Ritik Malhotra discusses his experience raising $105M for Savvy Wealth, including overcoming over 120 investor rejections and strategies for M&A vs. funding.
Ritik Malhotra discusses his experience raising $105M for Savvy Wealth, including overcoming over 120 investor rejections and strategies for M&A vs. funding. He also shares insights on building a strong team and vision for startup success.
You get no extra points for doing things yourself, so you might as well get all the help that you can along the way. [music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we have a a founder that has done it three times now. He's on his third time. uh and the the last two I mean very successfully so too with with quite the outcomes with the exits uh we're going to be talking about the building the scaling the way to think about fundraising what was his journey perhaps you know the first go at it you know versus how it is today given the experience also some of the inflection points and those specific days where things failed like perhaps product market fit was hitting turning around a corner as well as the importance of team building or the uh intensity and the pace when building stuff. So, brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation. And without further
ado, let's welcome our guest today, Retik Malhotra. Welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having me. Really excited for this. >> So, originally born in California, but you did move quite a bit between California, India, then coming back to California. How was life growing up for you? It it uh that's right. So initially born in California and uh what what I realized uh was that it all roads lead back went to that went back to India for a few years. My parents originally were from there. Uh and then they ended it back in the Bay Area back when I was right about turning four. So spent my entire life in California just around the Bay Area around technology. And I think that had a huge part to do with just falling in love with what technology is possible uh can make possible. So then walk us a little bit through as well being there in the 90s in California, growing up in the Bay
Area, seeing the incredible explosion of innovation. Your dad also being in tech, you know, I'm sure that those like getting those insights and experiencing that firsthand perhaps built a little bit who you are today, the entrepreneurial drive to tell us about this. >> Absolutely. So I I think all of these things come together. I think a lot of this happens when you're when you're younger and uh as a kid I just fell in love with with computers and I used to spend every free moment you know after finishing school homework playing with some friends and then coming back and spending all my time learning how I could make software on uh on a computer and this just inner curiosity of being able to do something with uh with just your hands and and your mind was actually quite quite impressive uh in in the in in seeing what that output could look like. So, putting that together, you know,
I I spent the first few years uh just learning how to make websites and putting things on the internet and uh ultimately ran a few internet businesses back when I was in elementary to middle school. Great way to learn, but also caught the entrepreneurial bug. Uh made enough money online to go help pay for college. And uh I had said at that time that you know this is so cool and so uh just just [clears throat] fulfilling for the mind that if there's a way that I could do this going forward and and make this you know my actual full-time job wouldn't that be amazing? Uh, and lo and behold, I went to to UC Berkeley for college a few years later and uh was studying the electrical engineering and computer science there. But ultimately uh ended up dropping out of school to say actually I want to go and build something and actually pursue that passion to uh to go build uh which which then gets
us into the startups. So then talk to us too because I mean you've you've also quite quite quite had the exposure to making money yourself and in fact you use that to pay for college. I guess you know having that exposure to the bay to what was going on obviously got you excited about what could be possible with building things yourself you know on the computer science you know side of things which is why you went to Berkeley. uh but walk us through your first exposure to making money yourself uh and and then going through college and and dropping out. So in in middle school kind of doing those those internet ventures I think that was the first exposure and uh there's something about just seeing the fact that you can build something and actually make some money and it ends up in at the time it was a PayPal account I think that that had received the money from whatever uh customer I was
selling to back in back for those internet ventures. And I think that just that ability to see that the the work that you do come to life was actually such a powerful driver that I said well this there must be something here. So actually even in even in college before dropping out I actually had at had um over the summer actually started a a business with a few friends that was uh less technology and a lot more on just uh it was just a tutoring business where we were teaching classes on the on the weekends. uh very profitable, really kind of worked well. And so there was this mind of just finding product market fit, whatever that product and whatever that market was uh to earn uh or earn you know dollars was actually just this loop that I really really enjoyed. Uh and then finally kind of you know going to the that first startup I think uh the the motivation was not hey how do we just
make something to make more money. the the actual joy of building something was the thing that I was seeking and ultimately when we we dropped out of school we had applied in and uh very fortunate to get into uh my combinator uh the teal fellowship program and those those moments uh you know really helped solidify that there is a pathway forward there's a level of funding there's a level of uh community that can actually help make the startup happen so that first company was born out of a personal pain point of of simply just how do we solve this personal pain point that we had and we had a hypothesis that others would have it too. dealing with uh the uh effectively a solved much more solved problem today related to cloud storage and particularly that back then a lot of data that's sat on cloud storage systems and and products was uh inaccessible to most people especially at larger
enterprises particularly because uh those the technology at the time would synchronize files and our thesis was could we actually develop a system that would instead of synchronizing files let you access the entire core corpus of data in an enterprise which uh would require a completely different technology, a different file system technology. And so that was how we had started uh building that venture and ultimately raised money, hired our friends and uh in 2014, a year before uh the IPO, we were acquired by Box uh and it made a lot of sense and we were able to to to join right before they went public uh which is you know a whole story in of itself. So tell us too about the you know the experience there with stream because it was also your your first experience too um to experiencing the full life cycle of a business and I mean it was amazing because your first company right the fact
that you were able to get it to the finish line and and and and have that acquisition from box I'm sure that that was you know quite the uh quite the experience too and and and and being able to see everything as a whole I guess how was that for you It it was um it was definitely I think the the most formative moment or formative years in the journey for me. I think the the uh starting out I think the this is just a story when I look back of uh the the classic set of trials and tribulations that I think every entrepreneur founder has to to to go through. So when we just started out it you know we we'd gotten into these incubator programs. We had a general sense of uh structure from those programs, but uh a lot of it was uh you know ideating and and building something and being completely wrong. We'd have to go talk to customers and figure out you know what are we doing wrong and just
kind of building the practice of talking to customers, building the minimal product, testing it, getting feedback was that first loop. And then uh you know fundraising was completely new and at the time you know being uh dropping out of college wasn't in vogue. It it you know being a 19-year-old kid with no actual real experience and and some product feedback and and some traction was uh was not uh made it hard to to fundraise. And I remember that first time uh we were raising and I think it was right under a million dollars um which was a lot for for any time but definitely in in back in 2011 2012 I should say uh I probably had 130 135 meetings with investors that had all been introduced uh through Y cominator or through that network. I would say 120 plus nos through that process. And ultimately that that's fine because you only need a few people to say yes in order to get the belief to
actually get…