Meet The Dropout Who’s Helped Raise £500M For Startups and Funds w/ Jay Dias | Leela Capital

00:00
Jay Dias:
So I have a principle. It doesn't matter about what sector it is, because 80% of business is business and 20% is about what you know about the sector. And this, when it comes to technology, businesses, is all about how resilient is your unit, economics, how much of that, you know, LTV to CAC ratio are you generating? How quickly are you generating it? What I do is I go, what is going to make the biggest impact in the next moment? So is it I need new sales, is it I need to handle this customer decision, is it I need to find the right person and I see myself as a resource, and the best and the only resource I have is time . And therefore, how do I then take that mentality into the rest of the business?

00:34
Jay Dias:
So, like, I live by Sting's motto, right, with a little tweak, which is you've got to shoot for the stars until you get shot down. There is no barrier. Just go for it.

00:46
Amardeep Parmar:
Today's guest is Jay Dias, the founder of Leela Capital. They've got three activities. They're regulatory, host, they have corporate finance and also work on investment strategies. But how Jay got here today is what's really fascinating because there's been some real hardship along the way. There's things that haven't gone to plan, but it's also been some massive wins and massive successes. So he's helped create over 500 million for different companies. He's two businesses as a CFO and CEO, he's led end to end acquisitions of 13 companies. And he left school at 16. So you've got to listen to this story because of where Jay has come from and what he's been able to do from that background, I'm sure it's going to inspire you and you're going to learn so much. So I'm Amar from the BAE HQ.

01:33
Amardeep Parmar:
So, Jay, so great to have you on today.

01:35
Amardeep Parmar:
We've obviously known you sort of for quite some time, so I'm so glad to be able to share your story.

01:39
Amardeep Parmar:
If you went right back to the beginning, when you were growing up, what did you want to be?

01:44
Jay Dias:
Well, thanks so much for having me on. What did I want to be? Honestly, I wanted to be a musician when I was a kid. That was my kind of core thing. I studied music, like piano, guitar, flute. But I mainly sang. I used to compose a lot. I even got into grammar school because of my music. So that was really what I wanted to do. And then ended up going into a good music school. And then about two weeks in Realize I'm not that good at music to everybody else, and I'm very competitive and just thought, well, that's it, I'm not going to do this anymore. So after that, I think, where did I find myself? I just basically find myself becoming an accountant. And I don't know if at that point in time I really knew I wanted to be something else.

02:31
Amardeep Parmar:
How has that transitioned there? Right? Because if your entire life, you thought you were great at music, you go to music when you realize you're not so good, that must mean hurt your ego quite a lot, right?

02:40
Jay Dias:
I mean, look, when you're 16, 17, definitely. I also was very classically trained. So I went from an environment where, you know, if you were the soloist, you were great. Right? But that doesn't necessarily then transcend into, you know, you're a good choir boy, into, oh, great, you can go off and be a real musician. And the avenues I could have gone down, like opera and things like that, I just wasn't interested in. I wanted to be like, cool, you know, I was, I'm like a little bit older, like the Rishi Rich and Joe Shawns kind of era. And I was around with bands like Double Trouble and things like that. So I wanted to do that type of music, which I wasn't. I wasn't good at doing at all. But actually the bit when I really first started working, I was the.

03:20
Jay Dias:
I would, well, I'd say to my uncle, the cheapest bookkeeper in the world. So I was getting paid 2 pound 50 Wednesday nights and Saturdays for my uncle, who had a chapati flower business. And that was my kind of foundation from the age of about 12 to 16. So then when I stopped that, it was like, oh, how do I go and get some money? So first job was, let me just go and get some back office accounting roles. And that's where I found like, oh, I can make a bit of money. I can work at bars and restaurants, and I did the graveyard shift at the post office and so on. But that was the one where I realized, oh, okay, I can earn a little bit more.

03:53
Amardeep Parmar:
It's interesting because one of the points about when to give up, quite a good challenge for so many people, right? So you could have continued the music and keep trying and trying to live out this dream, but you took quite a pragmatic decision there, right?

04:07
Jay Dias:
Yeah, I'm very. I would say, like most people, I'm quite hard on myself, right. And like, if we take a sport like snooker okay. I'm not actually very good at snooker, but I'm better than most people I know and that's enough for me. Right. So that was my borderline bit of, you know what, I don't have to be number one, but if I'm in the top 10, that's okay. And when it came to music, I just wasn't. I mean, there was one guy I remember, he used to be able to walk up to a piano, listen to a song he's never heard before and just play it. And I was like, that would take me weeks to be able to have that level of intuition and knowledge and skill. So for me it was just a brute. I mean, I'm a very competitive individual.

04:55
Jay Dias:
So my schooling was the one thing I learned. So I went to private school until I was 11. It was 91 recessions. I then went to grammar school. I didn't go to grammar school because I did the 11 plus or anything like that. I got in because of my music. Having a strong mother, beating down doors to get you into the right school. And the thing those two schools taught me fundamentally was competition. It wasn't. I'm not the most academic person left school. I left school at 16, so that wasn't really then kind of, oh, look, I've got a great education, let me move on. But the one thing I remember is that competition theatre, and I'm competitive in everything and I still play lots of sports today. So that's the reason why I was very easy just to let it go and go.

05:35
Jay Dias:
I'm not good at this. Don't waste your time, figure out what you're good at. And I was also really good at maths, like most Asians, so I was like, great, okay, I'm just going to go down the numbers route.

05:45
Amardeep Parmar:
So we lost 14-4 last night to HSBC in football. So if you#re trying a football  team. We need new help.

05:49
Jay Dias:
I decided about a decade ago, without giving away my age too much, that I need to start doing slightly more stationary sports. So my sports now are golf, snooker and chess. They're my, they're my. They're my three.

06:05
Jay Dias:
Yeah.

06:06
Jay Dias:
And strategy board games, but that's a bit too kiki. So, yeah.

06:09
Amardeep Parmar:
Going into the accounting world. Right. And you said you went, you dropped out of school at 16.

06:12
Jay Dias:
Yeah.

06:13
Amardeep Parmar:
You're doing it a different path to how many people might see it today.

06:15
Jay Dias:
Yeah.

06:16
Amardeep Parmar:
How did you find that experience of when you're. Obviously it's one thing being with your uncle, but getting other clients and working with other people outside of your family and getting them to respect you as a young kid who hasn't been to university yet and all those things. How was that experience?

06:29
Jay Dias:
Look, I was a bit blind to it for the first, let's say three years. So I still tried to go to school, I still tried to do my A levels, just didn't stick. I've turned up to a few classes and I thought, I'm just going to go down and go and work. But we did everything. Yes, okay, I did the accounting, that's the. But you know, I did everything from selling fireworks on Ealing Road, to sending speakers out in Wembley market to. You made your money, however you made your money because you wanted to go out on the weekend.

06:58
Amardeep Parmar:
All legally, of course.

06:59
Jay Dias:
Oh, no, yeah, obviously all very.

07:01
Amardeep Parmar:
We met 16 year olds selling fireworks.

07:03
Jay Dias:
Yeah, no, that was absolutely fine back in the day.

07:05
Amardeep Parmar:
Yeah.

07:05
Jay Dias:
Going down Dover and collecting two containers of fireworks. Yeah, it was perfectly a normal thing you would do, but it was good fun with the guys.

07:13
Amardeep Parmar:
So in that period of leaving the school and flunking out music in that way, what were the different things you did in order to try and make things work and make ends meet?

07:20
Jay Dias:
I basically just took back office jobs, right. So I did six months in a credit control team, six months in an AP team, six months as an account. None of it was structured even to the point where, you know, were still doing, you know, were doing gigs, you know, were doing gigs at night and were doing kind of promoting kind of daytimers and evening club nightclubs. Like, you know, were at a club every night, like people. But it was like, for example, when I was. There was a company and it was all in Wembley, right? So there was a company called Action Computers and I was in their credit control team. But actually my job was to sit in front of a printer, wait for the thing to print off, look at whose name it was on it and then give it to them.

08:02
Jay Dias:
That was literally my job for six months. But because I had nothing else to do, I had enough now to listen to what everyone else is doing. I went, well, I can do credit control now because that's not complicated. What are you doing? So you're reconciling something, you're calling them up, you chasing them up. You have a program, you go from A to B. And because I'd done it from my uncle, it was like, oh, okay, I kind of understand how this bit works. And I slowly, without realizing it, putting things kind of together. But then I Got my big break, right? Which totally accidentally. So I also trained to be a sound engineer in music, right? Because I was like, how else can I still stay in? So me leaving music, it wasn't a clean break, right?

08:41
Jay Dias:
It was like, you know, one of the messiest breakups you can have. But then I ended up getting a file in photocopying job in an accounting firm in London. And I remember Until I was 19, all my friends had already gone to uni. And I decided like, I'm definitely not going to do EA's. I'm not going down the uni route for whatever reason. I don't learn from reading, I learn from listening. And it took me until I started working to realize that. So that's how I do that. And I was like, okay, I've got a job in an accounting firm. Brilliant, fantastic. Turned up on my first day. It was the late 90s. Electric blue suit, yellow shirt, red tie. I mean, it was horrendous.

09:17
Jay Dias:
And at the end of the week, I saw my friends who came back from uni for that week or they were either going kind of very close. So look, you know, I'm working at this company called PWC Post Warehouse Keepers, right? And I'm in their kind of back office doing their property stuff. And they were just like, Jay's such a liar. Like, why is he saying he's working for this company? Because they knew who PWC were. I didn't know who PWC were. It was just, it was a job. And I was getting paid 13, 100 pound a year. I was getting the number 18 bus into Baker street and walking down. That's, you know, because I couldn't get the tube because it was too expensive. And then it took me about a week after, well after that weekend, I went, why is.

09:53
Jay Dias:
And a very good friend of mine too. So I said to him, have I just like, do I not fit in anymore? And he went, oh no, people just don't believe you're at this company. And I went, well, who are they? So I took the opportunity, I went, oh, okay, so these guys are a big firm. And it kind of dawned on me to go, okay, here's my chance, right? This is the path. You're in the door, get your head down and just work. And I then spent six years, six in the morning to 11 at night working. So you're coming back to your long answer to your question. How do I get people to take me seriously? It's really difficult in that environment, right?

10:32
Jay Dias:
So the first year as soon as I realized the next Monday or the Tuesday, maybe went to the guy who gave me my first break, right? And my career has been full of people who've given me breaks. So Chuck called Gary Mixture. We got on because I'm a Chelsea fan, he was a Tottenham fan, we just got on. I mean, I. Look, I turned up to my interview in earring, that's how much I knew he'd be. And I literally said to him on the Tuesday, right, I want to do some basic accounting exams. But because I was. I Left school at 16, I didn't have A's, I couldn't go straight to ACA or ACCA. So I see this technician says, oh no, you've got to wait six months. Which is pretty standard in the industry, right?

11:06
Jay Dias:
I don't know, I'm not waiting six months to start this off, I'm doing it now. So I went to night school. I took my money. Lucky enough I'm still living at home, you know, I can, you know, parents were both, you know, mum was a nurse, dad was an embalmer. But, you know, they had enough that I could just stay there and not have to worry about those things like traditional Asian family. So I was able to put myself through night school and then that was when the. After about a year. So I passed those exams in the year which normally take you two years. So I was, you know, studious to a particular level.

11:34
Jay Dias:
But I was, you know, one of the partners, a chap called Mark Homan, who's just a proper old boy, he was, you know, when Price Waterhouse, before the merger, had an insolvency's apartment, they could all fit into the taxi. And he was the partner, right? He's that type of old boy. And he just noticed this kid turn up every day before he turned up and he was still in the office when he left and he just, without talking to me, just found out a bit about myself. And then the day after I did my kind of a cat, day after day, like a week after, he came up to me, went, here's a check. When it was a physical check.

12:09
Jay Dias:
Cause, you know, still, you know, this was 99, 2000 maybe, and it was a personal check from him, not from the company, covering all of the holidays I'd taken and all of the school fees I'd done nice. And he said, here you go, that's to cover it. I want you to come to the fee earning side of PwC. And it's what they would now call the school leaver program. Right. But even the school leaver program is like, you're 18, you do a year, you go back, you're like, I just did my cat. So I would have been just turning 20 at the time.

12:36
Amardeep Parmar:
That's a really big thing that he did for you there. Right. By writing that first cheque. What happened after that? What were you able to do because of that first cheque?

12:43
Jay Dias:
And it was like, great. So got my break. And you then got thrust into a world of early 2000s. Everybody's Oxbridge, right? Everyone's doing ACCA, everyone works hard, everyone's smart, everyone's diligent. How do you make a difference for yourself? And Mark still had me under his wing. He was doing the Maxwell reconstruction at the time. So I ended up going into insolvency predominantly because a chap called Tony Lomas, who I still think is the coolest person I've ever met in my life. I mean, he.

13:17
Amardeep Parmar:
Did he have an earring too?

13:18
Jay Dias:
He didn't have an earring, but he was the best interview I've ever had. And I haven't had that many because I left PWC in 2004 and I've only had three interviews since then. Right. The audit guy came to me and said, sat down with me, lovely guy, big chat, kind of going, oh, you're going to go off and take this stuff and you're going to go to these different sites and it's about reconciling and really energetic. And then the tax guy came in, spent about 45 minutes really going, there's the white book and the yellow book and this book. And you know, it's about. And I was like, okay, it's kind of interesting. And Tony walked in the room and went, I sold some ships last week. I'm about to close down the Noddy reconstruction. I'm going to work some hotels next week.

13:53
Jay Dias:
Fancy joining? Let me know. And walked out the room and I was like, yeah, I want to be you. That was it. I was solved. That was like, great. Cause insolvency is, yes, it's internal control, but it's business, it's trading, it's understanding when to sell stuff. Little did I know that the accountancy is like the lowest risk of all of the professions in the world. Right. I wish I went into being a kind of a barrow boy instead of going off and becoming an accountant.

14:23
Amardeep Parmar:
Hello.

14:23
Amardeep Parmar:
Hello.

14:24
Amardeep Parmar:
Quick introduction to let you know about BAE HQ. We're the community for high growth British Asian entrepreneurs, operators and investors. And you can join completely free at thebaehq.com join. There, you get our CEO pillars. So that's content, events and opportunities direct to your inbox every week. So you can get involved and it can help you to further your business and your career. We also have a free startup course called BAE Startup Foundations, where if you're thinking about starting a business someday or at the early stages, it gives you all that information to help you hit the ground running and to thrive in this new world. Back to the show. So it was interesting you found out that accountancy wasn't sexy at that point. Right. Because I think most people know growing up that's probably a thing.

15:08
Jay Dias:
Right.

15:08
Amardeep Parmar:
But you then left that area and you think, much more exciting in my eyes, maybe, and went across to Asia as well.

15:15
Jay Dias:
Yeah.

15:15
Amardeep Parmar:
So can you talk about that little period of your life?

15:17
Jay Dias:
Yeah, so I. I didn't have the kind of the wider network to kind of guide me through. Oh, these are the roles you should go and do. But what we did have was there were family members who own businesses, and actually at one event one night, they said, oh, you know about turnaround, right? Well, I know about insolvency. And we sat down the next day for breakfast and just talked about a restaurant chain he had in Hong Kong where there were bleeding money. And we came up with 20 or 30 ideas of how I would go about fixing it. And at the end of it, he said, fancy going to Hong Kong and helping the management team turn it around. And that was what it was, 2005. I was 25. I was like, yeah, would love to.

15:55
Jay Dias:
And that then led to me being in Asia for three years doing kind of micro turnarounds for family officers.

16:00
Amardeep Parmar:
And that's such a massive change, right, from this kid who's left school young and is now doing these things all out in Asia. Was that exciting for you to move across to Asia at that point, or was it something which is quite intimidating?

16:11
Jay Dias:
Yeah, I mean, I definitely learned my arrogance whilst at PWC because then I realized who they were and I kind of let that fester. And then, you know, I was, you know, I was a qualified accountant at 22, and I then did my undergrad and all these things. So I definitely had that confidence. And then going to Asia and I've never had. Well, then I never had an unsuccessful turnaround. So, you know, I turned around four companies. The last one was a perfume business between London and L. A. And then I came back here and, you know, one of the things that Mark Ohman said to me was, you've got to differentiate yourself.

16:42
Jay Dias:
And the way it was that you've got to do an MBA and the only school to go to if you're going to do it in the UK was London Business School. So that's when I went to London Business School to do my MBA.

16:50
Amardeep Parmar:
And do you think the experience was worth it? Because sometimes it's a bit of an argument, but should you do MBA not doing MBA. Often sometimes people do MBAs, it might because they don't know what they want to do next. It's a turning point. Right.

17:00
Jay Dias:
So I definitely knew why I wanted to do it going in, which fundamentally was I want to go into private equity. However, I did my program in 2008 and 2009, so before the GFC started and nobody was going into PE, right. So that took my whole career in a totally different trajectory. I went there simply because I needed to prove it to myself and I needed LBS taught me lots of things, but what did it really teach me? It taught me how to speak differently. It differentiated my network. And the same thing that PWC and LBs do today is, yes, you slave away for a long time, you pay a lot of money, but nobody can take that away from you.

17:45
Jay Dias:
So I can walk into any room and if I meet somebody who's very arrogant, I'm like, oh, yeah, and they go, what business school you went to or what? Yeah, you can play that against.

17:52
Amardeep Parmar:
You couldn't necessarily go into practice in the same way you might have hoped because of the global financial crisis. It's funny when you say GFC, because I thought Leon Gluten Free.

17:59
Jay Dias:
Yeah, I know, yeah, sorry, it's worse.

18:03
Amardeep Parmar:
I was like, wait, what is. So after that, what did you go into after closed doors changing?

18:09
Jay Dias:
Yeah. It would have been really natural for me just to stay in turnaround. Right. Because it was the gym, it would be so much work. But turnaround is, I would actually say, much more intense than doing startups. It's real project based. You just don't sleep for a very long time until the project's done. So I then went to venture building, which was kind of the obvious thing to go and do because I like small businesses and I like getting my hands dirty and roll my sleeves up. So I ended up going and running. I was the CFO and COO of a underwear company actually, just down road in Richmix before, you know, in Shoreditch, before Shoreditch had a tube station. So quite a while back.

18:43
Amardeep Parmar:
And so telepath underwear is quite a different swerve from what you were doing before.

18:47
Jay Dias:
Yeah, yeah.

18:48
Amardeep Parmar:
So what made you go for that?

18:49
Jay Dias:
So I have a principle. It doesn't matter about what sector it is because 80% of business is business and 20% is about what you know about the sector. Right. It was basically a spin out of Make Poverty History, which was an Else Mandela occident campaign. And Ben, who was the founder, he actually persuaded Oxfam to let him to go off and merchandise products. And the business model was to provide Calvin Klein product underwear, the same price, but fair trade and organic. Right. Surprise, surprise. Unique. I couldn't work on that. We got it to a couple of million in revenue. It was doing well. And you may or may not remember the Icelandic volcano, The kind of ash clouds which stop planes for a couple of days.

19:32
Jay Dias:
When you stop planes in Europe for a couple of days and you're a very small brand and you're piggybacking on everybody else's shipments, it kind of basically halts your working capital for about three months. So that was the start of the demise of the business.

19:44
Amardeep Parmar:
We talked at lunch as well about the margin element of that. You jump into that about when you look somebody's looking at business, starting their own company about how important the margins are to work out. If it's the right area.

19:56
Jay Dias:
Whole like margin and price are two of the most important things. And picking the right industry is also fundamental because when the market goes against you need room to flex. So if you're in an industry that traditionally has 5% EBITDA when the market goes against you, and we saw this in Covid with travel, Right. When the market goes against you're massively underwater. So if you pick an industry that's doing 40% EBITDA, that doesn't mean your business needs to do 40% EBITDA. You could do more, you could do less. It just means that your business model is more resilient. And this, when it comes to technology businesses is all about how resilient is your unit economics. How much of that LTV to CAC ratio are you generating? How quickly are you generating it?

20:40
Jay Dias:
So, yeah, and that's the an underwear and fashion and travel, which is the second business I did, don't have great margins. So it took me a while to learn that lesson.

20:48
Amardeep Parmar:
And with this underwear business, it was struggling for some time with the different things happened there. Can you talk about those hard times there a bit as well? Like how were you able to get through that and what made you decide to Let go of that as well and move on to the next thing.

21:00
Jay Dias:
So I lived in Twickenham and the business was in Shoreditch and I said there was no tube station and weren't making much money. So it's what I call my box wine and Maggie noodles business. We just slept in the office. We just bootstrapped it. I mean, look, I went from graduating from London business school to two weeks later pushing a wheelbarrow of underwear down Nottinghall Lane for the carnival, right? It was that type of. Yeah, but I loved it. Like the store room and doing stock picks. It was, it was great. We were really trying to build something. Also, you've got to pick your business partners really well and you've got to understand founders mentality really well.

21:30
Jay Dias:
And that was the first one of the other lessons, because the founder wanted to build this thing no matter what and he wanted to create new products no matter what. So for example, like one deal I did a big deal with TK Maxx, right? We sold off nearly 70% of our stock to give us some cash and then the founder, you know, within two weeks went off and put a new order in and you're like, hold on a second, this is not the reason we just did that massive sell off. So there was the contributing factors of the business model and the team and so on that didn't work.

22:00
Amardeep Parmar:
And so where did you go into after that?

22:02
Jay Dias:
So I was really lucky. I was a friend of mine at LVS was just. We were out having a drink and I told him the story and he was like, look, you've got to meet my cfo. And he was at a dedicated cloud computing business which was called Rackspace, and they're about to launch their cloud offering into Amir and Apac. And they'd already owned a U.S. Listers business, a big business. And it just happened that the CFO lived like 30 seconds away from where I did in Twickenham. So went to the pub and it's a. If you haven't heard of Rackspace, it's one of the kind of the OG culture businesses within tech, right? It was all about being a racker, it was about being a fanatic, it was about White glove service, but it was super fast paced.

22:39
Jay Dias:
So I went in as kind of head of strategy, sales strategy and finance partner for their cloud business. We launched it and took it to 250 million revenue in 18 months. And it's what I call my, you know, my US flip flop tech journey. Like I Learned unit economics, I learned about culture. I learned about how do you ruin, you know, the power of venture capital? Because even though it wasn't venture capital, if I needed five sales staff, I would get it the next day. Right? Because we had the access to capital and it was just were burning money left, right and center, but were growing at such a rate that the market just loved what were doing. And that's where I really fell in. Fell in love with venture.

23:16
Amardeep Parmar:
And it's interesting because it's such a variety between what you've done there and contrast from an underwear business to a cloud computing company. Right?

23:24
Jay Dias:
Yeah.

23:24
Amardeep Parmar:
And how are you able to code switch those environments. Right. And fit into these new places? Because the people must have been so different and they're kind of say, interacting with TK Maxx. It must be completely different customers. You're interacting in rat space.

23:37
Jay Dias:
So there's a line which I've heard a few times, which is, rich people think poor people are dumb. Right. And if you go in pretending you know everything and you can do that, right. PWC lbs. I'm super arrogant anyway. I'm very competitive. People can take you the wrong way. So the bit you have to be is you've just got to be transparent about what you don't know and don't pretend you know everything. So what I do know is I know internal controls and I know data. And, you know, a marketeer might turn around to me, oh, you shouldn't be worried about visitors. It doesn't matter about visitors. And I know they're chatting nonsense and I'll just be like, okay, but I'm still going to track those top and the bottom number. Right. Everything's an in and everything's an out.

24:22
Jay Dias:
I did at that time, whilst I was a Rackspace, got accused of saying, yeah, I just think about it as numbers on spreadsheets, which from a leadership perspective isn't necessarily the best position to do. That was definitely a learning point for me when I was like 31 at the time. Yeah. How do you fit in? You. You lean into your core skill. Right. If you don't know forex and that's not your business, don't do it. Lean into building cars or whatever your bill is. And so I lent into that. How do I partner with these people? And I'm a service industry type person. So that's. Yeah, that's how I adopted to those partners.

24:58
Amardeep Parmar:
And when you're able to scale as quickly as you were talking about here as well, it comes with a completely different set of challenges to your previous company where, like, how do you get the customers in, how do you get the orders in? But trying to scale that quickly and hiring people that quickly as well, and making sure that they're right for all the different challenges, what part of that journey did you find the hardest?

25:17
Jay Dias:
It's all resource allocation. And again, so then, even though I don't say this publicly, it's just a spreadsheet, what's the rationale of your bet? And I actually even today, break down my day back into like PWC times as six minutes a day. And I don't literally do that, but practically what I do is I go, what is going to make the biggest impact in the next moment? So is it I need new sales, is it I need to handle this customer decision, is it I need to find the right person and I see myself as a resource and the best and the only resource I have is time. And therefore, how do I then take that mentality into the rest of the business? And that's the same family think about raising capital and capital strategies and so on.

25:57
Amardeep Parmar:
So you've had this experience where it's going massively quickly, but you didn't stay there, right? You didn't move anywhere else.

26:03
Jay Dias:
Yeah, I only stayed for 18 months. And it was, look, I was the golden boy, right, that my first day, we had to prepare for an offsite the next day where I was getting picked up at half five. I then went and presented in front of the international leadership team the next day. And everyone was like, oh, we don't know you. Like, how have you, how long have you been here? And like, I started yesterday and it just set me off on a great trajectory in that company, right? And I could have done whatever I wanted to do. And I sat down with Lanham when I was over in the States and I said to him, like, okay, what's my next move?

26:36
Jay Dias:
And he said, look, if you want to get to the big table, because I presented it to the board and so on. If you want to get to the big table, you're going to come to the US and whilst I was out there, I went for this director conference in San Antonio, which was amazing. Loved it, Loved every moment of it. On the Monday after the conference, I went to the office, and Rackspace's office back then was an old shopping mall in San Antonio. And when you think shopping mall like this, it was bigger than Westfield in Chesbush and it had four and a half thousand, five thousand people. We had taken the London office from 700 people to 1700, 1600 in the 18 month period. Right. But four and a half thousand, 5,000 people. It was on.

27:19
Jay Dias:
I'm in a game that I just don't belong in. It's not who I am, it's more political. I'm very direct. It just wasn't the environment for me. And they offered me to go and run a team in Asia. I said, well, that could be interesting. But actually David Kelly. So another guy who made gave a break for me, he was the MD at Rackspace. He had just left. He was the international md. He had just left. He was like one of the co founders of lastminute.com and a few others and he was looking for chairman roles in tech businesses in London. And one of them was a travel business called Love Home Swap, which was founded by Debbie, Oscar and MMC with a VC behind it. And David said, look, gave me a call, would you have a look at this?

28:01
Jay Dias:
And then I said, well, I will do if the VC appoints me. Because then it'd be like my first job as a vc being appointed by a vc. Wouldn't that be great? Fantastic. So they brought me in as a CFO and I ended up being CFO and zero there, effectively taking it from 500 customers, which was the Friends and family customer group, to 2,3 million before we sold it to Wyndham's in 15.

28:24
Amardeep Parmar:
Yeah. So it's like, it's amazing how this turnaround's happened.

28:28
Jay Dias:
Right.

28:28
Amardeep Parmar:
Because obviously you left LBs. The initial come with the underwear didn't quite work out. You wanted it to. There was all these struggles involved there and I think there's a lot of people at that point. I said, okay, maybe this isn't for me. Maybe I go back to not some curls. We then go into massive growth for AX Space, Massive growth at the Travelers company as well. And after the exit as well. You've now. It's kind of like the thing about what's next because you have so many different parts of your journey and they're all adding up and they're getting you more and more experience. You're getting this experience as well. That's in different industries as well.

28:59
Jay Dias:
Yeah.

29:00
Amardeep Parmar:
And obviously I know youlead Leela Capital today. When did that idea for Leela Capital starts coming about as like, this is something which I want to do independently and build my own?

29:08
Jay Dias:
It was, it was at the point of when we knew were selling La Fontois because after we did the deal, I resigned the following day. Right. So I wasn't a Founder, Right. So I was an employee at Employee Options. Whenever you set a business, you know, you get some of it gets deferred, etc. The person buying the business may be buying it thinking it's worth much more than it did. So they bought it at 10x, I think it was worth 1x. They had a 30x terminal value and they tie some my earn out to it. I'm never seeing that money. Right. So it was a very clear decision for me to leave. And over that kind of seven year journey, eight year journey of doing those kind of venture businesses, I knew that I didn't want to work for a founder again. Right.

29:53
Jay Dias:
So I had a choice, either kind of become a founder myself or do something new. And I then got persuaded to set Leela Capital up by a few kind of close friends who mainly predominantly from LBs to kind of basically build out Leela as a buyout fund or what was called a search fund.

30:10
Amardeep Parmar:
And what's the reason behind the name Leela as well?

30:13
Jay Dias:
So Leela has two meanings, two and a half meanings actually now given some what we've done recently. So the first one is kind of in Sanskrit, Leela means the playful creation of the cosmos, which as you pointed out, like that's how I, my whole career has just been like, okay, hold on a second, where is it? Where's the spark? How do I gravitate to that spark? How do I go from there? And cosmos in Greek actually means people. So it's like the fluid creation of that, building relationships. And that's kind of very much core to who I am as an individual. But I'm also about building communities and family and so on. And it's actually very Asian. It's my mother's first name. Right. So there the two kind of worlds collided. And when I did the turnaround stuff, I named it after my dad.

30:53
Jay Dias:
So I thought I'd name it after my mum this time.

30:56
Amardeep Parmar:
And what Leela does has got so many different divisions. And when you sat out at the beginning, did you think, okay, we're going to be this many different things going on or how did that structure of what you do today come about?

31:07
Jay Dias:
Yeah, it's fluid. It's so fluid. The core fundamental principle about our business today was a business we bought last year, you know, prior to that. So it's basically we're a regulatory first investment platform. So that means we have our own strategies, we invite other people with their strategies. We have corporate finance teams, we give them permissions to operate in the uk, in the US in Europe and so on. And two years ago when it came to regulation, I knew I had to do my continual professional development just to keep the license. I didn't know anything more than that. And last year my COO and I just rolled up our sleeves and we bought a business. And it was one of these things where our core business was sell side. Right. So raising capital for people and sell side is a feast and family model.

31:58
Jay Dias:
And we made hay in 21, early 22 markets turn a turn. We restructured as every sell side business does in the cycle. And one of the lines I couldn't restructure was a reg business and I was just, it wasn't a godfather offer, but I've managed to get the chap to sell me the business. And since then we've now 30x'd it since we bought it last year and we've got some really exciting products coming up.

32:26
Amardeep Parmar:
So if you were to break down. So let's have meet me for the first time, dealing with Leo Capital is if you were to tell somebody in a couple of lines what Leela Capital does, what would you say?

32:35
Jay Dias:
Yeah, if you're a finance person or if you're a normal person.

32:39
Amardeep Parmar:
Let's say for the audience.

32:40
Jay Dias:
For the audience. For the average person.

32:42
Amardeep Parmar:
Yeah, starting entrepreneurs might know a bit about finance, but maybe they don't know all of the jargon and.

32:47
Jay Dias:
Yeah, okay, so we are an investment firm. You would come to Leela if you were trying to raise money or you wanted to meet other investors who might be able to do. So what we are is if you think about a supermarket, right? This is how I explain to my mother in law. So we're a supermarket and we've got lots and lots of shops in it. All of those shops have different strategies and different services and we're just the house that they sit under. Sometimes they're under the Leela brand, sometimes they've got their own brand, but we give them the permission, the real estate, so to speak, for them to go off and operate.

33:19
Amardeep Parmar:
How's that experience been? Because obviously as mentioned, you were working with other people beforehand. Now you're building your own thing and by most business structures, quite a complicated one. So you're going in the hard mood, right? You can't be your first one in this way. How has that been for you? Have you enjoyed that process? Has it been harder than you imagined or actually been more enjoyable than you imagined?

33:38
Jay Dias:
Look, when markets are good, it's great, right? When markets are tough is where you really see the value. And this then comes back to price margin and why we focus on regulation. Right. Because it's such a lovely business model. So it is difficult. It's also difficult to ensure you stay focused. And yes, I have a big vision, but what's been the hardest thing to do is go, okay, what's step one, what's step two, what's step three? And also then decide, I'm used to being the investor in the groom, not being the investee. So how much and how far do I take this firm by bootstrapping it versus taking external money to help facilitate it?

34:22
Jay Dias:
And when I say external money like you would normally do with any other business, we take in external money to invest, but that's just us providing a service that's not us being invested in.

34:31
Amardeep Parmar:
You said the big vision there. Right. Can you share what the big vision is, what people can expect in the coming years.

34:36
Jay Dias:
So we're launching a program alongside Mount's Adventures in January and we're one of the sponsors, which is about supporting emerging managers within European venture capital. So if you're an emerging manager within venture capital, you can apply, go through this kind of Y Combinator style, fully funded accelerator program. I'm really proud to do that because it's the first fully funded one. I want to do that in multiple asset classes. And then I will have a number of emerging managers who come to us to go, how do I set up my first fund up? How do I set up a sell side firm? How do I get this from 0 to 250 million? Because we can talk about that journey ourselves. We haven't done the 250 to a billion.

35:12
Jay Dias:
So when you're there, you can go to that next tier, but we'll take you through that path. And then I'm hoping we'll have 30 to 100 emerging managers come through our platform over the next few years with some of the best investors in the market across Europe.

35:27
Amardeep Parmar:
And they build a really strong team as well. Right. So obviously you founded this, but then the team behind it is all superstars as well.

35:33
Jay Dias:
Yeah.

35:34
Amardeep Parmar:
How have you managed to get those people on board?

35:36
Jay Dias:
So it's all relationships. All relationships. And this is my biggest challenge and my biggest weakness. I do no marketing. Most people would not have heard of Leela Capital. That's a very conscious decision I've made, which I am trying to change, hence one of the reasons I'm here today. But it is through trusted networks and referrals and conversations. And these are People who I have either known for a long time or have been referred to me by people long time. Like for example, my COO is my sister in law. Right. And she's the best she person you could have as your, as your cmo. So I have to build up that trust and that community piece. Yeah.

36:14
Amardeep Parmar:
And I know you're really passionate about this job because as we know ourselves, there's so many people who are actors in this area in the Salisbury system who aren't necessarily above the board in terms of the way they do things.

36:24
Jay Dias:
Right. Yeah.

36:25
Amardeep Parmar:
And there's so many people who are founders who if you haven't been in this space for a long time, it's very easy to get screwed over. And what advice do you have for founders who are looking at investors or angel investors, family offices in order to make sure that they're getting the right kinds of people on board who are going to take advantage.

36:41
Jay Dias:
Yeah.

36:42
Amardeep Parmar:
And then we can also come to afterwards about investors if you're angel investor, making sure you're part of the right syndicate. And again not getting screwed over because it's something we talk about enough. But there's a lot of that danger in this area. Right. When there's all these different pieces of money at play and big sums of money, how do you make sure that you are taken advantage of?

36:59
Jay Dias:
Yeah. And look, it's so difficult and the way that you've got to. The way that I would approach it would be think about it as an interview. So whenever you go for a job interview you kind of feel like you're being interviewed by the company. But I always had the I'm interviewing you. That's just my mentality. So when you're seeing a vc, yes, you're going to be nervous. Yes. You're going to think about how do I impress them. But you've got to make sure they've got money and ask them the question, do you have dry powder? Because lots of these VCs don't have it. And what they want to do is they want to get you on board, get you excited, get them being excited and then use you as a stoking horse to go and get capital.

37:37
Jay Dias:
So that might work for some people, but you've got to be wary that especially in current markets that's super difficult to manage because they then may not be able to deliver the capital and you've picked a horse to go under and you've signed under exclusivity. So I would definitely. That's the bit As a founder, I would go, where are you in your investing cycle? And do you have what we call the industry dry pattern, which is just, do you have actual money available to deploy if you're angel business angel or, you know, you're thinking about investing? Personally, I would just, I would go, what protection do I have? Right. The FCA's core goal is to reduce harm.

38:18
Jay Dias:
Now, lots of people will go, the FCA aren't the nicest people and they're very difficult and they're the regulator and they're stifling this and they're stifling that, et cetera. And, you know, sometimes maybe that's the case, but their core principle is do no harm. And when you are, as an individual, a high net worth or sophisticated or just the likes of you and I, you are a retail investor, you're not a professional investor, you're not an institution. So don't waive those rights away and make sure the people you're operating with have the right permission to do so, because if they don't, and then you go and complain to the financial ombudsman because something goes wrong, hey, you're not going to go and get your money back.

38:58
Jay Dias:
And it's that whole thing of, do you remember when the global financial crisis hit, the Iceland went bust and there was a whole outrage of going, oh my God, we can't believe the country's banks gone bust. No, they were paying a 7.5% interest, which back then was a lot compared to what you were getting here, which was like three or something. And you're like, well, that's the reason they were paying you 7%, because it's riskier. So if you go to these platforms and these syndicate groups, just make sure they're established properly. There are some out there that are and you should work with them, but there are some which I would say are treading the line very thinly.

39:34
Amardeep Parmar:
So there's a lot more I could talk to you about, but we're running out of time, so I'm going to go to the quick fire questions now.

39:39
Jay Dias:
Okay?

39:39
Amardeep Parmar:
So first one is, who are three British Asians you think are doing incredible work and you'd love to shout them out?

39:44
Jay Dias:
Okay, so the first one is my partner. So Jyoti Mehan, she is the CEO of a healthcare business up in Yorkshire. So primary care, 35,000 patients. Spends a lot of time talking about healthcare. And the one big thing I would ask people to look at, especially within this community, is she's a big advocate around technology for kind of the elderly. Because we've got to remember the elderly cannot adopt technology as quickly as we can. And even when we're old, we're not going to have the agility to be able to maintain that. So that's one.  Second is Dr. Simi Gaudogama. So she is now leading the British Alternative Medicine association, which was recently formed. Great. You know, multiple founder. Really insightful. Getting her kind of getting herself out there.

40:31
Jay Dias:
And I'm going to do four, if that's okay, because both of these two you're not going to find. Right. I'm. I don't listen to a lot of people because I'm too arrogant. No, I do listen to people, but I don't listen to the people who shout the loudest. I like to try and really look for people who say a bit, but are really insightful and really trying to lead. Read between the two. So the first is a chap called Rajesh Sood. So he is. So he's currently running a business called or owning the business called ESMS, which is a drug services business. He's a multiple founder. Started with one shop and kind of grew from there. Really insightful, very good. All about price, all about industry. And the other is my brother, who is the total opposite to me.

41:17
Jay Dias:
I've got a very interesting and lovely relationship with him now, where we spent the first 20 odd years understanding, accepting why we're so different and we've spent the last five years understanding why we're so similar, which is lovely. But he runs meditation and detox retreats around the world and he does it very simply. He's Buddhist at heart, so he doesn't do it for commercial outcome. He sits with people who are kind of near their end of life and so on, says Ben Dias. But it's the art of meditation. If I'm allowed to shout out a brand, I'm not sure if I can. You can cut it out if I can. Where they do, you know, core kind of breath work and so on, but, you know, remove the jargon. He's like the antithesis of headspace. Right. It's not about the technology.

42:00
Jay Dias:
He would be like, you're consuming meditation through technology, then you're doing it wrong. Right, yeah. So, yeah, they're the four.

42:07
Amardeep Parmar:
And if you want to find out more about you and what you're doing today, where should they go to?

42:10
Jay Dias:
Yeah, so look, I'm trying to get better at LinkedIn. Definitely ping me on there. I'm a bit slow. If you go direct to the website and you submit a contact form. I actually get all of them. So I know I will reply. I definitely try. And if. What are you looking for? Look, if you. I've got people reaching out. Just chat through their business model. I'm good at a lot of things. I'm good at two. Two good things. One should go to market strategy and the other is your capital strategy. I'm happy to grab a coffee if you're going through problems, you're trying to think about what to do next, you know, just. Just to see if I can help.

42:42
Amardeep Parmar:
And if somebody listening right now could help you. Is there anything that you need help with right now?

42:46
Jay Dias:
So that we're about to launch this emerging manager program, what I want to see in our community is the movement from traditional asset classes into this asset class. So the venture capital, private markets, most families, large families I know continue to invest in bricks and mortar rather than the latest technology. And especially into the Asian founders. Right. It's one of the reasons why I went through the path I did. Like if I could do, I would just set up a business when I was 24. I'm sure it would have failed, but I'm happy with the journey. So if there are any emerging managers, corporate financiers, people are thinking about going into a fund. People who are working in large corporates and banking industry thinking about spinning out and they just want to go and talk through that journey of going.

43:30
Jay Dias:
How do I set up a corporate finance house? How do I set up my first fund? How do I set up a platform? They're the ones I'd love to have conversations with.

43:38
Amardeep Parmar:
So thanks so much for coming on today. Great.

43:40
Jay Dias:
I'm just going to say. So I live by Sting's motto, right? With a little tweak, which is you've got to shoot for the stars. Until you get shot down, there is no barrier. Just go for it.

43:51
Amardeep Parmar:
Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time. 

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