Graphy started as a bootstrapped MVP in Edinburgh - a few sketches sold to Scottish customers before a line of code was written - and quickly drew term sheets from London, New York and San Francisco. Rather than default to the Valley, Andrey Vinitsky picked the place where the money, the mentors and the quality of life all lined up.
He shares what having patient capital bought him: two months to define hiring philosophy, culture and process before shipping, a bias toward hiring the best talent anywhere over location, and a habit of asking three or five mentors rather than one. He's candid about first-time-CEO lessons, from underestimating recruiting to the loneliness of the role and looking after the whole team's mental health.
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors. Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
Hey, crew. Welcome back. We're on day two of week six at Turing Fest. So you some of you may have seen some of the talks earlier in the week with April Dunford talking about positioning with Amy Zima on product strategy and with Yara Paoli talking about structures for growth in in early stage startups.
Three really, really excellent talks, loads to chew over loads to go back into tons of tons of value there. Yadas talk, especially I think it was really like anyone who's in a growth growth team or building influencing the shape of their org, there's lots to learn and go back into there.
So do go back and check those out. And we've an interview coming up in a few minutes here with with the Palomine actually, so we'll get into that momentarily. But before that, just wanted to let everyone know about that. If you wanna check out of the expo, lots of our partners in there are hiring at the moment.
So if you're on the hunt for your next opportunity, Amazon, Current Health, Deliveroo, administrate, iZettle, they're all hiring right now, product management roles, engineering roles, design, tons of jobs there. So worth worth a look. Then next Monday as well, I just wanted to mention a session from one of our partners, and digital are running a session on data ethics of finance.
That is next Monday, five thirty after we finish the the afternoon keynotes. So that's one to register for now. And check out on Monday. Okay, so we're over to one of the one of the hottest startups in in Europe right now. And if you haven't heard of them, you probably will have the next couple of years.
And it's a startup that has its roots in Edinburgh, which is where about two years ago, I met the co founder and CEO Andre Venitsky. And it's been pretty amazing to to see just to see from a distance the journey that they've been on.
So we're gonna hear a little bit about that now. So Andre, if you're there, come on in. Hello. Hello. Hey, man. Hey. How are doing? See you, Brian. Yeah. I'm great. How are you? I'm good, man. I'm good. We're, yeah. I I'm sorry we're not in person.
It's, you know, nothing's in person right now, but we'll see you're you're in London, right? Right now? Yes. Yes. Exactly. Okay, cool. So we can maybe talk a little bit about how you started in Edinburgh, how you were tempted by San Francisco and New York, but how you how you pick London and the reasons for that.
So maybe, maybe we go back to so you and I met back in twenty eighteen. I was doing a talk at the at administrates conference. You were in the audience. We chatted afterwards, and we went for coffee a few days later. Yes. And, yeah, you and I straightaway, it was it was pretty obvious to me.
Was like, this guy's is is going places. He's he's pretty ambitious, and he moves fast. So maybe tell us a little bit about just the overview, your background, graphy, you know, just a quick a quick intro on on that and how you were in Edinburgh as well.
That's pretty helpful. No, of course. Yeah, I still remember when we met two years ago for the first time, was a forty two, I think, which was quite cool. But yeah, I lived in Scotland for six years. I'm originally from Moldova. I moved to Scotland to study marketing and management at Napier University.
I'm non technical and yeah, I've kind of like coming and saying like, I'll be studying marketing, Same time, I'll be thinking about ideas, changing the world, all of these big dreams. And when I first started my co founder who was living in Spain at the time to also move to Edinburgh, he enrolled to a computing science course and we've been brainstorming ideas for think one year or something like this.
And what happened then is we built our first company when I was, I think second or third year at university, which was basically a consultancy. And we used to build custom and interactive data visualization experiences. We've worked with different agencies, startups, SMEs and different companies.
And working with all of them, realized that every single company you'd speak to have the same two problems. Working with data is really hard. Every single solution looks like it was built in nineteen ninety five, horrible experience, and only a few technical people from a company can understand these solutions.
The second problem is that when they discover some insights or see some spikes or anything like that, just take screenshots, share them on Slack, send long emails discussing why this spike happened and so on. This is when we decided to start working on Graphite.
And Graphite's the easiest, most powerful, and most flexible way for teams to work with data. You can just build powerful dashboards in seconds by connecting your data from everywhere, invite your entire team and collaborate on this data. And we just started working on this idea of how can we productize this.
And what we've done is we build a couple of sketches quickly and we managed to sell to our first customers who are in Scotland without writing a single line of code just to do a couple of sketches. This is when we realized that this can potentially be big.
So we went, we built the product, we bootstrapped it for the first eight months from Edinburgh. And then, yeah, I think someone took our websites and published this to Bitalyst, or we published this on Bitalyst. Not of this were being contacting by different investors and from London, in general from Europe and from the United States.
And yeah, it's been quite exciting. I am in London now, we had a difficult choice between Edinburgh, London, New York, and San Francisco. And my plan was like, I'll go and pitch in all these places. And whenever I'll get a term sheet from, I'll stay in this place.
And happened is that we got term sheets from every single place we went to, from the UK to the States, both New York and San Francisco, and then decided to move to London. And yeah, London was awesome before lockdown, but I guess now looking back, I I I'd probably stay in Scotland right now and and enjoy it, basically.
So so, yeah, that's that's that's a quick story about us. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's been a it's been a whirlwind. Yeah. It is it's funny. I think it was it was I think it was November of twenty eighteen when we first met. So it is exactly two years.
So you it feels like you've done a lot in those in those two years, especially in this one weird year that we're having at the moment. And so fundraising journey is an interesting one. And I think something that you did that's different to a lot of a lot of companies in, in Scotland and across the UK in general.
You were pretty quickly you got on to you went to the States, you got on a plane, and you, you got to you made you hustled your way to some intros, you got on a plane, you know, and I think, by the time I think maybe two or three months into knowing you, you were you were, like, pitching at Andreessen Horowitz and stuff like that in San Francisco.
And I remember at the time you this was this whole new world. And you were like, you know, it's like this incredible experience. And I was wondering if your if your head was going to be turned by San Francisco, you know, you were just going to go, Oh, the valleys, the place for me.
And it did it, there was a moment where it seemed like that. And then you decided decided for London. Think that was a good move. And so COVID COVID made everywhere weird and maybe being in Edinburgh would be better right now and green space all that.
But what were the when you made the decision to stay in the UK versus go to the States? What were the factors behind that? And do you think it was the right call? Yeah. Yeah. I think I a couple of things. I met a bunch of founders who are running successful companies from London, and I was like really impressed by everything we're doing and the way they do this from here.
And also, brands in Europe are becoming more and more competitive. And I got almost the same offer to fundraise or in San Francisco or in the UK, but the difference is that money in the UK are much more available to us because you don't pay here three hundred thousand dollars per year for an engineer or something like this.
So it's way more advantages than another point to me was that I feel like the life quality, like to me personally, I think it's better in London with all the parks. Also, again, I should say this, it's also closer to home, so I have reason why I stayed, but actually one of the reasons was here is that some of the investors I met, and I met some people again, who used to run companies in the States and used to be investors in States and now they're running these funds from London.
Kind of like everything clicked to me, if you could tick all the boxes, London ticked all the boxes from at some point. So the choice was very, very obvious for me to move here then. And so you, so you you raised some money.
Not that long into that journey, I guess, and you raised a pretty decent amount of money raised an eight figure sum, I think you the rounds never been announced. So I guess we can't go into details. But the top tier funds across Europe and the US, and that's it seems like that's has that opened a lot of doors for you?
Yeah. I I mean, obviously we don't announce the round because we still kind of like are keeping on the radar, but the amazing part is that there is a huge demand for Grafias for what we're doing and we're solving a much bigger problem than we thought when we started this.
So this makes it extremely exciting. That's why we'll be opening the doors quite soon and announcing everything and so on. So it's not that far away from now, but yeah, I mean, look, I'll tell you on anecdotes, and I think we discussed this.
When I was staying in Scotland and I was chatting with other founders and asking them about fundraising journey, all of this and feel like that normal rounds of like a hundred k, two hundred k, three hundred k, but then I'd go back home in the evenings and I'll open Crunchbase, look at our competitors or companies in a similar stage, we're raising three, four, five, six millions and so on.
I was just like asking like, hey, what's wrong with my company? Can we just go and raise this amount of money? I I was asking this question quite a lot to you, Brian, and I wasn't getting an answer. Didn't know this look like.
So then I just decided I saw the potential of Graphite. I deeply believe it will have a chance to change how every single company in the world is working with data and is collaborating on data. So like, hey, my vision is as big, I have the same potential to IPO or as any of these companies.
So I went bold and I was asking for a huge chunk around essentially. Again, it difficult to be honest with you. If you find the right investors who understand your space and you have your compelling story, you have some metrics to back it up.
If they feel the founder chemistry and so on, so at the end of the day, it's not something difficult. So maybe feel lucky, but the investment process was super smooth. To be honest with you, I enjoyed it because of some of the people I met who I'm still very, very good friends with.
Yeah, it's been fun. It's a great example of how even before COVID hit, the geography was definitely becoming less of a factor in investment decisions. And, and, you know, hopefully that that seems like it's a good thing for for most ecosystems in the world, right?
If if the money that was been concentrated in a few small places gets dispersed a bit more. So once you once you got money in the bank, and you had this, you had your own yourself and your co founder, Roman, you guys had your own sort of innate belief and self confidence.
But then when somebody when people write, start writing big checks for you, that gives you maybe more confidence, and it gives you more firepower. And then I guess the clock starts ticking. And the first thing you've got to do is is build your team.
So how how is the team building been going? How many people are you now in graphene? Yes. So we are twenty one as of today, but like still still growing and still will close some some people by New Year. So it'll be closer to thirty, I guess, by by New York time.
Cool. So in that in that process, where did you where did you start? I mean, I guess you're looking at you're getting some engineers in. You had Roman, your cofounder is is CTO. And you got in a couple of pretty, pretty impressive people and who had been at at, you know, one in particular that you you brought in from intercom.
Maybe talk us through how how that went and that that kind of, I guess it's a process, right? It's kind of it's not just recruiting someone. Selling them on the journey. Yes. No, of course, of course. And unlikely any other founders, we didn't have much of a network.
Like my co founder Roman, he'd never worked in another big company where he can just go and approach very pleased to join us and something like it sound like about me. We've never worked in a company. We've just been doing this stuff for a while and experimenting, crying, failing, and so on.
So when we fundraised, we closed rounds, we moved to London. The next thing we've been doing is it's thinking like more about hiring in general and just thinking we we knew about graphic potential, but we also realized, both of us, that we can we can build the product we want just by building this world class team, finding the best engineers, basically best talents for every single role or recruiting.
We've been doing that. To be honest with you, kind of like we took it so serious. I remember our first two months after fundraising, I don't think we brought a single line of codes. We just took the time and we thought like, what's our philosophy?
How do we think about hiring? How do we think about fairness? How do we think about options? How do we think about processes? How do we think about benefits? How do we think about interview and everything else? And I've been working from a seed camp office back then.
So I've seen our founders next to us and they've been doing things differently and was very often asking myself this question, is it something, is it the right thing I'm focusing on or not? But I'm really glad today that we made these decisions and we made these choices and the amount of horror stories I've heard from other founders of companies who scaled, which did the things wrong, just was so big because I just knew that we're not going to make this mistake for graphics.
So we spent extra time at looking at our processes, at our interview process, at general, like a bit of options. And then another thing happened is that when we started, we followed to get our first employees involved with like three, four, five, we'll figure out the best way to work together and then we'll start hiring remotely.
We always thought about remote, like from even before we started, but we just thought that for three, five engineers who hired them in the office and then remotely. And then we've been seeing that we've been getting so many amazing applications, but the applications were from another places.
And so we said like, look, we are not going to optimize on the talent versus location. So our first two hires were actually in work remotely and one of them actually was working from Glasgow. So all the time now he's in Dundee, which is quite exciting.
And I know you've interviewed Jeff in another week and Jeff is super impressive. He joined us from Intercom and again, journey with Jeff was, I think I was speaking with Jeff for six or nine months before actually Jeff joined us and worked so well both sides For us, because I understood what Jeff values, how Jeff likes, what's his preferred way to work, how we're aligned on ideas, if we see the future on the same way.
And what been happening is at some point, I was catching up with Jeff every single week almost, and I was bouncing ideas by him, which was super exciting. And then when when the time was right and we we would build a little bit more product, but probably was one of the easiest hires I made just because I was so confident by spending so much time with Jeff before he joined us.
He's been with us for eight months, six to eight months, and it's been amazing. And I wish we can make more hires like this when we can just do have a chance to spend before that, but that's not how the industry works. So that's why we have to improve our interviewing processes all the time just to make sure that we identify the best talent for the role.
It's interesting to hear though that you I suppose it's the it's the, the upside or the luxury maybe of having the money in the bank and having patient and sensible investors that, you know, you're able to take a few months and go hang on, let's be intentional about two, it sounds like two things, right?
First of all, your culture as an organization, and then about your how you build product. And I think for companies that companies that bootstrap certainly and companies that raise smaller rounds, they kind of don't have, often they don't have the luxury to do all that essential work early on.
But it's, it's great to hear that you guys, that you guys got that done. So you, you've got twenty twenty one people in the team now, and you're still growing, and, you know, you're going to be growing for a while, I suspect. And what about the product?
You said earlier on that the problem you are solving is much bigger than you originally thought. Can you talk us through a little bit about that and what the product looks like today versus a year ago? Yeah, of course. No, no, a hundred percent.
And by the way, we built an MVP ourselves, which was like very basic, but just enough to prove it. Our hypothesis is correct. When we started, we thought that GraphQL would be used by just non technical people in an organisation and we'll be staying next to the technical tools we're using and more of them heavy BI tools we're using.
But we spent so much time with so many customers from small companies to big companies like Monzo, Shopify, Typeform and so on. And every single one of them is just so unsatisfied with the way they work with data. It's so hard, it's so clunky, it's so difficult.
So essentially what we're doing now is we're building the modern BI platform for any team in the world, for any job, just to work with data in the best possible way and to collaborate on this data. So basically going from this smaller market when we just target non technical, which by the way, it's a big market on its own, but we kind of like realized that the mission we're having and the problem we're solving, it's way bigger and it's very hard.
But again, I feel like we're on the right track and we have the best team in the world to execute on this problem to build and change how every single company in the world is working with data and collaborates on data. That's something I've admired about you since I first met you, Andre is your level of ambition.
It definitely sets you apart. So you had, we talked about that you by having a decent amount of money in the bank bought you a little bit of time to think about product and think about culture before you really got into coding. What about customers?
So you know, the, you're, I guess, now you're you're trying to figure out how you fit your customers world before you get into really chasing revenue and all that kind of stuff. So how does the customer beta customer whatever whatever way you're looking at it right now?
How is that shaping up? Yeah, no, it's it's going amazing. We've been building graphic version two, like starting in February, I guess. And we we started onboarding customers and graphic version two in August and it's super exciting. We've been experimenting with a lot of smaller companies, larger companies and so on.
We've been identifying some clear segments of the market that we think we can serve now. But the best thing is that the larger companies were just confirming our roadmap and we're as excited as we are by providing us feedback and I know that very, very soon we'll start onboarding bigger and bigger companies on Grafi and changing how we work with data, how we ask questions on data.
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty exciting. So I've just maybe to go back to the hiring question for a second. From when you said that you made your first hires at this point, summer of twenty nineteen, I think is probably right. And you're you're up to twenty more than twenty people now.
What would you say has changed in the way that you hire? What lessons have you learned in that in that process? What mistakes did you make? Oh, yeah. I always like to hear about mistakes. Yeah. I think we'll need another forty five minutes just to go through the biggest one.
Not not through all of them, but just sort of the biggest one. Yeah. Of course, we we made a lot of mistakes and we've learned so much. And I again, like the first thing I have to say is that I'm lucky to be surrounded by the best mentors in the world who've done this, who failed at their times.
And I'm just one WhatsApp message or just one phone call away from asking them these questions or asking from their experience, have you done this? I mean, how do you think about this problem and all of this? Brian, I should mention one thing before I tell you about mistakes is one of the best things we've done and would go back in time or do exactly the same thing in my every single company or I don't know, but just hiring someone to look after operations much earlier in the company.
And we found the perfect candidate for this role who can wear multiple hats. And the way I'll describe this role, it's like a glue in your company, which helps you to hold everything together and you know how startups are. When you build this, everything seems like it's falling apart, but having someone like looking after them operations, it's been like, it's been crucial for us and the feedback because hiring the right person for this role, the feedback we were getting, we've hired some people who work at some big,
large famous companies and they were coming to us saying that the onboarding at Krafya looks actually much better than these companies, which again is flattering and it's amazing employer brand element in this case. And, but something I was going to mention and Kelly is just doing a fantastic job on this front and he's just helping us to make sure we scale these processes.
Because honestly, if you wanna do this properly, it's a full time job. And I strongly believe that if you want to attract the best talents, you need to invest your time into this by being intentional about some of the choices you make, about some of the rules you create in the company, about how onboarding will be, how even the off boarding will be and all these elements.
It's not an easy topic and I just couldn't spend time, a lot of my time on this because I was focused more on the customers and on the product and just strategizing the company. And yeah, about mistakes, I think like what mistakes we made.
Yeah. It's it's I don't know if I qualify them as mistakes, more like learnings. For example, we're now way better at our interviewing process and then exercises we are spending with engineers or with other roles. We've learned how to optimise the time from the first call of a candidate to an offer we made.
We've learned to be very fast because again, the market is competitive, as you mentioned, but all your sponsor are looking to hire and essentially are competing with them in terms of the talent. So we need to show them another side of this. Another part of this is like from day one, we decided that we wanna be very, very generous with everyone who joins Kratzy in terms of options and we've been doing our best to be above the markets of companies of our stage by the salary.
So again, just making sure that we can remunerate these people and a lot of them are joining us from much better paid jobs and taking the risk to join us, it's an amazing sign that they value options, they see the future of a company the same way we do, and it's been extremely helpful.
Yeah, in terms of other mistakes, I think we made, I feel like we underestimated how hard is the recruiting ends. We, for example, five months ago or six months ago, we decided like, hey, things are going well, let's go and double the team size.
And we've been spending time with team like discussing how long it will take and so on. And to be honest, like the numbers were way of reality and it took us way longer to do that. But again, it was an amazing learning for us.
And we hired actually recently Tom and Amy, Tom is looking after our talent acquisition and Amy is supporting in operations for talent, which is just exciting and it makes our lives so much easier. And again, we can focus on the college of the candidates who are joining us.
Because I mean, what we've been using at Graphics, we call this talent density and the client talent densities of Graphics. I don't know, but higher chances for success, this is how I say this. So that's why I feel this is a super, super important part of the single company.
And Brian, I agree with the point you made is probably being lucky in other companies and we've had this funding, which gave us extra comfort to think about that. But I mean, I would do my best to invest as much time as possible in understanding how an ideal candidate will look like for your company and how do you attract them?
How you make it competitive? Because we were in London and as I said, compete with some big companies and big brands who are offering again, amazing benefits, they have amazing cultures and we have to differentiate ourselves somehow, many points how we can do that, but what I'm trying to say, but it's a challenge on its own to do that.
The you mentioned mentors, and you and I've spoken a little bit about that before, but some of the people that you have access to, which is pretty, pretty amazing. We can maybe dig into that in a minute. But I just wanted to ask you about the your own journey about becoming a CEO.
Because it I think when, you know, when you start out, it's he just, that's the job title, you know, one of you has to take that job title. And so somebody is the CEO, but I think there's an awful lot that you've no idea about when you first start.
And especially, you know, this is your first, essentially your first company, right? So what about what's that journey be like? And what have the what parts of the job do you like? What parts of the job do you find more difficult? Where have you found you've had to learn the most?
Which parts come naturally? What's it all been like so far? Yeah, again, coming back to mistakes. I think one of the mistakes I made is not realizing at the beginning, how hard is this job? And again, I'm still not realizing this because every time we every single week or month we grow, the complexity is just growing as well.
Yeah, the job essentially is, there is so much written about this specific topic. One of my investors actually, Gil has a fantastic book called High Growth Handbook. I highly recommend this book to everyone. Actually he has a couple of chapters about what's the job of the CEO, but what I found and I'm also networking with a lot of like very talented founders and CEOs.
And I found like this job is super, super different from founder to founder. I met CEOs with actually a good technical ability. I met CEOs good at fundraising, CEOs like very visionary and so on, or actually CEOs who are more on the strategy side or more, yeah, more with deep thinkers basically in this case.
Do know about me, how they describe this? Again, how I see my role is to make sure our company it's successful. And again, the success can come from many different angles from, I don't know, having the best team in place by encouraging bright values to attracting customers to, again, at the beginning, you have to attract investment and so on.
So I'd say it's a variety of a lot of things, but yes, I'm also a first time founder, but I decided this from day I realized this from day one is that my ambitions to build this company not very often are, I don't know, I knew it's going to be hard and especially for a first time founder, so that's why I surrounded myself with the best mentors and advisors.
And when I have a problem, I would ask them. And one of my rules is never ask just one person, always ask three, five or as many as you can. And in this case, you can see the versatility of feedback and ideas and different thoughts you can get.
This can make you decide the best idea. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I'm still trusting my gut and I've got many situations when fifteen people are telling me go this way, but know because I know this company so well, there is another way we should go.
And so far it's been going great. But again, I feel it's super important just to realize where you are, but you don't know everything, be humble about this and be humble of your people from your company and just let them know, I mean, how you think what's on your mind and you'll be surprised how much help and support you receive from them, which we've been very, very lucky and grafted to have this team in place.
So let's talk about those mentors a little bit then and which, you you can tell us some of the names if you like, or maybe more interesting is the the roles that they've played or the specific areas they've helped you with. How how has that been?
Because it seems like it's been very important for you. Right? Of course. One one person I I extremely admire and I spent time with him, it's a lot of time with him, it's Nigel Eccles from FanDuel. He'd been through his journey. He has a very interesting story.
He's seen it from multiple angles and so on. He he is was challenging me quite a lot in a good way from the early days, which was super helpful. And then Brian, by the way, after the Turing Fest, I met Ollie from Free Agent, the city of Free Agent, is amazing, who is fantastic.
And I love spending time with Ole. He's so knowledgeable, so smart about the topic. And if you have any questions about, you know, like, engineering teams and so on, like, Ole would be on a first contact, so we'll call and but, yeah, but then another people and the way I think about mentors is, I'm thinking like, if I take all these mentors and I place them into one building or one room and so on, they should be able to build a startup on their own.
And what I mean by this is, was choosing people with different expertise from product to customers, to engineering and something else, which is very helpful. So it means that I can speak with different people about different topics and get some good advice from what they've done.
Yeah, for example, I'll give you a quick example, but on the culture side, what's extremely helpful for us was the CEO and founder of Giphy and I've been in their offices, I was so impressed by like the hope about like people, I've chatted with people from GitHub, I've never seen so many happy people in a company in my life, like never ever and they have this like amazing big office, which is building a coffee shop style and everybody is like, it's, they have a bunch of vending machines and people are happy,
they're just chatting and building amazing stuff and I said, and now when it comes to culture or scaling the company and so on, I just call Alex Chang and say like, hey, man, I'm trying to do this. These are the three or four options I have.
How have you done this at Gif and what do you think I should be doing at Kraft? And we'll have this chat. And what I love about them is that they're very humble, even if they've done this and Gif was sold for hundreds of millions of dollars recently to Facebook, they are very humble about this.
They tell me like, this is how I've done this, but you might not listen to this entirely because pure difference because x, y, and z. But yeah, we have these constructive discussions. And to be honest with you, haven't got problems what I just couldn't solve with people around me who would just jump on a call, brainstorm sometimes two days, one after another, but I just do what it takes and we solve these problems.
And as long as you're humble about that and you admit things you don't know, you'll see what life it's way more easier and people actually are very, very willing to help and yeah. Yeah, totally agree with that. And Nigel and Ollie, the two people you mentioned, I think are both great helping and giving back to people.
So it's it's mostly been like this kind of exciting roller coaster, everything's been going well, I'm sure there have been like tough days and things that didn't go to plan, all of that sort of stuff. And there's probably tougher days ahead, that's just sort of inherent in the, in the kind of ambitious journey that you're trying to undertake.
And you've got you've got a co founder enrollment, your CTO, you've got mentors around you, you've built the core of a really good team by the sounds of it. But it's still a lonely job sometimes being a CEO. And especially as your first time as CEO.
How do you how the mental health side of it, the stress part of it? How have you found that? What do you what are your coping mechanisms? What do you do to relieve the pressure just for yourself? How's that all been for you?
Yeah, no, it's a very, very good question. And when I started Graphic, it's actually one of the advice or feedback I got from every single founder I would speak with, that being a CEO, it's a very lonely job and at the beginning you'll be taking things personally, like some of them, because again, the company, it's your life.
I spend the majority. I spend more time with Graph even with my girlfriend, put it this way basically, but I didn't see it this way and I kind of was assured that, hey, know how to deal with this stuff and so on. But yeah, the beginning, it's kind of like it's hard and it's extremely like emotional when, for example, you have to leave someone go or you have some other things that you understand from an employee perspective, but like also you are talking about best interest of the company.
Yeah, it's I feel like one of the things I'm doing in this case is I'm making clear defined plans of what I want to achieve or want to be. And I tend to focus the most on these specific things, but about the rest of the things, I'm worried less about in this case.
And I think we've been quite good at selecting what these things should be and what the focus in the company should be. And that's been going quite well. Yeah, I started going for like very, very long walks when that lockdown started. And when I say very long, could walk like just just like take a break in the middle of the day for two, three hours and just like walk fifteen miles, for example, one direction to another, which is super helpful, organizing my thoughts, not come back and then I'll crunch until the evening or
very late and so on. Then I'm learning more and more to disconnect during weekends. It's difficult sometimes because again, I have a big to do list, which needs to be actually SAP. So I'm better at this and yeah, spending time with loved ones actually it's super helpful and say it helps you to disconnect and it's been going quite well.
Actually what we've done, which is interesting is, and I know we'll talk about this in a second, but the way you adopt to remote and one of the things we've done is for example, we activated a service in Slack, which is called Spill.
And Spill essentially it's sitcom portfolio companies with an amazing team and what they do is they get you therapy hours and anyone from a team can access them and they can talk about anything about their personal life, what affects them and so on.
It's obviously, it's very secure and confidential and where the company never have access to this, but we feel much better about business. As much as I care about my mental health, I do for every single one in the company and who joined us.
And I know how lockdown was affecting people. So we're very, very empathetic about all of this because we're all here in the same game and we all have the same goal in mind. Something that you touched on there was about having your own, having clarity around your own goals and, you know, having these targets to work towards.
What we had an interesting chat with Rand Fishkin from, from Spark Toro. And before that, Moz a few weeks ago, and he talked about this, and he he's been on this journey where, once upon a time, raised twenty new by twenty million dollars VC and was building miles was at forty five million in revenues.
And then it also that the wheels came off a little bit. And certainly for him, it ended up not being what he wanted, and he left the company. And now he started again, and he's doing a very different approach. And he's got a much more clear vision of what he wants and what happiness and what success look like for you.
What does what does success look like? Yeah, I it's a very good question. I so much believe in our mission and the problem we're solving because now I go to the point when I feel like no one is solving this, it's now it's our obligation to solve this problem and just to change how all these companies around the world just by giving them better tools or to data like, which will be a big success to me.
I would love to see on Krafi helping us not just big enterprises and companies who traditionally had money to FortBI and so on, but start from the smaller companies and going up to the bigger companies in this case. So that's what I'd say it's a successful look like to me.
My team, it's another big one and having the team, I love working with and solving one of the most challenging things in tech, but that's another exciting part for me. And yeah, and look, Brian, I'm doing my best to surround myself in the journey with people I like.
I love hanging out with and so on, because I understand and I realize that graph is a big part of my life and spending it with people I call it good, but I don't like. It's just like life is too short for that.
So I'm very, very intentional in selecting people I like working with and ideally I spent some time with this. I spent time working with people in the past. That's what's most exciting part for me, but yeah. Good. Yeah, I like your approach and I agree with you that life is too short to spend a lot of your time with ********, especially if it's up to you if you if you hire them or not.
Brian, I'll give you a example here. Sure. Just give a quick example here, but with the latest round I've done with my investor, I think I made twenty long reference calls and I just thought like so much information. So it was like so, so important to me and that's kind of my approach and I think it helps a lot and I'd also encourage every single founder who is just deciding to fundraise money and so on.
Like if you feel like you have just one option and this option is not that good, I would suggest just walk out because there is so much capital available. I'm sure you'll find money from someone you enjoy working with, but at the same time get the right help and support from them.
So that's, yeah, if you take one thing out of presentation, make sure this is the one. Yeah, no, I agree on that. And I'm sure you've seen so many cases where people have taken investments, maybe without investigating the the operations or the culture or the alignment with with the investors, and it can go very wrong.
And we want, obviously, graphy, you know, there's a huge amount of ambition, you've got this massive market, you're tackling this big problem. If you get it right, the chances of you becoming a big company are pretty good. So growth is going to be obviously something you think about all the time we had a talk.
This is a question that's come in from from the audience. We had a talk on Tuesday from Yada Paoli, who was she's a co founder at growth OS now, but she was VP growth for Skyscanner. In on that journey from she was employee number thirty one or thirty two.
And then, you know, Skyscanner, well, you know, the rest turned into this gigantic company. And she did a talk about structuring for growth, about structuring the company, and add also about mindset. Have you can you give us a little bit of insight into how graphy is starting to think about growth?
Now, you know, early days for you, but you've been very intentional on a lot of other things. So I imagine this is something you think about a lot. Yeah, I spent very, a lot of time on this and from thinking about org charts and networking with the best executives in Europe for each of roles, it's been like super helpful.
And I spent a chunk of my time just in this right now. I know we'll probably make this highest in the next six, nine months or something like this. But as I mentioned initially with Jeff spending this time at the beginning was so helpful for us to make right decisions.
I'm trying to do the same with some of other roles as well, bringing bringing gratitude. So, yeah. And then another thing is we very much look after our processes, internal operations and so on and trying to understand which things will break next and it doesn't mean we do a lot of work in changing them or I don't know, it's mainly we want to know at what point we'll need extra help and what points we'll need to do things different.
And once again, it's coming back to people like Ole from page and who've done this, who scaled a team to one hundred and fifty engineers and, or put more than that. And he can point you directly like, hey, this service scenario is more likely to happen and so on.
When you try and work backwards from this scenario, so it's like, how can you do things differently, how can you bring bright people at the right time in the company, whatever changes you can make, yeah, growth has been a big massive topic for me personally and for some other people in the company involved and how do we make Rafi big because the thing will happen is that by June next year, we might be seventy people, like maybe approaching one hundred depending on some of internal results.
But as you can see, it's a short period of time until then. So I very much want us to be prepared to do that. Andre, I think we could probably be chatting for hours. And we haven't seen each other in a few months.
So there's lots to catch up on, but we are pretty much out of time. Any just before we go. It's a it's a tricky question, I suppose. But you've learned so much you've seen so much, you've learned so much, there've been mistakes, there've been wins and losses along the way.
And it really is still only very early in the journey by the sounds of it. Biggest learning thing that you you know, single takeaway. What what's the Yeah. When you sit, you know, when you sit back and think about it, you're like, oh, this was the one thing I've learned so far.
Or if only I had known this thing at the beginning. Yeah. I think I think being very ambitious about what we're doing, I think it's super important and everyone can feel that for you feel good about that. People who are joining your vision, like, feel the same way, investors, everyone, I think it's super important.
But, yeah, about about the building and the main learning, I guess yeah. I guess just to realize that that it's it's it's it's really hard. It's not easy, and it's not for everyone as well. And ask yourself this question like multiple times, what kind of company do you want to build?
Do want to build a, I don't know, a small profitable business, which is amazing or do wanna have this crazy, happier growth, right, in this case. And so, like, I guess, like, what's what's what's what's good for you personally, I think it's super important because I've seen I've seen founders being burned out by just they they they didn't expect this journey looking twelve months ago.
So I feel it's important to understand what kind of company you want to build and then optimize your journey and the decisions you make in this company to merge this path and to help you to get there when you want to. But yeah, feel like this is super important.
And another thing is, don't believe everything you read in TechCrunch or any other news and so on. They're just picturing a very, very glamorous way of how startups are operating, founders and everything like this. And it's not the case. It's very, very different.
And be sure to be, make sure to be prepared for that. Andre, that's some that's some some real wisdom to end on. You're totally right. The the I think it's gotten better in the last few years. It feels it feels like a few years ago, there was a lot more ******** about startup life and, you know, things like, I guess, I guess VCs, I think got it got got their message out a lot.
And we're persuading everyone has to build a unicorn. And it's the only way you can do it and all that kind of stuff. It feels like the world's changed quite a lot. And I guess it's just as ecosystems mature, and a lot more people learn, you know, try it, fail, succeed, learn on the journey.
But you are on a hell of a journey. And it's been it's been great chatting with you today. It's been great seeing the the evolution of the journey over the last couple of years. And we I'm I'm pretty sure we're gonna have you back on the stage at Turing Fest at some point in the future to to hear about where it all went right or where it all went wrong.
Whatever the whatever the outcome is, there's gonna be this I'm definitely gonna be watching with interest. So, Andre, thanks so much for joining us today. That's that's all we got time for, but great to talk to you. And I hope to see you soon.
Yeah. Thanks for having me. And I really hope that the next student will be in Edge and Brands. We'll we'll see each other soon. But yeah, thanks for having me, Brian. Thanks, Take it easy. Bye. Alright, so, I mean, like I said, Andre and I, we could probably chat for a long time, but I think we've we've stretched to the limit here.
So that's a wrap for for today. That's the end of week six, we're into the final stretch of of the conference. A quick thank you, as always, to our, our main partners to Deliveroo to, Amazon, Current Health, administrate, and of course, Mailchimp. And we will be back on Tuesday, where we have a bunch of keynotes coming up.
