Ariya Chittasy’s Post

Transcript

There was this chaos. It was like an organization called Chaos, and they did this survey and they found that it was 71% of software projects do not succeed. OK. So it's like some they call them challenged, other they call completely fails. The challenge can be like the timeline got pushed so much out that they didn't hit the business target. Right on the other side failed is like they just chucked everything away. And. Man, I saw a couple things. I mean, I literally got a call this last week. Yeah, Action knows about this. We were talking to them together. There was someone that we were speaking with about a middle of last year. And we were saying guys like you seem pretty confident in like the tech team you're working with everything. But we do recommend we do an audit not just on your technology, but actually your processes, your end to end design, development and launching processes, right. Ultimately, they didn't want to listen and they were like, no, no, no, we're we're all good. Let's keep going. They had just solidified their investors OK, so they had about two mil of investments. So they were in a really good position there. They were even having a lot of customers come through the door, but they're in theirs. It was a bit where they would work with them as a service and then they were bridging on the platform. Long story short, this call I got out of the blue was Aria, I need to speak with you. You were talking to us about all the technology back then. And we have just decided to like release our technology group. Yeah, there were so many cracks in this thing that we've built. And ultimately they they couldn't even get one customer on board because of all of those cracks. Yeah. So this was 15 months of development. They're coming to this point and then they're just wrapping it all up, and then they're even started thinking of starting again. Right. So unfortunately, this is not uncommon in our industry. And what I'd like to say is this is as if, you know, if this was the construction industry that you had ten families building a house and they're all paying for it, and then only three are left standing. And then seven are all like, you know, shabby. You know, like just outline you'd have URL on the streets. Yeah, you'd be like, this just doesn't work O. This is the the layer that we want to go into and I want to be sharing with you some of the things that we've learned overtime. And essentially the the overarching thing is, is how like what does it look like to waste over $1,000,000 in building technology? And unfortunately, this is my own personal story before coming to a genesis. Yeah. So I have the, the burns and the, yeah, the the scars of going through this process myself. I ended up building 4 different technology teams, like building a separate product each time, and each one of them hit a wall and collapse such that I had to Chuck it away. OK, so and I pretty much did everything wrong in the so-called textbook, which didn't yet exist. So let me share with you a couple of those things. I remember 1 where we were like, OK, we really want to build this platform, this product. We went we found this developer after interviewing lots of them. And his name was Ryan. He came in. And then we had our executive team and we had the whiteboard. And we're like, Ryan, can you build this for us? And then, you know, we put that all on the whiteboard. We said, we want this, we want this. And then he goes, yeah, yeah, no problem, No problem, Yeah. And then we're like, how long is it going to take? He goes three months. And then we were like so excited that we even in, in Sydney, there's this hotel right at the foot of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, right? So like, as, as you have a drink, it's like you literally see the thing. We booked out this whole place and we were ready to have the launch party, you know? About a week or it was about 5 days before the launch. We're like, hey, Ryan, how's it going? Can you like present this thing to us? And is that? Yeah, yeah, it's going well. It's going well. He comes into the room, he puts it up on the screen. And then every single one of our executive team, our jaws dropped. We were like, this is nothing like we were imagining at all. You know what I mean? It was just completely different. And then it was like really embarrassing with that tails between our legs. We ended up just turning that event. Into sort of a social gathering for fun, and then we didn't launch any product. Yeah, so that was like my first humbling experience of like, man with we had the developer, we had the budget, we pushed it there. So that that's what I call the hero developer. Yeah, like issue. Yeah, like thinking that we can just have one. But now it didn't stop there because then I was like, OK, I think we've learned the lesson. I'm now going to interview all of these different teams offshore, Maybe I can bring the price down and all of this stuff. So these guys, I went through the similar process, but this time we had it all graphed out and we were like making sure we're going to get it right. They end U delivering the project on time and on budget. And we're like, OK, awesome, we're stuffed up the first time, but second time here we are. And so everyone's so happy. You were like good job. We went, went back to them and say guys, you guys did a really good job. Congratulations. Like we're so happy. Now we want to talk about Phase 2. And then, this time, their jaws dropped. They were like, Ari, we had no idea that you wanted to do these things. If you want to do that, we need to Chuck away what we've built and we need to start again. And then what it, you know, this is crazy. It's almost like they built this whole house without putting the electricity and plumbing like, you know, integrated into the thing. So then I had to Chuck that away. So now I'm, I'm skipping over lots of things, just giving you the highlights. Let me give you one last one. O this one. I was like, OK, I've gone through all of this. Like we brought in even more capital into the project and we're like, how about I hire the best of the best, all based in Australia. This was my single biggest, worst, most expensive mistake I could have ever made. So we hired the best people from all of these known brands that you guys would know, OK? They had amazing track records and all of this stuff. We put them there into the office and then we said, OK, this is what we want to build. They said, great, Aria, like, let us go away and then we're going to work on it. And then they looked really busy, right? They had all of their meetings and everything. We come back three months later. And we go, OK, like let's do the the product demo and they go ohh area. We have not even started the work. We're still discussing about what methodologies we're using to get these things together. OK, so so now I mean, I'm so glad I can laugh about these things. So this is what happened before I joined as a partner in in Genesis Ventures. And in in Genesis Ventures, we've had 0% failure rate like every single project has gone as planned. Yeah, no, we're not gurus like we're not angels or something. Yes, sometimes we might have seven days delay here or there, but it's nothing like what the standards of the industry are. Does that make sense, right. And so it is possible. And now since then we've had many like now our portfolio that aggregated value of our portfolio is $45,000,000 US. And. A lot of that is based on us going through and getting this technology layer right so that they actually raise funds or they even get acquired.