Sachin and Adam
00:18:25 · Adam, Sachin
[00:18:25] S0: And, like scared? I think we're scared. I I think [00:18:28] S1: for me personally, like, growing up, I always wanted to start a company. Like, that was my dream. If I close my eyes and imagine my dream life, like, it really looks like, you know, surfing in the morning with Sunrise and leading a big team towards an impactful goal. Like, that's what I've always thought, then Venture kind of changed that a little bit. But I always knew that, like, we wanted to build a fund together, and part of the reason we wanted to build a fund together is because we want to build something big. Right? The fund was just a vehicle of building something big and getting to impact. I think, like, my dad started a company about four years ago, and if I reflect on that, that probably made me a bit more fearful of starting something. It made me realize how hard it was and the effects it has on our family. And also when you meet so many founders in a VC position, it's very easy to start thinking about why things don't work. And I think like a good investor will always have like, why can this work? But you see so many people, they mortgage their houses, they lose their relationships that, you know, have all sorts of kind of ill things happen to them with... Like, the truth is with a business that probably won't work. And I think that really scared me and never really made me doubt my own capability, but it... For some reason, it scared me. And I think there was also this artificial constraint that we'd created in our minds was like, we'd have to bootstrap this thing.
00:19:43 · Adam, Sachin
[00:19:43] S0: Yep. We never thought about funding or doing something that was non bootstrap. Because we didn't like... It's a [00:19:49] S1: chicken and egg thing. Right? Like, we were... If we were just launching a podcast, there's no way we should have raised money. But if we were launching something bigger, that's [00:19:57] S0: when those ideas started happening, but we didn't really even give ourselves permission to talk about those ideas until you had that moment. I don't think we truly gave ourselves permission to think big. And I think, like, on your behalf, you'd seen, like, the difficulty of the startup life. On my behalf, I don't know if I had, like, enough inner confidence at that stage. Like, I think starting a company had always felt like an abstract thing. Like, I had my investor hat on. I was, like, really keen on doing that. Starting a company, was like, am I... Would I actually start a company like this age? And, like, I think think I need to feel really, really aligned and passionate about something to, like, even think about starting it. And then once we started to flesh out this idea, it, started to feel really, really right really, really quickly in the sense of, like, wow. We we started to give our permission... Ourself permission to think really big, like, in an unconstrained way. And then we realized that, like, this was almost the dream. This was the dream life, the dream company. This is like everything we've been talking about ever before.
00:19:57 · Adam, Sachin
[00:19:57] S0: when those ideas started happening, but we didn't really even give ourselves permission to talk about those ideas until you had that moment. I don't think we truly gave ourselves permission to think big. And I think, like, on your behalf, you'd seen, like, the difficulty of the startup life. On my behalf, I don't know if I had, like, enough inner confidence at that stage. Like, I think starting a company had always felt like an abstract thing. Like, I had my investor hat on. I was, like, really keen on doing that. Starting a company, was like, am I... Would I actually start a company like this age? And, like, I think think I need to feel really, really aligned and passionate about something to, like, even think about starting it. And then once we started to flesh out this idea, it, started to feel really, really right really, really quickly in the sense of, like, wow. We we started to give our permission... Ourself permission to think really big, like, in an unconstrained way. And then we realized that, like, this was almost the dream. This was the dream life, the dream company. This is like everything we've been talking about ever before. [00:20:53] S1: That was in, I think, late August last year, maybe early September. And what was remarkable is like after that moment, things just started happening.
00:21:01 · Adam
[00:21:01] S0: When we started to actually talk about the bigness of this idea, we were initially like, okay. Let's be sensible and give ourselves two weeks to think about it. And I don't think in that two weeks we had many doubts. Like, we just talked about it more and more, but we're almost already locked in. It's like we had all these these years of discussion and these months of discussion, but it just suddenly, like, locked in. Yeah. And then we had events like you were saying, the rain on whiskey night. Yeah. I've never had a moment in my life like that before where something's felt so right, and it's continued to feel feel that way. Like, we haven't obviously gone through our... Any major struggles yet, but there's something, like, spiritual about that moment when something just feels like even in the worst case scenario that this doesn't work, this will be incredible, like an incredible experience. That was a really big part of it because I think what we saw is that, like, we're thinking... We weren't really thinking about funding at that stage. We're still thinking about bootstrapping it. Yeah. So we'd started to make advertising revenue. And per episode, it was going well. Yeah. And we saw that if we actually did this properly, up the volume, got more views, and charged more, we can sustain. Like, eventually, we can sustain ourself. But the downside was so good because we could just... We... The downside is doing the Tim Ferriss NBA for a year. The upside is, like, building this really big company.
00:22:13 · Sachin
[00:22:13] S1: And I think actually, like, a thought that just came to my mind is like, I'm gonna talk a lot about the benefits of venture before signing a company because I really, really believe in this, but I think one of the ways in which it held me back was that I thought about businesses very much on a what could return a big fund perspective. And so if you think about the multiples of any business that's not SaaS, they're like maybe one to three to four x revenue. And from from me, like, back solving, I always thought about, like, what could return a big, big fund's money, and that's like a 4 to $5,000,000,000 outcome, etcetera, etcetera. But when I kind of took that hat off and I'm like, what can create value for a 100,000,000 people And then use that as a, like, a wedge to then start monetizing. And we started talking about the biz... Different business models that we're playing around with and this whole thesis that we're building with, which we can probably talk to in a later episode. It started to really make it make more sense to me. Like, it's like you don't have to build an enterprise SaaS company that is valued at $6,000,000,000 and returns a fund that's a billion dollars big. Like, that's just not how you have to build business.
00:23:19 · Adam, Sachin
[00:23:19] S0: Yeah. I think we'll constrain by, like, yeah, that venture mindset of, like, you gotta build a billion dollar company. And I think the first iteration of this was like, okay. If we stay in tech media and we're sort of niche, we can build maybe, like, $3,040,000,000 dollar company. And money is just a proxy for the impact you're having. But then we sort of iterated on that, and we're thinking about those other ideas down the line. And we're like, okay, maybe this can be a lot lot bigger. [00:23:43] S1: Yeah. And I think at this moment, with 70% committed to kind of like working through this, a theme of ours has been like a lack of intention almost. Like with the podcast, it was like curiosity. Right? Yeah. And I think that's actually a good thing. It's like not not a lack of intention. It's like a lack of like a kind of transactional, hey, I wanna do this podcast. Would be a big thing. [00:24:02] S0: I wanna do... It's always started out organic and a lack of intention, genuine curiosity, organic stuff. And then when we flick on the switch, we become really, really structured and intentional. Yeah. It's like with the fundraising stuff, it, like, just happened suddenly. We got a bit of, like, a a goal and a vision together, but then we became really structured about, okay, who are we reaching out to? How much are we raising? How much do we need from each person? Who could be a really good value add? Yeah. All that sort of stuff.