Gagan Sandhu
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
So one example that I gave you was my coworker who left a very comfortable corporate job to become a teacher. Now that person, they actually walked away from a lot of future wealth, but they pursued passion. Now, The idea is that financial independence let them pursue a passion and shape their today and their tomorrow.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
They are living in the present, so they didn't wait until, a lot of people wait until they retire to pursue their hobbies and their passions. This person, probably in their late 40s, walked away from a corporate job and is now working with the kids.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Another couple that I mentioned, for them, living in the present is that their kids are young and they actually, until now, they were thinking they need to keep earning a lot of money because they just need to have a lot of money because they have two kids and they live in a very expensive area here in Silicon Valley and they just can't keep up. And knowing, for them, financial independence was...
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
something they couldn't wrap their heads around because of the way their thought processes worked. But by knowing what was needed, they were able to sift the signal from the noise and they were like, oh, okay, we can actually spend more time
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
raising our kids and building the family and building the foundations of the family and not just keep earning more because we have reached a point where financial independence is within reach. So my point is, even if you want to live in the present,
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
I think being aware of the pitfalls and also the possible rewards of financial independence, I think knowing those two is of extreme utility, is of extreme usefulness. So let me finish your thought, what you started on the financial independence part. I would say, yes, we provide assurance, but more than that, We also actually infuse knowledge in the product that is otherwise not very well known.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I have three or four properties, so that should do it. What we provide is, and people generally, it's not, as I said, like people... Most people don't know S&P 500 long-term returns, believe it or not. Even though to us, it's always at the tip of our tongue and it's always at our fingertips. We know it.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
And people don't know what the returns are for real estate in the long term. I'm talking about American markets. Asian markets are different, but American markets. So we bake the data. We also bake hard data. If somebody has
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
XYZ amount of funds in their 401 , which is the retirement account in the US, and they have some stocks in their brokerage account, and they have some real estate, and they have some treasury bonds, and they have some cash. We are able to put all that together and say, We know real estate grows about 3% to 3.5% per year. Based on what you have, here's where you can expect this thing to grow.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
You have some cash that's not going to grow. It's actually going to lose value. You have some bonds. You have some of this thing. So we are able to build that model. So there is the math there, even though I said it's easy for people like you and me. But for most people, it becomes very complicated very quickly. And that's where we come in and we help.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Who's our ideal customer? Our ideal customer is someone who is earning a decent amount of money. We say $100,000 or more per household. Typically a young family and also quite often an immigrant family. And they are so busy working full-time jobs, raising kids that they don't have time for pretty much anything else for that.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
And when they see Zillion, they're like, okay, this helps me because now I don't have to do all the research all the time. You guys do all this for me. And I'm able to spend five to 10 minutes a week And Zillion will, A, tell me whether I'm on a sustainable path to financial independence or not. B, if I'm not, Zillion will tell me, hey, we have too much cash here. Invest that into stocks.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
What kind of stocks? Here are the stocks you can invest in. also you have a 401k account that is actually you're paying too much fee there change that and optimize it in such a way we actually show step by step so a typical customer will get a lot of value because they're pressed for time This is the money thing is it's always like item number five or six or seven on their list.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
But their number one is don't get fired in this economy. So keep working, keep putting in long hours. Number two is make sure kids are raised properly and the groceries are done. And other things, meet with certain people so you're not a social zombie. So by the time you come to, okay, I also need to look at all my finances and see what I need to do. It's always number five, number six.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Maybe during tax time, it bumps to number two or number three, or we have to file taxes. But planning for financial independence is, and I would encourage you to talk to some young parents and to just to validate this.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
on how much do they actually are able to think about these things and that's where we believe our opportunity young families and also i would say some of the gen z especially who are not yet married and have kids but they're like okay i am finally making some money and i'm able to pay off my student loan or i should i pay off my student loan or should i invest this money and pay
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
the minimum in student loans. We have tools for those people as well, and they are also a big part of our audience. They're like, hey, should I buy a house with this cash I have, or should I invest somewhere else?
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
So what we do is, our pitch is, if you are a professional, and I could go back to this, if you're a knowledge worker, and today we are in the knowledge economy, the best use of your time is to increase your knowledge and increase your earnings through improved knowledge. We help you by taking care of a lot of your financial mediocrity.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
We help you to stay focused on increasing your knowledge so that you can accelerate your career more and accelerate your earnings more. And that's where we are seeing the success.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
a money management firm or something else yeah so we're not a software company you pay us a small fee and it's 19 a month and with that you get access to all our tools so that you can manage money like a professional wall street person you'll have the same tools as those available to the wall street the big egos and you pay us a small fee
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
But if you are like, hey, listen, I also need to talk to someone because for money, I don't just trust some numbers blinking on the screen. I also need to talk to someone. We offer you that service as well. You can talk to a certified financial expert and you pay us $79 a month. And it's a straightforward, simple, we're not an education platform.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Everything happens through osmosis, but that's not our goal. That's not our desire. We believe that there is enough content available just on YouTube itself and overall on the internet that anybody who really wants to learn, there are plenty of avenues available, plenty of resources available for you to learn. We are not here to teach you. We are here to help you.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Hey, thank you so much, Vince. Thank you so much for reaching out and rekindling old memories from business school. And I'm so happy to be doing this with you. And I'm a fan of you and what you're doing. So thank you so much.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
And that's how we position ourselves.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
The term is new, but the concept is not. If you go back, There are a couple of people who come to mind. Dave Ramsey, I don't know, I think he's in the late 60s or maybe early 70s. He's been an influencer for finance since like the 80s. Suze Orman, and there are many others, right? So influencers have always been there. The memory keeps changing. Before that, they were newspaper columnists.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
They were always there. People would write letters. Hey, what should I do this? How should I do that? So there have always been influencers. They started with newspapers and magazines, then to TV, then to cable, and then to internet and some user groups and discussion boards, and now to social media. hasn't changed so much, but it has fragmented.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
There's one Bera Ramsey, one Suzan, and there were probably like a dozen of them, say, 30 years ago, and there is probably thousands of them, if not millions now. I think there is a place for them. They provide bite-sized wisdom. I am in my own very small right. I'm also a finfluencer. I post my videos on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, everywhere.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
You can easily find me, Zillion or Gagan Asandu, if you search for it. So I post nuggets as well. But I believe that Influencers, they do have a motive. Typically, they're typically tied with someone they're either selling, hey, this JP Morgan bank account is really good. You should get it. And they get some money. I think that model has a place. We are not doing that.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
We don't tie up with influencers or influencers. We believe that it's less authentic. I would rather be selling our own product and not just using an influencer. We want to be an influencer ourselves rather than use other influencers.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
I think some of the things that I'm going to say are probably going to be controversial, but I'm just going to say it anyway. There are many aspects of this. I'll focus on one or two. Regarding ageism, I think I'm less worried about that.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
But the way I think about it is, as compared to, say, 20, 30 years ago, today, in this economy, especially in the US, and maybe in other places as well, a career is not It doesn't span 30, 40, 50 years anymore. A typical career, this is my reading, is about 10 years. Every 10 years or so, you need to rediscover your career. I have done it. I started as a mechanical engineer.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Seven years later, I became a programmer. Another five years later, I became a manager. Another 10 years later, I became a leader in tech overall. And five years later, I started a company. So I have changed career basically three or four times in the less than three, two and a half decades that I've been working. I think this is going to be the norm.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
And it's less about ageism, it's about discovery. For instance, right now we are in this hype cycle, which is somewhat real, but definitely we are in the cycle, I shouldn't say hype cycle, We're in the cycle where some of the old guard technologies are getting replaced with new guard technologies like AI, for instance.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
If you are, whether you're food or you're 20, if you are not exploring AI as a technology, as potentially an enabler of new opportunities for you, then you're falling behind. And what happens is I think the ageism is the name we give to the skill gap. Someone coming out of college is probably well equipped with the technologies that have come out in the last couple of years, AI being one of them.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Somebody who's been working in corporate and doing certain job is less likely to have used those tools because those tools are new and their job didn't require it. So I think as an individual, I think the onus is on me to discover those things and learn those things on my own so that ageism doesn't become a place for me to put the blame on. It should be skills.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
And skills are something that we unfortunately or fortunately live in a time when skills have to be updated and upgraded constantly. That's one. Second thing is, I tell anybody who I've worked with, anybody who has been on my team, I ask them to work hard. Jeff Bezos famously has said, work hard, work smart, work long, and you can't choose between them.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
When anybody joins at Amazon, they're told they have to do all three things. You have to work hard, you have to work smart, and you have to work long. I think what happens is once we start working, get married, we have kids, we have more social life, we have more obligations, I think the work-around part falls off.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
which is natural, but I think we need to find those times in your career where, in our careers, where we can work long for periods of time to build more equity, so to speak, with our employer or to build more skills. So maybe we are not, the work long part is we are doing somewhat long at the work, but also we are putting extra time to learn more skills. And that way we can actually
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
I think we can mitigate the side effects of ageism a decent bit. Does that make sense?
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Will I hire someone who's older? So let me address that. So you also asked whether I would hire someone who is, let's say, over 40 and comes to Zillion. I think the honest answer is yes, I consider everyone. And one of the things I learned early on in my career is to hire the best person for the job.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
So if right now, if I'm looking for, let's say, a marketing person who can come in and really take our marketing to the next level, I'll be looking for the skills that will help us get there. If those skills are in a 23-year-old or a 35-year-old or a 47-year-old, doesn't make as much difference as what is the specific thing I'm looking for. And sometimes experience is an asset there.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you that There is a lot of noise around this term. Financial freedom, financial independence, financially independent, retire early. There's a whole fire movement. And also, especially ever since social media became a dominant force in the society, there are just too many people out there trying to almost... Some of them sound like snake oil salesmen.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
And I would definitely look at that. So I don't think it's ageism as such. I would put it as it's skills. If you have those skills that I'm looking for. And again, we are a small company. We are a startup. Our needs, our skill needs, might be different from, let's say, Google. That is a 27-, 26-year-old company. They might, oh, probably even 30-year-old company at this point.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Our needs are different, and our skill needs might be different as compared to some of the established companies.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Oh, thank you so much, Vince. This was so much fun. Thank you.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
They're like, oh yeah, I'm financially independent. I just have this social media or I do X, Y, Z and I make enough money, blah, blah, blah. So I'll tell you what my criteria was. It was fairly straightforward. And I will actually contextualize, right? I'm careful to use the word financial independence and not retirement.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Because those two are different terms, very different context and very different overall outcomes. For me, financial independence meant I could leave my corporate job and go work on my own and build something from scratch. When I was able to do that, I said, I am financially independent because I can do what I want with my time.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
So I earned that independence and I don't have to be beholden to a paycheck to do that or to something else, right? In this case, it was paycheck. And for me, it actually, I'm an engineer after all, and I actually did a very mathematical thing. I figured out how much money I would need to sustain for at least five years so that I can build something on the side while not starving my family.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
And I did some math, and not super rigorous. We are all pretty good at doing basic math. And I did that. I'm like, OK, five years. Our yearly spend is about this much. My kids, one of my kids is going to go to college in this much amount of time. So here's that. And also, while I build, I will not have an income.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
So my retirement account has to be in a certain shape or form so that I'm not insecure about that. So that's going to be another amount, let's say X. And Y is going to be the amount that is going to be needed for just maintaining and sustaining for five years while I build something. And Z is the amount that is needed to send, let's say, one or two kids to college during that time.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
So X plus Y plus Z. I felt that once I reached that number, that would be my financial independence. And what I realized was that it was a number, right? I think the specifics are not super important. I think everybody's circumstances are different. And what I realized was that it was easy for me to do this almost like a mental math. But for a lot of people, it was a much hard calculation.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Not because the math is hard, but because I think the reason it's easy for me is because I'm able to keep track of things much, much better than an average person. For instance, I know pretty well what my monthly expenses are. I've known it since I was in college and I have always maintained spreadsheets. I can tell you what my monthly expenses were in 2005, for instance, right?
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
I'll maintain spreadsheets. So it's very easy for me to do that. It's just a habit. The second is I'm pretty decent at also managing cash flow and investing. So all of that combined, it became pretty, I would say, attainable and achievable goal for me personally and me and my wife as a family, as a unit. But what I realized is for a lot of people, it's much harder because
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
A, a lot of people don't know how much they actually spend in a month. B, a lot of people do not really start investing early enough to actually gain the compounding effect, the magical compounding effect to actually see their savings grow. And that actually also stops them. Or C, This is relevant very much to the question you specifically asked.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
A lot of people actually go in directions that they are told that will lead them to financial independence, but it's not. For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I only buy real estate because somebody told me that's what I should do. If you're going to own only real estate doesn't yield cash returns, which means you'll be cash poor, but asset rate. That's not financial independence.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
So understanding those things helped me build my viewpoint. And now my goal is to help others see that viewpoint and build financial independence in a way that works for them. And actually in that respect,
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Another thing that, you know, because you and I went to a really good school and some of the things were hammered into us completely while we were at Booth, which is the stock market returns, right? I think you can wake up any UChicago Booth alum in the middle of the night and say, hey, what are long-term S&P 500 returns?
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
And I think before they even gain a little bit of sense of the world, they'll be like 10%. Right? It's fit. That's the healthiest thing. And I think what I realized is that very few people actually know this very fundamental thing that you can get these kind of returns. And also, if you diversify a little bit better, you can probably get a little bit more.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
Or if you're conservative, you can get a little bit less. But what we did at Zillion was we helped people visualize financial independence so we built tools within zillion and we actually call this tool financial independence tool the fit so how fit you are or how when are you likely to hit financial independence
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
As soon as you tell us what you own and where your money is and how much you earn and how much you spend, we can actually tell you exactly, hey, you're going to reach financial independence in 2034, for instance, or 2037. And you can change things. You're like, oh, what if my income increases by $20,000 per year? How will that impact? We will show you how will that impact.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
You're like, oh, what if I have to pay 100% of my child's college education? How will that impact my financial independence? For those of us who are not very good at mental math, we built this tool so you can just plug that number in and say, okay, my child is going to go to some XYZ college, 200K expense coming up in five years. How will that impact my financial independence?
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
So we actually made the thinking part super easy and we took the assumptions out. Also, how will inflation impact my financial independence? Like I can say, oh, I need a million dollars to retire because that's the number thrown around or these days it's I think 2.2 million. That's the number that's thrown around. But hey, if I'm going to live for another 40 years, is it going to be enough?
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
How will inflation impact that? you can actually adjust for that. So the overall thing we have done is what I realized is some people are very good at this math, but a lot of people are not. And what we did is we made the math so easy and so visual and so easy to understand and actually play with that now financial independence should seem like a tangible thing.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
so much so that a customer of ours I was meeting with them and it was in a social setting and I was explaining what we do and I was talking to somebody asked a question hey
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
government how do i know how much money i need i'm like we built a calculator exactly we built a product just for this and a customer of uh ours he was also in that and he was also right next to me oh not the number i see on the top right corner i'm like yeah so the idea the thing is that we made it this whole complex thing
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
And we simplified it and we made it visually so appealing and so easy to use that people are able to now see what financial independence would mean for them and whether and when they are likely to reach that. And also once they reach, are they at the risk of running out of money or not?
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
If somebody decides, I want to send two kids to college and retire at 42, and I want to travel the world, and I'm going to have no income, our product will show them if they're likely to run out of money, maybe by the age of 65 or 70, or they're not going to run out of money and they can comfortably even retire. For them, financial independence might mean retire.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
For some people, it might mean they go from full-time to part-time. Or it might mean they, rather than just working for money, they can now pursue a passion where they will have a lower income. Let's say some people want to, one of my coworkers at Square, he quit his corporate job and became a teacher. Now, following that passion, I'm sure he took a huge pay cut, maybe 60, 70, even 80% pay cut.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
But my guess is that this person is really good at doing the math and they can say, yeah, I can do this. One of our customers, they both work and one of them decided after using Zillion, they're like, hey, listen, one of us is going to quit and focus on family and just take some time off because we know our financial independence is not at stake. Our tools help people do that.
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
I think we are talking about the same thing. Maybe we are talking about the two different sides of the same coin. What you are saying is living in present. One fact I think we both have to agree on. In the modern world, the concept of money and wealth is enmeshed with our daily lives. We just can't separate, right?
Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
How we live our lives is influenced by money, whether we like it or not, but that's how the world is structured today. To your point, living in the present, I agree with you 100%. Knowing about independence does is it helps you define that present and it helps you be very conscious about that.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
So one example that I gave you was my coworker who left a very comfortable corporate job to become a teacher. Now that person, they actually walked away from a lot of future wealth, but they pursued passion. Now, The idea is that financial independence let them pursue a passion and shape their today and their tomorrow.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
They are living in the present, so they didn't wait until, a lot of people wait until they retire to pursue their hobbies and their passions. This person, probably in their late 40s, walked away from a corporate job and is now working with the kids.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Another couple that I mentioned, for them, living in the present is that their kids are young and they actually, until now, they were thinking they need to keep earning a lot of money because they just need to have a lot of money because they have two kids and they live in a very expensive area here in Silicon Valley and they just can't keep up. And knowing, for them, financial independence was...
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
something they couldn't wrap their heads around because of the way their thought processes worked. But by knowing what was needed, they were able to sift the signal from the noise and they were like, oh, okay, we can actually spend more time
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
raising our kids and building the family and building the foundations of the family and not just keep earning more because we have reached a point where financial independence is within reach. So my point is, even if you want to live in the present,
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
I think being aware of the pitfalls and also the possible rewards of financial independence, I think knowing those two is of extreme utility, is of extreme usefulness. So let me finish your thought, what you started on the financial independence part. I would say, yes, we provide assurance, but more than that, We also actually infuse knowledge in the product that is otherwise not very well known.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I have three or four properties, so that should do it. What we provide is, and people generally, it's not, as I said, like people... Most people don't know S&P 500 long-term returns, believe it or not. Even though to us, it's always at the tip of our tongue and it's always at our fingertips. We know it.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
And people don't know what the returns are for real estate in the long term. I'm talking about American markets. Asian markets are different, but American markets. So we bake the data. We also bake hard data. If somebody has
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
XYZ amount of funds in their 401 , which is the retirement account in the US, and they have some stocks in their brokerage account, and they have some real estate, and they have some treasury bonds, and they have some cash. We are able to put all that together and say, We know real estate grows about 3% to 3.5% per year. Based on what you have, here's where you can expect this thing to grow.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
You have some cash that's not going to grow. It's actually going to lose value. You have some bonds. You have some of this thing. So we are able to build that model. So there is the math there, even though I said it's easy for people like you and me. But for most people, it becomes very complicated very quickly. And that's where we come in and we help.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Who's our ideal customer? Our ideal customer is someone who is earning a decent amount of money. We say $100,000 or more per household. Typically a young family and also quite often an immigrant family. And they are so busy working full-time jobs, raising kids that they don't have time for pretty much anything else for that.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
And when they see Zillion, they're like, okay, this helps me because now I don't have to do all the research all the time. You guys do all this for me. And I'm able to spend five to 10 minutes a week And Zillion will, A, tell me whether I'm on a sustainable path to financial independence or not. B, if I'm not, Zillion will tell me, hey, we have too much cash here. Invest that into stocks.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
What kind of stocks? Here are the stocks you can invest in. also you have a 401k account that is actually you're paying too much fee there change that and optimize it in such a way we actually show step by step so a typical customer will get a lot of value because they're pressed for time This is the money thing is it's always like item number five or six or seven on their list.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
But their number one is don't get fired in this economy. So keep working, keep putting in long hours. Number two is make sure kids are raised properly and the groceries are done. And other things, meet with certain people so you're not a social zombie. So by the time you come to, okay, I also need to look at all my finances and see what I need to do. It's always number five, number six.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Maybe during tax time, it bumps to number two or number three, or we have to file taxes. But planning for financial independence is, and I would encourage you to talk to some young parents and to just to validate this.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
on how much do they actually are able to think about these things and that's where we believe our opportunity young families and also i would say some of the gen z especially who are not yet married and have kids but they're like okay i am finally making some money and i'm able to pay off my student loan or i should i pay off my student loan or should i invest this money and pay
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
the minimum in student loans. We have tools for those people as well, and they are also a big part of our audience. They're like, hey, should I buy a house with this cash I have, or should I invest somewhere else?
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
So what we do is, our pitch is, if you are a professional, and I could go back to this, if you're a knowledge worker, and today we are in the knowledge economy, the best use of your time is to increase your knowledge and increase your earnings through improved knowledge. We help you by taking care of a lot of your financial mediocrity.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
We help you to stay focused on increasing your knowledge so that you can accelerate your career more and accelerate your earnings more. And that's where we are seeing the success.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
a money management firm or something else yeah so we're not a software company you pay us a small fee and it's 19 a month and with that you get access to all our tools so that you can manage money like a professional wall street person you'll have the same tools as those available to the wall street the big egos and you pay us a small fee
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
But if you are like, hey, listen, I also need to talk to someone because for money, I don't just trust some numbers blinking on the screen. I also need to talk to someone. We offer you that service as well. You can talk to a certified financial expert and you pay us $79 a month. And it's a straightforward, simple, we're not an education platform.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Everything happens through osmosis, but that's not our goal. That's not our desire. We believe that there is enough content available just on YouTube itself and overall on the internet that anybody who really wants to learn, there are plenty of avenues available, plenty of resources available for you to learn. We are not here to teach you. We are here to help you.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Hey, thank you so much, Vince. Thank you so much for reaching out and rekindling old memories from business school. And I'm so happy to be doing this with you. And I'm a fan of you and what you're doing. So thank you so much.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
And that's how we position ourselves.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
The term is new, but the concept is not. If you go back, There are a couple of people who come to mind. Dave Ramsey, I don't know, I think he's in the late 60s or maybe early 70s. He's been an influencer for finance since like the 80s. Suze Orman, and there are many others, right? So influencers have always been there. The memory keeps changing. Before that, they were newspaper columnists.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
They were always there. People would write letters. Hey, what should I do this? How should I do that? So there have always been influencers. They started with newspapers and magazines, then to TV, then to cable, and then to internet and some user groups and discussion boards, and now to social media. hasn't changed so much, but it has fragmented.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
There's one Bera Ramsey, one Suzan, and there were probably like a dozen of them, say, 30 years ago, and there is probably thousands of them, if not millions now. I think there is a place for them. They provide bite-sized wisdom. I am in my own very small right. I'm also a finfluencer. I post my videos on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, everywhere.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
You can easily find me, Zillion or Gagan Asandu, if you search for it. So I post nuggets as well. But I believe that Influencers, they do have a motive. Typically, they're typically tied with someone they're either selling, hey, this JP Morgan bank account is really good. You should get it. And they get some money. I think that model has a place. We are not doing that.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
We don't tie up with influencers or influencers. We believe that it's less authentic. I would rather be selling our own product and not just using an influencer. We want to be an influencer ourselves rather than use other influencers.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
I think some of the things that I'm going to say are probably going to be controversial, but I'm just going to say it anyway. There are many aspects of this. I'll focus on one or two. Regarding ageism, I think I'm less worried about that.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
But the way I think about it is, as compared to, say, 20, 30 years ago, today, in this economy, especially in the US, and maybe in other places as well, a career is not It doesn't span 30, 40, 50 years anymore. A typical career, this is my reading, is about 10 years. Every 10 years or so, you need to rediscover your career. I have done it. I started as a mechanical engineer.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Seven years later, I became a programmer. Another five years later, I became a manager. Another 10 years later, I became a leader in tech overall. And five years later, I started a company. So I have changed career basically three or four times in the less than three, two and a half decades that I've been working. I think this is going to be the norm.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
And it's less about ageism, it's about discovery. For instance, right now we are in this hype cycle, which is somewhat real, but definitely we are in the cycle, I shouldn't say hype cycle, We're in the cycle where some of the old guard technologies are getting replaced with new guard technologies like AI, for instance.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
If you are, whether you're food or you're 20, if you are not exploring AI as a technology, as potentially an enabler of new opportunities for you, then you're falling behind. And what happens is I think the ageism is the name we give to the skill gap. Someone coming out of college is probably well equipped with the technologies that have come out in the last couple of years, AI being one of them.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Somebody who's been working in corporate and doing certain job is less likely to have used those tools because those tools are new and their job didn't require it. So I think as an individual, I think the onus is on me to discover those things and learn those things on my own so that ageism doesn't become a place for me to put the blame on. It should be skills.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
And skills are something that we unfortunately or fortunately live in a time when skills have to be updated and upgraded constantly. That's one. Second thing is, I tell anybody who I've worked with, anybody who has been on my team, I ask them to work hard. Jeff Bezos famously has said, work hard, work smart, work long, and you can't choose between them.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
When anybody joins at Amazon, they're told they have to do all three things. You have to work hard, you have to work smart, and you have to work long. I think what happens is once we start working, get married, we have kids, we have more social life, we have more obligations, I think the work-around part falls off.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
which is natural, but I think we need to find those times in your career where, in our careers, where we can work long for periods of time to build more equity, so to speak, with our employer or to build more skills. So maybe we are not, the work long part is we are doing somewhat long at the work, but also we are putting extra time to learn more skills. And that way we can actually
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
I think we can mitigate the side effects of ageism a decent bit. Does that make sense?
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Will I hire someone who's older? So let me address that. So you also asked whether I would hire someone who is, let's say, over 40 and comes to Zillion. I think the honest answer is yes, I consider everyone. And one of the things I learned early on in my career is to hire the best person for the job.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
So if right now, if I'm looking for, let's say, a marketing person who can come in and really take our marketing to the next level, I'll be looking for the skills that will help us get there. If those skills are in a 23-year-old or a 35-year-old or a 47-year-old, doesn't make as much difference as what is the specific thing I'm looking for. And sometimes experience is an asset there.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you that There is a lot of noise around this term. Financial freedom, financial independence, financially independent, retire early. There's a whole fire movement. And also, especially ever since social media became a dominant force in the society, there are just too many people out there trying to almost... Some of them sound like snake oil salesmen.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
And I would definitely look at that. So I don't think it's ageism as such. I would put it as it's skills. If you have those skills that I'm looking for. And again, we are a small company. We are a startup. Our needs, our skill needs, might be different from, let's say, Google. That is a 27-, 26-year-old company. They might, oh, probably even 30-year-old company at this point.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Our needs are different, and our skill needs might be different as compared to some of the established companies.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Oh, thank you so much, Vince. This was so much fun. Thank you.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
They're like, oh yeah, I'm financially independent. I just have this social media or I do X, Y, Z and I make enough money, blah, blah, blah. So I'll tell you what my criteria was. It was fairly straightforward. And I will actually contextualize, right? I'm careful to use the word financial independence and not retirement.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Because those two are different terms, very different context and very different overall outcomes. For me, financial independence meant I could leave my corporate job and go work on my own and build something from scratch. When I was able to do that, I said, I am financially independent because I can do what I want with my time.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
So I earned that independence and I don't have to be beholden to a paycheck to do that or to something else, right? In this case, it was paycheck. And for me, it actually, I'm an engineer after all, and I actually did a very mathematical thing. I figured out how much money I would need to sustain for at least five years so that I can build something on the side while not starving my family.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
And I did some math, and not super rigorous. We are all pretty good at doing basic math. And I did that. I'm like, OK, five years, our yearly spend is about this much. My kids, one of my kids is going to go to college in this much amount of time, so here's that. And also, while I build, I will not have an income.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
So my retirement account has to be in a certain shape or form so that I'm not insecure about that. So that's going to be another amount, let's say X. And Y is going to be the amount that is going to be needed for just maintaining and sustaining for five years while I build something. And Z is the amount that is needed to send, let's say, one or two kids to college during that time.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
So X plus Y plus Z. I felt that once I reached that number, that would be my financial independence. And what I realized was that it was a number, right? I think the specifics are not super important. I think everybody's circumstances are different. And what I realized was that it was easy for me to do this almost like a mental math. But for a lot of people, it was a much hard calculation.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Not because the math is hard, but because I think the reason it's easy for me is because I'm able to keep track of things much, much better than an average person. For instance, I know pretty well what my monthly expenses are. I've known it since I was in college and I have always maintained spreadsheets. I can tell you what my monthly expenses were in 2005, for instance, right?
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
I'll maintain spreadsheets. So it's very easy for me to do that. It's just a habit. The second is I'm pretty decent at also managing cash flow and investing. So all of that combined, it became pretty, I would say, attainable and achievable goal for me personally and me and my wife as a family, as a unit. But what I realized is for a lot of people, it's much harder because
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
A, a lot of people don't know how much they actually spend in a month. B, a lot of people do not really start investing early enough to actually gain the compounding effect, the magical compounding effect to actually see their savings grow. And that actually also stops them. Or C, This is relevant very much to the question you specifically asked.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
A lot of people actually go in directions that they are told that will lead them to financial independence, but it's not. For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I only buy real estate because somebody told me that's what I should do. If you're going to own only real estate doesn't yield cash returns, which means you'll be cash poor, but asset rate. That's not financial independence.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
So understanding those things helped me build my viewpoint. And now my goal is to help others see that viewpoint and build financial independence in a way that works for them. And actually in that respect,
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Another thing that, you know, because you and I went to a really good school and some of the things were hammered into us completely while we were at Booth, which is the stock market returns, right? I think you can wake up any UChicago Booth alum in the middle of the night and say, hey, what are long-term S&P 500 returns?
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
And I think before they even gain a little bit of sense of the world, they'll be like 10%. Right? It's fit. That's the healthiest thing. And I think what I realized is that very few people actually know this very fundamental thing that you can get these kind of returns. And also, if you diversify a little bit better, you can probably get a little bit more.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
Or if you're conservative, you can get a little bit less. But what we did at Zillion was we helped people visualize financial independence so we built tools within zillion and we actually call this tool financial independence tool the fit so how fit you are or how when are you likely to hit financial independence
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
As soon as you tell us what you own and where your money is and how much you earn and how much you spend, we can actually tell you exactly, hey, you're going to reach financial independence in 2034, for instance, or 2037. And you can change things. You're like, oh, what if my income increases by $20,000 per year? How will that impact? We will show you how will that impact.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
You're like, oh, what if I have to pay 100% of my child's college education? How will that impact my financial independence? For those of us who are not very good at mental math, we built this tool so you can just plug that number in and say, okay, my child is going to go to some XYZ college, 200K expense coming up in five years. How will that impact my financial independence?
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
So we actually made the thinking part super easy and we took the assumptions out. Also, how will inflation impact my financial independence? Like I can say, oh, I need a million dollars to retire because that's the number thrown around or these days it's I think 2.2 million. That's the number that's thrown around. But hey, if I'm going to live for another 40 years, is it going to be enough?
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
How will inflation impact that? you can actually adjust for that. So the overall thing we have done is what I realized is some people are very good at this math, but a lot of people are not. And what we did is we made the math so easy and so visual and so easy to understand and actually play with that now financial independence should seem like a tangible thing.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
so much so that a customer of ours I was meeting with them and it was in a social setting and I was explaining what we do and I was talking to somebody asked a question hey
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
government how do i know how much money i need i'm like we built a calculator exactly we built a product just for this and a customer of uh ours he was also in that and he was also right next to me oh not the number i see on the top right corner i'm like yeah so the idea the thing is that we made it this whole complex thing
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
And we simplified it and we made it visually so appealing and so easy to use that people are able to now see what financial independence would mean for them and whether and when they are likely to reach that. And also once they reach, are they at the risk of running out of money or not?
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
If somebody decides, I want to send two kids to college and retire at 42, and I want to travel the world, and I'm going to have no income, our product will show them if they're likely to run out of money, maybe by the age of 65 or 70, or they're not going to run out of money and they can comfortably even retire. For them, financial independence might mean retire.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
For some people, it might mean they go from full-time to part-time. Or it might mean they, rather than just working for money, they can now pursue a passion where they will have a lower income. Let's say some people want to, one of my coworkers at Square, he quit his corporate job and became a teacher. Now, following that passion, I'm sure he took a huge pay cut, maybe 60, 70, even 80% pay cut.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
But my guess is that this person is really good at doing the math and they can say, yeah, I can do this. One of our customers, they both work and one of them decided after using Zillion, they're like, hey, listen, one of us is going to quit and focus on family and just take some time off because we know our financial independence is not at stake. Our tools help people do that.
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
I think we are talking about the same thing. Maybe we are talking about the two different sides of the same coin. What you are saying is living in present. One fact I think we both have to agree on. In the modern world, the concept of money and wealth is enmeshed with our daily lives. We just can't separate, right?
Chief Change Officer
#297 Gagan Sandhu: Redefining Wealth, Reinventing Work
How we live our lives is influenced by money, whether we like it or not, but that's how the world is structured today. To your point, living in the present, I agree with you 100%. Knowing about independence does is it helps you define that present and it helps you be very conscious about that.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
So I earned that independence and I don't have to be beholden to a paycheck to do that or to something else. In this case, it was paycheck. And for me it actually, I'm an engineer after all, and I actually did a very mathematical thing. I figured out how much money I would need to sustain for at least five years so that I can build something on the side while not starving my family.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
and i did some math and not super rigorous we are all pretty good at doing basic math and i did that i'm like okay five years our yearly spend is about this much my kids one of my kids is gonna go to college uh in this much amount of time so here's that and also while i build i will not have an income
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
So my retirement account has to be in a certain shape or form so that I'm not insecure about that. So that's going to be another amount, let's say X and Y is going to be the amount that is going to be needed for just maintaining and sustaining for five years while I build something. And Z is the amount that is needed to send, let's say one or two kids to college during that time.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
So X plus Y plus Z. I felt that once I reached that number, that would be my financial independence. And what I realized was that it was a number, right? I think the specifics are not super important. I think everybody's circumstances are different. And what I realized was that it was easy for me to do this almost like a mental math. But for a lot of people, it was a much hard calculation.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Not because the math is hard, but because I think the reason it's easy for me is because I'm able to keep track of things much, much better than an average person. For instance, I know pretty well what my monthly expenses are. I've known it since I was in college and I have always maintained spreadsheets. I can tell you what my monthly expenses were in 2005, for instance, right?
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
I'll maintain spreadsheets. So it's very easy for me to do that. It's just a habit. The second is I'm pretty decent at also managing cash flow and investing. So all of that combined, it became pretty, I would say, attainable and achievable goal for me personally, and me and my wife as a family as a unit. But what I realized is for a lot of people, it's much harder because
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
a lot of people don't know how much they actually spend in a b a lot of people some do not really start investing early enough to actually gain the compounding effect the magical compounding effect to actually see their savings grow and that actually also stops them or c This is relevant very much to the question you specifically asked.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
A lot of people actually go in directions that they are told that will lead them to financial independence, but it's not. For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I only buy real estate because somebody told me that's what I should do. If you're going to own only real estate, it doesn't yield cash returns, which means you'll be cash poor, but asset rate. That's not financial independence.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
So understanding those things helped me build my viewpoint. And now my goal is to help others see that viewpoint and build financial independence in a way that works for them. And actually, in that respect,
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Another thing that, you know, because you and I went to a really good school and some of the things were hammered into us completely while we were at Booth, which is the stock market returns, right? I think you can wake up any UChicago Booth alum in the middle of the night and say, hey, what are long-term S&P 500 returns?
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And I think before they even gain a little bit of sense of the world, they'll be like 10%. Right? It's fit. That's one of the healthiest things. And I think what I realized is that very few people actually know this very fundamental thing that you can get these kinds of returns.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And also if you diversify a little bit better, you can probably get a little bit more, or if you're conservative, you can get a little bit less. But what we did at Zillion was we helped people visualize financial independence. So we built tools within Zillion and we actually call this tool financial independence tool, the FIT.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
So how fit you are or how, when are you likely to hit financial independence? As soon as you tell us what you own and where your money is and how much you earn and how much you spend, we can actually tell you exactly, hey, you're going to reach financial independence in 2034, for instance, or 2037. And you can change things. You're like, oh, what if my income increases by $20,000 per year?
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
How will that impact? We will show you how will that impact. You're like, oh, what if I have to pay 100% of my child's college education? How will that impact my financial independence? For those of us who are not very good at mental math, we built this tool so you can just plug that number in and say, okay, my child is going to go to some XYZ college, 200K expense coming up in five years.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
How will that impact my financial independence? So we actually made the thinking part super easy and we took the assumptions out. Also, how will inflation impact my financial independence? I can say, oh, I need a million dollars to retire because that's the number thrown around. These days it's, I think, 2.2 million. That's the number that's thrown around.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
But hey, if I'm going to live for another 40 years, is it going to be enough? How will inflation impact that? you can actually adjust for that. So the overall thing we have done is what I realized is some people are very good at this math, but a lot of people are not.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And what we did is we made the math so easy and so visual and so easy to understand and actually play with that now financial independence should seem like a tangible thing. So much so that a customer of ours, I was meeting with them and it was in a social setting and I was explaining what we do and I was talking to somebody asked a question, hey, Gagan, how do I know how much money I need?
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
I'm like, we built a calculator. Exactly. We built a product just for this. And a customer of ours, he was also in that. He was also right next to me. Oh, is that the number I see on the top right corner? I'm like, yeah. So the idea, the thing is that we made it this whole complex thing.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And we simplified it and we made it visually so appealing and so easy to use that people are able to now see what financial independence would mean for them and whether and when they are likely to reach that. And also once they reach, are they at the risk of running out of money or not?
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
If somebody decides I want to send two kids to college and retire at 42 and I want to travel the world and I'm going to have no income, our product will show them if they're likely to run out of money, maybe by the age of 65 or 70, or they're not going to run out of money and they can comfortably even retire. For them, financial independence might mean retire.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
For some, it might mean they go from full-time to part-time. Or it might mean they, rather than just working for money, they can now pursue a passion where they will have a lower income. Let's say some people want to, one of my coworkers at Square, he quit his corporate job and became a teacher. Now, following that passion, I'm sure he took a huge pay cut, maybe 60, 70, even 80% pay cut.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Hey, thank you so much, Vince. Thank you so much for reaching out and rekindling old memories from business school. And I'm so happy to be doing this with you. And I'm a fan of you and what you're doing. So thank you so much.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
But my guess is that this person is really good at doing the math and they can say, yeah, I can do this. One of our customers, they both work and one of them decided after using Zillion, they're like, hey, listen, one of us is going to quit and focus on family and just take some time off because we know our financial independence is not at stake. Our tools help people do that.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
I think we are talking about the same thing. Maybe we are talking about the two different sides of the same coin. What you are saying is living in present. One fact I think we both have to agree on. In the modern world, the concept of money and wealth is enmeshed with our daily lives. We just can't separate, right?
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
How we live our lives is influenced by money, whether we like it or not, but that's how the world is structured today. To your point, living in the present, I agree with you 100%. Knowing about independence does is it helps you define that present and it helps you be very conscious about that.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
So one example that I gave you was my coworker who left a very comfortable corporate job to become a teacher. Now that person, they actually walked away from a lot of future wealth, but they pursued passion. Now, the idea is that financial independence let them pursue a passion and shape their today and their tomorrow.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
They are living in the present, so they didn't wait until, a lot of people wait until they retire to pursue their hobbies and their passions. This person, probably in their late 40s, walked away from a corporate job and is now working with the kids.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Another, the couple that I mentioned, for them, living in the present is that their kids are young and they actually, until now, they were thinking they need to keep earning a lot of money because they just need to have a lot of money because they have two kids and they live in a very expensive area here in Silicon Valley and they just can't keep up.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And knowing, for them, financial independence was something they couldn't wrap their heads around because of the way their thought processes worked. But by knowing what was needed, they were able to sift the signal from the noise and they were like, oh, okay, we can actually spend more time
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
raising our kids and building the family and building the foundations of the family and not just keep earning more because we have reached a point where financial independence is within reach. So my point is, even if you want to live in the present, I think being aware of the pitfalls and also the possible rewards of financial independence.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
I think knowing those two is of extreme utility, is of extreme usefulness. So let me finish your thought, what you started on the financial independence part. I would say, yes, we provide assurance, but more than that, We also actually infuse knowledge in the product that is otherwise not very well known.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I have three or four properties, so that should do it. What we provide is, and people generally, it's not, as I said, like people...
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
most people don't know S&P 500 long-term returns believe it or not even though to us it's always at the tip of our tongue and it's always at our fingertips we know it and people don't know what the returns are for a real estate in the long term I'm talking about American mark Asian markets are different but American markets so we bake these the data we also make hard data if somebody has
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
XYZ amount of funds in their 401 , which is the retirement account in the U.S., and they have some stocks in their brokerage account, and they have some real estate, and they have some treasury bonds, and they have some cash. We are able to put all that together and say, We know real estate grows about 3% to 3.5% per year. Based on what you have, here's where you can expect this thing to grow.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
You have some cash that's not going to grow. It's actually going to lose value. You have some bonds. You have some this thing. So we are able to build that model. So there is the math there, even though I said it's easy for people like you and me. But for most people, it becomes very complicated very quickly. And that's where we come in and we help.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Great. So my story is not very different from a typical immigrant to the U.S., and the U.S. is a big magnet for immigrants. So I came here in the early aughts, 2001, 2002, to pursue grad school at Arizona State, and I liked the way things are here. I got a job. Incidentally, though, even though I came here to do something related to tech,
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
My undergrad was in mechanical engineering, but I'm like, yeah, mechanical engineering, a lot of innovations happened in the 20th century. I should switch to something related to tech. So I went to grad school for that. By the time I graduated, nobody wanted to hire in tech because we were going through a huge recession. And
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
What happened, I ended up again working in the mechanical engineering industry here in the U.S. That was my first job. But I kept at it. I kept working on the side and just doing things on my own, which helped me secure a job in tech, actually. That happened back in 2005. I know I'm dating myself here, but that happened in 2005.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And one quick note I want to share with the audience, given that people are looking for nuggets in terms of career and how to grow. I do want to share that by the time I got into tech, I was 29 plus years old, so close to 30. I was married and I had a child by then. So I just want people to realize and know that you can change careers and nothing's going to stop you if you put your mind to it.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
I remember when my wife was pregnant with our first child and I was preparing on the side. I would take printouts, read all the time. I would install software on my laptop and write programs and write code and all that. And sometimes when my wife would have to, I would have to take her to the doctor's appointment for the wellness checks and all that.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
While we were waiting for the doctor, I would be combing through the notes and the PDFs and all those things and just studying, just reading. And all that paid off. I got into tech in 2005. I moved to Boston, worked at a tech company called Akamai Technologies. I worked there for many years, first as an engineer, then as a manager.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Then I realized that Boston is too small for market, which we will talk about in more detail. But I realized that since I was 8,000 miles away from where I was born and where a lot of my loved ones lived, moving a couple thousand miles within the U.S. wasn't going to make a big difference to me. So we moved about, this was around the time when I was still in business school.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
We were still at Chicago Booth. And I got a job in Silicon Valley and I moved about 10 years ago.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
uh to silicon valley and i've been here i've been working in many different companies and then two plus years ago i decided to launch zine which is the name of my company x-i-l-i-o-n and we'll discuss more in detail in a little bit but the idea was i became financially independent and i looked around and i saw that other people
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Well, especially people who were similar to me, people who work in comfortable jobs, have decent income. And I looked around and typically immigrants, I'm like, hey, I think I'm ready to hang up my boots, so to speak, to take a leap and build something on my own. They're like, how come? I'm like, I think I've... Enough to, as you said, I have enough to achieve financial independence.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And then they're like, but I don't. And I'm like, okay, here's the things I did. Have you done the same thing? They're like, I didn't know that I needed to do those things. And I kept talking to different people. kept getting similar story.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And then I realized that actually there is need for something like Zillion, which can help people make great financial decisions and become financially independent sooner.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Yeah, great question. I think if, as I said in the first question there, I started as an undergrad in mechanical engineering. And what I realized was I worked in the industry for three years after college in India. And one of the things I realized while working, it was an automotive manufacturing facility.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
My biggest learning there was that a lot of the innovation in manufacturing and automotive had happened. Paints of innovation had slowed down considerably. If you go back, I'm talking about 98, 99, 2000. Around that time, if you think about it, the internal combustion engines were running really well, highly efficient. A lot of the electronics was already factored in.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
A lot of innovation had happened. And when I looked around, I felt that by graduating from college as a technical person, even if it's mechanical engineering, I was hungry for knowledge. So I realized very early on in my career that I am a knowledge worker. And for me to continue to be successful as a knowledge worker, I had to consistently update my knowledge.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And that actually has been the theme of my career all along. What I mean by that is that once you realize that something is critical, like in my case, I figured it is knowledge. So after about a year of working in the mechanical engineering industry, I decided that I needed to upgrade my skills and get into this new industry. Back in the late 90s, tech was brand new.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Internet had just started to become popular and a lot of things were happening, exciting things. I decided that I was going to get into tech, so I decided to come to the US. So I took the GRE exam for grad school and started my journey. That journey took, if you think about it, 98 I graduated from college and 2005 is when I actually entered the knowledge industry, the tech industry.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
the journey wasn't simple it wasn't straightforward it wasn't even a straight line journey it took many different turns many different jobs two different continents many different cities but i was able to make that journey but one thing that was consistent and constant in that journey was knowledge and this is something i would like to share with all your listeners is
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
We actually are in the, I would still say in the beginning, but definitely our generation, Gen X and Gen Y and Gen Z, we are firmly in the knowledge economy. Unless you are doing something with your hands, let's say you are a construction worker or you are a gardener or you are a farmer, that's different.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
But if you're not, if you're working in any other kind of job, whether it's a research associate or a professor or tech person, data scientist, We are part of the knowledge economy and you always have to seek to increase your knowledge to improve that skill and that doesn't come automatically. You have to always go for it and find new avenues to improve your knowledge. It could mean
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
going deep and becoming a super specialist in your area, or it could mean going broad and finding more about certain areas, or it could mean looming one area and picking totally different area and learn more about it because you might have learned most of the things that had to be learned in your previous role, in your previous avatar.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
So to answer your question succinctly, I would say seeking knowledge has proven for me to be the ultimate success criteria. And every time I've increased knowledge, the dividends have been tremendous. And I should add here, since you and I share that background, for me, going to business school was purely a knowledge decision. I didn't go there to change careers. I was working in tech.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
I continued to work in tech. I didn't expect a huge jump. I was working as a senior manager, then I became a director after that. It was a pretty linear path. But I went there to learn about things that, as a person working in tech, Certain things like economics and marketing and finance and accounting, those things were my blind spots.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And as I was growing in my career, I realized that I needed that knowledge in my toolbox to be able to have a coherent conversation with some of my business partners at work. Even if I'm the tech person, I'm still expected to know a little bit more about how accounting works, how the basic unit economics of certain product work, how the cost accounting work.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And for that, I went to business school. So that has been my constant journey and even starting Zillion. One of the reasons was I learned a ton while working at different companies and I'm like, my learning has slowed down and plateaued. One of the best ways to learn more is to start something from scratch.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
And so I would argue that even starting Zillion was a step in that direction, which is to actually increase knowledge at a rapid pace.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you that There is a lot of noise around this term. Financial freedom, financial independence, financially independent, retire early. There's a whole fire movement. And also, especially ever since the social media became a dominant force in the society, there are just too many people out there trying to almost... Some of them sound like snake oil salesmen.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
They're like, oh yeah, I'm financially independent. I just have this social media or I do X, Y, Z and I make enough money, blah, blah, blah. So I'll tell you what my criteria was. It was fairly straightforward and I would actually contextualize, right? I'm careful to use the word financial independence and not retirement.
Chief Change Officer
#296 Gagan Sandhu: Engineer Your Independence
Because those two are different terms, very different context and very different overall outcomes. For me, financial independence meant I could leave my corporate job and go work on my own and build something from scratch. When I was able to do that, I said I am financially independent because I can do what I want with my time.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
So one example that I gave you was my coworker who left a very comfortable corporate job to become a teacher. Now that person, they actually walked away from a lot of future wealth, but they pursued passion. Now, the idea is that financial independence let them pursue a passion and shape their today and their tomorrow.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
They are living in the present, so they didn't wait until, a lot of people wait until they retire to pursue their hobbies and their passions. This person, probably in their late 40s, walked away from a corporate job and is now working with the kids.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Another couple that I mentioned, for them, living in the present is that their kids are young and they actually, until now, they were thinking they need to keep earning a lot of money because they just need to have a lot of money because they have two kids and they're living in a very expensive area here in Silicon Valley and they just can't keep up.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
And knowing, for them, financial independence was something they couldn't wrap their heads around because of the way their thought processes worked. But by knowing what was needed, they were able to sift the signal from the noise and they were like, oh, okay, we can actually spend more time
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
raising our kids and building the family and building the foundations of the family and not just keep earning more because we have reached a point where financial independence is within reach. So my point is, even if you want to live in the present, I think being aware of the pitfalls and also the possible rewards of financial independence.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
I think knowing those two is of extreme utility, is of extreme usefulness. So let me finish your thought, what you started on the financial independence part. I would say, yes, we provide assurance, but more than that, We also actually infuse knowledge in the product that is otherwise not very well known.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I have three or four properties, so that should do it. What we provide is, and people generally, it's not, as I said, like people... Most people don't know S&P 500 long-term returns, believe it or not. Even though to us, it's always at the tip of our tongue and it's always at our fingertips. We know it.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
And people don't know what the returns are for real estate in the long term. I'm talking about American markets. Asian markets are different, but American markets. So we bake the data. We also bake hard data. If somebody has
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
XYZ amount of funds in their 401 , which is the retirement account in the US, and they have some stocks in their brokerage account, and they have some real estate, and they have some treasury bonds, and they have some cash. We are able to put all that together and say, We know real estate grows about 3% to 3.5% per year. Based on what you have, here's where you can expect this thing to grow.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
You have some cash that's not going to grow. It's actually going to lose value. You have some bonds. You have some this thing. So we are able to build that model. So there is the math there, even though I said it's easy for people like you and me. But for most people, it becomes very complicated very quickly. And that's where we come in and we help.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Who's our ideal customer? Our ideal customer is someone who is earning a decent amount of money. We say $100,000 or more per household. Typically a young family and also quite often an immigrant family. And they are so busy working full-time jobs, raising kids that they don't have time for pretty much anything else for that.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
And when they see Zillion, they're like, okay, this helps me because now I don't have to do all the research all the time. You guys do all this for me. And I'm able to spend five to 10 minutes a week And Zillion will, A, tell me whether I'm on a sustainable path to financial independence or not. B, if I'm not, Zillion will tell me, hey, we have too much cash here. Invest that into stocks.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
What kind of stocks? Here are the stocks you can invest in. Also, you have a 401k account that is actually you're paying too much fee there. Change that and optimize it in such a way. We actually show step by step. So a typical customer will get a lot of value because they're pressed for time. This is the money thing is it's always like item number five or six or seven on their list.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
But their number one is don't get fired in this economy. So keep working, keep putting in long hours. Number two is make sure kids are raised properly and the groceries are done. And other things, meet with certain people so you're not a social zombie. So by the time you come to, OK, I also need to look at all my finances and see what I need to do, it's always number five, number six.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Maybe during tax time, it bumps to number two or number three, or we have to file taxes. But planning for financial independence is, and I would encourage you to talk to some young parents just to validate this.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
on how much do they actually are able to think about these things and that's where we believe our opportunity young families and also i would say some of the gen z especially who are not yet married and have kids but they're like okay i am finally making some money and i'm able to pay off my student loan or i should i pay off my student loan or should i invest this money and pay
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
the minimum in student loans. We have tools for those people as well, and they are also a big part of our audience. They're like, hey, should I buy a house with this cash I have, or should I invest somewhere else?
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
So what we do is, our pitch is, if you are a professional, and I could go back to this, if you're a knowledge worker, and today we are in the knowledge economy, the best use of your time is to increase your knowledge and increase your earnings through improved knowledge. We help you by taking care of a lot of your financial nitty gritty.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Hey, thank you so much, Vince. Thank you so much for reaching out and rekindling old memories from business school. And I'm so happy to be doing this with you. And I'm a fan of you and what you're doing. So thank you so much.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
We help you to stay focused on increasing your knowledge so that you can accelerate your career more and accelerate your earnings more. And that's where we are seeing the success.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Yeah, so we're a software company. You pay us a small fee, and it's $19 a month. And with that, you get access to all our tools so that you can manage money like a professional Wall Street person. You'll have the same tools as those available to the Wall Street big egos. And you pay us a small fee.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
But if you are like, hey, listen, I also need to talk to someone because for money, I don't just trust some numbers blinking on the screen. I also need to talk to someone. that we offer you that service as well. You can talk to a certified financial expert and you pay us $79. And it's paid forward, simple. They're not an education platform.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Everything happens through osmosis, but that's not our goal. That's not our desire. We believe that there is enough content available just on YouTube itself and overall on the internet that anybody who really wants to learn There are plenty of avenues available, plenty of resources available for you to learn. We are not here to teach you, we are here to help you.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
And that's how we position ourselves.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
The term is new, but the concept is not. If you go back, there are a couple of people who come to mind. Dave Ramsey, I don't know, I think he's in the late 60s or maybe early 70s. He's been an influencer for finance since like the 80s, Suze Orman, and there are many others, right? So influencers have always been there. The memory keeps changing. Before that, there were newspaper columnists.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
They were always there. You have people who would write letters, hey, what should I do this? How should I do that? So there have always been influencers. They started with newspapers and magazines, then to TV, then to cable. and then to internet and some user groups and discussion boards, and now to social media. Hasn't changed so much, but it has fragmented.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
There's one Bill Ramsey, one Sue Jarman, and there were probably like a dozen of them, say, 30 years ago, and there is probably thousands of them, if not millions now. I think there is a place for them. They provide bite-sized wisdom. I am in my own very small right. I'm also a finfluencer. I post my videos on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, everywhere.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
You can easily find me, Zillion or Gagan Asandri, if you search for it. So I post nuggets as well. But I believe that Influencers, they do have a motive, typically. They're typically tied with someone they're either selling, hey, this JP Morgan bank account is really good. You should get it. And they get some money. I think that model has a place. We are not doing that.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
We don't tie up with influencers or influencers. We believe that it's less authentic. I would rather be selling our own product and not just using an influencer. We want to be an influencer ourselves rather than use other influencers.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
I think some of the things that I'm going to say are probably going to be controversial, but I'm just going to say it anyway. There are many aspects of this. I'll focus on one or two.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Regarding ageism, I think I'm less worried about that, but the way I think about it is as compared to, say, 20, 30 years ago, today, in this economy, especially in the U.S., and maybe in other places as well, a career is not... It doesn't span 30, 40, 50 years anymore. A typical career, this is my reading, is about 10 years. Every 10 years or so, you need to rediscover your career. I have done it.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
I started as a mechanical engineer. Seven years later, I became a programmer. Another five years later, I became a manager. Another 10 years later, I became a leader in tech overall. And five years later, I started a company. So I have changed career basically three or four times in the less than three, two and a half decades that I've been working. I think this is going to be the norm.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
And it's less about ageism, it's about discovery. For instance, right now we are in this hype cycle, which is somewhat real, but definitely we are in the cycle, I shouldn't say hype cycle, We're in the cycle where some of the old guard technologies are getting replaced with new guard technologies like AI, for instance.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
If you are, whether you're 15 or you're 20, if you are not exploring AI as a technology as potentially an enabler of new opportunities for you, then you're falling behind. And what happens is I think the ageism is the name we give to the skill gap. Someone coming out of college is probably well equipped with the technologies that have come out in the last couple of years, AI being one of them.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Somebody who's been working in corporate and doing certain job is less likely to have used those tools because those tools are new and their job didn't require it. So I think as an individual, I think the onus is on me to discover those things and learn those things on my own so that ageism doesn't become a place for me to put the blame on. It should be skills.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
And skills are something that we, unfortunately or fortunately, live in a time when skills have to be updated and upgraded constantly. That's one. Second thing is, I tell anybody who I've worked with, anybody who has been on my team, I ask them to work hard. Jeff Bezos famously has said, work hard, work smart, work long, and you can't choose between them.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
When anybody joins at Amazon, they're told they have to do all three things. You have to work hard, you have to work smart, and you have to work long. I think what happens is once we start working, get married, we have kids, we have more social life, we have more obligations, I think the work-around part falls off.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
which is natural, but I think we need to find those times in your career where, in our careers, where we can work long for periods of time to build more equity, so to speak, with our employer or to build more skills. So maybe we are not, the work long part is we are doing somewhat long at the work, but also we are putting extra time to learn more skills. And that way we can actually
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
I think we can mitigate the side effects of ageism a decent bit. Does that make sense?
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you that there is a lot of noise around this term. Financial freedom, financial independence, financially independent, retired early. There's a whole fire movement. And also, especially ever since the social media became a dominant force in the society, there are just too many people out there trying to almost... Some of them sound like snake oil salesmen.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Will I hire someone who's older? So let me address that. So Minxie also asked whether I would hire someone who is, let's say, over 40 and comes to Zillion. I think the honest answer is yes, I consider everyone. And one of the things I learned early on in my career is to hire the best person for the job.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
So if right now, if I'm looking for, let's say, a marketing person who can come in and really take our marketing to the next level, I'll be looking for the skills that will help us get there. If those skills are in a 23-year-old or a 35-year-old or a 47-year-old, doesn't make as much difference as what is the specific thing I'm looking for. And sometimes experience is an asset there.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
And I would definitely look at that. So I don't think it's ageism as such. I would put it as it's skills. If you have those skills that I'm looking for. And again, we are a small company. We are a startup. Our needs, our skill needs might be different from, let's say, Google. That is a 27, 26 year old company. They might know probably even 30 year old company at this point.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Our needs are different and our skill needs might be different as compared to some of the established ones.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Thank you so much, Vince. This was so much fun. Thank you.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
They're like, oh yeah, I'm financially independent. I just have this social media or I do X, Y, Z and I make enough money, blah, blah, blah. I'll tell you what my criteria was. It was fairly straightforward. And I will actually contextualize, right? I'm careful to use the word financial independence and not retirement.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Because those two are different terms, very different context, and very different overall outcomes. For me, financial independence meant I could leave my corporate job and go work on my own and build something from scratch. When I was able to do that, I said, I am financially independent because I can do what I want with my time.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
So I earned that independence and I don't have to be beholden to a paycheck to do that. or to something else, right? In this case, it was culture. And for me, it actually, I'm an engineer after all, and I actually did a very mathematical thing. I figured out how much money I would need to sustain for at least five years. so that I can build something on the side while not starving my family.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
And I did some math, and not super rigorous. We are all pretty good at doing basic math. And I did that. I'm like, OK, five years, our yearly spend is about this much. My kids, one of my kids is going to go to college in this much amount of time, so here's that. And also, while I build, I will not have an income.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
So my retirement account has to be in a certain shape or form so that I'm not insecure about that. So that's going to be another amount, let's say X and Y is going to be the amount that is going to be needed for just maintaining and sustaining for five years while I build something. And Z is the amount that is needed to send let's say one or two kids to college during that time.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
So X plus Y plus Z, I felt that once I reached that number, that would be my financial independence. And what I realized was that it was a number, right? I think the specifics are not super important. I think everybody's circumstances are different. And what I realized was that it was easy for me to do this almost like a mental math. But for a lot of people, it was a much hard calculation.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Not because the math is hard, but because I think the reason it's easy for me is because I'm able to keep track of things much, much better than an average person. For instance, I know pretty well what my monthly expenses are. I've known it since I was in college and I have always maintained spreadsheets. I can tell you what my monthly expenses were in 2005, for instance, right?
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
I'll maintain spreadsheets. So it's very easy for me to do that. It's just a habit. The second is I'm pretty decent at also managing cash flow and investing. So all of that combined, it became pretty, I would say, attainable and achievable goal for me personally and me and my wife as a family, as a unit. But what I realized is for a lot of people, it's much harder because
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
A, a lot of people don't know how much they actually spend in a month. B, a lot of people do not really start investing early enough to actually gain the compounding effect, the magical compounding effect to actually see their savings grow. And that actually also stops them. Or C, This is relevant very much to the question you specifically asked.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
A lot of people actually go in directions that they are told that will lead them to financial independence, but it's not. For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I only buy real estate because somebody told me that's what I should do. If you're going to own only real estate, it doesn't yield cash returns, which means you'll be cash poor, but asset rate. That's not financial independence.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
So understanding those things helped me build my viewpoint. And now my goal is to help others see that viewpoint and build financial independence in a way that works for them. And actually, in that respect,
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Another thing that, you know, because you and I went to a really good school and some of the things were hammered into us completely while we were at Booth, which is the stock market returns, right? I think you can wake up any UChicago Booth alum in the middle of the night and say, hey, what are long-term S&P 500 returns?
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
And I think before they even gain a little bit of sense of the world, they'll be like 10%. Right? It's fit. That's the healthiest thing. And I think what I realized is that very few people actually know this very fundamental thing that you can get these kind of returns. And also if you diversify a little bit better, you can probably get a little bit more.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Or if you're conservative, you can get a little bit less. But what we did at Zillion was we helped people visualize financial independence. So we built tools within Zillion and we actually call this tool financial independence tool, the FIT. So how fit you are or how, when are you likely to hit financial independence?
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
As soon as you tell us what you own and where your money is and how much you earn and how much you spend, we can actually tell you exactly, hey, you're going to reach financial independence in 2034, for instance, or 2037. And you can change things. You're like, oh, what if my income increases by $20,000 per year? How will that impact? We will show you how will that impact.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
You're like, oh, what if I have to pay 100% of my child's college education? How will that impact my financial independence? For those of us who are not very good at mental math, we built this tool so you can just plug that number in and say, OK, my child is going to go to some XYZ college, 200K expense coming up in five years. How will that impact my financial independence?
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
So we actually made the thinking part super easy and we took the assumptions out. Also, how will inflation impact my financial independence? Like I can say, oh, I need a million dollars to retire because that's the number thrown around or these days it's I think 2.2 million, that's the number that's thrown around. But hey, if I'm gonna live for another 40 years, is it gonna be enough?
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
How will inflation impact that? you can actually adjust for that. So the overall thing we have done is what I realized is some people are very good at this math, but a lot of people are not. And what we did is we made the math so easy and so visual and so easy to understand and grab and actually play with that now financial independence should seem like a tangible thing.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
so much so that a customer of ours, I was meeting with them and it was in a social setting and I was explaining what we do and I was talking to somebody asked a question, hey, Gagan, how do I know how much money I need? I'm like, we built a calculator exactly. We built a product just for this and A customer of ours, he was also in that, he was also right next to me.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
He's, oh, is that the number I see on the top right corner? I'm like, yeah. So the idea, the thing is that we made it this whole complex thing and we simplified it and we made it visually so appealing and so easy to use that people are able to now see what financial independence would mean for them.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
and whether and when they are likely to reach that and also once they reach are they at the risk of running out of money or not right if somebody decides i want to send two kids to college and retire at 42 and i want to travel the world and i'm going to have no income
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
Our product will show them if they're likely to run out of money, maybe by the age of 65 or 70, or they're not going to run out of money and they can comfortably even retire. For them, financial independence might mean retire. For some, it might mean they go from full-time to part-time, or it might mean they, rather than just working for money, they can now pursue a passion.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
where they will have a lower income. Let's say some people want to, one of my coworkers at Square, he quit his corporate job and became a teacher. Now, following that passion, I'm sure he took a huge pay cut, maybe 60, 70, even 80% pay cut. But my guess is that this person is really good at doing the math and they can say, yeah, I can do this.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
One of our customers, they both work and one of them decided after using Zillion, they're like, hey, listen, one of us is going to quit and focus on family and just take some time off because we know our financial independence is not at stake. Our tools help people do that.
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
I think we are talking about the same thing. Maybe we are talking about the two different sides of the same coin. What you are saying is living in present. One fact I think we both have to agree on. In the modern world, the concept of money and wealth is enmeshed with our daily lives. We just can't separate, right?
Chief Change Officer
#101 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part Two
How we live our lives is influenced by money, whether we like it or not, but that's how the world is structured today. To your point, living in the present, I agree with you 100%. Knowing about independence does is it helps you define that present and it helps you be very conscious about that.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Because those two are different terms, very different contexts, and very different overall outcomes. For me, financial independence meant I could leave my corporate job and go work on my own and build something from scratch. When I was able to do that, I said, I am financially independent because I can do what I want with my time.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
So I earned that independence and I don't have to be beholden to a paycheck to do that or to something else, right? In this case, it was paycheck. And for me it actually, I'm an engineer after all, and I actually did a very mathematical thing. I figured out how much money I would need to sustain for at least five years so that I can build something on the side while not starving my family.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
And I did some math, and not super rigorous. We are all pretty good at doing basic math. And I did that. I'm like, OK, five years, our yearly spend is about this much. My kids, one of my kids is going to go to college in this much amount of time, so here's that. And also, while I build, I will not have an income.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
So my retirement account has to be in a certain shape or form so that I'm not insecure about that. So that's going to be another amount, let's say X and Y is going to be the amount that is going to be needed for just maintaining and sustaining for five years while I build something. And Z is the amount that is needed to send let's say one or two kids to college during that time.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
So X plus Y plus Z, I felt that once I reached that number, that would be my financial independence. And what I realized was that it was a number, right? I think the specifics are not super important. I think everybody's circumstances are different. And what I realized was that it was easy for me to do this almost like a mental math. But for a lot of people, it was a much hard calculation.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Not because the math is hard, but because I think the reason it's easy for me is because I'm able to keep track of things much, much better than an average person. For instance, I know pretty well what my monthly expenses are. I've known it since I was in college and I have always maintained spreadsheets. I can tell you what my monthly expenses were in 2005, for instance, right?
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
I would maintain spreadsheets. So it's very easy for me to do that. It's just a habit. The second is I'm pretty decent at also managing cash flow and investing. So all of that combined, it became pretty, I would say, attainable and achievable goal for me personally and me and my wife as a family, as a unit. But what I realized is for a lot of people, it's much harder because
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
A, a lot of people don't know how much they actually spend in a month. B, a lot of people do not really start investing early enough to actually gain the compounding effect, the magical compounding effect to actually see their savings grow. And that actually also stops them. Or C, This is relevant very much to the question you specifically asked.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
A lot of people actually go in directions that they are told that will lead them to financial independence, but it's not. For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I only buy real estate because somebody told me that's what I should do. If you're going to own only real estate, it doesn't yield cash returns, which means you'll be cash poor, but asset rate. That's not financial independence.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
So understanding those things helped me build my viewpoint. And now my goal is to help others see that viewpoint and build financial independence in a way that works for them. And actually in that respect,
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Another thing that, you know, because you and I went to a really good school and some of the things were hammered into us completely while we were at Booth, which is the stock market returns, right? I think you can wake up any UChicago Booth alum in the middle of the night and say, hey, what are long term S&P 500 returns?
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
And I think before they even gain a little bit of sense of the world, they'll be like 10%. That's one of those things. And I think what I realized is that very few people actually know this very fundamental thing that you can get these kinds of returns. And also if you diversify a little bit better, you can probably get a little bit more, or if you're conservative, you can get a little bit less.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
But what we did at Zillion was we helped people visualize financial independence. So we built tools within Zillion and we actually call this tool financial independence tool, the FIT. So how fit you are or how, when are you likely to hit financial independence?
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
As soon as you tell us what you own and where your money is and how much you earn and how much you spend, we can actually tell you exactly, hey, you're going to reach financial independence in 2034, for instance, or 2037. And you can change things. You're like, oh, what if my income increases by $20,000 per year? How will that impact? we will show you how will that impact.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
You're like, oh, what if I have to pay 100% of my child's college education? How will that impact my financial independence? For those of us who are not very good at mental math, we built this tool so you can just plug that number in and say, okay, my child is going to go to some XYZ college, 200K expense coming up in five years. How will that impact my financial independence?
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
So we actually made the thinking part super easy and we took the assumptions out. Also, how will inflation impact my financial independence? Like I can say, oh, I need a million dollars to retire because that's the number thrown around. Or these days, it's I think 2.2 million. That's the number that's thrown around. But hey, if I'm going to live for another 40 years, is it going to be enough?
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
How will inflation impact that? you can actually adjust for that. So the overall thing we have done is what I realized is some people are very good at this math, but a lot of people are not. And what we did is we made the math so easy and so visual and so easy to understand and grab and actually play with that now financial independence should seem like a tangible thing.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
So much so that a customer of ours, I was meeting with them and it was in a social setting and I was explaining what we do and I was talking to somebody asked a question, hey, Gagan, how do I know how much money I need? I'm like, we built a calculator. Exactly. We built a product just for this. And a customer of ours, he was also in that. He was also right next to me.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Oh, is that the number I see on the top right corner? I'm like, yeah. So the idea, the thing is that we made it this whole complex thing. And we simplified it and we made it visually so appealing and so easy to use that people are able to now see what financial independence would mean for them and whether and when they are likely to reach that.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
And also once they reach, are they at the risk of running out of money or not? If somebody decides I want to send two kids to college and retire at 42, and I want to travel the world, and I'm going to have no income, This product will show them if they're likely to run out of money, maybe by the age of 65 or 70, or they're not going to run out of money and they can comfortably even retire.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
For them, financial independence might mean retire. For some, it might mean they go from full-time to part-time, or it might mean they, rather than just working for money, they can now pursue a passion. where they will have a lower income. Let's say some people want to, one of my coworkers at Square, he quit his corporate job and became a teacher.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Now, following that passion, I'm sure he took a huge pay cut, maybe 60, 70, even 80% pay cut. But my guess is that this person is really good at doing the math and they can say, yeah, I can do this.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Hey, thank you so much, Vince. Thank you so much for reaching out and rekindling old memories from business school. And I'm so happy to be doing this with you. And I'm a fan of you and what you're doing. So thank you so much.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
One of our customers, they both work and one of them decided after using Zillion, they're like, hey, listen, one of us is going to quit and focus on family and just take some time off because we know our financial independence is not at stake. Our tools help people do that.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
I think we are talking about the same thing. Maybe we are talking about the two different sides of the same coin. What you are saying is living in present. One fact I think we both have to agree on. In the modern world, the concept of money and wealth is enmeshed with our daily lives. We just can't separate, right? How we live our lives is influenced by money.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Whether we like it or not, but that's how the world is structured today. To your point, living in the present, I agree with you 100%. Knowing about independence does is it helps you define that present. And it helps you be very conscious about that. So one example that I gave you was my coworker who left a very comfortable corporate job to become a teacher.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Now that person, they actually walked away from a lot of future wealth, but they pursued passion. Now, The idea is that financial independence let them pursue a passion and shape their today and their tomorrow. They are living in the present, so they didn't wait until, a lot of people wait until they retire to pursue their hobbies and their passions.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
This person, probably in their late 40s, walked away from a corporate job and is now working with the kids.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Another couple that I mentioned, for them, living in the present is that their kids are young and they actually, until now, they were thinking they need to keep earning a lot of money because they just need to have a lot of money because they have two kids and they live in a very expensive area here in Silicon Valley and they just can't keep up. And knowing for them, financial independence was
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
something they couldn't wrap their heads around because of the way their thought processes work. But by knowing what was needed, they were able to sift the signal from the noise and they were like, oh, okay, we can actually spend more time
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
raising our kids and building the family and building the foundations of the family and not just keep earning more because we have reached a point where financial independence is within reach. So my point is, even if you want to live in the present, I think being aware of the pitfalls and also the possible rewards of financial independence.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
I think knowing those two is of extreme utility, is of extreme usefulness. So let me finish your thought, what you started on the financial independence part. I would say, yes, we provide assurance, but more than that, We also actually infuse knowledge in the product that is otherwise not very well known.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I have three or four properties, so that should do it. What we provide is, and people generally, it's not, as I said, like people... Most people don't know S&P 500 long-term returns, believe it or not. Even though to us, it's always at the tip of our tongue and it's always at our fingertips. We know it.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
And people don't know what the returns are for real estate in the long term. I'm talking about American markets. Asian markets are different, but American markets. So we bake the data. We also bake hard data. If somebody has...
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
XYZ amount of funds in their 401 , which is the retirement account in the US, and they have some stocks in their brokerage account, and they have some real estate, and they have some treasury bonds, and they have some cash. We are able to put all that together and say, We know real estate grows about 3% to 3.5% per year. Based on what you have, here's where you can expect this thing to grow.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
You have some cash that's not going to grow. It's actually going to lose value. You have some bonds. You have some this thing. So we are able to build that model. So there is the math there, even though I said it's easy for people like you and me. But for most people, it becomes very complicated very quickly. And that's where we come in and we help.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Great. So my story is not very different from a typical immigrant to the US, and the US is a big magnet for immigrants. So I came here in the early aughts, 2001, 2002, to pursue grad school at Arizona State. And I liked the way things are here. I got a job. Incidentally, though, even though I came here to do something related to tech,
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
My undergrad was in mechanical engineering, but I'm like, yeah, mechanical engineering, a lot of innovations happened in the 20th century. I should switch to something related to tech. So I went to grad school for that. By the time I graduated, nobody wanted to hire in tech because we were going through a huge recession and
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
What happened, I ended up again working in the mechanical engineering industry here in the U.S. That was my first job. But I kept at it. I kept working on the side and just doing things on my own, which helped me secure a job in tech, actually. That happened back in 2005. I know I'm dating myself here, but that happened in 2005.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
And one quick note I want to share with the audience, given that people are looking for nuggets in terms of career and how to grow. I do want to share that by the time I got into tech, I was 29 plus years old, so close to 30. I was married and I had a child by then. So I just want people to realize and know that you can change careers and nothing's going to stop you if you put your mind to it.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
I remember when my wife was pregnant with our first child and I was preparing on the side. I would take printouts, read all the time. I would install software on my laptop and write programs and write code and all that. And sometimes when my wife would have to, I would have to take her to the doctor's appointment for the wellness checks and all that.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
While we were waiting for the doctor, I would be combing through the notes and the PDFs and all those things, and just studying, just reading. And all that paid off. I got into tech in 2005. I moved to Boston, worked at a tech company called Akamai Technologies. I worked there for many years, first as an engineer, then as a manager.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Then I realized that Boston is too small for market, which we will talk about in more detail. But I realized that since I was 8,000 miles away from where I was born and where a lot of my loved ones lived, moving a couple thousand miles within the US wasn't going to make a big difference to me. So we moved about, this was around the time when I was still in business school.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
We were still at Chicago Booth. And I got a job in Silicon Valley, and I moved about 10 years ago. to Silicon Valley. And I've been here, I've been working in many different companies. And then two plus years ago, I decided to launch Xilion, which is the name of my company, X-I-L-I-O-N. And we'll discuss more in detail in a little bit.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
But the idea was I became financially independent and I looked around and I saw that other people Well, especially people who were similar to me, people who work in comfortable jobs, have decent income. And I looked around and typically immigrants, I'm like, hey, I think I'm ready to hang up my boots, so to speak, to take a leap and build something on my own. They're like, how come?
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
I'm like, I think I've... Enough to, as you said, I have enough to achieve financial independence. And then they're like, but I don't. And I'm like, okay, here's the things I did. Have you done the same things? They're like, I didn't know that I needed to do those things. And I kept talking to different people. kept getting similar story.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
And then I realized that actually there is need for something like Zillion, which can help people make great financial decisions and become financially independent sooner.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Yeah, great question. I think if, as I said in the first question there, I started as an undergrad in mechanical engineering. And what I realized was I worked in the industry for three years after college in India. And one of the things I realized while working, it was an automotive manufacturing facility.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
My biggest learning there was that a lot of the innovation in manufacturing and automotive had happened. Pace of innovation had slowed down considerably. If you go back, I'm talking about 98 and 99, 2000. Around that time, if you think about it, the internal combustion engines were running really well, highly efficient. A lot of the electronics was already factored in.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
A lot of the innovation had happened. And when I looked around, I felt that by graduating from college as a technical person, even if it's mechanical engineering, I was hungry for knowledge. So I realized very early on in my career that I am a knowledge worker. And for me to continue to be successful as a knowledge worker, I had to consistently update my knowledge.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
And that actually has been the theme of my career all along. What I mean by that is that once you realize that something is critical, like in my case, I figured it is knowledge. So after about a year of working in the mechanical engineering industry, I decided that I needed to upgrade my skills and get into this new industry. Back in the late 90s, tech was brand new.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Internet had just started to become popular and a lot of things were happening, exciting things. I decided that I was going to get into tech, so I decided to come to the US. So I took the GRE exam for grad school and started my journey. That journey took, if you think about it, 98 I graduated from college and 2005 is when I actually entered the knowledge industry, the tech industry.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
The journey wasn't simple. It wasn't straightforward. It wasn't even a straight line journey. It took many different turns, many different jobs, two different continents, many different cities. But I was able to make that journey. But one thing that was consistent and constant in that journey was knowledge. And this is something I would like to share with all your listeners is knowledge.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
We actually are in the, I would still say in the beginning, but definitely our generation, Gen X and Gen Y and Gen Z, we are firmly in the knowledge economy. Unless you are doing something with your hands, let's say you are a construction worker or you are a gardener or you are a farmer. That's different.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
But if you're not, if you're working in any other kind of job, whether it's a research associate or a professor or tech person, data scientist, we are part of the knowledge economy. And you always have to seek to increase your knowledge, to improve that skill. And that doesn't come automatically. You have to always go for it and find new avenues to improve your knowledge. It could mean
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
going deep and becoming a super specialist in your area, or it could mean going broad and finding more about certain areas, or it could mean looming one area and picking totally different area and learn more about it because you might have learned most of the things that had to be learned in your previous role, in your previous avatar.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
So to answer your question succinctly, I would say seeking knowledge has proven for me to be the ultimate success criteria. And every time I've increased knowledge, the dividends have been tremendous. And I should add here, since you and I share that background, for me, going to business school was purely a knowledge decision. I didn't go there to change careers. I was working in tech.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
I continued to work in tech. I didn't expect a huge jump. I was working as a senior manager, then I became a director after that. It was a pretty linear path. But I went there to learn about things that as a person working in tech, certain things like economics and marketing and finance and accounting, those things were my blind spots.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
And as I was growing in my career, I realized that I needed that knowledge. in my toolbox to be able to have a coherent conversation with some of my business partners at work. Even if I'm the tech person, I'm still expected to know a little bit more about how accounting works, how the basic unit economics of certain product work, how the cost accounting work.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
And for that, I went to business school. So that has been my constant journey and even starting Zillion. One of the reasons was I learned a ton while working at different companies and I'm like, my learning has slowed down and plateaued. One of the best ways to learn more is to start something from scratch.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
And so I would argue that even starting Zillion was a step in that direction, which is to actually increase knowledge at a rapid pace.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you that there is a lot of noise around this term. Financial freedom, financial independence, financially independent, retired early. There's a whole fire movement. And also, especially ever since social media became a dominant force in the society, there are just too many people out there trying to almost... Some of them sound like snake oil salesmen.
Chief Change Officer
#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One
They're like, oh yeah, I'm financially independent. I just have this social media, or I do X, Y, Z, and I make enough money, blah, blah, blah. I'll tell you what my criteria was. It was fairly straightforward. And I will actually contextualize, right? I'm careful to use the word financial independence and not retirement.