Harpaul Sambhi - Founder & CEO of Magical | Trials and Tribulations of Serial Entrepreneurship

Welcome to success story the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host Scotty Cleary the success story Podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network as well as the blue wire podcast network now the HubSpot podcast network has incredible shows like the martyck Podcast hosted by Benjamin Shapiro the martyck podcast is all about maximum value in 30 minutes or less the martyck podcast shares stories from world class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success all in your lunch break if you like any of these topics you're going to love the martyck podcast some of the topics are zeroing in on the ideal product price point identifying loyalty plays for smart marketers finding the line between sales and marketing and SaaS extending the lifetime value of your customer if these are topics that are interesting to you go check out the martyck podcast hosted by bench Shapiro wherever you get your podcast today my guest is Harpal zombie he is the founder and CEO of magical he's a serial entrepreneur he's also an angel investor he bootstrapped his first business career fight serving over 250,000 users globally such as Microsoft Deloitte Unilever Blizzard Activision and space X before selling to LinkedIn this is his second go around with magical he just raised one of the largest series a rounds of investment coming out of San Francisco ever so an incredibly successful entrepreneur we went into several topics and the way we started this episode was things that he did in his first startup at career fire and then things that he would do differently with magical so a lot of great lessons learned this is focusing on the human side of entrepreneurship both internally in the company and who you look for to help you grow as an entrepreneur or founder so let's jump right into this this is Harpal zombie he is the founder CEO of magical awesome well my story comes from Toronto Canada I'm a son of immigrants and at the very early age I learned how to hustle because not a lot of things came to me because my parents were trying to provide food on the table so I didn't have allowances it didn't have some of the things that my friends had at school so as a result I had a result to entrepreneurship entrepreneurship very quickly example I read labeled fruit loops and lucky charms to Harpal loops and like Harpal charms and I sold them to my neighbors to a forward have a bubble gum and you know that that kind of mindset of just like being able to kind of like figure out how to sell something repackage things burn CDs make more money kind of came to you know to ingrained in my kind of overall job descriptions and when I thought about like applying to jobs it just didn't resonate because you know they want you they want people to be in a box rolls responsibilities and I was like I can provide a lot more so entrepreneurship came to me naturally in university in college I started my first company that was a software business called career 5 career 5 was really focused on empowering every employee to become a recruiter because the fact is Scott has really great relationships but he may not know all the jobs that are at a company he may not know all the people that he is a master in his respective career so how do you kind of connect the people to jobs and and really empower the employee to become a recruiter so we really kind of focused on connecting the social graph the LinkedIn's the Facebook's the Twitter's of Scott the employee and then come back to Scott and say hey Harpal we think Harpal could be a good job fit for this job what do you think and you know the the the the idea originated from my dad because you know he again he's he's an immigrant he worked at a manufacturing company you know that company in 2009 was servicing GM Chrysler Ford obviously we know what happened in those stories where there's massive unemployment in Laos and he was fortunate to have a job though he took a 60% pick up but what he's really saddened was the fact that his friends weren't able to provide food on the table anymore because they don't have a paycheck so you know for me I really like this building businesses where it ultimately helps people do the things that they love versus just pleasure like I help I love helping pain of people either can't finding a job or they having mundane repetitive still crushing tasks or things where they can ultimately improve their lives and that's kind of you know where my my my passion kind of comes from so nonetheless Currify was completely bootstrapped from start to finish which is kind of rare nowadays I feel in a software age and you know fish four years went from zero users to one user potentially thankfully I was living with my parents so I didn't you know my salary was one dollar and I didn't necessarily have to do a lot but and I didn't burn a lot but at the same time we were struggling you know crossing the chasm as we call it and the last 18 months we went from zero to two hundred fifty thousand users we had several million in revenue seven figure contracts with Deloitte SpaceX Groupon Microsoft Unilever ended up selling it to LinkedIn in 2015 and then join my product join the product team at LinkedIn from there I really want to just give back to the community so I made it a life mission to help any entrepreneur who called emails me help any student and help the elderly that's kind of like my life mission now and spend time investing in startups you know and at the same time thinking about my next play which was really kind of what do we do with this this platform of the internet where people are connected to so many different apps and they have to do these data symbols like how many tabs you have Scott open right now by the way well too many so I'm at one two three four five six seven eight I'm at eight and I close some so that while we're recording my CPU doesn't get too high and I don't have any like break break in the connection or whatnot so like eight is like the minimum basically and I think that's the life that we live in right yeah so we we are context-situring all the time in order to write an email worth referencing or CRM maybe it's LinkedIn maybe it's a a system or record to kind of solve a problem and we kind of data civil back and forth back and forth back and forth to source to data entry to fill something in or even send a message and that is essentially magical which is my latest company which is to automate soul-crushing mundane tasks so you can do the stuff that you love so you know in a nutshell entrepreneur love to help people and that's kind of like my overall story I love it and and the the the story arc or the thesis for why you do things it makes a lot of sense and I know that now now that helps me sort of put the pieces together as to why you choose to start certain businesses right I actually never knew the story behind a career fine why you wanted to to build out like an alternative it seemed like just like like a like a professional networking platform but it was actually to leverage like human capital and social capital to help people like in your network place them find them jobs help them improve their lives same with like magical that's what you're doing now so as we as you know as you go through your entrepreneurial journey I think would be interesting to walk through some of the things that you've done previously when you built your first company and in some of the lessons that you've learned and then some of the things that you're doing now maybe a little bit differently and I also want like you can you know speak to the success that you've had in terms of maybe the velocity of the success that you've had in the second venture versus the first venture coming from experience was it easier did it move quicker or is every time you start something as an entrepreneur is it just as difficult as the first time you did it yeah I think entrepreneurship is difficult no matter what age how much experience you have no matter what I think the gray hairs a lack of hairs in my case starts to speak volumes of like some of the experiences of what not to do and there's key lessons that you ultimately learn I did a retrospect actually the day after I sold my business took it linked in the first time around and I realized that six-year journey could have been shrunken into two two and a half years at most from what I learned during those six years at year six to ultimately be able to kind of do the same outcome maybe it would have been not so old to LinkedIn but would have had the same amount of revenue would have had the same amount of traction and I think that's just what experience gives you right it's the it's the gray hairs and it gives you what not I I was really naive when I started my business and I didn't know what to do um and I think I think I think I could chalk it up to probably ten key kind of like highlights that I changed from my first business career to my second business magical so first and foremost like I'm a big I'm a big fan of hiring and thinking about DI you know diversity inclusion and it really the way that I think about it is not necessarily to have like an artificial number because I think a lot of companies like slap something on and they're like hey we need to have a specific ratio of gender of of you know ethnicity and so on I really think about it from like a thought diversity perspective and ultimately like who are you serving so at magical we serve the billions of people that use the internet and as a result you have to look at the composition and start to say well how do we kind of really reflect and act and start to articulate some of the needs and wants of our users so for us as an example we have an intro metric where we're shooting for 52% of our work composition to be female and it's not necessarily to again create a number but it's just from our perspective we say the ratios of the world there's there's more female than male we have we have we have that in equal representation when we look at our user base no matter what and we should start to represent that because the more that we start to represent that and have a lot of different walks of lives the better we can start to have some of the finer things and that an individual user wants whether it is from a different country or maybe if it's a different age as an example as well so that's something that you know we just didn't have a full touch on an appreciation on when we built our first company and hiring is exceptionally explicit here where we're really trying to ensure that we're talking to not only you know different age groups in different ethnicities but different diversity like thought perspective like I want the best farmer to work at magical because the best farmer can teach us things that hopefully we can incorporate from a different industry I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now the new year might have you thinking ahead to what you want out of your career so when you think about your success story what do you actually picture is it retiring early with a beautiful view of the skyline is it leaving a legacy with your name on it or maybe it's helping influence and change some of the world's most pressing issues whatever it is writing your success story starts by working smart because when you work smart your success story writes itself a HubSpot CRM platform helps your marketing campaigns work harder and smarter with intuitive visual workflows and bot builders you can create scalable automated campaigns across email social media web and chat so your customers hear your messages loud and clear are you tired of your content not adapting to mobile making it difficult for your customers to absorb your message a HubSpot CRM platform optimizes your content for multiple devices so that you can reach your customers wherever they are which is just smart learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with a HubSpot CRM at HubSpot.com one thing that I was curious about was how do you build a hiring process that supports that so it's so simple it's so so simple to fall into the trap of and this is not a good thing but this is what happens when people you know the incorrect interpretation of culture and a business is you're just hiring people that are similar to what you already have which is yeah in my opinion and what you just described incorrect so how do you make sure that you build this into an actual process so that an entrepreneur starting out can get this right from the from the Gecko because a nervous entrepreneur that's just starting out probably would feel more comfortable hiring somebody that's very similar to them it probably would feel like safe right so how do you not yeah how do you go against that I think there's a couple of things to to ultimately anchor an entrepreneur on number one like be intentional about company values I think ultimately my first business I went to kind of websites went to Google went to like other companies and they said hey let me go ahead and just steal their values and then you write it on a wall and that's it and really quickly I realized that not a lot of people even knew what our value I didn't know what my values were either so being very intentional the values of what you want to become I think really starts to help in the sales process overall I think then you create that intentionalism and you start to go into interviewing and saying okay like we have we know who we are we come from this ilk we have these people on our network but at the same time as well where do we want to ultimately help diversify and be explicit and intentional about it so as an example we said hey we want to start to tap into the LGBTQ community we don't really have much in our networks so let's go out there and find it and be explicit and start to go into this communities and that's something that you have to be more proactive on instead of taking the reactive measures and I think it's lost one of the things that people they they they just don't necessarily an entrepreneur's just don't kind of like come back to and this is like one that I really had a huge guard up but now I'm totally forest is asking for help right and asking for favors so just being able to Scott like I don't have a network here do you have a network here and being intentional about the explicit helps that you need can you really start to open up the kind of like the conversations and speed up the ability to get you into those networks to then become more intentional about your hiring so these are kind of a lift after you figure after you make that connection is less of a lift after you do it the first time after you ask for help the first time then it's all of a sudden something that's more easily accessible to you too exactly yeah and I think those are those are like the key areas of how to become a lot more intentional when it comes to kind of like the hiring process start first start by you know diversifying your pool being more explicit there getting into avenues and channels that you're not comfortable with and being okay with and then ensuring that your interviews have well diversity or representation of the diversity that you're in for okay so that that covers like so now that's hiring and then as you're interviewing you're seeking out these candidates I'm so hiring and interviewing kind of like go hand in hand when you're trying to improve improve this aspect of your business what about what about the transparency when it comes to both what you're looking for in a candidate as well as what the candidate is exposed to in your business yeah I you know in my first business I was hidden I was hiding everything and it's not intentional but I you know you just learn that less is more I guess like that's like the attitude people sometimes say and as a result like you know my I would say my employees sometimes were in the dark of like we're refund raising we're not what happens to this big account that you were talking about that just didn't happen and I realized there that if you have radical candidness in your company and this is what we're doing in now magical where we we have our investor updates are open our financials are open to every employee to scrutinize or ask questions of why we're making these investments our decision making process is open it allows people to a understand your side and be at allow them to ask the right questions for themselves because I think a lot of the miscommunication and challenges in in company building comes from and stems from assumptions and if you don't know the key facts then assumptions start to create and then you go to other employees that might have other assumptions now if you level the playing field I'm just creating all the facts within your company then we're all basing it off the same facts and that creates the ability to have a very binary discussion to be able to say hey these are the facts this is how we're thinking about it what is your thought and now you agree to disagree versus not and I think my first time around like I said in in in career by my first business we just didn't have a lot of entrepreneurs that I spoke to I was like do you provide you know financial updates or like no we don't want to show the fact that we have six months of runway now those are sometimes situations where you as an entrepreneur have to ask yourself like what is this information going to do to an employee like it could be potentially an alarming figure but at the same time it's reality and why not give if you give people the data if you give radical candidness you start to create a foundation of trust and a foundation of trust is where you can work off of versus you know providing an alternate universe if that makes sense specific data points or conversely trying to lead them on hoping for a prior to win like a new key kind to kind of increase your runway and it never happens right so I that is something that we definitely learned a lot of and I think you're spot on in terms of building out that transparency and ultimately within the actual company itself how do you deal with deal with is probably the wrong word how do you manage all of the opinions that we're going to come at you now when you do have that radical candor because now everybody is going to have an opinion about what you should do and how you should do it and it may be difficult for people to to understand that you're not accepting their opinion or perhaps you like if they're coming from a place where they think they know what what's best but potentially you disagree with them as a founder an entrepreneur how do you manage that because there's a ton of noise the second you open everything up yeah it for me it specifically it's about instilling trust and ownership and we can always agree to disagree you know I think the the big thing that I've learned over 12 years so far is people want to be heard and if you can't give them the voice then you're you're already facing that battle of of of mistrust and not understanding the entire interpretation and the decision making process once you provide them this data points or not provide them the data points so you often have surprises where people just resign and you're like where did this come from right so I think it's important for any entrepreneur to say this room that we're building with you as employees is it's a room of trust it is something where we're not gonna always agree by but at the same time if you take the adaptation of learning listening and then pausing to reflect and say I agree or disagree that is actually like 90% of the the battle people want to be heard right so that is the way that I like to construct it and the the delta between my first business and second business is night and day people make informed decisions people will say Harpal I disagree with your thought here but let's move forward because ultimately a lot of decisions when you when you come down to kind of like what is this decision it's not gonna break or make the company now if it's a decision to where you're gonna make or break the company I you're gonna sell the business you're gonna go for a fundraise you're gonna go bankrupt you're taking on a key count that trash transcends the overall business then I do think you need to kind of move slow and think long and hard about it and welcome those opinions to ensure that you have it but most of these ideas most of these decisions there's always two doors and if there's if the door kind of lie to you to come back you can always kind of say hey you're right let's go now build this and you now have a bedrock of information that you can now quickly speed up in order to kind of sell for the the solution again versus not going at it all so that's how I think about it and as a result like I said like it's it's really elevated our ability to have a better employee experience in the company that's smart I like that okay so you're hiring talent speak to me about investing in talent so do you try and bootstrap do you try and find the cheapest option and train them up do you look for certain maybe soft skills as opposed to X experience with a certain hard skill or in a certain position how do you go about that I think there's always a trade-off depending on your financial situation my first business I was bootstrapped you know I penny-pinched I come I come from immigrants right so we really try stretch the dollar there and you know I think what we ended up happening is we really hired for like that can-do attitude the hustle mentality instead of experience and while that is great the challenges and I think the key what I've learned from the best in the business in the tech space at least is you want to scale yourself as an individual in order to scale yourself as an individual you need to create ownership and there are moments and times where inexperienced hustle is exceptional for the job but you have to then delineate of you have to in that in this scenario is when you want to invest in that that your time and energy is going to be there to up level and train them which is always part of the job and then there's going to be positions out there where you really need to get the top talent in so what I like to do is I look at the job position or the roles or responsibilities and say if this is going to really transcend the company or hinder the company do we want to make a bet on someone that's going to be rock have a whole bunch of hustle or hire someone that has top talent and I found that my decision-making process to act horrified given that we're bootstrapped I would often kind of curb to inexperienced and well I might have had the money but it's if you know I might have shaved off another month of runway or you know it would have been tight and wouldn't but you know I wouldn't be able to hire three people I would be able to hire two like if you start to have those conversations in your head we're trying to umming and awing about the the quality of a quantity aspect go after quality hands down especially if the job title and the job position is something that is very very pivotal for the organization itself and and I think that yes no go for it no I was going to say so so horrify you did you did bootstrap because I just want to highlight that the difference so horrify you did bootstrap and you were going for cheaper hustle and then with magical you are hiring you're trying to push your your budget for the talent that you're bringing in so that you aren't as a as a CEO or as a founder as an entrepreneur spending your time trying to upscale these people you're trying to get people that are walking in that do have the experience especially in those executive or or like key integral roles right that's what you're doing right now okay yes we're paying above then what public companies will pay simply because we want it to be a place where people can get ownership and you don't have to think as an entrepreneur for that line of business now there's always going to be problems right but you're creating an instilling trust in that person to get the right to get the job done and hopefully his or her respective career and experience can can be something that you can lean on while making decisions while they're making decisions as well it seems like that's an entrepreneurial maturity thing that you're able to hire somebody and trust them because I know a lot of very successful entrepreneurs that have the biggest issue trusting the highest salaries on their team even though that's why they're hiring them I'm curious if you have maybe advice for somebody that's in this position they want to hire talent and they're self-aware enough to know that they sometimes step into like a sort of like a micromanaging mindset what's that what what's the trust factor like what how do you how do you how did you allow yourself to let go of employees what was the test that you did internally in your head that was like this person is actually doing quite well and I keep screwing stuff up every time I step in and and try and oversee what they're doing is there something that you did to yourself that allowed you to remove yourself from that kind of mentality yeah I think the big thing was just self-awareness of what I'm really great at and what I'm not great at at all and there's a lot of things that I'm not great at in fact I'm really poor at doing and I think though we might have some understanding of the overall business you need to start to and you might have like the best feel for the end user for your end customer because as a founder or founding team member you're like I just know this person really well and I know the problem really well we we we not we may not know the solution so I would say like the stark difference again in career fund my first business I wanted to own it all because that was what you see right I wanted to be part of the all the decision-making process I wanted to be in part of it but that slowed the company down to a halt where if Harpal wasn't there he was on vacation he didn't pick up the phone there was nothing happening in the business so what one has to do is to say okay there's two things one is like what's best for the business and that's the first question that I asked myself is what's best for the business is it for Harpal to do this or is it for someone else to do this especially given that they might have a better pedigree better experience a better intimate understanding of a specific part of the business itself and then second it's really thinking about the overall of letting go and if you can let go of the things that you're not great at with people and entrust them immediately and not even thinking about like I think there's an important factor of like trust over time and trust in day one if you give people trust in day one they have faith that they can run with it and there's going to be mistakes sure but at the end of the day what you really want to drive for is that overall trust and integrity that you have and your empowerment of this person that they got this and and then what that ends up doing is if you hire people that are 10x better than you or better than you in every facet including the the things that you're great at it allows you now to do the things that are more strategic maybe you can take a step away from the day to day and start to think long-term maybe it's to say okay they got this part of the business let me now focus on another part of the business that we haven't really opened up yet and I think that's the key thing is the ability to kind of like really allow you to extend yourself to areas where the what what matters to the business so those are kind of like the key thoughts of how I was able to kind of like move my weight myself away from owning everything to now saying let go of everything and be able to focus on key strategic things and that's letting go that's trust and the last sort of I guess the last people are human component that you touched on before that I thought was interesting you mentioned how important company values are and company values kind of transcend almost everything that we just spoke about now the follow-up question is say you are a founder and you have the company values that you you're really adamant about how do you hire for those how do you hire people that fall in line or believe in the same values that you have as a founder because ultimately I think that's that would that wouldn't make that person you can trust them and they can be excellent at their craft but if they don't fall in line with those same values that's going to be a huge issue as well yeah there's there's something very tactical that one can do which is I like to take half of our values that are key to magical and then take values that are not key to magical and present them to a candidate and then ask them which are the top values speak well to you and when I'm trying to assess there is how well they are in line with our core values values that are really strong but not necessarily represent magical or magicians as we call it our employees today and that gives me a good telemetry very quickly but I think the the key thing here and I I love values I've spent a lot of time the last three weeks on rituals that we're starting to instill in our year and a half old company that and one of the things that I recognize is values of a founder might be very different for values of the early employees or values of the 50 employee number 50 or 100 or 300 or 500 and we've made this a yearly ritual where we reevaluate our values to see and represent who we are today as a company so value number one was built by me however value number two was built by a team of 10 where these founding employees now can become part of the fabric and say that this is what they contributed to and now they breed the breed it because that's really important for scaling is you want those people to embody and breed those things so then they can scale your culture to the next level from 10 to 100 and then so on so forth so those are the two tactical things that I do one is refreshing values to make sure that they represent all the employees today and have a very thoughtful discussion around them I often bring a facilitator or coach to kind of just really help codify that and anchor us and ground us on that number two on the tactical side on interviewing really thinking about the overall kind of employee candidate experience where we ask them like what is true to you as an individual and then we can make that assessment of they're going to be a good cultural photo not can you if you're comfortable with it can you walk me through like some of the some of the values that you've actually instilled that magical because I just think it's fascinating that you focus so much on them I think it would be a good lesson for people to understand what's important for somebody who is a you know serial entrepreneur building the second company and how you sort of build out this tiered value system as your company's grown yeah for sure so first and foremost our vision is to build a global workforce that's free and mundane of slow-crushing tasks that's number one and our vision is to deliver that's the first thing you told me on like on our first call together I remember that yeah exactly and our our overall mission is to deliver products and empower all internet users and create this magical moment be says a magician you know when you're watching a magician they pull a rabbit out of the hat or they they take the card and you're like no how do they do that that is what we really want to create ourselves so we really embody the cultural elements into the company brand when it comes to magical and how we kind of think about our overall values so that's our vision and mission is we set those up and we codify that and the then kind of kind of come down to kind of like the values overall and we have six values so number one is make make magical moments so gain kind of you can play experiment you can create these magical moments for both your employees or magicians as we call it and also for your end users number two create grit without compromise so have the confidence to hustle and spark change but at the same time keep the quality in mind because you're scaling a product right and we went from March to zero users we're now over 300,000 users we have over 25,000 companies using our products and you know you have to think about scale and you have to think about quality number three is practicing thoughtfulness it's really about measuring twice cutting ones and understanding that every decision has an impact to your colleagues to your customers to your users to your stakeholders so just think about it twice number four five and six are really thinking about like who we are as individuals number four is really thinking about everyone belongs and the key word that we have here is being psychologically safe in a company so we realize in software anyone can build anything it's pretty easy to do now so what is our real superpower and it's really our differences as individuals so we really want to make a place where everyone has a voice there's a psychological safe and our differences are truly our greatest superpower number five is really about practicing radical candidness or candor uh being open transparent constructive with everyone that you're speaking and working with and having that voice then the last but not least is hiring for a 10x human which is a key distinction Scott between hiring a 10x talent because you can be a 10x talent but be an asshole and what we want to do is we want to hire we want to hire 10x humans that practice compassion kindness and and that is like the key distinction there so those are kind of like the values that we bring forth at magical now some of the some of the points uh so that was sort of on the on the human side of of the business and then some of the points that you highlight are important for entrepreneurship I want I also want your opinion on these because I think I think your opinion on why some of these are important is interesting because I noticed that there's a list of some of some uh some things that you've put together that you want to do differently or whether you do do differently now with magical but none of the items that you listed are are like they're business they're business items but they're not what I would assume somebody would put in a list of 10 things I do differently for example I would assume somebody would speak about investment or how to scale faster or how to build a better product or all these different things that are actually not on this list so the last four are are learning asking for help being vulnerable and being human so you focus the first six on hiring the best people and and all the things that come with that then the last four almost seem like who you are as a person as and that's important to to entrepreneurship and none of the items in this list were focused on like business growth strategy so I just thought it was an interesting observation and maybe walk me through the last four and why they were important but also why did you choose this list of 10 versus something that I maybe incorrectly would assume would be something that would be a very tangible takeaway from your first business that you could have implemented in your second business yeah I think that the key here is how could this be ubiquitous to any type of business whether you're building a sushi restaurant you're you're building a winery you're building a startup in the tech space a real-state firm doesn't matter right and I think the application has to be universal and it has to transcend any boundary so to speak I think just generally having a growth mindset or you know learning continually is something that is embedded and in woven in a lot of the successful start of founders that I actually know they're constantly learning to seek to to learn continually in their craft of business and outside of the craft of business because they want to see if they can apply what they learn to from the best wineries to build in their tech startup or you know understand how a G2C company does it so then they can apply it for their real-state firm so I think learning is embedded no matter what number two I think the key thing that has helped me my first business was I was a sole founder and it's a tough journey man like I remember so many times where I just didn't know where to go to and people are afraid of just asking for help and I think the adage of if you don't ask the question it's always going to be no it's so true right so like being able to go out and and and showing that I need help which then stems to like the the second or last point in this this article that I kind of wrote which vulnerability right like people have their guard up they they you know who we often say how are you doing every the first word that you often hear is doing well you know when do we hear people say I'm not doing great and it's interesting because like when when I've actually done that people stop their agenda to lean in and when they lean in you got 100% of their attention and I think you know for me now I've I've said this to my current employee sometimes at magical I was just like yeah like I've had a mental stress point where I just needed to take a day or two off now if you're hearing that from the founder to be like COVID like did some shit to me like it's it's a reassuring that this person is human and I too can start to create this vulnerability and start to put our guards down and start to build that trust because trust is what makes or breaks a relationship and makes or breaks ultimately a company so I think it's exceptionally important to kind of just like have that vulnerability to not only the stakeholders whether it's employees but also to customers like we're human at the end of the day we want to help people and I think if if if it wasn't for vulnerability and for me lowering my guard eight days from going bankrupt at career fire I was eight days from going bankrupt by the way I wouldn't have signed that contract because she literally like you know God bless her she she you know she was an HR lady and she was kind of hanging out with like just saying yeah your product's great but maybe another time maybe another time maybe another time the classical like not now and I told her I called her up to say hey I made days from going to bankrupt I'm not looking for sale you're an HR person how do you transition people out so you give them a soft landing that was a conversation that I was trying to have with her and she's like hold on wow she said hold on and then literally a minute of pause I was just like not sure what's happening and she's like check her email this your your agreements now signed and I was flabbergasted because I was just like I am eight days from going to bankrupt and now you just funded me $30,000 to now give me a month's runaway to then became two three five months afterwards and you became profitable but why'd you do this I'm telling you that I'm going bankrupt and she was like because you're a human and before you were trying to sell a product a value proposition but you you have to realize you know especially as a starter person you're selling your vision you're selling yourself and if I can't deal with if I'm dealing with a robot I don't want to deal with you if you're a human and you want to like learn from me and I'm learning from you that's the type of relationship that I want and that moment really kind of codified to me to become vulnerable with people and to share more because that's how you build a bond with each other amazing amazing so now as like this is this is stuff that you have all of you've applied to you've applied to magical what would be a message or a takeaway that you would want somebody who wants to start their own thing what would be the one takeaway from entrepreneurship it's difficult it's hard there's these lessons that you've learned is it worth it for somebody to do their own thing or is this something that would you do it again if you had the chance we we often have you know it's a cliche but we have one life and the way that I look at decisions now is if if this decision or an idea or a thought process were at the the juncture of making a decision and saying left is equal to something and right is equal to something should I do or should I not if this decision is going to haunt me were in my last hour of my deathbed assuming I had one hour before I died if it comes to my my idea or my one hour left if it comes to me that I should have what I could have then just do it I think in today's world technology has made it so simple to craft your trade whether it's selling content building products providing value to an end user so if your dream is to to help people go do it I think that's like the the biggest thing and if it fails you have your own hustle MBA that you can learn from that someone will value ultimately in the business and and I guess the follow-up question to that so people are say people are highly motivated what does it take to be successful is it motivation is it what's the character trait that you see is the the main character trait that would drive an entrepreneur to be successful can somebody if they are motivated or passionate enough make anything work or do you have advice for what ideas you should actually try and execute against I think it's less about the idea I mean I think the idea comes secondary to kind of like what what is your purpose in trying to achieve something and because at the end of the day there's going to be days and nights where you just don't want to wake up or you don't want to even open an email and you're like oh they're like this this is a cringe worthy and you're going to have those roller coaster moments and the reality is there's going to be a motive that is not extrinsically driven not i.e. financially driven that will help you to push yourself in moments of hardship and those are the things that you really want to kind of like ground yourself into versus thinking about making a million dollars or a billion dollars or whatever that that financial output is I think that helps with kind of like in ultimately this it helps with the whole tire sales process selling to a customer selling to employee the moment you have like this this energy that's kind of going beyond just like the extrinsic motivations people gravitate that they they love that energy they they want to listen up peak up and be like this is what I want this is the leader that I want to go after because and this is the purpose that we want to go for and I think that is ultimately kind of like the key distinction versus the idea and I think the idea has to be extensive right like don't do something there I think that that's like the business fundamentals but I think that you can stem that from like research and whether people are going to pay for it they're going to love it and all that stuff but it's it's ultimately the the intrinsic motivation to get up every day the intrinsic motivation to to have that sparking energy to sell and to convince people to to take your product services or be employed whatever the causes that is ultimately kind of like the thing that one has to kind of seek in order to kind of make that decision for entrepreneurship awesome and this was really good this was like the this was like the human side of entrepreneurship because this is this is everything that I don't think people speak enough about and and candidly like when I have a lot of conversation with great people it's either like very tactical advice on how to build a business or alternatively there's a lot of negative sentiment towards the startup and hustle culture and you know misalignment between what a founder wants and what a VC wants so I appreciate this as well for a founder are there things that that they should be cognizant of or aware of so that they can maintain all the things that you mentioned if they're looking for external capital because that can heavily influence a lot of the items that you just mentioned external capital is probably the one the one item that could have the most negative impact on all those really good lessons learned because if you if you take money from a VC it does not believe in a lot of the things that you just mentioned I feel like that could be a really difficult relationship so how do you find the right person I think anyone who's gone through relationships knows this you know the easy and hard way personal relationships that is right it's it's that easy to to hang out it's provocative to think about long-term marriage and in partnership but it's exceptionally hard for the breakup yeah and one has to kind of think about that you know when we did our fundraising for magical we've done a couple fun raising we just raised one of the largest rounds into a convali history we chose investors that had the same vision and mission of what we had we stress tested it we said and this is a course over eight to ten months of just meeting with these people not even pitching them to be like what's your thought in the industry okay how do you think about the best entrepreneurs what do they do differently what are the values what are what are the things that that you have seen help and this is key learnings that we're learning from as well right like they're they they have 1500 companies that are thousands of companies that they've invested in and you're getting this key extraction but you're getting a better sense of like what makes them go and at the end of day we have to recognize that venture capitalists are trying to do their job which is trying to 10x their investments for their investors so one has to be mindful that if you're taking venture capital that revenue and evaluations are going to be the ones that they're going to be kind of indexing on however there's a human side of the business and it's best to work with people like if you have a feel where hey investor one is giving you better terms but investor two is more in sync with you take the investor to because dilution at the end of day is not going to like one percent dilution difference not going to be material at the end of the day if you're trying to make a meaningful outcome so I think that's kind of like the key thoughts that I often provide to entrepreneurs is is really think about the people you want to do business with because at the end of day they're all going to try to focus on making their capital 10x and that's just part of doing the business but the the reality is is you want to have you you want to pick up the phone and call them that is the key thing you don't want to pick up the phone or think about like you don't have one to have a negative feeling or cringe where the experience to be like I have to call Scott what is he going to say like you know you want to be like I guess call Scott because I have a problem and he's going to now share this problem with me and this is going to be awesome right that is the type of feeling that you want amazing okay I love it man okay I want to I want to do some rapid fire to pull out some some last like career insights from you some some professional insights but before before pivot where do people connect with you if they want to if they want to get magical if they want to test it out if they want to chat with you where do they go you hit the nail in the button if you want to get magical go to get magical like home and even mean that to be honest until I said it I'm like wait that's the domain yeah no it's it's a it's a good domain yeah yeah so if you want to like you know automate your slow-crushing mundane tasks check out get magical I get magical like home for me personally I am I am indebted to the world I'm indebted to and serving entrepreneurs students and the elderly all equal so hit me up on Twitter H. Sandby or LinkedIn I'm usually when you start typing in Harpal I'm like the first person that kind of comes up the key benefit perk of having a unique name but yeah hit me up either on LinkedIn or Twitter I'm more than happy to help you awesome okay a couple rapid fire let's let's jump let's jump jump into it okay so the biggest challenge in your professional or personal life what was it had you overcome it taking money for my parents as well only funding and having to tell an immigrant mother that didn't know anything about business that my five thousand dollars that I'm taking to pay people are it's going to be rewarding and worthwhile that's tough that's a lot of stress good for you good for you for for not for not messing it up that's a lot of stress okay if you had to choose one or multiple people that have had a huge impact on your life obviously there's been many but who was that person and what did they teach you young Wu from Toronto serial entrepreneur he told me the adage of never never fucking quit uh that really helped uh and my dad uh who continued to believe in me those are the two that come top of mind uh a book or podcast you'd recommend people will check out so I have some scots uh you know your your own uh podcast um you know I I love um play bigger is one rug category creation I just like really kind of expands that uh a second one more on the philosophical side the courage to be disliked I think is a really great book if you could tell your 20 year old self one thing what would it be just do it easy good and last last question what does success mean to you success means to me to ultimately my first business success was to help a million people get jobs we did that it's great this time around I want to help a billion people do the things that they love to do that's what success means to me