# Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1 How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living 20VC · May 31, 2019 · 53 min · 6,976 words Speakers: Harry Stebbings, Kulveer Taggar Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-5935588b/ ## Cold open **Harry Stebbings** [0:00]: are listening to the minute VC with me, Stebbings. and I have to say, I'm so excited for our episode today. I think what our founder today is building is just incredible, and the sky really is the limit for this one. And if you remember on Monday, we had YC's new president, Jeff Ralston, on the show. And so I thought it'd be awesome to have an incredible YC founder on the show this week in the form of Kulveer Taggar. Now, Kul is the founder and CEO at Zeus Living, the startup providing a home of your own for business travel with smartly furnished homes for extended stays. To date, has raised over $14 million in VC funding from some very dear friends of the show in the form of Gary and Alexis Initialized, James and Pete NFX, Mike at Floodgate, Y Combinator, GV, and Naval Ravikant, just to name a few. Prior to Zeus, Kulveer co-founded Auctomatic alongside Stripe's Patrick Collison. They ultimately sold the company for $5 million. And before that, Kul co-founded Bosco alongside former 20 VC guest Monzo's Tom Blomfield. They raised seed funding from YC before moving to the States to start Auctomatic. And if that wasn't enough, cool also made several angel investments in the likes of Boom, AirHelp, meetings.io, and more. And I'd also want to say huge thank you to both James Currier, Alexis Ohanian, and Garry Tan for some fantastic questions suggestions today. Many mojitos on me for that, and I really do appreciate it. ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [1:12]: But before we dive into the episode with Cool as you know, a lot of what we do on the minute VC is discuss scaling businesses, talk to experts, pick the brains of founders and investors who tell us about the trends to watch out for, offer tips on fundraising, and teach us how to excel at any company stage. But there's no playbook for building a great business, but we can certainly learn from people who've done it before. Beyond listening to this podcast and talking to mentors and advisors in your own network, it's important to have resources you can turn to when you're tackling a new challenge, and Stripe has built those resources for you. Whether you'd like to learn how to run a pricing experiment or build a knockout landing page, Stripe gives you the information you need to start, run, and scale a technology company. and their guides are often written by or feature people like Elad Gil, experts in their space who you've probably heard on this very podcast. And you can read my favorite guide on scaling engineering organizations and many more on stripe.com forward /20vc. That's twentyvc. And last but by no means least, to scale, you need customers. And Intercom offers a new and better way to acquire, engage, and retain customers. They've built a suite of messaging first products from chatbots to a totally reimagined business messenger that modern Internet businesses use to accelerate growth across the customer lifecycle, cycle from acquisition to engagement and support. And over the past eight years, they've totally reimagined what a business messenger can be, which is way more than simply live chat. Today, Intercom is used by the world's most forward thinking companies. 84% of Y Combinator companies that use a messaging or live chat tool use Intercom. Astonishing fact, that one. And they have over 30,000, customers, including larger companies too, like New Relic, Atlassian, and Shopify, and also smaller companies like Airtable and Coda. However, you've heard quite enough from me, so now I'm very, excited to hand over to Kulveer Taggar, founder and CEO at Zeus Living. **Kulveer Taggar** [2:57]: Two one zero. **Harry Stebbings** [3:01]: You have now arrived at your destination. ## Conversation **Harry Stebbings** [3:04]: Cool. It is such a pleasure to have you on the show I've heard so many great things from Garry Tan, from Alexis, from James and Pete at NFX. So thank you so much for joining me today, Kul. **Kulveer Taggar** [3:14]: Thank you, Harry, for having me on your show. **Harry Stebbings** [3:16]: Not at all. But I to kick off today with a little bit about you. So tell me, I can tell the dulcet British tones in your voice too, which I'm loving. But I to hear how you made your way into the world of startups and what that moment was for you with Zeus. **Kulveer Taggar** [3:28]: Yeah. So I didn't actually grow up wanting to be an entrepreneur. I took a gap year and I worked at Deutsche Bank. and it was actually somebody I met there. It's a friend of mine called Sachin Dougal who started a business when he was 15 selling computers. And so that was the first time I was like, oh, that's interesting. I didn't know you could just start a business. I always thought banking would be my default path. And then the second thing happened was when I actually went to university in Freshers Fair, someone had a stall up for the Oxford entrepreneurs. and I put my name down on it and I thought, you know, this sounds interesting. A few months later, got an email that they were looking for committee members, and I applied to join as a PR officer, not really knowing what PR was. And then my eyes were completely open to this whole whole world of entrepreneurship. And at that time, sort of Silicon Valley and and tech startups was becoming a thing. And I was lucky enough to just before finals, come out to San Francisco and I got to visit the Google office. I got to see Max Levchin's incubator and a few other things. And then I was like, okay, this is where I need to be. I need to find out how I can get to San Francisco. And, you know, with Zeus, Zeus happened, the idea came up about three years ago, and it was actually one of these sort of light bulb idea moments, which I never thought actually happened or existed. But my co-founder, Joe, was moving from San Francisco to Palo Alto. His wife's a doctor and she got residency at Stanford. And know, Joe's a brilliant guy. He's from MIT. But the process of trying to rent out his home was taking weeks, Like, you know, trying to get the home rent ready, dealing with Craigslist, figuring out contracts, taking out photos, and and doing the repairs. And we were in the middle of the NFX accelerator at that time, and I remember feeling frustrated at how frustrated Joe was at this process of trying to rent out his home and move to Palo Alto. And so one night, I remember lying in bed. It was around midnight on a Sunday, and I sort of just asked the question, what would be the quantum leap improvement in user experience for this process? You know, what if you could go to a website, type in the address for your home, it gives you a price, and you just click rent, and then that's it. There's nothing else you have to do. Your home is rented out at that price. And, you know, I was partially inspired by Opendoor. I was partially inspired by, you know, when the first time I saw the Stripe demo where you could copy paste seven lines of code to start taking payments. And I sort of had this realization. I was like, oh my God, this could work. There's a lot more rental data out there now. The way I would offer this is I would offer to sign a lease with the homeowner. And then I realized I would have captive inventory and I could solve the problem on the demand side. So yeah, it was actually Joe's process of moving that sparked the idea and really made vivid the sort of pain point that people experience. **Harry Stebbings** [6:02]: I mean, what a valuable Sunday night early to bed there. do I This wasn't your first time at the roadshow in terms of founding a company. So speaking of the prior founding with Auctomatic, what were the biggest takeaways do you think from that experience? And do you think it impacted your operating mentality today with Zeus? **Kulveer Taggar** [6:19]: Yeah, there was a couple of large takeaways. You know, my team then, it was me, my cousin Harjeet Taggar, Patrick, and John Collison of Stripe. And I think the biggest takeaway was we were thinking on a shorter time horizon back then. I think we were all maybe a little bit impatient with wanting to become successful and launch great big products. And I actually remember it was startup school in 2007 when Mark Zuckerberg spoke, and he first sort of laid out this idea of how much of an advantage it can be if you're thinking on horizon or a 20-year horizon. And then, you know, the more I learned about Jeff Bezos, a similar sort of idea came to mind. And we ended up selling that business within a year of starting it. And I actually think if we were thinking on a longer term horizon, horizon, we would have done better. So that was one of the lessons I had coming into Zeus was like, let's actually think really long term here. And I think it basically gives you an advantage when you're making decisions compared to other people who are working on a short time horizon. And the other sort of takeaway I had was the importance of sort of being intentional with your culture. So we had a lot of fun working on the startup. It was five guys living in a two bedroom apartment in Soma. And we had, you know, we're British, they're Irish. We had a very sort of jokey kind of banter culture going on. But there were times when it maybe went a little bit too far. And it was interesting. There were some mornings I'd wake up and I was like, oh, you know, I'm actually not looking forward to work today. And that was something that I took into Zeus. So I was like, okay, you can create really productive collaborative environments, but it takes being intentional about it to do it **Harry Stebbings** [7:47]: No, I absolutely love that. And I totally agree with being kind of really deliberate and intentional around culture. But I do want start today kind of top down with Zeus itself because there's this constant divergence between tech tech-enabled businesses and then pure play software businesses. And when we chatted before, you said to me that tech enabled businesses are just much harder than pure play software. Can I ask why is that? And what makes them so much more challenging? **Kulveer Taggar** [8:10]: Yeah. Great question. I think, you know, simply put, we're working with Atoms. It's harder to scale than a pure software play because we are acquiring and creating physical things. You know, we can't just add servers and increase our database size. When we rewrite code, we also have to rewrite processes in the real world with how we do things. Somebody else I think put this well is David Hahn from Instacart. You know, he said if you think about what the output is, if we think about the output for Zeus, it's someone living in our home for a few months and having a great stay. If you think of the surface area of inputs that go into that end product, it's a huge surface area. It means that Zeus has to be really good at identifying real estate, at pricing real estate, at assessing the quality of real estate, at designing real estate, at furnishing quickly, at marketing it effectively, at being able to do awesome sort of customer service and the normal sort of marketplace effects of matching supply and demand well. So we have to be really good at many things to deliver our end product. And sometimes I think in the software world, it's easier to be more narrowly focused on a particular piece of product or software. And yeah, that's exponentially harder when we're dealing with real world moving people and things. **Harry Stebbings** [9:23]: I totally see that. And I was to ask this question later on in the interview, but I'm too intrigued now. Obviously, I've interviewed over 2,500 VCs and when you add so many different moving parts into the process there in the real world, I do to talk about the fundraise and how VCs respond to it because there's generation of VCs that are maybe a lot more used to investing in the pure play software businesses. So how did the fundraise change given the tech enabled nature, I guess, And did you have to adapt the messaging? **Kulveer Taggar** [9:49]: Yes, I did. I think for VCs, there's a lot of pattern matching going on. Obviously, there's thousands of deals they may look at in a year. And when something like Zeus comes in front of them, there's actually not a huge amount of similar businesses that they may have looked at before. So when they look at the growth profile, they look at the amount of capital it requires to scale and so on. It feels a little bit out of the wheelhouse. Now one other thing I did notice was there was a bit of a difference between pitching and fundraising on the West Coast and in New York. And I think it's the LP base with the East Coast investors. A lot of them are very familiar with real estate. Often, they've made a lot of money out of real estate, and our model didn't seem too unique or too different. out here on the West Coast, it was. And so I think often, sometimes with these tech enabled plays, investors even ask, like, know, where's the tech? What is the tech? What's the advantage? And so it's our job to communicate that where it's much simpler to see that when it's a sort of pure software product. **Harry Stebbings** [10:42]: Yeah, no, I totally get that. I mean, speaking of the investors that did really get it and latch onto it, as I said earlier, spoke to Gary and Alexis at Initialized and I actually, in my stalking, saw a tweet where you said about the foundational impact that they've had on Zeus as a business. What did Initialized do to have such foundational impact? I was just super intrigued when I saw that. **Kulveer Taggar** [11:01]: Yeah, I think, you know, Garry, I've known him for a long time, but what I like most about investor is he has conviction quickly. He's not an investor who's overly influenced by trends or by what other VCs are doing or if a company becomes hot or not. He sees something that he thinks can change the world, and he'll invest into it quickly. I mean, looking back, I think it was he who accepted Instacart into Y Combinator after the deadline had passed for applications. And similarly with Coinbase early on, I think this is public, but there was a moment where they were having a bit of a liquidity crunch, and Gary just wired money in instantly. And so it's awesome to have investors who can get to conviction quickly and then be supportive. But I should also add there have been lots of investors and lots of people that helped along the way. But I think Initialized has come through for us at times that have been really critical. That to me makes me feel very grateful. **Harry Stebbings** [11:51]: No, I I totally agree. And I mean, incredible skill in terms of being an investor to build such conviction so early on. I do have to also in terms of skill difference, staying on the tech enabled versus pure play. How do you think about the difference between the skills required to really successfully create and scale tech enabled business versus a pure software play? And how have you seen that in reality yourself? **Kulveer Taggar** [12:11]: Yeah, I think with a tech enabled play, there's a bit more planning that you have to do. It's just a higher difficulty in sort of making changes and doing things. being really well set up with your goals and communicating them well and having assigned owners, I think is pretty important. Now the obvious one here as well is operational ability. You can be really good at software engineering and designing product, but you actually have to be a really good operator and actually understand how to run a tight ship and and strive for achieving a high level of quality, but also be nimble and be able to adapt based on how things change. You know, simple things like you can push a code update and everything's updated instantly. But if we're changing something in our process, we have to communicate with teams that are all across the country now and really ensure that they've understood it. And so I think your ability to collaborate and to have excellent communication skills is it's more leveraged if you're doing a tech enabled play, it becomes more critical. **Harry Stebbings** [13:06]: Yeah, no, I I do totally agree there in terms of that alignment, especially in the real world with people dispersed. I I do to touch on the pivot, before we move too far into Zeus, because I obviously went on Bookface and saw status agent Tagstand. So tell me, how did the pivots take place? And then a question from Mr. James Currier at NFX. What did you learn from the pivots, so to speak? **Kulveer Taggar** [13:28]: You know, it feels like a painful part of my history when I look back. But in short, Y Combinator had this brief period where they were experimenting, funding teams without ideas. So, you know, I knew Paul Graham, my co-founder back then, Srinivas Panguluri, he'd also done YC. So I emailed Paul, and I said, we want do YC again. We don't really have an idea. And, you know, Paul accepted us, gave us, a check. And then in 2011, we started Y Combinator without a solid idea. And I did it first in 2007 and in between 2007 and 2011, I felt like YC got to a different level of scale. And when it came to demo day, we had to pick something. And so the first thing we looked at was NFC technology, the stuff that's powering Apple Pay. And we very quickly realized that that was too early for us to be working on it. We got really good at phones and sensors, and we built a few apps. But none of them had real sort of large scale product market fit. And I didn't have that conviction inside that these were to have a huge impact. And so we did lots of iteration and experimentation and then got into NFX based on our status app, which was an automatic away message for your phone. Now NFX, I would say, was pretty transformational with me. I actually, in particular, remember one conversation I had with James Currier midway through it, and this is just before I'd come up with Zeus, where I was feeling really down and I felt like I'd spent three or four years working on stuff, building stuff, and gone nowhere. And I had this conversation with him, and he said, you know, Kulveer, some part of it is just bad luck. There's always a little bit of luck involved. Some part of it is maybe you haven't been as aggressive as you could as a founder. And then the other part was he's saying, you're taking market risk with what you build. You know, you're trying to build products and showcase your personality to the world and try and improve the world in some way. He said, instead, what if we did this? Let's create a list of the top 20 things that people spend their money on by dollar amount. So, you know, people buy houses, they buy cars, they buy insurance, they go on trips. And then he said, let's create another list, which is the top 20 things people spend money on by frequency. So you get a cab, you order food and so on. And he's like, you should create a business that doesn't go below point number seven in in either one of these lists. And the other thing that he taught me was actually, you know, if you have to question whether you have product market fit, you probably don't. He describes it as, you know, someone sort of like putting two fingers up your nose and yanking your head head forward as the moment when you find product market fit. And he actually also said it doesn't take that long. You can actually figure out or get to product market fit even within a month or a few weeks and use language and positioning to really test how receptive people are to your ideas. So I think there was a few things that sort of seeded my mind before we came up with Zeus, but that conversation was one of them. And then after that, you know, one other interesting thing that I did differently with James was he said, before you start work on this, go talk to 25 investors and see the appetite for funding an idea like this. And that was very different to what I'd sort of done before. I sort of had this model that pitching investors was maybe not a great use of my time if I didn't really need the the money and so on. But I did it as an experiment. And I remember of those 25 meetings, I had 20 up meetings set up after just sort of talking through the idea in the market. And compared to the previous products I was working on, often I would ask for five intros for one of these apps, and I would only get two or three of them. And then after that, like only get, say, one follow on. And I used to think that was just the grind of being an entrepreneur, that you have to overcome a lot of rejection and and, you know, investors, it's this tiring process. But then I realized when you actually have an idea that has promise, it's not necessarily like that. So with Zeus, we did a lot of positioning, testing, a lot of language testing. I think we set up 17 landing pages to really hone in on what the value propositions were going to be before we started anything. And And with Zeus, we almost took the approach of we were looking for ways for it to fail. Like we kept on giving ourselves harder and harder tests and Zeus would pass it and we're like, oh, well, actually, okay, it feels like the market needs this and the market wants it. **Harry Stebbings** [17:27]: Can I ask? I'm always fascinated by testing and iteration processes. How do you determine like enough time to reasonably get enough data on whether something is hitting or not versus too short to not allow enough data? How do you determine what to hit with and what to not hit with? And how do you ingest that data? **Kulveer Taggar** [17:43]: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, this is probably where it's part science, part intuition, and part data. We probably did about six weeks worth of data experiments where we were testing conversions. And then we did a few weeks of qualitative research where I was talking to users. And at the same time, was talking to investors and trying to talk to anyone I could in the real estate world and see what I could learn from them. I do remember after about maybe two months of diligence research and testing, one of the partners at NFX, he sort of sent me this test. He was like, okay, you have six weeks. I want you to sign up 10 homes. Go. And we were like, okay, this is our pilot. Let's test. Is there really a market out there? Would homeowners let some sort of no name startup manage their homes? How scalable was the idea? What's the margin structure? And so I think in total from having the idea to completing that pilot was maybe four or five months. Yeah, it was a mixture of some level of intuition and some level of like looking at the data and conversion rates, but I don't really have a precise answer for you. **Harry Stebbings** [18:42]: Can I ask you when you were going through these kind of multiple testing periods and also kind of multiple pivots, morale is such a a challenging thing to maintain when kind of in these periods. How did you maintain the morale yourself and also of your co-founder in these periods of uncertainty? **Kulveer Taggar** [18:56]: Yeah, it was hard. It was definitely hard. You know, I started seeing a coach who really helped me. one of our original co-founders ended up actually leaving and then Joe Wong, who'd worked with Srini before, ended up joining. So, it wasn't without some cost. I think, coming back to that point of thinking on a sort of longer term horizon, that makes it easier. When you're impatient and you're like, oh, I need to do something this year or within the next couple of years, you add an extra layer of pressure on yourself. And I've actually started to believe now that if you're doing a startup, almost the only thing that matters is the idea. I used to be one of these people that believed execution was everything and and the idea didn't matter. And I've come to realize now that you don't really know when you're have that idea and at what level and where it's going to come from. And if you recognize that, then I think it can sort of take the pressure off to have that immediate, you know, brilliant idea on day one. **Harry Stebbings** [19:51]: Can I jump in and ask? I was chatting to an investor the other day and they said that actually ideas are worthless because today there's rarely a truly novel idea that no one's had before and therefore it's all in execution. How would you kind of respond to that? **Kulveer Taggar** [20:04]: Yeah, I think firstly, I would sort of just expand what goes into the idea. And so one thing I learned from NFX was the channels that you would use to acquire customers is almost like a fundamental part of the idea you've had. And so I'd sort of expand, like when you say I have a startup idea, it means not just a way to solve a problem, but the way that you would acquire customers, the way you position it in the market, the language you would use to describe it. So I think that's one sort of trivial way of broadening that point. And then I actually think if if you do that, then those sorts of ideas where you line up market entry points, channels, language, and positioning, it's not that common to have the full sort of spectrum of that all lined up. So I don't I I would disagree that those are really sort of common. And then I've just been there where I've had bad ideas, I've had good ideas, and I've just seen the difference. And I've I've actually come to believe that in a startup, there are two states, pre-product market fit, post product market fit. If you're pre product market fit, all you should be doing is trying to get product market fit. And actually, you can be very, very, quick. I I don't think it takes more than a month to really test whether you have it. If you're close to it and you're using Rahul Vohra's method, then I think, you you can keep working towards a goal. And what I saw was once I had product market fit, everything changed for me. You know, one of the interesting things I think that happened is the equation on your time changes. Now, every marginal hour that I spend working on Zeus increases the expected value of the outcome. And so now I have this push to basically work really, really, hard. And so I actually often think that success or having product market fit causes you to work hard versus, you know, working hard causing you to get product market fit. So I think you need both. I don't think product market fit on its own without some capacity to really work hard and grind will will make you successful. But I do think it is really important and you should do everything you can to try and get it quickly. **Harry Stebbings** [21:57]: No, I I do totally get you. But I I spoke to Alexis before the show and he mentioned the product market fit you clearly, clearly, achieved and incredible growth you're seeing today. And the instant thing that comes to mind with me is that is actual operational scaling. And I want discuss something you said to me before, and it was using culture as this superpower to scaling. So can I ask, what did you mean by using culture as a superpower to scaling? **Kulveer Taggar** [22:18]: Yeah, I remember reading, I think is Reed Hastings from Netflix who said that culture eats strategy for lunch. And what I realized very quickly in Zeus was there were to be multiple teams and multiple sort of skill sets that we'd need to be successful, And we'd have to foster this environment where people were really comfortable communicating well, giving feedback and collaborating. And if we had any sort of problems there, and if ever, you know, people weren't thinking with a larger sort of mindset of what does it take to make the company successful, we would run into problems. And related to this, I had this breakthrough moment with the company where at some period when I was going through a challenging part of the company, I actually just opened up to the team and I said, hey, this is this is really difficult and this is what I'm struggling with. And at that moment, everyone you know, the vulnerability actually almost like strengthened my leadership in some ways, and it it brought us all closer together. And then I realized, was like, whoa, I don't need to sort of fixate or focus on trying to appear like, you know, the perfect CEO who has all the answers. And And actually, this is going to be a team effort. So at that point, when I saw how that brought us closer together and almost motivated us even more to be successful, I was like, okay, let's go for a culture where we screen for sort of high EQ, for low ego. We built some sort of company traditions. We do offsites. We used to do them every quarter and now twice a year. And we do this one exercise called, if you really knew me, where you then sort of just talk for two minutes. And we realized that when you actually let your coworkers get to know you sort of on a deeper level, you can build stronger connections. And with those stronger connections, your productivity as a team or your ability to get through challenging moments like skyrockets and the bond between everyone becomes much stronger. And, you know, I grew up in England, and I remember having the mindset of work is where you have your professional self and, you know, your personal self is very distinct. And then I kind of realized, well, actually, we spend a lot of time and a large proportion of our lives at work. What if you didn't have to make that sort of differentiation and you just brought your whole self to work? And so we experimented with that and it worked really well for us. And now the way this manifests in the company is we've had a very low attrition rate. We have people who take immense ownership in our mission and success of the company. And then it works exceptionally well for referrals because once you have those brilliant people in, then they want to refer people that they also want to work with into the company and communicate to everyone that we all co-own the culture of the company and we iterate on it. it. might not be perfect today and there's things that we have to change as we scale. But I've really seen firsthand how if you foster the right culture, it ends up being a superpower. **Harry Stebbings** [24:57]: Literally, if you could see my face right now, cool, it would be a good thing because I am smiling from ear to ear I actually tweeted last night. I I've always said for me building the team here, I always want everyone to bring their full self to work, like, whatever it is. And so I couldn't agree with you more there and couldn't agree more in terms of the need to remove the distinction between kind of personal and professional self. So supremely happy to hear that. I do, though, to move into, I have to admit, my favorite element of any interview being the quick fire round. So I say my immediate suggestion, suggestion, and then you give me your immediate thoughts. How does that sound? Sounds great. Okay, so your favorite book and why? What must I read on my next trip to the West Coast? This **Kulveer Taggar** [25:32]: is **Harry Stebbings** [25:32]: a **Kulveer Taggar** [25:32]: tough question because I think favorite books sort of vary over time. But for me, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, I think it's some of the best prose ever written. I really enjoy historical fiction, and I think they call this book as having some magical realism, but it's sort of the history of of India told from its moment of independence later through through certain characters. And then my other book that I really recommend is How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. I read that when I was 16, I think, and it sort of introduced me to his computational theory of the mind. And it was a mixture of being very technical, very enlightening on a sort of anthropological evolutionary point of way, and then just sort of blew my mind to the complexity that is our brains. And even I remember the first chapter was just about how the eye works. And when we look at all the companies trying to do autonomous driving today, it's sort of testament to that complexity. **Harry Stebbings** [26:24]: I I haven't actually heard of that, so I'm to add that to the list. This one I'm really interested by, especially given the growing up in Britain. So what would you most like to change about tech and Silicon Valley today? **Kulveer Taggar** [26:34]: I think I would like to change the bragging culture. I found this kind of difficult to adjust to when I came out here where everyone's kind of crushing it or, you know, in the press, it's like, I raised this much and you you throw these vanity metrics out there. I I can kind of understand why it happens, but I actually think it can be counterproductive. And I feel grateful that, you know, I've got a circle of friends and and CEOs that I'm quite close with where we can all sort of be open and genuine with each other. But yeah, sometimes that's tough for me to deal with. **Harry Stebbings** [27:03]: How do you use software to streamline what was a non-digital activity? And I have to give James Currier credit for this one. **Kulveer Taggar** [27:08]: our entire company at Zeus is basically this, using software to streamline a non non-digital activity. The mindset that we have at Zeus is we treat it like a software optimization problem. And by that, I mean, whenever we run into a bottleneck, we will use software to break through the bottleneck. And sometimes it involves changing processes. But there's countless things where we write some code and something that was a very manual process that a human had to do. We've now given them 3x or 5x leverage. And this is basically the definition of a tech enabled startup. So I'd say everything that goes into property management, we've used software to streamline it. **Harry Stebbings** [27:44]: What module quote do you most frequently revert back to? **Kulveer Taggar** [27:47]: Young When I was younger, I remember, I think it's a quote by Henry Ford where you can't build a reputation on what you're going to do. So maybe this ties back into the bragging thing, but I actually think it's a lot more powerful to to sort of just do things and show the world rather than talk about doing them. **Harry Stebbings** [28:01]: I have to say I haven't heard quote. I love Henry Ford, obviously, but I haven't heard the quote. That's one I'm to remember. Tell me, how do you deal with shit hit the fan moments? It's always tough. **Kulveer Taggar** [28:10]: On a personal level, take a deep breath. sort of use some of the techniques from meditation meditation where where I I try try and sort of become aware of what's going on in my body, what am I thinking, what are the emotions underpinning that? and then just calming myself down and getting through them. sometimes you have these moments at work and we have this process called the five whys. I think it originated with Toyota. But if something really bad happens, we'll bring in various teammates or anyone that's somehow related to it. and we will keep asking why until we think we get to a sort of root cause why, and then from there, do proportional corrective actions. These tend to happen more frequently than I would like, but I guess that's part and parcel of growing quickly. **Harry Stebbings** [28:47]: I mean, my word, that was far more analytical than mine. mine. included large amounts of mojitos and amaretto, But I love tell me, I want to finish on probably the most exciting of all. The next five years for you and for Zeus, just how big could this get, Cole? **Kulveer Taggar** [29:00]: This could get very large. Like, real estate companies just have a way of growing and growing You know, Shelter is, I think it's 18% of GDP. 18% of income is spent on it. We have a global ambition. We to be in every major city around the world. And I genuinely think like Zeus enables mobility. I've had friends who live in New York and have had amazing opportunities come up in San Francisco and haven't done the move just because they didn't to deal with the friction and stress of like, you know, finding apartments and like and and so on. And so I really hope that we can make it easier for people to move around the country or move around the world and really pursue the opportunities that excite them. **Harry Stebbings** [29:38]: Cool. As I said at the beginning, I heard this was to be a very special show by by countless people that I also didn't name. You've absolutely blown me away So thank you so much for joining me today. **Kulveer Taggar** [29:47]: Thank you. **Harry Stebbings** [29:50]: And as I said at the beginning, I could not be more excited for the chapters ahead with Zeus. And if you'd like to see more from Kul, you can on Twitter at Kul. Likewise, it'd be great to welcome you behind the scenes here at the minute VC. You can do that on Instagram at hstebbings1996 with two Bs. 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