#100 Gagan Sandhu: From Grit to Xillion — A Playbook for Reinventing Careers and Financial Freedom — Part One

324.702 - 345.482 Gagan Sandhu

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.

346.764 - 367.479 Gagan Sandhu

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.

367.499 - 394.29 Gagan Sandhu

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.

394.31 - 421.907 Gagan Sandhu

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.

422.288 - 450.436 Gagan Sandhu

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?

631.261 - 659.612 Gagan Sandhu

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.

659.752 - 687.585 Gagan Sandhu

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.

790.01 - 818.962 Gagan Sandhu

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.

819.182 - 842.193 Gagan Sandhu

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.

842.814 - 870.679 Gagan Sandhu

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.

871.08 - 889.832 Gagan Sandhu

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.

890.492 - 903.256 Gagan Sandhu

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.

1109.961 - 1139.538 Gagan Sandhu

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.

1140.278 - 1168.219 Gagan Sandhu

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?

1168.299 - 1197.926 Gagan Sandhu

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

486.296 - 515.671 Vince Chan

Reflecting on my career, there are lots and lots of twists and turns, much like yours and those of many guests I've had so far on this show. I always ask this question. As we progress, often without realizing it, we uncover themes, motivations, or drivers that push us from one milestone to the next.

516.772 - 549.137 Vince Chan

Although these stages might not appear linked on the surface, they are often connected by underlying forces. So it's clear our choices aren't as random as they might seem. Something is always guiding us. Have you thought about what drives you? What are your key motivators? What recurring themes have you noticed in your journey?

550.543 - 573.839 Gagan Sandhu

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.

575.049 - 601.148 Gagan Sandhu

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.

601.168 - 629.876 Gagan Sandhu

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.

949.895 - 978.3 Gagan Sandhu

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.

978.62 - 999.72 Gagan Sandhu

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.

1000.221 - 1028.712 Gagan Sandhu

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.

1028.792 - 1064.337 Gagan Sandhu

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.

1065.433 - 1086.022 Gagan Sandhu

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.