Hypergrowth 101 with April Underwood from Adverb Ventures

Speaker A: There are a lot of us that have worked in software for a long time that are sort of watching this happen kind of like a frog in a pot of boiling water. We should all be looking at this and asking if everything that we have worked hard to learn how to do for the last 5, 10, 20, 30 years is now becoming commoditized. I either need to jump in and like fire these tools, tools up and start using them and start getting into the mindset of somebody that comes to us with a fresh set of eyes, or I need to be on the side of building tools that are a part of that evolution.

Speaker B: This is NextGen Builders, the show for the growth and product leaders of tomorrow. Today we get to go behind the scenes of building hyper growth products. Uh, at companies like Slack and Twitter. We get to explore what does it take to scale a product vision to the next level. We're going to talk about managing founder dynamics and of course managing technology transitions to take advantage of the opportunities in front of all of us. Uh, and joining us today to talk through it all is April Underwood, Managing director and co founder at Adverb Ventures and former Chief Product Officer at Slack. Welcome to the podcast, April.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: You were the Chief Product Officer at Slack and you went through some incredible milestones. Tell us a little bit about that journey and how you went through the crazy growth, uh, at Slack.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I joined Slack in 2015, the summer of 2015. And um, I'd been at Twitter for five years prior and I had built a lot of great relationships there was there through an incredible growth journey from about 150 people to 4,000 people transitioning to a public company. Um, and I built some great relationships there. I would say. I still talk to, I still talk to, I don't know, like a dozen or so people from Twitter on a daily basis and not even the same dozen, um, uh, tightly connected group. And um, one of the things that caught my eye about Slack is, you know, for me, um, Slack felt like a bit of a product, like sort of logical next step. Because one of the beauties of Twitter was that you got to decide what you tuned into. And so you tuned into the topics and the people, um, that were most important to you. And you could have this real time access, um, you could have very fast communication, immediate, um, real time content and interactivity about the things that you cared about most. And um, and then, you know, you turn to your, your work communication and it was like this huge contrast. It was email, it was slow, there was a ton of work done on the recipient to need to sift through and triage and decide what was important and what wasn't. And when Slack came on the scene it sort of seemed like well this just makes sense. You know, we've gotten used to in our, in our personal lives being able to tune the dials on what media and information people you want to tune into. And work is similar work has a lot of background noise and the people that are the most effective, um, like to tune in to and go very deep and have a high frequency of communication and a lot of shorthand with the people that are sort of in the circle, that are working on the project, that are working on the feature, that are working on the plan. Um, and um, channels gave teams the ability to create that sort of uh, architecture for how communication flow and work got done within the organization and allowed people to um, you know, have a really fine grain set of controls around. Like you know, I want push notifications when Stuart Butterfield sends me a DM and you know, when somebody posts um, a note in the ideas channel, um, for product ideas like I can probably get to that tomorrow and I don't necessarily need my phone to blow up for me. Um, I can work on different cadences for different types of communication. So you know, I mean so what, what is, what that's to say is that I already loved the product before I got there. I started using the product socially and saw the tremendous potential for it um, in a work environment. And I met Stuart when he was looking for somebody to come run Platform and build out the, you know, really bring to life the possibility that Slack would be sort of the operating system, the control center for not just um, you know, message communication but also the way that you interacted with a lot of different applications. And um, spent a bunch of time with him, got to know him and other folks on the team and jumped at the opportunity. So I joined in 2015 initially to lead platform and the whole team. We rallied in March toward a ah, big launch for the platform. About six months into my time there was, and um, I think it was the next morning Stuart asked me to step up and run a product and I, it took a couple days to think about it and then I realized that this was the opportunity of a lifetime. And so um, built out the product management function, oversaw ah, platform, um, oversaw researches that sort of blossomed from one person to a full research organization that had a lot of impact. Um, eventually oversaw things like design and just was a member of the exact team and a Partner to Stuart as we built that business and took it to IPO readiness in 2019.

Speaker B: I mean that's incredible impact and I can't imagine not having Slack in my life every day. Sometimes there's a little bit too much, uh, but it is definitely a change how people work, which has been absolutely incredible. There's a lot that I actually want to unpack in both of your experiences from Twitter and Slack. You know, know both hyper growth, uh, journeys, uh, you're in the middle of the tornado. One maybe is more consumer facing while business facing. Like how do you approach that hyper growth? Like what does it feel like to make decisions where you're not talking about 100 users, you're, you're impacting millions of users with all these decisions from the

Speaker A: foundational level, you have to know where you're going, uh, a North Star for the product, um, what it's trying to be in the world or what its mission or purpose is imperative, especially for any product. And I seem to specialize in these. That is fundamentally an empty text, uh, input box where you really leave a lot to the users to tell you what it's for. I think that's where there is, you know, there is sort of the opportunity to do a bit of a study. In contrast, um, both Twitter and Slack have had, um, you know, in my belief, tremendous impact um, in the world. Twitter, um, sort of in the world and then Slack in the world of work. And not solely, but primarily in the world of groups of people collaborating together to get something done, which often has a commercial or economic angle but can sometimes take other forms as well. But um, both of them have had a ton of impact. Um, however, I think that by the time I joined Slack in 2015, I felt like I deeply understood what Stuart's vision was and what it had always been and what it would be. And what's really wild is that it didn't really change. And what I mean by that is not in the form of not responding to the market. I mean in the form of like sometimes you get it right. Interesting.

Speaker B: So like his vision was steadfast. Like he knew exactly where it was.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean he knew Slack was like generally shaped as a handful of things. It offered this channel based communication. It uh, was a platform um, that uh, other applications could um, could, could integrate into and make it easier to work with all the tools you use. So work with all the people you use. Work with all the tools you use. And then um, he knew that search was really extremely valuable. I think, um, when Stuart pivoted the company from glitch to Slack. He had a four bullet point deck. I don't remember it word for word the way that I did in 2019 and 2018 where I could recite it off the back of my hand. But let's just say it was right and it would be a good descriptor of what Slack is today and also what slack is in 2015. And there was a lot of work that we had to do to sort of like um, fulfill um, to take it from the vision in 2015 um, into, into the product, what the product was by the time I left in 2019 and that the team has continued to do um, on uh, onto today.

Speaker B: Were those principles the North Star for the product or were they like the product principles like be a good host, uh, or were those two things built uh, separately like because in a way you're trying to capture the founder's brain and vision and scale it across the organization?

Speaker A: Yeah, that description of Slack that um, that predated me was a description of what Slack was. Um, uh, it was, you know, what's in the bag. Um, and then the work of an organization as it grows is to make a million decisions every day about which things best serve that mission and which parts of that product vision are most important to the real human beings that are using your product. And that's where discretion and judgment, um, and prioritization and a lot of the work that is the work of product and engineering and design leaders comes into play. Um, the product principles, um, that we did have a set of ah, of product or design principles and those I would describe as um, the way that we thought about how we did the work. And there was even a phrase that was sort of used in a glib way like how we do and you know, and actually um, the name of my firm, Adverb, is um, a bit of a nod to what I've learned in my own journey, which is that it's not just what you do but how you do it that matters and that, that care for craft, um, that the consideration, the real deep empathy for the user, that these things really separate the very best products and the very best companies, um, from everybody else. And so you gotta have the what right, you gotta understand who you're actually serving and that is the part you oftentimes do have to sort of update your model as you go because um, sometimes who you're serving turns out to be a little bit different than what you'd originally imagined or um, or they just change um, humans are, humans are, you know, not as um, deterministic as um, product roadmaps can sometimes be. And so you have to, you have to be responsive and um, and, and have those feedback loops in place and. But then on top of all of it, you have to think about like, okay, there's a million, a million companies could go after this opportunity. They could have the exact same roadmap. What makes us us. And um, founders that are, founders that have that real taste where it, either their personality, their judgment sort of comes through the product or they manage to figure out how to scale an organization and bring a set of people and sort of bring them along into that way of thinking and working. And I think like Apple's a company that I think, you know, deserves a lot of credit for that. You know, I think, um, uh, we certainly. It's something I thought a lot about and it's something that we worked at very hard. That is a, that's a nuanced and tough thing to do. While you're also growing, growing the team fast and growing the business.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean we talk a lot about founders and founders sometimes have outsized personalities. They're definitely very opinionated. Uh, they have a strong view of the world and you've worked for some of the best founders in the world. I mean Stuart is incredible. Uh, Twitter has incredible vision. Um, how is it working with founders? Um, do you have any advice on, you know, the best ways of connecting together? Navigating that founder CPO dynamic For the,

Speaker A: the head of product, the person that's going to report to a product oriented founder. There's this X factor which is just like, do the two people jive? Like do they, do they speak the same language? Do they come out of their conversations, the interview process kind of scratching their head where they're like, I don't know what the other person meant because like that it's not a good sign for where things are going to go. Um, because I think you can't expect founders to be rational all the time. That's a fallacy. I think a lot of people that rise to the ranks, they're very rational and they're good at their jobs and then they meet this founder, this founder that is not rational all the time, that wakes up one day and may feel a ton of conviction about something that was not even on the priority list a few days ago. Um, and the thing is, the best founders are right enough of the time that there's signal there. And so then there has to be enough trust in the relationship to be able to start to jointly make the calls about where are we going to trust your judgment. Like hey, you may just be onto something like who knows where you got that list, like download them. But like, like, like I don't. Um, you could be right. Um, um, and then also like you may be right, but it's a, but it's going to be important for the organization for us to finish this thing we've started and then pick that up because there's like an LTV of, of these, of these changes, um, like a p. Potentially a negative one. And, and we have to, to weigh that trade off. You got to be at a really strong place of like trust and clear communication with one another to be able to even have that conversation because it's sort of so meta and it's also quite vulnerable.

Speaker B: I totally agree. I mean you just described my every day, every week. And sometimes it's super frustrating. Sometimes it can actually be really frustrating, but sometimes it's actually empowering. Um, where sometimes I can think of like the complementary nature of the skills. Like you don't need the exact same person, but you need enough that it like expands the brain or expands the context so that you can actually move faster.

Speaker A: That's right. Um, I would actually say you can't be too overlapping and so you need to come at it from different perspectives and then also respect the value of what one another brings. Even if there are days where there's enough friction that like on a personal level, it's just tough. Um, you need to respect. And I, and I think that's one of those things that I think a lot of people maybe when they are at the like director level and probably folks that even you know, reported to me, I think that's tough because like you have enough visibility into, um, the fact that your life as a product leader in a grocery startup is not super predictable. Um, and you've got people you've got to turn around to and explain when things go differently, um, than you expected or when you need to ask them to, to have some resilience and some flexibility in the face of a change, but they don't have that like, direct line of communication, um, to like be able to, to appreciate that there's, that there's wisdom there. It I. This is also like, you know, one of the things I really appreciate from my time now is realizing that gut instinct, um, and, and I, you know, sure, probably even said this just directly, but I feel like I also had to get there. I've heard first principles of my own. But that like uh, when people, sometimes people feel like, oh, we're just going on gut instinct, we're not using data. But like the thing about a founder and hopefully over time senior leaders and early team members is that they have spent so much time in the weeds talking to customers, looking at support tickets, what have you, that, that actually they have a bit of a data model. Like they have their own little LLM for what they're doing in their heads. And so they may be able to make calls quite quickly that look like they're going by the seat of their pants, but they're not. They're informed by a thousand data points over many years and it's just the folks that are new on the team that don't have the ability to do that. And uh, and I think, you know, one of the things I do think we tried to do at Slack was just naming some of this stuff like just like being a little cerebral about it and just like naming this like the human dynamics that surface in a, in an environment like that when you're trying to build something new. And I, I think that helped to some degree and I think that um, I think at Twitter we probably could have been better about that. I don't think that as somebody who you know, capped out at director a product there, I would say I never really felt like I had like the full understanding of like no, but like really where are we going? Like what are we actually doing here? And, and yet we still built a hugely impactful and large business in spite of all that.

Speaker B: Yeah, they might still be trying to figure that out, but that's a conversation for a different day. Taking that maybe to a uh, slightly different pivot which is managing technology transitions. When you've built something for a long time and your context is tied to a model that is changing. We've seen it from the rise of the Internet, uh, we've seen it from the cloud transition, uh, where now we're entering the AI world. How do you break through those maybe deeply held beliefs when the earth is moving from under you? It's literally happening as we speak. It's happening faster than we ever seen before.

Speaker A: Yeah, well I believe that at every technology transition the deck chairs on the like, you know, three legged stool or like the, you know, sort of just the ways in which the different product development functions relate to one another shift. And I think it's fairly predictable at this point. But who knows the next thing after Gen AI could prove me wrong. Um, in both mobile and Genai, what I have seen is that you've come out of a period where the technology for the prior um, sort of like era had reached a level of pretty well understood, um, even commoditized in certain ways and just the ways that development happens, um, when uh, we've all kind of figured out how to build mobile apps at this point, um, as of 2023 or whatever. But when it was new I found that product was not really in a place to, to lead from the front, um, and that engineering could explore sort of the capabilities of the new technology and build like interesting stuff. Like they could like wow one another or maybe even other people with some amount of like engineering innovation. But when things actually, when the rubber started to meet the road, when products started to be become um, like daily mainstays in people's lives on mobile, it was when really strong designers um, had a hand in. It's not even the last mile but like literally the translation layer between like this technology is so powerful and then humans have like a set of biases and expectations about how software works and they have a set of like jobs they're trying to do and they have like a mood um, that they're in when they come to this app and, and all of these and like you actually have to, you have to like build that interface um, in an interaction model in a way that actually works for people. And I think I would assert that in Generative AI we're still in very early innings on this. I don't believe that like typing long things into text boxes and then getting long texts in return um, is likely the final state for how we're going to get the most power out of LLMs. I don't think probably anybody that pays attention to space thinks that. And I have a belief that teams that have really strong design capabilities are where they may be even be somebody with um, who's either a designer or a very design oriented founder, um, at the helm, um, or at least as a co founder, um, have a, have a potentially a meaningful advantage over folks that are short on that skill set. Um, and once the designers like really figure it out then unfortunately that everybody just is going to like there's, there's prior art then and it's like why would you reinvent the wheel? And then I think you can start to see teams where you know, maybe somebody's got an edge on the distribution or an edge on the overall product capabilities and they get to just borrow um, sort of like the best breed in terms of design. But I Think we have these little windows of a few years where um, around these technology shifts where designers like, we need them more than ever and we need them to figure this stuff out for the, for all of us.

Speaker B: I love that you brought design as actually, I believe it's a superpower for a lot of teams that can be underutilized but is just untapped. And I think you could do so much more in these transition moments. Is it best to go all in and be the first? Is it best to like play around and experiment? Um, like how do you dive into these nebulous waters when it is changing? Right, you're constantly redesigning because you know the plates and the technology is changing every other month, if not every other week.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that um, the onset of generative AI and AI powered coding tools in particular, I think should be a huge sounding alarm for every single person that works in the software industry. Because in my work I get to work with, I get to meet um, early stage founders every day. Some of these people are pre product, um, but we sometimes meet people who are, um, maybe they're engineers or maybe they're not quite engineers. Um, and they are, um, they're just going to like, they are picking up these tools, they're picking up the cursors and the wind surfs and the, and so on and they are um, opening up Claude or ChatGPT and they are not losing a lot of sleep about like the way software got done in the past. And I think it's sort of an advantage. And I think there are a lot of us that have worked in software for a long time that are sort of watching this happen. Kind of like a frog in a pot, uh, of boiling water. We should all be looking at this and asking if everything that we have worked hard to do, to learn how to do for the last 5, 10, 20, 30 years is now becoming commoditized, then I either need to, I either need to jump in, I need to jump in the pool myself and like fire these tools up and start using them and start getting into the mindset of somebody that comes to this with a fresh set of eyes, or I need to be on the side of building tools that are a part of that, that evolution. Um, and I do sometimes feel like even in Silicon Valley, it's a little bit of like there's, there's two, there's two worlds just coexisting at the same time. There's a bunch of people that are running really important products and services and businesses that are, that have legacy code bases and that have Org structures and that have perf coming up. And you know, like, they, like, they have stuff, they're doing stuff, they're doing their jobs. But then you've got all of these other people that are like, well, what if I built, like, what if I built a better tax tool and I went and acquired a small tax team? And then what if I acquired three more and I did like a PE roll up? And like, I mean, I just, like, I think there are folks out there that are really rethinking the fundamentals of the role that technology plays and how it all gets capitalized. And, um, and I just hope to see everybody sort of embrace this and get their hands dirty. I have cursor on my laptop. I did my first coding in like a while.

Speaker B: Same.

Speaker A: Um, and, um, and I frankly found it really satisfying. And I think once you use it, it really starts to like, light up the synapses of what the experience is to start a company or start building a product from scratch today. And that needs to be brought into more mature companies.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, you just have to go, you have to go in and do it and try to make it part of your everyday job. It can't just be a thing that's on the side.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: So, uh, you've transitioned from product to venture, and now you're meeting with lots and lots of founders, seeing a ton of incredible ideas, people, technologies, uh, how do you evaluate, you know, what is a great opportunity is based on the talent, Is it the tech, is it, uh, the drive? Like, you have a different view because you've lived it and now you're hopefully picking ones that will have that same incredible impact on the world. Like, what do you look for and how do you approach it?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, in my own career, I have gone to, um, you know, my favorite experiences at Twitter and Slack, um, were a result of me following a product. I had an intuition, um, was going to be something that, that impacted everybody, that everybody was going to want. So, like, sort of bit of, you know, my product taste, but also just like, I just love those products. And then there was also my read that they were being built by teams that were really special, um, that had a combination of talent and certainly, like, access to capital and some practical things, but also just like some charisma at like the brands, products, people level that you also could even like, feel. I, um, think the kids call it Riz now. Um, part of it is that in it, it's just like, you know, you meet a set of founders, you believe that there's something they know earlier than other people. You believe that they have demonstrated that they have the ability to execute and actually capitalize on, on that insight that they have ahead of other people. Uh, m. And that you believe that they have um, both the capability to think about what they're doing in the context of markets and in the context of how they carve out a really big business that's defensible and durable, but that they also have enough taste to like even get it off the ground which is like that, like that like the 1cm level of uh, fidelity of like you know, can they, you know, because you can have like there's all sorts of people have big ideas but like they can't execute on them. And then there's people that are like beautiful artists but they don't necessarily um. Like there's not like some scheme for like where it's going. Um, and so, so you look for that. So we look for that in founders. Sometimes these are founders that have just proven it with their um, the things they've done in the past. So sometimes they'd proven it because in the nights and weekends they built something. And you just can't ignore the early traction that like I don't even, I didn't even know people were looking for shot for Shotzi for a GLP1 companion app. But the founder built it in her nights and weekends and by the time I met her, um, you know, she already had like you know, six figure consumer subscription revenue because in incredible reviews and people um, on Reddit saying that if you're gonna take a GLP1, the next step is need to download Shotsey. And so, so it's not always folks that like you know, did this within, you know, Such and such mag, um 7 company. Um, it can also be folks that identify a need and they just, they just get hustling. Um, and then I think um, so, so you look, we look at the founders a lot. We look at you know, the shape of the business they're trying to build. Is it believable? Does um, it hold up against our belief about where the future and the economy and other sort of macro trends are growing and then um, and then tied to that. Does this business have tailwinds behind us? It's just so much easier to build something when you're part of a bigger trend. I mean Slack was part of a bigger trend of the proliferation of workplace software and a cultural shift around bringing your whole self to work. Um, that manifests itself through emojis and through social channels and that sort of stuff. And then Twitter was um, a part of a bigger trend about people wanting to express themselves in a very public way, um, and wanting to be able to connect with the whole world, not just, um, you know, the small number of people around them. Um, and so, you know, we love seeing businesses that have, are attaching themselves to something like that, um, where they don't have to, they don't have to create the activation energy. They instead are serving the people that have already been pulled into that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean timing definitely, uh, plays a role, but you know, talent plays a massive role. Right. That the TAM that you're going after plays a huge role as well. And quite frankly then do you have a good idea? Do you have the tech?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, you have a, you have to have a good idea. It has to matter. And then you have to be able to actually take that idea the next step.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So taking everything that you've learned through an incredible career and now like working with incredible, uh, founders and leaders, if you could go back to your earlier self, whether it's beginning of slack, beginning of Twitter, even coming out of school, you know, what would you tell yourself back then? You know, if I knew then what I know now, here's what I would do.

Speaker A: I mean, I have to give my younger self credit. It took me three tries to get to Silicon Valley. Um, uh, almost came for college, almost came after college, but graduated right into the dot com bust, um, and got out here in oh, five. Um, and um, I do think putting yourself, especially if you're early in your career, putting yourself in an environment in which you were going to be around other people who think it's normal to do what we try to do in these startups is um, it's extremely helpful. Um, you know, I think that um, what is normal inside the tech community or inside, you know, like for, you know, inside the YC community or something like that matters because we all sort of rise to meet the, the peer set that we surround ourselves with. And although, you know, I'm really grateful, I spent three years of travelocity in Dallas and that was a formative experience for me early in my career. Um, but I came out of that not so sure I really wanted to be in tech. I kind of felt like I'd done it and um, I felt like maybe um, there were going to be real barriers to me as a woman to being able to have a leadership, um, ah, trajectory as well as, and Specifically a product leadership, um, trajectory because I just didn't see enough of it, um, from my purview in my early um, career. And I now look back on that and realize that that was because I, that was sort of the dawn of the engineering driven culture. Um, it was as, you know, those years were sort of like, you know, as Google went public and was really taking off and Google had a particular culture around the importance of um, big decisions in leadership coming from the engineering side of the house. It was just a strategic choice that they made, but it permeated throughout the industry. But what happened for me was when I got out here to San Francisco in 2005 and I started to get exposure to these startups in San Francisco that were uh, doing mobile apps and gaming and that sort of stuff and nobody knew how any of them were going to make any money. I started to see more of myself having a career in tech and sort of recommitted to it while I was in graduate school. And um, and I, I think if I had gone to maybe any location except for the Bay Area, um, for those two years, I might have ended up on a very different trajectory. And the. Given the experiences I've had now, um, that would have been a, that would have been a huge loss for me to not to have gotten, to take those, to have the wonderful experiences I've had with people I've worked with.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And do you think that, that um, in this world today, where I like to say we're in a work from anywhere world where we're a little bit more global, uh, and you know, there are more distributed communities, like how do you build that same network when maybe you're not in, you know, Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley or Silicon whatsoever?

Speaker A: Um, I would actually make a case, I would make a case to get on a plane. Um, maybe you can't move your whole life, but maybe you can, maybe you can spend time here. Maybe. Um.

Speaker B: Um.

Speaker A: You know, I think New York has a phenomenal community and I know these communities exist at other places, but we, you know, we've backed 20, uh, about 25 companies so far out of, out of um, our first fund. And you know, I hear from our founders that are not in San Francisco or New York, they are like, can I just meet other founders? Um, it's just not so, you know, it's kind of like the tailwinds. You know, it's like you can do it other ways for sure. It's just going to be harder. And um, if there's a way for you to make things that can be easy, be easy on a journey that is, um, um, intentionally nearly impossible. And you just have to know that when you set out to start a company that that is what you're taking on. You have to remind yourself every day that, that what you're trying to do is, is not, is not the expected outcome. It is. The expected outcome for most startups is zero. And so you, you want to just try to give yourself every advantage. And being in community with other founders that are going through what you're going through, that have information that's potentially highly relevant and valuable to you, um, I think is just an, an opportunity that you shouldn't forego. And what we try to do with, with, you know, our community is we use Slack. We have a shared channel with each of our portfolio companies. We have a shared channel for all of them. We do what we can to create that community and we also encourage people to come see us and we try to try to make sure that they, um, they feel like there's a, there's also a physical place they can go to when they need that like, hit of, of like everybody starting a company. Like they just. Sometimes you just need to feel like everybody's starting a company because otherwise you could talk yourself out of it a million times. Times.

Speaker B: Yeah, it always comes back to Slack. But, but, um, you know, I think curiosity, uh, is really important. Community, conviction. Um, I think also like coaching. Right? Just asking, because how do you have access to people? Right? You can ask. I'm looking for people like this. Even if you're not physically present. I think you can open the doors, but you'll actually see that there's a lot of people that are willing to share and engage.

Speaker A: They are. And also one of the best ways to create the conditions for people to share and engage with you is for you to get really clear about what you have to offer them. You know, we have another founder that um, was previously at TikTok. He's got some real insight about how to get your presence up and going on TikTok. So he's always happy to offer that to other founders because he knows that they have things that he, um, that he may need to tap them for in the future. And so, um, whether it's m in mentorship, relationships or networking in general, um, really kind of thinking about what's your product offering, um, what can you offer people when you interact with them? Um, and that creates the conditions for you also to ask for more from them.

Speaker B: I love it. Uh, I really appreciate, uh, how grounded you are in the realities of the world, uh, but also, like, everything that you've done, uh, and the impact that you had and how you're scaling that now not just to one company, but letting other companies grow is really, really, uh, amazing. So great work.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: Keep it up.

Speaker A: It's so fun.

Speaker B: Well, April, ah, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Uh, and thank you all for listening to Next Gen Builders. And look out for the next episode wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, please don't forget to subscribe.