Zeev Farbman - CEO & Co-Founder of Lightricks - What it takes to build a billion dollar company!

Welcome back to the Failure to Launch Podcast. I am pumped for today's episode because I'm here with Zé Ev Farben. An Israeli academic turned on Tripanae and the CEO and co-founder of LightTrix. Currently valued at $1.8 billion. Now, you may not have heard of them, but if you have used any of those, or seen any of those cool trick videos on social media, or played around with them yourself, LightTrix products were probably involved in their making. They include Facetune, Video Leap, Photo Leap, Filter Tune, Beat Leap, Motion Leap, Art Leap, Light Leap, Boosted, Popular Pays, and LTX Studios. So I'm gonna take a breath there 'cause that is a hell of a lot of the apps Zé Ev, welcome to the show. - It's great to be here. Thank you for having me, mate. - You're welcome. Now, I like to keep it just fluid and chaotic. So I'm ADD dyslexic. I'm not gonna stick to any kind of routine here for deep questions and start from one point and move to another. So I need to dive right in. Why so many apps and how so many apps? - When we started LightTrix, it was roughly 11 years ago. It was still the time that mobile was like this shiny new thing and mobile hardware was like extremely kind of underpowered compared to desktop. So when we try to figure out like what creativity use case makes sense for the mobile, it was clear that we need to create like this focused experiences that are centered around specific use cases. And obviously, face to another great example, selfie was a new thing back then, period or not. People look for retouching capabilities to kind of pre-tified their selfies back then. So that was kind of a clear use case that worked really well for us. And many more kind of came after a time. And with mobile, I think it was always was a thing that people are looking for kind of very focused experience. Very streamlined one, you can cram like desktop level complexity into mobile. So we decided to focus on a different use cases. We didn't want to be like this one app company. And initially they like it, they necessitated to create a lot of these apps where each app tried to really do a specific use case really well. So that was like the reason for the refrigeration of apps when we started the company. And this podcast is very much for entrepreneurs starting out on their journey. A lot of people get told, focus, focus, focus. Then they look at companies like yours, very highly valued, very successful, and you have so many different apps. Yes, in the same sort of area, but there are some there like the payment side of things. Yes, it's serving the creator network, but it's slightly off-peaced. What's your advice to people starting out and what's the difference from where you are now to where you were then? It's like I think focus is a great advice. And I almost would say that it's a kind of lesson that you learn the hard way. Initially you have to focus you because frankly, you typically don't have like a ton of resources, right? So you kind of need to bet most of your chips on one thing. And then you kind of hope that that succeeds. But then you're always like faced with dilemmas, right? You can go deeper or broader. And for us, initially the fact that we decided to go and build a bunch of apps was, I guess, some of it was necessitated by the business model. When we started, the company was just doing like the paid apps. So we used like phase two, and then we released and light would became for the, and we were like charging and like dollar or two for the apps. And at some point we just hit a ceiling in terms of revenues. Okay, so imagine we're like this bootstraight company. We created like these two successful apps. We got to 10 million dollars in annual revenues, but then we just like realize, okay, there is like really no more room for growth in the market. So then we realize, okay, if we, you know, we want to grow from 10 million dollars in revenues to 100 million dollars in revenues, we need to change things. Once you need to change things, you're I've got to go broader. But then like all these questions of focus becoming very real. So like, I think focus is an amazing advice. That said, sometimes they're like again, necessities of your market, of your business, et cetera, et cetera. And you need to figure out what to do. But overall, recently believe it or not, now we're like doing as a company planning for 2025. And that's kind of still one of the major points that are driving to all the VPs across the company. Guys, we need to focus. We always doing too many things, too many products, too many features like focus, focus, focus. And listen, if you're looking at the most successful companies, I think like we again and again, seeing the story that most of the value are coming from like really small amount of activity, right? Like if you're, there obviously some companies that are incredibly diversified and the somehow their like bottom line, it's spread uniformly across different lines of business. But typically it is not a case, right? The typical, there are like the small number of activities that create most of the value and obviously need to figure out what these activities are. Sometimes you need to try a bunch of things or you're gonna fail and over time you'll discover what you need to focus on. But overall, focus is a great advice it might be. - Yeah, I agree. It is a challenge though to work out the difference between what's a shiny ball and what's an opportunity. And I think it's interesting. You and I are a similar age and you were literally there to when selfies were new. I look back at my early stages in video and we're literally cutting film together. And then VHS tapes from one to another with all sorts of mixing discs. It's just, it's come so far and I love that. But there are so many apps that have just propped up and died along the way. I saw your apps early, early days with FaceJun and with PhotoLeap and others. And I was super impressed. I thought, okay, this is an app that's actually doing a thing really, really well. The design was great, the UX UI, the marketing around it was on point. What do you think, and maybe I've just stolen some of your answers, but what do you think were the reasons that you survived when millions of apps have popped up in fact? - Well, listen, it is a great question. It's almost like this like fundamental philosophical problem of survival bias, right? There are people that survive some kind of extinction event in this case in apps. They always have like this glory story is how they're like so smart to survive the event. And you never know how much it would attribute to like pure luck and how much to other factors. But listen, like if I need to guess, I would say like first of all, when we're talking about photo and video processing apps, we're like really domain experts, right? Like the founders of the company came from academia. My PhD was somewhere in the board between computer graphics and image processing. I spent some time both at Adobe who were obviously a creative content creation tool for professionals at that Microsoft. So kind of felt that, okay, although Mobert was a new thing, we came, like we're all kind of really happy tools from academia and the industry to create the really state of the art solutions. I also think, you know, like something that really worked in our favor, but also required a whole lot of effort, performance marketing on social media that's almost like a commodity for digital e-commerce businesses these days was a new thing back then. One of the founders that we kind of decided is going to be in the CMO of the company realized early on that that's where the value in marketing is going to be and invested a ton of effort to build internal marketing systems. So I think, for example, performance marketing for a long while was almost like a competitive advantage for a company because we like really always try to build an extra layer on top of the tools that are available on top of the social media. So it isn't like I can say kind of a concided bunch of factors that work in our favor, but if I need to finish with something that might be a little bit inspiring for the users, like I think at some point I started to realize that what happens in the world of technology and the businesses that there are like these huge ways that are coming, right? Like, okay, so more but it was like this huge wave. I don't think even like Steve Jobs with the introduction of the iPhone was able to imagine what a huge impact this platform is going to have. Now we have like this wave of AI. And I think as an entrepreneur, the best thing you can do is to figure out how to ride this wave, right? Like you can't like generate this wave by yourself. I think that's above our pay grade typically. But what you can do is just like figure out, okay, you know, like these waves are coming. They're gonna create both a lot of challenges and opportunities, right? Because like waves like this force of nature. And the best thing you can do is just like, first of all, obviously not oppose to the waves because they're gonna crash you. And the best thing you can do is just like figure out how you can, you know, leverage the waves, how you can sail into the direction that looks kind of interesting for you. So for us, I felt with mobile, it was like this kind of sailing. We're okay, we realize that mobile is gonna be a thing. We knew what we were passionate about. It was like the topics of our PhDs. And we decided to smoothly try and ride in a certain direction. I think whenever I ask an entrepreneur how they've been successful or why they've been successful. The true entrepreneurs that have actually built something, been through the ups, been through the downs and have discussed, approve it, will always mention luck is also a fact. No, it isn't like. I think a pretty cool story around that. I think one of their early investors in Israel, it's. Adventure Fund called Vallejo Ventures. They're like. very well-known fund in Israel. And at some point, they had like a meeting. I think it was like with the founder of Melanox, I believe, that. By then, it was already like a very big company, it was before their acquired BenVidia. And the founder there told their. he's kind of a founding story, etc. And he actually finished with the lecture, with the saying that they like, remember until now, he told me some guys in the end of the day, in order to succeed, startup needs two things. One is a whole lot of luck, and the number one is fucking miracles, okay? So that's like. So sums up everything you need in order to succeed. And good luck. Go for it. (laughs) Exactly. Love it. And then as a VC, they're also saying, and we're just gonna bet on a bunch of you, so that, hey, maybe luck spread out. But as for you, as a founder, like, that's what you got. It's obviously a very strong. kind of a misalignment in incentives of venture capital, it's in the start, that's right. Like, from a portfolio perspective, completely makes sense to make people bet everything in like a single direction and be super focused from a founder perspective, not necessarily. So one of our founders, at some point, he had like this idea that when a venture fund makes an investment, as part of the investment deal, what should happen is that the founders should get a stake in the investment fund, okay? So they have some kind of diversification. And you know, like, a lot of people laugh at this idea of, but in the end of the day, I think it may create kind of more aligned with interest, because if venture capital is wants you to be like super focused in one idea and bet everything there, well, how you are gonna get your diversification, right? So I think maybe there is something here. That is a fascinating idea. I really, if you're allowed to, if you can, if you're willing to, I'd love to dive into that a bit further, because I've got a. And you've gone from bootstrapped to raising as well. So, you know, you're straddling both of them, but I want to get your headspace on that, because entrepreneurs listening to this, one of the biggest questions is, do I bootstrap, do I raise? Right? I've always felt there's a misalignment with VCs, telling founders to focus. And it's not just focus for a year or two, you know? I laugh when I see these things online, where people say, you know, the difference between a successful founder and a normal person is, they've focused really hard and done what people aren't willing to do for two to three years. And I said, they go, two to three years until what? Like, you get started? You know, this is 20 years. This isn't two to three years, right? This is a long journey. It's a life's work in many cases, but for a founder to focus on one thing, and their investors to focus on 200 things. As you say, there's a complete misalignment. What are your thoughts around that space and how should founders tackle it? It's like the bootstraping versus the venture capital, I think for a lot of businesses, unfortunately bootstraping isn't an option, right? Like you hear all the stories of people these days that need to build nuclear reactors to power AI. So if you're creating a startup that's going to build nuclear reactors for AI, well, you probably can't bootstrap that, right? You'll need like a country with a significant GDP invest in you in order to get the things running. I think for a lot of e-commerce businesses, bootstraping is a possible thing, and many people do it. And I think in the end of the day, it also kind of boils down to your personal preferences. In our case, the kind of independence of the company, the ability to work and things that are like, we are really passionate about, was very important for us. And we weren't even sure that, for example, for a video editing, an absolute moe, but it's big enough of the market. So bootstraping for us was like this very clear direction. And we actually had some angel investors that knew some of my co-founders that kind of reached out and asked if they can put a small check, etc. Like we didn't want any of that. And for us, it always was a great bet, right? Like the first time we raised money, we already had a bit over 10 million dollars in revenues. And just like a great position to fund raise, because then you can, like sell a little bit of your holdings and get some secondary events and have less pressure about, I don't know, like money and things like that. So it worked out great. Unfortunately, I think in many cases, just not possible. But if you can do it, well, to me sounds, it's almost like the perfect scenario, right? Like if you are starting to fund raise at a more advanced stage, then you can maintain more control of the company, like less delusion, like again, it sounds great. For some business, I don't think it's an option, right? If you are, I don't know, want to create a new social network and you need crazy budgets for whatever, like people can agree. But even in your case, you mentioned 10 million ARR, I think you mentioned one to two dollars for the app, something along those lines. The math is pretty simple to work that out. That's a lot of users that are actually paying as well. At the time as well, when we were talking about, you know, I feel like old people, when we were young, when we were young in these apps, where we're being produced and we were using them, there were so many free apps and everyone kind of felt like apps should be free. So even a couple of dollars for an app, how did you bootstrap to the point where you were able to get a product out wide enough to get that many users in that much revenue? It's like, it's again, a lot of things at that time work it on our favor, right? So as I mentioned, like performance marketing with social media, like paid user acquisition was a new thing. Facebook's just introduced it. Kind of no one knew about it. For kind of a bunch of reasons, we're kind of close to Facebook people, although we were like very small startups, so we were able to kind of build up on these tools. And listen, just like to give you maybe like a story from the beginning, how tight the resources we were and how close it was. So imagine that the first version of Facium came out. And initially Apple gave us like a small promotion back then. App Store was like, was built slightly differently and they had like you would open an app store and it would show like the new cool apps that came out. So we're like one of these banners in a port in video category. And they generated like immediately a bunch of, you know, like, money for us. We weren't like very smart with this money. We just like so that it came. We went to celebrate. We went to like really nice steaks and wine restaurant. I mean, you kind of blew most of it on that. And our CMO kind of told us listen guys like after like the initial initial promotion and after all this like partying, what you left me for marketing was like $500. So what you actually deal like with this $500 and with performance marketing is starting to be like this arbitrage model between kind of the price of the user acquisition. And then what would happen with user acquisition, you would raise in the ranks of the App Store. And then you're going to have some organic exposure because some people are just going to the app store to see kind of what's cool in you and then we see your app. So we started like to build this model between how much it makes sense to invest and pay user acquisition to raise through the ranks and then like get these organics. And the interesting thing that was again like back then is that like the App Store's very different across Geo's. So what near our CMO started to do, he was like running like this. They created tiny campaigns on social media in kind of third world countries. I think he started like because of Stan or something like that. Like this you know, former Soviet Union republics. And he was able to kind of to calibrate the model to get to the through the ranks. And again, when the really small scale was they created hundreds of dollars kind of was nothing, but he was able to calibrate this model where you kind of know how much money you invest, how you're raising through the ranks and how much organics you're getting and what's your bottom line is going to be. And he kind of became boulder and boulder over time. So he started to move to a bigger country and bigger country and bigger country. At some point he told me these guys that calibrated all the models. I can do like this series of campaigns or like this burst performance marketing campaigns in the US now. And you know, we ask him this and how much money do you need and he's like just like half a million dollars. And we're like we had like like nothing maybe tens of thousands from like the money that he generated before. So we really need to kind of to scramble to we weren't able obviously to find like half a million dollars from our saving and stuff, but we found something we gave him everything we can and it worked amazingly well. Now like this story this day, if you weren't able to replicate it on the social media because like the world of performance marketing became like so sophisticated that kind of in order to get in the door you obviously need the way bigger budgets than that but well back then we kind of found a way so that's kind of again what goes back to our discussion about bootstrapping if you can do it is great if not and you're really passionate about something well you need to fundraise what can you do yeah I think it's funny as well as you as you build a company I'm sure you found it as well you just look back and go how will we able to do it so cheaply at the start and how is it so damn expensive when you've got a team and officers and layers of management everything else well listen like it's if you're gonna start like opening with these pin points we better have like bottle of wine or something stronger with us and yeah fly over we like the campfire sit around have a whiskey and a therapy session exactly trust me they're well needed after a few years of running businesses I want to wind back like I said I'm all over the place ADHD I just like to roll with the flow on this one but I want to dive back now to early days find out a little bit more about you as a founder right founders are wired differently I don't know what it is but when you actually speak to most most normal human beings they think we're absolutely crazy trying to start these things and build them out it felt like in some of the the interviews I've heard you in it almost felt like you've joked about being dragged from academia into into being an entrepreneur how young were you when you first thought that path of running a business or controlling my own destiny and the way I work is is where you want it to head so it's a great question listen like for me person that I never thought myself as an entrepreneur and but what they did have I think it's like this like really kind of strong realization that I don't want to hold a regular job okay so now listen I try okay like I work at a bunch of places I internally like it kind of different places but like the reason that I cherished academia so much is that to me it was like this almost kind of perfect environment I had like a great PhD advisors they basically gave me like a ton of kind of space to explore and we kind of have an agreement that if I produce research that's mature enough to produce let's say kind of a strong academic paper once a year then I kind of off the hook and I can keep exploring and doing things I like and back then I was also like training a lot in Brazilian G2 and competing and like these things were important to me so like for me academic felt great it felt like it's almost like he escaped from a routine of kind of regular workplace and it started to change actually because one of my co-founders like so Yaron is our CTO and at some point he was I was like mentoring him in his kind of he did a degree like in computer science and electrical engineering and I was like mentoring him and some that he did towards the end and then it was a really fun to work with him so he joined our lab also as a PhD student and we started to work together and Yaron was like an extremely kind of talent to do so with him we were able to do things that I would never even try to do by myself right we were like starting to work on really rendering systems and typically things are just like require a lot of kind of hard work and at some point it's like a story that I remember really clearly we got into like this project that we kind of tried to figure out a different way to kind of create lighting in computer games and we were like so hard on it that like we basically forgot about everything else you know like famous girlfriends everything was kind of on the back burner and we were just like doing our thing so at some point we finished like with the lab like relate it night and we couldn't like even catch a cab back home so we kind of started working and then I remember your own telling me this and you know that if we were like working so hard on something outside of the academia we would be millions years back now and for me it was like almost like with weird Eurica moment you're like wait a second maybe he's right you know maybe he's something to that so it's obviously it didn't kind of happen over day but your own kind of mentioned like started to mention to me a bunch of times and he kind of knew all this like startup scene that frankly I wasn't kind of terribly interested in what's going on in you know like we start up companies in investments and all these things but he kind of a new we see new people so we kind of discussed it more and more we started I started kind of to hear what's going on in the world of mobile and I met some people at Adobe that kind of looked at mobile by chance kind of made people from Nick Software that created snaps etc so like a bunch of things happen but for me like this push to leave the ivory tower of academia where I felt like I have a lot of freedom to explore things that I like to to like the startup journey was actually for RCTO he was like the guy who I guess made me crazy I think I was a normal dude back then normal dude just trying to avoid the real world in a job exactly but well that something I guess a lot of people can relate to that maybe do not have necessarily all the you know of shanality that I had back then but like yeah I guess a lot of people are unhappy with like this mundane nine to five where you're just like you know Kog and a big machine I think it resonates with a lot of people are just not everyone necessarily have a lot to do with it yeah I personally have never been able to sit in a normal job and be told what to do and and I remember very very distinctly I turned up to my desk at this job that was at a car auction warehouse in Sydney Australia and I sat down at five past nine at my desk and I get this email in my inbox from my boss who sat at the desk opposite me you know just behind the monitor and I get an email I thought that's weird she's just sitting right there and it said we start at nine not nine oh five and I just thought yeah yeah I'm out I'm done I'm done with the entire thing I'm done with the work scene I'm gonna go and you know pursue my own thing and I always knew I was going to but that was just the push that got me over the edge so you're your founding team how many are in the team so we were a initially like four of PhD students in Hebrew you the did computer science shortly after we kind of started to think about the company a guy that was kind of clerking in the Supreme Court of Israel back then joined us so we're like this kind of big-fongering team of five people four are still kind of around like at light tricks one guy by now is like open his own fund and he's a venture capital this by now he's jumped to the other sides I think when you kind of when you're starring I think a lot of the founders sees like venture capital is like really kind of the other side right like I think over time you realize that the world is kind of more nuanced and holistic right like I know a lot of venture people that over time move kind of sometimes moved back to operational roles I know a lot of founders that started investing actually think like most of the founders that I know they kind of more mature startups are investing in one way or another in like smaller startups right it's the cycle yeah it's good I want to dive right back to not not into your personal past now don't worry I'll leave that alone I want to dive into your apps and products I want to learn about the journey because obviously you've spoken about the waves is spoken about mobile touched on AI which I want to dive into further as well because I've got a theory that a lot of people say they're building AI and they can only barely spell it and they're using everyone else's AI and just putting a layer over the top which is fine as well as opportunity in that but I want to go right back to face tune and just find out more about how that morphed on to become the other apps so how'd you get started in that I know obviously you've gone from academia and build it out and but to actually make an app is a big step yeah so listen like initially when we decided to kind of pause our academic career we didn't have an idea what exactly we're gonna do we knew that the space is gonna be photo and video editing on mobile and the way we kind of tackle this transition is that we decided well while we kind of learning a different mobile technologies etc we're gonna create a bunch of prototypes of like various image processing algorithm on kind of mobile and we're gonna just like show it people to see what they're excited about and some of these directions were like a completely kind of wrong turns or dead ends I remember like one idea that we kind of were passionate about is kind of back then there are like a bunch of academic papers about how to extend the dynamic range of photos by combining kind of multiple exposures and creating like this high dynamic range image and we wanted to bring some of like these ideas to the mobile so back then it was a really hard to capture in like good photos in low light conditions so this is our work. Well, you know, we're going to create a system where it takes a ton of different exposures and then kind of aligns everything in the one coordinate system and like uses it for denoising and basically creating like a good photography and a low light condition, something that these days already kind of almost like happens on the hardware level but kind of very close to it. But the back time it was a relatively novel idea on mobile and we thought, well, you know, we're going to create an app for people who are going a lot to parties so that's going to be like a party camp where you're taking, you know, like if you want to take like a cool, a shots at party, you will have to use the app because the regular camera isn't good enough for it. So the career did some kind of product I've got very excited about it and then people who actually go to parties, I guess, unlike us, basically, totally guys. If I take a picture like, I don't like it, I just take another picture like, why do you need another app for it? So I'm going to take like 10 pictures and one is going to be okay. So some things that were exciting for us clearly weren't that exciting for consumers but what happened at some point is that, again, maybe again, this kind of strike of lack, we try to implement on mobile this tool that existed in Photoshop for decades. It's called liquefy where you can take an image right and change the contours and when you're doing on desktop inside Photoshop, you're kind of dragging with your mouse the contours of the image and we kind of want you to see how interaction is going to feel like when you're doing it on mobile. So we really like this project type and kind of some lady open an image of hers and she just like noticed that she can change the shape of her nose using like this tool and we just like solved the reaction because like, imagine like for us, like, okay, you know, I've worked for it a bit, it will be obviously new about Photoshop and all these like digital content creation tools, et cetera. It wasn't a new thing, right? I guess most of us played like with Photoshop since the 90s but we realized that for consumers at least back then, this realization still didn't sink in that what we were seeing in magazine photos aren't actually real photos. It's at the best some kind of artistic representation of the person who captures and it's the photos. So from kind of reaction to this product, it was clear to us that if we take Photoshop level retouching capabilities and bring to mobile, there is going to be something to it. And then we started like this iterative process where we tried kind of to map different features to mobile. Like early on, basically after each feature gave a lot of people to kind of to play with it. And again, like, we did it in a very simple kind of way. So again, near our CMO was in charge of user testing and his girlfriend back then who became his wife, she was kind of learning chemistry and somehow in her class, I don't know why most of the fellow students were kind of girls and she knew a bunch of them. She was actually doing the user testing, right? She was like sitting with an early face to the product, giving kind of to people to play and we kind of got a lot of feedback because of it. And so we kind of iterated quickly, got to a point where we felt that there's a mature feature set for like this first mobile retouching tool and the real estate. So that was like how the face started. Can I ask a question on the back of that because you and I, if you come from the academic background, you and I are probably polar opposite brains. I'm ADHD just lexical over the shop and would not be able to sit down and involve myself in academics to the level you have. So I'm very keen to hopefully get a contrary and view on this one. A lot of people talk about when you start a business, you need to lay out everything, plan everything, do a lot of customer research, all these sorts of things. And what the story you've just told me then could go to defend that story, right? To say, you made a wrong decision because you didn't do the right amount of customer research, et cetera, et cetera. You didn't come back and then, you know, analyze that data and then move in the right direction. My theory is that for entrepreneurs, the fastest way to get to the right result is just start sprinting in any direction and you will find out that, you know, the world will give you the answers or send you back in that direction and the other person still standing there analyzing the data because they haven't moved and you can't steer a parked car, right? What are your thoughts about those two different options based on what you've just told me? It's like it's a great question and just like hope that people at Leiches isn't going to hear my answer right now. Right. You can hear me. I go there ready to throw a Rubben Mallorbatch. Yeah, I already see that. It's a great question because, again, it's not my kind of personal opinion in conviction is that, first of all, I don't think you should build things that you are kind of no deeply passionate about yourself. Okay. That's. I'm not saying it's not possible. It's clear to me that some people are building kind of great things that have like zero interest in and like still making a ton of money. It's all good. It begins in our conversation. You kind of mentioned, right, like this, like, interprinural journey. What's two, three years, right? You can take a decade. It can more. You can be your whole life, right? You're going to spend a lot of time doing these things. If you're doing something that you're not passionate about, it's almost like what's the point? It's your life, right? So find something that you are passionate about. So when you're embarking on the journey and kind of doing something, that's actually already a consideration and like a pretty strong one. Now, like, together with that, you need to be kind of honest with yourself and kind of realize what are you doing. Are you building like a work of art? And if you're building an art, okay, there are no financial considerations, do what you want, or you're actually building a product for other people. If you're building a product for other people, yeah, you need to listen to them. You need to kind of to cover their feedback. Like what's the best way to do it? Again, kind of depends, depends a lot of things. Depends how quickly you can iterate, like what the nature of a product is, kind of, etc., etc. I kind of feel that a lot of times since we're like so discussed so much, data driven decisions, etc. Sometimes, it almost like become a reason not to do things, right? Because it's like so easy, especially using modern things. Think about the LLAMs. Like you can easily weaponize them as like this bullshit creating machines that are going to easily advocate any position you want, right? And data, again, it's like the problem with data. It's easy to manipulate it. You need to be like very honest and you need to be like really clear what you want to achieve. I kind of feel that a lot of times data is almost like used to advocate existing positions. And some people, they're just like don't want to do much, okay? So I'll find the data that everyone is happy with the God and that's not doing anything at all. So I would say that data driven decisions, it's, again, they're like super important. But it's a secondary thing. What comes first is, first of all, your passion, a clarity about what you want to achieve. And you need to figure out, and then I think a lot of things are becoming easier. Like if you're passionate about something and you decide that it's actually not going to be like a work of art or, but you're actually building in the for-profit organization, okay? That. Anyhow, like so I'm going to be here for a while, but just a quick way of handling things. They're great ramblings. And I think, you know, in building a business to the size you have over the many, the amount of years you have, you probably don't even realize how deep the depth of knowledge you have in this space is. And for founders starting out, I think you nailed it by saying many people use the data as an excuse not to move, right? Not to do something. And that's probably one of the biggest reasons why I tell, you know, start up founders just to get started to move, to just start going down A path. Because if you are passionate about building a business, if you are passionate about a certain product, the product you start with will almost always not be the product you finish with. So, you know, you don't need to get too obsessed about getting that right. You need to get something moving and then it's right on that. And I think, you know, your example of products throughout the years as well and now you, where you are with LTX Studios is so far from that original product. But what you've done is, and even face tune, the original product was so far from the original product. You've listened to the market. Put your shoes on and start running. Don't overthink this first step, right? Because it's very easy to always explain to yourself that tomorrow everything is going to be better and it's going to be easier to do whatever you say. Like, at least, you know, you're going to have a lot of fun. these first steps just like don't think, just like trust yourself, like put the fucking shoes on, start running, okay? And you know, while you're running, okay, now start thinking right, like where are you running, how to optimize, etc. But at least you're running, right? You're like, you're doing something. I think there is something to that. Health sports mindset is so important for entrepreneurs and they say the most important factor to success is grit and the ability to just stick it out and keep going, keep going. You've built a business through, well probably way back to the GFC and then we've got COVID, then we've gotten the tech crash after that and many, many ups and downs that we've both been through. What has, or do you, I was going to say what has helped you through those, but do you think that training in Brazilian Gidza was also played a massive part? Like I think I take like the analogy with the sport maybe from slightly different perspective, right? Like we've, like we've wrestling, you always realize it's gonna have a weird kind of pastime, right? Because a lot of time people are gonna be better than you and you're gonna be very tired and they're gonna submit you and not gonna be feel fun. But somehow, you're gonna still like the activity or coming back, something there kind of resonates with you that you're just kind of drawn back. I think if you're getting to this place and the fact that something is kind of demanding or hard, it's just like you realize, okay, that's like part of the game, it's almost like, it's almost like something about the nature of games, if the games are like too easy, well they're not that engaging, if they're like too hard, then okay, you're defeated and like there's no point continuing. I think like we start as if it should be something similar to that, right? Like there should be challenges otherwise, well it's not a game, but they should be kind of instrumentable, right? Like if something that's like too hard and you're not glory anything, of course, is just a crash, well kind of what's the point of that? So I think somehow you need to get to environment where the game is kind of very demanding, but you are kind of like real, have like a real chance of succeeding, right? Because, and again, like to find like this exact regime where it's like not too hard, so you're going to be burned out or not too easy that you're going to become like a couch potato. That's like you need to be honest with yourself and see like what kind of games work for you in life. Love that analogy. I was actually telling my coach and group the other day that you know, no athlete looks back at their career and say, well what was the best game you've ever played? And they say, how was that game? It was just brilliant. We were playing against such a horrible team. We just walked it in and just scored a bunch of goals, right? It's not about how many goals you score. It's about the challenge and the rivalry and the energy and the amount of grit that it takes to get that win. It's like in the end of the day if you're like, okay, there are like challenges, but if you're not kind of taking a step back and saying, well, I'm engaged in cool game. Like there is no other way to see it. I'm happy with it. If you're not there, I think you're just like kind of a big rat flag around how you're doing. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So if we're getting to the end of our 45 minutes that I like to try and keep these two, I could chat this out with you for hours. In fact, maybe we do it over that fireplace and whisk it some stage somewhere nice, but I want to ask, is there anything a question that you wish I had asked that I haven't asked? No, listen, I just like at the fun having this conversation and I completely agree with it, you know, continuing at some point. I don't think like there are any hidden questions that you should ask. It's just this simple key that, you know, how does somebody build a $1.8 billion company? If you just give us a 10 second answer on that and then we can just give that to our audience and they've solved it, right? It's like the easy game. Very nice. Well, congratulations on all of your success. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show and I've absolutely no doubt that our audience have learned a lot from you. Thank you for having me. It was great fun. Thank you so much. Adios, everyone.