Unveiling Our Team's Secrets & New Opportunities Q3 Update w/ Amardeep Parmar | The BAE HQ

Amardeep Pamar: 0:00

I'm going to spill some secrets today. The first one is I do these solo episodes when there's not enough recordings and we need to get a recording out last minute. So today is going to be on the fly and I haven't prepared, which means I might reveal more than I wanted to if I had the time to think about it. The first big update from us is that we're hiring a founder's associate. We've got plenty of applications flying in and from the back, behind the scenes, of why are we doing this right? So right now you can see we're doing a lot of different things all at once. There's me and Gervais full-time, and then we've got the team behind us. We've got Aamir, who does the video content. We've got Lou helping on that as well. We've got Saharah, our executive assistant, but we're just stretched. There's too much demand, which is a great thing, but we've got to try and deal with that and deliver that. And the idea behind a founder associate, full-time in person because a lot of people are asking this question is they can be our right-hand person here all the time whenever there's different things going on, all the chaos have to deal with in a daily basis. That person would take some of that chaos, own it, and it's a really good growth opportunity. You think about how I am, how I am, why I've been able to do as much I've been able to do. It's because I throw myself into these situations and I thrive. So what we're looking for is somebody who has that relentless resourcefulness. They work out how to get stuff done and they also have us to guide them. But it's not going to be a hand-holding kind of job. It's going to be one where we expect the people to really have that fire in their belly and to be able to look us in the eyes and be like, yeah, they're going to do this. So that's a big thing. Right now. We've got applications coming in. We're looking through them. By the time this comes out, that will still be open. You can still apply right now. So make sure you do get those applications in.Amardeep Pamar: 1:42

So let's have a look at how we are structured now. Right, so we've got four different pillars. So we've got the media, events, futures and investment. So let's start with the events, because we just had our event last week with HSBC Innovation Banking, who are a headline partner. That event was all about exits. We had Rupa Popat and Salim Chowdhury, talk about their exits and then also, as investors, what they're looking for in their investments. So over 130 people, 140 people I couldn't count this time because normally we've got four people in the panel. I can sit there and count around the room. When there's only two people in the panel, anything a lot more switched on, but it's a lot more fun and what you get as well is more interaction and that deeper, raw conversation.

Amardeep Pamar: 2:24

We don't record our events on purpose, to allow the people on the panel to talk openly and not be worried about what's going to come out of that. We've got a lot of other events coming up, so we took a bit of a break in july and august. Just because it's summer, the relentless schedule you don't want to be trying to fill a room up when everybody's on holiday and those kind of things, but so so it's Tuesday today that I'm recording this. This Friday we've got the coffee meetup with Femalefounders Rise. About 100 people signed up for that. In a couple of weeks time.

Amardeep Pamar: 2:51

So October the 8th is the fireside chat with Eshita Kabra Davies, who's the founder of ByRotation. She's got an incredible story. She's somebody who's really done well in a short amount of time. So she's from Singapore, moved across here, didn't have any connection with any network, but just grafted and grinded so hard to get this connection, to build herself to where she is today. And, honestly, before I met her, I assumed that she already knew everybody and was connected to my family and those kind of things. But she built this up and it's incredible to show how she was able to do it in such a short amount of time and building an app that's really making a difference in the sustainability space as well. So that's something to have. The 8th we're going to have a event with, so these next events are actually secret at the moment. So this is your inside scoop.

Amardeep Pamar: 3:34

So October 17th is an event we're doing with King's Entrepreneurship Society about getting into YC. So it's going to be Ahana Banerjee and Mariam Ahmed on that panel and there's gonna be one extra person as well. But that's looking at for students how do you, and, as a young person, how do you get into something like YC? For those of you who don't know, YC is Y Combinator, which is the greatest accelerator on the planet, let's be honest, and companies like Airbnb and those kind of incredible companies all went through this program and helped them to scale and grow very quickly and effectively. So that's October 17th. We're also going to have an event on consumer products with our legal partner, Joelson, and that's going to be something which we know there's a lot of demand for. So a lot of our events are based around tech and all those different subjects there, but it's also a huge number of you who are building consumer brands, and that one's going to be for you. So if you're building something in food, in beverage, in fashion, wherever it's going to be, this can be an event full of investors, full of other founders just like you who are trying to grow and learn.

Amardeep Pamar: 4:43

We hope you're enjoying the episode so far. We just want to give a quick shout out to our headline partners HSBC Innovation Banking. One of the biggest challenges for so many startups is finding the right bank to support them, because you might start off and try to use a traditional bank, but they don't understand what you're doing. You're just talking to an AI assistant or you're talking to somebody who doesn't really understand what it is you've been trying to do. HSBC have got the team they've built out over years to make sure they understand what you're doing. They've got the deep sector expertise and they can help connect you with the right people to make your dreams come true. So if you want to learn more, check out hsbcinnovationbanking. com. And there's going to be a couple of other events. I believe as well on the Fireside Chat in December, which isn't booked in yet, but that's the kind of plan there.

Amardeep Pamar: 5:31

Now we look at the podcast side. So I've got another 10 people booked in for the podcast coming up. I've already recorded seven episodes in September. The podcast on the Founderside is on fire. We're getting so many great people in and I'm almost in this difficult point now where I'm trying to delay the recordings, so there's not too big of a gap between recording and the episodes coming up. So, to refresh you, the BAE podcast is you need to have either 1 million funding or 5 million in revenue to come on that podcast. And people think there's not that many Asians have done that. There are a ton. There's so many Asians have done that and I'm the lucky person to speak all of them. But I get to share that with you so you can learn their lessons and learn their stories and realize it's not as hard as you might think it is. Well, okay, it's hard but you can do it and people like you can do it as well.

Amardeep Pamar: 6:17

On the LAB side, we've had this experiment. We've had four different hosts, so that's let's test my memory now Anshuka Arora of Eternity, nikita Ladwa of Naked Laundry, Mona Ahluwalia, who's currently in Stealth, and then Tanya Agarwal, who was a VC in a previous role. So what they're all doing is interviewing on our behalf and, honestly, one of the struggles has been on the Bay podcast side. I've been able to get everybody booked in on. The Lab podcast is an interesting challenge of when I'm asking people to come on. It's different when I ask them to come on than me versus can you speak to somebody else, and that's something which we're adjusting, trying to learn about as well. So any thoughts or feedback on that? Let us know. If you've been enjoying the episodes that have been guest hosted so far, let us know too. I want to hear that good feedback so I can pass on to the team.

Amardeep Pamar: 7:05

But on that podcast side, that's what we're looking at the moment how do we make this more effective, how to make it more streamlined, and we're going to keep upping the standard of the podcast as well. So in the background, we're working on the partnerships for next year. Once those are sorted, I'm so excited to really go hard on the media side and we've also got the news coverage too, so the media side is going well. But honestly, from my perspective, I will spend more time on that, do more time on the content creation. The Linkedin side of things is going great. We're growing really quickly, but there's more I can do and it's what I want to do just at the moment.

Amardeep Pamar: 7:35

We're resource constrained and this is where the founder associate can help out once we hire them to free me up more for that creative engine, which I think is my strength. On the next side, we have all the futures. So the mentorship scheme is currently ongoing and this is our beta schema, so first time they've ever done it. There's lots of different things we're trying to work out because with the mentorship scheme, if the mentee isn't asking the mentor for a session, we can't really do very much about that. We can't force a mentee to ask a mentor for help, so we're trying to work out how to make that more effective. If you're on the mentorship scheme right now, you've got your feedback. Drop it into my messages. I'm happy to help and we're trying to understand how we make the scheme really effective, and it could be next year that we break it into different cohorts. So some people more early stage, some people later stage, but it's going to be a lot more perks coming in with that as well.

Amardeep Pamar: 8:21

On that perk side, there's another secret I'm going to reveal at the end of this episode, so wait on for that as well. And then on the investment side, so we're now officially FCA regulated, which is an interesting journey, but that means that we can help out a lot of founders and introduce them to different investors and make sure that we're fully above board and fully legal, which is a really important step for us. We can also reveal that the Angel Collective we're going to launch is now a Q1 2025 thing. I know we've mentioned it for a long time, but to us it's really important to do it slow and do it right, especially on the legal side, because people can lose a lot of money if we do this wrong. Right. We want to make sure we're doing this right, because we have a responsibility to you to make sure we're doing everything legally and to make sure that all of the right disclaimers and all of the right systems are in place so that, if you're going to invest, you freely understand the risks that you're taking. So I mentioned there that about a little secret that's going to reveal.

Amardeep Pamar: 9:10

So one thing I'm working behind the scenes is I want to keep pushing this up right. Where we are at the moment to me is we're still baby steps, we're still early days, we're two years in, nearly next month, but this is still the beginning. We're not anywhere near where I want to be. So one thing I'm working behind the scenes is more of a community platform, because right now, everything comes into me a lot of the time. How do you make more of a community? So, building out their system, building up those kind of functions so you can self-serve, so you can connect to each other, people, to other people within the community to really enhance experience.

Amardeep Pamar: 9:39

You can see a bunch of books on the shelf behind me. Expect to see a book with my name on it pretty soon. So on that bombshell and if you're making attention, let me know in the comments and hopefully see you soon. And if you're not already signed up, make sure you go to baehq. com forward/ join. We're going to be making a lot more of our content exclusive to the subscribers too. And if you want some merch, that's on the website too www. thebaehq. com/ shop. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time.

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