Nico, tell me about your vision.
And when you ask me about my vision, are you talking about my life vision, my work vision, anything?
It could be whatever you like to share.
Okay.
Yeah, I think I have a vision for my own life, which is, you know,
I want to live a life where I'm able to travel the world,
knock every item off my bucket list, live with no regrets.
And so that's the life I'm living.
And professionally what I want to do is continue to grow my consulting firm,
involve a bunch of my family members in it. I already have several who work with me.
And I want to basically create this family company that I can, you know, hand off and hand down to the next generations.
That's amazing.
How did you get started on this path? Like where did it all come together?
Yeah. Well, the family business idea was one,
I think that was created in my mind when I was in college because I met
several people who had a family business. They were kids in a family business.
And I just thought it was so cool to just have that opportunity from the moment that you
even know what work is. You have this like path that you can walk down and
you know, even when you're in high school, you can be, you know,
doing internships with a family business and you get that work life experience. And I never liked school.
So I always wish that I had had more
work experience when I was younger.
So I was always interested in the family business aspect.
Now my family
traveled a lot all the time. And so I also always had that travel bug. We're all scuba divers.
You know, we've been to crazy places and
so incorporating travel, family business, these are just the things that I liked. And it was like, okay, how do I design my life
to include all of those things? That was the question.
Yeah, that's awesome.
How did you get started in the business side? Like when did,
I mean, how did that come about? Like was it hard, easy,
tough pill to swallow, entrepreneurship? How did that come up?
Yeah, well, you know, I joined a big consulting firm right out of college, moved to New York,
and learned a lot while I was doing that.
But I don't know, I think I always had the entrepreneurial bug. I think a lot of people, you know, you kind of
either have it or you don't. Like you either completely resent
people ever telling you what to do,
or you're able to stomach it. And if you resent people telling you what to do,
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.
And it was just kind of a matter of time developing skills,
you know, sucking it up and working for big companies and working for other people until I felt like I was
ready to go out on my own. And
you know, I
had multiple startups that failed
along the way. And this one that I'm running right now is now
very successful because I've learned from all my past failings.
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
physical consumer goods startup in the past, you know, shipping things to people all around the US.
But the consulting model is one that now after I've learned a lot of stuff, like
this is one that I can scale and I can run from anywhere in the world.
I have a
different perspective on what you just mentioned.
You said that if you don't like being told what to do, you have the entrepreneurial bug.
I think it's something else.
Have you read the E-Myth
before?
No, people have mentioned it. People have mentioned it, but I haven't read it.
Yeah, that book came out a while ago. There's a staggering
data in that book.
The statistics shows that 96% of business in the United States failed within the first 10 years.
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.
Out of the 4% that actually are able to survive that 10-year mark, how many of them actually are just
striving and how many of them are thriving?
It's a pretty sad number. If I go down to lesser years, like five years, I think it's like 70%.
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.
We are living in a time
where
people are lost in the world.
People are lost, confused, and they have no idea what they're doing in the entrepreneurial journey.
Right?
My perspective is if you are able to listen and humble yourself and learn, you might be able to skip past those
few years of struggle by learning from your own mistakes.
And you can reduce that to a few of your mistakes and learn from someone else's mistakes and
boost up your time and get there faster, easier, with less stress.
I don't disagree with that. I don't disagree with that. I think that is another...
I mean, look, if I could go back in time and be more
humble and listen to others and learn from other people's mistakes without having to make them myself,
yeah, I would have been successful a lot faster for sure. I mean, early in my, you know, entrepreneurial life,
you know, people talk about like networking or whatever.
When we talk about that, I just mean like being open to partnerships,
helping people so that they help you in return, you know, those sorts of things.
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.
I'm just going to make this happen with force of will.
And that's one of the learnings. It's like, no, you actually can't make it happen with force of will.
It's like the world, the economy is made up of people and you've got to be connecting with people.
And you've got to humble yourself in order to connect with people. So, I mean, I agree with what you're saying.
I think what I said, you know, about never wanting to work for someone else,
where that comes into play is if you do fail
with your first startup or your second startup, you always have the opportunity to go work for someone else.
You know, it's like, well, I gave it a shot. Now, I'm just going to go join a big company.
But for those of us who
genuinely
resent the idea of working for someone else, there is only one option, which is what is my next startup?
If I ask you this question
on the same question you asked me or you mentioned,
if someone had the clarity, the path and the direction
to actually succeed and not fail in the first or the second entrepreneur journey that they have,
would you think we would have
more entrepreneurs right now, more entrepreneur bug right now? What path would you have preferred?
And would that mentality of
only the people who have
who can work for someone else would be able to
succeed in that? What do you think of what I just said? It's all mumble jumbo.
What are your thoughts on that?
No, I mean, if I could summarize what I heard you just say was, you know, if the startup path
was easier and there was a higher likelihood of success,
do you think more people would go down that path?
And I think the answer to that is yes, for sure.
I mean, I think the fear really holds people back from taking that first leap to try that first leap.
To try their first startup. Absolutely.
Yeah, thank you for sharing that.
My next question for you goes along to
what you just mentioned, but maybe there's more to this that I'm not listening or hearing yet.
Why do you think, Nico, leaders hide from funding their vision?
And then how can those same leaders then lean into funding their vision?
Why do leaders hide from funding their vision?
Yeah, I mean, maybe it is kind of what I just talked about with fear, but
I don't know. I mean, there's everybody kind of is coming at it from their own
angle, you know, like obviously you can be afraid to jump. You can be afraid to launch your own vision. You
you may think, you know, this is the only money I have. What if I lose it?
Or if you're going to raise money, you may think how am I going to raise money?
You know, I'll never be able to do it. Or if I do raise it and then I lose my investors,
and then I lose my investors money,
now I'm like on the hook and they're never going to like me again. I mean, there's all sorts of
fear, I think,
that keeps you from
like running towards that.
And I guess I'll just keep coming back to what I was saying about like
when you know, you never want to work for someone again,
the fear
of
being in an office for the rest of your life working for somebody
outweighs any other fear that you might have about losing money or pissing off an investor or anything like that.
And so it's kind of like what's your greater fear? Like that's going to move you.
You're going to move away from your greatest fear
is what I would say. And by the way, you know, in my first startup,
I did raise money, investor dollars.
We did not end up getting those investors a return. You know, we ended up
having to close up shop. We sold the IP. We got a lot of our money back, but no return at all.
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,
which is, you know,
low capital intensity. Like I don't really need to raise money to start a consulting business.
And you can have a really healthy cash conversion cycle so that money comes in from customers
before you have to pay it out to vendors or, you know, employees or anything like that.
And so you get, you can basically fund your own growth.
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
go through the craziness of raising money again and then having to deal with investors and then having to,
you know, in a downside scenario, disappoint them.
Yeah, thank you for sharing that with us, Nico.
I'm going to mention one more thing. You mentioned again with that
that
when you have a desire to not work for anyone else,
that's when this entrepreneur bug goes through. I disagree again. Well, I'll tell you why.
I have something of that similar proposition. If I can
work for myself and make it successfully provided for my family, I'll do that. The only circumstance I would not
go the other route,
would be the worst-case scenario for me would be
literally getting a tech job and making enough
$100,000 or more a year and support my family. I think that would be the worst-case scenario for me in this aspect.
But
if given a chance to
work with maybe Tony Robbins or
Jeff Bezos or
Elon Musk for that example, there's so many people who have done something extraordinary.
But if I give a chance, like, hey, you go and stay with these guys and you work for them
and you absorb as much as you can, I will jump on that
first hand because
things that I learned from that would absolutely outweigh what I could do myself within the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years easily.
That's what I think.
But to me, I don't want to put myself in a box where
hey, I have this bug that I definitely cannot work for someone else. I just have to be the entrepreneur journey
understandable. But I'm not going to be the entrepreneur journey
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,
I might have had the same exact answer you did.
Same exact answer you did.
What do you think of that part? Like, do you agree, disagree? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
I agree in part with what you just said.
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
running my own business. But I think that's the best way to go about it.
Right now running my own business. But
after my
second startup failed,
I did end up working for somebody else. But I worked for somebody else in a
chief operating officer capacity.
It was a
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.
I had some stock options. It was a way to make money
and a way to learn a lot.
We ended up raising private equity funds. So I got to sort of dabble in that world.
I mean, there was a lot of the learning that came out of that.
And so I said yes to that job, working with them.
Just like if Elon or Jeff Bezos or somebody came to me and really wanted me to work with them,
I would have a hard time saying no because of the learning. So I totally agree with you.
The only difference is, you know, when you said,
I think about everything that I'd learned over, you know, three, five, ten, twenty years,
I could stomach the three. I could stomach the five.
I don't know if I would want to do that for ten or twenty years, even if it was Elon.
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.
It's just that's the, that's that bug that I'm talking about, you know. So there's a middle ground.
So you want to learn.
So that's what I'm saying. So there's not a hard line there. The hard line is
learning capacities and if you're able to boost
your journey faster.
So that's what I wanted to know. Okay, that's thank you for sharing that.
Yeah.
I have one more question for you today.
What is your why of what you do when you go? Like what is, if you could have the essence
of the why
or gets you out of bed every morning and do what you keep doing, what is that?
Yeah, I mean the essence that gets me out of bed every morning is the
the thrill of a challenge.
For sure.
And whether that's work, whether that's going on some long swim or a long run or
scuba diving or some sort of adrenaline seeking activity.
That's what, that's what I want to do every day.
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.
I had a lot of great thrills, a lot of great adventures. I lived a great life.
So that's the essence that gets me out of bed.
Thank you for sharing that. Would you like to
Know yours? Sure.
No, I mean you can. Would you can? Yeah. For me,
I'm still figuring a lot of things out, but what I would say
is waking up, spending time with my family and
having a healthier boundaries in life. I think that's pretty exciting.
That's pretty exciting. Another thing that I'm working on recently is
it's called opportunities for
Indians. It's my way of closing the financial gap between the West world and the other side of the of the world.
We have found that
the opportunities me and you have and
most of the Americans do, most of Canadians do, and most of Europe does.
Most of the world does not have that opportunity. They don't know
and some of them haven't been taught the skills necessary to feed their families on a proper extent.
They don't know the guidance. They don't have the skills. They can't speak the language right and
this is our way of teaching them skills
and getting them a better job and
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.
That's what gets me excited. That's awesome.
That's awesome. Yeah, I spent some time in Mumbai
and
beautiful place. I mean there is a lot of wealth there too, but you're right. There's a whole other
side of the country that is very very impoverished and could use a lot of help for sure.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.