Transforming a $1.4-Trillion Market with Spotnana’s Sarosh Waghmar

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The single biggest piece of advice for my entrepreneur perspective that I'd give to anybody is discipline. You do it when you feel like it, you do it when you don't feel like it, and you do it no matter how you feel. I think that's really key because people say, follow your passions, but some lot of people tell me, like, I don't know what I'm passionate about and that can happen. But once you find something that's interesting, even if you're not passionate about it, if you feel this as an opportunity, just be disciplined about it. Because that muscle and that rigor that comes with being disciplined, it builds something different. That's how character is formed. It's just about doing it, even when you don't want to do it. That ability to push yourself through that. And then when you do it, often you just realize that it's transformative. And my words might sound empty right now, but anyone who's done it knows that it's being in that, dealing with that uncomfortable truth. I don't want to do it, but I'm going to do it because I just have to do it. And being able to push through this.

I need some traction. You need 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 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth.

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You need some traction. Hey, Traction fam. Super excited today to sit down with my good friend Sarosh here, co founder, co chairman and chief product officer at Spotnana. They are, I would say, the AWS for the travel industry. 175 million raised. Today we're going to dive into his 20 plus years of experience in transforming the travel industry, building companies, failing learning, and now going for a massive moonshot. Sorosh so good to have you here. A lot of commonality. We both grew up in the Middle east, then we ended up in the States. Founders Sarosh went to school at UT Austin. I moved to Austin very recently and I guess our love for the. The Indian or Indian super villain Spotnana, which is your name?

Firstly, Lloyd, thank you for having me on the show. Excited to be part of Traction. The name. The name was inspired through a Bollywood movie, you're right. But the name was given to me when I was at UT Austin and it was based on this character in this Hindi film where you'd find out a lot of information about everybody and everything. And the name was given to me while on campus because bunch of these Indian students from all over India would come to UT Austin. UT Austin has a pretty large Indian population. A lot of kids coming from international places. And the name was given because they said if you want to know anything on campus, which classes to take, how to get a scholarship, what to do, or how to work the system, literally, you got to go talk to Smart Ghana first. So that's how the name came. Because my whole premise was I used to share this information with everybody and someone found it funny and said, from now on, I'm going to call you Spark Nanan and we need to have everyone talk to you before they do anything. That's how the name stuck.

And that. That Indian Bollywood super villain, he was a sharpshooter where he would find out everything about you and put a spot on you and then kill you. So this is.

It was the act of putting a spot. And the whole premise was finding out data about anything and everything, being obsessive about it, and then sharing it with everyone. And that's why I said, you put a spot on everything. And that's how the name stuck. And it made sense to call this company Spotna. And I've been doing this for the last 20 years. And why Spotnair? Because I think it's just sharing all this knowledge that was accumulated about the airlines and about travel, et cetera. And I think that was the genesis of this company. And we're still at it.

It's very rare that I meet somebody who grew up in the Middle east, in the GCC like me, who then go on this entrepreneurial journey, especially in tech. I've not seen very many tech entrepreneurs stemming out of the GCC like back in the day. Now, yes, everyone is doing startups. So what was your inspiration? You grew up in Bahrain, you ended up here. What was that journey like, and then into entrepreneurship.

So just some background here. I was born in Bombay. I grew up in Bombay, spent a few years in Bahrain. My parents lived there for a long period of time. And then I got went to UT Austin and came to the US in 1994. And I think one of the first things was, I still remember August 1, 1994, was the first time I ever came to America, landed in New York and said, this is where I need to be. And then over the next few years, I would say 14 years, I was in Austin and studied there, lived there, worked there, and then finally made a move to New York. And I think if I look back at this journey, I think the one thing was just wanted to never go back to India. It was just something that I decided that I want to make my life in America and just not go back. The whole point, as you mentioned about growing up in the Gulf, our parents went west to make a better life and give us an opportunity. And I guess you get conditioned that way thinking that you got to go west and you got to make the most of it.

So that's what I think. My grandparents wanted to just put food on the table and my parents just wanted to give us an education and give us things. And for us it was like always the safety. You got to do the risk free thing, Go study engineering or medicine, get a job, work till you're 65 and retired. That was their way. And I think now my thinking is if my kids become athletes or movie stars, that's fine. Like just do whatever you love. Just be in the top 1% versus trying to control the outcome of their life.

Yeah, no, it is true. So much has changed now. I think just the outlook has changed. No one teaches you about parenting. No one teaches you about marriage. They just tell you, get married, study, work hard and get a job. And then you are doing that all your life. And now I guess for us, this generation knows a little bit. I won't say better, just knows some things differently, let's put it that way.

Now you got involved in travel 20 years ago. Possibly like when you moved to Austin or around that or even before that, like how did you get involved in the travel industry?

So the first job when I graduated from UT Austin was Deloitte was in the consulting group. And you can imagine when you become a consultant, what do you do? You travel a lot. So I was part of this E commerce and data warehousing practice back in 98. These are just early things coming up then. And I traveled everywhere for Work. And I became obsessed with frequent flyer miles. As you get to know me better, I have an obsessive personality over a lot of things, but I just became so obsessed with frequent flyer miles that my sole goal in life. Then how do I go to India in first class once a year when I got vacation? Honestly, it was like, how do I go for free? More important, how do I go for free using my points. And I started understanding everything about airlines, luxury travel, credit cards, hotel programs, just the entire ecosystem of how my niche points moved. And I became obsessed with point where I started find, finding out all these hacks in the system. And today you have blogs and you have all these folks writing about mileage points and all of that. I started this in 2000, a Yahoo News group called Spot, where I would post information and shared everything that I learned. How do you go to India in front of the cabin? Or how do you travel to Europe without paying the miles? Or getting something ridiculously cheap, et cetera. Moving points from one frequent flight program to another, or from credit cards, vice versa, et cetera. That news group that had 10, 15, 20 people over time had a few thousand. And people would just follow whatever I'd write in the news group. That was the genesis of the name and my obsession with travel over time. At Deloitte, it became a joke where, say, if Lloyd was traveling, he would tell the travel desk, before you book my travel, ask Sarosh which airline I should travel for this month. Who has what specials. So the travel department called me. Richard is traveling. They want to know they're going from San Francisco to LA or San Francisco to New York or wherever. They said, need to ask you. I would say, oh, what are his frequent flyer programs? Or what are her frequent flyer programs? Explain them. Okay, this month, this is going on. Book this and add this quote to it or do this special. It just became something I start spreading and sharing with everyone. And that's something that stuck with me. Left Deloitte, had all this knowledge and then did a startup, raised some money doing a CRM marketplace, did that for two years. And then 2002 happened, as you can imagine, the first dot com bust, interesting times for me, obviously, had to shut down. The company, lost everything. Came to a point where I was living at different people's floors. I lost everything. Means I lost a home. I was in a home that was burned down at times, slept in my car. And at that time, the one thing that I was doing that you'd find very funny was I was interviewing with a lot of Venture capital firms. Why? I felt two years entrepreneurship experience, two years consulting experience, I could be an analyst. I kid you not. I interviewed with over 150 venture capital firms in San Francisco, New York and Boston. And there was a joke. Oh, the indeed guy from Austin. I would always make it to the final round of these interviews, meet these amazing venture capitalists, but could never close one single job. I still remember, I could never forget this. There's this amazing firm called Francisco Partners that still exists, and I met the founder there, and this was my final round. I'd already done the case studies, all of that, and this was the final round to meet them. And I went over there and he started talking to me and we started talking and I don't know how the conversation came about frequent flyer points or travel. One thing led to another and I started telling him, and he said, tell me, I have all these 4 million points in American Airlines. How do I move them or how do I move them around or how do I spend them? And I started telling him everything. We spoke for two hours. At the end of their interview, he said, I don't think Francisco Partners is the right place for you. I have interviews with everyone. I'm wondering, did I say something incorrect, inappropriate? Why are you saying no? He said, you need to be an entrepreneur. You don't realize this. Trust me, at that moment, I was crushed because this is the final interview. After being rejected at so many places, you feel like, oh, my God, are you going to get this job? For him to tell me that you don't realize this, you're not meant to be a vc. You're meant to be an entrepreneur, an operator. And at that time, you never connect those dots. And one of the things during that time that is really interesting about the Spotnano journey was like, how did I survive? I had no money. And the one thing that I came across at that time was I came across this promotion. I don't know if you remember, but there's a hotel group called Starwood, which is separate from Marriott. Yes. And Starwood had this amazing frequent flyer program. And as I mentioned earlier, I had this knowledge about all these frequent fly points. I used to find patterns in some of these, how to move these points around. I came across a promotion that if I could spend $869, I could fly on the Concorde, which was a $20,000 ticket. So what I figured out was, how do you get these Starwood points? Move them to Qantas, an airline, and from Qantas redeemed them on British Airways because British Airways ran the Concorde because this is one world partner. And in the process I wiped out 48 million miles on British Airways without stepping on the plane once. So as selling miles is illegal. But what I would do is I'd put these ads on ebay, hey, travel on the Concorde for $4,000, $2,000 or whatever. Lloyd would click on that ad on explain me a little bit more. We'd start chatting and you I'd say put your money in an escrow account and I will then act as Lloyd's assistant. Buy magazines under Lloyd's name, set up a Qantas account, frequent flyer account in his name and then act as an assistant. Move those points over from Mary from Starwood to Qantas. Call a Qantas, put the ticket on hold, give you your confirmation. You'll pay me. I'd pay the taxes. Do everything under your name as in.

What is the rel. What is the relevance of the magazines here?

There are these various promotions. You buy different things and you get points. Cereal boxes or different things. Magazines is what I came across by Newsweek, Business Insider. I found a promotion that you could buy magazines and get Starwood points. And from the Star points I was able to connect the dots that if I spend enough on buying these magazines, I could get enough points to redeem them on the Concorde and do an arbitrage. So that's how this journey started. About traveling in front of the cabin and understanding about travel. And one thing led to another. And then there was this other promotion about special case. Special case, a cereal box. Typically behind a cereal box there's usually a toy or something. In this one particular box that I found at Walmart was Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, American Airlines 100 mile certificate. I started doing the math that these boxes were $1.41. Imagine I bought X number of boxes. How many miles I could get and how much I could repurpose those miles out there. And a business class ticket was seven or eight thousand dollars. I could get a business class ticket for fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred dollars because of one hundred thousand. And one thing led to another. And employed a bunch of kids on campus, bought all the cedar box boxes and then donated them the food bank to get a tax write off. And just crazy things. I think, you know, in adversity there is opportunity. You have to understand. My back was against the wall. I had to survive. And all I knew is I knew all this knowledge. I'm trying to interview with all these people hoping one of them will give me a job. But that didn't happen. And then did this to survive. For one travel agent who was in Boston, who flew down and said, I buy all these coupons from you and all these things. Do you know there's something called corporate travel? I said, what's that? And he showed me my first Virgin atlantic ticket, a $15,000 business class ticket for 2,500 or something ridiculously cheap. I'm like, how do you get this so cheap? And the price is this. He said, you got to learn, Saber. There's something called travel agencies, and this is what we do. And this is how you and I think the next thing I knew is I started teaching myself all of this learning from one person or the other. And that's why it's taken me 20 years, right? Still learning. And one thing led to another and then said, that's it. I'm not going to interview with any of these VCs. And guess what? I went back to all these VCs and said, hey, I've started a travel agency doing first in business class discounted travel. And all of them became my customers. And that's how 2003, 2004 spotlight in its first version was launched. And here we are 20 years later, trying to fix the industry. Because I think sometimes you really need to understand what the problem is. It's not about a product issue, it's about truly understanding that are you going to do things incrementally better, Are you going to do things transformative? But as you said, this didn't happen in the last four years of COVID or in a garage in Palo Alto. This has just been my life work over so many years of understanding what is it that's inherently broken? Why is it that when Lloyd does a search for a flight, say from Austin to Bombay, why does he get 10 different prices? But when he shops on Amazon, he trusts the price and he just does what is right. He doesn't have to think twice when it comes to shopping on Amazon. But I said, we're going to go to London tomorrow, you're going to look at 10 different places. And you're like, why is price on a for the same flight different than on another website? It's just because the infrastructure that these sites operate on, et cetera, it's just been legacy infrastructure is not being changed. And which is why our whole approach was, this is not about the ui. This is not about. It's about trust and transparency. How do I create trust? When you come to the site, or when you see that you want to click buy now you just know that this is the price. This is one of the largest industries in the world. It's $11 trillion industry and I'm talking of leisure and business travel. And it's just very opaque and you just don't know. There are so many middlemen in this. You as a end user or consumer might not know. All you care about is where do I get the best prices for that cabin or for what I want. And we don't experience the same frustration when you're watching something on Netflix or consuming something on Spotify or on Uber or any of that. But when it comes to travel, everyone in the world has an opinion on this, on how they want to go, where they want to go, because. But travel is just one of those things. It connects us as human beings, we need it. If Covid has taught us one thing is they thought the single biggest industry to be decimated during COVID was travel, as you saw. But look at the way it's come back. Every time they think we don't need to travel or everything's gonna be done remotely. It's just. That's just not how we as human beings are wired to live or be.

What an inspiring story. Like I think two themes here is I, I always believe pain is the precondition for growth. If there is no pain, you don't invent. I think my best time of my life was bootstrapping. My wife was still a fellow at Stanford and I had started the company and we were not making any money. I got into having, I think EI had run out and we started this company and I was living on my co founder's spare bedroom on a futon in, in Calgary, Canada of all places because his wife was articling in law there and had to be there. And some of the best things as a function of us not being able to get customers because we were an obscure two guys who were selling automation of R and D tax credits. People like we don't trust you, why should we give you our ip? We ended up hosting our own events and inviting people and it turned into a big traction community. Today we had a long term column in the newspaper just as a function of begging the newspaper to give us a column to cover startups and they didn't. And so we wrote a blog and we just drove traffic to it and then we shared the social proof with the newspaper. And so doing those hacks you can only do when you're frugal, right? You Invite people, hack your co working space, turn into an event space. And I think the penny dropped when hundreds of people started showing up to the co working space and they're like guys, you need to get out and get, get a conference venue versus using the floor. And even the first Traction conference, we didn't have the money. So I cold email hundreds of unicorn speakers. This is 2014 and when anyone would say I'm interested, I'd reach out, I'd reach out to the rest with the interested person's name. And then a bunch of people, all the big names like the Twilios and the, and the Pinch and the Twilios and the Marketos and all the big names started confirming and then put up a landing page with Eventbrite, sold 50,000 in tickets, couldn't get a venue sold last minute so found an electronic dance music hall, EDM hall, booked that, retrofitted it, had to cover stripper poles, got more speakers than we could confirm and so now we gotta hold all the speakers to a 15 minute slot. So we bought a smoke machine, put it backstage. Whenever they ran 15 minutes we startled them with smoke, audience started clapping and it got so crazy. That's how hacky you get is. By the end of the night the smoke machine ran out of water and the drapes behind caught fire. So the things you do, I think in, in our Mumbai language we say necessity is the mother of all jugaads.

That is true. I, I always say in adversity there is opportunity and it is what it is. I don't know how to explain it that, you know, people constantly ask like how do you do this? I don't know that when you go through some intense amounts of pain, not knowing where what you're going to do tomorrow or sleeping in your car or just the need to survive, not go back home, you're struggling against all these odds, you have nothing to fall back on and you just have to make it happen here. It changes you.

And there's no other plan, there's no plan B.

There is no plan B. And then I keep telling people, like they say, growth is equal to pain. Yes, that is true. But growth happens when you truly free yourself from the habits and routines that just don't serve you anymore.

A hundred percent it's the same thing. Like my wife is super smart. She got her to med school in second year of undergrad without MCATs. And when I started doing startups, it was a time where in at least in our communities doing startups wasn't a thing. Like it was like graduate engineering, go get a job at a big company. Her parents never wanted to marry me.

This guy's a misfit.

He's working at startups, he does mixed martial arts. And I don't understand, like he's, why is he working for these three four person companies? They're not even companies. And they kept failing one by one. And so for me it was like they didn't want me marrying her. And it was a big like uphill battle. Our wedding got canceled the first time and then ended up happening nine months later. I learned to plan our own wedding because my wife's like, listen, last year of med school, I'm now going to plan a wedding after the first one being canceled. So I learned to plan the wedding and as a function of learning to plan and hold a big wedding, I learned to host events. And when we started the business and couldn't get customers, I leveraged that to host events, which ended up being free free sort of marketing for us. But the thing is, when you have something to prove and you have no turning back, then you keep having to go. But when you went back to those VCs to sell them on this discounted executive travel, did they fund you or suggest funding you?

I started up as spot and I changed the name to Seat 1A. Seat 1A is like iconic, right? First in business class, most coveted seat on airlines. So seat 1A. And no, it was a cash flow positive business on day one and just scaled that business till 2019 and one thing led to another and just started learning a lot about the systems and technologies being used, started dabbling in some technology along the way, building some in house stuff, but nothing at scale. But it's just for an agency trying to be pushing the boundaries. And these VCs led to a different kind of customer audience, from high net worth individuals to corporations, et cetera. And then when you start doing corporate travel at a much bigger scale versus a venture capital firm that has some business travel, you start understanding the nuances of the ecosystem, what are the needs and services that you need to provide, how does technology enable you to do that, etc. And then in 2019, always at the age of doing something in technology, that was the background I came from. And I was like, this time around, I think I know enough what's broken again. We had a very successful business that had scaled, got to got it to 70 million and its sole purpose was like, this time I got the way to fix this problem is just rebuild the infrastructure. But it's not about a better ui, it's about rebuilding the entire infrastructure, creating a platform that's open for everyone to build on top of. And started the company. Nissan called it again Spotlight in Jan of 2020 and then Covid happens in February 2020 and you're like, oh my God. And every investor is spooked. When is this ever going to come back? But again, our focus at that time was don't focus on anything else, just focus on building the product, just execute around that. And that's what we did over the next nine months. I had an amazing investor mentor advisor in Steve Singh. Steve. For those that don't know, Steve was the founder of Concur, sold it to SAP for 8 billion. Just a fantastic operator and someone who's seen a lot over these last several years. And Concur is one of the world's largest travel and expense platforms out there. And he just kept believing. At the end of the day, he wasn't a vc, he still is an operator and kept believing. Just stay focused, do what you need to do and the rest will follow. And as we continue building, there was a demand for what we were doing in over time, we continued proving ourselves and here we are. Obviously, lots happened between then and now, but I think again, life throws curveballs at you. It's just, I think you get so used to it, you just recalibrate very quickly. And people think that there's always a plan or there's a playbook for all of this. I can only tell you honestly, from my perspective, there's no playbook. It's just you develop a gut, you develop an instinct, and you try to do what makes sense. The one thing that I value the most in all of this, as I'm talking to you, I'm reflecting, is you just have to stay true to your values and principles. Other things might change, but if you stay true to that, water always finds its balance. I realize that. And that is the single thing that has think kept me sane at times. You just keep going and keep doing what you said you would do. And even sometimes, that's the thing about entrepreneurship or being a founder. You have to generate light for everybody else, including yourself, and sometimes more for others, because you're trying to lead them, you're trying to inspire them, trying to tell them every day that is it half empty, the glasses are half full, it's your lens. But being realistic is the hard part at times, right? Sometimes you generate that. And yes, but over time, what happens is when you start getting that traction and big companies and customers start betting on you, you start realizing the size of the opportunity. And I think we at Spotnote have been so fortunate that some of the world's biggest companies have decided to bet on us. So obviously there comes a huge responsibility that these people are really betting their careers, these decision makers at these companies to put it, put the future or run their travel program with a four year old startup. And I think they believed in the vision and they believed in what we were building. And obviously you have to continue proving yourself every day, right? You just have to show up and do what you say you do. And I think that's been one big thing about Spotlight is it's our position in the market, what we built and just what we stand for. I think that really is fundamentally important because how you are in your personal life will reflect in your business life. There's people think that you can silo these things somewhere or the other. It always comes out who you are. You will reveal yourself to the world who you are. And I think if you are truly passionate or crazy, as I call myself, you have to have a little kink in you wanting to do this 20 years later. And I don't know why, but I feel like the industry needs to move forward. But our whole premise for the industry or the way we wanted to move forward or want to move forward is I have no intention on becoming the largest travel agency in the world. No, never. We want to build a platform that everybody can use. Any travel seller, travel agency or corporation, an expense company, a technology company, build travel on top of us. That's been what has been fundamentally different about Spotlight offering an APIs. And the biggest thing is if you truly want to call yourself a platform and not a product, you can only call yourself a platform when other people make more money off you. That's what a platform does, a hundred percent. Which is why I said living by your values and principles. Because sometimes when you start getting a lot of traction and you start doing things well, you suddenly start believing you can build everything. How do you narrow your focus and keep doing that one thing again and again till you get a chance to do something else? But then again, there's a thin line. As you continue to expand, you're chasing revenue, have all these other pressures. Should I do this as well? Making those trade offs, what is right, what is wrong? I, at the end of the day just realize, as long as you do a lot more right, that's what will move the needle at the end of the day and try to Figure that out. And sometimes you have to be thinking about long term versus just a short term gain and that's really where the muscle or the experience comes to count, you know, surrounding us.

Spotnada is not a four year old startup in the sense the technology may be four years. The vision has probably always been there in some part of your head and it's a culmination of 20 years of trying to change this industry. Right. And so you come with a lot of one street cred and also experience in navigating not just the strategies but the tacticals of the industry to drive the industry forward. And I tell a lot of people is a lot of kids today will come and ask oh I have this idea, I want to start a company, I'm going to raise money. I'm like what do you know about this industry? What do you know like when we try to at boast solve the R and D tax credit problem by automating it. For the longest time we were doing these manually, right? That's my co founder worked in the industry KPMG prior to that and independent consulting firms. And when we couldn't raise money or we didn't have money, we did this work manually and then built our first version on no code with Zapier or rather with low code using Zoho creator and Zapier and then kept iterating on top of that. Nothing will compensate for industry knowledge that the founders have or don't have, right? If you don't have the industry knowledge like you don't know how to do it and you're solving for that industry the way I say it is when passion meets profession, you become Michael Jackson. You're very, very much the Michael Jackson of the travel industry. If you don't love your customers or the problem you're solving, you can never build something big. You can't dominate that market because there's always going to be somebody else, right?

No, that is true and I feel you should the passion should be about still I feel there's so much more I want to know. I want to know for myself, let alone my customers. If you have that inherent need, that curiosity that is what drives you to wanting to push things forward. That is why I feel like there's so much to learn from. Steve Jobs is just obsessive and I always like to look at all these figures with the things that they did right versus the other stuff. And I and for me that that just desire of building what the world he wanted to for all of us to live In. And that's the single thing that I feel that most me is I want to create this for everybody else. I believe that travel should be done like this. This is ridiculous that I have to wait for six hours or I buy a $10,000 ticket with an airline. And when I call up the airline, I want to make a change. They tell me, go and talk to your travel agent. You're like, I just don't understand this. This is your airline, your seat. You should be able to make a change for me. Just because I can't get a hold of my travel agent. Or why do I see a flight from Austin to New York with 10 different prices, a single airline for that same flight? Why is there no trust and transparency? But on anything else that I buy in life, there's a price. And that inherent need to solve for everybody is the thing that we just have to. And that is how we'll get a better traveler experience. If you think about Amazon, the best part about Amazon is not the inventory. The best part about Amazon is the refund process. It's ridiculous. Yeah. These days I don't even have to print out anything. I'll go throw this across the UPS counter, I'll pack it for you, scan it, and by the time I take 10 steps and walk out of the UPS counter, I've got my credit. Who has that experience, that joy, that trust? I'll buy it from Amazon. I'm protected. How do we create that feeling in travel? That is what we are fighting for.

A lot of people are adopting that. It's very hard because this industry is mired by a lot of middlemen and also corporate greed from the airlines itself.

Just.

I dread the experience of traveling depending on the airline and some airports. But I'd rather do a direct flight. Sometimes I would rather fly another airline, but the only way to this destination is through this one airline. And I know I hate it and it's going to be a miserable experience, but you stick with it, right? And I think at the root of a lot of this, because as I sit through dealing with suboptimal, crappy flying experiences, and we travel a lot, and I told my wife this year, okay, we've traveled a lot. I don't want to travel at all for the rest of the year. I'm done. I just don't want that. I have ptsd. From the process of buying to checking in, like all the other stuff, that the five, six, seven day trip almost becomes not worth it when we can go anywhere within driving distance. And as I sit through and used to think about all these things. And you realize that a lot of this is just they're run by a bunch of Luddites. There's a technological problem. It's a technological problem that can improve and drive their processes. But they're used to probably reading a book and saying yes or no.

Yeah, that's the whole point of technology. Right. Is it going to be incrementally better or is it going to be transformative?

Yeah.

And travel is just one of those things that has taken forever for disruption to happen. Not that it was not possible, but obviously cloud computing has made that possible. AI is obviously playing such a massive role in simplifying all of this, but these things take time. Especially if you're $11 trillion industry. It's just not going to move overnight. That's why I say 20 years in the making and still have. If it takes 20 more, that's what I'll do. Just can't walk away now from this.

I love the approach. Also. You're building a platform to make the travel experience better for everyone else. Knowing very well that if you build a travel agency and put it on steroids and scale it and even became the largest travel agency in the world, you likely won't be able to serve everyone else. But through, through building the AWS for that industry, you're now changing the dynamics of the industry, becoming the standard. Did you start by predominantly like, where did. Who was your first customer of Spotnana? Was it a travel agency? Did you spin up a travel agency yourself? Was it like a. I see you have channel partners like Brex and others that can add travel to their fintech platforms.

The analogy I'd like to give you here again is Amazon, because I'm inspired by so many things Amazon does. If you had Jeff Bezos on this podcast and said, hey Jeff, what would you have done when you started Amazon sold books or built aws? Today, the answer would be very different. But back then, Amazon sold books. And as they sold books, they sold several other things. And as their e commerce engine continued to expand, they were not able to scale and the site crashed because they were selling multiple SKUs of different products. They went out there thinking, who would help them build this infrastructure? When no one did, they built it themselves. Early days, that was the first version of AWS. And the first customer of AWS was no one but Amazon.com similarly, we wanted to build this infrastructure for Spotna. That's what we started doing. But the first customer was Spotana, the travel Agency leveraging the spotna infrastructure. So that's how we started off and we became our first customers or corporates who were using us as the agency as well as then we started selling to other agencies, et cetera. And we realized that for us to scale, truly be a tech platform, we want to focus more on the platform, size the tech side of the business and enable other agencies. So when a customer came along, you had these partners that could do the servicing, et cetera. So that's really how the journey has evolved over time. But the goal always has been to be a platform company. And you might question, so why did you get into the servicing? And the agency side of it is just for adoption, right? You have to prove yourself first before you can ask others to use your platform. Right. So it's just one of those things. And you get to learn a lot. Because at the end of the day, inherently I'm still a travel agent. I know the system, I know what to do and how to get the best fares and those kinds of things. So I had to build that for myself. And there's still tons of work to be done around that so that we can build this correctly for not only the corporation, but even for the travel agency to scale. You can truly be a platform for these companies when you reduce their operational overhead, which is the servicing, which is the agents, the manual work. How do you do that? Not by enabling a customer alone to consume your product. You got to make sure that you create, reduce their cost of transactions for them as well. And that's the thing of building it. Even for the TMC or the travel agency, you get to learn a lot about their workflows, things that happen behind the scenes that no one even knows. When Lloyd buys a ticket from point A to point B, it's booked, it's done. But there are so many other things that can happen manually behind the scenes. How do I automate all of that layer? And that was the whole premise is how do you build? Which is why this AWS approach is it's not just for storage. It's all these other things that go on behind the scenes for us to scale. And that's what we are focused on building as well. There's a lot of work to be done, as I said, but that's the.

Best way to learn, right? So like I was just channeling back to when we were building Boast is we couldn't build the technology first because we need to understand what, what the optimal customer experience is. And we had to take on clients and deliver them the outcome. Customers want an outcome today I don't think customers want software anymore. They just want an outcome. And you gotta deliver that outcome in the best possible way. I think there's this product management graphic that I like a lot is Mario eats the mushroom and becomes Super Mario. Everyone is selling Mario, selling the mushroom to Mario. They're like, this is our product. No, the product is Super Mario.

Exactly.

I don't care about the mushroom. If you, instead of mushroom, if you fed me like, I don't know, a protein shake or you fed me like water and I turned into Super Mario, I'd buy that. I just want to be.

That's the outcome. Exactly.

I want that. And I think the world is going in that direction. And even thinking back to the time I interviewed the founder of Carbon Health, I'm reimagining healthcare. I can't just go and sell to hospitals and clinics. I got a. The first one was we built our own clinic, we served clients, we understood the whole flow and then we could aim at building a platform to improve for everyone else. So I truly love the model but I wanted to dive a little bit in terms of scalability here. $70 million self funded revenue business is not a subscale business. There's nothing to be too shy about. Right. It's super brag worthy. Like a lot of startups that are extremely well funded don't generate 70 million in revenue. So you self funded the first iteration back in the day and got to 70 million in revenue. Why wasn't that enough? And why go then and say, you know what, I'm going to take VC money and be answerable to a bunch of people and then try to scale this tech different thing. I understand that, the personal motivation, but there's more than just that. Right.

So 70 million was in gross bookings. It's the volume that flowed on the platform. That's one. The second important thing is it was. I have a very clear understanding on this is an extremely comfortable lifestyle business. Extremely comfortable. I won't say I was not making money. No, that's not true. But when you have that itch in life that do you want to become rich or do you want to create wealth? There's a big difference between those two. Rich, you can do it for yourself. Wealth is being created by everyone else around you. And that is just something inherent that I had is I would have to build technology, do this the other way. Otherwise it would be a services business, there'd be only that kind of exit or that it would scale to a certain level. If you really want to change this industry you have to have the tech first. Which is why I decided that why take money from VCs so you can attract talent honestly. And in early days who knew that I was going to get to meet Steve Singh. Right. You have to think about it is I was someone was looking out for me that I got to meet someone like him who I always say is and now he's the CEO of Spartan. Got him here. He's helping us scale the company and it's someone who's done something at the highest level. It's very rare for first for you to meet someone who's been the best in your industry, who's retired, who sold their company for over 8 billion. Convince them to first invest in you. Then it takes a rare investor or an operator to build a company that is going to challenge the company that he previously built and now help come and scale Spartan and take it to the next level. I couldn't write this script even if I tried. And I think why take the money? Why raise it? Because the intention was obviously to build something big and get money from the valley. Follow that playbook which I had no clue about and I'm still learning about that space. And you just meet some amazing people who believe in you and then one thing leads to another and here we are.

I think the scale which we which you're going for you have to raise. Right. And so what I wanted to understand is the sort of journey between I'm living a comfortable life Rich. I love this answer. Right. I don't think I've ever heard it from any of the hundreds of interviews I've done. Is the difference between being rich and creating wealth riches. You're comfortable, you're living well and and.

Your life is good.

I don't need to work my but wealth is when not only you do well but everyone around you does well. And that's also motivating factor for me is after leaving the day to day at Boast and taking a couple year break in Dubai I want to do the next thing for that reason is like the impact of it. I always looked at it as impact. What is the impact you create where it's not just you but driving a purpose that's beyond you ultimately.

Exactly. Yeah.

Very now overcoming setbacks here you talked about apartment burling down and all the things you went through. Right. You got to be resilient and I think almost like childlike resilience because if you there's a little Bit of naivety. You have to have and have a lot of resilience because it never stops. You have to love the industry, love the process, and you gotta keep going. But talk to me about resilience and this apartment burning down. What happened?

So, obviously it was not my apartment. I was crashing at some friend's place, and one of them was doing the hookah, and they forgot to extinguish the coal. They threw it in the trash. The next thing is, I get a call. It's literally in Austin. The arson unit showed up at the complex because the entire apartment was just in fumes. And they got it in time before the entire building would go up. That's why it was the arson unit. And. And whatever little I had, I lost. I have pictures of my laptop, which was my prized possession because I used to put up those ebay ads to sell those mileage tickets. It turned into a ball, literally. I was like, oh, my God, one more thing. And I think these kind of moments just change you forever. I think. I don't know what exactly it is, but when you have these kinds of setbacks, you just learn that you just don't accept. No. And, you know, people say that there has to be a method to this. I can only. At least I can talk about myself. There's no method. You just get wired very differently when you get through so many setbacks in life that you were just like, I just gotta keep going on. I just don't. I don't understand. No. Everyone says impossible. I break up the word and say I'm possible. I keep saying that to myself and keep pushing along. And there is no secret. The secret is that there is no secret. You. I have to remind myself that consistency over intensity or progress over perfection or fundamentals over fads, you just have to keep reminding yourself of that. Just going back to the basics again and again. And that's why I keep saying is one thing that I've learned is your values and principles will be. The sum will be the single biggest thing that you would be tested when you build an amazing company. Because there'll be so many other distractions that will come with. Along with the more success, the more fame or the more admiration from customers or employees or whatever else. Just your values and your principles will be tested. And I think that's what you have to stay true to, because if you do, that's how you'll move the needle. That's how you'll be able to foster innovation or make that disruption that you're truly dying for to make that happen. I, I don't know. I really don't have any answer for because a lot of people ask me like, you're just crazy. I said, yeah, I'm crazy. I'm just, I don't know, maybe my superpower is being resilient. Just keep pushing through all of this. And I think so many people, so many people out there have had such crazy setbacks. Mine is nothing compared to so many other people. I look at them and I get inspired. You are right. When you earlier mentioned that we have something to prove. I'll be the first to admit when you were talking to me about your wife and the in laws, there is that need, that desire to prove. And for the longest time someone told me you have a chip on your shoulder. And I was like, chip on your shoulder? I typically associate that with something not very positive. He said, no, I. And I don't follow football as much, but I do follow cricket and I'm obsessed with cricket. But they gave me this football analogy is Tom Brady. They said, Tom Brady has a chip on his shoulder. And I said, explained to me. He said, if you ask Tom Brady what has been your greatest super bowl win, you'll always say the next one. He never said the one that he won previously because he always had something to prove it. If you look at some of his ESPN old snippets, he will tell you exactly how he was one of the last to be picked for the draft. He had something to prove. And that resonates with me. Yes, I do have something to prove. I just, it's one of those things. So that's where I guess the resilience comes. You just keep going. You just. And that is why there are pros and cons to this. Right along with this resilience you sometimes are not able to savor. Even some of the good moments, I want to call that out too. That's. I'm always about the next thing. Everything is so short lived and that's bad too. I'm working on that. But I have to call it out and be real with you and tell you some facts that every time you do something great and you move on, you like, you don't sit or you don't reflect on it, like, oh, wow, you've come such a long way. For me, it's always, I got such a long way to go. I have so much more to do, so much more to do. And from the outside I'm always being told like, you don't understand where you came from. From. From Bombay and from a mental class home to your. I am grateful for that. That I will admit it's not very often that you find a travel agent having an opportunity to build one of the world's largest travel companies. For that I'm very grateful. So yeah.

That'S a phenomenal way of putting. Putting it. I was reading somewhere that the lazy never want to get started. The losers stop early, and the legends, they just never stop. Right. Consistency is the secret ingredient that turns out small actions into big outcomes. And to have that, I think you need a chip on your shoulder for sure. I think I've interviewed now hundreds of people done this since not only online, but in person since 2014. I am yet to meet a successful entrepreneur who doesn't have a chip on his or her shoulder. Want to prove the naysayers wrong. Just not happy with the way certain way certain things are. And so it's that combination. You can't just have a chip on your shoulder but not have this innate desire to just keep going. I think most kids growing up, and especially kids from Indian backgrounds were rewarded or reprimanded on the results.

Oh, you got a good.

Great, great. It's a failure. No, you're punished. You don't get. You don't get to enjoy the weekend or we take some the TV away. We're not taught to enjoy the process. Right. And anything great is a long freaking slog. Right. And so I think that's a lot of comes from personal passion because you're not taught that. And I see that like you went through this journey where you really love the industry you're working for. And if you don't love that industry, it's hard to drive Change combined with this chip on your shoulder gives you this unstoppable superhuman like founder abilities, I think and maybe and, and that's not a formula because you can't just develop that. It needs to happen to you.

Yeah, it needs to happen to you. I keep saying it's just something that they say. The strongest steel is forged to the hottest fire. There is truth to that. There is truth to that. And you just have to go through certain experiences that transform you and just in the end you will reveal yourself.

Now on the company culture, leadership style. Right. You went from the small agency to raising Almost, you said 175 million. How big is your team?

Right now we're in north of 300 plus employees all over the world. New York is our headquarters, but we have offices in the Bay Area, in Palo Alto, in London Massive offices in Bangalore, Bombay and with distributed workforce. But I think just during COVID we had to build and wherever we found folks, we just built from there and have kept it that way.

The biggest challenge as I saw as we were scaling also was when you hire people everywhere and you grow, you become a different company. From seed to series A or just from the time of no customers to product market fit to eventually being at scale. How do you ensure the company follows or or rather acts according to the values and beliefs of the founders when the founder is not in the room, right? Like how do you. And that is culture. Culture is not what's written on your wall, but it's how people behave and they act. How do you make sure that scales so right?

Culture is when I'm not watching, right? It's in your small micro actions, how you treat people, how we respond, how you write on email or on Slack, right. And you're so right, it's hard. I again people say remote is the way to go. I can only I do not know about these well established companies. I can tell you about startups or at least in our case that culture is something very hard, especially if you're remote and if you really want to have massive impact very quickly as in the outcomes and delivery, I would definitely say if you had the opportunity, build in one room with you all on top of each other for all I care because I think the impact will be far greater. But how do we do it? And obviously we have an amazing team that we put together and at the end of the day it's about the people, right? People who execute, who believe in what you're doing. And I think the one thing at Spartan have been so fortunate about is people see how big this opportunity is. People see the vision, people see that, the traction, the customers that we have already signed up as a four year old startup, it's just unparalleled that they see, okay, there is something here. And that one thing leads to so much more. We have every year we have an off site, we bring people together, we do things that are slightly differently and again you try to follow some of the best practices other people have done. But you can take something from a big company, but does it fit in your company where you are at your stage? You have to always calibrate that, you know, like principles that Amazon has had that you could disagree but you got to commit that you can apply across the board. You don't have to be an Amazon to follow that. What are some of the things that you can learn from other people. I guess that is just some personal, personal inherent to me is what do I see. Some of the best companies in the world do and you want to emulate them and sometimes you're just not ready to do that. That culture gets built is when you have the agility. Not about writing code, it's about just how you operate on a day to day basis. How quickly can you pivot from some of the mistakes you've made or things that have just now turned out right. Having that humility in how we deal with everybody. I think that's where the culture gets defined. And I do not believe that you as a leader should be alone, the custodian of that. Yes, you're a custodian of the brand, but the culture is built by everybody who signed up to do this. At the end of the day, it's a team sport. And that is something that you have to keep hopping on again and again. And in every moment you get an opportunity, you try to come back to that. And which comes back to my earlier thing is you have to stay true to your values and principles because that's how people will emulate how you behave in the end. Not just on a meeting, but just in your interactions with them on a day to day. Because that story, whether I'm sitting in Palo Alto or in Pune, it will spread. How do you show up? How do you show yourself up every day? And some days are hard. But being honest, being vulnerable, listen, you can only speak how you feel. And how you feel is if you are able to share, that's how you bring comfort to somebody else. That's how you make them believe in you, is by being vulnerable. And if you're true to yourself and if you want people to follow you, you have to be honest with them, honest about them, about everything. And when you reveal yourself to them, I think the rest follows. I am blessed that I have an amazing team and they believe in this mission. And that is why I said at the end of the day, we keep talking of technology to scale, but we need human beings to scale to. Right. I keep saying Google did not get the search algorithm right. Google got the right folks who wrote that right search algorithm. And that is really. I wish I had the magic answer to that about people. It's just what energy you put out there. Hopefully you get the same back. Right? Right. You can only try. You can only try.

I truly believe that. Right. You attract the energy you give out. If you're a frustrated human being and you're just going to attract that energy. And what happens is your people around you, they emulate you. People don't read lips, they don't read articles on your culture, they watch your actions. If you say hiring and firing is meritocracy, but then you make concessions for that salesperson who's toxic, but they're hitting quota, then that's a problem. If you say, hey, I were very deeply analytical, but then when somebody comes in for a quarterly or an annual review, you just do a surface level conversation while being on the phone, then they know how you are. Right? People observe. Much like even little kids, I see my kids and they observe. And so then I know I'm not acting according to values. They hold me accountable. Right? Because ultimately people build companies, not the other way around. If you treat people with love and help them grow, they'll treat your business with love and the business will grow. And most companies, I think, fail because misalignment leads to crappy cultures than everything else. I want to talk a little bit about what do you have coming up next? Right before on the pre call, you said some things you can and some things you can't talk about. What are the innovations that you can talk about publicly? That's exciting for Spotnana.

I think this year our whole approach we've taken is staying focused to build on the platform. And we're very much interested in, at the right time, some of these partnerships or some of these large customers who will announce and reveal themselves to the world to go live and let everybody know. People have been talking about this for the longest time. So this year, I think hoping before the end of the year, some of these names will come out. And these are not only marquee names, but some of the world's biggest companies. Finally, everyone knows that we've been working with these companies, but having the ability to publicly talk about it. So I don't have to do this. What I'm doing right now, I think that's really one of the exciting things for all of us is that this has been a four plus year journey on building this and working with these customers. We're getting ready to launch them and obviously there's a lot. You see the finish line coming up and you look back at where you started and where you are and you're like, got to get this across the finish line, the first phase of it and then you continue building. But just being able to ship that out there and saying some of the world's largest companies have endorsed, have blessed, have given Spotnan a Chance and Spotna came through. That's really what I'm really focused on this year. Sometimes you gotta focus inwards. And right now our focus is just on delivery and doing what is right and putting these customers out there.

Hopefully I'll see you in November when I come for the board meeting to New York and we can celebrate. But this time I think you should stop and savor. Like my wife used to always tell me, stop and smell the roses. You're just going. And what happened was in towards December 2020, when we sold half the company to a growth equity. And I went from never having any money, my wife paying the bills, to coming into some capital. And I said, you know what I would tell her, like, I'll take you all to Bora Bora when the deal goes through, okay? Just stop bothering me. You're so busy, you don't have the time, the kids are calling you uncle, like, what's going on? And what happened was that deal went through. I booked everyone to Bora Bora, but two days before the Bora Bora trip, I got Covid hospitalized, almost died, and life, business, everything lost its meaning for me. I got depressed from that incident. And those words only rang to me was, if you die, if I die today, my kids won't remember. They probably grew up as trust fund babies and they won't care, right? I left them a good life, but I didn't have any relationship with them. And my wife's one sentence rang in my head. Stop to smell the roses. That was a. Was a big eye opener for me. That's why I disconnected. A big reason of why I disconnected and moved to Dubai was like, hey, maybe I need to rebuild this side and come back to the entrepreneurship thing. What's one piece of advice you'd like to offer someone starting out in an industry that's ripe for disruption, but like super, super entrenched in legacy systems terms?

I think everyone says it's not about legacy or not legacy. You really have to be passionate about what you're doing. And the single biggest thing is if you're passionate, a lot of people have a lot of passions, but then those passions die out. The single biggest piece of advice from an entrepreneur perspective that I'd give to anybody is discipline. You do it when you feel like it, you do it when you don't feel like it, and you do it no matter how you feel. I think that's really key because people say, follow your passions. But some, a lot of people tell me, like, I don't know What I'm passionate about, and that is that can happen. But once you find something that's interesting, even if you're not passionate about it, if you feel this as an opportunity, just be disciplined about it. Because that muscle and that rigor that comes with being disciplined, it builds something different. That's how character is formed. It's just about doing it even when you don't want to do it. That ability to push yourself through that. And then when you do it, often you just realize that it's transformative. And my words might sound empty right now, but anyone who's done it knows that it's being in that, dealing with that uncomfortable truth. I don't want to do it, but I'm going to do it because I just have to do it. And being able to push through that is something that, that's the only advice I would give.

Overnight success is nothing but compound interest on consistency. Right. I love this thing that you said is do it when you like it, do it when you don't like it, and do it when no matter how you feel. Because it's not about your feelings, right? It's little by little compounds, right? I give you an example. I was overweight when I went to after the COVID incident. I was, I had this lifestyle of just work and nothing else. And so my dopamine was drinking and socializing because for work and it's just that. And I put on a lot of weight, my immune system shot.

I was overweight.

When we went to Dubai, I just went all in on fitness. And I would just say I'm gonna just show up because I'm not competing for a bodybuilding contest or none of that. Just show up, show up, show up. Now three years later, people and they're like, man, you're 44, you have a six pack. How do you do this? What did you do? Like, when did this happen? I'm not taking off my clothes and hanging out, but I'm like, if you're at a pool or something, they're like, when did this happen? I'm like, it's just, I don't know when it happened, but it just happened. And you just. And same thing with business, with relationships, it's just you got to just show up. And I like that. I want to take things on a lighter side. One is, outside of building business, you're passionate about cooking. What's your favorite dish? And any parallels between preparing a meal and building a company. My dad is a retired celebrated chef. He was a well known chef in The Middle east would just go to hotels, five star hotels that were not doing well. And then they ask him to fix their fnb. And then he retired on this. I always wanted to be an executive chef someday and I wanted to go to Switzerland and study how to cook. And my mom said, listen, your dad, none of us got to see him right. We only saw him on a weekday. Your wife will leave you if you ever get married, so don't do this. And then you choose the entrepreneurial path and it's 10x worse. But what is your favorite meal and what are the parallels?

I think my favorite meal obviously would be a Parsi meal of yellow dal rice and prawn patia, which is like the spicy prawns, but you'd relate to it form of vindaloo. But parallels between food, travel, cricket, my three obsessions. Yes. If you ask me, my sole goal in life is to cook full time, be a chef after I'm done with all of this. The funny thing is I'm pretty obsessive by nature. As I said earlier, I became obsessed with cooking and that I cooked for our own wedding. Wow. Yeah. As I said, my wife will say, I have problems, but this need to feed is so big itself. Me just to break bread, because I just believe that at that moment in time when you're having a meal, whether it's a hole in the wall or whether it's a Michelin star restaurant or anywhere in the world on the floor, at that particular moment in time, when you're breaking bread with somebody at that moment, it doesn't matter who you are, what you have in your wallet or your bank account, or what your orientation is or what your religious beliefs are, at that moment of time, you just keep going. And for me, that bringing that together, that is one thing that I fostered at Spot Nana is I think in the next two and a half weeks, I'm going to be cooking for 300 odd people for the entire company. I take over a kitchen of a hotel where we host our annual gathering. And I cook for everybody. I cook, I just do the actual shopping, cutting, cleaning and just take over that kitchen. And this philosophy of cooking and my desire for it, I brought it into a mission statement of how we want to build spotlight. And that is why I always say, let's build longer tables and not higher walls. And that is really important to me. And cooking and working and building spotana, are there any parallels that I could take? Yeah, some days it's just a quick meal, some days it's about just getting things done. And some days it's about the artistry, it's about the thinking and about putting it all together. I find food after even a 16 hour day, I could get in the kitchen and just cook. And I just find that extremely relaxing and peaceful. And people are like, this is crazy. You just finished all these hours and you still want to do more work. It's not work for me. What I did previously was not work for me. I don't know how to explain this to anybody. It's just not work. And the joy that I get by putting something together and feeding somebody, like they said. Now, when you initially like someone, you ask them what they like to eat. When you truly like someone more, you go and eat with them, those things. But when you truly love somebody, you feed them and you cook for them. So for me, that is just how I feel. And that's something that I think everyone has. Spot on the nose or you now say a spot. And almost my obsession with food.

I think this is the first podcast I've done across interviews where I actually truly remembered my parents. That's how my parents are. And we have this culture of feeding people. And now my joy is, yeah, I love cooking. And I didn't cook for our wedding, but any events, like last night we had my son's birthday party and I cooked. Right. And my job at home is I need to make breakfast, lunch and dinner for the kids. Right. I wake up every day at six before they go to school because I didn't have that opportunity or time in the past. So my way of bonding with somebody is actually feeding them. And my wife gets so irritated that, why are you doing this? Like, sometimes they don't want to eat. And I research about how much nutrition, what they should have. They're fairly athletic, all of that. And I think I find it hard to explain to her that it's love. So I'm going to make her listen to your podcast and say it comes from a place of love, feeding people. As we close out, what is your personal favorite travel destination?

I think one country that's inspired me a lot. And a lot of what I do on the product side comes from this one country, and that's Japan. I'm just so inspired by that country, their way of doing things. And it's not only their food, which is one of my favorite cuisines in the world, but in Japan there is this thing called a shokunin. And people might ask, what does it mean to be a shokunin in Japan, people dedicate their lives to learn one single art. It could be making a piece of charcoal, learning how to make paper or fountain pen or just anything, or cooking one thing. They dedicate that life to that one art all their life so they can become the highest master. And in Japan, when you reach that stage, you're given the title of a shokunin. And that thinking and do you know what it means to be a shokunen? You're doing it for yourself, not because of anybody else's saying it. And if you think about Steve Jobs and how he built product and what he was inspired by, he was inspired by so many things about the Japanese way of doing things, because there's a method to that madness. It's just, you know when they say the Shinkansen, which is the bullet train, it comes at 8:17am at 8:16 it's just arriving 8:17. The doors open, stays there for 60 seconds and the doors close and it just whisks away. Everything is orderly, everything is out of respect. And that's the single biggest thing about that place that I've learned about Japan is just they respect everything. They respect their environment, they respect the need to do what is right. And I think that for me, Japan is one of those most inspiring places that I've seen or I've visited that has truly influenced me on my outlook towards life and just some of the things that I'd like to incorporate within Spartan as we continue to build this product. Because it's. You don't learn. People keep saying product led growth and you learn about product. I feel you learn about product on an idle Tuesday sitting, doing nothing. You learn about human beings. You learn things at a bus stop, you learn things in the middle of traffic where you observe something and you realize, wow, imagine if I could apply that principle to what I'm doing, how I'm building or what micro interaction I could have on the product on this website or on this mobile page, it's those small things. That's how great products are built. And I think you have to be curious. And I think just the Japanese way of life is something that I'm extremely curious by.

So love it. I truly feel like I'm speaking to the shokunin of, of the travel industry.

And no, I've got such a long way to go. Honestly, we're just grateful that we've been given this opportunity to build an amazing company. And there's just so many people that are rooting for us in the industry that we feel like we have to help the industry move forward. Just want a better experience and a better tomorrow where people will. As it is, there's so much stress with traveling, as you mentioned, going to the airport, the securities, all of this. If you could just make the buying experience a lot more pleasurable because we can only control that. I can't control the seat on the plane, can't control the weather, can't control any of the other infrastructure. Just that one thing. If we can do it in a more transparent manner, in a manner that just makes it more pleasurable, I think we would have done something right.

It's truly been a wonderful conversation. One A lot of commonalities. Two, it just felt like I'm sitting with an old friend and catching up in my living room here and just in general inspiring.

Give me an opportunity to cook for you. So I'm looking forward to that.

Definitely.

It's just having an opportunity to connect with you and getting this out there. So thank you for letting me be myself.

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