Know Your Product - Dennis Thankachan - The Revenue Maze - Episode #029

Today’s guest is an angel investor in many products. Dennis Thankachan is the Co-Founder and CEO at Lightyear. After studying Computer Science and Finance at The University of Texas, Dennis went to work with Goldman Sachs. He also was part of a $10 billion hedge fund. Dennis joins the host Valerie Cobb to talk about increasing your revenue at your company.

Takeaways:

  • It’s essential to think about the product that you have and how the buyer of your product would intend to discover and buy your product.
  • The founder of the company needs to be very focused in the early stages of the company and they also need to be open-minded. This can help you pick the right venue leader afterward.
  • Businesses spend way more on telecommunication services than consumers do. If you are looking to break into the telecommunication space.
  • The way in which businesses buy their telecommunication services was invented in the 90s and hasn’t adapted to modern times.
  • You want to make sure that you have adequate cash on your balance sheet and a level head in regards to how you analyze that. That will help your company through a recession.
  • It’s good to keep an eye on the market and hear the other perspective on the market. It’s always a good idea to market check.
  • Dennis was introduced to Mark Cuban through a mutual friend who ended up investing in his company along with other NBA team owners.

Quote of the Show:

1:28 “Think about the product that you have and how the buyer of your product would intend to discover and buy your product.”

Links:

Ways to Tune In:

The Revenue Maze is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through B2B podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/.

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Know Your Product – Dennis Thankachan – The Revenue Maze

I’m so excited about this episode. I have an amazing guest. There are so many wonderful things about this guy. First of all, he’s originally from Dallas, Texas, yet his parents are from South India so there are some interesting things there as well. He studied Computer Science and Finance at the University of Texas. He was with Goldman Sachs. Post Goldman Sachs, he was part of a $10 billion hedge fund. Count it. That’s amazing. We’ll lace a little bit of Mark Cuban in there. I want to welcome the CEO of Lightyear, Dennis Thankachan. Welcome, Dennis.

I’m excited to be on the show.

The rest of us probably can’t wait to know everything about you because this is amazing. Thanks for being on the show first of all. We always answer one question. What is one thing that you can tell the audience that will help them get out of the revenue maze?

My recommendation may sound simple but it is probably the only way to get out of the revenue maze. It is to think about the product that you have and how the buyer of your product would intend to discover and buy your product. Meaning like in the context of software as a service, which is where I play, you can think about inbound, outbound, enterprise-centric go-to-market motion target at a specific buyer and a product-led growth motion. You should think about given the nature of your product, the price of the product and who your buyer is, how they should discover your product and then all of the means by which you can go after that.

A company like Calendly, for example, is very much a product-led growth motion that has a viral loop and referral discovery motion as well as a lot of inbound motion. It’s not something that necessarily lends itself to an enterprise-centric or high-cost sales-driven go-to-market motion. That dictates where it should sell. You see a lot of companies that fail with go-to-market or are stuck in the revenue maze are often not able to match how they should be selling their product based on how the buyer wants it and how they are selling and marketing their product.

You almost described product-led as identity. Sometimes we swim in lanes we should not be swimming in. As we start to go into a go-to-market strategy, sometimes our desire to say we’re one thing is not the market’s desire that that’s what that would be. Maybe I confuse you but the product would be no different because you’re solving some behavior or something in the space and what people are willing to digest on their journey to buying that product. Give us a little bit more about how you’ve done that. You started Lightyear and you’ve been in all of these other industries and seen a lot. How have you worked through that?

Now, I have a pretty good understanding of the correct answers to these questions for Lightyear but at the time that I started Lightyear, I was previously an investor in software. Being an investor in software misleads you into thinking that you know how to run a software company because you’ve been an investor in software companies, which almost forced me to unlearn lots of things.

When I started Lightyear, the initial hypothesis was that we would build a product. Essentially what our product does is automate how businesses buy and manage their telecommunication services. Initially, we had a product that was focused on smaller dollar sales into smaller businesses with what would be more of a product-led rather than a sales-led motion. It’s more after the volume of both units and customers rather than individual very large customers.

That led us to go after certain types of go-to-market motions, meaning not sales-led. We went after a lot of inbounds. We did that via sharp content marketing and search engine optimization to rank highly on Google, going after things like Google paid media, AdWords and Reddit advertising, posting on Reddit and things like that that lent themselves to the more transactional acquisition of smaller businesses.

Over time, we’ve discovered that the quintessential value of our product is at the enterprise with bigger dollar spenders who buy in different ways. These are buyers that tend not to be googling for products and intend to be approached and sold to and also are very heavily researched before they end up buying a product and go through lots of cycles and how they decide to buy products. That’s caused us to shift a lot of things, meaning we spend a lot of time writing good content and on LinkedIn.

TRM 29 | Knowing Your Product

Knowing Your Product: Bigger dollar spenders don’t Google for products. They intend to be approached and sold to.

We have an account executive team and an SDR team tasked with booking meetings and conveying value to customers. We do a lot of work at conferences and meeting buyers with standard good old outbound marketing. It’s been a total change in motion upon that discovery. The core thing, which sounds simple but it’s much easier said than done, is making sure that the way we are marketing to our buyer is the way that that buyer for this product should be marketed to.

Sometimes it is a journey. You almost have to AB test your first theory of it. It was back when I was in healthcare when we were going against the grain. We have a lot of digitals that’s going on and they’ll have this pat answer like, “First you need this, then you need this and this. You need this great website, all this ranking and all this stuff.” People didn’t look at it like, “This is the trend. This is what statistically works but that doesn’t mean that that works in your environment.”

In healthcare, it was a bit the same thing. It was a tech stack but not at the same time. We ended up going to Marcus Evans events where I call them speed dating because you have all these doctors that come in for a conference. It’s a very expensive conference but it’s very niche and little. They guarantee a certain amount of meetings like twenty-minute meetings. The whole time you’re getting to know everybody because it’s a very small intimate group.

At the time, it was very out of the box because our buyers weren’t going online. This was in 2016 so things have changed but you think about who is making those decisions and how are they buying. If you’re doing the pat digital go-to-market strategy, have a website focus on inbound and then you find that your customer isn’t at the end of that, then what do you do? Think outside the box. It sounds like you thought outside the box, took a step back and went, “Where do our buyers buy? How do they buy,” and then created that strategy.

The tougher thing along those lines, which I’m sure you’ve experienced, is making sure that your revenue leadership, whether that be a founder, head of sales or head of marketing, whoever that may be, can take a step back and analyze with an open mind everything. I’ve seen it in various early-stage companies where you have a buyer that has experience with a few different channels that automatically biases toward those channels.

For example, a sales leader from a previous company is like, “We used to crush it at every single conference so we’re going to go to AWS re:Invent and the Gartner conference and spend $200,000 at each of these things. That’s where we’re going to get our customers. If you’re doing a very similar product or service to what you used to do, perhaps that works super well but if it’s determined that that’s not a good strategy or that strategy is being picked based on finger in the air like a historical experience rather than an actual thesis that this is the way they should buy, there can be a mismatch.

You spend money on these things and then it doesn’t work so it’s like, “We need to do something else,” that person that you have in the position may not be willing or able to do something else. That’s something to also think about. That’s why a founder being very focused at an early-stage tech company in particular and open-minded on discovering the channels that work well can help you pick the right revenue leader once you have inklings of what may work well.

Being very open-minded about discovering the channels that work well can help you pick the right revenue leader.

That’s so valid. In the workspace, we hear about the quiet resignation and before, the resignation period. I know that you’re going, “What does that have to do with it?” As people are switching jobs and trying to find their passion, in some instances, they’re going to bring a different background or outlook into your company.

I will use healthcare, not because I was in healthcare very long. I wasn’t. I’ve been in heavy equipment, tax and accounting software and a bazillion industries. When I think of healthcare, they tend to run the same thing. You get a job posting and it says they have to have five years in healthcare. It gets us a bit myopic sometimes on our product, meaning we go down that same path. It was more of like, “What have I learned?”

In the job space, especially with people leaving or not engaged anymore, which is what quiet resignation is about but it was already there whether we knew it or called it something like that in Wall Street Journal, if we look at that diverse group of people and say, “How do we fill some of these roles? Are we willing to take a look outside more at trade or something else so that we’re not being so myopic,” even with hiring the right founders that would help you with the right revenue leader, it’s broadening and saying, “Don’t get so focused.”

Maybe some of this next workforce don’t need to be right in your industry to bring that expansion or capacity to look at it in a different way. Maybe that was like, “Valerie went on this weird circle tirade.” The reality is I love that you’re taking it from a perspective of saying, “It’s not just me that needs to think. The buyers also need to think.” How do we get the right leaders in there that would make it so that you can get the right go-to-market strategy?

The whole point of being myopic with regard to your industry background or personal experience is something that can impact how a company runs. With regard to Lightyear and how we see it, we build software for enterprises to buy and manage their telecom. That lends itself to you probably wanting to recruit people who have a background in telecommunications, which is a very specific industry that does things in a very specific way that is somewhat painful to learn from the ground up.

However, our revenue leadership is not from telecom because the people within telecom are terrible revenue leaders for our organization. 1) Customers hate buying telecom services like B2B or B2C. Why would we want to replicate a means of distribution that customers hate dealing with? 2) We are doing it digitally via software. Nothing that telecom companies do is digital. We want to be antithetical to the way that they want to do things.

What we’ve done is we have individual contributors who have a good amount of experience in telecom. We do want to leverage the experience and we value it but our revenue leaders are people who are coming in aiming to change the way that things are done in telecom and leverage software experience. We’ve actively looked for people that are not from telecom.

TRM 29 | Knowing Your Product

Knowing Your Product: We want to leverage the experience and value it, but revenue leaders are people who are coming in aiming to change the way that things are done in telecom.

You probably were a little more concise than my big long story with it but that’s what we’re saying. If your go-to-market strategy is going to be one way, have we looked at the broader picture of how your buyers buy? What’s wrong with the industry? Before you even start dealing with how we are going to go to market. I’m a big challenger methodology person or challenger sale. I don’t know if you know Matt Dixon and those guys.

At the end of the day, it was more of an a-ha moment uncovering what people are not thinking about because that’s where your play is at. In your go-to-market strategy, when you’re bringing on revenue leadership that might be outside of the industry, it brings in that a-ha. It’s a double-check or an HR block at a second glance so to speak. This is cool. I want to understand a little bit about how you have done this at Lightyear a little bit more and go into a little more detail on what were the challenges that you were seeing. Why did you build Lightyear? What was happening? You had an outside perspective of something to start this.

I can answer the second question and then get into the first one. I have always been a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit. In middle school, high school and college, I was doing all sorts of things to start ventures. Not necessarily technology ventures but all sorts of ventures like odd ventures here and there. In college, I loved writing code and building things. I was pretty into the startup ecosystem.

Working at Goldman Sachs after school is almost antithetical to being entrepreneurial but the actual thought process there was, “I have no money and no access to people with money.” That would be useful. It sounds like a joke when I say it that way but it’s true. If I want to start a business, learning a bit about how corporations operate and then meeting people with potentially deep pockets that I could persuade, if I so choose, could be a good path to starting a business that would de-risk it quite a bit.

I worked at Goldman and got great experience. I then worked at PointState, a large hedge fund, where I was investing in enterprise software and telecom. I made some great connections and learned a ton. I quit my job at PointState, which was a lucrative job at the time with nothing lined up, with the goal of spending a lot of time in telecom and building a business in it without having an idea.

The simple thesis that I had was with telecommunications in particular, it’s a multi-trillion dollar market with no happy customers. Whether it be a business or a consumer, it is very difficult to find a happy telecommunications customer. There’s almost no startup activity in this space other than people starting new internet service providers. Even if that’s particularly difficult, it’s not a space that attracts smart 23-year-old Stanford graduates to build exciting businesses.

That combination of factors indicates, “Maybe there’s something exciting to do in this space. I don’t know what it is, to be honest, but let me quit and look into it.” I iterated on a bunch of different ideas. Some of them were terrible ideas but I fell into what was business telecom. The few interesting things that were determined regarding business telecom are one, businesses spend way more on telecommunication services than consumers and buy much more complex services with a lot more liability.

Businesses spend way more on telecommunications services than consumers.

For example, a hospital is going to pay way more for internet connectivity than you would at your home because if they lose their internet connection, people will die. There’s that liability that exists on the business side. Two, the way in which businesses buy their telecommunication services was designed pretty much in the ‘90s and hasn’t changed since you’re doing phone calls and emails to all potentially shady characters and there’s no digital way to do anything.

The simple idea was like, “Can we build a digital means for businesses to buy their telecommunications?” In short, that is what we’re doing. The thesis has proven pretty correct, although with lots of nuances along the way. The most interesting challenge that is worth citing is we had this idea in late 2019 and we were initially going to start a product focused on the procurement of internet connections for small business offices.

When COVID came around in March of 2020 and shutdowns came, the small business market fell off a cliff. The office internet demand fell off also a cliff. It is beginning to return a little bit but demand is potentially permanently challenged in that segment. Initially, there was a denial period of like, “Things are going to open up in a week.” Then there was the acceptance period like, “Things are not opening back up for quite a while.” Even when they do open back up, people may not return to offices.

What we shifted from was a small business strategy to an enterprise-centric strategy where demand for telecommunication services for all sorts of reasons went way up. We moved more into non-office-centric and more mission-critical infrastructure services like bigger dollars, higher liability and different segments than office, which are larger markets intuitively. We made some transitions that were painful at the time but ultimately helpful for the business. We have a product that is utilized by a bunch of large global enterprises and still has lots of challenges but the COVID period in particular was one that nearly knifed us.

I love that story because people are saying it’s not there and we won’t say the R word but it’s the recession. You described pivoting on a dime going, “I’m going from here. I went through my grief period. I went here and I’m coming back on top. So what? That was my original thing.” You’re like a phoenix rising saying, “I went through this.”

There’s a book by Jack Stack, The Great Game of Business. One of the consultants for The Great Game of Business constantly repeatedly told the company, “Recession is not a thing if you plan for it.” That has always stuck with me. When you’re first starting to send your product to market, you had an idea of going in a certain direction. I’m not saying it’s one way or the other. You then ended up in a different direction.

Even though there was a roadblock because COVID was a huge roadblock for a lot of businesses that were starting up during that time, you evolved and changed. You have then begun the road back. If you had tried to stick with your model and said, “No, I’m sticking with this model. It works. COVID is going to go away. Bury your head in the sand,” and all of that stuff, we probably wouldn’t be having even this dialogue about what’s going on because it wouldn’t have worked.

I love that you brought that story up because a lot of people are keen on hearing some hope with their businesses for sure and to make sure that they’re realizing there’s a lot of opportunity out there. It may not be the way you first thought it was out there or has been out there. Going into Lightyear and that journey to where you are now and you changed, what are some of the things that you grieved? You did all this stuff but you talk about different people who were working with you. Bring up some of the stories of how you came about that. Some people were still putting their heads in the sand for COVID like, “It’s going to be fine tomorrow.”

It’s interesting that you bring up the recession data point. You based the story on a tale of two recessions almost. In 2020, we had what was a short-term COVID-induced recession that was pretty unpredictable in terms of the actual shock that occurred, how things played out and the catalyst for transformation that occurred as a result of COVID.

In 2022, you have what is a recession that’s effectively a hangover from the stimulus, monetary policy and capital availability. Not to say you could have predicted this but far more predictable than the COVID recession. The impact of both and how you plan for both are quite different. For either recession, the planning component is ensuring that you have a strong balance sheet strategy where you can write out any transition or shock, which is panning out positively because capital is far less available than it was.

With COVID, the thing that was impossible to plan for is a series of transitions that accelerated significantly and not possible to have planned for some of those things. Also stimulus in response and all these other things. That is where there is no way you have planned for the outcomes but the only thing you could have done well is to make sure that you have adequate cash on your balance sheet and a level head with regard to how to analyze what was playing out.

TRM 29 | Knowing Your Product

Knowing Your Product: There is no way you can plan for the outcomes. The only thing you can do is make sure you have adequate cash on your balance sheet and a level head with regard to how to analyze what is playing out.

Our company is having to write up both of these recessions. How you plan to and think about each is different. The lucky thing we had during COVID is although it put a knife in our thesis, we had a little bit of pre-seed funding. We were only a three-person company, including myself, our cofounder or CTO and our VP of Sales. We paid ourselves next to nothing. I was ready to make the money that we had in our bank last infinitely. It means taking everyone’s pay down to zero and taking expenses down to zero. We’re going to figure it out or so-help-me-God kind of thing.

That is the type of mentality that’s required in a situation like that because you don’t know how long things last or how painful things become. Thankfully, demand didn’t fall off a cliff. It was supply that fell off a cliff and stimulus helped a lot. All these things were difficult to predict and it was way less painful than you would’ve thought but in the short-term, it looked very grim.

With this current recession, our company’s bigger. We have much more staff and you can’t take expenses down to zero without making big changes. The smart thing that we did in 2021 when the market was very hot is we did not delve into pressure to way aggressively overhire. It’s hard to see a startup that is not laying off a significant percentage of staff because tendency to overhire and seek growth at all costs.

The goal was to have a sustainable strategy for capital that could withstand a recession, which it does seem like we are in one and also, not overvalue the business. Be thoughtful about how we price our assets and mentally ensure that everyone is aware. When times are great, the market is overstating the quality of what is going on in the economy. You should be concerned that things are not as good as they seem. When times are bad, tell people, “We have a lot of money in the balance sheet and things are probably not as bad as they seem. You’re at a company that’s well run.” Remind people of that but always be mentally preparing for the absolute worst internally.

Sometimes, people don’t allow themselves to get there. Mentally preparing is a head-in-the-sand kind of thing. I remember in a Vistage meeting, one of the guys came out. They’d been around for all these years and he was offing arms and everything was going to go bad. By the next two months, he was like, “Everybody turns toward this product because of what’s going on.”

When I try to talk about mental preparation, give us some examples of that because we all go through a grieving process on it. When you’re an entrepreneur or you own your company, small business or whatever you’re working on, sometimes bottom-up doesn’t realize top-down worries and stuff like that. Even in a small company, there’s a lot on your plate. Being mentally prepared to handle things is not always an easy thing. You work out seven days a week. You told me that as part of it. Give us some points on how you were getting mentally prepared and how you’re mentally preparing for this now.

It is particularly difficult for a lot of humans to embrace the harshest form of reality, especially when it’s the opposite of a self-serving reality. If you’re undergoing what’s a difficult revenue quarter, it is probably difficult for the person leading the charge to call the quarter a dumpster fire. It is difficult for a person to admit that they’re terrible at something that they think they should be good at.

In January 2022 or December 2021, it’s maybe painful to admit as a SaaS CEO to take on around that value from your company at X. Given what’s happening with rates, your valuation probably dropped 70% over the course of 3 to 4 months because it’s hard to frame that. Very quickly embracing the harshest and sometimes most painful or at least gratifying form of reality can be the most beneficial.

It’s like the example of two different CEOs. One CEO is willing to embrace that your valuation dropped 75% and one CEO is insistent that it’s not a big deal. It is more of a blip and it’s going to go away. CEO 1 is able to make painful decisions early and rationalize costs in the business and focus on areas of growth that can get you out of your valuation hangover and perhaps you’re okay. CEO 2 may waste 6, 9 to 12 months of cash balance on the status quo before they admit what is reality.

By the time you’re forced to make what are tough decisions, you have way less firepower and time to make what are tougher decisions. In terms of how to do that, it’s hard. I don’t know that there’s necessarily a right answer but things like putting yourself in what’s a fair mental headspace and ensuring that you’re rational and matter-of-fact with the way you do the world is important. Self-awareness is very important.

Going to the gym, meditating, writing and reading helps. Ensuring that you have a personal board of directors that you trust who will tell you things like it is and are not yes ma’am is particularly useful. I have a series of people that I trust to seek opinions on various business-related items. I have a spectrum, meaning 1 to 2 people that tend to be more optimistic, 1 to 2 people that tend to be very pessimistic and 1 to 2 people that are more of a baseline. You solicit a group of opinions and you’ll be able to form your own. Have your independent perspective but it’s good to market check on what is your perspective on the market. Eventually, you have to execute.

It’s good to market check on what is your perspective on the market, but eventually, you just have to execute.

What helped me at one particularly difficult time is my two cents, take it or leave it. I’m an empath so I struggle with walking in people’s shoes all the time and knowing what some of those changes might mean to other people’s lives. At the same time, I had a coach one time who said, “When you’re working with a company, because you signed up with that company, your integrity was to that company and its goals. You aligned with those goals. If those goals no longer align, then you have no business being there. If your employees’ goals no longer align with the company’s goal, they don’t belong there either.”

That helped me because there are times when I’ve had to go into sales teams and go, “This isn’t working.” I’m happy to help someone find a different place but what is happening is we all went and said amen to whatever goal this was when we were coming through the door. When that goal is not being achieved, something is off. If there is no more alignment with that, then something needs to change.

Sometimes you can feel like, “I’m sticking to this goal. I’m creating all these jobs.” My vision is that businesses can change lives faster than the government can. They can create jobs and better things in the world without waiting for grants and all this other stuff. To stay true to that integrity, if something gets in the way of that, I say, “This is my boundary with my empathy aside. This is the needle that we do not cross.”

That way, I put my check and balance and then my emotional state is so much better from it. It becomes what I call the sage side of my brain versus the saboteur side of my brain. You described integrity to a T. It was like, “This is what has to happen or this does not exist. We’re not moving forward,” or whatever that is. I love that. That’s great. There are very few people that understand that we like to place blame. “My leader sucked. This didn’t work.” No. You knew the rule of the game. The business is the game. This is what we’re doing in this business. If it’s not working, it’s not working. It sucks but it’s not working. You pivot and move.

First of all, I love that you are an avid reader. People may not know that about you but I can tell that you’re an avid reader because you’re going through so many things. Who gets out of college and goes and works for Goldman Sachs? We know that there are amazing things on the horizon for you. What’s your favorite book? Who are your mentors? Tell us a little about that.

The ironic thing that I will throw up is I discovered a love of reading post-college. I write what I was supposed to read for school and get good grades and stuff but I used a lot of SparkNotes. I wasn’t excited to read. That’s a big regret of mine. I now read a ton. In terms of books that I like, I’m very big into human history like decomposing human history so frameworks for human history or books that provide that are good.

Gun, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens are great. There’s another book called Big History that is also great. I also love good memoirs and autobiographies that can dig into interesting people. I finished Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. That’s one of the greatest books ever. Off sight, it is a very common choice. Gandhi: An Autobiography is amazing and particularly good. It’s two people in very different circumstances who has a real will to achieve and persist in different ways that are ridiculously disciplined. It’s the thing that helps you think about your purpose. Those are two books that I love.

TRM 29 | Knowing Your Product

Man’s Search for Meaning

Those are fantastic. I love the differences between the two. They’re from different circumstances so that’s very interesting. You talked a little bit about Mark Cuban and some other cool people that are investors in Lightyear so I have to bring it up. That’s just me. How is that like and what is that like? It sounds a little bit like you have a relationship with Mark Cuban.

Mark Cuban has a big portfolio. We’ve done well in the context of his portfolio. The interesting piece of context there is I’m from Dallas and the Dallas Mavericks, which Mark owns. I’m a huge NBA fan. It’s my favorite thing to watch and I follow NBA gossip. I’ve been a Mavericks fan for a very long time. Watching Shark Tank and being a Mavericks fan, I always dreamt of finding a way to work with Mark Cuban.

The interesting thing is I got lucky. We were raising our seed round of financing, which fortunately was a very sought-after round to invest in like a lot of institutions. Word was getting around about hype around our company. It so happened that a friend who works with the guy who was leading investments for Mark at the time said, “Mark Cuban’s team found out about your company and wants to meet you.”

At the time, I was like, “This has to be a joke. Come on. I’m not going on Shark Tank.” It turns out it was real. He connected me. They ended up committing pretty quickly, put a little bit into the round and also introduced us to a few other people who are also NBA owners who ended up investing. That was an awesome opportunity.

We interfaced from time to time. There was one time when an investor update I sent out said we were looking for a software engineer and the next day, I got 500 LinkedIn requests. I was like, “What happened?” Mark posted, “One of my companies is hiring a software engineer.” Stuff like that happens from time to time. Mark has posted about Lightyear and things like that, which is cool. It’s more of a personal flex if anything. We have lots of awesome investors on our captive. It just so happens that Mark Cuban is the one that when you’re recruiting people, people will know of and remember.

With Shark Tank, the whole nine yards are there. I thought it’d be fun to pull it out. You were going to go to college for music. A lot of musicians end up more in the space that you’re talking about. What changed? Why did you switch? I’m curious.

Probably more financially lucrative for me to have done what I’ve currently done in retrospect but the decision would’ve been to probably not go to college and pursue music if anything. In high school, I was very deep. I produced hip-hop music and worked with a series of artists. I was getting deeper into that realm. It’s still probably my number one passion.

I was getting some early traction. I was also making some money producing and I worked with a few artists that were getting a bit of traction. It was a fun time. I loved doing it and making music. There was a possibility of me taking some time off, not going to college and trying to get an income via music or going all in on that path, which I opted not to do. Maybe that is a forever regret of mine but if I’m being honest, I was decent but I don’t think I was talented enough. I am better at this. It’s probably where I’m being honest with myself.

It’s funny because there are a lot of amazing musicians that never make the radar of anybody. I am assuming you’re probably very good and humble about it. I sing opera for eighteen years. When we talk about music, that was my fun. My day job pays my bills and that was more of it. I was fair. I was on a few shows and a few things like that but it’s a wake-up call. I thought it was very interesting. If you could give advice to the younger generation coming up. I know I’m old and you’re probably not old. I’m just going to say it that way but what advice would you give somebody?

My advice on this is also simple. Think about what your interests are and then follow them. When you are young, there are a lot of things that are purported to be interesting that are pushed on you by maybe your parents or other influences in your life that you may or may not be interested in. Thinking for yourself about what excites you with regard to getting out of bed in the morning is important and hard to answer. A lot of people go their entire lives without getting to that answer.

If you’re fortunate enough to have the opportunity to figure out what it is that excites you, do everything you can to get to that answer as early as possible and then work hard at trying to isolate whatever that is with regard to education and work. Especially if you start early and try hard, you’d be surprised how not as difficult as it seems it is to pursue your passions.

If you’re fortunate enough to figure out what it is that excites you, do everything you can to get to that answer as early as possible.

Building and interfacing with people are real passions of mine. It so happens that running a software company is a great way to get a high out of the building and interact with people every single day. Also, to challenge myself mentally and rack my brain with all sorts of numerical and technological questions. I have a blast and I view it as a daily fight to keep my job this way for as long as possible.

That’s great advice. I always appreciate it. Back to Viktor Frankl, somebody posted and there were two sides to what he sent. I know I’m saying it wrong but some work and find passion in their work that then pays for their passion. Find and uncover that. I’m not quoting him exactly but the gist of it is to find passion in what it is.

My dad was a bit of an example of that because he was an outdoorsman a lot and became a CPA. He used to always say, “My passion is you kids, the toys and the fun. My CPA is when I go and do that work,” or whatever it is that he’s doing right in that realm because there are a lot of different things in that realm but it is to pay for all that passion. That’s what gets me moving and going in the morning.

In the summer months, I take off more. We can go hiking, boating or whatever some of those things are but his passion was his children and he had quite a bit of them. That works. He loves teaching that. I love that you say tap into that, follow it and make sure you find something there for that. People want to know how to reach you. I’m sure that you’ll give us one good way. What is one of the best ways to get ahold of you and chat with you?

LinkedIn works. I am @DennisThankachan. I’m sure you can find out how to spell my name via this show. You can search for it and get me there. Message me or shoot me an email at Dennis@Lightyear.ai. Our website is Lightyear.ai.

Dennis, thank you so much for being on the show. I want to thank all the readers and guests. If you liked it, share some love. Go and comment. We certainly appreciate it. I’ve learned so much from Dennis Thanks again, Dennis.

Thank you so much for the opportunity, Valerie.

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About Dennis Thankachan

Dennis Thankachan

Dennis Thankachan

Dennis Thankachan is the Founder and CEO of Lightyear, a web platform that helps businesses comparison shop for network services (dedicated internet access, WAN solutions, VoIP, managed services, etc.). He regularly writes on various IT infrastructure and telecom topics here. Thankachan is based in NYC.

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About The Author : Valerie Cobb

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