We're going on a deep dive into the increasingly influential sphere of AI in performance management and workplace productivity. Pajal shares his insights on how AI can eliminate bias and promote fairness in performance reviews, a revolutionary approach that might just change how we perceive and execute performance management. We also delve into the unique challenges startups face and the importance of mental health amidst the high-pressure startup environment.
Closing out our conversation with Pajal, we explore the relentless drive of entrepreneurs to solve problems and the potential for growth that lies in rejection and resilience. Pajal gives us a glimpse of his vision for his company, OnLoop, and its ambitious goal to upskill and reskill the world's population, unlocking their full potential. A word of caution though, this episode might just change the way you think about startups, AI, and the media.
We're going on a deep dive into the increasingly influential sphere of AI in performance management and workplace productivity. Pajal shares his insights on how AI can eliminate bias and promote fairness in performance reviews, a revolutionary approach that might just change how we perceive and execute performance management. We also delve into the unique challenges startups face and the importance of mental health amidst the high-pressure startup environment.
Closing out our conversation with Pajal, we explore the relentless drive of entrepreneurs to solve problems and the potential for growth that lies in rejection and resilience. Pajal gives us a glimpse of his vision for his company, OnLoop, and its ambitious goal to upskill and reskill the world's population, unlocking their full potential. A word of caution though, this episode might just change the way you think about startups, AI, and the media.
And if people don't have clarity around what they're doing, that's why your revenue is fucked, and so not enough of that investigation happens. So what I evangelize a lot in the world is the very hard version of people productivity but people by general is soft and nuanced and complicated, and unless we solve that we're kind of fucked as knowledge workers because machines will do tasks better than any of us in five or eight years. And so unless we figure out how to solve the harder to measure software stuff, machines are coming for us.
Speaker 2:Hey folks, this is a special startup edition of the Winning Zone. You asked for it. You want to hear from startups the things that they've been challenged by, the ways that they've overcome them, the things that might have been surprising in their startup journey. Here are all of the tools and tips and tactics and techniques from friends of mine and folks that I've reached out to to help bring you insights, to help you have the greatest opportunity for success in your startup. You're entering the Winning Zone.
Speaker 1:Pajal, welcome to the show. No, thank you, Helmhund. It's good to be here.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you're here and thanks for either staying up late or getting up early on. I don't know which way your clock rolls, but I know in Singapore it is not the same time as it is in Miami. That's all I know about time change.
Speaker 1:It's the start of my night shift, so I have four more meetings after this, so this is the big night shift.
Speaker 2:I love it have you, have you how long have you been doing this kind of I'll call it upside down, but I guess for you it's right side up but just this bi-directional work life.
Speaker 1:Well, I was at Uber for three and a half years before I started on Loop in 2020. And so and I was in a global role the last sort of year I was at Uber, and so I've been very used to sort of being in Asia and operating global teams and being on global time zones, and the reality is that the world runs on San Francisco time. If you work in tech and people from San Francisco do calls between 9am and maybe 5.30, like, but 5.30 is a stretch, and then the rest of the world sort of adjusts around that time zone, and so you just learned to live with it and adjust.
Speaker 2:I agree with that completely, as you know, having made my San Francisco exodus a little over a year and a half ago that there is an adaptation to that center of gravity for sure. Hey, you know you mentioned that you worked at Uber and I want to dig a bit into on loop and what you're working on now. And I know that you are passionate about people and you're passionate about people from the standpoint of you know, not in just an altruistic way, but around people, productivity, and around you know the rights of people and the recognition of people. And I have to say that there are folks who would be surprised that an ex-Uber employee cares so much about people. How did you reconcile that? And obviously you could also dispel the myth that Uber is is, you know, this monolithic, non-carrying orb. But that is a little bit of the opinion out there, isn't it?
Speaker 1:I think one of the things you learn when you work in a company like Uber for three and a half years is literally how much what the press says is completely false, and so you can literally live a situation yourself and then read about it and know that it's not aligned and that's actually you read the fiction the next day. And it's and that's. That's been a hugely important lesson for me as I navigate the rest of my life, Because had I not gone through that experience, I don't think I would have realized that. And listen, Uber had its fair share of problems. I don't think Uber was a perfect company, but I think what I can safely say that the caricature of Uber that was painted by the press was definitely one-sided and lopsided.
Speaker 2:The press needs a villain, doesn't it? In all things, there needs to be a narrative that you know, if it bleeds, it leads. It's the only way you sell advertising and get eyeballs and click throughs, and I think that Uber has played the foil for them for some time. And also, you know, we love to build people up and then try to find a way to turn them down, don't we? I?
Speaker 1:think it's fair to say that the press is more sensationalist than factual, and actually there's a fantastic book called Factfulness that shows that the more educated you are and the more you consume news, the more wrong you are. And there is a huge bias of what we believe is to be true based on what we read about situations, and which is why the only way to learn about any situation is to live it or get an understanding of what happened from someone who lived it as directly as a source as possible, and anything in between is largely someone's narrative of what happened, and the more layers removed that gets, the further it gets from what is the truth. And in fact, two people can experience the same thing and experience different realities, and I think we all live our own reality and that's the only thing we can go by. But ultimately you have to trust yourself in seeing something through, then reading about it, and which is why I love podcasts and I love conversations to learn from, because then I can come up with my own narrative based on observations I hear, versus digesting someone else's narrative around a situation.
Speaker 2:You know you're bringing up an interesting issue that I think is becoming more and more prevalent as we move to this world of the rapid iteration, of AI and generative AI and other technologies, whether it's AR and VR that could augment and experience and create an opportunity for an experience that one might not have before, but they could also create a fiction and actually perpetuate myths that may not be true. How do you reconcile and this is dovetailing a little bit into what Anlup does and a little bit about where you come from and the things that you stand for how do we begin to reconcile the advancement of tech, find our human place in that ongoing generative technological innovation thing that we just do as human beings and ensure that we don't lose sight of those things that are kind of core to who we are as people, while still being able to leverage technology instead of technology leveraging us?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's a really good question and I think fundamentally what it goes back to is teaching critical thinking and getting people to not believe things at surface value, and I think one of the biggest detriments of social media and a lot of benefits to it but one of the detriments is that it has reduced our cognitive patience. As a species, and for even incredibly educated people, we want instant gratification and we will click on the thing that seems more sensational, and I think that not responding from a system one part of the brain and making more system two decisions that are done by the conscious brain versus the subconscious brain will lead us to make better decisions and to sort of not react on what might be fake news or fake headlines. And frankly, I think we've already discussed this that we already have largely written text that is somewhat skewed. Over time, we'll have richer media. You'll have audio and video and other forms that are also potentially fake, and so it's very much a continuum right, and you could argue that if it's audio and video then the likelihood of it being sort of mistaken to be real is higher. But we are on it. Nothing around Gen AI is necessarily sort of brand new in terms of what it means for the world. It just means that we have to increase our level of thoughtfulness and vigilance to get things right.
Speaker 2:So what is OnLoop's role in this continuum?
Speaker 1:Yeah, what are you building? So you know, we started with a very simple problem, which is that feedback and goals in how they're implemented in organizations, which is typically performance management, is one of the most hated practices that exist in the workplace, followed only a close second by planning Right. And when something is universally hated by everybody, there's something wrong with it. And so we sort of decided to go back to a plan slate and said look, how can we rethink our goals and feedback or implement an organization such that it is to the service of the people, versus against the people in how it operates, and people don't have to be chased to fill up these reviews and don't have to be nudged and pushed and and sort of beaten up to do it right. And this was in 2020. And in August of 2020, gpt-3 had come out in a private beta that was only accessible to very few journalists in Silicon Valley, but a couple of friends had access to it and couple of friends had reacted sort of, you know, in an insane manner to it, and so I had developed an interest in the technology right when the company started and and sort of are we talking about when on loop started or open?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we started.
Speaker 1:August, august 2020, around the same time that GPT-3 came out and actually I applied for GPT-3's private beta in September 2020, got rejected and then we raised $2 million in October and then I applied again in February and this time we got accepted and actually we pivoted the entire company's roadmap for three months to see if we could build version one of an automated performance review using GPT-3. And and we felt that writing reviews essentially was about language, not about observation accuracy, and so so, even back then, when we built out the tech, we said listen, to write a good review, we needed eight pieces of observations to write a coherent summary.
Speaker 2:And these would be from distinct systems, erp systems, other workflow systems, et cetera. As this is what we're considering observations as data.
Speaker 1:So we have our primary input app right, so people do 360 captures on our product, right, so so? So what we saw as a key issue with feedback and building habits around feedback is that all these systems that people were using ERP systems or performance management systems were incredibly clunky, right. So you can't get someone to do real time feedback or build a habit around it. If it takes you 10 minutes to load, you've lost the observation Absolutely, and and. So the the the basic framework of GTD, or getting things done, is the capture and and, and. The most important thing is capturing the data as it happens. So it's like for us to do feedback effectively in organizations, we have to make it much easier to capturing the data as it happens, which is what we called an improve or celebrate capture, depending on what was going on, and now that has evolved a ton in our product to be also generative AI powered in terms of just taking raw observations and writing out a capture. But initially, we had people write out the capture and then we were able to stitch that together into a coherent narrative around a person based on those individual captures. Back in 2021, the technology wasn't good enough to be a full performance review replacement, but we saw enough to know that it was going to move in the right direction. What was the distance.
Speaker 2:What was the gap that needed to be closed for performance between 2021 and where you are today?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think a couple of things. One is we had to build our own sort of clustering models to cluster different pieces of feedback into specific subjects. So we had to dynamically created section headings and then, in the way that the feedback captures were processed, needed enough tokens as well as post processing ability for it to read very much human like. So the mistake that would happen is, when we ran the captures initially, it would either repeat stuff or it wouldn't feel coherent as a narrative. So it was. It was able to sort of make it better, but it wasn't good enough or by a manager wouldn't feel comfortable, or individual wouldn't feel comfortable having that as a self review. And then where the tech got by end of 2022 is that it became good enough to be a wholesale replacement of running manual review processes, and companies were then able to then use our prison process to completely throw out the manual performance review and shift all of the manager attention to observing feedback or jotting down goals or really sort of focusing on getting work done at the source and, when it came to any sort of summarization or clustering, letting the AI do it rather than depend on a human eloquence to write the review. And and that takes a lot of bias out as well, because ultimately, in the workplace today, whether someone gets promoted or gets a good raise is dependent on either their own eloquence or that of their managers and and in the society we live, that disproportionately favors the straight, white, extroverted male and since at the very center of the differences in workforce outcomes that we see, whereas so there's a it sounds like you're saying there's inherent bias, Absolutely because people who have more confidence and courage ask for more feedback, they ask for the next race, they promote their own people and then inherent sort of belief that they're entitled to more. And and if you grow up as a minority or a woman or are on non straight or on introvert, you, you grow up in with much less confidence and entitlement to ask and so much about the differences and outcomes in the workplace is did you have the courage to ask versus did you so?
Speaker 2:let me ask you this is very interesting. Let me ask you hey, folks, go to founder sales acceleratorcom. If you are at that stage of trying to figure out, go to market. It's critical. It's a 90 day program, but let me tell you something it starts off super fast. In the first 30 days you're going to lock down data sourcing. You're going to lock down your market and personas. You're going to lock down the messages that you're going to use on every single channel and you're going to get those things out of the gate so you can start developing top of funnel to mansion. 30 days out from that, we're going to be looking at the proof, looking at the activity, looking at the data, looking at the iterations, looking at the conversions on the work that you've done the first 30 days and then, by month two, we're already looking at scale. This is where we're looking at the volume. We're looking at the resources you want to throw at these opportunities and ensuring that we are tweaking your pipeline to optimize for the highest level of conversion and qualification. This is the GTM accelerator that actually works, as opposed to beating your head against the wall trying to figure out how you're going to get to market and how you're going to generate revenue. So go over to founder sales acceleratorcom, click on book a strategy call. I will be on the other end of that call and I'll talk you through the process, going from the manual performance review to an AI. I won't say driven, but maybe augmented at this point performance review listening, who are probably imagining this dystopian orwellian world where the machines are now giving performance reviews, are metering the impact that we're having on an organization, are deciding who gets promoted and who does not, and it becomes. There's probably a perception that there is this lack of empathy, this lack of feeling, lack of nuance. You know what I mean the X factor. How do you solve for that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but the X factor is actually the problem.
Speaker 2:Right so interesting.
Speaker 1:When you, when you want to decide who performs well, it shouldn't be dependent on the X factor of the writer. It should be dependent on the X factor of the person and their performance. And so, in fact, by making it more standardized in term of what is the tone and what is the endowishment with which these reviews are written, you level the playing field out and you end up rewarding good work versus rewarding good eloquence, and that's how companies often retain the poor of performers, who play better politics, than retain the good performers, who are bad at the visibility games.
Speaker 2:I've seen that movie a thousand times. Absolutely Correct.
Speaker 1:So let me ask you this Go ahead. And the other thing I'll say is that the empathy of the average large language model because empathy is a lot about language and tone is better than at least half the human population. And so we will see why is? that because AI is not triggered. Ai does not come from a place of emotion. Ai is able to give you the response that you need, and it has got to do with you versus about themselves, versus. When a human being responds to someone, that's much more about what's going in it for them versus the other person, and therefore we will see AI get used for empathy a lot more than we think in the next decade.
Speaker 2:That's fascinating. So, speaking of being triggered in the spirit of startup confessions, you said that you were rejected from the open AI beta when you initially applied. That could kill a lot of people's ambitions when their whole company is built on AI and built generative AI and thinking that you want to get ahead on chat GPT, but you instead went out and raised $2 million. So how does that happen? How do you go to investors saying, yeah, you know, we were rejected from this beta. However, what was the value prop and how did you position the company, understanding that you have zero control over this one element and that you still wanted to keep the company moving forward?
Speaker 1:I think one of the side effects of the exuberance of 2020 and 2021 is that we've often seen founders start companies because they think it's a good career choice or there's a quick way to make money or there's something trendy going on versus. If you truly look at startup success, the largest pattern you'll see is people being problem-obsessed, not idea solution obsessed. And to be problem obsessed then you need unique insight and unique perspective of why you think you're uniquely positioned to solve this problem, and I think very seasoned investors are able to identify when a founder is problem obsessed versus they think that this is a good idea to work on, and which is why early stage investing becomes a lot more about the team and the problem versus the idea or short term traction, because all of that changes and evolves over time.
Speaker 2:So how did you articulate the problem in the absence of the tech? So often, particularly and you said tenured investors, successful investors, understand this. I agree with that. I've been in those rooms where I'm among those investors and the questions are different. I've also been in those rooms where I'm among investors who are much more transactional and really eager and they're asking all the simple stuff, at least in my mind, the simple stuff. How do you go, as a founder, about not necessarily divorcing the tech from the solving of the problem, but understanding that tech will continue to evolve and the problem is what is persistent, and that this is the thing that you're waking up every day or not sleeping every night, obsessed about? How do you articulate that in a way, particularly for someone who's a technologist?
Speaker 1:I think the only way to know that is to sort of retrospectively build out patterns in your career.
Speaker 2:So for me.
Speaker 1:I learned computer science in high school by teaching students in my class. I got people develop the VR as a first year analyst in management consulting at Accenture and none of that made sense sort of looking forward. But they made sense retrospectively in terms of a thread around how much I care around actually helping people succeed in the workplace and sort of that passion behind that outcome and how high my frustration was with tooling and processes that I was exposed when I worked at some of the world's best companies and went to some of the world's best business schools and there was a disconnect between what was preached versus what was practiced. And that's the delta that I looked to solve. And I think what I realized over time and I think investors over time is that I did have a depth of thinking around the subject that very few people globally did and which is why I think people made a bet on us being it and continue to better not solving it.
Speaker 2:You know you spent some time at Accenture and you know you're a Stanford grad and I know that a lot of MBA programs focus a great deal on people productivity to the extent that it fits in the spreadsheet, right, you know. Where does it? Where does it fit on the P and L? How does it look on the balance sheet? What are KPIs? Ok, ours, you know. Pick your acronym. How are we measuring improvement based upon those things? It sounds as though you appreciate that and you appreciate those as a data point, but that you see another path toward that observation as well as that impact. You know, it doesn't sound as though we've talked a bit, quite a bit, here about the process of the performance review and that's not the end of the game, right? The performance review. You said something earlier that I thought was profound around building habits and feedback, right? So if you're building a habit, you're changing behavior. So it sounds as though that on loop is truly attempting to change behavior, leveraging technology and solving this specific problem in the organization. How is that being received? You know, go to market is a challenge and I would imagine that you've got some folks who kind of nod in that direction. Yeah, yeah, whatever, but let's get back to my spreadsheet, because it's a comfortable place to live, yeah.
Speaker 1:So so we are grateful for a couple of things. One is the fitness industry and actually, as you think, about goals, feedback, well being, skills development, which is sort of the topics that we think make up productivity in the workplace. They're very similar to diet, sleep, exercise, and 10 years ago it was very difficult to get people to work out or be fitter or doff of fitness habits because it was very hard to track progress. It's not that you ran a mile, lost one kg, right, so like. So habits get. Habits get built when people feel a sense of progress and there is the right balance between challenge and accomplishment. And and that's what game design does, and that's how games are are very, very addictive. And the fitness industry, true, and evolution from first the Fitbit with 10,000 steps, then the Apple, then the Apple watch with the three rings around move and and I think that's what the three rings are and then the order ring and the wood band around a readiness score and a recovery score, got to a point where you could then drive micro changes and behavior, because you could show people the impact that small changes have. And and what we ended up doing was coming up with a five layer hierarchy pyramid that we call collaborative team development, which has well being at its foundation, which we attribute about 20% goals as the next layer, which is about 40 to 50%, and that's very much the foundation of high performance. And many organizations where people are not high performing they're usually broken at the well being and golds layer. And then you have celebrate feedback around recognition, improve feedback around blind spots and then unlocking skills growth, which is what you need to do to retain your skills. And and for us we sort of drive that as a loop and that's the name on loop and sort of categorize that and summarize that into a clarity score that then gives managers next actions to take to increase every person's clarity. And one team members clarity to be inhibited from their productive capacity of well being might being broken. Another ones might be inhibited by them not receiving enough constructive feedback and that might also change very much day on day, week on week. And that was much easier for managers to observe when they were all in an in office setting, because you can do a fly by and get a sense, but in a hybrid world you have to be a lot more intentional around how do you get every team member to be performing at optimal capacity, and therefore what we think we do as a company today is take all of the pain out of managing a hybrid team and adding more accountability to how work gets done, without burdening more bureaucracy or more process around it. And if we are able to do that right, we will see every customer we work with get a lot more productive in the years to come and be able to achieve more with less. And where a lot of the narrative macro economically is, and which is why our core customer often is the chief operating company, because we've seen the chief operating officer sit very much at that intersection of thinking about productivity for from a business lens as well as sort of a people lens, and so the versus, versus CFO sort of is more on the number and HR manager is more on the process and compliance side, but we often find the CFO as the main person and and we are very much figuring out a brand new GTM on how to approach this and which is why you know we're not we're not a easy solve right, and the problem we're out to solve in the world is a very big one. It's a very important one, but a hard one, and that's what excites us frankly, and sometimes that means the transactional investor does not invest because it's tougher to do. But I'm an old school founder and I believe that to go through the pain of building a company you know that's a very tough step and going through the clinical anxiety and the psychological and psychiatric help that I'm under today, that's only worth it If you're solving something big, or else is just not worth it. It's pretty bad and I've never had my anxiety get so bad that I felt at a below 50% productive as a person and for someone who was a career high performer, that was very hard to reconcile. And you face extreme existential dread and and obviously on loop and my brand is very intricately tied and it is super scary and actually the thing I'm most proud of in the last 12 to 18 months is to get over that existential dread and knowing that, no matter what happens, we'll be OK and and what that does is also lets you make the right decisions and think a lot more clearly versus when you're operating from a place of existential dread. You're likely to swing sort of softer and you're likely to not make the big moves that you need to make, and so being fearful actually then increases your chances of failure, and I often joke that being an entrepreneur is about being shameless and it's a. It's a journey in shamelessness. I don't think I've completely conquered it yet, but I've definitely become more courageous and shameless in the last three years.
Speaker 2:The first step is the realization right, the. If someone's listening right now and they're thinking existential dread and they're kind of hearing it but not necessarily recognizing it in themselves, what would be? You know, either personally or other founders that you've known over the years or might have as peers. What are some of the signs that you might be wallowing in this place and might need a lens, an external lens, to be able to move through it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think. I think a big part of it is just sort of observing your own productivity and comparing it to a time when you felt you had clarity on what you were doing. I, anxiety is one of the most unproductive things that you can do to yourself and it's sort of and your brain sort of plays tricks on you by keeping you in that sort of anxiety because it doesn't want to deal with the discomfort of acting on it and potentially getting rejected. So so often I used to explain to myself in the beginning oh, this needs to be perfect. I'm not going to write the LinkedIn post because, like it's not, it's like you know it needs to be better. But really I'm just fighting discomfort because I post something and there's crickets. That's what I'm avoiding. Just ship it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you're not embarrassed, you waited too long.
Speaker 1:And I think that's that's true about anything, and which is why, you know, now I try and actually get rejected more Like as I think about fundraising now and I'm just kicking off a raise, I'm actually adding investors who I know might insult me, where in the past I didn't add them on the list. But now I'm like you know what I'm going to see if I get triggered or not, because the resilience I'm building around me should not get triggered. And and the more you get dispassionate about what's out there. And it goes back to as human. When I get triggered by other people, it's less about the other people, it's about me Always, and it speaks about my insecurity, not how the other people or the other person was, but but as humans we tend to blame the other side. And so for me, I've just been able to sort of grow my own security, to be able to put myself situations where before I would not put myself, because I would react with anger or or lash out.
Speaker 2:You know I don't know if you've ever seen the TED talk by Jia Zhang I might be pronounced mispronouncing the name, but I'll put this in the show notes who went out to experience 100 days of rejection because he found himself so paralyzed by the anxiety around rejection that he figured well, the best therapy for me is to anesthetize myself to it and just go out out expecting it everywhere that I can. It's a powerful exercise. I don't know what I recommended for everybody, but it's a powerful exercise just to understand that this is simply in our heads. Right, you said earlier that that we all operate on our own belief systems and our own perceptions of the world and some of the things that one might look over and go. Joel, it was a great post. It just, you know it's, there wasn't much to say. You know, I just clicked like on it and that was about it, and you're over there going. Why don't I get any engagement, you know? And then there's the person who just doesn't click like but who was profoundly moved by the thing that you're talking 100, 100 percent, that's it. But we're so and this goes back to your statement around some of the ways in which social media is certainly a benefit, and in other ways we have. We've gotten a little a little caught up in it. It's interesting, though. I just want to stick with this for just a minute, because not a lot of folks are brave enough to state what you just stated. As a founder and you and I both know in the world of Silicon Valley and you're Stanford grad and you know you've spent a lot of time with some of these people that I might be referring to in a broad swath there are those that are very comfortable, whether it's because of their upbringing, because of any perceived privilege they may have in the world, whatever it might be. I'm not going to not going to stigmatize it, but there are those that I marvel at, who are very comfortable in saying I want you to rip this apart, or they will come back to a coffee meeting or have a conversation with me and go. I just talked to this investor. It was awesome, tore my deck to shreds, and I've always envied those people because I have not quite evolved to that place. I might say it because it's the right thing to say. You know what I mean?
Speaker 1:I mean this is this is this is. This is shameless superpowers, right Like you're not. You're not that shameless?
Speaker 2:yet I'm not that shameless yet, man, and I marvel at that ability because those people move much faster. Yeah, and it's not, it's not fake, it is in the DNA where it's like oh, oh, oh, awesome feedback. And these people are my clients a lot of them too and I just I love it because, as an adviser, you're talking to someone who will nod their head, accept the feedback, go and do the thing, as opposed to someone who's just blowing smoke and, you know, grin, screwing you, okay, going like, oh, yeah, thanks someone, yep, fantastic, and then you're going to go back to the same thing they were doing before. Have you seen, have you seen other than what we've talked about around creating a habit loop? Have you seen incremental ways in which a founder who might be listening to this, who is more in this? on the side of the fence that you and I may have been on. You may be closer to that shame than I am. Shamelessness Sorry Than I am. Have you seen ways in which you can incrementally move toward that level of openness, vulnerability and progress, if for nothing other, for no other word?
Speaker 1:Therapy.
Speaker 2:Therapy.
Speaker 1:Okay. And so the thing I say is that if there was someone decided tomorrow they're going to climb Mount Everest, yes, they would not just go and do it, they would die. And founders take on the mental equivalent of climbing Everest trying to build a billion dollar VC back company and then just go straight into it without any support, any training, and then they wonder why it all kind of fell apart. And so I have had a coach, a therapist and a psychiatrist all three and I believe every CEO must have a coach, and that coach is effectively your manager, because that person serves only you and that's not your investor, not your board member, not a friend. It's someone that is at your service for you and is a trained professional to train you. And you need a therapist and a psychiatrist to uncover anything else that's deeper about your mental fitness that is potentially tested when you're working it out at an intense level. And today I've been on SNRIs for six months. I was on SSRIs prior to that, which are two classes of anxiety meds, and then I see a therapist every two weeks and it is the two best things I've done to myself to sustain myself as a founder, and that's fantastic. And ultimately, being a founder is a high endurance mental sport, and so making sure that you have the support and the training of an high endurance athlete is what we should be aspiring to, and it should almost be a requirement that every VC-backed founder have a coach, therapist and psychiatrist to work with them on a consistent basis.
Speaker 2:Love this. I think you're probably a very supportive angel investor. I know you invest as well, and I love to hear this from someone who is a founder and is also an investor and gets that. All that we read about in social media and everything that hits tech crunch and every other news media outlet is just the result of a whole lot of hard work, a whole lot of emotional turmoil, a whole lot of dedication and passion, and a lot of folks who don't make it to those stories have put out an equal amount of effort. That is not to be disregarded, and maybe timing wasn't right, who knows what, but it was not an exercise in futility. Powerful statement, perjal. What's next for you, sir? Well?
Speaker 1:there's a lot to build and so you know, I think for us, because we were truly category creating as a product and we sort of reinvented things from scratch, it took us about two, two and a half years to even fully know what we were doing. And we are at that stage now where we serve over 30 customers and see the impact that we can make with teams when they use our product and just the frequency and quality of clarity and feedback that we can drive. And so, you know, it's about scaling that GTM out and figuring it out. I spend most of my time on sales and marketing today and feel like you graduate as a founder, from going from product to sales and marketing and it's a unique go to market and there's a. There's a lot to lot to figure out, but, but essentially, for me, the vision of our company as a whole is how do we unleash the full potential of a billion knowledge workers and and we started with how do you, how do you impact what happens day to day? But we live in a highly dynamic world in terms of the upskilling, rescaling needs of the world's population and various ways that we can help each person achieve their full potential. So there's a very long way to go.
Speaker 2:Love it. I wish you much success on the journey for all. Thank you so much for joining me here on the winning zone startup confessions.
Speaker 1:Thank you, elman, this has been great.