Conversation with Sunny Ray of Unocoin

I just came from junior high where I was fun had my circle, and now all of a sudden I'm taking id, and I'm around all these nerdy kids and I was like alright there's a guy, East Indian, who looks like a nice guy. So I just went up to him and I was like, hey, my name is Amin. And you're like, my name is Sunny. And that was kind of it. We became friends and from there we went through high school together, went to university together. But you and I both studied engineering.

But we went in much different directions. I kind of went into the oil and gas side and then eventually started remarkable branding, our marketing agency. You went towards renewable and robotics and crypto. So tell me a little bit about what happened after engineering and what your current role is now. Cool. I mean, we'll just go backwards from there. I'm currently the co-founder and president of Unocoin, which is India's first and foremost Bitcoin and crypto trading platform.

We launched in December 2013. We have a couple million users and it's kind of been an interesting journey. I obviously grew up in Alberta, like you, my first few summer jobs in co-op jobs were in the oil field, so sync crude working at companies like cosign, and eventually working in the actual inform McMurray and the oil sands. I realized early on that number one, I probably didn't wanna devote my career to the oil and gas industry.

I wanted to do something a bit more futuristic, innovative, something that hasn't been already figured out, so I switched halfway through. I did my last two years at the University of Toronto with the hope to see what's out there and not get kind of pigeonholed into that one industry. I felt like if I was gonna live in Alberta, that would be my destiny. Upon going to U of T my first co-op was with Xerox. , like the Xerox research in the center of Canada.

And I think a lot of people know about the stories of Steve Jobs and how he visited Xerox and found the mouse and I think early versions of the interface that Mac kind of adopted and all that. So Xerox was known to a lot of people as an innovative place. I remember I used to have lunch with people there, and it would be really different because all of a sudden it's like, Oh, this guy said he was on jeopardy last week, and this guy's a PhD working on crazy stuff. That was my first exposure.

Like wow there's a lot going on in the world that was way beyond what I even imagined. After I graduated I thought, if I want to get a job, then most likely a company that's growing really fast will have the money to hire me. There's a magazine called a hundred fastest growing companies in Canada and the number one fastest growing company at the time was a company called Hydrogenics. It was a hydrogen fuel cell company and I was like, sure why not?

I reached out to them and long story short, I ended up getting a job with them. And I thought, this is kind of the antithesis of oil and gas, so we'll run with it. Upon getting into that job, I realized a couple things. Number one that, I probably wasn't destined to be an actual engineer cause I didn't seem that passionate or great at it.

I also remember reading an article in Forbes way back 20 years ago, about how engineers in India would cost a quarter, maybe a 10th in terms of what engineers in Canada or United States would be paid. That I remember had a big impact on my psyche. I was like, what? Oh, okay so there's this crazy kind of arbitrage opportunity. I started realizing that I wanted to be more.

I started facing reality and realized that money was just really, really insanely complicated subject, and it was something that I just couldn't get my head around. You and I, we went to engineering, right? So it was like we would always learn things really deeply in engineering and you'd always have a very logical, kind of scientific, backing for why things are like Maxwell's equations and like electrons and protons and ones and zeros.

And so when I applied that kind of level of thought and rigor to the concept of money, I was like what's going on? And I remember clearly the feeling in my first few months of work where after you pay your student loans and your car payments, you're going out with your friends, paying for your rent; there would always be more month than money.

Money kind of felt a lot like this asthma thing When you have oxygen, you don't even think about it but when you don't, it's like the only thing you can think of. So back then I started really taking this concept. I was like what is money? Where does it come from? Who invented it? My kind of aha moment was like, Oh, wait, so if I wanna learn about this money thing, I'll become a financial advisor.

While working as an engineer in my evenings and weekends, I essentially became a financial advisor, started a brokerage, started helping families, and probably did that for a couple of years and then full-time and then realized I started all this to understand money, but I don't feel like I understand it any better than I did at the beginning of this journey. In fact, I think I understand it less. I have all these licenses and I'm helping people.

But when I ask the people around me , what is money? Nobody can give me an actual scientific kind of mathematical or can never articulate what it actually is or where it came from. So I ended up leaving that space. Around that time I discovered Rich Dad, Poor Dad; and I ended up realizing, I wanted to be a business owner, but I felt like I wasn't ready yet.

So I thought, okay, well if I'm gonna go back into having a job, I'd rather have a job that's not just programming, but more like business related and more on the business side of things. Ended up getting a job with a company called Kwanza. I spent the better part of my career, maybe 10 years there, essentially selling robots to all the major robotics labs around the world, including U of A, U of T, MIT, Georgia Tech, Stanford, IIT Los Angeles. I literally was like a glorified robotic salesman.

I sell a quarter million dollar really awesome, sophisticated robots, like five degree or freedom robotic arms that could do surgery across the ocean and transmit touch. Let's say I'm a surgeon doing the surgery on you and you're in Edmonton, I'm in Bangalore, I could technically feel what the robot was feeling as it was cutting into your body. Just really interesting stuff.

Fast forward into where I am today and then around 2011 I was living in India on behalf of that robotics company, helping them expand out to India and that's when I discovered Bitcoin. I read the white paper and I think it was a combination of engineering background with my kind of interest in wanting to understand money and pursuing that. The internet came and went; PDAs and smartphones had opportunity came and went.

I'd seen all these waves that were just coming and going, and by the time Bitcoin hit me I was like, Holy shit. There's no way I'm letting this opportunity passing by. I just grabbed it by the horn and started doing Bitcoin meetups in Bangalore. I'm a big fan of meetups and getting people together and just through doing meetups over and over again, I met Sathvik and Harish one of my co-founders; at no point we've essentially been working on Unocoin. It's been almost 10 years now.

If you were to think about how you structure your day so that you're actually motivated to do the thing that you need to do, maybe not want to do. Do you have some kind of routine that you follow? Like do you get up at a certain time? Do you exercise? What's your wellness routine look like if you even have one?

I wake up first thing and I open this habit tracker and I just do all these things from four in the morning; coffee, go for a walk, write journal, zero inbox, deep work, green tea. If I do those things, I'm almost guaranteed to have an awesome day and then I add things and take things out based on that. You asked the question how do I stay motivated? There's two different words. There's motivation and then there's inspiration, right? Motivation to me is more like taking a warm bath.

It's great when you're in it, but then when you're out of it, it's not really there. In my case, it's more important to be doing things that I'm deeply inspired by and things that are greater than me. The truth is that not every day is the day that you feel like working.

Sometimes I consider myself lucky because before I got into Bitcoin, there was a period of time when I was still in the robotic space and I remember the first five years I was kind of like meh, and then in the second five years I felt like I was on top of it and it was all because this one girl said to me. She said, love what you do until you do what you love. Stop waiting until the day that something's gonna come into your life and you're gonna love it.

The only way you're gonna find that is if you just love what you do today. While I was working in the robotic space, I discovered Bitcoin. And Bitcoin literally was the thing I was infatuated with. and still am to this day. I just find it so interesting and fascinating. Now that I manifested my dream as my job, it's not that hard to motivate myself cuz I'm doing literally what I chose to do.

It got consequences and I'm sure I could be making more money doing something else like running a startup is not easy. I'm sure a lot of people know that. It's like really, really tough. So if you can't find some sort of beauty or purpose in the midst of that, then you're fucked. You're done. To wrap up I think personally Bitcoin is gonna change the world for the better.

I was talking about more month than money, but money is just one of those things that people get into divorces over, people get into wars over, yet when you ask people what is money? Almost nobody could give me a straight answer. And the fact that Bitcoin answers that question even 1%, that it's potentially this future of money is just the most fascinating concept that's ever lived. So I'm decided to put my whole life into it and build a company where our mission is bring Bitcoin to billions.

One thing you said that was really interesting is that you find this so passionate you get up in the morning, you're reading about this, you're learning about it, you work all day cuz you enjoy it so much. Your family, though, on the other hand, when they see it from the outside in they can probably feel the passion, but to them it looks like working. I was on your website earlier stalking on you, even though I know you and I saw the post that you wrote about deep fun versus shallow fun.

It was really interesting cuz I had never thought about it that way. When you're sitting in front of the TV and watching a movie with your kids that may be considered shallow fun. Is that correct?

My wife sent me something where my kids have learned this new song and I was like, oh my God, they're actually really good. I was trying to explain to my that school should be things that are of deep fun. For example, it's not easy to solve a math puzzle, but when you solve it, the sense of accomplishment you get and the fact that you now know how to solve it for the rest of your life and that type of struggle is what I was trying to get across to my kids.

Like watching tv, I personally don't watch any tv. I stopped watching TV a long time ago, and that was one of the best things I've ever given up because it's this shallow fun and hours go by and you never can get it back, type of thing.

I remember moments of being terrified of kids from five grades above me beating me up and shit like that used to happen. That kind of stuff doesn't happen when you're an adult, especially when you work out and do a bit of martial arts and have friends like Amin. I remember going from elementary to junior high things got a little bit better and then high school, things got even a little bit better cuz you find a few people that you can hang out with.

What people don't know about me, I don't consider myself to be super smart, but I consider myself good at being able to find people who are smart and be amongst them. I compete with them and I usually never beat them. But because I'm hanging out with smart people, I end up in a good place. And I think that pertains to me kind of being friends with people much smarter than me. People like you who do about working out, and I remember you were very good at being social.

You wouldn't have problems meeting people and being friendly. I always took a lot from that. Fast forward to now, people in Bitcoins, they're some of the smartest people I've ever met. The fact that I'm able to identify who is smart both in a classroom environment and the world gives me a bit of an edge and I feel like I can connect the dots.