‘In the next five years, a large number of people will consume only 10-15 second videos’

Day 1 of Goa Fest 2022 kicked off with some insightful panel discussions and conversations. One of the most highlighted sessions was of Ankush Sachdeva, Co-founder & CEO, ShareChat, who had a conversation with Vikram Sakhuja, Group CEO, Madison Media & OOH, at the event.

Reminiscing about how his entrepreneurial zeal was sparked quite early in life, Sachdeva noted that right from his time at IIT-Kanpur as an engineering student, he developed several apps as well as tech products and services as part of projects or his own initiative, including an on-campus dating app for his college mates.

With ShareChat and Moj becoming the ninth Indian unicorn of 2021, Sachdeva seems to have only whetted his appetite so far. Discussing how the company’s raised capital (including some funding from Elon Musk) is spent, Sachdeva joked that a lot of it went into paying ransoms to Amazon and Google for their cloud services.

“In actuality though, a lot of that capital goes into building our technical infrastructure and the development of our AIs. We had to hire talent from across the globe. As the largest social media company in India, we had the best talent and the best AI and we still felt we needed to get more talent, so we have people in London, in the Bay Area, and in other parts of the world as well, all working on this together,” he explained.

Speaking about the success of Moj, Sachdeva shared that when ShareChat decided to launch the short-video sharing platform after the ban on Chinese apps was imposed, the team gave itself 48 hours to the much-awaited launch. “We did beat our own goal and had the app launched within 30 hours and running live.”

Sachdeva and Sakhuja agreed that this kind of turnaround became a requirement in a constantly evolving tech space, and tech providers had to stay on their toes to keep pace with the rapidly growing and ever more discerning consumer base.  

“There is some bad news for the ad industry. In the next five years, a large number of people will consume only 10-15 second videos. If your video fails to generate interest within the first 2 seconds, people will lose attention,” cautioned Sachdeva.