Transcript of Episode

Leah Gervais: Hey visionaries. Welcome back to the your biggest vision show. My name is Leah. I’m your host and I am very excited and honored to have Kunak with us today. Hey Kunal!

Kunal Mehta: Hi. How are you?

Kunal Mehta: I’m good. How are you?

Leah Gervais: Good, thanks.

Kunal Mehta: Thanks for having me.

Leah Gervais: Yeah, thanks for being here. So I’m going to read a little bit about you, but for those listening, he and I go way back. We actually worked together when I was in college at here at NYU. I interned at Charity Water. You were working in the finance department there a long time ago.

Kunal Mehta: It was a long time ago.

Leah Gervais: It was a long time ago. We’ve just always stayed in touch, but we both have the entrepreneurial bone and we’ve both kind of gone through obviously the corporate world, then the nonprofit and know on our own world. So I’m really excited for you to share your story.

Kunal Mehta: Yeah, absolutely.

Leah Gervais: So Kunall is a New York City based venture capitalists, author, and former entrepreneur who documents the stories of the bold risk takers that change the world through technology and social impact. He is the author of Disruptors, amazing book and you are now working on your second book, Finding Genius. You left the life on Wall Street to pursue your own passion and they can’t wait to hear more about it. Congratulations on everything you’ve done.

Kunal Mehta:  Thank you. Thank you so much.

Leah Gervais: My pleasure. So take us back a little bit. My show is all about your vision and fighting for your vision. I know you’re a big visionary and you really fight for what you believe in. When you were in high school or so, what did you envision your life to be like now or your career to turn out to be?

Kunal Mehta: Sure. Absolutely. So I grew up in Brooklyn in Bay Ridge, which is a small neighborhood. It feels a little far from Manhattan and New York City. So I didn’t have so much exposure to the financial district and Wall Street and really know what was going on in the financial services industry. But my entire family was in medicine. My father’s a dentist, my sister was going into medicine, my brother followed my father’s footsteps. I believe that science engineering was sort of the direction that I was headed and as well. Serendipitously I wanted to go to NYU. I knew I wanted to be in New York and I want to be exposed to everything New York has to offer. But it was just expensive. So I was applying for scholarship programs and came across a program that J.P. Morgan was offering where they were going to cover my undergraduate college tuition if I could earn that scholarship. So they were offering it to 15 students across the U.S. and you could go to one of the universities in New York. That set me on a path where I had a fascination with everything that had to do with Wall Street at the time. I was trading in my own personal brokerage account. I thought it would be interesting. I had an entrepreneurial bone growing up in high school where I’d try to start small businesses. So I was fascinated by the business world and wanting to learn more and seeing kind of how some of the big titans were doing and it was more of a fascination of what Wall Street actually was. I was lucky enough to get that scholarship program and then I started working at JP Morgan my senior year of high school summer, which was 2007.

Leah Gervais: So young.

Kunal Mehta: So young, exactly. So you can’t really do much. But I started working there and spent my summers and my full time during the school year there, but it was 2007 so it was right at the peak, before the crash started happening. So I got to witness that entire ride down and it really brought out some of the ugly parts of Wall Street and kind of what that work looked like. I realized fairly quickly about two or three years in, that whether I was doing a job as an intern or I was looking at the directors above me, there was a general unhappiness and I think it was just the sentiment that was going on in the industry at the time. I was learning a lot, but I just didn’t see myself being there when I was 35, 40, 45. I just wasn’t interested in the work, wasn’t engaged in it. I tried starting some businesses in college. I always had new brainstorm ideas and was working with friends and different ideas. We tried to launch something called Bill Mash, which was similar to a modern day Venmo. We tried to import things from China and sell those on Amazon. We were just trying a lot of small things and learning in the process, but continued down this structured path. It was very hard to break away from. So, after after graduating I joined Nomura Securities, which was on Wall Street as well. Then eventually just broke away. So I can go deeper into that, but I answered a little bit of your question around what the vision and what I was thinking about where that confusion was existing early on in my career too.

Leah Gervais: Absolutely. So thank you so much for sharing that. As you know, I completely resonate with your story. So you realize before you’re even done with college that you’re pretty much set out on a path that you don’t even really want to do all that much.

Kunal Mehta: Yeah, I was and I actually went to the Undergrad business school at Stern.

Leah Gervais: You went to Stern which is also one of the best business schools in the whole world.

Kunal Mehta: One of the best business schools. But it also puts you on, and I don’t regret it at all. It was a great institution, but it puts you on a very structured path. And I think in New York and it wasn’t much exposure to seeing what else is out there. There was never really a chance, which I speak about often around the first book is that growing up straight through high school, when you enter into college, you’re kind of going on this fly wheel of trying to figure out what the next big achievement is that you can hit. That’s Undergrad, that’s getting your first job after graduating and trying to hit that first salary mark, it’s trying to get the next job, the promotion to associate. I really never got a chance of figuring out what it is that I wanted, but I also didn’t know what else was out there. So I still accepted the job on Wall Street because I was like, this is prestigious and this makes sense. But there was no understanding of what else was interesting. So even while I was in that job, I was thinking, should I go back and try to get a degree in medicine? Should I go back and try to be an architect? Should I try to do something inspiring like you’ve done? So it was a lot of things pulling in and gnawing at me, which I think is something that most recent college graduates face. It’s something that I’ve seen again and again and again play out.

Leah Gervais: Right. So walk me through, if you can think of maybe one moment, even if there isn’t particularly one moment, but the moment or a moment where you remember feeling like this is not going to work. Like this is not the path that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Is there a thing you can pull from?

Kunal Mehta: Yeah. Several moments, some which I can’t share. But I think it was in the moments where I think I was looking around me at work and seeing people that were a lot older than me and realizing that I didn’t want the lives that they had. It was in seeing people being laid off while I was at JP Morgan at Nomura cause the equity trading desks. The financial services industry, even in 2012 was still going through a lot of changes where entire trade nests were being wiped out by electronic trading. I think there were moments where I had to wake up around 5:30 in the morning to go to the trading desk and then I’d be there until late and then we’d have client dinners at night. But there’d be days where I’d just be sitting at my desk and realizing that the work that I’m doing is very repetitive and if the stock worked out, I wasn’t learning enough. I wasn’t really pushing myself. I think what was interesting is that there were friends of mine that I graduated NYU too who are launching businesses at the time. And I was looking around and realizing that even though they might have not gone through this formal Wall Street training, which people say is transferable skills, which I don’t know how much I agree with. There were people that were going out there and trying to do bigger things and it felt like my entire twenties, I needed to be dedicated to that as opposed to chasing the most amount of money that I could possibly make. It was more, it should be chasing where I would learn and what I’d be interested in. Wall Street was very, very financial based. The decisions were very much around like how much can I make? So, I met one friend for example, started a company. He was trying to do online chats and online conversations, which eventually sold to Facebook, but just having conversations with him and realizing how much he was learning about consumer behavior, launching a product, engineering. I wasn’t learning any of that. And I think that’s what was inspiring to me too.

Leah Gervais: Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever told this publicly, but this just reminded me of one of my “Aha” moments when I realized I didn’t want to go to law school was when I was working at a law firm looking, you know, I did look up to the lawyers there. I worked in a good firm. It wasn’t as crazy as some of the big ones here in New York, but I remember one of them telling me that he worked at evolve top 100 law firm when he graduated from college and one night, you know, leaving the office at 2:00- 3:00 in the morning, whatever it is, you know, kind of classic story and seeing the garbage man and feeling envious.

Kunal Mehta: I can definitely relate to that.

Leah Gervais: Yeah. And that’s when I was like, am I really gonna go down this path? Like maybe I should step back and think about that.

Kunal Mehta: Right, right. Yeah, it’s rough. I think also what was interesting is that there were just some people that loved it. Like I was talking to some friends who were on the trading desk or in different groups and they just were obsessed with it and they would read every article and it made them better at their job. They were happy to wake up in the morning and go there. They were happy to stay there late. I was also envious of them if they had that diligence, that discipline to love this work and actually enjoy it. But I just realized I didn’t have that, that wasn’t the work that I want to wake up and work hard at. There were other things that I was doing outside of work that I’d rather spend my time doing and that wasn’t the job. So I think that’s what I was trying, when you talk about vision and searching for that next thing, that’s what I wanted to find is what is that thing that really drives me where I want to wake up at 5:00 AM and go to sleep at 12:00 and all day, eat, sleep, dream, breath that entire thing, which sounds unhealthy but I think in my early twenties that’s what I was looking for.

Leah Gervais: Sure. I think that’s a great answer and I think that it’s, you know, really inspiring and relatable to think like that’s what you wanted in your 20’s. You wanted that purpose, you wanted that thing that was exciting to get out for. So now walk me through a little bit what was going on internally when you had to give yourself permission, or maybe even find support externally or whatever it looked like to pivot and to say, you are going to accept the pursuit of this vision, you’re going to leave everything.

Kunal Mehta: Sure. So, that was a very difficult decision. So I think I was about eight months and when I realized I had this moment where I was like, I can’t do this anymore. I had several conversations with my family. I had several conversations, friends. I think the hardest part was that sense of peer validation, which is like if you decide to leave, what do you tell people? Like why did you decide to give up this job and say, I’m going to go figure it out. I think that’s a very hard point because you grow up and then there’s like a sense of competition between friends and peers where you’re graduating. I don’t know if this is in all places, but at least with graduating in that business school is very much around what was your first job? So I think he was getting to that point of being comfortable in the fact that I could make this decision and know that I would be able to figure it out. Also knowing, having the sense that I would be able to bounce back at some point in the future if this didn’t work out. So I gave myself another four to six months and this wasn’t about the people I was working with. They were great and they were supportive, but I gave myself another four to six months to say, I’m going to sit at my desk and I’m going to try to find interesting jobs when I go home at night that might fulfill me. But then when I realized is, is that I was just grasping for straws and I was applying to any job that would sort of form an escape, but I was going to jump from one negative experience to the next negative experience to the next, without figuring out what it was that would actually be my vision or my passion.

Kunal Mehta: So I decided that I needed to take some time. I tried to save up whatever I could for the next six months. I really spent as if I was living without a job, and began saving up, figuring out how I could move back home maybe or do what I could do at my apartment whether I sublet it or Airbnb it. Then solely made the decision that I would just leave if nothing panned out that really excited me. So I finally ended up leaving and I left with the idea of starting a company, which I won’t share with that company was now, cause it’s pretty embarrassing. But I had left with the concept of that I would try to launch a business of my own. But again, I think I was grasping for straws and I was picking a business that was, was not validated by customers. It was not what would actually drive me. I ended up leaving and then realizing fairly quickly that it’s very tough to start a business. Despite everything that I was reading at the time in 2012, every single article is making it sound like founders had started a business. Six months later, they raised venture financing and 12 months after they were selling their businesses or are they were scaling them and I think the popular media was all about this overnight success story that I think we were reading a lot of, so it felt like I could go out and do the same thing. I was like, I’m smart. I had a false sense of confidence and I can try and go launch this on my own and I realize pretty quickly that that wasn’t the case.

Kunal Mehta: There was difficulty in still going out with some friends and they’re still my close friends still today. But I think having those conversations and really trying to figure out, but I think many of us were unhappy in our jobs. So I’ll take the first step and having those conversations with them, we’re all also helpful. Let’s talk when you’re having those conversations and figuring it out every single day, where is my life headed, where’s my career headed and they’re not in that same boat and you’re trying to defend yourself that this was the right decision. At night you’re questioning whether it actually was or not. That’s a pretty raw moment that I think that was going through at that point.

Leah Gervais: How do you feel like those moments, those dark nights, that deep insecurity you must’ve experienced after the really nice ego job that you had for a little while? How do you think that, that, you know, I want to say with this story, but just fast forwarding to where you are now, you’ve written two books, you just become very successful. You’re much happier than you were. How do you think that that shapes where you’re at now?

Kunal Mehta: I think there is a period where I think a lot of people need to go through. I’ve seen you go through it. I’ve seen friends go through it where it’s like you need to force yourself into those lows to really try to figure out, and it sounds masochistic in some ways, but it’s like you almost need to really understand what it’s like to have without a parachute option of not having a job of really figuring out if it is that I could wake up every morning and I really worked and I was very diligent and I wasn’t just getting lazy and watching Netflix and hanging out. If I really work, what is it that will fulfill me, what would keep me excited? I think going through that, that sort of trough from like you’re saying, that ego job of like straight out of high school, having structure of knowing that J.P. Morgan was there every single summer. Never having to apply for a job and knowing that my college was paid for and knowing that I had a job after graduating, but it’s almost meaningless in some ways too because it’s like I was working toward something that was never really that exciting for me.

Leah Gervais: Yeah. Right.

Kunal Mehta: So, I think going through all that and pulling all of that aside and then realizing that there are other metrics that are important for me that drives me forward and what is important to me in my life might not be the same as the people that are working in industry. It was important for me to figure out, and it’s a balance that I think I fine tuned over the last seven or eight years then to get to where I’m at now, where now I have a little bit more of an understanding of what are my strengths, what am I excited about? Where do I want to spend more of my time, where I sit most output as opposed to spending time in a thousand different directions. I’m still getting better at that just because I don’t know what I’m excited about, right? Because I spend time here, here, here and try and figure it all out. But I think taking that year or six months to really figure out what I want to explore was important.

Leah Gervais: Yeah. Well, and I think something that comes up a lot on this show and I interview people like you that have really chased after something that lit them up. A common theme is that when you’re searching for that, a lot of times finding out what you don’t want to do is just as valuable, if not more valuable than finding like that one thing. So for you it was really blunt. You didn’t not want to work on Wall Street, not at all. And then kind of like trying to figure that out soon as you go in embracing, you know what, that didn’t work for me, that didn’t work for me. I think that that’s a really useful way to look at this because it can feel really daunting to think that you’re trying to figure out your life’s purpose. No one ever figures that out, that’s a really big task. It’s good to look at it like this, you know, this didn’t work, this didn’t feel good, I did like that. How can I kind of collect those little things? Try to bring some balance in your life, which I don’t even like using that word because I’m very convinced it doesn’t exist especially in this city. But I think that that’s a more practical and you know, effective way to go about it.

Right. I think that’s actually really smart. I mean one of the, the strategies that someone had given me at the time was to write a list since I was trying to figure that out, write a list of 10 areas quickly within 30 seconds, just jot them down very fast. Areas that I want to explore, things I was interested in. So that could be, it could be blogging, it could be architecture, it could be photography, it could be finance, it could be entrepreneurship and write each of those down. Then the goal was to explore three of those per week. And the way you explore them is to just go and speak to as many people that are doing that. If you don’t like it, cross it off and add a new one. So her entire hypothesis on this was it’s more of a process of elimination to figuring out what you actually enjoy as opposed to all of a sudden being like an epiphany where you wake up and you’re like, this is what I need, this is what I want to do. I think that’s been much of the process too through my twenties, is like eliminating things that I knew I experienced and I knew, okay this isn’t where I wanted to go. Then in the last three to four years it’s really narrowed in on the stuff that I actually know I enjoy. So I think that exploration period, like you were saying, of like how it’s helped that was important to do up front as opposed to having a midlife crisis when I’m 45 I think it’s important to have almost like a 20 year old crisis or 21 year old crisis.

Leah Gervais: Well, I totally agree. And especially when you are naturally visionary, like you are. Even if you did say wake up one morning and had a perceived epiphany about what you’re supposed to do, you know, give yourself a couple of months or a couple of years and you’re gonna have like a question about something else. So already knowing now that that’s not what you want to do, is going to make it better. Okay. Amazing. So you then go on to write Disruptors and you interview some of the most respected and well known entrepreneurs in New York, that have just built incredible companies. Tell me a little bit about your decision to write the book and speaking to these entrepreneurs and then I’m going to ask you a little bit about the content of the book.

Kunal Mehta: Yeah, sure. So when I left in 2012 from Wall Street then, and I tried to start this business as I was saying, I realized fairly quickly that everything that was out there was all about how successful these founders had been. There was no real story about what it looked like from when you left your corporate job and security, whether that’s business school with its law school, whether that’s a law firm, whether that’s any position of conformity or security where you know, you have that blanket to roll back onto. I didn’t know what that path looked like from leaving that through a year of launching a business and learning everything you did during that period. I knew that there’ve been people that were going through the same thing and I wanted to go and speak with them. So I reached out to a few founders. Who were just starting off at the time and they were extremely gracious in saying, you know what, we’ve gone through this exact process. We’re still going through it. We’re trying to raise our seed round of financing. Let’s have a conversation. So I started off with three conversations and that trickled into being 50 plus conversations with different founders that were all in the early stages. I got lucky where some of these founders, since the New York startup scene was kind of blowing up at the time where some of these founders were now the founders of companies like Pinterest and Foursquare and Betterment. Betterment is also a pretty massive financial service company here in New York. LearnVest, which sold to Washington Mutual, and then Charity Water, Scott Harrison. So I think I was trying to understand more about what do those first six months to a year look like when you’re trying to start a business or when you’re trying to leave that position of conformity, your security and how do you pull yourself out of that? This book was structured with chapters with one founder after next and kind of pulling out those morsels that they shared about what their journey looked like. So it was very anecdotal is more story based as opposed to very prescriptive. I think that I was reading too many prescriptive books, right? So I wanted to just read the stories of people and try to figure out where I related and how can I pull things out from there. So that’s how Disruptors came to be and we published that in 2014. It’s started off slow and then was fortunate enough to get picked up by a bunch of the big universities and institutions. So that’s what was interesting too, is where I learned more, I think that’s where I started to really get that sense of validation that I wasn’t the only one going through this.

So I had written the entire book and still was maybe going through a period of self discovery and trying to figure that out. Then when I went out there and started speaking, it was speaking at like Stanford, Harvard, Duke, like the best universities and then universities in different parts of the country that I would never go to like Kentucky or Idaho or North Dakota. And speaking to students there, it was just a parallel where I think every single student was facing the same problem. So I think that was interesting is that that really helped also validate what I was going through and realizing that there were so many people going through this, you need to tell these stories. That’s, that’s, that was the purpose and premise behind that book too.

Leah Gervais: I love that book and I love your explanation of that because on my podcast, that is the number one thing I try to hone in on is the… you know, for me, looking back at my business, I mean for me it was kind of long. I feel like it was like the first year and a half where I felt like no one cared. No one was reading that I was writing. That’s a little dramatic. But like when you just feel like you’re missing that.

Kunal Mehta: I was reading it.

Leah Gervais: Oh, thank you. Yeah, or you know, now I have a six figure business. I’m very proud of everything I’ve built and I think it’s so important to highlight those early days because I don’t want anyone listening or seeing me to think that, you know, if they’re going through that, that doesn’t mean that they can end up where they want to be. So I love that you wrote off called book on it because I don’t think it’s talked about enough. I think it really can make people, come up with these just sort things that are completely untrue about themselves thinking that if they don’t move as quickly as they saw someone else or if they’re not making as much money as they saw someone else then therefore they are inferior or they don’t have what it takes and you never know what that person really went through.

Kunal Mehta: Right, and I think what was interesting with that too is that in the last five years since that book’s been published, you’ve seen some of these companies take rocket ships and go straight off and others have gone the other direction. But I still meet with all those founders regardless of where their start up’s went and I think they’re all just very interesting people. I think they experienced a lot. They went through that period, they’ve all done incredibly well professionally and their all incredibly driven. Whether it’s with a startup or something else. But I think it was interesting to see all of them go to that period of self discovery and they were all a little bit further ahead in their careers than I was and learning from them through that process, which I’m sure Alexis will probably share also.

Leah Gervais: Sure. Do you have one common thread or a takeaway that you found that many of them, if not all of them have to deal with during that time or any sort of personal development thing that they had to do to get through that muddy water?

Kunal Mehta: Yeah. Well I think it’s very similar. Kind of what we are speaking about words they were, it really disproved that overnight success story. So many of them went through… *unable to transcribe* who is the founder of *unable to transcribe* ventures now, which has made several really big investments, but he also had three companies before this and another guy had been *unable to transcribe* and Lauren Bush, Lauren from feed, they all talked about several failed endeavors and experiments and startups before they launched. So then Vin Vicante from Yipit had I think 13 failed businesses before he launched Yipit, which ended up being successful and is a profitable business now, but they, each business was taking six months. His pivot, his iteration his like introduction of that business was taking six months to happen at the first time. And then by the time he launched 13, it was happening within a month. So he’s getting better and better at each process. I think that’s what the entire book was trying to show was that the overnight success story doesn’t exist. It’s more about trying to find those unstructured paths and figuring out where you’re trying to learn and then launch those businesses based out of those learnings. So there was different anecdotes that I can share that will further that, but *unable to transcribe* went through bankruptcy in order to launch it and faced that problem of peer validation and how do you actually tell your family that are going to continue doing this? And it was that search for passion and search for inspiration for the work that they were doing that eventually led to some of these bigger businesses that they eventually launched.

Leah Gervais: Amazing, and now you’re working on your second book finding genius. Do you want to share a little bit about that?

Kunal Mehta: Yeah, sure. So spent about a year and a half doing a book tour for Disruptors, was working at Charity Water for two and a half years. Then launched my own startup called Unfold, which was great. We raised a seed round of financing for that and partner with some folks and launched an app on the APP store and it did well for a little while. Then I ended up transitioning into kind of seeing everything that was going on. I transitioned into venture capital and I was really excited about if you want to continue launching businesses, that’s great. But this is also a really interesting job where you continue to work with these founders and spent a fair amount of time with them. So first was doing metric capital through NYU’s endowment where we were investing in seed stage startups. And now I’m with Hearst Ventures in Midtown. We do a slightly later stage investing in founders. What I learned while speaking about Disruptors was that everybody wanted to hear more about what the VC’s were doing and how are they finding these companies and what were they interested in investing. It was still a black hole to a lot of founders think founders have the concept of I have an idea and now I need to go raise financing. So what this book is trying to is I’ve had about 50 plus conversations again and spoken with the investors behind companies like Uber and Airbnb and Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin, Pinterest to understand are there patterns that emerge between one successful founder and the next and how does the entire process of venture financing work? Because I don’t think there’s been that much material on it and I think it’s been very pithy and self promotional. So I’m trying to really get to the core of it.

The fact that there’s not very equitable asset class, it’s mostly funding a very specific group of people and it’s leaving out minorities and women in most cases. So we’re trying to understand, better understand exactly how is genius defined from the old way it was being defined and how is that evolving now to include and be more inclusive. So it’s scheduled to be released in July. I think one of the big takeaways from that, I know we’re running up on time, was that it’s not central casting. It’s not the graduates of Stanford. It’s not the ones that have an MBA is not the ones from Wall Street. I think what they were really interested in are the ones that have gone through paths like we have and I’m sure much of your audience have where they’re looking for people that have gone through unstructured paths and learned a lot through that process. Like they have more capacity that’s been developed because of that. They know that they’re not just looking for success right away, the way they always have where they send in an application and they get into their business school or they get into the top. So it just, I think people of privilege are the ones that they were looking to fund. It was more the ones that have gone through that rigor over a period of time and developed a unique insight because of that. So I share many anecdotes and kind of concepts through that, through the lens of these investors. So that was an interesting project.

Leah Gervais: It sounds really interesting and that’s good to hear. Yeah. It’s okay if you have a ton of twists and turns.

Kunal Mehta: Yeah, exactly. That was, it was validated in a big way by them, so that was interesting.

Leah Gervais: Great. Well, your new book will be in the show notes of this episode, so will disruptors. Where can people find out more about you? Other than that?

Kunal Mehta: I think that’s good. My Ted Talk is on Youtube. If they want to reach out at any point, they can feel free to reach out if you want to have a conversation and both books are out there. So that’d be great.

Leah Gervais: Great. Well huge congratulations on your two books and thank you so much for sharing your story. It’s definitely one of courage. It’s one that I like to think I can relate to, I’m sure so many people can relate to. It’s just so impressive that you have continued to follow your gut. I know it’s not always the easiest thing, so thank you for being brave and setting such an inspiring example.

Kunal Mehta: Thank you Leah, I appreciate it.

Leah Gervais: Thanks so much. Have a good one. I’ll talk to you soon.

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