Season 1 | Episode 9

Chitra: Hello, and welcome to the ninth episode of The Tech Icon. Hi, my name is Chitra.

Aditya: Hello, my name is Aditya, and we're going to be your hosts for the show.

Chitra: Our guest today is Rob Woollen, the CTO and co-founder of Sigma, a company he co-founded in the year 2014. Today, more than a decade later, his cloud-native analytics and BI platform is valued at over a billion dollars. Sigma has raised more than $500 million in venture capital, crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue or ARR, and has over 1,000 enterprise customers.

A Princeton graduate in computer science, Rob is a leading technologist and innovator with more than 25 years of industry experience. Prior to Sigma, he held senior leadership roles in engineering at Salesforce and BEA Systems, where he served as the CTO and the chief architect. When he's not working, he enjoys good wine, cooking, and spending time with his wife, Heather, his three boys, Jack, Graham, James, and their Golden Retriever, Hank.

We're honored to have him on the show. Rob, you are a technology icon. Welcome.

Rob: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me today.

Aditya: Welcome to Episode 9 of The Tech Icon, a show that celebrates and honors technology leaders. 

Chitra: Cool. While we'll focus on your journey for the most part, let's take a moment to learn about Sigma. What was your inspiration behind co-founding Sigma?

Rob: As you mentioned, I spent many years at Salesforce before this full venture. I remember at Salesforce a couple of points where I would watch and we would have teams of very knowledgeable people working on planning. How many salespeople should we hire? Should we hire them earlier in the year? They'll sell more, but they'll obviously cost more, and building out all these intricate plans. I remember one day digging in with one of the people. I was just curious, how does this work?

What I quickly realized is that this person knew everything about planning. They knew way more than I did. However, they couldn't actually calculate any of the real values from the data warehouse. They had these built-in guesses, just accustomed to, we're going to use the number three in this place. That's what we've historically used. I felt like I really wanted them to have the same empowerment that everyone else, every technical person had. Really, I just got excited about this idea of, how can we spread the ability to access all of the company's data to everyone in the company, regardless of whether they were a programmer or not.

Chitra: Amazing. How has the vision really evolved since you started the company?

Rob: We're a fascinating example because we spent quite a while to get to product market fit. For most companies, that's because they radically change their ideas. They pivot and things like that. We're unusual in that, virtually from the start, we've had largely the same vision, believing that really data could change the way people work. Obviously, with things like AI, there's a huge accelerant there.

The vision actually has not changed very much. The implementation and how you actually make it happen has changed quite a bit. We're an odd company in that we had an idea of an important problem. We just didn't ourselves know exactly how to solve it when we started either, so it took a long time to figure that out.

Chitra: Got it. Makes sense. I think that's a great segue into the next one. You talked about AI being an accelerant. Are you really seeing any patterns and trends that might shape the future of data analytics and AI?

Rob: Absolutely. There's probably two that I would highlight, that I think are super interesting. The first is that, traditionally in analytics, you're looking at the past. What happened? I want to build a dashboard. One of the big focuses that we've seen is that this analytics stack is evolving, if that's the place where you have all the information about your customers, your orders, all the things that matter to your business, it then becomes a natural place then to build applications.

So a lot of the things that previously had been relegated into spreadsheets or relegated into these little siloed applications are now coming to this centralized infrastructure. So there was a case where I would say Sigma's vision has evolved. It's really evolved from just being more analytics focused to operational and application focused. But the second one I'd highlight and you mentioned as the start is AI. I feel like many people, I see the opportunity for AI to really raise the productivity of everyone. What today takes a human X hours is going to dramatically decrease, and I'm on the optimist side. I mostly look forward to this as there are lots of things that are grudge work and I don't enjoy doing, and I'm really hopeful that the robots are going to take all that over. I'm very much looking forward to that.

Chitra: If I were to summarize that Rob, one is really that productivity gain and taking the friction out of work, and then second, from your perspective, is the move from analytics to operation and application based.

Rob: Absolutely.

Chitra: With that, let's transition to your journey, and I am going to pass it over to Aditya to cover the next couple of segments.

Aditya: Cool. For this next section, let's walk down the memory lane to celebrate your journey and inspire the world through your story of courage and innovation. We'd love to know a bit about your early years. How would you describe your childhood?

Rob: I'm a very, very fortunate person. I grew up with two parents and an older sister. My older sister was an excellent student, and so I felt like whenever I entered a classroom, they'd always be like, oh, you're Michelle Woollen's brother. And I would sort of feel like I've got to live up to expectations, and no one wants to be significantly behind their sibling or something like that. And so I feel like I was very, very fortunate in the environment that I landed into, and to this day, obviously, I have a great supportive family.

Aditya: So you were surrounded by some smart family members, it seems. What did your parents do?

Rob: My father was actually a programmer early in his career, and then he moved into sort of IT management and running sort of IT for companies. And then my mom was a high school English teacher.

Aditya: As a kid, what did he want to become growing up?

Rob: I'm one of these really rare people that, since probably about the age of 11 or 12, I wanted to be a programmer. I loved computers really from the start of getting one. And I feel almost everyone I know, this story is not true, right? People often change very dramatically in their adulthood of what they want to go do.

I'm a super odd example. I could have told you in 1986 what I wanted to do. Probably the only difference is I don't think I ever would have thought I would start a company or be an executive or anything like that. I was, at the time, very much just focused. I loved working with computers.

Aditya: Yeah, so it sounds like as a kid, you were already programming a lot with computers. What ignited that spark?

Rob: I think when I was about 10 or 11, we got our first computer. And, you know, like many kids, the first thing I did with it is, of course, I played games. Then I think at some point, I remember my parents sort of pushing me a little bit to be like, you can do things other than play games with this, [and that] sort of gave me some inkling of programming.

You know, this was back in the day, long before the Internet and long before, a lot of the resources you would have today. You can just go on YouTube and learn about programming. But I started just sort of fiddling with even like things we had bought. I would try to like modify the programs that my parents had purchased, which, you know, sometimes I probably broke them, but they were pretty forgiving of it. But it sort of ignited this love. Still to this day, I love the fact that, I can change something in a program and see it immediately react and sort of feel like I'm, in some sense, controlling it.

Aditya: So really that experimentation and fiddling around, working around with different sorts of code and seeing the direct result, that's what really interested you.

Rob: Yeah, I think even to this day, it's one of the reasons if I find a bug, I can't let it go because I love getting in there and trying to figure out like, why is this happening? And, you know, what can I do to change the behavior? There's something about that direct sort of iterative interface that is almost addictive.

Aditya: Yeah, yeah, even I can relate to that. Like, I know I don't solve the same scale of problems as you, but, you know, in competitive programming problems, if there's like one mistake and I can't figure it out, it's just hard to let go of it.

Rob: Yeah, there's some sort of tenacity or something, I guess, is the attribute there.

Aditya: Yeah. Okay, finally, are there values that you all believed in as a family?

Rob: I mean, certainly, education was super important to my parents. Probably the thing that stuck the most with me was, there were times where, for instance, I wasn't doing well or, you know, I'd done some, maybe [got] a lower grade than they thought I should get. The conversation was almost always that it was clear I had the talent and the ability to do it and I hadn't applied myself. For instance, I was never going to be a pro athlete. I was a good soccer player as a kid, but my parents never were like, you should have made the national team or something, right? It's clear I didn't have that level of talent.

Whereas, you know, in school, I think, especially during the high school years, things like that, anytime where I did not sort of do excellent, it was pretty clear, frankly, I had not tried very hard. So I felt like one of the things my parents really instilled in me is just like, do you always feel like you're making the best effort on everything you do? And I still try to hold myself to that this day. Like, I'm not perfect, I make many mistakes, but I try to at least always give my best effort.

Aditya: Yes, that is really cool. Next, let's dive into your educational journey and get some advice for students out there. So what high school did you attend?

Rob: I went to Fremd High School in Palatine, Illinois. It was the public high school, maybe about two blocks from where I grew up in suburbs of Chicago.

Aditya: And then you did a bachelor's in computer science from Princeton University. That's amazing. How did the Ivy League experience propel your journey forward?

Rob: I mean, obviously, it's a phenomenal school. For me, a lot of it was getting to be in an environment where you're surrounded by super talented people. When you're in high school or things like that, you see a lot of talented people, but you don't necessarily see people that are world class in different things. At Princeton, I remember I had friends who were just amazing levels of academic talent, professors and people like that were just world renowned. And getting inspiration from those people, getting to directly speak to them, seeing how they do things was really just sort of a big chance to learn that I don't think you see in a lot of environments.

Aditya: Yes, that's definitely true. Now with the advancements of coding capabilities in AI, is pursuing computer science even like a good idea? How can students differentiate their work from what AI is already capable of?

Rob: I'm very much in favor still of people studying computer science. I will tell you, really for sort of two different reasons that I think about. The first is, when I think about education, I mean, I studied computer science and obviously that's the field I work in. But imagine I studied computer science in the early 90s before the Internet was even really necessarily a thing. So it's not that you're learning exactly, here's what you're going to go do at work.

In some sense, you're learning to learn and you're learning some of the foundational skills in your area. And I feel very similarly about studying computer science now. Yes, the particular systems you use, the particular things you may learn in a class, may not be what you leverage in 25 years. But the skills, the types of foundational things you'll learn, and overall just sort of frankly, learning to learn, right? Learning to be in an environment where you have to be able to pick up skills. I actually think that's a lot of what university is about.

Aditya: I see. So you think those critical thinking skills might be as important or even more important than the technical applications themselves? Right.

Rob: The particular programming language you might learn, the particular system you might work on, I mean, a lot of those that I did in school are in the history vaults these days. But I would still say my education was very, very valuable.

Aditya: Makes sense. Next, what do you call yourself, an introvert or an extrovert?

Rob: I'm very much on the introvert side of the scale. I fool people because I do a lot of public speaking and a lot of customer meetings, I do podcasts and things like that. It is not my natural element. One of the things I'm probably the most proud of, I'll tell you when I was in my early 20s, the first time I had to do a public speaking event, I was visibly shaking and dreading it for months ahead of time. And now it's something I do honestly many times a week, become very natural to me. But it was something I very much had to learn and very much wanted to learn. I think those two things are often a big component. You can change yourself if it's something you really want to go do. I mean, that for me was one of the biggest ones.

Aditya: In this podcast, I definitely cannot tell if you're nervous or an introvert. So yeah, it's definitely working.

Rob: Glad to hear it.

Aditya: All right. And then finally, how do you handle stress? What would you say to students who find themselves struggling with pressure and intense competition related to college admissions?

Rob: Certainly the college side is, you know, my oldest is roughly the same age as you. He's going be a junior in high school and sort of entering this process. I think for people perspective is often the most important thing. So, you know, college and all that process is important but in the end it's not going to define your life. It's not going to define whether you're successful or not. And I think in general, with stress and a lot of these things, being able to step back [is crucial].

I've had situations, for instance, where there's a lot of stress around a bug or something in our software or some sort of upset customer. Those are situations obviously where we care deeply about, you know, making the customer happy. But, you know, in general, it's not like a life or death situation. You have to sort of have some perspective of like, the world is going to go on and things are going to be okay. You know, even through like life transitions, right? There's people that go through low points and everyone has them. There's people that, you know, lose their job or make some mistake. Almost everything is recoverable. Allow yourself to step back and think about more broadly what's going on in the world. And how am I going to think about this in 10 years?

Aditya: Yeah, those are amazing insights. And with that, I'll pass it over to my co-host to cover the next segment — Work and Entrepreneurship.

Chitra: Thank you very much, Rob and Adi. Before we get into work and entrepreneurship, I want to tell you, I really liked what you said about giving your best effort and learning to learn. I think those two are like such powerful concepts. And it's amazing that you've built off of them.

Also, [I have] one follow up question. It's interesting that when you were a little boy, you were known as Michelle Woollen's brother. Now that you've built this unicorn, is she also called Rob Woollen's sister sometimes?

Rob: I don't think so, no. I think she's a very accomplished person herself. So I think now she's managed to be completely separate.

Chitra: Okay, cool. So you've had a fascinating career in enterprise tech from HPE to BEA to Salesforce and now Sigma. What was the biggest inflection point in your journey?

Rob: I think probably one of the more interesting ones was, I worked at HPE for about the first year and a half, roughly out of college, and I left to join this company, BEA, a relatively small company at the time.

Every job I've had since then, and this is 1998, has somehow been connected to that group of people that I worked with in 1998 at BEA. Including Sigma, including the funding of Sigma. When I went to Salesforce, I went to work for someone who was in that group at BEA. So I think the takeaway I've tried to have for myself and for other people is, first of all, I think working with a great set of people. They are likely, especially over time, to go also do a bunch of interesting things. And talented people like to work with other talented people, especially ones they know, right?

The classic thing is someone takes a new job and wants to bring in a bunch of people they know are good. That, for me, was such a powerful connection. I went to work for Chris Fry. I ran all of engineering at Salesforce. That's how I met Mike Speiser, who's our current investor. Sam Pullara, who's on our board, was part of that group. Scott Dietzen, who's on our board, was part of that group. When people talk about connections, sometimes they think about it as a very lightweight thing of like, we've met before. Whereas I think what's actually important is the very strong connections of like, we've worked together for many years. We trust and know each other and know very much about each other's capabilities. Those are the people that you have long-term relationships with.

Chitra: That's great. What are the top three learnings from your previous roles that you were able to carry forward and probably even apply to Sigma?

Rob: I think about it on different levels. For me personally, as I thought about my career, one of the big lessons I learned was that while managers and companies in general trying to look out for you and promote people of talent, each of us has to really be in charge of our own career and have to be driving our own destiny. I think there were several points in my career where I had to make clear to people like, hey, here's what I'm trying to go do, or here's what my goal is. I need to sort of seek help on how to get there. I think that self-ownership was super important.

Another part for me is just the camaraderie at work. I feel like you find people that are incredibly talented, you find people that are fun to work with. I try to find the people that have both of those because I feel like you spend so much of your life at work, and you just won't calculate the hours. It is a major part of who you spend time with. I want to spend time with people that both challenge me on the work side and have great ideas and build great things, but also it has to be fun. I have to enjoy seeing them, I have to enjoy the camaraderie of that. And I think that's something that I've thought a lot about.

I think it's too far when people say work is a family. We're not a family, we're a business. I want to be with people that I enjoy spending time with, I want them to be friends, I want it to be something that like I genuinely look forward to going to do.

Chitra: Fair enough. Is there a defining moment from your early days at Sigma that's etched in your mind, something that may have changed the trajectory of business?

Rob: I think one of the big ones was, it's a funny mental timing for me because it was during the pandemic, when we were all sort of remote and home, but we built an initial product. It got us roughly to about a million dollars in ARR. It seemed like obviously it was selling, it was far better than the zero we had done previously. But we made a big decision to essentially rebuild the product. As you can imagine, it's an interesting pivot to convince people that, even though we've finally gotten a little bit of success with customers, we should make this big leap and build this product.

Everyone aligned around the change both on the engineering side, we actually moved resources there and on the go-to-market side, where we were, hey, we need to sell this new thing, not the old one that you already have some confidence. Obviously, from the numbers and our trajectory since, it's clear we made the right call.

But those types of things in the moment are hard. Any of these pivots, people tend to look at them with a historical view of what was obvious that you should go do X. In the moment, it's rarely obvious, and there's almost always very reasonable people that don't want to make the change. My experience is almost always when you go through one of these big pivots, you lose people, because you have people that just can't make the journey through it. They don't believe in the change, they're not ready to make this kind of transformation. They're all sort of hard situations, but that one particular was a big one for me.

Chitra: That's very interesting, and I agree with you 100%. It's like super hard to make those pivots. It takes a lot of guts and courage to do it, so congratulations. Were there any tough technical trade-offs that you had to make as a company?

Rob: We had a firm belief that everything was going to move to the cloud. So from the start, we only supported cloud data sources, we ourselves were only in the cloud. there's always these different points, especially early on, where you have some early customer who's like, 'Wow, we'd be interested maybe if we could host it ourselves.' Or there's all sorts of things early on where you're like, you want to survive on one hand, and you want to build a company that actually is successful.

But we had a certain set of things where we were like, we're never going to violate this because this is our core belief. Anyone who's building an MVP or an initial product or company is going to take some shortcuts because you have to get something out to market, you have to make trade-offs in what you build versus having every feature in the world. But you have to have a set of things you just believe are your core attributes. I feel like those were the hardest things to at least nail down and then make sure we were always consistent.

Chitra: Absolutely. That's another tough one. Most companies would support cloud and in addition to that, they'd do on-prem and hybrid and all of that. Being really focused there is huge and it's paying off.

For my next one, I think we covered part of this, but I came across this piece and I found it super interesting. Now, is it accurate that you went through multiple rounds of iterations and pivots without any revenue for seven straight years before finding that product market fit or landing that very crucial meeting with the CEO of Snowflake?

Rob: Yes, it is true. I gave a talk recently where I showed a graph which was basically just a line all the way at zero for many years and then took off like a rocket ship and I was asked what it was. Of course, it's the Sigma revenue graph. On one hand, as I mentioned, we're very unusual and that we had this big idea. It was clear if we could solve the problem, there was a huge market. In that part, I think we're very well aligned with our investors. We're going after a huge market. We're going after a problem we think if we can solve, we can clearly build a public company.

We're lucky that our investors were patient enough to stick with us through a lot of iteration. Honestly, we're also very lucky that a lot of our employees stuck with us. Some of our earliest employees are still with the company and they've obviously been through that entire journey. I feel like if you've got the passion, if you've got the right problem, and if you can be lucky enough to convince investors and other people to help you make it through the obvious financial challenge of not having revenue, it can often be the right thing to figure out in how do you get to that big solution.

Chitra: Got it. A quick follow-up here. I would think that investors typically like to see quick returns, even if not so quick, like maybe three years, four years. They have to have that real conviction in the team, in the product, in the idea, to keep going, putting in money. So how did that pan out? And I'm not sure, is many startups have that luxury these days, it's rather unusual.

Rob: Even in our day, it was hugely unusual. We had a pretty significant track record with the investors, so they knew us very, very well. We had also been very careful about not spending money. So even the money we had raised, we had a pretty terrible office and didn't spend a lot on things overall. And so we were also sort of miserly with the money until we sort of knew we had product market fit. But you're right, obviously, the investors would have been happier if we had product market fit much earlier. They were not overjoyed with the amount of time it took. They're much happier now.

Chitra: Cool. Today, you've crossed $100 million in ARR. You serve more than a thousand customers and you're almost growing at 100% year over year. What's next — acquisition or IPO?

Rob: IPO has always been the goal. It always sounded audacious when we were just this tiny startup with no revenue to say, our only goal is IPO. But honestly, that's been the goal from the start. Depending on where people are in their career, they sometimes are looking for a quicker exit or looking for an acqui-hire or things like that. I had the fortune to be involved in a bunch of other tech companies and exec roles. So I didn't want to go through the obvious turmoil and pain of starting a company to end up back where I was if now I've got a senior role at a big company.

For me, it was trying to build something myself. Part of why it took so long to get to product market fit is because we would dismiss anything that seemed like a great idea for a feature or a small company, but we didn't think it's going to be a multi-billion dollar business. That was really how we measure ourselves and still do to this day.

Chitra: Sure. Is that also one of those non-negotiable ones?

Rob: I'm pretty skeptical of acquisitions in general. I don't get universal vote here, but I will say my aim is very much IPO.

Chitra: Got it. Thank you. Next up, we have a fun-filled rapid-fire styled segment where you will have 10 seconds or less to answer a question. Are you ready, Rob?

Rob: I'm not sure, but I'll do my best.

Chitra: All right, very quickly then... Your first computer?

Rob: An Apple IIe.

Chitra: Awesome. The first piece of code you ever wrote?

Rob: First real thing I remember writing was — I wrote a program for my mom who was a teacher to do her grades and figure out students' averages and stuff like that.

Chitra: Oh, sweet. The favorite tech that you ever built?

Rob: It's got to be Sigma.

Chitra: Yeah, guessed that. A non-tech hobby that might have shaped you?

Rob: I like cooking in particular. Even if I only do it once, I like trying to make things from scratch. Sometimes you do it once and you're like, I'm never ever going to make this from scratch again. It was too much of a pain. But I like seeing the derivation of how things happen.

Chitra: Nice. What's your favorite?

Rob: I do a lot of bread baking, that whole genre.

Chitra: Cool. Anything that keeps you up at night?

Rob: Not really. I feel like I'm a pretty peaceful person.

Chitra: Nice. A proud dad moment.

Rob: I'm very much of the ilk of I just want my kids to be great people and do great things. I feel like anytime I see them showing kindness, showing empathy for people, or just almost unexpectedly doing something nice for someone, it's a wonderful feeling.

Chitra: I love that. Someone in tech or outside, you've always admired but never met.

Rob: I think it'd be Bill Gates. When I was an intern at Microsoft in college and we got to go to his house. I saw him in the distance, but I didn't really get to meet him. There's two things I liked about him. One is that, like me, he's an engineer. A lot of people I think admire Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs is a marketer. Bill Gates is the programmer like me. Then the other aspect of it is that he's really done an amazing job in his later life on the nonprofits and really trying to change the world. And there's some good in him that I admire him.

Chitra: Maybe you'll meet him one day.

Rob: We'll see!

Chitra: Steve Wozniak is great too, the programmer guy behind Apple. All right. Something about you that very few people know of.

Rob: I don't know that there's a lot. I think maybe the biggest thing that people would say is that [I feel when people see] sometimes titles or founders, they will sort of come up with this character of you that, you're going to be this intimidating person. I'm maybe a shockingly simple person. I feel like I'm still basically a 12-year-old boy who's pretty happy to get a slice of pizza and eat a burrito or something, and that's a great night for me.

Chitra: All right. That was a lot of fun. You did great. Thank you very much for sharing your personal side. We're now nearing the end of this episode and I will pass it back to Aditya to cover this final segment.

Aditya: Yes. Although I do have one question come up which I wanted to ask. [This] stemmed from your answer regarding the tough technical trade-offs you had to make. There's this idea of tech debt, which is as you make shortcuts, in the long-term that might be work you have to go in and fix later. How do you find that balance between short-term shortcuts and long-term progress?

Rob: Yeah. It's a great question. Every software company I've ever worked at has to think about this and experience it at some level. Everyone has some degree of tech debt. There's the absolutes which are, look, it's better to have tech debt and survive with a successful product than it is to be the dead product that is perfect code. So you have to think a little bit about the absolutes, and then you have to think some about what are things that we know how to solve, and it's really just a matter of time and resources and need.

I remember early on at Sigma, we, for various reasons, had a very simple protocol for how the browser talked to the servers on the back end, and we knew immediately this was a very simple thing we had done. We could do much better, but it just wasn't worth investing the time until three or four years later. So there's a lot of things like that where you can make a time and resource trade-off of. I can do this very simple thing now, it'll be good enough, and when it really matters, we're going to have enough people or enough success or enough priority to make that piece great.

Aditya: Thank you for that. Okay, now to the conclusion section. So what's been one memorable moment in your startup journey so far?

Rob: There have been so many. I actually think one of the funny one was actually just the first customer who bought our product. There's just this first time that someone gives you a check. I didn't know how to accept money. I didn't know what we're supposed to do with this. They asked us for our purchase order, and I was like, I don't know anything about this. I had to get our attorneys to draft up things. There are so many things in the startup journey that make me smile in retrospect because early on, you're so scrappy about things. [Now] obviously we have professionals that do all these different things but it's fun sometimes to think about the different little things we did early on.

Aditya: That's great. If you could go back in time, is there anything you would do differently?

Rob: There's always things where you're like, I wish for instance, we would have gotten to product market fit faster, I wish X, I wish Y. I'm so happy with where we are that my answer is no. I feel like I'm so happy with the outcome and so happy with the company we've built, and the product we've built. It was a painful journey here, but I guess my realization is maybe that was the necessary journey.

Aditya: Yeah, definitely. Finally, what advice would you give to a young engineer or a student setting out to build something ambitious or solve a really hard technical problem?

Rob: It's easy to have some big problem in front of you. It's even true of professionals that are trying to build a new feature. You have this grand thing in front of you. A lot of times people get lost. They spend a bunch of time trying to figure out like, what should I do? They never really make any progress.

The two bits of advice I would give people is A, try to figure out, are there any ways you can simplify the problem. You can make assumptions or say, well, we're not going to deal with this part right now. I'm going to assume that we can do that later, or I'm going to fake it right now, or I'm going to mock it or whatever. But overall, it's that, and then the second is just, you got to just start doing it. You can only plan for so long, you can only pontificate about how could I solve this problem. You have to actually just go try to solve it. And a lot of times, that first effort teaches you way more, even if it's nowhere near the right solution, you learn so much just trying to be hands on in solving it that it's way more important than sort of anything you could have like thought of abstractly.

Aditya: So instead of thinking of all those specifics, actually go in and take the dive, take a first stab at it.

Rob: Yep, and then, you know, the second part of that, is you have to be very comfortable with throwing away that first effort. I think I've had people that unfortunately are very comfortable diving in, but they're very uncomfortable throwing away their work. You have to be comfortable with that iteration of, you know, you're going to dive in, it's not going to be the right thing, but you're going to learn a lot. If you can come to those terms, you can be really successful.

Aditya: Yes, that's great advice. Like I've always heard, take the first step, but this is the first time I'm hearing that first step isn't actually what you expect to be successful. It's the future iterations.

Rob: That's been my experience, at least. You may be better at the first step than me, but my first step is often wrong.

Aditya: Okay then. With that, thank you very much for joining us in our mission of inspiring students and entrepreneurs across the board. We wish you the very best.

Rob: Thank you.

Chitra: Thank you very much, Rob. This was excellent.

Rob: Glad to hear it.