Conscious Investment and Startup Growth with Amar Varma

Dive into my conversation with Amar Varma, co-founder and CEO of Mantle, a startup revolutionizing private asset tracking through innovative AI integration and fresh approaches.

Explore the transcripts to get Key Insights from this Episode

Mark MacLeod:
This week I sat down with my good friend Amar Varma. Amar is the co-founder and CEO of Mantle. This is either his fourth or fifth startup—I can’t even keep track anymore. He’s been a VC, a prolific angel—just so much experience to learn from.

In this episode, we talk about starting a new company in a crowded space. The lessons that he’s learned from being an angel in the VC and how that’s made him a better operator. His thoughts on AI and many more topics. I hope you enjoy it.

Amar, welcome to The Startup CEO Show. It’s a real pleasure to have you here today.

Amar Varma:
It’s a pleasure and honor to be here. This is a long overdue conversation.

Mark MacLeod:
Yes, it is. (LAUGHS)

So, Omar and I have known each other for a very long time, but only kind of really reconnected when I moved out of the city to the country where Amar has a country place. And now we play tennis together all the time, which is super important, but not why we’re here today. So let’s move on from that. And before we get started, Amar, maybe just tell folks what Mantle does.

Amar Varma:
Yeah, so Mantle is the brainchild of a group of us that have been working together over the last dozen years or so on just reimagining how people should track private assets, including cap tables, funds, and funds of funds.

Mark MacLeod:
You know, when you first talked to me about that, I was like, oh, isn’t that like Carta? It’s like a solved problem. What did you think about that? Where was the white space that you saw?

Amar Varma:
Yeah, you know, before I started this company, I had also thought it was a small space. You know, I’ll give credit where credit’s due —The incumbents have created a nice market opportunity here. And just by virtue of us starting a dozen years later, being able to reimagine what’s happened, what’s transpired, and start fresh. We’ve been able to come up with a fresh approach to how things should work, data models, seeing what’s unfolded, and then really the tailwinds of AI have picked up in the right direction for us at the right time.

And it wasn’t so much if there’s any problem with the existing incumbent apps, it’s really that sometimes you end up with a lot of input that’s not correct or not perfect, and it comes out the other end not correct or not perfect. So it’s not the platform’s fault. Sometimes it’s just a lot of the workflows have become disparate relative to the actual platform, and you end up transcribing information, and inherently, you make errors in doing that. And that’s not the platform’s fault. It’s just the thought concept of how it should work and how it’s evolved.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, super important to get right, that’s for sure. I don’t know what it is, by the way, about Canadians in this space, but there was a company in Calgary called Solium or something. I think they got bought for $1.1 billion.

Amar Varma:
Yeah. So Marcos at Solium, I met him early on in my journey through this company, and he goes, you’re nuts. So I won’t tell whether he’s bang on or he was just… I’d been through the journey once. It’s kind of the same thing, I tell people who want to do cloud software or vehicle software or apps. I’ve been through it, I could tell you all the scars, all the journey.

There is an inherent need to get this information not close to right, but right. And you’ve been through a lot of this domain over decades as well. And it’s never perfect. It’s never perfect. And it shouldn’t be something incredibly complicated. It should be something that everybody’s able to work together on, collaborate around, and just have it fit like a glove versus the other way around where it’s trying to fit you.

Mark MacLeod:
What is the nature of your market opportunity? Like, are you… Is this about taking market share away from Carta? Are you expanding the market in some way? Is there like, a new angle here?

Amar Varma:
Yeah, I think this is, you know, Carta, to their credit, has created a great moat. They’re the number one player in the space. People talk about number two, there’s no… In my opinion, there’s no number two yet. Cap tables are an expansive market. What used to be a file on your drive or in your drives back in the day has become a professional piece of software that’s incredibly complex, is operated by professionals who are highly powered, highly paid.

And what was a startup stack piece of software has evolved into more of an enterprise type software, where the different personas are people who are either your professional executives that you bring in, professional service providers you bring in. And it has that sophistication, but it also has to have that elemental elegance and simplicity for founders to jump in.

And that’s kind of the trick that we’ve started to uncover. It’s an evolution from a product-led growth item to something that’s enterprise-driven by the folks who recommend these products, whether it’s law firms, accelerators, or other types of influencers.

Mark MacLeod:
Does that inform how you go to market? Are you going to market kind of through referrers, influencers, that kind of thing?

Amar Varma:
Yeah. I think for this product to be successful, it has to have the mind share of people anointed as experts. And the people who are anointed as experts are generally a C-level executive through experience, or a repeat founder, or somebody in the finance or treasury function that’s used a product, or the law firm that’s working with you day in and day out. That’s important to have their mental buy-in.

I think the opportunity for this space is substantial. It starts with cap tables, and from cap tables, you get a trusted wedge in your enterprise, which allows you to have a lot of other trusted conversations. And that’s where I think you’ll see the TAM start to explode and grow.

An example in the enterprise that you see that has done this well is Rippling. They’ve gone and started with an annual enrollment of benefits once a year. And then they’ve created a series of products that end up like annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly IT systems that are always open as a dashboard on your desktop. And they’ve done a really good job of that in the enterprise. And then in terms of equity management, as you go through the canonical flow of company ownership to funds, there’s not been a substrate layer that’s been laid over time for each of those groups to have a transparent view of what’s going on.

As an example, I was asking what my ownership exposure was to private company ABC/Figma. Now that it’s back on the table, I have to go through and do a bunch of work, or SpaceX you had to go through and was I direct? Did a company sell to them? Which funds were on my end? Which rounds were they in? And if you can’t answer what your cost basis is for these private assets and what your actual value is today, there’s, there’s a reason for that. There’s a lot of friction, and we’re trying to eliminate a lot of that friction.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, I love it. Now, when I think of founder product market fit, or founder market fit, rather, this feels like something you have, because you’ve been a prolific investor, you’ve been a VC, and you have a very long list of angel investments. And, um, I guess I’m really curious to learn how has being such an experienced investor made you a better operator and also vice versa.

Amar Varma:
This is a great question. I think, I don’t know, maybe 16 years ago now, a long time ago, but I kind of went on this mandate of, if you’re going to be an investor, you also need to be not just a previous operator, potentially, but also an active operator to understand the market dynamic, the market forces, the challenges, and I took that to heart.

So, first, starting companies and funds at the same time made a ton of mistakes, didn’t know what I was getting signed up for, which was part of the fun, part of the war, part of the downside of a few things, but no regrets on that, and it’s been an exciting journey.

I feel like whether in distinct periods, you’re an investor or you’re an operator, or you’re a big company executive or you’re an independent board member, you just get better at all these things by reps and you see them. And when the important decisions percolate up, you’re able to instantly identify them and go, that requires instant like, that’s timely and urgent. It’s one we’ve got to tackle now, and we’ve got to think through the outcomes.

Then you’re able to filter out the stuff that’s like, okay, that’ll get resolved. I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but I have a sense that its blast radius is understood. We can go and take a look at that. I think there’s just a constant tightening of and readjusting of whatever system, whether it’s a suspension on a vehicle, whatever analogy you want to use that you’re getting by having these different personas.

Because there’s no guessing game of like, huh, what are the investors thinking? What does the independent board member think? What does the entrepreneur think? What’s the hired gun CXO thinking? What’s the exec sponsor who’s buying the company thinking? We’re going public, how should we think about it? Having been in all of those roles and thinking through them, I don’t have a perfect crystal ball in all of them, but I have a pretty good feel for the pressures and the pain points that people are going through in all of those decisions. And it’s been very helpful for me in my career. Hopefully helpful to the folks listening to this and hopefully helpful generally to people that we collectively talk to, because I know you’ve been through a lot of similar journeys.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, it’s funny. The joke with angel investing is the way to make a million bucks is to start with $3 million. I also read a study once that if you have a portfolio of less than ten angel investments, your statistically probable return is zero. So there’s a numbers aspect to it.

Amar Varma:
I will say the art of doing this has always been an apprentice. And I think, and I’ve seen a lot of people apprentice, and it’s taken them a long time to earn real profits because they took time to learn and they’ve made a bunch of mistakes, systemic mistakes. Oops, mistakes. And then I saw a decade where you couldn’t make a mistake.

And that was great for returns. That was great to see everybody do wealth, and that was peacetime, burp, whatever it was that you wanted to quantify it as. And now I’m watching people go through this and we’re in a different period.

You could see those who knew what they were doing, what they did, you know, some of the trimming last year, understanding what to do, you know, maybe reducing their scope a bit. But then sometimes you see mistakes being repeated. I’m watching a lot of the wallets open, a lot of the inbound interest we’re getting on our company on like, you know, let’s do it, man, whatever it is. And I’m grateful for it. I love the greed I share, the opportunistic greed. And it’s really, it’s really about building something sustainable and long-term.

And I just want to make sure that everybody’s understanding what they’re getting into in this angel investing, that it’s not something that turns itself next year or next quarter. It’s something you’re going to give time and patience to.

Mark MacLeod:
100%, yeah. My oldest investment is 15 years old with no sign of selling. Just install the new CEOs, just reset the clock. It’s like, yeah, we’re loving life. This is great.

Amar Varma:
The best one is the one that never sells, probably, right? I’m just talking about the data, right?

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, yeah. It’s like the perfect venture fund investment is one that you make in month one, year one, and you sell it in month twelve, year ten, and it just compounds every year since. Like at least 35% a year to hit your minimum target threshold and you’re good.

Amar Varma:
I don’t want to underestimate luck and timing for myself either. In my first few investments in the first year, I had two meaningful exits. Right place, right time, invested during the piano’s falling of a financial crisis. And when things turned, they turned quickly and people were looking for assets and people to create strategic value, and I just happened to be in the right place, right time. So, like Electronic Arts, Facebook, Apple, Salesforce, you know, just, there’s just a bunch of these. And it was just, you know, grateful for it. But was it skill? Was it luck? You know, there was, there was probably a bit of both.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, luck and timing are huge elements. I would argue timing is the single biggest factor in the outcome of a company. You could have a great team and a great product, but if you get the timing wrong, it’s just not going to work.

Amar Varma:
I think, to your credit, I’ve been watching your posts and the content that you’ve been putting out in the various social media streams. It’s pretty awesome. Some of it is a reminder of obvious things that you should never forget because you’re operating without a seat belt if you forget them. And then there are some insightful pieces where you’re like, huh, right? I’m thinking of like, you know, don’t run out of cash is in the first bucket.

And then how to turn your board… Where it’s like, keep people engaged, get them active, get them involved. And it was just, these are, these are things you hear all the time. And like, I’m reading them from your, your feeds and I’m like, right! You know? Cause I’m like, I’m reminded of some of this stuff or I’m learning some of this stuff now and you’re always learning and doing these roles, whatever they are, and you don’t know when you’re reading something who you’re reading it from, but I take note of the stuff you’re putting out there. And it’s been, it’s impressionable upon me and our team because we do take the time to look at it.

Mark MacLeod:
I appreciate that, man. That’s great. First of all, I’d say two things. First of all, any wisdom that you experience is not me, it’s the beard. It’s just, it’s just I’m just channeling the wisdom of the beard into the keyboard and letting it happen.

But I did start with a new CEO recently, and he told me he had sent, I don’t know, however many posts to himself with all caps, implement this. And then finally said, well, why don’t I just get this guy as a coach?

And you brought up a key thing, which is learning. Like, that’s the thing I love most, actually, about coaching, is, like, you learn on every single call, because there’s, like, infinite layers to the human onion. And, like, every startup has its unique context and place and time and challenges and opportunities. So it’s fascinating stuff.

Amar Varma:
Yeah, I think I shared it with you, I’ll share it again broadly, you know, I think over time, we all change. We become more of who we are. Our stripes get less and less likely to change in some domains as we get older. So after my time off, after the last company, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. And then it took this assessment of myself… And if you knew me a long time, a decade ago, I would never have listened to anybody’s assessment. I’d be like, what are you talking about? I got this. So I said, we don’t always have things.

So I went and did the assessment and the beauty of it was, I was like, I’m willing to hear anything good, bad, and ugly, because I know there’s perfection and imperfection, and I just wanted to see what some of the framework and results were. And it was fascinating to go through it with a mind that’s open to hearing it and being able to process it with an open mind.

And that was something in terms of, like, anybody who’s a founder in a company or an executive, anybody in any of these companies really should do these assessments, whether it’s self-assessment or professional assessment, potentially working with a coach, whatever it is, just to make sure you’re being true to yourself. Like, one of the key takeaways in the assessment for me was there are things that I’m very good at and very well suited for, and those were obvious to me at the time of the assessment.

There were things that I thought I was maybe better than I was at that needed improvement. And the beautiful ones were the ones that I’m not good at that they’re like, statistically, you’re not going to get good at these things. And that was the, like, okay, play to your strengths, build around some of the folks that can help augment those areas. That is their strength. So as a team and collectively, you have a strength around all of the items. And that was eye-opening for me.

And it was kind of the first time I had taken a quantitative look at it. You know, we’d done qualitative looks at it over the years, whether it was at extreme labs or autonomic or pivotal or VMware, wherever it was, or Ford… We qualitatively knew a lot of this stuff, but when we put it in actual brackets and buckets, it felt more like trading cards or I was a transformer fanboy as a child, and I had the decoder bar of all the graphs and charts. It was really good to understand that.

And at this point in my journey, I understood what most of it meant. And then I was able to kind of interpret the pieces I didn’t understand and kind of grind through and make progress. And, you know, I’ve gone back and done the assessment again a period later, and you could see improvements in some of the areas where I needed improvement. You could see some of the stuff that I wasn’t good at—Still not good at. And some of the stuff that I’m really keen on and tying into and dialing in were there. And it was just really helpful to see the conscious, small things that can mount to something that’s quantitatively different.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, I love that there are so many good things about that. First of all, I love that you had an open mind. Brings up a Zen proverb for me, which is, in the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, and in the expert’s mind, there are few. So I love that you did that. And then just highlighting, well, self-awareness and humility, which are two key ingredients for anyone to exceed in life, but certainly, as a CEO of a high-growth company, you have to be constantly learning, constantly open to feedback.

Amar Varma:
I know you do this professionally, so it must bring you a lot of joy to do that with people. Watching somebody go through it and seeing the smiles on their faces as they’re going through it is quite something.

Mark MacLeod:
At FreshBooks, every team member had to do a strength finder assessment. So it’s kind of like a light version, but then the purpose of it was to like, here’s how you communicate with Mark. Here’s how you can communicate with Amar. It was pretty accurate and we all had them because this was back when people were in offices and like, your desk had your strengths right on it.

Amar Varma:
Yeah, and I think over time I’ve gotten to know my, what do you want to call it, API or how I do things better. So I’m far more, I don’t know if it’s transparency or I’m just more vocal about how to interface or how I work on things, how I make myself a bell when it’s like the repetition of communication, consistency, and repetitions of what you’re doing so people can see and understand.

And also asking that question back to people like, you know, like, I’m an instant now on a few of these hot topics, like, how do I get you into my instant new domain? And so you’re thinking this is instant now stuff versus, hey, I just said this. This is like a, you know, we need to think about it. We need to have a conscious plan around it. We need to think like, like, those are different types of things. One’s a kind of fire drill, but ones are now, like, we need to get on this thing and one an, okay, we need to think about putting that post in place as we’re marching through this journey.

Mark MacLeod:
The thing that stood out for me about this story, and I’m really glad you shared it, is, how do I put this? The benefits of getting a little older, right? Younger Amar would have had the force fields up the defense, like, no, no, I’m not open to that. I’m fine. Like, but now you have no fucks to give. You’re like, I’m good with who I am. It’s all good. And therefore you’re open and you’re receptive, right? So that’s a great part of the human journey.

Amar Varma:
You’ve given me a lot of insights on these, on these types of phrases over the last period. So it’s been nice to hear them and just, and I’ll encourage everybody listening and watching. It’s kind of one of these things of like, if I could go back 20 years and tell myself some advice, it would be like, be far more open to people’s opinions. You don’t have to agree with everything. But give it a once over, you know, because there’s been times and maybe even just part of my personality or even recently, maybe not in a work context, but other contexts, like, no, right?

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, it’s all input. You don’t have to act on it, you don’t have to accept it but take the input. Why not?

I want to go back to angel investing for a moment just because I think it might be really interesting to many people who may be masochists and aspire to become angels one day. And of course, you’ve been a VC and you’re a limited partner in a number of venture funds as well. What are your biggest lessons from your investing career? Insights back to your 20-year younger self knowing all of this, I guess, would it change how you invest or you feel like, hey, it’s been great?

Amar Varma:
Yeah, I think the psychology around this generally is people get excited because they get into this domain and it’s a privileged domain. If you’re in this domain, you’re a privileged person in our society.

So be mindful of the privilege of being part of this domain. That’s one, too. You know, you always want your first one to be the big hit. Sometimes it is, sometimes not. Most often it’s not. And then you go through this jaded, like, well, that didn’t work and none of them are going to work. Or, you know, or you do one and you’re like, instant regret. Like, you kind of go through all of these arcs.

I think what I would tell people is, you know, you want to look for people who have the DNA. And when I say the DNA, it’s like they will be here in ten years. They will have given every ounce of their effort to do it. And they’re very conscious of how they win. It’s not just about winning. When you combine those two things of process, of how to do something in the process of doing something, I found over time that is a way to identify winners.

And that’s just kind of some of the DNA I’ve seen, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s somebody in their twenties, thirties, forties, male, female, it never changed. Like, I’m looking at some of the entrepreneurs that I’ve backed multiple times. They’ve been successful multiple times because they followed those two things. And that’s my framing of it. I’m sure they have a different framing for themselves, but that’s something I’ve seen, tried and tested. And then the second piece I’ll say is everybody talks about power law, and for sure, the institutional venture capitalists have a power law rule because that’s governing the returns, governing how they raise their next fund.

That’s not your law as a smaller investor or even a smaller institutional investor. If you’re a large fund, absolutely. If you’re a smaller fund, it’s really around you’re not in control of the exits. So it ends up being, you’re kind of taking along for the ride. And either it ends up being a slugging percentage game because you get a few really good exits or you get one great exit, and usually the great exits come later.

So it’s really one of the things where the game is different if you’re doing it for yourself versus a large fund. And you should be fundamentally aware of what the differences are, and you should be fundamentally aware of how fickle people could be along the spectrum of small investors to large investors.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, those are huge points. Click on a couple of them. Like, first of all, on, like, finding that, right, founder, you know, you, you have a technical background. Back in my operating days, you know, the reason why I never started a company was I felt like I needed to either be a product person or a technical person, and I’m neither.

There are clear examples of people who are neither, who have built great companies—Mark Benioff from Salesforce stands out as an example. But I still believe, like you would, like an accountant wouldn’t start a law firm, a lawyer starts a law firm. And, you know, I kind of feel a technology firm should be run by a technologist. Do you agree with that? Even though there are exceptions, like do you just gravitate towards people who have a technical or product or design background?

Amar Varma:
I think there are a few personas that people can be very successful with. I think people who are obsessive over details are generally, those come in a few flavors. Deeply passionate people around tech, deeply passionate people around product and experience, and deeply product, deeply passionate people around the details of how things work. I’ve seen them be all of the above. In the software era we’ve seen in the last 12/15 years, I think the verdict is out. There could have been any of those.

From the era I started my career in semiconductor chip development, you needed to be deep in the tech of chips to start a chip company. So that was one of the deep domains, ended up needing to be people from those domains. And that’s kind of had a half-life over things. But in software, I’ve seen companies you’ve worked at companies I worked at, where the founders were deeply technical and have been incredibly successful. Then you see product people who’ve led companies to be incredibly successful. Then you see sales and marketing people start companies that have been incredibly successful. So it’s like there’s some traits in the DNA to the passion and, you know, just the living in it and living through it.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, for sure. I never told people back in my operating days that I had an MBA. I figured it would be a super negative. I was like, you’re just going to keep that on the down low?

Amar Varma:
Interesting. Why?

Mark MacLeod:
You know, I got an MBA because I never felt like I was a traditional CPA and I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. So I was like, oh, I think I needed an MBA. Turns out I didn’t need it. But, you know, this is when I was getting ready to leave the CPA world and go into operating. But yeah, then again to the startup world where it’s like MBAs were bad.

Amar Varma:
You know, what’s interesting is I think this might be the first time I learned you had an NBA.

Mark MacLeod:
There you go. See?

Amar Varma:
Amazing. So what’s interesting to me about this comment is, I think is a bias. We have a bias in ourselves, and some people have a bias to be accurate. Some are biased about other skis leading back to their skis, whatever the analogy is. Back to my age, that has helped a bit. I know what I’m good at, and whether it’s because I have a background in something or whether I’ve gotten to a certain point by events and activities and experiences, I’m here. It’s like I’m not going to pretend to be something I’m not.

There’s a real authenticity to it now, I’ve never been tied to the outcomes of journeys. I’ve been tied to the experience in the journey. And then the outcomes, you know, knock on wood, they’ve been great. But it’s like that’s been a result of just being conscious of every day, building on the experience and how it’s done, and working with like-minded people, whether they have an MBA, CPA, CS, engineering, marketing, whatever it is, it’s just you kind of attract birds of a feather of passionate people are particular about how to do things.

And I know you talk about sometimes your experience with one of the founders you work with that was just obsessive over the details. And we all work with somebody like that and they leave an impression on you at the time. It might feel like handcuffs or a noose, but when you’re walking away from it, you’re like, oh, they had something right in there.

Mark MacLeod:
That was my boot camp. Yeah, yeah. 18 months of terror. That made me a far better operator, that’s for sure.

You know, you brought up an inherent misalignment between angels and VCs, right? VCs have funds. Funds these days, tend to be quite large. They’re shooting for those power law home runs. You’re not.

Do you ever try and get off the bus partway? Like if a liquidity event comes up, you’ll take it.

Amar Varma:
This is tough for me to make general statements on because for every reason it’s a different predicament. If you ask the number of people who are institutional investors who’ve made a carry in their fund, it’s an alarmingly small number.

Mark MacLeod:
Agreed.

Amar Varma:
And if you ask those people, hey, when there were burp deals going around, should you have taken some money off the table? Can you go back and do it? You can’t. But these are some of the you don’t know the outcomes till then. Till later, right? And then if you did something, were you later in the game or early in the game? So I tell people who are in earlier in their career in this stuff, if you have an institutional or some kind of organized capital, if you return your first fund, you’re guaranteed to raise the second fund.

I know it’s a passionately dispassionate thing to say, but if you get a chance to take a 1.2x, like, it’s almost a mechanical thing, like you should. Unless you think you have the next breakthrough in science. And I think about it in like, Bond villain characters.

Is that the next Bond villain character? Do they have fusion? Like, are they that group? Are they taking us somewhere we haven’t been? Like, that’s the kind of thing. So I think of that advice for people. I never had the opportunity to do that. They just came organically through exits over time. As an individual, now, it’s different because, you know, if you’ve been doing it for one year or ten years, you’ll have different scatter plots of outcomes and data points. I have the benefit of being eternally patient on stuff, but I think people should look at somebody else’s greed and figure out whether they’re aligned with it or not.

Investors came in and overpaid for a lot of companies over time. I’m still seeing it. And when that secondary email comes or the founder calls you, you should be conscious about, like, why? And it’s not a gotcha game. Like, you win, they lose. That’s not what’s happening here. It’s somebody else’s spreadsheet that needs to work. So they’re not, they’re asking you not because they’re trying to get something or win something from you. It’s that they’ve given you an opportunity. You don’t have to say yes, but if you do say yes, know why you’re saying yes and be, be very happy with the outcome.

We have probably a few mutual friends and a few mutual companies where people did take some secondaries and it materially changed their lives. If it’s the first time you’re donning off a serious amount of capital for yourself and it changes your trajectory in your financial life, you can’t fault yourself for that.

Am I upset that I sold some Nvidia a decade ago? No. Am I looking at it today as we go through it saying, well, that would have been nice. No, I don’t have any regrets about it because at the time it was important to me and now it’s just in a different space.

Mark MacLeod:
Totally agreed. Yeah. I sold a little bit of my Shopify shares to Omers pre-IPO. And if I look at it now, I know it’s not been a straight line up until the last two years, but generally massively up. If I think about the opportunity cost of that, well, I just don’t think of it. But I bought a farm, like with, and it was beautiful and I had years of memories there, so no regrets.

Amar Varma:
I think people, people try and optimize for like the big win so they can put it on a dartboard and advertise it, and I go, nobody’s keeping that score except you. And if I said, hey, you could have 10x today and not have the experiences that you had over that decade in the farm property, I know what the answer is.

Mark MacLeod:
Yep, exactly.

Amar Varma:
That’s why I’m trying to get you to put on the tennis court.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, I have to convince someone of that. But on that note, I’m getting her to sign up for tennis lessons, so I’m making progress.

Amar Varma:
There you go.

Mark MacLeod:
Hey, last big topic on this whole notion of the next Bond villain. So you and I were around for the birth of the Internet and the dot com boom and bust. We were around when mobile was its category and now we have AI. And, you know, you come from a deeply technical background. There’s AI built into Mantle. I would love your thoughts on AI. Where are we, where are we going? What does your crystal ball say?

Amar Varma:
Oh, it’d be, it’d be a bit of a blur to say I have a crystal ball, but I have an opinion. Yeah, it was funny, I was telling my oldest son last night, I picked him up after his basketball game from school, and he said, he was talking about the game, double overtime. They made the playoffs, and that was super exciting. Then he asked me a question that blew my mind. He was, how was work today? And I said, oh my goodness, this is amazing.

I was like, after I contemplated how to, like, take the question, I was like, okay, this is a good opportunity. I said, Son, something’s happening today in 2024 that I’ve not seen in the last 25 years. He’s like, really? What’s different? Because he’s starting to understand differences in time. Like, I talk about the Raptors championship parade, I go, it’ll be a fucked up we get another one, right? It’s been a long time since we had a parade, right? Like, stuff like that. He’s already starting to understand that.

I’m like, there is something happening in AI that I haven’t seen since the, whatever number of industrial revolution the Internet was, where digitization of information unlocked an experience that we’ve uncovered, we’ve seen over the last decade that’s just been life-changing. I’m watching AI do something similar.

So I went to a talk, I think it would have been 2000, maybe 2001. I was living in the Bay Area at the time, Scott Cranes, he was the CEO of Jdopper Networks at the time. And I remember him explicitly talking about this. I remember it so vividly. He talked about the evolution of time and technology and what it did. He goes, it has shrunk business cycles each time, and it struck the time and it swung the amplitude higher highs and lower lows.

And he goes, so as you’re going through steady-state business cycles, as innovation comes in, it shrinks the time and it increases the amplitude and increases the down. So the area under the curves or above the curves end up being the same, but they shrink in time. I’m just watching AI with that lens of, like, it’s shrinking a bunch of time of doing something, and it’s increasing the outside so greatly, and increasing the downside so greatly.

Like, I was just watching an interview yesterday. You know, Adobe came out with, with its, its modern version of Clippy. I’m sure you remember Clippy, it’s way more valuable in my opinion, but the times are different.

And I’m like, huh, last week, just last week, people are like, Adobe left for dead. There’s this, like, Sora product from OpenAI and I’m like, what are we talking about? They like, the creative folks are on Adobe. They’re here. It was just one of these things in a week. People were leaving them for dead, lurching them for dead. And I’m like, no, right? So there is a fundamental change in how we’re thinking about doing things.

And if you think about tech, each time they become a component of something. So Internet became a component of something, and Internet security became a component of something. Mobile became a component of something, the cloud became a component of something. AI is a component of something.

But over time, what you see is each of those individual point innovations become stitched into the fabric of these things. Everything’s inherently got security. Everything’s inherently mobile. Everything’s inherently built on top of the cloud now. Everything’s inherently going to have AI in it. So these are the types of things we’re seeing stitched in. And I think it’s a really exciting time to be involved with this stuff, which is why I’m doing it, because it’s fun.

And as I’m watching the impact on this for my kids and some of the tools we’re using to create stories for some of the younger kids in the house at this, it’s like, I am truly amazed at some of the stuff that’s out there and possible. And remember, I was a chip designer. I worked on graphics cards. I thought this was all about image rendering and projections. It was all about matrix multiplication in parallel. Who knew?

Mark MacLeod:
So it’s fair to say you’re an AI optimist.

Amar Varma:
I’m an AI optimist. But let’s go back to my Bond villain analogy, right? Like, you know, transportation, energy, media, space travel, those were all in movies, all controlled by one person. Now we’re seeing somebody else who’s in the media with a really big baton in AI, who has had a really good track record over the last decade of really creating a lot of social problems for a generation of people.

And it wasn’t so much that person’s fault. It’s the platform and how it evolved and how we started using the platform. We need to keep a check on these people around, like, what is the impact we’re allowing these people to have? I’m just watching this whole notion now of there being a sovereign superpower of AI. Your country should administer who can use AI, and who can do AI. And I’m like, okay, like we’re making this a national pride issue, a national globalization of national capability on AI. Interesting. I would have thought DNA replication might have been ahead of that.

But like, these are just the types of things that maybe are intertwined with AI. I’ve been perfectly involved with AI for a long time, and then I’ve been watching the research chair we have in AI and what they’ve been doing the last number of years. And it’s just been amazing and fascinating to watch the progress. And everybody talks about it getting in the wrong hands and stuff like that.

I don’t know that there is a sustainable wrong hands thing, but you always have to be mindful of playing with somebody in a sandbox where they have nothing to lose. And that doesn’t mean they have nothing to lose from a physical or monetary standpoint. It could just be they play with the attitude of having nothing to lose. And that’s the one that’s the most scary for me.

Mark MacLeod:
Oh man, this could be an entire episode in and of itself. Maybe I won’t bite, but maybe the last bonus question. So you brought up living in SF for a while. And back when I was a VC, which was a long time ago, geography mattered a lot more than it does today. And I would go down to SF and always come back feeling like I need to go harder, I’m not moving fast enough. And I would always encourage my CEOs to go down for that same reason and just plug in and feel what it’s like to be at ground zero.

And I’m just wondering, what impact did living there have on you? And did you walk away with similar conclusions? Did it make you better at what you do?

Amar Varma:
It’s a great question. I had a chance to process this. This is a dialogue with a classmate of mine. We worked at the same company at a school, and decades later he’s the CEO of a different company, and I’ve got this one. And it was very interesting. So we agreed on the following. We said, going to a place where you see somebody’s level of achievement, be substantial, and break the mold of what you think success is.

When a founder-led company goes public, that’s an accomplishment in a domain that’s much greater than an executive taking a company from 1x to 10x the size, like that’s just for me and maybe not for everyone. That’s how I feel about it. Being able to work in that environment and see those types of people do those things was mind-blowing for me and set an expectation early in my career that there is no ceiling other than the ceiling that is dealt to you by environment or the ceiling you put in through the effort and things you’re willing to do.

With that said, as an executive, as a founder, whatever your role is, you owe it to yourself, the company, your family, and your team to at least once a month be out there in the domain, whether it’s an epicenter of the Bay Area, whether it’s New York, if you’re in fintech, whether it’s Toronto, if you’re like, wherever it is, and give yourself exposure to that.

You know, go see a rocket launch in Austin. To be part of one of these events a month so that you’re starting to see people who’ve done these things, you realize it’s not impossible, and you start to really, birds of a feather flock together is my philosophy here. And people start to go, okay, how do we work together? Not to 10x, but 100x? And you start getting that mentality. And that’s what the Bay area has done over decades, and it’s not replicated in anything in my mind.

Maybe I’m putting it on a pedestal it doesn’t deserve to be. But I do take that. And for my entire career, every company that has bought me has either been in the Bay area or we’ve had an office in the Bay area. I’ve been there every month. So I do agree there is some connectivity tissue to that if you’re in tech, but there’s also connectivity tissue to other domains if you’re into other things. Like, I’m sure if I was in oil and gas, I’d be in Calgary every week.

Mark MacLeod:
That’s right. Oh, that’s right.

Amar Varma:
I don’t know the answer to these questions, but, like, there is some analogy, whatever industry you’re in, and then there’s. There’s just opening your eyes every month. Do something different. Make yourself uncomfortable. Go do it. Get on that plane, you know?

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah.

Amar Varma:
Like, do it.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah. That’s great advice. And I think a great way to wrap up, right? Just like, especially for that CEO, right? Go out there, get inspired, get that stimulation, and then bring it back and feed it to your team. That’s awesome. Amar, thank you so much for making the time. This could have been a much longer conversation. Been great if we were just sitting in smoking jackets, like sipping a single malt by the fire having this, but this was awesome. Thank you so much.

Amar Varma:
Thank you. And I’m privileged to be here and thank you for doing this for everyone.

Mark MacLeod:
Sweet. Thank you.

Mark MacLeod:
Hey, thanks for listening to the Startup CEO Show. If you’d like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacLeod.me, or follow me on LinkedIn at The Mark MacLeod, or X account @markmacleod_, and if you want to tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time.