[00:00:00 – 00:00:06] Nitin Bajaj

I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj, and joining me today is Raghav Gupta. Raghav, welcome on the show.

[00:00:06 – 00:00:07] Raghav Gupta

Thank you for having me, Nitin.

[00:00:08 – 00:00:13] Nitin Bajaj

Pleasure to have you here. Let’s start with the big question. Who is Raghav?

[00:00:14 – 00:00:46] Raghav Gupta

So Raghav is a loving husband, a founder, a student of entrepreneurship, the founder of Posha, which builds cooking robots for homes, a lover of the music of the Grateful Dead, consummate foodie, a person passionate about bringing people together through not just delicious, but healthy food. Somebody who is very passionate about fitness and not just for himself, but for the people around him. I think that would be Raghav.

A quick, short intro. What do you think?

[00:00:47 – 00:01:04] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. Many, many versions of you, and looking forward to getting to know most of them. I’ve seen flashes of a few of those already. But let’s talk about Posha. Tell us what is it, and more importantly, why did you start it?

[00:01:05 – 00:02:18] Raghav Gupta

Posha builds countertop cooking robots to help people eat freshly cooked meals every single day without necessarily having to spend tons of time in the kitchen. I started Posha to solve a very personal problem. I grew up in a household where love was expressed through home cooked meals, and I’ve seen enough people in my life who have had to sacrifice their personal ambitions to to provide these freshly cooked meals to their family. I do not want a world where I or other people have to choose between providing love and care to their families and living the best versions of themselves, and so I decided to start Posha. Since we started, we’ve grown to roughly 50 people spread across two countries primarily, India and The US. Started shipping a few months back with hundreds of consumers using our robot in their own homes and made it really indispensable in their lives. It’s so useful to them that they can’t now live without it, and we’re really proud to have created this piece of this work of art that that touches not just one but multiple senses, especially their sense of taste.

[00:02:19 – 00:02:48] Nitin Bajaj

Yeah. And food is the source to your heart, and you’ve nailed that piece. And I remember you telling me that your youngest user is about eight years old and the oldest is somewhere in their eighties or nineties. So what I love about that is you’ve you call it a work of art, which it is, but you built it in a way that the entire spectrum of age groups can use it pretty effortlessly. So kudos on that.

[00:02:49 – 00:02:50] Raghav Gupta

Thank you so much.

[00:02:50 – 00:03:07] Nitin Bajaj

Hardware is hard, and food is extremely personal. But to be able to bring these two very distinct and very difficult worlds together is a truly amazing feat. So congratulations to you and the entire team at Posha.

[00:03:08 – 00:03:53] Raghav Gupta

Thank you so much. It’s often said that that food robotics is the Olympics of hardware Yeah. Because there’s so much unstructured the environment of your robot is so unstructured. Your onions could be from a different farm. Your tomatoes could have more water content or less. Your admin conditions could be very different. But like a trained chef, you still need to teach your robot how to cook delicious food using human chef like intuition.

So we’re, we’re proud we’ve been able to build, actually one of, the few robots out there one of the few consumer robotics products out there that has actually shipped. I can’t think of many such products that have actually shipped and that that are, like, consumer robots for a consumer use case.

[00:03:54 – 00:04:50] Nitin Bajaj

And more than just ship have become a part of people’s daily lives to the extent that for many, it’s indispensable. They depend on this thing to carry on their day to day lives. So that’s, to me, is the true amazing feat. It’s one thing to build a product and then another to have a product that’s adopted so well that it becomes indispensable. So, again, can’t say enough good things. And having seen the product, having tasted the outcome of it, I am super excited for this product to get out to many more people. And with that, tell us give us a sense for the size and scale.

You talked about having a 50% team. You’ve just shipped this. But how are you thinking in terms of growth and what’s to come in the next maybe six months to a year?

[00:04:51 – 00:06:40] Raghav Gupta

So six months to a year, our focus is just to deliver more of these devices to our wait list wait list of customers. We started taking preorders roughly two years Bajaj. And since then, thousands of people are waiting for their Porsche to reach their homes. Currently, where we are right now, we are only shipping in the San Francisco Bay Area with with site to start shipping outside the Bay Area starting next month itself. So just building towards that. Hopefully, by the end of the year, we should have some four digit robots out in the field. I don’t think we’ll have, like, ten, twenty, 50 thousand units yet, at least within the next year itself.

How we measure successes by by two ways. We measure how often people use our robot because that gives us a sense of how big is the problem that we’re solving in their lives. And the more they’re using it, the more we know we’re actually creating an impact. The second way we measure impact is we ask our customers how they would feel if they could no longer use our product. And this was a framework that was popularized by Raghav Vora from this company called Superhuman. And it is said that if and if you measure the percentage of people who answered very disappointed, And you ask people how would you feel if you could no longer use my product, give them three options, very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, not disappointed. And you measure the percentage of people who would say very disappointed.

And we try to ensure that their number stays north of 40%. And as we scale, the denominator increases, so it becomes much more harder to to get that number above 40%. But that’s, like, a product metric that we have to make sure that people love our product. And we feel if you are able to truly solve a problem that people face, you know, everything else just falls in place automatically.

[00:06:41 – 00:07:21] Nitin Bajaj

I love that customer focus and also measuring for what is important. At the end of the day, if again, if you build a product and there is no adoption or people don’t love it, then why are we even building it or the next feature or the next extension to Nitin fascinating that you’ve been able to do this in such a short time and see that love coming from the customers. Now as you grow and scale, I’m sure there is multiple challenges. That’s the nature of the business you are in. Hardware is hard for a reason. But if you had to call out the one big challenge, what would that be?

[00:07:23 – 00:09:40] Raghav Gupta

I think in in the long term picture or or the locked up view of things, the big challenge is to attain what I call built in status. So we have seen that the most important appliances in your kitchen, the refrigerator, the the oven, the stovetop, and the dishwasher. But at some point of time, countertop device. Mhmm. These were devices that you would purchase, you would use, and then over time, they became so important in consumer lives that they started coming preinstalled in consumer homes. So I think the big mountain we’re trying to climb is how do we make Posha so indispensable that it attains built in status, and we’re able to replace the stovetop, something that has not changed in the last thirty years. We want to build something that you can cook on when you don’t feel like cook when you do feel like cooking, which you can anyway do on on a stovetop.

But, also, when you don’t feel like cooking, your stovetop should be able to create a delicious meal. And I think the journey towards that is going to be hard. Outside of that, if I have to talk about day to day hard challenges, it’s literally a lot of stuff. We’re we’re building at the intersection of software, hardware, and food across multiple geographies, and that itself is extremely hard. On the hardware side, we have manufacturing challenges with the current situation between US and China. On the software side, it’s extremely hard to find data, a robot how to think like a human being and use and have human chef like intelligence built into a machine. Nitin the food side, people’s personal expectations are very different.

Even with the same ethnic community, you and me are both of Indian origin, and the power body you like might be very different from the power body I like. And to scale that part across the same ethnic group, but but across multiple ethnic groups and combine 10,000 restaurants into one single robot for 10,000 different dietary preferences is a challenge in itself. And so those are some challenges on the product side, and then operating a team between two time zones with a large team sitting out of India and and a team also sitting out of The US is its own challenge.

[00:09:41 – 00:09:46] Nitin Bajaj

But, hey, despite all of these, you’re still rocking and rolling, so that’s amazing.

[00:09:46 – 00:09:48] Raghav Gupta

Thank you. Thank you for saying that.

[00:09:49 – 00:09:58] Nitin Bajaj

Now with challenges come opportunities, and I would love for you to call out that one most exciting opportunity that’s ahead of you.

[00:09:59 – 00:11:03] Raghav Gupta

I think the one opportunity that I can think of right away is is just this ability to have a private chef in every home. The world is moving towards the direction where everything is super personalized, and and I’m so glad that we established the deep morts over many years to find a way to make food truly personalized in consumers’ homes without consumers having to spend time. You and I can personalize that food, but to do that, we have to spend tons of hours in the kitchen every single week. And the opportunity is we’re able to now personalize food for every single person out there without them having to spend the time before they even know what they would like to eat. They have a recommendation not just for a recipe, but a recipe that their taste buds will enjoy. And we’re able to do all of that with with AI now. And I’m excited that we had built the foundations for this future many years back.

I think if we had just started, it would have been too late. So I think that’s an opportunity we’re truly excited about now.

[00:11:03 – 00:11:31] Nitin Bajaj

That’s just amazing. Now as we look forward, I love to pause and reflect, and I would invite you to share two moments from your previous personal or professional life. One where things did not work out as you’d expected. There was failure lessons that came out of that. And another instance where things exceeded your expectations and became a success beyond your imagination.

[00:11:33 – 00:13:41] Raghav Gupta

Okay. I think the biggest failure I can think of is an instance where we actually ran out of money, and that has happened more than months. And and as the builder of a company, you can do anything, but the one thing you cannot do is a lot of money. And it’s a truly devastating state when that happens. And I think what we learned out of that was, we learned the importance of money. We’ve been despite being venture backed, we’ve been extremely frugal. We make sure that every dollar is spent at the right place.

You understand the value of capital. B, you understand how hard it is to raise money and you you are prepared much in advance. You learn how to plan, and I think that was the lesson primarily. The lesson was value money very much and keep it close. Make sure you use it for needle moving activities in an organization. Don’t take it for granted ever, and plan for the worst in advance. Never be overoptimistic, especially when it comes to the operational plan of your company.

And I think it’s it’s too much of a professional learning that I had. And this is not on the personal side, but on the professional side. And then, likewise, a good win that was well and beyond my expectations. I think I haven’t learned how to celebrate wins well enough to even recall big win that I might have celebrated. I think, like, a big win that was in beyond our dreams was was the first round we raised. Again, very much related to money. Our first investors, the so Exceed Capital had Nitin our first check.

And when that money hit our bank account, we were super, super excited for maybe twenty minutes. Then after twenty minutes, we were like, okay. Is that what it’s supposed to feel like? And then that was the end of it. So I I can’t think of a moment that has stuck and, basically, a big win that has stuck for a very long time. Over time, it comes to an end.

[00:13:42 – 00:13:44] Nitin Bajaj

Okay. We’ll continue to work on that.

[00:13:45 – 00:13:46] Raghav Gupta

Yeah.

[00:13:47 – 00:14:11] Nitin Bajaj

Now switching gears, what do you do to de stress, relax, and just step off the the wheels, if you will? Because I’m sure this is all consuming, and I know we’ve talked about this.

We love working. We love doing a few other things. But outside of work, what do you like to do to just destress?

[00:14:13 – 00:15:18] Raghav Gupta

It might sound counterintuitive as a as a founder of a food robotics company who’s trying to automate cooking, But I’ve come to realize that I enjoy cooking to de stress. I think it’s also because it deepens my relationship with food, which is very important to me as a food tech founder. So I enjoy spending time with my food, both on the dining table and off the dining table. As an immigrant founder, I love spending time with my tribe whenever I can. I think it reminds me to be human and not be a human robot who is constantly churning one thing after the other. I like to go to the gym. This is again in line with me wanting to stay healthy or going out for a walk. Yeah. I play poker every once in a while.

That’s the other thing I enjoy again with my tribe. And I listen to music. And I mentioned this in the beginning, but blues and has had a big profound impact on my life for some reason, but I enjoy the blues. I enjoy the music of John Mayer and the Grateful Dead.

[00:15:19 – 00:15:32] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. Many common things to share, and I’m looking forward to continuing doing a lot of those together. Now any book or a podcast that you would like to recommend and share?

[00:15:33 – 00:16:18] Raghav Gupta

Reading Sidhartha. I’m finding myself to be inclined towards spirituality, and Siddhartha was one of those books that stayed. The other book is Kafka on the Shore by by Murakami. And then I want to read the Bhagavad Gita, but I haven’t had the chance to pick it up yet. An article that I’ve enjoyed reading is, again, an article I referenced a few minutes back. It’s an article written by Gaurav by Rahul Vora from Superhuman, and it’s a framework that that Rahul uses to find product market fit in his company. And that single article has had probably the largest impact, on us building the company.

[00:16:19 – 00:16:31] Nitin Bajaj

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing those. Now on to my favorite part of the show, which we call the one nine life lessons. Raghav, I would love for you to share your life lessons with us.

[00:16:32 – 00:17:32] Raghav Gupta

Okay. I think the few that come to mind are so that’s the first one, which is work hard, and the results will take care of themselves. Don’t think about the outcomes. The second Hindi phrase that comes to mind is which is, again, leave everything to to the universe And whatever is happening for the betterment of the universe, it helps you shed your ego and not be too self centered. You die when you stop trying. Again, very similar to the first one, which is keep working hard. I’m great. Uh-huh. And I think that has that is the reason Posha has been around for so many years.

Most companies don’t survive the rest of time. And then in the joy of others lies our own. This, again, helps me keep my ego at bay and find the joy in the in the happiness of others, and the joy of others lies around. And then all the years combined, they melt into a dream. I think that’s the last one.

[00:17:33 – 00:18:02] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. Raghav, thank you again for sharing your journey and story and your life lessons. Congratulations and kudos on the successes so far. You’ve hit some many important and big milestones, and you’re just getting started. So really happy for you and really happy to see Posha coming to more homes and spreading joy and happiness and bringing fresh food without putting in a lot of work. Congratulations.

[00:18:03 – 00:18:06] Raghav Gupta

Thank you, Nitin. Thank you so much for having me on the industry show.