463: EmergeOne with Aarish Shah Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Aarish Shah is the Founder of EmergeOne and Projected.ai and host of Off Balance and Nothing Ventured Podcast.


Will talks to Aarish about having the venture capitalist money idea and having that "aha!" moment that it could work, what drives him and having a purpose of helping others, and using his podcast to teach lessons that he's learned along the way.



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Projected.ai
Off Balance and Nothing Ventured Podcast
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Transcript:


WILL: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. And with me today is Aarish Shah, Founder of EmergeOne and Projected.ai and host of Off Balance and Nothing Ventured Podcast. Aarish, thank you for joining me.


AARISH: It's great to be here, Will. Really happy to be talking to you today.


WILL: Yeah, I'm excited. I can't wait to dive in and learn more about you. Tell me about your journey, how it all started.


AARISH: Wow, it's a bit of a long run. I'll try and condense it. But I am 44 years old at the moment. About 20 years ago, I came out of uni with a degree in languages which I found was sort of useful but not essential. So I ended up for a few years doing kind of the normal corporate thing. I worked with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Nortel Networks, and then Deutsche Bank. And I qualified as an accountant along the way, so I'm effectively what you guys would consider a CPA over in the U.S.


I then kind of up sticks, and I spent the next ten years of my life running a group of manufacturing and trading businesses alongside a property portfolio out in Papua New Guinea, which is a very, very interesting place to be, definitely one of the hardest environments to be building and running businesses for many reasons. I've had everything from people coming into one of my offices with guns. I had one of my factories burned to the ground and everything in between. So really, really great learning experience and certainly amazing to learn about physical products, you know, the manufacturing and distribution and sales and so on of actual physical products.


And then, in 2015, I came back to the UK. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And so I had a bunch of coffees with people and ended up as founding CFO in an EdTech venture, which was a joint venture between Eton College, which is one of the premier schools here in the UK where famously all of our Prime Ministers seem to come from, and Founders Factory which is an accelerator that was founded by Brent Hoberman of lastminute.com fame. So that was really exciting.


I was straight off the boat from Papua New Guinea, sitting 10 feet away from Brent Hoberman, learning everything that there was to learn about the tech sector here in the UK and beyond. And had a really great couple of years working in that business and learning really everything there was to know about the VCA ecosystem, the early stage ecosystem, how to build products, how to finance them, how to sell into new territories (We were operating in China at the time.) and all sorts of other things.


And then, in 2017, I decided it was time to move on. And I became what you guys would probably call a fractional CFO. So I worked across C through Series C businesses, everything from EdTech to FinTech, D2C, B2B marketplaces, beauty tech, you name it, kind of been there, seen it, and done it. And in 2019 and 2020, started getting approached by FDs and CFOs that wanted to work with me. And I really doubled down at that stage and decided to build EmergeOne into what it is today, which is a consultancy providing CFO services to venture-backed tech startups and scaleups.


So we work with a huge bunch of businesses here in the UK that are backed by VCs, some of the big names here like