In this Business Blast podcast episode, host Tyler Wagner interviews serial online entrepreneur Yashu Sharma, who also works as a Vancouver real‑estate agent and tech sales professional. Yashu shares a formative university story about ignoring well‑meaning but distracting advice to follow his own interests in economics, business, and computer science. He emphasizes that sales is fundamentally a people business, built on trust and expertise rather than product knowledge. His core business advice is to "go against the grain" and let market signals guide product direction, illustrated by his new venture VVO Coffee—a Vancouver‑focused coffee brand that offers neighborhood‑specific blends linked to distinct social impact projects (e.g., clean water, education). He advises his younger self to be more courageous and take risks, and describes happiness as a matter of openness and positive expectation. The book that most influenced him is MJ DeMarco’s Millionaire Fastlane, teaching the principle of divorcing time from money through systems and automation. Yashu also shares a favorite perseverance quote about the 5% who never quit, and provides contact information via Facebook and email for listeners to connect with him.
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Welcome to the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Wagner. This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite provides you with all the resources you need to become a successful author. You can learn more about Authors Unite and join the free community at authorsunite.com. Now let's jump into the episode.
Alright everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today I have Yashu Sharma with us. He is a serial online entrepreneur, Vancouver real estate agent, and tech sales professional. His next project is VVO Coffee, which is a coffee brand focused on the Vancouver market that aims to link coffee drinkers with world social efforts. So welcome to the show, man.
Hey, good to be here. Thanks, Tyler Wagner Wagner.
Of course, man. Grateful to have you here. We'll jump into the first one, Yashu. The first one I have for you is, what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?
So this one comes to me from back when I was in school, just in uni. And it's about, I guess the underlying thesis would be, people that mean well can really just be distractions. And I think over the years, kind of the whole underlying story behind this is a lot of people were telling me in university, hey, don't do this topic or don't do this in university, go this path. And they meant well. I guess tangibly what it was, I was going to be an engineer going to university. So I thought I'd do that. But that's really what a lot of people were telling me to do. But really, I cared about economics, business, computer science, that was more my background. So the story behind that was really, you know, everyone can tell you a certain thing and you can really feel that they have the best interest for you kind of out at heart, but really you got to follow your gut. And sometimes even when it doesn't feel right, you have to kind of stick with your moral choices.
And what's the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?
Well, now mostly being in sales for the most part, I think probably the most valuable piece of information that people should know is sales. And for those people that are in sales, probably already intuitively feel this. Sales isn't really a product business. You're not teaching people how products work. It's more of a people business. So, you know, you're getting people to trust you with their judgment, with your opinion, with your expertise. So kind of stepping back from the whole industry as a whole, I think the most valuable piece of information there is sales is more of a people's business than it is a products business.
I agree. What is your best piece of overall business advice? Maybe here you want to talk about your— I'd love to learn more about your coffee brand and just how you've done, serial online entrepreneur. Even maybe about your other ventures and just how you've done them all.
Sure. Yeah. The best piece of overall business advice here would probably be don't be afraid to go against the grain. I think with a lot of my older projects and e-commerce businesses and certain things I've done in the past, publishing online. I think a lot of people fall into this trap where they feel that they have to kind of go with the herd, and if they don't, they're kind of taking a risk by not kind of following the path kind of best laid out for them. Whereas I think moving forward here, kind of shifting gears into this project that I'm working on, I think allowing the market can dictate what it is that you're going to provide them and not being afraid to go against kind of even a 180 on exactly what the market is kind of wanting. So for example, this Vivio coffee brand that I'm working on, coffee has kind of been moving to more of a global level. So it's kind of gone from local producers with, you know, people in Costa Rica or Mexico or Guatemala really kind of selling their soul out to a bigger corporation and the big corporation really working on more of a national effort, national brand, and national exposure to actually move a lot of product. Whereas with this VVO brand, ideally what I'd like to do is build up from the city. So Vancouver, really big, really big coffee area. We have different neighborhoods in Vancouver. Each one is kind of known for their kind of pretentious coffee flavors. So my idea behind this is why not have different neighborhood blends underneath this brand and have a different social effort? So maybe it's clean water or education for people in Guatemala or building houses or building schools and have a different social effort tied with each product line. So tying those together and that way the free market can kind of decide what effort they want to support, what sort of product line they prefer, and kind of keeping it open to them so they don't really have to pick Nabob or pick, you know, you know, Death Coffee or something like that. It's more of a local solution, but also keeping, keeping the fun and kind of the hobby element of coffee still alive.
And if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?
I would say this one for me would probably be, be more courageous and take a lot more risks and not be afraid, like I said, to go against the grain.
And in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?
This one was a tough one. For me, I think it kind of boils down to wanting to be happy and being open to being happy. And I know that sounds kind of duh, but I think the whole goal here is if you want something bad enough, you'll find a way to kind of confirmation bias in that sense. Oftentimes, I think I personally speaking, I think a lot of people out there listening too, they look for all the negatives in a situation or be more of a pessimist or a realist is how I like to call it to kind of defend myself. Where if I'm more just open to things happening for me, I think a lot more things might.
And what is the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?
For this one, it'd be when I read Millionaire Fastlane 4 or 5 years back. This is— it's called Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco. And the reason why this is my favorite business book and just book overall is it really taught me that The whole goal with money and financial freedom is divorcing time and money. So you don't have to work, put in X amount of hours at a job to work for a living. You can create systems and put processes in place to work independently of that, create online content, create online books, whatever it might be, create physical product businesses and kind of divorce your time for money that way. Yes.
And thank you so much for coming on. I got two more questions for you. The next one is, What is your favorite quote and why?
This one, this one I came across a couple months ago. It's, and I'm probably gonna butcher the way it is, but it's something to the effect that the 95% of the people who quit their projects work for the 5% of people who didn't quit their projects to work on. So that was kind of nice because perseverance is the thing that I think we all struggle with, especially when it's not going well or you're hitting some roadblocks. Whenever I think about that, it always obviously helps me kind of get out of that rut.
Yeah, I like that one. So the last one I have for you is I'm sure everybody listening would like to know is what's the best way for people to find and connect with you online?
Probably from my Facebook. So I'll link it down there and I think I sent it to Tyler Wagner Wagner. Shoot me a message on Facebook, hit up my wall, private message me, or give me an email. Shoot me an email. It's just Yashu Sharma, my first and last name. Tylerwagner@gmail.com.
Perfect, man. Thanks again for jumping on. Awesome.
Thanks, Tyler. Thanks for having me.
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