Win Without Crushing Your Soul | Behind The Growth with James Mishreki

0:00I was telling him I wanted to get into marketing, I'm going to start an agency, this and that. And he said, James, you want to get into marketing, you don't know how to market yourself. You can never get internal validation from external achievement. It's just a never ending cycle and there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.

0:16Laura Donadio: Have you figured out again like a playbook for that as well? I think I'll be figuring that out till the day I dive. And I think a lot of founders, let's keep going, keep going, keep going. They get to like 55 and realize, oh, there's a real emptiness here. And I've never worked on myself. And I've kind of been winning, but I crushed my soul along the way. One of your personal goal was to build two billion pound brands in your 30s. Do you feel that sometimes chasing that number can distract you from building a great business? Well, I'm going to tell you a secret. I'm James from Shrekke. I'm building consumer health companies.

0:48And this is Behind the Growth.

0:53Laura Donadio: we always start by asking what you're known for and for you to give me a little bit of an intro of who you are sure i'm james i have um spent all my life doing my own thing so all my adult life at least i started out as a poker player professionally did that for a couple of years quite a um isolated stressful career but it was it was fun and it made starting a company after that quite easy. Didn't feel like risky. So I did that through my 20s, a software company. And then in my 30s for the last like eight, nine years, I've been building consumer health brands. One is called Skin and Me. We have multiple brands, Skin and Me, Hair and Me.

1:34It's a personalized healthcare company. And I'm just launching a new brand called S3 at the moment in oral care.

1:40Laura Donadio: Cool. And so in one sentence, what are you known for? I'm known for building consumer brands. Nice. I know that you've told the story about being a pro poker player quite a lot of times so I'm not going to make you rehash that but I'd actually want to know one thing that today still impacts your decision making process from what you've learned from playing poker as a pro well when you're a poker player your job is to basically make decisions all the time with imperfect information and you have to build a level of comfort and conviction in going with what you think is ideally 70 % confidence, but might even be less.

2:27And I think that translates well to entrepreneurship. And it's really something that I live by now. If it feels like it's more right than not right, I'm probably going to go with it because a decision is better than no decision.

2:41Laura Donadio: okay cool um with skin and me you raised eight million pre-product what did you believe about the business that made you willing to make that bet so early on it just felt like the market was really doing a disservice to customers a huge market skin treatment people with acne skin pigmentation rosacea skin aging concerns and basically they've got two options especially in a category like acne they can go to to the gp i mean my dad was a gp he had two weeks training in dermatology so he didn't really he wasn't a specialist and if you go to a doctor like that you get given just something you know this is off the shelf it's been mass manufactured and it's not like you can text the gp on whatsapp two weeks later and then on the other hand you can go to the high street you could buy clearasil or some other products that can legally not include prescription grade ingredients so you're not going to get the best possible results and so it just felt like having a convenient route to getting personalized made for you prescription treatment where you can actually talk to the person that prescribed it and get feedback and share photos and so on it just felt like a massive opportunity a billion pound opportunity hiding in plain sight And so like a lot of these things, as you start pulling together some of the pieces of it, you bring in experts, you understand the regulatory environment, you understand the customer mindset, and you start making progress.

4:16Even before raising the money, you just build more and more conviction. And so it then felt like really a no-brainer to bring this founding team together and basically go all in on this for many years and raise enough capital to make sure we're the group that wins the race, really. And so we knew that we had to build a vertically integrated backend. end we knew that in order to do this properly we needed to own all layers of the stack and that would then also enable us to do the best thing for the customer and get the price down to a really affordable level give us the gross margin that we could keep reinvesting in growth to serve more people and so I guess it was that momentum that we built up before even going out to raise the money that just felt like this is going to work there was no doubt in our minds and then when you go out to pitch investors they really feel that if it's authentic they can feel it if you're like raising really early on you're not even sure if you should be doing it they're the founders that you talk to and it's like i'm not surprised you're struggling you know you need to do more to build conviction yourself before other people are going to believe in you

5:23Laura Donadio: fair enough was that the first business that you were raising money for uh it was yeah my first company in in my 20s after the poker days was completely bootstrapped and believe it or not I was a big believer in never raising money. I wore that like a badge of honor. And there's pros and cons to each, obviously. But when it came to the Skinner Me business plan, it was just clear that raising a lot of capital on good terms from good investors was, yeah, absolutely the right way to go. But no, I hadn't ever raised money before that. Can we talk about the first business, the Bootstrap one? um what made you feel so strongly about not raising money what was your rationale behind it well you know it's kind of you're a product of your environment in many ways i was building that in the northeast of england where there's no network effects there's no strong founder community and so the co-founders that i had who were a bit older than me they were quite conservative they had no interest in going out and raising money i would you know read about and interact with different communities online and I really wanted to plug into the startup fundraising community but it just was a bit of a square peg in a round hole and I think the big lesson for me there is you know if I could turn back the clock just getting in the right environment early on is so important I think I really undervalued that early on in in my entrepreneurial career because is I stayed in an environment for basically seven years where I wasn't you know picking up through osmosis how people do things getting to know investors and other founders that have really big ambition levels and a different expertise I guess having gone through different things and different perspectives yeah exactly I think if there's one like message to any younger and early stage founders that are listening is, you know, put a lot of thought into where you are and who you're surrounding yourself by, because I think that has a real compounding effect 10 years later in your career in terms of what you know and what you can achieve.

7:35And I feel like I just massively overlooked that.

7:39Laura Donadio: So today, would you start another business by bootstrapping it?

7:47I can't see that happening. Ultimately, it depends, like for me personally, where I'm at in my career. No, I don't see my next business being a bootstrapped one. Because I feel like once I've built the confidence and pulled together a team in the business model and the opportunity, it's going to be an opportunity that we can most likely capitalize on by raising enough capital to build the right team and capability and move really fast. and that's just because I've become accustomed to that way of building value and serving customers. But someone else listening might not want to, you know, they might have different type of ambition levels.

8:30They might be wary of giving up any equity or control to investors. And I think, I mean, there's plenty of examples of incredibly successful bootstrap companies like MailChimp that didn't need investment. But yeah, for me, where I'm at now, I'm still going to leverage bringing on capital to win.

8:49Laura Donadio: And when you did that first raise, what was your biggest lesson between raising and launching? I guess everything takes longer and costs more than you think. Like building a house, it's never finished early and under budget. That said, we did an amazing job at Skin and Me of, you know, maybe our soft launch is a little bit later than originally planned. and maybe things could cost a little bit more, but we were incredibly capital efficient on the whole when you look at how some other companies might burn through investor funds. And it put us in a really strong position to then go out to the market with a strong amount of marketing capital without the need to go out and raise money anytime soon.

9:29And I think that's like, I'm a big supporter of raising more than you need early on because I think one of the, One of the ways in which a lot of companies fail is basically spending too much time fundraising. And on one hand, that's a distraction. On the other hand, your chances of raising money when you really need money are much lower, right? If you're desperate, then you lose the leverage. And so if you've got opportunities to raise a lot of money super early on, even diluting more, I think that dilution is really cheap compared to the risk of...

10:09Laura Donadio: Having to do it from a desperate position. For sure. There's an interesting conversation on social happening right now that, you know, ultimately a founder isn't a CEO. And most people, I think, you know, especially when it's your first business, you want to build it and you want to run it because, you know, you feel super passionate about the idea. You feel super passionate about the way you're doing it and the vision that you have for the business. You consciously separated both roles and decided that you were going to build it but not run it. What drove that decision? Well, I guess for me, it took me a while to figure out what I'm good at and what I want to spend my time doing.

10:45So I'm really good at coming up with an idea and understanding the market opportunity and building out the business plan and the business model. And then bringing together the right team, which I'd say is the hardest part of all of all of these ingredients that you need. bringing together the right team, incentivizing them in the right way, and setting up a culture and a company, basically, that is on a path to success and bringing the key partners, bringing the capital, making the key decisions, building the brand and so on. There's still a lot in there, but that's really my sweet spot. Then being the person to manage the company day to day, you know, much like, I don't know, someone like Richard Branson, who has how many companies is he attached to you, but he's never the person running them.

11:32He always brings in a CEO that he believes is stronger than him at managing the company. I've moved into that role of doing the same thing. And it took me a little while to figure out what I'm good at. And definitely earlier on in my career, I took a lot of pride in, I've got to be the guy

11:48Laura Donadio: leading this till the bitter end. But I've kind of learned over time that I frankly just don't care about that pride. All I have pride in is, am I creating maximum value for the shareholders and the customers that we're serving? And I think that, you know, the way I can, I can deliver that is by following this playbook. So it wasn't difficult to admit that you didn't think you were the right person to run the business and bring someone in to do it. I'd say there was moments along the way where certain people say, oh, right, I thought, you know why don't you want to be CEO and when I was a bit younger I definitely did feel like oh yeah you know I gotta be the the guy to see it through and I probably did have some insecurity around it but I could honestly care less and the reason is I now I guess I've now rolled out this playbook twice and I can now see a path to creating more and more companies in consumer health and similar of categories, bringing together the right ingredients, setting the company on a path for success, and frankly, having a lot more impact than I could have done if I was forcing myself to go through this role that I'm not really good at.

13:02I wouldn't even say that I'm not and never going to be a CEO because I think of myself as my own CEO that is setting up these companies. And I'm still very involved in all of them. I'm still the chairman at Skin and Me. I'm the chairman at the new company, S3. so you know it's not like I'm spending up 10 companies a month I'm still very involved but I'm I'm I guess operating in a different a different capacity how do you find the right

13:29Laura Donadio: CEO have you figured out again like a playbook for that as well or is that something you're still figuring out I think I'll be figuring that out till the day I die I got this recent book by by Steve well it's a posthumous Steve Jobs book which was only given to employees of Disney and Apple last year and I got hold of a copy. Cost me an arm and a leg on eBay. Anyway, in it, you basically see how much weight and how much care he puts into getting better and better at recruiting. And he was still learning how to recruit right up until his final days at Apple. And so I feel like I'm still down at the bottom of the ladder of becoming a world-class recruiter.

14:15I think I'm getting increasingly better at it. But I'd say recruiting a co-founder CEO is, it's such a rare person. It's so rare because not only do they have to have the competency to actually do the job of managing and steering the company, they also need to have the exceptionally rare resilience to keep at it for months and months or years of things going terribly. and a lot of people might say oh yeah i'm up for it but like really when you've had like 11 months of just everything going wrong and you might wake up and be like embarrassed and confused and not even sure what to do you still then got to come in and and do it and keep at it and i think screening for those um screen for that rather is the the hardest part of finding the right person but yeah really pleased to say that in skin and me we've got an incredible ceo in horatio who who joined as a co-founder around the time we were raising the funding round.

15:18And he's led the company and steered it in a much better way than I would have in S3, which is this new oral care company. Ryan is, you know, is very similar and basically very complementary to me. And so it's working really well. But we had spent a while working together before that.

15:38Laura Donadio: For me, buying back time is particularly interesting because I think time is one of the biggest luxury in life. I don't actually think money can buy you freedom. And I think the biggest thing is obviously being able to do whatever you want with your time. Um, and so I was curious when it comes to buying back time, how do you do that when building a business? Well, I try to, I try to get into a position where the only work that I'm doing is adding my specific knowledge, my unique value right so there's a thousand things that I could spend my time doing that I can do but a lot of people can do that as well and so I would recruit someone to do that and early on in my career I didn't have the resources to recruit someone but now I can do that I'd also say with where AI is at the moment over the last couple of years a lot of what would have been outsourced to a human can just now be outsourced to AI and I'm trying to get better and better at AI delegation but it's really important for me to be able to sort of you know come into work and just not be utterly bombarded by stuff that isn't in my zone of genius and I'm still not fully there I put a massive effort into just okay this can be delegated that can be delegated I have been defaulting to doing this task for the last four years but I don't need to do it because lots of other people are capable of doing it I want to be spending my time on the big strategic decisions pulling together the right information and synthesizing it to support the CEO and the rest of the leadership team.

17:14Recruiting key team members, bringing in key partners, fundraising. Even in a project like fundraising, there's a lot of fundraising that, if I think of the round you asked about with Skin and Me, I probably did so much work there that can now be automated through AI. It's the relationship management and the pitching and the nurturing of that and getting it over the line that is my unique value add. It's not updating spreadsheets and, you know, going back and forth. I would also say, just to add to that, it's really important for me to, I'm now trying to buy back even more time in my personal life.

17:51And so I'm just doing anything from, I'm on the move quite a bit at the moment, so I don't have this. This sounds like very privileged, so I might regret saying this, but I hired a chef, right? Right. And that sounds really baller. Like I have some live in chef in my home, but she would come to my flat every five days. It's actually a lot more affordable than you might think.

18:09Laura Donadio: No, I know. Especially in comparison to some of the meal delivery companies. Absolutely. Obviously it costs more than that, but not way more. And so that was part of, you know, my life that I just wanted to buy back time and feel like I've always got healthy food. I don't have to think about it. And I think there's a bunch of other areas that I've used maybe a PA for that I just used to assume I have to do myself. And so I'm buying back time in all ways. Because I think if you're wrapping up work on an evening and just working on personal admin, you're not that effective the next day because you're not getting any downtime.

18:42And if your downtime instead can be reading or talking to other smart friends or just chilling out with your partner, I think it sets you up much better for the next day.

18:50Laura Donadio: I'm quickly going to interrupt this episode to remind you to please hit subscribe if you're listening on YouTube. And for those listening on Apple or Spotify, to not forget to hit the follow button. It only takes a second. It's free, but it will mean the world to us. So I read this really interesting book a couple of years back, and it basically asks you to set up your hourly rate, not what you would charge in business, but just for what you would consider the right money for an hour of your time in your personal life. Anything that would cost less than that, that you could outsource, you should outsource, whether that being a chef, a cleaner, a PA, anything like that.

19:26Laura Donadio: and I always look at my life in that exact same way is what can I outsource that will make my life easier and faster and more efficient but also give me time back so that's why I wanted to ask you about that specifically because I think it's super interesting and I don't think it's necessarily just privilege I think it's just being it's a mindset as well it's a mindset for sure like a lot of people don't need to spend 45 minutes on the phone to a company because they think oh you owe me 10 pounds on that phone bill like yeah it's that that's a principle you might have and you might refuse to drop it until you get it but how much does that 45 minute cost when i was young i would not let anything go now i just write off so much stuff it's just not important or i'll just give stuff away instead of like returning it and driving back or something like that.

20:18Laura Donadio: Absolutely. And so with Skin and Me, you bought several businesses within that ecosystem. You then decided that you were ready to build again with S3. At what point from building Skin and Me and the ecosystem of sub-brands within that business, did you decide that you were ready to build again? Well, I guess step one is, is Skin and Me in a position where it's self-sustaining and self-growing without needing me to be operational? And the answer was yes. And so I, like a lot of entrepreneurs, have ideas every day. And one thing I'd been quite fascinated by was the eco-friendly refillable approach to personal care.

21:00There's tons and tons of plastic products that we use in our bathrooms every day, as you know from where you worked previously. And there was an increasing customer adoption of refillable eco-friendly packaging that reduces your waste. And so I then went off to start a new business and raised capital for it. And it was a refillable oral care brand. It's still around today. It's called Life Supplies. And we ultimately built that business to good revenues, but we concluded that it wasn't going to deliver a venture-sized return. And the reason is in oral care, Yeah. Whilst some customers are happy with a good enough toothpaste formula and good ingredients in fully compostable packaging, which may I add, which we had, most people care deeply about science, right?

21:51And in a category like oral care, where it's something you put in your mouth, which if you get it wrong, you're going to have pain in the future. people are much more sensitive than they are in other personal care categories and so we ultimately realized that because it was in a refillable format didn't matter how good the science was behind it that meant people would think oh it's not a scientific brand exactly so we decided then to go back to the drawing board and figure out where is the strongest opportunity in oral care and it was pretty clear to us that in the sensitivity category, this one giant incumbent has dominated it for 20 plus years.

22:31And we looked at the technology and we got to know the main two guys who had basically built that brand, including the guy that launched their key technology 15 years ago. So basically there are no, this is very nerdy, but there are no better sensitivity focused people than the two that we brought together to start this business with. And ultimately with them, we looked at the technology of the big incumbent and what we could develop. And it was clear that we could create a technology that would work better for more people. And yeah, and that's how S3 was born.

23:04Laura Donadio: Nice. Do you have any more ideas in the work? Yeah, I do. I do. I have a lot. I'm very interested in the moment at how the longevity space is going to come into the consumer health realm. definitely in air quality is one that i'm increasingly aware of i spend so much time in cities and um i think most people don't think twice about it but and that's probably because i mean if you work in the center of london you don't really have much of a choice you've got to get there somehow but i think you spend you know often at least a third of your day at home and you can control the air quality at your home i think there's going to be an emergence of consumer on the go products and maybe use a saline solution to support your lungs.

23:54And yeah, like so many different ideas, I could talk all day about it. But I just I love the health space and where it's where it's heading. And I also love physical products. And I love thinking about ways to integrate health, physical products, and AI.

24:11Laura Donadio: When you start building a business, and you make that decision of actually now is the time that it's reached that point it can operate without me do you think that's related to money or is it very much just the environment of the business itself the way that the team is set up like how how many different things do you look at to decide that the business is ready to operate without you or with you less and less involved yeah I'd say there's two phases to this and phase one is do you have the right foundation and then phase two is, is the business working, right? And so getting the confidence in the business model, bringing together the team, setting up the incentive structure, bringing together the capital and putting the brand and the product together and launching and developing the IP, that is the foundation.

25:00Okay. And that is a level of success that gets the company to a point that I might not be needed in the same capacity that I was up until that point, but I'm still very close to the company. And I'd say then there's another metric of success, which is a combination of our retention, our growth rates, whatever other metrics are specific to that business, getting to profitability and so on. that once we reach those metrics, it is a bit of a signal that I can be even less involved in terms of an operational capacity. So if we take the example of Skin and Me, I was CEO, built the foundation. I then moved into exec chairman.

25:44And then when we got to that second phase, I moved out of exec chairman into non-exec chair. And then I started the oral care company. And so you can kind of see how I look at it. And that's oversimplifying it because there's a lot in there. but I'd say they're the two measures of success.

26:01Laura Donadio: And I'm sure I've read that one of your personal goal was to build two billion pound brands in your thirties. Why that number specifically? And do you feel that sometimes chasing that number can distract you from building a great business? Well, I'm going to tell you a secret. In four days, I turned 40. Okay. Okay. Damn it. We're getting awfully close to it. Yeah. I love setting highly ambitious goals. My time was a little bit off on this one. It was. I would, you know what I'd say? It's funny, isn't it? When you look back every 10 years, when you have a milestone birthday, like, wow, I thought I knew stuff back then.

26:45now I know so much more about how to start two incredibly valuable companies and I think back then I knew when I set that goal I probably didn't know enough what I would say is it's definitely driven a level of ambition that has still gotten to um you know the and me portfolio skin of me hair of me and so on which is um worth hundreds of millions and it's got a new company in s3 which is on a really strong pathway but it obviously hasn't created value yet other than the ip that we've got but yeah i'll have to it's funny that you brought that up i'm gonna have to set another goal for the next 10 years we are what should it be why don't what do you reckon

27:27Laura Donadio: before i'm 50 what have i got to do um see i'm i'm a true believer of i'll carry my goals over until i reach them i love that i was thinking i gotta smash through it okay i'll take that Um, but yeah, so I'm, I had this, um, I'm 33. I, I set some really ambitious goals to when I hit 30. Um, and then I had all of them before I turned 30. And I think I was very lost for the first six months of my thirties because all of a sudden I didn't think through anything past the day I turned 30. Um, and I had to sit with myself and decide what I was setting for myself for the next. And I decided to look at it differently.

28:04Laura Donadio: So I started to look at it from a every two year perspective, because I thought that I actually like I think your perspective changes so much more as you get older. I think back to what you just said of you learn so much more about yourself, about, you know, where you work, the industry you're in, your career yourself. And I think 10 years is a long time and so many things can change. And I was always adamant I would never have my own business. And the last year I've built two. and whilst they're fairly small one is making um so like mid six figure um yeah and you know in sort of like less than a year so I think those things I would have never predicted and I was not even on the goal card when I turned 30 so I think I like having this idea of like every two years just revisiting where I'm at yeah yeah I like that framework and I'll think about that as I head into my 40s next week which is quite daunting uh I think we um I think it gets better every decade personally but yeah yeah yeah we're coming into the peak yeah absolutely um and then my last question and and then we move into our quickfire round if you believe that the best version of your career isn't actually running the companies themselves what does success actually look like for you as a person so i'd tell you something that's shifted for me it's quite apt that you brought up that monetary goal.

29:30I didn't used to place as much importance on having like a deeply aligned purpose. I used to think, okay, this is a clear opportunity. It can do a really good thing for society. And I know how to do it and it's really exciting. Let's just get on with it. I'd say I'm now much more thoughtful about, okay what really deeply inspires me because it's funny i wrote um never done this before but i wrote um my principles for my birthday i'm gonna read them out to my friends on my birthday because we're throwing a party um so i wrote my 40 principles and one of them was around the fact that um you can never get um internal validation from external achievement it's just a never-ending cycle and there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.

30:24And it's taken me a long time to realize that. And so whilst I'm still just as, if not more ambitious in terms of the stuff I want to go out and achieve, I think I care like much more about knowing what is going to make me feel like really proud of myself, not giving a damn about other people. Okay. I wouldn't say I I completely don't care what people think. I'm way, way, way, way, way better than I used to be. It's a journey. Yeah, it's a journey. But I care the most about what I think about myself. And I think that is the only way you can actually be happy long term. And I think a lot of founders, they're just, let's keep going, keep going, keep going.

31:03Then they end up like, I'm speaking from experience, having spoken to some, they get to like 55 and realize, oh, there's a real emptiness here. and I've never worked on myself and I've kind of been winning, but I crushed my soul along the way. And I think you can have it all. I think you can win without crushing your soul and still be insanely ambitious. And so as I head into my next chapter, that's how I'm thinking about it. And I'm really, really fired up.

31:33Laura Donadio: Well, we'll take into our quick fire round. What is the least glamorous part of growth in one word? Duration. who are we amazed by it's the the youngest person to achieve xyz and we all want that to be us so we all want to be rich and successful and beautiful today and i think the reality is the the growth takes time and it compounds and you've kind of got to have patience and that is not glamorous so that's not what we sell to people but that's the truth very true finish the sentence I felt the most out of my depth when? I felt the most out of my depth when I raised 8 million pounds and then needed to hire 20 people in one month.

32:19Laura Donadio: How did that go? We could have done in the end, it took more than a month, but it was a steep learning curve. I hadn't hired that fast before and I hadn't hired some of the roles before. And so it was a very daunting, but very developing for me experience to just jump into it, learn, make mistakes and, you know, get some help from people who had hired those roles before. It's okay if you don't know, but that's just out of my own curiosity. How many of those 20 people are still in the business today? Yeah, a good number of them because there were a lot of early team members and we got really good early team retention at Skin and Me.

32:57Yeah, which is awesome. And I think that's part of our superpower. You know, a lot of the cool people at the helm in the key functions have kind of had the context from day zero.

33:07Laura Donadio: It's really cool. What was your most expensive lesson and how much did it cost? My most expensive lesson is probably creating a brand and picking a name for a company, only to then throw it in the bin a few months later. And believe it or not, I've done that twice. I'm determined to not do it again. but with skin and me it was actually called gleam originally g-l-e-a-m which you can tell it was picked by by two men because like do you want your skin to be gleaming gleaming is like what you want your car wheels to be right and we went out and used this agency and spent 60 000 pounds on the brand ironically that agency one of the big ones in london they don't get out of bed for more than for like less than 250 grand now so we actually got them on the cheap but i didn't feel it at the time because we didn't have much money in the bank but we then threw that brand in the bin and picked a completely different name and uh so yeah it was expensive up until that point but on reflection definitely the right move we picked a much better brand name and branding nice um one person who gave you the best piece of advice and what the advice was you know i am chuckling because um it was this um this family friend who um as a very successful businessman and i would go to see him for mentorship in my early 20s i'd put on a suit to go see him so i thought that's what because he always wore suits and thought that's what you have to do and um i was in fact i was maybe like 19 or something and But I knew I wanted to start a company one day.

34:48And I was telling him I wanted to get into marketing. I was going to start an agency, this and that. And he said, James, you want to get into marketing. You don't know how to market yourself. And he tore me to pieces so much so that he sent an email that night, like apologizing because he's a friend of the family. And he thought he'd gone too hard on me. But it really hit me is, you know, it doesn't matter if you've learned good marketing tactics. because if you want to go out and do amazing things in the world, you've got to be able to convey yourself and your value and communicate in a really effective way.

35:21And yeah, it was really timely for me.

35:24Laura Donadio: Is that what helped you then navigate fundraising? Because that's a big part of it. You were saying how you have to really believe in your business and have that confidence when you speak to investors. And do you think that advice kind of like stuck with you with that as well? Yeah, I think so. I also feel like half of the job with fundraising is just really believing in yourself. You know, I honestly got laughed at by so many people saying we were going to raise, originally I said we were going to raise 5 million pounds for Skin and Me and people would laugh at that. This is in 2019 where raising that for a like consumer company, Preseed, just was unheard of.

36:04And, you know, If you believe in yourself and you actually get inspired by those reactions, because, well, if people are rejecting it, then yeah, it's unorthodox and that maybe has some value in its own right, then you just keep at it. And a lot of people know what they want, but they just don't dare go out and ask for it. We just went out and we asked for it and we raised even more money than that. And so, yes, I know I'm oversimplifying. There's a lot that builds up to that, but I think that applies to so much in life. Look at you. You said you didn't even know you'd ever be able to start a company.

36:38You started two companies and then less than a year one of them's doing six figures. Like just go out and do it.

36:43Laura Donadio: No audience, no network, a thousand pound in the bank. What is your first move? I would learn to sell. I think learning how to sell, going back to my last answer, is so important. So I would go and do some work in sales. Like maybe go work for someone or knock on doors. There's nothing more brutal than that. You know, anything where you can get rejected for 95 % of the day is going to thicken your skin super fast. So we started by asking you what you're known for. And we always finish by what do you want to be known for? It was interesting when you asked that at the start and I just gave a real business answer.

37:24And I feel like the business world is like only part of what I care about. Yeah, it's how I spend basically all my time and I want to keep doing great things for society and creating loads of value and doing things better. But ultimately, I also just want to build a great life. I want to be a father one day. I want to build my own community. I want to be an amazing friend, all the friends that I'm going to spend my 40th with in a few days' time. And so when it comes to, I heard the former CEO of JP Morgan getting interviewed or Goldman. I think it was Goldman. getting interviewed recently. And he said that if you imagine in your obituary, there's five paragraphs, you want maximum two of them to be about the work you did maximum.

38:14And he said he's messed up because for him, four to four and a half of them are going to be about his work. He's known for nothing else. He didn't invest in anything else in life. And it's interesting. Now he's reflecting. It's like, yeah, I kind of did myself a disservice there. I'd say just being a great

38:31Laura Donadio: person and doing great things for the world nice thank you so much yeah thank you