Hello and welcome to the exit presented by flippa.com the number one platform to buy and sell online businesses flippa manages over a billion in deal value annually and combines expert buy and sell side advisory with its market leading valuation tool deal room off market offering market insights and AI based deal by deal matching engine now for the exit the exit is a 30 minute podcast featuring amazing entrepreneurs who have been there and they have done it.

The exit talks to operators who have bought and sold businesses of all different sizes you learn how they did it why they did it and get exposure to the world of exits.

It's a world occupied by a small few but accessible to many on today's episode I sit down with Bobby Yazdani is the awesome founder and partner at code a capital and in this episode we talk about how he started at Oracle.

We go through his experience really getting entrenched in technology at Oracle and then how he left to start Saba and just the journey that took him all the way through to the exit is really fascinating and I really like how he's gone on to help entrepreneurs and this is just an ongoing theme on the exit.

It entrepreneurs in the spirit of the type of person that you need to become to go through you know start to an exit or just start to operate businesses usually you help others experience this and this is an ongoing thread of every episode if you kind of figure that out over watching a few of these and listening to a few of these interviews you realize amazing entrepreneurs like Bobby eventually start helping other entrepreneurs.

So without further ado let's sit down here and talk to the amazing entrepreneur Bobby Yazdani the founder and partner at code a capital.

All right everyone I am joined today by Bobby Yazdani and he is the founder and partner at code a capital. How's it going Bobby? Good good I'm doing well thank you Steve. Yeah I'm excited to really dig in here but before we get into your successes.

Multiple successes let's talk about your beginning. What was your origin story? How did you get into business and entrepreneurship?

My story I was born in Tehran Iran. I left Tehran when I was 16 years old during Iranian revolution. I left Iran for finishing up my high school in England so I went to a boarding school in England and then I came to US as a student.

I came to Bay area to Berkeley as a student in literally 1982 roughly 40 years ago. So I came here as a student I studied mathematics and computer science at Berkeley and my early career I started with a company

who had just getting started called Oracle and this guy started in late mid late 80s and I was there for about 10 years as a member of technical staff.

I worked on three releases of the core database I was a developer and then subsequently I ran engineering engineering management labs with Oracle.

From there I left and started my entrepreneurial journey after 10 years of working at Oracle.

Nice and let's talk about that. Let's talk about what that beginning story was with Saba. Did you find a co-founder? Was it just you? Did you raise money? How did that work?

Yeah so I mean Oracle was an interesting place. I mean this was a you know the company was run by of course with Larry Larry Ellsson very much an entrepreneurial you know very charismatic

career leader no different what like mosque looks today to us. So I watched how a company from concept become at scale business that was kind of my first experience even though I was within Oracle but I could watch an entrepreneur building a platform business you know and everything went

went into building a platform company how do you build a company and the technology that become standard on a global basis and everybody else kind of builds on top of that technology and a whole ecosystem that gets developed around.

So you know Oracle was entrepreneurial I thought that experience being there was entrepreneurial but then I also started noticing that there are periods where there are innovation periods or cycles of innovation that come around every so often that you want to be able to take advantage of.

So I mean I was working on a variety of distributed system and there was this thing called Internet in the early 90s and I remember I met Andrewson who was a student at the University of Illinois back then and he was talking about mosaic and the browser and being able to browse the back then you had to log into Internet by the way.

And there was no cookies there was no concept of a cookie and I thought myself wow this is an incredible you know opportunity to really build a whole slew of technologies around Internet and browser based applications and and that sort of like give me the cue to start thinking about what problems you know can be addressed with this new distributed color technology.

And sort of like they really I was always at the appetite to be independent I wanted to be independent I wanted to kind of carve out my own journey I was aware you know this is like my late 20s early 30s I knew I wanted to have my own journey I want to craft my own way.

So I think emotionally and you know spiritually I was ready for it but I didn't quite know where the opportunity set was and I wasn't willing to jump on to anything I wanted to be a substantial opportunity to go after it.

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