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Entrepreneurs are always at the forefront of change and innovation, and Ray Sharma certainly fits that billing.
Graduating from Ivey in 1996 Sharma went into the world of investment banking and became the top-ranked technology analyst in his first year after securing the title for five of his eight eligible years, Sharma joined the startup world and set up extreme Venture Partners. Over the years, Sharma firm has led, funded or founded more than 100 startups with exits to a who's who of brands like Apple, Google, Google Electronic Arts, McKesson and Salesforce, with a career spanning the early days of the Internet and the rise of social media.
Sharma joins Ivey lecturer Eric Janssen to discuss his entrepreneurial origins and shift away from the corporate world, how AI will Change what types of skills are important, and other major trends that students and entrepreneurs should note in this season of disruption.
The Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Connie Clerici, QS ’08, and Closing the Gap Healthcare Group, Inc.
Transcript
Eric Morse
You're listening to The Entrepreneur Podcast from the Western Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship, powered by Ivey. In this series, Ivey entrepreneur and Ivey faculty member Eric Janssen will anchor the session.
Ray Sharma
Entrepreneurs are always at the forefront of change and innovation, and Ray Sharma certainly fits that billing. Graduating from Ivey in 1996 Sharma went into the world of investment banking and became the top ranked technology analyst in his first year after securing the title for five of his eight eligible years, Sharma joined the startup world and set up extreme Venture Partners. Over the years, Sharma firm has led, funded or founded more than 100 startups with exits to a who's who of brands like Apple, Google, Google Electronic Arts, McKesson and Salesforce, with a career spanning the early days of the Internet and the rise of social media, Sharma joins Ivey lecturer Eric Jansen to discuss his entrepreneurial origins and shift away from the corporate world, how AI will Change what types of skills are important, and other major trends that students and entrepreneurs should note in this season of disruption.
Eric Janssen
Easy to look back, right? People look at your career now and they're like, it's a long ways away from at least when I was 22 years old sitting as an HBA student. Did you know when you were an HBA, when you were 22 years old, that you wanted to be an entrepreneur right away.
Ray Sharma
Well, I did do all the cliche things, like I did comic book collecting, card collecting. I even did had a paper route, you know, so and then student painting. That's as cliche as you can get in terms of startup stuff, lemonade stand. So yeah, I knew. I kind of knew that I loved technology. I knew I loved innovation. And the truth is, I wanted to invest in banking for the money, even though, you know how, in interviews, that's so taboo, why are you here? Oh, I want to make lots of money, like, you know, get out of here, right? You know how that's so taboo. But meanwhile, that's what everyone's really thinking, right? They just don't want to say it. So, yeah, I really didn't once I discovered, I kind of discovered through the other kids in the class, why is everybody always going for these? What's this investment banking thing? And so for me, I was, I had no choice, but had to kind of go towards where I could maximize and when I became top ranked analyst. And like, you know, we get these surveys and Wall Street and Bay Street. And so I was the number one ranked analyst in smartphones in the world for like, five years. And once you get ranked, even once, it's like, boom, as soon as you get ranked, you've, you're you've made it's like winning the Academy Award. And you know, you're constantly getting recruited there. They're throwing big guaranteed contracts at me and stuff like that, like MBA level contracts for an analyst job. So that's the reason. And I went, That's what I wanted to do, is I wanted to make as much money as possible, and investment banking seemed to have the most compensation upside. That's the truth of it.
Eric Janssen
So how did you leave that? I mean, presumably you're doing it for 10 years and winning at it. It's hard to leave after being at it for 10 years.
Ray Sharma
It's hard because every year I was like, get a guaranteed lot of 649, you know, in terms of compensation is really hard. I left at the top of my game too, man. I just I was 34 and I was making, like, three, four million a year. three, four, fivemillion a year. And I walked away from that to do this thing. And part of it was because of those, that one slide with those four graphics about autonomy and all that. And part of it is like, how much is enough? The one thing you'll talk about on Bay Street and Wall Street, more than anything, when you guys go out for drinks, when you go out for drinks, just like you guys all talk about, oh, I want to do this when I grow up. I want to do this when I graduate. I want to do this. What everyone talks about in the bars is, how much money do you want to make? What's your number? The number one thing to talk about is, what's your number. And then the number two thing to talk about is how other people have made their money, right? So there was this huge culture of, you know, making enough, you know, what's enough? And I was, I noticed this quite a bit, and I grew up in basements, and was born in India. So when I when I saw this, I was like, man, it's a very interesting world. And so I had to, I had a number, and when I hit it, I got out of the business.
Eric Janssen
It's interesting. I mean, it's a taboo topic. No one talks about it, but it's on everybody's mind, right? Like, it's the thing that no one talks about, but it is on everyone's mind all the time. So what was the what was the, what was your very first when you left investment banking? What was the did you quit and then figure out the thing? Or did you have the thing and leave for that?
Ray Sharma
Yeah I had the thing. What was like? What was the first thing? The first thing was the venture fund and I was starting to Angel invest, to others and stuff. If you look at the Goldman Sachs journey, when they went public, they. Did an amazing job of incubating the private equity firms, the venture firms, the all the firms, and they did, you know, they set up a situation so you could leave in a friendly way. Same thing with Terry Matthews, that guy. So some organizations are not very nice about setting up your thing before you do before you leave. But in this case, they were very friendly to it.
Eric Janssen
So talk about that transition to investing. And maybe this is fast forwarding a bit for some folks in the room. But did you two ways to think about this, mine, and I've made the mistake maybe, of thinking of it almost like, for me, it was charity to begin with. It was like, I want to support students. We were cutting small checks just as a way to, you know, be supportive of students, until someone smacked me and said, you know, no, this is actually, think of it as like part of your portfolio. So there's you can be in LP, Park money with an LP, and that's what I did. Smarter people than me manage that or do the direct investments you went. Sounds like direct investment,
Ray Sharma
Yeah, I did well, yeah. And then I created basically a network of super angels to invest in my funds. So I got Darren de champu, who went to Ivey, head of Wells Fargo's Canada securities. He's an investor, CEO of Canaccord, CEO of whole bunch of investment banks and other venture firms. So that's what I did, is I kind of raised money from influential people on Bay Street to do the fund.
Eric Janssen
You're often the first check. We talked about a concept in kickoff day with the MVP students. We talked about Noah Kahan. Noah Kahan has become this really well known performer nowadays, and his mom told him at eight years old, when he gets invited to the Grammys, you have to take me. And in February of this year, he took her to the Grammys. So to me, like the one of the most valuable things that a parent can give their kids is true belief, right? She believed that he was going. And I think the equivalent in entrepreneurship is that, like that first check where you're like, Whoa, you know, wow, they believe on Me, in Me, they're on board. And you're often that guy.
Ray Sharma
You are the first person I met that actually realizes that. That's a very good insight. It's like the first kiss. It's your first boyfriend or girlfriend. You will never forget your first investor. I've done deals where I put in half a million. Did that come across weird? (I liked it. I like it) I think I might have missed a new answer. Okay, so, yeah, okay. Now I get So, so I put in half a million into this company. Guys have come in and put in 10s and 50s of millions of dollars, and they, every entrepreneur, will always treat you with your little half a million it's because it's, there's an emotional connection, and it's what you said. It's really nice. You had to ask that question, because nobody's ever actually picked up on that. It's one of the best parts, I think, of being a VC.
Eric Janssen
It's kind of what you're known for, right? Like that first check, and I think you're confident in it, because you have a way of predicting trends and seeing what might happen, and so you're able, I think you're able to do that because you've maybe spent the time to think about that. How do you how do you make time to think about what might happen?
Ray Sharma
I think luck has a lot to do with it. I know it's an unfortunate answer, but there's a high correlation between the year you launch your venture fund and your returns. So the vintage, there's a high correlation coefficient, and it's not causation, it's just correlation. It's, there's, but there is luck. Luck has a lot to do with it, and but when we're at the early, early stage, it's really comes down to two things. I'm really saying it's, we're going to evaluate your personality as an individual, get a feel for you and and over time, maybe spend time going for dinner, getting to know them, get to know where their background is, their story. That's the number one thing. And then the number two thing is the market. You're trying to address the analysis of it. But is it an interesting market? Sometimes when you guys come up with ideas, you come up with an idea where there wasn't no market there before. So you have to come up with creative ways to analyze what your market opportunity is. These two things, the market analysis, addressable market and you as an individual. These are the two major factors. Now, how do you boost up your credibility as an individual? Well, you get, you get things like advisors, if you can get a teacher to cut you a check. Wow, that's a big differentiator, right there. I'm already, you've already, now, just jumped to the top of the list in my books. You gotta, you gotta check from a teacher, from a prof at an elite school. Yeah, I'm interested now. So that kind of stuff is going to be, I think...
Eric Janssen
two years ago I took, we took a year off and unplugged entirely. I traveled with my kids and my wife, and when I came back, generative AI was a thing. It wasn't a thing. And then all of a sudden it was and I felt, shoot, like, literally, the way that I would start a business in 2023 I think, was very different than the way. That I would start a business in 2022 and I've been trying to spend some time putting my finger on exactly what the differences are from your perspective. What's different 2024 now, how would you think about starting a business? Now, if you're these folks, versus a year ago?
Ray Sharma
This even this even better question, development costs have gone down 90% year over year. So if it costs you a million dollars to build some mortgage FinTech platform, it costs you $50-60,000 today, the whole dev game has changed completely the nature of startups. You know, we should do a presentation just on how Gen AI affects the future of startups. So you raised a million dollars, right? Traditionally, 700,000 of that million dollars would go into development, product development, software development, 200,000 would go into marketing, 100,000 in administration. That's 700,000 now you only have to spend 50-60,000 on I just said so is that, if that's true, what does that mean? You either raise less money. You can now just raise three, 400,000 that's a lot easier to do, infinitely easier to do. Secondly, you could reallocate resources. You could say, I'm going to shift the money I was going to spend on dev into marketing and sales. And I would say, generally, in general, the power has shifted from Waterloo, Comp Sci, computer science development to sales, leadership and Ivey. I'm not saying it because I'm here or I would. I'm only saying because I believe it. Trust me, I've been way pro-Waterloo and UfT, but now the time has come for Ivey, and it's because of this. It's because leadership and sales are the most important thing in startup world. Everything. Tech is now commodity. If you can dream it, we can build it. It's that simple. We can build anything. Now it's just a matter of, is it practical, and what's your imagination? If that's true, if you can just tell the and chatGPT is doing a great job of the coding, by the way, they there's benchmark scores that exist out there. Happy hippos. I forget there do really good ones. They're the best in coding. You get, you just tell it what to build, and 30 seconds later, and you can watch it compile. I've done bunch of apps like, it's amazing. You can watch it compile. It's awesome, and it's changing the game. It's like a great I would completely do startup differently. And think about this. Say you did your startup last year. You raised money and you spent it on software development. Well, now you could have just, you got a you got a new startup. You could just done it completely different the way, the way things where things haven't really changed it. So you're seeing a lot of controversy about, you know, Nvidia, hyperscalers, how the capital markets are dealing with AI. And what we haven't seen is the application layer emerge yet. So we're kind of like in 2008 of the App Store. When farting apps...Why'd you laugh? When you know all those different apps, those silly apps were coming out, they were kind of like jokes, right? We asked everything out right now are basically chat GPT rappers. All it is is taking they do. But what's happened is different. It's like the App Store has been vertically integrated with the dev environment, like it's like, it's like, it's like Apple is the App Store and the application layer at the same time. This is weird. This is not the way we're used to doing things. So we need to rethink AI completely. These llms are changing the game for application development completely. But one thing I think Ivey needs to do to help Canada is how to reimagine the business models. So for sure, it's obvious, more obvious about how we can save money and how we can do this, but business models need to be reimagined. Let's go back to mobile. Mobile is a great reference for learning. There was over 150 different freemium business models. We studied at one point, different ways to make money from free in mobile. There's so many creative methods, right? And what it resulted in is, is an evolution in things So Uber and all these companies all came as a result of the innovation in monetization for the application layer in the beginning. Now we're in the world where we need to rethink about, how do we How is a biz model? I'll give you a specific example. A lot of the stuff we do, you can do it. You can actually get a cost. And say, my compute cost on that, on that query, was x. So for example, 4.0 GPT cost about $80 million to develop. Did you know that it costs about 80 million in compute. So you can put so therefore, I can actually do a run a query and say, This cost me X amount, right? So what are you going to charge? How are you going to charge? Are you going to say, Oh, I'm going to charge my Amazon cost times plus 50% plus, no, that's not going to work. We have to re imagine. We have to do things like, instead of seat based pricing for SaaS, value based pricing with AI, there must be enough intelligence to figure out what is the value we are creating with the software, and try and get into the value game versus just the per seat game or the API call amount of money you charge per API call game like this is your opportunity to innovate on these new ideas. Your timing is perfect. I mean, it's like new school across a new building. Gen AI? These guys are lucky.
Eric Janssen
I know. I know. So you mentioned sales before I could get there. We're one of the only schools in Canada to teach it. It's why I got I exited my businesses to come back and teach sales at Ivey. When you spoke in Toronto at the one of the events a couple months ago, my inbox blew up with Ray's talking about sales. Ray's talking about sales. So part of why I wanted to have you back was to talk about that a little bit, because the stats are crazy. I think 50% of all grads end up in a sales role at some point after graduation, 88% of all marketing majors end up in sales right when they graduate. Less than 4% of higher ed institutions in all of North America teach sales. Ivey's been kind enough to give me a little bit of a toe foot in the door to start a sales course. So sales is up there. If we're going to redesign and help these students be the entrepreneurs of the future. What else do we need to be teaching?
Ray Sharma
It's amazing. That's, you're going to be in a really good position here. That's really good because it's, it's, it's going to, it's like, it's almost like the the world has changed so much that if you can just assume that that software is fully commoditized, fully commoditized. That is completely easy to do now, right? It's, there's no barriers to entry now, then, then. All that matters is sales. All that matters is discover and it's the different aspects of sales. So there's, there's the top of funnel, the bottom of funnel conversion, there's the, what's the lifetime value of your customer? How much does it cost to acquire the customer, right? Those are very basic things. What are more advanced statistics? Are things like, what is the average revenue per daily active user? What is the average revenue per paid user? Rppu? Weird name, rppu, but like these are the things that become much, much more relevant and less about technical performance and what, who has the best product? What can I be do in terms of sales? Like, you know, Xerox is famous for their people taking jobs, summer jobs at Xerox and organizations that professionally teach sales. And I got to tell you, sales is it needs to be like, the biggest thing is like, sales and HR are the two things. When you leave this school, you're going to say, I underappreciated HR and I under appreciated sales. Everyone's like finance, right? Because finance has got, how do I value a bond? Finance is so cool, right? No, it's sales and HR that are the most, most important post graduation. Sales is the most important because it's fundamental to everything. Say you're a research analyst of the research analyst of the nerds. We're the geeky guys, right? So, but we have to go out there and present to investors and to corporations. We have to be good salesmen. You have to be a good sales woman, sales person. No matter what your job is, you're either selling externally or internally. You're almost always selling and now that the balance of power has shifted from Waterloo to Western type of thing, I mean, it's like, it really is your time to shine.
Eric Janssen
So the Ray Sharma Sales Institute at Ivey, is that what I need? This is great. So you, you've been, you've been an advisor to government on policy, in technology, and, I mean, more broadly, entrepreneurship, you've been a friend of Ivey for a long time. We're, I'm in, I'm in the seat this year of teaching 400 students to start their first businesses. We've only got, we've got three months. So there's an MBA cohort and an HBA cohort. They've got three months to do whatever they possibly can and a bit of an independent study to come up with an idea for a business and pitch it to real investors in December. If you're them, what should they be focused on? Working on? How do they make the best of this three month opportunity?
Ray Sharma
Well there's, there's AI, the application layer is obviously next evolutionary way phase of AI. So there's they're going to start seeing, and they're already seeing this tsunami of apps and new companies. So there's a lot of opportunity there to kind of do some research and maybe do some side, some work on the side, on this Tindr was created as a result of a hackathon, so students how they get together with their case competitions and stuff like that. That's a very similar like, we actually think what Ivey was doing that's like what a Hackathon was way before it was called a hackathon. So that core thing that you teach them here within that is in that that exercise is a very good exercise to go one step further and hack together a business plan. So I don't think we do it here yet, but what I've done it with the great Canadian apathon and with hackergal is organizing with the Canadian government something called Code. The largest hackathon ever in Canada is coast to coast hackathons to hack together business plans like I know, for example, U of T and their AI department would be interested in doing a collab with Ivey. And we hack together. They'll provide the computer scientists you provide. It'd be interesting to see how they play in the room together. Do the Ivey people bully the U of T AI nerds? You know what? I mean. It'd be interesting to try this out. But there's a new AI building at college and university called SRIC (Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus). It's right across from Mars college and university. The entire building is AI companies. We haven't publicly announced it, but we've taken 5000 square feet. We're going to be building AI companies in collaboration with U of T out of that AI building. And at some point, I'll be back and talking about that and saying, Hey, does anyone interested in working with us? And maybe we'll do something collaborative, where we can do a joint hackathon and hack together a business plan.
Eric Janssen
We love that. I think things are changing so quick trying to try to keep up with I don't think teaching the tactics change so often, like I am not teaching a class on how to use generative AI. Use generative AI. You must use it as part of the project. I think I put in the course outline this year, but I'm not teaching them how to use it. So the tactics, I think are going to change, but important nonetheless, When was the moment in your career where you felt like you'd made it?
Ray Sharma
When you say made it like? How do you define that, financially or, well, the biggest KPI for my business was getting a top ranked analyst, being a top ranked and usually top three. There's about 40 to 50 analysts. It's like the Academy Awards, Best Picture, Best this, best smartphone analyst, best semiconductor analyst. So my objective was to be top three at some point in my career, because you only have to be top ranked once, and then you can just tell everyone, oh, I was a top ranked analyst. It's a marketing thing, right? Marketing thing, right? So, so, but problem I had is I got top ranked my first year, which was weird, tough problem. Yeah, actually, I thought less of the surveys. I thought there must be something wrong with the surveys, if, how could that be possible? But that's going to be one. So I that's one record that's going to be really tough to be, to be to get number one ranked right out of university, is kind of hard, because it was only because it was a it was a tech bubble. 99 I graduated the year Netscape went public. Netscape is the original web browser, right? Like when I went the year Ivey became Ivey was the year the internet had critical mass. It was the same year. So I'm in this you guys are in the same position I was in, but you guys are Gen AI and I'm internet stuff. And man, it was a hell of a ride. So that first year getting top ranked was like, oh, man, now what? So now I just tried to maintain the rankings. So I did it for about five years. And you know, that was one thing that was cool. Then the other thing was the financial objective, what we talked about already, and I had a number in mind where I wanted to switch gears from studying, focusing on on business and making money, to focusing on things like the existential questions in life, like, you know, why are we here? What happens when we die. You know, easy questions, but literally, I that's was my reason why I wanted to make money. My number one reason to make money was so I could not worry about money anymore and worry about these other things that inevitably, once you've faced death and you'll know what I'm talking about, it's that whole Steve Jobs thing about, you know, Are you really happy with what you're doing with every day and all that stuff. So that was why I wanted to maximize my wealth. Is just so I could shift focus to other things. The mistake I made that I hope you don't make, is you don't need to do one or the other. You can do both simultaneously. You don't need to be, oh, I'm just a spiritual guy, or I'm just a religious guy, or I'm just a good guy, or I'm just a bad guy, or now I'm a business guy. You can do both. And if I was to do it again, I wouldn't have done what I did, which was just to stop working and, you know, start. I would have kept working. I think now my philosophy is I'll work right to the end of the line. And if you look at all the TED talks of all the, you know, those blue zones where people live to an average age of 100 or above, places in Japan, places in Cali, places in Peru. There's these common trends you'll see throughout and there's like interesting ones, like eating hyper local. Nature tends to make nutrition that's optimized for the local environment. So eating hyper local was one thing, but one of the interesting things is that, like in Japan, they didn't even in that one area, they didn't even have a word for retirement. I mean, in the guys in Peru, where they were 90 902 years old, and they're still going out every day, tending the fields, going fishing, they kept active. I think once you get inactive, if you're not adding value, you're not evolving yourself, you're not learning if you know, there's a saying the devil makes use of idle hands, I think there's some truth to it. So, you know, I think I made a mistake, and in hindsight, I would just, I think you can work and you can pursue these personal goals at the same time.
Eric Janssen
I have to ask, because I keep getting peeks of it. You've got some tattoos on up your sleeve. Do you? Are you? If you're open to it? It would you share what they're about?
Ray Sharma
Yeah, okay, so weird is a good segue. So in these are a lot of the spiritual symbols of Christianity, Islam. There's one symbol that represents all the native 4000 native religions on the earth. There's Hinduism, Buddhism, and in these two patterns, here are something called Yantras. So if you ever heard a mantra, Mantra is like an audio hack to your internal operating system. Okay? What this is, is a visual prayer. So just the geometric pattern represents like a mantra. So just by looking at it, it's like you've said a prayer, you've said a mantra. Just so it's a it's a visual variation of it, so that's what. So it's like. So I built the I did these for me. So every time I look at it, it's like, boom. It's like saying a prayer.
Eric Janssen
Nice. nice. Last one before I turn it over to these folks, if you are in their shoes, we got some MBA classes here, some HBA folks here. But you know, average age of 25 what would your advice be to 25-year-old Ray sitting out here in the audience?
Ray Sharma
The two biggest opportunities I see out there, if you want to make impact, or if wealth is your objective is what's going on the continent of Africa is unbelievable. If we could talk about that for a minute. And then there's the Gen AI stuff, the application layer, which we've already talked about. So maybe we can focus on Africa. So 50% of all the live births, trending to two thirds of all the births on the planet, according to the United Nations, are happening on the continent. There's this city, Lagos in Nigeria, which has grown from 2 million to 22 million people in last 20 years. And it's stunning. Nigeria is like the United States of Africa. It sets a lot of the trends when it comes to Afrobeats, music, fashion, but the entrepreneurship environment and the it's the it's not only the next frontier, it's probably the last frontier. As you think, seeing things move from India, China, different regions of the world, the continent is clearly the last frontier for for development. And so, you know, I wouldn't, I think there was even someone who won the Ivey award, the similar award a couple years ago, and the two of them won the award. And their whole thing about the award was the development as Ivey students, they were doing in Africa, the opportunities if you wanted to make, if you wanted the quickest way to make a million, if that was important to you, or 10 million Nigeria, Africa, Kenya, yeah, South Africa, Egypt, those are the big four. The Big Four, economically, in terms of venture activity, are head and shoulders above the rest. So tremendous opportunity in Africa.
Eric Janssen
And is it taking opportunities and going there to execute on them? Is it living there and uncovering an opportunity there that you can act on like, what's what would I do there?
Ray Sharma
Yeah, the higher the risk, the higher return. So that would be the way that if you move to Legos. Yeah, that's what I would do. I'd move to Legos.
Eric Morse
The Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by quantum shift, 2008 alum, Connie Clerici and Closing the Gap Healthcare Group. To ensure you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player or visit entrepreneurship.uwo.ca/podcast. Thank you so much for listening until next time you.