Sergei & Vadim Revzin - What Venture Funds Look For In Businesses

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fitt.

Hey. Buenos dias, Joe.

Buenos dias, Matt.

The only reason we're laughing is because we started to record this intro, we screwed it up, and then we started again and I tried to do it the same way we did it last time.

Full transparency. We don't edit a lot in our show. We don't really edit anything unless it's a major screw up or someone said something on the pod that they. They're like. In retrospect, they're like, oh, shit, I probably shouldn't have talked about, like, that person that way.

So I tried to say my last intro was a major screw up.

Not a major screw up, but one enough to where we're like, this is probably not the best way to start the podcast, but what I'm trying to say here is, is, yeah, that's what we're laughing at because we recorded a full, like, what, three minutes or so? Almost.

Yeah.

In Spanish. Majority. Actually, we were playing. We're. We're completely fluent in Spanish and we're never gonna ever get that point ever again. You're not going to hear it on recording. Yeah. So just know that we are very fluent and dangerous in Spanish.

I feel like your memory of that last intro is different than my memory.

Of that last episode. All right, let's do a quick 20 second recap of our extent of Spanish.

Buenos dias, Joe.

Hola.

Hola.

Buenos dias, Mateo.

Bien. Gracias. Como?

I didn't ask you a question.

What did you say?

Said, buenos dias, Mateo. Good morning, Matt.

Yeah, good, thank you. That's what I said.

Jesus Christ.

All right.

And then we basically talked about talking, ordering tacos and TJ and how Spanish.

Comes in handy because if you use a teeny bit of Spanish, then all the people around you don't know the extent of your Spanish. So they won't talk crap about you.

Or they'll just give you good deals.

Or they'll give you good deals. No, that does not happen. We are way too white.

Well, at least it gives you potential negotiation power when you're trying to score some cool pinatas and.

Tacos. I mean, shit, I love a good taco deal, to be very honest.

All right, I don't know where we're going. Let's just move on. Cause there's nothing to do with Spanish or Mexico in this episode.

Yeah. I just wanted to give you an inside scoop. It's like, yeah, we screwed up that previous intro and now we're just kind of making up for it. But this is how we do our recordings. Yeah, but I guarantee you're gonna love it.

Today we're talking to Sergey and Vadim Revzin.

We are. These guys are identical brothers.

Yeah, they're identical twins, but twins. Twins and brothers, I guess. I mean, technically they're identical twins.

They don't.

Like, they have different hairstyles and facial hair growth.

No, they wear everything the same. They live in the same place. They're womb mates.

Yes, they were. They're womb mates. That was their joke, not ours.

I'll give them credit for that. But yeah, they're two brothers that work together. They're podcasters as well.

Yeah, they have a podcast called the Mentors, and I believe we've been on that podcast. Podcast.

We have. We've recorded an episode with them as well. So. Yes. I don't know when it's live, but that's okay. We'll be on there. But yeah, these brothers, we met him actually out at Podcast Movement in Orlando. Our. Our buddies, the old guys, we like to call them the Optimum Living Daily podcast hosts. It was actually Lee of the Justin and Lee duo over there. A lot of duo talk.

A lot of duo talk.

Yeah.

So a lot of two on twos. A lot of foursomes going on.

A lot of foursomes. A lot of golf gonna be had here. So y. It was just like happenstance in a bar. We actually talk about it, but we're all getting drinks and we just struck up a conversation. They're cool dudes doing cool things. Like what? Investing and startup mentoring and teaching at NYU and.

New York State University. Suny, I believe that was. Vadim teaches there. I mean, and frigging. He doesn't have any crazy degrees and stuff to even teach at that school. He talks about how he kind of hacked his way into becoming a professor. Yeah. In a whole topic that he loves and enjoys.

Yeah. And then Sergey, he runs a venture capital fund at nyu. And so we dive deep into what do people look for? What do venture capital firms look for when they're thinking about investing in a company? Like, what are some of the criteria if a company is looking to get, you know, funding from a venture capitalist firm and, you know, because he's tied to nyu, there's, you know, some different criteria than maybe like a different venture capitalist firm would go after. But we get deep into like, the whole venture capital world and what that looks like and what companies want to see to invest in other companies. We also talk about the a lot about the sort of teaching that they do at these various schools. And we talk a little bit about their podcast, the mentors podcast, and just, you know, two fun dudes with just a really enjoyable conversation where, you know, it's a duo of two, essentially brothers talking about talking to a duo of two legit brothers who are all in business together.

The legits versus the imposters. We're the imposters.

We're the imposter brothers. We just call each other brothers. There's no blood.

Nah. As far as we know. As far as we know, we haven't compared with 23s and me's. We are not sponsored by them, but we would welcome the sponsorship because I love that stuff. And also a big thing too is both these guys are really deep into startups and team and all that stuff. So they shine a lot of light on what they're seeing with brand new startups and how people approach creating a business with an idea and all that stuff. And hint, a lot of folks do it the wrong way, even when they're in an incubator at NYU or where, you know, like, this is. These are world issues.

Yeah, they do coach, they do coach startups as well. So one of the other topics that we dive into with them is when you're coaching startups, what are the things that most startups need coaching on? And we kind of dive into, like, what are the common pitfalls that most of these early stage startups run into? So really great, really wide ranging conversation. We do have notes on this episode.

Really?

Did we decide to do notes?

Yeah, we did decide to do notes on this one. We were hesitant about it, but ultimately decided that, you know what, we're not gonna break the mold and just stop doing notes for one episode.

It's like when you have a really good episode, you're just like, I don't know, do we really want to put the notes out there for free? Do we really want to give away? Yeah, I guess. I guess we kind of promise it.

I mean, like, they're free, but if you want to like PayPal us some money, we'll take it.

Yeah, just do that. But get the EGP letter. It's so you can get a bunch of these notes every month.

That's the better way to do it is go get the EGP letter and we'll just send you the notes in the mail every month.

But yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, it's clockwork. You Just like. Yeah, just have that show up in your inbox for you. Don't think about it.

For sure.

We got you. We got you. Yeah.

And if you have a phone on you right now, there's a really easy way to get the notes.

Yeah.

Obviously, don't do this while driving. You know, pull over. Like, literally, like, I want you to pull over right now.

Safely, safely, safely, slowly. Turn signals and you're there.

All right, now put on your emergency blinkers so people know, like, all right. Like, they can see you. Okay. So thanks for doing that. Now text the word comp. C O M P to 38470. If you text comp to 38470, we'll send you the notes for this episode.

38470, comp. 38470, comp. 38870, comp.

Dude, you got to make that a real song.

I think we just.

It's catchy. So 38470. Text the word comp. Or if you just feel like doing it the old fashioned way, like the way they used to do it in the 1800s, go to hustleandflowchart.com comp and you can just opt in on your computer and we'll send you the notes there. Hustleandflowchart.com comp either way gets those notes to you, and you're going to want these.

You know what's really cool is, like, if you do the texting 384-70-comp. It's a lot less typing. We don't need more typing in our lives.

Let's just get.

Let's just get to the free notes. Use the text thing. We got you. Carry on with the good, bad self.

All right. Thank you so much for hanging out with our randomly ramblings.

Randomly ramblings.

Random. That's it. It's accurate.

That's our next podcast.

Let's go talk to the bros, the mentors. All right, so today we have the mentors with us. What's up, guys?

Hey, gents.

How you doing?

Dude, this is great. Have we had another duo on the other side of the mic, man? Yeah, we've had the once they would. Yeah, the old guy. Actually, you know, it's a funny story. Is Justin or not Justin? Sorry. Lee of the Optimum Living Daily guys were the ones that actually connected us back at podcast movement at the bar that we're all hanging out at, so.

Oh, that's right. Yeah, that's right.

We could thank the old guys for this.

I like that because he did the classic, very, very sleek and professional networking technique, which is he. We talked for like, I don't know, like a minute. We were both getting a drink or something. And then he immediately took me to Joe and made sure to introduce me to Joe and told you a little bit about me. Like one second, about two seconds about me and vice versa. And then connected us. And you know, I actually even forgot that he's the one that did that. But that was so great because he knew that for some reason he knew that the conversation was going to be relevant. I love when people are the connectors at networking events. It's awesome.

Yeah, man, that's exactly what happened. And that just drummed up. How cool is that? We'll have to share that with him too.

But it is, it is very rare where we've got two guys on this side of the mic and two guys on that side of the mic. And yeah, there's a lot of similarities between what you guys are doing and what we've done. So it'll. It'll be interesting to dive in here.

And we're all brothers in our own right. Right.

We'Ll get into that. So.

Yeah, so you guys run a podcast called the Mentors, and we might have just recorded an episode together on there and that was awesome. Where you just interview some amazing founders and some pretty dang cool people. What, the dude from the reading rainbow?

LeVar Burton, he's the van.

Yeah, that was like. I think Matt was scrolling through the other day and he was like, wait, that's the guy from Reading Rainbow.

I'm like, uh huh. That's random. And I think he also did like the end part of the Magic School Bus where he like they like analyze the science from the episodes. I think that was him.

Maybe that one.

I don't know about that.

That's a flashback to my youth.

Probably all of ours. So. Yeah, go ahead.

Cool. Well, I have a giant list of stuff that I want to get into with you guys because you, you know, you mentioned before we hit record that you've had a few career shifts, a few pivots, as we call it in our world.

That's to make it sound a little better.

Yeah, no one left at that except the four of us.

We say pivot to make it sound like we're not indecisive about what business we want to be when we grow up.

Does anyone know?

But let's get into your story a little bit. Obviously you guys are brothers. You were womb mates.

You're such a clever mask.

I made that joke up on the fly.

Oh, sorry. So you're just going to leave it at that?

Yeah, I'm just going to take credit for it. No, no, that was.

We'll leave the credit with you, it's cool.

No, so.

So you guys have been together since birth, literally. How did you guys get into the sort of business, entrepreneurial world? What, What? You know, how did it start? What, what gave you the bug and you know, what was sort of your path?

I thought you were going to ask. How did you guys meet?

We already know you met as Woo mates.

Dating site.

Co founder.

It's interesting that. How do we get into entrepreneurship as a thing?

I don't know.

I guess from a young age we were interested in being leaders. Our father was a leader. He was a education reformer and a principal of a school back in the Soviet Union. So he was as entrepreneurial as you could get in a country where entrepreneurship is illegal. We actually did a whole three part series on our podcast about him because he's super inspiring for us.

And so entrepreneurship is illegal over there.

I had no clue.

Well, it was back, back in the Soviet times because there was no such thing as private property.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

So it was like a socialist communist thing where everybody shared. Okay, got it, got it.

Okay.

Yeah, you couldn't. There was a whole underground economy, but if you.

They would call it Kupi Pradai, which literally translates to buy and sell. If you had a bunch of T shirts that you wanted to go sell on the streets of Minsk, you could be in prison.

Yeah, you could go to jail. We have relatives and people that we know and that have been in jail for stupid shit like that for like a couple years. It's crazy. But, but when we came here, you know, our dad didn't speak English, had to start a small business. And so we worked at a shopping kiosk at the mall for years starting from age 12. And so we kind of were exposed to it a little bit. But I would say our first true thing that inspired us to start a company, which is our first company that we started in college, is there was this guy that was all over the news back in like, I guess when we were sophomores who decided to build a website where he would have basically, I think it was called like A Thousand pixels. Oh, one million. What was it? One million dollar homepage. You guys remember this?

I do remember it.

Yep, you're our age. About one million dollar homepage. He literally created a website with a bunch of pixels that he sold each individual Pixel for a dollar and it was a million pixels. And he actually ended up making more than a million dollars because a bunch of people would buy more than one. And he got all this press around it and we started thinking, damn, that's a cool idea. Advertising is an interesting space. We want to be entrepreneurs someday. It felt like something in the distant future because we were on a finance track and our parents wanted us to have secure, high paying finance jobs. So that's what we were going after. We thought, why not try doing some sort of advertising business? So our first business, and I sold my car for this because it was.

Our car, Sergey, we had two and.

So realized we don't need two because we always drive go places together. So I decided to sell mine so that we could outsource the development of this product because we weren't technical. And that was basically a website where you could sign up to put ads. It was almost like an affiliate network, but you could put ads, other people's links on your own, let's say away message profiles. Or now maybe it would be like Twitter or your Facebook profile or something and you make money off the spread of that. We made every mistake in the book. That business did not end up succeeding. But that was what first got us excited, that $1 million homepage. We're like, wow, that's cool.

That and also, I mean, aside from the fact that as Sergey mentioned, we grew up in a small business family and our dad was very entrepreneurial. He was constantly experimenting with different products to sell in the mall. And like, for example, one thing that we sold that you all might know is pillow pets. My pillow pets. Literally, it's a pillow and a pet.

Anyways. And it was one of those things where he kind of took a bet on it. It was before E Commerce really took off. And we were like one of the first distributors, funny enough, like this small kiosk, all they were giving away limited licenses or limited partnerships for distribution. And we were one of the first early ones. And yeah, our dad would place like 20, $30,000 orders and we'd get shipments from China. We remember dealing with all that stuff. We were negotiating with vendors since we were like 11 years old because our dad didn't really speak English that well.

Became entrepreneurial in that process. But in college is when we first started because of that $1 million homepage thing. And also we went to a business school where our roommate was running his own affiliate marketing company and paying for college, all with that company. And we were like, Jesus, well, if I could do it out of his room. We should be able to do something because we've been around this type of.

Stuff since we were little.

So that kind of is what pushed us and gave us the entrepreneurial bug early on.

Got it. Dude, that is a heck of an upbringing that just seems so amazing, like, being you're, like, incubated in entrepreneurship and like, literally from day one with your dad. And.

That'S so interesting. What led him to the mall? Like, was that just. Was that just something he was comfortable with and even like sourcing from China and all that stuff? It just seems like such an undertaking.

Yeah, I mean, that type of stuff happened over time. What led him to the mall is actually pretty simple. When we moved to America, this Guy has a PhD. He was doing education reform, had his own school system in Belarus, had documentaries made about him that were aired all over the Soviet Union. But when he came here, no English.

What are you gonna do?

He was pumping gas for, I don't know, about a year, a year and a half maybe. And he ended up meeting a gentleman. I think one time he was going through the mall. I don't remember the exact origin story, but he noticed that this gu. Owned the. Owned the kiosk, spoke Russian and so that.

There you go.

That was easy.

And so he spoke Russian to the guy, and I guess they got to know each other. And over time, it turned out that the guy wanted to get out of the business. Because, I mean, look, it's a physical goods product business. You're working in the mall.

It's.

It's not an easy business to do. And the guy wanted to get out of it. And our dad saw an opportunity, so he actually started working for that guy. He left the gas pumping station and he started working for that guy. And basically when the guy communicated to him that he wanted to sell the business, my dad said, look, I mean, I'm an immigrant. I have no money. I can't buy the business from you, but I'll work for free for a couple months and slowly buy the business from you that way. And that's essentially how he got into it. You know, he wasn't. There was no ideation session or brainstorming session about what business should I start. It was more so I can't be making five or seven dollars an hour at a gas station. There's more opportunity if you run your own business. And obviously my dad was a risk taker. I mean, he had to take a lot of risks. And Belarus working through the bureaucracy and also even moving to this country. And so it was kind of like a no brainer. I'm going to turn this business into something no matter what.

And he saw like the guy was lazy and would cut corners. And he immediately, when he started working for him, he saw like 10 different ways he could improve it. So for him, the risk of giving up a paycheck for six months, I think it was, even my mom helped support him at that time, us as well, giving up the paycheck. And I think he had to front maybe like $8,000 and plus another maybe $7,000 of not getting paid for a couple of months. And I think it was 15 to 20,000 total. I don't remember exactly. This is in the mid-90s. And so he ended up getting the business that way. But I can tell you that even though it was an interesting upbringing, when we were 12 to 18 years old, we were not super excited about negotiating with vendors.

I wouldn't imagine so.

No. I mean our dad was like a hard headed dude. It was part of why he. But you know, he had some, like some of the early vendors were actually.

In New York City.

And I remember he would drive to New York in his van and he would make us get on the phone with these guys because he was upset about some kind. One of the supplies that they messed up or something. And he'd be like, tell them that they can't do this, you know, and you know, call them names. We're gonna sue that.

Like, tell them you're gonna sue them. Like, dad, I'm not gonna tell them we're gonna sue them.

Fifteen, whatever it was.

Yeah.

And so it was, it was interesting and definitely learning experience and. But at the time I don't think we appreciated it as much.

Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I wonder what that would do, like psychologically to you being in one country where it is literally illegal to run your own business. And then coming here, like, I wonder if he constantly had this feeling of like, am I allowed to be doing this? Am I? Like, like when you, when you're raised in a place where it's illegal to do something and then you move somewhere where it's legal, is there always like a little bit of like a taboo in your head of like never really feeling comfortable doing that? Do you know what I mean?

Like, it's like, you know, I would say pretty resolutely no. And that's because it's, you know why? It's because it turns out, it turns out that owning private property and being an Owner of your own destiny is actually human nature. And even when the Soviet Union collapsed, like there was already huge underground networks of people doing entrepreneurship illegally. And then they just started doing illegally. And people jumped over those opportunities immediately. And when my dad came here and you realized you could actually take out loans to finance a business, my goodness. I mean, that took some discipline to learn how to manage credit card debt and all that stuff, but they jumped on the capitalist bandwagon very, very quickly. Even though he was in his 50s.

When he moved here, he was so used to being bound to the shackles of all the bureaucracy and rules that you have in a country like Belarus, but in America. But I mean, even though there's still a lot of rules and regulations you have to follow, it's actually relatively easy to start a business. I mean, you can be a sole proprietor, you never even have to go to city hall, you just automatically are your sole proprietor and treat it as such for the purposes of taxes. So there's much less friction here. And I think once he realized that, he felt pretty confident about experimenting.

And I don't know if this is like the perfect parallel, but, but I'm thinking about like the marijuana business here in California, right? For as you know, our entire lives, mostly it's been illegal and over the last like two years it's legal. And still to this day I feel like most people when they go to buy it or they, when they smoke it or whatever, they feel like they're doing something wrong because they were raised in a culture where it was, you know, not really it, you know, they weren't, you weren't supposed to be doing it.

Well, think about the business owners that are having to take cash a lot of times because it's not federally legal. Yeah, but I mean, like, but that's.

Like, it's, that was the sort of parallel that I was making in my mind of like coming from a thing where it was illegal and then jumping over to where it's now legal. And then you mentioned like, you know, there was all these underground businesses doing it anyway, and it, when it became legal, they just became above ground businesses, very like parallel to what I'm seeing in like the marijuana industry. So that's where my brain went when you said it was like illegal and then he moved over here. But I totally, I totally get what you're saying. It's, you know, inhaling a smoke into your lung is not necessarily human nature where trying to go and you know, better your own life by seeking these opportunities is within pretty Much. Everybody's human nature.

Yeah, yeah. Everybody wants to like the ability to own something for yourself and say that's mine and it doesn't belong to the government. I mean that's so fundamental. We, we really take it for granted. But that, that concept didn't really exist over there. And so when, when you had the ability to do that here, not to say that like there's always going to be like the relatives or the older people that were like, oh, you're greedy if you're, if you're really trying to make money with business. Some of that cultural sort of old Soviet thinking did persist, you know, with distant relatives or whatever, but, but for the most part, people really, really jumped on it.

Yeah, yeah. So, so what does your business look like today? Or what, what are you guys, where does your attention go these days? And I know, you know, you're two separate people, so they may not be the same things, but you know, I'm curious, where, where does most of your attention and focus go? And you know, where, where has your, your sort of entrepreneurialism led you?

Good word.

Yeah. Oh, that is good. So, yeah, so it's pretty interesting. I mean we, we started off in finance and we really disliked it. So we did follow through on our parents desire for us to, they created this opportunity for us in this country. Finance, it's a great capitalistic pursuit. Why not do that? You can make good money. And we had a bunch of friends that were in investment banking making six figures out at a college. So it was like a no brainer.

To try it and just to add a little color there. We did sell our car in college to start a business. We had a bunch of failed businesses by then. So our parents very much so supported are what some people would call craziness and trying different things out. But they also at the same time wanted us to. They had the somewhat conservative mentality that, you know, you do have to have a career to back things up. And I think part of that's valid, of course. And our parents always want the best for us, but they wanted us to see this finance thing through. And we lasted about two years, maybe.

Maybe a year and a half. And so we realized very quickly that we wanted to have our own company someday. And we decided, we really just started by going to startup events in Boston where we lived at the time.

We tried working on some different ideas. They didn't really work out. So we decided, you know what, we're just getting desperate. We need to get out of finance jobs somehow. It's not going to be right now with our own business. So why don't we learn from other founders business by working for them and then do our own thing? And so that's exactly what we did. I went and I went to go work for a 10 person startup in Cambridge. Vadim went to go work for a slightly bigger technology company. We both decided we were going to do sales because we tried coding. We weren't very good at it. And we think we've come to know since then that you're either really building a product or selling a product if you're working in technology, which is where we wanted to be. So we decided we'll do the selling part and that's what we did. We worked at a couple of different startups. Some of them worked out, some of them didn't. And then we decided to start our own software company. Throughout the years, being involved in different startups and then starting our own companies, growing a software business, we then ended up transitioning more to working and advising other founders. And that's how we got to where we are today, which is I work in venture capital at nyu. We have a fund there and an accelerator. And Vadim also advises a lot of entrepreneurs through accelerator programs, but he's also a professor at both NYU and suny.

Yeah, to answer your original question, just how do you guys primarily spend your time? Now Sergey's answer is a little bit clearer just because he is that venture fund at NYU that does take up most of the time that somebody would block as full time job for most other people. For me it's been a little bit varied. So we both also have our podcast which the mentors as you mentioned, which is kind of like the thing that we spend most the time of of our free time on. And through that we do a lot of writing as well as you can imagine.

If you guys used to be bloggers.

And the like and you still do have a blog, I believe it does take up a lot of time to create written content too. But aside from that, I have been really getting into teaching over the last few years. So it started off with this coaching of entrepreneurs through a couple of different venture funds, namely one Russian VC firm that runs an accelerator program in New.

York City called Starter Capital.

And we started both working there a few years ago and it kind of transitioned to me primarily working with the early stage entrepreneurs there. And I really loved working with each Cohort. It was 10 to 20 companies per cohort. I'd come in as a coach, advisor and meet with them on helping them grow their business for that three months. And I had also done some professional development training type stuff as well before that. So again, I actually ran our own training business for a little while as well, a soft skills development business that after we ran our software company and so I knew I liked teaching and I wanted to get more into that. And then a couple years ago I got the opportunity by joining a nonprofit as an entrepreneur in residence to create and teach an entrepreneurship class here at State University of New York. And you know, that first semester teaching it and really coming up with a curriculum, as I was going along, I realized I really enjoyed it. It was incredibly fulfilling and I always want that to be part of what I do. And that is what started taking up more of my time. So for example, this summer I ran a program, an accelerator program for it was a five week program I believe for entrepreneurs from across the globe, but mainly from latam countries that want to learn how to start a business. I also now teach at nyu. It's a management class, but I make it very entrepreneurial as well. And so that ended up starting to take up more of my time too. Aside from everything else as well, you know, I want to give this teaching thing a try and that's what I've been spending my time on. That said, we always have, always have had that entrepreneurial bug. It never really goes away. We've been able to alleviate it with the podcast because it is a very creative and entrepreneurial endeavor and it's already opened up a lot of doors for us. But we have some sort of ideas that we're not going to share because they're too early stage and we haven't done any work against them. We hate sharing ideas without actually putting the pedal to the metal, if you will. Sometimes when you talk about it, it feels like there's two schools of thought. Sometimes when you talk about it, it feels people say, well, you're creating accountability. But also sometimes when you talk about it it feels like, oh, I've actually done work towards it. But no, it's not real work. And so we are probably going to be starting a new business eventually. It's in our blood. It'll happen that we're gonna then shift our focus on more full time. But. But yeah, our time is pretty much.

Split like that now.

Okay, that's interesting you said that. I remember watching a TED Talk. I think it was Derek Sivers. He's done a handful of TED talks, but he was doing a TED Talk where he actually said something to the Effect of stop sharing your goals. Because something gets released in your brain when you start sharing your goals that makes you feel like you accomplished them.

Well, it's like you realized your goals already because you spoke them out, you've already envisioned them, now you're sharing them with others. It's like, hold on, you can envision them, but hold them tight.

It's very similar to like buying books, right? A lot of people will go and buy books and just by placing the order and receiving the book, it's almost like they've accomplished reading it. And then most people don't actually read it. Like, there's a, a very similar thing with like spreading your goals. And, you know, I could see the pros and cons to both sides of the argument.

I guess it depends on the person, the personality and, and maybe who you're sharing it with as well. Like, I could see definitely not, probably not a podcast, but maybe with a mentor, but you know, someone that can be there to support you, give you the right resources, guide you.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you're meeting with a mentor and they're a true accountability partner and you have the discipline to follow up and follow through, that's actually a great use case for sharing those ideas. But, you know, especially when you coach a lot of entrepreneurs, I think you've become a lot really sensitive to this and that's that there's a lot of people that are just talking. You know, you'll meet with them on a weekly basis, they're always excited. But when you actually dig into it, they really have not done much to move their business forward in terms of experimenting, doing the hard work that you really have to do, like sales, for example, or outreach or whatever it is, or building your product. And so I think because we've been coaching entrepreneurs for so many years now, we try to take our own advice and become allergic to some of that stuff that a novice entrepreneur will do.

Yeah. What are some of these things that actually there's like two parters. I wanted to ask about your dad. Like what? From each of you, something that you've carried from that experience from him and working with him to where you're at now. And then also circle back to the coaching and see what things you're either learning to do or not to do from seeing so many of these startups and new business ideas is developed.

Yeah, absolutely. I guess I'll start. This is Vadim. And by the way, so if the audience hasn't realized yet, Wombates means we're identical twins. We also sound kind of the same.

Yeah, you do.

I can usually not tell which one of you is talking exactly other than. Other than the context of what you're saying.

Right, exactly. And we're okay with that. Now, we don't need to, like, be the one that says the most witty thing, talking, by all means, but. But I'll clarify this. I'll start. I would say from our dad. I mean, the one thing that kind of always rings true that he would tell us is don't be afraid of hard work. You know, sometimes, especially if you have, let's say, a new project that's starting right, or a new opportunity, it's really exciting until you actually have to do the work. And, you know, if you have your own business, oftentimes that comes in the form of, oh, I just got a bunch of revenue up front. I don't want to do shit now because, like, I already have the money, but damn, I have to do the hard work now. But the shift that has to happen in thinking is that you need to be okay with that hard work and also find the positives from it. For example, I make this reference all the time. For me, sitting down and writing an article feels like hard work. It takes really a lot of focus and mental power and also to make sure that all the words sound good and to make sure that you have the right references and the data is correct and all that stuff and the editing process, it feels like hard work. And so before I sit down to do it, I find reasons not to do it. I procrastinate, you know, the classic stuff that you do when you think of something that's inherently difficult. But almost every time when I sit down to do it, once I get into that flow state, it's actually pretty rewarding because there's no other way to have that. There's no other experience that feels the same way. Writing is a very unique experience. And so once I'm in it, it actually feels good. So oftentimes, you know, we are afraid of hard work because getting that start is difficult. It's like going to the gym. Making yourself get up and go to the gym in the morning or in the afternoon is really difficult. But once you're there, you do feel good, and once you're done, you feel great. And so I would say that's one thing I always remind myself, is to have the discipline to not be afraid of hard work, because ultimately it's the hardest stuff and the stuff that we don't want to do that makes us move the most forward that was not eligible.

That makes us the best.

Like you said, though, like, the hard, the thought of the hard work is harder than the actual work itself. And when you said that about blogging, I 100% relate. I procrastinate like crazy when it comes to written content because I just dread the time it's going to take me to write. But when I actually open up a document and write the first handful of sentences, something triggers, you get into flow and it just comes out. And when you're done, you're like, man, I'm so glad I took that step.

Yeah, exactly. For me, this is Sergey, clearly with a better voice for me, for my dad at least. I was actually thinking about this the other day and Vadim and I were releasing an episode about how to make anybody your ally. And that's one thing that I've learned from my dad is to.

Somehow he imparted on us, maybe without specifically saying it, that you shouldn't have any enemies, or you should try to not have any enemies, or try to convert your enemies to your allies. And he absolutely succeeded in doing this. He was a Jewish guy who rose through the ranks in the Soviet Union, which is just unheard of because there's just like quotas for how many Jews you could hire for any position. And he was one of the only principals of a school in our whole city who was a Jew. And he did that by winning people over and by actually, actually showing people that he was an organizer, he was willing to do the hard work that no one else was willing to do. So for me, I always think about that as well, I'm like, well, I might be working with someone or dealing with someone on a day to day basis that I'm just not enjoying working with or I'm just not vibing with for whatever reason. They're pissing me off sometimes. And I try to figure out how do I change that relationship? Let me first maybe change how I perceive that relationship where maybe I try to go in their shoes a little bit and maybe try to assume that they're not an asshole. And then how do I make them feel good about themselves so that they then feel good about my relationship with them? And I found that making sure that pretty much anyone I cross or work with is an ally has served me pretty well.

It makes it better and easier to work with people. But also you never know how relationships will come back in the future to help you. Or you can help them.

Yeah, that's good for the second part of Joe's question I'm gonna, I'm gonna re angle it slightly but with that. So the second part of his question was about like the, the coaching things. And what I'm curious about is what are some of the common things that you find yourself working through with most early stage startup entrepreneurs? Like what are the things that you find yourself coaching them on the most?

So there's, there's obviously there's a lot.

Of things but, but two things that I'll point out that stood out even this week. I mean I met with like four first time founders just today on one on one appointments and every week it's several same for Vadim. And I would say one thing that really stands out that's so common is being really married and excited about the solution and the product that you're building. People will come with a fully baked idea of a million different features that they want to build and maybe they even have already spent several months building the thing or even in some cases a year plus building something. Yet they have never talked to a single customer aside maybe from their friend and had not truly validated whether the problem in the market exists. To me that's always just such a shame because you're spending all your mental energy and time building something when there might not even be a market for it. That's the one big piece of advice that I always constantly give, which is talk to customers first, figure out what their problems are. Figure out what the highest priority problem is and if that matches with what you think your solution is, great, then build the first part of it and try to sell it. And the second thing that I also have been thinking a lot about lately because I've seen it come across so many times is founder startup fit or founder solution fit. Meaning a lot of founders have brilliant ideas, but they have no way of executing on it. Like they to make that idea real, every single thing they need to outsource, they need to hire a salesperson, they need to hire a product person, they need to find somebody who does the marketing and they're just going to be the visionary and that's great. Well no, if you have no way to execute on a business, nobody's going to want to work for you and do it. And even if you had the money.

To pay people to do it, they're.

Not going to be as intrinsically motivated and understand the problem as you are. And so that's never going to work. So I always tell, especially for first time founders, try working in a business or solving a problem that you Intimately understand. And maybe something that you can actually deliver a solution for yourself or with a friend of yours, and maybe somewhere where you actually already have a network of customers that you can start selling into. Create a path for you that's not full of a million different things that cause resistance so you can actually have a chance to bring something to market and see where it works. And a lot of people just have pie in the sky ideas that they're never going to make real.

Yeah, that reminds me of back in the day, like when Facebook was taken off. People used to come up to me at networking events and they were like, oh, you know, I thought of Facebook years before they started.

Good for you.

Okay, congratulations.

Did you do it over a weekend and figure out how to hack a Harvard database so that immediately everybody had access to you could test immediately Mark had those skills and that's why he did that. And I always. Actually, that's a story that I tell a lot to founders when they tell me they want to build a social network.

Stop right now.

Don't do that.

But you can always go watch the movie the Social Network and see how it worked out for that set of twins that originally had the idea.

Yeah, I mean, they were, they ended up being fine with other stuff like bitcoin, but.

But you know, the one thing as Sergey was talking that I'll even prioritize over, some of the things that he mentioned, which are also really important, is what I think is the number one reason why startups fail. Well, number one reason I would say is you run out of capital and. Or you never make revenue.

Right.

If you're not going to make money.

Not going to have a business.

But the other thing that really creates a lot of failure and oftentimes forces companies to fail needlessly. In other words, it could be avoided, and that is co founders don't talk. In other words, there's not enough transparency. Now, you guys were on our show and a lot of what we talked about is when you decided to build a business together with ever again profits in this podcast, you were already friends and you knew each other's strengths. And to me it sounds like, because you're almost like brothers, there is already some, not only inherent trust, but a lot of inherent transparency. And oftentimes when I'm working through issues with co founders, you know, I'll meet with them for three, four, five weeks. And these are not like 10 minute meetings. These are hour plus sessions. And only in the fourth or fifth week I'll find out something that I Should have found out way before, but they were too afraid or timid to share because it actually speaks to something really important or an issue, a big issue that's going on with a co founder that hasn't really surfaced yet. And they say it as if it's an aside. But then I realized, oh, this is why you've had all these problems. And sometimes it's as big as, you know, founders, let's say business side founders and technical side founders not trusting each other and spending, you know, two, $300,000 towards trying to solve a problem technically before even making any revenue. Right. Like ridiculous things like that where they didn't even see the red flag to realize why their company might fail, like, soon. And so oftentimes we do end up working. I kind of think of myself as a entrepreneurial therapist, if you will. I'm not licensed as a therapist, so don't take any of my advice that you hear on this show as therapy. But oftentimes it is asking questions, understanding where they're coming from, and also helping them through the difficulty that is working with other people. Working with other people that may not have been your good friends before you started or on the inverse, were your good friends, but now you're seeing some issues and your business might fail because of it.

Oh, yeah, there's a lot there that you guys both said that definitely resonates because we've, I think Joe and I have both experienced pretty much all of those. We've both had partners in the past that, that were failed partnerships. We've definitely worked on products. I mean, as recently as this year, we've worked on products where at the end of the day we developed an entire product and went, wait, what problem does this solve again?

Oh, that's always been our default. And we've done this for like over 10 years. So I could see that being like a rabbit issue for a straight up fresh founder where there's a lot more dollars on the line, there's a lot of time. Of course, it can get scary if they're not mentored in the right direction after that.

Yeah. And like we talked about on the podcast that we did for your show, which, you know, we'll make sure we link it up below this episode when this episode goes live. And you can. Listeners can check that out as well. Joe and I are insanely transparent. Like overly transparent. More transparent than we even need to be.

That's definitely true.

More transparent than you are with your wives.

That's not. Well, if it's transparent, it's coming out on the podcast too. Yeah, they're probably gonna listen to it.

Yeah, that's very true. But Joe and I, we, we joke all the time. Is like a business is a marriage, right? And, and the level of authenticity and the level of transparency and the level of honesty that you would share in a marriage needs to be the same level that you share in a business partnership or over time it will fail. Like it, you know, it's like, it's like a game of, of Jenga, right? It's all of a sudden going to start teetering and shit's going to collapse at some point. So you need that sort of level of trust and honesty and transparency just like you would in a marriage, or it will collapse just like a marriage can.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it takes, it does take time to learn that. Like you can't expect, if you've never worked with someone or if you've never done anything professional or any kind of projects, even with the best friend that you've known for a very long time, you can't expect for that business relationship and for that innate trust and transparency to happen overnight. Sometimes it takes a year or even two years to do that. But if there's red flags coming up in the first couple of months where you're just not on the same page, you want different things out of the business. You know, actually I know of two friends that had been friends since boarding school and they started a business together and a year and a half into it, they were making money, they were doing, I think it was, I mean, it was in the mid five figures per month at that point, the product business. And only at that point did they realized that one of them wants to do a lifestyle business where she's basically, they're basically just running the business on their own and growing the team on their own. The other one wanted to do a super scalable business where they raise outside venture money and they go for a billion dollar market opportunity. And they actually had split the business 50 50. And so they were at odds and they still, like, they're kind of separated now, but one of them has 50% of the company and they're both kind of working on it independently and the business is not growing because they're not together anymore. And it's, it sucks. But they, even though they were close friends, they never had that difficult conversation about what do you want to get out of this business versus what do I want to get? Which is maybe sometimes harder to have with a friend.

Yeah, no, that's Actually interesting, because you bring that up and I think Matt and I, what's unique with us is we've always started with the end in mind.

We're reverse engineers.

We really have since day one. I mean, day one was, hey, let's get out of the grind, you know, and the dollar per hour thing. But we had this end in mind. We still do, and it hasn't changed for the duration of our company, Evergreen profits, which I guess is kind of unique the way that you just described that, because we've heard that so many times. And we'll see that from other partners and they just dissolve after, you know, six months because, yeah, they can make a lot of money, but maybe there's this tipping point of like, oh, I'm good with this money. But the other one's like, nah, let's scale this shit to the moon. We're going, right? Like, is it necessary?

Well, like, yeah, I mean, it's definitely tough. And like you said, there's. It is kind of those things that I feel like it's only learned through experiencing it. Like, I don't know if there's anybody listening to this podcast right now going, huh, I shouldn't pursue this project because I don't know if my partner is aligned on the same vision I have. It's almost like those conversations need to come out, and I don't know of any way to, like, to avoid them. But, you know, I think having, like, a good alignment of vision is probably something that a lot of businesses that we've talked to a lot of partners. Partnerships are hard. We know a lot of partnerships that don't last very long.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say one way to at least have the potential of having that conversation before it all explodes is do. And we actually just had a legal expert from David Pustolski from Gerhart Law that came on our show and we talked about, like, when's the right time to talk to a lawyer and what's the first thing that they should do? And the first thing isn't incorporate. It's have a founder agreement in place, like an operating agreement in place. So something on a piece of paper, at least that talks about what your intentions are from the very beginning. Now, you might not talk about as.

A lifestyle business or it's going to.

Be like a venture scalable business, but you will talk about who owns what percentage, what the responsibilities are, you know, what the goals of the business are and stuff like that. And so have a founder operating agreement conversation early on. Have a Conversation about, especially if you're starting a tech startup, what a vesting schedule is for equity to make sure that somebody that has half the company doesn't walk away with 50% of the company after a year of being business. And also, quite frankly, for many businesses, unless it's a purely equal partnership, which isn't always the case. It usually isn't the case, actually. Have the conversation about who the CEO is going to be. That actually oftentimes becomes an issue because you have a bunch of friends that are starting company. And if it's going to be a venture scalable business, for example, oftentimes VCs want to have a single CEO because you want one person. That's the ultimate decision maker when there is disagreements. When there are disagreements. And so for me and Sergey, I will say we have been co CEOs several times. I think part of that is because we feel like, well, we're twin brothers. I mean, we're never gonna, this relationship is never gonna end, no matter what. We're kind of bound here. And so there's, we're reduced in the risk significantly there. And there are, of course, co CEO relationships that work out totally fine. So it can happen. But I'm just saying that for most cases, it doesn't. And so figure out who's gonna be doing what and who is the de facto leader of the company, because that's just how companies are structured.

Yeah, it's fascinating. And the fact that you guys are working together as. Yeah. CO CEOs of. Well, you have your podcast is the thing. And obviously different business ideas. And you were saying there's certain paths that you guys share which overlap a lot. Whereas Matt and I, it took us a long time to figure out where is our lane, where do we best fit ourselves. And I think that was about a year ago, like nine, 10 years or so into our working relationship. It took us a long time to figure that out. We got to go through like, Colby assessments, different personality type things.

Yeah. I mean, just to put more clarity around what I was saying a minute ago, you know, obviously there's things that you can do that you can put in place before you get into a business relationship. But I feel like there's a lot of people that are just like, they're excited about the idea, they're ready to move forward, they want to go forward, and they're not going to learn that lesson until an issue pops up. And I feel like with, with, with Joe and I, you know, we've definitely had our disagreements and, and I think the one thing that we've always been aligned on is the vision is, Is. Is what we want this business to ultimately be, you know, several years from now. And that one thing is what has been the sort of glue that's made it so even when we do have a fight, it doesn't, you know, tear everything apart, Just go back.

Yeah, well, there's also. I mean, part of this is to hedge against the risk of the whole business failing if something does happen between the two co founders. Right. And look, life situations change. Somebody might decide they're kind of tired of it or they want to move on to something else or nothing, whatever it is. And so part of this is also just hedging against the risk of one founder leaving and everything completely falling apart. Now, you can hedge against that through some of the stuff that we talked about, also through having the right systems and processes in place. You guys mentioned that for you, the internal onboarding and training that you do for your employees, you have content that you share with people instead of it just living in your head, stuff like that. Documenting things is really important to, again, reduce the risk of things falling apart if they depend too much on the humans involved.

Definitely. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit, and I want to talk about the venture capital fund. I'm curious. So which one of you is the one that runs the venture capital fund for nyu?

It's Sergey.

Sergey.

Okay.

Sorry about that.

So with the venture capital firm, how do you. So first of all, can you explain how that. That works? Like where. Where is the money coming from? And, you know, how. How. How is that piece operated?

Yeah. So for most venture capital funds, it's a limited partnership. It's just basically there's limited partners that invest in the fund and then a general partner or a couple general partners to actually manage the investment. So that just means that limited partners basically give you their money and you're the one that is independently making these decisions. The limited partners basically have no say. Sometimes they do have influence, but they don't really have a say as to how you choose to invest that capital. And limited partners could be anyone from wealthy individuals to pension funds and college endowment funds as well. Right. Depending on the fund size. For the fund that I work at, at nyu, where I run the technology side of the investments.

It'S more of a nonprofit fund model where we have donors, actually. So it's kind of a unique one because it's part of a university, which is a nonprofit or the entrepreneurial institute. That's how we chose to structure it so our money comes from both philanthropic donors and also from partly from the university. The university did invest in some of the money into the fund. And this is the first fund at nyu. Our next fund might be this LPGP for profit model. And to be clear, the fund is designed to make a profit. It's just as part of this nonprofit entity. So we are trying to make a return on our investment and we have a fiduciary responsibility to do so, but it's just structured a little bit differently.

Gotcha. So the donors, do they ever get a return or is that money is just donated? They write it off and that they're done.

So for our fund, the donors, like the philanthropic donors, they won't get a return, but because some of the money is. So that's the nice thing. It is an evergreen fund, meaning that all of the returns that we get we get to pump back into helping founders start up at nyu, which is really cool for nyu. So because some of the money comes from the university.

Definitely cares about what investments we make and we have an investment review board that helps. I have to make sure that they actually approve the investments that we bring forth. Partly because the university wants to make sure it's self sustaining. If there is no return at a certain point, then they're going to pull the plug, I'm sure. So that makes it an interesting dynamic. If it was just independent donors, there was no university involved, then maybe it would be different. But because there is this university having some of their capital go in there, we definitely report directly to the CFO at NYU when it comes to we can investments were made.

I love the concept. The fact that you have donors over here and they are donating and essentially looking at the general partners like yourself, it sounds like to choose the right investments to then help other founders succeed in their own startups and back them and whatnot. It just seems like a really cool model to foster a lot more growth as a whole.

Yeah, it's a unique model. And part of the reason why I decided to go to university and do investing versus go work at any other kind of standard venture capital firm is because at a university it's just a completely different atmosphere and the work and the mandate is different. We're part of the entrepreneurial institute at NYU. The whole team at the institute is 10 people. The whole fund team is three people. And we're meeting founders anywhere from idea stage all the way through growing and scaling. And Vadim and I love working with the really, really early stage. Founders. So half my time is spent doing the kind of coaching that Vadim and I were talking about earlier and the other half of my time is spent saying, hey, let me see who the actual interesting investable high growth companies are and see if we can invest some capital into them. So it sort of provides both things that I like doing. Whereas if you're just doing venture capital straight at like a fund, your job is to find investments. You're chasing deals you're probably being pushed out of, deals you're trying to muscle your way into and it's just not as fun and you're saying no so much and you're not really providing value outside. I mean funds do try to provide value outside the capital, but realistically speaking, the founders just want your money and so it's a different job for sure.

When you are looking to invest in companies, what criteria are you looking for? What are the biggest factors that make you decide? Okay, this is one that we want to invest in.

There's the fundamental stuff, some of the stuff that Vadim and I talked about. By now we've met with so many founders that we're pretty good at asking the right questions and getting to know founders. So we can stress test what the co founder relationship is. If the co founder relationship is not good. And I can see that I would never invest no matter how good the market opportunity is. So one thing is the team, is the team cohesive and do they work well together? The other thing is they have complementary skill sets that can actually bring this product to market. Have they shown an ability to bring something to market? Usually we invest when we see at least some sort of traction or an ability to deliver on what you promise on. And the other thing in venture is just the way the economics work in venture capital, especially in regular the LPGP type of VC funds where you're just making 20% of the returns and you're giving the rest back to your limited partners. You have to have to invest in venture scale businesses, meaning hundreds of millions of value potential to billions of dollars in value potential because you know that 80% of your investments are going to go close to zero, maybe half are going to go to zero, another 25% are going to return the capital or return a little bit more than what you invested. And so you're looking at like 15 to 20. 20% of your entire portfolio will make the types of returns you need to be able to return the fund and actually have a profit on it by default. Every single business that you invest in has to have a huge market opportunity. Or else, no matter how good the idea is, how brilliant the founder, you just can't invest.

Those very economics are the reasons why when we talk to entrepreneurial people, we tell them that, look, most people, 99, 99.5 or something, or 99.9% of people will never raise money from a venture capital fund. Probably will never even raise money from a professional investor like an angel investor. And so you have to think about what kind of business do you want to start. There's only a certain type of business that fits that model. It has to have growth potential, it has to have a big enough market opportunity. But a lot of people are totally fine with starting a business that will generate a few million dollars a year and support them and their family and make them completely comfortable. And it might have a market size of 10 or $20 million, even $50 million. You know, it's crazy, but a VC would never touch that because most of their investments are going to go to zero. And so they need at least one or two that'll knock it out of the park.

This unicorn, so to speak, that will.

Make up for all the, all the failures.

Yeah, that's, that's like the. Take all the angel investors, it sounds like that's kind of a similar approach. They're just expecting most of them to go to nothing, but they're banking on just a couple handful of wins to fund everything and more.

Yeah, that's exactly it. And that's why a lot of people, they'll get like a high salary, especially engineers, they'll get a 300, $400,000 a year job, and all of a sudden you have a bunch of income that you can spend on investing. But let's say you're at the $250,000 a year mark and you might have 20, 30, 40 grand laying around. The last thing you should do, if that's all you have an investable income into high risk investments, is make angel investments. Because it's like you said, most of them are going to fail. And so as with any sort of statistical probability, you need to have at least 30 samples in order to have one that comes back positive. And so unless you can make 30 angel investments, 20, let's pay 20 to 30.

You'Re probably going to lose all your money. And you should not be an angel investor.

Angels can start doing, you know, your first time doing angel investments, you can start doing $5,000, $10,000 investments in really, really early companies. For most companies, that's way too little money from any single investor. So you have to go really early. But that already puts you at, you know, five times 30. Right. 150 grand in capital that you should be willing to lose before you get into that game.

Yeah. Now, do you guys have any big name companies under your belt that you guys helped fund that really took off?

Yeah. So I don't know if there would be recognizable brands, but at least at nyu, there's a company called Brooklinen. And if you live in New York, you've seen their ads everywhere. You probably see their ads on tv. They have these really high quality betting products that they sell and they're doing really, really well. I think they raised, raised like $10 million. So that can tell you about the multiple that they're seeing in revenue, which is huge. They're growing really, really quickly. And they went through our accelerator program a couple of years ago, so that's probably one of the more recognizable ones. And then when I was at Venture for America, which is this national nonprofit where my boss was actually Andrew Yang, the guy that's running for president now, when I was there, I helped them put together a venture fund as well and ran an accelerator. And we have several companies there. One company, Path Spot, that has gone on to raise, I think about 5 million or so. Another company, Clyde, that went through an accelerator and raised 3 to 5 million. So there's a bunch of companies, Chickpea Pasta Bonza, which is a chickpea pasta company that's in stores everywhere now. They were at 4,000 locations a couple years ago, they're probably at 10,000 now. So there's a lot of companies that are starting to get really big. Just in the last couple of years that I've been doing this.

That's super cool. It must be a good feeling, especially in New York over there, when you're starting to see these companies that you helped, you mentored from the beginning and funded and all this stuff, now you're seeing them just booming.

It definitely is rewarding.

This is a sort of random question, but as far as the weighting, when you're deciding to invest in a company, what do you think bears more weight on the decision? The the founder and like the personality and skills of the founder or the product and the idea behind the product, like what would you typically put more weight into?

You know, especially when you're doing early stage investment, which is what we do, it's definitely skewed more toward the founder because the product, if the founder is smart enough and if the team is good enough they can figure out a product, and most of the time they will probably pivot and change the product or maybe go after a completely new market that they didn't expect that they would go after just because they experiment so much and they learn as they go along. So definitely the founder is part of it. And when you meet with founders, for me, because I'm in the university settings with founders for several semesters, like two, three semesters, which was a year and a half sometimes, and you get to see, even within the first couple of months of meeting with a founder, you get to see which ones are the people that make moves and which ones keep coming to you with without any real traction of movements. The people that continuously make moves and go out there and take risks and put themselves out there to figure out what the market wants and build it, iterate, deliver, and start to generate revenue from that. Those are the people that you can feel pretty good about figuring out a big enough market opportunity, and people that also take feedback and kind of synthesize it and apply it right away. So I would definitely say the founder is the number one priority in the team.

Team. Yeah. No, because. Yeah, you need them to drive the ship and it's not like you're going to be there mentoring them the entire way. So that makes perfect sense from the very beginning.

Yeah, I mean, like, you know, part of, part of my, my experience is I don't really have much experience, but I watch Shark Tank and you got all the experience, you know, and when you watch Shark Tank, you kind of get the impression that a lot of times they're more sold by the person than the actual product idea in most scenarios. There's some scenarios where they're blown away by the product and they could give or take the entrepreneur, but I would say nine out of 10 times they're buying into the entrepreneur more so than the product.

But usually they have traction, you know, like the sales, which is one of those things that you guys mentioned. Whereas the early stages, it's like probably not a lot of traction, but damn good team behind it, you know, And a founder.

Yeah. And I mean, if a company has a bunch of. Well, if it's been around for a while, it's established business processes, if it's growing quickly. Actually, oftentimes what you'll find is they'll fire the CEO and bring in an experienced CEO to take it to the next level. That happens all the time. And obviously with companies, in huge companies that are involved in PE deals and private equity deals, sometimes they'll get rid of the whole management team, the whole executive team again, because there's already all the processes and sort of repeatable, scalable model in place. That said, even companies that are growing, oftentimes, if you take away that root, if you will, if you take away that founder, the company will fall apart. So almost always, even if it's later.

Stage, the focus is the founder and the leader.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, man. I've got so much more I want to add. We're kind of getting towards the end of our time here, but. So this question is probably a little more geared towards Vadim, but. So you. You're a professor at the. Not. Not nyu? No. You are at NYU now too, right?

I'm now nyun, State University of New York.

Yep, gotcha. So how did. How did that come about? Like, how did. How did you get involved with these universities and, you know, start actually teaching at them?

Yeah, that's a great question. Because, you know, the traditional path to becoming a professor at a university is get your master's, maybe go towards your PhD and kind of become old academic. There are some young professors out there, but usually that's the path. So you really focus on one particular discipline that you learn a lot about and then go deep on that and actually teach people.

Start as a ta, maybe, or an.

Assistant, and then create your own class. At some point down the line, I basically backed into it almost accidentally and in the exact opposite way. And part of the reason why I was able to do that is because I don't think I would have the discipline to go through like, 15 years of schooling to become just for the purpose of becoming a professor. I think when I was in high school or something, I thought I might want to be a professor, but it certainly I didn't think it would happen in my early 30s. And the reason that it did happen and how I was able to back into it is it just so happened that the higher education space is kind of getting shaken up right now. And a lot of schools, to stay competitive, they realize that they need to teach their students real skills for when they get out of college. And so, you know, you think they'd realize that a little bit earlier. And obviously some of the great schools have been doing that for a while, but now a lot of other schools, to stay competitive, you know, they started prioritizing other types of programs. And luckily for me, since I've been in the entrepreneurial game for a while now, entrepreneurship as an academic discipline has become more and more popular. And so Initially, I got the opportunity to create a class, an entrepreneurship class, essentially a business planning class for SUNY Purchase State University of New York in Purchase College, because they wanted to, they saw the demand from the students to have this type of class in their curriculum. And I think they were doing some co curricular stuff or extracurricular stuff around that, but they wanted to have a four credit class. And it was simple as the fact that the professors, the full professors, tenured professors at the school, they were incredibly brilliant in economics and art and design and all the other disciplines that the school is good at, but they really had nobody that had the experience to create an entrepreneurial curriculum from scratch. And they realized very smartly by them that bringing in a practitioner, someone that's done it before, has been an entrepreneur and has worked with many other entrepreneurs to create this curriculum, is actually probably the best way to do it, to create the most relevant content for the students and to increase the chances of success there. And so I got that opportunity ultimately because the market dynamics changed and because instead of now prioritizing the value of a PhD, they were prioritizing the value.

Of direct experience in a particular field.

And it kind of went from there. You know, the experience that I got.

In creating and teaching the class at.

SUNY then opened up the door to teach this class at nyu. And it's the program that I'm teaching at nyu. It's a technology management innovation program. And so it literally kind of marries everything that I've been working on for the last several years, which is working with technical people to develop business skills. And that's exactly what that program is all about at the Tandon School of Engineering at nyu. It's for people that want to study engineering, but also understand the value of knowing having the business skills so that they can either start their own businesses or successfully navigate their careers as engineers and creators and innovators once they got out of college.

Dude, that is super cool. And I can relate a little bit. I remember back in college I went through an entrepreneurship class and that was my. I enjoyed that class the most. I thought it was weird though, because a lot of folks weren't really like, they didn't have their heads in that game. And I don't think it was presented properly. It was presented by a great professor who I'm still a friend with, but I could see the whole practitioner angle. Like he wasn't as much of a practitioner, so it was a lot more theory. And so I like what you're saying. There is like, no, you're bringing real world skills. I think combo and the both are great.

I mean I'm making my students do customer development interviews in the, the second week of class. So it's a very much so we don't have a textbook in that class because you're not going to learn anything by just reading a book. And some of the theory of course is interesting and there are some lecture components of the class because like for example, when you're explaining startup financials and unit economics and how to look at an income statement and all that stuff, you do kind of have to talk through it and work through it. But a lot of what you learn has to be hands on. But also what I say is look, I mean these entrepreneurial skills because a lot of people ask, can entrepreneurship be learned? And I say, well yeah, by doing, but what's the value of teaching in the classroom? Part of the value is there are a bunch of people in that class that do want to start their own businesses and hopefully I'm reducing some of.

The risk that they would face otherwise.

But also there are other people that at some point down the line, maybe it's not right after school, but 15 years from now might want to start their own business again. These are valuable skills. And also being entrepreneurial, being willing to do the hard work that it does, that you do have to do as an entrepreneur, like taking the risks and doing the sales and running the different tests and like knowing how to talk to an investor potentially, if that's the.

Route that you're going to take.

Those are valuable skills to have in any career as well, like persuasion, public speaking, all that stuff is really valuable too. So I would say, you know, if you're in college and you're listening to this and you're thinking about taking that entrepreneurship class and you don't think you're going to be an entrepreneur, take it because it might open up your eyes into a whole new world. But at the very least you'll probably pick up a few really tangible skills that you'll be able to use right after school.

But I will also add that it's not just because Vadim was a practitioner, why he was able to get that role. Like there's plenty of entrepreneurs in New York, right? It's because by the time he was being considered for that role, we had started our own curriculum development company where we designed curriculum to teach non technical people, I mean rather technical people, non technical skills which we sold directly to companies. So he had curriculum design experience. We had done a bunch of Public speaking. So several years ago, like, five years ago, we decided we want to do more public speaking. So we started offering to do it for free for a bunch of groups in New York. And so we had a bunch of. Basically ability to show a bunch of content where, hey, we know how to teach. We know how to design curriculum. Like, we are entrepreneurs, but we can also effectively command a room and teach a class. And so it wasn't an accident. I think that's part of the reason why I took a chance on him, even though he wasn't a career educator or a PhD.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, that's really cool. Some big props to you for making that happen, because I don't think I've ever heard of that. Thanks, man. Yeah, if you have a little bit of time, I know we're going a little long. I want to talk about the podcast really quick, the mentors. And you actually reminded me, I think, Sergey, when we were together, you talked about a meetup you guys even do, or maybe just one of you do in New York, which I was like. And it's, like, grown pretty damn big, too. So how does the podcast fit into everything you guys are doing?

Yeah, you know, the podcast was. It was kind of a natural extension of everything that we've been doing. We dreamed up of it a year and a half ago over the holidays. We were sitting together and we were thinking, you know, we've done some content. We had done some YouTube videos. Some of them did okay. Like, there's one, I think, that has, like, 15,000 views or something. We're like, okay, we tried the content game, but we had never been consistent on the content. And we have so much to share now because we meet so many founders all the time. What's a consistent way for us to deliver content on a daily basis? Not a daily basis, but on a consistent basis to our network and grow it from there. And podcasting was just what seemed like an easy way to do it, because we already have the equipment, because we're musicians, we could record. We already have the content. We have a lot of friends that are entrepreneurs. We could easily get guests if we want to. So it was just very easy to pull the trigger. And we're all about trying to remove friction from actually executing on something, so it was easy to execute on. So we recorded three episodes, and we went from there. And I think now we're like, at 140 something, 150 episodes. Because we went from doing once a week to twice a week, and we went from Doing just us to also having guests. So it is a natural extension of what we do. It allows us to take all of these things that we experience on a day to day basis, working with founders, and actually share that content. Whether it's just us talking about specific topics like negotiation or sales, or other founders that we bring in, like you guys, who can actually speak to the areas of expertise that they have, whether it be marketing or even just telling their story to inspire other people to get started. That's really what our show is all about, is how to get started, how to get past those difficult early days, how to take a little bit of a shortcut where Vadim and I probably took us three or four businesses to learn about a lot of things that we're talking about here, which is, you know, the co founder stuff, the testing ideas, doing the quick test to make sure you're actually validating a problem that exists in the market. All of these things we think that you can learn through content so that you can, you know, obviously you have to kind of fail on your own many times, but we want to help people take that leap by making it a little bit scary for them and giving them the play by play of those critical early days, which is all the conversations we have with founders. That's what we focus on, is getting past those early days.

Yeah, exactly. And for us, and you probably noticed this when you were on our show, is we like to dig into the details because oftentimes there might be other shows where they kind of go surface level or try to cover too much. And then if you're actually trying to execute on whatever the lesson was from that founder, you don't know what the nuts and bolts were. So part of the reason why we like meeting with entrepreneurs all the time.

Talking to guys like you, is we.

Actually learn a lot through that process ourselves. We're naturally inquisitive. We actually ask a lot of questions. That's what a good coach does anyways, kind of like a good therapist. And so we do the same thing on our show. We will unapologetically ask detailed questions. And look, I mean, if someone's not.

Comfortable answering, that's fine.

But at the very least, we try to unpack as much as possible because ultimately the devil's in the detail. And I think for listener, that creates.

A lot of value too.

In terms of the meetup that you mentioned, actually we started, it was like a year ago now.

Yeah, I actually didn't start it. So if you're part of meetup.com, join a bunch of groups. Because what happens is, especially if you started your own group at Meetup ever and grew a group from scratch. And I had a group that I started years ago that was completely different topic. You will get notifications when somebody abandons the group. And this has happened to me several times. And it was like, five months into our podcast that I got a notification from Meetup that the NYC podcast meetup was just abandoned and you can take it over. And I was like, what I looked at, and I was like, like 500 people, 600 people. I'm like, that's amazing. I don't have to start a meetup from scratch. I already have a community with 600 people, and now I think it's like 8 or 900.

So I took it over and I decided to host an event. And so I've been doing I do them quarterly or so right now I want to do it more often. Events do take a lot of time to do, which is why I don't do it more often. But it's such a great way to engage the podcast community here, to engage potential sponsors, because event sponsors is a really easy ask and to share the content of everything that we've learned through the process of starting the show. So I guess there was a little bit of a shortcut that I took of getting adopting a community that already existed, but I tried to make it better, I guess.

I think it's brilliant.

Yeah. Honestly, like, I don't know how it is in San Diego, where y' all at, but I think this is a general feeling that people have now that a lot of stuff happens online and you want to find opportunities to meet people in person. And in New York, that rings true as well.

Right.

And so I think when we adopted this podcast, when we hosted this meetup, when we hosted the first meetup, about 100 people showed up. And every time we host a meetup again, close to 100 people show up. And I think it's A, because it's.

In a relatively niche space. Right.

It's podcasting specific. But B, people are looking for an excuse to meet other people, other people that might be interesting to them. There's no shortage of events in New York, and obviously there might be another event that you start that will only get 10 people in the room. And we're not saying it's easy, easy. We have to luck into this topic area that's exciting for a lot of people. And so that's what we're able to fill these rooms and get Sponsored. And stuff without relatively little lift. But people are looking for excuses to meet in person. And it's actually a great business development tool. It's a great way to meet other people that might become potential customers in the future as well. So I encourage anybody that's okay with being an organizer. And I do say that because it is a lot of work. But if you're okay with it, you're naturally good at it. Do the work to get people in a room because that's where a lot of cool stuff happens. And I mean, that's how. That's what happened with us, right? We met at a conference. If we didn't decide, all four of us decide to attend that conference in Orlando in August, we would have never met.

Decide to go. We would also never met because he's the one that introduced us. There you go.

That's true. Full circle right there.

That is awesome. And that's a cool little tip. As far as meetup, I did not know that's how the meetup sort of organizer worked. Now how many, when you do put on the actual live event, how many people show up from that? You know, 8 or 900. That's in the group now?

Yeah, between 70 to 100 people show up every time.

I mean, that's still pretty damn impressive. That's awesome.

Was it like fisticuffs when that notification goes off to 800 people and be like, hey, this group's been abandoned. Everybody meets up with like shanks and stuff and it's just like, fight it.

Out, last one to the end.

Like, how does that work?

No one took it over. I mean, I do.

I think that.

I do think that like taking over a group where you have to be an organizer does feel intimidating and daunting for a lot of people. They don't even know where to start. How do I organize something? For me, I had done events for jobs that I've had. I had a meetup before that. I started for musicians and tech, basically that I grew to about 5, 600 people from zero. So I wasn't intimidated by organizing. I was like, if there is a community, I'll host an event. I know how to get space in you York for free. I know how to get a sponsor. I know how to get food and wine so that people are not pissed off and they're actually like enjoying themselves. And that's about it. So it doesn't feel as intimidating for me. But yeah, no one was taking it over. I think that email was sitting in my inbox for a Day until I. Maybe two days until I acted on it.

Well, oftentimes the best opportunities come disguised as incredibly hard work. And so it's okay to look at something like that. And it was an opportunity for us. Most people probably got that email and were like, now screw that. I'm not sure I'm not going to organize this meetup, but if you are willing to do that hard work, then you might actually reap the benefits from it.

Love it. Love it. Well, we've already kind of gone over our time, the time that we promised you we would.

We knew that was going to stay under.

But, you know, we can probably do a round two if you guys are open to it. You know, we mentioned on your podcast that, you know that the four of us are going to try to meet up about once per quarter, you know, virtually to share ideas and game plan podcast strategies and whatnot. So I imagine, you know, you'll be on the show again in the future. There's, I mean, there's so many topics I still wanted to cover. I wanted to cover, you know, you guys, you guys write for Forbes and Harvard Business Review and you do a bunch of public speaking and you have some really high profile guests that have come on your show. And I really want to kind of dive into all of this and I feel like we could probably do a whole nother hour. So I'll, I'll spare you guys and spare the audience of us sort of going deeper on that. And we'll have to open that loop for around two.

But you'd love to do it.

Guys, before we do, are there any books that you find yourself sort of recommending often or you refer back to yourself often? I imagine, you know, as, as teachers and as coaches and with what you do, there's. There's probably a handful of books, one or two that.

You find it fairly important that entrepreneurs read. So I'm curious if there's anything like that.

When I was reading your bio, you mentioned, I think it was Matt, you mentioned the Alchemist is one of your favorite books. Was that you, Matt, or.

No, that would have been Joe.

Yeah, there you go. That's actually one of my favorites, but I won't use that one. But I will say kudos, I like it a lot. One book that I really love, I literally, on a weekly basis I recommend it is how to Win Friends that Influence People by Dale Carnage. I read it when I was younger. I've reread it since then. It's incredibly valuable to me. It was a game changer in terms of helping me figure out how to navigate relationships and look as an entrepreneur, it really is a relationship game with your co founders, with your employees, with your partners, with your customers, Everybody. Right. And so knowing how to deal with people is kind of the first thing that you need to learn in order to be a successful entrepreneur. And that book is timeless. I think it first was published in like 19, 1930 or something.

I'm getting the date somewhere around there.

Yeah.

But it's completely timeless. The advice there is incredibly relevant. And if you try to even incrementally change your life and the way that you approach people and conflict and the like after reading that book, then you're gonna be much better off through that. And then the other book to talk about, a recent one that Sergey actually did an episode about that we heard about from a VC that we follow on Twitter, is the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle or Tolle. Have you guys read that book?

Yeah. Yeah, it's a great book.

I have not, but I've heard good things. Yeah, I read it.

It's a really good book. It's also one of those books I feel it's very meditative. So I will say we recommend that you listen to that book in audiobook format. It's another one of those books I think that you can kind of pick up, like start and read half of it and pick it up a few weeks later and then pick it up a few years later to kind of learn the lessons again. I love these types of timeless books and both books that I just recomm recommended. It's kind of a great check to see am I leading life in a good way and also in a way that is making me fulfilled and quite frankly adding to the relationships that I have in my life.

I'll add a few more books, two that are on the customer discovery, which is like validating whether there's a problem field which are really important. One is Lean Startup by Eric Ries and the other is Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, who's a Stanford professor. Both really good about the customer discovery process. Check it out. But there's also. I love reading entrepreneur autobiographies. It's one of my favorite things to do. And two that I always recommend are Losing My Virginity, which is by Richard Branson. He just has such an amazing story. He's like the real life James Bond.

And also Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. Really cool story. He one cool thing without too many spoilers. Is that everything that the best practices of starting a business can go out the window? He was doing Nike part time for like 15 years, which most people don't know. Great book. And I love to read those autobiographies to get myself inspired by the kind of people that dream up products and then are able to bring it to market by taking calculated risks, which is just always fun to read about. You can emulate those people.

I love it. Yeah. And those are two of my favorite autobiographies. Love both of those.

Those are. I mean, those are all amazing books. I feel like that's like a well rounded recommendation list right there. Yeah. Very tactical, very personal things, and then very theoretical. And yeah, I love it.

Very, very cool.

Thanks, guys.

Where can people go to check out your podcast and learn more about you guys?

So they can go to Thementors Co. Thementors Co. That's where we host everything about our podcast. If you want to read articles that we share, we also have that on our website as well. But on Forbes or Harvard Business Review. If you look up our names, you probably have to look up how to spell them on our website or go to the show notes that these guys are going to provide. But you can link through and search on Google and find different articles that we write as well. And you can also follow us on LinkedIn. If you just search us on LinkedIn, you click Follow. Both of us share a lot of stuff on there as well.

If you're looking for the podcast we nerded out, and our cover art is actually a black and white picture of us staring at each other with a beach behind us. I don't even. I think we were trying to be funny with it, but now it's kind of like, oh, yeah, it's a black and white picture. The two weird bearded dudes.

How do you know we're gonna look that up now? Like, we're just like, okay, now we gotta go check it out. I think we've only been to your website.

Version of that photo that we can also privately show.

Yeah.

For Joe and Matt, though, not the.

Rest of the listeners.

Sorry, y'. All.

Thank you. Yeah. Hey, the COVID art looks good. It's solid. I mean, ours isn't. You know, obviously we had no, Ours was taken at a brewery. And we actually cut out one of our other business partners.

I swear to God.

And they.

Matt hacked it up in about five minutes.

It was literally a selfie that I took of the three of us, me, Joe, and our business partner. Partner in another business. And I Literally cropped out our other business partner and then did some Photoshop magic on the image. And that was our podcast image.

That's how things are done, actually. We do, too. It's lasted a couple years.

All right, guys, appreciate your time. It's been a. It's been a good one. We'll talk soon.

Thanks a lot, gentlemen. This was fun.

Hey, thanks for listening to that episode. Hopefully you enjoyed it.

You dang right you did.

Of course you enjoyed. What's not to enjoy?

We weren't gonna publish it unless you and we're gonna enjoy this.

If we don't enjoy it, we don't publish it. Therefore, we only publish the stuff. We know you're enjoying it.

We listen and read the notes as well.

So Very, very true. Well, you know what I want to do? I want to actually start reading some reviews of some of the people that listen to our podcast because we're getting some really cool reviews. And also I want to kind of incentivize people to leave more reviews because then we're gonna read them for you.

Hey, man. This is our shout out section. Yeah, that's kind of what this is gonna become for the Outro shout Out section. So, yeah, let's do some reviews and prior to that, let's talk about some.

Of the guys that have supported us.

Yeah, and there's a couple shout outs from our friends and some other folks that reached out to us. These two actually are our friends. They're pretty close friends of ours and they support our show. So, you know, if you want to get more of like an exclusive shout out, reach out to us. We have a couple spots available occasionally, so depending on. But the first buddy of ours, actually, Steve Olsher, he's one of our masterminds. He runs a podcast called Beyond Eight Figures. And they're chatting with just amazing entrepreneurs who do have either exited or they currently run a business that is above 10 million and they basically grill. So they have three hosts over there, Steve Ulscher, Mary Goulet, and Richie Otey. They're all buddies of ours as well in San Diego. And they basically grill them until they figure out their methodologies, the tactics and action steps that actually got them to accomplish that.

Which are what?

Few companies ever would ever get to that point.

For sure. It's a great podcast. They cover a lot of ground, and the whole thing is trying to uncover what goes into creating an eight figure business so that other businesses could reverse engineer the success. So, amazing podcast. That's Steve Olsher's Beyond Eight Figures. Podcast, definitely. Go check it out on Apple Podcasts and everywhere where you listen to your favorite shows.

You gonna like it. It's very similar to this one with different approaches. So I think if you're a fan of this, you're gonna love his show beyond eight figures.

And then our other supporter for this episode is our good buddy Casey Zieman's Easy Webinar.

Bam. And both these guys have actually been on our show too, Steve and Casey. So if you like them, you can even check out an episode too.

Yeah. So check out EasyWebinar.com hustle because Casey put together a 20% off deal for listeners of Hustle and Flowchart. So EasyWebinar.com hustleen now, Easy Webinar is kind of a. It's a webinar tool, but it has live webinars. It's got automated webinars, it's got kind of hybrid webinars. It's got all sorts of, you know, social media functionality. It's got. It's pretty much like the only webinar platform you would ever need. It's got everything all in a single platform. A lot of the other platforms, you gotta buy one product to go live and one product to go automated. And one product if you want to hire. And this one is just, you know, you get Easy Webinar, you're covered, you got it all. So if you want Easy Webinar, get it for 20% off. Go to easywebinar.com hustle and again, I just want to thank our partners and our supporters on this show. So, Casey and Steve, we love you guys. Let's go talk about some of these cool reviews we're getting.

Yeah, let's get into them.

All right, I got a review for us today.

What are we pulling out of the hat?

All right, so we got another five star er.

I'm gonna do it again.

Well, when you always hold my breath whenever you say, like, random.

Yeah. This one comes from Jeff Bish and the title of it is Every Episode Helps my Business and Motivation.

Damn. That, like, hits on everything that we're trying to achieve here.

Yeah, we're trying to motivate you and build your business.

Heck, yeah.

And also, you know, make you happy, of course.

Well, with good motivation, I feel like happiness is wrapped up in there. Right?

Yeah.

Cool. Let's get into it. All right.

I was so excited when they offered a physical copy of detailed notes on every show to be mailed to me each month. Because just listening to the show is not enough to absorb all the great content. Anyone who wants to grow a business will love this podcast. Matt and Joe are great at creating an entertaining show that provides countless ways to grow your business and stay motivated.

Personally, you know what the sound of physical mailed stuff is?

Yeah. Joe's shaking paper in front of a microphone. You know what? Since he mentioned the newsletter, where can people go get it?

Oh, come on. It's so obvious.

Yeah. If you actually. New way. If you text comp c o m p to 38470, we'll send you the thing.

38470, comp. 88470, comp. There it is. We're gonna make that a jingle soon. Already is.

Kind of.

It is. Yeah. No, Jeff, that was an amazing review. And, yeah, like, you probably heard us talk about it before, but we are trying to, like, we repurpose everything we do as best as possible. And the notes and the physical mailing and all that stuff you hear us talk about are just. Just extensions of this podcast. But obviously there's a lot more we put into it, and there's different benefits to this. This physical stuff we've heard. And I love to see that Jeff is. He's a subscriber. He's a listener. Like, that's the thing. You're hitting all these multiple modalities, and, you know, as a business owner listening, you want to hit on multiple modalities in your marketing. And that's exactly what seems to be working for Jeff, you know, as a value add. As a customer and subscriber, I think it's amazing. It's definitely something you could try in your business, too. Definitely.

Thanks so much for the review, Jeff. And those of you listening, submit your reviews. Give us five stars. I mean, you can give us less, but, you know, give us five stars.

Come on. Holla at your boys.

Don't be stingy with those stars. They don't cost you anything.

It's true. It's just one click. Every click is equal, but not really equal. But choose wisely when you click on a star.

Yes. Do you want us to read your review with.

Appreciation towards you?

Enthusiasm and gusto.

Enthusiasm. Or do you want us to read your review and then teach you a lesson about why you shouldn't leave negative reviews? No, I'm just kidding. We wouldn't really do that. I just have.

That's the hard ass here.

Yes. All right. Yes. Leave more reviews. We love you guys. And thank you so much, Jeff, for the amazing review.

You rock.

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