5 Unconventional Lessons From an IPO, $60M Failure, and a Unicorn with Gagan Biyani, Maven

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You can build businesses without capital and I've seen lots of people do it. And then for the people who are trying to build multi billion dollar companies, I would say be very wary of dilution because dilution means two things. One, it means your equity stake is worth less and you're relying upon business decisions that have less leverage, which means that slowly, over time, you will dilute yourself more and more. And then the second thing I would concern yourself with is realizing that dilution also means not only do you have lower equity stake in terms of financial outcomes, you also have less power. And so slowly over time, it won't be your company. And you have to decide if you're comfortable with that. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana and many more. Hey, Traction fam. Super excited for today's session. This guy, he built one of the first online massive online course platforms, Udemy and. And today udemy does over 700 million in revenue, nearly one and a half billion market cap. He then did a series of companies, Sprig, which was my favorite food app in the Bay Area. I was working in San Francisco on another startup out of Bessemer's office and my daily lunch was ordering from Sprig. Then Sprig shut down and now he's on the scene again with Maven. So welcome to Traction Gagan. I have a personal story with you because before I started Traction, I reached out to you and we had coffee in the Mission somewhere and you were running the Growth Hackers Conference like the first Growth Hackers Conference. And I took advice from you and I asked you if you wanted to collaborate, but you didn't have the Bandwidth. I think you were working on Udemy or maybe proceeding to Sprig at the time. But the advice you gave stuck and probably the impetus for us building traction to today 120,000 subscribers and a big conference and a podcast. So thank you so much. The man, the myth, the legend, Gagan Biani.

Thanks so much. I remember that conversation and I'm really glad. I've been watching your journey since then. It's pretty amazing to watch what you've built. So happy to be a part of it.

So let's dive right in. When we met at that coffee shop, I can't remember, I think it was 2014, you had already left Udemy. But let's go all the way back. What drove you to start Udemy? Because you guys were in Founder Institute, right?

That's right, yeah.

So I'm curious about your journey, which is a little atypical because most people, they either know the founders from before or have an idea and the founders are in their network. So I'm curious about this atypical journey, which we don't hear a lot. How did you venture into entrepreneurship? How did Udemy come about? What was the role of Founder Institute?

Yeah, funny enough, Lloyd, I've been co founder now to seven other people. So I've had seven co founders and only one of them did I know ahead of time. So I've actually frequently found co founders as part of the founding journey. And at Udemy, the story was that I was looking at building an online learning company that would create and sell sat prep videos. And Aaron and ok, the two co founders of Udemy, I became the third. They had already built. They'd already spent years building a live online learning platform like Zoom and they were focused on education. They had gone live in Turkey as under the name no band. And then they shut it down and they moved to the United States. They got jobs and they enrolled in the Founder Institute like years later and they decided they wanted to restart this company under the name Udemy. And first of all, I hated the name. I didn't really know these two because they were a little bit. I was doing the Founder Institute remote, so I didn't really know everyone in the cloud class. And Aaron and okay were introduced to me by Ado, who started the Founder Institute. And on aar I took the meeting, we had a Skype call and they demoed the product and I just fell in love with what they had built. Fortunately for me, they were willing to entertain me helping them build the company. I think they wanted a Business co founder. And they were looking at a whole bunch of different options and I was one that they decided to try out. And so we did not have any formal relationship. I did not join as a co founder in the first six months. I just said, hey, I just want to help you. And we just worked on this thing for six months. I travel from D.C. to San Francisco every weekend, spend the weekend working with them my weekdays, working probably 70 hours a week in my full time job. And slowly over time, we realized that we worked really well together. And they offered me the role of co founder and offered me a pretty reasonable co founder level equity stake as well. So I was a real part of the business. And then actually funny enough, I was the first one to quit my job and go full time because they were on H1B visas. You might know something about this, Lloyd. And since they were on H1B visas, I had to go full time. And so even though I was sort of third co founder, I was the first one to be full time on the business and out pitching VCs and stuff. And lucky enough, we eventually raised around. It took us six months and we were off to the races.

There's an interesting story there, right? Because one of the four first courses that took off was a course about fundraising on Udemy, wasn't it?

That's right, yeah.

So tell us that story and how did it tie to your fundraising journey?

So I did it. Pitched 200 investors. And that's like a retrospective count. I think it could have been higher than that. But we got rejected by 185 of them. So we had 185 or whatever, straight no's. And then finally we were about a month from getting real jobs again, but I was gonna get a job again. Cause we were running out of money. We were probably 30, 30, 40k. I don't know the exact number, but in debt.

How was the company funded up until that point? Cause you guys met through Founder Institute. And then how did you guys like actually build?

For six months we were all just working nights and weekends. And then I moved into their house and they essentially supported me by making food. We made all our food at home. It's so funny you even asked that question because I think modern companies and modern founders assume that they need a pre seed round to even get started. And, and that's so ridiculous to me because in 2008, most companies, the first six months to two years is just people living off their savings, living super cheaply and just figuring it out. So like I said, we went into debt because we were paying AWS bills and whatever other things, but for the most part we were just. Yeah, financing it on credit cards and on sheer. Just like bumming meals off friends and staying over at my girlfriend's place and that kind of thing.

So stretch Ramen.

Yeah, we weren't ramen profitable. We were just ramen staying alive.

Ramen staying alive. But was there anything in your childhood or your experience up until that point that drove you to say, I want to be an entrepreneur or force you to go to Founder Institute? Because what I found is like, as I talk to more and more entrepreneurs, there's always this burning spite or some anger or dismay to prove the naysayers wrong or change the status quo. Did you have any of that?

Totally. I grew up as an Indian American kid in a suburb in Fremont, California, which a lot of people on listening to the POD probably have heard of. Went to elementary school, junior high, and was an outstanding student. You know, I was like top 2, 3 in my class for most of that time period. And then I finally, in junior high, I started to realize that my teachers weren't as good as I thought they were. And I had a number of run ins with teachers where I thought they were being incredibly unfair or unreasonable. And it got a lot worse when I went to high school. And so I became very rebellious. This is also the time when my parents divorced. So I'm sure that had something to do with it. But essentially I started to have this feeling that I was not being treated fairly by the education system. And, you know, there were a bunch of things that went into that. You know, I started a speech and debate camp to raise money for our school speech and debate program. And the school was constantly trying to prevent us from raising the money by throwing up all these ridiculous rules in our face. I was in the principal's office regularly because we would go to tournaments around the country without chaperones, and that's against the school rules, even though chaperones cost a lot of money. And it seems silly. We were 14 to 16 years old. And I get that for most people that's an odd time to be traveling, but we had already traveled a bunch. We knew exactly how to get in and out of airports and go to tournaments on our own. And so we just had a lot of battles with the administration. And I just thought it was so crazy. I was like, you guys are adults. You're supposed to want us to be doing speech and debate. You're supposed to go after the potheads and like the kids who are cutting glass, which, to be fair, I did a little bit of those things too. But most of the time, I was a pretty good kid trying to do entrepreneurial and academic things. And the fact that I was fighting with the administration all the time made me so angry. On top of that, I was fighting with my parents because of all the stuff happening at home. And so it just sort of bubbled into me, I think, and I became frustrated with authority figures that I believe to be no longer benefiting. The goal that they are attempting to benefit. And particularly in education, I think we have a bunch of people who have very good intent but are in systems in which they don't have the courage to do the right thing. And we see that at universities all the time. And we saw that in high school and public high schools and all over the country. So I got really upset about that. At that time, though, I didn't know that entrepreneurship was a real option. So I decided to go to college and try to get a real job. And so it took me four or five years until I realized, oh, there's a whole startup scene out there of people who are starting companies and they raise VC and you don't have to be 30 years old with a master's degree to do it. You could do it as a college dropout or someone who just graduated. So that was a revelation to me in my early 20s. I think I was 21 when I realized this.

Definitely, I can see the burning passion in that voice, right? And saying, hey, I'm going to democratize education. Screw this to some extent. So my wife's a professor, associate professor at Stanford. She teaches medicine. Got into med school in second year of undergrad without MCATs. I didn't finish high school. Okay. And I finagled myself into engineering. So what would most people do if they didn't finish high school? They won't apply to university. I was in Canada. I applied to every single university. Luck would have it, one university said, do these entrance exams, right? Because that's what they have in Canada. I wrote it, I sent the last year's transcripts, and I had moved from Kuwait in the Middle east, and they said, where are your transcripts? I said, there's political unrest. I made up some stuff. And they said, okay, start the semester, but if you don't give us the transcripts by the end of the month, you're out. You gotta unenroll. Luck would have it, they never followed up. I graduated an engineering degree.

Wow, I love that story, Lloyd, you know, I didn't know the story, but I always felt that hustle in you when we met. I don't know if you felt the same, but I'm not surprised that there's a story like that behind the man.

Luck and risk are two sides of the same coin. The ones that get lucky are the ones that never stop flipping. Like you, right? And so my wife and I always had loggerheads because I'm like, I don't believe unless you want to be a doctor or some regulated industry, you don't have to go to school, like. And they teach you the same old thing. So I'm glad that Udemy existed. I learned a ton from Udemy, because one of the courses that I absolutely loved until today I recommend is Janice Fraser's course on how to build seven steps to building a startup. Like, how do you validate it? How do you wireframe? I think it's the first course I took when I did my first startup, right. I learned how to do user interviews and wireframe. So he's a fanboy here, right?

And.

And I still today recommend that course to everyone because founders, right, they want to do a startup, but they don't know how. And the first thing I tell them is, as a founder, you're not only selling, you're part salesperson and you're part product manager. So go take, do your. Do yourself a favor and take this course from Janice Fraser on how to build a startup. And that's like product fundamentals, basically seven essential steps for startups, which teaches you how to do discovery and validation and customer interviews and wireframes and pretty much pass it to your devs. And then the other course I pass is your how to raise funding course. So tell us that, because in the early days of Udemy, you guys weren't getting traction or something wasn't happening, that you're now a month away from running out of money and have to get jobs. So, yes, you gotta do fundraising, but you also have to get traction. What was that tipping point that made it explode?

Yeah. So we ended up raising a million dollar seed round. It was on a 2.4 million cap, just to give people some perspective. And we then went to work and we decided that we would stay lean, just the three co founders, no, no additional hires or anything. And we would try to get traction. And we spent months doing everything we possibly could. We hired a bunch of interns who would mass email anyone who was teaching online already. And remember in 2008, there were very few people teaching online. Okay. This was not a huge thing at that time. So we were messaging all these people with these janky websites, like professors from random universities or school teachers or just aficionados of a certain subject area. And we were just not getting anywhere. We tried to do poker, we tried to do dating. We tried to do, I think we did like, music. We did languages. Nothing was working. And then finally one day, actually we got introduced to someone. We had a fourth bedroom and our house. And so me, okay, Aaron, that's three bedrooms. And we had a fourth. And we thought, well, we better start renting this bedroom so we can make some money. We had a million dollar seed round, but we were very frugal. And so we. We found someone. His name was Chris McCann, and he was running the startup newsletter. At that time, newsletters were very new. This was a huge revelation that you could build a business on a newsletter, okay? And they did not have monetization figured out. There was no one sponsoring newsletters at the time. So they were just building this newsletter. It was becoming 50,000, 60,000 people, and they were living in our house. And so basically two startups, Udemy and Startup Digest, were started out of the same house. And at one point I went over to him and said, hey, I wonder, like, if we ran a course that targeted your audience, would you be interested in that? And Chris was like, sure. Chris was in the attitude of, I'll try anything, like, he didn't care either. And so Chris and I got together and we said, okay, why don't we create a course that's going to be for your newsletter? Chris was working on his newsletter. So I went and created this course and I thought, okay, what do startup people want to learn most of all? How to raise money. It's like the number one question I get is from anyone who is starting the startup is how do I raise money? So we decided to put together a course. Funny enough, our instructors, you know, Naval Dave McClure, all these famous investors at the time, they were investors in Udemy, and they did not want to sit in front of a camera and record themselves speaking. They refused. They were investors in our company. I was like, what the hell? They wouldn't do it. So we said, all right, you guys speak at events all the time. So what if we hosted an event series and I interviewed you and we filmed that and then we put that online. And so we hosted an event series. We sold tickets for nothing. We hosted our lawyer's office and then stuck a camera in the back of the room, and that was the first course on Udemy that was successful and we promoted on Startup digest, gave them 50% of the revenue, we took 50% of the revenue, and all of a sudden we made like 20 grand or something. And to go from zero to I think it was 20 grand roughly, in like a matter of a week or two, was just such a thrilling experience that we thought, okay, we're onto something. And it took a few more months before we realized exactly how to replicate that, because that event strategy was very slow, right? And so then it take us a few more weeks to start a course on hiring. And then we did a course on pr. And those courses didn't do nearly as well as the fundraising course, so we were a little concerned. But the fundraising course kept selling as well. And then we found more newsletters to sell those courses on. And then we thought, okay, well, we have enough courses. Why don't we have enough newsletters that are interested in doing this? What if we went and actually found an instructor to teach a course dedicated to these audiences and that is actually screen recorded and done over a camera instead of an event? And that's when we really started to.

Take off some key learnings here. One is maniacal focus on an ideal customer profile, understanding their needs and goals and aspirations, like which you inadvertently did because you tried all these other things and then you said, hey, what if we build for your newsletter? So you went an inch wide and a mile deep there in probably a moment of desperation when you're running out of money. The other thing, what people don't realize the value of email is huge, right? We built Traction literally on email, and it's 120,000 subscribers today. But initially it was a newspaper blog where people were applying to be on startup of the week. And then we started emailing them to come to our events and it started growing. Today, when you post on LinkedIn and you post on TikTok, you may have an audience, but if you don't have their email addresses, that's not a community for you that you can sell to. Right? It becomes very, very hard. People don't realize, hey, I'm going to just post it on LinkedIn and post it on TikTok. How do you convert that? Your email is more likely to convert, and I want to bring that attention again is like even building traction, even building my company Boast and the new book I launched became a bestseller in Wall Street Journal in a week. It was all email. 90% of the conversions came through email. So thank you for sharing that. So you found A newsletter, found more newsletters and grew. What was the next inflection point at Udemy and why did you choose to leave the day to day? What circumstances led to that?

So first of all, I'll say that you're totally right about email. Even today at Maven, about half or more. We don't have good tracking for our instructors when they're promoting, but I would guess over half of our sales come from email. I know that internally Maven sales that we drive for our instructors are over half from email. So you're totally right. Even in the modern social media era where we have hundreds of thousands of followers on our accounts, it doesn't matter. Email's still the biggest. Udemy went through a major growing period after we hit that aha moment of okay, if we pair emails with courses, email newsletters with courses, we could help these newsletters monetize and we can get more courses on board. And so we slowly but surely got more courses on board by telling them, hey, if you build this course, we have an email newsletter that we're sponsoring in three weeks. By the way, none of these were sponsored and paid. They were all affiliate deals, so they were all percentage based. But we have in the email newsletter going out in three weeks, we have one going on in six weeks. Which one do you want to be in and can you commit to a launch date for your course? And so we would work one on one in the beginning, but then slowly over time with more and more instructors and more and more email newsletters. And then of course we had to expand because email newsletters started to tap out. Felt like that was limited in how big it could get. I think we got to a few million run rate just off of email newsletters. And then we started to expand beyond that to paid acquisition, to PR and other marketing channels. And the company kept growing and growing. And then we raised a series A. And after the series A we realized that we kept growing and growing and then this moment where the team was about 20, 25 people and I was running half the team and Aaron was running half the team. And there was a fair bit of tension between me and Aaron at this point. I don't think we had really properly built the trust around our management styles and how we wanted to run a team. We were really good when it was just a couple of us. And I was a much more hard charging leader than Aaron was. And so Aaron, I think felt like I was a little too hard charging. And we certainly had some employees who felt the same. And I think that's true. I think that honestly I was a little too hard charging at times. And I learned a lot growing out of just not being so stressed every day helped me grow. But essentially that came to a head and Aaron felt like he had to make a decision of whether to continue to work with me and help us meld our management styles, or for Aaron to basically just be able to run the company on his own. And he made the decision to run the company on his own.

You know what's really interesting is I find great relationships, great companies that last, are built on great alignment. But when you are surviving, you're starving, there's no money, you don't think about values, it's not like a natural reflex. But then when you start to thrive, it's like, I care about these things and I care about those things. And that comes into foray and you start to friction. Talk about that for a second because you worked for a while together. But then it eventually came to a head. Did you guys just ignore these issues in the beginning? And how do you advise founders now to build lasting relationships?

A few things. One, it's very hard to predict what is going to happen in the future. And I think it's totally fine for co founders to have falling out and just for co founders to leave at some point, even if it's not because of the falling out, just because it's their time to leave or they have another opportunity that comes up or whatever. So I actually work with seven other co founders over my career and today I'm only working with one of them. Right. So all the other six, either I left or they left and that's just how this works. That's totally fine. The second thing I'll say is that when a co founding relationship is being built, a couple things really need to be solidified. You need to have a clear understanding of who's in charge and that person needs to be the right person to be in charge. And you need to have a clear division of responsibilities between you and that people. That's item one. Item two is that you really have to align on the type of company culture you want to build and agree to disagree in certain moments and let one person be themselves and let the other person be themselves when they need to be. So this is a very difficult thing to do over time because over time there are tension points in company culture and it's hard to predict what they're going to be. But you know, examples are, how political are you going to be? That was a big thing over the last five or ten years. Another example is how are you going to deal with low performers, how quickly are you going to let them go, how gracefully, et cetera. Other challenges are how, how are you going to make decisions about personnel decisions when one person is CEO and the other person is just co founder, does the CEO always decide or does the co founder have significant role in it? Will the co founder be willing to let go when the CEO makes a decision? The co founder doesn't like those things that come up around culture and values and decision making, then the third thing is you just have to build deep trust and you have to get through adversity. And so I think that third one is very much impacted by external factors like whether you have coaches, factors like whether or not you have investors who are good at mediating between co founders, factors like whether or not you two are under a lot of stress in your lives, or whether you're like more calm. I think stressed co founders are more likely to fight just because it's not about the relationship. It's actually just about external factors. So those are some thoughts on building great co founder relationships, but I would say it's a hard, ongoing journey. I've only been married for a year, but I've been together with my wife now for five. And I'd say it's similar. We are constantly going to couples therapy where we're having conversations with friends about our relationship and we're talking amongst ourselves. And luckily we've been able to get through a lot of difficult moments in our lives. Not together really, but more in our lives. But we've done them together and that has made us stronger. And so I feel like co founding relationships and marriages are really not that different. With the one key difference that makes, in a lot of ways a big difference, is that marriages are for life. And co founder relationships can have natural endings. And it's more.

Okay, what led to Sprig and how were you more deliberate about co founders?

So Sprig was a product of, in retrospect, I can say a bit of envy because I had been building Udemy for a long time and it was a grind every day. And then after starting the Growth Hackers conference, I spent six months consulting at Lyft. And when I was at Lyft, I saw a company that was just blowing up. It had real product market fit. People just kept using it and I thought to myself, wow, this model is so much better than Udemy. It's growing so much faster. And. And I think that they were onto something. And a friend of mine at the same time reached out to me and said, hey, what do you think about food? And I thought, oh yeah, we could build lift for food. That'd be interesting. And so we ended up figuring out what lift for food might look like and we came up with the idea for Sprig. I think the problem with Sprig was that from the beginning we were always looking to other companies and trying to build business like other companies, which is a tendency I have in general to analogize. I think it's very powerful, but sometimes it can be a miss. And we tried to build Sprig a bit like Lyft plus Amazon for food. And so that was both very strong because the value proposition was amazing. And it took off like wildfire in the beginning, but it led to a foundation that wasn't as strong as maybe Udemy, where it was really just a burning internal desire to see this thing in the world. On the co founder side at Sprague, I viewed it more like a recruitment process. So I did not view it like I was making a lifelong commitment to co founders and I had controlling equity stake in the company and I was clearly CEO. And I made that clear from day one. And I found people who wanted to follow me and who I wanted to work with, who I wanted to learn from and work with. And I found two people other than my friend. So my friend, childhood friend, we started together, still had the relationship where I was clearly CEO in part because I was afraid that if I did not set that relationship up that way, we might end up having a falling out. And he's one of my best friends. I live five minutes from him. I see him every week, even today. So I really wanted to preserve that relationship. And then the other two we recruited to be, you know, engineer and product lead. And they were recruited because they were going to be great at zero to one building. And that's like an executive hiring process more than anything else.

So then why call them co founders and give them like co founder equity?

It's a great question. I think there's something about my personality that I prefer to be in it with other people. And I also am not that greedy. I like to be fair. So I don't want to act like I don't want what I deserve. I do believe in that and I believe everyone should try to get what they deserve. But I really try not to overstep on that and try to just keep everything for myself. And so I think that's been a positive and A serious negative for me in my career. I felt like, look, I want to do whatever I can to optimize for the chance that this company gets off the ground quickly and effectively. And it's very, very difficult to hire first employees that are going to have the ownership level and the sort of hustle of early co founders. So even if you hire them, the fact that they are co founders makes them much more incentivized to care and to hustle and to get the company off the ground. And I think that's been true so far. I think that the co founders that I've worked with have all been instrumental in getting the company from 0 to 60. I don't know what the counterfactual would be if I didn't have co founders. I've seen some people do it. It seems a lot harder, honestly. So these were real co founders. They just weren't permanent in my mind. They were never necessarily permanent team members. They would have to grow to the next stage and the next stage of the business. And if they grew, they'd be at the company for a long, long time. But if they didn't, it's okay. It's okay for people to be at companies for two, three, four years and then turn over. And I, I believe that in part because of my experience at Udemy. You know, I left Udemy after three years and Aaron and Oktai left after year five and the company is 15 years later. You know, it's public company doing 700 million in revenue and everything's going pretty well in spite of our departures.

I think like early founders are pirates and there comes a time where you have to transition to being the Navy. And I think folks with our DNA don't want to ever transition to being the Navy. You've left the day to day of the company and somebody has taken your role. How do you like, mentally reconcile with that? Did that bother you ever?

Of course it totally bothered me. I think it's natural. No one likes to be replaced. I think you have to come to terms with the fact that you were good at a certain part of the company's life cycle. And there's other things that you're maybe not the best suited for. And also you have to come to terms with the fact that life is unpredictable and you just don't really know what's going to happen. And sometimes things happen that are maybe not the right decision or even right thing, but they happened. And you have to accept, you have to learn acceptance. So, you know, each time I've left the company. At Udemy it was because, you know, Aaron let me go. And then at Sprig it was because I shut it down. In both cases, I took periods of time for self reflection and recovery. After Udemy, the reason I built the Growth Hackers conference was because I needed money, but I didn't want to get a job very quickly and I wanted to basically not work very hard. And so I thought, oh, I'll start a conference and I'll make 10, 20 grand. We made more than that, luckily, and it was a nice experience. But keep in mind that 1020 grand was enough for me at that time. You know, like I went and traveled. I spent time with my girlfriend who was going off to med school. So that was kind of a, a tumultuous time in my life for that reason as well. And ultimately I rested and got back and built my confidence back up and then went built another company. And then between Sprig and Maven, I probably spent three to six months licking my wounds. And then I spent almost two years just traveling for fun. I had three years in between Spring and Maven, which is crazy if you think about it. It's a really long time to not be working and to just be wandering about. But it was so powerful for me and it gave me a lot of appreciation for the fact that life is like much more complicated and there's a lot more beauty in life aside from just building companies. And I appreciate all of those things. I think that helps you get over departures.

I understand, man. You know, all my life I was piss poor living on my wife's money. Grew up in Kuwait. My parents were from the slums of Mumbai. Never had money. But I had one thing constant, the community around me. And I was happy one time where I made millions when I sold half the company. I ended up depressed, face planted because I left the day to day and the growth equity guys brought in new leadership and I felt I lost my identity. And I went on this journey of self reflection and probably almost went crazy. And what brought me back to sanity was a group of people, fitness, community, right? And so I completely empathize when I hear everything you say. What led to you shutting down Sprigdo? I was so in love with the product. It was like my lunch every day. And I can even remember some of the dishes right there was this Moroccan dish, dish right there was this Turkish. Like you've been inadvertently part of my journey in many ways. One, the Udemy. I told you the courses, the two courses that I took that shaped me when I was doing Speakeasy. Sprig was pretty much part of my daily lunches in that you had the nice green bag. All right. And then of course, when you're starting traction, you gave me great advice on structuring the content, although we couldn't work together on it. So you've been part of my journey in some way or the other in the background. So I'm curious what made you shut down? And that would have been very hard because you raised a lot of money.

Yeah, we had raised 60 million. We got up to about a 20, 22 million run rate of revenue. So the company was pretty big. At its peak, we think it was the largest restaurant in San Francisco in terms of number of diners and in terms of dollars of revenue both. And we also had operations in Chicago and Palo Alto. And at our peak, we had over a thousand delivery professionals working for us. So part time employees, they were employees at the company. And then we had roughly 300 full time employees between our kitchens, which was like 250 and then 50 in the headquarters. So it was a big operation. And then UberEats launched. And when Uber Eats launched, we started to see our revenue dip. It took us a long time to make that connection, by the way. We didn't know that it was Uber Eats that was the reason why our revenue was dipping. But we went from growing every single week for two and a half years straight to starting to decline every single week for what ended up being a year and a half straight. And I did not handle that emotionally well at all. My identity was so in sprag. And the fact that it was going well and the fact that I was building a meaningful, important business that when it started to fall apart, I think I really had a bit of a personal crisis almost. And I had trouble with the fact that over the next year and a half we had to make a lot of tough decisions. And I consistently made compromised decisions. Instead of shutting it down and starting over or just like making a big cut, at one point we made small cuts. We shut down Chicago, then we shut down Palo Alto, then we got rid of the bikers because of the insurance costs. Every month we'd find out that we had another literally half million dollar bill from the government or from our workers compensation or something that we didn't expect. And we had to settle for an employee lawsuit. And it was just hit after hit. Every couple months I was letting go of people. We were constantly in emergency meetings. And it took a real toll on me. I Didn't realize that. I think there were a bunch of mistakes there. One was when things are not going well, it's hard, it takes months, but it doesn't need to be a year and a half of you realizing, hey, this business is really not going to work out the way it is. And so we did a bunch of pivots, but all the pivots were small pivots. We were still making the food and delivering the food and as long as we were making the food and delivering the food, we were a certain type of business that was inevitably going to fail, I think. And so we should have changed one of those variables. And we just, we tried different things to change that variable but we didn't try, we didn't get there and eventually we just ran out of energy. By the end we had maybe 20, 25 employees in the office, maybe another 20 or 30 in the kitchen and then I don't remember so I can't tell you for sure. And then we had probably like a hundred, two hundred delivery folks at that time. And so the team was a lot smaller. We were doing four and a half million run rate by the time we shut down a year and a half later. So every month or two we were laying some group off of the company, we were shutting down a division or we were trying to get everyone to hustle towards a pivot. Sometimes all those things at once. I think I ran out of energy after a year and a half of that.

Anyone would. That's what when we were doing spreakeasy eating Sprig every day we were AI driven, calling app for salespeople and the thing wouldn't work. This is 2015 and finally everyone ran out of energy and we didn't raise a bridge round and shut it down. So I feel that pain. I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomena. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness.com the digital copy is on for 99 cents. What is the key? Learning. Looking back, what would you do differently at Sprig? Not launch in a market where there's a big incumbent or how would you change that? I mean have you ever gone back and reflected?

I reflected a lot on this. It's been, I don't know, eight years since we shut it down. So maybe seven. So a couple thoughts on that. First is I think that what the business required of me, I was not the best fit to be running that business. So different businesses have different skills that make them successful, like skills from their founders. In the Udemy and Maven world, it's a bit of an instinct on learning. Of course, you have to be a lifelong learner. You probably have to be, and this is me describing myself, so it's a sample size of 1, but a bit of a lifelong learner. You have to be someone who is a fairly good salesperson because you're going to sell a lot of instructors on a dream. And then you have to be really good at marketing. Those are the three key skills. For example, product not that important at Udemy and Maven. I think we have an amazing product at Maven. But as a founder, as CEO, I did not have to be an amazing product visionary. I had to be decent because I had to have the instincts of a lifelong learner. And that led to the product decisions. But I didn't have to be maniacal about it. I didn't have to be great at viral growth. I don't have to be great at fundraising because neither of these companies, Udemy nor Maven, are really, they are capital intensive. And Udemy has certainly raised a lot of money, but it's not as important now. If you switch that to Sprig. One of the things Sprig had to be is you had to be extremely operationally efficient. I am the opposite of an operationally efficient guy. I waste money all the time. In my personal life, I'm someone who just like, who doesn't care about eking out 5% or 10% gains. And that's one of the big things you need to do in food. You need to be maniacal about every single detail. I'm not detail oriented. I'm a big picture guy. And if I. If. And if I'm not a big picture guy, I'm detail oriented for periods of time. I'm a sprinter, not a marathoner. And so marketing's great. Sprint for a marketing milestone. Get something out the door and then maybe optimize every two to three weeks. But like, you pushed it. Live food isn't great every single day. You have a new fire that you need to deal with and you need to keep the quality high while keeping the prices low. That is a very difficult thing. And then the third thing is that I would say that in food you have to have a real instinct for quality and quality has to be your number one instinct. Whereas in education, your number one instinct has to be product positioning and marketing. So I was not as good at thinking about how do I just make this product amazing that the food product amazing as I am at how do I make sure that we have great courses on our platform. Those are different instincts and different types of person. So I just don't think I was the right fit to build a big restaurant. The second thing was we shouldn't have built a big restaurant in the first place. It's not venture capital friendly. Restaurants take two to three years to nail their operations before they can scale. And the problem is that on a venture speed timeline, you need to start scaling within the first year or two of getting traction and then you need to keep scaling because you need to get to a billion dollars in 10 years. That is the goal. And I think restaurants are more like, if you're lucky, $1 billion in 15 to 20 years. So they are doable. You can get to that size, but it's hard to do it on a venture speed. And then the third thing is we just didn't predict how the competitive landscape was going to play out. Uber Eats did not exist when we started Sprig and Doordash and Postmates had a lot of flaws that they slowly improved over time. So as those companies got bigger and better, their products got better and better. As Sprig got bigger and better, bigger. It got worse, the product got worse. More food being cooked in a kitchen means lower quality unless you really nail it. Whereas more delivery drivers means faster deliveries. So DoorDash and Postmate started with really long delivery times and really expensive delivery, but they kept making it better and they cut the delivery time and cut the dollars per delivery. And Spring had the challenge of we were betting more on the food than we were on the operations and the food or the we were betting on the food operations rather than the delivery operations. And the food operations was very reliant upon being small scale.

You are trying to build a restaurant and DoorDash at the same time. And maybe there's also that divided focus, right? And focus is everything. Probably in the early days, you're probably running in two different directions. Do I make the delivery product better? Do I make the food product better? And those are two distinct problems, as you probably saw with DoorDash and Uber Eats. So you shut that down. What led you to Maven? There's some similarities between Maven and Udemy. So let's talk about that. And what are you doing differently this time?

Yeah. What led me to Maven was I was literally reflecting on it this morning. I was like, wow, I really am someone who loves learning. So right now, just to give you an example, Lloyd, in the last year I took a 12 week cooking course. I've taken two maven courses. I'm in a year long leadership development program. I've hired a private coach for soccer, I have a private coach for my fitness and nutrition, and I have a private coach for tennis. And so that's what I'm doing right now as CEO. Those are all the different things that I'm learning. So what led me to Maven was I was in a period of transition. I'd taken two years for a full sabbatical. No work, nothing. And then I spent a year trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And while I was trying to figure out what I would want to do next, I was taking all sorts of online and in person courses. And I was like reading lots of books and just trying different things out, trying experiments. And I realized how much I love this new way to learn on the Internet over zoom. And this is before the pandemic started 2019. So I remember just being so enamored by how powerful and how connected I felt to people, even though I was doing this call in my at that time girlfriends dorm room in Oxford. This is crazy. I'm halfway across the world. I'm connected with these people in Austin, in New York and San Francisco, and some of them are from Australia. And we're all learning how to write together in this class that I was taking. And I just thought it was super powerful and I wanted to bring it to the world. And then I spent about six months figuring out different ways to bring it to the world. And finally I thought, oh, I just need to do something like Udemy. Like, I actually thought we would do something like Substack or Patreon originally. And so I thought, oh, let me just empower all these Internet creators to like teach and they'll monetize super well. And that was the start of Maven.

What is fundamentally different between Maven and Udemy?

The number one difference is that it's cohort based learning. So I believe strongly that it is very hard to learn as a single player in single player mode. When you're in single player mode, you have to wake up every day, you have to watch. In the case of Udemy, you have to watch videos, then you have to go and practice it and it shows in the completion rates. It's just very hard to get through all of that. And particularly for busy professionals, that is not a very attractive way to learn things. And most professionals, particularly ones who are more successful and more busy, tend not to do things that aren't on their calendars or that they do not have some time pressure or motivation pressure to do. We generally, as humans, learn less effectively as we get older and less on our own. And so the power of Maven is that we're entirely focused on this idea of a cohort, which is that you take the course with other people at the same time. It has a start and an end date. And that is the fundamental kernel of the idea. So all Maven courses have a start time, a start date and an end date. They have asynchronous material you can review and learn from, videos, presentations, you can access them anytime. But the instructor's going to be live teaching this over the course of two weeks or over the course of two days, or over the course of three weeks or six weeks. And that creates a system that has a much higher chance that you will actually learn the material, that you will implement the material in your job and that you will finish the course. And that's super important. It's like a 20x improvement in the completion rates. So it's not even close.

I completely agree. Right. Anytime you bring people together to learn together, it's now not a one way conversation, it's multi way. And that's a community in a, in a nutshell. And people learn better together. It's like you're in an environment where other people are doing the same thing. And that motivates you, pushes you further. It's like I live in Dubai right now, I live on the beach, I was in horrible shape and now I'm 10, 12% body fat. But I'm just surrounded by fit people. And so being in that environment forces me to do this. I'm on a sabbatical. So much like you, I do gymnastics, I have a personal trainer, I have a gymnastics coach, I have a dance coach for Latin dancing, I have a Bollywood dance coach. And then I wrote the book in the year and a half sabbatical and then let's see where it goes. So a lot of what you're saying resonates and I tell people this, Take time for yourself, don't just go on the hamster wheel again. Because whatever you do in your personal time, the things that you learn outside of work will expand your brain. The self care is not selfish, right? Make you stronger in many ways. So you had this great post about minimum viable product versus minimum viable test. Talk about that and how you leverage the MVT minimum viable test.

At Maven, the idea is that a minimum viable product implies that from the day that you start a company, you are going to be building upon an existing kernel. So you build a minimum viable product and you add more and more features and eventually you get to the final destination of having product market fit. The challenge that I have with that is I think it's not actually the way it works and I think that it reduces the chance of success because you feel like you have to stick with whatever minimum viable product you start with. And so I created this idea in my head of minimum viable tests, where instead of trying to build the whole product, you just test different assumptions that you have about your product. So MVP theory to begin with was always about this idea of stack ranking all the risks and assumptions that you have for your business and then starting to test them in the real world. All I'm changing is instead of testing them all in one mvp, test them independently in different ways with minimum viable tests. So an example in the Maven case, we believe strongly that cohort based courses, that creators should create cohort based courses and that we would help them monetize their audiences accordingly. And so there's a lot of assumptions in there. One, would they want to create cohort based courses? Two, are co op based courses actually effective? Three, can we monetize cohort based courses? Four, are there enough creators out there who want to teach co op based courses and so on and so forth. And traditional MVP might be a first course partner with the creator, launch a course and like try to make it as successful as possible and start building the product while you're doing it. And then slowly over the next couple of weeks and months, make that creator more and more happy and build more and more features for them and then eventually launch it to multiple other people. And I think that puts the cart before the horse because you're already on the hamster wheel of building a company before you're sure whether this is a company you want to build. And so instead I chunk it out. And what we did at Maven was I took cohort based courses that was a form of a test. And I interviewed the people who were taking co based courses. As part of my research, I taught a cohort based course myself. That course is not really anything like what Maven is today, but it allowed me to test the monetization it allowed me to test the value of potentially having software. It allowed me to test the understanding that I would have of the business, whether I would like the business or not. And then I did other tests. I did tests where I tried to partner with a creator to sell a course after I had done all these original tests. And so these are all sort of isolated tests. They're not all building upon each other. And then finally at some point I said, okay, now I'm going to actually launch an mvp. And that MVP comes after you've done a bunch of testing. And it becomes much more likely that your MVP will be successful if you've done a bunch of small scale tests in advance because you have a bunch of insights from those tests now still, after that Maven's first minimum bio product, it did grow really, really fast. You know, we grew to like 4 million plus run rate in the first four or five months. But it hit a big wall. And so actually, even after all that, you don't have 100% chance of success. You still have to innovate and edit and modify your strategy a little bit to get to the next step. But you have a much better chance of getting to the first set of traction if you don't just have a vision and try to test it with an MVP and then keep building on it, but instead you test different minimum viable tests. You will allow it to be more meandering and then eventually you get there.

How did you get to 4 or 5 million run rate in the 4 or 5 months? That is insanity.

We planned the company to be focused on this idea that we would monetize creators audiences. It was 2021 when the market was really high and consumer demand for becoming better at technology skills was really high. And most tech people felt like they were flush with cash. They're just spending money on anything. So we raised money from a bunch of creators. Li Jin, Lenny Rancicki, Anthony Pompliano, Sean Puri. All these people became investors in the company. We told them, hey, if you invest, you're committing to teaching a course, or you're at least committing to like having multiple conversations with me about teaching a course. And so we made it a requirement of investment. And so in the first six months of the company, we were able to launch a bunch of courses with people who had extremely rabid popular followings on startups in the startup tech ecosystem. And those courses took off. And so those courses were making a lot of money in the first six months. And turns out that those ended up being difficult Supply side marketplace instructors for us, creators are not used to having scheduled meetings on their calendar. And so teaching live courses is not really in their workflow. They much prefer to put out content, even if they're spending more time on it. They'd prefer the flexibility of putting out content when they feel like it, et cetera. And so they were much more accustomed to asynchronous sort of courses. And so they, a lot of them churned. But we did get it off the ground and we got a lot of email addresses from the instructors promoting it to their audiences. And then we built the product more and it was more until year two or three when we started to really see really resonance with an instructor base. And now our instructor base includes creators. But the creators have to have some sort of professional experience, serious professional experience. They need to have been a CPO or a head of marketing or whatever at a name brand company. Because we find that if they don't have that, they don't care as much. They tend to be creators who don't have that. They don't care that much about the outcome or the impact they're having. They care more about reach and numbers. The instructors we have now have been like CPO at meetup, VP Marketing at Stripe or PM Lead at Stripe. Those instructors tend to be more motivated by the impact they can have on an actual student. And they tend to be more attractive to the person out there who's trying to learn product management skills, managing up better communication, Figma design systems, the various skills that we think are much more marketable to mid career professionals who are our main target audience. So we made a big pivot over that time. But it all started with this creator mentality to begin with.

You know, that's a good way to start, right? And you tap into the audiences of people who have large audiences and those people want to listen to them beyond just the YouTube videos and the sub stacks and the LinkedIn posts. They want to have a deeper, meaningful connection with them. And they'll pay to be in their circumference once a week. I paid. I actually did a course on video content creation with Nas Daily Nasir Yasin, who's got 20 plus million followers. And I gladly did it. I did Ali Abdel's course because I follow, I like these people and I'm like, you know what? I'm doing nothing with my time. What better way to upskill and learn? So I just missed on this journey of learning. I totally understand, but at one point you gotta pivot and I guess you're right. Most creators don't wanna be tied to their calendar, so it's a hard thing to do. But a lot of professionals, they work off their calendars real quick.

Lloyd. I thought I'd add. It's funny enough that literally this week we are now launching the ability for instructors to have what we call hybrid courses. So courses that do have a lot of asynchronous content and synchronous content. And this is an interesting lesson for your audience because I was fairly dogmatic when we started the company about having creators. I thought they would be a better audience for us. And I sort of ignored the professional creator or even just the experienced professional or retired professional audience. I also ignored hybrid courses and asynchronous content. And now we're launching a product because so many of our students actually prefer to have a combination of live and asynchronous content. So now I think that actually the product is much more attractive to creators because we've seamlessly integrated these two things. And depending on the creator, some of them are mostly building courses that are asynchronous with videos and documents and projects. And then they have projects that students actually submit, create and submit. And then they have live sessions as Q and A, or they do some discussions, hosted discussions over live sessions. And then other instructors are much more live session focused. And so we allow the instructor to choose a lot more. And it's been very powerful because I think the students also like it more, which I didn't expect. So it's funny to see how companies evolve over time. You know, as you start to learn more about your customer base and you start to narrow it on a segment that you think is working and maybe in that phase right now of feeling like know what's working and we're doubling down on it, you know, if you.

Follow your customers pains and goals, but also aspirations, you'll build multiple products. On that journey, a lot of us just focus on the problem at hand versus the aspirations. I love how you're going about this. Now. You built the audience, so are you driving now? Because the audience to these new creators that are professionals because compared to creators who have huge audiences and they're coming with thousands if not millions of followers, these professionals who are CPOs at XYZ companies may not have as big an audience. So then how are you driving them growth?

That's right. So we built a marketplace and Maven is now a full on marketplace where students every day who go to maven.com, i'm amazed that hundreds of thousands of people checking out and saying, hey, I want to learn X, Y or Z course. I want to learn X, Y or Z thing in my job. I'm like, I want to get promoted in the next year, or I want to get promoted in the next two years. I want to be on track for that promotion. And they go to Maven and they find courses that might be a fit for them. Maybe they need to learn, like I said earlier, communication skills, maybe they need to learn data skills if they're PMs, maybe they are in marketing and they want to learn, they want to deepen their ability to do a B testing. And we recruit instructors who have deep experience at Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, and also smaller companies like Stripe or Airtable or Zapier or whatever. And these instructors come on Maven and they teach courses to these professionals to help them level up their skills. And so, yes, we now have an active audience of professionals who are on Maven. It's still a little bit of a hybrid. A lot of our instructors do have some audience online, but they can have like a few thousand followers on LinkedIn or they can have an email newsletter with a few hundred of their friends. They don't have to have a real audience. They can just have connections. If you are someone who's a CPO at a famous tech company, right, even if you don't have an email list or a Twitter following or a LinkedIn following, you have credibility, high resonance amongst the people who you are connected to. You've built a connection. And often that can be enough to build your first couple cohorts, especially because Maven will also help market your cohort at the same time. And so Maven provides a marketplace to help these people. But also, it's surprising to us, you could have a hundred thousand followers and sell nothing, and you could have no followers and sell 10 or 20 grand in your first cohort. And that has been in large part because people who are experts, other people know that they're experts and want to learn from them. And so even if only like a few hundred people see that course, in the case where there's an expert, they still are the ones who are going to buy. Whereas even if a hundred thousand people see it, in the case of a creator, if that creator doesn't have as much credibility or they've done a lot of creator hacking to get that follower list, they actually could potentially not sell their course at all.

Now, you guys have only done your last round of Series A, or did you raise after that correct.

We just raised a Series A.

Awesome. And at what point do you feel you had product market fit and product channel or go to market fit or is that still evolving for you?

I think it's always hard to tell in the moment. We definitely had a little bit of an inflection point recently, so I'm hoping that we are on the right track. But I think it'll take me two years to look back and then say, hey, yeah, that was the moment. Because I don't like to. I think it's really silly to act like you have it when you don't. And right now I don't think we really know. We are definitely transacting a significant volume, millions of dollars a quarter now of transactions. And so people are buying courses in mass and instructors are making a good amount of money. On our platform, we have many people are making 50, 100 even. We have a few people making a million dollars a year. So. So it's like it's working. We're a far cry away from Udemy 700 million in revenue. So we got a long way to go to get there. And somewhere along the way I might feel a little more confident about our product market fit. But for now we're going to keep iterating and modifying, trying to improve. And I'm amazed. Lloyd, one thing I will say you mentioned Nas Academy. I love Nucyre. I'm an investor in his company, he's an investor in ours and I've really enjoyed watching him. I'm quite proud of the fact though that Maven has stayed steady and stuck with the cohort based courses thing because I think the compounding value of building towards the same product offering has really created an amazing end product. And we have changed the target customers, the instructors and the students a little bit over time, but we haven't changed the core product offering. And I'm very happy about that because I will say that having done this now for two and a half years of building product, three years since we started the company, I think that the product has really come a long way and it's much more powerful than it would be if we had made a bunch of pivots along the way.

Certainly sometimes, you know, consistently on small actions lead to big outcomes over time and what we call overnight success is nothing but compound interest. On consistency, you have that vision, you believe in it. There's no point in pivoting. If it is working, you're getting some pull, right? But what are some metrics? Then you stay on top because this is not a traditional SaaS business. A person who takes a course may go through that cohort and choose to never take a course again. So what are the key metrics for a business like this?

And we look at a bunch of standard marketplace metrics. So we look at obviously GMV growth, gross merchandise value, which is how much money is being transacted on the marketplace in a given week, month, quarter day, year. We look at retention rates. So of instructors who make a certain amount of money, how many of them retain of the cohort of instructors who started in Q1, how much money they made in Q1, how much do they make in Q2, how much do they make in q3? Of our users, we check how quickly they buy a second or third course. You're right that it is not a super high frequency product. But we are seeing a group of students who buy two to three a year, which is really awesome to see because these are short, right? LLOYD these are two to three week courses, usually maybe even two days, and they take maybe six to 15 to 20 hours to complete. Some of them are much more in depth than that, but the majority of them are in that range. And so you can, if you're a growing professional who really is ambitious, then you might take two to three courses a year. You know you're currently taking like four different fitness. I noticed I'm including dance and fitness, four different dance, fitness and gymnastics at the same time. There are lots of people who have that type of ambition. They really just are driven. And so that cohort of people is looking pretty good. But we have a lot to work on still and we're going to continue to grow. And then the final thing is we look at completion rates and ratings. So even if you never take a cohort again, if you gave us a 9 or a 10 out of 10 and the course has positive reviews and the people are actually completing the course, that gives us a good indication that the cohort was worthwhile for people.

Top growth frameworks for you and product frameworks for you like that are guiding as you build maven maybe from your learnings across the board over the years.

It's funny to see trends change and how my opinions change. The trends change. I wish that I was someone who isn't always susceptible to it, but I have found myself over the last one to three years becoming much more excited about the idea of product and brand driven marketing than performance marketing. I think when you have a company where you raise a lot of money like Udemy did, and you just keep Raising round after round, you can just pour a third or half of your budget into marketing. And I'm not sure we want to do that. At Maven, we have raised a fair bit of money, 25 million. So if we wanted to, we could keep raising money. But right now, the way we're managing the company is we want to be more brand and product driven. And really that's one of the reasons I'm on this podcast, for example. Lloyd, I do love reconnecting with you, but I also do these things out of making sure I'm thoughtful about my time. And I want to send the message of why Maven is powerful in ways that make people realize that they I, I don't need people to go from this podcast directly into buying the course. I don't need to be able to track that. Instead, I'm going to spend the next year doing a bunch of podcasts, doing some interviews, but more importantly, doing brand marketing of different forms. Blog posts, articles, videos, maybe some paid budget towards it, telling the story of Maven. And it's going to be interesting to see a year from now if that works as a strategy to get more people to Maven, I think it is a chance of success. But a lot of old school marketing people would say that, like, look, how do you know if it's going to work, you know, et cetera. And so I'm putting on faith that if I can win over hearts and minds, that will translate into sales more like at a higher clip, better roas better than if we do it based solely on performance marketing.

I completely agree. Marketing is taking a bloodbath in 2023, right? CPMs are up, conversion rates are down, and so you gotta do new things. And this is a great way. I'll tell you one very interesting thing, actually, to make my book a bestseller. One of the key things I did was I appeared on 80 little over 80 podcasts in the last nine weeks. But leading up to launch, in eight weeks, I appeared on 80 podcasts. So I knew two months ahead that when the launch week was and when we were going to aim for the Wall Street Journal bestseller. So in July, I started recording podcast three four a night. Three four a night. For that I emailed 150 podcasters with a concise email, shared my template, and then scheduled 34 a night. 34 a night. And most of them released the week of launch. I also reached out to key influencers, creators like Neil Patel, right, influencers like him, and asked them to send out an email. And many of them were featured in the book, so they gladly did. And that all came together a week of launch, which led to this. But if you ever want my list of podcasters and the email template, I'll send it to you right after this, because it seems like what you're doing is in line. It'll work. Because not only then did that drive book sales for me, but it actually drove a lot of leads for my company. Most, Yeah, I see that podcasting as a good channel to spread the message and also drive brand awareness and leads in the long term. So this is awesome, man. As you look back at your journey, what was the lowest point and how did you navigate it?

Leaving Udemy, I think that was harder than Sprig, even though Sprig was really hard until that point, I thought of myself as. As a fairly good leader, and I still think that I was actually. But I had some clear flaws that were just slapped in my face, and it made me feel like, wow, I, like, have a lot to work on. And how did I navigate it? I took my time. I let myself lick my wounds. I traveled, spent time with friends, people who didn't care what I was doing for a living. And then I solely did experiments and things that were a little bit easier. So the Growth Hacker Conference, running a conference day in, day out for years, like you have, I'm sure, is a very difficult job. But just running one event, not that difficult compared to running a startup. And so it was an easier thing that could build my confidence. Then I went to Lyft as just basically a regular employee, you know, as a consultant. And that was an easier way to build up my confidence. And so slowly, over time, that built my confidence back up, and I think that was a really valuable part. And then the final thing is I started focusing on my health. I had gained a lot of weight. I know you talked about this as well. I gained a lot of weight working at Udemy. I just ate whatever every single night. And I was dating someone. And so, of course, I had that stupid thing we do sometimes when we date someone, which is we let ourselves go because we know they're gonna be with us regardless. Which. I feel bad that I even did that, but we broke up. You, to me, happened at the same time, and I was like, shit, I gotta get in shape. Like, I. I'm 20. I was, like, 23 years old. Like, I did not. I did not want to be overweight and broke or, like, not having a job or not having purpose for the rest of my life. So I went and was determined to fix that. Luckily, all those things came together and even though Sprint didn't work out, it really did build my confidence back up and was a really great experience for me, a great learning experience. And of course, here we are. And Udemy ended up being quite successful. I'm quite happy with that. And I was able to build a career.

Fantastic. Now, as you talk to young upcoming entrepreneurs, any unconventional advice that founders ignore but shouldn't.

The number one thing is being wary of how much capital you're taking in and whether you should take capital at all. I meet so many people with ideas that are clearly not going to be multi billion dollar companies and they don't really want to. I'll ask them and they'll be honest with me and they'll tell me like, oh, it'd be great if I could sell this for $20 million or $50 million. I'm like, dude, you just can't take venture capital. Like, you can't. It's immoral too, actually. If you're satisfied with an outcome that is like 25 to 50 million and you take venture capital, you're essentially lying to the people who are giving you money because venture investors aren't looking for billion dollar outcomes. And you're also lying to yourself because you're acting like your only option to build this company is if you raise capital. And it's not. You can build businesses without capital. And I've seen lots of people do it. And then for the people who are trying to build multibillion dollar companies, I would say be very wary of dilution because dilution means two things. One, it means your equity stake is worth less and you're relying upon business decisions that have less leverage, which means that slowly, over time, you will dilute yourself more and more. And then the second thing I would concern yourself with is realizing that dilution also means not only do you have lower equity stake in terms of financial outcomes, you also have less power. And so slowly, over time, it won't be your company. And you have to decide if you're comfortable with that. And it's totally fine to decide you're comfortable with that. Lots of great companies have been built, but I think a lot of the healthier companies are ones that have been more conscious about raising the right amount of capital for the right moment and just forcing themselves to be lean and get there.

Fantastic. VC's got a lot of flack. But you know what happens is most founders, they're misguided. Accelerators, advisors, community. What they say is Polish the pitch and the turd to show such a massive tam that you want to win the deal. But founders don't ask themselves, what is my personal definition of success? And that is not money, but how much? What will I do when I have money someday that'll bring me joy? How much money do I need in my bank account to fund that? And is there a version of the company I don't want to work for? And most founders I talk to are fine with, man, 20, 30 million. It's like f you money. I'm never going to spend that. And so they are doing a disservice and they're lying to VCs. But that doesn't get talked about a lot. So I'm glad you brought that up. Anything else as we close out? You'd like to share that you haven't?

Yeah. Dovetailing with that, I'd just say like, you can always do more with less. And hustle is everything. And hustle doesn't need to be working 70, 80 hour weeks. It could be working 50 really smartly. But you need to hustle. This is a job that requires a fire under you to solve problems on a daily basis in clever, unique ways that allow you to gain leverage and provide more value than you are putting in terms of time. And that is a incredibly hard thing to really appreciate until you commit yourself to it. But when you do, you'll slowly see the benefits of that. That lesson will be one of the most valuable compounding value lessons that you could possibly have. Because once you learn how to find ways to get leverage and you will continue to find ways to get leverage and you'll be more successful that way.

That is the job of a founder. Continuously create leverage and do more with less. Be resourceful, engineer your own luck. And you have, you have done this over and over again. You know, I'll end with what I started with. Luck and risk are two sides of the same coin. The ones that are super successful are the ones that never stop flipping. And you've been flipping for years, man. Every time you are doing something and you're hustling and and you are making it happen. Wishing you great success, Gagan. I think Maven will be more successful than Udemy. Wish you all the best. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you very much, Lloyd. Congrats on everything and excited to do a course with you and to get that podcast list. This is awesome. Thank you.

Thank you. Take care. Love and peace. I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness, 13 rules to help you build iconic brands, brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomena. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness.com the digital copy is on for 99 cents. Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at. Boast AI that's B O a S T a I forward slash blog. If you're looking for revenue.