20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski

Смарт, люди, которые работают в макинете, в фаундах, они очень красивые. В флоро-консумерах, в симплистике, это most significantly, это much more significantly than the number of features, much more significantly than anything. Но много людей не understand, претензий не про про про, претензий не про про, в любом случае, это значит, что вы создаете это устроен, что это устроен, я тебе уже have terrible retention. Why? Because chimus itself have terrible retention. Я не могу уйти в General Advice, в General Advice всегда будет шоу. Если вы look on the history of any company, вы увидите, что everything is so nuanced, everything is so unique, there are thousands of ways to be successful and you should choose your way. So after 10 years of doing 20 VC, я начался, я уже had enough of podcast tour guests, guests who go on the same podcast, и вы've heard their stories before. 20 VC from now, more focused on telling the best stories from technology, with guests who've never been on a podcast before. That's the case for our guest today, Demetri Gersky, founder of Flow Health. The leading women's health app and the first European FemTech Unicorn launched in 2015, Flow has grown to 70 million monthly active users, and 5 million paid subscribers, with an error of over $200 million. The app is recognized as the number one recommended tool for period and cycle tracking, and what I love most, Demetri the founder, started life picking mushrooms. This is such an incredible story and shows like this make me so grateful to do what I do. But before we dive in, when a promising startup files for an IPO or a venture capital firm loses its marquee partner, being the first to know gives you an advantage and time to plan your strategic response. Chances are, the information reported it first. The information is the trusted source for that important first look at actionable news across technology and finance, driving decisions with breaking stories, proprietary data tools, and a spotlight on industry trends. With a subscription, you will join an elite community that includes leaders from the top VC firms, CEOs from Fortune 500 companies, and esteemed banking and investment professionals. In addition to mastery journalism in your inbox every day, you'll engage with fellow leaders in the active discussions, or in person at exclusive events. Learn more and access a special offer for 20 VCs listeners at www.thewinformation.com/deals/20VC. 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Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, CULY has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 60+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund's lifetime. We use them at 20VC and have loved working with their teams in the US, London and Asia over the last few years. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public, head over to CULY.com and also CULY.com, CULY's award-winning free legal resource for entrepreneurs. You have now arrived at your destination. Dimitri, I am such a fan of the incredible journey with flow, so first off, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for your friendly invite. Not a tool, I wanted to make this happen for a while. I would love to start. I read an interview at an interview before. I heard that you had a single mother who worked as a librarian, you got your first job at 16. Take me to that. How did those early shape you as an entrepreneur? As I see you, I am not so young, I am 41 years old and my childhood was in the 90s in Belarus, difficult times. The world, Soviet world was destroyed, everything ruined. People didn't have salaries, shelters were empty. A salary of my mother was maybe 30 bucks and nothing to buy because shelters in shops were empty. We were growing our own food, we had potato fields, vegetables in this field, we had garden, we were making hundreds of jars of pickles. Mostly we were feeding ourselves by this production. I still don't like potato honestly. I can't eat anymore. But it was a good life lesson, it was lessen of farming. And lessen of farming is usually just can't fake farming. It means that you should take potato, not eat it immediately, even if you are hungry. And you should put this potato to ground. And then you must do this potato next day and even one month after you should buy. And then you should work hard and you can't fake this job. And then it's like you never have 100% of chances that you would get your potato back because I don't know. It may be hail, it may be frozen, it may be box. But then if you are like and you work hard, then you will get your harvest. But also it's lessen of diversification because you should have not just potato, which also should have vegetables and garden. Because if it's like a bad harvest of potatoes and vegetables or apples or something, and something you will have to eat, but you can't fake that. It means you always have fast business. You said you first job was a sales team, always your fast business. My first job for money was gathering of mushrooms. We had two types of kids in our village, the gas reserves of berries and the gas reserves of mushrooms. And it was two different types of businesses. Because in case of berries, you just sit in the same place in the wood. And approximately you may gas the same volume of berries per day and stable income. In case of mushrooms, you should walk around the wood. And if you like, you may get much mushrooms and even a lot of money. But another day you will get nothing. Psychologically all kids were divided into two categories, who preferred fixed income or who preferred like a mushroom gathering. And I'm in my brother, we always wear mushrooms and gathers. We always prefer to take a chance for bigger gains and to have this journey around the wood, rather than to sit on the place for fixed income. To me, how does this work? How do you go from mushroom gathering and farming potatoes and that very wholesome upbringing in that respect? To founding one of the largest female, how do you get into technology first? Between mushroom gathering and far enough floor was 20 years. It means that it was a long professional journey before we founded floor. I spent half of my professional life in book publishing. I wrote books by myself, computer books. And then we worked with my brothers in the publishing house. And then we started our own publishing house. And I spent approximately 10 years in this world, world of books. And I was responsible for approximately 2000 titles of educational books. And I had a big pleasure from this work because it was so material. You're working with something and you're getting material result. It's almost like you're getting your baby and you may touch it. It was a very physical pleasure with these books. And then a very big change happened when App Store was opened in 2008 and the 9. And at that moment we decided she worked with mobile apps. And I did what's very simple to start from content apps based on books. And then gradually gradually, it's a longer story, but we got to 4. Well, I mean, Flow was the third app that you did. You did 2 before Flow. What did you learn from the 2 before Flow not working? The E took with you to Flow. Really we had much more than 2. We had 2 attempts to create successful peer-tracker. But before Flow, me and my brothers and parents started 2,000 different apps. Some of them successful, some of them less successful. Overall, my brothers and me, like we participated in different projects for a different extent. We had success with these apps. We had 6 exits up to this moment. We had access to Google, exit to Facebook. We started several companies, which has revenue in 100,000, 50,000. It was quite a journey before Flow. It was 5, 6 years of work before Flow. It was not so. simple than we just decided we would create success for peer tracker and we just started it was immediate success. But even with our experience, good success is a flaw from the third attempt. Like the first, uh, period tracker failed, the second period tracker failed and just this, this apps that he complicated and what we definitely learned from experience with consumer facing product that for consumers simplicity is the most significant, it's much more significant than number of features, it's much more significant than anything. Simplicity is the key of success in consumer facing products. Probably we created this first apps being beautiful, sophisticated, but you complicated for people. It's my theory, but honestly, nobody knows. It's always very irrational at the beginning. When we look at a flow, you break many rules. We're often told when it comes to an idea, choose a problem that you've personally felt and can really empathize with with respect to me, tree or wonderful, but you know, you don't empathize with peer tracking. Is that bad advice to choose a problem that you know? I would say that any general advice is bad. Any general advice is bushed. Every time when you say something like any sentence with every each, like any general advice is bad. This advice is bad as well because this advice is just like it assumes that each situation is the same, but no, no, no, like life is very nuanced and each situation is very different. Usually when people ask this question, they assume two different questions. One question is, if it's not about your own pain, how did you find motivation? If it's not your pain, how did you find knowledge? And motivation, I always wanted to do something meaningful. It was about books, it was about our other health apps. I have never had any motivation, for example, to work in gambling. If you propose me one, Bill and I would not take a CEO position in gambling company, it's just like, I just don't want it. It's against my values and I don't have any interest to that. And the understood very well the size of a problem because we had the experience with health and fitness apps before. But question about knowledge, we didn't have knowledge. But also we had humility to understand that we didn't have knowledge. And because of that, we started to analyze and we started to listen to users and doctors. And I remember that before starting floor, our document about this market and potential product had 700 pages. And still, we are making still all decisions based on data and based on user research. We have done in floor more than 1,000 of user researchers. We have user research in each product team. And we are talking with users all the time. Then we combine that with the data from the app and we are making decisions subjectively. And it was our way to make a good product for users without any own knowledge about this field to listen. Users and doctors were very, very careful and be very humble about our knowledge. How do you think about the Henry Ford quote, which is if I listen to my customers, I'd be able to build a faster horse? I think it may be right about absolutely UK-TGRAPH something. But when we started our product, our market was enough big and already formed. We had hundreds of competitors and some of them big and some of them raised significant capital. And for example, let's imagine one of our competitors glow. It was started by Max Levshin, like a key member of my palma, as I raised from Anderson Horowitz and Founders Fund, 30 million, almost immediately. They started three years before floor. And we had such competitors and it was rather formed market. It was not empty market, but it was all the opportunity to learn from them. It was good opportunity to not be a newcomer, but have an advantage to learn from other products. What did you learn from them? Why did you beat them? I would say that it's very similar at the beginning with a race. All cars start approximately at the same point, or at the same point, and all cars are the same. And then you need a little advantage. But then when you're making many, many, many rounds, like you're getting more and more distance. It means that it's almost kind of a defecation point. You're getting a little advantage to begin. And then in years, your advantage is becoming huge. And the ultimate reason behind that is that it's a flywheel. It's like just a cumulative effect of many things. And at the beginning, like our apps were on the slip pretty much similar. But then, probably we did some good product decisions. We got additional resources and we started to invest your product much more than our competitors. We invested two products, just two products, up to this moment, 150 million. We mostly had engineers in Eastern Europe, like to understand that in standards of UK or United States, you should multiply that on two. And then we created this big flow, this super app because of this investment. And this product became so good, so much better than competitors than it won naturally. But at the beginning, all our products were almost the same, and difference was very tiny. So I'm an investor. And we chatted before about some of you, you know, PCs, which was outstanding. I don't like competitive markets to meet you because I think it's very hard to stand out. I think your customer acquisition costs a high. Your churn is high. Product marketing is difficult. And I find them challenging to invest in. What would you say to me with that mindset? It's good to have good competitors because you have much opportunity to learn from them and the good competitions, you tap your own company because you just feel this competition. You team feels this competition. Team is not getting complacent. Pretty much like fixed pimentalities that I should have a monopoly to take this pie. No. When you have good competition, pie is getting bigger because products are better, like customers are more educated, and the total market is getting bigger. Of course, nobody wants to be in this kind of red blood ocean market when you have tiny margin and a ton of competition. But in case if it's normal competition, it's good. It's good. So when you first launched this V3 of Flow, having had the two, which didn't work so well, and the simplified Flow, did you have immediate product market fit? Take me to that. Yeah. And that moment when we launched Flow, maybe one month ago, I immediately understood that it had a chance to become really big because of retention. I saw like a retention I had never seen before, and we had many apps. I just combined two numbers, like a total rest bar market, women, and retention. And I understood that potential is tremendous by combination of these metrics. And retention is really rare in health and fitness pretty naturally because retention is not about product. Retention is about user case. What many people don't understand? Retention is not about product. It means that you may create the perfect app for gym fitness app. And perfect app for gym will have terrible retention. Why? Because gyms themselves have terrible retention. You know, this is like a gym business model, like to sell 1000 membership for gym risk capacity in 100 people because gyms know that like 900 people would never visit. And why apps would work better than gyms? Of course, it's about nature of people. They wouldn't. It's so rare to see good retention in health and fitness. And when I saw that, I understood that it will be very huge. What was it about the retention numbers that you can share that gave you such confidence? Was it the D7, which is the day 7, the D14, the D28? Was it the daily usage? What was it which made you go, wow, we have something. What's about long-term retention? Long-term retention. It means that how many users stays for six months and more? D180, which is six months. What was it? It's again, retention is user case. You may improve retention by good product or you may destroy retention by bad product, but the essence of retention is the natural user case. And natural user case based on natural nasty for a women's organized life around cycle. What's you can't skip that? You may skip gym, but you can't skip period. And because of that, retention is very good, but then our big idea was, okay, if it's so unique and retention is so high, could we build something more valuable than period tracker based on that? And the ultimate reason why flow became so successful was this idea of like kind of super app. Let's take period tracker as a core product and let's round this period tracker by Deepam Ovaluble, Health Features and Content. and the peer-tracker would become driver of your requisition and more significant retention. But all the features around would create value. It's something similar on Gmail ecosystem. Like Gmail itself drives the acquisition and retention, but this apps for documents, edits, and calls, and so on, drives value. But if you take out email, it would not work. And the same with peer-tracker. But if you don't have the ecosystem, it's not meant sizable because the value is just too tiny. Did you know that from day one? I think we can conclude it very, very eerily. And significantly because of our deep analysis of the market. I recently reviewed my first deck for our sit-around in 2016. And this idea of a big, like, super app, based on peer-tracker, was already in this document. It means that it was a very eerily idea. And it just took like a 9,000, 150 million of just product investment she created. And probably at that moment, we didn't anticipate that it would take so long and so much money. So then you have this moment of, wow, we actually have something. Six month retention is incredible. How are you acquiring customers at that point? Customer acquisition from 0 to a million is very hard. You have little brand, you have little word of mouth. How are you acquiring customers? And what did that look like? The most significant was to create the best product. And the best product means that users are happy and they provide them good ratings. And then the system of promotion of App Store and Google Play started to work because they have algorithms which promote good apps. And they usually look on retention, average rates, and other parameters. And if your app is really good, it's like, like, algorithm promoting your app at the top, the same as with website. And because the product was good, we got our first traffic just organically, but it was general traffic based on kind of a search as like peer-tracker. But then, because of retention, we started to get big and big and big audience, then World of Mouse started to work. And World of Mouse is the single predictable way how to get organic traffic. Because if you have a big mouth, then people would advise your product. And then you would start to get organic traffic. And now we have most organic traffic because of World of Mouse rather than because of such general, generalistic searches like peer-tracker. But again, if you ask me, what's prerequisite of organic traffic, I would say retention is prerequisite of organic traffic, because first you need to get active audience. Users should get happy. They will start to advise your product and then you will get organic traffic. And probably the biggest question is, how to get like an initial audience. In all the case, we got them organically, but in your reality, probably you must buy them. It's less realistic nowadays, to get initial audience organically. - So that was gonna be my question, which is like, do you believe then, if you build it, they will come? Or is that not the case and you actually have to have a completely paid strategy today? - It's much more difficult nowadays than it used to be 10 years ago, much more difficult. Sometimes it happens and the world often because of viralisi. But in most of cases, you need to start this process by paid user acquisition. But if your product is shitty, it will not be helpful. - How long did it take you to get to a million users? - One year. - Was that much quicker than you anticipated? - Probably, but also, I remember again, from this first deck for Sidround, and I say in the study you met with our first investor, Flint Capital. - Andre. - Andre from Flint Capital. In this deck, you know, like you're always exaggerating your future in decks from, for venture capital. We didn't believe in these numbers. And you probably shouldn't, when you're like presenting that investors, and we said, "Oh, like in 20 or 20 or 20 or 22, we will have three or four million months like the users and three million in revenue and company will cost 20 million." Probably real numbers, like 10 times bigger, at least. - Why did you get it so wrong? What did you not see? - I didn't think that we would get big share of the market so fast because the market was formed and competitive and I didn't have hope to get big share of this market with hundreds of competitors easily, but it happened. - Do you really think that is just because you had a better product? - Ultimately, yes, because up to the very recent times, we didn't spend money for paid acquisition. It was organic growth and it was organic growth because users liked our products and metrics of our product were so good that the app store and Google play were promoting it. But we started to spend more or less significant money for paid user acquisition, maybe in 2020, 2021, before that it was rather a minuscule volume. - Why did you decide to spend on paid then? - Because we started monetization and when we got monetization, it was just like you put money and you get money back, you put money back. I spoke to some of your team and they said, "Well, not a weakness, but something interesting about Meetures, he doesn't love brand or PR." It's an interesting point because most do actually. Why don't you like brand or PR? - I don't understand what is brand and once I tried to understand maybe two years ago, I was in the process of hiring a chief marketing officer and I had maybe 30 different candidates to meet. I was asking the same question, "What's brand by your opinion to 30 different simules?" And I got 30 different answers. - Can I give you mine? - I think it's like the way that it makes the customer feel. How they feel when they see your logo, when they touch your product, that is your brand. What they say when you're out of the room? - Yeah, I just don't feel that I understand while this topic and we're often people, they draw two words, people use for everything and for any situation and we're often without any meaning, two placeholders. Brand and culture. You may describe everything by brand and you may describe everything by culture but usually it doesn't have any sense and you need to ask clarifying questions because you always may say, "Our situation is bad because we have bad brand." Or "Our situation is bad because we have bad culture." Yeah, it describes everything and nothing. And talking about PR, I think it's slightly different. It's mostly about my internal belief that product defines everything and I always very frugal in spending money out of product. It means I'm very generous in spending money for product and I'm very frugal, very greedy to spend money not for product and when I see kind of budget for something like several hundred thousand and I don't understand the impact. I bet I would spend this money for product and I take this money and move this money to product. Sometimes even up to the uptox trims. For example, I never use business class because all the time and I am running company with 200 million in revenue probably like it's the time to start using business class for the CEO but I never use business class even in my trips to the United States even she's Seattle or San Francisco because all the time I'm thinking, okay, five, 10,000. I would better to pay one month of salary to develop a perinlistvania than to raise this money for my comfort and I was like, take this money and put this money to product. It's my philosophy that product defines everything. I don't think I've ever had a CEO like you on the show. (laughs) We honestly, you are one of the most humble people I've ever had on the show and I've done 10 years of the show. Do you think there's ever a point where that holds you back? You know, flow is a massive brand now. People care about the flow brand. Do you think that the hesitation spent money on billboards, brand, marketing is gonna hold you back? Maybe but many ways to be successful. It's a very simplistic way of thinking that there is manual how to run a company like and page 100, do that, page 110, do that. If you look on history of any company or any CEO, you would see that everything is so nuanced, everything is so unique, every journey is so unique and nothing you may say like you should do that and you shouldn't do that. Like you just understand this, you should understand your strengths, you should understand your way, you should not do something natural, not natural for you. And but then like the thousands of ways to be successful and you just should choose your way to be successful and make your company successful. One big piece of advice that's often given in startups to me, tree is speed is everything and you've got to move really fast and that's the secret success in the early days. Do you agree with that? I would say that the most significant early days is not to die too early because usually you need to iterate several times to find something that works. And, And if you increase speed, but you waste your resources on the way, probably it's a bad advice. If you combine your speed with the right, spending enough resources and you just have your one million and it's enough to make three, four, five iterations rather than one, then speed is the right word. But I would not say that it's about speed. It's about right distribution of resources to have several chances for success. I completely agree. It's about the number of at-bats you have. That means that you need to raise in often cases, we consume quite a large seed round. How big was your seed round? 300,000, 12,000 was 3 million. But remember, a company was in Bill recent, it was 10 years ago. Like it's everything was much cheaper. But you might believe that it's extremely good 300,000 at 3 million. Yeah, yeah. And company now costs more than one billion. It means that it's 300,000 to this investment if I'm calculating. Well, oh my God. Wow. Take me to that. How is the seed round? I think it was more kind of, they just decided to invest to us because we had successful success before these apps. And it was not like I saw big belief in our idea, but more believe that this guy will figure out something because they had success before. And I think they had arguments because it was so controlling idea. But probably it was the best or one of the best investment for the fountain. He started the fund. You're like a seed round investor or really station investors. You just need one investment like that in your life. And you're done. You'll be rich. Yeah. That's the business model of Van Schikapel, the major. That's why it's a very good business. It's one of the only businesses in the world where you can do a hundred things and mess up 99 of them. Can you imagine if I told you you can do 99 versions of flow and 99 can be 98 be shit. Oh, one's good. But it's a to the question, what is the most required trait of the founder and my personal opinion that founder must be crazy because if you're smart and you may understand your odds, why would you decide to start something with chances of success like one, two, three, four, five percent like it's better to play lottery like smart people. They work in McKinsey and founders are crazy because it's not rational. It's you're just crazy. Like you can't justify that by any rational thinking, why would you do something with lots of success in one person? I worry that that is no longer the case. I agree. Crazy and obsessed. I'm not too dissimilar to you in these ways. I'm crazy and obsessed. I could have been a lawyer and paid very happily and instead I decided to a podcast which made no money. But I love what we do. My worry is there's so much money in venture capital that if you're smart enough, you can be a founder, play the founder game, play startups, get paid quite well and try it. It's a free option. We didn't have such a luxury in our days because but do you what do you see what I mean? Do you worry that it's the same now where we don't have crazy founders like you? I think times have come back. It means it was a period of time between approximately 2019 to 2022 when it was true but nowadays it's quite difficult to risk capital, it's quite difficult. It's again the same. Was there ever an easy round to raise? No, it's never easy. But your numbers were so good. I saw your numbers in Sansa Tower. I tweeted about our show and I got all of these data providers and me on numbers and they are consistently great because venture capital investment is the fault no game and you may be very good but in any case you will get 100 notes to get one yes and what's the most difficult for founders is that he being this mindset when you're every day you're getting no no no no no and it's sole breaking. It's really difficult even layoffs are simpler because layoffs is like a computation cut and you're just in your three weeks and you continue your work but fundraising is like just like it's a each day you're getting no no no no no no and you're starting to lose your belief in yourself and you're starting to feel that maybe I'm not not a right person. Did you lose belief in yourself? I had moments when I adopted that maybe we are doing something wrong and maybe I'm not a right person and for me fundraising was all the much more difficult because of my origins my accent and because I'm kind of not a kind of right profile and I was pretty weird type for investors. It made my job of fundraising much more difficult. Do you think that made your job much more difficult? Do you think respectfully if you sounded like me as we said Lou not toilet? Do you think that would have been easier? Much easier. Because investors they especially in big funds you usually start your conversation not with partners or mentioned partners but with analysts or with principles and these people usually have profile kind of gradiated and Harvard and being stepped forward. We did it in Stanford and being Harvard and they believe in people like them and they don't believe in people like me and it's really difficult to bridge this barrier of this elite because they really kind of sort you out and and I understand like there's like a lot of money talking about this problem that mean it's so difficult minorities of any kind raised and I might say that it's the true it's true because you just sorted out at this level of right people so I'm really getting trouble for this. I think you are much less fundable than a minority woman from Stanford. Of course, of course. And it's easier nowadays when we have proven that our product is main-tizable and we may achieve success but it was really difficult at the beginning when I had combination of my kind of weird personality and all the combination of disbelief in our model in our product because we didn't have benchmarks to show that I look like this success and we will make the same success because it was first product of such kind and nobody believes that it's possible to build something monetizable or successful. I wish we met when you were fundraising below a billion dollars. My question to you is okay so then we start monetization. That's a new game. We've got proof that we can make money now. We've proved that we've got users who love it. How did monetization go? We turn it on. How did they go? Maintization is interesting because I'm coming back to our discussion about Brent and PR. Our big mistake at the very beginning was belief that it's enough to create value and people would buy. But then we started to understand that although we need to sell, we need to explain product, we need to experiment. We started to do that and just one number. A conversion to premium on unbording increased in several years eight times, 800% because of optimization, because of hundreds of AB tests and because of this approach that we should not just create value. We need to explain value. We need to sell and it was huge, huge shift in mindset in the company because before that, it's significant is just to create the best product and people you'll see and buy. No, no. You also should explain why they should buy. Even Apple spent much resources to explain that. You're not like arriving to shop and you're getting your iPhone in gray box. It should be beautiful. It should be very attractive and the same with monetization. It's a balance between value and how you sell this value and you should find proper balance between that. You may be too focused on selling, like overpromise or you may be like us. We did at the beginning, you may create value but you may undersell and everything should be right. It should be right balance. I think you consistently undersell. I spoke to many of your investors and they said that you're the best founder but you undersell yourself consistently. When you think about how to sell value and you produce value and then that's how to sell it, what did you learn about how to sell value through the monetization process? First question about this comment that I can sell myself. I think it's pretty natural because of my imposter syndrome and inferiority complex and I'm not even playing. It's my pretty natural state but although I think it's my superpower because I'm always so insecure about my position, position of the company that I'm always trying to do my job the best because I never feel comfortable. And it's my pretty natural state and I believe that big part of my success is just because of my impostor syndrome. And it's like strange weight you get your superpower but it's what is true. Has that got better with time? The flow now does 200 million in revenue. It is worth over a billion dollars. Do you have less impostor syndrome? No. No. No. Absolutely the same. I would even say that I'm getting more excited because now my responsibilities are even bigger. For me this round was kind of you may imagine that this like a sport when you're jumping like through the bar and when you're progressing you put your bar high and high. And one moment my bar became one meter high and I look on this bar and it's boring. Like a good I jump so high. I couldn't I at least I will make the best of them. I love it. It's just so right. We interview a lot of American founders to meet you and the humility that you have is not shared by a lot of them. What was the biggest challenges then as you started to scale monetization? What really became tough? What really changed what we didn't understand when we started monetization seven years ago that happy to pay off people for subscription is a change because when we started monetization our dream was maybe we would mean to increase five percent of American audience because that time it was quite a bar. Now we maintain it maybe if you exclude teenagers 25 30 percent of our American audience and we don't see that our monetization is slowing down but it's not just because the product is becoming better it's true it's not just because of our experimentation it's also because people accepted the idea to pay for subscriptions and it was huge cultural change and without that it would be impossible. Cultural shift. Did you test pricing a lot? I know what a day to driven culture you have. When you look at the pricing that you have what are your biggest lessons that you have from pricing? The biggest lesson from pricing that you should not make your decision just based on price you should understand the full funnel because you may increase your price but you would decrease retention or activation or you would destroy your user acquisition and then your ultimate revenue would be small. It means that ultimately you should decide based on top line and bottom line in your panel and optimize for that and then all this internal parameters you should look on them together because you should optimize the function of many variables if you talk about mathematics because it's not just about optimizing of price it's about optimizing of five six variables simultaneously and you should optimize them to find like the best combination when you're getting the most revenue from your product. And on the premium versus premium split what have been some big lessons in how to provide enough value in premium where they retain and they love your product but also keep enough value in premium where they're willing to pay for it and make that transition. Just experimentation. Usually we decide that based on experiments when we're creating something and they decide and they make it for put behind paywall we are testing to see how it would influence revenue but also how it would influence retention and for us it always balance of two metrics and we would never accept experiment which would increase revenue a lot but although which would destroy retention and it's a combination of these two metrics. The best is like when retention is the same but revenue is growing. So when did we know monetization was working? When did you look at it and go okay we've got to get machine here. So of subscription monetization the most significant is retention because if you are very good in selling you may convince people to pay for almost anything but much more tricky is that she provides so good service and they would continue paying retention should be good and it's the main sign of success of this model but this business model I believe is the best model she create good product because your incentives are aligned with user because user pay just when you create long term value and it motivates you to create long term value because if for example you monetize your product I don't know by one time payment then you would optimize for conversion. If you monetize your product by advertising probably you would try to increase engagement as possible what we see in media but in case of subscription you are really optimized for value because your model works the chance when users stay and continue to pay for years or it would be just a trade mill and you would exhaust growth very very fast. So we have that monetization engine working how long did it take to get to a million in revenue? Millen? Millen is very simple. Millen is very simple like 100 millions much more difficult. Millen is very very simple. How long did it take to get to 100 million revenue? Four years maybe. Wow. But we had the substantial audience when we started monetization because we started monetization in 2018 and product existed for three years. How many users did you have when you started that monetization journey? Maybe 15, 20 million. Wow. One selectifers. That's incredible. Is there anything that you do differently about how you launched monetization now you know everything that you do? I would do that much early because start of monetization unlocked for us flywheel of value creation and it's very simple. When you start monetization you are getting revenue and you may use this revenue to build product or to raise big around and then you create better product and flywheel starts to work but then you invest more and more and more and distance between you and competitors is getting bigger and bigger. When you do have monetization you should be very scrappy and development is very frugal and development is very slow. I completely hear you on retention being so important to any consumer. My question to you is, but me given the use case being periods it's probably one of the only use cases in consumer that is literally you can't avoid it. Anything from my eating, you can fast, you can gym, you can not go to the gym. Is this a one-off case that can't be replicated? In health and fitness it's difficult to find cases with good retention. There are some cases for example variable devices. They have very good retention just because you have physically them and have you thought about doing devices? No, no, no, no, no. Because you always should be focused. You always should be focused. Once I got a very good lesson from Vinod Hostler, like founder of Hostler Ventures, many years ago. And that moment our company was big enough and we had many ideas about how to build our product and many ideas for monetization. Because audience was big and I was patient to him describing it. We were doing that and that and that. At the end of my pitch I asked him, Vinod, you ever experienced, could you give me just one advice but like the most valuable, you think for me? He said, "Yan, mine. Business and product building is very similar to your marriage. You have many opportunities before your marriage. But to be happy you should choose one and really focus. And my advice to you, choose one business model and be really focused. And I learned this lesson and I was very focused since and I had a huge resistance to all proposals to take any other opportunities." I love that and Vinod's fantastic. My question to you is, does the super app not go against focus? Because with the super at-mentarity you are building multiple products in the same time, simultaneously, versus purely focusing on one product at a time. And they paradoxical. Yeah, for some extent. But you may solve this problem by org structure. You may create teams which solely focused on own part of the product and for them with the single product. And they have full focus on this product. And in our company each team has own part of product to own. Then you have like a difficulty to combine all the parts to the single experience and it's not easy, it's very challenging. But it's the way how to have focus in the case of a super app. What have been the biggest lessons in how to create that synchronicity between the different parts? It's extremely difficult. We still struggle. Is that the biggest weakness that you have today, do you think? I think it's really significant that she saves simplicity of our product because each year we have deep research of our user base. What's the most significant for them in our product? And for seven or eight years in a row, the most popular answer is simplicity. And the biggest mistake we might do is that she destroys this simplicity because it's the essence of our success and it's the essence of success for any product. And it's really difficult to have simplicity when you have so many features and when you have this concept of super app. It is. It's one of the hardest things. It's how do you prevent feature creep with time and stay simpler over time. Do we have that success with monetization? Now we get to the series A and B. How was it? the series A and B's. It was always difficult. And did you enjoy the meetings or not, Rene? No, because you need to meet hundreds of investors and repeat the same. And at some moment it's just boring. Like you just repeat in the same, the same again, again, again, again, it's just boring. Was there one or two that stood out? I'm not trying to flutter them, but really impressed by General Atlantic. And at the end of this process we had five bidders. And I had really big hope that General Atlantic would not provide a bad term shot because they showed so much bad understanding of our business model and showed so deep approach then they really impressed me by the depths of work. And I'm really happy by this outcome. I'm not even fluttering. It's not my nature, but I was kind of praying that I should impress you so much. Firstly, they had very deep understanding of our business model because of previous investment to Dueling and just com or unsimilar companies. And it's really rare to see investors with deep understanding of consumer subscriptions because they're not so many successful consumer subscriptions and just several public companies based on this business model. And most investors, they just don't understand this business model. They confuse it with SARS. And they make very wrong conclusions because of that. And General Atlantic, what are the wrong conclusions I would make comparing SARS? You may apply the idea that retention should be very high because if you lose your customer, you lose it forever. And it's the fact for B2B, but it's not the fact for B2C because in B2C in case of consumer face snaps, customers come, customers go, customers come back, customers go, we already have maybe 40% of installs from users who use DAW app previously. And because of that, you should analyze not like retention itself, but retention of revenue, for example, you should analyze how cohort behave in time and what you're, what rating you are getting because of this behavior that people are coming back and force, they stop the subscription, they start the subscription and you just can't apply this very simplistic logic of business as that if people pay and then the channel they will never come back or they will never start paying again. It means that logic in analysis for retention should be very different. Do you think the consumer multiple hit that happens with consumer revenue is fair? So if we look at say, let it flow, 200 million at a billion, that's a 5X, that is much lower than traditional enterprise software companies would be afforded. It's sad to admit that I'm invested in a SaaS business that is 7 million in ARR and valued at 1.3 billion. - I think for current market, we may check this number, but average multiple year revenue for public SaaS at this moment is close to eight and it was five last year and it was third or so in 2021. It means that it's declined five or six times as well. It means that. - I think that's right. - It's market. It's a market is. But I do think we under appreciate consumer revenue. - In a rational world, you can't have in 2021, multiple 3040 and in 2022, multiple five for the same company. Like it's a market is not rational, it's a market, but market is a brilliant statement, which is that market can stay irrational longer than your company can stay solvent. - Yeah, yeah. It's a. Because of that, like even kind of conversation about what's fair price is useless because markets are irrational. Nassiness rational, there's like a few years difference between two events and in one event, this company costs third year revenues and in other event, five revenues. I understand, you may understand, crisis, you may understand that rate was two percent higher to percent lower, but it's not like a reason why company would cost like five or six times higher or lower. It means that it's just a reflection that markets are very irrational and prices irrational as well. And again, it's a question when you're making justification of future value of the company based on current market multiples, are you trying to lie to yourself or so? Because who knows if markets change their dynamic five times in two years? - Do you think in five years time we'll have five plus 10 billion dollar consumer subscription companies? We have two a link a day, which is kind of 9, 9, half I believe. - Maybe today 10, I need to check yesterday it was almost 10. - Okay, so let's give it a 10, let's say we give it a 10. But that's kind of it. - We will have them because this business model is growing and you may just check numbers of Apple and you may see that Apple got from consumer subscription in 2017 and or five billion and it's projected that we will get maybe 100 billion or so next year. The model is growing and because model is growing then we'll have huge companies. - Do you think VC is provide value? - Of course. - What value do you think we provide? - We have one. I'm not, maybe I may share because he joked in Twitter we have a like Elystage investor Nikita Biel, very nice product. - You have a big interest in investing. - Yeah, like a small investor but he invested really. He joked recently the single role of investor is that he outrage entrepreneur and then entrepreneur have the full energy to prove investors that he's wrong. And so of course it's a joke but this is partly true. But I would say that a good investor may create ton of value by proper work in the board and good board brings ton of value and the biggest value from the board that you just accountable. And you have moments of truth like board meetings when you need to make proper refraction, prepare proper materials and explain fuchsia, explain past and without board meetings you would never have patience or energy to do that. But when you have such moments of reflection then your business is getting better because you're just reflecting all the time. And good investors, they've been part of the board, they may provide good advice, they may make you better. It's almost kind of if you have like a like coach, like what's the difference between having a coach or visiting gym by yourself? - Accountability. - Accountability. Accountability is a really significant success. - What do annoying VCs do? I want to be the best VC. We joke about me being a VC in my ninth year. But I want to be the best VC and I can't passion about that. If you were to advise me, Harry, I've met hundreds of VCs. You said no, don't do these things. What would those things be? - If you meet like a first-time entrepreneur, start your beach from explaining that it's normal and it's the fault play for VCs to say no and it's nothing personal. And you should just like understand the rules of games and just like put on your wall, I will get 100 nodes and each time you get a node, put like just one line. And you should be very, very, you should understand the rules of the game and it should not be like a person for you because you should say no. - When you get nose, I get nose, I fundraise to you for my funds. - When I get a no, I'm gonna prove you fucking wrong. It's very, very significant driving force for success in the case of many people. - It's a big. - For some extent, it was more significant for me at the beginning because at the beginning, all people around were so skeptical about our business and ideas and not just investors and I had this bitterness all the time that I didn't have any understanding of our vision and any support. And then when we proved that our ideas are worse and this is a good sustainable business then it became easy. - Do you feel vindicated now for everyone who didn't believe in you? Do you feel? - No, because I'm just trying to look like being just like a orational like some like a weird fall from dollars starting to be a traker and promising that it will become unique and there are no examples of that and why would you believe in that? Like nobody who is rational would believe in that. It was now it's so evident but at that moment it was pretty rational not to believe. - I get you, it's just sad. Our job is to believe in the outliers. It's to believe the best in people. That's how I view our job. - Right. - The main job of a Elystation Vester to distinguish cases with 100% of fail with 99% of fail and cases with small potential and big potential outcome and you should find cases when fail is not 100% guaranteed and potential outcome is big. And it means that for you it's the most significant is she understands that the team is not stupid. They know what they do and by that you would reduce your chances of fail from 99% to 95%. But then market should be big because it's impossible to get this proportional outcome from small market. Take this. market. You have a huge market. I spent Jesse at GA before this. She said, "Ask him how does Fly give me one billion dollar company to a ten billion dollar company?" I might answer this question just using benchmarks, for example. What's the difference between flow and doling? Partially, it's a. It's color-fraining. We have 200 millions. They have 600 million and it's achievable in several years for us to be in the range of 600 million. We have approximately the same. Why is that mouthful so much better than yours? Because it's a public company which simultaneously is growing very fast, top line and bottom line. They have simultaneously 40-50% of top line growth and they have very nice profitability growth. And it's extremely rare to see such companies as a public company. It's like just old rule of 40. And you rarely see rule of 40, 50, 60 at the public markets. And all the people believe that they still have good potential for expansion because there are so many learners of foreign language in the world. I think the combination of these two factors, but I think mostly it's just because the combination of 40% top line growth and the 20th and the growth of. The proportional growth of profitability is so rare. And it means that if you want to cost 10 billion, we probably should achieve 600 million in revenue and then show profitability and continue growing with the same pace. Can I invest now? Oh, no, it's difficult. My job is to be a VC, to me, to be sure it's going to be worth a try, right? Can I ask you a bit of a weird one on your leadership? Do you think you're a good CEO and how have you changed as a leader over time? I have a nice story for you. When I was in Stanford Business School, we had one lesson with famous professor of management. He did the next exercise. He started to ask people in the room, what is the necessary trait of good CEO? And people started to say, "Oh, this good CEO should be knowledgeable. Good CEO should have integrity. Good CEO should provide inspiration." And maybe in 20 minutes, like whiteboard was covered by different traits of good CEO. And then this professor looked on this whiteboard and said, "Probably even Jesus Christ was worse." It means that. It means in this lesson that people, they are making kind of glorification of CEO. That CEO should be perfect. They should be almost kind of gods. But CEO is just like the same people. And they can't be so perfect if people think they should be. You should just understand your weaknesses, your strengths. You should understand why you're useful and you should just make your proper work as good as you can. What is your biggest strength? What is your biggest weakness? The biggest strength that I may analyze, I may make like a rather good conclusions in a very simple manner. It means that people, they need clarity and simplicity. And I think I may provide clarity and simplicity. I'm not overwhelmed by information. I may take much of information on myself. But then I provide to them a solution, decision, description in a very simple form. And they understand and believe and follow. And my main weakness, sometimes I may be too slow for change. The biggest events in my life happened when the life burnt my bridges. But now I understand that I should have burnt my bridges by myself. For example, I started to make apps, very significant reason was that because it was crisis of 2008 in the book publishing was an terrible situation. I started to focus just on flow because my old portfolio declined because of a political situation in the region. And when everything was good, I was just delaying necessary change. And I was just waiting this crisis like for life to burn my bridges. And then like when necessary change happened, then I started to move. I'm fascinated on this one. You've been very successful over the last 10 years. What is money meant to you to meet me? Honestly, not so much because I have rather humble lifestyle. Honestly, I despise luxurious brands. I despise luxury. I even don't have car and I don't have any expensive item. I don't have anything to be branded or luxurious. I don't need business classes or private jets. I would want to have interesting and meaningful life and feel that I'm useful. And honestly, I never think about my personal money. I'm absolutely honest here, like never. Because I have so little need for myself that it's not even a kind of motivation for me. I'm very motivated by the story of founder of Generatlantic. Shakflini, do you know this story? No, please tell me. Generatlantic was started by a man who, even like a huge fortune, by duty free shops. I started in duty free shops. And because of this venture and because of Generatlantic, he earned billions, nine billion or something like that. And then secretly he distributed all his money for charity, absolutely secretly, nobody know. And he died two years ago and then the story became public that he just gifted away in his lifetime all his money and without any proud, because I was sharing to anybody absolutely secretly. And it's the best example for me how you should live your life. You should create something valuable commercially. But then it's your duty to return this money for society and to do that very efficiently. And I believe that if you're really successful, second part of your life should be not to earn money, but to spend your money for the sake of society. And I believe that it's a huge sin to pass billions to your children. Have you always been this good? That you are objectively one of the kindest humans I've had on the show. That shows like this, and why I love doing what I do. I didn't expect this type of show. Have you always been like this? Or has it come over time? I just go do it. But because of many, many, many problems and pains I had in my life. I have a little regret about my professional life and my biggest regret that when I was young, when I was less sensitive, I fart several people without decency, means in root form. And it was maybe 10, 15 years ago. And I still feel guilty because of that 10 years after. Just because you feel empathy, you should get pain by yourself. And then you start to feel pain of other people. And it's just like a trait of age and a trait of a difficult journey. I was not like that when I was young. You also work with your brother, Eerie. Not many people know this, but my work with my brother. He's sitting upstairs now. I love it. But everyone says don't work with family. What's your biggest advice to me on how to make it work so successfully with your brother? Again, I repeat my advice. Never take general advice. General advice is always bullshit. And everything is nuanced. I worked with my brother for 30 years or so if he start considering like how I work from mushroom gathering or potato field work. And we always work together in book publishing in all our adventures. And I remember that our first boss in publishing house and it was 2005 or so we work together in publishing house. We were responsible for computer literature. He said that you should always work together because you're so different. And when you combine your personalities, it's almost perfect because Eerie is good to make a pass and you're good to make a road. And you understand that time maybe too slow in deciding something, maybe in decisive, but then when I start doing something, I'm doing that perfectly. And Eerie is the opposite. He's kind of a D-generator, his venture driver, but he's not an operational person altogether. But when this combination is almost perfect and it works really well. But although I have worked all my life is my life. I married very early. How old were you when you come out? 21. Wow. 20 years ago. She was a student in the same group in university. And she had my trust because I was a very bad student because I was working and she was helping me with advice from to visit university and with different home tasks. And she was my friend at the moment. And we started working together. And again, we have been working together for 20 years. She was responsible for content in flow. I had the beginning of flow and she's now my executive assistant. And we spent together working together 20 years and very successfully. Your wife is your E.A. Yeah. How is that? That must be hard. No, it's very effective because we may decide what to do. do what not to do at the breakfast. That is amazing. I absolutely love that. Yeah, there's no way that I would work with me. Are you a wartime leader or a peacetime leader, do you think? I was pretty effective in both modes because I have one trait. Like, you know, there's a lot of rough for types of people based on level of negative and positive emotions. Like, people who have low emotions in case of bad situation and like slow, low, high, high, low, high, low, like, like, it depends on your emotions high or low in case of problems and in case of excitement. For example, if you have a huge excitement, but also like a huge stress in case of problems, probably, it's difficult to be a CEO. And my advantage that I'm kind of low, low personality. It means that I never feel too much excitement, but also I never feel too much stress. And because of that, I'm just in case of all our calamities, I was very, very calm and I didn't have much stress. I just played my duty. What was the biggest calamity, do you think? When you look back now, what was the, oh, that was hard. This moment when political instability in Belarusians were in Ukraine and we had she relocate urgently the whole company and all the I had she relocate myself into a few days. I spent 38 years in Belarus and I built my life there. I had like my house, my gardens and I spent many years to grow my gardens and then I had to make decisions to move out of Belarus into days and I have never come back. And then the same decision, most of our people had to make and it was really difficult. Could you imagine that you have built all your life in countries and in today's you must move to another country with your family and it was really difficult and traumatized me and our people a lot. I can't imagine that one. I also can't imagine having to move 100+ people which you had today. I believe even more. I believe that when we started in 22, we had 70% of our employees in Belarus. It was more than 200 and 90% of them were relocated with families in several days. How is that process? It was really difficult because borders were closed. It was impossible to get papers and we had to organize no flights and we had to organize charteres to Armenia and that year can then organize the ordinary charges. Yeah, because we didn't have flights and it was impossible to make flights to Europe because all flights were prohibited from the region. Did the company suffer in any way? Of course, for half an year we didn't have any progress with our product because all people were so stressed and defocused by moving families and it was a huge, huge destruction and it was very expensive as well. How much did it cost? My name is Irons. It's very expensive but it was significant to do because the company, the satire company and it's about people and this company would not exist without people. Also it was our responsibility to provide the support to our people because it was quite big chance that the Belarus would engage to the war and it would mean that men would be drafted and borders would be closed and it was a real risk for life for men and we had to organize this process. What did you learn about managing teams and people through this process? Trust is the most significant thing. Trust you. You should be a really trustable person or a company. You can win 90% of your employees. You take family and belong in some today and you move to another country. You should be really trustful for that. My question to you is when your mother is your brother. You guys have achieved such success and you look back to the potato farms and the mushroom picking. What did she say? She's a special, emotional, but she must be proud. She has never said that. Would you like her to? I don't think it would be natural for her. I like you so much. This has been so much fun. I'm going to do a quick far round. I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. That's not okay. What do you believe that most around you disbelief? I don't believe in talent. I believe that all people are approximately the same. We have the same processor. What makes people different is just hours of hard work, hard focused work. When people say to me that I can't accomplish something, I ask a very simple question. How many hours of hard work have you spent for that? If it's not about a thousand times, but why do you think you should achieve something without a thousand hours of hard work? Either I think smartness is good and needs to do it. I have brains. There are always extremes, but most of the people they have plus, minus the same brain. Believe me, I know many billionaires, many successful entrepreneurs, not just entrepreneurs, and I have no syngenesis. But I believe that what really distinguishes successful people and people who are not successful, beyond just luck, luck is really significant. Is the ability to take risk and then work really, really hard and persistent for a long time? Most of people just can't work really hard for a long time, and it's what distinguishes successful people and less successful people. Most people don't have discipline, which is you need to not go out and drink with your friends at the end of the day and go back and work. You need to come back after the 98th know and pitch for the 91st time. For me, the hardest time in my life was when I was in university, but also I was writing my books at nights. I usually was working for 18 hours per day for years and was sleeping just six hours or so and four years. But then I achieved a lot because of that. And I have very interesting story about my books. Sometimes you need to see many things in prospects and you need to put many dots on the map of your life. In 2004, I wrote a big book about ActionScript. It's a program language of Mokramidia Flash. And that time I didn't even match from that, but approximately next year in 2005, this book was gifted to one young boy. He was maybe 12 years old, but his brother said, "If you learn programming from this book, you will become a big person." He learned programming from this book. He started to practice Flash programming. Then, 10 years after, 15 years after, he became a founder of MSQRD. He sold to Facebook. Then he used part of this money to finance flow. It means that if I didn't throw this book in 2004, then probably he would not learn programming. And MSQRD would not happen. And then a flow would not have money to be financed. But distance between these two events was more than 10 years. And in your life, you were often just need much time to see how all lines will be connected. But you have dots to be connected. You need to have dots. You need to do something. You need to move forward. What's the idea you most admire? Am I then? I'm against globalization and of COS and making them heroes. And I even don't like glass door, when glass door put like a rating of COS. Because I believe that when companies are not even big, it's much more teamwork. And CO is just a role. People are just people. I always recommend not to read a book like how to be a great CO. Like you have in your book library, but it's a bit biographies about COS, about business. And you would see that even Steve Jobs, he made probably 90% of mistakes in all his decisions and many, many stupid mistakes. And he was not good altogether. Maybe the single common trade between all successful heroes I may found is decisiveness. You should make decisions. And because when you make decisions, you move forward. Even if decisions when decisions are stupid, you are moving forward and you're getting new information and the next decision will be better. The worst is just this. Another is parallel. Parallel is not making any decisions. One of my closest mentors, that's me the other day, the heaviest things in life are not iron or gold, but unmade decisions. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes people they kind of they're trying to find like a perfect solution, but the truth of life, that nobody knows future and nobody might make like a perfect decision just based on information or analysis because if it were the case then macchains or banks would be perfect business creators. But like you can't see any currents which were created by macchains or banks. Why? Because of unpredictability of the future. And if the future is unpredictable, then what's the best? Just make any decision and move forward. Just not stay at the place. Besides something and move forward. What have you changed your mind on over the last 12 months? I was much more optimistic about time which would be necessary for a generative AI to make impact on businesses. And because maybe two, maybe two or three years after the beginning of this hype, I still don't see many examples of real business success based on generative AI. Maybe something in programming, maybe something in support, but it's like rather tiny. We can't say that there is any big case, any big business which changed business model or got profitability or growth because of generative AI. And I had hope that the change would happen much faster. Who do you not have on the board? You would most like to have on your board. Let's say million decades because probably million decades is a person who is doing nowadays the most female health. Does it have to when people criticize a male CEO of flow? I understand the like why is that criticizing? Although I feel that our success was so beneficial for the industry because you are we see and you know that we see making decisions based on benchmarks. And now like all we see is this will start believing that it's possible to have a great success in this industry and all founders will have much easier journey than I had. I'm not trying to do the best for this company and I think I was rather good in that. But although I would want of course to see that more women are becoming very successful in this journey. Final one Dimitri, what question are you not often asked that you should be asked more? Would you want to eat something tasty? I'll roll with it. Dimitri I was really looking forward to this one because I love the business. I didn't know how you were going to be respectfully. You've been fantastic. Like you are funny, you are direct. Thank you for being so brilliant and I really have loved this. Thank you very much. I mean what an amazing story Dimitri is probably one of the most humble and kind CEOs I've ever had the opportunity to have on the show. I absolutely love that discussion and you can watch it. We recorded it in person in the studio in London. You can check that out on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC. But before we leave you today, when a promising startup files for an IPO or a venture capital firm loses its marquee partner, being the first to know gives you an advantage and time to plan your strategic response. Chances are the information reported it first. With a subscription, you will join an elite community that includes leaders from the top VC firms, CEOs from Fortune 500 companies and esteemed banking and investment professionals. In addition to mastery journalism in your inbox every day, you'll engage with fellow leaders in the active discussions or in person at exclusive events. Learn more and access a special offer for 20VC's listeners at www.theeinformation.com/deals/20VC. And speaking of incredible products that allows your team to do more, we need to talk about secure frame. 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Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Coole has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 60+ years working with VCs. We use them at 20 VCs and have loved working with their teams in the US, London and Asia over the last few years. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VCs backed companies going public, head over to Coole.com and also Coolego.com. Coole's award-winning free legal resource for entrepreneurs. As always I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming this Wednesday.