Founder Friday by Canopy Community

Series 2, Episode 1 - Biraj Nakarja of innatecompass.com

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Welcome to the Canopy Founder Friday Podcast Series

In Series 2, Episode #1 we interview Biraj Nakarja founder of https://www.innatecompass.com who is  now also the host of the Founder Friday series this year.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/biraj-nakarja-41a4047 

In this episode we cover his journey including:

  • What are your core strengths
  • Moving from the corporate world into entrepreneurship
  • Starting a coding school franchise
  • Give without an expectation of receiving.

Share in his gifts of wisdom and experience & join us as we seek to discover what makes this inspiring founder tick.

Co Hosts: Pedro Guimarães, Tijana Momirov, Stewart Noakes

Note: this episode was first recorded as a webinar in Jan 2021 and converted to a podcast so we could all enjoy it away from our screens.

#neverstoplearning #followyourdreams #tribe

See more about Canopy events and Membership at : https://www.joinit.org/o/canopy-community






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UNKNOWN:

Music.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Canopy Community's Founder Friday, the podcast series that brings real-life experiences and inspirational stories from founders and innovators across the globe. My name's Biraj Nakarja, and together with my co-hosts, Tiana Momorov and Pedro Guimérez, we bring you a diverse group of founders from varying industries who've been kind enough to share with us their entrepreneurial journeys and what makes them tick. This first episode is a special one, as Canopy's co-founder, Stuart Noakes, along with Tiana and Pedro, interview me and my journey from the corporate world into entrepreneurship. We really hope you enjoy this episode and so without further ado let's dive in and get ready to learn.

SPEAKER_04:

Let's make a start, shall we, now that we're all together. And it feels like we cannot start any Founder Friday without Tiana and Pedro being in the bottom two squares of the screen. It's fantastic to have you here. So a round of applause to all of us for turning up on time and a silly way for everybody who's watching the recording. Today, we welcome Biraj to be the focus of the Founder Friday. Wonderful to have you here. And it's kind of a precursor, really, isn't it, Biraj? Because you're going to be the host with the most on Founder Friday going forward. Indeed, yeah, I'm

SPEAKER_00:

super, super excited, guys. It's been fantastic to see Founder Friday throughout 2020 and the great people you've had on and yeah I'm really proud and honoured to be part of this going forward for 2021 so yeah really excited and looking to bring on some fantastic founders and share some great knowledge with

SPEAKER_04:

you all. Well as you know me so well Baraj you know I'm not very good at letting go so this is a huge moment in my life. We may have to bring you on as a guest Stuart maybe. Yeah let's not do that nobody needs that in their life but welcome Tiana and Pedro, what has become the founder Friday royalty of Canopy now, the two of you, the king and queen of these sessions. So would you like to, I mean, you don't really need an introduction, but it's always nice just to get the introductions out of the way. And Tiana, do you want to tell everybody who you are?

SPEAKER_03:

Sure. Thank you, Stuart. Hello, everybody. So I'm Tiana, officially software engineer, product manager, startup consultant, unofficially nomad, beach person, and one of the people who are having morning coffee on Friday and chatting with founders in Canopy.

SPEAKER_04:

Fantastic. And Pedro, who the heck are you, my man? Hi,

SPEAKER_05:

everyone. Have a great day today. Hi, Milos. Pleasure to meet you. I'm a proud member of Canopy also, coach here also, a colleague of Diana, our queen, and trying to help companies, startups, SMBs, whatever, embrace difference and change and understand how to face the, well, the coming and very demanding challenges we all face and trying to share a few things I learned throughout my career, whoever may use it. And that's it.

SPEAKER_04:

Thanks, Pedro. So a quick disclaimer for everybody that we're real people with real lives and real children that really may come in at any point. Both Biraj and I have that opportunity in our lives going forward. So yeah, as we settle in, I apologize for anything that happens on my side. Home's falling at its best, right? Absolutely. So Biraj, why don't you start us off? Give us just a couple of minutes background on you as you describe yourself to everybody else, and then we'll start to ask you some questions.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, guys, my background has been in technology and for the last 20 plus years, sort of in the corporate world, specifically within quality assurance and testing, which is where I met the lovely Stuart. And I have worked, I guess, across... different industries, but mainly in the sort of high transactional e-commerce world, working with the likes of lastminute.com, Expedia, Sporting Bets, Betfair, and the last 10 years in particular with the National Lottery here in the UK. It's a company called Camelot. And over that time, I've had the opportunity to meet some fantastic people and really sort of progress my career in terms of the roles and the responsibilities. In the last sort of five years in particular, I moved out of technology into the commercial space and was responsible for the European part of the business for Camelot and our global expansions in that respect. So I had some fantastic, fantastic experience there and met lovely and wonderful people along the way. But being very open and honest, I would say As fantastic as that career has been, there's always been something still missing for me. And I wasn't quite sure what that was until I would say the last year and a half to two years where I've really been spending a lot of time in self-discovery, understanding myself, understanding my why and my purpose. And it kept coming back to entrepreneurship and wanting to help people. And that just kept coming back out at me, but I didn't really know what that meant, right? That's quite broad. That can take very sort of different directions depending on how you look at that. And so I spent a journey really sort of discovering myself, understanding my own talents and my strengths and how I can start to apply that to my purpose, to my values and to my dreams. And with that in mind, I recently took the bold step to leave the corporate world and to step into entrepreneurship and follow my dreams, actually. And what has that led to? Well, it's led to a number of things. I have founded my company, Innate Compass, which is a transformation coaching business, helping people to, just like I did, which was a pivotal moment for me, understand themselves better, understand their natural talents and how to turn them into strengths that they can start to apply both to their personal and professional lives. I co-own a children's coding club. So we teach children from the age of five through to 14 how to code. And we do that in a fantastic way, teaching them to code video games because like my six-year-old and my 11-year-old, That's all they're into. They love video games, and therefore, if we're going to get them to code and teach them something valuable as a skill going forward, why not combine that with video games as well, which they love? So that's going super, super well. We launched that in September, and that's really progressing well. We're now going to be opening up our second site as well. But also, coming back to the helping people, in the last lockdown in particular, it's something that I– personally related to. There was two events, actually. The first one being a walk with my wife one evening, and I was going through some emotions. There was a lot going on in the world with the pandemic. There's stuff that was going on at work as well in terms of the energy and motivation of where I was feeling. And she could tell that there was stuff on my mind. And she kept saying to me, what's the matter? What's the matter? And I just didn't give her information I kept saying everything's fine everything's fine and she said one thing to me she goes oh you never open up you never you never tell me what's going on and then literally the following day I was on a zoom call with three of my buddies and one of them was also not feeling so great he looked down he didn't look himself and we kept asking him what the matter was and he wouldn't tell us and eventually we kept pushing and he opened up and um What was interesting was that he was feeling a lot of anxiety. He was feeling a lot of fear in terms of what was going on. He was fearful of his job because he wasn't sure about redundancies and things like that. And do you know what? We were all feeling the same thing. But none of us had the courage as guys to be able to say, you know what, this is how we're feeling. And therefore, I created and founded what I call the man drawer discussions. And Pedro and Stuart, you may be able to relate to this. But us guys, Tiana, you might be aware of this as well. We all have this one drawer in the house, the man drawer, which is full of, I don't know, batteries and receipts and things. old mobile phones and Pedro is smiling, right? I think you get where I'm coming from, right, Pedro? We all have that one drawer, but it's that one place where we can dump all of our stuff and it's our space and it's our place to collect things. And so I wanted to create a group and a community for guys to be able to come to one place and talk about loads of different things and loads of different subjects and topics that we wouldn't normally feel comfortable talking about, maybe to our partners and to our female friends. And I was astounded at how quickly that grew to around 350 people in a matter of weeks and early months. And we got people from across the globe contributing towards that, which is fantastic. And that just came back to my purpose of wanting to help people and why, as an entrepreneur in particular, I've now gone into coaching. That said, I've got so much corporate experience that I don't want to just... pop that to one side. And again, in the spirit of helping, I'm now also doing some advisory work and also some non-exec work as well so that I can use my corporate experience, but also my coaching experience now to be able to help businesses move to that next level as well. So very quick whistle stop kind of journey from my corporate world into entrepreneurship. And I guess I can now proudly call myself a founder and be qualified for Founder Friday.

SPEAKER_04:

Absolutely. Absolutely, Biraj. It's always interesting to hear how people describe themselves in their own words rather than us sort of describing you. So thanks for taking us through the journey there. And we've obviously known each other for quite a few years now. It's a pleasure along the way to see how things have changed for you. So Tiana, Pedro, what questions would you like to ask Biraj? And let's get this moving.

SPEAKER_03:

There is a lot of material. I just wanted to know that it's kind of a nice that you only have a man drawer because I know men who have a man room full of things

SPEAKER_04:

like

SPEAKER_03:

that. A man cave, right? A man cave. Exactly. I have a friend who refers to it as a man cave. So one drawer is quite minimalistic, actually. I really love to hear about a journey like yours with so many different things and for sure that all of that brought you where you are right now and every single experience brings value to whatever you're doing right now. So even if for your corporate experience doesn't seem like directly connected to what you're doing right now. For sure, it brings some value to the table and different perspective. But a couple of times you mentioned the desire to help people and then the connection to the entrepreneurship, which for many people is not like that. Many people see the entrepreneurship as a way to simply generate profit, get rich, get the status, et cetera, et cetera. And they keep saying this pretty directly. Like, I'm going to try to solve a problem, innovate that they can charge for my solution and I can charge like fat fees for that, right? So it's a very different approach in your case, but how do you think these things can be sustainable? Do you plan to keep it as like pastime, hobby, your volunteering activities, or you think that even this kind of entrepreneurship can eventually become sustainable?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So, I mean, with the man draw in particular, I'm not looking to monetize that in any way. That's a community of people coming together to be able to, in a very open, honest, nonjudgmental way, have conversations that can help them through whatever they're going through in their life. From my coaching perspective, my coaching perspective, and I left my corporate job to be a full-time coach, advisor, non-exec director. And that's where, you know, kind of the financial element comes in. So, And the same with the Code Ninjas business. So actually what I've purposely tried to do is come up with initiatives that generate revenue because I've left a corporate job and therefore I've moved into something that is around, as you mentioned, a business. But at the same time, also something that is something that's close to my heart, something that I can relate to as well. And who knows what that might grow into in the future. What that has done for me is it's opened up doors and it's opened up opportunities. It's allowed me to go and be a guest on people's Facebook lives and podcasts. It's allowed me to connect with people that I never would have connected with before. And it's just allowed me to have a platform to get my message out there. Now, whether that was three people, 300 people, 3 million people, the purpose was trying to help even just that one person. And already I know that that's happening and therefore it satisfied my value and my purpose of creating that in the first place. But everything that I'm learning through that, as you say, I can directly apply to my revenue generating businesses as well. The work that we're doing with the children and the coding, there's a direct relation there in terms of helping the younger generation and boys in particular, be confident in asking questions be confident in getting things wrong and learning from that and also just that communication and collaboration with each other and with, you know, the girls in the group as well. And, you know, there's so many online things going on right now, and it's obviously made it very difficult for us from a Code Ninja's perspective, but we actually pride ourselves in being an in-studio business as opposed to an online business, because there's just valuable skills there that the children can learn going forward from a comms perspective. But there's one thing just related to what you said there, Tiana. I read a book called The Go-Giver. I'm not sure if you've ever come across that book. But in The Go-Giver, they state in particular that your true value or your true worth is in the amount of value that you give versus the payment that you take. And having read that book, that just resonates so much with me. This philosophy of giver's gain and the fact that the more you give, the more you will receive eventually. And never give with the intention of receiving. Give with the intention of giving and the receiving will take care of itself. And that for me was, yeah, exactly, exactly. And that for me, I'm not a huge book reader, if I'm honest. But when I read that book, it just resonated so much. And I think it resonated because it tapped into my true purpose and my true value. And that's where with my coaching, I really want to help people get deep in terms of who they are, what's important to them, the way that they naturally think, the way that they naturally behave, the way that they naturally feel. Because when you can start to apply that to everything that you do in life and specifically in business, That's when you see productivity, that's when you see efficiency, and that's where you see results. So that's my purpose. And I'm really, really enjoying the journey so far, to be honest.

SPEAKER_03:

It's refreshing to hear. So it can be a win-win. It can be something that you do that is close to your heart, and still it can become sustainable, not only financially, but to have long-term impact.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. When people refer to wealth, I think wealth is in so many different ways. Wealth can be financial. financial, but I think there is this kind of mental and emotional wealth as well. And when you're doing something that is close to your heart, as a business, as a profession, as a full-time career, it can't really get any better than that, right? And that's what I try to aspire to. And I'm still on my early journeys, but I'm hoping that, you know, that can be the outcome here.

SPEAKER_03:

Sounds like a great start. Congratulations. Thank you.

SPEAKER_04:

Pedro, you game a geek here. Have you got any questions you want to ask Liraj about this Code Ninja stuff or anything else?

SPEAKER_05:

Yes, I have a hard time just choosing the first one. I'll choose the first one. How do you see Is there any relationship between your previous background on Q&A and testing and what you are doing now and the way you are doing it? Just to explain, I'm always interested in seeing art skills and soft skills and how do they mix and how do they help develop someone.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so I guess... With the QA and testing side of things, our job as testers is to rectify defects and bugs or identify those defects and bugs and help get them rectified. Now, a bug or a defect in software, you can translate that towards a bug or a defect in emotion, in value, in thinking. And as a coach, actually what I'm finding is that I'm able to find those things in my the things that maybe are not quite right or not sitting quite right with an individual, with their business, with their goals and ambitions and be able to highlight them Now, my job as a coach is not to give the answers there. My job is to be able to ask the right questions so that people can understand the answers. They can fix their own defects. They can fix their own bugs. And so for me, there's been a real nice correlation between the two on the coaching side in particular. But also, what I found actually is I fell into IT. I fell into technology. I fell into QA and testing. I was doing an IT degree at university and I kind of felt like I had to do information technology because everyone that was surrounding me at the time was doing IT and I kind of felt like I had to do that. Just a bit of background in terms of my sort of childhood. My father passed away when I was only two years old and my mother changed profession to go into teaching so that she would be on holidays when I would be on holidays at school as well. So from a childcare perspective. And so I've seen her work really hard and she's done a fantastic job of playing both the mother and the father. But my male influences in particular were my uncle calls and my older cousins and they were all working in that IT space and I kind of felt like I had to go into IT and what I've noticed is people of my generation, my age group, fall into a career maybe because they've been pushed that way or because they felt like they had to go down that route and then they've spent 20 plus years doing that and they've actually got quite good at that and then they don't know anything else because that's all they've been doing and But that's not their passion. And I found this myself. My passion wasn't in technology, quality assurance and testing. My passion was in helping people. Now that could be technology helping, that could be advisory, that could be non-exec work, that could be coaching. There's so many different elements to that. But what I found was, I didn't pursue my dreams early on because I felt like I had to do something and maybe that societal pressure, I don't know. But I find a lot of people are in that space. So again, coming back to the link between QA and testing, what I'm finding speaking to my corporate clients is that A lot of them are now, and maybe this pandemic has kind of exacerbated this, but a lot of them are now reassessing their own values, reassessing their own purpose in life. You know, people are spending so much more time with their families than maybe they were before, and they've taken things for granted that they're appreciating a lot more now. And these are the sort of things that I think people are now starting to realise. And so I'm here to help them untap that potential and here to be able to help them rediscover themselves so they can start to apply that to what they're doing. And from a testing perspective, that's no different, right? We're here to uncover all the issues and help get those issues fixed so that we can end up shipping software that is near perfect.

SPEAKER_04:

What can you do with that, Pedro? What can you do with that?

SPEAKER_05:

A lot, a lot. But it's Biraj there today.

SPEAKER_04:

So, Biraj, I wonder if you could tell people a little bit about the thing from the Gallup strengths with the left hand and the right hand. And if you can tell me a little bit about that technique, I thought it was very interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. And maybe we can kind of just do a very short exercise now with Tiana and Pedro, actually. Do you guys have a pen and paper to hand?

SPEAKER_03:

I don't even own it. As a nomad, I try to minimize my belongings. Can ever know to do?

SPEAKER_04:

That's impressive minimalization, Tiana, if you've actually dropped a pad of paper and a pen away from the list. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_03:

Because if everything is in the cloud, I don't care if my luggage

SPEAKER_00:

gets lost. Yeah, that's true. Okay, well, maybe we can get Pedro to do the exercise then. So, Pedro, what I'd like you to do is I'd like you to write three sentences on your piece of paper, and I'm going to tell you the sentence to write. but i'm also going to time you when you're doing this but before you start i'd like you to put the pen in your less dominant hand less dominant less dominant so if you're right-handed please put it in your left hand if you're left-handed you're left-handed okay so you put the pen in your right hand and i'd like you to write three sentences and the sentence is same sentence three times i use my strengths daily okay and i'm going to time you when you write this Yeah, so with your right hand, as neatly as possible, you're going to write, I use my strengths daily, three times, and I'm going to time you when you're doing this. So let me just get my stopwatch ready. Are you ready? I use my strengths? I use my strengths daily. Okay. Write that three times. Ready? Okay, go. And while you're doing this, just think about the emotions and the feelings that you have while you're doing this.

SPEAKER_04:

I can't believe you tried to put him off while he's writing with his less dominant hand. That's really harsh.

SPEAKER_00:

That's life, right? We go through stuff and we feel we have distractions and we have things that come our way, but we have to navigate around them. It's amazing. I do this so often with people and it's like the amount of time it takes to write three sentences is astonishing. I was going to

SPEAKER_04:

say,

SPEAKER_00:

you

SPEAKER_04:

said

SPEAKER_00:

three

SPEAKER_04:

times, right? Not 33 times.

SPEAKER_00:

I hope

SPEAKER_03:

you're going to see the paper in the end.

SPEAKER_04:

I'm wondering if the camera's frozen or something. The concentration phase there, Pedro, is amazing.

SPEAKER_05:

I'm feeling the emotions.

SPEAKER_01:

Still going.

SPEAKER_05:

Wow. Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. You can stop the clock now.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Give him a round of applause. Come on. That took a lot of effort. Fantastic. One minute and 14 seconds. And let's have a look. Let's have a look at that. Can we all make that out? Can you guys? It's as

SPEAKER_04:

good as my best handwriting. That's brilliant. Okay. Why are you laughing? I'm serious.

SPEAKER_03:

Maybe it works better.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. So we can, so we can still read that. Right. But Pedro, tell me, how did that feel? when you were doing that? How did it feel?

SPEAKER_05:

Both challenging and at the same time feeling I was accomplishing something. It was fun.

SPEAKER_00:

It was fun. Okay, cool. Challenging, right? Okay. How much focus did you have to put into that?

SPEAKER_05:

From here, I

SPEAKER_04:

could

SPEAKER_05:

feel how much work he had to put into it. I tried to put as much as I could, but I was trying to listen to you at the same time. That's fine. Over 90%. Okay,

SPEAKER_00:

so you had to focus a lot more. You found it a little bit challenging. How about the end output there? How neat was that?

SPEAKER_05:

I can do better.

SPEAKER_00:

You could do better. You could do better. Okay. Did you feel any... When I said to you, change hands from your left to your right, what were you thinking at that point?

SPEAKER_05:

No, I was... Actually, I was not thinking at all. I was just waiting for the

SPEAKER_00:

instructions. Okay, perfect. Okay, cool. The things I'm hearing are challenge... more focus. It took you one minute and 14 seconds. And the output you said probably could be better. What I'd like you to do now is that same exercise, but I'd like you to use your dominant hand. And I'm going to retime that while you do that again. So the same three sentences using your dominant hand. Are you ready? Okay, go. Let's go. I'm guessing this is not going to take one minute and 14 seconds, but let's see. He likes to be thorough. Stop the clock. Stop the clock, right. 22 seconds. 22 seconds. Now tell me, how did that feel compared to the first? What was the output like? Okay, the output looks much neater, I have to say. That's good. Okay, how did that feel compared to the first time?

SPEAKER_05:

Comfortable.

SPEAKER_00:

Comfortable, okay. What else? What other words? Tell me some words that are coming to your mind.

SPEAKER_05:

I was trying to beat my previous record by far, so I was challenged, but by that reason, not exactly by the effort of doing it. And I can write without looking at the paper, but I didn't because I wanted to be as fast and as well as possible.

SPEAKER_00:

How much did you have to think about that?

SPEAKER_05:

No, a lot less.

SPEAKER_00:

A lot less, a lot less. And the output was better, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_05:

Yes, it's readable at

SPEAKER_00:

least. And you took 22 seconds versus one minute and 14 seconds. So the point of this exercise, guys, is that the dominant hand and the less dominant hand, no difference to dominant talents and less dominant talents. Pedro was still able to write those three sentences with his less dominant hand. But when he did that, It took much longer. It took more focus. It maybe took more energy from him. Maybe he felt a little bit more drained at the end of that. And the output wasn't as great as it could have been when he used his dominant hand. And when he used his dominant hand, he did it much faster. It felt more comfortable. It felt easy. The output was better. He didn't really have to think about what he was doing. It was very natural. And this is the same when we are using our own natural talents and our natural strengths as well. When we start to identify what those natural talents are and we invest in those talents and turn them into strengths and we start to apply those strengths to everything that we do, we start to feel at ease a lot more. We start to feel more comfortable. Our productivity gets better. We actually spend our time, less time getting better results. Rather than spending one minute and 14 seconds, you spent 22 seconds with the same task, the same pen, the same piece of paper, the same three sentences, but the output was that much more better, more efficient, and more comfortable for you. And this is the same when it comes to strengths. A strength's Based philosophy, a strengths-based mind advocates the things that identifying what we're good at and making them even better. And I don't know about you guys, but in my corporate experience, but even if I think about kind of parents' evening at my son's school, often we go into a parents' evening or we go into a performance review and the conversation is dominated by the things that we don't have, the things that we haven't done, the things that we need to work upon. but not often.

SPEAKER_04:

That's quite a Portuguese culture as well, right, Pedro, to dwell perhaps on the things that aren't working so much. Quite a British culture as well, right? Yeah,

SPEAKER_00:

and I'm not saying that we don't look at those things. Of course, we have to look at those things, but we spend far too much time fixated on our weaknesses and things that we don't have and not enough time focusing on our strengths and the things that we do have. And I've come across, and I'm sure you guys would have heard of this term of being well-rounded. Now, it's quite a controversial kind of, statement to be making here but actually is being well-rounded a good thing um because one could argue if you're well-rounded you are average at lots of things i'm putting it

SPEAKER_04:

out there what do you think i thought well-rounded was like late 40s early 50s personally speaking anyway I mean, it's hard to be good at everything. I think that that's clear. I think there's also something to be said for if you're incredibly good at one thing and absolutely awful at everything else, that that's a bit lopsided for you as a person and in life and difficult for people to relate to. But can anybody be comprehensively at a top level of everything? is there any such thing as a perfect human being or a perfect existence? I don't think there is, right? There's just optimized for type, the type of life that you want or the type of situation that you're in.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. Exactly that. And therefore, rather than spending time and effort on trying to, um, increase the the efficiency and productivity of things that are less natural and and lesser talents for you is identify the things that you're good at and repurpose that time to making the things that you're good at even better and so rather than becoming well-rounded kind of this fist actually let's open that up and identify the four or five things that you're really good at the things that give you the most energy the things that give you the most motivation and the best results and invest your time, invest your knowledge, invest your skills, invest your networks and connections in making those things even stronger. I said that I don't read that much, but I'm going to reference another book actually called Spike by a guy called Rene Cariole. And Spike stands for Strengths Positively Identified, Kickstart Excellence. And it's the same strengths, mentality, and philosophy. Identify your spikes and make them spikier. Because when you start to apply those spikes to everything that you do in your business, in your relationships, in your day-to-day activities, that's when you start to see the greatest success.

SPEAKER_03:

But I would say this takes time and life experiences. As you mentioned, when you were entering the engineering university, same as me, I entered because it was something like good to do, it's easy to find job, IT is in boom, et cetera, et cetera. And then later, of course, I realized that according to my personality, I prefer to do some other things, of course, leveraging the knowledge that I had in that career, similar to you. But at that age, in high school, 17, 18, were we really able to understand our spot and all of that. I think we need more life experience. And that's why this culture of making a decision at the age of 18 to last until the end of your professional life, it's kind of nonsense, right?

SPEAKER_00:

I agree. I agree. And you're right. There's life experiences. There's jobs. There's people. There's lots that happens that helps us to understand who we are better. But my belief is that who you are doesn't change over time. Your experiences change over time and that kind of molds and shapes the personality that you may have. But I have two boys, both from the same gene pool, both raised in exactly the same way with the same privileges or whatever it may be, but they are chalk and cheese. absolutely different in every aspect you can think of. They look different. One loves football, one loves rugby, one's academic, one's not as much, one's more into sports. They're just so different in their personalities and characters. This is who they

SPEAKER_04:

are. You did raise them in an Arsenal household, so one was not going to like football,

SPEAKER_00:

right? That is the truth. That is the truth. Actually, that's the only one thing I've imposed on the two of them is they have to support Arsenal. I also regret that a little bit now because I feel like I'm torturing them with the latest results. If we're going to spark

SPEAKER_04:

controversy at this point, I need to ask you, what's your favourite Portuguese team? My

SPEAKER_00:

favourite Portuguese team? It's the national team by far. Okay.

SPEAKER_04:

Smart move, smart move. If you had to pick green or red, which would it be? Red. Okay. I'm sorry, Pedro. It's all gone downhill from here,

SPEAKER_05:

isn't it? Yeah. Okay. You can still evolve. You can

SPEAKER_00:

still evolve. There's time for that. Absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah, ultimately, you know, our natural talents are our natural talents. And the key, as you mentioned there, Tiana, is how quickly can you identify what those are? And that's where my coaching, I feel, can really help people because I I can help them understand who they are maybe faster than they would do more naturally. I work with younger children as well. And as you say, their life experiences will kind of lead them to different experiences and different situations and scenarios. But if from a very early age, they know instinctively what they do, then we can start to harness that a little bit more, then who knows? That may lead to a career choice, a university choice, subject choices, work experience choices that may better suit to their strengths and make those spikes even spikier at a much earlier age. That's my ambition anyway.

SPEAKER_03:

It's nice that you work also with younger clients, younger children. Super important at that age.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah,

SPEAKER_03:

definitely. People reach the coaching in their 40s when they already feel that something is really wrong, they need to make a change. And after all these years of not having the best time they could have, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, definitely. So I think there's two, there's two kind of markets there, right? There's the market that you explain where it's almost like they haven't done any self discovery and now they feel like it's the time to, to rediscover. Um, but I have an ambition and I think maybe the code ninjas stuff has, has sparked that a little bit as well. Um, we see some super, super bright children coming through, um, our studio. Um, and you know, these guys have real futures, um, but, um, if we can help them to identify themselves better and make them more confident in themselves, then the world is their oyster, right?

SPEAKER_04:

Of course, we've had one of those bright sparks. One of the teachers, if you like, in Code Ninjas on a Southwest UK demo night, haven't we? Yes, Naman. With this idea that he brought together. Yeah, it's very impressive.

SPEAKER_00:

That's right, yeah. And he just started at

SPEAKER_04:

university and already got his startup and already doing some great things.

SPEAKER_00:

And that's brilliant, right? So... That's a great example, Stuart. That came through a conversation, a connection, an idea. So he had an idea. He went with that. He... happened to apply for a job at Code Ninjas. We interviewed him. I didn't know anything about this startup business that he was doing. We had good conversation. He mentioned something about this. I was like, oh, okay. Well, did you know about Demo Night? And he's like, Demo Night? No, what's Demo Night? And I was like, okay, well, you know what? I've got some buddies of mine that did some really cool stuff here. You know, it'd be really cool. How are you when it comes to sort of like pitching and communicating and stuff like that? And he's naturally very good at that. Like for anyone that saw that, I don't think they would really have thought that this could like just started university and he's got, you know, this, this fantastic idea is so confident. And so what he's focusing on doing and what he should be focusing on doing now is getting himself out there and telling that story. Communication is a natural talent of his and he needs to harness that. Um, instead of maybe, um, doing some of the other things that he could be partnering with someone else to do. It could be outsourcing, could be strategizing in a different way. That's a really good example. And so when it comes to sort of business owners, understand what your strengths are. If your strengths are operational, and maybe not so much communication or storytelling or getting that message out there, but think of ways in which you can partner with someone that has that strength so that you can get the biggest bang for your buck. I work with some people at the moment who are fantastic when it comes to storytelling, but absolutely hate the administrative side of their business. But they spend so many hours working on the admin that they don't get to do any of the storytelling and getting their business out there and knowing the marketing in a way that they're fantastic at doing. And I'm not saying the answer is always outsource, but it's about understanding where the biggest bang for your buck is and where you get the most energy and then navigating and managing the other elements, the lesser talents, the areas that don't motivate you as much with multiple different strategies that you can put in place there. But understanding this is where I'm in my good space. This is where my business can thrive if I spend more time here. And this is where actually I give the most in terms of value to my customers and clients. Focus there and don't focus here where you're not able to give the most value. And that's the whole philosophy behind strengths and what I'm trying to get out there. But

SPEAKER_03:

do you think that the current system of education and workplace and talent management is really made for this kind of thinking?

SPEAKER_00:

No, not at all. Not at all. And what I would really love to do is get organizations to start thinking more about a strengths-based culture. within their organizations. Focus on the things that people are good at. Don't focus so much on the things that they're not good at. Everyone has their sweet spots and you will find that engagement increases. You will get more people staying with you as a business if you allow them to play to their strengths. But you have to allow yourself to be open to that type of business, that type of culture, that type of mindset. And you have to be open to also the fact that People are not going to be good at everything and therefore let them focus on the things that they're really good at and get them to partner with people on tasks, on projects, on whatever it may be, with others that complement their strengths so that you end up with a team that is effective as opposed to one individual that's trying to do everything. But you're right. I don't think the education system covers that.

SPEAKER_04:

We've got like 15, 20 minutes left of our time together. And I wonder if we take a small change attack here and just take us through what it took to launch Code Ninjas. And I'm asking that specifically because obviously you come out of a corporate background and you're now into grassroots entrepreneurship, right? You're starting from scratch. Yeah. A new territory, brand new area. Nobody else is doing it. You're not taking over an existing business or anything. Yeah. walk us through that what did that feel like what did you do you know and how entrepreneurial was it in the end to get it up and running

SPEAKER_00:

yeah so so code binges um it's not uh the brainchild of myself it's a franchise that was out of the uk uh sorry out of the us that were coming into the uk and we happen to be one of the first to launch here in the uk um however um you know, we're running our own business, right? All their operations were in the US, everything, all their systems and everything was US focused. And actually what we quickly realized was there's a lot of work here, right? This is not a traditional franchise cookie cutter, you know, take all of this and just implement it. There's a lot that we had to do. And so that entrepreneurial mindset had to kick into place pretty quickly. How are we going to start the business? We need to find space to run it out of we need to find staff we need to find customers we need to start marketing we need to start you know getting our name out there and we need to make sure that we retain the customers that we have because our customer service has to be fantastic we need to build relationships not just with the students but with the parents we need to build relationships with partners and sponsors and you know like literally from september to here the kind of things that we've quickly had to do um has been phenomenal. But what I've tried to do is kind of practice what I preach. And what I do with my business partners is we divide and conquer based on our strengths. My wife is very good at social media. She's all about social media and marketing. I'm pretty good when it comes to being in front of people and communicating with customers and selling the proposition. And because I come from a technical background, it's easier for me to sell the Code Ninjas proposition. So I do a lot of the lead calling and I do a lot of the demonstrations and the customer facing side of things. Our other business partner comes from a HR background. So she's been dealing with all the recruitment and all the business sort of getting people onboarding and things like that. So again, it just comes back to playing to your strengths and what we've done in a very short space of time, getting to from September zero to now in January, over a hundred students that are really flourishing and doing well and in a position to open our second centre now as well. We've only done that by playing to our strengths. And what I've done Stuart with that is I've almost replicated that to an extent to my coaching business into Innate Compass. So Innate Compass was kind of my idea, but how I've launched it, I've basically done the same sort of things as we have learnt through both positive and negative experiences with Code Ninjas in terms of what worked really well, what didn't work well. And I've replicated the things that have worked well. I'm not dwelling on the things that didn't work so well. I'm focusing on the things that did work well. I focused on the strengths of Code Ninjas and I'm applying those strengths to innate compass. And I'm going to do the same when it comes to my personal life as well. You know, focus on the things, focus on the people, focus on the conversations I really enjoy and maybe focus less time on the things that drain me, whether that's people or conversations, that's, you know, situations. It's not been easy, though, as I'm sure you're all aware, right? We come to

SPEAKER_03:

the challenge of saying no. So I was looking forward to maybe sharing a tip or two on that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, it's not been easy at all. And I think what I have quickly realized, having kind of stepped into the entrepreneurial world is, you know, this Christmas was the first Christmas where, you I was even working on Christmas Day morning. And usually in my corporate world, the two weeks before Christmas are like booked off. They're holidays, right? That's time for me to switch off and be able to just focus on other things that's not work. It's hard to do that as an entrepreneur. And it's hard to do that in the early startup days as well. And so I think the one tip that I have is structure systems and routine, you know, especially when you're juggling multiple businesses like I am now, it's segregating your day to certain businesses, certain conversations, certain activities. But within that day, also putting in place time for self-development or learning or going and taking a walk or spending time with your family or whatever it may be. Because what I've learned actually is spending time with my family in particular has given me a lot of ideas. That walk with my wife gave me the idea of the mandrill discussions. Talking to my 11 year old son, who's into gaming about code ninjas, gave us the will to start that business because we knew that there's a market, just like my son, 11 years old, loves video games. There's a market for this. Speaking to colleagues and friends and families who are feeling stuck and stagnant in their roles and are wanting to do something about that has sparked the innate compass coaching. And actually it's those conversations and those experiences where you sometimes don't, realize at the time that's where these businesses are born. That's where the ideas come from and that's where the success comes from as well. So my tips are keep an open mind, broaden your experiences, broaden your networks, broaden your conversations because you never know what conversation, what person, what situation can spark that idea. And when you have that idea, like me personally, Don't sit on it or don't park it to one side and just carry on doing your day-to-day. If you've got a passion, if you've got a dream, go and execute it. Go and execute it. This time last year, I was in a corporate job and that was it. I was in a corporate job. Literally one year on, I've got a coding business, I've got a coaching business, I'm doing advisory work, I'm doing non-exec work. And that's all happened during... one year. And by the way, we had a global pandemic during that year as well. So when someone says it's not possible, it is possible. It's just bloody hard. And sometimes, you know, it takes a lot of determination, but it can be done. It can be done. And so follow your dreams, follow your passions, follow your guts. And as I said, right at the beginning, with regards to the go-giver, focus on giving value and the rest will look after itself.

SPEAKER_04:

Pedro, I think we've probably got time for one more question each if you want. And then I've got some character questions for all three of you to answer at the same time. OK, so start getting your brain box ready. Pedro, your last question for Biraj.

SPEAKER_05:

Okay, great. I read a lot about what you do, and I believe impact is the most important KPI of everything you do. So instead of focusing on people, I assume you'll be trying to focus on business leaders as a means to impact on a lot of people by impacting on people that impact on a lot of people. So how... At the same time, coaching is not an easy business to escalate. How do you plan to do this?

SPEAKER_00:

So how do I plan to grow my businesses?

SPEAKER_05:

If and if are you or not trying to focus on business leaders as a means to reach an higher impact?

SPEAKER_00:

Sorry, you said business leaders, did you say?

SPEAKER_05:

Yes, entrepreneurs, general managers.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, okay, I'm with you. Yeah, I'm with you. So I think that's where my corporate experience has helped. So having been in executive positions within large organizations myself, I've got a really good network there. And my top strengths, actually, networking, I have one which I love. It's called WOO, and it stands for Winning Others Over. And it's very much about being a people person, being able to connect with people very quickly. If you haven't already noticed, I love talking and I love speaking with people and I love being around people. It's

SPEAKER_04:

true. You could wake him up from a drunken stupor at three in the morning and he'd be like, hi, how are you? How can I help you?

SPEAKER_00:

But leveraging those relationships, just going back to that, it's like leverage the relationships that you have. Always look to extend those relationships. Always look to network as much as you can. That's what I enjoy and that's what I'm going to be using to leverage my businesses. But also the proof is in the pudding, right? If I'm coaching someone that genuinely feels like that coaching has helped them, then they're going to go and tell other people. And then those people are going to go and tell other people. And therefore, again, coming back to value, making sure you give the right value. I think giving value is your biggest marketing tool, because if you give value, value and people appreciate that value, then they will recommend you. They will, they will refer you. They will share their experiences and that will help scale your business. So for me, the two things I'm really focusing on is leveraging my existing network, but also increasing my, my existing network. Because again, where I have my strengths, I will also have my lesser talents. And so being able to leverage, Being able to partner and collaborate with people that have the things that I don't have will be able to help scale my business. But also, make sure that whatever I'm doing, I give it 100% in terms of value. I give the right time and focus and dedication when it comes to my coaching. I give the right guidance and support to the children who are doing the Code Ninjas program. I give the platform for... the guys on the mandrill discussions, um, uh, group and community to be able to feel comfortable and confident to talk about stuff that they wouldn't talk about. I mean, it's amazing. Some of the things that go on in there and I've had strangers contact me and I say strangers, they feel like friends now because I know them by name on Facebook more than anything else. But, um, they, you know, they contact me saying thank you for this particular thread on the, uh, on the Facebook group or thank you for that discussion because I'm really going through something in my life right now and that particular thread or that conversation has really helped me. And so there's no better feeling than that, right? I just wanted to help one person and if I can help 300 people, that's fantastic. But if I still only help one person, I've served my purpose.

SPEAKER_04:

Tiana, your last question.

SPEAKER_03:

In the times of startups, gig economy, even passion economy booming, what do you think is the future of the corporate?

SPEAKER_04:

Future of the corporate?

SPEAKER_00:

Make it an easy question, Tiana. Make it an easy one. Yeah, absolutely. I think the future of corporate is being less corporate. Like, I think, and certainly during this pandemic, right? How many corporate organizations that maybe didn't allow homeworking are now thinking about homeworking? How many corporates that are considering benefits and reward schemes are now thinking about more flexibility as a reward or a benefit? One thing I've learned is time is precious and family and friends are so important that actually people value their time so much more now. And so I think corporates have to become less corporate. I think they have to be more open-minded. I think they have to be more employee-centric. And I think they need to pivot much earlier. Don't let a pandemic change the way you operate. Be forward thinking and listen to your staff, listen to your employees and put them at the heart of everything that you do. You come across this customer, the customer is always right and of course that is the case when it comes to the end customer but at the same point there's almost this employee is always right mentality as well. Listen to your employees because if you can increase the engagement within your business and within your company and corporate organisations then that's the lifeblood of your business and if you your staff are giving great value, then you as an organisation will give great value and that will only be a good thing.

SPEAKER_04:

Thank you. All right. I'm going to go for the character questions, right? I want an answer from each of the three of you on this because although you guys have been on a lot of these discussions before, Pedro and Tiana, not everybody who's watching this recording will know all about you. Okay, so let's get some insights to your character. First of all, coffee or tea? Which is more important to you, coffee or tea, Biraj? Coffee. Coffee. Janna. Coffee. Pedro. Coffee. Okay. Café or galão? Espresso or latte?

SPEAKER_03:

Espresso.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. Or latte. Which one, Biraj? Okay. Latte. Okay. Good. Cake or fruit? Cake. Fruit. With your personal fitness transformation, Biraj, you really went with cake. I can't believe it. Okay. Benfica or sporting? Sporting. Sporting, of course.

SPEAKER_03:

Blank.

SPEAKER_00:

Kite surfing. I was going to say Portugal national team. I'm not one way or the other.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay. Working for yourself or working for somebody else?

SPEAKER_03:

Myself.

SPEAKER_05:

Myself

SPEAKER_00:

serving others. Yeah, I think it's like this. I love that. 100%. I agree with Pedro there. And, you know, now having experience working for myself and I wish I did it earlier. I wish I did it earlier. Facebook or Instagram? Instagram. That's

SPEAKER_04:

a tough one. Both, I'd say. PlayStation 5 or going to the library?

SPEAKER_03:

Can I go to the library?

SPEAKER_04:

PlayStation

SPEAKER_03:

5. Library. I would say library.

SPEAKER_04:

Impact or Unicorn?

SPEAKER_03:

Impact.

SPEAKER_04:

Impact. Okay. WhatsApp or text?

SPEAKER_01:

WhatsApp. WhatsApp or text?

SPEAKER_03:

WhatsApp.

SPEAKER_01:

WhatsApp. WhatsApp. WhatsApp.

SPEAKER_05:

WhatsApp. But they're changing their policies quite recently and you should read it. You should read them.

SPEAKER_03:

Is it something about sharing with Facebook and something like that?

SPEAKER_05:

Sharing more information or you can close your account, something like that.

SPEAKER_04:

Audio call or Zoom? Zoom. Zoom.

SPEAKER_00:

Zoom with video on. Zoom with the video on. Otherwise it's just an audio call.

SPEAKER_02:

You need

SPEAKER_04:

to see people. Yes. In-person event or networking on platforms like Airmeet? In-person.

SPEAKER_03:

It's a tough one. It's a tough one because we have access to many more events this way.

SPEAKER_04:

That's why you have to choose, Tiana. There's no such thing as an easy choice. It's a choice, right?

SPEAKER_03:

Okay, then online. I've been enjoying these events a lot. Otherwise, I wouldn't be with you guys today.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, we wouldn't see you half as much, would we, with the difference and stuff.

SPEAKER_05:

In person, if they are huge, like Web Summit, for example, online, if they are smaller, so we can attend a lot and meet a lot of different people and be together.

SPEAKER_04:

You know, that's super interesting because I'm the other way around. Bigger events online, smaller events in person. Because one of the things I hate about Web Summit is there's so many people that I want to see and I can't do it because it's all jammed into a certain period of time. And I actually could see more people get across more online, but I'd much rather have like a dinner of eight people in person. But it's interesting, isn't it? Everybody's got a different... It was

SPEAKER_03:

very interesting on the... What was the name of the investment summit in Lisbon? They did dinner with a stranger where they put, I don't know if it was randomly or they had some algorithm in their mind, but for sure we didn't know anything about this, five of participants in each restaurant. We didn't know anything. Who's going to be there? We just received the name of the restaurant. Amazing. God, that could have gone so wrong, couldn't it? Actually, the best part of those three conferences that I went to was this dinner because in the conference, it's like So many people, as you mentioned, Stu, that it becomes like just a mess. And on that dinner, I really felt like, OK, I had two hours to talk to these five people. And that was the most valuable part of the whole event, which had I don't know how many

SPEAKER_05:

participants. No, it's because I live in Lisbon and Web7 has been in Lisbon for the last years. But it's like a full week of meeting, attending events. the conference and the meeting people having lunch having dinner so it's probably because I'm local but I do that I have that personal contact during the entire week you know so probably that's just

SPEAKER_04:

and isn't it strange what difference a year makes that dinner with a stranger a year ago made an awful lot of sense but a year on is now called a super spreader right it's just I

SPEAKER_03:

really hope this is temporary

SPEAKER_04:

absolutely

SPEAKER_03:

because I don't like

SPEAKER_04:

this so it's been a great great session today and great to kind of see what makes Biraj tick as you kind of take over now as the helm of the Founder Friday series for the rest of the year. So I wish you every luck with that. As I say, I'm not very good at letting go. So I may turn up every once in a while in a panel discussion.

SPEAKER_00:

Always, always, always welcome. It's your baby. We're just helping nurture the baby a little bit more. That's all. But now I'm really excited to be joining the team and hosting with Tiana and Pedro. Founder Fridays going forward. And actually, I just want to bring a little bit more, I guess, different experience both from industry and from people perspective to the founder Fridays as well so one thing that I'm learning actually is I learn a lot from people outside of the industries that I operate within and so what might be pretty cool is to be able to get some people and I've got some great ideas of people to bring on as well that have done some amazing things in different industries outside of technology for example but technology startups and entrepreneurs can 100% learn from these maybe that they wouldn't have necessarily looked at or kept an eye on. So I'm really looking forward to it. And yeah, it's going to be a good year. 2021 is going to be a good year, even though we started in lockdown here in the UK. It's going to be a good year.

SPEAKER_04:

Absolutely. And some of the changes, just to finish off, I mean, we're staying with the same time and in the month. So it's every second Friday at one o'clock UK Lisbon time. It will be for an hour, but we'll change the platform as we have today. So it will be on Zoom. That seems to have been much better for things like the lag and the recording and everything. And it's been brilliant to have Tiana fully in sync with the timing stuff because some of those lags on Crowdcast were driving me crazy and we couldn't get all your great questions out and everything. So that's brilliant. And we've made the live thing now will be specifically for Canopy members and Tribe members to attend. So the invites will go exclusively to members. And obviously, if you want to join the Tribe, that's easy to do. All the recordings and the podcast will be put on Substack and go out through Spotify and stuff. So people get access to everything. But the actual live interaction and the Q&A stuff, that would just be for Tribe members. And of course, you can... Let us know and let Biraj know about people that you'd love to see on here as a Founder Friday. Yeah, absolutely. This is about getting inspiration and really uncovering without any judgment what makes people tick as a founder and how they approach situations and giving us all that kind of different dimension. Because there's many versions of right. There's many different ways to succeed. And we're just looking at all the different ones around us and saying, wow, isn't that amazing? You know, what can we learn from that? How can we build on that? So, you know, come and contribute in that way if you're a member of Canopy and stuff. And if you're not, And we're going to continue to bring in Portuguese, Indian, American and UK people and people from around the world as it sort of makes sense. So there will always be a diversity thing to it. in terms of those backgrounds and those things that some of us won't know at all. We'll just have found them through the network. And we're very strong, and Biraj and I have agreed right from the beginning, and Founder Friday has always been like this, that there's a gender equality across our calendar as well, that there's as many men as there are women, and that we don't have a bias on either side. We make sure there's a good blend. So I hope that's all good for everybody going forward in the year. And if you don't like it, well, tell Biraj because it's his fault. And if you do like it, then it was totally my idea.

SPEAKER_02:

No, it's totally yours. I

SPEAKER_04:

guess as it's January, we should wish everybody a happy new year. Thank you, Pedro and Tiana, for being here today and for opening up on Biraj here and letting everybody see who he is as a person. Any last words from you, Pedro? Any last words from you, Tiana?

SPEAKER_03:

I'm really looking forward to this. Anyone?

SPEAKER_05:

Welcome. Good luck, Biraj. Thank you. Let's keep up the great work that was just started

SPEAKER_00:

oh absolutely absolutely is a big shoes to fill in that respect i'm uh i'm i'm looking forward to it and as i said looking forward to working with you guys as well so thank you and yeah here's to here's to successful 2021 and founder friday Thank you for listening to the Founder Friday podcast from Canopy Community. If you've enjoyed this episode, we'd really appreciate you leaving us a five-star review on your preferred listening platform and liking and sharing this podcast with your network. Canopy only exists because of the amazing hashtag tribe members who make our community so engaging. We really appreciate their support. If you'd like to join the tribe or have any recommendations for amazing founders or innovators for future episodes, please visit our website at www.canopy.com. So all that's left to say is a huge thank you from me for listening in and obrigado yet de breve from Tiana and Pedro. We really look forward to you joining us on the next episode.

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Stewart Noakes

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