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Nico, tell me about your vision.

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And when you ask me about my vision, are you talking about my life vision, my work vision, anything?

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It could be whatever you like to share.

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Okay.

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Yeah, I think I have a vision for my own life, which is, you know,

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I want to live a life where I'm able to travel the world,

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knock every item off my bucket list, live with no regrets.

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And so that's the life I'm living.

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And professionally what I want to do is continue to grow my consulting firm,

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involve a bunch of my family members in it. I already have several who work with me.

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And I want to basically create this family company that I can, you know, hand off and hand down to the next generations.

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That's amazing.

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How did you get started on this path? Like where did it all come together?

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Yeah. Well, the family business idea was one,

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I think that was created in my mind when I was in college because I met

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several people who had a family business. They were kids in a family business.

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And I just thought it was so cool to just have that opportunity from the moment that you

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even know what work is. You have this like path that you can walk down and

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you know, even when you're in high school, you can be, you know,

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doing internships with a family business and you get that work life experience. And I never liked school.

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So I always wish that I had had more

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work experience when I was younger.

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So I was always interested in the family business aspect.

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Now my family

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traveled a lot all the time. And so I also always had that travel bug. We're all scuba divers.

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You know, we've been to crazy places and

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so incorporating travel, family business, these are just the things that I liked. And it was like, okay, how do I design my life

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to include all of those things? That was the question.

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Yeah, that's awesome.

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How did you get started in the business side? Like when did,

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I mean, how did that come about? Like was it hard, easy,

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tough pill to swallow, entrepreneurship? How did that come up?

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Yeah, well, you know, I joined a big consulting firm right out of college, moved to New York,

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and learned a lot while I was doing that.

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But I don't know, I think I always had the entrepreneurial bug. I think a lot of people, you know, you kind of

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either have it or you don't. Like you either completely resent

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people ever telling you what to do,

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or you're able to stomach it. And if you resent people telling you what to do,

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you're going to be an entrepreneur. Like I think that's just what it is. You want freedom. You want autonomy. So I always had that.

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And it was just kind of a matter of time developing skills,

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you know, sucking it up and working for big companies and working for other people until I felt like I was

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ready to go out on my own. And

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you know, I

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had multiple startups that failed

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along the way. And this one that I'm running right now is now

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very successful because I've learned from all my past failings.

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And but this one is just a, you know, this is a consulting firm. Like I've had a software startup in the past. I've had like a

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physical consumer goods startup in the past, you know, shipping things to people all around the US.

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But the consulting model is one that now after I've learned a lot of stuff, like

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this is one that I can scale and I can run from anywhere in the world.

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I have a

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different perspective on what you just mentioned.

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You said that if you don't like being told what to do, you have the entrepreneurial bug.

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I think it's something else.

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Have you read the E-Myth

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before?

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No, people have mentioned it. People have mentioned it, but I haven't read it.

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Yeah, that book came out a while ago. There's a staggering

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data in that book.

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The statistics shows that 96% of business in the United States failed within the first 10 years.

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Right? As you can tell, even from your journey, you've had a few failed businesses until you were able to have a successful business.

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Out of the 4% that actually are able to survive that 10-year mark, how many of them actually are just

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striving and how many of them are thriving?

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It's a pretty sad number. If I go down to lesser years, like five years, I think it's like 70%.

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That's a different statistic. If I go to a two-year mark, I think it's like 60 or 50% of businesses don't make past the two-year mark.

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We are living in a time

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where

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people are lost in the world.

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People are lost, confused, and they have no idea what they're doing in the entrepreneurial journey.

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Right?

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My perspective is if you are able to listen and humble yourself and learn, you might be able to skip past those

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few years of struggle by learning from your own mistakes.

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And you can reduce that to a few of your mistakes and learn from someone else's mistakes and

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boost up your time and get there faster, easier, with less stress.

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I don't disagree with that. I don't disagree with that. I think that is another...

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I mean, look, if I could go back in time and be more

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humble and listen to others and learn from other people's mistakes without having to make them myself,

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yeah, I would have been successful a lot faster for sure. I mean, early in my, you know, entrepreneurial life,

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you know, people talk about like networking or whatever.

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When we talk about that, I just mean like being open to partnerships,

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helping people so that they help you in return, you know, those sorts of things.

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I didn't do any of that in the early days. When I started my first couple businesses, it was just like nose to the grindstone.

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I'm just going to make this happen with force of will.

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And that's one of the learnings. It's like, no, you actually can't make it happen with force of will.

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It's like the world, the economy is made up of people and you've got to be connecting with people.

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And you've got to humble yourself in order to connect with people. So, I mean, I agree with what you're saying.

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I think what I said, you know, about never wanting to work for someone else,

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where that comes into play is if you do fail

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with your first startup or your second startup, you always have the opportunity to go work for someone else.

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You know, it's like, well, I gave it a shot. Now, I'm just going to go join a big company.

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But for those of us who

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genuinely

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resent the idea of working for someone else, there is only one option, which is what is my next startup?

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If I ask you this question

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on the same question you asked me or you mentioned,

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if someone had the clarity, the path and the direction

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to actually succeed and not fail in the first or the second entrepreneur journey that they have,

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would you think we would have

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more entrepreneurs right now, more entrepreneur bug right now? What path would you have preferred?

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And would that mentality of

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only the people who have

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who can work for someone else would be able to

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succeed in that? What do you think of what I just said? It's all mumble jumbo.

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What are your thoughts on that?

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No, I mean, if I could summarize what I heard you just say was, you know, if the startup path

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was easier and there was a higher likelihood of success,

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do you think more people would go down that path?

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And I think the answer to that is yes, for sure.

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I mean, I think the fear really holds people back from taking that first leap to try that first leap.

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To try their first startup. Absolutely.

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Yeah, thank you for sharing that.

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My next question for you goes along to

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what you just mentioned, but maybe there's more to this that I'm not listening or hearing yet.

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Why do you think, Nico, leaders hide from funding their vision?

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And then how can those same leaders then lean into funding their vision?

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Why do leaders hide from funding their vision?

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Yeah, I mean, maybe it is kind of what I just talked about with fear, but

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I don't know. I mean, there's everybody kind of is coming at it from their own

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angle, you know, like obviously you can be afraid to jump. You can be afraid to launch your own vision. You

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you may think, you know, this is the only money I have. What if I lose it?

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Or if you're going to raise money, you may think how am I going to raise money?

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You know, I'll never be able to do it. Or if I do raise it and then I lose my investors,

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and then I lose my investors money,

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now I'm like on the hook and they're never going to like me again. I mean, there's all sorts of

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fear, I think,

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that keeps you from

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like running towards that.

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And I guess I'll just keep coming back to what I was saying about like

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when you know, you never want to work for someone again,

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the fear

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of

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being in an office for the rest of your life working for somebody

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outweighs any other fear that you might have about losing money or pissing off an investor or anything like that.

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And so it's kind of like what's your greater fear? Like that's going to move you.

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You're going to move away from your greatest fear

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is what I would say. And by the way, you know, in my first startup,

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I did raise money, investor dollars.

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We did not end up getting those investors a return. You know, we ended up

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having to close up shop. We sold the IP. We got a lot of our money back, but no return at all.

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And you know, that was a lesson to me, honestly. And it was a reason why I sort of went in the direction that I've gone now,

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which is, you know,

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low capital intensity. Like I don't really need to raise money to start a consulting business.

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And you can have a really healthy cash conversion cycle so that money comes in from customers

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before you have to pay it out to vendors or, you know, employees or anything like that.

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And so you get, you can basically fund your own growth.

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And that was something I really wanted to do. Whatever my next business was going to be, it had to have that because I did not want to

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go through the craziness of raising money again and then having to deal with investors and then having to,

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you know, in a downside scenario, disappoint them.

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Yeah, thank you for sharing that with us, Nico.

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I'm going to mention one more thing. You mentioned again with that

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that

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when you have a desire to not work for anyone else,

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that's when this entrepreneur bug goes through. I disagree again. Well, I'll tell you why.

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I have something of that similar proposition. If I can

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work for myself and make it successfully provided for my family, I'll do that. The only circumstance I would not

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go the other route,

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would be the worst-case scenario for me would be

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literally getting a tech job and making enough

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$100,000 or more a year and support my family. I think that would be the worst-case scenario for me in this aspect.

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But

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if given a chance to

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work with maybe Tony Robbins or

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Jeff Bezos or

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Elon Musk for that example, there's so many people who have done something extraordinary.

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But if I give a chance, like, hey, you go and stay with these guys and you work for them

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and you absorb as much as you can, I will jump on that

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first hand because

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things that I learned from that would absolutely outweigh what I could do myself within the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years easily.

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That's what I think.

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But to me, I don't want to put myself in a box where

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hey, I have this bug that I definitely cannot work for someone else. I just have to be the entrepreneur journey

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understandable. But I'm not going to be the entrepreneur journey

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understandable. But I'm like, I can go either or. And if you were to ask me the same question six months ago, maybe a year ago,

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I might have had the same exact answer you did.

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Same exact answer you did.

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What do you think of that part? Like, do you agree, disagree? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

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I agree in part with what you just said.

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If I was given that opportunity right now, I would really have to think about it, honestly, because my life's pretty good right now

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running my own business. But I think that's the best way to go about it.

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Right now running my own business. But

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after my

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second startup failed,

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I did end up working for somebody else. But I worked for somebody else in a

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chief operating officer capacity.

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It was a

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great industry that was about to get a huge government subsidy. And I knew that it was a business that was going up, up, up.

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I had some stock options. It was a way to make money

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and a way to learn a lot.

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We ended up raising private equity funds. So I got to sort of dabble in that world.

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I mean, there was a lot of the learning that came out of that.

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And so I said yes to that job, working with them.

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Just like if Elon or Jeff Bezos or somebody came to me and really wanted me to work with them,

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I would have a hard time saying no because of the learning. So I totally agree with you.

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The only difference is, you know, when you said,

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I think about everything that I'd learned over, you know, three, five, ten, twenty years,

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I could stomach the three. I could stomach the five.

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I don't know if I would want to do that for ten or twenty years, even if it was Elon.

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Like I would want to learn some stuff from them and get that value and then I've got to be out on my own again.

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It's just that's the, that's that bug that I'm talking about, you know. So there's a middle ground.

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So you want to learn.

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So that's what I'm saying. So there's not a hard line there. The hard line is

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learning capacities and if you're able to boost

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your journey faster.

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So that's what I wanted to know. Okay, that's thank you for sharing that.

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Yeah.

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I have one more question for you today.

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What is your why of what you do when you go? Like what is, if you could have the essence

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of the why

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or gets you out of bed every morning and do what you keep doing, what is that?

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Yeah, I mean the essence that gets me out of bed every morning is the

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the thrill of a challenge.

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For sure.

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And whether that's work, whether that's going on some long swim or a long run or

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scuba diving or some sort of adrenaline seeking activity.

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That's what, that's what I want to do every day.

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That's what I think if when I'm on my deathbed, if I look back and I say, man, I really challenged myself a lot.

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I had a lot of great thrills, a lot of great adventures. I lived a great life.

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So that's the essence that gets me out of bed.

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Thank you for sharing that. Would you like to

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Know yours? Sure.

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No, I mean you can. Would you can? Yeah. For me,

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I'm still figuring a lot of things out, but what I would say

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is waking up, spending time with my family and

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having a healthier boundaries in life. I think that's pretty exciting.

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That's pretty exciting. Another thing that I'm working on recently is

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it's called opportunities for

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Indians. It's my way of closing the financial gap between the West world and the other side of the of the world.

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We have found that

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the opportunities me and you have and

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most of the Americans do, most of Canadians do, and most of Europe does.

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Most of the world does not have that opportunity. They don't know

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and some of them haven't been taught the skills necessary to feed their families on a proper extent.

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They don't know the guidance. They don't have the skills. They can't speak the language right and

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this is our way of teaching them skills

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and getting them a better job and

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caring and I don't know if I can make a dent in that huge ship, but I'll try my best to do either.

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That's what gets me excited. That's awesome.

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That's awesome. Yeah, I spent some time in Mumbai

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and

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beautiful place. I mean there is a lot of wealth there too, but you're right. There's a whole other

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side of the country that is very very impoverished and could use a lot of help for sure.

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Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.

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I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.

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This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well.

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We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time and attention.

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Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.