This transcript was generated from YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels may be unavailable, and transcription errors may remain.
Nan Meka#
I think as somebody who’s entering into a startup you might get enamored with fundraising size but having been in a startup it’s actually not an indication of a successful product Market fit or commercial model or a great customer experience so that’s one metric I definitely ignore great to have you on the show I want to.
Start by asking you did you worked in a lot of corporate jobs right you worked.
Transitioning from Corporate to Startups#
At KPMG Macquarie a bunch of other like really corporate places and now you’re you’ve been in startup land for a little while so I want to ask what was the initial transition there what kind of LED you out of the corporate world into the Corp into the startup scene was there any sort of moment that triggered.
That yeah earlier in my career I was on the other side so I was assessing investing in Internet businesses I was also in gaming spaces and working on developing commercial models supporting digital businesses on their strategies spent most of my like earlier career in consumer Tech space particularly on the corporate VC side a strategy M A as well.
As early stage startup and scale up company side in the land year as a non-technical person I really didn’t think there was a pathway for me into early stage startups especially with someone with my random background and I found out that was the furthest thing from the truth because there was like a pent-up.
Demand for generalists who were like malleable learn fast solve problems have impact to scaling the business and effectively helping to create defensibility from both internal and external shots that an early stage constantly experiences through their Journey and the way I transitioned because it wasn’t so big and I don’t really want to show my age right now this is so big.
Back in the day I think when Blackbird VC only just really started uh coming to fruition around that time and so it was a very nascent period for investing early stage investing in Australia and there wasn’t much of a community or or meetups around this space for me I had to just basically reach out to.
Founders that I admired and identified problems that they were solving that deeply interested me and I think it was hard I’m not gonna lie to make that sort of leap because we’re going for a very structured and well-resourced environment to one that’s gray ambiguous chaotic all of the above like crazy and so luckily I did get my first foray in.
Startups and that was about seven years ago when I joined a little online bus booking business which actually ended up scaling to about 200 million in gross sales a year and that ended up helping yeah millions of customers travel easier and so I was in an area called business operations and what is business.
Operations the purpose and the role of my team was to drive growth of the business by either launching and scaling new initiatives or just even optimizing day-to-day operations or even just a mixture of both I was fortunate enough to work on a lot of different problems across products and marketing customer success and that was to ensure that the.
Business is solving the right problems in line with the company level objectives and so some of the projects I would work on would be hey we need to we’ve got a bit of backlog with our customer queries how can we improve our customer experience which is deeply important in the online travel space.
Getting that sort of real-time ability to connect with somebody and have your query answered because you’re about to miss your bus and it’s going to impact your journey and your experience um so looking at streamlining processes to handle these queries and looking to ways to improve like MPS I worked with marketing to launch loyalty programs to.
Improve like retention rates and so there was a variety of stuff and I wasn’t an expert in anything but what I was deeply curious about how things worked and I had a very growth oriented and learning mindset like a baby just coming into the world and then more recently I was the head of.
Operations at Simply Wall St which is a B2C SaaS app and we helped over 5 million retail investors make better stock decisions I don’t know if you’ve used it I have I did have a little I like a little bit of a player under the lead up to this but not yeah yeah it’s.
Great isn’t it’s and I think like for me I get attracted to not just any startup but a startups that’s solving a business problem or a or a or a problem that really hits like a bit of a personal note with me for me like I was actually a user of Simply Wall St.
Before because it helped my personal retail investing journey and I really had a lot of asymmetric information I didn’t have the clunky sort of Bloomberg terminal prohibitively expensive I believe they’re like 150 000 per terminal or per license something crazy like that which by hedge fund or a large company would have and as a result not.
Not have that same sort of Level Playing Field and what I saw is that business and the founder Al deeply passionate about that space and he was leveling this access and he was simplifying the journey for the average Jane or Joe so that’s what really attracted me to that business and then now currently I’M&A VP.
In the finance team at Pet Circle which is obviously a leading online pet company in Australia and it was a tough decision actually leaving Simply Wall St because you’ve gone from an early stage business startup solving super interesting problems to a business that is doing exactly the same thing but it’s in its scale-up Journey as well and the.
Decision really came to my skill set I wanted to level up I wanted to expand my toolkit I wanted to join a company during that journey and I fell in love with the founders stories and ambition to build a great enduring business that aims to solve all of our furry and scaly friends needs and that’s what really.
Excited me about it and hearing that Vision through the interview process from Mike our CEO and our CFO and just the excitement really really brought me in and what I do there and my team does is help the business to make the best decisions possible and enable Business Leaders to make the right choices for.
The customer and the company and support existing business business lines like optimizing them help the business to plan better and look at new growth opportunities as well so entering in New Markets or it adjacent businesses in the pet space that’s super cool thank you so much for sharing because yeah I think you’ve done some really cool things in.
Your career and it’s super cool to hear even there’s some of the details of what you do on a day-to-day basis but I would I don’t want to ask one thing in a bit more detail and so you can touch on a little bit through through that but if someone is looking to join a startup and.
You mentioned there some things attachment to the actual Mission how does it relate to your current skills and things like that but I wonder if someone’s looking to make the leap as you did what kind of things should someone be looking for when they’re going to join a startup are there any.
Finding a good startup#
Things that perhaps if you were like you know if you had to run the clock back and it’d be like yeah how would I do this what kind of things now would I look for in a startup that would you know that would maybe increase the odds it’s going to be a good experience.
For me what sort of things would you look for yeah that’s a great question I actually have started to do this a lot more in terms of interviewing the startup is interviewing me or interviewing a business that’s interviewing me and I think it’s important for people to spend the vast majority of your time like figuring out.
Is this the right company for you to join above anything else because that needs to be aligned otherwise you’re just not going to be excited coming into work every day especially when things get really and so it’s really important so I would ask some certain questions before joining startup you could probably do a bit of desktop research as.
Well but in particular testing the rigor of the business model is it a big Market size what does the team look like are they strong executors is it diverse are they creative are they good operators is diversity super important and in my experience I’ve optimized for companies that were operating in really big.
Growing markets so online travel is huge pets is a 15 billion dollar market just in Australia alone retail investing like Simply Wall St is tackling there’s about uh 300 400 million retail investors worldwide so those are huge growing markets more people are entering into that market as well more people are taking a note of it and also paying for.
Services and goods in those marks I also try to get a sense of how the product was doing before it launched so before an interview I would just go and do that desktop research that I mentioned dive into customer feedback be a trust pilot or your Google reviews and this would give me a sense of if the customer.
Feedback was really telling me that they’re solving a real pain point for a customer or that a problem has just been invented because it sounds cool but they’re not really but it’s not really a sustainable business and I think it’s also another thing which is what I’ve noticed about it and drives me crazy is that there’s a lot of.
Marketing around fundraising and so I think as somebody who’s entering into a startup you might get enamored with fundraising size but having been in a startup it’s actually not an indication of a successful product Market fit or commercial model or a great customer experience so that’s one metric I definitely ignore so you see if a lot of.
Companies going wow we’ve raised like 100 million dollars we’ve raised 150 million dollars and now you’re seeing in the news oh wow we haven’t nailed our sort of Revenue targets or some of the metrics that we had planned to hit we’re letting go of 15 to 20 of the workforce and this is happening a lot now like I’m.
Seeing a lot of stories come up in in the local news just even yesterday for this company that came out where there were Sac letting go of 16 of the workforce after they had just raised 125 million dollars was led by the atlassian sorry the atlassian founders yeah it’s important to just distinguish those two.
And if there isn’t any information or little information because it’s very hard with startups that they’re private companies by the time you get to the interview I would ask my interviewees actually about these topics and I would ask them Point Blank and I have done this in interviews where I’ve asked hey what are your actual challenges as an.
Activation that’s the issue is it acquiring customers is it retaining customers and really deep dive and whatever information they are able to give me and if they try to like gloss over it I would I would be like something suspect there so I think that’s really important for you to dig into that information and not be afraid.
Just because they’re interviewing you doesn’t mean you cannot interview them back it’s a two-way and so for me I’ve been an angel investor I’m also an operator in startups and scale-ups and um I also Focus most of my attention on the founding and exec team because in early stage businesses Revenue might not.
Be a metric that you can ascertain certain metrics might not be there I tend to look at other Founders the right people that are building the product in this market are they a customer do they know the customer well or they’re just doing it for bragging rights um do they have passion that can be.
Sustainable for decades it’s tiring building a startup you like there are more bad days than there are good days so you’ve got to have great and big bold Ambitions to change the world and help the customer and not just optimize for oh the financial return I’m going to I’m going to be a.
Multi-millionaire out of this but I deeply love what you’re doing and do they care like beyond the product as well so do they care about the people and do they care about building a business that’s a generational business that will transcend time and effectively have long lasting impacts for their customers and so if that’s important to.
Like distill and one red flag for me really is if they are covering up these challenges and problems that I’ve mentioned earlier I would just counter with what area of the business do you think that you can improve on and look at their response and their responses they’ve shown humbleness and real ownership of.
Problems and that there’s work to do um they’re really grounded in reality and it is about collectively getting together and solving that rather than glossing it over and then everything blows up and then finally for me is this a team I can learn from and want to learn from and even though a founder or.
A CEO has different skill sets to you there are these like important sort of meta skills beyond the technical and those hard skills that you can learn just by observing how they communicate how they prioritize how they handle stress and if you can observe those then it’s incredibly powerful to learn off them and also you don’t want to feel.
Like the smartest person in the room when you’re with this team or the founding team and if you are then you’re not going to learn anything so I would avoid businesses like that as well yeah no I think that’s really great yeah I think like he was saying if the company is going really well and there are.
Things to share then they’ll be more open to sharing them whereas if things perhaps aren’t going so well then maybe they won’t be yeah I mean with like how things are going so I think that’s a great way of working out without like perhaps getting a response but you can still get have an idea of what’s going.
On I think that’s really cool I think yeah there’s a lot of good things in there that I think are quite useful and things that I didn’t think about looking up the reviews and doing things that way to try and see what do people actually think about this an interesting point about funding because I feel like you.
Said there’s a lot of like media usually around like raises and stuff and it’s easy to get to think oh they raise lots of money must be a good company like like disregard a lot of the things that you did mention around is the customer having a good experience with this product like other Founders like going.
To stay in it for the long haul things like that yeah I like that a lot definitely definitely going to use some of those tips there yeah and if all veils watch a lot of True Crime because you get really good oh that’s amazing Yeah you mentioned it a little bit in there around you want to be in a team.
That is going to help you grow and learn and develop you don’t want to feel like the smartest person in the room I feel like this is something that you do really well you’ve done plenty of learning outside of outside of work you.
Learning and Career Progression#
Do the masters of Finance all these like different VC things I know you’ve done a few of those kind of almost like a boot camp style training things I’m interested to hear how you think about developing your skills both in your role and outside of that and how you’ve used those like external things and perhaps.
Your current roles as well to progress I guess yeah that’s a great question I think for me like University can only teach you so much I think once you get into the workforce and you start actually interacting with customers interacting with various functions and with your team that’s when the real lessons start.
To occur and I think it’s just about being open and being like deeply curious and understanding why we do what we do and so if there’s any sort of skill that I would suggest getting is getting curiosity and I think that encourages sort of the learning the exchange of ideas we communicate better with one.
Another in our team builds deeper connection and empathy to what a team made or a different function is doing fuels Innovation and I think when we’re curious we look at tough problems in a more creative light and try to sit in the problem until we deeply understand why it’s so challenging so in my case I.
Wanted to learn more about product management and growth because at Simply Wall St for example I was interacting with a lot of those but the development of those strategies and building those teams and if and I didn’t have any depth of understanding of it just what I’ve read online but I didn’t want that superficial understanding so I.
Started to invest a lot more time just learning from others setting up catch-ups coffee catch-ups with people just to understand what do they do why does it drive impact to the business why is it so important breaking it up for me as well and then doing my own sort of investment after hours in in training so.
I started doing those reforge courses which are a great way to level up your understanding of product and growth and understanding things around how product managers do their jobs and how strategies are set at that level how they even interview their users even from a growth perspective like how does how do you build like a growth model in.
A tech business what does that look like how do you think about pricing monetization like all these various um tidbits of that makeup sort of growth which is like deeply complicated because it is very I would say a newer area and very different to your traditional marketing channels and so yeah for me it.
Was just about investing a lot of time um in leveling up reading a lot subscribing to a lot of newsletters following people on Twitter as well to learn and effectively yeah just being really deeply curious about things and wanting to understand the why not because I wanted to execute that job but because it helped me to build more.
Empathy and understanding especially because I was on the leadership team and if we were supporting these teams in terms of growing them and building them and helping to Define strategies with them and I needed to have that understanding otherwise yeah it would just yeah I would add no value effectively yeah I think it’s interesting you mentioned.
Earlier about aligning the company that you or the startup that you’re going to try and join or the company that you’re working for with something that is like a personal pain point or something that you’re actually interested in a product that perhaps you use anyway I think that really helps with the curios Curiosity.
Peace right is if you if it’s something that hits you one of your pain points and you’re actually interested and then you also work there then I think that’s then obviously you’re going to be much more interested than having some pain points or whatever and then working somewhere that’s completely unrelated that’s going to be.
You’re going to have better odds at being interested right if you work somewhere that’s actually relevant to yourself so yeah I think that’s super good 100.
Mistakes young people make#
Nice let’s continue on I wanna I know we’ve only got a little bit of time left so I want to touch on sort of your career more broadly rather than day to day and I want to ask career advice so you are I’m sure you’ve seen many sort of Juniors or Junior marketers growth.
People whatever it might be product to come through different companies that you’ve worked at and I wonder what is some advice that you see these people what are some mistakes maybe that you see these people make that um you wish you could just tell everyone everyone that’s starting their career don’t make this mistake is there.
Anything there yeah um I’ve had this kind of common career advice come my way and it’s really it’s really either from your parents or from respectfully older people I’m just gonna say and they’ve communicated this often hey you’ve you’ve got to know your worth when going for a role and when they talk about.
Worth it’s effectively your compensation your total compensation and I do understand that it comes from a good place and it’s ensuring that you and others are valuing you and your time but the biggest mistake I see people make especially the ones that are trying to go from a corporate job into into a.
Startup or a scale up is trying to optimize sort of their salaries and so I think early on in your career you should definitely optimize for learning over earning a high salary and even the role as well and I strongly believe that if you invest in learning first you are going to develop that.
Highly sought after skill set which then translates into that valuable role which a high salary is ultimately a byproduct of and so just in my experience recruiting and interviewing candidates and you get to the office stage especially new ones coming in around the two to four year experience Mark and they’ve come from.
Large corporates and they think oh yeah like therefore I should be earning even more and so generally they want to try and get maybe five to tenk more which after tax is like totally immaterial or they want the role title in a startup because the one that they’re going for isn’t sexy enough.
And so it’s all totally immaterial because your foregoing valuable steep learning curve the immense amount of ownership you get from day one and also the conviction you building yourself through many opportunities of being tested failing consistently and then learning and picking yourself up and being stronger for it which you just don’t get.
That opportunity at a larger organization because there’s just so much cushioning and protection so I would really caution people to really think about why they’re going for a startup role and not really like optimized for that earning because what might happen is because startups are resource constrained or scale-ups of resource constrained it might not be in the budget and then.
You might miss out on a an opportunity which you can’t get back into an opportunity which a lot of people are buying to get into yeah definitely I feel like you mentioned it but yeah today I feel like startups I guess the new like sexy thing to do right and so you want the nice title or.
Like things like that but yeah I completely agree I think sometimes the learning particularly when you’re young is just important and I think you’ve said it quite well where you’re saying the learning or and the knowledge that you gained will lead to a high salary like sometime in the future you don’t necessarily need that right now in fact.
Sometimes choosing a high style when you’re young might like limit the growth in some cases where you’re being like overpaid to do nothing sometimes so yeah I completely agree I think it’s important for people to recognize that.
Nan’s Advice for Graduates#
Cool I’ve got let’s do one more and this is a question for you about if you could rewind the clock it’s a question I ask all the guests and it is Nan where you are now rewind the clock back to when you’re just graduating University heading out into the world knowing everything that you know now is.
There anything that you would do differently or is there any advice that you wish you would have known then that you know now yeah I think I’ve definitely put my foot in it a lot I definitely wrote a lot of mistakes and I’m also really grateful for that so don’t shy away from failure absolutely.
Not but having said that there are things that you can mitigate at least the impact because can often be very often when you get hit and you get constantly hit very demoralizing to your confidence and it often does take you a bit of time to pick up but realizing that things aren’t personal this is just.
The way of the world you don’t have the cushioning of the University you don’t have that protection anymore and so for me I wish I had developed self-awareness about myself my behaviors what I’m really good at what I’m terrible at and really being more open-minded in trying to unlearn the ones that were.
Holding me back from growing and sometimes it can be a little bit humbling it can take your steps back but I think that’s okay but I think the way universities been set up and the way Society pits people against each other in terms of competition and all that kind of stuff it really does get into.
Your head and that you want to move forward and for me I wish I had just taken a step back to address some of those areas and I can give an example but what one one thing that I one thing I did struggle with is but going from being like a really strong sort of.
Individual contributor to a people leader and what I found is it’s like a completely different job requiring new abilities totally new set of problems that require completely different muscle skills and tools and I had to really make significant changes from just going deep into my work and being really myopic and really good at like just.
Executing the task or building that skill set to looking at the bigger picture understanding communicating the context to the team in which we operate in and I went from being a master of my craft also to taking a step to trying to train others to be good at their job because.
That’s when you’re successful when you’ve actually been able to help others and I went from solving with what tools and resources I had to allocating resources and influencing others which became more important in this role going from like that functional mindset where you’re just thinking about your own function what’s required to do the job really.
Well to what’s actually good for the company mindset and often you have to unlearn a lot of these things it takes a bit of time because it’s like you’re a computer you’re programmed a certain way because of a society external factors internally driven as well and for me like I sought a lot of help externally.
And I wasn’t afraid that I was seeking help externally or internally or telling people I don’t know how to do this and I need to get better at this how do I go about doing this and showing that kind of vulnerability and some people might see it as weakness but it isn’t it’s so.
Powerful to just be vulnerable because this weight just lifts off you and you’re like oh great I can learn without any sort of judgment and they’re probably thinking exactly the same thing and so I think yeah really focusing on trying to unlearn and having that self-awareness about yourself a bit more um your internal engineering effectively.
Like your makeup spending a lot more time on on knowing yourself rather than knowing the business externally that can come second I wish I had done that a lot I wish I’d done an exercise where I was trying to figure out what actually motivates me rather than what my parents want me to do or when you graduate from.
A University degree everyone goes into an investment bank or a big four or a consulting firm and that’s like a mark of success when it actually really isn’t there are alternate Alternatives career paths and because I’d been so conditioned I only thought success was through that path and it didn’t bring me any joy and that’s probably why I.
Changed so many times as well because I was just getting deeply frustrated and I was like why am I getting frustrated but I just didn’t spend enough time on knowing myself knowing the creative side of myself knowing what problems I’m drawn to and now I’m more free and open about it I’m very honest.
About it because I don’t want to you know keep switching for example I want to just solve a problem that I’m deeply passionate about and that I love doing day in Day Out no I think that’s so important and it’s great to see it like you go on that journey and you know.
The self-development journey that you’ve been on and learning more about yourself the self-awareness I think completely agree I think it’s almost like we’re all sort of somewhere you know trying to chasing something and so I think um it’s yeah cool that you can now look back and see how far you’ve come I think.
I think you’re doing some really amazing stuff so um yeah really really unfortunately we’re able to hear your wisdom so thank you so much for sharing that with us um we might wrap it up there so I want to ask before we head off where can people go to find more about you and.
Connect with you after this after listening is there anywhere that you’d like to send people yeah look I’m on Twitter I’m on Instagram but that’s more like my travel photos and food photos from LinkedIn yeah so do connect with me on LinkedIn always happy to connect with people a lot of startup meets I’m deeply.
Passionate about the community and investing so if you want to get any I don’t know career advice I don’t know why you want to come to me or any of my sort of mistakes or War Stories I’m happy to share those and yeah like that’s the best place to catch me amazing well yeah thanks so much again.
For coming on the show now it’s been super like really really interesting and insightful to hear your thoughts and your journey so thank you so much for sharing it with us and yeah we’ll uh catch you around great thanks James for the insightful questions I feel like baby Yoda foreign thanks for listening to this episode I.
Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did if you want to get my takeaways the things that I learned from this episode please go to graduatetheory.com subscribe where you can get my takeaways and all the information about each episode straight to your inbox thanks so much for listening again today and we’re.
Looking forward to seeing you next week.