Funny Business
00:14:38 · Adam Miller
[00:14:38] S2: It was a funny journey because I think Sachin and I, we always wanted to do something together because we always felt like we had this special friendship, this special energy together, and we have very, very similar values about what we want out of life. One of those values is about we wanna do really ambitious things, and we wanna do really impactful things to help humanity in whatever way, and we really care about tech and startups and all that stuff. And we actually originally thought that this would manifest in creating a venture capital firm together. Like, we both really like investing. We think it's a very intellectually stimulating sort of domain to sit in. You get to meet a lot of people. We're both very extroverted. And we could see ourselves, like, being really fulfilled in that way, and we started to head in that direction. So Sachin went to Airtree. I was a year behind him, so I was, like, hopefully about to jump into a venture job. And that was where we thought our path was gonna go down. And we sort of hit this this fork in the road in 2023, like early twenty twenty three where Sachin was thinking about, you know, potentially taking his career to America, and I was thinking about next steps. And we realized that we weren't gonna be doing something together if we took that step. And so we started to think about, like, what could we do together that could be something that's super impactful, really ambitious, but we sort of stay together. And so the first iteration of that was, like, alright, should we do the podcast full time? And we're, like, we're starting to get in sponsorship revenues. We could bootstrap that. That would be really fun. And ironically, we'd always, like, joked about doing the podcast full time, but the moment it became a reality, it didn't feel ambitious enough. I think we're like, oh, fuck. Like, are we just gonna do a podcast full time? And then that sort of went rolling from there.
00:16:16 · Lachlan Bradford, Sachin
[00:16:16] S0: Yeah. And then I think that was the start [00:16:17] S3: of us thinking about things, and that's kind of where we came out with the concept of Kindling from. And then the other kind of factor in this equation was that, like, we started talking to people about, like, okay. If we build x y z, what would that look like in terms of funding? So we could have gone down the bootstrapped route and built a good cash flow business. And sometimes I think that's, like, the... One of best paths to take because you can take profit out of your business and live a comfortable life. But instead, we took the more frugal approach of not paying ourselves much, raising money, and trying to build a bigger business. And that was almost more like a... We know this problem is to be solved in the creative space and this problem is we're really passionate about, but it's also this almost soulful thing of like, hey, we we wanna be fulfilled by doing something really big and something that feels really hard to do. I think just doing the podcast by itself didn't feel like it was stretching ourselves enough.
00:17:06 · Adam Miller, Lachlan Bradford
[00:17:06] S2: Yeah. And I think what we really wanted is that you can some people bootstrap, some people take on a lot of VC money. Like, we wanted to take on a very small amount, get it primarily from angels in our network. We did, like, you know, Airtree participated in a community round and sort of be in a position where we're not taking on, like, heaps of VC money. Like, a sort of different sort of round. And... Yeah. They'll... So we went through, like, sort of lots of iteration with what we're gonna do, and the thing that we're really passionate about was technology media. So sort of spreading the voices and learnings of great startups in APAC. And so that was the first big thing we're trying to do. And then we had this idea for this sort of tech platform, which we wanted to build to enable other creators like ourself, which is something that sort of we're doing in the background. [00:17:57] S0: I love that you guys are documenting the journey and letting people in on how you guys actually operate. So if you go check out their Instagram page, you can suss that all out after you listen to the podcast. But how important is that aspect been around, like, showcasing the journey and how you guys are actually building it while you build it?
00:17:57 · Lachlan Bradford, Sachin
[00:17:57] S0: I love that you guys are documenting the journey and letting people in on how you guys actually operate. So if you go check out their Instagram page, you can suss that all out after you listen to the podcast. But how important is that aspect been around, like, showcasing the journey and how you guys are actually building it while you build it? [00:18:15] S3: Yeah. It's it's pretty meta. Right? Because that becomes content in of itself where you can document what you're doing. But we just felt that, like, no one in Australia was doing that well, and we saw people in America start to do it. And as as we mentioned before, we're naturally quite open people. We're naturally people that share, and this was, like, a way that we can scale our learnings as we go through this journey with more people. So we talk about, like, very authentically about when we're having really shit days, what that feels like, you know, the sacrifices we have to make to go into this journey. Like, there's lots of common nuances of being a founder that no one really talks about, and you only really get to expose to when you're on the inside. We And kind of wanted to take that stuff of what it's like on the inside and give it kind of to the mainstream audience.
00:18:15 · Sachin, Adam Miller
[00:18:15] S3: Yeah. It's it's pretty meta. Right? Because that becomes content in of itself where you can document what you're doing. But we just felt that, like, no one in Australia was doing that well, and we saw people in America start to do it. And as as we mentioned before, we're naturally quite open people. We're naturally people that share, and this was, like, a way that we can scale our learnings as we go through this journey with more people. So we talk about, like, very authentically about when we're having really shit days, what that feels like, you know, the sacrifices we have to make to go into this journey. Like, there's lots of common nuances of being a founder that no one really talks about, and you only really get to expose to when you're on the inside. We And kind of wanted to take that stuff of what it's like on the inside and give it kind of to the mainstream audience. [00:18:53] S2: Yeah. We we just saw this really cool opportunity because we've got this effectively on one level. We're building a media company first. And so that is media as part of the media company, but it's it's also meta because we get a document everything we're doing with the bigger business as well. And so there was that opportunity there and we're like, we can do this really well because we can put out personalities out there. We can be really open and, like, people just crave this sort of content. So we're making, a big bet there and we're committing to doing that for, like, multiple years and, you know, we just gotta execute, do, like, a vlog a week for a while.
00:18:53 · Adam Miller, Sachin, Lachlan Bradford
[00:18:53] S2: Yeah. We we just saw this really cool opportunity because we've got this effectively on one level. We're building a media company first. And so that is media as part of the media company, but it's it's also meta because we get a document everything we're doing with the bigger business as well. And so there was that opportunity there and we're like, we can do this really well because we can put out personalities out there. We can be really open and, like, people just crave this sort of content. So we're making, a big bet there and we're committing to doing that for, like, multiple years and, you know, we just gotta execute, do, like, a vlog a week for a while. [00:19:23] S3: Is there a Funny Business vlog coming soon? I would definitely watch that. [00:19:26] S0: Well, we... To be honest, we've toyed around with the aspect of doing all that type of stuff, but with the work that we were doing, we found it like a bit too intensive and just like lots of moving parts, I feel like, for us.