Prime Venture Partners Podcast

He coached Virat, Dhoni, D Gukesh & 25+ World Champions - Paddy Upton's Secrets

• Prime Venture Partners: Early Stage VC Fund

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From “Virat Kohli is the best preparer in the cricket world” to reminding startup leaders of the most important lesson - “Who I am and the results of what I do are different”, our podcast with Paddy Upton has it all!

🎯 What you’ll take away in this full episode with Paddy (mental coach to India’s 2011 World Cup-winning team):

✅ Why startup founders must evolve from individual contributors → captains → coaches
✅ How to build “personal mastery” through unsexy fundamentals
✅ The hidden costs of ego in leadership
✅ Lessons from MS Dhoni & Virat Kohli
✅ Why “success ≠ self-worth” — and how to emotionally detach from outcomes

📌 Episode Timestamp

00:00 – Introduction 

01:46 – What startups & sports have in common

03:46 – Leadership evolution: player → captain → coach

05:46 – Mental fitness: sleep, nutrition & exercise

08:16 – Separating identity from outcomes

12:00 – How to review wins & losses

15:20 – The danger of chasing shiny objects

17:35 – Lessons from Virat Kohli & MS Dhoni

🎧 Whether you’re building a startup, leading a team, or navigating your own mental game—this conversation is for you.

Hosted by Amit Somani!

#PaddyUpton #AmitSomani #Leadership #MentalFitness #Startups #Entrepreneurship #CricketLeadership #MSDhoni #ViratKohli #SelfWorth #PerformancePsychology #IndiaStartups #MindsetMatters #CoachingJourney #PrimeVenturePartnersPodcast 

Speaker 1:

He's not the most talented batsman in the world. He doesn't sweep. He doesn't reverse sweep, he doesn't ramp. There's players who've got much more expansive games than him, but nobody prepares better than him. Coley, who is the best preparer, probably in the world of cricket? Sports teams make the mistake of taking the best individual performer and making the captain. Failure is a better teacher. You learn more from failure. That's absolute rubbish, because the world judges us based on our results. 50 years ago, the endemic that the majority of the world's population suffered from was starvation. Today it's 50 years later. It's obesity. Social media is having the same impact as the junk food industry. I've listened to people speak behind their backs. I learned from MS Dhoni.

Speaker 2:

All right, welcome to the Prime Venture Partners podcast, delighted to have with me Paddy Upton again. He is a world-class coach and now a friend. I think we met like five years ago, virtually. So welcome to the show, paddy. Thanks very much. Thanks for the invitation, lovely seeing you and very happy to be here. Thank you, paddy. So, paddy, you have worked, of course, with a ton of elite athletes world champions, teams, individuals and now recently, in the last few years, also worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and startup founders, which is an area that I work in. How do you sort of compare and contrast elite entrepreneurs and elite athletes and what are lessons perhaps each can learn from the other?

Speaker 1:

So there's some unique and important similarities between high performance sport and startup entrepreneurs, but there's also some important differences to consider I would start with. The similarities are that in order to really succeed at the highest level, you need to, number one, have really good selection. So you have to have a team full of A players. You can't have B and C team players. You need to be employing very clear across the board high performance principles that you're getting the best out of each individual. You're getting the best out of each individual. You're getting the best out of your team. You're optimizing your product. You're optimizing your strategies, your go-to-market strategies.

Speaker 1:

There's immediate scoreboard pressure in most startup landscapes to a degree, when funding starts coming in, startups found themselves in almost a performance relegation type season that if you don't succeed, if you don't make the mark, you get relegated and you know, maybe you don't exist after that. So there's those similarities. The high performance principles apply and there's some very useful principles that the startup industry can take from sport. But one doesn't want to oversimplify it. Sport is 11 versus 11 or 15 versus 15. Both teams play by exactly the same rules. You have a referee who oversees everybody playing by the rules. You play within a side of very clearly demarcated boundary and the scoreboard and the success is very clearly defined.

Speaker 1:

In the startup landscape it's not. It can be david versus goliath. The rules of engagement aren't the same. The definition of success might vary and you don't have a referee. You might have a regulatory body, but they don't have a direct line of sight often that a referee does. So there are a lot, there's a lot more complexity and nuance in the startup and scale-up landscape, but, but the principles of high performance apply and they're very useful to bring those and use those fundamentals upon which to build whatever the business might be building.

Speaker 2:

So great. Paddy. Maybe you can elaborate on a couple of these principles of high performance for any individual. It could be an individual performer in a company, it could be a startup entrepreneur. What are some basic building blocks that you would recommend that people think about, just to elevate their own performance in whatever they're doing?

Speaker 1:

So, again, if I were to use a sporting analogy, a startup, individual, startup founder is like an individual athlete, an individual performer themselves. They need to have excellent levels of skill, they need to be at the front edge of innovation. Product needs to be as good as possible, so this is desirable as possible and the individual needs to prepare excellently. So athletes so much of their success comes from their preparation, their mental health, physical health, emotional health. They engage in so much practice in the gym and the training ground to achieve a level of personal mastery so when they arrive at the event, that they're in their best possible space. And similarly for startup founders, it's important to arrive at work in the best possible space mental, emotional, physical space. So personal mastery is one, and then probably I'd say next to that and there's so many similar, so many things that are useful.

Speaker 1:

I would say, as a business starts scaling up, individual founders need to move from being the player who is delivering the goods, the individual performer. They need to now move to be captain of the team. So they're playing, but they're also captaining others, coordinating things, make sure there's good communication, collaboration, cross-functional alignment. As the business scales, even to the next level, maybe it's time to move even further up and become a coach, or a player coach or selector coach, where, when the business is large enough, you really want to have experts in all the various domains that are more of an expert than the founder themselves. So then performance actually happens through the team and they move into a coaching role. And moving from player to coach is a fundamentally different mindset. One is I'm focused on my performance. The other one is it's not about my performance anymore. Now it's all about other people and enabling their performance. It's a very different mindset.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. But before we go from player to coach, can you talk about going from becoming being a player to becoming a leader or a captain of a team or, in a corporate jargon, right, becoming an individual contributor to a manager or a manager to a VP or whatever? So what are some principles that you know basically differentiate those that are going to be ultra successful as leaders or captains and those that are going to be perhaps just great as individual performers?

Speaker 1:

I would say, awareness is very important. So a lot of sports teams make the mistake of taking the best individual performer and making the captain. They end up not being a good captain. A good captain traditionally a lot of businesses have taken the best salesperson and made them the sales manager and they end you lose your best salesperson and you get a very mediocre average sales manager.

Speaker 1:

So it's awareness of what are the criteria or capabilities required to lead others and deliver yourself. And there needs to be someone who has a balance of self-orientation and other orientation. There needs to be an element of emotional regulation or emotional intelligence or other values that are other oriented. So caring, listening, collaboration, thoughtfulness, those are other oriented skills. So some of those we are born with and you can actually ascertain that somebody has the potential to be a leader.

Speaker 1:

But every leader in the top businesses gets leadership training. They get leadership coaching. In sport they make the mistake is we take a player and we make them coach, but we don't give them leadership or captaincy training. So it's awareness of don't give them leadership or captaincy training. So it's awareness of do I have what are the criteria required to be a relatively successful leader? Make sure that I use those and I harness those and I bring those out, but also that I gauge in some leadership training, because leadership is both nurture and nature. It is a trainable skill and I think it's important to dedicate some time, even though it might not seem like it's adding immediate value and it's not appearing on the bottom line as an impact to the business. But in time, quality leadership delivers huge, much bigger success than a bunch of individual performers who are not united with good leadership.

Speaker 2:

Fantastic, paddy. Your key speciality that's how I learned about you in the first place is mental health, mental agility, mental strength. How does one go about cultivating that in any context? Right, because that's what you really bring to bear to these elite athletes.

Speaker 1:

I didn't realize we were in a three-hour podcast. If we've got three hours, I could answer that question, sure. So mental wellness no-transcript. I need to be in a good space to be able to have access to good mental emotional regulation. So, like in sport and in business and in all performance environments, what are the fundamentals, what are the building blocks? What are the basics? And sometimes they're so simple, they're not that sexy. And the basics the unsexy basics to be in a good mental space is you have to be getting regular, good sleep. It's not negotiable. The fastest way to undermine your performance is to have a few nights of bad sleep. It won't make you a better performer, but it'll make you a weaker performer very quickly.

Speaker 1:

Nutrition Food fills us. It tops our battery up. Junk food it empties our battery. Quality food is medicine. It fills our battery. So food number two, or nutrition number two. Exercise number three. And that's sometimes a big challenge for a lot of startup founders because we are so busy doing what we're doing, we and we still need to have some time for family. If we've got a family back home and exercise often takes a back seat, that's a fundamental error. You need to be getting good exercise. We top our phone batteries up every single night, we plug it in. We need to be in the same with ourselves. So sleeping, eating and nutrition.

Speaker 1:

And then I would say probably one of the other key and a deep foundation of managing the mind is separating who I am from the results of what I do, or separating myself from the fact that I'm a founder or whatever industry I'm in, and the opposite of that. Where people get it wrong is we collapse. Who I am with what I do. So when I'm successful I ride a high, I think I'm good, people compliment me and I'm full of confidence. But when things go badly, my self-worth drops, I get doubts, I get insecurity. Imposter syndrome really kicks in and starts drowning me. I don't think I'm going to make it and that negative mental energy or negative self-perception becomes very hard to come out of that and we end up getting someone who attaches their self-worth to the results stays in those low periods of form for a lot longer than what's necessary.

Speaker 1:

So a key piece is to keep separating out and it's not a once-off thing, it's a constant work who I am and the results of what I do are different. If I achieve success, it does not mean I'm great, just means things work this time. If I fail or I don't get to raise that round of funding or something doesn't work in the business, it doesn't mean I'm a failure, it doesn't mean the business is a failure. It just means this time stuff didn't work. But I'm still okay with who I am and when we are able to do that, we can deal with the highs, deal with the lows and that sets up a more longer term mental equanimity, mental peace, perspective and those are funded fundamentals and foundations. There's more of them, but those are the two. That I'd pick is eating, sleeping, nutrition and separating myself from our results, and it's a constant journey because that keeps happening, because the world judges us based on our results, particularly if your results are publicly visible.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, fantastic. I mean, like you said, this could be hours, but we'll make it into minutes. So question is, on the win versus loss, let's take the scenario of a dressing room after a victory or a loss. How would you go about, beyond attempting to separate the results from yourself or your team's performance, actually analyzing perhaps what worked, what didn't? Or you would just go back to the process? Or how would you analyze both victory and defeat in some sense?

Speaker 1:

So for me it's fairly simple. Number one don't analyze it immediately afterwards, because emotions are high, whether you've won or lost. Even if you've won, some people have done badly. If you've lost, some people have done well. Never debrief on the day when the emotions are high. Debrief the next day and win or lose. Exactly the same two questions every time From what we did well, what did we learn?

Speaker 1:

And the things we didn't do that well, what would we do better next time? And there is most people, most athletes, most business people. When they do badly, they really interrogate the mistake. When they do well, they celebrate and they move on. We learn more from interrogation than we do celebration.

Speaker 1:

That's where the notion has arised that out there in the world is this popular notion that failure is a better teacher. You learn more from failure. That's absolute rubbish. You learn more from interrogation. So if what a real high performer will do, they will interrogate wins and losses equally, they will extract and then what they'll see is there's an equal amount of lessons to learn, regardless of the outcome. So review the next day and only ask two questions what did we do well? And spend a sizable amount of time consolidating what you're doing well and then what didn't go well? Don't go back and analyze what went wrong. Look forward and frame it in terms of a if we had that situation in future, what would we do differently? So what you're doing is you're actually designing solutions rather than doing root cause analysis on problems. They have a fundamentally different effect on the brain.

Speaker 2:

Great Paddy. A related question that a recently active golfer. There's a lot about your self-image that you carry right, whether you are winning or losing, or you score at a particular level or whatever. Does that also play? It's more like the subconscious and what you think about yourself. Does that play a role in terms of performance beyond the physical skills, beyond the process, beyond, you know, mental health?

Speaker 1:

So I think I answered that earlier in the concept of separating yourself from your results.

Speaker 1:

So the higher your self-worth separate from your results, the less higher your self-worth separate from your results, the less you're affected by the pressure to succeed and the less you're affected by the fear of failure. And it's the pressure to succeed and fear of failure that are two of the biggest mental obstacles to success in all of sport and it has, I guess, in life. People who collapse, who they are, with their results. They desperately need to do well in order to look good and feel good and be complimented, and they're terrified of doing badly. So those people tend to suffer pressure to succeed and fear of failure a lot more. When you separate your self-worth from your results, the impact of pressure and fear is significantly reduced and you're able just to focus on performing as opposed to focus on the results of performing. And we perform best when we focus on the process of performing, not when we're chasing results, because those exist either in the future or the past and performance doesn't exist in either place.

Speaker 2:

Just last couple of questions. One is in terms of your own sort of mental fitness, wellness, you know, improvement. What is the most hyped and useless sort of advice right that is bandied about and, on the contrary, what are very simple things, like you talked about sleep and nutrition that is there for everyone to take but people are not partaking in those um, there is so much hype and useless crap that gets delivered to us by influencers on our cell phones these days, just like, if I use the analogy, 50 years ago, the endemic that the majority of the world's population suffered from was starvation.

Speaker 1:

Today, it's 50 years later it's obesity. What's changed it's the amount of junk food and the readiness of junk food, and how cheap junk food has been delivered to us. People have lost the ability to discern, so we consume all the junk food and now we are obese population. And similarly, social media is having the same impact as the junk food industry. Now we're having this junk, calorie, empty information being delivered to us on our phone and people are following and chasing the next shiny thing, the next fad, and that's basically you just end up chasing your tail. That's basically you just end up chasing your tail. No-transcript those down and you move the doctrine and the out of the way. You will find that the universal principles are still the same as what they've always been. So stop chasing shiny shit. Let me try that again.

Speaker 2:

Objects Stop chasing shiny objects. Absolutely Well, perhaps the last one Can you share some examples? You obviously coached and mentored and worked with so many interesting people. What are some lessons you have learned from them that have helped you become a better coach or a better person or whatever? Because these are amazing people, right, so they've probably got some interesting things everything.

Speaker 1:

I think so much of the experience that I share in the workshops around in the talks it's they have been gifted to me through experiences with athletes and I've learned so much from athletes who athletes like Coley, who is the best preparer probably in the world of cricket, and I've learned the value of preparation. He's not the most talented batsman in the world. He doesn't sweep, he doesn't reverse sweep, he doesn't ramp. There's players who've got much more expansive games than him, but nobody prepares better than him. So I've learned the simple basics of preparing excellently can set you up to be the best in the world in all three formats for 10 years in a row. It's not a clever, shiny lesson, it's just the basics. I learned from MS Dhoni when I very first time I joined the Indian team and I would make contributions in most team meetings until Dhoni, after about six weeks, came to me after one of those, put his arm around me and very gently just whispered my ear. He said to me Paddy, you don't have to talk every time, and that was that lesson. Hurt, but it was an invaluable lesson as a coach or a leader or facilitator pay attention to the room, pay attention to what your audience needs, not what I want to say. It's not about what I want to say. It's about what does the audience need? So pay attention out there, not here.

Speaker 1:

There's so many lessons and equally I won't mention names, but there's a lot of lessons where I've watched very self-centered, egotistical athletes operate in a team environment. I've watched the team dynamics that forms around that. I've watched the toxicity around that. I've listened to people speak behind their backs. I've watched them retire and opportunities just dry up compared to the athlete who maybe is not as good, maybe didn't deliver as good a results, but they were really good team man. I listen to how people speak about them. When they retire, they get more sponsors. Sponsors want to be associated with good humans, with people with values and character and ethics, with people's values and character and ethics.

Speaker 1:

So I've learned from highly ethical athletes who go about things and role models, the role drivers of this world. And I've also learned from people who have gone about things in an overly self-centered way and it's like, wow, I really don't want to do that, be like that or be spoken to about. Have people speak about me like that, because I do have, and everyone has the tendencies to be overly self-focused, so those are just really good orange flags that have been waved for me through other athletes. So I've been gifted almost everything that I share and give. I've either got from experience with an athlete or some clever person's written a book or hopped onto a podcast and shared their stuff. So what I share is just what I've assimilated from other people. I've been gifted it and it's a privilege to be able to gift that on to others because it wasn't mine in the first place.

Speaker 2:

Well, Paddy, thank you so much. You're a totally compounding machine. I encourage everyone to check you out on social media, on the internet. I know you've not written enough books. I've always told you you need to write more than just the barefoot coach. But thank you again for being on the Prime Venture Partners podcast my pleasure.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, dear listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast app for free and you'll be the first one to know when new episodes are available. Just search for Prime Venture Partners Podcast in Apple Podcast, spotify, castbox or however. You get your podcasts, then hit subscribe and if you have enjoyed the show, we would be really grateful if you leave us a review on Apple Podcast. To read the full transcript, find the link in the show notes.