[00:00:00] Maggie: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Asian Hustle Network Podcast. Today we have a very special guest with us. His name is Yash Kothari. 

Yash Kothari founded Kindred Minds in 2020 with the hope of bringing together like-minded people to explore life’s bigger questions. Understanding who he was and living in line with those values has been his journey for the last seven years.

He has spent those years facilitating workshops and meaningful group experiences for people from all walks of life, including executives, families, founders, students, and more. He focuses on using mindfulness (trained in insight-based techniques) and other science-backed modalities to help people uncover personal insights and live their best lives. 

Kindred Minds is a membership that helps people live with greater purpose and intention. We offer a new, and more affordable, approach to traditional 1:1 coaching that uses the power of community, accountability, and structured reflection. Yash, welcome to the show. 

[00:01:01] Yash: Thank you, Maggie. It’s great to be here.

[00:01:03] Maggie: We’re very excited to have you here, Yash. So let’s hop right into it. We’d love to learn about your upbringing, where you grew up, and what it was like for you while you were growing up.

[00:01:13] Yash: Yeah, sure. Happy to share. So, I was actually born in Queens, New York, and then I lived in a suburb of New York City in New Jersey for about 10 years.

And then like in fifth grade, I was a pretty quiet, young boy. I was like the only Indian, I think in my middle school or elementary school at the time. And then my parents told me one day they were like, Hey, we’re moving to India. And I remember that was this really big shocking moment for me that I wasn’t happy about at all.

And so we moved to Mumbai and I spent my high school growing up in Mumbai, and that’s, I think, was just like an incredibly important time for me in both being in a culture, where I felt like I connected more with others who looked connected with me, understood me in a deeper cultural way.

And that really allowed me to kind of just open up a little bit, both from a confidence and self-esteem perspective, but also yeah, also emotionally and with friends and at school. Like there’s just, it just was a very clear difference. And so I spent my high school in India and then I graduated and came over, back to the US for my undergrad.

And happy to tell you more about that story too.

[00:02:27] Maggie: Wow, that’s amazing. It must have been such an experience for you to move back and forth, especially at such a young age too. And I can definitely feel what you’re saying about going back to your home country whenever I go back to my motherland, I also feel like I’m at home.

These are my people. I feel very understood here. But then there’s also that feeling like, where do I actually belong? Because there’s that identity crisis, like maybe I don’t feel Asian enough to be here, but then when you go back to the states, like, maybe I don’t feel American enough to be here.

Yeah. So it must have been such an interesting experience for you and can you talk a little bit about how you were able to adapt moving back and forth and where you went to college, where you went to school, and what was that like?

[00:03:17] Yash: Yeah, I will share that tension that you’re talking about, right?

Like neither here nor there, that never goes away or has never gone away for me. And I actually realize, like now even in my relationship with my partner, who I’m now married to, she was born and brought up in India her whole life. She did her undergrad in the US. We moved here. But we still see that conflict coming up and we see, hey, that cultural difference of me having spent more time here and quote unquote being a little bit more American like that actually brings up like all these conversations and at times conflict that we then work through and trying to understand each other and how we value things.

So I think the short answer is like, I’m always adapting, right? That, yes, there were, there were things I did to adapt back and forth as I moved back and forth, but also learning that this is a lifelong journey of understanding who I really am and how I fit within the context of these cultures.

And something my partner and I talk about is like in many ways, creating this third culture, right? What does that third culture look like and how do we take the pieces that we connect to in western culture and the pieces that we connect to in Eastern Asian culture, and how do we bring them together in a way that’s right for us?

And again, there’s no objective right or wrong. And that’s one of the things I’ve learned being in both of these places. Like there’s no actual right or wrong to anything. It’s just a matter of, Hey, who are you? What works best for you? And how can you help build the life that you want?

I think adapting, in some ways, was straightforward. When I was young it was like it wasn’t in my hands, right? So I just kind of went and then I was like, oh, okay, like I’m 11 years old and I’m just gonna kind of like try to settle in here. And I think the piece around familiarity and seeing people like me, people who grew up more similar to the way I did, created this sense of comfort and confidence within myself.

And so that helped me open up to people, open up to myself, build deeper self-awareness and feel more alive and my kind of truest self and matching that to my external self. So I think that that was like a big piece. And then there was a piece when I graduated and I came back to the US. So I came back and this is an important piece.

I studied at the University of Pennsylvania and so I was studying business at the Wharton School at Penn. And a big part of why I even applied to business school, I think, was the nature of my upbringing. And a big part of my entrepreneurial journey has also been deeply rooted in my upbringing, that growing up in India, I grew up in an entrepreneurial family.

My grandfather was deeply entrepreneurial. My father was deeply entrepreneurial. They were building businesses, were talking about businesses, and so when it came to, Hey, what do I wanna study? I just didn’t think that much and I was like, oh yeah, I’m gonna be a businessman. Like that’s what I’ve seen my whole life.

That’s what this Indian male archetype, at least in my context, looks like. And so, okay, let me go do that. And then it was like, well, what’s like one of the best schools I can do that for? And I was like, okay, Penn seems like they have a really great program for undergrad business and so I’m gonna go and do that.

And then I went through that. And again, we can talk more about definitions of success. Cause I think that’s been a big, big, big part of my journey of understanding, well, who am I? How do I build companies? What do I actually want to do? And then how do I find what, again, to the point around third culture, how can I find what really fits within who I am and what I’m deeply looking for?

[00:06:38] Maggie: I feel like success can mean so many different things depending on who you are as a person, and that just goes back to our experiences, right? And success to one person might mean differently to another person, right? Like you mentioned your family, you come from a very entrepreneurial background.

However, my family, my father worked in the same company for 40 years and so he’s always taught me and my sisters to just go to school, graduate, get a well paying job until you’re the age of 65, and then you’ll live a good life. But that might not be the same for any other person who comes from a very entrepreneurial background.

So you bring up a really, really good point there. I guess on that topic, what does success mean to you from your perspective? 

[00:07:22] Yash: Yeah, this is a little bit of a longer answer. When I was an undergrad, I actually didn’t fully know what I wanted to do. And so my life became a lot about achievement, achievement, achievement. Like get really good grades, get a really good job offer like, do really well in school.

Hey, what does a successful life look like? And so again, taking into account my life experiences by my senior year, that meant starting a company. And so I was like, oh, I want to start a company. Like that’s what it looks like. Like all these really awesome stories that you hear about people starting X, Y, Z company out of undergrad and growing into a really big business.

Like I want to be like that. And that’s what I started to do. And I was like, okay, let’s build this company. Let’s build this technology startup. And so me and my co-founder, who was also Indian, and I don’t think by coincidence, that’s what we did. And we did pretty well, right? By our second semester of senior year, we had mostly dropped out of school.

We still got our degree. We graduated. Right as we graduated, we got accepted into an accelerator called Y Combinator, which was a really big deal for us at the time. And so we went through YC and then we raised all this money, right? We raised millions of dollars. We got featured in Forbes and TechCrunch.

And my parents, so this is the point around upbringing, my parents are so excited. They’re like, oh, this is amazing. Like your company’s valued at this. Here’s this article about you in Forbes. Like, let me share this with all the people that I know and we’re so proud of you. And like that for me was so exciting.

I was like, oh my God, this is what success is. This is what it feels like. This is what I’ve been chasing. And then the reality, Maggie, is that like after the shininess, after the external pieces of it start to wear off, and it was like, well, what does my life actually look like day to day? I realized I just wasn’t happy and I realized that deep within me there was this sadness and this loneliness and this frustration.

That as I was chasing this definition of success that I thought was true for me and that I’d seen my whole life growing up, I realized that didn’t actually translate to the meaningful life that I was trying to build. And so that was a really big step in my journey — and I’m actually very proud of myself.

I decided, well, this is not going to be the rest of my life. And that this version of success and the way my parents led their lives, or the way that my grandparents led their lives is not necessarily the right way for me to live my life. And so I decided, well, no, I’m not gonna do this. And really, for me, the last six or seven years, and this relates to Kindred Minds, and I’m happy to tell more about that too, but really the last six, seven years have been a journey about understanding, well, what does success mean?

What is the life that I wanna build for myself? And how can I, again, with the true deeper part of myself and not the part that’s been influenced by others. The true deep part of myself, what does that mean? And what do I wanna build there?

[00:10:49] Maggie: You bring up such a great topic and, Yash, thank you so much for sharing that story with us.

I feel like a lot of us, we get caught up in our own narratives and expectations of what other people expect of us, right? And it takes a lot of courage for you to come to that conclusion. Like, maybe this isn’t something that is going to make me happy for the rest of my life. Because when you start something, when you start your own baby company, and it just becomes successful so fast and to that level, it’s easy for us to become attached to that company or attached to your little baby, right?

And so you think, oh, if this company is successful and I’ve grown it to this level, I have to go ahead and do this for the rest of my life, because I’ve already seen so much success.

But maybe it’s not gonna make you happy for the rest of your life. It’s really hard for someone to kind of get over that hump and realize that. So I just wanted to commend you for being so courageous to actually get to that level and get to that step where you actually acknowledge like, maybe I’m meant to do something else.

And would love to jump and talk about Kindred Minds. How did you get the inspiration to start something like Kindred Minds? It sounds like it was a reflection of your experiences alone. And I wanna learn what was the thought process when you were starting Kindred Minds. 

[00:12:18] Yash: Yeah, absolutely.

And thank you. Thanks for saying that, Maggie. I appreciate that because, I think a lot of times in startup land, people talk about resilience and push through and don’t give up, and that’s what leads to success and that’s what the great founder does.

And I realized when I was deep in it and I was performing in it, it’s so much harder to be able to say no and have the courage to be like, Hey, I’m not actually gonna be defined by this. It’s so much harder to do that than to stay in it and be like, oh yeah, I’m gonna keep going, keep going. The easier path for me at that time was to keep going. And so I do think it took a lot of courage and I don’t take all credit for that.

I think I had a tremendous support system that helped me through that and feel grateful for that. So yeah, thanks for acknowledging that. And I think about my story with Kindred Minds, it’s so deeply interrelated to the conversation we’re having right now because really, like I mentioned, the last seven years for me have been almost pulling this rug underneath me of like, oh, my whole life I thought this is what I was supposed to.

Wait, like I achieved some of that and I don’t think that’s what I want to do. And so now what? And in that emptiness I’ve been spending the last six years, seven years of like, okay, let me go try this really deep meditation retreat. I moved back to India again for a couple of years because my partner was like, Hey, I’m gonna go to India.

And I was like, well, my life maybe is now about love and that’s what I wanna prioritize. I worked at large tech companies, I worked at non-profits, and kind of what I came back to was this acceptance that deep within me, and I’m sure somewhat influenced by my family, but deep within me is a desire to wanna build and to create that.

When I think about what feels deeply energizing is I love to create and build things from nothing, like that feels meaningful and I had a skillset, right? That it wasn’t also just this pure, idealistic, like, I’m just gonna do something completely new that I’d never thought of before. It was like, okay, no, I also have a skillset set and there are needs that I have in my life, like financial and other pieces of it that I want to be able to build for.

And then it was like, well, how can I build something that solves my own problem? And the problem was this. This problem was who am I and what’s the life I wanna build? And so underneath the spirit of everything we’re doing with Kindred Minds, is that right? Is that we wanna help people live their best lives.

And we do that by helping them understand what are their deepest truths and how can they have the courage to align their lives with those truths. Right? And so, again, happy to tell you more specifically about what we’re doing with Kindred Minds, but that’s the real core nugget.

[00:15:44] Maggie: That’s amazing. I really appreciate you for sharing that and I feel like, especially as founders, for a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners, we go through the motions of figuring out who we are, what is our identity? Even if we’re not founders, I feel like a lot of us, we always want to figure out what is the next best thing, or what else am I missing out there?

Is this the person that I am or is there a bigger potential for me out there? And a lot of the time, it’s just human nature for us to constantly think about, who am I? What do I want? How am I supposed to get myself from point A to point B to live my best life?

And it’s just natural for us to always think that way, right? And I feel as someone who is trying to find your way to get from point A to point B, it’s hard for us to get there if we don’t get external help. And I feel like there’s a lot of coaching programs out there that are constantly trying to sell us on things that we might not be familiar with, but there’s a lot of hype about coaching programs right now.

What makes yours unique from others? I think that you do an incredible job talking about how Kindred Minds is a better group based approach to traditional one-on-one life coaching. But because there’s just so much competition out there, I’m curious to know, how do you make yourself stand out from the competition?

[00:17:28] Yash: Yeah. I think it’s one thing and one thing that we’ve learned over slowing our cohorts out and it is that we lead with belonging and so we say group-based or community-based coaching. And there’s certain advantages to that. It’s more affordable, it’s more accessible for more people.

But the biggest piece of it is it changes the whole modality of how we communicate and how we learn that beyond it being more affordable, it’s meaningfully more real and human and vulnerable and effective. And so if you think about any one of our sessions, there’s a bunch of one-on-one amazing work that’s out there, and they’re amazing frameworks, and we’re using a lot of those frameworks, right?

From therapy to coaching to all these other pieces. But the piece that makes us different is we do it in the context of community. And the piece here, and I think what would be interesting, is that the whole idea of Kindred Minds and this manifestation of community first growth has really come up from actually seeing my parents and my grandparents and my in-laws. And it’s come from there because actually deep within Indian and also Buddhist culture and other eastern traditions, there’s this concept of the Sung or the Satsung is this idea of like, for thousands of years people have come together in these small groups of 10 where they pray together and they learn together and they grow together. 

And it’s such a core tenet of so many of these modalities and practices. And for me it was, well, what does the modern day version of that look like? That I’m not particularly religious. I don’t particularly subscribe to these specific beliefs.

Like what is the combination of that beautiful community first approach with frameworks? And I think that’s our goal. That’s what we’re trying to build. That’s how we bring people together and how we grow. 

[00:19:16] Maggie: I love that. I love that you’re taking something that is traditional and you are putting a spin to it so that it’s easier to digest and understand in the modern day.

Maybe religion might not be applicable to every person today, right? But for you to kind of put your own spin to it and make it more easily digestible is incredible. I want to know, how does Kindred Minds work? How does it specifically work? Like if, let’s say I am someone who’s joining the cohort.

What can I expect when I join Kindred Minds? 

[00:19:50] Yash: Yeah, so you can expect a few things when somebody joins, right? The first and the core experience of Kindred Minds are live sessions. So once you join, we’ll match you with a group of 8 to 12 other people who are on this kind of self-development, personal growth journey.

And every other week you’ll come together online on Zoom, right? So it works for anyone, anywhere. You’ll come online for an hour and you’ll have a facilitator and you will learn together and you will connect and you’ll share your stories together. The important piece is we use something called the flipped classroom approach which, what that means is, while those live sessions are like the core experience of how people are connecting and learning, the actual insight and the frameworks are being delivered through content and pre-work for each session.

And so in between each session, we have a team of experts that we’ve worked with where we develop this pre-work, which is like content or videos or readings to watch, plus reflections to do that you then bring into the live session and then you use the live session to unpack, discuss and understand that.

And so those frameworks can look like the Enneagram, which is a popular one. There’s Disk, there’s something called the Wheel of Life where you examine, Hey, where are you on eight different key dimensions of your life, and where do you want to go? And then we do a bunch of actionable goal settings.

So then it’s every two weeks, what is the goal I wanna set for myself? How can I work towards that? How can I help the group hold me accountable to making progress towards the person I wanna be? So that’s what we do. And then, in between sessions, we have all these other value add pieces that we’re doing.

We have a Slack community to bring people together. We set up one-on-one conversations with others in your cohort, we have these other member events, so we’ll do meditations and work sprints and motivation planning. So there’s like all these pieces to make it this holistic experience of, again, how can we support each of us to understand ourselves, to live in alignment and to live our best lives.

[00:21:42] Maggie: Yeah. I love the community piece to it because that is the emphasis of the Asian Hustle network as well. And when you put a community together, you are able to find commonality with other people in the community and that makes you relate to the other person, right? And it helps to have someone there who is going through the same journey as you.

A lot of the time, especially founders or small business owners or someone who is just going through life, we often-times feel very alone. And that’s normal. That’s very normal for us to feel like we’re the only person who’s going through our own life experiences by ourselves.

But when you have a community with you and you realize that someone else is going through the same journey or someone else has the same background as you, it makes you realize, hey, I can get out of this too. Like I can do the same thing that he does too, because he comes from the same background as me, or she came from a similar experience as I did.

And I love that community piece too, and I feel like there’s not a lot of other programs that have that where it’s a very one-on-one, but not a lot of community based coaching. And I love that. 

[00:22:52] Yash: And to just illustrate your point, Maggie, like it’s such a great point that you made because one of the structures we have in our sessions, they’re called check-ins.

And what check-ins are is we just give each individual a couple of minutes of space to share what’s feeling most present for them today. And so we hear all these different stories of people going through really happy and exciting experiences, people going through very difficult, tough experiences.

And the one thing I’ve learned from check-ins is the human condition is shared, that like I have all these narratives of all these difficult or happy things that I’m going through and realizing that everyone is going through their own journeys as well, and that when we can open up the space to have those conversations, we can create this, oh, like my suffering is your suffering and your suffering is my suffering and my happiness is your happiness.

And that’s the piece that I really want to tap into.

[00:23:41] Maggie: Yes, definitely. So this is a question that I’m more curious about, and I know that this could be different for each person because everyone has their own experiences and life experiences, but throughout the last several years of working with so many different people with Kindred Minds, what do you think is the biggest blocker that you see when someone cannot seem to find their greater purpose or meaning to life?

And I know this can vary but in your perspective, what do you think is the biggest blocker and how do they normally get out of that situation?

[00:24:16] Yash: Yeah, I think there are two blockers that I see.

One is that people oftentimes will want to solve this themselves, right? That they’ll think, Hey, like I need to figure out what I want in my life. And so let me just like go and try and go through life experiences and figure this out. And this is what I did for a long time, right? That I was like, let me just go out and do this.

And I think there’s something really powerful and valuable in knowing there are frameworks out there. There are these structures out there that we can use, that can meaningfully accelerate our speed of learning on these, like what seem like non-academic or softer skills or softer subjects.

And I think coming to a place of like, oh, okay, like we can move through some of these challenges much faster by using frameworks that have already been developed by incredible people and experts and through a bunch of science to help us accelerate that. I think that’s really, really meaningful.

And I think the second blocker, and this is a little cliche, but I think it’s true, is that I think it’s a commitment to yourself, right? That oftentimes it is like, Hey, are you committed to this journey? To live in your best life and are you willing to work through the inevitable difficulty that will then come up?

And are you willing to prioritize it over other things that might seem more appealing at the moment? But are you ready to push through the challenging moments of showing up for yourself? And that doesn’t mean like necessarily doing this specific assignment or building this specific habit. But are you committed to the journey of always improving and can you have the courage and space and discipline to continue to make space and time for that?

[00:26:02] Maggie: Yeah, definitely. The progress, right? It’s about the journey. And I think what you said is super powerful to the first point because I think that a lot of us look to other people on social media or our idols or role models and we think it’s a linear path. We think that whatever they are portraying on social media or online, it’s flawless.

It’s perfect, right? And we’re not taking into consideration that it’s going to take a long time for us to get there. It’s not an overnight success, right? And we have to consider our own experiences and figure out what works for us. And there are frameworks out there, but a lot of us don’t look into those frameworks.

We just look at what other people are doing and think that it’s just a one way ticket there. But those frameworks are there for a purpose, right? And I love that you mentioned that. So how has your life changed as a result of building Kindred Minds? As a founder, I’m sure there have been amazing life experiences for you just by being connected with so many people who have been part of this program. How has your life changed personally? 

[00:27:14] Yash: Yeah. It’s such a beautiful question and the one big, huge change I’ve seen in my life is that this is my second time being a founder, right? The first time was this venture backed scale, very quickly company, and this again company, we want to grow and we want to build a meaningful business.

But the relationship that I have to my work as a founder could not be more different. And that first phase really came from a place of scarcity and not feeling enough and keep going, keep going. And this new one, it really feels like it comes from a place of abundance and fullness and creativity and openness.

And yes, there are things and targets and challenges, like financing. And there are these things that we have to deal with and we need to acknowledge them, but the way I relate to them is less, oh no, like I am in big trouble if I don’t get here and I’m a complete failure. And instead it’s like, okay, how can I approach this with curiosity?

How can I approach this with my full self and how does this feel for me as a part of my whole life? And that’s really been amazing, that I found a relationship to my work that I didn’t know existed. And that feels in many ways, the thing I’d like to think about, it feels enabling. It feels enabling of the other parts of my life and enabling of me being my best self rather than what I feel like was for me and is for many people I talk to, which is disabling, which is like, Hey, this is this thing I have to do in order to serve the other parts of my life, and now it feels like this is this thing I get to do that helps further serve the other parts of my life.

[00:28:51] Maggie: Yeah, I love that so much. So Yash, what is your long-term vision for Kindred Minds? What’s next for you? 

[00:28:58] Yash: Yeah, look, this is kind of funny how it comes full circle. I want Kindred Minds to touch as many people as possible. My goal is, I think we are on this journey as a society of moving towards, Hey, how can we live happier and healthier that we’re seeing these huge trends, right? We made all this technological progress, but we’re seeing that, Hey, are we even better off than we were before? And what’s going on here? And so I want to be able to harness the power of all this wisdom, right, that goes back to ancient scriptures around Hinduism and Buddhism and all these traditions and take, hey, what are the things here?

‘Cause we know how humans operate. We’ve learned that over time. How can we take some of those lessons, translate them in a language that makes sense for people like us, and then actually help people move forward in feeling more full and whole and fulfilled and purposeful. And so that’s my goal is how can we just help people take one more step forward in their personal journey, and how can we do that for as many people as possible?

That’s really, really meaningful for me. And that’s my hope for Kindred Minds in the long run. 

[00:30:11] Maggie: That’s beautiful. And as we enter into more of a wellness space and mental health space, I definitely have full confidence that Kindred Minds is going to become very big.

And I feel like our generation. We’re taking care of ourselves a lot more and we’re being more curious about how we can live our best lives much more than before, I would say. And that I definitely fully believe that Kindred Minds will help us get there. So really excited for your future plans.

So I have one last question for you, and that is, if you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring entrepreneur, what would that one advice be? 

[00:30:53] Yash: Yeah. I’ve thought of this question many times ‘cause I’ve spoken to a bunch of classes and the piece that comes up to me all the time is the more time you can take to understand yourself and understand what you really want, the better you are going to set yourself up for success in being a founder.

And be willing to have those hard reflections and conversations with yourself of understanding, well, what is it that I really want? And it’s okay. There’s no right or wrong. It can be like, Hey, I just wanna make a lot of money. That feels really, really important to me. That’s okay. It could be that I don’t wanna make any money at all.

And I just wanna focus on impact. That’s also okay. And so there’s no right or wrong there, but take the time to understand, Hey, what are you, because the path is so intense that the more you can build that strong foundation at the beginning and set your direction up well at the beginning, the better you’re gonna set yourself up for long-term success and building a really healthy, fulfilling relationship with your work, and hopefully with touching and helping as many people as possible.

[00:31:55] Maggie: Yeah, I love that advice. I love that you are kinda opening up this no judgment zone where it could be for any reason, but you just have to figure out why, and what is your purpose?

And for what reason is it that you truly want this, right? So I really love that advice. So Yash, thank you so much for being on this podcast. It was amazing learning about your story and having you on the Asian Network Podcast. Where can our listeners find out more about you and Kindred Minds online?

[00:32:25] Yash: Yeah, thank you Maggie. It’s been amazing being here. Folks can learn more about us on KindredMinds.com. You can get started. It works month to month. You can cancel any time. We’ll have a promo that we’re running for listeners of this podcast and so it’d be really awesome to get you to try this out, right?

Again, to help you use the frameworks we’re talking about, to build community, to have an accountability structure to help you move along in your own journey. And yeah, that’s my hope for everyone. That’s my hope for myself and would love for folks to join KindredMinds.com

[00:33:00] Maggie: Thanks, Yash. We’ll leave all of that in the show notes, including the promo code that Yash mentioned.

Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Yash. It was amazing having you on. 

[00:33:09] Yash: Awesome. Thank you, Maggie. 

[00:33:11] Maggie: Awesome.