Video Transcription
Mike Mann:
Okay, here we are again. I’m so blessed. I have my friend, Divyank Tarakia here today. And he’s the man to say the least. I’m gonna add him right this moment and we’re gonna have a little chat. Thank you.
Mike Mann:
Div. Hey, Mike. Looking sharp. Thank you, you are the man, literally. Literally, M -A -N -N. Yeah.
Divyank Turakhia:
Ha ha ha.
Mike Mann:
Looking good. Thank you that lagged.
Divyank Turakhia:
Now, I am in beautiful Dubai, and it’s really cool here.
Mike Mann:
Are you jet lagged from hanging off the edge of a jet out the window?
Divyank Turakhia:
I don’t think I’ve ever done that. I’ve come pretty close, but no, I haven’t done that.
Mike Mann:
Well, what was that video I saw on Facebook of hanging outside like a
Divyank Turakhia:
that one is called wing walking. It’s you take a biplane, you kind of put a stick on top, connect it to RNS and jump on top of the plane and do aerobatics with you on the outside. It is not unsafe. I know it looks a little crazy.
Mike Mann:
No, it is unsafe.
Divyank Turakhia:
No, no, it might look crazy, but think of it as a freelance rollercoaster ride. It’s a completely freestyle rollercoaster ride is how I would describe it. But from a safety standpoint, while it may look crazy, it’s got very, very low risk.
Mike Mann:
Well, we’re exact opposites just for the record. I’ve never been on a roller coaster before and I hate going on airplanes, which I rarely ever do. And I would never even consider going outside of an airplane.
Divyank Turakhia:
I like aviation, it’s a fun hobby of mine and everything connected with it whether you’re on the inside or whatever that flies or the outside of whatever that flies.
Mike Mann:
Well, I’ve been watching you for years online and living vicariously. Of course, I’ve met you over the years, but I don’t do these crazy adventures. So it’s awesome to watch you and some of my other friends living the life.
Divyank Turakhia:
Thank you. It’s good luck. I cannot complain. I’ve been very fortunate.
Mike Mann:
I saw online that you got your vaccine a few days ago. Did you have any side effects from that?
Divyank Turakhia:
No, just what was expected, which is, I took the Pfizer vaccine, I’ve just taken jab one, jab two is scheduled for 21 days after. When I took the jab, the pain level on where I took it at my left shoulder was like 0 .5 on 10.
Divyank Turakhia:
A couple of hours later in the night, it was maybe about 3 on 10 and in 24 hours, it was completely gone. There were no side effects and that’s kind of expected. We were told that that is essentially what you should expect to happen because that means it’s working.
Mike Mann:
So in the United States, there’s a huge number of vaccine deniers that think there’s some negativity to the vaccine.
Divyank Turakhia:
I don’t think that that is limited to the United States. I think a lot of people for a variety of reasons are concerned about the vaccine. Some of those concerns are real and some of those concerns are misinformation.
Divyank Turakhia:
I’d say the way I think of it from a logical standpoint is if you look at the number of people that have had any kind of side effects to a vaccine, whether this one or a prior one that has gone to a stage three clinical trial to what the long -term impacts, known long -term impacts of COVID are where millions of people are currently suffering from long -term impacts of COVID that haven’t gone away.
Divyank Turakhia:
The risk is a lot more of if you haven’t gotten COVID and especially if you’re at higher risk, if you have access to the vaccine, please go get it. It is a safer option for you.
Mike Mann:
And that’s what I wanted to reinforce with you here is I saw you take it online and I wanted to reinforce with everybody that it’s a good idea to get it.
Divyank Turakhia:
Look, obviously, we’ve done a lot of research. We spent a lot of time thinking about this very topic and spoken to a lot of the experts. And as soon as, and it made sense. Look, if you can get access to it, there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be taking it.
Divyank Turakhia:
In fact, you can’t try and figure out how to get access to it because it is life -changing.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, I think that’s the point. Yeah, literally saved somebody’s life. So we’re gonna segue to India, which apparently has the highest vaccine rate is vaccinated either more people or a higher percentage of people that I saw.
Mike Mann:
I just saw that a couple of days ago in the news.
Divyank Turakhia:
I don’t think India is there yet. I mean, the plan is obviously you have to vaccinate a billion plus people, so that is a very large drive that I believe the government needs to figure out how to do correctly.
Divyank Turakhia:
Just like the United States, I’m sure India also has a lot of misinformation in a lot of big spreads from WhatsApp. Some of it is spread by my dad.
Mike Mann:
He’s scared of it.
Divyank Turakhia:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, at that age, I think what happens is when you read something from a friend that sent them WhatsApp, you think it’s a friend that’s sending it to you so that level of, they haven’t fully understood what fake news is and what misinformation is.
Divyank Turakhia:
So they believe that trust that they extend to their friend extends to the information of some forward that was sent to them. And I’m trying to reeducate my dad about fake news, but it’s a long process.
Mike Mann:
so he hasn’t signed up for the vaccine.
Divyank Turakhia:
He has not yet, but I am quite certain that he’s currently in India, he’s coming to Dubai in a week and I am hopeful that I will be able to show him enough data to be able to change his mind. My mom is convinced, so I’m halfway there.
Mike Mann:
I’m betting that you succeed. You’re very convincing.
Divyank Turakhia:
I’m hoping I do. I really care about him, obviously. So I hope that I am able to do so. Because I’ve seen just by way of background, around mid -March last year, I had flown to Dubai from London when this thing was blowing up.
Divyank Turakhia:
And as part of that, when I got here, the local government here basically asked if I could help on some of the tech stuff for the COVID response. So I got very engaged and involved for several weeks looking at data and policy.
Divyank Turakhia:
So because of that, I have had access to a lot more information. And I have spent a lot more time thinking about it and talking to various experts about it to help with a lot of the policy work. That’s awesome.
Divyank Turakhia:
I didn’t realize that. And so I’ve seen a lot of numbers where a lot of people that are healthy that nothing should have happened to. A lot has happened to. And some people have gotten lucky that they have had no effects.
Divyank Turakhia:
In fact, the craziest story I heard was a couple of months ago, I was in New York. And as you know, aviation was a hobby. I was upgrading one of my aviation licenses. And my ground school instructor got COVID in March.
Divyank Turakhia:
Ended up in the hospital in New Jersey where he was checked in. Went into a coma. Was in a coma for six weeks. The Dutch word, everything is fine with him now. But that was a crazy experience for him and his family.
Divyank Turakhia:
In his case, he was declared dead twice by the doctors saying that his wife was not going to make it. Luckily, he didn’t make it. So there are lots of stories like that. And fortunately, I think all of us know at least, and statistically, I think all of us know at least one person that has passed away from COVID, if not more.
Divyank Turakhia:
And all of us know at least a handful of people that have had more than a small amount of symptoms or impact. So because of that, I’m hoping that I am able to change my dad’s mind on it.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, well, I don’t know if you’ve ever met a gentleman, Uzi Nisan, who passed away from COVID as a gentleman, I know. So a lot of people here are domainers. He’s a relatively famous domainer. I suppose his family still owns nisan .com.
Mike Mann:
That’s his name, is Uzi Nisan from Gabriel. And he owned this tiny computer company called nisan .com, whatever, a long time ago. And then Datsun changed the name of its company to Nisan. And it’s been suing him for years and years.
Mike Mann:
He actually passed away from COVID.
Divyank Turakhia:
That’s unfortunate, it’s unfortunate. But domainers have some of the coolest stories. That’s a cool story. I remember Microsoft, there was some misspelling of that where a kid had got it and that was a funny story.
Divyank Turakhia:
Now it’s, the meaning is a fun, fun industry having worked in it and many other things in tech and now also outside of tech. I’ve definitely seen that Domainers are an entrepreneurial lot. They are thinking outside the box and they’re very, very entrepreneurial.
Divyank Turakhia:
You should say we.
Mike Mann:
We, we, we, we, yeah, we. You’re the top man.
Divyank Turakhia:
I am nowhere compared to all of you guys in terms of I was, I’ve been a service provider in, whether that was on the domain registrar front or the registry front now with Radix or with Scenzo, where I was helping monetize domain names.
Divyank Turakhia:
But in terms of cooning domain names, I would basically say, hey, I’m not in the top, you know, or 200, obviously the ones that are, were highly innovative and thoughtful about how they did that business.
Divyank Turakhia:
And even though you are in an industry, sometimes, you know, you don’t, you can’t get, you can’t capitalize on every opportunity that comes your way. The goal in life, I guess, is just pick one or two opportunities, focus on them, make them bigger for yourself and unlock that potential.
Mike Mann:
You should have told me that a long time ago. Actually, you did tell me that a long time ago, but I should have listened to you all the time, I got it.
Divyank Turakhia:
at co .com, phone .com, buy domains, and like six other things that you wanted to launch that your generic domain names for. I’m like, Mike, pick one.
Mike Mann:
much harder. I should have listened to everything that you told me and what I want to do now is just go through your story. I’m going to go on mute but at the end I want you to give us advice on what everybody can do to be successful.
Divyank Turakhia:
I think the story is quite out there already. I mean, if you want me to re -hydrate it, I can try and re -hydrate a small part of it. I think, you know, the long and short of it was I started very young and I got, I didn’t grow up in a rich family and in India, you know, riches are a very relative term, or poor is a very relative term because no matter how poor you are, there might be someone who’s a lot more poor than you.
Divyank Turakhia:
So the only way to explain that was, I think, the way I think of it is when I was born, my dad just moved to Mumbai and it was my dad’s family, so four of us and my dad’s brother’s family, so four of them.
Divyank Turakhia:
So eight of us, we were living in a one bedroom apartment in Mumbai. So that was essentially the beginning of life. And then a couple of years later, we moved into our own, but at that point in time, we were six people in a two bedroom, 800 square feet apartment for all the time until I grew up and I started the businesses and each of them scaled.
Divyank Turakhia:
And I’ve built three businesses, the first one with my brother and two done on my own over the last 20 plus years. And the eventual one result was, I got to be the youngest Indian on the Forbes list in 2016.
Divyank Turakhia:
And obviously youngest is one of those things where you know that next year someone younger will be too. And I was expecting that in 2017, that didn’t happen and I stayed on and that didn’t happen for 2018 or 19.
Divyank Turakhia:
So I was the youngest Indian on the Forbes list for four years. And finally last year somebody younger came along as they always do and it was a fun, it was look, I mean, it’s been a fun journey with obviously lots and lots of learning.
Divyank Turakhia:
And I think that’s things that people need to think about. I mean, none of us grew up with it. All of us, almost all of us have potential to do extremely cool things. It’s about spending that time on focusing on what you want to specialize in.
Divyank Turakhia:
And as you keep learning within that industry segment or within whatever it is that you wanna be really good at, you will keep incrementally getting better. I mean, like in my first company, we’d started as a two people startup.
Divyank Turakhia:
It had taken me, I think six years to get to my first 100 employees. And then 12 months after I had another 100 and 12 months after I had another 200 and 12 months after another 400. So it’s a lot, no matter what you pick up, it is going to be, it’s not going to be easy the first 10 times you do it, 20 times you do it, 50 times you do it, maybe 100 times that you do it.
Divyank Turakhia:
But the more you do it, the more it becomes obvious to you and it’s much easier the next time onwards, right? So when I started my third company, which is media .matt in 2010, I already had experience of building two businesses before that, and this time around, it went a lot faster in terms of how I thought through things and how I wanted to build stuff.
Divyank Turakhia:
And I think that advantage keeps adding up for everyone. So the more you do something, the better it is. And there is a lot of people basically think about, hey, this is not the perfect time, I’m busy with five things, or I have other priorities, or I don’t have an idea.
Divyank Turakhia:
When you look back, there isn’t a single year in which certain companies that have launched haven’t been successful, which means every year, it is possible to launch a successful company. It is almost never the idea.
Divyank Turakhia:
So in 99 plus percent of the cases, it’s not the first mover that wins the market. It’s always a late mover that sees the opportunity and understands it a lot better and is able to better execute the wins.
Divyank Turakhia:
For example, Google wasn’t the first search engine. I mean, there was Al Davista, and Rob Paul, and Ask, and Yahoo, and a whole bunch of others. Facebook wasn’t the first social network. So I’d say Amazon wasn’t the only e -commerce company, a mass -market e -commerce company.
Divyank Turakhia:
Amazon was definitely not the first hosting company or cloud company. The idea is you can start in any industry vertical that is large, and as long as it is large, even though you might see a lot of competitors in it, and you might say that, oh, this thing has 600 companies, or this vertical has so many companies, how do I compete?
Divyank Turakhia:
What you need to realize is if you take a large enough space and that industry vertical has hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue being generated, there is always going to be some underserved set of customers, which even if it’s a small percentage, a small percentage of hundreds of billions of dollars is a significant amount.
Divyank Turakhia:
So you can basically get started, find underserved customers, spend time, develop products and services that they will use, and then use that as a leverage to basically jump on to be able to go mainstream and start competing with some of the more mid -sized or larger companies once you have that foothold.
Divyank Turakhia:
But you need that footing, and you’re not going to get that footing until you get started. And now is as good a time to start as any. In fact, now might be one of the best times because because of Covid, there’s so much disruption and there’s so much change, and the advantage of change is someone that is starting now has a blank slate and doesn’t need to make the changes, can directly adapt to the environment, while someone that is already big in a space, the changes are much harder for them.
Divyank Turakhia:
So a moment like this, where a huge amount of disruption is taking place worldwide, is there is a time full of opportunities where you can go and start in just about anything and figure out how to reconfigure and redo some parts of it.
Divyank Turakhia:
And it doesn’t have to be like, it doesn’t have to be 100% different than what’s being done right now, it just needs to be slightly better. And that’s where you start. And then you basically keep doing more and more of it, which gets you to an eventual situation where you find yourself to be highly successful within that space.
Mike Mann:
constant inclemental improvement is, there’s a American author who writes about that concept. It sounds like similar to what you’re talking about and a ton of focus, obviously.
Divyank Turakhia:
constant learning, right? Because essentially, the world has infinite amount and amount. There’s no way that one single human can learn. Forget everything, even like a fraction or small 0 .x percent of everything, which basically means you have to specialize.
Divyank Turakhia:
So find what you will love doing, because if you’re going to spend the next 10, 20, 50 years doing that one thing, then you better be loving it, because otherwise, you’re never going to keep learning, and you will stop learning.
Divyank Turakhia:
But the more you can not just make the incremental changes, it’s also about not do everything in the exact same form, but keep learning something more within that. Like every week, ask yourself, what did I learn this week, that I did not already know, which is exactly in my space.
Divyank Turakhia:
And if the answer was nothing, it’s not because there’s nothing to learn, because there’s always something to learn. It’s because you didn’t take the effort to find something additional to learn, and it could have been for three hours, right?
Divyank Turakhia:
I mean, like, yeah, I’m not telling you the three days to basically start learning something different or doing something different, but take three hours a week, learn one additional thing and whatever it is that you do, and that will continue to add up and compound and more compounds over yours.
Divyank Turakhia:
Again, you will find yourself in a position where you’re unbeatable.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, I mean, I can’t compete with, you know, genius computer programmers. So the way I compete is by working more hours and staying up and studying more and working harder.
Divyank Turakhia:
I’d say that you’re competing, not just, I understand that like, look, everybody has different skill sets. You don’t have to be a programmer, right? Like, there are programmers that have a natural advantage, and their advantage is the ability to program and understand stuff, and they can leverage that.
Divyank Turakhia:
There are people that are better at selling and may not know programming, and that’s your core strength. So I think it’s really important, just like you just said, you know what you’re bad at. It’s important to acknowledge that I don’t know this.
Divyank Turakhia:
And I’m really good at these things. And this is not school, life is not school, you don’t have to be good at everything. Like, you don’t have to get an A at everything. Just pick all the things that you really like doing, and double down on them and triple down on them, and take everything that you don’t want to do, and you don’t like, and you suck at, and you are not interested in, find other stuff that you can outsource that piece to, because you don’t have to do it.
Divyank Turakhia:
This, like I said, this is not school, you don’t have to be good at everything. You just find the things that you want to be really good at, and keep getting better and better and better and better.
Mike Mann:
Makes perfect sense. Would you mind if I asked you a couple of other things and I’ll let you go? With respect, I know all your companies. I mean, I’ve been watching you. And actually, I used to love hanging out with your crew.
Mike Mann:
You had Abishal, and Shimada, and Magda, and of course, Bhavan. Those are always the most fun people to hang out at when I used to go to these conferences. But I don’t actually know the difference between Skenzo, directiinmedia .net, and then how did you get the things sold?
Divyank Turakhia:
So essentially, DirectEye was just the web hosting and domain name registration company that we had started. That was the first company that me and my brother did together. Scenzo and Media .Net had nothing to do with the first business.
Divyank Turakhia:
But what happened many times is in India, because I started the first one in India, whenever they thought about me or spoke about me, they kind of basically muddled it up always as, oh, they’re DirectEye in all the other brands together.
Divyank Turakhia:
Scenzo, I started in 2005, which was a domain advertising company, like the other competitors at that point in time were domain sponsor and Google had its own AFD program, and there were a bunch of others.
Divyank Turakhia:
Where Media .Net, I started in 2010, and that’s the ad tech part of the business, which was the contextual advertising for websites. So the way I thought of it was around 2005, the only business I’d ever worked on was DirectEye, which was the domain registration, the hosting business.
Divyank Turakhia:
And I looked, I thought through it and I’m like, this is a great business, but what is my core competence? My core competence was clearly tech. I knew how to build better and cooler tech than a lot of people.
Divyank Turakhia:
I could make it more scalable, make it cheaper, make it more automated. I was very good with operational efficiencies, so figuring out how to reduce the costs and automate things to basically keep operational efficiency at the maximum.
Divyank Turakhia:
And much later I figured out that I was also good at capital allocation, but I didn’t know what that meant when I was in 2005 when I was 23. But my idea then was if I’m good at these things, especially internet tech, the largest business on the internet is online advertising, or it was mass market e -commerce, which was like your Amazon or your Sears online or your Walmart online.
Divyank Turakhia:
And between the two, between mass market e -commerce and online advertising, my thought was I know absolutely nothing about both of these industries, but I know even lesser about physical delivery of goods or physical products or physical objects as compared to just tech.
Divyank Turakhia:
Since online advertising will just be tech, even though I know nothing about it, let me start an online advertising because that is a large enough industry. I started with Schenzo because in Schenzo it was a domain advertising company, a domain parking company.
Divyank Turakhia:
The idea was I already knew and understood domains because I was selling domains as a domain registrar. So I had some of the relationships because I was a registrar. The registrars themselves have some domain traffic which expired traffic or coming soon pages, and maybe it’s not significant as compared to domainers, but it was some.
Divyank Turakhia:
And so I’m like, okay, I understand domain names. Let me pick that. So if you look at the Google AdSense story, Google, when they basically built out AdSense, AdSense was forced off, it was AdSense for domains, which was started by Oengo, which became Applied Semantics, which basically sort of do Google and it was AdSense for domains, and then they basically built AdSense for websites.
Divyank Turakhia:
So with Schenzo, I built the AdSense for domains, if you will, and that was getting my foot in the door, as far as online advertising is concerned, and Schenzo started becoming really big. In about two and a half years of running, I started Schenzo with about 10 interns, including the two that you just mentioned of the crew, Vishal and Chumta, were two of those 10 interns that I started that with in 2005, with $20 ,000.
Divyank Turakhia:
And in two and a half years was about, it was basically at about 240 million in valuation. Um, and then since that got my footing in to get me the relationships and get me to understand online advertising a lot better, uh, when I started media .net in 2010, I knew a lot more about, about online advertising.
Divyank Turakhia:
I knew exactly what I wanted to build, uh, in the contextual space. And that’s essentially how I got started with media .net. And, uh, I started media .net with about $2 million. It was the most that I’d started any business with, um, in, um, I built a beta product to be the product work well.
Divyank Turakhia:
Uh, it started getting a lot of engagement and then, uh, we were able to convince, uh, uh, Yahoo that, you know, this works well and we partnered with them for the ad sales cause I suck the ad sales.
Divyank Turakhia:
Like, I don’t know how to sell most things. Like my co -compedance is not selling, right? So, which is why, you know, when you guys sell a domain name for a really expensive price, I always scratch my head on like, I don’t know how they did it.
Divyank Turakhia:
Uh, but it’s, it’s awesome, right? So I’m not just similarly, I knew I couldn’t sell ads. So I partnered with Yahoo on that and they were great partner for that. And I basically built the deck for the contextualization and layered that in and that business started growing.
Divyank Turakhia:
And, uh, uh, there were over the year, over the six years that it took me to finally exit that piece, uh, uh, I had, uh, uh, we’d gone through, uh, a couple of sales cycles that did not work out in, and to our benefit, because, uh, in 2013, we had almost sold it for 180 million.
Divyank Turakhia:
And then in 2015, we almost sold it for 350 million. And in 2016, we sold it for 900 million. Uh, and the thing is, it’s, it’s very hard to time these things. It’s very hard to know what’s the top end of the price point or what, what the middle is or in some of it is just, you know, if the, if the sale makes sense and everybody sees the value and you can calculate the value, it makes sense.
Divyank Turakhia:
Uh, when we, um, when I did sell it in 2016, we had seven offers all around that same price point with, um, two offers from private equity shops at about 750 million, and we had five offers from, um, from other companies that are about 85900 and that’s what we closed, but here’s the more interesting part after we closed it, we, uh, for the new owners to be public in China.
Divyank Turakhia:
And it was, uh, trading at, uh, somewhere around three and a half, four billion. Uh, so it’s, um, look, as you keep building stuff, I think the, the idea is it’s, it’s hard to time these things. It’s hard to know what the right entry and exit point is, uh, in the, in my experience, having done it three times now, it is what you think is fair and what you’re happy with because you may get whatever price at some point, someone else might be willing to pay more or at some point it might be worth nothing and there’s no way for you to know that you have to figure out how you want to do this, like just like in a domain name, you might get a $300 ,000 offer for, for a name that, you know, you may not see another offer for, for the next 10 years and you basically stick to your price for a million and you might get that million or you might never be able to sell it.
Divyank Turakhia:
You might not get another offer for 10, 20 years and you don’t know that. So.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, go ahead. I’m good at doing that for small numbers, but if somebody comes up to me and says, do you want 150 million? I’m not gonna be able to say no. For 100 ,000, I might be able to say no, but.
Divyank Turakhia:
The reality was, look, some of it was luck, because the $180 million offer, I had said yes to, because of other circumstances that didn’t happen. And I got lucky and I made a whole lot more because that one didn’t happen.
Divyank Turakhia:
So sometimes, you know, things break and things don’t work, but it all works out in the end. As long as you keep working towards building something that’s long -term, building something that is sustainable, building something that you can keep adding more and more value to, the value of the underlying will keep increasing.
Divyank Turakhia:
And you can’t time the market, it never works. And you just basically keep building and you will along that path get the right options. And some people like to keep their businesses forever and never shop, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Divyank Turakhia:
In fact, if I look at the top 100 people on the folks list, most of them that are first generation are just that they’ve built one business and that’s all they’ve kept and they’ve never sold. They’ve sold parts of it, but they’ve held on to most of it.
Divyank Turakhia:
And they’ve held on to most of the value. Now, obviously for those 100, there are millions of people that basically build stuff and it didn’t work out. So you have to balance the risk for yourself and figure out what you’re going to be happy with at the end of the day, because the only person you’re accountable to is yourself.
Divyank Turakhia:
And if something makes you happier, then go do that because that’s literally all that matters in mind.
Mike Mann:
How did you find a middleman or a broker for your business? Did you have the same broker through all those transactions? No.
Divyank Turakhia:
They’re all different. So for for direct I when it’s sold, we just knew everybody in the industry. And it was a domain register and another domain register which endurance bought it and there was another domain register that was bigger and possibly the biggest right now that bid on it.
Divyank Turakhia:
And, and there were no broker for that because we just knew everybody in that space of loading them to have one. For Scenzo, we hired a banker, run a process that bank didn’t work out. And then later on, we hired another banker when we received an inbound and that banker did work out in San Francisco.
Divyank Turakhia:
So the first one was in out of New York. And the second one was we hired KPMG as our banker for Scenzo. Because they were our, they were, you know, they were finance guys. They were helping us think through some of the finance stuff.
Divyank Turakhia:
And in one of the partners was like, hey, would you be okay? We showed this to a few people. And I didn’t know he really meant that he wants to be the broker. I’m like, yeah, sure, you could talk to a few people.
Divyank Turakhia:
And essentially, they’re like, oh, and they were essentially the investment banker. That’s how they came about to be. For media network happened was we received an inbound. And when we received an inbound, we’re like, look, we’re obviously not the expert at doing this.
Divyank Turakhia:
Just like in domain names, if you don’t know enough in your domain industry, you’re very good at domain investing. But you don’t, if you don’t transact every day, then you don’t know enough about what makes sense and what doesn’t.
Divyank Turakhia:
So we’re like, look, I don’t buy and sell businesses every day. So let me find someone that does. And we, we hired Merrill Lynch, eventually, to a process. And Merrill Lynch ran a process. And at the same time, some of my founder friends, tech founder friends had said that, hey, China is a very interesting market.
Divyank Turakhia:
And all the US bankers know only BAD, which is like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. They don’t know the mid market, even though they might claim that they do. So I would recommend that treat China as a separate process and hire a mid market banker for that.
Divyank Turakhia:
And I did that on the recommendation of some friends. And so Merrill Lynch got us incredible offers from two private equity shops that we talked to very fair in the Chinese mid market banker got us five offers at even higher prices.
Divyank Turakhia:
And the reason for why do I reach them? I will send you the contact info. It’s a phone call at CBC. They’re, they’re very popular mid market forum. And, and I’m sure just like them, there are there are others.
Divyank Turakhia:
But the idea is, whenever you’re thinking of doing something, you have to do your research to figure out how to make sure that you’re getting the right and fair offer. And the only way to do that is to engage experts in just about everything.
Divyank Turakhia:
So just like in domain names, you’ll find the right domain brokers. That is, if you’re not transacting yourself, like someone that transacts as much as you do, I’m sure you use a combination of doing it yourself and using brokers where it makes sense.
Divyank Turakhia:
But, you know, as far as selling companies are concerned, for your industry, you basically look at who’s done the most amount of transactions for your sub vertical and who’s active and knows and understands that market, and then go and talk to them and go and talk to as many people because that’s the only way you will be able to do price discovery.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, I mean, COVID’s really slowed us down and then the fact that I don’t fly around a lot, but I need to step up my game and meet some people to say the least.
Divyank Turakhia:
I mean, actually, COVID has made Zoom or, you know, video conferencing, yeah, and this so much easier. So in fact, I would say that a lot of people that are harder to meet are easier to meet now like this, because there was a time where an in -person meeting was a lot more important and COVID has very quickly changed that, and that’s one of the good things that has come out of it, right?
Divyank Turakhia:
In fact, what I joke about recently is every banker’s compliance team wants to come and meet you, and now they do it over Zoom. I don’t think they’ll ever be able to go back, because no one wants to basically go to that.
Mike Mann:
especially good for you i mean i’m probably a ton of people harass you to try to meet you so
Divyank Turakhia:
I mean, look, at the end of the day, the people like, you know, obviously you and I have known each other for 15 years or so. So it’s very easy for you to reach me, but otherwise it’s hard to basically reach out to everyone that reaches out to you because it’s a lot of fun.
Divyank Turakhia:
I wish I could respond to a lot more people, but, you know, it’s hard to do that. If you look at your LinkedIn or you look at your email or you end up getting a lot more in bounds than you can possibly spend time on.
Mike Mann:
I’m sure you do. I want to wrap up with a couple quick things because I took you longer than I promised, but it was published, and you just mentioned the price you got for media .net, and then it’s also published ostensibly what your worth is.
Mike Mann:
How did you double from the sale today, according to the published report?
Divyank Turakhia:
So essentially, there are four things that I have, right? One is, so I sold three businesses. So the first one was sold for about 160. The second one was 200 plus. The third one was 900. After around 2008, I started the family office where we did a lot of very cool investments, mostly public markets.
Divyank Turakhia:
That did really well. In addition to that, the public network sort of combines me and my brother. And when I did Scenzo and I did MediaNet, my brother built two incredible businesses in Flock and Zeta.
Divyank Turakhia:
Flock’s doing really well and Zeta’s doing really well. And we also own Radix, which is doing extremely well. So you start adding all of that up. I mean, it’s really hard to pin a number out of the how these guys come up with a specific
Mike Mann:
that makes sense actually if you add all that up it gets awfully close to the published numbers
Divyank Turakhia:
I mean, you know, I think the number doesn’t really matter after the first little bit. At least if you’re in the first generation, you don’t know how to spend it.
Mike Mann:
I was just wondering what you actually did after MediaNet to keep things rolling. Now that you explained what, you know, I knew somewhat what Bovin did, makes sense now that you’ve sort of laid it out better.
Mike Mann:
And I’m gonna try to get Bovin to be my guest one time too. Sure. So the last thing I wanna ask you just is, what’s your next adventure? And if you wanna tell us anything about any business stuff, and I really appreciate so much of your time here.
Divyank Turakhia:
So in terms of next adventure, when I stepped down from running media .net, this was January 1st, 2019, I very publicly announced a two -year break. My two -year break just got done. So now I am in my planning phase where I’m gonna figure it out across the next six months as to what I want to do more of.
Divyank Turakhia:
In these six months, I’m spending a lot more time. In fact, in the two -year break, I spend a lot more time on the investment side across the next six months. Also, at the same time traveling a lot, I went to, I did, and I just very recently looked this up in Google Maps as a great tool.
Divyank Turakhia:
It gives you a lot of data as you have location on. I did 39 trips in 2019, and I did 24 trips last year in 2020. So I did a lot of traveling, a lot of fun stuff, a lot of meeting, a lot of very cool people that I would have never been able to meet had I been running an operating company.
Divyank Turakhia:
Because when you’re running an operating company, you only meet people within your industry vertical. You only meet people, like I only ever met people that were in tech or in the domain industry for most of my life.
Divyank Turakhia:
In these two years, I was able to broaden that horizon and meet a lot of people outside of tech and hear their stories, which are absolutely incredible to hear, and you can gather a lot more perspective from it.
Divyank Turakhia:
So I did a lot of that along with running the investment side, but now that I have a lot more time and I’m kind of out of my break a little bit, my goal for the next six months is spend more time looking at more and more investments.
Divyank Turakhia:
And at the same time, think about if I want to operate again in the near term and or if I want to continue just actively investing and not operate, or if I just want to extend my break by another few years.
Divyank Turakhia:
I mean, like, look, I’ve studied when I was very young and all I did was build businesses, which was a lot of fun and I have a lot of fun doing it, but I hadn’t done anything else. In the last two years, I’ve done a lot of other things in, you know, I’m liking it.
Divyank Turakhia:
So I have to figure out what I want, what I’ll have more fun doing and I’ll go do that.
Mike Mann:
And you’re gonna have your 40th birthday soon also? Well, I have a year left. A year left, okay. I know, I was trying to do the math.
Divyank Turakhia:
is coming up in in in a few days. The bigger one is about a year out.
Mike Mann:
Oh, I got you. Well, happy 39 then. Thank you. You still look very youthful to say the least.
Divyank Turakhia:
I don’t know the feeling.
Mike Mann:
All right, thank you. So I want you to be really careful when you’re like hanging off airplanes and skiing down cliffs and things like that.
Divyank Turakhia:
skiing is a lot more dangerous than hanging off airplanes or doing most of the aviation stuff, which really is very low risk.
Mike Mann:
I’m an agent of your parents. I’m, Thanks Mike. Well, thank you so much. This was an excellent session and you gave us all a lot of really interesting information and ideas that we can apply to our own lives and businesses.
Mike Mann:
And it’s a very special session and I really appreciate your time and thank you. I hope I could be helped.
Divyank Turakhia:
to anyone out there that you know finds any of this information useful and I do wish you the best and take care of it.
Mike Mann:
Thank you so much. And this is gonna be saved on YouTube for everyone. Thanks so much, Div. Talk to you soon. Take care.
