From the Founder: The “I was a tool” story. Upgrading my Jag F-Type and why I *really* started Maiya.

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It was Super Bowl Sunday and I slid into my Jaguar F-Type two-seater sports car. I took in the all-black exterior and leather interior before I pressed the Push-to-Start.

My last picture as a tool. Goodbye Jag F-Type. Hello ……

The roar of the F-Type engine starting never gets old.

I pulled out of my garage, and shortly after rolled onto the Jaguar dealership on Sunset Boulevard. I filled out some paperwork, dropped the keys and walked out, happy as a clam.

The Jag was gone, because I had upgraded.

The next morning, I was on my way to work. My new ride had a manual gear shift and I was still getting used to it. Three quarters of the way to my office, I slowed down as I hit the biggest climb of the commute. Let’s do it. Legs churning and burning, I pedaled and pedaled and ten minutes later I was in the office bathroom catching my breath and clutching a hairbrush, fixing my helmet hair. Sitting in my office, I glanced at my Trek FX-3 bicycle and smiled. Still all-black.

I was 24 years old when I rolled out of the dealership in the F-Type for the first time, also on a Sunday in February. Weeks earlier, I was T-boned and my Volkswagen Passat had been totaled. When I bought the used Passat, I had just moved to Los Angeles and did not have a job or an apartment. My Dad proudly referred to it as a “Young Executive’s Car”. I still don’t know whether he was joking. Either way, things were different now. I was an investment banker, giddily driving through Beverly Hills in my new Jag with Legend by Drake thumping through the speakers. A bit on the nose? Probably more than a bit. Not that I cared. I took my roommates for laps around our neighborhood one at a time (two-seater, remember?), soaking in their ooh’s and aah’s. I promptly posted a picture to Instagram. Sunny skies, palm trees and a sports car. This was my life, and the world had to know.

The F-Type was more to me than just a car. It was a tangible sign that I was “succeeding”. It was a 3.5-ton reminder that I was building the life I’d dreamed for myself. Most importantly, it was a clear sign of growth: in two and a half years I’d gone from a Passat to an F-Type. Plus, it was damn cool. Scratch that, it was sexy. I was a single man when I got the F-Type, and I maintained that the positive externalities made it worth the investment. I’ll just say, 24-year-old Nihaar did get some things right.

I turned 25 a few months later, keenly feeling the gravity of the moment. The day before, I had received an offer to join the Netflix Content Strategy & Analysis team in Hollywood. My main goal when I became a media investment banker was to land a strategy gig at a leading studio like Netflix. That it had actually happened, and through an inbound invitation to recruit no less, was surreal. As a graduating senior at Wharton, I had eschewed the traditional Wall Street track to pursue entertainment in Los Angeles, a distant city and a foreign industry. Friends and family thought I had lost my mind. I worked on sets, SAT tutored and spent six months at a talent agency getting an entertainment boot camp. When I joined a boutique investment bank to build my analytical skills, my LA friends thought I was giving up on the entertainment career and selling out. Getting the job at Netflix proved to both sets of people that I had a method to my madness, and it had worked.

But as rewarding as that was, 25 felt like cold water in the face. I was still young, but entering the back half of my 20’s ushered in a sense of greater accountability to my progress. The insidiously vague concepts of “Success” and its sinister sibling “Potential” loomed large over me. I had long hated that word. Potential just means you haven’t done shit yet. Use it or lose it, potential doesn’t last: it’s realized or wasted. I felt good about my path thus far, but 25 changed the game. 25 raised the stakes. Was I realizing my potential or wasting it? If the gamble of my early 20’s had paid off thus far, what did it mean for my late 20’s? Was I still on track to be “successful”? Or even scarier, was I on track to be as successful as someone with my potential ought to be?

I took the month of June off prior to starting at Netflix to recharge. As vague and abstract as the concepts of “success” and “progress” were, I had a very tangible and specific manifestation that stuck in my mind. My Jaguar F-Type lease was due in May 2020, and this anchored a central question: how was I going to upgrade from the Jag the way I had upgraded from the Passat? There were two key issues here: 1) the F-Type is already a luxury sports car, so upgrading meant entering a tier of supercars much pricier than the Jag, and 2) at this point I only had 36 months to get there. Keeping the F-Type would imply stasis, in turn implying stagnation and wasted potential, which was unacceptable. Downgrading was unthinkable. A 36-month ticking time bomb and an audacious goal: the challenge was set.

Now if you’ve stopped reading because you rolled your eyes out of your head somewhere in the past few paragraphs, I don’t blame you. I sound like I was an immature tool because, well, I was (cue: “was?”). In fact, I haven’t even told you the cringiest part of all: in my Uber on the way to pick up the Jag, I was Googling what the monthly payments would be for a Ferrari. Can’t hurt to think ahead! I know that sounds absurd at first. On second or third thought, it’s still absurd. But like I said, the car was more than a car to me. It had even become more than a sign of progress. It had become an external validator, a source of self-esteem. And functionally, it gave tangibility and clarity to the fuzzy concepts with which I was wrestling. After all, cars, money, sex — were these not the main measures of success that pop culture put forward for a young man like me?

I decided the only way I could upgrade from the Jag in 36 months was to find a supplemental source of income, spawning the search for a side hustle. Months prior I had explored a rideshare rental program with a like-minded colleague but the economics didn’t work out. While brainstorming, I thought of buying cheap street crafts from India and selling them at a premium in the States. Indian culture was rising in popularity in the West, particularly in LA’s West side. The demand was there and the margins would be great. Where would I sell them? Yoga studios, I thought. I had my distribution channel. Unfortunately, sourcing the products would be difficult and the model wasn’t suited to scale. So that idea was out. But I kept thinking about the yoga studios. I realized while yoga apparel had become super fashion-forward and trendy, yoga mats were still dull, utilitarian pieces of equipment. I had an idea for an authentic, trendy, premium mat and the idea for Maiya was born.

Yes, you heard that right. Maiya, its values, and its mission are all technicallyrooted in a 25 year old’s scheme to trade a Jaguar for a Maserati. So is the movement a farce or did something change?

I think it’s impossible for starting your first business not to change you. Making countless decisions and taking large risks in the face of total uncertainty is not for the faint of heart. And then there’s the lack of experience: when I started this journey, I had never designed or manufactured a product, incorporated a company, structured or managed a supply chain, executed a marketing campaign or tried to sell a product before. As superficial as my earliest motivations were, the task ahead of me to bring this to life was just as daunting.

Fleshing out the business in the first few weeks, I quickly realized there was something of real value in the mission. “I need a side hustle for passive income” was replaced by “this idea should exist” and “I don’t have an excuse not to do this.” During this time I was focused on what I called “escape velocity”: I was sprinting to create enough momentum and show enough progress to build the confidence that this project wouldn’t die as a good idea on a napkin.

A few months and a few strategic pivots later, I felt confident we had reached that escape velocity. We’re close, I thought. Boy, was I wrong. Altogether, it took over two years from the time I had the idea to the time we launched. Those two years were full of failures and missteps, delays and debacles, and issue after issue. I had no real idea what I was doing, no experience to fall back on, and no trusted authority to give me the answers. Weeks would pass without any real progress and that “we’re close” feeling turned into “is this ever going to happen?”. It was the most humbling experience of my life. All the academic pedigree, “intellectual capital” and prestigious resume experience in the world couldn’t out-smart the real-world obstacles through which I stumbled. It was an arduous struggle, and the ultimate reward for sticking it out and reaching launch was continuing the struggle. My supposed get-rich-quick scheme was kicking my ass and burning a hole in my wallet.

Somehow, I pushed through. What empowered me to overcome those initial challenges and cut through the blinding uncertainty? Certainly not the allure of a fast payout. Something had changed; I had become personally determined not to give up. Maiya had become about way more than selling products, and I owed it to myself and the mission to see it through. The monetary reward became the last thing on my mind because it paled in comparison to the importance of shaping culture and advocating for my community. This was about addressing a social imperative through the mechanism of commerce. My skills, experiences and perspectives didn’t mean I deserved to be rich, it meant I was responsible for effecting meaningful change in a way I was uniquely suited to do. Reward became responsibility. Leadership became stewardship. I matured.

But not because I chose to. I didn’t wake up one day having decided to evolve my value system and mindset. I changed because I had no other option. It became clear my superficial aspirations for starting the business would not come to fruition, and I was left with a choice: give up or grow. That was painful. The past two years were the most mentally and emotionally difficult of my life. The challenges I faced tore apart the beliefs that underpinned my self-esteem and identity, revealing in the process how fragile they had been this whole time. I was embarrassed. But I picked up the pieces and re-configured them to be stronger, because I had a job to do.

Upgraded to the Trek FX-3. Still all black.

The six months after our launch were just as much of a struggle as the two years preceding it. Bootstrapping the business was expensive, and I needed to manage our cash burn. Around the same time, my apartment lease was due and the Jag lease was coming up. I did the math; the answer was obvious. I never thought twice. So there I was, the day after Super Bowl Sunday, catching my breath in my office and staring at my bicycle. Smiling, because of what it represented: growth, maturity, persistence, a stronger identity and connectedness to a purpose much larger than myself.

Plus, it was damn cool.

Scratch that, it was sexy.