Transcript [EN]: Why Stores Are Struggling — and How to Reinvent Them

People can lie, data does. If you're running a digital campaign and you spent $10,000 on this creative and it brought no one to your website, you're not going to keep running that creative. Yet in retail, you'll have the exact same window or the same mannequin on the front table whether or not it is performing. Meet Simon Molner, the founder behind Flagship AI. He grew up working weekends in his family's jewelry store, scale that at Afterpay, and is now solving a problem worth billions that everyone else ignores. >> Visual merchandising is one of the most underinvested functions of retail. We built a platform where instead of these archaic PDF documents, the resource floor plan is loaded into the platform and merchandising a store becomes as simple as drag and drop. >> In this episode, we go through the systems behind building flagships team and why he says one key trait matters more than anything in hiring a players. >> Never ask someone to do something that you yourself are not prepared to do. Culture isn't about pizza parties with your team. It's about how your team feels on a Sunday night. And it's about understanding what drives and motivates every single person in the organization. I'm probably going to piss off a lot of people by saying this. I'm not a fan of What's up, guys? It's Mark. Quick break. Over 80% of you guys listening are not subscribers. The more subscribers we get, the bigger and better we can make the show. It would mean the world to me if you got value from this episode or any of the past episodes to hit the subscribe button below. Thanks for watching. So, e-commerce gets all the attention, but 83% of sales are still in store and most stores are running efficiently. When did you realize how broken that model was? >> Pretty soon after jumping into the opportunity. My whole life has been in digital and data driven retail and then as soon as my started to dip my toes into offline retail, it was pretty apparent. Yeah, I know you started with a family business on the jewelry side and then an afterpay. Was it a direct conversation with a specific brand or retailer that really led you to believe that people were just putting stuff in stores blindly without looking at the analytics? >> Yeah, so at Afterpay, a lot of my time was spent looking at stores, looking at physical stores, looking at how consumers shopped in store. A lot of what I did was trying to drive customers into shop in store, trying to really tap into that offline retail mindset. And that's where I really saw how much of an opportunity there was and how much or how how much of a lack of data available there was in that world. >> I I want to just set the stage properly with flagship for people listening. We have a lot of ecom people listening. I would say it's operators, marketers, and creators. And on the e-com side, I feel like there's a very negative connotation because they see Amazon as a black box. You go into retail, it's basically a black box. And I kind of want to encourage people after this conversation to be like, "Hey, maybe I should open up my own retailer because it makes sense with the technology you have." So, why don't we just pretend like we're explaining this to a fifth grader? What is Flagship AI? Yeah, flagship is a solution that helps retailers understand the true performance of their stores. Be able to understand exactly what's happening in the stores, have visibility of what's happening in the stores and to be able to know at an individual square foot how much revenue is coming out of every part of every store and being able to know what is contributing or driving that performance to be able to at an individual store level make improvements to stores. So moving away from this one sizefits-all or spray and prey or just send product to a store and hope for the best mindset and really start to hone in and understand where there's opportunities to drive more revenue through stores. >> So let's dive in deeper and we could look at it on like someone has one store, someone has many stores and it could be geography based where the experience is different in LA or it is in New York. So what is like the underlying technology and is it is it in real time? Is there some sort of feedback loop? Like dive into more of like what the product is. >> Yeah. So through just speaking to retailers, I kind of come back to the start. So through speaking to retailers and realizing how little they knew about their stores and the more I dove into the problem, the more I realized that the way that we were going to solve for bringing more data into stores is through visual merchandising. So a bit of context, I'm very data driven. My whole career has been built around data and using data to make decisions. And then when I realized that brick and mortar had very little data, it sent me down this rabbit hole. And just through speaking to retailers, what I found was that visual merchandising is one of the most underinvested into functions of retail. It is so important to retail, but it's a function of retail that is so often the first on the chopping block, gets the the smallest budget, and the life of a visual merchandiser so often is spent just trying to justify their existence. But the irony is that visual merchandising can be an unlock. And we have found it's an unlock for us because it can tell us where every product is placed across every single store. And so what we did was we built a platform where instead of these archaic PDF documents that are being put together, every store is loaded into the platform. Every store's floor plan is loaded into the platform and merchandising a store becomes as simple as drag and drop. And the great thing about moving into the tech world is through just simply through this process, we can now know where every product is placed across every store. And once we know that, we can feed in sales data to know what the impact is of that product placement. So for brands we're working with, being able to know in the last hour, how much revenue did every window in the world drive to be able to know what the real opportunity is? >> Why don't we take a step back first of just understanding to everybody here listening, you know, what is visual merchandising and then what does the visual merchandiser actually do? >> Visual merchandising is taking a buy or an assortment. So taking an entire collection that someone has produced and deciding where and how that's going to be placed in the store. It's communicating to the stores. They'll create a vision. They'll have an idea in their head of how they want a mannequin styled or how they want a rack of clothing styled. And the end consumer walks in just sees product, but they don't realize how much work has gone into getting that product into the store and in the right place. The way generally a lot of these teams will have a whole hierarchy from a director of visual merchandising through to a field team through to store visual captains and everyone's got differing levels of responsibility in that process. And what will generally happen today is you'll have someone who's deciding on the creative direction. They'll make a PDF document that will go to the field team or the stores in order to to make sure the stores are doing what they need to do. And it's a process built on email, WhatsApp, phone calls, FaceTime to make sure the source is doing what they need to do. >> So, zooming out even more, it basically seems like, let's just say like you're a clothing company and you have kind of these four big drops for the year. Are you basically saying that that visual merchandise or the director of visual merchandising, that one person is just subjectively creatively deciding like where stuff goes? Basically, in I would say in the best brands we've spoken to and the best brands we're working with, there is collaboration with the merchandising and buying team to feed in those decisions. But so much of visual merchandising, yes, is very creative and artistic and not always commercial or data driven in any way, shape, or form. >> Do you think flagship AI is going to be the end of the visual merchandiser? >> Absolutely not. It's really funny with the brands that we are working with. The the initial hypothesis from some CEOs that we worked with was that they'd be able to cut their VM headcount. And what ended up happening was they were able to understand how valuable their visual merchandisers were. So they were able to justify an increase in VM headcount. So it wasn't about visual merchandisers being on the chopping block. It was about understanding how valuable visual merchandises are to the organization and realizing that they've under underinvested into them and now giving them more headcount so that they can do more and drive more dollars through the stores. >> I do feel like though that you're going to change kind of that core persona of the visual merchandiser. Now they're going to have to need to understand how to evaluate data in conjunction with being creative. >> Absolutely. I mean the the challenging thing is that visual merchandising as a function has been a very creative role for so long. So it's not often that you'll find visual merchandisers that are naturally data driven or understand how to read a spreadsheet or data to make decisions. What we are finding is that we are able to take the work that the visual merchandisers are doing feed that through to people in the organization who are more data driven to then use that information to make their own decisions. So we're finding it's much more collaborative. We're finding that we are enabling more collaboration between functions of retail and slowly visual merchandisers are getting to the point where they are able to look at the data and use that data to make decisions. >> So I want to kind of liken the inside of a store as if it's a website. It's kind of like for me like how I look at it. It's like we understand and know if we have 1500 SKs if we put X skew on the first line of the first page we're going to sell more. So let's you know like walk through almost like a use case. So someone is launching someone. What is kind of that feedback loop between okay, we're launching this red shirt, it's going on the front of the store on January 1st and then what with flagship AI? >> Yeah, I really like that kind of analogy or similarity that you've created is how I look at everything that we do. Kind of looking back from an ecom perspective, you've got a very clear funnel. You've got someone who clicks through to a homepage, they click through to a collection, they click to a product, they add to cart, they check out. You've got a very clear funnel. Brick and mortar has not had a funnel really at all. You might have traffic counters to know traffic into a store and if you're really sophisticated, you might know traffic into different parts of the store, but the vast majority of brands are very high level. And everything I do is tied back to ecom. And so I'll ask myself, what is the brickandmortar equivalent of ecom? And if I was doing or making a decision from an ecom perspective, what would I do? So my front window of my retail store for me is the equivalent of an ad that I'm running on Meta or Tik Tok. What is the purpose of that? To get traffic. How do I know if it's performing well or not? If I'm starting to see a dip in conversion. So the performance of a window or the window the role of the window is to bring people into the store. And once it's no longer pulling people into the store, I know it's not doing its job. The homepage is the first impression that you get when someone walks into your store. So when someone walks into your store, the first thing you see is the equivalent of someone visiting your homepage. The purpose of that is to bring them in deeper, peak their interest, and keep their keep their attention for longer. And so all of these things, it's like what what is the value that we should be should be deriving. The homepage is really critical real estate. Our front table is really critical real estate. Is it performing? Yes, great. If it's not, okay, we need to go and and shift. So it's almost like in the front it's like almost like a lead magnet where you could again to keep liking it to ecom. This is why I found it like so interesting is you probably want to look at holistically you know what is your revenue. Maybe you're not selling the stuff in the front but you can look week over week with putting the red shirt in the front versus the green short where holistically getting more foot traffic deep into the store and more revenue. And you know you could just be using stuff almost like a loss leader in ecom to just get people into the store and drive revenue >> 100%. I mean, if you're looking at your homepage of an ecom site and you've got 20 products and or 19 of are selling and one's not, then you're not going to leave that product on your homepage. Or if you're running a digital campaign and you're spending 10 you spent $10,000 on this creative and it brought no one to your website, you're not going to keep running that creative. Yet in retail, you'll have the exact same window or the same mannequin or the front table whether or not it is performing. And it's about understanding what the value of the real estate is and understanding how every minute component of that real estate is performing because you could have a front table and that front table could at a macro level level be performing well but could it be performing better? Do you have a pair of leggings on that front table which isn't selling when every other pair, every other product on that table is selling and now you've just got a pair of leggings taking up prime real estate that's not performing and that's the opportunity cost of not switching that out for something that is performing that might drive more revenue to the store. >> I want to talk about flagship and then now and then we're going to talk broader into the future. So is it in real time? What is that feedback loop like? what is the technology and the flagship team? How do they communicate with the retailer? And then how does who is that point of contact in store? How are they talking to, you know, to corporate? What is that kind of feedback loop? >> Yeah. So, a a big component of flagship was creating the data layer in the first place. If you don't have the data layer, you can't make any data decisions because you don't know if what you're doing is working. Fortunately for us, the workflow is the creation of the data for us and the component that allows future decisions to be made. And so in this journey of creating the data layer, what I learned and realized was that it doesn't matter if you're creating the world's best data set. It doesn't matter if you're giving the world's best insights if you don't give the retailer a way to do something with that data. It doesn't matter if you know for every single store what should be on the mannequin of every single store if you don't have a way to communicate to all the stores what to do with the feedback loop that they have done what they do. And so for us the data component is really important but the workflow component is equally as important. And so essentially the way the the platform has been built is this vision or the decisions around product placement is created within flagship that's sent through to the stores. The store teams and the store managers will be responsible for executing on the instructions that are sent through to them. They will take a photo and attach it back to the platform. So it it creates compliance, it creates the accountability and then someone I mean we've we've just built or just launched AI photo review. So when the photo comes back and can be automatically reviewed and given been gi given feedback on but it's that component that closes the loop in terms of communicating to the stores and getting the feedback back from the stores. But that process then tells us okay we told you to put these 10 products on the front table through the photo coming back. we now know you've done it and now that tells us that we can now start tracking the insights because we know that you've done what we ask you to do >> and even if like let's just say you have like excess inventory would you guys give like proactive advice to say hey you're sitting on this it's doing well on ecom move it to the front >> that's definitely the view the the long-term view is when you're building a digital campaign you're telling Facebook or Google or Tik Tok what you're trying to optimize for you trying to optimize for reach are you trying to optimize for impressions or clickthrough or rorowass. And the long-term view is being able to set that same goal for a store to be able to know, are we going into holiday and we want to optimize for margin? Are we going into sale and we optimize for stock depth? Also being able to account for things like broken size curves or stockouts because if you've got a dress on a mannequin, but that is the last dress available in the store on the mannequin, that mannequin's no longer doing its job. And as consumers, the number there's so many consistent experiences that we have as consumers that I'm looking to solve for. Walking into a store and what's on the mannequin is the last one available and it's not your size or going into a store, trying something on, not being ready to purchase right there and then. Going home to try and buy it online and you can't find it online. There are so many of these different inefficient consumer experiences that we experience dayto-day and that's what we're looking to solve for. However and wherever and whenever a customer wants to shop, we want to make sure that they can find what they're looking for and complete the purchase. >> When a retailer comes on to flagship, like what is that aha moment when they're like, "Wow, this this works." Because for me, like when you told me the idea, I was like, "This is blatantly obvious." And you could tell the audience andor we can they can look online like you guys don't charge a crazy amount of money for this. And if you're doing this at scale for me, like you gave a bunch of use cases already, like this is obvious to me. So what is that aha moment for someone that onramps on the flagship? >> Yeah, the the aha moment is our money map. The ability to click into a store and see a heat map of a floor plan with dollars that are coming out of the store. Wow. Being able to see the the revenue that is coming from an individual table within a store or an individual shelf. It's a level of granularity that's never been available to retail before. And then being able to see that at a bird's eye view across every single store to be able to see what's working, what's not working. And again, something could be working in 80% of the stores, but in 20% of the stores, we need to go and fix it. And being able to know what's working, what's working is fine, but it's what's not working where the opportunities to improve. with our brands. One of the brands we're we're working with, if we can drive a slight incremental benefit in performance just to mannequins. So, if we don't focus on any other part of the store, we just focus on mannequins and make sure that mannequins are styled with products that are in stock. >> Wow. >> If we just did that, we drive 10 $10 million incremental revenue for the brand. And that is literally just mannequins baseline. That's basically like one extra sale on a mannequin a month. just under the notion that the mannequin is prime real estate. People could have it but up but not in stock and then they're just they're wasting the best sales asset with something that they can't sell. >> Exactly. I mean, the purpose of a mannequin is to drive performance of what's on the mannequin. And if what's on the mannequin is no longer in stock, it can no longer it can no longer perform. And the quickest indicator for us that a mannequin's out of stock is that we'll see a rapid drop drop in performance for the mannequin because it simply can no it it's not even possible for it to perform because there's no longer stock available. and we'll see week on week this mannequin has dropped by 90%. Okay, we jump in. It's 99 times out of 100 it's due to stock and now we'll go and change it out with something else. This is an undefeated idea. It's absolutely crazy. And then I mean it's almost also like when you look at a store as like a heat map. It's like you're a waiter and you want to be waiting certain areas of the restaurant where you know like the best customers come. Like you also kind of can evaluate maybe employees on the floor understanding and knowing like their area sells the most product. >> Absolutely. I mean the number of times we'll see that brands have completely miserchandised their store. Imagine if in a restaurant you've got a a table by the window with the best view and you don't realize that that table is where most customers are spending their dollars and you keep putting your lowest valuable customer on that table. It wouldn't make sense >> and or the lowest valuable waiter to then service that table. >> Exactly. And now think about if you have a a table that drives the vast majority of your revenue within your store and you have it merchandise with products that don't perform. Or on the flip side, you have products that will perform really well in a part of a store that traditionally doesn't perform well and now you've given up prime product to subprime real estate. And that's really what it is. It's marrying up prime product to prime real estate to maximize performance. And you guys now with all the clients that you have, I mean, you're probably seeing macro trends across all of these that you can just kind of cross-pollinate and share these learnings and just optimize all the source. >> Absolutely. I mean, a really simple example and it sounds intuitive. It sounds logical when you hear it, but until you have the data, it doesn't always it's not always clear. And the data point was that folded product above eyline wasn't selling. And when you hear that, it makes sense. Like if I'm a consumer and I walk in and you see a fold of product and it's above eyline, I'm not going to a I can't see what that is. B I'm not going to rumage through to find my size and risk the whole pile falling over and having to fix it up and therefore it just gets left untouched. And so being able to know, okay, well, we're going to change out that pile and that should be a front hung product so that the customer can see it and if they want it, it's more accessible. And so it's examples like that and being able to understand that not only at a macro level but at an individual store, individual region. Being able to understand how does a customer in Texas respond versus a customer in New York. And I mean I've been in the country for 12 months now. If there's one thing I've learned about this country is that there are so many different types of people in this country. And if we try and operate the exact same way in a store in that's in the Midwest to the east coast, it's just not going to work because it's a completely different consumer profile that we're not tapping into. >> What is some I'm just very very curious from someone coming from Australia. You've been here for a year. What are some of like those macro trends and how people shop differently? I would say that the biggest difference between Australia and the US is I don't know like for lack of a better word it's the it's the understatedness that we have in Australia. So for people that aren't aware in Australia we've got really bad tall poppy syndrome. So when that >> so if someone is overly successful or overtly successful or too put themselves on puts themselves on a pedestal too much we as a society will pull them down and basically say we want everyone on an even playing field. And so what that means is that most consumer behaviors in Australia is very understated. It's understated luxury. It's not overtly showy. Sounds like the exact opposite of here. >> Yeah. And so here people are happy to show that they and they want to show that they've bought a luxury item. They want to show that they're driving a nice car. There there's a lot of association between status, wealth, and how you dress and what you drive that we just don't have as much of in in Australia. Obviously, we do in little pockets, but I would say for for the most part, Australians will be happy to wear something that comes from a luxury brand that is more minimalistic to the point where not everyone knows that it's a luxury brand, if that makes sense. And I would say and I mean beyond that it's it's just the size the sheer size of the market and population that exists here to the point where these stores can just pump huge amounts of dollars through them. I mean I was speaking to one brand that said one of their one of their slower stores was doing $2 million a year and like for an Aussie brand if they were two $2 million a year they'd be ecstatic. And so there's a very big difference there. as Simon wears his understated beautiful fit with no logos. I I quite frank I need to go to Australia. It sounds like a place that I would like better than this place. Quite frankly, >> I highly recommend if anyone listening that hasn't gone to Australia, I highly recommend going and checking out. >> I got to hit that one soon. What is your boldest prediction about where Flagship will be in the next, let's say, 3 years, 5 years? >> It's a really great question. The the goal for me is to be the central operating system for brick and mortar. for any decision that's being made in store across any vertical whether it's marketing, buying, planning, it doesn't matter who it is, I want part of that touch point to exist within flagship to drive a decision because every decision that can be made in retail, there's going to be a data point that we will be capturing that is going to benefit that from a marketing team perspective around what to feature in an email or on a homepage. from a a buyer perspective to know what units we should be investing more into and where it should be placed in a store. That's that is kind of one one direction and then the other is starting to create more hybrid opportunities between the online and offline world. So right now you've got I mean omni channel has been such a buzzword for so long but so much of omni channel exists from the point of the transaction onwards and so much of unified retail exists before the transaction ever occurs but right now you'll have >> explain to me what that means. >> So if you're right now omni retail is about being able to buy online and return in store. >> We know from an ecom perspective how much the funnel exists before the transaction happens. >> Oh yeah. And so if we're only looking at the point of transaction onwards, we miss 80% of the funnel. And so for me, it's about how do we create more of the funnel or more opportunities or crossover between the channels before the transaction happens. Retail at the moment, you'll have separate teams for your brick and mortar teams versus your ecom teams. In some cases, it's a separate entity. In a lot of cases, competing KPIs. And we need to move to a world where it's one vision. It's one brand. It's not a channel. It's just a brand. And what we are doing through the creation and the capturing of this data layer means that we can take that data and we can plug it into the digital world to start to have both channels reflective of each other. So if you walk into a store, you've browseed online, you know what you're looking for, you walk into store, it's going to be the first thing you see when you walk into the store. You go in store, you try something on, you're not ready to purchase, you go online, it's going to be the first product you see when you go online. >> Oh wow. Instead of having to fight your way through racks in a store or through collections on an ecom site to find what you're looking for and eventually give up, it's going to be the first thing that's served to you on the website. It's going to be served to you in in an ad. It's going to be sent to you in an email. So more of what exists in store will be reflective online and vice versa. >> So it's I just feel like it's like more multi-touch attribution and it's almost like what you're saying right there. You're like pixeling someone in store to then retarget them back online if they're first in store. Correct. >> Yeah. I would say the focus is less on the person, more on the item. So, it's more if you walk into a store, what are you most likely going to see and try and want to purchase? And therefore, by laws of probability, let's provide that experience to as many people online. The reason why I'm focused on the item and not the person is because everyone is so hyper aware of their their privacy these days. And it is an environment that is constantly changing. There are new laws coming out left, right, and center across the world. And if we try and go too heavily on the consumer, there's a world where that could just blow up. But an item doesn't have privacy. So if we focus on the item first, >> so it's like white labelled. It's just the holistic numbers and you're just grouping it together. >> Exactly. In a perfect world. >> Sounds safer. in in the in the in the long run I do see a world where where by like through consent by adding value to the consumer there's a world where you can start to create a more tailored omni or unified experience to the consumer but I would say that's probably like if you're saying 3 years that's probably 5 to 10 years away >> question for you so it seems as though you are utilizing the online data to then drive inperson and brickandmortar decisions are they always when you go from digital to instore is it going to land on the same answers as if you went in store to online because I'm also under the notion too that like some products need to be tried on. Like what's your thesis on that? >> It's a really great point. It's not always going to be like for like it's not always going to be what's performing online is going to be performing in store. And to your point, there are certain products that lend themselves to being a being able to be purchased online and certain products that lend themselves to needing to be tried on. And these are all the edge cases that I believe that we can account for. That is an interesting use case though is like if you have a product that tries on very well and is super comfortable, that could be the first touch point that you want people to get them into your funnel through your store. >> 100%. The benefit that you have from ecom is you're capturing data 24/7. You're capturing insights 24/7. There is a world where the store is closed. It's 10:00 at night. At 10 o'clock at night, you've got some influencer on Tik Tok that's posted a video with this dress from this one brand and then consumers hit that website and there's a spike in traffic to this product. Now, that is a leading indicator that there is likely going to be an increased rate of people coming in to try it on the next day. That's not guaranteed. It's not guaranteed that's going to be the case in every store, but there is a good chance based on the ecom trend that people are going to be coming in to try it on. What happens over and over again is because of that disconnect, the customer will come in, they can't find it. Maybe it's not on the floor, maybe it's on the back shelf that no one can find. And the thing for me is that you've got, let's just say for argument sake, I know the numbers aren't quite quite this, but let's say for argument sake, you have half the world's population are extroverted and half the world's population are introverted. So half the population are going to come in and happy to walk up to someone and ask for help to find what they're looking for. Great. It doesn't matter maybe where that product is because someone's going to be able to help them. And let's say half the population want to come in. They don't want to speak to one. They just want to find what they're looking for and purchase it. If that consumer can't find what they're looking for, you just lost the customer. And right now, we don't provide an experience that lends itself to people of all different ways of shopping. >> That's so wild. I mean, in real time, the red shirt goes viral. Flagship is speaking to that department immediately pushes it to the front of the stores. >> Exactly. That's the view. And the flip side can happen on happen online as well. Like we see we see a spike in in sales for for this product then we can start to promote it online as well. And the number of times again I'm not going to name brands but for one of our customers every month or so I'll order their homepage. And on average 80% of the products that exist on their homepage are not available in store if you go to shop. And that homepage is again is prime real estate. By law of probability, customers are more likely to find it. By law of probability, more customers are going to come in to try it on. And those customers that come in come into the store are not going to be able to find it. And that's a customer that is using flagship that has the visibility. Now, think about the vast majority or tens of thousands of stores that exist out there that don't have that visibility at all and have no idea based on what's on their homepage where it's in the store or or if it in fact is even in the store at all. Do you think in the future more brands are just going to have flagship stores? >> The view for me is that retailers are just going to be able to treat every store like a flagship store. Some of the brands that we're working with, they've built business cases around being able to prevent stores from being closed. They had stores that were on the chopping block and by being able to understand the data, they were able to know, okay, this store was wasn't underperforming because it's not a good store in a bad location. It was underperforming because the products weren't in the right place. it wasn't merchandised well and we were able to rebound sales as a result and we were able to keep the store and I was speaking again I I apologize for not using any brand names I just prefer to but I was speaking to a major global brand like major major brand and when I was speaking to them about flagship the line that they said was that flagship makes every store matter and that fundamentally is the case it's not about like yes you're going to have stores that are naturally going to be bigger and showier and going to drive a lot more revenue but it's about making sure that every store matters, that every store is a flagship store and every store is given the best chance to succeed >> through objective data. >> Exactly. >> Not subjectiveness. >> PE people can lie. Data doesn't. >> All right. So, we're going to we're going to shift on. I definitely do. We're going to go at the end of this and we're going to go back to Flesh, but I want to transition a bit. So, you were a big part of Afterpay, a $29 billion rocket ship. Your brother found that I became a billionaire by 30 and you were there the whole entire way. What's the one thing about Afterpay's $29 billion rise that the internet doesn't know? That the internet doesn't know. Guys, quick 60C break. I am so excited to announce our first partnership. It is the perfect fit for me and what I believe in and more importantly you, the audience. I have personally spent tens of millions of dollars on meta ads. At one point, it made up 95% of my entire marketing budget. That kind of platform dependency is a real risk. One algorithm shift and your whole entire business can stall. This is why I partnered with Universal Ads, the CTV ad platform powered by the biggest names in TV built for any size business. In under 5 minutes, you can advertise across the best shows on NBC, Paramount, Roku, and more. You can reach up to 90% of the households in the US at social media CPMs. And the platform gives you full control. You can target by viewership, behavior, income, geography, custom audiences, and more. Just like you guys are used to seeing on social, I'm giving out $500 in ad credits with my referral code to the first 50 people who fill out the form below. First come, first serve. It's going to go fast. And if you're spending over 300K a month on paid, I have something special for you. Everything's in the description below. Go diversify now. And appreciate the support. >> The thing that the internet doesn't know is that, again, I hope I don't get in trouble for this. thing that that doesn't know is that Afterpay wasn't necessarily built on the premise exclusively of paying for. There were two products. One product was paying for, the other product was pay after delivery where you would order something. And the re the rationale for it was so Nick and I were running our jewelry site together. And we were trying to sell a $5,000 engagement ring site unseen. Like you're trying to purchase it from an image or a video. you've never actually held and you're about to spend $5,000. Giving them the confidence that they can see it and hold it before any money gets taken out of their account. And then the mindset was we'll send it to you and then if you keep it 30 days later you'll pay for it in full. And that was the thesis that Afterpay was was initially built on. And it's why it's called Afterpay. Like you pay pay after delivery. And I like the ICE our ecom site was the first the first website to offer Afterpay. No one used paying for sorry no one used pay after delivery. Everyone used pain for and yeah like Nick and Nathan just had the foresight to know okay there's a much bigger opportunity in paying for and they just shifted their attention very very quickly again like transparently it was it was almost immediate that the focus shifted to paying for but there was a lens of pay after delivery before that shift to paying for. >> So the genesis was through this family jewelry business that you were running with your brother. It was that and then they went on started after buy >> basically. What do you think is the most kind of underrated part of Afterpay's success story that like no one talks about? >> The people like fundamentally wholeheartedly that company hired so well. Every I remember watching like person after person join the company and every single person that joined was better than the last and it just blew my mind. And that continued up until 100 plus people where every single person that joined just significantly added value to the company. And any idea is just an idea. It only will perform as well as the people that execute on it. And Nick and Anthony did a phenomenal job at building a a world-class team. And that's the mindset I've taken over to Flagship. It's doesn't matter how good idea our idea is, we need a world-class team in order to execute on this. >> It's funny you say that because one of your team members said quote unquote, he has created an environment where everyone works really hard but with a sense of team. No one has Sunday anxiety about work. So obviously you learned a lot from Afterpay. You've brought it to flagship. So what's the secret to building a great team? >> I would say the secret is build around the team. I there was a post that I saw once and it said or it said culture isn't about pizza parties with your team. It's about how your team feels on a Sunday night. And I don't believe that you can define culture and decide that that is the company culture. I think you build your team and culture naturally forms itself around the team. And I believe in everyone being able to bring their true self to to work. It's not about having to come and hide who you are or hide a part of you. It's about being able to come in, be yourself, and have everyone accept you for you. And in our interview process, for anyone that joins, the last interview is always with me. And it's not an interview to decide whether they're going to join or not. Because by the time they're having an interview with me, the decision has been made that we want them to join. And what I say in that interview is that I need to understand you to make sure that we have the environment that is going to bring the best out of you. And it's about us understanding what drives and motivates every single person in the organization. Be able to know what they want to do, where they want to go, what they want to achieve, and building a framework that allows everyone to get there. And that for me is what builds higher achievement. It's giving everyone the the tools to get to where they want to get to, giving them room to grow to where they want to get to, and identifying potential. And I think that's that's key in life across the board. It's it's finding potential in people, finding potential in things, finding potential in relationships. And if you see that potential, you invest into it because you'll get such a big return on investment. >> How are you getting all these 18 players for flagship when I mean, it's a it's a startup. Yeah. >> What's the strategy there? Good comp packages? >> No, I I mean, when we started, we we didn't have the luxury of good comp packages. I was fortunate I was able to bring a handful of the early Afterpay people along on the journey. I knew a lot of the really great Afterpay star players. I couldn't afford them. And so, I brought in a lot of them around the company, not in the company. They came in as advisers. They came in as resources for the team to lean into. >> Smart. But I would say the way that we got world class. So I was very fortunate like again I I was speaking earlier about you walk along Bondi Beach and every couple of minutes I'm going to see someone that I know. I was walking along Bondi and someone that I knew he was a software engineer at Canva in Australia. He he he hailed me down. I walked past him. We had a chat and he was like I'm ready. I'm I'm ready for my next opportunity. And I was like, "Okay, well this there's this idea that I want to go and I'm I'm working on. Why don't you come and help me out with it?" And so he he was like, "Great, sounds good." He then brought two of his mates who were phenomenal. One of them brought another guy who was phenomenal. I then knew a couple people who I'd worked with before who are phenomenal. And we and I would say worldclass people are great at identifying world-class people and will know if they've worked with world-class people. We recently hired an account manager and I went to someone in the team and I was like, "Hey, who like you? I I trust your opinion more than anyone. Who's the best account manager you've worked with?" And she's like, "I've got the person. Great. We went after that person. We brought her in." It's about identifying the the talent. If if there's an opportunity, you identify the talent and you go after them. And I'm also a believer in for certain roles or for certain people if it's not a hard skilled role where like a software engineer where you need to be good at writing code. If it's a soft skilled role my mindset is bring the person in. If you got the right person bring them in and build the role around that person. If you >> people over skill set >> 100 like a million%. I've had the opportunity to bring some people in who at the time was maybe too early for when we brought them in, but I knew I'd worked with them before. I knew what their potential was and so I brought them in too early knowing that as soon as it was ready, we were going to see the results. And that's been proven time and time again. I've always said I don't I never want to miss out on the wrong person because of timing. If it's six months, if it's six months too early, >> I would rather invest the extra six months in salary and get that person because if they go somewhere else, you're minimum what 2 to 3 years away from being able to get them again. And so you have an opportunity if you have an opportunity to get world-class talent, you take them with both hands and then once you bring them in and you know that they are world class, then that's when you comp them really well and you make sure they have no reason to leave. And I would say that was like Nick's greatest mindset across both ICE and Afterpay was like make it a no-brainer. Give give customers no reason not to use us and merchants no reason to say no. And it's my mindset with my team. It's like I'm going to give my my team no reason to want to go anywhere else. Make it a no-brainer for them to want to stay and see this through. And that creates the culture of high performance. creates the foundation that everyone else that comes in is going to lean on because ultimately like I can work hard, but I'm expected to work hard. Like it's it's my company. I'm expected to work hard. If I'm working 12-hour days every day, great. That's expected of me. It's not expected of my team. And when they put in the hard yards, that's what flows onto everyone else in the team to want to continue to work hard. And the moment someone comes in that doesn't share that mindset, that's when we need to make a decision really quickly because nothing impacts high performance faster than accepting someone who's not of the same mindset. The moment you ex accept mediocrity is the moment that everyone identifies that that's where the benchmark is and people will bring themselves down to the benchmark as opposed to lifting themselves up to the benchmark. And so that's that's the mindset. We've got a core team who set the pace and everyone in the team it works towards hitting that pace. >> Simon's fresh off 32 hours of flying for one meeting in here. So, he's definitely putting in the time. If you could boil down all A players to kind of one singular trait, what would that trait be? >> No ego. Yeah. Every person in my team comes with humility. There was there was a quote I heard once from a professional rugby player in Australia and he said, "Humble on the outside, cocky on the inside." Like knowing internally that you're the best, but not putting that out to the world and remaining to the world that like that you're humble and you've got humility. The thing about carrying no ego is it gives you opportunity to grow. It gives you opportunity to see things from someone else's perspective. It gives you an opportunity to identify opportunity because you're never going to be tied to your own self-belief and that I believe is a really key trait across my entire team. Everyone will celebrate each other. Everyone will like my my whole mindset has always been I will take I will take a personal hit if it's for the greater good every single time. And I would say that that's kind of a trait that everyone in the team shares. What's what would you say is like the most difficult lesson that you've learned in relation to people along the way with flagship? I know you guys are at what 17 18 people. >> Yeah. >> You guys are 3 four years in. What's the most difficult lesson that you've learned? >> I'll say the most difficult lesson is that you can hire incredible people. Not everyone will fit. There have been people that wholeheartedly like with every ounce of my body, I've loved them as people. It just didn't work. And I would say those were some of the hardest conversations I had to have. >> Those are the worst. >> Yeah. But I also believe that like there was a quote from Albert Einstein ages ago which said, "Everyone's a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb trees, it will spend it life thinking it's stupid." And >> it's about understanding that not everyone is going to fit into this role. And it might be a nature of the time that we where we are in the company. It might be a nature of the fact that we bring someone in and we just don't have the resources to train them at that point in time and they need that personal development. It might be someone who fits more in the corporate world than the startup world and we just don't have that environment that works for them. And so you can find the right person like right person wrong time. And I'll say that's kind of the the biggest learning is that you can find someone and think and for all intents and purposes for in another scenario they would be and are great. It's just in this very specific scenario, it doesn't work. >> Yeah. I feel like you need right person, right seat, right time. >> Absolutely. >> That's from EOS. That's a huge thing. It's usually right person, right seat. But I think timing as well. And it's just it's always so difficult, you know, the team that you take. I would say >> I would even say at 5 mil like 0 to five and then like even five to like these are two completely different people >> on all levels of the company especially from sea level. So it's unfortunate when people don't make it for the next tier. >> Yeah. I mean the mindset that I have and I've had this mindset the whole way through is English football. You got four tiers of English football and when we started and we were preede we're in the fourth division and then we raise our next round and we get promoted to to third division. Now you can have people that were great at getting you from the fourth division to the third division but that's not the same person that's going to get you from the third division to the second division. There will be people that are able to step up and you need to identify those people and elevate them really quickly. But every single type of person that's going to get you to that next stage. I have been really fortunate that my initial core nucleus of a team have all been able to take a step up and get us like they got us to the third division. I believe they're all going to be able to get us to the third second to win a premiership, but that's not always going to be the case. So around kind of building a like a tech or a SAS company, I think a lot of people that are listening are more so product people. Obviously it tech and SAS can be considered a product as well, but it's a little bit differently. Like what are those important key hires in relation to tech and SAS? >> I believe the most important hire is a good product manager. And I didn't know that when I started flagship. I've learned that since then. >> I have no idea what a product manager does. So I am very very excited. Go on. So a product manager is the person who is responsible for taking the inputs of a whole lot of different people. Responsible for taking the inputs from customers, from customer success, from sales, from investors, from >> from you and a non-technical founder potentially. >> Yeah. From me, from engineers as well to be able to know what they actually have capacity for. This role or this person is responsible for taking a lot of different pieces of information and opinions and decide what is the highest priority today based on the bandwidth and resourcing we have so that nothing critical falls by the wayside. We keep everyone happy and we minimize the risk of of losing a customer or not getting a deal. And what I originally thought building a company was being a founder, I'm the ideas guy and I make all these decisions. And what I learned was I'm just another input. And I would say for a lot of founders out there, it's the best approach to take. I'll go to my my product manager and say, "Hey, I've got this thought. I've got this hypothesis. It's kind of like Schroinger's cat. Like every idea that I have is simultaneously a good idea or a idea until it's proven either way. It's like, hey, I've got this thought. I want to go and I want to go and explore it. I want to go and speak to customers and and explore whether it works or not. And then he and I will go together and we'll and we'll explore." And some things fall flat in their face, some things work. >> I mean, this seems incredibly important. It's like a resource allocator and they're also almost doing like workback schedules. Correct. >> Yeah. Like I kind of see it as like central to the business. >> Is this a sea level position or is this like a a mid >> So we like our our product manager, we we like very early on I was of the mindset that I want everyone on an equal playing field. Like there's no seniority or hierarchy. >> Love that. um once you get to a certain point, you no longer have that luxury. You need to create one. And he he is sea level. And again, like you might I was very lucky that the guy that I found was capable of stepping up into a sea level position. Not everyone's going to be able to do that, but I was fortunate that like our first product hire was was able to do that. >> So you're saying the most important thing is just really understanding and knowing who that persona is. Like what is their raw skill set? Are they analytics driven? Like they're managing budget yet they seem to have to be organized and then like they're also dealing with like people and personalities. Like tell me a little bit more about like who that person is. I'm curious. >> Yeah, I would say there's two key characteristics. Number one is the ability to listen and the ability to listen without opinion. Like the ability to listen to what someone says and understand how to guide a conversation to get to the root cause or problem of the conversation. not to come in with a preconceived idea. And I would say the second, which is really key, is someone who's able to keep a blue or keep a cool head. You can have people that are going to come in and kick and scream and say, or customers might come in and demand a certain feature or demand something. And it's about being able to to remain cool in that situation and not just give in immediately because if you give in to what they're asking for, you might not be addressing the root cause of the problem. You might be wasting energy and resourcing. I was also taught very early on that if you build a feature or you build a module and it's only used by one customer, it's so detrimental for you as a business because it means you're going to be upkeeping that module potentially for one person. And so every feature or every new module that we look at building, we validate it across as many retailers as possible. And it might not be used by every single retailer, but we want to make sure it's going to be used by enough retailers that if we're going to be spending the time upkeeping it, that there's going to be a return on investment on it. So, this person has invisibility into the P&L. >> Yeah. Like visibility into into like everything. I mean, I trust him with my life. >> Wow. Something that I did recently, I've never done it before, and I thought my assistant in her past company that did it, I thought it was kind of psychotic in nature, but we just did it and it was gamechanging is a lot of these personality tests, which kind of you're talking a lot about like soft skills and understanding and knowing, you know, there's hard skills and there's soft skills. It was called I'll link it below in the description. It was called Working Genius. very simple. It's a $25 test and just understanding and knowing not only individually does each person do do you cover all the things you need to cover, but then how do people work together? Yeah. >> I think that's like such a understated thing that people don't take these like personality tests like what you're saying right now. Like >> it's actually the complete antithesis of flagship. It's like 100% subjective. Like how do you know someone has those skills? It's pretty damn hard. >> It is. I would say so one thing my brother told me pretty early on was know what your superpower is and lean into it. And I would say one of my superpowers is people. Like I can have a convers. It's people and data and pattern recognition. So yes, it could be subjective, but I can speak to enough people and pick up the consistent traits across enough people to know what it is that I'm looking for. But what we do at flagship is every single person that joins the team does their Gallup StrengthFinder test. It's an assessment maybe takes half an hour, 45 minutes. And what it does is it gives us 34 strengths, strength 1 to 34. That to your point tells us a lot about that person. And there's no right or wrong combination of strengths. What it does is it tells us do people lean more towards thinking or to doing or to relationships or do they influence? And it helps us a understand how to interact with each other. Every single person that does it, I'll read the results and it's now at the point where someone I can get someone results and I can know a lot about that person before they've started on day one. >> Isn't it wild too how accurate they are? >> So it's crazy. >> It's insane. >> Incredible. I we've got a blended spreadsheet that everyone in the company has access to that shows mine and every single person's strength. Love that. We can see where people are strong. We can see who an includer is and who is going to lend themselves more towards new starters. They might not be in the same team, but this person is going to make sure this person's well looked after. Who are my executors? So, one of the I work really well with my my head of customer success. I am a lot of thinking, not a lot of doing. She's all execution. And so I know that I can go to her with these ideas that I have or these things I know need to be done and she's going to be able to go and execute on them. And it's being able to understand in each team where are we strong? Where do we lack as a company? Our first four or five hires we lacked focus. And so I'm like okay we need someone with focus who can keep us heading in the right direction. And our product manager brought us focus. And so it's being able to know where your blind spots and not all blind spots are bad. It's not about bringing people in to not bringing people in for the sake of it. It's like what is the purpose behind this role? What is the skill set that we are lacking or what is the gap that they're covering by coming in? >> I think I didn't even know that we were really going to go here. I actually think this is like one of the most valuable segments we've ever had. I just did this working genius thing and it was it was you know yours is 34. The Gallup test. I've heard of that one. I've heard of the Harrison test as well too. That's another big one. This is six working genius. For everybody here listening. I think what's really interesting about this is per Robert Green in the last episode, people don't change. Yeah. >> So that's what's really really good about this. So you can have this input and chat GBT is crazy with this. We got the individual reports and then the working genius gave us a collective kind of analysis on strengths, weaknesses, holes, etc. But then you then put that into chat GBT and you say this is my company. This is our one-year plan. This is our 5year plan. then you can start filling gaps for per what you said when you get to division two and division one. So, I can't say this. I I feel like not many people do these personality tests and I think that they're so underrated. >> Absolutely. The the >> because you can't lie with these tests. Oh, >> 100%. And even if you try to like it exactly >> everybody out there, I'm going to link down below. Let's take some of these tests and fill those gaps. I want to close up on leadership. I know we talked about a bunch of different strengths, weaknesses, tips, but if you can give founders one leadership tip, what would it be? >> Yeah. My number one thing is never ask someone to do something that you yourself are not prepared to do. When I had my ecom business, every single person that joined the company spent their first couple of weeks in the warehouse. And the reason for that is that everyone at the company needs to know what is involved in shipping out orders. Everyone needs to involve needs to know what's involved in warehousing. They need to know how easy it is to make a mistake when you're shipping our product so that when someone in the warehouse makes a mistake, they understand how it happened and so that they can develop the awareness and the empathy towards that person. When we in the very very early stages of flagship, we had a hardware product and when we had that hardware product, there were times that we had to spend in the store like on our hands and knees putting stickers onto products and >> I like the software play better. >> Me too. And I was in there with my team. It's like I'm not going to I'm not going to get my team to do anything that I'm not going to do. If we're in the trenches, I'm in the trenches with them. If we're digging deep and staying late, I'm going to dig deep and stay late with them. It's you you lead by example. And I'd say that's across the board. It's like just in life in general. Like if you're going to ask something of someone, know what's involved and show that you're prepared to to do it yourself or put the effort in yourself so that they know that you understand what you're asking of them. For all the people out there listening to, especially on the ecom side, I don't even I actually don't think I've I've mentioned any of the podcasts. One of the most humbling best I would say two things. one doing door-to-d dooror sales for a year was crazy in inland empire Beverly Hills in the hood that taught me a lot but one of the most humbling best exciting experiences and I'm I'm a weirdo is shop iconic atgmail.com for my company iconic I was customer service the first probably 4,000 orders so I found every single nook and every the single thing that every single person could ever ask and then that just further informed hiring and how the business would be run I think at the warehouse is one thing. Obviously, you're very very close to the product and the customer. Customer service for me. You know, if somebody has a fast growing company and maybe they can't afford to, you know, go slow and have people start in the warehouse, I think customer service is the best spot that even for like a week to see what the customer pain points are and such. >> 100%. And I mean on the flip side to getting people start in the warehouse when there was a major mistake that was made, we would have the person in the warehouse be the one to contact the customer and have that conversation. And it wasn't again it wasn't for the for the purpose of it wasn't for the purpose of like shaming or anything like that. It was for the purpose of building and developing empathy. It's like we you need to know what the impact is of I mean I I will never I will never get upset or angry at someone over a mistake like categorically it's like but we don't want we want to make sure that mistakes don't keep happening and we want people to be aware of the impact of mistakes so that they know if they are going to make one what the ramifications are and we were always really good at ICE of rectifying poor customer experiences if something went wrong so I it wasn't about sending someone in front of the customer to send to the wolves to to be eaten. It was about helping them and giving them the tools to be able to rectify the problem with the customer, but helping them understand what the impact was of those mistakes. >> I would imagine it was a blood bath in the jewelry business on on customer service. I looking back, what was the biggest kind of customer service lesson that you learned in the jewelry business? >> We we were just so focused on giving great customer service. One of the things that I learned was that every poor customer experience is a huge opportunity for you. And the reason for that is that if you think from like an NPS perspective, so NPS NPS scale minus 100 to 100. Now if you have a customer and they have a great experience straight away, their experience has gone from 0 to 100. Their experience with you has increased by 100 points. If a customer has had a terrible experience with you and they're now at minus 100, if you are able to fix that experience and take it from minus 100 to positive 100, their experience has increased by 200 points, they have arguably had a better experience by having that initial bad experience than the customer did who had the bad experience up front. And so every time we get a one-star review, >> I love I love those, baby. >> Literally, I'm going in the gutter on those. I love those. I'm on the phone, I'm in the car, I'm like whatever it is I need to do in order to rectify this issue, I'm going to rectify because that also builds trust. Trust is built in the times when things go wrong, not by things going right. And that is the time when I built trust with my customers to show them things are going to things are going to go wrong, things products are going to be missed, things are going to go to the wrong address, whatever it is. But I'm going to show you that when things go wrong, I'm going to make sure they go right. And that's what builds trust. That that's what builds repeat purchase behavior. And that's what so many brands miss today across so many different verticals. I'll order from Uber Eats and if something goes wrong, they will fight tooth and nail not to not to rectify the problem. And I'm like, great, I'm going to >> we're throwing Uber Eats under the bus. >> I know. Um >> I'm a Door Dash guy >> and I'm Door Dash on the on the back of it. And that was the that was the the reason it was like, well, okay, sure, you provide me a really great experience 90% of the time, but the 10% of the time that doesn't go right, I don't I don't trust you that you're going to look after me, and therefore, I'm not going to continue with the service. I have so many different thoughts on that. I'd say first and foremost is word of mouth marketing is the number one most powerful form of marketing. and having that touch point, especially someone from negative 100 to 100, you're going to amplify the chances of getting that because you're going to overextend yourself, probably give them a free product, go above and beyond, high chance of passing that on. And then I would say another thing, and we talked about this actually another a great episode in conjunction with this is Ryan from True Classic, an apparel company that should be on Flagship AI, by the way. They're doing a bunch of stores now. is he really got me thinking about overinvesting in customer service as a whole and we hired someone to be head of customer engagement and not only they just answering DMs and responding to comments but every single customer they are talking to and I'm taking a step further two ways one I used to for I don't know I would say probably over the last I've had Iconic for 10 years holy crap 520 Fridays I'd probably say I've spent 100 Fridays calling all customers that sent over $1,000. >> And now what I have something really interesting is I have this tool that collects first party data and I decide the different types of cohorts that I want i.e. an influencer, an athlete, someone that has a title of a CEO and then on Friday I'm just reaching out to people as the founder. That touch point is insane. >> 100%. I think that is something that >> the founder touch point. There's a reason why you had to fly to Australia for that meeting. you found her. >> I mean I mean we we hadn't we had a situation at at ICE where someone was buying someone bought it wasn't an expensive order but someone had bought a bracelet for her daughter's 21st birthday. Really important for her really important for the mom and it was ready. there were a couple delays and so she needed for the weekend but we were only going to be able to ship it out Friday and so if I shipped it I it wasn't going to get to her in time and she was maybe an hour and a half two hours away and it was a Friday afternoon I jumped in the car and drove 4-hour round trip to handel this order to make sure it got there in time and it's something that I think so many people miss is that it's easy but not easy but it's so easy to win on customer service >> so easy >> it's such a point of differentiation the number of and I think for startups like as a startup you're probably not going to be able to compete with an incumbent on tech stack or resources or marketing dollars or anything like that you can compete on service and the number of times we've been in a in a negotiation with a retailer and it was us or someone else and they said to us they're like look we know your your tech isn't quite like this like 18 months ago when we were really early on it's like look we know your tech isn't where it where we know it can be but the experience of working with you has been so good that we're going to go ahead and trust and work with you on getting you to where we where we where it makes sense for us and we have been multi-billion dollar companies in the process just on service because these brands have said to us that they want to work with us instead of them. >> Yeah. I mean I I would argue that like the founders should be doing customer service. I mean I did it for probably the first I would say like $2 million run rate. I think it just informs the whole entire business moving forward and you get all those disproportionate benefits >> 100%. At the end of the day, like someone's not going to give you money for the sake of it and people are going to choose who they do and don't want to work with and you want to make sure time and time again that you are people like a team and a company that brands and customers want to work with. Guard your reputation at all costs. Robert Green, great episode as well. What's up, guys? It's Mark. Quick 15-second break. We are building a private community for operators, marketers, and creators. And in order to join that weight list, you have to sign up for the newsletter. The newsletter is going to give you alerts on all of our new content and my personal takeaways from each and every guest. Make sure you click the link at the top of the description to sign up. Thanks for watching. I want to dive into some more topics. Let's go a little bit into some personal development. What would you say is the single most important habit in your personal life that makes you a better founder? It's a really great question. I would say I'm really focused on balance. I'm really focused on understanding myself mentally, understanding myself from a fatigue perspective. One of the things I say to my team over and over again is it's this irony where if you were to tear a hamstring, you wouldn't go out for a run. But if you've had a rough day or a rough week, you're still expected to work through that. And having this mindset of like mental health is treated in the same way that physical health is where if you had a hamstring tear, it's like you're going to give yourself that room. And for me, it's about having that awareness of myself of when I've got an emotional hamstring tear, when I need to rest, when I need to recover. And my form of recovery might be different to someone else's, but my form of recovery I'm don't know if it comes across, but I'm quite introverted. And so my form of recovery is literally just recharging and spending time in my own space. And give me 3 4 hours in my own space and I'll be back to good. But it's knowing when I'm coming up to that point where I need to give myself that room to recover. And I think a it's from my perspective affording that same level of trust to my team that they have the ability to recover themselves. My mindset is if you are going to come into work and you're going to operate at 10% efficiency because you're not at your best and by you taking the and by you pushing through the 10% you're going to come back at 10% again tomorrow and 10% again the day after or take that day off and come back at 100% tomorrow. I'd much rather you take the day off and come back fully recharged. And it's I would say like that's a big cultural shift. And from a company perspective, it's it's challenging because the risk is that people could take advantage, but you identify that pretty quickly. And I feel like what I have learned is like you treat people like adults and you give them the same freedom that you give yourself. I ran my own business for pretty much for the last 15 years. I've exclusively essentially like run my own business. And I know that even if I took a Friday off, I didn't miss a beat. or if I took a couple days off or I felt flat and I took the day off, I didn't miss a beat. And knowing that I have the ability to do that means that other people have the ability to do that as well. It is so crazy, man. I would say what we have maybe one or Oliver was under 30. We've had most most people I would say 30 to 50 on this podcast. Every single person is in this camp. I feel like for me I was an absolute maniac savage. The identity of my company is about hustle and motivation. I probably didn't wake up to like this probably till like 37. Yeah. >> I feel like it takes a while. What was your inflection point to get to this? Was it family, kids? Did something happen? >> I think it was just watching how my brother operated. I mean, there's a few things. It's it's number one like the whole the whole mindset that like if you're drowning, you can't save someone else until you've helped yourself. Like it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you help someone else self if you're both drowning. But if you get that float floaty ring, then you can help someone else. And so it's like prioritize yourself first. get yourself back above water and then you can start helping others. And when I saw how Nick operated, it wasn't about being relentless 24/7. It was about knowing the periods where you had to be relentless and in those periods being relentless, but knowing when you can come up for air. And so like I mean when Nick was starting after me, there'd be periods of like months where like I wouldn't see or hear from him and then he'd come up for air and then I wouldn't see or hear from him and then he'd come up for air. And really early in our in the flagship journey, we like this fork in the road. Will we make it? Will we not make not make it? There were certain things we had to deliver on. And I spoke to like one of our early investors. He was my first boss. And he said he was like, "Look, you have two options. Option number one is you throw in the towel. you give some money back to investors, they're not going to get everything back, but at least they're not going to lose lose everything. The alternative is you leave you leave no stone unturned and you just fight tooth and nail to get to where you need to get to. And in that moment, I was like, okay, this is one of those periods where I need to put my head down and I need to be relentless. >> And I knew that if I got through this period and we didn't make it, it wasn't going to be because of anything I didn't do. >> And so there was no stone unturned. It wasn't going to be for a lack of trying or a lack of wanting. And you can have one person who operates at 100% intensity and you can have someone who operates at 50% intensity. And the person who at 50 50% intensity can still produce more output than the person operating at 100% intensity if it's not being focused in the right way. And so much of flagship and our team is centered on output, not input. I could not care less what your input is if it gets the output that we want. And that's just fundamentally the case. Like I I could get you in the office Monday to Friday, 10 hours a day, but if the best output I'm going to get from you is in three days, six hours a day, I'm going to take that every day of the week because I prefer on what you're producing, not what you're putting in. >> Yeah. I'm in the camp of sprint rest, sprint rest, sprint rest. And something that you said, I think for the people listening, the Sahil Bloom episode is is great in conjunction with this is understanding and knowing there's different seasons in life. And from a macro perspective, it could be, you know, fourth quarter, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. But then also, you have to look at it a bit more on like the micro where like, okay, you're looking at that from a quarter or a year or five years, but then like what about your week? Like if you're sprinting like I sprint Monday to Saturday and then Sunday is like my recharge day. So just making sure you don't go too long on the micro because then you'll probably get burnt out, which is not not what you want to do. 100% I mean I I theme my months I theme my years like when we close round of funding it's like okay the next year the the year leading up to funding was survival like we need to survive to get to the round of funding close round of funding the mindset shifts towards growth and building for scalability the next year it's like you've the next year you want to raise again so your your your the theme is around building markers to make you investable and so different things are required at different points in time And what's important in 2025 might not be the same thing I focus on in 2026. What I focus on in January might not be the same thing in December. There was a thing I listened to ages ago. It was spotlight of a rugby player. And one of the thing is it says is you need to know when it's the fourth quarter and you need to know when you need to be perfect. And there was I was speaking to someone not so long ago. He's actually he's a high performance coach. And he was he said to me, "What's your definition of high performance?" And I said, "My definition of high performance is knowing when you need to be perfect and executing perfectly in those moments. It's knowing when you need to be perfect and making sure I mean, I had a call a couple weeks ago. It was critical." And I'm like, there is no outcome that comes of this call other than perfection. Like in that moment, I know I need to be dialed in. I know I need to execute to perfection. And it's knowing there'll be certain moments where you can be perfect, certain moments where you can afford to be a bit more relaxed. And if you're trying to be perfect 24/7, you're going to burn out. And it's about knowing when you need to put when you need to put the foot down and when you can take when you can give a bit more reprieve. >> Wise man there. Let's talk about raising money. I know you raised a lot of money. What do you think is the biggest misconception about raising money? >> The biggest misconception is that it's easy. I'll have conversations with people who will say, "I've got this idea. I'm going to go raise money." And I'm like, "It just doesn't work that way." I would say there's there's a lot of I've learned there a lot of different types of money that you can raise with different expectations and challenges that come with it. You raise venture capital money, you're on the venture capital journey until exit and you're you're on that ride >> and you have to answer to them. >> Exactly. I would say that the number one thing for me from a fundraiser perspective is the relationship. In the same way that the relationship is going to win you a deal when you're selling tech, the the relationship is going to win you a term sheet when you're speaking to investors. Investors will invest more into the person than they will willing to invest into the tech. Tech has to be important. The opportunity has to be important. The TAM has to be important. All those things have to be there. But the thing that is going to be a key differentiator is the relationship that is built and the trust that is built. A lot of the investors that invested into us, they invested after 18 months of building relationships. It wasn't the first conversation and it's like here's a million dollar check. It was no, we're going to we're going to build trust over 18 months to the point where we have no doubt that we're prepared to put this put this investment in. >> I think that's the most the biggest misconception is time. time to sell a company, time to raise money. Like an example is today is a conversation that I had with someone. I don't want to get too deep into it, but yeah, it was the first touch point. It went great. No rush. It's busy season. It's Q4. They might be in LA. I'm going to get dinner with them the next, you know, one or two months. It's just one more touch point. I think people highly underestimate the amount of touch points. And like for me, I have a thesis on probably 10 different things, kind of markers to invest in something. I really think now if I had to narrow it down to two, I would say it's literally the human and the TAM and making sure the TAM is not going to be radically smashed by AI. >> Yeah. >> It's the human and the TAM. >> Yeah. >> And it can't be affected by AI or it can be or or it's going in the right direction. >> Yeah. That's I I think people are are sorely mistaken about how hard it is. What's an underrated way to raise money? >> Just keep moving. take like anytime an investor reaches out, whether I'm fundraising or not, I will take a meeting 100% of the time. You never know how long it will take to build a relationship. You never know when you need money. You'll never know when an opportunity will come out of it. When we closed our last round, I worked out that in order to close the round, I had over 100 hours of meetings to close the round with investors. Like directly with investors, let's say an average of half an hour a meeting, it's 200 meetings in order to close that round of funding. And this is with a good idea with AI attached to it with a track record. That should say something. >> Yeah. And two Yeah. two 100 hours of of meetings. It It took reps. It took time. It wasn't something that happened overnight. And it was Yeah. Like again, relentless for for several months of going through this process. And you get a lot of nos, you get some may, you get a handful of yeses. And you only need a handful of yeses in order to get to where you want to get to. But it's it's not something that just happens by by chance. >> Yeah. >> Do you know what's so crazy about it too is you know every no gets you closer to a yes. You've heard that before, but it's just like it's so crazy like you could have 20 meetings and just that 21st meeting maybe don't you don't get the yes, but it just unlocks the pivot in how you position the pitch. That's what I don't think people understand is just the feedback loop what you're getting and you just keep optimizing a teeny teeny teeny teeny bit. I don't know how many times I've had my guy change one line on a deck before. He he hates me for that of just like little small optimizations. But you keep doing that and then you get to a position where it's so funny someone be like, "Oh, you're really dialed on this pitch." And I'm just thinking to myself like, "Yeah, this is like the 38th time I've done this." >> 100%. Like reps reps build momentum. >> I want to go I want to go a little bit deeper into digital marketing. We didn't talk about that. That's your background. What's kind of one thing that you think marketers should stop doing immediately? >> I'm probably going to piss off a lot of people by saying this. I I'm not a fan of above the line marketing. I'm not a fan of spending dollars on something that can't be attributed. I'm fine to spend on above marketing if you can determine what the attribution is. At Afterpay, at ICE, I would never spend a dollar if I couldn't determine what the return on that dollar was. And again, like that's why I built Flagship because you have these retailers spending tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in these retail stores without being able to understand the true return on investment that they're getting. I'd rather spend a lot more on >> direct response performance market. You need to know what goes in, what goes out. >> Exactly. And the thing about that is every single part of that can be optimized. Like I used to look at everything. I used to look at my clickthrough rate. Click rate is dropping. The creative is falling. my cost per click, the conversion rate, my rorowass, every single thing. I one of the things I also looked at from from an ICE perspective was I looked at the lifetime value of my customer after that purchased. Like I could have a customer that came in and the direct ROI on that campaign wasn't high, but the lifetime value of the customers that came through that campaign was so much greater that it was worth still running that campaign. If I switched it off, it wouldn't have been worth my while. And there's so many soft opportunities I think marketers miss out on. >> Well, that Yeah, definitely. People are definitely going to be be mad at that. What's good though, too, is a lot of kind of top of the funnel type stuff, they're getting better and better at attribution. I mean, back in the day, like how are you going to do like a billboard? Yeah. >> Like if it's like 2002 and you're doing a billboard like and you're and you have to own the P&L as a CMO in the marketing side, like how do you answer to that? I really I I agree with you. What what would you say is one digital marketing strategy that's timeless? >> Um, social proof. Social proof and user generated content. It was what we lend heavily into both at ICE and and Afterpay. At ICE, my bestselling watch wasn't the bestselling watch because it was it should have been the bestselling watch. It was my bestselling watch because I had a customer who put up a Facebook post about the purchase they made from us and we turned that into an ad. So yeah, that social proof and news generated content was really powerful for us. And one of the most successful campaigns that I ran at Afterpay. So Nick turns around to me. He says, "I want to turn Afterpay into a verb." I'm like, "Great. We want After to be a verb. We need to use it out of as a verb ourselves." What I did was I ran out I ran a campaign. It's really simple, just text. I mean the text image, but it said, "What have you afterpaid? Show us in the comments." And what I did was I put that I ran that ad to our top 20,000 customers. Just to our top 20,000, knowing it was going to be cheap, knowing that they were going to engage, knowing that we were going to get response to it. And I did that until I had 10,000 likes and 5,000 comments. And then once I had that, I withdrew them from the audience and went to my 20 to 50,000 customers and did the same thing. Now those customers aren't as passionate about the top 20,000, but they see 10,000 likes and 5,000 comments. They're going to engage with it. That then grew to 20,000 likes and a,000 and 10,000 comments. And I did that over and over again and slowly got kind of moved away from our core customer until a point where that ad was turned into an acquisition ad. And I didn't I excluded all of our customers and went only to net new customers. But by the time I did that, there were a 100,000 likes on it and 50,000 comments. And any customer that hadn't heard about Afterpay, seeing 100,000 likes and 50,000 comments where everyone's talking about things that they've purchased using Afterpay, it gave us so much validity that it just acquired customers on repeat. >> Yeah, that engagement social proofing. My guy flipped out when our Facebook account got messed up and we lost all of the engagement. get crushed. you said something very very interesting and to unpack that it's it's it's brilliant for people listening obviously from a verb perspective people say like oh I'm googling something I mean think about chat GBT like their advantage over claude like people say like oh chat GBT it so I think that's a very interesting thing for people starting out with their business like how do you position and make a campaign and creative to position your brand as something that you can make a verb that's like an interesting challenge for a a creative marketer to do that >> 100% % I mean I was I I was really fortunate at Afterpay. It was such a strong brand and such a strong product >> and the name makes sense. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> I was really fortunate that I had access to to a really great customer base. I would say generally speaking, whatever strategy the company had, there would always be a digital campaign that I would run to support it. Didn't matter what we were trying to do. Like, okay, this is what we're trying to achieve. I'm going to target the people that we want to target in order to get the outcome. The mindset for me has always been the people that don't need to know that we exist shouldn't know that we exist. The people that I don't want to know about this shouldn't know about it because if they don't need to know about it and they do know about it through my ad spend, it means I've wasted a dollar on someone that I can't convert. And so everything for me has always been very hyperargeted. Go after the person. One of the strategies that we had at Afterpay was trying to drive more intore adoption. trying to drive it was originally a digital product trying to get more people to use Afterpay in store. We could very easily have gone and targeted our all of our customers trying to a retail campaign. The challenge there is that not every digital customer has a store that they want to shop with within proximity of them. And so what I would do was I built campaigns around the brand that was within proximity of the customer that they've shopped with before online trying to drive them into that specific store. So it was always really hyperargeted to get the outcome that we wanted. >> Seems like it's all sunshines and rainbows with Afterpay. What was that the biggest internal challenge? Was it team? Was it investors? Was it culture? There had to be something for it, you know, to get to that size. >> I I kind of when I speak to people, I say like don't use Afterpay as an example because it's not normal. I I hate saying it, but the biggest challenge that Afterpay had was that it was too popular, that it was too successful. First world problems again, guys. We've had to say this a couple times with the camera. >> Yeah. Jeez. >> And so I like the biggest problem was that Afterpay was running out of money because too many people were using it and they couldn't afford to pay back the money. >> Exactly. >> And so I mean you have that problem. You I mean it I mean Afterpay listed on listed publicly after a year and a half of of going live. Like that's unheard of. >> Give people context. What was the the market cap? Like how big was that company? >> I can't remember. I think it might have been I reckon I actually don't know maybe like 200 million but yeah I mean Nick often used to refer to he's talking about a book I can't remember exactly what it's called and I don't want to misquote it but they used to talk about their moments a lot like the we're it's over moments and they used to happen he would say on repeat but I would say any company that exists is going to face some kind of existential crisis at some point in time. I don't think there's ever going to be a company where everything is going to go exclusively to plan. And if it does happen, it's just pure unicorn status. Like absolutely like unheard of. And I think the thing that founders often get trapped by is this expectation that things are going to be an overnight success. And something might have a an an over you might have that hockey stick moment where you'll get that point of inflection. And maybe that moment is considered an overnight success. But what is so often missed is everything that happens before that point in time. Afterpay itself, all right, fine, maybe could be considered an overnight success despite the fact that you might miss the first 12 months which include the first brand turning them off. >> But what is missed in that overnight success is the 15 years of relentless pursuit of other business ideas that Nick went after. And I would say that's like so many people throw in the towel and give up too quickly because they haven't become an overnight success or it's taking longer than expected. And you look at how many companies take significantly longer to deliver. And so many people give up too quickly. >> I also think too many people are too hyperfocused on rocket fuel. And I've seen so much terrible stuff on Twitter now with this AI boom saying that you know formally I would rather the former than the latter. Formerly you know a company looks great if they go 1 5 10 17 25 34 and now they're like for us to invest it's got to be 1 10 50 250. I remember when I was living in Arizona, like the guy that I that I rented the house from, he had 17 years in a row of year-over-year growth and it was like 1, two, 4, 6, nine. And I'm like, this is the greatest business of all time because it shows stability. And for the people out there listening, run your own race. I think that this is it's a like you said, Afterpay is a unicorn from another planet. As long as you get product market fit, I think within, let's just call it four years, three, four years, even that's kind of a little long, but as long as you get product market fit, then go at your own pace. >> Yeah. And I think it's also important to a like know what noise you should listen to and what noise you should drown out. And it's also important to know, is something not selling because you don't have all the features that you need? Is something not selling because you're not selling it well, because you're not a good salesperson? Is something not selling because of timing? Is something not selling because of pricing? Like there's so many reasons why something could not sell? Like I remember when we started this version of flagship, we were fighting this like really uphill battle because we were going out with this MVP. I went to my product manager. I'm like, I don't have enough to sell. Like I don't have I I framed it. I'm like, I've got I've got the burger. I don't have the meal. No one's getting excited. Like they want the whole thing. I don't have the whole thing to sell them. And I'm like I need I need more. And through our discussions, nothing will impact engineering morale more than building something that's never used. And so there's too much risk in engineers building without validating. And so we landed on this middle ground where we would design in Figma all these different modules and features. And so I'm like, okay, great. I can still sell and speak to it. And if we get a deal and that deal is predicated on this feature existing, then there's good validation for us to go and build it. And so yeah, there's a plethora of reasons why something might not work that might not be that it's a bad idea. >> It's a good advice there. I want to go into this last segment before we go into the final final segment. I've been in in the USA for 12 months from Australia. What's the biggest lesson that you've learned from taking flagship from Australia to the US? Outside of people here want to wear Gucci logos on the front as opposed to your muted out beautiful black silhouette t-shirt you're wearing there. as I'm wearing. I never wear logos ever. It's my homies company. Seement stable. I like it. >> It's different. It's just sporting. >> Lesson. >> I did a lot of prep work ahead of moving out here. I came a number of times and I started building network when I got out here. I'll say the other lesson is that I just met with as many people as possible. I say you never know who knows who, who's going to be able to introduce you to who. I was really fortunate that three weeks after landing I had to start fundraising. And the good thing about that and I would kind of recommend any founder who's moving to the US just start fundraising as soon as you land here. And the reason for that is a it forces you into discipline. It forces you into routine because you're naturally going to be working through these fundraisers are really great at opening doors to different people. Our first five or six customers that we got in the US came from these VC funds that used them as customer call as customer checks and just in that process it put us on the radar. We managed to get these deals. The other thing is like I had someone reach out to me in one of my trips. I would move here in July in the March leading up to moving here. I got a LinkedIn message from this guy in LA. He's like, "Hey, I come from retail background. Was at Nordstrom. Set up Nordstrom Live. before that was at Rag and Bone. Love what you're doing. Would love to chat, come out here, meet with him. I realize that he is incredibly wellconed across retail. He's really nice guy. We get along really well. And so when I land here, we start doing a little bit more together. He introduced me to great brands. He introduces me to Alice Olivia, to Rails, to Vince, to really incredible brands over here. And then he introduces me to David Neville who was the Rag and Bone founder who was his boss at Rag and Bone. Meet with David. David really loves it. David's wife is Gucci Westman who's a founder of Westminatellia which is a big beauty brand. Through speaking to David, David says, "Oh, you should speak to Andrew Rosen. He invested into Rag and Bone." I then meet with Andrew and and so through just taking this one coffee on the back of this cold LinkedIn message that I got ended up getting me meetings with some incredible people across the US which then opened so many doors for me in the process and it's I was speaking to someone ages ago and it was about the different types of luck that you can have and one of the types of luck is luck by doing like luck by meeting people and taking opportunities and the more opportunities that you take the more people you meet with the higher the likelihood is of having one lucky break in there. It's not to say that every single meeting you take is going to be fruitful, but if you take enough of these meetings, eventually something's going to give. >> Yeah, I think the blended average more shots on that. And quite frankly, we met through someone on your team saying they listened to one of one of the the podcasts he loved. He introduced us and I am most definitely going to get you some customers. Let's let's let's leave it at that. I want to fire off a couple more quickfire questions before we get to the last three questions we ask everybody. How do you see AI impacting business in the next few years? >> It's a really great question. I see a few. The first is that more broadly from like a personal AI perspective in terms of how people use AI individually, I find that AI makes you more you. It makes you you but more efficiently. And the more that people lean into that, the greater a return on investment they are personally going to get on AI. I think people are so nervous about it's going to come for their jobs, it's going to replace them. So many people underestimate the domain ownership that they have in what they do and they have the ability to be the domain owner in what they do plus AI backing them. And so people have the opportunity to own that space personally. from a broader perspective. I mean, it's a it's a hard one because there's been so many industries that have come up that have killed previous industries. You had Ubers that hurt taxis. You have Whimos that hurt Ubers. You have Afterpay that hurts credit cards. You have accounting software that hurts spreadsheets. Like you've got there's always different evolutions of product that creates a risk to a prior >> imagine. Right. >> Exactly. >> And like I mean everyone was terrified of the internet when it started like what's it going to do to all different people? And what AI will naturally do is yes it will make some roles redundant but it will create new opportunities in the process. He's got the brightest outlook yet on it. But it's everyone is doomsday. The Roberto episode is doomsday. The world is falling in 2027. That's good to know. Giving people some hope on that one. I I agree with you. It makes I think it's a specific type of person to understand how to embrace it to make you more you. On the same coin I see people chat GBT is just the easiest example of just like overusing chat GBT and they sound like robots. I think in anything from a a human perspective, a brand perspective, I firmly believe in just like AI enabling enablement like similar to like how your company does it. I'm not as bullish on just like using only AI as a person or using only AI as like a company because you're going to get smashed by the big AI companies. So AI enablement is how I see it. >> Absolutely. I mean, do I do I think ever that I'll be able to sit across the table from someone recording a podcast to where AI is asking the questions and AI did all the research and knew what questions to ask and knew how to guide the conversation? Absolutely no. But do I believe that you can take the conversations we had leading up to this, feed it into GPT, help structure the questions in a way that helps you get to your destination faster? Absolutely. And there's always going to be a human level and a creative level that gets overlaid on top of AI. I think that's fundamentally like you still need someone to validate that the output is accurate. AI still has its own risks around hallucination and getting things wrong that it's not bulletproof. Will it get there eventually? Maybe, maybe not. But there's like sort this thing. It's like if you go to if we all go to chat GBT and you ask to give a random number from 1 to 10, it will give you I think it's like 739 and like everyone will get that on repeat. And like if you ask it to be creative, it's probably going to give everyone very similar ideas and is going to still require a human creative type of person to be able to break the mold of where GPT is pushing everyone. >> I like the balance of the the positive outlook there. A couple blunt questions here. Who's the best retailer in the world? >> The product's good enough that the other ones are still going to come to you. Don't worry about it. And it could be and it could be hold a special place in your heart. It doesn't have to be as direct. >> I would say the best retail in the world is Zara. I'll say the way that they the the speed of their supply chain, the speed of their critical path, their ability to make very quick decisions at ICE, the way they used to operate was I would like Michael Kors would release a new range of watches. I had no data on those watches. I didn't know how I was going to perform. I'd buy one of each, list them. If they would sell, I'd buy more. If they sold, I'd buy more. And I would use the consumer demand to decide which styles to invest into, minimizing my exposure. Zara does that on an enterprise scale level and that is phenomenal. Like they to me are best-in-class in retail. There are Australian retailers that are that think about retail in the most phenomenal way. >> Give one of them a shout out on here. We're going to have some Australians listening to this. >> I'll say any company that is owned by or invested into by Brett Blundy. Like the way that Brett and his team look at inventory, the way they look at stores is unlike anyone that I have ever spoken to. And they are a clear leader across the board in in retail in Australia. And I think there's an absolute reason for it. I believe their their business model and the way they do retail means that they could rinse and repeat in any retail vertical and they will continue to get results. >> I never heard of Brett Blendale. Check them out. For people that are intrigued by this Zara supply chain of the ability to find a trend, probably backed by metrics, and turn it over and have on have it on the floor in a week, two weeks, a really, really interesting documentary is Steve Madden. I'm not sure if you've watched that, but Steve Madden, a guy from Long Island, actually had a super iconic shoe company, different stores. He had his flagship store in Time Square above Time Square was I don't know what shoe makers are called but he would have some sort of going back to kind of this is literally flagship before flagship. He would make a shoe upstairs, bring it down, bring it downstairs, and obviously New York Times Square had the most amount of traffic. And he knew like if that shoe got more than 10 sales within the first 6 hours, it was a winner. And then he would press the button, go to mass production, and then bring it to all the other stores. >> And I I think there is a really methodical, data-driven way that retail can operate, which is missed like that. >> And he's a maniac, too. Great documentary, guys. You should definitely watch that one. Last question before the the final three. What's the biggest lesson you've learned from your parents? >> My parents bring very complimentary outlooks on life. My mom's mindset is like find what you want to go after and go after it and fight tooth and nail to get there and enjoy life along the way. and dads is always bring it back to what is necessary in life in order to be happy and not needing to overexpend yourself, remaining humble and having humility and like not needing fancy things in order to be happy. Like my dad was a big skier, like we were a big skiing family growing up. And it was the skiing that was important, not where we stayed or anything like that. Like we would stay in really cheap motel if it meant that we'd be able to spend the day on the mountain. It wasn't about staying in this really fancy lodge and that's the the prize. the prize was being on the mountain. I mean, and like dad like after Afterpay had publicly listed, after they had like exited their jewelry company, he was driving Uber and he wasn't driving Uber because he needed the money. He was driving Uber because he wanted to keep busy. He wanted to meet he liked meeting people. He wanted to still have this sense of purpose and routine in his life. Yeah. >> And I mean, it was a great lead generator for me because I had people calling every day saying, "I met your dad in an Uber." And mom similarly could like they easily could both have just decided to to retire. And mom went and started a a not for-profit cancer organization called Cancer Chicks to help young women find young women going through or having had deal dealt with cancer to kind of meet and find a support network amongst each other. And so yeah, both of them have given me different outlooks and aspects on life that are just so well complimentary to each other. >> I love that. I think all couples are like a operating system working collectively together and it looks like that they're hitting both sides. The yin and the yang >> 100%. >> Love that. Great pick. Final three. So favorite book or podcast and why? >> You mean apart from this? Apart from this podcast. >> We've gotten that a couple times now. >> My my favorite book is the book that accompanies the Gallup Clifton Strengthfinder test. >> Wow. It really helped me understand it a lot better and gave a lot of really great lessons. One of the lessons that it gave was the story of like the world champion table tennis player and he had a terrible backhand and everyone knew he had a terrible backhand but his forehand was so good that it didn't matter. No one could actually exploit it. And that mindset that I've taken to everything that I do is like find what you're good at and just be the absolute best at that. And yeah, I would say that's kind of the the key book that I think has guided like my leadership style. >> Clifton Galp, you getting you're getting a lot lot of love on this one. I'm definitely going to check out that test. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? >> Aritzia. They are, I believe, the business model of like the future of retail. They've been able to create really large format stores filled with incredible product that is targeting a very clear demographic which is the future of retail demographic that's targeting the Gen Z gen alpha consumer. I kind of look through retail in the lens of like either you're going to have if you got an aging demographic, you're in trouble. If you have an up andcoming demographic, you're going to have a a really healthy future. And they're the latter. And I think they are going to be around for a long time and are going to do great things. >> There's two stores that my fiance stays in for longer than 45 minutes. It's Sephora, which for me is as bad as Home Depot. And then there's Aritzia, which I've been in multiple times. Amazing couches in New York City. Plus, it's like a upstairs. They got a nice little coffee shop, too. You ever been to that one in New York City? It's a It's beautiful. It's huge. And people in there are very I feel like it's like a an upscale female focused Zara. >> Yeah. >> A little bit. A little bit more. A little bit more taste. I would say a little bit more taste >> and I think that's bang on. I think there are some like younger up and cominging brands with a handful of stores that are taking the world by storm. The question is can they keep that up as they get to scale and we're starting to see brands like Aritzia, like Viori, like Aloe that have been able to get to scale and still continue to perform. And I think that's the biggest credit to these brands is they were able to grow and get big and not lose much of their identity in the process. Are they that big, Aritzia? I I think I I don't I don't know exactly. >> And Fury, those are those are monsters. I didn't know Aritzia is that big. Are they that big? >> I don't I don't think they would be too far behind if they were. >> Guys, we're going to pop up whatever Google says on the revenue there. So, I'm I'm very very curious. >> We'll find out. I We'll get fact checked in real time. >> I'm very curious. Last question for you. How big can a flagship AI be? >> It's a great question. My investors want me to say like multiples of billions and on the venture capital journey, that's what you have to shoot towards. Do I see a path to get there? Absolutely. But I don't want to get there at the expense of doing things right. It's like fundamentally my belief that we do the right things, we add value to our customers, we listen to them, we keep delivering value, that we will get there. And we're not going to get there just by spending, hoping, and not doing the right thing by our customers. And if there's a skyscraper of the f future of flagship AI, it's really about like the leader in unified commerce, right? That's what you want to be. >> Absolutely. I mean, again, similar from like a digital marketing perspective, the thing about flagship is it's very different to like an Afterpay. Like you go on any retailer website, you're going to see Afterpay on the website. We operate in the background. You walk into Viori, you don't know that they're using flagship. You walk into guests, you don't know they're using flagship. >> Guys, that's a nice nice social proofing right there. He just he just slid slid you in and there real nice. >> And but like we know they do. We know we add value to them. And so we'll never have a billboard with flagship. We'll never have a big building that we're being advertised because the vast majority of people don't need to know that we exist. And the people that don't need to know that we exist will never know that we exist. All that will happen is we'll make their lives better when they walk into a retail store. >> I love that. Where can everybody find you personally and professionally with flagship? LinkedIn is probably the best place. Simon Molner on LinkedIn and websites flagship.ai. So either of those two places. >> Amazing man. You are super super real one and I really really believe in flagship AI. I can't wait to see where it goes. Anyway I can help. For anybody out there that has a flagship store, please check it out. We're going to have website down below in the description and excited to see where everything goes, man. Thanks a lot. Appreciate you having me, my man. What's up, guys? If you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger, bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.