Champion Story 04 | Sunny Ray
Recorded on December 3, 2018
Biography: Sunny Ray is Co-Founder and President of Unocoin Cryptoassets & Blockchain Company, which is India’s first and leading bitcoin platform that serves more than 1.5 million people. It’s a simple and intuitive app that makes it easy to securely trade bitcoin and other digital assets. Sunny is also Co-Founder and President of Paycase Financial, a leading value network that merges traditional and crypto finance, providing infrastructure and liquidity to global financial markets.
Prior to co-funding Unocoin and Paycase Financial, Sunny was Head of Global Business Development for Kraken Digital Asset Exchange, one of the largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges in the world. Before that he was the Director Of Business Development of Buttercoin, Silicon valley based bitcoin exchange backed by Google Ventures and Y Combinator.
Dean holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Alberta. He lives in Toronto and speaks Japanese and Spanish.
Thank you Sunny, for agreeing to do this interview. First off, tell me more about yourself. What’s your story?
Wow, that's a big question about myself. So I was raised by East Indian parents and visited India pretty regularly growing up. I studied electrical engineering at the University of Alberta and then halfway through I transferred over to University of Toronto. I lived in Alberta for 20 years of my life and then the last 20 years I've been in Toronto. Upon graduating, I started a job.
During my co-operate terms, I worked for a bunch of oil companies because I lived in Alberta and my dad was in the oil industry. After having worked in the oil fields, five hours North of Edmonton in the cold... it was just a really difficult and boring job. You had to climb vessels and climb under pipes, and it was just hot and dangerous. So, I just wanted to not be in the oil industry, and it was bad for the environment. I was learning about all the consequences of the oil industry and I really wanted to get out.
So, my first job was in the clean energy space. I applied to one of the fastest growing companies in Canada, at the time called Hydrogenics. I worked there for about six months or a year and I realized that I was most likely going to die broke because engineers don't get paid a lot of money.
I think that was the first time in my life I really started asking the question, "What is money? Where does it come from? Who invents it? Why do we even use it?" It's just so funny when you think about it. It's like pieces of paper with people's faces on it.
With my evenings and weekends, I ended up getting all my licenses and making investments in insurance. I started my own brokerage. At the peak of my couple of years, I had like maybe 20, 25 brokers. They all traded and were serving hundreds of customers every month.
Then in 2007-2008, I started realizing that probably something was not okay. Everyone around me was doing all these strategies, so called strategies, that just felt really wrong as somebody who understood math. You just look at these budgets, and you'd be like, "Wait, it just doesn't add up." Like you're just trying to screw people. And that was happening kind of everywhere. So, before the crash I ended up leaving that industry completely, really turned off by it. And leaving with more questions than I had answers, even though I had all these licenses and customers and people that I would train.
In my heart, I just felt like no one knew what money was. Everyone was stressing about it and killing themselves over it and getting into divorces and wars and illnesses. Yet, nobody could define for me, what money is. Where does it come from? Like I said, why do we use it? All of that. Why does it go down in value every year? All these things, right?
So I ended up realizing that working in a job wasn't my thing. But, at the time, I felt like running a business wasn't my thing either, because I tried running my own business, my own brokerage, and it was just a struggle. So, I decided that I would do something in between. I decided that I would spend the next eight or ten years of my life in sales. It's actually a sales job. Where I had the comfort of like a paycheck, but at the same time, I closed good sales. So, I could make this upside.
It's like a pseudo business. For eight years, I got to sell robots to universities around the world, and hone in on how to sell. I used to sit across from somebody and sell something. And then that company ended up eventually taking me to India for about five, six years. I was in India, pretty much by myself, not any friends or whatever. And then, in 2011 or 2012, I discovered Bitcoin online. That essentially got me to start up Meetup groups, which ended up starting Unocoin. And Unocoin now is a company of a million plus users, and a hundred or so employees.
I mean, that's a very high level of view, from where I started to where I am.
What are the things that you now value? I know this is a bit of a broad question, but you've had quite the journey.
The first thing that comes to me is my breath. I would say I value my breath. Just being able to breathe.
I had asthma growing up. I might still have asthma. I take a little bit of medication for it. But, as a child I had really bad asthma. I was hospitalized quite frequently. Not being able to breathe really sucks. It's the most terrible thing ever. Whenever I get into stressful situations, or if I'm on stage in front of a thousand people, or if I'm pitching an investor that could make or break the future of our company, or speaking of a regulator that could put me in jail… If it's something really, really stressful, it's always the one common place is my breath. As long as I take a deep breath, as long as I have my focus there, it enables me to remain present. It allows me to be in the moment.
I find that if you're in the moment 99.99% of the time, it's not ever stressful. We only actually feel stressed when we think about what could have happened, or what might be something we want to do in the future that might not happen. So, the things I'm very thankful for are things like living more, breathing exercises, and yoga. I just have to maintain a full breath.
Beyond that, it’s things like good health, right? Times that I'm just eating unhealthy or not exercising or not taking care of myself, obviously I just feel shittier, right?
Then, things like family are obviously very important, right? I have two little girls at home, my wife, and also my parents, my brother. Having a sense of family. People who love you. And also, doing funny things. Like when I walk home and have two little literally girls attached to my legs. That's so cool and so awesome! Beyond that, I would say friends and community. All my friends bring so much joy to my life.
I know you talked about friends and community just now. What’s the whole human dynamic of being a founder and with co-founder relationships?
For me, prior to Carolina, I was in another relationship for three or four years. Unfortunately that relationship didn't quite work out. I got to experience what life is like when you don't have someone that's supporting you. And honestly, I can say that it was hell on earth. You literally can't excel at work. You can't take care of your health. You can't do anything because if the person who's with you is confrontational... It's just not all there and then it doesn't quite work out. I remember after that relationship I said, "I don't want to ever get in a relationship again. I'm good with this single thing.” That is, until I met Caro. But the thing about the two of us…
So, when we first met, we did this thing. We obviously liked each other and we were thinking about being together long term. We were like, "Hey, why don't we go and interview as many happy couples that have been together for at least three or four decades. Why don't we just go interview them?" And then, we started doing that.
I remember after a couple of months, we literally got to 30 or 40 couples that we had interviewed. We asked all of them what was their secret to success? We essentially boiled it down to three things that all of them had kind of alluded to.
The first one was respect. Just the importance of respecting one another. The second one was mini missions. Having mini missions, like whether it's going to New York for the weekend or Niagara Falls or whether it's building a business together. You know what I mean? Just having mini missions together. And the third one was having fun. Always remembering to have fun, because sometimes it's easy to forget to have fun.
So, I would say those three things have been barometers for our relationships. Whenever we feel like we're slipping on any one of those factors, we just try to catch each other. So that's been very helpful.
Then also, like literally right now, or at every event I've done… like the word Unocoin. Uno means one in Spanish and my wife is from Colombia. I mean literally every single thing I do, Caro is my number one fan.
In fact, I was thinking about it, "Why don't more people do Meetups?" You guys are so awesome. You get to do things around your interests. And I was thinking, probably the number one reason most people don't do it, is because they don't know that at least one other person is going to show up. And so my biggest strength is that I always know one person is going to show up and it's going to be my wife. And so I don't care. Let's say a third person doesn't show up for a single Meetup, it'll just be the two of us. We're just fine, right?
So, I think having someone who's willing to be beside you, believe in your ideas and support you is huge. It's massive. It's one of the main reasons I can take risks and do these wild things. Because I have that someone that supports me.
We live together. And I work from home quite often. So, we were working together all the time. I don't think there's that many people that I know that have that. But really early on, when we got together, we wanted that. Even when, at the time, we both had jobs and we were 9:00 to 5:00. We were both very conscious of the fact that we wanted to eventually be in a position where we could both work from home and raise our kids and just work together. That's something that, like I said, I don't see others having. I don't think it's practical for most people, but for us it's been very powerful.
I appreciate you sharing about this. I love the intentionality you shared about your relationship. I know for founders, it can be hard to cultivate those relationships, which can help us stay healthy and healthy.
What do you think we can do differently around mental health?
I don't know, to be honest with you. First of all, I feel a little bit uncomfortable talking about mental health. Maybe because my sister-in-law is a psychiatrist. I just know that if she was in the room and she heard me even trying to talk about this, she'd probably be like, "Who the hell are you?" I don't know. I just feel like it's something that's complicated. It's something that I maybe shouldn't be talking about. So, just to say that as an opening statement.
Personally, the things that I've been telling you are more along the lines that I think mental health is the tip of the mountain. There's all these other things that lead to positive mental health. To me at least, right?
I know it sounds unrelated, but if I'm feeling down and I go hit the weights, it doesn't matter what's going on in my life, I will feel better. The impact that it has obviously makes you feel better. But, if I eat a really, really fatty, greasy meal, I'll just feel worse and worse and worse. If you don't have a family, if you don't have friends, if you can’t say, "Yo, I need to just go chill. Let's go hang out and talk about nothing..." If you don't have those things, it could lead to depression and a state of not feeling good.
That's why, to me at least, mental health is like all these different things that have to move forward in tangent and then together, especially when you're in this very chaotic space like startups. If you don't have the ability to remain present… Like I said, you're focused on your breath, you'll meditate, stretch and take out the kinks in your body. It's very easy to think that kink is caused by the person who was talking to you and to take it out on that person. There's so many smaller elements that add up to being able to keep it all together, I think.
One of the ideas I've been thinking about lately is about providing. Providing people a space to just talk about it. But really, all that is coming from my discussions with you. Now that we've been talking about it, obviously, it's been something that I've been picking up more.
Thank you for taking the time to do this. I appreciate you as a leader in our space, and more importantly, for how you’ve built community in our city.
Happy to do it.