With a track record of innovation and a commitment to driving growth and sustainability, Ankush Sachdeva, CEO of ShareChat and Moj, talks about talent's role in shaping ShareChat's future.

As a leader, you have always spoken about scaling ideas to reality. Can you elaborate on what that means to you?

As a fast-growing startup, you always have more ideas than people. However, a significant part of being a tech-first social media company is that we can iterate very quickly compared to, say, an e-commerce company with on-ground ops.

Also, at our scale, simple ideas, if executed well, can be life-changing for millions of people. Therefore, we take pride in our fast-paced, experimentation-led culture of scaling ideas to reality.

The ideas come from the patterns we observe in user behaviour or some intuition about how the market moves.

One good example of “scaling ideas to reality” is our audio chatrooms in ShareChat. Right after the COVID lockdown happened, we saw a very interesting phenomenon. People were going back to their hometowns and being forced to be in their houses all the time. While we were solving their information and entertainment needs, we felt we, as a platform, could also help them form warm connections and find new friends.

We believed live audio conversations were the most natural and effortless way for like-minded strangers to meet each other.

As we launched this feature, we saw fascinating use cases we had never imagined. We saw virtual church prayers being conducted, people teaching English speaking to each other, people playing antakshri with each other, etc.

Today, we are the largest audio chatroom product in the country, helping connect 1 crore+ people every month through live audio.

That’s how simple ideas become massive at ShareChat.

ShareChat has about 325+ million monthly active users. How do you and your team solve complexities at that scale?

We are operating at a massive scale at ShareChat; therefore, most systems built here are built with scale complexity in mind.

One good example of such a system is our recommender system, which helps us serve relevant content to our users and keep them engaged on the platform.

We serve about 800cr content pieces to our audience every single day. Every time a user fetches a feed in the app, our recommender system finds the 10 most relevant posts for the user from a pool of 10cr posts using our ML models.

We had to invest in three key pillars to build this system: team, infrastructure and experimentation framework.

Team - We had to build a team from our internal talent and some of the best global domain experts in recsys. About half of our feed ranking team is based out of London & US today.

Infrastructure - we had to ensure that our computing infrastructure could support a large-scale recommender system. We continue building tools that help our ML teams observe, test and deploy new model improvements quickly.

Experimentation - We had to ensure that we built a very strong experimentation platform that could help teams move fast and make accurate estimations of metric impact and scaleup decisions.

There is a lot of investment that is needed when one needs to build and operate a complex system like our recommender system.

How do you see ShareChat and Moj creating a positive impact for users and creators?

For users, we help them stay informed and entertained. People come to ShareChat to find what's trending around them. For example, when Chandrayaan landed recently, ShareChat's traffic spiked to about 2x. People came to the platform to learn about landing details and get the latest information in 15 different Indian languages.

For creators, we help them find the audience they deserve. This is especially helpful when creators creating a very niche topic, say Odia health tips, come to our platform and can find the audience they wouldn't find otherwise. We also help them monetise their audience through brand ads and virtual gifting. Recently, a Moj creator went on a livestream and asked help from her fans for her mother’s medical emergency. She could collect Rs 1L in just one hour of live streaming! It was an endearing moment for us all to see that happening.

What does the growth curve look like for employees at ShareChat?

We believe in transparency and empowering people at all levels. We always strive to keep free access to information and data for all the people at ShareChat. This helps all teams share the same context and be empowered to make better decisions.

I have seen many young people joining us from other companies be surprised by how much autonomy we give them and how fast we allow them to see their features shipped into the product.

People who are curious and indexed towards making an impact usually find ShareChat to be a place where they can grow fast.

We have a lot of young people in the company who proved themselves with their impact and are today leading large business units.

Could you tell us about the work environment and culture at ShareChat?

Culture can be a subjective concept, but I can share my perspective on the type of individuals who tend to thrive at ShareChat. People who display remarkable ownership, bring their authentic selves to work each day, reason from first principles, and have an affinity for a transparent work culture succeed at ShareChat.

Finally, what is your talent philosophy, and how has it helped shape ShareChat?

Our most valuable asset is our people. Our business revolves around tackling challenging, large-scale tech problems. 

We believe that a group of talented people who share the same values is very rare to create; therefore, once you have created, it is important to retain them.

We believe in disproportionate rewards for high performers who have a strong demonstration of both company values and impact. We are indexed towards having lean, high-performing pods of 8-10 people on sharply defined problem statements with a strong sense of ownership.