Darwish Gani (00:00.316)
That's right.

Chase Mohseni (00:01.354)
All right, beautiful. So I'm back episode 12, The Growth Vault. I'm here with the CEO and co-founder of Pangea and Open Border. Robba decided not to join us, whatever. So we've got an LA Toronto connection. I'm really, Darvish, I'm really excited to chat with you. Thanks for, thanks Ron. Shout out Ron for giving us this connection. Excited to chat, man.

Darwish Gani (00:26.232)
Yeah, very cool. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Chase Mohseni (00:29.526)
Yeah, absolutely. So today, like we're going to talk about special episode because what Darwish does is so damn interesting. But, you know, this podcast is about the intersection between e-commerce and B2B SaaS and kind of how those two things actually have like a really strong marriage. And Darwish is actually on the front lines of doing both of those things. So it's like a really interesting conversation. But I think at the jump, we usually like to talk about something that's a bit of a hot topic. So I was reading an article.

this week about threads and how just their usage has fallen off a cliff. And I mean, this is not new news. But I still have it on my homepage of my phone or one of the pages that I can scroll to and I have not been on in three weeks. I went on after I read this article. But essentially now Facebook or Metta is admitting that they made a mistake, you know, just releasing it because there was no features that anyone was going to like, you know.

be a part of. And so I'm curious from your perspective, Dara, before we go into like some of the business stuff, have you ever released something where you knew like, this is not going to be good, but we just got to try it and see if there's anything there. And even if we have to deal with some backlash and like, you know, back it up a little bit, we're going to put it into market so that we know that it's something to invest in.

Darwish Gani (01:53.048)
Yeah, I mean...

Darwish Gani (01:57.824)
I would say I've fallen in that bucket more than the other way in my career. And I think the best example I have this, this is when I was early on, I was a product manager at a company called Optimize it, they do like A B testing. And, um, we, there's a feature that we had to build and I just hacked this thing together, but I think I hacked it in like two days. I was like, look, this thing's ready to go. We can launch it. Uh, and I, and, uh,

Chase Mohseni (02:14.508)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (02:26.288)
And it was like the other 20% of work is going to be a pain to do. And managers didn't want to do it. And I was like, guys, forget all that. We're just going to launch this thing as is and see what happens. I went to like this other PM who I needed to like buy in to get, get it launched. And he just said, like, why would you build this 80% like this? And I said, we don't need the other 20%. Um, then we just got in this like debate. And I think every, like a bunch of engineers crowded us as we both were kind of talking about why we, why we, we don't, we don't need this. And I was like this like.

Chase Mohseni (02:45.386)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (02:54.716)
crude guy just like pushing it out and he was like a perfectionist. So I think both on opposite ends and need a little bit of both that at different times. But I think definitely I view to launch iterate, get feedback and not waste time. So have been there and have felt the downsides of that. But the positives have always been bigger for us. And I think, you know, just a meta, we're not, I'm not a meta scale in anything yet. So maybe it's different in that world. But

Chase Mohseni (03:21.826)
Yeah, yeah.

Darwish Gani (03:24.944)
I'm totally, I totally like, I like it. I like moving things and breaking. I like moving fast and breaking things not that much.

Chase Mohseni (03:33.494)
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, there was no, I mean, there's no real downside risk for them, right? Cause it's, it's a now they have proof that they can build another ad channel for themselves, uh, over time. And now it's about like, okay, we have the signal. We know that there are people there. We know we have this opportunity. Let's go build all of the things that actually make it sticky. So completely, completely agree with you.

I have over optimized things before too, before you do a launch where you design it so perfectly and you're like, you know what, I could have just used a little signal before I spent all this time and money and energy building this thing. So I, like you say, build something quick and just make sure that it doesn't break anything too much. So a hundred percent, a hundred percent agree. So I want to talk about what it's like going from building a large

Darwish Gani (04:23.992)
Hey Chase, I'm losing you a little bit. Is that my internet?

Chase Mohseni (04:27.57)
e-commerce hold co of businesses and then taking those learnings and building something new. I think this is something I talk to a lot of different entrepreneurs about either they've been in e-commerce and they want to go into SaaS or they've been in service business servicing e-commerce and like, oh, I see this gap. Like what is, I mean, and frankly that's, you know, my new company Heatmap was an agency owner who saw a gap in the CRO market and we're building something for that specifically. So what's been...

What's been your experience kind of building something so different to what you're building now and like what did you see like that actually gave you the confidence to go and build something new?

Darwish Gani (05:05.708)
Yeah, so, and you're talking about the open border to the Pangea Jump.

Chase Mohseni (05:09.886)
Yeah, yeah, like yeah, the Pangea, you know, you've built this thing to make open borders, which I love kind of the synergy of names, by the way, and how they work together. That's great.

Darwish Gani (05:18.404)
Yeah, you know, I think for me, like working on this international problem, is in some way, like it was an inevitability is like destiny in some ways, like in a, in a funny way. Like I think I've always been obsessed with and thought about just like, how do we go build something in one country and clone it in another, like for whatever reason, I've always had this strand of thinking all the time. Um, and I was like, can I start, can I start an Equinox in India? Can I, I looked at all these different permutations of things.

Chase Mohseni (05:39.746)
Hmm. Yeah.

Darwish Gani (05:47.74)
along the way, fast casual concepts in the Middle East. So I was fascinated by just businesses that worked well here and could we bring them into other parts of the country or other parts of the world. And so Pangea actually was like the first like real scratch of that itch, which was you had basically, so Pangea for those that don't know, was a holding company for direct consumer brands. They're very much built like with the aspiration of being something like the rocket internet for direct consumer.

So we're going to fast incubate D to C brands. We're going to launch them in many countries out the gate, very aggressively. And we are going to focus on picking brands that we think have a lot of international potential. So that just means that the brand works on some kind of global secular trend. It's not like a Chubby's, which is like a very American frat guy type brand. It's, it's like men's skincare. It's it's grooming. It's electronics, it's stuff, supplements, stuff that really it's.

Chase Mohseni (06:37.814)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (06:45.388)
Everyone in the world is starting to adapt these types of products in some way. And the reason for that simply was one, you could do it now. Like with an e-commerce brand, you could build a little business out of the gate. Like you could literally be in 40 countries if you could flick on some Facebook ads. But then two, top down, every macro number I saw kind of affirmed to me that international was like this big next wave of e-commerce, 20% of global e-commerce was outside of the U S in 2018.

less than 10% of, sorry, 20% of the global e-commerce was in the US in 2018. Less than 10% of global e-commerce now in 2023 is in the US. So this is a movement of hundreds of billions of dollars. And most venture dollars that went into direct consumer were spent on US advertisements in region. And so I just felt there's gonna be this big arbitrage opportunity to market abroad. Not a lot of brands were doing it. All the major consumer conglomerates had been doing it since the 90s.

Chase Mohseni (07:24.649)
Wild.

Darwish Gani (07:43.456)
And I was like, this is inevitability. These, these brands will do it. This is exactly the type of stuff that I'm super excited by. Or for whatever reason, it's always intuitively scratched my curiosity. Uh, so let me give this a shot, but that was the idea of Pangea. And we set out, set out on that, set out on that with my co-founder, uh, Ricky. Uh, and we launched two brands. We learned in that process that.

After launching the first two brands, both of those brands got to mid-eight figures in scale. We would not be able to launch brand three. We were barely able to do number two. And the reason for that is really that you kind of learned that, I learned at least that in brands world, as you grow brands to be larger and larger, you find that you're better off having a couple of bigger category leading brands than trying to own 20 smaller things because they each require a lot of incremental thinking.

Um, and you know, the most exaggerated version of this is like LVMH grew like 30% or 40% last year at colossal scale. You kind of want to try to go build the really category defining leading brand that just keeps growing at scale over, because the incremental thinking there's a lot different than trying to launch the next brand concept, which is really hard to kind of keep finding. So there was some realization that we couldn't keep launching brands.

Chase Mohseni (08:54.102)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (09:02.421)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (09:05.616)
But then it was also this realization that international was really big for us. 50% of our revenue when we hit the nine figure run rate mark for the first time was outside of the U S. Uh, and so we were like, okay, international part of our thesis, correct. Multiple brands part a little bit different, learned a lot there and happy to chat more about that. And so open border was really the idea of, all right, let's go. Instead of trying to create product market fit over and over and over, because that's really hard.

let's go help all these other brands that already have product market fit go international. Because if we talk to them, they don't have the stuff that we have internally. They will struggle and spend a lot of time, they'll make mistakes that we have already made and we can do all that for them much, much easier. So that was the genesis of OpenBorder. It was the realization that we're better off powering instead of creating here. And that was a very empowering mission. And it kind of...

Chase Mohseni (09:42.529)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (09:56.398)
Hmm.

Darwish Gani (10:02.372)
You know, I think OpenBorder for me is like, is almost not a separate company than Pangea. It's like a 1.5, you know, it's the same problem. It's the same thing I went out to, it's the same original insight that I'm just kind of continuing to dig into. Um, so that was how we started OpenBorder. Uh, and it's a completely different business. It's a, it's a B2B software logistics business. And so the entire motion of it's completely different than, than in, uh, in building your own brands. But, uh,

Chase Mohseni (10:08.673)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (10:14.486)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (10:27.489)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (10:31.068)
But that's where we are and we're diving in.

Chase Mohseni (10:34.306)
So one question I have is like super, it's an interesting one I think like all founders should think about this. And maybe I'm completely reading this wrong. I think a lot of times like the way you're raised has an effect on the way you see the world. Do you think because you come from family, like immigrants, right? You see the world more global scale than maybe someone else would. Cause like a lot of people have the idea let's start like a hold co of brands, right?

They don't go in with the thesis like, this whole world out there, right? So you see, okay, well, we can service the entire world with these products because I have been in a store in another part of the world and the same products exist or don't exist that are having, people are having problems with here. So I absolutely need to be involved in that. So do you think that had anything to do with kind of your perspective?

Darwish Gani (11:30.044)
100%. So like my co-founder, he grew up, he was born in Korea, spent some time growing up in Japan. He moved here kind of closer to high school. And so for him, complete international background. I grew, I was born in the US, but I have family in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, a little bit in Europe and some in America as well. So traveled a lot kind of growing up. And so I think it's those experiences that colored

Chase Mohseni (11:51.232)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (11:59.66)
what we saw as interesting to us. Whether we saw the commercial reasonableness of it, there was like intuitive things that made us think about it a little bit differently. And I think this even showed like in our early rounds when we were fundraising for Pangia, there was no consumer investor that wanted to invest in us. They all thought we were kind of odd. In fact, like people would look at our website and be like, how do you guys make so much revenue? Like you make way more money than your site looks like it could make. Like you're doing that with.

Chase Mohseni (12:17.102)
BOOM

Chase Mohseni (12:25.339)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (12:27.876)
that site, wow, that's actually pretty impressive. How are you gonna grow this business? Well, I'm gonna launch in more countries. Well, it was kind of like they were looking for certain answers and we were always talking like a different way. And so early on, we actually kind of found ourselves not able to raise from the traditional consumer investors, but attracting like a much different group of investors who are more technology focused. And interestingly, all had international backgrounds themselves. So they were investors who themselves were immigrants. They had...

Chase Mohseni (12:28.746)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (12:38.348)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (12:57.584)
traveled to Rade, et cetera. And they saw and felt kind of what we were talking about in a way that we felt we never actually got from like strictly investors who were maybe multi-generation American. And I don't know if that was coincidence or not, but we definitely joked about it. We're like, wow, like we only get like immigrants or equivalent kind of early on from the institutional funds.

Chase Mohseni (13:19.426)
Dude, there's a different thing. Like I, and this might sound weird to people, but there's this weird connection you have when you're first gen, like with other people and you're like, dude, did your dad do this? And you're like, bro, like apps of freaking your dad jump up every time in the middle of the night. Where were you? Dude, I'm 27. Like you don't need to wait in the front seat of the house waiting for me to come home. So I don't think that's weird at all. I think it.

Darwish Gani (13:29.221)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (13:46.49)
100% tracks with any experience I've had when you speak to people who have had those same experiences so one thing you talked about That I think is really fascinating is I want to debate it a little bit is this idea because Everyone not everyone this is a bit hyperbole a lot of people want to have a hold Co I've had I don't know how many people have talked to me about this. I want to have a hold

And you just came out with, and I don't think it's a very hot take, which is if you actually want to do it well, having 10 brands is actually not going to be the way it is. One, two, maybe three, if you're, I don't know, like lucky that actually can do it at the scale that you want to do it. So I'm always curious about this because you have a bunch of people say, I have a suite of micro sass. I talked to these people and was like, well, yeah, you do.

Darwish Gani (14:15.33)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (14:42.262)
but you just have signed up for a different version of business, if you really want to grow your business, you can't spread yourself too thin. So I'm curious both on like what data supported that? Did you guys even try to start a third one? And we're like, no, we're not, we're absolutely not doing this. And then what's it like now that you have these two brands in this one business and essentially you've now taken, you've gone to Pangea 1.5, like.

Is it hard to run both and siphon them off? Or do you have like incredible operators inside of Pangea so you don't have to worry about it as much anymore?

Darwish Gani (15:18.464)
Yeah, cool. So two big, juicy, two big, very juicy, interesting questions. All right. So let's do the first one. So the first one, I'm going to, and you're going to have to remind me the second one after I finish the first one probably. But first one was, hold code model, why I kind of walked away from it, or what does it take for it to work? I think for a hold code model to work well, you need to have some edge of differentiation.

Chase Mohseni (15:21.398)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (15:27.487)
No, I got you. Got you.

Darwish Gani (15:45.892)
that you can really expose. I think you're, and the differentiation can't simply be operational excellence. Like there's a bunch of really smart founders. Like we're all, we all work hard. We all can do ads well. We all know how to like, you know, consolidate and find good three PLs, do supply chain well. Like we all know how to do that. That can't be the thing that makes the whole Co model kind of hold up. It needs to be something more proprietary and more unique. So that was where the international angle came in. Now,

I think that the reason we kind of walked away from it was our brands got bigger than we thought they would be. We thought we'd have 20, $10 million brands or 10, $20 million brands. We had two brands that looked like they could become $100 million plus brands and we still believe that today. And so we had two brands that we thought, whoa, these things can be special. Once you realize what a special brand can be, I think you also start to like have different types of conversations. So as I started to talk to more and more...

later stage consumer investors and more and more execs at the big consumer conglomerates, I kind of realized that the big brands were where it's really at. So what that means is the big brands, to make a brand work, you have to obsess over the product. You have to obsess over who your customers are. You have to obsess over getting these things right. And as soon as you lose that obsession, what you then get is

You lose the innovation and creativity that kind of got you to where you were. And that part is what you can't recreate 10 times over. You can do that one or two times over. And so you need to have full teams obsessed over like a problem every day banging their head on it. I strongly believe that. Uh, and so it doesn't mean you can't have, I don't think this means that like you can't do multiple companies. I actually just do multiple brands of separate companies entirely with, with CEOs in place, each one that are

Chase Mohseni (17:23.693)
Mm-hmm.

Chase Mohseni (17:38.516)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (17:38.716)
fully incentivized to wake up and do each thing like all in every day. That's how I would do it. And from a valuation perspective, every conversation I had shows that hold codes over time trade less than the individual brands. So what will happen is like, if someone wants to buy Lumen, the person who wants to buy Lumen wants to buy Lumen because of its brand. They understand premium men's skincare. They have an insight into the men's market, the beauty market. That's a certain type of buyer.

Chase Mohseni (17:52.654)
Really?

Darwish Gani (18:08.22)
The person who wants to buy an electronic trimming business, they're very different than that. The person who wants to, and imagine if you had like a mattress business what we did, those are three complete different strategic buyers. And even if you had talking to financial buyers, they're also different because they're like, we like this category and we're in love with this, but we're not in love with the other stuff. And so like what ended up, what I ended up seeing was that these kind of hold co models and I got this valid many, many times through many conversations, they ended up trading down.

They end up trading down on like EBITDA, the magic sauce of any individual brand doesn't show up as much as anymore. Uh, and so for whatever reason, that was the data points that they kind of sold me on taking this a little bit slower, uh, or thinking that, you know, like, you know, one, one guy, I don't want to say who, but biggest consumer funds out there, he told me, look, if you can make Lumen alone, a $400 million revenue business EBITDA positive.

Chase Mohseni (18:37.326)
Hmm.

Chase Mohseni (18:43.052)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (19:05.144)
It is going to be far more exciting than you getting eight brands doing $50 million. Like it is incredibly exciting if you can get one brand there. And I was like, Whoa, true, true. Uh, and he's like, but that's, think about what that would take. Like what, what type of focus that would require and how well you did nail the market to get there. But if you nailed that, what does that mean for what Lumen could be after that? And then I was like, Whoa, whoa. You know, like these $50 million things, they may just be $50 million things. And they may actually become.

Chase Mohseni (19:21.963)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (19:25.803)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (19:32.144)
harder to maintain because it degrades over time. There's a fight to maintain small scale. So that was like the shift in mindset for me. I was like, if I play, I want to win. I want to go for gold and that's it. That's my mentality. So that's the Holocaust model. And I think the math just tends to not work out usually well, but multiple brands, single founder, multiple CEOs, I think it can work.

Chase Mohseni (19:45.674)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (19:56.022)
Yeah. As Robba says, the math doesn't math. Right. Yeah, I get that. I get that. That's great. Second, second question was you have the hold cause you have the hold co with the multiple brands and you've moved over to like Pangea 1.5, which is open border. I know a lot of really aggressive, a lot of really aggressive people. A lot of people

Darwish Gani (20:02.084)
Yes.

Chase Mohseni (20:24.938)
either operators within a business and they want to go and do something on their own or they are, you know, business owners who see some opportunity somewhere else. And a lot of them that I've talked to are always worried about stretching themselves too thin beyond, beyond like, you know, just being exceptional in their single business, which is what that investor told you, right? Like you want to be able to be rigorously focused on this goal. What's it been like saying, Hey, I have this other, this one business we've raised.

Darwish Gani (20:44.772)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (20:53.154)
good capital, the business, like the brands are doing really well and we want to take it to that number that we've talked about, whatever that time horizon is for us. And then say, okay, well, I'm taking all of this and like you said, building this international logistics business that I'm going to start servicing brands at a really high level. How have you been able to bifurcate both things and actually be exceptional at both?

Darwish Gani (21:19.78)
Hey Chase, you broke up a little bit on the last one.

Chase Mohseni (21:21.978)
Okay, okay. Let me mark this so the editor knows to fix it. All I was asking was, you have the hold co and these brands and like, just like that, just like that investor said, you want to be able to really focus and deliver against that. But now you have open border, which is driving impact. And you see there's this huge path towards it being a meaningful, huge, meaningful business. How do you do both?

because a lot of people I talk to, they get really afraid of or reticent to try something like this and have such a bold vision for their life because of this, I wanna focus and just be exceptional at this one thing. So like, how has that been for you and what have you put in place to be able to action that?

Darwish Gani (22:05.66)
Cool, totally. People, it is impossible without the right people. And I think, you know, I'm very fortunate in Pangea to where I think we've surrounded ourselves with really good experience in brand building and people who've seen what it takes to build category defining, category leading brands. So we hired a CEO for Pangea.

Chase Mohseni (22:24.086)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (22:29.245)
Hmm.

Darwish Gani (22:32.708)
We actually first hired her not as a CEO, but as a president. So before we ever split Open Border out, before we even thought that was something we would do, we actually hired a president for Pangea who would be like our number two. And she would essentially bring in the experience of taking branch that next level. She was a former public company CEO, Ingrid's current CEO of Pangea.

Chase Mohseni (22:54.679)
Mm-hmm.

Darwish Gani (22:59.344)
former public company CEO, she took Physicians Formula Public in the 2000s. She sat, she was, she ran the company as a public company CEO for many years. She turned around multiple private equity backed beauty brands and took them to exit. And so you kind of heard her stories and what she was good at. And it was all the things I felt we needed to do well to be able to have a chance of being that category defining brand. It was like, and she had a very deep brand building, very deep product.

Chase Mohseni (23:21.816)
Mm-hmm.

Darwish Gani (23:29.456)
development background, whereas I think we were very, a little bit more leaned towards like growth marketing, digital marketing, and some of the things that kind of fill the ecosystem of D2C today, which is like, you know, how do I get clack to work out? And so I was like, cool, I need this. We need the best person we can find in this to make this work. And it doesn't mean that I can't learn it too, but I think it's good. This is a place where skill set jump is going to be big and it's going to bring someone in. We brought, we brought Ingrid in.

Chase Mohseni (23:41.866)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (23:58.84)
And then she was going to be like the overall primary person on PanGIA. And we were incubating open border in parallel under the overall PanGIA umbrella. It was in that process that we started building open border. We started to get some traction with it. Then we were like, Whoa, this is even crazier now. We have a B2B business and a B2C business all in one issuing equity to different types of people. It's very difficult because we can't give, we can't give.

early stage equity to like the early stage engineers at OpenBorder because they're part of the cap table of Pangea. The investors of Open, people who put money into OpenBorder will probably never put money to Pangea and vice versa. Oh, shoot. My video went off for a sec, I think.

Chase Mohseni (24:46.307)
I can still hear you. It does this weird thing. It doesn't.

Darwish Gani (24:47.812)
All right, cool. But yeah, people. Yeah, I think it's maybe my connection. Hopefully it's not a issue. But yeah, two different sets of investors, but two different companies being built under one right now. And really like multiple companies. Like we have a few different consumer brands and then we have open border. And so we kind of then started to make the realization of two things at the same time. One, it was gonna be far more advantageous.

Chase Mohseni (24:55.243)
All good.

Darwish Gani (25:18.undefined)
for OpenBorder to be a separate business than live under Pangea. It just needed to have that clarity and focus. And if you want to capitalize that business ever, it had to be a different company. We could not do it under Pangea. Like in fact, having OpenBorder inside of Pangea was hurting Pangea's ability to fundraise and OpenBorder's ability to fundraise. So we had to split them up. So we looked at the split.

Chase Mohseni (25:20.106)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (25:43.184)
Fortunately, Ingrid was already hired. She was the person that was the right person to be the CEO of now what is Pangea Brands. We already had her. We never thought it would play out like this, but we had her. So life sometimes is funny like that. And she became the CEO of Pangea. My co-founder and I went to focus 100% of our time on open border. So I don't have declared, I don't have two like big companies I'm working outside by side. I am not like a...

Chase Mohseni (26:03.438)
That's great.

Chase Mohseni (26:08.289)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (26:11.756)
I'm far from Elon Musking it. Yeah. You know, like I'm like, I do one thing and that one thing, it crushes me every day, you know, and I still, I still do that. I do spend like probably a day a week right now working with Ingrid, still on like Pangea, but I'm, I'm very heavily focused now day-to-day time on open border. Um, and I would say like, I think once companies get to that series B series C scale, your ability to bring in executives can be very helpful. And in this case.

Chase Mohseni (26:17.474)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (26:40.548)
I think building consumer brands was not our core skill set. And that was where having Ingrid come in, helped us in a way that we probably couldn't have imagined. And if we look at our board now, we have people from Unilever, LVMH, we have Ingrid, we have really good global consumer investors in Eurasio. So we have like a very well-rounded board and the level of conversations that we have today is, like it's crazy. I learned so much just being in the room.

And so that's what makes that still really exciting. Like even though I'm still a big shareholder in Pangea, but I'm also like, I'm a learner as much as a builder at that point.

Chase Mohseni (27:18.858)
I mean, I think this is something, thank you for sharing that. I think something I always try to tell, it's funny, tell the kids these days is like, just try to get in rooms that you feel awkward in because you're gonna learn a shitload from just incredible, incredible people. I mean, this is one of the things that's so fun about doing podcasts is like, I get to chat with someone like you, for instance, it's just like, dude, you just show me the way, right? You have all this other information that I just, I won't, I won't.

Darwish Gani (27:46.321)
I don't know about that.

Chase Mohseni (27:47.874)
have or don't have access to. So yeah, I really love that. I guess like going into, going from, so obviously you worked at a SaaS company before you moved over and started working on your own stuff, going back into SaaS. What's been the thing that shocked you the most? Because this is a funny debate I have with people where they're like, yeah, DTC marketers are better than SaaS marketers. I'm like, I don't believe that, but like, let's debate.

What did you think was going to be easy that wasn't hasn't been? Um, what's been easier because of your experience running Pangea before you split out.

Darwish Gani (28:26.96)
So I think in some ways, consumer marketing is easier because if you get it right, you sell to the customer immediately and they buy. There's nothing in the middle. It's a much faster scaling process. Like in the SaaS world, it's like this weird thing where it's like we go get the leads, we bring them in, and then we go through this three to six month sales process to go close them. And in that sales process, there's a lot of room for error.

Chase Mohseni (28:39.968)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (28:56.44)
Like you can mess up just because a salesperson didn't do something properly. We didn't ask the right question. We had the best product, but we lost a couple of pretty big deals where I was like, wow, in retrospect, we were by and far the best solution there. We were just not the best salespeople in the room. Now we're becoming good salespeople, but we were not the best salespeople. And so I think that in the B2B, in the SaaS world, in the lower mid-market world, it is, there's like some...

Chase Mohseni (28:56.738)
Mmm.

Chase Mohseni (29:24.223)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (29:26.552)
um, notions of like, how do you find your channels? How do you find like, who's the right, uh, you know, how do you find your ICP? How do you get in front of them? How do you keep CAC low enough? Uh, and you know what your deal sizes are, but as you get to move up and, uh, like ACV a bit, I think the sales process itself has a lot of variability, uh, and that, and, and it also means that anything you'd change upfront, you don't know the impact of it till later. So I can go and say, Hey, I increased my lead volume three X this month. Cool.

Chase Mohseni (29:36.039)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (29:44.692)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (29:56.048)
Where are the deals? Well, I don't know, I can't over three months because I gotta go close them now. So like the good quality deals, not sure. And so that's a little bit of the, there's like a little longer of a cycle where it's like input to output is like a little slower. And so like, if you're a very quantitative person, like me, as soon as you see a number like makes sense, I will abuse, I will find the thing that works and I will jump on it with 200% velocity, right? In this case, I can't jump because everything's a little bit slower. So I think that's.

Chase Mohseni (30:18.602)
Hahaha. Yeah.

Darwish Gani (30:24.804)
That's one of the big differences, I think, between SaaS and B2C. And I really talked like the large market SaaS, like this is SaaS where you're kind of doing consumer-esque marketing. But the upper market SaaS is like, I feel like a completely different game. Like it's like, it's like, it is, yeah, it's kind of how you, how you break into these brands and it's like the whole account-based marketing kind of strategy. It's all learning that.

Chase Mohseni (30:38.902)
Yeah, yeah.

Chase Mohseni (30:43.638)
Totally different.

Darwish Gani (30:55.168)
So the tactics are very different and the speed at which you can measure them and act with them are completely different. But the core thing is all the same, which is just like effort in to measurement of output out, right? It's just a little longer time horizon. And so I think you can do that scientifically with account-based marketing. I think it does relatively scientifically with a paid ad strategy or with an event-based strategy or some hybrid of all these things. So...

Chase Mohseni (31:11.744)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (31:24.216)
I think it's, it does come down to like numbers and it comes down to memorability. So the two things like ultimately marketing is like memorability and numbers. Like the numbers add up. If they don't, you gotta be more memorable. You know, it's not like, it's just like, how do you get higher recall on what you do and how do you get creative? And so that's, that's the game. It's just like do stuff that no one else does make them laugh. And I think like the adamintertenstion.com does some pretty cool stuff. Like it says.

Chase Mohseni (31:40.886)
Yeah, dude. Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (31:49.422)
100%.

Chase Mohseni (31:53.542)
Oh, great. Yeah.

Darwish Gani (31:54.2)
LinkedIn feed. You know, he's memorable. He has high recall. That's it. That's the same principles in some ways I find. So yeah, we'll be doing some wild stuff soon at Open Border, which I think are pretty non-traditional. We'll see how they go.

Chase Mohseni (32:11.498)
I think what you're saying is absolutely right. I mean, the time horizon thing is such an interesting one because I'm always telling people like, look, what you said, once you figure out the number and you can back into it, abuse that shit, like let it rip, but you have to be a little calmer and understand that it's just based on the velocity at which you're, like the numbers are growing, right? If we get a thousand customers in a couple, like in a month, we're happy. If you get a thousand customers on your e-commerce company, you're like,

Dude, we are fucked. Like that is not enough, right? It's just a completely different thing. We get it, that was like, oh my God, what a fantastic month our investors are going to kiss us. Like it's just a completely different conversation. I think the thing you're talking about though, which is really fascinating, I talk to people a lot about this, especially like this low mid-market SaaS you're talking about is, being cool and passing the vibe check are two of the most important things because

this is kind of how you make your word of mouth coefficient stronger, which is people want to work with people that they trust and think are cool. It sounds, it's like very non-technical. I can sit there and say like, these are the numbers that back into it, this is the activation rate that you get from it. But like, just from a very non-technical perspective, you get people across the line, they just want to kind of hang out with their friends and know that you've got their back and that you're not a number, they're not just a number on a dashboard to you, especially

If you can make someone who's spending $50 a month feel like this, you've won the game. But especially if you're doing just a little bit, I know you guys are doing more high ticket. Like if you're doing high ticket stuff, it's such an important portion of it. I don't think people focus enough on, hey, there's a human element to me actually being able to deliver this software to you and actually making it a meaningful experience. Because at the end of the day, you're helping me hit my numbers and my goal is to help you hit your numbers and there's a business relationship here. But that doesn't mean that we can't have a good time.

during the entire process. And unfortunately, maybe it's not unfortunate because we all have to do this, but sometimes we get so obsessed with the spreadsheet, we forget there's like shit going on in between those cells that is like human, right? And I've said this a thousand times on all of my podcasts, but I always remind people there's a human experience going on between every data point that you have. And you gotta be able to remember that is still a huge portion of why you're able to have good retention numbers. You know what I mean?

Darwish Gani (34:19.877)
Yes.

Darwish Gani (34:35.736)
Yeah, well, the human stuff, like the creativity and the personal relationships, like both sides of those things are what make the numbers work. Actually, I think the numbers just help you tell you, are you doing that or not? Right. Like, uh, they never would tell you what to do, but they just tell you what you're doing working. But like the thing that you do to get it working is that almost every time. Um, one thing you said that actually, I think, um, probably many people already noticed this, but.

Chase Mohseni (34:46.302)
Yes.

Yeah, so good.

Chase Mohseni (34:57.335)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (35:03.856)
to me it became insightful for me recently, is I think that LinkedIn is becoming for B2B, lower mid-market SaaS type stuff. LinkedIn is kind of like what Instagram was for D2C brands. What you're seeing now is influencer profiles being built on LinkedIn. They get following, they put out form content, they put out video content. There is being run like...

Chase Mohseni (35:29.292)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (35:32.288)
It's being run very direct consumer-esque in the way it works. I haven't flushed this out entirely and trying a full funnel yet, but I can see from a content perspective that LinkedIn has changed a lot recently. And I think it's going to, I think what we're going to see is sometimes the software components will be easier and easier to build. And we're going to find that in SaaS,

Chase Mohseni (35:48.814)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (36:01.924)
This may already exist, probably as someone new to this world, I'm seeing this for the first time, but like, I'm like, well, like there are going to be 10 companies that build this thing and their ability to actually build their brand and market it will determine who actually works well. Probably a better analogy is like agencies, like probably feel this a lot more than like SaaS companies do, but SaaS companies will feel it too because software is going easier. Like it's becoming easier and easier to do. And so now it's like.

Chase Mohseni (36:14.73)
Yeah, man.

Chase Mohseni (36:19.122)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (36:28.856)
Uh, it comes down and then it's like, okay, products commoditized. You had to go to distribution. Okay. How do you, who can, who can win distribution? Um, and winning distribution is, is all the, it's all the core stuff. You know, it is. It is, um, so I think the LinkedIn feeds are, are pretty interesting. And I, I bet we will see probably. Influencers arise that are like B2B influencers that get paid and sponsored and worked with, and it's going to be under the radar for a bit. Then it's going to come above board. Uh, but.

when it's under the radar, that's where the money is actually going to be made. So if you can figure that out now, then you got something.

Chase Mohseni (37:04.426)
It's interesting, I always tell people, if I'm an advising member talking to them, like, look, you have this company, it's a product. Your product is about value in value out. And it's like a, it's kind of an unemotional relationship, but you have an ability to layer on another product that is an emotional relationship that can help you when there are peaks and valleys in your customer's experience with you. And that's called your brand, right? And so that is either that's your personal brand, that's your...

products brand that's all of the different things that you do in between their usage of your product that allow you to keep the emotion and the like, the psych essentially, how happy they are with your experience as high as humanly possible. And I think people are getting wise to this and essentially it's like the D to Cification of B2B and it's happening at the, at the PLG like in the PLG world a lot more right now. And I think like anything it's

Darwish Gani (37:57.756)
Sure, of course.

Chase Mohseni (38:00.982)
as kind of you have these early adopters and innovators and it will move up market. But like anything, it's gonna take them, you know, four or five years to get their act together. Maybe faster, cause you know, information moves more quickly and people are willing to act more. But you're seeing it, you know, the Miros, Looms, you know, Survey Monkeys of the world, all these brands are having a lot of fun with their marketing. Obviously in our market, Triple Whale has done such an incredible job of like having just a good time.

Darwish Gani (38:23.856)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (38:30.994)
with their marketing and making sure that people just kind of smile whenever they think of the brand. I think that's almost like, recall is just about the emotion that you derive from that. If you can think of, like say we'll just use Triple Whale and say, man these guys are just hilarious. It's so much fun. Oh yeah, they service attribution. Oh, I need attribution. They're the most fun ones. They're the least stuffy ones. I'm going to go with those guys because they feel like they're me. That's really what

That's what cuts through. It's what you think of when you think of brands and you put them on, right? It's like, oh, my dad, it's funny, I got him some Viori stuff and he's like, yeah, I've seen you wearing this a lot. I didn't know if it was like for me. So he puts it on and it's obviously really comfortable. He's like, this is for me. And so he starts looking at the brands and he's like, oh yeah, they're outdoors. He's like, now I'm outdoors. It's funny kind of how these things work together.

Darwish Gani (39:22.873)
Hehehe

Chase Mohseni (39:26.206)
And so then I remember he's like, so send me the website. I'm going to buy some more stuff. He saw the price tag. He's like, what the fuck? You paid this much for this thing? And I'm like, dude, like nice things cost and it feels good, but you have these associations with what kind of life you're living, putting yourself in those clothes. Same thing, Lululemon has done an incredible job of. So I think you're dead on. It's going to be this consumerification of this. And people are going to have, the more people lean into getting their personal brands in place.

the easier it's gonna be to accelerate the business, like the business brands as well as a result of that. I think the one thing I would say to anyone who's listening that is a founder, but also has some really great killers inside is help them grow their personal brands because this is like a asset that they'll have for life and they'll always remember that you gave them access to growing their personal brand. I think in the old days, and maybe you experienced this, you felt like you couldn't

think about you when you worked for a company and you didn't think, and maybe I'm overstating this, but a lot of times you didn't feel like the company was in it with you. I think the new age of companies, as they help people grow their business, like their own kind of little personal stuff, you'll see an even deeper affinity for the company that they're working for because you've given them. Yeah, dude. Yeah. Jason Lincoln, bro.

Darwish Gani (40:44.656)
If you see this company Lemlist. Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah. I, I don't know anyone from them, but I see all their sales guys and their founder all post pretty good content all the time. I think they made a post sometime recently that they get 20 million impressions organically on link on Twitter or LinkedIn every week. Um, that is, that's crazy. When I saw that number, everything shifted in my mind. I was like, Whoa, this has changed. This is.

Chase Mohseni (40:58.22)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (41:06.295)
Bananas.

Darwish Gani (41:15.196)
The B2B SaaS, like lower mid market game, and they're PLG, I'd say more so, but like this world is, it's a consumer marketing world. It is a consumer market.

Chase Mohseni (41:28.606)
Yeah, 100%. I think that's, that is probably the title of this episode. It is a consumer marketing world. That is a bar, dude. So we usually, I think that like we should close off the main section on that. Incredible. Have there been any products that you use recently that have been a great experience? I can tell you one from me. I just signed up for,

the browsing company's new browser arc. It's not new, I'm just old and went, got to it. And just the onboarding experience was like this very, I don't know, it's kind of biblical, dude. Do you like, if your sound was on, it's like, oh, and they're saying welcome to the new internet. And you're like, oh my God, this is, I'm so happy that I've been welcomed. And it was a really delightful experience. And the browsing experience, like all of it's been pretty.

Pretty great. I might also just be on one of those placebo highs where like they made me feel so good during the onboarding that I feel like I just have to like this, but I was really impressed with how they productized that experience, which I've done a hundred times already and made it feel new and meaningful.

Darwish Gani (42:35.536)
Dope, dope. Products on my side. Let me see.

Chase Mohseni (42:35.831)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (42:42.436)
Oh, I have two. The first one is clay. So clay, yeah, it's really nice. Yeah, it's really nice. I'm still validating its accuracy versus some other processes, but it seems to be heading in a really cool direction that's way more intuitive. And yeah, I think it's really good. I think clay is really good.

Chase Mohseni (42:47.606)
Dude, I just did it. I just did it. It's incredible.

Darwish Gani (43:09.724)
magical, they're touching on a magical new type of experience that was really cumbersome before. So I would say that was number one. And then number two is maybe for the e-commerce folks out there, there's a lot of e-commerce people listening. This is a company that we wish we could use, but have not been able to use called Loop subscriptions. They've moved over like 400 or something brands from recharge and bold to Loop over the last year or two.

Chase Mohseni (43:12.972)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (43:28.096)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (43:37.612)
And they have never lost a customer the other way around. Um, that stat was crazy to me. I was just, I was just talking to the founder the other day. He told me that stat and I was like, say that one more time. Like, and he's like, yeah, what do you think? I was like, this is crazy. And I think the team is, the team is like based in India. So they're extreme hustlers, founder built a big company there before. So sometimes they have a little trouble breaking into like these larger accounts, but it seemed to me what they have is like way, way better product. Uh, and it's just a matter of time before it becomes.

Chase Mohseni (43:40.148)
Oh my god.

Darwish Gani (44:07.116)
seen. And we've had a couple of customers, we've moved over to them as well from OpenBorder, and they're pretty large merchants. And so that, if you're a subscription customer on Shopify, I think Loop is an interesting product to go check out. People seem really raving about it.

Chase Mohseni (44:30.058)
It's funny, by the way, just given the tenor of the like last 10 minutes of the conversation, how we're talking about SaaS companies as brands now. And it really does feel like that's going to be something that becomes more part of the natural conversation is it's not, Hey, you should try this product. It's like, go check out this brand. Um, what they sell is software, but it is about like, Hey, it's a brand rather than just, Hey, go check out this tool, which is kind of like old, you know, it's old language, um, but yeah, that's super interesting. So.

The last thing we usually do is we end on like a growth nugget. Um, I think since I've been in my, and debated a little bit, so I'm going to go and say, you know, I'm in my first two weeks as a CMO of heat map. And I think the thing that I underestimated was if you give, I've said this before, but it's a weird one to get a hard reset on it. Cause you go to a new job.

If you give and people have received and really appreciate what you've done for them, when you go do something new, they're going to be like knocking, beating down the door to support you. And it sounds weird because that's not technical. Usually I give like a technical growth marketing thing. Hey, think about this. Think about this kind of number. But I've seen kind of like the partnership, you know, gates open up.

really quickly and it's because of the relationships you build. And I think this, um, a lot of times I have been so obsessed with just hitting numbers and making sure that the charts look good, that I forget just how much people will show up for you. Um, even in the beginning, when you don't have something amazing to show when you've shown up for them. And so that might be a little bit hippie dippy, um, as Rob would say, but

I've seen that that's kind of my growth thing for the week is like show up for people that show up for you in spades when you have something new that they can support and be a part of. So that's mine. I don't know how that's been as you guys have kind of like you said, transitioned out of the day to day at Pangea and gone to open border. Has that been something you've experienced?

Darwish Gani (46:39.504)
Um, a little less open border because we brought a lot of our team from Pangea was a spin out, but at Pangea, some of our best early hires are all from network and, um, many of them actually were students. So before Pangea, I started a school, uh, called horizons. Uh, and so that's it. We don't have time for that, but basically I had a bunch of kids, a bunch of students that I taught, I met when they were in college and all the top students from horizons, uh, we hired many of them in, into Pangea and they would call me and they'd have like.

Chase Mohseni (46:43.511)
Okay. Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (46:52.332)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (47:09.536)
amazing jobs at Apple, at Amazon, at like unicorn companies, like amazing offers. And I'd be like, wow, those jobs sound really cool. Like I'm a 10 person company. We're just starting up, we're selling skincare. But like I have this role, if you're interested in joining me, like you could, like I wouldn't even sell it. I would just say like, this is what I have. And if you want to do it to be fun. But honestly, like you have an amazing opportunity there. I'm, I'm jealous for it. I'm jealous. Like that's really cool. And then time and again, they just bet on me.

Chase Mohseni (47:33.893)
Yeah.

Darwish Gani (47:38.184)
because we knew each other and we had a lot of respect for the environment that they were put in before. And we've had, you know, we had a ton of hires that came through there and from Pangea, I think we've probably put out four or five founders now who've went on and raised and building coal companies. So that was for Pangea was really big for us. And it was because we like, I was like mentors to all these guys and gals.

So, everyone here, and then they just had a lot of affinity to us, and we were hires we wouldn't have been able to make otherwise.

Chase Mohseni (48:13.55)
I don't know if you guys got the real growth nugget out of this that we just gave you, which is start a school as a way to recruit people. That's a little cheat code I took out of that I'm going to, I'm filing in the back. When you want to have an amazing cohort of people who just want to follow you into the gates of hell, it's because you've helped them learn how to do things. Absolutely. That was killer. Darvish, this was such a pleasure. I love learning about kind of the way that you see the world. It's...

It's great to reconnect after all this time. And yeah, thanks for doing it, man. Enjoy, enjoy that wedding.

Darwish Gani (48:45.712)
Sure. I'll see you around. And yeah, thanks again for taking the time and chat soon.

Chase Mohseni (48:51.306)
Yeah. Chat soon. Great job, man.