My guest today is Aashish Dalal who is the founder and partner at Sunya One. In this episode, we discuss the following: - Aashish Dalal Bio - Defining success in career and life - 15 years of ParkWhiz journey from a startup idea to an exit - Preparing your spouse/partner for a startup - Tuning out the naysayers, noise - Benefits of joining a support group for entrepreneurship - Importance of being authentic as a leader - Dealing with pressures of entrepreneurship - Focusing on the journey over goals - Comparing yourself to others - Focusing on Why over What - How to contact Aashish Dalal For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show
Aashish Dalal is the founder and former CEO of ParkWhiz. In 2008, Aashish created the company to simplify the parking experience by connecting drivers with an open parking space. Since then, ParkWhiz has become the nation's top booking platform, conducting millions of transactions on its apps, saving drivers time and money. Under his leadership, ParkWhiz has raised more than $50 million in funding and in May 2021 the company was acquired.
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Namaste and welcome. I am Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to the design MBA which is a real-life MBA program for designers. You will learn how to launch a side hustle and level up your design careers from the interviews rock star designers.
Jayneil Dalal: Today's amazing guest is Ashish Dalal. Ashish Dalal is the founder and former CEO of Parques. In 2008, Ashish created the company to simplify the parking experience by connecting drivers with an open parking space. Since then, Parques has become the nation's top booking platform conducting millions of transactions on its apps saving drivers time and money. Under his leadership, Parques has raised more than 50 million dollars in funding and in May of this year, the company was acquired. As the leading innovator in the parking industry, Ashish was inducted in the National Parking Association's inaugural ‘40 Under 40’ class in 2015 and he's also been named in Crane’s Chicago ’40 under 40’ and Crane’s Tech 25. Before founding Parques, Ashish worked at IBM and founded Revision, a company which leveraged wireless sensors and IR technology to reinvent transportation from mass transit to metered parking. Aside from that, Ashish is also a dad, has two daughters. And it's my pleasure, Ashish. Welcome to the show.
Ashish Dalal: Thanks, Jayneil. It's great to be here with you.
Jayneil: My god, man. I’m just looking at that number, 50 million dollars in funding. That's a huge, huge accomplishment. A lot of people don't even make it past just like incorporating the startup. And when people look at this, they must be like “Oh, it must have been an easy ride.” So, what do you say to that?
Ashish: Well, I mean, it depends on what your metrics in life are and how you cater success. First of all, thanks for having me on. It's been too long to be able to connect in this way but I think the way I look at it is there's a lot of definitions of success. To me, the least successful is the amount of capital you raise. And I think that while the capital was necessary for us to grow, I actually spent the first four years of the business bootstrapping the company. No investors wanted to talk to us. They knew nothing about us. Chicagoland where we built Parques just didn't have a community at the time to raise capital. And so, for us, for me and my co-founder, we just saw a problem and we wanted to go solve it and that to me was really the genesis of success – how do we attack a problem that clearly people had and how do we create a solution that … at the time, it was just “How can I solve the problem for my own benefit and then how can I use that to help others?”
Jayneil: It's pretty interesting when you say that capital raise is not your only metric for success in life. So, what are some of the other factors you look at, according to you, one should also look at aside from just the startup success or capital success to just figure out if they're successful in life?
Ashish: Well … I mean, I think … again, when we define success, I think every … it's subjective, right? And so, for me, with regards to a business, it's are you creating a product that people like, and not just like but love, and are you solving a meaningful problem, right? We talk a lot about solutions in search of a problem, where people built these elegant gorgeous solutions but there's no actual problem to be solved. And for me, it's all about what are the problems we have. And there's problems everywhere, problems just waiting to be solved. And so, if you can understand the problem, understand the nature of the problem, understand the psychology of why the problem exists, then you can start to architect a solution. And that, to me, is really the focus of life, right? What problems can we solve meaningfully that can help ourselves but then also help the people around us. And everything else beyond that is just sort of noise. And so, when we start thinking about “Oh, he or she raised a billion-dollar fund” or things of that nature that to me just are noise, we lose focus on what is that capital going to be used productively to solve, again, a problem.
Jayneil: Yeah. So, from the start when you had the idea for Parques to the point where the company was acquired, how many years is that collectively or approximately?
Ashish: So, if we're looking at it explicitly from when the company was formed, the company was formed in 2006. And the initial idea was a very different idea than what we are today. So, it's been 15 years from June of 2006, 15-plus years from June of 2006 to the company's exit, if you will, but if you think … but if I think about it in terms of the genesis of where this idea came from, it actually goes back all the way to when I was probably pre-teen and when I would be visiting India, we would get on a flight. And for me, travel was something I abhorred. I hated traveling. And I hated it not in the sense … we lived in Pittsburgh, grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My parents emigrated in 1968 from India and we would … and I was born in … I was born in Pittsburgh … but we would go back to India every couple years and visit family and so forth. And I hated the flight to and from India. I mean, we take it for granted today … but you know what? We take it for granted today because as painful as the flight can be, when you're 10 years old, maybe even … I was even younger … and none of the technology that we have today where we can pass time through our iPads, I was literally sitting on a flight twiddling my thumbs for 22 hours.
Jayneil: Oh, they didn't have the in-house movies and stuff?
Ashish: You know, they did but when you're flying antiquated airlines because we want to save a dollar, half the time you wouldn't be surprised if your device is the broken one on the plane. And so, it was torturous. And so, for me, I always developed this sort of disdain for traveling. And it was “How do I get to and from my destination in the most efficient way?” So, a 22-hour flight can really chore you but then if you take … so, that's where my frustrations with efficiency came from. I hated wasting time and I always looked at that flight, that 22 hours as a waste of time. And you fast forward to later in life, we're in college and getting to and from your destination, going to … we were in college and we would go to football games, I went to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and on game days, we would leave around 10:30 a.m. to start tailgating and hanging out with some friends. And when we pull up to the stadium, there's literally no parking available. All the parking facilities were completely booked. And so, we'd have to pull down these small streets. And Evanston is a very residential area. And so, we would pull down these little streets trying to find a parking spot, nothing available, and finally, we found this … I remember as a sophomore we found a … and I was lucky enough to have friends who had a car and our stadium wasn't literally on campus, so we had to drive. And so, we found on this back lot in a residence house this family literally standing on their driveway holding up a sign saying “Park here for 10 dollars.” And so, this little girl was holding up a sign and saying “Hey, you can park it in our driveway.” And we did that and it was great. It was such a great experience. And I think that was another sort of moment in sort of the episodes that I’ve had over the course of this journey to understand that this is a problem. This is … getting people to and from your destination whether you're flying on a 22-hour flight or whether you're driving for 20 minutes getting there the fastest because nobody wants … it's not about the travel. The travel is the means to the end. We want to get to our destination wherever that destination is and how can we get there as fast as possible. And so, in this own way, this girl had entrepreneurial … she was an entrepreneur at heart holding up a sign for 10 dollars and we were happy to give her that money and I said … I think I filed that in the back of my mind saying “Hmm. That's interesting.” And you fast forward … interestingly enough, that wasn't … I didn't leave college to start Parques. I finished college, ended up getting some jobs and stuff like that just like everyone, most people do, but I got sort of disenamored with the corporate world within a couple years and went back on my master's degree and recognized … this was the late ‘90s, the intersection of the internet, and … I mean, technology in general and these industries are on a crash course, right? Airline, hospitality industries are leveraging technology in meaningful ways where you can now book airline tickets on the web, you don't have to call a travel agent to book a flight. And I said “Why can't we do … what Expedia, American Airlines had all done for the airline industry and hospitality industry, why can't we do that for the parking industry?” And so, ended up landing on parking. Nobody would ever think about parking as … you don't wake up thinking about parking but, I think, that was the moment in 2004 actually when I was still at IBM where I was like “Huh. There might be something here.” And it took me another year or so before I actually made the plunge in 2006 to quit my job, and I just got married, but that was the timeframe in which Parques was born.
Jayneil: Wow! I’m just literally thinking about this like the genesis idea was obviously a longer timeframe but from the point that company’s formed, I’m almost thinking that you gave almost 15 years or maybe more of your life in making sure this idea of Parques is a success. And it has been a success. So, I’m literally just like … I can feel something in my body like when I think about that number 15 years of your life, and this is something that when people look at a Techcrunch report like “Oh, this company raised 100 million dollars in funding,” “This company got acquired for a billion,” x, y, z, we don't really think about the price that people mentioned in the article have paid. Sure, luck pays a factor. So, I think that was just mind-blowing for me to think about that you devoted that many years of your life and … you mentioned that you were married at the time. So, how did that conversation go? Because if you were just single and you were 18 or something, trying to do a startup, yeah, I mean, you could fail and there's … I mean, you just got to take care about yourself but now with a partner you're having the question, do you have to have a conversation that “Hey, honey, I’m going to like quit my stable job and then I’m going to do this startup thing. And it may work, it may not work.” How did that conversation go about? Was there like any …
Ashish: Yeah, it's not an easy conversation because, yeah, it was … so, for me, it was 2005 when I had in my mind made this commitment that I wanted to start something, that I knew there was something inside of me that “I’m not on the right path” for me personally, at least career-wise and where I wanted to spend my time somewhere else. I didn't know where that somewhere else was. It wasn't as if I had this foresight to know where life was going to take me but I knew the path that I was currently on working at IBM and another corporate job prior to that that it wasn't the right path for me. Now, yes, at the time, I had just gotten engaged, soon to be married. And so, when I talked to my wife … actually, when we were engaged, I said “Listen. This is what I’m thinking. I don't have a … I don't have a plan. Let's put it this way.” It wasn't the easiest of conversations. It definitely wasn't a conversation in which, I think, she looks back on fondly but she knew going in that, you know … that this was something I needed to do for myself, something I needed to satisfy and I probably would have been a better person … I probably wouldn't have been a very good person if I wasn't able to satisfy that. And so, you know, we made … she took the plunge with me when we got married where I literally quit my job at IBM almost … I can't remember the exact timeframe but right around the time we got married. And she was just graduating law school. And so, we were fortunate enough to have supportive family but even then, everyone was wondering “What are you guys going to do? Is she going to pay all the bills?” She was finishing up law school, getting a job and we had a lot of … and, again, when you're 27, you're not the most mature, you're entering a new relationship and you don't even know yourself, some of the things. So, it wasn't easy. It wasn't … but we navigated it. And you have to go through those dark days, those difficult conversations. When you're 27, you're also thinking of yourself as superman. So, I’m like “Oh, we're going to …” I showed her the financial projections, “You know, year one, we're going to do X. Year two will be a 100-million-dollar company. So, take it easy. We're going to … this is the life.” And it never, of course, went that way.
Jayneil: Now, did you have some like timeline or like … because I’ve read some entrepreneurs with partners, when they start this kind of like entrepreneurial journey, they set a timeframe like “Okay, I’m going to dedicate three years to the startup. If it doesn't work out, I’ll figure out something more stable, something more predictable revenue wise or income wise.” So, did you also have some kind of hard limit where your wife is like “if in three years, Ashish, this company doesn't hit this goal that we agreed upon, then you might have to just go back to, you know, get a corporate job or do something else.”
Ashish: Yeah, we had those conversations, without question. I think it's very difficult for anyone not to at least create some sense of a goal or framework in which you have these expectations. Of course, the vision's there. You don't know how vision's going to play out. And so, you try to create … you try to form some semblance of reality around these goals but it never goes according to plan. And whatever that plan is that you create, you can throw it out literally the moment you create the plan because you already know it's not going to work this way. And so, what ended up happening for us was in 2007, we were making traction. I had found my co-founder John who was out of New York and we had moved back to Chicago after we got married. And I said “Okay, we're going to try this for a year.” So, roughly 2006, we said “We're going to try to get this thing off the ground.” And we were a hardware company. We were building these wireless sensors. And we made progress, progress to the point where we said “We're going to go talk to some investors” but we struck out. We struck out. And so, I was talking to my wife and we were saying “I don't know if this is going to play out” but, again, you would have thought “Fold shop. Go get a job” but we had built some interesting things on the back end that we thought “Hey but you can't just leave this thing. We want to tie this loose end,” right? So many great companies have started because … by accidents, right? Things in which they built in which they built it for something else, maybe an internal tool and the internal tool becomes the billion-dollar idea. And so, John had built this back end on the software side that we were like “You know what? This could actually be interesting where we are a hardware company but if we just became a marketplace, we could pivot away from hardware and actually start to get buyers,” at the time, we were thinking of drivers who needed a parking space going to an event. And we literally flipped the business on its head within a matter of 30 days. John built the front end out. I mean, he was a brilliant engineer, can do both frontend and backhand graphics full stack all together. And by the time I was talking to my wife, she's like “Well, you have something here.” Now, the timeframe is all messed up, right? Now, we're past the year point in which we weren't drawing a salary and you've got to play this thing out. We want to see how far can we go. And it took another year before we were able to scale revenue in a meaningful way. And so, again, the initial plan that you come up with, a lot of times you can throw it out right from the get-go and it comes down to sweat equity, it comes down to desire, it comes down to passion. And, for us, we just … even though everything and everyone around us was telling us “Fold up. This isn't going to happen,” investors, family members, “When are you going to go back and get a real job?” You've got to learn to tune out … I mean, if you're passionate about it, you've got to just tune out the noise. And you've got to have a small circle of people who believe in you but it doesn't need to be a very big circle. And, for me, it was luckily a handful of family members that said “Keep pushing. Keep pushing” and that's what we did.
Jayneil: And you mentioned that it's helpful to have a small group of people who believe in you, who you are able to talk to because, I believe, in one of our earlier conversations, you had mentioned that as you're on this entrepreneurial journey, there were a few other likeminded folks like you in Chicago and I believe what you told me was all of you, all the entrepreneurs in Chicago would get together and you had some sort of like group meetup where you would rate yourself like “This week, out of like 10, I am an 8 on the family side of things, I’m maybe a 10 on the business side of things or maybe a 5 on sleep side of things.” So, walk me through that. What was that group and what was the purpose of that group there at that point?
Ashish: So, there was actually two groups and probably a lot more than that. And so, one of the things when you're a first-time entrepreneur and even for those who are serial entrepreneurs, your network is everything from a support group perspective. And so, when we moved back to Chicago, we … I didn't … I talked to … you know, Chicago … this was 2007. Chicago wasn't a very established entrepreneurial community as it is today. I mean, today, it's on the map. It's no longer a flyover city. People come to Chicago to start their startups. It's not just about the coasts but in 2007, you could count on your hands, one, the number of venture capitalists that existed and then you could count on the other hand the number of entrepreneurs. I would talk to family and friends and they were like “What's an entrepreneur? I don't even know what an entrepreneur … I couldn't even tell you the definition of what an entrepreneur is.” They're like “Is it someone who owns …” they would conflate it with a small business or something of that nature and it never involved technology. And so, I didn't know what I didn't know. And so, luckily for me, one thing that happened sort of serendipitously is an entrepreneur had reached out to me. I don't know how. Maybe they came across our website or maybe I had talked to a friend of a friend. And he invited me to a breakfast club, if you will. And we literally would meet at a corner bakery or a handful of other different … I can't remember … it was in Aubon or a corner bakery every … bi-weekly. And I didn't know it at the time but these were the founders of Grubhub, these were the founders of Groupon, these were the founders of Sittercity, handful of other key marketplace entrepreneurs who at the time, in some cases, had built their businesses up a little bit further than where we had but most of them were nascent entrepreneurs, all of them were first-time entrepreneurs, had never done it before. And we would literally just share best practices … it was a very informal “How you guys doing? What can we do to help each other?”, casual breakfast. And it was … I didn't realize it at the time but it gave me the energy that I needed to know there were like-minded people out there going through the exact same struggles that I was going through mentally because you'd wake up every day and you're like “What am I going to do? Huh. I took this big leap. I have no paycheck coming in and I don't know what's the next thing I’m supposed to do.” And so, just like life, you just put your pants on one leg at a time and you take the next step. And those guys would … and gals would talk to me about, you know, some of the things that they did, mistakes that they made so that I wouldn't make those mistakes, in some cases that you got to make these mistakes just so you can experiment. And that was extremely helpful. In terms of … you had asked the question about rating yourselves across family life and things of that nature. After … if we fast forward six years, after I raised our series A round, we called it the series A at the time, it was only about 2.5 million dollars, today it’d probably be considered a pre-seed round, but one of my investors had put me in touch with his other portfolio companies where we talked with the CEOs and we'd meet sort of like EO, entrepreneur’s organization, where you can get together and help each other out. And, again, it was another networking opportunity to share with like-minded people going through the same struggles. And so, we met, I think, it was once every four weeks and we had a moderator who had founded Redbox. And so, we all looked up to him, Greg, in terms of what he had built and he was able to navigate us through a lot of frameworks, mind maps to sort of help us unravel the chaos that's in a founder CEO's mind and sort of the struggles, especially first time. And he helped us think through what are you going through personally individually and rate yourself on a scale of 0 to 10. If you have a family, rate yourself on a scale of 0 to 10 of how much you're committing to your family. And then talk about your business. And those things vary on a week-to-week basis but just the idea to say “Okay, today, I feel like I’m a 10 at the individual level” is great but then when you realize that “At the family level, I’m a 2” or “From the business perspective, I’m a 7,” you start to realize the imbalance that you have in life where I’m giving a lot either to my business … and for me … for most of us, it was always “My business is at a 9, right? I’m giving everything to my business but my mental health is going to hell, I’m at a 1, right? My family life is probably, it's only a 0 but you could probably even go negative, right?” And so, you start to realize that there's not balance and that's not scalable … and for most people. And I saw this actually … when we were bootstrapping, I had talked to entrepreneurs who were struggling with mental health. Unfortunately, I came across people that we work with that committed suicide and it was extremely discouraging to understand the stress levels that I was going through to understand that that was an outcome that people felt they had no choice but to take their own life and …
Jayneil: Is it because they didn't get the success they wanted from the entrepreneurial life?
Ashish: It's actually fascinating because some of the people that I had met actually, in my mind, were unbelievably successful. And you never know what's going on in someone's life, right? So, I think we all struggle. Everybody struggles. Anybody who thinks … I think in this day and age with social media, we always look and say “Oh, that person must have it all,” right? “They figured it out.,” right? “They're god.” Reality is, is they have the same exact struggles. They might not be struggling in an area that you might be struggling in but they're struggling somewhere in life in a major way, right? That might be a family member that's struggling and that they have to support them. It might be mentally they have issues that you just might not be aware of. And so, everyone across life is struggling in some way shape or form. And so, nobody has this picture-perfect life. And I don't know for entrepreneurs and founders what everyone’s struggle is but I knew for me it was “My life is out of whack. I have too much either on my business, too much on my mind.” And you just got to find a way to deal with it. We all got to figure out a way to deal with it. And some people cope with that in different ways. And I think today, mental health has become at the forefront or at least it's moving to the forefront relative to success or material success but I think we still have a long way to go.
Jayneil: And it's kind of hard for you, Ashish, because as an entrepreneur, you have to project this picture of confidence that you figured things out in front of investors in some way, in front of your employees, you come home, your kids or your wife is looking at you. I mean, you don't want to just break down in front of them because, I mean, if you break down, they kind of like break down. So, it's like the cultural narrative kind of forces you to just like fake it till you make it but there's only a limit to how much like at some point you are going to feel a little bit tense or worried about things. You're human too.
Ashish: I think that's a good point. I mean, I think what I’ve learned, and I don't know if this is the case for everybody, but I think vulnerability is something that took me a while to appreciate and sort of shed and allow it to actually become a quality that defines who I am, right? Because once you start to realize that you don't need to pretend to be someone you're not, I think that level of authenticity is what people look for in terms of leadership. Not everyone abides by this. I think there's still an extent of people that want that bravado, macho “I’m better than the rest of the world” but it's not sustainable. It's just … even if it looks like it's sustainable, internally it rips you apart. I mean, the science just doesn't support, from a human nature perspective, carrying that type of weight on your shoulders is sustainable. And so, for me, I just found a lot more peace … that doesn't mean I didn't do the fake it till you make it and things of that nature early on but you have to pick your … you have to pick your … you have to pick your moments very carefully. Yes, I think when you're talking to investors, when you're talking to your employees, you have to project confidence, you have to show leadership with regards to the direction of the company from a product perspective, from a consumer perspective, but it doesn't mean that you have to carry this image that you have all the answers with regards to even the product, let alone how to get there, right? And I think it's that balance between vulnerability and confidence that truly defines leadership, truly defines success because at the end of the day, you got to … you have to make peace with yourself. When you go to bed at night, you're not with anybody else. Even if there's someone next to you in the bed, you're with your own thoughts. And those thoughts, they're the ones that drive your mentality … they're the ones that drive the actions that you take on a daily basis. And if you have too much chaos in your brain, it just doesn't matter how successful you are materially, you're going to be miserable in life.
Jayneil: I’m trying to think just the amount of pressure you had in your shoulders. At one point you had hundreds of employees and you're the leader in charge of the ship. So, did you ever feel that pressure that in a way that your decisions could impact in some way the livelihood of all these employees that are working at Parques? Did you feel that burden or was it like “No, they're just …”
Ashish: Oh yeah, without question. I mean, I think that … that actually more than investors or board members or if I piss somebody off from an investment perspective or otherwise. The employees kept me up more than anything. I would wake up, I remember, many, many nights more than I care to remember where I would wake up at 2 in the morning and be worried about an employee's X or Y, whether it's if we had to let them go or worried about a group … an issue that the team was having. I mean, those things would keep me up way … today, I can deal with it a lot better in terms of … I think I’ve matured and understood how to handle certain problems but in the earlier days, when we were five years old, had raised capital, had a lot of goals that we had achieved from a product perspective or we were launching a new innovative idea, the impact of how it would play out in the marketplace as well as the teams that would build those, I would wake up with cold sweats … I mean, I would wake up in the middle of the night, I’d wake up at 2, 3 in the morning and try not to disturb my wife and she would unfortunately wake up and be like “You okay? What's going on. Let's talk about it” and I just felt guilty, I felt scared. Even when we were succeeding, there were so many times that I just couldn't appreciate the things we were accomplishing because you just … like you said, you have so many problems, the weight of the world that sometimes you can't even appreciate the moment until it's way gone.
Jayneil: Oh my god! It's always making me wonder that even when you're successful, there's always this thing like whenever you do a trade or when you buy some, there's always this probability that something could go wrong. And in your case, the success of the company not only impacts your financial future but your kids are looking at you to be successful, everyone is, right? And then you also have the employees. So, I’m just trying to like really … I mean, I’ve never been in your shoes. So, it's even hard for me to fathom but I’m just thinking about like the amount of pressure that is there for you to make sure this … and I know every entrepreneur wants a startup to be successful but the stakes are just so high, man, like for your family future, for all the other employees for just this startup to be successful and just you dealing with that.
Ashish: Yeah. I mean, I think there's … again, I think it comes back down to not taking your … I think the learning for me that I can take into my future is to not take yourself so seriously. Upon reflection, I think that too many times, whatever the goals we set out for ourselves and that we all want to achieve, whether we're eight years old, my eight-year-old wants to achieve X goal or my 12-year-old wants to achieve X goal or my wife wants to achieve a goal or I want to achieve, whatever the goals are, at the end of the day, whether we achieve them or not is less important than the journey and actually the process. And so, for me, if I can walk away saying “I put my blood, sweat, tears into X and I didn't get the result that I wanted. Whatever the goal I set out to achieve, I didn't get to goal. I want to be a billion-dollar company. I want a billion users,” whatever this moonshot goal that we set, if we don't achieve it, that doesn't bother me anymore, right? You still set these ambitious goals but to me, it's less of … the goal sets the process and to me, it's about the process and that's what I’ve learned to appreciate is like … and then you can just appreciate life and then you can be present. And so, for me, it's all … today, it's all about being present, being in the moment. I still have personal goals that I want to achieve for myself and sometimes I don't achieve those goals and I can see the maturity in terms of … I’m actually sometimes more at peace today when I don't achieve a goal but have appreciated the process and I’ve come a little bit short of the goal than in my early days when I would actually crush a goal and be at the top of whatever it was I was doing. Even as a child, whether it's music or otherwise, and I was an accomplished musician, and I was miserable because I was like “Oh, I didn't do this” or “I didn't do that.” And so, you're so hard on yourself. And so, I think, again, that goes back to that mental awareness, the mental satisfaction that we should push ourselves but understand at the end of the day there's pushing ourselves and then there's satisfaction and then there's fulfillment and you've got to find that balance between all those things so that you can just appreciate the journey.
Jayneil: And not beating yourself up because so many entrepreneurs, their goals are like “Oh, I want to be featured in Techcrunch. I want to like maybe come on the cover of Fortune Magazine” or Maybe I want to take my company public” but it doesn't always pan out that way. And I’m not there yet but, to your point, I definitely am working on the part about something about setting goals but then if you don't get there like … this is a pretty interesting conversation. I was talking to my dad who's right now in India and he was just like sharing his life with them and sometimes we just share some insane wisdom that … because I’m like “Dad, I want to do this. I have all these goals” and he's like … he's like “Yeah, have those goals” like “If you want to be featured on a cover of magazine, whatever, sure but if that doesn't happen, don't be any less happy than you were before.” So, I think that was just like very profound like what you were talking about and my dad was telling me earlier about just like …
Ashish: I’ll say this. I mean … I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt but I was going to say to that point like if you think about what I shared with you earlier about going to India and how much I hated it as a kid and it was about the destination, right? I wanted to get to my destination so fast that the means were irrelevant, right? And parking … I wanted to solve parking, get people to their destination but I think the … not to wax philosophy here but I think the irony in all of this is that the goals that I set forth in my life are about the end. I want to get to X as fast as possible. I want to get to India. I don't want to be on this 22-hour flight. I want to get to the stadium as fast as possible. And what's ironic is those very goals help me appreciate that it is about the journey. It's not about the end. And we put too much emphasis on … you know, when we define success, “Oh, did he become a billionaire? Oh no, he didn't? Okay, he was a failure,” right? And I’ve met so many people who actually ended up being billionaires, billionaires or you read about them. Jack Ma is a great example of this where, you know … one of the richest men in the world and he says “When I was a teacher, I was happier than I am now as a billionaire.” Now, of course we can all look at him and say “Well, you know, would be … you know, you know I’d love to trade lives with you” or whatever but I think there is truth to what he's saying, right? I mean, we all, at the end of the day, when we accomplish our goals … and everyone's accomplished their goals … there might be different goals but whatever goal you accomplish, you're already on to the next goal. Nobody sits back and says once they've accomplished their goal, whether you're a billionaire or whether you want to become … get all A's or go to Harvard, whatever the goal you set forth, once you achieve that goal, nobody sits there and reflects on it saying “All right, that's it. I’m done.” You're already on to the next goal. And so, in life, we're just constantly goal seeking. And I don't think you can find fulfillment … I think setting goals is extremely important, don't get me wrong, but I think fulfillment comes through the journey. And at the end of the day, if you end up … I think my philosophy that I’ve learned in life now is if I became a billionaire, became a jerk through the process … and there were moments in which I was a jerk, either to my family or didn't provide them the necessary compassion or appreciation for the sacrifices they made in my life … if that's who I end up becoming, then I failed. I think that's a failure. I think that's a greater failure than someone who didn't achieve their goal but exhibited compassion and looking out for people throughout life. To me, that's the mark of a man or a human being is how you handled yourself through the adversity because the reality is, is we have so little control over the things that happen in our life. I think we'd like to believe we have control, I think we like to believe that we're in charge of our life, but the reality is, is we have so little control. And so, I think the real test is whatever happens to you, whatever the adversity that comes your way or success that comes your way, how do you handle it. If you become a billionaire, how do you handle that success? If everything you do, you're a failure at, or in the eyes of the goals that you set forward, you're failure, how do you handle that? That to me is the real test. That's what we're being measured on and that's the way I try to look at everything that I now do through that lens.
Jayneil: That is deep. So, a question is … and I’m going to use my example. It's just turning out to be a therapy session. I love this. I can look at your journey and be like “My god, Ashish is such a successful entrepreneur, raised so much money, has done all this, got featured in so many publications.” What if I find out due to whatever reason that maybe I’m not equipped to do what Ashish did or maybe I’m not good enough to follow in this footsteps or whatever that means, maybe I don't want to become an entrepreneur like you, but if you look at the media narrative, it celebrates people like you. It really lifts people like you up, puts people like you on the front cover and it kind of like … there's just not, I want to say FOMO but like I see your cover on some magazine and I’m like “Oh man, I should be like him,” right? So, how to deal with that, the fact that “Okay, cool. Ashish did it for himself but maybe that's not something I want to do.” Maybe I don't want to like, you know, go through that crazy ride that you went through or maybe I’m not good enough. So, how do I come to peace with that? Any advice on that?
Ashish: I don't know about advice but what I can say is I struggle with the same thing you struggle with. I struggle with that today. I have lots of friends who are way more “successful” in their lives in terms of serial entrepreneurs, have built billion-dollar enterprises and … or I’ve circled their wagons. And so, there's always that … what's the saying … you feel like a fraud or you feel like you're not measuring up to the peers in your life but I think, for me, while … again, I think it comes back to the thoughts that we have. Our thoughts are not ours. Every thought that comes from within us, we don't need to attach to them. I have two kids now that help me sort of … I see through them the struggles that I had not only as a kid but even more so as an adult because I can see the way they're … you know, I can see before they even act. I can see how their minds are working in terms of fulfilling a desire that they have that you can already see “Oh, this is not going to end up … this is not going to go well.”
Jayneil: Do you have an example that comes to mind?
Ashish: You know, just when we sit down and watch a TV show as a family and … it's an indulgence, right? We're, you know … you're ready to … got to go to bed and stuff like that. The natural thing is, and this is a human characteristic, is we always want more. We never appreciate what we have in front of us but we always want more. So, at the end of the conclusion of the show, one of them will say “Can we watch another one?” It's this desire for more. We always want more, right? And we have these thoughts in our brain that say “I got to have more. I got to have more. I got to have this” or “This wasn't enough.” We're never satisfied with what we have. We never appreciate what we have or what we received. And so, we'll get frustrated … and I’ll get frustrated and be like “Come on, guys. We gave you something that you weren't even supposed to have and now you want more. Think about that, right? Think about where you are in life and what you received and you don't even appreciate where you are.” And the problem is because, to your point, we're comparing ourselves. We're always looking at the person next to us. And so, for me, the internal benchmark isn't looking to your right. It's not looking to your left. It's looking to yourself and saying “Okay, where am I on my journey in life because when I leave this world, I’m not going with these people? Where am I in my life and am I better or worse relative to the metrics that are important to me relative to where I was yesterday?” And if the answer is “I made progress,” then that's a good day. If the answer is “Steady state. I didn't make as much progress,” okay, we got work to do. If the answer is “I’m worse off than it was yesterday,” we got improvement to do, right? And I think that's the problem that the physical world has is that we use our senses, our ears and eyes and we use them in the wrong way. We use them in a way to judge ourselves, to judge others when they should be all motivating forces. They should be motivating forces to say “Oh, well, that person's amazing of what they do. I appreciate them for what their characteristics has but I too have a superpower and I want to make sure that how I can leverage my superpower is to the best of my ability. I didn't know how I got these powers but I’m going to take advantage of them because I know at the end of the day, they're not going to last.” And so, you got to be in the moment to appreciate who you are, where you come from and a lot of the questions we just won't know the answers to. I mean, again, not to wax philosophy here but we just don't know. And so, you got to learn to appreciate what you have and just be in the moment.
Jayneil: And as you were talking about wanting more and you're talking about like just hanging out with friends or billionaires or acquaintances, an interesting story came to my mind. So, a lot of guys want to get like washboard apps or six packs and whatnot. I’m very lucky that I have a friend who is extremely fit. He's got … he's got six-pack abs and stuff. And I’ve been hanging out with him. I’ve known him for quite some time. So, we're hanging out and we'll be just be sitting there. And so, one day, I remember I was hanging out with him the whole day and he's fasting the whole day and then when he actually went out to eat food, he's got this like small scale in which he measures like in grams like pounds how much he's eating like literally everything is weighed. It's not just like “Oh, I like this. I’m going to eat this.” If you look at his food cabinet, it's just a bunch of like raw food like there's no indulgences. And I was like hanging out with this person, I see how they've achieved this goal and what the price they’ve paid. And, Ashish, in that moment, I was like “I don't think I want to pay that price” like “I want to be able to like go out and eat some ice cream and stuff and eat some sugar. And it was a very conscious decision that I made that even though I know that's a goal that would be kind of nice to have and maybe a part of me does want it but a part of me just wasn't willing to pay the price and I just made peace with that that “You know what? I don't want six-pack abs. I want to be able to eat some nice food, enjoy. And good for him that he's willing to pay that price.” So, that was something interesting for me is just hanging out with people and paying attention what is the price they're paying for this because you also paid a price, a significant price to get where you are today too.
Ashish: I think, to that point, there's … I think we can look to Apple. If you think … if we want to bring this back from a design perspective and I think the brilliance of Apple, if you look at … and I’ve shared this with my kids, I’ve shared this with my employees … if you look at what is it about Apple that differentiates itself from companies like Dell … I mean, Dell's a great company too but a lot of the PC-based companies, those companies focus on the what, right? Apple focuses on the why, okay? And so, when you think about it from a … when you think about the design side of things, if you're not attacking life from the why but you're attacking it from the what, it becomes extremely transactional. And so, the question why … if you're not constantly asking who and why about every decision in life, you're going to end up feeling empty because you're going after the what and the how. And the what and the how are extremely important questions. They're necessary questions to eventually answer on the … in whatever you architect in life but you won't find sustainability if you're not constantly asking first before you engage in the what why. So, if you want to get washboard abs, the question is is why. And there might be a very good reason for why. And if you can answer that question why coherently to yourself … and you don't have to ask this question to anybody but yourself … but if you can't answer that question why well, the what is going to disappear really fast … and the how, right? So, I wake up every day … and there are things that I do in life that I ask the question why, “Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why am I doing X? Why am I doing Y?” And the moment I lose track of the why, I quit because it's no longer fulfilling for me because now I’m doing it for reasons in which I don't even know why I’m doing this anymore, right? So, every day I ask myself “Who am I?” I mean, this sounds crazy but I ask myself “Who am I and why am I here and why am I doing this, why am I doing X?” And that little sort of life hack bio-hack, whatever you want to call it, keeps me focused on the things that I’m doing. You get to try a lot of different things but you can quickly pivot away from things that are wasteful in your life by simply asking “Why am I doing this?”
Jayneil: The answer for me, Ashish, is so … I’m so embarrassed to admit this but when I asked myself “Why do you even want these washboard abs?”, so the answer was so stupid now that I think about it, it was just because the media thought … the media or social media just made it something cool like “Oh, this is a goal you should strive for” or people I was hanging out with seemed to prioritize that. So, it's like I didn't have any reason. It was just that the vicinity around me or the surroundings around me prioritized that and I kind of like got strung along with that. You're like “Oh, everybody's around me doing this. I think I should also do it” kind of thing but that's not a good answer either.
Ashish: Well, I don't think … but I think you're being a little harsh on yourself in that or unfair because I think that's what most of us do. And I think we all struggle to some extent … I mean, I definitely struggled with it. I raised my first … or I attempted to raise my first round of capital in which we got rejected, we actually got turned down after we signed a term sheet and then I looked in and said “Why am I raising this capital?” And literally I could make up reasons why we were raising at the time but I had no understanding of use of sources or use of proceeds to understand what we're doing. Why did I want to raise that capital? Oh, so that I could prove to the world. And those around me who were naysayers that says “Hey, look what I did. I raised, you know, a million dollars. What have you done?” And at the end of the day, that is … that's ego and that's not going to take me very far. Maybe I’ll feel good in a conversation to tell something, name drop or say I did this and I can hang that on my “résumé” but what have I really accomplished? I haven't accomplished anything, right? And who am I trying to prove this to? And part of it goes back to like we're all sort of just trying to prove to ourselves, to the world that we're worthy of something. And at the end of the day, that's not what it's about. It's not about that. It's about creating value. It's about creating meaning. And you don't need to do it to a billion people. You don't need to do it through a monetary means of saying that “So and so is a billionaire. That must mean they had a successful life.” I’ve seen people who aren't entrepreneurs trying to scale businesses to impact millions and just literally the impact that they have on one person's life can be profound enough to say that person lived an unbelievable life. And to me, that's how I want to … that's how I want to be remembered or that's how I want make sure I walk away from all this is that “Did I impact one person's life? Did I make meaningful impact on my own life?”, right? It's less about the noise which, yes, to your point, the media can … they're in the business to make money, right?
Jayneil: Yes.
Ashish: And at the end of the day, as human beings, sensational news is what gets our attention. It's just the way we're wired. And for me, and anybody who wants to listen to me, it's about finding ways to distract ourselves from the noise. All of that is noise, right? All of that is the wrong … and I got swept up to it. I got … I started Parques because I wanted to solve a problem. Yes, we want to make money. Nobody's doing it to … you have to sustain a lifestyle, a certain lifestyle that you want to live but if you're doing it for money first, I’ve seen plenty of people succeed relative to that goal but it's not sustainable. They won't be happy in the … I can guarantee anybody who's telling you that they're happy and they did it because they wanted to be a billionaire, I can guarantee deep inside they are miserable. They might not even realize it but deep inside they are miserable. And I just don't think that's worth … I don't consider that a worthwhile fulfilling life.
Jayneil: Absolutely, Ashish. So, how can people contact you or reach out to you if like design entrepreneurs or designers who maybe just want to keep in touch with you?
Ashish: Yeah, I’m so … for me, I have not built the most prolific Twitter profile but they can always email me at Adalal1@Gmail.com or you can always reach out to me if they … if people know me, they can text me or I’m always or LinkedIn or otherwise, I’m always looking to help people from an entrepreneurial perspective, a life perspective. All of them are intertwined and happy to wax philosophy or psychology or otherwise, even product and things of that nature. So, always looking to engage and connect because I’m still looking to grow myself.
Jayneil: Thank you so much Ashish. This was a blast. Thank you for coming on the show.
Ashish: No, this is great. I enjoyed the conversation. Appreciate you having me on.
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