Boxes and clouds - Kate Pljaskovova

00:00

I never had regrets. So I really rarely think about the opportunity cost of my choices. Because as long as I'm learning, and my learning curve is really steep, that's where I want to be. And if I'm learning about something that I'm excited and curious about. If I'm not, I want to stop. And being a founder, however glorious a founder sounds, we both know it's really difficult. But what it brings is so much learnings, and a really strong community that we're both part of. That enables that learning, in the way that you can learn from the people that have been a couple of steps ahead of you. You can give a bit of advice, or share your experience with a couple of people that are just starting on that journey. And it's the sense of belonging.

00:51

If you didn't choose to be a head of people, and it chose you, how did that figure itself out?

01:00

Oh yeah. So I was 18, and I was a nanny between my high school and university. And I was a nanny to a little boy, for like an afternoon nanny. And the boy's dad was a founder of a tech company. And I had a white Mac, and he was like, because I got it, I graduated from high school, and the only thing I wanted for a graduation was a white Mac, because of the color. I had no idea what else.

01:27

And the PC against Mac advertisement I think made it, in my mind, if everyone remembers that, amazing, still need to watch it. It's so cool. And he was like, "Oh, a white Mac. I'm running a company. You take care of my child. Its much more important than my company. Do you want to come and join us, and help me hire more people?" And they were about seven back then. And I was like, "Um, okay." And yeah, I joined the company. And then he gave me one book, and he's like, "This is the only book you need to read." And it was Delivering Happiness, from Tony Hsieh. I'm always mispronouncing his name. And-

02:04

I don't know how to say that.

02:06

Yeah. And I was like, "I'm here to deliver happiness and hire many more engineers." And he was like, "Oh, can you hire another 10 engineers?" And I'm like, "Okay." I was like, "What does an engineer do?" And I went to all the people in the office, I'm like "What do you do? How would you describe what you do? And how would you hire someone like yourself? Do you have any friends that we can potentially hire from the places they worked before?" And they were like, "Yeah, I have a friend that we can hire." And we grew company exactly like that to about 50, and I was still the only person on people's side and office manager and everything, organizing fantastic retreats, getting people organized and drunk. That was my job on the Thursdays and Fridays.

02:50

And yeah, we got acquired by a Silicon Valley client that wanted to, they were really excited how we can grow the team fast and cheaply, because I didn't have any recruiters that I worked with. It was only me asking other people, "Do any friend that enjoyed the company?" And we grew after they acquired us, and we grew to 150 people. So that was my job. And I was 19 when I started, and finished at 23, 24, I think.

03:16

Did it feel like you were doing the right thing?

03:21

I had no idea what I was doing. I was just having lots of fun, and it was working out. It felt like right thing. I didn't feel like a job at all. It felt like I was just coming to do something that people appreciated. I was paid for more and more, as I kept negotiating my salary with the growth of the team. And it just didn't feel like a job. It just felt like something fun. And I just didn't think it was my career anyway, because back then, I studied also full-time in the uni, and this was my full-time job as well. And I just thought I'm going to be a diplomat anyway, so this is kind of a side career while I'm in the uni. And so I'd really didn't take it that seriously, and that's maybe why I was so good at it. I don't know. But it was quite fun.

04:06

And it also allowed me to do my internships in diplomacy when I was working full time in the job, they allowed me to go part-time for a bit so I can go to check embassy in Israel and try it, if I like it, go to Geneva for a couple of months, and try if I to serve at the Czech mission there. And I really didn't. So I decided that diplomacy is just not for me. And I decided to stay in tech, but I was like, "I don't want to be a head of people." I just found every head of people I met back then. It's much better now. But back then, it was really boring. I was the only person I knew that was actually having fun. And I went to a couple of HR trainings, and I'm like "Ugh." I was just bored to death. And I was like, "I can't do that."And I just thought I will never find another company that I would enjoy doing it. So I wanted to do something else, and it was build a company, was the next step that I decided I want to do. And it took a couple more years.

05:06

It sounds like a big step.

05:08

Yeah. I mean, it just took a couple more years to learn what I wanted to actually build. But I decided to learn from the best people, which is founders, and work much closer with the people that are building products and trying to figure out what people need. So then I continued on that path. But yeah, it was still, I was ahead of people. I still don't believe it. I didn't feel like it was the job, it was very fun.

05:31

It's funny how our mind plays tricks on us. And the thing that we think is the thing that is meant for us, turns out to be the complete opposite. And the thing that we fall into is the thing that we end up enjoying. It's like we have so many other parts of our life where we can make a more informed decision about what we do. And yet, this is kind of worked out in the opposite way that you expected.

05:57

Yeah. So there's no way if we can try so many different careers. So there's no place to be like, oh okay, I'm going to do apprenticeships for like, I want to be doctor a diplomat, I want to be a policeman, or policewoman, sorry, in my case. I want to be gardener as I mentioned at the beginning. There's so many options that you have. And how do you even know what are you really good at when you're at those crossroads? So I guess, you learn by doing, isn't it?

06:26

How do you reflect on all of the roads that you're not taking? And how do you come to terms with the fact that you are, by definition, you have to restrict your choices, but by doing so you're saying no to a different version of Kate.

06:43

Wow. Is that the part of the therapy session that we're going to dive into right now? I never had regrets. So I really rarely think about the opportunity cost of my choices. Because as long as I'm learning and my learning curve is really steep, that's where I want to be. And if I'm learning about something that I'm excited and curious about. If I'm not, I want to stop. And being a founder, however glorious that sounds, we both know is really difficult. But what it brings is so much learnings, and a really strong community that we're both part of. That enables that learning in a way that you can learn from the people that have been coupled steps ahead of you. You can give a bit of a device or share your experience with a couple of people that are just starting on that journey. And it's kind of the sense of belonging, and that fast pace of learning, which I absolutely love and enjoy, and probably unemployable after the last eight years of doing it, but maybe. Yeah, so that's how I always judged my options.

07:56

But when I was head of people, I was head of people, 150 people and applied for role in Berlin, which I've never visited before. I had no idea. I'm like, "Oh, that's cool." And to work with three founders that just got funding on a mobile app that was called DingDongs. I know British people would kill me for that. This was the name of the app, I can't believe. And it was a doorbell. It was a virtual doorbell.

08:19

It actually was a doorbell.

08:21

It was a doorbell that connected you with your friends. And the people were Dutch, the founders, they're absolutely brilliant, I love them to bits. And every English speaking country, of course, had a very different relationship to that name. So eventually they changed the name, and it was called TapTalk. But it was about literally having a virtual doorbell to your friends. And it was just three of them and me, and they were like, "Why do you want this job?"

08:44

And I wrote them a letter. And I was like, they were looking for someone like a community manager. And I'm like, "I've built a community of about 150 people in the company. I've never done a community, community role, but they were very happy. I'm the third person that ever left in four years. And I just would like to learn more about it, and I want to learn how to build a company one day." And I just sold myself, and telling them what I thought about building the community, and what my thoughts, and what might be the frameworks that we might use and just did my research. And I got the job. And it was absolutely wonderful. I was like, "I'm so empowered." And to come from that, to complete a different role, and just start applying and learning so much with them. And they were absolutely brilliant to allow me to learn lots of different things.

09:27

How do you learn to make decisions and not think about the opportunity cost? Because it sounds like what that's done is free you in a way, and it allowed you to make decisions at pace and move through life at a rate that other people might find quite quick. But in some ways it sounds like at the very root of that is this ability to be able to not dwell on the opportunity costs. And that feels really special.

10:01

I never thought about it. Yeah, thank you. I think it's our prefrontal cortex. We can imagine the worst scenarios. Some people are more prone to them, and some people can imagine more of the positive ones. And I've been always a massive optimist around, and I felt that I have an agency around what I'm creating for myself. And it's probably upbringing, potentially, some of the nature stuff for my parents. I think my dad is definitely more like that. My mom is definitely the opposite, which provides me a lot of grounding. So I think it's learned behaviors, and the nature. And my dad was like, "You can be diplomat." And I'm like, "Okay, I can be diplomat." And I went and studied it, and did it, and got my school paying for my internships, all these things. I just felt that I can do things that people can't just because they feel that they should not step out of their little box.

10:57

And I just felt like the box is not there, unless there's a very hard stop. But if there is, there probably is way you can go around the box, because there always is, there's no way. And I lived in the democratic country, and I was a bit different, because I'm Czech, but I speak Russian. So I had things I need to overcome but I always felt that I can. And was probably a lot feeling enabled and empowered by my family. And being in the safe space to make those choices, and potentially make mistakes and do things differently. So very lucky, I think. I know so little about your career. But have you had anything like this massive change in the direction, or was it quite more streamlined?

11:47

I think about opportunity costs as imagining that there's clouds and there are these ladders that all go up to the clouds, and there's loads of these different ladders. And you can pick one of the ladders, I can pick another ladder. And we're going to figure our way up these ladders. But when we get to the clouds, we go through them, and we realize the ladders we're all leading in the same direction. They were all leading to the same place. And I think that's the way that, for me at least, I feel comfortable with the costs and of the choices that I'm not making, is that I kind of feel like the destination is going to be the same no matter if you are the head of people, or I start off somewhere else, we end up in a place that actually means that we'll learn the same values and the same principles, but just from different perspectives. And then maybe we will we'll kind of meet in the same place eventually.

12:52

Yeah, it's a really nice analogy with the clouds. Yeah, I think they probably... Yeah, I think one thing that is really clear between the career that I wanted to have as a diplomat at the beginning, I did all the model UNs, and then I organized them the eight years of my life with all that. I loved it, and it was honestly one of the most fun thing to do, and I loved it. It was so much fun, and very different from how real diplomacy works, by the way. And what I loved about it is that you have massive impact on the world's direction, and how you can impact the world, and make something significant for yourself, but actually for making the world a better place. And then in the end of the day, that's what I'm doing now. So the reason why I wanted to do that career was just, one, it's exactly the same why I'm actually doing what I'm doing right now when it comes to running my company.

13:44

It's an interesting thought that the why can be the same, but the practice can be different.

13:48

Yeah. Totally. The means getting there. Yeah.

13:52

That's an interesting thought about the opportunity cost, that maybe there's a way that you could kind of hack, not losing out on too much opportunity cost if for whatever reason what you're working on is in some way cross-disciplinary, and you can use it in different ways.

14:07

Yeah. I think maybe that is the reason why it makes me always feel comfortable. And that's like whenever there is a learning, a massive learning, that's what keeps you motivated, when there's something very repetitive and which actually was a lot of the people role, unless we were growing back then, it's like that is very repetitive. You're onboarding people. Once you figure it out, when you grow to a hundred people, they need to change stuff a bit. When you grow to 150, 200, you need to change stuff a bit. But it felt like the learning curve wasn't steep enough for me to want to stay in that career, while now what head of people do is completely different, and the people team's roles have changed massively. I'm talking about something that I was doing my about 8, 10 years... Oh actually, 10 years ago.

14:55

So it's a bit different right now, of course. Back then it felt like it. And I think that's the same with anything that I do right now. As long as I'm learning, and I'm learning something I know it's like I can reapply in different places, and I'm finding it valuable, then it doesn't really matter what it is.

15:16

Do you just have a sense of what you want to learn and whether it will be useful to you?

15:25

Potentially, it needs to be also aligned with the business objective. Yeah, I guess in a way you are in charge of the business objective, so I'm in control of that too. Partially influenced by markets. I don't know, I just feel I'm in charge, and then if I'm in charge of the goals of the company, I'm in charge of the goals what we need to learn. And when I have people around me that love learning and just growing and being so hungry for it, then it makes the journey very enjoyable no matter what it is.

15:59

In some ways we all have the same expectations of work too in one way or another or in different forms, even if the practice of them changes. What are your expectations from work?

16:13

I think they were very much set by my first job, which was massive freedom. I had literally the founders were so, they were like, "I don't know how to do your job. You just need to figure it out. And this is the goal. And whatever is the way to figure it out." I had a massive responsibility, which was the main reason why we got acquired is, because we got so good at hiring people. And this was my job. And was about in a way, I'm always saying I didn't hire them, because I enabled other people to recommend other people to be hired. And I created that environment in which definitely supported by the founders. But I was enabled to do that, and just they told me, "You can do whatever, as long as you get to these goals, and this is the budget that you have. Go ahead." And I think that sense of freedom, I just always wanted to happen in anything that I was doing after that.

17:05

So that sense of agency that you are in charge, doesn't need to be COO, or whatever. But it's just that I love about it, because there are many different ways, many different letters to get to that one goal. You to just figure them out. And that's what I like and require from the work to, I think now as well.

17:27

What biases do you hold unconsciously about your work life?

17:39

Oh. How do you know? I think it almost always needs to be identified by someone else. I think, oh it's a deep question. I think work life doesn't really, as a thing.

18:00

So I think you are absolutely right, that it's hard to know if it's unconscious. So, that's difficult. But maybe if we take the time to think about it then it might become clearer.

18:11

I think one thing that is really clear, I think, is that being a founder, and see I'm a single founder as well, is that one thing that I always said, and people will always tell me exactly what they think all the time. But there's always going to be a vast majority of people that will have a filter speaking to me, no matter how close relationships I have with them, and what they know about me, and me know about them. And I think I kind of always want people to tell me exactly what they think. And I know vast majority of the time they probably do, but you need to find different points of view from other people, because how they might be thinking about that particular one problem that you might have discussed with them. Because they might be more facet than maybe they didn't disclose.

18:55

Maybe there's a little worry that they don't want to tell you about, because I'm a very positive person, we can do it all. But they don't want to discourage me for example, et cetera. So they're things like that. I think I need more people to work towards particular issues, and be able to gather some perspectives from the same people, so they can make the decisions or guide me on those as well. Because I think it is natural, right? When you're speaking to your boss, or even this is not how I feel that I'm someone's boss, it is still going to be on most of the people's minds, and that would put some of the filter on something that they think, or how they talk about it, et cetera. So that's something that I'm aware of. But I became aware of after multiple experiences, and I didn't know about.

20:00

I guess, in the same way that our minds have to create patterns in order to remember things, our culture has to create patterns in order to remember things. And in one sense, in your mind you can completely understand the use case for those patterns. It makes complete sense, because you need to remember things, have a character, whatever. But from a cultural point of view, there are some parts of our culture, I guess, that are in important and have stood the test of time, it's like the bible or whatever, for good or bad. And that's perhaps the perfect point, that bias, or that story has created this pattern throughout history that takes these different directions.

20:47

Absolutely. And the stories are a thing that motivate people to do staff or don't, right? So this is how we were able to create an environment we can organize much bigger groups, and actually create a society and cultures that have certain set of values and behave in a similar way. And this is the way how we can manipulate big groups, or do something good, or something potentially quite difficult and catastrophic. Yeah. So we're now completely in a different world of, yeah, it's same with the work.

21:19

Yeah. It's a really interesting way of thinking about how you could choose work, because if you are ingrained in a certain pattern or a certain bias, then you are inevitably going to follow a certain direction. And that direction might be the most fulfilling to you. So how can you release yourself from that bias, and want to make the right call?

21:40

I think there's fascinating thing, which it's massively driven by [inaudible 00:21:44] background, for example, in the UK. But there was the study. I don't really remember the name of the study. But they looked at the professions that children are the most... The professions which children will follow the most when they're choosing based on their parents' profession. And I think becoming a doctor was the top one, and becoming a lawyer I think was the second one. Yeah, I think it was in 20%, or 25, really, really high percentage of people that actually follow their parents. I'm not sure, I might need to find the study to make sure I back it up. But this was really shocking to me, because it really proves that we do follow the people we see around us. But it's exactly the same, if you look at for example, people from different social backgrounds, in the UK, the way how we measure it the most accurately right now it's through the parents' education.

22:34

And there have been lots of tests that actually have proven that this is the most accurate way. Because if you haven't had any of your parents or care caretakers of you who have been to the university, you don't understand the concepts if you're the first one doing it, there's a lot of the things that people that have been to the university, it was the main thing that, of course, I'm going to finish my high school. I keep forgetting how it's called in the UK. The thing before university, the school. And I'm going to go there, because this is the clear path. But for someone it is not. And I'm not saying that university will be the path to success, but for some it's just the way how it goes. And for people that didn't have that experience in their families, it will not be. And it can predict significantly their career choice, their financial abilities, or the way how they would be able to earn money in the future as well.

23:21

So we do continue in some of those patterns, but I was fascinated by the professions, that maybe it's going to be same for engineers if your parents are engineers now, that your kids will be engineers too. I guess, anyone in a way will be, to some extent, literal in that area, hopefully very soon. So yeah, I found that very fascinating. In my family, no one was a diplomat, but I still wanted to do that. I think potentially driven by my dad wanting to be one when he was a kid, but couldn't, because he's from Soviet Union. Yeah, I don't know. But we do follow some of the patterns, or at least I can recognize that I did.

24:04

What patterns have you followed, other than the obvious, that were set by your parents?

24:20

I think I was always contrarian towards my mom, and I value her very differently now, and I think she's absolutely brilliant. But I was really contrarian, because she was a straight A student always through the whole system. She went through to university, had a red diploma, which is in the Soviet times, was the best grade ever, the best students. And I just wasn't like that. I only wanted to learn what I was interested in, and my dad really gave me the permission to do that. And so, I think I was much closer, or I wanted to be like him much more than I wanted to be like my mom.

25:00

But I learned a lot from my mom too, probably much more than I thought back then. So I followed, my mom said, "You need to have a tutor, because you're not really good at..." I was a bit dyslexic, so to write properly, I was like "Okay, I'll do it." I hated it, but my dad says, "You don't need to do it." I'll be like, "Dad says I don't need to do it, and I can follow my own way, because there's computers anyway, everything is going to be corrected after you." So I liked, and my dad allowed me to find my own path, and whatever's the set path, he was like, doesn't need to be. And that permission I think, really enabled me to find myself and explore, while my mom kept me at the base, so I can actually go to the university and do some stuff that will allow me also to explore more freely.

25:52

Well, I think I disagreed with her approach, but a lot of the time it pushed me to the right direction as well. So they both are hugely influential in the way how I behaved and what choices I made. I think, I gave much more credit to my dad than my mom.

26:06

It's interesting that you've got to push and a pull there. You've got something that's pushing you away, and you've got something that's pulling you towards you.

26:12

Yeah.

26:13

I don't think that happens the whole time. Sometimes it's like you get a push from one, but the other one's still. But it's kind of both happened at the same time. It's kind of a double launch.

26:26

Yeah, I think so. And I think it created a sense of kind of the middle ground, isn't it? Because I think you need both, at least I felt I needed both in the end of the day. And now on a reflection I think I felt I needed both of these push and pulls. I don't know. It's complicated isn't it? But our parents are a mass influence, or people that care for us.

26:50

I think there can also be an element of complexity as someone's working life develops, because you are so deeply influenced by your parents when you choose what work you do, and sometimes it's very hard to know why. So in your circumstance though, you could be doing the opposite, and you could be rejecting it, or going towards your dad. But you may also find that as you come to find the benefits of pursuing that, you then almost don't want to outdo your parents in a way. You almost kind of feel this kind of guilty inhibition. You don't want to push your ambitions too far, because maybe you almost like self-sabotage for your parent's sake, if you experienced that?

27:47

No. Very clear, no. I think every time my mom was like, "Oh, why don't you finally get a job?" I was like, "Fuck it. I'm not going to get a job." But she keeps sending me job offers I remember, but it's still five years ago. So, "Oh, this is a cool company you could work." I'm like, "No, thank you."

28:06

So do you want to be better than your parents?

28:11

Yeah, I think every generation wants to be better than their parents. And not better, different, finding your own way. I think I'm coming from a very different background. I'm coming from Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia back then. They're a post communistic country, there's no set standard of what it meant. Now it is a bit more. But you need to develop a completely new world after the communism, I think a year before the communism fell in Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia back then. And so it everyone was freed, and they needed to figure things out. And so it's this sense of freedom that also bears a massive responsibility. And I think that also that probably had a massive influence on me, because nothing was set. There were some things traditional lawyers and doctors, these professions are of course, still relevant. But it's like you can do anything, because there's no communism, which is really freeing concept for something which is, in the UK, it's much more, you never experienced that, or at least some part of the society have never experienced that.

29:28

And it's just a continuum that didn't exist in my country. And so for me, it was now everything is possible. You can go to America. You can go to, and which I did, of course. I think that was probably a goal for many people in my generation. And there was just everything is possible, because there's no communism. And that I think it's really different from people's experience if they're not coming from that part of the world.

29:57

Is there is something that you work for that's not the mission of your company, but is greater than you?

30:06

Yes, I have a son. I have a baby boy. He's called Loki, and he's seven months. So he is not bigger than me physically, but he's 100% something completely, he is a human being that I'm responsible for rest of my life. And supporting them and whatever choices I make and give in front of him is inherently creating his own world. So now we're in dinosaurs, that phase, me and my partner love dinosaurs. Will we always sound like them. I have no idea, but be better, because everything is dinosaurs. These little things that you do, what you expose your children to, it has a massive influence on the options, because you're the only option that they have, they're completely dependent on you. Not overthinking it, but it is definitely greater than me, experience. And it makes my experience at work much more grounding, because there's nothing more important in the world than my son.

31:15

Even though I love my work, but because I have my son, I can feel very grounded at work. But at the same time, because I went back to work when I was five weeks when... Oh yeah, after five weeks when he was born. I found that very grounding to becoming a mom as well, because both things had both very important things in my life that I could do at the same time. And then made diluted them a bit, if that makes sense? Because they're so important, and which make it much easier to make important choices in both of those, and very grounding experience. So yeah, that's one of my ones, new learnings.

31:56

When you say grounding, what does grounding mean to you in that context?

32:07

I guess, I mean, hopefully that is the case. With children you kind of know, if you look at the predicted predicting the age, so they might probably going to live to 100, 120 maybe. Well, I'd love to. It's a very long term thing. With the business, there's so many other things that are influencing you. The market condition, it's like if you're starting too early. So in a way, this is a long term project. I hope long term. I can't really influence everything, but as much as I'm having it set in my mind, this is a thing that will be here all the time as long as I live, and I'll do maximum for that. But the business might not, and it might not be my fault, but I'll do absolutely maximum to make it happen, and make it really what I want to make it into. But in a way, there's so much more uncertainty.

33:04

But also, the grounding thing is about, we've known how to raise babies. We have about, what? It's almost 8 billion people on the planet. So it's kind of thing that there's a lot of manual for, maybe wrong manuals. But in the way that's a very common thing to becoming a parent. But what I do in my company, there are thousands of different ways I can do one thing, and so many more ladders that you can climb on to get to the one place. And so many wrong ones, they might go completely in a different direction, and you might fail the whole company, or hire one person whose going to blow it up, or make it all happen. So there's just so many more variables. So having that one thing that is much more stable, which is having a family with my partner and having a baby, it makes it really grounding for me. So that's what it means to me.

33:59

Is there anything else you want to touch on as we get through?

34:02

I'm just curious about one thing, which is like what's the careers going to look like for a vast majority of the people that don't want to probably be founders. So in that role we're always evolving, companies in some different areas and new areas, and it's always changing. But it's happening to almost every single role. The role of a doctor is very different now than it was before. A role of a teacher is very different, even that's quite traditional professions. But how people will be choosing their careers, and how much they will be changing their careers, and how many careers they'll actually have to in the lifetime, which I'm sure you probably think about all the time in cord. Is that it's really fascinating, because that means that as we're evolving we'll be able to learn. And I think the reason why human beings are still here is because our ability to learn and adapt in new situations.

34:57

We've seen how everyone adapted within the pandemic. It was literally, you need to do this, there's no other way. And people just adapt. They find ways to make things work,.and it's going to be the same with the careers, but I think it's just we need to start, I'm just wondering how you potentially think about helping people to actually explore, and give them the understanding what are they good at, or what they might be good at when they'll be choosing completely different career. Lots of people that are right now, for example, learning to code. And we had one of our engineers, she's absolutely brilliant engineer. She used to work in hospitality, completely different field. And she became this absolute amazing engineer. But how do you get to that path? And how do you find out that this is something that you can actually invest your time in learning to build a career on the top of it. And then maybe in five, ten years when a lot of the things on engineering side is ultimately you might need to choose something else or evolve.

35:53

So yeah, I would love to hear a bit more how you think about that, and enabling people to choose new things that they will be doing, rather than being stuck and getting more and more senior in one thing that might not exist when they get to the highest level.

36:11

I feel like there are two parts to it. There's one, Robert Green calls it your inclination, which is what you feel inclined to do. And it can be really difficult to know what you feel inclined to do sometimes, because you might want to spend time focusing on developing your weaknesses. But if you do that, that's probably something you don't enjoy, so you're not listening to your inclination. Or it might be that you're just like, you want to work really, really hard, and you're just trained to... And naturally, part of our biology is because our work used to happen through our body. So we're kind of work now, we want to transfer that hardness from our body into our brain. But then the things that we find hard in our brain might not actually be the things that we are truly inclined to do. So listening to those inclinations is so hard, and I think that if we can figure out how to do that, then that really helps.

37:03

I've personally found it so much easier to be able to navigate my own journey by spending more time on my own. And I've found since the pandemic, being able to listen to my own inclinations, when I have less distractions during the day, it's so much easier, as opposed to being able to go into an office where I'm being buzzed by those social interactions that don't let me self reflect and find it. So I think that's maybe part of it. But I think too many people say, "Go and do that in isolation. Sit on a cushion, and figure out what you want to do with your life and leave it." And I think this is a problem that cord doesn't solve. Cord is an amazing, amazing way for someone who already has experience to be able to talk to someone who wants to hire you.

37:44

But cord doesn't work If you're someone who wants to start something fresh, and you want to try something. You need a completely different product for that. And I think the big challenge is that I don't think that product exists yet. We need to try out different things and Multiverse tries to do by allowing apprenticeships and stuff. And that's definitely the direction that we need to head in. All the way from this kind of education where we have universities and stuff. And then we just make these big decisions, and go into jobs we don't love and they've changed load since we started studying. And how can we integrate that working life more into our experiments and try stuff. That's a real challenge. So I think it's the two things, it's listening to yourself, and then trying it out. But both things are so challenging.

38:35

I know. And there's also, I think some people from more stable backgrounds, or from the point where you can experiment, it's so much easy to do that. And some people that are coming from slightly less privileged backgrounds, they might find that really difficult, because you feel that you only have a couple of attempts, or maybe one. This is your big shot. They're so much more stressed around it. So, I think that really comes to that sense of security, because if you feel safe, you can do and try a lot of the things. And that's why I felt really lucky and privileged in the choices that I was able to make, because that has been really important. And even in founding the company, I'm like, "Maybe there's not enough women finding companies, which definitely would be amazing to change."

39:18

But a lot of the choices that I made, I made because I had security, for example, with my partner that he really believed in me, and had to some extent, not super massive financial security, but some security, so I could try things and go for it, which a lot of the people don't have. And I think I would say probably the vast majority of the people, not vast, but a lot of the people, I think the majority won't have these options. So how are we going to create the path in which we can be testing these things out? And it probably comes much earlier on in the education, which needs to become much more practical. And that's another topic I'm very passionate about being your mom right now, because I'm like, "Whoa. How do you make sure that the children can try the things, and can really explore, because that can be an enjoyable journey, but can be also quite a hell of a road."

40:13

So difficult. And it's interesting that we say that you need to fail at work and you need to fail quickly. But we never really set you up to be able to. We don't set the expectation that you can fail at work from an early age. You would be so lucky to be able to try out things in a working context in a way that wouldn't be detrimental to... That would be such an amazing experience if you could just try out that stuff. That was really fun. I actually don't think I've ever had such a free flowing conversation that's moved so quickly in so many different areas, and it felt really lovely. And I don't know, yeah, it came at the right time today. Thank you.

40:59

It was really nice. I felt I would be quite nervous to be on the podcast, talk about my career choices. But you made it feel very-

41:07

It was fun.

41:08

Just free flowing, fun, interesting.

41:09

Yeah.

41:10

Yeah, it was a great explorations. Great questions as well, Ben.

41:12

Yeah.

41:13

Oh, amazing. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much Ben. Have a great day.