2021 Reflection: The Sachin and Adam Show
2021 was a strange year for The Sachin and Adam show. We ended up putting a lot of energy into things we could have never foreseen.
A big theme of the year was about adapting to the covid lockdowns. Adapting is something I think is incredibly important. When sh*t happens, you adjust and you make the most of the situation. So when Sydney went into a hard lockdown earlier this year, we committed to putting energy into building this brand and making the most of the extra time up our sleeves.
For the podcast, this year we did 27 episodes, just hitting our fortnightly target. The learnings were immeasurable for us. From Malcolm Turnbull we got advice about what we should be doing with our youth, Sam Wong taught us how to invest like the best, Adam Powick taught us about leadership, Kirstin Hunter taught us about how to build a values based and ethical company and Tim Fung taught about about scaling tech companies. As our content became better over the year, we were delighted to start to get dozens of messages every month from fans for whom the content made a difference to their lives. This made us incredibly satisfied and more motivated.
At the end of last year, the podcast was purely a passion — we didn’t care about growth. It was just about learning, connecting and sharing with others. We didn’t care if we got 1 viewer, because it was fun and meaningful for us. But this year we started to build a vision about this being bigger part of our future, so we started to focus on scaling. This increase in focus saw us double our audio/YouTube listens, get 500k post impressions/views on linkedin and >2.5 million views on Tiktok. So we’ve started to focus more on growth, but alas, it’s difficult and we’re still not sure how to do it.
But to much surprise, we ended up putting a lot of effort into other projects too. Sachin and I had the vision of putting our content into a Tools of Titan style mini book. This idea ended up spiralling into writing an e-book with Saurav Risbud of Textbook Ventures. We combined all of our interviews with the best startup operators and investors in Australia and wrote ‘The Rising Tide: Your Guide to Startups and Venture Capital in Australia’. The reason that we wrote this is that we think there is a genuine rising tide happening right now in Australia: amazing startups being created at a faster rate, more funding for early stage and later state private tech companies, more people considering leaving the corporate world for startups and communities of young people being formed to discuss and test ideas. It felt like there was more and more young people emerging into the space and we thought that with our collective resources, we could write a guide that would enable them to understand the startup and early stage investment ecosystem.
The whole process took a lot longer than we thought. It’s not just writing, but editing, iterating, showing to other people, promoting, that all takes time. We were incredibly lucky to be helped by Hannah Ahn and our intern Savina with the design. The process was tough but it was an awesome learning process and we’re going to continue to push sales well into next year. This small taste of writing, editing, iterating and promoting gives me the desire to write a proper, full-length book myself some day.
Spontaneously, earlier this year we met the energetic Max Marchione. Over a few beers we realised we were all just as crazy as each other and our group chat became a flurry of ideas. Max knows 10x more than us combined on nearly every topic and he ended up introducing us to angel investing. Sachin and I had always wanted to invest in early-stage tech companies but we just never knew how to. Through this, we ended up doing a group deal into the seed round of a Ugandan fintech startup called Asaak.
Feeling validated after that first investment, we wanted to invest more, but we didn’t have enough deal flow and naturally, didn’t have much money at all. So we decided to start a syndicate to allow other young people to invest in private tech companies. It now has 25+ members and we’ll be making it more public in Feb. It’s been a remarkable opportunity to meet founders of early seed stage companies in Australia as well as invest in later stage growth companies like Spacex and Discord. I’m super excited by the thought of compounding this knowledge and learnings we’re getting through this investing over the next 10 years.
We were helped by a few superstars this year. Savina was our first intern and did a magnificent job. Her prowess in design is amazing. She has an uncanny ability to give us what we want when we do a ridiculously poor job of explaining what it is that we want. Jarvis Wang helped us rebrand our logo and podcast into a more mature and sleek version of us, one that is sustainable for the long term. So for that, a big thank you to both Savina and Jarvis.
A continuing theme is what Sachin and I are fascinated by. We constantly love to explore new technology, ideas, business models and the lives of fascinating people. I never see this curiosity of ours dying out and it informs nearly everything we do.
We achieved a lot, but we’re still left with questions. Are we spreading ourselves too thin? How do we strike a balance between work and play? How do you scale a media brand when there’s 1000s more out there? Should we focus on different types of content? How can we actually do this well when we’re unable to work on this full-time? Alongside the questions, there’s also struggles. Struggles with time management, making video/audio quality good, adapting to doing everything over zoom, making effective posts. We have so much to improve on.
Over the next couple weeks Sachin and I are going to continue reflecting on where we are and where we want to go. 2022 is bound to be an exciting year.
