Indian startup goes viral with chief meme officer vacancy

An Indian investment startup has been flooded with thousands of applications after its post to hire a chief meme officer went viral last week and turned into a meme itself.

The company, StockGro, was launched in Bangalore in 2020 as an experiential learning platform for millennials to become investment ready.

Its founder, Ajay Lakhotia, said that he wants to teach people how to invest because in Indian culture the focus is only on saving money rather than using it to gain profit.

“No one ever teaches us how to invest money, and there is a very large gap in our education system,” he said.

“If we want to build our nation, the money has to be rolled back through investment in different asset classes. I thought that this is something which is not just building a new startup, but also a nation-building exercise.”

Lakhotia, 41, began investing in stocks 20 years ago and noticed that most of his friends did not share his interest in finance.

As more than 65 percent of Indians are under 35, he decided to try to change perceptions surrounding investment and make it resonate with a younger, digital-savvy generation.

That is how StockGro came up with the idea to hire an officer responsible for memes — visual content, usually humorous, that goes viral on social media.

“Finance in people’s minds, when it comes to numbers, it’s not fun, it’s not exciting. That’s why we said, ‘Let’s break this whole monotony out there and let’s make it a little more fun. Let’s get someone who can add humor and satire to the whole finance sector,’” Lakhotia said.

“The new generation, their attention span is very small. If I throw 500-page literature at them, saying, ‘go read and start doing your options and futures trading,’ they will not do it. But if you make it bite-size content, if you make it fun for them, if you make it engaging for them, they will go after this.”

To the StockGro team’s surprise, the meme chief vacancy displayed on social media as an experiment has already drawn 3,000 applications, with candidates ranging from influencers to advertisers and college students.

All of the applicants, Lakhotia said, are “pretty much excited about this role.”

The successful applicant for the job, which comes with a monthly salary of $900, will be announced after the company runs a week-long test of shortlisted candidates’ skills.

“We will help them put out their memes, we will engage the audience and then we will know whose memes are working, whose concepts are working well, and accordingly we will move forward,” Lakhotia said.

If everything goes well, the company will venture into foreign markets, including the Middle East, where the demographics, especially in the Gulf region, are similar to those of India.

“The challenges are exactly the same,” Lakhotia said. “The market is very vibrant out there. The millennials actually are looking to invest in multiple asset classes and not just stocks, which is a very good time for us to enter these markets.

“That is what we are exploring, and we will probably be there in the next few quarters.”