Scaling Heidi in the US: Lessons in product, people and persistence.

28:33Like if you asked me six months ago, I'd say like, get that out of my face. I don't need that. But now it's, we need it because we're limited in how far we can go to the next phase without that extra 20%. So also I'll plug that we're hiring like 10, 10 roles. So if you want to come and, and, and roll around in the office, it'll, it'll be good fun. But that that's kind of our thesis, I think. I don't want to draw the wrong analogy. I remember speaking to someone who used to work in the military, a late SAS. And I was like, what's the difference between like the Aussie SAS and like the SIL team?

29:05And the way that he was describing it was like, if it was a general 1v1, Aussies would win. But if it was a specialist like sniper off or any equivalent of that, the US would win. Do you think that's true of like some talent in Australia versus US? Like maybe even just like the younger they are, is there this sort of laser focus or am I picking at straws here? No, it's really interesting. I think it's like a hundred percent true. I'm trying to like, as you're talking about it, trying to think about why it might be, because it's a hundred percent. Like it's what we've experienced fully. A, it's not necessarily just an Aussie thing.

29:46It's like, it's a, it's an approach to things. I do think maybe there's a very American way about going things where from, from the cradle, you kind of know what you're, what you're shooting for. Right. Whereas in Australia, it does feel like people pick up things differently, or I don't know if it's a product of like the really excellent people at a very specific thing. If they come out of Australia, they tend to move to the U S whereas the people that are in Australia are just the generalists, like the people that if they weren't, if they were so specifically good at something, they would go to somewhere else in the US where that's like highly in demand because there's a hundred times the companies.

30:27And so you're more likely to find the, I don't know, legal procurement, pricing, sales, AE role somewhere in the US than you are in Australia. So I do think it's true. I can't, I can't think of like a good reason as to why. But the other thing that's been a big success for us, which is on a similar vein is hiring young for the exact same set of reasons. It's like you haven't been jaded by an industry. You haven't learned the wrong set of skills that worked really well for company A, but now don't work here. And you've got to spend half the time unwinding it. You're kind of just like a fresh set of eyes to throw at a problem.

31:04And again, if you just hire people that are smart, that you like and throw of them are the problem, they can kind of first principles their way out of it. And so yeah, that Aussie and young, I guess, kind of exhibit those same traits. And so it tends to make up the shape of the team. But we found people from the US that exhibit that exact same behavior. It's the thing that we look for. Like it's what's most important to us. And how do you think about compensation from DoDot? yeah such a good question this is this is right now the the thing that i think about the most that's it's pretty you're a wizard um you're a wizard are you yeah it's really really really hard for a multitude of reasons one is like the stage of the company we're at i wish we were in a place where i could project this much quota this much revenue we're expecting this is the year on year grow.

32:01So, you know, we work backwards from a revenue target. We're on like the steepest part of a, of a gradient. And for me to like, look at an AE in the eyes and say, Hey, you've got to deliver this much quota this, this quarter is just like totally unfair. And I wouldn't even believe it myself. And so our sales reps right now, and I call them sales reps, but they're, like I said, they're more customer success, like just the people that are closing deals. right now we have a great group of people that were part of that early team that are so viscerally part of the mission we're on where if they close a million dollar deal that's maybe an extreme example they close a hundred thousand dollar deal they're not thinking oh well if i was on a 10 quota i would have got 10 grand of that they're thinking holy crap we've just made like a serious movement on our revenue number for this month and they're thinking about my equity and they're thinking about the glory of startup winning.

32:59And so there's a part of compensation, which I think is early on. You can rally people around the right incentives just by way of them wanting the right thing out of the company. This will change soon, I'm sure of it. As you get people in, the team gets bigger, the deals get bigger. The million dollar example, probably if someone closed a million dollar deal, they're going to want a bit of it, right? And that's totally fair. That would have been nice. and so it's it's really hard right like i i constantly go back and forth there's people in the team that would probably be more receptive to it people that probably wouldn't be but then you've got different people in the sales team on different comp structures and if they find out it gets ugly and it's it's quite a quite a complex problem and then the other thing that can that makes it more complex is across functions like i said pretty much everyone is facing a customer and is in some way, shape or form driving revenue through the door.

33:56How do you then compensate the, like Allegra is a great example of this. She's our head of kind of implementation customer success. We're bringing on like one of our larger clients at the moment. And just, I've never seen someone go harder at a problem and do better at solving like implementation. When that deal like renews or when they come in for the first time, they were just as important at closing that deal as the person that got it through the door. And then the compliance team spends three months going back and forth with the legal people. Like everyone kind of is together. And so this is something I think about a lot, which is in the early stage, how do you incentivize the right things in the right way to drive the behaviors you want?

34:41I've found, and I'm not going to say I've got it perfect at all. I've found that the biggest motivator is getting people to corral around a shared mission and like really buying in on what the upside of this opportunity could be. Like paint the picture of if all of us do what we're meant to do in 12 months, we'll be here. And holy shit, doesn't that look incredible, right? What does that do for our equity? What does that do for our personal brand? Like all those things. I am totally conscious that at some point you need to just give a sales rep 10 % of the check that comes in. I don't know when that is.

35:19And I'm honestly not looking forward to it. And we've tried, experimented with other different methods that like I won't go into for different reasons, but really the only thing that works is like either end of the spectrum. They're either like compensated fully by, by, uh, or incentivized fully by compensation and that sort of thing, or they're incentivized fully away from compensation. And also as a, like a young guy looking after the team, it's also always like uncomfortable. And that's just maybe me as a person, like I can acknowledge that, but I hate like telling, being the arbiter of like, if it's, if it's not on like a very objective scale, like performance bonus we've experimented with before, like you get a three out of four this quarter, you get a four out of four.

36:07Yes, we can write down on the board, like what the goals are next quarter, but what if the priorities shift, which they do at our stage, right? And so it's, it's just something that's very difficult. And I found the most reliable thing is just getting people in on the mission. It's equity, it's buying the goal that we're trying to achieve. I think over time, like that becomes a more sophisticated equation. I think if anyone got up out of bed and were excited about performance managing around compensation, I probably have some question marks on their character. What kind of weirdo are you? Exactly.

36:51That is a complex problem. And I think you've sort of like clued at it, but incentive alignment between what are dependent teams is the beauty of equity and hopefully compensation structures down the track. Yeah, exactly. That's the one nice little gold nugget we can dangle in front of people that they always like, no matter what their role is. Yeah, totally agree. When you were launching in the US, you've spoken about the archetype, one of the other big questions is how do I infuse the culture of what's made high E special in Australia into our new office? I know at SiteMate, Hartley literally was overseas for many months at a time, founder and CEO of SiteMate, Blackbird Portfolio Company, and just went over there himself.

37:43Plug. Plug alert. Plug. Plug alert. Plug.

37:48Well, I was just like in awe of like, so Tom hasn't taken that approach, which is probably healthier for Tom than it was Hartley. So I'm just curious like what the approach was with the team. Yeah, that's back to my point about like being a node. Like the good thing is that I was there from zero at Heidi. So like I had context on the decisions enough to where I could explain most things, right? Why are we here? Why do we choose this? Why is this that? Whatever. To give Tom his fair credit, like he is up here quite a bit, to be honest. He does his round trips and then gets yelled at when he goes home for leaving.

38:27And then it's like jet lag and has to go to the UK. This last trip that we did was just a total nightmare. But in the periods where he's not here, and especially early on when it was kind of just me, trying to bring people on and corral them was if you can get someone to like a good enough understanding of why things exist in the way that they do, rather than just being very dogmatic about, no, this is the CRM we use. No, this is our approach to customer success. No, this is our approach to sales. I think if you can give people a, the context on it, but be the freedom to go and rewire those like fundamental systems, that gives them enough insight on like the underlying decisions in a way that marries them around the shared kind of style and vibe of the company.

39:20I also think being, and I say this about Rags as well, Raghav who runs our UK team in a similar way, who also kind of shipped off to the UK in a similar way. having been there from the start you're also kind of a little bit of the reason why the company is the way it is for better or for worse right like you are the reason there are bad habits you are the reason that there are these good things as well and so just by nature of having been a formative part of the team you just by exhibiting the same like tendencies and idiosyncrasies can kind of create a similar environment here. Now, in having said that, like there are very common threads with the New York office and the Australian office, the UK office, the Australian office, but the New York office is quite different to the Australian office.

40:09The ways of working, the ways of communicating, like the styles, all the things that make a company a company are like slightly tuned differently. And so I do think while there's a common thread that unifies it all, they do tend to take on different shapes and forms and i haven't been back to the aussie office yet but there have been people in the team that i came over from the australian team and then have gone back a little bit and they go back and they're like whoa like i forgot it was like this so there is a duty to bring people on the shared mission but there is also a duty to not be afraid to build it from the ground up where it makes sense and contextualize for this market because different markets, different requirements.

40:49And I think that's been really important for us. To what extent does capital allocation play a part in your role? Yeah, I think the good thing, maybe the bad thing is that the founders trust me a lot. We'll lead our CFO. He wakes up in cold sweats in the middle of the night and texts me about certain spend or things like that. But I think on the whole, trust me enough to where it's not as much of a push and pull where I've got to create a robust plan of, okay, here are the targets we've got to hit in order for me to get this funding to put towards this thing. It honestly is more like the intuition that's got us here has done us well.

41:28So like, let's continue until something breaks. And that's not to say that we're spraying and praying in any means of the word, but I think there is a lot of freedom to like trust that the people at the front of each of the markets, like again, rags in the UK, myself here, we kind of have a good enough intuition to where like, here's a$60 ,000 conference. It's a lot of money. And it's the most money we've ever spent on the conference before by an order of magnitude, but you think it's worth it. Right. Let's do it. And then we'll look retrospectively and say, okay, was that a good bet? Yes. No.

42:00Why was that a failing on my intuition? Was it a failing on some other assumption? And then that just kind of, again, like builds the intuition and the trust over time to where now outside of like major decisions, a lot of it does just kind of like come down to regionally what we think is best. And the investments across the different markets are so, so different. Like the UK is investing a lot of money in things that are very different to what we're investing in here, which are very different to what we're investing in Australia. And I think it's really hard to do that successfully if you have like some centralized arbiter of what those things should be.

42:36And I think that's testament to Tom and Waleed, the founders and you as well, the technical founder. Like we've found a great sort of relationship there where we can, it's at a moment's notice. Like the time to make a decision goes at the speed of making the decision, not anything else that would hamper it. I love that. On the topic of bets, what are two big bets that have gone well? Okay, two big bets that have gone well. I think there was a fundamental thinking at the start. And I think we've like we briefly alluded to it, but that the product led motion would lead to enterprise success. That is a big bet.

43:14And when we were doing our like series A, that was the thing that turned most of the people that said no way. It was look, guys, you've got great metrics product led. It's the best thing I've ever seen. It's growing like crazy. But to win in the US in healthcare is to win all the enterprises. and we don't see the connection. We can't make the jump of faith that you're going to get to enterprise. We were seeing from conversations with doctors, from the ways we were winning like SMB deals and mid-market deals that no, no, this is happening for real. The reason being is that this category of software, this AI scribe is I think the first piece of technology in healthcare, maybe in like a long period of time where it's actually designed for the individual doctor to get joy and benefit out of it.

44:00You think of things like electronic health records or booking portals or all these things against population health tools. They're getting sold to healthcare for some other user. Not to say it's not useful, but it's not for the doctor. Typically, actually, the doctor sold because of it. You talk to a doctor, they hate EHRs, even though they're probably like a net positive on tracking and data enablement and things like that. the AI scribe means that the doctor has two hours more time per day to do what they want with. So that's the assumption one that you have to make. The next assumption you have to make is, okay, what are the decision makers?

44:38What are like the axes with which the decision makers are evaluating products by? The net benefit to the company in the case of like an EHR, the revenue uplift in the case of population management, the health of the users. in the case of an AI scribe, they're looking at which one is the doctor going to use the most? If we're going to go fork out millions of dollars on this tool for 10 ,000 doctors, which one are they going to use the most? And which one is going to see the most adoption? So the second assumption is that the decision makers are going to look to their clinicians to ask them, which ones do you guys like, want, and which ones should we buy?

45:14Which again, is very different to anything historical. A CMIO doesn't ask the doctor what EHR they want, or at least if they do, it's very rare. So if you take those two things, that A, the product is built for the doctor, which it is, and that B, the decision makers are looking to their doctor, it was really obvious to us why making the best product for the doctor and going product-led would lead to enterprise success because you infiltrate all these organizations, you win over the clinician love, and they rally together and tell their decision makers which one they want. That came true in a lot of cases, just in smaller doses, and also in more so overseas than in the US.

45:55And US investors, most of them, for some reason, discount anything that happens overseas to zero. If it happens overseas, it's not real, right? So the biggest bet we made was staying true to that, and it started to pay off. We're starting to win now these multi-million dollar deals, these health systems like the Beth Israel Leahy health of the world, the Franciscan health of the world, things like that, just because we won the individual doctors over. So I think that's the biggest bet that's paid off. I think kind of a subset of that big bet and one that we probably talked about quite a bit before was the free version.

46:33Huge bet, right? Like you're staking a lot of things on that. you know, Paul will lead, you know, early on, like CFO hat on, we're not making this thing free. Don't even think about it. That bet is a hard one to make and have conviction in. But again, like that, that is the accelerant that powers the rocket that is product led into enterprise. Those are, I think the two that were the most impactful and that have paid off the best so far. And well, I'll bring it to more specifically to you. What's been a bet that you've made in the last 12 months where you look back and you go, yeah, I'm quite proud of that.

47:07I think hiring, like the types of hires that we made, I think it's really easy to get wooed over in an interview with someone that's closed a million dollars at Gong. And I keep using Gong as the example because they're a great company. They are to me the epitome of sales. So these really seasoned veterans in a very specific thing, I think it's really easy to get led astray by that because they paint you a picture of what a sales organization looks like. And you go, wow, you could just build it for us. You can do it. whereas I think it takes a bit more like cojones to bet on someone as a person and from their personality and what they believe in and the things that inspire them to bet on those kind of people and see them win and do better than the specialists in all the other worlds I think that's been the most rewarding bet that we've made and that I think like I early on tried to really champion for.

48:06It would have been a very easy and a understandable decision to say, we need to fill a sales role. Let's find a seasoned vet with five years and like entrust them with the process. It's a bigger risk to take on, to bring someone on that's come out of this industry that is totally orthogonal, that has never done healthcare, never done sales, never done product-led, never worked at a startup because you believe in them and see them flourish. So I think that's something that's most rewarding for me. Yes. You know, you close this huge deal and yes, you do this and the company's growing and it's fantastic.

48:41But for me, the thing I get the most, like the thing that I feel is most rewarding is when the people grow into what you think they can be. And that to me has been like the biggest bet that we made. I love that. At Blackbird, we call it the hungry, not the proven, but it sounds like that's been an instinctive decision that is paying off in real time? I think it's like the bet Tom and Waleed made with not only myself, but like other people early on as well. It's like, who are these kids? Like they don't have any software experience. They don't know SaaS. Heidi was like literally my first job out of university.

49:18And so like, it just feels right. Like that's kind of the culture that exists. So yeah. What are two perhaps company bets that were made? and one personal bet that was made that did not work out? Okay. So I think that like the other side, like the two sides of the same coin. One is we thought that product led was going to lead us to the stars. I think I alluded to it a little bit before, but we thought we'd have this lean machine, marketing machine that, again, inspired by Canva, inspired by Notion, inspired by Slack. We thought we were going to product led our way through healthcare, especially in the US, no shot, Bucko, like bad luck back to the drawing board.

50:03I think we staked a lot of energy, time, product build, everything on that. And I think it took us quite a while to unwind that thinking. We had to reorganize the types of people we hired. We had to reorganize in the types of like go to market motions we were deploying in different places. that was a bad bet. I would say, like, I'll be honest, to be honest, it was a great story. And like, we could sell ourselves on it that look, we just need to, you know, make it this much easier. And then we'll cross the Valley of like getting a team to self-service and then we'll cross the Valley of getting this to self-service.

50:39And at the same time, we're like, you know, thinking about our Slack experience, there's a hundred of us on the Slack channel and we've never talked to a Slack account executive or customer success. friends like we could do the same thing um and just like no no way just didn't work that that was a company bet that i think we learned pretty quick and like acted on it quick enough a bad company that we made i'm gonna go i'm gonna throw it back to be honest like before heidi was even in the us this comes back to the hiring part of it and it's part of the reason we have such like a strong visceral feeling on what type of people we want to hire.

51:19It's because there was honestly like a period where we hired in the wrong way. And I have to do this like cautiously to not be mean, but basically the more degrees of separation between like the founders, the head of the snake and the operators, the young guns that are going and doing the thing, the more pain a company feels. I think at an early stage, we made the mistake early on of hiring too much in that middle band where like beyond anything else, that was kind of clutter. Like it was process for process sake. It was people that maybe had like incredible history and like very sharp, intelligent people that just couldn't make it work in the startup world.

52:02I think that was a really big bet or like approach we took that hurt us, nearly toppled the company to be honest. Like we were in a very downward spiral. go ask Tolo, like some of those board meetings were pretty brutal. And then I think once we got back to like founder, head of the snake, operators, doers, and the founders themselves are like doers as well. Like they are one in the same, right? Like Tom's doing it, spending as much time on Figma and like, like doing PRDs as like our head of product, as is the design team, as are the individual product contributors, right? Waleed is doing as much like enterprise selling into the NHS as, you know, Rags who runs like the kind of the team there as well.

52:47So I think that was a bet that we learned from pretty well, but it was one that like, we were close, like, like last couple thousand feet, the, the, the airplanes like yelling all the bells at us and like,

53:03it's a great analogy. Yeah. I think maybe. And then the, the personal best, I think it's honestly a bet that I've still like, double down on and I know it's not good is it's like finding balance. Like there've been periods like over, for instance, the Christmas break in the U S it's like a lot more hardcore shutdown than in Australia or like other places. Like it's really hardcore. No one's working. I've never like performed better or felt more clear and like better performance than like the couple of weeks or months coming out of that really nice break. I think I'm definitely like hitting the throttle now day to day where it's like red line every day and probably like net output is not fantastic.

53:47Like compared to if I was more diligent with taking time to do other things and stuff like that. And so it's like personal, but I think getting balance right when you take on a responsibility like this and you move to a new city and you do all the things that anyone in that given that opportunity would do. to, to be able to like find balance that is not balance in the way of like, you know, clock off at five and you do thing, but like balance in a way that at least like, maybe you're in like one gear below red light, right? It's a thing that I still haven't figured out. And like betting on the company this hard personally is probably like, you know, shorten my telomeres or something a little bit, but, um, but something, something I know I have to work on at least.

54:37The problem is, so I tried, I went for it. I went, okay, I need six days in Antigua, right? Okay. I grew up on the beach. So I'm like huge beach kid. Like the part of my homesickness is most that I feel the most is beach, summer, sun. So I think, all right, middle of winter in the, in the U S I'm going to Antigua, I'm getting 30 degree weather every day beach. It could not get more perfect. You know, the team is fantastic. Like I can throw them things. this is this is really bad like the whole time there i felt more agitated than i've ever felt in my life i felt like i was i felt like i was in a free fall like back to the plane analogy like i'm really like reaching with the analogy now but i felt like i jumped out of the planes like free myself from the nose dive but like the parachute wasn't pulling and the plane was still going down and everyone I love was still in the plane.

55:31So I like, I kind of like free fell back into the plane and I came back like two days earlier because I just hated it. So there's definitely like deeper set things that, that, that need to be figured out about ways of working. If anyone knows the truth to that, like that, that is like withdrawals where it's like the first week is always hectic and like, you're not, you haven't switched off even though you would, you've attempted to, you know, you're in free fall. Yeah. But it's like, Oh, like, do I need a month off to like really reset or like minimum two weeks? Like if anyone has any solutions there, just, just hit us up.

56:07Yeah, please, please. I'll do anything for life advice. Um, cause, cause it's also like, I think you can pick your struggles at some point. Like what is the struggle I want now? Like maybe it is a bit more tired. Maybe it is a bit more like lethargy. Maybe it is, you know, all the things that come with being quite hardcore. I think overall, like the sentiment from being here and from what we're doing, especially the team, back to like not to bring it back to what we're talking about before, but just being around incredible people, it doesn't really in the moment ever feel like exhausting. It's more like when you really zoom out and it's like Sunday afternoon and it's like, what did I achieve last week?

56:48Okay, here's, you know, 100 incredible things our company achieved and what we did. like did I learn a new instrument or did I like experiment with a new recipe right things like that where the balance part of the balance equation is just what are you optimizing for so it's it's constantly a work in progress do you know what you're going to be optimizing for over the next year yeah more money's in the bank uh for Heidi that is yeah um yeah I think company wise is yeah there's like a company answer and a personal like answer i think the company answer is you see now we're like in each of these different pockets we're hitting like a point where tom can't be involved in everything i can't be involved in everything even the people that like roughly look after that area of focus can't be involved in everything and we're having to change the ways of working to where like like you kind of just have to relax and accept that you will never be able to control everything in the company to the degree like to the degree that you want to If we've done a great job in a year, it's like all of these cylinders are firing autonomously.

57:51The layers of reporting where it makes sense, makes sense. And the teams are talking to each other cross-functionally really nicely. But there's no one that's like the actual puppet master that's pulling it all along together. That's where we're at now, it feels like, at least where we've got like our key team that are in the weeds of everything. And that's why we succeed. But we're hiring like 10, 15 roles at the moment. That doesn't sustain much longer. where I want the company to be in a place where in a year, like the cylinders are firing independently, right? That's a company thing I think is really important.

58:26Personally, it's a good one. Personally, Korea, I think it's like sappy and it's the same version of what I just said for the company as well. But if I can empower all of the people in the team to like be profound leaders and very prolific in what they're trying to pull off in their teams and to do it completely autonomously. That for me, like I said, is the most rewarding thing. I just want like a hundred times more that, like a hundred more leaders that are running their teams as an extension of the fundamental Heidi DNA, a hundred more people that are taking ownership in a way that we think is incredible.

59:06Because I think it's like, you then look at the company and it's a thousand little versions of mini versions of like the Heidi that was there in like the shitty six person, like Fitzroy loft, right? Yeah. That is so incredibly rewarding beyond anything else we do. To see people like grow into their role is just, it's the best thing ever. And so more of that, please, whatever that is, that'll make me a happy man. One final area and I'll let you go. Yep. You left Heidi at the end of 2023. Yeah. You were, I think the head of ops at Hatchery and then you rejoined Heidi again. Yeah. First of all, for those who don't know, just share like why you left and then like going into the abyss and then why you decided to come back.

59:58Yes. So there's nuance to that. So A, the role was like totally made up. There were three of us. So I wanted to be head of ops at the time. who I was still actually working at Heidi while working at Hatchery. So let me explain what Hatchery is. So Hatchery was an idea from Mo, who's the head of product at Heidi around how do you create, I guess what we would now call like an agent, like, but this was a bit before, like the kind of the concept of agents. How do you create like the agent of education for an individual user? Like how do you get them to some predefined outcome or goal, whether it's like a learning goal or test that they want to pass, whatever it is, how do you just like, or put them in like autopilot to get them to that end goal by like surfacing them, YouTube videos, surfacing them, question banks, surfacing them, mini tests, like basically create the hands-off road to succeeding in a learning goal.

1:00:54At the time, Mo was kind of like moonlighting that on the side as a little side project. It was him and one other founder of Hatchery, like a technical founder. I, at the time was like beady-eyed, didn't know kind of the world of startups. I was starting to get the feel of it from Heidi. I kind of knew the lingo. I started listening to all the podcasts that you have to listen to. I was like, oh, this is great. Like I get it. Startup is cool. And then like Mo, Mo's fantastic. Like he does a great job of like selling you on the vision of Hatchery. And we would just talk about it constantly. Like in the office, we walked past like, how's Hatchery going like this, that the other, it became quite clear, quite quickly that like, I was somewhat more enamored by Hatchery and what they had going on, like literally the two of them compared to what was happening in Heidi.

1:01:41This was around the time that I alluded to before, where we had that kind of like messiness in the company. We're in this downward spiral. Things were to, to not sugarcoat it. I was hedging bets like completely that that's what I was doing. I wanted to get experience in like an even earlier stage startup. And I wanted to do it with someone that was at work. So basically what would happen is we'd rock in. Heidi was very like nine to six kind of culture at the time. What wasn't fantastic. Six o 'clock would hit. Everyone goes home. Me and Mo were there till like 10, 11 PM doing hatchery stuff all night.

1:02:17that was such an incredible experience because it was i got all the like the learnings from going like real hardcore zero to one like no venture funding no money where like ten thousand dollars is all that's in the bank account we're figuring out where to spend it like literally down to the decimals i got all of that experience without necessarily having to take on all of the risk of doing that solely again back to this idea of balance like it came at the cost of like any sleep. There were, that's when I had the most like sleepovers at the office in my life. But, um, that told me two things. One, it taught me that you can't do two things exceptionally well in that kind of world that are like that side by side.

1:03:05I spoke to Waleed a lot. Who's our founder and a bit of a mentor, like great manager. And he, he was very, like, he knew what we were doing, like very intimately involved. He was very helpful actually. But it was very clear, like at some point, Jesse, you have to make a decision. Like, what do you want to do? Right. It became clear that that level of risk appetite actually wasn't for me at the time. And probably still to this day isn't worth it. I felt like I was learning more in an environment where we'd kind of de-risked it, where someone like Tom had already been a founder and had those experiences.

1:03:37Now bringing the founder experiences here and having the startup experiences in a slightly more safe way that was what i wanted more versus like just hardcore like if it fails no one knows your name no one knows the company you never raise money no one cares about you like bad luck you're off to go like start off with the next pack of graduates that are looking at mbb gigs or whatever right that's not i think what i wanted and that was kind of the second learning is like the risk appetite i had was like pretty far down the curve of like high risk, but it wasn't all the way at the end of like full on zero to one.

1:04:15Now, having said that, what we have kind of done in America is go zero to one in some way again. And so I think there probably will be a day in which I go, all right, let me solve something that doesn't exist. But at the time, I actually, like this is the advice that I give like friends in startup world or like have an inkling, like a sparkle in their eye for startup is maybe don't go like all the way in zero to one unless it's something you like cannot stop thinking about. If you want startup, go seed, series A, even like series B, build the tools, learn the lingo, learn the stuff, get first principles, experience, whatever.

1:04:59But like first principles is like my least favorite phrase. So when I say it, I have to like, I get sick inside. But get experience and then go take it somewhere else. That's what I thought. And that's what I kind of tell people sometimes. I love it. Jesse, thank you so much. That was so much fun. Yeah, yeah. This is elite. It's been so good.

1:05:28Thank you so much for joining us on this latest episode of Wild Hearts. If you want to learn from other ambitious people that are building, designing, and creating the world that we want to live in, then please hit the follow or subscribe button. It would mean the world to us here on the Wild Hearts team. We have an insane producer, Melia Rayner, an incredible editor, Annie Jones from Welcome to Day One. And our marketing and content support is provided by Jonathan Blakely, and we couldn't do it without them. If you're searching for investment, please, my DMs are open. find me on LinkedIn. I'd love to help.

1:06:03And so with that, we'll see you next week, Wild Hearts.