Why I Quit Being a VC to Become a Founder (Again)

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. This is 138 with Ishan Rakshit. He is the. Co-founder of ShopFlo, a checkout infrastructure platform for direct to consumer brands. He was formerly an investor with Elevation Capital, which invests in early stage startups out of India, and before that he had started other companies. So today we're gonna be talking about what it's like having been an entrepreneur, going to vc, and going back to being an entrepreneur. And from both points of view why he thinks startups fail and how they can succeed. So thank you for taking the time to talk with me. Why don't you tell everyone a little bit more about Shop Flow and we'll go from there. Thank you.

Ishan Rakshit: As you mentioned, we are a checkout infrastructure platform, largely focusing on retail, online, e-commerce brands to increase conversions and hence make more revenue out of the website channel. Um, we started working. With brands in India and now are starting to work with brands in the United States and North America as well. Um, there are two things that we do when we integrate with them. We give them a better, smoother, faster checkout experience, which is the last stage of the purchase funnel. Essentially, after you've added products to your cart on an e-commerce website till the time you have bought it, you saw that around 70, 75% people used to drop off. So we're trying to sort of make 15 to 20% on an average jump when we come in. And then obviously that translates to the brand's direct bottom line. And the second piece is because of certain tools and the platform features that we have, we are able to increase the ability to generate repeat sales, which in this market where customer acquisition costs are going skyrocketing high. Is becoming more and more important for these brands to handle. So we do that out of just a simple integration that they can do on their stores that they're built on, say Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, et cetera.

Sean Weisbrot: They integrate with Shopify and these other things. So you guys aren't also connecting that with payment processing directly. They have to bring that to, to the, to shop low themselves.

Ishan Rakshit: India and the US product differ in this matter because payments success rates is a big problem in India. Uh. So we allow direct integrations with payment processors. Uh, when it comes to India, uh, in the US we don't touch payments at all. We essentially ride on top of the Shopify checkout itself, just enhancing the experience using the certain levers that we have. Um, but in India it's very important to do a direct connection because otherwise the infrastructure isn't that robust yet.

Sean Weisbrot: So are you saying that shop flow acts as a payment processing gateway for those Indian customers?

Ishan Rakshit: No, we don't. So the great part is that you can work with, uh, razor pay, pay you cash free. All of these are payment processors and gateways of India. You bring them to us and we have a portal where you can enter the, you know, merchant ID and API secret and right. I mean, we just, a single click integration with any payment gateway. We just pass on the payments using our backend. Into the payment gateway. We never really handled payments ourselves.

Sean Weisbrot: I've recently been interested in payment processing, and so I've been thinking about this more.

Ishan Rakshit: Payments is a tough business to build otherwise.

Sean Weisbrot: Yes. So that's why I wasn't sure. I know India has, uh, definitely its own challenges. I've had some, uh, clients that were Indian and some, uh, coworkers that were Indian, and, um, I've, and I've been to India and so sometimes I, I. I think about those difficulties, uh, that people in India have just trying to get things done. I know the government has tried numerous times to get rid of crypto, um, which could actually serve as a really interesting payment gateway system for, uh, between, you know, domestic to international, right? So getting money in and out of India, but the government doesn't want it, just like they burned all of the notes that were like under a hundred or under 500. I can, I can't remember. Um, this was like last year or two years ago, or three years ago. Caused a bank run.

Ishan Rakshit: Yeah. No, a lot of things have happened in India, to be honest. And you're absolutely right. The government is trying to do a lot of things to digitize payments. Uh, but unfortunately, if the step is too radical, it just isn't really, uh, super supportive there.

Sean Weisbrot: I think the reason why, uh, moody undertook this is because he wanted to get more tax money. Yeah. He, he wanted to make sure that a higher percentage of people from India actually paid their taxes, and this is a problem in China as well. I believe only 2% of Chinese actually pay taxes. Yeah. Um, because the government just has a really poor infrastructure for handling it, and I think India is similar, especially because there's so many people in rural areas that it's just so hard to get government officials out there. I mean, I, I remember hearing, uh, for the national elections, they were sending government officials like walking through villages to just collect votes. In India.

Ishan Rakshit: Yep. No, absolutely. That still happens. Yes.

Sean Weisbrot: So I can imagine it's very difficult to do business in India as a a tech company because it's probably also quite radical for Indians.

Ishan Rakshit: No, absolutely. And I think the two parts to it, right? One is the change that you would want to bring might not have the right ecosystem support around you and be it government, be it whatever, comprises of the ecosystem. The other piece is that even if you do build something. The mentality will be always to bring the price down because given there are so many consumers in India, there's always gonna be 10 people solving the same problem. And, uh, unfortunately, specifically when it comes to software or sas, uh, the propensity to pay is really low, even for enterprises, even for mid-market customers, not just for the small ones. So I think the difficulty is aggravated with that, uh, context in mind as well.

Sean Weisbrot: Now, a lot of startups, uh, use like auto debit from for their clients or like auto credit card, um, like charges. Is that, is it different in, in India because you said that it seems like some clients will use their service and just not pay.

Ishan Rakshit: It wasn't possible until very recently. In fact, it probably got possible in 2022 itself. And that too, for amounts less than 2000 rupees, that'll be what, around $25? As long as the transaction is less than that, you don't really need to sort of do a PIN verification or an OTP verification as we call it here. Um, that part has gotten seamless, and that's still only supported by a handful of banks. Uh, but there's a, there's still a long way to go.

Sean Weisbrot: Is it difficult to run a startup? From the US that's focused on India.

Ishan Rakshit: Uh, in fact, look at it this way, right? I mean, I feel like that approach never works. Uh, if your market is here, you'd rather be here and build it. What we feel is the market really is outside India. Um, and obviously India is a high growth market, but the base is really small. So for it to become as sizable as an app opportunity as say North America, US, Canada. It's still gonna be six, seven years at least. So if I have to also build for the present, that market is out in the us. Uh, for us, the difficulty is the other way around. That for a team, which is largely based out of India, how we build for a consumer that is situated in the US in some sense. Um. And I think that's, there are multiple problems to it. I wouldn't really go into depth there. But yeah, I think, uh, this is a problem that has been solved by a lot of examples out in the market. We have, obviously in India we keep hearing stories of sad startups and this entire theme of building from India for the world is legit and it's happening. Uh, so I think the playbook has been written. Um, it's obviously a large dependency on how you execute it, but, uh, I don't, I don't think that's a, that big a challenge anymore. Now that there are so many great examples. I've done that.

Sean Weisbrot: I've used some applications, some SaaS platforms that were built by Indian teams for the West, and I actually have some competitors that are in India, um, focused on the West, which I won't name. But I've used them and they've raised 40, $50 million and they've been around for 5, 6, 7 years. And I just feel like their product isn't good at all. It, it seems like it was built 20 years ago.

Ishan Rakshit: One thing that I also gathered when I went to the US as well, uh, and I've been sort of, uh, interacting with a lot of merchants and brands who. Are working there. Uh, the bar for quality that they have for a product or a software product specifically is really high. Whereas in India, the mentality is that, hey, I mean, I'm okay with a half baked product as long as you bundle a great service around it because they want to extract value. And the value might not come out of the product directly, but actually by customization set Indian sort of customers would ask you to do. Uh, because of that, if you're really listening to the Indian customer and building in India and thinking that the product will work outside, the quality bar might not be met in some sense. Uh, so it's very important for us as well to really sort of focus on the customer that is truly the market that we are going to build for and build for them. And obviously what we have seen time and again. And if, if you build a product that really matches that quality bar, it works everywhere as well. And then again, the case would be in India as well.

Sean Weisbrot: So Shop Flow isn't your first company, but is it your first company where you're spending time outside of India while you're building it?

Ishan Rakshit: Yes. Uh, the previous company was focused on India where I was. Solving for a very small market as well. And that was five, six years ago.

Sean Weisbrot: What made you want to do it differently this time?

Ishan Rakshit: There were a lot of incidents and experiences because of which there was a bias to solve for businesses as a management consultant. For example, the problems that I was solving by being part of the firm called Parthenon, it's ba, Boston based consultancy firm, which has offices across the globe now merged with, um. I was solving her business problems in education, in hospitality, healthcare. Um, so that bias was always there, that, hey, let, let me just help businesses. This becomes more relatable as such, and a more homogenous solution to develop as well. Um, when I was working at MSCI, which was a Morgan Stanley spinoff into investment research, I was actually solving for businesses as well. 'cause my clients were BlackRock and the like. Where I was actually working as a developer to really code to create products for them. Um, even with my investment stint where I did investments in FinTech and SaaS companies, 90% of the investments that I would be part of or make or work with as portfolio were B2B companies in some sense. So there was obviously this entire conditioning that I had. As I progressed through my career to solve problems faced by businesses, uh, when I talk about businesses, it becomes very easy to start looking at where the market value is residing, where the, uh, if I build a product, great, it's productizable great that it's scalable, but when you ask the question that a great investible business, for example, as an investor, it has to make money. Yeah, and India is not a SaaS market for that. Uh, so just that filter obviously made us realize and given that we were, we were, when we started out, we started almost like listing a lot of problems down that, hey, merchants face these, these, these problems. It turned out that the problems were fairly homogenous across the globe. We were in fact speaking with merchants, not just in India, but in Southeast Asia, but in LA as well as in the us. And it was very clear that the problems are fairly similar. The solutions could be different, but the problems are similar. As long as I'm marrying myself to the problem, let me just focus on the market, which will pay me to solve it. And that's the filter that was very clear for us, uh, from the start, which is why we didn't really think a lot. We just registered the company in the US as well. We raised foreign capital as well. Our investors are not Indian. Uh. The companies that the merchants that we speak to day in and day out are based in the US as well.

Sean Weisbrot: If all of that was clear to you and it made sense, why did you still go after the Indian market as well?

Ishan Rakshit: My co-founder who used to work in the same investment firm that I was in, he was in fact leading investments in e-commerce direct to consumer brands in India. So for us it was almost like a proximity bias that, hey, great, we are solving a global market. But can we quickly test out the waters here? Can we quickly learn a little bit here so that we also match the quality bar that's required to be global in some sense? So what we did, we started with the smallest merchant in India, went up the ranks, targeted mid-market people who are doing a million dollar a year and then went to enterprises. And that's what we are working with right now. So that that'll, in fact, and again, the product that we work has been. We made, it has been made thinking that it should work across geographies. Um, so it was almost like, Hey, this is a great PMF market. We know all these people. We know our customer. These are great friends. I don't have to worry about the effort I would have selling to them. Let's just quickly test it out there, build an MVP, get feedback, and then build it out. But always keeping the globalization of that product in mind. So we, we did that. I think it, it's only been like seven months since the product has been live. And I think the feedback has been super helpful to even chart out the product roadmap, but I agree with you could have been done differently. It's just we wanted quick feedback, quick validation so that we sort of move very fast as well.

Sean Weisbrot: So you feel like the feedback you got from those Indian customers were valuable with customers outside of India?

Ishan Rakshit: What a US small customer wants is very similar to what, uh, Indian mid-size customers want, what a US mid-size customers want. It is very similar to what an enterprise is solving for in India. Knowing that transitive relationship in mine, uh, it was fair to sort of kind of move up in the market in India so that we can solve for the sizeable growing brands in the US as well.

Sean Weisbrot: Which one is more profitable per unit right now, which like the US or India.

Ishan Rakshit: So we haven't started pricing the product in the US or selling it in some sense. We're still in very testing phases right now. Where some brands, we have just gone to them and said, Hey, you know what? We're gonna increase your revenue. We're not gonna charge for it. Just start using, let me hear similar feedback. Let me make sure that I expose the right feature to you at the right time as well. Uh, probably will, given that we don't, we are not really in a super rush to make revenue in the US immediately. Probably will do that till May and June. Before we start figuring out GTM scaling plans and pricing as well along with it, uh, Indian product is actually very fairly profitable. We make around 80, 85% gross margin on that. Uh, obviously the only cost that we have is salaries. That isn't a lot in India as well. Uh, so we are in fact with the Indian product should be. Profitable in a few months time as well.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm sure your investors are very happy about that.

Ishan Rakshit: I hope so too. I think the need of the are is, uh, also business sustainability and profitability. So that's, that's gotten reiterated a lot of times from the investors as well,

Sean Weisbrot: is the way startups are fundraising, how much they're fundraising and what they, what valuations they can get for that. Do you think that's changing and do you think that change is based on a. Newer demand for profitability sooner or just the global markets, uh, shifting in general or COVID or, I think that

Ishan Rakshit: has changed a lot. I think a lot of it, there were a lot of triggers initially, uh, with the war in the background, obviously, initially. I mean, I think 21, 20 21 and 2020 were great years to be honest. Um, you could have no revenue. Absolutely. And I was seeing companies getting funded at valuations of a hundred million, 200 million left, right, and center. And that was actually not just in the us it was happening in India. It was happening everywhere. Uh, and we were all like, I mean, this company doesn't even need this capital. What are they gonna do? Uh, so I think a lot of that, uh, was happening. I know a lot of founders that I used to work with very closely. Uh. I had a very strong hint that, Hey, you know what? I know the market is very rewarding right now, but I know the winter is coming, so let me at least raise this much amount so that I have a massive war chest. Because ultimately when you reach that size of businesses, capital becomes a mo. You can outperform competition if you have the right capital, 'cause you start making strategic choices and investments basis that capital. So a lot of people were actually doing that and they were actually pitching to their investors that, Hey, the question that we were looking for in this industry, the answer is with us, you have to put a bet on us that hey, these are the winners here in this race. And just double down on those investments in that year itself without waiting for traction so that in the future I have a stronger right to the throne in the segment versus what I have right now. Uh, I think it was around. March 22 when all of it just started crumbling down and a lot of things were happening in some sense. Uh, obviously the public market started showing some colors. There's the war that happened in the background. A lot of capital pool was sort of, uh, showing bad returns as well when it came to large hedge funds, them failing. And obviously when that part of the pyramid crumbles, a lot of these smaller funds ends up showing that. Ripple effect as well. So I think 2022 was very mellow when it came to investments already. Uh, people announced funding rounds that they had raised right before the so-called winter had begun. I think that is continuing right now. I keep chatting with my friends in venture capital. I don't think rounds are happening right now, specifically people who are raising series A and above opportunistic seed beds are being made, but everyone else has to prove. A good amount of value, uh, to really demand a up valuation. There are down rounds happening. There are rounds happening, uh, at the same valuation as well, but, uh, good financing rounds are not happening anymore is, uh, what I've seen. I'm feeling that this will continue for another eight to 10 months as well.

Sean Weisbrot: I've heard that the best companies are built at times like these. Yeah. But would you rather be an investor or a founder right now?

Ishan Rakshit: I feel, given what I always wanted to do, I would always be a founder, uh, for me, when I became an investor. In fact, I remember when I was chatting to the partner of the fund that I interviewed with before I had joined, it was very clear for me that I am looking at that as a, it's, it's my own g TM in some sense. That, Hey, I'm gonna come, I'm gonna. I talk to a lot of these founders, network, learn, have a stupidity, filter on my ideas, be slightly more pessimistic, and so on and so forth. I'm gonna use all of that when I become a founder next. Uh, so I went in with that intention as well. Um, um, nobody, yeah, I think it's, it's a great time to be a founder for sure. Definitely.

Sean Weisbrot: Even despite all of the issues that we're facing with trying to fundraise and trying to get companies to become customers and give us money so that we can grow and all of that.

Ishan Rakshit: Absolutely. I feel like when you choose to become a founder, you're looking at a, it's, you're not looking at a couple of years or a couple of months. It's a decade long game at least, and you will end up, and every founder would have who has built a successful company, it would've definitely seen one or two cycles like this. It's up to your judgment and your business maturity to make sure the company just sails through it and survives and you keep on adding value to your customers. Uh, but yeah, I, I I think it's, it's obviously a great time. Uh, a lot of sectoral nuances have started happening for sure. I know founders aren't super excited to build in the consumer space a lot. Uh, people are realizing that if I can't monetize. A hundred million user base might as well just wait it out because any B2C play requires you to spend marketing money and know investor isn't really giving consumer valuations anymore. But in SaaS where you feel that, hey, funding from a VC is an optionality, if I do it, I will scale faster. If I don't do it, I will still have a path to profitability if I want to. And I think that's making SaaS very exciting right now as well.

Sean Weisbrot: What made you want to become an investor after you left your last company?

Ishan Rakshit: Just the want of being closer to the ecosystem. I think the view that an investor has on a startup ecosystem is unparalleled. Um, the know, the nitty integrities of what's happening, the trends that are shifting. Um. The network that you build with great quality founders and the learnings that you're able to just get firsthand when you have a conversation with them. The ability to actually work with portfolio and know the deeper problems that the founder is trying to navigate the company through, it's all of it is very unreachable, if not in a VC profession. Uh, so for me it made a lot of sense to actually just gain access. To that level of insight, to that level of network that I can actually start building my. Cell phone and my future on, in some sense,

Sean Weisbrot: I feel like I get to learn about a lot of the deeper problems founders have because of the podcast without having to be a full-time investor. But I can imagine how when you're giving them money, they're more likely to tell you even more problems. Um, even though you don't want to hear their problems, you want to hear their successes, but you need to know their problems in order to help them to get to their successes. Sometimes if you're able to,

Ishan Rakshit: the job pays you well. So to become. A founder, it just gives you a lot of mental, um, peace to have a financial cushion as well. 'cause you don't know when you're gonna get funded, if at all. You're gonna get funded. So might as well just have a cushion of amount of money that you can still build a team if you want. And if you have that conviction in your idea, just financing yourself as well. And that was very important, uh, from day one.

Sean Weisbrot: You'd rather be a founder, but it pays more to be an investor.

Ishan Rakshit: Absolutely.

Sean Weisbrot: So then why would you want to be a founder?

Ishan Rakshit: Yeah. No, that's a fair point. I feel like it's never a rational choice to be a founder, uh, especially in my case. I don't know how better to put it, but when the, even though I did it while I was still in college or high school, I mean college, uh, that was the first time I started my company. I just couldn't. Zone out of that feeling in some sense. I always wanted to get back to doing it and proving it again and, uh, never really was a rational thought. I wanted to just, in fact, every year after I graduated from college, shut my company down. That was 2017. I wanted to start up again. 2018, I wanted to start an ed tech company. 2019, I wanted to create a, a remote health consultation platform, 2020. I wanted to build a mental health platform with a consumer focus. 2021 was when I started thinking about soft flow. So I think it's almost like you've, you've tasted blood once and it, it, you have to just get back to it and I, I don't think it was a rational decision at all.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you feel like spending that time as an investor. Made you a better founder?

Ishan Rakshit: I think a lot of what we do, building organizations now at Shop Flow, for example, uh, comes from anecdotes. Uh, comes from anecdotes. And again, I, that's probably something that you would also get when you talk to founders. But as an investor, I was able to also learn real examples of how someone solved a problem in org ex expansion or. In international GTM and so on and so forth. Uh, also some very small nuances. How do you structure a certain policy within the company? All of those things you actually are seeing happening firsthand. And because I was actually working with early stage companies, people who had just started or raise the seed round or Series A, the breadth of problems that I saw them solve firsthand was a lot. And you are seeing a lot of companies at once. I was talking to, in fact. Five to six startups every day. The amount of knowledge that I was able to get is unparalleled, and I feel like today most of I, I talk a lot in anecdotes and I feel like that's very helpful for me to even add context to whatever I'm trying to implement here at TR Flow. I think that's been the biggest value add as such. Obviously the network is great as a founder. You want to sort of derive a lot of value out of the ecosystem. The ecosystem usually is supportive and I, I feel like I got introduced to the ecosystem because I was an investor. Um, and that's been super helpful as well. I think the third piece is, I don't know how much valid it is in the us but in India being a part of a well renowned vc, I think the one that I worked in was one of the top three largest funds in India. Uh. There is a certain aspiration attached to that job. So when I hire people, they have a certain connotation about a certain indexing that they have done that, hey, if the founders have this sort of a background, should be fun working with them. I don't know how that works, but I do feel that this is also one of the interesting merits of coming from that background. And having done that,

Sean Weisbrot: what's the most important thing you've learned from being an investor?

Ishan Rakshit: Oh, I think, uh, and a role as an investor makes you extremely pessimistic. 'cause your daily job is to say no to ideas. Uh, and I feel like just finding hope or, you know, taking a punt in some sense, it requires a lot of courage as an investor because I. Great. I mean, the founder would love to get money from you, but you have to justify it to people in the fund. You have someone who is invested in your fund, someone or the partner or other partners to make a case and bring the case to the table. I feel like that those were moments where I felt like I was perhaps more passionate about the idea than the founder itself, and I feel like that that was. Probably the most interesting and more impactful learning that I had during the period.

Sean Weisbrot: What's the most important thing you've learned from being a founder so far?

Ishan Rakshit: When we are building an organization, nothing matters more than trust. Uh, I feel like there every, every role at TR Flow, for example, is a high ownership role. If I'm not trusting a person enough, things won't get done as well. And that applies to my co-founders. That applies to the next person I'm gonna hire. And if I optimize for the ability of being trusted or whether I'm getting reliable people on the team, if that's the absolute filter that I have, I will, I'm sure I will make a great organization. And if great, smart, reliable people are aligned on the same cause and vision, there is very little chance that the product or the company will fail. Um, I feel that I, if I have to summarize it there way, there are so many great learnings otherwise.

Sean Weisbrot: So how do you know that you can trust someone?

Ishan Rakshit: Uh, I'll be honest, I have never really thought about this question, but, uh, so far it's been working on autopilot somehow in my subconscious. Um, I, I trust myself a lot. Um, if I am able to say that, Hey, this guy will do this better than I can. Or I will be able to trust this guy with this job more than I can myself. I think that's the o only question it boils down to, um, somehow it comes across in conversations. Uh, sometimes it comes across in certain gestures. A lot of times it takes months to come across, uh, from a person as well. Um. But I, I, I feel like that's the, that's the metric or the benchmark that I end up equating it with.

Sean Weisbrot: I think that's a very valuable response. I would've never thought about that before. When I'm looking to hire people, I normally think, is this someone that I feel understands the culture? Do we have a similar, uh, desire in what we get out of what we do? Um. And is this someone that I would want to be friends with? Even if we don't go and have a beer together, is this someone I would want to? Right. That's kind of the foundation for, for fit for me. And then obviously we go through, um, hard skills and all that to make, to, to make them prove that they're the best person to actually do the job. Um, but I had never thought about it as, is this someone I feel I could trust to do a better job than me? Because. Most of the positions I hire for, I can't do those things anyways. So I, I'm almost a hundred percent guaranteed to trust someone's gonna be better than me at something. So for me, trust is a difficult thing to use in a hiring process.

Ishan Rakshit: A lot of it, what you say when it comes to shop flow, for example, ends up getting equated to a culture, uh, ends up being in the same bracket as as well, right? For example. It might be that this person does not come from the necessary or the required background, but because I'm seeing a lot of passion and the ability of, you know, you know, move fast, break things, attitude and stuff like that, that helps the trust caution it need not be very fixed markers as well. So a lot of what you're saying is what I'm also saying in some sense, but in my case, given that our team is very young, a lot of. People are fairly little experience in some sense. Uh, uh, it's more about the attitude and the ability, whether given a task, will they just give it all to make it happen or not? Uh, versus really thinking about whether they were coming from a sales background, have they done it before? Um, and very solid culture fit metrics that slightly larger would be able to define. We also don't worry about culture a lot, to be honest. At least at this scale, uh, we've realized that we are not reached a scale where we have a strong culture than a person who would bring it. Uh, so it ends up happening that we are still probably waiting for the 30, 40 people to join so that there is a culture that everyone assign aligns with. But till then it's, it's everything else that matters more.

Sean Weisbrot: I know that you spend time in California. Do you have any employees in the US or you just live here by yourself And

Ishan Rakshit: the initial product and GTM Discovery always needs to be done by the founders. Else. Perhaps we are going to build, build in a wrong direction as well. Uh, we also don't still have the maturity of figuring out who to hire and how to hire there. And what we look at when we hire in India might be different from what we look at when we hire in the us. I think it'll take us some time to. Get there and once that's the right time, we also, we definitely anticipate setting up a sales, marketing and a product team in the us. While we do feel, given the cost arbitrage, most of the technology will still be built from India.

Sean Weisbrot: I've interviewed another person before who has all of the development in China. He's Chinese, so all of his development is done in Shanghai, but all of his sales and marketing are done outta Silicon Valley. With, uh, like people who are living there and working there. Um, I see nothing wrong with that model, especially if you can raise enough to make it worthwhile.

Ishan Rakshit: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Sean Weisbrot: How can people follow up with you or your business or

Ishan Rakshit: from a timeline perspective? Uh, we do plan to launch the product in the us um, sometime in April, uh, properly with a, with that pricing, et cetera, figured out. Um. We still don't have a domain where we want, we can have people sort of reach out to right now, they can reach out to us on software.com, but we are planning to sort of, uh, create a certain different identity in the US as well. Uh, so we'll figure that part out. Um, but no, I think, uh, I've been very openly connecting with a lot of people in the US already, so just happy to kind of speak with people from LinkedIn. Email when it's han@flow.com is SHAN at the rate S-H-O-P-F o.com.

Sean Weisbrot: All of those links will be in the show notes. So, uh, thank you very much Han. I appreciate your time and your energy. This was a very interesting conversation about both sides being an entrepreneur and an investor, and then going back to it and insights, uh, gleaned from both of them. You're making me think maybe I should spend some time as a VC to become a better founder. Uh. Probably not, but it's interesting for sure. And, uh, don't forget that entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint. So take care of yourself every day.