Jonny Plein on selling your identity, the cost of winning young, and the second act

0:00Welcome to Six Degrees of Purpose, the series in which we explore the trends shaping our relationship with wealth, money and meaning.

0:06Jonny Plein:Today we are lucky enough to be joined by Jonny Plein, who co-founded Pouch in 2016 and exited in 2019 at the age of 27. He now co-found his new business Yasso, which combines his passion for economics and the Chinese language to enable brands to enter China. Don't forget to subscribe and follow. We're now on Spotify and Apple and you can find out more about Six Degrees at thisis6.com.

0:38Johnny Plain, welcome to Six Degrees of Purpose. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here talking to you both today. It's an absolute pleasure. We just wanted to kick off with the story behind Pouch and sort of what were the drivers that led you to start it. And I think you've got an interesting tale to tell there. Yeah, it's a great place to start at the beginning, really. um so i grew up in north london uh did the typical path went to university and didn't know what i wanted to do and a lot of successful people around me were accountants my dad said just be an accountant then you'll be able to do what you want from there and i did my three and a half years at ernst and young and my first day they were like why do you want to be here and i said oh i want to be an entrepreneur and they said you meant to say you want to be a partner and it was a very difficult three and a half years but but but made it through and a friend from school came to me said i've got this idea for this browser extension that sources voucher codes i had no idea about digital marketing no idea about affiliate marketing which is like the technical way we made money i was just a young guy and i thought it's probably going to fail because why would it work um i'll do this for six months go traveling and get like a more interesting job than my ey job um but it didn't fail um so we built this business over two years so the product was a browser extension that automatically sourced voucher code so you wouldn't have to go through all these like rubbish voucher code sites.

1:54We went on Dragon's Den. It was a very exciting period and ran the business from 2017 through to an exit in 2019. So two years full-time, pretty quick by the scale of things these days.

2:07Jonny Plein:And forgive me, but you were quite young when you exited the first time. How did that feel? Were you expecting it? They say businesses are bought, not sold. We weren't doing amazingly as a company. um but someone just really wanted the product so i think it was a feeling of relief and also like excitement like i did make some money from the whole situation so yeah it was like it was unbelievable to be honest like i remember being my dad's office when we signed the papers and the money was transferred and like had a cry and gave him a hug because it had been so stressful like three months before we thought we were going to close down the business and then we actually managed to exit it successfully so crazy journey and yeah doing it so young was amazing um for so many reasons um also like very draining and everyone thought i was much older than i was because of like they wouldn't thought a 27 year old would have like built and sold a company for seven figures already so yeah crazy crazy experience did you feel a level of responsibility having sold both from a personal perspective from and wealth but also to stay in the business for some period of time so the partner we sold it to were incredible i can't speak highly enough of them they were called global savings group they're now now called atolls they're a german affiliate marketing business they own lots of different affiliate marketing properties and they wanted our product they tried and failed to build it themselves so they they bought it from us and they didn't give us a lock-in um they said we couldn't leave for six months but they said we want you to be here because you need to be motivated to be here which is really smart by them um my co-founder actually left within six weeks we'd had a bit of a fallout not like a bad one but i think he thought we wouldn't be able to make it work in the business together he'd been doing affiliate marketing for like a lot longer than i had it was his idea to start with he was kind of done with the industry and the product he'd been selling the same thing for seven years so he left and i had another co-founder our technical co-founder we stayed i stayed for a very happy three years um vikram was there for seven so it was a really good relationship and the product 10x it was you know a great deal for everyone involved um i felt responsibility for my team to make sure that they all got hired across and they had a good relationship there felt responsibility to our initial investors as some of these things go the early investors made some money the later investors lost money um but it was very interesting in the first i would say year I was still so in this, even though we were, we'd been acquired, even though like I didn't have to worry about payroll anymore and all these things, I still was like, so in the fight mode.

4:56I couldn't, my mind just wouldn't accept that actually it didn't need to like fight over every penny and that we could be a bit more relaxed and we could just focus on like growing the company rather than just surviving. So it was a very weird mindset shift from a money perspective. It wasn't life changing sums but it was enough to make it financially worthwhile i was able to buy a flat in london i guess actually some people would say that's life changing um someone asked me like what is going to change for you and i didn't rehearse this but i said now when i go to prep i don't need to choose between a coffee and a pastry i can have both yeah like that was my mindset shift because i'd been in survival mode for so for so long that that's what i could now enjoy you've written very eloquently about the merging that can happen between identity, your personal identity and identity built in the brand of the business.

5:50Can you talk a little bit about what that meant for when you actually parted ways with Pouch eventually? That was the hardest thing. Much harder than the sale process, much harder than like dealing, you know, being in the new company. I was Johnny pouch everyone knew me for this product it was a consumer facing product so um you know we had 300 000 users at some point all based in the uk it's like five wembley stadiums it's like a lot it's a lot of people i know nowadays it doesn't sound like it with all these crazy numbers and how quickly things can grow but if you think about 300 000 people it's like a small town um so sometimes i would be out with friends or on a date and i would say what i did and i'm like oh I use your product.

6:33I mean, like I used to put it in my Tinder bio and just send, hey, have you seen this product? Just like as a way to get new users, because I was like, would do anything to grow the business. And when I left and couldn't say I was doing pouch anymore, and I was fundraising for this new business for Yasso, like it was crippling. I didn't, almost didn't want to go out. Like I didn't, I was like, what do I tell people I do? I've had this identity for so long and a successful identity i've been in every national newspaper i've been on national tv with dragons then i you know tech crunch article having sold the business it was bizarre and like very painful to not know to yeah lose that business sense for the first time and imagine it's similar to what professional athletes go through when they um when they retire or anyone that sold a company people don't really don't talk about it and it's not really a topic that would elicit a lot of sympathy oh you sold your business you made some money and now you feel a loss of purpose as well i'm still paying my bills so screw you type of thing um yeah it was incredibly difficult and i wrote this medium post and the amount of people that reached out to me that i'd kind of met on the way that had solved their business or said they felt it because they even quit their job and tried to start something new yeah really really resonated how did you refine that purpose

7:56so sadly i don't think this is a good thing but it's the truth it only i only it's not really purpose how did i kind of find that sense of my myself again um only when we completed the fundraise for yasso and i remember distinctly because it was um when i left i started yasso start of 2022 a lot of our minds all blurred over COVID timelines but I think the global savings group Christmas party which would have been like my leaving do as well got delayed because of COVID and they had it in the summer of 22 and the fundraiser wasn't going that well at that point and I said to my girlfriend at the time like I just don't think I can go I can't go and see all these people and they'll be like how's the new business going and it wasn't going well I like mentally just couldn't deal with a little bit of shame, to be honest.

8:49So it took a long time to get that back. And actually, I don't think I've solved the core identity piece of why I felt that way. Because if Yassau disappeared tomorrow, I think I'd still be back in that same place of like, who am I if I'm not a founder, if I'm not an entrepreneur? It sounds like you've had that idea about yourself from very early on before you started working you wanted to be an entrepreneur yeah what was that based on because that's that's not not everyone comes out without before they've got their first job yeah it's um interesting uh i guess my parents they'd always work for themselves they wouldn't call themselves entrepreneurs they just took business models that have been around and did it for themselves my dad's a financial advisor my mom had um worked with my grandpa and like they had a very small textile like trade business.

9:41So there was never talk of salaries or bonuses or promotions in my house. It was like kind of eat what you kill type of situation. And when I went to university, I don't know why I thought this or thought this was a good idea, but I wanted to put on like a massive student concert. Just thought this is what I want to do. I wanted it to be like, I called it uni aid. I wanted it to be like the live eight or live aid of university students. Never put on events in my life. Don't know why i had this idea but in my first year of university i actually like did it and i raised about 10 grand for charity didn't outlay any money making connections got all these people together and and that feeling of i've had this idea and i made it happen from nothing like that was the best feeling ever and i think i've probably just been chasing chasing that feeling um since to be honest.

10:31Jonny Plein:I love that. I love that that drive and that passion came through so early on. But also what's interesting is with Yaso, your reasoning for that was because of doing economics and Chinese at university and doing something completely different. And again, going back to that passion and that heart that you left behind slightly with Pouch. How does that feel to come back to that now? It's great. So yeah, I did economics and Chinese at uni. I spent a year in China. And when I joined EY I tried to do China focused things and they weren't having it because I was in the financial services transaction team there was like no China connection at all so I kind of left that for a while and then you know did did pouch which was a completely different business model but when I was in China and I had my year off and it's an amazing place if if you if you haven't been I thought I'm going to build a business facing this one day i always had that that thought and i met my co-founders at a china focused business event back in 2013 and when they approached me to do some work for them they were trying to sell their business and they'd seen i sold pouch so i did some consulting for them um and we realized actually this idea that we had what they had for yasso really i was just driving things forward could become a reality it felt great almost like going back to passion number one and thinking okay this is like a 10-year journey to get to this point and when we pitched investors and told that story of this is not like an idea of three guys in a pub this is like a 10-year personal professional journey you won't find a better founding team in the world to build for this problem than us i do believe that's true that really resonated and that's probably what helped us raise money from investors where the brisk profile was probably typically a bit strong for them, but they could see like, no, these guys really know what they're talking about here.

12:26So the fundraising journey at the beginning was a bit slower than you hoped it to be or what expectations were. Yeah, massively. Did it change things having had, having left pouch and having had a successful exit then behind you? Or what was it that changed the needle? So, and I'll say this for anyone that's like on the precipice of selling a business, no one knows the real numbers um it credentializes you massively like to actually have sold that company it doesn't matter what the number is it will help unlock doors for you what it did for me for for yasso is it allowed me to go back to these vcs that had passed for pouch or i met along the way and said you missed out on this one on pouch we sold had the tech crunch articles and everything um let's have a chat about yasso so it opened doors but it didn't close deals no one just threw money at us it just allowed us to get those first conversations um a bit a bit easier but the reason the fundraiser was was difficult was you know post-covid most zerps money was a lot tighter we have like a geopolitical risk element to our business because it's china focused and russia just invaded ukraine in start of 22 so everyone was just a bit more risk averse especially looking at a business like ours they just wanted bog standard sass or or fintech companies um and there were points where you have like waves with fundraising of momentum when the first kind of wave crashed and we we basically lost half of our commits in one weekend just kind of happened where we had we're trying to raise two million pounds we had about 800 grand committed from angels then we had one vc that was going to commit half a million and another like basically like x like top dog investment banker that was going to commit half a million from his family office and we thought great this has taken a few months um we happened to get both pullbacks on the same friday on like the same bank holiday weekend i think i was chasing them right that's what happened i want to close this before the bank holiday know we've got the commits and come back and close the deal that was incredibly painful and i was in an amazing situation at my last job like i had a good salary ran my own team responsibility autonomy everything that most people say they want in a job but i felt like i was being wasted i built up all these skills growing pouch i built up all these school these skills growing the team post exit as well i was 30 years old and i thought if not now when i don't have any kids don't have any responsibilities like i've got some savings i bought a flat like what am i what am i waiting for let's go really big and try and let's do another the business but you know for a couple of weeks after that moment when my co-founders even said you know is this going to happen I was like why did why did I do this why did I give up this like very nice safe situation to go and like pursue this crazy dream again I could have just you know found some new age business models and done tried some drop shipping and tried some other stuff and like built up some businesses like that on the side to quench that entrepreneurial thirst I'm glad I didn't like give in because i'm very happy with where we are the asso now like we're on a bit of a growth journey so for anyone that's listening or watching that's like in that similar situation thinking should i try again for another business just you just got to do it like you just have to

15:50Jonny Plein:try it where did you find that energy and that resilience from great point there's this phrase around being three feet from gold where it's like the old adage of the guy during the um the gold rush in California and he goes and he buys all his equipment and he spends months digging and digging and digging and then he gives up and he goes home and he owes people this money and someone buys his equipment for like 10 cents on the dollar and four days later they like hit gold and you don't know when you're three feet from gold and that very much happened in pouch where we basically were doing this investment deal that fell through with news uk they completely screwed us over um And we thought maybe we should shut down the company.

16:34So no, no, no, we've got a good product. We've got to keep going. We've got to keep going. That book, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, like I read it like the day, I finished the book like the day before we actually sold. And he was like, if one person has the inspiration to carry on their journey from this, and I've done my job and I was like, I'm going to sell my company. So I think having been through a situation where you've had to show resilience once and it's worked out, gives you the confidence that it's going to work out. again and it's like already been another time in the asso like doing our series a where started off going well dip down and then you make it through the other side i think you need to it's like an unteachable lesson you need to know that you've got that resilience in you before you can have the confidence to do it again does that does that make sense yeah yeah we had um the entrepreneur joanna jansen on last time on last episode and she was given some advice before she sold the company, which was when the exit happens, take six months off.

17:32And she said she lasted six days before getting involved in something new. Would you do that again? You know, Yasa and the trajectory of Yasa and you have another exit and when that happens, what advice would you give yourself that you wouldn't have known last time? it's a great question um if you can i would take the time off you can't always do that depending on your sales situation um but yeah to give yourself some some space especially before you think about doing something else 100 i would try to take some time with pouch we'd sold the business i was working at the acquire for three years i was actually going to join entrepreneur first if you know what that is i got on as a non-technical founder which is like neon impossible to do and i was going to join their cohort for march or april 2020 yeah i'm glad i didn't i don't think i would have been able to build it in a covid environment but i turned them down because i said i'm actually not ready to go again yet this was a year after we sold pouch um entrepreneur first just for those listening yeah um entrepreneur first is a venture builder they actually just raised like 200 million at a billion dollar valuation.

18:45They take top, top talent across Europe or the world, depending on your geography, and they pay you up and they try to get you to create businesses with these people. So it's like a talent investor. They've had like Poly AI and Clio that you may have heard of. They've all come out of Entrepreneur First. So they've had some massive successes and it's harder to get into than like Harvard Business School. Like it's ridiculously hard. They actually rejected me the first time and I had to write like a very passionate email about why they should accept me. And the fact I'm writing this email is why I wouldn't give up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

19:16So they let me in. And then I turned it down because I just knew mentally I was not ready to go again. After another two years and what, you know, perhaps during COVID and had like a pretty good time of it because e-commerce was booming. I'd already had my break. I was like ready. I was very much ready to go again for Yasso. I had all the energy and all the desire to make it work. Okay.

19:42Jonny Plein:Bear in mind the differences in the businesses between Pouch and Yasso and the environments in which you're working in. What have you taken from Pouch from a culture perspective and used in Yasso? It's a really good question because they're completely different businesses. So Pouch is this browser extension that found voucher codes, a pure digital product. Yasso is a much more complicated business with a much bigger upside. So for those listening, Yasso is an operating system for Western brands that want to sell directly to Chinese consumers. It's an infrastructure and technology play. We've built out the logistics, payments, e-commerce integrations and analytics to allow any Western brand to sell their products directly to Chinese consumers.

20:32We work primarily with beauty, supplement and personal care brands. one of our biggest brands we work with cow shed so so house a skincare brand pixie beauty which you may know uk lash which we just signed so a lot of big brands and the business is going well we raised a series a in um september last year uh eight and a half million pounds congratulations thank you very much um i think that the lessons i learned for yasso came more after we sold pouch right when i was at the acquirer because they were such a good business I really saw how to scale like a really well-oiled operation. Pouch was so green.

21:10We just had no idea what we were doing. We tried and failed. And I think that like idea of experimentation was key. But culturally, we would hire anyone that would work for us because that's who we could afford. We only raised like 300 grand in total. And it was pure scrappiness and exhausting to kind of get the outcome. with the asso it was like we need to hire people that can do the job not just who will who will work for us we need to be very organized from day one we've like ran very tight okrs from the beginning like very clear goals very clear organization very clear finances all of these things where i know other first-time founders or new businesses may not have and when we presented ourselves to investors or partners like this level of professionalism that i'd learned from having been acquired and working in that environment and also my co-founders had a marketing agency before it was a lot more like of a tight professional organization we don't i wouldn't say we've got like a very like we don't have a party culture at all we don't really do like a thursday drinks thing mainly because all our staff are chinese and hardly any of them drink um and based in china based in china and in the uk so we have seven people in the uk including the founders and then 20 people uh in in china um so not a lot is the honest answer from pouch directly to yasso but a lot from global savings group and that professional environment of how to really scale a high-performing business you've got progressive thoughts um and they probably used to be more progressive than they are today around around work culture and work ethics and i'd be interested to hear a little bit about your thoughts on that and how you create a unified sort of work ethic across two continents?

23:00Yeah, it's a great question. Very visible and approachable leadership. So one of the things in China that's quite different is like the respect for the boss in most traditional corporates in China is like much higher than it is in the West. In the West, I would say that the boss can always be seen as your friend, you work on the same floor as them in china it's a bit different so making sure that our team has lots of face time with the founders um very clear goals like you really need to be crystal clear with what you want people to achieve otherwise people may feel a little bit lost and not having what they call the 996 working culture in china it's like being touted by a lot lot of VCs now that you need to do 996 to get ahead, which is 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

23:58If you listen to like Harry Stebbings or they say, you know, you need to do 996. Some people will work naturally hard to get the job done if you give them clear goals. If you say these are your goals, some weeks they'll work seven days a week to do it, some they won't. But a lot of Chinese companies just enforce that. And there's a lot of face time and time in the offers where there doesn't need to be the fact that we don't offer that has meant we've been able to attract really good talent who want a slightly more relaxed environment that still shows a massive level of ambition so we give share options to all our employees even though in china they don't really know what they are but we explain it to them and say this is you're going to own a piece of the company here's how you know this example of this employee that joined right at the beginning they got given this many options now on paper they're worth this much that's and That's like a big increase.

24:47So that's a roundabout view of how we maintain that culture. So James was out in China last month. Adam's there. Right now, I'm going next week, kind of on a bit of a conveyor belt of us going every two to three months.

25:02Jonny Plein:And what's the aim, the trajectory for Yasso? What's the plan? We think we can be like a next level e-commerce technology company, like the next big thing, really. the market's so big it's so immature for western brands trying to enter it we see a world where if you're a western brand operating in china you'll be touching one of the aso's products whether you're a small brand that's entering for the first time using our full solution or you're a massive enterprise that has been operating in china for a long time but needs to use our like advanced integrated analytics that we know they don't have access to because we've been doing this well my co-founder's been doing it for 10 years so uh there's a whole range of e-commerce technology products we're releasing for brands of all size.

25:47That's how ubiquitous we want to be with brands entering China. Do you have a feeling, in terms of your personal situation, we're always interested in how founders, you talked about merging of identities between the business and the brand and your personal situation. What would another exit mean for you professionally and personally? How would you feel about that happening? What does the next stage look like if you're even looking that far or can comprehend that? because it's a tough one to look at. I've thought about it a lot. I think now that I'm married, thinking about having a family, I think that you find your identity and your purpose in other ways.

26:25Like I wouldn't care so much if I wasn't viewed as this like hotshot entrepreneur. I'd rather be viewed as like a good husband or a good dad. I think priorities change. change um so while today i do think my identity is still very wrapped up in being this entrepreneur figure maybe in the future that will change but i also think that maybe with pouch there was a bit of imposter syndrome because everyone said that how could you you know build and exit the first business you ever tried i think there was a little fear of myself that it was a bit of luck right we I don't think we would have sold the business if we hadn't gone on Dragon's Den.

27:06So that gave us the boost we needed in user numbers. And it's always played in. It's like, if that hadn't happened, would we have made a success of it? I mean, it did happen, so I don't need to think about it. But I think building Yasso and getting it to the Series A stage, personally for me, was like another piece of evidence. And now I've built a stack of undeniable evidence that no matter what happens, I can be like very proud of what I've built and I don't need to think that my identity will look any less impressive or like I'm always going to be an entrepreneur. And I think I've built a big enough stack of undeniable proof that that's the case.

27:48Jonny Plein:we often talk with entrepreneurs about the relationship and the things they bring to relationships from their childhood and their upbringing you've touched on today um have it like having your dad there when you signed the contract and crying and then you talked about your mum and dad and their entrepreneurial spirit throughout your early childhood. We as a culture aren't as transparent around perhaps money or wealth or feelings even as some other cultures are. Are you reflective with your family now on the journey that you've been on, how that has changed and how perhaps that purpose has changed since getting married, but still that drive and passion and hunger in the business?

28:38money was always a very open topic in my family home my dad's an IFA he always told me you know make sure you fund your pension and people never put save enough for the future and he will admit himself even though he's self-made and done quite well for himself like he had a poverty mentality his parents weren't wealthy or wasted their money in in in many ways and he knew if he wasn't successful there was no kind of fallback and I think that seeped a little bit into you know our family growing up like i was very aware of when we had good years or or bad years we they were self-employed so um you know if they weren't producing then we had less school fees were always a big stress i was fortunate enough to go to a private school but i was aware that both my parents worked very hard to make sure that that i could i could do that and i decided myself to leave that school for sixth form to go to a college um it just so happened that in the same year that I left, my dad lost one of his biggest clients that accounted for a large proportion of his income.

29:39And I mentally, even though they never said this to me, they never said, we want you to leave because we've got less cash. I knew subconsciously that it was helpful to the family that we didn't have the burden of school fees anymore, which is quite a weird thing for a 16 year old to be aware of. But I was like quite aware of it. I got a scholarship to this private school i think like it was like i don't know 30 off which is quite a lot and my mom got a new car and i would joke with her saying i'm smart and my scholarship paid for your car which again it's like a weird thing for i was probably 13 or 14 at the time to like relate those two things yeah uh together and so i like do work on myself to detach to make sure that i don't have any money anxieties and I don't want to kind of put those onto my potential future kids.

30:30So yes, growing up with a dad that's an IFA, there's lots of benefits. You become very, I would say, financially savvy, but I probably had more awareness than I needed to of money when I was younger. I think I'm now at the stage, like professionally, like my family, my parents, like just, they don't worry about me anymore. I remember when I said I was going to leave EY, which was this very credible grad job to start Pouch. My mum was like, what would you do if it fails? part of me is like why are you even thinking about it failing but i get you're a parent you're being defensive um and i'll say i'll just go back to ey and i remember saying to my dad when i he won't remember this but when i said i'm gonna start again i'm gonna start a new business and do something that's now yasso i don't think you meant this in a bad way but you basically said you've you've sold one business what are the odds you're going to be able to do it again and I said how like how dare you like dampen my ambition and my my dreams like why would you I kind of understand why he said it from you know you've you've had a success why risk it um so I'm still quite open with them uh but now I think that conversation has naturally shifted towards my wife rather than my my parents um we had our first date the day after I handed in my notice at my old job and uh she said what you do i was like oh you know i'm not working at the minute she was like disappointed thinking who's this like layabout said no no i'm starting this business but i was in my notice period for three months and i had a lot of time i could see her as much as i wanted i still had a nice salary before i took a cut to start yasso um and that was in the september in the december we were on the tube somewhere and i said to her look the version of me you've seen for the last two months is me, but I'm going to have a lot less time.

32:19I'm going to have a lot less cash. I'm going to be working really hard. I said, you're always going to be a priority. You're not always going to be the priority. If you want someone that's a nine to five person, that's going to take you on two holidays a year and always be there for you. That's not me. We don't know each other that well, but if you want to walk away from this, there's like no hard feelings, but I can't hear in six months, you're working too hard. Why aren't spending time with me and to have that thought like to me that was a natural thing to say but a lot of people said oh that's like very mature foresight to to warn your partner about this but i knew what i was getting myself into and in six months there were sleepless nights there was a lot of stress and she was like well he did kind of tell me now you know we're very happily married and she fully understands it so i've definitely shifted that emotional element of what it means to be a founder and the stress from my parents to my very amazing wife.

33:15We often talk about how wealth and companies tend to be built within ecosystems. And all of our clients are part of an ecosystem. It's usually a family unit, but not always. And that ecosystem influences us in different ways. We also find that opposites tend to attract around their relationship with money and wealth in particular. And I wondered if you guys have that sort of conversation, not too personal question about that conversation how you both think about money are you aligned are you quite different and opposing about how you think about finances risk wealth more generally we are extremely open about money like i have a tracker where i track all our investments and our savings every month um very honest about what my family has what her family has i felt i grew up like not that wealthy and she's you know looked at my upbringing she's like what do you mean you used to go to america on holiday you went to uh you know this school or whatever it may be it's like what are you talking about but i think you know growing up in london it's all it's all it's all relative um we're really honest about it and it's great because i don't feel like it's an isolated journey um and when we got married in france you have almost like a default prenup where you have to say this is what i have going into the marriage this is what you have and this is what we jointly have together and you know i don't think this will ever happen but if we got divorced and yasso hadn't exited she would be entitled to half of what i have and to be honest she deserves it because i would not be able to be where i am in the business but without her and she's really aware of it so it's like our wins together we have a very cute story where um she wanted to invest in the pre-seed i did i said no i said we need your money to like to live off she works in tech sales so she does quite well for herself and i did this like investor event and asked me anything like 40 people came up to hear like the story of raising the money for yasso and people went up to her and was like are you uh are you an investor at the time we weren't even engaged she was i know i'm just a girlfriend she felt really disappointed you couldn't say she was an investor in the business so the next round i let her put in i think it was a thousand pounds and um the lawyer was like uh one person hasn't sent their money and signed the dots and it was my wife i was like you know you have to send the money she's like what do you mean i thought like i just got given the shares like no no you've got to like you've got to send a thousand pounds okay fine so she kind of understood what it's about a bit more yeah you don't listen for the first time around where people backed out you want to make sure every investor you've got it

35:58Jonny Plein:exactly 100 i think that's a good idea yeah great well oh what a note to end on thank you so much johnny for today it's been amazing um really enlightening conversation i'm sure all of our listeners will take something great away from it say thank you can i ask one last small question putting people on the spot at the end yeah but if you had to give your younger self one piece of advice either when founding pouch or just before exiting what would it be it's all going to be okay it's all going to be okay all your anxiety is they're not real it's all going to be okay very nice wonderful thank you thanks for your time really appreciate it pleasure Thank you.