Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
00:26:02 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:26:02] S1: Yeah. [00:26:02] S2: Like like like, it's really... I have been ruminating through, like, pain and then, like, sort of, like, abstracted these out. So the first one is it comes from self and then to others. So so when I am doing not well, like when I feel like I'm burned out, like the team does feel the energy and like everyone feels miserable. So like do take breaks at times and like focus on making your energy like calm and collected. I think that is that is one thing. I didn't... I was like always looking at like solving like this problem, that problem or this person's problem in the sector, but I didn't realize that a lot of the sort of most high impact moments are about either sort of adjusting my sort of situation, and then also like intellectual unlock in my brain, like clarity. So that's one. Two, I was really bad at, I think, just describing, feelings. I think before I was a founder, like, it's like, of course, I have feelings, but I don't describe them. I'm now better at naming because I am naming also others' feelings. And so it's actually took me like a very long self discovery journey to get to a place where I can put words to my feelings because there's this like actually natural wall of like always using the rational part of the brain. And the reason I say this is important hack is because, like, when you don't talk about feelings, sometimes I think gratefulness is not established as frequently as as I would like it to. And I'm also bad at putting people at ease because I don't name feelings.
00:27:39 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:27:39] S1: Can you give an example of that just so that people really get the lesson? [00:27:42] S2: Yeah. So I feel a lot of gratefulness to every member of my team. [00:27:48] S1: Okay. [00:27:49] S2: Not every day I say it. And there are like big, big times where we were just grinding. The night before the classification finance info groups, the entire office was just... I mean, at least half of them were there over like all nighter. The reason it's actually quite interesting is because our internal infrastructure tooling is very good. So we run everything very fast. And then what we realized is now is release time. And, like, ideally, you want others to independently validate your stuff. Right? But, like, their infrastructure tool is not very good. So, okay, now we have this choice. Like, that's like last minute choice. Like, it's like 8PM. Like, we're like 7AM. We're we're like posting that like, it might take them a long, long, long time to like run this thing and like cross check it. And they might think it's false, like, because it starts failing. And so, like, because of this issue, like, you're just, doing all nighter. I... Like, I realized that I will express my gratefulness by, like, buying people, like, this massive sushi party boat rather than saying it. I just can't... I... It's very hard sometimes. [00:28:49] S1: It's your love language. Your love language [00:28:51] S2: is not... [00:28:52] S1: It's not... It's it's service instead of...
00:28:52 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:28:52] S1: It's not... It's it's service instead of... [00:28:53] S2: But but let's say you're away from the team. Right? Let's let's say it's over Slack, it's after. It's very, very important to just make everyone feel seen [00:29:01] S1: Yeah. [00:29:01] S2: And that you remember them. I think this is something that I later learned. Because there's all these tension being built up just from, like, the daily stress. Yeah. And then the third thing I think about sort of... It's it's kind of an interesting one is to to... I later learned that I I should always make sure to... [00:29:20] S1: Oh, you can ignore that. Whoever's... Yep. [00:29:22] S2: Is is to... I'm just scared that's mine. Oh. Yeah. I don't think it's mine. Okay. But... Yeah. The third thing I think most interesting is people sometimes are very... People sometimes are very different. So I have the belief that because I'm very single threaded initially that I would want people to focus on this one thing. Some people are very, like, thriving when they're octopus ish. Like, they put, like, their claws on, like, eight things. And, like, I literally learned to, like, let that happen, and that's actually the beautiful part of that. So we're now a very, like, bottoms up and benevolent dictator kind of model Mhmm. Compared to before where we would be a little bit more... Like I was emphasizing like top down or like channel command when the company reached large scale. [00:30:08] S1: Okay. That's great. And just so people can understand, how many employees did you have at the beginning of the year, like in
00:30:08 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:30:08] S1: Okay. That's great. And just so people can understand, how many employees did you have at the beginning of the year, like in [00:30:14] S2: In January, we had, like, less than 15. [00:30:17] S1: And how many do you have today in October? [00:30:18] S2: We have, like, 80. [00:30:19] S1: 80. So imagine going from 15 to 80, you're quadrupling, more than quadrupling, almost quintupling in just... In less than a year. Alright. Terrific. I'm gonna ask the e t l signature questions, then I'm gonna open it up for questions from the students. So students, you can start thinking about questions that you might have. But the first one, Carina, actually before I do this, I'm curious just with your math background, is there anything that you took away from math that's helped you as an [00:30:43] S2: entrepreneur? Everything. Everything. [00:30:45] S1: So share that because I think people would be surprised that math was relevant to entrepreneurship. [00:30:49] S2: Yeah. So so I... This is something I learned actually from law school. I I did enjoy my law school year very much is that math... [00:30:55] S1: You did not enjoy math.
00:30:55 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:30:55] S1: You did not enjoy math. [00:30:56] S2: I did. Oh, you did. I loved it. You loved it. Okay. The first year. When you're in math, when you're doing a proof, you're training your first principle thinking. You're training a very, very particular skill of being highly analytical. So everything becomes like a problem solving puzzle. I cannot stress how important that is in my day to day life, especially in moments where it's very high stake and I'm very stressed. When I'm very high stress, this thing still stays with me. Like the ability to be very high stress in like say, a math tournament and then still like solve the problem. That is, I think, super crucial training. The other thing that I find very helpful from math is the ability to just go very deep, to be obsessed about a problem. Like, it's actually... I call this mental like mental resilience. It's not like, you know, it's not the sort of resilience about like hardship. It's like when I can't figure it out, I just keep thinking. I just keep thinking. I just keep thinking. I take a break and then it's another day and I still cannot get over it. I sense that to be very, very important in company building, because if you don't have that, you will escape from the most critical problem.
00:32:06 · Ravi Belani, Carina Hong
[00:32:06] S1: That's great. Thank you for that share. So these are the class signature questions. We'll go through a few of them with time, but I also want the students to be able to share. And I might need to share the poll anywhere in a second, but we'll intersperse these. So Carina, if you were 20 years old and starting again today, what would you spend the next five years learning or building? [00:32:29] S2: Brain computer interface. [00:32:30] S1: Brain computer interface.