I went from $1/day to billionaire in 10 years... here's how

it seems like it was an insane decision to go to china with no money no plan no relationships no language skills slept in a bush and literally build your own factory that was a disaster when i say we were naive i daylight that is even an understatement but to we for success is about t help and in our business now i'm a huge believer in firing bullets and failing fast and then at the bullet works is a cannonball ball and we invest and we built the recipe around that how big is the empire today a little of a two of a billion us in revenue and it's public or it's not a not a public company i the public i feel like i could rude where to know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a road that's true never here's what's fascinating to me so i i have like a love language when it comes to business and my love language self made dropped out of college family business multi billion dollar company with no outside capital like you hit all of the things on my little bingo card there which is what got me interested i wanna start with your the origin story so here's the bullet points group on a dairy farm started selling door to door hot air balloons was in law school and quit because he didn't like walking up a big hill every day and then made a crazy rash decision moved to china with no money no plan no relationships no language skills slept in a bush somehow turned that into a billion dollar company so that's the that's the the bullet points can you unpack that a little bit that's quite accurate that's quite a good way to summarize it quite quickly if i was to frame up our probably first ten years it's that famous saying that success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm and i think that actually really does sum us up grew up more or less on a farm and then we moved north for our schooling and my brother won the zealand science affair with a model hot balloon and then we decided or he decided he was twelve that we should make these kits set balloons and sell them door door and the festivals when we're at school and and i'm slightly younger in him so he kinda hired me as the when i say hi i was the free labor to help make the hot balloons and yeah we used to make these multiple for balloons and and sell du door i to when i was quite young and get my friends together in backpack around new zealand and south dora door and i can tell you that learning how to sell dora door is a great life lesson because you never know who's behind that door and you never know what response you're getting and on top of that selling a flying burning plastic bag is particularly hard to sell so it really hone your skills earlier on what was the what was your techniques so knock knock yeah i used to be like we're just a small company trying to get off the ground wink wink like no pun intended we're were young kids so that always helps and you know we'd often like with sort of build thesis around which neighborhoods were more likely to buy it was usually not the the richest neighborhoods they were all maybe a little too smart and so it was still somewhere in between we'd always walk for you know signs of children in the backyard of houses and i always remember that one of my good friends still one of my very good friends today fraser he was always out salvador me i don't think there's a day where outs sold him and i always thought i was a much better salesperson than him when the door opened but he just did not care about being rejected he'd go from each house he'd get yelled and shouted at and swear at and he'd come out laughing and it'd did knocking on the next door within seconds and i always had to build myself up after getting rejected which was most of the time to to knock on another door and it it it just kinda taught me i guess the power of just persistence right and you kinda keep going and if you keep going and have that level of of grit perseverance then i your chances of winning who chances success are much higher so i was certainly learning that at a very i guess young age yeah from there we we we cut matt matt went to university as well and then he dropped that after a year to sit up and make or develop this hot and through to a little bit more of a professional level and matt him why don't we start why don't we explore going to india or china to try and manufacture our hot and given i was making them i thought that was a great idea and so matt actually went often near in china did little sc trip came back and he said china let's go to china and like let's go to china he said you go to china so i pat up didn't go my second year law found the most entrepreneurial guy from my first year at university guy called joe drag joe to china and you we had no money really no contacts we went to a little place called s was the middle of nowhere there were no other western and we had an apartment i think it was like probably the equivalent of eight dollars a month to rent it was eight floor no lift so whenever you were first thing had to get water had like walk down eight flights of stairs to go and get water and come back up and that's where we started but we ordered we ended up getting ourselves into all sorts of trouble and strife and there's a lot of funny stories the story i had heard was that you guys like first night you slept a bush what what what what happened there and but basically what was the plan were you just gonna kind of go try to find a manufacturer or walk around like what what were you thinking of doing we were so naive and on reflection i looked back almost like we built a toy company from first principles because we did everything different to everyone else without even knowing it so we didn't know that you could go and contract manufacturer your product we were planning on sitting up our own little battery and that's essentially what we did but me and joe got into some trouble and joe had to fly home to new zealand so my brother came over we ended up trying to see it if we could get a hotel but improvement was way too expensive so we decided just to sleep in the bushes at hong kong airport and i remember just getting completely attacked by mosquitoes all night and we do wanna sleep in the airport because the flu lights were so bright and so yeah we ended up sleeping the bushes and getting attacked by mosquitoes all night it was not fun and they were fed it up to china and we set up a little factory on the side of a river it was a small kinda of shed more or less in china and my cousin simon came out at that time as well he was an engineer to help us and he welded a production line and we bought we pretty much spent all of the money we had on an molding machine we employed a few people on the production line had a little old lady who used to cook for us every day i think the budget was two rm and b per meal which is about thirty cents and and we started making our first product and then we started making our second product out of there as well which was a night frisbee which we got sued on and we had no money to to feed ourselves so so stu question but like why not like it seems like it was an insane decision just to go to china and literally like build your own factory like literally like create a structure on the side of a river and like weld it yourself together why'd do you feel like you needed to be in china instead of just doing it where you were well we understood that most of the toys in the world were made in china but when i say we were net naive i feel like that is even an understatement like we were trying to make our hot ear balloon but we didn't even realize that we couldn't sell it to any toy chains or large retailers around the world because of cost to making either the regulatory tree standards i mean it had a burning can under it so we were super so then we started looking up products that we can maybe make an our factory and we saw this company in america making white up of frisbee with leds and it could be thrown on at night with thought all that's cool so we made this night frisbee in our factory and i started hustling to try and sell this thing as in like i would email every buyer in the world of every major retailer in every country i possibly could and i remember i sold it to a distributor called shi in the us and we spent what was a lot of money at the time and i went to new york toy fair and we've made this night for frisbee and would also made this other poll or copied this other poll called a money gobble which was a money bank in the shape of an animal and you'd feed the coins into its mouth it would go down throat into the summit so we started making these two products matt decided we wanted to set up a wooden wood toy factory for this money go gallbladder we had our production line for making this frisbee so i sold them to this company called shi i so i go to new york toy fair it to be on their booth to start selling these two products stomach and i start selling these poll and this sky comes flying onto the booth and starts yelling out of a distributor so he's obviously got wind that we've made a product that's identical to his and he had multiple patterns for how the led connected to the fiber optics and how this will worked and of course we'd again we were a we didn't even really know what ip was so he comes and so dave comes up to me off the booth the the owner of the distributors hey network we need to pull up frisbee off the booth this is probably an an hour into new york toy show starting so i'm pretty disappointed because one of our products is gone but on my that's okay i'll sell the money with god and if i thought the first guy was crazy about three hours later this lady she has a whole business she's built over twenty five years building these money animal banks and she has this big booth on the ground floor jar and she comes up and she screams onto the booth and she's yelling and screaming and swearing at dave and dave sort of i can see this from where i are but dave sort won there's over to be sheep and says you need to take the money gobble off the booth as well so within the first morning of new york toy fair both our products have be taking off the booth of the distributor i flew back to china i said to my brother i said have you ever heard of this whole you know ip thing this whole patent thing i think we need to start renovating and coming up with our own ideas and then we ended up getting into a lawsuit on the night they sued we had no money to defend ourselves i remember going to colorado because that's where they sued us to try and find a law firm to defend us and i was going into at lease firms and i was saying that'll be a million or two million dollars we had like maybe a few thousand dollars between us at that stage and was saying how are we gonna defend ourselves i ended up actually hiring a lawyer convincing him his name was chad he later get got spa that we would write the whole suit he just had to put his name to it and and chad did the whole case for us but didn't really do it we did it ourselves we learned how to couple so we did it incredibly cheaply but he did he end up bad later on but that was our only way because ga had no money and i was so enthusiastic we had no of the choice that we had to sell this product and i remember selling the night frisbee to the department store chain in the us ko with the k i know we have ko down here australia with a c never forget the buyer's name i actually still work with her today this is you know nineteen years ago emma's was jin zero she was the byron ko and i would email her every single day and one day i got an email reply from her it was all capitals it said nick i do not have time for your daily email communication please stop emailing me every single day and it always wrote that i was so sorry jim but you know i just think our product was really great and at the stage when you were in illegal trouble but we had to sell something to survive so i i was like pushing and pushing and then eventually i get this email back from her was just two words nothing else said seen the sample so we send the sample to her and she ends up ordering a full container i think it was twenty thousand units of this night frisbee so we we're we're pretty happy at this stage it was big celebration we never had a full container order of any product and so we ship this full container of night frisbee and of course she gets enjoyed in the lawsuit as well come at ko and didn't speak to me again for a long time the irony is today she's the director of family door stores in the us and where they're second biggest toy supplier after patel so the that's the funny thing you're trauma bonded correct but we have so many of these stories that is one of mini mini mini in those early days so we really were just scrapping every day to try and survive and sell something and just like live somehow but we were living on less than a dollar a day okay i have two things one let's do a d tour to the dollar day thing because mike idea who helps you with research she goes you gotta ask him about the mc broke diet and the mc broke died diet i said what's that he goes goes apparently they were just eating off the dollar menu at mcdonald's in china every day and he had some trick about the french fries to get free french fries so what what is the broke diet as far as was it was we didn't eat mcdonald's mcdonald's was a treat so me and that we're in china and but chris of course i think my brothers didn't come back to new zealand for eight years he lived in a factory for ten years he had a tiny little room and a factory for ten years which is crazy itself but for christmas we would celebrate by going to mcdonald's and probably the equivalent of the combo is probably two dollars fifty in china at that time so that's how frugal we were we wouldn't even go to mcdonald's so but we'd go and celebrate about christmas i always remember going merry christmas friday be merry christmas roll and you know finally eat some good food i look like you know i was so skinny at this point but i'd always play a trick in order to get extra fries as i always eat half of them and then i'd take them up to the counter and say hey how you only fill my fries you know half full and i'd give me another one so i could get more for free but we were so we were like even you know when we'd gone on the train we'd use a concession or children's pass and hope we wouldn't get cork because it was half the price but i looked better was like you know a fear would only beat twelve r b or a couple dollars and we'd be saving a dollar so by getting a concession route fear and we did that for years so what what was driving this because like you lived in new zealand new zealand's a beautiful place i assume you could have just had like a normal life that was like comfortable more comfortable and i love like i'm a founder i've been a founder but i didn't do what you did i didn't sleep in the factory like a mat on the floor for eight ten years i didn't live off of the less than dollar a day like were you guys just like was it you're having so much fun or you just felt there was no other choice or what was the what was the mindset that kept you going because it was like malt like many many years just scrapping i reflect back on us and it's is a little bit hard to understand in all i'll see when you a flick back on it but i think when you're in it together you kind of hold each other accountable and you push each other because you don't wanna fail and i would say me and my brother are equally as competitive and so i don't think you're wanna let the other person up down in a sense and so you just keep fighting because if one of you gave up you're kind of admitting defeat and so in a sense you hold each other accountable to continued to to fight and push forward and as well as that i think we didn't really have another option we didn't understand like back then that there was even such a fingers going and raising money to build a company or you know a game i look back at the extreme i used to write emails to my mom from china and she was beside a herself that you know i was you know i was so young say and i read these emails and to understand how little we understood even about the worlds but just about business and how things worked is quite scary and so i just think we didn't know any bidder we just thought we'll just keep fighting and try and get these little wins and little wins and little wins and you know we started to get you know a little win after little win and then we start to get a little bit more momentum and then you start to learn my one of my favorite sayings is you win or you learn you never lose you never fail so and so connect the dots so now you're you've painted the picture beautifully of to hit the extreme na approach the scrapping and then somehow you know fast forward the tape and the movie and you end up with this super successful toy company i think you know the third most profitable toy company in the world doing over a billion dollars a year sales plus for like forget the other stuff you've even done after that but i'm just saying just the toy part so connect the dots where did you start to really get the momentum or break what were the breakthroughs the epi the key key breaks that got you to to actually get to that success well there were a few stories at all along the way and i remember just sitting there everyday harassing and thinking really big early so i've been i've just gotta get walmart i've just gotta get came out of that time i've just gotta get these big retailers and you know one story i remember ringing walmart every single day and because of the time zones it was late at night and to month after month after month after and i always remember all the early names because i just see it in my memory and i remember one night my brother was basically telling me to give up it was like you're don't gonna get walmart and eventually the buyer ryan he and was on the fo a warm up buyer from china and again i was up with this young company a distant child we're trying to get up the ground got these pot and he said do you have a showroom in hong kong and i said didn't i didn't know what to show in the hong kong was but of course i said yes i'll get back to you at the address we started to learn that the toy industry at the time revolved around these showrooms and a place called tim cha at hong kong the companies had showrooms there and all the buyers from around the world congregate in hong kong twice a year to come to these showrooms so i go on train the next day to hong kong and bad research where these toy companies were and so knock them on toy company doors and trying to do a deal with them i said i'll bring the walmart up buyer and if you just give me some space to use in your address and then you know hopefully you could sell so but your product still as well and every company denied me and denied being and denied me so i thought okay we need to rent a showroom and at the time it was a lot of money but we found these little glass cubicle in a place called south center and there were just a few meters by a few meters like tiny little cubicle but i think they would have been like i know two or three thousand us a month to rent because whole kong was so expensive and so at the time we didn't have that money it was we were so poor but i thought we don't have an option we've got this chance to get the walmart up by coming in and so we we we we just did we have to do it we read this little tiny cubicle and it kinda had curtains on the inside of it and we i i found some shelving that someone was drawing out from the showrooms so i put this little shelving in there we bought like a table and then i had little roll up mattress and sleep in the showroom under the table each night because there's no other room to sleep so i'd un unruly the mattress under the table sleep in that and then i'd wash in the little bathroom in the in south center in the morning but i had the showroom and i start kinda of realizing that the buyers come hong kong in january and october every year so that was good because now i have this kinda base to like invite people too so i get you know i get walmart come in i actually got a guy called frank demi domingo who is from walmart canada and i'll even forget because he came in and i think he was so shocked that he'd given me a meeting when he saw this two meter by two meter showroom room that he came with this two merchandise i went to shake his hand and it changed my hand he didn't even sit down and he just yelled at me he goes quotes across the table and i'd filled out the quotes for around two or three products at the stage it kinda reads the quotes and i'd filled something out wrong and he just throws the quotes down on the table and just walks out at least as to hong kong merchandise just any stereo thing i think that was my second a meeting and i'm just like in shock i'm like wow where it's gonna be and he just storms out and then i contacted his boss and said hey i just really like that experience and was got frank laugh i genuinely think he was really rude and like i didn't and as boss made meet me again in their procurement in walmart procurement center in shenzhen so i was like screw this i'm gonna go up and meet again bit per second time and he ended up ordering and at the stage we had a night ball along with our night for but i think you ordered seventy thousand dollars of this this night ball was another good example of of of persistence and then i remember one day i had a men with came out australia but i was sleeping under my table and the doors only about a meter from my head because this is such a little small showroom and the buyer came an hour early and i was still asleep under the table and she was knocking on the door and i'm sort of like there like looking her feet under the door thinking shit i'm still in bed under my table so i had to wait for her to go away and then messenger her afterwards and say hate you didn't chop but ten o'clock mini says oh i thought it was nine am and they had also sorts some experiences but i used to crash buyers hotels used to post samples under their you know under their hotel doors but really we did what it would it what it would take if this break we got is and this was a crazy story is there was a i was in the uk at a chemical called creation recreation and they were selling our night sports balls at the time so we'd had developed this other poll was instead of our night frisbee we made a night football a lit up at night and a night saw so had sold this chemical called recreation creation i made a guy called shawn on their booth and he'd developed a soccer tam gucci and so it was it was kinda like a tam gucci but you trained your player and through infrared you could play against each other and he like the manchester united license and it was selling reasonably okay in the uk but he was having troubles with manufacturing and i was like well we can make that for you like no problem and he was like great great great you guys could help me make it because we were really you know anything will sort of win at the time we were trying to find a way to win anywhere so we're like sean we can make this and then we started talking well maybe you know david beckham he's moving to the us to play in the us what i pick you the david beckham license and we could try and sell this in the us and he thought this was a great idea we went and pitch at the time i think it was simon simon fuller who started american idol had the david beckham rise at the time and i'm like guess so i'm a super young kid right and they said well we'll give you a big license but it'll cost you a million and a half dollars of course we don't have a million and a half dollars but then we go to walmart and walmart the buyer who know danielle i'll p and never forget it she loved david beckham and he was moving the us and she was just obsessed by david beckham and we probably blew a few bubbles but anyway as it turned out walmart turned around and ordered two point two million units of the david dick tam which i think they're like fourteen bucks fifty or something it was almost thirty million us dollars keep in mind would probably never had an order more than seventy thousand dollars at this point and our total revenue is like in the hundreds of thousands suddenly we get this order for almost thirty million us dollars and then we're like holy shit we've bought we're gonna make a lot of money because we we had huge margin and we were making this thing for three dollars and and we're were gonna make this thing for three dollars or three dollars twenty or whatever it was the sell for fourteen fifty so we were sort of counting our pennies and super excited we didn't even understand that sell through was a big thing but then we were like hold we have to look at how to make this product like you know we've got our tiny little factory with you know twenty people and there's no chance we can make two point two million units so we're not first gone to china i've been on a tour with he's one of the wealthiest guys in hong kong like in france c and it's billie light international about the contract manufacturer for has and mattel and toy companies one of the first factories i ever toured it i somehow got in touch with his two i i called wilson and had taking me on a tour as an eighteen year old with their factory and you can imagine me coming from new zealand and then go into these factories with hundreds of thousands of people weren't just being like whole what this is like and insane so i still had this contact with wilson from early light so i got a meet with wilson i said hey we've got this huge order two point to a million pieces can you help us make it and he said yep and then i said oh and by the way can you also pay for as well he said let me speak with francis come back to came back to me and said yeah if you transfer the liver of credit to us you know we'll help you pay for it as well great so we start making this product two point two million ics two point two million lcd screens to so that all the components and then walmart turns around ten like they cancel it from two point two million pieces down to age you know one point two million pieces and i was like no they can't do that we've got a little of print they've made it at all and then i'm flying back and forth at this point sean's kinda like in the background on this like i don't know twenty year old and i'm thinking there's no way but i was thinking well it's still fine one were two a million pieces we've got so much margin in this we we can still make like good money out of it but then they turned around a canceled that all way down to three hundred thousand pieces yet francis was making all of this poll and i was just like that so i'm going back forward it reads like custom some kind of soap opera because danielle got fired obviously part of this was part of it and with francis i was like there's no way i can tell francis that you know that i've canceled this many pieces and he's paying for it also i'm going back forward to walmart and i calculated that if i get the order about eight hundred thousand pieces we could still pay francis off because we had so much margin and still make like a million a half dollars and eventually i in convince walmart to to get the order back eight hundred thousand dollars i eight hundred thousand nine hundred thousand pieces wherever it was and we shipped this and it was a disaster like it a shower and it was corporate on the shelf like no one would buy it i think they retail at the oz they discounted it to twenty five then twenty in fifteen no i'm still buy then ten dollars no bought it then five dollars no one bought it and then they eventually sold it to the dollar and discount channels for like fifty cents on it like fifty cents a piece and then of course walmart might came back to us and said you have to fund all the markdown down money from thirty dollars to you know fifty cents and we were like what's marked down money and we were determined to keep out a little bit of margin and refused to give them any money back and so we had to we were like no but you cancel these pieces and like that this huge thing anyway we got black ball from walmart for like five years we never a business with walmart after that and it was not two years later that i met danielle boss at new york toy for dear laura sc and i wrote this big long email of everything that happened and like and we started to work either again but that was sort of out as crazy as it was that crazy story was our first break that actually made a little bit of money and then from there i started doing deals with us companies that only sold product in the us but didn't sell internationally so i started doing deals with them because we're were really bad at designing and developing toys terrible in fact so we need good products so i could open up these channels so i do these deals with american companies like z or z to deal the australian company called y sell to take their products and sell them internationally and that kind of an tell a story that i could get their products and everywhere that'll have to go out and hustle so we had a product called z which became really successful at a product called sc which was out of australia that became really successful so we started kinda ta other people's pull ups how did you figure out that model because you know did you see somebody else doing that and you're like oh that's much simpler than what we're trying to do or did you fall into it like it seems like you didn't use a lot of like mentors you did a lot of running around with the fork sticking it into outlets trying to figure out you know where the we're which ones are working there's that is a great analogy that's exactly what we did we just to be honest we were making these products and out the second pull line we made with these night balls but the product was so bad matt would factory by the stage and the engineering of them was so bad that they had these sort of foam eva patches glued into this frame but the production i i actually was getting quite a few orders i was hustling around and getting orders but matt couldn't produce them because the production was so hard to do and i get so mad at him there at one point i said i'm coming back from hong kong i was living in my showroom and then from there i was living in a dorm room with eighteen people over a place with puncture mansions in hong kong so wasn't exactly living the i in hong kong i was getting these orders and my brother couldn't produce them so i was like i'm coming back to like to china to take over the factory and i were two words of chinese one was came too slow and mine was quiet go faster and we ended up like put i was like on the production line pushing to get these balls out the door and i remember they were coming off the end of the production line half mangled and i was just like ship them just ship them ship the balls and we've gotta ship them but i remember years later like you'd see these things on shelves and all the ear gone out of them all eva patches peel off them and those these s little prune that called health i love that you're honest about it because there's so many people because it's a very sexy thing to be like you know what all all that mattered was product and we really just built a great product and then everything worked because we built a great product and like i don't know i know i've been there is like dude the first version of all my products sucked in fact the tenth version still kinda sucked and i think i love that you're kind of una bash and honest about like look we weren't super innovative we saw shit working and then we were like cool we could do lights on frisbee lights on a ball like that okay well let's copy what works and that your product kinda sucked and you were just like basically you just kept doing door to door sales even like at a global level you just started doing global like door sales mean literally it sounds like it was like distribution and salesman and marketing that was keeping you a afloat at the time yeah well we would sell i would sell a product to someone and then we we wouldn't get a realtor reorder we didn't know what a reorder was because the product sell through and then we just sell a new product to a new customer and we wouldn't get and i'll just help another customer and we didn't know for probably seven or eight years what a reel reorder there was like we'd had product actually actually sold off the shelf and the customer go back to buy more of them but we could but continually hustle to all these different customers but we did crazy things like we like a little back on and it was kind nuts like we sold this product the night ball we got a distributor in the us called spin master that one of the biggest toy companies in the world now a pretty similar story to our own three canadians built this this this this toy company very similar to us and spin master had agreed to take our night sports falls for distribution in the us and i'd kinda hustle a few retailers and so was this it was this shall we sell it to retail shall we use spin master they'll will really put lots of tv marketing on tv market at the time was the the thing and they said we'll we'll run this test in cincinnati so we'll put your night balls into all walmart in cincinnati and we'll run media in that in that city and then we'll decide whether to roll this thing out and whether or not i was dishonest i think it was more desperation at the time but of course i flew to where the test was i got to new york and i couldn't get a fight cincinnati well i could but it was too expensive that there was summer holidays i went down to the bus station i remember the bus station in new york at the start of summer holidays just like nothing on ever scene it was absolutely chaos but i got a greyhound cincinnati i think like thirty hours of broke down stop different places couldn't a greyhound henderson cincinnati stayed in this absolute like horrific place but every day and yes this is a little bit dishonest but we would desperate back then i would bus i get the bus schedule i'd bus each walmart i'd give people cash to go by a wall i'd go out and buy them on different credit cards myself was so paranoid that we get caught just to help our test sales go up a little bit and i buy these night sports balls but it was a long day because the walmart were so far apart and i was taking this bus scheduled to get to each one i stayed there for a month and i almost got kills in a place go over the rhine and if you look it up it was the most dangerous neighborhood in america at the time over the ride it's like while there was over these railway tracks and i managed to walk down there in the middle of the day and it there's the scariest thing in my life i had a guy come up to me and he said what the fuck are you doing here white boy and and i was like mister tourist and i hadn't realized i was in this like area and then i managed to somehow like weeks later walk into it i was walking back from downtown was such as uber back then on taxi so i was trying to walk back to where i was staying which was very close to over the rhine and i walk in the wrong direction i walked him there at the middle of the night and i got chased and had to hide that was very funny but yeah we were doing this to to get our test results up which we had a good test and then spin master to rolled the product out of course it wasn't wasn't a great product in terms of its construction it was the same thing but my god do we have to hustle we had to strap of fight so hard to to like literally initially just survive but we got to a point where we were we were selling enough to each new customer of each new product and we were getting reorder but we were profitable and it was actually funny because after the david beckham thing we made like that million a half dollars or whatever it was we got a little bit fat and happy and we had a month where we lost two hundred thousand dollars and i remember sitting we sat down and we're were like oh my oh we lost money this month and we were like from this day on we will never have a day a month a week a year where we lose money like if we're losing money in a month we will like sit down and we will like eat nothing or we will like get rid of people or we will like live on nothing just to ensure that we're like profitable because people will wonder how do we get to you know a few billion and in a few billion dollars a year and in sales now and we've built it completely organically and the truth is we just because we like we're so frugal and we start building our business got more and more and more profitable just every year of twenty years so it was almost this cognitive of process to how do we remain profitable and then that's just compound open twenty years and we've just got more and more and more profitable to the point where percentage wise by far the most profitable point came in the world where we run it like forty percent net at profits which is unheard of in any wow industry in the world the product industry in the world little only in software company so so we just built a very very different model that's why i roughly reflect on it now it it's almost like we built something from first principles the way we set up factories the way now we automate all of our production the way we don't do domestic shipping we do all fob the way we centralize all of our content and data systems run martha globally we've almost built this company from a first principles approach because it's so different to help everyone else does it but we did that more through navy than through planning so you're starting this kind of like eighteen years old when you go to china do you remember how many years it take you to get to your first you where you made a hundred grand or or when you made a million dollars like how many years was that well it was probably a couple of years where we started to make money but we still live the same way because we needed that money to fund a growth effectively you can't grow to billions of dollars a year in sales organically without borrowing money or go into a bank unless you're super profitable to continue funding that growth and so we sub to make money but we never spent it we still lived the same way i still lived in a dorm room in whole hole and so for years but probably eight years and as i said matt had as we slowly moved and built big at that crease matt would always have a tiny road like a tiny little room in the factory and that's where he lived in charlotte with no other like role interaction really with anyone else and we were going crazy in those first years in china like i looked baffled i'm like we had some serious problems and so you you take it all the at some point you start figuring out toys that are new novel good products mh like i've bought your bunch of balloon products where you fill up i don't know if it's like a hundred or five hundred now like a hundred water balloons at once you can fill up in like takes like fifteen seconds to fill them all up so you eventually start making good products how did that happen so who we it was sitting a parallel path who were taking other people's colleagues and that was helping us to really open up distribution i would hustle and get them into all the retailers across all the countries there's an email that i've seen internally that i had for like twenty years ago and it kind less every country in the world and all the retailers and distributor i was working with it the time trying to sell the parties too so we really like pushing out to everyone and at the same time we were starting to learn how to make better products ourselves we sort of building a team in china and engineers and like some designers and we're starting to sort of parallel path building our own products as well but i think our our big break after evs came when we did robo fish robo is still we still sell about eight million of them a year today and this was a chinese being we ended not getting sued for this as well we're a five year lawsuit but a chinese bean xi and i met a guy in hong kong a freak guy who had a factory at china was running a factory in china and he was doing some board rings of some for some inventions and he showed me this ro fish i should i thought and cool and think too much over then he showed my brother and my brother loved though so i gotta make this ro fish prom and part of the deal was we had to make it in their factory if we like the sip from from them so we licensed the fish and it was like it's got little carbon sensors it's very very clever design it has only electromagnetic coil on it so it touches water it's all microbes swims and looks like a like a real fish swims in all directions and it's water acting about it so we start making this fish and then the guy who was the inventor had worked in a us company before and he had tried to sell the to them that said no head sign to release on the and saying no problem you can go out to anyone else of course robe blew up came over with this selling toys in the world and then he decided that actually the inventor had designed some schematics or diagrams why who was under unemployment and he would sue us because they were still on his computer systems and so we were in this long haul lawsuit but even worse we finally had like this mess it was like the number one selling tour at once countries around the world it was it took us to i think we did like a hundred million dollars so this was like a big break for us but unfortunately there's always a curve ball the factory that we were bound to make it with weak bankrupt in the middle of production but we had to design so much specialist production lots was the tools but all these fish were tested underwater for precious that didn't leak and there was just a ton of like specialized equipment that have been built to produce a robo fish they were all slightly the weights had to be perfect so this whole factory gets shut down and of course the wars in china mean that the factory workers are the first creditors essentially so they send the army in to like stop anything nothing or any assets been taken from this factory so we're like peak robo fish production peak demand finally we've got clients that are selling and everyone's scrambling there were retailers that wouldn't talk to me for like seven years actually one of my good friends today it's one of the biggest independent retail chains in the in the uk could entertain it and the son of the owner stew one of my closest close friends today he wouldn't be the evening and called me for eight years like i couldn't even get an appointment with it but suddenly when robo fish took off suddenly always these buyers were coming to us said hey like like that rover fish so you can imagine we finally had this momentum and then this t of the factory and we lied we were like shit and it was crazy we could not get into the factory so my brother we had to do and this again there's so many of these stories but we were like we have no other option we have to get our tool and we have to hit a loud equipment we have to eat everything out of that factory and really roy relocated it to another factory but the army was there everyone was here you couldn't get in so in the middle of the night my brother got like eight trucks got all of our team from one of our little factories filled these trucks with with people in in like two three in the morning when there were less people like camped out at the factory pull up the factory paid a bunch of bribes to go in took all the trucks into the factory all our people went in picked up all of the tooling and all of the equipment loaded up all the trucks in the middle of the night left and we weren't really relocated to a new factory so we could could continue new production so it was it was crazy but that was like again like nothing even happens without a hiccup right like it was sort like we finally felt like we had momentum and then this happened so how how old are you now city not okay you're thirty nine do you still go as hard or like are you still as nuts as the early version of you like do you still have the same drive or are you human and you're like you know yeah i used to really be super you know super driven super resilient going going really really balls to the wall and now i'm you know tired and whatever you know i'm i'm a i'm a old guy now like do you still have it i can always still have think we still as motivated today if not more motivated added than we have ever been we see a pretty pretty cool roadmap here where we wanna get to the next ten years particular in building houses on production lines and a so let's talk about that so could you just summarize how big is the how big is the the empire today so there have a two of a billion us in in revenue but we're growing at about twenty five percent to thirty percent year on year so that's compelling but i think the thing with us is is our revenue is one thing it's just how profitable we've built the business and it's public or it's not a not a public company not public okay so privately held super profitable company that's like a billion dollars a year of profit basically out of the toy business but then you have this diaper company it's you started you started buying other companies right not so much buying i i actually got crohn's so i got sick in china and hong kong and i had to have my bell my large intestine on removed this probably has something to do with living in china for those years eating crude poorly i'm not sure but i had to move home to new zealand to get surgery about six years ago and it ended up being a great thing so i was in hong kong i i came home for the surgery i was me to rest for a while and i was sitting at home and i was getting restless trying to rest as i had my bell my large bowel will moved and i had a friend who had started a small back of business and he was doing like fifty grand a year d in new zealand so really really small he'd been met away at it for three years and i thought wow i'm might as well help with this but i always thought like toys is this industry where there really is a ceiling the size of the business you can grow just because of this the you know the addressable market the size of the market also you've got brands like hot wheels which are super hard to disrupt and i was looking at at g and i started to realize that there's like nine companies that dominate eighty percent of it globally and when you build a toy business you work in every material form you work at speed like speed of innovation is your dna you build this muscle for speed and working fast and innovating because you reinvent forty fifty percent of your entire product like every single year but first you haven't been so much from your product line every year it comes really hard to keep growing right because it's a reinvent to to to catch up every year and so i started to form this thesis about six years ago thought and we're so good at automating and we we sort of i would classify azure today as more an automation company than anything else like the part is almost secondary rate we build incredibly sophisticated automation we had a huge automation team so whether that's built your house on production lines with robots or a dark plaster with robots it's you know a big part of what we do so you know i was like we've we've built this automation muscle and the speed of automation muscle and i feel like these big fifty companies they one that don't innovate two they have a lot of jo so if you look at pit food it's mars and nestle if you look at baby it's kimberly clark and pop and gamble if you look at beauty personal care l'oreal and pop gamble a little bit unilever so there's a lot of if you look at laundry it's pretty much just bot gamble totally unilever so all these duo and monopoly across the board and through that they were delivering much margin to their retail partners they really held the the power and i met i remember mapping out walmart revenue and i met that against the top eight g companies in the world so walmart to more revenue that all of them combined but then what's that what's that acronym you're you're saying what mc what is that are fm g fast moving consumer goods so fm g cp g consumer packaged goods so so if i looked at pot gamble disclaimers all the biggest difference fm g companies collectively their revenue is less than walmart who does six hundred eleven billion but then walmart makes any fraction of the profit they're all public companies and the big companies make the lion share has seventy five percent of the profits so i thought is there a world in which we can be disruptive in fm fast moving consumer goods can we deliver more margin to our retail partners can we innovate faster or bring our speed of innovation mindset to to these categories and can we reach customer in a far more efficient way and can we move at the speed of culture and obviously at the time digital and data driven advertising was you know starting to become a bigger thing and you know targeted advertising and i was still looking at the ad idea i was thinking well you've really got a mom a mom who's an incredibly targeted audience or parent who who's incredibly targeted audience how can we serve them and add every single day and a targeted way robin just like wake media so that's efficient way to reach our customer once if we do the better product deliverable margin and position at a better price and that was kind of my overall thesis can we do this and can we run our saying kind of first principles toy model like fob b so we don't hold products super large am advertising dollar spent but in a really centralized control way and i thought okay i can do this i worked with my with my friend and i said okay let's watch this diaper of brand in new zealand as a test market and within one year i think we're taking forty percent market share in new zealand watching a diaper and i remember meeting greg four who the ceo of walmart at the time and he's in new zealand and i met him in new york and i was like greg i you know toys is great and it's been this it's this incredible university for us it really allows us to you know it's you would build skill sets that it's very hard to build in the other industry and i said we're gonna take on diapers and he turned to me and he said it ever heard of coke pepsi like he was saying that it was gonna be that hard to crack like pampers and hug are gonna be that hard to go and disrupt and i said i get you but i think we can do this i'm gonna give it a go so we launched in new zealand the second biggest brand in new zealand was treasures hug was number one treasures was a local brand this year just plummeted they ended up going out of business and and having to sell the brand for for the pennies on the dollar and you're spending a ton on facebook ads or what are you doing time on facebook and then it progressed instagram that was progressed to tiktok like it sort of always progresses right like so you've gotta to move the speed of platt forms but you're also gonna move at speed cautious how do you move at speed trends to build content to move the speed culture was that a new new ish skill set for you because it seems like the toy company was retail driven yeah well youtube was that kind a thing that it was mainly tv advertising for toys at that time so was still tv was predominant and then it kinda switched it to to to youtube so today we don't speak money on tv and toys it's all youtube it's all tiktok it's all youtube shorts so it really like the platform changed in how you reach people so i had this thesis but we just quickly took all market share in new zealand and i was like holy shit we can make an incredible but three fair success is a bad teacher like we just got the success out the gate ra just we launched be i just took off and so i packaged up that case study went to australia with to ko and i said hey look at what we've achieved in new zealand little margin we're delivering look at the category share we're driven we helped food stuff reverse their category share decline like they were getting hammered by the competitor wool worse here we inverted that we took in the other way with them one year so ko was like love launch with ko same thing we won coles non food supplier of the year award in the first year and just help them like take heaps of category share so i was like wow this really works took back model went to the us went to walmart was like hey walmart we could help you disrupt you know your two big suppliers here and they gave us a dallas test same thing we became actually last year walmart fastest growing brand total boss all categories with ras which to target did the same thing with our brand mill mill moon actually just over to private label and h as second biggest sub brand in target in under or about three and a half years which is incredible so it was sort of this slight wake up moment that wow and i think last year we produced two billion diapers and this is all under this is all about five and a half years would would would build this business so well over a billion dollars of retail sales last year in diapers in you know five years so from start to to to go a billion dollars a year shall i say and growing incredibly fast like this year would grow thirty percent again so this was sort of and i have different for me and i thought wow we can do this in all fm categories so i started testing in new zealand and losing like we tested infant formula didn't it work we tried fe care fails we tried like oat milk fail i did all these all things i started failing and i was like but my partner at the time jamie had a background and luxury p and and and beauty was huge beauty of this year so said hey don't do that let's start a beauty brand and we started monday hair care and which is the little pink bottle or forbes school that last year the most famous shampoo and conditioner bottle in the world but we launched that pete covid and that was a circle on it just took off we i think in australia we won product launch of the year and we had five of the top ten in total hair care we over to pent and sales what do you think is the difference between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't is it categories some categories were just more ripe was it you'd nailed the packaging and the positioning and that's actually the thing that matters most is it luck diapers was is driven by price and performance and we were the first one in the world take a china divert to the world and china making the best diapers in the world so in china there's like a thousand domestic brands all competing for the technology and non woven and substrates and sap and machine technology has just gone like that because of more domestic competition so we took the best product in the world to market at the disc price in a category which is price and performance driven so it's either gonna be price and performance driven and a performance driven category or you've gotta be innovation driven so we launched dummy yum which is super innovative to victory product like really innovative and that was just pure innovation that made that like takeoff off so innovation or it's gotta be design and creative so monday was you know store bowl shampoo but incredible design and creative and then we just owned tiktok as an it is the number one here here brand in the world on tiktok and by a long way and it was just the right design creative positioning branding marketing and it i just took off and i think last year in the us it was second only in total growth in here here to pro and gamble total he care portfolio just the brand and so the nice steps to learned kinda of which categories would work for us and we've gone super deep in those categories and we applied our same model so building all the factories in diapers we built a factory i think to was nine months to reduce and we're doubling the size in it right now so it'll have four billion diaper capacity by next year in beauty we built the whole factory everything under one roof and molding rot molding filling mixing all of it we built all the lab in shanghai we've got l'oreal formulation specialist over unilever leave a formulation specialist so as soon as we found something that was working so i was outsourcing to begin with then we do the z thing which is go super deep what about everything we possibly can put all ag b's and so every little part of it we wanna like water as much as possible and then pet food i started at the same time i bought a young guy who won zealand's high school on entrepreneurial program out i got called he's incredible i said let's start a pit food business together actually we work with supermarket and we said let's do pet food and so now we're getting a huge momentum there one of our brands i think bulk was drove thirty percent of all cap growth in america last year and then we experimented in supplements which has been a little bit hard i built a brand with a kardashians called dawson and c we ended up selling that last year just a work ever everywhere else in the world failed in the us and so as soon as we don't have to scale the us sort of less exit and yep and supplements we're sort of struggled one with our brand habit which is sort of ticking away and then very much home care we're building a bunch of brands as well so sort of ant conviction so we've built this what i call our five vertical strategy and we're going very very deep within all of these verticals and i think all of them individually can be bigger than our toy company within you know two or three years what's what's the dream like so why why go so hard why i you so many right like you could just off the toy company you could be sitting on a boat you own looking at an island you own with a you know a beautiful drink in your hand is that just you you love the game you have some dream you wanna be a hundred billionaire what's the what's driving doing more and more and more i think we love it number one love having a thesis love competing for me it's it's sport right like it is sport having a thesis going into something working it out and as we build these things you know toys business the edge business fm g business you know as you become more successful you like how can i solve bigger problems and the same person create for and all i said you gotta wrap your business on a bigger purpose as well and i thought we thought can we solve bigger problems because we're almost in a privileged position now right how do we go on and actually solve bigger problems which is while we've stopped buildings the boutique over the last what's actually been eight or nine years can you can you explain what that is so it's a crazy moonshot idea i think you have you either have or are building the largest factory in the world period what what do what is the what is that idea what is z attack so z tech the thesis really was if you look at the construction industry it's been done the same for hundreds of years it's also the biggest segment or market in the world construction and property development and the idea was how do we build the first factory in the world that has a customized input so the design of a building and a fully automated output so how do we build the buildings for a small fraction of the cost of what you build a building for today and and we're now we we started off so we built our software which is called dream catch which is built on unreal engine it has an incredibly simple ui sort of user interface but the logic layer or the coding lab below that is incredibly incredibly complex with catalog every building code in the world so you can drop a pin on any location of the world that maps the terrain it does the building code and then you can design your house or building or whatever building you want in our dream catch software we've also built our own ai assistant or on our own large language model called qui which is basically training it's training our model on all the great architects so you can talk to your building and it builds it in front of you you can put a two d plan in you can decide on this room i want to be stockholm home style and furniture and it max furniture and does it for you so it's incredibly intuitive software basically a ten year old can design on dream catcher and then it does all structural side it does all the e the mechanical electrical to the plumbing it does it order a super intelligent way wherever you drop the pin where you're building the building it works out the orientation of the building for the sun that works out how many hvac units you need it works out how many solar panels you need so basically then the software translates every part into our factory our factory builds every single part and it's completely automated and the factory is designed from start to finish so originally we built a one fifth scale factory so that's to test the software with the hardware and how that all integrates together so it builds leads mini houses the one fifth and every dimension and then we once we got that working we built it's about a three hit there factory and it's a test production line and that right now is producing that's we're testing the software at full scale with full scale houses and we're building a house about every two weeks right now which is test and then we have like hundred little changes and we go in software and changing it and then we bought a factory or or a building it's twenty five acres in size which is our first commercial factory for reducing commercial houses and in phase four we'll be building one of the biggest factories in in in the world i think technology only to boeing is is the plan so that's all planned out now but we are building a house for five hundred dollars square meter and it's the best quality in the world added concrete ceramic tile but we have innovated every single part of the process so we have the wall module the tile module the window module the lighting module the smart home module and every single team i think is the best in the world of what they're doing so it is a huge project there's a massive of undertaking i think we have about seven hundred software and hardware engineers working on it are you self funding this or did you raise money for correct you know we self funded it so we're getting very close now to a a final product we think we're five test houses away from getting it very close to to perfect and then it should be transformational in in in terms of how the world builds and anyone can use drink capture the software so you could go on to dream catcher and they might be a million different two bedroom houses that have been designed by people on the platform and you can look through them you can put a price on selling your own design you can go through them in real time you can stage furniture we'll have a marketplace ikea could digitally scan all of their furniture into our marketplace artists could digitally stand all it athens so you can put it in your house so you can go rather in real time and see it and so the software is really the software is really incredible you know what what what what we've built so super exciting that where we're getting so close out and the the houses that we're producing each couple of weeks are are really incredible i mean this is a insanely cool idea just to basic it's like like if you go to the website it looks like you're looking at the sims the video game like he's like you could just kinda like zoom around a house you can like move things whatever but you're saying there's a button where you just basically click print and then the house gets built in an automated factory which is just a a kind of mind blowing idea how much are you gonna put into this funding wise like you must be put this must be like you must be putting hundreds of millions of dollars is that is that right or my overestimate any wallet for sure so the software so we have three offices in india on the software side pun qatar in underground and we have two in italy milan and won the reason in italy is we actually acquired years ago the software part of it it was two guys martin the paris both architects that decided that architectural software was built on incredibly old software stacks and so they were like well gaming engines are like don't like this and so they decided to build software or architectural software on unreal engine and so we acquired them and that's sort of the reason i think we have about one hundred and sixty hundred and sixty or of people sitting in italy on the on the software side and then they work with india on the software side and then in china we built all the hardware side out so we have three sites where we're doing all of the hardware and automation development but we kinda parallel that our automation team is sort of grown and parallel we you know they automate for example we produce for fifty seven million dark and water blast a year but we produce a dart blast from a plastic gran through the finished poll with no people our competitors like has they outsourced to factories who super produce with drills on production lines we're now building out automation two point o where we're using vision and machine learning so we can actually change out any mo of blast on the same production line it can see the molds and we can see the shape and where all the screw holes are and it adapts completely so we've kind of parallel like parallel our automation and with building a housing project but also taking all that expertise and building a across our azure region and and toys a business which makes us so so disrupt that but the big difference is when we a polite in fm or toys you're making the same product over and over and over again with robots this is incredibly complex because you're building a tailored product for every building site in the world and every building code of the world and it's different every time and so having that fully automated output with a fully customized input has never really been or has never been done before in the world did you're a mad man do you even like who are your peers like who you relate to do you just read like an elon musk biography and here you're like this the only other guy in the world who i have something in common with like is that somebody admire what what we have a huge admiration for eli with the big tesla atkinson and fans for a very long time and fact i would say i had a chance to meet him and then i had to fly home for an emergency and so i actually don't know him but my brother my brother was very similar to you so my brother was sort of the the driver behind ridiculous at our our building project he's very similar in his way of of thinking i think like calls at the idiot index for example right and the idiot index is when you look at the cost of a rocket well he looked at the cost of what a rocket used to cost to build and then he looked at the cost of the materials and it's like you know hundreds of times of cost of materials to build a rocket and he's like well then he takes the first principles approach breaks it out and he works out effectively you know how to build a rocket at a price that makes sense based on the cost of the raw materials i mean we're having a similar approach to how we build a building whether it's at one story or a hundred stories it's look at the cost and the materials out of the ground and look at the final cost of the building the idiot index is really high and so it's same or similar type of thinking so how do you go back your first principles approach and do it from the ground up and a completely different way did you see the other day i think yesterday or two days ago boom supersonic did their first supersonic flight i don't know if he followed this startup up i did yeah he he kind of had a similar story where from he worked at group on basically and he's like you know a product manager at group on selling coupons on the internet and then you know for fun was basically having a you know a hobby of flying and then gave himself a year to from a first principal point of view understand how planes work and figure out if there was some business he could build in the you know around planes because he just loved planes and while he was building a spreadsheet he was just like i don't get it there's no reason we shouldn't be flying supersonic speeds right now and then he took it to like professors and others he's like we're where's is the error in my calculations because this is telling me we should be doing supersonic and they were like no there's no theoretical errors just no one's doing it like there's no courage is the limit not like there's not a materials problem there's a courage problem there's a entrepreneurship problem and seeing that go you know yesterday to do their first supersonic flight was super inspiring incredible so you you're doing all this stuff do you like have hobbies do you do stuff outside of this what's like what is fun for yours is this is like my cup is full with this sport definitely sport we loved it's loved competing really so in that has a competition element is something that i get a lot of enjoyment out of so you certainly tennis sc just swore in general is is is something that enjoy doing but yeah as you all they're like obviously we don't i always think you wake up every day with that pit of your stomach because you're wondering what's gonna go wrong today and what do we have solved today so you know obviously we don't have that that issue any longer and and definitely get to spend more time with family i finally had my first child last year so that's congrats any a big change it definitely changes your spec on things i think which is solved which has been really good i was sort of kick the can delayed as long as possible i think it would slow it out but it's definitely been one of the best things so do you when you start these new companies but i was i was find this interesting whenever ever you have like a serial entrepreneur people have different approaches so some people they you know they have their main thing and they leave and they say i'm gonna go on a sa basically for a year figure out my next thing other people they take some percentage of their time they're dev voting it to new ideas and they ghost they roll up their sleeves and they're super like on the ground figuring out the new idea other people they recruit a operator and they just give the operator kind of like the idea maybe a little bit of a plan and then let the operator run and they kind of are there as more of a chairman or a board member from afar when you did like the diaper brand and these other ones were you like boots on the ground like everyday figuring it out or did you do the operator model what what did you do decently boots on the ground what i would say is in our businesses a through line through it right we're essentially making a product where those was a house and bowl bullshit poo a laundry pot or a dark master i mean it's essentially still making building factories selling it into into retail so we've built such a big fly like if you look at our chin in office we have three and a half thousand people there right it's such a big flywheel that it just becomes easier and easier to plug into that flywheel regardless of you know what category in you at all different industries but we're still effectively trying to make the best product in the world at the price we set ourselves the goal of making a product the zero dollars i know that's impossible that that's how we've got do we that's zero dollars and how we make it the best in the world so there's a through line through it all so very much boots on the ground i believe you know leadership has to be on the dance for have to have your hands dirty that's where you get most insights and in our business now i'm you know i'm a huge believer in firing bullets and failing fast so i say get an actionable insight with insight finding an insight somewhere in the world and an insight forms a bullet and a bullet is a minimal viable investment into testing something and then at the bullet works it's a cannonball ball and we invest and we build the recipe around that and what's the recipe is working you can pull lot more things into that recipe and build that recipe out so our mindset around fast fail we actually have what we call fast start now and fm g so we're trying to build a minimal viable products test quickly as fast as possible and so we can really speed like speed of innovation is is probably the biggest thing for us and we're trying to test more things in these categories faster and learn what works and what doesn't because in my experience things either just like hit the ground and start working or they don't and then we have a mindset around continuous improvement so we call it two percent improvement a week the power of compounding i know two percent improvement a week is nothing you can measure but that's the mindset that's what we put into our dna and we always say to the team we suck now compared to where we we'll be in the future so we had this relentless mindset and being able to look back on ourselves a year ago and be like we weren't even good then and i think that compounding improvement is such a a a big part of of what we do and then from you know where i look at team members i'm trying to people say they're try and build talent density in their business yes we try and build talent density but for us we're trying to build like grit density and i say when we hire we're looking for grit smarts and someone with a bias action like real do right people are just like we fast fail we go in we do it we are the winner we learn if it doesn't work we're getting heaps of insights out of that and how to improve next time so our mindset or our dna in the business works across any of those verticals or categories are aware we have the same mindset and the same approach and the same dna as to how we approach them if you were interviewing me how would you figure out if i have any grit i i think actually like looking back at your history is it's kinda like we often find like people at really great competitive sports people and they really love the win in were highly competitive like i wanna understand how competitive you are how much you really want something and to be honest it cameo really hard like we've built this loop process in our business similar to the amazon loop so where you know half we're hiring and looking at you know whether you fit and can do the actual job but the other half is really do you align to our dna and so we have a loop we have you know eight people you know half of those people will interview of questions around you know our dna and really trying to go deep on understanding of that person fits our dna and so we're really trying to build up you know all our talent density but our grit density but certainly it's something that i find is really important all our best people have just incredible grit and incredible by aspiration sure that's smile but they just get shit done and you know we decide something in a meeting and they're already kind action it in that very moment and that's kind of our our our culture well is that it's kind of that saying as well right that lazy people work a little bit and expect to be winning whereas winners work as hard as they possibly can and worry that they're being too lazy and i feel like that's super true right like people that like work hard they're always worrying that not doing enough or but they're being too lazy and it's kinda of those people that's kinda like the mindset where we're we're we're looking for yeah the elon has a good question he uses in interviews he says tell me about he just start sits down he just says tell me about the hardest problem you solved and how you did it and you know you could get so much from one question because what's the hardest problem they solved you know it it'll show you the the scope and the trust they had in the prior roles like where they're just n on tiny little issues or were they actually like biting into really meaty things yeah and like yeah can they talk about the details the paths that didn't work the pets that did work because that's the person who was actually doing the work there's so much like resume lying where somebody says oh yeah we did this like tell me how you did it they don't know because they weren't the one doing those parts of it correct great nick this was awesome ben i really appreciate you coming on i know you don't do a lot of podcasts but your story is is honestly incredible i think as much as you're building in the factories i think you can you doing it at podcast like this can build ten thousand new entrepreneurs with more grit with more resilience just by sharing the story because you're showing you know what's possible you're showing what you did how it all turned out and how you approached it and so i think you know a simple hour like this can do a lot for a lot of people so i i really thank you for doing it was a lot of fun and yeah i don't often share us through that often but yeah i totally agree if it can help inspire people and i always say it right it it's not really how capable you are it's how willing you are and i think it's a willing people that stick out it for a long consistent period of time and continually improve that actually are most successful it's not necessarily about how smart you are really just grit perseverance and and you're end up getting there so i think that's the big lesson for any entrepreneurs out there really right on alright thank you so much that's a wrap i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days all on a road less travel never looking back