Bae HQ Compilation Episode 1: A Year-Ender Special | Bae HQ

Amardeep Parmar: 0:04

Hello, hello. So this is a special end of year episode where we've got a bunch of the best clips from all across the year and there's a huge list of people featured today. So I'm going to rattle through them and what you're going to get is sometimes they've been through hardships and where they're pivoted to do something better, which they're now getting more purpose from, it's making them happier. So if you're at that point in your life where you're trying to think about is this the right thing I'm doing now? Should I keep going? Should I change to something else? This is the episode for you. So let me rattle through the names of who's on today and then get straight into those amazing clips from this year. So you've got Avnish Goyal, Anya Roy, Raj Kaur, Benjamin Fernandes, Hardeep Rai, Lara Naqushbandi, Rahul Goyal, Sathya Smith, Iris ten Teije, Faraan Irfan, Vishal Amin, Sammi Wei, Nishul Saperia, Aaron Dardi, Rupa Ganatra Popat, Uzair Bawany, Lucy Jung, Dilesh Bhimjiani, and Amrit Dhaliwal.. That's a lot for you to get through, but you're going to get the best kit from hundreds of episodes.Enjoy it.

Avnish Goyal: 1:05

No one knew what I’m gonna do. They don’t see what I am seeing. And they said you know why are you joining there’s nothing for you to do here. And I said there is,we’re going to grow the property portfolio and we did. You know, it was huge fun doing that with my brothers and we really enjoyed that. And that was the first stage of that success. And then I had the opportunity to buy our first care home. I'd seen family members do that and I thought let's do that. I had no idea how. I'd never run a care home before and just threw myself in.

Avnish Goyal: 1:37

And what I found is, over the years you throw yourself in, you have a vision. You have an idea, it works out because you'll develop those skills. And then we decided I went on a course with tony robbins and said I was going to create this company that was going to be the leading care company and we're going to really and we didn't use the word disrupt in those days but I said I was going to change the face of the care sector and in my own way. I've been doing that with all the different initiatives that we've had, and that came out just an idea.

Avnish Goyal: 2:06

Someone said to me dream big, right, Don't worry about how you're going to do it, Do the what. What is it that you'd love to achieve? And that took a little while to even write that down on a piece of paper. And then, 23 years on, when I've looked back and I've still got that PowerPoint presentation that I created. It's like wow, it's incredible when you put your mind to something and able to articulate it, write it down and then work towards it. And that's what we've been doing, not just on that front, but even on and you know, in a moment we can talk about the charitable side of something we're also passionate about. And those the vision I had 13, 14 years ago, and that's being realized.

Amardeep Parmar: 2:42

So it makes me really happy to hear you say all of that, because that really aligns with what we're doing here. It's why we've got you on right, I think. From where I grew up in East London, I didn't really have role models to look up to, especially from our background, to say, oh, I can be like them. And what we're trying to do through our work is show people. There's so many people who look just like you, who you have the same background as you growing up, who've now gone on to achieve amazing things. And, as you said, everybody I've interviewed is human. They all sleep, they all eat, they interact, they have their insecurities, they have different problems, but it's that belief in themselves that they're able to push through that and continue to do amazing things and I guess anybody listening that's. What I really want to emphasize is that everybody's sat in their chair who's done incredible things. They're just human, they're just normal people.

Amardeep Parmar: 3:25

But what the difference is, like you said, is that they've sat down, made a clear vision and gone for it.

Anya Roy:

You know, if I didn't have that push and I didn't have that person just encouraging me, I don't think I would have taken it seriously. And, by the the way, like you know, I didn't just run out of the room and become an entrepreneur the next day. It just gave me the confidence that maybe this is something that I want to try later, later on, and it gave me the confidence that perhaps I could come up with good ideas, etc.

Anya Roy: 4:02

So so yeah, that's kind of the Cambridge story.

Amardeep Parmar:

So you mentioned as well that the ideas changed quite a lot since what it was originally. Yeah, what is Syrona Health today? Like yeah, can you tell us about, like, where you are, what the business is? 

Anya Roy:

Yeah, sure.

Anya Roy:: 4:16

Yeah, sure. So Syrona Health is a tech enabled platform that basically looks at supporting like taboo, stigmatized, underserved health conditions that occur across different life stages. We initially started in women's health, but like with a focus on menstrual health disorders like endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, we then expanded into fertility and menopause, and then our customers started demanding like more of a men's health version of it. And so we kind of focused on, in similar kind of, um, um, vein around like sort of sexual health disorders, male fertility, the angiopause, which is declining testosterone, et cetera. So we're really all about like serving these underserved conditions that affect people at different life stages. Um, and we think healthcare should change, depend on the life stage that you're at.

Amardeep Parmar: 5:12

If we dive into that period a bit or for, just like you, going into these companies and transforming them. What are some of the things that you kept seeing that maybe some of the businesses or founders listening to this right now might be experiencing themselves? What are some of the common problems you saw that you were able to solve?

Raj Kaur: 5:27

So, I mean, I, when I look at a business, I look across different functions. So, One of the main things I would see in product and engineering was a lot of technical debt, where the teams had rushed things into production. They were not doing proper QA. They were not doing, you know, sort of proper testing. And that led to a product that was very big, very inefficient, full of bugs. And, you know, just, just required a massive database just to run. So a lot of technical debt. I would also see teams not being commercial enough about how to decide what product features to try and build next.

Raj Kaur: 6:08

I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were very reactive and just wanted to chase the big shiny thing in front of their faces. And the product was constantly pivoting. And then you end up with the situation that you've got this Frankenstein that you're trying to sell that just doesn't really make sense. It's kind of become too bespoke for too many big clients. And now you've ended up with five bespoke products, as opposed to one thing you can sell everybody with add ons. That's what I would see. In the marketing function and sales.

Raj Kaur: 6:32

I would often see a very poor marketing strategy where there just wasn't enough focus. The channels weren't being approached properly. There wasn't enough sort of analysis being done on return on investment. Nobody was really monitoring where the leads were coming from, if they're paying off, that kind of thing. And I could talk you through every single department. But I think, you know, this would be like an hour long podcast just on that. So there are certain things. And I always say that I never worked for any exceptional startups. Like I never worked other than Corndel. I never worked for any that were like, we're the next Stripe or we're the next this. I've worked for a lot of businesses who did things very, very badly. So it taught me what not to do. And it taught me all the mad ways in which people do it wrong. And personally, I think that's actually maybe more valuable than working for one or two startups that do it perfectly, because there is more than one way of doing things right. But you also need to know what can happen if you do things in certain other ways

Raj Kaur: 7:28

That could be disastrous for the business.

Amardeep Parmar:

So, once you left university, what did you then go to? What was the next bit of the path? Because it's not a very obvious path to where you are today, right?

Benjamin Fernandes:

So I finished university.

Benjamin Fernandes: 7:40

Um, well, I was getting close to finish, one of my professors came up to me and he pulled me on the side. He said hey, Ben. So I went to his office, I went to see him and he sat me down. He's like hey, listen, look, I know you want to go back to Africa. Because I, that was always the thing. I wanted to go back to Africa and build something out to help people out there. And I didn't know what it would be, I just knew I wanted to build something. And so he's like yeah, I know you want to go back to Africa. And he says well, listen, promise me one thing.

Benjamin Fernandes: 8:02

I was like what, he's like well, if you're going to go back to Africa, promise me you're going to apply for your MBA and you're going to go to Stanford and Harvard and nowhere else. I look at this dude. I was like dude, I don't know somebody who's gone to do their MBA at Stanford, Harvard, any of these things. And I was like those schools are like not even in my league, like not even something I can even think. And you should apply, you'll get in. So you know, when somebody plants a mental thought in your head and can breathe life right. I always believe the world is really powerful.

Benjamin Fernandes:: 8:27

And so I went home and I sat down. I was like Googling what is an MBA? I didn't even know what it was. And so I was 20 years old and I was like you know what, let me just apply. And I had to go do this test exam, GMAT exam, which sucks and then applied for both Stanford and Harvard. Harvard rejects me immediately. And then Stanford put me on the wait list and they interviewed me and put me on the wait list. So I was like, oh, interesting. So at the age of 20 or 21, I managed to get on the wait list of an MBA program where the average is 29. I was like, okay, interesting, I think I have a chance. So I went, you know. Then, after the wait list, they rejected me and I actually responded to Harvard. I said one sentence. And even Stanford I wrote I actually have the email, I can show you this too. I said you've made the biggest mistake of your life by rejecting me. I just wrote that I was like you know, whatever, like it was never going to happen anyway.

Benjamin Fernandes:: 9:16

So I just wrote that.

Benjamin Fernandes:: 9:17

So then I applied again, but before applying the second, and I went to tell my dad. I was like, hey, I'm applying to these universities. My dad's like, well, who's going to pay? And, for context, the University of America my undergrad was in scholarship as well. So I was like, who's going to pay? And I said we'll see.

Benjamin Fernandes: 9:31

And so I went to church that it was June 2014. I went to church and I like I always believe in like seeds, so I took a bunch of money from my bank and I went to church. I was like god, this is my seed from education. If it's your will, it's your bill, you're gonna help me come through. So I applied, I I prayed and then I applied to stanford and uh, december 10th 2014, uh, I'm on my way home from work, I get a phone call and it says hi, is this Benjamin Fernandez? Was like yeah, he, hi, this is Derek Bolton, director of admissions at Stanford. I was like okay. He's like, well, first of all, I want to let you know that we've accepted you to the program.

Speaker 6: 10:10

And the phone drops. So the call drops. So then I was like, okay, so I'm frozen. I can't even say thank you. The call drops. I was like what's that? What's Stanford, yeah. And my dad's like, okay, who's paying? So I'm like sitting there. I'm like, okay, sitting in dar eslam. 25 minutes later I go back to my room like god, like remember that prayer I made about, like school fees. And then about 25 to 30 minutes later I get another phone call. It's like, hey, sorry the phone dropped. Anyway, what I wanted to let you know is we have this full scholarship that we give to seven out of 17,000 applicants for the Africa MBA fellowship, and we've decided to award you the Africa MBA fellowship, which is a full tuition cover on associated fees and expenses to attend Stanford. It's a $200,000 program.

Amardeep Parmar: 11:04

Hello, hello. Quick introduction to let you know about BAE HQ. We're the community for high growth British Asian entrepreneurs, operators and investors, and you can join completely free at thebaehq.com/oin there. You get our CEO pillars, so that's content, events and opportunities Direct to your inbox every week so you can get involved and it can help you to further your business and your career. We also have a free startup course called Bay Startup Foundations where, if you think about starting a business someday or at the early stages, it gives you all the information to help you get the ground running and to thrive in this new world. Back to the show. In this new world. Back to the show. 

Amardeep Parmar:

So, for people who don't know, ishan's been such a huge part of your life and your philosophy and your outlook on life. Now, can you tell us about that, about why that's affected you in the way it has?

Hardeep Rai: 11:54

Sure, so Ishin is my son. He is 17 years old. He was born in 2006 with a last minute birthing complication and that resulted in him having a severe brain injury. And just before he was born, my world was all about status progression, title money, cars, cufflinks, shirts that had my emblem on. It was really kind of you know. It was very ostentatious right, and when he was born and we found out there was a problem, it was just a very last minute thing.

Hardeep Rai: 12:36

My ex-wife went through a crash, cesarean for about 17 minutes, and we were then told that he's had a severe brain injury. His APCAR score was 3 out of 10, which is very low when you have a baby, and the next sort of 24 hours would be critical to see if he was going to survive. And in my mind I kept thinking it's okay, money will fix this somehow. We'll get the best doctor, we'll get the best this, we'll get the best that. But what we realized very quickly was we already had the best people working on us. We already had him back into UCLH. He was already randomized on a sort of a program. It's called a trial, the Toby trial.

Hardeep Rai: 13:17

Everything that could be done was being done and I think it took a few days to sink in that actually all my dreams and all my hopes and everything we had planned, all my dreams and all my hopes and everything we had planned, almost down to his marriage, you know, as you do as an Indian parent, sometimes was not going to be, you know, wasn't going to be that way and it was very, very, very difficult to adjust to that. You know, and I went through my own mental health journey. My ex-wife went through her own sort of depression, depression I did. You know, coming to terms with that kind of thing, especially when you're an Asian, is really challenging because we live in a society that is judgmental. It's judgmental across the board, right, but Asians, whether we like to admit it or not, we are probably the most judgmental people. And what made it hard, harder for me, was actually realizing that there were a lot of people that were around me, that were my friends, that were my not my close family, but the extended family colleagues that suddenly started judging me because of what had happened as well, and that was very difficult. So, on the one hand, I was coming to terms with his baby that actually looks like a regular baby when you saw, when you see, Ishin when he was young, you wouldn't know there was a problem, right, it was only from three or four months you could start seeing something different. So we had a regular looking baby.

Hardeep Rai: 14:31

And then we had all these other sort of external factors that were beginning to influence us, that were beginning to cause some real sort of mental challenges. So there were two issues of dealing with Ishin, coming to terms with that, and then there was dealing with, you know, families and friends, and then, of course, the workplace. You know, I'll never forget the day I walked back into work and you know, when you have a baby, you walk into the office. What are you going to expect? Right, you're going to have cake balloons, go out for drinks.

Speaker 7: 15:00

I walked into the trading floor, you know, 200 odd people, deathly silence, as I walked through, deathly, you know, and people didn't know what to say, and it was really awkward because it wasn't that they didn't want to congratulate me, but they were thinking do I congratulate Hardy, do we commiserate him? Do we ask him how he is? And so what most people did as a result of that is they backed off, they didn't talk to me, and that made me feel even more isolated. You know what I mean. So some of these situations are really difficult and this is why, with Kaleidoscope now, these are some of the things I talk about really openly, because we have to face these situations in life and not feel awkward.

Amardeep Parmar: 15:42

By the time you left Google right, what was on your mind? What were you thinking about, like what was behind your decision to leave?

Lara Naqushbandi: 15:48

So what happened? So I was at Google and I had another amazing boss I call Ronan Harris, and well, I had two bosses I had. Both of them were amazing, though my finance boss, James, and my UK boss, Ronan. Ronan had moved me out of finance into going to work for the business, and so that was a really big change for me, because I'd been a CFO or my career or a finance person, and now I was finally doing a P&L role, sort of general management, and that was a really big opportunity for me. So I wasn't really looking to leave Google. I had an amazing team, it was an amazing culture and, yeah, it was an exciting opportunity.

Lara Naqushbandi: 16:27

But there was this nagging thing in me about going back to the purpose and why am I doing all this and how am I having an impact? And I was speaking to my boss, ronan, and I was sort of saying I really want to do something. That's back in my passion of climate change. And he said well, why don't you lead the sustainability initiatives for Google in the UK? So I did that, and as part of that, I hired a management consulting firm to come and help us define some aspects of sustainability strategy

Lara Naqushbandi: 16:57

Anyway, the guy that I hired Felix. He basically had come up with this idea for a business in the sustainability space with his colleague Anthony, so he pitched it to me and I just thought, well, this is an amazing idea. As much as I love Google, this feels very much in line with my purpose. The timing seems good and I had a bit of a safety net. You know, I made a bit of cash because Google shares have done really well. I thought now's the time right. I should try this and see where it takes me.

Amardeep Parmar: 17:34

I think a lot of people have that a couple of years into their first job. Yeah, you've got the honeymoon period at the beginning, right, new job, like it's all shiny, all new, everything like that. Then after a couple of years that fades away and then you realize do I actually enjoy what I'm doing or not exactly? And taking that step out like did you know what you're going to do once you left, or did you leave and then start the soul searching?

Rahul Goyal: 17:56

So I think this, this, this is a funny thing that you made me realize that back when I'd gone into finance the shiny thing, actually I had never bought a lot of branded stuff in my life, so I used to make a lot of money as a private equity guy. So in the first one year was just all about like buying, like designer stuff with designer clothes, like, and once sort of like you start buying it, you're like, well, I don't, like you had been holding that desire for such a long time. And when you do it, you're like, okay, done, okay. Now what? When I left finance, I had no idea what I was going to do. I just left it. I had some savings because I was making a lot of money for my age, and back in the day in finance but sort of I had savings, so I left it. I said I'm going to take some time off and figure out what I really want to do. And at that time my idea was going into public markets because that's what I had been craving for, that I'm going to go into a hedge fund, figure out a job in a hedge fund and sort of like, get there.

Rahul Goyal: 18:43

And then I left and then I tried applying to hedge funds and sort of like getting into public markets, but it was very hard. I didn't have a visa to be here in this country, so anybody who had to give me a job had to sponsor me. So that was another level of hardship which I had to go through. It's like okay, like you have to first get a job and then you also need to get that company to sponsor, and and then you also need to get that company to sponsor, and when the job market is sort of like a dire place, it's very hard to get that. So I couldn't figure that out and I was like working hard to get the job.

Rahul Goyal: 19:10

But then what happened was there's a funny, funny, funny point in my life where I've come from India and growing up in India, like I never used to cook. My mom used to cook the food in the house and I had never been in the kitchen. I started cooking because this is the first time I was not doing anything like after studies and sort of like my job. I started cooking. I was like I need to take care of my health, I need to sort of like cook food. So I went, used to go to Tesco and sort of like buy ingredients and cook some recipe, like and that was the first time in my life I think I had the joy of making something you know, like making something from your hand, like not just like making software or making like writing code, making something from your hand where you go and pick up some like like 10, 10 different things, mix them together and then there is a dish.

Rahul Goyal: 19:55

Then I started calling like my friends to my house to like show them sort of what I'd cooked, and that was a fun experience. That like had a light bulb moment for me, like wow, this is great, great. Like I like building and creating things. Like that moment had not occurred in my head up till that point and that side, sort of like starting, started to like play into my entrepreneurial itch. That maybe, maybe, like I want to build things rather than sort of like move numbers around.

Amardeep Parmar: 

And obviously from being a Local Globe.

Amardeep Parmar: 20:25

That's where you came up your idea of your own startup. You just said what was it about this idea?

Amardeep Parmar: 20:29

that which was like this is the one that I want to spend the next how many years of my life on?

Sathya Smith: 

You know what, truth be told, when I was at Local Globe even before local globe or any point in time I never saw myself as an entrepreneur. I never saw myself as someone who had found a company. A founding company was what other people did. What I did was work in those companies. That's how I saw my life, that's how I saw my career. But I've always been a problem solver and the thing that happened at Local Globe was, I would work with all these early stage founders and I saw them struggling with this concept of leadership. So I started looking for solutions to help them and very quickly I realized there was no solution for how do you become a good leader? And especially given that, you know, most of these folks were very technically minded, they were looking for data, they were looking for metrics, and this was not how leadership training was done. And so basically, I was like well, hang on,

Sathya Smith: 21:32

the technology exists. You know. There are language models that can do this, there's conversational analytics we can use to kind of measure human behavior. Like this is possible. Just because no one has done it before does not mean it cannot be done, you know. I mean, if there's one thing I learned at Google, it was that you know. And so I decided, ok, I'm going to try and do this. And even with that it was not OK, I'm going to do this. And then next week I decided to start this company. I thought long and hard about it. I talked to Saul about it and he was like you know, that sounds like something good and you're talking about it quite passionately. Do you want to go and explore the idea and see if it has legs? So yeah, and thus I started Piper.

Amardeep Parmar: 22:22

And obviously you went through this major pivot with them as well, which has been really interesting, because you all have to agree to pivot in some ways. Could you tell us what was the original idea and then what was the pivot and why did you pivot?

Iris ten Teije: 22:34

So originally, because all of us have fintech or finance backgrounds we were working on an app to let people invest in alternative assets and we focused on collectibles so things like watches, whiskey, art and the idea was that users could buy a fraction of these assets, and a lot of these assets have gone up in value over the past decades. So it was an investment proposition. We built the product, launched it, raised some money for it, but ultimately had a lot of challenges, which is why we decided to pivot. So a couple of things.

Iris ten Teije: 23:10

It was very difficult from a regulatory perspective. Cost of acquisition, marketing are spent fairly high, in general when you're launching new sort of FinTech consumer apps, but even more so because the timing wasn't ideal. You know, when we went into market, that was just when all of the markets were going down. Not many new retail investors looking for new opportunities, so also the VC market going down. So we figured okay, we can spend all the money that we have left. We can make a projection about how many users we can get. Probably it's not going to be enough to raise our new round, especially in this kind of environment, which, yeah, so I would say, deciding to pivot and agreeing to pivot, that wasn't. That wasn't really the difficult part, because we all sort of agreed at the same time that it was the right thing to do.

Iris ten Teije: 24:01

The more difficult thing, I think, was around when we then wanted to pivot, not only agreeing up on what to do but also how. You have to strike a balance between taking action, because you don't have unlimited time Every month, you're spending money and you have a limited time. As a startup, you always have a limited time spending it's money. You're spending money and you have a limited size startup, you always have limited time. So, being action oriented but at the same time, not being reckless and making sure that it makes sense and you've done enough research to have conviction into the next thin.

Faraan Irfan:

And then, all of a sudden, having this fabulous career trajectory and being very happy with where I was going, it was a complete shock.

Faraan Irfan: 24:49

I just couldn't understand. I couldn't understand what was happening or how to navigate it, and so moved back to Pakistan for a year. That's when the conversation actually happened with my friend that I spoke about, where he said you know, you should start coaching. You have the time. You're not doing anything. Might as well do this. And I was like I can't even get you know, why would even somebody want to coach with me? And then he got me students, my initial students, and I was very happy about that as well, because you know, one of the students I started coaching he was, you know, his mother took a chance with me. He was initially second or third in his um in butterfly in his event and then he eventually spent nine, ten months with me. He not only broke, he started breaking my records at school and then he went on to break the national record in the event.

Faraan Irfan: 25:42

And then when we compared his timings with the kids in his age group in Australia, if he had competed there he would have gotten the silver medal in his event, so he had become that good. So you know that transition between the corporate job. And then I applied for the MBA during that time because I was like, what can I do now? And I was very lucky to get admission to this incredible program. I deferred it for a year because I didn't have the money to do it, and so I started doing this, and even while I was doing my MBA I was still coaching swimming. So I used to coach them for three weeks and then not be there for a week. And so that kind of transition is where the MBA happened.

Faraan Irfan: 26:33

And doing the MBA is when I was toying with three different business ideas. But every time I spoke about music I could see the difference in how people reacted, and not just music per se, but music with me, because what? The term that I learned later was essentially founder market fit, which I didn't realize at that point. But at that point it was just I wanted to do something with Pakistani classical music, which is now South Asian classical music. So what we're doing now is not just for Pakistan, but it's for the region. But at that point in time, that's all I wanted to do, because I wanted to make that difference. I could see these incredible, world-class artists who should be getting more recognition on the world stage because they are absolutely incredible, and I'm in a position where I can make a difference. I could make a difference.

Amardeep Parmar: 27:32

Do you mention there about how the idea changed from the initial looking at PT? Was there anything else that once you started this business, which is a bit different to other ones, that surprised you?

Amardeep Parmar: 27:40

And you learn as you went along the way?

Visal Amin:

Yeah, if you think about the businesses I'd uh, been part of, historically, it'd be it was it was much more about selling human capital, right? So the first business was all about using onshore and offshore clinical labor to provide services to insurance companies. The consultancy firm was literally selling people's time, um, and I think the reason I wanted to get away from that is those business models, whilst they can be successful, are hard right and and can be challenging, and I wanted to build something that, um, was more like a product business, albeit, you know, more service-based, and I think what I, but ultimately, what I learned was all businesses are people businesses.

Speaker 13: 28:19

And actually, you know it's not true. You know, you, people are the most important part of every business you can. You know people are sat there waiting for ideas or to come up with a product or, um, you know, have that aha moment. It's not really about that. It's about finding something you love and then putting brilliant people around you, and that that, for me at least, has been the thing that's made the difference.

Amardeep Parmar: 28:47

 What were those first steps of trying to make this reality to, let's make something which people can actually use?

Sammi Wei: 

I remember there was in the beginning, 

Sammi Wei: 28:55

we spend a lot of effort in research. We spend a lot of work creating this yellow paper that we never published, um, mostly because we we've pivoted away from that kind of research oriented route and into, well, let's actually throw something out there for people to play with, and break and experiment with, and create chaos and see what happens. So we're very much focused on having a product mind. We've gone through quite a few product managers in that process because we didn't know what we were looking for in a product manager. Meng Yao actually has an architect slash design background, so she herself approached this from a very you know, let's design things that solve people's problems. That was her approach, which is great. I don't have any product experience. I've learned how to upskill quite a bit to be able to have those product conversations.

Sammi Wei: 29:43

I think I would highlight one major pivot, which is that in the white paper we only very much talk about curation of content. Let's curate the whole internet. Let's figure out a way to align incentives of how people use the internet so that we're getting the best content possible for every individual. And then, of course, we realized well, actually people didn't have as much of a problem with curation, or at least that wasn't really. The incentives that we had in mind maybe weren't enough to curate, so to speak, because again, who are we to judge, or who is anyone to judge? Really, it's more about what appeals to an individual the most and what that niche interest might bond with other people who might want to come into that.

Speaker 14: 30:24

So that's when the community aspect really pivoted from curation to just let's create a lot of interesting stuff in this particular very niche topic that we're interested in. For now. Right now we have, for example, a community, uh, vinyl collectors based out of Poland, and they just want to talk about music and they love talking about how you know, vinyl, as it's making a little resurgence, but still, in in the bigger grand scheme of things, it's it's becoming devalued and they want to. They want to look at how what three may even play a role in that. So very exploratory, uh, I love it very much, yeah, so new cool things like that.

Amardeep Parmar: 31:07

And then after that, you went into continuing your mentoring work and advisory work. And how was that period so when did that end? So it's about 2017, is that correct?

Nishul Saperia: 31:11

Yeah, so yeah, 2017 was when we shut beach fix down and I actually just decided to take a bit of time out. I went and played a bit of golf and then I was thinking about what I was going to be doing next towards the end of that year. And then, in early 2018, my dad got diagnosed with cancer and that actually ended up being quite a tumultuous year. And while I was still looking, I mean, I remember talking to a professor at Cambridge about some cybersecurity startup and I met, I spoke to a few other people, but it just nothing really kind of took hold.

Nishul Saperia: 31:46

And, if I'm honest, I think around this time I was starting to be a little bit uncertain about what I really. I was getting uncertain about what I wanted to do and it was, you know and so I ended up focusing on my dad. He unfortunately passed away in mid-2019. And then the pandemic came. But around that time end of 2019, 2020, I started to realise that really, what I wanted to work on was climate and biodiversity. That's absolutely, and that's what I've focused on ever since.

Amardeep Parmar: 32:15

Looking at that as well, so you've now started to wind that side of the business down a bit. Was there a transition period or was it straight into energy bubble?

Aaron Dardi: 32:22

So I took a bit of time out and I helped with family businesses. So my family and family associates operate businesses across a variety of industry. So because of my finance background and strategy as well, which I'd picked up from running the COVID testing business, I assisted and plugged in in different roles there, kind of taking almost on like a COO role of different arms, and that was really really good. I mean I was involved in some really successful businesses, high turnover businesses. It was really exciting, exciting, but the reward was limiting because ultimately they're the businesses running themselves quite well. They're quite stable. They're, you know, most of them been running for over 15, 20 years.

Aaron Dardi: 33:09

There wasn't much need for creativity because of the sectors they operated in. However, one thing we found in one of those businesses was there's a huge gap on energy. We faced our own energy challenges. In one of the businesses there's a huge gap on energy. We faced our own energy challenges in one of the businesses. So why don't we fix this issue? And the first idea we had was why don't we just fix this issue for our associates, luckily operating in the space we have as a family, and our associates, my in-laws family. Between that network there's a lot of independent business owners we know in that network and we said we'll help them with the energy crisis because we created this concept to effectively help navigate that crisis and sophisticate that procurement pathway. And upon doing that, the demand we were getting inbound was outstanding and it quickly became that, okay, instead of just helping people, we need to create something, and that's where energy bubble was born.

Aaron Dardi: 34:02

It was a concept we were doing and we spun it out, commercialized it and then started going to market with it and so far it's going quite well.

Amardeep Parmar: 

So I'd love to hear about the like behind the scenes of how you felt the different members as well, because obviously, building that business up and then the huge success of this other business and, I guess, just trying to juggle those different things at the same time, like how was that rollercoaster? Because you'd left your company where you've been for 10 years there almost, and then now you're having all these different things going about and even how I feel now there's all so many things going on all the time, it can be quite overwhelming at different times. And how did you deal with that almost success? Right, it's something to do with failure, but it's also a different thing to do with growing so fast.

Rupa Ganatra Popat: 34:44

So I think, first of all, I think, um, we have such like incorrect perceptions of what failure and success is, and I didn't know that at the time, so it was actually really difficult to be like, okay, something's not working and I have to shut it down, or it's not getting the capital that it needs from investors and whatever it is like. You know, it just wasn't, you know, couldn't be able to go any further, and so when I was in banking, a lot of my identity was linked to the success in my career, and so I had to unravel quite a lot when I didn't have vice president, director, my business card and I'm going around, and all of a sudden, my business card says, like my Gmail address, and it's like I'm going to start a business, and so that was, in itself, a huge process. And now it was like I had gone out and told the world, like my world, my world that this is this business, is what I'm building. All of a sudden, it's like, okay, well, that's not going to work out. So, to be honest, at the time it felt like a huge failure. Today it just feels like a data point and a point in the journey that made me, you know, and now even you think about it, I invest in.

Rupa Ganatra Popat:: 35:47

You know, my portfolio has, like always a handful of DTC um kind of businesses if they have like an interesting lever and so on, and so it's like I'm actually like back in, but at the time, and also I'm using skills that I had from back then to, like you know, know that sort of thing, and so everything happens for a reason, like I truly, truly believe that, but obviously then I did not know that, and so for me it was actually like, oh okay, I need to shut this business down. Luckily I was so busy with the new one that I didn't have and that had already taken off, that I didn't have time to like sit and like wallow guilt with like space and time. So what it actually meant is I overthrew myself into the other business to compensate for like not wanting to have time with my own thoughts. I think today,  I'm in a very different space from that. It's like I can go inwards and I actually benefit, like I understand that every all your answers are within, but at the time I was just literally looking to scale this business.

Rupa Ganatra Popat: 36:38

So I would say that there were huge lows, there was a lot of, I'd say, feelings of like guilt and shame and so on.

Rupa Ganatra Popat: 36:43

And you know thinking well, you know, because I had been you know you almost get like, I'd say, an ego.

Rupa Ganatra Popat: 36:51

So in my twenties it was like an ego around I'm so successful, I'm going to be successful at anything I do, and all of a sudden I felt so unsuccessful at this one business that it basically broke kind of some of my biggest perceptions of myself, when actually now I know that nothing like that defines your success or you know all of these things, and my definition of success is very different today, but back then it was like, it was just like it felt so big.

Rupa Ganatra Popat: 37:18

I would just say to like anyone who feels like that, like that it really is just a point in a journey. And there's a very good reason why it's happening, because if a door closes, there's a bigger door about to open. And you know, what I then went on to build is actually more suited to my skill set, which is community and ecosystem building. And even today, when I look at, you know, the fund that we built at Araya, it's all about community and ecosystem and so all of these things are stepping stones to where I've got to today, which is like my biggest mission, purpose, etc. But I could not have seen that then, and so it felt pretty like harsh back then.

Uzair Bawany: 37:59

I grew the business and we were doing amazingly. And then it got to a point where we had the end of 2001, 2002, when the markets were tightening up, and she came to me and said we need to put more money into this business. And I said I'm not putting any money in if you're running this business, because you don't know what you're doing. And she didn't. She didn't, she didn't understand it. She'd sit in a corner in the office, in a room and wouldn't come out and thought she knew everything. And then I said look, I'm not going to put money into this business. If you're running it you either let me give it to me, I'll buy you out. And this is 2001 too, when the markets were in terrible state or I'm leaving, I'm going to go do it myself. I'm done with all these people.

Uzair Bawany: 38:41

So anyway, suffice to say it became very hairy when I was working. She accepted my notice. During my notice period. She rang me up on the Sunday, told me not to come in on Monday and that I had to not come in anymore. And I spoke to my lawyer Sunday night. They said you have to go in. You're an employee, you can't just leave. So I went in and we negotiated and ended up buying her out and I bought the entire company. I remortgaged my house. I had an apartment. I remortgaged my apartment and didn't realize that there was also a £200,000 VAT which hadn't been paid. She didn't tell me. I traded my way out of everything, out of the repayments, the whole thing, and we grew that business from what was 15 people to 140.

Uzair Bawany: 39:23

And I sold it in 2000, just before the crash in 2007, eight. So we set up in Singapore. We had an office in India, I bought business in Ireland, two offices in London and we grew that and that's where I was kind of like, that's where I kind of learned how to build. So when you say everything's great, it was, it was amazing. I mean we were like the darlings of the recruitment industry. I was on the chair of all the recruitment federations and everybody wanted to know us and you know, meeting multimillionaires in Singapore, wanted to acquire us and everything. But then, just as I was looking to exit, the market started getting edgy and obviously Lehman's went bust, baring's went bust. So I've ridden a real bull market of growth and really managed a real down cycle, consolidation, selling off bits, putting it all together and then eventually selling it, and that's when the fairway came up, the brainchild of my search business, which was all in trade finance.

Amardeep Parmar: 40:20

Even when you went back for as well, where you said that you came here and you didn't know what, like you didn't have any experience of like living in another country, and it was a big challenge there. Do you feel like that challenge has really helped you today? Like, what did you learn from just trying to integrate into the UK and learn about it? Like, how was that experience? Was it quite easy for you or was it quite hard?

Lucy Jung: 40:39

I have to say that I do get myself into something that I didn't expect, that there would be lots of hardship which I think actually relates with the startup as well but I tend to just follow things that just clicked to me at that time. I wanted to see outside of Korea and how things are like outside of this kind of the culture that I grew up in, everything, so I wanted to see it. So I didn't really think about what am I gonna do if x, y and z happen. I kind of tend to just do it if I feel like, oh, I need to do it for me to understand. So so I kind of am brave in that sense and sometimes that like just being brave sometimes help because otherwise there's so many things that you have to worry about.

Lucy Jung: 41:28

And early days of my Sharko startup journey because it's a medical device product and you know all the regulations and trials and funds that are required I remember really early days, Cambridge Judge Business School had this like a founder group and they were asking me Lucy, so you're doing a hardware in the medical sector, what were you thinking? And I said I wasn't really thinking that much, I just really wanted to help people with Parkinson's and I think that kind of trying to find out, okay, what do I really want to do in my life led me here and it also helps you get through things as well.You know, you know it was you who wanted to do it, so no one is kind of pressuring you to do this, so it helps me to get through those hardships that you mentioned.

Dilesh Bhimjiani: 41:28

So we ended up working on a number of projects that helped define the 50-year economic plan for the country, but also start to think about how you foster a culture that supports innovation, how do you facilitate the key drivers and the mechanics of what you need to do to pivot an economy?

Dilesh Bhimjiani: 42:33

And I think if most people know about the UAE, they've got kind of a past in hydrocarbons which has supported them really well. They've diversified themselves into becoming a logistical hub, both from a cargo and shipment perspective, from an airline and passenger perspective, from money and finance. So as a hub they've really cemented themselves. But that serves them well now and it won't necessarily serve them well in the same way in the future. So we define this vision around the UAE  becoming the hub for future-based thinking, which I think is a huge leap forward and as a testament to the government and the leadership, they're actually doing a great job of it.

Amardeep Parmar:

so, after highlights like that, what then made you decide to start another company?

Dilesh Bhimjiani: 43:18

When you work on macro projects, you lose the capacity to have a tactile influence on things on the ground and I think, especially as a technical person, you want to learn from implementation. I think that's the real hard part, and on one side, I wanted to be able to continuously improve and iterate and learn from data, but on the other side, I had this huge level of curiosity around why leaders were driving themselves into the ground from a health and well-being perspective, why they weren't being able to perform, and I think that was at the time where this concept of how there is a strong alignment between how well you are and how well you can perform was starting to surface, and I think that drove me to go right.

Dilesh Bhimjiani: 44:02

I want to build something where we have total control over being able to define the output, and that's why we founded Level.

Amrit Dhaliwal: 

And so we were having this cup of coffee in Amersham in this old, really lovely cafe which I don't know if it's still their seasons and it's a place that we used to hang out, and I was saying to her what could I do next? And she was like, have you thought about domiciliary care? Like every self-respecting 26-year-old Asian dude, my next question was what the hell is that?

Amardeep Parmar: 44:35

I was going to ask the same question 

Amrit Dhaliwal: 

And she was like look, I think you'd be really good at home care. You've kind of got this skill set, you're kind of empathetic enough, and all of that. So the next thing I know I'm basically speaking to all the different franchises all around the country, bought a franchise and so I'm living in Buckinghamshire, I'm driving an hour to Oxfordshire where my home care business was. I'm doing a nine to five there, driving three hours to Richmond, working there until midnight, driving an hour back home to Buckinghamshire and then speaking to my girlfriend for an hour and a half on the phone, kind of keeping those plates, and then waking up early trying to hit the gym. And so I think for about two years I probably slept for about four hours a night on average, and then weekends I was fully at the restaurant, because that was a time that we actually made some money, right so, and I was like my God, this is brutal. But I ended up then selling the restaurant and then moving full-time into the home care business as that started to grow, as that started to grow. But what I realized this is probably 2012 in September that I signed my franchise agreement, got my registration in November, started trading January or February of 13.

Amrit Dhaliwal: 45:48

And it was then that I realized that this is the problem I need to really solve.

Amrit Dhaliwal: 45:51

The problem that I need to fix is not really the home care issue, which there are various issues in, and actually, yeah, you know, there's lots of positive transformation that can happen there and disruption that can happen there.

Amrit Dhaliwal 46:05

You know, simply moving online and going paperless is a huge piece of work and actually that's really quite important in the industry. But what I realized was actually it's probably bigger than that. It's probably that I need to do something with the franchising side of things, because both home care and home care franchising felt very archaic and for somebody that was not from the industry and all I needed was someone to just wind me up and say go in that direction. But it just wasn't there because historically it'd been government contracts and it'd been you're from a care background, carer, registered in that direction. But it just wasn't there because historically it'd been government contracts and it'd been you're from a care background, carer, registered, manager, whatever it is here, you go, go do the work. And so I thought, well, this is the real problem, this is the thing that I can scale. I can impact way more people by franchising my business.

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