Rahul Vohra: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, good problem to have. Let’s talk for a minute. Before we go to Superhuman, which we’re going to spend most of the episode on, can you tell us quickly on Rapportive? How did you start it? It was a very quick turnaround. Rapportive was basically started to satisfy my own need. It was a classic case of scratching my own itch. I was at the University of Cambridge at the time and I, in fact, have just dropped out of the PhD program. I started a PhD there in Machine Learning and Computer Vision. This was way before either those things were cool or even feasible. In any case, I dropped out because I realized that what I wanted to be was an entrepreneur, but I didn’t have an idea at the time what I wanted to pursue. So, I networked my way into the part of the university that helps staff and students create companies called Cambridge University Entrepreneurs. Essentially what I would do is I would actually come to folks like yourself, VCs, angels, big tech companies, and I would say, “Hey, can I please have some money?” They would be like, “Why?” and I’d say, “Well, I want to give that money to staff and students at the University of Cambridge who are making companies. It’s going to be awesome. Trust me.” These folks would sort of rub their hands together and go, “Cool, how much equity do we get?” I would say, “None whatsoever. This is a charity that we’re running here. We’re trying to help people learn how to build businesses and by their work we’re going to make some amazing businesses as well.” As we’ve covered multiple times on the show, Cambridge is actually a really great entrepreneurial hub. ARM came out of Cambridge as did many other companies. Everything’s crazy. ARM, Cambridge Silicon Radio, let’s see who else. There was that company that Qualcomm acquired. I forgot the name. And wedding companies, too. My partner, Rylie at Wave was a graduate student in Cambridge, as well as our friend, Nells at Eventbrite, and plenty of Silicon Valley has come from Cambridge in the UK. These VCs should have given you money.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.