 Wait, before I start, can we give it a round of applause for our hosts? I've never been to this before, and that was pretty cool. The energy level in the room feels amazing. So, hey guys, my name is Steve. I'm the flower guy. Two years ago, I didn't know anything about flowers. 18 months ago, I still worked at Google. And now I run a flower business that does a couple of million dollars in revenue. Yeah! So, this is my story. So, three things, that's it. I promise, Steve Jobs quote. So, my story, my fog ups, some of my fog ups, far too many. And some of the lessons learned from building a flower company. So, Google to flowers, right? It's just like peanut butter and jelly. Let me explain. So, I grew up in New York. I did consulting. I wanted and did things in pursuit of a dream job. I was obsessed with prestige and finding the next step and finding what really mattered. I wanted to advise clients. I wanted to do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So, consulting, okay, fantastic, then what? Okay, Google, fantastic. Corporate strategy, that sounds pretty cool. In reality, less cool. Okay, first in San Francisco, that's kind of interesting. Then moved to Singapore also, pretty interesting. But, something didn't really feel right. Something in my gut said, Steve, what the fuck? So, I walk into my boss's office one day and I say, hey, I'm either going to quit or you're going to give me a sabbatical. You tell me. I go three months off. What do you do? So, it all starts in Columbia. So, I get a sabbatical. The first thing I do is I book a one-way ticket to Pablo Escobar's Old City of Medellin. Has anyone ever been to Medellin? Fuck yeah. It's this paradise in Columbia. Beautiful weather. It's the city of the Toronto Spring. And every single day for three months, I sat in a coffee shop. I pontificated about my life. I thought, do I need this? Can you guys hear me? Okay, fantastic. I hate these things. So, every single day for three months in a coffee shop, thinking about my life. Thinking about what gives me energy and what doesn't. Okay, so I came away with these 21 takeaways about my life. The central theme, passion and love. I need to be obsessed. Obsessed with everything in my life. Okay? Google's not doing it, so then what? So every single day in that coffee shop, by the airport, you know this, they're flower farms all over the place in Medellin. It's beautiful. You tour them, they're roses, it's lovely. I could do that. I remember trying to give flowers to a girlfriend, and it fucking sucked. I could do that. Made people happy for a living. Let's do it. So I moved back, told my boss I was quitting, told my mom I was quitting, that was pretty funny. And started a flower shop. So, when you start, you have legitimately nothing. I still have nothing, by the way. And I remember attending a happy hour. I don't like doing networking events. I find them really scary and draining. But I remember attending this tech and Asia happy hour. And talking to this fucking guy. And telling him all of my wide-eyed aspirations, and how I was going to do whatever the fuck I was going to do. Cool, right? And this is what the guy told me. He's like, okay, Steve, so you quit your job. You don't have a supply chain. You don't have a name. You don't have operations. You don't have any employees. But you thought it was a good idea to quit your job. Did I get that right? Yeah. Yeah, you got that right. So I boarded that train. That's the train that goes from Singapore to KL. Night train, you sleep. It's not terribly comfortable, but you make do. And went in search of flower farms. Because what the fuck else are you going to do? So I rent a car in KL. I drive on up to the Cameron Highlands. I'm literally just chilling on the side of the goddamn road. And somebody stops. Dude turns out his name is Hans. He says, get in the back of my pickup truck. Some dude who I've never met before, a minute after meeting me for the very first time, tells me to get in the back of his pickup truck. Okay. Well, luckily I'm still here today. But that's how we started our supply chain. That's the photos from one of his farms. And that was the first moment of real value. So first business card. You do something right. Fantastic. Then what, right? First delivery men, first florist, first janitor, first psychologist, first bitch. I'm still all of these things. I do every shitty job. I've cleaned more toilets than I care to admit. Taking out more trash cans than I care to admit. But eventually, something slowly starts to work. Slowly. So onto some fuckups. The first fuckup. I was supposed to talk here once before. Fuck that up. If you could read it, it was supposed to be August 3rd. Apologies, thank you for inviting me back. And the second fuckup. So Valentine's Day. I run a flower business for fuck's sake. Gotta deliver. I started this business because I couldn't deliver to a girlfriend. I already, right? So, the before photo. Lots of friends and family and whatever. We actually had a really interesting castle character. We had like 50 of our friends come help out. People were at the TAMASIC or UES or like, people were pretty ridiculous individuals. Just the thorny rosin. Just hanging out. If anybody wants to do that next year, just get in touch. We need a lot of labor. And then the after gets clobbered. My favorite one was I got a LinkedIn message that basically read fuck you. This dude works for an unnamed VC and threatens to blackball me. Fuck you, you worthless cunt. But legitimately. We earned it. We deserved it. So I had with 2,000 orders we didn't deliver 10% on Valentine's Day for fuck's sake. It sucks. You work so hard. You spend the entire night, the entire weekend. Nobody slept the night before. People slept three hours the night before that. And you make some really shitty decisions. Sucks. The days after that were hilarious. Every single, like all of my closest friends even people I'm not close to at all called me out. They're being so goddamn nice. I don't know if they thought I was going to jump off a bridge or what they were like. But legitimately all of these people were like steens or anything I can do. Like I'm so sorry. This is such an opportunity. This is such an opportunity. And genuinely it was. So every single fuck up. A high profile one. My own one. I'm the face of the goddamn company. It's an opportunity. It genuinely is an opportunity and you pick your ass up. Your employees don't want to see you cry. Nobody wants to see you fucking cry. So pick your ass up. Dust your ass off. Go back to fucking work. So doing this is really, really hard. I'm sure you guys have heard this narrative again and again and again and again. It's harder than it it just is. Just take my word for it. Elon Musk being an entrepreneur. He's going to deal. So be cheap. Like if you're ever going to do a business or whatever. You didn't expect to refund say 15, 20% of your customers, didn't you? Glad I didn't buy shares. Glad my office is super small. So be cheap. Get your butt kicked and get out quickly. And nobody cares. So you make them care. How many people in this room want to start companies or do something else or have expectations about life and just want things? Nobody gives a fuck about you. Make them. Make them give a fuck about you. It's the most powerful thing I could take away. You are always on. You always represent your company. You always are whatever you need to be. So make everyone care eventually they will. So use code. And that's about it.