"Earned and Learned" with Diraj Perkash Goel of Get Fresh Ventures

Today we welcome onto the show founder-extraordinaire Diraj Perkash Goel, Managing Partner and Founder of Get Fresh Ventures. At Get Fresh, Diraj and his team have played a pivotal role in launching over 200 startups onto paths of significant growth and profitability. 

His tenure at technology giants such as Hootsuite and Vision Critical has given him invaluable insights into operational excellence and customer engagement strategies, making him a cornerstone in the realm of business growth acceleration.

Before establishing GetFresh Ventures, Diraj's visionary leadership was instrumental in the revitalization of BC Tech's HyperGrowth Programme. His overhaul of the program structure led to a marked increase in the success rates of participating startups, many of which have since surpassed $100 million in revenue.

Of course, these are just a few of the bona fides that have made Diraj such a distinguished figure in the tech industry both in Canada and globally. I can’t wait to pick his brain on his startup journey, some of the great companies he’s working with today, and what’s on deck at Get Fresh Ventures for the rest of 2024.

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Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

Transcript

Paul Davenport:

Hello, and welcome to What The Tech from Boast AI where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome onto the show Diraj Perkash Goel, managing partner and founder of GetFresh Ventures.

At GetFresh, Diraj and his team have played a pivotal role in launching over 200 startups on the paths of significant growth and profitability. His tenure at technology giants such as Hootsuite and Vision Critical has given him invaluable insights into operational excellence and customer engagement strategies, making him a cornerstone in the realm of business growth acceleration. Before establishing GetFresh Ventures, Diraj's visionary leadership was instrumental in the revitalization of BC Tech's HyperGrowth program. His overhaul of the program's structure led to a marked increase in the success rate of participating startups, many of which have since surpassed a hundred-million in revenue. Of course, these are just a few of the bona fides that have made Diraj such a distinguished figure in the tech industry, both in Canada and globally. I can't wait to pick his brain on his startup journey, some of the great companies he's worked with today and what's on deck at GetFresh Ventures for the rest of 2024. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Diraj.

Diraj Perkash Goel:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Paul Davenport:

Awesome. I'm thrilled to have you here. Now, I know I just gave a little bit of background on how you got into the startup space, but I'd love to hear it from you. What gave you the startup itch in the first place, and how did you get into the game?

Diraj Perkash Goel:

My first startup was in the early nineties, back in '93 when I was only 15. So you could say I've been in startups since day one, but what I really enjoy about startups is that I get to engineer and build how things work. I like building things. It's something I've earned and learned from a young age, in terms of taking things apart and rebuilding them. And for that reason, I like getting my hands dirty and getting into building companies from the ground up, and if they're at early stage or late stage, it really doesn't matter, everything can be improved. In my mind, anything's a startup until it's a well-oiled machine.

Paul Davenport:

I love that. Now, if you're okay telling us, what was fifteen-year-old Diraj working on back in 1993? I'd love to know just kind of what sparked the itch for you.

Diraj Perkash Goel:

My dad was an engineer in Texas Instruments in Singapore. In 1990, we moved from Singapore to Canada, and he started working for a company that was building clone computers and selling them to enterprises. And these were SMBs that generally had less than a handful of computers. Computers were very expensive, and not a lot of people knew how to use them back then. This was pre-internet, but I did. I had grown up around them, from the Apple IIe clones that my dad used to bring home from Texas Instruments to prototype speak and spells. Because of that, I knew how to fix every single computer problem. That could be software, hardware, didn't matter. It was like magic when anyone saw what I could do.

So wherever my dad sold computers, they needed to have computers fixed. I just used to follow my dad around and started charging companies a monthly subscription fee to fix any of their computer problems. I was a kid, so that didn't really take off until I was 16. First, I was just going in and fixing the computers with my dad whenever there was a problem, and I started a company to do that and then built a subscription practice and then had a bunch of employees that went around with pagers. Everyone thought I was a drug dealer for having a pager in high school in the mid-nineties and being able to buy everyone McDonald's for lunch, but I was just running a computer service business.

Paul Davenport:

You were in the SaaS game pre-cloud, and you were just getting in on that whole subscription model early as a kid. I love that. Truthfully, I would've thought you were a drug dealer too. That is hilarious that you had the whole team working for you. But I love also hearing too, that we have a lot of different kinds of founders on here. Some of them are the ones that are kind of the... From the start, they are born with that curiosity, that entrepreneurial spirit. Some of it learn it once they're in academia and they get a taste for what it actually goes into developing new solutions. I love how you just have that spirit. It seems like it was built into you. You leveraged the skill set that you had, leveraged your dad's access to people who need solutions to acute computer problems when there was no one else there. It was kind of, I guess, identifying the white space before there was even a market that you could latch onto for it. So I love that. That is super cool.

Now, GetFresh Ventures. Could you tell me a little bit about how you journeyed from, maybe not sixteen-year-old garage to GetFresh Ventures, but how GetFresh Ventures did come about today? What was some of your motivation for founding it, and some of the initial projects, I guess, that you were involved in at the start?

Diraj Perkash Goel:

GetFresh Ventures is the culmination of all my experiences, both as a founder and an executive, especially working during downturns and building companies where we couldn't raise capital to scale those companies. We were dependent on revenue. But then on the other side, also going through periods of abundance where there was significant exuberance and seeing those waves turn, the consistency always was that there was always going to be problems that were very visceral and real in the moment, and that was always the case during downturns or economic upturns. What I saw the difference was a sense of scarcity that forced companies to innovate, truly innovate and solve problems at scale, versus companies that spent a lot of money and built companies that bought their revenue rather than built sustainable growth companies. And the key difference was, with founders being clear about their plan and the value of the companies, that they were building the ultimate value.

It was so real to me because it was part of all those conversations from the early stage to the late stage when we're looking for an exit and investors are looking for liquidity, and being part of those conversations, it became clear to me that this journey goes one way. I put money in, I get money out. Everything that happens in between needs to make sure that the money out is more than the money in, significantly more. When I wrote the HyperGrowth Accelerator, Bill Tam, at the time he was the CEO, said, "I need help to rewrite this," or not rewrite it, but I need help to run this program. And I saw that the content was more curriculum than execution. It was teaching branding by using McDonald's as an example, versus this is what you need for your brand for the next two years as you're building out your company.

So I took all my knowledge that I gained and my experience, and I have ADHD, which I just learned about a year ago, which compels me to simplify everything into an executable plan that everyone can understand. It's the easiest way to change, manage and direct and get people to focus. I built that plan, and from there, all our companies in the program across two cohorts presented a go-to-market strategy that was defensible by the numbers and through the execution of that plan, which ultimately became the traction that they could justify to support the validity of the plan that they presented at a go-to-market strategy of a board of advisors of existing investors and CEOs. One of those companies was Jane Software, which as we know is doing over a hundred million now, and they were very early stage at that point. We have several success stories that came out of that.

In fact, Jane Software got their first investment right out of the gate. I knew that the problem that I was serving was one where founders knew their product or knew their customer. In a lot of cases, most founders know more about product than the customer, but in cases where there was the passion and desire to pursue the problem and serve the customer, they needed an economic model and an execution model that they could actually deliver on.

Every company is not ultimately unique. If they were, you wouldn't be able to hire people off job descriptions, and there would be no one qualifying. So you could actually engineer companies from the ground up, and that's where I saw the need and that's why I started GetFresh Ventures. It's really giving founders a fresh perspective on what is it that you need to do to build a company and why you're building the company and how to navigate the path to success. That is driving everything around enterprise value. Knowing that the product that you're building is the company itself, the economics around the company and the market that it pursues and the cash flow it generates is how it's valued and you can drive that with a system, and that's what we do with our portfolio companies at GetFresh Ventures.

We work with early, late-stage companies. It's really where founders get stuck and they need to know what to do next. We, as a team at GetFresh Ventures, partner with those companies. Through a relationship of a combination of cash and equity participation, we work with these founders to scale these companies and navigate the path of capital where they limit their dilution as much as possible by building a lean company that services them in terms of driving the highest enterprise value they can so founders get a meaningful generational exit. And we participate on that exit as value generators and value accelerators and true acceleration.

Paul Davenport:

True acceleration. I love that you threw that in at the end there too. And Diraj, I'm just going to call back to a point you made earlier that you were seeing there was more curriculum versus execution at similar, if not accelerator or incubator programs, just similar resources for founders in the community. They needed to actually know how they could execute, drive that value. And to that other point too, the company itself being the product, I think that's a different mindset than you often hear, again, when you go that more academic route out the gate, versus literally just getting into the field and making your business happen. That is very, very cool.

I'd love to know too, you've mentioned partners in the ecosystem. Could you tell me a little bit about, I guess broadening it out, locally in Canada, what are some resources that GetFresh and the companies that you've partnered with have used to kind of achieve the growth and achieve that scale and execute on your mission, unique to Canada or even just unique to what you guys are doing at GetFresh Ventures today?

Diraj Perkash Goel:

Companies need two things as fundamental tenets. Not only these two things, but these are two fundamental ones, which is capital and talent. Capital is hard to get, and talent is hard to get, sure enough. So we work with our companies in helping them solve for those two challenges. Everything's derivative of talent, and capital is what you use to drive talent to achieve outcomes as well as invest in the infrastructure of the business. So when we look at a capital strategy, we look at how much revenue can we actually drive and how much of that revenue can we use to drive growth. And we take a tiered approach of revenue as our first and primary source of growth capital, then to non-dilutive and then to equity-based financing. So we go through the tiers of non-dilutive in terms of what's available as grants. So it's free, versus a bankable approach where we go to venture debt partners and institutions to look at, based on the economics of our business, how much can we actually attract into the business without giving up equity.

And then lastly, we start to look at convertible debt before we do a price equity round, or not a price round, but like an equity round where we give up a stake in the company and the founder stake dilution. So on the capital side, we work with several partners. Those partners are VCs, those partners are banks, those partners are angel investors. Those partners are Boast, for example, on the non-dilutive side in terms of shred, submission and pre-funding, because getting access to that capital sooner means that we can do things faster. Then on the talent side, it really depends on the type of business and the type of talent we need to get. We work with several different partners across multiple segments on the talent side. And then on everything else, it really comes down to the unique needs, and the partnerships are progressive where we partner on a win-win where the companies that we partner with are mutually motivated to succeed as our portfolio companies in achieving our outcome. Those are the partnerships that work the best.

Paul Davenport:

I love that. Now, I'd like to know, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we did have a webinar with you last week. I'll be sharing information for how folks can access that full recording in the show notes here today. But a lot of what we talked about in that webinar was how to kind of navigate the growth journey, given the current market conditions in 2024. We're recording this now just on the cusp of June, but could you maybe give some advice for founders who may want to work with GetFresh Ventures or even pitch themselves to any kind of investor on what they should maybe bring to the table in that conversation? Not necessarily hedge their bets for a larger investment per se, but to communicate that they are mutually motivated to you to take your words, given the realities of what it takes to be a successful startup today.

Diraj Perkash Goel:

The core to any startup's success is an audience of users who are willing to pay for whatever they're selling. And the cheaper the audience, the better. And by that, I mean are they coming to you or are you going to them? If you have gravity because you solve such a visceral problem that they're somehow finding you through SEO or through their peer network or just hearing you in the zeitgeist, they're coming to you. If you have that, a large part of growth is solved where you have so more demand than you can handle and you're constantly breaking the engine. If you're not in that situation, the first question you got to ask yourself is why. Solve that.

If you've got a product that you know works, it doesn't mean the market is going to adopt it. There's a difference between common sense and common practice. Common sense says that you should stay healthy and eat right and go to the gym three times a week. Common practice is otherwise. So you can't depend on the medicine driving growth. You have to depend on the desire and the pain to drive your medicine. So whatever you're selling, make sure you have a healthy dose of a captivated need where people are willing to give you the money and to solve their problem and you don't have enough capacity to do it at a great quality or at scale. That's a problem that every investor wants to solve.

Paul Davenport:

Love it. Capacity and at scale. All right. And Diraj, before we go, I'd love to know what's on the roadmap for GetFresh Ventures for the rest of the year? I know that I had alluded to, we did a webinar recently. I know that it's the summer events season and that we're going to a bunch of conferences here on the Boast team, but are there any things on your roadmap that you want to tell our listeners to keep an eye out for in terms of where we can catch you with the rest of the GetFresh Ventures team?

Diraj Perkash Goel:

Well, we've got a few great news articles that are going to be coming out soon on successful growth trajectories for our companies. So I'm excited about those, but I also know that good news shouldn't be celebrated longer than the next quarter because we got to solve the next problem. So what I'm really looking for is navigating the changes in the market landscape as the years evolve. For every dip, there is a return. For every return, there's a dip. And there's going to be a swing for the fences period coming up in the next 24 months, where I want to make sure that we're ready for those and we can capitalize on that upcoming wave. Specifically, we're looking for that have that desire for accelerated growth, willing to talk to any founder who's motivated and willing to put in the work and they feel they've got something in their hands.

What we can do really well is address all the problems that they will encounter by first understanding where they are, where the opportunity lies and what to do in between. And so founders that are at that point, reach out to us through our website. We are also rolling out a founder therapy series where we're going to run multi calls. I am inviting founders to join these calls. I'll pick two to three founders and help them solve real problems in their business around growth velocity on those calls themselves, and it's a great way founders to understand some of what we do and how we can work together.

Paul Davenport:

I love that. I am going to make a request for marketers therapy hour with the people in my network. I think that we could all use it. Diraj, this is fantastic. And again, I just want to call back to that point that you made earlier about being mutually motivated. I think that's at the heart of what you guys are doing at GetFresh Ventures. You want to work with founders who are hungry because you guys are hungry too, and you have that ambition and you just want it to be matched. It's a partnership. It's a marriage in a very non-traditional sense, but you guys got to be making decisions together that will benefit everybody at the end of the day that will drive that true value, that will get the company in a spot where everyone involved, investor, partner, whatever you want to call it, benefits at the end of the day.

And I know you were talking a lot earlier about getting to that point of healthy exits, but that's what you need. You need simpatico between your teams, whoever they are. So that is music to my ears. It's a big reason why we love working with you guys and the team at GetFresh Ventures as well, because I think there's a lot of simpatico in our mission here at Boast and what you guys are doing over there. We want the tide to raise all the boats in our community. We love that we're in this together.

Diraj Perkash Goel:

Yes, yes. I like to do things that... I love this acronym of ELF. It's Christmas all the time because if it's easy, lucrative, and fun, I just want to have elves all around me.

Paul Davenport:

Easy, lucrative and fun. Ho ho ho. I love it. Christmas all year round. Thank you so much, Diraj. I think that's the perfect point to leave it at.

Diraj Perkash Goel:

That was great. Thank you so much for that.