Data-first, human-centric
Connecting human experiences with universal process and data orchestration with Kalyan Kumar, Chief Product Officer at HCLSoftware.
“Experience needs to be orchestrated for humans in the loop.”
AI is shaking up traditional service models and pushing businesses to take a more holistic, value-driven approach.
Kalyan Kumar, Chief Product Officer at HCLSoftware, encourages enterprises to focus on orchestrating experiences, unlocking data value, and streamlining processes – rather than chasing every ‘shiny new toy’ in tech. This approach is key to HCLSoftware’s partnership with Ferrari, where mutual values drive transformative digital experiences.
Kalyan joins Debbie Forster MBE in this deep dive into how companies are evolving their tech strategies.
Transcript:
Announcer:
Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech? Welcome to the XTech Podcast, where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations, and insight that are shaping our future.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion, and innovation in the tech industry.
Now, today I’m really delighted to be joined by Kalyan Kumar, Chief Product Officer at HCLSoftware. Are you okay if I call you KK?
Kalyan Kumar:
Yep, perfectly fine.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Welcome, KK, to the show.
Kalyan Kumar:
Thank you, Debbie.
Debbie Forster MBE:
So what we like to do here at XTech is to get to know you as a human before we dive into all things technical with you. And so, I love finding out from people how they found their way into tech. Some were born with a laptop in hand, others wake up and find themselves there accidentally. So, I think your background has been quite unique from going from services into enterprise software. But where did it start? What sparked the initial passion for you?
Kalyan Kumar:
Thanks, Debbie. Thanks for having me. And maybe let me tell you a little story. I had no clue of what I wanted to do for a long period of time because I was trying to do quite a few different things when I was growing up. So, I played cricket, I was a semi-pro, I played close to first class cricket. I wanted to be a full-time cricketer, but obviously I always had a liking for tech because my dad got me a Commodore 64.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Ah, there’ll be several people on the show now leaning back and nodding sagely when you’re mentioning the Commodore.
Kalyan Kumar:
Yeah. So I grew up in a mining town in eastern part of India in Calcutta. So he got us this thing and I liked computing. I was very curious about networking. There was a compute networking, more systems software. I was very curious about that. I used to love to learn more. Curiosity was very much inside me. I played professional cricket for a period of time, but 90s, mid late 90s, cricket was not as fancy as in today, especially in India, it was very competing. I wanted to go, I was in the territorial army I wanted to do because of my grandfather was in the British Indian army, so there is aspects of, I wanted to go and try everything.
Came into tech because I loved technology and I loved playing sport. And as I started to see this, and I’ve started to rediscover the aspect of sports, so I believe that cricket is a game of life. You learn a lot of things in cricket and if you play cricket as a good standard, that’s how I started to become a playing member for the MCC, then became an MCC member, which I made the average age of MCC down now, but did a lot of interesting things. But tech was very much in curiosity.
Got in doing a lot of networks, did a lot of part-time work for HCL HP, which was a joint venture with HP before even I came to HCL. Started my career at Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC, and then found my way into HCL and I’ve been at HCL from a smaller part of HCL, which was doing MSP remote infrastructure management, I was building software, MSP platforms for the remote infrastructure management part of the business. And then, so I was doing software in infrastructure, I was doing software in telecom, and then started doing software platforms building services, and then moved over to, was the CTO for HCL Tech for eight years, was involved in building out, working with our CEO, CVK, very closely in developing this whole product strategy.
But then jumped in on the other side of the fence from a service provider to an ISV. But now interestingly, as we go and touch upon and talk about AI and agentic and this whole service as software or software, you want to start to see if you have seen both sides of the world as service provider, as an ISV, and also as a customer, you get to get some perspective. So I think it’s good when people have seen you become more empathy. You get more empathy, you put yourself in other shoes and you learn a lot.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Good, lovely. And so, when we think about HCLSoftware, I was interested to learn, it was the largest enterprise software company by IP headquartered in India. And I read that you were one of the key leaders that helps them on that biggest bet, which was carving out IP from services to enterprise software products. Clever move that’s really paid off. Now, how did you manage that in practise and how did that make a difference?
Kalyan Kumar:
Interestingly, I think the credit goes to our founder, chairman emeritus, Mr. Nadir who always believed in products, correct? He was a great believer and CVK, our current CEO, took a decision way back in end 2015, ’16 that we have services business, but how do you build an intellectual property that product business and that part of that, it meant that you had to build, buy, ally, you have to carve out existing IP, you have to acquire new intellectual property, you have to have rights to patents and other pieces. You find and do IP partnerships, we did joint ventures, we did all kinds of different constructs from 2016 up until 2020 ish, 1920 when we started to do big divestitures, which we carved out.
But the whole theme was services industry was growing in a certain way, but could you build a nonlinear business, a fundamentally different business model? Because the heritage of HCL had a very deep engineering and R&D pedigree. We used to build products for others. So the big question which was asked by the founder chair and then by our CEO saying that, why should we not build for ourselves? And why not just build for others? So I think that’s how the whole piece happened.
So now, the journey of carving intellectual property. So it’s very hard to build products if you operate with a services mindset. Productizing means to build something which make it repeatable at scale. Services is all about customising to the customer’s need. Product is long-term backed services you invest and build capability to start to generate revenue quickly. So by design, what HCL Technologies Limited that we really created two different brands, HCL Tech, which is a services brand, and HCL Software, which is the product brand. And we really built out an operating model which was about building products with ability to sell, deploy, offer, support products in a product life cycle. And you have some professional services, lab services capability into the software part of the business, but clearly differentiating it from the services business so that you could stand alongside because you could work with services as a go-to-market, but you could also work with other partners who might compete with our services business, work directly with customers.
And the way you engage with customers in the market as an ISV or a OEM is very different than the way you would engage as an outsourcer or a systems integrator or a managed service provider. So it was by design very well thought of from a strategic standpoint by the board and our core management, we all agreed that we should run it in a different way and that’s the path. It’s a hard journey. We are the largest enterprise software product business headquartered out of India owning intellectual property. It happened over a period of time. It also means that we run with very different objectives and goals. We want to be a highly customer success, highly empathetic, value-centric software business. We want to change the way enterprise software is consumed, licenced, and supported and offered to the end customer. There’s a lot of greed in the way enterprise software industry operates. It’s like significant unrealistic price hikes and expectations. We want to be really more value-centric and then that’s where we are shifting towards the software product business. So fundamentally different empathy, customer success at the core, value centric.
Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think in looking at that from a distance, I think there’s a lot of companies as AI is starting to disrupt things, particularly around services, a lot of companies are having to think about, what are we? What do we do? What’s the core of what we do? The pivot that you were able to achieve feels as if, as you say, you took the best of services, that customer-centric, empathetic approach, what does the customer need? And building that into the product, which makes you very agile, really, really different. Is there anything in that process that if you could go back and do it again, you’d do differently or slower or faster or any key learnings in that pivot?
Kalyan Kumar:
I think we should have done it more faster. We took a long period of time. I would say we did everything thought through in the right way. I think the speed at which we could have carved out and done these things, made some harder decisions faster would’ve been even better.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay.
Kalyan Kumar:
Other than that, I don’t think, yeah.
Debbie Forster MBE:
And that’s interesting because a lot of time when I talk to people about significant pivots like this, they’re more worried that they went too quickly. But equally, I think it’s important to remember you can go too slowly. You can prolong the pain longer than you have to, but it’s clearly worked out. You mentioned earlier when you were speaking about this agentic AI. Now, AI is obviously front of mind for you, for everyone in tech at the moment. At HCL, you often talk about this agentic AI experience orchestration. It’s quite a mouthful. Can you walk me through what that means and what does that mean to what’s happening in HCL and more broadly?
Kalyan Kumar:
I know, that’s the definition of what this whole thing is. We really use a very simple word. We call it HCL UNO.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Nice. Easier to say, easier to remember.
Kalyan Kumar:
UNO. UNO is universal orchestration. So why we started to believe, so if you really look at, you see what’s happening in the industry, if you go back, there was a rapid run towards cloud, but the big issue with cloud was that you had to modernise applications to make them run in the cloud. But most of the customers lifted and shifted stuff into the cloud.
Then you saw this rapid run towards AI, but to do AI, you need to be able to get your data organised. And the third thing which you start to look at agentic, gen AI, and agentic and different capabilities, you are really trying to automate functions, but the process is always deterministic, functions which could be inserted could have probabilistic nature, but processes always have an input and an output. You need to, because in many cases you’re regulated, you have to report things, you need to have deterministic systems to be able to drive an outcome. But you could use in steps multiple probabilistic steps. So what’s happened in enterprises that people had applications. God made world in seven days because he had no installed base. Even if the creator of the earth came back and looked at our IT landscape, he would’ve got puzzled saying that, “What have I created? What has happened?” Because it’s just so complex, tangled web we’ve just made collectively as an industry within technology, we just complicated things too much.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Right.
Kalyan Kumar:
A lot of times we have this rush towards shiny new toy, everyone wants to get a new toy, any new toy comes in, everyone runs towards that.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Absolutely.
Kalyan Kumar:
And that really means that you have old systems, you buy new systems, you keep the old. So what’s happening many a times is the landscape of technology similar like that. We’ve had mainframes. They work and they’re distributed, client server, then you add in cloud, cloud native. Now you’ve got distributed agentic, you’ve got data fabric, data mesh, you created data, you build data warehouses. Then you said, “I’ll create data lakes.” Now you said, “No, no, no, no, no. I want to create lake house. Now I want to create data lake house.” You’re just adding so much.
So when we looked at all these things, we said, “If you break all these pieces, what are our customers trying to do?” When you go and really have a conversation, we started to build this whole theme around three big pillars called XDO. Every customer, every business, every industry which we are in, there is a big push towards experience. Can I improve experience of my customers, my business, my product, my service, my employee? So there’s an experience aspect, correct? Humans, in the context of agentic AI, there’s a human in the loop and that’s all built around how people interact and experience these capabilities. That’s one.
Second is you want to really solve this problem in an enterprise, so you need to orchestrate experiences, correct? Experience needs to be orchestrated for humans in the loop. Data, the big issue with data today is we never had data first approach ever in our technology landscape. We always build app first, process first, function first.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Agreed.
Kalyan Kumar:
Data was hidden behind applications. So hence what happened is that if you look at large language models, if you look at AI, AI has been there for 40 years.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Of course it has.
Kalyan Kumar:
What has happened is that cheap compute to process sizable amounts of data has really accelerated the adoption of AI or innovation around AI. So now you need to organise, classify, manage your data. So I think what one very big discipline, which is now coming back and we acquired a start-up in France called Zeenea. Absolutely interesting. So they really do something called active metadata management.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Nice.
Kalyan Kumar:
They help manage the definition of data, where data exists, what is the purpose? Classification, lineage, tagging, tag the data based on the type which is compliance, PII, what data can be used for training, tracking lineage, creating data products, creating data contracts. So, you have to start to separate data from applications. So building data is one. So one we said people want to improve experiences. They want to really understand data because the more older the company, more data they have, more they have data, they have locked. There are companies which exist today, which have existed from the mercantile age from 1700s, they have kept data in bookkeeping, record keeping, correct? We’ve digitised those data, they’ve created data, new companies are creating so much data. How do you make sense of the data you have?
The third is there is lot of processes I talked about, which is processes, long-running processes, business processes, it doesn’t matter what process, they need to be orchestrated, they need to run long-term, input has to come, output has to be delivered. You could have multiple things to plug into between. So when we looked at this concept of X, D and O, it’s saying if you take all the noise out, three fundamental things you need to really start to do to build agentic, you need to understand how do I improve human experiences? I need to really unlock the data, so hence extract the value of the data, but really organise data using metadata-driven approach.
Third, I need to orchestrate across enterprise rules based, workflow based, robotic, agentic, all kinds of systems. Correct? They all will coexist together. And now if you look at the number of agents out there, every SaaS provider is building their own agents. Every ISV, including us, we are going to offer agents for our business applications. Customers have agents on top of hyperscalers. How do you connect all of them to make an outcome? So that’s what we believe and we talk about this theme called, Universal Orchestration, is how do you connect human experiences with universal process and data orchestration, but understanding your definition of data, you can build agentic apps if you get these three things right. Or else you will build lot of POCs, pilots, small things, and then you’re going to struggle scaling it in the enterprise.
Debbie Forster MBE:
And I love that key concept, and I think I’m going to start quoting you instead of always talking about, because we hide it under calling it legacy. It sounds much more dignified and much more like we need to hold onto it by calling it legacy. Whereas these are toys, these are old toys, and we’ve got to look at much more in those three pillars that you’re talking about; the experiences, the data, the processes. And it’s about simplifying and orchestrating.
Kalyan Kumar:
Most customers have, Debbie, a lot of the pieces of the puzzle.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Of course they do.
Kalyan Kumar:
They just need to put them together. It’s like Lego building blocks.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Exactly.
Kalyan Kumar:
You cannot see, it’s very easy to throw away things. And then I’ve met customers who’ve been telling me, “Why do I need to modernise the application UI, UX? I can just put conversational plugins and change the way these applications interact.” I said, “Yes, because you are thinking experience, how you want to deliver experiences. Correct?” It’s no more about what you do to modernise applications. You have to look at, how do we extract value from the data you have?
Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah, experiences and value I think are two fantastic things. Now, I also noticed, and we’ve not had anybody on the show yet talking about gov tech. So I know that HCL Software has real deep experience in terms of government technology solutions. Now, how did the requirements, the challenges of government digital transformation differ from other enterprise solutions?
Kalyan Kumar:
I think if you look at the time we are talking about in March, you look at say, I would look at government in two ways, correct? We’ve been engaged in a lot with government on a few different areas. And some of the work which also done in India especially, we see India has become the global benchmark of what you call digital public infrastructure. Benchmarking, how do you do government citizen scale digital? Couple of things we started to learn. And similarly, a lot of countries in the Middle East, you look at their citizen services, government to citizen, significant digital first approach, correct?
So a couple of things which we learned. So one of the things we started to look at in the government stack was three, four things mattered with government a lot. First thing is a lot of conversations about sovereignty and that’s becoming even more in last few weeks, if you see the global political landscape, so many things going on, countries are saying that, just like you have digital public infrastructure, a lot of countries are defining something called critical national infrastructure. They’re starting to define, say that, “Hey, if I am dependent upon a technology where a change in regulation could cut access to my tech, my existence as a nation becomes relatively challenging because it then becomes a very complicated this thing.” So we’re starting to see that a lot of governments are wanting to understand, they want to build sovereign infrastructure. That is one way they’re talking to and that’s where you see chip and various different countries want to invest in semiconductor, ability to build, create diversification. That’s one part.
Second is a clear ask around secure sovereign collaboration. Communication, collaboration, messaging, email. So, we have some technology, we are actually, HCL Software is the only choice a customer has if they don’t want to run cloud or SaaS based email. If they want to build a complete sovereign end-to-end messaging stack, collaboration stack completely running with private AI if you need to run. We have a lot of government customers, defence customers across the globe who licence the technology and deploy it because they know that it’s within their control of how they really want to build and operate.
So the second thing which I learned about was they want to build sovereign clouds, which is obviously infrastructure, but they want to also create sovereign collaboration. They also want to look at data technologies, databases, data warehouses, data platforms. We offer significant amount of data platforms which can run on the cloud or also on-prem or in private or sovereign infrastructure. And the fourth is that is the sovereignty side of the government. They want to create critical sovereign environments. So, we’ve got components that can help them build that.
Second, we are seeing this whole need about G2C, government to citizens. Just like we talked about experience, we’ve got our total experience platform, which we have. We’ve got a lot of customers across the globe. Large governments need to see citizen services. They want to really do the same significant experience improvement to the citizens. Actually, if you realise, citizens are one of the biggest sources of revenue generation for the government.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Yes.
Kalyan Kumar:
And you keep paying a lot of them. But the fact is forward-looking governments are saying, “How do I deliver better digital public infrastructure? How do I better deliver digital services to the citizens? How do I make sure I make it easy?” So we’re seeing a lot of pieces around, hey, if I need to fill a form, governments is all about forms. You have to fill forms. You go to any government in the world, however you digitise data is captured in forms. How do I automate forms? How do I make sure that it doesn’t matter what channel or device I’m coming from, from tablet, from whatever shape and form, I’m able to get universal experience. I don’t need to see different applications in different… I want to also do campaigns, focused, targeted campaigns to the citizens or notification services and things like that. So we’re starting to see the experience angle. So one is sovereignty, the second is experience.
And the third which we are seeing is even government runs large technology infrastructure. So they need to want to run their IT operations efficiently. They’re worried about cyber security, just like your national border security, cyber security threats, protecting the endpoints, protecting the servers, ensuring policy and compliance, secure coding, because we are wiring everything up in digital. How are we making sure a software supply chain is secure? So we’ve got a lot of our product stacks fit in with a lot of affinity with the government.
One of the things that we’ve made a decision in net software is a concept called choice. We give customers choice on how they want to consume and deploy a software. We don’t force them only to use one way to consume products. We have SaaS offerings, but all our products are cloud native, can run on a containerized infrastructure that the customer has in their own clouds, okay? So that we give them a choice to deploy. So that’s where I think we’ve got to focus on government. We’ve got, across the globe, about close to 450+, 500+ government agencies customers so we’ve got a good understanding of their needs and how you help them deploy.
Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think takeaways here, two really. One, I do think a number of our listeners are or are interested in working with government. So hearing this shift in things, I think, and particularly that G2C is really, really powerful and it’s great to see that focus on UX coming into government work. But that sovereignty issue, I’m also hearing other enterprise companies, 2025 is the year in which it feels all the rules are changing globally. And I think governments looking at sovereignty, security, as well as that G2C piece, I think a lot of enterprise companies are having to think about that as well. So I think that learning is powerful. And then I think we’re coming full circle, KK, in that cricket lost you, you loved the idea of sports and tech…
Kalyan Kumar:
I don’t think cricket lost me. I’m still connected to the game in some shape or form.
Debbie Forster MBE:
All right. All right. Well they’ve loaned, you’re on loan, but I know that HCL also, if we go from the world of cricket into F1 racing, I know HCL has a really interesting partnership with Ferrari. Can you tell us about that and how you’re helping Ferrari accelerate their digital transformation?
Kalyan Kumar:
So we are a digital team partner for Scuderia Ferrari HP F1 team. And we built this digital partnership two years back as we are in the year three. Ferrari is a very unique brand because it’s like both parties do enough due diligence before… You can’t buy into a brand like Ferrari. It is mutually… You have to have common culture value alignment. So the heritage, the pedigree of value centricity, empathy, the passion of what HCL, how it has been built, the Ferrari team saw that and that’s why we agreed to build a partnership.
We helped them on few areas around total experience, low code, no code, application security, both on the pit as well as on the digital enterprise side of the Ferrari business. And it’s been an amazing partnership with them and we also have a lot of like-minded other partners like AWS is in there, a few other partners, HP. So they managed to string a very interesting set of companies, a lot of focus on value and heritage and pedigree into this thing.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Nice.
Kalyan Kumar:
So it’s been an amazing partnership and yeah, we’re looking forward to the season now. We’ve got a amazing British driver now in this year’s season with Hamilton. So, he’s been cranking the car hard.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Excellent. Well now when we tune in, not just to cricket, we’ll think of you and also if we’re watching F1, what’s happening with Ferrari. But it’s powerful seeing that it’s not just the technical expertise but that boiled in culture is part of that partnership and that passion that comes across. And I think sometimes we forget in tech that that is as powerful a sell point when great brands are looking for those tech partners and you can never underestimate the power of culture that is built into an organisation and their services.
Great. All right. So, we are nearing the end of our time together. I feel we’ve gone full circle around the world through several sports. What’s on the horizon for tech? It doesn’t have to be specifically something that’s in the middle of your desk, KK, when you think about tech, what are you keeping your eye on that’s most interesting?
Kalyan Kumar:
So a couple of things. So the way I look at what’s really in the horizon, see, there’s a lot of technology which is in and out there, but if you really look at the way I see or what I’m really keeping an eye on, one is this whole aspect of intelligence reimagined. This whole thing around AI is artificial or you call it augmented or applied, but I would say, how do you really leverage the power of intelligence reimagination by making sure it is valid? See, in the consumer, see. There are two sides of this whole game, correct? There is this consumer side of the world where the technology, I would say the benchmark is now consumer tech, it’s no more enterprise tech.
You benchmark consumer of the rate of adoption of what’s happening, but from an enterprise standpoint, how do you really get intelligence reimagined but also bring the human in the loop? How do you bring… Everyone is talking about algorithms and data, but where is the human centric AI? How do you bring… So I would say intelligence reimagined combined with experience supercharging, correct? How do you really reimagine experiences and reimagine intelligence? You’re reimagining intelligence, but how do you orchestrate experiences? It’s going to be very, very important. So reimagining this, and a third piece which I’m really interested around is there’s a lot of how do you do this in a responsible way? Technology, responsible innovation, responsible AI, responsible data. There’s going to be significant amount of these things. One is data reimagination, intelligence reimagination, experience orchestration, but also doing it responsible.
And the last, there are a couple of technologies I’m really interested about is quantum computing, absolutely is going to fundamentally relook at how you would imagine compute, correct? It is going to be the same electricity invention moment, correct? It’s going to reignite how things are going to be done. There are some interesting stuff happening in neuromorphic computing, spatial computing, things around that. It’s going to be extremely interesting. Bioengineering, things can all be accelerated with quantum.
And the last but not the least is this whole, I would say, technology/spirituality line starts to blur. And there are things which is happening around that. I think this whole space and things around that, unexplored frontiers, there is tech… There’s this old saying in a Vedantic philosophy which says, “I know what I know, I know what I don’t know, I don’t know what I don’t know.” So it’s not about how intelligent you are, but the more you know realise the more less you know, correct? So hence that whole aspect of there’s enough for us to collectively learn and solve in the industry, but it’s about how do you really apply them back is what I’m really fascinated about. You can extract value on what you have already. You don’t need to throw everything away. There is this whole, you can bring sustainability back into how you deploy and consume technology. That’s one thing which our industry needs to adopt and learn more.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah, yeah. No, couldn’t agree more. And it’s lovely to see that curiosity you said you had as a young man, as a boy is still very much boiling away there as you look at what happens in the future.
And then we go back to just you as a human. KK, is there anything that in your downtime, if you have any, that you’re reading, you’re watching, you’re listening to that fires you up at the moment that you’d share with the audience?
Kalyan Kumar:
I was a musician for a long period of time. I used to play for a band. So that’s the other thing, which I-
Debbie Forster MBE:
You are the true renaissance man here, KK.
Kalyan Kumar:
Yeah, I’ve been trying, keep trying things. So keep listening to a lot of music. Nowadays, these days, the challenge is that the kind of music I love, 70s, 80s, classic rock, 90s, and what my son listens to now, he’s starting to listen to stuff which I listened to. It’s very interesting when you see teenagers trying to listen to that.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah, I love it when it comes full circle and you go, “Hey, that’s mine. Yeah, that’s mine.”
Kalyan Kumar:
He’s trying to listen to Dire Straits and Floyd. He said, “Wow.” It’s not just these new guys, but he’s able to start to connect because he also plays a bit of music and also he’s got a very similar trait about playing cricket, music. So it’s very interesting.
I listen to a lot of podcasts of late. I’ve got into this podcast stuff. I love this Acquired Guys. They keep doing this extremely long podcast, like seven, eight hour ones, but we listen to them over a week. But the stories about companies. I love listening to a lot of smaller podcasts. I think a few of them from some of the strategy consulting firms, some interesting podcasts. I just listened to podcasts. I also love, because of following cricket, I listen to the Skype cricket podcast with Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton. So, quite interested. I keep listening to a lot of podcasts. That’s one.
What I’m reading is I’ve been trying to read… I read a lot of blinks. You know Blinkists? So either small blinks and then I figure out, I love to read both fiction and nonfiction together because it’s something I love to keep pushing around and reading. Wherever I get the time, I read. At present, I’m trying to read this big fat book about the biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. It’s a very-
Debbie Forster MBE:
Wow.
Kalyan Kumar:
Yeah. You try to…
Debbie Forster MBE:
That current events now, isn’t it?
Kalyan Kumar:
No, no, no. But it’s very interesting. You want to understand the person behind the person you see. You realise how his childhood has shaped into a lot of the behaviour. It’s a big fat book. It’s like the same big as Steve Jobs’ book was. And what am I watching? Champions Trophy, which is going on.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Of course.
Kalyan Kumar:
For me really, I’m deeply involved in tech. I love to watch movies when I’m on plane and flight movie, series. But I love to watch, whenever I get some time, watch or listen cricket. It’s very interesting. So I listen to either cricket podcast or watch sometimes live.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Perfect.
Kalyan Kumar:
That’s me. And I’m co-authoring a book. We are trying to create an illustrated… We are trying to take some eastern philosophical concepts from the east in India down below, and then trying to marry it with some of the western philosophies and really create an illustrated book. So we’ve been working around that.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Oh, now KK, I would love to hear more about that at another time. That would be fantastic.
Kalyan Kumar:
Yep. So that’s what I’m doing now. That’s it.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Fantastic. Oh, listen, KK, I know how crazy busy your schedule is and I really appreciate you taking the time today. It’s been lovely to have you here on the show.
Kalyan Kumar:
Thank you, Debbie. And it was a pleasure talking to you, really.
Debbie Forster MBE:
Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at [email protected]. And finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to the XTech Podcast.
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