Think for Yourself: Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli

0:00A CNBC original podcast. We all have to make big decisions in our lives, decisions that define and influence our professional and personal journeys. If you reflect on them, some are good and some I'm sure you definitely regret. In my nearly three decades as a financial journalist, I've interviewed literally thousands of CEOs, politicians and market voices, and they all had to make decisions and choices to get where they are today. In this podcast, I hear about those decisions, as well as the moments of doubt, risk and conviction that impacted our guests' journeys and the people they lead. This is Executive Decisions with me, Steve Sedgwick.

0:43In this episode, I speak to Victor Ripperbelli. I grew up with all these interests that was kind of outside of the beaten path. I hated going to school. I hate when people tell me what to do, like learning something because I'm told to learn something. So you're rebellious? are very rebellious. Victor is the visionary behind video content platform Synthasia. It's one of the UK's most valuable generative AI startups. It was a total fringe idea. We went out and said to people, look, in 10 years, you can make a Hollywood film on a laptop with just your imagination. After a semester abroad at Stanford University, a life back in Denmark just didn't sit right with the Scandinavian native.

1:19I love Denmark. It's an amazing place, but it's really not a place that inspires ambition and drive and innovation, right? These are Victor Ripabelli's executive decisions.

1:35One of the key purposes of this podcast is to work out how people become what they are, how they become the entrepreneur, the founder, the leader that they are as well. From a very early age, how did you see yourself in the world? I think when you're a kid, right, like you're a kid, I think I always felt different in some ways and that I had interests that I felt like my peers maybe didn't have. There's like a very kind of sort of interesting thing, which is that when I was a kid, I was almost like half deaf. So I had like a bunch of my eardrum got replaced like three or four times. things like that and when you're when you can't hear very well what tends to happen to kids right is that you become sort of more in your own world so i was reading a lot of books and doing a lot of things in kind of my own time i was never an outsider since i always had lots of friends and i wasn't like the weird kid in the corner just like on my computer but i just always think i had like a very rich inner world from a very young age and i think this was probably a huge part to just the amount of reading i would do i would read a book a day almost when i was very very young and just immerse myself in all these uh kind of fantastical worlds especially when i was a kid And I think when I discovered computers, the internet, the local library, all of a sudden the kind of world of knowledge just expanded very rapidly.

2:51And I just have always had, I've always been much more interested in sort of weird fringe ideas, music, film. I don't know where that stems from, but I think in my later life, I think if I have to sort of look back, I think that's probably always been one of my strengths, that I learn a lot of things about a lot of things. and sometimes it's the knowledge that you know in theory would not be very valuable that ends up in connection with a bunch of other things you've also learned in your life that become really valuable right so i think uh i think my understanding of like culture and trends was probably one of the first things i noticed when i was young i was very good predicting like what music would be popular what clothing would be popular never much as someone who's like you know part of it but more like an observer of like what's what's kind of happening around you know I think later on in life, I think that translated well into business, right?

3:42Where I'm not an AI researcher. Like, we're not successful because, you know, I sat at, you know, some great university and came up with a new technology and commercialized it, right? That's not me. That's my teammates, my co-founders, my colleagues who are excellent at that. But I think what I think I am uniquely good at is kind of looking around corners and seeing trends. And that's driven really just by a very deep curiosity for the world, I think. You've mentioned a lot of fascinating things that you felt that your problem with your hearing at an early age made you more resilient in many ways.

4:18Did it aid your creativity? Because you say that you read a lot, but you weren't the outsider. You had lots of friends as well. How did that work? So you were part of a big group and you felt part of society, part of your school class, or you felt aloof from it? Actually, I've always felt both. yeah you know that's a contradiction it is kind of a contradiction but i think i've always just had this like side of me that i never really shared with much other than like a few friends and actually i would say almost to this day is i would say almost still the case i have very deep friendships with people around very specific things you know some of my best friends will be all about music and we go extreme deep with that but i think most people who met me in my you know teenage years and kind of before synthetia would would probably not like notice these things around just like victor's like an average normal guy likes to go out likes to have fun and does what most other normal kids do but as everyone of course i've we're i think we're we have our own interests and curiosities right i think i just never in denmark really felt like there was that many people to share it with because i think it's a lovely place but it's a small place right and i think people tend to believe what others around them believe and maybe not really challenge themselves as much because they're thinking and i just found early on that getting into heated discussions around these things just didn't feel very productive because it didn't feel like it was like a high quality discussion.

5:40Who were the people who supported you most? Was it family? Was it friends? Was it educators? Or was it a combination of the above? I'd say it's definitely family and friends, right? So I have two amazing parents that have always let me pursue my interest and been supportive of that, both in my early life but also in my kind of later life. and actually my dad was at some point in my teenage years when I was very confused about what I should do with my life. And he's like, well, you've always been really good at computers. Why don't you do something with that? And when he said that, it was like the most obvious thing.

6:12But for some reason, I never really like put, you know, two and two together. What did you think you had to do before your father gave you that epiphany? Well, I was kind of lost a little bit in my teenage years. I think I grew up with all these interests that was kind of outside of the beaten path. I hated going to school. I hate when people tell me what to do, like learning something because I'm told to learn something. So you're rebellious. I'm very rebellious to the point where it can become sometimes probably, you know, a net negative. But I'm very rebellious and I really dislike, you know, a teacher telling me that I have to learn something just because.

6:47There's one of my early teachers who said, Victor is, I think he said, he's very smart and he's very deeply interested. Just rarely in what the rest of the class is doing. and I think that's probably always been like a theme in my life that I do things I'm very interested in I get obsessed with I know everything about them and I can learn about it very very quickly but if I don't have an actual real interest in something it's very hard for me to to do that but is that a problem with education as you see it and for the generations that come after you as well that there is a conformity there is a way of teaching there is an orthodoxy that teachers say you must do this when actually they should be perhaps lighting, igniting that flame of rebelliousness or of passion in a certain subject.

7:32I definitely think the school system can do better. I think on average in Denmark, I think the school system is actually pretty great. I think it's much less rigid than most other places in the world. I think a good part of this is also just being a teenager. I think most people are pretty confused. They don't know what to do with their life. And for me, I think it just took a bit of reflection, like what are you actually really good at and realizing that the fact that i'm really good with computers and being on the internet and researching things i do like build websites for fun i'll create maps and computer games i would dabble music production 3d graphics all these things which isn't necessarily because i wanted that to be my career path but i kind of realized these are actually valuable skills right and the first way i realized that was that um you know there was in kind of my late teenage years everyone was getting on social media everyone's getting a website everyone's getting an e-commerce store right not just the big brands but also kind of the local stores in in in the city that i grew up in and i realized that i could make a website for someone in a day you know and so it goes to all the local stores and say how old are you then uh 17 18 so you're still in education and you've got this entrepreneurial streak going on yeah and i realized that there was this information arbitrage which is that most of these stores they would have salespeople in suits coming by and say, I can build you a web shop for 10 ,000 euros, let's say.

8:55And I just discovered Shopify. This was like a young company back then, which is a platform helping people build e-commerce stores in five clicks. So it's like I can go and make a Shopify store for someone. I can change out the logo. I can replace the funds. I can put their colors in. I can upload some pictures. And I can do all this in a day. And I don't need 10 ,000 euros, right? I need 500 euros because at that point in time, for me, that was a lot of money. And I remember I went around and I did this multiple times. It was like, this surely cannot be that easy. Why are other people not just using Shopify to do this themselves?

9:27Where you can foresee something, right? And you can take that prediction and actually, you know, make money off it. And that was basically what I was doing here, right? Everybody needed a web shop. Everybody wanted an e-commerce store, a social media page. Very few people knew how to do it. And I discovered a way to do it, which was like 100 times faster than the existing industry of people driving around in suits and having to sustain like agencies where it took 10 people to build even just a very simple website, right? But there's something going on here at around 16, 17, late teens. You've got an amazingly supportive father.

9:59You've got an education system which doesn't appear as open-minded as you'd like it to be. But you're discovering this entrepreneurial streak at the same time as well. Did you decide then that you knew what you wanted to be going forward? I think something definitely clicked. I liked that I was in control of my own life, right? I was my own boss, essentially. And I think even more than that, I liked that I could do things my way. And I started figuring that I was pretty good at it. I was pretty good at making decisions. I was pretty good at making these websites. I was pretty good at putting marketing behind it to make them actually sell something online.

10:37and i at that point in time also got my one of my the only corporate job i've ever had which i had for six months where i worked in a very big company and i was doing online marketing essentially and i just really had this feeling that people were very nice um but i was just like what's going on why does everything here take like you know 10 times the amount of time it should take they're using old technologies that you know were 10 years ago and they're not listening i know how i can fix a lot of their problems in a tenth of the time but they won't let me right um and and that was really like demotivating for me so i think that kind of made me feel like the startup world and like building things and and you know probably one day being a founder was the right path for me so building you know websites and web stores for these local businesses and intellectually capped out like after a few years because it's it was interesting but intellectually is you know selling like tennis ratchets online um i think didn't really uh stimulate me enough intellectually right so i went from from from doing these sort of things to going into the danish startup ecosystem where i also met my co-founder steven and there i became part of building more like products as opposed to more kind of like services like i did with the websites and i absolutely loved that i thought building products was really really really fun i thought growing product was really really fun and i met a very different type of business people that i met in business school right which was these like young people with big ambitions uh everything was about moving fast not sitting in meetings not making powerpoints but doing all this sort of very corporate process orientated things and that i think attracted me a lot because it had this rebellious energy right to be a good entrepreneur you're gonna have to think that you're smarter than others you're gonna have to think that you can work harder and that you you've seen something that that for some reason um the kind of legacy players industry haven't seen yet right and i I think that tapped a lot into my personality of just generally being, I think, you know, kind of fairly rebellious as a person.

12:39We're going to fill in the gaps in your career in a few moments, but are you still rebellious as a leader of Synthasia today? Yeah, I would say so. Is that a key characteristic? I think so. um i think it's really important to be highly sensible not letting your opinions be guided by what people around you think right i think if you think about it like most of the things we believe today um we probably won't believe in 50 years right like you don't have to go that far back in time to a world in which everyone thought it's completely normal that women couldn't vote for example um in 50 years time i'm not saying you know hopefully we're not going to go back to that but we're going to believe a very different set of ideas than what we're believing right now we're going to use different technologies like the world changes a lot right it's it's very few things from the current moment that will remain true in 50 years and i think that realization means that i think for most people that go around believing most of the things that they say that they read in uh you know in the media or that they hear from people around them and and i think that's i think it's a really good habit to kind of by default you should be skeptical of ideas and even technologies and points of view, right?

13:51Just really try and get to the bottom of like, what do you actually think? And I think most good entrepreneurs have this, right? You have to make a lot of hard decisions. You have to make a lot of unpopular decisions. You have to make decisions that aren't supported by data many times. So I think, I don't know a lot of like great entrepreneurs that don't have that gene in them. Yeah. And a lot of these great entrepreneurs, and I'm thinking of yourself, I'm thinking of some of the big tech names out there as well. They seem very frustrated by conventional wisdom, very angry almost at how people are so slow to cotton on.

14:23And that's already come across a little bit in this interview. Can you give me an example of a time when you've become so frustrated with people that it's maybe boiled over and you perhaps didn't make the best decision? Actually, I think I'm very good at remaining calm even if I get angry. but look i think when we started the company right like back in in spirit 2016 but really 2017 there was no one who was willing to listen to what if you know this technology is not just like deepfakes and apocalypse what if it's actually a new way of creating content which is for sure going to have negative consequences which we've always you know i've always talked a lot about done a lot of work both internally and externally in the company to to make sure we alleviate as much as we can but it was so hard to get through the people right every time i sat down in front of a journalist and I was like finally it feels like we can have like a conversation where maybe we talk 50 percent about the negatives and 50 percent about the positives.

15:17Mayor Culver, Victor, I've probably asked you about those deep fakes and you've probably just rolled your eyes at me. It can be a little bit annoying to answer the same question over and over again but on the other hand right when you when you feel like well the reason they're asking those questions because they're just like behind on the timeline that's actually the sign of a great business right. I forgot who it is that said it but there's someone who said that like a great idea is not a great idea unless most people disagree with it initially except for very few select people that you deeply respect right and i think that's i think that goes for like business ideas i think it goes for music i think it goes to so many things in life that you should kind of uh so to me it's actually it gives me energy i think more than anything when people you know wildly disagree with me progress wasn't driven by everybody agreeing with the status quo is what you're saying as well um let's go back um to how you saw a bigger world and you got more excited so i did a semester at stanford i remember there was like wow this is like the exchange of ideas like the level of debate the curiosity the interest in like also being taking opposing viewpoints and that was like a very very different world than what i felt like i grew up in i think growing up in in in Denmark, which is, again, I love Denmark.

16:33It's an amazing place. But it's really not a place that inspires ambition and drive and innovation, right? It is a country where we have this concept called the law of Jansu, which is essentially this idea that you shouldn't think you're someone special, right? Just like blend in with the crowd, sit down, get a job, live a normal life, and don't think you're someone special. It's not, of course, a real law, but it is something that sits very deep in Scandinavian culture, but also very specifically Danish culture. And so I think what I felt like I take from Denmark of positives is the focus on living a great life, taking care of everyone in society and family values and living the good life, which is also what generally Scandinavia is known for out there in the world.

17:22but what i discovered in the u.s right was this you know let's celebrate human greatness let's celebrate that people have drive and ambition and it's okay to say i want to build a big company or like i want to invent a new research paradigm i want to do something big with my life and seeing people around not being like oh shut up but being like amazing how can i help you right um and i think that was a very big difference in like the mindset the mentality is it about the individual it's it's about the individual but it's also just i think actually at its core it's a capitalistic thing right in the u.s capitalism is like generally celebrated as a positive thing with sort of some negative side consequences for sure but generally people believe that the capitalist society is is a good society right in denmark that's not so much the case right i would say denmark is it is of course a capitalistic society in many ways but it is still very rooted in socialism.

18:17I think the mentality is just very, very, very different. You've gone to Stanford, your eyes have been opened up, and then you end up in London. Why did you make the decision to come to London? Why are you not in Silicon Valley? Well, I think part of the truth is probably that, you know, when I was, when I got back from those like four or five months I spent at Stanford, right, I knew I wanted to build my own company. I knew that I loved building products, which is what I was doing in Denmark. But in Denmark, we're building HR platforms, bookkeeping software, not things that I, on a personal level, found terribly exciting, to be completely honest with you.

18:57I always loved sci-fi. I loved fringe technology ideas. And I wanted to see if I could combine my love for building products with my personal interest in those things. And Denmark was very clear not the place to do that. So I would probably have gone to the Valley if I could, but had some friends in London, met a bunch of great people, ended up here. and basically spent a year figuring out like what company I want to build. Tell me about that year. We know now looking backwards, you know, it was probably time well spent. How difficult was it for you? I presume scraping around financially, it was probably quite difficult.

19:28Tell me about that year in London. Yeah. Well, so basically me and another guy were kind of just freelancing, working for like the big companies, working a little bit for the government in terms of helping them with how can we make London into a great ecosystem for virtual reality and augmented reality, which in 2016 was like the hype cycle of the day, right? Like back then, we definitely thought that, you know, we were conducting this interview in VR and that the whole world was going to move into the metaverse. Look at how many meta spent on it. Now we don't talk about it. Exactly. There's the, you know, a lot of good came out of that from a research perspective and I still am a believer in VR in the long term.

20:07But I basically spent a year figuring out what to build and I spent most of my time in the VR, AI ecosystem. I kind of realized pretty early on that I wasn't super bullish on VR in its current state. Like the form factor was not there. It's too difficult to create content. And it just kind of gave me this like, you know, feeling that this is not really going to last. And I kind of felt like, what if we could use some of these technologies to create video, which doesn't have the same distribution problem where you have to put on a clunky headset and sit at home and experience it. everyone has access to video already right and i met this guy professor matthias nisten who became my co-founder and he'd done a research paper called face to face which is sort of the first one of the first papers that demonstrated neural network that wasn't just analyzing data that was mostly what people thought of of machine learning as being back in 2016 right give a big data set and show us the patterns in that data this is one of the first papers that used the neural network to actually generate new data.

21:04And in this case, video of people talking, which looked pretty realistic. If we look back at it today, of course, it's not so impressive any longer. But back then, I had this sort of eureka moment. This blew your mind, this paper, didn't it? I mean, it's called Face to Face. I have it in my notes here that you absolutely fell in love with this content. Was it a moment of epiphany for you? It definitely was. And I think it's one of those moments where I think all of my interests in content and creating music, dabbling in 3d graphics all the stuff as a kid right i looked at that and i was like if this were is this clip was made in hollywood by how people do visual effects back then this would have been like a six month project with 15 people and would cost four thousand dollars right yeah this system is doing it completely automatically maybe it's not exactly up to the same standard but there's something here that's extremely powerful right if we can begin to actually synthesize video content and we don't need cameras, we don't need actors and studios and all the things we need to make video, like what we're doing right now, that's going to be a camping explosion of creativity, right?

22:08It's frightening the possibilities, isn't it? So 2017, you've been blown away by this face-to-face piece of research. Matthias, Stefan and Lourdes as well, I think you decided to set up this company, Synthasia as well. That was a massive decision, wasn't it? Did you realize then that this was the one that was going to occupy all your time? Or did you have it as one of many irons in the fire? I mean, up until then, we'd built, like me and my co-founder Stefan, and actually some people who ended up working in Synthesia, we had like a little kind of a crypto side project. We'd done like a few different things that ended up like just being mediocre, not really going anywhere.

22:46So we were experimenting with a bunch of different ideas. And we ended up focusing everything on Synthesia, I think not because we had like, you know, massive data points to like back that up. But there's just something about it that felt very real. We're very convinced that this was not just like a funnel company we could build on the side. This could be something really, really, really big. It's actually funny because I don't think for me it was a big decision. A lot of people think that it's like this. For me, it's like I have nothing to lose. I'm in London. I'm making pretty crap money. You have a lot to lose though.

23:21If you don't mind me saying, you have a lot to lose because you could do anything. The tech engineers and people of your skill set could build massive careers at Google, one of the banks, loads of places. By going hell for leather for this rather than going on other career paths, I think you have got a lot to lose potentially, haven't you? Or you just didn't see it like that? I think it's a total misconception. I think the more risky thing is just going down a boring corporate path, which is only going to get harder to get out of that, right? at this point in time i'm not making lots of money i don't have a corporate career i can lose maybe i'll spend six months or 12 months of this and it'll fail and then i'll go do my family and house and commitments that was the right time but i think it's more risky to go into a career that's safe and predictable and you're going to make a lot of money very quickly i've seen this across all of my friends right because when you're making i don't know 100k a year and you're 25 years old yeah um it's it's pretty hard to go out and say i'm gonna live on 20k a year and do a startup when you're then 30 right you're making a lot more than that if you're in finance or tech it becomes progressively harder so i think when you are young and you have nothing to lose it's the most obvious time to to try and do something like this a brilliant lesson to come from this interview for every i was gonna say every young person but every person watching as well you just got to go for it and not worry about all the other responsibilities that are going to come further down the line it gets harder and harder as you get on people catastrophize so much even if you do something as a 35 year old whatever with a successful career right let's say you spend six to 12 months on doing something it doesn't work out then people have this idea that you know they're never going to get a job again they're going to look like absolute idiots every great company highly highly highly values people who tried something and failed Like when I hire product managers, like my absolute favorite archetype is someone who built a startup and failed at it.

25:17So I think this perception that it's incredibly risky to start your own thing is actually most of the time wrong. Because, you know, back then, it was very difficult for us to raise money, for sure, but we also didn't have a lot to lose. If you've had a career at Google or finance and you have a good career, right, you can definitely raise enough money so that you can live for a year or two on maybe less salary than you used to. But I think people's general perception of like how risky it is, is like wildly off. I think it's so much more risky to just stay doing the same thing you've been doing for the last 10 years.

25:52So you've gone for this company and all of a sudden you're knocking on every single door finance-wise trying to find the money. Did I get it right from an earlier conversation that you and I have had? You tried hundreds of people to get the money from? Yes. It's amazing technology and most of the financiers and the VCs, they don't want to know. Well, I thought it was amazing, right? I think clearly the rest of the market didn't really. But I think it was a classical thing where I was very young. I also on paper was a terrible founder for this. It was a total fringe idea. We went out and said to people, look, in 10 years, you can make a Hollywood film on a laptop with just your imagination.

26:30That's going to take a while to get there, but we think it's worthwhile building a company around this idea. And back then, everyone was only investing in like fintech, maybe some like machine learning for data prediction and analysis and pattern matching, et cetera. So this was like a very, very kind of non-consensual idea at the time. And while I think a lot of people probably admired like the ambition of it, I think most people thought that it was just like completely crazy. So we went around and, you know, we tried a lot of people, more than a hundred people. We got turned down by most of them.

27:01I actually think if we'd been in the Bay Area, it would have been a lot easier. Someone would have given us money like much early on. The ecosystems in the Bay Area. The ecosystems in Silicon Valley, isn't it? But also because Silicon Valley, you know, a majority of investors, especially angels, are technologists. They're people who build products, who understand technology, right? The things you often face in Europe, a lot of the investors and business angels, they're finance people. So when I come to you and put forth this idea, right, the first thing they start doing is like putting it in Excel sheet.

27:29That's not going to work out, right? Because that Excel sheet is going to show you like absolutely not completely risky. these guys no idea what they're doing but the right technologist might look at it and see this is a weird idea but do i believe enough in the founders the team that they can figure out something and assuming you of course believe in the end state right and i think after those 100 people you know the story which i've told many times that we we sent a cold email to mark cuban was one of the people we had in our list of of people could be interesting and mark cuban you know he was actually one of the first people to bring radio online which he sold to yahoo for more than three billion dollars and it was a very interesting there's a very interesting lesson in there because we sent him an email he doesn't do calls so we had a 14-hour email exchange with him without ever speaking to him live and it's basically just us sending you know here's what we're doing what do you think him sending some questions back and this just kept on and on for a very long time and he ended up saying after 14 hours i'll invest a million dollars assuming the sort of diligence of the two of you uh goes through right and the lesson here is that Mark Cuban already believed that in 10 years this is going to be possible.

28:35He had actually implemented the paper himself face-to-face with like a tutor at home or something because he was so fascinated by it. And so he wasn't really challenging us like if this is going to happen or not. He was more trying to figure out like do these guys have any idea of like how to seize this opportunity. And it's so evident when you look at that email exchange that that was what we were discussing. And so I think the lesson that I took away from that is that when you're doing something which is very non-consensus you have to try and find people who don't have to convince of the vision just have to convince them of you right if you have to both convince them that yeah the vision and that you're the right person to tackle it it's very very very difficult it's really interesting i've got friends who are in pitches sometimes from both the financer point of view and indeed from the innovator point of view and to a man and to a woman they tell me it's all about the belief in the person themselves, how genuine you think that person is.

29:27If you're trying to fake it, it just won't work. It's all about the person looking them in the eyes and just saying, I really believe in this and I can do this. Is it about that as far as you're concerned? For sure. I mean, now I'm a very active angel investor myself, right? So I've been very fortunate to be on the other side of the table of great founders. And I think it is that, right? The founder is so much more important than their idea. Most great companies go through a chaotic period in the beginning of trying to figure out what to do. And so did we. We started off trying to create technology for Hollywood studios, video professionals.

30:00Everyone was already making video. And then we realized three years later that actually this is completely wrong people we're building for. We need to build for your average PowerPoint user who have no clue about how to make video, but desperately wants to make more video. And that's a story that you see in most great companies. But tell me about what you see in someone when you're looking them in the eye. What do you see in that person? As you say, it's about the person rather than the ideas that makes you want to invest in them. I mean, you want to see the fire, right? You want to see that they really want this.

30:28And then I think I look a lot for rebelliousness. I look for someone who has strong opinions but loves engaging in discussion. You can have very strong opinions but be very stubborn and hard to discuss with. And I think that's generally not a great trait because then you really have to be right all the time, which some people are. But I think the best is when you're going to have people that have low ego, have high conviction on something, but love discussing it. Love to be challenged, right? You're looking for Victor Ripperbellion, aren't you? I guess I am. It sounds like the qualities you're looking for are the qualities that you see are your best qualities.

31:03Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah. But I do think that is a general trend. Of course, it comes in all different shapes and sizes. And there's things like deep domain expertise that also can be a good thing, can also be a bad thing. I have not that much domain expertise. But I do think those are some very important traits of entrepreneurs. How do you cope with bad decisions? And when you've made a bad decision, how do you pick yourself up? How do you evaluate that bad decision? I'm just very interested because you're clearly very successful. I wouldn't be talking to you now if you weren't. But you've clearly made some tough and bad decisions along the way.

31:36Can you think of any great examples of where you've made a bad decision and how you've reacted? i mean we've made so many you know bad decisions along the way um i think luckily we made more right ones than bad ones but i think if you're not making bad decisions you're moving too slow right like it's just like if you're building a startup you're never going to have perfect information you don't have time to wait for perfect information so you have to just it's better to make a decision than not make a decision the most important thing is just to be open about when you've made a mistake right i think in in general we try to hire smart people with low egos where because you make a wrong decision, we make a wrong bet on our product, that's fine.