014: Starting a Business Part-time and Becoming an Entrepreneur with James Gupta From Synap

Neil: Hello everybody, its Neil Ball here, thank you so much for joining me again today on the entrepreneur way. The entrepreneur way is about the entrepreneur’s journey. The vision, the mindset, the committments, the sacrifices, failures and successes. I am so excited to bring you our special guest today, James Gupter. But before I do, I have a little quote for you. Mary Astor said, once you start asking questions, innocence is gone. The entrepreneur way asks the questions, so we all get the insight, the inspiration, and the ideas to apply in our businesses. James, welcome to the show, are you ready to share your version of the entrepreneur way with us?

James Gupta, Synap: I am delighted to be here.

Neil: Thank you, thanks for joining us James. Now James Gupter is a serial entrepreneur and a medical student at the University of Leeds in the UK. He is the founder and CEO of CINAP, an online education platform that uses AI and Neuroscience insights to enhance the way students learn. James, can you provide us with some more insight into your business and personal life, to allow us to get to know more about what you do and who you are?

James Gupta, Synap: Sure. So I’m James, I am a medical student at Leeds University in England. In my fourth year at the moment, so over half way through my training. Interesting the clinical side of things, interested in education, always had an affinity for computers and enterprise and that kind of thing, so I taught myself how to programme when I was about 14 years old and started hacking away at different websites, and playing around with games and that sort of thing. Always really enjoyed that, enjoyed the problem solving nature of it. I enjoyed the fact that when you run a website, you can actually offer value to alot of people and you can see that growing over time.  So when I was in medical school, we were presented with a problem that you are expected to learn a vast quantity of information in a really short period of time.

Neil: Yeh

James Gupta, Synap: and the way that you are encouraged to do that does not facilitate long term knowledge, it doesn’t let you approach that knowledge in a way that you can use on the job. Its generally very static, so what most students do is read over and over a text book until they feel like they have memorised a chapter. So my colleague Omar and I started to write quiz questions for each other, and send them over facebook. That sort of encourages a really active way of learning because you are trying to trip the other person up, and it sort of just helps our learning in general, because we could go into the exam and we could engage with this knowledge in a much more active way. So that really helped us. Over summer we had a bit of time on our hands, so we built it into an app and a website that the students could use. Which was called MyCQ’s at the time. Started to get popular in our year, we kept it ticking over. It ended up getting really popular with a whole range of people from pilots to vets to economists. So we left MyCQ’s running to the point where it got about 15,000 downloads in one day, just because of word-of-mouth spread.

Neil: Yeh

James Gupta, Synap: We weren’t running it as a business at the time, but since then I was involved in a different company which we might come onto a little bit later. That introduced me to the whole concept of start-ups and crowd funding, vc’s and you know that whole really exciting world. So when that business was acquired, MyCQ’s were still doing phenomenally well without any real input onto it. So we thought we had a chance here to re-visit what made it so popular. Look at introducing some intelligent elements, around the neuroscience and looking at how people learn effectively, and build that into a purpose built platform, which we are now calling Cynap and is currently in private beta.

Neil: Excellent. So you have not realised it yet have you not? Cynap?

James Gupta, Synap: Its just in testing phase at the moment, so we have got a beta of about 200 people. People can sign up to the site, at Cynap.AC and we will send them an invite.

Neil: Its really interesting this because obviously you are in learning environment, and you are thinking of a way of actually trying to make it easier to learn, I think its fascinating. You would think of all the learning environments that a sort of medical area would be the sort of area where they had figured this out already in a way wouldn’t you?

James Gupta, Synap: Yeh absolutely, thats a really good point. I think there are two points there, so alot of the products that people really like on the market come from start ups come from I think founders who are initially trying to solve a problem in their own lives. So I sort of joke, but its probably actually true that we have the fastest iteration cycle in the world because we will be studying, we will be using Cynap or MyCQ’s to study. We will notice a problem, or we will want to tweak something, so we stop studying for a bit, edit the code and then go back into it. But the other point about education in general, it just feels like its been left behind, so for the last 50 years, there has been research coming out of psychology and neuroscience. It tells us all this fascinating stuff about how the brain consolidates information. Why it forgets so much of it. Why we remember some things but not others, and more importantly how students can take advantage of that, to really optimise the way they learn, basically study hacking, and its all out there, but it has not been adopted by mainstream education until now.

Neil: No, I mean I have got a few kids who, I’ve got four children and they have all gone through education or the fact that they are still in it to some extent. And they have never been taught how to learn.

James Gupta, Synap: Sure

Neil: Really, they have just been given stuff and say, ‘go and remember that or go and learn it’ and you would think people would be told how to learn and they would somehow be applying new ideas and thoughts on how people can learn better and it does not seem to be part of what is actually taught to kids, which is a real pity.

James Gupta, Synap: Yeh, no absolutely because its theres obviously such a thing of the science of learning, or the art of learning and people just aren’t being shown the way.

Neil: So James, what do you enjoy most about what you do?

James Gupta, Synap: I enjoy everything about what I do. I think I enjoy it because obviously from the beginning, you will know that my interests span the whole range of different things. I do bits of programming, I do bits on the business side, and I like trying my hand at lots of different things, I’m not necessarily the best person at any of them. I’m a very good dabbler, and running the company lets me sort of, it forces me in a way to dabble in lots of different fields, and to speak with people from different of a range of expertises, so it never really gets boring. Your, especially the starter of by whereby definition of what you are doing hasn’t been done before. You are operating in an environment with unparalelled freedom to do what you want to do. Certainly to begin with, there are no rules. You have got to make and discover the rules of your industry for yourself. And it just gives you the freedom to explore new ideas and to take risks that you could not get anywhere else. It just gives you that ownership and automony over what you are doing.

Neil: And what is it that drives you then?

James Gupta, Synap: I guess what drives me is, first and foremost, I just really enjoy doing it. Its really fun for me, its rewarding when the website traffic is going up, when we get feedback from a customer. When we sign a new deal or something like that, so its almost like a game in that sense. But beyond that, the fact that we are addressing a real problem here, so we were just chatting about basically students being let down by mainstream education and not being given the tools and training they need to succeed in their education. We hear back from students and professionals all the time, saying how useful Cynap is being. We have people offering to leave donations for it, and that kind of thing. And it just really validates what we are doing. And I think that is especially important in an information economy that we are in now, education is probably the most important thing to get right, because we need this generation to grow up. Being able to critically interpret evidence, being able to take on board new concepts and Cynaps one part of helping that.

Neil: Ok so something fascinates me here, you are training to be a medical doctor, and you are also doing this entrepreneur, you have got your Cynap business. How do you see yourself going in the future with that? Where do you think you are going to go?

James Gupta, Synap: I enjoy a lot about medicine. I love treating patients, not treating patients of my own at the moment, but I love seeing patients, I love taking histories and being able to help with whatever it is that is wrong with them. The thing that got me into medicine was working in my dad’s practice a few years ago, and just really getting involved of the frontline of the NHS. That is something that I believe in. For me, I think the way that medicine is going, is that it is becoming more and more specialised. Its becoming more and more sort of side loads. And more driven by protocols rather than experts intuition. Which is really good for patients, because it means they get safer and more consistent health care. But when medical schools are recruiting the sort of creative, multi-faceted students and then putting them through a course that does not give them much room for creativity, or sort of personal freedom. I think its something that myself and more and more medical students will start to do. They start to look for opportunities outside of clinical practise. Some do lecturing, some do other things in medical education. Some go into public health and in my case I have sort of chosen to go down the entrepreneurship innovation route.

Neil: Yeh

James Gupta, Synap: So I would like to finish my training, which is about 18 months away, and then move into Cynap full time, just to see what we can really achieve with the business, and then I will evaluate it from there.

Neil: The reason I mean as you were saying that I was thinking of something else actually, quite alot of medical stuff tends to focus on the symptom rather than the cause as well doesn’t it? So you fix the symptom but doctors and things don’t always deal with the cause of things, which is I suppose dealing with a problem like an entrepreneur, isn’t it if you think about it. Do you think that is the case, or am I wrong in thinking that?

James Gupta, Synap: No I think that is a fair point. I think that the way we train that problem is, this idea of holistic care, so a patient comes in with a headache or something like that, and obviously there is one way of looking at that where you say, ‘right ok you have some paracetamol and come back’ and often that is fine and often that is all the doctor has got time for, because of the pressures on the health service anyway. But, then in alot of cases, you have got a lot of other things going on there, so why is it that this person has chose to come in today? Is it just a headache? Is it that she is just stressed with her job? Are there other psycho-social factors factors going on? And its probably why things like homeopathy gain in popularity because its, from a scientific point of view, its a total hoax. But homeopaths do this sort of personalised care and they have got the time to really spend that time really getting to  grips with the patient and their background, and that kind of thing. And I think alot of people feel better just by being able to just get that off their chest and having someone listen to them.

Neil: Yeh so how do you relax when you are not doing what you do? When you are not studying to be a doctor and you are not running Cynaps. I can’t imagine there is too much time available, but what is it you get up to?

James Gupta, Synap: No, there is not much time available, as I have said before, I really enjoy what I am doing, especially with Cynap and personal freedom is something that is really important to me. So with Cynap, its not something that anyone is forcing me to do. Its something that I have chosen to do and its something that my team and I really believe in. There is no such thing as ‘grunt work’ in Cynaps or even when I am doing accounts or doing something that in any other context will be phenomenally boring. I know this is my thing, and it is something that I need to do, so it does not wear me down that much. I think work life balance in general, is a bit of a misnomer in start up worlds. Because of that, the lines between work/hobby/socialising become blurred, which is something that I am quite happy with. I have downloaded headspace, if you have heard of that, which is a meditation app, which is I have used and I really like it, but I don’t use it as much as I should.

Neil: Yeh ok and do you have any entrepreneurial role models?

James Gupta, Synap: Yes, there are the standard ones, so I am not going to say Steve Jobs. Although I do like Steve Jobs. I like what he did with software basically saying that software should be something more than just functional and hardware should be more than functional. It should be something that delights users. But the entrepreneurial role model that I have sort of grown up with for the last ten years now, is Trent Tresner, who is the frontman of 9 inch nails.

Neil: ok

James Gupta, Synap: He is more than just a singer or whatever, he runs that entity as a business with different models, he has released alot of his music for free. He has been at the forefront of adapting to the whole digital revolution. He is sort of pioneering the apple music thing at the moment, and I just really like his attitude to the work that he puts out, it is very sort of perfectionist and he gets the right balance of following his vision listening to what other people are saying. So yeh, I bet you have not had that one before.

Neil: Absolutely not. Not at all. Ha ha ha interesting I shall check him out. So James can we talk about the time before you were an entrepreneur, so obviously when you were a student. What difficulties did you have to overcome when you started your business?

James Gupta, Synap: So when we first started MyCQ’s which was like the prototypical version of Cynap. It wasn’t a business for us at all, like I did not even know what a start up was at this point. We just had a bit of time, I knew how to code, so we decided to sort of do it. And that is something that a lot of students do, they figure, they are already spending so much time making revision resources. They might as well do something a bit different with it, and publish it online. When we started to see it as more of a business, the main struggle that we had was coming over the problem that obviously we are not, as much time as we have put into it. We are not full time, and the medical course takes up basically our 9-5 Monday to Friday.

Neil: yeh

James Gupta, Synap: So we had to first of all, come to terms with that because for ages we were saying ‘no it will be fine, we will fit it in and things like that.’ but then you realise that even if you can put the hours in for full time, it means that you can’t commit to meetings in London. You can’t travel to people on short notice and that kind of thing. So we had to sort of build up the company structure in a way and find the right team of people. So that we could delegate work and so that we could sort of make our roles fit with in our lives and let other people handle the rest of it. So, building up the team and actually stopping being control freaks and delegating to other people was probably the main challenge.

Neil: And did you have any doubts that delayed you starting your business?

James Gupta, Synap: Probably. I mean alot of them sort of snowball on you so we started it as a business. Like incorporated it about 18 months ago. And at the time, I didn’t especially know all the problems that we were going to face, even the basic things just around accounts and sort of the operational stuff that you have got to do. But we just figured look, we will take it as it comes, we have got him this far, we have got a team of supporters behind us, and at the end of the day, lets just give it a go.

Neil: Ok and what mistakes did you make that slowed your journey?

James Gupta, Synap: So we have had experience ith Cynap through a previous platform again called MyCQ’s and we branded, we decided to call cynap Cynap rather than just keeping it within the MyCQ’s brand because even though the products do essentially the same thing, they are revision resources for students. For us, MyCQ’s was this hobby project thing that we were hacking together, and Cynap we wanted to be really the summation of everything we had learned over that process. One mistake that we made and there was not really a way of avoiding this, but we did not build MyCQ’s to scale. We didn’t expect it being used by more than 500 people. So literally one day we got his 15,000 downloads, and the server had actually held up ok. Which was a miracle, but what we did not do was we didn’t have the features in place, we didn’t have the support in place, and the sort of notifications ready to really engage and retain that set of users. So we had this spike which could have been like a real game-changer for us, and it was really helpful but alot of those users, it tailed off or we didn’t get the full experience that we would have liked them to do. So that is something that we are now bearing in mind while we are building Cynap. We are making sure its all really sort of tight.

Neil: Right ok and what are some of the things that you did before you started your business? That would be helpful tips for some of the listeners who have not yet taken that first step of the entrepreneur way?

James Gupta, Synap: In my case, so this is probably where my previous company comes into it. So once my CQ’s got popular, and before we started Cynap, I was recruited by two other lead students who were starting a taxi booking in sharing app called ‘Jump in’ the idea was that students often can’t afford taxi’s home or they choose to get the bus instead or they walk and there are all sorts of problems walking back home at night. So if they could build a platform that lets students see what taxi rides are going on in that area, and jump in with other students. We grew that to five UK cities and then eventually sold it to Edison Lee. But I wasn’t the CEO of that company, I was the CTO, I was the chief technical officer. So I was mainly focused on like the tecnical development which I was much more comfortable with at the time, but it gave me alot of insight into how this thing operates, and I think mentally I was using that to prepare for starting my own business at some point. Or sort of learning what the other guys were doing, picking up the contacts, so I’m not saying start another business before you start your business, what I am saying is, there are certain things you can only get by being sort of face-to-face in that world. And whether that means going doing work experience or an internship with a start-up for a week or two, or getting a job there for a month, it does not really matter, it just go and experience it first hand.

James Gupta, Synap: Guarantee you within a week, within a few days, you will learn a whole wealth of things that will save you an inordinate time of money, when you start your company.

Neil: I was speaking to someone recently, an american who said ‘doing it on someone else’s dime’ which I thought was a nice way of putting it.

James Gupta, Synap: Yeh yeh that makes sense, entrepreneurship as well, sort of taking on roles within a company.

Neil: Absolutely, so what I would like to do now is, I would like to talk about the actual journey itself of when you have started your business, so do you think that culture is important from the beginning in a business?

James Gupta, Synap: Yes and no. Culture is really important when you are doing this because of all the reasons we have talked about before. The boundaries being your work, your social, your hobbies are going to blur into one. So whilst its possible to work in a job, that you don’t particularly enjoy, and to put on a certain persona, and to act in a certain way 9-5, that eventually is going to backfire on you in a start-up because your true self is going to come out, and if you have convinced people that you are one way and you can work in a certain way, its sort of like, putting on a certain face on a date, eventually you go into a long-term relationship with that  person, they are going to find out who you really are.

Neil: Yeh

James Gupta, Synap: But, so that is something that you should bear in mind, but on the other hand, I don’t think its something you need to explicitly focus on in the beginning because so long as you are happy with the way you are operating your business, and that you are doing it in a way that is true to your values and your beliefs. Then your company culture is going to sort of shine through you anyway. And that is going to impact the people that you recruit, the contacts that you make. The way that you promote your business. So I think company culture is, if its done right its an emergant feature of the founders themselves, rather than something that is imposed explicitly.

Neil: Thanks for that. Knowing what you know now, is there anything that if you had known it when you started out, would have helped you to shortcut the learning curve?

James Gupta, Synap: Yes so I think this goes back slightly to what we are saying on one of the other questions, in that there are things I think you could gain by sort of doing it on someone else’s dime or getting involved in other capacities that would help. I think there is a role for books and blog posts and reading that sort of thing from what other entrepreneurs are doing. Sometimes I have to sort, back in the early days I had to sort of force myself to read certain books. Things like the lean start up and other things that you should read if you are getting involved in this. Because when you have got an idea and its your baby, you don’t want to find out that maybe you are doing it wrong or maybe someone else is doing it. But its better to find out those things up front and it is better to sort of learn the lingo and be able to converse with other entrepreneurs early on rather than sort of further down the line when you have spent half of your money.

Neil: And how much does gut feeling influence your decision in your business?

James Gupta, Synap: In mine personally, alot. Its part of what I like about running the business, because it is part of what contrasts with medicine, so medicine, we were saying before has gone away from the expert intuiton, the gut feeling sort of thing. And thats a good thing because we have built up a great enough body of knowledge in medicine that we know just on the basis of statistics, which treatments work for which people, and to what extent. And that evidence is overwhelmingly more accurate than anyone persons judgment, no matter how smart they are. In a start-up sense, there is not enough data to make all your decisions. There is data available to influence it, and you can sort of look at what other people are doing, but ultimately this is a new thing in the world. So you have got to rely on your gut instinct to some extent but inform it with data, and what I always say, because this is a difficult concept, especially for doctors and scientists, getting involved in entrepreneurship. Your gut feeling is almost certainly what inspired you to start your business in the first place.

James Gupta, Synap: Its the reason you are doing what you are doing. So you should definately trust it going forwards as well.

Neil: Ok great, thanks for that. Life is made of constant change, whether we like it or not. So I believe one of the only constants in life is change. So James how do you try to keep up with change?

James Gupta, Synap: Yeh its a really good question. I agree the only constant is change, especially in technology, where you look at some of the predictions that have been made in the past about the way things would go. And its fascinating to see, because we sort of, I think humans generally have a very poor intuitive understanding of how expendentials work. Like if we are trying to plot a trejectory of something, we are going to do it on a linear sort of curve. So we sort of look at the technology that we have got and we sort of think, ok well its getting faster and smaller, and easier so the iphone10 will be sort of like this but thinner and way more powerful. But we famously can’t see disruptive change. Even massive companies who invest millions of dollars specifically into identifying disruptive trends, are continuously out-manouvered by small companies. And this is what we see happening in silicone valley all the time. So I think it is keeping up with change for me, is sort of understanding and accepting that our intuitions are really off here. And things can take hold in probably 10% of the time, that you expect them to, and established platforms, established business models can fall just as quickly.

Neil: And what is your favourite book on entrepreneurialism? Business, personal development, leadership or motivation? and can you tell us why you have chosen it?

James Gupta, Synap: Sure. I’ve got two, is that allowed?

Neil: Yeh Sure.

James Gupta, Synap: Sure. One I have read recently, its really new book, its called ‘platform scale’ by Sanji Chowdri. Its fantastic. It should be recommended reading for anyone who is starting like a website or an app that involves a community of people. What I really liked about it, was the fact that it put words and particular phrases to concepts that alot of us had, that I had certainly suspected for a long time, but couldn’t really fully grasp so, it has a model that fully explains the rise of airB&B Uber and YouTube and WordPress and Medium and Instagram. And the potential of this new business model where you are basically creating businesses that add value. Simply by connecting producers and consumers of content together. Really quick book, highly recommend it.

Neil: Ok

James Gupta, Synap: The other one is one that I have been recommending for a few years now, its called ‘Mastery’ by Robert Green. Its a really well researched look at people who you would recognise as experts throughout history. So it looks at Leonardo de Vinci. It looks at Steve Jobs and other people going back to sort of Roman times. And it looks at the sort of their journey and the sort of single mindedness in what they were doing, that allowed them to sort of see things that other people didn’t, or allowed them to achieve a level of mastery that other people didn’t. And I think its great reading of entrepreneurs where we are sort of on that path, you said at the beginning of sort of self-sacrifice, and just sort of throwing all your eggs into this basket, and yes its a fascinating read.

Neil: Ok. Listeners, when you have a busy life, listening to audio books is a great way to expand your knowledge in the time that you may be doing other things, such as driving or when you are at the gym. We have a special offer for you of a free audio book of your choosing. To choose your free book, go to www.freeaudiobookoffer.com. As long as you haven’t already signed up, you will qualify. James, what I would like to do now is, can we fast forward to the future? and what I would like you to think about, is a few questions around that, so what one thing would you do with your business if you knew that you could not fail?

James Gupta, Synap: Share Buy back. That would be quite nice.

Neil: Share Buy back.

James Gupta, Synap: No, what we are doing is inherently risky, we are trying to sort of minimise the risk. So we are trying to choose the business strategy that you know, has the right amount of risk, if we knew it could not fail, we would just sort of really put ourselves out there. We would sort of scale it much faster, we would approach all sorts of different markets, and we would put more of the money up front into sort of really interesting AI Emmission learning hires, and just see what came out of that really.

Neil: Ok. And what skill, if you were excellent at it, would help you the most to double your business?

James Gupta, Synap: I think the most important thing for me to be doing generally is to sell people on the vision that I have got for the company. So in my head, I have sort of got an idea of where we want to take it. How we are going to do that, where we sort of reside in the market, and its a vision that is being, from the word vision, it is sort of makes you think of some sort of ‘you speaking to god moment and it just appears.’ But no, its developed over 2-3 years now, and it is a jigsaw of things that I have pieced together from Ted talks, from books, from networking, from speaking to users. So its a massive volume of information at the moment. But I am trying to boil it down to sort of elevator pitches and sort of job adverts, and things like that, that I can sell different groups of people on. The better I can do that, the more I can incentivise people to come and contribute to Cynap in different ways.

Neil: Ok, in five years from now, if a well-known business publication was publishing an article on your business. After talking to your customers and suppliers, what would you like it to say?

James Gupta, Synap: Well I would like it to say that Cynap is hands-down the best education platform in the world. I would like them to say that we got to that position in a way that is respectable. Like in a way that is not underhanded, or cheating or sleazy or anything like that. I would like them to say that we got to where we got to, by building the best possible product, and incentivising people in the right way to bring on board their friends and to share it and to be part of this sort of the world’s most vibrant, sort of education focused community.

Neil: Ok now I would like you to share three golden nuggets with us James, so what is your favourite quote and how have you applied it?

James Gupta, Synap: I don’t know about a favourite, but the one that came to mind just because of the stuff I had been doing the last few months is from General George Patern. If you tell people where to go but not how to get there, you will be amazed at the results. So I am by nature probably a bit of a control freak. I dabble in different fields, so I can sort of do most things to some extent by myself at least. And I have a very particular way of how I like things to be done. But we are starting to scale the team, we have now got seven people working on Cynap. We are going to have an extended team of ambassadors and developers working with us. And the only way for me to scale my time is to start relinquishing control to that other people and giving them the chance to sort of develop and show of their skills as well.

Neil: Mmm hmmm.

James Gupta, Synap: So, whereas previously to people running our social media. I will be saying, ‘look here’s five good articles, here are some good hash-tags, post it out.’ I am then not giving them the chance to sort of show me what they can do, and I am not giving them the chance to stimulate themselves or any incentive to learn. Whereas now, we found the right people that I trust to do it, I can just say to Shawna, our marketing manager, look we would like to get 7% growth, week-on-week over the next few weeks. Do what you have got to do to do it, if you need any help, I am here, but otherwise, I trust you will get on with it. And she is fantastic at it now, does a better job than I could do, and it has freed my time up.

Neil: Ok, and do you have any favourite online resources that you could share with us that would be useful for us?

James Gupta, Synap: Yeh they were obviously the ones that most people know about, entrepreneur.com forbes and things like that. The ones I really like, there is a silicone valley, developer turned investor, called Andrew Chen. Who posts just fantastic blog articles. They are just fantastic, they are on growth, they are on sort of product strategy, they are on launch strategy. But they have really tangible take home messages. There is a website called growth-hackers.com. Which is, when you are looking at marketing and especially social media marketing, I think there is a lot of useless or non-actionable information in there. I think there are alot of people selling themselves as consultants, who don’t really know what they are talking about. Growth-hackers is a  reddit style community where some of the best people in the industry. Sort of known people who have worked on twitter and things like that. Submit resources and then the rest is the community votes on them. But the ones that come to the top are just hands down the best articles on how to grow your business, and they are just very trustworthy. And finally, I am going to do a little plug for a website called doctorpreneurs.com which I am involved with.

Neil: Yeh

James Gupta, Synap: Doctorpreneurs.com is free community for medical students, doctors, nurses, any healthcare professional who is interested in enterprise or innovation, technology. And would like to learn a bit more about it. And would like to sort of meet other people in that community. So we post interviews, and articles and sort of events for people. If you are in that field, I would check it out.

Neil: Ok thank you. And what is your best advice to other entrepreneurs?

James Gupta, Synap: I always preposise by saying, ‘it sounds a bit cheesy, but its really important, just do it.’ This is not the sort of field where you are going to get permission from someone else to do it. Or you are going to wait for the ideal moment to do it. There are always going to be a million reasons not to do it, so I could have chosen to wait until the end of medical school to do this, but then there would be other problems should I wait until I have sort of got a mortgage sorted, should I wait until after I have had kids? blah blah blah. So just do it. You will hit a million problems and roadblocks and hurdles that you didn’t predict. But you will be fine, you will get over it, and its just a fantastic journey to go on. So go for it.

Neil: Ok. Everyone, if you didn’t manage to get a note of James’ s favourite resource or his favourite books, you can find the links on James’s shownotes page. Just go to the entrepreneurway.com and search for James or James Guptor, in the search box. James is there anything else that you would like to add about your business?

James Gupta, Synap: Yes so Cynap we want to put on the worlds largest platform for students and professionals sharing quiz content with each other. Its a fantastic way to learn, its relatively easy to produce the content, although there is a learning curve to it. If anyone would like to sort of get in touch and learn a bit more about what Cynap is, if anyone would like to be a content producer on the site or you know someone who would, please get in touch. I am GuptaJames on twitter.  And I am always happy to give advice to sort of new entrepreneurs, if I can so get in touch.

Neil: Ok James it has been absolutely fantastic having you on the show, its really been fascinating learning about what you are up to and especially with you juggling it with your medical course as well.

James Gupta, Synap: I’ve really enjoyed it thanks for having me on Neil.

Neil: Its an absolute pleasure so thank you very much. Its been great.