[00:00:00 – 00:00:07] Nitin Bajaj

Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host Nitin Bajaj and joining me today is Aarish Shah. Aarish, welcome on the show.

[00:00:08 – 00:00:11] Aarish Shah

Yeah, really glad to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me.

[00:00:11 – 00:00:15] Nitin Bajaj

Great to have you here. Let’s start with the big question, who is Aarish?

[00:00:16 – 00:00:48] Aarish Shah

Yeah, it’s a difficult, difficult question I think for a lot of people to answer. So I think most people would answer that in terms of what they do, but I will answer it slightly differently. So I’m someone who loves writing, speaking, thinking and also doing in my personal life. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how I can improve myself in various ways and in my business life. I run a business which, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in a second but which I’ve been building for the last seven, eight years.

[00:00:49 – 00:01:12] Nitin Bajaj

Amazing. And the little I’ve got to know you, you do have deep perspectives and a pretty amazing background and experience and have had some really interesting exposure to areas most people don’t get to in a lifetime. So really looking forward to getting to know some of that. So tell us more about emerge 1. Why did you start it and why do this?

[00:01:14 – 00:03:48] Aarish Shah

Yeah, so my look, my life and my journey has been peppered with I think moments of serendipity. Definitely a huge amount of privilege. The very sort of brief backstory is my career. My very short lived career in the kind of corporate sector was after having graduated university. I read languages at university which I quickly realized were useful but not essential. And so I ended up working with PricewaterhouseCoopers, BPO, then Nortel Networks, then Deutsche bank and qualified as a chartered management account along the way.

So for the US equivalent of a cpa. But I’d never been in, I’ve never been an accountant. I actually then up sticks. I moved to Papua New Guinea where I spent 10 years running a group of manufacturing and trading businesses alongside a property portfolio. And again, this is the first part of where that privilege comes in. That was a family business. My family has been in business throughout Sub Saharan Africa for over 100 years, but expanded out into various other regions, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Canada, the uk, et cetera.

But I actually left that business and came back to the UK in 2015. And again, to cut a very long story short, I had no network, I had no relationships here in the UK anymore. So I took a bunch of coffees and through one of those coffees a very good friend of mine had this sort of aha moment and he is now a very good friend of mine. But I had an aha moment and I joined an edtech business as the founding cfo. And it was a joint venture between Eton College, for which, for those who don’t know, is where many of the UK Prime Ministers seem to come, a very famous private school here in the uk, and Founders Factory. And Founders Factory is the accelerator that was created by Brent Hobman of lastminute.com fame. So anyway, really this is all to say I caught the startup bug.

I spent two years with that business and then realized that there was a gap in the market for what I’d have called in those days, portfolio services from a CFO and FD level. And so I decided to strike out on my own and consulted with a number of businesses, worked on some really interesting companies. And then after a couple of years I was getting approached by other CFOs and FDs that seemingly wanted to work with me. I think they enjoyed the content that I was putting out. They realized that I had built some very deep relationships within the ecosystem. And in 2020, really as a pandemic hit, I doubled down on that whole proposition and built EmergeOne really into what it is today, which is a consultancy that provides fractional CFO support to venture backed tech startups. And yeah, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, to be honest.

[00:03:49 – 00:04:02] Nitin Bajaj

Really cool journey. Now you’ve been doing this, as you said, about seven, eight years now. Give us a sense of the operations, the types of companies you’re working with, the types of groups, the kind of value you’re bringing on the table.

[00:04:03 – 00:06:45] Aarish Shah

Yeah, look, I’m in an, again, this is that word, privilege. I’m in an incredibly privileged position because we get to work with some of the most innovative businesses in the UK and beyond today. To give you a bit of a sense, we’ve worked with 100 plus startups over the last several years. We work with businesses as diverse as Generative AI all the way through to Life Sciences Tech, Bio Biotech. We may well soon be working with a space tech business. We work with Fintechs within Short Tech and various others, but really just incredible founders building incredible businesses. And again, we’re very lucky because of the relationships I built.

A lot of those customers of ours come to us directly as referrals from their investors, from the VCs that are back them. So we already know that they have some kind of pedigree. Right? They’re either scaling very quickly or they’re doing something incredibly innovative. And if I think about the sort of impact that some of these companies Have One of the companies we’re working with has created engines that allow them to map microbiomes from cancer tumors to oncological medicine. So they’re able to see how the microbiome in the tumor reacts with medicines and therefore give pharmaceuticals a better idea of what populations those medicines will work in and where they will have most impact, which is just an incredible thing looking at potentially transferring those medicines from Southeast Asia to the US or UK or Europe and having an impact on just large scale lives. We’ve taken businesses through nine figure exits when they were doing relatively low numbers in revenue.

We’ve helped founders through really difficult journeys where they’ve had co founder breakups. We’ve taken them through all of those really tense moments which I think every business owner has. But certainly when you’re externally backed you have those existential points.

Can I make payroll this month? Am I going to be able to pay my, my team their salaries? Am I going to be able to raise that investment? Who am I going to raise it from? How much? When all of these sort of questions. And I’m very fortunate that we’ve built a team of really extraordinary CFOs that have just incredible amounts of experience operating in the venture backed space.

Many of them have themselves founded businesses. They really understand what it means at your core to work with a founder led owner operated business that is scaling very quickly, that has technology at its heart. And as I say, it’s just we’re incredibly privileged to be able to do what we do. We get to speak with and be part of the teams of just extraordinary businesses doing extraordinary things. So yeah, it’s really incredible.

[00:06:46 – 00:07:25] Nitin Bajaj

As fascinating as the journey has been and the impact that you and your team have been able to create in such a short time. The one thing I’ve loved about you is the humility, the cognizance of what you have and what most others don’t have the ability to have. And I think in many ways it’s your curiosity that keeps you grounded, if I can say that. But amongst the myriad of personalities and types of businesses and geographies you interact with, I’m sure there is many challenges that come up. What’s the one you would like to call out.

[00:07:27 – 00:10:58] Aarish Shah

Within our client base? That could be any number of things and I won’t necessarily. Those are their stories to tell. In my own business, in my own life, there’s a couple of ways I could answer this. So the first way to answer this is actually it took me a very long time to internalize that I am enough that I have worth and that I don’t need to measure myself against others. I don’t need to look for others permission. I think, obviously, I know this podcast is predominantly aimed at South Asians at a cultural level.

We have this really deep seated and very positive right thinking around respect of our elders, respective family members, our parents, our grandparents, etc. And I spent a lot of my, especially coming from a family business background, I spent a lot of my time listening to actually what ultimately was incorrect advice or certainly advice that was not appropriate to me. So the biggest challenge in my life was just accepting that I should back myself, that I should back my thoughts, my opinions, my ideas. And of course by backing yourself, that obviously leaves you open to potential failure, but that’s fine because that’s still within your control, not within someone else’s. And then I think the other challenge, it’s really incredible. Again, we work with all these businesses, they raise millions upon millions of dollars and pounds and euros of investment. But I bootstrapped my business from scratch.

It’s not had any external funding or investment rather. And the biggest challenge I face is we want to grow, we want to grow stronger and bigger and better and always faster. But we have to temper that with the restraints that our resources essentially put on the business. And that’s really frustrating for someone like me. I think I have to some extent some sort of undiagnosed ADHD and I want to go down 100 million miles an hour in multiple directions, as my team will no doubt, would no doubt tell you. And it’s quite frustrating. That challenge of, I know we need to do this, but I’m only going to be able to do it when we reach XYZ milestone.

Equally, on a positive note, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve raised external investment for another one of my businesses, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit. But I quite enjoy being the master of my own destiny. Those challenges are natural, normal business challenges that we will all face from time to time. And I think leaning into those and really understanding how you can drive your business forward under your own steam is actually incredibly liberating because it also means that if you reach a certain size, if you reach a certain scale, there’s no one else looking at what you own. You own what you own. That’s yours, that’s.

You can do with that, what you want. You can sell it, you can keep it, you can run it for cash flow, you can do whatever you want. But I always talk about this with founders. Do you want 1% of a billion dollar business, or would you like 100% of a $10 million business with a much shorter time frame, a much higher chance of success, and you get to do it at your own pace and under your own steam. So again, massively privileged to be able to do that. But. But it can be challenging for sure, at times.

[00:10:59 – 00:11:20] Nitin Bajaj

Sure thing. And I think in many ways what you’re highlighting, or at least what’s resonating with me, is the freedom that comes with being able to be your own master, your defining, or being able to define your destiny. Now, on the flip side of these challenges come opportunities. What’s the one that you’re most excited about?

[00:11:24 – 00:14:06] Aarish Shah

Look at so many from a client perspective. Again, as I say, some of the businesses that are coming across our table are just phenomenal. We’re talking to a business that very early stage is building manufacturing for pharmaceuticals in space. And it’s just, I wouldn’t have even considered that as something that was feasible, was possible. But it’s there and they’re doing it right and they’re testing it and they’ve had some launches and they’ll continue to do more. So from a business perspective, it’s just every time we turn around, there’s just something else incredible that’s happening. So those opportunities always there, but they’re wonderful.

I think at a personal level, the opportunity that I am most focused on right now is living my life in a way that works for me. And I think it’s the big mistake that many people make. And it is an opportunity because you can choose how you live your life. You can choose to work a 9 to 5, you can choose to work 15 hours a day. You can choose to prioritize money over family. You can prioritize family over money. You can do any of those things.

And the opportunity that I have in front of me is both to build just a consequential business that has, that has value, but is recognized by the industry within which I work. But beyond that is actually to create a life and a lifestyle that really works for me, for my wife, for my daughters, and, and I’m already 75, 80% of the way there. And I think it’s very easy with our kind of monkey brains to always be looking at, okay, I’ve done this, now what? And I think you always have to ask yourself, when is enough? What do you really need? And so I spend a lot of my time thinking about that opportunity. And that opportunity is essentially to sit back and enjoy life.

We have one life. We’re on this planet for a finite piece of time, and that time is never guaranteed.

So how would you choose to live it? And I think that’s the opportunity that I’m focused on. Very mundanely. I’m always looking for just more avenues of interest, more things that I can learn. There’s an opportunity in front of me every day, especially with generative AI now you can learn all sorts of things which you wouldn’t have necessarily considered in the past for me. You mentioned earlier curiosity and Absolutely. I describe myself as an incredibly curious person, both in the negative and the positive sense of the word.

But that curiosity is, that is again an opportunity, because you don’t know what comes out of that curiosity.

[00:14:06 – 00:14:06] Nitin Bajaj

Right.

[00:14:06 – 00:14:43] Aarish Shah

I think curiosity is what drove an ape to pick up a tool and dig in the ground, or humans to start speaking. That curiosity in the stars is what caused us to start thinking about physics and about God and about all sorts of other things. And I think that that curiosity is the opportunity. And I’d love to live my life just being curious and. But within the realms of what? Of the time that I have, rather than spending it just thinking about, okay, building a business, making money, all of these sort of things. So I try to find or try to see life as the opportunity rather than anything else.

[00:14:44 – 00:15:19] Nitin Bajaj

Beautifully said. And I must say this is not something that people in the type A personalities, people that are out there achieving things, necessarily get the opportunity to pause and reflect on. I think it is, like you rightly said, the biggest opportunity we can have and to be able to focus on that is a privilege. Yes, but many people have that privilege. I don’t think they necessarily pause and think about it in that way. So kudos to you for doing that.

[00:15:19 – 00:16:45] Aarish Shah

No, I thank you. But I’d add one other point, and I think this is the thing that if I could get one message out there to the world, do not abdicate yourself from your own agency. You can work for an employer, you can pay your taxes to the government, but you still have agency. You are in command of your life. You do not have to wake up in the morning, go off, do a drudgery job. Of course, many of us will have to, for sure. You have to be able to live, you have to be able to support yourself, your families, etc, but you also have agencies.

Agency, rather, you can change the course of your life. Now, that may mean I’ve spoken in my, my early 40s, many of my peers were lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc they looked at me, they’re like, but how did you manage to do this? And I don’t want to be a doctor anymore, but I’m tied because, Sarah, what do I do? And I say, look, you’re not tied. You just think you are. You could go into a smaller house, you could move country, you could do whatever. Right choice is yours.

I think one of the things I’m really fearful of in a lot of the discourse we see around and about, especially on the Internet at the moment, is people seem to have just assumed that they have no agency in life, that they must look to someone else to solve their problems. The first person who can solve your problem is you. And I think if more of us embrace that attitude, and I think the world would be an incredible, more incredible place than it already is today.

[00:16:45 – 00:17:22] Nitin Bajaj

I agree. Going back to what you said initially, describing who you are, you said, I like to think. And I think that’s an attribute, a quality that most people have put on the side and have forgotten. And. And I don’t blame individuals, but they are. And we are responsible to remember that thinking is one of the most critical assets we have, and we have to put it to use. I think there’s too much information overload, and most people are in that space where they need to be told what is black and white, and they want to be able to pick one of.

[00:17:22 – 00:18:49] Aarish Shah

The two rather than thinking. The world is nuanced and there are shades of gray in between. And 100%, it is too easy to move from one episode to the next on Netflix. It’s too easy to scroll on X, it’s too easy to sit there and be swamped with mindless stuff. One of the things that I do religiously, and this has been my routine for most of my life, I read every evening, I read non fiction, I read fiction, read every morning when I wake up. And it may be for five minutes, maybe for 10 minutes, it may be for an hour, it may be shorter, longer, whatever. But I think if, again, it comes back to that curiosity, if you lose that desire to learn, then not only does your thinking become lazy, but you yourself become lazy because you will reach for the easiest answer rather than challenging yourself.

And we only grow when we challenge ourselves. We only grow when we face some sort of hardship, when we face some discomfort in what we’re thinking, how we’re thinking. A lot of things that really challenge me at the moment are things on the political spectrum. So I make an effort to try and listen to or read from different viewpoints. Right. From viewpoints that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with. Because only then can I challenge myself to think, okay, am I thinking about things in the right way?

And more often than not, yes, the answer is I think I am. But of course, occasionally there will be something like, oh, I hadn’t considered that perspective and maybe I should.

[00:18:50 – 00:19:21] Nitin Bajaj

True, again, very unusual, but kudos to you for doing that. It’s something we need as a community, as a humanity. Now, as we talk about today and the future, I want to pause and reflect. I would love for you to share two moments from your life and career. One where things did not work out as you’d expected, There was disappointment, failure, lessons, and another where things exceeded your expectation and was a success beyond your imagination.

[00:19:23 – 00:20:54] Aarish Shah

Yeah, I’ve already got again, more of those than I could tell. Okay, look, the one obvious failure which I would never have considered fail. I don’t think about life in terms of faith, in terms of failure. I only think of life in terms of lessons to be learned or lessons that can be learned in 2020. 2021, we had lockdown, etc, as I mentioned, I’m very bored and get, get excited by doing different things. And I decided to launch a tech product. I said, look, I operate in this sector, I should be able to build a product, right?

I’m not technical, I’ve learned how to write a bit of Python, but I couldn’t build a product by any stretch of the imagination. But I went around everything the wrong way. So I went out, I raised money, I then hired some people, we built a product. I didn’t talk to customers and, or at least initially. And when we released a product, we realized we built a great product but for the wrong segment and the people that could pay for it didn’t need it, and the people who needed it couldn’t pay for it. So we pivoted, but we pivoted very at really the wrong time. We were entering 22, 23, which was almost the death of venture capital.

Suddenly the bubble had popped quite considerably and I knew there was no way I was going to be able to raise enough capital to really build a remarkable product. I ended up winding it down. I had to service some of the debt that I had essentially accrued with payroll taxes, various things. So I had to service that over the next year and a half. And I finally wound up that business a few months ago, earlier this year.

[00:20:55 – 00:20:55] Nitin Bajaj

But.

[00:20:56 – 00:24:33] Aarish Shah

And here’s the incredible buck, right? The lessons I learned throughout that whole process were if I were to do the same thing again, I wouldn’t do the same thing again. I would do it completely differently. But I learned through having done it right. So the first thing is I wouldn’t have raised money. I would have tried to avoid raising money as far as possible. Now, for most, I’m not saying that is what everyone should do by any stretch of the imagination, but for me, it’s right.

I like building on my own steam, right? So I’d rather build, build myself. Second thing I learned was not only just talk to customers, but it’s not enough to have a great idea. You need to find a problem that needs a solution. If you don’t have a problem that doesn’t need a solution, you don’t have a business or you will not have a business, right? So focus on the problem, not the solution. Talk to customers.

Talk to customers. Talk to customers. Right? Or talk to potential users. Understand where their pain lies. Focus on that. Great people can do great things.

I hired an incredible team. They did amazing things, but they’re human, right? And they need to know where their paycheck is going to come from. They need to know what they’re going to do next. So you’ve got to look for the people that can not only support you, but also understand the journey that you’re going through, especially that very early stage. But the biggest lesson I actually learned was this. Every single investor, almost every single investor who put money into my business told me two things.

The first thing they said is, Aarish, throughout every element of this journey, you’ve been completely transparent. You’ve been transparent about where you are, what the challenges have been, where your cash is, what the Runway is, how you spent it. Completely transparent. And that is hugely appreciated because not many people, or many people don’t do that, right? And they invest in lots of different companies. And the second thing, which was incredibly humbling again, was many of them said, we would invest in you. Again, you learned.

And if you were to go out and do it again, we back you because you have approached it in the right way. So, yeah, I learned a huge number of lessons through that whole process. I’ve learned. I learned a lot about me, strengthened some opinions of myself that I already had, one of which is that I’m really bad at managing people because I’m the sort of person that, here’s the thing that needs to be done. I’m going to let you get on and do it, and if you deliver, brilliant. If you don’t, I’m going to be like, what happened? But I’m not good at managing people through that process.

And that for me is a real challenge. And so actually in, in my business, in Emerge 1, I’ve hired someone who is very good at doing that sort of thing. And you know, I learned a lot about myself, how I think I journal every day. And part of that process, when I journal every day and I journal on, on, on using notion, I go back to prior years and read my entry for that day and the entries on notion go back to 2022, actually to about September 2022. So I have three years of my thinking every day that I can go back and look at and I can see the progression and I can see how I’ve changed my thinking or how nice or how the circumstances influenced my thinking at the time. And yeah, so like, I don’t think you could distill everything I learned, but all I can say is the experience was incredible. It was challenging, it was tough.

I would do it again in a heartbeat, but I would do it differently.

[00:24:34 – 00:24:36] Nitin Bajaj

True. What about the success?

[00:24:39 – 00:28:07] Aarish Shah

This is a really tough one for me, I’ve got to be honest. Part of my story is that I had my first daughter incredibly early in life. So I had not yet graduated. I was graduating university when she was born. She’s now 24 years old, has graduated university herself, is an incredible human being, as is my younger daughter who’s in her final year of school. And my biggest success is that they are healthy, happy human beings. And I say that with a caveat.

My elder daughter recently and again, this is something that I think certainly within our communities we have to talk about, we have to talk about these things more. She was diagnosed very late in life. In the last year and a half, she was diagnosed with autism. We had never even considered, thought, recognized, realized that she was anywhere on the spectrum. Once she had the diagnosis and we looked back, we were like, oh, wow, okay, we should have figured out now she doesn’t have autism to the extent, extent that she is not able to function. But that coupled with a huge number of physical kind of problems that she has makes life really tough for her. And the biggest success, as I say for me is we have two happy adjusted daughters and we can, we’ll support them through whatever challenges they’re facing because ultimately, again, you know what else matters?

If I’m sitting in a, a million dollar mansion, but I don’t see my daughter ever, or I’m not involved in her life or whatever that to me has, that’s not success. That to me is failure at multiple levels. But most Importantly, at the human level.

So I think that’s. I think that’s probably the biggest success.

And I can’t. I equally can’t take credit for it because I spent a large part of the early part of their lives traveling a lot for work, and they’ve. What they’ve achieved under their own steam. I would hope that I’ve been able to influence and direct, but certainly the outcomes are theirs and theirs alone. That’s one success, the other success, and again, very abstract, so apologies. The other success in my life is I went through a period, I spent a couple of years not in therapy, but talking to a therapist to really understand things that drove me, things that challenged me, problems that I thought I had or problems that I didn’t have or whatever. And so the biggest success was actually getting to know myself really well, forgiving myself for whatever my actions may have been in the past that I perceived or had guilt over.

And as a result of that, my relationship with myself improved, My relationship with my wife improved, my kids improved, but my relationship with my parents just became completely different. My dad and I started talking about things that he would never have talked to me about, certainly hadn’t talked to me about in the past. And for me, that’s just a massive success. I think too many of us, we accept where we are and we think it’s written. This is who I am. I can’t be any different. No, you can be very different.

Again, you have agency. You can choose to put in the work on yourself. You can choose to have someone work with you. But, yeah, for me, that. That is probably what I would describe as certainly in. In over the last three, four years, the thing that sticks out to me as being the most successful first of.

[00:28:07 – 00:28:57] Nitin Bajaj

Thank you for sharing these, the honesty, the humility. And as you rightly pointed out, there is a tremendous need, especially in our community, to talk about these things. This notion of and definition of success we’ve thrust upon ourselves, that we have to be perfect and ideal in every definition of the word can’t be true. And that pressure is so unneeded and brings that unnecessary stress that I know has destroyed many a life, many a relationship. So thank you for stressing upon that and being the role model in living that, but also being open and transparent about it. I really appreciate it. Aarish, switching gears.

What do you do for fun?

[00:29:00 – 00:29:17] Aarish Shah

So my life is. It’s driven by flexible routines, right? So one thing I do, which I. I love doing, is I run every day. I’ve been running every day since January 4, 2020. So coming up to six years now.

[00:29:17 – 00:29:18] Nitin Bajaj

Nice.

[00:29:18 – 00:30:03] Aarish Shah

And I’ve had a few times where I was ill or couldn’t, couldn’t run for whatever reason, but very rarely. And it doesn’t sound like fun, but it is because it’s clarity, it’s mental clarity. It’s using my body in a way that 20 years ago I had never considered. So I love doing that. But for me, I’ve just created a life which everything is fun. Right. As I said earlier, I read.

I spend my life talking to incredibly interesting people. I have a podcast. I get to speak to people that just have interesting things to say, which again, fuels that curiosity. Outside of that, I love to travel. I’ve again been privileged and fortunate that my parents had us traveling from a very young age. The first time I ever went on a plane on my own, I was three, my sister was six.

[00:30:03 – 00:30:04] Nitin Bajaj

Wow.

[00:30:04 – 00:30:43] Aarish Shah

And our parents, my parents sent us to, to Kenya where we’d spend all of our summers, sort of earlier years and have been fortunate enough to have traveled all around the globe. But for me, again, fun is where you look for it. Right. Everything can be fun. So I don’t really have a stock or a generic answer to that. I just, I try to enjoy whatever it is I’m doing. Sometimes it’s a bit harder.

This morning was a bit of a slog, getting on the treadmill, but I love going out for a walk. My wife and I often, less often than previously, but we’ll take five, ten kilometer walks out in, out in the fresh air. Yeah, I just, I think I just get fun out of life.

We’re here being.

[00:30:45 – 00:30:51] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. Any book or a podcast you like and would love to recommend.

[00:30:52 – 00:37:27] Aarish Shah

Yeah. So shameless plug from here?

I’m afraid so. I have a podcast, Nothing Ventured, where we talk. I talk to predominantly VCs, investors, but people throughout the sort of venture ecosystem and fun story. I on the 7th of October, and I remember that date very well for a number of reasons, but on the 7th of 7th of October last year got about 540 subscribers on YouTube.

Two weeks later we had 5,000 plus. And today we have about 42,000 subscribers. And if you are interested in what investors who are investing in really the generational businesses of the future, what they have to say, how they think about things. It’s, it’s a great podcast and it isn’t a Q and A.

It’s very much a conversation. We delve into lots of different topics. That’s one I obviously, as I said, recommend because I’m being selfish. The other one, which actually is something I do for fun when I’m. When I’m winding down or I’m in the shower or something, there’s this great podcast called Off Menu, which is hosted by two British comedians, Ed Gamble.

Ed Gamble is one. And, oh, gosh, the second’s name has escaped me, which is crazy because he’s the one I actually enjoy more. But anyway, Off Menu, and it’s a podcast where they invite guests on and they talk about or they have them talk through their dream menu in a fantastical restaurant. Hilarious. It’s incredibly funny, funny podcast. They’ve had some great guests on. So I highly recommend that if anyone wants just a bit of laughter and humor in their lives.

And the book, again, I’m going to be selfish. I’ve just finished writing my first book, as yet unpublished, and certainly has to go through, I think, a number of rounds of editing and of rewriting and all the usual things. But I wrote actually in the period of AI wrote this book completely freehand. And it’s 100 chapters long.

It’s 122,000 words. It’s about the length of a PhD. It is about business, and it is the hundred lessons that I’ve learned over 20 years of being a CEO, a CFO, a founder. And it actually just gave me a huge amount of enjoyment as well as pain, getting those thoughts down on paper and. And really exploring some of the topics that have been inside me for a long time. And then. And of course, I.

I will happily share the book with you to share with your audience in the future. But then if I’ll give you two books, or two, actually, one series. One book. So there is a great author, British author, called Terry Pratchett. Terry Pratchett. He passed away several years ago from early onset Alzheimer’s. A really sad loss to the literary world.

I first started exploring or reading his books in my early, late, actually my late teens. And I still read them again and again. And he has a series of books called the Discworld series, and it’s set on a fantasy world which is a mirror of ours. And he uses satire and irony to hold a. Hold a light up against what is happening or what. What he saw happening in. In the world around him. And it’s.

But it’s incredibly witty, incredibly funny. The characters are wonderfully deep, and there are several. I’m actually currently rereading a number of them. And there’s one called Jingo, which is essentially about perceptions of the other. So we’re seeing a lot in the US at the moment and certainly online. I don’t know if it’s the lived experience of many of you in the US the issue around H1B vis and some of the demonization of Indians in the US and certainly we see parallels here in the UK with, with the anti migrant rhetoric. But you read Jingo and you look at him, he wrote this how many years?

20 years ago? 15, 20 years ago. And he could be talking about today. So it’s, they’re really incredible books and they, they are modern philosophical books in my mind. And actually so the other thing that I would choose, the one I would choose from a business perspective first is a book called the Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, who is one of the general partners at Andreessen Horowitz alongside Marc Andreessen. That is one of the first books I read when I started getting into the kind of venture ecosystem. But it is written in such a candid and meaningful way.

If you’re a founder, if you’re an operator, you will, the book will resonate with you because you will just understand everything that he has to say and all the challenges he had to face and all the things that he went through. But it’s a, it’s a great, a really great book. And then finally, I’ve been exploring philosophy more and more. I’m currently reading the Jain Philosophical treatise which embodies the kind of way that, or the precepts that I guess Jains live by. And I come from a Jane Jane family and background. But beyond that, I try and again read across different philosophies. The obvious one is Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations I think are incredible.

The Tao Te Ching is incredible. Laozi Eastern philosophy I just found find incredible. I read the Vedas. I actually, I was in Italy, my wife is Italian. We spend a lot of our time in Italy over the summers. And I just said I’m, I’m heading off. What do you mean you’re heading off?

I’m going to go. I just booked two nights at this villa which is about 10 minutes away and I am going there to read and that’s what I want to do. And I had five books with me, all of which were philosophical books and actually quite a lot of Eastern philosophy in there. And I read the Vedas. Oh, sorry, not the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Book of Five Rings, various others. And I just think there is so much value in these ancient historical writings for people who could not even imagine the world that we live in today. And I think it grounds you in a way and forces you to challenge again how you think about thinking, how you think about life, how you think about the things that you do.

And, and yeah, I find that exploration to be incredibly gratifying. Yeah, sorry, that was more than one example. And James Acaster is the other host of Off Menu, so Ed Gamble and James Acaster. So sorry that, that was going to bug me for a while, but good, you redeemed yourself. Giving you a few options there.

[00:37:27 – 00:37:55] Nitin Bajaj

Yeah, thanks for sharing those. And just, it’s fascinating, but it’s not that how things change, but they remain the same. The things that were written thousands of years ago are still the ones that we need the most as things continue to evolve on a daily basis. And on one end we talk about how quickly things are changing and then as we look at the macro scale, the essentials and the fundamentals have remained exactly the same.

[00:37:56 – 00:39:09] Aarish Shah

Human beings are human beings. And actually the point is, how do you retain your humanity in a world where everything is automated? We talked about curiosity and thinking earlier. How many people are outsourcing their thinking to generative AI? Yes, use it to enhance your thinking, but don’t use it to replace your thinking. I speak to a lot of people who still say, and writing is the purest form of thinking, to really construct your thoughts in a systematic way. And again, it’s lost art.

By writing, I don’t mean picking up a keyboard and typing, of course, that is valid. But long form writing with your hand, there is something incredible. And of course the neuroscience and the physiology of writing has been explored very deeply. And it triggers different patterns in different areas of your brain in a way that too many of us are not using anymore. And I think the beautiful thing about those Asian literatures are they are shed, they are bereft of any of these modern, modern connivances that we have. They are humans exploring what it means to be human. And I think it’s, I think it’s just something that all of us should, should do a little bit in our lives.

And it doesn’t mean you have to be a philosopher, but I think it can be quite, quite interesting to explore.

[00:39:09 – 00:39:23] Nitin Bajaj

Yeah, it’s very purifying. It’s very lean in in many ways. Now onto my favorite part of the show. We call this the One Line Life Lessons. Aarish, I would love for you to share your life lessons with us.

[00:39:25 – 00:41:51] Aarish Shah

Yeah, this was really tough mainly because actually the book that I wrote was 100 lessons in fact, it started off as a LinkedIn post which went viral. I think I had over a million views. Nice 100 lessons, but I have tossed one or two others in there. So the first lesson is that money doesn’t sleep, but you absolutely should. And this was something that came late to me in life. The beauty and the wonder of sleep. This next one is actually a Naval Ravikant saying, which actually just embodies so much of how I think, which is you should play long term games with long term people, which again is something I love.

The next one is again one of mine. Be actively lazy. Find ways to make your life easier. I think passive laziness is just allowing Netflix to roll. Actively being actively lazy is figuring out how to do things more efficiently so that you can go and watch Netflix. Maybe the third is, or the fourth rather is a bit of a. It’s a bit of a finance sort of systems thing.

But when you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out. But that goes for everything, right? So a computer, you put rubbish in, you’ll get rubbish out. But your brain, you put rubbish in, you’re going to get rubbish out. Your body, you put rubbish in, you’re going to get rubbish out, consume and use things that aren’t rubbish. Which should be a really obvious one, but I think far too many of us fail with that one and my final one, which again is something it took me a long time, long time to learn. But my business can’t be in good shape if my mind and body aren’t right.

And again, this is something that hopefully over the course of this podcast has probably become relatively apparent. But I think if you don’t prioritize your own health, nothing around you will be healthy. And that that is both your body, your mind, of course, your spirit. And I think it’s really important that people think about that a bit more and especially again in our community. I had an uncle two years ago, he passed away, 69 years old, completely unexpectedly. Heart attack. You know, he may maybe would have been able to avoid it had he have done more exercise that he had done, taken, taken better care of.

How yet maybe not, I don’t know. Don’t leave it to chance. Try and stack the odds in your favor.

Make sure you’re healthy. I think that’s incredibly important.

[00:41:52 – 00:42:15] Nitin Bajaj

Aarish, thank you so much for making the time to share your journey, your story, your life lessons, but most importantly, for being who you are. An extremely curious, humble and honest person. I really enjoy our conversations and I’m really looking forward to the book, and maybe once it’s out, we can have you back and talk more about that.

[00:42:15 – 00:42:31] Aarish Shah

I’d love that. I’m going to try and set myself a goal of at least getting it to ship shape and maybe ready for a few people to have a read of it over the next month. But look, thank you so much for inviting me for taking the time. I love the questions. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness, and it’s been an absolute pleasure.