Growth, Acquisitions, and Startup Wisdom with Ravi Kurani

In this episode, Ravi Kurani, the founder of Sutro, shares his experiences with acquisitions, funding strategies, and the pros and cons of being VC-backed or acquired by a strategic buyer. Explore the significance of team management, personal growth, and the entrepreneurial mindset. Get inspired by Ravi's advice for hardware startups and learn the secrets behind making your financial spreadsheet truly valuable.

 

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FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

INTERVIEW WITH RAVI KURANI

Gboyega Adebayo:

Oh and FYI if at any point the video starts getting cloudy don't worry Riverside Uploads it immediately All right today I sit down with Ravi Karani. He's the founder of Sutro. How's it going, man?

Ravi Kurani:

I'm doing good, man, doing really good. How are you?

Gboyega Adebayo:

I'm good, I can't complain. Like I was saying, apologies for sounding stuffy and maybe a couple sniffles, so listeners don't get angry at me. So I'm excited to talk to you because you have an interesting story from the perspective of you've created a product that didn't exist before and you've taken it to market, you grew it, and then you sold it, and now you're... you know, working within a broader company, you know, driving your mission forward and trying to grow the business. And so that's a very unique perspective. I don't think that we've gained on the podcast. So thank you so much for joining and just really excited about exploring it.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, yeah, of course. No problem at all.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Perfect. So we'll start with the first question that I ask everyone. When you were a kid, what did you want to do growing up? Or what did you want to

Ravi Kurani:

Funny,

Gboyega Adebayo:

be when

Ravi Kurani:

I wanted to,

Gboyega Adebayo:

you grew up?

Ravi Kurani:

yeah. When I was a kid, I actually remember, I used to love playing with Legos. And so I used to build these little cities in a little backyard covered area we had. And so I think very early on, I wanted to always be like a city builder, like a city platter. I didn't know what the job was, right? But somebody that builds cities. And then when I kinda got a little bit older, I wanted to be the... typical astronaut, right? I think I saw like a lot of the stuff with space happening. And then when I got a little bit older, I wanted to be like a biologist. And so those were kind of the like, or like actually like an ocean biologist, because I used to love going to the zoo and seeing it. I mostly just really loved like water and the ocean animals. I don't know why. Probably just like the color blue,

Gboyega Adebayo:

Hehehe

Ravi Kurani:

I guess, but yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

No, man, that's really cool. I chuckle because I assume we're in the same age range. And anytime someone talks about wanting to be a builder, I think about Sims,

Ravi Kurani:

Oh

Gboyega Adebayo:

which

Ravi Kurani:

yeah, exactly.

Gboyega Adebayo:

is like the game that owned our generation of, oh, I wanna build a city, I wanna build a house, and I still have Sims on my PS5. Like it's just, it's a game that is so fascinating and I can't get away from, it's just fun.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, and I think I remember at some point in time, I just stopped playing the game and building things. I would just build these homes and put sofas in places or a door, or windows, a balcony. It was like, I remember that. I just enjoyed the building of the city, even though I wasn't actually playing the Sims game to progress in the game.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Right, right. Oh, that's funny. I always love going back and thinking about the Sims. I'm gonna play one of these nights.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

So you've identified this interest in being a builder, right? And exploring these interests. What motivated you to start a business? Like how did you become an entrepreneur? Did you have a career that you started and then you got tired of something or was it just always in you that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, you know, it's kind of funny. I never really like, I don't think I started off when I was building Legos or playing Sims or whatever that was, thinking about how I wanted to be an entrepreneur. If I kind of think about the ingredients that went into becoming an entrepreneur, probably the first thing was seeing my family, notably my dad. He immigrated from India with my mom and obviously me. And at a very young age, he had a master's in chemistry and couldn't find a job in the US. And so he ended up basically running pool routes, right? Being a pool boy. Until he kind of walked into one of the pool stores and like ran a water test for one of the customers as the owners had stepped out. And these guys were like, that's crazy. Like how does this pool guy know so much about water chemistry? And he's like, well, long story short, I'm a master's in chemistry from India. And they're like, you don't need to be out there scrubbing pools, you should be in the store. He ended up growing that one store to 30 stores while I grew up, right? And so growing up in the family business as an immigrant, right, you're like, it's kind of all hands on deck. Like I remember dad and mom would be sick, so I'd walk in the store sometimes at 15, 16, 17 years old, opening the doors, sweeping floors. worried about slotting, where do you put what chemical, taking credit, how do you upsell at that point. And so I think that's ingredient number one. Ingredient number two is I have a background in mechanical engineering, studied mechanical engineering from UC Riverside and did a really small stint at NASA. And to your point, I kind of got tired of being an engineer. I just... I wouldn't say tired, I didn't do it for that long, but I noticed it's not something that I wanted to do, being in the nitty gritty of actually building the thing. And so I kind of started to explore what was an MBA, what is investing, what is entrepreneurship, kind of going back to the basics again of like, sure, I can sit behind a computer and code in MATLAB, or I can design in SolidWorks a particular 3D model. But I think both of those two vectors are kind of what got me into entrepreneurship, right? Seeing my dad starting this business and then not wanting to do the core engineering, but figure out how to kind of combine those two together to see like what else is out there. And so I think that's

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

kind of what kicked off entrepreneurship.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Man, that's no, I love the way you framed it in terms of the ingredients. I do feel as though the journey into entrepreneurship is always this combination of life experience and maybe a little bit of, you know, a dash of frustration about something.

Ravi Kurani:

I'm going

Gboyega Adebayo:

And

Ravi Kurani:

to go to bed.

Gboyega Adebayo:

that's what gets you in. So tell me a little bit about Sutro and kind of. Explain to me what your first action was because again, you know, it's not something that's existed before So where did you start?

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, the story actually started when I was in India. I had done a stint about a year in India with my grad program. And I was kind of a standalone associate at a small impact investing venture capital fund in India. And so we were basically deploying capital to companies who built products for people who earned less than $2 a day. So a lot of things around poverty alleviation, how do you get electrification into villages, just really, really interesting business models at this stage. We're used to seeing stuff in Silicon Valley and all that, but this was a really interesting world on seeing how economics and business models worked. In seeing a bunch of these deals that were coming on my desk, one thing that we noticed was there was a really big gap around water sensing. people didn't know what the quality of water was. Everybody was trying to fix water. They all had water filters, but nobody knew what was wrong with water. And so we

Gboyega Adebayo:

Mm.

Ravi Kurani:

kind of set out to build the first water sensor, initially trying to deploy it into the Indian market. And as you can probably imagine, working with the foreign government, especially India, it's riddled with red tape. And so

Gboyega Adebayo:

Mm-hmm.

Ravi Kurani:

a really stupid decision from a startup standpoint to try to sell to a government. And so... You know, long story short, it was a bit of a winding road, kind of ended up shelving the idea for a bit. Came back to the US, you know, after my stint was done. And I was like, Hey, wait a second. I, you know, dad used to do dad, dad got into pools through water testing. Um, that's all we did at pool stores. I mean, that's why you, you have a pool store. And I'm like, what if I flip this model around, sell the water sensor to a more wealthier clientele, notably pool owners. And the sensor. was built as an architecture to scale into drinking water, agriculture, all of these things I wanted to do in India. And

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

so we just flipped the model around and that's kind of what the initial impetus was of building Sutra as you kind of see it today.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, no, that's pretty awesome. And that's actually really fascinating that your pivot was to just flip the, like just go to the other end of the spectrum. It's like, we're trying to, you know, we're trying to serve a specific audience in India, but it's going to be very challenging to serve them. So let's serve a different clientele who will need this service, generate the momentum more or less that you need. And then that allows you to. to kind of serve a broader audience down the road. That's pretty smart.

Ravi Kurani:

Exactly.

Gboyega Adebayo:

How did you guys, just out of curiosity, what was the aha moment? Was there a moment where you're just like, oh my gosh, this could work? Or was it just feedback from investors having conversations with folks?

Ravi Kurani:

It was actually at a Google startup weekend that was in San Francisco. So I had, when I came back from India, I ended up working in between launching Sutro and leaving India was a building consulting firm that did like energy efficiency and lead certification for buildings, right? So I got to see a lot of finance and energy efficiency and water efficiency within the built environment. And then actually right after I came back from India, I ended up working for another impact investing fund that was out of San Francisco, right? Kind of parallel to my work that I was doing in India already. In between that, I went to a Google startup weekend, right? This like Friday, Saturday, Sunday thing, you pay like 50 bucks or whatever the heck it is. And the whole goal is you're like in these like little teams and you kind of do a sprint over the course of a weekend. Usually, they'll have a series of entrepreneurs or just people that are kind of bored and want to hang out over the weekend that pitch a particular problem. And so I remember

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

I went up there and I pitched and I'm like, hey, I have this robot that measures water chemistry for swimming pools. Like anybody want to be on my team? Can you guys upvote me so we can actually start this thing? And the project got upvoted in the Google Startup Weekend. It was one of the six projects there. And then I had a team of six people and we like... You know, it's three days. We like ended up kind of validating the idea. It's, it's very, it's very lean startup be very sprinty, right? You kind of just like go

Gboyega Adebayo:

Right.

Ravi Kurani:

in over the course of a weekend and you see if this thing's going to work. And it gave me the light bulb enough to be like, Hey, this thing, this thing has legs, um, I should, you know, Unshelf pick up off the shelf, this idea of the technology that we built in India. And let's actually go ahead and repurpose it for the swimming pool market.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, no, that's pretty cool, man. And I love the fact that kind of these random kind of networking, just meet people, interact type of events is yielding some value because, you know, even as an early stage, you know, entrepreneur, there are sometimes where you're just like, do I really need to go to this event? Is there,

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

you know, and you, and you realize you never realize how impactful it could actually be. So. Thank you for sharing that. So one question I do have, excuse me, tell me about the prototyping process because this hasn't existed before. How did you find someone to build it? Were you in your garage building it? Like what was that process? What was the process?

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, so we kind of had a napkin sketch from India, right? The first rule of prototyping is to, as cheaply as possible, make something that's going to fulfill the problem that you're trying to solve, right? And in our case, it's water chemistry. We're trying to measure the pH, the free chlorine and the alkalinity in a swimming pool, gather those insights from the information of what is the pH. and then tell you what to do. So add some acid, add some soda ash, whatever that might be. So it's a very simple loop. It's like, find out what's wrong with the water, crunch how to fix it, and then tell me how to fix it. The initial point of that is actually figuring out what's wrong with my water. And that's kind of what ended up happening when I realized that the sensing market was so broken from my India experience. And so the first thing we did from the prototyping process was we just went to Amazon. And we like said, what can we buy that is off the shelf that measures water chemistry? The technology that currently exists are these, are these things called glass bulb sensors, and I won't go into like the crazy physics of it or any of that. The best way of understanding what's wrong with these glass bulb sensors is to think about it as a car speedometer that's broken, right? So if you're traveling on the freeway and the speed limit says on the freeway that you should be traveling at 60 miles an hour. Your feedback loop is, if my speedometer reads that I'm going 100 miles an hour, I should slow down. If I'm below 60, I should speed up, right? Very simple, if this, then that statement. The problem with these glass bulb sensors is now if your speedometer was saying that you're going 100 miles an hour and you're actually going 40, you're going to think you should be slowing down, but you should be speeding up. And so that's the problem with these sensors. They're just, they over time begin to drift, begin to kind of quote unquote break. or change what the initial value is. And then you don't know what that feedback loop is to go up or go down, right? Do I speed up or do I slow down? Given

Gboyega Adebayo:

All

Ravi Kurani:

my

Gboyega Adebayo:

right.

Ravi Kurani:

speedometer example. We use that technology, we deployed about a hundred sensors and we very quickly realized that if your input sensor data is screwed up, then how can I tell you to speed up or slow down? Because that whole thing is broken, right? If your pH is off,

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

If I'm taking the input data and then crunching what to do and then telling you the wrong thing to do, well, that's not going to help you any, right? You're going to screw up your, your swimming pool and you're going to be swimming in unsafe water. Um, so we kind of went back to the drawing board again and we're like, we can't use these off the shelf things, right? Which kind of sucked because the goal of a startup is to deploy something quickly, build it, get it out to the market and then start iterating on it. But our initial first principles were broken because this off the shelf sensor didn't quite work. And so we

Gboyega Adebayo:

All

Ravi Kurani:

went

Gboyega Adebayo:

right.

Ravi Kurani:

back to the basics and we saw that for those of you out there, you might know this, right? The way that you measure a swimming pool is you take a sample of water and you put like a little food coloring inside there, right? Some, some like chemicals and reactant chemicals, those chemicals then change the color of the water, the sample water, and then you know what the water chemistry is, although those test kits are big, right? They're like the size of my, my hand to run one test. And so we said. Hey, there's in the medical industry ways that you can run tests. And I'm not pointing to Theranos right now, but you know, tests that

Gboyega Adebayo:

Hehehehe

Ravi Kurani:

do work. And microfluidics does exist as a technology. You know, I studied it in mechanical engineering. And so microfluidics, really, really tiny fluids. How do you take this test kit that's the size of my hand and turn it to something that's the size of my nail? Um, and so we went through that process. That was kind of the second iteration of like our first sensor didn't work. That was the easiest way of getting to market. Let's try this more difficult option. Um, our first sensor cluster, because we literally were building something from scratch now, right? Where we're literally miniaturizing. Something that's bigger into something that's smaller was like the size of my desk and probably cost us like $10,000 to make, right? Nobody's nobody's going to buy it at that cost, but Your main goal then is can I get something that works and that I can validate in the market from a sensor standpoint? Because if that works, now I know what's happening with the pool chemistry, I now know how to crunch the data and then what to do, that loop will work. So then you can go ahead and isolate that technology standpoint and then drive down the cost and figure out how to make it usable. But that's kind of long and short of how we got to the first stage of building out a sensor that's never existed in the market. by having a few failures of looking at something that is available, but it not working.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah. And it's, it's very interesting that you started with what can we buy right now? Um, because I think that if I were starting and this is probably unwise obviously, but I think I'd be so obsessed with my own idea and how I want to design it that I wouldn't immediately go and say, okay, well, can we just. tweak what's already there right now and just try it. Hmm, that's a really kind of wise way to approach it.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, because your number one most limited asset is time and secondarily money. Right? So if your whole goal is to validate an idea and make sure that it works, then the quickest way of really turning up the time dial is by taking something that's off the shelf, right? Like not doing work on the actual idea. And,

Gboyega Adebayo:

Right.

Ravi Kurani:

you know, I say this, given our example, there's varying points of first principles that you need to go back to, to say, This is what we're trying to validate from a problem standpoint. And here's, here's the ingredients of the solution. Do

Gboyega Adebayo:

Mm-hmm.

Ravi Kurani:

I need to double down on the product and spend millions of dollars on building it today when something exists that's off the shelf that I can put in tomorrow? Um, and

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

so it's just, it's just kind of really breaking things down into its digestible parts and then checking off the box of all of them as quickly as possible to get something into the market.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, no, that absolutely makes sense. In consulting, we have this analogy, it's like, do you wanna build it or do you wanna buy it? There's like,

Ravi Kurani:

Thank you.

Gboyega Adebayo:

yes, as a given company, you could build your own financial management system, but are you in the business of building financial management systems? And as a startup, it is very wise to understand what's my unique value proposition, and that's the thing I'm gonna spend time building rather than

Ravi Kurani:

Mm-hmm.

Gboyega Adebayo:

reinventing the wheel for... the commodity stuff that's in the space.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

That makes a lot of sense.

Ravi Kurani:

And also the longer you stay in heads down building is opportunistically less time that you're going to be out there validating, right? The whole goal of a startup, because this stuff has never existed, is getting it into people's hands. And as quickly as you can do that, as fast as you can do that, the better. Because now you're getting, you want feedback as quick as possible and not to keep the door closed and be sitting inside heads down. Granted, if the thing doesn't work, then don't deploy it. That was our first problem.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Right.

Ravi Kurani:

And so, yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

So I'm curious, how did you build your team? What did your team look like at this stage? Did you raise capital and kind of have some initial investment with the idea stage or was it just kind of bootstrapped and then you created your prototype and then you got funded? How did

Ravi Kurani:

Mm-hmm.

Gboyega Adebayo:

you put together a team?

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, we raised money pretty early on through an accelerator. We ended up joining a hardware accelerator called Bolt, Bolt VC. And their model was they had kind of shared resources in terms of mechanical engineer, electrical engineer from a hardware standpoint, right? Because when you compare hardware to software ventures or companies, hardware is 10x more hard you have to like physically build a thing, right? There's bits and bytes. The bytes are cool because you can hire a bunch of developers, but the atoms, the bits are really, really hard to do because if your plastic is off, if your electronics are off, if you don't think about your wifi connectivity, that's problematic. And so the funds thesis, right, Bolt's thesis was, we'll go ahead and kind of create a shared group of folks that can help you on the hard part, on the bits part.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Mmm, yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

and also on the bytes part, but more notably, give you a little bit more resources than you otherwise would have had. So you can then get to market quicker. So from a team perspective, I had that resource pool from Bolt. My first hire was actually a chemical engineer and a mechanical engineer. Because very quickly when we realized that we needed to build this thing from scratch, and notably we needed to focus on microfluidics of chemistry, everything else from there on forward, the electronics, the software could could kind of wait in a certain sense, right? We needed to get the core technology down, which was back to first principles, the actual chemistry, and then a little bit larger than that would be the mechanical side of how do you actually dose and make really, really small amounts of liquid go into a flow cell. And so that was actually my first two hires that we had when we started.

Gboyega Adebayo:

All right. Sounds like, uh, it's, I try to surround myself with engineers. Um, I shouldn't say intentionally. It's just my closest

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

friends from college are engineers and the engineers are just extremely smart.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

And, and it sounds as though if I were to reframe it, you did a really good job of just doubling down on product and figuring out how to, you know, build the best product. How did you think about going to market and kind of sales and marketing at that early stage? Because you are trying to get feedback, right?

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, our. Again, you start with this manifesto of get to, get it out of the door as quickly as possible and get it into people's hands as quickly as possible. More notably, so you can get, you can collect nos, right? Collect as many nos as possible because you wanna close all the doors in this room so you can focus on the one that you wanna open. Because if all of the doors are open, you just don't know which way to go. And so you quickly wanna get out there and validate your price point, the way that it's gonna work, the way that people are gonna use it. you know, what's their behavior? How are they doing it before the product even existed? Like what did they currently do today? So you can then kind of, you know, bandaid their problems that they have or give them pain pills for the problems that they have. Which meant that my first question was how the heck am I gonna find people with pools? Very, very simply, you can open up Google Maps and zoom into people's backyards, which is a little creepy, and you can see who has a pool. Like honestly, if you open up Satellite View,

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

I know what address has a swimming pool. And so, we didn't wanna do the creepy thing of knocking on people's doors and saying, hey, do you have a pool? So we ended up going to Nextdoor, which is a Facebook for neighborhoods. And we just said, hey, who has a pool here? We have a product. And that was kind of the way that we basically initially got our first few people that signed up for Sutra.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, no, that's it's so funny hearing the, uh, the un unscalable ideas that founders have. And you're right. Like you could literally pull up Google maps and be like, okay, this looks like a neighborhood that has a bunch of pools in it.

Ravi Kurani:

A lot of fools, yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

I want to target this zip code. It, it's not a bad strategy. Um, And honestly, the whole art of it is beg, borrow, and steal. Just figure out the answer to the question you're trying to answer. So

Ravi Kurani:

Exactly.

Gboyega Adebayo:

I get it.

Ravi Kurani:

And I think people get way too hung up on like, do I need to get on Facebook ads and this and that? I'm like, open up Google Maps if you want to see pools.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

Let's ask the five why's. Let's go why, and get down to the basis of what we're trying to figure out and then figure out the

Gboyega Adebayo:

Mm-hmm.

Ravi Kurani:

simplest way that takes less than an hour to do to get us there.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

And so, yeah, definitely.

Gboyega Adebayo:

No, man, I like it. So you've been running Sutro, what, seven years now? Is that correct?

Ravi Kurani:

I think it's about seven years, eight years, something like that.

Gboyega Adebayo:

That's seven years. And when did you guys get acquired?

Ravi Kurani:

We got acquired five years ago now.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Five years. So talk to me a little bit about that process and that experience, because this is your baby.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

How did that kind of, not only kind of physically, how did that happen and how did it work, but then internally as someone that, you know, you probably were thinking, hey, this is gonna be a multi-billion dollar company. Like, how did you deal with that?

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, so the kind of first question you asked of like the process, we were in the middle of raising some strategic financing, kind of leading up to our series A. And, you know, very, very simply, one of the strategic's basically said, hey, it might just be a better option instead of us funding a part of this larger thing to kind of just, you know, acquire you. There was also, you know, to be honest, a deal that also fell through. So a little bit of founder drama in there too, but I won't dig deep too much into that. And so things just kind of popped in at the right place in the right time. And with that being said, I don't think it necessarily changes anything on my vision, notably because Sanimark, the company that acquired us in Canada, has a parallel vision. They see eye to eye with me in building this thing out for the pool industry. They themselves are a sanitation company that has verticals in food and beverage and janitorial in hospitals. And so, why not work with a large distributor that already makes chemicals in these markets to help me not only see the pool market, but see it scale horizontally until these other markets as well. And so we were very much aligned and... You know, nothing against VCs. I like honestly, you know, my, my paths to them, like I'm super, super gracious for all of the VCs that invested in us. But there's also a beauty in being so close to a strategic that has financing that also understands the end to end of your business model, right? Because VCs and I know this because I had a VC hat on it's really, really tough, even if you focus on a particular area like deep tech or hardware, you know, building like a smart breast pump, right, which was one of my friend's companies versus a water sanitation company for swimming pools versus a smart water bottle are three very separate markets that all have three very separate distribution strategies and three

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

separate products. And so, I mean, not that any three of these are bad investments, but as a VC focusing one person on three separate ideas or many separate ideas, it just becomes really, really problematic. From an entrepreneur standpoint, to get feedback from a funder that can kind of resonate with you. And so there's pros and cons, right? Honestly, I think the, I can argue the opposite point of, it's also great to kind of, you know, not have the management side of a large company or, you know, somebody from the management team that's kind of guiding product direction. Whereas if I had a little bit more autonomy with the VC or investor side, I might be able to make decisions a little bit more, you know, lean or quickly. I don't think there's like one size fits all, one's better than the next. But the kind of end of it again was like, they saw eye to eye with the vision of the company and the vision of what I wanted to do. And honestly, I'm super gracious for them for kind of leading us to this point. And so, yeah, that's kind of, it's the process of how we got there. And then, and then how it's been.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, no, that's really cool because I think that the thing that I really key on, key on that you said is the importance of aligned vision and partnership, right? This just alignment of, hey, this is where I want to go and this is where they would like to go and what they do and it kind of works well together. I think that that's really important because there's nothing more You know, there's a gate, there's no game that I like less than, well, what if someone offered you $10 million or a hundred million dollars, or you name the number for your ideas? Like, well, I don't want to put a price on it. Like I know what it can be and I want to kind of build this out. And so it is this challenging thing that, um, you know, your friends are always going to ask you when you have an idea and you know, it does become a little bit of a challenge. to make that decision. I always make, I'll put it out there, I always make the comment to say, I want my strategic partner to be Microsoft for Yensel. I think it'll be, I know their product suite and how it would perfectly align with us and I would love that, that'd be awesome. Would I want them to buy all of my company? I don't know.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

I love it a little too much, right? But

Ravi Kurani:

Sure.

Gboyega Adebayo:

I get that, I get that. priority and the importance is that alignment and vision and then that partnership as well.

Ravi Kurani:

And at the end of the day, it goes back to leverage and momentum, right? Your goal is to get

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

this idea seated in the market and get it in people's hands. And so, you know, whatever the quickest way at the end of the day is to do that, then you kind of go with the, you know, at the path of least resistance. And so I'm not, you know, again, hindsight, 2020, I would have never known or made that decision with, with like looking forward. It's not kind of, you know, you just kind of follow that, that zigzagging path. And that's kind of where we're at today. And so, yeah, I mean, and honestly, am I grateful and gracious, you know, in the middle of COVID that we had a strategic partner that was helping us fund the hardware? I mean, 100%, man, that would have, a few of my friends over here, it was painful seeing them try to fundraise, working with the

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

team that was entirely flat now because everybody went to video, like it was, it was crazy. And so,

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

you know, I'm also just really grateful that we got acquired when we did. And then also, looking back the time that we've been through COVID and through the lockdowns and through the supply chain crises, there was a lot getting thrown at us and then you're a startup to begin with. So like 10x that, right?

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, absolutely. So I wanna tap a little bit into your VC brain, since you know the social space so well. How would you, how do you think about money? How do you think about kind of raising money, choosing the right money for your business? Giving your experience as a VC, how do you tend to think about it? not only for your business, but then also for someone that were to ask you, it's like, I have this idea and this is what I'm trying to build.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, the one thing that I remember, and every VC will say this, the one thing to look for is team, is the people. I think at the forefront is the entrepreneur, mainly being if he or she is not focused on their business. If they're doing 10 other things all at once, and this is kind of a little flash in the pan, they're not focused. Then again, like to your baby example. If they have 10 different babies running around, you want to focus on this one thing that you're trying to grow and nurture and get out to the market. And you can't do it without being focused on one thing. The second thing I would say is founder ego. And I've worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and mentored a ton during my VC days and also kind of in growing up. And As a founder, you need a certain amount of ego, right? Because you get this imposter syndrome, you're kind of standing there on a stage, you don't really know if this thing you're making is or is not gonna work. But there's a point at which that gets dialed up too much very early on in the game. And that can also be detrimental, right? So almost being introspective, looking at where you do stand in that kind of ego complex. And by all means, I'm not saying don't have an ego, like I get it as a founder, you're... You're kind of taking a step out there and doing a thing that's never existed before. So you need to have a little bit of an ego, but tone it down because it can end up not only being detrimental when you're raising money, but more importantly to your team. If you're trying to build a group of people that are going to trust you as a leader, you're going to end up having way too much churn because people just don't believe in you as a leader because you're way too busy sitting up on your own high horse for them to even think about. contributing to your idea because they're like, I don't know if I even want to work with this guy. And so

Gboyega Adebayo:

Right.

Ravi Kurani:

those are kind of the two things I would say are like at utmost importance in kind of building or wanting to launch something.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah. How, how, how have you, how have you thought about, let me ask this question. How has your leadership style changed and evolved over the years from starting Sutro to now, especially given what you said about managing your ego and kind of learning from experience? Like how has it evolved if you were gonna be introspective right now?

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, yeah. I think the first thing I've learned is this concept of unattachment, right? And I think that has come about from the acquisition, from kind of this deal falling through before the acquisition. You necessarily... The world throws way too many things at you and there's too many variables for you to be able to control yourself. And so a certain level of unattachment is necessary, right? Nobody could have predicted COVID. Nobody could have predicted the outcomes from COVID, right? The fact that we shut, if you were opening up a restaurant in the beginning of COVID, nobody would have told you, you know, hey, for two years, you're gonna literally shut your doors and the only business you're gonna have is DoorDash. Like there's, you could have spent all this money on your interior design and then you would have had zero people stepping into that building because nobody was going out, right? So... But it wasn't written in a book anywhere that like, hey, COVID is going to happen at this date at this time, so don't invest in this business because you're going to be better off doing X. All bubbling up to this concept of like unattachment, right? Which kind of in general allows me a bit of calmness when there is like a lot of things just getting thrown around. Because you don't necessarily get attached to a particular thing and hold onto it. And granted, everything I say here has a yin and a yang, right? Like you don't want to be too disattached

Gboyega Adebayo:

Thanks for watching.

Ravi Kurani:

where you're just like kind of lazy and you're like, I don't care about anything. There

Gboyega Adebayo:

Right.

Ravi Kurani:

is a certain tenor, there is a certain like ambition, a certain drive to get to a point, but don't be so like hell bent on it that you're never going to be able to like move to the next thing, right, to be able to pivot. And then the kind of flip side of that is actually acceptance, right? And I know these are kind of very like broad terms, but unattachment and acceptance. COVID's happening, I spent a million dollars on my, interior design of my restaurant and nobody's gonna come in. What do I do now? Let's just, let's accept the scenario as it is today and let's figure out what to do next, right? Which is like, maybe I need to turn this thing into a ghost kitchen. Maybe I need to figure out how to get on DoorDash. Maybe I need to figure out how to make the food cheaper so people can order it on Grubhub and DoorDash. Whatever it is, don't be so bent on your restaurant and the interior design of it because nobody's gonna come in. but figure out how to still make money, stay afloat, and then get the food out there. Because at the end of the game, you want people to eat your food as a restaurant, right? So those are kind of the two ways that my leadership style has changed is in these two kind of factions of unattachment and acceptance.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, I really appreciate that. Like there's unattachment. I've got to think and spend some more time on that one because acceptance is one that I've been working on for years. It's like control what you can control, except

Ravi Kurani:

Is

Gboyega Adebayo:

the

Ravi Kurani:

it?

Gboyega Adebayo:

things that you can't. But the unattachment is, I think there's a lot of wisdom. There's a lot of wisdom in that. You will fall in love with an idea. and you'll do everything you can do in your power to make it come true. But in the event that it's time to pivot, you've gotta take the emotion out of it. You've gotta dissociate and say, hey, it makes sense to pivot. And I think that there's a lot of wisdom in that.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, exactly.

Gboyega Adebayo:

So, one second. Sorry

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, no problem.

Gboyega Adebayo:

about that. No, this is fun. There's so many kind of like random tangential questions that are popping in my head that I wanna dive into. This is something that I'm curious about. At any point over the seven years, have you had a sigh of relief or a feeling of less pressure or stress? Or is it just every single day there's just something new that, you wanna enjoy the small win, but the next day you're just like, all right, now this is a new thing.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, I don't know if I would. define it as relief or stress. I think part of that theory of acceptance is every day is a relief because you're here today. You've tackled the challenge of yesterday and so in a sense, that is a relief if you give this kind of definitional angle of it. But the kind of end of it is like, there's just a series of problems, things to solve in front of me. And whether the universe is throwing it at me or the world's throwing it at me, or it's like a business created problem, or it's Silicon Valley Bank literally not having deposit. You know, there's like, who would have thought of that? Right? Like the

Gboyega Adebayo:

Great.

Ravi Kurani:

startup world almost crashed because they're like, I can't pay payroll because I can't access my bank. Right? You can be thinking about everything all in the above. And then you're like, yeah, my bank shut down. So that goes back to acceptance and unattachment, right? Like just today is today. I have to accept the fact that Silicon Valley Bank doesn't have my money. Let's figure out what the feds do and get to that next point. And so is it really relief or stress? I think it's just kind of seeing what's in front of you right now and then attacking the problems that need to get attacked. And those problems obviously become bigger, right? The bigger you get, there's more at stake, there's more risk, but you also need to make sure you're building in more redundancy. You build in more... securities, more fail-safes, and still the big problems end up happening. You get a COVID event, you get a Silicon Valley bank event, and there's just no predicting those. It's just literally out of your hands. And so, yeah, that would kind of be my answer. I know it's not like a direct answer to your sigh of relief question, but it's how

Gboyega Adebayo:

No,

Ravi Kurani:

I would answer it.

Gboyega Adebayo:

it's good and there's, you know, candidly, I admire the sense of calm. Your sense of calm is something that I'm very, very impressed with and I want to pull as much into that because I'm just kind of a high functioning ball of anxiety. But I'm kind of random question. What is your morning routine? I'm just curious. Like what does your morning routine look like?

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, I try to wake up at 6.30 every day, even on the weekends. I'm just, I guess I'm more of a morning person. That's what my, so my aura ring tells me. I wake up at 6.30. I, my phone is always outside of the room. I actually, I actually hate it when I'm in like in the hotel and I have to keep my phone next to me because I'm such an addict for picking it up and like opening up my email app or Slack or something, right? Like I just. That's a problem I have. I can't not do that. So

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

I keep my phone outside. Then the first thing I'll usually do is actually read like for five minutes, three to five minutes. I keep my Kindle right next to me and I'll open up some sort of a philosophical reading, right? It could be like Marcus Aurelius' meditations. Ryan Holiday has this thing called like the Daily Stoic, which is cool. It's like two pages. He has a verse from Seneca or from Marcus Aurelius and it's just... It just makes you think, right? There's

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

nothing scientific about it. It's just kind of like, you know, sometimes it's like be a good person today and it's like, cool, awesome, great, right? You just, you kind of like, you start your day off

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

with like a little bit of a sentiment there. And

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

then straight after that, I'll actually do 30 minutes of meditation, a combined breathing practice plus sitting in silence. And then I touch my phone. So that's like after basically an hour. Will I get up? I'll pop up my phone and the first thing I always do is open up my email, which is not the smartest thing, but whatever, I have that itch and I need to scratch it. And

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

then I make a little bit of breakfast, a coffee, and then I head into work. And so, yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

What? I like it. There's, my sister actually does this thing where she keeps the phone out of the room and I always call her crazy for it. I'm like, what if an emergency happens? And it's just like, oh, I mean, people will find

Ravi Kurani:

Well,

Gboyega Adebayo:

you. It's not the end of the world.

Ravi Kurani:

if it does, it also does. My phone's on do not disturb and silent. And so they wouldn't, you know, honestly, if they, if I think whatever it is, if your favorites ring you three times or something like that, it'll, my phone

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

will go off anyways. If it's out there, I'll still hear it, right? It's gonna

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

go off and I'll pick it up, but yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, but no, I like that. I'm also a morning person, so on any given, even the weekends, as long as I didn't go to bed super late, 7 a.m., my eyes have opened.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

They have at least opened. Sometimes I force myself to go back to sleep, but by seven, I've unfortunately touched that phone once, probably.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah. Yeah,

Gboyega Adebayo:

Cool

Ravi Kurani:

I also,

Gboyega Adebayo:

man. That was cool.

Ravi Kurani:

you know, there's a bit of what you allow to control your morning, right? Like I said, I open up my email every morning. There is no amount of self-control that I have over the subscriptions that I get, right? The subscriptions will fire that night. I'm going to have, you know, 10 emails or whatever from these subscriptions. You might email me to, you know, the day before like, hey, a reminder that we have our podcast tomorrow. Like, do I need to at the first thing in the morning, like read these 30 things and have the world dictate the way that my day should go? Or can I start at the way that I want to? Right. That's kind of

Gboyega Adebayo:

Mm.

Ravi Kurani:

the question that I've asked. And that's why I leave my phone out there. And granted, if there's an emergency, somebody will call my mom and dad will call the phone will ring because I have that setting on there. And I'll

Gboyega Adebayo:

Right.

Ravi Kurani:

figure that out. But, uh, you know, on a, on a recurring basis, I don't want. the world to dictate how I start my day. And I'd rather have that limited amount of control to start it myself. And so that's,

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

That's a really wise way to think about it. That is a really good way to think about it. All of these things are outside of your control. And do you want to start your day off with a, I don't have control of my day anymore because I've got to do these seven things that someone else has put on my plate.

Ravi Kurani:

Exactly.

Gboyega Adebayo:

It's a really smart way to think about it.

Ravi Kurani:

And you can't stop your brain from having these internal loops. As soon as you see that, as soon as I see that email, regardless of what it is, I'm going to start thinking about Apple's new VR thing because Product Hunt emailed me. I'm going to start thinking about the podcast I'm going to be on because you emailed me, right? Like

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

I don't get that time to breathe in the morning to be like, what really are my priorities? Like, what do I want to do today? But now I've started thinking about all this other stuff that's filled my brain and, you know, put opened up Chrome tabs in my own head that I never really had control of. And so, you

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

know, I always want to start, I have 27 tabs open on my Chrome too, but I'd love to start with, you know, a fresh slate every morning at least.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah. Yeah, there's, there's one thing that I've been trying to do. Um, over the years I used to do us for kind of all of my to do lists and I kind of organized my entire life on it. I'm trying to get in a better habit of the night before. To turning what I want my next day to look like. Okay. These are my priorities. These are the things so that even when I do wake up and I see the emails. I now have to figure out how to slot those things into what I've already told myself I'm going to do. So

Ravi Kurani:

Entirely, yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

yeah, that's something I'm probably going to try to work to have a little bit more discipline in because I like the idea of controlling what I want to do in the day rather than being very reactive to it.

Ravi Kurani:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's funny, it'll open up so much, quote-unquote, free time or focus time for you when you flip the day like that. Not to say that you're not going to answer emails or finish up the work that you need to get done, but you'll just do it within the context of you knowing what you want to do, right? So then you also just feel better and feel more accomplished at the end of the day because you're like, I tick that one to two things off, as well as a bunch of other work, before I fall asleep tonight.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, absolutely. So as we start

Ravi Kurani:

Is he in? No.

Gboyega Adebayo:

kind of wrapping up, I did want to ask one question of, what advice would you give other entrepreneurs who are considering, not just starting a company, but building a product, a hardware product that similar into your case wasn't out there already, or there was something out there, but it was just such. those so far from the quality or the standard that they wanted to achieve, what advice would you give them starting out?

Ravi Kurani:

The first thing I would do is take out a sheet of paper and write your product idea on the top, right? In my case, I would say a swimming pool robot that measures water chemistry. That inherently, the second line I would do is figure out what problem that solves, right, for the customer. Is it, people need to test their pool, and if they don't, they get green algae and they're swimming in a cesspool of mosquitoes and a bunch of nasty stuff, right? With that being said, I would take that second line, I would fold my solution on the other side so I don't see it, and then I would try to find 15 people, 20 people, as scary as that sounds, face to face. Like, don't do a video conference, don't do a phone call if you're able to. Sit down with them, buy them a coffee, go visit them at their home, go to their office, whatever your product is. In my case, I would walk with them in their backyard and I would ask them, How do you test your pool? I wanna see it. I don't wanna, I'm not gonna pitch my idea. I don't forget that I'm even here as an entrepreneur. How do you test your pool? Right, and then follow them. Watch them as they take that test kit that has cobwebs on them, sitting out in the sun that's bleached. Open up that test kit and have no more liquid inside there. And then go to the pool and take a sample of water where they shouldn't take a sample of water. Watch them as they look at the colors and they can't really see what the colors are. understand when they pull out a big sheet of a bunch of formulas and try to figure out what the chemistry is. Don't talk. Don't try to pitch your idea at that point in time. Just watch them. Listen to them. Say,

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

yeah, do you know what the colors are on that little test strip? It doesn't work, does it? Do that 15 times and encapsulate, internalize the information that these customers have, and write it on that same piece of paper. Open up that flap that you turned over and make sure that the thing that you're going to build... is actually solving the problems that you've seen in those 15 people. And then

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

go ahead and build it. But if you're going to take your first step without even talking to a customer to see what their actual problem is, then you're just building it and hoping it, hoping that they're going to come.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, yeah. No, I love that. That's incredibly wise and great wisdom. And I can see that, that applies beyond the hardware. I think about the conversations I had with folks before starting Yenso, like, okay, you need this spreadsheet, what do you do? Oh, well, I Google it. I think I actually, ironically, I think I asked five or six people, like family and close friends. hey, go find this document.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah.

Gboyega Adebayo:

And like, or tell me something that you needed over the last, I think that's what it was. They said, tell me something that you needed over the last week. And people came back, it's like, oh, I needed to, I needed this thing for my kid, or I needed this spreadsheet for this trip that I'm building. And then I was like, okay, how did you get it? And I basically collected an inventory of the ways that people would do it. And probably more subjectively, I said, that's an efficient, that's an efficient, that's an efficient

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah,

Gboyega Adebayo:

and

Ravi Kurani:

exactly.

Gboyega Adebayo:

so yeah, so I really liked that process. All right, so let's get to some concluding questions. Excuse me. What misconceptions did you have about entrepreneurship before you started?

Ravi Kurani:

Um, the, the financial Excel sheet, like literally when you're first building this model, every single VC asks you for this thing and all those assumptions are wrong, right? You're like, I'm going to, I'm going to 10 X volume and my costs are going to be five X and you know, all this stuff. Um, that financial Excel sheet is the biggest, the biggest misconception of what I think is going to happen in the business and what actually doesn't happen. Um,

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

so I got a lot better at finance, but, uh, that Excel sheet, I would say.

Gboyega Adebayo:

How so I've heard this a number of times and As someone who loves spreadsheets and Tries to be as conservative as possible and make sure that it isn't always just up into the right. I Guess my question is How do you still Gain value out of that spreadsheet knowing it's gonna be wrong Like from your perspective, what value does that spreadsheet actually provide, knowing that all of your assumptions are inaccurate.

Ravi Kurani:

Zooming into the spreadsheet, right? So if you make a five-year model, you'll have a very high probability that it's probably not right. If you have a year model, probably a little bit better in terms of probability. If you have a weekly model, you're getting a lot cleaner on being able to pivot and make decisions such that you can actually hit that year benchmark. And so what I would say from the Excel sheet standpoint is figure out your KPIs, figure out what's important, figure out the OKRs, right? The objectives and the key results. What do I want to get to in this year? Break it down again into these weekly, or whatever time segment is right for you. And if you can see things at a smaller scale, you're able to pivot a lot more. You're able to make decisions at a much quicker base where your feedback loop is quicker. And that's when the Excel sheet makes sense. I know some people will be like, man, so you want me to like analyze entire financial spreadsheets over the course of every single week? No, pick your five to seven metrics that you know are going to be levers and volume buttons to make sure that you can actually get to that North Star that you're trying to get to. Not to say you shouldn't have a five-year plan, by all means have it, but if you spend 90% of your time on building a five-year model, your just general probability of achieving it is probably going to be lower than you would on a weekly level because you're able to think in terms of weeks and days, not necessarily in terms of years.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, yeah, that's really good advice. Okay, what book or books would you recommend to other entrepreneurs? And it'll be added to our library that's on our site for other entrepreneurs.

Ravi Kurani:

Um, I would recommend... Actually, I would recommend Harry Potter. And the reason that I say Harry Potter for entrepreneurs is because your number one goal is to be a storyteller. You're raising something out of the grave that has never existed before. You're building something that's completely fresh. And the way to do that is to convince people. So tell really, really good stories that make sense. And that goes back to the problem solution matrix, all of the stuff that we talked about during the pod. And JK Rowling is an amazing storyteller, right?

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

She has amazing character development. She really makes you feel like the emotion behind the things that are happening with Harry and Hermione. Read, just read really, really good stories. Read, read sci-fi. I've gotten a lot into the, just go to the Hugo Awards. It's like the sci-fi award thing. And pick like a handful, you know, go to Amazon and pick a handful of books that interest you. And read a science fiction novel because it... places a version of reality that's in the future that doesn't exist today by somebody that, has a science background, right? For those engineers that wanna get sciency about fiction and don't want something that's super fantasy. So

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

those are two things that I would recommend or two books or two styles of books, Harry Potter and read a science fiction novel.

Gboyega Adebayo:

I like that. I like that. It's a very unique answer. But I think, I think you, you hit on such a really good point that it is all about storytelling and, and a lot of times the best way to learn is to like, just be a little askew to what you're focusing on because it'll get you thinking about your problem, your problem statement a little bit differently. So I really liked that. Okay. My second to last question. What question do you think I should ask the next guest?

Ravi Kurani:

do I think you should ask the next guest? Who demographically will the next guest be? Another entrepreneur.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Um, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter.

Ravi Kurani:

Okay.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Just what question would you want them to answer?

Ravi Kurani:

Um... I think a really interesting question is the earliest memory you can remember when you were growing up that has had like a profound impact or you know that you like remember enough that has probably shaped a little bit of what you're thinking about today.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah. Okay, now you have to tell me about your earliest memory that shaped the impact of what you're doing today. It's the trick I get every guest with.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, I think the earliest memory that I just probably can remember is actually what I started off with, like building these Lego cities with my grandfather. I think I was like seven maybe or eight, I don't know, I don't remember how early I remember back, but like it was prior to 10 or 10 years old and I just remember going... I remember I had my cousin's Lego hand-me-downs, right? So I had like thousands of pieces and I'd built this entire city on probably like a 10 by 10 room that we had in the back. That was kind of a, like a shed area sort of, it was covered.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Mm-hmm.

Ravi Kurani:

And I realized that the Legos were not, didn't have enough high fidelity for me to build the city. And so I just remember going to like Michael's, the arts and crafts store

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah.

Ravi Kurani:

with my grandfather. And I... picked up things that I could add to the LEGO City. So I remember picking up little palm trees and little people and stuff like that, just because I wanted to give a different feeling to this LEGO City than the LEGOs were giving me at this point in time. And so that's kind of what I remember as the earliest memory.

Gboyega Adebayo:

I like it. This might be one of my new concluding questions, because I think it does put a pretty interesting bow on the conversation, because it does tie right back to what you said. And I'm sitting here thinking about what my earliest memory was. I have to think more about it. But the one that stands out to me in my head was, I remember when Magic Johnson was in the news because he was opening movie theaters.

Ravi Kurani:

Hmm.

Gboyega Adebayo:

And it was kind of like the beginning of his like business empire. And I was, I remember saying, I'm going to make the NBA, but I'm also going to be a businessman. I'm going to own a business and I'm going to run a business. And as my hoop dreams faded, every job I walked into, I thought about it from the lens of how is this going to make me a better entrepreneur in the future? So when I went into consulting. I walked in thinking, my job here is to understand how this consulting business works because I'm going to have my own consulting business in the future. And it was fascinating because I never really knew what my business would be. I just knew I would own a business. And so you're right. There is something about that very early memory that does have this through line to how you approach a lot of things. I think that's a really great question.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, that's interesting. Really, really interesting memory.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah, yeah, I was in my cul-de-sac. We had a little cul-de-sac and we used to use the sewer top as the hoop.

Ravi Kurani:

Okay.

Gboyega Adebayo:

So we would all just kind of like be shooting. I just remember being in the cul-de-sac and just kind of thinking like, holy crap, I'm going to be the next Michael Jordan and I'm going to have a business empire as big as Magic Johnson.

Ravi Kurani:

interesting.

Gboyega Adebayo:

Yeah. All right. Well, my final question is, Robbie, tell folks how they can learn more about you, learn more about Sutro, and get connected.

Ravi Kurani:

Yeah, you can go to mysutro.com. That's M Y S U T R O.com. That's where we have all the information on Sutro. If you want to find out more about me, you can go on my LinkedIn. It's pretty, pretty well stocked with everything I'm up to. I'm also in the midst of starting a podcast myself. And so if you want to learn more about that, my podcast is called liquid assets, the business of water. And so you can just go to liquid assets.cc to find out more. But those are three ways that you can get a hold of me.

Gboyega Adebayo:

That's awesome. Right. This has been incredible. Thank you so much, man.

Ravi Kurani:

Thank you, thank you for having me here, man. This was awesome.

Gboyega Adebayo:

awesome.

 
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