Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Raghu Kumar Uses Games To Take Stress Out of the Trading Equation | Episode 350

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Raghu is a serial entrepreneur and has been obsessed with the financial markets since the age of 16. After graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he started his first company in 2006 – RK Trading Partnership – a proprietary trading company which actively traded the forex markets. He was able to turn $10k into more than $2M over a span of two years using low-latency, news trading strategies.

Using the profits, he moved to India in 2008 – along with two other co-founders – and setup RKSV Securities, a retail stock brokerage, which eventually rebranded into Upstox. RKSV was also a proprietary trading firm and actively traded India’s stock markets, and Raghu led the prop desk division. After Upstox raised its Series A, the prop desk was shut down, and Raghu transitioned into a traditional co-founder role.

In 2019, he stepped down from the Board of Upstox and left all operational duties, but remains Upstox’s largest individual shareholder. He took a long sabbatical, moved back to the US, and started thinking about his next venture. He wanted to create a new, bolder company, which could massively disrupt the financial markets at a larger scale than a typical stock brokerage.

In 2020, he incorporated TradingLeagues, a disruptive, gamified offering for the financial markets. The goal behind TradingLeagues is to massively increase awareness and engagement with the financial markets at a global level by leveraging gamification. TradingLeagues launched globally in Dec 2023 and amassed more than 100k users.

In his free time, he loves playing chess, being involved with his two young boys, and finding ways to keep his mind sharp.

 

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Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob:
Hey, engagers. And welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game podcast. And we have Raghu with us today. Raghu, you’re probably gonna correct me for saying your name terribly, Raghu Kumar, but first of all, are you prepared to engage?

Raghu Kumar:
I am ready to engage, Roberto. And actually, you pronounced it pretty well, so, yeah, I think that was good.

Rob:
Amazing. So, Raghu is a serial entrepreneur and has been obsessed with the financial markets since the age of 16. He graduated from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He started his first company in 2006, RK Trading Partnership, a proprietary trading company which actively traded in the forex markets. He was able to turn ten k into more than 2 million over a span of two years using his low latency news trading strategies and using those profits. He moved back to India in 2008, along with two other co founders, and set up RKSV Securities, a retail stock brokerage which eventually rebranded into up stocks, which you might have heard from. And he’s been in the trading industry for quite some time, doing many interesting things. He moved back to the US, and in 2020, he incorporated trading leagues, which is a disruptive, gamified offering for the financial markets. The goal behind trading leagues is to massively increase awareness and engagement with the financial markets at a global level by leveraging gamification. It launched globally in December 2023 and amassed more than 100,000 users. And in his free time, he loves playing chess, being involved with his two young boys, and finding ways to keep his mind sharp. Raghu, is there anything that you feel that we didn’t mention that we should have, that we want to make sure we know?

Raghu Kumar:
No. I think that was a great introduction. Thanks for that.

Rob:
Amazing. Amazing. So, Raghu, what do regular days, weeks, or months? How do you structure your life nowadays? If we were to be in your shoes, what would that look like, essentially.

Raghu Kumar:
So I think it really depends on what time of the year and what I’m up to in terms of my focus areas. Right now, to be very honest with you, we’re trying to go through a fundraise, so my mind is really occupied with that aspect of my company. Obviously, as an entrepreneur, you’re wearing multiple hats and you’re doing a lot of different things. And so right now, a large part of my day involves thinking about the next investor calls I want to have. How am I ready for that, preparing for that in terms of how I budget my day, obviously, sleep is important, right? I’m a big fan of actually making sure that I get enough sleep, so I try to sleep at least seven to 8 hours every day, and then I try to get to the office early. I put in at least eight to 10 hours at work. I’m trying to stay active and healthy and things like that, and then spend time with my kids. It really kind of revolves around those areas for the most part.

Rob:
Amazing. Wearing plenty of hats like most entrepreneurs, and doing plenty of things, but also taking care of sleep and family. It makes a lot of sense. I think it’s the kind of stuff that keeps us healthy. I personally have just started, hopefully a long journey into physical, active health as well. Let’s see. Hopefully it lasts until the end of my days. We’ll see. We’ll see how we manage to do that. But Raghu, this interview is all about you and your experience. So the first question we like to ask our guests has to do with failure or first attempt at learning. So we want to know about a time when you were trying to do one of these gamified strategies, one of these games. Maybe it has to do with trading leagues, I don’t know. But things did not go your way, at least initially or partially, and we want to be there with you, feel a little bit of that pain and learn some of those lessons as well.

Raghu Kumar:
So I could probably think about multiple things here, but one failure comes to mind. So I had just graduated from college. I graduated early from college. So I finished a four year degree in two years just so that I could graduate early and basically get a head start with trading. I think you talked about the fact that I’ve been involved with day trading. So I kind of knew from a pretty young age that I wanted to become a trader. So even when I was in college, I just thought about the day that I, I was going to graduate, and then I would start trading. So I spent a lot of time in college just reading up on day trading, reading different books. And when I graduated, I basically asked my parents, hey, I don’t have a job right now, so I need to live with you guys. And they said, okay, no problem. And I started basically building my own trading models. And it was very, very difficult, right? Because you read these things in books, and when you read them in books, you get a certain kind of idea of how easy things can really be, and then you actually realize, okay, now I need to actually build trading models and try to make money from it. And trading is one of those things where it’s extremely difficult to make money from trading because 95% of day traders lose money. This is something a lot of traders don’t know.

Rob:
Wow.

Raghu Kumar:
But the large. Yeah, the large majority of traders actually lose money. Now, if you’re investing, that’s different. If you’re investing long term, then that’s a different beast altogether. But if you’re trading, most traders lose money. So, long story short, it took me a long time for me to actually build a successful trading strategy. Took me more than a year. And during that one year, it involved a lot of thinking that I had something which would work and then deploying it live, and then realizing that it wasn’t making money on the live markets. So a lot of kind of back and forth, and eventually I came across some strategies which did make money, and then that kind of got my career started. So that’s the first major kind of failure that comes to mind for me.

Rob:
Makes sense. And I don’t know if this is a stretch, but as you know, we’re generally focused on games, gamification, gamified strategies. But is there anything that you learned from that then maybe you have applied or could apply to a different arena outside of trading?

Raghu Kumar:
Yeah, 100%. I think one thing that comes to mind is when you try to take the stress out of the equation, it really helps. Right. And so again, for me personally, it’s been an interesting journey to go from trading to now building a gaming product. But with gaming, we don’t associate stress with games. And so even with trading, one thing I realized is during that one year, when I was building my first strategies, what I realized was, once I eliminate the stress from the equation and I thought about it more as a game, then things came into picture and things made sense and it became easier to make progress. So there’s a certain element of gamifying the experience in itself, and that experience can be anything. But whatever you are trying to experience, if you try to take the anxiety and the stress away from it and try to gamify it and try to have fun with it, then it actually induces a nice emotion internally, which for me led to a good outcome. So, yeah, I think that’s what comes to mind over there.

Rob:
Makes sense, taking the stress out of the equation. Sometimes when we’re creating gamified strategies, gamified products, some people think that because the result, or the usual thing is that people get stressed around it, maybe this should be a stressful experience, and maybe it needs to be. Maybe it doesn’t. I mean, maybe if you’re training people for stressful situations because they’ll be facing that afterwards, maybe it has to be maybe escalating stress, but otherwise, maybe it doesn’t.

Raghu Kumar:
So cheers. And everything is a challenge, right? I mean, if you think about like even running a company or as an entrepreneur, if you’re running a startup, there’s obviously an end goal in mind, and you know what the end goal is, so why stress over it, right? Instead, try to have fun and try to just enjoy the moment, enjoy the process. And, you know, it may sound cheesy, but I think if you actually think of the whole thing as a game, it actually makes for a better experience.

Rob:
Of course, of course. And there’s strategies that we’ve discussed here in the podcast many times. Engagers, as you know, this is something that you can apply to clients, you can apply to the learning of others, but this is definitely something that you can apply to your own self. There are things that you might want to gamify to achieve your objectives, to keep yourself engaged, whatever that may look like. But Raghu, let’s actually go in. I don’t want to even call it the opposite direction, but a different one. How about you tell us about a time when you were using gamified strategies and things actually went well. We want to be there and hear about that success, maybe some of the success factors. And again, it doesn’t have to be at the initial attempt you made, it can be the hundredth attempt, but we want to, again, we want to be there and perhaps have some of that experience that you got.

Raghu Kumar:
Sure. So I want to keep a little bit more brass tacks and just get to the point here. So with trading leagues, obviously, that’s the company that I’m building right now. And trading league’s basically for those of your listeners who don’t know what it is, it’s basically like a draft kings meets a Robinhood. That’s the way I try to explain it to people. It’s basically a gamified environment for the financial markets. So our users come in from all around the world, and they’re playing games against each other involving real time prices of stocks, cryptocurrencies, forex, etcetera. And we’re trying to basically get more people interested with the financial markets using the power of gamification. Right. So, you know, that’s essentially what the product is. Now, our go to market strategy for acquiring customers basically involves working with different community managers. We have hundreds of community managers, and what they do is they are trying to build communities and basically train their users on how to play the games and play games alongside them, etcetera. So we launched the community manager program initially, and it was doing okay, fairly well. And then one day we said, you know what? Let’s try to gamify the experience for the community managers. That’s how we started that whole process. The question was, how do we gamify the experience for the CM or the community manager? And again, the idea was to actually eliminate the stress for the community manager, right. Because they’re already being tasked with something quite difficult, which is to tell their users and their communities to join trading leagues, which is not the easiest thing to do. So how do we make things more fun and enjoyable for them? And what we decided to do was to create, like, a UI, which would involve different types of missions for the community managers to accomplish every week. So, for example, if I’m a community manager, and if I accomplish the task of introducing 100 people to the platform that week, then I would basically be incentivized to do that, right through a cash based payout. But everything was done through a very gamified UI. So when the community manager logs into the application, they can see every day exactly how close they are towards accomplishing that mission. Just a little status bar, which shows how many people they referred. And once they achieve that mission, some confetti gets sprayed on the home screen, and then it makes them feel good, probably induces some dopamine or whatever that is, you know, at the chemical level in the brains. But I guess the idea is to actually try to induce a sense of gratification and enjoyment through the application itself. Right? So that’s an element of gamification. And what that taught us is when we launched that it was extremely well received from the community managers. And in fact, the number of conversions and we got through the community managers basically went through the roof. But more importantly, they enjoyed the experience even more. Right? They enjoyed the fact that they could not come here to the application and see every day exactly how they’re doing. And essentially, it’s like a game within a game. So, yeah, that was a really cool kind of thing that we did, which shows the power of gamification, you know?

Rob:
Amazing, amazing. So you were gamifying the experience of those community managers, and now you’ve done it in this company and used this strategy. Did you follow some sort of process to create the gamification? Or if you were going to do it again with perhaps another product, would you follow a process, a series of steps? Essentially, how would you do it? If you were to help somebody else do it? What would that look like?

Raghu Kumar:
So I think you have to understand, number one, who it is that you’re trying to build this for and why, right? Like, why are you doing this? Right. I think the term gamification can be potentially a very generic term. Like, what does that even mean to gamify something? So who are you trying to please satisfy and why? And then really getting very clear on what it is that you’re trying to do for that user. So for, you know, in our case, again, going back to the example of our community managers, obviously the community managers, we wanted to induce a better experience for them. So that’s the why and the who. And then the what became, okay, well, we can do it through the application itself, right? Since the community managers are anyways promoting trading leaks to their communities, why not try to induce a sense of gamification on the application itself and then working backwards from that? So I think if you break down the problem into those different variables and you really spend the time to answer those questions, then you can go from there and then make some progress, you.

Rob:
Know, makes a lot of sense. Thank you for letting us into your mind in that sense, for that question. So, Raghu, you’ve had some experience now with gamification. I know you’ve been a gamer as well. You’ve been playing some stuff in your life. If somebody were like in the previous question, to do gamification by themselves, would you say that there is some, through your experience, any best practices? No silver bullets? We know those don’t really exist. But what would you recommend them to do to get their project to be at least a little bit better? Essentially, yeah.

Raghu Kumar:
So I think a lot of this kind of comes down to just paying a lot of attention to who your users are and what they’re actually looking for. And again, what are you really trying to solve? Because I think the term gamification can potentially be a very generic term. Right. So really getting very detailed into who you’re solving for, and then how are you actually going to use gamification to solve those users problems? And the more you really deep dive into this and the more specific you get and the more detailed oriented you get with that process, then you can build a solution. Like, again, going back to the example of what we did for our community managers, we didn’t come up with that overnight. Right. It took us almost a month and a half to really solve for that because one thing we realized was our community managers were not having the best experience. So that was the problem that we’re trying to solve. And then we spent a lot of time thinking about how can we create, like, a missions based approach to solve that challenge and then working backwards. And once you get very clear in your mind as to what the end outcome can look like, then it’s actually pretty simple. I mean, obviously if you have a decent team you’re working with, in our case, working with our design team and our developers, we were able to tell them exactly what we wanted done and then we got the job done. So you have to be a little patient and understand exactly what it is you’re solving for. And then working backwards from that amazing recommendation.

Rob:
Thank you very much for that, Raghu. And now, like you’ve known a little bit more about the podcast, now you’ve heard our questions, at least some of them. You kind of have a vibe for the podcast. Is there, you know, is there somebody that you would be curious to hear answering these questions in a future episode, sort of perhaps a future guest for the podcast?

Raghu Kumar:
Sure. I think someone who has built some sort of a mass consumer facing product which has potentially served maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of gamers would be very, very interesting because we’re still very, very young in our journey with trading leagues and we’re still trying to figure certain things out. We just launched the app seven months ago and we have maybe four or 5000 users playing every day on the app. But once we get to the point where we’re serving hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users, then the problems take on a different scale altogether because you cannot just make some sort of ad hoc decision, and there’s probably so many variables that enter the picture. So it would be very interesting to see if I could listen to someone who has been in that kind of situation, answer these types of questions.

Rob:
Makes sense. Fantastic. Thanks for that. And continuing up with the recommendations sort of idea, if you were to recommend this audience again, people who are thinking about doing something like what you did with trading leagues, but probably with other products as well, would you recommend a book? And which book would that be? And of course, why?

Raghu Kumar:
So my book recommendation is going to be, I think, very different from maybe what you would expect. But I am a big fan of kind of seeing what successful entrepreneurs have done in the past and how they kind of went about businesses more from a sector agnostic perspective. So not necessarily with gaming. So I’m a big fan of Steve Jobs. I think what he did with Apple is just magical and Pixar. And so Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is a must read. Right. I think Hills, you know, jobs transformation over the years and how he thought about, how he thought about building companies like Pixar and Apple. Right. I mean, it really takes a revolutionary kind of a mind to do that. And then, along the same lines, the same author, he’s obviously written the recent book on Elon Musk, but then he’s also written an amazing book on da Vinci. Right? Leonardo da Vinci, who’s obviously the polyglot. He did so many amazing things in his life. Amazing scientist, an artist and an inventor. And so I personally enjoy reading biographies of very successful individuals of the past. And I’m currently reading a book on Napoleon. And so I think, for me, what inspires me to keep going is to understand that there have been incredible geniuses who have done incredible things, right. And trying to just maybe become 1% of that versus maybe reading a book on finance or trading or gaming, because that’s just theory for the most part. But I think if I’m trying to keep myself motivated and trying to become better every day, I prefer trying to read on these amazing stories of visionaries.

Rob:
Of the past, you know, amazing biographies. That’s actually a pretty good one. I’ve read a few. I can’t say I’m hooked onto biographies as you are, but I’ve read a few that I found very interesting and very useful as well. So nice recommendations. I’ll jot down Steve jobs for now, and then you will see if the other ones are still that valuable for you as well. Does that make sense? Fair enough.

Raghu Kumar:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Rob:
So, Raghu, what would you say is your superpower, especially in this world, again, of creating games and gamified strategies, in your case, in the trading space, what would you see is that thing that you do at least better than most other people.

Raghu Kumar:
So I think, for me, discipline is really, really important, especially as an entrepreneur and trying to build a gaming business now. And especially now, since we’re trying to do something a little different than what is conventionally accepted out there? We’re trying to do something different with trading leagues. And so when you’re doing something different and you’re trying to be a little disruptive, it’s important to have a unique perspective on things and to be able to challenge yourself. Right. I need to hold myself accountable. So I think having discipline is extremely, extremely important. And so I try to, you know, remain super disciplined. Right. I try to get and try to make sure that I try to remain as consistent as possible every single day with my work. So I would say discipline and focus are some of the superpowers that I try to cultivate. And for any listeners out there, I would definitely recommend cultivating the same superpower if possible.

Rob:
Hmm, very interesting and very useful ones as well. I would say anything you want to achieve, you definitely need discipline and focus. So, Raghu, we’re getting to the end of the podcast, but before we get to that, we need to know, what would you say is your favorite game?

Raghu Kumar:
So I’m a huge fan of just like sports, sports in general. I love watching sports and I think a lot of this actually comes back to the gamification angle, right? Because I just love games in general. And so sports is obviously a form of a game. And along those lines, I’ve always been a huge fan of just sports games, right? So sports video games. So obviously you have FIFA, you have Madden, NBA, two k. And I’ve been playing those types of video games like for as long back as I can remember, from the age of probably 14 or 15 onwards, I’ve been hooked to sports video games. And yeah, so I think whenever I get some downtime, I try to play two k with my kids. I have an older son who is also really getting into video games as well. So we both try to play with each other. And that’s what I love about video games because it allows us to come together. It’s a social acceptable kind of activity, right, that you can partake in with other people. And so, yeah, I think for me, my go to games involve sports video games.

Rob:
So I’ll jot down two k as your favorite one, at least for now at the time of this interview. That might change in the future, I’m sure. Does that make sense?

Raghu Kumar:
100%. 100%.

Rob:
Cool. So Raghu, again, thank you very much for being here today. Available, sharing your experience, your expertise. This is the time if you want to share anything for trading leagues or anything else, you want to tell us where we can find out more about what you’re doing, your work, your company, whatever that is. And of course, any final words or piece of advice you want, now is the perfect time.

Raghu Kumar:
Yeah. So for any of you who want to check out trading leagues, check it out. Our website is www. Dot tradingleagues dot app. It’s a web based platform, so you don’t have to go to the play store or the app store to download anything. It’s super fun. You can also find me on twitter. I’m at Raghu Rain, so r a g h u r a I nde and would love to connect with you.

Rob:
Amazing. Thank you for sharing all of that. Thank you for sharing where we can find you, where we can do all these things about trading leagues as well. All your experience, everything you’ve shared on this podcast, I think will be super valuable for the engagers. However, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Engagers. It is fantastic to have you here, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game podcast. And I’d like to ask you a very quick question. How are you listening to this episode of the podcast? If you are using any podcasting app, you know, anything from Spotify, iTunes, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, I don’t know any app that you could be using out there. There’s plenty of them. And we are on all of those apps. If you are doing that, have you clicked on that follow or that subscribe button? Have you rated us? Have you rated this podcast? If you haven’t gone ahead and do that, please, please do so. This is a great way so that we can reach more engagers like you to achieve this mission of making engagement, retention and learning amazing using game inspired and gamification solutions. If you want the instructions, we created a quick one on professorgame.com iTunes, and it’s iTunes because that’s the first one that we created. There’s a couple more in there. And as always, as we’d like to remind you, please, before you go on and do your next thing, please remember to hit that subscribe or that follow button using that favorite podcast app. And of course, listen to the next episode of professor game. See you there.

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