This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
Abhi: I think that’s super important, and it’s a lifelong journey: always reading, finding people’s perspectives, challenging those perspectives and challenging your own as well.
James: Hello and welcome to Graduate Theory. My guest today is an investment analyst at Folklore Ventures, and out of hours he’s a co-founder of Web3 group called DAO Under. He’s the co-founder of Brown Baddies, which is an NFT collection representing South Asian women in the metaverse, and he’s also a writer at Super Fluid, which is his tech newsletter focused on Web3 and deep tech.
Please welcome to the show, Abhi.
Abhi: Thanks, James.
James: Thanks so much for coming on the show today, man. I’m excited to dive into your experience.
Abhi’s University Experience#
James: I’m excited to explore your university experience, what happened afterwards and all the interesting things you’re working on outside your job. What did you study when you first started at Deakin University, and what was your process as you went through your degree?
Abhi: Firstly, thanks for having me. It’s an absolute privilege to be on your podcast. I’m a massive fan of your work, and it’s awesome to see what you’ll do in the future. Hopefully I can play a small part in that. I started university in 2015 with a Bachelor of Actuarial Studies. I did that for a couple of years but became bored by it. It was statistics-heavy and, even though I loved maths, always felt an arm’s length away from practical applications. I ended up dropping that and sticking with my applied finance degree, graduating in mid-2018.
While I was at uni, I ran a small tutoring company, was president of the student society, and did a few leadership things here and there. But I’d always had an entrepreneurial itch. Even from when I was a kid, I did the paper run when I was 10 or something like that, and I saved up and invested that money into Macquarie Group shares. I was always into investing and starting random side businesses.
Straight out of university, I wanted to get into startups, but in mid-2018 the Australian startup ecosystem was underdeveloped from an entry-level perspective. There were senior roles and roles for people who had been in the ecosystem for a couple of years, but it felt harder for someone coming straight from university to get in.
I went down the corporate route for a couple of years, working for Cambridge Associates with institutional investors—super funds, family offices, endowments and foundations—to structure their portfolios. These portfolios had anywhere from $100 million to about $2–3 billion in assets under management, invested across all asset classes. While I was there, I learnt much more about the funds management industry and asset management as a whole. One of my favourite parts of the role was meeting different fund managers and understanding how they saw the world.
The VC managers were always especially interesting. That’s where I met my current boss, Alec Cameron. He came to Cambridge when I’d only just started and pitched Tenacious Partners, which was the fund’s name before Folklore.
I liked what he had to say, but unfortunately we didn’t invest in the fund. That was something I disliked about the role: we’d meet many people but make few investments. They were pursuing interesting strategies, but if you tried something new and it didn’t work, you were almost penalised. Coming from an entrepreneurial background, I didn’t appreciate that mindset. I did the job for two and a half years, became disillusioned with it and left at the start of 2021.
Just before I quit, I spoke to about 30 startup founders to see if they had a role, because the startup ecosystem was now more developed and easier to enter. Before taking that route, I had interviewed with Folklore for an investment associate role. Their feedback was: you’re really enthusiastic about this, you understand VC, but you don’t have startup experience. Find a way to get it, and we’d love to have you as part of the Folklore team. That spurred me to meet these founders, talk to them and understand what I could potentially do for them.
I talked to 30 people. Some conversations were exploratory, helping me understand where I might fit in the ecosystem. Others were targeted: I really wanted to work for that particular company. One was UpsTrade, an early-stage fintech business based in Sydney. It works like cash rewards, but instead of cash back, each purchase earns shares in the business you bought from. For example, if you shop at Woolies, you get a percentage of your order back in Woolworths stock. It’s a novel way to get onto the investing ladder.
It helps people become more financially literate, which is close to my heart. Being in control of your finances is important, and I saw this as one way to help. I worked there in a wide-ranging role, doing everything from product to B2B sales. I was there for about five months when the Folklore team reached out and said, “We’ve got a more entry-level role in VC if you’re keen.” That was the investment analyst position.
I jumped at it, since working in VC had been my goal for a while. I joined in mid-June 2021 and have been part of Folklore for 10 months. We’re an early-stage VC investor that invests for the long run. Our team has about 18 people—eight investors and 10 operators.
We really love to partner with businesses early and partner with them for the long run, supporting them with whatever they need. We’ve got a portfolio of about 18 companies now and we’re looking to deploy our third fund, which is a pretty exciting time. We’ve made a fair few investments out of that recently, and I’ve been involved in that process. It’s been an awesome start to my career in VC. That’s where we are today.
James: That’s an extensive background. It was good to hear about everything you’re doing. I’ve got a lot of questions, starting broadly with the VC space.
What different strategies do VC funds have?#
James: You answered part of this already: Folklore invests at a very early stage for the long run. What alternative strategies might a VC firm have?
Abhi: There are quite a few strategies. We like to partner very early, sometimes at the ideation stage, and support entrepreneurs in their goals. Other firms operate at later stages, perhaps from Series B onwards, as later-stage or growth-equity investors.
They’ve probably got bigger fund sizes, can deploy a lot more capital, but are more risk-averse. They don’t play in the early stages where it’s a lot more risky. That’s one strategy. Another strategy is spreading your bets really wide and investing in a lot of startups. As I said, we’ve got 18 companies in our portfolio.
Our funds tend to be fairly concentrated, but we take pretty hefty bets in all of our companies. We have high conviction—these are the right companies to back. Other funds might spread their bets, invest in 30 to 50 to maybe a hundred companies in their portfolios. Those funds go for an optionality strategy.
They do a small investment at the start and then try and follow on in subsequent rounds to maintain their ownership stake or scale it up as the startup starts hitting milestones and things like that. Then some funds are just pure investment funds. They’ll just have investors in their team.
Others, like Folklore, have more of a service model and a large operations team to support startups. For example, our head of people and culture helps early-stage startups establish their HR systems and programs while also looking after our internal systems. It’s a valuable service we can give our startups.
We’ve also got a financial controller, a head of growth, and community and marketing associates. These talented specialists are there to support our portfolio companies with whatever they need, while also helping internally.
James: That’s interesting. I didn’t know about the operations side of VC firms. I thought it was mostly investing and moving on, but it’s good to hear that there’s collaboration as well.
Abhi: VC is undergoing an interesting shift towards this full-service model. People without an investing background should consider the other parts of VC that might interest them. It’s a semi-consulting style of work, because you’re working with different portfolio companies while also supporting your main company.
I think those are all really interesting roles where you get a bit of variety, but also a lot of stability that you might not find at a startup that’s continually growing. Those are all really amazing roles and they’re all super high-impact as well.
The difference startup experience makes as a VC#
James: When you applied for your current position, they said, “You don’t have startup experience. That would be helpful in this role.” Now that you have it, can you see the difference between someone with that experience and someone without it?
Abhi: It’s a good question. There’s some debate about whether startup experience makes you a better investor. I don’t know the answer, but my experience at UpsTrade has helped from an empathy perspective. I can understand the struggles an early-stage founder faces. Seeing the approaches taken to product management and B2B sales also provided insights that help when deciding whether to back a company.
For example, at UpsTrade, some sales cycles were very long because we were bringing large companies onto the platform. It gave me first-hand experience of the uphill battle a startup faces when dealing with them. They won’t simply sign a contract and help you do whatever you want. You have to sell to them for three, four or five months, and getting them over the line can be arduous. The outcome is valuable, but reaching it is tough.
When portfolio companies face the same struggle, I can suggest approaches. When looking at a new company, I can better understand the uncertainties in its business: who is the core customer, and what will the sales cycle look like? Working at a startup gave me insights that help me analyse other businesses and assist our portfolio companies or anyone else in the ecosystem.
We do office hours. People come up and say: “Hey, I’m really struggling with this.” And they’re not portfolio companies. They’re just founders out in the wild. We just like to help wherever possible. It’s come in handy a few times, which is surprising, but it was a good experience for me to go through.
Skills You Need to Be a VC in Australia#
James: That’s good to hear that it was well worth it. I think you’ve got some application out of it. I’m curious to extend that question and say: that was a really great experience. What other traits and skills do you think would really benefit someone going into VC in these kinds of roles that would be nice to have or essential perhaps?
Abhi: I think what people don’t realise is that being a VC is like a sales role. You’re prospecting for companies, you’re nurturing leads. It’s very sales-focused. You have to sell the firm that you’re working at. Whenever I’m talking to founders, we sell ourselves as really good investors.
My sales pitch is pretty similar to what I said before. We’ve got 18 companies. We love partnering with companies really early on. That’s my pitch to founders, and I think that’s a pretty compelling offering. But you have to talk to a lot of people. Not everyone will want that. It’s talking to a lot of people, and I think people in sales roles would probably do pretty well in VC. If you’ve got a bit of investing knowledge or nous, that definitely helps. I think that’s one thing that people probably miss about being in VC.
Especially if you’re not at one of the brand-name VCs, then it’s even harder to get people to come and take your money. Being a really good salesperson is super important. I think another thing that people don’t necessarily think of is probably just building a public presence and being super accessible for people to come up to you and ask you for help.
You have to be really accessible to people. And I was like: “What does that mean?” It means you’ve got to have a public presence. You’ve got to write in public, you’ve got to tweet, you’ve got to talk to people, just be at events and things like that.
It can get a bit overwhelming if you’re a private person. I was a pretty private person before all of this, but I’ve had to push that away and embrace being in public and being super accessible for literally anyone to get in contact with me and ask me stuff, or pick my brain about something, or even just approach me to brainstorm stuff. Being accessible is super important as a VC. You want to be as embedded in the ecosystem as possible. I think that’s something that can be done without being a VC as well. You can talk to people on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or wherever it is.
You can go to events, you can build your own name in the ecosystem. I think that’s something that people can get started with literally today, if they go to the next event or even if they start tweeting about stuff. To be honest, that’s a really easy, low-barrier way to get into the startup ecosystem.
Besides that, maybe more on the investing side, is just constructing your own investment thesis and thinking critically about companies—either ones that have raised or haven’t raised. Do your own digging. Use Crunchbase to find up-and-coming startups in Australia and think about: what’s going well for this business? Where could it go, and where could it fail?
It’s even better if you DM the founder and just be like: “Hey, I’d really love to chat about your business for 30 minutes.” Then you get the first-hand input, and then you can construct your own investment memo. It’s even better if you publish that publicly. If you’ve got a pretty robust memo, publish that publicly and that’s the start of your content journey as well.
I think those are a few different things that people could implement today and get started if they’re interested in becoming an analyst at a VC fund.
James: I think that’s interesting. It’s good to hear that there’s plenty of things that you can do.
James: As you said, people can get involved through content creation, Twitter, events and other avenues. You can become quite involved in the ecosystem without working at a startup, if that makes sense.
Abhi: There are many ways to get involved, so pick the ones you enjoy; those will stick over time. If you love meeting people, go to networking events, talk to people, be where founders congregate and get to know them personally and professionally. Don’t feel intimidated. Pick something that comes naturally and do it—that’s my usual advice.
James: Hopefully that makes it easier to decide what to do.
How does Abhi upskill himself as a VC#
James: How do you approach upskilling in this environment? Of all the skills you need and already have, which do you most want to improve? Do you rely on experience, or do you seek external resources as well?
Abhi: It’s a good question. As I said, VC has several skill-set verticals: community building, public presence and investment thinking. On the investment side, I love reading other people’s writing, identifying their mental models and applying them to the companies I meet. That’s important and is a lifelong journey: always reading, finding and challenging people’s perspectives, and challenging your own as well.
I think that’s super important. On the public-presence side, much of it is about doing and trialling things. I always wanted to write, and I did a lot of it for my tutoring startup at university. I wrote blog posts about HSC topics and related subjects.
But this is a different style of writing. This is my opinion on something. With Super Fluid, what I do is try to unpack complicated things. Naturally, it’s got a Web3 tilt because that’s a really big interest of mine, but there’s also some deep tech stuff.
And deep tech is something that I’m super new to, but I find really, really fascinating. I try to break down some of these really cool deep tech topics into digestible pieces for people. That’s me one, learning about something new, which fits in the investment column, but also two, writing about it, getting better clarity of thought, and then also building a public presence.
The community side—it’s me helping other founders with whatever they need or connecting different people to each other, just being present and accessible. That’s something that I’m also improving upon: how do I deliver feedback, or how can I get better at giving advice? Or where can I learn about something that would help someone else? That’s also a continuous journey. A lot of it is in reading and doing, I would say. You also need to talk to people, get their perspectives on things. There isn’t some course, I guess, that you could do, unless you did one for—let’s say if you wanted to be a better writer, you could do a course on that.
Or if you wanted to get better at Twitter, I guess there’s courses closest to that. But a lot of it is self-driven, just a lot of reading. A lot of just thinking. I’ll just sit there and think about stuff, like where could this possibly go or what logically makes sense in terms of next steps for this industry, where the tailwinds are—just doing research like that, I guess, and just thinking about it.
What is Deep Tech?#
James: I’m curious about deep tech. What is it? This is the first I’ve heard of it. How is it different, and how does it connect with those other areas?
Abhi: Deep tech is anything highly scientific or advanced. At face value, it can turn people off if they aren’t scientists themselves or particularly curious, but it’s really interesting. I’ve written about several deep-tech topics in the past, including longevity technology, which is very biomedical-specific.
Effectively, what are the technologies that are pushing people to live longer and healthier lives? That was a really interesting deep dive. Another one was just about space tech and what’s happening there. There’s more to space than just sending rockets up into space to the moon or to Mars or whatever it is. There’s different subsets. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s intricate in that realm. Another one that I’ve written about is this thing called metamaterials. They’re effectively just taking existing materials that exist today, putting them in unique structures.
And then that gives that end product unique properties. It was just different things like that, which are sometimes hard to believe, but people are attempting it and it’s something that’s really interesting to me as someone who’s really curious about this stuff. It’s fascinating to read. I read about all of this—it’s a bit like magic, I guess. But I think people get turned off by the deep tech moniker because it just sounds hard to understand. People just shut off. But for me, that’s when I start to get more interested in it, to be honest.
Where does Abhi go to learn about new technologies?#
James: That’s cool. I’m curious to know too—these trends that come up—where are the places that you go to have your finger on the pulse of the trending technologies and where the world is heading?
Abhi: That’s a good one. Honestly, it’s reading other people’s substacks, listening to podcasts, reading news articles. The metamaterials one, for example—where I found that was listening to another podcast which featured one of the founders of Lux Capital, which is a deep tech VC over in the US. His name’s Josh Wolfe, and he’s an incredibly clear thinker, really good at explaining complex concepts. He was telling me about metamaterials in a really brief two-liner. And I was like: damn, that sounds super interesting. Let me do a deep dive into that, because 99% of people don’t even know what this thing is. I may as well write about it.
One, from my perspective, I’m learning about it, but then two, I can educate other people about it. That specific article—quite a few people have come up to me and said: “That was super interesting. I had no clue that this existed.” Which is cool as a writer for people to do that. But also, for me, if I learn about something, that’s always really good.
What is Abhi’s advice for people thinking about learning in public?#
James: Definitely. I think that’s super cool. What would you say to someone that’s thinking about doing something like that—being more public in the environment, posting things that they’re learning about, reading about? I was like that back in the day, where I was on the fence. It’s risky in some sense—what are people going to think? I’m going to have to really put myself out there to do this. What advice would you give? What would you say to someone that’s in that position?
Abhi: It’s a good question. For me, I was semi-intimidated by it, but the fact that I’d done it before helped. Back then, it was in the context of building a business, which is completely different. In this case, I’m giving my opinion about things. To be honest with you, 99% of the reception has been super positive.
I doubt people will call you out on LinkedIn for your opinion. They might have a friendly debate or pose a question, but they won’t say, “You’re stupid; you’re wrong.” I have had negative feedback on one article, probably because I made the title a little clickbaity. It examined whether 10-minute grocery delivery services were sustainable and good for workers.
Some people had really biased views on that. It just opens up a can of worms and a nice, healthy debate. But to be honest with you, I think a lot of people are just happy to read what you put out, happy to learn alongside you. I think the worst thing to do is obsess over the views.
Those are always nice to have, but I think the best part about it is: if you can get something out of writing that article, that’s great. For the longevity tech one, I learnt a lot about longevity tech. I was able to distil it into a couple of thousand words, and that was me fleshing out a market landscape piece where I was like: okay, these are the different parts of the value chain. These are some interesting companies in that.
Now, if I come across a longevity tech company, I can go back to my article, look at what I was reading before. Look at if there were competitors in the space, or if these guys are doing something interesting. I’m able to come up to speed with what they’re doing a lot quicker.
It helps from that perspective, if that makes sense. I always say: do things that you like doing. If you really like writing about or talking about something, then just do that, because it will make it easier to stick to that consistent schedule. And you’re more likely to follow it through.
Abhi on DAO Under#
James: I agree with that absolutely. I think that’s really important. One of the things that you’re really into as well is Web3, and it’s a space that, like you were saying, is trending tech. Web3 is one of the main trigger points of this space, one of the main things that’s going on.
You’re also involved with DAO Under outside of work. I’d love to hear its origin story, what it is more broadly and what you see it becoming in the future.
Abhi: DAO Under started with my friend Jack and me chatting about crypto and Web3. We thought it would be awesome to do this with more people, so we reached out to 10 people who we thought would be interested.
They all said yes. We just joined this group where every Tuesday night at 8 PM, we would just talk about this stuff for an hour, two hours, something like that. We started this back in November. That snowballed and people would invite their friends or friends of friends and things like that.
We grew that group to about 50 people or so, and it was crazy. We were on Slack back then. We got to the Slack limit of 10,000 messages—got to that in two weeks’ time. It was nuts. We had 80% weekly active users or something crazy.
That was really awesome. Over Christmas, what we were thinking about was: okay, how do we scale this up beyond just our friend group or our close circles? That’s where DAO Under was born—APAC’s first Web3 community where new entrants, builders, participants can all congregate and learn from each other and build together.
Why this came about was just because all the people in our initial group were like: this is amazing because everything happens in our time zone. This is something that I’ve seen for a long time, but it didn’t fully click that this was a huge pain point until a lot of people said it to me—that everything in Web3 or crypto usually happens in the US or in Europe.
It’s always 3 AM our time. Different calls or different events, always in the US. Australia and APAC more broadly is just always left out. We were like: okay, how do we bring that experience here, in our time zone, where we don’t have to sacrifice our sleep to get involved in this stuff?
How can we help each other build our own projects without having to go to the US? That’s effectively what we’re doing. We’ve deployed three or four projects and are incubating a couple more at the moment.
Effectively, what that means is cross-pollinating teams with different talent. If an artist needs engineering talent, helping them there. If a dev needs artist talent, helping them there. We’re just building this community from the ground up. We’ve got about 250 people—260, I think—in the community.
We’ve got 350 people on our waitlist. We’ve intentionally gated it for now, but hope to open it more broadly. That’s where we are today, but we have a bigger vision. At the end of the year, we want to deliver a four-day conference called Decade Down Under. Two days would feature panel speakers and builders talking about and showcasing their projects.
The other two days would be hackathons, bringing a hacker-style, Silicon Valley vibe to Sydney. It’s a big vision, but I think we have the team and resources to achieve it.
Where does DAO Meet Community?#
James: That’s exciting. Where do you see the DAO—this decentralised autonomous organisation idea—where do you see the actual DAO side of things coming in and joining the community?
Abhi: We’ve already kicked off at that. Within our community, we’ve got this thing called pods, so we’ve got an art pod, research pod, design pod, developer pod, marketing pod and a community pod. All six of these pods, what we’ve done is instituted pod leaders that put their hand up. Effectively what the pod leaders are going to do—or what they’ve already started doing—is getting people interested in those segments working on something. For example, we’ve let the design pod take over our initial design efforts. In terms of branding guidelines, our logo, what our collateral should look like, what our merch should look like.
They’re in charge now; we’ve handed control to them. That’s the first step towards decentralisation. My core team and I have built this, but how do we distribute duties to other people, let them run with it and allow the community to build what it wants?
They’re doing that. We’ve got a developer pod working on a decentralised jobs protocol and things like that. These are just ideas that have come out from the community as well. We’ve got a long list. Our research pod wants to start writing more about gamified different advances in this space.
We’ve given them the ability to go into that. We’ve enabled them to do that by providing them the resources or connections wherever possible to go into that. That’s how we make this a bit more decentralised than it is now.
I think some centralisation is not a bad thing. Otherwise nothing will likely get done. What we’ve seen with other DAOs in the space is they’re either not really that organised or they’re lacking a larger vision. I think there is always going to be a central nucleus, but what we’re hoping is we can get the community’s input into all of that.
As much as possible, we will hand over to the community and build together. That’s the goal, but we’re still fleshing it out. The right balance between decentralisation and centralisation is a big debate in my eyes. I don’t know the answer, but we’re very conscious of it and want to operate in a distributed fashion.
Advice for people discovering Web3?#
James: That’s exciting. Let’s say someone is discovering Web3 and encountering all these communities, including yours and many others around the world. If you had to restart in Web3, which resources or subjects would you use to upskill as quickly as possible?
Abhi: There’s a really good introductory Web3 guide from another DAO called Crypto Culture Society. If we break Web3 down into verticals, there are a few places to start.
There’s NFTs, DeFi, normal tokens as three main verticals, and maybe GameFi as a fourth vertical, but that’s under NFTs. NFTs might be the easiest one for people to wrap their heads around, just because it seems a bit more tangible than the others. I think that’s an easy one, or DeFi might be another easy one.
If you go through apps like Josh’s Minke app, which I think—Josh, you had Josh on the podcast a while ago. Things like that are easy ways to get involved and understand what’s going on in the ecosystem. But I think largely it’s just jumping in headfirst.
And just reading different people’s threads, understanding who you should follow in the space, just reading different people’s writing is the easiest way to go about it. Talking to people in person as well is a really good way of learning. I think there’s only so much you can read, but if you talk to people in person or online—in Discord or wherever the community is based—I think that’s a really good way of getting involved and learning more about the space.
I think it was all about practical application. If you read about NFTs, go and buy an NFT. If you read about DeFi, get stuck into a DeFi protocol and just stake a few tokens and things like that. You just have to give it a go. It seems pretty daunting, so do it with a little bit of money.
Use an amount that can’t ruin you. That’s how I got started, probably in early 2017. I bought a little Ethereum, did some reading and read the white paper. It opened up a larger world and let me keep diving deeper down the rabbit hole.
James: That’s exciting. I like that, as Web3 matures, there are more places where people can get the lowdown and find simpler explanations than were available before.
Abhi: For sure. This space is still finding product-market fit. Despite having been around for 10 years—even longer in Bitcoin’s case—it’s still incredibly early, maturing and growing.
It’s still really early on in its journey. Certainly, I don’t know where it’s going to be in six months’ time. No one really knows. We’re all learning together. Hopefully it’s not too intimidating for someone to just come in. One of the good things I think about Web3 is everyone understands that.
Everyone’s always enthusiastic to help more people get in. Just reach out to me or someone else that you see who’s posting about Web3 or talking about it. I’m always willing to help people get involved and find where they might fit within the whole ecosystem.
Anyone in this space is always willing to help people learn, which is really awesome.
Who does Abhi look up to?#
James: Definitely. It’s nice to have that in the space for sure. I want to take this conversation to a bit more of a macro level of yourself and your career. I’m curious to hear—as someone that’s in VC and in all these different areas—are there any people that you really look up to and say: that person does something well, I really admire them for this thing? Or someone that you really want to emulate, and what would be the reason why you look up to them?
Abhi: That’s a good question. There are many people I look up to and have to thank for where I am today. One interesting example is Josh Wolfe, founder of Lux Capital. I found his writing ages ago.
When I was at university, I was fascinated by him as a person. His writing is exceptionally clear; I wish mine were even 1% as clear. The way he speaks on podcasts and in presentations is also incredible.
He’s just got a high level of clarity in his own mind. He’s also a really forward-thinking person. Some of the stuff that Lux do is just incredible. They incubate sometimes some deep tech companies, they back really amazing companies. That’s always just fascinated me.
He’s been at the forefront of all of that. He’s someone that really inspires me. Hopefully I can meet him one day, but who knows?
James: It’s nice to have people like that. It’s interesting that he’s been someone that you’ve looked up to for so long as well. That’s really cool.
Abhi’s advice for Graduates#
James: You’ve mentioned university and I’d love to wrap on a question that I ask all the guests, and you can take this wherever you’d like. Something I ask the guests is: if you had to wind back the clock to when you were just finishing uni and starting into the work world, what are things you know now that you wish you knew when you were at that stage?
Abhi: I think I’d probably experiment a lot more with my career. I think what I should have done back then is probably talk to a lot of people in the ecosystem and figure out ways to get involved. Even if it didn’t seem like I’d be able to get involved from the outside, I should have been a bit more proactive, I think.
I would also talk to people. I was daunted by how experienced everyone seemed and wondered who would talk to me. But they probably would have been kind enough to do so, and I should have tried.
I think there’s a lot more opportunities for experimentation, and I say this from a privileged point of view as well. I think some uni students are really privileged in the fact that they still live at home. They don’t have to pay rent, they don’t have to pay for food.
Those students can take riskier options in their careers. They can work at different startups for two- or three-month periods and intern at different places without worrying about securing a graduate job. But others aren’t as fortunate or privileged.
For them, it’s important to secure a graduate job initially and then use it to leverage other opportunities. Because companies are desperate for good talent, I think the following approach is becoming more accepted.
You’re able to negotiate with them your start date. Push your grad start date back six months or a year or something like that. In that time, go and experiment working for a startup, or go and experiment with doing something that you’ve always wanted to do. If that’s travelling all over the world, go and do that. If that’s starting your own business, go and do that. You’ve got a bit of security there in that grad job. You can always bring that forward. I’m fairly certain, if you just talk to people, they’re willing to help you out as much as possible.
I should probably have talked to people and experimented much earlier in my career.
James: I think that’s great advice. Having a wide range of perspectives and views will help you decide what you want to do. It’s so important.
Abhi: For sure. People are more open to it now, so why not make use of that opportunity? Talking to people and experimenting are important. If you’re unsure what you want to do, that’s the best way to discover what you don’t want and what you might want to do for the rest of your life.
Where to connect with Abhi#
James: Definitely. I think that’s so important. Thanks for sharing that today. Where can people go to find out more about yourself and what you do?
Abhi: You can find me on LinkedIn by searching my name, or on Twitter. I write Super Fluid on Substack at AbhiM.substack.com. You can find DAO Under on Twitter at @DAOUnder.
You can also find Brown Baddies on Twitter. For Folklore-related matters, you can book office hours with me on our website or email [email protected]. I’m very happy to chat with anyone who reaches out.
James: Great. We’ll have all the links to all those places wherever you’re watching or listening to this show. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. It’s been really fascinating hearing from you and the things that you’re involved with. Thanks so much for your time today.
Abhi: No worries. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.
Outro#
James: Thanks for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want to get my takeaways, the things that I learnt from this episode, please go to GraduateTheory.com/subscribe, where you can get my takeaways and all the information about each episode, straight to your inbox.
Thanks so much for listening again today, and we’re looking forward to seeing you next week.