He raised $11M off a deck. Here's how he launched Clumio & grew 4x to over 8-figures in ARR. | Poojan Kumar, Founder of Clumio

Poojan 0:00 I say some things become easier. You can say maybe fundraising becomes easier. But overall, the startup experience doesn’t become easy. It’s as hard every single time. It’s fun every single time. If you enjoy that journey, it’s as hard every single time, but nobody cares. Every person you’re working with, employee, anybody, or investor, it doesn’t matter what happened in the past. It’s what’s happening today. Pablo 0:21 Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed-stage firm based in Canada. I’m Pablo. I’m a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product market fit. Poojan, welcome to the show. Poojan 0:39 Thank you, Pablo. Really appreciate doing this. Pablo 0:41 I’m looking through Crunchbase here, which is usually how I start before I jump into these. You started this company in 2017, Clumio. You raised $11 million Series A. Two years later, you get preempted on this $40 million Series B. From a fundraising perspective, it’s like a founder’s dream <laugh> But I think talking to you earlier, a lot of the success you’re having now with Clumio, especially on the fundraising side, had to do with what you accomplished before. You’re a repeat founder and you had another company before Clumio that was acquired, raised about $60 million and was ultimately acquired. Maybe let’s start there. What was your first company? Maybe walk us through what you were working on and what those early days was like, what the origin story was for PernixData, your first company. Before Clumio Poojan 1:30 Absolutely. I think if you look at my career, I spent about 10 years at Oracle and a couple years at VMware before I started the first company. I’ve really not been part of startups if you may, or for that matter, even raised capital and things like that. It was extremely hard, and it’s just basic things as you can imagine, even getting an introduction to a VC. Which VC do you go to? How do you go figure that out? Because obviously there is a lot of options available in the Bay Area, but then how do you approach it? Just even more simpler things like, okay, where do you go and what does the deck look like? You want to raise a seed. What does a deck look like? What is needed in a Series A deck if you’re trying to raise Series A and things like that? I think some of those basic things, which today I can take for granted. Pablo 2:23 Maybe just to set context like, PernixData, you were at Oracle for nine years. You were at VMware. You were doing well, and then to leave and to start a startup, how did that happen? Why did you decide to do that back then? Poojan 2:36 That was always an entrepreneur by heart. I did my grad school at Stanford. I almost dropped out of Stanford, wanted to do a startup back then. Thankfully, I didn’t because bubble burst. But then after spending the time at Oracle – and I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, seeing some growth at Oracle with a new product that I was part of in the early days. Throughout my career, I’ve always worked on new stuff and started new things. That was the desire that I ultimately decided to put into action. Pablo 3:03 What was Pernix ? Poojan 3:05 Pernix was a storage startup, you can say, basically trying to accelerate storage environments with this new device back then that was coming in in enterprise servers called Flash, which became prominent in laptops, and your iPhones, and stuff like that, and started coming into the enterprise. Pablo 3:25 When you get this idea back then, do you just jump ship and go all in? Do you raise money first? How did you time that exit? Poojan 3:32 In both the startups I have done, I typically said, most of my things are more applicable to B2B, not B2C. B2C works different. But in B2B, there’s couple of things. If you can go build a quick prototype or whatever, you and your co-founders leave your job, build a quick prototype and show something, that’s one way to go raise capital. Or in both my companies at least, there was no easy way to do that. The initial alpha, beta, whatever you want to call it, did require 10, 15, 20 engineers in a good amount of time, call it year, year and half. In both cases, we had to go raise capital on an idea, on basically the idea, the market, and the team. The idea is to basically show that it’s a unique thing. Nobody is doing it right now. Market is really, if I go and build it, this is a market and this is a problem it solves. The team, just to give the confidence that, yeah, ultimately I’m asking for a multimillion dollar check, but this is the team is capable to go and execute and build on this. In both cases, we basically had gone that route. In Pernix case, we went and raised $7 million Series A with basically a PowerPoint deck with all the three things. Then Clumio did the same thing. Again, as I said, it, it varies based on what you’re doing. In my case, we had to do that because there’s no way to kind of – and there’s no point in building a prototype and showing that we had the background to go and say that, yes, we can build this. Now, it was about going and convincing somebody that, yes, it’s unique and there is a big market to go after. Pablo 5:07 How did you do that? With Clumio, I get it, because at that point, you’re a founder with a large exit. You’re proven. When you’re repeat founder, successful repeat founder, it’s frankly just a lot easier to raise. But with Pernix, to go out and raise $7 million on a deck, I can tell you, I meet so many founders and very few are able to do that. I know that as a founder, I think people listening to this must be like, what did he do? What was the magic? What was the secret to actually getting $7 million? It’s not $1 million. It’s $7 million off of a PowerPoint presentation. Maybe you can take us through what’s your advice, and also what is it that you think you did right, specifically with Pernix to be able to raise $7 million off of a PowerPoint, as you said? Raising 7 Million Dollars off a Power Point Poojan 5:53 It wasn’t easy. I would say that was always a desire. At any point in time, just take a step back, you raise a round of financing. It’s meant to take you from Point A to Point B. The goal was for us to go raise that $7 million of Series A. We had made a plan saying that if we are able to raise that, then I can go and build a shippable product, and then I’m ready for Series B. Basically, get me through the Product Market Fit, and really go raise a Series B to really go scale. I knew that that’s not going to be easy. If I’m not able to do that, I had a backup plan, and the backup plan was go raise a million, million and a half, which I thought was definitely doable just based on the background. Because remember, I had enough close to 15 years of enterprise experience, and it was enterprise idea. I had credibility in the space. You have to be clear in your head and what you want. Pablo 6:46 I think that’s smart, having these two plans, but not necessarily disclosing it. Sometimes founders almost disclose too much, and it then appears a little bit soft. It’s like, I’m going to try raise seven, and they say this, I’m going to raise a seven. But if I can only raise two, here’s what I’m going to do. It’s like, okay, you got to go all in at least in the way you talk about it. That makes sense. My question though is, ultimately, Plan A worked. You did raise 7 million, and I’m curious what you attribute that to. How much of that was your credibility, as you said, having been in the enterprise space? How much of it was the deck and the presentation? Maybe how much of it was just meeting the right investor who just got it? Poojan 7:21 I would say, I think that it’s a combination of everything at the end of the day, but the third factor you pointed out is very important. This is where meeting the right folks is very important. You have to go to folks who understand the stuff. The VCs that have gone both in my previous company, as well as at Clumio right now, are folks who get the space, who understand enterprise B2B very deeply, and are not afraid to make a Series A bet on the right idea and the right team. You really have to go and get to these folks, and you get one shot. I tell the folks, you get one shot. If you’re lucky, you get the second meeting, but you should expect that if you don’t nail the first one and there’s no second meeting. Again, and going to the right set of folks after having honed the pitch, which is again I tell folks, don’t go to your perfect target in the first listing. It’s okay. You’ve got to burn a little, burn a couple folks to perfect it. While I was doing it for the second time at Clumio, it’s a little known secret that, no, I still had to go through a couple of VCs to perfect my pitch and stuff like that before I decided to go to the folks. I was really interested and I knew that these folks, if I can convince them, they have the ability to give me that check. Pablo 8:37 At Pernix, do you remember how many of those meetings did you do? Did you do 10, 20, 50? Poojan 8:41 No. I would say it was still very laser-targeted. It is very important to be very laser-targeted in some of these things. I think I would say if my goal was to raise a million, million and a half seed, I think there’s definitely more options I had, and I could go and optimize. You can optimize for the person. You can optimize for the valuation. You can optimize for a bunch of things, as you know. But this one was more laser-targeted. There was very few of those folks, and I actually went methodically after them. I would say it was definitely less than 10. Pablo 9:10 Maybe fast-forwarding a little bit. You go through Pernix. You end up raising it a Series A, Series B, Series C, about $60 million in total. You end up exiting. The company gets acquired in 2016 or so, I believe. Correct me if I’m wrong. Then a year later, you start Clumio. What drives you to do that? Did you not think about, okay, I’m going to go take a break for <laugh> a few years sabbatical, some people call it? Or did you know right away, I’m going in for a second one? Starting Clumio Poojan 9:35 I think it’s one of those things. I joke about it as though there’s a wiring issue. Doing it again and again is not easy. I say some things become easier. Maybe fundraising becomes easier. Overall, the startup experience doesn’t become easy. It’s as hard every single time, and it’s fun every single time. If you enjoy that journey, it’s as hard every single time because nobody cares. Every person whom you’re working with, employee, anybody, or investor, it doesn’t matter what happened in the past. It’s what’s happening today in this particular thing. It’s never easy. You have to fundamentally like the journey. I think that ultimately drove me to, going back to your question, is to basically do this. Nutanix was a fantastic company. I was, again, doing two or three new things there, but then the whole thing about going out and the thrill of the journey of starting something with a brand new idea. The other thing that was a big driving force for me personally in this case was my entire career was in the data center, building software, hardware, things for the data center. Public cloud was a new big thing that was happening, and I was vicariously living it all along. My goal was to really go and be part of building something in the public cloud, a SaaS service. I’d never built a service in the cloud and things like that. That was another driving force, really reinventing myself into the cloud SaaS space was another big driving force, which comes with learning and all of that. Pablo 11:03 The way that you think about coming up with startup ideas, and you are alluding it to there, you have this. You’re seeing what’s happening in public cloud. You want to play a role there. You want to do something at SaaS. How do you go from that to a specific idea? What was the process by which you came up with the idea for Clumio? Poojan 11:19 It takes time. I think in both cases, I was always in the back of my head. I was thinking, okay, what is the next thing? What could be the next thing? Again, you have to go predict the future. You go start a company today. If you’re lucky, you’re going to get a 10-year journey, if you’re lucky. You would basically almost see that, okay, is this idea going to be relevant for the next 5 to 10 years? Bottom line is that stuff you have to go do some deep thinking around in terms of what’s happening in the market. What are the discontinuities in the sector? For example, it’s very simple. Going from hard desk to flash was a discontinuity in the storage sector 10, 15 years ago. It already happened in the consumer devices like iPhone, but it was beginning to happen in the data center. There was a big discontinuity. That discontinuity, if you see, created a set of companies. Some became really big, like Pure Storage, Nutanix. Some, like ours and others, got acquired. The point is that discontinuity created that. Similarly, the discontinuity from data center computing to cloud computing started by Amazon and followed by Azure. Google Cloud has created a new set of very large companies like Snowflake and Datadog, focusing on these discontinuities, which you’re lucky if they happen, but they happen. If you’re looking closely every 5, 10 years, you see some of this. Now, there’s discontinuities. AI is happening as we speak. Anytime these discontinuities happen as an opportunity, now you have to go double-click and say, okay, with this discontinuity that’s happening, what’s an opportunity? This is where the knowledge of the space does matter, again B2B. B2C is different. But in the B2B world, it matters. Where are the legacy architectures will not be able to adapt, whom you can go and disrupt where technology cannot adapt to this new thing? That double-clicking and triple-clicking and thinking deeply gives you a bunch of ideas. Then you got to go and validate it, and think about, and find the right set of co-founders, how you can build it, and get validation with customers if you really want to raise a Series A and so on and so forth. But bottom line is it starts with a discontinuity, and you go from there. Pablo 13:22 I love that because what it clearly shows is the power of being an expert, a deep industry expert, and how that helps you find unique insights. I’m curious if you can go a step further. Specifically with Clumio, you’re talking about the discontinuity that you saw jumping to cloud computing, AWS cloud, Google, et cetera. What was the next step there? What was your process to go from there to the idea like – and you mentioned, the legacy players that you thought, okay, this legacy player, this legacy solution’s not going to be able to translate. What was it in this specific case? Poojan 13:54 In fact, if you think about it, all of those things really went – if you look at a Series A deck, all of that basically went into the deck. That’s how you convince somebody to give you a non-trivial check. Because what you’ve done is you’ve basically shown them, talked about the discontinuity, talked about the market, talked about why the existing players will not be able to go and capture it, and how you can. You’ve not built anything, obviously, because building is going to require a significant capital, at least in the examples I’ve been involved. That is what you’re basically convincing folks on. Double-clicking on this thing, the cloud computing environment is very different. People were consuming services in the cloud. People were going and running their software across multiple regions, or that required a very different architecture in the cloud. In my case, we already had companies that were beginning to do that, but in different spaces. The example is Snowflake was doing that in data warehousing. Datadog was doing that in cloud monitoring. Now, it was about, okay, what are the white spaces now that are not already being done? Because I think obviously, you can be a Number 2, Number 3 player and try to copy an existing idea. That also happens, when somebody becomes successful. But we are trying to find a brand-new white space, which is a market that’s actually not being tapped. I always believe, companies doing something with data can become the largest companies over time. We wanted to basically be in the data space. One of the things we are looking at is a backup. Backup is a large market, and as people move into the cloud, they’re going to need backup in the cloud also. Then we try double-clicking. It’s like, okay, what’s the solution available in the cloud today? How are people doing it today? Can I take an on-prem architecture, data center architecture and really retrofit it to the cloud? Not really. Why not? Then that’s a double-click, triple-click. That is how you convince yourself first. If you are convinced, of course, because you’re from the broader space – never in the backup space per se. But bottom line is once you’re convinced when understanding what’s happening, then you create the framework of a deck that I talk about, which is you talk about the idea, you talk about the competition, you talk about their architecture, you talk about what your architecture can be, you talk about the market. You get some customer validation. You talk to customers and said, okay, if we did this, would you buy it? Is this a pain point? Then you have the entire package and then you&#39;re ready to go fundraise. Pablo 16:19 Tell me a bit more about the customer part, because there’s so many ways to do that from a high-level conversation. Like, hey, we’re trying to build this. Do you think it’s a good idea? A lot of people are just nice. They’ll just tell you what you want to hear. That’s a waste of time especially for the founder, frankly. But how do you structure those conversations to get actual information, real insight, real feedback, and get a real sense that, yeah, okay, you know what, if I built this, they will buy? Starting Conversations with Customers Poojan 16:41 In both cases, I would say both at Pernix and Clumio, I think it was all about first finding these folks. In some cases, your past relationships, your past background helps. In some cases, you just have to go spend the cycles, your LinkedIn, your network and everything that you can, and really get in front of a few of these folks. I pretty much hustled and did everything possible to get in front of these folks. Pablo 17:09 What were some of the things – do you remember, especially at Pernix, now, I think I’m sure it was easier at Clumio. But at Pernix, do you remember some of the strategies that really worked to get you in front of the right people? Because like you say, that alone is a hard step for a first time founder just to even have the conversation. Poojan 17:23 Yeah. Pernix was much harder, as I said. Obviously, in the case of Pernix, we had some relationships that I had in the past that I leveraged. Then basically use them to get them introducing me to their other peers, so to speak. That’s how I created the set of folks. Over time, I really went into conferences. Literally, I’ll tell you a story where I went to no conference and then stood beside a booth of a storage company, which will basically go and not eliminate, but essentially take budget from and stuff like that. I stood beside for a few minutes and a couple of folks I saw asking really deep questions about the technology and this thing. Once the guy left that, I basically followed him, and I essentially told him, oh, I’m the startup founder, this and that. This guy is like, [unclear] following me, and then asking me this thing. One thing led to another in that journey, and that guy whom I actually caught at the booth became our first customer, first paying customer at Pernix, $15,000 deal. He bought it for two servers, first paying customer. Not only that, he actually went ahead and joined the company also as our first systems engineer. Pablo 18:33 Wow. I think it’s funny you mentioned that. What I’ve noticed more and more is there’s founders who just – they put so much energy into the world thing that something’s bound to give. Who knows how many conferences you went to or how many of these things you tried? Then this one really led to a customer that led to somebody that joined your company, like really clicked. But yeah, the more things you do, the more things that seemingly fall in your lap. It’s really just like you say, hustle. Poojan 18:57 Even to get our alpha program going, I think we basically went to the biggest VMware conference back then. It’s actually Clumio. At Clumio, we went to a big conference and I basically had set up 15, 20 meetings based on LinkedIn. Of course I had my past background also at play. Then between those 15, 20 meetings over those three, four days over lunches, and coffees, and dinners, or whatever, that’s where we got our first five alpha customer. I’m saying, these are things you got to do. It’s like, you don’t have the budget to put up a big booth, and you don’t even have a product yet and things like that. Now, you have to go and do this stuff behind the scenes and get in access. It’s just hard work. It’s not impossible. Obviously, if you’re going after market and you’ve validated in, and there exist people out there, you just have to find them. I think more and more with LinkedIn and others, it become much easier in finding folks. You’ll find there’s a class of people who are early adopters. They love new technology. As far as you’re solving a pain for them and you’re articulating that well, who will get the opportunity? Pablo 19:57 Walk me through that. You get those conversations. How do you structure them to actually make sure that you are solving a real pain point versus just having people tell you what you want to hear? Poojan 20:07 Absolutely. I Finding and Solving the Real Pain Points Poojan 20:08 think this is where the rubber meets the road. I think it’s a combination of firstly telling them, because you have to set the context. You tell them what are you really going and solving, and how you are solving it, getting them excited about the how is important because that’s where the difference is in most of the cases, and what it means for them in that particular case. Is it something that saves them money, for instance? Or does it basically save them time, or it’s something that they’re not able to do today and you’re enabling them to do today? You’re essentially going, and ultimately, what does it mean for them and how you’re doing it? I think the combination of those two things you do, you’re essentially going in saying, this is the pain I’m solving for you. No. But you need to hear back on, is this a pain in the first place? Because if it’s a pain in the first place, you’re solving it and you convinced them that you’re solving it in a very unique way, so it’s not something that they can get it elsewhere. Now, you got them very interested. If it’s not a pain, guess what, that’s not a customer you’re going to essentially get. I think if you double-click and ask the right questions, you will get the answer. Because the person there, at the end of the day, if he has taken the meeting and things like that, they’re, at the end of the day, either looking for a solution or they very happily say, this is not a fit for me. That’s what you have to go and try. Sometimes it takes a little bit of trial and error to get to that right thing, but you have to be very intellectually honest. You’re just not there to hear what you want to hear. You really want to get to the answer. In these cases, since there is an outcome involved, what’s the outcome? I’m either going get them as an alpha, beta customer or not. I think you’ll get the answer because it’s going to happen or not going to happen. The happy years thing is not going to happen at the end of the day. Pablo 21:49 Do you charge? Early on when you’re this pre-product phase, you’re trying to get these alpha customers, are you asking them to be an alpha customer and pay you? Or how do you structure that usually? Poojan 21:59 At least my experience in the last decade in the last couple startups, it’s really, I think you are essentially giving them the service for free, initially, with obviously the understanding that as the thing goes from beta to GA and they like what they see, customers are more than happy to pay for it. There’s no issues there, especially if you’re solving them a real problem at the end of the day. Yes, why not? It’s not something that – but in the initial phases, because you’re looking not for money, you’re looking for feedback. You’re looking to become the product. It’s like you can go from a 0 to a 0.8 version product. At 0.8 to 1.0 is what you’re looking for from a customer in the customer environment. That is what you’re looking for. That time that they’re giving you and the feedback is what is priceless, and you should focus on that. Now, you get to the 1.0. If you’ve solved it, they’ll pay, and guess what? Now, that journey that they have helped you getting the 0.8 to 1.0 will help you to basically go much wider to a lot of other customers. That’s what you should focus on. Pablo 23:01 Because one thing I hear a lot, and even has happened to me is you get these tire kickers sometimes where we’ll say, yeah, this is interesting. Oh, it’s free. Oh, sure, I’ll do it. Do you find that it’s maybe less common in enterprise? In enterprise, to adopt a product and give that time is maybe a bigger ass than if you’re selling to SMB or something like that where it’s like, oh sure, yeah, I’ll try it, whatever. Do you think that’s a reason why in your case, giving it for free didn’t give you false hope, these were real customers? Poojan 23:29 Absolutely. I think, yeah, these folks, at least in the space we play in, they won’t give you the time. They don’t have the time to give you. You’re asking for real time, maybe one hour a week, installing the software in their environment, asking for feedback and all of those things. They won’t give you all of that. Don’t get me wrong, it might not convert into a sale. It might not convert into this thing because they might not have the budget. They might not have the power in the organization to influence you and all that. That should not be the goal with the early folks. The goal should be to get you from that 0.8 to 1.0. That should be the focus. Pablo 23:59 Then walk me through that early stage between Series A and Series B. You have $11 million. How many people do you go out and hire? Is it 100% product and engineers? How do you just structure that part of it? Because it’s weird when you’re building, you don’t have the customers yet. You’re just in this build mode. The Stage Between Series A and B Poojan 24:18 Yeah. In both my examples, if you’re in stealth, you’re really focused on building products. A hundred percent of the team is really engineering and products, basically. That’s all there is to it. That’s a company. It’s 15, 20 people max because you don’t need more than that, and that includes QE and everything, the entire set of folks who need to go and ship the product effectively. That’s all you should need. Then once you’ve gotten the alphas and the betas, now you decide, are you ready? Are you seeing enough of a signal in the market? Are you seeing enough repeatability? Do you want to go come out of stealth? Does coming out of stealth help you in getting more folks in your funnel and so on and so forth? This is where you go figure out the timing for that next step, which is going and investing in sales. Again, depends if you could have a PLG motion or you could have sales led in more of SLG motion. In our case, it was more SLG in both cases. Now, you’re going to go start investing in sales folks and initially, basically, tying them to essentially going and creating pipeline, and maybe beta customers, and so on and so forth. Over time, going and transitioning them into more carrying a quota and things like that. But by the time, you most likely reach the Series B stage and you’re ready to go and raise more capital to go and expand that motion that you started doing. That is the transition where you go from purely product and engineering and all of that to now started to put your toe in the water in terms of go-to market. Pablo 25:51 One thing that’s interesting is you raised 11 million. You only hired 15 or 20 people. Why not hire 30 or 40 and just move faster? Does that not work out? Does that break when you try and do that? Keep your Team Lean Poojan 26:02 No. I think that’s a classic mistake. Firstly, I think I raised the $10 million, $11 million because I could. Reality is I didn’t need more than five. That was a reality. Ultimately, if you see, we pretty much – I would say if I literally use the amount of capital we burned to go through the first year and a half, two years to get that initial alpha, beta product of $3 million, $3.5 million. Right there, you can say that five was more than enough. You want to keep a buffer on top. But I think you would keep the team lean at that point because I think you need the ability to go and iterate really fast and pay work if needed and so on and so forth. That’s where it’s very important to keep it very lean, because you don’t know. You don’t know if what you built is actually good enough or would there been more iterations, or more changes, or things that you’ll have to do. This is where keeping it lean is very important. Even if you have the capital in the bank, capital in the bank is more there for like, okay, just gives you more, call it insurance or whatever. But really, I think that should not change how you think about going through that first couple of years, depending on the complexity of the product. Whatever the time period is, that should not change. Keep it lean. I would say if it’s a five people thing, keep it at five people. If it’s 20 people, keep it 20, but it doesn’t matter. Just don’t hire because you can. If at all, you can say it can slow down things and doesn’t speed up things. Pablo 27:21 That’s been my experience as well, perfect. Let’s end on these two final questions that we end on. What ends up happening is you get a $40 million Series B that was preempted. Then you really start to deploy with customers. The first question is, when did you – at that point, it’s still, let’s say experimental. You have alpha customers. You have signals. But when was it that you felt like you had true product market fit? Finding True Product Market Fit Poojan 27:47 I think product market fit, in both cases, it’s about finding the repeatability. Can you hire a new sales rep and can you point them in the right direction, which they call, say an ICP, idle customer profile, and train them on the two or three use cases that they need to go after? That is what you need. Of course, you need to have the right enablement for it. Can you take somebody obviously some domain knowledge in the overall sector, not specifically, but your technology? At least they would have done some enterprise selling, call it. That’s it. You are able to get them onboard and enable them, and give them the ramp time, and see them predictably going in, generating pipeline, and ultimately, closing business. I think that is what it comes down to. It takes time. You get a rep. You have to give them the ramp period, six months. It can be nine months, whatever it might be. That tells you that if you can do that repeatably and you’re able to point them in the right direction, and they’re able to close business repeatably now, yes, you can go and expand that. Pablo 28:53 Having done everything you’ve done, we went through one full journey and now you’re going through another one. What would be your number one piece of advice, either for yourself as you were starting off or for a first time founder that’s just getting started today? One Piece of Advice Poojan 29:06 I would say, I think as every journey is so unique and you might think you know it, but the reality is there’s so much that unknowns are going to come in front of you. Of course, you have the past experience to able to go and deal with the unknowns, but that doesn’t change the degree of the unknown and stuff like that. For me, it’s been a ton of learning in this one also. It’s like what we thought was true was not really true. Then we had to go pivot and pivot and really get to ultimately where the pain is and where we can find repeatability and so on and so forth. I think being humble, being very grounded, you’re going to have your ass kick, doesn’t matter what happened in the past. You’re going to have your ass kick. Just be prepared for that. It’s not going to get easier. It’s always hard and going to remain hard. It doesn’t make it easier. Maybe some aspects get easier. I’ve talked about fundraising type stuff and you knowing what to put on a deck. All those things might be. But otherwise, execution-wise is still as hard. Really, I think those are things you have to internalize and know about, whether you’re doing it first time or second time. You’re lucky you get that 5, 10 years ahead of you. Then make sure that you’re always very focused, really not trying to hear what you want to hear, but really what’s happening out there, being intellectually honest. Pablo 30:24 Thank you very much. We’ll stop it there. Really appreciate you taking the time and jumping on the show. Poojan 30:29 My pleasure, Pablo. Really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you very much. Pablo 30:33 I just gave you content that you liked so much. You actually listened to the end. Guess what? You didn’t pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn’t even put any ads in your face, so you just got a bunch of content for free. Now that I’ve delivered that value, I’m asking for something in return. Open your app, open Apple Podcast, open Spotify, open whatever app you use to listen to this, and hit that follow button. It’s actually going to help you because it’s going to help you make sure you don’t miss out on the next episode, which you like so much that you listen to the whole thing.