Allocating time - Juan Andrade

00:00

... Lead designer, CTO, and myself are basically the guys that shape the work to be built, and we have big disagreements on how and why, and what I always try and do is, just tell me, what is the incentive that is making you think that's the best thing? And, then we do that with each other, and if we all understand our incentives, it actually adds another layer of clarity to the decision, and it starts being about like, "Oh, I'm going to get my way, or I care about value, so I want to do it this way." It becomes far more rational, and I guess that's what we always try and do. We always try and get to, what is the most rational way to make this decision?

00:51

What part of your brain have you used in the past to make the decision to allocate your time?

01:00

Well, I'd argue that it's always a combination. Things are always happening up there even with your body. So, I wouldn't single out one particular area, but when I rationalize those electrical signals into how I make decisions, my best decisions have been the scariest ones that feel like they have leverage, so I'll explain. Before all of this, I was working for an insurance company, a long time ago. My first proper job, I did really well, I got promotions and so on, but I got to a point where I was kind of ready for the next thing. I wasn't going that well in the company. I was looking for another job because I knew I was probably going to get fired. I was an okay employee, not great.

02:07

It depends how interested I was. So anyway, I looked for a job, I thought I found it. I hadn't had the contract, but I was like, "Fine, I'll leave. I'm going to leave right now," and it was all good, I thought. I left with my pride intact. That job didn't come through and I ended up with three... Well, I ended up being unemployed for about three months and I think so few people that I talk to are comfortable with that idea of stopping the thing that you know doesn't make you happy and just sort of figuring it out afterwards. Some people, your mentee or just friends, will want to go from wanting to the next thing without pausing and thinking and reflecting. I think about that because that was kind of like a pivotal decision.

03:02

Because the first month I just partied. I didn't really do much, but then the second month I was like, "Okay, hold on. We need to figure this out." And, I remember sitting in my bedroom in Brighton late at night just thinking like, "What do I really care about in the long term, and if I continue to do will give me long term benefits, be it social, career, whatever?" And to be honest, that paved the way for all the way up until now.

03:37

It's interesting that you had to pause and stop. It's like, "Why couldn't you have access that part of your mind whilst things were busy?"

03:47

You can't explain the feeling as you are feeling it really, you have to sort of find a way to, I guess, remove all of that noise from your mind, and you can say yoga and retreats and stuff helps, but I don't know why you can't do that, but I know that anytime that... I guess it's I don't hesitate so much now to make big decisions because that time it happened, it happened another time in a way where I quit my job and I had to pay a shit ton of money for an MBA, no promise of a salary, and I just thought, "I'll figure it out." So, maybe it's not that you can't access that part, but maybe it's more that for an individual like me, the challenge of figuring it out as you go is just more appealing.

04:48

How did your decision making process work when you made those big decisions, and were there any frameworks that you used that helped you work through them?

05:01

I think we give ourselves too much credit when making decisions, that there is a process. I think it's a lot more natural than it appears, but the sort of conscious side of it that I do my best to influence, I'm always trying to think of the long term, and so when I hear people talking about optimizing salary in career fairs and stuff, I'm like, "That's the dumbest thing ever." So I think for me, it's optimizing for learning velocity and given... So, I kind of worked in corporate a little bit and then worked in startups, and so my worldview, limited as it is, is that the best learning velocity happens in high growth companies.

06:02

So, when it comes to picking a role, if they're not growing 30%, 20% month on month... Well, you want to find that company and you want to work there because that's going to that expose you to a lot of things more quickly, and if you are someone like me, that's really nourishing, not everyone likes that. So, long term and about learning, especially when you're young. Saying that, I'm not following my advice. When I was very young, I was trying to optimize for salary because I think at some point you're just like, "This is unfair. I should be paid a lot more. My friends are all paid a lot more," but I wish I hadn't, but it's hard.

06:55

In some ways it's kind of impossible to get a out of the trap that you're in if you surround yourself with people in that moment who are all at your similar level. It's almost like if you were spending more time with people who are older than you, maybe like 20, 30 years, and they were your peer group, they'd probably be giving you the advice that you would give yourself back then because our peers are going through the life stages at the same time as us. We're not able to get that insight yet.

07:25

Your immediate circle has such a strong influence on the decision, the way you think, and the things that you aspire to have, and that's why you hear, every now and then, someone talking about... And, my grandma used to say it, tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you will become, and there's various versions of that.

07:48

When you've optimized for learning velocity, how have you chosen the things that you want to learn quickly? What skills are you looking to learn there at that velocity?

08:04

Well, this is what makes me a bad employee, and I'm friends with my old boss now, but I don't think we got on that much when I was at Secret Escapes, or at least... So, to answer your question about how do I pick the things, I just pick what I want. So, I used to find it hard if someone told me, reconcile this, whatever, and do that or whatever, I'd be like... It's almost like my mind couldn't process it, and I just went into the stuff that seemed cool.

08:43

So, how do I know? That just comes from who you are, right down to being a child, and as a child, I was interested in inventing things. I didn't know entrepreneurship, what that was, but I would draw things and then give it to my teacher and draw things for my parents, so creation or building is something that's kind of been in my mind as interesting from an early age. So, at my previous role, I wanted to spend every single day in or around the product and engineering team, working out new things to add to the website, to the product.

09:32

In the same way that you had to pause during your working career to find the quiet to make that decision, how are you able to reflect on what you are interested in there? As you talk about it, it sounds like you're going such a long way back to kind of what's influenced you during childhood, or what things that you just kind of played with as a kid. Is that something that's conscious to you day-to-day, or do you have to do anything to access those insights, to enable you to make decisions?

10:12

Something I wish I started doing earlier was just questioning myself and just trying to understand what I'm good at, and at first, like 10 years ago, that's really hard, in your mid 20s, early 20s. If you ask yourself those questions, what am I actually good at? You can't answer it, but I didn't stop asking myself that, and over time I got better understanding. So, new products are more interesting than working on the same thing, ops is more boring than projects, and so on. So, the reflection is sort of in the near term, because I just... Sometimes I write just to help me clear my mind and stuff.

11:09

And because of that, I've tried to link it back to an earlier time, and actually part of the reason I've done that, now that I think of it, is because I started a company, especially we go into Y Combinator, which is an accelerator in the US, and we really had to drill down on what we were good at because American founders and VCs are used to I'm awesome at this, the best thing about me is this, and growing up in sort of Northern Europe, it wasn't natural to me. So, it kind of evolved from just finding out, what am I good at, what might I like to do, to okay, what have my achievements been in the last 10 years, what single moment was decisive and so on. So, in the pursuit of developing yourself and your career, these questions have to come up and you have to answer them.

12:21

What other stuff did YC teach you about pursuing your best work personally?

12:28

Well, they were the first... The partner that got us in, Aaron, who we still talked to, who's been amazing help, recently especially, first of all, they were the first people to say, you could become this. And as a founder, you're deprived of any kind of external validation early on, and they were the first one to be like, "Hey, well done. You could go to the moon if you wanted to," and that's kind of sad. It's kind of sad that it took all that time speaking to UK investors and everyone else that there was only one group of people that said that to us. Now, once we got in and I think we realized from... Well, we realized so many things. It was a pretty intense, and kind of transformative for the company and for us, experience, and they all matter so much.

13:34

I need to sort of go through them. The first thing is that every founder is completely different. There's no cookie cutter sort of founder model. So, it doesn't matter if you are highly sociable, highly anxious or whatever. You can if you so choose, and that was kind of cool seeing sorts of founders. Then the next thing, these guys and girls are so well respected in the community, and the first thing they talked to us about was failure, and they described themselves as experts in failure, and again, that was so... I don't know, it just felt real, it felt human whereas other experts in startups and tech, they don't really talk about failure, they talk about how successful they are and how amazing everything is, and that's just bullshit,, we realize. And, for YT to also tell us that, it's like, "Oh, cool." As a sort of first time founder, you're still figuring everything out, it's like, "Oh yeah, I can talk about all my failures and it is part of the process." So, that was really important.

14:52

They sound like the types of things that wouldn't just be relevant to a founder, but would be relevant to anyone in their job, self-belief, the confidence to go from failure to failure.

15:05

Yeah, that's true, and it did give us a lot more confidence and self-belief, and I see some of our interns that we are working with, other people, founders that we meet in their early 20s, they just blew my mind because of the fact that they got that confidence, that soft belief so early on. It doesn't happen to everyone at that age. At that age I was partying and just having fun, and I think it all came from a lack of self-belief. I didn't feel like I could go out there and achieve something great. I felt I was just small town, this is what happens in a small town, but luckily I moved out of there, moved into London and things slowly started changing.

15:59

There's less that you needed the confidence to just be yourself, but more like you needed the confidence to know that you could do the thing in the future that you hadn't thought about yet. It's almost less about just like existence and more like these possibilities just wouldn't have felt open to me had I not been shown that I could maybe one day do it.

16:25

As soon as I started looking at startups, everything in my mind just sort of started waking up to that reality. It was like, "Oh, my dad started a company when I was born and we moved countries for him to do another company." "So, actually I've got entrepreneurs in my family," but it just never clicked like, "Oh, and my grandma started a hair salon in Peru," and I don't know. I think that happens across all professions, it isn't just startups, but as soon as you open yourself to that opportunity, your mind, it's almost like it accesses what it needs to help you, I guess, move forward.

17:10

Since YC, what have been the biggest things that have stopped you doing your best work?

17:19

It all starts in the mind and it manifests itself in some form, I think, and what I mean is you are your own worst enemy because it is a choice to believe the doubt or to believe the uncertainty that's in front of you. So, I guess that's a very short and simple answer, but more specifically I think it's quite uncomfortable to fail every day, and I think it is not something that is discussed early on in childhood. Early on it's about getting the grade and doing good and failure is seen as bad, bad reports, unhappy parents and so on.

18:23

But in startups, the only distinction between startups that fail and startups that succeed is that they have had marginally more successes than failures. They've all had the same amount of failures, but the successful startups have marginally more successes. So, there's a mentality shift, I think, and when new people come into the company, one of the first things I try and do, subtly, is to, I guess, kind of help them fail, which sounds weird, but make sure that their relationship with failure is one that will help them progress. The fear of failure is what stops us doing our best work.

19:13

What part of your body do you listen to when you make these bigger decisions about where to allocate your time and what projects to work on?

19:23

It's a dance, and at least from what I'm learning, it's a dance within your brain and your body, but what I sort of... Historically, it's sort of your heart, your mind, what do you listen to most? But, I think everything kind of connects right up here, doesn't it? So, I just don't believe that we understand and have awareness of our bodies... Enough awareness that we can say, here you go. So, the answer is more a reflection of who you want to be, as opposed to how your body makes decisions, and I want to be a logical person. I want to be the mind, but like I said earlier, the decisions that I've been happiest with when looking back have been the ones where my mind has got me to a point and I need to sort of pick one route, and then my gut or my heart takes me down that route.

20:41

Earlier on you said that we over-index on our kind of own self-confidence and our belief that the decisions that we are making are ours, and that it's us that's affecting them. And, you said just then that our awareness of our own body is potentially pretty limited. It almost sounds like there's this challenge that you're going through when you're making decisions, which is trying to figure out what it is within my sphere of control and what's outside of it. How do you think you go about that process of understanding what's inside of your control and what is part your decision making process and what else exists outside of it?

21:33

When it comes to decision making, deciding... I think that's a natural process because when your decision making... Or, a consequence of the decision making process. So, I don't think of it that much because the frameworks to make good decisions, at least in business, are to make sure whatever data is available, to help make that decision better, you all have access too, and I think how Google works, I think the book is was Schmidt. I can't remember the CEO. I can't remember if it was Schmidt or not, but he describes how at the beginning of every meeting that everyone shares data that they have to help that decision. So, everyone's on an even sort of playing field. They have a scribe that takes notes on a sort of projector as people are talking as well, which you can't do as a small startup, so I don't think about what's in my control or what's out of my control.

22:44

I focus in on the decision. So, what does the data say? And like everything, the logic, the mind only gets you so far. You always make decisions with incomplete data in business, otherwise you're just slow, you can't make fast decisions. So, we look at the data, we all agree on the outcome that we want, and we hash it out. We debate, we go back and forth and that's the most enjoyable part, I think, of working, hearing everyone's opinions and trying to understand how their incentives are influencing that. So, I'm going a little bit away from your question, but I think it's really interesting and it happens a lot. I notice it a lot, but say a design decision...

23:49

Our lead designer, CTO, and myself are basically the guys that shape the work to be built, and we have big disagreements on how and why, and what I always try and do is okay, just tell me, what is the incentive that is making you think that's the best thing? And, then we do that with each other, and if we all understand our incentives, it actually adds another layer of clarity to the decision. And, it stops being about, "Oh, I'm going to get my way, or I care about values, so I want to do it this way." It becomes far more rational, and I guess that's what we always try and do. We always try and get to, what is the most rational way to make this decision? So, the image of a CEO just pushing their idea through, that doesn't fly with us. I rarely get my way, which I'm glad if that's the case. A little bit of a digression, but hopefully it touches on it somewhat.

25:01

In some ways... Are there are any examples where your own incentive is a good thing, not a negative thing?

25:11

It's more about the combination of incentives that then... Are they aligned or misaligned? And usually when they are, when there's some kind of friction or disagreement, it's because incentives are misaligned in some way, and I'll give you an example. So, me and my community manager were talking about it yesterday actually, and we were just trying to break down, why is this happening the way it is? So, it's just about some of our video content, and we realized that his incentive was to grow awareness of Rebank, obviously, as a community manager. My incentive was to showcase really cool videos to investors, maybe prospects, so hold those in your mind for a moment. As the community manager, if videos are getting like 50 views, you're kind of like, "Well, this isn't going to help me grow Rebank. I need to focus my time on other things."

26:22

So, it'll be a bit choppy, I'll just be quick. I'll do something quick, get it out. Done is better than perfect, but for my incentive of showcasing awesome 30 second clips, it needs to be perfect because the audience is of one and I'm trying to convince one or two people. So, when we were talking about it at that level, it was like, "Oh, well of course done is better than perfect because you want to grow our user base and..." Well, that's an example, and I love finding, I guess, those hidden drivers of decision making.

27:12

And, that all comes from just this very sensible principle of no one gets out of bed and is like, "Okay, I want to do a really bad job today." It's just dumb, but I think most companies act as if their employees get up and say to their girlfriend, boyfriend, "I'm going to make sure I really screw up how codebase today." So, when you realize how dumb that is, the conversations you can have around disagreements and moving forward are just far more interesting.

27:51

It almost sounds like the purpose of a conversation is to verbalize the hidden drivers in the room, like you said, and part of the difficulty of finding work is that it's a one player game and you therefore don't get the chance to necessarily verbalize the hidden drivers that exist inside your own mind.

28:19

And, this goes back to awareness. This goes back to awareness. So, that's why I'm the guy that asks those kind of left field questions because people get on their track and then you have to find a way to sort of bring them back into okay, let's focus on drivers, let's focus on data, let's focus on the task that has been done or has not been done as opposed to just kind of clashing.

28:53

It's almost like you need to put a little version of yourself on your shoulder to be that person that asks those difficult questions.

29:05

Yeah.

29:06

If you were to take the Google metaphor and you have a scribe and you have data, are there any practical things that you think you could reference in your... If someone's trying to figure out, okay, what project should I work on next, or should I join this company or stay where I currently am? In that Google analogy of you've got a scribe that's kind of taking note of all of the things that you're working through and you are being presented with all of the information that you need in order to make that decision, how would you picture that in your own mind?

29:45

It's so easy to fall on platitudes about what I said earlier, learning, about making sure the people are awesome, making sure that the company is focusing on a mission or vision that you care about. I think those things come up a lot and I feel like I could give so many non-answers because of what I said earlier about awareness, but I think ultimately having a single decisive reason is something that's also not done enough where you can put the pros and cons and write them out. In each one you can do your... This is what the values are and how I align to them, this is what this is, but you're only really lying to yourself. Your attempt at being rational is still only accounting for a fraction of the full sort of, I don't know, the full decision and the full data set that you'd really need to be rational.

31:04

So, do all of that, do the values, do the people, do the growth, and whatever the hell else you can think of, but always decide based on one single decisive reason, and I think when it came to me leaving my company, Secret Escapes, and starting Rebank, it did come down to that. So, let's list all the bad things. I've got to pay a lot of money for an MBA, and if I leave work, how the hell am I going to do that? No promise of salary, obviously a lot of stress figuring things out, family, parents, friends not understanding, are you unemployed now? What's going on?

32:01

A lot of cons, but on the plus side, something that I've realized what is really important to me, and I wanted to do in the next three years. Everyone's like, "Oh, what I want to achieve in the next three years," after some thinking I was like, "Well, screw the next three years. Let's just start now." So, I ignored the financial, social, family negatives, and my single decisive reason was this is... I've never been this excited about starting something, and this feels like it really kind of... There was something that was... I don't know, I can't describe it, but you know what I mean. It just felt exciting. Working for a startup was awesome, the people and everything, but the single decisive reason was if not now, when? Which sounds so emotional and hearty and stuff, but I don't think there's a right or wrong way.

33:09

In some ways, if you have a single decisive reason, what you are doing is you are optimizing for making a courageous decision like the one that you did, that may be better suited to your type of character that wants to live in that, and it would almost strike me that if you were the type of person who wanted more balance and your version of fulfillment and happiness was less of a kind of regret minimization and more kind of here and now, how can I live my life by being in the present or however someone wanted to choose how to live it? That they may not choose to identify a single decisive reason for the decision that they make, but they may try and find some kind of balance between all of the multiple drivers.

34:02

Well yeah, and that's what creates inertia in decision making because you've got these two tables in your mind of pros and cons and you just get stuck and you stay in the same job. It's okay to stay in the same job until you realize that that is not nourishing you, and then you not leaving, then you're the problem, frankly, and you're the problem because you have the pros and cons, but you can't pick a single decisive reason. The single decisive reason also works when you say no in that you might have three reasons why no is the best option, but you still owe it to yourself, and those who are affected by that decision to pick one.

34:51

And, I have examples of this as well, where more of a social thing about... Let's just say picking to spend more time with one group of people or another. You can list it, but you always have to go to the single decisive reason, otherwise you'll doubt yourself more. And again, it might just be me, but I doubt my decisions less when I do whatever exercise I want, I gather my data, qualitative and quant if there's some, but then I go back to the single decisive reason.

35:30

You said earlier that your single decisive reason was learning velocity, and if you can find company that's growing 30%, whatever, then you're going to be in an environment where you can pick up as much learning as possible. How do you balance that against the kind of classic YC advice, which is like be a cockroach, you need to get through this thing? If it's not growing, don't worry about it, just don't give up.

35:55

Well, not all companies are growing 30% month on month when you are interviewing, but there's no need to reconcile that because they describe two different moments in a company's life. The cockroach thing goes back to other ways that they say is the only thing you have to do to succeed is just don't die. So when times are tough, make the cuts, make the changes that need to happen to go into cockroach mode. So, another illustration of this, when we were creating our plan for fundraising after demo day, we had an optimistic sort of an A, B and C plan and the C stood for cockroach. So, plan A was hire 10 and do this. Plan B was like hire 20 because we're going to do so amazing.

37:00

But plan C, plan cockroach, was like, "Okay, everything goes belly up, we just stay as four people and we get back to four people and we just work things out as a small team." So, that's on the company side. On the candidate side, if you have a toss up between a 30% month on month and an early stage, then that's hard actually because we've been both and we've had people join us when we were not a 30% company, and that goes into the complexity of decision making once again because I think... Well, it's hard to sort of comment on it without picking a scenario, but I guess I'll just say that there is no need to reconcile. They describe separate events or moments and for a candidate, as long as you have an understanding of where that company's going, why they're growing 30% month on month and so on, and if they're growing in the way that you like, then that's all you need to continue your sort of analysis, if you want to call it that.

38:31

In some ways, I would say, if you want to get good at sales, you try and sell a product that doesn't have product market for it. Is there an argument to say if you want to get good at something, then you should join it before it hits that 30% growth and that learning velocity because the learning velocity will actually not be in line with the company's growth, but you'll learn more if it's stagnant.

39:00

So, selling something that doesn't have product market fit, so when it's untested, when it's hard to achieve something, then you'll get better at it, yeah, 100%. So, how does that to joining companies? They will be different kinds of growth for you, and this is something we see in the US more than we see here, where people come to us and they're like, "I'm an early stage expert, so I've done it like six times, go from like three people in a bedroom to like 50 and I know how that works in consumer or B2B or whatever and so on." So, that is yet another layer to consider.

39:58

If you had joined Rebank when it was three or four of us, you would've got in at the ground floor and you would've had to go on just the founders and some YC, the amount that we'd raised, and for some people that is enough. It's all about their risk appetite and I'm so glad that the team that we now have sort of trusted us and believed in our vision that has now become their vision as well, but it depends what that individual wants, doesn't it

40:40

If you were in a parallel universe and you were an early stage employee knowing what you know now, and you were deciding where to work, and you were considering working at a company that didn't have product market fit, you were going to join pre-product market fit and you were trying to assess whether you would join that company or not, what factors were to come into your decision making?

41:04

I have an unfair advantage as a founder in making that decision because... It's important to describe where I'm making this decision from. So, I have had to develop my understanding of what I care about and all I mean is I care about helping founders like me do work in a completely new way, and that's what we do at Rebank. We're the financial source truth for founders, for startups that turns 12 days of work into 12 seconds. So, I know I really care about that.

41:59

So, the sort of mission driven side of it I'm clear on. Some people don't have that. So, knowing is probably going to be the strongest driver if I had to choose a company because I would want to work in a company where the customer was a founder, seed, series B, I can get really specific when you know that. If it's consumer stuff, it'd just be a whole new thing. I just can't be bothered. It'd be helping founders with finances and making sure we're eliminating finance in some way for them, so that's one thing. Then when it came to meeting people, I think with the best intentions, founders sometimes lie to themselves about progress, about everything because you have to be a little bit schizophrenic to deal with the negative and the positive all on the same day. So, I'd really drill down on what is actually working.

43:16

And, then I would drill down on how they want to grow in the next two years, and that's what I do in Rebank as a founder. Every three weeks, at the end of our cycle, it's like, "Okay, what's actually working for us? Let's do more of that." And, then the other side of me has to think about the next two years because I'm talking to investors. So three things, your sort of impact or mission thing that you care about, what's actually working for them and how they want to grow in the next two years and drilling down just on one of them.

44:05

For me, I want to work in companies that grow organically through word of mouth, through referrals. I don't want to work in a company that has a sales team that is forcing a product down a customer's throat. So, if I'm having a conversation with a founder and he or she is talking to me about community, about referral loops in the product, product led growth, I'm like, "Yes, this is exactly what I want to focus on." So, just picking on one of those, but I can do that because I have the awareness, I have the context of how companies grow, of what works, what I want. So, it's harder when you don't have all of that.

44:59

How much of that information are you able to pull together before you go into a company, for example, or let's say before you went into that company, trying to figure out whether you wanted to be a part of the team or not? How much of that information could you gather before you went in there versus that you'd have to gather through conversation?

45:19

That's really relevant. A surprising amount just through the website. In fact, it's super easy. Sign up for the product and experience it. What's the onboarding experience like? Is it shit? If onboarding is crap, if you need to talk to a human to get on onto the product, if you ask support questions and no one gets back to you, you are already learning. And in fact, when we hire, we've had so few of our candidates that actually sign up and start using the product and when they do, it really makes them stand out because that's how I would do it. I'd be johnnyappleseed@hotmail.com. I'd be trying everything, signing up to the newsletter, just understanding everything. So, actually it is easy. You don't need too much context. So, then the questions at the interview are around things you care about and it could be decision making or whatever, growth or whatever.

46:26

Reminds me of a Reid Hoffman quote, I'll paraphrase, where he would hire people before he'd even... He decided whether he was going to hire someone or not before he'd even met the person because he's already got a reference on that person from four or five other people who have known him and he's done some kind of back channel. It's almost like, could you do that if you're trying to figure out whether you should work on this project or not? Is there a way of you back channeling references on the people or the product that you'd be working on somehow?

46:54

I think it's easier for the candidate about the company than the company about the candidate. Reid... And actually, that's kind of cool because the leverage is with the candidate really, and if they're a strong candidate, and they do this additional research, they just stand out. They will always stand out.

47:21

Can I ask you a few final kind of slightly quick fire, but maybe difficult to answer questions? How have you handled the trap that we tend to fall in, like a sunken cost fallacy where you're going to make this big call that people are going to think you're on the dole, but you're not, how do you make up for those costs that are sinking in that moment?

47:48

I always made sure that we had just some, a sliver of hope. So in the very early days, when we talked to... Customers and prospects are the ones that ultimately decide. When we talked about the problem, we'd get maybe one or two people who were really excited and I was like, "Okay, cool," but then we'd get a bunch of people that would literally walk us out of their office and laugh and we traveled like two hours to go to somewhere north of London and walked for 10 minutes. It was like an industrial estate, and we presented and they just kind of looked at us and I think they felt so sorry for us that they showed us the tool that they use instead of us, and they kind of walked us out. I was like, "Okay, thank you."

48:45

I don't know, you have to ignore so much, which is a sunken cost fallacy, but because we always had one or two or three people every month being like, "Oh wow, but I can see where this is going," that was enough for me. And, I suppose that's classed as faith because that's not rational. And so, then ultimately it becomes about, what is the bigger thing here? And, the bigger thing for us was about creating this thing that didn't exist that we thought was extremely important. So, sunken cost fallacy all the way through to YC really, but that's fine. I think sunken cost fallacy really best applies in immediate, short term decisions. For the longer term, life stuff it's maybe a bit more complicated.

49:50

Would you apply the kind of the same thought and the same belief structure, kind of having that faith in something on a personal level too, for example when you left Secret Escapes, it must have felt like you were sinking in a hole right there, are you still looking for faith there?

50:13

Yeah and because of how we described that your mind can only perceive so much. Well, I wouldn't attribute my good decisions to sort of my ability to make them. There's always an element of chaos in there. So, it applies across the board. There's no distinction between personal and career decisions when you're actually thinking about them.

50:52

When you set out your view of what you want to create, whether that's your own personal career or whether it's the life of Rebank, you look at it with nothing but perfection. You want it to be perfect, our ideals and our ambitions come from our views of perfection, how have you balanced that against the thing that we've all come to realize, which is that we are not perfect and that in order to get to that place you're going to have to do a lot of things that feel imperfect in some way?

51:29

It got easier as we went on and that striving for perfection early on just made us so slow. Maybe that's something that YC kind of beat out of us. All they tell their startups is, "Talk to users and build and everything else is a distraction," and that's what we did for three months, but the... Now, the moments where I've been the most sort of frustrated have been when some kind of imaginary level that I've created in my mind hasn't been met and in the moment I get frustrated and I show it, but when you're leading a team, when you're managing people, that stuff doesn't really... That's not sustainable, communication has to trump any sort of imaginary line or belief. So my antidote, and it's a long term one, it's kind to teach. I've realized in the last year that I would never be a teacher, but I like spending time with the group, just five minutes, just showing them something obscure about business that I picked up from the masters or whatever.

53:25

So, it's kind of by helping everyone understand the company the way I do, that then becomes more important than striving for perfection, and that is a journey that I am on, and what I feel now is that I'm combining those two things, and those are the two things that really matter to me, and I want to develop in the next year, my ability to tell stories, to educate, and my ability to turn the people around me into the most formidable versions of themselves. I would never know how to say that five years ago, but it's just being surrounded by awesome founders in the US and all of that. I just don't think there's any merit in being subtle. You really have to believe even yourself, and that's what I believe I'm here to do. So, the perfection thing is kind of more about working with your team than it is about the goal because they create it with you.

54:49

If the great ideas look bad, how does that principle apply to finding work in some way? Because whilst it's difficult for an investor to be able to pick an idea that may feel or look like a toy, but actually is something more profound, that problem is just as equally difficult to solve if you're someone deciding whether you should work on that project and dedicate your time to it or not.

55:21

You're always hopefully making decisions multi-dimensionally and on your list of negatives, it could be either the product kind of sucks, but as long as on your positives you have things that matter to you like, I don't know, where they want to go is really interesting, talking to them, I feel like they really know this space and the questions as a candidate that I'm asking to try and break their logic or whatever, they are impressing me with their ability to discuss it. I think it's more about the people, at least to me. So every product, it kind of looks like a toy, it's a bad idea at the beginning mostly, unless it's a copy of the same thing that already exists. So, it's okay as long as the other things that you care about are there.

56:34

Thank you so much for taking the time out to break down the way that you make these decisions.