Boris Lau - Sr. Software Engineer of Khan Academy

On this episode of Founder Journey, we've got Boris Lau. From cutting his teeth as an engineer in the cybersecurity industry to building his own data and analytics company that went through techstars. Boris shares with us his journey and the experience of going through a top tier accelerator like techstars, but also the back and forth decisions that you make as you shift from focusing on small to medium sized businesses to enterprises and then going back to small and medium businesses and ultimately making decisions of how to fire customers and how to say no to customers that just aren't right for your business.

Three, two, one.

Hey, what's up everyone? We're back at it again. Another week of Founder Journey stories. Today we've got Boris Lau. Boris is a longtime launch caddy member and he was actually one of the OGs, first in 2012 with a company called Pathful. Pathful ultimately joined Techstars in Chicago in 2013 and in 2015 it got acquired. So within a three year period from founding the idea to bringing on a co founder and getting into a top tier accelerator to getting acquired, it's quite the journey. Boris, awesome to have you on.

Yeah, thank you.

Why don't you give us a quick little background about you background about Pathful, the industry that you're in. You're obviously not with Pathful anymore because you've been acquired. You're with Khan Academy, another amazing, amazing company. So maybe we can talk about a little bit of that journey, going from a startup to a huge company like Khan Academy. But kick it off by telling us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, thank you. First of all, just want to say that without Launch Academy, Parkour wouldn't be on the journey that it has gone on now. So thank you for that.

But yeah, always love the launch shout outs there. But Launch is one entity, but it's the people in Launch that made it what it is and you were a key part of that in the early days, especially with your engineering background and that whole element that you brought to the ecosystem.

Definitely it's about a whole community that we are all within that privilege to be in that. And yeah, so for me initially when I first started with Patho, before that I was actually really coming deep in from the technical side. So I used to be in the comprehensive security background and work with reverse engineering of malware. So I totally don't do the business side. We'll literally be locked in the room and spend weeks working on a piece of software, reverse engineering, understand what the code is about. So how it got started is actually with the idea of Patho is from a bike trip or failed bike trip that during one summer I was working a lot with browser like web browsers and within web browsers I kind of like understand the events that's happening and there's so much data within that that people that built the website didn't know about that exist. And if we can, I was just playing around the idea that we can visualize and provide those ideas to people that own the website. Not talking about like third party marketers nowadays like Facebook or anything, but if you have your website, let's say if someone come into your house, what would it be like to see all these visitors understand what piece of text they're looking at, what images they're looking at? Literally that excitement of playing around that idea and building something around that is.

The first iteration of pathflam to break that down. Pathful really was an analytics tool for your own website to see what images people are clicking on, where they're spending more time, what pages are spending more time on, what content was resonating with them. So it's really a breakdown of your website for you to really understand where people spending their time. So if you want to equate it to a brick and mortar, which aisle are they in, which products are they looking at, how much time are they spending in my store but in a digital context with your website.

Yeah, that's great analogy of that. And in fact that's how we started. Ultimately we come down to a tool that not only give you the visibility into how people walk around your store, that actually provide you with ideas on how you can improve your store. So ultimately we kind of like come to this realization during this founders journey that from learning from our customers that we realized that actually customers don't need more data, they need more advice on how to improve their website. So we actually become a tool that support marketers to give them ideas and data driven clues on how to come up with a b testing ideas. So the journey between how pathl is acquired was where it started. Although it's like using the same technology, similar technology is very much more focused and honed in customer value proposition and target segment that we are facing.

And so who ultimately acquired pathfall?

Yeah, so pathfl actually was acquired by Mobifi which is also an amazing local Vancouver company which has recently since been acquired by Salesforce.

So there's a lot of press and media around that Salesforce coming in and acquiring Mobify and reinforcing their corporate presence here in Vancouver. But Mobafi itself was an international company with clients all over the world. Mainly I think it was retail clients that wanted a web and mobile presence and really increasing their e commerce platform. And Pathl seems like a very logical acquisition target for them to bring in that type of technology into their suite of software.

Yeah, definitely. I think that's something that's alignment of technology there and ultimately end up like not completely reusing all the code but also like building something really similar within the data pipeline on what's happening with Patho versus what's happening.

Yeah, and so that's quite the journey. So you as a solo founder, as I know, came into launch academy with this idea, you ultimately found a co founder and you guys went to techstars, then you got acquired. Talk us through that journey for yourself. Like what are some of the obstacles and challenges that you had to overcome? Again, not having the business acumen and the business side of the realm interest in the business side, you're more on the technical side but you had to do some of that work to get your company off the ground. So walk us through maybe some of that mindset that you had to get yourself into to break away from the tech side. Just say, okay, I have to actually build a business out of this or to just rely on your co founder.

Yeah, definitely. I think that's certainly a few turning point around this journey that I was looking at. And it all started in 2011 when I first started was going to a bike trip. Took a month off my holiday at work for my holiday but I ended up injuring myself. So I ended up actually spending a.

Month take a step back. So when you talk about bike trip, you're talking about mountain biking, motorcycle trip around America. Like what type of bike?

Yeah, we were hoping to do a bike touring trip that was going along the Pacific west coast that goes in going from Vancouver down to Mexico. So that was the plan.

On a motorcycle.

On a bicycle.

Road bike. Road bike, yeah, bicycle.

Wow. So it's on a touring bike. So it was a trip that going to take around 40 days and at that time I have a stable employment but unfortunately I got injured and I couldn't go on that trip. So I actually decided at that time to experiment the ideas of building something that is actually a prototype. At that point I didn't even know understand the concept of lean startup and being building a prototype. So let's say actually at that time I was hoping to build a full blown product within 40 days and literally that's it. And certainly I had no idea what I'm doing. At that time I came up with something and then went and kind of like lucky enough I feel in Vancouver that was certainly a great community there to support. And I was like talking to different people. I end up going to the Startup Weekend at that point. I learned a lot about the Lean Startup methodology, on how you can build an MVP and go and test out with potential customers and how you gather data from them. And that's certainly a big turning point. It's mostly about the community and that's also where the community connect me with my venture founder who is Campbell that actually when we first met we end up in a startup event and we, we were talking, we didn't end up reconnecting until six months later. So really appreciate the community that kind of set us on that first date at first literally to say yeah, so.

Gavin McDonald is still a prominent person in the tech community in Vancouver. And so he wasn't a brand new entrepreneur, he was a seasoned entrepreneur. He was actually a mentor at Launch Academy. I worked with a lot of companies but you guys connected and ultimately join forces and start building Pathfall together. Where does that kind of lead you in the context of. Yet you didn't understand the business side or you weren't really as interested in the business side. You wanted to bring in a co founder but the journey of building a startup is very difficult. How were you able to leverage each other or rely on each other to build something so successful?

Yeah, I think ultimately I think that come to a lot of conversation understanding what myself is lacking in that sense. It took me a lot of trial and error even before like going to talking to customers and trying to come up with some resemblance form of business plan to understand what skills I need. And also one of the things that I really appreciate from a tech, as a tech co founder also appreciate from Campbell as a business co founder is his ability and willingness to understand the technical concept. And I'm able to really easily explain a lot of the technical concept of what this technology does to him as well as that we've got a really similar mindset about how we get stuff done. And I think that's something that we really appreciate that almost that project management product, how we come into product is something that we've got similar mindset about that we do. We much rather do like really quick Sprint and kind of like validate with customers which I'm sure that a lot of founders do also it's also from a technical side we do tend to fail into that gap that we want to spend a month building. So.

So it sounds like it's a great complement to each other. But how did you know that he was a good fit? Like, what was that ding, ding, ding moment where you knew, okay, this is somebody that I can definitely build a company with.

Yeah, I think that's certainly something that we. It kind of like takes a lot of time to find out. Also, it's like during I didn't know Campbell well before. There are certainly founders that lifelong friends and they know each other that being through high and low and I think through interviews, as with any companies that you understand certain aspects of people, but only when you go through certain scenarios that you be able to really appreciate someone being there. And I think with Campbell, what we did is that we actually end up just saying, hey, let's just work together with each other for a while and let's work together for a month and let's go and talk to some customers and let's kind of like iterate a bit on our product and see how we feel. And that's certainly a very time invested product process. But at that time we didn't really kind of like really feel like ownership of that, oh, you must do this or oh, I must provide this to you and I must take this from you kind of respect. And it's like more journey of about, like you said, learning, getting together and just doing things together with PAFO and see how it feels.

And then when you guys joined techstars going through an accelerator, did that help strengthen that relationship? Did it test the relationship? What was that experience like? Because you guys were relatively new working together, you guys didn't know each other that well and then you guys got into techstars. And techstars is not a simple thing to get into, let alone complete because it's very onerous and there's a lot of smart people that are coming in and giving you advice and feedback and ripping your company apart and pulling you in different directions. So it can be very trying and testing for co founders to go through. So how did that work?

Yeah, definitely, I think both going into the TechStart process because I mean, TechStart is such an amazing place. We learn so much from it. But also going into that, we do realize that there is certain expectation what is our trade off going to techstar versus what we are going to do, continue building what we have and learning, like maturing a bit with our pathfinder before going forward to the next step towards accelerator. And at that time, I think one of the Key metrics that we were using kind of like within Our pitch to TagStart is the amount of data that we get. Because for us, basically what PLATO does is that it collects data about our customer's website and from there on we able to demo that how much information and data that we have. But ultimately at that point we're at an early stage that we didn't really have any paying customers yet. So I think that is one kind of like challenging aspect that we were discussing where to go in and on. So certainly that was a discussion that we had a lot and trying to understand what do we want, what do we want? Do we actually want to have a more self sustained kind of business model where we can actually get some paying customer before taking on, for example, taking conversion books from techstar and kind of use that to like go into page nine and from there on get some seed funding. So that's something that we actually have a lot of conversation about and that's certainly help us to align about what how do we see the growth trajectory of our company is. And certainly within Textile itself we come to, we obviously have a lot of secrets like that kind of both kind of exaggerate the like both I guess the euphoria and depression as we say in the startup world. And that's something that we really felt. Yeah, we definitely have a lot of conversation especially there is a lot of revision on directions on which customer we talk to. I think particularly being in techstar is that you get connection to a lot of potential customers and a lot of those customers have different need. And it's really, really important to go through a process to understand and triage where you want to be at, which customer you want to serve and which customer that you actually unfortunately have have to not be able to focus on because you only got three months to do that.

And that's actually, sorry, I was going to say that's like a big problem that a lot of entrepreneurs have. It's hard to say no to a customer, especially a paying customer. But at a certain point in time you got to realize who are your true target markets and who are just a time suck because that customer might be willing to pay you, but they're actually consuming 80% of your time servicing them, whereas the other 20% is spent on clients that are paying you as well. But you are better off finding more clients like that than servicing this one. And so that is a challenge. And so how did you guys digest that? That's a hurdle. That's a very difficult thing to do? No, we gotta cut this customer off. How did you guys make those decisions?

Yeah, that's actually one of the decisions I think we actually with hindsight is a learning that we had. But that hindsight only happened after we come off tagstar. I mean to be frank, I think in tagstar one of the big misstep that we have is going for enterprise customers. So at that time one of the value of PARFO is our unique value prop is to increase your conversion rate. We have got some case studies already with some of the smaller companies that saying that hey, we can increase your conversion rate by 7% and out of like that 2%, like even it's like out normal rate of 2% conversion rate, that 0.1% conversion rate increase is huge. And that's something that we've got some successful case study on. And we try to leverage that, talk to enterprise customers and try to extract that value that they had. Like just the pure leverage that they have can have on this 7% increase in their conversion rate. Ultimately I think at that time we were trying to spend our time doing a lot of work for enterprise customers. For example, we actually come up with this really cool pitch of being able to compare that using data. We basically build up a beacon that build up a web plugin that allow user testers to go into different customers web different their website and their competence website and gather data as if powerful was already installed on their website and kind of show them the report on what your if you install pathboat, what your enterprise report would have looked like and compared to your competitors. So at that point we kind of like was really excited about this pitch to these enterprise customers and I think that carried us away because we ultimately, I think it hide the fact that we knew that it would be a multi quarter deal, multi quarter engagement with an enterprise customers.

Sales cycle for enterprise customers are notoriously long because there's a lot of decision makers, there's a lot of hurdles that you have to go through to win that contract. So you were actually successful with small medium enterprise clients or small medium businesses SMEs. But you then took that success metrics and try to apply to enterprise clients and make that shift from small companies to enterprise clients. Was that a decision made prior to techstars or was that a decision made going through the techstars experience?

That was a decision that based on literally it's based on the pipeline of customers that we have access to from techstars.

So it was something that you go through the experience and you see okay, we've got all these new contacts and these networks. It's amazing. It's like a kid in a candy store being able to access all these major companies. But they weren't the core target market for you based off of the previous success that you've identified. And so you veered away from the small companies, from the medium companies, but ultimately made the realization that no, you need to go back to those and that's where you're going to make pathfall really successful is to continue to work off of those success metrics that you identified prior to. And so what was that journey like making that decision? Say okay, let's cut these people and how do we find these smaller companies?

Yeah, so we end up actually having quite. It was after taxdar that we end up like still engaging with these in this enterprise conversation for a while. As I say it's about a quarter. So the TechStart experience was three months and we end up being in Chicago for about half a year and ultimately we decided we were going to come back to Vancouver and I think at that time we did have a lot of conversation about which direction we should go. And that certainly was something that we. Based on that we find that we can have existing distribution around small medium enterprise through for example like we've got a lot of inbound campaign that's going on as well as like being able to actively identify customers that use certain a B testing tool. One of the value prop that we talked about we end up with pathfo is the ability to improve your a B testing experience and from there on for example convert nectar with a lot of customers from Optimizely and ultimately become engaged in the conversation with Optimizely that they were actually kind of referring us as like almost like optimizely consultant that allows us to work with different customers. So we have got some tragedy of distribution there that allows us to gain some traction in SME.

Now I want to kind of circle back to you and your personal journey here now going through techstars and then focusing, doing that pivot towards enterprise and then realizing that hey, this is a long sales cycle and there's a lot of challenges here and making that decision to kind of revert back. There's a lot of self doubt and regret or confusion and depression and things like that that start to pop up in your head as you're going through that journey. You had a co founder a lot of times it's difficult to talk to your co founders about these things because you don't want to show signs of weakness or you don't want to create friction where it's not needed because there's already stress in there. How did the two of you handle this together? Because obviously through Campbell's eyes, he was probably going through doubts and challenges and issues on his own end. But you guys came out through it very successful. Was there opportunities to collaborate on that and help each other out, or do you guys work in isolation on those matters? Personal matters?

Yeah, that's something that we certainly have a lot of conversation around that both.

Open with each other.

Yes, we definitely try to be open with each other. And I mean, ultimately we work really separately. We in the textile environment, we go into a lot of interviews. While I would take the feedback and go on, go on to trying to iterate on our products to show customers. And ultimately it was a very. We work in a very different cadence, but also we try to keep conversation about what's happening and how is he doing. Trying to really not hide any. Any doubt that we have. And I think they really appreciate that. Having a co founder, I think having. Being able to have these conversations is definitely something that's really important as a co founder and I think especially being able to like, understand talk have almost. One of the ritual that we have is that we try to do a retro every sprint. And I think that's a tool that is a lot of teams are doing also a lot of teams are not doing. And that's something that I think is a great tool to express, like teams level. Kind of like someone might go, oh, that's actually. That's an elephant in the room that the team are not talking about together and really trying to encourage it explore these. But ultimately, personally, I think there have to be a, like, safe space for founders to talk to each other. And I think that's a space that you really need to be honest with your co founder.

And were there other things that you guys did internally to create that safe space? It's not an easy thing to do because again, it's a lot of self doubt, self reflection. But both of you or your senior team all needs to be on the same page to do that or not. What did you guys do? How did you make that happen?

Yeah, I think that's also part of it is also I think we both have a lot of disagreement on potential things that we should do. And I think it also that I think one thing it helped is that.

The decision.

We have pretty clear definition of ownership on different parts of how Parfau operates. So in that sense, I think we ultimately, like, we have a lot of. A lot of conversation around those. I might, for example, I might disagree with certain, certain aspects of like the pitch that he might be very interested in, but I really trust Campbell's decision on those. There is one particular. Very well. It's one particularly interesting conversation I did remember during the textile where we were like, kind of like discussing, discussing some of the branding choices within Pravo for the pitch. And that's something that I think is interesting because it was a discussion that I think I end up making. I end up like expressing some conflict of it in not such a great way in hindsight reflect that, but it's.

Certainly something that emotions got involved.

Yeah, definitely. And I think that's something that I felt like he's able to understand that and he also expressed that emotion. But ultimately I think that's something that we have to come back and say, hey, this is what happened, and understand each other, not take that going forward. I think you have to be able to express that kind of struggle and like with each other and not hide it.

I said multiple times here, that path hole was a great success, but success is in the eye of the beholder. And you are from a technical background. What did success look for you? Where did you ultimately say, yes, I was successful here or no, I was not successful here, or this was a great outcome or that wasn't a great outcome for you?

Yeah, I mean, ultimately you can also look at it different way, at least in powerful terms. The ultimate acquisition is not a giant acquisition that we have. It's a relatively small acquisition from coming up from TechStart. So in terms of startup success, I certainly would not like just being honest that it's not a great success in terms of startup.

In terms of dollar value, right?

In terms of dollar value, exactly. But that's also something that I feel is also in terms of. That is. I think that is not the only motivation. On the law founders on how they would do a startup, and at least especially from a tech founder perspective or business founder perspective, it might be very different things that motivate why each of us is driven to go on a journey of entrepreneurship. And I think for myself, at least for me, it was really about building a product and really getting excited to be able to working with other people and kind of like sharing this building of the product together that got me excited and seeing this product in different people's hands. And I really, really want like more users to be using that as opposed to there's like one potential enterprise that we end up doing consultancy service with them. And that's something that I think ultimately, I think that's the thing that I think in a way is a proxy message metric to success. But also I think ultimately I have to ask myself what is driving me especially what is it different from what is nowadays looking at marketing analytics is such a almost you can use the word kind of like, kind of like dirty space. There is not a lot of privacy concern there. And for us, I think for patho ultimately I think this is something that is very different because it's something that allows us, a person that owns a website to understand more about their customers as opposed to relying on something that's like kind of like oh, what else does this customer see what curious like what third party information that other services are leaking. And that's something that I think is really drive me and motivates me to make this path like analyze the data and analyze users behavior to understand what it is about.

So not so much driven by how much money can I make, but more about how can I get what I built into the hands of more people so it makes a positive impact on their businesses in a clear and.

More.

Transparent way without nefarious activities behind the scenes. Yeah.

And really trying to tell the story about the users of what they're interested in, what content they're engaging with, what image is driving them in, what user interface is driving them away and be able to tell that story to the marketer to understand their customers. And I think that's something that ultimately through both working together with the team and Campbell and, and as well as like talking to different customers, they help us to kind of understand that. I wouldn't have said that at first when I started this journey, but ultimately I think that kind of like that is almost like kind of a step that at different points of this founder journey I realized there's different things that's motivated me and I kind of like really need to be able to like talk to Campbell and kind of understand what is this that kind of like driving us during this journey at different time.

So it's a bit of self reflection and realization on your end of what really mattered to you. And your social conscience obviously came through and you realized what you wanted to build and how you wanted to see it used by people. And that's a tremendous thing and it's a very admirable thing. And that kind of speaks to where you are now. You're with Khan Academy. Khan Academy is, is known around the World as a very social conscious entity and proliferating education and making education as accessible as possible to people around the world. Maybe tell us a little bit about what you're doing at Khan Academy and why that's important to you.

Yeah, so Khan Academy is a non profit that trying to provide free digital access education around the world. So one of our promises is that we will never charge learners directly about how they can access our platform. All the learning you can just go and come to learn Khan Khan Academy and do your learning for free on our platform. And I think that's something that really is driving motivates me in terms of mission that certainly kind of come back to the success metrics that we are talking about. And currently I'm on the the site reliability engineering team and Kanakandu especially during the nowadays with the school closure that we've got huge lift in traffic. So we're trying to. We are the team that reliable responsible for the reliability of the site to try to scale the site and make sure that it can stay up while we double our traffic to handle.

Yeah, I can just imagine that the demand and the load on your site site must be insane over the last six months.

Definitely. And initially there was definitely some seamless site involved in by trying to scale up the site and that also echo back to the excitement and startup that certainly when you are trying to scale a startup that how that how that come through and sometimes certainly there is time that you need to worry about the scaling both in terms of our customers as well and seeing how it works both the worrying and the excitement aspect of it.

So you may not be a founder yourself right now, but you're staying true to that vision and mantra that you had as a founder carried over into this new role at Khan Academy. But going back to your days as a founder, kind of want to wrap up the interview here but what would you say was one app or one tool that you found instrumental to your founder journey and how you were able to transform yourself from a engineer into an entrepreneur?

Yeah, I mean for us it's actually a really interesting, not quite an app that we all use but actually especially during the textile period, we have a lot of complicated concept and mockup. We actually all use Google spreadsheet to do that. And I think that is something that is totally sometimes like I used to hate spreadsheet but we actually have a joke running a team that actually spreadsheet can do everything and it almost builds a minimal viable standard for us to do internal communication. So let's say for example Campbell have certain ways to to like express certain priority. Then we almost straight away build a spreadsheet and kind of have different pro and con than trying to build on the table to better evaluate it. Or hey, if you've got a customer report that we're trying to articulate what the mockup is like, we'll actually quickly use a spreadsheet to mock that up. And in a way that using we are abusing the two of the spreadsheet but also hold us honest to ourselves to how we trying to be minimal in trying to express our ideas. And certainly for me I feel that was with the reflection that I felt that is actually one of the two that we had spent quite a lot of time in using it both as how it's supposed to be used as well as how it's not supposed to be used.

So you guys are creative in how you adopted and used Google Sheets and I think a lot of people take it for granted, but the ability to collaborate together in real time, even if you're not side by side but seeing each other's comments and activities in there. But you guys used it in non conventional ways. It wasn't just about calculating numbers. It was about visualizing concepts, ideas and workflows. And make it a collaborative workspace for cheap because let's face it, Google Sheets is free when you have Google Suite, right? Or you're paying for your Google account. But especially back then being lean and bootstrapped, you don't want to spend money on expensive tools or SaaS services when you can use that. That's already included in the tool that you have, right?

Yeah, totally. And it also allows us to have a common language even within designers or our analyst or business technology side to have this common whiteboard that we can all come in and draw together and bound by these squares that we actually kind of like communicate our ideas.

And so that's there's obviously a lot more tools that are available and accessible today. But back in the day when you guys started in 2012, 2013, that's a great hack that you guys put together there. But if you were to come back to the entrepreneurial side, what is it that you would love to see or do differently as an entrepreneur in today's world? What's your advice for other entrepreneurs new and old about building a company today that you wish somebody had told you back in your day when you started?

Yeah, I feel ultimately it comes down to, like you said, there's a lot of changing technologies and even then I think there is already a lot of tools that you use to build, prototype and mock up and connect with customers. I wish that when I first started I didn't just spend like half a year trying to build a product before showing it to our eventual customers and well, eventual first customer that we tried to interview. And certainly that was an encouragement when I first joined Launch Academy. That kind of got that, hey, that push outside the building and got to customers aspect that I really appreciate. And yeah, definitely, I think learning from customers doesn't mean having a product or it doesn't even mean having a product having a mock up. It could be just going to talk to customers and trying to get some qualitative feedback from them. And that's something that I wish I'd done more and that certainly at that time I didn't know how to do it. And with hindsight I really encourage someone to just go and have a coffee and really trying to listen and understand, understand what the problem is as opposed to staying in the room trying to build a solution.

Yeah, that's definitely a challenge that a lot of entrepreneurs have, especially first time entrepreneurs. You want to build, build, build. You don't want to share your ideas because you're afraid somebody's going to steal it and copy it. But hard reality is ideas are a dime a dozen. It's all about execution. You need to get out there and talk to people and gather data and information as much as you can that's going to shape and mold what you can actually build in a sustainable fashion. Boris, really appreciate you taking the time today. It's been a great conversation. Really dived into the nuances of having a co founder and working together. That's a bit of a different take than some of our other founder journey stories. I really appreciate you diving into that. This is where we want to give you a chance to have a call to action. What is it that our audience can do for you? How can you benefit from this experience as well?

Yeah, I think ultimately I really learned so much from the experience of being in PARFO and being Launch Academy and being in techstar and that's something that I feel I'm still applying that every day, trying to be closer to my venture customers, whether it's someone that's internal or external. So that's something that I really appreciate and I would encourage any first time founder if they definitely don't stay in the room and join the community. Especially with Launch Academy, you've got the program that allows Launchpad program that allows you to go and join with a community that is and be part of the community that you can go and learn a lot and it's seeing a lot of successful entrepreneurs and have advice from them and that's something that I really encourage you to go and check out. And ultimately I think also you'd be surprised even for myself first when I first joined Launch Academy, I didn't know whether I can contribute to the community or not. But ultimately I actually ended up meeting a lot of other co founders and able to have a lot of conversation that sometimes I didn't realize that I'm contributing. But yeah, just encourage you to be part of the community.

Well, I really appreciate the shoutouts to Launch. Didn't expect that. Yeah, definitely. We got a lot of online courses. We can help people all around the world with our programs and basically it's for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. It's the stuff that we learned building our companies and watching people like you build your companies that we've been able to digitize and put into online format. So for anybody out there selfish Plug on our End Link in Bio Lots of links to our resources online. Boris, really appreciate you taking the time today and look forward to seeing the big changes and the world impact that you're going to have working at Khan Academy and hopefully as a future returnee entrepreneur in a new venture. Boris, thanks for taking time to stay in touch.

Thank you Ray. Really appreciate the time.

Launch Ventures is for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode of Founder Journey, please share this with your friends, family and other entrepreneurs. If you're ready to start your own entrepreneurial journey and would like some guidance, Please head to LaunchAcademy CA and check out our entrepreneurship course and other online resources like our Launchpad for virtual incubation and mentorship.