#33 - Sean Cai: Founder and CEO of Tourable, President of Life Changing Labs, and Growth Hacker
Podcast interview (host Peter Liu) with Sean Cai, a Cornell class of 2025 student and entrepreneur. Sean recounts early startup failures (team equity splits and being removed from a high-school startup), explains the origin and GTM for his current company Tourable/Torbl—aiming to improve online college tours by targeting high-willingness-to-pay international students and education consultants—and shares practical advice on market validation, metrics, growth tactics, CRM-based relationship management, and recruiting student ambassadors (he reports recruiting ~800–900 campus tour guides).
1, 2, 3, 4. Welcome to Passion Play Profit. I'm your host, Peter Liu and I'll be interviewing both young and business entrepreneurs to teach you how to find your passion, play, enjoy, persevere in the game of business and get rewarded.
Right.
Today I'm privileged and honored to be joined by a fellow class of 2025 student at Cornell University. This man is the CEO and founder of Torbl and an online 360 degree video conferencing platform building, personalized live and comprehensive video touring and college discovery options for everything from consultancies, international schools and even universities. But you probably know him as the main man behind startup office hours at Cornell and as the president of Life Changing Labs. Beyond that, he's a VC fellow at 406 Ventures and Conscience VC. He's also an analyst at 186 Ventures. Most importantly to me, I'm very proud to call him my friend. Sean, Kai, welcome to the show. Let's talk about how you've turned your passion to play to profit.
Looking forward it. Forward to it, Peter.
100%. Sean, gonna change it up a little bit today. I'm not gonna ask about your childhood right away. I wanna learn about what's your biggest failure, man, from a lot of the people that do know you at Cornell. You're a guy that has your shit together. So when's the moment where you probably didn't? And what'd you learn from that?
Yeah, what people don't know, I think about my current venture is that it's actually my third venture and I had two ventures before this, starting in high school, which is when I really, really got into entrepreneurship. Being from California, not from the Bay, but still being surrounded by that culture. Got into Venture through a high school accelerator program called Gifted and Talented Silicon Valley Innovators. I'm going to call it Gatsby for short here. Gatsby was based out of the Bay and me with a group of students from Irvine, which is up north where I lived down in San Diego, went to Gatsby. The program, went through it pretty successfully and long story short, ended up in front of a podium in front of a stage over in Plug and Play, over in San Francisco, in front of a bunch of VCs from the Silicon Valley ecosystem. There's one thing Gatsby did really well and it was place high schoolers and really young people positions where their startups would actually be taken seriously. At that point though, we didn't call it a startup at that point. It was more of a project that me and My co founders worked on. Long story short, again, we were building an edtech platform that combined all aspects of the school calendar, athletics calendar in grade school systems, into one portal that this school could control as well as into an app that would go and gain adoption among students as part of our growth marketing. And going into that meeting, all the metrics seemed green. We had 98% grassroots user adoption in two schools within one semester. And if you know anything about edtech, going into schools is probably the hardest thing in the world because schools are the worst startup customer in the world.
Right?
But I went ahead and did that, came into that meeting and we got funded. It was great feeling. 16, 17 year old me and my 16, 17 year old co founders, we felt like we would be one of those prodigy Silicon Valley startup kids that you read about on the news somehow. At that point, I wasn't a technical co founder, but we all, we all had pretty, pretty defined roles on that team. And, and it might surprise you later that a week after that CTO called me and he said, sean, I'm sorry, but we're kicking you out of the team.
No way.
And you might have wondered, how did it get to that point? You just raised funding from Plug and Play as high schoolers, just had all these amazing metrics at their school and more schools were looking at this. And what I realized is when we made this step as high schoolers, to actually think about this as a startup rather than a venture project or project in general. You know, kids in California, they're competitive about their college apps, they know what they're doing with these projects. But when we started thinking about it as a startup, then you start to introduce factors that really test your team equity splits. Equity splits was probably the main point of dissent we had in the team because you get a bunch of high schoolers together in the room who have been taught all their life that sharing is caring or whatever, and then you tell them, you guys are going to have to decide on an equity split that probably isn't equal because not everybody contributes different amounts to the team, even though everybody would like to think so. And you start generating conflict because people that young or me a few years ago in that situation have never accepted that people deserve varying amounts based on what they can contribute, even if they can't control what they contribute at that very moment. So we let that simmer up to the point where we didn't figure out equity split until we raised. And then when we raised, we were forced to make that decision. And then some co founders Went behind my back and. And then the rest is history. And what I realized is at the end of the day, look, businesses require revenue to stay alive, right? Revenue is the one thing businesses need. But if you don't have the right team and you have the revenue, yeah, it's still going to blow up later down along the line. And at the end of the day, it's just all about the team. And that's what people mean when they say startups are all about the team. This is a direct example of that.
I feel like I, I absolutely love that and I don't think there's a lot of people that can relate to that unless they have actually had something on the line right when they had a team, right, to have to fight over. Especially for me, I've had the exact same issue, right, that we still, I'm trying to solve, right with my venture, right. Be, you know, getting the edge things along those lines. So that's definitely something we have to talk about later in the line on, on my side. So I'm glad to hear that I'm getting this advice earlier. But I guess in that sense I'm sure other people have faced very similar problems and are potentially susceptible to that in the future. So from that lesson itself, what skills are you building to kind of mitigate something like that from happening again? How do you start something where you can provide enough value so that you are irreplaceable and how do you prevent things like that from happening in the future?
It all starts when you get together with a group of people and decide you want to build right at the point at which you decide to make this into a backable venture. Look, in a startup, people play many roles, right? Everybody wears different hats. That being said, a startup doesn't need a CFO straight off the bat. And if you're just giving somebody a CFO title, just include them in the startup and make it feel like they have an important role. While all they did is some operations work that they feel like should be compensated for, that's not worth an equity stake. That's not probably even worth a co founder status. Right. As you work through more ventures and I, I think see more startups, you start to realize the type of skills that each startup needs. And one thing is, there's a really traditional view here that a lot of my friends have, which is every startup needs a technical co founder, which is very, very true if you're looking at it from a purely statistical view. If you're a technical co founder, you'll have probably no trouble in these situations, especially if you work out that your team is the right people to go to before getting into these things. But at the end of the day, you have to have that equity discussion way before building. And I think it's just a thing on the checklist you got to do, because your founders, they're going to be with you with more time than your spouses or your significant others. I like, I like to say.
Right.
So it's not really a question of how to make yourself irreplaceable, because if you're at the point where you're asking yourself that in a team, you probably are replaceable.
I see what you mean. Yeah. And you know, obviously before you go into bed, you always got to know what's the responsibilities for each individual. Right. So in this case, setting that clear in the beginning kind of sets expectations. And when expectations are violated, then, you know, discussions can be actually made depending on the portion of equity. So makes that discussion a lot easier when that does eventually happen. Yeah. And obviously. Right. I'm sure I don't know where the venture is at today, but you decided to fully go in on your own venture. Right. Which is horrible. And that's blossoming as it is right now. So how did you come across that idea? What'd you do, you know, how did you dive into this? Like, did you look at the market first? Was it like a personal anecdote where you found there was a missing gap or something else?
Yeah. Torbill came about as a collision of two observations. Right. Online college touring was always a thing before COVID and it always sucked. But nobody cared because there was never any restriction on people to actually travel to colleges. And people actually viewed the college touring experience as like a family bonding activity, like a, like a rite of passage or something. When Covid hit online college touring came a lot more into perspective for its inadequacies. I wouldn't say this was the main reason, but it definitely accelerated the process because people were looking at these online college tours and realizing that they were basically just glorified Zoom ads put together by university teams, and they showed very, very little of campus. I distinctly remember Cornell's. One of Cornell's admission info sessions or slash tours over Zoom was literally. They literally just had three tour guides standing at various places around campus and screen, like just twirling the computer around them just to show them the background in order to try to give people a sense of what campus was. And I just, I was just thinking about that and I was like, wow. This has completely failed to give me a physical tour experience. This is completely failed to give me what me as a student wants. All right. There's a complete mismatch between what schools want in their tours and what students want in their tours. But here lies the other problem. What's the willingness to pay for that? That's not a hair and fire problem. You talk to students here in the US and tell them, hey, you can jump on what if I could solve that problem for 10 bucks? And then they're like, I'm not paying you 10 bucks for a college tour. Right. So there has to be a willingness to pay there. And that's when our market shifted. We started looking at international students because you look at the willingness to pay for US, UK and Canadian education over there, it's so high that they're dropping tens of thousands of dollars on admissions consultants to try to get them into US and UK and Canadian universities. And it's gone to the point where there's a burgeoning consultant market, educational consulting market over there, servic lot of international students which, with extremely high willingness to pay and even a small sort of market developing in those consultants in terms of differentiation. And that was a perfect go to market for me and my co founder who was a South Korean international student who had connections to many of those firms and private institutions. There's an alignment of the willingness to pay, but there's also an alignment of. We realized we could create a solution that could mimic the physical process very well, but also provide what students value the most out of these college tours, which is unique insider information, especially international students stuff to write their why College essay about. Unique insights, talking to a student and feeling like this will help their chances of getting in. And also at the end of the day, a premium upscale product where they felt like they had a bunch of students at various top universities around the us, UK and Canada in their back pocket. Yeah. Extremely high willingness to pay in that market, combined with our capability to actually build that led to torable and obviously still iterating. Yeah, but there's a, there's a really, really compelling market here. Basically with us having really, really unique go to market access and us building a solution to this in a novel way.
Yeah, 100%. Wow. That's, that's, that's crazy to hear that. That was the original story and it's deeply relatable as well because I remember my tour was also just not even showing the school itself, but going through slides and pictures, which is even worse and I guess you know, since a lot of the audience is, you know, just starting off in their venture right. Or you know, in the beginning stages, what are some of the more practical things that you've done to kind of get started? What do you prioritize when you did build this right? Was it trying to find the customer fit the validation right way, or did you find that you had that and you wanted to move on to just building the solution first? Right. Was it trying to sell people first? Trying to get at least, you know, maybe a wait list or perhaps it was a combination of all those different things. What should you prioritize when you are just starting out and what are the most practical ways to do so?
The number one mistake you can make if you're trying to create a serious venture and even if you're a builder, is to start building without market validation. Because the number one thing you should be doing when the thing that separates basically an ideation stage venture and a venture where you're actively building is have I conducted enough customer interviews and enough market discovery to validate that customers have a problem that is worth fixing? And look, there's a lot of guides out there on how to do customer interviews and yet people still screw them up all the time. Yeah, they walk up to people and they're like, this is my product, would you like to buy it? Yes, no and why wouldn't you like to buy it? And then they start asking open ended questions from there thinking that they're being non biased, but actually they ruined it from the start because they showed them the solution first.
Exactly.
What you need to do is validate if that your problem actually problem actually exists by talking to people, talking them about something they do on a normal basis, asking them are there any pro problems here? Asking them about the severity of the problem, asking them to open up about explaining the problem to you without you even pressing them about this problem. Yeah. And at the point you can do that consistently with people and also determine consistently that this is a hair and fire problem or it's a really, really nice thing to have, or simply put, they're willing to pay for it at the point where that happens, then go start building, build an mvp, build a wait list if you need funding, show people the amount of traction on your wait list, try to do pre sales. Pre sales is the number one way to demonstrate product market fit without building a product.
Right.
And then you can get so much backing so easily for whatever you're building at that point it's just a matter of connections and network but trust me, if you're building something that's doing a thousand dollars in pre sales in a day or two, let me know because I want to help you out.
That's hilarious. Wow. It seems like a lot of it was perhaps planned, right? And obviously you had kind of goals, maybe in the back of your head to kind of hit before you set out and did those things. Right. And you just talked about a lot of these metrics, the pre sales, the wait list, interest. Right. Things along those lines. So when you started, were those, you know, the types of numbers that you want to hit, or were there something else instead? And for those, for you, maybe specifically for your venture, like, what are those numbers beyond just pre sales and wait list? Is there anything else?
Metrics are something that are entirely arbitrary, that are a tool that you use mainly to fundraise, in my view, and they can be manipulated very well. You, as an entrepreneur, you have very astute and tight control over one thing, right? Which is the date of when you started actually seriously promoting or actually seriously selling. Right. Because it's a really powerful tool in the entrepreneur's toolkit because they can walk up to a VC and be like, I made this many sales in two, just two weeks, or I onboarded this many tour guides in just like a few days. Yeah. And that demonstrates a lot to VCs, right? The numbers you can't lie about, but the dates, the dates you can twist around to your own effect as well. I'm not saying you should, like, deliberately commit fraud, but in terms of raising positioning yourself in the best way possible, that's what it's for. In terms of metrics, I don't believe in setting arbitrary metrics for yourself unless you have data to back up those metrics. Right. Cause if you're just. If you've just built your product and you're like, I want to sell to three B2B firms by the end of this month, that doesn't do anything for you. It places an expectation on you that is not backed by anything. And really the only reason you do that sort of thing is to hold yourself accountable.
Right.
But why do you need a number to hold yourself accountable at that point?
Exactly.
So I think metrics only really becomes important in the fundraising context. When investors go ahead and do their market sizing, they go and take a look at, ARR, all those metrics, and at that point, you can play around and tabulate with your metrics really, really well at that point. Gotcha. Yeah.
Okay. Awesome. And it's interesting because right before we had this conversation, we were talking about ways of growth. Right. How you built. Right. Something from scratch to what it is today. And obviously that comes with a lot of experience. Trial and error testing, ab, things along those lines, you know, for. In your experience, what were some of the things that have worked best for you in terms of, you know, increasing visibility and marketing, getting things that you do want in terms of just acquisition, and then perhaps what are some things that didn't work out so well that you would urge against or things that you maybe didn't do well, that you kind of found a way to do better at? I just want to get your thoughts there.
You know, people say there's a learning curve with every startup failure you have. And at first I was really skeptical when people said that because it's like, okay, you're in an operations role, and then you failed your second startup. What did you take away from that? Some arbitrary lesson like, don't do this to customers, don't say this to people. But as I'm going through the motions, I'm starting to realize what they mean. Because, for example, on the operations end, you learn about CRMs, you learn about zapier, you learn how to make a really, really efficient and automated workflow for onboarding tour guides, which is what I'm doing right now.
Awesome.
And you just get much better and much faster, and you just know how to do it much cheaper every single time you build something. Which is, which is amazing in the context that you're. You're building something like this.
Yeah.
Did that answer your question?
Yeah, 100%. 100%. It's just more streamlined, more efficient at all times. And. Yeah, okay, interesting. And I guess on top of that, then what are perhaps, you know, obviously, you know, like you said, the customers is one thing, 100%, but then there's also the relationships. Right. That helped and push you along the way. You know, how did you get in touch with them? How would you maintain those relationships? And perhaps, you know, if you can speak to both sides on the creating something from scratch versus creating something that already exists, building off something that really exists. What are some ways that maybe, perhaps you do that you don't see other people doing?
You know, I started doing this, and this isn't necessarily something everybody should do, but it's helped me out a lot. It's. I was really fascinated by the idea of customer relationship management software CRMs when I first encountered them. Just the idea of being able to tabulate everybody you've ever met in a business Setting out in a map in front of you, just like it's a spider web and draw connections between the two and between the people and sort of create a diagram of where people could be leveraged and whatnot. And I like treating people really more in the resource based view. And I don't mean that in terms of like use people, but in terms. Because every relationship you have should be benefiting both of you guys. Right. I strongly believe that as an entrepreneur, but. And in that way, you know, in a resource view, you're actually benefiting both of you. But less on that, more on the fact that I started seeing CRMs as a great thing to use in your personal life and personal connections you make with people as well, because it just allows you to manage relationships, leverage synergies between people, you know, and overall, just create a better image for yourself and your startup a lot easier. I don't see people seeing this and being like, we want to apply data analytics to this. You know, it's funny because everybody's like, we got to apply data analytics to everything.
Exactly.
Email, click through rates, you know, like AR, revenue, all of that.
Right.
But what about your relationships? Like, why, why doesn't anybody tabulate these relationships, put them down on a map in front of them and start drawing lines between people and figuring out, I can help this guy in this way, he can help me in that way. We can create this synergy here. Yeah, I didn't talk to this guy in a few months. And you know, one of my favorite apps, and here's this, like a plug sort of is Clay Earth, which is a personal system which helps me do that. Helps me remember to check in with people every couple months. Helps me to realize how I can help people and how they can help me. And it does it in a really, really systematic way. And for, you know, aspiring entrepreneurs or people who are builders, often your personal network is very, very mixed in with your business network. So it works pretty well. At the end of the day with that. That's something I don't think people have thought about a lot. But what I realized is very valuable for me.
Yeah. Wow. Especially, you know, for me as someone who's like doing a lot of networking for banking, doing tons of coffee chats back and forth, back, being able to connect the dots and. Right. Like introducing maybe one person to someone else within my network.
Yeah. For professional networking though, it's a little different because there's not much you can do as a college student for an investment banker.
Right, right. So it's more so just keeping track of. Okay, are you going to give me the referral or not? Should I even follow up with you? Did the first call even go well? Something along those lines. And I love the way you're thinking about it, like creating quantifiable metrics. That way you can revert back. Right. Kind of rank them. Right. Even though as soft as it is, it can get extremely technical, nitty gritty no matter how you make it. So it's really, you know, as much technical detail as you want you can bring to the table. But yeah, okay. And in terms of just horrible right now, I'm sure, you know, obviously, like there's a lot of students who would be, I guess, quite interested in potentially, you know, learning more about it, getting involved if possible and potentially, you know, helping you out since, you know, they go to a university and they maybe want to help other students. Right. From abroad, from domestically, it doesn't matter, you know, take a stake in this boat. So, you know, what are some ways that they can get involved?
How can they potentially help you out with Torrible?
Yeah.
Yeah. We recently just ran a really, really viral growth marketing campaign on LinkedIn and across our social medias, we basically. Well, they're not fully onboarded, but we brought in about 800, 900 tour guides across top US, UK and Canadian universities for our ambassador program for our upcoming launch of our platform. That is students working for us as ambassadors for their universities to lead college exploration Sessions and our360 online video conference rooms for international students. So there's a couple ways, right? That way is probably the most common way and most efficient way to do it.
Yeah.
If you're interested, just search up Torable's LinkedIn page. Trust me, you'll find it. It's a very, very visible post.
Nice.
And how I like to describe it is if you're time strapped and you want to meet prospective students and also make a great big chunk of, of pocket change with that. Our, our per rate. Our per rate. I guess compensations are pretty really high for college students. It's a great way to do that because how I like to describe it is it's monetizing your free time. You set your hours. When you're available to be booked, people book from those hours. Except it's better because it's basically just zoom calls all the way down with our platform, of course. Yeah. The other way is we're starting to put together student teams. I'm going full time on this, so is my co founder David Soon. And what we're realizing is we spent a lot of time ourself wearing different hats around the startup technical development, the first iterations of our MVP operations, just marketing and sales in general. And we need to shift more of our focus towards the business operations and sales end.
Yeah.
So we're really looking for really savvy technical and operators, those people in those two categories, to perhaps join our team in the next coming couple months or so. And I think it'll be an exciting journey for anybody who wants to join us. Just be aware, you're going to be working in one of the fastest growing startups out of, out of Cornell. And me and David, we're definitely not slowing down this summer. And if in case you're interested in that also just shoot us a DM on LinkedIn. Happy to respond anytime.
Wow. All right, man. And just to give some context to this opportunity, it's probably, it's going to pay you better than probably your first job out of college, so potentially.
But on a per hour basis.
Yeah, on a per hour basis. So it's definitely worth giving it a shot. Yeah. I mean, look, like Sean, you've been probably one of the most impressive people I met at Cornell and I can't say that lightly. Right. Especially at our age. I have a ton of other questions to ask you, but perhaps the final one that I want to leave off with is something more so about maybe the legacy and want to bring leave behind and just words of inspiration for the people who do want to be and walk a journey very similar to yours. Right. Who are on the precipice of taking that first step. So, you know, in very simple terms, you know, what is it that keeps you in this game for this long? Is it just the love of just creating that impact? Right. Building that venture in the long term and seeing people's lives get better? Or is it more so for yourself? The fear of failure, you know, the, the fear of maybe not realizing your full potential. Like, what is it that just gives you fire?
You know, I had. There's one thing I would build in this world and I would just love to be at that thing that I built every day. And that thing is a college campus where basically you tell everybody after graduation you can have your Goldman Sachs job or whatever, but then you encourage them all to do startups. I want to see a world where you get a bunch of smart people together in a room and you tell them you should do startups, but there's no career harm from doing so, and then just see what they Put together because there are so many, so many smart people who don't get into startups because they take the safer route out in their eyes. I want people to realize that, look, Goldman Sachs is awesome. Great brand, great pay. You'll be probably set up for the rest of your life. Right? Same thing with Fang, same thing with top consulting, same thing with everything else. But the same thing can be done in startups because people really don't. I think people are really discount, discounting what a startup network does for you because people in startups, the more you work in the early stage venture space, they are smart people. They all of them were smart enough to go into industry but chose to do startups instead. All of these startups, you work enough time in startups, you start to pick out and realize which ones are going to do well and you know, it was probably a pretty good gig working for Facebook after their series B raise. Right?
Right.
If you're worried about long term earnings. But also the work is just so much more interesting.
Exactly.
And maybe as a college student, people don't understand what they mean by interesting work, but if what you do is impactful to an organization and you see the changes in your organization's product with the people that use it every single day, that is an amazing feeling. That is something I think later down along the line you're going to start valuing a lot more. And at the end of the day, your career growth, you spend enough time building a network in early stage venture, you can find a job anywhere in earlier stage venture, in any startups and early stage investing, after you achieve some success in early stage venture and startups. And the same principles of networking still applies, right. In startups as compared to it in IB or any other really, really high flying jobs. It's just that everybody can benefit each other now instead of just you benefiting the kids from your school because you guys went to the same school and regular networking and at that point, yeah, it's just an amazing feeling to be in that environment, to always be around people who are excited about what they're building and who honestly don't complain about their hours or anything that they would in regular jobs too.
Honestly Sean, I'm sure you've heard it before, but one of the founders worst nightmares is filing that, shaping up their resume and you know, applying to a job again. And I think there's no better testament to that than what you just said because after you go through that process of building a startup and just being committed to, you know, running your own gig going back is just like, you know, it just doesn't feel normal, just doesn't feel as fun anymore. So of course, you know, you can obviously take those other routes with investing, growth and things like that, but it's, it's a drug and it's, it's one of those things where if you go there, you just. Just hard to go back. But yeah.
And I think the real risk from startups comes from if you pursue startups and you don't think you need to build a network and you don't pursue your startup fully 100% seriously, and you continue to try to make it work even if it doesn't achieve product market fit after a while. Because knowing when to quit is also very, very important because at the point where you're trying to operate a startup where it's just dying, you're not learning anything, you're not helping your career. And really there's so many other people you could be helping if you're already that sort of person willing to go into startups in terms of helping other people by working in their ventures. That's also something the other side of the coin. But I think it's a lot less pronounced than people make out to be, 100%.
And with that, Sean, I want to leave it as that. Thank you so much for your time again. Honestly, I've talked to you, you know, CTO CEOs, and your insight is just as practical, if not perhaps even more so, because you're more on our level and know how to speak our language right from your experience. So it's great to have your time today. And there's so much that I still haven't covered yet that I have my, you know, entire list of questions essentially, you know, about your VC experience and how you end up later on. So we'll definitely have a part two sometime down the line, but for now we'll have this cliffhanger for what Sean will do in the next six months to maybe a year, and then we'll.
Catch up again for sure. Peter, thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.