HackerNoon COO and CEO Discuss Entrepreneurship, Working With Your Spouse, and More

Paul Lee, Co-founder and CEO of roiquant, sat down with HackerNoon CEO and founder David Smooke and HackerNoon COO Linh Smooke for an hour-long interview where they discussed the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur and what it’s like to work while being married to each other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze_oq9oKBao&embedable=true 0:00Right. 0:02Good evening. 0:03David and Linh are over your end. 0:06I know it's night time there. 0:08So thank you very much for making time to speak with us. 0:12So just a quick introduction first for the audience. 0:16So David is the founder and CEO of Hackenoon which he founded I think yeah, 10 years ago now at 2013 prior to that deep sorry time flies. 0:29Yeah, time flies, right. 0:31And so prior to that David worked at a as a writer at smart recruiters. 0:37I think it's a start up. 0:38Then the the Lewistown Sentinel, I believe that's a news agency. 0:43And then at University of Redland, David also started numerous businesses and websites which some of them are no longer have DIF, which some of them are, maybe David, if you want to talk a bit about them later, you can. 0:58And then Linh is the co-owner and COO of Hackanoon, which she joined later at 2017. 1:05Is that when you guys were married, got married? 1:08Yeah, we actually got married 2016. 1:10And I joined Hackanoon shortly after our kid was born. 1:16Our first kid was born and then prior to that Linh worked at numerous you worked at University Minerva University and Brown University and then also worked at this United World initiative. 1:35And then in Linh's yeah past she also founded this creative kit project platform in Vietnam. 1:43Maybe, Linh, later I will ask you to revisit that to tell us a bit about what's that about. 1:50And so, yeah, so thank you for doing this and very exciting. 1:56I mean, I'm, you know, a user of Hacker Noon. 2:00We read stuff and we even publish a few things there. 2:04And so it's good to finally meet you, even though it's virtually. 2:09So yeah, thanks for contributing to Hacker Noon. 2:13Oh, so that's how we meet most of our teams is also actually like the original title of this tag. 2:21I was planning like just how to manage this like 100% remote company. 2:25It's kind of rare for us to meet people in person. 2:29I guess we do but so why why don't we begin by you sharing how did you two men I know I read somewhere you you you met at like some concert, right. 2:41But like in briefly, you know, like you want to tell us the audience how you two met and how you got into deciding that, you know, after marrying it's a good idea to work together. 2:53You know, a lot of couples married, but they don't necessarily work together. 2:57So what makes that? 2:59But a lot of people work together and they don't marry as well. 3:02Exactly. 3:03So both ways. 3:05So yeah, I think we're just very quick, decisive people. 3:11So we met randomly just by chance on the street of San Francisco. 3:17I was working for a university at the time that was headquartered in San Francisco. 3:22So I was only there for like 10 business days because you know, like my employer was send me sending me there. 3:30And on the close to the last day of the trip, it was a Friday, right? 3:35Yeah, we met on in front of the Civic Centre. 3:41It was like an outdoors kind of concert. 3:43And David was there to support his friend, a musical friend. 3:48I would just think there's a through line of why we decided, I mean to be a couple like to get married as well, to work together. 3:56It's like we're not super like like we're not stewing on decisions. 4:02Like we're never going to be the kind of people that just sitting on something for three years, never acting on it. 4:08We the kind of people that if we go to a restaurant, we look at the menu pretty much like 30 seconds, we know what we want. 4:18So that translates to the decision to just go for it both relationship wise as well as working together wise. 4:27And it just so happens that our skill sets complement each other and we need it like each other. 4:33At the time, like just moved to Colorado. 4:37I just had, you know, she's given birth like a couple months ago and was ready to go back into the workforce. 4:45And David's like, well, I have this thing I see, I see. 4:49Yeah, it was more natural than it's like very methodical or like super strategic at the time, right. 4:59And so you so for David you thought, you know having Linh would be an extra, you know, add a value help for you. 5:09Oh yeah, she's more talented than me, has a much better resume. 5:13He happens to not be a man with a company. 5:17So that was the difference, but it was a great recruiting pitch. 5:21All you have to do is marry her and she'll join the team. 5:23That's all that easy peasy. 5:26So you got her and then you let her go and recruit the other hundreds for you. 5:34So now does it really translate from your decision making at the workplace? 5:47I mean like you're the CEO, she's the CEO. 5:49So eventually at a company you, you made a final decision. 5:52So is and earlier Linh, you said you know it's, it's the same in the workplace and for home. 5:58But is it really or like does David first to David this question or does she really call the shot at home CEO, You're not making that many decisions like you want to make the important ones and you want to put your foot down that matters. 6:12And when there's a, you know it gets to me hopefully like her ability means less problems come to me, less big problems come to me. 6:20So it's it's that I think and I mean the the board is us too. 6:25So you know. 6:25Yeah it is So neither of us can fire. 6:28Yeah. 6:29With the majority, right. 6:32Right. 6:32Yeah. 6:33So I mean it's an equal partnership but I I think companies structurally Co CEOs is like confusing people don't get it. 6:41So it's like to me, it's one job and eventually it gets to the one person and you have two people on the chief, you have two people on the board. 6:50And you know, as far as all the team and problems are concerned, like either one of us can handle it. 6:56And eventually, yeah, I may need to put my foot down. 6:59But it's usually that's not a thing that happens often. 7:03I mean I think if you look at our life, you know, maybe I've made some of the bigger decisions or was you know the proponent for them. 7:09But overall the amount of decisions we've made as a family and as a company, links made more of them, you know. 7:15So in in the aggregate, I think, yeah, I would say going back to the complementary skill set, it's also mindset. 7:26David is more of a creative mind and a very abundance of mentality, mindset of like expansion and growth. 7:36Whereas I'm of a more practical and you know, not like opposite of abundance, but I I'm definitely focusing on like what's in front of me and trying to focus on completing and executing, you know what's need it the most. 7:53So yeah, it's like explore versus explore. 7:56You can also think of it that way if we sit in front of like a Netflix night, which we rarely have these days, just the two of us. 8:05But let's just imagine one night, just the two of us deciding on a Netflix movie. 8:11Then I would tend to go to something that I already know and love, like The Office whatever. 8:16And David would like present me with like 10 different new options. 8:20So I think that's kind of balance works out in both our relationship as well as the way we run the company. 8:27Like, I think you would probably agree with me on that, but like team members probably tend to go to me more for like day-to-day stuff. 8:35You know, like oh, who do I go for this kind of things? 8:38Or, you know, I have this event that I have to go to, Can you like take, take a quick look at my points at my presentation? 8:48Whereas for David, you know, like we have a developer who was working on his own like hack a thon idea and then who, who would pitch it to David, right? 8:58Like oh this is like potentially a new company idea that I have. 9:03Would you like to take a look at it. 9:05So I think people come to us for different reasons and we make different pieces of of our company puzzles move right and is that also how you manage your relationship and and at your household in this like I mean because if you're so used to working with each other I mean that question let me elaborate on that question. 9:34If you're so used to working with each other and that mode when when you're at home do you still are you also in that mode you know with each other you know when you when you're with your family when you with your children. 9:46I mean, it's not like a clean off on switch that suddenly, you know, you step in the door and you're ready, but sometimes, you know, you're in the activity. 9:55Like if I have a big problem but I'm going to take a break and hang out with the kids for two hours, I'm not going to talk about the big problem and maybe it, you know, so. 10:03So I think that's if it's a small problem, it's actually easier to seep in because it's more casual conversation. 10:10Like, oh, I've been letting this problem sit in the back of my head and suddenly we're sitting on the living room floor and I say an idea to the problem that I hadn't talked about in three hours. 10:19Now if I'm not married to the person, maybe I write that idea down or maybe I keep it to myself or maybe it disappears into the ether. 10:26So there are definitely like we are intermingling at like a very, you know, deep level across many our life, our business, our careers, you know, all of that our most important people. 10:37I'll tell you this, it's a luxury to be able to solve a lot of things on the way to grocery store. 10:43Like it it. 10:46You won't be able to solve your fundraising problem or your thing problem like those big ticket items, but you will be able to solve your administrative and your whatever that's going on with slack like you know, like is so. 10:59So that's a luxury like, so we don't have to like schedule a meeting, you know, show up to a place, take two hours of commute or anything like that to solve a small thing. 11:09So I think that's a luxury. 11:10But also because we work together, we live together, we raise kids together, we also decide that we don't have to be in the same room together while we work. 11:19So actually, David mostly uses the office space downtown and I just stay at home in this room right here working. 11:28So we have our own individual spaces for our creative creativity as well. 11:34So is there a fine line where you said you know like OK maybe that's enough. 11:42You know like can we stop talking about work for a moment and like you know have some you know couple me time or family time or like you know I understand the luxury of time for you to always engage in talks. 11:54By the way my Co founder is also my wife. 11:58So I'm in the same situation like you but I'm we're we're. 12:01But she has a day job and she's only helping out you know during her free time and during the weekends and even at times you know you know with the limited time that she has with me and you know I'll be sharing ideas with her and then sometimes it can be overwhelming because you know she just come back from you know from the university and she's only one foot in foot in. 12:21That's right. 12:22That will create a little tension. 12:23I I think that could be more tension than even you know, husband and wife teaming up. 12:28That's that's it's kind of its own attention of like these ideas are going overboard, you know, like right, right. 12:34So I imagine you're carrying them with you a lot. 12:37There is a boundary I would say that that has to be I would say when it comes to our kids, when it comes to family meal times and obviously whatever. 12:48You know, we like stop work for the day and just start sleeping. 12:52You know, like just me and like our own personal, private space, things like that. 12:56Like we talk about it very rarely, but we both understand that those are just off limits, like meal times, bedtime, kids time, sometimes things might happen. 13:09So I saw one of your questions being like critical problems, like sometimes do happen, not at the time that you wish for. 13:16So we do have, like, occasional examples of that. 13:19Like, I think 2022 November was when, like, our site just suddenly went down, off, you know, like just the face of the earth, like, just cannot be accessed. 13:31And, you know, we finally tracked it down to a GoDaddy problem, all of that. 13:37I think I documented that well enough on the Internet. 13:39You just go search Ling Hakunoon, GoDaddy, you'll see, like a pretty elaborate story. 13:44But yeah, it happened at like 7:00 PM, You know, like bang on in the middle of dinner time. 13:50Yeah. 13:50And we're like basically one of us, we were alternating between kids and calling engineers all the night and calling our customer support. 14:01Yeah. 14:02So I think one of us stays at the line at all time, you know, and then the other one just takes care of the kids and vice versa. 14:11So and also don't keep your domain with GoDaddy. 14:15Yeah. 14:18Oh, we're still with them. 14:21So sort of circling back to what David said. 14:24So do you find it easier if let's say American people, if they're in this, you know, they should go all in and then, you know it makes it easier. 14:34Otherwise when one it's you know only having a single foot through the door it makes it more challenging. 14:41I mean it's it's hard to say because you know one finances come first. 14:45If your if your house is stable how are you going to build a stable business of course. 14:48So if you know if one of you is having another thing that brings in the money to keep the house stable, it just means on the new thing, you have to understand their commitment level is actually lower than you from a from a thought point, from an endpoint point. 15:02And it's not quite an equal partnership until you're both all in, in terms of just, hey, whenever. 15:07This is the decision that requires the expertise of the business. 15:10In the very beginning, I would speak with more authority because I was the one all in and if she had an opinion on it, I would take it. 15:16But I wouldn't treat her as, hey, this is equal first because I was the one working on it all the time and she was the one helping. 15:25And you know, now that's been very different for many years. 15:28It's not like that anymore. 15:29You know, it's I remember we were pitching investors back in 2018 or something, 2019, no, 18. 15:37And they've been like, you know, we both were in the room together and they just like looked at David talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and then like about 30 minutes and like they like glanced at me and be like, what are you going to do? 15:49And I'm like, dude, I've been here for like this whole time. 15:53And that's because your take away from it is like I'm just some kind of bystander. 15:58So yeah, I I took from that moment as like it's and and it's it's my personality too. 16:05I'm a very, like either I'm in or I'm not in Like I'm not like a half, half kind of person either. 16:12So at that moment I I kind of like make a mental note to myself that OK, maybe speak up a little bit more, speak a bit more with authority and just like discuss with David beforehand, like how we want to mutually present ourselves, you know, individually but also *** a unit because that's how we present most things to the world like the equal partnership part. 16:37I think that that's the key point. 16:39That's how we parent, that's how we divide like house chores, you know, like he cooks, I clean you know he takes care of the boy, I take care of the girl via like keeps you know things like that. 16:50So at work that's how we also divide the the work. 16:55It doesn't have to be the same, but I think it has to be roughly understood between the the the two people that you and I are in this equal partnership together right now I will like to touch on something more. 17:11I don't know whether it may appear a bit more tricky and sensitive to YouTube but like to many you know in the context of conflicts and like disagreements in in situations where you know you're you're totally in full disagreement. 17:33You know head on you don't agree with the strategy and you know and then if one, if both of you are stubborn, you know in in, I mean you know you know you're championing that that that that views and whatnot. 17:46And in that process you know we're only humans. 17:49You know we we we get triggered emotionally and let's say let's say you know at work, you know you're triggered you know as colleagues and then let's say that link it on because that issue had not yet been dealt with. 18:01So does that how do you deal with and then you're going home together right. 18:07So then how that. 18:10Oh you exactly. 18:12Then how how do you. 18:14OK if you're already home then how do you not let that be carried on to the bed for instance or vice versa. 18:21You know like you know maybe over a weekend you know you you, you cross at each other just on on something. 18:27You know you're at your your your parents place. 18:29You know they your, your in law said something. 18:31You know one of you is crossed you had a family with you know, then how then do you stop that from not being you know dragged on into the office on Monday, you know how do you deal with this. 18:45Yeah that's that's a really good question. 18:48I don't, I don't want to pretend to be like the best person at it. 18:52We still working on it. 18:53That's basically the trickiest part about working with your spouse. 18:58But I think lucky for us, we're stubborn. 19:01Unlucky for us, we're also stubborn. 19:02So what I mean by that is the good thing about being stubborn is that you keep on keeping on despite the bad stuff, despite all the evidence pointing to the country. 19:13Like, oh, entrepreneurship might not be a cakewalk. 19:16It might lead you to really, really some bad stuff, but for some reason we're still here 77 years it, So I think that's a good part of it. 19:24The bad part of it is sometimes we cannot find a mutual ground for sure, like it has happened not way often, but I could think like on the top of my head, you know, like a couple of times that we do need time away from from the argument and also from each other. 19:43I would say the one thing that helped in terms of our personality as well is that we are not ones to avoid the problem and to avoid talking about what the disagreement is about. 19:56And now it might be very unpleasant in the time to, like, magnify even bigger, but I think. 20:04Basically, dealing with the problem head on, make us understand what the disagreement or argument actually is about. 20:13You know, like there's a surface level of what you think the problem is, and then the moment you like, talk about it, maybe you yell at each other about it. 20:21If it gets heated enough, then you at some point you would arrive to oh, so that's what the actual problem is. 20:29Maybe you did not get enough exercise. 20:31Maybe I did not sleep enough. 20:33We we feel underappreciated in certain chores or kids, you know, or at work. 20:40Maybe I did something for you that you didn't acknowledge or a colleague was saying something and you know, that got to me like things like that. 20:51I think it comes out a lot more with open communication rather than avoiding tendencies. 20:58And yeah, I would say it's conflict is healthy. 21:01You know, it means you care about the project and it means you can talk about your point of view and keep it or lose it. 21:07You know, it's it doesn't. 21:08It's not a loss to lose your point of view. 21:10You just move on to the next project. 21:13You're not right about everything you know and you know. 21:15So it's just keeping that type of mindset. 21:18And it's like the other thing if you're looking at trying to scale up as a husband and wife team, how the team interacts with you is very important. 21:27It's really important for other people to see that me and Ling disagree on things. 21:31And whenever you hear something from me or you hear something for Ling, it doesn't mean it's fact and it's going to be carried out and we're going to have to do it. 21:38It means that's the opinion of David, that's the opinion of Ling and there's going to be a discussion about it. 21:42And that the opinion of, you know, all the other colleagues, we want to put them, you know, on the same level as us whenever we talk about how to best solve the problem. 21:51Got it? 21:52Got it. 21:53So do you also think taking time outs and short breaks helps in that regard? 22:02Yeah, absolutely. 22:04We have spent some time just basically, hey, this is not about like I'm running away or you know, whatever. 22:11Like I literally just need a break. 22:14And I think a break just in general, even if you don't have a disagreement, helps tremendously. 22:21It helps to switch your environment. 22:23It helps to change your mindset to for you to see things in a different way. 22:29Honestly, sometimes the very act of stepping outside, right? 22:33Like we are all Zoom workers, right? 22:36So like we should, we might be very OK with just doing this all day, every day. 22:41Yesterday, sorry Segway. 22:43But yesterday, Nora, our daughter was like talking about farmers being a job. 22:48And we like, wow, the best farmers probably do this all day because they own the farm, right? 22:55So they probably talk to their lawyers and accountants and like the corporations that like make deals. 23:00But anyway we have this generation of workers. 23:03So it helps a lot to simply walk outside, feel that sunlight and change them like that is one of the good things about running your own business and having people around the world like we do make our own schedule. 23:15You know, we have key meetings that we're doing and you know, meeting with customers and investors in our team. 23:20But it's like it's still, it's a lot of flexibility of, hey, maybe I'm going to take the afternoon off early and then when the kids go to bed, I'm going to log back in and I'm just going to let that problem sit for four hours and nothing's going to be fine. 23:33Nothing. 23:33The world's not going to burn down. 23:35I'm just going to see if I can think about something else for a while. 23:37And no, I'm going to come back at this time and solve the and you know, work on whatever I was planning to work on. 23:42So I think there is a lot of control that and discipline that it'll take your business a long way if you're able to build a schedule around you and let your mental health like take breaks like that. 23:55It is you're you're going to burn it if you don't. 23:57And you know, I I felt close to burning out before, but I've been at this a long time and I haven't. 24:02You know, I kind of learned like when my body is telling me like you know when to push and when to when to sit back and that that's something you have to learn over the years. 24:12You can't just know when to do it, you have to go through it. 24:17So obviously you have to have a system in place like a, like a even like a playbook. 24:22You know internally how you work with each other, how you work with your remote employees, how you deal with things. 24:31Yeah, I think over time we learn that we don't like meeting too frequently. 24:35Like we prefer async communication a lot about colleagues because they don't live in the same time zone. 24:43In fact, most of them live in a very, very strange time zone for us, Like 2:00 AM for us would be like 9:00 AM for them, Things like that. 24:49So then yeah, we, we would wait you know, for their response, no problem. 24:57But then we make sure to value the meetings that we do take. 25:02So in like we have one product meeting, one sponsor meeting, one editorial meeting, one marketing meeting. 25:09And those are the ones that we pay a lot of time, effort, energy into. 25:15And like people think that it's a big deal, you know, showing up to these meetings. 25:19And I think that builds a healthy culture around deadlines, accountability. 25:25And you know if you say last Thursday that you're going to ship this by, you know, X amount of time, then what, what's happening today? 25:33So that's, yeah, that's that's been what works for us. 25:38And you you mentioned earlier in the beginning that you are a remote team. 25:42So since day one until now you're still remote. 25:45Yes, and how how many of you right now to get like full time staff, part time staff, and like the whole and like your community helping you to keep Hackanoon afloat and making money? 25:59Yeah, so our ratio is quite funny between actual staff working at Hackanoon versus community members. 26:07So if you're talking about the Hackanoon community at large, we have 4,000,003 millions readers month, monthly. 26:16I mean year to date is the 100 million page views, which is calculated at the other day for SO. 26:25So that's readers. 26:26We have a pretty large readership for writers. 26:29We have 30, 3040 thousand writers that have been published on Hacker Noon, at least one story. 26:38The actual number of users with accounts are more than that, but we only count like in this example, people who have stories on Hacker Noon, the contributors to the site. 26:47And then As for the team, like I'll let David, yeah, we're about 1718 people and everyone is their editorial sales or product, you know. 26:59So I'm spending a lot of my time as a product manager working with software developers. 27:03But you know when I started this business, it was a lot of editorial work and a lot of marketing work and trying to get people to contribute to the site and service their editor. 27:11Now I'm editing just a few stories a week and we actually have a enough of a team in place between full time and part time editors that within two to four days if you submit your story on Hacker Noon, you'll get a professional review accepted or rejected and if it's accepted you're going to get about 1/2 hour of our editors time to improve your cost. 27:30So it's it's a it's a good team structure for us because those are all skills that I somewhat have you know in terms of hey, once you get to 50, a hundred, 500, a thousand employees those are a lot of skills you don't have you know as the CEO managing it. 27:44So I'm still in a nice phase where like the people doing the skills below me are better than me at the skills. 27:49But I can understand your job enough that I can be a helpful teammate and that that's kind of a nice age for me of I mean imagine these people running thousand person companies and not knowing the name of 20% of their staff. 28:02It's kind of wild of how like how their job is like ripple effects almost. 28:07You know, I'm still between mostly individual contributor and manager, not public figure slash occasional manager, you know. 28:16So that's the it's a nice stage to be in perpetual fundraiser, not perpetual raiser, right. 28:23Well, so you're actually, you know, doing very good on many fronts here like not only as American couple, you know, running this, you know, cash flow positive business, you know remotely and having such a big community and stuff all over the place. 28:43So I mean you you've literally, you know, made what a lot of VCs don't fund and work. 28:51Yes, right. 28:52So, So is that what? 28:54Yeah, exactly. 28:55So but you've proven these are only the only time they've bought Hacker Noon shares is following on other people's terms. 29:02You know we've done equity funding where some participated and we did strategic investment from technology companies and then the the a couple of VCs have fallen on, but #1 VCs no longer invest in purely common stock companies. 29:15So we have 100% common stock. 29:16There's no preferred exit whatsoever for anyone. 29:20So if this sells 10 millions, 20,000,000, God forbid 100,000, everybody gets their share price worth. 29:29We are still the majority shareholders by far. 29:32So I think that makes it not as attractive and obviously VC would look for like 100 X type of companies which were more like the couple digit X, maybe 10X company. 29:45But we're definitely not like the Super hot AI on the block, you know so but we're also not the thousand companies pretending to be the Super hot AI company on the right, right. 29:56No real history of record and established you know a certain level of consistent revenue and team and just grind and not willing to give up that I think makes a decent small business. 30:09Maybe if you're 7X you're happy with 7X you don't need the seven, the 70XI mean maybe I'll have to turn down the offer so I can get 7 1/2 X I'll get a keep getting a little more, right, right, right. 30:21So then how would you advise you know other couples you know in similar situation, you know the background, the family and you know trying to work together. 30:31So we have before it's been it's actually really nice, you know it's really refreshing. 30:35You know when we meet couples that are also creating their business together. 30:38So first and foremost good for you, you're going out in terms of understanding, upping your risk profile. 30:44You are now heavily risk, more heavily risking your life and your career, you know, together, which means your returns will be better if you do Better Together, which we have, but it means you're risking those things at a higher profile. 30:56So I would just be clear about understanding that you know, understanding your real runway and talking about hey, if this doesn't hit this number and what amount of time are we talking about shutting this business down, What amount of time are we talking about, what are we doing next? 31:10You know like I think it's having those honest discussions upfront about your timeline and your risk profile matter a lot but we also didn't we did it but also we didn't we haven't made it yet like we're still trying to do it. 31:23Well it depends on you know your definition of success right. 31:26I mean some would say like to me and I thought wow you like you guys have OK maybe the first hurdle yeah you you have a few more goals or milestone to yeah but at least you've you're ahead of many already and and I have a couple more just tactical like super practical tips like if you if you are a start up founder and you have made it through like the initial honeymoon period like you feel like you in some kind of grooves. 31:54Don't cheap out on your accountants. 31:56Don't cheap out on your lawyers. 31:58You know, like, keep track of your paper paperwork. 32:02Definitely there will be one person at least in your relationship if this thing's going to work out, that cares more and is more capable of doing that kind of, like, quote, UN quote boring stuff. 32:13But it's so super important to set the foundation and the baseline right from the get go so that you don't have to clean up the mess down the line. 32:22So, yeah, like we and at least think about from experience, like, you know, it's not like, oh, we've done it so perfect that now like we just like pointing fingers. 32:31It's more like we missed so many mistakes along those lines that we like, OK less. 32:38You know, nobody's going to fault you for making that first mistake. 32:41It's, it's the second one that you don't want to make. 32:44Yeah. 32:44So I would say if I were to redo some of this, that would be like paperwork, administrative stuff and just like really keeping your record straight. 32:54Right. 32:54So what kind, how would you advise? 32:58You know, like those young couples in in their fundraising effort especially face when facing with VCs, you know, and when VCs would some most would see this as a disadvantage rather than advantage. 33:13Yeah. 33:13No. 33:13First of all have thick skin because you're going to get some questions that frankly are inappropriate. 33:18And to them it's not inappropriate. 33:20It's their $1,000,000 they're about to spend. 33:23So they may ask you a question that's too far. 33:25Something that someone did in the workplace, there would be an HR issue, but it's not in the workplace because they haven't invested yet and they're considering investing. 33:33So I first and foremost, I'd say, be ready for that. 33:36Just accept that there's going to be a certain level of they're going to try and pry at your relationship in an inappropriate way because they feel they're risking their money on your relationship. 33:45Just don't take it personal during this process. 33:48Yeah. 33:49And at some level, I get it. 33:50And at another level, I'm like, do I really want you as a shareholder? 33:53Yeah. 33:54Yeah. 33:54Where do you guys. 33:57So it's I mean you're I would practice your pitch obviously talk to these people. 34:02I mean we're not we've never had AVC lead around. 34:05So we're not exactly the people that's convinced, you know those type of people to say here's the price we're that we did. 34:11Our first round was equity crowdfunding. 34:12We said, hey here's the price of our business that I think a lot of people would want to buy a cut of and anyone can buy a cut And we just put the link atop our site and that was 90% of the traffic to our equity crowdfunding campaign. 34:23So we were just saying if you like reading the site, buy shares in the site. 34:27And that was to us as people that are good at writing, good at marketing, good at storytelling, that was a more a platform that fit us better than go meet with this wealthy firm and convince them you're going to take them from very wealthy to very, very, very wealthy. 34:42That's not like a good room for us. 34:43That doesn't treat us well. 34:45So you know, it's where you take money from. 34:49It doesn't have to be these ideally, it's your customers that that's where you really want the money to come from and then you can stay on your numbers and if someone wants to buy a share of the business based on the numbers. 34:58That discussion's simpler. 35:01Yeah, we have been a lot more focused on profitability and just literally having the actual cash, you know, as opposed to raising on a promise. 35:12So I think the I wouldn't say that like oh we have figured out the magic formula but I think we have been always a lot more cautious about diluting versus making money you know and and I I think the latter it's just more longer lasting and showcasing of of of value that that is tangible sooner have you come across couples in your you know like who are also so founders read experience where the board or the investors are suggesting one of the other one of the other party to to to to to step out you know like yeah. 36:00So basically let's say if someone's you know want to make a follow on investment but one of the terms would be like OK I don't want your wife no longer want your wife or your husband you know to take off this role and do that say no you know that would we would that would probably end the discussion and we'd be like why would you want to cut out 50% of our top labour like that would be response to that question. 36:23So I I come up more of like the why not like you know do this or else but more like yeah like why do you guys like it's so it's it's slightly strange that you you're putting all your eggs in one basket type of things. 36:40But like if we can come up with, you know a decent answer decent pitch then some people would say yes. 36:48I guess the other thing I would say couples should say in that moment is like, hey, I get you're risking $4 million in your whatever million fund, but I'm risking my life. 36:57So you think I'm not committed to this and you're more committed than me. 37:01That's not true. 37:02You know, I'm putting everything here and you're not. 37:04So like, I I appreciate the money. 37:06Well, we're going to work for you. 37:07The terms are going to be good, but our risk profiles are very different. 37:10Like what what you're. 37:11So that's, that's what I would say if someone said that to me. 37:17Very good. 37:17Great. 37:19OK. 37:20I've got some question here. 37:24The first one here would is what key takeaways or pearls of wisdom would you like to share with the audience about balancing work, personal life, and entrepreneurship as a married couple? 37:40Pearls of Wisdom put a lot of pressure. 37:45Yeah. 37:46About balancing work, you know, personal life and as a Co founder, exercise Enough. 37:51I think this this one is for us, but it's also for, like, entrepreneurs in general. 37:55Like that's one where it's just like, it's so easy to sacrifice on exercise. 37:59It just is. 38:00It's going to tell me about it wants to go away and it's like, it's going to add up. 38:04Your sleep's going to get worse. 38:06Your productivity per minute's going to get worse. 38:08And it's it seems selfish in the moment to say, hey, I need to go move my body without you guys later. 38:14But we trust each other that hey, we set up windows that we can make sure we we take care of our bodies in that way. 38:20So I think that's really important one, you have to and you have to rely on your partner to be able to have those windows. 38:27And As for me, I would say entrepreneurship has very high highs and very low lows. 38:34So, you know, just understanding that, but let's say if you have a really terrible problem at work and your business is facing some existential challenges, well, is it really existential? 38:48Like you have to step out of that moment of that mindset a little bit and understand that it might just be the cyclical nature of this up and down ride that is the start-ups journey. 39:00So understanding that you're going to have your highs and lows often times at the same times. 39:05So instead of you know you're coming home and you get the high wife had the low and vice versa depending on your work. 39:10It's like, you know, when the bad stuff happens, it's happening to both of us, amplifying both the joy and the, you know, the fact that you being very upset over something. 39:20But so I would just say, yeah, just ride it out, you know, understand that the bat stub won't last forever, but also understand that the good stuff also won't last forever. 39:30So you don't get complacent and, you know, being too cocky over something, you know, like, let's say you just close this really attractive $10 million round or something. 39:41Well, that's not forever. 39:43Like 10 million depends on how you spend the money. 39:46Like, it could last, you know, for all of your journey or you could just burn it, you know, by making one critical mistake. 39:53So you don't want to go in either direction. 39:57So I think there's like a metaphor for life when there like nothing lasts forever and the joy is in the act of doing it itself. 40:08Right now that's as married couple. 40:12Now what about in, in terms of parenting, like when you're doing all this and then what about your kids and now that especially you have to. 40:21Yeah. 40:21So I mean routine is very important and setting up a strong structure around you. 40:25You know as a parent you're you got to accept you're going to have child care you know and we we have a part time nanny we have my parents around we have a very structured school schedule you know and I'm not doing any meetings around pick up and drop off like it's just like booked out. 40:39You know what I mean? 40:41So it's that's I think setting boundaries of what your schedule is, is is really important and the kids respect that. 40:48They get used to it. 40:48They need it. 40:49You know the moment you switch their routine you have a double cost. 40:52So it the the serving a strong routine, it serves you to make sure you get good work hours and it serves them to know what to expect. 41:01So it's and you have to break your routine obviously sometimes. 41:04But the more the older I get, the more I'm doing the same routine. 41:08By the time I'm 80, I'll be doing the same thing every single day. 41:13I think our youngest won't get it yet, but our oldest starting to get that we are business owners and we have employees and we have business problems that we have to deal with. 41:25I mean, she, you know, drew a lot of pictures, you know, to both of us. 41:31And in her recent drawings, I've seen like the Hackenoon logo on it. 41:36So, like, she learned how to draw the clock. 41:39Speaking of the devil, she just popped in. 41:43And how old is she now? 41:45Six and a half, 6, 1/2. 41:47And the son is just a couple a year old, No. 41:50Yeah, 1 1/2, right. 41:52Full ball of energy, just ready to go. 41:56I myself just had my son last February, so he's nine months. 42:01Yeah, I'm like coming to 10 months now. 42:04So. 42:04So yeah, I'm still juggling with all this and trying to, you know, yeah, make it work. 42:11So yeah, then I actually have a question. 42:14But since then, you know, jump off and maybe later on she can share her view as well. 42:18So as a, you know, Hacker Noon, you know it's a tech based publishing startup. 42:25Obviously you know a lot of time you're spending your time in front of the screen and now that you have children how how when when do you find the right time to introduce tech or like iPads or phone to your to your to your kids. 42:40Yeah that's a that's a great question. 42:42It's a challenge of this whole parenting generation that no one has a, you know, a full answer to. 42:47I I have a few guidelines I go by though. 42:50The first one is trying to teach her that the phones for creation and not consumption and that's a hard thing to do but she takes a lot of pictures. 42:59You know, and as opposed to, you know, there's this adapted mind game. 43:04So it's like teaches her math and words and English. 43:08So I think, yeah, that that rule we came up with very early on of like active participation in electronics as opposed to just mindlessly consuming something seems to be the the the key to a healthy relationship with technology, at least when it comes to young kids. 43:29She does. 43:30We did really early. 43:31That was really great and I didn't know we were going to keep it 6 years. 43:34It's just something we made-up with in the moment. 43:36But no TV till after dark, right. 43:39Flat rule on no screen during the daytime of just not allowed to do it. 43:43Right. 43:44Right, right. 43:44She'll still see us typing on the computer sometimes, obviously during the day. 43:48But in terms of, you know, consuming movies, we just cut that out. 43:52And that was. 43:54Yeah, that that was. 43:54I think it was really helpful to get her to draw longer and keep your attention away from just so when how long is the screen time then when it's allowed like up to 30 minutes. 44:06At that point. 44:08She has been given opportunities to watch movies. 44:12We made one mistake of letting her watch something that was way inappropriate for her age like it's Harry Potter 4. 44:23I think 123 is fine for a 6 1/2 year old Harry Porter. 44:26Four that's that's the cut off line. 44:29So, so I think yeah, but we only do that during you know, like special times like extended break or during like a super long weekend or something. 44:40For the most part she gets to watch something for 30 minutes. 44:44I remember we had a talk at Colorado Business School, unit leads Business School in Colorado. 44:49And Nora came and she didn't really get what's going on. 44:52But like it was it's fun to like have her and show, you know, be just see like, Oh yeah, he's not just on the computer, Like, he's a real person that goes places and does meets things. 45:00So there are some elements of like a remote job can feel a little not real to the kid, you know, like, do you really need to work? 45:07And I was like, do you really need me to buy this for you? 45:10Right. 45:12So how do you fight off the temptation of sort of like influencing them picking tech up or like computer science or something like that, you know, as they grow up, I mean, especially when you're a tech startup founder. 45:24Yeah. 45:24And she likes computer Class A lot. 45:26So I think like there is this healthy like encouragement of doing that. 45:30Yeah, her current life aspirations are like, I'm already an artist, she said so. 45:36And I to be an illustrator and I want to be a mom. 45:40So those are her as of now a 6 1/2 year old. 45:43So take it as a with a grain of salt, but I would say at this point, you know, being Asian, like I understand the temptation to like parents, especially the tiger type, to be like lawyer, doctors, whatever. 45:58But for me, growing up in a musical family and just marrying into like this Jewish guy's family, which also values education highly, like we already have a pretty high bar of expectation for her. 46:11We don't also have to tell her what career attracts we you know gonna expecting her to do like she already told us. 46:18So I think when the time comes if she chose computer science technology, great. 46:23If she work chose whatever else. 46:25I mean maybe AI would enable. 46:29I don't know some some career path that we cannot think of right now right so. 46:33So I would just keep that options, keep those options open for her when you know until the. 46:41OK. 46:42I've got another question from the crowd, from the audience. 46:44How did you, how do you manage the logistics and operation of running a business with employees and partners based in yeah like different time zones You, you, you, you know the topic here is 10/10 time zones. 46:58So how do you get, yeah, yeah, logistically a routine. 47:02We have some people that have been willing to make sacrifices in terms of late night meetings and that's that's sometimes people have left, you know, because the meeting times at this schedule, you know if you're joining the editorial team and you can't attend the weekly editorial meeting, it is not going to work and we can't move a whole meeting for one person. 47:20So sometimes there are, I mean occasionally you can but not often. 47:25It is like it has to kind of stay within the routine. 47:28So there are you know people in Asia will have like 1 late night meeting a week and that's kind of a trade off they make of their job and they have two total meetings a week. 47:37So it's a pretty good trade off but someone has to be willing to make that and they have to be a good. 47:42I think we've realized like we really gravitate towards doers and individual contributors and like we want to like we want you to put your head down and get after it like we don't want to go back and forth with you a bunch, you know. 47:55So that's I think making structuring the meetings that way has helped to track that type of person and make that the type of person that stays versus the type of person that goes. 48:06Got it, got it. 48:07And a lot of bank calls for wires. 48:09So international wire transfers get a good bank that gives you free or cheap wires. 48:13We have a good deal with our local banks where we make 20 wires internationally a month at $0.00 fee. 48:22So I mean, over the past like 7 years, we've saved quite a good bit on wire transfer fees. 48:27So that's a very practical advice. 48:30It's like you actually can negotiate with your bank, you know, if you have a good enough page of relationship with them. 48:38I would just say don't expect your colleagues, like I think I mentioned it earlier, to respond in real time when they live in a different zone. 48:45It sounds obvious, but at the flip side of the coin, it would be to communicate as clearly as possible by providing contacts, by linking to what you refer to, by tagging people at the appropriate channel every every new hire. 49:01There's always a point in the early days where I'm just like you have to provide more context. 49:05I'm the one coming. 49:06Like if you if you mentioned it and it's available somewhere in one of our notions or Googles or whatever, and you didn't link to it, that's wrong. 49:14Don't respect your colleagues enough. 49:16You know when you saving your colleagues that little extra moment of finding the document that is such a great courtesy that like just gets forgotten and you can see it very early when someone joins an environment, if they do it or not. 49:29And it's just, it seems small, but it's it's, it's if you want to save your teammates a moment, you can like just just make one less steps so they can get into it. 49:37You know what? 49:38Sign out. 49:38I love the way you send your emails where you like blip stuff, italic stuff. 49:44Formatting is highly important when it comes to remote communication. 49:49You know, you can take away like nugget of information simply by the way you present them. 49:55So that's just like a simple thing that and you know, for somebody who values it, think is a no brainer. 50:01But for somebody who like steps into this new remote world, just think, whoa, so you do have to do that linking and sort of like this huge random characters thing, hyperlinking, you know, people don't have to like read irrelevant characters information like random, you know, very, very small simple things like that. 50:20But like working remotely tones don't get transferred like tone you don't hear. 50:27So like the moment that you you how much, how much emoji is acceptable then when tones and as many as possible, right. 50:38That's why I love your newsletters, all the GIFs, all the crazy GIFs, you know. 50:45Yeah, we are very encouraging of casual and sometimes even slightly inappropriate. 50:56You would call it New Agey type of communications online, like all the gifts and all the emojis and some of the slangs. 51:04I think that kind of things like actually do have a science to them. 51:08They break the tension and they make people feel like they can let the guard down a little bit more. 51:14And you know you're not coming from like this high horse of yours with all of your wisdom to offer the world, right? 51:21Like you are just person of the Internet as well, which it should be because we want to invite people who are not professional writers to write on our platform. 51:29That's like a main goal of having to have as many people from different technology industries as possible to contribute. 51:37So really, the moment you say it has to be academically proven, it has to be capitalized in like a certain way. 51:45You cannot use and at the beginning of a sentence like that's where you lose a lot of your actual negative gems, right? 51:52Right. 51:53So with your current structure, is there is your organizational structure flat or like do you have little, do you organize yourself in terms of like cells like kind of little group where at different time zone there's always somebody to sort of like a go to person you know when you're you're you're not available. 52:16Yeah. 52:17So no hierarchy, that is way too structure except that me and David people know that the decision makers, but they're absolutely stacker time zones like stacker workers and different times. 52:31And that's actually works to our advantage that we have a remote team which means at mostly 24/7 we can have somebody doing the editing, looking at the queue 24/7. 52:44We have someone to take meetings with potential leads, potential sponsors and 24/7. 52:49We had developers looking at you know potential tech support issues or just like developing new products. 52:56Not perfect, but yeah, I think it works to our advantage that we have Asia, then Europe, America, then also Africa. 53:04Like, you know, like imagine if this remote team is based 100% in America, then basically like 2 hours from now until like 10 hours from now, like nobody would be answering anything. 53:15And that's not how the Internet works. 53:17Like some important news might be breaking as we sleep. 53:21So we actually do enjoy the fact that we have people in Asia, you know doing so obviously you will have a very big knowledge base like a huge notion kind of thing that everybody's connected. 53:36So if you need this, click this, read this, you know, all this kind of playbooks up available for everybody, anywhere to access at any time to, to get information and answers. 53:46Yeah, I mean, and with editing, we even put a site together with our CMS, it's at editing protocol.com and it's just our editing protocol list and it's the base like the first, you know, 20 rules of what how editors are editing stories. 53:59And so it's kind of like once the internal documentation gets good, a lot of times we like to publish it and just put it out and see, see how someone else could, you know, use our our system for editing stories or how artificial intelligence can learn from our documentation and make a protocol. 54:14So I think I think our documentation is pretty good and we've definitely erred on the side of like we hire for better writing. 54:21If you're a better written communicator, maybe you haven't sold much before, but if you're a good written communicator, I can teach you how to sell what we what we sell, you know. 54:29So that's I can't teach you how to be a good writer. 54:32That line is actually in our career speed like we want to be almost like prerequisite. 54:37So Power hires is like you have to be able to write well, OK. 54:43You mentioned AI that David and I know you're sort of an AI enthusiast yourself because I see your post and what you're interested in. 54:51And so I've got a question for you. 54:54Do you see the pursuit of AI by the marketplace as a threat or as a disruption to either media or like in your case a publishing industry? 55:08Say you know, like you know with the with the advancement of generative AI, you know, how has that impact that your industry is? 55:17Has there been any negative impacts to your business or you're not worried. 55:24I'm a little worried, yeah artificial intelligence is taking such a leap in the last year to two years, so that's certainly I'm more excited than worried. 55:33It isn't massively disruptive technology and it hits on a very simple input output level that other disruptive technologies is harder to show to anybody. 55:42You know, it's just easier to say prompt creation, prompt creation. 55:46So that stuff is very flashy and it's impressive mostly. 55:51I mean, it's been positive for us in terms of people writing about it has been very interesting and I want to read about it. 55:58So I like that when people submitting AI stories on Hacker Noon and we've been putting it into our process, like some jobs in editorial and editing can be done, you know, by AI. 56:08Like right now, when an editor opens a story, an AI has already read it and it's checked it for plagiarism, it's checked it for AI writing. 56:16It's given a score on both and it suggests 5 headlines based on the content of the story. 56:21That and the Hacker Noon library of what will do well. 56:24So we have a good, like we're trying to really just push it as the editor's assistant and eventually the, you know, more towards the writer's assistant as well. 56:32But the image thing as well. 56:34Oh yeah, we also have image generation. 56:37So you know, the feature image is one of like the early if anyone was blogging 1015 years ago. 56:42Everyone has that notice from some image licensing site that you found some image and even if you accredited, they're still coming after you for money, whatever. 56:51Or you just didn't have an image and it didn't get shared as well. 56:54So I mean, the AI image generation is definitely like a baseline minimum for putting out a new piece of content. 57:00Ideally you create your own original image, but it's like an AI image is much better than no image, and bringing that out there and having it with a new original image makes makes a big difference. 57:09Yeah, like the quality of the AI image totally depends on the prompt, how well you phrase, you know, whatever images you you want to create. 57:19But I also want to touch on I don't think AI, at least at the current stage in the publishing industry, being a competitor to writers as it's just a tool. 57:31And what happens with tools is that people who are good with tools then will become even better and rise above, you know, the rest. 57:39Whereas people who are not good with tools then you know they will lack behind. 57:44So really what AII think has been doing so far for the publishing industry and media in general is that it elevates, you know, the the good ones way above the rest, and it makes it harder for mediocre or even like bad content to to be discoverable. 58:03And I think that's a good thing, at least at this point, right? 58:05Like it hasn't really completely fooled anyone that this is, you know, a completely original research paper that's like has never before been written before and like it's name is like Steve. 58:18You know, like so far what it has been able to achieve is that sometimes it hallucinates and makes up some facts that some people think that it's it's true. 58:29So. 58:29So that's where the AI and plagiarism detector comes in. 58:34And that's why the human, you know, aspect of our editorial process also comes in. 58:39Like every single piece that you see on Hakunun has actually been looked over by a human person to ensure quality, quality, but you know all the check boxes that you have to make. 58:49Well, the other argument is, you know for other language AI start-ups, you know where we are self. 58:57You know we're one. 58:58We're also doing our own R&D in this area, applying it in our business intelligence tool. 59:06But like you, you, you, you may have other language, text, AI scraping your site for content and training it and monetizing it. 59:16So based on your writers work, how do you then deal with IP then like you know, in that regard, I mean so on our site writers own the content and they give us a non exclusive license to it and we have paywalls and I mean we're not encouraging AI bots to come to our site and scrape it and upload it. 59:40But let's be honest, you know, open AI and everyone else has already scraped the whole Internet. 59:45If it's a public URL, it's been scraped and it's part of someone's trending. 59:49And so that's, you know, I think what's going to play out here in the courts between Sarah Silverman's, this and her group of celebrities, you know, going after the AI creation is going to create some president in the United States about how this, how this IP starts to work, I mean. 1:00:05I read a book in the 5th grade. 1:00:07Do I have to pay George Orwell, You know, did he see my vision like that? 1:00:11You know, since it's very, it's very delicate. 1:00:14And ideally, I think somewhere along these lines, there's going to be a cost to train. 1:00:18And the cost to train right now is just GPU and hopefully it goes to GPU and who owns the content that was inputted. 1:00:26But creating a system to actually manage that, I've seen some other people coming out and starting to try that. 1:00:33But it's it's very tough because you don't know what the model knows. 1:00:36You don't even know what the data input of the model was. 1:00:39And the people who know what it was may not be incentivized to pay the the rest of the Internet for that. 1:00:45So I'm kind of with everybody else of waiting to find out what exactly the rules are going to be, right. 1:00:52OK, well, we've got to wrap up, and I've got one last question from the audience. 1:01:00Have you ever got burned out from working and parenting? 1:01:04If so, how do you deal with it? 1:01:07Yeah, we're only humans, so absolutely it has been before. 1:01:14I think, you know, as humans in this world, we have relationships with society, We have relationships with each other, but we also have relationships with ourselves. 1:01:24So when you know all of those farmer 2 fronts fall apart and you focus on the last front, which is OK. 1:01:32Did I sleep enough? 1:01:33Did I eat enough? 1:01:34Did I exercise today? 1:01:35Did I use sunlight today? 1:01:36Things like that, I think just eventually would always help out. 1:01:40If you cannot take care of it yourself, it's like that airline thing. 1:01:44You cannot put the mask on for others either. 1:01:47So yeah, so go back to that. 1:01:50I think it doesn't last though. 1:01:51I think I find just way too much joy in this crazy ride that is the entrepreneurship journey. 1:01:57But also parenting. 1:01:58Like, I love being a parent to our kids to death. 1:02:01Like it's it's it's two of my most favorite in the world. 1:02:05Like, truly. 1:02:06So I think I just accept a certain level of burnout and risks and that stuff. 1:02:12I mean it's it's great to celebrate the wins. 1:02:14I mean, my daughter, she was drawing last night and then we ran out of time. 1:02:19And she's like, I want to get up early and do this before school. 1:02:22I'm just overjoyed. 1:02:23Got her up at 6:00 AM. 1:02:25Said one day she went for it. 1:02:29I All right, we gotta go. 1:02:31All right. 1:02:34OK. 1:02:34All right. 1:02:34Thank you very much for your time. 1:02:37And we appreciate it that you've, you know, taken your time off, you know, to to do this. 1:02:43And. 1:02:44Yeah. 1:02:44Thank you very much, David and Linh, for sharing your stories and, you know, wisdom and advice, practical tips and advice. 1:02:51Yeah. 1:02:51We're really, really grateful for that, even for myself. 1:02:54Yeah. 1:02:54So thank you very much. 1:02:56And we'll speak again soon, next time in the future. 1:03:00Thanks for having us. 1:03:01Enjoy the rest of the day. 1:03:02No worries. 1:03:02Thank you. 1:03:03Bye. 1:03:03Bye. 1:03:05Thank you very much, Mr. 1:03:07David and Miss Mrs. 1:03:08Linh. 1:03:08We will now have our 5 minutes break and we will start our next session at 11:00 AM sharp. 1:03:24Hello everyone. 1:03:25We will start the session in 2 minutes, but I will start the live broadcast in one minute. 1:03:30I'd like to remind the moderator and panelist to stay muted and silent until I give the cues. 1:03:36Thank you. 1:03:49Hello, everyone. 1:03:49Our next panelists are Mr., Simon Sue from Track and Roll. Paul Lee, Co-founder and CEO of roiquant, sat down with HackerNoon CEO and founder David Smooke and HackerNoon COO Linh Smooke for an hour-long interview where they discussed the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur and what it’s like to work while being married to each other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze_oq9oKBao&embedable=true https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze_oq9oKBao&embedable=true 0:00 Right. 0:02 Good evening. 0:03 David and Linh are over your end. 0:06 I know it's night time there. 0:08 So thank you very much for making time to speak with us. 0:12 So just a quick introduction first for the audience. 0:16 So David is the founder and CEO of Hackenoon which he founded I think yeah, 10 years ago now at 2013 prior to that deep sorry time flies. 0:29 Yeah, time flies, right. 0:31 And so prior to that David worked at a as a writer at smart recruiters. 0:37 I think it's a start up. 0:38 Then the the Lewistown Sentinel, I believe that's a news agency. 0:43 And then at University of Redland, David also started numerous businesses and websites which some of them are no longer have DIF, which some of them are, maybe David, if you want to talk a bit about them later, you can. 0:58 And then Linh is the co-owner and COO of Hackanoon, which she joined later at 2017. 1:05 Is that when you guys were married, got married? 1:08 Yeah, we actually got married 2016. 1:10 And I joined Hackanoon shortly after our kid was born. 1:16 Our first kid was born and then prior to that Linh worked at numerous you worked at University Minerva University and Brown University and then also worked at this United World initiative. 1:35 And then in Linh's yeah past she also founded this creative kit project platform in Vietnam. 1:43 Maybe, Linh, later I will ask you to revisit that to tell us a bit about what's that about. 1:50 And so, yeah, so thank you for doing this and very exciting. 1:56 I mean, I'm, you know, a user of Hacker Noon. 2:00 We read stuff and we even publish a few things there. 2:04 And so it's good to finally meet you, even though it's virtually. 2:09 So yeah, thanks for contributing to Hacker Noon. 2:13 Oh, so that's how we meet most of our teams is also actually like the original title of this tag. 2:21 I was planning like just how to manage this like 100% remote company. 2:25 It's kind of rare for us to meet people in person. 2:29 I guess we do but so why why don't we begin by you sharing how did you two men I know I read somewhere you you you met at like some concert, right. 2:41 But like in briefly, you know, like you want to tell us the audience how you two met and how you got into deciding that, you know, after marrying it's a good idea to work together. 2:53 You know, a lot of couples married, but they don't necessarily work together. 2:57 So what makes that? 2:59 But a lot of people work together and they don't marry as well. 3:02 Exactly. 3:03 So both ways. 3:05 So yeah, I think we're just very quick, decisive people. 3:11 So we met randomly just by chance on the street of San Francisco. 3:17 I was working for a university at the time that was headquartered in San Francisco. 3:22 So I was only there for like 10 business days because you know, like my employer was send me sending me there. 3:30 And on the close to the last day of the trip, it was a Friday, right? 3:35 Yeah, we met on in front of the Civic Centre. 3:41 It was like an outdoors kind of concert. 3:43 And David was there to support his friend, a musical friend. 3:48 I would just think there's a through line of why we decided, I mean to be a couple like to get married as well, to work together. 3:56 It's like we're not super like like we're not stewing on decisions. 4:02 Like we're never going to be the kind of people that just sitting on something for three years, never acting on it. 4:08 We the kind of people that if we go to a restaurant, we look at the menu pretty much like 30 seconds, we know what we want. 4:18 So that translates to the decision to just go for it both relationship wise as well as working together wise. 4:27 And it just so happens that our skill sets complement each other and we need it like each other. 4:33 At the time, like just moved to Colorado. 4:37 I just had, you know, she's given birth like a couple months ago and was ready to go back into the workforce. 4:45 And David's like, well, I have this thing I see, I see. 4:49 Yeah, it was more natural than it's like very methodical or like super strategic at the time, right. 4:59 And so you so for David you thought, you know having Linh would be an extra, you know, add a value help for you. 5:09 Oh yeah, she's more talented than me, has a much better resume. 5:13 He happens to not be a man with a company. 5:17 So that was the difference, but it was a great recruiting pitch. 5:21 All you have to do is marry her and she'll join the team. 5:23 That's all that easy peasy. 5:26 So you got her and then you let her go and recruit the other hundreds for you. 5:34 So now does it really translate from your decision making at the workplace? 5:47 I mean like you're the CEO, she's the CEO. 5:49 So eventually at a company you, you made a final decision. 5:52 So is and earlier Linh, you said you know it's, it's the same in the workplace and for home. 5:58 But is it really or like does David first to David this question or does she really call the shot at home CEO, You're not making that many decisions like you want to make the important ones and you want to put your foot down that matters. 6:12 And when there's a, you know it gets to me hopefully like her ability means less problems come to me, less big problems come to me. 6:20 So it's it's that I think and I mean the the board is us too. 6:25 So you know. 6:25 Yeah it is So neither of us can fire. 6:28 Yeah. 6:29 With the majority, right. 6:32 Right. 6:32 Yeah. 6:33 So I mean it's an equal partnership but I I think companies structurally Co CEOs is like confusing people don't get it. 6:41 So it's like to me, it's one job and eventually it gets to the one person and you have two people on the chief, you have two people on the board. 6:50 And you know, as far as all the team and problems are concerned, like either one of us can handle it. 6:56 And eventually, yeah, I may need to put my foot down. 6:59 But it's usually that's not a thing that happens often. 7:03 I mean I think if you look at our life, you know, maybe I've made some of the bigger decisions or was you know the proponent for them. 7:09 But overall the amount of decisions we've made as a family and as a company, links made more of them, you know. 7:15 So in in the aggregate, I think, yeah, I would say going back to the complementary skill set, it's also mindset. 7:26 David is more of a creative mind and a very abundance of mentality, mindset of like expansion and growth. 7:36 Whereas I'm of a more practical and you know, not like opposite of abundance, but I I'm definitely focusing on like what's in front of me and trying to focus on completing and executing, you know what's need it the most. 7:53 So yeah, it's like explore versus explore. 7:56 You can also think of it that way if we sit in front of like a Netflix night, which we rarely have these days, just the two of us. 8:05 But let's just imagine one night, just the two of us deciding on a Netflix movie. 8:11 Then I would tend to go to something that I already know and love, like The Office whatever. 8:16 And David would like present me with like 10 different new options. 8:20 So I think that's kind of balance works out in both our relationship as well as the way we run the company. 8:27 Like, I think you would probably agree with me on that, but like team members probably tend to go to me more for like day-to-day stuff. 8:35 You know, like oh, who do I go for this kind of things? 8:38 Or, you know, I have this event that I have to go to, Can you like take, take a quick look at my points at my presentation? 8:48 Whereas for David, you know, like we have a developer who was working on his own like hack a thon idea and then who, who would pitch it to David, right? 8:58 Like oh this is like potentially a new company idea that I have. 9:03 Would you like to take a look at it. 9:05 So I think people come to us for different reasons and we make different pieces of of our company puzzles move right and is that also how you manage your relationship and and at your household in this like I mean because if you're so used to working with each other I mean that question let me elaborate on that question. 9:34 If you're so used to working with each other and that mode when when you're at home do you still are you also in that mode you know with each other you know when you when you're with your family when you with your children. 9:46 I mean, it's not like a clean off on switch that suddenly, you know, you step in the door and you're ready, but sometimes, you know, you're in the activity. 9:55 Like if I have a big problem but I'm going to take a break and hang out with the kids for two hours, I'm not going to talk about the big problem and maybe it, you know, so. 10:03 So I think that's if it's a small problem, it's actually easier to seep in because it's more casual conversation. 10:10 Like, oh, I've been letting this problem sit in the back of my head and suddenly we're sitting on the living room floor and I say an idea to the problem that I hadn't talked about in three hours. 10:19 Now if I'm not married to the person, maybe I write that idea down or maybe I keep it to myself or maybe it disappears into the ether. 10:26 So there are definitely like we are intermingling at like a very, you know, deep level across many our life, our business, our careers, you know, all of that our most important people. 10:37 I'll tell you this, it's a luxury to be able to solve a lot of things on the way to grocery store. 10:43 Like it it. 10:46 You won't be able to solve your fundraising problem or your thing problem like those big ticket items, but you will be able to solve your administrative and your whatever that's going on with slack like you know, like is so. 10:59 So that's a luxury like, so we don't have to like schedule a meeting, you know, show up to a place, take two hours of commute or anything like that to solve a small thing. 11:09 So I think that's a luxury. 11:10 But also because we work together, we live together, we raise kids together, we also decide that we don't have to be in the same room together while we work. 11:19 So actually, David mostly uses the office space downtown and I just stay at home in this room right here working. 11:28 So we have our own individual spaces for our creative creativity as well. 11:34 So is there a fine line where you said you know like OK maybe that's enough. 11:42 You know like can we stop talking about work for a moment and like you know have some you know couple me time or family time or like you know I understand the luxury of time for you to always engage in talks. 11:54 By the way my Co founder is also my wife. 11:58 So I'm in the same situation like you but I'm we're we're. 12:01 But she has a day job and she's only helping out you know during her free time and during the weekends and even at times you know you know with the limited time that she has with me and you know I'll be sharing ideas with her and then sometimes it can be overwhelming because you know she just come back from you know from the university and she's only one foot in foot in. 12:21 That's right. 12:22 That will create a little tension. 12:23 I I think that could be more tension than even you know, husband and wife teaming up. 12:28 That's that's it's kind of its own attention of like these ideas are going overboard, you know, like right, right. 12:34 So I imagine you're carrying them with you a lot. 12:37 There is a boundary I would say that that has to be I would say when it comes to our kids, when it comes to family meal times and obviously whatever. 12:48 You know, we like stop work for the day and just start sleeping. 12:52 You know, like just me and like our own personal, private space, things like that. 12:56 Like we talk about it very rarely, but we both understand that those are just off limits, like meal times, bedtime, kids time, sometimes things might happen. 13:09 So I saw one of your questions being like critical problems, like sometimes do happen, not at the time that you wish for. 13:16 So we do have, like, occasional examples of that. 13:19 Like, I think 2022 November was when, like, our site just suddenly went down, off, you know, like just the face of the earth, like, just cannot be accessed. 13:31 And, you know, we finally tracked it down to a GoDaddy problem, all of that. 13:37 I think I documented that well enough on the Internet. 13:39 You just go search Ling Hakunoon, GoDaddy, you'll see, like a pretty elaborate story. 13:44 But yeah, it happened at like 7:00 PM, You know, like bang on in the middle of dinner time. 13:50 Yeah. 13:50 And we're like basically one of us, we were alternating between kids and calling engineers all the night and calling our customer support. 14:01 Yeah. 14:02 So I think one of us stays at the line at all time, you know, and then the other one just takes care of the kids and vice versa. 14:11 So and also don't keep your domain with GoDaddy. 14:15 Yeah. 14:18 Oh, we're still with them. 14:21 So sort of circling back to what David said. 14:24 So do you find it easier if let's say American people, if they're in this, you know, they should go all in and then, you know it makes it easier. 14:34 Otherwise when one it's you know only having a single foot through the door it makes it more challenging. 14:41 I mean it's it's hard to say because you know one finances come first. 14:45 If your if your house is stable how are you going to build a stable business of course. 14:48 So if you know if one of you is having another thing that brings in the money to keep the house stable, it just means on the new thing, you have to understand their commitment level is actually lower than you from a from a thought point, from an endpoint point. 15:02 And it's not quite an equal partnership until you're both all in, in terms of just, hey, whenever. 15:07 This is the decision that requires the expertise of the business. 15:10 In the very beginning, I would speak with more authority because I was the one all in and if she had an opinion on it, I would take it. 15:16 But I wouldn't treat her as, hey, this is equal first because I was the one working on it all the time and she was the one helping. 15:25 And you know, now that's been very different for many years. 15:28 It's not like that anymore. 15:29 You know, it's I remember we were pitching investors back in 2018 or something, 2019, no, 18. 15:37 And they've been like, you know, we both were in the room together and they just like looked at David talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and then like about 30 minutes and like they like glanced at me and be like, what are you going to do? 15:49 And I'm like, dude, I've been here for like this whole time. 15:53 And that's because your take away from it is like I'm just some kind of bystander. 15:58 So yeah, I I took from that moment as like it's and and it's it's my personality too. 16:05 I'm a very, like either I'm in or I'm not in Like I'm not like a half, half kind of person either. 16:12 So at that moment I I kind of like make a mental note to myself that OK, maybe speak up a little bit more, speak a bit more with authority and just like discuss with David beforehand, like how we want to mutually present ourselves, you know, individually but also *** a unit because that's how we present most things to the world like the equal partnership part. 16:37 I think that that's the key point. 16:39 That's how we parent, that's how we divide like house chores, you know, like he cooks, I clean you know he takes care of the boy, I take care of the girl via like keeps you know things like that. 16:50 So at work that's how we also divide the the work. 16:55 It doesn't have to be the same, but I think it has to be roughly understood between the the the two people that you and I are in this equal partnership together right now I will like to touch on something more. 17:11 I don't know whether it may appear a bit more tricky and sensitive to YouTube but like to many you know in the context of conflicts and like disagreements in in situations where you know you're you're totally in full disagreement. 17:33 You know head on you don't agree with the strategy and you know and then if one, if both of you are stubborn, you know in in, I mean you know you know you're championing that that that that views and whatnot. 17:46 And in that process you know we're only humans. 17:49 You know we we we get triggered emotionally and let's say let's say you know at work, you know you're triggered you know as colleagues and then let's say that link it on because that issue had not yet been dealt with. 18:01 So does that how do you deal with and then you're going home together right. 18:07 So then how that. 18:10 Oh you exactly. 18:12 Then how how do you. 18:14 OK if you're already home then how do you not let that be carried on to the bed for instance or vice versa. 18:21 You know like you know maybe over a weekend you know you you, you cross at each other just on on something. 18:27 You know you're at your your your parents place. 18:29 You know they your, your in law said something. 18:31 You know one of you is crossed you had a family with you know, then how then do you stop that from not being you know dragged on into the office on Monday, you know how do you deal with this. 18:45 Yeah that's that's a really good question. 18:48 I don't, I don't want to pretend to be like the best person at it. 18:52 We still working on it. 18:53 That's basically the trickiest part about working with your spouse. 18:58 But I think lucky for us, we're stubborn. 19:01 Unlucky for us, we're also stubborn. 19:02 So what I mean by that is the good thing about being stubborn is that you keep on keeping on despite the bad stuff, despite all the evidence pointing to the country. 19:13 Like, oh, entrepreneurship might not be a cakewalk. 19:16 It might lead you to really, really some bad stuff, but for some reason we're still here 77 years it, So I think that's a good part of it. 19:24 The bad part of it is sometimes we cannot find a mutual ground for sure, like it has happened not way often, but I could think like on the top of my head, you know, like a couple of times that we do need time away from from the argument and also from each other. 19:43 I would say the one thing that helped in terms of our personality as well is that we are not ones to avoid the problem and to avoid talking about what the disagreement is about. 19:56 And now it might be very unpleasant in the time to, like, magnify even bigger, but I think. 20:04 Basically, dealing with the problem head on, make us understand what the disagreement or argument actually is about. 20:13 You know, like there's a surface level of what you think the problem is, and then the moment you like, talk about it, maybe you yell at each other about it. 20:21 If it gets heated enough, then you at some point you would arrive to oh, so that's what the actual problem is. 20:29 Maybe you did not get enough exercise. 20:31 Maybe I did not sleep enough. 20:33 We we feel underappreciated in certain chores or kids, you know, or at work. 20:40 Maybe I did something for you that you didn't acknowledge or a colleague was saying something and you know, that got to me like things like that. 20:51 I think it comes out a lot more with open communication rather than avoiding tendencies. 20:58 And yeah, I would say it's conflict is healthy. 21:01 You know, it means you care about the project and it means you can talk about your point of view and keep it or lose it. 21:07 You know, it's it doesn't. 21:08 It's not a loss to lose your point of view. 21:10 You just move on to the next project. 21:13 You're not right about everything you know and you know. 21:15 So it's just keeping that type of mindset. 21:18 And it's like the other thing if you're looking at trying to scale up as a husband and wife team, how the team interacts with you is very important. 21:27 It's really important for other people to see that me and Ling disagree on things. 21:31 And whenever you hear something from me or you hear something for Ling, it doesn't mean it's fact and it's going to be carried out and we're going to have to do it. 21:38 It means that's the opinion of David, that's the opinion of Ling and there's going to be a discussion about it. 21:42 And that the opinion of, you know, all the other colleagues, we want to put them, you know, on the same level as us whenever we talk about how to best solve the problem. 21:51 Got it? 21:52 Got it. 21:53 So do you also think taking time outs and short breaks helps in that regard? 22:02 Yeah, absolutely. 22:04 We have spent some time just basically, hey, this is not about like I'm running away or you know, whatever. 22:11 Like I literally just need a break. 22:14 And I think a break just in general, even if you don't have a disagreement, helps tremendously. 22:21 It helps to switch your environment. 22:23 It helps to change your mindset to for you to see things in a different way. 22:29 Honestly, sometimes the very act of stepping outside, right? 22:33 Like we are all Zoom workers, right? 22:36 So like we should, we might be very OK with just doing this all day, every day. 22:41 Yesterday, sorry Segway. 22:43 But yesterday, Nora, our daughter was like talking about farmers being a job. 22:48 And we like, wow, the best farmers probably do this all day because they own the farm, right? 22:55 So they probably talk to their lawyers and accountants and like the corporations that like make deals. 23:00 But anyway we have this generation of workers. 23:03 So it helps a lot to simply walk outside, feel that sunlight and change them like that is one of the good things about running your own business and having people around the world like we do make our own schedule. 23:15 You know, we have key meetings that we're doing and you know, meeting with customers and investors in our team. 23:20 But it's like it's still, it's a lot of flexibility of, hey, maybe I'm going to take the afternoon off early and then when the kids go to bed, I'm going to log back in and I'm just going to let that problem sit for four hours and nothing's going to be fine. 23:33 Nothing. 23:33 The world's not going to burn down. 23:35 I'm just going to see if I can think about something else for a while. 23:37 And no, I'm going to come back at this time and solve the and you know, work on whatever I was planning to work on. 23:42 So I think there is a lot of control that and discipline that it'll take your business a long way if you're able to build a schedule around you and let your mental health like take breaks like that. 23:55 It is you're you're going to burn it if you don't. 23:57 And you know, I I felt close to burning out before, but I've been at this a long time and I haven't. 24:02 You know, I kind of learned like when my body is telling me like you know when to push and when to when to sit back and that that's something you have to learn over the years. 24:12 You can't just know when to do it, you have to go through it. 24:17 So obviously you have to have a system in place like a, like a even like a playbook. 24:22 You know internally how you work with each other, how you work with your remote employees, how you deal with things. 24:31 Yeah, I think over time we learn that we don't like meeting too frequently. 24:35 Like we prefer async communication a lot about colleagues because they don't live in the same time zone. 24:43 In fact, most of them live in a very, very strange time zone for us, Like 2:00 AM for us would be like 9:00 AM for them, Things like that. 24:49 So then yeah, we, we would wait you know, for their response, no problem. 24:57 But then we make sure to value the meetings that we do take. 25:02 So in like we have one product meeting, one sponsor meeting, one editorial meeting, one marketing meeting. 25:09 And those are the ones that we pay a lot of time, effort, energy into. 25:15 And like people think that it's a big deal, you know, showing up to these meetings. 25:19 And I think that builds a healthy culture around deadlines, accountability. 25:25 And you know if you say last Thursday that you're going to ship this by, you know, X amount of time, then what, what's happening today? 25:33 So that's, yeah, that's that's been what works for us. 25:38 And you you mentioned earlier in the beginning that you are a remote team. 25:42 So since day one until now you're still remote. 25:45 Yes, and how how many of you right now to get like full time staff, part time staff, and like the whole and like your community helping you to keep Hackanoon afloat and making money? 25:59 Yeah, so our ratio is quite funny between actual staff working at Hackanoon versus community members. 26:07 So if you're talking about the Hackanoon community at large, we have 4,000,003 millions readers month, monthly. 26:16 I mean year to date is the 100 million page views, which is calculated at the other day for SO. 26:25 So that's readers. 26:26 We have a pretty large readership for writers. 26:29 We have 30, 3040 thousand writers that have been published on Hacker Noon, at least one story. 26:38 The actual number of users with accounts are more than that, but we only count like in this example, people who have stories on Hacker Noon, the contributors to the site. 26:47 And then As for the team, like I'll let David, yeah, we're about 1718 people and everyone is their editorial sales or product, you know. 26:59 So I'm spending a lot of my time as a product manager working with software developers. 27:03 But you know when I started this business, it was a lot of editorial work and a lot of marketing work and trying to get people to contribute to the site and service their editor. 27:11 Now I'm editing just a few stories a week and we actually have a enough of a team in place between full time and part time editors that within two to four days if you submit your story on Hacker Noon, you'll get a professional review accepted or rejected and if it's accepted you're going to get about 1/2 hour of our editors time to improve your cost. 27:30 So it's it's a it's a good team structure for us because those are all skills that I somewhat have you know in terms of hey, once you get to 50, a hundred, 500, a thousand employees those are a lot of skills you don't have you know as the CEO managing it. 27:44 So I'm still in a nice phase where like the people doing the skills below me are better than me at the skills. 27:49 But I can understand your job enough that I can be a helpful teammate and that that's kind of a nice age for me of I mean imagine these people running thousand person companies and not knowing the name of 20% of their staff. 28:02 It's kind of wild of how like how their job is like ripple effects almost. 28:07 You know, I'm still between mostly individual contributor and manager, not public figure slash occasional manager, you know. 28:16 So that's the it's a nice stage to be in perpetual fundraiser, not perpetual raiser, right. 28:23 Well, so you're actually, you know, doing very good on many fronts here like not only as American couple, you know, running this, you know, cash flow positive business, you know remotely and having such a big community and stuff all over the place. 28:43 So I mean you you've literally, you know, made what a lot of VCs don't fund and work. 28:51 Yes, right. 28:52 So, So is that what? 28:54 Yeah, exactly. 28:55 So but you've proven these are only the only time they've bought Hacker Noon shares is following on other people's terms. 29:02 You know we've done equity funding where some participated and we did strategic investment from technology companies and then the the a couple of VCs have fallen on, but #1 VCs no longer invest in purely common stock companies. 29:15 So we have 100% common stock. 29:16 There's no preferred exit whatsoever for anyone. 29:20 So if this sells 10 millions, 20,000,000, God forbid 100,000, everybody gets their share price worth. 29:29 We are still the majority shareholders by far. 29:32 So I think that makes it not as attractive and obviously VC would look for like 100 X type of companies which were more like the couple digit X, maybe 10X company. 29:45 But we're definitely not like the Super hot AI on the block, you know so but we're also not the thousand companies pretending to be the Super hot AI company on the right, right. 29:56 No real history of record and established you know a certain level of consistent revenue and team and just grind and not willing to give up that I think makes a decent small business. 30:09 Maybe if you're 7X you're happy with 7X you don't need the seven, the 70XI mean maybe I'll have to turn down the offer so I can get 7 1/2 X I'll get a keep getting a little more, right, right, right. 30:21 So then how would you advise you know other couples you know in similar situation, you know the background, the family and you know trying to work together. 30:31 So we have before it's been it's actually really nice, you know it's really refreshing. 30:35 You know when we meet couples that are also creating their business together. 30:38 So first and foremost good for you, you're going out in terms of understanding, upping your risk profile. 30:44 You are now heavily risk, more heavily risking your life and your career, you know, together, which means your returns will be better if you do Better Together, which we have, but it means you're risking those things at a higher profile. 30:56 So I would just be clear about understanding that you know, understanding your real runway and talking about hey, if this doesn't hit this number and what amount of time are we talking about shutting this business down, What amount of time are we talking about, what are we doing next? 31:10 You know like I think it's having those honest discussions upfront about your timeline and your risk profile matter a lot but we also didn't we did it but also we didn't we haven't made it yet like we're still trying to do it. 31:23 Well it depends on you know your definition of success right. 31:26 I mean some would say like to me and I thought wow you like you guys have OK maybe the first hurdle yeah you you have a few more goals or milestone to yeah but at least you've you're ahead of many already and and I have a couple more just tactical like super practical tips like if you if you are a start up founder and you have made it through like the initial honeymoon period like you feel like you in some kind of grooves. 31:54 Don't cheap out on your accountants. 31:56 Don't cheap out on your lawyers. 31:58 You know, like, keep track of your paper paperwork. 32:02 Definitely there will be one person at least in your relationship if this thing's going to work out, that cares more and is more capable of doing that kind of, like, quote, UN quote boring stuff. 32:13 But it's so super important to set the foundation and the baseline right from the get go so that you don't have to clean up the mess down the line. 32:22 So, yeah, like we and at least think about from experience, like, you know, it's not like, oh, we've done it so perfect that now like we just like pointing fingers. 32:31 It's more like we missed so many mistakes along those lines that we like, OK less. 32:38 You know, nobody's going to fault you for making that first mistake. 32:41 It's, it's the second one that you don't want to make. 32:44 Yeah. 32:44 So I would say if I were to redo some of this, that would be like paperwork, administrative stuff and just like really keeping your record straight. 32:54 Right. 32:54 So what kind, how would you advise? 32:58 You know, like those young couples in in their fundraising effort especially face when facing with VCs, you know, and when VCs would some most would see this as a disadvantage rather than advantage. 33:13 Yeah. 33:13 No. 33:13 First of all have thick skin because you're going to get some questions that frankly are inappropriate. 33:18 And to them it's not inappropriate. 33:20 It's their $1,000,000 they're about to spend. 33:23 So they may ask you a question that's too far. 33:25 Something that someone did in the workplace, there would be an HR issue, but it's not in the workplace because they haven't invested yet and they're considering investing. 33:33 So I first and foremost, I'd say, be ready for that. 33:36 Just accept that there's going to be a certain level of they're going to try and pry at your relationship in an inappropriate way because they feel they're risking their money on your relationship. 33:45 Just don't take it personal during this process. 33:48 Yeah. 33:49 And at some level, I get it. 33:50 And at another level, I'm like, do I really want you as a shareholder? 33:53 Yeah. 33:54 Yeah. 33:54 Where do you guys. 33:57 So it's I mean you're I would practice your pitch obviously talk to these people. 34:02 I mean we're not we've never had AVC lead around. 34:05 So we're not exactly the people that's convinced, you know those type of people to say here's the price we're that we did. 34:11 Our first round was equity crowdfunding. 34:12 We said, hey here's the price of our business that I think a lot of people would want to buy a cut of and anyone can buy a cut And we just put the link atop our site and that was 90% of the traffic to our equity crowdfunding campaign. 34:23 So we were just saying if you like reading the site, buy shares in the site. 34:27 And that was to us as people that are good at writing, good at marketing, good at storytelling, that was a more a platform that fit us better than go meet with this wealthy firm and convince them you're going to take them from very wealthy to very, very, very wealthy. 34:42 That's not like a good room for us. 34:43 That doesn't treat us well. 34:45 So you know, it's where you take money from. 34:49 It doesn't have to be these ideally, it's your customers that that's where you really want the money to come from and then you can stay on your numbers and if someone wants to buy a share of the business based on the numbers. 34:58 That discussion's simpler. 35:01 Yeah, we have been a lot more focused on profitability and just literally having the actual cash, you know, as opposed to raising on a promise. 35:12 So I think the I wouldn't say that like oh we have figured out the magic formula but I think we have been always a lot more cautious about diluting versus making money you know and and I I think the latter it's just more longer lasting and showcasing of of of value that that is tangible sooner have you come across couples in your you know like who are also so founders read experience where the board or the investors are suggesting one of the other one of the other party to to to to to step out you know like yeah. 36:00 So basically let's say if someone's you know want to make a follow on investment but one of the terms would be like OK I don't want your wife no longer want your wife or your husband you know to take off this role and do that say no you know that would we would that would probably end the discussion and we'd be like why would you want to cut out 50% of our top labour like that would be response to that question. 36:23 So I I come up more of like the why not like you know do this or else but more like yeah like why do you guys like it's so it's it's slightly strange that you you're putting all your eggs in one basket type of things. 36:40 But like if we can come up with, you know a decent answer decent pitch then some people would say yes. 36:48 I guess the other thing I would say couples should say in that moment is like, hey, I get you're risking $4 million in your whatever million fund, but I'm risking my life. 36:57 So you think I'm not committed to this and you're more committed than me. 37:01 That's not true. 37:02 You know, I'm putting everything here and you're not. 37:04 So like, I I appreciate the money. 37:06 Well, we're going to work for you. 37:07 The terms are going to be good, but our risk profiles are very different. 37:10 Like what what you're. 37:11 So that's, that's what I would say if someone said that to me. 37:17 Very good. 37:17 Great. 37:19 OK. 37:20 I've got some question here. 37:24 The first one here would is what key takeaways or pearls of wisdom would you like to share with the audience about balancing work, personal life, and entrepreneurship as a married couple? 37:40 Pearls of Wisdom put a lot of pressure. 37:45 Yeah. 37:46 About balancing work, you know, personal life and as a Co founder, exercise Enough. 37:51 I think this this one is for us, but it's also for, like, entrepreneurs in general. 37:55 Like that's one where it's just like, it's so easy to sacrifice on exercise. 37:59 It just is. 38:00 It's going to tell me about it wants to go away and it's like, it's going to add up. 38:04 Your sleep's going to get worse. 38:06 Your productivity per minute's going to get worse. 38:08 And it's it seems selfish in the moment to say, hey, I need to go move my body without you guys later. 38:14 But we trust each other that hey, we set up windows that we can make sure we we take care of our bodies in that way. 38:20 So I think that's really important one, you have to and you have to rely on your partner to be able to have those windows. 38:27 And As for me, I would say entrepreneurship has very high highs and very low lows. 38:34 So, you know, just understanding that, but let's say if you have a really terrible problem at work and your business is facing some existential challenges, well, is it really existential? 38:48 Like you have to step out of that moment of that mindset a little bit and understand that it might just be the cyclical nature of this up and down ride that is the start-ups journey. 39:00 So understanding that you're going to have your highs and lows often times at the same times. 39:05 So instead of you know you're coming home and you get the high wife had the low and vice versa depending on your work. 39:10 It's like, you know, when the bad stuff happens, it's happening to both of us, amplifying both the joy and the, you know, the fact that you being very upset over something. 39:20 But so I would just say, yeah, just ride it out, you know, understand that the bat stub won't last forever, but also understand that the good stuff also won't last forever. 39:30 So you don't get complacent and, you know, being too cocky over something, you know, like, let's say you just close this really attractive $10 million round or something. 39:41 Well, that's not forever. 39:43 Like 10 million depends on how you spend the money. 39:46 Like, it could last, you know, for all of your journey or you could just burn it, you know, by making one critical mistake. 39:53 So you don't want to go in either direction. 39:57 So I think there's like a metaphor for life when there like nothing lasts forever and the joy is in the act of doing it itself. 40:08 Right now that's as married couple. 40:12 Now what about in, in terms of parenting, like when you're doing all this and then what about your kids and now that especially you have to. 40:21 Yeah. 40:21 So I mean routine is very important and setting up a strong structure around you. 40:25 You know as a parent you're you got to accept you're going to have child care you know and we we have a part time nanny we have my parents around we have a very structured school schedule you know and I'm not doing any meetings around pick up and drop off like it's just like booked out. 40:39 You know what I mean? 40:41 So it's that's I think setting boundaries of what your schedule is, is is really important and the kids respect that. 40:48 They get used to it. 40:48 They need it. 40:49 You know the moment you switch their routine you have a double cost. 40:52 So it the the serving a strong routine, it serves you to make sure you get good work hours and it serves them to know what to expect. 41:01 So it's and you have to break your routine obviously sometimes. 41:04 But the more the older I get, the more I'm doing the same routine. 41:08 By the time I'm 80, I'll be doing the same thing every single day. 41:13 I think our youngest won't get it yet, but our oldest starting to get that we are business owners and we have employees and we have business problems that we have to deal with. 41:25 I mean, she, you know, drew a lot of pictures, you know, to both of us. 41:31 And in her recent drawings, I've seen like the Hackenoon logo on it. 41:36 So, like, she learned how to draw the clock. 41:39 Speaking of the devil, she just popped in. 41:43 And how old is she now? 41:45 Six and a half, 6, 1/2. 41:47 And the son is just a couple a year old, No. 41:50 Yeah, 1 1/2, right. 41:52 Full ball of energy, just ready to go. 41:56 I myself just had my son last February, so he's nine months. 42:01 Yeah, I'm like coming to 10 months now. 42:04 So. 42:04 So yeah, I'm still juggling with all this and trying to, you know, yeah, make it work. 42:11 So yeah, then I actually have a question. 42:14 But since then, you know, jump off and maybe later on she can share her view as well. 42:18 So as a, you know, Hacker Noon, you know it's a tech based publishing startup. 42:25 Obviously you know a lot of time you're spending your time in front of the screen and now that you have children how how when when do you find the right time to introduce tech or like iPads or phone to your to your to your kids. 42:40 Yeah that's a that's a great question. 42:42 It's a challenge of this whole parenting generation that no one has a, you know, a full answer to. 42:47 I I have a few guidelines I go by though. 42:50 The first one is trying to teach her that the phones for creation and not consumption and that's a hard thing to do but she takes a lot of pictures. 42:59 You know, and as opposed to, you know, there's this adapted mind game. 43:04 So it's like teaches her math and words and English. 43:08 So I think, yeah, that that rule we came up with very early on of like active participation in electronics as opposed to just mindlessly consuming something seems to be the the the key to a healthy relationship with technology, at least when it comes to young kids. 43:29 She does. 43:30 We did really early. 43:31 That was really great and I didn't know we were going to keep it 6 years. 43:34 It's just something we made-up with in the moment. 43:36 But no TV till after dark, right. 43:39 Flat rule on no screen during the daytime of just not allowed to do it. 43:43 Right. 43:44 Right, right. 43:44 She'll still see us typing on the computer sometimes, obviously during the day. 43:48 But in terms of, you know, consuming movies, we just cut that out. 43:52 And that was. 43:54 Yeah, that that was. 43:54 I think it was really helpful to get her to draw longer and keep your attention away from just so when how long is the screen time then when it's allowed like up to 30 minutes. 44:06 At that point. 44:08 She has been given opportunities to watch movies. 44:12 We made one mistake of letting her watch something that was way inappropriate for her age like it's Harry Potter 4. 44:23 I think 123 is fine for a 6 1/2 year old Harry Porter. 44:26 Four that's that's the cut off line. 44:29 So, so I think yeah, but we only do that during you know, like special times like extended break or during like a super long weekend or something. 44:40 For the most part she gets to watch something for 30 minutes. 44:44 I remember we had a talk at Colorado Business School, unit leads Business School in Colorado. 44:49 And Nora came and she didn't really get what's going on. 44:52 But like it was it's fun to like have her and show, you know, be just see like, Oh yeah, he's not just on the computer, Like, he's a real person that goes places and does meets things. 45:00 So there are some elements of like a remote job can feel a little not real to the kid, you know, like, do you really need to work? 45:07 And I was like, do you really need me to buy this for you? 45:10 Right. 45:12 So how do you fight off the temptation of sort of like influencing them picking tech up or like computer science or something like that, you know, as they grow up, I mean, especially when you're a tech startup founder. 45:24 Yeah. 45:24 And she likes computer Class A lot. 45:26 So I think like there is this healthy like encouragement of doing that. 45:30 Yeah, her current life aspirations are like, I'm already an artist, she said so. 45:36 And I to be an illustrator and I want to be a mom. 45:40 So those are her as of now a 6 1/2 year old. 45:43 So take it as a with a grain of salt, but I would say at this point, you know, being Asian, like I understand the temptation to like parents, especially the tiger type, to be like lawyer, doctors, whatever. 45:58 But for me, growing up in a musical family and just marrying into like this Jewish guy's family, which also values education highly, like we already have a pretty high bar of expectation for her. 46:11 We don't also have to tell her what career attracts we you know gonna expecting her to do like she already told us. 46:18 So I think when the time comes if she chose computer science technology, great. 46:23 If she work chose whatever else. 46:25 I mean maybe AI would enable. 46:29 I don't know some some career path that we cannot think of right now right so. 46:33 So I would just keep that options, keep those options open for her when you know until the. 46:41 OK. 46:42 I've got another question from the crowd, from the audience. 46:44 How did you, how do you manage the logistics and operation of running a business with employees and partners based in yeah like different time zones You, you, you, you know the topic here is 10/10 time zones. 46:58 So how do you get, yeah, yeah, logistically a routine. 47:02 We have some people that have been willing to make sacrifices in terms of late night meetings and that's that's sometimes people have left, you know, because the meeting times at this schedule, you know if you're joining the editorial team and you can't attend the weekly editorial meeting, it is not going to work and we can't move a whole meeting for one person. 47:20 So sometimes there are, I mean occasionally you can but not often. 47:25 It is like it has to kind of stay within the routine. 47:28 So there are you know people in Asia will have like 1 late night meeting a week and that's kind of a trade off they make of their job and they have two total meetings a week. 47:37 So it's a pretty good trade off but someone has to be willing to make that and they have to be a good. 47:42 I think we've realized like we really gravitate towards doers and individual contributors and like we want to like we want you to put your head down and get after it like we don't want to go back and forth with you a bunch, you know. 47:55 So that's I think making structuring the meetings that way has helped to track that type of person and make that the type of person that stays versus the type of person that goes. 48:06 Got it, got it. 48:07 And a lot of bank calls for wires. 48:09 So international wire transfers get a good bank that gives you free or cheap wires. 48:13 We have a good deal with our local banks where we make 20 wires internationally a month at $0.00 fee. 48:22 So I mean, over the past like 7 years, we've saved quite a good bit on wire transfer fees. 48:27 So that's a very practical advice. 48:30 It's like you actually can negotiate with your bank, you know, if you have a good enough page of relationship with them. 48:38 I would just say don't expect your colleagues, like I think I mentioned it earlier, to respond in real time when they live in a different zone. 48:45 It sounds obvious, but at the flip side of the coin, it would be to communicate as clearly as possible by providing contacts, by linking to what you refer to, by tagging people at the appropriate channel every every new hire. 49:01 There's always a point in the early days where I'm just like you have to provide more context. 49:05 I'm the one coming. 49:06 Like if you if you mentioned it and it's available somewhere in one of our notions or Googles or whatever, and you didn't link to it, that's wrong. 49:14 Don't respect your colleagues enough. 49:16 You know when you saving your colleagues that little extra moment of finding the document that is such a great courtesy that like just gets forgotten and you can see it very early when someone joins an environment, if they do it or not. 49:29 And it's just, it seems small, but it's it's, it's if you want to save your teammates a moment, you can like just just make one less steps so they can get into it. 49:37 You know what? 49:38 Sign out. 49:38 I love the way you send your emails where you like blip stuff, italic stuff. 49:44 Formatting is highly important when it comes to remote communication. 49:49 You know, you can take away like nugget of information simply by the way you present them. 49:55 So that's just like a simple thing that and you know, for somebody who values it, think is a no brainer. 50:01 But for somebody who like steps into this new remote world, just think, whoa, so you do have to do that linking and sort of like this huge random characters thing, hyperlinking, you know, people don't have to like read irrelevant characters information like random, you know, very, very small simple things like that. 50:20 But like working remotely tones don't get transferred like tone you don't hear. 50:27 So like the moment that you you how much, how much emoji is acceptable then when tones and as many as possible, right. 50:38 That's why I love your newsletters, all the GIFs, all the crazy GIFs, you know. 50:45 Yeah, we are very encouraging of casual and sometimes even slightly inappropriate. 50:56 You would call it New Agey type of communications online, like all the gifts and all the emojis and some of the slangs. 51:04 I think that kind of things like actually do have a science to them. 51:08 They break the tension and they make people feel like they can let the guard down a little bit more. 51:14 And you know you're not coming from like this high horse of yours with all of your wisdom to offer the world, right? 51:21 Like you are just person of the Internet as well, which it should be because we want to invite people who are not professional writers to write on our platform. 51:29 That's like a main goal of having to have as many people from different technology industries as possible to contribute. 51:37 So really, the moment you say it has to be academically proven, it has to be capitalized in like a certain way. 51:45 You cannot use and at the beginning of a sentence like that's where you lose a lot of your actual negative gems, right? 51:52 Right. 51:53 So with your current structure, is there is your organizational structure flat or like do you have little, do you organize yourself in terms of like cells like kind of little group where at different time zone there's always somebody to sort of like a go to person you know when you're you're you're not available. 52:16 Yeah. 52:17 So no hierarchy, that is way too structure except that me and David people know that the decision makers, but they're absolutely stacker time zones like stacker workers and different times. 52:31 And that's actually works to our advantage that we have a remote team which means at mostly 24/7 we can have somebody doing the editing, looking at the queue 24/7. 52:44 We have someone to take meetings with potential leads, potential sponsors and 24/7. 52:49 We had developers looking at you know potential tech support issues or just like developing new products. 52:56 Not perfect, but yeah, I think it works to our advantage that we have Asia, then Europe, America, then also Africa. 53:04 Like, you know, like imagine if this remote team is based 100% in America, then basically like 2 hours from now until like 10 hours from now, like nobody would be answering anything. 53:15 And that's not how the Internet works. 53:17 Like some important news might be breaking as we sleep. 53:21 So we actually do enjoy the fact that we have people in Asia, you know doing so obviously you will have a very big knowledge base like a huge notion kind of thing that everybody's connected. 53:36 So if you need this, click this, read this, you know, all this kind of playbooks up available for everybody, anywhere to access at any time to, to get information and answers. 53:46 Yeah, I mean, and with editing, we even put a site together with our CMS, it's at editing protocol.com and it's just our editing protocol list and it's the base like the first, you know, 20 rules of what how editors are editing stories. 53:59 And so it's kind of like once the internal documentation gets good, a lot of times we like to publish it and just put it out and see, see how someone else could, you know, use our our system for editing stories or how artificial intelligence can learn from our documentation and make a protocol. 54:14 So I think I think our documentation is pretty good and we've definitely erred on the side of like we hire for better writing. 54:21 If you're a better written communicator, maybe you haven't sold much before, but if you're a good written communicator, I can teach you how to sell what we what we sell, you know. 54:29 So that's I can't teach you how to be a good writer. 54:32 That line is actually in our career speed like we want to be almost like prerequisite. 54:37 So Power hires is like you have to be able to write well, OK. 54:43 You mentioned AI that David and I know you're sort of an AI enthusiast yourself because I see your post and what you're interested in. 54:51 And so I've got a question for you. 54:54 Do you see the pursuit of AI by the marketplace as a threat or as a disruption to either media or like in your case a publishing industry? 55:08 Say you know, like you know with the with the advancement of generative AI, you know, how has that impact that your industry is? 55:17 Has there been any negative impacts to your business or you're not worried. 55:24 I'm a little worried, yeah artificial intelligence is taking such a leap in the last year to two years, so that's certainly I'm more excited than worried. 55:33 It isn't massively disruptive technology and it hits on a very simple input output level that other disruptive technologies is harder to show to anybody. 55:42 You know, it's just easier to say prompt creation, prompt creation. 55:46 So that stuff is very flashy and it's impressive mostly. 55:51 I mean, it's been positive for us in terms of people writing about it has been very interesting and I want to read about it. 55:58 So I like that when people submitting AI stories on Hacker Noon and we've been putting it into our process, like some jobs in editorial and editing can be done, you know, by AI. 56:08 Like right now, when an editor opens a story, an AI has already read it and it's checked it for plagiarism, it's checked it for AI writing. 56:16 It's given a score on both and it suggests 5 headlines based on the content of the story. 56:21 That and the Hacker Noon library of what will do well. 56:24 So we have a good, like we're trying to really just push it as the editor's assistant and eventually the, you know, more towards the writer's assistant as well. 56:32 But the image thing as well. 56:34 Oh yeah, we also have image generation. 56:37 So you know, the feature image is one of like the early if anyone was blogging 1015 years ago. 56:42 Everyone has that notice from some image licensing site that you found some image and even if you accredited, they're still coming after you for money, whatever. 56:51 Or you just didn't have an image and it didn't get shared as well. 56:54 So I mean, the AI image generation is definitely like a baseline minimum for putting out a new piece of content. 57:00 Ideally you create your own original image, but it's like an AI image is much better than no image, and bringing that out there and having it with a new original image makes makes a big difference. 57:09 Yeah, like the quality of the AI image totally depends on the prompt, how well you phrase, you know, whatever images you you want to create. 57:19 But I also want to touch on I don't think AI, at least at the current stage in the publishing industry, being a competitor to writers as it's just a tool. 57:31 And what happens with tools is that people who are good with tools then will become even better and rise above, you know, the rest. 57:39 Whereas people who are not good with tools then you know they will lack behind. 57:44 So really what AII think has been doing so far for the publishing industry and media in general is that it elevates, you know, the the good ones way above the rest, and it makes it harder for mediocre or even like bad content to to be discoverable. 58:03 And I think that's a good thing, at least at this point, right? 58:05 Like it hasn't really completely fooled anyone that this is, you know, a completely original research paper that's like has never before been written before and like it's name is like Steve. 58:18 You know, like so far what it has been able to achieve is that sometimes it hallucinates and makes up some facts that some people think that it's it's true. 58:29 So. 58:29 So that's where the AI and plagiarism detector comes in. 58:34 And that's why the human, you know, aspect of our editorial process also comes in. 58:39 Like every single piece that you see on Hakunun has actually been looked over by a human person to ensure quality, quality, but you know all the check boxes that you have to make. 58:49 Well, the other argument is, you know for other language AI start-ups, you know where we are self. 58:57 You know we're one. 58:58 We're also doing our own R&D in this area, applying it in our business intelligence tool. 59:06 But like you, you, you, you may have other language, text, AI scraping your site for content and training it and monetizing it. 59:16 So based on your writers work, how do you then deal with IP then like you know, in that regard, I mean so on our site writers own the content and they give us a non exclusive license to it and we have paywalls and I mean we're not encouraging AI bots to come to our site and scrape it and upload it. 59:40 But let's be honest, you know, open AI and everyone else has already scraped the whole Internet. 59:45 If it's a public URL, it's been scraped and it's part of someone's trending. 59:49 And so that's, you know, I think what's going to play out here in the courts between Sarah Silverman's, this and her group of celebrities, you know, going after the AI creation is going to create some president in the United States about how this, how this IP starts to work, I mean. 1:00:05 I read a book in the 5th grade. 1:00:07 Do I have to pay George Orwell, You know, did he see my vision like that? 1:00:11 You know, since it's very, it's very delicate. 1:00:14 And ideally, I think somewhere along these lines, there's going to be a cost to train. 1:00:18 And the cost to train right now is just GPU and hopefully it goes to GPU and who owns the content that was inputted. 1:00:26 But creating a system to actually manage that, I've seen some other people coming out and starting to try that. 1:00:33 But it's it's very tough because you don't know what the model knows. 1:00:36 You don't even know what the data input of the model was. 1:00:39 And the people who know what it was may not be incentivized to pay the the rest of the Internet for that. 1:00:45 So I'm kind of with everybody else of waiting to find out what exactly the rules are going to be, right. 1:00:52 OK, well, we've got to wrap up, and I've got one last question from the audience. 1:01:00 Have you ever got burned out from working and parenting? 1:01:04 If so, how do you deal with it? 1:01:07 Yeah, we're only humans, so absolutely it has been before. 1:01:14 I think, you know, as humans in this world, we have relationships with society, We have relationships with each other, but we also have relationships with ourselves. 1:01:24 So when you know all of those farmer 2 fronts fall apart and you focus on the last front, which is OK. 1:01:32 Did I sleep enough? 1:01:33 Did I eat enough? 1:01:34 Did I exercise today? 1:01:35 Did I use sunlight today? 1:01:36 Things like that, I think just eventually would always help out. 1:01:40 If you cannot take care of it yourself, it's like that airline thing. 1:01:44 You cannot put the mask on for others either. 1:01:47 So yeah, so go back to that. 1:01:50 I think it doesn't last though. 1:01:51 I think I find just way too much joy in this crazy ride that is the entrepreneurship journey. 1:01:57 But also parenting. 1:01:58 Like, I love being a parent to our kids to death. 1:02:01 Like it's it's it's two of my most favorite in the world. 1:02:05 Like, truly. 1:02:06 So I think I just accept a certain level of burnout and risks and that stuff. 1:02:12 I mean it's it's great to celebrate the wins. 1:02:14 I mean, my daughter, she was drawing last night and then we ran out of time. 1:02:19 And she's like, I want to get up early and do this before school. 1:02:22 I'm just overjoyed. 1:02:23 Got her up at 6:00 AM. 1:02:25 Said one day she went for it. 1:02:29 I All right, we gotta go. 1:02:31 All right. 1:02:34 OK. 1:02:34 All right. 1:02:34 Thank you very much for your time. 1:02:37 And we appreciate it that you've, you know, taken your time off, you know, to to do this. 1:02:43 And. 1:02:44 Yeah. 1:02:44 Thank you very much, David and Linh, for sharing your stories and, you know, wisdom and advice, practical tips and advice. 1:02:51 Yeah. 1:02:51 We're really, really grateful for that, even for myself. 1:02:54 Yeah. 1:02:54 So thank you very much. 1:02:56 And we'll speak again soon, next time in the future. 1:03:00 Thanks for having us. 1:03:01 Enjoy the rest of the day. 1:03:02 No worries. 1:03:02 Thank you. 1:03:03 Bye. 1:03:03 Bye. 1:03:05 Thank you very much, Mr. 1:03:07 David and Miss Mrs. 1:03:08 Linh. 1:03:08 We will now have our 5 minutes break and we will start our next session at 11:00 AM sharp. 1:03:24 Hello everyone. 1:03:25 We will start the session in 2 minutes, but I will start the live broadcast in one minute. 1:03:30 I'd like to remind the moderator and panelist to stay muted and silent until I give the cues. 1:03:36 Thank you. 1:03:49 Hello, everyone. 1:03:49 Our next panelists are Mr., Simon Sue from Track and Roll.