Building a Breakout Consumer Brand: Gyve Safavi, Co-Founder & CEO of SURI, on Product, Margins and Scaling

Hello and welcome to another episode of Riding Unicorns. Today we're delighted to be joined by Giv Safavi, co-founder and CEO at Surrey, the award-winning electric toothbrush company. So Giv, thank you so much for joining. Your journey spans across different little industries before you got into building Surrey. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit about that journey in the lead up to starting the company. Sure. James, first, thanks so much for having me. Really great to be on the show. Huge fan. Yeah. So I started my career first in fast-moving consumer goods. I worked at a company called Procter & Gamble for about eight years. Started in financial planning, and then I moved to marketing. Last on the Gillette business, I was brand manager for Venus for a year, released in Africa. And then I moved after that to a company called Dyke PP, a large advertising holding company. I was recruited to work with the founder and CEO at the time, a man named Martin Sorrell, where I worked with him in a business development capacity and an aid to the company. And then I worked with him in a business development capacity and an aid to the company. And then I worked with him in a business development capacity for about three years, learned how to walk through walls. That was quite a great experience. And then I moved to a company called Mirama Ventures, where I worked on startups that they were acquiring. One was a beauty startup that I spent quite a long time on called Showcase Beauty, helping turn them around, make them scale better and be more profitable. That's where I probably got my first dose of startup life. I think as the saying goes, once you try it, you can't get enough. And so after that, I took some time off, but then went quick into building Surrey. Awesome. And we've had Sir Martin on the podcast twice, actually. He is a former Riding Unicorns guest as well. So it's full circle, lovely stuff. And then the common misconception of Surrey is that it's just a beautiful toothbrush, which is obviously a great thing to be known for. But as the business owner, you want to presumably tell us a little bit more about the actual detail and intricacies around what made Surrey a success rather than just relying on this wonderful design, which it obviously is. Oh, well, thank you for that. I still love to hear that, too, as well. But I will say when we were starting out, there was a lot more that went into it beyond the design. So our ethos was, could we make exceptional products that delivered a great clean, so delivered on performance, elevated from a design point of view, and then more sustainable at the same time? So three core values: great design experience, meaning you enjoy holding the product, using it every day. Often, the toothbrush thing is a forgotten ritual. We do it twice a day. Before I started Surrey, I actually had never heard anybody say, "I love brushing my teeth," a very rare and awkward thing to say. But also, when you then looked at the category itself, there weren't many devices that had exceptional design that you would fall in love with. So for us, design was very important. I'm not going to deny that, but we knew we needed to match it on performance as our second core value, really delivering a product which is table stakes in our category. If you don't clean teeth well, then what are you doing in the category? Do something else. So we knew we needed to deliver a great, exceptional clean, and so that was where a lot of work went into. How do we get a slim design, still have a high-powered motor? Nobody at the time, and I still don't think today, had slim brushes that had high-powered motors in there. So there was a lot of design work that needed to go into getting a strong, sonic clean in the form factor. And then the last but not least value was sustainability. We openly say on our website, we are not the most sustainable business on the planet. That's a fact. For us, it's about pushing boundaries and considering it at every stage of the journey. Can we use an alternative material? Can we offer a recycling take-back program for our customers' heads? Can we use alternative packaging? Can we offset our carbon emissions? How do we consider sustainability at every step of the journey when we innovate and run our business? There are many businesses that often champion one of those values. Maybe it's performance, we're the best at this performance angle, but they kind of let design and sustainability fall by the wayside. Or they're very sustainable, but the performance is not very good without using explicatives. Or they're design and they're kind of just heroes, lives on design, but nobody really wants to use the product because it doesn't deliver. So for us, it was about championing those core values and delivering a product that could delight people and delivering on all three values. Yeah, awesome. And the things that really matter in consumer product startups is getting your margins right, getting your distribution right, and obviously team and things like that. But margins and distribution, those seem to be the absolute pillars of building a successful company. The early stage around margins is really challenging. When you add in an extra complexity of, you know, we want it to be sustainable as well, you know, you're not helping yourself. You're probably making things a little bit harder. So how did you get that balance right of getting the right products, the right margins with that sustainability angle? And how much work was it to kind of find all the right bits to make that work? So margin, you're absolutely right. Like, I think that's one of the reasons why startups like top 10 reasons is like margin structure doesn't work. And you know, for the venture capitalists that listened to the show, we had quite a few tell us like, free recycling, you must be crazy, how you gonna make that payout? And they were right, it's harder, but it wasn't impossible. Fortunately, we had a lot of people that were like, yeah, we're gonna make that payout. And they were like, yeah, we're gonna make that payout. And fortunately, I did work for quite a few people in finance managers that helped cut my teeth, including Martin Sorrell, on helping me understand margin well and underlying costs. And so we set a high target gross margin for our business from day one, because we knew that we needed to be able to maintain that. But I think what often happens is, people don't know what is the sort of price they can sell their product at. And it often is a function of does it deliver on the consumer benefit? Are the intangibles of design, making people feel like it's worth it. And so we did a lot of consumer surveys that helped us understand what price we could sell at and based on our design. And then it was a race to get the best cogs to enable that price point, to hit a margin that could enable us to do the things that we wanted to do with the materials and the recycling program. And so the research, you know, we did pricing tests. I'm gonna butcher the name. I think it's Weissman or Weissman, but there's sort of four key pricing questions that you ask. We use SurveyMonkey. We couldn't afford really expensive survey platforms, but with 100 quid, we got 500 responses in like an hour. And so we were able to put up a concept slide with rough sketch of what we were trying to do. Ask a bunch of preliminary questions like, do you brush your teeth twice a day? Yes, I do. Great. Part of the panel. And then we, we asked these four pricing questions, which may be useful for anybody looking to launch a product, which is one at what price do you think this is so cheap? You wouldn't consider it. Okay. And what price do you think this is so expensive that you wouldn't consider it? It's just way too expensive. 500 pounds is not gonna do it. And then at what price do you think it's not too expensive, but you'd have to do more research, right? You'd have to look into it, see do people like it. And then the last one is at what price do you think this could be a bargain? Like you think this would be a really great value and you get people answer these four questions. And when enough people answer them, you get these four curves of kind of that sweet spot of like what I could list at what I should be at sale at. And that, that general sort of space is where you should probably put your product price to start with. And then the rest is obviously testing and learning. That is probably the best answer we've ever had on how to price your product on over 250 episodes. That is quite absolute gold. Thank you so much for sharing that. And then as an investor, we see consumer companies the whole time and a lot of them will start with not great margins, but the promise is that they will get better with economies of scale. And then in the tech world, we often see high CAC and they sort of say, well, it's CAC will come down, but actually often it goes the other way. And so I'd love to hear your experience. How has economies of scale impacted your margins over time as you've been able to scale up production? Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I think it's a really good question. And B, how has it impacted CAC as you've gone to wider audiences? I think the sort of expression, what gets measured gets managed. But the reality is, I always say that the deck of cards you're stacked with from the beginning are not the deck of cards you want, right? When you start an early stage business, you have the lowest volumes in the game. And as a result, whether it's using a platform like Shopify, you're just going to get terrible rates. Like they will charge you a higher billing fee because your volume is lower and you can't really negotiate. And so what you're going to do is you're going to charge a higher billing fee what you have to do is you have to continually push on every angle, push for savings. And my co-founder and I are extremely cheap and any opportunity, and it's really uncomfortable, right? Like it was a learning experience for me because you have to push and negotiate and sometimes anchor ridiculously low. Might be like, oh, you want 50 pounds? I was going to pay five pounds. Like, how can we get to a common ground there? And so like, it was a learning experience because I didn't really like negotiating price, even with our suppliers. We treated them like investors. So every time we had a press piece, we would send it to our suppliers and say like, look, we got in a daily mail. Look, we got in fast company wrote about us and they were getting excited. Like we're growing and we need a better price because we can't maintain margin and we're scaling volume. And so as your volume goes up, you have to continue to go back and negotiate prices across the board with products. And you have to be comfortable with that. They expect it too, right? Because their supply chain gives them better prices when the volume goes up. And so they're not going to pocket that savings as you grow. So getting comfortable with that, coming back to CPAs, we had in our model early on. You have a manufacturing contract, mid-contract, mid-production runs, you're going back to them and going, oh, but we need a bit more. And you know, you're kind of umming and ahhing about the next run. You know, you're pushing them at every step. A hundred percent. And you know, I would be lying if I said I did myself. My co-founder is very great and he's a great commercial negotiator. And so like, I run the product side. And so like, I was a bit like, are you really, we just launched like two months ago. You're now telling them for like a $2 savings. How can we do that? And the reality is you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. Wayne Gretzky, right? Like if you don't ask, you don't get. And that's the biggest learning that I have had found in my own company. If you don't ask, you don't get. And if you get comfortable with asking, then you might just get more. There's another expression, like the more I practice, the luckier I get. And so the more you ask, the better you get at asking and asking and getting people to accept what you're asking. And so we went back, we asked for savings, reasonable, right? We weren't asking for ridiculous savings. And so we went back, we asked for savings, people are saying like, look, we're scaling, we need a better price. this and that was pretty much in line with what we were trying to achieve now when we did the forecast we didn't build it a lot of it in because we're like it's variable we don't know if it's actually going to happen it's kind of like when you mentioned saying that our cpa is going to go down but is it really or is it going to go up and like i was that person in my early financial model being like cpa is going down and we hit it actually but you control that too right like we hired a great head of growth who came in and was like you're doing ads totally wrong that's where your cpa is not going down let's try this let's put in new landing pages let's do more variations let's see what we can do and that brought our cpa down eventually like it's hard to maintain low cpa so that maybe they go up and they stabilize but whatever you want to bring lower you have to invest into how are you going to do it building a structured savings plan with your manufacturer saying like when we hit these targets i want to get savings here but if you have good growth then you have a story to be like look we delivered the first five thousand we're going to deliver twenty thousand next quarter and i want a savings at the end of that so that we can continue to grow because you're getting better margin and they might say like it's not going to be five dollars let's start with 50p and then you'll get settled on maybe two dollars awesome but yeah it's brutal right like i hate it i never negotiated anything and i just like i'm a totally different person outside of work let's just put it that awesome have you got any stories about one of the things that you asked for and you guys thought you were being way too cheeky but actually it came off we played a lot of competitions and i probably shouldn't say this but we did a competition early on and it was for like one day of airing on adernet in london the advertising and i think we were like could we do a month for the same price we don't have the money but could you just leave us in rotation and they're like oh that's a lot of investment i don't think that could be possible and we're like all right well we're just asking because we're just a new brand and we we just really need the exposure and they just gave it to us free advertising for an entire month and like one of the biggest billboards in london that costs i don't even know what it costs like we just we got it we want a competition to get one day advertising we've got a whole month so i think that's probably one of them but there's so many but that's a great example because no one's actually getting sort of hurt from that it's just being the space is there and asking the space is there exactly and people want to support early stage companies the biggest lever you have is relationships and this has been our another big learning you know like i i'm very demanding and i often i'm like business should just be transactional i give you the sales you give me the better price right but the reality is when you're starting out you don't compare to big accounts on almost even whether i mentioned shopify in the beginning or whether it's your fulfillment if you're using a third-party logistics provider you just don't compare and so the only way you're going to get an unfair advantage and sort of share of heart is through building a relationship right because share of mind people are like this is the smallest peanut in my portfolio i'm not going to focus effort on it but obviously if you delight them then they'll be like you know what guys we're just going to help you out and so the relationship that you build i mentioned like sharing things back with our manufacturing partner because that was building a relationship we were treating them like investors you know giving them obviously updates on what we were doing how the business was going so that they bought into the story and they got excited too yeah awesome there must have been tough moments along the way obviously the business is a very well-known brand now but there must have been tough moments along the way what is one of the things that you couldn't have predicted that was difficult tough moment you know maybe even derailed the business that just wasn't on your horizon when you started i'd say probably the biggest one is taking a step back giving something abstract that will work with other businesses or other people looking to start a business or in a business is co-founder relationships and dynamics like i think they say the number three reason why startups fall apart is co-founders don't get along my co-founder and i have a great relationship so i'll just start with that we were friends before we started met each other eight years before surya was even an idea i mean we had a we were friends for a while and we started working on surya together and i never thought we were going to be friends again i mean we were friends for a while and we started working on surya together and i never thought like we're very different people so i'm probably semi-introvert very detailed he's more extrovert probably bigger picture we love different things i love products he's not that interested in product he's more interested in the commercial side and we came at things in a different way which is really interesting because when you start a business in general in the beginning you have the same goal which is to scale sales right there's no denying you have that same goal but the way you go about it is a very different way often a lot of the times that isn't necessarily from wanting different things it's always about the same thing everything from the way you're raised. He was born in Brunei. I was born in New York and he grew up in Scotland. I grew up in New York and then lived in Canada and Switzerland. Our parents come from different places. Like just that alone, we think in different ways. And there's an element of learning to respect different ways of thinking, but it's very hard when you're a co-founder and you're like, this is what I want for the business. And another co-founder is like, this is what I want for business. And so we learned through, I mean, credit to him. And we had what I called our first Friday bitching session, basically where he was like, Hey, I don't think things are working as well. And this was like three weeks in or four weeks in. And he's like, I don't know if things are going really optimal. And like, I feel like we should sit down and just have an open conversation about it. And I was like, I think everything's going fine. What do you mean? And he's like, oh, well, okay. Can I share some things? I'm like, yeah, go ahead. And he just let out on like, I don't know, 20 minutes of, I didn't think that was good. That could have been better. And I was like, well, now that you mentioned that I've got a list of 20 things I want to share with you. And we just did it so openly. And the interesting thing was, like, normally you'd think, oh, wow, these guys hate each other. But the reality was what he was sharing with me, I was like, that bothered you? I had no idea. I had no idea that something was bothering him because I was just totally, because we think in totally different ways. He's like, you know, when I shared with you the JD and even small things like that. And I said, what do you think? Can you have a look at it? You re-edited the whole thing. It just was like, do you want me to do it or do you want to do it? And I was like, oh, so you wanted help on it, you know, but generally different ways of working again. And we've evolved that over the years, right? Like we don't nitpick on little things, but because we, we respect that we think differently and we respect that we have the same common goal. We respect the difference of opinion and we see it through. And his thoughts often are very valuable and innovation when I'm thinking of a product, because this is the most beautiful thing in the world. And so our bitching sessions have evolved into something more, I salute in my business optimization sessions, but the fundamental thing of you need to invest in your co-founder relationship. And I didn't see that as an important thing starting out as one of the fundamental things that I would tell any business starting out, figure out the dynamics between each other. You know, you can even take, we've had people come in who've coached us in different ways. We've gone through many people giving us feedback and we're still optimizing, but we're very clear now that our differences is our superpower because we put it together and slowed in and we're able to achieve more things than we were if we weren't put together. Yeah. Complementary. The fact that you both came to the table, had it all out, could absorb and repair as well is probably incredibly healthy. Whereas if it had been held onto and just put under the carpet, it would have been a lot better. It wouldn't have been four weeks. It would have been four months and then it would have been a breakdown. So I think it's probably a really healthy thing that that happened. And now you've turned it into almost like a, this is what we do. This is not for everyone, but this is what we do. We have our bitching sessions and that's cool because that's how we operate. And then it gets it all out. I think it's, it's amazing. You've got to find the right way to work together. I talked to Mark that we have more dialogue than I do. I shouldn't say this with my wife, right? I call him five times a day, whether on holiday or not, because we just can't stop thinking about the business. And before we started during COVID, so it was zoom that was on 24 seven. It was like a portal. I'd walk in and out of the room and he was still there and having coffee. And then it was just like, if you don't get these things out, it just goes into a place that's unhealthy. That's great. So obviously founder relationships matter massively, but you must have learned a lot along the way. If there was one bit of advice that you'd give to founders that you haven't already kind of mentioned, what would it be? Well, my first thing on advice in general is whenever I give advice, I'm going to give advice to the founders. So I'm going to give advice to the founders. I say, you know, better than me. What's right. I'm just giving you an opinion and whether you take it and whether you find it useful, that's for you to decide. Because the reality is like early on, I used to index so heavily on it, on advice and from investors, from people who were successful. And I had one investor who didn't invest in us or down. And I was like, what do you think of the product? Do you think we should do for your site? And the German guy, and he's like, well, you care what I think. And I was like, excuse me, you've invested in so many successful businesses. I respect your opinion. And he's like, you're asking me about the product. I'm like, yeah, and he's like, it's not for me to answer, is it? He's like, it's for your customers. And he's like, and if they like your product, they will show you that with their share of wallet. And if they don't, well, you better figure out how to make your product better. And he's like, and you need to be talking to them about whether they like it and they don't, because I'm going to give you one opinion. You're going to go down a rabbit hole and I might not be your customer. As simple as that. And ever since then, I was okay. So every time I get advice, I'm always going to try and rate it, whether or not I agree with it and not index so hard on what other people tell me beyond customers, because our business is customer related. That's one piece of advice. The other one is it's almost part of the day job. Things go wrong in the startup, left, right, and center. Shit hits the fan once a week. And I used to get really frustrated, right? Like I used to get really low when the lows happened, like, oh, this happened. And I think maybe I become more mature or maybe I just needed to do this to drive sanity. I have two young daughters. So like, I just didn't have the emotional element to put into it. I try not to get low when things go wrong. I just try to look at them and go, cool, that happened. Now, how are we going to solve it? And I think being able to not index on the low times and to sort of take out that emotion and to just focus on the, what's the solution now? Like this was not great. It happens every day to us. How are we going to stop? Sometimes it happens even worse than other moments. And actually we often find that in our biggest mistakes, we get these amazing learnings that make us much better as a company so that we launch even better products or we're able to drive you more sales because the failures become our biggest learnings that are our know-how in essence that are better than what other companies would. I never figured that, but that would be my best tip if I was to give one. Do you think that tolerance naturally improves or do you think? you can hack it you can shortcut that by just going if you don't naturally try to improve that you will just get really stressed the other thing is like the other end so i'm talking about don't let the bad times grind you down find the solutions the other angle is don't ignore the good times we were in hong kong airport my co-founder and i we had just come back from seeing our manufacturers and we had a whole bunch of things that we need to do and he's like things are going great we negotiated savings we've got press growing he's like things are going really early on and i was yeah i forget that let's just focus on the things that aren't going well so we can improve those and he's wow it's gonna be a crazy journey if we're just gonna focus on the negatives for the next five ten years and i was what do you mean he's like well you don't want to celebrate or talk about the great things and i was well they don't need fixing he's like that's not the point that's not why you talk about things going really well and i was you're right when you say it that way it sounds terrible so from that moment on we've made a deliberate choice whether big or small like we won free advertising with channel four in a competition around 120 000 pounds we celebrate that huge the whole team goes to nando's anything's you know whether small or big we celebrate because there's a lot of stressful times and you need to have that excitement around the good moments to keep things sane and positive so it's just as important as not stressing out it's just as important to really celebrate those wins when they do come along yeah awesome and then this might be hard to answer but i'd love to hear your answer in a world of investors flocking towards ai and sort of obsessing over it what excites you in the sort of consumer space and the consumer tech space and sustainability the areas that you really cross over into what do you think is exciting i'll just start with that we don't have a roadmap for ai in our toothbrushes not in the short term so it's still just going to be good old brushing your teeth many investors ask for it you know i don't think ai will brush your teeth in the next 10 years like i just don't think it's going to happen you still have to brush your teeth like every morning and night but i'm really excited as a business we're really excited by ai in the sense that it's going to be really interesting and we're going to be able to see what's going to happen in the next 10 years so we're going to see what's going to happen and we're going to see what's going to happen and we're going to see what's going to happen and we're going to see what's going to happen and so we are building a surrey brain and we are at such a pivotal point in our business's life because we haven't subscribed to any major data warehouse we're not tied to some like heavily red taped corporate data warehouse that can't be pivoted and brought in ai we're so flexible that we can be at the cutting edge of using ai to grow our business and distribute insights for example slack prompts our team very set their scorecards this is where you're at then it prompts this is what i think you should say what do you think you should say about how your performance has been in the past week they put it into slack that builds into a weekly report that i get that is everybody's thoughts on everything then you know becomes a monthly report and it takes the weekly ones and puts them in into like still one to two page format because i don't want anybody to know what they're talking about but just that alone and having ai do any of the admin like taking out admin work we work with a lot of influencers and affiliates and often they send you proposals in some form of slides whether it's we transfer whatever they send you what they're doing the rates and you have to calculate cpms and different things to that oh i think this is good this isn't but it takes time and we've leveraged ai to automatically catalog that into google sheets when emails arrive so our team literally just opens google sheets and it's already start being put in there and they're not having to do that work but and that just saves an entire day of time for them and so the efficiency you can get out of it is huge i think a big factor with ai is we're not in a place where it's ai runs your business people great people plus great ai make a business go further average people with great ai probably go a lot less further you know so it is about having great people that know how to leverage ai know the thinking and can make it run faster so it's the exciting thing in consumer the fact that it's never been a better time to start a consumer company because of ai better than me i completely cannot see that like as the end user you're using the picks and shovels to build your gold reserve essentially because there's so much money chasing the ai companies but actually it's really hard to be the ai company used by all the companies what it's much better to be is the company using the ai tools because you've got abundance of choice you're not relying on one provider you can switch whenever you want and you can drive better efficiency into maybe areas that were slow mundane difficult low margin can become high margin all these types of things so we're just going to move on to our final two questions i'm sure you're well embedded within the ecosystem so i'm sure you've seen lots of really cool companies if there was a future unicorn prediction another company that's doing really well who would that be don't hate me james but it's an ai company it's a company we started working with called rig rig.so and rig is helping us create a brain and so what's nice about it is they map out all the data and they map out all the data and they map out all the data and they map out all the integration so to your point of being really flexible whatever you use it is a data layer you can use cloud chat gpt to work with it doesn't matter what it plugs into that too but it becomes a data layer it builds reporting for you and then at the same time it sequences things and connects to a warehouse of your own and a sock to compliant method so if you're early stage or you're mid stage and you don't have it and if you have a data warehouse great it can run it but what i love about it is the connections into everything so it connects to slack obviously you're going to have a lot of data but it connects into our customer service tickets and connects into granola for our note taking and so i can say things like produce a report of the learnings across the company look at meetings with more than four people in them that were not private and also our customer service tickets and it'll come and be like top 10 learnings across the company we need more time to launch products documented here for example how amazing is that and learnings are like how early stage companies grow and become better but now i've got an ai tool once a month telling me top 10 learnings across the company and that's kind of where we're at right now and that's kind of learnings just shared passively without any you know somebody mentioned learning in a meeting boom it's coming into my report and that's just one way i mentioned obviously like influencers was another way we were working at it but you could just think of any other way you want to pivot it and it started because it's plugged into every data source we have and when you start to think about that you're like well there isn't enough time in the day to build more things and we had a hackathon where everybody in the company was prompting things to get built and it doesn't matter whether obviously finance or somebody managing amazon was like well can you show me this in the data can you pull this every week can you do that it has a tick up so like sometimes that we were told you know like a or v as a metric average order value we sell it might look at like aov over not just first time purchases you have to train in otherwise that's where i think the human brain comes into play otherwise like the ai runs off and you know i meant first time aov not second time because we sell a toothbrush to the head so it can be totally different aovs but i think rig is a you 's a unicorn waiting to happen the team's really bright and it's gonna bug into a lot of businesses and then you mentioned a hardware company who are they i think yodo are doing pretty amazing things and the reason why i love it is the ethos of being smart tech that educates and entertains without screens and so you're probably already well aware of yodo doing quite well i'd say they're past probably series bc but on their way to maybe unicorn we'll see yeah awesome no i think they're they're tackling into something some really important themes that particularly parents are very aware of so yeah absolutely and then our final question is our dinner party guest game so if you could have dinner with any three people who would they be i'm an apple fan boy it would be johnny ike former chief design officer apple now founder of love from because i just love to learn more about the process how did you do with this team it isn't like art there's some people who create art for themselves and for other people but when you're a product designer obviously you have your own desires but you do it for other people and it must be such a difficult process to get things right consistently over and over i'd love to know how it is at the top another one and maybe you've heard this before jeff bezos because is there anybody who scaled businesses better than him i just generally think amazon what a story and like i'm in e-commerce obviously but i'd love to know how he did it early days and so you get the sort of design process and then that sort of business scaling process from him and last one mick jagger is there any other artist that has consistency like him in terms of the hits i was at a rolling stones concert a year and a half ago and i just couldn't get over the fact that how many songs i knew the words to and how many hits they have it's really hard to deliver consistency in any sort of aspect whether it's business or or music as obviously it's a group and it's banned but i think one person on that would be mick jagger just being able to deliver that consistency how do you do it yeah i mean hector and i we sometimes play a little game where we sort of like could we have predicted those answers and i feel like johnny i i could have because i know that you're so hot on product and design and everything so that's great and bezos is a great answer i think he might even be our most named answer because like loads of people have betched him but surprisingly mick jagger completely first time answer yeah first time so you've got one it's always good to get at least one unique so that's awesome and i feel like when you see someone like mick jagger and you're like oh my god i'm so excited to be here and i'm like oh my god i'm so mick jagger live and you see the energy and everything it's pretty special thank you so much for sharing that and thanks for coming on and sharing suri's riding unicorn story i know that you have big ambitions but also that you don't really care about the status of unicorn and actually it's much more about building a brilliant business and you are building a big company regardless of whether it gets labeled as a unicorn in the future or not and it's become a very well-known and loved brand by lots of people and i think it's a really good thing that you're able to do that and i think it's a really good thing that you're able to do that and i think it's a really good thing that you're able to do that so congrats on everything and it's great to hear more about how it's all all worked out oh thanks so much for having me james who knows if we'll be become a unicorn one day i mean we do want to become a household love brand so like that's the first part that we want to do globally i will never say never so maybe we'll be back on here when we are a unicorn who knows we'll see exactly that would be great thank you so much thanks so much james really enjoyed it that's it for this week thanks very much for listening to stay up to date with the latest episodes please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform please tell your friends about it and we'll see you on the next episode