Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Yash Tekriwal. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Yash, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I was one of the co-founders of a business called Radify Labs that was born out of a program from a non-profit that me and a friend ran in college called HackCville (now known as Forge https://joinforge.co/). The idea was that at HackCville, we built an internship program that was an immersive in-person summer experience. We could only have 100 spots in the program because it was limited by the number of businesses we were able to get sold internships with. The idea of the original non-profit program was that we would give students internship placements and course skills that were hot and emerging. Think data science, think marketing, think web design, think software engineering, and then we would pay them a stipend where they would over the first four weeks in the summer deeply and immersively learn that skill at the level where they were then able to be a meaningfully contributing intern at one of the companies we placed them at.

So there was so much demand for this program that we after year one ended up with over 1,000 applications for what was just 80 to 100 spots. And we cared deeply about accessibility and giving everyone who was really stoked about this internship program an opportunity to be able to engage and the problem was that we were turning away tons of qualified people. It has to be the same problem I imagine that universities like Harvard or Stanford or Yale face or competitive companies like McKinsey and Bain where you have more qualified applicants for the job or for the position than you do spots available.

What Andy and I at the time came up with was this idea that we would design an accessible, low-cost scholarship available program for students to do a sampler of all the different programs we had in person through HackCville and then work on a group internship project for free with a local company or business that we had identified. And we knew this was worth solving because there was so much student demand for real skills. We saw it through the HackCville Bootcamp that we ran and our unique approach was that we ran HackCville where we had already built this sort of entrepreneurial non-profit center where students could come and learn. And so we bootstrapped that idea. We just talked to a bunch of students. We launched a simple one-page landing page, and we bootstrapped our way to six figures in revenue over one summer, which was enough for us to decide to forego our official full-time job offers and go all in on building Radify Labs.

Then we learned a bunch of things in the process thereafter. We got into top national accelerator, met a bunch of incredible mentors, learned about how to sell to universities, started to get in the weeds on how the program would grow and expand. And learned a lot of hard but really exciting and beautiful lessons along the way. And I think the lesson for us at the time is listen to the customers you seek to serve. Listen to the problems that they have. Design programs in conjunction with your customers, and everything else sorts of falls in place because you know you’re building for people with real problems.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Hey there, I’m Yash Tekriwal. I am a co-founder, a teacher, and an all-around expert generalist who is really passionate about innovation, creative ideas, and creative problem-solving. I think my journey into the entrepreneurial space really began in college when I joined a couple of clubs focused on local innovation, entrepreneurship, and business building. I love the nitty-gritty, in-the-weeds creative process that is behind all business building, whether it’s a small restaurant, a local bookstore, or a VC-backed software company. There’s a specific 0-to-1 creative ideation process and a lot of hard work that goes on behind bringing something from your idea into real life in a meaningful way that’s going to serve real people. I loved going through that process with several business owners in college and have ended up accidentally forging my dream career in startups afterwards.

I think one of the biggest strengths to being an entrepreneur is being what I call an expert generalist – someone who is really good at a lot of skills but maybe not great at any single individual one. I call these spikes, and I think about these spikes as the accumulation of above-average skills that you can obtain that when put together form your own unique competitive insight or advantage into a market.

One way that people traditionally spike in their careers is by being really good at medicine, really good at law, really good at finance and accounting, and then you have this single spike that makes you really wonderful banker or lawyer or accountant or doctor. But then I think there’s this increasing number of careers, particularly in the age of AI, that benefit from people who are what I call expert generalists or multi-potentialites – folks who love becoming a “mini-expert” in multiple skill categories.

A really good example of this in my own life has been that I started out my career as an early data scientist with a little bit of a mix of education experience and a little bit of a mix of coding experience and automation experience. And then what that led to was the creation of our first company called Radify Labs where we built this kind of curriculum at scale for 1000s of students.

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of different things that have built my expert generalist profile. I started my career in management consulting, and then moved into data science, and then spent some time as a high school teacher before becoming an ed-tech entrepreneur. Ended up being a lifestyle and career coach at Alt MBA with Seth Godin. Then went back into being an ed-tech entrepreneur at another failed startup after the first successful startup. Then pivoted into running product and data at a sales tech opportunity advancement startup called Volley. Spent some time as a venture capitalist with Steve Schlafman in New York. Before finally ending up as the Head of Education at Clay dot com where we’re enabling this kind of creative ideation process for thousands of people worldwide to continue to grow their businesses.

I think what really sets me apart from others is typically this expert-generalist idea that I’m talking about. It’s the ability to, number one, learn new topics and digest them and understand them at a rapid rate, and then also, two, to be sort of an expert subject matter on a number of different things. What I’m most proud of though through all of my skill sets is my ability to really listen deeply and help people unlock themselves in the problems that they’re facing. A lot of the work that I do whether it’s from consulting agencies automation work claywork or something else isn’t really about the tacit knowledge and skills that I have it’s much more about being able to make someone feel seen and heard and to help them walk on the path that they didn’t know they needed to walk themselves in order to get to where they really needed to go.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

One of the best sources for new clients across multiple businesses that I’ve started (whether it was my consulting agency, my automation agency, or even our first EdTech business) has always been content. I think one of the most organic ways in which people connect with new ideas and new spaces online is through content. One of the best parts of content is that it starts to create a corpus of knowledge about who you are, what you stand for, and what you believe in, making it easy to access and easy for other people to come in and see what you’re all about. This idea actually started when I was an Alt-MBA with Seth Godin, and one of his number-one pieces of advice for all of us was to just write something and post it every day. I think this has three different benefits to people’s careers: – Writing every day is a very clear, very strategic activity to engage in. It helps clarify rigor of thought, it helps you communicate really important ideas in succinct ways, and builds your overall career critical thinking process. – Being visible and posting about your content online is the best way we still have today of finding your tribe (I put tribe in quote-unquote because your tribe are the people who look like you, who think like you, who want to follow the same path that you are taken). The best way to attract people who might be in your tribe is by putting out content that acts as a bat signal to them that you are someone else who is also a part of their tribe. – The most beneficial thing of all clearly is being able to have authority and a stance on a topic of mine. For example, when I first started out posting content on LinkedIn, I was posting all about education and universities and higher education and the ways in which things needed to be moving, shifting, changing or growing. Those posts, not intentionally at the time, led to my first dozen or so clients (both from the university level and the individual level as coaching clients) as well as built a specific rapport and trust with people that made our client engagements that much easier when we started to put the pedal to the metal.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

There are so many lessons that I’ve had to unlearn over the years, but probably the biggest one that comes to mind in this moment is needing to unlearn the black and white nature of how I thought about problems in the past.

I’ll dig into an actual example and a story here. For context, when I was earlier in my career just starting our first company and getting entrepreneurial space, I was an extraordinarily passionate and really well-trained debater. That gave me a couple of strengths: I was really good at rigorously debating interesting new ideas, fleshing out ideas from multiple different angles, and also being able to advocate for my own ideas with logical precision.

However, what I didn’t realize was the double-edged sword of how that kind of critical thinking and critical communication could really alienate people that I was trying to work with, not against. One piece of feedback that one of my co-founders gave me back at our first company was that he felt afraid to bring things up in discussion with me, not because he knew they were good or bad ideas, but simply because he knew that whether or not his idea was high or low quality, he was likely to lose a debate against me about the merit of the idea because he didn’t have the same level of debate skills that I did. And I was always looking at all of the critical points in any given idea.

I think another idea that shows up in my personal life here about the lack of empathy that I had to unlearn from my logical rigor processes is that one time in one of my relationships earlier on in life my partner was struggling with her future career decisions and she had gone back and forth on this decision to go into a larger corporate job or go into something more creative and entrepreneurial for herself. I saw it as a logic-based problem. So what I did was I grabbed a whiteboard and started diagramming what she was saying and what she thinks she wanted to do, pointed out the logical inconsistencies in what she was saying, and circled the area that she needed to figure out what she actually believed in order to improve and figure out her problem. Naturally that was not the most helpful thing to do in that moment. She was upset, and the conversation did not move in any sort of productive manner.

I think what really was the un-learning moment for me was actually when I sat down for co-founder therapy for dozens of hours with my first co-founders at our very first ed-tech company. Really had someone moderate our co-founder relationships with each other, and it was through those long discussions that I realized even if an idea is logically right, it doesn’t mean you need to batter or beat people over with it. I first thought that in business, right always wins. There is always an objectively better answer, you always want to grow revenue, there are things that work and there are things that don’t work. But what I also learned and really unlearned in the process is that business, like everything else in life, is all about humans and human relationships and human creativity and human emotions. And ultimately humans, while we think we are rational creatures, are really rationalizing creatures. We are emotionally led and emotionally driven, and we attempt to use our brains, logic, and reasoning to back our way into the decisions that matter most. But ultimately everything starts with the core of being seen, heard, and understood.

So then that led to me somewhat unlearning my propensity to logically debate the merits of every single idea and instead relearn the process of first hearing and gathering and bringing in all ideas, making them all feel seen, heard, and pursued to their logical degrees using a yes-and type mentality. And then being able to layer in logic and reasoning later on in the process once you’ve actually created a feeling of safety and comfort for other people to present their ideas.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://yashtekriwal.com
• Instagram: @tekhelp
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yashtek/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yashtekriwal/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/yash_tek

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