How thinking like a monk can make you a better founder with Joyeeta Das, Co-founder & CEO of Samudra Oceans

Not My First Guess

Today I’m joined by Joyeeta Das, Co-founder & CEO of Samudra Oceans. Joy is a serial deep-tech entrepreneur who’s founded five startups, three of which have had successful exits. She’s also an influential and active member of the wider startup community with additional roles as an advisor and investor. She’s scaled projects to hundreds of million of dollars in revenue, managing teams of three to 800 strong so she has a lot to teach us from startup to scaleup.

Our conversation is a little bit different again today as it focuses more on Joy’s collective wisdom and experience so I’ll give you a quick taster of her various businesses now for context, before we get started. I’d also highly recommend following the links in the show notes to learn more about them if you’re interested.

Joy’s current business is called Samudra which is sanskrit for oceans. Joy and her co-founder Alexander Facey founded Samudra in October 2022 after meeting at climate emergency venture builder, Carbon13, and bonding over their mutual love of the ocean and hardware engineering. They believe the ocean holds the key to a lot of the present climate crisis and are on a mission with Samudra to take 10 million tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere by 2033 by scaling seaweed farming using robotics and AI.

Joy also co-founded;

Gyana - an organisation that creates tech platforms to democratise the power of AI.
SuperPitch - an online ecosystem connecting globally-minded investors with talented, diverse founders, particularly women, to raise funding and build successful businesses.

Anahatalife - a unique NGO that gets artists, scientists, poets, actors, musicians and mathematicians together to solve world scale problems.

Aseema - a strategic consultancy advising new businesses on the formation of corporations, business structures, drafting privacy policies and structuring commercial transactions.

In this episode we discuss:

• Why Joyeeta pivoted her dream of becoming a monk into being a serial founder and what it taught her about taking risks
• How to gain the same market intuition in three months as someone who’s spent a decade in the same industry
• Dating to find the right co-founder, nurturing your relationship, and breaking up successfully
• Why the funding system is broken and what we can do about it
• The number of meetings it takes to raise your first million and then turning that into 20 (million)
• Responding to bias

Links:

• Check out Samudra Oceans - https://www.samudraoceans.com
• Joyeeta’s TED Talk, Why do we have to choose between a dreamer and a doer? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3Nx4YT-_U
• The 36 Questions - https://www.scienceofpeople.com/deep-questions/
• Carbon13 - https://carbonthirteen.com
• Gyana - https://www.gyana.com
• SuperPitch (acquired by Diversity X) - https://www.diversityx.vc
• Anahatalife (integrated into a national program)
• Aseema (acquired)