E02 - Yuriy Timen | Scaling early-stage startups from $1M to $50M+ ARR

trying to balance, you're trying to figure out how deep is this well, right? This initial PMF that I got, I got some metrics, I showed 'em to my investors, cool. So now it's like, as I start growing this thing, can my metrics hold or even improve? Or if they start degrading, how do I balance the potential top line growth or top of funnel growth With because with my metrics, and it becomes a little bit of a dance because if you got your Series A funding, you have to grow because that's usually how you justify getting that funding, right? You're like, we have these growth plans. Give us money so we can get there. Now when you start doing whether it's SEM, SEO, etc., you're automatically going for lower intent automatically because those, even if it's just slightly lower intent. So you are gonna see some variability to your metrics and that's gonna lead you to be like, okay, you know what? When I started doing SEO, my activation rate has dipped by this much. So now like you, but you see that there's a ton of top of funnel potential in SEO. So you have, okay, let's keep investing in that channel. But we got to work on bringing up our activation.

So first, I want to thank you for joining this podcast. It's— you're a busy person, so it's not an obvious thing. Appreciate your time. And honestly, like, ever since I think I watched you at Lenny's, like, ever since that, it was about a year ago, maybe a little bit more.

A little more.

I really wanted to chat. A little more. I wanted to chat. Like, I remember 2 things: the energy was very contagious, and the second thing, like, there was no bullshit thing. So I guess it was a fun conversation. Like, oh my God, it can be fun as well. So yeah, and so thanks again.

Thank you for having me. Um, and, uh, we, we, uh, haven't met face to face until Just before, you know, a few days before this episode. But I've definitely seen your name out there. I've seen your content and we've exchanged some LinkedIn messages. So it always felt like it was just a matter of time before we would do something together.

Thank you. Thank you. And it's— I honestly do enjoy it. And because I care about my guests, I did a little bit of research. So if I'm getting something wrong, with my research about you, please stop. So a few things. Um, you were born in Odessa, Ukraine. So this is something in common with me. Like, I was born in Ukraine as well. We both are immigrants, family of immigrants. I do know it's not the jolliest ride. Sometimes it can be harsh, completely different reality.

Yep.

Your family builds yourself, you need to build yourself. I think you moved to United States about an age of 10.

Yep, exactly.

I don't remember. Yep.

That's all online? Wow, amazing.

I invest in research. You went to, you started your career in marketing, I think, not really in marketing, but your like first early career was marketing, affiliate marketing, SEM. And your biggest break was at Grammarly, you joined Grammarly in 2012. And you did everything that needed to be done to make sure Grammarly grows. This includes literally leading the global marketing team, leading growth, whatever had to be done. You've been there almost 10 years, at least like until like 3 years ago, but you still have a relationship with them. You're advising them. And talking about being an advisor, I think you're advising like a gazillion of startups. Yeah. Like from early stage to late stage, like let me remember, like Canva, Airtable, Crisp, Softr, Flow, like super a lot of different, like all of them on your website. I want to chat today about 3 different topics which are connected. So the first one is about building growth motions and specifically in earlier stage startups. Like, let's define it. Like, let's say Series A, maybe before Series B, $5 to $20 million ARR.

And

usually I do talk about the later stage one, but today let's, let's do the shift to the earlier ones. And the second topic is connected to the first one because like if the first topic was building growth motions, the second one is how do you actually hire the first team or scale this team so they can help you to spin those growth motions? And the third one is about, okay, so we understood what growth, what career is, how you spin growth motion. So how do I as a professional, as a growth professional, should approach my career development? And specifically there, I myself identified a few different routes of how to approach career growth. One is more horizontal one, like everything you try to expertise in everything from demand generation to generating demand to capturing it. And the second one is more vertical, more niche one. So love to talk about it. Does it sound fair?

Yeah, absolutely. Can I make— can I, before we kick off, can I just make a couple of small corrections to my bio?

Oh yeah.

Yeah. They're not like, you know, earth-shattering or anything, but just to err on the side of accuracy. So I actually started my career in finance. So I spent about 2 to 3 years in investment banking and private equity, which I think is an important detail because, you know, I'm a quant at heart, right? And that sort of quantitative foundation is what guided, I think, a lot of my early growth and marketing career and approach to things. At Grammarly, you're right, that was the big break. It was an 8.5-year run, not quite a 10-year run. Otherwise, I'd have a gold Rolex or something from them. But yeah, so it was an 8.5-year run. But the coolest part, or one of the coolest parts about that experience is that after leaving, and of course, staying friends with a lot of the team there, et cetera, 2, 2.5 years later, an opportunity presented itself for me to boomerang back and advise them and work with them on a fractional basis. And so I did that for another year. So it's like 8.5 years as an operator, 2, 2.5 years, 2, 2.5-year break from Grammarly, and then boomerang back and do another year with them in a fractional capacity. But now I'm no longer commercially involved with Grammarly anymore.

How was it for you, by the way, coming back to Grammarly? How

did you feel about

it?

It was weird. It was fulfilling. It was exciting. It was in some ways frustrating, but it was, yeah, I'm very grateful for that experience. So it's interesting because You spent 8+ years there, you take 2 years off. During those 2 years that I was away, the company almost doubled, I think, in headcount and in many other respects. And so when I came back, it was an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, it was still the good old Grammarly that I've always known, right? Same values, same kind of foundational DNA. But in other ways, it was, Kind of all grown up. It's like, you know, it's kind of like human life, right? Can you imagine like you go to someone, let's say you have someone you're in school with in high school, right? And then maybe you don't see each other for 5 years and then you reconnect. You know that feeling of like some things didn't change? They're like, oh, it's exactly how I remember this person. And in some ways they've grown, they've evolved, they have some new habits. New quirks. That was sort of the experience at Grammarly. And I think that was part of our thesis for why it was a good idea for me to boomerang back because Grammarly is a very kind of specific and in some ways peculiar organization that not any kind of outsider, especially as an advisor or whatever, a fractional person can have immediate impact. But I was someone who knew the company in and out, right? But then I did this like 2, 2.5-year tour around the world, right? Seeing other companies, other growth teams, other growth engines. And so coming back, the thesis was that, hey, I'm an insider-outsider, right? Like in some ways I'm an insider. So like, I will have people's ears, right? Because I already have like organizational credibility, but in other ways I'm bringing in new ideas and an outside perspective.

I would say it's like an unfair competitive advantage do you have. But then, and another comment on what you said, I can so much like, I can understand when companies going through hypergrowth, they change constantly. And by the way, and it's, it's, it's good analogy with relationships. Some people say that the secret to maintaining a good relationship through years, when partner maintaining relationships through years, is being able to constantly adapt to your partner's change. Because the premise is, the hypothesis is that people always change. Being able to understand that, being able to appreciate it, being able to adapt it, this is the secret of how you can dance together until you're 90 or 100 years

old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's like, you know, yeah, it's integrated growth. Right? Because like both people are going to grow, both people are going to evolve. And like, yeah, and to some extent, I do think it's a lot of it is effort. Now we're getting into relationships. Like, that's not what this podcast is about, but I couldn't agree more. Right. And a lot of relationships fail. A lot of relationships fail because people grow in different directions and are unwilling to grow in an integrated way.

I will go on a limb and say that being able to take different paradigms from relationship and fitting them to business works in many cases. Those topics are not completely unrelated. Business and people are relationships. So like not mutually exclusive.

Yeah, it's very interesting. I tend to do more of the inverse. I try to take habits and practices that I've developed in business and apply them to my relationships. And I would— I have to say that my wife definitely criticizes me for that quite a bit. She's like, she's like, yeah, we're not just another project or something, right? But like, I'd be like, okay, hon, we need to develop family values. And like, we'd go through like, we defined our family values. Like we've documented them, you know, we've revised them. Okay.

Those are great.

Yeah.

It's just like, I guess setting OKRs will be too much and doing like a PIP conversation would be—

A PIP would be— I would, yeah. Well, I wouldn't put it past me to try to introduce OKRs. Maybe when my kids, because they're a little too young, maybe when they're like in 3rd grade, uh, then maybe we should— we can start having an OKR conversation.

Love where this conversation took us. Cool, cool, cool. So if we are— if you're gonna dive in, like, let's dive in lightly to the first topic of spinning gross motions. So even— it's not even an icebreaker question, but I I think it's a question that precedes talking about growth motions, which goes like, there are growth teams. Yeah, they're doing their job. What in your opinion is actually the ultimate mission of a growth team in a startup?

To grow the company.

True. True.

I mean, So I'll answer this question with respect to kind of give you an answer that I think encapsulates all types of growth subdisciplines because you have growth product, you have growth marketing. This is the setup that I would use. An effective growth team is Needs to exist in a in a in a parent culture where everyone thinks about growth, right? So I don't I don't like the delineation of like the growth team is responsible for growth, and then every other team in the company should does not need to think about growth at all. They think about their own little narrow no. Like growth needs to be. A rallying cry across the company, similar to how, I don't know, user experience is a rallying cry across the company, right? Like growth needs to be at that level. That being said, when it comes to more the day-to-day and who is planning their work and organizing their work, with respect to anchor to specific business metrics and moving those metrics, that tends to be more the growth team than any other team, right?

Mm-hmm.

So everyone should think about growth. Everyone should be prepared to work on things that are contributing to growth. Everybody should be prepared to reprioritize their backlogs to assist growth. But the one team or the individuals that are, you know, in growth roles, those are individuals for whom growth is gonna be their north star, right? They're gonna have specific business KPIs, whether it's around activation, retention, you know, monetization, LTV maximization, whatever. And that's gonna be driving all of their activities, right? Mm-hmm. So, like, another way of putting it is like, If we're doing OKRs as a company, if I see OKRs where it's like improve user activation from 20% to 30% by end of Q1, that probably came from a growth team, right? Or someone with growth in their title if the team is not there yet, right? Mm-hmm. Another take I'll say is oftentimes when talking about, one question that you get commonly is like, well, how is growth product differently from core product? Right? And what I'm gonna say right now is an oversimplification and our listeners can poke holes in that all they want, but I think it's still helpful as a generalizing framework. Core product builds features to help you realize your product vision. Growth product makes sure those features get discovered, used, understood, and activated around.

So we can say that core product is about building product-market fit and extending product-market fit to a new TAM. Growth product is about capturing this TAM. Literally capturing and monetizing this. Capturing is monetizing this time. So we can look at those things in those perspectives.

Yeah, I think that's a good framework as well. I think that's a good framework as well. But the only thing is that I would also argue that getting to product market fit, especially when you're early on, I mean, by definition, if you're looking to get product market fit, you're either early on or maybe you're early on for that specific product. Mm-hmm. If you're looking for product market fit for your initial product, so your seed stage or whatever, then I would say product market fit is not just responsibility of the product team. It is one of those rallying cries, right, across the company. It is what— if you have already, if you already have a product that got to PMF and now maybe you're looking, you know, to get to PMF with a new feature or with a new product, then I can see being, you know, more just within the wheelhouse of your core product team because everyone else, you know, has your initial product to continue to advance and promote, et cetera.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Just to simplify my understanding of it, I would say after PMF, there is separation. Before PMF, everyone are doing everything to make sure we get to the PMF.

Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Yeah.

Cool. Got it. Super clear. Amazing. So if I'm going to jump in into the, like, the first, like, big question of driving, building growth motions. So assuming, like, I mean, I'm a founder of a startup. I just got to PMF. Yeah. So I'm at PMF right now and I'm like, okay, I heard Yuriy talking about now I need to build my growth motions. It's 2024, like things always change. What's the best way to approach this point, this decision point, and start actually building growth motions nowadays?

Yeah. So let's, okay, so let's say you're past initial product market fit, right? However we define it.

Got my Series A and a little bit of money.

Yeah. Okay. You got a little bit of money. So I'll answer it in kind of like philosophical terms and in more practical terms. So, in philosophical terms, what you're trying to do after you got that initial product-market fit is you are trying to balance, you're trying to figure out how deep is this well. Right? This initial PMF that I got, I got some metrics. I showed them to my investors. Cool. So now it's like, as I start growing this thing, can my metrics hold or even improve? Or if they start degrading, how do I balance the potential top line growth or top of funnel growth with because with my metrics and it becomes. It becomes a little bit of a dance because if you got your Series A funding, you have to grow because that's usually how you justify getting that funding, right? You're like, we have these growth plans, give us money so we can get there. Okay.

Mm-hmm.

And so, you're trying to generate your top of funnel growth, grow to, you know, 15 to 20% month over month. Or whatever, right? Like that's kind of like the target at that stage. At the same time, you are maniacally monitoring your activation rate, retention rate. You're gonna start as you're growing, you are by definition, as you're expanding your top line, top of funnel growth, by definition, you're going broader in audiences because before you got your Series A, most of your acquisition was probably word of mouth with strong contextual recommendations. And that's how those users were performing. Now, when you start doing whether it's SEM, SEO, et cetera, you're automatically going for lower intent automatically because those, even if it's just slightly lower intent. So, you are going to see some variability to your metrics and that's going to lead you to be like, okay, you know what? When I started doing SEO, my activation rate has dipped by this much. So now, but you see that there's a ton of top of funnel potential in SEO. So you have, okay, let's keep investing in that channel, but we got to work on bringing up our activation. Okay. So I kind of started with philosophical, but I've already pretty much segued into the practical. I think in a practical sense, this is a very common tension or a dynamic that I find with Series A companies or companies that have recently hit PMF. and are now kind of ready to hit the gas pedal. And the tension is improving, like improving, continuing to improve your activation and retention metrics. In some cases, even monetization. We can talk about that a bit later, but monetization is definitely becoming more of an earlier endeavor for companies. But at a minimum, you're focusing on improving your activation retention. You're also starting to zero in on your ICP. Right? You're understanding that not all of your users are your target users. Like, I'll tell you a common thing with AI tools today is that there is this, you know, whether it's AI for design or AI for writing or AI for coding, what you're finding, what a lot of these companies are finding is that there is this distinct user type that's kind of like represented to a great degree In all of their user bases, and that is and that type of user is called colloquially is called the AI tourist. It's just is it's these people who just want to try out new AI stuff. They don't have a specific job to be done. They're not gonna come back. They're just you know AI so freaking exciting, right? Like ChatGPT had this problem early on. Right? Most people were just popping in to check it out and to see how fascinating it is. They didn't have a specific job to be done and they weren't gonna be sticky, right? Today, I think ChatGPT has done a better job of identifying the core jobs to be done. But a lot of these other AI tools are dealing with that right now. And it's important to separate your AI tours because like, yeah, you can try to like, there's no point of catering to them. Right? You wanna cater to people with distinct jobs to be done, the ones that have already like gotten past the just, oh, I'm kind of fascinated with AI 'cause it's like cool and actually are trying to solve specific problems. So to go back to this sort of like post-PMF Series A company, so they're focusing on improving their activation retention because as they're growing, you're moving away from referrals and word of mouth. users, right? To more like mainstream users, if that's what you wanna call them. They're focusing on identifying their ICP. They realize that, hey, I'm acquiring all these people in my funnel, but they're not all created equal, right? Like, we care about the people who have the distinct job to be done that we're solving, and we're gonna try to cater to them and other people, like, whatever. Like a Grammarly, at one point— kind of our non-ICP that we were getting a lot of, but we weren't like necessarily catering to them were like, you know, academics and educators and people like that. Like, we were like, okay, it's fine. You can use the product, no problem. But we are building for knowledge workers. And so when we were focusing on metrics, running experiments to see, we're not looking at just all of our users, we're looking at our ICP, right? Or in this case, knowledge workers. Right? So we'll ship things that help improve the knowledge worker experience kind of irrespective of what it does to our non-ICPs, right? So I'm working with a company right now. I'm working with a company right now that, you know, is actually, I'll give them a shout out. Why not? The company's called Recraft.

Sure.

And it's basically a generative AI design tool specifically for designers and graphic artists, right? But it's so cool and it has such advanced technology and it has its own foundation model that it built. And that is frankly outdoing a lot of the well-known models out there. I won't name anyone by name, but this will come out soon. And they're getting a lot of AI tourists, but we don't care about those people. We don't care about how they— we're not going to— We're not gonna try to improve their retention or their activation. We care about the designers and graphic artists that are coming in. That's who we're building for.

Fair enough.

Right? And so it's one of the first things we did is we introduced like a, you know, an onboarding survey that, you know, users self-identify who are they, et cetera. And now we have dashboards and initiatives geared at users who self-identify as graphic artists and designers, right? And so when we ship changes, we wanna see how it impacts their activation, their retention. That's who we care about, right? And then last thing I'll say and then I'll pause because this is like the longest answer ever.

It's informative.

Yeah. So there's that balance around like improving your activation retention for your ICP and growing your top of funnel because, you know, again, conventional wisdom, you should be growing at 15 to 20% month over month at that stage. And so there is kind of, you know, you are trying to balance the two.

Is it the conventional wisdom or is it the demand from VCs that became a rule for the last few years to get funding?

I think I don't actually draw a distinction between the two, to be honest. You know, it's conventional wisdom that probably is heavily influenced by VC expectations. Yeah, but I think it's because it's like, I think it's now become conventional wisdom because it's not so much the VCs will actively request it now and will be like, hey, why aren't you growing 15%, 20%? In fact, maybe today VCs are a little bit more malleable around that because they wanna see more responsible growth, profitable growth, but you know, inertia.

I do agree that this should be the rate of growth at this stage 'cause it's an early stage. Yeah, maybe later on, like, we're not talking anymore about 300% hypergrowth, like the growth is much more responsible. Let's break for a second, actually, the premises of my initial question, because I connected 2 concepts. I said Series A, early stage, like those have to be together. Like, then is there a way to start spinning the growth motions, started layering, building them without going and getting a capital raise, like doing it in a way which will not demand from me, um, $500K or $1 million to start understanding how to do performance marketing and started investing, but doing it in maybe a slower based, maybe more profitably responsible one, alternative to literally the, I guess, the mainstream approach that is with us already for many years of showing PMF size, showing potential of growth, getting money from Series A, getting this money and starting balances the dances by investing in different pay channels, etc., etc. Yeah.

The short answer, yes. The longer answer is yes, yes, and yes. And I've lived it. I've seen it. I've seen it at Grammarly. I've seen it—

Even in Grammarly.

Yeah, I'll touch on, I'll expand on that. I've seen it at, 2 of my current clients, 2 companies that I'm working with right now, raising funding right off the bat where you are, you know, giving up a 15 to 20% ownership stake right off the bat to get that seed capital. And Maybe sometimes upwards of 30%, and falling into this whole outside investor world, which comes with specific expectations. Now, it comes with some amazing perks, like the access to network, the access to collective brain trust.

Advice, guidance.

Exactly. Access to collective brain trust. But that's not the only model, right? And an alternative model, which I frankly respect a lot, right, is the bootstrapping model where, you know, you are, and it takes a while. Like it may take you 3 to 5 years where maybe it's a part-time job. Yeah. Sorry, maybe you have a full-time job and you're doing this on the side for a while. You're reinvesting your own savings. You are, you know, maybe raise a small amount of money from friends and family, but oftentimes don't even do that. Mm-hmm. And you are growing slowly because you don't have the resources to grow fast. But it doesn't mean that your business is not compatible with hypergrowth. And I've seen it where a company would take 3 to 5 years founder-led to get to like, I don't know, anywhere between $1 to $5 million in ARR. Maybe let's say $1 to $3 million. There are exceptions like Grammarly got to like, I don't know, maybe like $50 million bootstrapped. Right. I don't remember the exact number, but it was impressive, right?

Crazy.

And then, you know, I'm working with other bootstrap companies that are doing tens of millions in revenue and they still haven't taken outside funding. And I'll speak to that, by the way, of some of the challenges when you get more mature and you don't have outside investors.

Fascinating.

There are some challenges there. But, you know, you get to that point where you're maybe at a million to, you know, $3 million in ARR, and maybe you've been growing 30% to 50% year over year or something like that. Certainly not hypergrowth. I think that there is still a way to demonstrate that you can hypergrow with the right injection of capital and the right guidance and the right talent. And I bet, and I know this because I also, you know, have enough VC friends that they would love a business to invest in a business like that. A business that has already proven out unit economics, that already has proven out monetization. And the remaining risk or the thing that's not proven out is can you hypergrow? Can you grow fast enough? And is it a, is it a, a VC-compatible business? Is it a venture-scale business? That's what's left to figure out. A lot of my VC friends would be all over that. If that is the only risk they need to estimate, they would be all over that. I like that model. If I were ever to found a company, I see myself taking more of that approach. Because the more unknowns, venture investing is about underwriting risk, right? So VC is gonna tell you, okay, if all you have is an idea, here are all the unknowns. All of these unknowns represent risk to me as an investor. That is why for this amount of money, I want 20 or 30% of your company, okay? If instead it's like, hey, Mr. VC partner, I already answered this unknown. I answered this unknown. I eliminated these risks from you. You're now underwriting far fewer risks. The terms should be different, right? You no longer get 20% of my company for, you know, a $5 million check. You only get 10% of my company.

You mentioned that You saw quite a few examples of those from different ranges of revenue, like literally bootstrapping it. And you said like, I think interesting phrase, it's about also the right talent. Yeah. The right mentality, like not the mentality of like our OKR is get to 1,000 employees by the end of next year. This is the wrong mentality. You should not look at metrics like that. This should not be a metric, headcount. And what kind of ratios? For example, ARR, FT, you saw in those businesses? I guess those change depends on if it's like a very early one, but maybe on the later ones.

Yeah. I mean, I've seen bootstrap businesses get to, you know, $30, $40, $50 million in ARR or even in just in top line revenue. And Here's what starts happening. And I saw this everywhere. I've seen this at Grammarly. Why did Grammarly take on outside funding? Grammarly was profitable. Grammarly was stacking up cash reserves. Grammarly was growing decently. I would say maybe like 50% year over year, but that's not venture-level growth, right? And Grammarly didn't have an obvious use. We didn't have obvious use for additional capital, right? But we still raised. So why did we raise? I remember being in those discussions and what it came down to is this. When you are not part, so the venture, the Silicon Valley bubble, right? Sometimes we talk smack about it. But there are certain things that are pretty incredible about it, right? And it is the concentration of talent and it's the concentration of access. So imagine being locked out of that bubble, right? When you don't have outside investors, you are locked out of that bubble, which means you don't have access to the same talent. You don't have access to the same thought partners. You don't have access to the same advisors. You don't have access to the same business development opportunities because with investor backing comes a certain level of credibility. I can't tell you at Grammarly how many times we would interview a top talent and then we'd be like, you know, compensation, blah, blah, blah, you get equity. And I'd be like, equity? They're like, well, like, How do I know that this equity that you're ever going to exit? How do I know that? Like, when a company is bootstrapped, it's sort of like—

No valuations.

Well, yeah, no valuation and no outside pressure to exit, right? As soon as you take outside investor money, it sets an expectation that there's got to be liquidity at some point. Without that, it's just words. Right? So, we would tell candidates, I would tell candidates that I'm trying to hire for my teams, like, look, we're gonna give you some equity. We think this is what we're worth because based on comparables, and take our word for it. We're gonna exit at some point. Take our word for it. And it works on some and it doesn't work on others, right? And so, it affects the caliber of talent. It also affects access. One thing, by the way, One thing that I kind of ended up developing this niche expertise, which is really fascinating, and I hope to meet more such companies. But my niche expertise is working with bootstrap companies to connect them to Silicon Valley practices, talent, and kind of, you know, and intellectual horsepower because I am very well connected in that world. But also I understand and empathize with bootstrap companies because Grammarly was bootstrapped. Grammarly was bootstrapped for the first 7 years of its existence or the first 5 years of my time there. So I know how bootstrap companies operate and I also know how to retain that DNA even after you raise outside funding. Grammarly raised, you know, at this point, $400 million across 3 rounds. They have not lost that bootstrap DNA.

And this is the thing here. This is the thing, because when you are raising late in your life, then your business model is already sufficiently strong enough that you have confidence around your viability to actually You know, get this money and keep growing at the same rate. It's just something that, again, we are talking about risks. The risk is going down, obviously. But the thing about access to talent, and this is very interesting, I never thought about this perspective of like, there is a network of talent, there is a network of collective brain that you are tapping into when you're going and having those connections with venture capital. But those are actually also maybe even more useful in the early journey, you know, the risky stage. So I understand why you guys did it later on, but I guess like this is an evergreen, evergreen opportunity. It's an evergreen advantage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like at Grammarly, wanting to uplevel talent and get access to the world's best talent, was one of the big motivators for finally taking on venture funding. And then at the bootstrapped companies that I work, have worked with or work with, we try to get really creative. And because I've lived through it, I'm able to help them, hopefully. We try to get creative on how to attract talent. Despite the fact that we're not venture-backed. And actually—

Interesting.

Actually, some recent events like when the market crashed and we saw what happened with valuations and all of that stuff, that actually has served these bootstrap companies well because there have been a lot of talent had their equity values wiped out and they became more disenchanted with this kind of like fairy tale, right? Of, you know, I'm gonna get equity and it's gonna be worth whatever, right? And so they're now like rather like, you know what, they value like stability more and Proven out concepts.

Makes complete sense. And I wonder, then you talked about valuations, obviously, like valuations have been crazy. I think there were like 40x, 45x, 50x in some cases. Now, according to like, and I love this report, like by OpenView, like SaaS benchmarks, and obviously talking about SaaS industry, it's lower than 10. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's, so what, what happens to those companies that took hundreds of millions on 40x valuation lines?

Yeah.

It's tough.

Yeah.

It's hard.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's good. It's a bloodbath. It was a bloodbath. I think it's still not completely done. The bloodbath nature of it. It's interesting. I do a lot of informal kind of career coaching and some stuff that I help people with is like with their job searches and even with like offer negotiation stage. And people get to an offer stage and they get some kind of equity grant. And it is remarkable how many companies still have not corrected for the valuation. So they would be like, they would be, they'll give it, they're giving these equity grants that are anchoring to a valuation that, geez, they will be lucky to grow into in the next 5 to 10 years, if ever. Right. And it's frustrating because a lot of these candidates, it's— there's information asymmetry. Candidates don't always know what questions to ask. Right. They just be like, I'm getting 100,000 RSUs over 4 years. And I'm like, okay, well, what is it anchored to? Which valuation is it anchored to? What are your strike prices? I mean, not in the case of RSUs, but ISOs or something. What is your strike price? Okay. What valuation is that for? Okay. And it's like companies are not, some of them are proactive at adopting, like for instance, Canva, right? What Canva did was pretty commendable. They proactively cut their valuation I think from $40 billion to $20 billion. And I mean, honestly, Canva is a company that's going to grow into, if not, it hasn't already grown into their $40 billion valuation. So they're not worried about them.

So here's a framework for whoever wondering what's the value of the company they're working at. Just like, obviously it's not accurate, but just How do you think about it? So if you know, if you figure out the general range of the ARR, if it's a SaaS company, just multiply it by 8 to 10 maximum. Like this will be the top range.

Like right now, this is where you operate. Yeah, right now it's starting.

AI a little bit more.

Yeah, it's starting to tick up. Multiples are starting to tick up. Yeah, because we did just go through, we did just go through, you know, 30% growth in the market in the last year or something. So multiples are starting to go up. I didn't, I haven't looked at that OpenView report yet and how and whether and up to when it goes. But yeah, I think there has been a bit of a recovery, which is why you're now seeing, you know, more IPOs. Coming down the pipe.

IPOs are going to come second half of this year for sure. Some of them at least, like, it makes sense, like it was too long and I think the macroeconomics are there to support it. Cool, got it. And then there's another question about bootstrapping. So what products, and I never, like, I didn't think about it before, but what kind of ideas, what kind of products will be a little bit harder to bootstrap. Like, I'm thinking for now, and I might be completely wrong, and let's obviously stay in the software industry. Yeah, let's not manufacture micro components, which is obviously hard to bootstrap.

Yeah.

But like, we have AI products which are based on huge datasets and a lot of compute power. And obviously price is always going down, but also the demand of the compute is going up. Do you think right now, or maybe a little bit later, it's viable, AI businesses are viable for bootstrapping, or you think, you believe you do need the money in order, because like your money is connected directly to your PMF here?

Yeah. I mean, I think AI businesses and software businesses in general are the most kind of like bootstrap compatible businesses because the cost of building those businesses is going down. And you can now use AI in a lot of aspects of building that business and the backend of that business. Which, you know, just brings down your costs like crazy. And as far as computing power, et cetera, I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert on this, but I think right now everything is moving in a direction where that's gonna— the cost is going down to zero as well, to virtually zero with all the, you know, competition across models and open source models and things like that.

And

just look at OpenAI's price and how in the last 18 months, ChatGPT, you know, prompt-based pricing like dropped precipitously, like by orders of magnitude, not by like 5%, 10%, but like slashed in half and then in half again. So I think, you know, AI businesses can get to either they can bootstrap or they can get to breakeven. 'Cause there's another flavor of this. There's a company that I'm working with, I'm not gonna name them because I don't think they're making this information public. Yeah. This company I aimed, that I'm working with that, you know, is an AI-first company and, you know, they raised a modest seed and a modest A, so they didn't go the bootstrap route. But they still had a bootstrap mindset, and now they're sitting, you know, Series A gearing up for their Series B profitable and cash flow positive, which is also an awesome position to be in. It's like, yeah, sure, they probably took like a 20 to 30% dilution on their first two rounds, but now when it comes to raising the B, they're going to be more in a position of strength. They're going to have leverage. And so they're gonna be able to minimize their dilution going forward, probably. And I think one of the keys to their success is because they are AI-first and have relied on AI on their backend and their operations a lot as well. So they're able to do things with a leaner team.

Oh, this is the key here. Yeah. I

mean, headcount and marketing budget, right, are typically line item 1 and 2.

100%. I went and looked like an average. Let's like, okay, so there is the average cost of goods like COGS, which is for those kind of companies is about, so the gross margin are 75%, so they're like 25%, putting it aside. Then there is the OPEX part. So there are many elements in the OPEX part, but 2 main elements, marketing and R&D. Hello. Hello. And it's 60% of ARR. It's huge. So, and on average, those companies, they have burn rate. And let's say it's a company of like $5 million ARR to $20 million. So their burn rate, annual one, is between 10% to 40%. I think it's a lot. It's like they're burning. They're not profitable on average.

Yeah.

So then the question is like, Okay, so you want to bootstrap, obviously. So then you must be more efficient in your R&D spend. Of course. And this is what you're doing in OPEX spend, like headcount and everything. And of course in your marketing spend as well, because marketing is no less than R&D, even more in some cases, in many cases.

Yep.

So, so I do understand how to do it in terms of R&D because, hey, like this is where we are going. We can do more with less. And I think even there is a trend of full-stacking talent. So we can talk about this later, but like growth and product merging, there are many disciplines that many people can do many things at once. But how do you approach it like from the marketing perspective, from the marketing spend? Like how do you, if you want to bootstrap, you need to go down in your ops, you need to go on an R&D and the marketing. But how do you like, how, What opportunities are there today to go down on the marketing cost that we didn't have, like, for example, a few years ago?

Yeah, I mean, okay. So first of all, I think there are a lot of marketing disciplines that you can do. And I see it happen a lot where founders or like early team members that don't have formal training, can do a pretty good job of getting those disciplines off the ground. So for instance, SEO, there is enough, less editorial SEO. I think that's harder and you need more expertise, but product-focused.

What do you mean by editorial SEO?

Like running a blog and writing content. Okay.

Okay.

Writing content that you're trying to rank in Google. That's harder to do without someone with dedicated expertise. But product-focused SEO, take a look at what your competitors are ranking for, right? Via, you know, Ahrefs or SEMrush or whatever, right? Look at what their pages look like that rank for that and then create similar pages, right? With a little twist on it. And you're like founding engineer and— You know, a co-founder can do that together, right? And so as opposed to like hiring an in-house SEO person or even hiring an agency, this is like in the very early days, right? We're talking about early days 'cause I do think there's value in hiring maybe an agency down the line so you can kind of bootstrap.

Specifically SEO?

Right now, yeah.

'Cause I was told for years SEO is, Statements.

Yeah.

Empty statements. Yeah. SEO is dead. You want to rank in SEO, you need to wait years. Those with the highest PageRank will always be on top.

Yeah.

So it's like the ROI is like in, you know, will come sometime.

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of those statements are contradictory. You know, SEO is dead on the one hand, And then on the other hand, it'll take years to pay back. Well, that's not dead. That's more around the payback horizon. And then, yeah. So I think that SEO is definitely not dead. I mean, like I have one company that's bootstrapped that today that, you know, got to $30 million ARR predominantly off of SEO. You know, I have, yeah, so I have another Series A company that's doing incredibly well that is doubling down on SEO all in-house, no outside expertise, and they're crushing it, like, you know, doubling their SEO traffic year over year. Okay, so I mean, going back to your original question, which is, you know, how do you scale, you know, how can you maybe scale marketing while keeping your costs down and, you know, let's think about how can AI help, right? So I wanna try to like introduce AI. So with SEO, for instance, like, you know, you can do like AI website generation, for instance. So which already, which we already, shout out to another client of mine, 10Web.io, a fantastic company that's doing AI website generation.

10Web.

10Web, yeah.

10Web, yeah.

They're doing AI website generation, With best practices, with best SEO practices built in, built into the generation. So you're gonna get a page, you're gonna get a site that's fast, you're gonna get a— and you don't have to do it for your whole site, you can do it for individual pages of your site, right? And you're gonna get the right meta tags, you're gonna get the right basically SEO components to the site.

Mm-hmm.

That's on the SEO front. In performance marketing, there are a lot of things, a lot of AI advancements that are lowering costs as well. My rule of thumb in performance marketing for an early stage company is like, only do it like if you, okay, I'm gonna like intertwine multiple concepts here, monetization.

Mm-hmm.

So there is no doubt, it's a pretty It's a pretty, I think, uncontroversial statement to say that monetization moved up the lifecycle of the company in terms of when it's time to focus on it, right? Investors still kind of vary on this in terms of what their philosophies are, but in practice, and I see enough companies to where I think this is a trend, in practice, companies are starting to focus on monetization earlier. And there's also been a bit of a reversal in the freemium model. I'm seeing more and more companies go the free trial route. So it's a bit of a reversal because remember we had this whole period of like everybody was going freemium, right? Everybody was opening up some part of the product, giving away for free. Now I'm seeing the reverse of that. And I can point to a number of companies that I've worked with or just I'm friends with that have either not done freemium at all or have done freemium, couldn't quite get the performance they were looking for, rolled it back and went for like a credit card gated trial and have been growing very, very respectably. And it's not that they won't do freemium again, right? That's another thing that I'll say is that business models are not fixed. Attributes to never be revisited. They can evolve and they should evolve. Grammarly was not always premium. And, you know, for the first, I don't know, half of its life, it was a credit card gated subscription product, which by the way, allowed us to monetize really well. And invest in performance marketing. So to bring it back to my broader point, companies that focus on monetization sooner and are able to hit certain targets, like, I don't know, I'm not gonna go into benchmarks right now, but—

Mm-hmm.

We write about benchmark, Lenny writes a lot about benchmarks and he and I co-authored a few articles on like paid marketing benchmarks. But basically companies that focus on monetization earlier are able to get to, you know, that kind of like good enough cumulative first year revenue. If you're focusing on one year breakeven, you can start investing in performance marketing sooner. And then because there are usually 2 barriers to investing in performance marketing, one is unit economics. Mm-hmm. Like, can you actually earn back the money you spend, right? Okay, this is Riverside with its emojis, I know. And the second thing is the team that's needed to do this. So on the aspect of can we make back the money we spend, I'm helping companies and I advise companies to focus on monetization earlier, not before PMF, Make sure you got product market fit. Make sure you got healthy activation retention rates. But soon after that, when it's like, do I grow my top of funnel? Do I grow my top of funnel or do I focus on monetization? I kind of like to parallel path the two, right? I think gone are the days where you're speeding to your Series B and at this point monetization is just a theory where you go into, used to be able to go into your Series B pitch meetings having generated zero revenue and sell them on a big story of how you can monetize once you decide to. Like, those days are gone.

Mm-hmm.

And so, but then the second thing after that, even if the companies have like a healthy conversion rate from free to paid and, you know, strong renewals and strong projected LTVs, Another obstacle that they often encounter is that, well, how do I get the creatives done? How do I get channel expertise, et cetera? And so now I think there is a way to do it.

Team.

Yeah, there is a way to do it that, listen, I'm meeting companies now that have an in-house generalist growth marketer, a generalist. Not even a growth marketer, just a generalist growth person, okay? Who are sometimes managing like, I don't know, $500K a month in paid media spend on their own across like 4 to 5 channels. And how's that possible? I think it's possible for a few reasons. Number one, I mean, the ad platforms have become easier to use, right? And there's a lot more like automation, a lot more set it and forget it. Obviously they're using AI to help you target your users, et cetera. Sometimes it works well. Sometimes you need a little more granularity. I can speak to that a bit later, but at least like, yeah. And then the second thing is creative. Creative has historically been such a blocker on how to create good performing creatives. And now, you know, with the advancement of AI, there are all these tools popping up. I don't wanna shout out any of them because I don't like, yeah, any specific ones because I don't like know them that well. It's more like secondhand knowledge, but I'm seeing that these channel managers or these growth generalists, Like don't even have to rely for creative on their in-house teams or go and hire a designer or graphic artist. They can pop into one of these tools, right? And do AI-generated videos pretty cheaply, AI-generated statics, GIFs, et cetera.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. This makes complete sense. Like even if I will start with like, okay, you need to run marketing, Obviously, you need a budget, you need monetization. So try to monetize early. So freemium, to be honest, like I can have entire conversation just about freemium. Freemium is hard. Freemium takes time. Freemium doesn't work for every single product. There are specific things that should be in a product, Netflix, others, for freemium to actually take on easiness. Many, many, many things, many components there. And free trial, it's a fair, very fair starting point, maybe not even starting point, maybe the endgame strategy as well. Creates friction on monetization, brings you the needed revenue to reinvest in marketing, which I like. It was super fascinating to hear about generalists that can, a generalist that can run multiple channels, no more 5, 6 people. Early stage company, everyone responsible for a single channel and a department creating content separately for each one. Those days are gone. This is exactly how you go down on both the ARR, FTE, and obviously the OpEx spend. Super. So one more question about approaching growth because we talked about how to approach growth in 2024. And we touched a little bit, like, we have new opportunities right now, the landscape changes, there are more, much more opportunities than before, different ones at least. We talked about how it's done before. So we have those 2 points. And if, as a quant person, we can do a regression and draw a line and look, okay, so in 3 years, let's say in the future, like, let's be visionaries for a second. Where are we going? Like how this growth approach, how the growth approach will change in X years from now? What's the trend? What is waiting for us?

So I am not a futurist and I, and it's like my least favorite thing to try to do is to try to predict the future. But, you know, I'll say something that's probably pretty obvious and non-controversial. But I think where things are heading is we're gonna be able to do more with less. We are gonna be able to, there's gonna be definitely kind of a leveling of a playing field that you're seeing happening, right? Like for instance, like, you know, managing ads used to be, Like you had to have like, I don't know, no more than $1 million per headcount because every channel was different. Every channel needed its own approach. It wasn't as algorithmic, et cetera, et cetera. You had to have these deep expertise. I remember when I started managing like Google Ads in 2008, Right? It was my first exposure to Google Ads. It was complex and you needed like a ton of training and yada yada, right? But now we see that all ad platforms are heading toward like removing controls from users, right? And there's like, there is different schools of thought. Like of course Google or Meta are gonna tell you, listen, the reason we're removing these controls, they don't call it that. It's like, no, no, We are helping you. We know what's best. We know how to find your users best. All you gotta do is like let us know who your users are. And by that, like, I don't know, upload a lookalike list or upload a user list or something, right? Give us your target CPA and we do the rest, right? And, you know, and some like, performance marketing purists, and I'm like not quite there, but I sometimes feel this as well, kind of go like, no, I want to keep my controls. Like, I want to be able to structure my campaigns how I want to structure them. I want to have the level of granularity that I'm accustomed to having. But I think the positive at a societal level is that you are reducing the barrier, you're reducing the bar for what it takes to engage with these ad channels, right? The fact that these like generalists, these like, you know, founding employees who don't have formal training but are just sharp and, you know, whatever, like intellectually rigorous can figure out how to run Google Ads or whatever. Like that wasn't the case 5, 7, 8 years ago. So we're gonna be able to do more with less. There's gonna be a leveling of a playing field because today you can start a business, you can launch a marketing function cheaply and on your own. Build a website, 10web.io. Need creative, like XYZ products, right? AI-generated creative. Need to write page copy, Grammarly, generative AI. All of this accessible, all of it Self-serve, right? So that's where things are heading. So then, you know, this is kind of a broader conversation around AI. What's gonna be the role of humans, right? What's gonna be the role of growth and marketing professionals? I mean, yeah, we're all gonna need to uplevel and upskill ourselves, right? So where we need to be focusing on knowing how to use those tools effectively, knowing which tools to pull in when, knowing how to use those tools in combination with one another. That's, I think, where, you know, where we will need to evolve to stay relevant and lean into the revolution.

This is super interesting. I will actually jump around one topic, the teams. I will jump into career because I had the question there that I believe you're already answering. Because I also feel that Things are changing, changing rapidly, and we need to continuously uplevel ourselves continuously. This is a day-to-day work. And what do you think, like, in, in this year— we are not futurists, we're right now— but we need to a little bit understand where the industry is going, what are the trends. What do you think, like, the few skills, hard skills, not soft skills, which are also not less important, but what are like a few hard skills that growth folks, growth marketing and growth product, let's not forget the growth product people, could benefit a lot from investing in this year?

Well, I think one skill that's not going away is interpreting data and drawing insights from data. And when I say insights, I don't just mean like detecting patterns because AI can do that, right? You can give AI a dataset and you can say, hey AI, you know, what sticks out here or what trends do you see or what patterns are notable? Sure. But being able to connect it to what matters to a given business or be able to connect it to What what events we think took place that impacted those metrics, and one of the big things with things things with data is not so much you're like whether you know SQL, but do you know the right questions to ask? Do you know the right questions to ask? And that's one thing I feel like I bring the value that I bring to a lot of the data conversations with my companies is not that I'm the best at querying data. Or, but it's like, I know which questions to ask. I know what it's basically, it's like the prompt writing, but a step removed from prompt writing. And so I think that skill is not going away. If you wanted a hard, if you wanted a hard, I think it is a hard skill. I mean, honestly, there's also the skill of like, this is a hard skill right here, prompt writing. Everything is text to something now, right? Text to video, text to image, text to text, right? And I do think that we're already seeing a bit of a divergence in skill sets. There are some people who are better at prompt writing than others. So actually being able to effectively communicate with an AI is gonna be a hard skill because you get back, you know, you receive

But there is a reverse trend as well.

Yeah, which is?

Because I would argue that if right now communicating with AI, which is a central piece, requires us to require a hard skill such as prompt writing, I bet the interface with AI will become easier and easier and easier because it's an actual problem to solve and solving this problem will become easier and easier. That's fair. Will actually get you more customers. That's fair. Yeah. It's gonna meet at some point.

Yeah. The question is timing, right? And it's like, because today prompt writing is the predominant mode of engagement with AI tools, right? And at least generative AI tools. And the proliferation of generative AI tools is growing astronomically. So you don't really have time to be like, ah, but I think someone is going to introduce an alternative way. It's not always going to be prompt writing, right? If you want to maintain your relevance right now, you better figure out how to use it effectively.

Between the lines, you remind me one of my principles when I'm evaluating a company to work for or to advise. And as you said, you need to be able to ask the right questions. But sometimes you know how to ask the right questions, but the company cannot provide you the right answers just because they don't have the data infrastructure. And if you are an early-stage startup, Series A, and you're about to hit product-market fit, you're already there and you're thinking about growth at some point and you still don't have data infrastructure, a proper one, which can allow you to use any analytical tools, doesn't matter, self-serve, no self-serve, you must get there because no growth will work without it.

Yep.

So for me, usually it's a huge red flag when it's not there. And I'm happy that you highlighted it. I had quite a few of those conversations of, hey, we want to start the growth team, we want to build a growth team, but we have zero data and zero visibility. It contradicts itself completely. Yeah.

Yeah. When somebody tells me I want to build a growth team, the first thing I say is that, like, let's zoom out and don't tell me that you want to— when you tell me you want to build a growth team, you already You're already signaling to me that you have figured out a solution to a problem. But let's start with a problem. What is the problem or what are you— what kind of outcome would you like to see? Paint to me a world that you would like to see in the near term at your company that you think the answer for realizing that world is a growth team. That's where I like to turn the conversation because it's not always hiring a growth team, right? Or people will come to me, I'll get connected to founders who are like, I'm looking for my first growth leader. And I'm, and I want to talk to you about what's the right person. And I would say that at least half of those conversations, after I dig a little deeper, you know what I say to them, they connected with me to get some tips on the right profile of a growth leader to hire. And sometimes, 50% of the time, at the end of that conversation, I'm telling them, you should not hire a growth leader right now. Instead, here's how you should be mobilizing your existing team to get to the kind of growth outcomes you want to get to at your current stage. At your current stage.

Interesting. And what are those like signals usually that signaling you that it should be an internal hire?

Yeah.

Versus bringing someone—

Yeah. So, I mean, one signal is where they don't have a strong hypothesis on where they think growth should come from. Like whether it's channels, PLG, viral, like they don't. And number 2, data is not in a good place. So they don't understand, they can't answer some basic questions around data. They don't have like an easily accessible data analytics platform. That's another signal. Sometimes there is like a really unfortunate signal, which is like, hey, you're not actually, you haven't demonstrated strong enough PMF. So those are kind of like the top ones.

Do you think that like even for a company that have all those signals, Like they have strong P&F, strong data culture, clear hypothesis. Like, is it better sometimes to groom someone internally with help of an advisor rather than like trying to hire from externally? Because like, and as you said in the beginning, there's such a huge value in understanding the bits and the bytes and DNA of how the company operates.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, yes. If there is such a person internally, it's absolutely better to groom them and pair them with an advisor. And I can, I have a lot of examples of that. I'm working with a lot of such people, a lot of such homegrown generalists who kind of learned on the job and they're like perfect for it, right? But then also you encounter companies sometimes where, you know, even though that should be your Option A, sometimes there just isn't anyone internally that you can groom. And then you should kind of look, you know, and then you have an opportunity to either hire somebody like that who's going to be the Swiss Army knife or hire already a more kind of mature and fully baked growth lead.

Clear. I suggest us for this conversation to leave the career topic. We will have more topics to cover maybe in the future and jump to a set of few more of like more or less quick questions if you can answer them like in, you know, like 20—

Rapid fire.

10, 20 seconds. Rapid fire if you want. And super. So the first one goes like that. What do you hire for and what do you fire for?

I hire for potential over experience. I fire for repeated inability to drive impact or obviously there's like values violation. And sometimes you have to fire even when things are going okay, if you believe that the needs of the company or the needs of the role have outgrown a given individual.

Love the potential versus experience. The very anti-reverse from that.

Yeah.

Yeah, I would say. Okay, second one. What was your biggest career failure?

My biggest career failure. I fail a lot. It's a question of like, what's the biggest? At first, my impetus was gonna, 'cause here's the thing. I was just listening to Bill Ackman on Lex Fridman's podcast. And he said that, If you are content with where you are today, it's hard to look at anything in the past as having been a failure per se, because in some weird cosmic way, it probably played a role in where you are today. Right. And so it's like, yeah, I can point to things where like I had an opportunity Opportunity to take equity in some company that went on to do really, really well, and I didn't do it. But like, as long as you're content with where you are today, I wish I went into startups and tech right out of college. I wish that I you know didn't go into finance, and I could say that I you know wasted two years. But did I waste two years, or did I lay a certain quant foundation? You know, so yeah, I think professionally—

I can understand that.

You know, I'll tell you—

I can literally understand it because—

Sorry, I'll tell you what I think are failures that are more black and white. Because all of that stuff that I explained, you can look at it. Anytime I upset somebody at work, anytime I gave someone a cold shoulder, Anytime I didn't offer a colleague the kind of support or encouragement that they needed, all of those moments, those are failures. And those are failures without caveats, right? As opposed to other things like, should I have taken that job or this job, or should I have invested in this company, that company, that all that can be caveated. Right? Because as long as you're content with where you are today, you can just say that, hey, that played some role in getting you there, but not when it comes to relationships with people.

Fail experiments, try products, try to build products that would not work, but don't be an asshole.

Yeah,

right. This is the biggest thing. Clear. Which are the healthy habits or maybe routines that help you to stay productive and happy? On a daily basis?

I have a gratitude journal. So every day—

Oh, need to do this more.

Every day, 3 things I'm grateful for. I have a bedtime routine with my kids. I make sure that I bathe them and that I take them out of the bath and I read with them and study with them. I have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old. That's a habit. I exercise every day and have been doing that— Every single day? At least something. And have been doing that since my younger child was born and it's a core part of my identity. So, for the last 3 and a half years. I try to practice mindfulness. I'm not good at it, But I do it every day. I try to meditate every day, but I can't say I always get into the right headspace when I do that. And I also use the sauna regularly. I actually had one built at my house.

Cool.

So yeah, those are mine.

Nice, nice. Like super important. Like I think we chatted about the importance of it before. Or like, some people say that— I was thinking about it actually today— people say we need to do the best framework, like you need to be productive at work, you need to, you know, better collaborate, better everything. But they don't think like— and they think how to improve their impact through that, but they don't think of how to improve their impact through the time they're not in the office. Like picking your Energy up, your mood, your concentration helps to you for you to accomplish anything you want in your career as well. Last question, if possible. So who are the two three people you learn from?

My dad, who

that's

amazing is you know a an entrepreneur or more of a small business owner. But, you know, he lived through the collapse of Soviet Union and, you know, what it was like to try to take, you know, lean into fresh capitalism and, you know, did what he could and definitely set myself and my sister up for our successes. Mm-hmm. I honestly, when you ask that kind of question, the people who come to mind are not some kind of thought leaders, industry thought leaders, but it's like family, friends, grandparents. Those are the people that come to mind. Those are the people I learn from because I think that their lessons are They are evergreen lessons, right? Like, my grandfather is 93 years old. I don't think he's ever had an unhappy day in his life. He's the most—

Amazing.

Grateful, high-integrity person ever. And trying to You know, impart some of that onto me. I mean, he's one of the biggest teachers for me out there. There are people, you know, industry thinkers that I follow and stuff like that, you know, Lex Fridman and, you know, the All In Pod and Bill Ackman. But You know, that all pales in comparison to some of the people that are closest to me and their impact.

I can 100% relate to that. The most dominant figure in my life was my grandfather. I shared the room with him, you can say, until I was 18, but also in the university, like in my 20s. So, and The day he was gone was by far the most traumatic and hardest day in my life. So he was for sure a person that had the most impact on me as a person.

Yeah.

So I, I can— I think it's something with like with us who were born in USSR, we have special connections.

Yeah, yeah, that is definitely true because, you know, like in the United States, it's more, it's rare when you have a special connection with your grandparents, right? Because like people move away and like, you know, and I, one of the reasons why I never, this is probably already not going to make the recording, but whatever. One of the reasons I never left the Bay Area, weirdly enough, is less because I didn't want to be away from my parents. It was the grandparents. I didn't want to,

I understand,

I didn't want to, you know, like, um, and I don't regret it.

Like half a year, like a year after Eder died, I left Israel. I, I didn't leave before. I didn't do my MBA in US because of that. Like I didn't want to leave. So like, it's like the connection is crazy. It's like your core family. Cool. Thank you so much.