Vishal Punwani is the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, the world’s first generative AI-enhanced virtual workplace platform. Founded at Harvard's Innovation Labs, SoWork transforms team productivity and collaboration by seamlessly integrating work tools, social spaces, and gamification. As businesses adapt to hybrid and remote-first environments, Vishal discusses how SoWork bridges the gap between traditional office settings and the evolving needs of modern workforces.

In addition to his leadership role at SoWork, Vishal is a medical doctor, Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs, and a mentor at Oxford, MIT, and Hollywood startups. He has also worked at the World Health Organization and was one of Khan Academy’s highest-rated teaching fellows in health and medicine.

Tune in to learn how SoWork is revolutionizing remote work dynamics by reducing costs, boosting productivity, and enhancing workplace culture with exciting new features, such as in-app gaming and immersive team-building experiences!

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Choosing the Right Tools: Selecting the right technology is crucial to boost productivity in remote and hybrid work environments.
• Human Behavior & Autonomy: Remote vs. in-person work is influenced by human behavior and individual autonomy, not just logistical concerns.
• Staying Flexible with Work Trends: In a post-pandemic world, companies must adapt to evolving hybrid and remote work trends to meet the changing needs of their workforce.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Vishal Punwani on Linkedin
• SoWork
  

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show. 

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus. I am the founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey. And get a glimpse into the future of the industry. This episode is brought to you by, you guessed it, at Here's Waldo Recruiting. We work with game and tech firms and prioritize quality over quantity. We find you who you need today. 

We have Vishal, who goes by Vish, Punwani, with us. Vish is the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, founded at Harvard. SoWork is the world's first generative AI-enhanced virtual workplace, which transforms productivity and team cultures for thousands of teams around the globe.

This is very interesting. I met him at a conference. He does all of the things. Besides being a CEO, he is a medical doctor and entrepreneur in residence with Harvard alumni entrepreneurs and mentors at Oxford, MIT, and several Hollywood startups. In his prior life, Vish worked at the World Health Organization in Geneva and became one of the highest-rated teaching fellows at the Khan Academy in health and medicine. He likes traveling, playing video games, ice hockey, and building things with smart people. 

Let's get started. Glad to have you here. For those who don't know or use SoWork, can you please dive a little bit deeper into what it is? 

Vishal Punwani: Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Lizzie. It was great meeting you at GDC last year. That was a lot of fun. SoWork is basically a virtual workplace. It's a virtual office platform. It looks and feels like a video game, kind of like Animal Crossing or Zelda or something like that, but it has a whole bunch of workplace tools layered in. So every, you know, user or teammate of yours will have their own avatar. 

You'll have a customizable workplace that, you know, customization works just like it does in the Sims. In fact, one of the main people who built the Sims, his name is Bing Gordon. He's one of our angels and one of my closest mentors. So he was really, really instrumental in us building the customization function of SoWork.

Anyway, when your avatars walk up to each other, you'll automatically connect over live stream video and audio. When you walk away, you'll automatically disconnect. So it's very good for spatial and fluid calls simulating the office environment. And what we started to do over the last, I guess, year and a half is, implement a lot of these more cutting edge AI workplace features. So you can automatically have your meetings summarized and transcribed, and action items can automatically be generated for all your meetings. And then those can be automatically assigned in Asana to the right people, et cetera. So it's just a really fun thing to build that seems to be making an impact for people around the world.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, what a cool experience. I love how you've gamified work. And I didn't know that about the Sims. What is SoWork? What does it stand for? 

Vishal Punwani: So SoWork means Social Online Work. I had the whole idea when we were actually building a different software on campus at Harvard. And when the pandemic hit, we were all kicked off campus obviously, so it was pretty much everybody else in the world. My team was basically spread out around Boston. And every day jumping onto Slack and Zoom, it just kind of sucked. Like it felt like the lifeblood of my team was kind of slowly seeping out because I'm like a really big in-person guy. So it's actually kind of ironic that I'm building SoWork. 

But you know, I thought about the times in my life when I felt super connected to people, despite being across long distances, and it always reminded me of the time I played World of Warcraft. I'm sure you're familiar, given what you do. I had so much fun playing that game when I was, like, 18, 19 years old. I met so many of my best friends playing that game. And it turns out there's actually a fair amount of organization work and stuff like that when you are playing that game at a high level. Like the raids were 40 people. Instead of like 5 to 10 nowadays. So then you have to keep track of things like banking and there's like a ledger system and there's all sorts of coordination and organization of people and work in that game. And so we wanted to translate that over to help on both the social and the productivity side. And that's why we came up with Social Online Work. 

Lizzie Mintus: So you were inspired, you would say, by World of Warcraft. That's where the idea kind of came from, and mixed with the circumstance of the pandemic.

Vishal Punwani: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: And what were you building before? And how did you make this transition? 

Vishal Punwani: We were building something that I like to call the Spotify of education, specifically health sciences, nursing, medical education. So basically what we would do is we would work with schools. We worked with Harvard. We worked with UBC, we worked with Calgary, we worked with McMaster, we worked with a whole bunch of schools across the US and Australia as well, and the UK. We had lots of people from all over the world. 

And basically what we would do is we work with the medical and nursing faculties tied into their testing systems, and figure out where all the students were in all of their various competencies inside those subjects. For example, in med school, it's kind of broken out into biochem and pharmacology and histology and cardio and, you know, pulmonology, et cetera. And based on testing results from the schools, we would be able to figure out where each student was on any of those dimensions. And then we would be able to serve up from the Internet all of the most used resources that successful students around the world- remember, we would know which successful students were using what based on grades. So we'd be able to serve up all of the most high yield items from the internet that everybody who's using to all the people who really needed them. So it's kind of like, instead of you going out on the internet and finding the stuff that you need to learn, topic X, Y, and Z, that stuff would be streamed to you based on, based on you and what you needed. So that's why we called it the Spotify of education.

Lizzie Mintus: Cool. And then did you keep the same team when you had to make this pivot? Did any of that transfer? I feel like business transitions are stressful and not everybody makes it. So how did you make it through? What did you change? What do you keep? Who did you add to your team? 

Vishal Punwani: Yeah. Well, it turns out that a lot of engineers were inspired by gaming when they were little. So that was a really fortunate point for us. And we had a number of engineers on our team at the time when we were building the prior software that just loved building games. And you know, if you have an engineering team, you can just ask them, Hey, like show of hands, how many of you guys have built a game? How many of you were inspired by playing video games when you were little? It'll be like 90% of them, right? So that's how we discovered that essentially. 

And so we were able to keep pretty much the whole team, because we were very excited about working together. Like, we were all excited about the problem, sure. But we were all extra excited about working together because we developed these really strong friendships over time. 

And the core of the team, we'd gone so far back. Like, the core of our team had known each other for, like, 10-12 years. So we're super close. We were going to work on problems together for probably the rest of our lives, right? We did end up running into lots of roadblocks as we pivoted. You know, we had to kind of let some of our team members go who kind of weren't the right fit for the new direction and speed because building outside of education is a lot faster. And people prefer a bit more stability. So that was a learning experience.

The second learning was, many of our angel investors were inspired by the mission that we had in the prior company, which was about, if we were able to kind of build these algorithms that were super good at training healthcare professionals, you can take that to all sorts of countries around the world that are less resourced when it comes to delivering a world class education. And so a lot of our angel investors were inspired by that mission. And to see us switch was a painful transition for many of them. I'm close with all of our, I mean, I would say 90% of our angel investors today, 95%. And some of them who initially were not on board came around. Some of them, we were never able to kind of bring over, but you know, that's life. Business is tough. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I mean, at least your company has survived instead of shutting down after all. Okay. And so then when you started the company, you had this team, which you knew each other for a long time. Where did you meet them? 

Vishal Punwani: This is kind of ridiculous, but Mark, our CTO, I met him playing World of Warcraft. And so it was that game- that game, I swear. So I accidentally joined an Australian server. So I was on the west coast at the time when I first started playing, you know, when I was 18.And I had a friend who I used to always play Dota with, and Warcraft 3. So this is obviously way back in the day. Warcraft 2, 3, we grew up playing like initial Command and Conquer, then Age of Empires, then Warcraft 1, 2, Tides of, Tides of, what is it called? Reign of chaos and then tides of something. 

Anyway, and then we started playing Dota and then we started playing World of Warcraft. And so I just said, you pick the server and I'll just join it. He's a night owl. And so he picked an Australian server, even though we were in North America. And so I made friends with all these Australians, including our current CTO, Mark, and he's also one of our co-founders.

It turns out he's like the strongest engineer anybody's ever met. So he was just perfect. I remember when we brought him over to Harvard, there was this lineup that was always there that was at his desk of all the students, kids who would come from both the proper university, as well as from MIT, who would line up to ask him questions about stuff. And at some point, I had to be like, Okay, we're shipping slower because Mark is helping all these people with questions. So I had to put a sign up on his desk that said, Do not talk to Mark. If you want to talk to Mark, talk to me first. And then I will decide whether you can talk to Mark or not, because it's just getting out of hand. So that went on for months. 

Lizzie Mintus: I should have had Mark on the podcast. 

Vishal Punwani: Oh my God, he's so good. Honestly, if there's somebody I'm consistently impressed with over and over, it's my two co-founders, Emma and Mark. Emma, I had met a couple of years after Mark, but I met her in undergrad. And then we ended up working together teaching anatomy. Then we taught biology, then we worked at Khan Academy together, then we worked at the WHO together, so we've worked together on a ton of different things. Then we worked at Harvard together, actually. 

And I saw that she was super thoughtful and probably the smartest person overall that I know. And so it made sense. And each of us, the 3 of us, we tackle such different parts of the business and the founder pie, I guess, that it's just an awesome combination, which makes it easier to build multiple things with these people.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Enter his money and a transition because you know them so well. So did you start by building this kind of thing for yourself? 

Vishal Punwani: Oh yeah, exactly. That's a good point. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Vishal Punwani: So basically when we were kicked out off campus because of COVID, my intent was to build a team that was really, really close. That's why I love in-person. And when I felt that slipping, I was like, this isn't the type of CEO I wanted to be. This isn't the type of company I wanted to build. You know, and I'd left full-time medicine at this point, right. So I'm like, I'm not gonna not build the thing that I want to build.

So I was like, okay. After I had racked my brain for a long time and we'd come up with the like World of Warcraft for work idea, World of Work Craft is what we called it then, we decided to build out a prototype, a hacky prototype, and test it internally with our team. We did that, took a couple weeks, and it was like, amazing what potential we saw for it to transform our team.

So we essentially shelved the other thing we were working on, and we kind of pivoted everybody full time to this thing. And it just completely changed our team. And then we said, okay, let's just see what other teams in our cohorts at Harvard thought about it. And so we brought them in and they were using it for their teams because remember everybody was kicked off campus. So they were also using Zoom and Slack. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Vishal Punwani: The feedback was incredible and so we thought, okay, maybe there's something here. And then that kind of all added evidence to our kind of belief system that we should really double down on it. 

Lizzie Mintus: I like it. Okay, so you have your product. Everyone at Harvard likes it. How do you go about scaling it outside of Harvard? And at what point do you start fundraising for your new product? 

Vishal Punwani: Yeah. Well, scaling it outside, that was kind of an easy thing for us because, you know, you throw up a website. A billion people are having this problem. It's probably more than a billion at that point, because it was mid pandemic. So, like, at the time I say a billion, because I'm trying to choose a big number. 

Turns out, it's actually bigger than that. And so everybody on the planet was having this problem. And so it was really easy. It was almost like, you find untouched land and you just dip a bucket into a lake to catch a bunch of fish, you know what I mean? I don't know if that's how the world used to be, but that's what I imagined in my head. And so getting early testers and other people outside of the Ivy walls to validate was easier at that point in time. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, stop playing Animal Crossing and stop watching, what was it, Tiger King.

Vishal Punwani: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: And come playtest for us. 

Vishal Punwani: Exactly right. Exactly. So that was that. And then the fundraising thing, you know, fundraising is always opportunistic. That's always the best way to do it. Obviously, you can do, like, surgical precision targeted fundraising and things like that. But the majority of checks are going to be written in opportunistic times. And so we were able to benefit from that. And the other thing is that, when you build something that is new and seems to strike a chord positively for people, other people who are successful and who are building cool stuff, they just find a way to get in touch with you. 

That's like one of the biggest learnings I've had. I've had to reach out less and instead get to field more inbound meetings and things like that with really cool people. So that's how we met Bing, right? And he's like this incredible magnate in Silicon Valley. He's like board of Amazon and Duolingo and Zynga and Spotify. He's just this incredible, incredible guy. And that's how we met him and a bunch of other people. And then inevitably they helped us with our fundraising that was successful for us. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And then getting clients was easy because everybody was having this problem.

Okay. And then what about, it's January 2025. I was going to say 2024, still adjusting. But so many companies are doing RTO or some kind of hybrid work. So how have you pivoted or have you had to pivot? 

Vishal Punwani: Yeah. I guess, this is such an interesting area because it's almost like a massive earthquake happened in 2020 metaphorically and everything's being rebuilt as we speak and it's not done yet. As with any natural disaster, it doesn't take a year to rebuild, or two years, or whatever. Everything is always much more complicated. 

It reminds me of an anecdote I always mentioned, which is, like, when we were fundraising, I'd say 20% of the investors that we talked to just thought about things in such a simplistic way. They were like, Oh well, you're building this thing for the remote, but the vaccine is going to come out soon. Everyone will just take the vaccine and then everyone will be back at work. And the world will be back to normal. And I'm like, Oh, you guys are so cute. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, I work for the World Health Organization, let me tell you how it's going to work. 

Vishal Punwani: Well, I mean, I think you just need to have some modicum of understanding of how human behavior works. That is just not how humans work, you know? There were some people who were like, Great, I'm on board, like jab me. You'll have some people who are like, well, I believe that it's important, but I also believe my own individual autonomy to choose is important. Great, don't jab me. And that's perfectly reasonable. And then you'll have people who are like, wait, you're telling me to get jabbed. Go fuck yourself, you know? And so it is not as simple. 

Nothing is as simple when it comes to human behavior. And I think what we're dealing with now, collectively, is just another example of that, where RTO is happening in lots of different companies for lots of reasons, and some of it is surveillance. Some of it is, you know, the illusion of productivity. Some of it is legitimate. If you're working on some hardware or something like that, and you need a kind of butts and seats, or butts on an assembly line or something like that. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, people who work on an assembly line.

Vishal Punwani: Thank you. That's more eloquent.

But at the end of the day, I think if all managers and team leaders know is Zoom and Slack, then I don't blame them for wanting to go back in-person. It's just tool choices wrong, right? It's like, I recently put together a squat rack and I didn't initially like the right ratchet set. And it was really hard to use wrenches to do that thing. I hated my life when I was doing that. And then I got a proper ratchet set and I put it together in like 10 minutes. You know, so I think like tool choice is really important, and if you try to solve everything with a single tool, i. e. in-person, or in Slack, then you're not approaching the problem in a thoughtful enough way that balances the needs of your company, which are legitimate, with the needs of your people, which are really legitimate.

Lizzie Mintus: What kind of squat rack did you buy? 

Vishal Punwani: I don't know what it's called. 

Lizzie Mintus: I built this out too. 

Vishal Punwani: Yeah, it's pretty good. I'll send you a link after. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, yeah. I work in games. I like to dress up and I also like to lift. So we'll compare notes. 

I think RTO is so interesting too, because in the pandemic, from a recruitment standpoint, people had all the power. They would send their demand list. They would say, I need a sign on bonus and I want to work four days a week. And I want all of this. And then layoffs started happening, starting with Meta's layoffs which just made this windfall of people losing their jobs and companies feeling like they have the power and they can cancel all the extra benefits, remote work, DEI, anything that they feel is apparently not necessary, right? Whether you believe that or not. But to me, it seems like, I mean, we'll see productivity and I'm sure there's data on it. And people have various reasons for why they are doing RTO. 

But we'll also see a shift again soon towards people being in power and candidates having the right to choose and then it'll be the same thing. And so I'm so interested in companies who said yeah, you can work remotely forever. Okay, no now you're back in the office or your fire will do during that shift. 

Vishal Punwani: That's the thing about tool choice, right? I mean, if you choose something that actually works for people and the companies, and you have ways to track productivity and deliverables and stuff in a way that makes sense, you don't really need to be swinging pendulums. You can actually do something that is reasonable. 

Lizzie Mintus: Whole time, no matter what. 

Vishal Punwani: Right. It will always work. Because it's resilient, it's sturdy, it's a good solution. And so that's what we're trying to build. You know, we have teams that have half their companies in the office physically and guess what, like you're still going to have designers who say, Oh, we're in on Tuesdays and Fridays and then product people who are like, Oh, we're on Mondays and engineers who are like, actually, we prefer working in bed. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. 

Vishal Punwani: And then as soon as you have a few of those, guess what? You're effectively a remote company. 

Lizzie Mintus: I mean, everyone's like, oh yes, I have to badge in so I don't get fired so I can sit on Zoom with my team that is somewhere else, which is so irking. And the only reason they tolerate this is because they don't have the upper hand. But once they have the upper hand, that is done.

Okay. So tell me about data and success stories of companies that have adopted SoWork from Zoom, Slack, or hopefully not Teams, and Microsoft Stack, but whatever other stack they were using. How that brought productivity. Boost in culture. and all that?

Vishal Punwani: You know, one of the things that keeps us going is that daily, I'm not even joking daily, we get messages from our customers that say things that are just amazing. One of my recent favorites with the end of year wrap up is from a lady named Alexandra at Squid Pixels the company. I'm sure she wouldn't mind me mentioning her name, but she sent us a message from her team that said, SoWork is the best thing we did in 2024.

And I'm not even joking. We get messages like that all the time. The aggregate, if I was to give you kind of buckets of why people say things like this, it's because we allow them to, A, reduced costs. They're not paying for physical real estate. Earlier you asked a question about how is RTO affecting our business? Well, just as a small aside, it turns out that when you have COVID plus an economic recession, plus lower spending power, plus higher rent prices, plus all these things, and it's harder to raise money for 99% of startups out there, or, you know, businesses irrespective, the number one thing on executive minds is shit, we need to get burn under control, right? We need to make sure our costs are under control. And when you're faced with paying 10K a month or 20K a month for a building or a room or whatever, whatever it is, 

Lizzie Mintus: Or much, much more, plus the cost of having everybody in San Francisco or whatever expensive location you've picked. Seattle. Yeah. 

Vishal Punwani: Totally. It's ridiculous, right? You also often have to pay these things a year up front. And it's like, Okay, well, who has that cash flow right now? Right? Not that many people. It's just a lot more of an elegant trade off to at least try something that isn't that. And for a lot of companies, they've really taken to the virtual office space. And in the virtual office space, we're one of the top ones, if not the top one. 

And so for us, we've actually noticed business going up instead of down. And I think it's because of all of these other things that are happening in the world right now economically.

Lizzie Mintus: Success stories. I mean, people think it's the best thing that's happened, but I imagine you get the kind of the water cooler talk back in the collab that would happen naturally that you would miss. 

Vishal Punwani: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for redirecting me. The feedback buckets are really productivity.

And culture and so on the productivity side, it's like, okay, great. This is awesome because we were able to centralize all of our tools and we were able to cut costs. And because we have a full Slack chat and obviously all the video services like Zoom and stuff like that. And then, because of our AI integrations, they're able to do some workflows faster. And, you know, those are kind of nascent for us, but they still work pretty well. And we're expanding that kind of repertoire. 

On the productivity side, people are happy. And then on the culture side, you know, that's been a huge area of happiness for our customers, because they're able to, instead of being a little video tile on zoom, they're actually able to represent themselves as whoever they might be in-person, instead of having a single profile picture on Slack. They're able to decorate their little desk space and have their cat or whatever other pet follows them. We have all sorts of pets and customizations available. So those are the 2 buckets that we hear the most about. And so those are the features that we try to lean into. 

Lizzie Mintus: I like it. I also think that remote work enables a more diverse culture from a gender and global perspective. And there is data that a more diverse team yields more ROI. Because I mean, if you have a baby that you are breastfeeding, for instance, maybe you're not going to want to go into the office. RTO is going to be terrible for you especially in the U.S. when you have to go back after three months or whatever it is. So I think that there's a ton of benefits. 

And so you're in this virtual workspace world, which it sounds like you are the best or one of the best in, what is the future of SoWork? Do you feel like you might gamify it or there's other use cases for it, or you're really going to stay focused on this virtual workspace for the foreseeable future?

Vishal Punwani: It's a great question. But first, I want to just agree with you on the equity perspective. I think equal opportunity is really important. Equal outcomes may or may not happen, and that's okay, because that's life. But equal opportunity is really important. And the number of women, for example, that I've talked to that are like, Well, we are living lives. And we had a kid. I'm great at my job, I'm amazing at what I do. And all of a sudden, it just doesn't seem fair without a clear rationale that actually passes some kind of sniff test, which it doesn't, to go back to the office, so I'm obviously super against things like that. And I think they fly in the face of equal opportunity initiatives that I think are really, really important to get everybody's brain power on the side of building. Right? Again, an equal outcome may or may not happen doesn't have to be that way. That's fine. That's an individual thing, but the equal opportunity is the least that we can do from a company standpoint to try to make things the good version of inclusive.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, absolutely. And then the future of SoWork is virtual workspace or virtual workspace plus something else or to be decided. 

Vishal Punwani: What we want to do is build a platform that's almost kind of like Roblox, but for work first, or for adults, I guess you could say. They have a lot of moral and ethical things that I don't agree with that I've read about from Roblox, but in a sense, I like what they build from a platform perspective, where they give you the tools and then you create whatever you want. 

And so from our perspective, that's kind of what we're aiming to do, where we build a really rock solid, stable platform that's like multiplayer and multi- customizable, multiple users can customize. And it's kind of like a buildable world like you'd find in lots of other games. And we want it to be an open world. We want it to be like the MMO of starting with workplaces, but then other games and other social events and things like that. We just saw workplaces as the most extreme urgent need that people would actually pay for, you know what I mean?

So, as it stands, we have a completely custom built engine. And it allows us to take our destiny into our own hands, so to speak. So in the present day, we have a lot of important workplace tools. And the next thing that a lot of teams are asking for is they don't want to be linked outside to play games with their teams. They want the gaming to happen inside SoWork. 

And so what we did was we shipped our first completely native game built on top of SoWorks engine. It's called Tank Wars. So, the idea is, it's almost like playing Battle Mode in Mario Kart, but you have tanks that you can customize and gain, use power ups for and level up and things like that. So it's pretty fun. There's other things that we're doing in the gaming arena. So sneak peek, there's a gardening sim that will be there. Harvest Moon was one of my favorite things when I was a teenager and kind of like a pre teen. So that type of gaming is dear to my heart. 

We have a whole like monster catching, monster battling system. I won't reveal the name because it's too cool. And so I don't want to, I don't want to reveal it too soon. But that's going to happen as well. And so there's a bunch of gaming related things and depending on what you're doing in the workplace that could allow you to unlock more and more of the functionalities and special items in each game. So it's all kind of this loop that we want to work really nicely together. 

And then, you know, on top of that, we want lots of workplaces to kind of exist together in the same world. Spotify is hosting an event with some artists. If you subscribe to them, you might get a notification that says, Hey, I know you're in your workplace right now, but this Spotify thing starts in an hour. You can get a ticket here and then teleport to their arena when you're ready. So that kind of, like, more massively multiplayer online space is what we're really going for. 

Lizzie Mintus: I like it. I need to get SoWork for my team. Okay. I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to your website, sowork.com. 

Last question. You are a startup advisor and you've seen many different companies. What advice would you offer for any listeners who are considering starting their own company? 

Vishal Punwani: Hmm. I like to give advice based on painful lessons. I'm not a huge fan of kind of academia-izing things. That's not a word. But I think experience is really the best teacher. And so I would say as much as you can, as you start your company, as you recruit your team, as you validate your problem, which is pretty much the 1st thing you need to do, you figure out pricing and fundraising and all the different things that you need to do- don't be too much in a rush to grow up and start running. 

Every entrepreneur is like, We want to build a unicorn. We want to be a billion dollar company. Yeah. Okay. That's fine. Don't necessarily just give up on that, but do things in the right order. It's really important to make sure that your actions align in a priority based manner with what you actually need to do. And the best framework I've seen to make sure you're doing that is the idea that there's every company, every team has an actual stage and a behavioral stage. And as long as you're behaving, as long as your behavioral stage is matching your actual stage, whether it's in fundraising, product development, customer development, team building, et cetera, then you give yourself the best chance to be successful. 

There's a really, really good article about this that I can send you after. It's by the startup genome project or something like that. I can't remember exactly what it's called, but honestly, it was life changing for me in my younger CEO days. I'll send that along because I think it could be really helpful to other people to really internalize and I'm not joking. It's really important that your behavioral stage matches your actual stage. 

For example, you get ahead of yourself, just bring yourself back. Like, get excited, that's fine, celebrate, whatever- bring yourself back, because you're going to be avoiding so much pain later on, and you'll have to trust me on that. And if you don't, I'll look forward to an email from you to tell me I was right, once you realize it, because it's a law. It's like Newton's law.

Lizzie Mintus: I talked to so many founders who say, Yeah, we're going to hire these people. But it's like, Okay, what are you looking for? Oh, we don't have that yet. Do you have a job description? No, that's kind of what we're thinking. Okay, we have to learn to walk first. 

Vishal Punwani: Order is important. Order of operations. 

Lizzie Mintus: So important. We've been talking to Vishal Punwani, CEO and co-founder of SoWork. Vish, where can people go to sign up for your product or contact you to tell you that you're right? Or just to get in touch. 

Vishal Punwani: Yeah, you can go to sowork.com. If you want to try out SoWork, we do free trials, so you can go for that. And otherwise, you can find me on Twitter. I'm @vishyvish. 

Lizzie Mintus: Vishy Vish, amazing. Thank you. 

Vishal Punwani: No worries. Nice to see you.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.