The Exchanges

Q Yeah. Um, as you got older and, and went to high school, did you end up kind of like finding a group of people, uh, kids that, that you were comfortable with or, or not, not really?

A Yeah. So in high school, as I got older, I always felt like an outcast being the only Indian kid in a very racially divided school. I didn't have a lot of friends and because my parents weren't around, They'd give me money to make up for not being able to give me their time. So I did discover there was one way to get kids to want to hang out with me. And that was by me offering to buy them things. And I noticed when I was paying for things like lunch or snacks or arcade games, a lot of people wanted to be my friend. And I didn't realize this until My adult years, but I associated money with love.

AI assessment note: “I always felt like an outcast being the only Indian kid”

Q What were you gonna, they were gonna be inspirational, but where were you gonna get your ideas from? Like, how are you coming up with things to say?

A My ideas initially started off just inspired by my own life experience. So if you look at my earlier videos, it was more so messages that I needed to tell my younger self. My next iteration was I realized instead of just giving life advice, if I told a story and gave a moral at the end of it, Then those videos started performing a little better. So instead of getting a hundred views, maybe they would get to 500 views. And since I was telling original stories, I couldn't just rely on stock footage. I now had these cartoons that I would pay some international company around 200 dollars or so to develop. So very low budget animations. And then I would tell voiceover Over the cartoon.

AI assessment note: “My ideas initially started off just inspired by my own life experience.”

Q Yeah, so, so tell me what, what happened? Like, what were you doing as a, as a real estate developer that got you into trouble?

A Uh, so property management, that came easy to me, but construction, that was a lot more complex, and I quickly found out that construction projects take a long time to finish, and they were very expensive, so I could only take on a certain amount of projects at once. But I always wanted to do things quickly. Uh, so that's why I was really excited when I found out about this real estate grant program that the city of Oakland had, where you could get a 50% reimbursement if you fixed up properties that were in certain rehabilitation areas. So I decided to take on multiple renovation projects at the same time. And what I didn't expect was how long of a time it would take for the city to issue these grant reimbursements. It turned out the money could take anywhere from one or two years to come in after all the work was completed and all the money was paid. So I found myself in this financial pinch. I took on too many projects at once that I couldn't afford. Come back to haunt me. I decided to take some shortcuts on my grant application. I changed the dates on my paperwork to make it seem like the projects had been completed and contractors had been paid sooner than they were in order to start the reimbursement process faster. Faster.

AI assessment note: “I decided to take some shortcuts on my grant application. I changed the dates”

Q so, I mean, you were, From what I read, like, bringing in, like, you know, a few thousand bucks a month doing this business, and I guess at a certain point, you decided not to go into the flyer business full-time, but to, to drop out of, at a school and focus on running a business, and it turned out to be like a mortgage company. How did that happen?

A Yeah, so at this time, this was around 2004, 2005, when real estate was booming, and my brother, he had just become a real estate broker. And he had just bought a condo in San Francisco. He bought a new Mercedes and me being money motivated at that time, just saw whatever he was doing with his real estate business as much more successful than whatever I was doing with Davis marketing services. But I knew he was in the business of helping people refinance their home to either take equity out or get a lower interest rate. So when I asked him what it was limiting him to take his business to the next level, uh, he said, It was not having more leads to close more deals. And so my idea was I could just start my own telemarketing company that could generate leads by cold calling homeowners and trying to get them to refinance. So the next step was I needed to hire telemarketers. And thankfully I was able to use my marketing company for that. I put up flyers all around campus saying I was looking for commission based telemarketers. And within a month or so, I had four students working for me.

AI assessment note: “my brother, he had just become a real estate broker”

Q How did you figure out how to stand this whole thing up?

A I I figured it out just like, I guess I figured out every other business that I ever got into. I would just do a lot of research. I would consult with people. I remember I went to Best Buy and said, Hey, I want to start doing live online classes. What do I need? And they said, well, you probably need a webcam and two softbox lights. And luckily they had a starter pack for And I still needed a website. Uh, so I go on Craigslist and I put an ad up saying, I will pay someone to build me a website. So then I get an email from a guy who says he likes the business idea. And within a few days or so I had a website and in order to market the classes, I had the beauty influencer I was partnered with record a short video explaining what the school is about. So my web developer tells me that The best way to put the video on the website is to host it on YouTube, and then he'll pull the link to the site, which is exactly what I did. That was the only reason that we posted on YouTube. YouTube was not part of my thinking at all at that time. So I upload the video, I make the website live, and I went to bed that night before the launch. But to my surprise, when I woke up in the morning, my inbox was flooded with emails. New user registration, new user registration, new user registration, and there were all these payments for 20 dollars that were coming in from PayPal. I was so confused. I was …

AI assessment note: “I would just do a lot of research. I would consult with people.”

Q Can you tell me a little bit about that?

A Um, so as you can, Probably tell by everything I've said. I've always had this insane work ethic, and I was neglecting my health. I was neglecting my family. I had no life outside of work. I was so obsessive that there was no convincing me of anything else until COVID hit my whole family on Christmas Eve, twenty-twenty-two. So all of us were sick. So I remember Christmas night, I was working through my sickness. On my laptop, and out of nowhere, my breath starts changing. It felt like it was becoming hard for me to breathe. Now my heart start beating really fast. I had to close my laptop. Call the doctor, and after explaining all the symptoms, the doctor says, he's just having a panic attack. But these kept happening every couple hours for a month straight, and so all my problems were stemming from me not eating right, not sleeping right, not having work-life balance. So going into twenty-twenty-three, I knew I was going to completely change my lifestyle. I started removing a lot of my responsibilities from work, and you know how stressful it is when you start removing yourself from any sort of decisions. But fortunately I had Laura and Ruben, the two people that were there from the very beginning to step up to the plate. Laura took over all of human resources and finance and Ruben took over all of production and operations. But the craziest thing happened while the first half …

AI assessment note: “I knew I was going to completely change my lifestyle. I started removing”

Q Let me back up for a sec. I mean, how did you, how did you finance it? How did you get the money to buy the equipment and to stock the That equipment into a 15,000 square foot warehouse.

A I guess from an early age, I always over leveraged myself, so I relied a lot on credit cards, and for suppliers, you could actually get products on terms with them, where you wouldn't have to pay them back for 30, 60, 90 days, and I was just relying on product sales that would help me pay off the inventory I bought from them previously, so it was a lot of leverage. But if you remember how earlier I said I thought all hydroponic stores didn't discuss cannabis because they were worried about federal laws, I came to realize that it was actually because of rules that hydroponic suppliers that controlled the hydroponics supply chain had set up. So there's a few big distribution companies that supply most of the products you see sold inside of hydro stores. They were so big and selling products all over the world that they didn't want their products having any affiliation with cannabis. So if you even mentioned it, you would get cut off from product distribution from them. And here I am on CNN live talking about the medical marijuana superstore. So the night of our grand opening, I got contacted by the big distribution companies saying they were cutting us off from receiving any product. So my business was pretty much doomed from the start.

AI assessment note: “I relied a lot on credit cards, and for suppliers, you could actually get products on terms”