#79 Exploring the E-Commerce Ecosystem: CEO and Co-founder of Wayflyer, Aidan Corbett

0:00M2Hers would be the channel right now that we see that's growing quite a lot. And I think is one of the marketing channels that I think works really well. And it can vary a lot depending on the business. So I've seen some businesses and they do really well with direct mail. So literally posting letters to their customers.

0:25E-commerce really is a dynamic playground for innovation and entrepreneurship. I was keen to get somebody on to talk about this space and the prospects for it to get disrupted by AI and other technology innovation. Aidan Corbett is a Dublin-based entrepreneur, e-commerce specialist and founder of e-commerce funding solutions provider Wayflyer. We go in deep on why it's a great idea for any entrepreneur to learn to code. We also talk about Dublin as a brilliant city to start a tech firm, how Aidan and his team assess and decide upon investment prospects and when to invest in entrepreneurs. We also talk about why VR and AR, augmented reality, still haven't really found a use case within retail and e-commerce and how Aidan sees that playing out.

1:22And we also talk about what makes a good e-commerce entrepreneur. What attributes does Aidan look for? It's a really great interview. Aidan is a top guy. We covered so much ground in a relatively shorter space of time than what we normally do. But it's as value-filled as any interview we've ever done. I think you'll love it. It's Aidan Corbett.

1:49Aidan, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders Podcast How are you over there in sunny Dublin today? Very good, it's a rare sunny day in Dublin Delighted to have it for late summer and September Yeah, it's a great city Whereabouts in Dublin are you based, Aidan? We're based right in the centre And I live very close by I love living in the middle of a city I'm not a suburbs person So even though we started a family recently, I adore being right in the middle of the city. And Dublin is small enough to be manageable, but big enough to be relevant. So it's a great place to live. Absolutely.

2:22Well, it says a lot about me, but the part of Dublin I know best is Temple Bar, which kind of says a lot about the holidays that I've gone over on. Normally involved around rugby trips, but yeah, it's a great, great part of the city. It's a really up and coming, happening place right now, isn't it? There's loads going on. And I'd like to talk about that as well in due course. But let's start with this one, Aidan. Sure. we're a technology and leadership podcast what does good leadership mean to you i think it depends on the person in question one of the things that i've learned in over the last 10 years of being in startups is that strengths matter more than a lack of weakness so if you're really good at something you should probably double and treble down on that worrying about rather than worrying about um bigging up your weaknesses more and what that means is i think leadership can look very different depending on the person in question.

3:12So for example, Elon Musk is probably not the best person to lead Facebook, but he's definitely the best person to lead Tesla. And so your personality and where your strengths lie as a leader can vary from company to company. And I think leaders, to be most effective, need to lean into the things where they're great or they're world class, rather than worrying about where they need to improve necessarily. And what that means is that great leadership can look very different in different contexts. I agree with everything you've said there. I think context is everything, isn't it? And it's about being the best leader you can be within the context of the organization or whatever it is you're a leader of.

3:49You can be a leader in many ways, can't you? But Neil, that's a fantastic answer. Thanks for that, Aidan. So let's maybe go back to the beginning then. I want to just talk about the early milestones in your career which set you on this path. I understand you went to university down south in Cork. On this period after you left university, what did you want to be when you grew up, Aidan? If you look at my career history, it's very unclear that entrepreneurship is going to be part of it. So when I was completing my undergraduate, I think I ended up watching a lot of the West Wing in my final year of undergrad.

4:21Even though I did electrical engineering, I got obsessed with politics. There's a lot worse things to do than that. That's a great show. But yeah, sorry, go on. Absolutely. So I ended up spending a month or a summer in Washington, DC doing an internship. And then I tried to actually get a job in the civil service here in Dublin. So I worked in the civil service for about 18 months. And in that time, I realized I actually didn't want to work in politics or in government. So I decided to do what everybody does when they don't know what they want to do. And I joined a management consultancy. So I worked in McKinsey for a while.

4:51And then I worked in a business that invested mostly in renewables called NTR. And then I did an MBA in London. And the MBA was really a method for me to get to the UK and get a qualification to see what I would do afterwards. And during the MBA, I got obsessed with entrepreneurship. And I stopped going to a lot of my lectures. And basically, I spent most of the MBA learning how to code, which is not how a lot of my classmates spent it. And after the MBA, I bootstrapped my first business called Cubicle. And then after Cubicle, I started another business called Conjura. And Waveflyer, which is the business I'm running today, spun out of Conjura back in 2019.

5:29So a very varied first 10 years before deciding entrepreneurship was the thing. Absolutely. So I want to go back then. You said you became obsessed with entrepreneurship. Can you, what was that trigger point? What was that watershed moment that really got you into? Were you inspired by a person or was it just something that gradually crept up on you? I think it was the fact that when you're doing an MBA, it's a very expensive way of taking time off, but it's a very socially acceptable way of taking time off. And when you have time off, you can really explore what gives you energy. and I remember at the beginning of the MBA kind of wondered do we actually want to work in a private equity fund or a hedge fund or continue to do investing and I remember almost living in the roles for three or four weeks I would do the research go online read up about company financials and then after three or four weeks it was very beneficial because I realized that I would hate that job and what I actually just got a lot more passionate about was entrepreneurship because I was doing a course in entrepreneurship at the time and it just appealed to me and one of the things that appealed to me was the ability to kind of create a company that you would want to work at.

6:32MBAs, and I would a lot of employees, we all think that we know how to run the company we're working in better than the current leaders. There's a lot of freedom in creating the company and the structures and the values that you want to, in a company that you want to work in. So that was very appealing to me. And also I fell in love with being able to create and being able to do it myself yeah and i probably spent too long actually relearning how to code but that did give me the freedom to come up with ideas and actually test them and that was very empowering sure but that ability to kind of live in the job for a while it's really beneficial because you can think you really want to be an accountant or a lawyer or what have you if you live in the job for four to six weeks you have a great sense then of whether you actually like it or not because it always looks good when it's on a website or or it's been described to you by a friend but you actually living the role yeah figure out pretty quickly do you get energy from it or not yeah for sure there's loads to unpack there Aiden but I really want to ask you about an MBA something that I know I've considered myself and I've done an LBA which is kind of a taster course for an MBA well can you tell us why did you do an MBA is it worth it is it that's that's stripping everything out yeah is an MBA worth it let's just roll with that so I think if you want to become an entrepreneur you definitely should not do it and the reason is very simple okay if it if the if the mba is going to cost you the bones of if it's a top tier mba might cost you a hundred two hundred thousand yeah you are much better off taking that money and putting it in to your startup because that could sustain you for you know multiple years so you're much better off actually just starting your startup rather than doing an mba and you will learn way more in the first year of your startup than you will in two years of an MBA.

8:16What an MBA is really useful for is if you're not sure what you want to do, but you know you want to move careers, it's extremely beneficial because it creates a floor under which you can progress from. So for example, if you previously worked in finance and you want to become a product manager on Amazon, or if you were a lawyer and you want to become an investment banker, most of these organizations like Amazon and Google or Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or Bay, they own specific programs geared towards people who have mbas so if you want to do a career change mbas are incredibly valuable because to create that floor under which you won't drop a low and they give you that kind of entry point into these organizations that you want to work at but if you want to do a startup you really shouldn't do an mba because they're very expensive you'll end up paying back that debt so by the end of it you're a lot less likely to actually pursue entrepreneurship and at the same time you've you departed with a lot of hard-earned cash that could help you actually start the business in the first place that's fascinating i think what i'm getting from what you've just said is an mba is something to consider maybe later in your career if you want to go in a different direction like you said whereas if you're it's your if it's your first gig as a you know you want to become an entrepreneur and you've got a good idea just just just do it just get it it just done beats perfect and just go and make loads of mistakes and that's how you learn i suppose totally if you think of time as the ultimate commodity yeah two years in an mba with the additional amount of time needed to pay back whatever loans you have that's an incredible opportunity cost in comparison to just starting your business can i also ask you about you said you learned to code you're not a technical person by trade looking at your well you you sorry you did an electrical engineering degree i understand that but you obviously learned to code with more modern tech stack talk us through what prompted that And what was your experience of learning to code like?

10:09How did you pick it up? Did you pick it up well and did you love it or was it a bit of a chore? No, I pretty much loved it from day one. And I didn't do much programming even though I did engineering in my undergraduate. And I did a bit of research online. And if I wanted to build a web application, this was back in 2013. So it's not too long ago. But if you wanted to build a web application back then, it was either Ruby on Rails or Python Django were kind of the two things that people wanted. Or PHP. PHP was beginning to become a bit uncool. So I ended up going with Ruby on Rails and pretty much dined out on Ruby on Rails for about a year and a half to two years.

10:47Probably limited me in terms of the types of applications that I could build. But ultimately, I just wanted to be in a situation where I could build something so that it could be tested. Because ultimately, you tend to end up rebuilding everything anyway, especially if you get a bit of product market fit. but I actually adored it and that was one of the things that I think really sustained me through it which was I was getting energy from coding and I wouldn't be allowed to commit any code ever in Wayfair and that would be that's a good thing for the business but I actually missed it a lot and if I did have a bit of free time in the future and my kids are all growing up I think I'd spend a lot of time programming because I get energy from it I find it intellectually really enjoyable.

11:26Do you think learning to code like maybe if you're advising young people who are at the very beginning of their career is it worth people coding these days with all these no code solutions and drag and drop to create applications i mean is it sort of obviously we're going to need coders but is it something which is going to contract you know what i mean is it is there going to be less need for you know full stack coders in the future i think data literacy is very important So that ability to manipulate data, to understand this, SQL, maybe a little bit of Python, more from a data analyst data science perspective, that should be more ubiquitous.

12:03Because whatever role you're in, if you have the ability to access a database, take data out, manipulate it, summarize it, do it in an automated way, write basic scripts, that makes you incredibly powerful versus somebody who can't do that. So that I think should be more table stakes than the ability to actually to be able to write code. and one of the things as well is that if you're beginning to build applications from scratch you're normally if you call yourself a full stack coder you're normally not very good at anything but you're okay at everything so you have a little bit of javascript a little bit of ruby a bit of sequel on the database side you can spin up a server potentially a lot of the time to be able to do all of that uh you're not a specialist in one area but i think and that's okay.

12:48I think the thing that's more important, more society-wide, is that ability to have those data literacy skills, the ability to maybe write a SQL script, maybe write a Python script, because more and more data today is not stored in Excel sheets, it's stored in databases, it's stored in APIs. It's too big for Excel sheets. And in that scenario, you really have to have the ability to access that data and manipulate it. Otherwise, you may end up getting passed out by peers who can do that. And it's not that hard. Yeah, sure. You talk to entrepreneurs on a regular basis, I'm sure, within the e-commerce world.

13:20Most of them able to code then, Aidan? You know, do you come across any software entrepreneurs who are not able to code? Or is it sort of an absolutely essential thing for them to know the code, you know, know it at engineering level, you know? One of the co-founders will normally know how to code. But at the same time, I think that there's a ton of things to do at the beginning of a business that were non-technical founders needed. So I think you absolutely can have incredibly talented non-technical founders. Steve Jobs is probably the best example. But at least one of the co-founders has to be able to code.

13:57I think it's very difficult to be able to iterate quickly if you outsource the programming. So iterating very quickly is the essence of the early stages. Much easier to do that if you've two or three voters in a room who are up all night rather than sending product request specs to an outsourced agency. efficiency gets expensive and it's it's you just won't move as fast and speed is everything in the early days yeah sure so speaking of early days i want to get back on track in terms of your the chronological story of your career you spent a year at mckinsey's i know it was a while ago now well it wasn't that long ago you're not but i think you nonetheless you i get the impression it was quite a profound period for you i mean what did you take mckinsey's a renowned consultancy firm, you know, written more books than you can count and, you know, very, very impacted the business landscape, certainly in the Western world, at least.

14:48What did you take from that experience? And was there anything you took from it, which has helped you in your career as an entrepreneur? Yeah. So there's a couple of things that you would take as good. And some of the things you would take there that I would probably regard as not so good. So the good things that I would take, the first thing is the work ethic so mckinsey demand a serious work ethic as do all management consultancies and i came out of the civil service so that was a bit of a sea change as you can imagine what kind of what does your working day look like are we talking like oh north of 12 hours in a day or yeah there might have been like a six or eight week stretch where i wouldn't have gotten out before a 10th yeah for fridays but at the time if you're 24 25 and you're on a steep learning curve you want to do that so i think it gives you that great learning curve and i think the other thing that mckinsey does is and other consultancies do is they really show you how to become a great communicator if you think of what their output is their output is a presentation and their output is a recommendation that's normally given verbally and in person so a huge part of their skill set is actually the ability to communicate concisely and to also the ability to communicate with rigor and they would have been the two things that I think McKinsey really benefited me.

16:01I was a much better writer. I was a much better communicator. I was a lot more concise when I left than when I went in. The one weakness I think that management consultancies have is because you have to do an enormous amount of work in a very compressed period of time, I don't think you go as deep as you should. So in my first year at McKinsey, I probably worked across five or six different industries. it's very hard to get up to speed and answer a very difficult problem in an industry that you don't have any context in especially as a 24 or 25 year old yeah so i often feel that the answers probably could go deeper and that's really why you have to do in a startup like you need to know if you're really going to do it well and give yourself the best chance of success you need to know the problem space backwards you need to know everything about it every competitor every piece and that just gives you the best chance of success you wouldn't have the freedom to do that as a manager or consultant because you need to provide the next project in six weeks yeah sure no that makes total sense so you i believe you went on to be a business analyst for a while and i think was it was your first jaunt as a entrepreneur in terms of starting a company was it conjura it was cubicle actually so it was cubicle is a yeah it's a data literacy platform and cubicle is still going today i'm still a shareholder and it's doing really well we put a great new CEO in there called Mark Henderson a couple of years ago and it's scaling really well very different to Waveflower so I have the experience of bootstrapping which is Cubicle yeah I have the experience of raising a small bit of money with Conjurer and I have the experience of raising a lot of money with Waveflower so I've tried all three different flavors of being a tech startup but Cubicle was the first and for the first year and a half I was coding and recording videos that teach people Excel and other tools.

17:45And then gradually over time, we ended up getting our revenue up towards a million, being able to hire a team, brought in some external investors in 2020 when I ended up taking a bit of money off the table. But even since then, the business has gone on to scale really, really well. And unlike Waveflower, Cubicle is very profitable and was bootstrapped and has raised a lot of money. So it's a very different business, but it was a really exciting thing to do. And it was very empowering to be able to build the first version of it myself, put it out into the world, iterate about nine or 10 times before you eventually find some semblance of product work.

18:18So why did a business analyst with a background working for a big consultancy firm start a training company then? How did that come about? At the time in my MBA class, most of the class had okay Excel skills. Half the class or the rest of the class might have had amazing excel skills and most the employers wanted people with amazing excel skills and if you were coming into the mba without great excel skills it was a real challenge and it was the thing that you probably struggled with the most i had very good excel skills so i saw a gap saying i'm actually going to teach everybody excel but i'm going to teach them to a level that's like a plus because most excel most excel training at the time would teach you with examples of four apples three pairs two oranges i was going to teach you an excel level that means that at the end of like a two or three week period you're going to be as good as a mckinsey consultant at excel that's what i was aiming for so it was a very particular niche in the market which was if you want to be amazing at excel you should take this training so i never touched the mouse in any of the lessons it was all just shortcuts you never you're not allowed to use the mouse and that really kind of set it apart from most of the other trainings and it wasn't for everybody but it was really for my initial target market, which was my classmates.

19:33Obviously, Cubicle has expanded a lot since then. It's teaching Python and AI and Tableau and Ultras and lots of other types of tools. Day one, it was, if you want to be really good at Excel, I can do it in two or three weeks, and this is what you should use. I think Copilot's going to disrupt Excel and PowerPoint massively. I don't know how much you know about that, but it seems to be it's kind of like expertise on demand across all the applications but i can't wait to see it i don't know if you have you do you know much about copilot have you come across it at all have you read about it so we use github a lot internally and i think ai is going to disrupt a lot of those two a lot of those tools which is fantastic yeah and i think that makes learning easier about everybody more productive 100 agree let's come back to that because i want to get your thoughts on ai but can i ask you about conjura then yep let's maybe set the scene late 2016 you obviously along with another co-founder or another two co-founders was it yeah come up with this this idea and it was all based around e-commerce so what i'm getting at or aiden is what took you into the e-commerce direction because that's obviously where you've gone so you've had this more general background and obviously training and stuff like that but you you obviously saw potential in the e-commerce space and you wanted to fire down that route can you talk us through that decision process and what brought that about so at the time in 2016 cubicle was scaling reasonably slowly um i had brought in a a co-founder into cubicle and he was definitely more on the sales side.

20:57We had a bit of an engineering team and I had said to him, look, I don't think Cubicle is going to have this exponential curve rocket ship that frankly I was looking for, even though it was definitely going to be a very profitable bootstrapped business. I was probably wrong, by the way. That was my thinking at the time. And so I teamed up with that co-founder, I let him take over running the business and I set up a new company called Conjura. And we actually started off doing data consulting projects for lots of different types of companies as a way of actually finding a product. So our theory was, if we wandered into companies who had data problems, we could ultimately, you know, one out of five, one out of six times, we would actually find a product that we could build that could be scaled.

21:43A worst case scenario, you do the consulting project. And eventually we found an opportunity, which was creating a single source of data truth for e-commerce. And it was a segment where you had huge data challenges. It's a very data-heavy business. You had lots of different data sources. They all conflicted with each other. And if you were in a position to create a single source of truth of data for an e-commerce business, you were able to create a ton of value. And that was a product because they typically need to connect to all the different, the same data sources. So they all need to connect to Google Analytics.

22:16They all need to connect to Facebook. They all need to connect to Google Ads. They all need to connect to Shopify. So you could do it in a way in which it became a product rather than it just being one single consulting project. So we did a consulting project for an e-commerce store, and then we actually decided to turn it to a product, which was Conjura. Right, and it's just a one-stop. The platform basically covers analytics across all channels then, basically, yeah? All digital marketing channels, it's all there in one place, right? You got into the space 2016, 2017. A lot's changed since then from, you know, we've had COVID and stuff, but obviously from a technological advancements and innovation and stuff like that.

22:52But how was the, in a very, just to ask you a very general macro question here, what are the biggest changes in the e-commerce space between today and 2016? What's the most profound change that you've observed? Customer acquisition has changed totally. I think back in 2016 to 2018, if you could make really good money based off Facebook advertising and Google advertising, it's so much harder today. So back then, I think the cost to advertise, your ability to target, your level of competition, the amount of tracking that those tools could do before Apple started removing some of that tracking capability.

23:30Advertising on Facebook in particular and on social was much easier back then than it is today. And as a consequence, most of the companies that we back today, when we're looking to fund them at Waveflower, we're trying to see what are the channels that they're using. Are they using channels outside of Facebook and Google Ads? And if they are using Facebook and Google Ads, how efficient are they with it? Because those channels have got a lot more challenging over time. Partly due to greater competition, but then also partly due to the fact that Apple is constrained, the amount of tracking that these companies can do, which relates to how effective your ads are going to be.

24:07So probably the biggest change that I can think of is definitely how hard it is to advertise. And that's in direct-to-consumer. if you factor in things like amazon i think the biggest change on amazon since then has been the introduction of their advertising product so when you look at advertising today on amazon maybe the first like 15 or 20 products might be advertised yeah and you need to factor that into your own unit economics today if you're selling your products on amazon because it may bring you more deals but it's certainly uh taking away a lot in terms of your cost base so yeah direct to consumer it's been advertising on facebook and google ads on amazon it's been the introduction of ads and including that line item in your operating costs yeah sure so what what is the biggest mistake you see then that the retailers make you know the independent retailers and the kind of type of companies that you invest in not the big boys but what in terms of small retailers who are marketing products online what's the biggest mistake you see they're making so the first mistake is believing that having a great product is enough the thing about e-commerce is it's very exciting because you're a global business in day one yeah but that also means that it's really really difficult so building a great product is a necessary step but it's nowhere near enough so you need to know how to do marketing you need to know what to do you need to source a manufacturer you need to figure out a way of partnering with a last mile provider who's not giving you great economics on every single person you need to know how to process returns you need to know how to interact with the 3pl now a lot of those services today are better than they were back then but the thing that we always say is that having a great product is necessary but it's not enough and you have all these other tasks to do and all those other tasks are actually the majority of your time as a merchant especially in the early days and you need to enjoy all of that or at best you need to outsource all of that or you need to get that done and not just fixate on perfecting the product.

26:09You also need to perfect all those other parts, particularly advertising and distribution, because that ultimately determines how successful you are. You can't go door to door with your product. It's hard these days, day one, to get in booths, for example. If you're selling direct to consumer, you've got to get your distribution right as early as possible. And building a great product is necessary, but it's not enough. So in terms of like taking your offering global, then, as you said, I know it's global from day one, but how easy is it for, let's just maybe focus on British and Irish firms trying to sell products.

26:44Would you advise your portfolio and entrepreneurs to just concentrate on domestic markets first before they go global? Or do you just put everything into a global strategy from day one? Well, if you're based in Ireland, you definitely have to go global from day one because we only have about four and a half million people. That's too small. So if you're in Ireland, you definitely need to go global from day one. If you're in the UK or if you're in Germany or if you're in France, I think it really depends on how big the niche is. So if you're making very specific product for a very specific niche, you need to determine whether there's enough people in that niche in your geo.

27:21If you're like, do you know what? I think there's like half a million buyers for this product and that's more than enough in this geography, then that makes things easier. But if you don't determine that, then you need to go global from day one. And a lot of the companies that we see that do really well, they're in specific niches where you look at the company and you're like, how in the name of God did you come up with that product that's that specific? And they work really well. In that scenario, you need to go more global. so if you're a small market go global if your product is in a tiny niche need to go global other than that you can stay in a domestic market yeah no that that's that's really good that that makes total sense it's very a logical way to look at it but um so how do you assess the potential of a prospective investment date and what criteria do you place emphasis on when you're looking at a an investment opportunity yourself and your and your colleagues you know it's very similar to what a VC would look at as an investor, actually.

28:20We just have the system set up to do it in a largely automated way. So what we like to see are really strong unit economics. So how effective are you as acquiring customers? Have you got multiple channels working or are you reliant on a single channel? Has that channel been improving or disimproving over time? How sophisticated is your channel strategy in relation to that? So we can see when you connect up your data sources, how sophisticated are you as an investor on Facebook and Instagram? Yeah. The second thing we look at is, does your product have repeatability? Because if your product has repeatability, you don't need to be as good on the acquisition because you're getting a lot of follow-on transactions.

29:01So some particular verticals, you have a lot of repeat purchases. Health and beauty and baby products will be two examples. So if you're buying organic nappies online, you're going to keep buying them if you like the product. So that's going to have a very different set of unit economics and lifetime value than, for example, buying a toy or buying a mattress online, which tends to be a one-off purchase. So we focus on the unit economics, which is your cost to acquire a customer. We focus on that lifetime value, which is really a measure of repeatability. We also like to look at the range of products you have, because most e-commerce merchants will need to have a substantial range of products to get that lifetime value go up.

29:41We look at your gross margin because that will determine your profitability. So it could be really high at 80 % or it could be on the lower side at 50%. And then we look at your cost base. And the cost base is really around, you know, how much does it cost to transport the product? How many staff do you have? What are your running costs? What are your storage costs? And we do that at a very granular level. And then in addition to that, we do a lot of the simple checks that you would do if you were a bank around looking at your cash balance, looking at your accounts, etc. With e-commerce, because of the nature of the data sources, it just allows you to automate a lot of it, which is why the speed that we can turn around and the granularity that we can go into when we're doing our underwriting is greater than almost any other vertical I can think of.

30:27Yeah. Well, what about the person then, Aidan? Do you have an investment criteria for entrepreneurs? Do you look for certain attributes, certain qualifications, even accreditations? Is there anything red flags for you? Things that you try to avoid in an entrepreneur? So we will do the usual checks that you would do in an individual if they were applying for a loan or what have you, like adverse media checks and things like that. But no, we kind of let the data speak for itself. And normally with the company, when you look at the company information, the company data, you can get a really great handle on how well the business is being run.

31:04In certain scenarios, we will do a call, especially for the first time, we might do a call with the entrepreneur, particularly if we have some follow-up questions. We don't have a specific profile of person that we like to prioritize. Some of our biggest customers, we're taking millions and millions of offers for years or in the early 20s. So we don't have a profile that we kind of specialize in when we look at people. We just let the data really guide us. Yeah. In terms of the flow of opportunities that you're seeing at the moment, how buoyant is the startup scene in Ireland right now? Are you getting bombarded with entrepreneurs wanting investment?

31:42Or do you find it difficult to source good opportunities for yourselves? Or is it sort of somewhere in between? Obviously, in Ireland, the e-commerce market is reasonably small because it's a small business. And Wayflair, I think, is 65 % or 70 % of our business is in the US. so we don't really fix it on our Irish business right now. More generally, I think the startup scene in Ireland has been a bit later to the game than other countries in Europe. So I think countries like Estonia, Sweden, Israel as an example, kind of countries with a smaller population are probably ahead of Ireland in developing their all kind of set of unicorns.

32:16But I think Ireland is catching up. Ireland has one major advantage, which is the sales talent that's available in Dublin in particular. Most US tech companies, when they're coming to Europe, all their smb sales that happen over the phone happen in dublin one square mile from where i'm right now so as you're scaling your sales function dublin is probably the best place in europe to do it so all the other functions like product design engineering they're all really important and dublin wouldn't have the same resources there but in sales it's got one of the best sets of smb sales resources in the world why do you think maybe in addition to what you've just said what why is Dublin a good place to start a company today for an entrepreneur?