S14E16: Building an Inc 5000 business with C-grade students, with Aditya Siripragada of Fountane

Richard Medcalf
Hi, Aditya, and welcome to the show.

Aditya Siripragada
Hey Richard, thanks for having me.

Richard Medcalf
Hey, yeah, you’re welcome. This is going to be interesting because what I know about you is that you’re the founder of Fountain, which has won the top, the top 5,000 award for being one of the fastest growing businesses. I know you’ve doubled your revenue annually for six years. You now have 125 people across the US and India and what your digital product studio and a venture lab. So you do some consulting, you do some venture work and you’ve kind of got a different model about this.

Now, most leaders talk about how they’ve got an A-team, right? A-grade team or whatever it is. And when we had our initial conversation, you said that you’ve built this business and in your, to quote you, you said, I built it with C-grade students. So like, tell me about that. Like, yeah, why are you celebrating that you’ve got C-grade students in the mix? Tell me more.

Aditya Siripragada
That’s what I’m.

I’m so glad that you remember that and wonderful job on the introduction, Richard. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It’s an honor to have this conversation with you.

And the SeaGrade student analogy really resonates with me. For one is that I am a SeaGrade student. I think I’ve told you this. But the thing that I really love about SeaGrade students is that we don’t care about failing. in fact, for us, the idea of getting a success is actually something that we’d celebrate then failing. Failing to us is normal. And that’s how startups in a innovation is, right? Like it’s not about the 10 times that you fail, it’s the one time that you succeed. That matters, right? And when I had founded Fontaine at the age of 19, I wasn’t really a very successful student. And in fact, like me and my co-founder started this company because we weren’t able to get any internships in college. Because we weren’t able to get internships, we said, let’s start our own company. And if we succeed, it’s going to be awesome. And if we fail, we have a great story to tell on a resume so that we can get a job.

Richard Medcalf
Mm.

Aditya Siripragada
But as we, you know, went out and started hiring people, one of the things that we’ve noticed is that the other folks that couldn’t get a job was other C-grade students. And it was like those are the only talent that was available in the market. We hired them. But turns out that like, you know, they were the most like the most risky and the most like, you know, wanting to take any kinds of risk out there. And when we created our first startup in like less than 90 days,

Richard Medcalf
Right.

Aditya Siripragada
That got funded at a $10 million valuation. And that actually happened just because a bunch of students came together. So there is this power of a C student, which is this no fear and this no risk of embracing a failure. And at startups, I think you need a lot of C students.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. So it’s really, it’s really fascinating, right? Because first of all, in my clients, you know, some of my clients are incredibly successful leaders and quite a high proportion of them actually, I think have this inner shame about actually I didn’t get the, you know, the degree or I dropped out or I took a different path. And like they’re absolutely nailing it in the world. And yet there’s this kind of educational shame that they still have.

After many years and some of them go back and they do a degree later in life just to prove themselves that they can do it, that they’re not dumb. They’re obviously not dumb people, right, very successful. So that’s just one thing that’s coming to my mind. And then I suppose the other is, you tried recruiting kind of A-grade students and found actually they’re not taking the risks or then you know they’re trying too hard to be right and to follow the instructions?

I’m kind of wondering whether you’ve seen it like that because often people I see are you know, are going, know, we need to recruit these A players and what A players they mean a resume that looks impressive, right? But that’s not necessarily what you want to.

Aditya Siripragada
No, so certainly right, like I’m not necessarily.

You know, looking at people’s resumes and saying, you have a C, then you’re in, or like to say that, hey, you have an A and you don’t fit in here. Certainly, like, you know, that’s not the criteria that we look at. But when when we look at an age student and we’ve had like, you know, several age students in in in our company, what happens is that like, you know, age students are are unable to take the smallest amount of uncertainty is like the way that we look at it. When I say uncertainty,

Richard Medcalf
Okay.

Aditya Siripragada
There are times that we’re unable to pay salaries on time. This is not now, but there’s a couple of years ago where if we say that we’re going to pay salaries by the third, sometimes it’s the fourth or the fifth we’re able to pay. And they’re not able to take that uncertainty the same way that these students are able to. And there’s several anecdotes that I can give around the same line where age students kind of expect that life to be certain. Because what’s been really told to them is that if you do this, then this, right? Like they live life in a very functional way, if this, then that way. And they’re not open to this idea that tomorrow may be different than what’s been told to you. Right. So it’s not that like C students have this like anything unique than a students. And it’s not that a students have like, you know, this, this radically high IQ. I think what it is is just mindset. think a students are C students are intellectually very

Richard Medcalf
Yeah.

Aditya Siripragada
Similar. Everything is very similar. It’s just the mindset. C students have this mindset of really being able to take uncertainty to their advantage while A students are not. And it’s not like we’re shying away from A students. It’s just that C students work well in our firm.

Richard Medcalf
Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. So do you think this is around kind of perhaps see students wanting to prove something, as in prove how good they are, and perhaps A students are trying to prove like the other way around trying to defend their self perception of I’m one of the best, right? Because it’s my schooling, I was one of the best, therefore, I’ve got to like not mess up.

Aditya Siripragada
It’s exactly right. And I look at this like very similar, Like, you know, even in politics, there’s a left versus right, like one person is trying to disrupt, the other person’s trying to preserve the status quo. So I look at A is like, you know, status quo preservation and C is like, okay, let’s change things up because it’s more fun and we want to live a fun life.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So tell me about like, obviously setting up any business is a risky thing, right, on some level. What were some of the kind of uncertainties or risks that you took yourself in those earlier stages? Like where do you think you brought your maverick soul to bear in the growth of the business and what moves did you make, which were perhaps unorthodox?

Aditya Siripragada
So I was an international student. I moved from India to the US at the age of 17 to go to University of Minnesota for my undergrad.

You know, all students want to get an internship in college and it’s a no-brainer when you’re an international student and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. I couldn’t land even an interview. Nobody would look at me. I had the lowest possible GPA. I had just enough GPA to stay in school. So I…

You know, I just didn’t fit into the system. And one of the recruiters once told me, hey, Aditya, you want to get placed, but like, you know, look at yourself and compare yourself against other international students. You really got no choice but to like find a way to go back to India. Under that moment, I said to myself, I have three years left in the U.S. What do I really want to do to maximize my chances? And that was to like potentially start a business because there’s no other place I can start a business outside of the U.S. that can like really give me a hundred X.

And the way that I looked at it is that I don’t have a better alternative than starting a business. A lot of people like in hindsight tell me, how did you take the risk to start a business? And I keep telling them, I didn’t have a choice. Like, it’s not like, you I wanted to go start a business. I was happy working, but like, you nobody would give me a job. So in hindsight, like, you know, waiting it out and waiting for a job was more riskier than to like take life into my own hands and start a business.

Richard Medcalf
Hmm. All right. Right, yeah, so often I see that, right? Risky is safe and safe is risky very often.

Aditya Siripragada
Exactly, spot on, right? Like if the biggest risk is not to take a risk.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So tell me about your business. So why have you set it up in the way you have, right? Obviously it was a consulting business, but it looks like you’re doing a few things differently. Yeah, what are you doing differently and why?

Aditya Siripragada
So when I did start Fontaine back in college, one of the things that was really inspirational to me is this idea of minimum viable product.

There was minimum viable products in the Bay Area. There’s this guy that wrote a book called Lean Startup Methodology, which went pretty viral. And the idea of Lean Startup Methodology is to create lean software. How do you develop software startups in the least amount of features that possible? And in the state of Minnesota, where I’m from, there was no companies or service companies that was doing minimum viable products.

So the least amount of code that you would get is like nothing below $200,000. So we wanted to create an alternative. And our offering was a $30,000 software building exercise. And the first startup that we helped create actually got funded at a $10 million valuation in less than 90 days. That’s when I realized that actually the game is not necessarily in maximizing the statement of work and trying to get your client to pay you as much as possible because the way that service firms exist is like they want to like maximize every penny and want you to build a lot of features whereas we said instead of like trying to be in the business of projects let’s be in the business of business let’s quickly help our clients go to market like let’s get them like adoption and they’re gonna come back to us and build the firm with us so kind of seen ourselves to be in the business of business and that way what we

Richard Medcalf
Alright.

Aditya Siripragada
Also done is we looked at the world of startups as not necessarily as like, let’s get more projects done. And we said, let’s look at it as an investor and let’s see which startups and which founders have the best bang for buck. Let’s also invest in them and take a part of the business.

So we played both a role of a service provider and also a role as an incubator where we had equity in a wide variety of startups.

Richard Medcalf
So how did you do that? Because obviously as a bunch of 19 year olds suddenly deciding that, you you wanted to kind of make investment decisions in a whole bunch of very, very early stage company, that’s quite a risky business. So how did you, you presumably didn’t have a whole fleet of, you know, Goldman Sachs analysts to do all the number crunching. You know, how was it gut feeling thing? Was it just the sheer scale of numbers? How did you go about choosing?

Aditya Siripragada
Yeah. The story really stems from my co-founder’s experience right before my co-founder started this business with me. He was a part of a founding team, early founding team at an idea stage for this company called Luxury. It’s a friend from high school that wanted to create an AR app that takes your face and turns it into a rage comic. My business partner said, that’s a pretty dumb idea, but I’m going to work with you because why not?

The initial prototype and it wasn’t that good. And then his friend went to his dad and said, hey dad, I want to develop this into full-fledged product. That’s when my co-founder had left that. And the dad and the son kept working on this. They take this to market. Market loves it. And then Snapchat buys it for $150 million. And so that turns out to be the feature in Snapchat where it scans your face and turns into a dog filter and a bunch of different filters. the technology behind that is this company called Luxury, which Snapchat acquired in 2019. we saw this idea of enterprise value building through technology pretty early on, and we said, whoa, if we can churn out these kind of ideas, there’s tremendous value to capture at an idea stage. And we said we’d rather give up a few tens of thousands of dollars in service value to capture early stage equity. And when it comes to like how we value these companies, we really like, you know, did discounted cash flow. We did all of that. But at the end, we just said like, hey, like, just give us a part of your company, whatever you’re comfortable with. That’s how we started out. So started taking three to five percentage of a bunch of different companies. Now we do a lot of like, you know, discounted. Now the process is a lot more sophisticated. But back then it was just, you know, it’s just like everything else, right? Like we would discount it by 10,000 and we say like, okay, now give

Richard Medcalf
Yeah.

Aditya Siripragada
Me 3 % of the business.

Richard Medcalf
Nice. And so if I was a cash strapped startup wanting your services now, like what would I have to demonstrate to get you to kind of want to invest, you know, your time in the business?

Aditya Siripragada
So yeah, well, ideas are diamond dozen. And we quickly were able to attract a lot of ideas. getting demand wasn’t really a problem for us. We saw lot of founders wanting to get started. To us, the most important thing was domain and distribution. I call it the D square. What is the founder building? Do they have any unique value in the market, unique value for the idea that others don’t? It’s this idea called founder market.

Does the founder have any unique advantage to take this idea to the market than anybody else in the market? That’s like the question. And distribution is, do they have the first set of customers to get them to a million dollars in ARR? So that’s kind of like what we used to look at to get started. And if we think like the founder had domain distribution, we’d say like, okay, let’s build it.

Richard Medcalf
Nice, yeah, quite simple rule of thumb to get you going. Yeah. What was the failure that you had? Like, or the biggest learning, like where you really misjudged something or you pulled resources into something which didn’t end up working? I’m sure.

Aditya Siripragada
See ya. Yeah, I think we hear this way too often, which is this idea that idea is a diamond dozen and good ideas are actually not that important. It’s all about the founder.

I think I got way too excited by ideas at an early stage, invested in the wrong people, and kept investing resources year on year. The problem with this kind of a business model is that you have to pay your employees month over month, and these are fixed salaries. But then you’re waiting for a huge liquidity event to happen, the next investor coming on board, the next seed round, the series A round. That shit never happens. instead, focusing to build it on and investing in the right people is like what I realized. Now I realize why investors like without even seeing anything, without even seeing a full-fledged product, just like write a $500,000 check to an individual or a team. Because at the end of the day, you’re betting on the people and not the idea. I wish I had known this earlier. And now that I like have seen this work in real time, I’m betting on people now. If I see the right individual, I don’t care what they want to build, I’ll work with them.

Richard Medcalf
Right, so what do you look for in the people? So what would be your mental checklist?

Aditya Siripragada
I think it’s like demonstration of a similar to what is what to.

Demonstration of like what a startup would be. A lot of times what happens is like it’s a prior founder that’s built something. But what are ways that they’re showing foundership? So what I mean by that is there’s a lot of entrepreneurs in enterprises that have led transformations, right? A lot of times, executives in enterprises, they are getting paid to keep the status quo running like it is. Very few executives say it’s my burden to change the way it works, although they’re not rewarded for it. They’re really doing like the shadow operation where they take on a lot of risk to change the way that these enterprises work. So we like those kinds of things. We look for individuals that have demonstrated some kind of a transformation despite all odds. And we want to bet on those individuals.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, it’s interesting, right? Because even the most dynamic, ambitious corporate exec who might even see themselves as an entrepreneur or entrepreneurial spirit, until the moment that it’s actually your own personal money on the line, it’s not the same. Yeah, mean, I had one of my clients just recently, amazing leader.

Aditya Siripragada
Exactly,

Richard Medcalf
When I first started working with him, he was managing director of his business. He built it really from zero, but within a larger structure. And, you know, he really nailed it in many, many ways. And yet he realized the future of the business was probably going to be better served outside the current investor structure. That set a real internal process going with him, which I helped him work through around, do I see my, am I actually an entrepreneur?

And risk taker and put my money on the line and all the rest of it, or am I just a good operational leader? And it’s really an identity question, right? And he had to work through that. actually, God bless him, actually said, you know what? I’m born to do this. I have to do this. And he went all in, he put his own money on the line. He raised millions. He brought up, know, put a deal together to buy out his company, right? But that…

Does, you know, and I was, you know, privy to that journey, the ups and the downs, supporting him in that, you know, like, looking at it all. And it was really fascinating, right? Because he did ignite. He’s all in. And I know when he’s all in on something, he makes amazing things happen. But my point was, like, on one level, it’s the same job. He’s running a company inside a structure, or he’s actually, you know, it’s his own company and he’s running the same company.

In one level, it’s the same job, but on the other hand, it requires a very different internal commitment because it’s more money.

Aditya Siripragada
100%, 100%. You’re so right, this idea of like, you you’re doing the same job, but are you playing it on house money or are you playing it on your own money?

Richard Medcalf
Exactly, exactly. So yeah, it’s a fascinating one. So tell me about where you’re going next as a business, right? Because obviously you’ve done this for several years now. You’ve got to a certain level. What’s it to be like for your business to multiply its impact within the world, right? For Fountain to get to the next level. So what’s the next level for the business?

Aditya Siripragada
Yeah, no, that’s a great question, Richard.

We’ve done this for the last seven years with startups, and I would say like small businesses, and we’ve done it pretty well. But when I look at like professional services broadly, I look at this idea of trying to maximize a client budget to get Statement of Works done. That’s the business model of services, Trying to get $1 million client to go to three, three to five, five to eight, eight to 15, 15 to 30. It’s really like how do you maximize.

IT budget or marketing budget of your client.

That’s the model. And they’re never liable for business outcomes. They’re liable for projects getting done, but they never, that’s why there’s jokes on consultants that like consultants never get real shit done because they’re always trying to, they’re kind of a scrape go tactic for executives when shit goes south, right? But consulting is a power, can be a force for good in a lot of ways. And I look at like, you know, what Y Combinator has done in startup world is like being this platform where innovation can happen at scale for startups. And when I look at a lot of enterprises today, their model of innovation is mergers and acquisitions. I have free cash flow. I go and buy the next hot thing. mean, like we talk about Cisco, right? Like you’ve been at SX Cisco and one of my friends, Nitin, he sold a company called Epsilon to Cisco for 530 million.

Aditya Siripragada
And that was like a four year startup. I couldn’t believe it. was a ridiculously good sum. But Cisco companies like Cisco, ServiceNow, Oracle, they have like a huge pile of cash year on year. And they’re not innovating. They’re buying innovation from the market and adding that to their sales engine. And this is basically any enterprise today in that Fortune 500 list.

The model that we look at is like, should you buy or should you build it in-house? And how can we make enterprises act like startups in the sense that how can we get key individuals in the enterprise world to say, hey, let’s take a small budget. Let’s take a siloed team. Let’s get to innovate with them at the same scale that a startup does. And let’s bring that.

To your distribution. And simultaneously, your &A teams can go like scout out deals. But we can guarantee you that we’ll build you the same amount of enterprise value that a startup that you’re acquiring would do in less than 18 months. So we have this venture creation model that is gaining a lot of momentum, and we want to bring this to scale.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. So a lot of companies that seem to try these kinds of things with large corporates, you know, getting them to be more innovative. suppose part of me is always like, yeah, but you know, when people are not incentivized, like in a startup, you know, do they have the hunger if they’re on a fat corporate paycheck, you know, with job security and all the rest of it, right? So I don’t know, is it just about the technical component of like helping them build their MVP or, you know, are there deeper issues which are going to need to be addressed?

Aditya Siripragada
There is a whole plethora of issues outside of building the technology. If it’s as simple as building the technology, there wouldn’t really be a whole professional services world out there, right? We actually view ourselves less as a tech shop and more as a strategy shop. We actually have a lot of people working in the strategy department in the US. And the goal is not to build the tech. The goal is to understand user problems and user journeys.

And to figure out how do you give them higher levels of efficiency than what they are experiencing today. And it’s about solving user appetites for technology because in technology, what happens is change management. You can have the best thing in the world, but is there user appetite to adopt them? So.

Richard Medcalf
Sure, I’m with you. So yeah, so I mean, if we’re kind of bringing this down, the question about how Fountain is going to need to change is you say what you’re doing is you’re moving from this kind of equity based startup model to looking at what’s it going to take to really deliver on the corporate innovation agenda.

Aditya Siripragada
Exactly. Yeah. And as I saying, like, you know, for us, they’re the, you know, the big thing that we are solving for is can, okay, let’s talk about like how it works at the core, right?

How &A works is, let’s just say something like a United Health Group is saying, we look at this new way of doing this kind of an insurance. And there’s a company that we’re trying to acquire that’s currently $4 billion of enterprise value. And if we want to acquire them, we want to pay maybe 15 % premium on what their last round of valuation is. And how are you valuing the startup at $5 billion? Because they have so many insured patients or whatever it may be. So there is one or two key metrics that the CIA or the CTO is looking at and saying, we are wanting to acquire the startup for those metrics. It could be like number of patients insured. It could be some unique technology. It could be their free cashflow. The idea of corporate innovation is not that we are able to build that whole startup for them overnight. It’s that like, can we show them a model where in less than like six months or in less than a year, we can build like 15 % of what they’ve built with that.

Richard Medcalf
Definitely.

Aditya Siripragada
Competing startup. Same thing with like how I look at like with the Google like you know when you look at a Microsoft Teams versus Slack. Slack was first to market and they had a whole distribution of market share in enterprises and startups but it took teams like less than two years to get all of Slack’s customers and more users. That’s because Microsoft had an inbuilt user base of enterprise. So the idea is not that like you know you’re building all of Slack overnight. The idea

Richard Medcalf
Yeah Yeah, cool

Aditya Siripragada
Is can you show them some confidence that like you know that it’s actually working in that direction instead of spending 27 billion dollars on slack can you spend maybe 25 million dollars on on a project that can show early signs of slack disruption internally

Richard Medcalf
Hmm, got it. Yeah, fascinating. So I did want to be wrapping up soon because I think you fascinating conversation, but I want to make sure I ask my favorite question, which is, as you make this shift, as Fountain moves from the world of startups and also includes the world of corporate innovation and creating these pieces of concepts that you’ve been talking about, how do you need to change your leadership, right, to multiply your impact? We’ve talked about this, you you’re a founder at heart, you’re a disruptor, you’ve made these big changes in your own life and career and built businesses. What’s your next level? How are you going to get to your 10x? What’s coming to mind when I ask you about that, your own personal stretch?

Aditya Siripragada
Yeah, I think as a leader, impact can be measured on a whole set of things. And I think about this like, you know, very regularly. Are we measuring ourselves in market value? Are we measuring ourselves in qualitative things? Like how many lives have we changed and like, you know, people’s lives and like, you know, what we’ve done with our employees or like the community at large. There’s multiple ways to like measure impact. To me, I look at myself as for me to show up better and for me to like lead a whole team. The idea is that like, you

I want to be a better leader myself. I want to be a better individual at scale. Like only if I’m able to like, you know, guide the people closest to me to disrupt in the right ways, am I able to like multiply my impact? So it’s like, how can I show up myself in a way that like the people, 10 people next to me are able to multiply their impact, then only I’m able to impact, you know, multiply my impact on the world. So I think it starts from leadership, right? Like, you know, you can have like a very high individual contributor impact.

But as a leader, it only works if you’re able to have that influence on the 10 people next to you.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, absolutely true. I talk about transformation and then multiplication, right? So it will incubate then scale. So there’s one journey, which is to become a great leader. And then there’s a second journey, which is to help other people become great leaders. And that’s often the only thing that people don’t go on. But let me get specific about that because, know, leadership is all sounds very big. If I was being provocative, you know, if I was to go around and ask your 10 closest people to you in the business, you know, like.

Aditya Siripragada
Perfect. Spot on.

Richard Medcalf
How does the D.E. need to be a better leader? What do you think they would say? And this is not to deny any of your great strengths, but just to kind of ask, if you were ask those people, what would they be encouraging you to look at within your leadership?

Aditya Siripragada
I think there is a lot of things that I’m sure that comes to my mind, but I would say expectation management is a really big thing.

I think they would ask me to push themselves, but what is the right amount to push themselves? This is something that I have issues with. I want the people closest to me to do their life’s best work, but I want them to have a work-life balance. So what is the right way to ask them off things? And what is time to back off? And am I showing up myself like, know?

Every day with my best self, right? only if a leader gives their 10x, do the people around them want to give their 10x. Do they feel like I’m being my best self at work and am I being able to give my best self? And I don’t think people next to you are going to tell you that, hey, you’re slacking. You’re not doing your best work. So maybe creating this kind of a vulnerable, making an environment where they feel like they can give you honest feedback and saying like, hey, like, I think you can push yourself harder. You’re not doing that. So there’s a set of things like I do think like there’s, you know, an opportunity for the people closest to me to give that kind of feedback. And I’m sure like, you know, it will really help me because, you know, that kind of conversations don’t happen as often as it should.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, it’s really precious, right? It’s hard to get feedback often, especially when you’re in a position of leadership, right? People don’t want to tell you the hard truth. I see it a lot. I was just running a retreat with 10 amazing world-class CEOs and entrepreneurs. And I’ll tell you what I was saying to one of my other clients. It was exhausting. I loved it. We got nine, I think average score of 9.7 out of 10 from these people. So they loved the retreat. But it was intense because there I was having to

Aditya Siripragada
Yeah.

Richard Medcalf
Challenge and push and stretch people, and even just telling them hard truths that I can see that they didn’t want to hear or see themselves. And like, there’s a lot of energy required to do that, because these people don’t get it. They don’t get the unfiltered truth from people around them. It can be really hard. And I think the other thing I want to pick on is what you said around expectation management, because what happens, see often is that driven leaders have high

Big goals, They’re forceful people, right? They’ve got a big personality. They kind of drive their organization, right? And that’s all very well and good, right? Important. And then at the same time, there can be this creeping sense of, perhaps I’m being too much. Perhaps I’m pushing people too much, right? And so actually, in a way, they also almost tone down their level of challenge sometimes to their people because they don’t want to like…burn out their people, right? Or they don’t want to be too much and like be unreasonable and so forth. But it’s almost like they alternate between too much and not enough, like too demanding and then not actually holding the standards to where they need to be. And I found this really interesting dynamic in key leaders because it’s what you said, like I want people to like be their best and bring the best. And I don’t want to be the jerk of a leader who’s just burning his team into the grave either. Right, for my own selfish gain.

Aditya Siripragada
Yeah, it’s this style of leadership I’m sure you’ve heard. You either show the carrot or the stick. And people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, they show the stick, right? Like for them, that’s their style of leadership. But somebody like a Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, they show the carrot. inside of me, there’s obviously this constant challenge of am I a carrot leader or a stick leader? And I don’t see myself as a stick leader, but as a carrot leader, there’s only so much that you can keep incentivizing. And incentive is not always the right tool.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, for me it’s about range, right? So most leaders, we operate in a small section of our range, right? Across support and challenge. And we don’t necessarily, some people don’t lean into tension enough, right? They’re always playing a bit safe. And other people are always kind of driving, driving, driving, and don’t actually give people the inspiration and the encouragement to actually do the next step. So, it’s a fascinating conversation. We could spend probably a lot of time on this all by itself.

Aditya Siripragada
Yeah.

Richard Medcalf
But I think we are getting for any leader, know, listening, we’re really thinking about that, right? It’s the balance of support and challenge, really what we’re talking about here. And to see how do we calibrate them so that people feel really supported and encouraged and being held to their highest standards. Yeah.

Aditya Siripragada
Exactly. It’s a tough balancing act. again, the best leaders figure that out. And that’s why their companies are so good.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, absolutely. Hey, Aditya, this has been a great conversation. I really enjoy this kind of fun idea of playing around with what it is to have C-grade students and actually realize about the risk taking potential, be comfortable with uncertainty that they have. I’ve loved the conversation about business models around not just going for the consulting mindset and maximizing projects, but taking a business mindset and say how do we maximize value and get a part of the value.

Which I think is a really compelling idea. And then obviously moving to the future, to what it’s going to take for you to be the leader who builds the business that’s at a new scale, deals with corporates, and builds leaders within it. So it’s been a really fun conversation and thank you for your openness.

Aditya Siripragada
Likewise, likewise, it’s been a super fun conversation, Richard.

Richard Medcalf
If people want to get in touch with you or find out more about Fontaine, how do they do that?

Aditya Siripragada
So. I am on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. On Twitter and Instagram it’s dealsman, D-E-A-L-Z-M-A-N. On Instagram it’s Aditya Siripragada, S-I-R-I-P-R-A-G-A-D-A. And yeah, you can feel free to shoot a message Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn. I’m pretty active and I’m also going to be pushing a lot of shots or reels from this podcast too. So it’ll be fun.

Richard Medcalf
Hey, that’s been great. Thanks so much, Adia. Looking forward to following along on the journey. Take care now.

Aditya Siripragada
Yeah, likewise. Thank you so much, it.

Richard Medcalf
I’m having a real problem with my computer. It’s just stopped. It’s recording still. we go. getting there. I don’t know what the hell is going on. One second. My mouse is not letting me even move over the stop button. Here we go.

Aditya Siripragada
No, no, no problem. No problem.