Grow. Transform. Thrive | Co-Founder of Mindvalley, Kshitij Minglani (Podcast 59)

We complement each other's skill sets, so that's very important. So we don't overpower each other's discussions, especially when we know it's not our forte. So we stick to our territory. Let's say his territory is marketing, mine is business. So we sort of have created our own play field which is existent in his mind and my mind as well. So that play field and that distinction is very important.

K Ming Lani is with us today on the Second In Command podcast. And K is the co founder of mindvalley. He's also a serial entrepreneur and an experienced CEO who's demonstrated track record of starting and running multimillion dollar companies in IT, SaaS, educational technology and the learning space. He's extremely skilled in strategy, negotiation, fundraising growth, hacking and marketing strategy. I would also call him a level 5 leader who is kind of behind the scenes and focused on the internal operations where he has a co founder and CEO of a company that we've all heard of that is kind of very outward facing in the face of the brand. So, Kay, welcome to the Second In Command podcast.

Thanks Cameron, thanks for having me over. Everybody calls me K. My real name is Shitaj. That's what happens when you have Indian parents, but everybody calls me K. And that's, that's perfect.

First off, I mean I've heard of mindvalley and I'm sure a lot of our listeners have heard of it as well. But just tell us what mindvalley is and how you've branched off and grown over the years. I know that you're based right now in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia as well. So you're calling in at midnight for this and thank you for that bit of a background as to mindvalley so that we understand it as well.

Mindvalley is sort of playing to create the largest company on planet earth in the field of energy, education and personal growth. What we are trying to do is create the curriculum for the next humanity or next generation of humanity. So what we intend to do is write that curriculum that will help or upskill the future workforce or upskill the kind of human beings we're going to see in 2025 or 2050, so on and so forth. So constantly we talk about the human mind, the human mind evolution, talk about digital transformation, how that's going to change the nature of the work at the core of the company. Cameron, we're trying to be a massive data company revolving around human emotion, human mind, human evolution from a personal transformational space.

When did you guys get started? How did you and Vishen, your co founder, how did you guys connect and kind of give us some of the lifeline of the company?

I think the company has been in existence for a while. If you just Google search it and find the legal time when the company was listed. But the actual business is probably about five to six years old. We were earlier selling meditation courses online and that's how we started. But I think the whole course probably changed in 2012, 2013 when we, when we realized that the kind of people we teach right now, about 10 million people every year. And back then we were teaching only a few, few hundred thousand. I think when your customers start to see value in what you offer, they sort of shape the vision. And that's how we pretty much started as well, selling meditation courses and then going on from personal transformation to health to diet to human mind to leadership. And we expanded and expanded, but our goal was that we probably want to be anti choice. If we were to build a School for Humanity 2.0. We can't offer them five authors or five teachers in the same space. It's our duty, our job to go out, pluck the best and say, we've done the homework for you guys and we think this is who you should be learning from and these are the principles you should be adapting in your life.

It sounds like you really did listen to your customer then. I mean, you guys had created the event years ago that I heard of Awesomeness Fest. Is that still a part of the brand or was that kind of as you were emerging from that mindset, mindfulness and meditation space that is very much.

Part of the brand. But now we evolved quite a bit. We run something called Mindvalley University, where over a thousand people get together for a period of 30 days with us along with their families. Yes, that's 30 days they spend with us in a different remote city. Last year we did that in Estonia. And going back to what you were saying is, yes, I think for us, customer and handholding a customer through the journey is very important. So most of the teams in Mindvalley are non traditional, which means you would see customer success in typical companies or customer support. And there are different versions of that title that floats around like Chief Happiness Officer. We don't have those titles because we think companies and users and human beings are reward. So we have something called a success manager or a tribe Success manager or a community success manager. So their job is to handhold a single user through their transformational journey. And then there are accountable partners and then the tribe becomes sticky because they find these connections that they crave. And I think the number one thing that human beings crave for is human connection any which way.

So you guys have gone with non traditional titles in the organization. Do you have a traditional org chart still?

I think that thing evolves every now and then because the company and the nature keep changes. We are actually in a hyper growth phase. This Q1 to last Q1 we grew 140%. So when you are changing at that, that kind of pace, any ARC structure that you put together is not going to be relevant the next one. But we give people the freedom to move around and change with the organization because I think that's very, very important because ultimately they will one day leave you and build their own career. So you got to let them have that freedom to be able to build their career in the best possible fashion.

You guys have actually done, I think, a pretty extraordinary job at corralling and attracting Gen Y to work with you. And you work in multiple countries, multiple cities. How many total approximately do you have now? Just so we can understand the scope of that as well, Cameron?

We have about 300 employees that work for us and they come from 54 different countries. We now have offices across us, across Estonia, across Kuala Lumpur. And we are fully bootstrapped.

It's unbelievable. I actually met a couple of your people. One named Jason who was working out of Vancouver at one point, but I think he's now over in KL with you as well. Looks like he's. He's moonlighting as a fitness model. I met another guy at a TED conference over here, Amir, I think, who was in the Arabic area.

Yeah, he started Mangali Arabic for us. Author, wrote the book on Islam. Most people at the company live and breathe transformation, which means as we, as they say, we eat. Eat your own dog food. So we actually try and be guinea pigs to what we put out to the audience. And there was a time when 150 of us were running the Spartan race together. At any given time, a third of the companies either on one or the other programs either on wildfit. So their coffee conversations or water cooler conversations are around, or they're making green smoothies or they're talking about how do we avoid sugar consumption or they're talking about fitness or how do you keep up the core strength, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's what we try and live.

And this I think is key to understand your growth. I've always believed that culture trumps strategy and culture eats strategy. For breakfast. I've always said culture is critical. I've always said it's more important to build slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion. You guys have done an unbelievable job at that. And if you were based in North America with 300 employees, we would all know of you as a household word in the normal business media. What's working in the culture side? How are you attracting all these amazing people? How do you align them? Like this should be an MBA at Harvard.

Yeah, I think. I mean, I just finished my B school, so not that I learned anything from it because I was studying.

Doubtful.

Yeah, I know, but I mean, you take human connections and that's pretty much it. But I think what's working for us is a couple of things. One is a really strong vision alignment with most people's. Most people who actually apply for a job at our place. Career Page does not talk traditional job descriptions. It talks values and what's expected of you and what are you likely to learn and what are you likely to contribute. And that attracts a very different kind of audience. And I think we make the recruitment process designer in a way where a person is either filling up an online application and putting up a video out there, then goes through a bunch of interviews where a whole series of strategic interviews are placed in picture so that we get to evaluate the person the best possible way. Is the person aligned with the vision? Is he a culture fit? Is he likely to contribute and take back and give back at the same time? How likely is he to grow within the company and outside the company? I think that's what is working for us. And that in nutshell, results in growth because everybody is aligned. They are big time into personal growth. They are aligned with the vision. Politics take a complete backseat and that creates a very healthy atmosphere in the company that you want to come to work every single day.

Okay, you just said something that I think is really intriguing to me and that was that politics take a complete backseat. How do you foster that? Is it just by hiring people that aren't political or. Because once you get past around 100 employees, that's when politics tend to creep into a company. How are you avoiding that?

I actually think it's also the way most teams run, which is every team in the company. Cameron is driven around an okr, and that's a concept from Google. And Doria started the concept as well. And we see several versions of that concept evolve. And OKR essentially is a high objective which, which is a version of BHAG. But we allow for a 50% failure rate which means if you're not failing 50% at the OKR that you said you must be doing something wrong or you've set an easy target, which anybody could do, any which way. So I think that it starts from there and then it trickles down to several strategic meetings and not overburdening an employee or a team with the meeting. So everybody gets their space to contribute and figure out and learn how could they achieve their okr. Let's take an example. We set an OKR to enter government, schools and companies at the same time, which was completely new for us. We set this OKR about a year ago and today we, in about a year's time we've done a massive program with Finland, we've done live with several large Companies including Intel, PwC, Google and just this morning we did a massive training with 700 of Malaysian government employees who are ultimately going to be taking minorly programs and are going to be on our digital mentoring program. So I think once you set an okr, the team figures out a way to achieve it and that creates a very healthy competition. So if you have a viewpoint, a better viewpoint to achieve that okr, you and if I do, I win. But the idea is the team as a collective, as a whole unit goes out and achieves that okr.

And I love the whole like you're okay with, not only are you okay with failure, but you're actually kind of encouraging it. Is that because you're just encouraging people to stretch more?

No, I think it also relieves the pressure in a silly way that look, we are not, if we set our target, let's go, we're going to do 100 million this year, that's not going to happen. Let's be realistic, who the hell are we kidding? But it also tells you figures out a way, hey, if we were to do 100 million, what would we do differently? And that dialogue shift is very important and that's why this year probably will end up with a 55, 60% year on year growth as a whole, which a company our size, it's very hard to see in most companies because we are bootstrapped. So we are literally reliant on looking at gross margin percentages, looking at free cash flow very carefully and actually turning that back in, back in reinvestment of the cash that you're making becomes really important. So if, let's say you set an okr, which is really, really difficult out there and you're going to figure out the best way to get there because the cash is very dear to you. You're not sitting on piles of money that you can blow an experiment and hey, oops, I spent 10 million and burnt an R and D that didn't go anywhere. You don't have that luxury. So you, you pick your battles carefully.

When we built 1, 800 got junk, we went six consecutive years of 100% revenue growth, which was super fast, but also really, really hard to manage that growth when you, you know, we went from 14 employees to 3,000 employees in six years. But you're starting that same trajectory or in the middle of that trajectory. And the one thing that we encountered was it's very hard for the mid level people to go through either two doubles in revenue or doubles in size or to go through one triple. How do you help grow people and keep people? I know that you said you're okay with losing people and letting them go off and do their own thing at some point. How do you continue to grow your people, grow their skill set and their capacity as the company is changing so rapidly. Like the company today is extremely different than it was two years ago.

I actually run the company looking outward, so I am assuming that somebody in the next door, especially you're in Southeast Asia. So everybody's working on a different tech problem anyways. So I assume that the person sitting next door is already building something similar. Right. And we watch competition really, really carefully. So we always, always have an outward approach to running the company. And that's what we instill in every single employee. Which means if you are running the tech team or mobile team, you're probably reviewing the apps every single day. You're constantly learning. We have never stopped an employee from going out there and participating in external forums. In fact, a while ago you mentioned Amir as an example. He's a perfect example. Had the will to go back to his own country and say enough is enough. I'm going to start mind daily here and change people's health and their mindset. And he did so, came out and gave a bunch of TED talks and wrote a book about it. And few of the employees got together and started our Estonia office. Few of the employees took on a tech challenge, organized a 24 hour hackathon, pulled in teams from Google and created a solution that now powers our AI part of it or our corporate learning part of it. So I think that environment is very addictive and it spreads in a different way. I think personal growth is an overarching theme. Cameron. Everybody wants to evolve and actually look at Their rate of self evolution. Yeah.

So it's all self driven learning then as well, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

All right. You talked about alignment with vision. So you and Vishen were the co founders of Mindvalley years ago together. How do you and he stay on the same page would be question number one. And question number two, you're also quite entrepreneurial, as I was as a COO or second in command co founder. How do you get aligned with his vision? How does he get aligned with your vision? How do you kind of stay in sync with plans? How do you guys stay as that two in a box? Because as you mentioned to me offline, you're very kind of inward facing in the company and Vishen is really kind of the outward face of the company. How do you guys do such an amazing job at staying completely aligned like you are?

Yeah, I think two, three things there, Cameron. Number one is we complement each other's skill set. So that's very important. So we don't overpower each other's discussions, especially when we know it's not our forte. So we stick to our territory. Let's say his territory is marketing, mine is business. So we sort of have created our own play field which is existent in his mind and my mind as well. So that play field and that distinction is very important. Second is a concept of ooda, which means we're always in constant OODA loop, which means at the end of the day we would send each other a voice note or a voice WhatsApp text, just sharing either what happened or making quick bullet point decisions. Because we have done that for many years, it now is now a second nature to us.

So walk us through this again. So OODA is just constantly updating each other on your successes or making decisions. Is it just staying in sync? What does it mean?

OODA is like a cycle. OODA basically means observe, orient, decide and act. So which basically means we are constantly observing what's happening in the company. Let's say I look at revenue almost every single hour. So I'm a numbers guy, I'm a finance guy, he's a marketing guy. So he's also looking at what's converting, what's not converting. And we are always deciding in a very crisp, clear manner, which means even if the decision is not going to make us cash in the short term, we are totally fine by it. We've constantly figured out that loop between us and certain things will go unsaid because after, after falling that trend for such a long time, some of this.

Assumed that's part of your secret sauce for sure. I mean, I've heard of the military or I think is the air force uses an acronym or it's plan, brief, execute, debrief. Very similar. So observe, orient, decide. Very cool. I love it. Tell us about some of the early decision points or the early insights. It sounds like you really listen to your customers and your tribe on where they wanted you to pivot. What was it that they were saying? And then how did the transition happen from going from that mindfulness meditation, which is actually when I first heard about you and I was like, God, I wish I could align with them, but they're just so not in my space. And then all of a sudden I'm looking around, I'm going, God, you're exactly in my space.

It was.

It's like the brand was so strong and you pivoted so perfectly. So what did you hear? What were you listening to? And then how did it go making those pivots? I'd love to learn some of the lessons from that.

I think a few things that come naturally and we are by no means perfect at it. I mean, we've had our fair shares of failure. Rather we've failed gloriously at times. In fact, I'll give you an example of when we did not listen to a customer. We actually launched an app a couple of years ago by the name Omvana and that was the first meditation app. And the only competitor at the time we had was Headspace. The market kept telling to us, you guys should be on a subscription business model. That's the future. We were like, why would somebody pay $10 when they could just meditate to a song or a track and just pay $2 to us? So we just stayed away from it. We did not listen to market at all. And at a time we were number one app in 37 countries. And a month later we were gone. 2015 was a time when plethora of meditation app came by and obviously we didn't pivot early. So that's a classic example of not listening to the market and customer. And now we're trying to revive that and rebuild that app and in fact, in 20 days we'll launch it again. But we don'. Know, I think we've missed the wind any which way. That's one lesson that we learned. Second is while you're listening to the customers, don't make delusional business decisions, which means don't go out and start giving away a ton of free goodies. And so nobody converts and so on, so forth. We've made that mistake as well. We had an offering in the sleep space which hit number two. We were very popular with Apple, worked closely with them, but our mistake was we were giving away just way too much. So nobody came on the paid section and never bought anything. In spite of the fact that we were getting quarter of a million downloads in any given week. We were just not listening to the customers. What kind of stuff would they pay for and what they would not pay for. Third mistake we probably made was around naming our subscription program. On the event side of things. Had we spoken to a few customers in a detailed way as to what sort of an experience would they want as opposed to just deciding for them. Because sometimes, you know, and everybody tries to take this example saying hey, Steve Jobs used to say don't listen to the customers or listen to them in a way that you tell them what you can push and how far you can push the boundary. So we tried doing that and I think it was sort of a decision that we went back and forth and probably wasted six to eight months on the naming and on the pricing and the offering and how to structure the offering. Yeah, I think we try and listen to the customers, but the outside is also look at the market, where it's going. Also look at what's happening in the VC circle, what sort of companies are coming about, what business models are they following and just make a non delusional decision. I think that's probably the key. So in most of the meetings that I'm part of, my idea is to look at the numbers, do a bunch of a B test and make a non delusional decision which probably will stick around.

Thank you. By the way, those are three massive insights and lessons that you guys learned from some of the struggles over the years, which is huge. I remember Umvana that was really when I think I tried to figure out a way to even, even work with you guys and it was just so completely disconnected. But I loved what you were doing the same. I actually remember listening to a few of them and thinking they were really good and then all of a sudden it was gone and, and I think I'm still paying for headspace and I don't use it, which is insanity. I learned something years ago and I grew up in Canada and you know, we had celebrated Christma and you know, as children, as like five, six year old kids, you would write a letter to Santa and you'd write a letter, you know, three weeks before or a month before Christmas, my parents would make us write a letter. And I always thought it was really stupid and we had to write a letter and tell them how good we'd been all year and then all of the things, the gifts that we wanted for Christmas and then we would put the letter in an envelope and our mom would say, okay, I'll mail it on the way to work. They never mailed that letter. On the way to work they opened the letter up and they looked at all the things we'd written down on the list and they, they bought us a couple of those gifts and we're like, whoa, Santa knows exactly what I want. And I think that's kind of like listening to our customers, right? If we just ask our customers what they want, they'll tell us. And if we, as you said, don't make those non delusional decisions and give them what they're looking for, they'll pay us for it. What's a non delusional decision versus a non delusional dream? Is putting people on Mars a non delusional decision or is that just a huge massive bhag?

Firstly, on a lighter note, when you grow up in India, you don't have to. It's not snowing out there. Neither do you follow Christmas. You don't write letters to Santa. You just sit in bed, order a burger and watch Home Alone. And that's what you do year after year after year. But coming back to what you were asking, I actually don't know what the perfect answer is. But I think when you probably burn a few startups to the ground, you probably learn from those mistakes. And logic sort of takes a trump over sometimes even strategy. And I think most entrepreneurs even, I'm pretty sure, including you, and you would end up saying, hey, that's my intuition. My intuition says or my gut says, that's actually not your gut saying or intuition saying, but, but over the years you've had those, you've burnt your fingers a few times to be able to say that's, that's the right part, that's the logical path and that's the wrong path. I always think in my meeting or always say in the meeting, what is the logical next step, Right. What would you do if money was scarce or you were running the company or if you were starting from scratch Business go up and down, no matter how successful you are. You could be a GE one day and next day you are raking the company up and selling it up.

You seem to speak a lot, Kay, in kind of mantras or themes, saying things like if we had $100 million, what would we do differently? And if money was scarce, how would we make decisions? Or is that part of your magic as well in speaking in those kind of statements? I would imagine that you repeat those things often and that your employees see those as themes or guidelines.

The senior employees would catch onto it. And that's what you want. You don't want that to be a mantra across the organization. But as long as your top management and your leadership team or senior managers involved, I'll give you another example. One question that's one of my favorite questions to ask is if, let's say, if you're running a project within the company, let's say you're launching a subscription product which is a subset of a company. Your question that you ask is, if this was to live as a standalone company tomorrow, what would it look like? Or if this project was to be a standalone company, what would it look like? And the second question you ask is, if somebody on the street gave you $5 million, what are you going to do with it? So then you are now thinking scale as well as you're thinking startup mentality. You're thinking both sides of the coin. And that's exactly how at least I like to drive projects, which means MVP is the key word. You are always thinking, can this be a standalone company? Can this be big enough that somebody will give you a $5 million check? And you're always at the back of the mind, assuming somebody next to us already building it.

You just mentioned mvp, which is that acronym, a minimum viable product, where they're talking about launch. How do you guys protect against. When we're hiring really smart people and they want to develop perfect. They want the perfect app or the perfect marketing piece, and perfection just seems to take forever. What do you do in that sense? Do you have them push for perfect, or do you try to get them to go out with the minimum viable everything?

We always ship, by the way. I think the first question you always ask is, when is the shipping date and when are you going to ship? And that's. That's exactly when you try and ship. And I think that has worked for us, and that has also not worked for us because people, guess you're right, going to their own Perfection street, and they keep it on the same email copy or the same web design and keep tweaking the images, but it has, it has no impact whatsoever. And that's why we do these small huddles in the group called the Revenue Task Force. Or you make a Health check or revenue? Health check. And you get to question some of these decisions. And then the employees automatically understand when everybody else is shipping, why am I not? If every other team is making money, why is my product sitting on the shelf? So we try and instill that mentality. I don't know if it's good or.

Bad, but you guys are operating in multiple countries. How many offices do you have? And then how many of your people are remote and not working from offices?

We have an office in kl, which is the headquarter. We have a small office in Miami and another third office in Estonia. Plus we set up these remote studios across the globe. When people as they're part of our festival, Mindvalley University, they are literally spending living with us for 30 days, about a thousand thousand of our best customers. And then we have these remote setups. So a lot of team go on remote because they have the flexibility to work around. That's how we function. I know it's not a unique, perfect way. I mean, it has its own pros and cons. It is an imperfect solution. As of now.

Tell us about Mindvalley University. You keep dropping it on me and I've heard about it a number of times. I know it's over in Europe. Is it in. I think in Croatia, maybe this June.

It's mindville.com u that's probably our biggest, one of our biggest pet projects that we decided to run last year. We started as an experiment. Every year we want to try and live in a different country, try and gather really smart and tribal teachers and try and see how we can create. That's your word that you use called the cult tribe or the Cult experience. But a really loyal fan base across the globe which competitors cannot replicate. That's a model that you can't replicate.

So where are you hosting this year?

Well, this year we're actually in pula, Croatia from June 24th to July 24th.

I just sat down with my map of Europe for the summer looking at. I'm going to be over there for five weeks and I'm going to start re looking at my map again. Damn you. It's just like a magnetic pull to go and spend time with all these people. All right, so this your model at least. The Mindvalley University model is really, really strong pull for Gen Y. The unencumbered no kids yet can work and live from anywhere. But you said you've got people going over with their families as well. Is that more and more of that now where people are living globally and traveling more with their kids?

Oh, absolutely. I think a lot. We run a parallel massive track for teenagers and we're doing a special track for parents because I think a lot of parents would like to learn something that we call conscious parenting, how to be a better parent. A constant theme that we've been trying to attack in some ways. So that's one area that's really exciting to us. I think if you're talking human curriculum or generation or next generation of curriculum for humanity, we cannot not address that which is parenting, which is such an essential part of everyone's life. Two main pillars of mindvalley today are all these events that are happening across the globe and our online learning platform called Quest Q U E S T that's a learning format.

How come you don't have any big goals? Walk us through some of how you're working with some of your remote teams. Can you kind of give us some of those operational insights as to working with some of the people that are remote or global?

I think sometimes out of mind, out of sight. So I think you should have constant touch with your key employees. Otherwise you're always figuring out in a large organization of 300 people, hey, are you still around? Are you a contractor or. I thought you moved out last year. And that's going to happen. I mean, we can't avoid it. There will be a day when you go to the office and a batch of 25 new people have joined in and a week later you can't remember half their names. But I think that's a problem of the attention span that we live in. Second, as you grow bigger and bigger as an organization, you can't control that. But the idea is that your chain of command in the company is so strong that people don't fall out. And we think OKR as a model keeps everybody in check. And what we did differently was rather than having company OKR structure, we also added a dimension where you should list down your personal OKR as well. So people go through an exercise with us called Lifebook where they list down their life goals in 12 areas of life. So they know that they got to pay attention to their self growth as well. So I think when you are attached to your work and your personal life is one thing, then they tend to stick around in the remote working aspect works in some way.

Is that the Lifebook that John and Missy Bowen are involved with?

John Missy Butcher? Yeah, that's correct.

I just had a piece of art delivered to my home yesterday that John Butcher called Blackstar.

Oh that's fantastic. I love that documentary John has done and Missy has done some phenomenal work in that.

It's the second time I've had to buy that piece. Bought it three years ago and then my ex wife somehow managed to lose it and so I just bought it again and it arrived yesterday and I'm excited to hang it. John's wonderful. So interesting. So you bring Lifebook inside the organization as well.

Every employee is mandatory to actually go to Lifebook. And after that and you join as part of your induction, we take you to a beautiful private, private resort on an. Sorry, on an island. And you get to experience Lifebook with all the new people who joined.

Do you do the full five days or three days, or is it a shorter version?

We do it, we do it over the weekend. And the last one was very special because we actually threw down John and Missy as an authors of the program to actually spend time with 25 of our top new recruits. And that creates a very different level of connection with them. And then some of them go remote, but the connections stay on and then the remote culture works.

I was speaking with Chip Wilson from Lululemon. We were spending time together at the TED conference this year and I was speaking with Chip about his early days at Lululemon and he used to make all of his employees do a program called Landmark and they would do the two day Landmark forum or two and a half day Landmark Forum. And it's such a kind of a cult thing. And he goes, yeah, it's beautiful. I'm like, like I've actually never met anyone who's done it that I don't like. It's a lot of that self and self reflection and introspection and planning. And that's got to be part of your magic then doing Lifebook. How does your leadership team stay structured and how do you guys meet and keep everyone there on the same page?

We meet every event, stay for three hours. And that's the structure that actually we borrowed from Apple, to be very honest with you. One person is in charge of hr. The second person is in charge of tech. The third person is in charge of revenue. Fourth person is in charge of marketing. And we spend three hours talking about everything from hiring, firing, company strategy, some of the next steps, and as silly things as travel plans. And we got three hours. And we try and try and say this is the most expensive payroll in one room. Let's talk about our areas that we are handling. And again, that play field that we spoke about a while ago, I think Everybody's play field is pretty clear. So my constant quest is no matter what companies I'm part of, the leadership team should have a very different play field, which means everybody should have their own genius zone. And if you find overlapping skill set, that's where contradicts happen. Or that's where if you have two people or three people from let's say tech team being represented at the leadership board, you will always have an overlap overpowering agenda. And that's what you want to, that's what you want to avoid.

I had a client who I've been coaching for five years. He's gone from 40 employees up to 700. He just raised 255 million from Warburg Pincus and he was talking about how bad his meetings were. He's like, meetings suck. I'm like, no, meetings are actually amazing if you know how to run them. Wrote that book called Meetings Suck for just that purpose. So you guys are actually doing a really good job with your meetings and meeting rhythms. What's the mindset shift you've had to get your employees to go through or how do you get them to engage and be excited about these? Because you're crushing it with them.

The day starts with 11:30 morning scrum or a stand up which is attended by like almost if not more 35 people and we are able to finish it in 25 minutes. Where everybody knows what's happening and who's connecting with whom after that scrum is over. And one thing that we stopped doing is actually emails. Yeah, I don't think nobody sends each other emails except if you, unless you want an approval from finance. That whole culture of emails is completely gone. Like it just works for us. You are either on slack or you are just having a quick five minute catch up with somebody and you don't have to call everybody into a room.

I've been trying to show people there's a simple sentence. It's a six word sentence. I didn't say you were beautiful. Read that six word sentence and put the emphasis on the first word. It means something different than the second, third, fourth. Right. Each word makes the sentence completely different. And I think there's a lot of miscommunication and frustration and conflict that happened because of of Slack and because of email that I think you guys are again killing it with that face to face communication. But you're all Gen Y like your entire company for the. Well, I guess most companies are Gen Y anyway. But how do you push Gen Y towards this face to face video communication with each other or is that just part of the adoption? You just hire people who already engaged that way?

I think it's also to do with office design. Like we have closed spaces, open spaces, and I think the whole open work culture sort of places is getting noisier and noisier. We've designed the office in a way if you just Google manually office space pictures you would understand, and we've done a couple of posts about it as well, that you should have an environment where people can come out and quickly gather for a quick 5 minute huddle or a 25 minute crumb and then go back into their workspaces in cubicles. Or we've designed it in a way where they have their own private space to focus and to work. So coming out of that shell in a way is very cathartic and people and teams actually look forward to it. So it has a lot to do with office design. It has a lot to do with the way we use Slack. It has a lot to do with the morning huddle which already clears half the doubts and strategic handpicked meetings sprinkled across the week. So everybody knows if it's Wednesday, what three meetings are happening. If it's a Tuesday, what two meetings are happening. Tuesdays are focused on tech and rest. Everybody else is gone. Which means you get to have a focused Tuesday and tech is strategizing on Tuesday and marketing catches up only for an hour in an entire week. You're have less meetings for sure, but more strategic.

Yeah. And those meetings are all baked in as part of your rhythms then.

And if something is an R and D, we call it a genius storm G stomp and you call for a G stomp, which means if you are calling for a G stom, you have made a conscious decision to pull in the strategic people, you're going to wrap that up in 45 minutes and you would have had very well prepared for that meeting.

What have you worked on in terms of your skillset to scale and to continue to stay not relevant. But what are you working on in your skills? I know you said you just finished doing your MBA or your business degree. What kind of stuff were you focusing on?

I actually go into things that I've been doing for a few years. So let's say I did two specializations. One was running companies that are on the verge of bankruptcy. Means cash flow is important and scaling up is important, gross margins are important and how do you revive a startup or a company. And second was running public listed companies. So I get to experience both the spectrums. And I stay relevant by either angel investing in a few startups, helping my wife with her business, or starting another project on the side. So I do have a few investments. I have a project on the side which actually is. I'm hiring a bunch of people for it. And I'm very much engaged with my wife in the way where she runs her business. So those are the three, four things that I try and do. But I do read Financial Times back to back, starting my day and try and see what's happening in the startup world. I think most often new technologies and new business models are actually right there. You just have to read between the trends. And I think one book I read a while ago was the Blue Ocean Strategy. That probably captures a few of these elements as well.

All right, Kay, last question. If you were to think back to being, you know, 21 years old when you were maybe finishing university or just getting started in your entrepreneurial career, I don't think we listen to our parents very often. You know, parents probably try to give us advice. So what advice would you like to have listened to, either from yourself, maybe that, you know today that you wish you'd known earlier on?

I'd say focus on health. Yeah, that's probably, probably would be it.

Yeah.

I had those years of when I was exiting out of my first company, I probably destroyed my health completely. I picked up, picked up all the bad habits that you could, you could think of. And, and that was a stressful period. And I think that it takes a while to come out of that. It's not like one day your health is bad for five years and you will take only a month to recover from it. It takes you five years to recover from it. So I think health is probably what I would listen to a lot more. I wish I had done that.

Kay Mumani, co founder of Mindvalley Quest and Mindvalley thank you so much for sharing with us today and for showing up so late at night. I really, really appreciate all your time.

And ideas ensuring that you put people in a position to be successful. You never quite feel like you're ready for that next role, role you're preparing. You may be 80% of the way there. And the company had a tendency to pull you, to stretch you and do it in a pretty responsible way. So as you turned as a senior leader to develop those around you, oftentimes you would do the same thing.