Don't chase your dreams, just follow them until they get tired and lie down 🎯 | Yehong Zhu (Zette)

Don't chase your dreams. Humans are persistence hunters, so just follow your dreams until they get tired and lie down. If you chase, you're going to tire yourself out. But if you keep following your dreams with this dogged determination, it's going to happen and it's going to come before you know it.

This week's Millennial Master is Yehong Zhu. From breaking into journalism at Forbes to managing products at Twitter, Yehong has continually pushed boundaries. Now she's taking her experience to the next level with ZET, a bold vision at the intersection of media and technology. Based in San Francisco, Ye Hong's startup has already raised $3 million to fuel its ambitious growth. In this episode, Ye Hong shares how to innovate why tackling real-world problems, why using a global talent pool is essential even in Silicon Valley, and why resilience and balanced leadership are key for long-term success. This episode is brought to you by OffWork. Gym memberships, gift cards, free coffee, and Pizza Fridays. Well, These staff perks just don't cut it anymore. That's why OffWork gives your team something they already love—travel! They can book their own flights, pick their own hotels, and plan the perfect getaway, all with the travel fund you set up for them. It's super easy—just set the contributions, and OffWork handles the rest. Better time off means less burnout, more motivation, and happier employees. Give your team a perk they'll actually love. Check out Offwork today on offwork.com. Millennial Masters is proudly sponsored by Jolt, the UK's top web hosting service. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling up a custom app, every great project needs a reliable home. That's why Jolt has hosting plans starting at just £3.95 a month. With unbeatable deals on domain registrations too, why jolt? It's a no-brainer. There's no waiting around with support within 30 seconds on live chat. Your site stays live no matter what with over 99.99% network uptime. And you can also pay with Bitcoin or American Express, so you can rack up those points too. How good is that? Sign up today and enjoy your first 3 months free. Head to jolt.co.uk to get started.

Yehong, welcome to Millennial Masters. Thank you so much, Daniel.

It's exciting to be here.

So let's just go straight in. You went to Harvard, your mum was a journalist, and you interned and then worked at Forbes. And Twitter. How did all these experiences influence the path you're on now with Zett.ai?

Yeah, so it's pretty exciting because I'm the daughter of both a journalist and an engineer. So ever since I was quite young, I was intrigued by the intersection of media and technology. I grew up reading stories in the library, first in print form, in physical books, and then in digital books and online and in social media. So I knew that the impact of technology, especially media and storytelling, was very vast, and it allowed me to dream of new horizons and realities for myself. And I actually got to see the inside of a newsroom when I was a journalist myself. I was on the editorial team at Forbes, where I was a business reporter, uh, reporting on public market trends. And this is the summer of my sophomore year as an undergraduate at Harvard. And honestly, I, I, I loved it. There's, there's nothing quite like being able to tell the breaking stories on the markets in real time and having people depend on articles that you write to make trade decisions, to make purchasing decisions as retailers, as consumers.. And it also made me realize, it really opened my eyes to how a newsroom operated and how the business models and incentives work. One thing that I saw as a huge pain point for the industry was that monetization of digital media was really lagging behind. At the time, Forbes was a free outlet and we were generating all of this alpha and all of this value, but capturing so little of it and only through clickbaity ads. And programmatic advertising has had a long place and tenure within the media industry, but generally speaking, an ad model alone is not sufficient to keep an entire newsroom running. So I already saw the rise of the paywall well before paywalls kind of completely dominated the internet, and that was one of the first problems that I set out to solve.

You've seen firsthand how most national publishers struggle to make money on ads alone. But right now, the industry has evolved and we have hundreds and thousands of paywalls across the board, and people aren't subscribing to every single site that they read. I'm assuming that's where your business idea came into place, right?

Exactly. So this was something that I actually had as a pain point myself as a journalist. My job is also to read a lot of breaking news. And there were a lot of outlets that I wanted to read that on a journalist's budget and salary I could not afford. And I figured if I'm the one producing this content and this is my industry and I can't afford to read what my other friends who are journalists at The Economist and the Financial Times and Bloomberg are writing, then who can afford this? Or how can we make it easier to make journalism and real content more accessible to the general population? And so exactly like you described, my insight was a key one that inspired my initial journey at ZET, which was that if we could get all the publishers to license content to us and we can provide a simple technology platform to be able to connect all kinds of payment models or, or different sorts of options for payment to a larger consumer base, then instead of having to subscribe to a thousand different publications and websites, you can subscribe to us and you can pay for on a per-article basis or a subscription basis the news that you wanted to read. So we would essentially be a plug-and-play model, almost like a Plaid, to connect all of these different websites through our service so that the end consumer can have an easier life. And along the way, what we realized is that it's not just readers like you and me, individual consumers with this problem. It's also enterprises and businesses in the same way that we need to read breaking news to stay up to date with the markets and the elections and the pandemic and different realities. So do all the industries across the world. And so I really believe that this space is so expansive and not just on a B2C level, but also a B2B level. And we're planning to really dominate the world and take over and make media accessible for everybody.

You mentioned the pandemic and that was a turning point for you. That's when you developed the idea for ZETT. Can you tell me how it felt at that time to start a business?

It was pretty terrifying. There was so much uncertainty. There have been pandemics before and also throughout history, but I'm not sure if there had ever been a precedent for COVID the way that it happened and spread so quickly. The way the lockdowns affected not only economic decisions, but social decisions. I was in San Francisco at the time that COVID was announced, which was one of the first cities to lock down and institute social distancing so that you couldn't even really be with, you know, friends and family during that time. As an entrepreneur, taking a risk during such a risky time felt scary because I had just given up my health insurance, rent, and other things, other benefits of having a tech job. And so it felt really kind of all in, um, at that point. And the one thing that really kept me going despite all the dark nights of uncertainty of the pandemic was that people were glued to the news. They were refreshing the page constantly trying to find updates about what's happening with COVID what's happening with local regulations, what's happening with the development of the vaccines. And they were often hitting these paywalls one after the other. And I think there was even an outcry, there was a public outcry at some point for at least some of the publications where they said it's unethical to be paywalling this type of news because lives are at stake. But then on the flip side, if you look at the journalist's argument, if you look at the newsroom's argument, if they don't charge for that kind of news, they're not gonna be able to afford to keep putting it out. And so it's not a public service, at least not yet, for journalism. So How can we create a sustainable model that benefits both sides without either party feeling like it's too expensive or it's not a good deal? So it really became existential. And not only did we clarify that this is what I wanted to be working on during the pandemic, but we also clarified that this is how important journalism is for the world. The wrong information about vaccine access or about lockdowns or about some other piece of some critical crisis could mean that 1,000 people will die or more that day. And so talk about existential and talk about a mission. We definitely wanted to make sure that people had access to the information that they needed.

So we know the pandemic was a key moment for thirst for reliable information across the board. So at the same time, it was a great moment to pitch your idea. So how did you go about it? What were the next steps after you decided that I'm gonna start this business?

Yeah, so the actual next steps when I first decided was a period of bootstrapping and ideating to figure out what the business actually was. Because if you think about the gusto and the momentum behind wanting to start your own company, In the beginning, it's just you sitting on your laptop with a blank Google Doc, and that's how that started. It was just me, an idea of, okay, this could be an interesting thing to work on, and having to build out an entire infrastructure of how do we make sure that this is a company? How do we make sure that we have the right solution, the right market, the right team, the right product? The right partnerships, the right integrations, the right business model, the right go-to-market strategy, the right marketing strategy. So each of these component pieces was mission critical to figure out. And no matter how smart you are or no matter how much experience you have, chances are you don't have all the pieces needed to start a fully fleshed out company. You might be the best coder in the world. It doesn't mean go-to-market at all. You might be the best finance guy. It doesn't mean that you can, uh, sell a product well. So I think all of these skill sets that were necessary in a startup were things that we needed to learn right off the bat. And that's also when I realized that your ability to learn and your upwards growth potential is more important than the knowledge that you came in with. And that's also why as a company, we're willing to take bets on younger, less experienced interns or undergrads or new grads, as long as they have a huge appetite to learn, take risks, and to do their best to deliver. And so, in the first year of Sett, we were fully bootstrapped. We built out an MVP, we recruited a team, we were able to raise our initial kind of angel round, friends and family round, and then we went out into the markets. During a very uncertain time to raise. And after a lot of lessons learned about fundraising and venture capital, we were able to successfully raise an oversubscribed $1.7 million pre-seed round from a number of institutional investors. And I was very pleased with the progress that we had made during a very difficult time in a very difficult season of life, but we pulled through and we will continue to pull through. Now and into the future. So that's what excites me about that.

This is no minor feat by any chance. So I, I've read that you've already raised altogether by now in November 2024, $2.7 million. And I think a lot of people would be interested to hear your learnings from this process, not only as a founder, but as a female founder, what are the bits of wisdom you can share about fundraising in a rather tricky climate, which I believe we remain in?

Yeah, the fundraising markets are, are super interesting in that you can never quite time the market. Oftentimes when you start raising in a period of uncertainty, it solidifies into a period of great bull run. And that's kind of what happened in our first round of funding in that when we started raising, it was the tail end of 2020, which was a very, very tumultuous time. A lot of funds had actually frozen, uh, their check writing abilities. There was a lot of dry powder on the market, but because of the pandemic, there was incredible uncertainty about how that dry powder was going to be deployed. And we weren't sure really how investors or VCs would feel about us, about check writing in general., but we had a mission. We went out there and we basically just got through it. And when I first came into startup land, I didn't have a preconceived network of startup entrepreneur, founders, investors that I could easily hit up because I had come from not just a liberal arts background coming from Harvard, but also from a big tech environment where I would say out of the people who typically come from big tech jobs, it's the, the vast minority that will choose to start a company, right? Like you'll have people with these brilliant backgrounds, but most of them are not necessarily startup founders or not necessarily well connected in the startup space. So I was really just looking at the resources I had and I was thinking, how am I supposed to get all these warm intros? Because the VC game is actually a connections game where most investors, especially GPs and such, will want a warm intro before they talk to you because they just get so much deal flow, so many cold pitches every single day. They don't know who exactly is worth their time to vet. So in order to get a first meeting, you really need to get introduced by somebody that they know well. So coming out of school after like one year at a big tech company, starting a company in the middle of the pandemic where I had no ability to physically meet people, I was really trying to think, okay, how are we going to win this warm intro game? And the way that I ended up, um, approaching it was by finding lists and communities of female founders and investors and just adding all of them on LinkedIn with a message like, hey, I'm a female founder, I'm building that. I had this idea to connect all the media providers with consumers so we can all reduce behind tables. I would love to connect over a call. I had so many of these calls and in many cases I didn't understand exactly what the benefit of the call was or exactly kind of what I was getting out of it. It was really just to build relationships and try to find people who could either support me in my mission or maybe be helpful down the road. And it just so happened that many of these women were well-connected in the Valley, were investors, were people who really resonated with what I was building. And as I kept on in touch with them on LinkedIn and kind of over the phone over the year, they were really impressed when we checked in again about all the progress that we've made and all the things that we've built. Because when I talked to them, it was just an idea. By the time we talked again, we had assembled a team, we had built an MVP, we had all this traction. And so I think it gave a lot of people people confidence in introducing me to their network. And then in terms of how we were able to close the round, at first we raised some money from angel investors who then were very helpful in opening up their Rolodexes for us because now they had skin in the game. Now they were invested in us, right? And so a lot of our angel investors actually brought us into some of the VC funds that ultimately came onto our cap table. And I'm just so delighted and grateful that because of the support of the community and network that I built over time, that we were able to get our foot in the door and that was enough for us to close our first round of funding and more. So it's a really tough process. Fundraising is always so tricky and there's so many different ways to close a round. So my story is just one data point among many. And also there's so many different types of capital, which is something that I learned later as well. So institutional venture capital is not by far the only type of capital. There's also grant money. There's also competitions like pitch competitions. There's also revenue, obviously. There's credit, there's debt, there's venture debt. There's tons and tons of different— there's, you know, family offices, syndicates, individual angels, high net worth individuals, like philanthropists, social impact investing. So really depending on your venture, there will be a different playbook for what you need to do. But I think in all cases, having connections will never fail you. It's never gonna, you're never gonna go wrong with that strategy. But yeah, I can kind of dive deeper into the fundraising route, um, if, if that's interesting. Um, but there's also a lot of great resources online for how to set up a pitch deck and a business plan and how to structure a pitch meeting. Um, and you get better over time. So that's the other thing, which is that when I first started pitching, I was pretty rusty. And now after hundreds of iterations, I feel pretty confident being able to pitch at this point anybody. And so it does just take a few iterations to get to that level of confidence.

So the lesson there is that it's not going to be an overnight success and you need to hone your pitch and your idea and develop your connections, even if you start from scratch, like, like you said, and start contacting people on LinkedIn. From there. Is there any particular shortcut that in hindsight you think you could share with, with other people that they could leverage in their endeavors?

I think one shortcut is when I started, I was quite the perfectionist in that I was building my pitch in a vacuum, in isolation, you know, iterating on design elements until the deck was perfect to my eyes, right? But I was doing that without external feedback in the same way that when I was a journalist, I used to write articles and stress over and craft the perfect paragraphs and, you know, sentence structure and grammar without having an editor look at it until the draft was done. I actually think a much better approach is to be iterative instead of thinking exactly what the investor wants to hear. Take the roughest draft of your pitch, have a friendly investor listen and have them just give you the most brutal feedback possible. Take all the feedback, integrate it, pitch the next investor, tell them, tell them to tell you what they think. Take all their feedback, pitch it to the next investor. And don't get me wrong, you could easily pitch, I don't know, 10 people, 100 people, and they'll give you 100 competing pieces of feedback. But generally speaking, if you keep getting feedback on certain points, or if you keep getting the same questions, You should double tap and click into that and see, maybe there's something here. Maybe I haven't explained my business model well enough, which is why it's confusing people. Or maybe my one-liner for my deck isn't clear enough, which is why they're still asking what the product is by slide 3. And so an iterative approach will save you a lot of time because instead of having to predict the future, you can go quite literally into the market and get real-time feedback. And I think that's also true of the product that you build for your customers. Instead of necessarily building a pitch-perfect product with all the bells and whistles, you could build something simple, launch it, get feedback from real users who are testing it, ask them what they want, and see if what you're building next aligns with what the customer's asking for. And I think by doing an iterative approach and releasing before it feels ready, it will actually end up creating a better product in the long run.

Do you think being in Silicon Valley and San Francisco was key to being able to launch that? Do you think you would have been able to do it anywhere else?

Well, firstly, I think entrepreneurs exist all over the world. I think there's amazing companies and founders globally. I've met incredible people from everywhere, from China to Europe to the US, Latin America, and more. There's unicorns in all of these countries. I do think there's a concentration of smart, talented operators in the Valley. There's a concentration on both sides. There's a concentration of capital and there's a concentration of, of talent. So I think it's a bit of a marketplace, right? The capital will go where the talent is and the talent will go where the capital is. Uh, I think increasingly there's more globalization. In terms of where people build companies. A lot of remote work, um, is still present after the pandemic. There's a lot of talent that have moved overseas, or maybe you're hiring international contractors. There's more global hiring that's happening, right? But I think that your network where you start matters a lot to seed the rest of your work experiences, lived experiences. And I think building a tech company in the Valley is a bit different from building companies elsewhere in general, in the same way that raising money in the Valley is a bit different than raising money in other geographies. So I would say that your geography matters in terms of how it impacts your experiences. And sometimes you're in such a bubble that you don't see exactly how that's true. It's not until you, I would say, try to raise money in the Midwest that you realize, oh, people are different here. I've heard European friends who are trying to raise money from European GPs, and they talk about how much more risk-averse Europe is as an investing class, right? So there's a lot of nuances there. Um, I'm personally glad that I started where I did, but also I'm American, we're building an American media company, so it, it helps basically be doing that in the heart of innovation. But I also think that for us specifically, New York City is a huge target because you can imagine it's the media capital of the world. And so a lot of our supply-side publishers will be on the East Coast, and I've actually had to make many business trips across the country. So for us, I think a bicoastal presence is and will remain important. But in the future, we plan to scale globally and have offices all over the world. And so do I think it's possible to build an incredible company anywhere? Yes. Do I think there's reasons why people built it here? Also, yes.

You led me interestingly into the next question as you were explaining how you started growing the company, hiring your team, and looking at global deals. And you also started at a time when you couldn't possibly meet face-to-face your new hires or your future employees? And did that allow you to find the best talent, not only locally, but around the country and around the globe?

How do you reflect on it? I was actually very fortunate because prior to starting ZET, I was working at Twitter as a PM, and I was on a rotational program called the APM, or Associate Product Management program. And it's rotational by design. So, my second rotation for that program was actually on a team in London, and at the time, managing a remote team in London from San Francisco was really challenging because managing remote teams in general was kind of an odd skill set. A lot of the prevailing theory about how to build successful tech companies was that your engineers needed to sit with you on the same floor in person. Product needs to sit next to engineering. There's a lot of, uh, co-located kind of geographical wisdom around that. And I do think a lot of that rings true, but what I found was that being a remote manager for, uh, a distributed team gave me a lot of learnings about how to communicate, how to ensure that everybody was aligned on the same page, how it's really important to document everything because when with asynchronous communication, documentation will save you from having to be in meetings all day, replying to the same sets of people. So ultimately I brought this entire skillset that I had been honing to a COVID and post-COVID world where I became very comfortable not just hiring, but also interviewing and conducting work with a lot of my earliest employees. In fact, one of our I think most of our early employees at Zed, I hadn't met in person until potentially a year in. So just imagine, I mean, now I think it's much more commonplace to think that's normal, but at the time it would've been insane to not have met someone in person and decided to start a venture with them or jump in as a founding team member. But I think nowadays, as we've all tested in the market, we all are on Zoom, we're doing this podcast. Over, you know, video conferencing. The technology for that has gotten a lot better as well. I think in the early days it was a bit sketchier and the audio video quality was worse for sure. I think a lot of those things got ironed out over time and the general comfort level both among investors and founding teams around remote distributed team building is, is generally, I think, very positive. Although I will say Having done remote work for a long time now, I think there are, there is some beauty in having an office. And so I think the next iteration of that will be more in person.

Let's talk about that. You naturally started at a time when remote work was the norm or the only option at the time. And now you've evolved 3, 4 years down the line into a multifaceted business. Where you are looking at meeting your employees face to face. So I want to ask you, looking back, is there a question that was key to you hiring people remotely and understanding the type of person that you were dealing with and you would hire next? And then has that process changed now that you're starting to meet face to face your potential future employees?

For sure. I think that The benefit of hiring remotely is that you get access to a global talent pool. So that's really huge. I remember our first designer was out of Africa and we hired him because his portfolio was the best out of the hundreds that we received worldwide. And also for a startup, it's more cost effective. Imagine the cost of an engineering team all based in Palo Alto, California, or San Francisco, California. Versus the cost of an engineering team in Africa and Argentina and Taiwan and Vietnam and in Eastern Europe, right? And so I think increasingly the trend line for where especially growth stage startups are hiring tends to be pretty international, right? Uh, that's not just true on a cost basis, it's also true on a talent basis in that a lot of times amazing engineers, amazing designers, amazing operators, product builders they're not necessarily from the US. And so I think that there's a lot of benefits looking internationally for, uh, a founding team or even as you scale up as a company. But at the same time, there's a lot of benefit in being in person too. So the way that I would strike this balance would be to consider, let's say, a spoke and wheel model of maybe having an in-person component of an initial team, but also a remote component. And then bringing people in for offsites that are in person once a year. I also think there's a number of unicorn tech companies that do this model, including Twitter, by the way. So they had a, an annual conference called #OneTeam where they would bring in all of the international Twitter employees from all the offices around the world to San Francisco or to New York into a giant, almost like party-like week where everybody would assemble and we would all align on priorities and we would finally meet the coworkers we've been conversing with across the world for, for years. And I think that these types of models will become increasingly accepted in the new workforce over time. And so I think that balance of hiring in-person, co-located where people can work together, but also remotely, maybe even where they can work together. I mean, if you hire an entire engineering team out of Argentina or Taiwan, it could, you know, theoretically be co-located. In an office in that location as well. So there's a lot of benefits, I think, to both sides, but that's how I would strike that balance.

Is there a question that you ask every single potential employee that kind of like decides their fate, whether they join you or not? Giving away our secrets.

But I think, you know, we can, we can do this. So one thing that I do ask is tell me about a time Where you've overcome impossible odds or improbable odds to reach success. And depending on how crazy their story is, I can tell what kind of person they are. And we received all kinds of answers to this question that are frankly pretty impressive. I think if you look throughout at the resilience of humankind throughout history, our ancestors have overcome unbelievable obstacles just so that you and I can be sitting here today talking to each other. And that level of tenacity and resilience is exactly what we select for at Set because we don't want people who will easily give up if they can't figure out, you know, our SEO strategy. We don't want people to like throw up their hands if they don't have an account executive to like do a first sale for them, right? We want people who can dig their heels in, are not going to die or quit easily, and are going to say, we're going to get through this. And even if it seems like it's not happening, we're going to make it happen. So I think that if you're an early-stage startup and you don't have that mentality, I have no idea how you're going to survive because throughout the last few years alone, look at everything that's happened with bank runs, with pandemics, with market uncertainties, electoral uncertainties, or changes of power in the White House, how that affects people on a macro level, the wars that have been going on, right? So any number of shifting tides can completely overturn an individual, a company. So without that kind of tenacity and resilience, um, I think it's difficult to have staying power to, uh, to ensure that a startup is successful. So, it's something I try to embody myself, something we definitely ask in interviews. And fortunately, I think everyone that we selected to work at ZET has so much gumption and so much fire. It's a pleasure every single day to be able to lead my team.

Thanks for sharing that little secret there. Now, I want to focus a little bit about ZET. It's at the intersection of media and technology. Right.

We see ourselves as a technology company, but we do work with a lot of media providers. A media company would be, in my opinion, somebody who directly hires journalists and produces content. And we don't do that at all. In the same way that I guess you could call Spotify a media company, but really Spotify is a technology company. Netflix is not a media company, it's a technology company. So we see ourselves in the same way.

And I understand that's how you pitched set as the Netflix or the Spotify of media. And for $10 a month, people can have access to hundreds of publishers and pay piecemeal for stories that interest them rather than a single one. Do you think we are now getting oversaturated with paywalls across the board?

I think so. I think there has been a lot of subscription fatigue over the years. Especially because there's a tragedy of the commons problem where it's tough. If one party paywalls, everybody paywalls, but it's really hard to justify subscribing to a million paywalled publishers. Um, and you end up kind of picking and choosing maybe the New York Times plus your favorite local newspaper if you're lucky. But on average, the average paying subscriber of news only pays for one, and statistically it is the New York Times because they are the market leader. So there's that problem with subscriptions, but for different market verticals, people will subscribe. They will subscribe typically to their favorite music streaming platform, whether it's Apple Music or Spotify. They will subscribe to hopefully at least one of the many video streaming platforms, whether it's HBO or Disney or, you know, Netflix or more. So for a given category or vertical, thesis and our intuition was that if people could have one subscription, they would rather have more access than less. They'd rather have a diversity of news than a single provider. They would rather be able to read all the articles that come across their feed than just one of the many. And then the insight between, uh, our model was basically that Rather than a micropayments model where you're only paying per article, we charge a subscription upfront that gives you a bundle. The bundle is use it or lose it. So no matter what, it's going to be recurring. We actually call it macropayments because this model allows us to actually give more money back to publishers as well. But micropayments would be quite literally charging you per day that you're at the gym versus for a gym membership. And so our model is a membership model. Not a per-day use case. So that's one thing. But what I also will add here is that despite the subscription fatigue, subscriptions are not, in my view, going away. The reason they're not going away is because journalism newsrooms, they still need monetization models to keep the business alive, to fund the writers that work and the editors that work and the business people that work so hard for the media industry every day. And I think that the way forward for this industry is to open up monetization across the board. So it's not just consumers that are actually running into paywalls, it's businesses too. And it's not just normal enterprises, it's also AI companies. So this actually leads to a very interesting recent expansion of our model that we are deep in exploration now. Which was that OpenAI was sued by the New York Times by illegally infringing on their copyright law by ingesting all New York Times data into their models. And because of the lawsuit, they had to strike a deal with New York Times, but also a deal with a number of other publishers for whom they were also infringing on their licenses for. And so what we realized was that, wow, every single AI company that's using news articles as training data is going to either have to do all the deals themselves, just like we did, or potentially go through an intermediary like us. So we can not only open up subscription access, uh, or content access to consumers, but for a very different use case at a very different price point, we can do the same for enterprises as well. And in that way, we can funnel back different sources of revenue to our media publishers.

And take a cut too. This year, there's one bad boy who's been kind of like put in the corner by the government in the, in the US, and that's namely Google, who has been called out for their monopoly, both in the ad market and in the app market. And you reminisced how all the publishers, when you were in the journalism itself, were reliant on ads, programmatic. We know Google dominates in programmatic with over 90% there. Do you think at the end of the day they played a positive role in bringing the industry into the state that it's now, or in the end that allowed ZED to happen?

Are you talking about whether Google served publishers positively or negatively, or are you, are you asking about?

Something else. Let's go down that route. Yeah, let's, let's try and explore whether at the end of the day, Google had a positive impact on publishers, considering they officially, at least legally, from, from a US judge point of view, they siphoned most of their money in their favor, leaving very little for the publishers on the table who are actually creating the value and the content.

Yeah, so my perspective on Google is as follows. Google has made billions of dollars off the backs of syndicating publisher content by ranking and having SEO and searching without passing the value back to publications. And I think that this is an observation without necessarily assigning blame. Was it Google's responsibility to provide the monetization model for the publishers, or was their only responsibility to provide the backlinks so that consumers like you and me can find the news easily and go on ourselves and decide whether or not we want to subscribe or want to click ads, etc. I think that it might have been Marc Andreessen who said that when he was building the first browser, his biggest regret was not actually putting a wallet into the browser itself. So the concept of micropayments had been executed well at the dawn of the internet would have been a non-issue by now. Like, we wouldn't have a need for subscription paywalls, period, if a browser came pre-equipped with the ability to siphon what you were reading and automatically pay. And maybe ads wouldn't even exist at all. And that's kind of a novel concept here, where we wouldn't need advertising per se as a key revenue driver. Um, I mean, maybe people would still need to find out about what to buy, so like maybe there would still be ads, but certainly there would be more innovative ways to directly have a relationship with the content provider and also facilitate payments through that. So there's a, there's an open question here of, I think, is it Google's fault for wanting to make as much money as possible with as likely or less of a cost basis as possible? Was it the browser's fault for not actually building in a wallet time. Is it the publisher's fault for not innovating quickly enough, not having a paywall at the inception of the internet rather than having to institute one later down the road, or even not banding together as a consortium? Because theoretically, the entire industry could have said, well, we're just gonna band up behind a single paywall provider and everyone's gonna have to go through us. And that would've essentially recreated Zap from first principles had the industry done it themselves. Well, I think fortunately or unfortunately, we live in none of these timelines. So whatever the would be, exactly, the would be, should be, could be, they just don't exist. And so that is possible now because a solution is still necessary. And who knows, maybe the solution we have today is going to evolve over time as Google dies because search is dead and everything goes through AI. And so I would say that the solution itself can always change, but the need for the solution will always be there. And whose responsibility or fault it is for not having a solution, I say we can disperse with the blame game and just get on with the innovation.

I am certainly subscribing to that idea, but understanding also the context in which we operate and how we got here, I also think it's quite important. So now, understanding the context in which we operate, what would you, what do you see as the biggest challenge in getting more people to adopt Zett? And you are obviously attached as a Chrome extension with Google to the most used browser in the world at this stage. So you are in the right spot, but there's also potential that Chrome would be broken up from, from Google in the, in the current market. So to recap my question, what's the biggest challenge in getting more people to adopt Zett and the model you're offering, which is clearly more flexible than being tied to a single subscription and not having a variety of information available to you?

Yeah, I think that there are a lot of potential challenges in adoption, but we love a good challenge as a startup. So. I'll name a couple. One is getting users to change their preexisting behavior. A lot of people will hit paywalls every day, but not even realize what a nuisance it is, or not believe that there could be an existing solution. So to the extent that they're searching for solutions, that would come from their own initiative unless we had an external marketing strategy. So typically people will find us one of two ways. One is that they go looking for us, they'll go searching for, oh my gosh, I've hit another paywall, how can I possibly get access to this article? The second is that we go looking for them, we'll have targeted ad campaign, we'll have even word of mouth sometimes, or we'll have a product use case where users that will share referral of the product to a friend. But either way, we're gonna have to find each other. And oftentimes, it's the finding of the other that's very difficult. And that's where a lot of startups will actually fail to find product-market fit because they can't find their core user or their core user can't find them. So that's why ads is such a big trillion-dollar-plus industry, because ads will get eyeballs on your product if you have the right copy, the right images, the right visuals. But it's also why growth is such a huge, you know, job role and opening at so many companies, especially startups too, because there's more than one way to get eyeballs in front of your product. And that includes everything from cold emailing users to, um, you know, throwing events to having viral marketing campaigns and social media, even having product-driven growth cycles where your product itself is so viral-friendly that you're just gonna want to share it with people. Maybe you have to invite people. In order to unlock certain articles. So there's all of these flywheels that are possible in terms of distribution, and we've certainly experimented with a lot of them. We will experiment a lot more, but this is generally falling into the bucket, I think, of the product and the user needing to find each other. The second bucket that we are exploring now is going where the users already are. Historically, they were on Chrome, they were on, you know, Google, they were searching, they needed maybe a Chrome extension, a dropdown to make their lives easier while they're navigating all of these tabs, right? But increasingly we're thinking, where are people getting their information? Where are people getting data? They're getting it from AI. They're using chatbots more and more frequently, and they're expecting their products to be AI-enabled so they don't have to search as much. They don't have to use Google as much, right? And so we're thinking that if we can provide value as a data intermediary and we can still funnel the news through, let's say, foundation models or LLMs, or potentially even have our own AI-enhanced news product, I think that's kind of where the market is heading next. That's the future of where people are using, they're putting their attention. So these are the different models of how we expect to generate a large user base. We're excited to see what happens next.

AI, as you mentioned, is the next frontier, and do you see it as soon replacing search and possibly challenging Google's dominance?

Yes, absolutely. I think even Google knew that, like Google, funnily enough, it was their engineers and their researchers who wrote that pivotal paper about transformers, which was one of the underlying facets of the technology that made the AI revolution possible. But the reason why, so, so they knew what they were sitting on, right? They knew that they had unlocked, you know, a gold mine, but also potentially a grenade because had they really gone all in on AI, it would have totally decimated the ads market that was all built on SEO and search that they had created. It would quite literally cannibalize their own innovation. But this is the exact innovator's dilemma that's written about so many books for so many companies. It's the same reason why Kodak, the camera company— they were a cutting-edge camera company at the time. They were the first to invent digital cameras, but they sat on it. They didn't want to release it because they had the monopoly on film. Look at Kodak now. They're still doing Polaroids, I think, or just selling them as like little vintage shish kebabs. But they could have been the dominant digital camera company. Instead, they waited so long that they were competed out of the market, essentially. And so that— I think that's a huge missed opportunity. So absolutely, Google is going to get destroyed by these other AI companies unless they figure something out really quickly. But I think OpenAI and a lot of the other foundation model players are moving ahead so fast that the market is extremely competitive to catch up in now. So we'll see where things play out, but I think Google missed their boat, to be honest.

We know Apple has been a great example of cannibalizing their own products with the iPod in order to develop the iPhone, which then became their biggest selling product. Do you think Google still has a chance to evolve to such an extent, even with the AI-generated search results that that they're offering at the moment, or are they really too late to, to the table? They still have over 90% of the market.

It's tough because when you're at the start of a new wave, you don't know how quickly or how high that wave is going to go. So imagine that your competitor has a 1-year head start in an industry that's going to grow 1,000x in the next year. That's a tough head start to catch up on. It may seem like just a year, but in that year they could fly so high that they're impossible to reach, right? But also I would say that Google wasn't the first search engine. Uh, so this is interesting cuz there's an argument to be made on both sides. There were dozens, if not hundreds of existing search engines prior to Google, but I'm pretty sure their main innovation was PageRank in that many of the preexisting search engines had trouble accurately cataloging and having relevant search results. I think they had to hire human teams often to actually rank different page results. When Google came out with algorithmic ranking, despite not being the first player, they just blew everybody out of the water. And the question is, clearly Google has access to talent. They have some of the smartest engineers the world over. But do they have the startup mentality of do or die? Do those engineers find that it's mission critical to either get Google to the next stage or Google's gonna disappear overnight? I don't necessarily think they have that level of conviction. I don't know how many Google engineers you've met, but a lot of them are maybe not the most hardcore people who are not like, oh, I'm gonna—

you certainly met more than myself.

Listen, I don't wanna, I don't wanna give a bad name to Google engineers. There's some, they're some of the smartest people in the world, but I will say that it is a choice to become a big tech company engineer in general versus an early stage startup founder or, you know, working on like frontier research for a foundation model years ahead of commercialization, right? I think there's different levels and tiers of risk appetite and conviction. And I think Google can catch up if they can get their stuff together and really put their nose to the grindstone. But the question is, do they still have it in them? And I guess the next few years we'll see how things play out.

We're going to see that very soon. I want to, I want to turn the dial back now onto yourself as an entrepreneur and a founder. Starting a company in the pandemic or immediately after, you mentioned going through a period where you felt unhappy and you started seeking discipline in all areas of life in order to motivate you and to take you from one step to another in what can be, in a way, a lonely place to be in as, as a founder and entrepreneur. But you've recently turned 29, uh, and you, you shared some of your learnings and wisdoms, which I wanted for you to possibly recap in this discussion for our viewers and listeners. Yeah, exactly.

I think that longevity in anything that you do is so, so important. And what's become a company value for ZETT and a value for me personally is the concept of antifragility. Which was popularized by the book Antifragile, but basically describes gaining strength from chaos as opposed to getting weaker. It literally embodies the phrase, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Um, and what I realized was that a lot of the habits that I had built in the early years of my tech entrepreneurship journey were not the habits to be building. I had bought into all the propaganda about hustle porn, hustle culture, you know, eat, sleep, breathe your work, no vacations, no days off. And I just realized that, what does that do, right? You drive your engines into the ground. The startup journey ends up being a marathon and not a sprint. By the time you've made it to one milestone, giving it everything that you have, you're tired, you're tired, you're running on low for the next one. One. Um, that's because certain foundational principles are not met. Now, what those principles might be include: are you getting enough sleep? Humans, at the end of the day, are biological creatures. We need sleep in order to reset. There's an entire host of research, scientific research, on why sleep is important for optimal brain function. A lot of founders in the early years of their startup, they do not sleep. They will stay up at all hours of the night writing emails, hacking, coding, that's not sustainable. Maybe it's sustainable if you need to do a singular hackathon or, or get a product out or work to meet some release, but it's not a sustainable strategy over time. Similarly, if you don't have fulfilling meal plans, if you're just eating junk all day because you don't have time to cook, you don't have time to grocery shop, what are you fueling yourself with? How are you going to— Exactly. You are what you eat, right? You also are a lot of other actions that you do. If you cut out your friends and your family and your loved ones because you're working all the time, when things get really hard, who is going to support you? How are you going to get emotional support and love that you need as a human to get through the ups and downs of life, especially during the hardest times of products breaking, or a big customer just canceled, or you thought an investor was coming in and they didn't. Those are really difficult emotional setbacks to absorb. And if you cut all the social activity out of your life, you have no shock absorbers. You're just taking it in, you know, alone. And so these things will ultimately make you more fragile. And it wasn't until years in that I realized Wow, I'm not building the type of life that can allow me to be in the entrepreneurship game for the next 20, 30, 40 years, right? A lot of people don't think like that because maybe they have different goals. A lot of people that I know, they want to burn fast and burn out. They want to build a company, build, build, build, get it acquired at the speed of light, and then potentially never have to work again. And so if in 2 to 3 years they can fire all their engines and burn out, it doesn't matter to them because they've met their objective. That is not my objective. And so I have to build my life in an antifragile way. It doesn't actually feel like a choice for me. It just feels like something I have to do. And so now that I'm recently 29, actually my birthday was yesterday, so it was a fun time to kind of look back at all the progress over the last year. I realized that if it's not gonna last in my life in the future, then I don't necessarily want it now. I want to build things that will last. So that's my key takeaway there.

To build things that last, we know you, you have to make sacrifices. What's the biggest sacrifice you had to make to be where you are today?

I've had to make sacrifices on all levels, and it took making all those sacrifices to learn what was not worth sacrificing any longer. And I could, I could list them off. Made financial sacrifices by leaving a lucrative job and doing something very risky. And I've put my personal money into Zed, especially when we were bootstrapping in the early days. There was no guarantee that we could source outside capital. It was all savings that I had. I've put in, um, social capital, right? My reputation. Is on the line. Um, the entire network that I've built is built largely off the back of the innovations that we're pursuing at Xat. I've sacrificed time with my family, friends, loved ones, sacrificed opportunities to get into relationships and dating because work took precedent. I've even sacrificed my health, right? And staying up, pulling those all-nighters, working those 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100-hour work weeks. And at a certain point I realized the things that were worth sacrificing versus not, right? Health, I think, is never worth sacrificing because if you can't have your health, you can't build a company. I, I mean, that just seems like patently obvious to say that, but every day the decisions that you make are often sacrificing your health. And so Most founders, they won't go to the gym if they can spend an extra 2 hours working on their product, but you should go to the gym because in the long run you're gonna need stamina to work on your product for longer. These things can be like counterintuitive. And I think that there's also a balancing act, right? I mean, maybe if you're young, financial sacrifices make sense, especially if you're confident that whatever you're going to be paying now, you're gonna make back. When you make it big. But I also think that there is a delicate balance in not spending your whole savings on your venture. Now, this is, it's already too late for me, but I would say that if you have some sort of safety net, whether it's a family safety net, economic safety net, something, make sure that your safety net can catch you in worst case scenarios, right? Don't go all in on crypto betting and then it'll wipe you out and you realize, whoops, that actually is the only savings that I've had. And now it's going to leave me a lot more exposed when it comes to financial risk, because everything else I have is totally invested in my startup, which is not liquid until you, until you exit typically. So I would say like, be smart about it. If you need to work longer before making a leap into entrepreneurship, consider how many more years it would take to build up your personal runway. If you need to ask different friends, family, network to be angel investors, consider if they would actually invest in you before you leave your job, right? So these are considerations that I think are very salient that can cut down on the number of harsh sacrifices that you yourself have to make on a personal level. And then finally, I would say there are some sacrifices that you make that may be necessary in the moment, but that you can't necessarily get back. You can't get time back with your family. And oftentimes when you miss out on important life events with your family or friends, you can't rewind the clock and go after you're successful and, and say, okay, I'll make it up to you. I mean, you could, but your time and your presence and the ways that you choose to spend your life and the relationships that you build, these are often the things that you'll look back on, on your deathbed and think back to, I wish I had spent more time with my mom. I wish that I had been a better partner. I wish I had been there when my close friend needed me. So I try to always keep in perspective what is really important. What are, let's say, glass balls to juggle and rubber balls? And sometimes those balls will change over time and like some things can shatter, some things can bounce back, but it's really important to keep an eye on which is which. So yeah, it's all about balance. I think if you're gonna be an entrepreneur, you have to be very clear about the sacrifices you're willing to make and which ones you aren't.

I think you touched on a lot of interesting points there, but before we taper off this discussion, I wanted to ask you if you can think off the top of your head any particular books that have changed your outlook on life or on business that you think other entrepreneurs or people are watching this or listening to this, uh, should, should—

Yeah, this is a good question because there's so many potential books. I think there's like the classical startup repertoire of Zero to One, The Lean Startup. There's books on building technical proficiency. I think there's also books that are potentially lesser known, but that I usually recommend. For example, the, um, book America's Most Successful Startups. Which was written by the Samour brothers, uh, as their master's thesis in Germany prior to starting Rocket Internet. I think that one is like a pretty important and information-dense book, and it covers a lot of the basics for startup founding. There's also books on, you know, financing, venture deals, etc. It'll teach you the basics of the financial and accounting side of startups. Uh, but then, you know, in terms of strategy books, you have The Art of War You know, that's a classic. Um, you have Meditations by Marcus Aurelius that'll keep your head on straight through the chaos of startup life. I would also recommend On Pyrrhonian by, um, Epictetus. It's also another Stoic philosopher. It's a very short read and I reread it every now and then. It really keeps in perspective what's important in life. And finally, I would say, you can't have fiction because I think that as important as nonfiction and these kinds of business guides and manuals are. Fiction is the realm of imagination. It gives you space to dream. If you're going to be a technology entrepreneur, you need to be able to dream. So yeah, pick your favorite fiction artist and go ham on that.

Another quick one. Do you read the physical book? Do you read it on your computer, iPad, Kindle, or do you go for the audiobook version?

Oh yeah, I am a sucker for physical books, although sometimes it's hard to carry that many books around, especially if you're moving or traveling. So I think for space constraint purposes, I do books that are more PDFs or Kindles. Um, I should listen to audiobooks more, but I typically don't. I, I will either read physical or kind of read online, but physical's my preference, to be honest, cuz I look at screens. Way too much.

I'll wrap up with a parting question. What's the advice the 29-year-old Yi Hong would give to the 25-year-old Yi Hong when she started the ZET?

Yeah, there's a funny one that I think I might give. Don't chase your dreams. Humans are persistence hunters. So just follow your dreams until they get tired and lie down.

That's a deep one to end on. It is indeed.

Indeed. Because if you chase, you're going to tire yourself out. But if you keep following your dreams with this dogged determination, it's going to happen and it's going to come before you know it. Amazing.

Thank you so much for this insightful chat. And I'm wishing you best of luck with the next move, and I'll be following up on your journey.

Perfect. Thank you so much, Daniel Ionescu.

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