Founder Week panel: Launching from Illinois

“As a founder, you are constantly, intentionally thrusting yourself into places where you don’t know what you’re doing.”
- Arnav Mishra, co-founder and CTO of DOSS

The Grainger College of Engineering hosted a special fireside chat as part of Founders Week on Thursday, October 1. The Grainger Engineering alumni behind two high-growth, venture-backed startups, Arpit Dwivedi, founder and CEO of Cache Energy, and Arnav Mishra, co-founder and CTO of DOSS, spoke to a packed room in a chat moderated by current student and local business owner Vidhi Chavda.

Arpit Dwivedi ('22, PhD, Mechanical Engineering) is the Founder and CEO of Cache Energy, a company that works on reliable, low-cost, long-duration energy storage to help enable a future where energy is accessible and affordable for everyone. He has worked across corporations, startups, national labs and universities, giving him a broad perspective on technology, teams and the impact they can create.

Arnav Mishra ('18, BS-MCS, Computer Science) is the Co-Founder and CTO of DOSS, a suite of applications that helps brands manage the flow of goods, dollars and data into and out of their business. Arnav spent his early career as a founding software engineer at construction finance startup Siteline.

Vidhi Chavda is a junior double majoring in mechanical engineering and Innovation, Leadership and Engineering Entrepreneurship (ILEE). Her store, Elite, offers healthy food options that incorporate nutritional supplements so students can easily grab a shake or other quick meal on their way to class.

Jed Taylor, the Landuyt Executive Director of the Landuyt Center for Entrepreneurship, introduced the trio to the audience.

The panelists advised students to identify why, when and where to start a tech company, emphasizing persistence, resilience, flexibility and curiosity.

Watch the panel discussion

Questions and answers from the panel have been edited for content and length.

Jed Taylor: 
All right, welcome everybody. Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us for our fireside chat today. I'm Jed Taylor, the Landuyt Executive Director of the Landuyt Center for Entrepreneurship.

Many of you may know the Landuyt Center for Entrepreneurship by our former name, the Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC). This is thanks to the generosity of Rick and Gayle Landuyt. We are now known by the Landuyt Center for Entrepreneurship in the Grainger College of Engineering. Our mission is simple, to help produce more founders at the University of Illinois, the next generation of great Illini founders, and also to help our students, faculty and researchers turn their ideas into new ventures that have impact. We do that through our entrepreneurship courses, programs, mentoring and programs like the the COZAD New Venture Challenge and I-Corps that many of you have participated in, and also connecting our founders with our alumni, investors and partners across our ecosystem. Today I'm excited to introduce three founders who each started their entrepreneurial journey here on campus. So let me introduce those panelists.

First is our moderator Vidhi Chavda. Vidhi is currently a mechanical engineering student here on campus and on top of that she's a founder and a CEO of Elite, a healthy food cafe in Champaign, and just in the first six months, they're rapidly approaching six figures in revenue while maintaining an extremely lean inventory.

Arnav Mishra. I remember Arnav when he was a student here on campus. Didn't seem like it was that long ago, but he took  all of the TEC classes he could take. And anyone who knew Arnav when he was a student knew he would be wildly successful at anything he did. And I also remember he met his co-founder, Wiley Jones, in one of our programs on our Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship Workshop trip. Today, Arnav is the co-founder and CTO of DOSS, the next-gen AI-native Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), where he leads engineering across data infrastructure and application layers behind complex supply chain and accounting systems. Previously, he built ERP accounting automations as a founding engineer at Siteline and worked on cloud infrastructure and data systems at Rubrik. He spent most of his career building software for messy, operationally complex problems and is now focused on rethinking how those systems should work in an AI native world. 

Finally, Arpit Dwivedi. He's the founder and CEO of Cache Energy. He earned his PhD in mechanical engineering, where his research focused on thermochemical energy storage. He saw a problem that needed to be solved. He saw that most of the world suffers from not being able to store energy and have access to energy, and so he set out to solve that problem. He founded a company Cache right here in Champaign and incubated that company at Enterprise Works, and now he has his own manufacturing facility here in Champaign. Cache stores energy for months in low-cost lime-based pellets using chemistry that traces back to Ancient Roman concrete. 

Cache has raised more than $25 million dollars and took first place at the Department of Energy pitch competition hosted at the White House. This year alone, Cache has worked with Duke Energy, Whirlpool and the US Army, and has installed projects in Alaska, Minnesota and several other places across the country. Three founders, three different paths, and all of them started here at Illinois. 

Vidhi Chavda:
We're going to jump right in. But the first question is a loaded one, and I, in all honesty, really wanted to ask it so that all the students in the room kind of know we're on the same playing field. So, the first one's going to be: as a student, what made you realize that you wanted to be an entrepreneur? What steps did you take during that school year? 

Arnav Mishra:
As Jed mentioned, I was here from 2014 to 2018 studying computer science. I had grown up in the Bay Area, so I was fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of the startup ecosystem. To me, the value-add that I wanted to achieve while in school was to absorb as much information as possible. So, as Jed said, I probably took every single TEC class that existed on campus. I was just back in a few of them today, and you learn a lot. There's-- I'll name-drop a couple of them. TE 567: you learn about venture funding. That's not something most students get to learn about. There's a class on trademark and patents, and how you actually operate with Joe Barich. And there were a handful of other classes. There's one on finance and things you don't get exposed to as a computer science major that I learned a lot from.

The other pieces that were really important for me were just getting a well-rounded kind of opportunity to see different things. I thought about the business minor, thought about other opportunities, but the thing that drew me the most was actually joining one of the consulting groups on campus. I spent a lot of time with OTCR Consulting. I feel like that was an opportunity to really feel how different types of businesses work, experience that firsthand, and it was a great opportunity to just meet a lot of people. I think the community that I got to build here, the literal education in the classroom, and some of the external RSO-type groups that I was part of all really put it together for me.

I think outside of that, the computer science education, of course, was vital to starting a company in software.

Arpit Dwivedi:
 I think my perspective is slightly different because I never thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I still don't really relate to the word as such. I think it's more about I wanted to do something; the goal is to build something to make a positive change in the world, and if that's the goal, what's the path, right? Somebody has to take that first initial step, that first risk and come out and say that this is possible. And then after that, once you show that small seed of possibility, you could have other people who could join you. I feel our team at Cache- all of them are pretty entrepreneurial. It's about what you want to do, and it led to entrepreneurship, but it was never like, "I want to be a founder" or "I want to be an entrepreneur." If it takes me to be a hiking guide in Alaska, I would do that, but this is the way to make an impact.

“At U. of I., I explored a lot. It’s such an amazing ecosystem. Within a few miles, you get people studying physics, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering. So explore as much as possible, take random classes, meet random people and just be curious about what this campus has to offer.” - Arpit Dwivedi

Vidhi Chavda:
I was just going to add, I think this room is a prime example of that. There's a big, diverse group of people in this room, some of them alumni, and that creates a really good dynamic to have.

Okay, so moving on to the second question that I had as a student: what do you think I can do, or any other student at U. of I. who currently doesn't have an idea or any concept, what can they do right now to get that step forward?

Arpit Dwivedi
As I said, I would explore a lot; I wouldn't settle on an idea, pursue anything, or commit to anything until I'd explored. When I was in undergrad, I tried working with every possible professor who would let me in. Sometimes the best way to find out what you want is to figure out what you don't want to do. Do a bunch of things, try elimination, settle on something, and then you know this is really what I want to be and what I want to be doing. Very frankly, it is hard enough that anybody with a sane mind would give up. If you are not 100% sure about doing it.

“I would say take your time; just because it sounds cool, it is not actually cool.” - Arpit Dwivedi

There should not be any plan B. That is one thing I would say, so go and explore, work with everybody, talk to everybody, be curious and maybe take a quick diversion from there. We should also ask what the university can do for students. I feel as a university, as an ecosystem, we need to normalize failure. I think the university's role isn't to back people who already have a track record, funding, or a grant; it's to back you when nobody else cares about you. Because if you have shown, if you have built something, you can go out and raise money, but I think that's where the university's role becomes most important: backing you very early when nobody else wants to back you, not because they want to make more money, but because they want to. That's where the breakthrough happens. Normalizing failure, I think, is extremely important for society so more people pursue this.

Arnav Mishra:
I'd add a couple other pieces from my time here as well. There's a huge human component to starting a company, which is that you have to know people who are going to back you financially. One of our investors is an Illinois grad, actually here right now. You have to meet people who can support you through your journey. But the thing that the university, the university specifically, and your time there, gets to offer you is education that you don't really get an opportunity to once you graduate. I think most students, myself included, definitely took for granted just the access that you have to learn in so many different environments. After college, throughout the many years I was working at various companies, there wasn't an easy opportunity to go learn. Now, with AI, there's more available to educate yourself and find access, but it's still hard.

I think finding areas of interest and areas of education that aren't part of your normal major is really important because when you're a founder, you have to do everything. I think a good explanation for what a CEO often has to do in the first couple of years, or a CTO, or any founder, is that you're going to take whatever the hardest problem is, make it a little less hard, find someone else to come in there, and then go find the next hard problem, and go do that again, and again, and again for every single piece. As an example, I ran recruiting for the company for a period of time. I ran business operations. I ran revenue operations. I didn't get a chance to learn any of that as a computer science student, but the exposure I had to different individuals at different points through my time in college, through my time in my career, was really valuable.

I'd say a great way to do that that's not just classwork, because I know adding a few more midterms and a few more final exams is hard, is again the RSOs. When I was a student in CS, I would go to the business version of Quad Day- and go meet all the RSOs there and learn about those. Making friends in other departments is extremely valuable because you learn so much through osmosis from spending time together. So really trying to get out of the natural cycle of l'm in these classes for this major and I'm going to go do more, and more, and the only reason I'm taking classes outside is because I'm required to take a class on whatever, it needs to be more of being curious to learn other things as you were saying as well.

Arpit Dwivedi:
Can I add one more quick thing?

“I think passion is overrated. People say, ‘Do what you’re passionate about,’ and that’s true, you have to find your passion, but that’s not enough.” - Arpit Dwivedi

That's necessary, but not sufficient. I am extremely passionate about treating cancer, but I can't do anything about it. Finding something you are passionate about, but also enjoy doing day-to-day, and finding an overlap is so important, because you don't have to like enjoy the highs; you have to enjoy some random Sunday afternoon when you have to work on some extremely boring stuff to keep going. So that intersection is extremely important, too.

Vidhi Chavda:
I just wanted to add a quick little note to that. As a student myself, I remind myself every morning: what is my why? Why am I in college? Why am I here? Why am I doing the business that I am doing? And for me, it's my parents, but other people might be different. And I think reconsidering that is important, too.

My other question that I had was hypothetically if you're sitting in a classroom at Illinois, right now, back when you were a student, did you actually see yourself becoming a founder? And at that point in life, where were you? What were you uncertain about?

Arnav Mishra:
I was always interested in the idea of entrepreneurship. I was never the kind of person who was going to quit my job and just ideate for months, which I know a lot of people do. There's people that have been very successful in that way, but for me the opportunity to build a company seemed like a compelling option if I found an idea, I found a partner and I found an opportunity that I was excited enough about. As a student here, I would say I was the inverse of what some people might expect. I think I was a worse student as a freshman than I was as a senior. My first year of school, I was class, midterms, finals, do the thing, whatever. By senior year, I was going to my 8:00 a.m. classes every time, going to every single class and seeking to learn. It's partly because you become a little unencumbered. When you're in high school, everything is towards how do I get to college?

You forget that you're actually here to learn. So, if I was in a classroom in my senior year, I was mostly focused on absorbing the information, meeting people and having the opportunity to grow with the people around me. Then, on the journey of figuring out what I wanted to do after: Did I want to go be an engineer? Did I want to go into being a product manager? Did I want to go become some a consultant? Did I want to go do something in VC? What was the place I actually wanted to go to? And exploring those via internships, via groups and RSOs, via education, whatever you can, was the focus.

Arpit Dwivedi:
I don't know if I want to be a founder. I'm still figuring it out. Because the problem is: what is a founder? Who is a founder? It means different things depending on which stage your company is in. So, saying I want to be a founder to me means nothing. Early on, you have to be really good at fundraising, then building a prototype, then hiring people, then scaling, manufacturing; it changes so much.

“There’s no one thing to be a founder. That’s why I said that finding out your why, and is this really what I want to do? What if there’s no plan B? I think a founder is somebody who has no plan B. That’s how I’ll define it.” - Arpit Dwivedi

Vidhi Chavda:
If you were to look back, how does a student even decide whether they should start now? Everyone has ideas, but how do you know it's valid enough, or if they should pursue graduate school, or learn inside a different company and go get that experience? How do you know? What are your tips for that?

 Arnav Mishra:
I think it's kind of similar to a lot of what we've been saying so far, probably kind of different versions of it, which is I would not start a company for the sake of starting a company. That is probably not the incentive you want to run with. I have met people who have done that, and I think very often those companies or those founders are looking to build companies that they can get acquired very quickly. That's another piece: I would never build a company for the sake of acquisition or with acquisition as the goal. Build a great company, and the opportunities will come depending on how the business grows. If that's something that ends up happening, great. If it's not, then great. Because you'll make different decisions based on whether you're thinking about a different outcome. I think it's really just if you have found a thing that you're extremely interested in, that you're extremely passionate about, that you think there's actually a viable business for, where you know, that last piece of it that can come immediately, that can come over time, that can take years to really understand. Then you know, whatever age you are, whatever time it is, there's going to be an opportunity. Plenty of people started companies in school and have been successful. Different VC groups will fund people in college. There are many types of businesses where you don't even need to raise money to be successful. It really depends on what you're interested in, and what your appetite for actually doing this for the next decade of your life is.

Arpit Dwivedi:

“I think the best time to start is right now. I think you will never be ready. I don’t think I’m still ready.” - Arpit Dwivedi

Just get started because it's such an iterative process. You have to learn so much that the faster you start, the faster you fail, and the cheaper you fail, the faster you get there. The best time to start is right now. I feel like you can never be ready enough. As I said, we have deployed across the US. We're expanding in Australia and New Zealand. We have deployed in Europe; we're about to deploy there soon. And I still don't feel ready. If I wait until I'm ready, I'll be 89 before I start a company.

Arnav Mishra:
I would add something really quick to that as well: normalizing failure was a really good point you're making. When I graduated from the university, I was working at a company, and on the side, a friend of mine and I started a company. We were looking to start a company, we started working on it, and I think we probably made every single mistake you can possibly make in starting a company, and we worked on it for six months, and at the end of the six months we decided this is not the thing. We're not passionate enough about the idea we have made. The situation wasn't right to build a company. We hadn't spent enough time together as cofounders to even know if this was the partnership we wanted, which is a huge part of the journey.

There was no way without the education I had of trying and failing to start a company at that time, plus working at small startups, plus all these different accumulated learnings through university and post, that I could have done what I have today. But even today, people talk about imposter syndrome, about feeling like, “Am I good enough to do the thing I'm doing? Everybody feels it in every job at different points in their lives.  I think as a founder you are constantly intentionally thrusting yourself into places where you do not know what you're doing.

“It is very natural to always feel imposter syndrome. ‘What am I doing right now?’ There’s a lot of engineers in this room. There’s a lot of folks from all over the place in this room. You take the hard problem, you break it down, you execute against it. That’s what we learn, and that’s the framework that you use every single time.” - Arnav Mishra

Arpit Dwivedi:
Very quickly, I would agree with you not to start a company just to be acquired. I would never do that. I think there could be some exceptions where your goal is financial freedom and financial stability. You don't have to be noble; your cause doesn't have to be to save humanity, and that's the only time to start a company. There are cases where people want financial stability and freedom, and entrepreneurship can give them that, and I think that's okay sometimes.

Vidhi Chavda:
To ask a follow-up to that, you both have masters and a PhD. What made you guys get said degrees? Has that helped you?

Arnav Mishra:
Any professors in the room? No. Is this recorded? No.

Arpit Dwivedi:
Are we recording this? Yes. Okay. So, I can't say much. I think it's useful, right? I came to this country just to start this company. I did my undergrad back home and I was running a company there. I was very passionate about energy, and I came to this country just for the sole purpose of starting Cache. There was no other reason, and I think a PhD was such a great place to come and give you time to think about the biggest problem to solve. Because when I came here, I knew that generally that energy is the place to work on. But I did not know what the technology would look like, what the path would look like, I did not know anybody, I didn't have friends, I didn't have any family when I moved here, so PhD gave me so much time to think through it. And again, you meet a lot of people in the process, which helps with setting things up in a new country.

Arnav Mishra:
For me, I really wanted to stay in college for four years. I think it's an incredible four years that you really don't get another opportunity to do. I had finished my bachelor's degree in the first three, and the university has this great four plus one program, where you can add one year on and focus on the masters. That was honestly the biggest initial motivation, where you have to apply as a sophomore, and I had no clue what a master's degree really meant in any way. I would say, at the time I made the decision, I don't know that I was thinking super deeply about it. Now I look back on it, and I can see the value it provided, which is another year of curriculum that is actually really useful. I took many master's degrees—master's-level classes across computer science and TEC. Across both of those, I learned so much that was actually valuable to the things I did, not only at my current role, but even in past companies that I worked at when I was out of college earlier. The other piece of it is genuinely building the friendships and the community.

“The first place I worked at there was an Illinois founder. The second place I worked at, there was an Illinois founder. My current company, my co-founder, townie, first engineer from Illinois and 10% of the company came out of this place. Two of our investors, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign grads. There’s such a power to this community.” - Arnav Mishra

 I think the university is doing such a good job of talking more about it. I think historically it's Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, but the power of the community that we have here is so exceptional, and spending the time here to to be part of that is really important. As for the master's degree by itself, I took a lot more TEC classes than CS classes. Like, as with a master's in CS, maybe the university should have a master's in technology entrepreneurship. It was a good part of it.

Vidhi Chavda:
You both have very sustainable, valid companies.  Obviously as students, you have a lot of ideas. What was that validation or that first piece of evidence that you had that made you know that this was going to be a good company and this was going to be stable?

Arnav Mishra:
When do you know the company's going to be stable? I don't know.  I think my realization every single year is that “Wow every startup has about a year of life at any given time.”  I don't care what the runway numbers are or whatever it is. I'm talking about startups; startup does not equal private company. OpenAI is not a startup. Anthropic is not a startup right now. The way that they operate, the size of the businesses, the decisions that they're making, the style of operation, it does not reflect what you would normally think of a startup. There's an impression people have in their mind when they think of startup usually, and I would say that today I would not say we have made it. We have not reached escape velocity. We are a company that is still figuring it out, one step at a time, and that is going to be the case for the next many years.

If you'd asked me when I was starting the company, when would we know we'd made it? I probably wouldn't have known. I'd have been maybe series B, maybe series C. I don't know.

In reality, it's not about those metrics.

“It’s about continued success. It’s about finding the next hard problem. You cannot drive to complacency. You have to constantly be curious enough to make decisions and change. Especially in the current world where everything is constantly changing.”
- Arnav Mishra

 I feel like every time I look outside my apartment, there's a new AI billboard in front of it because it’s San Francisco, and because Y Combinator decided to move next door.

It's something that I don't think you ever really know. At least I have not yet reached the point where I know that the company is guaranteed to be successful. I think it took us years of building, and years of iterating to get to where we are today. We have been successful so far, but there is so much more to be done still. And that's true from the day we founded; that'll be true for every student right now who's thinking about it. Yeah.

Arpit Dwivedi:
Sounds stressful in the Bay Area; you should move to the cornfields.

I think, as I said, you know that the idea that you have would not retain its form by the time you have scaled, or you have built a product. The one thing you know about your right idea is that it is wrong, it would never be the idea that you start with. So that's why my point is to start early, start fast and iterate fast.

I would decide if I have an idea: do I really feel strongly about this? Why am I doing it? And do I have some kind of skill set to prove early that this is a viable idea. I don't have to be an expert, because once I show that it is good enough, I can hire people who are better than me at doing that. So, do I feel strongly about this idea? Is it big enough of a problem to solve? Do I have some of that the initial skill set to show this is viable? If all three intersect, I would run with it and be flexible. One thing people say is that a great quality in founders is having very strong opinions that can change easily. So, you have a very strong opinion about something, go all in, and then you figure out, what the heck was I doing? Then you change it and then you have a strong opinion about that, and you go all in.

Arnav Mishra:
I was literally about to say the “strong opinions, loosely held” thing.

I think it is so true. I'd also say there are so many different ways that a company starts off. I imagine the way that all three of us started our companies was dramatically different. Our first years were so different.

We spent two years just building. It was the whole Tony Stark in a cave. We spent two straight years trying to figure out what we were doing. We built a lot of product, and only then did we start to sell because the style of product we're building involved a massive buildout before anything else. If you read a book on how to build a company, I'm sure it'll be  'within six months have paid users, within one year have what?' None of that. You can take a large data sample and find the average of it all, but that doesn't mean that the average is the way that the thing works. There's an entire sample, and all these companies have been successful in so many different ways. So, don't look at another founder and think that's how I have to do it. You can look at it for inspiration. You can look at it for learning. You can look at it as a way to de-risk certain things that you're doing yourself, but assume that it's going to be different for you. Assume you're going to have to go against your own challenges, whether it's business, or hiring, or the product itself, and react as it comes.

Audience: Q&A

Vidhi Chavda:
Thank you for that. I'm going to switch things up and potentially open it up to the audience for any questions, if any students have any before we continue. Oh, go for it.

Question:
Are there any specific steps you took to validate your idea before committing to it?

Arpit Dwivedi:
 I think the first step would be to talk to our customers, l hypothetical customers, because you don't exactly know sometimes who the customers are. So, the first step would be talk to as many as would come to you, keep talking to them and the key there is to listen. Because sometimes you're really excited about an idea, and you will go and ask questions where they're forced to say, "Yes, I want this.” So the trick is to listen. Is it really something? Is it really a pain point for them? So that would be the first step. What we did was talk to a lot of people, and that teaches you so much; it saves you so much money and time.

Arnav Mishra:
That is probably the most recurring piece of feedback I would say most founders would give. If you didn't talk to enough people, your feedback's probably going to be "talk to more people," and if you spoke to people, then your feedback is probably "talk to people." The first two to three months of the company, we probably spoke to 200 or 300 different people were in various forms of adjacencies across competitive businesses that we were interested building in that area, to prospective buyers, to all sorts of pieces.

I know the natural follow-on question people often have is like, "How do I talk to these people? How do I get in touch with these people?"

I've been asked that two or three times in the last day or so. Usually, the way I would look at it is if you try to sell someone something they don't want to be sold to. It's kind of what you were saying as well, where if someone shoots me a LinkedIn cold message and says, "Hey, would you like to buy blah?" I'm just like, "Nope, no, don't want to talk about it." On the flip side, if you can ask people questions, if you come in asking for advice, especially for students, where you're in a position where you can say, "Hey, I'm trying to learn about something." People are much more willing to do that. People naturally like to help other people. If someone comes to me and there's some shared community of some sort and they add that in, they say, "Hey, I'm an OTCR grad from 2025. I would love to talk to you about this thing I'm thinking about. I have a lot of questions about it." I'm much more likely to take that conversation and just have that conversation. And from there, it's the natural classic sales trick: at the end of it, you ask for five intros.

I will say that VCs are another great place for that. Investors love to be helpful. Thank you, Reed. Like, they love to introduce you to people, and they love to help you meet people, and they meet so many people in their days, and you can use those as avenues to really help do that.

Asking for advice, finding ways to get introductions to people, having those conversations helps a lot.

Arpit Dwivedi:
I will add: don't take feedback at face value. Sometimes when you talk to people who are not really your customers, they can have opinions that are negative. If I had listened to every piece of advice about how this will not work, I would still be doing my PhD in my 15th year. It's important to take that feedback with a grain of salt except when you're talking to customers. I can't stress that enough.

“As students you have such a great power. You can reach out to people and say, ‘I just want to learn about it, I want to talk to you,’ and people will be willing to do it. If I reach out to people, they’re thinking ‘This guy's going to sell something to me.’ And they'll never reply to me. You guys have that superpower right now. All the students.” - Arpit Dwivedi

Arnav Mishra:
I'll just say you will not get a response from everyone. We talked to a couple hundred people. We probably reached out to a couple thousand. That's the ratio that you're probably going to see, or some ratio like that.

Question:
It is important in the early years of the company to be good at fundraising, but I would think that it's difficult for a young person fresh out of college, or a recent graduate to be good at fundraising. People who have worked a few years have much more credibility. So why do you think you've been successful? And what is the lesson there for current students.

Arnav Mishra:
I think that so much of it is storytelling. If you come to someone with a bunch of cold heart facts, that's great. But ultimately at the seed round, or whenever you're raising your first money, they're not necessarily investing in the final product. I would guess- I have no clue what the stat is- but I'd guess at least 50% of people say something in their seed round; and then probably shift their business two or three times after that. That's why what matters is the ability to tell the story about why this matters. Show the passion, show the interest, show what you want to do, talk about the vision that you have.

You're going to do the same talking. It's going to be slightly different, but you're going to be having that same conversation, using the same storytelling when you talk to customers, the early adopters. You're going to do the same thing when you're talking to early employees, convincing them to stop whatever they're doing right now and come make way less money working with you on something. And you're going to have to do that again and again, and again.

“The superpower for a lot of great fundraisers, people who raise money, are the storytelling capabilities, the ability to craft the narrative that you actually believe in”. - Arnav Mishra

I think it's also just a lot of practice. We must have pitched so many times to so many different types of people over those hundreds of conversations. Even when asking questions, you're still crafting the narrative that you want to talk about. That's all part of it.

Arpit Dwivedi:
I would say you don't necessarily need to be good at fundraising. You just need to be good at being rejected. If you can depersonalize that, a lot of people will say no, and you will be bad at storytelling initially. Most likely, you'll hear five nos. You'll get some feedback, or "Why did you not invest?” Ask for feedback; you’ll become better next time, slightly better. You keep getting better, but you can keep doing it only if you have high pain tolerance. 

“You have to accept that it’s okay to be rejected. I think the most important quality in fundraising is persistence and learning from the rejections. If you can do those things, you don’t have to be a master salesman.” - Arpit Dwivedi

 

Question:
How does location play into the startup? Like, where was your startup started?

Arnav Mishra:
It's hard for probably for both of us to answer because we both started companies in one place. I guess my answer is that the value of starting a company in San Francisco is that you have a lot of access to talent. The con of starting a startup in San Francisco is that there are a lot of companies vying for the same talent. I know a lot of great companies that started up in Salt Lake City because they have access to all the talent coming out of BYU. There's Research Park, which has direct access to students at Illinois and so on. For me, the in-person aspect mattered more than the location. We've been in person five days a week since 2021, so we might hear some groans here and there, but we're not a 996 company. We work hard. Some people work weekends when they need to. The perspective is that by being in person, we get to drive ideas way faster. With a large pool of talent around us, and because my co-founder and I had worked in San Francisco for a long time, we had more access to people who could join us early on.

If I wanted to start a company in New York, I wouldn't have a network there to pull my early team from. Same with basically any other place in the world, really. San Francisco is where most of the people I know are.

Arpit Dwivedi:
I'm not sure if you care about hardware, but from a hardware perspective, of course you need talent, but you also need space, you need electricity, you need raw material, you need transportation. There’s a lot of things, and sometimes having a lower cost- rent, lower-cost electricity- becomes a competitive advantage. You can build something cheaper, and you can iterate faster; you can do more with less money than people sitting somewhere else can do. We think about that in terms of hardware. As a hardware company, it's hard. It’s very, very capital intensive, and it takes a lot of time to even figure out whether something worked, so capital efficiency and speed are extremely important.

Arnav Mishra:
I would revise one part of the answer I gave: San Francisco does have a certain advantage, which is the community. Not community in a friendly sense, but a community of people who know a lot and are always talking about what's happening. I do think that there are certain times where you will have an idea of what's coming down, what's going to become the next big thing a few weeks, a few months earlier in certain settings. For example, going to conferences. I'll go to the Databricks conference, I go to the AI Council Conference. I go to some of these things, and you talk to people at these in these settings and you hear the same themes again, and again, and again, and you think "Oh, that's probably going to be a thing in the next months or years that's going to be very relevant."

But you're not blocked out of those opportunities just because you're based in a different place.

“I think ultimately, it’s having access to capital, having access to people to build a business with, or a network where you think you’re going to be able to draw from. I think those are extremely important to building the company because so much of the company is the people in it.” - Arnav Mishra

You can still go to San Francisco and experience that, and I'm sure if you're in fintech, it's New York, and so on and so forth. 

Vidhi Chavda:
I'm going to jump in for my final question. You guys mentioned rejection. And failure. What is your biggest piece of advice for that? And if anyone can walk out of this room with one thing, what would it be? How to deal with rejection?

Arpit Dwivedi:
Cry. No, I'm just kidding. No. No, no, don't, do not, do not cry. One way to think about rejection is that you don't need a lot of people to like you or back you; you need like a handful of people initially, and that's all it takes.

“You could have one hundred no’s, and you could have one yes, and that’s enough.” - Arpit Dwivedi

You don't want money from every individual on the planet, right? Only a few people are needed. That is one way of thinking about rejection. If you have thought through your idea in great detail, and you really love pursuing that idea, rejection would not feel that painful. Most times, it will feel like, " Ah, he doesn't get it “or " She doesn't get it," and you'll keep moving. As advice when you walk out of this room, I’d say don't take any advice at face value. I think that's the most important advice, because there are a lot of people giving advice about how to run a company, how to raise money, how to hire, and I think none of those can be directly applied to you, because your story is unique. Your market is unique, your team is unique. So don't take the advice at face value.

I would say, “How does that apply to my life? Does it apply to my life?” It sounds like a great idea and good advice, but if it doesn't apply to my life, I don't care about it. I'll think of more, but I think that's one.

Arnav Mishra:
I think about rejection; people are going to constantly say no in any setting that you're in for a long time. The more important piece in my mind is to extract the themes behind the rejection. People aren't saying no for the sake of saying no. They probably have a reason for saying no. Sometimes it might be that this is just not the right person to chat with. They're not someone who's very excited about change, and this is a one-off case, and that's maybe the thing that you draw from that. But another place might be that “oh, this person or maybe these two or three people I talked to didn't actually understand the thing I wanted to do. That means I need to craft the story better. I need to make a better-- I need to explain the pieces that matter more.”

 There might be other scenarios where people are saying no because they haven't yet understood how this could really change their experiences. Okay, maybe I need to show them something, not just talk to them; show them something tangible they can understand and see and feel for themselves. Extracting the reasons behind rejection is really important.

I'd also say it's one of the reasons why asking for advice is a great way to enter in when you're early rather than selling something, because when you sell someone and someone rejects, they've made now their mindset has changed, and now they're not as interested in what you're talking about, and it's going to be really difficult to change their mindset from rejection to be even advice givers, they might give you some feedback, but being true advice givers. Coming for advice - you can't reject giving advice. You can say you don't have time to give advice, but you can't say "no, I disagree with the premise of giving advice." They'll give you advice, or they won't, but you have not put them into a position where they have to say yes or no about what you're doing. You put them in a position where they are there to support you and are now invested in your success as well. 

I think that's a really important thing for a lot of it. But the other piece of it, it's the stuff that you've already mentioned: the resilience.

“You can’t take rejection and turn around thinking, ‘Oh, I guess I'm doing the wrong thing.’ ” - Arpit Dwivedi

You have to have high conviction in what you're doing. You can't forget that there are learnings in rejection, and you have to extract that learning. You can't just say that I'm right, they're wrong, next. That doesn't work.

 In terms of pieces of advice walking out of this room, my co-founder said this a few times; he has been to so many of these different types of forums, and I have as well, and you're really going to get maybe two or three transformative pieces of advice or pieces of information over the course of the company's lifespan. Knowing when those are the pieces is really important.  Listening for that, finding those moments that are maybe it's not what they said, but maybe it's an adjacent thing, or maybe it's an extraction of themes that you've heard, or whatever it is that can help you become a better leader, or a better founder, or better at raising money, better at building product, thinking in a different technical setting, whatever it is, that's kind of what you're hoping to look for in a lot of these types of things. I don't know that, maybe today helped one person, maybe it didn't, maybe it helps a lot of people, but I wouldn't come out of here thinking that your journey is going to look anything like any of our three. Your journey will look like the fourth, the fifth, the nth version of whatever building a company looks like.

Arpit Dwivedi:
Okay, I have 10 more. No, I have one more. I think reading a lot. Reading a lot of books, reading biographies, has been helpful for me. I have gotten more from reading books than any human being.  I think reading biographies is extremely helpful, reading the history of technology if you're building a technology, going back to the 1800s, 1700s, and seeing how things were built. How was a car made? What were the iterations? What were failure? It can teach you so much, because, as humans, we don't change much.

“We think that we are more advanced than we were in the 1700s, we are not. We just invent more tools, and we interact with them differently. We behave similarly. If you go back and read books, which can take two weeks, you can avoid a lifetime of a mistake. So, I think reading is critical.” - Arpit Dwivedi

Arnav Mishra:
I would say one more thing and it's related to what you said which is somewhat related; don't be dismissive of competitors or incumbents. Learning from their mistakes and decisions is really important. We compete with Oracle and SAP. A lot of people look at Oracle and SAP today and say, “Wow, those are like some old companies.” You look at that UI, and you're like, wow, I feel like I'm back on some old Windows machine from the 90s. “What am I doing right now?” Then you realize that there are two companies that have combined several hundred billion dollars in market share that have been dominant players for 40 years in a space. How does that work? We used to have every person who joined the company read a book called Soft War, a profile of Larry Ellison from the early 2000s. It was so interesting to read his ideas, many of which are the same ideas we have today. He just didn't have the technology of the 2020s to do some of it. If anyone was in the tech talk we did yesterday at Siebel , similar to what you were saying earlier, we studied a lot of the history. There was a picture on one of the slides of a 3500 BC Mesopotamian receiving ticket. We learn less from the 3500 BC era, but it's interesting to see how the technology evolved over time. So definitely plus one to what you were saying.

Vidhi Chavda:
Thank you, guys. I believe that it is our time to wrap it up. If we could get a great round of applause for Arpit and Arnav.