An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Don’t chase capital — My co-founder and I were so confident in our idea and the relevance of it that we thought we were owed capital contributions from investors right at the beginning. Turns out, that’s not the way the world works, especially within the consumer mobile space. We hadn’t yet realized the significance of going through the fire ourselves first and pushing the limits of our own beliefs about our product.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Pranjit Kalita.

Pranjit Kalita is the Founding Consultant of “koyn: the opinion network” (“coin”) — a new opinion-based networking platform for two-sided discussions. He bears responsibility for everything related to koyn. After graduating with his master’s in computer science from Princeton University, he grew concerned about the polarization, vitriol and stifling of free speech on the traditional social media platforms. He and koyn co-founder Parth Sharda wanted to create a solution by building a welcoming community for people with different viewpoints to engage on a secure connected platform.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

Absolutely! I am originally from India, and spent the earlier part of my life there. I’m from the state of Assam, in the northeastern corner of India, which is known for its black tea and being a crude oil producer. My father retired as the Group General Manager of Engineering at a major oil exploration & production company (named Oil India Limited) and my mother is a professor of education (she also serves on numerous academic boards and chairs her own center). So, from a very early age, I was encouraged to excel academically and expected to do well in whatever I did. I have a younger sister who I adore.

Growing up consisted of playing a lot of tennis, swimming, along with schoolwork and just having fun with friends. I was quite into sports and was a statewide tennis champion in the juniors category. I had a great upbringing and miss my hometown, which was a tight-knit community where everyone knew everyone. All of my mother’s side of the family lived in nearby towns along with my grandparents, so childhood included a lot of visits with them. I especially miss my grandmother very much. And of late, I’ve thought a lot about my grandfather who was a lovely man. A lot of my family were doctors, and so initially I thought I was going to become one myself; but soon realized that my love for technology and computers was probably something I’d be best at!

I came to the United States for my undergraduate education in 2012, and have been here ever since. I did my bachelor’s and master’s in computer science and engineering, and was fortunate enough to be at the forefront of a lot of interesting technologies throughout my six years in school. Those things have helped me tremendously in my entrepreneurial journey.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

For me my favorite life lesson quote would be “When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.”

The reason I like that quote is because not only is it catchy, it’s also extremely easy to see and realize. My mother used to say this to me all the time when I was a little boy, and I’ve liked that quote for a long time. It says something about never giving up — about always being the captain of your own destiny (like that famous poem Invictus by William Henley). That’s I think the common thread across all legends in any field — the ability to face troubles and challenges without making any excuses, and simply keeping your head down and focusing on what you can do to make the situation better.

Usually the most valuable and lucrative things in life don’t come easy, and therefore it’s always important to keep saying to yourself that you’re one step closer to your goal every time you encounter a challenge head on. In my own life, at several times I was close to running out of funds to keep my hedge fund business from folding, Through sheer willpower and focusing on what I needed to do to keep it going, I have been able to keep coming up with the necessary new capital to keep it going (thus far anyway!). Same thing with koyn — some of the challenges being more current as we work to try and get users excited about what we’re about. I’ve mostly found that how one faces challenging times defines them, and the only thing I can control is my response to them and how hard I work. Usually the results take care of themselves. It’s like the other saying I truly like — “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

It’ll have to be the movie Steve Jobs (2015) and an ESPN documentary called The Brady 6 (2010). These two films totally define how I look at life and handle myself. The Steve Jobs movie zoomed in during 3 major product launches of his career, but what I really appreciated was the interwoven thread of his single-minded dedication for perfection that ran throughout the length of the film. I really took to heart the importance of self-belief and that there’s nothing to apologize for if you’re passionate about something. The way Jobs compared beautiful technology with the arts and humanities was also I, as a computer scientist, have never forgotten — always trying to approach problems from a humanistic point of view, never forgetting the nuances of the human psyche! In my mind, that movie gave me the permission to be super-passionate about what I did, even and especially when the rest of the world was against me!

The other documentary about Tom Brady (and the 6 QBs drafted before him who failed to make any significant impact on the sport) truly resonated with me because it showed me how fleeting things like hype, talent are when not complemented by hard work. Like the saying goes “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”, Brady is the embodiment of that. He has truly inspired me to always keep my head down and focus on what I had to do to make myself great, and to not compare myself with others. A strong work ethic coupled with persistence will eventually win the day, even when you’re not the most talented person. I will never forget that lesson.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

The most important thing is your idea should be related to a relevant issue without an actual solution available within the marketplace that correctly solves the problem. If there are a bunch of strong headwinds that are signaling the existence of the problem, then even better since you will have a large addressable market to tap into. Which leads to monetization — another key concept from turning an idea into a business. How do you intend to make money? Do you have multiple revenue streams? Are they independent of one another or totally correlated? These are the main questions that every idea generator has to grapple with prior to launching a business.

In our case, we did a bunch of surveys that showed how people at the ground level felt about the echo chambers and information vacuums presented within modern day media and social media. That augmented the research reports, news articles, polls, etc., that we had already seen for months leading up to founding koyn indicating that there was a problem with the burgeoning political divide in this country. Thus, speaking with people and realizing that most felt there was a need for a platform like ours, something that didn’t exist in the marketplace, gave us the confidence to even begin developing it. The global nature of the problem just encourages us to think big from the get go! Because this is not just a U.S. problem, but a world problem.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

Great question!

What we did was scour over the internet and within the App and Play Stores with keywords that could even hint at 2-way opinion and idea sharing, and realized that there were no standard apps or solutions that did precisely what we were trying to do and on a large scale. Furthermore, we used resources like PitchBook and followed specific industry categories such as social media startups. We studied these in depth, looked at similarities, and concluded that no one was doing what we were interested in accomplishing with koyn.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

Surely! Going off of some of the specifics related to ideation that I mentioned earlier, here are the general steps to go from idea to product in customers’s hands –

1. Make sure you do your market research and poll prospective customers to sanity check the viability of the problem you are trying to solve.
2. Check to see if there are products out there that already implement your solution. If yes, then ask yourself why they’re failing and how you will be different. If not, ascertain that a good macro case backs up the market research you’ll have done on #1 and then get to designing and implementing the product.
3. File a patent, if applicable. This is not the most important thing for software products, but wherever applicable, and if affordable, do so. You can do so in 2 steps — provisional patent for 1 year, which is relatively inexpensive, and then a deeper, more inclusive patent once the provisional patent expires. There are lots of great patent attorneys out there!
4. Make sure you find a good team and build a good culture, and select the best people for specific departments of your product — development, marketing, finance, etc. Do not make compromises on this stage otherwise it’ll negatively affect your company later on.
5. Make sure you incorporate the company soon and have attorneys take care of the operating agreements among the founding team. This shows to prospective investors that you are real and not just a bunch of hobbyists. Professional handling of documents is important even at the beginning of a company.
6. Once you are ready to delve into the product, build it, test, iterate, and repeat the process until you’re satisfied.
7. Before you do a mass release, first check with some beta users in a demo stage. To make sure your product is able to withstand real-world pressures.
8. Take advantage of analytics tools like Crunchbase, PitchBook, etc., to learn more about the investment community should you require capital.
9. If a software product, take advantage of tools like Mixpanel, Seamless.AI to do market and customer research both in-app and from a customer discovery point of view.
10. Keep building up those relationships at the ground level both with retailers and/or users throughout the product lifecycle and never hesitate to put yourself out there. There’ll be a lot of rejections initially, but if you believe in what you are offering, then it’ll be an abomination if you didn’t give it your all! That’s the mentality you should bring to marketing and growth during the early stage — persistence at all costs.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

Surely! Here are the 5 most important things that I wish I had known prior to starting my company koyn –

1. Don’t chase capital — My co-founder and I were so confident in our idea and the relevance of it that we thought we were owed capital contributions from investors right at the beginning. Turns out, that’s not the way the world works, especially within the consumer mobile space. We hadn’t yet realized the significance of going through the fire ourselves first and pushing the limits of our own beliefs about our product.
2. Don’t have team members for vanity reasons — One of our earlier team members was solely there because of his larger public profile, which we thought would help us in appealing to users. Not true. Not only were we dead wrong about that, the person also turned out to be a major bust. We could’ve saved a lot of our time instead focusing on what we ultimately realized — people do not discover something and stick with it for superficial reasons. So, always keep your focus on the product or service and getting people interested in it the right way.
3. Don’t let friendships stand in the way of firing people — It is common for startups to consist of people who you’re already familiar with, or are your friends. That could be both a blessing and a curse. If the latter, and the person isn’t delivering, they’ll bring down the morale of the entire startup. It is important to be clear and upfront about that instead of ignoring it because you’re interested in maintaining a friendship. In my case, one of my good friends had signed on to be the tech lead for koyn but not only was his work insufficient and delayed, it was also incomplete. I let it drag on for almost a year before finally taking over. Since then, the product has been completed, released publicly and iterated upon multiple times. Note that in this case, I had the ability to replace him myself since I possessed the necessary skills to do his job. Sometimes you might have to look for a replacement elsewhere, but whatever it is, it MUST be done. Do not let personal relationships get in the way if they’re dragging down your product or company.
4. Timetables and plans seldom work — Especially in the beginning, when there are unknown unknowns. In our case, we had taken in multiple team members with some assurances that different phases of the project would be done by a particular date, which was when their roles would begin. Not only did those dates get continually pushed, some members became disinterested in the project as it dragged on so they left it. Never set in stone timelines and deadlines, especially when starting a new company or project. Circumstances change so you must be flexible. But through those trials, you will find out who the true believers really are.
5. Don’t forget to iterate by constantly talking to customers and clients — It is highly unlikely that your product will go viral in attempt #1 like Facebook or Twitter. Just because it doesn’t, that is not an indicator of the product’s failure, but perhaps a reason to try a new approach.. We had a lot of plans ranging from enlisting influencers to partnering up with college clubs to signal “the arrival of koyn”. When none of those proved to be the straight paths we had hoped they’d be, we had to consistently (and still are!) iterate. Keep improving the product, keep getting insights from early users, understand their concerns, look at what the data is telling you, and if possible, try to put new features into the product.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

1. Make sure your product idea is trying to solve something that a majority of reasonable people would say is a problem
2. Find polls, user consumer satisfaction surveys, historical data, etc., depending on your idea, that suggest why and how people think the currently available solutions within the marketplace are insufficient to address the problem
3. If possible, conduct in-person or virtual interviews with prospective customers. Pre-product you can use tools such as Survey Monkey and break down the demographics, regions, etc., for your sample set. You can also use services like Seamless.AI that provide query-based customer analytics and discovery tools.
4. Only after you’ve determined the product-market fit, get to actually realizing the product.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

I would not recommend it, since the genesis & synthesis of the idea has to be your own in order to achieve its highest potential. It’s like that movie Inception — “The subject’s mind can always trace the genesis of the idea; true inspiration is impossible to fake.”

Thus, you should absolutely strike out on your own. I bet that’s more fulfilling too!

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

It depends on the type of company you are and which stage you are on.

If your company needs major capital expenditures up front (for eg: an EV or self-driving startup), then you will need institutional capital, most of which would include VCs. However, if you’re in the software space, then at the very least until the product/MVP/prototype stage you should bootstrap it yourself until you don’t have the ability to, and/or you can make a case for why the next stage will include more capital that could come only from VCs. VCs are not only about capital, but partnerships. Their general network, industry connections and familiarity within your space could lead to better business and client acquisition strategies, so that’s what distinguishes them from other institutional investors such as hedge funds, private equity, family offices, angel investors, etc. If needing institutional capital, better go the VC route as often they’ll be able to find other strategic investors and partners.

In our case, since koyn is within the consumer mobile space, we need to not only build the product out (at least koyn 1.0), but show adoption or traction in some form, prior to going for even our seed round. This is why we have delayed our seed round continually in favor of meeting continuous milestones. However, I have been in touch with at least one VC firm throughout the process and gotten their input, so they could be familiar with how we have been progressing. We expect to only raise our seed round from VCs when we absolutely need it. Right now, we will see how our first rollout of koyn goes over the next few months. Hopefully that gives us a good valuation too since we will have extracted every bit out of our bootstrapping process before absolutely landing at their doors!

Therefore, in short, determine what your product is, how far you can go till not having capital is a hindrance, and if possible, continually iterate during that process. Sometimes the product-market fit might require nuanced iterations intra-product. In our case, that’s what we’ve been doing since our public launch in late-December 2021 — and in the meantime building a case for using the upcoming seed round to identify brand new verticals that could make koyn that much more powerful and relevant!

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

As I briefly alluded to before, I am also a co-founder of a global macro hedge fund, which tries to understand how the flow of debt within an economy dictates the political and grassroots pulses of the people, which is largely historically repeatable. The more you study history, the more you are prepared to anticipate what’s next. Long story short, my co-founder Parth Sharda and I, having learnt and absorbed this history, anticipated things like January 6th, or the Facebook expose by Frances Haugen, and were incredibly worried about how unrestricted, free-flowing information (which is not a bad thing!) could undermine the value of truth in a society. This is why we thought that the best way we could give back to society was by establishing a platform that in fact did away with all the ills that such information vacuums would breed, and envisioned a means to break the back of polarization in society. That’s why we built koyn, and we will continue to build koyn with the primary objective of serving mankind.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I’d really love it if people, average folks, would believe in their ability to affect real, enduring change by making their voices heard. Too much of our media — both conventional and social media — today is geared towards celebrities, influencers and those with large followings. It leaves the rest 99% of us behind. Also, a lot of us fear being ridiculed or judged or retaliated against if we speak up against the status quo. I really want to empower the average person to be in a position to change all that. koyn is a step towards that — given our extensive feature set (anonymity, pools, dual-feed opinions) — but I always want people to have that belief in themselves.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I’d love to get to meet Peter Thiel because he was one of the earliest investors of Facebook, a company that has unfortunately caused a lot of harm in our society, culture and politics, which we at koyn have the vision to solve globally. Furthermore, he’s very much in the news lately due to his support of conservative political candidates despite his Silicon Valley background, which means he must know how in terms of messaging, present day conventional and social media platforms rub a segment of the society the wrong way — another problem koyn is attempting to solve. I believe that if he takes an under-the-hood look into koyn’s DNA, he’ll really like what we’re about. For all those reasons, I think he’s the most significant person I could meet with privately.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

It was my pleasure! Thank you for the work that you do and for giving me this opportunity.

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Making Something From Nothing: Pranjit Kalita Of koyn On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.