David Litwak:
Hello everyone and welcome to how I got here mosey on focus, whereas a weekly podcast about innovators in travel and transportation today we’re joined by Varun Kona of head out. head out is a mobile first India based tours and activities platform. And since Varun and his co founders launched the site in 2014 7 million people from about 200 countries have used the platform. So welcome Varun, thanks for joining us today, we like to start every one of these podcasts the same way as I’m sure you’re familiar with, which is to ask you how you got here.
Varun Khona:
Thank you so much for having me, guys. we appreciated the story of how we got started with routers is actually rather crazy interesting. So I think I’d probably spend a little bit more time on this one, then what is usual. So back in 2014, there were three of us that were serene, Vikram and I, and I used it in as a buddy from college for almost sort of 1817 years now from school, in fact, and so we’ve known each other for a while. And serene, I wanted to start it out, we had this idea that, you know, people would love to go out and do interesting things. And they would want to do this at last minute, spontaneously, because that’s how we looked at the world. And doing this on mobile was the obvious sort of format through which this would make sense. So that was the initial idea that we had the hypothesis. And we started working on the idea with the crown, who was our third co founder, who is our third co founder, who works with our CTO as well and works on leading sort of Technology Engineering. We started working on the idea in Bangalore. But I think five weeks in, we realized that India as a market was not big enough for what we were trying to do. And so we had this crazy idea that we should go to the US and start a company there and see what happens. The only issue was the fact that none of us had actually lived, worked studied in the US at all, I hadn’t even been to the States. I think someone had gone there once and recommend probably gone there once for his for his prior work. But we still made that call, we tried speaking to a few individuals to try and understand if that makes sense, we pretty much got an overwhelming rule from almost everybody that we spoke to, where they essentially mentioned that building a consumer internet company in a country that you’re not aware of that you haven’t been to where you’re not from is not an easy task. But we essentially in our own naivety decided to ignore all the advice that we got. And it was in June 2014, that we sort of got a one way ticket from Bangalore to the US with regular tourist visa. There were three of us, we didn’t have housing in New York. So essentially what we did was that serene was living with his cousin in Midtown, I was living with my aunt in Queens, and Brooklyn was staying with his friend in downtown. And we sort of figured out a way to catch up every day and figure out how do we start building out what’s the initial value proposition, who should the suppliers be, and so on, and so forth. So that’s where we got started, it was pretty insane. We didn’t know pretty much anybody as we enter the country. And we had to build things from scratch, both from a product standpoint, from a sales standpoint, and also from a network standpoint, which was difficult and interesting. But we were able to make that happen. We got into 500 startups, move to California, did the accelerator and then on the back of what we were able to accomplish in those four or five months. And the traction that we had, were able to raise a couple of million dollars in a seed round, which was largely by us investors, like 97% of the money came from us investors and and then we decided that as we started expanding, head out, we realized that being in the US or UK or any XYZ, geography was not relevant because we started expanding to new countries and cities. And so we essentially sort of ended up having this weird global model where the majority of the office is located in Bangalore, because that’s where our tech is based. And then we have our hubs in New York, in London, in Berlin, in Hong Kong, which acts as sort of the central regional offices for all the work that goes on. And so in some sense, I don’t know if I should call ourselves an Indian company, an American company, because that’s kind of where the parent company is located. or whatnot. I think, like most things in the world today, we’re a fairly global company, and, and it’s hard to sort of put a finger on which country to be all sort of does the companies really come from right? So yeah, that’s that’s a that’s in a nutshell, sort of the story of how we got started. It was weird and unconventional. I don’t recommend it to most people. But I think the large takeaway for it for us was to do what we felt like doing and and things sort of somehow fall in place if you if you follow your heart in that direction.
Kevin May:
very welcome. It’s Kevin here. And interesting point you did have a couple of years with another travel startup beforehand, which he co founded. I think it’s just useful context. For how you kind of got into travel, to tell us briefly about trippy as well.
Varun Khona:
Yeah, so before to be I was in investment banking, I was at Goldman, and why I quite loved the job. And I don’t really hate good in the way that people usually like to actually found it to be a really incredible place to work out. I just want to do something on my own. And I was significantly less wise than than I am today. And so I use my only criteria was that I should do what I love doing and traveling and backpacking or sort of on the top of that list. And so the in the initial idea at 22, was that let’s sort of figure out a way to get more people to travel the way that I would like to, and the approach that I had with to be, and I was a solo founder, it was just me was to figure out sort of group dynamics around holiday packages from India, right. The idea was, it could be bring together a group of people, let’s eat and more, and can we then get a discount on a package, you know, travel itinerary by thomascook or Coxon kings or XYZ travel operators from India. So I ran with that idea for about two and a half years. It was the most profitable company that I’ve run. If I compare that with him, we made money from day one, which was amazing. But it just did not scale because most of the operations were largely offline, the customer interactions were offline and scaling, it was just a nightmare. So it became an extremely intense glorified travel agency with a snazzy front end for regeneration. But that’s kind of all it was. And that’s not really what my heart was into. And at that point in time, I got in touch with serene again, who was in Paris, poster college, he was studying and working there. And so we got in touch again. And the idea for head out sort of came about from a bunch of conversations. And we said that let’s quit what we were doing and start working on head out. And so I think in about two weeks, Sterling quit his job from Paris move back to Bangalore, I started figuring out how to wind down to D. And then we got him into the fray. And then three of us started working on.
Kevin May:
So just a couple of kind of follow ups on that. I mean, is there anything you learned as an entrepreneur, launching and running trippie that you then either carried on into head out or said, I’m never doing it that way again? And also you you reference very quickly there that winding down? trippy, what did you have to do in order to do that just for now we have mostly entrepreneurs who listened to this podcast. So it would be interesting just to kind of expand on those two things, if you could fair.
Varun Khona:
Yeah, for sure. So in terms of what I learned not to do, I mean, that’s a long list. But if I have to really pick the ones that matter, one was the fact that I have a clear path to becoming a product that works on cell service, which to me was not obvious because to be ended up evolving into a service organization, which is not what my initial hypothesis was, and what was not what was exciting for me. So I think just making sure that we don’t get into trap of building everything the customer wants, and just following their lead. And that usually seems to be sort of what people propagate is the right answer. I think there’s a lot of nuance to that observation and, and so for me, the big lesson was not to simply build all features and all requests the customer has and and sort of try and have a more big picture view of what you’re trying to build. And the second one, which I always talk about people, to entrepreneurs, founders, were looking at getting into trouble. It looks sexy from the outside, but it’s an absolutely messy industry from the inside. And all of the romantic notion that we have a travel when we start the company is is the furthest thing from truth when you sort of start getting into it. So I think those two were the biggest takeaways from me, from transitioning from sort of trippy into head out, in terms of winding down, it was actually fairly straightforward. I didn’t raise any external capital because we didn’t need it. So it was just me and me. And I had to just ensure that our team got good jobs elsewhere, which was not a really big problem statement, because India was booming at that point in time. And, and traveling itself has been very well. So finding alternative opportunities for most of the team was, was not hard. A couple of them, in fact, even started up and I was able to sort of help them out with that, which is amazing. Um, and the legalities of it was not very complicated from what I remember. It was, I mean, there’s a scheme in India of every three years you’re allowed to wind down companies and there’s a specific way in which you do it took me about 45 days of back and forth with lawyers but wasn’t really.
Kevin May:
Okay. Thank you.
David Litwak:
Okay. So yeah, Runa I remember the first time we met I think it was that I kind of vanilla pub outside of WTF in London, that that one the way everyone congregates and outside. And I remember we had a chat about your business model. And remember, there was a hoteltonight aspect to it on that kind of distressed inventory. I think I remember you telling me about how you could actually get pretty good margins. rates for many of these tours and activities providers, because you know, last minute if there’s a space on a boat that’s going to leave our Segway tour or something like that they’re willing to give you you know, quite a healthy markup there. I’d love if you could delve a little bit more into kind of the economics and the you know, the nitty gritty back end of kind of how your business works and how it’s kind of different from the other tours and activities providers by being mobile first and focus on that last minute use case.
Varun Khona:
Yeah. So initially, the hypothesis was that there is a tremendous amount of unsold inventory that lies at the heart of the equation when it comes to those activities, which is a huge problem statement for the kind of partners that we work with. On the other hand, most customers increasingly are looking at doing things spontaneously at the last minute, like, it’s hard for us to believe that we would want to lock down the exact specifics of what which activity or which experience we would want to do, just like we would book or flights or hotels, it doesn’t happen at that same sort of timeframe. It’s something that we largely like to keep at the very end and try and figure out when we get into destination. So a combination of these two trends for us was essentially, where we thought that at the intersection of these two things, we could figure it out a mobile first marketplace that could connect this distress inventory with customers are looking to do things right then and there. And that model was the mainstay of what we did as head out for the first I would say, sort of two and a half, three years all the way from 2014 to I would say initially, even made of 2018, the focus was connecting this unsold inventory with customers are looking for it, we’ve been able to do this pretty well, in the sense that we were able to scale this from zero to a few million dollars of sales in a month, our margins used to be about 14 15% of the time. And we have scaled this in about seven cities around the world, most of them in the US and then some in Europe. And while the initial hypothesis was accurate, the understanding was clear. I think he found that a larger problem statement is around not just pricing, but around discovery and trust and reliable reliability, right. And essentially, the reason for that is very simple. At the end of the day experiences are a service. And services, by definition, are not standard. And when something is not standard, it’s very hard to sell it online. Because it’s very hard to compare it, it’s very hard to benchmark it, it’s very hard to commoditize it in a way that can be easily packaged, and sold. And so we from 2018 onwards have been on this interesting journey, where we have 3d Now, last minute or mobile focus, like that’s always been the bread and butter of what we do. But we have significantly evolved into a marketplace that’s also getting into the dirty sort of back end of supply, and trying to ensure that we’re creating standards and creating sort of consistency of service and supply as much as possible. So for example, today on head out before COVID happened, if you would want to go on a walking tour and lose, unlike existing aggregators on head out, you would essentially sort of see only one listing of a walking tour in for the loop. And on the back end, we might have 4567 different vendors who are providing that walking toward, but we have done all the legwork of getting them standardized and and attached to this one single steel that we have created, which in itself is a very different take on aggregation than what the current model that we saw with the likes of getyourguide and Kluk and TripAdvisor. And our thesis was that on mobile, we’re looking to do things that last minute, they want curation, they want a limited list of recommendations that makes sense for them. And they don’t really care about the brand, because the brand of the experience provided because they don’t know what that renders. And so it doesn’t really matter. And so how can we ensure that we are able to bring together curation, we are able to bring together really good pricing, and we are able to bring together the fact that availability is key to ensure that if you are looking for something to do in the next 20 minutes in the next few hours, then I should ensure that there is enough spots available for them to book right. And so for us to be able to ensure all of these things take place, we figured that a managed model where we were doing a lot of the heavy lifting at the back end, and creating these queues and then getting multiple vendors to attach themselves to the skill was the best way to control that supply in a way that allows us to control availability or maximize availability, to control pricing, and to be able to ensure that we are able to control the skews that we haven’t had out don’t have, you know, 10s of listings for loop like how can we provide an experience with four skills you’re able to, you know, figure out what are the different ways in which you can experience that specific landmark. So that’s how the model evolved and that Hager sort of grows Go from like, a few million dollars a month to a few 10s of millions of dollars a month, that’s kind of been the mainstay of how our business grew. What also happened very interestingly, in that zone was the fact that as we started doing this manage model, our acreage grew from about 15% to 22%. Today, and on the function of this growing revenue and the growing acreage, we sort of in 2019, had a sort of Halo switch where we were able to get profitable first on a contribution margin basis, and then on an EBITDA basis, sometime in q3 last year. And so we’ve essentially sort of been on this interesting journey where we were spending a lot of we started with a very limited focus on last minute, but that proved out to be true. Partially, the larger problem was that last minute problem statement is not just around pricing, but it’s around standards, and it around discovery and curation. And so we expanded our interpretation of that problem statement, and solved for the logical use case. And we’ve seen that to be out really well, all the way until March this year.
Kevin May:
An interesting one on that is that many startups who come into the industry say this hotel, or an airline, the standards, this is a question about standards. So the standards that exist already have been in place, whether it’s GDS standards, or open travel Alliance standards in hotels and things like that. And tourism activities is a very, very overused phrase, but it is a wild west when it comes to kind of standards around inventory and distribution, and, you know, revenue, revenue management systems to reservation systems. How did you approach that? I mean, you’ve so you’ve said a couple of times there that you created standards, but they are standards that only exist between you and your customers? Do you sense that it? Would it be easier for you as a startup if they’d been wired sector, and sector implemented standards for you to work with it?
Varun Khona:
So I think the interesting thing, and that’s a good question, Kevin, I think I think the interesting thing here is that when you talk about tours and activities, unlike accommodation, or airlines, this is not one industry, right? It’s an amalgamation of a few industries put together, which makes standards even more difficult. I mean, if you look at, for example, we sell tickets to attractions, we sell tours, we sell activities, we also sell a lot of events, which is a really big activity for head out, which is usually not the case for the likes of get to get into can, etc. And so in each one of these industries, what defines itself as a standard is extremely different. And so we have not tried to talk with a standard that is equal across all of these different skews and industries like we don’t think that intuitively makes sense. And our job essentially has been that if you want to buy a ticket to an attraction, here are some settings that you would want to know, you would want to know if you need to print this, you would want to know if you can show this on your phone, you would want to know if this can be canceled, all the way up to the time that you visit, you would want to know, what are the what are the different time slots in which you can enter. So for each type of these different activities, whether it’s an entrance to an attraction, or a tour or an event, there are different things that people care about, right. And to expect the industry to rally together on each one of these specific points and create nomenclature that is widely understood both at the supply level. And the demand level, I think is is a bit of a pipe dream, quite honestly. And so we look at solving this by ensuring that if a customer is coming down to head out, if they want to go on a tour of the Warner Brothers Studios in London, or they want to go to a tour outside the city of Paris all the way to give me the way that the consumer information, and the factors that matter to them should be similar. And it’s our job to figure out what those factors are. And it’s our job to figure out supply that is able to solve for those variables to the best of our abilities, right? So instead of having, let’s say 20 listings of daytrips, from Paris to Giverny, we would have one or at max two listings, and we would ensure that all the components of those listings are same. So it’s the same inclusions. It’s the same timing, it’s the same price point. It’s the same description. And it’s our job then to figure out what are the suppliers of the back end, who can give that same standard experience for that one day trip from Paris to given? Right. So I think that heavy lifting on the back end is to us difficult and intense from an operation standpoint, but necessary from a customer experience standpoint. And that’s all that matters.
Kevin May:
Okay,
David Litwak:
so that seems to be a really similar insight, actually, to the one that Uber had, and obviously, you know, Moses and ground transportation and we take the aggregation view, which is more of the Get your guide, click View and your well you know, I won’t share Moses valuation, but I can tell you it’s not $60 billion. So clearly one of these models was more successful than the other by showing you know, mozia still exist aggregation model and Transportation does have a place and I’m curious, I’d love to get your viewpoints about your own industry to do you, you clearly optimize that curation was good for mobile and last minute bookings, it seems and like, do you think that these other guys in you know, a risk of inviting you to either boost up or trash your competitors here? Like, do you think they have like a, you know, potentially a better market, a better product for the specific use case and market they’re going after.
Varun Khona:
So the way that I look at this, we believe that a managed model like ours, an aggregation model should exist, right? To me, that makes a ton of sense because it solves different kinds of problems statements. In the case of aggregation. It’s also a problem statement, where you really have a wide variety of items that you can explore and do, and, and sort of go from a very high level, and start digging deeper and get to something that you would like, right. And there’s a certain cohort of customers for which that makes a tremendous amount of sense. And we see that and we appreciate that. At the same time, we believe that for this cohort of customers, customers, who are largely sort of in the 27 to 40, bracket who are urban, on their mobile devices, looking at doing things at the last minute, they need a solution, which solves for their problem statements, right. And we believe that our solution fits better for that demographic. And so how do we expand from from where we are today to a larger sort of, you know, equation where we are able to serve significantly varied amount of demographics, like the way that a cat you get to can? That’s a question that that time will answer I don’t think anybody can predict that today. Our our assumption is that even though the wall that we are building is smaller, the hope is that the motor that’s connecting these different plugs together is stronger. And so if I have an infinitely long time horizon, can I see this becoming valuable enough to solve the problem statements that our users and our suppliers fix? If the answer is true? If it’s Yes, then we’re happy to do it. And we believe that it is, we don’t believe that it’s the only model that can be successful in this ecosystem. But we believe that the model that’s connecting these bricks is a lot stronger, and hopefully that will pay for itself from a 510 15 year horizon.
Kevin May:
what’s what’s interesting about the various models is that at least one of those competitors get your guide is going down the kind of the branded route. Which, you know, it’s it’s an interesting strategy for many, many reasons. I mean, because you, because of the way that head out has been, has been set up is that been something that you would consider once your brand is arguably bigger?
Varun Khona:
So Kevin, interestingly, had out has been, quote, unquote, running branded tours for like two and a half years now, right, because on head out, unlike a tour guide, you don’t get to know who the end operator is. So essentially, you’re looking at her experience, we don’t tell you who the operator is, it doesn’t even come to your confirmation inbox, it’s just we decide for one skill, we might have seven different operators in the backend, we figured out from our own algo, which is the right one for this customer, and we make that connection happen. But we don’t expose this confirm this information to the customers whatsoever, because we don’t believe that it is integral to their decision making process. Right. So in some sense, we’ve been running branded tours for a long, long time. Now, when it comes specifically, to get your guide model, I think the way to look at this essentially is to think about them as a sort of a white label on top of an existing product, right? They have not changed anything fundamental, at a structural level, they’re essentially just saying that I’m going to buy all these mini slots from this vendor, and I’m going to sort of plaster my brand on it, I’m going to white label this experience. And to do that, I will ask the vendor for certain benefits on the lines have relaxed cancellation or lower price points or higher commission rates, and so on and so forth, right. But it does structurally sort of change anything, it’s still one skew provided by one vendor with a white label on top. So I still believe that there is value to what you’re doing because a customer who is used get your guide and trust the brand, could now potentially trust the original product more than a regular listing on the website, that hypothesis could potentially be true. But we don’t necessarily feel very excited about white labeling products. I mean, it’s it’s a tactical thing, in my opinion, I don’t think so. It’s a huge strategic angle, that changes the structure of the experiences or the supply stack in a way that makes any meaningful difference to the end customer or to the supplier that yeah,
Kevin May:
I mean, I personally Yeah, I kind of guessed that what you were gonna say. It’s an interesting illustration of just how kind of nascent in a way that tools and activities is that there are these different models and it depends on what kind of coach you put on. It is the way it can be interpreted. So I’m glad you kind of phrased it in that way, David?
David Litwak:
Yeah, it’s funny. We call them an Mozi branded aggregators. And it can be kind of infuriating at times. Sometimes I’ve spoken to people who were trying to pitch them on working with mozingo. Like, we’d like to go direct. And then they’re like, oh, who are you working with? And they’ve named a bunch of our competitors. And like, we use all the same suppliers, dude, you aren’t going to read? And and like, it’s funny. That’s basically what it sounds like, what you’re saying is like, get your guide is basically kind of going down that branded aggregator pathway a little bit more. And ironically, it’s something we’ve been talking about recently is how do you make a fundamental change from the bottom up in ground transportation, which, you know, like, how do you actually change the fundamental thing, so I was just using the same guys on the back end. So it’s interesting to see that you’re, you’re doing a lot of that in your industry, I wanted to slightly shift the conversation over to, you know, something, culture shock. So I think you you kind of very quickly went over of what must have been an incredibly interesting transition, moving to the US to start a company without even know anything about the culture now, I recognize, you know, English speaking stuff. It’s not like, you know, me trying to go start a company in China, but I think there must be a lot that you had to go through, you know, in order to make that work. So, you know, tell some more stories from from that time.
Varun Khona:
Yeah. So I mean, in hindsight, it was an extremely foolish decision, right? Like, I think, if I sit back today, and I try and trace back my steps to figure out the logic as to why that made sense to me, I actually can’t think of one. So I think it was just one of those things that you do, because you’re young, and you feel like you could do anything that you would want in the world, because we have not, we have not yet been hardened by life experiences and so in, in a weird way, that worked out really well, for us. So when we moved to the US, in some sense, it was a huge culture shock, because I had actually never lived outside of India ever in my life, and had never been to the US. And so it was a new country, new people pretty much nobody that I knew outside of the two founders and I came with, and my aunt, who I saw once a week, because I used to pretty much be at the CO working space that we used to work out of. So it was interesting, because I was used to an extremely comfortable lifestyle in India, I used to live with my girlfriend back then, in India, we had all the amenities that you would want a nice house, you know, house health, etc, etc. So it was just an extremely comfortable and relaxed lifestyle, which got appended in a pretty dramatic way when he moved there. And after the first couple of months, when my aunt finally sort of pushed me out, because she was like, okay, that’s long enough. Now, we got an apartment. North of Columbia, I think on on 99th Street or something, and the apartment was just it was was a bunch of Chinese graduates who were studying in Colombia, we’d gone back home for summer, and, and we subleased it from them. And the apartment was just infested with cockroaches and I have like a huge cockroach phobia. And I had to essentially sort of like, live with that pretty much.
David Litwak:
I think that’s just normal.
Varun Khona:
Yeah. And so I literally had sort of live with that. For two months, it was just intense, right, like, I mean, and because I used to hate going back home, because it was infested, I used to essentially sleep at the CO working space, there’s a couch there, which actually has like a photo of me sleeping there, posted next to the couch, and the guys that keep talking about it for a long time, every time I go back to New York, I go back and say hi there. And, and so it’s just become one of those funny sort of stories where every morning, they used to come back and clock in and sort of catch me sleeping on the couch. So it was incredibly intense from that perspective. But one interesting thing that I realized was that growing up in urban Indian, was not very different than growing up in any urban center in the US, or for that, for that matter, I think growing up in any largely English speaking, urban city in the world is though the experience that you have is actually very, very similar. Like, I watched the same movies, you know, sort of looked after the same way queasy about the same dance, read similar kind of books, and so on and so forth. So I think in a, in a pretty surprising way, I actually was able to make some really good connections and make friends rather easily on the back of these similar cultural touchpoints of movies and books and authors and so on and so forth. Which, when I think about it now, I realized that my experience as an individual is a lot closer to somebody, let’s say living in New York, then somebody living in a tier three town in India. Right. And I think that potentially could be true even for this New Yorker, I think their experience of somebody, their experience of living in New York versus somebody living in a rural township in in Utah, I think, I think might be very, very distinct and disconnected and they might be late. They might be able to relate much more to guy like me, so I think I think it was in justing, the revelation that in a lot of ways it is in urban centers around the world, life is a lot simpler than we anticipated.
Kevin May:
You went from, you know, living in a kind of getting used to living in somewhere like New York, from a business perspective, you are then thrust into the world of 500 startups, that kind of well talk to us a little bit about that, and what you do, what was your experience of that?
Varun Khona:
Yeah, so it was an incredibly helpful experience for us personally as head out, because we didn’t really have the connections of the network in the US. And we were able to build that off of the 500 family, which worked out as a great sort of short circuit to be able to get to the funding that we needed to get to write, and also give us a very real deadline, because the accelerator sort of was around for the bachelor’s would like for four months. And so whatever it is, that we had to do had to be done in those four months. And so when we join the accelerator, we were the smallest company in terms of revenue. There were a few that didn’t make any revenue. But from the ones that were generating any revenue, we were the smallest one. And by the end of the batch, we sort of ended up becoming the largest one. And so that four months was just incredible time for us, because it allowed us focus to be able to really sort of put our heads down and just solve for the problems that we’re trying to solve. We got enough money to be able to get a house, which was nice, though, didn’t really matter, because I was sleeping, or the 500 offers in Mountain View, which doesn’t exist anymore, unfortunately. But dad a lovely office, in Mountain View, on the seventh floor, from which you could pretty much see the whole peninsula. And I pretty much spent almost all of those four months there. I still remember it was fun. It was most of our customers were from New York. And we used to have phone support, which was handled by me. And so I used to wake up at four o’clock in the morning, because it was seven in New York, and people start sort of, you know, pinging those calls and asking questions. So we used to have questions from suppliers. And so I used to sort of do this weird four o’clock to like 12am, shift, and then sort of try and sleep for four hours and then get back on the calls again. So I mean, 500, for us was like a huge boon. Like, I can’t, I don’t recommend an escalator for every company. But for a company in our context, which doesn’t have that network and finds itself in an alien environment. I think. an accelerator like 500 actually does the job of what an accelerator should do, which is like really sort of propel our journey in a way that it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
Kevin May:
And lastly, for me for a bit, and maybe I’ve got this wrong. You were on a show called the pitch TV show. Tell us about that.
Varun Khona:
Yeah, it’s one of the more questionable things I’ve done in my life.
Kevin May:
goals you say? Did you say questionable? Yeah, yeah. Okay.
David Litwak:
All reality show the Bloomberg one or something like
Varun Khona:
that. Okay. Okay.
Varun Khona:
So yeah, it was a reality show about entrepreneurs pitching ideas and doing a bunch of tasks, which are not connected with their startups at all whatsoever. To prove their entrepreneurial mettle. I still don’t quite agree with the, with the evaluation procedure, per se. But it was interesting. I mean, it was across, I think I spent about almost about two months doing the whole thing. It’s what you would expect from a reality show, what you see on TV is not exactly what sort of went down the, the bits and pieces that have stitched together are, are incredibly interesting and made for good viewing. But But isn’t quite reality the way that you would expect it to be. But it was interesting challenge for me, because I before that show, I was a sort of a reclusive guy, I didn’t really talk much. So coming in front of a mirror and doing all of that, for me was like, the first time in my life that I did public speaking and, and put myself out there and under the spotlight, which was a huge life changing. story for me personally, but it didn’t really do anything for what you’re trying to do head out.
Kevin May:
But you spent two months you spent spent two months on it. Right? So you must have considered it to be something that was good for both, as you said, your own kind of personal development, but for development of the company in terms of exposure.
Varun Khona:
I mean, the exposure, I think I think most things on these lines, is you overestimate the exposure that you get when you’re in it, and then sort of when you’re done with it, and then you look back. You’re not quite so sure. So I would say I mean, after the first four weeks, I didn’t have an option like a contractual like we had to finish the show. So there was that, but I think it was just like personally, it was really helpful. Like for me as an individual for the company. I mean, I just don’t think reality shows are, are a reasonable path to building companies like i don’t
Varun Khona:
i don’t think there’s any connection between the two.
David Litwak:
Find that there was like a spate of those shows. You know, I think it was like six or seven years ago I remember Bravo had one as well, if I’m not mistaken, had someone sleeping on At the desk of the 500 startups statement colors or whatever, where everyone rolled their eyes, he was one of the tech people was actually a blogger, or something like that kind of is this like, and they were kind of hold this girl who was living at the Marriott four seasons as a as a tech entrepreneur that was kind of rolling their eyes. But anyways, yeah, you know, we don’t have much time. But I wanted to kind of transition to something that I think is a little bit topical, which is remote. Yeah. And you, you have this kind of joint, you know, you have an office in India, and you sleep in various offices in America, apparently. And so you are doing this kind of interesting remote work, you know, the thing that you’ve been doing for a while, and mosy is the same, we’ve for nine years have actually been fully remote, most of our people actually in Argentina, and Europe. And you’re seeing this kind of all these VCs rush to kind of pretend like they’re thought leaders and at the forefront of remote work. But, you know, I’m curious how you came to the decision of structuring your team like that? And how did you manage a culture across at least two different locations.
Varun Khona:
So at the very beginning, what was obvious to us is that we wanted some local funds in each of the regions that we handle, because sales and distribution was largely local. And that was just critical and important. But at the same time, a lot of the functions could be centralized in a way that is extremely cost effective, right. And so we made the decision that if it could be centrally, it could be anywhere in the world. And if it could be anywhere in the world, then why not do this in Bangalore, which is where we are from, we know the industry, we know this city, we know, what’s the best way to hire people there. And it’s easier to attract talent, then it would be in a place like New York where we are relatively more unknown entities, right. So I think we just made that call to set up our entire product and support team in India, and sort of go with a hub model for all the regional offices. So we had one in New York, and then we open a second one in London, and then Berlin happened, and then Dubai happened, and then Hong Kong, and so on, and so forth. So we did this, largely out of necessity, like it just made sense to us that having a central office in a place like SF or New York would not make sense for us as a company because we are still largely global. I mean, 35% of our customers come from the US, but then the remaining 75, the remaining 65% are split between 98 countries at any point in time. And so it’s an incredibly diverse set of people. And it doesn’t matter to us, where we are, it doesn’t matter what customers where we are, as long as the central operations can be delivered effectively. Right. So manual for from that perspective, there was a logical decision. And and the local hubs was also a necessary evil, so to speak, because we had to have those offices to have connections with our suppliers and our distributors on the ground. Now, in terms of managing our culture between these different offices, I would, I would be incorrect in saying that we have figured this out completely. I think it’s it’s a constant sort of evolution. And we still keep getting better at it every single day. But there were a few things that we did. One, the whole company lives on slack. And that’s been one of the most incredible investments that we’ve made from day one. To be happy, have the structured sort of events that we put together multiple times a week where the team comes together for a wide variety of activities, we have a team lunch that happens together, where all of us are eating from different offices, and everybody sees everybody eating at the same time. And there’s a whole bunch of conversation around it, and so on and so forth, which happens religiously, every single week, which is amazing. Um, we have a virtual tour, where one person from one of our offices would sort of, you know, give us a tour of the city that they live in of some specific place within that city, and and show us what the city has to offer, what those what their stories are, what what the people, what were their cultural nuances are and so on and so forth. And this again, happens on a on a on a weekly basis. And then we have our socials where we all get to drink every Friday evening together, we have our ama’s we have all our video calls are supposed to be mandated with a with a video on options so that people get to sort of see each other more often than not. So we’ve just done a bunch of these structured initiatives to ensure that the connection between people is is is as human as human as it can possibly be. And then on top of that, we’ve done our annual retreats like surprise a your we bring everybody together last year we did Srilanka this year, we did go, that was just before COVID. Like we literally did that, I think in February 2 or third week when the ship was just starting to get serious. And a few of us actually fell sick. And in hindsight, we believe it might have been covered, but we never really got tested. And that was that but we do these annual retreats every six to nine months. Where we get everybody together from all offices, which isn’t going to be a good amount of fun.
Kevin May:
Okay, well, we’re sadly up against time. But I’m glad that we’ve covered and something as important as culture and remote working given that so many of us are living and breathing it, and mine quite likely to do for some time. So thank you for covering so many different indeed. So thank you so much for covering so many parts of your history, and for being our guest on how I got here. Thank you very much.
Varun Khona:
Thank you really appreciate it. That’s always
Kevin May:
fun, guys. Okay, so thank you very much again. So that’s another episode of How I Got Here in the can as it were, so you’ve been listening to Mozio PhocusWire weekly podcast where
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai
