How Kerim Baran Merges Investment Acumen with Decentralized Solar Energy Solutions

The transcription of the video is below. 

Introducing Kerim Baran and His Entrepreneurial Wisdom 

Nico: Well, Kerim. We have so much to talk about. I’m going to say from the beginning here that this is likely a part one, who knows how many parts there will be with you, Karen, but you and I have had more hours than I can count, although many of them have been recorded and will probably be published at some, at some point in the future, but you’ve become an outsized, uh, influencer in my life.

And I’m glad that you finally agree that we can share a bit about who you are and what you do. With the Suncast world, welcome to

Kerim: Suncast. Thank you, Nico. Thank you for having me here. It’s been a long time coming and I’m very happy to be doing

Nico: this with you. Do you remember the calls of, like, young hubristic Nico from Trina Solar, trying to convince Karim and the Civic team of how, like, I wanted you guys to be a part of this ecosystem that we wanted to build within Trina?

And then I’m curious, what were your thoughts back then of this, like this young whippersnapper Trina? Well,

Kerim: my first and continuing impression of you has always been your vivacious and really lovable personality. So whatever impression or memories you have of you have to say has nothing to do with you and it probably, um, had to do with, uh, and I honestly, I I don’t even remember the details, but all I remember is we didn’t really sell a ton of Trina for various reasons.

Uh, and, uh, and I think maybe back then Trina wasn’t even that big on distribution because if I remember correctly, you guys, you, you, you guys had huge deals with solar city, if I remember correctly. And, you know, you really went to the biggest, biggest players in the industry. And our focus was all, all about empowering the, um, this, the smaller players, the long tail.

Yeah, the long tail. Yeah,

Nico: absolutely. We have been kicking off Sunkast lately with, uh, with an inspiring quote. As you well know, I am a quote collector. Uh, if I ever did have a physical office with a team, I would, as I was inspired by Millikan Corporation years ago, do the same. I’d have a hall of quotes where I would literally just post the, I mean, I probably have thousands of quotes that I’ve collected in an Evernote note.

Um, many of them I’ve gone and found video or like, uh, digital memes of those quotes so that I could plaster them on my background. You’ve seen it on my computer. And so I’ve started each episode lately. with simply the, uh, the quote that is on my background at the moment that the episode starts. So I’m going to go and then you go with a quote that has similarly in some way inspired you.

Uh, so the quote of the day today is I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please. Everybody, Mr. Mr. Bill Cosby and many others, uh, get the credit for that one. And, um, I would say that this is the single hardest lesson I’ve had to face in my life, hands down, as an entrepreneur, as a person, as a pleaser, as a performer, I try to please everybody.

I try to show up for everybody. I try to address everybody’s concerns. I try to answer every call. Don’t answer every email. As you well know. Um, how about for you, Karim, I will not leave room for you to opine because you know too much about me, but how about you? What quote would you bring

Kerim: into the conversation?

Just to say, I, I, I’ve been guilty of the same, same, same behavior and, and, uh, yeah, as I was preparing or thinking about today’s interview earlier this morning when I was driving away. Sun somewhere, I, uh, this quote popped into my head, which I think is Inc magazine’s founders quote. He said entrepreneurs are the artists of the business world because I was kind of thinking about how do I really explain what I’m doing now?

Because I’m not like my, my current activity. Activities don’t fit into a single, single, uh, traditional definition. So I was thinking, yeah, I’m a little bit. Like an artist weaving and connecting dots in many different, uh, areas is still mostly around the, uh, the solar industry. Um, but yeah, that’s the quote that comes up to my mind.

If I could offer a second one related to what you said, my second most favorite quote that I usually go to, and I, um, talk a lot about this with my 16 year old son these days is less is more and which is kind of. Another favorite quote, but yeah,

Nico: well, anyone who listens to suncast recognizes that I have not yet internalized the concept of less is more.

We often have 60 plus minute interviews, but trust me, we’re trying with micro content and figuring out how to actually distill it down to the. The essential essence, the essential elements, and by

Kerim: the way, that that artist code and the, and the list is more are kind of in contradiction to each other and that that balance each other.

Because I, I think about, you know, how would my career. Have evolved if I had stayed in a traditional corporate role, which is like, getting really good at 1 single function. Whereas what I do now is totally almost diametrically opposite of that. Um, yeah, but, but I’m guilty of doing too many things as, as you said about yourself too.

And so how to balance that, um, that focus create value, but still have joy because I think most of us. Are not really meant to fit in a, a, you know, like that role that I think about in that Charlie Chaplin, black and white movie, I think it’s called modern times where the guy’s just doing the same repetitive task all day long.

And, you know, there’s something to be said for that too. If you do that for 10, 000 hours, you’ll become an expert in one thing and you’ll probably be the best person at that, but also doing many different things brings that, um, uniqueness as well. So,

Nico: Well, you know, if we think about entrepreneurs as artists of the business world, there is a lot, there’s a lot to unpack there.

And um, you know, even Tim Ferriss famously, uh, built the four hour work week on the concept of the muse. He used a very artistic term to describe the process of building something that, uh, itself gives back to. You and freeze you from the necessity to be so concerned about the outcome. A lot of artists, um, feel like they are, um, not so much intentionally, but, um, I’ll say spiritually channeling.

The art, the channeling, the activity. And that’s what I get from a lot of entrepreneurs. And I speak with them is, um, you’ve got a general sense of direction. It’s kind of like you’re in the, you’re in the woods and you know, there’s something on the other side of them and maybe you’ve got a compass, but you also are following your gut and intuition.

Um, and I have learned so much from the conversations I’ve had with you around, um, around being intentional about the art. But listening to, uh, to the gut, where are you currently seeing in your personal life? You know, typically I have a guest on who is actively building a business that frankly most people already know about, um, or she will soon know a lot about because they’re already in the public eye.

You’ve built and sold multiple companies. I want to talk about those. Um, but you are also actively investing in my life and in many others as entrepreneurs. Um, can you talk a bit about how you are expressing in that muse? How’s that sort of experience of being an entrepreneur, expressing itself in the business world, fleshing itself for you right now?

Naming Enki Solar and Kerim Baran’s Entrepreneurial Vision

Kerim: I would say actually the way it’s playing out is really not that different than I. I kind of, um, had a plan for even when I was literally 27 years old, 28 years old. I remember it was 1999 when I had first moved to the Bay Area working for a large, one of the, at the time it was the largest CRM company.

Uh, software company called civil systems, and I had a whole plan in my mind about, you know, okay, I’m going to work for this next software company. I had worked for a number of other software companies at the time. I had gotten my MBA and I, I kind of had a plan saying. Myself, okay, I’m going to work at this company, get my green card, save up some money, start 1 company, and then I’m going to do another 1.

I kind of had a plan to do 2 startups. And after that, I, I want to mostly share my knowledge and share my. Learnings and teach others and, and just have fun while, you know, I can still continue to work to late years of my life, which I enjoy a lot more. I enjoy working a lot. And so I’m kind of at a place where I have built 2 companies and sold, sold them, uh, and are contributed to building.

I wouldn’t say I did them alone.

Nico: It’s fine. We’ll get into the

Kerim: nitpicking in a minute. I had a lot of, um. Very valuable co founders who contributed more than me in many ways. Um, and, you know, I become a, I also early on started reading about investing and I didn’t really actively invest so much until my first exit, but I become a, I become an investor or investor minded person.

Um, and, you know, and I enjoy, um, analyzing companies and investing in them. So I’ve been doing that. For over a decade and a half, and I, I enjoy investing in public markets as well as early stage, mostly tech startups. So, uh, that has become a big part of my, um, journey and and starting about 6, 7 years ago, I guess, with, uh, mid mid life, uh, I have, uh, started thinking about other aspects of life as well.

And I’ve. I’ve been, uh, enjoying, uh, growth and, you know, other areas than just business as well. And, um, and 1 of that, the way it manifests itself is I actually look at the entrepreneurial process as a human psychological process. There’s usually a lot behind that, like, kind of, kind of, like you said, I think there’s a.

There’s a spiritual force of creativity that people want to, uh, realize or manifest into their lives. Um, sometimes there are some pains associated with with that as well. So I’ve been thinking a lot about, like, what has. Made me, uh, choose the paths and do the things that I have done. So, in that aspect, I actually enjoy, um, acting as a coach or a, or a advisor or a teacher, someone who someone you can safely talk to, or people can safely talk to.

But I also. Don’t just want to be a coach. I actually, um, I like still the process of building things. I like to get into the KPIs of the business and, you know, strategic aspects.

Nico: Yeah, you definitely still have some, uh, some gas in the tank, so to speak, in terms of your operation, uh, operation minded entrepreneurial activity.

And, um, uh, and you do, I think, put that to work in a lot of meaningful ways. Is there a core? Thesis that you would announce that you can enunciate around what your work post civic solar looks like right now.

Kerim: I would, I would say, um. That core thesis or that core thread is common actually. Uh, even before civic solar, um, and during civic solar and and what I’m doing now, um, most of my activities have been really around.

Explicitly attacking concentrated power, but seeing the trends in the world that, like, that empowered the long tail. Um, and that was the case at civic solar. And that was the case in the case of building a social network, giving power to express and connect to individuals. And it is also, it is also what is, um.

At the forefront of Enki, uh, Enki, solar investments, uh, thesis and activities right now. So I

Nico: heard you say give power to express and connect to individuals, which suggests that it’s already in the hands of let’s say corporate, um, or, or more centralized. So

Kerim: centralized institutions, centralized, uh, um, systems that have been outdated, I would say.

Nico: You mentioned Enki. Uh, I, uh, first came across the name Anky when listening to, um, snow Crash. The book that Yeah, exactly. Listening to the book that introduces the term metaverse into the world, uh, book called Snow Crash, which I’ve talked about on Suncast. It was in my top 10 books recommended for 2022 for folks who liked, who watched or listen for those uninitiated.

Talk a bit about the importance for you of, of Anky as a, as a, as a, mm-hmm. as an entity, a concept, and how. Came to be the name of the Inky solar fund, which we’ll talk about and, um, in a moment as well.

Kerim: I honestly don’t remember exactly how the name popped into my world. And this all happened in the last 3, 4 years as I was trying to figure out a name to name.

A, a, a brand to pick for my investing activities. Mm-hmm. . Um, but, um, I came across this, uh, Mesopotamian myth of these two brothers, inky and enl, um, who are the sons of a God in, in the myth and in in this Mesopotamian myth. They’re extraterrestrial gods that landed on earth to mine the earth for for gold.

And then, um, they essentially engineered or genetically engineered humans. To do the hard work of mining and use them as slaves. Um, so it goes the myth and there were these 2 brothers, uh. The sons of, uh, another, the more powerful God. One of them was , uh, who wanted to keep humans in the dark, uneducated, and, uh, not empowered.

Continue to use them as slaves and anky the other brother. Are the champion for humans, um, argued for, um, sharing all the godly knowledge and the wisdom that, um, these gods had with the humans thinking that if we share them with if we share this knowledge with them, they will be. As capable as us, and we will have much more, um, much more resources and much, much faster capabilities as a, as a society.

And and so this, uh, thank you and little. Um, conflict and the 2 brothers, uh, obviously didn’t get along and that conflict is, uh. Present in every, um, I think in every person’s, um, psyche, uh, when to share when not to share how much to share. And this is something that, um, I’ve thought a lot about, um, probably because of the circumstances that I grew up in, uh, in, uh, in Istanbul, Turkey, where I spent my first 17 years of my life.

Nico Johnson’s Quest to “Pull Back the Veil”

Nico: I’ve asked you this question many times in different ways. You usually are very consistent with the storytelling, and that’s the first time I’ve heard you tell that story. That’s the first time I’ve heard you tell that story that way. And that is not to say that you haven’t told me that story that way.

I’ve probably been taking notes or thinking about something else. For, for Suncast fans who perhaps are watching this on YouTube, I stepped back away from the microphone, like, had a moment. Because so many of the things that we won’t even talk about on this interview just collided with one another in my head about what we are trying to accomplish in the world.

Um. The idea that some of us, and I’m going to put like an air quotes, some of us hold back knowledge and others of us willingly advocate for the sharing of knowledge is at the core of what I built Sunkast around, right? If you listen carefully to the inner, to the intro, it says. We pull back the veil and the veil in biblical times, it’s a very intentional term, right?

I say we pull back the veil because in biblical times, the only people that were allowed to go behind the veil where the image of God and the spirit of God was able to exist and were able to interact with the spiritual realm and the most high. We’re the priests and a very small subset of society were privileged enough to get true wisdom, right?

And I spent the first 10 years of my career in the solar industry standing on one side of the veil and nobody would pull it back. And no matter how high I climbed to Conergy and Trina and everywhere else, I found one or two mentors who were willing to pull me into a small room and say, I’m going to teach you something that nobody else is going to teach you because this is considered a secret black box.

And it’s not just the solar industry that does this. It’s every freaking industry, candidly, because there are so many of us who are afraid to share. What we’ve learned for fear that it will be used against us, right? Um, by competitors, um, by, by lots of like in, in many, in many areas. So bear with us here, please, because this really is meaningful to you.

Uh, if you’ve made it this far in this conversation, it is because something resonated in your heart that we are already plucking. Karam is on a mission that is a different sort of mission than building. A module or a tracker or distribution business. Um, and the reason that he’s on the show today is to pull back the veil a little bit.

Maybe 1 that you’ve willingly allowed to fall before your own eyes. Um, about how you think about the knowledge and wisdom that you hold. So one of the earliest businesses that Karim started was this business, uh, Yonca. And it’s one of the first social network businesses. We mentioned that, um, you know, I think it’s, I think we should go back further than that.

You started to unpack this. So let’s go back further. The first 17 years of your life were in Istanbul, Turkey. But you are not a normal human being. Explain to me why that is true. You are normal in lots of different ways, but you weren’t born into the kind of society that most of us were. And you’ve had to spend a lot of time coming to terms with that.

So what does that mean for the, for the listener who knows nothing about you?

Kerim: I always thought I had a normal, normal childhood growing up. Of course, everybody does. Only thinking through some of those things in the last, uh, six, six or seven years. I’ve kind of realized, wow, you know, it was unique in some ways.

And I think what made it most unique was because. You know, by American standards, it was probably a upper middle class type of existence that I that I lived in in Istanbul, Turkey. But, of course, by Turkish standards, that was definitely upper class or even, you know, I would not even call it 1%. It was probably 0.

1 percent or 0. 01 percent type existence. A friend of mine that would describe, like, typical Latin American countries, he would say, you’re either a maid or you have mates, or there’s like, uh, you know, probably 1000 to 2000 families that run the country. And Turkey wasn’t really that far away from that reality.

Um, 50 years ago, or 40, 40 years ago, 35 years ago, when I was growing up. And it has become, uh, you know, more advanced, more capitalistic in many ways. But many of the people that I grew up around, it was a lot of family businesses, a lot of codependency type relationships between the, it was like a mini succession.

Type, uh, set up, uh, you know, if, you know, the movie, the, um, HBO series, so it, it was just, uh, a lot of that. And, you know, a lot of these, uh, wealthy, powerful families were either, um. Directly friends, or 1 run, like, you know, 1 degree of connection away and, you know, observing a lot of that, um, around me, I just, you know, I would see the vast gaps of power, income, opportunity, wealth and knowledge and.

And, you know, on the 1 hand, I would feel fortunate. On the other hand, whenever I traveled West, whether it was for vacation with my parents, or for, um, uh, really mostly vacation for my parents. I didn’t really feel that in the US. And that’s probably why I ended up in the US like. In Europe, I would feel, um, discriminated against, you know, just even answering the, a country like Switzerland or France or Germany with a Turkish passport.

I felt like, Hey, it’s not a passport. Just a stop for everyone else is passing through the passport control. And you were asked. It doesn’t questions why you’re coming to this country and what is your purpose? Well, you know, how dare you come and, um, you know, explore these lands. I kind of felt a little I got a little bit of the, I would say the brown person treatment.

And so, like, yeah, On the 1 hand, I would feel very, um, kind of fortunate on the other hand, you know, I, I would feel discriminated against. And, um, so just those, uh, kind of, uh, experiences, I would say, made me more sensitive to how, um, most people I would think like me wanted more equality around them. Like, it didn’t really feel.

Too good to have too much more than others, at least for me, and mainly that’s probably why I always yearn for a more or more normal life life. Uh, and, uh, and I, I think I found that when I came to college in the U. S. mostly, um, and I, I own purpose. A lot of the international students picked the coasts.

Many of them picked Boston, and I did have some options to go to a college in Bos Boston, but I, on purpose, picked Chicago and went to Northwestern. Mm-hmm. Northwestern. Really liked the Midwestern culture and had a great experience there and, and thereafter spent most, most of my life, uh, in the US living a more normal life in some ways.

Kerim’s Entrepreneurial Journey and the Power of Connection Building

Nico: I don’t mean to make light of, um, the experience that you share, which is really beautiful around feeling other, um, had a recent conversation with, uh, Devin Hampton, um, from utility API about, um, you know, being the other in the room, often the only person of color, um, that’s discriminated against. Um, what came to my mind when you said, um, the Swiss stopping you at the border as a child, um, is that many people in Europe would have stopped you because they had, they still had a fresh memory of the Ottoman empire that didn’t end until the 20th century.

Right. So, um, I know that’s, I know that’s callous, but it’s what came to mind. I thought I’d share it. Um, I don’t know. That makes me sound any, uh, any, any smarter, but,

Kerim: um, I don’t think most Turks really Oh, actually, yeah, there’s always identify with it, but no, there’s definitely that, uh, Ottoman history, how much of that is, uh, the identification of the modern Turkish population.

But, um, yeah, there’s obviously, there’s been a big divides, um, between, uh, the Western Christian European nations and yeah, for a long time, the, one of the most powerful. Um, Muslim empires, uh, that there’s bad division as well. And yeah. Yeah. They bring it up because you do connectedness in, in, in the universe that, that affects everyone’s

Nico: psyche.

Because you’ve, you’ve been a part of two important empires. Many would say that the U S is an empire in the world. And, uh, and that’s, I think that’s unarguable. Uh, it is. And, uh, all the empires fade. Um, but, um, but I wanted to, I just want to set the stage here, talk a bit about, um, sort of growing up in Turkey before we move forward.

Um, tell me about Robert college.

Kerim: Yeah, that is the middle and high school that I went to is called Robert college of Istanbul. It’s actually started as a, um. College for boys in the 18, but 150 plus years ago as 1 of the, I think it is the longest, uh, or it’s the oldest American, uh, college standing in this original grounds outside of the us, uh, you know, in the colonial era started to, uh, educate the kids of the, uh.

Influential families in the region and by the time I was a kid. Oh, well, actually, and probably another. I don’t exactly remember when, but in the early 1900s, they, they started a, a girl’s campus just to. A couple of miles down the road from the boys campus, and in the 70s, I believe the girls campus, the, the college became coed and they turned the boys campus to a university, uh, coed university and the girls campus became a middle, um, coed, middle and high school for, um.

Mostly Turkish kids, and the education system in Turkey is such that it’s a little bit, like, in India, where you take these standardized tests, like, and that determines what schools you go to. So, it’s very meritocratic in some sense, and not so fair and others because good test takers are or. In a position of advantage, and so I remember being in 4th grade and 5th grade and being tutored every single week to prepare for this 1 exam and the top 100 or so kids get to go to this school out of my peer group of a million kids.

I mean, not every family makes their kid apply and only certain families can afford tutors. Um, so there’s obviously a little skew. It’s a little skewed because of that, in terms of, um, social demographic mix, but it is a school that attracts a lot of super bright kids from all backgrounds. Um, I was a great, I was a good test taker.

Um, I did really well under pressure. So, and I was kind of mathematically oriented. Um. Was my life, so I did well, and I got in and it was really a great experience. And that that opened up, you know, the opportunity to come to the West for college and, and many other things. And, you know, was kind of a first step in becoming a world citizen, which is not an opportunity that everybody gets in this life, you know?

Nico: Yeah, yeah. The, um, around 1904, it, the school had about, uh, 300 students boarding for about 200 of them. It was founded by an American philanthropist in the late eighteen hundreds. I’m going to link to the Wikipedia page that I read around it, but also, um. It is, um, they accept around 200 students a year.

And as you pointed out, you have to take a test. Uh, they accept students who’ve scored in the 0. 0, the 0. 2 percentile in the nationwide exam, just to put into perspective how elite the school is academically. It’s, it’s like Exeter or Robert Louis Stevenson for people who understand, like, U. S. boarding schools.

Cool. So I wanted to set the stage because it also distinctly as an entrepreneur impacted, um, because it’s true. You are the sum of the people you surround yourself with. Right. You were surrounded a young age in the school with folks who were handpicked for their education and for their and for their, um, and for their family pedigree, I would say, and as a result, um, while you came from a middle to upper income family, you were able to.

Get the experience and the connection in the network of folks that came from, let’s say, old money and people who also are exceedingly smart. I mean, the kinds of people who we in the U. S. acknowledge are like the geniuses that went to the governor school that scored 16 on the on a Saturday after, you know.

Doing just they just kind of showed up and scored the test because they didn’t have to try hard and they went to Exeter or they went to Harvard because that was the natural procession for smart people. I think I’m telling all this and I know that this makes care uncomfortable, but it’s important that we.

Um, I kind of looked at Karim through this lens and I first met him like, Oh, like privileged European guy that invested in civic and considers himself a co founder and all this stuff. Right? Like I had this, well, who is this guy? But I’m going to, I’m going to unpack this for you because I think it’s really important to understand not everything is, uh, on the surface is, is underneath what it looks like on the surface.

And it is true that people come from different backgrounds and can leverage those backgrounds to get what they want. Um, and then we’re going to, and, and it all comes back to, uh, at the end of the day, what do we do with what we’ve acquired? What do we do with the knowledge and even the wealth that we’ve acquired?

Um, so with that in mind, um, I’m going to ask you another tough question. And this is a typical one, but you got to be prepared for it as, as I’m sure you are. What was conversation like for you around that?

Kerim: I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, both my parents, uh, came from entrepreneurial families and they actually worked together building a fashion business. So a lot of my childhood, uh, family experiences were around the family business. And, um, and one unique aspect, most of my, uh, Not most, but a good portion of my friends were, uh, families were also entrepreneurial or own their own businesses or, or many of them were also like high level executives at, at big, important businesses.

So, business was always a part of the, uh, life. I, I would say, um, 1 unique thing about my family was that my. Neither 1 of my parents took over their family or continued their own family business, but they, uh, my mother actually started our family business and it was, uh, have. Fashion business, or it was a clothing business for women and and so a lot of the activity was around that.

And, uh, yeah, so a lot of the conversations around the dinner table were also about that. And, uh, you know, very much related to business, but, you know, we also. A pretty, uh, good size, social, um, community and, you know, also talk about what’s going on with our friends and relatives and all of that. Do you

Navigating Family Expectations, American Dreams, and Career Choices

Nico: feel there were any expectations?

Kerim: Oh, yeah, unspoken, but yes, definitely, I would say, um, or even spoken, but, uh, um, not too explicit explicitly. Um, but, yeah, as a, I guess, as a, as a male child, even though my mother was the entrepreneur, um, uh, you know, there was always an expectation, like, in, um, You would see this in Indian and Asian immigrant families.

They expect you to be a doctor or engineer or, uh, you know, something in the STEM field. Uh, there was a little bit of that, but there was also a little bit of like the expectation of starting something, doing something with your resources, building a business, taking care of family, creating value for others and all of, all of that.

Yeah, for sure.

Nico: Is there anything that you feel from your childhood particularly explains? Well, um, or sums up sort of captures why you ultimately ended up doing the things that you do something that you’ve through the last 7 years of, of real introspection come up with as, um, that anchor sort of that drove you to the U.

1. to study and then to entrepreneurship. Um, is there any way that. You’ve thought through how to explain that to, to your son, or even to yourself. One of my

Kerim: other favorite quotes is, uh, uh, hold on. I have it here. Um, the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parent. What were your parents unlived lives says Carl Jung.

So my mother’s unlived life. Well, she came from a well to do family. Many of her female friends in the 60s traveled to Europe to study and her dad did not support that and did not even though he had the means to send her to Europe for college. He said, you’re a woman. What are you going to go study for?

abroad for? Why don’t you become a mom? And my dad’s unlived life is, he went to University of Istanbul Law School, and he was one of the best students at the law school, and they asked him to be an academic and stay at the school and teach. But because he did grow up without a father at those years of his life, his father was due to family circumstances had left Turkey and he was practicing medicine and in the U.

1. and he. My dad grew up without a father pretty much and his uncle put him through school. So, his, um, he felt obligated to work in his uncle’s business for a while after school and never got to teach. So that’s why my unlived life is to live across cultures, traverse the world as if no borders exist and to

Nico: teach.

Um, it’s amazing how this next question that I’ve been skipping a lot fits perfectly here. Um, as a result. Uh, what career path did you not go down, but always thought that you would?

Kerim: Yeah, I’ve seen you ask this question a few times. You know, in my younger years, I, I really liked, um, technical, um, subjects.

And I thought I would be an engineer. I studied engineering. I considered becoming an architect. I thought of becoming a pilot, I thought of, um, I, in my early years of my career, I, I, and, and later years at civic solar to people would vouch for that. I really enjoyed teaching as a, like a product manager, but really more of a teaching focus of, uh, um, subjects.

And those are all things that I didn’t pursue mainly because. I kind of knew you can’t really maximize your income doing those things like, um, you can’t really become a super wealthy person just being a pilot or just being a solo architect. Well, actually you can probably, if you’re a great architect, you can make a ton of money, but, um, somehow.

You know, the, um, technical aspects of software really resonated with me and, uh, I found myself in the software industry for a shot of college and just, uh, my career evolved in tech and software and tech 1st, and then, uh, became more entrepreneurial. But, yeah, so, but architect pilot, those were all appealing options for me lately.

I’ve been also enjoying, um, kind of the coaching this psycho spiritual aspects of life as well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Although I do have some reservations are around characters. Like, uh, we talked about this, uh, characters like Tony Robbins or, or, Jordan Peterson or all these people who tell people how to live lives and, um, because I think everybody’s answer lies within themselves and they should find the answers for themselves rather than listen to others.

But that’s a separate, that’s what makes

Nico: you a good coach. I’d like to briefly touch on young. I think it’s a really key moment in your career and it explains a lot about how you think about, I’ve learned a lot from you just listening to how you talk about young, uh, you were, I think still a student at HBS.

Um, when you came up with the idea for Yandere, is that right? Or is it pre HBS? Actually,

Kerim: you know, one of the early tech companies that I worked for was, um, a company called Powersoft that got acquired by Sybase. Sybase at the time was Oracle’s number one competitor, only half the size of Oracle back then.

And then Oracle grew leaps and bounds. And Sybase… Continued growing, but not as much and Cybus had acquired Powersoft. Powersoft had acquired the, um, the small French software company that I was working at. And this all happened in the same month. And we became part of Powersoft. And I got to meet these high flying tech founders of Powersoft that were coming to work with their Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

And, and I remember one of them telling me that his first business was a dating site. With punch cards back in the day, back in the early days of, uh, technology where people would mail in their profiles with punch cards. And then, you know, with bubble, uh, bubble cards, and like, you would market with your pan and then they would put all those cards into the punch card system of a computer.

Back then a computer system and they would match profiles and then mail back matches to these people saying, you should call this person at this number. He lives 20 miles away from me or whatever. And at that moment, I realized the power of networks and and then I always kept that at the back of my mind.

And it wasn’t when I was at business school that I actually came up with the idea of. Oh, Fionja. But it was actually after having worked at, um, after business school, I worked for, uh, Siebel systems for about 3 years and, uh, then took a little time off and was thinking of what to do next. And right at that time, social networks were taking off.

LinkedIn was out. Uh, Friendster was out. Friendster was growing leaps and bounds. And I serendipitously found myself next to a. Investor entrepreneur who had invested in both linkedin and friendster and was doing another concept. And then I say, you know, what of all these concepts, I think friendster is the most efficient from a capital perspective and, you know, potential perspective.

So I want to do this for Europe for all major European languages is the way I thought about it at the time. So we started a social network. Pretty much modeled after Friendster with the intention to capture major European markets with their own languages. 

Yonja Journey Inspired By Market Observations

We never took off in those major markets, like Germany and France and Spain and Italy, which we thought we needed this.

Service in their own language, but. The English only UI, when we were essentially beta testing the product, it really captured the attention of a lot of my Turkish, um, friends in the US or Turkish American young population, grad student, college students, grad students, young professionals, and then. Became a thing amongst them and grew very quickly to tens of thousands.

And then hundreds of thousands of users jumped to Turkey became one of the vitally grew to be one of the top, uh, by properties of Turkey ran from San Francisco in the early, early days. Is it true

Nico: that you had billions of

Kerim: pages? Yeah, we did. Yeah. In, in a single month, we would, I think our peak was about a billion and a half or Close to 2.

This is circa what year? I would say our peak was the year we sold the business in 2007. Yeah.

Nico: Wow. 2007. By the way, that’s right around the time Facebook came out of like private colleges, right? They were just opening up. Yeah. What a great time to be able to sell the company too, because it was obvious that That the whole idea of social networks was, um, gathering speed.

I want to dig down a little bit here. What did you see in Friendster and how did you break that business down using your business acumen, your, your business school understanding for those who are similarly thinking how to reverse engineer success. How did you reverse engineer Friendster to create success for Yonja?

Yeah. When I,

Kerim: when, you know, when I was actually starting another Friendster, many of my friends and supporters said, ah, there’s not even a revenue model. What is this model? Like, you know, doubters will always doubt, but. What was clear to me at the time was essentially that, that story that I remember from my power soft days.

This is essentially technically another dating site. It had 1 single. Future difference, and that was. The fact that every single profile had a connection, uh, or an opportunity to create connection with other profiles, essentially the friend request, and then the accept or decline kind of option feature feature set and that was the.

Single most important difference between a traditional dating site and France, and that 1 feature improve the business model vastly because it essentially eliminated approximately 30 percent of the cost space of the vis a vis the revenues, which most, you know, back then, this is like, 2002, 2003, online dating Was an industry like that industry was going and going pretty strong match.

com and his competitors were all growing 30, 40 percent a year. They were spending a quite a bit of money in marketing, but they still had healthy 10, 20 percent margin, but they were spending probably 30, 40 percent of their revenues in, in user acquisition. What Friendster and LinkedIn and all the major social networks didn’t have at the time was that expense and the viral, the product design made it viral.

And it grew super fast and with no expense, uh, and it also created a richer experience by the fact that you not only saw a profile, whatever the user put into his or her profile, but you also saw who they are connected to in the real life. So it was a, it was a brilliant business, um, design really. Uh, and really a lot of that kudos goes to, I think in my mind, Jonathan Abrams, who’s the founder of Friendster.

And then. Z and many others, um, replicated it in, in and in some ways, in a, in better ways. And the Facebook team, my hats off to them, they they won that game clearly. Yeah. And, and in a deserved fashion. And, and, you know, they, they did push the envelope in certain, uh, certain ethical ways in my book, but. You know, still it’s they, they won the game and, and overall, I think social networking, like any technology can be really good for the world.

If you use, if you use properly,

Nico: is there anything else that you did that you think about, um, that I fundamentally impacted the ability for you to take what you saw in, for instance, you would And put it into your business, how you actually cloned that as a, as like an operating system for your business, um, because it was so new.

It wasn’t like the friendster guy was out there telling everybody how they’re building the business, but you were able to reverse engineer. Is there anything that you learned that you’ve used over and over, even just use the ones that helped you build the Anja and then, um, sort of you’ve put into your brain that you now use as a business building principle.

Kerim: I mean, I observed all the products that were out there really meticulously. I, I signed up to probably 6 or 7 of them and I experienced each 1 of them as a user since you invite, you know, like. I’ve mapped out essentially the, uh, the page flows and the wireframes and the templates and the entire page flow of every, not every single one, but probably 5 or 6 of the major, uh, competitors to Friendster.

You know, there, there, there were, I don’t remember all their names right now, but there were probably 5 or 6 that, um, that I, uh, mapped out literally on my wall in my living room. And I, and then even then, like, I remember Facebook had about 40, 40 pages at the time. I diminished that to about 26. I figured many of the features were, um.

Not that critical. Uh, so I brought that down to a minimum viable product and we launched with that. And that was kind of my reverse engineering process. What did

Nico: you learn through the young experience that impacted the way you think about business building? And I’m thinking in particular about the power of networks.

Kerim: Well, at this peak, you and your had probably six or 7 million registered users, a third of which maybe more were, um, active on the platform on a weekly basis. And. I mean, I very quickly, so the power of the network effect and how, um, number 1 player for, in our case, we didn’t really have that much of a better product.

We were the 1st mover and that created a huge advantage to, um, capture the Turkish market for, for a good while, 5, 6 years. Although later, we Facebook pulled the rug under our feet in a, in a, in a major way and, and their product. Had some major advantages, um, primarily in the sense of, um, real user identity, um, and also, uh, a level of, uh, privacy that users could control.

And those were like, like, there are 2 key features, but another aspect of it was the fact that they started and it’s going to sound. It’d be a little, um, not perfectly politically correct, but they started as the at the top of the social pyramid. Right? And and that, um, that had an effect, I think, in, um, you know, the fact that it started Facebook started in Harvard and and was started by, um.

What I will call a privileged, uh, Turks, uh, you know, getting educated or working in the U S and then thereafter spread to the, um, population. People always want to obviously, um, keep, yeah, exactly. And so those were definitely aspects that helped our growth and then ultimately helped Facebook as well. Can

Nico: you explain.

The underlying metrics that suggest that there is a network effect happening and how you learned about and tapped into that with your business. Yeah,

Kerim: I learned about the term after the fact, you and I talked about this term K factor, but if, but it was very apparent to me in the early days of Yonja when, when you, when a user invites, um, and every, every new user invites.

X many new users, ideally on a, on a platform, that’s the word of mouth effect, actually, like, what product do you feel so good about that? You want to share it with your best buddies or your family or whoever’s around you. And if that the result of that invite, and the resulting sign up number is greater than 1.

0, then you do have a, a viral, uh, a viral phenomenon at your end. And if it is. You know, even 1. 1 or 1. 2 or 2 is great. You know, that means every new user is bringing in 2 more new users or, uh, you know, whatever that number is. And if it is, and that’s how viruses grow too. Um, so, and if it is less than 1, let’s call it 0.

9. It’s just not going to grow on its own, then you’re going to have to spend a ton of marketing money to make it grow. And, and the best products usually, uh, require little marketing. You know, if your product is so far differentiated from anyone else’s, then you don’t really need that much marketing because, uh, it sells itself.

That was, that was definitely an observation that I, um, had running those, um, Running engine in those days.

Leveraging Virality to Propel Yonja to New Heights

Nico: It’s interesting. Um, I was just reading the, I remember reading the Wikipedia page on KF Factor. Mm-hmm. and two examples that people wouldn’t expect of KF factor under one that still ended up in successor Dropbox and WhatsApp.

So I’ll link to, oh really? WhatsApp did not have a Uhhuh , so WhatsApp had a KF factor of 0.4.

Kerim: How did they, how did they. It’s

Nico: a, it is, uh, so I’m leaving that here because folks are, I’ll probably will find some more stuff that I’ve read on, um, on K factor and social coefficient that, um, I think is important.

Um, and, and Karen, uh, has been a great, uh, help in me understanding this. Um, but I think that as we all are building businesses that. In some way, leverage the internet, understanding how viral marketing works. And in particular, what we do a lot is video and audio, how content can get, can help with virality is, uh, is really helpful.

So I’ll link to a K factor with regards to marketing and the Wikipedia page. I just wanted to drop that in there. Cause I think it’s really interesting. There are examples of K factor under one that succeed. There are the, the, the, they’re not the, uh, the rule, but, but there, but. But that terminology was new to me when I met you.

And this whole idea of virality really, um, is something that I think in the solar industry, like with the exception of, uh, of residential lead gen marketers, like very few people understand it. And I would suggest that a lot of the Legion folks don’t understand it either. Um, they’re leveraging other. Uh, other types of, uh, of effect, but I’m curious, there’s one funny story that you told me about how you tapped into virality that particularly began to skyrocket.

Yonja, do you remember, um, uh, when, do you remember when Yonja really started to, to

Kerim: accelerate, you know, I, I was referring to my co founders and other people’s, uh, importance in the success of. Or in the modest success of both my businesses, and I could not have done it without my brother who, uh, acted as a part time CTO, uh, pretty much throughout the entire life of John never really full time worked at it, but, you know, helped him get a job at Google even and, uh.

Techie jobs and, and, and being a guy five years younger than me at the time when I launched Yonji, I was pretty much, uh, you know, engaged and, uh, you know, living With, with my, uh, who became later my spouse, Stephanie, um, and, uh, and, uh, my brother was a single guy and the first couple hundred people I signed up were like 80 percent guys.

And they were really super closely tight knit. They were kind of like spread out in different geographies. And they were all my friends from different parts of my life. But there was not a. cohesive, uh, unit of group that could make a big effect. And when, when Yonca took off was, you know, both that year, like a month after I launched it, um, my brother and I, we both traveled to Turkey for Christmas break.

And he went out pretty much every night to clubs and nightclubs and bars and basically asked. Every one of his single attractive female friends to sign up on the onja and within days, it just made a huge difference in terms of the vitality of the platform. And so, and that’s just the, the nature of, uh, you know, I mean, Facebook was the same thing in the early days.

It was a lot of the activity was, you know, that. Um, sexual attraction between boys and girls or people to each other and, and yeah, that definitely did drive it.

Nico: Thank you for sharing that. I love watching how self conscious you are sharing these stories of how you effectively made money off of, like, getting, you know, connecting people.

It’s almost like you had a dating. Yeah. It was

Kerim: essentially a social dating site. Um, yeah, although there were a lot of points of interest too. And I think what really made. Facebook succeed is that like, we all leverage the, the fact that that, that dating aspect was what we all knew. It was kind of like the unspoken aspect of the social networks positioned as a lot more than that.

But in the early days. 80 percent of the activity was really checking out, um, guys and girls. But what Facebook did really well is they evolved that beyond, uh, beyond that and into areas of interest and groups of common interests and communities and, uh, and many other types of content. If you look at Instagram now, it’s, you know, A whole other type of platform.

Nico: So in your, uh, this is all in your twenties, right?

Kerim: Late 20, no, actually early thirties to mid thirties. Okay.

Nico: So early to mid thirties, uh, you finally kind of get in your rhythm. You’ve created this thing, you sell it. Um, you feel a sense of success. You’ve been able to take some chips off the table, press pause for a minute.

Think about your life. This is like early teens, right? Like late 2010 or late, uh, late aughts, early teens. And you’re in California. 2007

Kerim: is when I, when we sold majority of the business, 2009 is when I exited the business, like personally, I tried to, I tried to compete against Facebook for another two years, but it just became very clear that it was not going to be a.

Fun

Nico: experience. Yeah. 

Exploring Civic Colar’s Origins and Its Journey from Idea to Impact

How and why did you, did it occur to you that, uh, as there was a social shift, there was also an infrastructure shift afoot in the world and you needed to be a part of it. How did you pick up on what was happening in the energy sector and in particular renewable energy?

Kerim: You know, my, my wiring growing up in an entrepreneurial family and, uh, you know, and my Harvard business school education, kind of like the common path that.

Many people would expect is either start another tech firm after doing 1 or invest the capital that you created, uh, on a full time basis that I think I think my, my path. Like, if I had gone back a decade earlier, you know, when I was graduating business school, and if I knew that I would have this success, this model success, I would probably say to myself, okay, you would invest that.

And that’s kind of what I try to. I didn’t really, after having been, uh, you know, beaten by the Facebook team, I just didn’t feel like competing, I guess, another Zack. And I, I, I, I felt like I would probably have a, uh, more balanced life if I just invested. So I sat down to invest and. I tried doing that for a couple of months, but it felt like, you know, and I did create a public equities portfolio during that time, but there was not really that much to do.

I read a ton of investing books, but I did not enjoy doing that activity for longer than a couple of months and longer than an hour or two a day. Like every time I would think, okay, how can I maximize my investing? It just wouldn’t feel right in my body. I would actually get a sense of discomfort and that was around the time when I first started kind of like.

Meditating or pseudo meditating sitting quietly in my office by myself. Whenever I did that, I would get this message to actually use my know how my technology, um, experience, uh, software tech, uh, internet experience. Towards fields that needed it, and that was very clearly I would get these messages internally.

Like, whenever I quieted down, these thoughts would come up education, health care, clean tech education, health care, clean tech and and right around that time. Michael Goldberg Goldie, my co founder and the real leader behind the civic solar. He came to me with the idea of doing civic solar together. He and Taylor were already talking Michael Taylor, our 3rd co founder and they, they wanted a.

Another another guy in the mix. And how’d you meet him? I had known Goldie through one of my good friends from college. Um, I, I used to be on the sailing team and 1 of my buddies from the sailing team. And I, we’ve done multiple vacations together and I had met Goldie, um, through those experiences before.

And at the time, he was also working for green volts, whose offices were right downtown San Francisco, very close to his offices. And we were just connecting frequently talking about solar and, you know, the future of solar. And, and that’s how

Nico: I need to get Goldie on and we get deep on the, the civic story.

Cause he, as most people recognize was the face of the company and CEO led the company. Um, you know, got a lot

Kerim: of the early, he never liked, he never liked the title CEO. President or in some of his, uh, communications, he would sign his emails, account manager actually is

Nico: a true, I thought it was confusing as hell

Kerim: is a true, uh, the The best sales guy we had at Civic Solar always and showed people how to, how to do it really.

Nico: Yeah. Uh, Goldie, I love Goldie. Um, he, he’s still to this day, by the way, lists himself as senior marketing manager at Green Tech Renewables. Yeah. Right. Like a co founder and VP of marketing is what he says he was at, at Civic. Um, he’s, uh, and he was director of marketing for those who didn’t know green volts.

Uh, he was at swell before it was swell. Like he, he’s, he was a, he was a marketing guy that was trying to figure out like what’s going on, what’s going wrong in solar and how do we fix it? Um, and in that context, um, that’s kind of, that’s how you guys came together. You needed a tech guy who, who understood it, but also could help, you know, you’d been steeped in investment, my sis, my suspicion, and I’ll ask Goldie this, but my suspicion is that he saw in you a tech guy who also had some money and could probably help raise around to get this idea going.

And I did,

Kerim: I put in the first, uh, 50 K I think it was myself and then, um, helped raise close to another. Half a million, most of which, um, I helped raise. And, uh, yeah, and I was just another, um, business mind on the table that, you know, did various

Nico: different things. For those who are unfamiliar, what did Civic set out to accomplish?

Kerim: Initially, we thought we could, we could create a eBay like Model where we would connect the installers and the manufacturers in an efficient way. Um, we thought initially, we thought we could do that even without, um, too much handholding, um, kind of like, we could take our sweet 5 percent margin and create a.

You know, marketplace type web platform. Um, by the way, all 3 of us, I forgot to mention Nicholas, my buddy from college and Michael, they built swell together. They were partners as well. And that was an Internet business. And Taylor, our CTO at civic solar, he had built a number of web based, uh. Platforms and businesses himself, just so we were all 3 of us were Internet entrepreneurs.

We all kind of understood the concepts of marketplaces, e commerce and so forth. So, we basically brought those, um, elements to, to civics business model. We thought it would be as simple as a, um, eBay like model, but very quickly realized. That we would need to handhold, uh, the installers and, and also engage the, uh, the, the manufacturers in, in, in a deep way.

And, and we built a very specialized e-commerce platform that shared a ton of information that was behind the veils for a lot of those, uh mm-hmm. long tail in installers and, um, And back then, it was really difficult to get a hold of a salesperson at a traditional installer. And it was really difficult to get the specs and the data sheets and all of that detail.

Um, and we built a platform that shared all that information up front and that that got us. Really ton of SEO and ton of visitors to our website and hundreds of phone calls coming into our 800 number, thanks to doing that really with minimal marketing. Back then.

Crafting Success through Quality Content and the Evolution of Civic Solar

Nico:  I remember being blown away with how quickly civic started dominating SEO and how civic clearly had an edge on competitors in educating the market.

And understanding how the internet worked and getting and then using that data, like really building the business around data and, um, yeah, disaggregating something on that

Kerim: point out of. We never paid a dime to any SEO professional or any SEO activity, just like EnergySage. I think I heard Vikram talk about this at EnergySage.

Um, they never optimize the contact or they never produce content with SEO in mind, and neither did we. We just did the right things. And Google recognized that. And, and I, I, I also saw this at Yoong J too. I, I never, you know, did anything for any s e O, but, um, if you Googled any term related to social networking or dating or friendship or interest, like communities, yonggi would always come up on top, even in the very early days of, uh, of it in, in Google searches.

And, and same thing happened at Civic Solar too. Um, and to me, that says, like, Internet has a special magic, or maybe it’s Google’s magic, but it’s like, when you put stuff out there, it brings you good stuff back. And, and that is something that I, I remember. I keep in the back of my mind in every single activity that I’m doing right now, but

Nico: to put a pin in the civic solar conversation, uh, could you, I remember very distinctly, like, as I left Trina, um, I didn’t see you much in civic anymore, but I know that you were instrumental in the exit.

What can you tell me about the involvement that you personally had in civics growth and the exit to CD green tech? I know a lot of the stuff that you can’t talk about, but what can you talk about in terms of what you. Yeah. Uh, how you participated and also what you learned from that experience that would be instrumental for others.

Kerim: I would say I was quite involved in civic in the early years, probably the first 5, 6 years. And, and then as, as you know, um, I moved to San Diego, uh, around, uh, 20, uh, 5th, 2014, 15 era. And, um, and mainly because civic was doing really well at the time, and we were growing leaps and bounds. Everything was going well.

And, um, and I had an opportunity I had invested in a biotech venture, um, run by some old friends. And, um. And I, I was really curious about the healthcare sector as well. And I had an opportunity to do certain projects within that, uh, biotech venture. So I wanted to actually, I did both for a while. I, I, I was 90 percent of my time in, in this biotech business, but I would fly up to, uh, the Bay area and spend two, three days, uh, at civic, uh, for, uh, for a good two, three years.

And then, um, I became more involved towards closer to the exit as civic got bigger. It’s. Unique advantages of being, uh, we didn’t really talk about this, but 1 of the key advantages of civic was the fact that it had a negative working capital type business model, which meant it didn’t require capital. It actually created capital as it was growing because we would get paid on day 0 or day 1.

Of our sales, and we would pay the vendors at day 30 or 45 or 60. so we actually created financing through our sales activity, which helped us grow from pretty much 0 to 60M in revenues without even touching half of the capital that we raised in the early days of the business and and that negative working capital, though, didn’t.

It couldn’t scale past a certain amount, and I think that amount was 60 to 70 million at the time of the market. Um, because as we grew, um, our customers grew with us and as they grew, they, they wanted terms when they were small, they didn’t. Necessarily have the negotiating power to ask for terms. So we could ask for cash up front, but as the customers grew, they wanted terms and that forced us to shift our negative working capital business model to a more traditional type business model, even though we carried much less inventory than a traditional inventory, close to zero, we started giving a ton of terms and that required more capital.

And at that point, I got more involved to. Thank you. To, uh, help raise capital, uh, potentially look at exit opportunities. And ultimately we, a lot of our best customers were going to, we were losing them to c e D because they are the best in the market. I mean, they have a brilliant and ’cause they give terms.

Yeah. And they give great terms and they are everywhere and they have a brilliant, uh, business model. A superb, uh, culture. Mm-hmm. and a leadership great reputation. And, and we had the option to, uh, sell it to them and, and we did, and that was a happy ending for, for the civic story, I would say

Nico: it was, and I can say without reservation, I worked with every, uh, distributor civic was always my favorite, not because of the business that you built, but because the people that you hired, like,

Kerim: I know information we share because they were all knowledgeable

Nico: individuals like Charlie and a seed row that like.

Yeah. And I mean, my buddy Jose and Scott, like a lot of my friends that worked at that organization who are genuinely amazing humans, right? And they’re wicked smart, and they are willing to share with anyone who will ask. And that sort of underscored the culture. Of the business that you built had a quick question for you before we turn away from civic to some other things.

You had mentioned how between and civic, you spent a lot of time thinking through and learning about and then sort of just considering do I, am I an investor? How do I handle that? Part of my, uh, sort of my now my, my life preserve capital. Is there any particular learning book or, um, or, or resource that came into your life that made you a better investor that you would recommend for others?

How Kerim Builds Businesses by Learning from Books

Kerim: There are 2 books that I’ve read probably dozens of investment investment books, and many of them are very academic and really thick. Um, but I, I have 2 simple books that are that. Created my approach to public equities investing at the very least. Um, and those are rule. Number 1. And the little, little, I can’t remember the name now is a little book that builds wealth rule.

Number 1 is a book by a former who used to be a river guide in. Uh, one of the rivers in the Grand Canyon area who saved the life of a, um, major mutual fund manager where the mutual fund manager shared all the secrets of the industry with him. And, uh, and it’s Phil town is the guy’s name and it’s a great book.

And it basically simplifies the company picking process to, uh, you know, 5 or 6 key metrics and certain attributes of the business, which essentially are investing companies that. Build products that you like, and that are ideally founder led and that have 10 percent or more growth in key metrics, like profits, earnings per share.

Book value, um, and a higher than ideally 15 percent return on invested capital. Those are the key key metrics that he tracks and that’s a good, good way to filter companies. And then another, um, and the other book, the little book that builds wealth argues. Slightly differently looks at the investing opportunities slightly differently looks more through a moat and network effect type perspective lens and says, there are certain businesses.

It doesn’t matter who runs it. Whoever, whatever monkey you put on the helm, the businesses will just do well. Because of the structural elements of that business, I don’t want to be derogatory, but I think you can apply that to every, to many utility companies that are currently running in the, in the U S which has been one of Warren Buffett’s traditionally best, uh, you know, investment approaches, utilities and newspapers, because they are winner take all models.

Utilities are, and newspapers used to be. And, and social networks are too in some way. So, um, you

Nico: had, there’s a term for that. You can win or take most, at least there’s a term for that.

Kerim: I’m going to take all or winner take most. Yeah. I don’t know if there’s another term, but yeah, that, that ends up being the case for most network effects, uh, for most businesses that benefit from network.

Nico: Yeah. Well, there, there you have it. If, uh, this is, I’m going to have to turn this into at least a multi part episode, I believe, Karim, and I think that’s a great place for us to stop. We always ask for book recommendations anyway, and, um, why not leave it there for the end of part one? I would suggest that you go out right now and buy Rule Number One and the little book that we’ll build with, I have, and, uh, And they have impacted my life.

Um, I will link to them as I always do in the show notes. Karen, uh, we’ll be back for a second part. All right. Well, I, as I mentioned, we are definitely going to do this in two parts. So that’s the end of part one with Karen. I hope that you are taking away a ton. I mean, right there at the end, just those two books alone are worth the price of admission.

And I learned so much from Karen over the years, not the least of which is how to. Reverse engineer businesses and, um, what virality means, how to leverage the very existence of the terminology around K factor and the metrics, uh, they’re in to, uh, accelerate growth and, um, and sort of what to look for in other businesses.

Um, it has helped improve my lens on not only creating my own business, but who I partner with and how we sort of show up in the world. So, uh, I would dare say that you are getting. Insight from the manual, as it were, Karen knows what he’s talking about. He’s been a longtime friend and advisor to me of meditated deeply with him on when is the right time to bring him on the show and, and, uh, let you all get a chance to sort of sit by the fire with him.

He has an outsized impact on, uh, on Suncast and on many other businesses. In in ways that probably won’t ever be public. And I’m grateful for you, Karen. Thank you for being on suncast. We will have a part two. It’ll very likely show up in the feed right behind this, meaning, you know, if we publish this, we’ll probably publish them side by side.

Um, very rarely do we publish them week after from week from week and make you wait. But maybe I’ll consider that. So I hope that if you do have questions, if you do want to reach out and connect with Karim, you can easily do that. He’s very accessible on LinkedIn and we will link to how you can find him in the show notes as we always do.

Uh, as I always say, if you are interested in more of the resources that will you, my fellow philomath can find this and so many other. Bits and bobs that I found in the research and the things that I was mentioning, the Wikipedia page for some of this stuff, Robert college, et cetera, uh, along with some reading around lots of other stuff that we talked about in this episode of linked to in the show notes over on my suncast.

com. That’s also how you can get the link to the other episodes that we’ve had and all the rich detail of past guests, more than 600 now guests in the suncast catalog. Thank you for taking the time. To invest here with us in your personal growth. It’s not lost on me that you have taken time out of anything else that you could be doing to be here with us.

And I just want to honor that and say, I’m so, so grateful. Um, there are a number of ways that you that you’d be spending your time. You’ve spent it here with us. If you do feel That you could give more. Uh, one of the most important ways is by leaving a rating and review. You can do that easily at rate this podcast.

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