E90: VC Principal Kunal Mehta and His Many Leaps
About
In this episode, we hear about Kunal Mehta's path from pure finance at NYU to Sales & Trading at Nomura once he graduated. Find out why he quit without anything else lined up, what he did to pay the bills, why he was lost and how he stumbled into work that had meaning for him. What I like most about this episode is his willingness to share is failed missteps an entrepreneur and how it has shaped him as an investor on the other side of the table. Make sure to check out his latest book, Finding Genius on Amazon or in Bookstores. Link in the show notes.
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WSO Podcast (Episode 90) Transcript:
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:00:06] Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis. Your host and chief monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me as I talk to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general. Let's get to it. In this episode, we hear about Kunal Mehta's path from pure finance at NYU to sales and trading at Nomura once he graduated. Find out why he quit without anything else lined up, what he did to pay the bills, why he was lost and how he stumbled into work that had meaning for him. What I like most about this episode is his willingness to share his failed missteps as an entrepreneur, and now how it has shaped him as an investor on the other side of the table. Also, make sure to check out his latest book Finding Genius on Amazon or in bookstores at a store near you. Enjoy. All right, Colonel, thanks so much for joining the Wall Street Voices podcast.
Kunal Mehta: [00:01:08] Yeah, I appreciate it. It's great to be here. Thanks.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:01:11] All right.
Kunal Mehta: [00:01:12] Yeah. All right.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:01:15] So real quick, give a little bio of your background just to for the listeners to get some.
Kunal Mehta: [00:01:21] Oh, sure I can. I'll start. I'll start way back. But I had. Actually, I'm from Brooklyn, originally a small town of Bay Ridge, and began working at Morgan in seven. It was part of a four year program with NYU, where they were going to pay for my full college tuition, but I had to work for them. At the same time, it was called Smart Star Program. I think they still run it. Really great program. Pretty exciting. They accepted about 15 people here from New York and got into the industry before the recession hit. And it was really kind of peak Wall Street. Everybody was living a pretty great life and really interesting to be there. So spent the following four years there kind of riding it the entire way down. So seeing J.P. Morgan go through a lot of transitions, the acquisition of Bear Stearns, we actually moved into three eight three Madison, my senior year of college, which is the old Bear Stearns building. So got to see a ton of changes there. Spend another year on Wall Street after graduating college, but was more excited and interested in kind of an entrepreneurial side of things and decided to leave without much of a plan. And I think the reason for that was a lot of the tech media that I was reading was more about.It's so easy to start a company. If you're smart, you've gone to a good college, you've gotten a good job, you're smart enough to go and launch a billion dollar business. So quit with that kind of misnomer pretty quickly realized I had no idea what the hell I was actually doing, and I ended up in order to break into the startup ecosystem and learn more. I ended up interviewing about 50 different people who left their corporate jobs. So are you to start up companies that went on to do well? But I wanted to understand kind of in their first six months what that journey looks like. So I ended up tracking down some founders and got pretty lucky to speak to the founders of Pinterest and Betterment and Learn Best and Foursquare, and a nonprofit called Charity Water here in New York. So some of those companies have gone on to do really well. Some have kind of gone up and then down, and then some disappeared. But it was really interesting kind of hearing all the perspectives. So publish all that in a book called Disruptors and then started working for charity water. So I'll I'll breeze through the rest really quickly. Just add some context. But so spent three years, two years at charity water, then left as the book started doing well, did about a six month book tour which led into a startup idea.We called it unfold. We raised some financing for that and did that for about a year and a half, but it eventually failed, which I can go into if it's of interest to your listeners and then transition into venture capital. So for the past four and a half years of an adventure, first two ish years were through NYU's endowment. It was a small seed stage fund investing in PhDs and faculty and postdocs out of the ecosystem. And in the last two ish years, I've been at Ernst Ventures here in New York City, and we're doing Series A through C investments. The fund has been around for over 20 years. The first generation was all media investments and Roku, Pandora, BuzzFeed, Netscape, Sirius XM Media Investments. And then the second generation has been more as Hearst as diversified away from. They still are very invested in media and magazines, broadcast television, radio, but we're also hearst at the corporate level has been looking into other areas of interest. So it's been health care, it's been finance, it's been transportation mobility. So the Ventures team gets to kind of invest in areas that might be of interest to the corporation in the future.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:04:50] So let's go back to your story because I think that's the most interesting. I think that's the most relevant to the listeners because you've had some interesting twists and turns. Yeah. So going back to that program at NYU, you were working for the full four years.
Kunal Mehta: [00:05:03] Yeah, so full time in the summer, in part time in the school year.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:05:06] And so what are you doing like 20 hours a week during the school year or
Kunal Mehta: 00:05:09] About twenty twenty five during the school year?
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:05:11] And that just covers your tuition fully at NYU.
Kunal Mehta: [00:05:14] I cover my tuition fully at NYU and they paid hourly and they paid for books, so it was a pretty great program.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:05:21] So, yeah, NYU tuition, even back then was probably like fifty thousand a year.
Kunal Mehta: [00:05:25] It was a lot. It was definitely a lot. And so books add up, and getting paid hourly to is pretty helpful when you're going out in New York City.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:05:32] So does that program typically transition to a full time job at the same bank?
Kunal Mehta: [00:05:38] It doesn't necessarily. I mean, the hope is kind of for both sides. That it does is that it works out well and kind of everybody transition into a full time job there. The the idea is that they're supporting you for the four years and then you kind of in your junior year summer the way most people do their internships, they do it and they try to find a role there.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:05:58] Were you in were you in banking during your summer internship?
Kunal Mehta: [00:06:02] Yeah, I didn't invest in banking my junior year summer.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:06:05] Tell me about that, you didn't get the full time off for coming out. I mean, I knew it was a bad year.
Kunal Mehta: [00:06:09] Yeah, I did. I ended up getting a full time offer, but it was not a fan of investment banking. Tell me, tell me what you want to do trading. And one of the directors was leaving JP Morgan to go over in Nomura, and that was when Nomura Securities was kind of building out. They had bought over Lehman and everybody was saying, It's going to be this incredible experiment here in the US. I don't think it panned out the way that many people had hoped, but it was an interesting time to go over with with him.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:06:37] Tell me about your thought process, sales and training versus investment banking. Just just like more basic level of like, OK, you did the banking thing, what you liked, what you didn't like, and then why you were more attracted to S.A..
Kunal Mehta: [00:06:48] Yeah, sure. I think the banking side was definitely a bit more. It was interesting in terms of when deep and within one industry. So we were doing a lot of real estate kind of hospitality, gaming and the skills that you build within banking. I've definitely noticed later in my career like a charity water, I didn't notice it building a startup. I didn't notice it. Now more and more when I'm evaluating businesses, I notice it. But I think the stuff that I could have learned in banking would have been in three or four months as opposed to doing it. So many different repetitions of it, which I think is why a lot of analysts go in for a year or two and then get out. I didn't like the culture, I didn't like the kind of lifestyle of it, and I didn't like the pace of it. I think there was a lot of hours in the day we were just sitting at your desk waiting for someone to drop work on your table. What I appreciated about trading, which I had done my sophomore year, was more the pace of it. And kind of every day you get in around 6:00, you leave around four thirty five. I really appreciate to this day day trading and investing in stocks, and I think that was the closest thing that I was getting into was the pace of the flow of it and JPMorgan. There was a really good team there, so appreciated that a bit more and that's what I want to do that. But I don't think skill is that transferable.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:08:08] Why do you think if you kind of knew that you liked it on sophomore year, why do you think you went into the bank? It was just a pressure to like, Do you invest in banking because everyone else was
Kunal Mehta: [00:08:15] A lot of pressure? And I think at Stern, a lot of the conversation was investment banking is prestigious, the status and things like that. And that's where you need to go.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:08:25] Well, also S.A. at that point, you know, after Dodd-Frank and all that stuff, it seems to be a dying business, right?
Kunal Mehta: [00:08:30] Right, exactly. And I think that was also changing. That was pre Dodd-Frank when I did S&P all kind of being talked about while I was there, and I think they didn't see the implications of it all changing at that point. But especially with banking, I think there was more of a status element that I didn't really fully understand what the role was before going into it. And I think I went into it a bit blindly.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:08:52] So, OK, so you've got a nice taste of it. Over the summer at JPM, you did get an offer, but you turned it down. Was that with? An offer from Nomura in hand. It was, yeah, about like that time period of like getting your offer, how long you have to respond and then what you did to flip it into a Nomura offer.
Kunal Mehta: [00:09:11] So I actually know so it was it was a soft offer from JPMorgan Morgan. It was kind of when you finish the program, then they end up deciding, then they discuss kind of work with you since you're in that program until the end of June and they give you another internship for that final year. So they show you another side of the bank so we can stay at JPMorgan. And here's this group that you can kind of fall with it. But I ended up doing on campus recruiting anyway and then getting an offer from Nomura through that director that I was mentioning. And that kind of helps transition over to Nomura, which I know where I just thought that might be interesting. It might be a new challenge. He was I was more interested in entrepreneurial endeavours, kind of through college. I tried to start a couple of businesses. And that's the way the director was positioning. And it's a new thing. You'll get a lot more opportunity. You'll learn a lot more. It'll be faster paced. Try something.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:09:58] You still work at JPM during your senior year to pay for your tuition.
Kunal Mehta: [00:10:02] Yeah, yeah.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:10:03] But you knew you had the offer of Nomura and they were cool with that. They don't care.
Kunal Mehta: [00:10:05] Yeah, they were cool with it. And I think like the individual managers that you're working with, they're great people. They're just like, Yeah, you're working with us for a year. So let's make the most of it and we know you're leaving. It's a big company. So it's like,
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:10:18] Yeah, okay, so you're you joined Nomura right after undergrad. It's kind of the depths of the recession. We're coming out of it a little bit. Yeah, 2011, right? Tell me a little bit about what it was like being in that it was more like the wild wild west was. Was it a six a.m. to five p.m.? Tell me anything.
Kunal Mehta: [00:10:35] It was six a.m. to five p.m. And then there would be kind of most nights we'd be going out with clients. So that was kind of different. Worked on a really interesting desk. There it was with some folks who have been in the business for a long time. Twenty five years, they taught me quite a bit still pretty close and some of them actually. So I talked to them quite a bit. So I won't be too transparent there about the internal experiences, but actually got to kind of meet a ton of really, really interesting clients understand the business pretty well. And I think more and more as I talked to the senior members of the desk too, some of them were also telling me. Is this something that you want to consider for the rest of your career? Things are changing in our industry. We're doing it. We're doing well. But I think the good days of kind of past and I think it's kind of what you said to is the recession. It just we're just sort of coming out of it. So people are a bit more cynical. I think now there's a lot of traders that are doing really well in the role, and it's kind of a little bit gone back to normal. But at that time, they were very much, I think they were seeing my dissatisfaction with the role they were seeing that I maybe wasn't as interested in the work. It was doing well. They got the full bonus and got the good reviews and things. It was on a good patch promotion, but I think it was more just.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:11:49] Were you more on the trading side or more
Kunal Mehta: [00:11:51] On the trading side? Yeah. So you are
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:11:53] Like, but you still had to entertain clients and go
Kunal Mehta: [00:11:55] Out? Yeah, we saw that the entire state. Yeah, yeah, we're doing more kind of repo anyway. So it's it's a pretty social business.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:12:04] Tell me a little bit about, yeah, what was the what was the trading like? What did you what is it? Mostly just what you'd call like flow trading, like just, you know, making markets?
Kunal Mehta: [00:12:13] Yeah, mostly making markets matching one kind of book with another. It was it wasn't rocket science. I think like once you do it for a month or two, you pick it up pretty quickly.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:12:22] The farther you were, you like, OK,
Kunal Mehta: [00:12:24] Yeah, I think I think for me, it was more like I didn't see myself wanting to be a director on that, that desk. And I saw myself 20 years from now basically being like, OK, so I keep doing this. This is what life looks like. Is that exciting? And I think I couldn't pretty honestly say to myself that, yes, it did.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:12:40] The only thing before you made the decision to move S.A., if you had known what the day to day would be like, would you have changed? Would that have changed your decision? Would you have gone to banking?
Kunal Mehta: [00:12:48] No, I don't think so. No, I still don't think. I still don't think that the banking piece was something that I wanted to do. And would you
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:12:57] Still don't S.A. just to just abide some time and make some money?
Kunal Mehta: [00:13:00] Yeah, I would have. And I think I also appreciated the personalities in S&P much more than making.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:13:06] A little more colorful,
Kunal Mehta: [00:13:08] A little more colourful, a little more social. A little bit more. Kind of less structured in their approach, I think the banking is very much like the banking approach was very much like this deck has to look like this move this period to this problem. Make sure the slide is one which wasn't for me. I was just like, This really is entrepreneurial.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:13:26] You're a little bit more like, let's just go and figure things out and move.
Kunal Mehta: [00:13:30] Even if the role was a little bit repetitive and trading, I think the the directors had fun in their jobs. They weren't, they weren't there. They were there to work, but they were also they had families and they were going back to them and they were spending time there. And not to say the bankers didn't want to do that, but it just felt like they were all at work all the time.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:13:45] I mean, like a one minute summary of what your typical day was like there.
Kunal Mehta: [00:13:49] Yeah. So it was a long time ago. I remember too well, but I mean, I would get into work and we would have these roles where we would have to roll off some of the trades that we had on from the previous week or things like that. So that's kind of what we would do in the morning. And the rest of the day was finding a inequities because we were finding we were I can't I can't even actually remember it well. We were making a market on some of the dividends of these Canadian equities and then we're trading those with Canadian banks, international banks as well. So it was a lot of sitting time on the phone and finding equities that people were trading out of and getting into and matching the markets with what Nomura wanted. So it was on a daily basis. It was very similar. There weren't like longer term projects that we were working towards, just execution. It was all execution. Yeah, yeah, OK.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:14:38] And so when you how soon into that role did you know, Hey, this isn't for me, was it like within a couple of months?
Kunal Mehta: [00:14:45] Yeah, I think like four or five months and I started looking for other roles pretty quickly.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:14:52] Is this when you started reading media to about like startups and you can do it yourself?
Kunal Mehta: [00:14:56] Yeah, I started reading media. I started seeing like, what's this far away from this as possible? Starting getting more excited about nonprofits started getting really just excited about everything else and technology. I think the hardest part was that there's twenty two year olds that are building massive companies. I feel like I'm sitting here doing this repeatable job every single day and then people are telling you with the opportunity cost of you sitting there is that you're not going to be building something that's interesting to your building a career. And if you stay in trading longer, you get typecast as a trader. And that was hard for me to stomach. So I kind of at the four month mark I started applying, I said, OK, if at one year, I can't really find anything that I'm into or interested in because I think a lot of people were also looking at my resume and saying he's just been to Wall Street, like, why should we as a start hire? And that was also pretty humbling back then. Luckily, things have changed since then, but at that point, Wall Street still had a pretty negative stigma.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:15:47] Did you think of potentially going venture at all?
Kunal Mehta: [00:15:50] I didn't. I didn't actually know too much about venture at that point. And I think also, I wanted to be on the operating side for a while, which was which was a good experience.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:16:00] You had some, some businesses during college admission. Any anything worth mentioning a friend.
Kunal Mehta: [00:16:06] And I tried to start something called Bill MASH, which was around the same time that Venmo was being launched. And similar to kind of how friends share and split expenses, we didn't get too far with it, but we were just kept trying small things. And I did like a lot of things that were never technology or venture scale, just small businesses of importing some random thing from China and then selling it on Amazon and making some money like that. But it's just things to keep excited. And I think it was more to keep myself distracted away from Wall Street because that's what all stern was. It's all what I was doing during the day. It was like, All right, what can I do? That's I'm building something of my own.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:16:43] Yeah, it's funny because with the with NYU Stern and all that, given the proximity, given everything when we look at the company database and Wall Street, Oasis and Stern gets the most interviews of any because you hear, like Wharton, Penn, all that stuff, at least, at least from what we're seeing the data, it's like Stern is just gets a ton of interviews, right?
Kunal Mehta: [00:17:03] And you'll have I mean, I think what you'll have is listeners of this podcast who are a little bit confused by the decisions I made because I think. If you're interested in Wall Street and you know that you're interested and excited about it and then you actually start liking the work. Stern is an incredible place to go. And then JPMorgan Morgan is an incredible place to go, and then being a banker is the elite, and it's perfect. And it's exactly everything you've wanted. But I think I did those things and I still wasn't excited or satisfied by the work. But I wish I was because if I was, I would have stayed in it and I would have done really well, and I would have not minded staying up until four a.m. or five a.m. every day.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:17:36] But the good thing is, you had that perspective early on, you were actually able to see that during college and make the pivot.
Kunal Mehta: [00:17:42] Right? And I think that's what turned me off from it. But like, I still talk to kids who are going to bank and they're like, Wait, so should we do this? Well, I think you should still try it. I think you should still go into it and you should still do trading. You should still do banking. And if you don't like it, then leave. But I don't think like you should write it off just because I'm saying I had that experience. So that's kind of how I think
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:18:01] About you can I can also help you pay off some student loans. Tell me about the comp you had at. Yeah, it can be a range. It can be a range. You don't have to tell me exactly
Kunal Mehta: [00:18:10] It was between. I mean, bonuses at that time weren't great, but at that time, starting salary was between kind of like 70 and $90000. And then they had a bonus at the end of the year. But bonuses at that point weren't great. I think across the across the industry, when I was talking to people, they were kind of in the 20 to 50 percent range.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:18:35] So you're talking like 20 K to
Kunal Mehta: [00:18:37] 30 K, some of that 40 K now I think it's gone more into like a hundred percent bonus. I think starting base is like 85 to 90 K in some trading shops. Yeah, it's definitely increasing. But I remember everybody on our desk and kind of people are still talking about. Jp Morgan were disappointed at the bonuses.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:18:55] They were disappointed. Yeah, I mean, those years were not the breakout years, like 06, 07 or and
Kunal Mehta: [00:19:01] I think it's another reason. It's like if you're going into Wall Street for money, which is kind of part of the reason why I was going there for. And then you find out, OK, the money is not even here anymore. I mean, it's still really good, but it's still really good money.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:19:11] But compared to most the undergrads going to school, when you're making six figures, you can't complain.
Kunal Mehta: [00:19:15] Exactly. You're right. So yeah, that's OK.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:19:20] So you're this isn't for you four months in, you're kind of drinking the Kool-Aid or the media of, Oh, it's so easy to build a multibillion dollar business. You know, it's funny because I was in private equity and I was reading similar stuff, but more like the Forbes 30 under 30. And what struck me wasn't the billion dollar businesses, but it was like, Hey, wait a second. The kids that they're profiling have these like little niche businesses, right? And that's kind of what spun me to like, push and get something started.
Kunal Mehta: [00:19:44] And you did well with it. I mean, I think that's the entire interesting model is that there were some businesses that I was considering when I was leaving of saying, I'm never going to raise venture. I'm going to go and try to build something that doesn't need external capital. I didn't fully understand the full venture model until I started writing that book and how it operates. But yeah, I was reading media and I was realizing that there's a lot of businesses being started. It seems like they're being able to raise capital fairly quickly. They're going out and chasing that billion dollar valuation. But I wanted something in between. I was looking for more of a lifestyle business and something that I could do as one piece of a larger portfolio. Some real estate, some isn't it?
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:20:25] I'm surprised. You know, a lot of a lot of kids, I think, make the mistake of deluding themselves or being delusional into thinking they're going to be the next Venmo, the next WhatsApp.
Kunal Mehta: [00:20:33] So I think so. They waste a couple of years of their life doing it. But then there's a lot that end up doing well with it. And I think so. That's where I was. I later on did that. I was delusional again and thinking that I can do it, and I think I might still have that delusion of trying to start something again.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:20:49] The only way to actually make it and to hit those home runs is to swing for the home runs, right? You can afford it.
Kunal Mehta: [00:20:54] Yeah, and I'll tell you about it later. But the second book that I wrote actually is a lot of these founders. A lot of these VCs were backing companies they're talking about. There's like an irrational element to a lot of these geniuses who have started these companies, but they just don't know how to quit, and they just keep sticking with it for six or seven years and then eventually works out, which I can share some stories, obviously.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:21:16] Yeah. So tell me a little bit about. So kind of add up. Eventually, a little under two years you ended up leaving no more. But tell me about that transition and a little bit of your search and what you were kind of thinking about in the mind, the mindset you were in and then tell me about the book and how that kind of unfolded.
Kunal Mehta: [00:21:33] Yeah, sure. So I was it was pretty hard actually to make that decision. I think it was lucky that my parents were pretty supportive of saying that if you if you were really unhappy, you decide to quit. That's fine. You'll figure something out. I didn't have student loans, which was another comfort. I think a lot of students are like, they go into the like, we have to pay off our loan. So I understand that I was a little bit of a privileged position where my family was like, Are you going to move home if you need to and you don't have loans? I think for me, I kept trying to find the perfect role so I would go in for interviews. But then I think a lot of them were just similar positions, like if I did get an offer, it was a very similar type of role. It was in trading. It was an asset. It was back in banking, and I'm like, I'm jumping ship, and I might as well go all in and do something completely different. I don't want to just do a lateral move at another fund. So I actually made plans like two of the friends that we would all quit together because they were pretty miserable too. And the plan was that we would all try to launch something simultaneously. They didn't quit. I ended up quitting and I had some business ideas of what I wanted to do at the time, but they quit. Those plans quickly blew up. I realized fairly quickly that those weren't things that would be interested in. I don't need to talk about those pretty useless ideas.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:22:45] But give me an idea of how much planning like before you went into your bosses. Obviously, I'm done. Yeah, a little bit. Like, what was the thought like a couple of months chatting with your buddies? And they said, Yeah, I'll quit too. If you quit and then you did, and they didn't.
Kunal Mehta: [00:22:57] Yeah, it was a couple of months of that. I mean, it wasn't. They were pretty clear later on that they weren't going to actually do it, that they needed to still think about things. But I noticed that they were pretty unhappy in the following years the years that followed, too, with their roles and their jobs. And they've made they've found themselves in roles now they're more excited about. But I think that that period, it was too big of a leap. So I did that and then I figured out the transition piece of like the weeks leading up to it. We're definitely a bit scary, but I saved up enough kind of through JPMorgan and Nomura, where I was like, OK, I can try to give this a real go of maybe six months or five months of trying to figure out what it is. But now I can commit fully to trying to find a new job. The early days of doing that, my bosses were pretty understanding about it and they were like, We've been having a conversation the entire year, like six months prior where I was telling them, like when we'd go out for drinks socially, I would tell them, like, Yeah, I'm not that excited by the work. Like, it's interesting. But and they weren't either. I mean, they were being pretty transparent about how shitty things were on Wall Street that they were like, I think it was a very transparent conversation and
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:24:04] They weren't shot. They weren't shocked when you, they
Kunal Mehta: [00:24:06] Weren't shocked, and they even told me that they were like in six months. If you want to come back, we'll figure out a way for you to come back. That's really helpful. Like, that's why what bothered me was that at that time, it was also this entire. I forgot the movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and they were all just bashing every single manager and every single director, and I'm like, I work with really good people who are also like just trying to make a living. And so they were actually really supportive and nice about it, and I actually went out for drinks with them a year later, and at that time, I was doing this. So what I ended up doing just to kind of support myself financially was used a little bit of the financials, like a little of the financing that I'd saved up and took out some small leases on apartments in Bay Ridge because Airbnb was just getting launch them and we did it about five or six different apartments. We're doing short term rentals and then renting them out at a higher clip on a nightly rate. And that did pretty well in order to support myself financially for a couple of months while I was figuring things out. And it wasn't as much time.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:25:07] And you're saying you were you, you're leasing out apartments that you were able to sublease through.
Kunal Mehta: [00:25:11] It was it was legal in New York at that point. They've changed the laws. There's been some pretty big companies have started around it now a common. There's like multi hundreds of millions of dollars of companies. But that was always the plan is like a service department model. But then we didn't want to go through the entire legal effort of it. But that was something that to support myself was a small business that I was like, this could work in the long run.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:25:31] We're trying to bring it in what, like three thousand a month, something like that profit?
Kunal Mehta: [00:25:35] Yeah, right. A couple of guys to support myself and kind of go around still go out with friends. But the hard part of that six months after leaving was also going out with people that you were close to mentors and things like that. And then them asking like, So what's the plan? And you really have no sense either. And you're like, OK, I'm going to commit to exploring and trying to figure this out now, which sounds delusional. Like now that I'm saying it back, it actually sounds like you're crazy. That was not smart. It was not a good decision. But I think in retrospect, like I have younger people who ask me all the time, like, should we just quit? We're unhappy at our job. I'm like, You know what? It's not. It's not the worst idea, but you've really got to be committed to saying, every morning I'm going to wake up, I'm going to try to stay positive, and I'm going to try to figure out what it is they want to do next. So that was sort of the process of going through it,
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:26:20] Trying to think how long how long were a few months you were doing this Airbnb thing?
Kunal Mehta: 00:26:24] Got to keep doing that. I was applying to some jobs. What I realized is every single night, that was the frustrating thing where I have a panic attack and then I go start applying to jobs, and all the jobs that I started interviewing with were the same thing. Again, it was like, Go back and JP Morgan, go back. And I was like, Why am I doing that? I've committed to this. Like, why am I going back into that? So then I
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:26:41] Even know you didn't even really know what you were committing to, though, right? You're committing to you're committing to finding something else outside of finance.
Kunal Mehta: [00:26:50] Right. And I think like so then I was like, you know what? Startups seem really exciting. So then I change my search to be more startup focused. But then when I started putting my resume in startups, nobody was responding. And it's because you have a four or five year resume on Wall Street and they don't know what to do with you. So then that's where the book started emerging. I'm like, I need to network with founders. They're not responding right now. They need marketing. So let me say I'm writing a book on startup founders and see if they respond. And then two people responded, we're starting pretty big companies at the time. And then from there, they just started introducing me to other people and I'm like, All right, I actually have a pretty good, sizable sample size of what if people done when they've quit their job and they're unhappy, they're trying to figure out what they want to do next when they want to be fulfilled and how do they navigate that journey? And I was like, I'm going to write this book because there's enough people who are miserable in what they're doing, where it would be interesting. Like, it'd be interesting to talk to you one day and say, OK, how did you figure out when you were going to launch Wall Street Oasis? I'm like in the early days when your friends are like, how are you doing? Like, what is this thing? But now it's like I was.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:27:52] I didn't have any sort of guts like you and actually just quit outright. I went to business school as like an insurance policy while I was building it up.
Kunal Mehta: [00:27:59] That was my plan to. My plan was like, OK, if things really go south, then I go business school.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:28:04] So tell me a little bit about so as you start interviewing what was the first big break in terms of who you interview that you thought was a big?
Kunal Mehta: [00:28:11] Yeah. So the first one was actually pretty interesting was a guy named Ben McEntee, who started a company called Yep, it used to work at Blackstone. And he also got inspired because Mark Zuckerberg came and spoke at Blackstone. And then he quit, and he started 13 companies that failed before launching it, which is now a profitable company in New York and doing pretty well. But then beyond him, like he kept introducing me to others. And then I think it was the founders of like the head of business development for Foursquare. The one of the founders of Pinterest and Lavinia. The Betterment and LearnVest were very small, then they were basically seed stage startups, they were building out of small rooms. I didn't know how big they'd eventually become, but learn to Washington Neutral for, I don't know, a couple of hundreds of millions of dollars. Betterment is now valued at over a billion dollars and it's doing pretty big, doing pretty well. So I sat with John Stein, I think when they had like seven people in the room, so I didn't know the magnitude of what this company would become and kind of how much equity I would have really forced myself to getting a role in those places. But I think the one that I was most inspired by was a guy named Scott Harrison from charity Water. So I sat with him and then right after I emailed him, I was like. I want a job like whatever I can do, let me know, and he immediately introduced me, the CFO is like, we're building out our finance team. Do you want to join? So I met with the CFO and pretty quickly turned into a job there, which was really exciting. Tell me a
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:29:34] Little about what charity water did.
Kunal Mehta: [00:29:36] So they're still around. They're doing really well where they their focus is providing clean and safe drinking water in developing countries. The entire premise is that the nonprofit model was a bit broken where if you give $100 dollars, you don't actually know how much is going to people in need. Fifty forty five percent of that could be eaten up by overhead costs, and you don't actually know how the dollar is being broken up. So Scott was in, I think it was Liberia kind of saw what the problems people are facing without clean water. He told us about it. He'd done quite a few talks on it and then launched this non-profit charity Water. And it's more it's a faster pace, more modern, well branded, well thought out nonprofit. That's like there were a ton of consultants and bankers and tech people that were involved. So two of the pretty early employees of Twitter were now running, wrote Chris Sacca from Lowercase Capital. Was a big investor in charity. Water might still be. And they've had supporters like Daniel Ek from Spotify all within the tech community. So it's more kind of younger, fast moving non profit than the ones that are traditionally around. So I was working on the finance team. There was about a three person team. Now I think it's about 15 20 people and they've provided clean drinking water to millions of people. Now, I don't know what the exact number is. And almost over twenty seven countries, so got to see some of that work in Ethiopia as well, which is really interesting.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:00] That's awesome. So Sara, how much more time do you have?
Kunal Mehta: [00:31:03] Yeah, you got another 10, 15 minutes.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:05] Ok, so you're there for you're there for a couple of years. Tell me when you released your book, was this journey like you had started interviewing? You were inspired by him? Yeah, part of the book, right? Finding genius?
Kunal Mehta: [00:31:15] Yeah, part of it. So this so that was actually my first book. That was Disruptors are disruptors.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:19] So Disruptors is your first book
Kunal Mehta: [00:31:21] For finding genius. I just published two months ago, which is all book based.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:26] So disruptors, you had started with those specific interviews that you were going to bring it into a book? Yeah. Were you working the two years you're at charity water? Were you kind
Kunal Mehta: [00:31:34] Of working at the same time? Yeah. And I published a kind of midway through and then talk to Scott, the CEO of charity, and he was like, super supportive of it. And at first, so when I published the book, I don't really know what I was doing on publishing and hiring some virtual assistants and then did a pretty extensive book tour. So I got featured at Stanford Harbor Ted talk around it, started getting into conferences, started learning. I can be paid to speak publicly, so it turned into a second revenue stream, which was interesting and then and then kept doing it. And that led to a startup opportunity called Unfold. So then I ended up leaving charity water to do that.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:32:12] Tell me a little bit more about the the actual publishing idea. Did you go self-publish, did you?
Kunal Mehta: [00:32:18] I did self-publish. So at that time I talked to two publishing agents and I had a book deal from one of them. And the book deals is shit. And they're really they're not good for first time authors. They are.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:32:32] What do you do? Like 10 percent royalty, net royalty, much less five percent and like a ten thousand dollar advance or something?
Kunal Mehta: [00:32:38] Yeah, exactly. And they're like, they promise you a lot of support in terms of what they're going to actually do for you and how they're going to market the book. And but I also knew that I was nobody writing this book and we were all banking on the people within it. So then I ended up self-publishing through Amazon, which was it was a good experience like it was. It worked out well, hired some editors, hired some designers and then the book ended up taking off just because of kind of like if again, with the entrepreneurial endeavour, if I wasn't doing it on my own, then it was more fun to actually try to launch this and try to sell it. And then you get 100 percent profits. Yeah, the same thing with the speaking to
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:33:14] What is what is Amazon take? What's their cut?
Kunal Mehta: [00:33:16] Amazon takes about thirty
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:33:17] Five percent, so sixty five comes news much better than any sort of deal you're going to get
Kunal Mehta: [00:33:22] Right? And then also control how your book is distributed when it's released or anything like that. Like, you can get a book deal and then they can say, You know what, we need to work on this for three years and then the contents of the bleasdale. Then it defeats the purpose
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:33:36] For people who are looking to self-publish a book. Yeah, and they have, let's say, they've been able to compile like experts. I think that's an awesome way to get great content and get something actually really interesting kind of published. Tell me about what you what leverage you feel like you pulled. Was it the speaking? Was it the was it social media? Was it what was the leverage you pulled that you feel like made the biggest impact in terms of sales? It was it coming on podcast like this?
Kunal Mehta: [00:34:01] Yeah, of course. This is going to be huge. I think it's more the virtual assistance and kind of them. I figured out that universities wanted this, this topic to be discussed kind of internally. As well as that they had a lot of the big firms coming in to recruit, but nobody was really asking students what it is that you like to do. How do you figure that out? How does someone navigate that? That process, so a lot of the universities ended up picking it up, I think the speaking was the biggest way of getting it out because then you get a hundred or two hundred bucks sold right overnight into one of these institutions and then you go there and speak, you get. You work with the students and trying to figure out some of the stuff that they're thinking about, too. So I think that was probably the biggest
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:34:40] And we're getting paid for that. Was it covering your travel? At least
Kunal Mehta: [00:34:44] It was covering travel and there was speaking fees and kind of
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:34:47] Like five hundred bucks a thousand bucks. What? What are we talking?
Kunal Mehta: [00:34:49] Yeah, in the beginning, yeah, it was somewhere around there. And then it scales up as you keep negotiating with each kind of university and con
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:34:56] You mind sharing the most, you've been paid for a speaking gig.
Kunal Mehta: [00:34:59] Yeah, probably keep that private. It's been. Yeah, it's been good.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:35:04] Ok, I'm just curious. Just curious that whole market like it's.
Kunal Mehta: [00:35:08] Yeah, I know. Yeah, I'll tell you what. So the
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:35:13] Actual. So the book ended up turning into your own business, really?
Kunal Mehta: [00:35:18] It did. Yeah, which was really and it was the first time. And I think that was kind of what I was looking forward to is something that brings revenue on the side of what you're doing, what keeps you passionate and excited and charity, whatever what was keeping me excited and passionate at the time. So got to do that and then also is interesting, like going and meeting students and talking to them all the time, figuring out like, you hate Wall Street. So what is it that you want to do? You hate consulting, you hate startups. So your parents are telling you to do one thing your faculty is telling you to do another. Like, Have you ever thought, OK, this is what I actually care about, this is what I want to do. So spend some time doing that.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:35:51] Yeah, great. So tell me about this, this startup.
Kunal Mehta: [00:35:54] Yeah. So there's not much to tell, but we launched a startup called Unfold. I partnered with a creative director and kind of a senior engineer from Charity Water, and we launched our premise, our hypothesis, which I still believe in. And I've seen maybe 20 other startups doing the same thing and all kind of facing the same struggles is that long form content, whether it's The Atlantic or The New Yorker or kind of the best New York Times articles, it's pretty noisy on the web to find good content, and the way we believed it would happen was your social network would recommend it to you. But the way they're doing that is on Facebook, where there's also kind of baby pictures from kind of friends. You know, there's status updates on Twitter. They share things, but it's pretty ephemeral, goes away fairly quickly. So we were trying to launch the Instagram for long form content where you click into it, your friends are sharing the best things. It's more about what they're thinking about as opposed to the external pictures and things. And that's what we launched and we launched on the App Store. So we raise some financing for it through venture capitalists and good process like good learning and actually getting a product out there, thinking about how you launch a business that's supposed to be bigger, not profitable for a while, kind of what the revenue stream for something like that would be. But it ultimately didn't work out, kind of as we started thinking about how we get beyond the paywalls for publishers, which is kind of what we want to do, which was, I think part of it was my naivete is something that was not really learning how to build products, moving a bit slower. Now I think if I had a second go at it, just being a venture like I would know a lot more about how you build a business. But I think it was I wouldn't take it back the same question about sales trading, even though it was another year of trying to figure something out. I wouldn't take it back. It was helpful.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:37:42] So tell me about your latest kind of pivot. And so then as that was kind of winding down, you started obviously looking well, you still enjoyed working with startups, right? Yeah, they're looking to VC, but tell me a little bit about the second. What kind of spawned the idea for this new book Finding Genius?
Kunal Mehta: [00:37:57] And yeah, sure, they're on that. Yeah. So the second book is was released two years ago. Sorry, two months ago, I started working on it two years ago, but I think after unfold, which was a startup, then I really figured out, OK, this is what I want to do. And now I know venture capital is what I want to do. And it took me maybe up until twenty six years old to figure that out. But now I've been in metric out when I plan on staying in it for the foreseeable future. But the venture capital industry is extremely exciting because you're as close to founders as possible and you're taking some level of risk. But if you believe that you personally don't have it in you to be an entrepreneur, then it's a great place to be and you get to invest in them and get to see kind of macro trends. But what I want to learn about was the top VCs that are out. There were people were asking questions about them. When I was on the book tour for the first one, they cared less about the entrepreneurs and they cared more about how do I get financing for my idea? And I realized there's like, it's a it's still pretty kind of this mythical beast on how venture capitalists operate. Like, where's the money actually coming from? What? What are the theses? How do they make investments? So I started interviewing the 50 VCs behind Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, Tesla, SpaceX, kind of a lot of the large companies to see what patterns they had noticed and did that for about two years. And then the back half of the book is written by a more diverse audience, a diverse author base of VCs who are kind of female from different geographies. Different socioeconomic back. Grounds people of color, so they gave their perspectives on health care, on fintech, on media, on commerce, on consumer to share. So now an entrepreneur who's about to start a company can read the first half, understand how venture capital works and then go deep within an industry to see how things are changing. So just released that about two months ago.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:39:43] And so I can think of it almost like the perspective from a VC of how they look for genius.
Kunal Mehta: [00:39:48] Exactly right. And like what is real versus what's just a pithy tweet that they put out or a blog post. So it's like really going deep into ones that they've backed kind of what stood out between each of them? And how do they all work together in that sense?
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:40:04] Very cool. So any book tours planned for this one?
Kunal Mehta: [00:40:07] Yeah, I've been on a pretty extensive because I just did Harvard Business School, Brown University, Columbia, NYU, Stanford and then have now broken into corporate like JP Morgan, S&P Brex. I've done events for the book already and then have some lined up. So it's been it's been a lot of fun getting it out there. Yeah, it's been good.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:40:27] So super exciting. I think it's great that you're able to kind of own the missteps.
Kunal Mehta: [00:40:34] Yeah, right? You've made it.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:40:37] I'll call them missteps, but they were learning missteps, right? So tell me a little bit about looking back over like the four years. So if you want, you can tell me a little bit about what you're currently doing. Yeah. Or you can kind of look back in terms of the transitions. Is there anything you would have done differently? I know you said you would don't regret the other things, but
Kunal Mehta: [00:40:54] Yeah, I think the transition, I think the. I've been giving getting out of Wall Street quicker, I would have probably been better for me, maybe not even staying the full year or not even staying after graduating. I think just because I knew pretty quickly, that's not what I want to do. I think the experience that charity, what I want to take away, that was pretty helpful in developing an international perspective, seeing our product team work well with tech teams. I would have given the startup more time of seeing if we can make it work. But I think that was also if we knew more about how it was all supposed to operate, now that's saying that now we're sitting on how businesses and products we have launched. So I still don't know what I don't know
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:41:43] In terms of that in terms of unfold. Do you feel like it was just a question of not asking for enough money up front and to give yourself a longer runway?
Kunal Mehta: [00:41:52] No, I think it was also based off of what money we would be able to get. And I think that's another thing too is like a lot of people try to raise venture when they're not ready to raise, and I think we weren't ready to raise. We have the traction yet to demand it. But I think even without that, there was other ways that we could have support ourselves without raising venture capital. Like we didn't even need to raise venture capital at that point, and we could have tried to really give this a go at a much more focused way.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:42:16] You talked a little bit about that, like in terms of what would you, how would you define as ready friends and family first?
Kunal Mehta: [00:42:23] No, not even from a finance perspective. I think like we were trying to build the most beautiful product over six months where we should have just launched something quicker within one month and seeing how people use it and go and talk to the customers and figure out what is it they like, what don't they like? What would they want to see more of? Go and talk to publishers and basically say, this is what we're thinking. How do we partner with you? So it's completely out of the financing realm. So the money that we spent personally in the six months, we could have made a lot more headway. I think had we been doing this now and knowing what we know. So my CTO kind of has gotten become the CTO of another big company, and we talk about this often as like now the stuff that we know now, four or five years later, if we want to give it another go, it would be much different. But I don't think I have any regrets. Like there were missteps, there were decisions that I think I made that. But I think, like all this has led to being a better VC because now I think I have the perspective of finance. I have the perspective of starting a company and the perspective of working at one. There are better VCs because they've been doing one thing for a long time because they've been doing venture for a long time or they've been operating for a long time. So I think it's all like when you're in venture, it's kind of how diverse your past perspectives are when you're reaching out to companies and knowing kind of how you evaluate them for that, that platform that you're standing on. So now if I need a publishing startup, I know more about that space and industry than I did otherwise. If I need something and clean water and renewable energy, I know more about it. I mean, fintech, I have some kind of basis to go off of. So that's sort of how I
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:43:51] Think about it too, for sure. In terms of the listeners, they may they often ask me to ask this. So in terms of VC and pay, our is more of your stuff skewed towards Kerry now? Is the base better than it was in finance? I assume since you're more senior, but it is.
Kunal Mehta: [00:44:07] Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how much I can share just based off of where I am and things like that. But the salary is good and there's a ton of really good VC kind of salary surveys and things like that. There's some there's some element of base or some bonus. The range is very wide, but I think you'll notice that kind of at most buy side roles too, is whether you're a one fund, how big the fund is, how one of the assets under management, right? Exactly. So I'm happy to share kind of one of those surveys with you so you can share it around too with your listeners. Cool. That'd be great. Can you come to you?
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:44:44] So anything else you want to leave listeners with? Where can they buy? Where can they buy your book?
Kunal Mehta: [00:44:48] Yes, it's called Finding Genius, and it's on Amazon, and it's in a lot of bookstores as well, so they can pick it up there and hope they enjoy it.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:44:56] Awesome. Well, we'll link, we'll link to that as well in the show notes so. Thanks so much for taking the time to share your story. I think it was really interesting.
Kunal Mehta: [00:45:04] Thanks a lot. I really appreciate your time.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:45:06] And thanks to you, my listeners at Wall Street Oasis. If you have any suggestions whatsoever, please don't hesitate to send them my way. Patrick at Wall Street Oasis dot com. And till next time.
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