 greejings a mwelkom to this month's EHF Live investor session. Edmond Hillary Fellowship, it's a collective of entrepreneurs, scientists, storytellers, creatives and investment change makers who want to make an impact globally from A2 at Oa New Zealand. So, hopefully, these informal investor interviews are planned in a way that when you leave here after the 60 minutes or so, you feel you know the investor fellows on a personal level and understand what their intentions for New Zealand. Now this month you will hear from Ed Baker and EHF Investor fellow as he is interviewed by Mark Pawlowski, founder of NZVC. So it is a Q&A session so firstly there will be Q&A from Mark to Ed and then we will open up the floor and then you can ask questions also. You can either put them in the chat or you can just raise your hand and Mark can ask them. So over to you Mark. Thank you Michelle. Great to have everybody here and I'm pretty excited to be interviewing Ed today so I'll give you a quick intro on Ed and then we can dive in. So Ed studied at Harvard and later Stanford and while in Stanford he actually took the famous BJ Fogg Facebook apps class which was class design solely to creating apps on Facebook right when their API became public and so the idea of the class was to make a viral app. So Ed was one of the lucky few and actually there were quite a few folks who made apps that got over a million users and kind of you can actually read in the New York Times some of these folks got profiled so it was basically he was a student who created a viral app over a million users and eventually that led to him starting his first company which was then acquired by Facebook. Given that his focus had been on growth and viral tactics and marketing he led Facebook's global growth right as they were having kind of one of their biggest growth spurts to date internationally. Then after a few years at Facebook he actually knew Travis Kalmick at Uber and joined Uber right as that company was getting ready to have an exponential growth phase and basically led Uber's international growth. After Uber his dad actually told him that after working so hard at Uber he was working 15-hour days from what I wanted. Yeah, his dad told him he was in the worst shape of his life and so I decided to focus on that as a problem and became a triathlete. He had done some track in college. I had never really done any biking or swimming. He learned biking. He learned how to swim really well and 18 months later won his first triathlon and sort of somewhere in between that he had three kids and actually back in February of 2020 he was one of the first people I think publicly to start saying that COVID was probably already in the US and spreading which was really interesting. His connection to New Zealand he's actually invested in a couple of companies here. He's on the board of Crimson Education and was also an investor on the board of NZDC which is our investment firm here in New Zealand. He's recently got it into crypto investing and Web3 and several of his friends like Jaikara can evolve. Rabakan have also got involved with the fund that's helped. So that's a bit about Ed. Let's just start off by learning more about your childhood. How did you grow up for your parents? What gave you the inspiration to go do all these very interesting things that you've done throughout your career? Sure and thanks for that intro Mark. There are things you said that I haven't even thought about for a while. I'm not sure how you even got all that information but that's awesome. So let's see where do I start? What was it like growing up? I guess I'll just start by saying I was born in Seattle. My family then moved to Taiwan for a couple of years so my first memories are actually from when we were living in Taiwan and apparently I was speaking some Mandarin at the same time I was learning English. We then moved to the Bay Area when I was five and that's where I grew up until the age of 13 at which point we moved to Jacksonville, Florida which was a pretty big change from Palo Alto, California to Jacksonville. Why were you moved when you were young so much? You know my dad just had different jobs and I think the hardest move for me was the one to Florida and I think part of the reason we made that move I didn't really realize it at the time because I was 13 years old but I think my parents just felt like there was so much pressure in Silicon Valley even back then. This was around 1992 and they just felt like we had to get out of there. And so we moved to Jacksonville, Florida where my mom was born and raised and so I think my dad was in the Navy when he was stationed in Jacksonville that's where he met my mom and so for them they had all these good memories of like this is the place where we met and I think it just felt like that would be a fun place to go but for me and my brother who was two years younger than me it was hard to leave all of our friends in California and start a new life in Florida at that age. So let's see I wasn't really I'm kind of talking all over the place right now. Do you think that the moving around do you think that influenced you in a positive or negative way? Good question you know I think ultimately it was positive but it was really hard at the time I mean I remember when I I mean I think it's probably hard at age 13 to no even if you don't move that's a hard age but moving across the country before internet was around to message your friends was especially hard I remember my parents would let me like I could call one friend a month for like five minutes because it was so expensive to do a long-distance phone call you know and I would write letters to some of my friends you know I just did I for the first six months I lived in Florida I cried myself to sleep every night you know I really missed California so it was tough but but now looking back I think it it made me more resilient you know the school I went to in Florida I was I went to a public school in California and in Jacksonville Florida went to a private school and that was a big change you know I had to wear a tie every day and I remember kids making fun of my ties and I just like felt like I didn't really fit in and I was I was also like I think what I had been studying in California we were like a bit ahead of where we were the kids were in Florida so I took some classes with some of the kids that were like a great ahead of me and people are like oh this nerdy guy is taking these more advanced classes and so I just like was not a very popular kid and it was tough I was trying to find my place and didn't really feel like I fit in um did you ever like ever say let's let's move back or did you ever say let's move back um you know I think they again a lot of the stuff I didn't realize until I kind of became an adult but I think um for my dad especially it was um he didn't have great great experience out in the Bay Area and I think it was a difficult time in his life and um so that was never really an option that was on the table and you know when you're a kid you kind of just go along with whatever your parents do I think right or at least at least that's what I did so I didn't even really think of it as an option um so it took me a while to kind of I never fully felt like I fit in at my high school in Florida but I did discover track as kind of an extracurricular activity track in cross-country running and I felt like that more than anything made me feel like okay now I have like a group of friends that and I I started to feel like I found my place a little bit more so um just discovering a sport I found was was really helpful back then nice so what kind of happened after that uh so after that I um well I ended up applying to colleges and decided to go to Harvard and um studied physics and chemistry there uh at Harvard I felt much more I don't know it was it was a refreshing change from from Jacksonville Florida and um I made a lot of friends there I ran on the track and cross country team there and it athletics ended up being a pretty big part of my college experience you know I kind of thought like oh that's just a high school thing in college I'm going to study and not not worry about athletics but I realized that um that I just really enjoyed that and I enjoyed the balance between um kind of um academics and athletics the balance that provided and it was a bit of an escape for me too um because Harvard was a pretty like intense place um and a bit of a pressure cooker at times so it was nice to have a a sport I could do to kind of help me relieve some of that stress um uh let's see so in college I um yeah I made some some some of my closest friends today are still friends from college so it was a pretty um um those those four years were pretty meaningful for me and uh I also started my first company while I was there um I don't know if you could really call it a company actually it was I at the time I thought I was starting a company but it was really just a website um back when websites were kind of this new thing it was called datesite.com and the way it worked was you would put in email addresses of people you had a crush on and they would get an email saying somebody likes you and then it said go to datesite.com to see if there's a match and you'd go there and you'd have to type in email addresses of people you had a crush on and if it matched up it would say hey you guys have a match you should go out and um you know I part of the reason I built it was I was too shy to actually ask anyone out to their face um and so I partially built it for myself although I don't think I ended up getting any matches but you know I tried um but within one week a quarter of all the students at Harvard had signed up for it wow and that just blew my mind this was back in 1999 um wow and people were just starting to use the internet and this was back when like people actually would read an email saying someone has a crush on you and it wouldn't go into your spam folder because their spam folders didn't even really exist back then um so it was a different time back then but I was just blown away by how quickly it grew on its own and um I was you know studying physics at the time so I was really interested in the math behind that viral growth and uh that's when I first started to experiment with this idea of viral growth on the internet and the fact that it can actually be measured and um you can run experiments you know just like you might run a physics experiment you could run an experiment on the internet and say well what if we tweak the email to say this instead of this you know how does that change the conversion rate and what if we change this page to you know say this instead of this and how does that change things and then with all these experiments kind of seeing well does that allow us to grow faster so it was kind of something I just stumbled stumbled upon did you start running those experiments right at that time uh not right away but um I I at first when I first launched it it just happened to be viral from day one although that was at Harvard campus it maybe tells you something about Harvard students the fact that they they all wanted to like put in crushes and not actually tell people it was also viral at MIT right yeah it went viral at MIT as well actually that was our second school um so I did more experimentation um later on uh I so I went out to Stanford for business school and that as you mentioned that's when I took the Facebook class and at that point in time I was starting to do a lot a lot more of those experiments and you were at Harvard before uh Zuck was there right that's right I I graduated I think a year before he started so I think it was five years do you think there was something special at Harvard at the time that that led to well it sounds like you got a lot of really interesting um experiences with viral growth and he later did with Facebook um do you think there was something special at Harvard at the time that led to that being kind of in some ways you know like you know a lot of innovation kind of flourishing there um good question I don't know I think um I think it might just be a coincidence I'm not sure um I'm trying to think if there was anything in particular um I mean well so the reason I I actually built the site was there was this business plan competition and my roommates and I at dinner one night were brainstorming like well what we should apply for this business plan competition if we win we can make some money it'd be cool and we're like what what what would the business idea be and that's when I came up with the idea for date site we ended up writing a business plan submitting it we ended up not winning anything um our idea was not selected but we we liked the idea so much we were like let's build it anyway you know so I I remember going to the the bookstore and buying a book to learn how to code and so I could code the site myself wow I coded it and uh I mean it was not not very pretty it would I code I remember using I think C++ and CGI scripts and you know I was learning all this stuff for the first time wow cool and then you said that's awesome thank you and then you went to Stanford and that's where you sort of really got into the growth yeah that's where you know um when Facebook launched their app platform in 2007 that was a great way to experiment with these growth ideas by building different apps and you know one of the apps I built in that class you mentioned that BJ Fogtaw was it was called Send Hotness and it you'll see a common theme with some of these things I worked on it would let you send hotness points to people you thought friends of yours you thought were hot and that it was just a silly little you probably remember the days of those crazy Facebook apps that all were growing virally so this one grew to five million users in five weeks wow five million users in five weeks yeah Matt can you go on to the question yeah yeah I was going to make a comment to the question that Mark asked earlier about whether there's something unique happening at Harvard I was there before you uh graduate and I hate to admit this actually in the earlier century in in 1978 and even then there was a lot of encouragement to do things and and a lot of things that were probably not a great idea at the time and I was in physics and we were basically even free run of the lab and we did a lot of stuff that was in hindsight probably very dangerous but that was okay and I think later because I was there overlapping with Bill Gates and he and his buddies would just took over the computer center and basically built their whole product on Harvard's system presumably when you built your app it was also probably on Harvard's systems totally in violation of the rules that's right probably between the two of you because it was probably in the late 80s or early nine no it was later than that it would have been the early to mid 90s um we I got pulled into something that was a workshop or a program that I that Harvard was looking at is how do we use technology so they brought a bunch of alumni in and we looked at it and they were actually thinking of suing um Microsoft they thought they you know a few hundred million dollars from Microsoft because he had violated the terms of use and therefore when they built their initial computer and all this and we talked them out of that uh which in hindsight Harvard got a lot more money from both Microsoft and Bill Gates and various other alumni who had been there but it was really I think that was the thing that allowed people like you or Zach or others to do things there was just it was encouraged to try stuff more so than a lot of other that's that's a great point Mark you know now that you say it that resonates with me and I was trying to think though like who how who encouraged people to do so where did that come from and you know like you said it was actually against the university rules to actually to start a company while you were there so it wasn't that the university was actively encouraging students to start companies but I'd say it was almost just like almost from my peers like when my roommates and I were brainstorming over dinner and we're just like let's do this you know there's almost that and I think Harvard believes in in free range students you know they they say they have rules but actually it's free range you do whatever you want and that's the way they treat their academics largely you get out of it when you put it and if you don't put something in they don't come and help you yep yep true oh thanks for that comment that's really interesting work thank you so where were we we were saying you five million uh five weeks five weeks this was spend hotness and standard it was spend hotness yeah and our professor said your grade will be based on how many users your app has so really we uh yeah it was like a minimum that you had to have I I don't know if there was a minimum but I think like because if you have like you know five million and everyone else has a thousand right then all right how do you standardize the rating I know that that that I I got a good grade in the class even though I didn't do the homework guys so so this was this was like almost seven five seven years after your experiment at Harvard right that's right so I kind of skipped over the five years between college and business school where I was in Boston most of that time I worked at bain consulting and bain capital private equity um most of that time in Boston but spent a year in Tokyo as well I guess yeah I understood because it was like it's been five years so like they're like grown pretty fast instead right so did you find that it was the same techniques that worked both kind of before no uh yeah um the it was the same framework but um there were slightly different um I guess same framework in similar tactics but the biggest thing that changed were the actual growth channels so by the time I was out at Stanford email wasn't working anymore um for some of those reasons I mentioned just like spam filters and people just not not reading their emails as much as they used to um so actually when I was at Stanford business school another thing I did before Facebook built that platform was I I built a mobile version of datesite.com and I still had the domain name I just did it with text messaging and that went viral and with that one I did do a lot more of the ab testing and experiments and that kind of thing um and then of course with the Facebook platform those growth channels were things that all existed within the Facebook platform itself so things like sending invites and notifications and things via Facebook um so I'd say that was the biggest thing that changed um and I think that still is like the thing that's constantly changing is the actual growth channels that are most effective change over time but I think the framework stays the same you know and I like to kind of draw out a viral loop anytime I'm trying to make a new product grow in a viral way the first thing I do is just draw out a simple viral loop and think about you know it starts with how does someone who's never heard of this product before um get pulled into it and sign up for it and use it and then ultimately share it with their friends so that their friends get pulled into it and the loop repeats so you can kind of just like draw out the steps that what has to happen between the first user using something and the next person who heard about it from them using it and you can measure every step of that loop to um kind of see what your k-factor is and if that k-factor gets above one that's when you see massive exponential growth and by the way that's that's the main reason you mentioned um the pandemic and I wrote a medium post um a couple of medium posts about it I think yeah as as as Michelle's saying that's the R that's the R not is the same thing as a k-factor and the math is exactly the same and so um I think yeah I may have written my first blog post about it in January I think um before people were people were still saying no it's not going to be in the US but just from all the data I had seen from China and pattern matching that with all these viral experiments I'd run over the last 20 years um it just struck me that this is the exact same pattern and there's no way this thing is going to be contained to China or any other part of the world um and I and the blog post I wrote you applied to EHF right that's right sorry but it'll go yeah the blog post here oh yeah I just made I made all of the um the analogies between like how you calculate a k-factor when you're trying to make something on the internet growing a viral way and the the R not with COVID and um it was it was kind of a a weird exercise for me to go through because I had always been trying to do things and run experiments to increase the k-factor right because you always want to grow faster but then for the first time I was as I was writing these blog posts I was thinking about well how do you effectively reduce that that effective R right and um that's why I also wrote a post a follow-up post about face mask back when the CDC was still saying no one needs to wear face mask I was going to this this is the only thing I can think of that might reduce our our k-factor so there were just a lot of um analogies that that struck me um and that's why I started writing writing about it although by no I'm by no means an epidemiologist or anything like that I just wanted to spare some of my observations yeah and then back to back to back to Facebook so at that time there was a lot of companies that were taking off just based on Facebook it's not like they they you know built inherently the product baked in a bunch of these viral kind of tools right so like Zynga took off and like a bunch of companies kind of became really huge and then when Facebook and the flip side turned those things off right Zynga tanked and a lot of other companies kind of went bust so kind of can you talk a bit about that like period and what was like was being trying to leverage other products to grow and at some point they decided that was that was kind of you know uh they're taking them too much too much space and it's time to close them down and then what was your role kind of because you had a company you got acquired that's right yeah so I I did build I started a company after business school called Friendly um Friend.ly which uh we built on Facebook's platform so we were using all of those those Facebook channels to grow and we were able to grow to over 25 million registered users um doing so but I always felt vulnerable you know I always felt like Facebook could shut these things off at any time and then we would just we wouldn't be able to grow anymore and um and that that is what happened with companies like Zynga you know so I think that that was the biggest risk at the time the same way that you know email used to work and then with spam filters and stuff like people stopped seeing the emails and it's harder to keep that k-factor high um with Facebook I think Facebook kind of it was kind of like the wild west and for a while they were just kind of letting anything go and then um I remember there was one app I built called Zodiac Photo Album um that uh basically it would just look at all of your friends on Facebook and create a photo album for every Zodiac sign and it would show you which of your friends had that um Zodiac sign you know it had one for areas one for etc and then it would tag all those friends and it was like it was actually the most viral thing I had ever built um and when you were at Facebook or outside no this was this was before I was at Facebook this was actually like when I was starting up friendly this was something I built right before that got it it was super viral but within 48 hours we got shut down because we had tagged I think like over 100 million people in photos on Facebook including Mark Zuckerberg um was tagged in some and this was back when they had this highlight section that would show you know popular photos on Facebook from your friends and like all of the highlights were all Zodiac Photo Albums it just kind of broke the site for a day and I later found out that Zuckerberg said to the platform team what is a Zodiac Photo Album thing and why are we allowing this on here you know and they just shut it off even though we hadn't technically broken any of the rules I said why did you guys shut us down and they just said I said did we violate any of your platform policies and it took them a while to get back to me and they finally said well it it violates the spirit of the Facebook platform so um anyways it was the Wild West and but we were always at the mercy of like Facebook's channels and whether or not they wanted to keep those going so um you know I think these days um it's interesting I I feel like a lot of apps are figuring out other ways to grow like I think SMS is still a pretty popular one and especially with smartphones and address the way you can import your address book like clubhouse for example use that and I think we're able to grow really quickly just through doing the address book importer thing pretty well so there's still and those are ways that I think are um safer to grow because you don't have um a company like Facebook that can just turn it off I mean with a lot of things I guess you have Apple to turn it off we talk about some of these tactics right like importing the address book for example I think every single app tries to do that right get some apps succeeded some don't so like when you think about the viral loop how do you think about like sure like I think the tactics are every tactic is available to every company what makes certain companies stand out yeah so yeah the interesting thing about making something kind of hit that tipping point and start growing exponentially is it's all about getting that k-factor above one and even if you're just below one at like point nine you won't have any exponential growth whereas if you're at 1.1 that can just compound so quickly and and grow so much and so sure everyone's trying to do things like add an address book importer and do these different things and that might help you get some virality but unless you're really measuring the the k-factor and iterating on it and running experiments you're probably not going to hit that tipping point so and that's that's a pretty hard thing to do is to hit that tipping point and I think it's only gotten harder over time and at the end of the day it actually takes I think a lot more art than science to get there these days so I don't think you can just kind of experiment your way to getting something to go viral these days I think you have to really be creative and think about what what are the things that are going to make people want to share this product and and want to sign up for this product so that the art I think is um actually like more important in 20 years ago I think you could just take a very scientific approach and almost like brute force it to get going viral but these days I think you it's actually you have to build a better product it's a lot harder to make something go viral that isn't a good product right right so by the way I saw a couple questions might have come in like does it make sense now to look at any of those or um I think we we've addressed uh I think there was one I just briefly saw it um pop up about maybe giving an example of a viral loop it's it's an ask yeah I mean I can read it to you basically and just ask you yeah so I mean uh you know um I had a business that was viral and grew but uh you know when I started in 2011 Facebook it was kind of super easy to do and then with their algorithm changes and also with Google changing their algorithm all the time it gets more and more difficult so um you know with um Uber or even something that you're working on now um or if you're investing in a company are there certain ways um like importing address books some more concrete examples that you know some of the entrepreneurs or investors here could use with their portfolio companies to say hey uh here are some things like a referral program or uh anything that you kind of like map out a viral loop um like how to do kind of get off the ground and get back after up so um referral programs are a very common viral loop and a lot of times there there's more than one viral loop in a product and sometimes you need multiple viral loops all kind of working together to get your overall key factor above one but with Uber the the referral program was and probably still is a big part of their growth and that's that's the give a ride get a ride um when I first joined Uber I think it was give um 20 dollars get 20 dollars and so any you could kind of give a new user you give any of your friends 20 dollars worth of credit on Uber once they signed up and claimed that and took their first ride you'd get 20 dollars of credit to your account we then tested out different versions of that and found that give a ride get a ride was more viral because I think people that received those free rides for whatever reason valued that more or were more likely to sign up when they received it even though the average ride costs less than 20 dollars um so that was a great discovery when we found we can spend less money and grow faster when we switch it from give 20 get 20 to give a ride get a ride um so that was one example of something we did at Uber to increase the virality um that was on the rider side on the driver side we had a driver referral program as well um and we found that we were actually uh more supply constrained than demand constrained at Uber anytime you have a two-sided marketplace usually one side of that marketplace is is where you're constrained and with Uber in most markets it was weird that we were constrained on the supply side so when we realized that and it took us a while to really fully realize that then it became all about how do we get more drivers on the platform that's the key to unlocking growth um so there was the driver referral program where drivers could refer other drivers but we thought there've got to be other ways to get new drivers on the platform and one of the things we did this is a super simple um tweak we made to the app but when I look back at my time both at Facebook and at Uber and at other companies I've worked with there's often like one thing per year we do that moves the needle on growth more than everything else combined and a lot of times it's a pretty simple thing so I'll share with you the example at Uber um we added the ability for riders to sign up and become drivers we just added a little button in the rider app saying hey would you like to become a driver and suddenly that gave us more new drivers signing up than like all of our paid marketing on on the driver's side so and it took a week to just to do that a week of engineering time to add a little button and make the sign up flow work for riders to become drivers we called it R2D rider to driver and that was a huge needle mover for us on uh for the overall company and you know we were we were running dozens of experiments a week and had at that point in time hundreds of people on the growth team and doing all kinds of things looking for one person improvement here or there and then it's like add a button in the rider app asking riders to become drivers and that like one thing we did caused more growth and everything else combined so um I feel like there was maybe one thing like that each year and of course you you didn't always know ahead of time what that one thing would be but it was always interesting when we discovered like wow that one little feature was more important than everything else combined in terms of driving growth uh that year and with with um a lot of these you were early and so for a lot of these with a facebook ruber being early allowed you to you know trial and error things and get to something that worked whereas now a lot of these have been tried and you know one could argue that a lot of these big platforms whether it's google or facebook control and apple control the ecosystem it's as harder to break through right they um may they're taking big tax or they they want that how fast you can grow how do you think about that like do you think we've sort of left like like clubhouse maybe an example something that really broke out last year but I feel like the frequency of those types of companies have become less and less frequent do you feel like that's true do you feel like there's now I mean because you have these sort of monopolies um it's harder for companies to to break out and and if and if so what are some of the new ways that they can try to you know are there any platforms and mediums that will allow them to do so yeah um it's a good question I I don't know I mean on the one hand I I sometimes feel what you're sharing which is like wow all these big companies they almost feel like monopolies now and like is it possible to create your own startup anymore but then you look at like the number of unicorns that are created every year these day like in the last year it's like way more than ever before so there are plenty of companies out there that are growing faster than what we've ever seen before um I do think that kind of the the growth hacking which is kind of what I've some of the stuff I've been talking about with measuring the k-factor and running AB tests and all of that is you know probably less important today than it used to be and I think the more important thing today is is really just building a great product that that people want to use and people want to pay for I mean that's the other thing a lot of the stuff I worked on in the past was it was all free and so you had to grow to millions or tens of millions of users for it to really become a valuable business whereas today I feel like um there's so many more things people are willing to pay for and um I'm I'm involved with a couple of subscription companies subscription-based companies in the health and wellness space um both of whom are are now unicorns and they they got to that milestone with just hundreds of thousands of subscribers so you don't even need a million subscribers to you know when you have people who are actually willing to pay for something so I think that's maybe one of the differences today versus in the past is that it's just like easier to get people to pay for things maybe and therefore it's easier to build businesses that can um you know that that can generate meaningful revenue like more easily. Yeah I think one of those companies is Woop right and I found out about what was because one of the other fellows you are who's on this call he he told me that he was wearing the band right so that was actually an interesting um you know viral transmission uh way of doing it or actually wearable but people ask you about because I asked them what is that he explained it to me right and then and then it became a thing that like other people asked me about. And uh EHF uh cohorts seven member Ryan McIntyre is on their board. Yeah. On Woop's board? Yeah. Ryan McIntyre? What's the name of the company? Woop I'm on Woop's board but yeah I don't think. That's awkward for me because that at least it's recorded that I'm wrong. I mean maybe maybe he's on their advisory board I'm not sure. He's definitely an investor in the company so Foundry Group in Boulder. Oh right okay yeah yeah so um we we'd have Foundry's like one of their biggest investor actually. And I kind of wanted to maybe two more things before before we sort of you know have people a time lapse. One thing I wanted to talk about was definitely kind of New Zealand, you're interested in New Zealand and how Foundry's here because they can find growth. And the second thing was um Woop 3 right because I think Woop 3 now is turning out to be you know now it has a lot of different growth tactics that Web 2 companies didn't really have. And you know I'm happy to talk about what Woop 3 even is or you can talk about that. Maybe those two things we can kind of cover before for the end of the call whichever way you want to take it. Yeah for sure. So let's see Web 3 and by the way Foundry Group's one of the biggest investors I saw your note but Chris Moody from Foundry is on the board so he must be partner. Yeah he's the partner and I think Ryan led the investment and then Chris took the part too. Okay so I'm not totally wrong. Okay no no you're not. It's somewhat vindicated. Yeah for sure. And by the way just quickly on Woop before we move on to your question Mark. One of the one of the first suggestions I made when I joined the board of Woop was a change to their pricing which ultimately it was basically instead of charging $180 upfront for the strap and getting six months free and then paying $30 a month to just charge $30 a month from day one. And that's just it's a very simple concept but by reducing that friction of not having that huge upfront payment and instead of just doing $30 a month and we we basically make you commit for six months so we know we will get that $180. We saw twice as many people started purchasing Woop just because of that one little change. So a lot of times how did you make them commit they're only paying $30 a month? The same way like a cell phone company will say you know we'll give you an iPhone if you pay this much per month but if you cancel early you've got to pay us the difference. So and that was the main reason Woop hadn't done that was they're like well the hardware's a lot more expensive than $30 so we can't just let you start paying $30 a month but when we added that language around the commitment it ended up working. The position now is you're paying for the service right you're paying for the monitoring the data which exactly and you get free hardware upgrades by just being a member so it really is more about being a member than a hardware sales business. Back to web three I have to say this is not an area where I have any I consider myself to have any expertise so I think my my the extent of my expertise is I was able to connect you Mark to for other friends of mine who do have expertise in that area and I I kind of follow along and invest in some of the things they invest in but I I have to say that's just not something where I can speak with a whole lot of knowledge but it is an area that I that's obviously going to be huge and a place where I would like to learn more and spend some more time. Yeah and maybe I guess just for everyone who is not what web three is just it's the idea of using kind of blockchain technology for a lot of the applications that we use today which are centralized and sort of web two and the reason I asked was because a lot of these projects are going super fast part of the way they're able to do that is to incentivize with uh with actually with payment like they pay their users right so the model instead of paying their third party company to get the users they actually pay the users directly so I'm just curious yeah I've thought about that how they change some of the buyer rules but yeah yeah that's that's fine and we can we can talk about New Zealand now because I think you're also under yeah on the board of Crimson right which is a New Zealand company yeah I'm on I'm on their advisory board and an investor in the company and and yeah so far you know unfortunately since uh we haven't yet had a chance to go there in person everything I've been doing in terms of investing in companies in New Zealand has been through introductions and zoom meetings you know including through you mark um and so I'm excited for the time when I can actually go and meet some of these founders in person um but in terms of like how do I decide on what companies in New Zealand I want to get involved with the first thing I think about is like where can I actually be helpful so if um my background on growth could could you know for example with Crimson it made sense that I felt like there were places I could add value there um and uh and then from there it's I'd say most of what I've done is it tends to be consumer facing so I tend to lean more towards consumer facing companies and I've done a lot of stuff in the health and wellness space you know like Woop and Zwift and and others and being a um kind of endurance athlete myself that's just uh a space that I'm personally passionate about so uh that and ed tech is a space I've also started to get a bit more involved with um so how do you think about this is traditional New Zealand hasn't had a lot of a direct to consumer companies right most the ones at least that that are well known are either deep tech for BWSAS think zero and rocket lab how do you think about and I think I mean my opinion is that part of it is that New Zealand is isn't quite you know quite far away from the consumer markets like the United States um how do you think about founders for building direct to consumer businesses from New Zealand what do you think is there a way to do it from New Zealand or do they have to move to the States I don't think you need to move to the States I think especially these days you can start any company from anywhere in the world I think right so um I mean there there may be certain things where you if your target market is in the States it's easier to start off living if you live in the States but um just trying to think I mean um well I mean crimson education is a great example of a company that uh was able to to build a big successful business from New Zealand a global business and um I don't see any reason why anyone else can't do that are there anything that given your experience with crimson making the you see as especially difficult or especially see being based here are there any advantages and disadvantages to being based here and building I'd say probably this may sound silly but I actually think the biggest um challenge and point of friction is just the time zone difference and you know like the the having calls it has to be you know like right now it's it's evening time for me I'm about to put my kids to bed and it's morning time for those of you who are in New Zealand and um you know my triathlon coach actually lives in New Zealand and it's even hard for us to find times to connect at time so it's just a logistical thing um but I think that does uh his name is Daniel Plews PLEWS um he's awesome so we we still of course find time to chat but a lot of it is done more asynchronously just through you know messages on WhatsApp and that kind of thing I know that if I message him uh in the morning I'll hear back from him by the evening nice um cool that's great anything else and you want to talk about that we didn't cover um I know you had the I mean the presentation I think uh I don't know if you want to it's a question here Mark actually there's actually a few questions in the chat mark that I don't know if you've been oh yeah okay so we have top five we've already kind of covered the k they don't know how can you utilize k-factor to increase the consumer product for example fmcg products or solutions yeah I think I think I think and you were saying the k-factor thing it matters less now right I think so I think these days it's actually more about just building a great product and if you build a great product then there are so many channels that already exist where people can share share that they love that product well for example even take like uh I was going to say on Twitter and stuff but even like on TikTok if you have a great product I think there's some brands that have figured out how to use TikTok to make things go viral yeah um I didn't do a lingo I saw something they've had some things go viral and you'd think like well how does a brand that's like about translating things you know like go viral on TikTok but it just takes like some creativity that kind of stuff there's a question here from Lily I think do you have any solutions in increasing digital capacity upskilling in New Zealand and creating more tech companies hmm um probably hard to say if you haven't been in the country right yeah I I I I hope to have a more informed opinion on this once I do actually get to spend some time there um but I would just say I mean I think what EHF is doing is is hopefully going to be a big part of this um and just continuing to like not not be constricted by the by the borders and to have these networks that almost live more in the cloud these days you know just like we're all on zoom right now um so I think by just almost like making I feel like the pandemic has made location less relevant other than the time zone difference that I mentioned I mean I feel like these days I just have meetings with people all over the place and half the time I don't even know where they are but to me they're all kind of like there's meetings just like every other meeting and so I I feel like physical geography is a lot less important now than it used to be. Thanks for that Ed may I just say something very quickly before I disappear and there's currently an old teotoroat digital strategy um government is working on with um communities and companies throughout New Zealand to try and find a strategy and um perhaps if you'd like um we could send you a link to that to let you understand more what's going on and and how because we're looking for big players who've been from Silicon Valley what have you who have the expertise to help share the expertise also different um investment opportunities um so it might be worthwhile you reading that strategy great thank you there is also a question about uh sustainability and given given like climate change and stuff is there a way to discourage consumption to help save resources which is sort of the opposite like similar to your uh limiting the k-factor with the virus like it's limiting yeah yeah I I I don't I don't know if I'm necessarily have have a great answer to that question um but I I agree it's important and uh so that yeah the question is there a way to create a view creatively used by reality to discourage consumption um hold on let me think just a minute well okay the first thing that that pops in my mind is in addition to making products go viral actually the easiest thing to go viral is an idea and um I think it all comes down to um how you how you can package that idea in a way that it's very easy to share with a lot of other people and where they want to share it with others so if you can package that idea and when I say package that idea what's that mean I don't know it could mean like create a TikTok video that when people see it they want to share it um it could mean um you know it could be a tweet it it could be like any it almost doesn't matter what the format is but if it's something that is a shareable piece of content that gets across the message you want to get across but as importantly when other people see it it makes them want to share it as well I feel like that's that's that's the key anytime I try to make something go viral I feel like they're two they're two key elements one is it's got to be something that the people that use it want to share and it's got to be something that when it's shared those people then want to use it yeah needs both both I mean on that on that note actually there's a lot of ideas now that we probably don't want being shared right like there's a bunch of anti-vax stuff and the stuff around the the capital insurrection and how do you think about that right do you think the platforms today make it easier for the French groups to get mindshare and is that is that a problem or is that just part of it I mean sure I think that's Facebook's been dealing with this I mean all the platforms have been dealing with this and unfortunately um in the past it's just kind of been whatever content goes viral goes viral you know and I don't think the platforms have really I think they've been afraid to like moderate content too much and so as a result and a lot of times the more extreme the content is the more viral it will go and it can go viral within certain pockets so I do think that there's that that's just a hard problem that I know Facebook and other platforms are trying to figure out how to solve and I don't know the answer there but I agree it needs to be solved how do you think about the the metaverse I mean I remember the first time I put on a VR headset just being blown away by how how realistic the thing felt and then you know I reminded myself we're like at the super early days of all of this you know it's like the pong day pong days of gaming right so it's hard to even fathom what this will be like 10 years from now let alone 20 years from now and so I think the metaverse is going to be a thing I think there's debate as to will it be like one single metaverse or will there be multiple kind of universes I saw I think Sam Lesson wrote a piece on that recently in the information again this is an area where I don't have a ton of expertise but I'm fascinated by it and I think it'll be interesting to see how it plays out but by the way that's one more thing that's going to like just like the pandemic almost make physical location less important if people are spending more and more time um in the metaverse I mean it's to some extent just having all these meetings on zoom is a form of the metaverse you know it's just a very kind of um it's just not a not a very like entertaining and fun version of it but it's something the first iteration of it right so so given that you have kids I mean how do you think about your kids like they're going to grow up they might even grow up most of their time inside of a headset right we don't know how do you think about that do you think that's like like on the one like yeah do you try to stop them do you I think you have a good I mean it's I think it's kind of scary and so when the pandemic started I my wife and I decided we would let our kids play roblox because it was the one way for them to socialize with their friends when they weren't allowed to see them in person but now that um they're able to go go to school again wearing mask and all of that um we've said no more ipads ipad usage so no more roblox no more tiktok like we're trying to hold hold off on all of that stuff as long as possible um and they do ask to play VR from time to time but I I don't allow much of that either yeah I mean I mean when you train on switch right that's that's that's an interesting product because it's actually you're physically training on a bike but you have a virtual interface right and I think that probably makes you train harder right yes find that oh yeah no I mean I do almost all of my bike training indoors on swift it's great um and it's you know the most efficient way to train too maybe you can explain about what swift is sure it's it's basically a virtual world you can ride your bike in from home um I was going to show you about my cameras flurry right now but I set up my bike trainer in front of a tv and I just hop on my bike in my home gem and I can see myself biking in this virtual world and I can see other people all over the world that are connected at the same time so it's another example of like a its own little metaverse I guess and um and yeah it's a great way to for me to train and stay in shape and I like that I don't have to go out and ride on the roads and have traffic lights and cars and all of that stuff to worry about so um for me it's a great way to stay in shape and not just have to stare at a wall right right so and that's another subscription based business it's uh can't remember it's like 10 or $15 a month um and again like when you it's when you have a product that people are willing to pay for even if it's only $10 a month the numbers can get big pretty quickly yeah yeah um so so do you think that's kind of the the direction things will go with the whole like I mean because we've talked about the downsides of screens for kids right yeah well yeah so I mean with kids I don't know I honestly don't know um I um I'm going to have to figure this out my oldest daughter is 11 and her sister is nine and then my boys are six and three so uh I don't think they're you know they they they love their iPads but I've been my wife and I've been able to like put them away um but I don't know a few years from now those of you who have teenagers can maybe tell me how it is but I know we won't be able to control their screen usage forever oh that's awesome um I'm assuming there's no last questions we've gone quite over time but I just want to say thank you Ed that was awesome and thanks Mark for your interviewing skills it was very good I hope you all now feel that you know Ed personally enough that you can get in touch with him to talk more I know he's got a lot of more info that he can talk about on growth and what he thinks are his top five tips so if you do want to get in touch with Ed I've put his email address in there and also in the chat I have put his link in so you can connect with him and I have put Mark's email address and also one last thing that I want to share with you is we've got coming up this week some other live sessions that are slightly different one is uh post cop 26 we've got it's going to be a climate session of three hours we've got another one on innovation about what should New Zealand be looking at and how do we get from start up into growth phase with our companies and another one is inter generation on the Rangatahi so how do we get our youth to have higher salaries and greater job opportunities in the Pacifica and Māori populations of New Zealand so thanks Ed and thanks Mark and thank you everyone for showing up and we'll see you soon thanks Mark thanks everyone for joining tonight yeah appreciate it see you guys