Ep 148: Founders Unfitered For The Last Time ft. Mazin Biviji

Speaker A: I think there's a talk about fire. There's a funny story of a guy in Japan who, uh, you know, would not use electricity in his house and, like, would shower in public toilets to, like, get to this fire. Retirement. And then he finally retired. What did I do with my 20s and 30s, right?

Speaker B: It's just, yeah, there's this nice stand up, which Kanan was doing. Doing recently. He's like, I want to have things, but once I get them, I'm not happy. I think the purpose is well defined when money is a constraint. And then when once money is not a, uh, constraint constraint, then the purpose becomes harder to define.

Speaker A: Reminds me of that book, the Monk who Sold his Ferrari and that whole.

Speaker B: I mean, that's a book.

Speaker A: Ridiculous. I mean, he made millions off the book again. Yeah,

Speaker B: A monk who sold his Ferrari to buy more Ferraris. Like that.

Speaker A: That part gets left out.

Speaker B: It gets left out. Uh, welcome to Founders Unfiltered. I'm here with Maazin today where he is the guest, uh, and I'm the host. Usually it's the other way around. Um, we'll be flipping the script and talking about Mazen's journey and his learnings from the, um, Founders Unfiltered podcast. Maybe we can start with the rapid fire questions. Um, we've got a bunch of very interesting answers, um, over the years, and would be good to get your opinion on what you thought were the most interesting answers. Maybe we can start with the first one, which is a founder or leader you'd blindly back.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting one. It's also a tough one if you try to answer it right. Uh, I think you have a good answer for this. Deepender Goel of Zomato. Uh, this is probably the one that you would pick, but we've heard a lot of kind of cliched answers. A lot of founders said. Elon Musk, I think that was probably our most popular answer, which I think is also the cop out answer.

Speaker B: Easiest answer. Uh, Deepinder is probably a person who has created a very distinctly Indian company and doing operations plus tech in India at that kind of scale from zero is very, very hard. He's also been willing to reinvent himself throughout the journey of the company, including today. So I think that's the reason why I do it. He seems like a true entrepreneur. Uh, what about the book, Film, Mental Model? Any ones that you really liked? From the answers we got, I think

Speaker A: I have one book that has impacted me a lot, though. Freakonomics has been one. It Talks a lot about incentives and I think it's a good lens to look at the world at, to think about how people are motivated. Um, so that's one for me. We've got a wide range of answers. Like nothing really.

Speaker B: Yeah, a lot, A lot, a lot. I think Thinking Systems was a book, uh, that was mentioned, which I quite liked. Um, I got it from the conversation. I um, read it afterwards. That was a nice one. Thinking, um, systems, your go to ritual or daily habit that keeps you sane.

Speaker A: Um, so for me, like a lot of people that I've heard of, I think it's trying to get more fit and then you get to a certain stage in your life that becomes a bigger priority. And I think we've heard a lot of founders talk about that. A lot of founders, surprisingly like endurance athletes.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Have you. I mean some of my crazy triathlon founders. And I think that's, I don't think that's a coincidence. You know, it's uh, a common set of traits that you need.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: That kind of persistence, that resilience. Um.

Speaker B: Correct, correct. I think, uh, they're both marathons and that's why I think it makes sense. I agree. What about AI hacks and tools? Anything that stood out for you?

Speaker A: Not too much from the answers we've got. I think that's a newer question. Uh, yeah, I think for me personally though, I've been dabbling with OpenClaw, which is fascinating and it's been in the news a lot lately. Um, but yeah, I mean it's just a new tool every day and I think it's. You need to keep playing with it and pushing it and seeing what you can do with it.

Speaker B: Um, correct.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Anything you've seen as patterns across founders?

Speaker A: Well, I mean this is obvious, but I think a lot of founders are really quick to kind of jump on and try stuff out. Um, right. I think the founder, you sort of have to, uh. No, I think maybe an anti pattern. Not a lot of productivity tools like you think of. Founders would want productivity tools, but I don't think that was the case at all. Um, yeah, I think most of it was more getting. Making people more like, you know, it was more trying out edge use cases and playing with tools. That was the theme that I took from it.

Speaker B: Yeah. And more broadly, any patterns you've seen?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the one that we have spoken about in private a lot is small town founders. Isaac does all. Almost half, I would say, which is disproportionate. Right. To like at least in the past the numbers that you saw for like, startups. But I think that's one trend that sort of caught up with what we're seeing out there as well. Like, you know, startups applying from smaller towns and. Yeah, I mean, I think the other trend, very, very different journeys for a lot of the founders, but a lot of them are constantly kind of the kind of people are looking for, for changes, change. You know, I mean, I, like always trying to kind of question things around them. I, I think that's probably one theme. Um, you know, but again, that's kind of fundamental to being a founder.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think small town is. It's pretty frequent, uh, because they change their location and you know, they come to a place which is uncomfortable. I guess that's basically good, uh, way to look at where entrepreneurial talent is coming from in India. Um, it's fascinating. I think for me, like some, uh, some patterns are. They're pretty approachable and down to earth people. Yeah, I've rarely found, at least on the founders who've come on the podcast, they don't seem to follow themselves. Obviously there are, you know, many founders who are in the.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good one actually.

Speaker B: Um, but maybe that's also a trait of a founder. It keeps you on the ground, it keeps you, your ear on the ground, it keeps you realistic. I think that that's another observation from me, at least in terms of founders.

Speaker A: I've been some good episodes over the years and quite a few I think

Speaker B: we've spoken to like so many people across the years. Razorpay, uh, grab, uh, urban company.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Um, stable money. A bunch of very interesting.

Speaker A: A couple of MPL stands out. And then infra market. We had as well a couple that scaled really, really fast. Uh, a bunch of D2C companies.

Speaker B: Correct. Um, I think good speaking to a lot of different people. And so I'll probably start with the first question we asked them for you. Uh, what was early life like? Where did you grow up?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I was, I was born in Dubai, um, and my mom and dad worked there. And then I moved to Hong Kong when I was three or four. Uh, we spent a year or so in India in between where my brother was born. Uh, I then lived in Hong Kong for. Till I was about 12, 13, moved back to Dubai where I finished school and then went to the U.S. um, and so, yeah, grew up all over the place. My mom worked at Emirates and so travel was kind of part of, you know, life, I guess. Growing up, I actually took my first flight When I was less than a year old. So. Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay, where did you fly?

Speaker A: To Dubai, to Bombay, but to see my grandparents. Yeah, yeah. And my mom still tells me she remembers the flights, the flight was Dh50 at that time because she got like staff tickets. So you pay? Yeah, so for me it was Dh50, which is about Dh12. So yeah, for a, uh, flight to India. Um, different times, but.

Speaker B: And you, you started up right after mba. You know, how, where did you study? What did you study? How do you get into B school?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I moved to the US when I was 18 to study engineering. Um, initially actually I wanted to study aeronautical engineering. That's what I was fascinated with. Uh, but went to the US and then ended up changing a few times and doing industrial engineering. Um, after I graduated, I worked in consulting for a bit. I was in Detroit, so I spent a lot of time working in the auto industry. Um, and then, yeah, after a few years of doing that, thought, okay, let me do an mba. Um, going into the mba, it was always a chance to just kind of reset. And I had the thought in the back of my mind that I want to maybe start up, uh, afterwards. And yeah, moved, um, to France, did the mba, met Akshay, ended up my co founder there. And you know, we thought, okay, let's uh, let's give doing a startup a shot. And that's basically how it went. Uh, we didn't actually participate in any of the standard MBA recruiting, um, stuff and just, you know, uh, went out and tried to build our first startup to Kutty. And it was, uh, it was quite a journey.

Speaker B: And, and what were your learnings? Why did you decide to do that? Um, and you know, it didn't work out like you expected it to.

Speaker A: So, so we started, we were in France then doing our mba and you know, that time kind of crypto and blockchain was like all the hype. Um, and we were kind of new to the space, exploring it. Our idea was to make private equity liquid. My co founder worked in late stage private equity. And so he was the analyst who was doing all this paperwork. And it was a very idealistic dream. And that time, two Indians in France. Why start a business in France? When you think back, it seems ridiculous, but the thought process was the French government was one of the first in the world that time that actually said tokenized equity can be considered, you know, legally valid in courts. So that gave us the like, motivation and you know, being two business school students who don't know anything about Starting up, the first thing we did was started making pitch decks and participating in pitch competitions. And yeah, see people seem to like the idea, which is I think what gave us the conviction to, to do it. Yeah, um, but yeah, looking back that's, that's probably not the best way to actually start up. Um, but it taught us a lot I think. Uh, so yeah, we left business school, we went and actually did it full time. Uh, the two of us learned how to code, we built a website which took us about a year and then we actually started showing it to people and realized that our vision, nobody really cared about what people wanted was to solve. We did find a problem to solve. I think people wanted to explain the value of their equity to employees. Um, and so that was really the problem. So it ended up from being this kind of much bigger vision of this platform where um, we would manage equity and do secondaries and stuff to actually just being a SaaS to manage documents and explain the value of stock options to employees. So the value was much smaller than we thought it was. Um, and we ended up getting about 40 or 50 companies, um, mostly in France, some in India as well. And I don't know if you remember but I randomly reached out to you back then, uh, when we were looking to connect with startups. Um, yeah, and yeah, you'd helped us get a couple of customers and so it was, you know, we had a few people use it. Exactly, yeah, that's how we, that was uh, how we got talking initially. Um, and so yeah, what happened basically to kind of wrap up on the first startup was we got to a point where we realized we had six month lead times to acquire customers. Um, we had 20, 30 customers but the amount they were willing to pay, given what the solution had become was just not enough for it to definitely not be a VC fundable business but do not even pay the bills for me and my co founder, which I think was uh, yeah, uh, a lot of learnings there. The most obvious one being build first, test demand first rather than building first, switching to other academics and uh, taking that as validation. Um, but yeah, I think my biggest takeaway from that whole experience was that I realized I really love you know, doing this, building products. Um, and yeah, so I think it was overall a good experience. But yeah, I think that's where we met. And AGVC back then was just a newsletter for people who are listening in. Right. I think it was, that was the only vertical that we had and it was how many people were we there? I think it was Four. It was just four people. Yeah. And, yeah, I think then the podcast was sort of a Covid project.

Speaker B: And, uh, yeah, I am a writing person. I still am a writing person. And I think you were very

Speaker A: passionate,

Speaker B: um, about doing a podcast. We talked about it for quite a long time and then we finally, I think, gave it a go. It's been going on for what was probably six months, almost six years. Um, how was that experience? Um, you've done the podcast? Ah, we written blogs together. There's a Slack community now. It's become a fund. Uh, how was that journey for you?

Speaker A: It was amazing. I mean, especially early days with. And it was a lot more like the Slack community was also, I think, a lot of stuff embedded into that Slack community. Right. We tried all these coffee chats. We had so many ideas that we worked on back then. Uh, we had, you know, people even had more time during COVID I think that was the other thing. So we got a lot more engagement both with the podcast and Slack.

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: And, uh, I don't know if you remember, we used to do live podcasts then, and we used to have people who used to join in and take notes and share it. And I think that whole feeling was amazing for me to still feel like I'm able to build something. And I think the whole community, especially back then with that Slack community and people interacting, uh, we could try out a lot of things. You remember we even launched, uh, an NFT.

Speaker B: Yes, we did.

Speaker A: It's still out there on OpenSea. By the way, we have an Air JVC NFT.

Speaker B: Yeah. Probably is worth, uh, nothing like most NFTs now.

Speaker A: Like every other NFT.

Speaker B: Yeah. But somebody m. Bought it for like 10k. I remember that. I was pretty crazy.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly. 10,000 rupees someone spent on it. Yeah, exactly. We sold a natural nft. Um, so it was fun. I think we did quite a lot. And you know, I think one of the other things I remember, um, was we launched on product hunt, the comic strips concepts. Yeah. Um, which was also another experience. Um, and did you come first for the day or something?

Speaker B: First for the week. Everywhere.

Speaker A: First for the week. Which is a really big deal. I think probably something more startups expired to do, but.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I think we built a lot and learned a lot. We had an amazing community. Um, and it was the core team that grew as well then. Right. I think we had. We went from what, five, six to 25 interns as well. It was a layered team.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. So it was, it became an experiment. It Became from a newsletter to community to uh, eventually a fund now which is. I think.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that trajectory was quite interesting. Um, yeah, I think the fund also kind of evolved out of it kind um, of organically almost.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's one thing leading to another, building up. It has been, yeah, it's been amazing for me to see that whole journey and be a small part of it. But I think agvc was something special, especially during COVID for a lot of people.

Speaker B: Correct. I think it picked up a lot of steam. I think everything picked up a lot of steam. LinkedIn actually became pretty big then. Um, 2020 to 2024. It was like scaling very, very fast. Um, it was interesting. I agree. I mean I think the, in general people are consuming lot more things or a lot less things in some sense or um, I think everything is moving to short form videos and things like that. Um, that's one.

Speaker A: But I also think attention spans are reducing.

Speaker B: Attention spans are reducing. Uh, I still think there is like long form and stuff like that that people find useful.

Speaker A: Um, it's just, I think it's there less of it and it's, it has to be higher quality. I think the bar is higher.

Speaker B: Correct. Less of it, higher quality. I also think podcast people have got kind of bored of uh, generally. Uh, they're just too long.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was a, it was a fad. A little bit of a fad.

Speaker B: It feels like that, like there so many people just with mics talking but uh, a long time. Um, but I also do think that the physical world has become much more important in terms of time. So I mean, I guess uh, it's an interesting evolution of where people are spending their time on. Um, and I think you launched a stock trading platform as well as a first consumer product. Uh, how did you end up at Agoda 2? What's it been like?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So that was also kind of a side covert project. So I mean what happened was I wrapped up in France. I got the offer from Akoda relatively quickly luckily. But um, then Covid happened and so I had almost six months with a job offer but no savings at all because I'd spent everything my business soon set up and was literally living in my parents house trying to figure out what to do. Right. And so podcasts on AJVC was taking up a bunch of my time. The rest of my time before I started working at Agoda was um, building what we call Stockwitty. So the first startup was Stokwitty. We put an S on the start of it and Then use the same logo and theming and everything and built this new website that had nothing to do with the first one. It's called Stockwitty. So literally the idea was we love building. Let's just build something and forget about trying to sell it and just do something consumer facing. Because we were a bit sick of going and pitching and doing kind of B2B sales cycles and yeah, I think that was fun. Um, again, like you said, I think a lot of people getting into stock trading as well at that time we racked up almost 3,000 users who were like weekly active, I would say, um, in about three weeks. Um, so yeah, and then you know, started Agora sort of happened and you know, like how that kind of happened was me just looking for product jobs in parallel and never planned to actually move to Bangkok. But Agora just came up actually funnily when I was looking for jobs. Agora uh, posted their job in London and I clicked on the link and then found out in the small print a relocation to Bangkok. So completely random. Not at all planned. Uh, I don't think people plan to move to Bangkok for a job.

Speaker B: But yeah, I remember when you told me that I'm moving to Bangkok. I was like, who goes to Bangkok to work?

Speaker A: Exactly. Uh, interesting. But no, then Agoda, I mean it ended up um, I learned a lot, you know, about how to build products, consumer facing products at scale. It's been six years now and initially I joined again. This was just after Covid, right. I joined the customer service team and you know, it was just like all hands on deck trying to figure out how to bring our cost down. People are calling us three times as much as before because of COVID Our sales are one fifth of what it was before. Um, and so yeah, that was a really interesting journey. Building products to help service customers better. For the first couple of years after that, worked on our flights business, built the app and website for our flights uh, business and grew that for a couple of years. Um, so yeah, I mean it's but very different right? When you're talking about a startup and building products there versus Agoda where it's experiments and data versus a startup there's no data at all. Right. In Agoda we're looking at every click and we're looking at micro conversion drops from page one to page two. And it's just such a. You're building products, consumer facing products in both cases. But it's so fundamentally different. When I think about stock query versus Agora, it was just, hey, this is what it should look like and you're never going to have enough data to actually validate it with an A B test. So I think it was just, uh, it was good to kind of have both experiences on both ends of the spectrum. But yeah, I think quite a different way of building products.

Speaker B: And um, how has the Agoda experience been? You obviously said travel has been a big part for you. Uh, how has it been for you?

Speaker A: Yeah, overall, Agoda is an amazing company. Extremely data driven. Uh, and if you can make a case with data, they give you a lot of autonomy. Um, very international company. So overall, fantastic experience. Um, but, uh, you know, also being data driven is I think also what's restrictive. Right. Because if you don't have data to prove that something's going to work, it's pretty hard to build it. Um, so, yeah, I think that's the challenge there. And you know, that's where kind of, uh, you know, it's sort of a conflict between building consumer products, uh, zero to one versus at this kind of stage. Uh, it's not based on value, it's more based on can you prove that this will actually create some incremental business value not based on what users actually want and listening to what customers want.

Speaker B: And um, the experience and your journey has left you with a reasonable corpus. How do you think about personal investing? Fire. Um, and how much do you save? If you're happy to share? Um, because you've been thinking about personal finance, I thought we'll talk about this too.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, um, yeah, of course, happy to share. I mean, it's so I, as of now, I save about 80% of what I make. Uh, and you know, I've read about fire a lot. I kind of stumbled into it and I didn't really think I was working towards it, but I think it's an interesting concept. Uh, I think the underlying idea of saving more and savings actually having more of a impact on your, your corpus than maximizing for returns is something that has really stuck with me. I think that's the main idea behind fire. I think people take it to an extreme where they try to kind of make, you know, if you're maximizing for savings only, then what's the point of living life? You also need to enjoy life. Yeah, exactly. I think there's a. Talk about fire. There's a funny story of a guy in Japan who, uh, you know, would not use electricity in his house and like, would shower in public toilets to like, get to this fire retirement. And then, oh my God, he finally retired. What did I do with my 20s and 30s, right. It's just, yeah, everything in moderation, you know, that's. I think I take. But, um. Um, I guess talking a bit more about my portfolio. Happy to get into more details. I mean, I'm saving, so when I talk the 80% that I say I save, it's sort of a rough target. Right. Um, of course, Bangkok being a cheaper cost of living place, it helps a lot. Uh, and there's some arbitrage there. Um, but yeah, I think the bigger thing is as you kind of progress through your career, you make more money. I think people tend to spend more. I think that's what I've tried to limit the most. Right.

Speaker B: Uh, lifestyle.

Speaker A: Exactly. I think that's what has really worked for me. Um, and so, yeah, I think I'm at a good point now where, um, at least if I continue staying in Bangkok, I can live off of what I've saved. Uh, so yeah, I think that's the core idea of fire. Right. So I sort of got there, I guess. But, um. But it also really depends on how your life changes. Right. I mean the bigger thing is what do you do if you retire early? I think that's the usefully to do something.

Speaker B: Uh, uh, so what do you think about the retire early bit? Financial independence I can understand, but what about retire early?

Speaker A: I think, I think that's. That's the problem. Right, like, exactly. Financial independence I think makes sense. It's then, then it's optionality and I think that's what people should optimize for, like give yourself options. The retire early part I think is, well, you need something to do. Um, and you know, I love to travel and it sounds nice to say, hey, I'll retire and just travel. But how long can you travel for? Right. You still need to have. I mean, it's nice for a few months. And uh, you know, I've seen a lot of these young founders that I've met and I'm sure you've seen them as well, who get that big exit and then will travel for a year or two. But it only lasts a year or two. It never goes on beyond that. And then you have to come back and figure out something. And so yeah, the retire early part is. Sounds nice, but it's. I don't think it's realistic, to be honest.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's like that you keep chasing something, you want something to chase in life. Um, and when you get it, you are like, okay, fine. I mean that's what Most people's reaction is there's this nice stand up, which Kanan was, uh, doing. Doing recently. He's like, I want to have things, but once I get them, I'm not happy till I'm trying to get it. I'm like, oh, you know, I want this. I want this. I'm super excited. Once I get it, I'm like, okay. And I also don't want to lose it. So it's like, that's how most people behave. Um, they just want to collect stuff for the sake of collecting things. And once they collect it or they reach something, then they don't know what to do. I, I, I, I agree. I, I have, I mean, from my personal experience as well as friends. And, you know, just when you get into a situation where you are not, uh, thinking about money, uh, you realize that it's not the only thing to think about. Um, and it's, it's very funny because people are looking for. People keep looking for more philosophical reasons, uh, to exist and do things like, uh, read more, learn more, and things like that, which is interesting. I mean, I, I think it just becomes a score at some point, um, rather than. Yeah, it's a scoreboard. And it has no correlation with happiness, I guess.

Speaker A: No, I, and you mentioned, I think there's a study that I read about, right. Where they looked at income versus happiness. And there's kind of a point, right. Like, beyond which it just plateaus. Happiness is correlated to income up to a point after which. Yes, it doesn't matter. And that point is, you know, in your country, whatever is enough to afford life.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, correct, correct. So I think it's that and human, uh, beings are looking for purpose. I feel like it expresses itself as money till you don't have it.

Speaker A: And then, because that's the immediate need, that's the burning kind of thing, or

Speaker B: that is a purpose, I mean, I guess. Right. Uh, so, so at least how I think of it is people are working in a, in a game, rather. And the rules of the game are very explicit when you're making money for the first time. Like, you know that, hey, my rule is that I must make money and then I must spend on this. And, you know, this. There's a trade off, and it's very clear. So the game is, like, very clear. Um, and Maslow called this hierarchy of needs. I mean, it's a game. It's a game with levels, basically. Um, but after you win this game in some way where you're like, oh, you know, getting more of this is not really giving me that kick. Then the game becomes a little more undefined. Um, and then people start being like, oh, you know, what should I do now with my time and life? And that's where, you know, it becomes more interesting because then people do very, very strange shit. Like they. I've seen people go and become sages. Um, I've seen people go and like, yes, Go to the mountains. Um, I've seen people like, just leave everything and keep traveling, like you said. Um, so I think the, um, the purpose is well defined when money is a constraint. And then when. Once money is not a constraint, constraint, then the purpose becomes harder to define. Um, and then people are like, just searching for purpose that gives them that kick. Um, and I think that the farther you get ahead, probably in this ladder, and money is not the only way to get ahead. I think it's like a mental ability thing, which probably a lot of philosophers and these great thinkers, maybe like Buddha or other people, they kind of discovered that this is how I find meaning. Uh, and I can see it, like, I see why people would want to give away everything, sacrifice, and then, you know, find. Find this purpose in life.

Speaker A: So it's just a new way of defining meaning. It's because it's the opposite of what you have been doing so far. That's why.

Speaker B: So, so the purpose and meaning for me, uh, when. When I'm starting out is like getting money and then eventually it's not. So then you're like, trying to invent some things.

Speaker A: Reminds me of that book, the Monk who Sold his Ferrari and that whole.

Speaker B: That's a. I mean, that's a book.

Speaker A: Ridiculous. I mean, he, he made millions off the book again. Yeah, correct.

Speaker B: That's what.

Speaker A: Ridiculous.

Speaker B: A monk who sold his Ferrari to buy more Ferraris like that.

Speaker A: That part gets left out.

Speaker B: That part gets left out. Correct. Um, and you know, I have a lot of respect for people who are deep thinkers and who make a dent in the universe in some sense. They're not necessarily the most wealthy. I think if you just look at people, you know, from history, they will not be the richest people. I do this thought experiment that. Is it the richest people that you know, or is it the one who had. Who had the most influence? Right.

Speaker A: So that's really. I really like that. Yeah.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: As you start to think, I mean, it's. Yeah, it's never. The names of your history are never the richest.

Speaker B: It'll be like Edison, Tesla. Edison was wealthy, but still, I mean, he's not exceedingly Wealthy, uh, unless you're

Speaker A: into finance like me. And it's like Rockefellers or something like that, which is also few and far between, but.

Speaker B: Yeah, correct. You'll just, and you'll remember Rockefeller fellow, not because he was rich, but probably because he did oil and railways and bunch of other stuff. Right.

Speaker A: Funded a bunch of wars and. Yeah, exactly, correct.

Speaker B: And so da Vinci, um, M. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, um, you look back in time, uh, it'll always be the thinkers, um, the people who shaped how the world went ahead. Um, Shakespeare, I mean, you know, you go back in time, it'll be, it'll be those people.

Speaker A: You could argue that tech and entrepreneurship is kind of combining both.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Where if you're a thinker, you're able to execute.

Speaker B: Probably, probably. But I don't think all tech entrepreneurs are thinkers. Yeah.

Speaker A: Ah, it's. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: And, and to be fair, to be fair, a lot of tech entrepreneurs were thinkers before they became

Speaker A: entrepreneurs.

Speaker B: Yes, before they became entrepreneurs. And I do buy that, by the way. I think a lot of the renaissance type energy is in tech, like all the creative people. But they will not be remembered for making money. Still, they will not be remembered for making money. It's almost never been that. So from like a micro inward perspective, it's awesome to make money, obviously. But if you want to look at a macro, human history, time horizon, it's probably not going to be the people who made money, is my guess. I know you got a little philosophical here, but.

Speaker A: No, but it was good and relevant, I think.

Speaker B: How do you think about money portfolio? Um, you've also invested in the fund. Um, how do you allocate all those things?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it's uh, I think simple is better. Right? I think, um, high level, like, like when it comes to allocation, I think you, you want to kind of have a good balance of fixed income instruments, equity in different markets, and then some more riskier investments that would not give you a payout for a longer period. And it's a question of balancing all of that. Right. So how I think about the investment the fund is, that's on the other end of the spectrum. Uh, most of my corpus is tied up in corporate bonds. Uh, why corporate bonds? Many reasons, mostly optimizing for tax and kind of taking advantage of interest rate arbitrage. But I think it's a question of picking the right asset classes. On one end it's corporate bonds, a bunch of index funds, which is when it comes to equity, my philosophy is basically you can't really pick stocks and Beat the market. Right, everybody? That's your first instinct. And maybe it's kind of a learning curve that everything needs to go through, trade at some point, get burnt and then realize there's no point. But I mean, if you take a step back. The way that I think about it is no matter what you do as a retail investor, you don't have the resources to compete against these institutional traders who are hardwired into the exchanges. Right. So what's the point in even trying? Just buy an index, invest in macro themes that you think make sense and then just stay as long as you hold it. Exactly.

Speaker B: And I think, I think it's that simple. That's why you should give money to money managers. I mean, I know it comes from a place where I myself am one, so, uh, it's preaching to the choir. But uh, I've always maintained this, like even before the fund, I've written about it that you should not buy stocks directly. Uh, you just cannot beat someone who does it as a full time job.

Speaker A: No, exactly.

Speaker B: I've seen people who are like, oh, let me angel invest some of my corpus and they'll do like four angel investments and they'll be like, oh, wow, I've angel invested. They might get lucky. I mean that's, that's probability. But in general they'll lose money. So you should, my, my rule of thumb is that only if you can do 35 investments minimum, uh, you should angel invest. Otherwise it makes no sense to get

Speaker A: enough to even get the numbers to make sense.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It'll probably need to work. Yeah, I think people underestimate. I think it's a question of overestimating your own abilities. I think an underestimating the market really huge, which is I guess, natural. So. Yeah, I completely agree. I think advisors play a role. Um, but it's really important to think about how advisors are motivated. Like what are the incentives?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, and making sure that your incentives and theirs are aligned or you're at least thinking about that. Right. And yeah, um, yeah, I think that's one of the things that, like a lot of the models that have worked in the past have been advisors who sell you products where they get a commission and there's not a lot of transparency around how much commission and why they're recommending one product over the other. So yeah, I think definitely advisors play a role when it comes to managing money. Um, but as an investor, I think you just need to think about what that role is and how it fits

Speaker B: into everything else and what's Your take, um, on having advisors for telling you

Speaker A: where to invest, like which investments to pick or instruments to pick. Yeah, yeah. I mean I think fundamentally I think there are two types of people, right? The type of people who say, hey, I want someone to manage everything, just take my money and then do it for me.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And then the other types of people and I feel like I'm in that second bucket where I want to have control. I would rather get a little bit less returns but have control and know what's happening. So I think it's, it's a little bit of that. But even then I think it's about finding the balance and kind of seeing what works for each individual. But uh, in generally I feel like people are on one end or the other. Right. You don't, uh, you kind of, you don't see a lot of people having both. Um, right. You, you either directly are buying your own m, making your own investment decisions or then you kind of completely outsource it most of the time.

Speaker B: Right. And how are you thinking about what, what next and just uh, what are you exploring? Are you exploring something? Pick up what are your thoughts there.

Speaker A: So in terms of what, what's next? Um, you know, definitely want to get some more time with family. I think that's a big thing. I want to free up my Sundays. I have a 2 year old who keeps me very busy as you know. And you have a daughter as well. So I'm sure that's taking up more and more of your time. Um, but yeah, in terms of thinking about what's next professionally, uh, Agora has been a really good journey. Um, but trying to kind of explore and build something consumer facing again and wealth tech was a space that I think was really interesting. Um, and so I'm trying to come up with an mvp, uh, to see if there's a way to kind of help people with the behavioral aspect of managing money to help people come up with better habits. But yeah, I mean I've worked on more ideas and I can keep track of at this point. So many with agvc, many outside agvc, um, all over the world. But yeah, I think would love to find something that I can, you know, I would love to build a product, consumer facing product. Again, it's just a question of finding what and how. Um, with consumer facing products, monetization is always hard. But yeah, it's one step at a time. Um, and I think the idea is to keep exploring and while still maintaining a balance. Right. Having enough time for work but also enough time for family and doing other stuff outside of work, traveling.

Speaker B: What's a piece of unfiltered advice you've received, uh, in your journey?

Speaker A: Unfiltered advice? Yeah, I mean, we ask founders this all the time. Um, I think, like, well, and I've spoken about this, but I think one of the pieces of advice that I got from you early on was, was about the power of consistency. And I think we've seen that with the podcast. Right. I think if you do something incrementally every. I actually went back and looked at our first ever YouTube podcast. Um, and yeah, I mean, it's, it's come a long way even though.

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: I mean, if you keep doing something and keep improving, improving it a little bit every day, um, I think it can really, you can kind of build momentum. Um, and yeah, I think that applies to a lot of things. Right. Even when it comes to startups. I think going back to themes, actually I should have brought this up in the start. I think one of the themes that I've seen is a lot of founders are committed to the problem that they're solving. Like, it's not a short term horizon. And you get the sense that a lot of these people would solve this problem no matter what. Right. Like, everything else is incidental. I'm obsessed with kind of, this is what I want to do for the next ten years. Um, and if you can give something that long and keep letting it compound, that's how you know you can actually build something that's valuable. Um, so I think that's, yeah, one piece of advice that I, I think applies and it's, it's a pattern that I've seen.

Speaker B: Marjan, thanks for your time and, uh, sharing your thoughts. Uh, I think it was a good chat. A lot about finance and personal finance. Uh, we look forward to hearing from you again.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Awesome to have done this for so long.