The ex-engineer who says sales beats product | with George Kurdin (CEO, Monk)

0:00George Kurdin: Why does it get stuck? Why aren't they getting paid? You can just like flex in me. Like Nike or Walmart can just basically be like 180 days. It's also like a very archaic system designed for like a person talking to a person. But why can't it be like Venmo? How does Monk do that? We have proprietary harness for account receivables with our own set of emails, our own guardrails, our own tests that does collections, that does cash application, which is a colossal problem in business. unsolicited messages from customers that are like, oh my God, this is insane. And so you built your own proprietary harness.

0:32George Kurdin: What are your thoughts on how that creates differentiation moving forward? I mean, we should hire you as a marketer. I'm already all in. You're a professional poker player. You were an operator. You were the CEO of a company that sold. And now you're a founder. George Curtin, the co-founder of Monk. I think in building a company, you have to be adaptable. Otherwise, obviously, Obviously, competitors will destroy you. Our space doesn't have a winner yet, so people are pushing really hard.

1:12George Kurdin: George, welcome to GTM Now. Safiyah, thanks for having me. Absolutely. It's always so fun to see all of your progress at Monk and extra fun to be able to sit here and talk about it in person and hit record in doing so. So really excited for the conversation today. Thank you. And the progress is all the team. I love it. Well, we're going to dig into all those areas around how you built, how you're building Monk. But a huge part of a building journey often starts off with the founder's background and journey there. And before we get into Monk, which is a topic everybody loves because Monk helps you get paid, helps invoices get paid faster.

1:46George Kurdin: Let's start with your background. You were a professional poker player for around five years. What did being a professional poker player teach you about reading a bet that maybe a traditional finance environment wouldn't have? Yeah, that was well back. But I think a ton of lessons. And I think that as with most things, you can cross apply a bunch of things. So poker, finance, you can apply that building a company. I'm not going to talk about bets because that's kind of obvious. I'll give like two quick ones that come to mind. One is about evolution. One is about pain. So in poker, same as in trading, you can kind of play your best game.

2:21You can make all the right decisions. Like Sophie is playing. You're being so sharp, so disciplined, but just like things don't go your way because of variance. And so you have to just know that that is life. And even if you make all the right choices, you get hit in the face and you're entitled to nothing. And so one lesson is just prevail and stay disciplined and just keep doing all the right things. and eventually you will beat the opponent that's actually getting lucky. So that's one lesson. And I was hit in the face with like a ton of, in poker it's called a bad run or like a bad streak of luck.

2:55I think the other quick lesson is just evolution. Like if you play with poker with someone who is quite good, they will adapt. And so I'm playing with you. You know that I'm bluffing a little bit too much in this specific sequence. So then you become more conservative. And then if I don't adapt, it will just destroy me. And so a smart opponent will like keep changing your game as you play with them. And I think in like building a company, you have to be adaptable. Otherwise, you know, obviously competitors will destroy you.

3:17George Kurdin: Yeah, those are great lessons. Super, super interesting. And you have one of the most fascinating founder backgrounds, I think. And not just because you're a professional poker player, everything. You know, you moved from a different country when you were 13, from Russia with your sister to the United States. You're a professional poker player. You were an operator. You were the CEO of a company that sold. And now you're a founder. You really worn a ton of different seats and sat in these different perspectives. One of those that I mentioned, you were the CEO of a company. Tell us a little bit about that journey.

3:52George Kurdin: I believe you sold for about$100 million in 2019. What did you learn from that experience that translated over to Monk? Honestly, I was fortunate to be in some of these positions. I think the teams were all exceptional and it was really cool to support them. Streamlabs wasn't the company that I founded, but there was a need and I had to step in. I think the team at Streamlabs and the business is quite healthy and is still going well. We sold to Logitech. It was phenomenal. Like, really good consumer gene. I think one thing that we did really well that we do today is just how fast we ship. And I think we were obsessed with shipping and committing literally daily.

4:26Like, we would not, some of us would not leave if we would not, you know, submit at least, like, a couple of good PRs that day. And in consumer or, you know, Streamlabs is a prosumer company. But, like, releasing quite quickly is sort of how you win. And I think now it's obviously in vogue, like velocity, et cetera. But that's one lesson, just like shift quickly.

4:46George Kurdin: Yeah. For anyone unfamiliar, I know, you know, Monk's been, I would say, fairly visible. You're on TPPN and everything around your Series A race. But for anyone unfamiliar, give us a little background on Monk itself. Right, yeah. We are an apply AI company that solves accounts receivables for businesses. And accounts receivables is the other part of the ledger. So Ramp does AP primarily, and that's payables, expenses. Ramp, obviously, is an inspiring company, and we do AR. And AR is more relationship-based, and it's just how the money flows between businesses. And, yeah, we're a team of primarily engineers based in New York that does this for B2B.

5:26George Kurdin: Brilliant. Like you said, engineer, you have a product background yourself. now if we think about your build story at monk like what has been your go-to-market coming from this eng background yourself i think everyone says they made a lot of mistakes and i think i made like 50x more mistakes than i thought i would make um it's my like second serious b2b sass business and i think now more than ever and actually i think like you do a great job of highlighting folks on this pod that like talk about growth but building a go-to-market function is hard for my co-founder and I it's like doesn't come naturally to us I can walk you through all the mistakes that I've made but I was lucky to have some good friends and obviously listen to you and other folks and now I'm like obsessed with building like the best GTM machine but we're really early in that journey like our team has lines hard but like folks are just ramping candidly maybe a decade ago I was thinking that sales and marketing is just not that important and now I think it's like she's you know the most important p0 why did that change i was young i was naive about how things work i felt like product and eng is the alpha and omega if you build it they will come product and engine gorgeous design is all that matters and um what i've learned is a that's wrong b now it's 2x wrong because it's quite easy to ship things or to make things look decent super super interesting And also enterprise sales is really hard, is what I've learned also.

6:55George Kurdin: Super hard. And I mean, like you said, that was a lesson learned along the way. And for a lot of founders, especially founders listening to this, they're always trying to learn from other people. Because typically there's two different ways to learn. One is by doing firsthand experience and the other is from learning from others like yourself right now. You mentioned you've made a lot of, you know, pseudo mistakes or perhaps learnings along the way. What have been some of the key ones that you would tell founders about, other founders, because you want them to learn from? They're critical ones that they can learn from.

7:25So one, and I learned this from a very good friend that runs a company called Profound, and they've done a really amazing job. They're inspiring. but I think having an insane website with a gorgeous aesthetic that is consistent with your product but also with your sales collateral and everything is mega buttoned up as if you're like serious d but really your seed is the way to do it at seed or even pre-seed and you know I was trying to make my own website myself doing everything myself not inviting someone who is much better than me at this and that was a big mistake and i think you just get a leg up and i think the traditional school thought is like crawl walk run and i would just like spend the money and

8:10George Kurdin: be bold right away with the website that is a great piece of advice something i think any founder has felt before because sometimes it's it's a little bit easier to take kind of the less expensive routes and then you realize the impact of these things and it's just quicker to to kind of invest Yeah, and just like I think like having a cohesive visual identity and design system through everything, including the sales collateral, that, you know, it matches the product and it doesn't, it also doesn't look like clotslop now. It's also very important. Super important. I actually spent many years in the conversion optimization space, full funnel with software companies, with AI companies, with software companies.

8:47George Kurdin: And there was so much interesting data about the quality of your website and the impact that that has. Interesting. Because at the end of the day, you know, now we've got agents and humans browsing websites, but we still have humans. And humans are humans. We impute the quality of something from the design of it. That's what we have accessible. And we ran an experiment. One company we were working with ran this experiment, completely transformed the website, similar to what you were saying, really amped up the visual identity itself. And the close rate went up. And there's many different variables.

9:18George Kurdin: And they said, look, there are so many different possibilities, but we have not changed a single other thing than this big kind of project around the website itself. And we truly believe that it has been the cause or at least the primary cause of our sales close rate increasing by 50 percent because people just have a greater perception of us. And they mention it on call. So we've got this kind of qualitative, slightly quantitative attribution to it. Yeah, it tracks. It makes a ton of sense. At least now I'm like mega website pilled. Yeah, I love it. That's a great learning. Super interesting.

9:51George Kurdin: And let's talk a little bit about how you're building Monk because I talked to a bunch of people at Monk prior to this. Every single person called it the most unique and thing. One of the most unique things that they appreciate about Monk is the culture. And they describe the culture as extreme accountability. Tell us about that. What does that mean? There's really three key things that we believe in at the company. And we work really hard to make sure that these things are not just like a slide that we put up or some poster or some like BS page in our careers website, but like actual values that are like imprinted in our hearts and minds.

10:31And those three things are speed, ownership and clarity. and so I think when if you've spoken with the team if they speak about accountability that's just everyone is trying really hard to produce world-class work and everyone is pushing super hard to the point where they know that a like I'm not going to produce anything but world-class work otherwise I'm going to let Sophie down and that's kind of the mindset on the team today and everyone really wants to win because I think people understand nothing that I'm doing really people understand the like the finite nature of this moment like i think people feel as if at some point the music will stop playing or like the winners will be declared our space doesn't have a winner yet so people are pushing really hard and and now it's like for me it's almost the dream because i don't even need to necessarily obsess every day as hard about the culture i still do

11:20George Kurdin: but it's like self-perpetuating at this point tell us how you operationalize that i've heard little things about slack for example yes slack you know everything is an open praise feedback uh everyone sees everything from investor updates to to to code to sales wins and losses we're like quite anti-meeting so we don't really have any meetings we don't have stand-ups for eng for example at all uh we do something called ytb in writing it's like a way to i guess it's too nuanced and and we have we have we have we have an all-hands meeting every monday 9 a.m where like We discuss everything in the company.

11:55We have a sales meeting and a customer meeting. But generally speaking, no meetings. Just so that people can be in flow and build or spend time with customers.

12:04George Kurdin: How many people total at the company? 16. 16. Yeah, that are involved in these all hands. Yeah. A quick pause. If you run outbound sales, this is big news. Most reps are bouncing between five different tools just to send one email. But there's a better way. Nooks is the AI agent workspace built for intelligent outbound, where AI agents and your reps work together in one place. Nooks' AI sequencing handles the busy work, finding prospects, writing outreach, knowing who to contact and when, so your team can focus on actual conversations. If you're evaluating your outbound stack or renewing legacy tools, check out nooks.ai.

12:39George Kurdin: That's N-O-O-K-S dot A-I. So quite small. And I think the last piece is tons of mistakes, like mainly on me, just because I'm a bit older, but our hiring process like the big thing and the big the biggest inputs and why it's working is the people and the reason for why we have these people is because of the recruiting piece and a lot of it is led by my co-founder joe who is like an end of one human being but i think we've been very fortunate to attract the kinds of people that are on the team today very cool tell me a little bit more about the slack piece because i think a lot of people want to emulate that overall mind share around teammates but it's a lot harder to operationalize so let's say i'm a teammate of yours and maybe i i do something not in the finest way you know there was a better way to do it how do we actually share that learning with the rest of the team does it just go in slack somebody types it up in slack ideally like you know it's constructive feedback like if you have something for me just about something that i like like a better word fucked up then and there'll probably be a private conversation, but then we'll try to have a retro or a conversation about this in the open.

13:47And I think that a fast, in the moment, hey, what went wrong? How can it be better? What's at least one action we're taking based on this is better than some fancy retro and a Gdoc, and it takes five people in a meeting just to write it out. And now with Claude, obviously, it'll parse everything and it becomes part of the knowledge base. So I think do it fast, write it down, something, even if it's imperfect, write it down, is better than something more polished tomorrow. And do it in the open. That's what does it generally.

14:20George Kurdin: So let's say somebody, for lack of a better word, made an error or could have done something in a better way. So somebody provides constructive feedback. They would type it up quick, throw it in Slack. Everybody at the company has visibility to this. And how do people react? Are they celebrating? Like, what kind of emojis do we have in the slack oh crazy i think emojis is like i think you've seen it but i think emoji is like kind of indicative of of company culture i think like some of the best cultures that i've seen crazy emojis people have emojis we'll have like you know five emojis for sophie with like laser eyes and lots of like unique things i think default slack emojis is kind of you know yeah um but but i think it's it's it's looked at as like hey we've leveled up like we've made this mistake now what is our response like hey we lost the deal like how will we do better going forward it's kind of uses fuel and i think it's very important that it's blameless and everyone understands that it's blameless and yeah we're so tight-knit that it's now like cool we got this opportunity to learn from this mistake let's get better yeah a very i would say that translates well to a culture of experimentation because typically you're celebrating the wins or really any kind of constructive feedback is a data point used to help redirect and help everyone level up yeah yeah super interesting that was uh yeah one of the biggest things people called out actually of just appreciating the culture of accountability and and perhaps like having it to another degree where people really celebrate these learnings um and if you do anything the whole company will know and the whole company will celebrate that learning so that that's very cool and very special how you're doing that yeah it's it's all a team we're trying i think it is it is quite special and i'm super energized mainly by the team these days.

16:01Like I cannot let them down. I think when we speak again, I hope we retain this. Like it's quite magical now. It obviously gets really hard once you're like 100 to 100 people. So I think some of it is just our size too.

16:13George Kurdin: Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how you scale that just as the team scale. Yeah. Hopefully we can do it. Let's talk a little bit more about the product itself. You gave us a quick summary, but talk a little bit about the problem like why solve this problem accounts receivable so essentially people send invoices it takes them a long time to get paid why did you decide on that acute problem to solve there was another company that was building out of south park commons with a different co-founder who's incredible his name is anton and uh we're doing yolo models which is like it was a way to test mobile apps without an sdk so like computer vision-based testing and we were doing okay but quite quickly we learned it's going to be a very small market.

16:55And then we basically shut down the company and returned the money. And one big reason for why this, to your point, like everyone has this, it's just massive TAM. And the reason for why we wanted to build in a space that is massive is it's good for recruiting. People want to work with fast-growing companies. They want to work with fast-growing businesses. And we couldn't really come up with anything that's a larger TAM than FinTech. And so our founding principles were like, Big Tam, let's actually be an apply AI company. So no gimmicks, have to actually use LLMs to solve the business, this core problem.

17:30And it's beautiful for unstructured data in AR because AR is just conversations, emails, phone calls, data. LLMs are amazing at wrangling that. And then our other big thing last year was let's not get disrupted by Satya and Sam. and so and now obviously it's like dario and claude but we really wanted to be to the extent that we could like fight against primarily other founders less so the frontier labs and we had this belief that this problem is like so nuanced data is so sensitive the integrations are so hard you cannot make a mistake you have to have your own harness that like yeah i think eventually the labs will come for this but we have like a decade to to really build a big business yeah and And so then we kind of reverse engineered our way into this problem.

18:20Like I don't have a story about how my parents in Russia were not paid for some milk that they sold. Like we don't have that. It's just kind of like opportunistic reverse engineering into like what would be a good business.

18:31George Kurdin: Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I like it. I mean, it's brilliant. And like you said, even if the Frontier Labs do try and comfort in 10 years, there's a lot of applications that because they process so much sensitive data and just by nature of meeting, to be like the top 1 % we believe are going to be just fine. So yes, there may be the capabilities, but will it make sense for someone to build through a frontier model or go with an application layer that is building like the top-notch capabilities? Probably the latter. Yeah, yeah. Especially something as sensitive as your revenue and cash flow.

19:09I would agree. I mean, 11Lavis has done, I mean, obviously I wouldn't put us in the same bucket. They're also an incredible applied AI company. They have their own models, but they've done an incredible job of building a phenomenal business, right? Yeah. And at this point, it's just theirs. And so, yeah, we aspire to be the same.

19:26George Kurdin: Super cool. And, yeah, I think to your second question, you know, if we can put money into your pocket that's really yours and accelerate cash flow for you and front load the money, we believe we can meaningfully help your business. that is hard ROI, that is measurable dollars, that's sort of like time savings, like nebulous efficiency, we are motivated by that. And we'll stop with nothing to achieve that. And that is why we think this is what businesses need. Yeah, 100%. Take us through almost as if somebody isn't in the founder seat or isn't running AR. Like what actually happens? Maybe I'll give like the very high level for my end and you can fill in the gaps.

20:05George Kurdin: Yeah, yeah. You mean like why does it like get stuck? Yeah, why does it get stuck? So business sends an invoice. It's net 30 days. The recipient has to pay it within 30 days. Why does it get stuck? Why aren't they getting paid? Amazing question. Imagine like an equation that has like nine different variables, like X plus Y plus Z, like theta. And like each one of these variables is a reason. And so it's very important. It's a good question because we cannot impact some of these variables. So like one very obvious reason for why it gets stuck is you're broke. if you actually don't have the money cash flow that's not something we can do today like you know you don't loan etc but another reason why it gets stuck and i'll get to the parts quickly like where we can actually help another reason why it gets stuck is like sophie you're just so big you're just such a big business you can just like flex on me like nike or walmart can just basically be like 180 days and also when it hits i'll be like another 30 days late because they can because everyone wants them as a supplier and they they have like little people that will exercise the might of the firm and like increase the cash conversion cycle and so these variables are somewhat immovable then there's a bunch of other variables like uploading invoices to ap portals making sure that upstream or downstream the invoice have no mistakes uh interfacing with the teams on the other end which is ultimately like communication like oh hey like pay me this thing actually no i have this question actually you know i cannot pay because i left for pat leave and now and so there's there's a bunch of reasons for beyond those two that that i think impacts the delays mistakes admin clerical talking to someone else it's also like a very archaic system designed for like a person talking to a person but why can't it be like like venmo like why can't you just like message me and be like hey man like send the money pay up yeah yeah um so that's what we're striving to okay and so how does monk do that we obviously use the labs but we have we've built what's now colloquially known as the harness we have proprietary harness for account receivables with our own set of evals our own guardrails our own tests that does collections that does cash application which is a colossal problem in businesses this is a mechanism of figuring out what of the deposits on your bank account should be matched to what invoices and it's a hard problem because there's many reasons why they cannot be a match like effects or short pay etc so we have a harness and then we we layer your rules your policies your business guard rails etc to guide the agents to perform on your behalf and there's a bunch of other modules in the platform but that's how we do it.

22:54George Kurdin: And we're talking like the implications for some businesses is astounding. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions. Yeah, I think, well, not a thing. We see it in our customers' numbers or like unsolicited messages from customers that are like, oh my God, this is insane. But it's very much one of those where it's just a hard fact. Like the world has accepted that the way that the money moves, which it doesn't really move is okay and the the delays are okay yeah all these issues are okay and so when there is like an actual legitimate antidote to this problem yeah it's it's it's a huge impact yeah yeah definitely and so you built your own proprietary harness what are your thoughts on how that creates differentiation moving forward just as the models get better people are building more application layers there's been a lot of discourse around harness lately and just how important it is now as that differentiating piece.

23:51George Kurdin: Curious your thoughts. I mean we should hire you as our marketer. You just answered it. There we go. I'm already all in. We think it's a big deal. We think that it's not like ultimately everyone has the same keys to the models. Like everyone roughly has the same access. What separates the winners from the losers besides their taste and their judgment on the client and the UI is how they wrangle the models and that's that's that's the harness yeah yeah definitely and i think like yeah at least at least in our space i can't speak for any other domain but in our space um precision and accuracy and security are like tier zero and you know if we make a mistake and a cfo will message me and i will rip my face off if i get something wrong with our customers and their money and so we don't just try to like solve the problem by just throwing compute or inference right at the problem we have a lot of guardrails and logic and procedures to make sure that things go exactly how Sophie wants.

24:55Right. And that's the really hard part.

24:57George Kurdin: Yeah. And the stakes are so high in the finance space. Like you said, somebody will rip your face off, as you said. Which has happened and I've learned. And I try not to do that again. Yeah. Got to protect the goods. But the finance space truly is like very, very high stakes. And so it's challenging for people to build in the finance space sometimes, which you've been doing an incredible job at actually circumventing and being able to build. If we zoom out, what would you see the status of finance and AI is at an intersection right now? From the conversations that we're having with customers, it's now no longer about, hey, let's try some AI and let's pilot a thing.

25:42I think we're way past that stage. And it's obviously also in mass media. So that means that we're definitely past that stage. And it's very much about hard ROI. And hard ROI is bottom line or top line of margins. I could make the case that time savings or efficiency isn't even that impressive anymore. Because like, hey, we made George hours more efficient, but now he's on Reddit. Like, what has he done with these five hours? And so, yeah, I think it's, you know, we love our position because we help you grow your top line. And then the other big piece, I think it's just, it's no longer about just like procuring a solution.

26:24It's also like, how do you get like a company to actually use the solution? And that's something that we're growing into.

26:31George Kurdin: Yeah, the latter is a huge one right now. I mean, there's tons of reports of people not seeing ROI from AI. And we're seeing a tremendous spike in for deployed engineers because it is really hard to adopt. And so companies are having to go in and physically help companies adopt AI and understand the use cases. Okay, zooming out, more macro, in my experience, I think that these things like margin optimization or like, in this case, model costs internally are like really easy to solve our problems in the future. And so like I just have a wavering conviction that we can tune the costs. But right now we have to grow.

27:08And so I'm not – and we're like quite small. And we're very fortunate where the talent density is so high that one person can do like five things plus Claude. And we should like invest in our best people. And so I'm not really thinking too much about like internal inference or like our anthropic bill beyond like a few caps.

27:27George Kurdin: Is it going up? Your anthropic bill? Yeah. Yeah. Nothing like, certainly nothing I've seen, but I think, but in the hands of the right people, and like there's a lot of people on the team that are smarter than me. I mean, it's incredible like how much we can do. And also like, we're not the first company in our space. Like we're actually quite, you can say late to the space, but it's a huge advantage for us, a huge edge, because we can just leaf frog people because of the models. Yeah, definitely. Let's see. And are you hiring for any roles right now? Hiring for all the roles, as you can imagine, all in New York, if possible.

28:04But yeah, engineers, sales, post-sales, ops, recruiters.

28:09George Kurdin: Finish this sentence for me. The thing nobody tells you about founding a company is? The thing that nobody tells you about founding a company is that sales and marketing is tier zero. It was always tier zero, and it's more important than ever right now. That is a very cool perspective to hear from someone with an edge background. I'm glad you're on this podcast. Yeah, I mean, on the go-to-market side, we obviously are true believers in that. That was the impetus for starting GTM Fund and GTM Now is how do you help support more people with go-to-market because as tech modes decline, that really is the catalyst and differentiator for growth.

28:45George Kurdin: But it's interesting to see that kind of permeating more mainstream now since that was pre-ChatGPG, pre-AI kind of when we first started. Yeah, you guys were early and we're very fortunate that you support us. And yeah, it makes a ton of sense now. But yeah, this will be my message. That's a great message. Let's talk a little bit about fundraising advice, you know. Okay. You have raised a Series A. You raised about$28 million total. And we were fortunate to meet early on in your journey. So you've got some experience fundraising. You've got some experience leading a company that is venture-backed as a CEO.

29:17George Kurdin: Also, for any founders, a couple steps behind you looking to successfully raise funds. What advice would you give them? I think the best one, and this is not something that came to me, I learned this from someone else who's way better than me at this, James, but compress the process. I think that running a tight process is so important because then you generate heat around your round. At the extremes, if you are casually seeing a number of VCs and going to dinners and then you take some meetings and then you're like, don't take some meetings and then it's like three months or even maybe a month, it's too long.

29:51I think it's too long. I think that it will hurt your round a lot.

29:56George Kurdin: Can confirm that we would also echo that piece of advice and agree with you on that. At the end of the day, you want to elicit FOMO from an investor. An investor should feel like there is a hard deadline and that there's demand for that and want to get in before that deadline. And so if you're elongating a process, you remove an element to that FOMO. Yeah, that's well said. Hard deadline, even better than I said. Hard deadline, precisely. And stepping away from the maybe the go-to-market side, the building, the founder side, it could be that, but it could be anything. What is the best piece of advice you have got and who gave it to you?

30:32I would say like one thing is to invest in your founder relationship and to spend a lot of time. Really, if you don't have a co-founder, trying to find the right co-founder. I think that is so obvious as like most obvious advice, like, oh, drink water. well duh like you're gonna die like but that's why it's so important and it's like scientifically proven and so i think it's like even more important to have the right partner than than having a great idea because i think most companies will just fail because you get into a fight or like you know sophie and i run out of energy and that's why the company dies and so find the right person and then continuously invest in this relationship the way you wouldn't like a marriage and the

31:16George Kurdin: divorce rate, if we can use that word in this context of co-founders, is quite high. I might be misquoting this, but I've definitely read something around the 50 % mark. I think, yeah, it's quite hard. And I had a co-founder breakup with someone that I've known for seven years. And we've built a bunch of things together. And because you're under so much stress that even with the best intentions, which is also why like you have to, I think, invest in the fabric of this relationship like a lot like consciously do it and and it can be just like oh let's just have like a recurring you know half an hour on friday that's not enough definitely how did you and joe meet uh introduced by dylan who is a partner at south park commons because he said we're both hardcore and you guys should chat both hardcore i like that i will say you did get the description and for multiple people as being one of the most direct and kind people combination that they have ever met, which is a very unique, beautiful combination.

32:16I don't know if I deserve it, but thank you. Go people. Yeah.

32:21George Kurdin: Well, shout out Paul is one of those people. This is fantastic. George, this has been really, really helpful. Thank you for sharing your journey. If anyone wants to follow you, follow Monk, where can they find you? Yeah. Thank you for having me, Safi. we are at monk.com. And yeah, you can find us at monk.com or you can just find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Perfect. First name, last name. Beautiful. And those will be in the show notes. Thank you, George. Thanks for having me.