Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Perfect Pitch, a podcast by Kickstart, where we reveal the minds of both investors and entrepreneurs throughout a startup's journey.
Speaker: I'm your host, Karen Zelnick, and today we have Alex Shamir, co-founder of Yofi and Tanner Potter, an investor at Kickstart.
Speaker: Welcome both of you.
Speaker: So glad to have you on the show.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Alex, let's tell our listeners a little bit about you.
Speaker: So you were a senior product manager at Nike before you transitioned into a technical project manager role at Apple.
Speaker: You became obsessed with bots.
Speaker: Is obsessed a fair word to say?
Speaker: I think I would say caveat it in the past as yes.
Speaker: Now bad actors and policy abusers in general.
Speaker: Like I am wearing a sweatshirt that says bot mitigation is my passion.
Speaker: It's my Yofi swag.
Speaker: And so I think it's a fair assessment.
Speaker: Okay, great.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: And that led to the founding of Yofi.
Speaker: You were recognized recently as Forbes 30 under 30 watch list, which is amazing and well-deserved.
Speaker: What else should we know about you?
Speaker: That's a hard one.
Speaker: I love raccoons.
Speaker: So that's part of our Yofi mascot and logo.
Speaker: I was a chemistry nerd.
Speaker: I started working in a chem lab.
Speaker: Shout out to Dr. Laren Tobert and EA Weeks at Georgia Tech at 15 years old.
Speaker: Had a lot of fun.
Speaker: Well, at 15?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Just had to make sure we all heard that.
Speaker: I think most of the world love organic chemistry.
Speaker: It's, you know, the most fun hobby.
Speaker: And then, you know, for fun, I love being with my dog, being outside.
Speaker: So skiing, snowboarding.
Speaker: I went to college.
Speaker: I'll call Utah, Montana home.
Speaker: So anything that gets me outside of the mountains, kind of like that.
Speaker: Yeah, I love that.
Speaker: What about raccoons?
Speaker: I have to ask before we move on.
Speaker: Okay, so people tell me my personality is kind of like a raccoon with access to broadband drinking a Red Bull, which I think is pretty fair when you get to know me.
Speaker: They're just the cutest little animal you've ever seen.
Speaker: And they're like digging for trash and they find golden trash.
Speaker: And I just love that about them.
Speaker: That's so great.
Speaker: Okay, Tanner.
Speaker: How do you follow that?
Speaker: How do you?
Speaker: Yeah, how do you follow that?
Speaker: What's your favorite animal?
Speaker: I would go...
Speaker: I like gorillas.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I've seen gorillas in person in the wild.
Speaker: That was one of the cool things I've done in my life.
Speaker: And so now ever since I like saw them, actually, I liked it before that, but when saw them in Rwanda, that was that sealed the deal for me on baby gorillas.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: We should put some photos from your trip there in the show notes because I would love to see them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's so cool.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: We'll have a link to your bio.
Speaker: It's great to have you back on the show.
Speaker: I mean, we just learned your favorite animals.
Speaker: Is there anything else the audience should know about you that they don't yet know about you?
Speaker: No, I would say Alex actually spurred the she's skiing and snowboarding this year.
Speaker: I've gone back and forth on my life skiing and snowboarding, but this year I've been doing both skiing and snowboarding.
Speaker: I like trying new things.
Speaker: So that, that was this year.
Speaker: I'm not that good at either, but it's fun to go back and forth and get some powder while snowboarding and then skiing's, you know, moguls and just going straight down is a little bit better.
Speaker: It's hard to be ambidextrous with skiing and snowboarding.
Speaker: It's very hard to go between them both, just saying.
Speaker: You put your weight differently, right?
Speaker: I even found it really hard to go from water skiing to snow skiing because in water skiing, all the weight's in your heels, but snow skiing, it's all in your toes.
Speaker: I just...
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Anyway.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: It's funny because then you start to see different things you like about it.
Speaker: Snowboarding is closer to the ground and through powder you float and you get a little more floating sensation.
Speaker: But then the transitions between everything kind of sucks.
Speaker: Taking off your bindings, getting off the lift, and skiing is just a little more smooth that way.
Speaker: So they got their positive and negative stuff.
Speaker: Alex, before we move on a little bit, I do want to ask you, where did the name Yofi come from?
Speaker: We'll talk more about the company later, but the name, where did the name come from?
Speaker: So our original name was Botnot.
Speaker: And we pivoted away from only dealing with bots.
Speaker: So we're thinking about a name and we're a customer intentionality platform.
Speaker: So we're thinking, okay, good customer, bad customer.
Speaker: And I kept saying my dog's name and my dog's name is Yofi.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, Yofi always means great.
Speaker: I'm a big pun person.
Speaker: So he's always a great boy.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Okay, let's dive into the discussion a little bit.
Speaker: Alex, you, back in 2017, the beginning of your career, you were a PhD student actually studying chemistry.
Speaker: We know that's a passion for you.
Speaker: What changed?
Speaker: You're not a chemist.
Speaker: You're not doing like what, what happened?
Speaker: I think chemistry just gives you a good baseline skill.
Speaker: So it makes you extremely analytical, gives you a lot of grit.
Speaker: It makes you fail a lot, right?
Speaker: Because chemistry, you're always testing a hypothesis.
Speaker: And you're in a lab, something environmentally could go wrong in a lab, something could be contaminated, and it just goes wrong.
Speaker: And I was working harder than I ever did in my life.
Speaker: in a chemistry lab and doing physical chemistry.
Speaker: So computational chemistry.
Speaker: And I just realized, as long as I've been doing that, at that point, I've been doing chemistry for almost 10 years.
Speaker: It wasn't for me.
Speaker: I wasn't loving it.
Speaker: I wasn't passionate about it.
Speaker: Waking up in the morning became very arduous because my heart wasn't there.
Speaker: And it's not just the failing aspect.
Speaker: It was do I want to be in a lab every day doing the same monotonous labor constantly?
Speaker: And the answer was no, it didn't allow me to be creative.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: Like I love, I recently read a book called The Dip.
Speaker: It's really short.
Speaker: I think it takes like an hour to read, but it's talk, it kind of, I love the concept of like, is this just a dip or is this actually not the life I want to choose?
Speaker: And then, so I, there's a lot of power and the most successful people learn the right things to quit.
Speaker: You have to quit the right things.
Speaker: But Tanner, I love your thoughts on that.
Speaker: I don't know how to word this exactly, but like, was that a red flag for you?
Speaker: Was like changing course and doing something different after having done something for 10 years?
Speaker: Like how do investors think about pivots in life courses?
Speaker: No, it's, in fact, they're usually positives.
Speaker: Maybe it's because there's so many stories of
Speaker: Steve jobs and Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, all these people, they drew, they dropped out.
Speaker: So within every founder, there's a bit of a rebel.
Speaker: There's a bit of like a falling and unorthodox path.
Speaker: And so when we saw that with Alex,
Speaker: It checks the box.
Speaker: You know that she's smart.
Speaker: Like I said, you know that she's gritty.
Speaker: If she's in there, she can be detailed.
Speaker: But also, she is not going to follow the traditional path.
Speaker: And so when we think about investing in founders, that's by definition what they are.
Speaker: People who are going to go after something without resources to try to solve a problem.
Speaker: So now I think for us, it was like, okay, this is really interesting.
Speaker: And she's following her path.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Alex, what advice would you give to a listening entrepreneur who started something, whether it's a company or a degree, and now they're having sort of second thoughts?
Speaker: Like, how do you decide if quitting is the right choice?
Speaker: It's going to be the most cliche advice, but the advice I love it.
Speaker: We love it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Always listen to your gut.
Speaker: Your intuition will always be right.
Speaker: You need to like, there's wake up calls.
Speaker: There's always going to be red flags.
Speaker: The more you ignore it, the harder it's going to be.
Speaker: Life, in my opinion, needs to be organic.
Speaker: The more inorganic it is, the more you force, the harder it's going to be.
Speaker: The second you feel that way, it's time to hop off that boat and you'll find the right path.
Speaker: It's really, really cringe.
Speaker: And I'm sorry, but it's the truth.
Speaker: I don't think it's cringey.
Speaker: I don't think it's cringey.
Speaker: Like it's cliches or cliches for a reason, I think.
Speaker: No, I think that checks out for me.
Speaker: Especially when you've... I think you've developed intuition in your gut.
Speaker: Over time, you've been doing it for 10 years.
Speaker: You don't need any more data.
Speaker: If you think of your intuition as some mix of your natural proclivities and the data that you've acquired through life experience...
Speaker: 10 years in, you're going to know, okay, this is not right for me.
Speaker: And so you can really trust your intuition.
Speaker: You obviously have to give things a fair shake before you can make those decisions at times.
Speaker: And that's the testing hypothesis period.
Speaker: Often we see our founders go through and whether that's on a business front, whether they want to be a founder or not.
Speaker: I think there's different things you can do to help you start to build some intuition.
Speaker: But yeah, then I agree with Alex.
Speaker: It's like, what...
Speaker: It's the cliche, you know, what Phil, what Phil's right here and go with that rather than, and oftentimes that leads you to do things that like, isn't what everybody else would tell you to do.
Speaker: And that's, that's when you usually find like the unique idea, you find alpha, you find cool opportunities is when you don't just do what everyone else is doing.
Speaker: Did you find that to be the case, Alex?
Speaker: Yeah, I remember starting at Nike and getting into the bot space.
Speaker: And then I moved to Apple.
Speaker: And by the way, Apple was my dream company.
Speaker: I was like, perfect.
Speaker: I'm going to stay at Apple.
Speaker: I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker: Love the product.
Speaker: But it was an itching feeling of like, this is what I should be doing.
Speaker: And then going into Apple being like, hey, I don't feel like this is the right place for me.
Speaker: I don't feel like I'm doing the right thing.
Speaker: I don't feel like I'm on the right path.
Speaker: It was that pivot that one opened my new chapter in my life.
Speaker: But if I ignored that, I don't think I would have been as successful and as happy as I am now.
Speaker: Tanner, you mentioned there are things people can do to sort of learn to like to hone their intuition.
Speaker: Do you have any examples?
Speaker: Yeah, it's kind of like a chicken and egg thing where you you need experience, get experience.
Speaker: And how do you get how do you get the first experience?
Speaker: I just think there's
Speaker: I remember when I was deciding whether I wanted to, in undergrad, whether I wanted, my mom was like, oh, you're smart and you got good grades, so why don't you be a doctor?
Speaker: We have a lawyer in the family, we have an academic, why don't you go do this route?
Speaker: I remember I went and shadowed my uncle who was a podiatrist.
Speaker: And I shadowed a family friend who was a family doctor.
Speaker: And I started taking some of the classes.
Speaker: And I gave myself some experience to try and figure that out.
Speaker: And I was like, yeah, that's not the right fit for me.
Speaker: So I think on the startup front, you see that where sometimes people... For example, they're thinking about a startup...
Speaker: You know, they start advising, they start working on the side, they do it.
Speaker: And then like, oh, yeah, this actually fits my, you know, this resonates with the way that I operate.
Speaker: And so like, I think it's just starting just starting with running little test experiments.
Speaker: And then ultimately, you know, you don't really know until like you take the full jump on on something until you burn the ships.
Speaker: And and so it comes down to that.
Speaker: But then I think your intuition can guide you a little bit there.
Speaker: So Alex, your intuition has guided you to leave chemistry.
Speaker: You're at Apple, your dream company.
Speaker: What led you to start Yofi?
Speaker: How did the idea come about?
Speaker: Walk us through the story.
Speaker: Okay, one, I don't know if people have contacts of how Tanner and I met.
Speaker: Give us the context.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Give us the context.
Speaker: Tanner and I were both graduate interns at Nike together one summer.
Speaker: And I have a personality where I'll talk to practically anyone.
Speaker: And we're sitting at a table.
Speaker: And at that table, they asked us a question of where do you see your life in the future?
Speaker: Where's your next 10 years going to be at Nike?
Speaker: And I remember raising my hand and I said, I'm going to be on a ranch with my dogs after selling a tech company.
Speaker: Tanner looked at me.
Speaker: I looked at Tanner and I was like, we're going to be friends and who can do more pushups right now, me or you?
Speaker: Literally what happened.
Speaker: I don't know if Tanner remembers this, but I remember this.
Speaker: So how Yofi more or less started is I was on a growth team at Nike and they gave me...
Speaker: a project to work on.
Speaker: And the project was figure out the bot mitigation strategy for Nike China.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: So I started looking at data.
Speaker: And I created a deck that was called 2am thoughts.
Speaker: And I was looking at data that people were like, Oh, great, our growth numbers are growing up going up.
Speaker: But why is our AOV falling?
Speaker: Why is our new coupon rate falling down or going up?
Speaker: And I started asking these questions on like, what are our legitimate users?
Speaker: Why are these accounts fluctuating month over month?
Speaker: And just diving in that data made me fall in love with this field.
Speaker: Going over to Apple, I can't talk about what I did, saw a similar pattern.
Speaker: And I'm like, all these retail companies and the largest retail companies in the world, including the ones that my co-founders worked at, are seeing the same issues.
Speaker: Why aren't people questioning their legitimacy of their data and their customer intentionality?
Speaker: That's our core data that we're making for everyday decisions, whether that's machine learning, procurement, or more.
Speaker: If that's faulty, you can't build anything correctly.
Speaker: So why aren't they questioning it?
Speaker: Data and data integrity is a hard topic.
Speaker: Understanding the difference and the nuances of customer intentionality is a hard problem to solve.
Speaker: Policy abuse isn't simple, right?
Speaker: Because you have to think about how is this customer interacting?
Speaker: Are they masking as a bot?
Speaker: Are they masking as a return abuser?
Speaker: It's a lot of questions and it's a lot of orgs in a big company having to talk to each other.
Speaker: And the bigger the company you are, you realize the less and less that people talk to each other.
Speaker: So it's really understanding how to stitch the data and also where can we be the most useful or be the most utilized.
Speaker: So this passion for solving this problem led to Yofi.
Speaker: You connected with your co-founders.
Speaker: Tell us a little bit about that founding story.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Andrea and I helped build the bond mitigation strategy together at Nike.
Speaker: We couldn't stop thinking about it.
Speaker: Andrew went to a bunch of different retail companies.
Speaker: And we would just be pinging each other on WeChat like, Hey, did you see this?
Speaker: Hey, did you see that?
Speaker: I was actually driving because I did policy abuse myself on a mattress.
Speaker: And I was like, Why aren't people thinking about this?
Speaker: Why aren't they solving it?
Speaker: I called my brother who ended up being one of our co-founders as well.
Speaker: because Jordan scaled companies from like zero to 300 million at IBM.
Speaker: He's insanely smart and like the best product person I know.
Speaker: And I was like, Hey, I just want to talk this through with you.
Speaker: People will talk about fraud.
Speaker: They'll talk about friendly fraud.
Speaker: They'll talk about bots from like a laugh and network layer, but no one talks about policy abuse.
Speaker: And like to say policy abuse and fraud are very similar is like, they're very nuanced.
Speaker: It's extremely different.
Speaker: So like,
Speaker: I'm going to go back and go on a little tangent.
Speaker: I was listening to a podcast of George Kurtz, who's the CEO of CrowdStrike.
Speaker: It's a $65 billion company.
Speaker: And it's like he's talking and having to correct people what the difference is between malware and breaches.
Speaker: It's the same thing with us, where it's like,
Speaker: going back and tying this together.
Speaker: No one's ever thinking about this.
Speaker: In 2020, it was all about growth of a company.
Speaker: Let's build a direct-to-consumer business.
Speaker: No one thought about the data play and how much it's eating their actual bottom line.
Speaker: Tanner, and so she brings this idea to you.
Speaker: What are your thoughts?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when I was at Nike, the sneakerhead culture, this obsession with getting...
Speaker: Air Jordan, one of them, or specific brands was just on the cusp of just becoming mainstream.
Speaker: And then with 2020 COVID, we saw this just insane mainstreaming of sneakers and all these secondary marketplaces where you could buy them
Speaker: and this demand happening.
Speaker: And so it started to become obvious that there were hype sneakers or sneakerheads.
Speaker: This was happening where bots were coming in and buying up a bunch and then reselling them and people were paying exorbitant amounts.
Speaker: And I can actually remember when Alex talked to me first about it, the example she gave is that it wasn't just arbitrage that was happening there.
Speaker: People were finding a 20% coupon and buying Air Monarch 87s, which
Speaker: if you don't know, are really cool shoes.
Speaker: The biggest dad shoe in the world.
Speaker: Yeah, they're like, they're dad shoes for like 60 year olds and plus that you only see in Florida, you know.
Speaker: But people were buying up a bunch of these, getting them for 20% off, reselling them.
Speaker: And then for the ones they didn't resell within a 30 day period, they were sending back to Nike.
Speaker: And so you were seeing huge bullet effects on the supply chain.
Speaker: It costs $14 plus to just return and backstock those shoes.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: For me, when Alex and Jordan and the team first came and talked to us about it, it was like, there's no doubt there's a there there.
Speaker: There's an issue going on.
Speaker: And just as if you think about physical retail, there's so many...
Speaker: there's actually physical guards they have to put in place.
Speaker: They have currency checks on dollars, like people, there's leakage where people are stealing things.
Speaker: Like there's all sorts of things that are happening in the physical sphere that we don't think about, but like that, that there's institutions and guardrails and things that have been put in place.
Speaker: Whereas online, like it's still a little bit of the wild west.
Speaker: And so when you think about e-commerce brands,
Speaker: How do they deal with a bot or some bad actor that's buying up 10% of the stock of something that's scarce and then reselling it?
Speaker: Is that what you want?
Speaker: Is that what the customer experience is?
Speaker: So there's all sorts of ramifications.
Speaker: And I think that was just the beginning of understanding that was the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker: Well, now, the hottest topic is returns abuse.
Speaker: We've been doing that for 2 years at this point.
Speaker: It's been a thing for the last 11 years on e-com.
Speaker: So it's people who are wardrobing, I'm wearing this hoodie, I'm going to return it, I'm going to send back the package for a product that is equal weight in a package, even though it's not a real product, or I'm going to send back a counterfeit.
Speaker: It's hitting every econ business.
Speaker: So it's like, how do we detect it?
Speaker: How do we find these bad actors?
Speaker: Because it's technically not fraud.
Speaker: It's policy abuse, which is a completely different area.
Speaker: And it's something that they have to come and think about where, like Tanner said, great, there was bots, hype product, but now it's hitting almost every line of business within a company's org.
Speaker: You can't recapture that product.
Speaker: It's a zero sale.
Speaker: Like this is fascinating to me, like stuff that I don't think about as a consumer, but then impacts me too.
Speaker: Now you have to pay a reshipping fee, right?
Speaker: Like I'm getting impacted.
Speaker: Like 1% of what we've seen from our customers is 1% of bad actors contribute to about 15% of returns.
Speaker: That's a huge number.
Speaker: So when H&M or Zara calls, not our customers yet, but... Yet, yet, yet.
Speaker: Can't say that, but you get the point.
Speaker: They're charging people $4.99 for returns and shipping because of these bad actors.
Speaker: We shouldn't be impacted.
Speaker: We didn't do anything to harm their policy.
Speaker: It's the 1% who are really impacting and taking advantage.
Speaker: That's fascinating.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now I'm just like, before the episode, we asked Tanner if there was one thing that he would want entrepreneurs to learn from you, what would that be?
Speaker: And he said to know more about the problem than anyone else in the world.
Speaker: And it's very clear from just our short conversation already that that is you.
Speaker: You know more about this problem than anyone else in the world.
Speaker: How did you come to that?
Speaker: How do you have the time to research that?
Speaker: How do you do that?
Speaker: They're an ever evolving problem.
Speaker: How do you stay up to date with something that is constantly changing?
Speaker: When you're equated to a raccoon with broadband, you've been on the internet for a long time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: With the Red Bull.
Speaker: You forgot.
Speaker: With the Red Bull.
Speaker: With the Red Bull.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm on the internet.
Speaker: I'm constantly doing threat intelligence.
Speaker: My background was a botter.
Speaker: I was a reseller at some point.
Speaker: I won't age myself, but I was doing this for Justin Bieber tickets.
Speaker: How do we write a Selenium script?
Speaker: How do we do this before it was a nice GUI package and I paid $200 subscription for a bot, which is wild to me when it's like a few lines of code.
Speaker: I came from this world.
Speaker: It was a passion project of me.
Speaker: So then transitioning to the threat intelligence side was I'm chronically on the internet.
Speaker: I love solving this problem.
Speaker: I wake up and the only thing I want to do is like do big data and do data engineering for this.
Speaker: it makes me so happy and finding the clues and puzzles.
Speaker: I'm a big puzzle and Lego person.
Speaker: It's essentially what I do every single day.
Speaker: And so once you're staring at data, and you've been doing it for as long as I have, it becomes a mystery game of how do I get smarter?
Speaker: How do I outsmart the policy abusers?
Speaker: Do you ever get to a dip?
Speaker: Or does it ever become mundane?
Speaker: Or you're just like, this is my problem.
Speaker: And I'm passionate about it.
Speaker: I'm not going to lie.
Speaker: Staring at a CSV file or a BigQuery table at times is not the most fun and sexy.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: I was shocked here.
Speaker: Shogging.
Speaker: And when I do, that's when you take breaks.
Speaker: You go outside, you clear your mind.
Speaker: I mean, I'm luckily at a position where it's not my only thing that I do on a day to day.
Speaker: Like I get to talk with clients and get to involve clients and threat intelligence and make them knowledgeable to the problems.
Speaker: But it's also so... It's not a mundane area because bad actors are quick.
Speaker: So you patch a loophole, it's a constant cat and mouse game.
Speaker: You're never going to catch 99%.
Speaker: You're never going to catch 100%.
Speaker: Anyone who tells you that it's a lie, but it's how do we catch 80, 75%, 60% and how do we stay up to date with our techniques makes it non mundane.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: Tanner, two questions for you.
Speaker: The first one.
Speaker: So how do you stay energized at your job?
Speaker: I'd love to know your approach to that as well.
Speaker: Yeah, I think as VCs, in some ways, we have the inverse problem, which is we are involved in so many different things that you don't ever get to deep work on it.
Speaker: You feel it's shallow.
Speaker: It can feel shallower because you have 10 minutes of context and then you jump to the FinTech and then you jump to an internet company and then you jump to a SaaS company.
Speaker: So for me, I think it's just...
Speaker: I feel lucky that I'm like, I get to learn for me.
Speaker: Like, I think one of my core values is just being a curious person.
Speaker: And so when I think about it, it's like, Alex is the expert on bots.
Speaker: So who better to learn from and, and get knowledge from and try to help than somebody who cares about solving a problem and who is an expert on something that, you know,
Speaker: not that many people really understand.
Speaker: So for me, it's like remembering that entrepreneurs, you know, they're, they're like the, they're the main stars of the show.
Speaker: And you're like, how can I be a supporting actor in a bunch of different shows that I can support them and whatever it is they're doing.
Speaker: I think that that helps.
Speaker: And then, yeah, it's like life balance stuff.
Speaker: There's certainly ebbs and flows when you've,
Speaker: I was joking with some people here internally and my wife that during February, March in Utah, it can get tough when it's been cloudy for a week straight and you've been on Zoom calls all day.
Speaker: So I think there's just good life balance stuff, getting outside, snowboarding or skiing, stuff like that.
Speaker: Or both.
Speaker: Hard life out in Utah.
Speaker: Hard life.
Speaker: Really, really tough.
Speaker: And Tanner, why is it so important for entrepreneurs to know more about the problem than anyone else in the world?
Speaker: Why was this the takeaway you want listeners to walk away with?
Speaker: Yeah, I think when we think about what kills most startups, it's, Gavin has said this a few times, it's apathy.
Speaker: It's like people just don't care.
Speaker: And oftentimes people, because people are just busy on whatever it is they're busy on.
Speaker: And so one, I love it when like an entrepreneur's problem obsessed because the solution often changes and evolves over time.
Speaker: Like what Alex thought she was solving two or three years ago is very different than what she's solving today.
Speaker: But if, you know,
Speaker: As a product person, what we always talk about is you're solving for the job to be done.
Speaker: People don't want a screwdriver, they want a screw in the wall.
Speaker: And so if you remember that, then you always have a North Star.
Speaker: You keep yourself in business by solving a real problem.
Speaker: And that's where product and ultimately companies are fun when you actually solve a problem for somebody.
Speaker: It's not about the microphone here.
Speaker: It's about the audio quality that then leads to a cool conversation that somebody wants to hear.
Speaker: And so I think that's the right framing.
Speaker: We've seen people that come forward with technology-first solutions where they're like, hey, I see this technology and they try to find a solution.
Speaker: And that can work.
Speaker: It doesn't mean it's the wrong way, but I feel like the more tried and true way is you really know that problem and you can then go figure out how to solve it with whatever tools you can find.
Speaker: And Alex, you're a young entrepreneur.
Speaker: I mean, you're on the 30 under 30 list.
Speaker: We're not going to ask you for your exact age.
Speaker: We know.
Speaker: Well, but have you ever felt, I'm just going to point, I just want to, I'm curious, have you ever felt underestimated because of your age?
Speaker: Like you were doing organic chemistry at 15.
Speaker: You are so knowledgeable about, you know, everything that you're solving, but have you ever felt underestimated?
Speaker: So I'll caveat this with I'm a Capricorn.
Speaker: And so I'm on a mission in life.
Speaker: I've never really used age to underestimate myself.
Speaker: Like, I know what I know.
Speaker: If you're going to use my age to question me, it's your perspective.
Speaker: And I think it's hard being a young entrepreneur where people will use your age against you.
Speaker: But it's hard to get domain expertise.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: the fact that I do have domain expertise at a younger age is to my benefit.
Speaker: It allows me to grow where this policy abuse grows.
Speaker: It allows me to be cool enough to hang out in Discord and Telegram and still understand how to use those products.
Speaker: So I mean, my advice there is if you feel like you're too young to start a company, like I'm not Mark Zuckerberg's age by any means, but I'm not going to let it use against me.
Speaker: Yeah, Tanner, any thoughts on that?
Speaker: Or do you have any hesitations investing in young entrepreneurs who are doing it for the first time?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I mean, there's trade-offs for whatever stage of career you're at.
Speaker: I saw somebody, an entrepreneur talking about this.
Speaker: When you're young, theoretically, you have more energy, you have more time, you potentially have less people dependents.
Speaker: And so there's benefits.
Speaker: Whereas when you're potentially more seasoned, you have more experience, you might have more domain expertise.
Speaker: So I think there's age benefits that...
Speaker: that Alex showed that occur with this business.
Speaker: Like it's hard for somebody that's not internet native, that doesn't understand sneakerhead culture, that doesn't understand discord, that doesn't understand who bots are like bots.
Speaker: I mean, demographically are typically young.
Speaker: Like, so there's times when that, that makes a lot of sense versus if Alex was,
Speaker: you know, the age she was and she was developing those, those shoes for 60 year old plus dads and air monarchs.
Speaker: Like she may have, there may be less natural like reasons why, why that's a good fit.
Speaker: So there's, there's things that we think about from like an age perspective, there's types of industries that might play well, but ultimately it is like way down the list from just like ambition, uh, intelligence, uh,
Speaker: ethics, integrity, like all of those things.
Speaker: And so when, you know, when we thought about Alex and you're like, Hey, she's an expert here.
Speaker: She's been at Nike.
Speaker: She's been an Apple.
Speaker: She's seen it.
Speaker: She was, you know, doing AI at the university of Utah.
Speaker: Like that's, you know, when we think about like you have domain experience, she had, you know, she had that in really interesting ways.
Speaker: And so, you know, that like ages is, wasn't really something we, I don't, we didn't think about.
Speaker: Alex, what do you know now that you didn't at the beginning of your founder journey that you would counsel, you know, first time or young entrepreneurs on?
Speaker: Your product doesn't have to be perfect.
Speaker: I'm a very perfect product person.
Speaker: I will coddle my product until I think it's perfect.
Speaker: There's some times where it's like, just get the MVP out there, iterate quickly.
Speaker: The quicker you iterate, the quicker feedback you get.
Speaker: We hit our stride in the last 8 months, I would say.
Speaker: We started doing... Jordan and I both come from a product background.
Speaker: Mine is data product.
Speaker: Jordan is software and cloud-based product.
Speaker: And both of us were like...
Speaker: The product's not ready yet.
Speaker: And that really held us back.
Speaker: If I were to tell myself a year and a half ago, just put it out there, ship it, we'll iterate quickly.
Speaker: Let's do that.
Speaker: But we kind of built... When you're in the space of policy abuse, you have to build stuff like graph databases, you have to build gold plumbing.
Speaker: And by skipping those steps, it's really hard to do.
Speaker: But at the same time, it definitely hindered us a bit.
Speaker: Not detrimentally, but...
Speaker: We wanted to have the right foundation and a perfect product.
Speaker: And sometimes shipping a little bit sooner can be okay.
Speaker: And then second piece of advice is never feel bad firing quick.
Speaker: I tend to be a nice person.
Speaker: And times you get emotional, especially like, Oh, this was our first engineering hire.
Speaker: Even though the perfect isn't person isn't right.
Speaker: You always feel emotional letting go the first person.
Speaker: I don't think any person that we decided to let go was ever a regret.
Speaker: It's a constant theme through entrepreneurship where it's like focus on building.
Speaker: If they're not the right person, always be grateful to that person and what they contribute.
Speaker: Just don't think about it.
Speaker: How did you know it was time to fire?
Speaker: So a lot of advice we give often is, you know, hire slowly, fire quickly.
Speaker: But what's the moment when you kind of know?
Speaker: I don't know, Tanner, if you've got any thoughts on that too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, the, this is one of those, there's certain startup and VC truisms that like have only become more true in my experience is in that if you think that somebody is not a fit, I've never seen somebody think they fired too fast.
Speaker: And I continue to see other examples of that.
Speaker: And so moving quickly on that, uh, just in my experience, nobody, I have not seen a founder that has regretted that.
Speaker: It's also mutually beneficial, right?
Speaker: At some point, the other person's happier.
Speaker: They're not getting demand.
Speaker: They're not feeling stressed about being in a situation that they want to be in as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then that's like back to that intuition.
Speaker: Like a lot of times you just know, you just know, and it sits there and it's a hard decision.
Speaker: It's a really hard decision to make.
Speaker: And so, and it has to be done in the right, the right way.
Speaker: But once, once you know, it's like, Hey, it's, this is, yeah, I think that's the right way to perceive it as what's best for both of us or all of us.
Speaker: Yeah, it's great insight.
Speaker: Um, my, so I have two, I have two final questions for us.
Speaker: I was debating which one to do first, but I do need to know who can do more pushups.
Speaker: Like you can never answer that.
Speaker: You just threw that out there and now we've just been left hanging the whole time.
Speaker: So I'm going to, I'm going to have to say Tanner, but maybe that summer at Nike.
Speaker: questionable.
Speaker: We'll never know.
Speaker: We'll never know.
Speaker: I, Alex, somehow don't remember.
Speaker: I remember sitting in that room.
Speaker: We went on the ground.
Speaker: I must have blocked this out of my memory.
Speaker: I remember the other stuff.
Speaker: I actually went on the ground and did push-ups.
Speaker: We literally went on the ground and did push-ups.
Speaker: And I don't even remember which conference, which banquet hall we were at, but it was the grad section, underground section.
Speaker: And I was like, push-ups?
Speaker: Now.
Speaker: Fun fact, I can't really do a push-up.
Speaker: So, anywho, who was I to antagonize Tanner?
Speaker: It used to be so fun.
Speaker: What happened?
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: So fun.
Speaker: Never forget Thursdays.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: So good.
Speaker: And the final question I do have and something Alex that we ask everybody, and that is what's an effective practice that you've implemented in your work or personal life that you think has had a great impact on your success?
Speaker: It's something that we brought into the company.
Speaker: And it's one thing that you will prioritize over work itself, over anything that you need to do.
Speaker: So it's for me, it's always walking my dog, I could have a call, I'll always walk my dog, I'll always be walking Yofi while talking about Yofi, I will always prioritize that because it's good for my health, good for my mental space, and it allows me to breathe and catch up.
Speaker: For example, Jordan saying is always watching a Manchester United game.
Speaker: So granted, good thing we're in the US because they happen to be early in the morning.
Speaker: So he can wake up at 4am and watch Man U and that's his prioritization.
Speaker: So always prioritize one thing above work, whatever you need.
Speaker: some of our other club teammates.
Speaker: It's cooking, it's baking, but for me, it's walking.
Speaker: And if I was still in Utah, I would be hiking up in I Street.
Speaker: I miss I Street and the bike jump.
Speaker: I Street, like in the avenues?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: 18th Ave and I Street.
Speaker: So good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: I love it up here.
Speaker: You're always welcome back, Alex.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Anytime.
Speaker: Tanner, what were your thoughts on that?
Speaker: It's a good question.
Speaker: I think something that I was thinking about earlier is I like... We've talked about this a lot.
Speaker: Listening to books and podcasts and getting other information.
Speaker: For me, what I've been thinking about, I like history a lot.
Speaker: And so history, when I read history, it just helps me put things in perspective.
Speaker: Helps me think about...
Speaker: big patterns and changes and macro cycles, you know, as I, like right now I'm thinking about, I've been reading about the Silk Roads and the rise and fall of all these empires.
Speaker: And there's just all these like challenges that, that the empires face, whether it's like bundling or unbundling who they ally with, who's who, like how they, how they run succession within their kingdom, uh, how they use technology, like, you know, what they're, whether they assimilate with another culture or whether they like, whether they move that culture out.
Speaker: So for me,
Speaker: It's really keeping what helps me then is to have something that's like not directly connected, like history that then like spurs my thoughts on, on what I do at my job.
Speaker: So that like, that allows me to geek out a little bit.
Speaker: And Alex, like I'm a, how many, how many times a week do you think about the Roman empire?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: How many times?
Speaker: A few.
Speaker: But I'm going a lot of empires right now.
Speaker: I'm adding.
Speaker: I'm adding.
Speaker: Do you have a favorite empire, like empiric period?
Speaker: Right now it's the Ottomans.
Speaker: Fair.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What they did in Turkey.
Speaker: I love the style.
Speaker: They have these really cool.
Speaker: They kind of used nightlife.
Speaker: And they did a lot of cool things.
Speaker: And some bad things like all empires.
Speaker: I was going to say, they also did some.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The story of all empires.
Speaker: All empires.
Speaker: Some good things and a lot of bad things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Story of life.
Speaker: Well, thank you both so much for being on the show today.
Speaker: It's been an amazing discussion.
Speaker: Alex, really grateful for your insights.
Speaker: So excited about all you're working on and all the work you're doing to help all of us who don't even know all that's going on in the background.
Speaker: So thank you for saving the world for us.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
