Julian: Hey everyone. Thankyou so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have SanjayGoel, CEO and founder at NachoNacho. NachoNacho is a B2B SaaS marketplacepowered by FinTech. Sanjay, I'm so excited to chat with you, not only becauseyou have an extensive background in the startup space, building companies,investing in companies, and really just having an insight into, I think, whatmakes companies successful and and scalable and, and all that.

And, and also what you're working on atNachoNacho in. Connecting these a a lot of these as companies with theircustomers and finding unique ways to, help them not only expand their reach andtheir audience, but also helping companies purchase the right products and, andreally kind of manage that overall procurement process.

But before we get into all that, whatwere you doing before you started NachoNacho?

Sanjay: Hey Julian, great tobe with you today. So I, I'm a third time founder. And other than that, I'vehad a quite an extensive career in banking. So I was in New York and Londondoing banking derivative structured products in global financial markets.

Yeah. And before that I was an engineer.I was doing VSI design, designing memory ships and microprocessors. And also Iworked in Japan doing robotics research in a large Japanese company. So I'vehad a few careers.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And justthinking about, your startup and startups.

Experience. I know you've not only gonethrough some acquisitions yourself, but you, you've invested in companies andI'm just curious for, for, the audience to kind of get some context, whenyou're thinking about investment and you think about startups, what makes orwhat are the components that makes a startup successful?

What do they have? What, whether it'sproduct market fit, or tight operation, if they're bootstrapped, what inparticular have you seen for companies? You feel will have long-term success.What are those kind of features that they have?

Sanjay: Yeah, no, I think soit comes down to two basics, right?

So like, coming down to basics is ideaand execution. So idea, inclusive vision, like what, what market are you goingafter? How big is your vision? Yeah. Are you going to make a substantial impactin the universe? And secondly, you have the tools to do it. Yeah. Which isreally your team, your experience and all of.

So, yeah, it's, it's really down to thebasics.  

Julian: Yeah. And, and whenyou, when companies say, don't have a component of it, how, or I guess backbacktracking, what are some common ways that companies say are under-preparedto scale or under-prepared in terms of the market we're serving or don't havethat product market fit?

Are there some kind of common. Themesthat you see for companies that are successful in, in, in ways that they canactually improve to reach success? Anything come to mind?  

Sanjay: Well, I think so the,one of the key qualifications of a founder, I, I think about twoqualifications. One is you have to be at least partially delusional.

You have to be able to believe that youcan, you can build something out of nothing, which is pretty scary in itself.Yeah. And secondly, you need to have the grits to be able to do it. Yeah. Andto be able to build something out of nothing, to have very little resources.And be able to do a lot with that.

So be able to do a lot with very little,right. Yeah. And that's something that you, I don't think you can read aboutit. You can read about it, learn from a book. I don't think you can learn aboutit in a classroom. Yeah. Uh, It just comes from, life experiences.  

Julian: Yeah. And thinkingabout, just jumping into your entrepreneurial journey, I know and know a fewstartups ago, but just curious because I feel like a lot of founders havesimilar, whether it's personality traits or, or similar qualities about them.

What was the initial move into in, intostartups and entrepreneurship in your mind? You, you were doing investmentbaking before that you were at an engineer. Building hardware and other andother technical products. What, what kind of itch did you need to scratch? Didyou see a problem in the, in the world that you needed to solve?

Was it certain product? What were thecircumstances that inspired you to, to take on the journey and then continue onfor however many years in however many startups?  

Sanjay: Yeah. So I think, somy, my starting point is not necessarily that I want to do a startup, I want tobuild a company that is not my starting point.

Yeah. I only build a company when anidea comes to me. So some founders start with the notion that they want to be afounder and then they go looking for an idea. I don't do that. I workbackwards. I, I'll let the idea come to me and I only start a company if, ifthat happens. Yeah. So I'm not forcing it to, to become a founder.

I don't think there's any glamor inbeing a founder, as everybody knows who's being a founder. It's a very, verytough journey. Yeah. And it's not about the money. It's not about being theboss, none of those things. It's really about getting inspired by an idea andthen taking it to reality making, making it real.

So that's really what the journey isabout. Yeah. That starts with identify. Or coming across, I should say, a needthat exists in the market. I always start with that.  

Julian: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Andwhen thinking about the, the needs that are out there, is there a certainmarket you gravitate towards or are you pretty much open to seeing, I, I guesswhat's behind your decision making, know, in, in what you're addressing yourmarket?

Is it, be it based on a certainexpertise for other founders out there who have a similar philosophy? What getsyou excited? What, what would, would, would essentially qualify for you tospend that much time on? And like you said, go through the difficult journey ofentrepreneur.  

Sanjay: Yeah. Yeah. Sopersonally, I I look for very wide and very wide spaces.

Mm-hmm. So both criteria have to be met.It needs to be a very wide space, meaning I don't want to be a Me too. Yeah. Iwant to create that space. And it has to be a very large opportunity, or atleast it should have the potential to be a very large opportunity. Yeah. Butsomething that can have a large scale impact on something.

The world, on society, on on, oncommerce, on business, on people's lives. It has to be substantially impactfulfor me to be involved.  

Julian: Yeah. Well, inthinking about if it is a wide space, I, I feel like, first thing I think aboutis, is driving adoption and, and driving education. Getting people toacknowledge that there is space or there is a need out there.

Yeah. How, what are some strategies thatyou found are successful for that education piece and getting people to seealmost the elephant in the room that, that you've Yeah. Come to, come tofind.  

Sanjay: Yeah, it's not easy atall, especially if you're going after a white space. If it was it was, if itwas obvious, somebody else would've already done it.

So by definition, you're going aftersomething that is less obvious. Yeah. So I think for that, what you need isallies. You need people who already have seen a similar need and then theybecome your allies and hopefully they have their own following and influence.Yeah. And so you create these concentric circles of.

Very close allies. You truly get whatyou're doing. Yeah. And then it spreads outwards from there. Yeah. And thenover time, as you start realizing a vision, more and more people start seeingit. And at some point people say, of course, that needs to be done. I mean,right. There's no question about it.

Julian: Right, right, right.

Yeah. Yeah. And thinking about, thesuccessful companies that you've had, Whether successful or not is the rightword, but the companies you say, gone through transitions and a lot of people,a lot of founders measure success on say, acquisitions. And I know you've gonethrough, one or two or even more yourself when you're evaluating an acquisitionas a founder, is how do, how do you know who the right acquire is?

What are some of the criteria you'veseen? Because, having the right partner, creating the right ecosystem of howthat transition's gonna be, whether it's an acquihire. Completely absorbing thecompany. How do you identify the right acquirer based on your business or yourteam? What are the criteria for you to kind of go through a transaction likethat?

And would you do it differently from,from your past experiences?  

Sanjay: Yeah, so I think sonormally founders, when they create a company they're emotionally very tied toit, to their vision. Mm-hmm. And if you're talking about an exit in the form ofan acquisition, then. I would think that they would want to see if thatacquiring company will be able to carry on that vision and perpetuate thatvision.

Yeah. Further with more resources.That's what I would look for. Yeah. If I were looking to be acquired. Butpersonally, I, when I think about building a company, I don't think about anexit at all. I think about the day-to-day joy I get from building the company,from building the team bringing in investors.

Who are your partners into the, thecompany. Talking to customers, identifying needs, developing the productfurther. So that's what gives me the joy. Yeah. It's not, it's not thinkingabout who can I sell the company to?  

Julian: Right, right. Andthinking about NachoNacho and, and. What particularly excited you about theproblem set that, that you discovered in the marketplace?

And, and give a little context here forthe audience sake. What does NATO nacho do? Who, who, who are you addressingand what did you, essentially, what were you inspired about the problems that,that you are essentially solving now and tackling, and within this aspects?  

Sanjay: Sure. So, Is nowdepending on who you ask, a 600 billion per year industry.

Yeah. And growing at 20% per year. Sojust like software was eating the world, now SAS is eating the world. Sosoftware has become sass. Yeah. And there were a few pioneers, early days,companies like Adobe who migrated from shrink wrap, software to. SaaS,Salesforce came along. Those were the early days of online, recurring paymentbased models.

Mm-hmm. Which have proven to beobviously very successful, both from a customer perspective as well as the, theprovider perspective. Yeah. But what we, what I realize is that nobody hasbuilt a true marketplace for SaaS so far. So, think. For example, the consumergoods space. Mm-hmm. So we have amazon.com, which is actually more of amarketplace than an e-commerce company.

Right. We have Etsy and eBay that, thatthey're complete marketplaces. Right. Then you have Uber, which is amarketplace. Airbnb is a marketplace. So we have all these marketplaces forvarious goods and services that we, we look for where there is a. Relationshipbetween the marketplace and the buyer and the seller.

Yeah, so an Uber, the seller is adriver. The, the, the, the buyer is a passenger. Airbnb, the seller is thehost, the buyer is the, the, the guest and so on and so forth. And there is,nobody's built a marketplace for sas, a true marketplace where you have deepand direct and ongoing relationships on both. Yeah.

And there is a, I realize there's adesperate need for that because the cost of user acquisition for SaaS vendorsis high and going up because of mm-hmm. Increased competition. Mm-hmm. And youdon't need to spend all that money on Google ads and Facebook ads and buildingthese giant. Sales and marketing machines, which are extremely costly.

Mm-hmm. If you have a marketplace, youcan be a lot more efficient in being able to get your product to all the rightcustomers. Mm-hmm. And from a customer perspective, the reason we likemarketplaces is because it's, it's the one place. So I go to Uber because allthe drivers are already there.

Yeah. I go to Airbnb because all thehosts are already there. I go to Amazon because, Hundreds of thousands ofvendors listing their products in Na Nacho in Amazon. So there's clear valuefrom a, from a buyer perspective, from a convenience perspective. But more thanthat, there is a, from a union economics perspective, there is a huge advantagethat marketplaces bring to the whole system.

Yeah. And the advantage is that isnetwork. So that is the core of what we do is network effects. Basically, onceyou have a critical mass of buyers and sellers, they, they reinforce eachother. The more buyers you have, the more sellers are there. The more sellersare there, the more buyers are there. So for example, we have for example, a customerthat is subscribing to 40 SaaS products and through our recommendation engine,they discover.

The 41st SaaS product in a marketplace.So our incremental cost for finding that match between the buyer and seller isliterally zero. Yeah. There's no incremental cost. Whereas for that seller togo and find that buyer that we already have, it would've cost them 30, 40, 50,60% of their LTV to be able to, to find that.

So the network effects and theefficiencies created in marketplaces are unbeatable, which is why all the othermarketplaces exist. Yeah. It's just that nobody had built it for, for sas. Andthe reason I believe nobody's built it is because it's really, really hard tobuild. Yeah. And I am the type of person who only likes doing hard things.

If it's easy, I get bored. So I like todo hard things. Yeah. Yeah. And this has been this, we have actually passed thehardest. But building the marketplace in the early stages was very, verydifficult. But we are way past that now. We're in the scale upgrades. Yeah. So,what we do is we do three things for businesses.

On the buyer side. We firstly havebusinesses manage all the SaaS subscriptions that they already have thatalready paying. By the time we meet any business, obviously they already havemany, many subscriptions. Yeah. The problem is that their subscriptions out ofcontrol. So free trials become. You have unused subscriptions, you haveduplicate subscriptions Sometimes, yeah, sometimes vendors overcharge you, youget surprise charges.

Sometimes cancellation is difficult. You,subscription is easy, cancellation is difficult. Employees leave, they leaveorphan subscriptions behind that. Nobody knows how to cancel all theseproblems. So that's the first problem we solve. The way we solve it is byissuing virtual credit card. So we're also a FinTech company, and the main ideais that you have a separate credit card per vendor.

So if you. Let's say you're a 20 peoplecompany and you have 45 subscriptions, you'll have 45 credit cards. Yeah. Andyou can create a new card within five seconds. And on each card you can put adollar limit, you can set you an expiry date, you can cancel the card at anytime. So you have very granular control over every subscription that you have.

Yeah. And you have a dashboard where youcan see all your subscriptions in one place in real time, and you can run anykind of reports by date, by vendor, by employee, by category, anything youwant. Yeah. So that's the first thing we. Yeah, go ahead.  

Julian: Yeah, no, I was just,I was just thinking in terms of I'd love for you to finish, but I'm, I'm,fascinating piece is the issuing of the virtual credit card per subscriptionthat you have, and how are you able to do that outside of, say, traditionalmeans of getting access to a credit card, like going through credit checks andgoing through all the.

The underwriting that is, is, isrequired to actually, have and own a credit card. What are some ways thatyou've worked around that? That's, that's pretty, that's pretty unique to thespace, especially within old financial structure.  

Sanjay: Yeah, yeah, it's agood point. So we, we think of ourselves not as a lender, but as a softwarecompany.

Mm-hmm. So the idea is not to actuallyset up credit lines for you to evaluate the, the financial profile of thecompany. You can actually get started within literally less than five minutesin nacha Nacho. We don't have any relationship with credit agencies. It's plugand play. Yeah. And the reason is that we don't, we're not really extending acredit line to you, even though we are issuing credit cards.

But normally we are pay as you go model.So every time you use our card, we will draw the same funds from your bankaccount. Sure. So the idea is not to actually give you a loan or give you floatfor some time period. The idea really is a software provider to give youcontrol over all your, your subscription that you have.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like obviouslybuilding that whole infrastructure is as, and you're right, is is obviouslytakes a lot of work. Yeah. Because we have to have a relationship with thenetwork like Visa, there's a ban bank behind it. There is a process of behindthis. It's quite a complex architecture to be able to build that.

Yeah. And from, but from a userperspective, it's extremely simple. You can literally onboard in 2, 3, 4. Get,start issuing cards, five, five seconds per card. Yeah. The second thing we dothen is we help you discover new assets relevant to you using ai. We've beenusing AI before this whole thing became, hyped up with ChatGPT.

And the idea is to help you discoverproducts that are specifically relevant to your company based on private datawe have on you because we know what you're already paying. And also based onpublicly available data on your company as well as publicly available data onthe vendor side. So we are, we're the matchmaker.

Mm-hmm. And we take all these signalswhen we put it into our machine, AI machine. And what comes out is specificrecommendations for you as a company. And most tech companies are always buyingnew products. On average, subscribe to one new product every week, at least oneevery week. Cause we're always trying new things on.

On the back end side, on the IT side,middleware side, growth hacking, side design, we're always trying always new,new products. So gives us a way to control all of that in one place. Yeah,because that's the second value prop is helping you discover new products thatmay be relevant to you. Yeah. Just like Amazon offers you recommendationsbecause they, you buy so much from.

Hmm. That they will say, you're buyingall these products, Julian, so you may be interested in these three as well,because other people like you are buying these products, for example. Yeah.Yeah. Uh, And then we have the marketplace where we have more than 400 SaaSproducts already listed. Every product in the marketplace comes with adiscount.

The total discounts available in themarketplace are close to 2 million per year already. And we are listing moreand more products every day. So almost any product you can think of will mostlikely be on a marketplace. And if you buy it from a marketplace, you will getvery substantial discounts.

Yeah. So really it's a one stop shop formanaging, discovering, and buying all your staff.  

Julian: Yeah. And thinkingabout the, the recommendation engine, going back to that idea and, and you,you, you're talking about, you take a few different signals and then identifyand use that recommendation, but is it, is it, is the recommendation based onprice or is it based on, is there any input on the company side to identifywhat's important to me?

Maybe I don't care about price, but Icare if I'm looking up CRMs, for instance, that it plugs into a different api,like Zier and then, you can have all the sophisticated work. How do youidentify the right signal? To recommend the right products.  

Sanjay: Totally. Yeah. So manythings go into it. So first of all, we have a, what we call a product graphwhere we match Yeah.

Every single product in the world, everysingle size product. Yeah. We have a graph where we, we have basicallypairings. Is this, is Product A complimentary two? Product B. Mm-hmm. Forexample, maybe because they have direct integr. Maybe because one product helpsyou do the what, whatever you're using the other product for, maybe do itbetter.

Yeah. So those are complimentaryproducts. The other type of pairing would be competing product. Yeah, so youhave product A, and then you have B, C, D who compete with a, and then one maybe cheaper than the other. One may be better than the other, but they'recompeting products. So we have all these relationships between products and theproduct graph.

Yeah. And then we add to that obviouslywhat other companies are buying. If you're. You are buying the same 10 productsas another company's buying, but they also have an 11th product. That productmay be interesting for you, for example. Right, right. So there are many, manysignals like that that go into it.

And we also take input from the sellersbecause we have on the other side, sellers are also our partners. SaaS. SaaSvendors are our partners. And they can also. Their ICP in their, in theirseller account. Mm-hmm. They can say, I'm interested in, I'm targeting, forexample, companies size one to 100. I'm targeting comp companies in NorthAmerica and Europe, for example.

Yeah. I'm targeting EdTech and educationcompanies, and I'm targeting government institutions and I'm targeting, I don'tknow manufacturers. So all that input, those are also signals we take from the.And that becomes part of our, our, our matchmaking as well.  

Julian: Yeah. And, andthinking about just how it affects you.

If, if I'm a SaaS product, how itaffects pricing, right? We enter into this marketplace, we identify icp, andthen we're in this pool of competition to reach this customer. Obviouslythere's ways that you facilitate that relationship so that they can, purchasetheir product. But what does that mean in terms of the.

New landscape of pricing and figuringout customers and what they actually care to pay for, but also how they care topay for it. Are companies, are you seeing sellers collect that data and makechanges in that structure and their business model based on the feedbackthey're receiving from the marketplace?

Sanjay: I, over time, yes. Sothe whole, the whole idea is to harmonize the whole subscription economy.Right? Right now it's kind of a free for all. Every vendor has to go andacquire their own customers. Pricing is all over the place. Pricing is opaqueas well. Most many vendors don't list their pricing and they have to talk to anAE and then negotiate pricing with them all of that.

So it's, it's all over the place rightnow. On the buyer side, they have their own problems. Yeah. Cancellation may bedifficult. You don't know what other people are paying. The price is notpublished. So you are always concerned. Maybe I'm not, I could have gotten abetter deal. I have unused subscriptions.

So on both sides there are, there isthis dysfunctionality. So the goal is to create a much more harmonizedecosystem. Yeah. For, for SaaS. Good actors are rewarded and bad actors areover time removed from the system.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah. And tellus a little bit more about the traction of NachoNacho

how many, how many sellers, how manyvendors, how many buyers have you had on the platform to this point? And thenalso, what's the next step? What's the next stage in, in the growth in, in, in,in terms of what you're willing and excited to offer in the next few years?What's, what's been exciting up to this point and what are you looking forwardto?

Sanjay: Yeah, so on the buyerside, we have more than 25,000 businesses signed up so far. Three years. In thethree years since we have launched On the seller side have more than 400 SaaSvendors listed so far. And we are targeting 5 million businesses in the buyerside. We're targeting uh, Maybe a hundred thousand SaaS vendors on the sellerside.

So we have a long way to go. Yeah. Butwhat, what we already have is by far the largest marketplace, SaaS marketplacethat's out there. Yeah. Where are we heading? So creating more and more valuefor all stakeholders. We also have a community called Mastermind mm-hmm. Thatyou can access from na.com, where we basically, it's a connective tissue.

Between all stakeholders, betweenbuyers, between sellers, between thought leaders, investors, they all cometogether and it's a public community where you can share your opinions andthoughts on, on SaaS. Yeah. On the buyer side, creating more and more value forour customers by offering them incremental products, whether they're on theFinTech.

Or whether they're on helping them growin different ways helping them connect with the right providers of services andproducts. Yeah. On the, on the seller side obviously acquiring more and moresellers, getting them listed, becoming a major source of revenue and, and, andcustomers for them to the point.

We should be, we should get to a pointwhere if you're really good at making a product, you don't need to know how tosell it. Yeah. Just listed. And we do, we bring you all the right customers.Amazon does that for consumer products, right? So many manufacturers ofconsumer products, they're probably only channel is Amazon.

So they just list their product onAmazon, they have to pay Amazon, whatever, 10, 15, 20% of their revenue. Butthen they don't have to worry about distribution at all. Right. So Amazon doesall the distribution. Right. So that we, we, we see that as a potential outcomeof our marketplace.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Andthinking both externally and internally, what are some of the biggest risksthat NachoNacho faces today?  

Sanjay: The, the, I would saythe biggest risk is on the FinTech side. Fraud, as is prevalent in,unfortunately, in, in this world, we. And that's something we, we monitor very,very carefully and we have lots and lots of triggers that help us avoid fraud.

Yeah, that's something we always have tostay ahead of potential bad actors.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And, andif everything goes well, what's the long-term vision for NachoNacho?  

Sanjay: So long-term vision isto become the central hub for SaaS. We should be, if anybody thinks about SaaS,whether as a buyer or a seller, or as an investor or as a thought leader, theyshould think about NachoNacho. We should be able to provide. All their, toprovide for all the needs of all stakeholders in the SaaS world.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I alwayslike this next question I called my founder faq. So I'm gonna hit you with somerapid fire questions and we'll see where we get. First, first question for youjust to open it up, what's particularly hard about your job?

Sanjay: My job, the hardestpart is, is stopping work. Yeah. I enjoy work way too much and I find it hardto stop working and working, almost any, and whenever I get time, like even, Iflew back today from Vegas. I was in a FinTech conference. Yeah. I keptworking. Even when they told me to shut the computer down, I was still tryingto sneak in a few more, things to do.

Yeah. Got home, I was working in a taxiwork late at night, all of that. So I just enjoy a lot what we're building andit's very, very exciting. So I said, that's the hardest job.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. , what'sreally popular nowadays is, is identifying the procurement process and, andbeing.

Efficient as companies, have to be alittle bit more bootstrap. VC funding is not what it used to be, just because Ithink there was a lot of, bets being made that maybe didn't pan out or overallit's just we have a strap market, but procurement has been extremely morepopularized, especially now because, companies are really having to managetheir spend.

How have you. The value increase in theprocurement side for companies, for buyers on your platform. And have you seenany behavioral changes of companies, bringing on new products or changingproducts, anything that you've seen kind of through the marketplace in thelast, three to four years that, that you, you've been around?

Sanjay: Yeah, absolutely. Somore and more customers signing up users is going up and use is going up aswell. Mm-hmm. Because not everybody was originally using us for all their sas,but as more and. As, as they got used to it, they're using us more and more.Yeah. And they also, our biggest channel, actually, believe it or not, evennow, is word of mouth.

Yeah. Word of mouth and partnerships aretwo of our biggest channels. Yeah. And we create so much value for users foralmost for free. Yeah. The prices. Almost nothing that people want to tellother people about it. Yeah. Yeah. And then our partners are also very, veryexcited about working with us, so they promote us as well, and many of themhave very significant reads.

So we have partners like Zendesk andDeal and. GitHub and SAP Concur. Yeah. And they promote us on in their own totheir own audiences Yeah. As well.  

Julian: Yeah. And thinkingabout also, we touched on it a second ago about price and we were talking abouthow, know, a lot of pricing models are, are, it is just wild, wild west outthere.

They're, they're different. Maybe they,they are. It's very opaque. You have to go through channels to actually get aprice or conversations versus just having a menu of sort. Have you seen pricingchanged or, or is there a common pricing structure that you've seen and, andhas that changed in the last few years?

Sanjay: Well, I would say thatas competition has increased I've seen SaaS vendors becoming more flexibleYeah. With spending money on either channels like our, we are a channel forthem. Yeah. So they're willing to give away more of the revenue to us as achannel. And also be willing to give more discounts to their cust end customeras well.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and the reason is thatmargins in SAS are so high that even after all of that, they're left with very,very, thick margins.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. It, itdefinitely is The benefit of, distributing things online is, is the cost tooperate is becoming increasing. Less expensive with microservice, especiallybecoming a huge, game changer for a lot of companies to be able to decreasethat spend.

But thinking about just a two-sidedmarketplace as, as a, as an organism or, or even as a machine, how do youessentially, gain traction in both sides of the marketplace? If I'm a founder,I am a founder that read the West Side Marketplace, but for my other foundersout there who do the same, how do you not?

Prioritize which side of the market togrow but understand how to grow either side as, as fundamentally they havedifferent incentives. What are your strategies around that?  

Sanjay: Yeah, so I think ittook us quite a while to actually figure out which is the harder side. There'salways one side that is harder than the other.

Yeah. So in Uber, for example, driversare the harder side. In Airbnb, the hosts are the harder side. So, whichever isthe harder side is, is where you would put more emphasis. That's number one.Mm-hmm. Number two is to make sure that you're creating value consistently onboth sides. That's really, really important because Yeah we, and we have to bevery careful about that.

So we, for example, we are often offeredmoney even to. Give special treatment to some SaaS vendors. Mm-hmm. And wedon't accept that right now. Yeah. Because we want to make sure that every SaaSvendor is getting a fair treatment in a marketplace. Yeah. Yeah. So I thinkthose are the things we have to keep in mind.

Julian: Yeah. More on a, yeah,a personal level, what's something that you, you tend to find yourself spendinga lot of time on that you would like to spend less on and something that youspend less time on that you would like to allocate more?  

Sanjay: I think you'll have toset up a, another podcast just to cover all that question.

So, I have way too many interestsoutside of my, my main interest, which is building companies, but I flyhelicopters, I fly airplanes. I, I've been skiing. We have a ski house inTahoe, so I've been going there. Winter, which has been amazing. Yeah. I I rockclimb and ice climb. I do mountaineering, high altitude mountaineering as well.

Scuba dive. I I recently went to CostaRica, took a lot of surfing lessons. And a few other sale I raise sailboats.Yeah. So a few other interests like that as well.

Julian: I love that. I lovethat. It sounds like that it refuels a lot of the, the passion, honestly, itkind of justifies the, the amount of time you allocate towards work, it, itkind of really probably feeds that, that engine and rejuvenates you a lot,which I think a lot of early founder.

Learn later in their career and theimportance of having those different interests being so invested into theirproject and their success of their company. Just for, for in reflection on yourcareer is what in particular for other founders out there is something thatyou're good at now that you weren't, or that you wish you were better atearlier on in your career?

Sanjay: Well, I would say I'mstill not good at many, many things. Things I would like to be better at isleadership. Yeah. So I'm an operator more than a leader. Mm-hmm. And so mystyle of management and art, general style of management in our company isbasically self-management. Yeah. So we don't have any manager managerial rolesat all.

Yeah. Everybody does their own things. Ihave my own tasks, I have my own deliverables and so does everybody else. Soyeah, that's kind of my style. But at some point you need to become a manageras the company grows. Mm-hmm. And that's something still I'm in the process oflearning how to do. Yeah.

Whereas, so that's, yeah. It's, it's adifferent skill set than being an operator and being able to produce on yourown. Yeah. Yeah, we could get the best out of others is, is a, is a differentskill set and it's, it's learning, it's work in progress for me.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I, I'dlove to ask this question because this next question I love how foundersextract knowledge from anything they ingest.

So whether it was early in your careeror now, what books or people have influenced you the most?

Sanjay: Oh yeah. So manypeople. Well, the book, the one book that I read zero to one, so, was very not,I wouldn't say very influential, but it was definitely thought provokingbecause it was very counterintuitive. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I, and I, I lived inmany countries. I've had many careers, so I've been exposed to a lot ofknowledge and information.

So that book was different and it was,it's a very contrarian view to conventional views. Yeah, and I like that. Ilike to hear contrarian views because, There, there's always a risk of groupthink, right? Everybody starts thinking the same way. You don't even realizethat you're thinking about things the same way.

Yeah. You just are. Yeah. Until somebodybrings a totally different view. And then that's, that's very powerful whenthat happens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Along the way, most, most industry leaders. I,I, I was very impressed with Jack. I'm forgetting his last name from ge.Mm-hmm.

He's, I think he's passed away now, buthe was one of the most charismatic leaders like one of the, the, the greatleaders of corporate world. Yeah. And there've been many, many other ones.Yeah. And they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Right. They're noteverybody's. Strong at every aspect.

So the Musk is a great leader in someways, in many. Not So in other ways, Bezos has its own strengths and one ofthem. Sure. So you can, you can basically pick and choose, the virtues of eachone of them.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I, I knowwe're coming through the close of the episode and I wanna make sure thatthere's nothing we left on the table there before.

know, You give us your plugs and let usknow where we can support. But what, is there any question that I didn't askyou that I should have or that you would've liked to answer? Anything that wemissed that you wanted to share with the.

Sanjay: I think you did apretty good job in covering all the questions I would've wanted to ask me.

Julian: Cool. Cool. I lovethat, Sanjay, and last little bit is I'd love to give our, our guests a chanceto give us your plugs. Where can we find you as a founder? Where can we findNachoNacho? Give us your websites, your LinkedIns, your Twitters. Where can wenot only be a supportive you, but also a customer and, and start getting intothe product and, and the platform.

Sanjay: Yeah, so we are veryeasy to find. We're just nachonacho.com and from there you can find ourLinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, you can find all our channels. They'rein our Twitter, so everything will go from na na.com. And if anybody needs tosign up, if they need any kind of handholding, any onboarding, we're all, allof us are completely available anytime, including myself.

Julian: Amazing. And last, Iguess last question, why NachoNacho? Where did the name come from?  

Sanjay: So, yeah, I was, weactually started out as a B2C company. We were originally, we were planning onbuilding a B2C SaaS subscription marketplace, like, for Netflix and Hulu andall of those things. So we wanted a name that is funky and memorable.

So we thought about, for example, Yahoois a household name. Yeah. GoDaddy's a household name. Yeah. All these arereally weird, funky names, but they really stick. So we wanted something likethat. And then we pivoted to B2B and I said, we will just figure out a morekind of corporate name. At some point, we'll just keep this as a placeholder.

But since the last three years now thename is stuck and people actually really like it and it really stands out.Yeah, the B2B word. So we're just decided we're just gonna go with it. I loveit. Turns out that NachoNacho in Hindi, which is one of the few languages thatI speak, means dance. Dance as well. Oh, I love that.

Julian: I, I, I love the.Yeah. Sorry. Say, say that again.

Sanjay: It means Spanish. Youwould say it's an invocation to  

Julian: Yeah. I love the storybehind it. I, I, obviously, I saw it and I was like, I gotta ask. And somemorable and, and first thing it reminded me of Nacho Libra, if you've everseen the movie of Jack Black.

So, so, so corny, so silly. But yeah, myimmediate association. But anyway, Sanjay, it's been such a pleasure. Not onlylearning about your background and experience, but how you view two sidedmarketplaces, how you view. This whole SaaS model and, and connecting, not onlybuyers and sellers, but also really understanding and identifying not onlypricing and, and all the changes that can be made, through a marketplace that,that provide, that's provided by that ecosystem.

I, I hope you enjoyed yourself on theshow today, and thank you so much for being a guest today.  

Sanjay: Yeah, it was greatfun. Thanks for your time as well.  

Julian: Of course.

‍