EP11: Sohun Sanka - How an Entrepreneur thinks about going All In

Martin Tobias (00:00) Hi, the I'm Martin and this is the first bet. Every successful person ha gets interviewed about how they won, and very few people drag them back to the moment before they knew it would work, when the information was thin, when the money was real and they pushed their chips in anyway. And that's what we do here. I'm Martin Tobias. I'm the managing partner of Incisive Ventures. I've placed these kind of bets as a VC, as a poker player, and as a CEO.

And my guest today is Sohun Sanka. He's 25 years old and he spent six years rotating through every layer of TikTok shop on the brand side, the agency side, the platform side at a YC company. And then he quiet quietly walked out of the head of a GTM role and took a beat and founded a company to do TikTok shops full time. And not he didn't raise any money.

but he basically went all in on this idea of TikTok shops. Maybe before a lot of people thought it could be successful. That decision, like what he knew and how he decided to go all in versus the other opportunities at the time, is what we're gonna talk about today, along with a few other things about how CEOs decide between many things what to do. Shahoon, welcome to the first bet.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (01:15) Awesome. Thanks for having me on and excited to chat through this.

Martin Tobias (01:18) Yeah, so maybe take us back to y you know, what you were doing at the time and you had mentioned just just before that, you know, you're kind of a go all in guy, but you probably also have lots of opportunities. Tell us what was going on through your mind when you decided to go on this TikTok thing and what some of the alternatives were and how you thought about choosing this thing to go all in on versus maybe some of the other things that were on your plate at the time.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (01:46) Yeah. So I I originally started my TikTok shop journey working at an omnichannel marketing agency where they had a portfolio of brands. they did about a hundred million plus per year, managed brands on Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok shops sort of fell in my lap because they needed someone younger to build out more of an influencer focused marketing engine. And so I worked directly with leadership to build that out. And at the time I didn't realize that it was gonna become a big thing because it just launched in the US, but our CEO was like, Hey.

This is going to be the next big thing. So I was one of the first I guess, like agency strategists to build out a TikTok shop scaled service and made a ton of mistakes at the beginning. Where looking back, I'm like, my God, I can't believe I did that. but it ended up being the right decision. And I basically went and scaled their TikTok shop service out, worked with several you know, enterprise nine figure brands. and then I got poached by the first ever TikTok shop affiliate software.

In the space. and those softwares are incredibly important because without them, it's impossible to run a TikTok shop program. And essentially what they're doing is these softwares help you find TikTok shop creators and work with them. It's like a TikTok shop CRM product.

Martin Tobias (02:58) Right.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (02:58) Yeah. And so from there, you know, I basically came on as their head of growth at 23 years old and I took a big bet going out of agency. I was on track to become

you know, manager there had other offers, like because TikTok shop was so new, everyone was looking for like a head of TikTok shop or a TikTok shop leader at the time. But I took a bet on this company because I really thought it was going to the future. Cause I saw that every single brand who onboarded had to essentially go through this software to then start their journey. And I was like, if I can go and be at

Martin Tobias (03:27) This part of the co

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (03:29) like the nexus of like where brands incubate and then scale, I can get so much perspective.

to then make a decision on like where TikTok shop is gonna head. I can see the back end of every single business and start to really understand

Martin Tobias (03:40) Yeah.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (03:41) the system. So that's what I did at that first company. It was called Euka AI. It is the biggest TikTok shop software company right now. Again, that space is a little bit on the smaller side, but just learned a ton while I was there.

Martin Tobias (03:54) Okay. And then how did you decide to leave Euka and start Clankers?

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (03:58) Yeah. So after Euka ended up working at a few other companies, the compensation like only got bigger and bigger and bigger, which made it even harder and harder to leave. But I essentially saw this period where, you know, these harnesses like Claude Code, Codex, and everything was coming out. And it was really making the moat around Pure SaaS, at least in the marketing space, very, very thin. And what a lot of you have to understand is that a lot of these e-commerce softwares, they're a lot less complex.

Than some of these like enterprise grade, super complex technologies that are like agent to agent in San Francisco. Like these softwares function in a way where it's like you put stuff in a form and it outputs things in a table. That's what my

Martin Tobias (04:39) Yeah.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (04:40) my friend was saying. He's like, all these softwares are just form to table softwares. And so you can imagine with Claude Code coming out, anyone can just like HTML to Chrome extension, like rip these softwares and just mimic the logic and then recreate them very easily. So I was like, hmm.

Is this industry really the industry that I want to stay in for the long run? Like the short-term cash versus long-term upside and how fast AI is just disrupting all these legacy softwares really was part of the push out. but then I saw an opportunity to create a business that was sort of straddling between like the services and the software side. I I believe that the future will be in internal tooling and people will just hyper-personalize all the software internally.

And just pull from like public APIs or MCPs and really just custom fit the solution they want. And that was my pain point as a marketer from the beginning. Is I always used all these different softwares to essentially execute my marketing strategy. But now as a non-technical marketer, I can essentially build my dream software in-house just using these tools and harnesses. So that's what I'm doing at my company, Clankers. We're going into marketing agencies and TikTok shop brands.

And teaching them how to build these in house workflows and softwares to help them solve their problems on scaling their TikTok shop revenue.

Martin Tobias (05:57) Okay. So you were early in this idea of of TikTok shops and you're working at an agency and then you stayed with the idea, but you moved to different sort of implementations of the idea. And it seems like you keep moving when you see a new technology shift coming, but it's still it's still

It it sounds like what one of the things you're saying is that you you are still trying to solve old problems that you've had for a long time, but in new ways. And what keeps you moving and making different bets is when you see something change materially enough to make that change and to give up even some guaranteed

salary to to do something a new way. Is that fair s to say how you think

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (06:44) Yeah.

Martin Tobias (06:45) about this?

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (06:46) Yeah, absolutely. I'm heavily opportunistic. And you know, even my family and a lot of my mentors are like, just be super risk averse while you're young. like I've given up like hundreds of thousands of dollars, like probably over a million dollars in like total comp just to pursue these opportunities. And like I'm still living at my parents' house right now and trying to keep my like trying to literally go all in on this right now.

Martin Tobias (07:07) Burn down.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (07:08) Keep that burden as low as possible. just to explore this idea because I really do think it'll be the next big thing. And the biggest

Martin Tobias (07:16) So

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (07:16) thing for me Okay, go ahead.

Martin Tobias (07:17) go ahead. It would so but but the move to Clankers, so you kinda were early at agency, you were the young guy that tried to figure this out, but you were doing it inside of an agency that had o lots of other things and it seems like you kept moving with this idea. But Clankers is the first time where you decide to go all in at w on your own company. What was going through your mind, you know, obviously some of the other people on this thing have said, you know, you've gotta

you know, bet where you think you have an advantage or where you have some insight. But what was the shift in your mind that made you think now is the time to stop being an innovator inside somebody else's company or inside somebody else's framework, even in an area that I care about, and to go all in and to do it yourself. Because the upside of doing it yourself is

a little bit greater, more asymmetric than doing it inside somebody else's company. But what was going through your mind when you made the shift from, you know, being the expert on this thing in somebody else's company versus doing it yourself? What what gave you that confidence to to make that move?

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (08:23) Yeah, and and you know, part of the decision making was me also running a podcast at both companies and interviewing a ton of founders, just getting a ton of information on like what it really means to be a founder, the jobs to be done. And while I was at both of these companies, I was virtually employee number one. So I was doing a lot of things. There were things where I was going back with our lawyers and drafting up NDAs for other CEOs that we were partnering with.

There were times where I would even step in and help hire new leadership roles that were completely outside of my department and and be an interview sounding board there. And I was essentially abstracting all the jobs of being a founder. And I'm like, really what it comes down to is like you need to just make sure you get more customers and make sure they're happy. And then there's a few admin things like invoicing, legal and accounting, and you know, all those things are there, there's solutions out there and they're very easy to do.

and so I was like, okay, reasonably, like, what are the things that I don't think that I think I would have trouble with that I'm not already doing as an entrepreneur? When I have to make up a whole new service from scratch, go to market, go and use my own network, because I brought leads to these companies without using any paid media spend or using too much budget because they're like very early, like seed stage companies, pre-seeds sometimes too. I was like, well, look, what what about this?

Can I really do here? Because I'm leveraging my personal brand. I wasn't always leveraging the company brand to get these leads. And I was like, that's why this c these companies are giving me equity. But I'm like, if I'm leveraging my personal brand and I can essentially do all these things as like a founder's right hand, then like realistically, there's only like three to four things

Martin Tobias (10:00) Yeah.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (10:01) that I can't do and this much upside to get, which is like invoicing legal, forming an LLC. And I'm like, those can all be done within

Martin Tobias (10:06) Yeah.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (10:09) like, you know, you can just hire accounting firms. There's like a

Company called like Haven and it's like 500 a month, you get accounting done, you get like legal,

Martin Tobias (10:17) Yeah.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (10:18) and it's like you know, it it just seemed very like obvious to me. And the thought process was like, Look, if this doesn't work, which it was seeming very unlikely because I was a the way I got leads is I was kind of like a TikTok shop thought leader on LinkedIn. So I was like, if I just keep posting on LinkedIn, I will get leads because people were already offering and asking me to consult. And so there was already

Martin Tobias (10:37) Right.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (10:38) like

Latent demand that I had already been vesting up through my own brand equity. And I was like, okay, even if this doesn't work, could I reasonably get a job in two years and get paid even more than like what I was making now? And I was just like, yeah. So like virtually it was a zero risk decision on my part. And because I was young enough to still live with my parents, like I also just like negated as much risk as possible. And I built up this network of founders and brand equity and connections.

along the way working in SaaS, because you just get distribution to like everyone in this space versus in an agency you're just competitive with other agencies, that I just had this like kitchen cabinet of advisors, I these people I knew, mitigated my risk by staying at home. And I was like, it's time to go all in while I have time. Cause if I have a spouse in the future, if I'm a mortgage, if I have other obligations to other people, like those things are going to affect my likelihood to succeed.

Martin Tobias (11:33) Yeah. That that's certainly something I've heard. you know, you you got good advice to be a little more a little less risk averse early. the decision to go all in at twenty three, twenty four, twenty-five is very different than the decision to go all in at fifty five or sixty, you know, when you have mortgages and families and and and stuff like that. and you used a tool which I've heard other people talk about, which is you you thought about what is

You know, the downside's fairly capped, you've minimized the the the the the burn rate, and you th there was always sort of a second bite at the apple where you could go you proved that you could work for other people to do this job and get paid well, and you thought you could do that again even if your own attempt at it didn't work, which was very similar to what Alec Torelli was talking about. He's like, I can always come I can quit college and and I've got thirty thousand dollars, I can go try to play poker.

If it doesn't work out, I lose thirty thousand dollars and I can always come back to school and get a job. Like it is the that door that I'm on now is always going to be available to me at the same rate that that it is now. So I'm not really giving up anything by taking a year off or something and and and taking a shot. and and so that's a framework that I have heard. let's go back a a little bit.

to w when you started Clankers, what were some of the other cases that you just gave some cases for? What were some of the other cases against? Were your parents or your girlfriend or what were some of the other things that were in the back of your mind that were saying maybe I shouldn't do it? You you have always been this, you know, I'm gonna go for the upside, but what were some of the the the other things that were nagging at you saying maybe you shouldn't?

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (13:10) Yeah, I think there was definitely a I'll still like fear and uncertainty. You know, and

Martin Tobias (13:14) Yeah.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (13:15) I think every founder has a little bit of paranoia where especially the more they build, and if the success starts coming really fast, they get those like bouts of paranoia where it's like, it's gonna all go away next week or it's gonna all go away next month. You know, it's like those those happen. I think the bigger thing that I was really struggling with was I believed that every founder needed to have a good co-founder.

And for me, I didn't have someone who I grew up with in high school, did projects with, went to college. you know, I had this like family friend who I was considering starting a business with, and we were gonna basically launch a SaaS, you know, with like some orchestration layer on it where it basically surfaces all the gaps in your marketing program. And, you know, probably MVP was going to be like a glorified dashboard APIing into like Google, Facebook, TikTok shop, and then like a

open claw orchestration, you know, network to solve it. And so that was a huge risk where it's like, I have I don't know this guy at all. Like I I got introduced to him through my like my uncle who's been a good advisor to me. And I'm like, okay, well this mitigates the risk that he's gonna maliciously stab me in the back. Right. You know, but you don't know if you're gonna get along with this person. I wasn't technical so I had no idea how to evaluate his technical acumen as well. So those were always things that like really scared me. Is like especially working at these past software companies

And seeing what a like I I worked at like two very the exact same businesses, they're competitors, and like the difference in the CTOs like made a huge impact on like how their product went to market and like the customer experience too. And like I didn't really understand the exact details of those differences until I worked at that company for like 10 months. And so at

Martin Tobias (14:55) Mm-hmm.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (14:56) face value, when I'm starting and creating a co-founder agreement and I have to make a decision to like start.

Because I don't believe in like delaying a year to figure it out. Like none of that information was known to me. And so I had to kind of dive into that. And bottom line is it didn't end up working out. Like the timelines weren't there. Original idea to create a SaaS. I was like, hey, I'm quitting my job in two weeks. He was like, like, you know, I'm I I'll quit in a month. And then like he was burned out by the end of it. And then I was basically like, Okay, my original idea is not gonna work because I don't have

Martin Tobias (15:26) Yeah, not going to work.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (15:27) a CTO.

And I'm left here. I've quit my job. And

Martin Tobias (15:29) Yeah.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (15:31) I need to figure out what I'm gonna do. And that's what I started thinking about services, because I was like, okay, I've done services and consulting my

Martin Tobias (15:39) So

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (15:39) entire business or my entire business career. And like when you think about going into software, you have to get institution if you want to build anything complex, you have to go and find some sort of institutional capital and raise because I don't have 500k to a million in my bank account to start this, right?

See to go find those people, raise, have a team, have a thesis, have an idea a little bit, have another co-founder where they can hedge their risk on. And I didn't have any of that. So I'm like, okay, what is like the like easiest

Martin Tobias (16:05) What's your okay?

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (16:07) thing I can do today that I have the best advantage on that is highly profitable and will put cash into my pocket? And I was like, well, I have this perspective of working behind these two software companies.

As head of go-to-market, and no one has done that in the same seat in the TikTok shop SaaS industry. Because that industry has only been around for like three years.

Martin Tobias (16:24) Okay.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (16:26) and so I was like, no one has done that. So, like, therefore, I have a level of like product manager acumen where I can demonstrate how these software is run to end, explain it to a dev, explain it to a designer, sell it, educate it. So I'm like, I have all the ingredients to run something like this, but I don't have like the software building capability.

So is there any way I can wrap this around a service? And I saw Claude Code coming around, and I'm like, okay, internal tooling. Everyone has user experience problems with these softwares. If we just use them as data layers and then help people learn how to use cloud code to build their own solutions in their own way in-house, all this requires for me to start is a cloud code subscription, maybe a few other softwares like Figma and Slack, and then $500 to like form an LLC through Stripe Atlas.

And I'm like, I can reasonably risk, you know, like a couple thousand dollars to just start this right now. And I already have like innate demand that I'm confident that I can build up. So like that was my decision making process and things that, you know, I was navigating starting out.

Martin Tobias (17:27) Okay. So you limited your downside, you focused your product offering and your investment on something that you think you had a unique advantage on and that you could execute with the resources you had, the co-founders and the the people around you, the the the the leads that you had and and and the money that you had. that's a a very good and and and useful framework. Yeah, a a a lot of people in other capital allocation decisions or decisions to start things.

they they end up with too many dependencies. I mean, I see it in V C all the time. It's like, well, I might invest, but it depends on who else is investing and who else has done the diligence and this kind of thing. And I think that's a very bad way to to to make decisions to depend on other people's work to make your decision. And I'm glad you were able to get through that process with

Do I want to start something that requires a co founder and somebody that so you spent a little time working with them and figuring out did you in fact need them and was that key to your product? And you decided that it wasn't, and that there was something else you could do, and that's probably the right w way to think about it. Cool.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (18:34) Yeah, exactly.

And and on your point about dependency, this is something a mentor was talking to me about was he was basically really against this whole like YC philosoph and this is YC is like recently switching away from like co-founders and stuff. My previous company was a YC company, that's why I'm using that as an example here. but he was just like this whole idea of a co-founder is just like it kind of like is like you need to like just look through it and like think about it critically. He's like, Why do you need it? And I was like, Well, in software

It's so complex and hard to build, and your focus is split so much between product vision, design, building, managing devs, and then scaling and marketing and selling that you need to be hyper specialized to compete against other people in the market. You know, that's what I kind of have abstracted. But I'm like, well, software at a very basic level is becoming much less complicated to build. And really there's so much diffusion into the market where everyone needs to just understand, like, okay.

How does this software fit my exact need and give me a better return on my capital than investing in this software? And they want to make that decision very, very quickly. And if that is like the main constraint to scaling a software business, then that's a GTM constraint. You know, and I'm like, okay, there's actually also arbitrage on like helping people make that decision because there's a third route where they can just create their own software and they have someone who can just explain

simply.

Here's how to do it, and here's what these softwares do. And so

Martin Tobias (20:00) Yeah.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (20:00) I was like, that's something I could kind of anchor on using my positioning, even against other TikTok shop solutions providers. They don't have the angle of being like a TikTok shop SaaS PM plus agency operator. So you get the technical side, and then you get a little bit more of the applied approach with reinforcement from

Martin Tobias (20:19) Yeah.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (20:19) real learnings on clients. And that's where I hedged myself a little bit on the solo founder.

Martin Tobias (20:24) Well, I mean I I I I I don't have a problem with solo founders, but I I am a B2B software VC and I invest

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (20:31) Yeah.

Martin Tobias (20:32) in software companies. And I d I I am a fan I do think you still need somebody that understands technology if you're fundamentally building software. But your realization was maybe I don't really need to build that complex software. Maybe it's more about the consulting, the integration and the application of the best

of breed technologies, I don't necessarily have to have my own better mousetrap in order to compete. And I think that's going to be in in for entrepreneurs going forward, a much more common case is that you don't have to build a lot of your own, or you could build it yourself with clawed code without having to have necessarily a CTO. I think we'll see a lot more companies that focus on the implementation of technologies than building somehow unique technologies.

themselves. but where do you think you it seems like you have a lot of confidence in yourself and your own ability to do things. Where did that confidence come from? Did your parents tell you you could do anything when you were young? Is it's you'd mentioned mentors a couple of times. where do you think you got this entrepreneur's confidence that I find not as prevalent in entrepreneurship as I

would think.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (21:44) Yeah, it definitely wasn't like a I was raised with like, you can do anything and do whatever you want, like you deserve this. Like, you know, I I think for me and and my parents were immigrants is there was never a feeling of like any sort of entitlement. Like you always just had to like work for it and you don't deserve anything until you can like carve it out with your own hand. Right. So even for me, when I was in college in my internship, I was like, I just need to like outwork everyone.

And like that's what I was always told is just like keep outworking everyone. And like that's what gave me certainty in my ability is like compounded reinforcement that there is results behind what I'm doing. And even on a long enough time horizon, I might not be as perseverant as other entrepreneurs, but I've been fortunate enough to like do work and get feedback, you know, within like a couple of weeks or a month that like what I'm doing is right.

And I have a very obsessive personality. I play a lot of poker, you know, and so that that also, you know, goes hand in hand there. But I when I get that feedback and when I get that reinforcement, I just keep diving it in. And when I have those moments where I'm like, like, you know, can you do it? Like, can you scale this? I can just go and look tangibly at my pipeline. Or I can go and like look at the content that I've done. And I can be like, okay, what has changed within the last couple of months from now to then?

that leads you to believe that you can't get even better or replicate at least that baseline. Has the algorithm shifted? Have like five new competitors that are even better than you enter the market and targeted all the people you're trying to get. And like usually that isn't the case. You know, so I try to like anchor specifically to results and a stack of proof that like, you know, I have done this work.

Martin Tobias (23:19) Yeah, I like that. The that y you you got early an in instilled value that hard work pays off. And you know, I I'm astounded by how many people I meet these days that are not told that hard work pays off. They're told they are owed something or, you know, they should get stuff without having to work very hard. I think that's very destructive to what it means, you know, the American the the way that America created

value. so as we wrap up here, do you have any sort of lenses or sort of portable rules that you would give other people who are trying to decide if they're gonna commit to being an entrepr entrepreneur for something? How do you think about it? You mentioned a few like cap your downside, asymmetric your upside, you know, play to your strengths. are there one or two things that you would share with other people that has helped you

beside decide to go all in on an entrepreneurial decision.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (24:16) Yeah, I would say there's like a few frameworks that I use. Like one thing that's very important to me is like clarity and focus. I see this especially

Martin Tobias (24:22) Clarity and focus.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (24:24) in the digital marketing and e-commerce field specifically. People try to pick up referral revenue streams, or they try to like get side deals with other companies, or they try to start another business with one count co-founder here and another one here. And you know, everyone is doing that and your time gets split. And if you're like a smart person,

I think anyone can scale almost any business if they focus a hundred percent of their time on it with at

Martin Tobias (24:50) that business.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (24:51) least like 70 hours a week. Like at this point in time, if you are doing 70 po 70 hours of work, concentrated work a week, with an AI agent helping you along the way, like there is literally nothing you can't get done.

Martin Tobias (25:04) Nothing you can't do. Yeah.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (25:06) It's like even for me, I'm like, I'm planning out a full workday on Sunday. I have my full task risk litten up.

I have everything documented in Google Drive, Figma, call recordings, and now agents that could even do research and scrape social media for what other founders are doing and supplement my own thing. I'm like, this took me two hours instead of seven hours, you know? And I'm like, it's because I was just focused. So I would say saying no to things and like being very focused and anchoring to just two things. One, what's the constraint of your business? And are you doing at least like it's 80% of your time solving that?

If if your constraint of your business is sales, are you spending at least fifty-five hours a week? And if you don't know how to do sales, it could even just be DMing every single person that Claude tells you fits your customer persona, right? You can even have Claude do it for you, but I suggest that you manually do it. And I think this is where people get really tripped up. Because things can be automated, people spend too much time looking for ways to automate things, or if it's not automatable, they kick the can down the road. But like

No one is sending like a warm outreach to like a thousand people a week. Like, which is like it's the it's the easiest and most predictable way to get a sales call booked on your calendar. But like no one is doing that. And if the constraint of your business is getting more customers, then do that. And then the next thing you need to do is just make your customers happy. So like anything that's not like getting more customers and making your customers happy.

And doesn't directly within like one order of magnitude impact that in the next 18 hours. Just don't do it. Just ignore it. And like that's the philosophy I'm I'm doing right now. Like I'm getting hit up for creator opportunities and referral opportunities and advising other SaaS's. And I'm just like the cognitive split, and

Martin Tobias (26:47) Yes.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (26:47) even just one to two hours away from this can completely derail like momentum in one direction. So I just have to like say no to that.

Martin Tobias (26:55) I like that. stay focused. I I saw a startup the yesterday that's like, you know, we're building three different products, we're solving three different problems, and we want to raise like five hundred thousand dollars to go solve three different problems. I'm like, You're gonna need five million dollars to solve each of those problems individually. Like, I don't understand.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (27:12) Yeah.

Martin Tobias (27:13) I I

There there's always a a I think a conflict between a lot of founders of I've got this grand vision, but then the question is what do I do for the next three months to really, you know, make progress? And I really appreciate the founders that can have a clear vision of what they're gonna do. They I I hope they all have a a a big idea, but the ones that are successful are the ones that are really good at the next month to three months, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next, because it's a it's a it's a path. All right.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (27:42) Fully agreed.

And I have a question for you. I mean, I you know, I heard this like one quote, like, you know, I saw like this reel of like Kevin O'Leary always referencing like the Steve Jobs thing where he's like noise to signal and he's like, only do the three things that help you progress your business in the next eighteen hours to get to that next point. Like, what do you what do you think about how founders are allocating their time and their capital on like shorter term time horizons? Because what I've found is that like

It's so hard to predict where things are going. You could build a software, Claude launches something new where the agents now can take control of twenty browsers on your computer and like rebuild it even faster. You know, it's so hard to like go in the long run. So I'm thinking, is there like any short term framework things you've seen work well for founders or?

Martin Tobias (28:26) Founders have the same problem that VCs do, that poker players do. You have a limited set of resources. Let's say you raised a million dollars in your pre seed. You've got a million dollars. That's it. and you have a so you have a limited amount of money and you have multiple competing things. So the your your core job is to decide what the highest leverage thing to do with the money and your time is at any time. And

That's the same job, you know, for everybody. Now, you've mentioned a couple of things that I've heard other founders talk. I I interviewed one of my founders, Alex McNaughton of this company called GrowAI. And one of the things they do is that they do try before you buy for employees. They do 90-day performance plans, they do for every go-to-market, they do like five different go-to-market things with a limited budget, like five thousand dollars.

There's a lot of trying before you buy type of things, but doing lots of things. So, you know, one of the problems that I see a lot of people say, I've talked to one of my portfolio companies, and he's like, our go-to-market is LinkedIn marketing right now, and it's the only thing we have and it's the only thing that's working. And I go, how what else have you tried? And he goes, Nothing. And that's

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (29:35) Okay.

Martin Tobias (29:36) not a very good CEO. The good CEOs are ones that let's say they find LinkedIn marketing is working for them. That's great. But they've still also tried TikTok. And

Twitter and everything else in a small amount, they keep trying other you know alternatives in a small scale, in a limited scale to see if they can find other things that work. continually continually being curious at a small scale to find the things that are then replicatable to where to deploy more capital. That is the key skill, I think, for any CEO is

And to not go all in until you've proven, you know, that strategy, whether it's with a person, whether it's with a go-to-market strategy, whether it's with a new software. So the ones that are really good at trying before you buy, are are the ones that tend to to to be better and make better transactions. The ones that are like, I'm building this, I'm going all in on this, regardless of what the customer says, regardless of my go-to-market problems, those guys tend to not do as well.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (30:41) Mm-hmm. That makes sense. I mean, is there a point where you feel like you need to go like like there's a spectrum, right? Where it's like if you go if you don't go all in enough on something on a smaller scale, then like you don't know if it really works or not, right? Like let's say what if it takes like ten thousand dollars versus five thousand dollars to make something work or like an extra five hours to make it work. Is there like a spectrum you see where it's like you do need to like go all in somewhere or like you can't just contain it small enough at a certain opportunity cost to like

Another time allocation here or

Martin Tobias (31:10) I'm not sure. I was just talking to a CEO today. he just raised a million dollar round. He's already profitable, he didn't need the money. And the first question

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (31:18) Mm-hmm.

Martin Tobias (31:18) I said is, what the fuck are you gonna do with the money? And he said, Well, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to spend a third of it the best way that I think I can to basically 10x my revenue.

And I said, if you can 10x your revenue with a third of your balance sheet, that would be a fucking amazing. I would be happy even if you lost the whole third of your balance sheet, because you still have two thirds of your balance sheet. But you're but the but the upside, the downside's asymmetric. It's a third of your balance sheet. The upside is 10x your revenue. You're right.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (31:51) Yeah.

Martin Tobias (31:52) So I'm like, this is a bet I want you to take.

And I don't care, you know, even if it's a lower probability, even if there's a ten or twenty percent chance of your bet working, I still want you to place that bet.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (32:05) Mm.

Martin Tobias (32:05) so you know, what what what I would say is the the I expect founders to come up with capital decisions that the the that they have c confidence in and that are measured enough.

To not be existential capital allocation decisions, right? And in fact,

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (32:24) Hm, that makes sense.

Martin Tobias (32:25) most of the capital allocation decisions that founders make are not existential, right? You're

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (32:30) Mm-hmm.

Martin Tobias (32:30) not committing all your capital.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (32:33) Yeah.

Martin Tobias (32:33) And and and those are the ones that get into trouble, are the ones that commit all their capital to one strategy with no options. The ones that are better are the ones that try five or six different things and then double down on the ones that work and then

That compounding that you talked about of learning over time is what leads to success more than they had some light bulb moment and lucky for them it worked out. the the the the the the founder path that I have found that is more replicatably successful is the one that is iterative and that builds on things that are compounding. And and the key CEO trait is

being good at making those smaller bets, understanding your upside and your pot math, right? You know, your bankroll math. It's just like in poker, right? You never sit down at a table and put a hundred percent of your bankroll on the table. You might put ten percent of your bankroll

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (33:29) Yeah, no that makes complete sense.

Martin Tobias (33:31) on the table or five percent of your bankroll on the table. You never put a hundred percent of your bankroll on the table.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (33:34) Yeah, you gotta have like

I I would never I'd be so nervous. You gotta have some in reserve to make those like high upside opportunities and take them on if they do come

up. So fully agree with you there. Yeah.

Martin Tobias (33:45) Exactly. it's a very similar

process. and and with that, thanks for your time and I know that you're not gonna be in San Francisco next week when I'm there, but I look forward to playing poker with you next time again.

Sohun - Founder @ Clankers (33:55) Absolutely, me too.

Martin Tobias (33:57) All right, take care.