Hossein Azari shares his experience selling his first company for $100 million, offering insights into the exit process for startups.
Hossein Azari shares his experience selling his first company for $100 million, offering insights into the exit process for startups. He also discusses building his new venture in the crypto space.
look i mean as an entrepreneur you're ambitious you want to change the world tomorrow right think about like steve jobs right this this guy starts companies like gets kicked out of his own company like if you look at his journey he didn't come up with apple like iphone like overnight alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so today very exciting guest the guest that has been there has done it you know has said now he's on his second company the first one was a really nice outcome uh but i guess without further ado let's welcome our guests today hosain asari welcome to the show thank you alejandro it's great to be here so originally from iran from a place that it was very cold close to the mountains so how was how was life growing up there uh well it was cold but it was fun so uh it's uh northwest of iran around like i mean you heard about turkey it's very close to
turkey border so it was fun and um yeah and was there like anyone in your family that was an entrepreneur or in business or how did you get that incredible drive and ambition yeah pretty much everybody so so the thing is but back home uh you gotta be an entrepreneur right so you hear in some of the developing countries entrepreneurship is probably your top choice you don't have the corporate jobs or maybe you have a smaller companies that they would hire but they won't they don't hire as much so so entrepreneurship is how everybody kind of starts thinking unless you work for government which is also another alternative so my family my dad uncles they they were all uh building things from the time that i mean you know i was growing up my dad would take me to the deal rooms that they would negotiate stuff and i would just run around with the papers and stuff so uh it's i i had a lot of
exposure to that kind of life um and seeing how things are so then why harvard because obviously you know here you are you're seeing everyone you know doing their thing and they're in iran you know like making business happen and and then all of a sudden you know you decide that it's time to pack the bags and come all the way to the us and and going to harvard so so tell us about what was that journey like and and why yeah that's a great question i think there was a kind of when you look at look backward you you do do see some disconnect from entrepreneurship on surface but actually it was a lot of adventure so for like 22 year old kid who or even 18 year old kid who is like now getting to learn stuff i wanted to study in a school uh to kind of that was top tier i wanted to like see what's the rest of the world you know and then you take it to the next step and then you have basically us
as the place that you know things happen possibilities so um you really don't envision what will exactly be well what it will exactly be but uh you see a lot of opportunities and then there's a lot of respect on the institution the harvard itself that how it can train you to be part of uh you know this this greater broader community uh and country so uh it all obviously made a ton of sense as a as a gross uh period um also it was 2008 so when i arrived here so everybody was going to graduate school so and it was it was it was a good time to spend in graduate school and kind of um start looking for jobs like after the crisis was over i hear you and obviously you started looking and you definitely found something meaningful in a place called google so so why google out of all the places i mean obviously when you go to harvard you know like the the doors open you know and and and everyone
wants you know a harvard grad so how do you land in google why google yeah obviously it i was lucky and it was it is an amazing place to work and i i worked on couple of problems around machine learning and aggregating opinions and the network stuff computational economics that turns out google cared about so it was important for them on designing all the kind of the money making parts the auctions they run advertisements so and they were looking for people on those topics i was in this conference that it's called new rips it is one of the top machine learning conferences out there and i i actually had two papers in there presenting and then i met this director google director in there and she was nice enough to give me a job and it was an amazing place i learned a ton and i actually i think i got a lot of a lot of stuff done as well and you were there for a little bit i mean close to
two years and this was around the time that you decide that maybe there's something bigger for you maybe you can actually launch your own thing your own baby and this led you to really build your first company clarity money uh and and i think it will be very interesting for for the people that are listening and watching what was that transition like from you coming up with the idea to all of a sudden making that jump because you know i'm sure that when you were calling back home and speaking with your parents and telling them that you were leaving google one of the most respected companies in the world to start your own thing probably they thought you were completely crazy so how was that like yeah i mean it was tough until i told them that i'm leaving and the the moment after i did that it was like i got unchained you know it's just a lot of pressure to you know make that decision uh
and obviously a lot of uncertainty when you are part of a company like google or any other corporation as a matter of fact you have a lot of uh risks kind of taken away it was tough but at the same time there is a there was and there is still a 20 30 years out view that i kind of try to use in my decision making than like what is the next 510 event so when i was thinking and i when i still think about 20 year two years out or at that moment advertisement ad tech the way that companies like google make money uh has been really beaten to death by these guys i mean uh the the scale and like uh size of the operations and the money they make out of these really shows how much innovation has gone in there so if you are if you have aspirations to build something new uh you want to look for somewhere that not many people have explored you know that is part of uh trying to figure out a place that
you could actually actively imp be impactful so and i looked around and it was also part of my own problem that i i wanted to know how you invest your money i wanted to know i was just making some money that i got me to think that okay what do i do with this do i do i keep my google stock or do i adverse why do i invest in this do i spend like this so i didn't have a source to really like have a clear answer at least a clear view of what should i do so that kind of got me thinking how little technology has gotten into the consumer finance side there's a lot of technology in um you know hedge funds quant trading no doubt but um not much on the consumer finance side especially 2014-15 and that got me thinking maybe that's an area that i can jump in and start making impact so then so then let's talk about you know the what was that event i mean do you remember that event where all of a
sudden you said you know what i'm just gonna go at it and do this thing yeah i mean it was more like a continuous uh effort and i gave myself and people around me chances to stop me from doing it by basically i wrote a proposal i said google for example google assistant back then was the early days of it so i was like google assistant is a cool idea why not build it as a google assistant to help you with your financial decisions right and i went around and talked to enough people and to kind of get a good sense of okay if i was doing this in google and i wanted to like get this done obviously i i was just hired you know i was not like a director or a vp that has actually uh capability to take high-risk large projects so but with whatever i could i went around and like with a slow process i discovered that there is a clear project here it's not it's not a bad idea it's just there is an
inherent risk there that your google director might not like to take but as long as you have a kind of clean carved out risk that you think you can take and it's a bit that you want to take other folks don't then go take it outside so there's kind of that logical progression that helped me uh basically to first validate the idea and then say okay this is good now basically there's the risk part that i should be the person taking it yeah so then so then in this case you go at it i mean what were some of those early days like at clarity money how was that well i think there was a lot of uncertainty obviously but also something interesting was that there were many other people were trying to do similar things i remember actually at some point account there was like 13 other apps that wanted to help consumer so and it really boiled down to the technology side that we had a great team on as
well as kind of…