Madhu Chamarty is one of the most fascinating people I have had the pleasure of interviewing. The Indian-born Stanford graduate who achieved great success in Silicon Valley is on to his newest project with the creation of Hynt. An application that aims to prolong our digital conversations, Hynt is able to bring a deeper emotional level to what is often an immediate demand for information. If you have any interest in entrepreneurship, this post will keep you on the edge of your seat.

When did you initially pursue the field of entrepreneurship?

Well, technically speaking, at age 9. I was living in India with my uncle and aunt at the time in a huge apartment complex, and always loved that my uncle had a huge personal library of books of all sorts. I was excited about the possibility of not just sharing these with friends, but actually renting them out! I mean, what better way to strengthen friendships than to build a revenue stream out of them right? I stamped my name on the first page of about 100 books, opened up a makeshift library on the roof deck of our apartment building, and ran it for about 5 weekends - before my uncle realized a ton of books were missing. My venture folded then, but luckily I got to keep the money.

Fast forward 8 years and after numerous other such adventures: my next serious attempt was as a college student in Dublin, Ireland, building an online virtual reality tour company as part of a nationwide student competition. A friend and I wanted to offer virtual tours to exotic destinations, right from the comfort of your own home. This was in 2002, and Virtual Reality was still a novelty concept. We were semi-finalists, which was exciting, but we did not continue on with the idea.

My professional entrepreneurial ventures occurred over the past 10 years in Silicon Valley. After graduating from grad school at Stanford, I joined a bunch of business school professors from Harvard and Wharton as an early employee of a technical consulting company working on some cool projects at Microsoft and the Department of Defense/Boeing, among others. After 2 years at this, I wanted to go back to school again, and was 3 weeks from heading back to Europe to study Technology Policy at Cambridge. However, another uncle who was a tech startup CEO at the time gave me a pep talk and mildly chided me for wanting to go back to school again instead of growing my real-world practical experience. 

Deferring my program at Cambridge, I joined as a sales engineer at a 2 year old startup called Adify, which was building ‘ad server+analytics’ as a service to large digital publishers like ABC, ESPN, Univision, Martha Stewart, etc. This was my first taste of the startup culture in Silicon Valley. My work was my home. After 2 years at Cox, some colleagues and I spun out and founded Dynamic Signal, which pioneered the idea of a SaaS platform for employee advocacy, i.e. empowering a company’s employees to become social media advocates on behalf of the brand. We raised ~$33MM in 3 rounds of funding, and built up an awesome set of clients: IBM, Intel, General Mills, BMW, Warner Bros. as well as many other Fortune 500 brands. I was heading up the company’s customer success group, and it was my responsibility to prevent my clients from leaving and to help them grow with us. Miraculously, we maintained zero churn for the first 4.5 years of the company, up until I left at the end of March 2015! And, oh, my place at Cambridge is now in its 8th year of deferral!

What inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

Only over the past 5-6 years have I really been thinking of myself as an entrepreneur. Up until then, I just saw myself as someone who loved creating things that people can enjoy - that makeshift “library” when I was kid, the virtual reality tour company concept, a website to publish interviews about famous-but-hard-to-reach individuals, a web app to classify social posts and tweets, and an avatar app built on top of Foursquare that grows happy/sad/fat/thin based on your real-world checkins are all projects I did because I just loved the idea of building something from scratch, putting it in the hands of people, and watching that cause some sort of positive/beneficial/entertaining impact on them.

I have always been obsessed with the notion of creating something from scratch and watching its impact grow. My time at Stanford and in Silicon Valley just allowed me to give this obsession a name and some structure! I have since come to work with, meet, and read about some amazing entrepreneurs, whose stories continue to inspire me. I am partial to people who think of ‘positive impact’ as their primary metric of achievement. There are so many problems to solve in the world, so many new trends to explore, so many aspects of the future to invent. I’d love to be part of the narrative that addresses one or more of these, and this desire is what continues to inspire me to continue as an entrepreneur, now from Project: SPACES in Toronto.

What advice do you have for young entrepreneurs who may be apprehensive to joining this field in pursuit of “stability"?

One of my favourite questions! A young entrepreneur today has so many options to grow. I’ll share a few personal insights that I hope will be helpful for others:

a)   Joining a new/growing startup is a great way for first-timers to learn. Getting past the first year or two takes a special (and often unforeseen) combination of skills and luck. A company that is past this stage can certainly be a great place to test the waters and hone skills. It is more stable, but still very exciting and educational.

b)   If you are launching into a venture yourself, get comfortable with, expect, and do not be scared off by uncertainty. If you feel like you are lost in an ocean of a myriad possibilities, priorities, tradeoffs, then you are in the right place! Growing a startup from an idea to an MVP to something useful/interesting to a handful of people involves mastering the art of dealing with uncertainty and extracting some sort of repeatability and scale. Growth then comes as the next phase.

c)   Talk to as many of your fellow entrepreneurs as possible. Seek out people who may have failed in past endeavours; they will have even more to teach you on what (not) to do. You will learn a ton. There is no shame in admitting that you are scared or feeling clueless that you need help. You will be amazed at how good you can get once you start this and how many benefits you can get out of opening up. There is strength and comfort in community, and at Project: SPACES especially there is a strong and growing community. No one is going to steal your idea and drop the 500 priorities they have in their own life and build it and get on the cover of Forbes or Fortune. Great companies are seldom build on the initial idea and depend on execution anyway more than the idea.

d)   Don’t look at startups as ‘high-risk’, but instead look at them as ‘high-opportunity’. Of the various things you can do as a young person to build your personal/professional brand, trying to build a new product/service is an incredible and innovative way. Many startups pivot, and even more startups fail, BUT, the personal learning from the journey typically beats the learning while at a large corporation, over a comparable period of time. Lessons when doing a startup come fast, and in large numbers. Neither BigCo nor any university can match the pace, vigour, diversity, and value of this experience. You just have to maintain this perspective that win or lose, it is all learning. You can then use this in your next endeavour, entrepreneurial or not. Easier said than done, I know, but trust me, once you get comfortable with seeing this perspective, startups suddenly become even more exciting!

Describe Hynt, and the benefits of why people would want to use this app?

Hynt is a social communications platform that aims to make digital interactions more participatory and longer-lasting. The idea is to build up anticipation and excitement when digitally sharing everyday moments. The initial version of this vision is a mobile service that lets you turn your photos or videos into an interactive puzzle that your friends get to reveal. The content is initially hidden or scrambled, and users unscramble or reveal it by performing fun actions (like inviting other friends to reveal, or guessing X times, or exchanging points for the ability to ‘insta reveal’, etc.). The key focus for us developing Hynt is to make the unraveling process almost as exciting, if not more exciting, than the reveal itself, turning the whole engagement into a game of sorts. This is similar to online/social gaming where the journey is more exciting than the destination.

This idea has two implications / applications:

a)   Companies using Hynt: When you post an update on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, or any other social channel, there is no inherent incentive or requirement for users to engage with this content. Most social audiences are passive consumers of content, even when it comes to their favourite brands/bands/celebrities/fitnessTrainers/photographers/bloggers. 

Companies spend millions of dollars creating great content to share on these platforms, but are essentially left to ‘spray and pray’ when it comes to engagement. My experience over the past 8 years working with Fortune500 brands is proof. I interacted primarily with heads of PR/marketing/social, etc., and know that they all spend a lot of time and money on various tactics to get users to hit that Like/Retweet button. A majority of people still don’t. Hynt aims to change this by developing building a ‘participation mechanic’ into a social communication platform. So, engaging with content isn’t an option, but actually integral to revealing content of your choice. The challenge here of course is to not make the reveal process tedious or boring, but actually entertaining and addictive!

b)   Individuals using Hynt: A good portion of social communication follows the format of “hey, here is what I did!” in order to build excitement. I believe that changing that to “hey, guess what I did?!” will bring about even more engagement and excitement. By turning a statement into a question, we can induce an innate sense of wonder. 

People love surprises, and guessing games are probably as old as human communication itself (ok, I don’t have actual origin dates here, but just go with me on this one). So, with Hynt, we want to develop a new format of messaging that essentially turns communicating with friends into a game. Engaging with a hidden/scrambled piece of content to unravel it is a form of sustained release of joy, and I want to propagate such micro-instances of enjoyment across everyday interactions between people.

Do you think, especially in today’s age where people demand information immediately, that there is enough patience in human nature for people to wait for Hynt’s surprise reveal?

Great question. As I mentioned earlier, the goal behind Hynt isn’t to introduce barriers but to actually make the process of engaging with content (whether it is from a brand, their favourite blogger, or their friends) more fun and exciting. The key to sustained engagement is providing some reward every step of the way (i.e. micro-positive feedback), making the whole process enjoyable. People love playing games online and on their phone, and no one complains that a game is too hard or takes too long, because they enjoy the journey and the progression. In fact that challenge makes the game even more interesting and exciting! 

The goal with Hynt is to induce game mechanics into social communication, i.e. to carefully tease out the reveal, making the journey to reveal super fun and engaging. I want to build Hynt such that users would want to play, and play takes a lot of work! Not all digital communication is fit for the hunt-reveal mechanic. For example, if I have to text my sister that I left the keys to the car on the kitchen counter, I will not use Hynt! That is a message where speed takes precedence over engagement. However, I believe there is a ton of room in daily digital conversations for hynt-reveal. E.g. “Guess what I bought at the mall?” or “Guess where I’m taking you this weekend”, or “New workout video coming out - play to reveal”, or “location of surprise sale this evening - play to reveal” etc.

What has your experience been like working at Project: SPACES? What benefits have you reaped since working here?

Jeff and Neil were among the first people I met since moving to Toronto. I wrote in to them asking for a tour, and really haven’t looked back since. I’ve always seen them as two super helpful, fun, and resourceful dudes fostering a creative, collaborative, and entrepreneurial spirit. Jeff liked to call me an MIT (Member in Training), as I tagged along to a couple of happy hours and events before joining as a member. The main aspect I love about Spaces is the awesome diversity of its members. [Shoutout to Liam Williams and Mike Mason, fellow members at RHINO, as two such cool dudes!] 

I hear conversations about craft beer, node.js, ZigBee devices, and activism magazines, all within a span of a few hours on any given day. This makes SPACES very unique, and I love it. It is almost like being back in Uni. I also like the fact that SPACES is 24/7 and that members can access both RHINO and OWL. This signifies openness and a welcoming attitude. Another really attractive aspect of SPACES has been the steady stream of events that take place here - showcases, founder interviews, happy hours, etc. 

As a newcomer to Toronto, I’m open to any opportunity to make new like-minded friends, so I am a big fan of these events. One other small but cool feature for me is the ability to stream my music over to the speakers at OWL. Esp. after 5pm, when “official” music stops, and my more serious work begins (I am a night-owl), I love playing some good instrumental hiphop or alternative beats and pushing Hynt further.