Building Yonder: The 10-Year Founder Journey Nobody Talks About I Tim Chong, Yonder

0:00I mean, we had Silicon Valley Bank. We just closed our Series A. I think we had£12 million in the bank and Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. And we caught up our investors and it was pretty clear that they couldn't do anything. Like they didn't have just cash lying around. You know, the idea that your entire work could just go poof overnight, something out of your control, is pretty devastating. I remember though one night I just said, look, we've done everything we can. Let's just have a great dinner. Control the things you can control and let the score take care of itself. Tim, at Yonder, you're disrupting a huge market and you're going up against competitors that are worth literally billions of dollars.

0:43But only in a few years, you have been able to get tens of thousands of customers. So I'm wondering, what is the most important decision that you made early on as a founder to disrupt this industry? I think it sounds a little bit cliche. I think the thing that I think a lot about is picking a problem or like a space that you're willing to invest a lot of time in for a long period of time which sounds like super classic like cliche and i kind of like cringe saying it a little bit but i think that uh one of the things i found even in our early journey was that well when i started yonder it was like you know a crazy fintech period like you know there's a lot of venture capital funding for fintech kind of similar to ai as it is today and a lot of what i I've described it as like a lot of fintech tourists, both on the founder side and the investor side as well.

1:32So people who are like, I like this industry because it's hot now. And I kind of think similar to AI as well, where it's like people like it because it's a hot industry rather than necessarily like really like the industry. And I think like with anything in life, there'll be seasons where it is, you know, flourishing. You know, like imagine London in summer versus winter when everyone's like hunkering down. I think that is not unique to the climate in London, but actually consistent for any sort of startup you build into the ups and downs. And so I think part of, I guess, what's allowed us to get to where we are so far is this real sense of genuinely wanting to keep doing this for a long period of time, wanting to really build a product that we're really proud of.

2:13To an extent, I think that's helped us get through some of the ups and downs of the market. And to an extent, we're one of the few consumer fintechs that are still around that started in 2021. A lot of the ones that are really successful now started much earlier. So, you know, the likes of Monzo Reveille started around 2015. but in a 2021 sort of vintage um there aren't there aren't a ton to be honest and and part of it was like we just kept going and we were able to you know fortunately raise capital we're able to you know grow the business um but i think that when there are periods of times where the market kind of changed direction you know we had a team that just like wanted to be there and build a great product and that was really good because people were like oh are you worried about the market sentiment and how your team will feel about it i'm like honestly my team didn't care about it the team really just care about building a product they love and you know being proud of the work they do so i think that's that's helped and i think about whilst we're not building an ai company but when i kind of speak to a couple of the the folks from my team have left start companies as well and we've had we're fortunate to have about four to five people leave our company to become founders themselves and go through the venture journey as well um and one of the things i sort of encourage them to do is really just to think about the fact that this isn't a two three year journey it's a 10 to 15 year journey at minimum you know we often forget that uh first couple of years like that fun because it's a little bit novel five years in it is a grind like there is like a sense of grind in the sense of like if you don't like what you do or you're not really proud of the product i think it gets really hard to get out of bed long term and at the very beginning you mentioned um the problem that you're passionate to solve because when you like look at those major players like american express visa massacre there there was something that you saw which was fundamentally broken what was it that you saw that others didn't one of the things that i found really fascinating was that you know i when i kind of sort of move into the fintech space it was a real like focus and this is where a whole bunch of like the neobanks are built uh i mean i guess i'm described as like cheaper faster more convenient which i think it's great right they've built multi-billion dollar businesses off the back of that um i was more interested in the idea of you know at the end of the day money itself isn't that interesting it's like what you do with it and whatever you could connect that with how you discover a city and how with a saying, Henry and I spoke about this a long time ago, which is like, how do we make everyone feel like a tourist in their own city?

4:23And how do we make everyone feel like a local whenever they travel? And no one had really sort of connected money in that sort of thesis ever. It was always like very much like, you've got your like travel and like the secret lenders in the world that are like discovery and things like that. And then you have your sort of like your neobanks, but no one had really sort of bridged the gap. I'd say like American Express had done that sort of in the 70s and 80s. And actually the first ever card product, most people don't realize it was called Dinah's Club. literally it's in the name diner's club it was actually a restaurant club that's how it started in the 1950s and so i always kind of had a i don't know it's something that i would like as well i love exploring new cities it was a problem i wanted to solve for myself um but but also i think you know as someone had moved to london uh and it was like an exciting time i was like could we be like that local friend that you had to show the city uh and how can we start to like connect that with how you spend your money day to day and then connect that with the city that you go into and explore as well um and no one had really played that concept to be honest and maybe part of it because i came from a background actually in media so i didn't actually work in financial services before this i actually worked in media before this uh and and like with media a lot of it is like if you kind of think about the effective value of like watching netflix is actually like pretty nil like it doesn't actually do anything for you um people often say to me like yeah so like the classic advice is um build a painkiller not a vitamin i'm like what like painkiller is netflix really solving it's not it's like pure vitamin it's pure enjoyment uh but i but i think like with consumer products which is what i love doing there's something about like the sense of like doing something that's fun and enjoyable and i sort of wanted to make a consumer fintech product that felt like that that felt really emotionally led that felt varied rich of photography that felt kind of like um cycling down regent street i mean you have those like beautiful shops and you kind of you cycle through and you see all those that feeling that you get i wanted that feeling with our product as well yeah and it's a really weird thing to describe but i literally met um the general partner at a very large venture fund um he said to me this is kind of weird i've never heard something like this before and you know i've literally heard basically thousands of variations of every single company that could be pitched and basically every time someone pitches me a company I've almost always heard someone do that before this is one of the first times I've heard someone do this and it was like oh this is interesting doesn't mean he's going to invest but I think it was quite interesting to hear that and was this also your approach to carve like a small percentage of the users out because I'm like if you look at the industry before you got started like you have those major players so I'm wondering like what was your approach to get those small percentage of the very first users was it to be different and like very new this is like an effuriating uh thing that vcs always say it's like you need a big tam right so like and everyone gets a pitch it's like you need a big tam um but the problem is is that trying to break into a big market is pretty much impossible you know so let's say uh i don't know uh you know you guys are working on like erp and it's like yeah big tam oh let's go after like salesforce.com it's like yeah like how are you what's your beach head in that market because going to head to head doesn't really work and so I really like that framing of like what's the beachhead market and the beachhead market is to be really narrow and needs to be a sort of a segment that you can go really deep on that is too small that a large company would ignore and I think that's kind of like the interesting paradox it needs to be large enough that you can kind of land and expand but small enough that is uninteresting because if it's interesting that everyone else would do it and so like I always think about it's interesting that zoom exists video conferencing is not a new thing like google meets and a bunch of other platforms exist there um but but you know eric was like really focused on like doing this really narrow thing really really really well and you know i was able to build a billion billion dollars of business for the back of that and so we kind of we we sort of picked but we started like foodies in london very much like the short attack me by people and i was just like a segment that we knew we could deliver a credible experience for that we felt a lot of excitement about now we're much bigger than that now but we sort of felt like we had to pick a beachhead that we could go after uh and then obviously the next question then is like how do you expand but i would rather have a swan of customers who love the product that we then have to expand tam for then the counter factory would just have a massive tam but not have any customers like the product because you mentioned zoom like do you think the strategy is also applicable to other industries that you need to go very niche?

8:45Or what would you say to a founder that is building in an industry where you have those large players? What's the approach that you would suggest? I think no matter what, you need to find a beachhead somewhere. I think a universal truth is that there needs to be a small enough segment of customer that you can wrap your hand around, at least to get started. Now, how that evolves, that looks different. But to get started, you kind of need to find a beachhead market. And I remember talking to Grant from Gamma, and Gamma has obviously, you know, been publicized, doing really well, like 100 million run rate.

9:19I was actually a user interview participant in 2021. And I remember he was initially looking at going after consultants, like management consultants. And that was what my background was. And so because of pitching this thing, I think he sort of pivoted a little bit. I don't know for sure, but it sounds like he's doing a lot more with like teachers and educators now as well. but he was very much like trying to find a specific use case where essentially making creating presentations from scratch really easy could really work now like PowerPoint's used by pretty much every single company in the world now you go after like every company in the world every industry it's like pretty hard to like crack that um and so you kind of have to find like a beachhead where um you know for all the people who use PowerPoint there's like a segment that you think you could do a really good job for and do that really well if you want to try and build a a platform for like all companies in the world in the first year it's like pretty hard and I think it's very unlikely you better like find product market fit.

10:13And then Tim if we go back to the time before Yonder so to early 2020 you were based in London at the time and your girlfriend moved to London as well after you had a long distance relationship but then she loses her job and also at this point in time many of your friends move back to Australia actually. I want to speak about this moment in time because I think it would have been an easy decision for you to go back as well. Like, why didn't you? Yes, it was a very depressing year. So a bit of context in 2020, my wife had just moved. So we just got married. She just moved over. We're doing long distance for two years.

10:47She had no friends. She just got a job. She got let go in the middle of COVID. We were in a 45 square meter apartment with no friends, no family. And Australia, by the way, had no lockdown. So Australia had like complete freedom. all our friends were going out going for dinner where's the paradise yeah and like we would call them and they're like how's it going in london we're like oh we can't do anything and my wife is unemployed and i was at a scale up that was really having a tough time during covid as well and we were having to you know cut down the business i was at so not only was like the startup i was not doing that well uh my wife was also made redundant so she had no job for nine months and i said to her hey i want to work in the startup which is like are you serious like we just got married like why now uh and i was like well like i have this itch and i've been thinking about this for a while i think like a bit of it was i know two elements i think one i did really want to see this through uh i i don't know i had a lot of excitement about what we wanted to build i think like on a deeply like personal like spiritual level i kind of had this little sense of like conviction i had like i'd like a personal faith and there's a sense of like this is what you're meant to do and it just kind of felt this sense of this is what you're meant to do and my wife said to me she goes look if you want to go and stay and we and commit to this let's let's go and make a choice to do it um because people a lot of our friends would say hey are you guys planning to move back this year and we would always be like oh i don't know like depends if the startup goes anywhere and have a thing and she's like look if we're going to stay we should just stay and commit and so sort of in 2020 middle of the year we're like we're going to stay and commit and we're going to see this through uh and you know the rest is history we did manage to end up raising our pre-seed round sort of end of 2020.

12:21And, you know, it's been a huge rollercoaster since. I think it's super impressive, like the thought process and that you make that decision. But I'm wondering also when like everything is like against it, basically, I was wondering if there has been a specific experience for you that showed you that entrepreneurship is like exactly what you want to do and if there has been that it can be like a force for positive change as well. I love just walking to the office and seeing my team you know we're not huge for 60 people but the fact that we've managed to a like bring together a whole heap of like incredibly talented people who came from companies like Wise, Monzo, Rezzy, Bain like just from all these walks of life and come together and be proud of their work I think that's like super fulfilling I don't know there was something fulfilling about as a founder people joining you on this like crazy merry journey of building something from scratch and every so often i have to kind of like take a step back and be like we built this like this was an idea and we built this and this is incredible um i think the second thing is to see people go out and start their own things as well and we've had a couple of people go out from yonder and start companies as well uh so henry went up to start fruitful and raised venture backing.

13:38James went out to start artificial societies and also raised from some great funds as well. And I, you know, I take it a great privilege to be part of their journey, going into that journey of starting companies as well. And I hope we can do more of that as well. And I think the third thing is just seeing customers love your product. Like that is, you know, every so often when I've had like a bad week, which happens very often is I'll go to like a trust pilot and be like, huh, these are like people who like bothered to write something positive about our company. That's cool. Like that is a, such a great privilege to be able to build something that people want to use.

14:12You know, very, so occasionally someone will come up to me like, Oh, Hey, like, you know, I don't really talk about my job outside of work too much. So people were like, Oh, what do you do? I'm like, Oh yeah. Like I run a startup, you know, I work at a tech company. I even, I didn't even say I'm a fan. I usually say, yeah, like I work at a tech company. And they're like, Oh, what is it? And I'm like, Oh, this is company called Yonder. And they're like, Oh, I love that product. It's so good. I loved it. And so that's kind of like really, really fulfilling to see that. So I think as my background was in product and the proudest thing for me to do is to build a product that people love.

14:43Like that is like, if I define what makes me happier to do great work, it's to build a product people love. And so seeing that is always a massive high. Is this also how you would describe the mission that you're on? Because even with like everything you said, like why did you choose FinTech as the industry to actually execute on this? So I have this really lofty ambition. And in 2016, I lived in Kenya and I worked with the founders of a payment platform called M-Pesa. And for those who don't know, M-Pesa is basically a mobile money platform. It was built in around late 2006, 2007, I think. To give you a sense of scale, about 50 % of the GDP goes through these payment rails.

15:25Like that is an insane level of like payment flow. and what I think was really cool was to see what that did for the nation and so I would go out to villages I was working on an international aid assignment and I'll go out to little villages in the middle of nowhere and they'll be like oh I love M-Pesa like I send money back to my family I like use this to keep my money safe I use it to trade I buy stuff like I use it for like commerce and I think this is something that really cool about hey you know if you actually make money work really well it literally powers the entire economy which is like it's not a profound thought but every single person in this room every single person hears this podcast will have interacted with money for that day you know for sure guaranteed and so like the you like to build something that touches that basically means you touch every part of someone's life um and that is incredible privilege and i think there's this ambition i have which is i think when you do this sort of when you do money well, I think you can like lift the entire level of an economy in an entire nation.

16:27And I say that like, because I saw it, like I looked at, and I spent a lot of time in East Africa and I spent a lot of time in different parts of East Africa. And I would say like, obviously payments wasn't the only thing that made this work, but it was definitely a massive enabler, right? Like with payments, you can do commerce, you can do trade, you can keep money safe, you can invest. There's like the whole bunch of good stuff that happens with payments and the flow of money. And so I had a deep belief that you could build a valuable business and also like lift the standard for like millions of people in the world.

16:57And so that was always the ultimate goal, which is, hey, can we build something that would be a great business, but also genuinely change it like nations and make like a GDP level impact. Yeah, I love that. And when you got started, like that's the thing that really impressed me is that you were super methodical about how you got started, like in terms of like your age, your experiences until that point and also your personal runway so which is like very much the opposite of many founder stories that you hear when they say okay just fuck it we go all in like could you talk about this thought process of yourself like just before you started yonder i you know i think that um it's funny because like i have a high risk tolerance and a low risk tolerance at the same time it's very weird i have like a an asian upbringing right and so like you're taught with asian upbringing is like make sure you have security make sure you have financial a safety net there's like a bunch of things that's like ingrained in your psyche your entire life so it's hard to like break that but one of the things i think about now is this framework of uh where are the opportunities where there is capped downside but uncapped upside and i think the founder journey for me was pretty much uncapped upside pretty limited downside like the worst case scenario is i get a job in another startup or if i'm really desperate i go back to consulting right like there's like like a avcd and if it goes really really bad you know what like i'll go back and live with my parents back in australia right like there was like a waterfall of like how bad things can get and i'm like you know what living with my parents isn't that bad yeah that's my gut my absolute worst case scenario um and and so i kind of thought of this lens of but the upside is infinite like we could build something that has an infinite upside and i don't mean that just financially i think infinite upside in terms of learning fulfillment building something we're proud of and so i think about life through those lens now where is there like an uncapped upside but limited downside and for most people who become a founder they pretty much have like the most employable set of skills anyway and so it doesn't really matter like you'll be fine uh and to an extent there was an element of like there's a bit of an itch that i had to scratch and it definitely kind of felt like everything i did before that was like leading up to it i don't know how to describe why it felt like that but but one of a few jobs where I feel like this is the perfect set of my skills where I feel like I can be like top one percent in this in this area yeah and one one other thing that you said is that um you could actually run a startup like a large scientific experiment so that um if you start without distribution and without costs that you could like ask the very initial question if people actually love the product so yeah could you talk about this approach of experimentation and how it helped during the journey a lot of the way i think about it was being very systematic about like a p &l which is like and you go to the very top is like revenue but how do you get revenue you need customers customers times why our poo is is monetized is like reaches monetization equals revenue and then it's like marginal cost and then gross profit and then gna and then all the way down and actually i realized like as a startup you basically work your way through that down that list over like 10 or 15 year horizon like at the very start is like customer can you find customers then at some point can you figure out how to monetize them and then can you figure out a way how to like make sure that whenever you acquire a customer you're not spending more money supporting them than you are making money from them which is gross margin and then it's like can you get enough scale where you can cover the cost of running your business and so like I guess I kind of thought about a startup like systematically going down that list all the way through and like we're now at the you know scaling optimized gross margin stage but not worry too much still about DNA just like scale scale scale scale scale uh and so when we started I was like do not ignore everything but just like for example one thing which is like find customers like find customers that love our product and we will sticky tape everything and so our original customer support was literally an iphone that got passed around and when you're on the overnight shift you got given an iphone that was literally would buzz at night time and you would be woken up at 2am in the morning to do customer support and that was like the most unscalable customers of all but we were like i want to deliver this like memory experience and so the way we do that is we're going to like sticky tape it together it was an iPhone that we passed around and so like we sort of like looked at you know most things we would sticky tape and then once we sort of figured out that it worked then we would then move to the next thing and move to the next thing and the reason why we did that is like partly because as a startup there is like a limited throughput that you can do like you are you are genuinely capped on how much you can like execute on any given moment and so really great founders knows how to know how to sequence things doing the right thing at the right time and that's a really hard thing to do which is like the sequencing side because I think there are too many problems to solve like every single startup is generally collectively on fire in multiple places uh and so you kind of have to pick like which fire you put out at any given time and so you I think great founders know how to sequence which problem to solve next and I think bad founders tend to just jump on every single fire that turns up and and And then you kind of get no, you get no momentum at all.

21:47Did the experiment scale with the size of the company as well? So when you talked about at the beginning, it was like a lot of sticky tape. And then how do we apply it now? Let's call it like use screws when you have a level of confidence. But if you don't have confidence, then use like blue tack or sticky tape. So how do I think about that is things like international markets that we're launching in Europe next year. Like that will be sticky tape together because like we will have very little confidence on how to do it. We will just be like figuring stuff out on the fly. and so by design everything will be like literally like gaffer taped together like the entire business will be gaffer taped together in europe because we really want to learn and we want to focus on you know changing things and changing quickly um and so i think it's proportional to like which part of the business certain parts of our business is much more stable now and so yeah we want to like make sure it actually works in scales so i don't know let's just take customer support now like it is not scalable now with our number of customers to have an iphone being passed around now like we actually have to provide like scaled level of customer support um and so now we've got like a team in place and we'll do a lot more like processes and all that but a bunch of other stuff in our business is like i don't know it's going to work let's just try it out and so that's like pure sticky tape and so we want it to be as easy as to change as possible and so i think that will change again i think every startup will have to continue to define new planet market fit and so one of these i always push our team to do is make sure we don't apply the structure that we apply to our mature part of our business to new parts.

23:13And so when we go and do Netherlands, like the team are like, well, we need all this headcount. I'm like, guys, we lost the entire company of six people. We do not need all this headcount. We need like, and I know there's six people including engineering, right? So like, we really do not need that many people. We need two people. And then they're like, oh, but how's it going to work with like 10 ,000, 100 ,000 customers? I'm like, it doesn't need to work for 10 ,000, 100 ,000 customers. It needs to work for 100 customers. If you have 100 customers, call me and then we can figure out how to solve for a thousand customers.

23:40Until then, leave me alone. You're going to get that. And so like trying to keep the sort of investment proportional to the confidence. And I think that you kind of avoid the problem where you end up having too much investment in something and then you have this like weird sunk cost fallacy and it becomes very hard to like get out as well. And, you know, we saw that when I was my last scale up, I was out, I was part of the international expansion team and we launched into new markets. And, you know, it gets tricky if you overinvest in the market, it's like hard to like get out of the market because you're very invested in a lot.

24:09And there was something that like, I have a thesis and I don't know if it's fully proven yet, but my thesis is that finding product market fit is almost like giving birth in the sense of you can't like fast track it. You can't just like push capital to find product market fit better. It takes kind of as long as it takes. So like you can't just like force to make it faster. And so I think certain things, you can apply more capital and it makes it go faster. But certain other things, applying more capital doesn't make it go faster. one other topic that you and i we talked about earlier is which is very much underrepresented in our industry um is the psychology of founders and because i looked it up like sifted did the study last year and the results were really shocking it said that every single founder they spoke to had mental health complaints uh when you hear this statistic what moment of your journey comes to your mind i mean there's so many i mean we had silicon valley bank we just closed series a they made 12 million pounds in the bank and silicon valley bank collapsed and we were in another country doing a due diligence for a debt financing so we were there and the bank collapsed while we're on the plane there like what were the chances of that happening and caught up our investors and it was pretty clear that they couldn't do anything like they didn't have just cash lying around and they had a bunch of portfolio companies that impact i mean there were literally hundreds of portfolio companies across the UK impacted across and then if you add in the US probably thousands as well uh and I think that you know the idea that your entire work could just go poof overnight for something out of your control is pretty devastating like it's pretty full-on and you know we spent out you know you know we we poured out a sweat blunt here closing a series it wasn't easy like all these things are like huge milestones and all of a sudden your And Tycom just goes poof overnight.

26:01And people are like, well, you should have had money in other accounts. Like we did have money in other accounts, but how do you split 12 million pounds across many accounts? Like we had 2 million in another account, but we can't run the business on 2 million pounds. I remember though one night I just said, look, we've done everything we can. We've had our meeting with our board. We've done all our lobbying with the government through sort of the startup ecosystem in the UK. Let's just have a great dinner. Literally when you got the news. Yeah, I was like, let's just have a great dinner. So we went out and had a really nice dinner.

26:29And we're just like, look, there's nothing we can do. We can't change it. And so one of the things I've really been thinking a lot about is like, control the things you can control and let the score take care of itself. And what I mean by that is there's obviously a lot of rhetoric at the moment, which is like, are we in an AI bubble? And like, we probably are. But the problem is like, we don't know when it's going to end. Like, the problem is it could be, the bubble could pop in like four years and you could like over-index it into conservative or it could pop next week. like I don't know I can't control that and I remember talking to one of our board members about it and he just said to me he's like look control what you can control and I think that's a really weird part of running startup because you obviously care deeply about what you're building that's why you're a founder and yet there are so many things that are still out of your control despite feeling that you have control over many things you know you could be doing a a big enterprise SaaS deal.

27:23And all of a sudden your main sponsor leaves the company. The deal's dead. And like, you can't control that. Like all these little things that are outside of your control. And I think that the truth, the reality is, is basically shit happens to every startup. Like, and you know, the last startup I was at, this is public, but ClearScore was getting acquired for 275 million pounds, which is a great exit within about three to four years of getting founded. And then the CMA, so the competition market authority decided to block the deal and so that's pretty devastating uh i wasn't directly impacted i wasn't part of the early team but you know that sucks that's not fair a lot of great lawyers would have been engaged to tell you this deal would have been fine and the ultimate outcome of the deal was it was blocked and so then you have to kind of get back and continue and you know we say there's like a passing comment but imagine like three four years of your work you get this great exit opportunity you're suddenly like wow this is amazing incredible outcome and then a year later nope it's falling so get back on it it sometimes feels unfair actually it often is unfair but I think that when you kind of accept that that's just part of the journey then it then it kind of makes it okay yeah um but we've definitely learned a lot which is on one hand you have to be incredibly optimistic and hopeful and on the other hand the incredibly paranoid um any great writer great book called only the paranoid survive and i always tell like our management team you need to be constantly paranoid like i am so paranoid and so this is weird like schizophrenia where you need to be super optimistic and yet really really really pessimistic and really really paranoid because you need to like i'm always paranoid we're not working hard enough i'm always paranoid we're not shipping fast enough always paranoid we're not going fast enough like you want this sort of sense of dissatisfaction and yet if you live in that for too long you create like this cloud of sadness in the company but if you're too overly optimistic you can also create like a false sense of security as well and you're not like looking around corners you're not hustling you're not pushing for the next inch and so you kind of always want to be in this modality uh and i always told one of my co-founders i don't think i'll ever feel like we're ever working hard enough and yet at the same time the team will always feel like we're working too hard and like that that tension will always inherently exist and i've just sort have accepted it now so so you mentioned um focus only on the things that you can control are there any other practical advice or things that work for you personally to deal with this intensity because you mentioned it will it's not for like a year or two it's like 10 years plus this journey and i think it's a different thing i think for like a year or two is fine it's like the five to ten year like speak to fantasy doing it for 10 years they're tired like it's very tiring yeah um i i think i mean on a very practical level i think the thing that we always say is you're running a marathon not a sprint and so you need to be quick but you also need to be going for a distance i think secondly i think when you go in knowing it's going to be a long journey it does change the way you make decisions like we went into this and we continue to have this posture of this will be a 10 or 20 year journey this isn't going to be like a four or five year thing for this is like a 10 and 20 year journey there's any other practical things like actually like find a support network other founders friends community my case like i have you know a church community i have like a great family and friends and like actually make sure you don't lose them because they are the first things to drop when you get busy and yet like when things don't go well they are the ones that will look out for you when things don't go well they're the highs and lows of you know tech consifted come and go um the same journalist that will say good things about you will say not so nice things about you so like obviously that that stuff is fleeting and it will never last uh but hopefully you've got like friends and community that will stick around um and then we also got a coach as well pretty early on and we've been working with a coach since start of the company i remember things she said to me she goes tim how do we help you find a really sustainable 50 to 60 hour work week it wasn't like for you like it was like being realistic that this is going to be a lot of hours but she's like look 70 to 80 you can probably do from time to time but like the science probably shows that 70 to 80 continuously will probably burn you out so let's go for like 55 to 60 let's aim for sustainable 55 to 60 so she's like very realistic about what is involved in building a startup but also like the key thing is sustainable and so we work we did a lot of work together so for example i have a rule that i only work i work all weekends but i never work both weekends so like i'll never work saturday and sunday i'll work a saturday or sunday um i'll generally work most late evenings but i always take five night off like stuff like that and i found that that's just been a great way to continue to like push hard but also just find something that's sustainable as well yeah and i think i mean personally like i sometimes think of life also as a sequence of different trade-offs so i'm wondering like what is the what's like the highest price that you paid for building especially like a fast scaling company i mean i'm not around for my whole family is back in australia uh i'm not around for them my parents getting older uh my co-founders i mean they've got kids and uh you know one of them his daughter actually did a family photo and didn't include him in it because he was working all the time and that was like hard that's super hard to hear to see something like that um so there's real cost I don't think people talk about that but that was a real cost of early years and he's tried to like readjust a little bit because he doesn't want to be completely absent dad as well um but you know he came down and said hey guys like I need to go take my daughter to swimming classes like literally she's like i'm not even in the family photo um and so i think that's a real sacrifice i think that it's not a nine-to-five job though right and so you're not going to get the same thing i think that's a trade-off that all of us are sort of hard to accept especially if you want to do it long term you know if i want to have a family in the future and still want to keep doing this there are real trade-offs there i think people don't talk about that i think enough i think there are real trade-offs there i think it's a trade-off that we're willing to make in this season of life I wouldn't want to be an absent parent for the entire life if that makes sense and so I think there are like moments where you might choose to lean in more lean out more uh but I but I do think that there is a real trade-off there and you can't you can't deny that yeah and one other thing you speak about is the personal transformations that you also go through like while scaling the company which is at the at the very beginning you probably yeah you focus on building the product and then you spend more and more time on building the team and ultimately the organization like how did you experience these transformations for yourself?

33:48One of the things that's very weird is that, at least for many founders, you end up becoming a CEO. But it doesn't actually mean you're CEO material. It actually is funny because being a founder and a CEO is actually a different job. We conflate them and they're not the same job. Being a founder is building the product and trying to get something off the ground. Being a CEO is like running an organization. And oftentimes, you are the same person, but the skills are very different and so I had to learn the CEO job in addition to being the founder and that was a whole new set of skills that I just don't have experience doing right like I've never done it before I was like middle management at a scale up but I'd never been a CEO before and so all of a sudden the team are coming to you with is like really obscure decisions you have to make and you're like I don't have any reference point on how to make that decision and so I joke like my the problem being a CEO as well is that basically all the decisions that come to you are only the hard ones because all the easy ones are already done by your team so by the time it comes to you you only get the gnarly ones and so it's like pretty fatiguing and so you know I got better at that I think I got better at leading uh I would say like I was probably like a b minus manager I'd probably say I'm like maybe a b plus manager I wouldn't say I'm excellent but I think I'm better than I used to be I think I'm a better leader than I used to be I think the thing that I also didn't realize is that your job as a recruiter does not end like you will be a recruiter your entire career because as a founder and as a CEO your job is to find the best talent and that doesn't change because even when you're a unicorn doing 100 million run rate you're still trying to find the best talent and by the way the talent you're going after is also getting approached by many other great people as well.

35:35So your job like doing sales essentially does not end. It's easier that we can attract a better quality of talent, but yet the very best talents still are hard to get. And so, you know, for example, we recently recruited the guy who set up Starling Banks, customer service support, and he ran it for seven years. And so, you know, he was the right person we needed to help scale out customer support and Starling had a great reputation. And so the second, And my colleague, she was like, hey, I really want, I think we should really hire him. I'm like, let's get a train tomorrow. Let's go to Cardiff and get it and close him.

36:08So literally like we got on a train, we went over there, I had lunch with him and I said like, how do we get this over the line? And then by the end of it, he's like, yeah, I want to join. And he's created so much leverage for us, right? He's an incredible leader and he's really helped change the business in that area of our business. And so I always say that it is my job to still close the best people in our company. and to the credit some of our board members have said to me if you need help closing great candidates like let us help you as well and that's like proper vc value add like there's a lot of bullcrap vc value add and like one of the vc value add is like how do i help you close a candidate or help you close a deal did you experience that it was actually helpful for you like with vcs helping you yeah i mean for a couple of candidates it was just a bit of an extra vote of confidence yeah uh like we don't negotiate on salary but we're like what we can do is give you a chance to meet one of our board members yeah and actually for a lot of people they don't get a chance to meet a board member so that's a pretty unique opportunity and they can also hear why that investor invested in the first place as well and that's always a bit of a extra angle as well um but but i think that this isn't unique to you know companies even our size i mean you hear about mark zuckerberg going out and like with putting the best talent i think that's true i think the fact that the best leaders have to go and really seek out the best talent and that's how you create leverage yeah and you mentioned that so those different stages require different skills but i think almost they also nearly require different characteristics um i'm wondering like how did you personally had to transform to actually fit to those different roles i think to an extent that i think at the early stage you can put your arms on everything and you know exactly what's going on every part of like you know if you're like you know pre-sage super early stage company you pretty much know how everything is working in your company like ins and out we're not even that big but even now like i don't know what my team are doing every single day of the week like there's just too many people now to know what happens and so you start to get better at knowing what do you need to put in place to know things are going well versus not well but also how do you know people are lying to you yeah but as in lying to you not because people are bad but because people want to tell you good news and so you kind of get much better at like sniffing out is there is there a problem there i don't need to go deep um i think that the bad advice for vcs is when you get to i don't know the scaling phase let's call it 10 million one way plus whatever um you need to hire your management team empower them leave them alone it's actually like really terrible advice because um i think the thing that's unique about the founder slash ceo is that you still have perspective on the entire company that no one else has like you have a unique set of perspectives and also you have a sense of like attention to detail that no one else has as well so the way I think about it is my my job is to I describe great leverage where I can which is I put in this input but I get like a much larger output somewhere else and then there are certain parts of the business that need attention and I should go really deep in there and you know where I consume a product business it's basically like product and distribution are like the two most important things and so I should stay very very very very close to it all the time like I never not get close to it uh and i've told my head of product and my head of marketing like look i will not leave you alone like i'm sorry but product and distribution is what makes our business so i will always take place to the part of the business the other parts of their business i will generally hire empower and only get close when they need help yeah and so i've tried to be quite particular on when i'm really close to the detail versus when i'm not so that's probably the evolution whereas in the past maybe i could be close to everything and you just can't do that anymore.

39:43Tim, we have a closing tradition on this podcast, which is something I ask our guests, which is if you could challenge our listeners to do one thing this week, and they could be whether they are founders, professionals, students or operators, to get them a step closer to their goal, what would that be? I would say try something you never thought you would have tried. So I heard this thing, as I get older, the less I'm willing to try new things. And I say as in uh it's slightly embarrassing but i had a friend's birthday over the weekend and she volunteered us all to do vogue dancing um which is slightly embarrassing um but i was very much like i'm just gonna say yes and i think what i want to try and maintain is a sense of like curiosity and hopefully that will then maintain curiosity in every other part of what i do as well because i think that once i lose that curiosity i think i'll lose my edge as a founder yeah thank you so much Tim.

40:39I think you're a very rare combination of like things that usually don't really happen to meet each other very often which is like on one hand there's intensity and like a fast-moving pace that you have but also at the other side like you're very empathetic and considerate so and I think like both sides we saw in the conversation so thank you so much. I appreciate it.