Simon Molnar - Why Stores Are Struggling — and How to Reinvent Them

25:53You're like pixeling someone in store to then retarget them back online if they're first in store, correct? Yeah, I would say the focus is less on the person, more on the item. So it's more, if you walk into a store, what are you most likely going to see and try and want to purchase? And therefore, by laws of probability, let's provide that experience to as many people online. The reason why I'm focused on the item and not the person is because everyone is so hyper aware of their privacy these days. And it is an environment that is constantly changing. There are new laws coming out left, right, and center across the world.

26:28And if we try and go too heavily on the consumer, there's a world where that could just blow up, but an item doesn't have privacy. So if we focus on the item first. So it's like white labeled, it's just the holistic numbers and you're just grouping it together. Exactly. That sounds safer. In the long run, I do see a world where whereby like through consent, by adding value to the consumer, there's a world where you can start to create a more tailored or unified experience to the consumer. But I would say that's probably, like if you're saying three years, that's probably five to 10 years away.

26:58Question for you. So it seems as though you are utilizing the online data to then drive in-person and brick and mortar decisions. Are they always, when you go from digital to in-store, is it going to land on the same answers as if you went in store to online? Because I'm also under the notion too, that like some products need to be tried on. Like what's your thesis on that? It's a really great point. It's not always going to be like for like, it's not always going to be what's performing online is going to be performing in store. And to your point, there are certain products that lend themselves to being able to be purchased online and certain products that lend themselves to needing to be tried on.

27:36And these are all the edge cases that I believe that we can account for. That is an interesting use case though. It's like, if you have a product that tries on very well and is super comfortable, that could be the first touch point that you want people to get them into your funnel through your store. 100%. The benefit that you have from AECOM is you're capturing data 24-7. You're capturing insights 24-7. There is a world where the store is closed, it's 10 o 'clock at night. At 10 o 'clock at night, you've got some influencer on TikTok that's posted a video with this dress from this one brand and then consumers hit that website and there's a spike in traffic to this product.

28:11Now that is a leading indicator that there is likely going to be an increased rate of people coming in to try it on the next day. That's not guaranteed. It's not guaranteed. That's going to be the case in every store, but there is a good chance based on the e-com trend that people are going to be coming in to try it on. What happens over and over again is because of that disconnect, the customer will come in, they can't find it. Maybe it's not on the floor. Maybe it's on the back shelf that no one can find. And the thing for me is that you've got, let's just say for argument's sake, I know the numbers aren't quite this, but let's say for argument's sake, you have half the world's population are extroverted and half the world's population are introverted.

28:48So half the population are going to come in and happy to walk up to someone and ask for help to find what they're looking for. Great. It doesn't matter maybe where that product is because someone's going to be able to help them. And let's say half the population want to come in. They don't want to speak to one. They just want to find what they're looking for and purchase it. If that consumer can't find what they're looking for, you just lost the customer. And right now we don't provide an experience that lends itself to people of all different ways of shopping. That's so wild. I mean, in real time, the red shirt goes viral.

29:16Flagship is speaking to that department, immediately pushes it to the front of the stores. Exactly. That's the view. And the flip side can happen online as well. Like we see a spike in sales for this product, then we can start to promote it online as well. And the number of times, again, I'm not going to name brands, but one of our customers, every month or so I'll audit their homepage. And on average, 80 % of the products that exist on their homepage are not available in store if you go to shop. And that homepage is, again, is prime real estate. By law of probability, customers are more likely to find it.

29:52By law of probability, more customers are going to come in to try it on. And those customers that come into the store are not going to be able to find it. And that's a customer that is using flagship that has the visibility. Now think about the vast majority or tens of thousands of stores that exist out there that don't have that visibility at all and have no idea based on what's on their homepage, where it's in the store or if it in fact is even in the store at all. Do you think in the future, more brands are just going to have flagship stores? The view for me is that retailers are just going to be able to treat every store like a flagship store.

30:27Some of the brands that we're working with, they've built business cases around being able to prevent stores from being closed. They had stores that were on the chopping block. And by being able to understand the data, they were able to know, okay, the store wasn't underperforming because it's not a good store in a bad location. It was underperforming because the products weren't in the right place. It wasn't merchandised well. And we were able to rebound sales as a result and we were able to keep the store. And I was speaking again, I apologize for I'm not using any brand names. I just prefer to, but I was speaking to a major global brand, like major, major brand.

31:02And when I was speaking to them about flagship, the line that they said was that flagship makes every store matter. And that fundamentally is the case. It's not about like, yes, you're going to have stores that are naturally going to be bigger and showier and going to drive a lot more revenue. But it's about making sure that every store matters, that every store is a flagship store and every store is given the best chance to succeed. through objective data. Exactly. Not subjectiveness. People can lie, data doesn't. All right, so we're going to shift on. I definitely do. We're going to go at the end of this and we're going to go back to flagship, but I want to transition a bit.

31:38So you were a big part of Afterpay, a$29 billion rocket ship. Your brother found that it became a billionaire by 30 and you were there the whole entire way. What's the one thing about Afterpay's$29 billion rise that the internet doesn't know? that the internet doesn't know. Guys, quick 60-second break. I am so excited to announce our first partnership. It is the perfect fit for me and what I believe in, and more importantly, you, the audience. I have personally spent tens of millions of dollars on meta ads. At one point, it made up 95 % of my entire marketing budget. That kind of platform dependency is a real risk.

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32:49First come, first serve. It's going to go fast. And if you're spending over 300K a month on paid, I have something special for you. Everything's in the description below. Go diversify now and appreciate the support. The thing that the internet doesn't know is that, again, I hope I get in trouble for this. The thing that the internet doesn't know is that Afterpay wasn't necessarily built on the premise exclusively of paying for. There were two products. One product was paying for. The other product was pay after delivery, where you would order something. And the rationale for it was, so Nick and I were running our jewelry site together and we were trying to sell a$5 ,000 engagement ring sight unseen.

33:28Like you're trying to purchase it from an image or a video. You've never actually held it and you're about to spend$5 ,000. Giving them the confidence that they can see it and hold it before any money gets taken out of their account. And then the mindset was, we'll send it to you. And then if you keep it 30 days later, you'll pay for it in full. and that was the thesis that Afterpay was initially built on and it's why it's called Afterpay. Like you pay after delivery and I saw our e-com site was the first website to offer Afterpay. No one used Pay After Delivery. Everyone used Pay In For and again, like Nick and Nathan just had the foresight to know, okay, there's a much bigger opportunity in Pay In For and they just shifted their attention very, very quickly.

34:12Again, like transparently, it was almost immediate that the focus shifted to paying for, but there was a lens of pay after delivery before that shift to paying for. So the genesis was through this family jewelry business that you're running with your brother. It was that. And then they went on started Afterpay. Basically. What do you think is the most kind of underrated part of Afterpay's success story that like no one talks about? The people. Like fundamentally, wholeheartedly, that company hired so well. I remember watching person after person join the company and every single person that joined was better than the last.

34:52And it just blew my mind. And that continued up until 100 plus people where every single person that joined just significantly added value to the company. And any idea is just an idea. It only will perform as well as the people that execute on it. and Nick and Anthony did a phenomenal job at building a world-class team. And that's the mindset I've taken over to Flagship. It doesn't matter how good our idea is, we need a world-class team in order to execute on this. It's funny you say that because one of your team members said, quote unquote, he has created an environment where everyone works really hard but with a sense of team.

35:32No one has Sunday anxiety about work. So obviously you learned a lot from Afterplay. You've brought it to Flagship. So what's the secret to building a great team? I would say the secret is build around the team. There was a post that I saw once and it said, it said, culture isn't about pizza parties with your team. It's about how your team feels on a Sunday night. And I don't believe that you can define culture and decide that that is the company culture. I think you build your team and culture naturally forms itself around the team. And I They believe in everyone being able to bring their true self to work.

36:10It's not about having to come and hide who you are or hide a part of you. It's about being able to come in, be yourself and have everyone accept you for you. And in our interview process, for anyone that joins, the last interview is always with me. And it's not an interview to decide whether they're going to join or not. Because by the time they're having an interview with me, the decision has been made that we want them to join. and what I say in that interview is that I need to understand you to make sure that we have the environment that is going to bring the best out of you and it's about us understanding what drives and motivates every single person in the organization be able to know what they want to do where they want to go what they want to achieve and building a framework that allows everyone to get there.

36:57And that for me is what builds high achievement. It's giving everyone the tools to get to where they want to get to, giving them room to grow to where they want to get to, and identifying potential. And I think that's key in life across the board. It's finding potential in people, finding potential in things, finding potential in relationships. And if you see that potential, you invest into it because you'll get such a big return on investment. How are you getting all these A-team players for flagship when, I mean, it's a startup. Yeah. What's the strategy there? Good comp packages? No, I mean, when we started, we didn't have the luxury of good comp packages.

37:38I was fortunate. I was able to bring a handful of the early Afterpay people along on the journey. I knew a lot of the really great Afterpay star players. I couldn't afford them. And so I brought in a lot of them around the company, not in the company. They came in as advisors. They came in as resources for the team to lean into. But I would say the way that we got world-class... So I was very fortunate. Like, again, I was speaking earlier about you walk along Bondi Beach and every couple of minutes, I'm going to see someone that I know. I was walking along Bondi and someone that I knew, he was a software engineer at Canva in Australia.

38:17He hailed me down. I walked past him, we had a chat and he was like, I'm ready for my next opportunity. And I was like, okay, well, there's this idea that I want to go and I'm working on. Why don't you come and help me out with it? And so he was like, great, sounds good. He then brought two of his mates who were phenomenal. One of them brought another guy who was phenomenal. I then knew a couple of people who I'd worked with before who were phenomenal. And I would say world-class people are great at identifying world-class people and we'll know if they've worked with world-class people. we recently hired an account manager and i went to someone in the team and i was like hey like you i trust your opinion more than anyone who's the best account manager you've worked with and she's like i've got the person great we went after that person we brought her in it's about identifying the the talent if there's an opportunity you identify the talent and you go after them and i'm also a believer in for certain roles or for certain people if it's not a hard skilled role where like a software engineer where you need to be good at writing code.

39:24If it's a soft skilled role, my mindset is bring the person in. If you've got the right person, bring them in and build the role around that person. If you... People over skill set. A hundred, like a million percent. I've had the opportunity to bring some people in who at the time was maybe too early for when we brought them in, but I knew I'd worked with them before. I knew what their potential was. And so I brought them in too early, knowing that as soon as it was ready, we were going to see the results. And that's been proven time and time again. I've always said, I never want to miss out on the wrong person because of timing.

39:58If it's six months too early, I would rather invest the extra six months in salary and get that person. Because if they go somewhere else, your minimum, what, two to three years away from being able to get them again. And so if you have an opportunity to get world-class talent, you take them with both hands. And then once you bring them in and you know that they are world class, then that's when you comp them really well and you make sure they have no reason to leave. And I would say that was like Nick's greatest mindset across both ICE and Afterpay was like, make it a no brainer. Give customers no reason not to use us and merchants no reason to say no.

40:36And it's my mindset with my team. It's like, I'm going to give my team no reason to want to go anywhere else. make it a no-brainer for them to want to stay and see this through. And that creates the culture of high performance. It creates the foundation that everyone else that comes in is going to lean on. Because ultimately, I can work hard, but I'm expected to work hard. It's my company. I'm expected to work hard. If I'm working 12-hour days every day, great. That's expected of me. It's not expected of my team. And when they put in the hard yards, that's what flows onto everyone else in the team to want to continue to work hard.

41:13And the moment someone comes in that doesn't share that mindset, that's when we need to make a decision really quickly because nothing impacts high performance faster than accepting someone who's not of the same mindset. The moment you accept mediocrity is the moment that everyone identifies that that's where the benchmark is and people will bring themselves down to the benchmark as opposed to lifting themselves up to the benchmark. And so that's the mindset. We've got a core team who set the pace and everyone in the team, it works towards hitting that pace. Simon's fresh off 32 hours of flying for one meeting in here.

41:51So he's definitely putting in the time. If you could boil down all A players to kind of one singular trait, what would that trait be? No ego. Yeah, every person in my team comes with humility. There was a quote I heard once from a professional rugby player in Australia. And he said, humble on the outside, cocky on the inside. Like knowing internally that you're the best, but not putting that out to the world and remaining to the world that like that you're humble and you've got humility. The thing about carrying no ego is it gives you opportunity to grow. It gives you opportunity to see things from someone else's perspective.

42:34It gives you an opportunity to identify opportunity because you're never going to be tied to your own self-belief. And that, I believe, is a really key trait across my entire team. Everyone will celebrate each other. Everyone will, like my whole mindset has always been, I will take a personal hit if it's for the greater good. Every single time. And I would say that that's kind of a trait that everyone in the team shares. What would you say is like the most difficult lesson that you've learned in relation to people along the way with Flagship? I know you guys are at what, 17, 18 people? Yeah. You guys are three, four years in.

43:12What's the most difficult lesson that you've learned? I'll say the most difficult lesson is that you can hire incredible people. Not everyone will fit. There have been people that wholeheartedly, like with every ass in my body, I've loved them as people. It just didn't work. And I would say those were some of the hardest conversations I had to have. Those are the worst. Yeah. But I also believe that like there was a quote from Albert Einstein ages ago, which said, everyone's a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb trees, it will spend his life thinking it's stupid. And it's about understanding that not everyone is going to fit into this role.

43:53And it might be a nature of the time that we, where we are in the company. It might be a nature of the fact that we bring someone in and we just don't have the resources to train them at that point in time and they need that personal development. It might be someone who fits more in the corporate world than the startup world and we just don't have that environment that works for them. And so you can find the right person, like right person at wrong time. And I'll say that's kind of the biggest learning is that you can find someone and think. And for all intents and purposes, in another scenario, they would be and are great.

44:26It's just in this very specific scenario, it doesn't work. Yeah, I feel like you need right person, right seat, right time. Absolutely. That's from EOS. That's a huge thing. It's usually right person, right seat, but I think timing as well. And it's just, it's always so difficult. You know, the team that you take, I would say, I would even say at five mil, like zero to five, and then like even five to 20. Like these are two completely different people on all levels of the company, especially from C level. So it's unfortunate when people don't make it for the next tier. Yeah. I mean, the mindset that I have, and I've had this mindset the whole way through, is English football.

45:01You have four tiers of English football. And when we started and we were pre-seed, we're in the fourth division. And then we raise our next round and we get promoted to third division. Now, you can have people that were great at getting you from the fourth division to the third division, but that's not the same person that's going to get you from the third division to the second division. There will be people that are able to step up and you need to identify those people and elevate them really quickly. But every single stage that you go through, you're going to need to find a new type of person that's going to get you to that next stage.

45:29I've been really fortunate that my initial core nucleus of a team have all been able to take a step up and get us, like they got us to the third division. I believe they're all going to be able to get us to the third, second to win a premiership. But that's not always going to be the case. So around kind of building a tech or a SaaS company, I think a lot of people that are listening are more so product people. Obviously, tech and SaaS can be considered a product as well, but it's a little bit differently. What are those important key hires in relation to tech and SaaS? I believe the most important hire is a good product manager.

46:03And I didn't know that when I started Flagship. I've learned that since then. I have no idea what a product manager does. So I am very, very excited. Go on. So a product manager is the person who is responsible for taking the inputs of a whole lot of different people. Responsible for taking the inputs from customers, from customer success, from sales, from investors. From you and a non-technical founder potentially? Yeah, from me, from engineers as well, to be able to know what they actually have capacity for. This role or this person is responsible for taking a lot of different pieces of information and opinions and decide what is the highest priority today based on the bandwidth and resourcing we have.

46:46so that nothing critical falls by the wayside. We keep everyone happy and we minimize the risk of losing a customer or not getting a deal. And what I originally thought building a company was being a founder, I'm the ideas guy and I make all these decisions. And what I learned was I'm just another input. And I would say for a lot of founders out there, it's the best approach to take. I'll go to my product manager and say, hey, I've got this thought, I've got this hypothesis. It's kind of like Schrodinger's cat. Like every idea that I have is simultaneously a good idea or a shit idea until it's proven either way.

47:20It's like, hey, I've got this thought. I want to go and explore it. I want to go and speak to customers and explore whether it works or not. And then he and I will go together and we'll explore. And some things fall flat on their face, some things work. I mean, this seems incredibly important. It's like a resource allocator. And they're also almost doing like work back schedules, correct? Yeah. like I kind of see it as like central to the business is this a c-level position or is this like a mid so we like our our product manager we we like very early on I was of the mindset that I want everyone on an equal playing field like there's no seniority or hierarchy love that um once you get to a certain point you no longer have that luxury you need to create one and he he is C-level.

48:07And again, like you might, I was very lucky that the guy that I found was capable of stepping up into a C-level position. Not everyone's going to be able to do that, but I was fortunate that like our first product hire was able to do that. So you're saying the most important thing is just really understanding and knowing who that persona is. Like what is their raw skillset? Are they analytics driven? Like they're managing budget, yet they seem to have to be organized. And then like, they're also dealing with like people and personalities? Like tell me a little bit more about like who that person is.

48:37I'm curious. Yeah, I'll say there's two key characteristics. Number one is the ability to listen and the ability to listen without opinion, like the ability to listen to what someone says and understand how to guide a conversation to get to the root cause or problem of the conversation, not to come in with a preconceived idea. And I would say the second, which is really key, is someone who's able to keep a blue or keep a cool head. You can have people that are going to come in and kick and scream and say, or customers might come in and demand a certain feature or demand something. And it's about being able to remain cool in that situation and not just give in immediately.

49:19Because if you give in to what they're asking for, you might not be addressing the root cause of the problem. You might be wasting energy and resourcing. I was also taught very early on that if you build a feature or you build a module and it's only used by one customer, it's so detrimental for you as a business because it means you're going to be upkeeping that module potentially for one person. And so every feature or every new module that we look at building, we validate it across as many retailers as possible. And it might not be used by every single retailer, but we want to make sure it's going to be used by enough retailers.

49:49If we're going to be spending the time upkeeping it, that there's going to be a return on investment on it. So this person has a visibility into the P &L? Yeah, like visibility into everything. I trust him with my life. Wow. Something that I did recently, I've never done it before. And I thought my assistant and her past company did it. I thought it was kind of psychotic in nature, but we just did it. And it was game changing is a lot of these personality tests, which kind of, you're talking a lot about like soft skills and understanding and knowing, you know, there's hard skills and there's soft skills.

50:20It was called, I'll link it below in the description. It was called Working Genius. Very simple. It was a$25 test and just understanding and knowing not only individually does each person do you cover all the things you need to cover but then how do people work together yeah i think that's like such a understated thing that people don't take these like personality tests like what you're saying right now like it's actually the complete antithesis of flagship it's like 100 subjective like how do you know someone has those skills it's pretty damn hard it is i would say so one thing my brother told me pretty early on was know what your superpower is and lean into it and i would say one of my superpowers is people like i can have a conversation It's people and pattern recognition.

50:58So yes, it could be subjective, but I can speak to enough people and pick up the consistent traits across enough people to know what it is that I'm looking for. But what we do at Flagship is every single person that joins the team does their Gallup Strengths Finder test. It's an assessment that maybe takes half an hour, 45 minutes. And what it does is it gives us 34 strengths, ranked one to 34, that to your point tells us a lot about that person. And there's no right or wrong combination of strengths. What it does is it tells us, do people lean more towards thinking or to doing or to relationships or do they influence?

51:30And it helps us, A, understand how to interact with each other. Every single person that does it, I'll read the results. And it's now at the point where someone, I can get some results and I can know a lot about that person before they've started on day one. Isn't it wild too how accurate they are? It's crazy. It's insane. Incredible. Yeah. We've got a blended spreadsheet that everyone in the company has access to that shows mine and every single person's strength. Love that. We can see where people are strong. We can see who an includer is and who is going to lend themselves more towards new starters.

51:59They might not be in the same team, but this person is going to make sure this person is well looked after. Who are my executors? So one of the, I work really well with my head of customer success. I am a lot of thinking, not a lot of doing. She's all execution. And so I know that I can go to her with these ideas that I have, all these things I know need to be done. And she's going to be able to go and execute on them. and it's being able to understand in each team, where are we strong? Where do we lack? As a company, our first four or five hires, we lacked focus. And so I'm like, okay, we need someone with focus who can keep us heading in the right direction and our product manager brought us focus.

52:38And so it's being able to know where are your blind spots and not all blind spots are bad. It's not about bringing people in for the sake of it. It's like, what is the purpose behind this role? What is the skill set that we are lacking? Or what is the gap they're covering by coming in? I think, I didn't even know that we were really going to go here. I actually think this is like one of the most valuable segments we've ever had. I just did this working genius thing. And it was, it was, you know, yours is 34, the Gallup test. I've heard of that one. I've heard of the Harrison test as well too. That's another big one.

53:09This is six working genius. For everybody here listening, I think what's really interesting about this is per Robert Green in the last episode, people don't change. Yeah. So that's what's really, really good about this. So you can have this input and chat GBT is crazy with this. We got the individual reports and then the working genius gave us a collective kind of analysis on strengths, weaknesses, holes, et cetera. But then you then put that into chat GBT and you say, this is my company. This is our one-year plan. This is our five-year plan. And then you can start filling gaps for per what you said when you get to division two and division one.

53:43So I can't say this. I feel like not many people do these personality tests. and I think that they're so underrated. Absolutely. Because you can't lie with these tests. 100%. And even if you try to, it gets you. Exactly. Everybody out there, I'm going to link down below. Let's take some of these tests and fill those gaps. I want to close up on leadership. I know we talked about a bunch of different strengths, weaknesses, tips, but if you can give founders one leadership tip, what would it be? Yeah. My number one thing is never ask someone to do something that you yourself are not prepared to do.

54:18When I had my e-com business, every single person that joined the company spent their first couple of weeks in the warehouse. And the reason for that is that everyone at the company needs to know what is involved in shipping out orders. Everyone needs to know what's involved in warehousing. They need to know how easy it is to make a mistake when you're shipping out product so that when someone in the warehouse makes a mistake, they understand how it happened and so that they can develop the awareness, the empathy towards that person. when we, in the very, very early stages of flagship, we had a hardware product.

54:52And when we had that hardware product, there were times that we had to spend in the store, like on our hands and knees, putting stickers onto products. I like the software play better. I know, me too. And I was in there with my team. It's like, I'm not gonna get my team to do anything that I'm not gonna do. If we're in the trenches, I'm in the trenches with them. If we're digging deep and staying late, I'm gonna dig deep and stay late with them. It's you, you lead by example. And I'd say that's across the board. It's like just in life in general. Like if you're going to ask something of someone, know what's involved and show that you're prepared to, to do it yourself or put the effort in yourself so that they know that you understand what you're asking of them.

55:32For all the people out there listening to, especially on the e-com side, I don't even, I actually don't think I've mentioned any of the podcasts. One of the most humbling best, I would say two things. One, doing door-to-door sales for a year was crazy. In Inland Empire, Beverly Hills in the hood, that taught me a lot. But one of the most humbling, best, exciting experiences, and I'm a weirdo, is shopiconicatgmail.com for my company, Iconic. I was customer service, the first probably 4 ,000 orders. So I found every single nook, the single thing that every single person could ever ask. And then that just further informed hiring and how the business would be run.

56:10I think that the warehouse is one thing. Obviously, you're very, very close to the product and the customer. Customer service for me, if somebody has a fast-growing company and maybe they can't afford to go slow and have people start in the warehouse, I think customer service is the best spot that even for like a week to see what the customer pain points are and such. 100%. I mean, on the flip side to getting people started in the warehouse, when there was a major mistake that was made, we would have the person in the warehouse be the one to contact the customer and have that conversation. And it wasn't, again, it wasn't for the purpose of, it wasn't for the purpose of like shaming or anything like that.

56:46It was for the purpose of building and developing empathy. It's like, we, you need to know what the impact is of, I mean, I, I will never, I will never get upset or angry at someone over a mistake. Like categorically, it's like, but we don't want, we want to make sure that mistakes don't keep happening. And we want people to be aware of the impact of mistakes so that they know if they are going to make one what the ramifications are. And we were always really good at ICE of rectifying poor customer experiences if something went wrong. So it wasn't about sending someone in front of the customer to send to the wolves to be eaten.

57:21It was about helping them and giving them the tools to be able to rectify the problem with the customer, but helping them understand what the impact was of those mistakes. I would imagine it was a bloodbath in the jewelry business on customer service. Looking back, what was the biggest kind of customer service lesson that you learned in the jewelry business? We were just so focused on giving great customer service. One of the things that I learned was that every poor customer experience is a huge opportunity for you. And the reason for that is that if you think from like an NPS perspective, so NPS, NPS scale minus 100 to 100.

57:58Now, if you have a customer and they have a great experience straight away, their experience has gone from zero to a hundred. Their experience with you has increased by a hundred points. If a customer has had a terrible experience with you and they're now at minus a hundred, if you are able to fix that experience and take it from minus a hundred to positive a hundred, their experience has increased by 200 points. They have arguably had a better experience by having that initial bad experience than the customer did who had the bad experience upfront. And so every time we get a one-star review...

58:31I love those, baby. Literally. I'm the one in the gutter on those. I love those. I'm on the phone. I'm in the car. Whatever it is I need to do in order to rectify this issue, I'm going to rectify it because that also builds trust. Trust is built in the times when things go wrong, not by things going right. And that is the time when I built trust with my customers to show them things are going to go wrong. Products are going to be missed. Things are going to go to the wrong address, whatever it is. But I'm going to show you that when things go wrong, I'm going to make sure they go right. And that's what builds trust.

58:59That's what builds repeat purchase behavior. And that's what so many brands miss today across so many different verticals. I'll order from Uber Eats and if something goes wrong, they will fight tooth and nail not to rectify the problem. And I'm like, great. Man, we're throwing Uber Eats under the bus. I know. I'm a DoorDash guy. I'm DoorDash on the back of it. And that was the reason. It was like, well, okay. sure, you provide me a really great experience 90 % of the time, but the 10 % of the time that doesn't go right, I don't trust you that you're going to look after me. And therefore, I'm not going to continue with the service.

59:38I have so many different thoughts on that. I'd say first and foremost is word of mouth marketing is the number one most powerful form of marketing. And having that touch point, especially someone from negative 100 to 100, you're going to amplify the chances of getting that because you're going to overextend yourself, probably give them a free product, go above and beyond, high chance of passing that on. And then I would say another thing, we talked about this, actually another great episode in conjunction with this is Ryan from True Classic, an apparel company that should be on Flagship AI, by the way, they're doing a bunch of stores now, is he really got me thinking about over-investing in customer service as a whole.

1:00:14and we hired someone to be head of customer engagement. And not only are they just answering DMs and responding to comments, but every single customer they are talking to. And I'm taking it a step further, two ways. One, I used to for, I don't know, I would say probably over the last, I've had Iconic for 10 years. Holy crap, 520 Fridays. I'd probably say I've spent 100 Fridays calling all customers that sent over$1 ,000. Incredible. And now what I have, something really interesting is I have this tool that collects first party data and I decide the different types of cohorts that I want, i.e. an influencer, an athlete, someone that has a title of a CEO.

1:00:54And then on Friday, I'm just reaching out to people as the founder. That touch point is insane. A hundred percent. I think that is something that - The founder touch point. Yeah. There's a reason why you had to fly to Australia for that meeting. You, the founder. I mean, we had a situation at ICE where someone was buying, someone bought, it wasn't an expensive order, but someone had bought a bracelet for her daughter's 21st birthday. It was really important for her, really important for the mom. And it was ready. There were a couple of delays. And so she needed it for the weekend, but we were only going to be able to ship it out Friday.

1:01:29And so if I shipped it, it wasn't going to get to her in time. And she was maybe an hour and a half, two hours away. And it was a Friday afternoon. I jumped in the car and drove for our round trip to hand deliver this order to make sure it got there in time. And it's something that I think so many people miss is that it's easy, but not easy, but it's so easy to win on customer service. So easy. It's such a point of differentiation. The number of times, and I think for startups, like as a startup, you're probably not going to be able to compete with an incumbent on tech stack or resources or marketing dollars or anything like that, you can compete on service.

1:02:05And the number of times we've been in a negotiation with a retailer and it was us or someone else. And they said to us, they're like, look, we know your tech isn't quite like this, like 18 months ago when we were really early on. It's like, look, we know your tech isn't where we know it can be. But the experience of working with you has been so good that we're going to go ahead and trust and work with you on getting you to where it makes sense for us. And we have beaten multi-billion dollar companies in the process just on service because these brands have said to us that they want to work with us instead of them.

1:02:43Yeah. I mean, I would argue that like the founder should be doing customer service. I mean, I did it for probably the first, I would say like$2 million run rate. I think it just informs the whole entire business moving forward and you get all those disproportionate benefits. 100%. At the end of day, someone's not going to give you money for the sake of it. And people are going to choose who they do and don't want to work with. And you want to make sure time and time again that you are a team and a company that brands and customers want to work with. Guard your reputation at all costs. Robert Greene, great episode as well.

1:03:17What's up, guys? It's Mark. Quick 15-second break. We're building a private community for operators, marketers, and creators. And in order to join that wait list,

1:03:37I want to dive into some more topics. Let's go a little bit into some personal development. What would you say is the single most important habit in your personal life that makes you a better founder? It's a really great question. I would say I'm really focused on balance. I'm really focused on understanding myself mentally, understanding myself from a fatigue perspective. One of the things I say to my team over and over again is this irony where if you were to tear a hamstring, you wouldn't go out for a run. But if you've had a rough day or a rough week, you're still expected to work through that.

1:04:18and having this mindset of like mental health is treated in the same way that physical health is. Where if you had a hamstring tear, it's like you're going to give yourself that room. And for me, it's about having that awareness of myself of when I've got an emotional hamstring tear, when I need to rest, when I need to recover. And my form of recovery might be different to someone else's, but my form of recovery, I don't know if it comes across, but I'm quite introverted. And so my form of recovery is literally just recharging and spending time in my own space and give me three, four hours of my own space and I'll be back to good.

1:04:52But it's knowing when I'm coming up to that point where I need to give myself that room to recover. And I think A, it's from my perspective, affording that same level of trust to my team that they have the ability to recover themselves. My mindset is if you are going to come into work and you're going to operate at 10 % efficiency because you're not at your best. And by you pushing through the 10%, you're going to come back at 10 % again tomorrow and 10 % again the day after, or take that day off and come back at 100 % tomorrow. I'd much rather you take the day off and come back fully recharged.

1:05:32And I would say that's a big cultural shift. And And from a company perspective, it's challenging because the risk is that people could take advantage, but you identify that pretty quickly. And I feel like what I've learned is you treat people like adults and you give them the same freedom that you give yourself. I ran my own business for pretty much for the last 15 years. I've exclusively essentially run my own business. And I know that even if I took a Friday off, I didn't miss a beat. or if I took a couple of days off or I felt flat and I took the day off, I didn't miss a beat. And knowing that I have the ability to do that means that other people have the ability to do that as well.

1:06:15It is so crazy, man. I would say, well, we have maybe one or Oliver was under 30. We've had most people, I would say 30 to 50 on this podcast. Every single person is in this camp. I feel like for me, I was an absolute maniac, savage. The identity of my company is about hustle and motivation. I probably didn't wake up to like this probably till like 37 yeah I feel like it takes a while what was your inflection point to get to this was it family kids did something happen I think it was just watching how my brother operated I mean there's a few things it's it's number one like the whole the whole mindset that like if you're drowning you can't save someone else until you've helped yourself like it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if you help someone else self if you're both drowning but if you get that float floaty ring then you can help someone else and so it's like prioritize yourself first, get yourself back above water, and then you can start helping others.

1:07:05And when I saw how Nick operated, it wasn't about being relentless 24-7. It was about knowing the periods where you had to be relentless and in those periods being relentless, but knowing when you can come up for air. And so like, I mean, when Nick was starting off, there'd be periods of like months where like, I wouldn't see or hear from him. And then he'd come up for air. And then I wouldn't see or hear from him. And then he'd come up for air. And really early in our, in the flagship journey, we like this fork in the road, will we make it? Will we not make it? There were certain things we had to deliver on.

1:07:39And I spoke to like one of our early investors. He was my first boss. And he said, he was like, look, you have two options. Option number one is you throw in the towel, you give some money back to investors. They're not going to get everything back, but at least not going to lose everything. thing. The alternative is you leave no stone unturned and you just fight tooth and nail to get to where you need to get to. And in that moment, I was like, okay, this is one of those periods where I need to put my head down and I need to be relentless. And I knew that if I got through this period and we didn't make it, it wasn't going to be because of anything I didn't do.

1:08:13And so there was no stone unturned. It wasn't going to be for a lack of trying or a lack of wanting. And you can have one person who operates at 100 % intensity, and you can have someone who operates at 50 % intensity. And the person who at 50 % intensity can still produce more output than the person operating at 100 % intensity if it's not being focused in the right way. And so much of Flagship and our team is centered on output, not input. I could not care less what your input is if it gets the output that we want. And that's just fundamentally the case. Like I could get you in the office Monday to Friday, 10 hours a day.

1:08:54But if the best output I'm going to get from you is in three days, six hours a day, I'm going to take that every day of the week because I prefer on what you're producing, not what you're putting in. Yeah, I'm in the camp of sprint, rest, sprint, rest, sprint, rest. And something that you said, I think for the people listening, the Sahil Bloom episode is great in conjunction with this, is understanding and knowing there's different seasons in life. And from a macro perspective, it could be, you know, fourth quarter, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. But then also you have to look at it a bit more on like the micro where like, okay, you're looking at that from a quarter or a year or five years, but then like, what about your week?

1:09:28Like if you're sprinting, like I sprint Monday to Saturday and then Sunday is like my recharge day. So just making sure you don't go too long on the micro because then you'll probably get burnt out, which is not what you want to do. I mean, I theme my months. I theme my years. Like when we close a round of funding, it's like, okay, the next year, the year leading up to funding was survival. Like we need to survive to get to the round of funding. Close a round of funding, the mindset shifts towards growth and building for scalability. The next year, it's like you've got, the next year you want to raise again.

1:10:02So the theme is around building markers to make you investable. And so different things are required at different points in time. And what's important in 2025 might not be the same thing I focus on in 2026. What I focus on in January might not be the same thing in December. There was a thing I listened to ages ago. It was called Spotlight of a Rugby Player. And one of the things it says is you need to know when it's the fourth quarter and you need to know when you need to be perfect. and there was, I was speaking to someone not so long ago. I mean, he's actually, he's a high performance coach and he said to me, what's your definition of high performance?

1:10:41And I said, my definition of high performance is knowing when you need to be perfect and executing perfectly in those moments. It's knowing when you need to be perfect and making sure, I mean, I had a call a couple of weeks ago, it was critical. I'm like, there is no outcome that comes of this call other than perfection. Like in that moment, I know I need to be dialed in. I know I need to execute to perfection. And it's knowing there'll be certain moments where you can be perfect, certain moments where you can afford to be a bit more relaxed. And if you're trying to be perfect 24-7, you're going to burn out.

1:11:16And it's about knowing when you need to put the foot down and when you can give it more reprieve. Wise man there. Let's talk about raising money. I know you raised a lot of money. What do you think is the biggest misconception about raising money? The biggest misconception is that it's easy. I'll have conversations with people who will say, I've got this idea. I'm going to go raise money. And I'm like, it just doesn't work that way. I would say there's a lot of, I've learned a lot of different types of money that you can raise with different expectations and challenges that come with it. You raise venture capital money, you're on the venture capital journey until exit and you're on that ride.

1:11:53And you have to answer to them. Exactly. I would say that the number one thing for me from a fundraise perspective is the relationship. In the same way that the relationship is going to win you a deal when you're selling tech, the relationship is going to win you a term sheet when you're speaking to investors. Investors will invest more into the person than they're willing to invest into the tech. Tech has to be important. The opportunity has to be important. The TAM has to be important. All those things have to be there. But the thing that is going to be a key differentiator is the relationship that is built and the trust that is built.

1:12:31A lot of the investors that invested into us, they invested after 18 months of building relationships. It wasn't the first conversation and it's like, here's a million dollar check. It was, no, we're going to build trust over 18 months to the point where we have no doubt that we're prepared to put this investment in. I think that's the biggest misconception is time. time to sell a company, time to raise money. Like examples today is a conversation that I had with someone. I don't want to get too deep into it, but yeah, it was the first touch point. It went great. No rush. It's busy season. It's Q4.

1:13:04They might be in LA. I'm going to get dinner with them the next, you know, one or two months. It's just one more touch point. I think people highly underestimate the amount of touch points. And like, for me, I have a thesis on probably 10 different things, kind of markers to invest in something. I really think now, if I had to narrow it down to two, I would say it's literally the human and the TAM and making sure the TAM is not going to be radically smashed by AI. It's the human and the TAM. And it can't be affected by AI or it can be, or it's going in the right direction. Yeah. I think people are sorely mistaken about how hard it is.

1:13:44What's an underrated way to raise money? Just keep moving. Take like any time an investor reaches out, whether I'm fundraising or not, I will take a meeting 100 % of the time. You never know how long it will take to build the relationship. You never know when you need money. You'll never know when an opportunity will come out of it. When we closed our last round, I worked out that in order to close the round, I had over a hundred hours of meetings to close the round with investors, like directly with investors. Let's say an average of half an hour a meeting. It's 200 meetings in order to close that round of funding.

1:14:16And this is with a good idea with AI attached to it with a track record. That should say something. Yeah. And yeah, 100 hours of meetings, it took reps, it took time. It wasn't something that happened overnight. And it was, yeah, like, again, relentless for several months of going through this process. And you get a lot of no's, you get some maybes, you get a handful of yeses, and you only need a handful of yeses in order to get to where you want to get to. But it's not something that just happens by chance. Yeah. Do you know what's so crazy about it too is, you know, every no gets you closer to a yes.

1:14:56You've heard that before, but it's just like, it's so crazy. Like you could have 20 meetings and just that 21st meeting, maybe you don't get the yes, but it just unlocks the pivot in how you position the pitch. That's what I don't think people understand. is just the feedback loop, what you're getting, and you just keep optimizing a teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny bit. I don't know how many times I've had my guy change one line on a deck before. He hates me for that. I've just like little small optimizations, but you keep doing that and then you get to a position where it's so funny someone to be like, oh, you're really dialed on this pitch.

1:15:28And I'm just thinking to myself like, yeah, this is like the 38th time I've done this. 100%, like reps build momentum. I want to go a little bit deeper into digital marketing. We didn't talk about that. That's your background. What's kind of one thing that you think marketers, should stop doing immediately. I'm probably going to piss off a lot of people by saying this. I'm not a fan of above the line marketing. I'm not a fan of spending dollars on something that can't be attributed. I'm fine to spend on above line marketing if you can determine what the attribution is. At Afterpay, at ICE, I would never spend a dollar if I couldn't determine what the return on that dollar was.

1:16:06And again, that's why I built Flagship because you have these retailers spending tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in these retail stores without being able to understand the true return on investment that they're getting. I'd rather spend a lot more on direct response, performance market. You need to know what goes in, what goes out. Exactly. And the thing about that is every single part of that can be optimized. Like I used to look at everything. I used to look at my click-through rate. Click-through rate is dropping and the creative is falling. My cost per click, the conversion rate, my ROAS, every single thing.

1:16:37One of the things I also looked at from an ICE perspective was I looked at the lifetime value of my customer after that purchase. Like I could have a customer that came in and the direct ROI on that campaign wasn't high, but the lifetime value of the customers that came to that campaign was so much greater that it was worth still running that campaign. If I switched it off, it wouldn't have been worth my while. And there's so many soft opportunities I think marketers miss out on. Well, yeah, definitely. people are definitely going to be be man at that what's good though too is a lot of kind of top of the funnel type stuff they're getting better and better at attribution i mean back in the day like how are you going to do like a billboard yeah like if it's like 2002 and you're doing a billboard like and you're and you have to own the pnl as a cmo on the marketing side like how do you answer to that i really i i agree with you what what would you say is one digital marketing strategy that's timeless um social proof social proof and user-generated content it was what we learned heavily into both at ice and and afterpay at ice my best-selling watch wasn't the best-selling watch because it was it should have been the best-selling watch it was my best-selling watch because i had a customer who put up a facebook post about the purchase they made from us and we turned that into an ad.

1:17:55So yeah, that social proof and use to turn out of content was really powerful for us. And one of the most successful campaigns that I ran at Afterpay, so Nick turns around to me, he says, I want to turn Afterpay into a verb. I'm like, great. You want Afterpay to be a verb? We need to use it as a verb ourselves. What I did was I ran out, I ran a campaign. It's really simple, just text. I mean, the text image, but it said, what have you Afterpaid? Show us in the comments. And what I did was I put that, I ran that ad to our top 20 ,000 customers, just our top 20 ,000, knowing it was going to be cheap, knowing that they were going to engage, knowing that we were going to get response to it.

1:18:35And I did that until I had 10 ,000 likes and 5 ,000 comments. And then once I had that, I withdrew them from the audience and went to my 20 to 50 ,000 customers and did the same thing. Now those customers aren't as passionate about the top 20 ,000, but they see 10 ,000 likes and 5 ,000 comments, they're going to engage with it. That then grew to 20 ,000 likes and 1 ,000 and 10 ,000 comments. And I did that over and over again and slowly got kind of moved away from our core customer until a point where that ad was turned into an acquisition ad. And I excluded all of our customers and went only to net new customers.

1:19:11But by the time I did that, there were 100 ,000 likes on it and 50 ,000 comments. and any customer that hadn't heard about Afterpay seeing 100 ,000 likes and 50 ,000 comments where everyone's talking about things that they've purchased using Afterpay, they gave us so much validity that it just acquired customers on repeat. Yeah, that engagement social proofing, my guy flipped out when our Facebook account got messed up and we lost all of the engagement, it crushed. You said something very, very interesting and to unpack that, it's brilliant. For people listening, obviously, from a verb perspective, people say like, oh, I'm Googling something.

1:19:46I mean, think about ChatGPT, like their advantage over Claude. Like people say like, oh, ChatGPT it. So I think that's a very interesting thing for people starting out with their business. Like how do you position and make a campaign and creative to position your brand as something that you can make a verb? That's like an interesting challenge for a creative marketer to do that. 100%. I mean, I was really fortunate at Afterpay. It was such a strong brand and such a strong product. And the name makes sense. Yeah. I was really fortunate that I had access to a really great customer base. I would say, generally speaking, whatever strategy the company had, there would always be a digital campaign that I would run to support it.

1:20:26Didn't matter what we were trying to do. Like, okay, this is what we're trying to achieve. I'm going to target the people that we want to target in order to get the outcome. The mindset for me has always been the people that don't need to know that we exist shouldn't know that we exist. The people that I don't want to know about this shouldn't know about it. Because if they don't need to know about it and they do know about it through my ad spend, it means I've wasted a dollar on someone that I can't convert. And so everything for me has always been very hyper-targeted, go after the person. One of the strategies that we had at Afterpay was trying to drive more in-store adoption.

1:21:01Trying to drive, it was originally a digital product, trying to get more people to use Afterpay in-store. we could very easily have gone and targeted out all of our customers trying to run a retail campaign. The challenge there is that not every digital customer has a store that they want to shop with within proximity of them. And so what I would do was I built campaigns around the brand that was within proximity of the customer that they shopped with before online trying to drive them into that specific store. So it was always really hyper-targeted to get the outcome that we wanted. Seems like it's all sunshines and rainbows with Afterpay.

1:21:37What was that the biggest internal challenge? Was it team? Was it investors? Was it culture? There had to be something for it, you know, to get to that size. I kind of, when I speak to people, I say like, don't use Afterpay as an example because it's not normal. I hate saying it, but the biggest challenge that Afterpay had was that it was too popular, that it was too successful. First world problems again, guys, we've had to say this a couple of times with the camera. Yeah. Jeez. And so I, like the biggest problem was that Afterpay was running out of money because too many people were using it and they couldn't afford to pay back.

1:22:10Loat the money. Exactly. And so, I mean, you have that problem. You, I mean, I mean, Afterpay listed on, listed publicly after a year and a half of, of going live. Like that's unheard of. Give people context. What was the market cap? Like how big was that company? I can't remember. I think it might've been, I reckon, I actually don't know, maybe like 200 million. but yeah I mean Nick often used to refer to he told me about a book I can't remember exactly what it's called I don't want to misquote it but they used to talk about their with your moments a lot like the where fucked it's over moments and they used to happen he would say on repeat but I would say any company that exists is going to face some kind of existential crisis at some point in time I don't think there's ever going to be a company where everything is going to go exclusively to plan.

1:22:58And if it does happen, it's just pure unicorn status, like absolutely like unheard of. And I think the thing that founders often get trapped by is this expectation that things are going to mean overnight success. And something might have an over... You might have that hockey stick moment where you'll get that point of inflection. And maybe that moment is considered an overnight success. But what is so often missed is everything that happens before that point in time. Afterpay itself, all right, fine. Maybe it could be considered an overnight success, despite the fact that you might miss the first 12 months, which included the first brand turning them off.

1:23:33But what is missed in that overnight success is the 15 years of relentless pursuit of other business ideas that Nick went after. And I would say that's like so many people throw in the towel and give up too quickly because they haven't become an overnight success or it's taking longer than expected. And you look at how many companies take significantly longer to deliver. And so many people give up too quickly. I also think too many people are too hyper-focused on rocket fuel. And I've seen so much terrible stuff on Twitter now with this AI boom saying that, you know, formally, I would rather the former than the latter.

1:24:15Formally, you know, a company looks great if they go 1, 5, 10, 17, 25, 34. And now they're like, for us to invest, it's got to be 1, 10, 50, 250. I remember when I was living in Arizona, the guy that I rented the house from, he had 17 years in a row, year over year growth. And it was like, 1, 2, 4, 6, 9. And I'm like, this is the greatest business of all time because it shows stability. And for the people out there listening, run your own race. I think that this is, it's a, like you said, Afterpay is a unicorn from another planet. As long as you get product market fit, I think within, let's just call it four years, three, four years, even that's kind of a little long, but as long as you get product market fit, then go at your own pace.

1:25:02Yeah. And I think it's also important to A, like know what noise you should listen to and what noise you should drown out. And it's also important to know, is something not selling because you don't have all the features that you need? Is something not selling because you're not selling it well, because you're not a good salesperson? Is something not selling because of timing? Is something not selling because of pricing? There's so many reasons why something could not sell. I remember when we started this version of Flagship, we were fighting this really uphill battle because we were going out with this MVP.

1:25:34I went to my product manager and I'm like, I don't have enough to sell. I don't have... I I framed it. I'm like, I've got the burger. I don't have the meal. No one's getting excited. Like they want the whole thing. I don't have the whole thing to sell them. And I'm like, I need more. And through our discussions, nothing will impact engineering morale more than building something that's never used. And so there's too much risk in engineers building without validating. And so we landed on this middle ground where we would design in Figma all these different modules and features. And so I'm like, okay, great.

1:26:08I can still sell and speak to it. And if we get a deal and that deal is predicated on this feature existing, then there's good validation for us to go and build it. And so yeah, there's a plethora of reasons why something might not work that might not be that it's a bad idea. Good advice there. I want to go into this last segment before we go into the final, final segment. I've been in the USA for 12 months from Australia. What's the biggest lesson that you've learned from taking flagship from Australia to the US? Outside of people here want to wear Gucci logos on the front as opposed to your muted out, beautiful black silhouette t-shirt you're wearing there.

1:26:45As I'm wearing, I never wear logos ever. It's my homie's company, Siegelman Stable. I like it. It's different. It's just sporting. It's a good lesson. I did a lot of prep work ahead of moving out here. I came a number of times and I started building network when I got out here. I'd say the other lesson is that I just met with as many people as possible. And I'd say you never know who knows who, who's going to be able to introduce you to who. I was really fortunate that three weeks after landing, I had to start fundraising. And the good thing about that, and I would kind of recommend any founder who's moving to the US, just start fundraising as soon as you land here.

1:27:24And the reason for that is A, it forces you into discipline. It forces you into routine because you're naturally going to be working through these fundraise conversations. And these investors are really great at opening doors to different people. Our first five or six customers that we got in the US came from these VC funds that used them as customer checks. And just in that process, it put us on the radar. We managed to get these deals. The other thing is, I had someone reach out to me on one of my trips. I would move here in July in the March leading up to moving here. I got a LinkedIn message from this guy in LA.

1:28:04He's like, hey, I come from a retail background, was at Nordstrom, set up Nordstrom Live. Before that, was at Rag & Bone. Love what you're doing. Would love to chat. Come out here, meet with him. I realized that he is incredibly well-connected across retail. He's a really nice guy. We get along really well. And so when I land here, we start doing a little bit more together. He introduced me to great brands. He introduces me to Alice Olivia, to Rails, to Vince, to really incredible brands over here. And then he introduces me to David Neville, who was the Rag & Bone founder, who was his boss at Rag & Bone.

1:28:42Meet with David. David really loves it. David's wife is Gucci Westman, who's a founder of Westman Italia, which is a big beauty brand. Through speaking to David, David says, oh, you should speak to Andrew Rosen. He invested into Rag and Bone. I then meet with Andrew. And so through just taking this one coffee on the back of this cold LinkedIn message that I got, ended up getting me meetings with some incredible people across the US, which then opened so many doors for me in the process. And so I was speaking to someone ages ago and it's about the different types of luck that you can have. And one of the types of luck is luck by doing, like luck by meeting people and taking opportunities.

1:29:21And the more opportunities that you take, the more people you meet with, the higher the likelihood is of having one lucky break in there. It's not to say that every single meeting you take is going to be fruitful, but if you take enough of these meetings, eventually something's going to give. Yeah. I think the blended average, more shots on that. And quite frankly, we met through someone on your team saying they listened to one of the podcasts. He loved it. He introduced us. And I am most definitely going to get you some customers. Let's leave it at that. I want to fire off a couple more quickfire questions before we get to the last three questions we ask everybody.

1:29:53How do you see AI impacting business in the next few years? It's a really great question. I see a few fold. The first is that more broadly from like a personal AI perspective in terms of how people use AI individually, I find that AI makes you more you. It makes you you, but more efficiently. And the more that people lean into that, the greater a return on investment they are personally going to get on AI. I think people are so nervous about it's going to come for their jobs, it's going to replace them. So many people underestimate the domain ownership that they have in what they do. And they have the ability to be the domain owner in what they do, plus AI backing them.

1:30:36And so people have the opportunity to own that space personally. From a broader perspective, I mean, it's a hard one because there's been so many industries that have come up that have killed previous industries. You had Ubers that hurt taxis. You have Waymos that hurt Ubers. You You have after pay that hurts credit cards. You have accounting software that hurts spreadsheets. Like you've got, there's always different evolutions of product that creates a risk to a prior invention. Exactly. And like, I mean, everyone was terrified of the internet when it started. Like what's it going to do to all different people?

1:31:21And what AI will naturally do is, yes, it will make some roles redundant, but it will create new opportunities in the process. It's got the brightest outlook yet on it. Everyone is doomsday. The Roberto episode is doomsday. The world is falling in 2027. That's good to know, giving people some hope on that one. I agree with you. It makes, I think it's a specific type of person to understand how to embrace it to make you more you. On the same coin, I see people, chat GPT is just the easiest example of just like overusing chat GPT and they sound like robots. I think in anything from a human perspective, a brand perspective, I firmly believe in just like AI enablement, like similar to like how your company does it.

1:32:07I'm not as bullish on just like using only AI as a person or using only AI as like a company because you're going to get smashed by the big AI company. So AI enablement is how I see it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, do I think ever that I'll be able to sit across the table from someone recording a podcast to where AI is asking the questions and AI did all the research and knew what questions to ask and knew how to guide the conversation? Absolutely no. But do I believe that you can take the conversations we had leading up to this, feed it into GPT, help structure the questions in a way that helps you get to your destination faster?

1:32:43Absolutely. And there's always going to be a human level and a creative level that gets overlaid on top of ai i think that's fundamentally like you still need someone to validate that the output is accurate ai still has its own risks around hallucination and getting things wrong that it's not bulletproof will it get there eventually maybe maybe not but there's like a sort of thing it's like if you go to if we all go to chat gbt and you ask to give a random number from one to ten it will give you i think it's like seven, three, nine. And like everyone will get that on repeat. And like, if you ask it to be creative, it's probably going to give everyone very similar ideas.

1:33:21And it's going to still require a human creative type of person to be able to break the mold of where GPT is pushing everyone. I like the balance of the positive outlook there. A couple of blunt questions here. Who's the best retailer in the world?

1:33:40the product's good enough that the other ones are still going to come to you don't worry about it and it could be and it could be hold a special place in your heart it doesn't have to be as direct I'd say the best retail in the world is Zara why? I'll say the way that they the speed of their supply chain the speed of their critical path their ability to make very quick decisions at ICE the way they used to operate was I would like Michael Kors would release a new range of watches. I had no data on those watches. I didn't know how I was going to perform. I'd buy one of each, list them. If they would sell, I'd buy more.

1:34:13If they sold, I'd buy more. And I would use the consumer demand to decide which styles to invest into, minimizing my exposure. Zara does that on an enterprise scale level. And that is phenomenal. They, to me, are best in class in retail. There are Australian retailers that think about retail in the most phenomenal way. Give one of them a shout out on here. We're going to have some Australians listening to this. I'll say any company that is owned by or invested into by Brett Blundy, like the way that Brett and his team look at inventory, the way they look at stores is unlike anyone that I have ever spoken to.

1:34:57And they are a clear leader across the board in retail in Australia. and I think there's an absolute reason for it. I believe their business model and the way they do retail means that they could rinse and repeat in any retail vertical and they will continue to get results. I've never heard of Brett Blundie. I'll check him out. For people that are intrigued by this Zara supply chain of the ability to find a trend probably backed by metrics and turn it over and have it on the floor in a week, two weeks. A really, really interesting documentary is Steve Madden. I'm not sure if you've watched that, but Steve Madden, a guy from Long Island, actually had a super iconic shoe company, different stores.

1:35:35He had his flagship store in Times Square. Above Times Square was, I don't know what shoemakers are called, but he would have some sort of, going back to kind of, this is literally flagship before flagship. He would make a shoe upstairs, bring it down, bring it downstairs. And obviously New York Times Square had the most amount of traffic. And he knew like, if that shoe got more than 10 sales within the first six hours, it was a winner. And then he would press the button, go to mass production, and then bring it to all the other stores. And I think there is a really methodical data-driven way that retail can operate, which is missed like that.

1:36:13And he's a maniac too. Great documentary, guys. You should definitely watch that one. Last question before the final three. What's the biggest lesson you've learned from your parents? my parents bring very complementary outlooks on life my mom's mindset is like find what you want to go after and go after it and fight tooth and nail to get there and enjoy life along the way and dad's is always bring it back to what is necessary in life in order to be happy and not needing to overexpend yourself, remaining humble and having humility and like not needing fancy things in order to be happy. Like my dad was a big skier.

1:36:54Like we were a big skiing family growing up and it was the skiing that was important, not where we stayed or anything like that. Like we would stay in a really cheap motel if it meant that we'd be able to spend the day on the mountain. It wasn't about staying in this really fancy lodge and that's the prize. The prize was being on the mountain. I mean, and like dad, like after Afterpay had publicly listed, after bed, exited their jewelry company. He was driving Uber. And he wasn't driving Uber because he needed the money. He was driving Uber because he wanted to keep busy. He liked meeting people.

1:37:24He wanted to still have this sense of purpose and routine in his life. That's wild. Yeah. And it was a great lead generator for me because I had people calling every day saying, I met your dad in an Uber. And mom similarly could, they easily could both have just decided to retire. And mom went and started a not-for-profit cancer organization called Cancer chicks to help young women find young women going through or having had dealt with cancer to kind of meet and find a support network amongst each other. And so yeah, both of them have given me different outlooks and aspects on life that are just so well complementary to each other.

1:38:01I love that. I think all couples are like a operating system working collectively together. And it looks like that they're hitting both sides, the yin and the yang. 100%. Love that. Great pick. A final three. So favorite book or podcast and why? You mean apart from this podcast? We've gotten that a couple of times. My favorite book is the book that accompanies the Gallup Clifton Strengths Finder Test. Wow. It really helped me understand it a lot better and gave a lot of really great lessons. One of the lessons that it gave was the story of like the world champion table tennis player. and he had a terrible backhand and everyone knew he had a terrible backhand, but his forehand was so good that it didn't matter.

1:38:51No one could actually exploit it. And that mindset that I've taken to everything that I do is like find what you're good at and just be the absolute best at that. And yeah, I would say that's kind of the key book that I think has guided like my leadership style. Lifting Gallup, you're getting a lot of love on this one. I'm definitely going to check out that test. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? Aritzia. They are, I believe, the business model of the future of retail. They've been able to create really large format stores filled with incredible product that is targeting a very clear demographic, which is the future of retail demographic.

1:39:38that's targeting the Gen Z, Gen Alpha consumer. I kind of look through retail in the lens of like either you're going to have, if you've got an aging demographic, you're in trouble. If you have the upcoming demographic, you're going to have a really healthy future. And they're the latter. And I think they are going to be around for a long time and are going to do great things. There's two stores that my fiance stays in for longer than 45 minutes. It's Sephora, which for me is as bad as Home Depot. And then there's Aritzia, which I've been in multiple times. Amazing couches in New York City. Plus it's like a upstairs they got a nice little coffee shop too.

1:40:13You ever been to that one in New York City? No, I haven't. It's beautiful. It's huge. And people are in there very I feel like it's like a an upscale female focused Zara. Yeah. A little bit. A little bit more a little bit more taste I would say. A little bit more taste. And I think that's bang on. I think there are some like younger up and coming brands with a handful of stores that are taking the world by storm. The question is can they keep that up as they get to scale? And we're starting to see brands like Aritzia like Viore, like Allo that have been able to get to scale and still continue to perform.

1:40:42And I think that's the biggest credit to these brands is they were able to grow and get big and not lose much of their identity in the process. Are they that big, Aritzia? I think I don't know. Allo and Viore, those are monsters. I didn't know Aritzia is that big. Are they that big? I don't think they would be too far behind if they were. Guys, we're going to pop up on whatever Google says on the revenue there. So I'm very, very curious. We'll find out. We'll get fact-checked in real time. I'm very curious. Last question for you. How big can a flagship AI be? It's a great question. My investors want me to say like multiples of billions and on the venture capital journey, that's what you have to shoot towards.

1:41:20Do I see a path to get there? Absolutely. But I don't want to get there at the expense of doing things right. It's like fundamentally my belief that we do the right things. We add value to our customers. We listen to them. we keep delivering value that we will get there. And we're not going to get there just by spending, hoping, and not doing the right thing by our customers. And if there's a skyscraper of the future of flagship AI, it's really about like the leader in unified commerce, right? That's what you want to be? Absolutely. I mean, again, similar to from like a digital marketing perspective, the thing about flagship is it's very different to like an afterpay.

1:42:00Like you go on any retail website, you're going to see Afterpay on the website. We operate in the background. You walk into Viori, you don't know that they're using flagship. You walk into Guest, you don't know they're using flagship. Guys, that's a nice social proofing right there. He just slid to it in there real nice. But we know they do. We know we add value to them. And so we'll never have a billboard with flagship. We'll never have a big building that we're being advertised because the vast majority of people don't need to know that we exist. And the people that don't need to know that we exist will never know that we exist.

1:42:35All that will happen is we'll make their lives better when they walk into a retail store. I love that. Where can everybody find you personally and professionally with Flagship? LinkedIn is probably the best place. Simon Molnar on LinkedIn and websites Flagships on AI. So either of those two places. Amazing, man. You are a super, super real one. And I really, really believe in Flagship AI. I can't wait to see where it goes. and any way I can help. For anybody out there that has a flagship store, please check it out. We're going to have a website down below in the description. And excited to see where everything goes, man.

1:43:02Thanks a lot. Appreciate you having me. My man. What's up, guys? If you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger. Bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.