that i always say after a breakup just because it hurts it doesn't mean that that person was right for you so even two years on when we feel something we can look at those feelings and go because i know in my breakup there is there are moments where it comes into my mind and i feel like i go back to being a heartbroken teenager you know i who like you know i i sense that teenager and i don't mean it this in the derogatory sense i mean this in the sense like there's an adolescent part of me that's so hopeful and romantic and so you know the idea of finding love the idea of like that there's that part of me always exists and that's there's also that's almost the part of us that got hurt isn't it because it's like you threw yourself in you let your guard down you you opened yourself up to loving someone you imagined the future with them and then that got smashed and there's a there's like a wounded part


and there's a there's like a wounded part of you the child in you that's that that still can hurt when he thinks about that um and i think by the way that's kind of beautiful that's a beautiful uh perspective on things man and you know it kind of reminds me of the people and um the kind of couples who really speak about the beauty of long-term relationships marriage serious boyfriend girlfriend relationships what do you think of that concept of marriage in general because we're seeing divorce rates go up all over the world so why are they going up according to you're a dating coach i'm sure you've helped a lot of people like that what goes wrong primarily in 2021 and uh what do you think of the concept of marriage in general as a man is it something that intrigues you because it's something that is one of my life's goals like i want a stable partner i want to raise a family i believe that there's a lot of personal evolution that happens through


a lot of personal evolution that happens through giving through growing together but also why are divorces happening i you know if you'd have asked me a few years ago i was a bit of a contrarian on marriage um i i it's not that i wasn't romantic about the idea of marriage but i also i didn't love the idea that it was someone else's job to confirm my relationship with somebody else and to you know put it on a piece of paper and then have it you know have the the the law involved in my relationship i didn't like that idea i thought you know if two people really love each other they don't need a piece of paper to prove it i have evolved on that point since then um i don't take a position on whether people should get married or not i think both can work and and i think people should do what's right for them but i do understand when people say we were together for a long time we really loved each other and when


a long time we really loved each other and when we did get married it something felt a little different some you know in a good way it felt like we had we had made a different kind of promise to each other and the the act of doing that i know for a lot of people i know it it did galvanize that commitment for them it did make them feel like they were even more of a a team than before and i think there's i think there's something to be said for that and i also i understand the arguments that something that is a little harder to unwind than a simple relationship outside of marriage not that any long-term relationship is easy to unwind but something that has more barriers to unwinding and disentangling is can be a good thing if it makes you think twice about bailing at the first sign of trouble you know if it makes you feel like you know what we're actually gonna we're gonna it's this is we signed up for something serious it's it's a serious


signed up for something serious it's it's a serious thing to get out of it so maybe we shouldn't call throw in the towel too quickly maybe we should actually work on this i think that's there's there is something to be said for that i understand that argument so um i i i get it i think it's but i i think what people have to really do is assess you know obviously sometimes people can have that as a goal to the point of obsession and then they forget what the real goal is the real goal is to have a force for the people who are talking about it the real goal is usually to have a deeply committed relationship with their ultimate teammate and marriage is a symbol of that so i think that it's it's worth always reminding ourselves of that that what we're really looking for is that teammate and marriage is going to be hopefully an organic progression of that love and that commitment um but i also think that there are people who think of marriage from a


that there are people who think of marriage from a i suppose an egoic point of view and by that i mean society expects it of them that's that's what they believe they their parents or their grandma or their friends who are married expected of them and so now it's no longer coming from a place of this is an organic progression of a a love and a relationship that i've found but is something that i feel if i don't do i won't be worthy i won't be living up to some expectation that's had of me in my life and and i think that's the dangerous part because marriage borne out of genuine love and teamwork becomes a really beautiful commitment marriage that occurs because of a fear-based mindset that i won't be enough unless i do it leads to some very bad decisions and we see those happening all over the world and if you look at the last couple of years i think that some there there will will be an awful lot of marriages that have


will be an awful lot of marriages that have ended because you know a lot of people wouldn't perhaps have been that level of team in the first place and what the last what the last year especially of the pandemic did is it exposed the fact that they actually weren't capable of being that kind of a team when the chips were down that the relationship worked because of distraction it worked because they were always occupied with other things well when the other things got taken away suddenly they were faced with each other and what they really had now the one caveat i'll add to that because i think it would be irresponsible of me not to is that there will be a lot of people who this this was an unnatural situation for a lot of relationships as well and i think that there will also have been some good relationships that ended because people were forced together in an unnatural way that human beings are not designed to be forced together in we're not you know it's not like a


in we're not you know it's not like a blissful idea of a relationship is two people being stuck in a home together for the better part of a year we wouldn't if we were advising people on what's a healthy relationship you wouldn't say that was it you would say maintain close relationships with your friends spend time with people other than your partner so that you guys have some balance lose yourself in some projects and passions that you really enjoy as esther perel says have your own secret garden right a place that you can go to be you and to do things that you love that that's just yours um and there were an enormous number of people who didn't have access to any of those things they didn't have access to their friends uh in person maybe in the house through zoom but that's not the same as getting out of the house and getting the chance to miss even when we go to work for a day we get to miss our partner for a day you know we


to miss our partner for a day you know we get to actually experience missing them and we come home and we're happy to see them again i also want to echo another thing esther perel says she says that this whole period fast forwarded relationships so if you were meant to get closer you got closer if you were meant to break up anyway you broke up but i love the perspective you brought that there could be a third possibility yes but the one thing i would say about that idea of it fast-forward relationships is that there are fast-forwarding a relationship isn't always a great idea even if it's positive because there are certain things about a relationship we can only know by going through experiences with someone good and bad now you could argue that well they went through the ultimate bad experience together so that if they can survive that then they can survive anything but i don't think that's entirely true because for a lot of people who met at the beginning of the pandemic it fast


met at the beginning of the pandemic it fast forwarded something but even the even the even the scary traumatic nature of the pandemic there's something novel about it when you met someone new and you met under those conditions there's something exciting about it and oh my god we would never normally live together this quickly but shall we like it gave you an excuse to have this crazy romantic passionate time in the honeymoon phase of your relationship but that's not the same as as the things that you learn in year in in six months or in a year or in two years that you can only know you know what does how does someone react when you're not healthy when you you know are going through something what how does someone react when there's financial difficulty how does someone react when they need to make a a real compromise for you or vice versa um how does someone react when things are difficult these are things that we know over time character is something that's revealed over time take it slow man


something that's revealed over time take it slow man i think that's the key message here uh maybe it wasn't the key message in the 70s or 60s but it's become the key message in the social media age uh i think we'll move to our final section because we've got a flood of questions from our twitterverse uh so let's let's take on some fan questions ruchi chawla asks your partner can always be emotionally dependent on you but there should be limits put on emotional dependence so how do you figure out those limits and what do you think about emotional dependence in general well we are a relationship a romantic relationship by definition is not one where there is unconditional love we have to go into a roma even though we may say you know i would do anything for you the truth is it's always i would do anything for you as long as i feel like you're also you have similar feelings about me you know sometimes i think is sometimes too much to ask that two people feel exactly the same


much to ask that two people feel exactly the same way because it's you know david white uh a poet and a a british poet he says unrequited love is actually the norm it's not the exception and by that he means throughout our relationship we're always going to go through times where our partner feels something more intensely than we do or vice versa times when we're willing to do things for them that they may not be willing to do for us that that's real life but relationships truly break down and become untenable when the difference between the two versions of love that two people are giving are really really vast the reason i say that is because your your listener question i look at that and say okay let's remove the word emotional dependence from it and say that we have emotional requirements in a relationship in order to stay there emotionally dependent suggests that we wouldn't survive emotionally without them in our lives and that can never be true you always have to know that if i had


true you always have to know that if i had to leave this relationship i could and i would emotionally survive outside of this relationship because if you don't know that then that relationship always has a gun to your head you will never leave even if things get so bad and abusive that you should leave so emotional dependence no but emotional requirements yes and the emotional requirement is what are the basic fundamental things that i need from you in order for me to continue to invest emotionally in this relationship and physically and time-wise and it might be okay i have an emotional it it should start from a point of view of saying who do i want to be in this world how strong do i want to be how independent do i want to be and what do i expect of myself because if we don't do that then we could say go we could go to our partner for reassurance that we're good enough 30 times a day which is an unfair thing to do to our partner because we have to think


to do to our partner because we have to think of our partner's existence in this relationship and it would make it a really un it would make it a really unenjoyable existence for your partner if all they're doing all day is reassuring you that you're good enough so there we have to say it's my responsibility to to make myself feel good enough most of the time or at least even a lot of the time or even if i'm not feeling good enough to resolve to do the work that i need to do without always bringing that as baggage to my partner because there's a big difference between vulnerability and dumping vulnerability is me saying i felt a little jealous this morning when you spoke about this person and i don't want to feel that but i did and then our partner can because we've brought it up not in an accusatory way not in a judgmental way but we brought it up in a vulnerable way our partner can come to our aid and make us feel


partner can come to our aid and make us feel better and it can actually bring us closer but if 20 minutes later we say it again and then an hour later we say it again and then an hour later we say it again and then this afternoon we pick a big fight over it and then five days from now we bring it up again and it now with we're not this isn't vulnerability this is dumping because i'm not taking responsibility for resolving these feelings in myself i'm just expecting you to keep patching up the wound over and over again without me doing the work so there's a difference between vulnerability and dumping and and that's something we should explain to our partner if there be if we sense that they're becoming emotionally dependent on us we can say to them i know you have things that you're struggling with anxieties things that that you're you find hard that's okay that i'm okay with like i'm i love you and i accept your flaws and i because i have


and i accept your flaws and i because i have them too and my god i hope that you are compassionate about mine so we have to be that for each other but part of that compassion is i want you to be able to bring things to me but i want you to be able to bring them in a productive way that also recognizes that whilst your energy is important to you i hope that my energy is important to you as well and if you continuously bring these things up after we've already talked about it and we've had a great conversation about it and i've made you feel better if it then becomes this conversation we have every five minutes then i feel like you're not being compassionate about my energy and you're not also doing the things i the things that will help you feel better i want to help you do those i support you you know whatever we need to do to make you feel stronger i support you but if it if if it's you continuously saying something to me without us doing


you continuously saying something to me without us doing those things that actually make you stronger then i feel like it it's not good for our relationship and i know that what we want is to build an amazing relationship so i think that making that distinction is important emotional dependence versus emotional requirements and the by the way the converse of that is if someone can't meet our most basic emotional requirements if they don't make us feel loved if they never make us feel special in the relationship if they never show up and and give us their affection or and and it always the relationship is falling short of what we need not on our worst day but even on our average day what we need then we that person isn't meeting our fina our emotional requirements and then we have to start having a real conversation about that um i was gonna ask you a question about being possessive because we have a lot of uh possessive ness related questions uh in this segment but i think you kind of answered that either


segment but i think you kind of answered that either way i'm still gonna take one of those the nostalgic aki asks how do you balance care and being possessive like how do you how do you balance being caring and being possessive and i think this is like a very tropical culture perspective can't generalize but i've seen this across tropical cultures latin america india parts of africa the guys do tend to get i mean both men and women get very possessive so what do you have to say about that well caring and possessive are diametrically opposed words yeah because if what we say when someone says caring that's a euphemism they're being polite to themselves they're saying i just care so much that has nothing to do with loving the other person that has to do with not wanting to lose something you're getting care true caring true caring is caring about the experience of the other person if i really love them then i care about the experience of life that


them then i care about the experience of life that they're having that doesn't mean i can never get jealous it doesn't mean i'm not gonna have possessive moments but it means that our relationship and my love for them has to be paramount as long as what they do doesn't fundamentally cross a line that we've agreed on you know but but possessiveness so much of possessiveness is about control when we quote care so much which is another way of saying i am so afraid because i have something i don't want to lose our most controlling nature comes out because when we have something we don't want to lose we want to hold on as tightly as possible to that thing now we have the illusion that by holding on tightly we're going to keep it and what we all know is again like an animal can love you but hold on too tightly and that animal starts to like wait hang on i need to be able to move i need to be able to run to the other side of the


be able to run to the other side of the room if i need to holding on tightly doesn't work and it also it's a you can never exert that level of control because there's always going to be a party that they go to that you're not going to go to that night there's always going to be a trip that they do with their friends that you didn't go to that time you can't play surveillance on every part of a person's life you can only let go and i think that this is where it's worth becoming a little bit fatalistic and saying i am gonna allow for like if this is gonna happen i'm gonna be a little bit fatalistic and say i'm gonna it's gonna happen if it's gonna happen and i am gonna make my peace with the fact that i'll be able to deal with it if it does don't worry about controlling them worry about being strong enough to handle any situation where someone actually is disloyal when someone actually does betray


someone actually is disloyal when someone actually does betray you cheat on you do something if you know that you're strong enough that you can walk away if it happens then you don't need to control it it's not necessary because you don't need to worry that yeah but they're so great i don't want them to do this if they do it then they may not be so great you may you may decide the vision i have of this person isn't true anyway so what did i really lose and so therefore i don't need to worry about losing the right person because the right person may not do it to me in the first place or even if there are some relationships that get through things like that but even then you holding on wasn't stopping them from doing that so all you can do is show up in the moments that you're in the relationship and be the best you can be that's it and being the best you can be includes giving that person space to be who they are and


giving that person space to be who they are and taking the risk that who they are in that moment may actually be something that hurts the relationship or it won't be and if it isn't something that hurts the relationship then what you now have is an even more beautiful relationship as a result because you've got a person who realizes that you love them enough to let go and to trust in what you believe you have together yeah again this is coming from the whole self-improvement content creator space but my mathematical definition of a possessive nature is one of two things childhood experiences or adult insecurity like you know when you're not feeling like you're good enough on a very deep level again that boils down to some kind of childhood experience or a pre-pre adult experience yes and that and that not feeling good enough is a poisonous thing because it it makes us fear everyone in the room all the time you know we we could be with our part we could be with our partner and


with our part we could be with our partner and someone walks into a coffee shop someone said to me the other day i used to you know if i was with my boyfriend and someone i thought was beautiful would walk into the room i would have a meltdown internally like it my day would be ruined because i'd literally all i'd be thinking is he wants her not me you know and and and so sometimes it's not even about someone being disloyal it's literally just about perceiving constant threats to this thing that you care about and it's worth noting that the threats are going to be there no matter what like that's they're just always going to be there i live in los angeles the threat of an earthquake is always imminent we just just a week or two ago we woke up in the middle of the night to an earthquake at four o'clock in the morning like it's always a possibility but you don't live your life every minute of the day i'm not sitting here with you


of the day i'm not sitting here with you holding onto the table you know worrying about an earthquake me holding onto the table doesn't help it's not going to make the earthquake less likely right all it means is mean i'm ruining my experience of everything that's happening in my day because of the possibility of the earthquake it's not about saying to people it won't happen someone could betray you someone could cheat on you someone could leave you for somebody else all of those things could happen but it doesn't make it any less likely that they'll happen because you're holding on and gripping it doesn't make it less likely that it will happen but what it makes guaranteed is that you won't be able to enjoy anything that's happening and by the way you can also console yourself with the idea that you can take solace in knowing that there isn't one person in the world who doesn't have the same threats no one we personalize these threats that's ego our ego


one we personalize these threats that's ego our ego says i'm not good enough that person who just walked into the room is more beautiful than me they could my partner could leave me for that person that partner could go off with that person that's all true they could leave you for that person what's the the the part that's insidious is that we personalize that threat we make that threat about us when the truth is every single person in the world who is brave enough to be in love and to have a relationship has the exact same threats at their doorstep as you do and we see that every single day there are people that are you know we think of objectively as the most successful and attractive people on earth and they get cheated on and you know there will be people looking at you ran there and they're like who would ever cheat on ranvier there will be people that say that like look at him he's good-looking he's successful he's got emotional intelligence he's got a lovely way about


got emotional intelligence he's got a lovely way about him he's good with people like who in their right mind would do that but the truth is these things can happen to anybody so it's not about saying there is no threat it's about saying hey that threat you face you're in great company because the rest of us face it too why don't we all relax and just let what's gonna happen happen yeah i hear you and i'd probably like to add one more thing you let's go back to that example of someone a couple sitting in a restaurant where you said that that lady said that if another beautiful lady walked in i'd get insecure i've dated women who felt this i feel the same way especially when i'm in a great relationship when you're dating someone who you love a lot everyone in the room disappears and at least at least for me uh because you're that involved with that person irrespective of how long you're dating so uh you need to trust your partner that much


so uh you need to trust your partner that much especially you know if you guys have been together for a while if you're getting all the right signals tell yourself that at least that's what's helped you know a lot of people who have given this advice to okay interesting question from the nanogram she asks why does one get attracted to someone who has no interest in them at all and i think the other question i'd like to add is that whole bad boy or bad girl attraction theory that why you always attracted to the bad boys or the bad girls someone who's not good for you someone is not right for you we have this idea that if someone doesn't want us then they must be valuable they they must you know we especially when we don't think we're good enough when someone likes us we're suspicious of them we think there must be something wrong with you if you like me because i'm not great so you must not be great you you know you can't be worth anything if you like


you know you can't be worth anything if you like me let me go and find someone who's worth something and who do i think is worth something the person who doesn't notice me the person who doesn't want me because i don't think very highly of myself so if you don't notice me you must be pretty cool you must be on to something so then we start chasing that because it becomes that idea that if i could just get this person i would be enough that would prove that i could be enough this person's validation becomes the key that unlocks my confidence which of course is completely the reverse of what's true that this person if this person fell for you it wouldn't unlock your confidence all it would do is unlock more insecurity more anxiety because now you get that person and you still don't feel good enough and you're spending every waking moment terrified you're going to lose them so someone not liking us someone that we really like suddenly liking us doesn't is not going to unlock


suddenly liking us doesn't is not going to unlock our confidence um and we get attracted to the bad boy the bad girl partly because of what we just said right if if we can get this person to fall in love with us then i'll be somebody you know they don't want me they're hard to wrangle but if i could then i'd be good enough and some of this stuff comes from from childhood and you know there's that idea that we're trying to complete trying to get closure on some story from our childhood you know my i didn't get it from my dad so if i can get it from this person then it will show that i was good enough for my dad that i could have had my dad's love i'm completing a story that never got completed in my mind we're still allowing some person in our past to play god over our current decisions and trying to give ourselves a sense of finality over that um but of course that's when we do that we forget that those


course that's when we do that we forget that those people that we're trying to still win the approval of they were very flawed human beings and that they're not god they were just people they were just people in the same way that this person who's not showing interest in you right now or this person who's the bad boy picking you up putting you down you know whatever that that's not an indication of value what it is is an indication of this person either just isn't that into you or this person isn't looking for something serious right now or this person is um not ready to love the way that a relationship a true relationship really demands love or this person is insecure and needs to have five people on the go at all times because they're trying to fill a hole that they can't fill so we're basing our value on a phase of life or or inadequacy or insecurity or ego that somebody else is in the irony is that we could have someone who really likes us today


that we could have someone who really likes us today and is ready to treat us well and ready to give us a ton of love who was the bad boy five years ago but has evolved and matured and is now ready to really love but that person's ready to give us a kind of unironic unsarcastic pure love and we go hmm something's wrong with this let me go for this let me go for the bad boy so you start to look for someone who's currently in a bad boy face so what happens then is you end up cycling through people your whole life who are always in a certain phase of their life because you're not ready for someone to treat you really well even if one you know you're like oh but i really like someone with an edge well maybe that person was that person but they've grown up and so what it really is is not that you know how do i is it's that you're always attracted to people who have not grown up you don't see the people


who have not grown up you don't see the people you don't acknowledge the people that have grown up who are past that phase you're not you're not ready for something more than what you're getting right now and as soon as you do see something that could resemble good treatment you don't treat it as valuable because you don't treat yourself as valuable you're still trying to complete some story you have in your mind of what you're supposed to get and how it's supposed to make you feel matthew hersey spreading those positive vibes spreading all that healing all over the world while i have a ton of questions to ask you i think for this episode we'll uh call it a day i appreciate everything you've done on this episode brother right from giving me advice from my personal life to just putting out pulls of wisdom out there for the audiences uh thank you from the bottom of my heart both as the podcast host and someone who consumes your content regularly you have no idea


who consumes your content regularly you have no idea what you're doing through your work man so god bless thank you thank you so much i um i it's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you i'd love to do it again i genuinely you know i don't say that to everybody i i really have enjoyed this one and um and for by the way for anyone out there we i put together a little video for you guys that if you want to keep building your confidence and you've realized from listening to this conversation between ramveer and i that that's the the deeper confidence is something you need to work on i have uh a speech that i gave that was behind closed doors it was only a couple of hundred people in the speech but i never gave it again um and it's a training on confidence and what i call the three layers of confidence um if you go i've actually created a special place for you guys to get it as listeners of your podcast ramveer um


get it as listeners of your podcast ramveer um if you go to ranveerandmathew.com you can literally download that that's especially for you guys so that's at ranveeranmathew.com and ranveer i hope if i uh i've it's been a dream of mine to come and do an event in india for a long time if i get to mumbai you and i have to go for a coffee and a and a catch up i have the same plan uh at some point i don't know familiar with aaron marino but i plan on flying all you guys down at some point probably after covert is done and have some kind of a mass meet and greet i don't have a or you know like a conference or something where we do the same thing that you guys do spread positivity spread guidance uh let's let's kind of work together towards a better world man that's that's why we do what we do at our core i love it thanks ramveer what a pleasure i'll be


it thanks ramveer what a pleasure i'll be linking all of matthew's handles down below i will be linking uh a lot of his videos that i personally love so please go check it out and once again from matthew and ranveer thank you guys for listening [Music]


imagine beginning your career out of the love for coding then helping with the creation of one of the world's biggest tech companies pinterest and then moving on to founding your own tech company gum road this is the story of sahil of india this is an entrepreneurship special of the runway show lots of business learnings lots of perspectives from silicon valley and the tech world in general it's high living here's on the rnv show today but before i let you slip into this insightful episode of the ranvi show we've got to announce that trs will soon become a spotify exclusive that means that before it's released on youtube 48 hours before it's released on youtube the audio versions of all the podcast episodes will be released exclusively on spotify that's right watch out follow us on spotify but for now slip into this beautiful episode of trs with sahil lavinga [Music] sahil of india thank you for being on the ranveer show brother thank you for having me excited to be here


thank you for having me excited to be here i love talking to entrepreneurs i just feel like uh through the medium of storytelling you know especially when you're talking about your own story your own business story there's a lot of little learnings that happen through your mistakes through your experiences but also just generally there's a lot of subject related learning so i follow you on twitter i know that you're due to studies a lot of different things you study psychology you study human beings you study business for sure maybe maybe on a slightly deeper level than most people so while we will talk about gum road i wanna ask you everything about your life because you began your business journey really early you began in college and that's not how a lot of indians think people think that okay let me wait till i turn 22 23 once i'm out of college that's when i'll start and you started like pretty early man so first of all what was the thought behind that and secondly uh how did


the thought behind that and secondly uh how did you deal with being from a traditional indian family yeah yeah i mean i i got started yeah super early uh designed uh started designing websites when i was in middle school or high school i think and then the app store the iphone app store came out in 2009 when i was in high school and i started making iphone apps uh and it was really just fun honestly like i think a lot of it was you know in a lot of career paths you have to there are certain things you have to do there's certain you know either you have to get a degree or a certification or you have to go through some path whereas with with software it's one of the few things where you can just you know it doesn't matter really like if you've made something good people can pay you money for it and that was just very freeing to me and very just really cool like i could build something and then people could you know pay for it and then i could


could you know pay for it and then i could build more stuff right which is sort of a line that i think has followed me since uh with gumroad and and other things how did you figure that the stuff you were building counted as good like how were you so sure that it was good and what apps did you build back then yeah there there are two there are two things i mean one one is you can charge money for it right and i think i always even in the beginning i don't think i ever released anything for free uh even if it was 99 cents on the app store or something like that i made you know i made an app funnily enough in the one of the first apps i made maybe the first was uh called taxi law which was a a an app that allows you to call a cab from your phone uh you know this is before uh before uber and all of that stuff um and you know so i just built it often i would solve my own problem i think that's


often i would solve my own problem i think that's the other sort of signal that you can use uh to know if something's useful is like i think a lot of people they get into it uh and they say i need to start a company i need to start a business like what problem can i go solve and that's really hard i found that really difficult it's much easier for me to be like just look around my own life and there's plenty of things that i can improve i think it's sort of early days uh you know and and there's just problems everywhere why according to yourself do you think pinterest has become deep interest today if you were employee number two you saw a lot so what went right for that organization yeah when i joined we had something like 15 000 users and now there's probably i don't know 100 million 150 million users i don't know what it's at now um it's sort of a thousand next i mean i think uh it's it's honestly it's it's weird


uh it's it's honestly it's it's weird because you know a lot of people ask like what was it like being there that early and i'm like look it's probably like most startups are that early you know it's a bunch of people in a room shipping code uh i mean i think what made it really big was just the fact that it solved a problem for a lot of people uh when we started getting that initial traction even though we only had you know tens of thousands of users the sort of engagement metrics per user were just insane and the value like it was so clear when you talk to somebody or even when you use the product yourself the amount of value that was being created was just immense and we were really competing with like the internet explorer bookmarks folder right this is like how people would track things you know if you want to sort of catalog a bunch of recipes that you want to make or something you'd have like an internet explorer bookmarks folder and we just kind


an internet explorer bookmarks folder and we just kind of like at least that's the way that i thought about it i can't speak for the for the whole company but the way i thought about it was like we're just we're just taking this sort of like very old school traditional thing and we're just making it a software startup putting in the cloud making it social which is similar to what you know people did like what facebook did to the facebook etc right we were just taking like scrapbooking and these very physical things that people were doing already and just sort of saying what is the web 2.0 version of this right what is the equivalent of collecting and curating online for like a mainstream audience and i think that's all you know that all would have led to a meaningful company uh but i think the thing that really catapulted it was facebook and i think we just sort of tie i mean similar to instagram i think timing wise you know it it's kind of like paypal on ebay back in the


kind of like paypal on ebay back in the day you have a platform in facebook that's growing like crazy and uh pinterest was just the perfect sort of thing to ride that wave because with pinterest one one thing that's unique about pinterest is it's mostly about uh curation it's not about content creation which is which means that you can effectively do an action a hundred times in five minutes right if you're pinning a bunch of things for a wedding for example you're not going to tweet 100 you couldn't do that it would break like it would be very sort of like against the sort of social etiquette of the platform whereas with pinterest that's what it's about it's about re-pinning you know as much content as possible uh primarily for yourself and then you know the sort of algorithm and stuff will kind of distribute that to people and i think with facebook at the beginning uh when their algorithm was was really simple it was like if people are doing an action on a website a thousand times


are doing an action on a website a thousand times a day you know we're gonna that's important we're gonna put that on facebook and you know with open graph and you'd see all your friends so i remember within like a a six month period or something i you know it went from like you know i would tell friends like i work at this thing and they're like cool like what is that to like seeing pinterest on my feed like every day because because of that so i think you know every startup needs a few of those moments to get to the next level especially in a time scale that's rapidly compressed you're not going to get to a 30 billion evaluation in 10 years without certain events helping you along the way but i think it's like you know it's kind of like hard work meets luck right like we prepared and we had a really great product and then i think the company had a few of these instances that really just kind of skyrocketed and then you know it's a network effect


skyrocketed and then you know it's a network effect at some point you become big enough that it's just a snowball right more people like in terms of all the competition went away and it was just like a clear line of sight um to it you know to a multi-billion dollar company but it still i think you know surpassed expectations for me i did not think it was going to be a 30 billion i don't think anyone when they invested i don't think you know like even the just evaluations of companies in general have have grown so much in the last 10 years in technology even in the last year because of coven so i think it's you know who knows like where where things go but that's sort of that's some of the some of the some of the insight there but like on a very business level what was the founder doing right or what was correct culturally within that organization that allowed it to scale this much yeah i mean i think ben has always just been a phenomenal


i think ben has always just been a phenomenal communicator i think that's something that i really try to to copy effectively and i didn't realize you know back then i was that was my first professional experience right so i don't know how many people their first boss also is a boss of a ceo of a 30 billion public company uh so i think that you know i i feel like i i almost get to cheat because similarly to that kind of like you need that those moments in a company i feel like i had those moments as an individual whereas i was able to learn from someone that that competent or that had the capability to be that competent over time right very few people can can do that but i think he he just communicates really well i think he's always been very good at making sure everyone is aligned on like what we do why we do it what problems are we trying to solve how are we trying to solve those problems who is our ideal customer or user you know like why


is our ideal customer or user you know like why should we you know why are we not building these certain things uh and i think culture a lot of it just comes down to like why are people in the room and i think he's just been really good at making sure that people are in the room for the right reason uh but certainly i'm sure pinterest had a lot of it you know its own set of cultural problems as any company that scales that quickly does and you know last couple years there's been a lot of stuff in the media like there would be for any i think multi-billion dollar company with thousands and thousands of employees but i think in the early days of which i can really only speak for it for those i think it was just like an insane focus on product and insane focus on the on sort of user experience uh and just making sure that everyone that joins the company is a really really good human being uh and then i also think the the cheating i think


and then i also think the the cheating i think the the way that pictures can sort of cheat is you never really have to worry too much about the business side of things because if there's such a built-in commerce aspect that everyone can kind of say okay if pinterest gets to 50 million monthly active users you know we can see it with twitter we can see with facebook we can see with instagram we can see with snapchat there's a pretty clear path to monetization here like clearly people are using the product to find products to purchase you know furniture to buy weddings to plan like there's so much uh opportunity there and so i think that allowed the company and the team to really focus on the product knowing that there was like a very clear you know if and when we get to this benchmark we can pivot and focus on on on revenue and and probably do really well at it uh whereas other companies you know that are a little bit more like snapchat i think is a good example where like i


snapchat i think is a good example where like i think they spent quite a few years even as a public company where people were like how is this thing gonna work it's a bunch of kids using this thing they don't even have any data they delete all the data every 24 hours you know after 24 hours and now it's a 40 40 billion company so uh it turns out you know if you hire a really great team and you have a you know you really care like and you're a software company you're like often you're likely to figure that stuff out over time but i think you know 10 years ago even facebook when the ipo sort of tanked i think it was still very unclear um you know if this was really going to be a sort of a sustainable thing which like nowadays is laughable right like i remember back in the day people were saying you know facebook you know all of their users are going to start using it on their phone that was sort of new how how do you advertise


that was sort of new how how do you advertise on a phone there's only so much screen real estate um and obviously that's been proven yes you can advertise on a phone there's a way to advertise on a phone um so yeah i don't know i mean there's nothing too crazy and sometimes it sounds it's like i don't know if when you when you talk to someone like a like a professional basketball player you say how are you so good they're like well i play a lot of basketball and i do the bait you know i'd like run the fundamentals and i and it's just like yeah but what like what else is there you know and i feel like sometimes that's talking about business is similar where it's just like you you know you build a product you make sure it solves a problem you scale you find new customers you do it over and over and over again and i think the the it's sort of like it's like it's like the hardest things are the simple things right


like the hardest things are the simple things right everyone wants like the the you know what's the 1000 instruction manual that i can follow to build a massive company but the truth is there isn't really one right it's like if you want to test someone's ability at cooking you don't tell them to cook some elaborate meal you could say cook me an omelet and i will know how good you are at everything else i don't even need to see any of that stuff or a a teacher of mine he used to say or he says uh you can tell if someone's good at piano within three seconds like you don't need to literally like within three seconds you know someone can play the piano or not there's no way to fake that and i think product development is similar where like once you you you really just want to work on the core competency the core skill and that just comes from like building iterating talking to customers and doing that over and over and over again and i think ben has always


over and over again and i think ben has always had that obsession uh you know he was the ceo of the company but he was also doing basically all of customer support uh for several months when i was there so he's always been like you know and i'm sure if you go to his pinterest account now he's still like an avid user of the product he still uses it all the time and i think very few people continue to do that i also learned like there's nothing crazy there's no secret sauce right like i think it was just a bunch of people i thought they were pretty smart you know i don't think we're any any any of us were just like incredible uh we just you know found a problem solved it and and i think that's helpful for me to know too right so i think some people get caught up in the idea that they can't do something that they need access to something or they need some degree or they need some amount of money or they need a skill that


some amount of money or they need a skill that they don't have talent that they don't have um and i think a lot of those are just excuses uh or they're lies like there were lives that people told you so that they would have less competition effectively gumroad the idea considering the fact that you did your entrepreneurship thing when you were a teenager and you figured that okay let's address real world problems and start a business because of those real world problems then you work at pinterest you get all this experience then that adds layers to those solutions for the real world problems so what in your head made you want to start gum road yeah i mean i think that's a big part of it is just like the the depth the complexity of which i could sort of think about these these problems was a big one for me um and seeing the impact right seeing like oh wow if i if i don't think about the stuff i was building as oh these like random things that i'm i'm shipping


oh these like random things that i'm i'm shipping for fun on the side to buy xbox games but instead as like a way to change the world and build a really valuable company and product and team and and grow as a human being just like the aspirations that i i i think grew within me just sort of via osmosis right just like sort of pulling it from the people around me uh sort of silicon valley culture and and it also gave me the network and i think that was another key point uh is like i had these ideas and i would build stuff and you know i'd build something and i'd ship it and it would be cool and then i'd build something else and i chip and it would be cool and then when i moved to silicon valley all of a sudden it was like hey you built this thing like have you thought about starting a company it was such a different way of thinking about it and so i think those two things combined to be like oh this is possible like


things combined to be like oh this is possible like there are these people that i really respect maybe i follow them on twitter for a long time people like naval and other folks and they're like you know they want to give me money to start a company and i can go like all of these things like when i went to school my goal was i would be in school for four years i would join google or something i'd do that for a few years i joined a startup i do that for a few years and then maybe one day i'd start a company right this would be like a 10 to 20 year thing and i was in no rush to do that and i thought that was kind of you know even though i was doing all the software stuff i still felt like there was a professional path and that was kind of different and maybe it was maybe the internet kind of consolidated those the two things as i was you know kind of coming up uh but yeah it was it was really uh people in the


yeah it was it was really uh people in the valley who were like hey you can start a company we'll give you money you can basically just mess around for a couple years and you know see what happens and we trust that you'll figure you know you'll you'll have a good shot at figuring something out um and if it doesn't work you know similar to pinterest like if it doesn't work go back to school if it doesn't work go work at a company right like you're not gonna you're not gonna be down i think one of the the best things about the culture over there is like failure is like a good thing because it means that you learned a bunch of stuff and that people are willing to pay you to take those learnings and apply them to their company so you're almost like you know it's sort of it felt to me like a win-win situation certainly i was giving up the position at pinterest and stuff but it just felt like yeah i want like starting a


it just felt like yeah i want like starting a company having this opportunity at this age this early in my life like how can i say no to that yeah i could you know people like naval and max levchin and kurosaka and and all of these folks are like giving me money just like paying me basically to do this uh and so i i felt like i just it was it was like imagine if there's like a door all the way over there and you're like no one gets to that door right like no one does so it's not worth thinking about uh one in every hundred thousand people get to that door and then all of a sudden someone's like hey you know here's a key like and it's open for you you don't even think about it to be honest you don't even maybe you should be like well do i even want to go through that door like what's even on the other side of that but when you get that option it's kind of like you know yes like


that option it's kind of like you know yes like whatever like it's it must be worth it so what did people what do you think those guys saw in you specifically like what do you think you did right i think there's so many people who want to start a company want to start a business they're more excited about that uh but really to build a business like you got to build a product and the business is kind of like the the kind of like sprinkles on the product uh but really the core thing you're selling is the product and so i think i mean you know i'll meet a team of people that's like three mbas and i'm like what are you building they're like oh we're building some software i'm like who who's building the software oh we here we have it you know we're outsourcing that i'm like well imagine you tried to start a band and you said you know none of us play instruments uh but we really want to start so we hired some people i'm like


to start so we hired some people i'm like that doesn't work frankly it doesn't work it just to me shows a lack of either conviction or sacrifice or like you're not willing to do the work what was the idea behind gumroad what was your core idea what was the core problem you were solving and in your early stage of business what did you learn about life that you didn't know prior to starting gum road yeah i think you know in the beginning the problem that i was solving for myself was i had an audience online i wanted to sell something that i made this icon to them i had a thing i had the audience i just needed to like give them a link and they could give me a dollar you know they could fill out a credit card form and it was mind-blowing to me that that wasn't possible like it just wasn't you know this is 2011 before stripe launch like it was just so hard to accept payments on the internet um you'd have to


to accept payments on the internet um you'd have to sort of say paypal me money and then like give them a dropbox it was just weird it was a very manual process uh and i sort of you know kind of considered it like a lemonade stand like if you just wanted to like set something up really simply and sell it to people who already were in your radius uh it wasn't wasn't easily possible and so that was the problem we solved initially and the sort of the reason i became interested in it broadly is that i felt like the internet was connecting all of these people all of a sudden you know musicians didn't have to talk to magazines and ceos didn't have to talk to journalists and politicians didn't have to go through the traditional people everyone was now building an audience on instagram twitter facebook pinterest uh youtube etc similar to this right you don't have to you can reach a huge amount of people now who all have a direct relationship with you and i thought that was


a direct relationship with you and i thought that was awesome but a missing component was the transactional element like the you know the next step for me would be well why wouldn't you just pay everybody directly why would you build this amazing relationship and then say okay now you have to go over there to buy my products you have to buy them from this per from target you have to go to target to buy my products target's going to make the majority of the money i'll get a little bit uh it just didn't make sense to me you know kind of d2c which is what's happening now it just made sense for me to like to think well if you're you know if you're selling a product you should be selling directly and so that was the kind of the core thing that that i think i really was excited about was i just i felt like there was going to be a shift uh and it was i don't think it was a unique insight i think a lot of people saw it


insight i think a lot of people saw it i just had the problem and i saw the problem and then i was able to kind of start on that journey i think in terms of what i learned you know in the early days from it uh it's really hard i think when you build what all of a sudden when i wanted when i wanted this thing to grow like crazy because that was now my it was before it was like we'll see what happens right this one i was like no i need i want this to actually grow i realize how hard it is to get people to change their behavior most people and i tweet about this a lot in different ways but basically people are people have inertia right sort of like things that are in motion stay in motion people things that are still stay still uh whatever the second law of thermodynamics or something and that's true of humans right like in general if you're not working out you're not going for a run every day unlikely that you're gonna


for a run every day unlikely that you're gonna go for a run today if you go for a run every single day for the last three years very high odds are going to go for a run you just you won't even think about it it's just something you do and i think that's similar in all of these different facets and so when you start building a product you're like oh it's so easy just solve a problem and then you like show it to the people whose problem you solved and they'll pay you money and then you realize like no they're happy like they're they're living their life they have a certain level of sort of things that they do challenges already they have certain risk aversion it's really hard to get someone to actually change what they're doing and with gumroad some you know for some people it's like hey this this way that you currently earn a living today is bad you should earn a living in this new way it's better that's really hard to to even deal with even


better that's really hard to to even deal with even if it's it's like if you're religious and someone says you know it's like you won't even listen to the argument because it's so core to your identity you have to be willing to let that go first before you're even willing to listen uh and i think it's somewhat i always tell people that the example i use is is coke you walk into people like oh it's so easy i'm so free i i only do the best products i like i don't i don't care about ads i don't care about any of that stuff and i'm always like like if you go to a store and you buy potato chips or you buy a can of soda you buy coke you buy blaze you know like do you go to i promise you if you go to the store there's going to be other options brands you've never heard of but you've never tried any of those things why because you're not you're you're stuck in a loop like you're


you're you're stuck in a loop like you're doing the same thing you're going to the brands that you trust the names that you're familiar with are these other things going to kill you no but your your body you just can't help but sort of stay away from that and so i think it's similar it's like it takes it takes it's like really feels like pushing a boulder up a hill where you it takes a long time to get to that now gum road's big enough we've been around long enough people are like of course i'd use camera for this right now we have the we're on the other now the boulder is kind of rolling down the hill in a sense but in the beginning i think people are surprised often how hard it is and i think as an investor it's often why i focus so much on that building and shipping component it's because a lot of people are like i'm so good at business i'm so good at this you know i'm so good at selling and


at this you know i'm so good at selling and building company building even all i got to do is figure out the product stuff and i'm like no that you you're not gonna that's most people fail here like at every level there's like a ten percent that get through you know um and so if you can't do this beginning thing none of this other stuff is gonna matter uh and i think a lot of people who don't build it's kind of like the the musicians who've hired the the you know outsource the the the guitars or whatever it's i think people don't really realize how hard it is and how you need that feedback loop to be really compressed right because you need to talk to a customer and then you you got to fix the thing do it again and again and again and if you every time yeah yeah just get the point just to uh yeah i i'm so sorry i'm interrupting you but i gotta give my listeners some context on your customer experience so in 2020 what is


context on your customer experience so in 2020 what is a gumroad customer going through like could you explain why someone would open the app what would they do on it just run the people through that process and i can take you back to the story totally yeah so creators you know musicians designers writers filmmakers photographers anyone that wants to sell digital content already has an audience we make it really easy for them to basically create a digital storefront so they can go to gumroad they sign up they upload their products right they upload their music or their ebook or their videos or what have you and then we give them these pages that they can customize and then share on social media or on their blog or their newsletter so it's just within five minutes basically we want to make it possible for an author to sell their ebook or a filmmaker to sell a workshop or any of these things and then on the on the buyer side you you come to this page it's really simple beautiful landing page uh


to this page it's really simple beautiful landing page uh heavily optimized for conversion again like one of the key insights we had was if you or if you're a lemonade stand you don't need that much right people already know who you are they just want to support you and so we make it a super streamlined experience because of that um you know with a preview and a name and a price and a buy button you hit buy you fill out a credit card uh you know it's beautiful and simple and you hit pay you get a little receipt that like comes down in a nice animation you hit download or watch or listen or whatever the the you know the file sort of the the product is and then you start consuming whatever that is right you have a you know an email in your inbox if you need if you need to go back to it etc but you just the goal is basically if you're a creator we want to make it super fast and simple for you to sell content and if you're a buyer


for you to sell content and if you're a buyer we want to make it really easy and fast for you to buy the content and consume the content i read this like thing about your gumroad journey there was a point where you had to lay off about 75 of the organization yeah so uh what was this story like why did that happen and uh man i've had a few fires in my life and it's been it's been difficult i think i've kind of gotten used to it but i can't imagine what you went through back then yeah it was tough i mean so you know we we had sort of a high rise in the beginning we raised the million dollar seed round from you know naval and max levchin and and and a bunch of these great investors in the early days and we raised a seven million dollar series a from kleiner in 2012 with a tiny team so we had three or four years kind of to figure things out and then twice that went by really fast 2015 you


then twice that went by really fast 2015 you know we have product market we're like again do we have it i don't know it felt like we had it we were growing we had a bunch of users people were making a bunch of money uh but we just weren't growing sort of venture fast right like venture yeah you kind of need to be growing at this sort of exponential rate if you want to create these you know outsized outcomes and we just weren't doing that and so i talked to you know i felt like i talked to everybody i talked to maybe 100 or more firms like vc firms not just individuals but like you know i went down to sandal road and went in an office and pitched gumroad and got rejected a 100 of the time like every single time uh which is very different than the first time where i felt like i got mostly yeses and so it was a very very different experience and learn learning experience for me for sure uh and so yeah we


experience for me for sure uh and so yeah we basically we're like what are we gonna do we we can't raise money we're not profitable yet we sort of over scaled kind of like you have to kind of assume that you're gonna be successful and kind of grow ahead of where you think you are and that sort of you know the venture capital kind of model uh and uh and so yeah in 20 2015 we raised a small bridge around from kleiner perkins to give us a year of runway which kind of buried the company in preference in liquidation preferences would basically means like uh forever you know you have to pay them back a multiple of what they put in first to kind of make it worth it for them to keep this company alive uh and i don't you know i don't regret that i just it was just what had to happen and yeah we so we had a year and we said we're going to focus purely on growth see how can we fix this we really believe that


see how can we fix this we really believe that we could turned out we couldn't and then in august october of 2015 uh i told the team all right i told them in jail like this is likely not gonna work we think it has the potential to and no one left and we all doubled down we all worked like crazy we all focused on growth it was like only growth uh we called it moving the needle like we only work on things that move the needle and it didn't work and so so nine months 10 months in we we did a round of layoffs we went from yeah 75 of the company from 20 people down to five people and then ultimately you know from five down to just me and i rebuilt the company from basically from scratch in 2016. yeah uh again like this is why knowing how to be self-sufficient is good you know i could i could do that um are you are you like i mean i'm sorry i'm bringing you back to the present and cutting you


bringing you back to the present and cutting you short sure see an entrepreneur is never satisfied an entrepreneur is never completely happy uh what's your mental space like right now dude you've been through some some intense ups and downs what are you what what's your zone like right now i i think i'm doing okay honestly i mean i you know it it does feel sometimes like i had a whole career already in terms of the yeah the school and then doing a company and pinterest and gumroad and raising money and failing and being a profitable business now and being uh you know starting to become an investor on the side like just feels like i'm you know i've had that um and i think part partly that makes me feel good you know it makes me feel like wow i've had so much experience in such a short amount of time i can take i can say that business yeah business is the best uh teacher for yourself like you become extremely self-aware because of running businesses but i mean


extremely self-aware because of running businesses but i mean um it's a pretty brutal journey for the prize of self-awareness so while i'm sure that you become self-aware like are you are you okay with the brutality yeah i mean it's it's definitely easier to talk about in hindsight right i think in the moment i i remember being like you know i like i i actually know the date november 5th 2015 uh techcrunch wrote you know put a front page story of like gumroad does layoffs uh you know 75 of the company uh and you know like that's the indus that's like the paper record right so that's like waking up and like you know the whole sort of silicon valley is i you know potentially talking about you none of them are talking to me right because you don't it's kind of like you know when when you know your friend run goes through something you know like do i talk about do i bring it i don't know the answer is for what for


it i don't know the answer is for what for what it's worth the answer is yes you you talk it's already on their mind so you might as well like support them uh a few people did but yeah it was definitely you know it's very lonely you know being a ceo is already lonely but when you sort of fail in that way so publicly it's a very brutal sort of very brutal experience you don't know who you can talk to about it you're like i gave up 50 million dollars a pinterest stock to do this like like was that a mistake like you know like all of these things run through your head you know i remember meeting meeting i had a meeting at the office and i was like do i cancel the meeting there's no one in the office anymore we have this big office with you know nobody's here except me so i have the meeting like as if everything's normal and you know years later he he tells me he's like dude that was so weird


me he's like dude that was so weird like you were clearly like you know but i don't i don't even remember you know i was just like on autopilot just like i need to make sure that things are just moving and like it's kind of like when you go you know it's like a traumatic experience you kind of just go into autopilot mode uh and i felt like i was there for months and it took me leaving san francisco and really figuring out like you know it's very difficult to wait if you have an identity uh like i'm the ceo of a company it's very difficult to get rid of the an identity it's very difficult to think of nothing right to go from thinking of something to thinking nothing is like you know it takes a long time to get into that state uh it's much easier to just think of something else right and so i think it it it took me a you know six months or a year to realize like living in san francisco just trying


to realize like living in san francisco just trying not to think about that is not gonna work i need to leave i need to write i need to paint i need to just get out of my head and like do something else uh which is what i ended up doing and that's really what gave me i think physical distance literally really helped me just realize like that wasn't everything when you're living in san francisco that is kind of everything right uh and you're on twitter that's kind of everything too but when i moved when i left san francisco and i moved to utah and i just started writing uh all of a sudden people didn't even know right people like hey what do you do and i'm like oh i'm just writing uh you know i work for i'm a software engineer i work for i would say i work for a company based out of san francisco which is true i i technically was accurate but i it just allowed me over time to you know once people start asking


me over time to you know once people start asking you these other questions uh you know you almost forget like you almost you know kind of are a lot you give yourself that that space um otherwise you're constantly reattaching to your identity every time you talk about it every time you bring it up and so it took probably nine months or a year for me to really be like okay i can now look back at that experience and be like okay that was really meaningful and valuable for me and that's what got me to the place where i ended up writing that that um essay a year and a half ago reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company because that was the first time it was it was like december i think of of 2017 uh or 2018 2018 it must have been when i when i i felt like come so two years and i realized the reason i wrote that is i was talking to my mom and my high school friends and no one knew what happened you know


friends and no one knew what happened you know i failed so visibly and so publicly and i but i didn't want to tell anyone i didn't want to address it because if someone hadn't read it why would i why would i tell them hey by the way i failed you know uh even though in hindsight i realized probably everyone knew i just you know i should have just probably addressed it anyway but so that's definitely a lesson but uh yeah i just i i remember like people had all of these it was like a telephone game right someone would be like did i heard you sold gumroad it shut down you like you're you know like all of these different stories and i was like i just need to correct the record like i just need to write from my own voice what actually happened uh and just just for my friends and family just to send them and be like here you go here's what happened uh and and then when i wrote it the first one or two drafts


i wrote it the first one or two drafts in i was like okay there's like when i send it to someone they're like this is amazing i need to send it to i had a friend who did this and they needed you know they need to see this because very few people fail as publicly as you did after being as successful as you were so early and then also feeling like you know talking about it um and so i think it allowed people i think 800 000 people ended up reading that article uh and you know hundreds of people read every day and i think that's not because of some amazing uh skill that i have to write or whatever it's just i told the story that so many people wanted to hear uh and have seen in their lives but never you know it's very sort of it very rare to really see someone put it put it out there uh and even even like i sent it to my investors it was the first people i sent it to i'm like hey i'm


people i sent it to i'm like hey i'm publishing this uh about the government journey and there a lot of them are still investors in gumroad they're sort of just we'll see what happens um and you know a couple of them were like wow this is like this is like you know flashbacks uh gives me flashbacks to uh you know my own company from you know the 90s or or what have you um so i think yeah i think people you know people people are always looking for uh for stories that were all the same that we're all struggling that we're all like figuring this stuff out and there's so many founders that were like wow i thought you had all your together and actually when when gumroad when i was happy when the when the article came out because i was like haha finally you know he hit a ceiling and exploded like his rocket you know it was like jealousy uh and it just it made me think like wow like that's such a terrible you know


like wow like that's such a terrible you know not that they're they're you know like you know it's just like the amount of comparison and jealous like this like we're all so focused on other people and it's just like it was just such a terrible kind of realization that like um has just made me really really realize like i need to be in charge of my own emotional state not gumroad not what i read on the internet um my my head like this it's all here like literally everything uh you know is happening in a very small space uh that you know i should i should probably sort of focus on for focus on on clarifying a lot of those thoughts so steve jobs said that as long as you have a vision you don't really need motivation the vision keeps pulling you but at the same time i feel on a day-to-day basis every entrepreneur has this thing that he or she turns to and uh for me it's cricket basketball and twitter so what are those three


cricket basketball and twitter so what are those three slots for you like what do you turn to in order to just keep yourself for lack of a better word fired up yeah that's a good question uh reading for sure uh reading long form books typically uh on my kindle would you would you recommend like a bunch of them like three or four books that like you have really helped you yeah yeah i mean uh recently um i read uh where is my flying car uh the rational optimist by matt ridley all of his books are phenomenal uh i just read ice age which is a phenomenal really short book around um the ice ages um uh and just just you know a lot of it like they're not business books you know i've read recently read the fabric of reality beginning of infinity uh by by david deutsch it's phenomenal i read a lot of sci-fi as well i think a lot of it for me is is i i love i love physics and i love reading about just


love i love physics and i love reading about just science because i think it grounds like it just reminds us like it reminds me of like how like weird society is sometimes like where we get caught up in these ideas but like you know the like reading about like wow the the earth is is you know is is really like a ball of fire like there's like a there's some there's some rock but like down there there's literally just like molten lava and fire uh and at some point it was just ice you know uh and it's just like it just i don't know it like really grounds you in a way where like you you you just you don't realize like we're hurtling through space yeah so you realize how small your problems are yeah you get how small your problems are yeah exactly exactly and and how random and weird and you know how like you think you're in control because you can move from here to there but you can't you know in the sort of context of the universe


you know in the sort of context of the universe your experiences are are relatively you know limited um for for better or worse i think it's just important to understand kind of like the natural prison that we're in um and under and sort of rock it and understand it and that's that's really helpful i really love books like rational optimus and beginning beginning of infinity because they just inspire me with you know the i like to say the present is fixed right like the present is a fixed moment whatever moment we're in you can't do too much outside of it you can't make a billion dollars tomorrow um but the you know over time like this like the outcomes of humanity are going to be so divergent right you can see a world in which the whole world's on fire uh or covered in ice again or we have flying cars or we have like you know we live in space or we go to mars like or neurolink i mean there's so many crazy things that could


i mean there's so many crazy things that could happen and i think there's this there's this concept of the black swan right like uh nasim to lab phenomenal book all of his books are great highly recommend them all especially skin in the game but we i think society we obsess over that we obsess over the black swans we're actually pretty good about realizing them now i feel like you know kobe happened we're like we're all screwed like almost immediately right and so i think he he he he won because he kind of convinced everybody to you know to pay attention to these tail risks but i almost think we don't spend enough time thinking about the white swans like what are all the internet uh cryptocurrency who knows what like there's so many amazing things that could happen uh that like tomorrow right like you're like oh we're gonna have self-driving cars or we're gonna have you know robots in 50 years and then you see like a video that elon musk is


then you see like a video that elon musk is just like oh maybe like five years like your conception of the future changes so quickly uh you know based on technology and innovations and research and you know like there's so many people working at the future all the time that we don't really see every day like but somehow your phone gets better you know like your life is getting better you just you just don't notice it it's kind of like watching grass grow but you open up you know you look at like go to archive.org and go to twitter.com like you go to any website and you're like what this was the internet that we used like five years ago um so i think it's always helpful for me to like to like you know like to to like both stay constrained in the present realize like i'm only in so much control of this uh sort of stoic i guess but then also realizing the future is can be crazy and i just i love books because i just think they're they're


i love books because i just think they're they're they're just they're so refined right like when you read a book you're getting like so many like filters on it and i just love when you read words like that it's just it's just like wow like humans are possible of creating this amazing stuff um it's just like it's like art it's like reading art you know i think being desi like i think it it you know it really made at least it felt like i was continuing a journey like you know my grandparents were not uh you know would not be considered successful their you know poverty basically in india and then my parents grew up in poverty but were able to transcend that and go to america and get their educations and and do quite well and then i you know it's like i have an obligation to continue you know to continue that and i think one of the things that i know sometimes it gets controversial in america um but i think one of the things about


america um but i think one of the things about like the sort of desi culture um that i see at least is like it's it's it's very much about like you know it's your job to be successful and when you have examples of that like this person grew up here and and and escaped in a sense like you know was able to transcend their experience it's hard for me to come up with excuses you know like even even with the gumroad stuff like i always tell people like look like i definitely struggled like i i i but you are successful right now man like yeah oh no yeah looks at you now yes but even even in the downs you know the down parts i was like this is not incomparable to what my parents went through like i i think like even when i moved to utah you know people are like how are you going to move to utah that's so crazy i'm like there's uber and airbnb like what do you like my parents like you know like when


do you like my parents like you know like when you moved in you know in the 80s like you moved like you're writing letters to you you know like it's a very different experience and so i i think that's true for every every everyone not just sort of daisy culture but i think like when you see people within one or two generations you're just like i can do it like the the sky is the limit and i think that's that's the way that my my parents and my mom i think was slightly less traditional in that way where she wasn't like you need to go to school you need to do this she was definitely like you know you should probably uh but also like you know they struggled i think to give me the freedom to choose uh you know and i think i always i always appreciated that where they were like you know luckily i think it's gonna work out anyway but you know they were like look you know we worked really hard and did whatever it took so that


worked really hard and did whatever it took so that you could do whatever you want and so don't don't waste your life on like being even more rich or even more this or whatever we already did that like have fun do what you love uh and i think ironically i think it means that i will probably do pretty well financially as well but you know i think that was always empowering to me that like my my parents weren't constraining me in that way um that i i think was was me but i see it all the time i see them like people like i can't speak for people like naval and biology and and chamoth and stuff but there is something about you know there's something there i think about experiencing that culture and having that perspective and being like look yeah people say things on the streets sometimes you know i'm not saying it's like us ideally but like who cares like that's not gonna i'm not gonna give up because of that capitalistic question when you look at


up because of that capitalistic question when you look at india from the outside what's your viewpoint on the startup ecosystem or just the opportunities for international businesses to kind of look at india and say oh we can sell our stuff here yeah i mean what's your viewpoint on i think it's absolutely massive i mean i think if i were doing a ton of uh like i still think you know i'm lucky i have a great network in san francisco and so that's probably where i'm going to be investing most of my investment capital and and other things but i definitely think like outs i do i try to do a little bit outside of america and they're focused on basically two sectors or two geographies one is africa and one is india um i think those two economies if i had to sort of guess like you know where is the most growth most growth going to be coming from it's going to be those those two and i think again it kind of comes down to i think


think again it kind of comes down to i think which part of which part of africa specifically i mean like lagos nigeria uh is you know is probably the most developed zambia um as well like that part of of of africa egypt etc like i think there's just so much growth there but i think a lot of it comes down to culture right like i think you can replicate silicon valley but you have to figure out what me like you know it's not a geography thing it's a cultural thing and figuring out why like failure is acceptable people pay it forward there's equity financing there's minimal regulation and the countries that figure that out and are able to implement that system uh like hong kong was for china our strength was for southeast asia like figuring out where new york was for you know america back in the day like figuring out okay how do we allow people to innovate um and the the the the big question is will people uh be able to control their own


is will people uh be able to control their own destinies and will people be able to be rewarded financially by that right because ultimately it's that scorecard thing and i think it does matter i think creating an incentive pattern for for folks who are insanely ambitious to just like work to the bone so that they can build these amazing things for people people just don't do that it's hard it's painful most people fail people aren't going to do that if there's like a an okay exit at the end of the tunnel there needs to be this crazy the crazy outcome and i think the governments that can figure out how do we allow that to happen and you know corruption sort of makes sense i think in the short term for certain people but it almost always hurts long term and i think that the you know the things that a lot of these growing economies figure out is minimize corruption allow people to innovate make it easy to start a business make everything open and transparent


easy to start a business make everything open and transparent uh and and allow people to invest and get equity in these small projects to incentivize people to give money to them and then let those those things do do you do amazing things but yeah i would say india is gonna it's gonna explode i mean i think the amount of uh sort of like things happening there um around technology and broadband and uh internet connectivity and phones uh and payments like i just think is gonna be really uh really amazing and i think ultimately the whole world is gonna be where america and you know is like in terms of uh obviously america's not perfect we have plenty of our own problems but but i think in terms of sort of gdp per capita and how much money is being spent on what and infrastructure investments like and so it's just an easy bet to make because it just seemed inevitable to me that at some point you know there's no difference hiring an engineer in india is the


no difference hiring an engineer in india is the same as hiring an engineer in san francisco is the same as hiring an engineer in lagos and so in general that's it's easier to make those bets if you're investing you should invest in those two because they're they have the most room to grow right but i see a ton of stuff i see a ton of stuff in india i've made one investment in an indian company in pesto and uh he's a very very dear friend of mine oh she's a very very close friend we've had him on the show oh cool a lot like yeah i think that like and a lot of it you know comes down to the people right like it comes down to you have to find those people and you have to have an environment and currently people like me immigrate right and so india has to do what it can to keep people if it wants to see that influx they you have to keep people there you have to reward people for not for


people there you have to reward people for not for staying luckily covet creates like a year or two of forced staying uh and hopefully like the governments can react in a way that like you know makes that more permanent uh permanent over time as well yeah man you know the thing you said about people leaving uh it's partly um this i mean success stories like you your family people have seen that and said okay there's a better life out there i completely get that a big chunk of it is this thing about a status driven society there's this indian entrepreneur called kuna are you familiar with this wealth driven society versus status yeah yeah so um india's i mean all asian countries are but india specifically is an extremely status driven society and a lot of middle class parents here associate the idea of success with a comfortable life in america uh but i am seeing a change in indian kids mindsets for example i'm 27 now back when i was in college that was considered successful that


when i was in college that was considered successful that okay i've left the country now i'm beginning my life somewhere else uh nowadays people kind of associate success with wealth-driven societal ideas and they associate success with um someone taking on that journey of entrepreneurship all the stuff you spoke about the brutality the self-awareness so 19 year old 18 year old indians from urban centers from small towns they're thinking way differently than they were five years ago so my big hope is that india is going to become some kind of a outsourcing capital like that's the kind of work that pesto is doing where they take work from all over the world and give it to like smart indian coders or whatever and say that okay you know we we're the connectors the whole world outsources their coding or their content creation needs to us uh and i don't know why man but i do feel that india will have a role to play in the ai revolution that happens in the world primarily because i feel like


happens in the world primarily because i feel like uh culturally we have a fantastic eq i do i i i don't know whether it's the whole family culture or what but this has just been my experience that we're very empathetic human beings and i have been reading a lot about ai lately and i have figured that besides the technical aspect of it to create really good artificial intelligence products even in like uh on a mental level you know just to be able to conceptualize a really good ai product you need to be extremely empathetic as a human as is the case with all businesses but specifically ai because you're trying to replicate a human being within a product yeah so my gut is that india will have a role to play in the ai revolution but what do you think do you think that makes sense yeah no i agree completely i mean i definitely agree that ai requires the most empathy because you're literally trying to create that sort of experience it's very hard to do that if


sort of experience it's very hard to do that if you if you don't have that ability um and i definitely think i think you know just like when you go to a big city there's like a district here that does this there's this over here there's different subcultures right and i think the world will resemble a city effectively at some point where you'll have you know certain things over here certain things over here and like more freedom of movement so people can move back and forth but ultimately the geography the topology the culture you know it's like you know even if you if you think about olive oil like it's all made in italy you know like it's still like there's certain places that i think become known for something and they become they sort of get the gravity and then everyone who cares about that moves there and it kind of continues and continues and i think india will figure out like what what is it really phenomenal at is it uh manufacturing is it coding is it


at is it uh manufacturing is it coding is it software development is it ai is it content production uh it'll be a lot of those things i think um and it you know the reason to leave is gonna go down for sure as as india improves as as you know these sort of other societies kind of hit their asymptotes as it becomes easier to kind of like cross-pollinate an idea like before you know i remember when the iphone came out it was only an american product like you couldn't get it you know you'd have to like have a friend or someone like you know uh and then it came to the uk in singapore and now it's like assumed everywhere right and so over time like there's just going to be less reason uh the number one reason to build software in america is you just have a market a big market willing to pay for stuff so you start an american company you have a lot of people to sell to uh and as this sort of as india grows


uh and as this sort of as india grows it's sort of like it's its own snowball right where it becomes it's like less people are going to leave because there's more opportunity which is going to create more opportunity so even less people are going to leave and all of a sudden like you know it's going to it's going to it's going to not make that much sense to leave at all right beautiful sahel lavignia thank you brother i hope you had fun on this episode uh i hope i helped you with some more of that self-discovery journey that you're on because that's what podcasts do for me if i'm ever on a podcast it always helps you a little bit more and i hope that it was the case for you as well i'll be linking all your handles down below uh any last message for the listeners one last sentence for the world uh i don't know i mean yeah follow me on twitter that would be awesome uh but but otherwise you know i'm i'm super


uh but but otherwise you know i'm i'm super accessible i mean that's like the the thing we'll see how long i can maintain it but i always try to be really responsive to emails and everything like that so my all of this is you know is googleable and so you know if you know again like you're in charge of your own success and you're not going to get help if you don't ask and if you're not worth helping so you know make sure you're there and then you'll be surprised i think at how how much the world will like contort to to allow you to do what you want to do um because and people are selfish then you know if they believe you you know that you can improve their lives like i think i think in general they will they will look past some of these other things and and and and help you do that so beautiful thank you brother thank you appreciate you being on the show we'll do a show the next time you're in mumbai yeah


a show the next time you're in mumbai yeah i know i've been wanting to uh but uh yeah hopefully after this whole debacle we will uh i will do a big yeah trip and it'll be fun [Music] beautiful [Music] you


if you've got to learn about the stock market in detail don't try learning it just off of the internet try learning it from the experts of that world mr and mrs malkhan have been very experienced in the world of the stock market in the world of making money through the stock market and on today's episode of the ranvi show the training you the beginner in the stock market the college student the young professional who wants to expand that skill set even if you're an intermediate when it comes to the stock market i'm sure that this couple's experiences and knowledge will get transferred to your mind and you'll enhance your own skills before i let you slip into this episode with mr and mrs malkhan i want to announce that the ranvi show will be a spotify exclusive very soon when it happens the audio version of the podcast will be available 48 hours before the video version on youtube make sure you follow trs on spotify this is just the beginning for the runway show for now though enjoy this


for the runway show for now though enjoy this very special episode with mr and mrs malkhan you've got to polish your financial skills using the knowledge of this power couple enjoy this episode of the randy show [Music] welcome to the ranveer show today i'm just excited as a learner i feel this is going to be a coaching session for me you guys are icons when it comes to the stock market leadership marketing firstly welcome here thank you so much thank you it's been a pleasure to be on this show and of course we'd like to teach you something you are the youth icon i mean yeah i guess that's what my job entails but again so okay stock market is something i didn't have knowledge about when i was in college when i was a teenager and now when i understand personal finance a bit i look back and i say that oh damn i wish i'd like learned some stuff back then but maybe before we actually get into the abcs of it and we will teach


into the abcs of it and we will teach people a lot of what they need to know about stock market today but i'd love to know your story y'all are the finance power couple so on your uh marriage series right i want someone who's good at finance okay so let me start with that is because i started my journey as a into stock trading at a very early age was 16 i was just out of college in fact before that i was when i was in eighth grade and during my summer break i used to go to my dad's office was into textile at kalba day in mumbai but everybody was talking about stock market because that was the period when that harshad mehta thing happened 1993 and since then i was so much fascinated by the number game and the whole up and down and those acc reliance and all that and especially thanks you must have seen that series it's so nostalgic for me to watch that because i was also part of that and i decided i