Leadership is pushing everyone to do their best, maximizing their efforts towards the achievement of the same goal.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Sanket Shah: Seven years ago, I started creating videos on non-fiction books and uploaded a bunch of them to YouTube. These videos got huge traction on YouTube. But I realized that the process of video creation was cumbersome. It wasn’t a great experience.
So in 2016, after my last company, MassBlurb got acquired for a few million dollars, I and my partners were wondering about the next big thing. What would be the next gig? The answer lay in trying to solve a problem that he had experienced as a video creator a few years before. The time-consuming and complicated tasks of video creation, editing, and publishing. We were building the tech to fix that.
Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Sanket Shah: Of course. And it’s been a journey and it has people who might not be very famous as well as people who are very famous that would have an influence on me, particularly here. So America taught me one thing and those were my professors, they were serial entrepreneurs. One of them was actually the first investor in Groupon, who actually cut an angel check to the Groupon founders.
And they said that “Hey, it’s okay to fail, if you fail, you are going to find a job. If you fail, you are going to start where you are today. And it’s okay.”
America was very open and that opened my confidence. But a couple of professors had a large influence on me and I would say I was still a kid then, but they kept pushing and nurturing that spirit. They kept correcting me but not demotivating me, so those were two professors. I had a very large influence from Richard Branson. So Richard Branson has written a book, how I lost my virginity, which is actually a biography about his adventures, how he went through things and I thought that was fascinating.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons you learned from that?
Sanket Shah: So again, at times I believe that because of my world exposure, which is mediocre at best, I have started both the companies from personal experiences. So, my father, he runs a small business and he didn’t have a website and he didn’t have all these digital marketing tools. So what happened there was that I said that, “Hey, a small business should have marketing tools,” and that is why I started our last company. But to be very candid here, it was not the best decision of my life, because with respect to entrepreneurship what I learned right now or what I understand is, it’s the market size. It’s like how large is your market and then achieving a product-market fit and is the market lucrative or not. So I would say my first company was a misjudgment with respect to understanding the market size and how lucrative that market is, but we started creating a small and business marketing suite and then selling it to a bunch of businesses in India.
I can definitely think of two and those things are something that I keep thinking about. One is thinking hard. I strongly believe, at least in entrepreneurship it’s not more doing, it’s more strategic. Execution is supremely important. Just being busy doesn’t mean you’re getting enough done. If you have a setback if you think purely black, why, how, what, rationalize it. The output will be much better. What we as humans keep doing is actually, we want to get to work immediately and you want to do something because then you have a feeling that, hey, I did something.
Resilience is critical in critical times like the ones we are going through now. How would you define resilience?
Sanket Shah: I would say resilience is work through problems. You need to find your strength, your support system, and bounce back from it. You will find different sources of stress but you have to overcome those through your will and strength.
In your opinion, what makes your company stand out from the competition?
Sanket Shah:So because of the geography we are in, we believe that one of our secret sauces is support. We do 24/7 support and the reply within 30 seconds. And we do that for a product that’s $10 a month and 95% freemium customers. But we still do that. Now what happens is, you give extraordinary support, people review you, people write about you, people are amazed, they recommend people. So that investment actually brings in five times the investment. But what we think often is that, hey, I can’t support a $10 customer or I can’t support a free customer.
What do you consider are your strengths when dealing with staff workers, colleagues, senior management, and customers?
Sanket Shah: Definitely my listening ability and communication ability. These two skills are my greatest strength.
Being a CEO of the company, do you think that your personal brand reflects your company’s values?
Sanket Shah: Definitely, it does. It builds a level of trust and deepens the connection between you and your customers.
How would you define “leadership”?
Sanket Shah: Leadership is pushing everyone to do their best, maximizing their efforts towards the achievement of the same goal.
Do you think entrepreneurship is something that you’re born with or something that you can learn along the way?
Sanket Shah: So right from when I went to college, and when I did my schooling, I always thought I was entrepreneurial. I found immense pleasure in ideas, in selling something. So more than the money, the kick has always been about actually doing something, creating value, and then in turn get money. So right from college, I used to teach robotics, ethical hacking in several different colleges across India and when I moved to the US, my love for that never went down. In fact, that is what gave me the motivation. That is what I wanted to do.
What’s your favorite “life lesson” quote and how has it affected your life?
Sanket Shah: “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” – James Cameron
This interview was originally published on ValiantCEO.