Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:01 So investing heavily into the vetting and, and hiring process is key much more than the higher, fast tire fast mentality companies have at our stage because here, um, the amount of time you need to invest into someone to onboard into blockchain is a lot. So in that per, um, that doesn't work so much. So we're more of investing extremely like a lot into the vetting process and actually filtering out people and fighting the correct candidates.
Speaker 1 00:00:30 Welcome back to the scaling. So far podcast with me, Dan Kanes at such a brilliant time speaker at Bo down how co-founder and CTO blockchain for startup tenderly. We shout through their approach to hiring and developing engineers globally, enabling the team through knowledge sharing and investing in the hiring process and why it's so critical at the stage they're at they've recently raised 40 million in a series B around following 400% year on year growth, which pretty staggering to congrats to the team on that. If you are in the block industry or passionate about scaling tech and engineering functions, do give this a listen. Excellent. Bob, really pleased to be chatting with you today. First off, thanks for joining us on scaling so far podcast. Great to have you with us, for our listeners. Can you tell us about to kick off?
Speaker 0 00:01:18 Sure. So first of all, thanks for having, for having me. Uh, so I usually like to explain myself as a too much information type person, as in probably each form of human expression has been abused so far, so much by far by me to actually say things as my mom would say, I would probably talk on my elbow if it could be possible, but yeah, uh, from a professional vocation perspective on the co-founder and CTO of tenderly. So, uh, last 10 years has mainly been me, uh, working on distributed systems problems, which is mostly what we do here inside of tenderly right now, uh, prior to tenderly, I was part of a startup got acquired by GoDaddy at some point, and then was part of Celsius, which is like the lending platform on, uh, on blockchain. Uh, I was one of the tech leads there, and then we started generally basically what we'll we're gonna talk about today. So, yeah.
Speaker 1 00:02:11 Excellent. Thank you. So you co-founded, you mentioned, um, just there a moment ago, so that was back in if I'm right. Yeah. Um, can you tell me a bit more about, um, the sort of mission and vision for the organization?
Speaker 0 00:02:24 Sure. So, um, it first started as like scratching your own edge type of problem. We started actually as a Hacka project that did a completely different thing that than what we're doing right now. And then the tenderly that you see right now was actually us building internal tooling. And we found out that we enjoyed doing that much more than the initial project we set out to make. And then we discovered from a mission and vision perspective, um, as we truly believe blockchain is, um, the next big step when it comes to computation and, and everything around that, our mission and vision is to, uh, lower the barrier to entry because this space will not succeed unless great minds enter the space. And right now the barrier to entry is extremely high. So Tan's vision and mission is to enable people to work on blockchain as easily as with other technologies in the, in the past like 30 years, basically.
Speaker 1 00:03:14 Excellent. Thank you. So I'd, I'd love the journeys look like for you cofounders from having that idea through, to finding product market fit and raising in July last year and now being 30 odd team members. Is that right? So how, how did that look?
Speaker 0 00:03:29 Yeah, so, uh, the initial tenderly and that's actually, uh, a really interesting trivial, always of how the, how the name came to operation. So the original tenderly was actually a public procurement platform on top of blockchain and, uh, public procurement in Serbian is called tenders. So the name tenderly, which we thought was quite funny at the time, uh, came into existence, but then we started working on the internal tooling, open source. Some of those things, uh, had like four GitHub stars, which is absolutely nothing, but that was more than enough us to think, Hey, we might, it's a strange decision that like let's put our jobs and try to make this into a company. So basically, um, then we pivoted into the internal tooling. We enjoy working much more on plus that was much more aligned with what we did in Godad and previous companies, which was mostly enabling other teams with infrastructure and everyth that. And then when it comes to the journey itself, hackathons have been, uh, an extremely huge part of our culture. So basically, uh, we were bootstrapping tenderly for, well, 2, 2, 2 and a half years, something like that by basically going to hackathons, uh, and uh, spending the money that we win on hackathons to Fundly basically. So,
Speaker 1 00:04:45 Oh,
Speaker 0 00:04:47 Won or first four second on hackathons and use those winnings to, to basically Fundly now that we're not participating hackathons anymore. We can, the secret sauce is actually to everybody that I think like four hours of sleep basically gives you <laugh> a first or second place. It's quite easier than we thought initially, but basically, uh, we're working on hackathons. Um, and then when it comes to product market fit again, hackathons were really important. So because what we would do, we would travel around Europe, uh, around blockchain hackathons and then try out new ideas. And then if we win a place and enough people approach us and enough VC approaches about the idea, we would see that there's a signal that it might make some sense mm-hmm <affirmative>, but when it comes to product market fit in general, I think it was a bit easier for us because we weren't building tools actually for us as in other developers.
Speaker 0 00:05:43 So we knew like some of the pain points, but actually 70, 60 or 70% of generally was completely done by user feedback. As in mm-hmm <affirmative> in the previous company, the one that got acquired by GoDaddy, which was called, uh, manage WP. Um, we were thought almost in, in <laugh> indoctrinated into knowing that like, you should always listen to users and user feedback for like king for everything. So from day one, literally tenderly had like an in-app chat and anything anyone would ask, we would at least write it down, but usually try to, to actually make it into a feature like in, in a couple of days. So finding product market fit was basically just listening to people, feeling pain and then trying to alleviate that pain. And then when it came to funding at some point, I really think funding is a side effect of bringing value.
Speaker 0 00:06:34 I think funding shouldn't be the goal of the company. I think bringing value should, and then funding funding is like an accidental thing that happens because of bringing value. Again, huge air quality <inaudible> on the accident, accidental, but <laugh>, but it should, it should be perceived as such, because I think then the main focus isn't like bringing the number of your, like the valuation of your company up, but actually bringing value. So then in the beginning of last year, we got approach approached by 0.9. We already had like an existing relationship with them where we were like, like doing regular check-ins around how we were doing. And they said like, Hey guys, we like the progress. And like, everything else that's happening. Do you wanna do a seed round? And then, uh, <laugh> closely after, uh, so seven days between the money landing and then, uh, between signing the series a, a term sheet was between 0.9 and Excel.
Speaker 0 00:07:26 But during the due diligent process, we, we were approached by Excel. Um, last, like if we wanna do a series a, we thought, I mean, it's too early. As in like, we, it has been like less than a month from signing the term sheet for the seed round. Um, and we thought that we don't need more money. And they said, yes, it is true. You don't need any more money, but the expertise you can get with this is much higher and bigger. And then we actually took a step back, started thinking, and then actually saw the actual big picture. We thought that we saw the big picture, but we saw only yay big it's like much, much, much, much bigger. Uh, and then through the whole process of a bunch of conversations with them and everything else actually saw what generally can be, it's something much bigger than we in, uh, originally envisioned. So we did the series a with Excel as well, and yeah, right now we're 37 37 team members right now.
Speaker 1 00:08:20 Wow, cool. And following that funding in July last year, there was a big push to recruit engineers and business people to support and expanding your global F footprint. I'd love to understand what your hiring approach has been since then. Some of the processes, initiatives that you focused on when it comes to scaling the team and how have you, um, had that, um, from those much earlier stages.
Speaker 0 00:08:44 Sure. So in the earlier stages, <laugh> we had the very wrong assumption that hiring is in the full-time position because you're just doing interviews <laugh>. So at the point where your calendar is filled and you're actually having a tough time, um, differentiating, differentiating between candidates and everyone else. But one of the things that actually, uh, Pavlo from 0.9 was of saying actually from day one, is that to hire a recruiter or talent manager to help you out mm-hmm <affirmative>. So when we did that, that's, uh, Nena, when she a team you could see <laugh> like tenfold, not just the output, but like the quality of the process itself, because you're not hiring is a, is
Speaker 1 00:09:23 A fulltime. Oh, no, I can, I I'm with you on there. That's what I do. <laugh>
Speaker 0 00:09:27 Yeah. So, so yeah, uh, that is like one difference between like being seven people. And right now is actually having someone who owns the process, uh, works on it constantly and, and adapts it. Um, that's one. And then when it comes to hiring, uh, engineers and business talent, uh, for engineers, it's, it's a bit easier for us as like for all four of us are engineers. So we can like establish some baseline a bit easier, but here it's very important because how I at least is from a technical perspective, separate tenderly is like 60% is like just standard software development. 20% of it is like standard, uh, software development with like a small modifier because it's blockchain. And then the last 20% is something actually new that we are the ones doing it for the first time. So you basically are hiring for that 20% because those people usually know to do like the previous 80%.
Speaker 0 00:10:22 Yeah. So investing heavily into the vetting and, and hiring process is key much more than the higher, fast tire fast mentality companies have at our stage because here, um, the amount of time you need to invest into someone to onboard into blockchain is a lot. So in that perspective, um, that doesn't work so much. So we are more of investing extremely like a lot into the vetting process and actually filtering out people and fighting the correct candidates. And then when they come investing also in their education and everything else, but huge emphasis on deselection process, basically
Speaker 1 00:10:59 That's good to know. And this sort of ties into my next question. So what you really focused on for the next 12 months is co-founder and CTO at tenderly.
Speaker 0 00:11:07 Sure. So those are two hats that are overlapping by a lot, but some of the things they need to focus are kind of in dissonance to one another. So definitely one is scaling the engineering team. The idea is by the end of the year for the engineering team to have around 60 people. So that's definitely a hard job, um, especially because, uh, right now we're hiring mostly senior engineers, but to have senior engineers, you need to hire junior engineers as well to produce new senior engineers like globally. So investing also into internal education, we have been thinking a lot around that to basically fast track junior developers into like, what is a senior, at least from our, our perspective. So that's definitely one focus. The second one is, uh, scaling up the product suite from a technical standpoint, as right now, having more people we can paralyze more, but when you're moving fast, things happen to break.
Speaker 0 00:12:05 So definitely not forgetting that we are a platform as a service product in the end, and then we don't have benefit of breaking or not loading or everything else. So trying to optimize for velocity, but also not losing the stability. That's the second thing that's mostly on my mind. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and then I would say those are the two main one, like from a CTO perspective. And then like from a co-founder perspective, um, keeping the culture and we'll talk about this, I guess, a bit later, but keeping the culture that we had so far, because when so much PE, so many people are joining so fast, it's, uh, very important. So the culture should definitely change with new people. I mean, they, we are, uh, we want to them to join the team to influence the culture, but also keeping like the initial things that made it tenderly tenderly, if that made sense. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 00:12:53 So absolutely.
Speaker 0 00:12:54 Yeah. That that's like one focus and then the second focus is more business development and strategy as in, uh, how to expand more in the verticals that we're right now discovering new verticals as well. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:13:07 Excellent. And co-founder, and CTO is overlapping quite bit for you, right? High talent. Your team is super critical, um, to the success of the product being able to achieve milestones and your roadmap. So what's your approach to partnering with talent acquisition in order to achieve your goals. You mentioned earlier on that you realized this was a, this was a full time job. So, so how do, how you make sure you acquisition, make sure you
Speaker 0 00:13:35 Found out that you can build a whole company around this, basically. So people are actually doing this for a reason, basically. So, um, I think there's two parts to that question. Uh, first one is, uh, hiring key hires slash leadership. That's one. And then the second one is hiring, uh, hiring the rest of the team. Who's also pushing that vision that, that is kind of made by the leadership team in the first one. It's definitely important, especially. Um, for example, in Serbia, the go to market talent is lacking when it comes to our type of product, as in it does exist for consumer type things, but for B2B infrastructure platform or, uh, platforms as service product that we are it's lacking. So definitely working with talent acquisition to help us scale globally, because I know a lot of engineers in Belgrade, but they are in Belgrade. So it, it's kinda a double edged sword there because the engineers are good, like a finite amount of people. So working with talent acquisition in general, to help us scale in actually make tenderly into a global company, which is like one of our missions, that's one. So that's for, and definitely then when it comes to leadership and everything else, helping us to find people who have, um, a vision and mission, or at least, um, driver that's similar to ours are compatible with ours. So we can basically pull the company together. So, yeah.
Speaker 1 00:15:00 Excellent. Thank you very much that the world of blockchain is incredibly exciting and overing, but with that, the very niche, talent times, very specific skill. How do not, we attract the right candidates, but assess whether they're right for your team at tenderly.
Speaker 0 00:15:16 So we're kinda coming back to those 20% basically that we, that we mentioned. So <laugh> the first thing that we had to forego quite early on is that we will find people who know blockchain as in the types of problems that to solve our Mo mostly like distributed system problems. I'm, I'm gonna sure I'm gonna approach this both from the engineering perspective, but then business business role perspective as well, from an engineering perspective, it's mostly distributed systems problems, which are extremely hard. A lot of people don't find these problems interesting, even though I, myself investing a decade into it, think it's extremely, extremely fun. So, uh, attracting people from the, we call it web 2.0 world, but people who worked on cloud technologies and similar, uh, attracting them, and then basically showing this as the best place to learn about blockchain is the approach that taking right now because quarantine Belgrade, if you took like all tributed system, as engineers who know blockchain, probably like 60% of them are in the company, but out of those 60%, 80% knew nothing about blockchain when they enter the company, basically. So it's basically, <laugh> making the talent <laugh> that we need. I'm guessing that's like one part of it.
Speaker 1 00:16:31 I was gonna say, it's really interesting quite, and it's just a general a comment rather than, than the cut. I think it's, it's interesting what you're doing. Lots of organizations go down this box exercise, especially when they're scaling, they need everything. And then they spend what they spend six months, 12 months trying to hire when they could have actually got those people with the right, you know, trained up to the right skill that time.
Speaker 0 00:16:50 Yeah. I think it's a very, um, it's a much more senior approach because again, especially for engineers, you need like at least like three to six months to actually become productive. In that time, you can also onboard to a new, to a new industry or a new domain. So instead of searching for, as you said, six months, 12 months, and then worst case failing and seeing that the person is in the correct fit here, we can both measure if the person is the correct fit for the team, but also onboard the person to blockchain. So you kind of overlap those two things. And I think it's it's much easier. And then, especially from the perspective of, uh, more junior people, uh, soon, hopefully we will have a person from academia who actually one of our best teaching assistants from a couple of us here from the same college, joined the company to work literally on onboarding junior developers into tenderly and on blockchain in general and everything else.
Speaker 0 00:17:45 Because again, all senior engineers have been junior engineers at some point taking only senior engineers doesn't make any sense, especially like from a local ecosystem perspective, but also from a global ecosystem perspective. So intentionally investing into making those professionals for the future is something that we're doing. That's like for the engineering side of things. And then yeah, for the business side of things, it's also similar, especially when it comes to marketing. I think, um, the space is close enough to similar bleeding edge technology, like IML IOT in a couple of like cloud in a couple of other things we saw like in the past decade. So close enough that it looks like that, but the person the needs to be able to take a step back and actually see those differences because those differences can actually kinda kill the company it handled incorrectly. So yeah, from the business perspective, there's a lot of money in the space, but also the space is very young. So it's really very strange because there's like a lot of capital from the business investment and all other perspectives. So knowing how to operate there and not be like a kid in the candy store, I think is very important for, for business people.
Speaker 1 00:18:58 Excellent. Thank you. And I know you're incredibly passionate about enabling your team and knowledge sharing. So as a leader, how do you go about, um, embedding a culture of knowledge sharing amongst your team and what are some of the rituals and practices you have in place to enable?
Speaker 0 00:19:12 Sure. So, um, I would kinda actually even rephrase the question, uh, as a general company value and like the main one is, uh, we say extreme transparency is actually key because knowledge sharing is actually a subset of extreme transparency, although an active, not a pro, not a passive subset from that perspective inside of the company, uh, all meetings are either recorded or have meeting notes. All calendars are open or all salaries are completely transparent. Um, you like to joke, but it's actually true. Like an employee tenderly can actually find out how much money we spent on toilet paper last month, if they want to. <laugh>
Speaker 1 00:19:53 Excellent
Speaker 0 00:19:54 From that perspective. Uh, the first thing that you need for knowledge sharing is actually access to information. So that part kind of influences for all people to like write documents in public, collaborate in public. So all of that. So that's one thing that is kind of prerequisite that's needed for, uh, knowledge sharing in general. And then from the perspective of processes and rituals around that information, or on top of that information, uh, there is passive knowledge sharing, uh, as in people teaching it each other's stuff during like general interactions, but like from things that we have like on a certain cadence or, or similar, uh, definitely one interesting thing. Um, for engineers, we have tech talks. So when somebody works on something interesting or is researching something interesting, sharing it with the whole team, uh, again, all discussions, both business and engineering happen in, in the open in written form, which is very important to have a trail, but also inviting everyone in the company to participate. Yeah. Again, not from a democracy perspective, but from a meritocracy perspective, of course, my thought about something marketing is worth much less than for example, and who's the CEO around marketing, but still a junior engineer should still have input for something because if we're targeting other junior engineers, their perspective is also very important.
Speaker 1 00:21:15 Absolutely.
Speaker 0 00:21:16 So tech talks, uh, or similar it's similar type of, uh, sharing information like in front of multiple people. And then, um, also it's mostly, it's mostly everything around written form and collaboration in the open. I think that's like the, the most important thing. And then finally we do a bunch of, uh, talks like again, I think speaking, correct people is speaking other people that will, at some point leave your company to start their own. Those people always perform very well. So we actually overshare that. I mean, this is a good thing, the whole process around the investment and funding and everything else, basically having this, like as a little startup school again, there quotes, I mean, but sharing all of that information with everyone, like, so people, again, I really hope like a couple of people here actually leave the company in five years in something successful on their own. And then on Twitter have like, extendedly proudly like as a sort of a accolade, an emblem that they did something interesting here and that it helped them start their own thing. So, yeah.
Speaker 1 00:22:21 That's nice. I really, I love that ethos. Absolutely love it. I think it's great. So, um, what have been some of your biggest learnings when it comes to building teams? You know, whether in found whether it was from founding tenderly or previously likes of goad?
Speaker 0 00:22:36 Uh, I think it's different again, uh, this is my first startup as a co-founder. So everything I see here is an opinion is in a role very important, very important to preface. So, uh, taking it from the perspective of Godad, which is like a much larger company that, that existed for a much longer time. Um, I think there it's, um, much more work around accountability or enabler teaching people in the team and, and by leadership showing them that accountability and driving something is important because in large systems it's kind of easy to go by without having any accountability at all. So I think learning that, and from that creating new managers, like future managers who will actually show that to other teams as well. So I think that was one. And then in the startup kinda when there isn't like, especially when there was like between seven and 14 of us, you have to own a thing, even if you're not good at it, because there's just like, there's a hands on deck amount of hands on deck.
Speaker 0 00:23:40 Um, so it's more less that, but it's actually, um, optimizing for correct things at the correct time. I think that's like one usually like what's an MVP or like what's an 80 20 solution to a particular problem. Um, and then here, what we did a huge emphasis from like building a team is, um, actually all of our engineers is an example are doing customer support. Not because we don't wanna have a customer support department, but because they should feel the pain, the customer feels because that creates, that creates empathy towards, towards customers. This was actually learned by us accidentally in, in managed WP. I was, um, the engineer that was nearest to support. So everyone first from support was coming to me to ask things. And when you hear how many things they hear from customers, it starts to hurt you. So you want to fix things.
Speaker 0 00:24:34 You want to make things, right? So you develop empathy and then make better product decisions like as a side that, so in a startup, I think it's extremely important for all teams, not, not just engineering, to be extremely close to the customer, talk with the customers. So involve people in, in conversations, group chats, group emails, whatever, uh, that's one. And then the second one is yeah. Thinking, um, in terms of product. And again, this is very important for all teams thinking in terms of product and not their own vertical, I think is really important as well.
Speaker 1 00:25:06 Thanks. That's good to hear. I love some of the stuff that you're talking about that it sort of reinforces that transparency piece as well. Yeah. Um, and any advice that you you've seen Bandi around that you'd love to dispel fellow tech leaders to avoid. So any pitfalls to be, be aware of when it comes to building and scaling products and of growing scale up environments such as you own.
Speaker 0 00:25:30 Sure. Uh, I think, uh, first one is as a leader. So this isn't something that should trickle down to people in your team, but as a leader, uh, the fact that you're making something new as in like starting a company and scaling that cannot be an excuse for making a toy as in things unstable and like, ah, we're just starting out. So it's okay for this not to work. It's okay for this to break. Yes, it is. Okay. But you, you, yourself, shouldn't ever use it as an excuse for yourself. This isn't something you shouldn't force down to your team because that would be extremely toxic micromanaging and everything else. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I'm more talking about internal conversations that you have with self during shower when you lay in bed or whatever, and then especially between other people in leadership. I think that's one, uh, the second one, which we saw, which I saw in a, in a couple of companies, again, uh, being an engineer, it's extremely easy to you're building something for other humans, cuz in the end, even if you're making an API, which is used, I mean by a program basically at the other end, that program was again written by a human being.
Speaker 0 00:26:38 So the whole product and customer thing that I mentioned is extremely important. Basically one of those things I'm ready to die on a hill on is for engineers to be exposed to customers as much as possible, going to conferences, talking to people that the second one, and then the third one, um, for tech leaders, engineers aren't hired to write code code is the necessary evil needs to happen for a problem to be solved. So if you're hiring people to think that thinking can go outside of engineering. So involving them in discussions, around marketing business product, again from a meritocracy perspective, not to democracy perspective, very important, but involving them in those conversations, you can actually get a bunch of interesting solutions to problems that you would never think of yourself just because it was like an engineering approach to a problem, similar to how product people can sometimes think of a very interesting product solution to an engineering problem. It can go vice versa as well.
Speaker 1 00:27:38 Something that's coming through quite clearly in your answers is, is going back to, you talked about transparency, talked about culture earlier on and something I've seen when I've been in scale up organizations, myself, um, when it comes to that culture, at some point you're gonna go boom from headcount perspective is it looks like youre already. Um, how do you, you talked earlier on about, um, and tell me, tell misinterpret this, but you, you wanna tech culture? What, what, what was tenderly? What is tenderly, but therefore it with people in, so you
Speaker 0 00:28:25 Sure. Um, two, two parts to the answer of the question, the first one is I think never to make exceptions. If you have a feel to make, except an exception around a certain category of a problem, you should challenge the system. So never challenge the decision challenge the system, because I think how people are disconnecting from a culture is when the company itself or other people in the company, other EMBO aren't embodying it mm-hmm <affirmative>. So if let's say tomorrow, uh, transparency becomes a problem and not from our perspective, but from all employee perspectives, like if employees are constantly censoring sensor censoring, maybe that isn't our culture anymore. So I think evolving in that perspective, although I think <laugh> transparency is the most, I important, um, important piece of culture. So this was more like a synthetic example. So again, challenge, um, not making exceptions and then challenging the systems, not the decisions that are made by the system itself.
Speaker 0 00:29:26 That's I think one thing, and then the second thing is not having, I've been part of companies that have like 16 values, which I'm quite sure even the CEO not name them all. Um, having only like less than a handful of, of values that you can use basically to make decisions in, in any point in time is extremely important. And that's also from a focus perspective. So here we organize around initiatives and then if any person here is asked to do something, they should see if an aligns with the values and then overlay or with the initiatives overlaid by the values. Again, if everyone is thinking like this, and then if somebody MIS misbehaves in this system, they probably did it for a reason. Just talk to a person, nobody is in the company to do bad things. They just did the thing due to something other than happen. So basically investigate and see why that happened and then either fix it or change, change the way that you do things basically. So I think that's, again, there's only 37 of us. I have no idea how this will look at 200 people, but what we think again is those two things they've kept in mind will scale this in a way.
Speaker 1 00:30:42 And if there's one thing that you could wave, uh, I magic wonder that and fix when it comes to building and leading tech teams, what would that be?
Speaker 0 00:30:51 Uh, thinking that, thinking that, uh, engineering is the most important thing. Uh, so I know this is a very, <laugh> polarized thing to say the least, especially like as an engineer, but um, really while making the startup, we found out like the whole build ITIN, they will come mentality is definitely faulty. That's like the first thing mm-hmm, <affirmative> the second thing. There also is yes, engineering is extremely important, but product is extremely important as well. Uh, I remember my manager and, and manage that. And then Goda one said a thing that a couple of people got, um, sad when they heard, but it was inspiring to me when he said engineering is the instrument in the hand, in the hands of the product. And then people felt that engineering is less important, but the sentiment there isn't that it's, that one cannot function without the other. So if you look at all of the ver in the company, um, and I mean, this is for everyone else, but again, you ask, like to wave aand and, and, and remove like the tech, uh, tech side of things, what people think in the wrong way. Um, engineering is certainly an important piece of the puzzle, but as important as other pieces of the puzzle as well. So removing that, uh, or he part of, of approaching a problem and seeing that we are all in this ship together, it's not just the people building the ship.
Speaker 1 00:32:14 Absolutely. So a couple of lighthearted questions to bring our chat to close today. Is there anything that you are super passionate about, um, that you really find, um, unapologetic and of joining this can be of course, professional personal for both?
Speaker 0 00:32:29 Sure. So from a professional, uh, from a prof, yeah. I I'll give you two answers. I tend to too much information if you remember
Speaker 1 00:32:36 From the, no, you're all good
Speaker 0 00:32:39 From a professional perspective. I think I could never give up talking to people and customers. Um, I am basically seeing again because, uh, in previous companies, again, we were building things that other people were using to build other things. So like those of like passing shovels where other while other peoples are the are repeating. Um, I think I could never lose that as in, I would be extremely unhappy if I ever lose that. And then the joy, we just came back from a conference, the amount of joy I get from talking to people and see what other people are building. And then especially if in some capacity they're using generally to build those things. Um, it means a lot. So that's like one, and then from a personal perspective, the definitely music it's, it's one of the most important things in my life. I'm quite sure if I wouldn't be doing this, I would be in the music industry in some way, shape or form. So, uh, huge amount of joy in music and something, something I I'll never hopefully look, so. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:33:41 Excellent. That's good. Good to hear the balance. And is there a thoughts or value or phrase that you, that you live by?
Speaker 0 00:33:48 Sure. Uh, if you asked me this four years ago, I would probably just parrot something I read of internet or some self or something else. Uh, think while working on tenderly, that became extremely apparent and it is sentenced that comes to my mind constantly, um, is, um, intentional tradeoffs. So to be completely honest in, in my head, it's intentional sacrifices, but it's intentional trade offs. Again, each decision is another decision that wasn't made every day. So like, am I going to water or Coke zero. It's still like a trade of being made. That kinda influences how things are going to happen. Um, every time when, when there's even a small decision that needs to happen, especially around tenderly. I, I think like what should be the intentional trade of here? So I'm definitely making a trade off. I need to identify it. So again, in my head it's intentional sacrifices, but it's like intentional tradeoffs.
Speaker 1 00:34:46 Excellent. That's something I'm definitely taking away from this meeting. Not the only thing I should stress about, but that's definitely one I'm taking away. I think you're absolutely right. So thank you very much for your time today. It's been really a really interesting and, um, uh, and fun conversation. It's been, it's been a pleasure speaking with you, so thank you very much for your time and thank you for being on our podcast.
Speaker 0 00:35:07 Thank you so much. I, I definitely had a lot of fun and fun and had a lot of fun. That can be a fun actually. Yeah. <laugh> that, that wasn't, that wasn't intentional, but yeah, that wasn't an intentional trade off, but yeah. Anyway, uh, thanks for having me had a lot of fun and then hope we can talk sometime in the future to see how things in the
Speaker 1 00:35:27 Brilliant.
