The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski
Mon, 23 Sep 2024
Dmitry Gurski is the Co-Founder and CEO of Flo Health, the leading women's health app and the first European femtech unicorn. Launched in 2015, Flo Health has grown to over 70 million monthly active users and 5 million paid subscribers. The app is recognized as the #1 recommended tool for period and cycle tracking, and it recently achieved a valuation exceeding $1 billion. Beyond Flo, Dmitry is a partner at Palta, a co-founding company with a portfolio of successful startups including Simple App, MSQRD (acquired by Facebook), AIMatter (acquired by Google), and Wannaby (acquired by Farfetch). In Today's Episode with Dmitry Gurski We Discuss: 1. Why 99% of Startup Advice is BS: Why does Dmitry believe that speed is not the most important thing? Why does Dmitry believe that competition is actually a good thing? Why does Dmitry believe that craziness not intelligence is the most important trait in founders? Why does Dmitry believe that fundraising is simply a numbers game? What does no one understand about retention that everyone should know? 2. From Potato Farms to Billion Dollar Apps: What a childhood in potato farming taught Dmitry about leadership and technology? How mushroom farming taught Dmitry about diversification and focus? How does Dmitry advise people analyse the hardest moments in their life? Why Dmitry does not believe in talent? What else is there? 3. Scaling to Flo's First 1M Users: What were Dmitry's biggest lessons from two failed prior versions of Flo? What is the secret to success in consumer subscription? How did Flo acquire their first customers? What worked? What did not work? Why does Dmitry not believe in brand and PR? 4. Building a $200M Revenue Market Leader: What have been Dmitry's biggest lessons on monetisation? How does Dmitry think about retaining product simplicity with time? What are the first things to break in the scaling of a company? What did they do with Flo that he wishes they had not done?
Smart people, they work in McKinsey. Founders, they're crazy. For consumers, simplicity is the most significant. It's much more significant than number of features. It's much more significant than anything. What many people don't understand, retention is not about product. Retention is about user case. It means that you may create the perfect app for gym and you'll have terrible retention. Why?
because gyms themselves have terrible retention never take general advice general advice is always if you look on history of any company you would see that everything is so nuanced everything is so unique there are thousands of ways to be successful and you should choose your weight
So after 10 years of doing 20VC, I decided I've had enough of podcast tour guests. Guests who go on the same podcast and you've heard their stories before. 20VC from now on will focus on telling the best stories from technology with guests who've never been on a podcast before.
That's the case for our guest today, Dimitri Gursky, founder of Flow Health, the leading women's health app and the first European femtech unicorn, launched in 2015. Flow has grown to 70 million monthly active users and 5 million paid subscribers with an ARR of over $200 million. The app is recognized as the number one recommended tool for period and cycle tracking.
And what I love most, Dimitri, the founder, started life picking mushrooms. This is such an incredible story and shows like this make me so grateful to do what I do. But before we dive in, when a promising startup files for an IPO or a venture capital firm loses its marquee partner, being the first to know gives you an advantage and time to plan your strategic response.
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So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public, head over to cooley.com and also cooleygo.com, Cooley's award-winning free legal resource for entrepreneurs. You have now arrived at your destination. Dimitri, I am such a fan of the incredible journey with Flo. So first off, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for inviting me.
Not at all. Listen, I've wanted to make this happen for a while. I would love to start. I read actually an interview you'd done before, and I heard that you had a single mother who worked as a librarian. You got your first job at 16. Take me to that. How did those early years shape you as an entrepreneur?
As I see, I'm not so young. I'm 41 years old, and my childhood was in the 90s in Belarus. Difficult times. The Soviet world was destroyed. Everything was ruined. People didn't have salaries. Shelters were empty. Salary of my mother was maybe 30 bucks and nothing to buy because shelters in shops were empty. And we were growing our own food. We had potato field, vegetables in this field.
We had a garden. We were making like hundreds of jars of pickles. And mostly we were feeding ourselves by this production. I still don't like potato, honestly. I can't eat anymore. But it was a good life lesson. It was a lesson of farming. And the lesson of farming teaches that you just can't fake farming. It means that you should
take potato, not eat it immediately, even if you're hungry, and you should put this potato to ground. And then you must not eat this potato next day, and even one month after, you should wait. And then you should work hard, and you should, you can't fake this job.
And then it's like you never have 100% of chances that you would get your potato back, because, I don't know, it may be hail, it may be frost, it may be... bucks. But then if you're lucky and you work hard, then you will get your harvest. But also it's a lesson of diversification because you should have not just potatoes, you also should have vegetables and the garden.
Because if it's a bad harvest of potatoes, then vegetables or apples or something. And something you will have to eat, but you can't fake that.
Dmitry, what was your first business? You said that your first job was at 16. What was your first business?
My first job for money was gathering of mushrooms. We had two types of kids in our village. Gatherers of berries and gatherers of mushrooms. And it was two different types of businesses. Because in case of berries, you're like just sitting on the same place in the wood and approximately you may gather the same volume of berries per day and stable income.
In case of mushrooms, you should walk around the wood and if you're lucky, you may get much mushrooms and even a lot of money, but another day you will get nothing. Psychologically, all kids were divided into two categories, who preferred fixed income or who preferred mushroom gathering. And I and my brother, we always were mushroom gatherers.
We always preferred to take a chance for bigger gains and to have this journey around the world, rather than to sit on the place for fixed income.
Dmitry, how does this work? How do you go from mushroom gathering and farming potatoes and that very wholesome upbringing in that respect to founding one of the largest female... How do you get into technology first?
Between mushroom gathering and founding of Flo was 20 years. It means that it was a long professional journey before we founded Flo. I spent half of my professional life in book publishing. I wrote books by myself, computer books, and then we worked with my brother for a publishing house, and then we started our own publishing house.
I spent approximately 10 years in this world, world of books, and I was responsible for approximately 2,000 titles of educational books. And honestly, I had a big pleasure from this work because it was so material. You're working with something and you're getting material results. It's almost like you're getting your baby and you may touch it. It was very physical pleasure with these books.
And then a very big change happened when App Store was opened in 2008 and 2009. And that moment we decided to work with mobile apps. And the idea was very simple to start from content apps based on books. And then gradually, gradually, it's a longer story, but we got to Flow.
Well, I mean, Flow was the third app that you did. You did two before Flow. What did you learn from the two before Flow not working that you took with you to Flow?
Really, we had much more than two. We had two attempts to create a successful period tracker. But before Flow, me and my brothers and partners, we started two dozen different apps, some of them successful, some of them less successful. My brother and me participated in different projects for a different extent. We had success with these apps. We had six exits up to this moment.
We had an exit to Google, exit to Facebook. We started several companies which have revenue in 100 million, 50 million. It means that it was quite a journey before Floor. It was five, six years of work before Floor. It was not so simple. We just decided we would create a successful period tracker and we just started and it was an immediate success.
But even with our experience, we got success with Floor from the third attempt. The first period tracker failed, the second period tracker failed.
Why did they fail?
these apps that he complicated. And what we definitely learned from experience with consumer-facing products is that for consumers, simplicity is the most significant. It's much more significant than the number of features. It's much more significant than anything. Simplicity is the key of success in consumer-facing products.
Probably we created this first apps being beautiful, sophisticated, but too complicated for people. It's my theory, but honestly, nobody knows. It's always very irrational at the beginning.
When we look at Flow, you break many rules. We're often told when it comes to an idea, choose a problem that you've personally felt and can really empathize with. With respect, Dmitry, you're wonderful, but, you know, you don't empathize with period tracking. Is that bad advice to choose a problem that you know?
I would say that any general advice is bad. Any general advice is bullshit. Every time when you say any sentence with every, each, any general advice is bad. This advice is bad as well because this advice assumes that each situation is the same. But no, no, no. Life is very nuanced and each situation is very different. Usually when people ask this question, they assume two different questions.
One question is, if it's not about your own pain, how did you find motivation? And if it's not your pain, how did you find knowledge? Motivation? I always wanted to do something meaningful. It was about books, it was about our other health apps. I have never had any motivation, for example, to work in gambling. If you propose me one billion, I would not take a CEO position in a gambling company.
I just don't want it. It's against my values and I don't have any interest to that. And we understood very well the size of problem because we had experience with health and fitness apps before. But question about knowledge. We didn't have knowledge. But also we had humility to understand that we didn't have knowledge.
And because of that, we started to analyze and we started to listen users and doctors. And I remember that before starting Flow, our document about this market and potential product had 700 pages. And still, we are making still all decisions based on data and based on user research. We have done in Flow more than 1,000 of user researchers. We have user researchers in each product team.
And we are talking with users all the time. Then we combine that with data from the web and we are making decisions objectively. And it was our way to make a good product for users without any own knowledge about this field. To listen users and doctors very, very careful and be very humble about own knowledge.
How do you think about the Henry Ford quote, which is, if I listen to my customers, I'd build a faster horse?
I think it may be right about absolutely a new category of something. But when we started our product, our market was enough big and already formed. We had hundreds of competitors and some of them big and some of them raised significant capital. Let's mention one of our competitors, Glow. It was started by Max Levchin, a key member of PayPal mafia.
They raised from Anderson Horowitz and Founders Fund 30 million almost immediately. They started three years before Flow. And we had such competitors and it was a rather formed market. It was not an empty market, but it was also an opportunity to learn from them. It was a good opportunity not to be a newcomer, but have an advantage to learn from other products.
What did you learn from them, and why did you beat them? I would say that it's very similar at the beginning with a race. All cars start approximately at the same point, or at the same point, and all cars are the same. And then you need a little advantage, but then when you're making many, many, many rounds, like you're getting more and more and more distance.
It means that it's almost kind of a bifurcation point. You are getting a little advantage at the beginning and then in years your advantage is becoming huge. And the ultimate reason behind that is that it's a flywheel. It's like just a cumulative effect of many things. And at the beginning, our apps were honestly pretty much similar.
But then probably we did some good product decisions, we got additional resources and we started to invest to our product much more than our competitors. We invested to product, just to product up to this moment 150 million. We mostly had engineers in Eastern Europe, like to understand that in standards of UK or United States, you should multiply that on two.
And then we created this big floor, the super app, because of this investment. And this product became so good, so much better than competitors and it won naturally. But at the beginning, all our products were almost the same and difference was very tiny.
So I'm an investor, and we chatted before about some of your views on VCs, which was entertaining. I don't like competitive markets, Dimitri, because I think it's very hard to stand out. I think your customer acquisition costs are high, your churn is high, product marketing is difficult, and I find them challenging to invest in. What would you say to me with that mindset?
It's good to have good competitors because you have much opportunity to learn from them and the good competition speed up your own company because you just feel this competition. Your team feels competition. Team is not getting complacent. Pretty much like a fixed pie mentality that I should have a monopoly to take this pie. No.
When you have good competition, pie is getting bigger because products are better, customers are more educated, and the total market is getting bigger. Of course, nobody wants to be in this kind of red blood, like
red blood ocean market when you have tiny margin and a ton of competition but in case if it's normal competition it's it's good it's so good so when you first launched this v3 of flow having had the two which didn't work so well and the simplified flow did you have immediate product market fit take me to that
Yeah, and that moment when we launched Flow, maybe one month ago, I immediately understood that it had a chance to become really big because of retention. I saw a retention I had never seen before, and we had many apps. I just combined two numbers, like a total address bar market, Veeamon, And retention. And I understood that potential is tremendous by combination of these two metrics.
And retention is really rare in health and fitness, pretty naturally. Because retention is not about product. Retention is about user case. What many people don't understand is retention is not about product. Retention is about user case. It means that you may create the perfect app for gym, fitness app. And the perfect app for gyms will have terrible retention. Why?
Because gyms themselves have terrible retention. You know, it's like a gym business model to sell 1,000 memberships for a gym with capacity of 100 people because gyms know that 900 people would never visit. And why apps would work better than gyms? It's about nature of people. They wouldn't. It's so rare to see good retention in health and fitness.
And when I saw that, I understood that it will be very huge.
What was it about the retention numbers that you can share that gave you such confidence? Was it the D7, which is the day seven, the D14, the D28? Was it the daily usage? What was it which made you go, wow, we have something?
That's about long-term retention. Long-term retention. It means that how many users stays for six months and more. D180, which is six months. What was it? It's again, retention is user case. You may improve retention by good product, or you may destroy retention by bad product, but the essence of retention is natural user case. And natural user case, based on
natural necessity for women to organize life around cycle. You can't skip that. You may skip gym, but you can't skip period. And because of that, retention is very good. But then our big idea was, okay, if it's so unique and retention is so high, Could we build something more valuable than Period Tracker based on that?
And the ultimate reason why Flow became so successful was this idea of a kind of super app. Let's take Period Tracker as a core product. And let's surround this Period Tracker by deeper, more valuable health features and content. And the Period Tracker would become a driver of user acquisition and more significant retention. But all these features around would create value.
It's something similar on the Gmail ecosystem. Gmail itself drives acquisition and retention, but these apps for documents, editing, for calls, etc., drive value. But if you take out Gmail, it would not work. And the same with Spirit Tracker. But if you don't have this ecosystem, it's not monetizable because the value is just too tiny. Did you know that from day one?
I think we concluded that very, very early and significantly because of our deep analysis of the market. I recently reviewed my first deck for our seed round in 2016. And this idea of a big, like, super app based on Pure Tracker was already in this document. It means that it was a very early idea. It just took, like, 9 years and 150 million of just product investment he created.
And probably at that moment, we didn't anticipate that it would take so long and so much money.
So then you have this moment of, wow, we actually have something. Six months retention is incredible. How were you acquiring customers at that point? Customer acquisition from zero to a million is very hard. You have little brand, you have little word of mouth. How were you acquiring customers and what did that look like?
The most significant was to create the best product. And the best product means that users were happy and they were providing good ratings. And then the system of promotion of App Store and Google Play started to work because they have algorithms which promote good apps. And they usually look on retention, average rating, other parameters. And if your app is really good, it's like...
Like algorithm promoting your app at the top. The same as with website. And because the product was good, we got our first traffic just organically, but it was general traffic based on searches like Period Tracker. But then, because of retention, we started to get bigger and bigger and bigger audience, then Vault of Mouse started to work.
And Vault of Mouse is the single predictable way how to get organic traffic. Because if you have a big mall, then people would advise your product and then you would start to get organic traffic. And now we have mostly organic traffic because of Vault of Mouse rather than because of such generalistic searches like Period Tracker.
But again, if you ask me what's prerequisite of organic traffic, I would say retention is prerequisite of organic traffic. Because first you need to get active audience, users should get happy, they will start to advise your product, and then you will get organic traffic. And probably the biggest question is how to get like an initial audience.
In our case, we got them organically, but in new reality, probably you must buy them. It's less realistic nowadays to get initial audience organically.
So that was going to be my question, which is like, do you believe then if you build it, they will come? Or is that not the case and you actually have to have a completely paid strategy today?
It's much more difficult nowadays than it used to be 10 years ago. Much more difficult. Sometimes it happens, and more often because of virality. But in most of cases, you need to start this process by paid user acquisition. But if your product is shitty, it will not be helpful.
How long did it take you to get to a million users? One year. Was that much quicker than you anticipated?
Probably. But also, I remember, again, from this first deck for seed round, and as I understood, you met with our first investor of Flint Capital.
Andrew.
Yeah, Andrew from Flint Capital. In this deck, you're always exaggerating your future in decks for venture capital. We didn't believe in these numbers, and you probably shouldn't when you're presenting that to investors. And we said, in 2020 or 2022, we will have 3 or 4 million monthly active users and 3 million in revenue, and the company will cost 20 million.
Probably real numbers like 10 times bigger at least. Why did you get it so wrong? What did you not see? I didn't think that we would get big share of the market so fast because market was formed and competitive and I didn't have hope to get big share of this market with hundreds of competitors easily, but it happened.
Do you really think that is just because you had a better product?
Ultimately, yes, because up to the very recent times, we didn't spend money for paid user acquisition. It was organic growth and it was organic growth because users liked our products and the metrics of our product were so good that App Store and Google Play were promoting it. But we started to spend like more or less significant money for paid user acquisition Maybe in 2020, 2021.
Before that, it was like rather minuscule volume.
Why did you decide to spend on paid then?
Because we started monetization and when we got monetization, it was just like kind of you put money and you get money back, you put money, you get money back.
I spoke to some of your team and they said, well, not a weakness, but something interesting about Dimitri is he doesn't love brand or PR. It's an interesting point because most do actually. Why don't you like brand or PR?
I don't understand what is a brand. And once I tried to understand, maybe two years ago, I was in process of hiring of chief marketing officer, and I had maybe 30 different candidates to meet. I was asking the same question, what's the brand by your opinion, to 30 different CMOs.
And I got 30 different answers. Can I give you mine? Yeah. I think it's like the way that it makes the customer feel. How they feel when they see your logo, when they touch your product, that is your brand. What they say when you're out of the room.
Yeah, I just don't feel that I understand well this topic. There are two words people use for everything and for any situation, and they're often without any meaning. Two placeholders. Brand and culture. You may describe everything by brand, and you may describe everything by culture, but usually it doesn't have any sense, and you need to ask clarifying questions. Because you always may say...
Our situation is bad because we have bad brand or our situation is bad because we have bad culture. Yeah, it describes everything and nothing. And talking about PR, I think it's slightly different. It's mostly about my internal belief that product defines everything and I always very frugal in spending money out of product.
It means I'm very generous in spending money for product and I'm very frugal, very greedy to spend money not for product. And when I see kind of budget for something like several hundred thousand and I don't understand the impact, I bet I would spend this money for product. And I take this money and move this money to product. Sometimes even up to extremes.
For example, I never use business class because all the time, and I'm running a company with 200 million in revenue, probably it's the time to start using business class for the CEO. But I never use business class even in my trips to United States, even to Seattle or San Francisco, because all the time I'm thinking, okay, five, 10,000.
I would better to pay one month of salary to developer in Lithuania than to waste this money for my comfort. And I was like, take this money and put this money to product. It's my philosophy that product defines everything.
I don't think I've ever had a CEO like you on the show. Honestly, you are one of the most humble people I've ever had on this show. And I've done 10 years of this show. Do you think there's ever a point where that holds you back? You know, Flow is a massive brand now. People care about the Flow brand.
Do you think that the hesitation to spend money on billboards, brand, marketing is going to hold you back?
Maybe, but many ways to be successful. It's a very simplistic way of thinking that there is a manual on how to run a company. Page 100, do that. Page 110, do that. If you look on the history of any company or any CEO, you would see that everything is so nuanced, everything is so unique, every journey is so unique. Nothing you may say like kind of you should do that and you shouldn't do that.
Like you just understand your strengths. You should understand your way. You should not do something that is not natural for you. But then like thousands of ways to be successful and you just should choose your way to be successful. make your company successful.
One big piece of advice that's often given in startups, Dimitri, is speed is everything and you've got to move really fast. And that's the secret to success in the early days. Do you agree with that?
I would say that the most significant early days is not to die too early. Because usually you need to iterate several times to find something that works. And if you increase speed but you waste your resources on the way, probably it's a bad advice. If you combine your speed with
right spending of resources and you have your one million and it's enough to make three, four, five iterations rather than one, then speed is the right word. But I would not say that it's about speed. It's about right distribution of resources to have several chances for success.
I completely agree. It's about the number of at-bats you have. That means that you need to raise, in often cases with consumer, quite a large seed round. How big was your seed round?
300,000 valuation was 3 million. But remember, company was in Belarus and it was 10 years ago. Like everything was much cheaper. But you may believe that it's extremely good.
300,000 at 3 million.
Yeah, yeah. And company now costs like more than 1 billion. It means that it's 300x to this investment if I'm calculating well. Oh, my God.
Wow.
Take me to that. How was the seed round? I think it was more kind of they just decided to invest to us because we had success before with apps, and it was not like a so big belief in our idea, but more belief that, ah, these guys will figure out something because they had success before. And I think they had arguments because it was so contrarian idea.
But probably it was the best or one of the best investment for the fund in the history of this fund. You are like a seed round investor or real estate investors. You just need one investment like that in your life and you're done. You will be rich.
Yeah, that's the business model of venture capital, Dimitri. That's why it's a very good business. It's one of the only businesses in the world where you can do 100 things and mess up 99 of them. Can you imagine if I told you you can do 99 versions of Flow and 98 can be shit? One's good.
But to the question, what is the most required trait of the founder? And my personal opinion is that founder must be crazy. Because if you are smart and you may understand your odds, why would you decide to start something with chances of success? Like one, two, three, four, five percent. It's better to play lottery. Smart people, they work in McKinsey. And founders, they're crazy.
Because it's not rational. You're just crazy. You can't justify that by any rational thinking. Why would you do something with odds of success in 1%?
I worry that that is no longer the case. I agree with you. Crazy and obsessed. I'm not too dissimilar to you in these ways. I'm crazy and obsessed. I could have been a lawyer and paid very happily. And instead I decided to do a podcast. Which made no money. But I love what we do.
My worry is there's so much money in venture capital that if you're smart enough, you can be a founder, play the founder game, play startups, get paid quite well and try it. It's a free option. We didn't have such luxury in our days because... But do you see what I mean? Do you worry that it's the same now where we don't have crazy founders like you?
I think times have come back. It was a period of time between approximately 2019 to 2022 when it was true, but nowadays It's quite difficult to raise capital. It's quite difficult. It's again the same. Was there ever an easy round to raise?
No, it's never easy. But your numbers were so good. I saw your numbers in Sensor Tower. I tweeted about our show and I got all of these data providers send me your numbers and they are consistently great.
Because venture capital investment is a default no game. And you may be very good, but in any case, you will get 100 no's to get one yes. And what's the most difficult for founders is that being in this mindset, when every day you're getting no, no, no, no, no, and it's soul-breaking. It's really difficult. Even layoffs are simpler because layoffs is like computation.
You're just in your three weeks and you continue your work. But fundraising, it's just like each day you're getting no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and you're starting to lose belief in yourself and you're starting to feel that maybe I'm not the right person. Did you lose belief in yourself? I had moments when I doubted that maybe we are doing something wrong and maybe I'm not the right person.
For me, fundraising was also much more difficult because of my origins, my accent, and because I'm kind of not a kind of right profile and I was pretty weird type for investors it made my job of fundraising much more difficult do you think that made your job much more difficult do you think respectfully if you sounded like me as we said loo not toilet do you think that would have been easier
Much easier, because investors, especially in big funds, usually start your conversation not with partners or managing partners, but with analysts or with principals. These people usually have a profile, graduated in Harvard, MBA in Stanford, or graduated in Stanford, MBA in Harvard. And they believe in people like them. And they don't believe in people like me.
And it's really difficult to bridge this barrier of this elite. Because they really kind of sort you out. And I understand there are many talking about this problem that it's so difficult to minorities of any kind to raise. And I may say that it's It's true. It's true because you just sort it out at this level of right people.
So I'm going to get in trouble for this. I think you are much less fundable than a minority woman from Stanford.
Yeah, yeah, of course, of course, of course. And it's easier nowadays when we have proven that our product is monetizable and we may achieve success, but it was really difficult at the beginning when I had a combination of my weird personality and all the combination of disbelief in our model, in our product, because we didn't have benchmarks to show that I look like this, like...
success and we will make the same success because it was first product of such kind and nobody believes that it's possible to build something monetizable or successful.
I wish we met when you were fundraising below a billion dollars. My question to you is, okay, so then we start monetization. That's a new game. We've got to prove that we can make money now. We've proved that we've got users who love it. How did monetization go? We turn it on. How did it go?
Monetization is interesting because, and I'm coming back to our discussion about brand and PR, our big mistake at the very beginning was belief that it's enough to create value and people would buy. But then we started to understand that also we need to sell, we need to explain product, we need to experiment. We started to do that and just one number, conversion to premium
on onboarding increased in several years eight times, 800%, because of optimization, because of hundreds of A-B tests, and because of this approach that we should not just create value, we need to explain value, we need to sell. And it was a huge shift in mindset in the company, because before that, It's significant just to create the best product and people will see and buy.
You also should explain why they should buy. Even Apple spent much resources to explain that you're not like arriving to shop and you're getting your iPhone in a gray box. It should be beautiful. very attractive. And the same with monetization. It's a balance between value and how you sell this value. And you should find proper balance between that.
You may be too focused on selling, like overpromise, or you may be, like us, we did at the beginning, you may create value, but you may undersell. And everything should be right. It should be right balance.
I think you consistently undersell. I spoke to many of your investors and they said that you're their best founder, but you undersell yourself consistently. When you think about how to sell value and you produce value and then there's how to sell it, what did you learn about how to sell value through the monetization process?
First question about this comment that I can't sell myself. I think it's pretty natural because of my imposter syndrome and inferiority complex, and I'm not even playing. It's my pretty natural state, but also I think it's my superpower because... I'm always so insecure about my position, position of the company, that I'm always trying to do my job the best, because I never feel comfortable.
It's my presidential state, and I believe that a big part of my success is just because of my imposter syndrome. It's a strange way to get your superpower, but it's what is true.
got better with time. Flow now does $200 million in revenue. It is worth over a billion dollars. Do you have less impostor syndrome?
No. No. Absolutely the same. I would even say that I'm getting more anxiety because now my responsibilities are even bigger. For me, this round was kind of... You may imagine that it's like a sport when you're jumping through the bar. And when you're progressing, you put your bar high and high. And one moment, my bar became one meter high. And I look on this bar and worry like...
Could I jump so high? Couldn't I? At least I will make the best attempt.
I love it. It's just so rare. You know, we interview a lot of American founders, Dimitri, and the humility that you have is not shared by a lot of them. What were the biggest challenges then as you started to scale monetization? What really became tough?
What really changed, what we didn't understand when we started monetization seven years ago, that habit to pay people for subscription is changing. Because when we started monetization, our dream was maybe we would monetize 5% of American audience, because at that time it was quite a bar. Now we monetize maybe, if you exclude teenagers, 25-30% of our American audience.
And we don't see that our monetization is slowing down. But it's not just because the product is becoming better, that's true. It's not just because of our experimentation, that's true. It's also because people accepted the idea to pay for subscriptions. And it was a huge cultural change. And without that, it would be impossible.
cultural shift did you test pricing a lot i know what a data-driven culture you have when you look at the pricing that you have what are your biggest lessons that you have from pricing
The biggest lesson from pricing is that you should not make a decision just based on price. You should understand the full funnel because you may increase your price but you would decrease retention or activation or you would destroy your user acquisition and then your ultimate revenue would be smaller. It means that ultimately you should decide based on top line and bottom line in your P&L
and optimized for that. And then all these internal parameters, you should look on them together because you should optimize the function of many variables if you talk about mathematics because it's not just about optimizing of price. It's about optimizing of five, six variables simultaneously.
And you should optimize them to find the best combination when you're getting the most revenue from your product.
Can I ask, on the freemium versus premium split, What have been some big lessons in how to provide enough value in freemium where they retain and they love your product, but also keep enough value in premium where they're willing to pay for it and make that transition?
It's not just experimentation. Usually, we decide based on experiments. When we are creating something and we decide to make it fair or put it behind the paywall, we are testing to see how it would influence revenue, but also how it would influence retention. And for us, it's always a balance of two metrics.
And we would never accept an experiment which would increase revenue a lot, but also which would destroy retention. And it's a combination of these two metrics. The best is when retention is the same, but revenue is growing.
So when did we know monetization was working? When did you look at it and go, okay, we've got a good machine here?
In case of subscription monetization, the most significant is retention. Because if you are very good in selling, you may convince people to pay for almost anything. But much more tricky is that you provide so good service and they would continue paying. Retention should be good and it's the main sign of success of this business model.
But this business model, I believe, is the best model to create good product because your incentives are aligned with the user because the user pays just when you create long-term value and it motivates you to create long-term value because if, for example, you monetize your product, I don't know, by one-time payment, then you would optimize for conversion.
If you monetize your product by advertising, probably you would try to increase engagement as possible, what we see in media. But in case of subscription, you're really optimized for value because your model works just when users stay and continue to pay for years. Or it would be just a trade meal and you would exhaust growth very, very fast.
So we have that monetization engine working. How long did it take to get to a million in revenue?
Million? Million is very simple. Million is very simple. Like 100 million is much more difficult. Million is very, very simple.
How long did it take to get to 100 million in revenue?
Four years, maybe. Wow. But we had a substantial audience when we started monetization because we started monetization in 2018 and product existed for three years.
How many users did you have when you started that monetization journey?
Maybe 15, 20 million.
That's incredible. Is there anything that you do differently about how you launched monetization? Now you know everything that you do.
I would do that much earlier because the start of monetization unlocked for us flywheel of value creation and it's very simple.
When you start monetization, you're getting revenue and you may use this revenue to build product or to raise big around and then you create better product and flywheel starts to work, but then you invest more and more and more and distance between you and competitors is getting bigger and bigger.
And when you don't have monetization, you should be very scrappy, and development is very frugal, and development is very slow.
I completely hear you on retention being so important to any consumer app. My question to you is, bluntly, given the use case being periods, it's probably one of the only use cases in consumer that is literally, you can't avoid it. Anything from eating, meaning you can fast. You can gym. You can not go to the gym. Is this a one-off case that can't be replicated?
In health and fitness, it's difficult to find the cases with good retention. There are some cases, for example, wearable devices, they have very good retention just because you have physically them. Have you thought about doing devices? No, no, no, no. Because you always should be focused. You always should be focused.
Once I got a very good lesson from Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, many years ago. And that moment our company was big enough and we had many ideas how to build our product and many ideas for monetization, because audience was big. I was pitching to him, describing, we may do that, that, and that, and that. And at the end of my pitch, I asked him, Vinat, you're very experienced.
Could you give me just one advice, but the most valuable, you think, for me? And he said, young man, business and product building is very similar to marriage. You have many opportunities before your marriage, but to be happy, you should choose one and really focus. And my advice to you, choose one business model and be really focused. And I learned this lesson and I was very focused since.
And I had a huge resistance to all proposals to take any other opportunities.
I love that. And Vinod's fantastic. My question to you is, does the super app not go against focus? Because with the super app mentality, you are building multiple products in the same time simultaneously versus purely focusing on one product at a time. Are they paradoxical?
Yeah, for some extent, but you may solve this problem by org structure. You may create teams which solely focused on own part of the product, and for them it's a single product, and they have full focus on this product. And in our company, each team has own part of product to own. Then you have a difficulty to combine all this product.
parts to the single experience and it's not easy it's very challenging but it's the way how to have focus in the case of super app what have been the biggest lessons in how to create that synchronicity between the different parts it's extremely difficult we're still struggling is that the biggest weakness that you have today do you think
I think it's really significant to save simplicity for our product because each year we have deep research of our user base. What is the most significant for them in our product? And for seven or eight years in a row, the most popular answer is simplicity. Simplicity, nothing else.
And the biggest mistake we may do is that we destroy this simplicity because it's the essence of our success and it's the essence of success for any product. And it's really difficult to have simplicity when you have so many features and when you have this concept of super app.
It is. It's one of the hardest things. It's how do you prevent feature creep with time and stay simple over time. So we have that success with monetization. Now we get to the series A and the B. How were the series A's and B's?
It was always difficult.
Did you enjoy the meetings or not really?
No, because you need to meet hundreds of investors and repeat the same, and at some moment it's just boring. You're just repeating the same, the same again, again, again, again. It's just boring. Was there one or two that stood out? I'm not trying to flatter them, but I'm really impressed by General Atlantic.
At the end of this process, we had five bidders, and I had a really big hope that General Atlantic would not provide a bad term sheet because they showed so much better understanding of our business model. so deep approach, then they really impressed me by the depth of work. And I'm really happy by this outcome. I'm not even flattering. It's not my nature, but I was kind of praying.
What did they do to impress you so much?
Firstly, they had a very deep understanding of our business model because of previous investment to Duolingo and HS Commer and similar companies. And it's really rare to see investors with a deep understanding of consumer subscriptions because there are not so many successful consumer subscriptions and just several public companies based on this business model.
And most investors, they just don't understand this business model. They confuse it with SaaS. And they're making very wrong conclusions because of that.
What are the wrong conclusions that I would make comparing it to SaaS?
you may apply the idea that retention should be very high because if you lose your customer, you lose it forever. And it's a fact for B2B, but it's not the fact for B2C because in B2C, in case of consumer-facing apps, customers come, customers go, customers come back, customers go. We already have maybe 40% of installs from users who used our app previously.
And because of that, you should analyze not like retention itself, but retention of revenue, for example. You should analyze how cohort behave in time and what revenue you are getting because of this behavior that people are coming back and forth. They stop subscription, they start subscription, and you just can't apply this very simplistic logic of business sales that if people pay,
And then the churn, they will never come back or they will never start paying again. It means that logic in analysis of retention should be very different.
Do you think the consumer multiple hit that happens with consumer revenue is fair? So if we look at, say, flow, 200 million and a billion, That's a 5x. That is much lower than traditional enterprise software companies would be afforded. Sad to admit that I'm invested in a SaaS business that is at $7 million in ARR and valued at $1.3 billion.
I think for current market, we may check this number, but average multiple-tier revenue for public SaaS at this moment is close to eight, and it was five last year, and it was 30 or so in 2021. It means that it's declined five or six times as well. It means that- Do you think that's right? It's market.
Market is- Do you think we underappreciate consumer revenue?
in a rational world. You can't have in 2021 multiple 30-40 and in 2022 multiple 5 for the same company. Market is not rational, it's market.
There's a brilliant statement which is the market can stay irrational longer than your company can stay solvent.
Yeah. Because of that, even a conversation about what's fair price is useless because markets are irrational. Nothing is rational that there's a two years difference between two events. In one event, this company costs 30 revenues, and in another event, five revenues.
You may understand crisis, you may understand that rate was 2% higher or 2% lower, but it's not like a reason why company would cost like five or six times higher or lower. It means that it's just a reflection that markets are very irrational and price is irrational as well.
Again, it's a question when you're making justification of future value of the company based on current market multiples, are you trying to lie to yourself or so and so, because Who knows if markets change dynamic five times in two years.
Do you think in five years time we'll have five plus $10 billion consumer subscription companies? We have Duolingo today, which is kind of nine, nine and a half, I believe.
Maybe today 10. I need to check. Yesterday it was almost 10.
Okay, so let's give it a 10. Let's say we give it a 10.
But that's kind of it. We will have them because this business model is growing. And you may just check numbers of Apple, and you may see that Apple got from consumer subscription in 2017 $5 billion. And it's projected that we'll get maybe $100 billion or so next year. The model is growing. And because the model is growing, then we'll have huge companies.
Do you think VCs provide value? Of course. What value do you think we provide?
We have one. Maybe I may share because he joked in Twitter, we have an early stage investor, Nikita Beer. Very nice product.
You have Nikita as an investor?
Yeah, like a small investor, but he invested early. He joked recently that the single role of an investor is that he outrages the entrepreneur, and then the entrepreneur has the full energy to prove to the investor that he's wrong. Of course, it's a joke, but it's partly true. But I would say that a good investor may create a ton of value by proper work in the board.
And a good board brings a ton of value. And the biggest value from the board is that you're just accountable. And you have moments of truth, like board meetings, when you need to make proper refraction prepare proper materials and explain future, explain past. And without board meetings, you would never have patience or energy to do that.
But when you have such moments of reflection, then your business is getting better because you're just reflecting all the time. And good investors, they've been part of the board. They may provide good advice. They may make you better. It's almost kind of if you have like a Like coach, like what's the difference between having coach or visiting gym by yourself? Accountability. Accountability.
Accountability is really significant for success.
What do annoying VCs do? I want to be the best VC. We joked about me being a VC in my ninth year. but I want to be the best VC and I care passionately about that. If you were to advise me, Harry, I've met hundreds of VCs who've said no, don't do these things. What would those things be?
If you meet like a first-time entrepreneur, start your pitch from explaining that it's normal and it's default play for VCs to say no and it's nothing personal.
and you should just like understand rules of games and just like put on your wall I will get 100 no's and each time you're getting no like put like just one line and you should be very very you should understand rules of the game and it should not be like a personal for you because you should that you're per se no when you get no's I get no's I fundraise too for my funds when I get a no I'm gonna prove you fucking wrong
It's a very, very significant driving force for success in the case of many people. Is it for you? For some extent, it was more significant for me at the beginning because at the beginning, all people around were so skeptical about our business and idea and not just investors. I had this bitterness all the time that I didn't have any understanding of our vision and any support.
And then when we proved that our ideas are worth and this is a good, sustainable business, then it became easy.
Do you feel vindicated now? For everyone who didn't believe in you, do you feel, ha-ha?
No, because I'm just trying... Like, look, like... Being just rational. Some weird folks from Belarus starting period tracker and promising that it will become unicorn. And there are no examples of that. And why would you believe in that? Nobody who is rational would believe in that. Now it's so evident. But at that moment, it was pretty rational not to believe.
I get you. It's just sad. Our job is to believe in the outliers. It's to believe the best in people. That's how I view our job.
The main job of an early stage investor is to distinguish cases with 100% of failure with cases with 99% of failure and cases with small potential outcome and big potential outcome. You should find cases when failure is not 100% guaranteed and potential outcome is big. And it means that for you, the most significant is to understand that the team is not stupid. They know what they do.
And by that, you would reduce your chances of failure from 99% to 95%. But then market should be big because it's impossible to get a disproportional outcome from a small market.
Big market. You have a huge market. I spoke to Jesse at GA before this. She said, ask him, how does Flow go from a $1 billion company to a $10 billion company?
I might answer this question just using benchmarks, for example. What's the difference between Flow and Dolingo? Partially, it's a scale of revenue. We have 200 million, they have 600 million, and it's achievable in several years for us to be in the range of 600 million.
We have approximately the same- Why is their multiple so much better than yours?
Because it's a public company which simultaneously is growing very fast top line and bottom line. They have simultaneously 40-50% of top line growth and they have very nice profitability growth. It's extremely rare to see such companies as a public company. old rule of 40, and you rarely see rule of 40, 50, 60 at the public markets.
People believe that they still have good potential for expansion because there are so many learners of foreign languages in the world. I think combination of these two factors, but I think mostly it's just because combination 40% top line growth and the 20% growth of, the proportional growth of profitability is so rare.
And it means that if you want to cost 10 billion, we probably should achieve 600 million in revenue and then show profitability and continue growing with the same pace. Can I invest now? No, it's difficult.
Listen, my job is to be a VC, Dimitri. It's got to be worth a try, right? Can I ask you a bit of a weird one on your leadership? Do you think you're a good CEO and how have you changed as a leader over time?
I have a nice story for you. When I was in Stanford Business School, we had one lesson with a famous professor of management. He did the next exercise. He started to ask people in the room, what is the necessary trait of a good CEO? And people started to say, oh, a good CEO should be knowledgeable. A good CEO should have integrity. Theos should provide inspiration.
And maybe in 20 minutes, like, whiteboard was covered by different traits of good Theos. And then this professor looked on this whiteboard and said, probably even Jesus Christ was worse. It means that, in this lesson, that people, they are making kind of glorification of Theos, that Theos should be perfect, they should be almost kind of gods, but Theos is just like the same people.
They can't be so perfect as people think they should be. You should just understand your weaknesses, your strengths. You should understand why you're useful and you should just make your proper work as good as you can.
What is your biggest strength? What is your biggest weakness?
biggest strengths that I may make rather good conclusions in a very simple manner. It means that people need clarity and simplicity, and I think I may provide clarity and simplicity. I'm not overwhelming them by information. I may take much information on myself, But then I provide to them like a solution, decision, description in a very simple form and they understand and believe and follow.
And my main weakness, sometimes I may be too slow for change. The biggest events in my life happened when the life burned my bridges. But now I understand that I should have burned my bridges by myself. For example, I started to make apps, very significant reason was that because it was crisis of 2008 and book publishing was in terrible situation.
I started to focus just on floor because my old portfolio declined because of political situation in region. And when everything was good, I was just delaying necessary change and I was just waiting this crisis for life to burn my bridges. And then when the necessary change happened, then I started to move.
I'm fascinated on this one. You've been very successful over the last 10 years. What does money mean to you, Dmitry?
Honestly, not so much because I have a rather humble lifestyle. Honestly, I despise luxurious brands. I despise luxury. I even don't have a car and I don't have any expensive item. I don't have anything that would be branded or luxurious. I don't need business classes or private jets. I would want to have an interesting and meaningful life and feel that I'm useful.
And honestly, I never think about my personal money. I'm absolutely honest here. Like, never. Never. Because I have so little need for myself that it's not even a kind of motivation for me. I'm very motivated by the story of founder of General Atlantic, Chuck Flinney. Do you know this story?
No, please tell me.
General Atlantic was started by a man who earned a huge fortune by starting duty-free shops. And because of this venture and because of Giant Atlantic, he earned billions, nine billion or something like that. And then secretly he distributed all his money for charity, absolutely secretly, nobody knew.
And he died like two years ago and then the story became public that he just gifted away in his lifetime all his money and without any profit, without sharing to anybody, absolutely secretly. It's the best example for me how you should live your life. You should create something valuable commercially, but then it's your duty to return this money for society and to do that very efficiently.
I believe that if you are really successful, the second part of your life should be not to earn money, but to spend your money for the sake of society. I believe that it's a huge sin to pass billions to your children.
Have you always been this good? You are objectively one of the kindest humans I've had on the show. Shows like this are why I love doing what I do. I didn't expect this type of show. Have you always been like this or has it come over time?
I just got better because of many, many, many problems and pains I had. in my life. I have a little regrets about my professional life, and my biggest regret that when I was young, when I was less sensitive, I fired several people without decency, in root form. And it was maybe 10-15 years ago, and I still feel guilty because of that 10 years after.
Just because to feel empathy, you should get pain by yourself. And then you start to feel pain of other people. And it's just like a trait of age and a trait of a difficult journey. I was not like that when I was young.
You also work with your brother, Yuri. Not many people know this, but I work with my brother. He's sitting upstairs now. I love it, but everyone says don't work with family. What's your biggest advice to me on how to make it work so successfully with your brother?
Again, I repeat my advice, never take general advice. General advice is always bullshit and everything is nuanced. I worked with my brother for 30 years or so if we start considering like our work from mushroom gathering or potato field work. And we always work together in book publishing, in all our ventures.
I remember that our first boss in publishing house, and it was 2005 or so, we worked together in publishing house. We were responsible for computer literature. He said that you should always work together because you're so different and when you combine Your personality is almost perfect because Yuri is good to make a path and you're good to make a road.
And you understand that I'm maybe too slow in deciding something, maybe indecisive, but then when I start doing something, I'm doing that perfectly. And Yuri, he is the opposite. He's kind of... idea generator, his venture driver, but he's not an operational person altogether. But when we have this combination, it's almost perfect and it works really well.
21.
Wow. 20 years ago. She was a student in the same group in university and she had my trust because I was a very bad student because I was working and she was helping me with advice when to visit university and with different home tasks and she was my friend at that moment. And we started to work together. And again, we have been working together for 20 years.
She was responsible for content in Flow at the beginning of Flow. And she's now my executive assistant. And we spent together, working together 20 years and very successfully. Your wife is your EA? Yeah. How is that? That must be hard. No, it's very effective because we might decide what to do or what not to do at the breakfast.
That is amazing. I absolutely love that. Yep, there's no way that that would work for me. Are you a wartime leader or a peacetime leader, do you think?
I was pretty effective in both modes because I have one trait. There are four types of people based on level of negative and positive emotions. People who have low emotions in case of bad situation and slow-low, high-high, low-high, high-low. It depends on are your emotions high or low in case of problems and in case of excitement.
For example, if you have a huge excitement, but also like a huge stress in case of problems, probably it's difficult to be a CEO. And my advantage is that I'm kind of low personality. It means that I never feel too much excitement.
but also I never feel too much stress and because of that I'm just in case of all our calamities I was very very calm and I didn't have much stress I just played my duty what was the biggest calamity do you think when you look back now what was the oh that was hard
that moment when political instability in Belarus and then war in Ukraine and we had to relocate urgently the whole company and also I had to relocate myself in two days. I spent 38 years in Belarus and I built my life there. I had like my house, my gardens and I spent many years to grow my gardens and then I had to make decision to
move out of Belarus in two days and I have never come back and then the same decision most of our people had to make and it was really difficult. Could you imagine that you have built all your life in countries and in two days you must move to another country with your family and it was really difficult and it traumatized me and our people a lot.
I can't imagine that one. I also can't imagine having to move 100 plus people, which you had to do.
I believe even more. I believe that when we started in 2022, we had 70% of our employees in Belarus. It was more than 200, and 90% of them were relocated with families in several days. How was that process? Really difficult because borders were closed. It was impossible to get papers, and we had to organize no flights, and we had to organize... charters to Armenia and the Turk and then organize.
You ordered charters? Yeah, because we didn't have flights and it was impossible to make flights to Europe because all flights were prohibited from the region. Did the company suffer in any way? Of course, for half a year we
didn't have any progress with our product because all people were so stressed and defocused by moving families and it was a huge huge destruction and it was very expensive as well. How much did it cost? Many millions. It's very expensive but it was significant to do because company, it's a tech company and it's about people and like this company would not exist without people.
And also it was our responsibility to provide this opportunity to our people because it was quite a big chance that Belarus would engage to the war. And it would mean that men would be drafted and borders would be closed. And it was a real risk for life for men. And we had to organize this process.
What did you learn about managing teams and people through this process?
Trust is the most significant. They should trust you. You should be a really trustful person or a company to convince 90% of your employees to take family and belongings today and move to another country. You should be really trustful for that.
My question to you is when your mother looks at you and your brother, you guys have achieved such success and you look back to the potato farms and the mushroom picking. What does she say?
She's not especially emotional. But she must be proud. She has never said that.
Would you like her to?
I don't think that it would be natural for her.
I like you so much. This has been so much fun. So I'm going to do a quick fire round. So I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? So what do you believe that most around you disbelieve?
I don't believe in talent. I believe that all people are approximately the same, we have the same processor. What makes people different is just hours of hard work, hard focused work. And when people say to me that I can't accomplish something, I ask a very simple question. How many hours of hard work have you spent for that?
And if it's not about thousands of things, but why you think that you should achieve something without thousands of hours of hard work?
You don't think smarts has got anything to do with it, like brains?
There are always extremes, but most of people, they have plus minus the same brain. And believe me, I know many billionaires, many, many, many successful entrepreneurs, and not just entrepreneurs, and I have no syngenesis. But I believe that what really distinguish successful people and people who are not successful beyond just luck, luck is really significant.
is the ability to take risk and then work really, really hard and persistent for a long time. Most of people, they just can't work really hard for a very long time, and it's what distinguishes successful people and less successful people.
Most people don't have discipline, which is you need to not go out and drink with your friends at the end of the day and go back and work. You need to come back after the 90th no and pitch for the 91st time.
For me, the hardest time in my life was when I was in university, but also I was writing my books at nights. I usually was working for 18 hours per day for years and was sleeping just six hours or so and four years. But then I achieved a lot because of that. I have a very interesting story about my books.
Sometimes you need to see many things in prospects and you need to put many dots on the map of your life. In 2004, I wrote a big book about ActionScript. It's a program language of Mercantile Media Flash. And at that time, I didn't learn much from that. But approximately next year, in 2005, this book was gifted to one young boy. He was maybe 12 years old, by his brother.
And he said, if you learn programming from this book, you will become a big person. And he learned programming from this book. He started to practice Flash programming. And then 10 years after, 15 years after, he became co-founder of MSQRD. We sold to Facebook and then we used part of this money to finance Flo.
It means that if I didn't throw this book in 2004, then probably he would not learn programming and MSQRD would not happen. And then Flo would not have money to be financed. But the distance between these two events was more than 10 years. And in your life, very often you just need much time to see how all lines will be connected. But you have dots to be connected. You need to have dots.
You need to do something. You need to move forward.
What CEO do you most admire and why them?
I'm against glamorization of COs and making them heroes. I even don't like when Glassdoor put a rating of CO because I believe that when a company is big, or not even big, it's much more teamwork and CO is just a role. People are just people. I always recommend not to read a book like how to be a great CEO like you have in your book library, but to read biographies about CEOs, about business.
And you would see that even Steve Jobs, he made probably 90% of mistakes in all his decisions and many, many stupid mistakes. And he was not good altogether. Maybe the single common trait between successful and all successful CEOs I may found is decisiveness. You should make decisions. And because when you make decisions, you move forward.
Even if decisions, when decisions are stupid, you are moving forward and you're getting new information and the next decision will be better. The worst is just this analysis paralysis, not making any decisions.
One of my closest mentors said to me the other day, the heaviest things in life are not iron or gold, but unmade decisions.
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes people, they kind of, they try and find like a perfect solution, but the truth of life is that nobody knows future and nobody may make like a perfect decisions just based on information or analysis. Because if it were the case, then McKinsey or banks would be perfect business creators. But you can't see unicorns which were created by McKinsey or Banks. Why?
Because of unpredictability of the future. And if the future is unpredictable, then what's the best? Just make any decision and move forward. Just not stay at the place. Decide something and move forward.
What have you changed your mind on over the last 12 months?
I was much more optimistic about time, which would be necessary for generative AI to make impact on businesses. And because maybe two or three years after the beginning of this hype, I still don't see many examples of real business success based on generative AI. It means that maybe something in programming, maybe something in support, but it's rather tiny.
We can't say that there is any big case, any big business which changed business model or got profitability or growth because of generative AI. And I had hope that the change would happen much faster.
Who do you not have on the board? Who you would most like to have on your board?
Let's say Melinda Gates, because probably Melinda Gates is the person who is doing nowadays the most for female health.
Does it hurt you when people criticize a male CEO of Flow?
I understand why they're criticizing, although I feel that our success was so beneficial for the industry because your VC and you know that VC are making decisions based on benchmarks. And now all VCs will start believing that it's possible to have a great success in this industry and all founders will have much easier journeys than I had.
I'm trying to do the best for this company, and I think I was rather good in that. But also I would want, of course, to see that more women are becoming very successful in this journey.
Final one, Dmitry. What question are you not often asked?
that you should be asked more. Would you want to eat something tasty?
I'll roll with it. Dimitri, I was really looking forward to this one because I love the business. I didn't know how you were going to be, respectfully. You've been fantastic. You are funny. You are direct. Thank you for being so brilliant. And I really have loved this.
Thank you very much.
I mean, what an amazing story. Dimitri is probably one of the most humble and kind CEOs I've ever had the opportunity to have on the show. I absolutely love that discussion and you can watch it. We recorded it in person in the studio in London. You can check that out on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC.
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