Podcast Transcript

 [00:02:26] Sean Steele: G’day everybody, and welcome back to the ScaleHQ Podcast. Welcome back to our regular listeners, and to anybody joining us for the first time, we are thrilled to have you. My guest this week is a very special one for you. This week, Esha Oberoi, Founder and now Executive Director of AFEA Care Services, as well as Founder and CEO of Leora.ai since I guess the beginning of last year, how are you, Esha?

[00:02:50] Esha Oberoi: Very good. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:53] Sean Steele: It is my pleasure. Well, it's actually almost two years to the day, September 21, that you were the very, very first guest on what was called the ScaleUps Podcast back then now called the ScaleHQ Podcast. So, first of all, huge thanks to you for trusting me and for being the very first guest. And for those who've joined us more recently, it was a fantastic episode. We had a lot of fun. We unpacked the journey of what was at that stage of AFEA Care Services, compassionate home and community care in Sydney and Melbourne, that you'd started at 24 and by the time we'd spoken, you'd grown to 350 full-time equivalent staff over the 13 years to 2021. And since then, you've stepped back into a directorship at AFEA Care Services, founded Leora.ai, which I'm going to get you to explain in a minute, which is a very big journey, because there are a lot of Founders listening today who have in their mind, some kind of future where they've built their company to a size that suited their ambitions, their professional development goals, whatever. Then they've stepped back, they've remained involved perhaps in some way. They haven't sold the golden goose, they've installed management, et cetera, and they've been able to either just step back and enjoy the proceeds or be able to focus on something new. Quite often they think about selling entirely and starting something new. I don't have any data on how many actually step back into a direction and then start an entirely new business at the same time. So, I'm really keen to unpack that transition with you today because it's not just strategy, it's psychology and your identity and all these other amazing things. So, actually, can I ask maybe just as a starting point, let's just start with what is Leora.ai?

[00:04:37] Esha Oberoi: Leora is a mental health chatbot, so it's effectively empowering an individual to go into an app and do therapeutic exercises, self-directed in the absence of having a therapist, or whilst they're waiting for a therapist session.

[00:04:54] Sean Steele: Ah, okay. So, it's often actually almost used as an in-between. They may have booked a therapy session, and this can get them started.

[00:05:01] Esha Oberoi: Yes, exactly. And in fact, as we're building up the features on our product roadmap, we also have recommendations of exercises coming through from the therapist to the user. So, it's kind of doing a full circle where it's not that you go and do a session and then there's a vacuum of accountability. We want to build in that accountability and kind of ownership for the user to be able to interact. And that's what Leora is, a mental health chatbot, to make it engaging for a person to learn cognitive behaviour therapy techniques for themselves so they feel empowered in their own mental health.

[00:05:37] Sean Steele: And what took you to, so you're kind of playing at the intersection between, like, there are actually human therapists available, I understand as part of the platform. You've got a chat bot that is leveraging a psychological model like, cognitive behavioural therapy, which some people may or may not know, but also called CPT, I believe. And then there's an AI component. What is the AI actually doing in this process?

[00:06:00] Esha Oberoi: So, yeah, there's three parts to it, you've rightly said this is a blend. We're a blended model. We actually have therapists within the app as well. So, Leora as a chatbot can then identify, and this is where the AI comes in. It can identify sentiments and emotions through as one example, keyword classification and as we train the bot, and then it can triage or recommend a therapist within, from the platform itself. And so, we have our own therapist, clinicians that are on the platform, ready to jump on if needed, or they can be booked in for a later time as well. So, the AI comes in… When we think about artificial intelligence, it's huge. You know, there's the machine learning element, there's deep learning, and I think we're really, in all honesty, very much at the start of that. When we think about chatbots, there's large language models. Did we want to come back to this?

[00:06:59] Sean Steele: Let's go straight into it. Yeah. I'm keen to unpack this, and, because I'm going to move you back to the transition, but let's make sure that everyone's really clear about actually what you transition to.

[00:07:07] Esha Oberoi: Okay, sure. So, well then let's give a little bit of a backstory. The whole thing about Leora and the importance of bringing or using technology now to break down barriers. We are going to continue breaking down barriers. If we think about even two decades ago, let's say, when I had depression; culturally, my parents didn't identify with the word depression. They had no kind of resonance with it. What does it even mean? What does it mean to be depressed? So, that was two decades ago. Now we've come a long way from a society perspective, starting to really break down that stigma. But there's other barriers of people wanting to access mental health care. The three biggest barriers that we know of around why someone won't access mental health is, so stigma, which I just mentioned. And then there's cost. It's incredibly expensive. We're talking $250 per hour from a private sense to go and sit in front of a psychologist for an hour, right? So, these can add up really quickly these costs. And then even if we're on a subsidised plan, like we're paying through partly subsidised Medicare payments, we're still paying up to $110 on average to see a therapist. So, the cost is a huge barrier. And then if we can overcome even the stigma and the cost. The other thing is access. There's a maldistribution of clinicians versus people that require, or the demand of healthcare users are people that want to access mental healthcare. They're not being able to get it. So, in Australia…

[00:08:39] Sean Steele: I didn’t know that, actually, So, there's an undersupply, is there? Of clinicians versus the current demand to access it.

[00:08:45] Esha Oberoi: Yeah, absolutely. So, to see a psychologist, you're sometimes waiting three to six months. 27% of the Australian population lives in rural and regional areas. And in those areas people are sometimes waiting 12 months to see a psychologist because most of our psychologists and clinicians are based and they reside in metro cities. So, with the technology or utilising this technology, what we're hoping to do, what we're hoping to achieve is we want to bring in, we want to empower users to one learn therapy. This is my own personal experience, having seen therapists for over a decade now that there are certain techniques that are just repeated no matter how deep I go into my trauma or my healing journey, there are certain therapeutic techniques or questions or coaching style, which is, and the most widely used one is cognitive behaviour therapy. That is just a repeated set of questioning and coaching that occurs within the therapy session. And so, when we think about like mental health more broadly, we have stress. You can see how passionate I am about this. I'm not even allowing you to talk, Sean.

[00:09:59] Sean Steele: No, it's good. Yeah, unpack it.

[00:09:58] Esha Oberoi: This is not good. So, when we think about mental health, we know that depression is the number one form of disability globally. That's huge. We are only trying to capture people that have stress, anxiety, and burnout, which is the most common. Anxiety is really very, very common when it comes to mental health.

[00:10:22] Sean Steele: And are they the top three reasons that people use Leora?

[00:10:25] Esha Oberoi: At the moment, yes. So, Leora is not built for, I mean, we're not even going down the path of someone who might have schizophrenia or bipolar, like these are psychosocial disabilities and require extensive, large language models and probably another whole decade of getting us there. But what we do is, if we can create these conversational engaging exercises through the chatbot that people can do to self-regulate or learn the process of self-regulating their mental health and emotional wellbeing. Then we free up our clinicians and therapists to look after people that really, really need it badly. I have a very close friend a number of years ago, and this is, I mean, there's so many reasons why we start businesses, but again, it brings back that memory. She was waiting 12 months because she had schizophrenia and she was waiting 12 months to see a specialist for her schizophrenia so she could be get a prescription for her medicine.

[00:11:29] Sean Steele: Yeah, I mean, you just think about how long one day is when you're battling with mental health, let alone 12 months. Can you take me back to what, was there a specific event that made you decide I need to build Leora? Like I know AFEA has been amazing. We've had a great journey. I'm doing a lot of good in the world. We're doing a lot of care for a lot of people. But what was the thing that happened that made you like on that day, go; I have to build this thing, like it has to be now?

[00:11:56] Esha Oberoi: Sean, can I be really honest? I'm in a world of pain in a startup again, right? So, I'm being frank. Like, I'm like, what was I thinking… So, I asked myself this question all the time. I'm like, what? I was in startup. I built a great business. Why am I doing startup again? So, yes, I have asked myself this question and I consistently asked myself this question, and there's a number of things. One, I was in a business and I built a really great business. I was operational in it for 15 years, and every single day I realised that we were having a growing problem in healthcare services, in the delivery of healthcare services. We just, in that business, we were looking after people with disability and people that are aging. We never had enough people to be able to respond to the demand of supports that we needed to carry out. So, that was always a pain point. And so, it was always obvious to me that at some point we needed technology to interject, to manage low to moderate needs. Whether it's physical disability or mental health or whatever that looks like. And of course, my passion goes back to mental health because I've had personal experience in that. There's a real, and then have lots of, just my whole world, I've got very personal relationships where people have had mental health issues that I've also lived through as a lens of a carer. And so, those were sort of kind of reoccurring reasons that just kept coming up is we've got to interject and use technology at some point and then covid really like just it magnified the need for it. I think Covid magnified the need for it. We saw it in our own business with people that were really finding it challenging to function and operate at their peak performance.

[00:13:56] Sean Steele: And was there something that happened like on a specific day, you know, during Covid where you're like; okay, that’s it, enough thinking about this, like I've been thinking about, it sounds like it's been kind of emerging for a while. You could see there was a difficulty in balancing supply and demand. You could see there was a difficulty in having almost a one size fits all, high touch, go out and see the customer. Where actually there was a whole bunch of people that could be triaged, could do self-care, could have interventions in between care, that there was a way of doing that. But was there something that made you go. Because you know, I imagine there was a lot in that decision. It wasn't just like, you know, this is a very different decision to I'm working a 9 to 5 job and I'm a well-paid corporate, and I'm wondering if I should start my first business. Like you've done your first business and you scaled it to a material size, and then you were going, hang on a second. Am I going to go back and do this as a startup? Like, just talk to me about the decision point and what factors came into play and how did you get through that decision?

[00:14:50] Esha Oberoi: Yeah, it was a weekend, I clearly remember it. So, I was asked to represent a person with lived sort of mental health experience on a podcast. And I was with some president of a hospital in the UK and a president of the Mayo, the director of the Mayo Clinic, and we were in this podcast and leading up to the podcast I had the imposter syndrome. I was like, what am I doing on this podcast? Like we've got these people that are running enormous, global kind of organisations. And so, I did a lot of research in preparation for the event. Sorry, it wasn't a podcast, it was a webinar, a global webinar. And as I did the research, I could not believe I am working, in 15 years I'm working in psychosocial disability. But what I was looking at in my lens and my experience was very much schizophrenia, overcoming drug and alcohol addiction. So, it was like the very extreme end of psychosocial mental health issues. And as I was preparing for this event, I wanted to understand mainstream issues. What is the average human being going through when it comes to mental health? Because there was little points I wanted to sort of dictate around early intervention and put some value across in the early intervention and preventative space. And that was it, like I remember my husband, like Gaurav came home. He'd just done the groceries. I was sitting in the backyard, on my laptop, frantically like picking all these stats and completely blown away that we don't even realise how many people have just anxiety in the world. And we're struggling with burnout and we are not aware that we are going down the path of serious mental health conditions. And so, I said to him, he came home and I said; Gaurav, I want to start something around this space. I think we can make a huge impact given our experience. I want to call it Inside Story because, and I had even come up with the name within the hours. Because I was like, wow, look at these inside stories I was coming up with. I was reading all of these like in literally inside stories. Everyone has a story and a really story of pain and suffering and healing. And so we, on Monday, we registered the business called Inside Story and then went on a six month path of R&D. Everything from, there's a problem statement we know like, one in three people now will suffer from a mental health condition at any point in their life. The most common form of disability being depression, but then stress and anxiety being the most common form of day-to-day mental health issues. And so identified that, identified the commercial, the product, go to market. And then realised, like as I was looking at all the business models, I was like, you know what? It makes sense to create a mental health chatbot. If I'm going to do this, it has to be a chatbot. It has to be something that's going to empower people to teach them how to take more control of their own health so they're not dependent on a specialist.

[00:18:06] Sean Steele: And so at that stage, you were still operational in the business as a co-CEO with your husband, and then, so what then happened to get from like, when was that conversation and then what would the sort of transition look like to then actually be all of a sudden turnaround and go, oh, the next five days I'm only going to be focused on Leora and I'm not going to be focused on AFEA talking about that transition.

[00:18:30] Esha Oberoi: Yeah, it was just from that weekend, it was this intense focus around Inside Story. Because we'd already come up with the name. Like I'd already come up with the name. So it was, everything was about Inside Story, and that was October Mental Health Month when the event was, so from October to…

[00:18:50] Sean Steele: October, 2020 or 2021?

[00:18:54] Esha Oberoi: 2021. Not last year. Because last year we pretty much launched the product.

[00:19:02] Sean Steele: Yep. The year before. Yeah. Okay. October 21. Yep.

[00:19:04] Esha Oberoi: Yeah. So, it was 21 and then it was, I stepped out in April, like So how many…

[00:19:12] Sean Steele: 22. Yep. Okay.

[00:19:13] Esha Oberoi: Last year. April. Yeah. I stepped out of the business and handed over the reins and it was very challenging psychologically. So, then I was like, oh, wow, we need this product even more, even for me.

[00:19:33] Sean Steele: And so, is Gurav still running? Is he the CEO of the business or did he step back as well and you installed a new CEO? What's the operating model now inside AFEA?

[00:19:41] Esha Oberoi: Yeah, he's running it. He's the CEO, so he then took over.

[00:19:48] Sean Steele: And so was he. Like, that's an interesting conversation in and of itself. You've been running it as co-CEOs and therefore you've been splitting out responsibilities based on stuff that you're interested in and your strengths and all the rest. And then all of a sudden, well actually, you've got to take the whole thing. Did he want the whole thing or did it take him a period of time to kind of wrestle with, well, I'm going to be the sole driver of this thing, or  what was that like?

[00:20:09] Esha Oberoi: There were high points and low points, and I don't want to speak on behalf of him. This is only my perspective of it. My perspective is that when things are going great, he loves it. When he can make decisions, he loves that autonomy. And there's very clear sort of; oh well, you know, I didn't talk to you about it because you're on the board, so this is still quite an operational decision. So, I think, when there's high points, my perspective is that he loves it. And when there's down periods in the business, and there's some real challenges around, it could be ELT, it could be sales specific, like revenue or a compliance like regulatory, then we often sit and reflect and say; oh, it would be nice if I was still around.

[00:20:58] Sean Steele: I love it. It's good to be needed. And so, in that process then, by April, so six months after this kind of weekend, six months later, you had stepped back into a board role only for AFEA. Like how much time does that take for you, your board role? Like how much time do you spend looking at results or reports or kind of engaged in AFEA versus your focus on Leora?

[00:21:19] Esha Oberoi: So, it's interesting. When I stepped out in April last year, I went through a sort of mental journey around that, an emotional kind of period of like. This is it. Because I didn't have anything like, Leora was still conception. It was an ideation. I was speaking to a lot of VCs. I wanted to understand the market because I also knew that it's not something I can build on my own. So, I was already speaking to key stakeholders that I thought I would need in that journey of growth for Leora. So, what I was feeling was a whole sense of projection because like the market here and the VCs were trading quite carefully around the space, and so, I was feeling emotionally very disappointed with my decision of moving away from AFEA. So, there were a few emotions I went through. Definitely like, wow, this is my baby, and have I abandoned it? Is it, you know, I went through that questioning, is it the right decision? I went through a whole world of uncertainty coming from Leora because I wasn't kind of getting the right answers, and I realised that I had to do a lot more research and understanding AI and how it intersects with mental health. It's very new area.

[00:22:39] Sean Steele: And what about…

[00:22:39] Esha Oberoi: Actually, as I'm thinking.

[00:22:41] Sean Steele: Go ahead.

[00:22:42] Esha Oberoi: No, I was just thinking as I was going down the path of the journey. I completely lost the question you asked.

[00:22:49] Sean Steele: Well, no, I guess, you know, part of that transition was an identity one as well, right? Like I can only imagine, like, I haven't been in that situation, but I'm wondering what the ego was like, because you'd essentially, you know, you have an identity built up as a business owner, you would've been constantly on interviews and all the rest, you've been so successful in AFEA, blah, blah, blah, and then all of a sudden you are putting yourself in a position where you go back to being vulnerable and exposed, like; oh, well, what if this fails and do I actually have the skills to do this anymore? Because I spent the last, you know, I've just come out of running a larger business. Like the startup world's changed, technology has changed, the funding model's probably entirely different. You know, if you are even thinking about VCs, I'm sure there wasn't VC investments in AFEA, in the early days. It's not that kind of business. So, how did you grapple with your personal identity as making that shift, and did you have a sort of insecurity, like was it quite scary in terms of having to put yourself back out there and the risk of, you know, any startups fail. So, what was that like?

[00:22:55] Esha Oberoi: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think from an identity perspective, what validated for me was that I'm the only person who can validate what I have achieved in my life and be comfortable with the decisions that I'm making and the path that I'm choosing. And I say this because no one stopped to say "Hey, we are going to miss you." It was none of that, you know, like there was none of that. It was just like, one day I am there and the next minute I'm out. And everyone in the business was perfectly fine with it. And it wasn't that anyone is bad, but you know, it took me a while to understand that. I took it really personally. I was like; wow, I'm really not wanted, I didn't add much value. Now when I look back at the business like this year, we were named, AFEA Care Services was named Top 10 workplaces in Australasia. Top 10 Most Inspiring Workplaces in Australasia. And again, last year towards the end of the year, we won a number of awards for most best places to work. This year we're nominated again, three times over in the HRD upcoming awards for best places. And I just, no one needs to say it to me, and I'm not saying it out of ego at all, but just humility and self-acceptance. I think I've left a bit of a legacy because those things don't happen overnight, and so I can comfortably say that it's okay. I created something that's still recognised and they're able to carry on that vision. And that is beautiful and no one needs to say that to me, that I think I would be interested to hear other CEOs and Founders and their journeys, and how they come to that point of; it's okay to appreciate what you've done for yourself.

[00:25:53] Sean Steele: Absolutely. Well, I think, you know, it's quite the… legacy is an understatement because you built a business that's very on purpose and doing real good in the world, and I think it's so satisfying to be able to step back and to be so proud of the team continuing to build it on. You know, when I left at EdventureCo, which was probably three years ago now, like we built it from 3 mil to 50 mil. And the most exciting, you know, when I departed, I was like; oh, they don't need me. To your point, it's like I always think, you know, when someone leaves a business, whether you've watched somebody leave a business or it's been you, it's like sand. It's like I always think it's like a hole in the sand. It gets swallowed up so fast and we're so worried that the whole thing's going to fall apart without us, and we're so important to it and all the rest. And as soon as the wind blows in and that hole fills up, everyone's like, what? So, who are you again? And the world just keeps moving, which is amazing. But when you can step back and I can see that that business today with the same team in place, like the same core team, and they're now up to 80 plus, but they're doing really good work, and I can see it from the outside. It's actually really gratifying, even though I'm not no longer part of it, to see that the strategy we put in place is still the one being executed. The culture that we built is still the one that's still being built today by the people who I really cared about, and put into that team, and they're just still amazing humans, doing more great work. It is very gratifying, but yeah, no one reaches out to you to go, hey… actually, I did have one person who reached out to me and said, “I just wanted to let you know. The reason that all this is being achieved is because what you actually did in the first four years. But no one's probably ever going to tell you that. But just so you know, everybody still thinks highly of you.” Like it's good to know. ,

[00:28:44] Esha Oberoi: Oh, that's so sweet. You’ve articulated it really well

[00:28:51] Sean Steele: It's an interesting experience. Tell me about actually the funding. So, you were explored with VCs to kind of get a sense of their appetite. Was this a AFEA sponsored subsidiary. Was this out of like personal money? We want to do this entirely separately, we're going to seed something in and of itself, and we're going to have no relationship with AFEA. What about the funding aspect? Have you bootstrapped, have you taken VC investment? Like, talk to me just about how you thought about that.

[00:29:18] Esha Oberoi: Yeah, so of course everything goes right to the top, which is the family trust. So, there is that relationship. However, the business Leora is in and off its own entity completely and entirely separate from AFEA Care Services. But the ownership level, when you go a few layers up is obviously Gurav and I. the thinking was that we would seed in up to the first mill, get it to a point of revenue generation, and then start looking at divestation. So, we would then start divesting to be able to scale it to growth, basically. Yeah. To the next stage. So yeah, AFEA is a hundred percent owned by us and there's no sort of VC partners. And then Leora was just going to be a completely different trajectory. That's the vision for, I mean, and that's still the vision for it. So, we've seeded in and we continue to invest in it, and we will continue to invest and we are actually actively looking for solid investor partners that want to come on the journey.

[00:30:27] Sean Steele: Okay. And is it at revenue now or where are you at in the stage of the business model?

[00:30:32] Esha Oberoi: Yeah, it's at revenue now, so we have businesses that pay for it as an employment assistance program. This was a number of months of market research. We originally went to market as a direct to consumer.

[00:30:49] Sean Steele: Okay, so originally B2C. Yep.

[00:30:51] Esha Oberoi: Yeah, it was originally B2C and that was really where I wanted to play in in the market. That's what I was really confident. I was like, yeah, let's get, unfortunately, we found very quickly through commercialisation at those initial stages of commercialisation and product market fit as well as lots of user testing, continue to invest a lot in user testing, that that wasn't going to happen in Australia. Australia's not built for that B2C market in mental health care because we actually have a huge support from the government through charities and not-for-profits that dominate that space, whether that's lifeline and beyond, et cetera. And so, where we found now our product market fit and where we are now really ramping up our commercialisation, it's an employment assistance program. Businesses pay for it to offer their employees mental health support. It's a novel EAP, and it's very different because you've got on-demand therapists there that you can book straight away for a telehealth session, virtual session. So, we are very much digital first, that's where it's got a nice differentiation to other EAPs where you ring a phone number. You go into a black hole and then you book a session for three weeks later when it's too late already.

[00:32:11] Sean Steele: Yes, the situation has passed.

[00:32:14] Esha Oberoi: Yeah. And you've self-soothed in like the most negative ways, like we all do.

[00:32:21] Sean Steele: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I love that. Like for those who are listening, we've got a lot of, there's a lot of seven figure fans listening to this podcast who've probably almost forgotten the first few years of having to build their business. And actually, all of this iteration and testing that happens, like figuring out the business model and who's actually going to pay for it. Like, I thought it was going to be consumers. And all of a sudden, I discovered actually it needs to be the enterprises, but I can still get to the end consumer. They just happen to be an employee as opposed to just, every jam black, and if the business doesn't make any money, then the business ceases to exist. And so it's part of the natural, but it's also part of the joy ride is actually the problem solving and the figuring out and finding the way to make it work and all that hustle. I'm very interested in your perspective on what you've taken from the AFEA journey that you are infusing into the Leora journey? Because I mean, you've built a sizable business and the learnings of course, are very different at the different stages of the business. You know, you're learning a lot more about leadership and building culture and things that can happen at scale in the later years as opposed to the stuff you did, which was like 15-16 years ago. What learnings did you take into Leora and have been sort of deliberate about infusing into the way you're building that business?

[00:33:39] Esha Oberoi: That's a really interesting question because Leora is such a different business and beast. I have had to very fast learn artificial intelligence. I've had to learn technology, as a product that the business is a technology product versus in AFEA, yes, we built technology, but that wasn't the business. The core business is still delivering care. I've had to learn products. So, there's a lot of new learnings, but what I can confidently say, what I brought from AFEA is because the last four years in AFEA, we've been best places to work. I'm bringing all of that IP and how we did that into the psychological model of an employment assistance program. And the reason is because of all of my conversations with business leaders and CEOs and people and culture, so small to medium businesses dominate the Australian market. Something like 95% of businesses in Australia are actually small to medium businesses. They don't have the resources. This is our little secret sauce, so they don't have the resources to create great cultures because at that time they're completely consumed in growing that business. So, what we're infusing is actually all of our learnings on how do you bring a great place to work. And we can do that through the Leora, because the Leora doesn't just need to be a mental health app, but it can create psychological safety. It can improve the culture of the organisation through some of the things that we're bringing in, which are little secrets. And I don't want to give too much away, but that's probably the biggest thing that we're bringing into Leora.

[00:35:21] Sean Steele: That's so interesting. I mean, psychological safety has been such a big growth area in terms of people's acknowledgement of the importance of that in culture, like police. Fundamentally, if you think about any environment where you feel… No one's going to take risks in the absence of safety, right? Like, you know, you think about sort of, it's almost leadership 101. If people are scared of how you are going to react when they screw something up, then they're not going to screw anything up and they're just going to play safe. And you're going to end up with a whole bunch of conservative doers who wait to be told and then just rely on your instructions. You don't get people who are driving innovation. Getting distracted. I have another question for you. So, that's about what you've been able to sort of take from AFEA into Leora. What did you have to unlearn? Because you would've built up almost like a mental bank of like, this is how you get to success, and this is what success looks like, and this is all the things that work. And then you come into a startup environment where you probably had to throw a whole bunch of things out. What did you have to unlearn to succeed in this model?

[00:36:21] Esha Oberoi: Delegation. I had to unlearn to delegate. I had to unlearn and realise that it's me that has been the biggest challenge. Like, so what happens is you're in a startup, you're a small business, you are the expert in every area of domain. But my last few years in my business, I was no longer the expert. I had spent a lot of time in coaching and leadership in that sphere and just getting the best out of people. In Leora, I had to unlearn all of that and actually become an expert. Like, I need to know technology. I need to know sprints. I need to know product. I need to know the AI, and I can't delegate that. So that was quite a journey and a few months of pain because I naturally would keep delegating and hiring and then I was like, oh no, this is not going to work. So, look, it's a good thing. I think that business is about learning and it's about our own evolution and growth. I don’t see it as negative.

[00:37:27] Sean Steele: It's making me laugh because I had, you know, numerous conversations with friends after I left my group CEO role and in the first six months, the question was; well, how are you finding kind of at a starting point of building scar? You know, I was like, I keep looking around for people to delegate to and there's just no one there. It's like, it's ridiculous. It's like, oh, what? I have to write the blog and I have to like design? I don't know how to use Canva or like… I'm so used to having teams of people to do all this stuff. To your point, you all of a sudden have to go back. You actually, I think, you know, the big challenge is you're growing up in a business as you said, is you actually have to unlearn being the smartest person in the room. Because if you continue to be the smartest person in the room, then the business is suffocated by you, your development, your mind, and you never end up with anyone smarter than you, so nobody ever takes the reins. No one drives, no one's more capable. And that's a real problem, because all of a sudden the business is dependent on you. So, you actually have to really unlearn the being the smartest person in the room and get rid of your ego and hire people that are better than you at things. And now you got to go back to the opposite where you go; you know what? I probably do have to be the smartest person in the room on a whole range of areas, maybe not like super deep technical, like, hey, maybe I don't have to be the smartest coder, but if I actually don’t know enough to hold my developers to account or to know how to test, if the wool's being pulled over my eyes or whether the thing's going to be quality or whatever, then you've got problems. Especially because you can't usually afford in the early stages, the most expensive people who would do that for you in the future. Yeah. It's such an interesting journey.

[00:38:54] Esha Oberoi: That's it.

[00:38:56] Sean Steele: Wow. Can I ask for your, you know, we've got a whole bunch of Founders listening, as I mentioned, I think this is the pinnacle for lots of Founders. Yeah, I think a lot of Founders. I always talk to the clients and the Founders that we support in ScaleHQ about three particular, you know, when we're setting up their strategy, we're talking about do they want to step up, they want to keep scaling and they also want to scale up their leadership and stay at the helm and continue to be the CEO and just see how far they can push a thing, or are they really trying to plan a strategy that allows them to step back into a director's role, some level of influence, ownership, et cetera, over the asset, but no longer operational? Or are they planning for a step out? So, step up, step back, or step out? And many of them want the step back option. And partly because some of them recognise, some of them really enjoy the journey of continuing to step up and growing their leadership. Some of them have absolutely no desire once the business gets passed, even 50 people or a hundred people to continue to be at the helm, because as you know very well, having had a many hundreds of FTE, it ceases to be, you know, there's a lot of people leadership stuff that you've got to learn. There's a lot of, you know, how do you run a company as opposed to run a business stuff that you've got to learn, and not everybody loves that. So, what you've done now for those who are like, I just love that initial hustle. I loved the figuring it out. I loved the problem solving. I loved finding the customer who is willing to pay me and chasing it down. I think you're at a stage for many Founders who are listening who are probably like, that's like the pinnacle. Build a big business, then step back, then start a new thing, how exciting. So, I'm interested in that context, what your advice would be to someone who's currently, you know, their business is going well, it's growing well. They might still be, you know, relatively early days, like, I don't know, 5 to 15 mil. But this is their ambition. What advice would you give them?

[00:40:53] Esha Oberoi: Wow, that's a big question. And I think it really… because it depends on what their biggest internal challenge is. Is it going to be removing the identity and moving away from that identity that they've created? If that's going to be the biggest challenge, then the advice would be you've got to do a lot of inner work, and of detachment. It's a big question, but I think it's knowing yourself, like you've got to do a lot of inner work for these big decisions in your life. So, I mean, I would encourage anyone, you've got to go on a path of like self-discovery. What do you absolutely love? And our values through our life change. So, as we evolve as humans and go through life events, whether that's like having our kids and then parent buying few houses and or coming to towards like more mature marriage life, our values are constantly changing. So, I think it's really sitting with your value system and understanding where you are in your life. Like I felt that I had a creative outburst, post covid. So, I wanted to go back into full expression and sometimes you can't do that in a well-formed business because it's too disruptive. So, it's asking yourself those questions like, am I really happy in what I'm doing? Have I got more to give? And getting that values alignment.

[00:42:28] Sean Steele: There's a question in there as well that's raising for me around, you know, what is giving you energy and what's taking energy away because that's something, as you said, your values change and therefore the things you want to prioritise and naturally want to move towards change. And probably because it's actually giving you energy. And I think one of the biggest challenges for Founders is if they make the assumption that they're like, you know, they have to be the one at the helm, or they have to be the one who does everything, but they've got areas of the business that absolutely suck the life out of them. And you know, they end up often self-sabotaging their companies because they just hate doing that thing rather than finding somebody else to pick up those reigns and do the thing. But so maybe there's a scenario where you need to kind of constantly be, maybe an annual check in with yourself to go based on the things that I'm actually going to be doing in the next 12 months, personally, not what the business goals are, but what does that mean for me? What does it mean I'm going to spend my time focused on, and is that actually going to give me energy or is it going to take energy away from me? Because it sounded like your energetic needs changed, and you needed to get back into that creative space. And it was something that sort of drove you, and very fortunately, you'd built actually a leadership model that allowed you to have a trusted CEO to pick up the reigns. I mean, that in and of itself can be a big challenge, right? If somebody's still running the business as a CEO, has the epiphany that you had and then goes; oh dear, I've actually got like three years now before I can do anything, because I don't have anyone else to hand the reins over to, that's an interesting challenge in of itself.

[00:44:03] Esha Oberoi: Yeah, you make a really good point. I think, it's also going to that, you know, like depth of understanding what's taking energy from me now and where do I get energy from? And then if I decide to do X, Y, and Z, how will that shift in the right direction for me? And then I think, the other point is, you know, in our businesses is, you make a good point around succession. I think at any point, no matter what size of business it is, always thinking about that succession. And I always viewed that as an important part of my, like my lens around my future, which is who's going to look after this if I'm no longer there? So, I'm very lucky that Gurav and I worked together. Me and my husband worked together really well, but I think if he wasn't in the business, that is definitely inherently something I would've created because I'm always looking forward. So, I'm always securing my base, who's going to manage this? And I think that's really important because the minute that you want to do something else, you want to have that option.

[00:45:09] Sean Steele: Absolutely. And actually I would also say for those who are maybe thinking about some kind of, it's almost a bit of a side point, but many companies have a good healthy seven figure business, and their financial ambitions aren't that sort of overly done or crazy, and they think, yeah, I want to have an exit. I want to do it now. It's like, okay, great. But you're still running the business and you don't have a trusted general manager that's ready to step up. You don't have a co-CEO, you don't have anyone else to build a bit. So, you want to have a full exit. And you've told me you want to get out in like three months. That's great. But what risk does that create for the buyer if you don't have somebody who's actually already in there and proven in that environment. Like that's a gigantic vendor cliff kind of a risk for a buyer to take, and that's going to affect the valuation you're going to get. So, I agree with you. It's got to be on your radar. It's got to be something you've got to be thinking about, all the way up. If you want to have the opportunity to step back or to step out, you need it for both of those options. Esha, this has been so lovely to see you again and I'm so grateful for you sharing your time and your vulnerability of the journey because I think it's such a human journey that you've had to go through and such a psychological one as much as a business one. How would you encourage people to get in touch or follow along with what Leora is doing, where would you send them?

[00:46:25] Esha Oberoi: I would say search me up or the Leora on LinkedIn. It is the most active platform for me. I don't go onto anything much more than LinkedIn or of course, go to the website www.leora.ai and get curious. It's a novel product that's going to really reshape how mental health services are delivered, and I'm very open to feedback. So, if you've got an opinion or a thought, yeah, reach out.

[00:46:51] Sean Steele: Beautiful. Esha Oberoi, thank you so much for your time today. Folks, thank you very much for sticking with us. I hope you got a lot of value out of that. I'm sure you did, and we will see you again next week. Thanks again, Esha.