Raj Shamani is figuring it out. Unsupervised.

There's a running joke among Raj Shamani's team. When a few of the core crew suddenly start getting a suspicious number of messages, the group chat reaches its verdict in seconds: Shamani has been left to his own devices. Furthermore, he's either on holiday or stuck on a long-haul flight, unsupervised, with a problem to chew on and nobody to stop him.

Shamani relays this piece of information with a muffled laugh and the first signs of a cough. It has been less than 12 hours since the entrepreneur, podcast host, author and content creator landed in India after a week in New York City. The transitional weather between summer and fall has earned the 29-year-old a cold, something I tell him we currently share as we connect over Zoom for our chat. But through it all, Shamani never once disputes the earlier allegations of his core inner circle of lieutenants.

On being asked, he admits to taking five or six days off a year for pleasure, which, as he cheerfully confesses, is a bit of a technicality. “Legally, it's like five days long, but mentally it's just 24 hours long.” After a day and a half of genuine switching off, his brain reboots and he's back at it. Not clearing his inbox, he's quick to clarify, but thinking. He picks one department or one business line, locks onto a hard problem, and starts sending possible solutions, growth and scaling ideas to his team. “That's vacation for me,” he says. If you've ever been side-eyed by your friends for answering an email on a group trip, consider this your permission slip. 

But here's the thing about a team that shrugs at the boss texting from a beach: it doesn't happen by accident. Shamani hires for it, and he has a very specific name for what he's looking for: a figuring-out attitude, which is the core principle of everything he builds. It can be further distilled into three things, and Shamani makes sure every interview he conducts checks all of them. First, the valuing of speed. “Everything that needed to be done was yesterday. Nothing is to be done tomorrow,” he says as my brain races to the three editorial deadlines I am due on that very day. Second, the ability to operate without instructions.. Third, you can eat, breathe and sleep the dream, and you never say no. You say yes, and then you figure it out.

Tuning the Voice

This intense work ethic, one that Gen Z will quickly brand as workaholism, ties in to an origin story that Shamani tells with the utmost affection. Before the stages and the speaking gigs, he was a teenager in Indore, doing what he describes as the thing any son in a middle-class, small-town family might do: joining his father's chemical trading business at the age 16 during a time of financial hardship. Three years later, he founded a dishwashing liquid product called ‘Jadugar Drop’ which ended up getting merged with the larger parent umbrella of Shamani Industries, a manufacturer and distributor of household cleaning products. But the real turning point came in 2020, during the COVID lockdown, in one small room.

Shamani had ambition but no roadmap or powerful network to fall back on. “I was just curious,” he says. So he started recording videos in his room, and because the acoustics were terrible, he'd pull a blanket over his head to get cleaner audio. Picture it: a future media founder, under a duvet, talking to nobody in particular, building something out of sheer want. The want, as it turns out, had been there for years.

Long before podcasts, Shamani was a radio kid. On the school bus, 30 or 40 minutes each way, he'd wait for the one or two slots when a radio jockey would cut in between songs and advertisements to explain something: the news, the weather, the meaning behind a lyric. He didn't understand half of it, and frankly, he didn't care. “But what I had was curiosity, and I remember looking forward to those interludes. Even if it meant just waiting to hear the meaning of a word that I didn't know existed.” It remains, to him, the purest audio format there is, and if you squint, it's the blueprint for everything he does now.

If the Figuring Out with Raj Shamani podcast looks effortless from the outside (with 19.7 million subscribers on YouTube, and over 2.5 billion views), the early days were anything but. His method for booking guests was a numbers game of almost comic stubbornness. He would flip through Forbes (ironically he himself landed on the magazine’s cover, after making it to their coveted 30 Under 30 list in 2023 at the age of 26), Google the top hundred influencers, and email every CEO, educator and entrepreneur he could think of, “left, right, centre.” Out of every hundred or so, one or two would reply.

His first guest was Gaurav Raturi, an entrepreneur who painted walls across Delhi and spread social messages while he was at it. After that, the floodgates opened. Since then, Shamani has interviewed a plethora of guests—from a much coveted booking with controversial businessman Vijay Malya and President of France Emmanuel Macron, to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and most recently Robert J O’Neill, the former SEAL operator who shot down Osama Bin Laden. Which raises the obvious question: now that the show is a giant, the doors must swing open, right? 

“Not exactly,” says Shamani. “Instead of chasing a hundred people and hoping for a reply, we now research probably a hundred profiles and pick one or two who truly deserve the slot. The ratio hasn't budged; probably only the approach has become more streamlined.” 

Business of Conversation

The podcast is also just a door to a much larger, multifaceted institution. Under the Figuring Out banner sit five divisions, and Shamani rattles them off with the clarity of someone who has explained this many times and still finds it exciting. There's the  Figuring Out Academy, where the perspective gets turned into practical skills, with educators and experts helping people build money, upgrade their knowledge and get unstuck. There's Relevance Media, which helps young startups and established brands build distribution and cultural relevance using technology. There's a consumer business of his own, which he's keeping under wraps until launch is closer. And finally, there's a fund in the works, formalising the one-to-one backing of startups he already does.

Then there's House of X, the arm that started as a launchpad for creators who wanted to build consumer brands but had no idea how to run the machinery behind them: sourcing, manufacturing, delivery, payment gateways, the unglamorous grunt work. It has since narrowed into one brand, Kyara, now one of the fastest-growing kitchen and lifestyle brands in the country, and the learnings are feeding into a bigger plan to back founders and creators on a larger scale.

Building the Dream

So who's still on the wish list? Shamani gives me three names, from three very different worlds. Former US President Barack Obama, not for policy or politics, but for something far more specific: how do you speak in a way that is commanding and comforting at the same time?  Second comes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. And finally, pop sensation-gamechanger Taylor Swift. Shamani knows how the name lands; apparently everyone reacts the way I did (which is to let out a barely stifled chuckle). But, he argues, he sees her as one of the sharpest marketing minds in the business, a side of her that rarely gets airtime.

Through our long, winding conversation, Shamani keeps returning to the idea of making and holding the lamp for a small-town boy or girl, like him, with no access. But a good chunk of his audience is urban and cosmopolitan, so what's in it for them? Shamani gently but firmly reiterates that he isn't excluding anyone. The audience he's building for isn't defined by a postcode. It's anyone who looks at their current reality, feels it's too small, and is working toward something bigger. The aim is for every episode to leave behind a framework, an emotion, or something you can steal from the guest's brain and actually use.

And finally, we land upon the million-dollar question: where do family and love fit into a life this fast? Shamani's answer is disarmingly honest. He's, in his words, the worst friend when it comes to celebrating, and the best, and first, when you need something. The cost of ambition is high, he says, and you can't be available around the clock for everyone. Instead, there's a small circle: his mum, dad, younger brother, core team, and five or six close friends he can count on one hand. It's not a work-life balance in any traditional sense, and he'd be the first to say so. It's something more like a promise: he might miss the party celebrating a milestone, but he will never miss the call from someone in urgent need of a helping hand. 

And then, presumably, he's back to thinking hard on a plane somewhere. Unsupervised.

Editor: Snigdha Ahuja (@snigdha.ahuja)
Interview: Anwesh Banerjee (@anwesh_writes)
Videographer: Sujoy Joseph (@sujoyjoseph)
Stylist: Selman Fazil (@selman_fazil)
Cover Design: Mandeep Singh Khokhar (@mandy_khokhar19)
Makeup and Hair Artist: Bharat Limba (@bharatlimba.hmu)
Editorial Coordinator: Shalini Kanojia (@shalinikanojia)
Assistant Stylist: Nami Nair (@naminairr)

On Raj Shamani: Jacket, jeans and t-shirt by Levi’s (@levis_in); sneakers, Stylist’s own