Building the $3B API That Didn’t Exist, Europe’s Regulation Problem | Marcelo Lebre, Co-founder of Remote

27:32Turner Novak:It's so fascinating though, because if I'm a country, like if I'm the country of Portugal, my revenue that I'm bringing in it's basically like taxes. Like you would think that I would be on top of optimizing how like efficiently collecting taxes and like making as much tax revenue as possible probably. But it's literally like in the US, like you submit your taxes and they're just like, they don't even know what you owe. Like it's just like, this looks directly corrected. There we go. It's like, what? Because as I told you, like the reason is if 60, 70 % of the population was like standard, then they would do it.

28:10But what I told you is that it's actually the opposite. 60, 70 % of the people are edge cases or they have something going on that is not normal, that is additive in complexity. And so it grinds the machine to a halt because the infrastructure is very old and outdated. So it never really gets to see much more than, hey, we optimize for the norm and there's normal distribution. We're going to check like this. We check for the upper bounds. We check for the lower bounds. Everything in the middle, as you said, is directionally correct. So let's assume that's right until there's an audit. That's why you know a lot of people that get surprised in an audit, both negative and positive, like, hey, I overpaid taxes for five years.

29:01Awesome. You're going to get some bonus. But Some people are like, oh, no, I owe like$100 just because something got misfiled or something. Yeah.

29:12Turner Novak:And one thing super interesting that you said, you talked about ways that AI can kind of interact with this. When I just think about how large language models have evolved, it's literally take a bunch of text, so rules and laws, interpret it, and then just execute on it, right? Just do the thing. So it sounds like maybe this is a pretty down the fairway application of like, hey, can we use large language models and AI to automate some of the stuff. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah. So this was actually one of our unfair advantages. For years before this advent of AI, we had a, as part of our core way of running the business, everything is documented, literally everything under the sun.

29:58How you take time off, how you do whatever. And most of it is public if you go to handbook.remot.com. But it also means that things like the way we operate in every country across the world is also heavily documented.

30:12Turner Novak:Oh, so like each of the rules you've kind of like figured out for customers and in the product? Every single thing was already documented. So the moment we had LLMs available or widely available, we were like, oh, this is pure gold because we'll just plug it in. And now you have these masterminds, LLMs that can give you insanely complex answers or very fast, straightforward answers to very insanely complex questions. Now we're at a stage where we still check them because I'm not just about to give someone heavy, impactful tax advice. Yeah, some hallucinations in there. We all still get those. Even though we tell our LEMs to not make mistakes, but they still make mistakes.

31:03And anyway, the point is, it led us to massive improvements all across the board, from internal operations to external operations, product development. but a lot of it comes from our obsession with knowledge documentation on a per country basis

31:24Turner Novak:really interesting i pulled it up the handbook.remote.com i'll throw a link in the description if people want to check it out and one actually super interesting thing that i saw kind of tying back to the early comment about like a lot of competition in the space there's a lot of players you had you guys had just recently announced actually like a partnership with i I think Gusto and Workday where you're powering their global payroll. I'm not exactly sure what that was. So what happened exactly or what did you guys announce? The story behind this is that we started to build remote. And as I told you and alluded to, as we were building it, we had to build a lot of the infrastructural things that do not exist or had not exist.

32:06So we thought about, you know what? Like, why don't we make this available to others? that there's a lot of adjacent businesses that we're good friends with that in a market of consolidation, they can treat what we do as a revenue opportunity and we treat them as top of funnel opportunity as well. So we started to create an API over pretty much everything we did. And across the years, we partner with amazing people and amazing brands, You know, Gusto, Personio, Bamboo, HR, and now, most recently, a very big partnership with Workday. So this means that we will power their operation in employee records, in payroll, in contractor management and payments across the world using our infrastructure API.

33:04So we are now that glorious API that I mentioned that did not exist. And now it does. And it amplifies, it does two things. Of course, one is for my ego. And so it further amplifies our own belief. Because to be honest, six years ago, anyone talking to us would say, these guys are nuts. building an API for global payroll? What the hell?

33:36Turner Novak:Like just that it's a dumb idea or is it like it's too hard? Yeah, it's too hard. Like a lot of the feedback we got is, holy shit, like there are massive businesses out there. Massive. Just doing it one single country. Right? If you go into any country in the world, you'll find a local payroll provider that has been around for 20 years and is making like 600 million in revenue a year. And you're like, these guys are doing fine. It's just a simple country. Like, why don't you just focus on a couple of countries? And we're like, we're insane to the point of, you know, having high ambition and, you know, but also very down to earth to understand that this takes a lot of work.

34:24And so, look, we took on the challenge and it feels a bit like walking in the dark with a bunch of people and everyone is asking you, are you sure this is the way? And you're like, yeah, I can see it even though you can't. And eventually it turns out, first turns out to be true and you're not hallucinating. Certainly not on shrooms and saying crazy things. But it's a weird... journey, but well worth it, I'd say. Because ultimately, we really empower, and it's a very cliche thing to say, there's a lot of people that, one, can build the business that they always wanted to build because they're able to offload all their crazy stuff to us from an HR payroll standpoint.

35:18And two, there's a lot of great people that can get finally hired in countries where they wouldn't before because it's just too complex for companies to hire them or pay them either locally or remotely, whatever you want to call it. Because as I said, even just running local payroll for someone as an edge case could be way too much. And we all know of stories of people that got turned away because they were an immigrant in one country, went into an office for a few meetings and an interview, but then was the best, but got turned away just because the company couldn't really find a way to pay them properly.

35:56Turner Novak:Oh, really? That happens a lot? It happens a lot, right? If you go to agencies like those, sometimes CPAs or local accountants that take over running the business, the payroll business for small businesses, they don't really know how to handle all this. So they will more easily turn away business and people then handle it and we saw like we saw when we started we had countries where we literally got told we do not want your business anymore you are too complex for what we like to do and we don't want your business please go elsewhere and and this was as simple as learning and expanding and learning like landing and learning to expand our business there and they would act as like surf consultants, but it was way too complex.

36:57So just to give you a bit of flavor of why it's so messed up still.

37:01Turner Novak:So you were working with some of these sort of like CPAs that were, they were executing on a country by country basis, some of the payments for you originally, or am I understanding that right? No, not really. But my point is you have to learn as you're gonna build something, it's like, okay, I'm fairly certain I can build a modern house. but I've never built a house in ever. So the best thing you should do is go talk to people that have built houses. They learn like what are the tips and tricks, what are the things they do that work and what are the things they do that don't work. And it's like the Henry Ford scenario where it's like, yeah, people were asking for faster horses and I built a car.

37:45So you have to hear what the faster horses look like so that you can envision the car. So meaning that you have to go into local experts talk to them hear what they do why are they the best and then build something that is better than than the best that's what i i mean that makes sense and so i think this that you talked a

38:05Turner Novak:little bit about starting the company so when you guys first started it i think you actually met from you and your co-founder yob from your wives or now wives like you were like dating at the time what what's kind of like the the story of how you guys first met well it's a very boring one but essentially i had moved to so i'm not i'm from portugal but i'm not from lisbon lisbon is capital and i'm from a tiny village up north and and i and i went to lisbon for work i moved to lisbon i got a job there and i was moving in a week over a weekend to start on monday and on sunday so my wife told me hey you know what at the time girlfriends she said well you know remember you know my my friend from university carla is back in lisbon so she had gone to the netherlands for her masters i think at the time and she was like oh she's back in lisbon we should go for a coffee i'm like yeah let's go for a coffee and she has a boyfriend i'm like fuck no like i don't do those things i'm not a not a social animal and like i don't want to she was like marcello you don't know anyone in this city.

39:15If you need something, if you're, like, you literally have no one. So you know Carla, you like Carla, so let's go have coffee at least. And like, okay, let's go have coffee. So we went, and Job was there, and we were sort of third wheeling, and we ended up talking geek stuff, nerd stuff. He was a researcher, and he was walking me through his crazy setup at the lab and we sort of hit it off and it was kind of nice and then he emailed me a few days later saying hey i had this idea and i thought about you you want to talk about it and i was like yeah let's let's have another coffee so we we met and we started talking about sort of the first discussion was we were a bit like-minded you know the the spite store familiar larry david like the the curb your enthusiasm no i don't think so curb your enthusiasm it's a larry david show you know he at some point he he opens a spite store it's a it's a coffee place and but essentially to in spite of the the the his the neighbor that had a coffee place that sort of treated him poorly and he's like i'm going to open it just to mess with them because there's it should be it's not how hard can it be right to build something properly and we are always we we found ourselves to be very close together talking about in the same thought on and talking a lot about something that brought us together which is like why people that some people that you meet they are doing their jobs they're so cranky about it like you go to any reception, you know, authorities or public offices, or even just private practices.

41:09And people are like, computer says no. They don't want to help you. They don't want to do business. They're just collecting a paycheck. Why is this? Like, it's so fucking upsetting that you need something and you go to a place and that person has no interest in helping you whatsoever, even though it's their job. So we sort of talked about it and I was like, well, the reality is people have that job because they couldn't find the thing that made them happy. They need the money, but they didn't have the opportunity. They couldn't find the opportunity to do the thing they're really good at. It wouldn't pay money.

41:48So how could we solve it? And the first thought was, okay, what if we found a way to, you know, the best companies to hire the best people in the world and vice versa. We tried it. So we sort of, okay, let's give it a go. Job quit his job and I was running, I was essentially working double jobs. I would work until, you know, nine to six, then go home, work until 2 a.m., sometimes more, to build this. And we applied to a local incubator. This was 2012 in Portugal.

42:25Turner Novak:Oh, wow. This was like seven years before officially starting. Okay, this is a long time ago. And so we applied and we got a bad rejection letter, email at the time. Oh, no. What'd they say? It was very dumb. Honestly, looking bad, it was really like, yeah, I don't think you guys know enough to build this. And it was very off-putting, to be honest. I thought about like, it was super, I remember this tiny incubator, they would invest like 20k or so. But in Portugal, it was a fortune at the time. It would be enough for us to, you know, sort of build. Took a chunk of change, yeah. And we, you know, we sort of got a bit sad about it.

43:17And Job was like, yeah, let's keep mulling on the idea, mulling over the idea. and he then got a job and we kept working on and sort of maturing this idea. We also start building other things. You know, some friends get together and they play soccer and whatnot. Job and I would build products. We build software together. That's what we do. And eventually came a point where I think our idea is we built so many apps and platforms and shit over the years. So, so many. There's a whole cemetery of apps in our GitLab repos that never saw the life. Or rather, they did, but we didn't sell them because we suck at selling.

44:08Oh, no.

44:10Turner Novak:Why do you suck at selling? What did you do wrong? It was very practical, actually. So I can give you a few things that we saw, whether we built. One, of course, one was like a vetted platform for companies and people. So we would only allow certain companies and certain people to apply. So it's like a recruiting platform, like a job? Yeah, it's like a job board, but like highly vetted. We would like handpick companies and people to be in platform. And we didn't really want it to scale, but it was like a niche thing, more of an artisanal thing. it started to have some traction but we were like okay so what if we make money how like he was in the netherlands i was in portugal how is this going to work like who's going to pay the taxes where are we going to incorporate this company who's going to be the owner how do we distribute money and we sort of realized that like to do it only in europe is impossible.

45:10We would have to start a company in the US. And I'm like, dude, this is a whole thing. Oh, wait, I have this another idea. Let's start building another idea. And we did this like seven or eight times. Another one was before Find My was a thing. We actually built an app.

45:31Turner Novak:This is Find My Friends. Yeah. So it was like, hey, you know, you would just either share a position of things or of people, friends. And you would always have, you know, the best path to meet them and see where they are. And this was 2013. So way before all this became a thing. It was funny because then it became a thing. And we sort of killed it at the end because like, oh, what if we now build a way? Because, you know, I was at GitLab. I was at another company, CTO. So it's like, what if we built a way like Mixpanel to track data or signals, but simpler, like not as fancy, much more down to earth, much more direct data to people.

46:26And we built it and then we started using it for some projects. They're like, oh, we should start selling it. Yeah, let's also build another app. so we and this went on and on and on for like seven years like and then and and we i i think we at some point we just realized that we like building things together and that's what we enjoyed um and and but eventually came a time where we sort of both realized look we know enough we've built enough we've built teams we've built companies for other people like let's stop dancing around this and let's put our you know weight and minds into it and then we

47:09Turner Novak:started remote so it was it that big problem of you you kind of mentioned you kept running in this problem of like how do we collect the money how do we pay people and like so it was like the reason that you stopped all these different projects was then the inspiration for actually that was the idea for remote. Yeah. So it got us together quite a lot. You've also felt this at GitLab where they were also distributed, paying people was not easy and so on and so forth. And, you know, when you're having fun, then when you start talking about making money out of things, sort of sucks the air out of the room.

47:48When it becomes so serious, then now you're talking about taxes and lawyers and it sort of locks you in. And by the way, I know if you're listening to us and you're born and raised in the US, it sounds like, what the fuck is this guy talking about? Because in the US, it's very, very easy to spin up a business and tear it down. In Europe, it's a massive nightmare. You're legally liable for every single thing that happens. even if it's a tiny company of one or two. So we have massive downside on starting a business. Tremendous upfront payment of taxes even without realizing capital. So it's not as straightforward as we want it to be.

48:36And at the time, that's as far as we were willing to go. We had our careers as well. We had our families to support. And we're having fun. So that's what kept us alive doing those things up until 2019.

48:49Turner Novak:Yeah, so 2019, it's a pretty interesting timing where you like officially decided to do this in 2019. And then COVID hit, like, depending on where you were in the world, end of 2019 being a 2020. What was just kind of like the series of events just throughout that time period of like, we start the company, you know, I'm assuming you get, maybe there's like some customers, but then all of a sudden, like a couple months later, it's like, oh shit, the entire world is working remote, like in everything flipped. Can you just kind of explain like from your perspective inside the company, how that went?

49:25We started the business in January, 2019. we started to build stuff and launch the first version in August but was very much like a landing page hey companies can sign up here you can advertise some of your jobs and then we're going to connect both ends on employment and payment and we started to get such big traction and then we're like okay maybe we should race for it should we? we didn't really want to but we we met the folks at Index Ventures and were super early supporters of this crazy journey and Hannah was you know she was so into she was such a believer in the whole thing that maybe up until that moment, I didn't really believe, I don't really look much into the future.

50:34I'm a builder. And I thought, let's build this as much as we possibly can and then we'll see what comes out of it. And Yop was like, should we talk to investors? Should we take the call? And I told him, look, it's going to be a huge time waste. you can of course and we split the bill but he's the CEO for all intents and purposes yeah well let's talk to these people and see what they're about and our crazy crazy idea had quite a lot of excitement around it and I remember I was walking my dog Job was walking his dog and he was like the conversation went this way this is the time for us to decide if we want to go the venture-backed route or not.

51:30I said, yo, I'm all in. If you're all in, then we go. If one of us is not, then we shouldn't. I was like, okay, we're both all in. So let's go. And we took the investment. Then it just skyrocketed. We started to have so many customers, even before the pandemic hit. So we started scaling pre-pandemic. and once the pandemic hit, it just kept going. It kept piling up and piling up to the point that we had over two months of back-to-back sales calls. We couldn't get bookings, time to book schedule with people. Yeah, and then the pandemic hits and we're like, what the fuck do we do? Will this affect us?

52:16We don't know. No one knows. We just keep working. We just keep going. That's it. one day at a time. We're all winging it anyway. So all of a sudden, we have people coming to us, big companies saying, hey, could you guys help us? How do you do this distributed work thing? Walking companies through it, showing them how we do things, the things, business kept going. But to be honest, I felt that ever since I started this business, every year there's some fucking near apocalypse thing happening. And the first year was remote, was the pandemic. Then soon after the pandemic, it started to die out. It was like banks collapsing, economies collapsing.

53:05There's big bubble bursts, 2021, 2022. Then there's banks shutting doors, people freaking out. No one knows what's going to happen. Then one war started Everyone scrambling, is this World War III? What is going on? Market's going crazy again. Then another war starts. Then we're in this very weird scenario. And so now we're in an AI bubble or whatever you want to call it. So every year, there has been something that is a world-changing event for the past seven years. And at this point, he's just rolled into punches. That's it.

53:57Turner Novak:Does it help? It seems like maybe it'd be beneficial that the company that you're building is kind of a trend that's probably going to continue no matter what happens in the world, if that makes sense. Whether or not there's an economic crisis, people will still need jobs and need to work, etc. but also people probably continue to unlock new economic opportunities globally. People working in a global setting is probably just going to continue to peripherate and get more pronounced versus not. Is that a good way to think about it? It's half of it. So the other half is companies also learned throughout all these events that they can de-risk themselves if they start to operate across different countries.

54:49Not just for the commercial opportunity of being able to sell into a different geography, but also because you can set up an entity somewhere and we will help you set up your entity and then run payroll for you in whatever country. And all of a sudden, you are not as exposed to a centralized economy. So if you have a company that is only operating, let's say in the US, something happens with the dollar, you're screwed. If all of a sudden now your lease doubles, you're screwed. The salaries in a country like SF or the Bay Area or New York are certainly not the same as the salaries in London or Paris or Lisbon or Madrid.

55:39So all these are different parts of the same equation. that balances out opportunity and talent across the world at the same time as it primes for execution. So we have big companies that are openly against sort of remote or distributed work that are big customers of ours because they realize that, you know, they could come to us, learn how to build an entity in one country and then open an office there and have their whole global workforce in a single platform. Everything is straightforward for them. We take care of all the tax parts. We take care of all the details. If they have any questions, they come to us.

56:22We help sort everything out. And up until very recently, this was a whole thing. You would have to hire one of the big fours, pay millions for them to give you a report on how to set up an entity, on how to employ people locally. And that's all given with remote. So remote as a company. So that changed aggressively, we saw. And it also gives us the ability to go with the flow, meaning that we as a business, we're a big raft. So that if one part of the world is not hiring, the other part will counter and will start to hire because of the opportunity that they can leverage. It's pure arbitrage and they are our customers.

57:11So if one size of the customer pool is not hiring, the other will. And it creates a big distribution across the world that gives you significant leverage and to keep growing and becoming even stronger.

57:24Turner Novak:And it's kind of interesting, even if a company is anti-remote work, like you must be in the office, 996, we grind, it's all in person. Eventually, you get to a point like, all right, we got to open a sales office in London. Like your base in San Francisco, like we'll open an office in London. Maybe we're expanding into Asia. So we have an office in Japan and you got to hire people there. So it's like, even for the most in person cultures, like work cultures, it's still a global company. If you get, if you're big enough. So it just became, it didn't have a name. Now everyone says they're a distributed organization, a global organization.

58:04No one cares anymore. Either you're in an office or in the back of a van, no one really cares.

58:13Turner Novak:Yeah. Do you have any customers that work out of vans? Oh, yeah. Oh, really? Okay. We have, as I said, we have financial institutions as regulated, as corporate, as white color, anti, as you possibly can. And we also process payroll for those folks that are traveling across the world. So, you know, to each their own. Yeah, my wife actually has been trying to convince me to do like the van life thing where you like live in a van and travel. I'm like, I don't know about this. I can't go that far. I mean, look, you got a Starlink, got a way to travel, way to be. It's so doable these days. Yeah. So what if you found like, you've got to be like one of the global experts on like working remotely, like having a remote team.

59:04Turner Novak:what have you kind of found is just like best practices that are remote like for you guys that has worked in terms of like if I want to come to you, I'm just like, hey, I need to figure out what I'm doing right or wrong with my own team. Like what would you kind of, I guess, giving me like an assessment of like, here's some things you should think about and this is like best practices that we found and how I should approach it if I wanted to ask you for advice on this. So there are four tenets and there are warnings. First is you must document everything. If you are working distributedly, people will not always be online to answer for things.

59:43Different time zones, different happenings, document everything by default. It's one.

59:50Turner Novak:So what's a good way to do that? Do you use Microsoft Word, Notion? We use Notion very heavily since day one. Very big Notion users. So there's a lot of work processes, like you basically write out how you do a job. How do you do that? How do you take time off? How do you organize projects? What kind of projects? How do you describe things? What is expected of people? What is the job at? What is the role? What is the pay? Everything is transparently documented. So that you can just, at max, just link stuff to people. And people can find whatever they want and you're not there to just answer a basic question.

1:00:27All right. So that's one. Second is asynchronous work is fundamental, meaning that you're not standing by idle waiting for someone else. This often happens in the office, but people just don't see it. It is like, hey, well, I need this, but John is not here. I don't have it documented and John is not here. So maybe he went out to lunch. I'm just going to have a coffee while he comes back. And meanwhile, you know, John comes back and you're already talking to someone else. he sort of misses you. You know, when you go back to John, actually John is now in a meeting. So you decide to wait for John again.

1:01:07So all of a sudden you wasted two, three hours waiting for John.

1:01:10Turner Novak:Might be the end of the day. You go home. Yeah. So this happens a lot. But in an office, it's like, oh no, you know what? This guy works a lot. He was there, didn't even go out to lunch. He's just on his computer all day long, nonstop. But you produced nothing because you were waiting for John. so the the basics of async is you parallelize your work and you're able to do several things at the same time it's called multiplexing because you did something you you shot that over to john now you're picking something else and you keep going and like in your conversation with john rather than wait for him you recorded a loom or a video you send it over easy to convey the message and to have like a sense of just the expression rather than just writing.

1:01:59Turner Novak:So you could technically do that in an office as well. Yes, you can do this whatever you want, really. The third one is make no assumptions because ultimately you don't know if someone is working at the same time as you are. Meaning, you know, if you want to build a distributor organization, you really don't know if someone is Let's do this. You know, if they have the same context as you, if they're ready to answer a call, you just don't know. So if you operate based on that assumption, you're going to really waste a lot of time. So you use the first two tenants. You do a lot of documentation and you work missing.

1:02:42But the core of that third item really is culture is what you tolerate. Just for the fact that you are distributed, it doesn't mean it's a lifestyle. job because there's a lot of people that took a job at you know company because it was just

1:03:06Turner Novak:remote and they're like well i'm just gonna you're like go to the beach and yeah and it's fine right i'm gonna work three hours a day no one really knows no one checks i did my thing and that's it no you really work fucking hard and that's what you should tolerate is people working fucking hard and not less than that just because it's remote. So culture is what you tolerate. Those are three of the core things. And then one advice is, of course, there's what you're billing, how you're billing, who you're billing it with is the important part. As you're hiring people, there's a lot of people that, one, are not great at documenting.

1:03:47They don't care about it. They don't care for it. Second, they don't really want to work in an async environment. This is a lot about how you personally work and handle things. A lot of people really feel that they need a connection, a human connection to be productive. And that's totally fine. but you have to acknowledge that different people work best in different kinds of environments. And this is still true in different offices, right? It's not about, but it becomes even more pragmatically important in this sort of sentence. And I guess the last item is you have to pay attention to the impact of the geographies and time zone because it can have a significant impact.

1:04:44For instance, in some areas of the world, there's a day of the week where people don't work or that people work and you're not expected to.

1:04:55Turner Novak:And it's different. It's different around the world, right? It's very different. Same time that, you know, if it may be 9 a.m. for you, it's probably 7 p.m. for someone else across the world. and you have to bake this into how you work, meaning is it okay or are you unable to tolerate this sort of marginal difference? It's totally fine to say, no, I want to work with a small team. We want to be in a small time zone, a difference, it's totally fine. And same for people building offices, satellite offices, right? Hey, I have my full team in London. I now need a team in, I don't know, Nicaragua. So how will it work?

1:05:45How do you hire people for an office in a country you've never been, but you actually want to do commercial sales and commercial business in? So thinking about through this is like, okay, so do I need corporate law? Like I need to know how to recognize revenue there. How do transfer price works? How do I employ people there? So working through all these elements is key, right? Because you have to understand your potential, your upside, but also your liabilities, your risk. That's where companies like ours come in because remote was built precisely to solve for it because it was a big, big pain.

1:06:23The big pain of how do I plan for executing rather than just focusing on my business and then have someone take care of it. So yeah, there's a lot of different nuances and I could go on all day long, but to be honest, over the last seven years, I've sat down with so many founders and C-levels, VPs of companies that are in this space, finance and HR, and they just want to know how to do things. And my advice generally is different on a business-by-business basis because it differs heavily on the culture, the people, the business, the geography, the financial needs and regulations as well. It really tailor...

1:07:07I can, you know, as I said, I could share for hours the different things that we've learned, but it really is much better tailored when tailored to a specific angle.

1:07:21Turner Novak:What is like the most interesting, like different, unique thing about how people work around the world? Like, I think one I kind of think is fascinating is I think it might be Spain is like they randomly just take off, they kind of take lunch, but it's at like 3 to 4 p.m. or something like that. Do you know what I'm talking about? Are there any interesting things like that you've just come across with the way different cultures might work? Yeah, there's all kinds of idiosyncrasies. So, Spain used to have the siesta. It's not mandatory anymore. And in work, you don't really see it much. But if you do know, certain cultures, they start working later in the day, they work super crazy hours.

1:08:04In some countries in the world, every month, the employer has to print out all the things and take to the tax authorities. Like a stack of everything.

1:08:15Turner Novak:So you can't like electronically submit your tax? Not a thing. Okay. That's such a waste of time. Like so much resources. Yes. In certain countries in Europe, you have to wet sign every single document, or most documents. And if not wet sign properly with your passport signature, it's not valid. We're not talking about third war countries. We're talking about well-known countries, heavy in bureaucracy. In some countries, it's also normal for people to hire a company to quit. So they don't quit themselves. They hire a company to come in and say, this person is quitting. What? How does that work?

1:09:06Yeah, because it's a cultural thing. People don't want to face the sort of shame or... Interesting.

1:09:17Turner Novak:Okay. lack of stature of saying, I'm leaving to another company, I'm betraying you and leave to another country. In certain countries, it's virtually impossible to fire anyone. And in many countries, there's actually very permissive laws that allow people to circumvent any sort of lack of performance. Yeah, I could go on and on and on. It's in countries where you get deduction for riding a bike to office. That's actually probably a good one. That's probably like a good... I'm not judging any. I'm just saying that they exist and to each their own again. Well, I think one of the most insane ones was I think our mutual acquaintance friend, Andreas Klinger.

1:10:03Turner Novak:He's the one who told me about that when in Germany, you need to have a notary, like live read, I think all the documents when you like close a funding round or something. I'm just like, that would take a day. Yes, it does. It takes hours. It literally takes hours. And it reminds me the part in Dune, at least for those that watch the movies or read the book, where the priest is just sitting there before the war, reciting nonstop crazy chants. It reminds me of that. You find all kinds of things across the world. And it really is insane how, you know, it's the... it's almost a question of perception.

1:10:50You know, you remember that meme that was going around, it's like, what is the color of the dress? Is it blue or is it gold? And everyone's like, no, of course this is blue. Of course, right? Isn't this blue? And everyone's like, no, it's gold. What do you mean it's not gold? It's the same thing. Like everyone, if I talk to you about a startup, you're like, yeah, startup is a startup. You know, it's business, you know, growing fast, starting, you know, handful of people, just a bit of money. If everything, you ask this in every single country across the world, The definition is different if it exists.

1:11:20Turner Novak:I mean, it might be risky. Like startups, they fail. You lose your job. Like it's embarrassing that it didn't work. Yeah. There are countries where if you fail, if your startup fails, you are personally liable for the money that you took on from your investors. And you're screwed forever. Jeez, that's crazy. I think, have you come across this? There's this account on Twitter. It's called Compliant VC. It's like this Europe, it's just a parody account. He's an investor from Europe. Have you seen this account? I don't think I did. Oh, it's absolutely hilarious. It's basically run by a compliance company.

1:11:59Turner Novak:They do like SOC2 compliance and stuff like that. But this account's name, it's Henrik Johansson. And he'll tweet things like, like four months ago, I was introduced to a European startup founder. Today we met for coffee for four hours. the company is doing, you know, 800 euros in revenue. And I'm so pleased that they paid their $2 ,000 regulatory bill to like, you know, register the revenue and they're paying proper taxes. So excited that I just next month, I'm going to start my review process. And in three months, I may be able to invest in the company. And I'll invest 25 euros and blah, blah, blah.

1:12:38Turner Novak:And it just like makes like kind of like a parody of some of like the European regulations. I don't know if it's like what you've come across. So probably one of my favorite Twitter accounts where he just kind of, you know, pokes fun of some of this like overly bureaucratic, overly regulatory, onerous stuff that they kind of put on, on startups and in Europe. I could go on and on about those. And they're not a joke at all. So do you know why, like, why are there so many regulations? Like as somebody, because I'm in the U S and I just think when I kind of see some of the stuff that's happening in Europe, I was just kind of, it just kind of seems like a little silly to me.

1:13:15Turner Novak:Like, do you know the reason that there's so much in the culture is so different? So historically, so Europe is, Europe is not a thing, meaning, and this is very loaded sentence. Europe is composed of a bunch of countries, all of them entirely different from one another. So the European Union said, okay, there must be some ground-level truth to how we operate this organization, by this sort of body, right? And what we want is economic stability, prosperity, and react as a bigger group, as we will be able to better defend ourselves, both physically, geopolitically, but also financially. In order to do so, we sort of have to create a big denominator across all the countries.

1:14:20and then you start to see that there's big discrepancies across the board in everything how you treat human rights how employment laws work how you know pollution is as understood so you start to plug holes here and there right and okay so i need to increase how much this country is, you know, because the core basis is there's a balance across it all. No one has the upper hand. No one is so far behind. So there has to be some balance. So on this big, wavy, wavy scenario, you start to pluck the holes. Hey, let's introduce this regulation that allows this country to pick up the slack. Let's introduce that regulation that does not allow that country to sort of go over the line and have such an unfair advantage over the others.

1:15:13And then let's also introduce this regulation that allows us to give away subsidies for a lot of different things. And in order to also give these subsidies, there's also this one country that has another law that allows them to take advantage out of that. So let's introduce this other law that does sort of regulate that. And the complexity of this generated a union that is essentially a regulatory body. I am personally a big defender of something called single responsibility principle. That's how I look into everything that I do.

1:15:53Turner Novak:I've never heard of that before. It's essentially when you're thinking, you're looking at a team and you say, hey, this team is not performing. Why aren't they performing? Well, the first thing I ask is, what is the single responsibility principle? What is this team really responsible for? The one thing. Like, what's the one thing that they care about? And sometimes people say, oh, it's this and that. No, no, no. The one thing. Come hell or high water, that's the one thing you do care about. And there has to be one thing. Right? And the single responsibility principle of the union, the European Union, is to regulate.

1:16:30so what do regulators do they regulate and eventually in or of course you know as regulation is the main thing you know creating the balance in order to keep you know sort of building innovating and all that you introduce all the avenues right you introduce okay so we're going to create, have$3 billion to invest in innovation. Great. And here's 3 million regulations to distribute those subsidies. At the end of the day, those subsidies are badly allocated. Why? Because the theory does not meet practice. Right? You know, the theory of regulation rarely meets the the needs of reality because they're often built, drafted by folks that never built anything ever.

1:17:30So it's as if, you know, you're a dentist, but you never saw a tooth in your life. You went through university, you read only books, and now you walk into a dentist, into your new cabinet and then you're like, hey, here's a patient. Go drill for the first time. How do you think that will work?

1:17:57Turner Novak:It sounds like a disaster. Correct. So today, that's a bit of the read. Europe is filled to the brim with innovators, with people like myself, like all kinds of other founders out there with a high level of density of unicorns per capita, but all stifled. And because we're filled with regulation that is 20, 30 years old, if not more, that is built for other times, that is very inflexible and upheld by regulators that do not have any interest in moving and those that do have the interest in moving, they work in a timeline of two to four years. Most of these businesses will not be alive by then because they're not allowed to thrive by then.

1:18:57Whereas if you go to the US, you will build your way into it. And you sit down with people and you reason through why do you care about your business? And in Europe, it's just not possible. That does not work. and you know it's so it's so stiff it's so outdated and the worst part is that you know we woke up late and realized this year of course with you know the report that came out from Mario Draghi that said hey wake up European Union we're late innovation is dying we can't compete we must unshackle everything. And we're in a bad spot and getting worse. Massive uproar. Everyone was like, oh my God, it's vice president wrote this.

1:19:55We need to look into it. It hit all the news everywhere across Europe. What came out of it was, okay, let's create a task force that is going to talk to banks and regulators to know how to deregulate. And everyone went into like, what the fuck just happened? So regulators decided to talk to folks that have nothing to do with entrepreneurship and innovation to talk about how to foster innovation and deregulation. So it went like, the whole opposite.

1:20:29Turner Novak:Yeah, so it's almost like the thing that was going wrong, it's like, let's just even go deeper into that avenue. Yeah, correct. And then what came out of it was more regulation. So it is as if right now what is happening is that, look, you're asking someone that has a hammer to screw the screw. They don't know they have a hammer, so they're going to keep hammering it. And this is the fundamental problem. We need deregulation. We need conscious, ethical regulation. honest deregulation across the board. That's it. We have the power, we have the potential, we have the cash to do so, but we do not allow it.

1:21:18To give you a perspective, in the U.S., the big LPs are funds. They are

1:21:25Turner Novak:pension funds. It's illegal for pension funds to invest in any sort of risk based investment across most Europe. So there's no liquidity. There's, well, by comparison, there's very little liquidity to invest in entrepreneurship and innovation across Europe, because all these tiny things that are not as tiny do not create the world where, you know, it's very common that you hear about founders that spend weeks or months, they spend months, not more crawling across Europe to raise a fund, to raise a round. They get shitty terms, takes them four months or six months, shitty terms, super low valuation.

1:22:13They take a trip. And in two days, they raise a massive amount of money, crazy valuation in the US.

1:22:19Turner Novak:I've seen it multiple times, yeah. And it holds no value. It holds no value. There's no one taking lessons. Or rather the people seeing it are unable to act because we built such a heavy machine over these years, that no one really has the courage to say, this machine has to be taken apart rather than patched on. So, you know, I'm an optimist. The fact that we see it means that we can fix it. But we'll probably still have to push very hard against old ways of doing things. I don't know if you have like a good solution to this, but I'm curious based on how you just described it. Like if you could basically change anything, like in your opinion, go in and say, I think these are the things we need to change if we could fix things.

1:23:10Turner Novak:Like what do you think should be done differently? And whether that's like make a tweak, start from scratch. I don't know if there's like a silver bullet, like one single solution. Like we have the people and we have the infrastructures to do all the things we need to do. what they need to do is bring in who's on the ground. Like instead of bringing in, you know, when this whole, you know. The Draghi's report. Like they started to interview notaries and regulators. And I'm like, no, no, go get the entrepreneurs, the innovators, the investors, you know, go talk to, you know, go see what is being done outside.

1:23:53like in other countries, go pull in, bring those. And I can tell you, I can promise you that, you know, I would gladly, and I do it on a country-by-country basis, and we've been remote as even involved in a couple of work streams in the European Union, where we're more than glad to spend time with them and tell them what's not working and what should be done instead. And actually, more so than that, provide the data to back up our claims. this is not just hey it's a founder at raised 2 million has a team of three and things they know best no it's people building businesses for decades with teams that are thousands of people that have seen a lot across the world and can really have the data to back up every single claim just bring them close that's it like you don't need to like because you know we will tell you like exactly how it is on the floor and that's the one thing you know There's a big book that I love there I carry with me for years called The Toyota Way.

1:24:59Turner Novak:Oh, I've heard of that one. What originated, you know, the lean startup and all that. It's where you pull in all those things from, like, how do you build efficient processes, so on and so forth. And there's two core items that are mentioned in there. And this process, this book, you know, all the learnings that came from Toyota back in the day, there are two things that are key to this. One is the way to optimize is to clean waste, reduce waste. If you have a bad system, if you go there and remove waste from it, it will by default just get better. So it's all about deletion. It's all about removing things that are not helpful.

1:25:44So that's one. And the second is there's a chapter talking about walk the floor. That means that, you know, it was introduced because the owners of the factories, you know, early days in Japan, they would not talk to the people on the floor. So they would vicariously try to solve problems they never saw.

1:26:04Turner Novak:Yeah, that's hard. It's almost impossible. So they start to walk the floor, like go there, see what is going on, see the struggles. like you know we have a big tax team we have a big payroll massive payroll team we have a big people team big engineering team i'm i can sit like anyone all the best experts in the world on any topic with anyone and they will distill the best learnings because they see it they feel it they do it and um that's a very simple way to do it it kind of sounds like what you just said so you've said removing things and then talk to the experts. It kind of sounds the opposite of what you described the approach where it's like, let's add new things that add complexity.

1:26:49Turner Novak:And then let's also talk to people who aren't dealing with the problems on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, it doesn't sound like a good recipe for success. Do you know why they've been doing that? Like is somebody you know running the show that thinks that that's a good idea well it's a system it's a typical system it's a regulatory body that regulates itself in all those departments they're built on regulation so and they're they move years at a time every you know that's how politics works and what we need here is a closer reality closer you know gap between both realities because both are important we also need to understand that with with too much deregulation comes chaos and we we it's a very fine line but we have to find the line and we can't just be on the safe side of life forever because it will stale evolution and and if you stale you die interesting yeah that's a good point actually one not really related no but kind of related yob your co-founder told me in terms of making things disappear taking things away he said you have a skill or an experience with uh making spreadsheets disappear i don't know if there's a story behind this but he told me to ask you about this what's the story with that very early days.

1:28:21So one of my learnings in life is that humans will evolve at the brink of despair.

1:28:31And that's when you see the biggest revelations. When shit is about to hit the fan or already hit the fan. You have to scramble to make something work. That's when the ha-ha moments come up. And the first year of remote, we relied heavily on a lot of spreadsheet work very early days this is six years ago this is like as you

1:28:54Turner Novak:were kind of building the software and trying to automate a lot of those things okay and one day i said enough is enough i recorded a loom and i said you have four weeks in four weeks i'm going to record myself deleting this so do whatever you take you need to find you know the nearest engineer pull them into you to pull them closer and have them build whatever you need to build everyone freaked out holy shit this guy is not like is deleting the whole company we have so much important data and spreadsheets and I said sucks to be you I am not about to build a company that is fully duct taped if you want that go work for our competitors like you know they duct tape shit they have spreadsheets they have manual workforce we do things in a way of the future like we do things through automation we do things through AI We do things through thinking smartly.

1:29:51The biggest problem is that people are great at automating everything around themselves, except themselves. That's fair. And so that moment created sort of an existential threat to some of teams, some of the way they do things. And we evolved massively. We leapt so much that today we still are able to do things that no one else in the competition is able to do. We can onboard people in a matter of hours. No one else does this. And we can do shit within internal processes that really no one else in the market can do because of how much we obsessed about documentation, product building, engineering, and making sure that things are automated to the best of their ability.

1:30:36Turner Novak:What are some of those other things? So like onboarding people, why is that so hard? Imagine you want to hire someone in whatever country. and you need them to start today. You just need them to start today. In most companies, you will take a week or days at best to have everything processed. You have your insurance, you have your this, that. In a lot of countries, you really can't work until this is all set up. In the US, you can fairly much handle it easily. In many countries, you really can't. You have to sort out everything ahead of time. and so it becomes like a a proper thing to do and it's an example if you want to have as I said before an answer to a very complex question of any sorts you should be able to get it in seconds or minutes rather than days or weeks and this we can do it's the kind of you know making very boring complex things feel very simple and very nice.

1:31:45Turner Novak:I guess Yob's on a roll with the questions. He actually told me to ask you one more. He said that basically every time you guys have raised money, I think it was one of you was either moving or having a baby. Yeah. What's going on with that? Why do you guys have this issue like every time i generally don't know like it it became it became a joke but it's sort of a real one where i think by the time so the first time we raised money i i became a dad this was back in 2019 2019 i i was that i became a dad and yob was like oh this sounds funny like if something you know like you know not funny not funny let's not do this again next time we raised he was having a baby and I'm like not again but okay and you focus on the baby I'll run the show and we took turns and then and we like he moved to a new house and I'm like holy shit and then I think maybe the last time we raised I moved to another house and I'm like look at this point this is a fucking joke because it's like the worst time to do the two very complex things that literally physically limit you from working so either moving houses or having a baby so it sort of became a thing and we keep saying, well, next time we raise, if we raise something, we don't need to raise.

1:33:36And so we're in a very good position for many different reasons. But one of it is like one of us doesn't need to move, none of us needs to move and none of us needs to become a parent again. So it's a bit of a running joke. Let's see.

1:33:51Turner Novak:Well, and for people who don't know, when you're fundraising, It's typically like just adding another full-time job. It's not something where you just kind of, I'll take a meeting with someone and they might just wire us$100 million. It's usually, you make a spreadsheet, there's like 50 investors, you got to talk to each of them multiple times. They all ask you tons of questions. You probably have to meet a lot of them in person, maybe, I guess, depending on the time when you're doing it, you might not. But it's basically just like adding another full-time job on top of running the company. And very stressful one, right?

1:34:23Because if you imagine those 50, if you spend like three, four hours, three, four meetings each. So it's four meetings, one hour each, all of a sudden it's 200 hours that you put in. And if you add 200 hours, now all of a sudden you will also have to answer questions by email. and you will have to wait because none of those are happening back to back. So you will very quickly add weeks of work that are very stressful. Why? Because maybe you don't need the money and it's fine. But if you do need the money, you're seeing a very big clock over your head with time decreasing, like 24 style, every second taking money away from the bank account and you're running close to the wire.

1:35:18And so it's very, very stressful. On top of it, you have a company to run. People may or may not know that you're running. They're raising. It's a big distraction because a lot of people don't understand it. People think the company needs to have money in the bank for many, many years and be always fine. Otherwise, they'll freak out. And so you always have to balance out the expectations of the team,

1:35:44Turner Novak:your own and the needs of the business you know and and it it is it is very time consuming it's very draining as well because you know that's that's the job of founder you you take on the things that no one else should take on and and that's your job to manage expectations to paint the vision the the the mission and find the money for it and eventually build a business for it now We're in a very lucky position and we're very lucky, derived by a lot of hard work where we don't need to raise money because we're cashflow positive. That means that we make more money than we spend. We can reinvest to grow the business.

1:36:27We're growing at a good clip. And so, you know, we're in a good position. But I think that soon enough, we may want to raise some money to make acquisitions, to grow the business further. Hopefully, none of us will have to go through the whole thing and we can dispel the curse of having babies and shopping houses. But we'll see.

1:36:53Turner Novak:We'll see. If I ever hear a rumor that one of you guys are pregnant or I see your house is listed on the market, I'll know. Inevitable, they must be fundraising, IPO or something. Yeah. We'll see. Well, speaking about growing fast or growing, how have you kind of changed and grown as a leader? I just know if you look at your LinkedIn, you were originally the CTO. And I think you were the COO. I think now your title is president. how have you kind of like made that evolution over time like I guess you think CTO you think oh it's the engineer it's like the tech guy but now obviously you're not doing just that like how did that kind of happen?

1:37:34So one of the books sort of marked me most in my upbringing professional upbringing was the book of five rings from Miyamoto Musashi and essentially it's a book it talks about you know it it's like it's like the art of war like a japanese counterpart oh this is from 1645 is when it was written and so it talks about you know five chapters five rings you know and to dominate the different you know fire water air earth the fifth one is is the void and so the void and then you can derive whatever you want from these things it's the beauty of these books and void is

1:38:23as a founder, as a leader you do two things you either create a void or you fill a void and sometimes both so my job at Ramon my contribution has been I started as CTO I built the best organization I could possibly build I had done it in the past, so there was more textbook. There was a need in the operational world. There was a void that I came in to fill. And then I created a bigger void as I wanted someone much better and that could take it on full time, right? Because as a founder, I'm always drawn to more things across the business. So I hired a kick-ass COO to be in seat. and I started to take on more specific projects across the board.

1:39:14So what are the top three things that I could do to lift the business, to make the business leap rather than walk? Currently, I'm also focused on go-to-market. So I took that on. So today, my remit goes from go-to-market operations and engineering. All flows up somehow to me. But in practice, Job and I split the bill across the organization and we work with the people that we need to work with to solve the biggest problems. So my professional arc has been, I guess, filling the void and solving and creating the void. I fix shit.

1:39:55I can see the path through the noise. I can hyper-focus and hyper-obsess very aggressively. and that allows me to distill the most important answers in a very short period of time. So that's what I do.

1:40:11Turner Novak:Interesting. Speaking of hyper-obsessed, I heard that currently one of your big things is health and you actually don't eat sugar. I don't know if that's what someone told me. So what's been like the story with just getting really into health and nutrition? Well, so I think second year into remote, my kid was two years old. Company was growing very fast. and I was adjusting to all this thing with like being live 24-7, 24 hours a day, like always alive, always online. You should probably not get much sleep. And I was getting pinged all the time, day and night. I was answering Slack emails and I found myself in a situation where I was stressed all the time.

1:40:55I was worried all the time. I was eating crap. I was like, in my mind, I started by saying, okay, I can eat one type of junk food every week, just one. And then I found myself eating sushi once a week, kebab once a week, pizza once a week, and a random barbecue once a week, and, you know, pokeballs once a week. My nutrition is shit. I started to have, I started to feel like I would sleep very poorly I would not exercise at all and I felt tired like endlessly tired but like a fatigue that is chronic almost and I'm like this can't be it this can't be it like there has to be a way not by brute forcing that I can work more and feel better.

1:42:01And so I started to read a lot into things, into health, into how do you do things, into hormone regulation and metabolic regulation. Realize that it has to be a matching and a balance between your body and your mind. And within your body, within your mind, you need to know what makes you tick. and within your body you need to feed it and and and to nurture it properly that comes into exercise right and working out and i'm obsessive and that's what i do all i do all the things so i got into a lot of that i found a a great functional doctor that i work with on a on a regular basis. I read a lot into it.

1:42:52And so I decided to, I found out that the more intense my workouts are, the more intense my feeding regimen needs to be and my nutrition and my exercise needs to be. So if I want to work 16, 17 hour days for months on end, years on end, I need to work out a lot and I need to eat very well and sleep well. And those are non-negotiable. It's like a balanced system. If I eat super well and if I work out super well, but then I work five hours a day, I'm not going to feel well. I'm mentally not going to be there. I will feel like I'm missing out on a big part of my life. That is my mission with Ramon.

1:43:41and the same for nutrition if i work out super well work out work super hard but eat shit i will not feel great like it's a very balanced three-part tight system and i i learned that the more i optimize for it the better i can get at the end of the day My biomarkers are great. I do very elaborate blood work every three months. I do very regular checkups. I wore all kinds of biofeedback and wearables to give me pointers about what I do when I do it. And I keep optimizing for, you know, having a great life, being able to be a great dad and building a generational business. And live forever.

1:44:36Turner Novak:And live forever. Okay. Well, I was going to say, what's been like the most fascinating thing recently you've kind of like dug into is it longevity? Yeah, I guess so. I started to look when Brian Johnson started to do his thing and I was also fortunate enough to meet him for a bit and I was doing it for years already and I sort of I find society evolved very fast in the last 10-20 years food and nutrition evolved as well but it evolved in a commercial way our bodies our brains are not ready to process the kind of shit that we put in front of us and like and i'm not saying like oh is this mambo jambo no like do some blood work and eat certain kinds of things and you will see the direct impact of them.

1:45:42It's not rocket science. It's not propaganda. No. If you eat processed sugar every fucking day, you will see an impact on your BIRT markers, if not worse in your direct health. And it's one kind of example. So I try to eat well. I remove processed foods as much as humanly possible I avoid sugar I'm not a sugar kind of person anyway I eat a lot I know I don't look like it but I do eat a lot I always did I have very fast metabolism or rather I metabolize things sometimes fast sometimes not very efficient way which is very different all metabolisms are roughly the same just react differently and i learned to deal with all these different i think every person is their own very complex environment and machine like there's i can tell you what works for me but i can also promise you they will probably not work 100 for you we all have different builds we have different needs and that's what i spent the last five years or so working on because I feel great.

1:47:02Like I feel I can work 16, 17 hours days. I have the energy to be with my kid. I have the energy to do things I love. I run right now, I'm running 10K every day and working out as well. So last year I was doing a half marathon every week.

1:47:20Turner Novak:Oh, that's intense. And so like it just allows me to live life at my definition of its fullest. And I think that's the best. Yeah. And you mentioned you're kind of like posting LinkedIn, Twitter a little bit more. Where can people find you online? LinkedIn, Twitter, are those the two places? Yeah, those are mostly two places. Every once in a while I post on Instagram, but not a lot. I keep my private life to myself. I don't like to share a lot. I certainly don't post anything about them or that you can identify them. but you know building a business like remote teaches you a lot about building business about yourself about being entrepreneur about being a leader about being a person about the vulnerable parts of the hard parts the true parts and i i don't like to write about the beautiful things that i did that are so magical that everyone should copy them no no no i i i found out that by writing about the hard truths, the hard truth behind the hard truths, the sucky, fucked up shit that happens to people building businesses, and both professionally and personally, I started writing about it.

1:48:40And you know what? First few tweets and LinkedIn posts, investors and friends were like, oh, do you want to post about this? Is this the kind of content you want to write about? And I said, look, I don't care. If I can help one person, one single person that is going through some hard bullshit in their lives, it's all worth it. And I started to get a barrage of people saying things like, hey, you know what? I didn't know I needed to read this. Thank you for writing it. And at first I thought, well, it's great to read this. Awesome. And then it was another, and then another, and then another. And then the people that you were saying, well, maybe don't write about that.

1:49:28Maybe just write uplifting things. You're like, maybe, maybe, maybe you're onto something. And I'm like, no, I don't care if I'm onto something or not. I don't know. I can tell people what to do. I really, I, you know, Turner, I can say, Hey, keep doing this because you're going to be a billionaire in five years time if you do this, this and that. No, I don't know. I've never done it. But I can probably tell you, look, I've done these things that don't work. So maybe you should avoid them. And I've done these things that work. But this was the context in which I did them. It's up to you to understand if you want to try them out and if you can match the context or not.

1:50:10And then I may be here to, you know, give you some examples and show my scars in a professional way and help think through the models that allow people to get out of the jam. If I can, if not, then I'll just straightforward say nothing to say about this. And I found that, you know, we sort of live in a world of make-believe, to pretend.

1:50:41And I am generally not interested in that. I'd rather spend time with my kid and my wife than join the make-believe world of these social media.

1:50:57Turner Novak:Yeah, well, hopefully this conversation wasn't make-believe for people. Hopefully people learned some real stuff from it. The fact that I'm here... It says a lot. Yeah. Well, this is a lot of fun. Thanks. Thanks for doing it. Thanks for having me. It was a blast. And I hope you had a blast. Thanks again to Numeral and Flex for supporting this episode. If you like this conversation, it would mean the world to me if you shared it with a friend who might enjoy it. If you missed last week, check out the episode with Kevin Hartz on what he learned from the PayPal mafia and investing 20 % of his latest fund in teenagers.

1:51:30Turner Novak:Tune in next week for a conversation with Nathan Benach, co-founder of Air Street Capital and author of The State of AI. Nathan has been publishing a report since 2018, and we talked about all the biggest trends he's watching, what most people are missing in AI, and if we're in an AI bubble or not. Author upcoming guests include Gary Tan from YC, Chathan Putagunta from Benchmark, Sophia Amoruso, and Doug Song and John Oberheide, the founders of Duo Security. If you don't want to miss any of these episodes, subscribe to my newsletter, The Split, linked in the description to get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox every week.

1:52:05Turner Novak:Thanks again. See you next time.