What Gautam Shewakramani teaches about brand purpose

We don't have any ads on pages that have to do with violence, race, terrorism, you know, those kinds of topics that I don't think any brand would want to be associated with. Patan, Cora is huge when it comes to user-generated content. How do you monetize that content? So our mission is to share and grow the world's knowledge. One of the key parts of that is to make sure that the knowledge on Cora lasts forever. So the way we monetize is through ads, very high relevance, intent-based ads across the platform. And we feel that the revenue from our

ads will help support our mission and make sure that we run a sustainable business. And how big is it an opportunity for brands to collaborate with Cora? It's a really big opportunity for brands to collaborate with Cora. In fact, some of our, the genesis of our ads platform actually came from businesses who were organically very active on Cora in the early days. And they came to us and said, you know, there's an opportunity here for ads. So a lot of our product market fit around ads came from brands specifically. And we're seeing a

lot of organic use cases for brands as well. Consumers writing about brands, brands coming in and advertising on Cora next to that content. Lots of high relevance, high relevance ads. So, you know, when a user is actually looking up a question about a product that they want to buy or looking up the brand, there's an opportunity to actually drive conversions there. And finally, a big aspect for brands on Cora is one of the unique things about the platform is it's very safe. We have extremely high standards around brand safety.

We have a policy called be nice, be respectful, where we expect all discourse on Cora to be of a certain level of civility and quality and respect. And finally, one of the sort of big decisions that we made at Cora is brands, we do not show ads on high risk or non brand safe pages. So rather than take the risk, we've decided to take the hit. And we don't have any ads on pages that have to do with violence, race, terrorism, you know, those kinds of topics that I don't think any brand would want to be associated

with. Is there a lot of branded content as well on Cora? Dr. So branded content in the sense that, yeah, we do have an option for brands and businesses to now promote their answers on Cora. And we, of course, label those answers very clearly as being promoted. And yes, we have seen brands and representatives of brands talk about their products. We have again policies around that about clear disclosures and calls to action. But ultimately, the way we look at it is if the content is useful, credible and high quality, we're okay with it.

Dr. So Cora is big when it comes to English content. But in India, growth actually lies in languages. Dr. Yeah, we're seeing that. Dr. So how do you realize that opportunity? Dr. Yeah, so, you know, when I started working with Cora back in 2017, we existed only in English and a handful of other languages, a few European languages, Spanish, German and Italian, I think, back in 2017 when I started. Our first non-English language after that was Japanese. Now we are

actually at 17 languages, including English, with several more in the pipeline coming up. In India, we launched Cora and Hindi last year at the end of May. And in early 2019, in January, we launched Marathi, Bengali, and Tamil. And we have a few more languages in India coming up as well. So the growth has been absolutely phenomenal. Dr. So are you also experimenting with voice videos? Because voice search is pretty big these days. Dr. I think audio is one of the few

mediums or probably the only medium that allows you to actually consume it without using your your hands and your eyes. Dr. Right. Dr. Right. So it allows you to actually, it opens up a whole bunch of use cases and a whole bunch of consumption patterns that actually don't exist today for video and... Dr. Especially in India when the population is not used to typing. It's a new thing for 90% of the users. Dr. Exactly. So we do have, so Cora does have an Alexa scale actually, which we've, which, you know, one of our engineers

put together as sort of like an experiment. We've been exploring voice and video, but we haven't formed a very strong sort of position in the company on this yet. I think that's one of the things that, given my focus on India, I'll probably be very closely involved in driving. Dr. So in the last decade or so, we've seen content exploding. Dr. Yeah. Dr. Right. So what are the trends that you've noticed? What, what future do you see for the industry? Dr. One is, you know, we, we actually experimented with something. We, we launched a product called Spaces.

Uh, last year it was in fact Diwali of, of 2018 that we launched it. Um, and you know, that's a, Spaces is a community product that we built within Cora to allow people that shared common topics, um, you know, common context to come together and share knowledge. Um, and one of the reasons we did that was because we, when you hit a certain scale, people also want that, that sort of, bound, that boundary to talk to people that, that share a very, very similar context to them.

Dr. So I think, you know, we, we started with that. Then we heard at, at, at, you know, a big conference, the F8 conference that the future is private. Uh, you know, so obviously large companies, uh, in, in this space are also talking about that. So I think that's a trend that, that, um, you know, we're going to see a lot more of across many companies, not just Cora and some of the other companies I mentioned. Um, I think the other big trend that, that we are seeing, and again, we, we tried this out and we're,

we're kind of growing this, this, um, model as well is I think we're at a stage in India for certainly in India and definitely across the world where the payments infrastructure allows for rapid small payments. So I think we're now going to see an interesting trend around, uh, you know, different payment models for contributors, for content owners, for license owners, um, you know, of course, depending on the industry and depending on the type of content. So Gautam running a new age company could be a lot of hard work. Uh, how do you unwind?

You know, I, I spend a lot of time with family. I have a daughter, uh, she's four years old. Um, and, uh, of course the travel, my, my travel, I travel a lot. So that does, uh, take, take a toll. Um, I'm a very, very avid scuba diver. Oh, uh, I've, um, I've dived all over the world, at least all over Southeast Asia. And I make it a point every year to at least take a week out of my schedule completely decompress and dive, um, you know, in different places, even if it means living on a boat for a week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.