Building Sutro: From Idea to Water Testing Robots with Ravi Kurani
Join us as we sit down with Ravi Kurani, the Founder of Sutro, to learn how his innovative water testing robot company got started. Discover the importance of local startup events, prototyping strategies, validating ideas, and building a strong team. Gain valuable insights for your own entrepreneurial journey in the technology and hardware space.
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FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
INTERVIEW WITH RAVI KURANI
Gboyega Adebayo: Oh, O and f y I. If at any point the video starts getting cloudy, don't worry, Riverside ups uploads it immediately.
Gboyega Adebayo: All right, today I sit down with Ravi Kurani, 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, listeners don't get angry at me 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 now you're, working within broader company. You driving your mission forward and trying to grow the business. And 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 exciting about exploring you story.
Ravi Kurani: Yeah, of course. No, no problem at all.
Gboyega Adebayo: Perfect. So we'll start with the first question that I ask everyone. you were a kid, what did you want to do growing up or what did you want to be growing up?
Ravi Kurani: I wanted to when I was a kid, I actually remember I used to love playing with Legos and so I used to build these like little, these little cities in a little kind of backyard covered area we had. And so I think very early on I wanted to always be like a city builder.
Ravi Kurani: Like a city pla I didn't know what the job was, right? But like somebody that builds cities. And then when I 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.
Ravi Kurani: And so those were the like, or like actually a like an ocean biologist. Cause I used to love going to the the zoo and seeing, and I mostly just really loved like water and the ocean animals. I don't know why. Probably just like the color blue, I guess but yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: No, man. That's really cool. I'm, I chuckle because I think, 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 yeah, yeah, exactly.
Gboyega Adebayo: 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
Gboyega Adebayo: It's just It's a game that, that, 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 like building things. I would just build these homes and put sofas in places or a door like windows, a balcony, it was like, I remember that. I just enjoyed like the building of the city, even though I wasn't like actually playing the Sims game to do like progress in the game.
Gboyega Adebayo: Oh, that's funny. I always loved going back and thinking about the Sims. I'm going to go play one of these nights.
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: You've identified this interest in being a builder, right? In 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 then you know, you got tired of something?
Gboyega Adebayo: Or was it just always in you that you
Ravi Kurani: Yeah. It's funny. I never really 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 think about the ingredients that went into becoming an entrepreneur, probably the first thing was seeing my family notably my dad.
Ravi Kurani: 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, being a pool boy. Until he walked into one of the pool stores and ran a water test for one of the customers as the owners had stepped out.
Ravi Kurani: And these guys were like, that's crazy. Like how does this pool guy know so much about water chemistry? And he is 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 at 30 stores while I grew up.
Ravi Kurani: And so growing up in the family business as an immigrant, right? You're like, it's all hands on deck. 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, like how do you upsell it at that point?
Ravi Kurani: And I think that's like 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 got tired of being an engineer. I just, I wouldn't say tired.
Ravi Kurani: I didn't do it for that long, but I just, I noticed it's not something that I wanted to do, being in the nitty gritty of actually building the thing. And so I started to explore, what was an MBA? What is like investing, what is entrepreneurship? Going back to the basics again of sure, I can sit behind a computer and code in matlab or I can, design in SolidWorks a particular p 3D model.
Ravi Kurani: But I think both of those two vectors are 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 combine those two together to see like what else is out there. And so I think that's 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, a dash of frustration about something and that's what gets you in. So tell me a little bit about Sutro and explain to me what your first action was, because again it's not something that's existed before. So, where did you start?
Ravi Kurani: Yeah. The story actually started when I was in, when I was in India I had done a stint about a year in India. With my grad program and I was 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.
Ravi Kurani: So
Track 1: a
Ravi Kurani: lot of things around, poverty alleviation, how do you get electrification into villages? Just really interesting business models at this kind of at the stage, right? Like we're used to seeing stuff in Silicon Valley and all that, but this was like a really
Ravi Kurani: interesting world on seeing how economics and business models worked seeing a bunch of these deals that were coming on my desk.
Ravi Kurani: One thing that we noticed was there was a really big gap around water sensing. People didn't know what, like the quality of water was, right? Everybody was trying to like fix water. They all had water filters. Nobody knew what was wrong with water. And so we set out to build the first water sensor right, initially trying to deploy it into the Indian market.
Ravi Kurani: And as you can probably imagine working with the foreign government especially India, it's riddled with red tape. And so a really stupid decision from a startup standpoint to try to sell to a government. And long story short, it was a bit of a winding road. Ended up shelving the idea for a bit came back to the us after my stint was done and I was like, Hey, wait a second.
Ravi Kurani: I, dad used to do, dad, dad got into pools through water testing. That's all we did at pool stores. That's why 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.
Ravi Kurani: And so we just flipped the model around and that's what the initial impetus was of building Sutro as you see it today.
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah. No, that's pretty awesome. And that's actually really that your pivot was to just flip the just go to the other end of the spectrum. It's like we're trying to We're trying to serve a specific audience in India, but it's gonna 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 serve
Gboyega Adebayo: audience down the road.
Gboyega Adebayo: That's pretty smart. How did you guys, just outta curiosity, what was the aha moment, right? Was there a moment where you're just like, oh my gosh, this could work? Or was it just feedback from, investors having conversations
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?
Ravi Kurani: 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 outta San Francisco, right? Parallel to my work that I was doing in India already.
Ravi Kurani: 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 do a sprint over the course of a weekend. Usually, they'll have a series of entrepreneurs or just people that are bored and wanna hang out over the weekend that like pitch a particular problem.
Ravi Kurani: And so I remember I went up there and I pitched and I'm like, Hey, I have this
Ravi Kurani: robot that measures water chemistry for swimming pools. Like anybody wanna be on my team? Can you guys upvote me so we can actually start this thing? And I got, the project got upvoted in the Google startup weekend.
Ravi Kurani: It was one of the six projects there. And then I had a team of six people and we like, it was three days we like ended up validating the idea. It's very lean startupy, very sprinty, right? You just go in over the course of a weekend and if this thing's gonna work.
Ravi Kurani: And it gave me the light bulb enough to be like, Hey, this thing has legs. I should, I. On shelf, 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, that's pretty cool, man. And I love the fact that Kind of these random kind of networking, meet people and interact type of events is yielding value because, even as an early stage, entrepreneur, there's some times where you're just like,
Gboyega Adebayo: need to go to this event? Is there, you realize, you never realize impactful it could actually be. Thank you for sharing that. One, one question I do have, me. Tell me about the prototyping process, cuz this hasn't existed before. How did you find someone to build it? Were you in your garage building? What was that process?
Ravi Kurani: Yeah. So we had a nap napkin sketch from India. 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.
Ravi Kurani: Gather those insights from the information of what is the pH, and then tell you what to do, right? So add some acid, add some soda, ash, whatever that might be. So that's, it's a very simple loop. It's 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, right?
Ravi Kurani: And that's what ended up happening when I realized that the sensing market was so broken from the 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?
Ravi Kurani: The technology that currently exists are these things called glass bulb sensors, and I won't go into 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 a hundred miles an hour, I should slow down.
Ravi Kurani: If I'm below 60, I should speed up, right? Very simple. If this, then that statement. problem with these glass bulb sensors is now, if your speedometer was saying that you're going a hundred miles an hour and you're actually going 40, You're gonna think you should be slowing down, but you should be speeding up.
Ravi Kurani: And so that's the problem with these sensors. They're just, they over time begin to drift, begin to 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. Do I speed up or do I slow down? Given my speedometer example,
Ravi Kurani: 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?
Ravi Kurani: Because that whole thing is broken, right? If you're pH is off, if I'm taking the input data and then crunching what to do and then telling you the wrong thing to do, that's not gonna help you any, right? You're gonna screw up your swimming pool and you're gonna be swimming in unsafe water.
Ravi Kurani: So we 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.
Ravi Kurani: And so we went back to the basics and
Ravi Kurani: 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 a little food coloring inside there, right? Some like chemicals, some reactant chemicals. Those chemicals then change the color of the water, the sample water, and then you know what the water chemistry is.
Ravi Kurani: Although those test kits are big, right? They're like the size of 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, tests that, test that do test, that do work. And microfluidics does exist as a technology.
Ravi Kurani: We, I studied it in mechanical engineering. And so microfluidics 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? And so we went through that process. That was kinda the second iteration of our first sensor didn't work.
Ravi Kurani: That was the easiest way of getting to market. Let's try this more difficult option. Our first sensor cluster, because we literally were building something from scratch now, right? 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.
Ravi Kurani: Nobody's gonna 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? Cuz if that works, now I know that the, I know what's happening with the pool chemistry. I now know how to crunch the data and then what to do.
Ravi Kurani: 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 like long and short of how we got to like 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 very interesting that you started with can we buy right now? Because I think that if I were starting, and this is probably unwise obviously, but 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, can we just tweak what's already there right now and just try it? That's a really
Gboyega Adebayo: to approach
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? Not doing work on the actual idea.
Ravi Kurani: And, 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 the ingredients of the solution. Do 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. And so it's just really breaking
Ravi Kurani: 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. And in consulting we have this analogy, it was like, do you wanna build
Gboyega Adebayo: it? There's 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 like, what's my unique value proposition, and
Gboyega Adebayo: I'm gonna spend time building rather than reinventing the wheel for
Gboyega Adebayo: the commodity stuff that's
Ravi Kurani: And also the longer you stay in heads down, building is opportunistically less time that you're gonna be out there validating, 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.
Ravi Kurani: Because now you're getting, you want you, you want feedback as quick as possible, and not to keep the door closed and be sitting inside, heads down. Now granted, if the thing doesn't work, then don't deploy it, right? That was our first problem. And yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: I'm curious, how did you build your team? What did your team look like at this stage? Did you raise capital and have some initial investment when with the idea stage? Or was it just bootstrapped and then you created your
Gboyega Adebayo: then you got funded? How did you
Ravi Kurani: Yeah we raised money pretty early on through an accelerator. We ended up joining a hardware accelerator called Bolt Bolt VC. And they, their model was, they had. Shared resources in terms of a mechanical engineer, electrical engineer from a hardware standpoint, right?
Ravi Kurani: Because when you compare hardware to software ventures or companies hardware is 10 x more hard because you have to like physically build a thing, right? You there's bits and bytes. The bites are cool because you can hire a bunch of developers, but the atoms, the bits are 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.
Ravi Kurani: And so the funds thesis, right? Bolts thesis was we'll, go ahead and create a shared group of folks that can help you on the hard part, on the bits part and also on the bytes part, but more notably give you a little bit more resources than you otherwise would've had, so you can then get to market quicker.
Ravi Kurani: So from a team perspective, I had that. Resource pool from Bolt. My first hire was actually a chemical engineer and a mechanical engineer. Cuz very quickly when we realized that we needed to build this thing from scratch, and notably we need, we needed to focus on microfluidics of chemistry everything else from there on forward, the electronics, the software could wait in a certain sense, right?
Ravi Kurani: 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 small amounts of liquid go into a flow cell. And so that's a, that was actually my first two hires that we had when we started
Gboyega Adebayo: Okay. All right. It's, I try to surround myself with engineers. I shouldn't say intentionally, it's just my closest friends from college or engineers and engineers are extremely smart
Yeah. Yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: 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, build the best product. How did you think about going to market and kind of sales and marketing at that early stage? Cuz you are trying to get feedback, right?
Yeah.
Ravi Kurani: Our, again you start with this manifesto of get to get it out of the door as quickly as possible and get 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.
Ravi Kurani: Because if all of the doors are open, you just don't know which way to go.
Ravi Kurani: And 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. What's their behavior, how are they doing it before the product even existed?
Ravi Kurani: What do they currently do today? So you can then 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 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, right?
Ravi Kurani: Like honestly, if you open up satellite view, I know what address has a swimming pool. And 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?
Ravi Kurani: We, we have a product. And that was the way that we basically initially got our first few people that, that signed up for Sutro,
Gboyega Adebayo: yeah. No, that's it's so funny hearing the 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
Gboyega Adebayo: of pools in it.
Ravi Kurani: A lot of tools. Yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: I want to target this zip code. It's not a bad strategy. And honestly the whole art of it is bank borrowing, steal, just figure out the answer to the question you're trying to answer.
Ravi Kurani: Exactly. And I think people get way too hung up on do I need to get on Facebook ads and this and that? I'm like, open up Google Maps if you wanna see pools. Just let's ask the five whys. Let's go. Why? And get down to the basis of what we're trying to figure out and then figure out the simplest way that takes less than an hour to do to get us there.
Ravi Kurani: And so yeah, definitely.
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah, man, I like it. So been running Sutro , what 7 years now?
Gboyega Adebayo: that
Ravi Kurani: It's about seven years. Yeah, eight years, something like that
Gboyega Adebayo: Seven years and you, and when did you guys
acquired?
We got
Ravi Kurani: five years ago now.
Gboyega Adebayo: Five years. So to me a little bit about that process and that experience, because
Gboyega Adebayo: this is your baby
Yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: How did that kind of, not only physically, how did that happen and how did it work? But then internally as a, as someone that, probably were thinking, Hey, this is gonna be a multi-billion dollar company. How did you deal with that?
Yeah.
Ravi Kurani: So the kind of first question you asked of the process we were in the middle of raising some strategic financing leading up to our series A. And, very simply one of the strategics basically said, Hey, it might just be a better option instead of us funding a part of this larger thing to just, acquire you.
Ravi Kurani: There was also, 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 things just popped in at the right place in the right time. And, with that being said, I don't think it necessarily changes.
Ravi Kurani: Anything on my vision, notably because Sani Marc, the company that acquired us in Canada has a parallel vision, right? 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, in janitorial, in, in hospitals.
Ravi Kurani: And 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 into all these other markets as well. And so we were very much aligned. And, nothing against VCs. I like, honestly, my, my path to them.
Ravi Kurani: 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. Because VCs and I know this because I had a VC hat on.
Ravi Kurani: It's really tough.
Ravi Kurani: Even if you focus on a particular area like deep tech or hardware, building like a smart breast pump which is one of my friends' 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 separate products.
Ravi Kurani: And 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 problematic from a, an entrepreneur standpoint
Ravi Kurani: to get feedback from a funder that can resonate with you. And so there's pros and cons, right?
Ravi Kurani: Honestly, I think the,
Ravi Kurani: if I can argue the opposite point of, it's also great to not have the management side of a large company or somebody from the management team that's guiding product direction. Whereas if I had a little bit more autonomy
Ravi Kurani: VC or investor side, I might be able to make decisions a little bit more, lean or quickly.
Ravi Kurani: And so I don't think there's one size fits our 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 leading us to this point. And yeah, that's it's the process of how we got there and then how it's been.
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah. No that's really cool because I think that the thing that 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 works well together. I think that's really important because there's nothing more, there's a ga there, there's no game that I like less than, what if someone offered you 10 million or a hundred million or you named the number for your ideas? A price on it. I know what it can be and I want to build this out.
Gboyega Adebayo: And so it is this challenging thing that your friends are always gonna ask you when you have an idea and It does become a little bit of a challenge to make that decision.
Gboyega Adebayo: I I always make, I'll put it out there, I always make the comment to say I want my to be Microsoft for Yencil it'll be, I know their products suite and how it would perfectly align with us and would love that. That'd be awesome. I want them to buy all of my company.
Gboyega Adebayo: I dunno,
Ravi Kurani: Yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: I love it a little too much. But I get that the priority and the importance is that alignment and vision and then that, that partnership as
Ravi Kurani: well.
Ravi Kurani: And, and at the end of the day, it goes back to leverage and momentum, right? Your goal is to get this idea seeded in the market and get it in people's hands. And whatever the quickest way at the end of the day is to do that. Then you go with the, at the path of least resistance.
Ravi Kurani: And so I'm not, again, hindsight, 2020, I would've never known or made that decision with looking forward. It's not you just that zigzagging path. And that's where we're at today. And yeah, and honestly, am I grateful and gracious?
Ravi Kurani: In the middle of Covid that we had a strategic partner that was helping us fund the hardware. A hundred percent, man, that would've I, a few of my friends over here, it was painful seeing them try to fundraise. Working with the team that was entirely flat now because everybody went to video.
Ravi Kurani: Like it was crazy. And 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, through, through Covid and through the lockdowns and through the supply chain crises there was a lot getting thrown at us.
Ravi Kurani: And then you're a startup to begin with, so 10 x that right.
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to tap a little bit into your VC brain since you, so space so well, how would you, how do you think about money How do you think about 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 I have this idea and this is what I'm trying to
Ravi Kurani: build.
Ravi Kurani: Yeah. The, the one thing that I remember, and every VC will say this the one thing to look for is team, is the people, right? I think at the forefront is the entrepreneur mainly being if he or she is not focused on their business, right? If they're doing 10 other things all at once, and this is a little flash in the pan they're not focused, right?
Ravi Kurani: Then again like to your baby example if they have 10 different babies running around you wanna focus on this one thing that you're, youre trying to grow and nurture and get out to the market and you just, you can't do it without being focused on one thing. The second thing I would say is founder ego.
Ravi Kurani: And I've worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and mentored a ton, during my BC days and also in growing up and. As a founder, you need a certain amount of ego, right? Because you're, you get this imposter syndrome, you're scanning 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.
Ravi Kurani: 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, I get it. As a founder you're taking a step out there and doing a thing that's never existed before.
Ravi Kurani: So you need to have a little bit of an ego, but tone, 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 gonna trust you as a leader, you're gonna 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.
Ravi Kurani: Contributing to your idea because they're like, I don't know if I even wanna work with this guy. And those are the two things I would say are like at utmost importance in kind of building or wanting to launch something.
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah. How have you. How have you thought about, me ask this question. How has your leadership style changed and evolved over the years from starting Sutro to now? Especially given what you've said about managing your ego learning from experience. Like how has it evolved if you were going to be introspective right now.
Ravi Kurani: Yeah. Yeah. I think the first thing I've learned is this concept of un attachment, right? And I think that has come about from the acquisition, from 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.
Ravi Kurani: 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've told you, Hey, for two years you're gonna literally shut your doors.
Ravi Kurani: And the only business you're gonna have is DoorDash. There's, you could have spent all this money on your interior design, and then you would've had zero people stepping into that building because nobody was going out, right? But the, it wasn't written in a book anywhere that Hey, COVID is gonna happen at this date, at this time, so don't invest in this business because you're gonna be better off doing x all bubbling up to this concept of like unattachment, right?
Ravi Kurani: Which, which kind of in general allows me a bit of calmness when there is like a lot of things just getting thrown around cuz 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? You don't want to be too disattached where you're just like lazy and you're like, I don't care about anything.
Ravi Kurani: There 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 gonna 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 very broad terms, but unattachment and acceptance.
Ravi Kurani: Acceptance means covid is 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 me, let's just, let's accept the scenario as it is today and let's figure out what to do next. Which is maybe I need to turn this thing into a ghost kitchen.
Ravi Kurani: 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 door, 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.
Ravi Kurani: Those are the two ways that my leadership child, the style has changed is in these kind of two, these two kind of factions of unattachment and acceptance.
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah, I really appreciate that. There's an attachment. I've gotta think and spend some more time on that one because is one that I've been working on for years. It's like
Gboyega Adebayo: what you can control
Gboyega Adebayo: That you can't. But the unattachment is, I think there's a lot of wisdom. There's a lot of wisdom in that. And you'll fall in love with an idea and you'll do everything that you can do in your power to make it come true. But in the event it's time to pivot, you've gotta take the emotion out of it. You've gotta dissociate say, Hey, it makes sense to pivot. And I think there is a lot of wisdom in that.
Ravi Kurani: Yeah, exactly.
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah. So one second.
Gboyega Adebayo: Sorry about that.
Ravi Kurani: Yeah, no problem.
Gboyega Adebayo: 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's that I'm curious about. At any point over the seven years, have you had a sigh of relief or feeling of less pressure or stress, or is it just every single day there's just something new You. You want to enjoy the small win, but the next day you're just like, all right, now this is a new thing.
Ravi Kurani: Yeah, I, I don't know if I would define it as relief or stress. I think
Ravi Kurani: part of that theory of acceptance is every day is a relief because you're here today, right? Like you you've tackled the challenge of yesterday. And so in a sense that is a relief, right?
Ravi Kurani: If you give this kind of. Definitional angle of it. But the kind of end of it is 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.
Ravi Kurani: There, there's who would've thought of that? Like the startup world almost crashed because they're like, I can't pay payroll because I can't access my bank. You can be thinking about everything all in the above,
Ravi Kurani: then you're like, yeah, my bank shut down. So that, that goes back to acceptance and un attachment, right?
Ravi Kurani: 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 seeing what's in front of you right now and then attacking the problems that need to get attacked.
Ravi Kurani: 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, more fail safes. And still the big problems end up happening, right? You get a covid event, you get a Silicon Valley bank event, and there's just no predicting those.
Ravi Kurani: It's just, it's literally out of your hands. And so yeah, that would be my answer. I know it's not, I know it's like a, not like a direct answer to your sigh of relief question, but it's how I would answer it.
Gboyega Adebayo: It's, good. And there's, candidly I admire the sense of calm, like your sense of calm is something that I'm very impressed with and I want to pull as much into that. Because I'm just a high functioning ball of anxiety. But I'm random question. What does your morning routine, I'm just curious, like what does your morning
like?
Ravi Kurani: Yeah, I tried my alarm. I try to wake up at six 30 every day, even on the weekends. I'm just I guess I'm more of a morning person. That's what my, that's what my aura ring tells me. Wake up at six 30. I, my phone is always outside the room. I actually hate it when I'm in in the hotel and I have to keep my phone next to me cuz I'm such an addict for picking it up and opening up my email app or Slack or something.
Ravi Kurani: Like I just, that's a problem I have. I can't not do that. So I keep my phone outside then the first thing I'll usually do is actually read like for five minutes, three to three to five minutes. I keep my Kindle right next to me and I'll open up. Some sort of a philosophical reading, right?
Ravi Kurani: It could be like Marcus Aurelius's meditations. Ryan Holiday has this thing called like the Daily Stoic, which is cool. It's two pages. He has a verse from Seneca or from Marcus Aurelius. And it's just, it just makes you think, right? There's nothing there's nothing scientific about it.
Ravi Kurani: It's just sometimes it's be a good person today. And it's cool, awesome. Great. You just, you you start your day off with a little bit of a sentiment there. And then straight after that, I'll actually do 30 minutes of meditation. A combined breathing practice, plus sitting in silence.
Ravi Kurani: And then I touch my phone. So that's after basically an hour, will I get up? I'll pop on 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 then I make a little bit of breakfast to coffee and then I head into work.
And yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: Nice. 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. And I'm like, what if an emergency happens? And it's just oh, I mean, people will find you.
Ravi Kurani: Well, if it does, it also does my phone's on do not disturb and silent and so they wouldn't, honestly, if they, if I think whatever it is, if your favorites ring you three times or something like that, it'll, my phone will go off anyways. If it's out there, I'll still hear it. It's gonna go off and I'll pick it up, but yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah. no I like that. I'm also a morning person on any given, the weekends, as long as I, didn't go super go to bed, super late, AM opened
Gboyega Adebayo: At least opened, sometimes I forced myself
Gboyega Adebayo: back to sleep, but like by seven I've unfortunately touched
Gboyega Adebayo: once. Probably
Ravi Kurani: Yeah. Yeah. I also, 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. The subscriptions will fire that night. I'm gonna have, 10 emails or whatever from these subscriptions.
Ravi Kurani: CK will send me my five or six notices.
Ravi Kurani: You might email me to, the day before Hey, reminder that we have our podcast tomorrow. Do I need to at the first thing in the morning read these 30 things and have the world dictate the way that my day should go? Or can I start it the way that I want to?
Ravi Kurani: That's 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, their phone will ring because I have that setting on there. And I'll figure that out. But 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.
Ravi Kurani: And so that's
yeah,
Yeah,
Gboyega Adebayo: That, that's a really wise way to think about it. That is a really good way to think about it. 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 cuz I've gotta do these seven things that someone
Gboyega Adebayo: on my plate. It's a really, that's a really smart way to think about it.
Ravi Kurani: And, 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, I. Regardless of what it is, I'm gonna start thinking about Apple's new VR thing because Product Hunt emailed me. I'm gonna start thinking about the podcast I'm gonna be on because you emailed me, right?
Ravi Kurani: Like it, I don't get that time to breathe in the morning to be like what really are my priority? What do I wanna do today? But now I've start, started thinking about all this other stuff that's filled my brain and, put, opened up Chrome tabs in my own head that I never really had control of.
Ravi Kurani: And I always want to start, I have 27 tabs open on my Chrome too, but I'd love to start with, a fresh slate every morning at least.
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah. Yeah there's one thing that I've been trying to do over the years. I used to-do list for kind of all of my to-do lists, and I organized my entire life on it. And I'm trying to get in a better habit of the night before determining what I want my next day to look like.
Gboyega Adebayo: these are my priorities. These are the things
Gboyega Adebayo: 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
I'm
Yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: So yeah that's something I'm probably gonna try to work to have some, a little bit more discipline in, because I like the idea of controlling what I want to do in the day rather than
reactive to it.
Ravi Kurani: .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 gonna 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 wanna do, right?
Ravi Kurani: 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 wrapping up, I want, 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, it was so far from the quality or the standard that they wanted to achieve. What advice would you give them out?
Ravi Kurani: first thing I would do is take out a sheet of paper and write your product idea on the top, in my case, I would say assuming 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.
Ravi Kurani: 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. Don't do a video conference, don't do a phone call.
Ravi Kurani: If you're able to sit down with them, buy 'em a coffee, go visit them at their home, go to their office, whatever your product is in my case, 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 don't, I'm not gonna pitch my, I don't forget that I'm even here As an entrepreneur, how do you test your pool?
Ravi Kurani: 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.
Ravi Kurani: 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, yeah, can you, do you know what the colors are on that little test strip? It doesn't work, does it?
Ravi Kurani: 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 thing that you're gonna build is actually solving the problems that you've seen in those 15 people. then go ahead and build it.
Ravi Kurani: But if you're gonna 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 gonna come
Gboyega Adebayo: yeah. No, I love that. That's incredibly wise and great wisdom, and I can see that applies beyond the hardware. I think about the conversations I had with folks before starting Yencil.. Okay, you need this spreadsheet, what do you do? I Google it. I think I actually, ironically, I think I asked five or six people in, like family and close friends, Hey, go find this document.
Gboyega Adebayo: Or tell me something that you that you've needed over the last, I think that's what it was. I said, tell me something that you needed over the last week. And people came back and was like, oh, I needed to, I needed this thing for my kid, or I needed 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
Gboyega Adebayo: that people would do it, and I, probably more subjectively. I said, that's inefficient.
inefficient.
sure. Yeah,
Gboyega Adebayo: And yeah, so liked that process.
Ravi Kurani: Yeah.
Gboyega Adebayo: All right. So let's get to some concluding questions. Excuse me. What misconceptions did you have about entrepreneurship before you started?
Ravi Kurani: The financial Excel sheet, like literally when you're first billing this model, every single VC asks you for this thing, and all those assumptions are wrong, right? You're like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna 10 x volume and my costs are gonna be five x and, all this stuff. That financial Excel sheet is like the biggest misconception of what I think is gonna happen in the business and what actually doesn't happen.
Ravi Kurani: So I got a lot better at finance, but that Excel sheet, I would say,
Gboyega Adebayo: How I've heard this a number of
Okay.
Gboyega Adebayo: as someone who loves spreadsheets and tries to be as conservative as possible and make sure that it isn't always just up and to the right, I guess my question is, how do you still gain value out of that spreadsheet, knowing it's gonna be wrong? From your perspective, how 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.
Ravi Kurani: And so I would say from the Excel sheet standpoint is figure out your KPIs, figure out what's important, figure out the OKRs or 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.
Ravi Kurani: 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, right? 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 analyze fi, entire financial spreadsheets over the course of every single week?
Ravi Kurani: No. Pick your five to seven metrics that you know are gonna 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 gonna 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. No, that's really good advice. What book or books would you recommend to other entrepreneurs? it'll be added to our library that's on our site for other entrepreneurs.
Ravi Kurani: I would recommend,
Ravi Kurani: actually, I would recommend Harry Potter. And the reason that I say Harry Potter for entrepreneurs is because you're number one goal is to be a storyteller, right? 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 to tell really good stories that make sense?
Ravi Kurani: And that goes back to the problem solution matrix. All of this stuff that we talked about during the pod. JK Rowling is an amazing storyteller, right? She has amazing character development. She really makes you feel like the emotion behind the things that are happening with Harry and Hermione.
Ravi Kurani: Read, just read really good stories. Read sci-fi. I've gotten a lot into the just go to the Hugo Awards. It's like the sci-fi award thing,
Ravi Kurani: and pick like a handful. Go to Amazon and pick full, 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?
Ravi Kurani: For those engineers that want to get sciencey about fiction and don't want something that's super fantasy. So those are two things that I would recommend, or two books or two styles of books. Harry Potter and Rita read a science fiction novel.
Gboyega Adebayo: I like that. I like that. It's a very unique answer. But I think you, you hit on such a really good point that it is all about storytelling. 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 saving a little bit differently.
Gboyega Adebayo: So I really like that. Okay. My second to last question what question sh do you think should ask the next guest?
Ravi Kurani: Question, do I think you should ask the next guest who demographically will the next guest be another entrepreneur?
Gboyega Adebayo: doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Just what question would you want them
Ravi Kurani: 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 that you like, remember enough that it's probably shaped a little bit of what you're thinking about today.
Gboyega Adebayo: yeah. Now you have to tell me about your earliest memory that shaped the impact of what you're doing today is the
Gboyega Adebayo: get every guess
Ravi Kurani: Yeah. I think the earliest memory that I just probably can remember is actually what I started off with, like building, 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 it was prior to 10 or, 10 years old.
Ravi Kurani: 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 a 10 by 10 room that we had in the back that was a, like a shed area, it was covered
Ravi Kurani: I that the Legos were not, didn't have enough high fidelity for me to build the city.
Ravi Kurani: And so I just remember going to like Michael's the arts and craft store my grandfather, and I picked up things that I could, add to the Lego City. So I remember picking up like little palm trees and little like 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.
Ravi Kurani: And so that's a, that's what I remember as the earliest memory.
Gboyega Adebayo: I like it. This might be one of my new concluding questions cause I think it does put a, put an interesting bow on the conversation. Cause it does tie right back to what you said and I'm sitting here thinking about what my earliest memory was. I'd 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
Gboyega Adebayo: And it was like the beginning of his like business empire. And I was, I remember saying, I'm gonna make the N B A, but I'm also going to be a businessman. I'm gonna own a business and I'm gonna 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, walked in thinking, my job here is to understand how this consulting business works because I'm gonna have my own consulting business in the future. And it was fascinating cause I never really knew what my business would be. I just knew I
Gboyega Adebayo: a business. so you're right, there's, there is something about that very early memory that does have this through line to how you approach a lot of things.
Gboyega Adebayo: I think. I think that's a really great
Ravi Kurani: question.
Ravi Kurani: Yeah, it's interesting. Really interesting memory. Yeah. Yeah. I was in my cul-de-sac, we had a little cul-de-sac and We used to use the sewer top
Gboyega Adebayo: the hoop
Ravi Kurani: Okay.
Gboyega Adebayo: so we would all just kinda be shooting. I just remember being in the, in, in the cul-de-sac and just thinking like, crap, I'm going to be the next Michael Jordan I'm going to have a business empire as big
Gboyega Adebayo: Johnson
Ravi Kurani: Interesting, huh?
Gboyega Adebayo: Yeah. Alright, my final question is Ravi, tell folks how they can learn more about you, learn more about Sutro and
Ravi Kurani: Yeah. You can go to mysutro.com. That's mysutro.com. That's where we have all the information on Sutro. If you wanna 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 wanna learn more about that my podcast is called Liquid Assets the Business of Water.
Ravi Kurani: And so you can just go to liquid assets.cc to find out more. But those are the, those are three ways that you can get ahold of me.
Gboyega Adebayo: That's awesome. This has been
Ravi Kurani: Thank you. Thank you for having me here, man. This was awesome.
Gboyega Adebayo: Awesome.