Seed to Exit
Welcome to Seed to Exit, the ultimate podcast all about startups, scaling, and venture capital. Your host is Riece Keck: Startup veteran and recruitment entrepreneur.
Join us as we dive into the journeys of startup founders and venture capitalists who share their insights, successes, and lessons learned from seed stage to successful exit.
Each episode, we bring you candid conversations with startup founders, executives, and investors. Whether you're looking for inspiration, actionable advice, or a deeper understanding of the startup ecosystem, Seed to Exit offers invaluable knowledge and real-world experiences to help you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Tune in to Seed to Exit and get ready to be inspired, educated, and connected with the exciting and ever-changing world of startups and venture capital.
Seed to Exit
Julie Kheyfets, CEO of Block Renovation | Revolutionizing Home Renovations | AI-Driven Design, Empowering Homeowners, and Leadership Insights
Julie Kheyfets, CEO of Block Renovation, joins us to share her insights on revolutionizing the home renovation experience through technology and AI. We discuss the challenges homeowners face and how Block addresses these issues while exploring ambitious plans for scaling and innovation in the industry.
• Julie's career journey and transition to CEO of Block Renovation
• The challenges in the home renovation industry and Block's approach
• Shifting from a one-stop-shop to a flexible marketplace for homeowners
• The role of AI and technology in simplifying the planning process
• Addressing homeowner overwhelm and decision fatigue
• The importance of information and safety nets in renovations
• Strategies for scaling the business and fostering a growth mindset
• Quickfire insights on leadership and productivity tools
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I think different chapters of a company's lifetime require different leaders. Coda did a phenomenal job of conceptualizing the company, going after this really difficult problem space of renovations, setting a fantastic culture of humility, excellence, hard work, collaboration All those things will carry forward In this next chapter. What matters a lot is building out our AI capabilities, so using artificial intelligence to put world-class tools for design, planning and hiring in the hands of homeowners, and then scaling the company as well.
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks for tuning in. Today I'm joined by Julie Kafitz, the CEO of Block Renovation. Block is a company on a mission to transform the home renovation experience through technology, data and seamless project management. Julie brings a wealth of experience, having held leadership roles at Facebook, tractable and the Boston Consulting Group before stepping in as Block's Chief Operating Officer and is now leading the company as CEO. So in this conversation, we're going to talk about a few things, including what drew Julie to tackling efficiencies in the home renovation industry, how Block is solving one of the most fragmented and complex consumer experiences, how she's transitioned from COO to CEO and how she's starting to make her mark on the company. Lessons from raising capital and scaling a fast-growing startup. And the role of AI, data and automation in shaping the future of home renovations.
Speaker 2:So, whether you're a founder, an operator or just someone who's interested in how technology is reshaping old-school industries, this episode is packed with insights that you're not going to want to miss. No-transcript that power the startup ecosystem. I'm your host, rhys Keck, founder of MindHire, a talent acquisition firm specializing in helping startups build exceptional teams. Each week, I sit down with founders, investors and industry leaders to explore the journeys behind iconic companies and game-changing ideas. Whether you're building, investing or just curious about what it takes to succeed in the startup world, I want this podcast to be your go-to resource for actionable insights and inspiring conversations. Now, if you enjoy the show, please don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or share it with your network. Your support means the world and really helps bring more incredible conversations to life. Julie, thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me, rhys, excited to be here.
Speaker 2:Likewise. So, before we get into everything, you have a super interesting background. You've spent some time in consulting. You've spent some time at some really well-known tech companies like Facebook. You had a VP role at Tractable. I'm just curious, now that you've ended up at Block, could you mind just to start things off walking me through your background a little bit, how you got to where you're at today and what drew you to applying tech to the home renovation space?
Speaker 1:Yeah, great question. So I started my career in management consulting at BCG. I did that for a number of years, used that as an opportunity to see a lot of different industries and functions. I really enjoy learning, so I got to learn very broadly. But doing that, what I really was missing was actually operating. In consulting, you write the strategy deck, you do a lot of good thinking about where a company should go or what it should do, but you don't do the thing. And I wanted to do the thing and actually take that strategy, implement it, learn from it, iterate, and so I went into tech after consulting and I spent some time at Facebook on the business operations team, which was really interesting. This was over 10 years ago, starting in 2013, when Facebook was still in this crazy growth mode and I was embedded in the revenue organization in ad sales. So I saw how that was scaling really quickly, which was really interesting very culturally cool, but still felt really big. And at that point Facebook was 10,000 people, a fraction of what it is today. But even then there was a lot of kind of meetings and decks to get things done, and so I knew I wanted to go towards something early stage.
Speaker 1:I then spent four years at Tractable, the company you mentioned. What Tractable does is computer vision for accident and disaster recovery. So it has an AI platform that takes photos and videos of damaged cars and damaged homes and figures out how to repair them, and that platform is sold to insurance companies, to restoration companies, repairers, things like that. And I launched and built out the North America business for Tractable, which was really interesting. So we essentially tried to figure out what was the product market fit in North America. The company was headquartered in London, had sold a bunch in Europe and Asia and we had to bring on the first clients, build out the team, build out the go-to-market for the United States and Canada, but not the go-to-market for the United States and Canada and that. So I did that from 2018 to 2022. So before the latest wave of AI, at that point AI was much harder to build. You know, before building an auto damage assessment AI, we had to teach a model how to even recognize car parts Like what is a hood, recognize that there is a car hood in this photo. That took months of work, you know, let alone assessing the damage to the hood or how to repair it. So it was a different era of AI, but it was really cool to see that brought to market and to bring it to market and put it in the hands of millions of users.
Speaker 1:When Block approached me, I just became so intrigued by the home renovation space, in part because it is such a massive market. Americans spend $470 billion every year renovating their homes. That's not including maintenance or small repairs. That is major renovations, and it seems like almost everybody still has a nightmare of an experience that's both homeowners and contractors and so what really intrigued me was, you know, just seeing a space that was so large and still so difficult. There aren't many industries left like that. It also is largely untouched by technology. So there are lead generation platforms like Angie's List and Thumbtack, you know. There are CRMs for contractors. There isn't something really that creates a great experience for homeowners and contractors, and that's what we're trying to do with Block. So what really excited me was seeing this really difficult space and trying to figure out how to create a much better experience for it with technology.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I can 100% agree with you on what you just described. I mean, I personally have a couple of rentals and you know I don't manage them personally, but you know, having to deal with the contractors or the maintenance repair folks, it's they're running off of phones, their things are being written down on paper, it's almost completely untouched by technology and it's it's frankly, it's a really frustrating experience that I've had several times as a homeowner. So when I, when I came across across just Block as a company, I was like oh wow, this is solving a really interesting problem. So you came on there a couple of years ago and talk to me about what your experience has been like at Block and what you've done since then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been really great. We have a really great team that deeply understands the space and is super motivated to create something much better. When I came on, I came on as chief operating officer, so that was two years ago, at the end of 2022. And at that point our offering, our model, was still a bit of a one-stop shop. So you would come to us as a homeowner. We would match you with a great contractor from our network for your build, and then we would also support you with things like your architectural plans, your permit with the city, your approval if you're in a co-op or a condo. We would source, warehouse and deliver on a single pallet all of your materials. So you didn't have to wait for hundreds of deliveries coming piecemeal. So it was a really operationally intensive process and that process and that offering made sense for a small segment of homeowners who didn't have strong preferences. They kind of said, okay, I'll pick that template and you guys handle it for me. I'm going to go work at my super busy job.
Speaker 1:But if you had very specific tile or fixtures that you loved like, let's say, you travel to Spain and you had found some gorgeous tile, you had shipped over something else it was hard for us to accommodate because we had this templated, streamlined process, and so what we actually did over the last couple of years is evolve the offering. So we stopped requiring homeowners to use our materials, follow our architectural plans. We leaned in much more to the marketplace side of the platform, which meant helping homeowners to discover the right contractors for them, get proposals, evaluate those proposals, negotiate and transact on the platform. We also started to build out a whole suite of planning tools. On the platform. We also started to build out a whole suite of planning tools. So all the thinking, the work that happens before you hire a contractor, just trying to figure out what you're going to do with your home, how much it'll cost, what it'll look like. We support that too.
Speaker 2:Got it. So you recently took on the CEO role, just as recently as a few weeks ago, so congratulations. So the founder was Coda, so he decided to step back. He's still serving on the board. Talk to me a little bit more about what it was like as you started to have those conversations, how you thought about it and just really how it all came to be, how you thought about it and just really how it all came to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, leadership transitions can be complex, especially at startups, which often don't have the same reps as large companies do. Transitioning CEO to CEO. Kodai did a really fantastic job of thinking about this pretty far in advance and giving us the time to plan it and execute it, and so we were just really deliberate about how to do this transition, how to have the right conversations with our investors and our board, with our team, how to set up the leadership team around me to support this transition. He is still really involved as executive chair on the board, just less in the day-to-day, and the fact that we've been working side-by-side as CEO and COO for the last two years that helped a lot as well.
Speaker 2:I can imagine that, as you step into the CEO role, you want to make an impact, you want to put your proverbial stamp on things, but then also, at the same time, you want to be respectful of the legacy and what has been built so far. How do you navigate, balancing those two things?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think different chapters of a company's lifetime require different leaders. Coda did a phenomenal job of conceptualizing the company, going after this really difficult problem space of renovations, setting a fantastic culture of humility, excellence, hard work, collaboration all those things will carry forward In this next chapter. What matters a lot is building out our AI capabilities, so using artificial intelligence to put world-class tools for design, planning and hiring in the hands of homeowners, and then scaling the company as well, and those are things where I bring the right track record, and so I think there's natural complementarity in the foundation that Coda has built and the momentum that I can inject for this next chapter.
Speaker 2:When you talk about scaling, what does that look like in terms of the vision of what you want to do next?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we started to expand geographically a lot more quickly, more aggressively this year. So initially Block launched just in New York City, especially with our much more operationally complex 1.0 original model. It was hard to go and bring that model elsewhere. We'd need to open up warehouses, put up supply chains. So in the first six, seven years we opened up only a couple of more cities. Just three months ago we already opened up Chicago, philadelphia, connecticut.
Speaker 1:We will continue to expand city by city across the country, probably every six months or so. So that's a big part of it. The other part is just handling more of the renovation journey. So historically we've focused so much on helping homeowners to hire contractors and to execute their projects. But that's the last 10% of the journey.
Speaker 1:The average American renovates their home about every three years and 90% of that three years is just trying to figure out what to do. You know you wake up and you look at your kitchen. You're like this is kind of outdated, I don't know the right counter space, I just wish it could be right. It just doesn't feel right. But going from it doesn't feel right to actually knowing what to do and how much it'll cost and who to hire, that is what we call planning, and that's usually a multi-year process. So more tooling around that. Putting more data at homeowners' fingertips. So more tooling around that. Putting more data at homeowners' fingertips, helping them to figure out design scope, budget iteratively on their own schedule, without having to hire an architect. That'll cost them $20,000.
Speaker 2:That's where we're focused on the product side as well. Why does it take years? Is it just a matter of not taking action and knowing it's just one of those things that need to be worked on, but you just haven't bothered to do it.
Speaker 1:That's such a great question. I think it's largely because it feels overwhelming. The thing we see over and over again is that a lot of homeowners just feel stuck. They know they want to change their space, but when it comes to figuring out what to do or how much to spend, or even where to start should I do my kitchen first or my bath first they Google around, they ask around, but there's no reliable source of information and it feels like such a consequential set of decisions that people just get overwhelmed and they stop.
Speaker 1:And then they start again. They start to look at Pinterest again and Instagram again. They're like oh, I really like that. But then, going from I really like that to actually investing the capital, trying to figure out do I need to move my family to a hotel, you know, can I actually live through the renovation? It just seems so overwhelming and there are hundreds of decisions you have to make. So what we're focused on is how do we empower homeowners, put the right tools and data in their hands and the right support in their hands so they feel empowered, and so they don't feel alone.
Speaker 2:So what is building that process look like from an AI perspective? I'm just curious. I'd imagine it's multimodal. I'm sure there's a chatbot built in. I'm sure you can upload images and say hey, here's the space. What is? What are the AI capabilities that you're actually building?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love talking about this because there's so much you can do with AI. Today. There's a lot of AI hype, which I'm always aware of. You know. One thing we observed with the renovation planning specifically is people really struggle to articulate what they need and what they want, but they also have very strong reactions to it.
Speaker 1:So if I show you a space, a lot of people, if they've been thinking about renovating, will instantly say, oh, that feels right, or oh, no, that's not for me. You know, think of it like a simple bathroom, five by eight feet. I can one person. You show them white, with white accents, and they're like, oh, that's so sterile, that's not for me, and they want something moody and dark. You know blues and greens and blacks. And you show somebody else that moody and dark, and they're like, oh, that's not right at all. I want something clean, modern, industrial.
Speaker 1:And what we figured out is there needs to be an accessible, delightful, easy way to show homeowners different things that are possible, to allow them to narrow down what they really have in mind. And in a way, that's what architects and designers do. They show you mock-ups and you're like, oh, I like that one, but maybe not the cabinets. Can we switch that out? And you iterate.
Speaker 1:So what we're building is an iterative process that gives you different stimuli or examples to react to and allows you, through your instincts, to narrow down. The key, though, is doing that in a way that feels personalized to you, so I can show you generic bathrooms or kitchens or spaces, but you might say, well, that one is twice as big as my bathroom. That's clearly not right for me. That won't fit here. Or that one has a window. I don't have a window, so it needs to feel sufficiently relevant and personalized to you and your space. And the hard part is that every single home is different. Unlike new construction, where you have a piece of land that's almost a blank slate with renovation, you have a home that's been there probably for decades, that probably had work done on it, permitted, unpermitted. You might open up a wall, find stuff that you didn't know was there, and so we need to account for that in kind of giving people this information and these options and these choices.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to ask that actually because, again, having lived through a couple of renovations myself, you get in there and you find something that you didn't think was there. There's always surprises, right, or scope changes, so how does the platform and team adjust and adapt to that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. That's one of the great joys of renovation you know there are always surprises because, again, every home is different.
Speaker 1:So we do a couple of things. One is upfront. We try to share as much information as possible. So when homeowners get proposals from contractors, they see things like it might take this long, to this long, like these are the kinds of things we don't know yet, that we will see once we actually open up walls and see what's there. So I think information upfront is something that's often missing in the industry, especially for first-time homeowners. So often first-time homeowners kind of figure out their vision and maybe they use online platforms like Pinterest or Instagram and they just see these beautiful aftershots and they think, oh, it's going to be a smooth journey, I just need a trustworthy contractor to build that. But your home is a construction site for a number of weeks and there will be surprises. So sharing information upfront is really important.
Speaker 1:The other thing that we do is always provide a safety net, so homeowners and contractors work together to get through these surprises. Our contractors are equipped to do that, but homeowners always know. If something is really strange, we're there to help. So if there is a change order, your contractor comes to you and says we opened up a wall. There's stuff we didn't expect to see there. That's going to cost another $10,000. Usually the homeowner and contractor work it out. But if the homeowner, for some reason, is I don't know maybe skeptical or confused, they can always come to us. We review, change orders for free. We'll always intervene. You know, on the off chance your contractor hasn't called you back in 24 hours. You can always reach out to us. So we're a safety net. So you know you always have somebody who has your back throughout the process.
Speaker 2:And the other thing too with renovations they're obviously incredibly expensive. I'm curious has there ever been the thought or discussion around introducing some sort of financing component to the company?
Speaker 1:Yeah, really good question. Very top of mind right now. For sure, we used to have financing partnerships with various companies when rates were lower. We put that on hold just because borrowing costs were so high in the last couple of years. And we'll actually be relaunching a financing partnership shortly offering HELOCs through a third party, which should help homeowners who aren't ready to wire five figures tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes sense. I'd like to shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit more about you and your thoughts and philosophies behind building the company. So when I was reading the press release, coda mentioned that you had a really deeply held growth mindset. So I'm just curious how did you develop that and how does that affect your general leadership style on a daily basis?
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are kind words from him, so I'm really grateful for that. Yeah, I think growth mindset it's a term that's used a lot and you can interpret it in different ways. What it means to me is a real commitment to learning, and a commitment to learning to the extent that you're not afraid of setbacks or failure. And for me, I think I'm just so driven by learning about users, by learning about what we can do, by learning how we can be better, that I am pretty enthusiastic about running at hard, hard problems and expecting that we're going to fail many, many times. That's one of the things that appealed to me about the renovation space. It just seems so damn hard.
Speaker 1:The fact that you have a market that's almost half a trillion dollars that nobody has solved is a massive testament to how hard it is. But I find that really appealing. And I think what drives me personally, both in my professional life and my personal life, is these problems that might be impossible or might just be really hard, and you don't know until you try. And when you try you're going to fail many, many times. But every time you're failing you are also learning, because you're getting signal that failure itself is signal and that might be signal on what users need or want. It might be signal on what marketing channels work or don't. I think, when Codas' growth mindset how I interpret that is this perseverance and this commitment to learning.
Speaker 2:I love that. And when we talk about signal from failure, because I think there's two ways that you can interpret that signal right. There's this isn't working and we need to change, or there's we pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. So how do you decide whether it's time to shift gears or just keep powering through?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is one of the perennial questions of building a company, you know. I think when we think about failure, it's important to stratify. What that failure is Is when something isn't working. Is it that we're losing conviction in the problem space? So, for example, you know, are we losing conviction that homeowners need help renovating their homes? Is it that the current solution isn't working? Are we offering a particular product feature that's not resonating, or are we tackling this problem space in a method that's not working? Or is it distribution? So, are we maybe pursuing the wrong homeowners or homeowners in the wrong channel, or are we communicating in the wrong way?
Speaker 1:And I think, with startups, it's really important to have conviction in and commitment to the problem space first and foremost. And when people think about pivoting, pivoting to me means you go, pursue an entirely different problem space. You go from renovations to something completely different. If you're changing the feature sets, the actual product, the solution or your distribution, that's not a pivot. That is guaranteed. You know your product and your distribution will change many times. And so when we think about setbacks and something not working, I think it's really important to diagnose what exactly isn't clicking the way we expected it to.
Speaker 2:I love that. Can you tell me a little bit more about the internal operations of the company? How have you built out your teams? What does that look like? Where is everyone located, et cetera?
Speaker 1:Yeah, our team is split 50-50 between on-site in New York our offices in Brooklyn and Dumbo and remote, and initially the team was entirely in New York plus engineering a couple of engineers in Poland. During COVID we hired more folks remotely. Now we're leaning more toward hiring in New York again.
Speaker 1:So almost all roles we hire for going forward will be in New York. Our existing remote employees we of course support and we bring them on site a couple of times a year and we have a really great hybrid culture as well for most of our teams, who are hybrid. But going forward, we do want to build more and more of a center of gravity here in New York.
Speaker 2:How do you think about, when you know we were talking about earlier that growth mindset? How do you screen for that when it comes to potential new hires, or just how do you think about hiring generally?
Speaker 1:Yeah, when it comes to potential new hires or just how do you think about hiring generally? Yeah, with growth mindset, one of the things that is really inherent to our culture is humility, and you know, we we talk from time to time about a low ego culture, and I think that's that's actually part of the foundation that Coda built culturally, and what that means to me is people who are really committed to figuring out the right answers for users, for our homeowners, our contractors, our designers, our architects and people who care less about being right. And that comes back to this notion that we're actually going to be wrong a lot. We're going to be wrong 90% of the time. What's important is that we're trying different things and we're learning.
Speaker 1:Every time we have a setback or we feel like something isn't going well, we celebrate that. That's real signal. The thing to be worried about is when you're not getting signal, when you're taking too long to build something. Get it out in front of users. When you're overthinking a marketing campaign something. Get it out in front of users when you're overthinking a marketing campaign. So, when it comes to hiring, we look for people who are really committed to figuring out the right thing for users and working collaboratively to do that together.
Speaker 2:I love that. And then, as you think about this next phase of scale, opening it up in all these new cities, building and really focusing on these AI products how do you think about doing that? From either a scaling from a people perspective or a tech perspective, or both? Do you tend to lean one way, building and really focusing on these AI products? How do you think about doing that? From either a scaling from a people perspective or a tech perspective, or both? Do you tend to lean one way or the other?
Speaker 1:Yeah, when it comes to people, we hire on an as needed basis. You know, we I think in this day and age, most startups especially don't create a hiring plan January 1st and go hire against it. Tooling is also changing so much. You know you could use AI for a lot of things. It supplements a lot of people and we give ourselves the flexibility to hire throughout a year, multiple years, as needed to support our growth.
Speaker 1:For example, seo was not a big priority for us until recently and then we ran some experiments with an outside consultant. They were fruitful. We brought on an SEO lead, we brought on writers. We could do all of that really quickly because we had the flexibility. We didn't have to say, oh no, we need to wait until our hiring plan in 2025 to go and kick this off.
Speaker 1:So for us, the most important thing is to give ourselves the flexibility to adapt as we learn is to give ourselves the flexibility to adapt as we learn With our technology. The place where we maintain a lot of flexibility is in the AI models we use. So today we're leaning on various foundation models. That is text interpretation, that's image interpretation, that's image generation, and the state of the art changes every single day. I mean, I read AI papers every day because new models come out every day, and so it's really important, as you architect a product that uses different AI capabilities, is to allow yourself the flexibility to plug different models in at different points, and that's a big thing that we're focused on as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to ask you that because obviously, like you said, stuff is changing every single day and the abilities of the foundation models change. So do you anticipate and do you build in certain assumptions around maybe future capabilities as you're thinking about scaling up your own AI products, or what is your overall relationship with the foundation models and how you think of them affecting the business?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think in today's day and age, if you're building any kind of AI product, you need to be super selective about where you train a completely proprietary model from scratch versus where you take an out-of-the-box model and fine-tune weights versus where you take an out-of-the-box model and prompt engineer it.
Speaker 1:So we're super selective about things like that. I think it's also really important to be selective about where you optimize versus wait for the technology to catch up. So one thing we don't solve for today is inference cost, so what we pay to foundation models per token to deliver results in the product. That's because the cost of inference is falling constantly and we're assuming that, given the amount of competition in the market, that's because the cost of inference is falling constantly and we're assuming that, given the amount of competition in the market, we're going to see that cost continue to fall. If at some point it plateaus, we'll have room to optimize, use fewer tokens here and there be a little bit more efficient. But we're super selective on okay, we have limited resources and time and capabilities. Where do we focus our manpower to actually optimize and drive step change results versus? Where do we focus our manpower to actually optimize and drive step change results versus where do we expect the technology to advance on its own?
Speaker 2:Love that. So a couple of quick fire questions for you. For one thing, so you're an ultra marathon runner, which is, which is to be honest, crazy. I can't comprehend. I I generally like I think about myself, I mean, I'm in generally pretty decent shape, but when I think about that I'm like that is just so far beyond anything that I could ever do. I'm just curious how did you get into that? What was your? What's your journey been on on that side aside from work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, moderation has never been a strength of mine. I'm either 200% into something or 200% out of it. And you know I ran in high school. Our team was not very good. I jogged a little bit in college and then my first year out of college I started working as a management consultant and I threw myself into work and I stopped exercising and I, like would work on the weekends and kind of see friends but do a lot of work as well. And at my one year review the feedback I got was you're working too hard. Everybody thinks you're going to burn out. Chill out like find a hobby, make it easy. And you know consulting is a place where you're expected to work hard. So that was surprising feedback, but it came through loud and clear. And so I started to run again and I kind of started to run three miles here and there, five miles here and there, and then on the weekend I would extend my run longer and longer and eventually ran a marathon, really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:And marathons, I think, are pretty binary. You either love it or you hate it. And you've checked off the list and you swear to never do it again. Uh, I, I loved it. Um, and then I met some ultra marathoners here in New York and I was like, oh, you can go longer than 26. Okay, and they just kept going on longer and longer and um, I think, uh, the ultra marathon community is a little bit different.
Speaker 1:Like marathoners are really intense. You get a lot of like I don't know to stereotype investment bakers who are working a hundred hours but also running. Ultra marathoners usually are a little bit more low key. You know, you're just like shuffling around in the woods for a long time. You're like chatting and laughing as you run because you're going at such a slow pace. So I love the community and I love the adventure and I love the exploration of what humans are capable of. It's not only what your body can do. It's so much about what your mind does. You just watch your own mind as you're shuffling in the woods for hours and hours and your mind does crazy things. It's just like you can watch yourself, over the course of a day, go through really high highs and really low lows, and it's really fascinating.
Speaker 2:Next quick fire question what is one book that you think every leader should read?
Speaker 1:That's a good one. My favorite book in the world is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and I used to think psychology as a field was just bullshit. I'd like written it off. There's too much pop psych and self-help. But Kahneman, who passed in the last couple of years, was just such a tremendous thinker, extremely rigorous, very epistemically humble, and in his book book he really deeply explores the nature of human cognition and how, how we think, and he talks about these two systems system one, which is impulsive and rapid, and system two, which is kind of more deliberate and slower, along with the tremendous amount of cognitive bias that exists in the different types of it. And I think it's a really good map to understand how humans think, whether it's your own mind, your, your colleagues, your team, partners, customers, investors. I really, really recommend it you sold me.
Speaker 2:I'm going to go pick it up on Amazon after this.
Speaker 1:A lot of studies, so it's okay.
Speaker 2:No, it's fine, I geek out over that type of stuff. And then last one what is your go-to strategy or tool that you use to stay just organized and productive with everything you have going on?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think for me it's really helpful to always have a clear line of sight to what matters, and a lot of the time the number one thing I prioritize is speed of signal. How can we learn as quickly as possible, day-to-day, hour-to-hour? I feel like our most scarce resource is time and what I try to maximize for in that time is learning, and what that means is whether we're building products, whether we're launching marketing campaigns, whether we're selling, trying new things as quickly as possible and as decisively as possible to learn. That comes back to being comfortable with failing. It also comes back to realizing that most decisions are two-way doors. We're not doing brain surgery. It's okay to take a risk even if we're not sure, but there's such an opportunity cost to waiting and kind of waffling and being indecisive. So I encourage my teams and try to really empower my teams to make decisions. Get out there, try stuff. Even if it doesn't work, we learn and that's really valuable.
Speaker 2:I love that. Well, julie, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate all the knowledge you dropped here. Thanks, rhys. Thanks for having me conversation insightful and valuable. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to subscribe, leave a review and share it with your network. Your support means the world helps us continue to grow and bring more incredible guests onto the show. Now for more content and updates, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter, or you can check out MindHire, where we help startups build exceptional teams. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode of Seed to Exit.
