#115 Milind Mehere of Yieldstreet: My Favorite Books, Tools, Habits and More | 20 Minute Playbook

About Milind Mehere

‍“Be bright, be brief, be gone.” – Milind Mehere

Milind Mehere is co-founder and CEO of Yieldstreet. Milind's background is fascinating. Before founding Yieldstreet in 2014, Milind founded and scaled several other companies, including Yodle, which he scaled to $220 million in annual revenue before being acquired by web.com. Over the last eight years, Yieldstreet has built one of the largest private investment platforms in the world. To date, they brought on over 377,000 members that have invested more than $1.5 billion, and Yieldstreet has paid out over $196 million in interest alone.

In this episode, Milind shares why he's been fascinated with blockchain and the problems it can solve, including KYC for platforms like Yieldstreet as well as why his superpower is adaptability, and how that's helped him as a serial entrepreneur. He shares some of his favorite books, including, Leadership and Self Deception and The Richest Man in Babylon, as well as why he loves the phrase, "Be bright, be brief, be gone," and why, if he could go back in time, he'd tell his younger self to take even more risks.

For more, explore the transcript of this episode.

Chapters

In this episode, we deconstruct Milind Mehere’s peak performance playbook—from their favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on their life. In it we cover:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:09 – The impact of blockchain on private markets
00:03:16 – Adaptability as a superpower
00:04:59 – Learning from mentors, both personal and public
00:07:09 – Be bright, be brief, be gone.
00:09:14 – The ABCDE of building a company
00:12:19 – Leadership and Self-Deception, plus American Aristocracy
00:13:49 – The importance of gratitude

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Castbox, Pocket Casts, Player FM, Podcast Addict, iHeartRadio, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

An Idea Worth Trying

Milind uses an app called Delightful to note three things he's thankful for every day. He believes that showing gratitude helps create positivity as we're bombarded with so much negativity and polarizing situations every day.

Our Favorite Quotes

Here are a few ideas we'll be thinking about weeks and months from now:

“Thomas Edison: vision without execution is hallucination. I think it's very important for startup founders, because many of them have vision, but how do you translate that to education?”
“You have to really focus on what not to do versus what to do, and be very deliberate about the choices that you make based on what is important, and how can you prioritize those.”
“It's very important that you're adaptable, so you can learn things quickly, learn from your mistakes and your wins. As an entrepreneur, you're making decisions very quickly, on an everyday basis. If you are adaptable, and you can change by processing information by circumstances, by learning new things, you can be successful, and you won't get caught in your own ways, and you're always evolving as a person.”
“A B C D. A: always be well capitalized. B: build and hire talent. Without the team, there is nothing. You have to have the right people, and believe in it. C: communicate the vision. What's your true north? Why should people care about it? What is the impact you are going to have? Because, that's what is going to rally the team. D is delegation and decision making. I think those are two such important skills, but all of us sometimes flounder with them. Can we make quick decisions? Can we delegate appropriately?”