Ep. 534 - FAN FAVORITE | Mindvalley Co-Founder Kshitij Minglan - Fail-Proof Strategies Gen Y Leaders Really Love

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

Second in Command with Cameron Herold
Ep. 534 – FAN FAVORITE | Mindvalley Co-Founder Kshitij Minglani – Fail-Proof Strategies Gen Y Leaders Really Love
Date: December 9, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this fan-favorite episode, Cameron Herold sits down with Kshitij “Kay” Minglani, co-founder and COO of Mindvalley, the groundbreaking personal growth and education company. They delve deep into the operating principles, fail-proof strategies, and cultural blueprints that have fueled Mindvalley’s global expansion, particularly their appeal among Gen Y. Kay shares candid lessons from failures, the secrets behind Mindvalley’s cult-like culture, rapid growth tactics, alignment with co-founder Vishen Lakhiani, and the critical importance of health for leaders.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Mindvalley’s Mission and Evolution

• Company Purpose: Mindvalley aims to be the largest force in personal transformation, creating a “curriculum for the next humanity”—future-proofing human skills for 2025, 2050, and beyond.

  “We are trying to be a massive data company revolving around human emotion, human mind, human evolution from a personal transformational space.” (B, 02:29)

• Growth Path: Started with meditation courses online, pivoted in 2012-2013 after customer feedback shaped their broader personal transformation agenda.

  “We were earlier selling meditation courses online… then going on from personal transformation to health, to diet, to human mind, to leadership.” (B, 03:33)

2. Building a Distinct Culture and Attracting Gen Y Talent

• Cultural Strength:
  • Relentless focus on vision alignment and values-based recruitment.
  • Non-traditional job titles and organizational structures; flat, fluid teams.
  • Bootstrapped growth: 300 employees from 54 countries, multiple global offices.
  • “Eat your own dog food”—employees live and exemplify company programs.
• Unique Practices:
  • Roles like “Tribe Success Manager” and “Community Success Manager” replace generic customer support.
  • Employees are expected to be transformational “guinea pigs.”

  “We eat your own dog food. So we actually try and be guinea pigs for what we put out to the audience… conversations are around diet, or they’re making green smoothies…” (B, 07:57)

3. Aligning and Structuring a Hypergrowth Remote Organization

• OKRs and Psychological Safety:
  • Adopted OKRs from Google, but with a twist: aiming for a 50% failure rate to encourage true stretch and experimentation.

  “If you’re not creating 50% at the OKR that you said, you must be doing something wrong or you’ve set an easy target…” (B, 11:20)

• Freedom and Career Growth:
  • Employees have agency to move across roles, promoting growth and “stickiness.”
  • Personal OKRs added to encourage holistic development.
• De-politicizing the Company:
  • Vision-, growth-, and learning-aligned teams = less internal politics, more innovation.

4. Fail-Proof Strategies: Learning from Failure

• Embracing Failures and Pivots:
  • Launched “Omvana,” the first meditation app, but failed to move to a subscription model despite market cues. Lost early market lead to competitors.

  “The market kept telling us, you guys should be on a subscription business model... At a time we had even number one app in 37 countries and a month later we were gone.” (B, 22:17)

• Other Cautionary Tales:
  • Giving away too much free content in the sleep space undermined monetization.
  • Naming and positioning for events missed the mark due to insufficient customer exploration.
  • Lesson: Listen deeply to customers, avoid “delusional” business decisions, and balance intuition with data.

5. Fail-Proof Decision-Making & The “Non-Delusional” Mindset

• Logical Decision Making:
  • Evaluate: If we had $100M, what would we do? If resources are scarce, what’s next?

  “What is the logical next step? What would you do if money was scarce or you were running the company, or if we were starting from scratch?” (B, 28:25)

• Mantras for Leaders:
  • “If this was to live as a standalone company tomorrow, what would it look like?”
  • Emphasis on MVP (Minimally Viable Product), rapid shipping, and iteration over perfectionism.

  “We always ship, by the way. We never move our are. I think the first question you always ask is when is the shipping date and when are you going to ship?” (B, 30:56)

6. Leadership Insights and Co-founder Alignment

• Co-Founder Dynamics:
  • “Complement each other’s skillset”—Kay focuses inward on the business, Vishen outwards as the face/vision.
  • Use of military “OODA” loops—constantly updating each other on observations, orientation, decisions, and actions.

  “We don’t interrupt each other’s play field. We stick to our genius zone and pass the ball to the other person when required. And second is constant OODA loop…” (B, 17:37)

• Leadership Team Structure:
  • Weekly three-hour leadership meetings modeled after Apple.
  • Clear play fields/zones for leadership; minimizes overlap and disagreement.

  “The leadership team should have a very different play field, which means everybody should have their own genius zone.” (B, 39:56)

7. Operational Best Practices for High-Performing, Distributed Teams

• Meetings and Communication:
  • Tight scrums (e.g. 25 min for 35 people), minimal use of email—opting for Slack and face-to-face or video huddles.
  • “Genius storm” sessions for creative breakthroughs.
  • Office design encourages both open collaboration and focused work.
• Remote Work and Lifebook Integration:
  • All employees go through “Lifebook”—a personal development program—for alignment and deep connection, even remotely.

  “Every employee is mandatory to actually go to Lifebook... as part of your induction. We take you to a beautiful private resort on an island, and you get to experience Lifebook with all the new people who joined.” (B, 37:22)

8. Unique Growth Initiatives: Mindvalley University

• Annual 30-day event (“Mindvalley University”) rotates globally—deep community for families, teens, and adults, building unreplicable loyalty among users.

9. Personal Growth, Resilience, and Final Leadership Advice

• Staying Relevant:
  • Continuous learning through angel investing, regular reading (Financial Times), and new side projects.
  • Studies include specialization in turnaround management and running public companies.
• Advice to Younger Self:

  “Focus on health... when your health is bad for five years, it takes you five years to recover from it.” (B, 46:31)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Vision and Ambition
  “We are trying to create the curriculum for the next humanity… write that curriculum that will help or upskill the future workforce.” (B, 02:29)

• On Culture
  “Most people at the company live and breathe transformation, which means as they say, we eat your own dog food.” (B, 07:57)

• On Fail-Proof OKRs
  “If you’re not creating 50% at the OKR that you said, you must be doing something wrong or you’ve set an easy target.” (B, 11:20)

• On Decisive Partner Collaboration
  “We don’t interrupt each other’s play field. We stick to our genius zone and pass the ball to the other person when required.” (B, 17:37)

• On Listening to Customers & Avoiding Delusion
  “In most of the meetings that I’m part of, my idea is to look at the numbers, do a bunch of AB tests and make a non delusional decision.” (B, 24:22)

• On Minimum Viable Product
  “We always ship, by the way … The first question you always ask is: when is the shipping date and when are you going to ship?” (B, 30:56)

• On Health & Leadership
  “Focus on health... when your health is bad for five years, it takes you five years to recover from it.” (B, 46:31)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Mindvalley’s Mission & Growth Path: 02:29 – 04:48
• Culture, Team Composition, and Employee Practices: 07:17 – 10:55
• On OKRs and Fail-Proof Operations: 11:16 – 13:49
• Co-Founder Synergy & OODA Loops: 17:37 – 19:57
• Lessons from Failure (Omvana & Product Decisions): 22:09 – 25:22
• Decision-Making Frameworks & Mantras: 27:20 – 29:16
• Leadership Weekly Rhythms, Meetings, and Communication: 39:13 – 43:48
• Integration of Lifebook & Remote Work: 36:43 – 37:57
• Advice to Young Leaders: 46:31 – 47:04

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Tone

• Candid, honest, and practical—Kay is open about what works and what fails, generous in sharing trade secrets, and has a reflective, systems-focused mindset.
• Inspirational and ambitious, yet grounded—emphasizing culture, logic, learning from failures, and holistic growth both personal and professional.
• Conversational and approachable—the rapport between Cameron and Kay is light-hearted and rich with anecdotes and humor.

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For Listeners

This episode is a goldmine for leaders building high-growth, values-driven organizations—especially those wanting to inspire Gen Y, foster psychological safety, and build loyalty through both personal and operational mastery. Kay’s unfiltered stories, leadership mantras, and tactical frameworks are essential listening for any second-in-command or CEO aiming to scale smart, not just fast.

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Transcript

[A]

Just a quick note before we dive in. This is actually one of our older episodes, but we're bringing it back because it's one of the most downloaded ones we've ever released. Clearly it struck a chord with a lot of listeners and I know there's so much value packed inside. So whether you're hearing it for the first time or revisiting it, enjoy this fan favorite.

[B]

Number one is we complement each other's skill sets. So that's very important so we don't overpower each other's discussions, especially when we know it's not our forte. So we, we stick to our territory. Let's say his territory is marketing minus business. So we sort of have created our own play field which is existent in his mind and my mind as well. So that play field and that distinction is very important.

Welcome to the Second In Command podcast, produced by the COO alliance and brought to you by its founder, Cameron Herold. In the second in command podcast we talk to top COOs who share the insights, strategies and tactics that made them the chief behind the chief. And now here's your host, Cameron Herald.

[A]

K Ming Lani is with us today on the Second In Command podcast. And K is the co founder of mindvalley. He's also a serial entrepreneur and an experienced CEO who's demonstrated track record of starting and running multimillion dollar companies in IT, SaaS, educational technology and the learning space. He's extremely skilled in strategy, negotiation, fundraising growth, hacking and marketing strategy. I would also call him a level 5 leader who is kind of behind the scenes and focused on the internal operations where he has a co founder and CEO of a company that we've all heard of that is kind of very outward facing in the face of the brand.

Kay, welcome to the second grand podcast.

[B]

Thanks Cameron. Thanks for having me over. Everybody calls me K. My real name is Shit. That's what happens when you have Indian parents. But everybody calls me Kay and that's, that's perfect.

[A]

All right, so I'll call you Kay. I'll try Shortage as well, but I think I'll stick with Kay. It's going to be easier for me. So Kay, first off, I mean, I've heard of Mindvalley and I'm sure a lot of our listeners have heard of it as well. But just tell us what mindvalley is and how you've kind of branched off and grown over the years. I know that you're based right now in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia as well. So you're calling in at midnight for this. Thank you for that. But give us a little bit of a background as to mindvalley so that we understand it as well.

[B]

Mindvalley is sort of playing to create the largest company on planet Earth in the field of education and personal growth. And what we are trying to do is create the curriculum for the next humanity or next generation of humanity. So what we intend to do is write that curriculum that will help or upskill the future workforce or upskill the kind of human beings we're going to see in 2025 or 2050 and so on, so on and so forth. So constantly we talk about the human mind, the human mind evolution, talk about digital transformation, how that's going to change the nature of the work, etc. Etc. So at the core of the company, Cameron, we're trying to be a massive data company revolving around human emotion, human mind, human evolution from a personal transformational space.

[A]

Wow. Amazing. Okay, so that's a lot deeper than I think a lot of people see on the surface as well. Um, all right, so how. When did you guys get started? How did you and Vishen, the. This, your co founder? How did you guys connect and kind of give us some of the lifeline of the company?

[B]

I think the company's been in existence for a while. If you just Google search it and find the legal, legal, legal time when the company. But the. But the actual business is probably about five to six years old. And we were earlier selling meditation courses online and that's how we started. But I think the whole course probably changed in 2012, 2013, when we realized that the kind of people we teach right now, about 10 million people every year. And back then we were teaching only a few hundred thousand. And I think when your customers start to see value in what you offer and then they sort of shape the vision. And that's how we pretty much started as well, selling meditation courses and then going on from personal transformation to health to diet to human mind to leadership. And we expanded and expanded, but our goal was that we probably want to be anti choice if we were to build a School for Humanity 2.0. We can't offer them five authors or five teachers in the same space. It's our duty, our job to go out, pluck the best and say, we've done the homework for you guys and we think this is where you should be learning, learning from and the other principles you should be adapting in your life.

[A]

Got it. Okay, so it sounds like you really did listen to your customer then. I mean, you guys had created the event Years ago that I heard of Awesomeness Fest. Is that still a part of the brand or was that kind of as you were emerging from that mindfulness and meditation space into it?

[B]

That is very much part of the brand. But now we, now we've evolved quite a bit. We don't come something called Mindvalley university where over 1,000 people get together for a period of 30 days with us along with their families. Yes, that's 30 days they spend with us in a different remote city. Last year we did that in Estonia. And going back to what you were saying is. Yes, I think for us customer and handholding a customer through the journey is very important. So most of the teams in Mindvalley are non traditional which means you would see customer success in typical companies or customer support. And there are different versions of that title that floats around like Chief Happiness Officer. We don't have those titles because we think companies and human users and human beings that are bold. So we have something called a success manager or a tribe success manager or community success manager. So their job is to handhold a single user through their transformational journey and then there are accountable partners and then the tried sort of becomes sticky because they find these connections that they crave. And I think the number one thing that human beings crave for is human connection. Any which base.

[A]

So you guys have gone with non traditional titles in the organization. Do you have a traditional org chart still?

[B]

I think that thing evolves every now and then because the company and the nature keep changes. We are actually in a hyper growth phase. This Q1 to last Q1 we grew 140%.

And so when you are changing at that kind of pace, any ARC structure that you put together is not going to be relevant the next one. But we give people the freedom to move around and change with the organization because I think that's very, very important because ultimately they will one day leave you and build their own career. So you got to let them have that freedom to be able to build their career in the best possible fashion.

[A]

It's interesting. So you guys have actually done, I think a pretty extraordinary job at corralling and attracting Gen Y to work with you. And you work in multiple countries, multiple cities. How many total employees approximately do you have now? Just so we can understand the scope of that as well?

[B]

Cameron? We have about 300 employees that work for us and they come from 54 different countries. We now have offices across us, across Estonia, across Kuala Lumpur and we are fully bootstrapped.

[A]

Yeah, it's unbelievable. I actually met A couple of your people. One named Jason, who was working at a bank, Vancouver at one point, but I think he's now over in KL with you as well. Looks like he's. He's moonlighting as a fitness model. He's in unbelievable shape. Yeah.

[B]

And then I met.

[A]

I met another guy at a ted, a TED conference over here, Amir, I think, who was part of Mind Valley or Mind Valley. Where was he in the Arabic area?

[B]

Yeah, he started mindvalley. Arabic for us by Sharp. Brilliant, brilliant author. Wrote the book on Islam. Yeah, yeah. Most people at the company live and breathe transformation, which means as we, as they say, we eat. Eat your own dog food. So we actually try and be guinea pigs to what we put out to the audience. And there was a time when 150 of us were running this part and race together. At any given time, a third of the companies is either on one or the other programs, either on wildfits or their coffee conversations or water cooler conversations are around diet or they're making green smoothies, or they're talking about how do we avoid sugar consumption, or they're talking about fitness or how do you keep up the core strength, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's what we try and live well.

[A]

And this, I think is key to understand your growth. I've always believed that, and it's become a popular phrase, but culture trumps strategy and culture eats strategy for breakfast. I've always said culture is critical. I've always said it's more important to build slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion, you know, in that of a cult. And yes, you guys have done an unbelievable job at that. And I think if you were, if you were based in North America with 300 employees, we would all know of you as a household word in the normal business media. What are you doing? What's working in the culture side? How are you attracting all these amazing people? How do you align them? Like this should be an MBA at Harvard.

[B]

Yeah, I think, I mean, I just finished my, my, my B school, so. Not that I learned anything from it because I was studying.

[A]

Doubtful.

[B]

Yeah, I know, but I mean, you take human connections and that's pretty much it. But I think what's working for us is a couple of things. One is a really strong, strong vision, alignment with most people's. Most people who actually apply for a job at our place. Our career page does not top traditional job descriptions. It talks values and what's expected of you and what are you likely to learn and what are you likely to contribute? And that attracts a very different kind of audience. And I think we make the recruitment process designer in a way where a person is either filling up an online application and putting up a video out there, then goes through a bunch of interviews where a whole series of strategic interviews are placed in picture so that we get to evaluate the person the best possible way. Is the person aligned with the vision? Is he a culture fit? Is he likely to contribute and take back and give back at the same time? How likely is he to grow within the company and outside the company? So I think that's what is working for us. And that in a nutshell, results in growth because everybody is aligned, they are big time interpersonal growth. They are aligned with the vision. Politics take a complete backseat and that creates a very healthy atmosphere in the company that you want to come to work every single day.

[A]

Okay, you just said something that I think is really intriguing to me and that was that politics take a complete back seat. What do you. I mean, I understand what you mean by that. How do you foster that? Is it just by hiring people that aren't political or. Because once you get past around 100 employees, that's when politics tend to creep into a company. How are you avoiding that?

[B]

I actually think it's also the way.

Most teams run, which is every team in the company. Cameron is driven around an okr and that's a concept from Google and Dora started the concept as well. And we see several versions of that concept evolved. But an OKR essentially is a high objective, which is a version of BHAG, but we allow for a 50% failure rate, which means if you're not creating 50% at the OKR that you said you must be doing something wrong or you've set an easy target, which anybody could do it in which ways? So I think that it starts from there and then it trickles down to several strategic meetings and not overburdening an employer or team with the meeting. So everybody gets their space to contribute and figure out and learn how could they achieve their okr. Let's take an example. We set an OKR to enter government schools and companies at the same time, which was completely new for us. And we set this OKR about a year ago and today we, in about a year's time, we've done a massive program with Finland. We've done, we've been in live with several large companies including Intel, PwC, Google, and just this morning we did a massive training with 700 of Malaysian government employees. Who are ultimately going to be taking minorly programs and are going to be on our digital mentoring program. So I think once you set an okr, the team figures out a way to achieve it and that creates a very healthy competition. So if you have a viewpoint, a better viewpoint to achieve that okr, you. And if I do, I win. But the idea is the team as a collective, as a whole unit goes out and achieves that okr.

[A]

That's amazing. And I love the whole. Like you're okay with. Not only are you okay with failure, but you're actually kind of encouraging. It does that. Is that because you're just encouraging people to stretch more?

[B]

No, I think it also relieves the pressure.

In a silly way that look, we are not. If we set our target, let's go, we're going to do 100 million this year. That's not going to happen. Let's be realistic. Who the hell are we kidding?

[A]

Right? Right.

[B]

But, but it also tells you figures out a way, hey, if we want to do 100 million, what would we do differently? And that dialog shift is very important. And that's why this year probably will end up with a 55, 60% year on year growth as a whole, which a company our size, it's, it's very hard to see in most companies because your area bootstrap. So we are literally reliant on looking at gross margin percentages, looking at free cash flow very carefully and actually turning that back in. Back in, back in, back in. So the investment is really, really important as well.

[A]

Sorry, did you say investment becomes important?

[B]

Reinvestment of the cash that you're making.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Becomes really important. So if, let's say you set an okr, which is really, really difficult out there and you're going to figure out the best way to get there because the cash is right dear to you. You're not sitting on piles of VC money that you can blow an experiment in. Hey, oops. I spent 10 million and burnt an R and D that didn't go anywhere. You don't have that luxury. So you pick your battles carefully.

[A]

Go ahead.

[B]

No, no, please go ahead.

[A]

No, I was thinking when we built 1, 800 got junk, we went six consecutive years of 100% revenue growth, which was super fast, but also really, really hard to manage that growth when we went from 14 employees to 3,3000 employees in six years. But you're starting that same trajectory or in the middle of that trajectory. And the one thing that we encountered was it's very hard for the Mid level people to go through either two doubles in revenue or doubles in size or to go through one triple. How do you, how do you help grow people and keep people. I know that you said you're okay with losing people and letting them go off and do their own thing at some point, but how do you, how do you continue to grow your people, grow their skill set and their capacity as the company is changing so rapidly? Like the company today is extremely different than it was two years ago.

[B]

I might say a few things that might sound really silly, but I think has worked at least in my team and other companies that I've run is I actually run the company looking outward. So I'm assuming that somebody in the next door, especially you're in Southeast Asia, so everybody's working on a different tech problem anyways. So I assume that the person sitting next door is already building something similar. Right. And we watch competition really, really carefully. So we always, always have an outward approach to running the company. And that's what we instill in every single employee. Which means if you are running the tech team or mobile team, you're probably reviewing the apps every single day. You're constantly learning. Right. And we've never stopped an employee from going out there and participating in external forums. In fact, you knew a while ago you mentioned Amir as an example. He's a perfect example. Had the will to go back to his own country and say enough is enough. I want to start Mind daily here and change people's health and their mindset. And he did so, came out and gave a bunch of TED talks and wrote a book about it. And few of the employees got together and started our Estonia office. A few of the employees took on a tech challenge, organized a 24 hour hackathon, pulled in teams from Google and created a solution that now powers our AI part of it or our corporate learning part of it. So I think that environment is very addictive and it spreads in a different way. And I think.

When personal growth is an overarching theme, Cameron, everybody wants to evolve and actually look at their rate of self evolution.

[A]

Yeah. So it's all self driven learning then as well, isn't it?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

All right, you talked about alignment with Vision. So you and, and Vishen were the co founders of mindvalley years ago together.

[B]

Vision actually started it. I joined him a bunch of years later. So Vision is actually the founder.

[A]

Okay, so then, so how, how do you and he stay on the same page? Would be question number one and question number two, you're also Quite entrepreneurial as I was. As a COO or second in command, co founder. How do you get aligned with his vision? How does he get aligned with your vision? How do you kind of stay in sync with plans? How do you guys stay as that two in a box? Because as you mentioned to me offline, you're very kind of inward facing in the company and Vishen is really kind of the outward face of the company. How do you guys do such an amazing job at staying completely aligned like you are?

[B]

Yeah, I think two or three things there, Cameron. Number one is we complement each other's skill set. So that's very important. So we don't overpower each other's discussions, especially when we know it's not our forte. So we stick to our territory. Let's say his territory is marketing minus business. So we sort of have created our own play field which is existent in his mind and my mind as well. So that play field and that distinction is very important. Second is the concept of huda, which means we are always in constant HUDA loop, which means at the end of the day we would send each other a voice Note or a WhatsApp text, just sharing what happened or making quick bullet point decisions. Because we have done that for many years, it now is second nature to us. Number one is we don't interrupt each other's play field. We stick to our genius zone and pass the ball to the other person when required. And second is constant OODA loop, which means we are constantly sharing text at the end of the day or early morning and we have those constant touch points even if both of us are traveling.

[A]

Okay, so how do you spell that? Ooda. Is it A, U, D, A or. I don't think it is.

[B]

Ooda. O O, D A O, O, D A. Yeah, it's actually a concept from, from the Army. Army guys. And that's how they started it. If you study the history of it, it's actually pretty fascinating.

[A]

Okay, and, and so, so walk us through this again. So OODA is just constantly updating each other on your successes or making decisions. Is it just staying in sync? What does it mean?

[B]

Is like a cycle that basically means observe, orient, decide and act. Right? Yeah. So which basically means we are constantly observing what's happening in the company. Let's say I look at revenue almost every single hour. So I'm a numbers guy, I'm a finance guy and he's a marketing guy. So he's also looking at what's converting, what's not converting. And we are Always deciding in a very crisp, clear manner. Which means even if the decision is not going to make us cash in the short term, we're totally fine by it.

We've constantly figured out that loop between us and certain things will go unsaid because after following that trend for such a long time, some of the things are always assumed.

[A]

Yeah, that's part of your secret sauce for sure. I've heard of the military or I think is the Air Force uses an acronym or plates. Plan, brief, execute, debrief. Very, very similar. So observe, orient, decide and act. Yeah, very cool. I love it.

Hey, it's Cameron Herold, your high energy leadership guru, here to pump you up on the Second Command podcast. If you get frustrated because your managers aren't leading like you want them to be, check out my game changing leadership [e-mail] that's investinyourleaders.com for just 347 per leader you get 30 years. My proven experience straight from taking 1,800 got junk from 2 million to 106 million as COO and it's packed with 12 easy modules. Learn situational leadership coaching, delegation, conflict management and more all in under six [e-mail] with straight to the point videos, worksheets and real life scenarios. Your team will master time management, be able to hire a players and get aligned with your vision. It's all backed by a 30 day money back guarantee and raved about by hundreds of CEOs and thousands of managers already learning from the content. Grab this now and watch your business soar.

All right, so tell us about some of the early, early decision points or the early insights. It sounds like you really listened to your customers and your tribe on where they wanted you to pivot, is that right?

[B]

It is, it is. It is actually very deep, deep part of it. But is there a second part to that question, Cameron?

[A]

Yeah. So what, what was it that they were saying? And then how did the transition happen from going from that mindfulness meditation, which is actually when I first heard about you and I was like, God, I wish I could align with them but they're just so not in my space. And then all of a sudden I'm looking around, I God, you're exactly in my space. It was, it's like the brand was so strong and you pivoted so perfectly. So, so what did you hear? What were you listening to? And then how did it go making those pivots? I'd love to learn some of the lessons from that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's a big question. I wish we had a cup of coffee in an hour to chat about it, but I do.

[A]

I got one.

[B]

It's nine if I have one. I'm not going to sleep for sure. So. No. But I think, I think a few things that come. Come naturally and we are nowhere, by no means perfect at it. We've had our fair shares of failure. Rather we failed gloriously at times. In fact, I'll give you an example of when we did not listen to a customer. We actually launched an app a couple of years ago by the name Omvana, and that was the first meditation app. And the only competitor at the time we had was Headspace. And the market kept telling to us, you guys should be on a subscription business model. That's the future. We were like, why would somebody pay $10 when they could just meditate to a song or a track and just pay $2 to us? So we just stayed away from it. We did not listen to market at all. Oh, wow. At a time we had even number one app in 37 countries and a month later we were gone. And 2015 was a time when plethora of meditation that came by and obviously we didn't pivot early. So that's a classic example of, of not listening to the market and customer. And now we're trying to revive that and rebuild that app. And in fact, in 20 days we'll launch it again. But we don't know. I think we've missed the wind any which way. So that's one lesson that we learned. And second is while you're listening to the customers, don't make delusional business decisions, which means don't go out and start giving away a ton of free goodies and so nobody converts and so on and so forth. We've made that mistake as well. We had an offering in the sleep space which hit number two. We were very popular with Apple, worked closely with them, but our mistake was we were giving away just way too much. So nobody came on the paid section and never bought anything. So in spite of the fact that we were getting quarter of a million downloads in any given week, we were just not listening to the customers. What kind of stuff would they pay for, what they would not pay for? And the third mistake we probably made was around naming our subscription program on the event side of things. Had we spoken to a few customers in a detailed way as to what sort of an experience would they want as opposed to just deciding for them? Because sometimes, you know, and everybody tries to take this example saying hey, Steve Jobs used to say don't listen to customers or listen to them in a way that you tell them what you can push and how far you can push the boundaries. So we tried doing that and I think it was sort of a decision that we went back and forth and probably wasted six to eight months on the naming and on the pricing and the offering and the outer structure of the offering. So yeah, I think we try and listen to the customers but the key outside is also look at the market, where it's going, also look at what's happening in the VC circle, what sort of companies are coming about, what business models are they following and just make a non delusional decision. I think that's probably the key. So in most of the meetings that I'm part of, my idea is to look at the numbers, do a bunch of A B tests and make a non delusional decision. Which, which is, which probably will stick around.

[A]

Yeah. Okay, I'm going to go back to this non delusional question in a second, but I just wanted to comment on what you were talking about with listening to the customer. Thank you. By the way, those are three massive insights and lessons that you guys learned from, from some of the struggles over the, over the years, which is huge. I remember Umvana, that was really when I think I'd tried to figure out a way to even, even work with you guys and it was just so completely disconnected. But I loved what you're doing and I was the same. I actually remember listening to a few of them and thinking they were really good. And then all of a sudden it was gone and I was. And I think I'm still paying for headspace and I don't use it, which is insanity.

So I learned something years ago and I grew up in Canada and you know, we had celebrated Christmas over here and we had, you know, as children, as like five, six year old kids, you would write a letter to Santa and you'd write a letter, you know, three weeks before or a month before Christmas my parents would make us write a letter and I always thought it was really stupid and we had to write a letter and tell them how good we'd been all year and then all of the things, the gifts that we wanted for Christmas and then we would put the letter in an envelope and our mom would say, okay, I'll mail it on the way to work. Well, they never mailed that letter on the way to work. They opened the letter up and they looked at all the things we'd written down on the list and they bought us a couple of those gifts and we're like, whoa, Santa knows exactly what I want. And I think that's kind of like listening to our customers, right? If we just ask our customers what they want, they'll tell us. And if we, as you said, make, don't make those non delusional decisions and give them what they're looking for, they'll, they'll pay us for it. So how do you avoid, oh gosh, I wanna, how do you avoid the non delusional decisions and how do you still stretch and grow amazing companies and big brands like you guys are doing?

Or I guess what's a non delusional decision versus a non delusional dream? You know, like is, is putting, is putting people on Mars a non delusional decision or is that just a huge, massive bhag?

[B]

Yeah. Firstly, on a lighter note, when you grow up, when you grow up in India, you don't, you don't have, it's not snowing out there neither. You do you follow Christmas, so you don't write letters to Santa. You just sit in bed, order a burger and watch Home Alone.

And that's what you do year after year after year. But coming back to what you were asking, I actually don't know what a perfect answer is. But I think when you probably burn a few startups to the ground, you probably learn from those mistakes. And logic sort of takes a trump over sometimes even strategy. And.

I think most entrepreneurs even, I'm pretty sure, including you, and you would end up saying, hey, that's my intuition. My intuition says that my gut says. That's actually not your gut saying or intuition saying. But over the years you've had those, you've burnt your fingers a few times to be able to say that's the right path, that's the logical path and that's the wrong path.

I don't have a perfect answer. I'm sorry. But I think.

I always think in my meeting, I always say in the meeting, what is the logical next step? What would you do if money was scarce or you were running the company, or if we were starting from scratch, would we make decisions?

[A]

And did you say if money was scarce?

[B]

Yes, money was scarce. That's the truth. Because I think business go up and down no matter how successful you are. You could be a GE one day and next day you are raking the company up and selling it up.

[A]

You seem to speak a lot, Kay, in kind of mantras or Themes like saying things like, if we had $100 million, what would we do differently? And if money was scarce, how would we make decisions? Or is that part of your magic as well in speaking in those kind of statements? I would imagine that you repeat those things often and that your employees see those as themes or guidelines.

[B]

Yeah, I think the senior employees would catch onto it. And that's what you want. You don't want that to be a mantra across the organization. But as long as your top management and your leadership team or senior managers involved.

I'll give you another example. One question that's one of my favorite questions to ask is if, if this was, let's say, if you're running a project within the company, let's say you're launching a subscription product which is a subset of a company, and if your question that you ask is, if this was to live as a standalone company tomorrow, what would it look like? Or if this project was to be a standalone company, what would it look like? And the second question you ask is, if somebody on the street gave you $5 million, what are you going to do with it? So then you are now thinking scale as well as you're thinking startup mentality. So you're thinking both sides of the coin. And that's exactly how, at least I, I like to drive projects. Which means MVP is, is the key word. You know, you are always thinking, can this be a standalone company? Can this be big enough that somebody will give you a $500 check? And you're always at the back, back of the mind, assuming that somebody is, somebody next door is already building it.

[A]

So, so that you just mentioned, mvp, which, that acronym, a minimum viable product where they're talking about launch.

How do you, how do you guys protect against.

When we're hiring really smart people and they want to develop perfect, you know, they want the perfect app or the perfect marketing piece and, and perfection just seems to take forever. How do you push or, or what do you do in that sense? Do you, do you have them push for perfect or do you try to get them to go out with the minimum viable everything or.

[B]

Well, I think we, we always ship, by the way. We never, we never move our are. I think the first question you always ask is when is the shipping date and when are you going to ship? And that's, that's exactly when you try and ship. And I think that has worked for us. And that has also not worked for us because some people, yes, you're right. Going to their own Perfection street and they they keep it on the same email copy or the same web design and keep tweaking the images, but it has, it has no impact whatsoever. And that's why we do these small huddles in the group called the, called the revenue Task Force. Or you make a health check or revenue health check, and you get to question some of these decisions. And. And then the employees automatically understand when everybody else is shipping, why am I not. If any other team is making money, why is my product sitting on the shelf? So we try and still instill that mentality. I don't know if it's. It's good or bad, but I don't. I don't know.

[A]

But it's working. It's working.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So you guys are operating in. In multiple countries. How many, how many offices do you have? And then how many of your people are remote and not working from offices?

[B]

We have about. We have an office in, in kl, which is the headquarter. We have a small office in Miami and another third office in Estonia. Plus we set up these remote studios across the globe. When people as. As they're part of our festival, Mindvalley University, they are literally spending. Living with us for 30 days, about a thousand thousand of our best customers. And then we have these remote setups. So a lot of team go on remote because they have the flexibility to work around. And that's how we function. I know it's not a unique, perfect way. I mean, it has its own pros and cons.

But it is an imperfect solution.

[A]

As of now, life is not perfect. Okay, tell us about Mindvalley University. You keep dropping it on me, and I've heard about it a number of times. I know it's over in Europe. Is it in. I think in Croatia, maybe this June?

[B]

I would. It's mindvalley.comeu that's probably one of our biggest projects that we decided to run last year. Actually two years ago, it was started as an experiment. And now every year we want to try and live in a different country, try and gather really smart and tribal teachers.

And try and see how we can create. That's your word that you use called the cult tribe or the culture experience. But a really loyal fan base across the globe which competitors cannot replicate. That's a model that you can't replicate.

[A]

Right. So where are you hosting this year?

[B]

Well, this year we're actually in pula, Croatia from June 24 to July 20.

[A]

June 24 to July 20 in Croatia.

I just sat down with my map of Europe for the summer Looking at, I'm going to be over there for five weeks and I'm going to start re looking at my map again. Damn you.

It's just like a magnetic pole to go and spend time with all these people. All right, so this your model, at least the mindvalley University model is really, really strong pull for Gen Y. The unencumbered no kids yet can work and live from anywhere. But you said you've got people going over with their families as well. Is that. How are you more and more of that now where people are living globally and traveling more with their kids?

[B]

Oh, absolutely. I think we run a parallel massive track for teenagers and we're doing a special track for parents because I think a lot of parents would like to learn something that we call conscious parenting, how to be a better parent. And that's been the theme, at least for a constant theme that we've been trying to attack in some ways. So that's one area that's really exciting to us. I think if you're talking human curriculum or generation or next generation of curriculum for humanity, we cannot not address that which is parenting, which is such an essential part of everyone's life. So that's what we are trying to do as well. So two main pillars of finally today are all these events that are happening across the globe and our online learning platform called Quest Q U E S D. That's a learning format.

[A]

God, how come you don't have any big goals?

They're beautiful. They're amazing stretches. So walk us through some of how you're working with some of your remote teams. Can you kind of give us some of those operational insights as to working with some of the people that are remote or global?

[B]

I actually, I used to be rather. I'd be lying if I say I still don't feel this, but I think sometimes out of mind, out of sight. So I think you should have constant touch with your key employees. Otherwise you're always figuring out in a large organization of 300 people, hey, are you still around? Are you a contractor? Or I thought you moved out. And that's going to happen. I mean, we can't avoid it. There will be a day when you go to the office and a batch of 25 new people have joined in, and a week later you can't remember half their names. But I think that's a problem of the attention span that we live in. Second, as you grow bigger and bigger as an organization, you can't control that. But the idea is that your, your chain of command in the company is so strong that people don't fall out. And we think OKR as a model keeps everybody in check. And what we did differently was rather than having a company OKR structure, we also added a dimension where you should list down your personal OKR as well. So, so people go through an exercise with us called Lifebook where they list down their life goals in 12 areas of life. So they know that they got to pay attention to their self worth as well. So I think when you are attached to your work and your personal life is one thing, then they tend to stick around the remote. Working actually works in some way.

[A]

Is that the Lifebook that John and Missy Bowen are involved with?

[B]

John Missy Butcher? Yeah, that's correct.

[A]

I just had a piece of art delivered to my home yesterday that John Butcher painted called Blackstar.

[B]

Oh, that's fantastic. I love that documentary John has done and he's done some phenomenal work in that.

[A]

It's the second time I've had to buy that piece. I bought it three years ago and then my ex wife somehow.

Managed to lose it and so I just bought it again and it arrived yesterday and I'm excited to hang it. John's wonderful. So interesting. So you bring Lifebook inside the organization as well. It's fantastic.

[B]

Every employee is mandatory to actually go to Lifebook. And after that. Yeah. And you join as part of your induction. We take you to a beautiful private, private resort on an. Sorry. On an island. And. And you get to experience Lifebook with all the new people who joined. And that's.

[A]

Do you do the full five days or three days or is it a shorter version?

[B]

We do, we do it over the weekend and, and the last one was very special because we actually flew down John and Missy, as an authors of the program to actually spend time with 25 of our top new recruits. And that creates a very different level of connection with them.

And then if some of them go remote, but the connections stay on and then the remote culture works.

[A]

It's amazing. No. I was speaking with Chip Wilson from Lululemon. We spent a lot of time together at a few events in the last couple years, but we were spending time together at the TED conference this year and I was speaking with Chip about his early days of Lululemon and he used to make all of his employees do a program called Landmark and they would be the two day Landmark Forum or two and a half day Landmark Forum. And it's such a kind of a cult thing. And he goes, yeah, it's beautiful. I'm like, right. Like, I've actually never met anyone who's done it that I don't like. And it's. It's a lot of that self and self reflection and introspection and planning. And that's gotta be part of your magic then doing Lifebook.

[B]

And I. Yeah, and I like how cult is no longer a bad word.

[A]

Yeah, I do, too. In fact, I wish Seth Godin, when he wrote his book called Tribes, just called it Cults.

[B]

I don't know if that many people would have bought the book then, but.

[A]

Yeah.

We don't need to rebrand it. It's pretty darn cool. All right, so walk us through then. You guys have a really strong leadership team. How does your leadership team stay structured? And how do you guys meet and keep everyone there on the same page?

[B]

Oh, we meet. We meet every Wednesday for three hours. And that's the structure that actually we borrowed from Apple, to be very honest with you. One person is in charge of hr. The second person is in charge of tech. The third person is in charge of revenue. Fourth person is in charge of marketing. And we spend three hours talking about everything from hiring, firing, company strategy, some of the next steps, and as silly things as travel plans. And we got three hours. And we try and say this is the most expensive payroll in one room. Let's talk about our areas that we are handling. And again, that play field that we spoke about a while ago, I think everybody's play field is pretty clear. So.

My constant quest is, no matter what companies I'm part of, the leadership team should have a very different play field, which means everybody should have their own genius zone. And if you find overlapping skill set, that's where contradicts happen. Or that's where if you have two people or three people from, let's say, tech team being represented at the leadership board, you will always have an overpowering agenda, and that's what you want to avoid.

[A]

Yeah, I love this. All right.

I had a client who I've been coaching for five years. He's gone from 40 employees up to 700. He just raised 255 million from Warburg Pincus. And he was talking about how bad his meetings were. He's like, meetings suck. I'm like, no, meetings are actually amazing if you know how to run them. Oh, yeah. And I wrote that book called Meetings Suck for just that purpose.

[B]

I love that.

[A]

Yeah, you guys are actually doing a really good job with your meetings and meeting rhythms. What's the mindset shift? You've had to get your employees to go through or how do you get them to engage and be excited about these? Because you're crushing it with them.

[B]

I think it starts the day starts with 11:30 morning scrum or the standout which, which is attended by like almost if not more 35 people and we are able to finish it in 25 minutes. Where everybody knows what's happening and, and who's connecting with whom after, after that scrum is over and, and we, and one thing that we stopped doing is actually emails.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah, I don't, I don't think. No, nobody sends each other emails except if you. Unless you want an approval from finance. But that whole culture of email is completely gone.

It just works for us. You are either on slack or you are just having a quick five minute catch up with somebody and you don't have to call everybody into a room.

[A]

Yeah, I've been trying to show people there's a simple sentence. It's a six word sentence. I didn't say you were beautiful. And if you read that six word sentence and put the emphasis on the first word, it means something different than the second, third, fourth. Right. Each word makes the sentence completely different. And I think there's a lot of miscommunication and frustration and conflict that happened because of Slack and because of email that I think you guys are again killing it with that face to face communication.

But you're all Gen Y like your entire company for the. Well I guess most companies are Gen Y anyway, but your company. How do you push Gen Y towards this face to face video communication with each other?

Or is that just part of the adoption? You just hire people who already engaged that way?

[B]

I think it's also to do with office design. Like we have closed spaces, open spaces and I think the whole open work culture sort of places is getting noisier and noisier. So we have, we've designed the office in a way if you just Google mindvalley office based pictures you would understand and we've done a couple of posts about it as well that you should have an environment where people can come out and quickly gather for a quick 5 minute huddle or a 25 minute scrum and then go back into their workspaces in cubicles or we've designed it in a way where they have their own private space to focus and to work. So coming out of that shell in a way is very cathartic and people and teams actually look forward to it. So it has a lot to do with office design. It has a lot to do with the way we use Slack. It has a lot to do with the morning huddle, which already clears half the doubts. And strategic handpicked meetings sprinkled across the week. So everybody knows if it's Wednesday, what three meetings are happening. If it's a Tuesday, what two meetings are happening. Tuesdays are focused on tech and rest. Everybody else is gone, which means you get to have a focused Tuesday and tech is strategizing on Tuesday and marketing catches up only for an hour in an entire week. So. And that. And you're going to have less meetings for sure, but more strategic meetings.

[A]

Yeah. And those meetings are all baked in as part of your rhythms then.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And if something in R and D, we call it a genius storm G stomp and you call for a G stom, which means if you are calling for a gstom, you have made a conscious decision to pull in the strategic people, you're going to wrap that up in 45 minutes and you would have had very well prepared for that meeting. So. Yeah.

[A]

Well, I want to be respectful of your time. So I know it's about one o' clock in the morning there. I could be asking you questions for six days. So I think I'll just have to fly over and spend time.

[B]

Well, next time I'm going to. I'm going to pour a glass of whiskey before I start speaking, please.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

I will too.

[A]

Shit.

[B]

And.

[A]

And I love kl. I've spent a bunch of time over in kl. I've got some friends over there that I used to coach from the Entrepreneurs Organization. One of them is the biggest maker of cookies in Malaysia, CK Tan. Great guy. But anyway, so two final questions. One is.

What have you worked on in terms of your skill set? To scale and to continue to stay not relevant. But what are you working on in your skills? I know you said you just finished doing your MBA or your business degree. What kind of stuff were you focusing on?

[B]

I actually go into things that.

That I've been doing for a few years. So let's say.

I did two specializations. One was running companies that are on the verge of bankruptcy, which means cash flow is important and scaling up is important, gross margins are important and how do you revive a startup or a company. And second was running public listed companies. So I get to experience both the spectrums.

And I stay relevant by either angel investing in a few startups or helping my wife with her business or starting another project on the side. So I do have a few investments. I have a project on the side which Actually is I'm hiring a bunch of people for it and I'm very much engaged with my wife and the way she runs her business. So those are the three, four things that I try and do. But.

I do read Financial Times back to back, starting my day and try and see what, what's happening in the startup world. I think most of the new, new technologies and new business models are actually, actually right there. You just have to read between the trends and I think one book I read a while ago was the Blue Ocean Strategy. That probably captures a few of these elements as well.

[A]

Awesome. All right, K, last question. If you were to think back to being, you know, 21 years old when you were maybe finishing university or just getting started in your entrepreneurial career, I don't think we listen to our parents very often. You know, parents probably try to give us advice. So what advice would you like to listen to, either from yourself, maybe that you know today that you wish you'd known earlier on? What advice would you give yourself?

[B]

I'd say focus on health. Yeah, that's probably. Probably would be it. Yeah. I had those years of.

Yeah. When I was exiting out of my first company, I probably destroyed my health completely. I picked up all the bad habits that you could think of and that was a stressful period. And I think that it takes a while to come out of that. It's not like one day your health is bad for five years and you will take only a month to recover from it. It takes you five years to recover from it. So I think health is probably what I would listen to a lot more. I wish I had done that.

[A]

That's huge. All right, Kay, Melanie, the co founder of Mindvalley, Quest and Mindvalley, thank you so much for sharing with us today and for showing up so late at night. I really, really appreciate all your time and ideas.

[B]

My pleasure. My pleasure, Cameron. Happy to be there.

[A]

Thanks, Kay.

[B]

Awesome.

You've been listening to Second in Command, brought to you by COO alliance founder Cameron Herald. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, share and subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and our other podcast streaming platforms. For more best practices from industry leading COOs, visit COO Alliance.com.