Ankur Nagpal - Founder of Teachable & Ocho.com Speaks on Building Wealth For Business Owners

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. I am very excited to announce today's sponsor of the pod because if you don't know, over the past year I have been taking my health very seriously. From running my first marathon in Honolulu to getting an ice bath and plunging every single day to a product that I've been using every day. And that brings me to today's sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by Athletic greens. I consume AG1 daily, taking it before my morning workout, and it gives me the energy to tackle the day. AG1 Simplicity makes it a convenient supplement choice as it only requires one scoop of powder mixed with water daily. Each scoop is loaded with 75 top quality vitamins, minerals and whole food ingredients that provide gut and mood support, increased energy, and improved skin, hair and nail health. If you're looking for an easier way to take supplements, Athletic Greens is giving you a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to athleticgreens.com CaseyAdams that's athleticgreens.com CaseyAdams check it out and enjoy today's episode. Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today I am joined by Ankur Nagpul, the founder of ocho. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Ankur.

What's up, Kasey? I'm excited about this. Let's do it.

Absolutely. I know we've been trying to make this happen for a while, so I appreciate you making the time today.

Yeah, I'm excited. Let's do this.

Absolutely. So, you know, I've been, I've been following your journey on Twitter for a while now, and it's, it's been so cool not only to learn from you and what you're building at ocho, but just to understand your story. And the way you put out content is just incredible. But, you know, you're also the former founder of Teachable, which is a product that completely revolutionized an industry, in my opinion. And it's so cool to see you now building your new company, Ocho. And I want to just start off and give the opportunity to share with people what is Ocho at a high level if people don't know. And then we'll dive into it. We'll dive into it.

Yeah, absolutely. So, as you mentioned, OCHO is my second business. It's a technology startup. The goal with Ocho, it's a problem. I saw myself as an entrepreneur, but also with a lot of our clients, customers at Teachable is we want to help business owners build wealth because what we found is when people are entrepreneurs, they spend so long working on their business, they're not thinking about their personal finances. So our goal is to build products and education to help people learn how to leverage the tax code and ultimately build wealth. So what that means is, you know, I have a couple of products now. One is sort of around the education piece, because when I sold my company, I learned so much crazy tax stuff. It like blew my mind how messed up the system is and all the things that people don't know about. So there's the education piece. And on the technology side, right now we have a retirement account for anyone who works for themselves, because typically your company is the one who takes care of that. But yeah, that's the quick story and we'll keep adding new products to it.

Very, very exciting. And I know you guys have ocho.com and you launched the company fairly recently. How long has it been now?

Five months.

Five months and.

Five months and nine days.

I think this is a great starting point. How's it been so far since launching?

It's been really fun. But as someone who's built a company before, as I'm telling the team, I'm like, yo, this hasn't gotten hard yet. Like the first six to 12 months stuff's kind of easy. Everything's exciting. Like, you know, everything is new. Things will get hard soon. You know, like, there's gonna come a time when we're looking at our numbers. We're like, why are things not growing? Do people like the products? We're still so early that everything is like rose colored glasses. Super, super fun. But the hard. I mean, this stuff is never easy. And I'm sure it's gonna get hard real soon.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And you know, I. Your story is so incredible, but I do want to take a step back and, you know, kind of dive into where this all started. Like, what led you to starting teachable initially? And where did this initial drive for entrepreneurship and business come from?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think I've always, like, tried. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs have this story, right, where like, ever since you're pretty young, you like kind of like always have these small little micro businesses because, I mean, you're too young for it to actually even be a business. For, for me, it started with like, I was ripping out posters from a magazine and selling it to, like, my dad's friends. And that's how it started. And it kind of kept snowballing into bigger and bigger businesses. But the first sort of real Entrepreneurial thing I did was in college, it was my freshman summer when I started building these silly little applications on Facebook. And that summer completely changed my life. Because at the start of that summer I was like, I don't know, an 18 year old college kid. But at the end of that summer, these silly little applications I was building were making 10 or $20 a day and it's like a switch went off in my mind that you can do things on the Internet and make a living. Why would I ever, ever do anything but that? So that was sort of my first taste. And then in college I built and scaled this Facebook application business to, you know, a couple million dollars in revenue, completely life changing amount of money. And then when I was 23, ended up moving to New York and starting Teachable which ran for seven years. And as an old 33 year old man, here I, here I am doing it all over again.

Wow, that's so epic. So, so this business in college like you were, it was growing, you know, seven figure business and then what, what was the transitionary point of that to then starting Teachable?

Yeah. So I mean that business, we were building zero enterprise value and arguably adding no value to the world. I mean it was like personality quizzes and really, really like kind of like silly dumb little things. And it wasn't a consistent business. You'd like build and launch an application, it would kind of grow like crazy. You'd make 5, 10, 20k, whatever. Then it would kind of die down, then you'd keep launching new applications and soon you're launching hundreds of applications. And it was an emotional roller coaster because you'd go from feeling on top of the world, your thing is growing really fast. But oh wait, Facebook changed something and now your app is dead. So in a lot of ways it was fun, but it wasn't a grown up business. Right. We didn't raise venture funding, we had very, very few employees and it was all usually contractors. It wasn't a. We were not building enterprise value either. Your company was worth whatever revenue was making. So it was fun. It taught me a lot about entrepreneurship, but it wasn't a real sort of business. I then had a two plus year period in between where I tried lots of business ideas and nothing worked like it was. It was not like I went straight from that to like successful company at two years of like just like eating shit.

How old were you then? I'm just curious like those two years.

So I graduated college young, so I think graduate college at 20. And I think the last Facebook App stuff was probably 21. So I think between 21 and like, let's say 23. And change is like the, not the dark period, but the period where like nothing. Nothing really worked. Yeah. Tried 10, 15 different businesses, nothing quite stuck. Ended up changing cities. I'm a big fan of changing location when you kind of want to, like, you know, change stuff in your life. Moved to New York City, started doing a little bit of teaching and in person online or general assembly. Sorry, in person, a general assembly online on Udemy. And sort of stumbled into what ended up becoming teachable. But it was sort of a slow path where we started as creators ourselves, then built a platform for us. Then we're like, hey, maybe other creators want this too. And then sort of raised venture funding and built a real company.

Wow. It's. I think there's so much to learn in those two years of testing. Testing.

It didn't feel like it.

Yeah. Like what?

Just felt like hopeless.

Yeah. Because I mean, we're going to get to the teachable. I'm so fascinated by that business. But those two years specifically, like, what led you to or what made you just keep going? Like what? You know, there's so many people out there that have different ways and different reasons why they just keep on trying things. But like trying 10 to 15 different things. You're young. Like, did you have another plan or was it like, hey, I'm going to make something work here? And that's, you know, that's one.

I was fortunate. Right. The Facebook apps made money. Money. So like Runway or whatever was not a problem. Yeah, I was living off my savings, but I wasn't spending a lot of money. I didn't have a very expensive lifestyle, there's no financial stress. And it was just like going back to like, you know, after working for yourself, like, it kind of makes you unemployable. The thought of having a job was positively nauseating. Like, I could not imagine it. And I remember like having conversations with my parents, for instance, where they would try to convince me to get a job. And to me that was like the most hurtful thing you could. You could tell someone, right? Like get a job. Like, so, yeah, nothing. So it was. Honestly, I didn't really have a long term plan and I'm glad things worked out when they did. But at the time I was just like kind of going from idea to idea and like kind of seeing what sticks. But yeah, it was a point of debate between my family because my mom thought enough is enough. I should, you know, like Suck it up and go work for someone. And my dad's like, nah, just keep going. Something.

I love that. So when you say you were teaching, you brought up Udemy. What was that process that led you to saying, hey, let's go build a tech platform for this type of creator?

That was a couple of courses. We're all online marketing and things I learned on the Facebook app platform. And we scaled that business to a few thousand dollars in core sales a month. But it was impossible to go beyond that. And there were a few reasons for that. One is if we bought ads for that business, ultimately Udemy owned the lifetime value, right? I would acquire the customer, but the rest of the lifetime value would go to Udemy. They would cross sell their. Cross sell my customers competitive courses. They control pricing, they would discount heavily. All of that just made it very clear that if I wanted to actually scale this business, I needed to own that channel. So I ended up building the first version of the platform at the time for my co founder, Conrad, he was the one sort of running the courses. I'm like, okay. He was basically like co founder slash customer number one and built it and was. We were able to like scale our own sales to much greater when we control the platform. And then it gave us a value proposition to go to other Udemy creators and be like, hey, you know you're paying Udemy a lot of money. Do you want to run this yourself? And then that was our initial go to market.

Wow. Very, very cool. So when you launched this, you're 23. When you built the product, when was. What was the, you know, the, the company itself in terms of raising capital and scaling the team? As you said, this was like a seven year, a seven year journey from start to exit.

The first, like the first six to six to eight months, nine months. It was a side project. It was just me. I was like engineer, customer support, marketing, sales. Like, it was like ridiculous. I would like, someone would, you know, there'd be a customer support ticket being like, hey, you don't have a forgot password feature. I would like literally code it up and reply two hours later. Be like, what do you mean? Yeah, we do.

Yeah.

Be like, I swear that did not exist like right before. So it was a one person shop. Then summer of 2014, which at this point I've been working eight, nine months on it. I decided to like go out and start trying to. I started raising money in the spring of 2014, only succeeded by the summer of 2014. Ended up raising capital, hiring a team and kind of off to the races from there.

What was your initial experience raising capital during that time? And I say that because I raised capital for my startup media Kids in 2021, first time raising any type of capital. We raised just over a million dollars. And like that learning process for me.

That'S a good year though for that to be the first time raising capital.

Yes, I completely agree. Like looking back in just the short two years after, I'm like, wow, timing was great. But for you and for me and where I was going with that is like that really laid the foundation a lot of just how I think about business and just my experience there in terms of raising capital, like running a business where there's, you know, actual liability, actual investors. And I learned a lot. I'd love to hear your experience during those early phases of that and how that gave you a foundation of building and running.

Teachable. Yep. Yeah. So first I was scared to raise money because I had like tried so many ideas that went nowhere. And when ideas fail, what it looks like to you is you losing you falling out of love with your own idea because you'll try something and then it'll kind of not work and you'll keep working on it and someday you'll get distracted by a new idea and move ideas. So I had this conception in my mind that I'm clearly someone that does not stick with things. So that was kind of a damaging self belief. So I was scared to raise money for a while because I'm like, oh, I'm going to raise money from these investors, then I'm going to get bored and I'm going to like let all these people down. So I didn't want to do that for a while. So either way, six, by the time I was running it for four or five, six months and I realized I was more passionate than I was before. I got over that fear. Then I actually tried to raise money. And the act of raising money, it's the sort of thing that it absolutely sucks until it doesn't. And from the point it doesn't, it gets great because you have a little bit of momentum. So for us, what that looked like was two months of like no one really wanting to talk to us and pretty downright disrespectful things frankly. But then we got our first investor, second investor, third investor. That all happened, happened really quickly. And then within a week or two we raised, you know, everything and we had all these amazing people that wanted to invest. So it was very, very sort of momentum driven.

And how much did you guys raise back then as like a first round in the year 2000 bucks, which is.

A lot of money.

Bucks? Yeah, totally.

At an $8 million valuation, which was a random number I picked and until the market sort of was fine with it and.

Yeah. Wow, very cool. And then just like going through the teachable journey because I really want to talk about Ocho and I think there's so much to learn in there as founders that listen to the show, but like raise money. Talk to us about some of the growing pains through raising that first initial round to actually having that investor pressure to then going and building and scaling and then selling the business over those, you know, over the years.

Yep. We were very, very careful about how we constructed our cap table and who we raised money from. So we never actually had any investor pressure till the day I sold the company. I personally owned over 50% of the company and I had two out of three board seats. So I had like full operating control. And the people that were investors ended up becoming the most supportive, like best people ever who I will work with for the rest of my life. So from that perspective, like there's no investor pressure. I think the pressure is all self inflicted because I strongly believe if your company isn't growing, like, what the hell are you doing? So every single month we kind of like killed ourselves to try and hit monthly growth targets and just sort of did that for three, four or five years, almost to our detriment in a way. But it, we wouldn't have been successful without that. We had very strong internal goals and targets and we as an organization rallied around hitting those numbers.

Got it. That's awesome. And you know, just speeding up to the transition from teachable to Ocho selling the business. What was that experience like for you?

It's wild. It was, it was from a timing perspective, it was really interesting. I mean we decided, we came to conceptual agreement like fall 2019 or something. Then it took a very, very long time to actualize the deal. I think it's because it was a cross border transaction. We all weren't sure how like just legal. We ended up spending so much time on the legal side of things. But then it reached a really interesting point where it's March 2020, the first week of March. There's all these whispers of this like weird virus thing going around. We're not able to close the like, we're still like struggling or whatever to close a deal. And I remember calling the Brazilian company want to incorporate us and I'm like, Look, we've added 4 or 5 million in ARR since we started negotiating the deal. If we don't get the deal closed in the next week, we're going to ask to renegotiate. And what they did then is they kind of flew in, and these poor guys had already flown into New York three or four times. They finally flew in with the idea that we are not leaving till we actually, like, make this deal work. So we were. We were sitting in these, like, like, you know, midtown loft offices for, like, hours for every day. Like, literally, you know, like, it was soul crushing. You'd get there at like, 8:00am and not leave till like, 8 or 9:00pm oh, my gosh. Towards the end of the day, I'm, like, willing to negotiate everything, just, like, get out of the room, like, whatever you want. Just get me out of here. But they stayed till. They stayed till. I can't remember the day we signed the deal. On the Thursday, there was the single biggest stock market crash in history because of what was happening with COVID We announced the deal on the following Tuesday, which is, I think, the same Tuesday that, like, the NBA decided they were shutting down. A lot of weird.

Gosh.

And so those two events, for the rest of my life will always be intertwined. Right. It happened at the exact same time. We ended up announcing the deal a few days later, but it all happened in that one very crazy week.

Oh, my gosh. That is insane.

Yep. Yeah.

How do you. I mean, you know, you just. You must be the master of timing things. That's insane.

Yes.

Thinking about it, we.

We ended up, like, when we negotiated the deal, we were at about 20, 21 million in ARR.

Okay.

When we signed the paperwork, we're at about 25 million in ARR. Six months after signing the deal, we were at 50 million in ARR. Because of, like, how big a boost Covid was. So.

Wow.

Yeah. Timing. The timing part is debatable. But overall, I think it's. It was. It was the right decision for the company. We're super excited about the people we're partnered with and all of that.

Yeah, absolutely. No, that's. I mean, again, and I know I said at the beginning, but congrats on the success and just getting that deal done. It's so incredible to see that. And I think, just coming from that exit of teachable, when did you decide, hey, I want to go start the next venture, and I want it to be Ocho. Like, what was that transitionary period like, especially through Covid, Right. Where you sell the company world Shuts down. Now what? Like, where. Where did that. Where did your head go? And where did you start thinking?

I think the seed. The seed. The seeds behind Ocho started getting planted as I was negotiating this deal. Because as I was negotiating this deal, I finally was like, okay, let me go talk to accountants and lawyer. I hired an estate attorney and, like, a financial adviser, all these, like, smart people to help me figure out how to structure my company, my estate, and all of that. So the seeds started getting planted. Then when I kind of realized the sort of crazy tricks that exist, but at the same time, when it actually came down to selling the company, I was very burnt out at the time. I told myself I will never, ever, ever for the rest of my life, ever start a company again. Why would I do that? It's horrible. It's gonna, like, exhaust me. And then I spent, you know, I worked. I kept operating teachable for about a year after the acquisition, and then after that, I spent about 18 months just, like, not chilling. I was investing, running a fund, but traveling. You know, like, the best sort of work life balance I ever had. Would go from country to country, work when I wanted to, and still felt very involved by working with really smart entrepreneurs on the investing side. But I did not have the stress of operating. And that was a period of soul searching when I'm like, okay, what is it that makes me happy? Like, we spent all our time, like, working so hard with this idea of, like, retiring one day. What if I just do all the things a retired person would do, right? Like, what is it that makes me happy? And. And I found that, yeah, like, my previous lifestyle was not sustainable. I have no desire in, like, sitting behind a computer screen all day and, like, you know, working isolated from people. But if I can build something that gives me joy, that's something I want to do. And while, you know, going through this journey, I realized that everything in my life felt really good. But I was missing the sort of high you get by building something, building something cool with a group of people. And that's what started getting the wheels turning. And when it came time to figure out what I wanted to do, I think the idea behind Ocho, the seeds were planted by, like, seeing how messed up the financial industry is and how much, like, knowledge there is, like, sort of hidden and the very specific product. Also, I tried to set up a retirement account for myself earlier in the year, and it was super painful. So that felt like a very easy first wedge. But I remember it was at the start of. It was in the summer of 2020, that I. Sorry, some last summer, summer of 2022, that I decided, okay, I want to start this. But I kept trying to talk myself out of it because if it's an irreversible decision, Right. Once you start something, you can't really kind of go back. So I told myself, just chill, don't try to not do this. But if at the end of the summer you really want to do this, go ahead and do it. And I was going to end the summer with a two week trip in Portugal. I was going surfing and I was going to have that be my like final sort of moment to decide. But when it became time to leave, I realized I didn't want to go. I wanted to work on this thing so badly. I actually did not want to go surfing in Portugal. So I cancel the trip and like, okay, fine, we're, we're doing this. Time to get the band together. And then I started, you know, recruiting and all of that.

Wow, that is so incredible to hear. And yep, just when it comes to Ocho today, I know that, you know, you found that wedge to start with, the Ocho Solo 401K. I'd love to just kind of dive in there a bit more. For people that may be listening to this that don't have retirement account set up, like, what is the core product that you launched with and why do you believe it's so important for. For business owners and entrepreneurs.

Yep. So I actually, I actually never heard of this product and it blew my mind that it existed. But What a solo 401k lets you do is if you're self employed, it lets you take up to $66,000 of the income you make, get a tax deduction for up to $66,000. You put it into this like solo 401k, which is your own retirement account. And what's cool about it is because the Solo 401k, instead of a corporate 401k, you can invest it in any asset class you want, like, like startups, crypto, real estate, whatever. And all of the growth is tax free. So you buy and sell, it keeps growing, you don't pay taxes. So this compounds really, really, really, really fast. And you can build this like retirement nest egg of millions, potentially tens of millions of dollars super effectively because of how high the contribution limits are. The alternative, which is an IRA would be $6,500 a year versus $66,000 a year. On top of that, the other thing that's really cool is you can also set up a Roth account which lets you put in post tax dollars. But the benefit with that is even at retirement you don't pay any taxes on it. And it's an interesting sort of loophole in the legislation where you cannot set up a Roth IRA if you earn over $150,000 a year in salary. But for the Solo 401k, there is no income limit. You have creators who are earning, you know, tens of millions of dollars a year who can still make Roth contributions. So it's just really, really powerful. It's a niche product. It doesn't apply to everyone. You have to be self employed. But if you're self employed, it's a really, really cool benefit that I think everyone should be taking advantage of.

I love that. And I know, like, just, I know we're going to get there at the end, but for people that are listening right now, like, where can they go learn more and check that out because I mean there's lots of business owners, entrepreneurs, creators, listen to the show that they might just be like, okay, where do I go if I wanted to go learn more about this?

Yep, yep, absolutely. I mean again, we'll, we'll, we'll set up a link for them, maybe ocho.com Casey or something. And yeah, we'll love that.

Yeah, absolutely. No, and so I want to talk about something that we briefly touched on before we started the show and that is ocho.com valuable domains. I know you, you had a whole Twitter thread about this teachable and now with Ocho.com like what do premium domains do to a business in your perspective? And why are they or why are they not important?

Yeah, look, I think it's a sort of thing that if it was my first business, I would probably not spend a ton of money on a domain. But as a, as a second time business owner who was able, who has like funding and stuff, it felt like a shortcut to legitimacy because I think a very legitimate domain confers with a certain sense of legitimacy, especially if it's a dot com. This was a sort of shortcut to it. The thing that I think we did right, that we were very fortunate to do, that I recommend a lot of people do, is it helps a lot when you go domain shopping when you haven't already picked a name. Because when you've already picked a name and you go like, I know someone who like for instance owns, you know, like I think there's a thread on Twitter. This is public information. A founder owns a domain name, maybe.co and he's trying to buy maybe.com and this is really tough for him because the owner of maybe.com knows that there's no other domain this person would buy. That's the only one they need and want and as a result have a lot more leverage. For me, when I was shopping for a domain, I hadn't called the company Ocho.com, i'm like, I'm going to just, if I get this baller domain, I'm going to call the company Ocho. Otherwise there's like 100 other great names for this company that helped a lot with the negotiation. And we're able to buy it for 45k, which I think is a pretty fair price for it.

Absolutely. And just to like talk about domain negotiations, when you say, you know, some people, maybe they haven't heard 45k for a domain, that's insane. What, like where, where, where would a domain like that in your eyes be overpriced versus like you're getting underpriced and you're getting a good deal when it comes to something like four letters.

Like so it's. I think it's a good deal. But it's so hard to. No, I mean in general, the price of any asset is determined by what other people are willing to pay for it. Domains specifically. It's such a thin market, it's such an illiquid market. There's not too many buyers or sellers that the variance in price is massive. Like you have companies that have paid 2, 3 million dollars for a domain and it's crazy. So in my mind, I think 50k was sort of my upper limit for what I would be willing to spend but bought. You know, you've had domains like that sell four letter brandable for, you know, six figures easy.

Totally. No, it's. I, I totally agree with you and I, I've, you know, I have a couple solid domains on instagram specifically, not necessarily.com but like I have branding at questions at how much did you pay for them? Some of them I got for free just by like knowing the owners. Some of them it ranges like I have Casey on Instagram and that took me like two years to get. And I ended up, I got a solid deal on that $1,700 to get that domain.

I'm trying to get my first name on Twitter and Instagram without any success. We can talk about that later. For sure.

For sure. No, it's. And I think it's same thing. Like I remember I interviewed the president of Shopify, Harley and he has Arley on Instagram. And it was so funny. Like when we, when I interviewed him, the first thing he talked about is, oh my God, we're, we're domain buddies, like first names. And it's like not only legitimacy, but just like conversation starters and branding. It's also important and I think you've done absolutely, totally well. OCHO Wealth. If you were to think about the future of Ocho and tell the audience something that you're excited about for business owners, for creators, for people that want to build wealth, what gets you excited and what should people look forward to when it comes to the future of what you're building?

So let me, I'll tell you what, I want to work backwards from what I've been thinking a lot about and the team's been thinking a lot about, and what we'll spend the next 10 years thinking a lot, lot about is what can we do to help people in general make better decisions with their money. Like, I think when you think about sort of new companies and new opportunities, I think fundamentally, yes, there's a lot of very specific, innovative things we can do. But if you can on average, help people make better decisions, that unlocks a tremendous amount of value while doing good in the world. I think the company that I think was the closest, most recent company, and it's funny because it's a boomer company, it's not recent at all that I think has done or did a really good job at the time was Charles Schwab, which back in 1975 came in and they're like, hey, all these brokerages are kind of terrible. They charge people massive fees, they sell people products based on where they earn the maximum amount of commission. No one's advocating for the customer. And I think at the time Schwab did a really good job being an advocate for the customer and becoming a trusted financial institution. And that's what we're trying to work backwards from. We decided, you know, focusing on entrepreneurs, business owners, creators. That's our initial wedge. But eventually, I mean, it'd be great to serve everyone. But really, how do we on average help people make better decisions? Which is going to be a combination of technology and education. And that's really what we're working backwards from.

I love that. I mean, that's such a purpose driven, high impact problem that I'm excited to, to get involved because, I mean, that's something that I know I will consistently be thinking about. And you guys are building a product for so many great.

And it's Hard, man. It's hard. I'll tell you that. Like, for a while, it looks like Robinhood could be the company that sort of changes the paradigm of how investing works, and they kind of took it in a fully different direction. Right. And it's very hard, like, and a lot of this stuff, again, it's less about technology. It's about how do you change behavior. And based on how much of a believer you are, some skeptics will say you just won't. I don't believe that. But I think. I think, you know, like, changing behavior is hard, but that's sort of where I think we come in.

Absolutely. And, you know, I'm curious about this next question I'm about to ask personally, but I think a lot of people listening can get value from it. You know, you're building a company now to help people build wealth. You're a very successful entrepreneur that had a big exit. What were some of the misconceptions about building wealth and sustaining wealth and keeping wealth that. That you quickly realize that, you know, if there's someone listening that maybe is going through a liquidity event or plans to, like, what can you tell them today? That they can just save a lot of time from that. They can, you know, go back and reflect on and say, oh, Ankur told me this, and I'm so glad he did.

I mean, I did everything wrong myself, right? Which is the other thing that, like, kind of reiterates this mission is like, I knew nothing about this. Like, I'll give you an example. Like, one really stupid thing I did is, like, when I had all those Facebook apps, right? Like, a lot of them, I'd made money when I was pretty young, and I ended up investing almost none of that cash. Most of it sat in, like, these really bad bonds and things that really just generated no return during what is the biggest bull market run in history. Like. Like, you know, the opportunity cost of that is really, really high. So in terms of, like, stupid things people to avoid, cash may sometimes seem safe. Cash is safe in, like, the very, very, very short run. Like, I want money I have today to be available in a week. But the longer the time period you look at, the less safe an asset cash is. So in general, I think the sort of common sense advice I give everyone is, if investing and optimizing your money is not a focus, let's say you're just a business owner and you want to focus on your business, fine. Just take the majority of what you have, put it in an index fund, and get Back to work. Like pick something with a really low expense ratio. So mistakes to avoid. That's one. Number two would be like, avoid expensive advisors. Any advisor that charges you an assets under management fee and AUM fee, it's just like net worse for you, right? There have been so many studies done on like actively managed stuff versus passively managed by an index fund until or unless you, you know, your strategy gets pretty sophisticated. So that's, that's another sort of quick win. Third is like, like if you are under the Roth retirement account limit, like the Roth IRA income, which I think 150,000, make your Roth contributions every year. It's. It's such a gift from the government. Like, and it really starts compounding, you know, the young. The. Whenever you are. Yeah. Those are just some tips for everyone. On the business owner side, I think that the single biggest thing you want to ensure is you have the right incorporation set up. Since every all like the incorporation setup you use, whether it's an LLC or a C corp or an S corp, it's sort of like pick your tax benefit. They each have their own sort of benefits and figuring out which one makes sense for your business goals.

Very, very well said and appreciate you sharing that. And I know people that want to learn more can learn more at Ocho and really dive deep in there. A couple more questions before we wrap up here, Ankur. I want to go back and if you were to reflect on your business entrepreneurial journey and give yourself advice to that young entrepreneur that's building Facebook apps not just from a wealth aspect, but just from a building company culture, building products that matter. Um, what would that advice be and why?

And it's, it's. This is gonna sound really cheesy, but I think the advice would be like, in the moment, sometimes everything feels very intense. Like whether you hit the growth number or not, like your competitor is like releasing this new feature. Is it gonna kill the company or not? What I would tell myself now is like, look back especially look at the people around you and take some time to like, just appreciate, appreciate it. Appreciate the moment. Think about how cool it is to be in this place in time where you're able to just hang out with cool people, build something of value. I mean, all together, it sounds really cheesy, but like this time as a company where we like, take photos of important moments, like, oh, here's our first trade, here's our first customer, things like that, we didn't none of that the first time. So I think like, just like, honestly, like Enjoying that like, journey because I know by the end of it I like got myself super burnt out and wasn't having a good time. So I think like being mindful of that stuff and just reminding yourself what a privilege it is to be able to kind of just do whatever you want for work, hire whoever you want, kind of like, you know, go make all your wildest dreams kind of come true. This is like when I think back when I was a kid, this like, this sounds super dope. Like just, you know, take a moment to appreciate that.

I love that. That's very, very impactful, for sure. And when it comes to the team now at ocho, what are some of the core values that you guys stand by that you know, you want people to represent inside of your organization and why?

Yep. So I think the one thing I'm trying to tell everyone at this stage is like, at this point, speed is the single biggest competitive advantage we have. So if we're not moving fast, we're like, because we're pre product market fit. And when you're pre product market fit, all that matters is getting to product market fit. And how do you increase the odds of getting to product market fit? It's like rapidly iterating. So speed is the single most important sort of value we have. What that means is like anti values are very low sort of culture, very low meeting culture. Not spending much time on. We've kept internal comms very, very light, no recurring meetings. Just like a case of let's just go in every day and kind of kick ass. And when it comes to the sort of people I've hired, it's again, people who value working at a really small company, people who value moving really fast. People like for instance, if someone was deciding whether they should join like Facebook or ocho, like that's already not a good candidate because it already means if like you're evaluating one versus the other, like this is not kind of going to be a culture fit for you. But yeah, I like it's like, and I think hard work is important, but more than hard work, I think it's like moving with intensity. And like the difference to me is like hard work is like someone that's going to work 100 hours a week. Intensity is like, like, let's say someone passes you the ball, you pass the ball back immediately. Right? Like you're just moving really, really fast. And I think intensity is what is important to me. Not necessarily like quantity of hours or whatever. Obviously they're correlated.

Totally. Absolutely. I want to talk about Outside of work, where do you really like spending your time? What are some. Some things that you enjoy doing outside of work?

Yeah. So, I mean, again, I caught the travel bug. Time when. When I ended up selling the car company, I ended up. I remember, like, I traveled for the first time by myself, which I was terrified of, in the summer of 2019. And even then, I, like, saw some friends before the trip, after the trip, but I was like, oh, let me, you know, like, think it's a life experience everyone should have. And it was terrifying. But by the end of that trip, I'm like, wow, there's so much of the world I want to see. And after I sold the company, ended up taking a bunch of long trips, being like, let me get the travel bug out of my system. Yeah, but the problem is it kind of doesn't work that way. You're like, wow, there's so much. There's so much more of the world, you know, I want to see. But, yeah, I mean, I love travel. I mean, I also like the combination of travel and spending time in, like, dope outdoor places is like, I think, what, like, kind of completes my soul or whatever, you know, whether it's, like. Whether it's, like, surfing or, like, climbing mountains or like, just like, outdoor stuff is, like, where outdoors where I feel feel the happiest, play a bunch of sports. But, yeah, like, to stay pretty active.

Yeah, you got the half marathon coming up. I mean.

Yeah, that's a new half marathon.

Let's go.

Half marathon coming up. Yeah, I have all these, like, silly personal goals. Like, yeah, this year was a half marathon. Want to, like, visit a bunch of new countries? I read, like, been trying to read close to 50 books a year. I have this, like, very dorky spreadsheet of, like, all the books I'm reading.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So keep myself pretty busy.

I'm curious on that. So 50 books a year. Um, like, how do you.

How do you hit? I've only hit 51 out of the last five years, but I've been averaging, like, 30, 37, 38. Like, pretty good is the goal, but typically miss it. But get. Get close.

That's awesome. That's. That's really. It's really cool. I'm. I'm averaging probably, like, 25, 20 or so.

Yeah, that's great. Like, the Average person averages, like, 05.

Sweet. Sweet. We're doing better.

Yeah.

When it comes to, again, the future of you as a founder and when you think about yourself in 20, 50 years, what is important to you when you think about Ocho building the company, that's one thing. But just long term in life, what are some key moments or goals or just things that you want to experience that are moments of, hey, this is important to me, and this is what I want in life.

Overall, I think the most important stuff in life always boils down to the relationships. Like, either relationships you have or the ones you make on the way, and that becomes sort of very clear. And like, I think a lot of it in a lot of ways, like, I guess the act of earning money, for instance, it's to me, a tool to live the life you want, not your life, is not a tool to make the maximum amount of money. Right. Like, I've seen a lot of people fall into that trap, and that's something that, like, trying to stay away from. So for me, I think, like, again, like, as I think about what is it important like, that I do this year? Or like, the is, like, how can I spend the most amount of time with my parents? Like, how can I, you know, spend the most amount of time with my family? Because that's the kind of stuff that I like. I'm never going to regret that. There's no amount of time I could spend with my parents, or I'm going to look back and be like, oh, that was a misallocation. I spent too much time there. So what are things like that? There's not many things like that. But again, like, time you spend with your parents, time you spend with your family, your family, your friends, time you spend out in nature, time you spend, like, moving your body. And, you know, those are the things that I will never, ever regret. And it's. It's. That's the stuff that I think matters long term, but at the same time, like, people have a negative idea of work, but when you sort of reframe. For me, work is like building cool things with cool people. Then that's also fits into that category of like, yo, this is actually really fun. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, no regrets on that aspect either, for sure.

Yep.

That's awesome. It sounds like just hearing you say that, just the. The alignment and moving with purpose sounds like it's just. Those cups are full for you, for sure, before we wrap up. I mean, first off, thank you so much for making the time today, but for those that are looking to learn more about Ocho, follow your journey and just stay along for the journey and more. So get involved with Ocho as well, because it's an incredible product. Where can they go to learn more to follow you and just stay up to date with everything you've going on.

Yep. Absolutely. To follow me, it's either my full name on Twitter or my first name, A N, K U R N, A. My first name to the letters on Instagram. I wish if unless Casey helps me get my first name on Instagram. And yeah, For Ocho, either ocho.com or ocho.com Casey all of those will work. But yeah, we should have everything up there.

Awesome. Ankur, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Really appreciate it and really inspired by your story. So I really appreciate you making the time.

Thanks for having me, man. It's been a blast.

Absolutely.