This is the full transcript for Episode #317 of the Wild Business Growth podcast featuring Sasha Siddhartha – Thrive Market Co-Founder, Healthy & Sustainable Online Groceries. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
Sasha Siddhartha 0:00
Better to regret the things that you’ve done than the things you haven’t.
Max Branstetter 0:17
Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the Wild Business Growth podcast. This is your place to hear from it. I ran through that one. This is your place to hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wild ideas into Wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter, founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting, and you can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. This is episode 317 and today’s guest is Sasha Siddhartha. Sasha is the co-founder and CTO of Thrive Market Your Online place, your online place, your online place, for healthy, organic groceries delivered straight to your door. They are up to over a million and a half members. They have some incredible numbers, incredible growth behind their business. And in this episode, we talk about how they’ve scaled their business, their membership model, and that crazy code sprint that Sasha did in college designing a video game. It is Sasha. Enjoyyyyyyy the showwwwww!
Aaaaaalrightyyyyyyyy we are here with Sasha Siddhartha, Co-Founder and CTO of Thrive Market. Who is thriving. I think you guys named the company well. Sasha, so excited to speak to you today about all things Thrive Market and growing a business and food, and you know, some entrepreneurial stories beyond that as well. Sasha, thanks so much for joining. How you doing today?
Sasha Siddhartha 2:00
I’m great. Max, thanks. Thanks for having me excited to be on the on the podcast.
Max Branstetter 2:04
Yeah, yeah, of course, my pleasure. And as part of this, your team sent over some amazing goodies. So my wife, Dana, and I have been really enjoying the interview prep for this, I think, even more than usual. So, so thank you to a listen team for that, and I have to shout out the like, sweet potato, coconut oil chips. Those are really good. And then the, I don’t know if it’s cassava or cassava, the like, yuca, the cassava chips, yeah, cassava. There you go. It’s like you work for the company or something. Those are really tasty and extra crunchy as well. So anyway, before we get to Thrive Market. A little birdie told me, Sasha, that your mom was a diplomat. How did that impact your upbringing? And kind of like what you learned growing
Sasha Siddhartha 2:51
up. She was she worked for the Indian government for her whole career. I was born as a consequence in Bangkok, Thailand, back in back in the 80s, and we, you know, traveled all over the world with her. So we, as a diplomat, you get posted to a different country every three years or so. So I lived in seven different countries before I came to the west coast here for college. And I think it built a lot of adaptability. It was pretty unique childhood, and I had the experience to see a lot of pretty unique places on Earth, and spend enough time there to really immerse myself in the culture. But it also meant that I was finding kind of a new home, new relationships, finding my footing over and over again every two or three years, and I really grew to enjoy that. You know? It means that today, as as things change in my life, whether in business or my personal life, like I always see that as an as an opportunity to grow myself and experience something new. So think it hopefully set me up well for the twists and turns of life and startups and life’s an entrepreneur.
Max Branstetter 3:50
Yeah, twist and turns. That’s putting it lately. Adaptability is one thing, but seven countries back to back like that, that’s unbelievable. Like, obviously, so many pros with so many cons as well. Like, what’s something you took from that experience, from an adaptability standpoint, that you’re like, you know what? This, here’s a way to kind of immerse yourself in a new culture, a little bit more smoothly,
Sasha Siddhartha 4:10
come in with no, no assumptions or expectations, and really, really immerse yourself and kind of in a regular context, would be listen attentively, but really, kind of pay attention to all your senses, and I say approach it with positivity. I think the biggest thing that makes change hard is that people feel like they’ve left something behind and they’ve gotten attached to the past way of doing something. From a consumer experience standpoint, people hate change in the in the apps they interface with. When it comes to kind of habitual daily rituals, they hate change in in those little things as well. So I think being really open minded and approaching, approaching each new experience with the with an attitude of curiosity, I think, allowed me to make the make the most of that, and like, make most sick. It’s it’s hard. Like you miss friends when you when you leave a country, particularly when you’re a kid, but you form your relationships really quick. Quickly if you open yourself up to the new environment you’re in as well. Yeah,
Max Branstetter 5:03
no, that’s incredible advice, like keeping that open mind from from day one and a new place. You don’t have to list off all of them, but what was like a country or two from that experience that, like, you really had no idea about beforehand, and then you’re like, Wow, this was, like, actually pretty cool. I got to live here for a bit. I
Sasha Siddhartha 5:20
mean, given that I was pretty young when I went to both these places, I didn’t know a lot about most of them beforehand. So I was born in Thailand. I left there when I was two. I moved to Yugoslavia in the mid 80s. So this is why Yugoslavia is like Serbia and Croatia were still a single country. I
Max Branstetter 5:35
was gonna say that communist rule. That’s pretty cool to say that, you know, just as like a fun fact that you are part of a place that technically no longer exists under the same name. It’s
Sasha Siddhartha 5:43
wild because it was a, you know, it was such a beautiful country, and still, still is. And I’ve, you know, really fond very early childhood memories of it, you know, went through some, some real tumult, you know, the years after we left, you know, then spent some time in India, which was great, because, you know, obviously I’m ethnically Indian, and my mom is now retired in India, but I’d never, I’d never seen the country until then, in any for any extended period of time. So spent four years there. Had to pick up a couple languages on the fly, because when you study in India, you need to know the Indian languages. And I didn’t speak any of them. Going in, that was kind of an exciting experience. And then, you know, moved to the moved the Philippines, which was also an amazing experience because, you know, it’s just such a, such a warm, welcoming culture, and so, like, so different than everything else that I experienced today. Yeah, those are few of the few the highlights. What
Max Branstetter 6:34
languages in India? By the way, I have very little knowledge of Indian languages, so
Sasha Siddhartha 6:39
I learned to speak. I spoke a little bit of Tamil, which is our regional dialect as a very young child. So I’m from the very south of India. The national language in India is Hindi. And every every Indian School, even if they’re teaching in a an English medium, with English as the primary language, requires you to come in with a working knowledge of it. And I came in in second grade, where, you know the the average student has been learning this since its birth, and I knew none of it. So it was definitely, it was definitely kind of a crash course education for me to pick up and catch up. But I’m really grateful for me now I’m reasonably still fluent, even though it’s not something I use day to day, even even conversing with family. But it’s, it’s one of those things that’s really stuck
Max Branstetter 7:18
with me, crash course in languages, crash course in new countries, uh, adaptability, I think that’s something that like, if you were, if you were to create your own entrepreneur, I think adaptability would be pretty high up in agility, in terms of, like, the traits that you need, or that would be helpful when you’re starting businesses before even Thrive Market, you Know, you started multiple businesses. What is it about entrepreneurship that kind of sealed the deal for you that you knew you were going to go the entrepreneur route. I
Sasha Siddhartha 7:47
think, I mean, it’s a little bit of the I’m a product of the time I was born and the time I matured. So I graduated high school in 1999 you know, this was the 90s, or sort of the height of the first.com era. You know, I was already interested in technology, so much hype about high flying startups at the time, and this just seemed really appealing, you know, as kind of a path to build an amazing career, a path to, you know, have real ownership and kind of make one’s own mistakes and kind of chart one’s own course when I came to when I came to school and kind of talk to people who were interning and having $30,000 summers after their freshman year. It also seemed like a great sort of financial ROI at the time, which had been disabused of afterwards. So I got really interested in it, and I didn’t have the ability to study business directly, so I went to Stanford. Stanford doesn’t have an undergraduate business program, so I studied Computer Science and Economics instead, with a goal to ideally get out there and immerse myself and build build my own company as soon as possible. Few things got in the way at that point. So by the time I graduated.com, had gone from boom to bust. A whole bunch of the companies that have been showing up at job fairs early in my college career were no longer in business at all, and it’s really only large employers that were hiring. I was also here on a student visa, so at this point, it was more kind of an existential question for me as to how I could prolong my career. So I actually, you know, the first seven years of my career worked at Microsoft, so which is also a really amazing experience, because you got to learn what it takes to build a product that people really like and can be used at real scale. So I’ve written lines of software code that ran on over a billion devices at one point.
Max Branstetter 9:27
And you counted all of them, I’m sure one of the time. Yeah,
Sasha Siddhartha 9:31
it was, it was an amazing training ground. But yeah, I mean, I always, I always want to be able to be in a position to chase my own ideas and make my own mistakes. So, you know, fast forward to 2011 was around when I took the first full time leap into entrepreneurship. So the opportunity to come down from I was living in Seattle at the time, come down to Los Angeles, co found a fashion e commerce business with an old friend and colleague who had moved down here and had just kind of exited his rotation as a VC and. So you know, at the time, speaking of adaptability, like I didn’t really know that much about what it took to build a company. Certainly knew nothing about fashion and very little about e commerce. But it sort of recognized that if I didn’t take the leap at this point, like it was never gonna get easier as I just got more mature in my career, in my life, literally, like, packed my clothes into a car, drove down to LA, slept in an air mattress for a good six months, I think before I even bought getting bothered getting furniture, and we built this business together over the course three years, you know, scaled it up, raised a couple rounds of venture capital, ended up acquiring another company, ended up, you know, kind of being acquired ourselves into part of a larger, larger ecosystem of fashion business is in LA so, so many mistakes made, but an absolutely amazing experience, and I think, gave me enough training and pattern recognition that allowed me to be effective in the current role of thrive, and kind of set me up with the mindset to be able to really tackle this opportunity when it showed up, which was, you know, that was just, that was just serendipity, that, you know, right place, the right time When, when thrive, the idea of Thrive Market was being, being sort of germinated. Was right around when I was stepping off my last company and ended up meeting my co founders. The rest is history.
Max Branstetter 11:13
So first of all, I have to thank you, because that is the first use of the word germinated. I believe in wild business growth, podcast history. So thank you. You check the bingo card there. But let’s get to Thrive Market. And actually, real quick before that, it’s inspiring to know that even somebody who doesn’t know too much about fashion, hint hint myself as well, can succeed in a fashion startup. So that’s pretty cool, but Thrive Market, so you teased it a little bit. How did you meet the other co founders? And this start to turn into like, this is actually a real business idea.
Sasha Siddhartha 11:43
Gonna wind back to about 10 and a half years ago now, mid 2014, so I just rolled off, rolled off last company, and I knew I wanted to co found another business, and you had at least one more app bad in me, but you know, I’ve been doing this for three years. So had, you know, more stringent criteria in terms of where I wanted to put my time to use. I knew I wanted to work with seasoned entrepreneurs as co founders. I knew I wanted to work on a space where I could have impact. So I was definitely looking at consumer and E commerce businesses. And I knew I wanted to work in a vertical and a domain solving a problem that I was personally passionate about, which is what led me closer to the health vertical. So yeah, much as fun as it was to run a fashion business, it was not something where I was my own consumer or was passionate about selling someone their 20th handbag. But I know when I when I got introduced to Nick and our other other co founders, the mission of making healthy living, easy, affordable, accessible, just personally resonated with me and just struck me as a really, really worthy cause to pursue. None of us had really known each other a long time before we got into business together. Nick and I got connected through a mutual friend of ours who was running an accelerator in in Santa Monica called Launchpad LA at the time. So Nick had been the entrepreneur in residence there for a while, and I had met the managing director there for a few years ago when I moved down to LA so we connected, and over the course of several meetings, think just five, I think that’s a big part of it is the business had such strength that had already been established In terms of the the coalition of influencers who’d come in to invest early on. You know, if you hear Nick talk about the founding story, one of the, one of the seminal moments for us was that Nick went out and pitched a lot of traditional venture capitalists in the very early days the business, and got almost summarily rejected by all of them because, you know, these people couldn’t see the need for an alternative source when there’s a whole foods around the corner, but the health and wellness influencers saw there’s, you know, there’s a real need for this product in the, you know, the Midwest and the Southeast, in the constituencies where they couldn’t afford to shop at some of the most expensive grocery stores in the country, where they didn’t have geographic access to those grocery stores because they lived in the food desert. So they’d already established an amazing coalition of these folks who had written checks for signing up due to promote the business upon launch, the moment of the business really stood out. The strength of the business model stood out. I had some experience in like my past, business was a membership driven business as well, and I knew the favorable cash flow dynamics, but also the power of membership to create a community and to allow us to invest those membership fees directly back into consumer experience from from day one, makes such a difference in terms of the kind of experience you can create for for your customers. Combination of a, you know, what felt like a robust business model, amazing partners to to get into business with, and a a worthy cause to pursue a combination of factors was was definitely too appealing to pass up. So yeah, here I am, and
Max Branstetter 14:47
the rest is history, once again, of the like points of differentiation for Thrive Market. What would you say is one that like when you when you first either heard about or thought about it early on, you were like this? Well, for success, if we can do this really well, I think it
Sasha Siddhartha 15:03
came, it comes down to the mission and our ability to pursue it, you know, with unwavering focus. You know, there’s already a very clear plan, even in the very early days, how we were going to tackle this gap of access that existed around national, organic products. And there were, you know, really kind of three pillars. One is the barrier price. So we wanted to get National Organic products made available to people at as close to the cost of a conventional equivalent. So National Organic is typically at a 25 50% premium, which makes it unaffordable for a large percentage of people, using a curated catalog where we only buy you know, call the top 2% of products in the natural products industry, we go narrow but deep with a small, a small selection of products that are hyper curated for our members. That gives us a lot of purchasing power and the ability to really, kind of negotiate much deeper discounts. And brands pass those savings on to the consumer. The carry catalog also serves a function of reducing cognitive load for people in that, you know, if you walk into a grocery store and you look at the, you know, the peanut butter aisle or whatever, and there’s 50 SKUs on there, what do you buy? Like you could spend the entire day reading labels, our job at Thrive is to be the to do all that heavy lifting for you and allow our members to outsource their trust for us, and give them, you know, the top two to three items to select from in any given category, while still maintaining assortment that’s broad enough to cover as much of the grocery basket as possible. That was, those are two aspects. The third was eliminating the geographic barrier. There’s a lot of people who live in geographies where, you know, they’re more than 10 miles from any grocery store, let alone a natural, organic one. So the operational model that we were planning at Thrive, which involves shipping through national and regional carriers, means that we can get to every single zip code in the lower 48 so whether you’re in an urban area with tons of access in Los Angeles or New York, San Francisco, or in a deep rural community in the Midwest, the southeast, where There’s no whole food store, anywhere in sight. You know, we’re able to we’re able to access members and all those different geographies, which is reflected in our member base today. So we, we largely mirror population density. Half our members are in the Midwest and the Southeast. We span urban, suburban, rural neighborhoods. Our average household income is, it’s under $100,000 the fact that we had the emulator cast and really broad net was also something that not a lot of people were doing back then. Other companies have tried. I think we’re probably still one of the small number of of online retailers that carries the breadth of catalog that we do and truly has a national footprint in terms of where we can where we can deliver. The other piece that’s emerged more recently is this focus on data, AI personalization, and really building a shopping experience that is purpose built for healthy living. So the way I used to think about this in the past was e commerce hasn’t really changed a whole lot in the last 20 years, and in many cases, people are still shopping for groceries the way they shop for books in the 90s, and there’s a lot of power to that sort of pattern recognition, but it’s not necessarily the right model for this category. We’ve been really committed to constant innovation in terms of how people start to approach building that grocery basket AI and machine learning has been something that’s been a core focus from us, from probably the first couple years the business, we’ve always had this idea that everyone’s health journey is really unique, we want to be collecting personalization data from our members and using that to provide them the most relevant products. I think over the course last couple years, this has really come into the forefront. I don’t know if you had a chance to sign up for the Thrive Market experience recently, but the way we onboard our members is you sign up for membership and then you take a personalization questionnaire where you talk to us about your household composition, your dietary preferences, your ingredients sensitivities, your health goals, the kind of categories and brand products you like. So we build this really comprehensive 360 degree view of the member, and then we use that to actually personalize and help them build that first cart. About 90% of members are getting their first basket built using our AI. About 40% of the products they buy in that first order are directly a result of the recommendations we’re making. And this has really been a game changer for us in terms of helping people accelerate their onboarding, because it’s a bit of an overwhelming experience. Otherwise, when you hit the storefront, you’re like, What should I buy? Now? We solve that problem for you. So we’ve really, we’ve really seen that pay dividends in terms of an improved customer experience and also, obviously, driving, driving revenue and stickiness for the business.
Max Branstetter 19:30
Yeah, that’s so cool. I that, like, yeah, if anybody goes and checks out your site, like, if you go to sign up, like, right away, there’s that personalization that you can feel you’re, you’re you’re kind of like, warmly welcomed into the community there. So I think it’s brilliant. And obviously AI is becoming bigger and bigger. It makes sense. You’re using that a lot, but you’re, I mean, you’re CTO, obviously, you know, billion lines of code for Microsoft, we’ll call it that. You’re very familiar with the tech side of things. What does that look like over the past couple years? Dollars from a tech side to transform Thrive Market, to be so able and adaptable to use like aI recos and AI shopping cart, smart card and stuff like
Sasha Siddhartha 20:10
that. It really starts with people. You know, we’ve been fortunate from the very early days the business to be able to punch way above our weight class when it comes to caliber talent that we’ve been able to attract a big driver, that is how passionate people are about our mission. So it allows us to really attract and retain top talent over the entire history of the business. But certainly, I’d say over the last two to three years, we’ve been able to do up level our technical capabilities on our team by leaps and bounds. So you know, from our VP of engineering, who kind of ran engineering at Stitch Fix and we works the chief architect at eBay, to amazing leaders in the product and user experience side, such a diversity of amazing talent driving the customer experience and technology experience forward that we’re able to move so much faster. I think that’s that’s one piece. The second is a commitment to intentionally, more intentional improvement of organizational processes and efficiency. This is something that’s kind of becoming top of mind for us more recently as the team has scaled and and we actually have the resources to focus on it, but getting to the point where, you know, we now have a dedicated team focused on enabling efficiency for other technologists across the company. We’re very fortunate to be able to resource something like that, because it’s such a high leverage thing, where if we can make even small improvements in people’s workflows on a day to day basis, that remove impediments, that let developers get code to production faster, that reduce the amount of time spent on support and bug fixing and kind of production fires. It allows the team to stay really focused, stay in the zone, and be more productive and deliver more value to customers quickly. But also does a lot for just the satisfaction and retention of top talent within the team, which is also self reinforcing, because you get really great people to come on board, you create an amazing work environment for them where they can focus on being autonomous and delivering delivering value and having purpose in their work. That means they get they get better and better and better at their job with each each passing day and the business, the business and the customers reap the benefits.
Max Branstetter 22:14
So that’s like a lot of the behind the scenes, ops and logistics of making things smoother. On that logistics note, not talking about actual shipping logistics, but of the consumer facing side, a big differentiator for you is the membership model. And so I think it’s pretty unique. I mean, there are many businesses that have that, but it’s not always the first thing you think of when you think of like an online shopping type thing, like, why was membership such a big thing from the early days for Thrive Market, we
Sasha Siddhartha 22:44
think of it as a win win, and one of the best pathways, again, towards being able to achieve our mission. Membership versus subscription. To me, the membership stands more for community of shared values. So by being a member of Thrive Market, you know you you’re kind of voting with your dollars to shop at a retailer and kind of use your funds in a with a business that that aligns their values, and that’s everything from the kinds of products we carry, the quality standards we maintain, our commitments to sustainability, whether it’s zero waste fulfillment, being a public benefit corporation, being plastic neutral, having that membership construct, you know, really makes Thrive Market a part of someone’s identity, in addition to just a place that they can go shop, from a business and financial perspective, the membership is a major profit center for us, obviously, and it’s also a generator of cash flow, because we collect these membership fees up front that allows us to be really efficient with both our marketing and customer acquisition efforts, but also allows us to pass on a far greater portion of savings on the actual grocery orders to our customers compared to what we’d be able to do otherwise. There’s financial benefits to it. And last but not least, once someone opts in and makes a conscious decision to participate in the Thrive Market membership program that motivates them to get more value out of the experience of thrive. So that means higher order frequency, bigger baskets, higher satisfaction, which in turn leads to more customer savings and a better experience over the course of their year, which in turn leads to them renewing that membership and repeating this virtuous cycle over and over again. So the business has these twin value streams around the membership component and the product sales component that end up being self reinforcing or mutually reinforcing, and create this, this virtual cycle for us. So those are, I mean, those are a few of the thoughts it’s been, you know, it’s been one of those things that’s been central to our success. I think a lot of businesses over the course of particularly around when we were getting started, were ditching membership as a member of the plague because it represents an immediate, near term barrier to infinite scale, because there’s obviously somebody who does not want to sign up for that membership. But, you know, we we stuck to it, and I think we’ve been, you know, we’ve definitely been the beneficiaries of that decision, and it’s created a much, you. A much stronger, stickier business for us over the time.
Max Branstetter 25:02
Yeah, you’re not kidding. I saw some of the numbers from your business’s performance over the past year or two, and it’s just staggering. I mean, you’re like, think over the past year, it was over half a billion in sales, and over one and a half million customer like, just awesome stuff, which is probably a lot more than the one customer you started with 10 years ago, which is probably yourself and your mom now. But I guess that would be two customers.
Sasha Siddhartha 25:27
I am customer ID one, as it turns out. Oh, I knew it. I called it. Someone has to test the site.
Max Branstetter 25:35
So those are just super impressive numbers, like over the past decade, you know, basically a company’s lifetime, what would you say has been the biggest driver in actually being able to attract customers and, like, keep growing this business at such an awesome rate over time?
Sasha Siddhartha 25:48
I mean, 24 is equipped, even the numbers that you put out, this is a kind of a quick plug to the team. You know, we’re well over 1.6 at this point, million members, you know, well over $700 million in sales, and continue to scale, scale really
Max Branstetter 26:02
quickly. Congrat Hold on. Let me ask my question again with even more enthusiasm. No, just kidding. No, go ahead. I think
Sasha Siddhartha 26:11
comes down to a few things. You know, you have to have a strong value proposition to begin with. And I think over the course of the last 10 years, every department that thrive has been maniacally focused on creating as much value as possible for the member. You know, we’ve gotten objectively much better that in every area than what we started. There’s still so much headroom to grow. Because, you know, for every every success we see, we also see like 10 opportunities that make it onto next year’s next year’s planning process. So we’re certainly not rusting our laurels, but we’ve created, you know, we’ve created enough value to make this a really early attractive proposition for a lot of people from there, you know, just huge kudos to our marketing team to be able to communicate that value effectively to people and at scale. So a big focus over, you know, called the past year, year and a half, has been finding the ideal target customer and getting really focused on making sure we’re able to find out what they are, get in front of them, present them with the right message, parents and kind of wellness champion parents, as we call them, who are parents with kids of all ages, heads of household, grocery buyers, but also people who are committed to making healthier decisions, not just for themselves, but for their whole families. That’s very much our sweet spot right now, and that’s where we’ve been. We’ve been really effective, piercing through all the noise and presenting ourselves as, you know, an amazing utility, an amazing solution for people who live these really busy lives and have to make challenging decisions and balanced budgets to be able to feed their put healthy food on the table for their families, you know, we’re one of the resources that they can leverage to be able to do that. And I think that message is resonating loud and clear. So that’s been a huge portion of our ability to get out there and grow and ultimately look like it’s a huge category with 1.6 million members, we’re still one and a half percent of US households, or something like that. So that’s that’s insane to think about. Yeah, yeah. It’s a business where we have no, there’s almost no practical ceiling in our ability to grow and scale and find a find a receptive audience. But I’d say the recent, our recent and continued kind of rapid pace of growth is reflective of the team just getting better and better and sharper and sharper at presenting that value to customers in a in a telegraphic way, and then once they sign up, that’s when the rubber meets the road. We got to create a great sticky experience for them. And we’re, you know, we’ve gotten to a good level of doing that, and we’re continuing to just relentlessly pound the pavement to make things better and better every year. And
Max Branstetter 28:34
you mentioned as customer ID one, you had to do some somebody had to test the site early on. How much testing have you done since the birth of the site?
Sasha Siddhartha 28:42
I have saved 10s of 1000s of dollars, if not more shopping for groceries on thrive over the past decade. I don’t know the exact figure, but I’ve got to be up there in terms of the, at least the top decile of customers. But interestingly, like even our shopping, we order from Thrive very, very regularly. I’m probably not the top customer, or even close to it. There are, there are a lot of people out there, you know, real families, who are getting, you know, more value out of the platform than I am, which is, like, that’s the most exciting part of it. But we test a lot all the time. Well,
Max Branstetter 29:17
now I’m going to put you to the test. We’re going to switch it up a little bit, and this is a fan favorite segment called the unusual. So this certainly doesn’t have to be tied to thrive at all. It’s just a way to learn about you more as a person. You could tie to whatever you want. But pet peeves, quirks, weird talents. So let’s start with quirks. What is something just a little bit quirky, like friends, family, your team, somebody calls you out for, but it’s who you are
Sasha Siddhartha 29:44
interesting. I think one thing that definitely comes to mind that a lot of people do call me out for is I am unusually sensitive to really small details, being off, like nit picky to a fault, and it’s something that I’ve definitely. Have to kind of govern in terms of how I communicate that to other people in certainly in a work context or anywhere else
Max Branstetter 30:06
you’re gonna I’m sure you hate my eyebrow scar and my hairline, then
Sasha Siddhartha 30:12
good to go. This is more anything that I have agency over. Like, you know, good example. This is we, you know, we remodeled our house recently, and like, I’m the guy who comes in and, like, any line, like any wall, door fixture that is, like, one degree crooked, I can kind of spot it across the room. So I’ve definitely, like, driven a lot of people insane getting them to fix that. I go back and forth between whether, like, this is a strength or liability for me, you know, maybe, maybe it’s mostly what I do with the knowledge.
Max Branstetter 30:44
I think it’s both. It’s a beautiful curse. My my grandpa, Fred, he and my dad’s the same way. I’m the same way. I don’t think was ever officially diagnosed as OCD, but just kind of like perfectionism. Focus on little details like that. And, you know, we’d be sitting in a room, you know, three generations, and we’d all look up and, like, see the same painting off kilt, you know, and it’s like a fight to who’s gonna go fix it. But we started calling it emerging Fred syndrome, when you’re becoming more and more like, focusing on that. So it’s funny, you got the same, same genes as well. All right, what is a weird talent you have? Or weird talent. I call them that, but really it’s like a party trick. What’s something that like? Other than what you just said, you’re really, really good at, but it doesn’t really impact the business at all. I’m
Sasha Siddhartha 31:29
a surprisingly good cook. That’s good. That works well for the business. Yeah, that’s it. That’s it surprising, because I don’t really cook a whole lot habitually, but, you know, I take it upon myself to make rather elaborate feasts for whoever will show up on holidays and such. And it’s always, it’s always something new. You know, sort of part of my kind of explore new things and adapt. So I don’t. I rarely repeat recipes, so I take a lot of risk in terms of cranking out three courses, four courses, for a group of people that have no idea what to expect. But either everyone’s been really polite or generally, generally satisfied over the years. So
Max Branstetter 32:04
do you have any tricks for finding new recipes? Because I feel like, Dana and I are we have our staples, and then we’ll, like, come back from vacation and start cooking in it again and be like, Oh my god, we’re so sick of the same food, I
Sasha Siddhartha 32:16
think, to the point of perfectionism. Like, I’ll decide what I want to make, then I’ll go read like, three or four recipes online, and then, like, come up with my own little combination, like, suits my fancy.
Max Branstetter 32:26
Mix it together All right? And then last one pet peeves, what is something that just ticks you off a little bit? But in the grand scheme of life, it’s not a big deal. It’s
Sasha Siddhartha 32:34
interesting now that post, post pandemic, particularly now that we’re we’re all on zoom all the time. Like, I have a real, like, love hate relationship with meetings, because I do think they take a little bit more of a toll on you when you’re remote. You know, particularly large ones, where I often feel like I don’t need to be here. So my approach has been, like, keep them as small as possible. I’ve also found that, like, I’ve never on time, I instituted what actually, like, someone gave me a tip on this, which is, it’s been pretty useful. It’s just like starting every meeting five minutes late. Just having that be a norm, there’s no chance whatsoever that everyone’s gonna hit one of these things on time. So the first five minutes is just like a gray spirit for everyone. And then the meeting actually starts at five after little bit, little things there
Max Branstetter 33:19
I’ve been unintentionally doing that for a lifetime. I have the same gene of not being on time as well. It’s tough these days.
Sasha Siddhartha 33:27
Yeah, just, just Institute as a practice, and everyone’s everyone’s
Max Branstetter 33:35
happy, all right? Well, in the interest of time, let’s wrap up with some rapid fire, Q and A to give me a few minutes back. For the record, we started this five minutes app. No, I’m just going but totally random questions. You ready for it? Far away. All right, let’s get wild. What was the most shocking difference in going from Microsoft to the startup world?
Sasha Siddhartha 33:58
Just how much more you need to worry about, I think large companies do an absolutely amazing job, like putting you into a kind of putting into a slot, and getting you to the point where you can be incredibly effective and like, have no concern whatsoever for anything around you. Case in point, I probably interviewed 100 engineers over my time at Microsoft, like I never had to worry about how much a single one of them wanted to be paid. Like, all I had to figure out was, like, is this person going to be a great technical fit for my team? Are they going to collaborate well? And then, like all the rest of it became someone else’s problem. Fast forward to, like, building a team from the ground up. And it’s a it’s a whole other ball of wax, like convincing people to, you know, come on board, managing a budget, juggling like 50 other priorities simultaneously while still still trying to build great tech.
Max Branstetter 34:45
Your analogy of like being put into a slot, I got some serious shivers. Says, you ever watched the show severance? I was getting, like, severance vibes, yeah,
Sasha Siddhartha 34:55
I love that show. It’s great. Shout out my
Max Branstetter 34:58
brother Andrew, who was catching up on it. And look. Right before this interview, texted me, just finished severance season one. So good, so very exciting stuff. Anyway, what is the worst that someone’s messed up your last name because you’re also like me in the long last name club.
Sasha Siddhartha 35:16
Most people seem to get it, because I think they a lot of people have heard of the book, even if they don’t know who the character, Siddhartha is, like, they’ve heard of the book about Herman Hesse. Like, somehow they get it. They get it pretty close. So my, my legal first name is Pradyumna, which is, I was
Max Branstetter 35:32
good, yeah, I like Sasha. Yeah, that’s
Sasha Siddhartha 35:35
right. So that one gets, that one gets sort of destroyed, like, on a pretty regular basis. So I just stick to my nickname. Wait, sorry,
Max Branstetter 35:41
can you say it one more time? Oh, time? I’m going to try Pradyumna.
Sasha Siddhartha 35:47
Yeah, it’s close, but it’s a lot harder than Siddhartha.
Max Branstetter 35:51
for those just listening, Sasha just died inside when I tried to pronounce it. But anyway, thank you. Went down swinging. What is an item that you purchase on Thrive Market that has just become like a lifesaver, like a fan favorite for you and your family? So
Sasha Siddhartha 36:12
we go through like an absolutely ridiculous quantity of our our own brand, the Thrive Market brand, plantain
Max Branstetter 36:18
chips. Oh, that’s, I love plantain chips. Yeah, yeah.
Sasha Siddhartha 36:21
So we’ve got those on auto ship, and it’s like, they’re the they’re the savory ones, not sweet. We plan on consuming two bags every two weeks, and then by the time, like, day two rolls around, or something like, I’ll walk in the pantry and like, they’re guaranteed to be gone. That’s we need upper, upper, upper order, all
Max Branstetter 36:37
right, and then last one. And I’m, I’m sweating thinking about this, but I am, like, very not familiar with the coding world, so feel free to totally correct me on this. But what’s like? The longest coding sprint you’ve ever done takes
Sasha Siddhartha 36:50
me back to college, actually. So my junior year of college, I was taking a an advanced graphics class, and one of the kind of the end of semester project under quarter project was you had to code up a full like 3d video game, which, if you’re like, you know, an 18 year old nerd sounds like the best thing on earth to like, devote your time to. So there was three of us, and like, we more or less, worked for three weeks straight, probably 20 hours a day, like, no significant exaggeration, maybe 16 hours a day. Like, we slept in work, that was it, and we produced something pretty impressive. And I remember going to bed after it was done. There was like, a demo that we had to get to by, like, nude or something, and I probably fell asleep at like eight in the morning or something. And I remember, like, waking up at like four in the afternoon, and like, turned out, like, we had, like, barely, we hadn’t made the finals, or anything close to it, because, like, the the talent bar, and this was so high, the stuff that people could produce was so much better. But like, that was it still stands out as, like, you know, I kind of, like, we left it all out on the field on that one still like a fun memory all these years later. Oh,
Max Branstetter 37:58
that’s an epic, memory, and my eyes are like tired for you for looking at a screen doing that. But Sasha, thank you so much. This has been awesome. Learned a ton, and just endlessly inspired by all things Thrive Market. I know if people want to try out or even become a member, they can do so at ThriveMarket.com and you personally like, where’s the best place if anybody wants to connect with you online? Yeah. Online,
Sasha Siddhartha 38:22
I’m on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out or email me. It’s , so Yeah, happy to happy to connect and chat.
Max Branstetter 38:32
Awesome. Thank you. And then last thing, I got one more for you. Final thoughts. It could be a quote, Words To Live By. It could be, you know your favorite line of HTML. Now whatever you want send us home
Sasha Siddhartha 38:45
here sort of better regret the things that you’ve done, the things you haven’t, get out there and try stuff within reason.
Max Branstetter 38:54
Get out there and try stuff that is my tattoo. Thank you so much, Sasha for coming on the wild Business Growth podcast, sharing the awesome Thrive Market story. And thank you wild listeners for tuning in to another episode. If you want to hear more wild stories like this one, make sure to hit Follow for the wild Business Growth podcast on your favorite podcast platform, and hit Subscribe on YouTube. YouTube is @MaxBranstetter. That’s where you can catch the video versions. And you can also find us on Goodpods. And for any help with podcast production, you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter that’s every Thursday short and sweet, where podcasting meets entrepreneurship meets god awful puns, and you can sign up at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter Until next time, Let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!
