368. From a Bar Owner to $100M+ ARR, How an Outsider Navigated Silicon Valley, Raising through Peaks and Troughs of Hype Cycles, and How to Select $B startups at the Incorporation Stage (Oz Alon & Nadav Eylath)

Oz Alon & Nadav Eylath of Honeybook & at.inc/ joins Nick to discuss From a Bar Owner to $100M+ ARR, How an Outsider Navigated Silicon Valley, Raising through Peaks and Troughs of Hype Cycles, and How to Select $B startups at the Incorporation Stage. In this episode we cover:

Honeybook’s First Pitch
Investing in Founders at Incorporation
How to Sell to SMBs
Raising in Up and Down Markets
What the Future Holds For Tech Investing

Guest Links:

Oz Alon
Nadav Eylath
Honeybook
At.Inc/

The host of The Full Ratchet is Nick Moran, General Partner of New Stack Ventures, a venture capital firm committed to investing in founders outside of the Bay Area.

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Transcribed with AI:

Nadav Eylath joins us today from San Francisco. And Oz Alon joins us today from Israel, Oz is co-founder and CEO of the unicorn, HoneyBook, the leading platform for independent businesses to manage their client flow and cashflow, the business has raised nearly $500 million in venture capital and provides tools for client communication contracts, invoices, and payments, all in one place. Inspired by his firsthand experience as a small business owner, as built HoneyBook to enable creative entrepreneurs to focus more on doing what they love, and less on administrative tasks. Nadav isa general partner at.Inc is an early-stage venture firm that aims to invest at incorporation. Their early investment strategy has also led to successful investments in Netlify, we discover replacer.ai, and more along with early advisor roles at companies such as HoneyBook, Nadav, welcome to the show.

1:08
Thank you, Nick, thank you for inviting us.

1:10
Yeah, it’s pleasure to have you both. Nadav, you and I have known each other for some time, Oz this is the first time we’ve had the pleasure to meet. But let’s start with you. As you tell us a bit about your background before HoneyBook.

1:20
I’d like to say that I was born and then there was HoneyBook. HoneyBook was kind of my first job out of college. And it’s not only my stories to story, my wife and mine together, we met when we were 16 years ago, actually 13 years old, we started dating at the age of 16. I made a lot of things together. And one of the things that we did over the years, we were the ones that host parties for all of our friends. So they were like hundreds of people came to our parties. And we love this huge project. In hindsight, you know, you can connect the dots. And you can see that what we liked was creating great experiences. And late 20s. We both owned businesses. And as we were owning businesses and found ourselves interacting with other small businesses, we learned that small businesses were very outdated in the way they performed and communicate with their clients. And that’s kind of what got us to, start HoneyBook we want to serve as many service-based businesses as possible. You want to help them respond quickly to their clients and to accept online payments, which was Believe it or not, not a thing 10 years ago.

2:15
And what were you doing in business that kind of allow you to uncover some of these issues with managing a small business?

2:22
at the time, I owned a bar in Tel Aviv, and that’s a great business. You get to meet so many amazing folks. Our third co-founder drawer I met at the bar he was a regular kid. Yeah. And one night I asked him, hey, drawer, you know, how, how are you making the money we’re taking away from you? So he said, Well, I’m an engineer. And I was like, no way we thought about this idea. And maybe, you know, we should meet and talk about it. And the rest was history. So I would meet great people every night, and I loved creating experiences. I loved serving customers. And again, I think that that’s what one led us to do. HoneyBook but to to fully appreciate and admire the fact that our members we call our customers members, our members, every one of them is a service based business. They love serving, they love delighting they love creating great experiences. We have web designers and interior designers and business coaches and photographers and and you know what they all have in common. They just love creating great experiences and serving their customers.

3:24
Amazing. Well, I bet you’ve had a pretty good venue for some close dinners and maybe some drinks to ask the dive Can you share a bit about the history and thesis of at and

3:35
so started in 2015 actually called it tank Hill ventures after the name of the hill next to my house in San Francisco. I’ve invested in 18 companies and actually committed as lp in eight funds. And we already have six multi billion dollar businesses today in that portfolio. And you mentioned honey book is a unicorn. But I like to talk about HoneyBook as a company that already crossed $100 million in revenues in ARR. And growing in 2021. I reached out to my 25 year old friend Ronnie bond Jack, we went to high school together. And then we actually were in the University of Tel Aviv University together and move to Silicon Valley roughly at the same time to join me in actually building it as a firm and scaling it. So we raise fund number two, and we basically are running, adding so we rebranded it, we rebranded from Tango ventures to adding because Tango ventures was nothing strategic in that name. It was just the name of a beautiful hill in San Francisco. And adding is very very strategic for us. We like to partner at in cooperation with founders and support them from day one. And all the way similar to the way we supported HoneyBook and Netlify and place are and others. We look to partner with the founders to work with them to build that close relationship and develop deep insight into what they’re working on and to be able to evaluate and understand the challenges and the opportunities along the way. And we focus on the intersection of have global and tech, so something that you can sell globally. And it’s actually keylight. Not easy to do. It doesn’t need to be deep tech, but it just needs to be technically not easy. And then we also find ourselves liking industries that are a little bit overlooked. So for example, we invest in a company called shipping.ai, that they’re innovating in the maritime industry. And this is roughly who we are right? Like we like to partner, the beginning, be there with the founders go through the different iterations through product market fit building foundations for hyper growth and support companies throughout that lifetime. Awesome.

5:33
Well, true formation stage investor, that’s kind of a rarity in today’s market, you know, most people are requiring some traction on the dock. Can you talk about how you met us?

5:42
Oh, yeah, definitely. So almost at the bar, but not exactly.

5:46
The first serious conversation you and I ever had. Yeah, it was on the block.

5:50
Yeah. That was a dual bar in Tel Aviv. That was this first serious conversation about hiring. That’s, that’s true.

5:56
You’re recruiting the engineers, and you’re recruiting the investors at the bar. Yeah.

6:01
But actually, the duff is married to childhood friend of mine, may towel, and they were dating at the time to each other for the first time in a cinema where we lived. And you know, the first thing that came to mind is like, you know, seriously, you’re dating this guy. But then when we had a serious conversation at a bar understood why,

6:17
yeah, and I think like, the longest time we spent together back then was when you were at our wedding. Yep. Right. That’s probably the longest time that we spent together back then.

6:26
Were you guys carrying on HoneyBook at this point, or what were you on other ideas before this?

6:31
We were already thinking about HoneyBook at a time, you know, and I think one of the things that, you know, many people talk about the CO founding moment of a company, and indeed cooperation, etc. But the reality is that most entrepreneurs dream about the idea for many, many years before it actually happens. So absolutely, certainly, we’re talking about honey book one way or another at the wedding as well.

6:51
And then I was moved to Silicon Valley roughly a year after we moved. And that’s when we developed a closer deeper relationship. Also, over drinks at the bar, probably were at roughly on a weekly basis, we were talking about, like I was sharing with him what I’ve learned about those early days here, when I moved to Silicon Valley, coming in to this area and learning about it, and then AWS moved in with HoneyBook. And that’s how we can develop our closer relationship.

7:15
We talked about these things, we sat at the bar, and the dad was talking about Silicon Valley, they lived in Silicon Valley. And you know, when you are an intrapreneur, in Tel Aviv, so far from Silicon Valley, probably like more than 7000 miles away, it sounds like a place you will never ever get to right. It’s like this magical place that things happen. And you will never get to. And it’s interesting to see that we’re living in a world now that little foreigners can really travel the world and start companies in foreign and amazing places like Silicon Valley.

7:42
Tell me about that early experience, right? You moved to Silicon Valley, you finally got there, you got to this magical place. You know, I run this firm, new stack and our tagline is investing in outsiders, right. So here on the show, we’re featuring unicorn founders that were outside, right. And in many cases, somewhere along the journey, they find themselves in the valley, whether they move there or they have to go out there to raise their series B or Series C round, you know, what was what was your early experience like moving out to the Bay Area.

8:07
So first of all, I have to give the credit to to sell our first investors and at the time it was it was an accelerator named Alquist labs now it’s a fund they invested in propose that we will move to what I thought at the time was called alto, Palo Alto. In hindsight, the real name was Palo Alto, no matter what we got to the right place, it was actually Menlo Park, but diversity is experience first of all, getting together with people that you know from home. So in Uddhav, it was a critical relationship to slowly understand like, what’s going on, right, understand how to communicate a lot of people what people expect probably is different from from what people expect in Israel. One thing that really stood out is that in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, people really wanted to help you and and almost no one was like unreachable, people were reachable. And I love that I fell in love completely with that mindset that people that you heard about elevate these famous names Sonny are willing to take a meeting and to hear your story. And another thing that was very interesting at the time for me was now my nice again, I’m I was my co founder is my co founder, we are married, happily married in Israel, investors did not think it’s a plus, to be a married couple as co founders, right. But we ran into investors in Silicon Valley that thought it was great and solid is a pro and a con. Interesting, you know, these experiences of the difference in culture. And lastly, I will say that you sit in front of investors that did very well in a very successful you read about them in the media, and then they come to the meeting with this crappy car, and it’s not what you would expect, right? And they walk into the meeting, and they sit with you and they look at you and they imagine the company you’re going to build they imagine you’re a company with hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions in revenue and the reality is that we know as intrapreneurs we promised the moon but do we actually believe that this company that at the time there Three people in that company, right, the three co founders is going to be hundreds of employees back then in Israel, I didn’t run into a company that had hundreds of employees. But again, these investors that saw that before look at you, and they could see that idea, this is so important that enterpreneurs get that belief of the investors that already saw this before. And that belief really helps kind of like refine your dream, and the ability to dream big. And in Silicon Valley, you know, you can dream really big 100%. It’s funny,

10:29
I remember our first conversation at that bar in Tel Aviv, you were talking about that $50 million market cap that you’re going after. And then maybe a year later, after coming in with up with labs, and going through all of the training, if you will, as well, you were talking about the $50 billion business opportunity and and as time goes, by talking about bigger and bigger opportunities, but seeing them and getting this kind of help from people that have done it already to imagine and dream that big

10:57
in the job. Have you written the first check on this? Are you advising at this point?

11:01
No, I was first employee at a startup hacking my way into Silicon Valley as well. And helping wherever I can, I was connected with the team at tapas labs, who are amazing. And that was trying to help whatever company that they were bringing in to share what I’ve learned about those early days. Similarly with HoneyBook. So it started with like, you know, the weekly beer, and then it naturally developed to form an advisory role in their company. And then over time for a personal check and multiple checks from the different funds. I didn’t have a fund or anything at a time.

11:31
Amazing. And then as Can you talk about like the initial instantiation of the product in like, how did you get that first group of customers?

11:38
It’s a great question. It really evolved constantly, there’s a thing that we thought we want to build. And then there’s what actually happened. In the end, we were just gravitating towards building software that will help these businesses manage their businesses, the one thing that really annoyed us was the fact that small businesses would ask for a cheque, or cash, that kind of business will send you an agreement and ask you to print it and integrate it, I’m fax to send a fax back, we just couldn’t believe it. And these were the things we really want to solve. We didn’t know how we’re going to solve them. But we want to we want to get rid of the of those things. And we thought that as long as businesses are going to operate that way, they won’t be as successful as they can be. So we had conversations with potential customers. And I remember going in San Francisco kind of going to their houses and asking them questions, showing them mock ups of our product. But one interesting thing was I remember talking to this photographer, and Treasure Island, and he was looking at the screen and he asked my wife and I, what are these military numbers? What do you mean, what is 1600? It’s four o’clock. And what we didn’t realize as Israelis is that Americans used for PM, they don’t write 1600. Right. But we didn’t know that. So I think the initial conversations that we had with him, it’s just it’s such a small thing. But you know, if you don’t know, like, this is the reason that someone didn’t understand your product, then you don’t make the right decisions. So these initial conversations with customers helped us kind of like change these things. But then there was another thing, we thought that we’re going to build this, it sounds weird, but a photo sharing app of where small businesses are going to be tagged. And then people are going to find them, and then they’re going to communicate, and then they will send a proposal and agreement and accept online payment. Now obviously, we just want to go after the proposal, the agreement, the online payment, we went like this, this very long route to get there. It made sense to us, but in reality didn’t make sense to anyone else. And one day, it was an event planner actually did ask us, hey, like, can I just use the payment thing? And we looked at her and we said, what do you want to use the payment without all the other stuff? And like, yeah, and I remember kind of driving back home and thinking, why are we building this entire thing, if eventually what we actually want to do want to help them to communicate with their clients, and transact money. And then I remember sitting in a coffee shop, I think Vinnytsia in Palo Alto, I remember this moment where we were looking at each other and saying, Well, we’re probably going to fail. But if we fail, and when we fail, what are we willing to fail for for another photo sharing app, or to really change the way that people didn’t like the way they transact money communicate, and we were like, obviously, the transacting money, like we would fail for that I don’t want to fail for like a photo sharing app. And that was a decision the next day, it was like, This is what we’re gonna do. And we built the first product we saw the first transaction goes through and the rest is history.

14:29
In the data. from your standpoint, you had known AWS from the beginning, you’d seen iterations you know, when did it it feel like they had found product market fit to you? When did you start getting really excited? And what did you see as some of the biggest risks to HoneyBook in the early years?

14:46
Yeah, I think that moment in time, I remember it so vividly that that decision that they made like and they were sitting and saying, hey, you know what, like, why don’t we go and help them do what they asked for for us to do right like to actually transact that to me The payment. And if you think about those times, they were starting to become services like Stripe and plaid. And it was just the beginning of that, right like 2012 2013 1415. Those were the early days of all those services that were making it possible to do that. And I think even HoneyBook, were doing it manually at the beginning,

15:19
when you say manually, I transacted like I went into the bank account and send money to customers, the first 1700 34 transactions, were manually actually on bill.com, like in the bank account, sending them sending these transactions

15:37
just before stripe and like when it all started, right, right, like, but you had those, I would say tail winds that helped you and other startups to do that. But with HoneyBook, what was special and I think like from the very beginning, I think this was what the most interesting part, it was that HoneyBook was focused on the member, right like the what they call member, the customer and the workflow that they needed and help them do that, right help build the partnership and their relationship directly with the customer and help them do whatever they needed to accomplish. Right. Because those independent businesses are, if you think about it, they are operating in an area that they know best, right? If it’s a graphic designer, or if it’s a wedding planner, or photographer, or any type of service provider, they focus on their service, they don’t want to deal with business related workflows, they want that to be solved. And I think this alignment that HoneyBook had from the very beginning, but it evolved over time. And you can see it’s kind of like tightening up and tightening it up over time. This was, in my mind, one of the biggest assets that HoneyBook has been building this aligning themselves with their customers faith, if you will, and solving all the business issues for them. And when you see that they have started transacting on HoneyBook. You understand, okay, there’s a product market fit here, right? Like there’s like cash moving hands, there’s a really big connection between HoneyBook the end their members. And it’s not only the transaction, right honey book, because they were focusing on the workflow and because they were focusing on the needs, the transaction is something that happens after the fact. But what’s happening before that is the invoicing. Right? But what’s happening before the invoicing, it’s all the interaction with their customers and trying to understand what are those needs for service providers for the independent businesses providing a service, there’s a lot of back and forth and interaction that happened before that, right. So this type of alignment has been from the very beginning, I think something very special, but HoneyBook, and big part of our thesis in supporting handbook throughout the lifetime of the business. This point

17:46
is very important, which Doug just said, because I think it’s a good lesson for an intrapreneur out there when you think about your business model. And I know it’s not always possible. But if you can align, create this business model where you are completely in alignment with the interests of your customer, your company is going to benefit, we build software, but we make our money on transactions. So it’s actually a means that when our members win, we win. When they lose, we lose. And in COVID By the way, when we were at our customers were at major risk, we knew that the only thing that matters for us is to help them survive. If they survive, we survive. So that was the only focus. We didn’t care about anything else. But our customers have to survive, they have to succeed. So I think it’s a great thing. If you can you have a business model that creates has alignment of interests.

18:29
100%. I mean that that non elective churn, you know, if customers fail, then you still lose the business, even if they’re not opting out. Right. And you know, when did you know that you had reached product market fit? Were there some key metrics? Or was there an inflection point that you knew that the business had reach product market

18:46
fit, product market fit? It’s a loose term, right? And it’s probably as a kind of a spectrum of what what does it mean, it’s not binary, although I think Marc Andreessen talks about in a binary binary sense, but I think there’s a level of product market fit. And when we look at our customers, we have so many different verticals. I talked about web designers, interior designers, business coaches, photographers, and there’s different sizes of businesses. So the level of product market fit is different between them. And we’re constantly on the journey to improve the product market fit and every one of these segments and verticals. So this is kind of a day in day out work that we do every single day. That will be how I would think about it. I will say that today when we have customers that perform better from a logo churn perspective, dollar retention perspective, from an activation conversion, when we look at all these metrics together, we get a good sense of here is a group of folks that is big enough to build a great business, right? And all these metrics give us an indication that we have a certain level of product market fit. Now we go to the next vertical and we say what does it look like there? And how do we get it from here to here because now we have a benchmark. That’s how we think about it

19:58
at the time it honey book was founded in sort of those early years, SMB was not a super hot category. I’m based in Chicago, you know, companies like Groupon and Grubhub had success in the SMB world, but it was sort of a tricky category for a lot of venture capitalists in the space at large. And curious to hear, from your standpoint, how do you lean into some of these categories that are not, you know, hot or trendy at the time that you invest, but you clearly project out that the business and the fundamentals are strong. And these are areas that will become hotter and more attractive spaces over time. If you

20:38
think about in the time that we invest, right, like we are. So early in the process, we’re not a series B focused type of VC or growth or whatnot, right? Like at the point where you’re focusing on growth, you already know that there’s like the shared economy, the point in time that we are investing in is the point in time that we want to imagine the founders coming to us and tell us you want to live it, people are renting space in their house to other people. It’s like, you need to imagine it together with the founders, you need to try to understand and connect to what is their vision? What are they seeing, and this is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to listen to be open to the founders to identify what has changed in the world, right? Like, what do they see that has changed in the world and why it has changed, right? Like the founders of Netlify, they have coined the term JAMstack, right, like they have identified like Matt, Belinda, Eva and datafied that the world has is changing from like dynamic website to static website, he has identified some change in the world and saw that coming. It’s not something that we see coming, it’s not something that we can even imagine or decide, or these are the categories that we’re looking at. We’re coming in so early. So we’re trying to listen to the founders work with them understand how they think about the world. And what is it that they see that is changing the world? Right? Like with HoneyBook? I think they had in their presentation multiple times slide that has the ad 20, right? Because I think you still have it, like how do you flip the world from transacting 90% or 80% of the time in cash to transacting online, the founder is kind of identified that the world has changed already. And now they are the best people to execute and help all of us basically bring all of us together into a new world.

22:19
I will add to that, as he was talking about it, it occurred to me that no, I don’t hate many things. But I do hate cash. And my wife hates cash. And so for us, it was it was war on cash. Right. So that slide was very precious to us. It was like, Look, this is what people are doing, we absolutely have to change that. We’re not alone, right? Like there’s many great companies that are fighting that war together with us. But anyway, joining forces, but you know, again, it’s like that feeling from the inside that you really want to change something I will give props to you to Nadal have the ability to kind of have a perspective and conviction on things, which I think is an crucial trait for an investor, I saw investors with conviction investors without conviction. You know, the ones that follow other investors with conviction, the dove is in the category of investors with conviction. And it’s extremely important for an entrepreneur to be surrounded by investors like that. One example that I like is that COVID hit, we were all very sad. And there was a high level of anxiety, it was hard for me to see how we’re gonna get out of this. But there were some early signs that our our members are resilient. And they’re figuring this out. And a dove saw that. And he said, Hey, you know, I want to invest $1.5 million. And I said to him, the Dove, you know, as a friend, I don’t think you should do that I wouldn’t invest right now at HoneyBook. And I’d have said, Yes, exactly. That’s why you’re not investor. And it panned out to be the best investment and HoneyBook. But again, I think great investors have this way. Yes, as the W said, like the enterpreneurs are going to imagine things but the ability to have conviction around what the world is going to look like. And then see how these things fit into that world. And I saw that firsthand. But it

23:58
also came from the data that you guys were sharing, and you were showing some data from the product and from the insights that you have about the contracts being delayed, and you can start seeing that in the data information. That is not necessarily projecting bad things about the future. It’s all about the likelihoods. But how can you get conviction about that likelihood about the future, right? Like you don’t know what will happen, but you can start understanding stuff now, I would not have been able to understand that if I have not been so close with all then he would have been sharing with me information and consulting all the time. It’s a big part of that, right? Like, through many years, right like and, and this is why like during that very hard times, I was able to relatively quickly analyze information that comes from the company and executives of the company in a way that helped me understand something about the world but I think it’s very, very crucial what for any founder to share information and to share thoughts with their investors as it happens, and I think this is kind of like one of Austin’s superpowers, he doesn’t share it only with me, he shares it with every single person that he meets a time that it could be like, Oh, we’re just like here with friends. Like, we’re talking about that right? Like, but this guy, he cannot stop, right? He’s, he’s in that war against the gas or whatever that would be. But it’s a good thing, right? Like, because you don’t know, who are the people that will help you get to where you need to get.

25:26
This is another important point, what point was around building a business model that has alignment of interests, and the other was about investors is conviction. I think the point that now that I’ve raised was around transparency and sharing information with others, I see many entrepreneurs, the beginning of the journey, I like to call it they’re in the NDA stage, they don’t want to even share with you what they’re working on. Today, I’m working on something and I’m like, Oh, great, what and like, it’s in stealth, if you don’t share information, you’re not gonna get the feedback, right? And what you want, you actually want to share it with everybody you can share it with. So you can get that immediate feedback and iterate and you know, build the right thing and not barking the wrong tree, I will say about about the data. It’s true, yes, we share it with lots of people. But I do think that building a very strong relationship, obviously, we’re friends. So it’s easier, but build a really good relationship with your investors, where be extremely transparent is going to help the trust levels, right, and you can get the feedback. So I think that’s, that’s important as well,

26:23
you talked about this before, but part of this required a lot of patience, right? You needed consumer behavior, business behavior to change over time. And in a way, you are also creating some change in behavior. But that bears out in fundraising, right? We go through Fast and Furious cycles, we go through slower cycles, you’ve raised near nearly 500 million, I suspect it was not just a smooth line up into the right the whole way, especially with your comments on the pandemic. So could you share maybe some of the lesser known takeaways on fundraising and the financing process, things that you’d share with founders on sort of taking VC?

26:58
So first of all, I think it’s great to have conversations with investors, super smart people that have a good perspective on the market and can give you valuable feedback. So talking to investors at all times a great idea we had it rounds it closed within three days, and we had rounds it closed within three years, like seriously three years, it took us to raise one round, you know, we started kind of like having like C one C two, C three, we had C 3.5. It’s just we add these things, what we learned over the years is you can raise $25,000 $25,000,000.02 100 $50 million, and the amount doesn’t matter. It’s almost the same effort in a way, for the most part, it’s hard enterpreneurs need to always prepare themselves to this is going to be hard, don’t fall into the trap of kind of like what people are telling you that I just kind of opened my email inbox, and I had like five term sheets landing within after I just thought about the idea in the shower. I don’t think these things really happen. Maybe they are of 2021. But they are 2021 is the anomaly. That’s how things work. So I think enterpreneurs need to prepare themselves for a very long journey. It’s going to be hard raising money every single time sometimes will be easy. And then you know, just be happy about it. And that’s it. And then the other thing I will say as an entrepreneur as a CEO, you always raise money and I like to say to people that I never raised money but I I just do this every single day. Always have conversations with investors when a good investor wants to invest, find a way to get them in here people Oh, we already closed around. If you think that investor, it’s another great partner, another great fan. Like find a way I never regretted investors have joined us through this journey. We have many investors, and I’m super excited about all of them.

28:38
Awesome Nadal, you’ve seen this journey? It’s been a long one. You’ve watched the business you’ve known as well, very few founders and businesses reach 100 million plus of revenue and unicorn status. Are there any key takeaways or any characteristics you’ve distilled down on and what makes us unique and why this is you know, worked out so well

28:59
before that have answers sorry, I will just say honey Booker’s don’t like to be referred as unicorns. We’re not a unicorn. At best. We’re a camel, you know, we we like long distance. Yeah, I will actually give the credit to Yoni dairy and other he’s really CEO for coining that camel idea, but I liked it resonated with that. How did we reach that camel status?

29:20
I was always knows how to ride camels since it was a young boy in Israel. Definitely what I mentioned before, right, I was kind of like in his personality and the way that he engage people with transparency and conversations and the ability to kind of like engage every single person that he is encountered with engaging them with HoneyBook. Right. It doesn’t get into them with his relationship isn’t getting them with HoneyBook in some way, in a way that is working for HoneyBook in so many different directions in hiring employees in introducing some of the best people a mutual friend of ours who was engaged with honey book in a very good way has introduced us to, I think one of the most strategic hires they had in the company. And that person was, you know, someone that you could not imagine hiring as an Israeli coming into Silicon Valley with all the titles of the Harvard’s and whatnot, then you were like, How can I even approach someone like that, but I think like AWS is engaging people who were with him in the class, and these people who are doesn’t have anything to do with HoneyBook are kind of like connecting them directly to HoneyBook. And it seems like he’s getting everyone around him to work for HoneyBook. So I think this is very, very specific character of Oz specifically. But I think this is something that we’re looking for, in a lot of the founders that we back, I think, also another thing, and this is definitely something that we described when we’re looking for is we’re looking for founders who are willing and able to learn and change super, super fun, learn super fast and change super fast. And this is something that I think AWS is, and HoneyBook as a as a team is very, very good at there are some people who are learning all the time, but are not changing. It doesn’t help you get anywhere. Some people, they just keep on changing, but without the learning. It’s just super, super hard to learn and change all the time super fast. And sometimes you learn to change but not fast enough, right. But with startups, you really need to learn to change really fast. And I think this latter characteristic that AWS has ingrained in him,

31:27
what do you need to do to reach the next level of high velocity growth

31:31
for us, we’ll need to figure out how to expand internationally. And it’s something we didn’t do yet. We’re only in the US. That’s the first thing. Another thing, it’s just keep being obsessed about the user experience and creating a really good experience for the right customers. And it sounds kind of like straightforward. Obviously every company needs to do that. But it’s a it’s a constant battle, you always need to learn who is your best customer and how to reach them. It’s complicated. And it’s just it’s an ongoing thing that we do. And then developing more products on the financial side, our members users to manage their clients, their client is the most important thing for their business. And then the second most important thing is money they do their client flow is us and their cash flow, and there’s a lot more value that we can create for that cash flow. And we’re looking forward to do that, because that will really open many opportunities for our members and for our business.

32:23
For either of you guys. If we could feature anyone here on the show. Who do you think we should interview and what topic would you like to hear them speak about?

32:30
I think both. Gilpin Artie from our past Labs is super interesting person to learn a lot from especially for outside people who come outside of Silicon Valley and what does what does it mean to come out at Silicon Valley to Silicon Valley, as well as I would say Ron McAfee, who sold the company to Facebook, led growth at Facebook, and then built the growth for and was the chief growth officer at Lyft.

32:57
I am presented with both perfect

33:00
Nadav, what resources have you found really valuable that you would recommend the listeners

33:04
to authors that I like to think and to specific books from each of them is Nassim Taleb Fooled By Randomness specifically and anti fragile. Those two specific books I think are great. They’ve taught me a lot. And I think it’s super interesting. And then more recent one is Annie Duke, the two books that I like are thinking in bets and the new one quit super, super, super interesting perspective. And applicable in both cases, I think both anti fragile from the same Taliban quit from any do are very applicable for definitely for investors, but also for founders. And for anyone, any executive was making decisions, or any leader is leading a team and trying to make decisions every day.

33:47
Or if you enjoy some poker, it helps for that too. Do you have any habits, tactics or techniques that are a secret weapon?

33:54
With actually it actually connects to my other answer, but But I will say authenticity goes a long way. If you can keep it real, be overly transparent at times, people will will respect that they will trust you more, they will follow you and you will have good conversations.

34:13
And finally, guys, what is the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow along with each of your companies?

34:20
Yeah, so for us, our name is our website URL. It’s ATT dot IMC at Inc, basically. So that’s a good way to interact with us and follow us. And then with me directly, it’s mostly like I would say LinkedIn direct messages. I’m not a big Twitter, user or anything else. So LinkedIn would be the best way

34:40
was really LinkedIn will be the best way and yes, our website is alibaba.com.

34:45
Well, there it is. Nadav, Oz, you know, thank you so much for the time today and thanks for sharing this incredible story of HoneyBook.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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