S2E1 ‘Missing the Forest for the Trees‘ | Sachin Shah | Co-Host of ‘The Sachin and Adam Show,’ Deloitte Analyst, TEDx speaker

A young analyst's case that profit and social impact align

Sachin Shah, a Deloitte analyst and podcast co-host, rejects the split between making money and doing good. He argues the hardest social problems are now the most viable business problems, and that social enterprises, which scale on revenue rather than donations, are the vehicle. His own method pairs small daily habits with a vision built over years.

Takeaways

• Perfectionism stops more starts than failure does. Sachin favours the lean startup idea of minimum viable products over polished plans, and says he and Adam Miller booked a podcast room and recorded rather than waiting. He felt no failure because the show extended who they already were.
• Solving big problems is now good business. Sachin says the idea that business is bad and social impact requires a not-for-profit is wrong. Social enterprises sit between companies like Westpac and charities like Oxfam, scaling on their business model instead of donations. He says the first trillionaire will come from climate change.
• Daily habits need a long-term vision. His system pairs daily habits, cold showers, meditation, exercise, healthy eating, water, eight hours of sleep and blue light blockers, with a vision developed over years. Habits without a vision cause existential angst because you do not know why you need to perform well.
• Senior people improvise more than they admit. People in business and law project certainty because that is how they sell, while privately carrying imposter syndrome. The tough banking culture that avoided personal disclosure is changing, and vulnerability has risen over five to six years.
• Students should experiment rather than reason it out. He tells students to take internships across finance and startups, message people on LinkedIn, and not to think their way into a purpose. He reached social entrepreneurship by combining social justice with business, after earlier plans for human rights law and the World Bank.
• Their five-year aim is a social impact fund. Sachin and Adam Miller want to start a social impact VC within five to ten years, and he is drawn to using capital to fund new social innovations. A recurring theme in his interviews is that building something meaningful takes a decade or more.

The bodybuilding experiment

1. Adam Miller challenged him to do the thing that scared him most at the end of their exchange in the Netherlands.
2. He had trained three or four years, then hired a coach for twelve to thirteen weeks of shredding.
3. He interned at Deloitte four days a week and studied full time, adding an hour of cardio daily.
4. He weighed all his food and in the final weeks slept one or two hours a night, seeing black spots in his vision.