My 10-Year-Old Son is My Customer Success Associate | A Family Business Story

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. Today's guest is Raja, Misha. The founder and CEO of prezent.ai, the presentation productivity platform for enterprise teams, which recently closed a $4.3 million funding round.

Sean Weisbrot: He's also the executive producer of Think Deeply Speak Simply Podcast, which talks about the art and science of communicating ideas. He formally ran the $14 billion customer experience business unit of Cisco, which consisted of over 1000 team members. While the original goal of the conversation was to discuss business presentations.

Sean Weisbrot: We went deeper and discovered how his family is a huge part of his companies and his life, and the lessons they're learning from working together. You'll learn about why he started his company, how he includes his family and his work, how he gives back, what he has learned and where he is going next and more.

Sean Weisbrot: I was really inspired by his lifestyle and his journey because he grew up in India and learned it like a lot of Indians do, and came over to America for work. And he was able to build a life, build a career, build a family, and now to build companies. And I wish more people had this opportunity. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Rajat Mishra, a very humble and knowledgeable man.

Sean Weisbrot: Tell everyone a little bit about what it is you do and how you came to the idea that you need to start this company.

Rajat Mishra: I am an ex-corporate person, turned entrepreneur.

Rajat Mishra: Rright now I am the founder and CEO of Prezent.ai and I'm also the president of a presentation services firm called Prezentium. We help large enterprises with representation needs. And helping them save time and making their ideas shine. You have a question on how we got here? I've always wondered about being in corporate, I worked at McKinsey and Company for a while, Microsoft, before this, I was a senior exec at Cisco Systems.

Rajat Mishra: I've always wondered why there is no enterprise grade, productivity platform for presentations and communication. So every function in a company has an enterprise grade productivity platform like sales has Salesforce. Finance has, you know, financial force ticketing as ServiceNow, but companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of hours on presentations.

Rajat Mishra: Like 30 billion hours are spent every year by people making business presentations. but there is no enterprise grade platform. So that was the problem that was kind of vexing me from an efficiency perspective and from an effectiveness perspective, most people are not trained in the art and science of business communication.

Rajat Mishra: So a lot of improvement can happen, right? So I've been thinking about both these aspects. And, that journey eventually led us to founding the services business, Zenium and the software company. Also,

Sean Weisbrot: I want you to tell the story briefly about how you got to the first one and then it led you to the second one because you had told me that and I thought it was really cool.

Rajat Mishra: I was an executive in corporate America and my wife and I, we both worked at McKinsey and she was an executive in healthcare. So we were not 21 year olds out of Stanford looking for a business idea and nothing to lose.

Rajat Mishra: So we, you know, I remember this discussion on our kitchen table a little over five years ago. We said, look, it feels like there is an efficiency and effectiveness problem here. If you think 30 billion hours are being spent every year, multiply that with a hundred dollars an hour, fully loaded cost, you know, that's it.

Rajat Mishra: A multi-trillion dollar problem and at least half the time is getting wasted. Many friends have come to me and said, project, I have a great idea for a presentation, but I don't, just don't know how to say it. Right. So both anecdotally and from a data perspective, we knew this is a huge problem to solve, and no one was really doing it because most people in the space are designers.

Rajat Mishra: So we said, look, instead of kind of going all in, quitting both our corporate jobs, you know, we have. Two kids and a mortgage. So we said, you know, maybe we should be a little planned about it. And so we said, why doesn't, why don't one of us keep our job? And why doesn't one of us go and start a services business?

Rajat Mishra: and the goal of the business would be to learn more about the customer, learn if people would actually pay for business presentations. gain some insight because I've always believed that success comes from privileged insight. If you don't know something more. And someone else, you know, why would your business be successful?

Rajat Mishra: So that's what we did actually. So I continued at Cisco and I kind of grew the ranks from being a corporate vice president to a senior vice president there. Meanwhile, my wife deeply, she quit her job at Genentech, and she started a services business called Zeni which offers a very simple but powerful service that you send your presentations, unclean, dirty presentations, or draft presentations by 5:30 PM in the evening and next day, morning.

Rajat Mishra: You get polished presentations ready to use. And, she started that about five years ago, and over the last four years in kudos to her, she and her team grew that to supporting thousands of users and over 50 Fortune 500 companies. So we do thousands of slides every night. We have hundreds of people on the team.

Rajat Mishra: But the most important thing, Sean, was we learned a lot about the actual customer. What their pain points are, right? We learned a lot about making presentations, and we built over a million slides and 50,000 presentations, so we also learned about the metadata. I've always been thinking about what's the right time to join her and build the software offer, which would complement the services.

Rajat Mishra: But when COVID hit. I realized, okay, now this is the right time. People are more open to working remotely. You know, a number of presentations. Sean actually went up by 150% in COVID because more people were communicating remotely, and we also had the customer contact. We had thousands of customers we could just sell the software into because most startups struggle with who the customers should be, and we also had this metadata set and knowhow.

Rajat Mishra: We had a team. I was running a $14 billion business at Cisco, but my dream has always been. To build this company and help millions of people. So I quit my job. When we started off, we said we'll put the first million in to see if we can build a product that has some traction. And in March we released the alpha version of a software offer.

Rajat Mishra: And what was very heartening, Sean, was that, you know, customers loved it. They told their friends, started using it, and then people started asking me, Hey, how much do I pay for this? The idea wasn't to sell it as a paid product. So we said maybe this thing is working. And then, you know, this like, you know, machine learning engineers are not cheap, and designers.

Rajat Mishra: So we said maybe this is, we've got some customer validation. Maybe it's time to raise an external round, get some funding. And it's not just for the money, but also to work with people who can be thought partners and partner with us in this journey. Right? So very, very fortunate that we were oversubscribed by more than double for our round.

Rajat Mishra: We've got an amazing group of corporate executives. Founders of Unicorns and Decacorns and some VCs that I know who are my friends. So everyone in this round is a personal, you know, one or two degree connection. It's been amazing to get so many people interested in building this productivity platform for presentations.

Sean Weisbrot: That's what I noticed doing my seed round, was that I already knew those people or they were a friend of one of the people that invested.

Rajat Mishra: Yeah, exactly. I mean, because it's so early, they're kind of, in a sense, they're betting on you, right? Because they know the idea might pivot but it was a very, humbling and scary experience at the same time.

Rajat Mishra: So now there are so many people betting on this, we wanna make sure we do it right by them and, you know, do it right for all the people who've left their jobs and also join this company now.

Sean Weisbrot: So like you, I put my own money into my company until I raised from external investors. Now I've, before I did the raise, I was concerned that I would feel more stressed by having investor money in my hands, but what I felt afterwards was actually relief because I knew I didn't have to pay for the company anymore.

Sean Weisbrot: What was that like for you?

Rajat Mishra: I do feel a sense of responsibility for everyone, but what has always driven me is I wanna make sure that the idea reaches its full potential. It's a greater responsibility to remove any roadblocks which prohibit the idea to reach its full potential. And capital should not be one of those constraints.

Rajat Mishra: I think bootstrapping is fine, but on the margin I found myself. Of, you know, making decisions, which would've either slowed the company or limited reaching its full potential, which is a little bit easier to do when you have a little bit more capital, right? So now when I'm faced with a decision, I can say, look, if I go this path, I could save a few hundred thousand dollars, but I go this other path.

Rajat Mishra: This company can truly reach its potential of helping millions of people get better at business presentation and save time. I feel stronger now with the capital, and I feel I can really push the envelope. And, help the company realize this full potential.

Sean Weisbrot: So did any of these investors be like, okay, here's millions of dollars you need to spend this in 12 months, like, you need to spend this. Do they give you any of that kind of pressure? Because I hear that some VCs do that, but if they're like your first or second connections, I imagine that maybe they're a little bit nicer.

Rajat Mishra: Yeah. One of the discussions I've had, I was an owner myself, a general manager, right? Many people who are investors actually are people who've run businesses or build businesses themselves.

Rajat Mishra: And they understand that what we are trying to do here, we are trying to build an enduring business. And an enduring business is only built when the business model makes sense. And it takes time to figure out the business model. One of the phrases one of our investors uses is go slow to go fast.

Rajat Mishra: What we wanna do in the first six months, I think all of this year, is figure out we have the right product, the right go to market model, right? We have the right set of customers because not everyone is your customer and basically get the right product market fit. So I don't want us to scale or go.

Rajat Mishra: Exponential without product market fit and not just on the product side, on the go to market side, team side. And once we have those pieces in place, then we can always accelerate. But I did not get that pressure. In fact, since most people have run businesses, it's harder. I think if you work with someone who's more of a financial numbers person has never run a business before.

Rajat Mishra: I'll give you an example. In the last month and a half, I sent two kinds of short emails to my investors, right? One of them was how customers are growing and ARR is growing.

Rajat Mishra: People were happy. Then I sent them another email, which is one quote I heard from one of our customers saying that.

Rajat Mishra: This product has literally changed my life. I was spending so many hours on the presentation that I'm spending now. I'm spending 20% of that, and the response by the investors to the second coach, Sean, was a lot stronger than the first one about numbers. These are all business people, guys and gals, and they understand that if customers love your product, everything else is noise.

Rajat Mishra: So the most important thing is to get a hundred customers who you don't know, who love your product and tell their friends, because behind each of those a hundred people, you know, there are another thousand that you can go and mine. Right? So that's been my experience and I'm fully focused on making sure.

Rajat Mishra: Customers love it. So, I don't wanna scale it too fast till customer success is ready. I don't wanna scale it too fast till you know the product analytics is ready. Once those things are in place, you know, there's infinite scaling as possible, right? Because the market for this is trillions of dollars.

Sean Weisbrot: I mean, that's been a concern of mine is if we get too much money too fast, or the people we partner with may not understand what we're doing, it may push us. In a direction that I'm concerned about or may push us to go too fast. I've been going slow as well, and that's why I spent the first few years kind of just funding it myself because I wanted to make sure that we had that freedom.

Sean Weisbrot: And we're also trying to work really hard on establishing our high level processes across all of the departments and then creating like a data pipeline so that things flow and there's no silos ever anywhere. And so my COO is amazing with all of this stuff. Like I could never even begin to think about how to do any of this.

Rajat Mishra: I, I'm in the camp, get the foundation right. I've known many friends who've scaled businesses to, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars only to fall back down very quickly because the business model does not sound right. So I'm focused on making sure the business model is sound and the product market fit is strong.

Sean Weisbrot: So you mean you don't believe in injecting billions of dollars into research and development and marketing with no idea of whether it's gonna work or not?

Rajat Mishra: I mean, call me old school, right? Because, because I was a general manager in a large company, I took a look at. Are we spending things on the right thing, starting small and then tweaking things if they work right. Recently we gained even more insight into who the initial customer might be, and then now we are dialing that up. That's what a startup is ready for, or a bunch of hypotheses to be proven or disproven. So as we prove or disprove hypothesis, we know a little bit more and then we can scale it up or down.

Sean Weisbrot: Is anything in your tech related to the actual psychology of it? Like how, how, what makes your platform unique? I'm sorry. I, I have like this investor hat on at the moment just thinking about it. I mean, I'm not gonna invest, but,

Rajat Mishra: The way I like to describe it is you need to codify empathy, right? Because the heart of being a great communicator is to empathize with who you're speaking with. And then tailor your communications to them if you have to. If the goal is to codify empathy, you need to understand how people are different. First, understand who you're presenting to, then understand how they are different.

Rajat Mishra: And then as a communicator, take that into account to create a great presentation. So that's what we are trying to do. We are trying to crack the code on codifying empathy, understanding how everyone is different, and then using the rich data set that we have. We have the metadata for over a million slides, not the actual content, but the metadata of who presented to whom and things like that.

Rajat Mishra: So using that, come up with, based on who you're communicating to, you have a certain set of personality traits and the person you're presenting to has a certain set of personality traits. Maybe it's not one person, maybe it's a group. And then also the kind of presentation you're doing. You know, if you're talking about growth, it's different than if you're doing a monthly update, right?

Rajat Mishra: So all that context is pregnant with empathy, right? So how do you codify that, understand that, and then translate that into rules and, technology and machine learning recommendations so people become more effective. So that's what we're trying to do. We do have an element of beautiful design. We do have a learning component.

Rajat Mishra: We. Folks like Guy Kawasaki who talks about how to make things simple. You know, you mentioned body language. We do have high stakes professional poker player who talks about how you read an audience, just like you would read a poker table. And so there is a learning component for our communicators, how they can get better at communicating, delivering, understanding cues.

Rajat Mishra: but really the heart of it is codifying empathy and then helping people save time.

Sean Weisbrot: It sounds like a complicated system, but I think that can be good for you in terms of defensibility. Some company founders wanna keep their raises private and others wanna make them public. The reasons why they might wanna make it public is to make it easier to hire people, to attract more potential investment or free pr, et cetera, et cetera.

Sean Weisbrot: The reasons why they might wanna hide it is to prevent competitors from knowing they exist or to copy their ideas or go, oh wow, they just raised 10 million. Like, yeah, I'm gonna go build this and raise 5 million and try to beat them on price or whatever. I heard about your raise, so obviously you went the public route, but how did you actually feel about that being publicized?

Rajat Mishra: It was a deliberate decision and it's for the reason you said it's for hiring. As we scale and as we need more people, I think you need that story and need that pr. I understand it from the point of view of a machine learning engineer or a designer. They read things in the media and it gives them more confidence that yes, this company's gonna be around.

Sean Weisbrot: Did you have any other companies that were larger than you, come to you about partnership or acquisition or anything as a result of the promotion?

Rajat Mishra: I cannot divulge any names, but we've had people who've come to us to learn more, you know, have exploratory conversations. It's too early to think of that.

Rajat Mishra: If we are, we're in the entry stage, right? We are starting.

Sean Weisbrot: There's a long way to go. Is that AI capable of recognizing something is beautiful or not, or making a recommendation about beauty? I'm a computer engineer. So what

Rajat Mishra: We've codified what we think good design should look like. We've broken that down into 60 plus traits.

Rajat Mishra: Things like what makes a presentation kind of a good design or beautiful, and then start learning. Based on what people are using and what people are liking, that's the engine. And again, I don't know if we are gonna crack the problem fully, right? But that's the, that's the path we are on.

Sean Weisbrot: What is your definition of a good design on an individual slide basis?

Rajat Mishra: What we always say is the audience is the hero. You cannot take a slide and say, this is a great slide, this is a bad slide, without knowing who is it being presented to and what is it being presented for. So that's what I mean by you need empathy and design going side by side. So maybe someone creates a beautiful visual and presents it to me, but I won't like it because I hate, I hate images.

Rajat Mishra: I like clean lines and less, less on the slide. But there might be someone who would love that. That's the hard part, right? Not just creating multiple types of designs, but then also saying what will work for whom. And also it depends on the company context. Having spent so much time in corporate, there's a concept of.

Rajat Mishra: Tribal knowledge or company culture, right? So how do you bring that into the tech also, right? So it's not just design. Not just the empathy, but it's the company, right? It's the person listening to it. And every function is different, right? What finance finds beautiful marketing may not find beautiful, right?

Rajat Mishra: Or what finance finds appealing, marketing may not. Those are the dimensions of the problem that need to be taught through.

Sean Weisbrot: Did you build your deck using your own software?

Rajat Mishra: Yes, of course.

Sean Weisbrot: And how long did it take for you to close the 4.3 million?

Rajat Mishra: It took us a month. I mean, the legal paperwork and all the terms and all that stuff took a little bit longer, but, and like I said, you know, most of these people are people I've known for years.

Rajat Mishra: Right. They were also wondering, you know, why would someone leave a senior executive role in a large company? You know, I was fortunate to be one of the top. 30 people in Cisco, which is a company of 70,000 people, leave to pursue this. And people who've known me for a while know that I have a lot of passion for communication and democratizing communication.

Rajat Mishra: So this has been, at some level, Sean, I feel this is my life's purpose and I'm gonna spend the next 10 years either failing miserably. Or, or coming up with a solution that can help millions of people.

Sean Weisbrot: I feel like you'll fail miserably along the way to discovering. I feel like we have to fail, like I probably fail multiple times a week in what I'm doing, just like opening my mouth to say something to my, to my CTO, and then my CO is like, oh, why did you say that?

Sean Weisbrot: Don't, don't say that next time. If you wanna say that, ask me first. Like, yeah. You know, I think every day is an opportunity to fail. I think, you know, there's a great speech, right?

Rajat Mishra: I think Roosevelt's speech about man in the arena, right, where he said that, it's not the critical counts, but it's the person who is in the arena.

Rajat Mishra: I'm paraphrasing, but he said it's some things, a word doing, even if you fail and. If you succeed, you succeed greatly. But if you fail, at least you failed with daring greatly. Right? And Brene Brown took that to make her a book also. Right? But daring Greatly. So in a sense, I feel that's what we're trying to do as a team, not just me.

Rajat Mishra: The many people with us, are daring greatly and trying to solve a problem, which may or may not be fully solvable. But so far the data points seem like we are moving forward.

Sean Weisbrot: Theodore Roosevelt says, nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain. Difficulty, no kind of life is worth leading if it's always an easy life.

Sean Weisbrot: I know that your life is hard. I know that your work is hard and hardest of all. For those of you who have the highest trained consciences and who therefore feel always how much you ought to do. I know your work is hard, and that is why I congratulate you with all my heart. I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life.

Sean Weisbrot: I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.

Rajat Mishra: Well said Sean. One of my favorite books, Sean, is the Hero With A Thousand Faces. There's a code in that book that says that if you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, it is not your path. Your path is the one you make with every step you take.

Rajat Mishra: That is why it is your path.

Sean Weisbrot: So the Hero with a Thousand Faces was first published in 1949 by Joseph Campbell and George Lucas acknowledged him and he said that it was a huge influence on the Star Wars films.

Rajat Mishra: What Joseph Campbell says is, most stories follow the same arc. The arc of a hero with a thousand faces starts with someone who has a calling and you can take like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars Karate Kid, take any, any kind of movie or even people's lives, right?

Rajat Mishra: you have a calling, you kind of follow the calling, and along the way you find a mentor and then things go bad. You go into the abyss. And you find someone that helps you and then you come back with something of value. It's a great book because it's like a meta book. Most books follow that, that journey.

Rajat Mishra: And that's what he talks about, right, is people say they're trying to find the meaning of life, but what they're actually trying to find is the experience of being alive. I mean, I don't know you that well, but Felix, like it's what we're trying to do, right? It's the experience of being alive when you feel more alive.

Rajat Mishra: And, you know, solving this problem in a way that the collaboration problem, you're solving for teams in a way that has not been solved. And you want that experience and so do I. Right. For me, that comes from building a company with people I love working with, and then eventually solving a problem at scale.

Rajat Mishra: And all the, you know, happiness and sadness and ups and downs that come with a journey, that's all part of that experience of being alive. That's what I want.

Sean Weisbrot: I think entrepreneurship is. It's crazy. The whole thing is nuts. Anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur has to have some level of craziness in their personality in order to be successful at managing all of those ups and downs.

Rajat Mishra: No, you're right. I mean, I mean, George Behar said this a long time ago, right? All progress belongs to the unreasonable man, and I did. There are all unreasonable men and women now, right? Because if you're reasonable, you'll play along with how things exist. So you have to be unreasonable to a certain extent to say, you know, things need to be done differently.

Rajat Mishra: I know who said this, but you know, since I've been an entrepreneur, you know, I've been sleeping like a baby, right? I get up every two hours and cry. It's part of the journey. But the satisfaction also is amazing, right? Having built something every day, I get to see hundreds of people who are logged into the product and are using it and how their time is being saved, right?

Rajat Mishra: And you can see the potential of how that can scale. So, yeah, so I think, you know, and, and you are, you are living through that. And so why, and. I've chosen that life and I would, there's nothing else I would rather be doing than building this company with a set of people that I'm,

Sean Weisbrot: I would rather wake up every two hours and cry than work full time for somebody else.

Rajat Mishra: It's not that the other life is bad, right? It's a choice you wanna make, right? People have different aspirations, right? And that's a great path too.

Rajat Mishra: Going back to that empathy, I'm empathetic to everyone who enjoys a steady professional life and people who try to do something unreasonable with a high risk of failure.

Sean Weisbrot: For example, one of my friends called me before. We did the recording and she's like, okay, I'm driving down from Orlando. I'll see you in a few hours. Thank God it's Friday. And I was like, yeah, for you. I've gotta work tomorrow.

Rajat Mishra: You know, Sean, I mean, what I've been thinking about is, so, you know, I, I've got two kids.

Rajat Mishra: I think one needs to have some kind of, you know, I call it work life harmony, right? There needs to be some harmony between your life and your work. It's gonna be a 10 year journey building this, otherwise things will break down. Right? So even my 10-year-old son, and if you look up his LinkedIn profile, his LinkedIn profile, he built the profile.

Rajat Mishra: So one of my. Team member actually sent me a note once, looked at this LinkedIn profile and I opened it. It was my 9-year-old son back then. He's created a profile saying he is a customer success associate at Presion and his job is to make sure everyone has a great experience with the service and he's been reaching out to people, telling them about the service.

Rajat Mishra: So, it's kind of, you know, it's a little bit about integrating that into your life because this concept of, okay, you know, it's Friday now. The weekend is. I'm gonna do something that I wasn't doing during the week. I think that's not a scalable model, right? So my wife and I, I mean, we are doing it as a family business, right?

Rajat Mishra: With really high stakes. Now it's like a high stakes poker game, but I think we've integrated our kids into it. We are trying to find a way, I'll say, 'cause otherwise it's not sustainable, right? Because this is not something I want to do for six months, raise a bunch of money and sell the company to someone.

Rajat Mishra: I don't wanna do that. I wanna build an enduring business that'll help millions of people. And that's gonna take 10 years, right? Just to be realistic, right? Everything takes longer. Everything is a little bit more expensive. Then you think, right? So I want to find a way to be a dad and kind of be an entrepreneur.

Rajat Mishra: And I, and I think it's possible. I don't think it's a zero sum game. My daughter, she's six. You know, when she, when I say I have a meeting, you know what she asks me? She asked me, dad, is it a customer meeting or an internal meeting? So she knows that if it's an internal meeting, she can come in and ask what she wants to ask.

Rajat Mishra: But if it's a customer meeting, she knows, okay, you know, don't disturb that at this time. So it's like those little things. Everyone in the family knows we have two kids, but we also say, you know, the company's another child that we have and we are trying to raise all these children at the same, at the same time as good parents.

Rajat Mishra: So I know that makes sense, but that's kind of a philosophy we are trying to adopt. Otherwise, it leads to burnout. Otherwise, it leads to kind of hating what you're doing because then it's, then it's at the expense of something else. You know, Ray Dalio is one of my, people I look up to. You know, he runs Bridgewater, the largest hedge fund in the world.

Rajat Mishra: And in his book Principles, he says something very interesting. He says, when you are faced with two choices that seem to be at odds, and you want both of them, like in this case you want, you want a life, you also want to build your company. He said, when you think the two choices are odds, you gotta slow down.

Rajat Mishra: And he said there is always a path where you can get a lot of both. You just haven't figured it out yet. So that's what he talks about. Right. So I really don't think life is kind of either of our choices. I think, I think if you slow down, you can find a way to be determined. There, there is a way to get not all of both at the same time, but maybe you can kind of sequence things and, and get as much of both as possible.

Rajat Mishra: And again, I think it's a different stage, right. I've, I've been running a business for 20 years. I'm not 21. So the way I'm gonna approach building a company is gonna be different than someone who's 21, who has no kids, you know, who's, who's not married, who can do it in a different way. So, that's our approach.

Rajat Mishra: We've, we've taken, and maybe we can reconnect in a year or two. And I can tell you, Sean, how, you know, we can give ourselves a grade of how that approach went. But I would rather do it this way than build something unsustainable and not just. And one of the practices I have is that at the end of every month we actually do a monthly assessment of family health and business.

Rajat Mishra: How are things going on? All those three aspects. And the beautiful thing about having all three things going at the same time is even if there's trouble brewing in one, the other two give you balance. My son is running for student council elections today and last night we spent time on a speech. And you can imagine he has a very professional looking poster made for his thing.

Rajat Mishra: And that brings a little bit of joy. And, you know, I had to get up a little bit early today to meet a customer because I spent time with him yesterday, but, but that's fine. I would rather make those micro choices all day long. So I can run this business and be a dad to my kids too.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, it's a fantastic way that you're doing it. It's definitely interesting. When I was younger, my dad was a dentist. He had his own practice, so I would go to the office with him sometimes and I would talk to the patients and like, I didn't know what I was doing. I was young. But they liked me being around, I was this cute little energetic, blonde haired kid and you know, just like very positive and saying hi to everyone and all that.

Sean Weisbrot: And then I ended up working with him as I got older, like more in a professional capacity and all that. Do you remember that time? Yeah, absolutely. The definitely positive experiences. I'm curious, since your son is a customer success. I don't remember the title. Are you giving him a salary for this? Is he saving for college with it or?

Rajat Mishra: So for the family side? He does. He does get paid, you know, a very small amount. All that money goes directly into his Roth, IRA, and he has picked a Vanguard fund that he likes.

Rajat Mishra: And all his money every month goes into that fund. And you know, no Bitcoin, he's anti Bitcoin and you know, I have some percent in it just as a hedge against the dollar.

Rajat Mishra: You know, the other thing is, you know, like we talked about balance, right? The other thing that ET and I decided is, we give back. So we don't wanna wait till we are 60. So like for our Sian business, for every slide we make, we give a dollar to a children's charity. And like I'm on the leadership council of No Kid Hungry.

Rajat Mishra: I didn't know one in seven kids in the US actually are at the risk of hunger. And then we also are building a medical campus for, for Sonia Abe Foundation in Uganda, which helps kids with type one diabetes. And I'm also on the board of an orphanage in India. So we're trying to kind of create a life, Sean, that has, like I was saying, multiple bottom lines.

Rajat Mishra: So build a company, also try to give back, you know, be there with kids. And, this is also integrated with the business, right? Because even giving back, the people we work with, you know, they support us. They sometimes tell us what they're doing. We let our employees know we are doing this.

Rajat Mishra: It makes everyone feel good and gives more meaning. To kind of what we are doing right, and in the end, everyone's looking for meaning in their lives.

Sean Weisbrot: I would direct you to a charity called Pencils of Promise. They build schools around the world for villages and people that are really poor, so they put in 90% of the funds.

Sean Weisbrot: The other 10% comes from the government. The local government and the community has to actually supply the lumber, like they have to supply the raw materials and build it with their own hands. Oh, cool. So the government provides a local teacher and they work with them on the curriculum and all that, so they're not here's, you know, $20,000, go.

Sean Weisbrot: It's like they're building a relationship with the local community. They're forcing them to take responsibility for their kids' future. And, you know, the community, the government and them are all partners in the long term to make sure that these kids are getting a good education.

Sean Weisbrot: Because the guy's philosophy is like, he was traveling around the world when he was in his early twenties, and he realized that. It's like some of these kids that he saw on the street, they're like begging for money. So you start talking to them, you're like, you know, if you could have anything in the world, what would it be?

Sean Weisbrot: They're like, I wanna go to school. I wanna learn. He had this six figure job in Wall Street and he quit his job and, and started this thing off of nothing. And built it into something. I think they've done over a thousand schools in the last decade or something. Crazy. So when you say pencils with Pencils of Promise.

Sean Weisbrot: Promise, great. Yeah, no. So I donated $500 for my birthday. I would like to support them through the company. Once we have a. The means to do so. 'cause we don't have any revenue yet.

Rajat Mishra: That's awesome. And I think it's a lot on where you come from, right? So I grew up with nothing. I grew up in India and in a middle class family, right? So when you grew up there, kind of, I can totally relate to the story in which the US was my ticket to a different kind of life. It's always something you, and you remember where you're from. And I'm only grateful, right? I mean, my life Sean has exceeded all my wildest expectations. If you had asked 10-year-old Rajat, you know, you would be in Silicon Valley building a company and you have a thriving business.

Rajat Mishra: And, I have two kids getting to do what they want to do, helping people. I, there's only the only gratitude I have I have for this and, I'm also excited for, and the path forward.

Sean Weisbrot: I grew up in an upper middle class family in America. For the average person like me, it's very difficult to understand what life is like outside of America growing up.

Sean Weisbrot: But because I've spent the last 15 years of my life living in those countries, yes, I've seen what poverty is. Yeah. And sometimes I'm in America. I'm in America now, and I hear people complain about things like,

Sean Weisbrot: oh, my umbrella broke. I need to go buy another one. Like some people don't have a roof over their heads, let alone a freaking umbrella.

Rajat Mishra: It's all a matter of perspective. Right. I think for the person, the broken umbrella, that's probably one of their top set of problems, right. That they're dealing with and, and I think Daniel Kaman said, right, nothing is more important than the. The thing you are doing at the moment, you're doing it because that's what you are thinking about.

Rajat Mishra: So I can empathize with that person with the umbrella. My dad had a blue scooter. My mom would sit in the back, my brother would sit in the middle, and I would stand in front. And that's how we would drive around. Right? So it's just a matter of perspective, right? And you put that person in the umbrella in rural India or you know, rural Cambodia, they would come back in six months.

Sean Weisbrot: Is there anything we haven't talked about that you would like to add that kind of helps to close this all off?

Rajat Mishra: Everyone deserves a fair chance to realize their potential and communicate their ideas, and that's what we are trying to do, trying to kind of democratize great communication.