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Transcript of our conversation with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder of BTV Ventures and 500 Fintech:
Immad Akhund:
- Hi everyone, welcome to the Founders in Arms podcast with me, Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury.
Raj Suri:
-And I'm Raj Suri, co-founder of several startups.
Immad Akhund:
-Well we have a special guest. Sheel Mohnot, he's a founder of BTV Ventures and 500 FinTech. Sheel and I actually for about a year during Covid ran a FinTech podcast slash clubhouse thing together, which was fun. So now he's a guest, but we've been co-host many a time. How are you doing Sheel?
Sheel Mohnot:
- Great. How about you?
Immad Akhund:
- Very good. I thought it'll be fun to kind of kick off with FinTech, obviously, you know, Mercury's in FinTech and, and we are doing well. Yeah, and, and I feel like a few other scaled up fintechs are doing well, but as a, you know, FinTech as a early stage industry, you know, I've, I'm trying to think like when's the last time I even invested in a FinTech company? It's been quite a while and I, I get to see a lot of them from my vantage point. Obviously you are an active FinTech investor, so like how are you thinking about the FinTech industry? Do you feel like it's, you know, still a good place for entrepreneurs to kind of start companies?
Sheel Mohnot:
- Yeah, I think so. I think the way I think about it is just from a macro perspective, I started investing in FinTech end of 2015. Basically been investing in FinTech exclusively since then. And my lens on it then was the same as it is now, which is financial services are like 20% of global GDP and you can easily digitally transform financial services. It's just numbers. And then I think about it from a micro perspective in my life every day there are things that I wish were better in my finances. And thanks to Mercury, many things are improving. That's how I think about it. And then, you know, in 2021 things got really crazy where everyone was building a FinTech company and I think that actually was bad for the companies themselves because every company that we invested in there were like four or five other companies doing the exact same thing. And so it made it more difficult for any one of them to be very successful. I think now we're seeing companies again that are starting and being extremely successful in FinTech.
Immad Akhund:
- I feel like the tricky thing is the 2021 just explored like the idea space of FinTech so extremely, right? It was like, yeah I think it was like 30% of all funding went to FinTech that it's hard to come up with like an idea that, like a new idea that didn't have like 10 million plus in funding in 2021 and didn't work out. Do you feel like AI creates like new ideas? I haven't seen that many kind of AI ideas.
Sheel Mohnot:
- Yeah, I think AI creates new ideas and I think, I think a lot of what was explored in 2021 was on the consumer side and we're not seeing a whole lot of interesting stuff there today, even though I'd like to, but I still feel like there, there are there lot of B2B opportunities out there and like you said, we are seeing some cool AI stuff. We actually have a company that I just met with that is in the AI for accounting space and there's a ton of those. There's a ton of those. This one actually we, we have three different companies in that space.
Immad Akhund:
- I'm invested in two or three as well.
Sheel Mohnot:
- Okay. This one sells into large accounting firms and the results they're seeing are phenomenal. Where like it's only been, you know, they, they haven't been live that long, but one of their customers already with just one module said they've increased profitability on the entire business and this is a top hundred accounting firm having increased profitability 5% already.
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah. I think accounting, bookkeeping, wealth advisors like things where it's a lot of humans involved and you could imagine AI is gonna, either augmenting or automating all of it are pretty interesting. What do you think of FinTech Raj? Have you, is that something that you've explored in your kind of entrepreneurial time?
Raj Suri:
- Yeah, actually Presto did payments, so we did a lot of integrations with all the big payment companies. I mean we were processing billions of dollars of payments a year, but not, we didn't really monetize payments. Another company in this space, Toast is a big FinTech, right? Like they actually really monetize payments and, and it's a very unique business model where they basically give away their product at cost for, for very cheap and then they monetize the payments and that, that model has worked really well and I'm surprised how well it's worked because like basically like they make so much profit on their payments, it pays for everything else. But like I'm surprised that small merchants haven't caught on, you know, to some degree and like, like negotiated down the payments again or figured out some other solution. It just kind of shows, you know, how much margin there is with small businesses on, on these payment resellers. So yeah, definitely very interested.
Sheel Mohnot:
- It's complicated because payments are so opaque, like people don't, the small merchants especially don't know how much they're paying. But I, I do think this Toast is a great example of FinTech, which is all these vertical SaaS businesses, you know, start out offering some software product and ultimately like you said, they will all, I think majority of them will make more money from financial services than they will from software. And it starts with payments they can add in lending, insurance, accounting, payroll, all these things or products that Toast has. And I think all these other vertical SaaS companies will ultimately have as well.
Immad Akhund:
- The good thing about payments and actually like starting a FinTech company when I'd never done one before, maybe this is really obvious, but when you are in the money flow like that you hold money or your money's like transacting. Yeah. Even if you take a little bit of everything, it doesn't seem too unfair to customers because you can give away a free product. Yeah. But it's actually a lot of money and it's got really great price discrimination, right? Like you can have make very little on a tiny merchant where there's very little money flowing, but on a bigger merchant you can make a lot more and it seems like somewhat fair to both sides. So it's a interesting aspect of FinTech for sure.
Sheel Mohnot:
- I think so many companies are really an iteration of that. Like if you look at what's the difference between Airbnb and VRBO, VRBO, you had to pay on a listing basis Airbnb, they just took a chunk of what you made and didn't have to charge you anything upfront.
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah, that's super interesting. I feel like the way you just described it is like, okay, you know, all of these vertical SaaS players are gonna have embedded like accounting payments, et cetera. That kinda tends towards like, you know, this idea that was actually pretty hard in 2021 of like embedded FinTech and you know, I invested in at least one lending embedded FinTech and one insurance tech embedded FinTech. Do you think that kind of thesis played out that there, there was winners in that space and they'll, and they'll continue to be kind of big companies in embedded FinTech?
Sheel Mohnot:
- Yeah, I think it's taken longer to play out than we had hoped. We have investments in a few different categories there. We have one in banking, which is unit, we have one in payroll, which is called Salsa and one in accounting, which is called Layer. And then there are a few other companies you could also consider embedded. Like between them they have like Toast, GlossGenius, like any number, huge number of vertical SaaS companies. I think the uptake has been slower than we expected, but with some of these companies now new customer attached rate on some of these products is like greater than 50%. So it actually is working. And I think to your point on, on Toast, like Toast has a huge attach rate on all these other products and I think the same will be true for these other different texture here.
Immad Akhund:
- I remember Raj, you, you were a big believer in Toast and you bought some at the bottom. Has that trade done well for you?
Sheel Mohnot:
-Yeah, really well, you know, so 50%...
Immad Akhund:
-I feel like I should have followed you. I never did.
Raj Suri:
- Yeah. Yeah. There's been a few trades I can talk about some of the stuff, but about a lot of stuff in 2022 and 23 and it's gone pretty well. But yeah, Toast, I believe strongly in that company as well. I mean it's MIT founders, actually wearing my MIT shirt today, and I know the founders that they're really strong, they're still only like eight or 9% penetrated in their market. So there's a huge amount of these restaurants out there, you know, and using like junk POS systems and Toast is really dominating that market. There's the largest player, but they're still only 9%. So there's a large, there's a lot of expansion room plus the, the team is able to build new products in that space. So because it's, it's a strong product team. So that, that's my, that's my pitch for Toast in the, in the S&B space.
Sheel Mohnot:
- I've been a big believer in Toast for a long time. I have friends that own restaurants and you know, there there was NCR and Micro were the old school guys on-prem for the most part. And you had to literally, if you wanted to change your tables, like if you wanted to move one table from one place to another or increase the size of a table, you had to call in somebody and pay like $500 for a service call for them to come in and manipulate something. Now it's like you pinch and squeeze on a screen. It's just so much a better user product.
Raj Suri:
- I mean I worked in that space for a long time that there were, so there was a huge graveyard of dead companies in that space and they all, so many companies tried so many different things and I, I was shocked at like how many companies every year try to do the exact same thing. And then, you know, Toast actually is the only one who nailed it. 'cause everyone realized there was a problem. But, you know, the, the existing companies were terrible. But you know, what it took was actually, I think it was, they took a combination of like a great product team combined with enough capital to survive all the, like, the years of like, you know, just torture that you have to go through to, to get to a a a recent, and, and I'm not normally a, a big, you know, proponent of raising capital, you know, for early stage companies, but for that particular model,
Immad Akhund:
- How much did they raise before they got somewhere?
Raj Suri:
- They raised a lot of money. I, they had like, I think a series A was Bessemer raised at least 10, 20 million and, and remember they're Boston based company. So as a Boston based company, not easy to raise. I I, I've been through that. So, you know, I think it was Bessemer out in the east coast that that invested and then Google, I think invested in their B or something like that out here in the Bay area. And, but they, they raised enough capital to go through all those moments of doubt, which happened in this space, especially very crowded space. But it also kind of shows that even though, you know, there's a lot of companies that die in the space, it doesn't mean the space is bad. Ended up becoming a big behemoth who just got all the combination right, you know, good product enough capital, good go to market. They hired some industry veterans who I know who were later, you know, advisors to our company as well. And like the industry veterans came from the failed companies and they joined them and managed to make it work, you know, with that combination working.
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah, I mean to tie this back to the FinTech conversation, it's probably a pretty good time to start a FinTech company, especially, even in an idea that like didn't work out in 2021. Like you're not gonna get much competition. You can hire talent from like existing companies that didn't work out and, but you have to like really have the grit and belief in that idea at a time where like maybe it'll be hard to get the same kind of level of funding.
Sheel Mohnot:
- I think actually the funding worked against so many companies, like in the case of Toast it was great, but so many companies, you know, tried to like hyperscale raise too much money and then ended up killing the company. And so, and you know, they never got the discipline in how to acquire customers and have like a, a lifetime value greater than your CAC or a quick payback period. And so I actually think a lot of these ideas that were done in 2021 were good ideas, but just because of the funding environment ended up being poor. And I think some of these consumer opportunities exist now in a way that are, are better than what they were in 2021. So that recent in part
Raj Suri:
- Immad, I had one question for you. I mean, I've been kind of really surprised at how like you've been able to continually innovate in this space. Like I would've thought like, like the space is kind of done from, from some perspective. Like I, there's been enough products in the space, but just like every few months you come out with a new product, something else, like that's like kind of changing the game. Like how do you have a lot more of these coming and like, you know, or do, do you, do you see the space as like, as like ripe for a lot of, you know, interesting reinvention?
Immad Akhund:
- I don't remember if this was in the series A page probably was, but it was definitely in the seed pitch. But you know, the fun thing about Mercury and what like got me interested in doing this idea is because I always thought if you get enough penetration in banking and you have enough people using you, there's so many things to build on top of it, which isn't true for that many companies. But yeah, banking is this like very fundamental thing where it has your money and like all your finances are there. So it's just like, feels like there's a ton to build on top of it. So that was kind of what was exciting to me in the first place. Like I wasn't, I mean, banking is cool and I wanted to improve it, but that wasn't the thing that I was like, oh my God, I just wanna build like the best kind of banking tool. I was like, oh, once I build that there's these other 10 things I can build on top of it. So that was always the idea. And I, I think that's why like we, in, I guess last year or the year before, we finally got to a stage where there's enough people using us and we are like, we've been profitable enough that we've, you know, I was like, okay, now we can do these other five ideas I had seven years later. That's one reason. And I think the second reason is I just like really like new things. Like I'm just, and yeah, to some extent I have to kinda hold myself back because it's, it's just so fun to like work on new products and like enhance things. But what's also kind of funny, and I don't know if every company's like this, but we go through like phases of like, we spend one year like building and launching a bunch of things and the next year we're like, okay, you know, we did too much and like all these teams are understaffed and there's so much bad stuff out there, let's spend this year like fixing things. And then, then a year after that we're like, oh man, we, we haven't launched anything in a while, let's go launch it. So this year was like kind of a year of launch for us because actually last year we didn't really launch that many things because we were kind of consolidating a bunch of things that we'd launch the year before. So yeah, I don't think next year is gonna be quite as crazy and I don't know if it's actually that healthy to do it the way I just described, but that's like kind of the phases we, we go through.
Raj Suri:
- I think that's really legit. And like even as every time you're developing new products, you need like a stability sprint, you know, after that like to, to stabilize everything, knock out all the bugs, it makes no sense to keep putting out new things without stabilizing the last ones. So you, I think you this yeah, this is the best in class kind of what you're describing.
Immad Akhund:
- One thing that I've learned for doing new things, which you know, again, it doesn't make sense when you're a tiny company, is it's very hard to do new things when you attach them to existing teams. So something we tried doing is like, hey, your main thing is like, let's take a bill pay product for a long time we were like, you know, the team that deals with like payments and send money, we were like, Hey, go build a bill pay product. And that was like the 20, 30% focus. But you know, they also had to like make all the payments run and all that stuff. And a year went by and they made a little bit of progress but didn't really work and I was getting frustrated. The team was kind of getting frustrated and then eventually I was like, hey, you just need to have a separate team that's just gonna do this thing. Even if it's a very small team of two people, like two people that are dedicated to a new thing are work way better than like six people that are doing two things. And that's been a good mode for like getting new stuff done, just having like dedicated teams that I'm not trying to maintain existing existing work, but I mean, maybe it's an obvious lesson, but I feel like I have to keep relearning that one.
Raj Suri:
- Yeah, I found the same thing. Like you, you gotta separate the innovation otherwise you run into the innovation innovator dilemma as well, right? Yeah. And in fact, the further away the team is, you know, from the other teams is the better.
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah, I'm, I'm always hyper worried about the innovators dilemma. I'm probably like over paranoid about it given like we're so small, but I'm just like, oh my god, I don't wanna build a company that like, like does well and then like just stagnates. That would be like the, the worst outcome for some reason I think it's like feels almost worse than failing is to build a big company that like stops being innovative.
Raj Suri:
- Yeah. You just feel embarrassed by your own company, right? You're like, oh my god.
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah. Oh my god, that would be awful.
Raj Suri:
- Right, Sheel, I, I'm kind of interested in, you know, I mean your views on India as a, you know, entrepreneurial ecosystem. I saw you just went to India, right?
Sheel Mohnot:
- Yeah, I was just there a couple days ago.
Raj Suri:
- Yeah, I saw, yeah, I saw your, your feed, your posting from Gujarat I think, and, but I also saw your, your post on Ratan Tata, just one want, would love to hear your thoughts on him and also just generally entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.
Sheel Mohnot:
- Yeah, sure. So we can start with Ratan Tata. So for those who don't know the Tatas are a huge conglomerate in India. They operate in a bunch of different industries. They own Tata Consultancy Services, which is huge, which is the second biggest company in India along with Air India. They own Tetley Tea, they own Jaguar Land Rover, a type of conglomerate that you don't really see much in the world anymore. It's a huge, huge conglomerate. And Ada ran it from 1991 to 2012. This company's especially close to people in India's hearts because they basically always do the right thing. So Jamsetji Tata started the company in the 1800s. He actually was the first one to say like, better working conditions are better for everyone. And so like, he had a steel, he had a steel company, a hydroelectric power company, and I read this book that really was, was really instrumental in my life. It was about 20 years ago this book called For the Love of India. It's about Jamsetji Tata and how he did, he built a lot of things that were really like great businesses, but they were done for the love of India. One example is the Taj Hotel in Bombay, one of the best hotels in the world still, especially back then. And at that time, Indians were not allowed in good hotels. So like the British had built all the great hotels, Indians weren't allowed. So he said, fuck it, I'm gonna build the best hotel in the world and it's gonna be for Indians. So anyway, like a long legacy of doing right by by the people and, and actually two thirds of the, of the companies owned by their nonprofit, which is kind of an interesting structure. So anyway, I think a lot of Indians have looked up to that company for a long time.
Now, entrepreneurship in India, you know, I think the macro in India has been great for the past 20 plus years. And the same story has been told time and time again, which is like you have this large and growing middle class, of course digitally native, and there's, that means there's these opportunity and I think that's true, but you still have to sit, put it in perspective, which is GDP per capita is quite low. And really the opportunity is not for 1.4 billion people. The opportunity is really maybe more like a hundred million people. And if you look at most of the success successful companies, that's who these folks are reaching the like urban rich or nouveau rich or middle class. And if you look at the success stories, recent success stories, there's like cred is is actually higher than that. Like they reached like the probably rich people you could call it. There are companies like grow investing in the stock market. Again, these are, these are for rich people. And so I think that story of reaching is a difficult one in India. I think there are still opportunities but hasn't been there yet. And then I think from my perspective in FinTech, if you look at the ways that you make money, you can make money by charging customers. In India, there's no willingness to pay. Consumers do not pay for anything. You can make money by payments. And in India, you know, the government has done a tremendous job with Aadhaar, which is the digital identity and UPI, which is how you pay people. But that's meant that like they've eroded margins for any new, new entrant and and startup. And if you wanna make money on payments, it's very difficult. So then, then there are a couple other ways you can make money a UM. But again, we spoke about how there just isn't that much a UM in this country investing in the stock market. And then, so the last way to make money is, is lending. And that's basically how every FinTech company in India makes money. And for a variety of reasons, lending is a difficult model for venture capitalists because we're investing in growth and you can grow very easily by getting out money, but you may not always get it back. So that's been my struggle with India, but still love, love the place and have made investments there.
Immad Akhund:
- I guess one thing to link it to is kind of Indians being very successful in tech and in Silicon Valley. Yeah, I remember, I feel like this was like 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, there was this article, I, I was trying to just find it right now, but I couldn't find it. Maybe it was New York Times where it was like, you know, what happened to all the tiger kids, right? There was this like idea maybe 20, 25 years ago that like, actually the most successful people in colleges were Asians, both Indian and East Asian. And like they didn't turn out to kind of, they seemed to hit like a ceiling and didn't, it didn't turn out to be successful. Then I thought it was kind of funny that like, it, that turned out to be completely wrong and it just kinda, it just called it like 10 years too early. What do we think about this trend of like, you know, oh I think for a while like, oh it was like top 20 tech companies that like 50% of kind of Indian CEOs. Is that, does that continue? How does that play out?
Sheel Mohnot:
- I think on the tech side, you know, some of the smartest things that India did was build these institutes of technology. Indian Institute of Science actually was built by, by Jamsetji Tata and they started down this path of let's educate our brightest to be, to be like among the brightest in the world. And at the time my, my dad went to IIT Bombay and at the time that he graduated in the seventies, I think like well over half of the people were leaving the country. And I think that that actually went up over time and then now it's gone down. I think it's in part that many of the brightest came to America, India was a socialist country until the nineties and opportunities were limited. And so to succeed you kind of were forced to come to America. Like my dad's story was, he was making $20 a month in India and after graduating from IIT and basically decided that he could make more on his stipend when he came to the United States and send back more money to his family than he could working in India as graduating from the top university in India. So I think people just came to America and, and it was the best people who came.
Raj Suri:
- You know, it's, it's still remarkable to me even as like, you know, part of the Indian heritage, even though I was born in Canada, like, like it's still remarkable to me, like just the scale of talent in India, like the sheer scale. I don't think people in the US kind of understand this, it it, and remarkable to me even to this day because you know, when you're like hiring engineers, like the quality of like engineers coming out of India, you know, it's just massive. It's just like the quality is huge and the quantity is huge, you know, and they're hungry, right? Like, and, and they're willing to, you know, to go the extra mile. And, and you know, of course we all know that like, you know, the, the universe of tech CEOs, you know, partly comes from the universe of engineers and, and other talented folks, right? So like if you have just a large volume, you're gonna have some of those that rise to the top and then they're just driven to do that. This is not stopping, this is like a trend that's gonna continue. I think you're gonna see even more, you know, people from, you know, the, you know, they see diaspora and you know, you know, kind of embed themselves in Silicon Valley and, and rise to the top. You know, when I think of the East Asian community though, like, you know, China, I think there's also a trend there. The the thing that's always held them back is just English, right? And that's always, you know, been the challenge for them, but you're still seeing people like Eric Yuan from Zoom and, and a lot of others who are, you know, hungry and wanting to rise to the top. I do see a generation of Chinese entrepreneurs, you know, we, we do this through our immigration work, we, we, we get a chance to meet a lot of these folks and you know, they're moving to the US now in bigger droves than ever, you know, just given the challenges they're having in China, and a lot of them are gonna be very successful. I think investing in these Chinese entrepreneurs coming from China who are very hungry, who have like this mindset of like going the extra mile, I think is a smart move for a lot of people. So I, I think you're gonna see even more Asians kind of, you know, penetrate to the top of the rankings. Immad, do you have an office in, in India or do, do you hire many people in India?
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah, it's really hard to do the time zone thing. We, we only do US and Canada, we have a few in Europe, but generally I think if you build a company that's like completely async and okay with time zones or, or sometimes people have kind of teams where, you know, this team is in India or wherever that just functions like completely independently that can work. But, and actually one of the interesting things in Silicon Valley is I don't think people quite understand it, is there's some companies that literally live on this arbitrage. So, you know, maybe this is too extreme a statement, but from my understanding, the only way Rippling is able to produce as many products as it produces is there's, it's got a huge team in India and one of its co-founders was Indian. And you know, they really like, because I mean, if you think, if you look at their product suite, it's like 20 startups in one and the way they're doing it is like they get lots of capital in the US figured out kinda sales and marketing and then huge team in India like just, you know, making a very complicated product. So the arbitrage that exists, if you can like, figure out how to make it work, you can have like a way cheaper cost of labor and build things elsewhere.
Raj Suri:
- It makes a ton of sense, right? Like you, you sell to the US consumer or the US like business which pays you top dollar right. In the world and, and you know, your, your cost structure is all, you know, dispersed over the world.
Immad Akhund:
- Is there other good examples of this apart from Rippling?
Raj Suri:
- I've seen a lot, I've seen a, I've seen this is like the standard playbook now, like, you know, for, for a lot
Immad Akhund:
- Of, it's one of the standards. Yeah.
Raj Suri:
- Yeah. I would say for companies like are developing not that complicated software, you know, with spaces that are not that highly regulated. I, I've seen this to be basically, you know, the standard. I, I mean I'm, I'm trying to think of counter examples, you know, from, from companies I, I've like looked at recently, I feel like there's, there's like a cohort of companies that, you know, like maybe started in like the early 2010s, which were used to building all in the US and Presto was the same like kind of thing where we, we had a mostly US team and then when immigration became harder to deal with, you know, in the Trump admin, we actually, we out, we started moving the jobs overseas, you know, but, but there was a time in the early 2010s it made sense to hire everyone in in the, in the us but that became much harder later. But, but I think all the recent companies that I've looked at who've started in the last five years generally have an offshore team.
Immad Akhund:
- Really, that sounds extreme. I don't know if every, every company.
Sheel Mohnot:
- Yeah, I, I wouldn't say every team on my end. One challenge is it's gotten expensive in India, it's not as cheap as it was. Obviously as more people have used India, the managerial talent is actually similarly priced to here. It's actually the low level talent that's quite cheap. And so that arbitrage is going away in part because they're making more money now and like generally you need more Indian engineers than you would us engineers for the same amount of output.
Raj Suri:
- Yeah. So I think that's changing with ai. And I, and I also think, like, I also think like the labor market has dramatically changed, like with the tech sort of labor bust that we've seen and I think people are willing to take lower salaries to get stuff done now in India especially, so that, that's kind of changed recently.
Immad Akhund:
- How is AI changing, like Indian labor?
Raj Suri:
- Well we've talked about this on our pod, right? About like, like AI makes like, you know, give superpowers to engineers, right? So like, you know, AI is almost a leveling force amongst, you know, you know, say you're a junior engineer, you can act more like a senior engineer in some ways you can act even more productively than a senior engineer who is not AI native. I've seen this for sure, like, you know, the, the experience actually can be a detriment in engineering. So you have this just large volumes of junior engineers in India, as we've mentioned at lower cost. But if they're using ai, they actually act like a mid to senior and actually in some ways it can be more productive, more skeptical of that.
Immad Akhund:
- Raj really, really drank that Kool-Aid.
Raj Suri:
- I'm telling you it's true.
Immad Akhund:
- And then Sheel, when you say like managers and I guess more senior people at the same price, are we literally talking about like Google, Facebook salaries level?
Sheel Mohnot:
- Yeah, I was talking to my cousin in India and he, he's like a VP level at a company and he's making like $400,000.
Immad Akhund:
- I mean that's, that's a lot cheaper than the US.
Sheel Mohnot:
- Well it's not...
Raj Suri:
- At like a public company?
Sheel Mohnot:
- ...not at, not at a Google. He's at, he's at, no. He's at like a startup that's raised a series B.
Raj Suri:
- I still think managerial, I mean the management talent in the US is still the best, you know, for the dollar you pay. I think it's still, I mean, and especially if you're selling into the US you kind of need to understand the US culture, but it's, it's, it is surprising that ma the management's a similar cost unless you're selling into India, which would make sense to hire in India.
Immad Akhund:
- I wanted to talk about one other subject I'd be interested in Sheel's take on this, you know, one thing in, in 2016 after I sold my previous company, I was thinking about kinda Mercury and other ideas and I decided to like really invest in kind of trying to build an audience on Twitter. And yeah, it took a long time, but you know, to some extent that was successful. I have 50,000 followers and I do think part of Mercury's success is that audience of like, you know, especially at the start when we were first distributing, it gave us a lot of trust. It gave us kind of, I guess free, free advertising and organic kind of growth. Sure. You have cultivated a big audience and I think you, you kinda tweet or post four, five times a day sometimes. Like how do you think about that? Is that something you just do for fun or is that kind of a deliberate kind of strategy you've taken?
Sheel Mohnot:
- It's not a deliberate strategy or it didn't start out that way. I should say it started out really in the pandemic. I was on Clubhouse, like, so I was actually first like started using Clubhouse and then Twitter was the way to communicate with people from Clubhouse via text. And then I gained a following through the Clubhouse stuff.
Immad Akhund:
- You were the one of the default followers, right? I think you had like a million Clubhouse followers or something.
Sheel Mohnot:
- Exactly, yeah, I had like over 3 million nets yet, but it, you know, obviously I, I don't know how many of those people actually knew who I was. It's probably in, in a very, very small fraction. I found that I really enjoy Twitter and it does pay pretty good dividends for the fund in that like if we, like we have a a section of like, how did you hear about us when folks applied to the Mint, our pre-seed program and a good number of them came through my Twitter. Now that has pros and cons because I think my, my Twitter persona attracts a particular demographic, which is Indian males. Like if you ask an Indian male anywhere, like they, they will have seen something from me. And so actually we, we recently posted a job we're hiring an associate and I think in the first day we got like 150 applications and I think 80 of them were Indian males. It has paid dividends in some ways. Like there was one company I I was really interested in investing in, I reached out to them and I knew that a bunch of other funds were reaching out to, and they weren't, they weren't taking investor intros, but the guy just responded and said like, I had posted something that was funny on Twitter and he was like, Hey man, like I'm not taking investor intros, but you really made me laugh today. And then ended up we ended up investing in the company.
Immad Akhund:
- Wow. That's our ROI right there. Raj, do you think about building a audience or that's not something that interests you?
Raj Suri:
- Yeah, I go back and forth. I mean, it's not something I'm super like passionate about, like, you know, I just, I don't like talking about myself very often and I do like talking about ideas, but you know, I think especially nowadays the Twitter algorithm is so like changeable and stuff, it's like hard to depend on it. I actually like group chats, right? So, you know, this is a thing I like is talking with small groups of people who you know and having some interesting conversations with them. You know, I think Twitter is a little bit performative, so like obviously, you know, you're, you're putting on something, you know, you're, you're showing a version of yourself and there's a huge market for what you do Immad which is like founder advice, life advice and things like that. But I feel like people like you are doing it well, so why do I have to do it? You know, like you're giving all the advice I would probably give anyways.
Immad Akhund:
- I would have a hard time if I had to talk about myself, but like I feel like a little bit of my Twitter and now LinkedIn stuff is like trying to give back to the community, which I, you know, I can feel, I can feel good about like wasting time. But yeah, hopefully I help one person every now and then and it's like there so much.
Raj Suri:
- Yeah, your content's good. I mean, LinkedIn is actually, I mean I think people don't talk about this, but LinkedIn is becoming the new dominant, you know, like I would say internet feed and a lot of tech people I think sleep on LinkedIn especially in a, in a work context.
Immad Akhund:
- Because I feel like X under Elon, he's just pushed so far away from like these kind of work niches and like, it's actually like I follow only tech people on, on X, but the amount of non-tech content I get is like 90%. It's crazy. Like I, I have a hard time seeing Sheel's posts even though like that's kind of the stuff I care about.
Sheel Mohnot:
- I've muted so many terms now I've muted like 50 terms. Like, so anything political, it still comes through by the way, but it's greatly reduced.
Immad Akhund:
- It helps a lot. Yeah, you have to, otherwise it's almost unusable. Yes. Earlier the CI basically was like, hey, I need to build a LinkedIn audience because I wasn't sure X was gonna be around. So I've grown my LinkedIn audience from about 14,000 to 22,000 by just posting frequently. It's a vibe, but I have a hard time logging into LinkedIn to just like engage, like in Twitter I engage a lot with like replies and stuff like that, but this is something about LinkedIn, it's just like, I don't know, it's just not as smooth on the kind of engagement side.
Raj Suri:
- Yeah, their design isn't as optimized for like quick replies for sure. But, but in general they've done a really good job with their feed and now they have like a short videos, so they're trying to like do like a TikTok for like, you know...
Sheel Mohnot:
- Do we need that?
Raj Suri:
- ...for work. TikTok for work? Yeah.
Immad Akhund:
- Every freaking site has short feeds now. Like X is trying to make that happen. Snap. I mean even Pinterest, I was, I let my daughter use print Pinterest. I was like, okay, you know that's a safe social network, right? Like that's, it's all freaking TikTok. You go on Pinterest and it's like she's, and I was like, okay, I need to ban this and I banned it like almost right away. I was so surprised how much short feeds dominate Pinterest. Yeah, short videos.
Raj Suri:
- It's interesting, right? Because when Elon took over Twitter, there's been a, there was a lot of sort of other competitors, you know, popping up, you know, Gabor we know, you know, started one competitor and there was one from I think one of the, yeah, Meta Threads. There's so many, right? But I, I think actually LinkedIn is turning out to be the winner into my view. Right.
Immad Akhund:
- Oh that's interesting. Do either of you use Threads? I mean I feel like I haven't gone to it since the, oh no, the feed is weird. I think.
Sheel Mohnot:
- I don't use it but a lot of people do. It's actually, I'm just looking up the, pulling up the data, but I think last time I checked it was it had half as much traffic as Twitter and you know, it's only, it's only a little bit over a year in so Threads is really working.
Immad Akhund:
- How many of that is Meta employees?
Sheel Mohnot:
- No, actually it's funny, my wife works at Meta and I used to joke to her that every time I logged in it was only her friends that I saw, like her, her work friends. And now that's not true. There are a lot of other folks. I think Elon has alienated some folks from Twitter and I'm seeing, like when I go into my Threads, I see a lot of folks that I used to follow on Twitter who are now on threads now. The problem I have is when I post on Threads, I just get no engagement so I don't get that feedback that wants me to keep posting on threads. So I don't really post it on threads anymore.
Immad Akhund:
- We are like the old aristocracy where we are like we are living on X on like the previous followers we got and like the new, the new elites will arise on threads and we will be left behind. But yeah, it's funny, the same thing, like it's just not interesting posting something when you have like zero engagement in a, on a platform. But yeah, it's interesting how these things change over time. Social is like a very hard space. I would definitely, I have a hard time kinda investing in it, but maybe this is a good, good point to kinda end the podcast. Really, really fun conversation. Sheel, thanks for joining us.
Sheel Mohnot:
- Thanks guys. It was really fun.
Immad Akhund:
- Yeah, follow us on all the channels and leave us some reviews on Apple and Spotify and all that and we'll be back next week.
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