Compounding effects - Youssef Ahres

00:00

There is value in exploring what someone enjoys, because that's how, basically, they're going to build their skills over time. If you constantly box yourself, this is what I'm good at and this is not what I'm good at, you're locking yourself in a specific career that you might not enjoy for the rest of your life.

00:17

So if you have a choice, especially nowadays for younger generation, you have a lot of choices, especially if you work in technology. You can work in education. You can work in healthcare. You can work in SaaS. You can work in productivity. You can work in literally anything. So, finding really what are the things that make you excited to wake up in the morning and work on them, I think is something that I feel is very important, especially for the younger generation that has choices for the first time in history.

00:47

How have strengths defined your search for work? By strengths, I mean your strengths.

00:58

Yeah. Search is an interesting term. I think it's like you're constantly in search. You're constantly trying to figure out how to best spend your time. To me, it's not as simple as like, hey, an objective function, this is what I'm good at, therefore I'm going to do this. It was a lot more about if I wake up in the morning and I'm excited about what I do, I ask myself, "How do I do more of this?" If I'm not excited about what I do, the question becomes, "What do I need to change?"

01:44

I was at Instagram up to three months ago. I left recently. Every morning when I wake up, if I'm not excited at all, I start asking myself, "Well, what's going on, and what do I need to change?" It does not mean I need to change my job. Changing the job is probably the most extreme thing you can do, like changing completely the environment. But oftentimes there are actually subtleties in where you are. This is trying to figure out what works best for you, and at some point you have to realize, is this compatible with what I want versus not?

02:23

As an example, six months ago, nine months ago now, that's when I decided to leave Instagram because I realized what I wanted to do next, what I was most excited about doing next, was just not compatible. I loved my job. I loved the people I worked with. Been working with each of them for years. The team that I helped build was the same for years.

02:51

You have to come to a point where you decide what are the things you enjoy? Where do you want to spend your time? At that point, you have to ask yourself, "Well, am I in the right position right now to do it?" If the answer is no, that's when you start opening up, you start saying, "Oh, okay. You know what? This is no longer compatible. So, where do I fit in so that it's compatible?"

03:12

At that point, I'm happy to explain how I went about the search itself, but it starts from the meaning, like what are you excited about, what are you finding yourself enjoying, which for me was problem-solving and higher level, kind of like zero to one, trying to figure out a problem and making the world a little more fair.

03:36

I think it starts from the internal engine basically, and then you start building up outside.

03:42

Implicit in what you're saying there is a strength doesn't have to be something that... it doesn't necessarily have to be something that you're good at.

03:50

It doesn't. To be honest, when I started in data science at Facebook, I didn't know what data science was. I was there by mistake, and yet I think I had a reasonably successful career in data science at Facebook. That's because I found myself randomly enjoying it, and if you enjoy something, you'll spend a ton of time on it.

04:10

If you do enjoy spending a lot of time on it, you know what, when you go to sleep, you're going to be thinking about it. If you're thinking about it while you sleep, you're just going to keep getting better at it. Sooner or later, you will converge to a point where you're excellent at it. That's dedication, and dedication comes first from that kind of internal motivation, finding what you really enjoy.

04:33

The myth that I found myself debunking during my management career at Instagram was people are either good at something or they're not. I fundamentally think that's wrong. I think people become very good at whatever they enjoy because they will be spending the time. Maybe you're not good at running. Go run three times a week for a month and you'll see how good you become at running.

05:01

Yeah. It's the same as starting a company. You look at founders and work backwards and think, "Oh, you were a founder before you started that company." It's like, "No, you were born a founder by founding that company, and it was in the furnace that you became that thing."

05:21

Yeah. This has roots in mathematics, right? It's very hard to understand compound effects. As humans, we think very linearly. If you improve 1% every day, the end result after a year is actually quite exponentially higher. But, in general, as humans, we actually don't see that as much and so we tend to think of things as linear.

05:50

A lot of the returns in life are defined by compounding variables. If someone keeps on getting better because they're enjoying what they do, a year later there's a good chance they become some of the best people in their field.

06:05

Is there a way that we can be more aware of those compounding effects day-to-day? Because it's so hard to grasp them and recognize their growth from one minute to the next.

06:19

That's a really good question. If you look at an exponential curve very closely, it looks linear. It's only when you zoom out that it looks exponential. I like mathematical analogies because I think actually they speak a lot to how we look at the world.

06:38

So, in reality, I think that's where good management comes into play too. I found that I am very biased because I had an incredible manager from day one at Instagram. I didn't realize how good of a manager she was until I started seeing my friends work at different companies. I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. It seems like your manager is not doing a proper job."

07:07

It's the role of the manager to be able to actually give clear feedback, whether that's positive or that's negative, on specific checkpoints, of like, "Hey, you got a lot better at this." I think people don't do enough of that because, as a society, we're so much more tuned to give feedback when things aren't going well. We're like, "Okay. You could have done that better." Of course it's coming from a good place but, in reality, as a single person, it is very hard for you to realize like, "Oh, wow. I got so much better at presenting. I got so much better at explaining ideas. I got so much better at diving deeper," which are all incredible qualities you develop in a job, but you need that external view to tell you like, "Hey, three months ago this is where you were. Today here's where you are."

07:56

So, having those checkpoints, having the right guidance around, someone who can observe in a somewhat objective way, to me, it remains as the most powerful weapon you can have in your career because it helps you realize where you're making progress and where you're not. Let's be honest, sometimes it's just harder to make progress in some areas than others.

08:15

Mm-hmm. And, in part, part of the difficulty is that if you don't get those checkpoints, it's just a lack of information. It's not someone saying to you, "No, this isn't working." So it's not like you've got this thing staring at you in the face that's like, "It's not working. It's not going in the right direction." You just kind of have this silence, which then makes you question, "Well, am I headed in the right direction or not here?"

08:40

Correct. A lot of it is confidence too. For better or worse, a lot of skillsets are actually very dependent on confidence, and the way to build confidence oftentimes is to actually start seeing the successes little by little. I can give you an example about myself. I spent my life thinking I couldn't play tennis well. My little brother, who you're going to talk to soon, was a national champion. I would play with him and it would be a disaster. I was a kid, right? I didn't realize that, well, he's so good because he spent hours playing.

09:21

So, all my childhood, I would play a little bit with him, I realized how bad I am, and I'm like, "Oh, no, no. This is just not my thing." Recently I started playing and now, okay, well, it takes time, it takes effort, but you learn and slowly I'm... I don't think I'm great. I don't think I'm that good either, not yet at least, but I think I'm learning and I think that's... I came to that realization at 28, that it's not because I'm not good at it from day one that I will never be good at it.

09:51

So it takes time to actually realize those things, and to your point, the feedback is the most important piece, and now I'm actually surrounding myself with really good friends who are really good in tennis and they basically teach me and give me feedback all the time.

10:03

So it's how do you create that confidence? How do you create those small wins, that positive feedback loop of like, "Oh, yeah, you got really better at this. Here's where you can get a bit further"? In general, surrounding yourself with people who can give you that feedback, who can actually, really coming from a place of growth, help you grow and help you realize when you're growing, I think is one of the actually most important steps one can take in their career and in their lives in general.

10:33

In some ways I think you answered a question that popped up in my head, where I was imagining that exponential graph and us zooming in on a part of it and seeing that it didn't look like there was actually that much change in a given moment. The hard bit there is that you don't know the difference between things going very badly and things going very well because when you're zoomed in so close, how do you tell the difference? When you said the word checkpoint, I was like, okay, yeah, I understand that, that would make sense. I'm not going to see the destination of this until I look back on it with hindsight, but if I have some checkpoints it will help me.

11:15

Yeah. If I had one recommendation for people looking for a job, it's like, well, that's what you should expect from a manager or a mentor. That's the single most important thing you should expect from someone who's here to help your career.

11:32

Everything else, like defining a career plan, that changes. Finding you a good job, good roles, over time you should figure out your own roles. All of those things can help in the near-term, but the single most important thing is, does this person have my back? Does this person really care about my growth? If they do, checkpoints are the way to go.

11:52

So, how did you end up being the first data scientist on the business team at Instagram by complete accident?

12:01

That's a really good question. So, okay. I can give you the full story. So I was in grad school at Stanford. I was primarily studying machine learning, primarily natural language processing, computer vision. I don't know, at some point you're like, "Well, if I want to stick around, I'll have to find a job." And at that point, the first thing that comes to your mind is this something actually Americans don't realize or even the internet, people who are local to where they were, where they study and work, don't realize that one of the first thing that pops in your head when you look for a job is, "Who's going to sponsor my visa? Who are the companies that are-"

12:41

Small detail.

12:42

Well, exactly, right? For a lot of people, they tell you like, "Ooh, why did you go to Facebook? You can take so much more risk." I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." Risk is something you can afford if you're a local. If you're an international, you have to think about visas. And so in practice, again, I'm not proud of this, but I only interviewed at a couple companies, Google and Facebook, because they helped with visas from day one. And when I was applying to Facebook, I genuinely thought that data science meant going and building machine learning systems, because guess what? It's not actually properly defined. I just thought, okay, well you're using data to build systems. That's data science. And in some companies, actually data science is the function that builds ML systems, so I wasn't completely wrong. I was just wrong for Facebook.

13:31

And so I come in, and at Facebook, there is this process called the bootcamp. They take you through several weeks of ramping up to the culture, ramping up to the internal systems, internal tools. And during those four weeks, towards the end, you start choosing the team. And it's at that point, I was starting to talk to teams, and teams would tell me, "Oh, what do you expect to do? What do you want to do?" And I'm like, "Oh yeah, I want to build systems that use that natural language processing to solve problems." And they're like, "Well, you're on the wrong job. That's software engineering. Data science is not that."

14:10

So I started essentially talking to multiple teams and trying to figure out, okay, where do I fit in? And at that point, I met with this person who later became my product manager and mentor, Sanchan. He convinced me in the span of 30 minutes that the future of how business will get done online is on Instagram. That all the brands are moving to Instagram. This was back in 2016, by the way. Instagram did not have business tools, did not have any of that. The difference between my profile and Nike's profile were nonexistent. We did not know who is in business and who is not. And so in the span of 30 minutes, this person was actually able to explain to me the vision of, hey, how do people use Instagram today? How do brands connect with people on Instagram? There was a huge opportunity in building products in that space, and that he was starting a team on it, and they were looking for their first data scientist.

15:09

An opportunity started started ringing a little bit, so I was excited about that in a couple of more things. I talked to my wife Ines because she knows always a lot more than I do, and Ines simply tells me, "Well, all the teams that you're thinking about are cool, but Instagram is probably the future of social media." I was like, "I don't use Instagram. How is that? How is that the case?" Basically, she made me realize, again, that I was too narrowed in to the job and, hey, I should actually zoom out and think about like broader secular trends, and Instagram, it's true that it was picking up. And so I ended up going for that role. I stayed there six years.

15:50

How much of it was the role and how much of it was Sanchan and the energy or whatever you picked up from him in that moment?

16:05

Yeah, I think it's hard to say. It's hard to say, but I think it definitely played a bigger role. Obviously if he wasn't as convincing or as excited about it, or as compelling in explaining the vision, I would've probably gone for something else. So he definitely had a big role in that. But to be honest, Ben, I think people make too much of a decision to whether you join this or not. I think the more important decision that one should think about is also do you stay or not? And I think in staying, it was very much about the people. In going, that's a, it could have gone either way type thing. And it's okay to make the wrong decision every once in a while. But I think, to me, the biggest thing is that people defined my willingness to stay. They defined me staying for six years, which was by far the single most important part of my career.

17:13

And I think that even you think about it from a talent perspective as in, "Oh, as a human, where do I go?", but you have to also think about the other side of that coin, which is, okay, you're an organization and you're hiring people. It's the same by, it's the same problem. People focus so much on, "Oh, can I get this person?" But they don't often think enough about, "Can I retain this person?" And retention is actually far more important than hiring because in the end, if people stay and they work together and they enjoy working together, the end result of that same team that's been working together for three years, their own growth as a team working together just goes up exponentially as well. So Sanchan was very critical in me choosing that team, but he was even more critical in me staying.

17:59

Sounds like there's a relationship between what you started with there and compound interest and the fact that staying gives you the chance for it to return on your investment.

18:13

Correct. In my leadership group at Instagram, we were the same for three years. As in three years, I spent then working with the same director of engineering, director of product, director of marketing. We all became directors somewhat together. We started, we were all ICs in that space, and then we became managers and we started working together as manager, and then we became directors a few years later. We had a saying, which was the first year you don't expect much of one person. The second year, you expect a little bit. Starting the third year that you start expecting the results. And a lot of our strongest performers were there for four years, five years. That's not properly represented in leveling. That's not properly represented in compensation.

19:08

See, companies try to systemize, and for good reason, try to systemize compensation, try to systemize, okay, how do I think about level and seniority, and so on, so that I can attract senior talent from elsewhere? But all of that neglects the depth of context. And in the end, you become very, very, very, very good at doing something if you do it for a very long time. That's true for individuals and that's true for teams.

19:35

And so as you think about, if you're an organizational leader, as you think about structuring teams, it's not just about, oh, okay. I need to hire a senior engineer here and I need to hire senior product manager, and it's okay to have a more junior designer. That's an okay starting point, but the way I have to think about it is, three years from now, how do I make sure that these people are the same? How do I make sure these people are the ones building up the context and taking over the torch from us and becoming the leaders of that space? Does that make sense?

20:05

Yeah. You've got a really hold your nerve there. But I think people will sometimes do something new not because they necessarily have found something that's pulling them, that they have to go and do, but because... Maybe we use the term itchy feet in order to compensate for what's actually just kind of cold feet. Like, I'm actually just getting a bit nervous here because I've been doing this for a while and society's telling me that I should be getting up and doing something new here.

20:42

Yeah. And that's the challenge. And I think everything is a balance. I ended up leaving too, right? It's good to get out of the comfort zone whenever it becomes a comfort zone. Whenever you stop growing, I think the itchy feet, it's totally fair. The other, the one extreme is spending 20 years in the same job, doing the same thing. And let's be honest, you no longer grow you if you get there. The other extreme is, oh, jumping from company to company in less than a year and never giving yourself a chance to become very good at what you do. And I'm not advocating for people not changing every year. I think people can change as long as they need to find whatever they are excited about and excited to spend time on. But once they do, they need to give themselves a chance. If you don't give yourself the chance to become very, very good at what you want to be good at, then you never will.

21:39

And unfortunately, to be fully transparent, I've seen that. I've seen people who would always... Even at Instagram and Facebook, there were people who would switch teams every year. And sure, they learn new spaces and new contexts, but they never give themselves a chance to go very deep. And as a result, their career also stagnates. So it is a balance. It is a balance and it's very personal. Some people are much more comfortable with changing much faster, but being able to find the space where you want to get dedicated, when you want to spend, not the rest of your life, but you want to spend enough years and enough time to become very good at it is probably one of the fastest accelerants you can get in your career.

22:27

At what point did you decide that the graph wasn't working in your favor anymore and it was time to do something different?

22:37

Yeah. I think I mentioned this earlier, but when I wake up in the morning, I try to get a sense of how excited I am. Like, am I thrilled today? Am I excited? And it's okay to not be excited. One day you may have a lot going on and you just feel overwhelmed, and that's fine. But if it happens too many days in a row, you start asking yourself, "Well, why am I not excited?" And you start sort of that debugging process of... I'm an engineer from background and start thinking in debugging and, what's going on? What's the root cause here?

23:09

For me, I think the biggest reason that pushed me to leave was I felt that I wasn't growing anymore. I was sort of doing the same things. For example, just to kind of make this a little more concrete, one of my biggest focus areas when I was at Instagram was monetizing stories. How do we build a strategy to figure out how do we monetize stories in the best possible way? How do we make it valuable for businesses? How do we make people enjoy their ads experiences, for example, on stories? And that took us years. And by the time it ended, well, we started thinking about reels. And so you can see sort of, okay, we started seeing these patterns of, okay, well, I'm sort of solving the same problem. Now, I have these senior people who at the time of stories were reasonably junior, and now they're leading the way, but in reality, it wasn't as challenging for me. It felt more repetitive, which goes back to the point is because my context was so deep, because I spent so much time in the same place, for the company I was very, very valuable. Because I've been there for long enough to have seen it and done it if you will. But if at that point you have to ask yourself, well, am I ready to settle? And for better or worse, I decided that I wasn't ready to settle.

24:33

Now the jury's out whether that was the right decision. But I was like, oh, well, I'm starting to feel the diminishing return. And it takes time to see it, by the way. You cannot make that judgment within a month. But I started looking back in August 2021. I had a month off because after five years at Facebook you get a month off. Great benefit by the way but everyone quits after that. During that month I started thinking, okay, well, what did I do last year? Like, what did I grow in? What did I enjoy? What did I not enjoy? And what I started realizing was, well, this last year, I enjoyed my time as always, but I wasn't growing as fast. I wasn't feeling the Delta anymore.

25:17

And a year is a long time. If you don't feel any major Delta within a year, like I haven't seen any major growth anywhere within a year, you start asking yourself, well, did I put myself in there? Like, should I change teams? Do I put myself in the wrong conditions? Or should I switch jobs? Should I do something completely different? And it takes a lot of introspection to do that thinking. And I think I spent two to three weeks just thinking about, well, what do I want to do? What are things that I'm excited about? When did I feel most excited in over that past year? What are things that when I do them, I'm very thrilled and waking up excited in the morning. And that's when I decided to start thinking about, okay, what's my next step and what do I want to do? And I ended up converging towards starting the company.

26:06

There's a part of me, when you said you were going, you finished the work on stories and now it's reels and it's two pronged in my heart because part of me was like, yes, Youssef, you're going to know how to do this. You are the perfect person to do this job. You could not get a better person in the world to figure out what to do in that scenario. You, in some ways, have been through the fire where you've never done it for the first time. You've tested yourself and then you've gone through the heartache and the challenge of that growth when you're doing something for the first time that you've never done before. And there was a part to me that was like, this is perfect. You can almost like trade this in.

26:53

And that project will be... and that work that you do on reels will be the best project ever. But then it was interesting that you went the other way. And I was like, actually, no, I feel like if I do that, I'm going to be running the playbook that I already understand.

27:10

How do you know when to go with either strand there? Because I'm sure there are times where you might want to double down on your learnings and use them, but other times where you want to optimize for growth again.

27:24

Yeah. A couple of answers to that. I think part of it, I really care about what I work on. I really cared about my team. I really care about the people. I really care about the space. And so I wouldn't have left if I didn't know that they got it. That the team will be able to carry the torch. And that's something you get... one of the most fulfilling feelings that you get as a manager is when someone in your team or multiple people in your team are able to carry the torch and do it better than you do. Now I actually think the person leading that project who used to report to me is far better than I am and that I will ever be at doing that.

28:10

And of course, she was also on the team on stories, but at the time it was earlier in her career. Now she she's able to carry the torch. So part of management is also when do we step in versus when do you step out. I think there is definitely that part that played a role. Beyond that though I think what you're asking is, well, when do you explore new things versus when do we exploit existing strengths?

28:33

Yes.

28:34

And I think that's actually a very, very good question. It's very personal. To be honest, there's no right answer. You could stay in a comfort zone for a while and decide to earn a bit more, because guess what? Because you became so much more valuable for the company, the company is willing to pay you a lot more. As an example, that's a way to exploit an existing strength. Or you can decide, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm willing to take a little more risk and go and explore other lands, if you will. It's almost like island hopping, right? You're on this boat. You're going to this island and it's great. And you can decide, oh, I can stick around and I establish camp or I can just go try to search for the next one.

29:12

So it is very personal because it's related to risk appetite. How are you feeling at that point in time? What constraints do you have and what will you be... this is how I thought about it. In, I don't know, a few decades when I'm on my deathbed, what would I be excited about? If I stay here for the rest of my life, am I going to be proud of the path that I took? And the answer to me at that point was probably not. It was too early to settle.

29:47

There is a world, Ben, where if I had kids, if I was 40, it would've been a great job to settle in, because I loved the people. I loved the problems. I loved the work, but because at the time I was 29, I was like, well, this is great. I love it. And I can always come back to it. I think they would have me back if I decide to go back, but maybe I have space to explore a bit more and potentially find other avenues where I would be just as excited if not more excited. So it is very personal. Unfortunately there is no right answer. And I think it all goes back to risk appetite and how much risk are you willing to take at that point in time?

30:33

Yeah. I want to search for that answer in that moment. I'm trying to look for, okay, how is he figuring this out and what is the way that you're going about it. But in practice, if you were to, I guess, look at the circumstance objectively, everything going on in your context is going to change the inputs of your decision making there. And what might be the right decision for you in that moment with your context might be the completely wrong decision for someone else in their context, even if you're doing the same jobs, you have the same CV, at the same point in time.

31:11

In that sense, it's more of a personal decision than a CV decision. It's like investments. You decide how much risk you take. Just a funny story, but I know a lot of people who went very deep in crypto. I never felt comfortable with it. I grew a little bit, but it's so much risk. And I was never comfortable with that much risk with my financials.

31:37

Some people are, and it doesn't mean that they're right or wrong and maybe long term they'll be right. And maybe long term they'll be... I don't know. I don't know what I don't know. But the question is how do you sleep at night? What's your risk tolerance? Different people have different risk tolerances. I mean, that's why people climb some skyscrapers or climb mountains. Others will not take a plane because they're too worried. And we shouldn't be in a place of judgment. We shouldn't be saying this is right or this is wrong. It's just, people have personal decisions depending on their circumstances and risk tolerance, independently of how the work is going. If that makes sense.

32:15

What drew you to starting a company rather than finding another job?

32:24

So a really good question. At that junction, when I decided that I was ready for something different, it was a very legitimate question of hey, well, learnt how to do this here. Maybe there's value in switching jobs, finding another company, or maybe there- and even then obviously there's actually a spectrum. You can go to another public company like Google or Shopify or one of those bigger companies. Or I could go to a startup or I could try completely something like just starting something myself. I quickly ruled out the first. Going after another big company because it felt too similar. The reason why I was leaving is not because I wasn't happy. The reason why I was leaving was not because I didn't believe in the people or products that I work on. The reason why I was leaving was because I was looking for growth and to do something completely different and challenging myself a bit more.

33:27

I knew that I became good at data science in product. I became good at that because I spent six years on it. So if I had gone to Shopify or Google, I kind of... sure, maybe there are some learnings and cultural differences and whatnot, but in reality, it's very likely that the core skill set is actually quite similar. So I ruled that out because it didn't meet my goals. And so it became very much about, okay, do I join something earlier where the job is likely very different? Or do I start something new? And there was no right answer there, neither. I started looking into what problems I was excited about. What are the secular trends in the industry that I... and for better or worse, I continue to be very excited about what I work on.

34:12

And my company now works on the very similar... not similar problems, but helping people, helping small brands finding consumers is what I've always been excited about. Now, the way we're doing it is fundamentally very different from how I used to do it at Instagram. But I really deeply care about leveling out the plain field and I knew that. I knew that I cared about economic outcomes. I knew that I cared about empowering people to become entrepreneurs and having everyone focus on what they do best and make a living out of it. That I knew. I didn't want to change that. So starting at that point, it was very much dependent on the situation. Hey, what are the good companies doing this today? Do I feel like joining one of them or what are problems that I'm excited about solving that aren't solved yet?

34:58

So it was an intellectually... you have to be intellectually honest. And it was an intellectually challenging task of starting from the problem that I was looking to solve and looking at all the ways you could solve it. Can join a company and there are... I had a list of the companies that are doing something related to it versus oh, maybe there is a gap and there's no company doing it. And I ended up landing on the latter. Basically the place where I decided to focus, because that's where I saw the biggest need, was not being addressed or at least not properly. There were definitely companies around, but it was not addressed properly. And so I started talking to two of my best friends. One of them, I've known him for 10 years and the other person was my roommate at Stanford and turns out the three of us were thinking about our next step. And so we started thinking about the problem that we were excited about. We started tailoring the product and about three months ago we started a company.

36:02

What moment in your history.

36:03

What moment in your history do you point back to now, where you realized you wanted to help level up the playing field for smaller businesses? I'd put my money that you didn't come out the womb thinking that.

36:20

No, I did not. It was very much those first years at Instagram. I was a kid. I was doing what I thought was a good job. They tell me, you should do this. And I just go do my best. At some point something clicked. We had a lot of research sessions where we bring all of these small businesses and they tell us about their stories, their livelihoods, how what we build really helped them survive. How what we build really helped them.

37:05

This is something I [inaudible 00:37:07] because I'm a millennial, but I'm excited about if someone tells me, I quit my job because my side hustle, that's on Instagram, started working. This is what I wanted to do my entire life, but I wasn't able to do it until now. Thank you for building those tools. Over the course of maybe two to three years there, I really developed this deep passion for that space because I saw the impact.

37:32

To me the impact, it was very real and very felt. I think that's definitely the place when it clicked. There was also deeper, probably, reasons why it clicked particularly with me. I've always cared a lot about fairness. I'm a middle child. I do think this is a theme you probably see in all middle children. They care a lot about fairness. I do, I care a lot about fairness. I think...

38:02

It's amazing observation though. I don't know how many middle children would accept that in themselves and then use it for good.

38:12

It's something you start seeing. It's the patterns that you start seeing over the years, and middle children typically care a lot about fairness. I didn't realize that before. But now in hindsight, it becomes somewhat obvious, it's because I had that deep insecurity about fairness. And then I found myself in a position which transparent is somewhat random.

38:31

I think randomness plays a big role in someone's life. Somewhat randomly found myself in this position where I was helping people. I was helping leveling up the playing field for small businesses. And guess what? I loved it. Because of that, I continued a few more years there. And now I'm basically committing five or 10 more years to the same mission.

38:54

What are you optimizing for as you go through this? Are you looking for success, or joy?

39:08

Honestly, it's something I struggled a lot with. The easy answer is, I'm actually looking to help people. When I'm in my deathbed, 50, 60, 70 years, I don't know, maybe less, I don't know, 50 years from now, I will look back at my life and I will be asking myself, what did I do. I will not care about how big the bank account is. I will not care about my title. I will not care about any of that. But I think what I will deeply deeply care about is, how many people I touched. Was I a force of good?

39:56

Even when we started the company, we sat down with my co-founders and we were like, what are we optimizing for? And the answer was, we're optimizing for creating value in the marketplace. We're optimizing for helping people find good products. We're optimizing for helping businesses finding good customers. That's what we're going to do. How much revenue we make, how much money we make in our pockets is all a byproduct, if you will. The question is, what brings you joy? Because you asked, would you optimize for joy? I think we all optimize for joy deep inside. We're all selfish in the end. Even when sometimes you give something, like you give money to a person who's in need, to some extent you're looking for that feeling that, I gave this person this much and therefore I feel good about myself.

40:54

I'm realistic in the fact that I'm realizing that it's probably somewhat selfish. But in my lifetime, I found most happiness and fulfillment when I was helping people. I think I understood that about myself over the years. Now I'm positioning myself to actually do more of that, so that by the time I'm in my deathbed, I'm proud of myself.

41:21

How much of that is because there's a narrative as a founder where we have to, by the definition of our work, connect with the mission that we're working towards. I think little enough founders say, you know what, it's okay to want to optimize for your own happiness. It's okay for you to do this thing because you want to do it, not necessarily because you want that impact. How much of that resonates with you?

42:02

I think it's a fair assessment and a fair thing to say. Different people have different internal engines, and that's okay. I don't think we should be in a position of saying, you should be doing things because you believe in them, or you should be doing things because it makes you happy. In the end, we're all trying to figure this out. That's the reality. Everyone around, even people who seem the most impressive, are just trying to figure this out, and they're just trying to figure out, how do I make the most out of my life.

42:33

For me, I think the mission preceded the company. I didn't care, necessarily, about starting a company. I started a company because of the mission, not the other way around. I totally understand that there are people for whom they really want to start a company, for whatever reason, it's personal, it's their choices, and then they found a mission they connect to. And from there, they work backward, which I think is totally fine.

42:59

I think for me, it doesn't resonate as much because... Maybe I will be wrong, obviously only time will tell, but my belief right now is that I will be happiest in the long run if I succeed at doing this. Naturally, what comes in first is solving that problem, and then happiness will take care of itself. But again, Ben, I don't know. I'm trying to figure this out, so it might be wrong.

43:27

These journeys are so personal and interlinked with the people and the stories of our past. My final question is to do with your experience as a middle child. Because if it prompted a desire for fairness and that has gone on to change your working life, are there any other moments from your past and from your origin story that you think manifests themself in your daily work?

44:17

Wow. That's a very deep and vulnerable question. Okay, cool, let's address it head on. I think, my professional and personal life are very much not just impacted, but a lot of how I behave has its roots in my childhood and even insecurities as a kid. I think that's probably the case for a lot of people. These are observations you start making about yourself in your late 20s or in 30s.

44:53

Another interesting example is... This is something I struggle with until now. I don't like to be the center of attention. I hate it. I like being second. That's actually a truth you can ask about me. Whenever there's a celebration for me or something, I have a tendency to go hide. I just don't like being the center of attention, or people talking about me, or people celebrating something I did.

45:29

I always found it very, very comfortable to be a quiet force behind someone else who can take the credit. I, personally, find it to be a much better comfort zone for me. It is challenging now because in our company, I'm the CEO. Honestly, it's not something I necessarily wanted. You can ask my co-founder. It's not something I was optimizing for. I never thought of myself as CEO. I never thought I should be the CEO of this company.

46:04

The main reason why that happened was because it was so deeply rooted. The mission was so deeply rooted in my past experience and I was most prepared to actually speak to it. But I have to be honest, it is challenging on a day-to-day basis. I don't mind the responsibility. I don't mind the stress that comes with it. But I do mind, in a very weird way, the credit that comes with it.

46:34

That's another example. There are probably others, but that's another example of how childhoods and anyone's deep insecurities or how they grew up impacts how they work and boost the positives and the negatives of it.

46:55

Youssef, thank you so much for sharing your story. Breaking it down with such clarity, from compound interest to coming second. I've loved it. Thank you.

47:09

Thank you, Ben. Thank you for having me, and thank you for asking all these questions that actually were quite challenging in a good way. I hope this will be helpful for the audience.

47:19

Oh, I'm sure it will. Catch you later on.

47:21

Catch you later. Have a good one.