Hi there,

Twenty five years ago, I sat down with my boss in investment banking and told him I was leaving. He laughed, because he assumed I was joking. I wasn't.

Good salary. Good bonus. A clear, sensible trajectory upward. Every rational reason on paper to stay exactly where I was. I left anyway, because the job was real and the money was real, but the life that came attached to it wasn't the one I actually wanted to be living.

What followed wasn't some tidy, straight line to success, whatever a highlight reel might suggest. It was 25 years, starting quite literally at a dining table, building what eventually became Samera. Accountancy first. Then dental advisory. Then building out offshore teams in India, long before that was a common thing to do. Then AI products. And now, most recently, aviation finance. People occasionally ask me if spreading across all of that means I've lost focus. I'd argue the opposite is true, and in the new video on my Youtube channel I actually get into why.

We talk about why diversification isn't the lack of focus people assume it is, why bootstrapping the business rather than taking outside investment early on actually protected the creative decisions I got to make, and something I don't usually talk about publicly, what losing my mother at 14 taught me about how I ended up building things the way I do. That one shaped more of this than most people realise.

Watch the full conversation here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59gK1RVyVL4]

This is a more personal episode than our usual finance and tax content, and if I'm honest, it's become one of my favourite things we've put on the channel this year. If you haven't subscribed yet, this is a genuinely good one to start with, and there's more of this honest, unfiltered material coming, not just the practical how to videos.

Speak soon,

Arun