Episode 586 Samir Vasavada from Vise

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Over the last decade, a lot of amazing technologies and companies have been invested in and built, which created the finance industry as we know it today. A lot has been done, but there's so much more to go. This podcast was created to tell the stories of the people who are building and investing in the global future of fintech. I'm John Siracusa, founder and host of the Bank On It podcast and founder of Listen Deck, a podcast audio and video production company. After producing over 1,500 episodes in fintech, I realized every founder and investor has an intuition of a possibility in fintech, and through their superpower with sheer will and determination, they make that possibility a reality. On this podcast, I discuss with my guests the the pattern matching they nurtured through experience, personal characteristics, and advice, the theories they devised, and the means in which they test theories and convert the right ones into reality. This podcast is their story, unscripted. I'm here to ask the right questions to verbalize why they built or invested in the fintechs that they did. If you're looking to build, partner, or invest in fintech, This podcast is for you. If you like what you hear in today's episode and want to support us, please feel free to give the show a 5-star rating in a podcast application of your choice. You can also follow me on Twitter and Medium at John Siracusa, J-O-H-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, or on LinkedIn at Siracusa. In today's episode, I chat with Samir Vasavada, co-founder and CEO at Vise. This episode is a story of Samir and his co-founder Roonik Mahotra's journey on refounding Vise. They did so by making very difficult choices to move the company in a better direction. Here's a little about Vise. Vise automates the management of financial advisors using artificial intelligence. Vise has built a full-stack platform spanning the entire lifecycle of the advisor-client relationship, including designing personalized portfolios for clients, managing portfolios, and providing ongoing intelligence.

So recording Humboly with me today, I have Samir Vasavada. Samir is a co-founder and CEO of Vise. So Samir, you were on, think about a year ago, right? On, on the show.

Yeah, I think about a year ago.

Yeah. And so thanks for coming back on.

Always happy to join.

So what we're gonna go over today is a little bit different, right? And so I recently read an article that you wrote on Medium, which is Refounding Vise. And so we're gonna go over that. And 'cause I thought there was a lot of nuggets that could be very valuable for founders, right? Just founders in general and people who are doing something that's really hard, right? And then having to relook at themselves. And so I really appreciated that and I wanted to go over that story. So can we start first? Like, I know that there's pretty much, if we simplify it, there's 3 parts of this, right? The creation of Eyes. I know it wasn't really easy to create in the first place. I know you were sleeping on couches and those type of things. And then There was a wave where Vise was doing really well and then you had to relook at things and do a hard stop. So why don't we start first with that initial creation of Vise? Walk me through that. What did you have to go through in order to create it in the first place?

Yeah, for sure. So the original backstory actually starts at summer camp of 8th grade. My co-founder and I had met at a summer program. It was actually at a college at Northwestern. Our parents had sent us to Northwestern to do college courses from 6th grade onwards, and we had had our dorms across the hall from each other in 8th grade. The two of us are both from the Midwest. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio. Ranuk is from Detroit, Michigan. And there's not much to do. I'm not sure if you've been to the Midwest before, but as an 8th grade, 9th grader, there's not too much to do in the Midwest. Swift had just come out and it was like the programming language to build apps on iOS. We learned how to program for iOS and it seemed like apps were the new cool hot thing. So we started building apps for small businesses. And we cobbled together $20,000 or $30,000 from building apps for small businesses. We felt like we were super rich as 13, 14-year-olds. And my co-founder got this opportunity while we were building apps to actually do research at a pretty well-known university on artificial intelligence. He was a math prodigy doing math research ever since he was really young. And we had realized that math research translated really well over to AI research. And we were wondering, well, can we use AI to build apps? Our first startup actually grew out of this app development firm where we tried to say, okay, well, instead of us coding the apps, is there a way we can get AI to code the apps for us? It's funny because there were just recently breakthroughs in this, but our first startup was basically an AI where you could tell your app idea to our AI and our app idea would be generated using artificial intelligence. It turned out to be a very, very difficult technical challenge, one we were not equipped to solve at the age of 14. But one of the advisors we had met, this guy from the internet, was a former investment banker. And he's like, look, you guys know so much about AI and machine learning now. There are all these large investment banks and financial institutions that want to learn about AI. And you guys could start consulting with them and educating them on how AI works. So we started consulting with all of these large financial institutions. Think the MassMutuals, RBC Royals, Deutsche Asset Management. I would get up in the middle of school during class, like English class, and just leave and do a consulting gig and charge $800 for it. But I was learning. About how a lot of these institutions worked. And during this process, we spent a lot of time with wealth management institutions. And we'd realized that the wealth management group of Morgan Stanley was 30 or 40% of their revenues, Goldman Sachs 30 or 40% of their revenues. It was this huge golden goose of the financial services industry. But what we believed at the time was that wealth managers were world-class at money management. They were like their clients' investment gurus. They knew about the markets when their clients didn't. And what it actually ended up turning out to be through our learnings was financial advisors were really good at relationship management, right? They were their clients' marriage counselors, their therapists, their closest outside advisor to their clients' families. They like oftentimes helped kept their clients' families together when, you know, there was no one else to help do so. But they weren't the best in the world at money management. And we saw an opportunity and a lot of these institutions saw an opportunity, you know, can we use artificial intelligence to help them be better investors? Could we use AI? Could leverage AI to basically help advisors not only select better investments for their clients that are personalized to their needs, but help tell a better story so they can build better relationships with the end clients. What's going on with the portfolio, why it's happening, how it's tailored to the client's needs, all of these things. And these institutions were wondering, you know, could you guys help us build this? And Rudik and I were on a consulting engagement with a large institution kind of thinking through ways to build this. And we kind looked at each other and were like, why are we helping this institution build this product? Why don't we just build this on our own and sell it to these institutions? So we created a software called FSAI, Financial Services Artificial Intelligence. It was our first AI-powered portfolio optimization tool. So we could build a portfolio and we could kind of help tell the story, talk through the narrative of the portfolio, but it was entirely automated with the whole vision that the advisor would only have to spend time with the client relationship. And we were going to sell this to institutions. And Jamie Dimon was speaking at Detroit Startup Week, and there's a school trip to go see Jamie Dimon speak. This is about a year into us working on this business. Our hearts and souls are tied into this business at this point. We're 15. Jamie Dimon speaks at Detroit Startup Week. He gets off stage. We rush him on stage. We say, Jamie, this is what we've built. What do you think? Do you think JPMorgan will buy this? He's like, look, guys, JPMorgan, we have a lot of data scientists. I don't think we're going to buy this, but you should look at independent advisors because what's happening is that all of these advisors are leaving big financial institutions and they're going independent and they don't have the software and the tools they need to really be successful. You guys could sell this to advisors. And for a sec, our hearts kind of shattered. But then, you know, we'd started to look into this independent advisory business and we realized there's something like $30 trillion in the independent RIA channel. It's growing rapidly. So every single day after school, we would go home and just cold call independent RIAs. And we'd posted job ads online.

You were like 15?

Yeah, 15, 16. Just cold call RIAs, try and understand what happened. How do they think? How do they make decisions? Why do they make decisions? We realized like, wow, okay, there's a real opportunity here. The independent RIA channel is blowing up. It's getting larger and larger and larger. More advisors are breaking away and becoming independent. The technology in the space is decades old. And personalization is going to take over all other aspects of our life, right? From how we deliver food to how we consume content, how we shop, but it hasn't really impacted how we invest. Clients today still get the same generic mutual fund ETF portfolios that advisors, you know, that's all they have to be able to give them. They should be able to have to give them a portfolio that is as personalized as their relationship with their clients. There shouldn't be any room in between. So as we were doing this, we ended up meeting an advisor who had just said, hey, look, I like you guys. I like this mission so much. I'm just going to join and I'll work on equity. I'll work full time and we're going to like build this business.

15, 16-year-old?

Yes, I was a sophomore in high school.

And you had a wealth advisor who said, I'll just join you.

Yeah, he left his job and joined us.

That's great. And I'm guessing he wasn't 15 or 16.

No, he wasn't. He was, he was in his 50s or late 40s.

That's crazy. So actually this is kind of going to add into the whole conversation of where Vise is today. I'm actually really curious. Why do you think he joined? Like, why do you think he got excited to join? If you think about it, right? It's like you're 15 and 16 years old, right? And smart as it may be, This is your first real business, right?

Yeah, it was our first real business for sure. We didn't have very much money to throw at it. We were putting all of our consulting income into bootstrapping the business.

And he accepted equity.

Yeah, he accepted equity, but it wasn't just him. We actually ended up recruiting 4 other people in the same kind of equity-only bootstrapped group to initially build the business. And it was a lot of fun, but everyone was based in the Bay Area. And it was interesting because it's kind of like this burn the boats. So one of our values is burn the boats moment for me, which was I have this team in the Bay Area. We have this team that's working hard and they're working on our dream every single day and we're sitting in a classroom and that's not going to work. Why would I wait on my dream? So I just left school, left high school. I worked out a deal to basically do community college credits on the side and graduate early and moved to the Bay Area. We basically snuck into a WeWork every single day and we just tried to work on the business until we could, we could make something of it.

So did you work in like the cafe? Is that what you did?

We got one WeWork membership and just kind of like shared the cards and just, it was, it was all we could afford at the time.

Yeah.

I feel bad about it now because we kind of took advantage of WeWork, but we were doing the best we could with the resources we had. And everyone was all in on trying to figure out how to make the business work.

So Samir, actually the point you just made about being all in, right? It's very interesting because it takes a lot to have conviction yourself to build something, but to actually instill that conviction in other people is a whole nother level. And at this point you're in your late teens. How do you think you're able to do that? Like what were you thinking at the time when you were able to get other people to have conviction in this dream that you have? Or this idea?

I think it was pure conviction. At the end of the day, we had a thesis on the market. I still feel like we're, we're right on that thesis. And we had deep, deep conviction that this is the way the world is going to work and we're going to let nothing stop us in our pursuit to getting there. And I think that conviction was kind of positively infectious, right? Like we got people hooked on that conviction. And I think where a lot of the challenges eventually came was when the people that joined didn't have that same sense of conviction we had on the business because we didn't recruit them or we didn't instill that conviction in them. But oftentimes, you know, what enables people to work the 80-hour weeks and to not take a paycheck and to do these things that conventionally people wouldn't do, they have to have extremely deep conviction in what they're doing. They have to have confidence and a belief in the vision that they're pursuing and the mission that they're pursuing. And I think the thing we were great at early on, and we hopefully still continue to be good at, is this belief, this unwavering belief in our mission and our purpose.

So walk me back then. So you went to the Bay Area, you're sneaking into WeWork here and there, swapping one card or whatever it is, or one seat or hot seat or whatever the heck they call it. And did you have accommodations there? Like I'm talking about, where were you living?

I was living in the Tenderloin. Which I'm not sure how well you know the Bay Area, but it wasn't the ideal place to live. I would walk out of my little apartment and there would be people shooting themselves up. It was very, very scary, but it was an interesting life perspective coming from the suburbs to kind of experience that side of the world. My parents kind of found out I was living there and it wasn't ideal. And I eventually actually moved into a hacker house called the Crypto Castle, where the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik, and a number of other kind of early crypto people had lived. It wasn't much more glamorous either. It was a bunk room. So there was 4 of us in this bunk room and I lived there for another year. And then something really interesting happened, which the plan was always for my co-founder to— and we're like 3, 4 years into the business at this point. But the plan was my co-founder was going to drop out of school at her graduate high school and then take a leave of absence and build the business. He wasn't going to go to college, but he ended up getting into UPenn. He got into Wharton and his parents said, "You have to go to college." And he went to college. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm screwed. My co-founder is going to college. The employees started to ask for salaries because they're like, "Look, it's been a couple of years. We need to see something." I've dropped out of high school at this point, basically. I'm sure my family's not too happy with me. There's no plan B. This is plan A. Plan A doesn't work. I'm just dumb. I don't know what would've happened. And I'm like, okay, the only way out of this situation is I'm just going to go move onto Roonick's dorm room floor and I'm not going to leave until he drops out. And I'm just going to plant myself at the University of Pennsylvania. So I still think I have the record for the most guest passes at University of Pennsylvania. The two of us, day one, start at UPenn and I'm living on his dorm room floor, albeit illegally. And every day he does class, I'm working during the day, and then at night we just stay up till 3, 4 in the morning and just grind on the business. And he goes to his parents and he asks, hey, how do I get to drop out? How do I get to try something new? How can I focus on this business full-time? And they're like, if you raise $1 million, we'll let you drop out. Or we'll let you take like a leave of absence. So we're like, okay, we're gonna go try and raise $1 million. And the way in which we're gonna do this is we're gonna just go reach out to every investor we possibly can. I just set cold calls all day long, cold calls, cold emails, and just no bites, no traction. And then we end up meeting these two guys who've actually gone to UPenn, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, who were our first investors. And then we had met Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, actually a partner there, Keith Rabois, who led our first seed round. And then, you know, we had $2 million in the bank, not $1 million, but we overachieved and got $2 million. And he left school and we moved to the Bay Area and the rest started to go from there.

Hearing the story about the founding of this and the struggles you went through and actually living it are two very different things. So people hearing this will be like, wow, that's crazy, right? But you're actually living this. When you mentioned live in Tenderloin area, you had to see people shooting up every day, right? It's horrible, right? Like your co-founder is now going to college, right? And you have to, you're like, oh my God, I have to do this all myself now, right? Because the plan that we had originally was he was going to drop out and then I would do whatever we need to do in order to move things along. So living through this is a very different experience. How many times did you say to yourself, what am I doing here? This is just stupid. Like, Why am I doing this?

I mean, it was more of a, I'm completely screwed if this doesn't work out. There was no question ever in my mind, why am I doing this?

Okay.

Some people have this deep passion for something. I had a calling. I had known this is what I want to do when I was 5 or 6 years old. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to build something. There was no not doing this. That wasn't an option. It's still not an option. I think the difference was part of me kind of wondered to myself, how am I going to figure this out? And I think the answer was, I'll just keep trying until something works. And I think that's oftentimes the meta example for startups is people come and they have strategies and they're like, I'm going to figure this out and I'm going to employ this technique and it's going to work. You know, oftentimes it doesn't work, right? It's just the reality of business, but you just got to keep trying until something works. And I think that that's kind of what I did.

So to add on to one point there as well as, so you had this, you know, I'm going to keep doing this till it works, right? But then reality hits. You're on your 100th phone call or your 100th outreach and nothing's happening, right? Like you're seeing people shoot up. You have nowhere to go. Your co-founder's leaving and all these things are just not working. And then how do you just keep going? Like, and now reality is hitting your dreams, right? Like, it's not just a dream anymore. This is reality hitting your dream.

You know, we figured it out. So I guess I kept going, but we had said that year, so I think this was 2018, we said if we don't get a dollar of funding by December of 2018, and maybe we'll call it quits or we'll figure something else out. And I'd kind of known in the back of my head, I'm not going to call it quits. I'm just going to figure this out. But we had a timeline, so to speak, for it. And that timeline in our minds was the end of the year. But we figured it out before then. So I guess maybe the point is to set some kind of constraint on yourself. Creates some kind of urgency in your mind.

So when did it shift into now being a wave? Like, so how long after that time did it become a wave that really things started to move fast?

Right before the pandemic. Right before the pandemic, Sequoia, we had met them at a happy hour. It was hosted at their office. There was free food, so we decided to show up. We'd already raised funding at the time, but we're never gonna turn down an opportunity for free food. I still don't turn down opportunities for free food. A partner comes up to us as we're chopping down pretzels at the pretzel station and he's like, "What are you two guys doing here?" Because we also look like we're 12. So he was like, "You guys seem very out of place." And we pitched him on our business and he's like, "Well, that's interesting because at a recent conference I'd heard from the Collison brothers at Stripe that the wealth management space was one of those rare spaces where Despite technological advancement, the power is still within the humans, the advisors. We're like, yeah, because of the relationships. Sequoia believed in the thesis. They bought the thesis and they came in for a seed round. Shortly thereafter, we had launched a beta version of the product and we had gotten incredible customer feedback. Customers were elated with the product. They were ecstatic with how the product was working. It was these small advisory firms in Northwest Arkansas and Iowa, and some of these small places that just love the product. They talked to Sequoia, and Sequoia decided to preempt us on a Series A round. Then shortly thereafter, other venture funds said, "Hey, we want to preempt you on a Series B round." Sequoia said, "Nope, we're not having it. We're going to preempt you guys on the Series B round." Overnight, we'd gone from having $2 million in the bank and being a team of 4 or 5 people, maybe we were 6 people at that time, to having $50 million in the bank. And then it started to shift in our minds. We're like, okay, we're like a real company now. We should start to hire people. So then we go and we scale the team to something like 40 or 50 people. And then we take AUM from, at the end of that year, it was like single-digit millions in AUM at the end of 2020, all the way to $500, $600 million in assets in like a 4 or 5 month period. It was Crazy growth, crazy quickly. And people loved the product. It was clearly starting to work. And we had thought to ourselves, and all of our investors had started to tell us, you guys need to scale. Your job as founders is to figure out how to scale the business. It's no longer to do all the scrappy hustler things you guys did to get here in the first place, but it's to figure out how to scale and be leaders. And you guys need to hire executives and build a team and all of these things. And we're like, okay, it seems logical, right? We had also raised a unicorn round. We were valued at over $1 billion. I'm like the youngest person ever to run a company at $1 billion. I feel like it's probably starting to get to my head at this point. And we realized, okay, we need to hire executives. And we're being told we need to hire executives. It seems like the next step. So we go, we do two things. One, we had a lot of people at the time that were like star players, but they were having struggles. They were struggling scaling themselves. They were struggling becoming the next generation of leaders. That we thought they could be. In reality, I think they were the right people, but we didn't give them enough time. We didn't give them enough rope. We thought we needed the big company executive today. And then the second was we started to hire people that had been referred to us and we had used executive recruiters and such through the big VCs that had worked in other portfolio companies, other really big technology companies, companies like Dropbox and Google and TripActions and places like this. Like successful technology companies. But it turns out that Dropbox's business and TripActions' business and all these traditional businesses are very different than the Vise business, incredibly different. And it also turned out that we didn't have as much product market fit as we thought. We were on the path to getting incredible product market fit, but there's still problems you had to solve, right? It wasn't a foregone conclusion. So we end up delegating a lot of things that we spent our time on, right? Spending time with customers, spending time on product to an engineering leader, to a sales leader. And the thing that you learn is that these people are really great in big machines where there's existing process in place, but they weren't great at solving problems. And that the other point that we had kind of talked ourselves into believing is that we were less of a basketball team and we were more of this big organization and we needed to hire lots of people. Success was hiring lots of people and growing and growing and growing and getting really big. A lot of startups at the time had also believed this. Your headcount is your success. All of these leaders, we thought success was them recruiting and hiring more and more people. But what you realize with more and more people is more and more problems and your time goes away from I'm going to spend my time on customer problems and understanding how I can best solve for the customer, best build the right product, you know, these things that got you there in the first place, to I'm going to figure out how to manage these managers. I'm going to figure out how to make people happy. I'm going to figure out how to recruit more people. I'm going to resolve arguments. All of these big company political problems that aren't actually solving your problem, which is how do you build the best product for your best customer? How do you make your beer taste better? As I think Jeff Bezos says, it wasn't that problem.

You have all these articles coming out saying how brilliant you guys are. You have Sequoia coming on board, you have money coming in, you have executives coming in and all those things. And then suddenly you start to realize, wait a minute, something is not right here.

Right?

And so you actually said in the post that you wrote on Medium, you said, you know, in early 2022, right? We woke up, right? As a team. You and your co-founder. What does that mean?

I wouldn't say it was just that we woke up one day and we're like, everything is really broken. It's like we knew it was broken. I was miserable every single day in 2021. Like, I was miserable. Like, I didn't like the people I worked with. I, like, felt like it was broken. I felt like it wasn't harmonious. I felt like I was spending my time on all the wrong things. But like, I was the one that put myself there, right? I was the one that hired these people. I was the one that listened through listened to all of the advice. I was the one that made all of these mistakes and decisions. And I thought the fact that it was broken was— and I had to figure that out. It was just what leaders had to do is they had to deal with these things and just be miserable. I didn't think there was another path. And I think my co-founder felt the same way, which was we just had to deal with it to a certain extent. Then at a certain point in early 2022, we had realized Not only is it probably not a great idea for us not to operate this way, but it's actually not leading to business progress. Because the reason why we kept dealing with the pain is we thought that it would lead to business progress. We thought that all these people that would help us scale would actually scale the business. But what actually ended up happening is the business declined in growth in this period where we hired all these people and built this whole team. And it was actually worse off than when we were a smaller, scrappier company. We realized that it wasn't actually helping us build a better business. We were building a worse business and we were miserable. We just had to fix that. It was as simple as realizing we made a mistake, we screwed up, we need to own that mistake, and we need to make a dramatic change. If we wait to make this change, if we wait any longer, it's only going to have a compounding worse effect on the What did you do to actually get back on track? So we did a bunch of different things. The first was we right-sized the organization because back to my point that more people cause more problems, we needed not only less people, we needed the right people. So what happens when you raise a lot of money, when you're this hot company, is that everyone wants to join you and you recruit a lot of mercenaries, a lot of people that see your company as your get-rich-quick card and they join and they expect it all to work. But startups inevitably are really hard and when they get hard, those people either leave or there's challenges that are caused in the organization. The people that actually end up building the business, and you don't always know who these people are, they show up when times get tough, are the missionaries behind the business. The people that are there late in the office. They're there solving your customers' problems. They're there pointing out the problems and figuring out the solutions without you having to ask. They're the ones that are truly there because they have the same conviction in the mission and the business that you do. We needed a team full of missionaries. We needed to transition away from the mercenaries and we needed to really focus and hone in on the missionaries. It was about first right-sizing the organization and finding the right group of people. That were our missionaries, our core. And then second was about instilling the right values, right? Like we had a lot of values, a lot of focus on how do we make people happy? How do we build the right place that people really want to work at and make sure that everyone feels inclusive and all of these things that I think at a certain scale you should think about. But at our scale, the only thing that matters is are we building the right product and does our customer love that product and are they buying more of it? And the values needed to be really focused around that. And then do you have a group of people that are mission-oriented and truly bought in? So we evolved our values into a way of operating and a way of thinking about our business to our customer and our product and our speed of delivery around those things that was truly aligned to our business and making it successful. The other important thing that we also did was we reset where we spent our time. We said, okay, Instead of spending time on how do we build the best organizational process for running our leadership meetings or making people feel great, we are going to spend our time on product and customers. I will spend my time on customers exclusively. Radek will spend all of his time on making sure the product is great and works really, really well. We'll just kind of let some of the other problems break. Like if there is something that's not perfect, that's okay. If it is not related to how do we build a better product or how do we get our customers to buy into that product and get our organization closer to our customer, we'll solve that problem later. So reassessing where we spent our time and really leading forward with that I think was really important.

So if I'm mistaken, correct me if I'm wrong, did you let go of your whole sales force?

We didn't let go of the entire sales force. We let go of most of it. We should have let go of the entire sales force looking back on it. Because we tried to take a half measure. So this is an important thing as, as founders is that half measures do not work. Like if you're going to do something, go the full way. Don't try and hedge your bets. And at the time I was just king of half measures. I wouldn't go the full way on decisions. I tried to kind of de-risk the decision a little bit, but we had let go of the entire sales team for the most part.

Hmm. That must have been very, very hard to do. What's changed since that hard reset?

A lot. One, we're just a more efficient organization, which has been great. It's kind of hard when you are burning lots and lots of money to not be able to show a massive ROI as a result. You know, businesses exist to make money. So I think it was important that we could show that we could create efficiency in our business. I think I enjoy working with everyone we work with. Our decisions, our leadership meetings, and our Time as an organization is no longer spent thinking, how do we make people feel more included at the workplace? Or how do we make people happier with how we make decisions? It's not that we don't do that, but it's, you know, how do we build a better feature that will help win this customer over? And we are all excited and enjoy that part of our business, which makes me really happy because it's why we got into the business in the first place, right? The whole organization is thinking about the customer, the whole organization. Is focused deeply on the product. And I think that was a pretty dramatic change that I think is giving us a, a deep competitive advantage over other organizations in our space that just aren't customer obsessed in the same way we are.

So you mentioned during the time of when you started hiring so many people and executives and all those things, you started to realize that there was a decline in revenue, started to decline slightly. How much has that changed?

We are well over our metrics from when we originally, uh, made those decisions.

What metrics are— and also companies tend to, and I think you even mentioned in your article about vanity metrics or metrics that were not that as important, right? So were you measuring things early on that were not as so important and then now you look at things differently?

So early on we measured the right things. Today I feel like we measure the right things. In the middle, when we had raised all of this money, we were measuring all of the wrong things. It wasn't like a measure in a KPI room. I think we were still focused on the right metrics. But the thing about being a founder is you spend a lot of time with other founders, right? And everyone's talking about how much money they raised and their valuations and their headcount, how much they're growing, the fancy people they've hired. And all of that is great, but you spend your time comparing yourself to other people and other businesses. Other situations that are very different than yours. And just as a general rule in life, you shouldn't really do that. You should just think about yourself as the scorecard and comparing yourself to the person you were yesterday versus some other guy or other girl. And I think that we spent, and a lot of other founders spent their time thinking about themselves relative to other founders, and that's why they were really hard-pressed to making these tough decisions. That's why we wrote the blog post. Which is, who cares? Like, everyone's going through tough shit. You know, you have to make hard decisions. It's okay if you look like an idiot. It's totally okay. Everyone else also looks like an idiot. Just make the right decision for your business. It doesn't matter what other people think. And like, it's not so bad when you make those decisions. Like, it's really tough for the people that are impacted by that. And I think you have to be empathetic to that. But it's important to make the tough decisions regardless of, you know, what other people might think of them.

Do you think that if you didn't go through the experience that you went through, the, the struggling, the ups and downs and so on, do you think you would be where you're at today?

No. And I think I still have plenty more struggling to go.

Hmm. And if you could, would you do anything differently?

So much. We'd have to have a 4-hour long podcast for this.

Well, and on that point, Samir, I want to say thank you so much for your time today. And thank you for sharing your story.

Yep. Sounds good.

Thanks for listening to the end of this episode. And I want to thank Samir for being a guest on my show. But more importantly, I want to thank you, the audience, because if it wasn't for you, we wouldn't exist. And although this show is over, I look forward to seeing you next Thursday morning as we release our next remotely recorded interview. See you real soon.

It's over, Johnny.

It's over.