.