Champion Story 37 | Kunal Gupta
Recorded on January 20, 2019
Biography: Kunal Gupta is the Founder & CEO of Polar, a technology platform provider whose mission is to enable a business model for premium content. Polar’s partners include major global publishers and the business is headquartered in Toronto with offices in New York, London, and Sydney.
Kunal is passionate about finding calm and focus in a modern era. Kunal is on the foundation board for CAMH Foundation, supporting Canada’s leading mental health teaching and research hospital. He writes regularly on the topics of leadership, mindfulness, and technology culture on his blog at find focus today.
Thank you for agreeing to do this interview, Kunal. I know you have such a rich story to share. I want to start off by asking: How did you get here?
That's a very broad question and I'll share something that people might find useful. Over the last year, I reflected back on my life and I see my life in different chapters. Each chapter has been roughly 10 years. My first chapter was what I'd call student leadership. I was very engaged with student government from the time I was 10 years old and got involved with student council. Then I went to the University of Waterloo and got involved in student government.
It was a formative experience for me, understanding student politics, building an appreciation for government, systems, and society. I started to think beyond myself in understanding how systems work and how they could work and then influencing some change through that. I was fortunate and started to develop my own leadership style, identity, and voice through those experiences.
I was lucky because I was surrounded by other student leaders. I remember in grade nine, I was interviewing for the student council and was inspired by the other council leaders. How they communicate, how they ask questions and the level of organization. Then the thought came up of I want to be like them when I grow up. I'm excited to say that happened. I said yes and then I got involved and I had a lot of moments throughout high school.
The second chapter started when I was 18 with a lot of like-minded people at the University of Waterloo. This was like 15 years ago before entrepreneurship was cool with young people. It was pre-Zuckerberg, pre-Angels. I remember going in to see guidance counselors and they would share that, if somebody couldn't get into university or college then maybe they should go start a business. Entrepreneurship was seen as a last resort.
That's where the culture was when we started Impact, and our vision was different. We think entrepreneurship should be accessible to young people. So we organized a number of conferences, events, and competitions and that became my university education, my education wasn't in the classroom, it was through these extracurricular activities.
After three years of leading the organization, I stepped down intentionally. I forced everyone to take a backseat so that other younger team members could step up and learn so that the organization would have a chance at succession and being sustainable. Impact went on for 10 years, every three years it had different leaders, it was always a student leader, and the organization continued to grow, all the past leaders, we formed a board of directors from a governance standpoint to create some continuity.
We shut down the organization, which was probably the most satisfying thing I've done in my life. To have a vision, to see people around you help make that vision realized, and then to be able to say, "Done. We did it." By removing Impact from our identity and being very objective about it, it allowed us to do the right thing.
My third chapter is one that I'm still in right now, it's called Polar. I asked a number of the Impact people to join me and we graduated from school and had a business in 2008. There were 1000 people who graduated from our class, at Waterloo Engineering, four of us started companies. That gives you a sense of how starting a company was not done. The infrastructure and resources, none of that was there. Today the business has 50 people, four offices, it's in the publishing and media industry. During my third chapter, I've learned a lot.
I would say in the last couple of years, there's a fourth chapter that's started and that's more what I'm calling service, and how I can give back to society. In two words, it's mindful leadership, in one word its wellness.
Thank you for sharing all that. There's a lot of depth in the way that you explore different themes or topics in your life because, in the entrepreneurial world, there's a lot of trying an idea and going onto the next thing.
As a founder, what inspires you to pick the themes that you end up focusing on and sparking the different creations that you do?
It's awareness and there's lots of ways to practice and strengthen awareness. Another word for awareness would be listening. So listening to what or to who? Listening first and foremost to myself, which means being able to practice introspection, there's lots of obvious ways we could get into it as to how that happens. It's listening to the people around me, people who are not around me who might have different perspectives, and that means challenging biases and preconceived notions.
I'm continually building on self-awareness and I get to be in touch with what's going on inside and outside. I don't consciously choose the product, value, or the intention, it just shows up because I've put energy into awareness. I think awareness is 90% of the work. Once you become aware that somebody needs help, I will naturally help them. If I'm not aware that they need help I can't do anything. If I'm aware of a business opportunity, I will naturally gravitate towards it. If I'm not aware that an opportunity exists, if I'm not open or listening, then I can't do anything about it.
It's interesting that you mentioned awareness because I feel like that's such a rare skill nowadays. How do you cultivate and protect that?
Intellectually it's understanding the value of it. I can't imagine living life with my eyes closed and I mean that figuratively. But living life with your eyes open changes the experience of life. For people reading this, you might say, "I agree," or you might say, "I'm skeptical", it's your choice.
Meditation is a big part of that, which I do every morning. I become aware of things at a deeper level that I was not aware of. Awareness does not discriminate, so I become aware of things that are pleasant and things that are unpleasant. Things that are wanted and things that are unwanted, and that's totally fine.
The way I see it, it's kind of like cleaning up the place, and the place meaning my mind. On a daily basis, I'll sit anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes, and that's the equivalent of taking out the kitchen trash. If you don't take out the kitchen trash, it starts to get stinky. It’s best to take out the trash every day, and by trash, I mean mental trash.
Then there has been a lot of unstructured retreat which I take a couple of days for myself, disconnect from everything and everyone, and kind of go inside. This is like a deep scrubbing of the place. I do get stressed, I become aware of that faster, and then I pause to check in. If I'm not able to do that I simply just acknowledge something is up.
Has that always been something that's been important to you? How did you get into this journey around awareness?
I remember the first time somebody suggested to me that I should meditate. It was in Toronto at a friend's place, he had just come back from a meditation retreat and we were chatting over dinner and he said to me casually, "Hey you should meditate. You should give it a try." My immediate reaction was, "I don't need to meditate." That's what I said. Now I am preaching and teaching and writing about it. Not just as a reminder for me of how everything changes and it really does.
The trigger moment was realizing that everything I thought that I wanted, I had it, but I didn't feel any different, and I expected to feel different. I expected this feeling of happiness/success, which I kind of mashed together and put on the other side of this finish line.
That was the trigger to start to look inside and just to change from looking outside for answers to looking inside for answers. Then, no surprise, as I started to go inside I started to discover interesting tools to help me go inside and become more aware of myself.
I started to read about meditation, went to yoga classes, ended up on a yoga retreat, and started to have different conversations with people. I didn't realize it at the time but I started a process to pick up each one of my values and beliefs, most of which I'd inherited from society and culture and I was looking at each of my values and saying, "Do I still believe this to be true, knowing what I know now and having the experience that I have?" Some of the answers were yes and some of them were not, and some of the answers were, “I don't know.”
The ‘I don't know’ stuff was the hardest category because I had to find an answer, which meant I had to play with it closer, let me hold it further, let me see how I feel. Some attitudes towards materialism and consumerism changed pretty drastically through this process. I stopped drinking alcohol around this time because I wanted to examine whether I needed this and why? My food habits changed, my exercise habits changed.
This is pretty gradual, we're talking about probably over 6 to 12 months. A lot of these things started to change but I didn't even consciously change them. It was at a deeper level, starting to understand what do I value? What do I still value? What do I not value? Once you're aware, everything else kind of happens almost automatically.
There's all this talk about awareness, meditation, and mindfulness. When we go deep into that journey, we discover something about ourselves that isn't what we expect. There are things that we discover about ourselves that we have to let go and sometimes, there are all kinds of emotions that come up.
What's been the hardest part of the journey?
Awareness, with awareness everything becomes easier. It's a good question but I guess I don't relate. I've done difficult and challenging things but they didn't necessarily feel hard. For example, choosing to change my relationship with alcohol. I socially drink as often as a guy or gal next to me, and then it got to a point where it's like why do I want this?
I thought it was hard, but on the surface, it could appear difficult if I thought about it too much. Doing something that was different than what the norms may appear to be. There isn't a lot of that and there were a lot of changes that have happened as a result of awareness, but at the surface will look different.
How would you describe the difference between something that's difficult versus something that's hard?
That’s going a level deeper. So something might feel unpleasant or hard and then if you can actually sit with it and be aware of it and be like why do I find this hard? For example, we had to make some difficult decisions that resulted in some people losing their job with us. It was a difficult decision and initially, it feels very hard. The thought of the impact you're going to have on people's lives potentially and the impact on everybody else who's still with the organization. It feels really hard. But when I sat with it and went a level deeper, started to deconstruct it and understand, what about this makes it hard?
Well, I'm impacting people's lives. What's hard about that? Well, they're going to stop earning an income. Okay, well how long are they going to stop earning an income for? Well, in the profession that we're in not very long. All these people are highly employable people. Okay, so what can I do? Well, I can put together a package that bridges that gap between when they're working for us and then when they find their next employment. What else can I do? Well, I can try and help shorten that gap in terms of helping them find the next place to go work.
What are the other things that are hard? Well, what are people on the rest of the team going to think? Are they going to start being scared about their job, is there going to be doubt on the company's financial situation or the company's strategy? How can I deal with that? Well, why don't I just tell everybody what the financials are? Why don't I be extra transparent and show them how we got to the decision and why it's important?
That will help a lot of people. It probably won't help everybody. Some people are going to want some form of assurance from me that there's no more changes like this coming. I asked myself and for my leaders to anticipate a change like this for X amount of months or quarters and why we feel good about that and make that commitment to the team, that you're not going to see us remove any roles over this time period and have our commitment.
One of the things that came up was your workaround mind tech and mindful leadership. Mindful leadership is something we don't usually speak about, and your work relates powerfully to mental health. Can you tell us more about the work you're doing with mindful leadership and what you see as possible for founders?
I identify more as a leader. Everybody can identify as a leader, and a leader means you lead your life and then the way you lead your life, you end up leading those around you, be it in subtle or not so subtle ways. Leadership starts with yourself. It's not exclusively for leading other people in a formal leadership managerial capacity. We're constantly leading ourselves and others around us, whether we know it or not.
When I'm walking down the street in New York and if I'm smiling at somebody, I've now led them, or somebody is talking, they're leading me and I'm listening. Mindful leadership means to be mindful of that. That means being clear on what's important to me. Setting a one-word theme for the year that acts as a north star to help me make decisions along the way. Any time I feel there's a fork in the road, I reflect on what my theme for the year is and it often helps. My theme this year is trust. Last year was fearless. The year before was freedom.
It's very simple and abstract. I love this because it means I can interpret it however I choose to. Leading my own life means being clear with myself, what's important to me, and that's where the practice is. I have a little more conviction because I understand the role they have to play in my life and I'm leading myself and going to do so. Then leading others around me. It's understanding how do I show up, how do I interact, how do I communicate? Is there a level of kindness, is there a level of compassion that I'm sharing and receiving in those interactions with others?
In a formal capacity, it's being aware of what's going on. What's going on within the team, what's going on in the market, what's going on in the products, and incorporating all of that into your decisions.
I'll give you some very specific examples. We are a B2B technology business at Polar. It was about three years ago, I was in a meeting with a couple of their executives and we were talking about the state of the market and then they shared pretty early in the meeting that they were not going to be using our services anymore.
I was calm and asked them some questions to understand why and they shared with me their business reasons. I didn't fight it, it was clear to me my job at that moment was to simply listen. Then I walked out of their office and I was on the street and just before jumping into a cab I took a moment to stop and check-in and ask myself, "How do I feel?" A moment to pause. I didn't look at my phone, didn't talk to anyone, and knew intellectually that something big just happened. I wanted to give myself a moment to understand emotionally what's going on inside of me.
I paused and reflected and came up being objective. I realized that they should have stopped using our services a year ago based on the rationale they shared with me and they didn't because of a number of things that we had done and that people on our team had done. In the past, in a situation like that, I would get stressed and I would have put everything on pause and I would extrapolate that if one customer is going to move on from us then every customer is going to move on from us.
That would turn into a domino effect, where a good part of my team would have to give it attention, where we would stop what we were doing, and we would start talking about it. We would be stressed about it, we'd worry about it and we would get into an unhealthy mode.
This time with a mindful approach, I wasn't consciously trying to be mindful, I started to show all the gratitude towards people on the team and that there were a number of things that we had done that meant we kept adding value to them over this last year. The way I shared this news with our team is I sent thank you notes on Slack to say, "I met with this client, here's what they shared with me, here's what I think of it, and here's what I realized, and I'm very appreciative of x, y, and z. Because of your hard work and these decisions that you made, that resulted in us continuing to work with them over the past year when they may otherwise not have."
That was a completely different way to respond to a situation. We're now three years later and they're still a client of ours. It turned out that they did actually need our services even more than they thought.
Thanks for sharing that with me. This year for me, with the losses that I had in my family, something shifted in my experience. It was this experience of wondering if there's a different way to have a relationship with this experience [pain]. To choose a different story away from suffering, pain, and trauma, as a story of acceptance and of handling this with grace.
To wrap up, what can other people in our community and our industry do to push mindful leadership and mental health forward?
Thank you for sharing your examples of relating to difficult situations and I'm sorry to hear about your mom's experience.
In terms of mindful leadership for all of us or for the leaders and listeners, it's becoming aware, becoming awake, it's choosing to see yourself and once that happens then all the other stuff pretty much happens unconsciously. This is not something that you can consciously say, if I wanted to do this, okay this year I'm going to become a mindful leader or I'm going to introduce these habits or practices or routines in my life or in our culture as a company. It can't be forced because it has to come from inside.
It is a big ask to learn how to look at yourself, to learn how to study your emotional state when you feel agitated to actually sit with that agitation, and figure out why do I feel this way now? Versus the common tendency for me before was to move to a state of ignorance.
All of that stuff takes us to a state of ignorance and we're ignoring something of our current reality that we don't like or that feels unpleasant to look at. So it takes a lot of courage to look at yourself. Once you go back to look at yourself and understand yourself, you're going to see a lot of good things and not-so-good things. Then a lot of other changes will happen. If you happen to identify as being a leader of your own life, of those around you, or in a formal capacity, then you will, on your own, start to become a more mindful leader. That's all that I can offer there. Is to look at yourself or have the courage to look at yourself, and then you yourself will become a changed person.
Thank you for taking the time today to do this interview with me. Appreciate your courage in allowing us to see you as well.
Yeah. My pleasure.