How do you build things together, especially creative work. As Kahran and Divya embark on experimenting with new mediums and on new projects, they discuss their experience of working together for the first time on making comics.
Like most conversations between them, the discussion meanders into discussion about building companies, creativity, the difference between entrepreneurship and creative collaboration, how they see scaling, and their lessons for this experiment.
Bonding over the creation process is really a bonding moment, because it's so arduous and it's fun — but it can be painful at times.
Podcast is a little bit of an improv. You have to figure out the other person's energy and you have to move with it.
Hi, I'm Divya. Hi, I'm Karyn. And this is... Thinking. Fun Thinking.
Hello and welcome to this episode of Thinking on Thinking. This week, Divya and I talk about making together. After months and years of working together, we decided to explore a more creative pursuit in the last few weeks and months and build comics. And it's been an incredible learning experience.
For me, building comics for the first time has been incredible and so much learning. And for Divya, having a co-creator to build a comic with was a new experience and something that she also found very rewarding. We talked through that and talked through some of our recent podcast episodes and how much we're learning from these incredible guests we've been having.
We love today's conversation and hope you enjoy. So once upon a day... Gosh, many years ago, I want to say maybe 2008 or so, I think... Yeah, so around the end of college or somewhere towards there, my family really likes to go crabbing, especially my dad is very into crabbing.
And so the way crabbing works in the greater Washington area is you can get a permit and then there's a crabbing season. And then you're allowed to go and place these things there crab pots. And crab pots are basically just metal pots with one-way doors. They're metal cages.
And then you put some sort of bait inside. And most crabs really like cat food, but you could also put, like, I don't know, chicken bones or something, right? But or you can just take a can of cat food and make holes in it and then the crabs will come in.
And then you're only allowed to keep male crabs. Female crabs you have to throw back and the crabs have to be of a certain size. I think it's like seven or eight inches. Anyway, so we were in this smaller boat to go and get the crab pots. Me and my cousins, actually the ones I mentioned on the podcast before, the ones with the home
decor business. And so the three of us are in this little boat, like maybe an eight foot zodiac. And we've gone to where the crab pot is and you're pulling it up because it's on a rope. And then the rope has to go, like, all the way down to, and there's a little floaty to mark where it is that's on the surface.
And the rope maybe goes 30 feet down to the crab pot. And then as we're pulling it up, so the Apple Watch band, that type of band that I was showing you, it has like a little pin. And then that pin is what's holding it. So there's a lot of pressure on like a rope pulling it in a sideways fashion.
And it can happen in a way that the watch, the band will just tilt enough that then it'll just pop out, which is what happened to me. And so in a very quick moment. And he lost your watch. Yeah, it just flew into the ocean, right?
Because there was so much force on like what I was pulling up, because as it turned out, we had a ridiculous number of crabs. There was like 30 crabs in there, of which I think. Wait, but you can't have Apple Watch in 2008. Oh, so it must have been later than that.
So it must have been the trip they did after college. Maybe it was 2014 or so. Because I think they did one in 2008 and one in 2014. But yeah, so then we've had this joke for a while that we got a lot of crabs, but we sacrificed the Apple Watch to the ocean and then in return for the crabs that we were.
Well, the ocean gods probably wanted. Some sacrifice. Yeah. Yeah. They needed to, you know, stay on top of their notifications.
So you grew up near a lake. Did you have like, you know, weird sort of urban myth type stories around the lake? Like Loch Ness Monster stories there or like Cthulhu stories are there in the ocean or something? We only really moved to this, to the lake that my parents live on now, Lake Washington, in when I was 12.
So which I feel like is a little bit older than like the era of like, you know, really telling these scary stories. But no, I just also don't think there really are that many. It's not that big of a lake. Like you can see the other end at all times.
Okay. Maybe you were just not into horror stories. I am very not into horror stories. I find them very scary. Yeah.
So like maybe, you know, when your friends were discussing those stories, you're like, la la la, don't tell me about it. I do remember there are some parks now that like, there were weird stories about like, you know, people who had like gone missing and then like, they would like come to you if you were like making out in the park.
But it was like, you know, it was a tale to stop teenagers. Yeah, exactly. I was going to ask, should we discuss the last podcast episode? Is that what we're doing? We can discuss the last podcast episode.
We can also talk about like the experience of working together because by the time this week about you would have already started posting some of the comics. Yeah, I forgot when the one I was recording with Premiers day was coming out. And so we talk about like, they just acquired a company, right? And we're like, tell us about the news today.
And then it's like, oh, that's going to be six weeks from now. But that's OK. OK, so maybe I'll just set some context. So Kahran and I have been trying to start it. We are doing this thing where we want to be making more things.
Oftentimes, like creative energy and trying to look for a client and then like trying to get that satisfaction out of just doing client work is not the most compatible thing. This is something that our last conversation about like podcast and why we do it sort of led into. And so we decided maybe we like, you know, experiment with making many small things instead of making long term commitments.
So for our first section or whatever, like for our first sprint session, we decided to make some comics together because I love making comics and Kahran loves writing and maybe like, you know, Kahran, you can tell me what it was like making comics for the first time because like for me, it is like, yeah, I've made comics before. So I have like some more, yeah, I made comics kind of a feeling about it.
I did enjoy the experience of making comics. It was fun to realize that there's still more ways to write, right? Because I think as a writer, unlike maybe some other types of mediums, you kind of get into a certain thing, right? You write poetry or maybe you write short stories or you write long form.
And like you'll still have familiarity with the other modalities, but you kind of are zooming in on one. I think I kind of had thought that I had written all the things that I was curious about writing, but then writing comics was really fun. Did it make you feel more curious?
Made me more curious to try more things. And I'd like to do a few more comics because I feel like I'm still at a point of like rapid progression, if you will, right? Where I think I'm like rapidly improving and it's very fun. But yeah, I feel like I don't think I'm going to like switch to like writing comics
as a primary vocation. So it's very interesting, right? How your brain went into I'm not going to primarily do this. No, I was thinking about in terms of that procreate class I did a couple of months ago, right? Where I feel like now I would take another class,
but I don't really feel like I need to deepen my knowledge of procreate. And so as I was thinking about the comic making experience and that, I was like, oh, yeah, I don't feel like where I am with procreate yet, right? Like I would still like to do more comics. But I also feel like this has reminded me how much I like doing new things.
Makes sense. And I also wonder if like, you know, that it would be more, I guess, like it would be a different experience for you if we did like a or if you did more story based comic kind of a thing. So like what we did was much more of like a slice of life.
Or like, you know, just a snippet. It has more humor. But if you look at something which has more fantasy element to it, or like something which is more narrative heavy, like what we created is not particularly like narrative dense, right?
Like it's trying to be more fluffy in some ways. I think they steadily got a little bit more narrative dense. Yeah, they did. Right. Like I think the first few had literally zero context, right?
It was like these characters kind of just dropped in wherever they were. And I think by the last one, it felt like these characters had a life before you engage with them for these four frames. Or 16 frames. True.
Very true. I always find it very interesting because the two mediums that I really, really love both comics and games are not a very mainstream creative medium. Like you'll find poets, you'll find people who write, you'll find like, you know, people who make art or music even, but like you'll not find that many
people who make games or write comics. It's a very like niche kind of a thing. Do you feel like that's part of the appeal? No, I think that like I really like a multimodal nature of it. Like I think that like with games, I definitely like the interactive nature of it.
For me, it's not as much of like the niche-ness of it because as such games is not a small industry. Like games are financially much more profitable than like, I think film, music and TV combined, right? So it's not non-mainstream in any way, shape or form.
But I still feel like it just it's not a very accessible format. I personally enjoy it because they are more interactive feeling. There's just something more touchable about them. Yeah. I mean, of course, I guess with with games, right? Like they're designed to be interacted with and like so many other kinds of art.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, like I would really like for one of our things to be like a choice based narrative thing. That would be really fun. I really loved those books when I was young. Yeah, because I feel like I've been wanting to make a choice based narrative game for so long.
Like it's been a while since I've been wanting to make one. Oh, maybe we can work on that next. We can try that. Like that might be really fun. It's funny. My father was worried for us.
He's like, you know, if you build these skills, how are you going to monetize them? Like, you know, and then the next day he came back to me and he's like, you know, you could build comics for people. He's like my company, the companies that he is part of, right? Or advising to, he's like, would love to have a comic to explain them to use for recruitment,
to use their product. I was like, OK, father, thanks. I'm just like, sure, I'm happy to like, you know, do those kind of things. But I also feel like at least for me making these, this is like slightly side story. And I promise I will get back to how I felt about making comics with somebody for the first time.
I was talking to a very good friend of mine and like, you know, she was talking about how, you know, when you want to build something, you have to have the vision, then you have to do the execution and then you have to do the sales. And I feel like entrepreneurship and tech industries are the solid by outsourcing the execution layer. But media industry doesn't like at least the good stuff doesn't like, for example,
the movie that I'm working on, the director sits with us, like, which is a VFX team, right? Like a much smaller part of the whole movie. He has written the movie, he has directed the movie, interacted with all the actors, worked with the cinematographer, like worked on the edit for like a long time. Even now he'll sit and he'll be like, yeah, maybe we should place one more tree here.
Or maybe we should like shift this to a little bit to the right. And then he's going to go and try to sell it. Just thinking about myself in that position, it sounds exhaustingly grueling, right? Because you have to have the vision, then you have to do the execution and then you have to, like, you know, go and sell it.
It's just like such a marathon kind of a situation. You have to keep your momentum up. You're running a company. We're doing exactly that. Yeah, but like, yeah, yeah, I agree.
But like most companies don't want to scale with this in mind, right? Like most people would sort of step away from execution. Like most of the business wisdom that you also see is like, OK, sure, do it for a while by yourself, but then don't do it too much. And actually this conversation with my friend actually made me realize
I think I want to do all three things. I mean, we've talked about this many times before as well. But I feel like I want to work with like a small team of like really smart, really multi-talented people. It's just like one of those things into me, sort of like us making things together
feels like it's a step in the right direction. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's interesting. It actually reminds me of this conversation they had with our podcast guests. I think they'll be in the next podcast with Prima and Andrew of Humanly.
And something that Prima was talking about was how he's found that his ability to grow the business in the different capacities that it needs of him as the business has gone from zero to one and then one to 10. And now they're kind of at that almost like 100 to 1000 stage. They just did an acquisition.
They've raised their series A. And it was interesting how he was talking about how something he had realized in part from the inputs from his co-founders and from his board was that he wasn't going to scale well for all of the places that he had been scaling till now.
So even though he had these kind of areas of interest, there were certain ones where he was starting to hit his capacity in how well he was being able to manage that for the business. And so he was now looking at saying, how do I take a step back from that function? So someone who is more skilled for that moment in the business.
And I think something Andrew and Prima both did a really great job of just talking to me about how they really look at it as saying, is this the opening in the business that gets you excited as a person to solve this problem that gives you energy to solve this problem? And maybe that's only for a year and a half or two years.
And then it's time for you to move on and time for you to do something else, either humanly or not. And it's just interesting to hear them as they brought that insight to their employees, sure. But also we're thinking about themselves and saying, yes, we won't walk away
from our role and to carry this business forward and successful. But we will think about are we the right person to be growing this specific function of that business? Or is this the right time to find someone who may be more skilled for this moment? It was interesting.
Like as you were saying, it was also making me think, I wonder if that is the difference between like a creator and an entrepreneur, because both are jobs that require you to sort of like, you know, do creative thinking, do divergent thinking, like, you know, cut down some ideas, converge everything, like, you know, put in long hours, put all of your analytical and like non analytical parts
of your brain to work. But I wonder if like just on a value level, at least to me, it feels like an entrepreneur is thinking about growing the business and a creator is thinking about making amazing things. It's a little bit like, you know, how Miyazaki said Boy in the Heron would be
his last film, but he was back in the Ghibli offices of like last week with like a new script and he was like, I have new ideas, guys. Like the man might not even be alive to make the film. Like, I don't know, you know, like we don't know if he's going to. He's quite an old man.
Like we don't know if he's going to be around to finish his work. Like there is just a bit different kind of feeling when you see, oh, I have made this. And then you just sort of like put your thumbprint on it all. It's different from like I made this big company and like, you know, then the company becomes a separate entity from you.
I don't know how to explain it, but it is just like an experiential difference. I feel, yeah, if I may, I feel like what you're saying is that you kind of feel like you're more into the creator side than the entrepreneur side. Yeah. Interesting.
So you wouldn't kind of look at and saying, oh, you know, the business needs more. I don't know. Why does the business need that? And for what would be the questions I would ask? Because I'm not trying to think everything needs to be the next Amazon.
I thought of a good example. So something you and I have talked about is that we would love to kind of grow joyous to be a place that helps people explore more. Right. And if that means that maybe there's a physical venue where, which can almost almost be a play space that we can invite other artists to come,
be able to create together. Right. We've talked about kind of like some, some dreams that we have there. So let's imagine that we are. Yeah, we make a space like that in New York, let's say. Or, or, you know, we, we decide that it's time to commit to that vision.
Right. Let's do something that we could do. Right. So let's say that, you know, we don't have the kind of skills in design that we are today, right? Where we're, we're able to kind of architect a space like that or keeping the architecture aside, let's say, to the existing space, just even thinking
about the interior flows of the space. Right. And as you kind of think about gauging, you know, yes, we could come up to speed on it. And, you know, we might be able to get to a reasonable set of understandings on flow and lighting, or would you think about,
Well, I have no issues hiring an expert. Yeah, that's a problem for a project. It's kind of a different thing because it would be a shorter term thing. So my hypothetical got myself stuck. No, but I also feel like it's a value thing.
It's a little bit like, and maybe it comes from, like, you know, in the cultural zeitgeist, it comes from the way we see, want you to run business, but like no business, which is not 10 Xing is worth VC money. And I feel like that's not necessarily the, I don't know, there's this almost business centricity that ends up happening where, like,
there is a mythological list of these other things that a business needs. And then you as an entrepreneur are supposed to sort of bend yourself around those things. Hiring people is a different thing. But I think about even when people initially believe that, oh, something like work from home is good for the team,
they will eventually be convinced, quote unquote, that work from home is not the right way to let your workers work. And you have to, like, you know, bring them in office because businesses need middle management, whatever, whatever, like there is a chain of flow. And like, I'm just talking about stuff that is happening, like,
let's say I've seen in Bangalore and like, you know, post COVID, there is a lot of like conventional wisdom. I give you that. But I don't know, I would, I feel like at least in the way I had the conversation with Prima and Andrew,
I managed to kind of like send it in a little bit of a different direction. Because what I was asking them about was, well, if that's how you feel, like, how far does that go? Right. So even if it's just for yourselves, do you think about it as what are the assets that you guys have and how can you create situations that leverage those assets?
So the example that you know, you and I could think about is that I'm very good at maybe I would say understanding very empathetically where a person is coming from, like even in a conversation where it might seem like there is no, there is no win-win situation, I think you're really good at sort of like building that. I don't know if that was the kind of example you were looking for.
Yeah, that could be for sure a reasonable example. And then the question is, would you think about how do we grow the business in a way to take advantage of that? And what did they say? So that's like the other extreme of it, right?
So one of it is saying, OK, here's a place that we're weak. So how do we find people that maybe support us? And then it could be a decision of, OK, is that a place that we want to grow? Or do we want to bring someone in? And there I think your point you were making about the creator versus entrepreneur
and how you would weigh that differently depending on which part of those is stronger within you. But what I was kind of saying is, I think a different version of that question that's very similar is, well, saying, OK, here together in this organization, we have these assets and some of them are underutilized. Now, can we build the company in a way that takes advantage of those assets?
They answer that Prima and humanly kind of gave us that it's changed over the business. And now today, they're 50, 60 person business. And it's a little bit different about what the needs are and how much you can kind of create parts of the business for different people. But it was sounded like it was something that happened earlier on for them more.
So you kind of put that question to you. Do you feel like that's something that you would think about with our business? Even as you were speaking, you said that, you know, which part of you comes into picture like entrepreneur or the creator? And I had never really associated myself with the entrepreneur part, per se.
I think that's something we've talked about because it's kind of like a weird association, right? Like there's all these classmates who are like the entrepreneur. Yeah. Is that fair? I think I am like two into the Bangalore tech scene or Indian tech scene, whatever the startup scene that I have like developed some ick about it.
Like even when somebody says, oh, you're an entrepreneur, I'm just like, no, not really. No, no, no, I'm not. I'm not. I'm definitely not. I feel like we talked about early on the podcast, you kind of had those feelings about sales a little bit where it's like, oh, I'm not good at this. And like it's a skill I need to grow.
But then I think as we unpacked it, we I realized you are quite good at selling things you believe in. Or maybe in a different way, maybe I would say helping people see the value of things in a way that they want to just buy them, right? Which is almost it's a different kind of selling.
It's a very focused on what is this thing that we're building together and painting this dream that then people desire versus kind of convincing something in them, finding a need in them that you can leverage. The last episode I recorded, it's not going to be out for a while. But these guys are talking about and they have some of the best marketing.
So these are my friends. They're on a mental health company. And I was just asking them, like, how do you guys have like such a good marketing? Like last month, I think their reels did something like eight million views or something like that cumulatively, which is a large number, right?
And it's not organic. And it's all like, you know, word of mouth sharing and all of that, which is crazy good. But it was just interesting what she said. She was like, you know, mental health is something that people might even deliberate for six months before the book therapy session.
Or even if they have booked one, they might not book again for like another six months. It's a very like takes a long time for people to do it. And she was like, and we don't want to sell people anything. We just want to be like, oh, we are here and we understand the situation. But in a very like life is going on kind of way and we want to be around you.
And I was like, this is such a beautiful way of doing sales, especially if I think about like the fact that these guys have not raised much money and they have managed to like get close to seven figures in dollars by themselves in like two and a half years. I was just going to ask that.
See, I feel like if you raise a lot of money, it becomes very hard to do those kinds of sales approaches like I faced that at the next, even though we hadn't raised from that many investors because we were spending, you know, three, four carors a year, right? It just meant that we had so much demand on needing capital into the business.
And there were so many expectations of that capital that it meant that if we were doing a long sales cycle where we were trying to educate someone for maybe a whole year before trying to sell them at the very end of the year or have them, hopefully just come to us to buy, it meant there wasn't that much patience for stuff like that.
So, yeah, I think that's actually really great that they haven't kind of put themselves on that VC roller coaster of I'm sure it's a very good episode. I'm excited to hear it when it comes out. It is like I'm really, really excited about like, you know, everybody listening to it. OK, but before we end, no, before we end, you have to answer the question.
How is your experience of building comics with me? Um, so the first thing is like, it's always good to work with somebody who is good at what they do. It's always a delight to work with somebody who is good at their craft. I think that like, while I'm not really much of a craftsperson, if you think about
like all creatives and on that spectrum, I'm not going to fall very highly on craft. I'm much more on the concept or like thinking side of things. But it's still just like it's such a delight. Everything just like, you know, moves so smoothly. It's like cutting butter through with a knife or something like that.
I don't know whatever that metaphor is. So like that part was really delightful. It's also really good to work with somebody and this is from a very different angle. But like somebody who knows what they're doing. So for example, I've written for my comics before, right?
Like for a long time. But for me, writing was like catching butterflies. I cannot control it. I can try to do it multiple times. But like, you know, it's the butterfly has a mind of its own.
But like it felt like for you, it was much more like you are riding a horse and you could direct it in one direction or the other. So like for me, it was more like I have to hope for serendipity and have to keep trying until the serendipity hits. But like for you, it felt like, you know, you were able to direct the thing a lot more.
So for example, when I was revising, I think it was the second comic. I just kind of took two frames from one of the earlier revisions. And I think if I remember correctly, I took them almost as is. I maybe changed like a few words of the dialogue. But with that have been really hard for you to do because it was a completely
different story, but I just kind of was like, oh, I can make it kind of encompass these elements and then we can just kind of reuse that thinking and dialogue. Because I know that's easy for you to do in a visual medium. But is it very hard in writing? Yeah, I would just not be able to think so in general.
I'm not particularly great at reuse. For that, a side effect is that like I'm really good at coming up with new concepts. I don't know how to reuse like 100 percent like the reuse would have been hard. But I also think like there's just another metaphor I could use is like I would cut with the axe and you can cut with a scalpel.
So like you can remove a word or two rather than like, you know, I would try and change the whole thing, well, it's not working. So then something about the whole thing needs to now go. I see. So maybe a more appropriate example is like the edits I gave you, I think, on the fourth one, third or fourth one, right?
Whereas like, oh, can you just change these two words? Because I just felt like it wasn't it wasn't flowing quite right. But if it just had the little pause, I was like, oh, this will be fine. Oh, interesting. I see what you're saying. Yeah, something like that.
Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, I just found that part like really delightful. Like because I really like making things. So like just working as somebody who's also like, you know, enjoying what they're doing is yeah, like that part is just like really fun.
It's interesting you had so much more of a holistic view of the experience. And I feel like my view of the experience is very centric to myself. Because like you were exploring a new medium. So like for you, you had to gain your positioning with respect to the new medium kind of insights first, only then you would think about like, you know,
three-party problem much harder to solve than two-body problem. Yeah. And of course, I don't have a place of comparison, right? Whereas you can be like, oh, when building comics in the past, it felt like this. And now it feels like this. So yeah, it's been both that and like, you know, my newfound inspiration to try
and incorporate poetry in my painting, which I don't know when I'm going to do, how I'm going to do it and all of that. But like, I think both of those have been very delightful things. So just like, you know, working with you and working around you. Yeah.
The music is by Akshay Ramu Halli of BTRPT Music. Editing is by Beatnik.