YouSaid · the spoken record

Abhi Ramesh

lines on the record: 95
first: 2025-03-31
most recent: 2025-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And the missing piece was is there demand? Are people interested in quote unquote good quality produce but not your grocery store grade delivered to you but at a discount?”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was good enough. So I'd eat some of it. I'd give away a lot of it. And then, like, there were just cases and cases of squash sitting in my living room. And I have photos. My apartment was filled with produce.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would eat some of it, but I can't eat cases of it. And so there's a lot of produce just sitting around my apartment. And I lived in an apartment building. So I started leaving it out for free for people to take in the apartment building. And so it was really just kind of like a way to test the supply side.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Max And the interesting thing that I found was for most of these farmers, they didn't even have a price for these items. They kind of were like, I don't really know, you know, like what would you pay? Things have changed a little bit now, but at the time there was really no market for these items. And so there was no such thing as a market price.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your roots, they're twisted around each other. It's like there are two carrots that are almost like hugging each other. So I started buying all this stuff.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last long time. There's huge quantities of. And a lot of these are like what's fascinating about the vegetables especially was there are significant aesthetic imperfections nothing but aesthetics like i'm seeing carrots that are just”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would call them and ask, Hey, do you have produce that you can't sell to grocery stores? And most of them would say, yes, why? Who are you? What do you want? And I would just say, I want to buy it from you. They all said, Great, come on by. And so drive to the farms. I start buying up cases and cases of their kind of grade to product”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the challenging things was some of the Amish farms. You probably know they can't use cell phones, they don't use it, and so they have their one phone landline in the barn. And so if you don't catch them at 6 a.m., you're not going to catch them the rest of the day. So I'd wake up early, call them at 6 a.m.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so some people ask me why we start organic at misfits? Because we actually started the business only doing organic produce. In part, I think it was because I thought that starting organic would kind of give us more of the quality credibility. But the real answer is there's not a list of all conventional farms, but there is a list of all organic farms online on the US Data website. And so what I did when I got back home is I pulled that list of every organic farm in Pennsylvania and I started cold calling or emailing all of them.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And if you think about the time that I was doing this in Philadelphia, this was kind of late summer, you know, summer to late summer. And so a lot of what was being grown at the time was these kind of like hardier seasonal fruits and vegetables. Apples were a huge part of it. The squashes, the potatoes, the onions, like I was so excited. I need to immediately figure out if this is a one-off thing that I just learned about this apple farmer or if this exists across other commodities. And so the first thing I did when I got back home to Philly is I was Googling around to see how I could get in contact with other farmers. What's interesting is the USDA actually publishes a list of every organic certified farm.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was probably the first moment where kind of made me realize I am looking at a grade of apples that I as a consumer would feel totally fine eating. And I'm talking to a farmer that is willing to give it to me at almost any price, you know, not any price, but it is basically saying like my alternative here is either zero or five cents or 10 cents. And there's a whole lot of room between that and what I as a consumer and probably willing to pay given the price of apples at the grocery store.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or less. 25 cents. There's a whole lot in between there. And so are there apples here that could be sold for 40 cents or 50 cents To the retail channel, and is there something there? And so in a sense, sort of testing the farmer, because I was like, okay, can I buy these? And he said, sure, how many ever you want? And I was like, you know, how much do you want me to pay for them? And he kind of was just like, name your price, you know, pay whatever you want for them.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just generally curious about does it taste any different from the apples that we're picking from the trees? And I think the other thing going through my head at the time was, okay, if these apples could be sold via retail channels for a dollar an apple and sold to the juicing cider channels for 20 cents an apple. Right.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was very curious. I was like, can I look at them? So he opens up his cold storage little container. I look inside and I just see giant drums of apples and I pick one or two out. And I was like, nothing seems wrong with these. Like, yeah, maybe they're a little small. I maybe see a bruise on one or two, but I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with these apples. I was like, can I buy some from you?”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We decided to wind down horizons. I still did not know what I was going to do next. So my girlfriend at the time, wife now, was finishing up her med school at Penn. And so on one of our adventures, we ended up going to an apple orchard located about 40 minutes outside of Philly. And when I was there, I remember seeing like we were going through the apple orchard and for every apple that was, you know, on the tree that we could go pick there were like hundreds on the ground already. And so I, you know, I remember that. All these apples on the ground, like what do you do with them? I'm more just curious. And he points this giant cold storage container that he has and says, I put them all there. I donate some. I make cider with some, and I end up having to throw out the vast majority of them at the end of every season.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And what kind of piqued my curiosity was when you read through some of the standards, some of them are sort of like very quantifiable. You know, it's like, oh, you don't want a rotting spot on your pair when you sell it or, you know, you need a certain size. And some of them are pretty vague. Some of them are like, you know, you want the apple to be clean on the outside. And it's like, what does that mean? You know what I mean? If there's a little dirt on it, does that not count as clean? And so this just piqued my curiosity. And I kind of just put it in a folder in the back of my head, but I was just interested having learned about it. And then I think the most pivotal moment for me, I actually ended up moving from San Francisco to Philadelphia.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. So there are a couple of moments that led up to me deciding there was something interesting to do with selling produce online. The first one was I actually stumbled into an article that talks about produce specs. They're actually like extraordinarily specific specifications that the USDA puts out for every item, bananas, apples, oranges. There is strict guidelines on what falls into what tier. If you look at apples, for example, there's extra fancy, fancy, you know, grade one, grade two, and all the way down. And so some of them an article that kind of was explaining some of this, and I just didn't realize that that's actually how produce grading work.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because we looked at the type of business it was and we were like, this is not something that can withstand venture style funding. Like it's just doesn't make sense. And so rather than disappoint a bunch of investors who want to see a 10x on a tutoring business, let's just give the capital back. And so maybe we should go look to see if we could do other things.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's funny because you think that we would make the same mistake twice, but the big realization Horizons, again, was we were like, okay, we have this thing at a couple hundred students a year, but going from zero students to 100 students was easy. We couldn't see a world in which you could go from 100 to 500 or 500 to 1,000 without multiple years trying to scale to multiple occasions, multiple cities. And I think we still could have done it. But I think both of us looked at each other and said, like, do we actually want to be scaling a physical another physical tutoring education business? And this is probably early 2018. We were doing Horizons for three years now. It's a profitable business. We are making money from this, which is awesome. But it's really hard to scale. And there was a period of time where we actually took on a few hundred thousand dollars of external capital. We returned it two months later, the entire amount.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it is definitely under threat because of AI. I also think it's under threat because software engineering hiring has just has shrunk. Those roles are just a lot fewer of them now. And then I also, yes, definitely think the self serve tools have become a lot better as well.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So moving to San Francisco allowed us to scale in a very meaningful way. And I actually believe we raised the price a little bit when we moved to San Francisco to probably more like $12,000, $12,500. So you can do the math. Like if we're running 200 students a year at that tuition cost, it was getting to be a real business for us.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, that increased the pressure a lot because the cost of doing anything in San Francisco is a lot higher than it was in Philadelphia. So hiring instructors, teaching assistants, classroom space was a lot more. And so we knew that by moving to San Francisco, it was going to be a higher stakes game. But we still thought it was the right decision to actually start to scale the program”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, for one very large reason. We didn't just promise that you learn how to code. We also said we were going to help you find jobs to all the students.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't raise any money. When a student signed up, we took a deposit. That deposit gave us enough to kind of fund some of the upfront costs of renting a space, paying the security deposit. And then the rest of the business ended up being cash flow positive because once people paid their entire tuition up front, we could fund the rest of the program after”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I'd say the hardest part to the financial equation for the coding boot camp is just what your class size is going to be. You want to have a big class size and try to stretch that instructor cost to over as many students as possible. However, the more students you have in a class, in theory, the less effective it is for the entire class. And so we have to balance class size with that.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was a 12 week program. And we hired an instructor because, again, we're kind of the operational heads. We helped design the curriculum. But we wanted to make sure there was someone with like real credibility and also could teach computer science fundamentals well. Again, I'm self-taught. So while I can write code, I don't think I'm good enough to teach code.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and the reason that came up was because I was talking to Darwish about how I had taught myself how to code. And he was like, interesting because I also have kind of been teaching myself how to code as well using a lot of these tutorials online, things like Code Academy. And we were like, do we think that there is an opportunity to actually build kind of like a, can we focus on teaching people software engineering skills? And there were a whole lot of people that were looking at kind of pivoting their career. And one of the big gaps was, yes, there were non-technical jobs in tech, but if you didn't know how to code, it was hard. And if you didn't study computer science in college, you did know how to code.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And funny enough, he essentially had the exact same itch. And he was like, gosh, I'm sitting here working in finance, thinking back to our Altair Prep days. And we did some things wrong. We did some things right. Like maybe we should give that another go.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yes, I only lasted nine months there. So it was nothing about the firm itself or the experience. I just got the itch to go do something else on my own, and I could not get rid of it. You know, most of my job was looking at these, you know, I'd say companies between $50 million revenue and $300 million of revenue. And so my job was to go and like analyze them, underwrite them, and go and figure out whether Apollo would lend to them. Every single time that I would sit there and look at one of these pitch decks and build the model, I was like, I wish that I were on the other side. And so it got to a point where I was like, gosh, like, it's not like I don't like working here. I just, this itch is so strong that I feel like I have to go do something on my own. And I reconnected with Darwish, who was my co-founder for Altair Prep.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the conscious side of me was I'm kind of done. This whole startup thing's really hard. You know, I met Wharton. I met the sort of premier institution for learning finance. Why didn't I go actually give that a shot?”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much, yeah, because there were really no costs for you know, for me, it was, I had to live somewhere and I crashed on people's couches in LA. And my only cost were my living costs.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was exactly like Stitchfix before Stitchfix existed, so maybe I should have continued to do that. But it was a style, a personalized style quiz for men. So you'd go online, you'd kind of go through this giant quiz, and then we'd essentially send shoppers to go and pick a box for you every month and send it to you. I coded that myself from scratch.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and what ended up happening was I took a full year off from Penn. This happened probably around month five or month six. And I still had five or six months left on my leave of absence. And so I ended up deciding that I was going to teach myself how to code, how to become a software engineer. In trying to build the software product for Altair Prep, I realized how hard it was to hire engineers to speak their language unless you actually knew how to write code. So I was like, I'm going to spend the next five or six months learning how to code by myself and trying to build things.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, the reason we moved to LA was there's a small incubator in LA that essentially said, well, we will write you a $25,000 check to go build the software around this. So instead of a giant tutoring business, we can actually have like a recurring subscription sort of software business. So that was the idea. The long story short was that did not work. Given who our customer was, you know, like a high performing student with parents that want to figure out a way to get their students to get great scores, they didn't want to just pay for software. They wanted to look a kid who got 2,400 on the SAT in the eyes and sit their kid next to that kid and say, learn from this person. And so even though the software we built kind of had the same pieces that the Excel sheet and the tutor did, people ended up preferring the tutor. So we realized that early on ended up essentially dropping the software model entirely.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And so the primary reason was though the test prep kind of business model, the tutoring business model, allowed us to get traction quickly and had real margins and we were able to get it to a certain scale, we thought about how we could actually scale it beyond that. Like how do you scale a physical tutoring business to really hard to do? So we're like, okay, we got to go software.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, an important distinction, so I was not doing the tutoring anymore. I was helping build and design the curriculum, kind of pushing on strategy. We hired tutors. And actually, as we started to kind of get a little bit more momentum and traction in clientele for all tarot, I was like, okay, I actually think this merits investing more time and energy. I'm going to go take a year off from school to do it.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the main co founder was a friend from high school named Darwish. He actually runs a different startup today, and I worked on another company with him after her. So, you know, we actually had clients and we were tutoring folks.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was somewhat of a technology idea. We created a gigantic Excel spreadsheet tagging thousands and thousands of SAT and ACT questions. We then use this to essentially create a personalized program for kids who wanted to get much higher scores in SAT and ACT. And so what we'd end up doing is the program was you take a diagnostic test at first. We will then take that diagnostic test, see which 30 questions you missed, go to our bank of tagged 10,000 questions and essentially go and build you a 10-week program personalized to the exact types of questions that you had been missing on your diagnostic. Early on we thought we were going to monetize this by building software”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like, I can't pay for it. I don't make money. And so they were basically like, go make money and figure it out. And so at an early age, it was like, you got, if you want to buy stuff, you need to kind of earn and appreciate what things actually cost and why they cost and what it takes to go generate that. Obviously as a high schooler, you have only a handful of things you could do to go make money. And so I started tutoring people.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the tutoring business kind of came naturally out of that, where there were a few other high schoolers, friends of mine that were like had good scores in SATs. And we said, hey, let's go create a tutoring program to run that. Now, to be honest, it was mainly because I had to make money I think when I was 15, I wanted to buy like a go-kart or something like that. And my parents said, sure, but you pay for it.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So I listened to that episode as well, and I did not know that. I was like, holy cow. And believe it or not, I believe Nick also started and worked on a tutoring business of some sort, if I recall.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end of the day, what got them out of India, what got them the opportunities to move to the United States. So for them, it's such this critical, critical foundation. And as I think in most of my, what do you want to be when you grow up answers? It was probably like either an engineer or a doctor.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I ever got anything below 100 on a test. My dad would show up to the school. And this wasn't for show, he actually meant it. He would schedule a meeting and he'd be like, why did he get a 97? Is there anything we need to be doing at home to make sure he's not missing three points out of 100 on an exam? He did that a ton, to my embarrassment. And as any kind of teenager growing up at the time, I was like, this is nuts. My parents are crazy. Like, what's wrong with them? I think I understand it a little bit more now for both my parents, education is what got them here.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During COVID. So, if my wife hadn't been gone through that type of cancer treatment, I probably would have looked at some of the problems that Misfitz was going through at the time been like, holy cow, this is like life or death. But it certainly did give me perspective on what is truly a life or death problem and what are actually just hard problems that you can deal with. And at the end of the day, coming on the other side”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were woefully unprepared for COVID. Just the sheer volume of folks kind of signing up. On top of all this, it was a very challenging kind of personal time as well. My wife was actually diagnosed with lymphoma.”
2025-03-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT