Asi Sharabi on scaling Wonderbly from the kitchen table to an award-winning business & selling to Penguin Random House

0:00You know, I guess that if you're lucky enough to raise your Series A, it's the money that you raise in order to continue to make mistakes and hopefully to learn something from the mistakes until you get to the next point.

0:16Welcome back to 40 Minute Mentor, the podcast on a mission to raise aspirations and inspire the next generation of category defining founders, all in just 40 minutes. Today, we're joined by Asi Sharabi, the co-founder and CEO of Wanderbly, the world's leading personalized publishing company. I'm sure any parents listening to this will have come across Wanderbly and their amazing personalized children's books. Founded in 2012, Wanderbly is on a mission to make everyone feel loved and inspired through meaningful personalization and connect the world through books given as gifts. Over the last decade, Asi and the team have gone from strength to strength, raising money from some of the biggest investors in the industry and winning multiple awards, including Children's Publisher of the Year at the 2021 British Book Awards.

1:04To date, the team has grown to over 70 employees and they've shipped well over 10 million books to over 150 countries. And it's fair to say they're far from being done. Wunderbly has had not one, but two successful exits to date. First in 2021, when they partnered with a mid-market private equity firm, Graphite Capital, and more recently they found their permanent home as they were acquired by Penguin Random House, the world's biggest publishing company. I'm so excited to dig into his incredible journey and welcome, Asi, to the show today. So a big welcome to 40 Minute Mentor. How are you? Good, thank you.

1:40Thanks for having me. Well, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show. I can't wait to hear all about the business and your career. But before we dive into that, we're going to warm you up with a few quick for our questions. So please finish the following sentences after me. Question one, the moment that defined my career was when? I guess that had to be when my then three-year-old daughter received the personalized book for her birthday. Ah, okay, fantastic. The biggest lesson I've learned about leadership is? Hire the best people you can and just get out of the way. Ah, brilliant, brilliant mantra something i am a big believer in given what we do as a day job a skill i wish i had mastered earlier in my career is focus and prioritization yes i can relate to that one for sure i do get distracted somewhat i do i find that's the case for quite a few people that have come on this show it's that entrepreneurial mind there's always so many ideas floating around and if i could change one thing about how companies build teams it would be the need for recruitment agencies fair enough well we might have to debate that one another time but but it would be i guess it would be great if we didn't need it yeah yeah it's definitely not on the kind of you know executive headhunting side of things it's more it's more than everything below it's more yes you know this is where i find more of the structure No, no.

3:11I mean, look, one of the reasons I started JBM was I was so fed up of the recruitment industry kind of being lumped in the same bucket as a lot of the slightly more nefarious types that make this industry so transactional. And I'm pleased to say that in the search world, I find that there are some really good ones and much more relationship driven, much more consultative, less salesy. But anyway, that's probably a whole podcast topic. But thank you with being so honest. Well, I appreciate those already insights into you. And we've sort of teased the audience a bit with the origin story of Wanderbly.

3:43But do you mind sharing a bit about what your upbringing was like and ultimately what brought you to London? I guess I had a pretty uneventful, perfectly normal and mostly happy childhood. You know, growing up in a small city in Israel, just outside of Tel Aviv. I arrived to London after my first degree. I was about 28, I think 76. I came to do my master's here originally just for uh I was supposed to be here just for a year that master then somehow evolved another five years of PhD at the London School of Economics and then uh 25 years later we're still here in London and we're having this conversation amazing well I'm glad you're here because we wouldn't if not wonderfully probably wouldn't have come to existence and wouldn't have inspired so many kids so it's a good thing I'm always interested with uh with entrepreneurs where that kind of spirit comes from?

4:37Was that something that's just ingrained within you or from your family? Tell us a bit about that. And I guess our audience would also love to know sort of how Wanderbly came to be. I never really thought myself of as an entrepreneur, but I guess I fit the description. My mother recently reminded me that when I was about 10, I took some of myself and more of my sister's precious toys and obviously without permission and set up a garrousel on our street one day. One of the, as we'll get to it soon, it was a bit of a happy accident. But at the same time, it was a happy accident that in so many ways was meant to be.

5:12I guess, you know, if you track the past, my dad always worked for himself. He had the business still working. And I guess that, you know, if you grew up in Tel Aviv, the kind of social circles that I have, half the people that you know are working startups and half of them are founders. And so, you know, it's a very entrepreneurial culture in a way. I guess that the base context was there just waiting to happen in one form or shape or another. Got it. And I think I read that Wanderbly started as a DIY project with friends in 2012. So do you mind telling us more about that origin story? How did that idea come to be?

5:47I don't want to dwell too much on the Genesis story because it's, you know, I told this many, many, many times over the past years. But, you know, my first daughter was I did it when she was three. She received the gift with the name on it from her uncle and auntie. I was completely unaware of the category of personalized books never seen one before but as the story goes he was pretty lame and underwhelming so I called a few friends sat around my kitchen table and read that we can do something much much better than that and the rest is history so yeah it did start as a side project between friends but very quickly it grew up to be a VC back business and all the way to where we are now but yeah amazing how these things come from just that one moment and an incredible business was born.

6:29When you start something that you know has potential, there are so many great ideas that have had potential but never turn into anything. So what was the moment you went, I'm going to go all in on this? And what were the early signs that you were really onto something very special? So I think at the moment that we said, let's just do it. And, you know, surely we can do something better than that. And, you know, in some ways we were looking, you know, we had quite demanding full-time jobs and then very young and early families at that time but i guess we just couldn't ignore this book and the fact that you know we saw something with huge potential but just genuinely really badly executed and so we just started to work on it as a start project you know early mornings late nights a little bit of time during the weekend but it was very much a startup side project rather than there was the element of there was the creative element and the creative brief of can we make a personalized book that does suck that was the kind of you know the original print but very very early on we realized that other than the the creative challenge there's actually quite a lot of operational technical technological marketing and a whole array of challenges that comes with a you know some kind of a direct to customer operation and one which involved print on demand and you know going from digital to physical.

7:48And so very, very quickly, even at the mindset of a side project, we saw that it's actually quite a complex interdisciplinary endeavor, which was just super, super exciting. And so we worked on it for over a year, maybe a year and a half before we put it in the market. And the approach was very much a lean startup approach. It was a little lean startup side project, a very kind of creative element to it from an editorial storytelling art point of view. But it was very much, it wasn't just a pure creative endeavor as a side project. We were hoping that something interesting would happen from a business point of view.

8:26And we put it there on the first season, first holiday season, and we bootstrapped about a million dollar in revenue. And that was the moment it was like, okay, we're onto something. This is really interesting. And then that was the point that we decided after 2013, early in 2014, we decided to park our day jobs, take a small seed round and just start to build a company around that little project that's gone horribly well. That's a lovely problem to have isn't it? What were some of the sort of harder parts of that earlier scaling journey? What were some of the challenges you had to overcome and are there any things you wish you'd have done differently?

9:00Generally for me fairly early on I've consciously and intentionally adopted a no regrets mindset because if you keep thinking about oh i could have done that i should have done that because it's constantly the case that you think that you you know what you're doing you actually don't know what you're doing and then you realize that you should have done something else this is in 90 of all the cases and so i think that the early days as i'm sure any founder that experienced this kind of hyper growth stage of something that you found a product market fit things are going well so it's just beautifully chaotic, I guess is the right way to describe it.

9:38But a lot of fun. I think it was also a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's often when you know you're in the right world is when it is hard and lots of things are going wrong, but you're still enjoying it because that's part of what being an entrepreneur is. It's the build. You've got to go through the hard yards, don't you? We briefly touched upon the fact that you ultimately got to this point where you raised the seed round and you've gone on to raise some incredible investors. So it's something that comes up a lot on this podcast because we know how challenging fundraising can be what was the experience like for you and what would you say are the biggest lessons that you learned and sort of advice you would pass on to maybe founders listening to this that might be sort of doing it for the first time maybe struggling with it what were your learnings and takeaways i actually enjoyed fundraising it was one of the things that i really liked i've gone through three rounds c the A and B.

10:28And for me, the first two rounds were fairly easy. And anyone was listening to it, and I'm doing the quote-unquote kind of thing. But again, in hindsight, I got to meet a lot of people. And in the early days, we had such a strong traction that getting money was not an issue. It was actually getting money from the right people. That was on my mind. The B round was a very different story, very different experience. We were just kind of heading properly into what you can call the messy middle, if anyone read Scott Belsky's book. And it was very close to just taking some kind of a down round, I guess, which fortunately we ended up not having.

11:12But so I had a first two fairly straightforward, one that was much more challenging, but eventually managed to get there and then a year later i decided i'm not doing it anymore i'm shifting the business to sustainability profitability and not going on that road again and that was probably the second you know you asked me earlier what was the moment that defined your career the second one would probably be to shift the business to profitability and taking back ownership of our destiny okay really interesting um and i guess you've won many awards you've obviously raised these great rounds you appeared on dragon's den which is actually we've had a few dragon's den guests come on the podcast which i'm sure is a unique experience what for you are the real standout moments for you and why i guess it has to be winning the children publisher of the year because from day one we obsessed about proving to ourselves and and the world that personalized book can be as good as any off-the-shelf books that you can buy in bookshelf in a bookstore Because when we started it, a personalized book, rightly so, had a quite bad reputation, you know, just being a bit of a tacky novelty gift and not much more than that.

12:26And so we wanted to prove that there can be real products of literature or real books. And so, you know, getting this accolade from a fairly snobbish British publishing establishment was a big moment for me and, you know, I think for all of us. I think it's fair to, in hindsight, kind of, you know, reflecting on those views, I can describe our relationship with traditional publishing as something like, first they ignore you, then they snub you, then they invite you to give keynotes in their innovation conferences, then they give you the awards, then finally they acquire. So I think we've completed the full circle and we are now part of the big publishing industry and I could not be happier and prouder.

13:07So amazing. Well, you should be. It must be incredibly proud for you and the team to kind of look back on all the things you've achieved. But also, given you're still doing incredible work, which I can't wait to come on to hear about the future as well. One of the topics that I'm most passionate about is sort of building high performing teams, culture, all of those things. And that's what I'd love to talk to you about. So I know it's a topic that that you're passionate about and very good at building high performing teams. so um i guess what was your approach firstly to hiring in the early days of wonderbly and how has that evolved as the years have gone on there was no magic formula and a lot of mistakes were made definitely in the early years of of pc back hyper growth but again no regrets but you know i guess that if you're lucky enough to raise your serious a it's the money that you raise in order to continue to make mistakes and hopefully to learn something for the mistakes until you get to the next point we tried agencies we tried to source internally we worked with talent partners that you know came in and embedded themselves in the building etc etc we tried cheap we tried expensive we tried seven stages of hiring and i did a lot of just you know gut feel you hide on the spot kind of at the end of the day honestly i'd say it's at least 50 luck and the rest is a combination of you know having a really rigorous process culture that you know what you're optimizing for and have a standard good intuition yeah yeah definitely and i think um it's almost a rite of passage to make mistakes when it comes to hiring no one's ever going to get it perfect and i think one shouldn't beat themselves up too much because you actually learn a lot from the mistakes you make when it comes to hiring and i think if you can learn something from each process and then sort of refine that because it will it will evolve all the time depending on you know the scale of the business and different challenges you face what was the most difficult hire that you had to make to date and why was it so challenging i think in the early days for me personally it's probably been marketing leadership and then later more kind of i guess recently it was people leadership actually come to think of it could it be that these two areas of the business that are really closest to my heart and my skill set your expectations are super high i guess so but these two are not honestly just reflecting on it for a second these are the two things i like to do and know something about and yeah i guess that's you know finding the people because i have absolutely no problem whatsoever i'm really not this like centralized founder or you know CEO that likes to keep everything they like to be hands-on absolutely not the opposite actually but I guess it's with marketing and people marketing in the early days and you know until we find the right people which luckily have been with me for you know a good few years now but yeah that was a bit of a challenge yeah it's so funny it's not the first time I've heard that one marketing is often a very challenging hire anyway but I think particularly if it's something you spike on you will naturally be pickier and you know want to get it really really right because it's something you're close to and the same goes for people and actually people is such a strategic I think often was not seen as this but actually so important to get that people leader right and you really want somebody that can be that cultural beacon and somebody you can really trust and rely on so yeah you want to get that one right of course I'd love to learn more about the culture that you've built at Wonderbly how would you describe it and as you've scaled how has it evolved we'd love to know if those fundamentals are still the same or if it's sort of changed as you've grown yeah culture that abstract elusive yet also important ingredient i can talk about culture for all hour if you have the time we've got a team that's as diverse as our books and storylines writers engineers designers marketing people crm pr illustrators product managers finance people of course are deeply caring customer support angels operations content managers i'm probably forgetting people of course hr translators analysts producers office manager and i think that you know it's a really wonderful bunch of makers and dreamers and these are people who are equally obsessed about the craft as well as one of its mission and i guess what i really enjoyed i feel like i had the immense privilege over the years is seeing just how each person found kind of their own personal way to connect to our mission and to manifest our values which is you know one lens to look at the wannabe culture and to manifest those values you into their own kind of work in a quite personal, personal way.

18:05And, you know, so these are courage, curiosity, and kindness. These are one of its values, and they have been there pretty much from day one. And it's this idea of having the courage, and having is not to either have it or not. It's cultivating the courage to try things that no one else would, for setting yourself to insanely ambitious goals, and for being willing to be wrong and fail most of the time. We are, at the end of today, operating in a hit and miss industry. We have more booths that didn't become global bestsellers than those who did. And we've always trailblazed the whole category. Yes, we didn't invent the category.

18:47We've been around for many years, but no one did it with the same obsession and care and uncompromising approach to quality that we did. and no one innovated in this category as much as we were lucky to do. So you need a lot of courage to do that. The other sign of that coin, I guess, is curiosity because that's what keeps us wondering and wondering, just being always open and curious about finding new ways to make meaningful connections and magical stories. And I think that you have to have this curious mind, beginner's mind, a learning mind, which is very important. And then finally, kindness on Bell, that at the end of the day, only kindness matters.

19:31And so it's being kind to your colleagues, being kind to your customers. Other people matter is what I keep telling anyone who cares to listen. Yeah, that's beautiful. I can really see just the strength of those values and how it's a great place to work. Like, you know, when you have that combination of people of all different shapes and sizes coming in and but also buying into that, I think that's so powerful. I guess beyond that, it probably comes with that being a very interdisciplinary team. So, you know, it's a very small team. It's only 70 people, but very, very diverse from a profession and craft point of view.

20:12and that diversity and I'm using it not in a DEI diversity kind of side of thing just diversity of professions and just brings with it there's a lot to work with you need to find the common ground between very different characters and personalities and ways of working and I think that this is it could make things difficult in some ways but also this is the reason why we thrive and have a quite multifaceted kind of you know culture one hand it's a very very high performing high output organization on the other hand if you will walk around the business it's also a business that i'd like to believe and i have all reasons to believe that it's a very pleasant and pretty relaxed environment there's a lot of support here a lot of friendships been made over the years deep friendships and there's a lot of you know i think that sometimes high performing team and high output comes with something quite harsh.

21:12I think Wanderbly is just, it's a very hard place. And we've been mindful of both in a way in equal measures. Yeah, I love that. And I guess when you're interviewing four candidates to come work at Wanderbly, and I'm sure there'll be people listening to this thinking, I want to work in that type of culture. So what helps candidates stand out to you? And on the flip side, what are the red flags, particularly when it comes to that cultural alignment that kind of are really off-putting i don't know maybe saying i'm playing obvious here but candidates and then hires that stand out and having a very you know good meaningful career just people who are genuinely and deeply passionate about their profession about the craft about the works that they that they do it really really helps if you're passionate about books working at Wannabilly.

22:01So being obsessed about your craft as well as books in equal measures is a good starting point. I guess that kind of jumping back to the people or walking backwards, looking at the people who had an amazing career here at Wannabilly who still have, they're prolific, they are tenacious, ambitious, and they thrive on autonomy, which are things that, you know, over the years, I think we've learned to intuitive response. You know, it's very, very hard to ask in an interview, oh, are you being prolific? But because it does, we need people who can just process a lot of information. And it's incredible to see that some people have the natural talent of processing tons of information, being incredibly prolific.

22:49And some people are simply not. I personally, I sit somewhere in the middle and definitely, far from being the most prolific person in the building. But early on, And I learned to genuinely appreciate that trait and try to find ways to optimize for that. Yeah, I love that. Thank you for sharing. Like many companies, WandaBly was a more in-office culture before the pandemic and now is a hybrid model. So how has your mind changed to that, like the impact of in-office versus hybrid? And how has it helped or hindered you in terms of attracting and retaining talent, sort of adopting a hybrid model?

23:24That's a great question. Look, I think that maybe in some interview in the past, I said before the pandemic, I said something about I can sky. But I think it simply comes to personal preference. And I just love people. I just love being around smart people that stimulate me and do amazing things and amazing work. And I do, you know, more specifically, for one of the, I do believe that creativity thrives on collaboration, that human interaction breeds creativity in a wonderful and serendipitous kind of ways, which in some ways tends to happen outside of formal workshops and brainstorms. And, you know, one can argue that, yes, some things can happen over Zoom.

24:11But I guess fast forward to where we are, post-pandemic, you know, two or three years, at least after that. If I believe in anything, it's probably that a hybrid model where you can be very mindful and specific about the type of work and interactions that can only benefit or can only happen and benefit from working remotely, as well as, of course, in the office. and then create a model that makes the best use of both worlds. Because I think that after the pandemic, I think that the whole world learned that we don't have to be five days in the office. Good things can happen to companies that are having a bit more flexible, I guess.

24:57Even if I was more vocal against remote, I was always probably very vocal about, positively vocal about flexible and about giving people the way to do the work around the things that matter to them most and where they find that they can do the best work. Because I think there's a difference between flexible and remote work. Flexible doesn't have to be remote. And so as a natural kind of post-COVID evolution, first we were forced to work completely remotely for a year. And I think after the initial couple of weeks of shock, and say because of the strength of the Wanderly culture, we were able to preserve the kind of the culture, the high-performing team, the high output, the sense of belonging, even when we did have to work fully remote.

25:49So, you know, we adapted very well, but then when we could go back to the office, it was clear that the days of full fight is the office over and we should cater for something that is, you know, we should continue to evolve our operating system or our operating model and at the moment we're doing three days a week in the office and two remote but of course anyone can come to five up here five days a week because they have a very easy commute now and so it's a minimum three days and it's working yeah that's great i find that's often the sort of structure a lot of our clients are adopting and it seems to be working well so that's great to hear we've spent a lot of time reflecting on the journey and all the learnings and all the great things that have happened over the last few years.

26:33But I'd love to also ask about the future. What are the plans for Wanderbly in the years ahead? So we just started our next chapter, probably fourth chapter. We have joined the biggest publishing group in the world. As I said, I could not be happier. I think that, you know, over the years, Wanderbly became closer and closer to the publishing world. well you know retained our kind of early stage startup techie kind of vibes but you know from an editorial point of view from understanding customers from the point of view of creating products and books that people want to buy are making deeply meaningful connections between people and with our approach to international expansion and and this idea of a meaningfully personalized book for every age every occasion every relationship you know we want to put a one of the books on every bookshelf in the world.

27:27And so being a part of the world's largest publishing group is coming with a lot of benefits, which we still, you know, it's a very, very early stage. We closed the deal in July and then we broke into the summer. So it is very, very fresh and we're still learning. And I was very, very excited when the global CFO of PRH, who was part of the team that we're instrumental in this deal, told me that it's his personal mission to make PRH, Tecmo Mano House, by the way, the most attractive environment to entrepreneurs doing new things in publishing. And they're not looking to consolidate or to merge us or to put us into some kind of a box.

28:13It's like, you know, we acquired you so we can just enable you and watch you continue to do what you've been doing in the past 10 years and just tell us how we can help. And that was obviously like, you know, music to my ears because as an entrepreneur, you've got two, I guess, existential anxieties. The first one, if you're lucky enough to find product market fit and to be on the road and to, you know, start the journey, your first existential anxiety is to not fuck it up. And to, you know, definitely once you took your money from investors, you're just constantly anxious about not fucking that and to get some kind of a meaningful outcome for all shareholders.

28:54And then, again, if you are as unbelievably lucky as I feel that I am, and you manage to have a very positive outcome, and you found a permanent home, and you exited the company to a huge group, that anxiety immediately transformed itself to, oh my God, what can happen now that I'm part of a$5 billion publishing group? And what will happen to Wallerby? what will happen to our culture, what will happen to everything that we worked so, so hard with. But there's, you know, I think that I've always worked from intuition. And if there's one thing that I'm allowing myself to take credit for is about bringing in the right people, the right investors along the way and board members and working with private equity for four years before that.

29:42So I do think that we couldn't be more luckier and happier with PRH's absolutely great leadership. Their intentions are genuinely to see how they can help us to continue to grow. That's amazing to hear. And again, many congratulations. It's an incredible outcome and it sounds like the potential is huge. So wishing you all the very best with the future. Before we get to our wrap up questions, I just wanted to touch upon entrepreneurship more broadly and being a founder. because it is a hard existence. And a lot of people listening to this may be going through those sort of the brutal parts of the founder journey.

30:19And I think you've previously talked about the psychological strain that being a founder can sometimes have and what a lonely place entrepreneurship can be. And I felt that I ran my business as a solo founder for 13 years before being acquired and now being a part of a leadership group. And so I know firsthand about that. So I'd love to hear just a bit more about sort of what you have found difficult, especially when you're a new founder, but just sort of what have been the hardest parts of being a founder for you? And how did you overcome those sort of difficult days? Okay, rolling it back, you know, I guess as we just mentioned, if you find yourself like I did, you know, whether accidental or intentional founder that is running, in our case, the fastest growing startup in the UK, in 2016, with all the strills and pressures and pain that comes with that, I guess it can just be quite overwhelming unless you're not an asshole.

31:12And I think that it's just this constant sense that you're completely out of your depth. You're just winging it day after day, after day, all day, every day. And I think that for me, in the very early days, it did feel like I just woke up one morning and I have a company with about 80 people and six different investors on the board and some kind of an executive that I'm told I should manage. And everything was just entirely new and changed all the time. So you're constantly in and out of a sense of control or lack of growth, mostly the latter. You need to be able to operate in that environment.

32:04you need to be able to not completely freak out and have a few hours of sleep every night yeah yeah do you have any advice for founders in terms of looking after themselves and their well-being and just sort of maybe people that are starting out things that you think will be just useful for them to hear from someone that's been there and done it i guess honestly my best advice would be to start on your mindfulness journey as early as possible that's the thing is very very important because if you are if you develop and you cultivate a healthy level of self-awareness i think that that can really help because then you can anticipate things you can you know where you are you can actually it's not you're not entirely out of control yeah yeah totally no it's a very good advice well with with Sally and Nandasi i've got two final quick questions for you to wrap things up this is for two minute mentor so i have to ask you if you could be mentored by anyone dead or alive who would it be and why i've always really admired still really admired a guy called scott belski i've mentioned the messy meal book earlier so scott belski founded interesting this guy he impacted me and influenced me in different ways along the journey he doesn't know it i wish i had the opportunity to tell him that one day but So he founded Behance that was then later acquired by Adobe and he became the chief product officer.

33:27And other than the fact that I found my creative co-founder, Pedro, on Behance, Scott also wrote two books. The first one was Making Ideas Happen, which was a great influence on me of going into that side project. and then he wrote the messy middle which perfectly described those hard messy turbulent years that you kind of go in and out of when you are on that scaling journey yeah it's great it sounds like a fantastic mentor and finally what's uh one final piece of career advice that you'd like to leave our listeners with today try really hard to not be an asshole other people matter well said well said i got the succinct and very very powerful it's a really good way to live actually yeah it's something that i think is just that shouldn't be overlooked when you're building a business it just makes for a much much better environment so i hope our listeners will take heed and i'm sure they will also want me to thank you for a brilliant conversation incredibly inspiring i'm a huge admirer of what you've built and the business and i hope many many more years to come we can enjoy the incredible books that you uh produce so thank you so much and uh wishing you all the very best thanks so much thank you cheers

34:47thank you so much for tuning into today's episode i really hope that you found it useful and inspiring if we have left any questions unanswered or if you have any feedback or guest recommendations for future series, then please make sure you get in touch on info at jbmc.co.uk. I often get asked by listeners how you can help us spread the word about 40 Minute Mentor. There are two simple ways you can help. Firstly, share this episode on your preferred social media platform and LinkedIn is probably where I'm most likely to see it. And you can also leave us a review on either Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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