Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Connect podcast. Today I’m speaking with Neeraj Vir. Neeraj enables inspired entrepreneurs to make the best business growth and technology-related decisions. He’s the managing partner and CEO at Amalgam Incorporated, which focuses on digital transformation, app modernization, AI, and ML solutions. He’s also the co-founder of Lotus Rise, a platform that will democratize access to cutting technology for nonprofits and foundations so that they can better fulfill their purpose. Neeraj, how are you doing today?
Neeraj: I’m doing very well, how are you doing, Dave?
Dave: I’m doing well too. I’m actually away from my regular office in Philadelphia; I’m in Florida right now, just taking a little break from the Philly cold. Hopefully, everyone’s doing okay up there.
Neeraj: It’s getting quite warm here too, so you’re getting there.
Dave: Good then. I’m looking forward to being back and not running away from the cold anymore. You know, you’re such an interesting guy managing multiple businesses. I’d love to hear a little bit about your background and the history of Amalgam and Lotus Rise.
Neeraj: Sure, I’m a first-generation immigrant, came here in 2000 from India. I worked with a few organizations, the most memorable being a startup that was acquired by a big organization. So, I was able to see how things were in a startup and how it was to run and build a startup, and then see from the other side also when it gets acquired how things changed and for us, it was for the better. Even during the time I was with the big organization, we were launching new banks which was banking software solutions for non-banking banks. By non-banking banks, I mean those that were either brokerage houses, insurance houses, or other fields that had a good amount of clients for their core business and they also wanted to give banking products. I was able to help them along and the thing I loved most was discovery and requirements analysis and coming up with solutions of how they could differentiate themselves. After we got too big, I realized that that’s what I wanted to continue but my path forward as an executive wasn’t there for that, so I launched Amalgam to continue doing that path which is work with entrepreneurs, work with entrepreneurial people in big organizations to realize their dreams. It’s been 12 years plus and I wouldn’t change it for anything at all.
Dave: When you came here in 2000, was it your goal to start and grow businesses or is this just something that kind of happened serendipitously?
Neeraj: I think I just grew into it. In fact, I wanted to do an MBA and international marketing, that was my aim. I’m a technologist but I also realized that I was good with interactions, I was good with people, I was good with things that were related to solutioning. But soon I realized that I could do all of that with my existing company. I was able to travel the world with the organization, launching new banks and customizations and so on. I learned a lot that I would otherwise had to go to school for. It was just by chance that all of those dreams kind of fulfilled itself in my workplace and then I started thinking about who I am as a person, what do I really want, what can I really give and be successful at, and that’s how Amalgam came into being.
Dave: Very cool. Now you manage multiple businesses; we’ve already mentioned Lotus Rise, we’ve mentioned Amalgam, you also advise several startups. How do you prioritize your time?
Neeraj: One is wake up early. I wasn’t an early person before, but over the years I’ve embraced it, I enjoy it. You get so much done when you start early. But that’s just personal, you have to have your rituals around making sure that you are able to close things. A lot of people don’t know how to shut down things and defer for tomorrow. Actually being more efficient means deferring some stuff which is not important to you or to the organization. You can’t just be on top of everything. So, prioritizing things and acting accordingly is what I try to do. The second thing, which is the most important thing, is I find people who I want to collaborate with. For example, with Lotus Rise, I quickly realized that I did not understand the inner workings of nonprofits and foundations. I had been in software development, I had done things for the energy business, for the retail business, for banking and financial services, but I had no idea about how nonprofits handle technology. The next best thing I could do was to find a collaborator, and I met Charles Gasper who has been a technology and business consultant for nonprofits and foundations for 25 years. He became a co-founder in Lotus Rise. I brought him in and now things are so much easier because I brought somebody who understands it and that’s just been the playbook. When I hire people, I don’t hire necessarily for any other reason than if I gel with them, I know that they mean well and they have some level of background on which I’m trying to hire. In Charles’s case, it was not even hiring, it was like I felt confident enough to say, ‘look, I want to bring him in as a co-founder.’ Again, I’ve been lucky and intentional in bringing people who can then run independently so I don’t have to oversee it, I trust what they do intrinsically.
Dave: Any advice on finding those great people? Is it just a matter of, hey, you do enough interviews, you get a sense for who you gel with, or are these people from your personal network?
Neeraj: Yeah, so Charles, I met him at a conference. I spoke to him and we had a five-minute conversation, we reconnected, we got to know each other. And I feel as technology gets commoditized, for example, you’ve heard of all the things that are happening with AI, everything is going to be simpler, hopefully, we’re in for a pretty interesting ride in the next few years. But I think again, it goes back to the fundamentals of the person. You hire a person for their traits and their attributes and who they are, and I think skills are easy to get because they’re getting commoditized. So I think having a connection, trusting your intuition, realizing, and if you don’t know them from before, getting a background on them, asking people how they’ve interacted with them, it’s not necessarily for the quality of the work which you can realize really quickly when you meet somebody or see their work, but it’s really knowing the person and seeing how they gel into what you’re trying to build.
Dave: On the topic of technology, and you kind of alluded to trends to where things might be going, you’ve been involved in it for decades, where do you feel things are heading and what’s going to be the good and the bad and maybe the ugly?
Neeraj: I mean, there’s for everyone to see. There’s no, there’s ten-year-olds talking about AI, right, and actually starting to use it in schools so obviously AI is going to be omniscient, it’s going to be in our lives, it’s going to be in everything. So that is obviously one place that we need to constantly understand and realize what it is and how to use it. I think the emphasis would be on creating and being creative and being the master of the business sense. What I mean by that is as technologies become easier to implement, the old standard values of being full of grit, being determined, being a master in the field you’re in, being able to bring things together creatively, I think those are the trends that are going to see more people. Obviously, from a platform perspective, cloud computing will become better and better and more commoditized and cheaper over a period of time, I would think with new companies coming with new chips that would then compete with Nvidia chips, things are going to get even more interesting there. Blockchain or distributed ledger technology is going to start to really make an impact. We already hear about cryptocurrency, but there are so many other use cases that are happening. I’ve been talking to somebody who’s thinking about the internet of aviation, for example, where they want to bring all the aviation software onto the blockchain or create a level playing field where participants can work on chunks of that and I can see other industries also doing it where collaboration amongst the players would kind of force them to create a platform and blockchain would be the de facto if not the primary place. So I think those are the four things, of course, cybersecurity and all of that will continue to expand because you need to secure all these new things that are happening.
Dave: I want to make sure we give some exposure to the various companies that you work on. You referenced Lotus Rise and the work you’re doing with Charles to democratize access for nonprofits. Tell me a little bit about where you guys are at right now in the journey. Is this a platform, is it live right now, is it in development, where are things going?
Neeraj: Right now, I would say that that is the end game or end goal. We have started working on some of that. Again, it’s a self-funded, bootstrapped thing, so what we’re looking to do is again find use cases of solving certain problems, that could be in the funding space, there’s a problem that we’re talking about in the evaluation space of how evaluation happens for impact for a nonprofit by the donors and the foundations. There are spaces that we are trying to optimize and trying to create utilities and tools that we can inject. Creating this whole infrastructure and the platform will take time, so I would say that we’re about 30% there. We’re concentrating on solving real-life problems with these tools and these projects, learning from it and that would feed us into the platform.
Dave: Super cool. Well, we’re excited to hear about when you guys are ready for that final version. Neeraj, for people that want to learn more about you, what you’re working on, updates, how should they find you?
Neeraj: They can connect with me through LinkedIn, obviously, I’m open for having conversations. I’m also part of PED, which is the Philadelphia Alliance, so I do attend some of those conferences. I’m part of i2n, which is a kind of a Chester County networking of innovators and so on. But you know, happy to share my email, happy to share my LinkedIn, and people can connect with me. I’m always happy for a chat and any guidance I can give them. I feel like that is the most, uh, happiest moment when I get to share my experience and be able to give some insightful moments into and light up some insight into people.
Dave: Thank you for sharing some of those moments with our audience today. Neeraj, thank you so much, it’s been a pleasure.
Neeraj: Thank you, Dave, it’s been a pleasure.