How Rathin Shah Used A Picture of A Monkey to Get into Y-Combinator

Rathin Shah is the CEO and Co-founder of Spenny, a FinTech app helping millennials in the Indian market invest their spare change. He started his career at JP Morgan, then launched his first startup creating pallets for shipping, which he exited before entering Entrepreneur First to launch Spenny.https://spennyapp.com/Learn:- What he took away from JP Morgan that helped him on his startup journey- How he validated the idea that became Spenny using a picture of a monkey- his experiences with his first company- What he learnt from Y CombinatorFavourite Book:Netflix Culture Handbook (https://jobs.netflix.com/culture)[00:00:00] Alvin: Welcome to Abyss Gazing, the podcast where we interview entrepreneurs about how they started their businesses, the challenges they overcame while building their companies. Today's guest is Rathin Rathin: ShahAlvin: Rathin is the CEO and founder of Spenny. A FinTech app helps customers in the Indian markets save your spare change Rathin.Graduated as an electronics engineer and was working as an investment banker after graduation. He then started an industrial manufacturing products startup before joining the talent investor Entrepreneur First, he went on to Y Combinator with his idea Spenny. Rathin. Are you ready to Rathin: begin? Yes, absolutely.Very excited to begin. Okay, Alvin: so just to the viewers know, I forgot to press record, so we are repeating about 10 minutes of our conversation.  previously I was asking Rathin: Rathin. Alvin: He graduated as an electronic engineer, but he went Rathin: into Alvin: KPMG and then JP Morgan, even though he had a lot of like Rathin: entrepreneurship related Alvin: activities [00:01:00] back in university, he started, he was a co founder of a Rathin: tech bottle called top talent Alvin: in and the center for Rathin: entrepreneurial leadership.Alvin:  Rathin was telling me earlier about why he decided to do that instead of starting his own startup after graduation. Rathin: Yeah. I mean, you know, way startups. I like this. you know, we started working on something and we realized we forgot to press record. So it's funny. but, no, I mean, the reason my actually, as a part of my university, I was super involved with a lot of stuff. During my first year of university is one, when I had my first brush with entrepreneurship and I fell in love with the idea of,  you know, working on an idea and implementing it, taking it to, you know, taking it to a real. A business. And that is super exciting to me. And so us, for us, what we did was that every year we would sit down and, you know, well, I figured out one idea that we wanted to implement during the course of that year, and that's how we came about. you know, toptalent was one of that the center for entrepreneurial leadership was [00:02:00] another one of that. So on and so forth. But while doing these things, I do realized also that, there are a lot of stuff, there's a lot of stuff that I need to figure out before I can actually run a full pleasure business.in fact, that the things which I want to get trained in the things which I want to get, Jane myself in, specifically by working in. High pressure work environments. and, and in good brand name environments, which can really help me develop as a person. And then that can, that skill set can help me in my businesses later on.So that was the whole idea. And so that's why after university, I was, I was very lucky to be associated with two of the top brands. one escape BMG and the other was JP Morgan. Both of them are of a good high risk. I mean, high intensity work environments. and one of them had me a lot in, in, you know, shaping me to, to do my businesses later.Yeah. Alvin: So tell us a bit about Rathin: how, Alvin: what, what you brought away from the experience at JP Morgan that helped you with startups. Rathin: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, specifically with JP [00:03:00] Morgan, my role was I used to work as an investment banker, with JP Morgan and, working across geographies, in India as well as in London.I was, I was majorly walking on the Europe and geography. for me, I used to walk in the MNA advisory division, which is mergers and acquisitions advisory division, specifically overlooking the AMIA and all the sectors of consumer health ed and reading. so essentially any, any companies, within the consumer, retail and healthcare sector.Which would require modern acquisitions, advise anyone, anything of that sort is something that our team would look at. and for me as such, my personal takeaway during these two years was that I really got to know about that and that business life cycle. From, from a financial standpoint. So, you know, right from the point where a particular company gets their first round of funding as a startup all the way up through, you know, CDs, ABCD funding, and then eventually, sometimes leading up to IPO and eventually getting acquired.So, it really, for me, it was more like a first hand [00:04:...