A life worth living - Stefan Boronea

00:00

I think a life that's dedicated to learning, I think that's a life worth living. I think a place where you can learn from other people, whatever that is, I think that's a place you should be in,. There's always that kind of mantra that people should have where if you are in a place where you're not learning and you're seeing that you're not growing and you just do the same thing over and over again, then it's probably time to find something new.

00:48

What is work?

00:50

So I guess for me it's always been very interesting because when I started my career, I always wanted to do research in this. Research is an interesting topic all the time. You don't feel like it's work, you feel like it's something that's coming out of passion and coming out of what you're doing because you want to discover something new. You don't see it as work, you don't see it as a career in a way, it's just something that's driving you. And for me it's always been that transition from, let's say, the research fields to corporate life in a way that sort of defined my career trajectory. I think it's always been that I've been somebody that wasn't looking for work, if that makes sense. I wasn't pursuing-

01:50

What were you looking for?

01:52

I was always looking for passion, for anything that drives me, that allows me to spend sleepless nights without even feeling like they're there. I think flexibility has always been something that I've been looking for. The inability to move from one thing to another just felt a bit weird, didn't feel natural. I think a lot of people end up being in these kind of jobs, roles, whatever you want to call them. I wouldn't call them necessarily careers or something that they're passionate about, but it's just endless work doing the same thing over and over again. And I feel like for me it's never been that drive. I've never looked for safety or security or anything that's a job description and you have these five things to tick off of a checkbox. I didn't want that. So for me it's always been the search for something interesting, something that gives you more. The more you go into it, the more it gives you that adrenaline boost. The more you discover something else.

03:22

And I think you could take yourself... If you were to take a step back from that even further, one way of defining work is... I mean if you were to think about it from a kind of physicist point of view, if we have the law of entropy and all atoms in the universe trying to distribute themselves evenly, then unless something works against them, then we will fall to entropy. So in some ways every life form is, and that kind of process of capturing energy and putting it to work is work in a way.

04:09

But do you see that there should be... And this is, I think, interesting because for me, I've never accepted that entropy, that force that kind of drives your path and your career and you're just sort subject to this higher power in a way. For me it's always kind of been driving my own path between those atoms.

04:44

Where does that come from? Because you have done some incredible things, things that are very different. It must have taken something different for you to carve that path out.

05:01

I think it's interesting. So as a Romanian, as a Eastern European, I think my childhood has been primarily driven by looking around and seeing people who were essentially just had the same job. They've been working for 50 years in the same company. They've been doing the same thing that somebody else told them and having at the end of their lives, as you were mentioning at the beginning of our conversation, having these kind of thoughts around work and what does work actually mean for them? What did it mean? And I feel like a lot of people were just at this point where work was meaningless.

05:50

It was a means towards an end, but it wasn't something that they chose a lot of the times. It was simply because there were these two, three different career paths that they could go towards, whether you were a doctor or a lawyer or maybe an engineer, but that was kind of it. If you would stray outside of that kind of path, then the communist and post communist media, post communist era of Eastern Europe would be unforgiving, let's say. So the concept of entrepreneurship was just unheard of. You wouldn't have companies. You wouldn't even start a startup. What's a startup when you're coming from 50 years of oppression?

06:50

So in some ways your decision is this equal and opposite reaction to the circumstances that you were in. It almost sounds like this rejection of just doing the same old job.

07:03

Correct. Right. You see this frustration. You see the people that are lost in that kind of, wouldn't even call it the rat race, I think at that point was just kind of accepting what was put in front of them and just going with that. And I think for me that was definitely not the case.

07:28

If we were to take it back to the history of work and this kind of moment in time that we're in at this point where we no longer have to do the job that our family did or our class did necessarily in some parts of the world, but instead we can have this kind of blessing and cursed choice of what we want to pursue next. It almost sounds as if both because you are kind of reacting to that Romanian childhood and we're at this moment in history, if there's this first moment where we can explore our passions through work or our gift through work, and it's in some ways it's hard to understand because we are maybe one of the first generations in history that has been able to do this.

08:26

Perhaps. Yeah, I feel like it's definitely a blessing and the curse, as you said. There's the downside of this kind of choosing your role, choosing company you work for. Or nowadays everybody has maybe two, three different careers throughout their lives. Reinventing yourself and having that kind of courage in a way and energy to keep up with the ever-changing world. And I feel like that's difficult. And I think it works for some people, especially the people who have this kind of mindset around exploring more and they're builders. They want to build something or they want to explore something. And I feel like maybe a bit more of a, I wouldn't say lack of fear, but I would say just not taking these kind of hits that, let's say, a failure would entail.

09:39

A writer's first draft is always very poor.

09:42

Correct. But in a way nowadays that failure, and I don't know if a lot of people realize this yet, but that failure is accepted. That failure is, maybe it's even implied from our society these days. You have to fail in order to keep up with the changes that we've kind of gone through as a society. If you look over the past 20 years, whatever, 30 years when I was young, and I guess I'm one of those old generations that remembers what life was like without the internet. But since, well, computers kind of became a thing, since the internet became a thing, everything has changed towards the better or the worse, that's obviously debatable.

10:45

It's interesting that a builder mindset is potentially better placed to deal with these failures. Because I guess from a kind of existentialist point of view, we kind of end up in this tricky situation where we don't know what's going to happen in the future. And so we are overwhelmed by this amount of choice that we've got in the immediate term. And because of that, the kind of planner or the thinker struggles to keep up in the way that the builder does because the builder is able to, he or she is able to make those faster decisions, those smaller failures. And as opposed to the thinker or the planner that can't do that,

11:52

I think it's not about they can't, I think this is the weird part about it because I feel like it is just a matter of not taking those risks, not taking those chances. It's not a matter of skill. It's not like the thinker wouldn't be able to take those decisions. I feel like it's a lot of the times it's simply that fear of failure, that fear of trying something, experimenting, and figuring out that, okay, it just doesn't work. It's a failed experiment, but you've learned something from it. Whereas I feel like a lot of people, especially if you've not been in that situation where failure was accepted or you've failed previously, you feel like it's such a burden on yourself that it's very difficult to get past that failure and find that passion again or find something that kind of drives you again. And realizing that new passion or whatever, you've come across later down the line.

13:15

It's actually also driven by your learnings from those failures, from those experiments. And I feel like a lot of people just don't see it as building blocks towards something. They just see it as pure failure and they see a sort of trajectory where nothing has changed. But we're fundamentally a this history of our experiments, of our failures, of the people that we've met. And I feel like there isn't a right or a wrong regarding which path to take or which experiments to try out. I think it's purely the joy of experimenting and having those sleepless nights and working on something that's interesting at the end of the day.

14:20

Sounds like it's a risk decision.

14:23

It is.

14:23

Sounds like it's a risk decision.

14:26

But people are, I think, I don't have the data, but I think that people are pretty bad at assessing risk generally.

14:40

How do you assess risk when it comes to professional decisions?

14:47

Well, I think that there's always the question of what is the downside? And I feel like without having the knowledge of previous failures or experiences from, let's say, family or friends or the group of people that are around you, I feel like that downside is overplayed most of the times. People see the downside as being much higher than if it actually is.

15:25

And I would even go further to the point where I would say the lack of experimenting, the lack of trying to fulfill whatever you're passionate about, I feel like that's even a higher risk. That gets you to that situation where you're just driven by somebody else at the end of the day. Your decisions, whether you want to make them or not, will be made. The decisions around your career, about your education, about your life will be dictated to you by whatever your environment is, whatever you've been. Whether you are in the UK or whether you are Romania or whether you are in New York, that will essentially drive your default or whatever you should be doing. Now, that doesn't mean that you should go in that path. I feel like that's exactly what my point was, that you can always decide what path to choose in a way.

16:43

So if a market economy rewards specialized skills, but in order to have specialized skills, you need to have a particular interest or kind of proclivity, and in order to find that you have to take risk.

17:05

Exactly. And I feel like the people who really find the passion, maybe earlier on in their careers, some people say they would be lucky, but I feel like they're the ones who tried different things and really experimented from an earlier stage in their lives where they found something. And I think they've also learned that by doing and by building and by experimenting with different concepts and different subjects at school or whatever, or they found out that they're better at playing sports or whatever it is, I feel like that's obviously driving them or it's cementing that kind of trajectory throughout their lives. And coming back to my previous idea as well, I feel like that's also what teaches them that they can fail or they can look at those kind of different options to really make their trajectory a bit more solid and really believe in what they're doing throughout their lives, throughout their careers.

18:39

You've gone on to make career decisions that a lot of people aspire to make. And maybe in the future you rise up at Booking, you join EF, you then start Proportunity and you are making home ownership possible. But there's so many other things that Stefan could also do. How do you deal with that knowing that there are so many other things that you could be doing?

19:20

That's a good question. I feel like if it's something that you really want to do, I think you can find that time. I feel like a lot of potential founders or people that want to go towards, I don't know, having a business, having a startup, I feel like they see this as taking over their lives entirely. And I feel for a good part of the journey, it definitely is. But that doesn't mean that it should consume you completely, you should be replaced by this person who only does one thing.

20:11

I feel like there's obvious things or obvious stages of a company that you need to worry about. And when you're starting off, when you're two people in EF or in a small workspace, then that probably doesn't allow you much time. But once you've gone past that initial phase, I feel like you can obviously still explore a lot of these things that you would like to learn. And for me, for example, I feel like one of the things that I've learned is also within Proportunity. It's also building up teams, building up teams, hiring people within different departments, understanding how to run those teams that are a bit more multidisciplinary than what I've initially been used to. Hiring engineers and having them join a tech company the size of Booking.com for example, is very different than having sales people join a small startup in London that's making home ownership possible. It's a very different skillset.

21:36

Well, I guess you are in a kind of privileged situation there. To a certain degree we both are, because we have a slightly broader remit that means that we can play out our multiple different parts of ourselves under the same umbrella, but we still do only spend a certain amount of our time at work. And outside of that, it is very difficult, for example, to run two full-time jobs. And in your circumstance there's so many things that you could be doing and there's this almost this risk decision which is like, okay, by nature you're all in on this one project. So you're every day, though it doesn't feel like it, saying no to all of these other projects. Is that something that you are aware of or go through any process to keep a check on as you go through this kind of ongoing risk decision?

22:43

I've not given it that much thought, I guess. I feel like it's always been where if I really want to do something, then I'll try my best to go in that direction as well. Obviously time is a tricky topic, as a founder, but I feel like you also have to give yourself that kind of space. Otherwise, I feel like a lot of the times, if you're not, especially as a person who is kind of used to trying out, okay, maybe I want to test this, maybe I want to do this, if you're kind of limiting yourself to not doing those things, then I feel like a lot of the times that will make your work with your company suffer. You're not going to be as productive. You're always going to have in the back of your mind that, okay, well maybe how about this? Should I do this, should I not?

24:05

And obviously there's an infinite scope of what those things. We always have these ideas and especially as founders, I think, our brains are not necessarily wired differently, but I think we're kind of used to juggling different ideas and different things. And we're always thinking about these kind of experiments that I was talking about earlier. And I feel like if you have something in the back of your mind just kind of always prods you at some point and you're always thinking about that, then that's probably a sign that you should try to entertain that experiment and find the time, that energy, find those sleepless nights where you can spend a bit more time even after coming back from a long day at work.

25:11

Where does that prodding come from?

25:16

I don't know. It's automatic. I feel like the more you try to find a structure for it or find some explanations, the more difficult it becomes. It's not about that. It's something that you've probably learned from a very early stage of your life. Again, just kind of understanding what you're passionate about, what you want to go towards and is just something that's, yeah, it's just what you do. You can't necessarily define that process. And I think that's okay. I think that's what makes it interesting.

26:10

Those kind of intuitions are, I would say they're very important, especially when you're running a business and half of the things that we're doing, maybe more, we have no idea about. I'm sure you've run into things where you simply have no clue, and maybe you didn't have the resources to get somebody that was a bit more skilled than you, but you still had to do that. Whether that's, again, hiring, whether that's sales, whether that's marketing, whether that's building a website, design, programming, whatever it is that you've kind of had to do at some point. And I feel like a lot of the times people just don't accept those challenges as I was mentioning before, it's that fear of risk. And if you're not that afraid of failure and you're kind of giving yourself a bit of slack, then I feel like the results are always interesting. The results are interesting because you've achieved something or because you've learned something throughout that experiment.

27:23

So if you can't control what's causing that prodding, what can you control?

27:37

Your time. Your priorities. I think that's the only thing that we can control. And I feel like a lot of the people, and this is probably something that I've also done quite a lot in my early career and I've learned throughout time, is saying no, saying no to things. Whether it's something that you're, I don't know, whether it's something you're invited to or whether it's something at work that people are asking you to do and just saying no.

28:16

If you believe that something is not worth your time, just don't do it. Nobody's forcing you to do something. And I feel like a lot of the times what we were talking about earlier around this idea that some people just accept whatever career path or trajectory has been set for them. I feel like if you are not in control of your time, then that's where you end up in. That's the situation you end up in. A situation where everything is controlled because you're just saying yes, you're expected in a way by society to say yes. And it's easy for them. It's easy for everybody to just point a finger at you and say, "Hey Ben, can you do this for me?" Because then they won't have to do it, somebody else will. Happens every day.

29:21

Is there something in the middle as well? Because on the one hand we've kind of got this, what we can't control, our unconscious, whatever it is, it's in the ether and it's giving us this information about what things we could or couldn't be focused on. And then we have our time where we can say no or yes to things, but it's almost like this part in the middle that connects the spontaneous inclination with your time. And I think our people struggle to bridge the two together. It's like, well, I can figure out what to do of time. But it's just a case of knowing which of these things to listen to and how to listen to it. Because they don't appear as words, they appear as intuitions, like you said, as kind of directions. But they really are, they're very hard to locate, not words, not emotions. It is almost as if I can't even describe them.

30:21

Yes. I feel like it's always... This is what I was, you were asking me about. Okay, what's that prodding? How would you describe it? Well, there is no description. I don't know. You just feel like you should be doing something or you shouldn't. And I feel like a lot of the people that I met, especially earlier in my career, were people who were very hardworking but didn't necessarily have some sort of plan for themselves, if that makes sense. And I feel like that that comes with time. And I feel like that comes with giving yourself that time to think, that time to understand what is your intuition telling you. I feel like it's, especially nowadays with social media and all the distractions and everything that's going on, I feel like we've lost that skill of really focusing on ourselves. It's not even about focusing around what's happening around us, but it's more around focusing of what's happening within us, that kind of voice, that intuition, what you were saying as well.

31:46

And I feel like we've not given ourselves that breathing space, that time, to really understand what those intuitions tell us. And I feel like a lot of the people nowadays, I feel like they're not even aware that that exists. And this is the scary bit where you are stuck in this loop where your interactions with society, your news, everything that's around you is just sort of put in front of you and you're consuming exactly the same things that everybody else are consuming. And I think that also drives this lack of understanding of one's self in a way, which is leading to everybody acting in the same way, everybody doing the same things, everybody going for the same careers. I don't know, for me it's just a waste of potential, if that makes sense.

32:56

What do you do to get out of it?

33:00

I feel like, again, just stopping the noise is something that's kind of step one so that you can hear that kind of voice that's telling you that intuition, that's telling you exactly what's good for you. It's not good for whatever because it's telling you to, but rather because yeah, that's you, that's what you want. That's what you are passionate about. That's what you want to see in the world in the end of the day. Whereas if you're living in this bubble where every single minute you get a notification and the same notification has probably gone to 10,000 other people and you're looking at the same news, you're interacting with the same people, no chance for that voice to kind of just say, look, this is the direction you should go in.

34:06

It almost makes me think of a system. And if you are closer to the center of that system, it's harder to know the context of that system and whereabouts it is in the grand scheme of things. And it's a fascinating thought to think that every notification you are getting is being sent to thousands of other people. And if that's true and your behaviors are then molding around systems that are kind of large scale developed by our society, it would make a lot of sense to say that you are far less likely to strike on originality if instead you are part of a more kind of standard system.

35:00

I mean, this is why I feel like you can't see the overview and it's why probably it's so easy for social media companies to just, I don't know, group us in very specific target groups and bombard us with information that actually, in a way, works for us. But I think the target for everyone should be to become that kind of outlier. And when Twitter is trying to cluster you among the other people, I think you should be at that outlier where somebody just goes in and data scientist goes in and just says, "Okay, well what's going on here? Why did they not react to that tweet?" Why didn't they become, I don't know, upset or angry or frustrated, or all these kind of emotions that we're kind of driven towards, extreme emotions. Whereas I feel like that's definitely something that is more characteristic of our generation.

36:26

I don't feel like the generations before were just so accustomed to these kind of very strongly emotions. You wouldn't have these kind of fears and you wouldn't be upset in the same kind of manner every day because, I don't know, you got a notification. And this is something that's very worrying because obviously this what's driving our usage of these platforms. We wouldn't be using them if we wouldn't have these kind of emotions, these kind of fears. They wouldn't trigger us in this way. And I feel like finding that way of becoming that outlier in those algorithms. I feel like that should be a target for everybody.

37:22

I guess there's a worry when it comes to the consumption of our social media. And there's also worry when it comes to the production of social media and the fact that a large amount of the work that we do inevitably creates a digital footprint that can in some ways hinder us. And what it stops us doing is taking the risks that we need to in order to discover those inclinations and those prompts. Because guess what? The first time you do it's really embarrassing and you look like an idiot and you fail.

38:09

And if all of that is now encrusted in a digital footprint that's going to be there forever, that's kind of terrifying. I often think about the poems I write, if I put them online and if you go back to the ones at the beginning, they're absolutely awful. And I remember thinking at the time that I'm so embarrassed that I'm writing these because I think that they're bad. But for whatever reason it's taken more strength just accepting that this is going to be bad and if I look back in the future, it just will be bad, it's so difficult to come to terms with.

38:53

But again, it's that idea that I feel like for a lot of people, it's what I was talking about earlier, which is they feel like that failure or whatever it is, it's final in a way. This is what we've been accustomed to in this era where everything is tracked and recorded and we can't escape from whatever we published or whatever we've liked, whatever we think. But I feel like there's definitely more flexibility that we have. Again, those failures aren't failures, they're experiments, they're learning opportunities, and people should be seeing them a bit more in that direction. Whereas if you are always worried about, okay, what's going to happen? I feel like you're wasting that potential and you are not exploring those opportunities that are in front of you. They're the same opportunities had before as well. I feel like, again, everybody is so afraid of just taking that risk, just going a bit above of what their comfort zone is and just trying out.

40:17

The thing I find hard still, though, I find this really difficult, is the buildup of painful mistakes. Because it is absolutely true, and everything that you're saying it just makes complete sense, those small risks, these small failures, and don't define yourself by them. Let them be the kind of success paid forward, but at the same time they are painful and they hurt in a way. You feel like in some ways you are kind of littering your life with mistakes.

40:55

Sure, but when we learn how to ride a bike, we're probably going to fall a couple of times and then we know how to ride a bike. How do we know how to ride a bike? Nobody knows. Even the physicists had issues at the beginning of the century just realizing how do we actually stay on those two wheels? What's that all about? But it is those kind of failures. It is those times when you fall to the ground and then you get yourself back up, you brush yourself and then couple of times later you're good to go. You're cycling through London through crazy traffic and surviving and it's fun.

41:45

When has it not been so fun for you? When's been a moment of failure for you that has stung and has stuck?

42:01

Interesting question. So I feel like out of the things that I've tried, when I came to London I actually did EF twice. And I started one company and then joined EF the second time. And that first experience was painful. It was a failure. I saw it as a failure, which obviously wasn't because the second time I joined EF, I knew exactly what kind of co-founder to go for. I knew better how to test the idea that we had, and I knew exactly what I can bring to the table. I think that was also a learning experience in kind of knowing myself and knowing exactly what I was good at and maybe what I wasn't. I feel like that's definitely been a learning experience. But yes, at that point in time, for sure it was, I saw it as a failure, but actually it wasn't. It was just one of those experiences where you learn to ride the bike.

43:18

What happened in that first session at EF? Why was it so painful?

43:23

I think it was simply the idea of going for something that you were really passionate about and you wanted to build a company that's obviously successful and you're going on this journey towards building something that's not there. And after working quite hard, seeing that amounts nothing, which is the difficult part about entrepreneurship in general. I feel like there's so much pressure around entrepreneurship and obviously everybody has those targets in the back of their minds, I guess, where they want to get to, whether that's, I don't know, valuation or it's number of employees or it's money in the bank or whatever drives people starting a startup.

44:35

And it's always that we are our worst enemies. It's always like that because we set those kind of goals and then if we don't achieve them, then we feel like we failed. But again, you always have to get back to the fundamentals, get back to that experiment that you've been running. And in the grand scheme of things, it's that learning experience is so valuable. It's much more valuable than then the failure, the sense of failure, the pain, whatever it was. And for better or for worse, those were six months. Now, for example, with Proportunity, been running Proportunity for six years now. If you are comparing one with the other, it's very different.

45:39

There's another side to looking for work to the side that's pulled by more of our biology, in a sense and more of our evolution, this search for status and this ego that drives some of our decisions because naturally we evaluate our circumstances and our progress based off whereabouts we fit in the pack. How have those types of pull, these kind of evolutionary forces affected your choice of work?

46:28

It's interesting. I've never seen it like that. Maybe that's more of a British thing where people do look for that status. I feel like status is always kind of linked to money or financial success. I feel like for me it's never been that. I feel like that's obviously a nice to have, but for me, it's not been driving my way of thinking about work, the choices I've made. Actually I feel like I've rejected that hypothesis that was put in front of me, you have to be financially successful, because I would probably not make the decisions that I've made if that were the case.

47:38

Entrepreneurship is not very glamorous when it comes to earning. It's not something that you are, especially at the beginning of it, it's definitely not something that you can go for. So I feel like I've completely blocked out that side of things, that status. I feel like for me it's more around people and working on something that's helping people, building the team that I want to build alongside my co-founder. I feel like it's always been that that's driving me. Having those kind of extraordinary people in the team, learning from them, it's much more valuable for me than status for myself. I feel like that's just something that's, it's a path towards being unhappy because I feel like the more you grow, the more you are comparing yourself to whoever has more money. There's always going to be somebody that has more status, more exposure, I guess. For me, it's just not been something that I've craved. It's been obviously something that can happen, but it's not something that I've liked. I've never liked being in the spotlight in any case.

49:27

And what is underneath that desire to learn from other people in your team and to have those relationships and in some ways maybe the question here is what are your expectations? What are you optimizing for?

49:47

I think a life that's dedicated to learning. I think that's a life worth living. I think a place where you can learn from other people, whatever that is, I think that's a place you should be in. There's always that kind of mantra that people should have where if you are in a place where you're not learning and you're seeing that you're not growing and you just do the same thing over and over again, then it's probably time to find something new. There's no point, especially nowadays with so many options, so many careers, so many different companies, if you're not learning, then why are you there?

50:54

I feel like I've learned a lot talking and I'm grateful that you've taken us through your own journey in how you've navigated it, both from its risks and its choices. Thank you for sharing it.

51:20

Thank you, Ben. All right, Ben.

51:22

All right.

51:23

I appreciate it.

51:24

That's fun. Take it easy.

51:25

Have a great day.