"Comedy has given me the ability to take a lot of hits and keep going," says Rakhesh, who has done thousands of gigs — "you'd be lucky if you did thousands of gigs and 20% of them went well." It also taught him to read the room, "and that translates to every area of life, not just comedy."
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The resilience math of comedy maps directly onto fundraising and sales: even sets that went well for the audience often didn't go well by his own standard, and "sometimes you try stuff and you get absolutely nothing." There's also a craft lesson in reliability — sometimes you cop out of the ambitious version of a set, do your time, and get off stage, because being dependable matters more than being brilliant that night.
Thea's observation in the episode ties it together: there's something brave about stand-up that the founder journey demands too — "you're committing yourself to getting punched every single day." Rakhesh's eight months of pitching four or five times a week is the comedy circuit with higher stakes.