Sold a Company at 16, Raised $3M at 19 | Dhravya Shah, Supermemory

26:19Dhravya Shah:Yeah, so when you like, you know, in my version of the world in the future, my basic point is inference will be run everywhere, locally, on device, it will be on people's own premises, it will be on thousands of inference providers, on the model labs, inference, everywhere. And the data either has to be on a third party system, the context itself needs to be on third party or the first party. So we got the third party covered, right? Like, super memory is the system that can hold a context that works with every model and can be used in different ways for any use case. But the first party, we did not get tried before, which now we will, because you can't just run super memory locally with your local models.

27:05Dhravya Shah:And, you know, you own the entire stack end-to-end. And, yeah, like, that's, you know, if models can be run locally, why can memory not be run locally as well? completely self-contained. So that's the philosophy of the binary. And it also helps us have an easy ramp into the enterprises because now the way to use and own your own data is to just run a command in your CLI. And then you can reach out to us when you want to run it at scale. So yeah, that's kind of the thing that we are going for. It's really exciting. I think that one thing that's really notable about you and Super Memory is both the speed at which you iterate, and it feels like you're constantly launching, which it doesn't just feel like it, you are constantly launching, but also your willingness and openness to continue to push forward with new things and kind of either throw things out or move beyond them.

28:08Because I remember the day you moved into SFP when you made this announcement and launched this version, it got an absurd amount of interest and traction. And I think a lot of people would actually take that and they would say, okay, that's validation. We're good. We're locked in on this. And you were always, and continue to be, pushing forward to figure out what is the thing that's right for now? Because ultimately what we built then was good for them, but we want to keep moving forward. We want to move the industry forward. You know, we should talk about evals at some point and sort of the system that you've come up with there.

28:47But ultimately, you don't feel very married to the present. You're always pushing to the future. I'm curious sort of if you have any reflections on that, like the philosophy there, because it seems like very right. But at the same time, it seems to be a thing that a lot of people tend to struggle with, especially when they get the validation of all the likes and all yeah because i think you got millions of impressions on that on that post when you moved in sfp like and i and and i think everybody was kind of and it was also in the middle of your fundraise um so can you share a little bit more about sort of the philosophy there and sort of how you don't end up getting sort of like maybe uh overly overly married to things because you get that sort of external validation Yeah.

29:34Dhravya Shah:So the story is actually very interesting, right? I was in the middle of my fundraise, pivoting to B2B at the same time. And in my fundraise deck, there were literally a slide which was like, we kind of do B2C still, but we also do B2B. And that day, we launched the router, which got 500k impressions, lots of organic views, everything organic in one day. and millions later um and i still remember i actually thought this is it like this is the way to do things etc and again like i never thought that i need to do anything more to make this successful but sometimes you have to realize like step back and realize that okay this thing that I'm doing is not received the same way I'm imagining it.

30:28Dhravya Shah:So we still have users for the router. We could not discontinue it, but it's completely buried. People don't know how they can use it. We also had to shut down the original version of the consumer app, and we had to kind of get to a better, build a new vision of the world of what the consumer app should look like, should be which is a completely background context engine instead of like having a lot of things on the you have to do on the app itself the important part to realize here is not just the numbers it's the vibes which is if I feel like this is blowing up right now and this is not the future I'll just end it but also if I feel like something is the future which is people will be using file systems I will be building it even if it doesn't get as much of an initial pop yeah exactly so right now for example very few people use our SuperMEMI file system but we think that it is you know an ideal version of where context will be and yeah it's again it's kind of a philosophy based approach yeah like there's also a story you know there was IBM that was absolutely blowing up in the world, it was the greatest company in the world and they had the inventor's dilemma of like, okay, we build custom machines for each enterprise in the world why should we do anything else, right?

31:58Dhravya Shah:We are perfect. And then the next person who led IBM, the son of the founder, he was like, no, no, this makes no sense. We should kill everything. He killed the company for two years. He built the IBM 360 which then became the next big thing that made IBM the best company in the world again. I think it might be interesting to talk a little bit about team at this point because you've got a great team. And solo founders are not solo forever. In fact, in some ways, they need to bring on teammates earlier than co-founded companies because when you have co-founders, that's your initial team, right?

32:38So what was it like sort of bringing on the first people? What was the dynamic of that? What are things that you did right? What are things that you did wrong with hiring?

32:47Dhravya Shah:I think my philosophy has always been bring true builders, even if non-technical, they should be truly, you know, invested in the craft of the way things are done, fun to work with, and someone with extremely high autonomy. And people like that are quite easy to find in the open source community because they are true builders because they're doing things for free. That's where I found some of my earlier employees. Like there's Mahesh, there's Sri Ansh. All of them essentially just started contributing. We also hired two more that was just contributing to our open source work. And I think that's like a great magnet for people.

33:37Dhravya Shah:And how I think about, you know, building a team is also, when they do come in, you should give them all the tools necessary for them to be kind of the lead and they should feel like this is something that they also own. I have a lot of team members right now. You know, I've done a lot of things, right? Like I have some amazing employees. Some of the things I did not do right before was sometimes you would give all the resources to someone and and you would not kind of realize that they are not doing the right work, or they are not being nice, or not fun to work with. And in that case, you need to get rid of them as soon as possible, because that brings the entire team dynamic down.

34:23Dhravya Shah:And I did do that as well. I think in the course of SuperMemory, there have been 30 people who have worked with us. And now we are a team of seven core members. So yeah, it's been interesting. And pretty much all the seven of them have been here for a year. So it's incredible. Yeah. When you were fundraising, what was that experience like once you decided that you were going to fundraise? Because I think I remember, if I recall correctly, we were talking after ODF. You know, we were getting ready to launch the first cohort of SFP. And you and I were sort of riffing on sort of like the fundraising narrative.

35:05But I think that like at that point you were still on, I think you just said earlier about this, like you had a slide for talking about sort of the B2C, but like a large part of the narrative was starting to shift into. And then we realized like a lot of people actually wanted this sort of stuff that we're building that allowed us to do the B2C stuff. They actually wanted it for their own applications. but can you share a little bit more about kind of what the actual fundraise was like in terms of sort of what you learned throughout that and then also kind of what you learned about sort of how to tell a story?

35:39Dhravya Shah:I got really lucky in my fundraise as well, to be honest, because I was very online. And I think that's actually one of my superpowers, that I am very honest and true in my online self. and that led to a few people back in the day like you know some really good angels to be connected with me and my journey and what I was building so I had a few messages like when you're raising let me know I'll be happy to put in money that was actually very helpful because it gave me a validation but I never replied to those messages I was like I'm not raising right now but I love that you said that. And when I did start racing, like the point when I decided to do it was like, first of all, the entire world kind of started changing.

36:32Dhravya Shah:Claude was starting to becoming big back then. At the same time, it was kind of obvious that chat GPT is not the only big way to use AI. So from a consumer angle, that was amazing, right? Like, oh, now there's two major or three major ways to do it. And the thing that triggered it was I was in Vegas. And one of the VCs was so excited that I actually flew to Vegas. And I mean, I met them at a conference. And I also had an A16Z meeting at the same exact time online. and both of them went incredibly well but not well in terms of okay we will invest in you but in the in well in terms of this is so obviously the future this is the way it should be and I my my thinking is crystallized into my narrative the way I'm gonna do it and I think Julian helped me a lot with that because when I was in college I kind of was doing whatever made sense at the moment and never thought of of it as a company but when I got into SFP it started makes making sense that this will be a company and the story around it so yeah I think there's also this um this aspect of like you're in college and like and you know some people are very anti-college and they're like, oh, drop out or don't even go, right?

38:04But I don't think you're anti-college or I think you had a good experience from all we've talked about with ASU. You have lots of friends there. So you're not an anti-college person. So for you, dropping out wasn't necessarily a badge of honor or even something that you felt like you needed to do. So, and then of course, like there was the visa, right? You needed to get a visa. And I know Noemi, you know, helped you a lot with the visa. but can you share a little bit more about sort of and I think this is useful for other people to hear because there are probably a lot of people who are in similar situations where it's like both they they're still in school and maybe they also have like a visa that they need to apply for like an 01 can you share a little bit more about kind of what that was like in that decision just

38:47Dhravya Shah:to help other people think through it yeah in college I was actually doing pretty well I was top of the class for most of the time I was there I had tons of fun went to tons of parties lived with Americans in my first year it was probably the best time and I would actually not leave college if it did not make so much sense um there was never the goal that has never been a thought and even when I was raising it was like I actually dropped out kind of before like I made a decision to drop out before I even got the visa because it was that obvious you know um i had also kind of dropped out from my dream of getting into the most prestigious place in irt and the the typical route and even that was not like i it was kind of a leap of you know uh faith i did not know what i was doing but that turned out well in high school so i always had this belief in myself that you know whatever it is I will figure it out I also had some cushioning because I was in Cloudflare before I had done some work there I knew that if I you know if I don't make it at the time my thought was it's going to be fine now that's no longer an option obviously um but yeah like that is all the considerations that were in my head at the time i remember also talking to my parents they were essentially saying like no no you should not drop out you should have like this certificate and um my brother was also like okay you should not drop out all of these vcs are here to you know like money launderer like it just it was just so insane that someone's giving me millions of dollars to work on this idea full-time that everyone I asked was saying no um but in my head I had so much belief that I will do it that I decided to do it anyways um despite the visa constraint so yeah that's awesome um so so if I were to sort of uh like highlight part of that um it's that uh you felt such a tremendous this pull on this being the right thing for you to spend time on, not VCs want to give me money, or it would be really cool to tell people that I was starting a company.

41:17It was because you'd spent enough time on this as something that wasn't a company, but it eventually evolved into you realizing that this was the right thing for you to be spending time on and building as a company. I think that's really important because oftentimes people don't go through that process. And I think it's often a failure mode for people. And they ultimately maybe drop out for the wrong reasons. But it seems like, you know, this was definitely the right thing for you at the time.

41:47Dhravya Shah:Yeah. And I'm actually glad I dropped out. And I still think for context, it had been two and a half years since the very first iteration of any context that I built. so I was working on this at that point for two or three years now as just something that I'm very excited about I had dived really deep into the tech I had dived really deep into how this would look like how I should approach this problem and a lot of that is not true anymore because no one knows what they're doing and even in AI even in especially in memory no one knows the right answer to it and at the time I was also um thinking about you know how important it is to be in college and have the exploration um and how powerful that time is it's like you're a free agent you can do whatever you want so what would you do um it's a very exciting time I think everyone should do it do that in college and I want to take I want to take uh some time towards the end here where we talk about kind of various people in your journey after you decided you wanted to make this company.

43:00So maybe talk about some people at SFP, talk about some of your investors. Before we do that, I think that one thing that I've noticed is sort of an outsider to the memory, like AI memory contact space is just how much FUD there is. Can you share a little bit more about kind of i'm trying to i'm trying to say it in a nice way um but just like the bullshit uh essentially that that's out there about memory and also um sort of what evals like actually should look like in this world for benchmarking and also what what bad benchmarking

43:41Dhravya Shah:looks like the the reason why as you mentioned there's a lot of bullshit in this space specifically is because the barrier to entry is probably the lowest. Because think about inference or databases or all of these. They're really hard to start with. And anyone doing it is definitely, you know, extremely smart and motivated and is doing it for no reason but something that they know is correct. and it's also very deterministic to measure how these things perform. In memory, it's not that deterministic. A lot of people almost have AI psychosis where they think of something and then the AI builds something for them and then the AI runs its own benchmark and it turns out to be the best thing and people tweet about how their thing is the best.

44:40Dhravya Shah:But the thing that people should really think about, So there's benchmarks and non-benchmarks Inside of benchmarks, you cannot just run one thing You need to look at multiple different benchmarks For example, there was Mem Palace recently It only measured against LongMemEval And their code, like their benchmarking code Was completely different from their actual code But the actual code literally optimized for the wordings Inside of LongMemEval And it built a graph, like they literally looked at LongMemEval and they build the system for that benchmark. Because I think it's called the Goldheart's Law.

45:16Dhravya Shah:When you have one goal that you're optimizing towards, the goal is no longer relevant. The second problem is that the setup itself looks very different for different people evaluating it. Because it's not just about how you remember and store things, it's also about how you bring it back into the system, the context. How many tokens are you ingesting back, for example? or is it a tool call or a hook? Is it, you know, in what model is used to look at the context and answer it? And then what judge is looking at it and measuring the quality, even if you use the same judge, it is non-deterministic.

45:58Dhravya Shah:So in this completely non-deterministic system, you should run like Beam, you should run LongMem, Eval, Shure on like a deterministic or as deterministic it can get environment. And we have built a tool for that. It's called MemoryBench. That will help you run a deterministic test, show you all the numbers related to it, like latency, quality, speed, in terms of the answering model reasoning, but also the tokens given to the answering model, and also recall at 5, recall at 15, like pretty much all numbers. And then when you post these numbers, you should be honest about it, which we do in all of our materials.

46:39Dhravya Shah:But also, when you think about what's not in the benchmarks, it gets even more interesting. Because if I say something as simple as, hi, what should a memory system do? Will it go and look up who is this user, which will not get any more information about me? So real systems are not built to perform well on benchmarks. Think about the best memory stuff, you know, like, you know, poke, you know, like chat GPT, Claude. These things perform really bad on these benchmarks. The reason is that they're built on something that's closer to the user, for the user, and not for showing some numbers on Twitter.

47:23Dhravya Shah:And so that's what we try to do at all times. Like, that's what our products do. Like, profile is for depersonalization. We have a playground that will help you make it perfect for your use case. We help the enterprises set up and benchmark it on their own data, on what they care about. And all of that is really important, and I think people don't think about that stuff a lot. It seems like one thing that people really don't understand, at least the people who are building memory companies, is just how much the ability for the end business, the end developer, to actually make decisions, to really be able to choose, to have sort of the autonomy to structure things themselves, it feels very much like a lot of the systems that are there are effectively hard-coded, and there's very little sort of ability for the teams that are evaluating using these systems to actually do anything on their own.

48:27And I think more recently you've described it almost as like what you're building is sort of the contrast to that, which is like these Lego blocks that you can arrange, you can choose to use some of the Lego blocks, you can choose to not use some of the other ones. Can you share a little bit more about your philosophy around sort of giving people, giving developers, giving companies the ability to have much more flexibility and autonomy in how they actually develop these memory systems using your sort of pieces?

48:57Dhravya Shah:Yeah, so I remember talking to you about this back when I was thinking about it, and you mentioned this very cool thing, which is it's a Lego set with no instructions on what's perfect. Because what's perfect, you will decide. And you will figure out for your use case. And designing it is kind of hard because this set has a type of piece which is configurable in itself. For example, in memory, one thing is, okay, what should the model learn? What should the ontology be? And, you know, how you want to structure it in the data? Second is, how do you bring it back to the harness? So a lot of people think, okay, tool calls are the right approach, or MCP is the right approach.

49:44Dhravya Shah:A lot of people think hooks are the right approach. But let's say you're building a business agent, right? You would want it to have some knowledge of the business and what's going on right now in the business, inside Slack or whatever. You would also want it to know the documents, so you have to put retrieval into it as well. But you don't, and then you need to have memory. But you don't know what you did not learn, right? Because there's no way for any system to perfectly determine what the user will bring up in the future. So we have this thing called hybrid mode where if a memory does not show up, the document will show up.

50:29Dhravya Shah:So all of these different configurations are possible with super memory. And let's say you have tons of files and you have some determinism in it, like it's kind of semi-organized files, but it's also not organized at the same time. So you would attach a file system to our agent and the agent can go figure it out on its own. So there's so many ways to do it and we enable every single way to do it in the cheapest, best format that's perfect for any use case. What's the thing that really gets customers excited about that? Whenever I'm in sales calls, it's always interesting. They come in with some perfect way of doing it in their minds and then they try to bring it up like, okay, can I do this?

51:18Dhravya Shah:Can I do this? I have different users. I have different teams. The teams have different access controls in them. Can I build my agent in a way where it follows these access controls? And for each of these questions, the most exciting thing is like whenever they have a question, I already have the next slide is about that thing. The most exciting thing recently has definitely been some of the research we have done specifically in bringing this back to the harness. That has been very, very interesting because when we tell people that, okay, we learn everything, there's a model internally that is determining what is important that you can configure for your use case and it's stored in our data structure, they get very excited because they know that they cannot build their own model or they cannot find you in a model because they don't have the data to do that.

52:12Dhravya Shah:and we have it and that's how we make it really cheap. So all of these things that kind of show them the complexity of the problem then make sense why they should be building on top of our infrastructure instead of just bare metal. And they also have that flexibility of being able to use some of the building blocks or using them in a certain way. Exactly. That's interesting. Okay, so let's pivot this to talking about co-founders and solo founders like you are a solo founder um but it's not necessarily because um because you thought that you were going to be a solo founder what's the story like did you try and have co-founders like share more about sort of how you ended up becoming a solo founder yeah um my first two companies i had co-founders and uh epic host was an interesting story as well because it actually died because of a co-founder breakup um where one of the co-founders went rogue because of money or power or whatever and then they essentially tried to destroy the business and we had to sell the business off minutes before they destroyed everything um so you know like i have had insane like extreme experiences but also have had like kind of you know, uh, lukewarm experiences where I trialed with a bunch of people also for super memory.

53:39Dhravya Shah:And even before this, um, for like various different things I was doing and there was always either lack of compatibility. Um, there was a time when I was trying to build a startup in college. Like I was like, bro, I should build this as a startup. It was a healthcare thing that I should never have thought of. but I still remember I was not as excited about it or the opposite person was not excited about it or there was some compatibility issue. One more thing that would happen is different ways of work which is I like to be very hands-on in engineering as well as the sales but there's different ways in which people build the companies.

54:27Dhravya Shah:One more thing was You know The vision of the future and the directionality I don't want to wake up every day And argue with someone about Okay this is what we should do next There is a lot of easy money everywhere in the world I don't want to do that You know like I want to go for the For the thing that is kind of hard to do And it will take years to get there We won't make any money Or we might die We might be on the streets But we have to do this It's very hard to get someone as excited about it, especially when you're changing paths all the time. You have to get the opposite person aligned, which is very hard to do.

55:04I could imagine at multiple points over even just the last year with Super Memory, if you had a co-founder, and obviously you have these incredible teammates, but it's a different dynamic with teammates necessarily than it is with co-founders, where you maybe feel this need to really convince a co-founder in a different way than maybe a convinced a teammate. And I imagine that that could have potentially gotten you stuck at various points when you knew that you needed to keep moving, keep progressing, but maybe somebody else wanted to stick with the other thing. Kind of what we were talking about where you got some viral traction or some viral interest, and maybe one person, if you had a co-founder, they would misread that as sort of like this is the optimal stopping point.

55:46We just continue on this. maybe you can share a little bit about you know what it's like being a part of solo founders program but particularly maybe what you've learned from some of the other people in solo founders program because I don't want to make this like an advertisement for SFP but I think it would be really interesting for you to share maybe what you've learned from people like Chai or Phillip people who are who are also building companies solo because I think there is something really special about being around other founders? And even just being in San Francisco, I think there's a lot of value, but maybe share a little bit about kind of what being around other solo founders and SFP has been like.

56:27Dhravya Shah:Yeah, living in the house is probably the best decision ever. Not only from a perspective of being around other founders, but being around people who can push you towards the right direction but just by them existing for example chai was my roommate uh is my roommate right now but he was like in the room next door to me and i would go on walks to dandelands coffee with him and he would tell me all about formal verification and how how people build their architectures and he would be super excited about it i was like bro what is this like you know i I don't get any of it. And he would keep sending me links of him being excited about what he's building.

57:16Dhravya Shah:And that kind of leads to osmosis of learning. That's an engineering sort of thing where you learn that, okay, I should probably look into this to build really good, reliable infrastructure. And I did. And now we have really good infrastructure that pretty much never goes down and it's pretty cool. So that's one thing, which is help in learning and osmosis of learning. Second is people like Ryan, who are just extremely relentless and teach you discipline. I would sleep on the nook in the office sometimes just after work, and I would wake up to his voice, him recording like, okay, today is day 34 of building this company, and I did this yesterday, I'm doing this today.

58:06Dhravya Shah:It was like he's in the army. It was like he's an astronaut in space. But he would have that level of discipline. This was pretty early in the morning. Yeah, this was at like 5.30 a.m. It's extremely cold. And no one should be working at this time. But he would. So that taught me a lot of discipline in my life as well. And he has also been killing it recently. Because of his discipline. He also has world record for most number of pull-ups. by the way so that's cool um then people like philip who are unhinged at everything like you know default talented default good at everything they do um amazing people to hang out with like namanya you know like um there's so many things that my life was fulfilled from by being in that house and still is because i can still walk up to them and i can be like bro like this is what i'm thinking what should I do we talked to like 2 a.m downstairs just talking about the world talking about startups something that's annoying me something that is I can help to others and it's been an amazing experience.

59:17What's a really random tangent here but I just realized that you and Philip and we probably talked about this quite a while ago now but you and Philip both had hosting businesses. Yeah. Hosting businesses are great sort of like bootstrap businesses like they were good ways to get started but they ultimately weren't the things that either of you uh ended up working on did you guys talk about that or like what what's like what's something that you've learned

59:40Dhravya Shah:from philip yeah um by the way i think the hosting business is an interesting one because it needs like there's a high barrier to entry to build it and uh it needs very good business sense um because there's a lot of unit economics that you have to do like everything is you know okay this margin, this percentage, everything is something like that. Which is, by the way, why our company also did not work out because I was not perfect at it. But when you're building something that you want others to also do, you build ways to enable others to do it as well. So that leads to hosting businesses, I think.

1:00:19Dhravya Shah:I have spoken to Philip over a lot of things. One interesting thing is, like, his brain is not built to stop. He's like Iron Man, where he was in a cave working on something and then he comes out of the cave with like guns everywhere you know kind of that guy uh now he sells to public companies and like you know all of these large government agencies but he was he's also someone who's a tool builder and he just does it for the fun he's also very um he is extremely disciplined about his values he's like okay everything must be open source it's fine if i don't make money and his values is what has gotten him here i i had never seen anyone with that deep values about building everything for free um and i know like ryan jokes about it but i think it's a great uh great thing to have those values in life so yeah it's certainly how most people have heard about docmost and for those who are listening philip is the founder of docmost it's um it's sort of the best sort of uh option for on-prem wiki software for governments uh or big businesses that really want to have control over their data.

1:01:28But he started out as an open source project. And interestingly, similar to you, how you had an idea with any context that became Super Memory, he was actually doing hosting for open source sort of wiki software, and people were paying for it, and that was a good business. But then he saw that all of the open source wiki software was kind of crap. So he's like, why am I just, you know, doing hosting for this crap? Why don't I actually build the good open source wiki software and then charge for, like, the on-prem with all of the different logins and all the things that enterprises need? And he went and he built that, and it's doing extraordinarily well because of that.

1:02:14Maybe you could share, and maybe this is, like, the last thing before we get to the final two questions. um what talk talk to talk to me about your investors like what you've learned from them

1:02:25Dhravya Shah:yeah uh I think I have some of the best strategic investors that anyone can get I got very lucky so uh and there's various different stories as well about like you know how I met them for example I was introduced to Joshua Browder through Sudarshan and um I lived with Joshua router like days before moving to SFP. I was you know crashing at his place because I didn't have any other place in SF. I remember like he would he would come and he would be like extremely direct at okay you know figuring out exactly what I'm going for and he would keep asking me questions until I had a direct answer. He's extremely direct and then when I did have a direct answer he would come to me and he would be like, okay, can I put in more money?

1:03:17Dhravya Shah:Can I put in? So he's like so convicted. I would be at 1 a.m. doing something and he would come up to me and he was like, do you want 200K more? This is the trick of having somebody stay at your house. I mean, that shows extreme conviction. If you were signing the safe right there, he would have the money right there. It was insane. It's like one year of runway in one night. you know but then that chain of events also led me to suza ventures which is shaheer and shaheer is also a guy who knew nothing about memory and context and this world died extremely deep in and he knows pretty much everything i know about the market now and that is something that most vcs would not do with that much conviction sudarshan also keeps calling me every week asking if I need any help with sales, etc, etc.

1:04:11Dhravya Shah:One of my VCs sat with me on the sales call and then after the call they were giving me feedback about how I should improve. I share research with one of my angel investors and they give me feedback on the research I do. So all of these things are very rare and I feel very lucky to get that stuff. Also, solo founders like you, I just walk up and ask directional questions about my life, the company, all of these things. It's very hard to talk about these things, to think of it as investors, not as investors, but actual people who are along with you on a journey to build something great, instead of just people in suits putting in money.

1:04:54Dhravya Shah:That's what I imagined them to be, but it's all people in jackets and shorts helping me out. I think the really cool thing is you assembled like a great crew like a lot of people um i think more than the average company does for the size round that you raised for angel investors and i think you did a great job of that because each of these people could help you with something specific you know sadarshan um who i think is like you know i think he's probably pretty well known on x but i think like most people probably don't know him yet i think he's he's great um he's just like incredibly high energy Josh hopefully you know he's he's a solo founder actually yeah we should have we should have him on the podcast soon um like John Andrew yeah he was helping me with sales he was like you should hire two sales rep three AEs three BDRs he essentially made like a chess board of people you should hire for me which is cool and I think that the the interesting thing here is like you know people I think that it's easy to say oh well I don't have any connections it's like well the way that you get connections if you if you don't have connections you're an outsider to silicon valley is you put stuff out there and you put it out there in public and i mean that's that's it like you were you were a kid in india and then you were a kid at asu which is not like a thing that people are thinking of when they're thinking of startups and like maybe they will start to do and i know there's some cool entrepreneurial stuff happening there but i think that the the lesson is like put stuff out for play and then like if you put stuff out for play that's just your art your interest um that will gain you followers and attention and like those people will say oh wow he's actually working on a company now yeah you should get involved no i i think it won't even give you followers attention for the first few years that should not even be the goal like you know i see a lot of people being depressed about oh bro like i post a lot of things i don't get anyone looking at it for sure like because your goal for posting something should not be someone looking at it it should be to to show your real self on the internet and then there will be a network effect that starts at some point but you should not expect it this is this is like the thing i mean i'm you know i went to school for music and i loved music and uh like very often you'd play to a room with nobody in it yeah you know what i mean so it's the same thing as launching a product that you've been working on on x and getting like no engagement yeah like that happens Yeah, it has happened to me a lot of times, actually.

1:07:21You've got to do it, not because you're hoping... If you play to an empty room and you're disappointed about that you quit, you're not going to be able to actually get there ever. That's really cool. Let's close it out with the classic questions that we ask. The first one is sort of the bear case, like the case against solo founding. And then once we talk about that, we'll end it with the case for solo founding. What's the bear case? Why shouldn't you be a solo founder?

1:07:48Dhravya Shah:Yeah, I think as a founder, it's like having, you know, in Matrix, there's a lot of darts being thrown at you. And you have to, you have to avoid all the darts or you have to, like, but you cannot avoid the darts because you're a founder. So you have to do, like, you have to actually hold them somehow. You have to catch all of them, do all of those things. And if you're not very good at multitasking, like, there's so many things to do, you will not get everything done. and especially if you're not able to recruit a good team, it's kind of really hard to, you know, do all the basic things to be successful.

1:08:27And I think like building a team,

1:08:30Dhravya Shah:building a distribution, doing the sales, doing the engineering, all of that at once can be really challenging and you have to be a different type of person to be able to be okay with that challenge. I think everyone can do it. It's just that you have to train yourself mentally for it. And it's also a journey where no one is there to keep you accountable for these things. So if you just don't do it, there's no one coming and scolding you about it. No one being like bro, what the hell are you doing? Which was actually, I think I've told Julian and other solo founders about this as well. I think I was terrible at this for the longest time.

1:09:09Dhravya Shah:and now I have more confidence in the fact that I'm able to do the sales, do the engineering, do all of these things and keep myself accountable to it. I also do have other solo founders in the cohort that come and shout at me if I don't do it. Even after? Even after, yeah, even right now. I can just walk to Chai and he'll be like, did the deal close? And I'm like, no, bro, I didn't follow up with him. Like, what the hell? So yeah, like, I think you should definitely try to hold yourself accountable. And also put yourself in a position where other people can sort of push you. Exactly. Even if they're not your co-founder.

1:09:45Dhravya Shah:Yeah. You know, you need, you need, like, I think a lot of people benefit from it. Even if they do have a lot of, you know, internal discipline, to be around other people, to have that model is really good. Yeah, I mean, I remember you being like, oh, bro, you're not tracking all your calls. You don't have a CRM. You're not actually doing all the things that I was like, man, you're right. And then I did all of those things right now. So, yeah. And now it seems like, I mean, thank God you implemented the CRM and stuff a while back because you showed me your calendar. It's like full up with calls for people who want to use this.

1:10:18Cool. Let's end with the last thing, which is what's the case for solo founding?

1:10:22Dhravya Shah:Being a solo founder is the best way to build something that's true to yourself. And that only happens when you have extreme conviction about what you're building. it's kind of like if you're doing it with someone else it's a shared it's one person's vision that you are kind of inside or it's your vision that you need more people to do but it's typically a standard business um which does work out but if you want to build something big there must be something that's true to yourself that you're really excited about that you're okay to do in darkest, deepest times, and if no one is by your side.

1:11:02Dhravya Shah:And I think, so all the businesses that solo founders do start are kind of that, you know, like it makes sense that they would start those businesses because it's like literally their representation inside a company. Like think about Philip, Ryan, Chai, like, you know, when I think about these and the companies they are building, it makes so much sense that they are the ones. But also the people who came to the podcast, Vercel for example all of these solo companies are literally representations of the founder as a company which is really cool to me that's awesome, cool, great way to end it thanks for being on it's funny because we obviously hang out so it's weird to record like this but really awesome, I feel like we talked about things that we've known each other for years now we're still talking about things we haven't talked about before So this is a great way to do it.

1:11:56Dhravya Shah:That's amazing. Awesome. Well, thanks for doing this. Amazing. If you enjoyed this conversation, we would love it if you could share Solo Founders with everyone you know, particularly people who are considering starting companies solo or who are already doing it. You know, the entire goal of what we do is to normalize Solo Founding, encourage more people to Solo Found instead of end up with co-founders of convenience. If you'd like, and we'd really appreciate it, you can go leave a review on Apple. You can go give us a thumbs up. You can subscribe on the YouTube channel. Anything helps. And of course, if you are starting a company or considering starting a company, you should go look at the Solo Founders Program.

1:12:30We work together with you in San Francisco alongside of a bunch of other solo founders. The idea is it's much better to be solo together than to be solo alone. I'll spend a lot of time helping you. And we also invest$100 ,000 in your company. So if you're excited to learn more about that.