Shaul Olmert of KwaKwa on finding the one KPI that tells the story

Shaul Olmert

I've been in the tech, media and marketing business for the past, I want to say, the better part of 30 years now. It's been a while. When I started, the internet was in its infancy, and there was a lot of excitement I felt about what this medium could create, but questions of business model, scale and globalization were yet to be determined. In many ways I was part of the exploration phase of what this technology and these new platforms, first internet, then broadband, then mobile, and now AI and perhaps the metaverse and many other evolutions, can offer to people.

01:01 I started my career at a VC firm, and later on I started working for an online games company. Then I lived in New York, where I went to grad school at NYU. Later on I worked at MTV, where I was a vice president of digital products. Then I moved back to Israel and started embarrassing myself more in startup life. I was involved in a few ventures, but most notably I'm the co-founder and CEO of two companies: PlayBuzz, which I co-founded in 2012 and served as CEO of for eight or nine years, and now KwaKwa, my recent venture, which started four years ago. I'm still co-founder and CEO.

Shaul Olmert 02:35

Obviously you said it's a tough question, so I hope you won't be too disappointed that I don't have an already-made answer that will completely seal the deal for everyone. I think the biggest challenge in business, in startups, and perhaps even in life in general, is priorities. The same goes for KPIs. You really have to choose the one KPI that really tells the story of your business. If your business is dependent upon a combination of too many KPIs, you probably don't have a business. You probably don't yet understand what's the right narrative, and what are the determining factors in making your business a success.

03:05 By the way, it's an ongoing challenge. I've been around, I've started a bunch of different companies, but with each and every new one the same story repeats itself. I'm still struggling to find the right KPI, spending a lot of time measuring a lot of different things that don't really lead anywhere. It's not something you can come up with, at least in my experience, right out of the box with a ready-made answer. It's exploration, it's a search.

03:35 With every company, for instance at PlayBuzz, my previous company, we figured out the right KPI when social media became a thing and people started sharing information on social media and discovering content through social media, which never happened before. The main KPI for us, I guess the KPI, was share rate: how many people who view a certain content item created with PlayBuzz are sharing it. This is what we optimized for. We turned our content into the most viral content on the internet. We were ranked as the number one most shared website on Facebook, which at the time was not only the leader but the sole proprietor of social media in the world. That was the one KPI that let us understand how well we were doing, how many people were sharing our content.

04:35 But it's not always that reaching this point, knowing what it is that you're measuring, is a sign of maturity for the company, and it doesn't come easy. It usually takes a lot of exploration and failed attempts until you reach this point.

Shaul Olmert 05:05

I'll give a bit of background. The company that I currently run started with a mobile application that was trying to replace the word processor, a content-authoring platform to enable people to create projects for school, presentations, reports and letters, all the kind of stuff you usually do with Google Docs or Microsoft Word.

05:37 For a while we struggled. The product was, and still is, very good, and people really liked it, but it never became a habit. It was too broad to serve a wide variety of needs, and not focused enough to serve one need in a way that would really make it a winner in the market. After a lot of maneuvers, testing and exploration, we turned it into a mobile application to enable content creators to easily author and distribute paid courses, paid classes.

06:09 So a content creator, let's say an influencer on TikTok or Instagram who has a lot of followers and usually talks about baking and offers different recipes, can now, through KwaKwa, offer a paid class on how to create the perfect pie, or how to design the perfect menu for a social gathering, whatever it is. It's very easy to create that course with the application, and then offer it as a paid, premium service to their following. We enable people who have a lot of audience but usually not a lot of monetization to actually monetize their audience.

06:39 Now, I don't have a great answer for what the KPI is that we should focus on. For now we are focusing primarily on how many creators create a second course: after they go through the experience, create their first offering, offer it to their audience and run the experience, how many of them come back and create another course, or rerun the same course to market it to a new audience. That's sort of the ultimate proof that we are creating value for our creator community. Later on I think we'll start looking at other KPIs as well. For now that's the one we're focused on. I don't know that it's going to be the solid one for the years to come, but it's representative of the stage we're at at the moment.

Shaul Olmert

In a year we'll be in a completely different position than the one we're at right now, and I don't know exactly what to imagine. Experience is a pretty interesting double-edged sword. On one hand, I'm going through challenges, and I feel like I've been through them before and survived them, so I have the confidence and I'm not overly excited when I'm confronting a new challenge, because now I'm a second-time entrepreneur and I've already been through that. On the other hand, you keep reminding yourself that you're not fighting yesterday's war, that the challenges you had a few years ago are not the same as the ones you face now. It's a different world, a different market, a different product, a different environment altogether. The challenge is really how to learn from your experience but also not be bound by it, not limit yourself to your past experience, but really take a fresh look at reality and figure out what's the right solution for the challenge you're currently facing, and not try to apply the solution that worked ten years ago and expect it to work like magic on a completely different situation.

Shaul Olmert 09:11

I think a startup is kind of a journey in which you mark a certain destination, a target, a goal, but you don't really know what it is. It's usually something pretty broad, like "I want to dominate the world of short mobile courses." I don't even know what that means exactly, it's a general ambition. Then you're on the journey and you see where it takes you, and over time you become more accustomed to the actual market, you understand what's building better, you're creating it, and you develop a more refined sense of being able to define exactly what you're doing, what the next step is, what you're aiming for.

09:41 I feel like it's exploration as we go. The team and I, first of all we're a very small team, we're like eight people, and we work really closely together. It's not really directing, it's not my direction and them executing, it's actually the opposite: they're trying different things and then we're looking at the results together, and I'm trying to provide context.

10:43 I guess to answer your question: I'm trying to say, okay, we're seeing that creators really appreciate how easy it is to create with our tools, so now let's make sure we're helping them create something that's robust enough for the expectations of the consumer. Make sure the creators don't confuse the ease of creation with the depth of the creativity required. Let's have them create something that offers a lot of value to their audience, and not be tempted to say, oh, it's so easy, let's just spend five minutes and create something quick and offer it.

11:13 This is an example of where I'm developing this sense of looking at the data, looking at the performance result, and tying it back to the goal, understanding what it is we're trying to achieve, what I think is going to make us successful in the long run.

I'll give you another quick example. Since it's a UGC platform, open for everyone to create, someone could create questionable material, pornography or racism, or content dealing with things that could be correct or incorrect. To even form that policy I have to think about the boundaries of freedom of speech, and how we make sure the freedom of speech of one person doesn't create a conflict for somebody else, because it's triggering an unpleasant memory or thought or whatever it is.

12:15 What is my role? Do I need to be the policeman, the arbiter, or am I like Google, that says, "if you're looking for adult material, I'll tell you where you can find it, I'm not endorsing this content, but you're looking for it, so I'm trying to help you"? Or do I take a more restrictive approach, like social media, that says, "this kind of content cannot be shared on our platform, it's beyond the boundaries of freedom of speech"?

12:46 I think, as you go, you're asking yourself what's my overarching goal, what am I trying to achieve, what are the key factors that are going to make me successful, and then you stick to them and tie it back to the day-to-day: in this case, we're going to apply this policy because I think it will serve us better in the long term. I guess that's the art of management: doing things, seeing the results, and then trying to figure out how they fit into a larger puzzle, which is not always very concrete. You don't always have the full picture in front of you. You try to make an educated guess about how it all fits together, and apply policies accordingly.

Shaul Olmert

I think we tend to think of marketing as marketing to customers, and that's obviously a big part of our marketing activity, but we also have many other layers of marketing. We are marketing to our investors, we are marketing to the general public, because we want to position ourselves as a potential employer, or just as a company with a public reputation. We market ourselves to our employees, we're constantly in relationships where we're trying to make sure they acknowledge the value of the company to them, and have them stick to it. We're constantly marketing to a lot of different audiences.

13:47 Specifically with investors: whether you know when you're going to raise your next round of funding, or you don't know because you're doing well, you're profitable and you're not sure if you'll ever need external funding, you're never in the safe zone. At some point you may need to tap back into the investment community and market yourself again, so you always have to keep in touch with investors even when you're not raising money.

14:17 Similarly to other processes familiar in life, you usually get the most interest when you don't need it. When people see you're doing well, they want to invest in your company, so it happens that at this particular time you don't need their investment, but that's the way it works. It's an ongoing maintenance of relationships. When investors contact me, I usually tell them, listen, thank you for calling, I'm not raising money right now, but I'll be glad to introduce the company to you, to be on your radar, for you to know what we're doing.

14:48 Many times I've developed the tactic of getting to the point pretty quickly, so in 90% of the cases the investor will tell me, listen, what you're doing is great, I wish you luck, but it's irrelevant to my investment strategy, or to the stage we're investing in, or the market we're investing in, or everything else. So rather than make it a pitch meeting, it's more of an advisory meeting. I tell them a bit about what I do, and I get a fair share of their brain power, their ideas, their connections, so it serves me well that way.

15:48 I always feel like I've got to have an investor pitch ready, and I've always got to have an investment hypothesis in mind. If I raise twenty million dollars right now, here's where it's going to bring the company, here's what we'll spend it on, here's why we need that money, even if that's not necessarily the plan I have right now. I've got to be ready, because if the opportunity presents itself you don't want to sound like a complete jerk and say, "oh, you're interested in giving us money, let me think about what I could do with it." It kills the momentum of the conversation. You've got to be ready to say, listen, we weren't planning on raising right now, but I do have a scenario of raising X million, and here's what the scenario looks like. So on one hand you didn't put yourself out in the market, but when the opportunity comes you're ready to launch and grab it.

Shaul Olmert 17:21

Like many facets of life, you don't become a grown-up overnight, you're not a kid and then overnight you're a grown-up. It's a process, and you can't really tell the point at which you made this elusive transition. It doesn't work this way. Companies are going through the exploration to product-market fit, to scale, to growth, and it's not always a definitive moment that marks this. Sometimes it is, but mostly it isn't. You're constantly doing all of it. When you start a company you're all about creating the most basic product, putting it in the market and seeing what it triggers: how do customers respond, what feedback are you getting, what are the usage metrics, and you see where it takes you from there.

17:52 At a certain point it begins to pick up, if you're lucky, and you do have some market traction, but it's not like you can check the box on product-market fit and say, let's not worry about product-market fit anymore, because guess what, your product is changing and the market is changing, so obviously the fit between the two will change as well.

18:23 One example: a few years ago it was very popular to post photos of what you're eating and upload them to social media, and everybody did that, it was called "foodporn," and everybody loved it. Dozens of companies were formed based on the assumption that people really enjoy taking photos of their food. It was a big trend, and there were companies sending equipment for better photos of your food, companies that could tell what ingredients are in a dish and offer you the recipe, a lot of innovation was based on that. Then something really interesting happened: people stopped posting photos of their food, because it was considered lame. What was considered cool for a bit was now considered redundant and less original, and people just stopped doing it, and all the companies formed on the basis of that market trend had to reinvent themselves.

19:24 So I'm saying, product-market fit, even when you think you have it, you don't know it's there to stay. You constantly need to ask yourself, okay, people are using my product, they see value in it, but how do I make sure they see more value in it, how do I tie them to the product in a way that will make switching costs unbearable, so I'll be less susceptible to competition. There's no right and wrong here, you can't score an A+. If you're doing really well, you'll succeed more than you fail, and all in all the company will continue to grow, but you're never fully protected.

19:54 Look at a company like Facebook. The entire world was using Facebook, and then the entire world kind of stopped using Facebook, and began using Instagram and WhatsApp and other applications acquired by the same parent company, Meta. They were smart enough in their acquisition strategy to continue and maintain audience, but the product did not survive. No product survives forever, even though they created a lot of different hooks in the Facebook platform, for instance the fact that you have access to all of your friends and all of the photos you uploaded. People said, once you've uploaded all your photos to Facebook, you're never going to stop using Facebook, because it has all your photos. Guess what, many people stopped using Facebook regardless of the fact that they had all their photos there.

20:56 So I'm saying, you're never fully protected, you don't always have product-market fit, it's something you constantly need to maintain and reinvent.

Shaul Olmert

I define marketing as the art of reducing a complex reality into digestible portions. This definition will probably not be adopted by the dictionary, and everyone has their own definition. If I meet you at a conference of marketing people, and let's say there are a hundred people there, there are probably a hundred different professionals in the room. One is more into PR, one is more into performance marketing, one is doing paid affiliates, another is doing more of a sentiment analysis, there are many different trades.

21:59 I would say the one mistake I see is thinking about marketing in a very technical way, thinking it's a skill: let's have someone who knows how to buy media, put them in the room and we'll buy media, or let's have someone who knows how to talk to the press so we can roll out communications and get some earned media through PR. It doesn't really work that way. I think marketing, in its roots, is about storytelling. It's about understanding what the company really does, what's the real value it offers to consumers, how the different target markets, consumers, business partners, creators, the general public, perceive what we do.

22:29 How do we take this chaotic thing, we have a product that can do so many different things and it's competing on so many levels with so many other products, how do we crystallize it? It goes back to my definition: how do we reduce a complex reality into digestible portions? We're not going to have the luxury of everyone listening to us for an hour on a podcast about what our product does. We have to make sure it explains itself, make sure it's clear and obvious, that people understand it, that it immediately answers all the tough questions they may have that could prevent them from using or paying for the product.

23:01 I think the one mistake some executives make with their marketing efforts is thinking that marketing is something you just hire someone for, bring them over, and then they do the marketing. Understand that marketing is really entrenched in everything the company does. It requires you, as the CEO, first and foremost, and everyone else around you, to really understand what our story is, what the perception of the different target audiences is about what we do, and what guides them: what's the determining factor a decision-maker in an organization uses to decide which software suite to subscribe to, what are the main pain points, what are the main considerations, and how do we adapt ourselves to make them understand what value we can bring, and then convince them that we can bring it.

24:03 So I think tying marketing into the organization is the only way to make marketing effective. If you just hire a marketing person and tell them, take some budget and run with it, I don't think they can run with it to anywhere substantial.

Shaul Olmert

I think I need someone who is either really committed and excited, where I just feel a personal chemistry, that's great, or, hopefully both, but if they don't necessarily have that same level of excitement, I want to see that they've been able to adapt themselves to a bunch of different things. If they only did marketing in one area, say they only marketed dating sites and worked for five different dating sites, it's very hard for me to see them do something completely different. But if they've done one dating site, one employment agency, one B2B marketplace, they have a diverse background, and I feel like, okay, they have the ability to dive into a new situation, analyze it, understand it and figure it out, rather than be a cookie cutter of one specific thing.

25:36 If I'm hiring for a marketing team that's already established, that already has a hierarchy and different professions in it, then I know I'm looking for someone who does something specific, someone who does newsletters, great, if he only did newsletters, fine, that's probably the guy I need, because I need something very specific and concrete. But in the earlier stages you need someone to write the book with you, to invent, understand and explore what our story is, how we tell it, what medium works best for us. You need someone who has either their burning desire, the real understanding of what we do in a very deep sense, or the professionalism and experience to adapt themselves to something new and be able to understand it. Those are about the three qualities I focused on. Other than that, the rest really depend on the specific situation, whether I need someone who can work alone or as part of a big team, or someone who can cater to a specific audience or juggle between different ones.

26:40 In all of my answers, I view marketing as an evolution of storytelling. I think every organization needs to know what its story is, what is it really that they create. I'll give an interesting example. Mark Cuban, when he acquired the Dallas Mavericks, said his first challenge was to convince the executive team of the Dallas Mavericks that they're not in the basketball business. He said, our business is not basketball, our business is the "what's on tonight" business. It's a whole different perception: our competitors are not just other basketball teams, our competitors are anything someone would rather spend their time on than watch a basketball team. We need to compete on that attention.

27:41 I think this perception of understanding what it is, in essence, we put the ball in the basket, but we're not a basketball company, we're an entertainment company, we're creating an outlet for people to spend their free time and enjoy themselves, you begin to understand what your story really is.

27:41 I think it goes back to understanding that nothing lasts forever, and even when you feel like you've arrived, it only means you're temporarily there, you still need to continue and fight for its continuation and longevity. There were many times I felt like my business was on a roll, and nothing could ever stop us, we're too good, we're doing what we do, nobody else is doing it as good as we do, we are getting market share, people love us, everybody wants to invest in us, everyone wants to buy the company. Then a few months later, the business is collapsing, what do I do? Then it goes back to being good, and you fall back into this idea of, I figured it out, I got it right, it's working, I shouldn't be worried.

28:42 Yes, you should be worried. It's working now, but things are going to change, things are going to evolve, new competitors are going to come, your clients will do different things, the world is changing, the needs are changing. I think the one mistake is assuming you've figured it out for the long run. Once you have something working, it means you've figured things out for now, and that's great, keep doing it, but always be on the lookout for new ideas, always explore what can possibly go wrong, what threats are knocking on your door, what other opportunities are out there, because whatever is working for you right now is not going to continue to work forever, unless you continue to reinvent yourself.

Shaul Olmert

When I entered the startup world, people described it to me, and if I need to describe it right now I'll use the exact same words they did, but now I really understand what it means. You can talk about it, it's like me telling you you're going to go out on the battlefield by yourself and people will shoot at you, try to kill you from a lot of different angles. You can try to imagine what it's like, but until you've experienced that, which hopefully I haven't, and I hope for you and our listeners too, you don't really know. You can say, yeah, I know I'm going to be out there on the battlefield by myself and everyone's trying to kill me, but when it's really happening, that's when you're really getting the grasp of what it means.

30:16 So the misconception is, people say startups are a very demanding thing over your life, you're all in, you're going through this roller coaster of highs and lows and you're not really in control, things are happening and overnight everything is changing. Everybody knows that, everybody's heard that, and it's true, I don't have anything else to say, that's exactly my description of a startup. But all I'm saying to our listeners who weren't founders, weren't entrepreneurs yet: you don't know. You feel like you hear me and you're saying, yeah, okay, we know what to expect, but you don't, because only when it actually happens to you do you really understand the magnitude and the emotional power of what you're going through. But hey, it's worth it, this is obviously addictive, and everybody wants to be successful at whatever they do.

31:17 Whether they choose to be a football star, a supermodel, or a startup founder, they want to be successful, and when they are, it's obviously a great feeling. I'd say even more than that. Going back to when I was 21, a couple of friends of mine and I started a fanzine, the internet was still in its infancy, and we were kind of doing it as a labor of love, we wanted to spread our ideas and change the world, wake up young people to be more creative. If we were five years older we probably would have done it on the internet, but at the time we did it in a print magazine. It wasn't a successful venture, but we published six or seven issues over the period of about two years, and some people really liked it. Until today, very seldom, but every now and then someone approaches me and says, hey, I used to read your fanzine thirty years ago, and I feel so proud.

31:49 When I look back at that experience, I think we were a bunch of really passionate young people with great ideas, and we pursued them, and everybody called us idiots or nut cases, and we didn't care, we just enjoyed doing our thing. We had some aspirations about it becoming the most popular thing in the world, and it didn't, but it created something, a little dent in time, a little influence on some people, and that's cool too. I'm not judging myself as, oh, I didn't become the ultimate biggest publisher in the history of the world, I'm such a failure. I'm more like embracing the fact that we were young and innocent and passionate and followed our guts.

32:49 I feel like that's the kind of satisfaction I see from entrepreneurship too, because you may be successful with your venture and you may not, and your success doesn't necessarily indicate that you did a good job or not. It kind of does, but sometimes it depends a lot on circumstances beyond our control, and we call that luck, because we don't know how to quantify or measure or solidify it. But whether you'll be successful, it's going to be an experience.

33:20 I'm an old guy now, I'm going to be 50 this year, so I deserve the privilege of speaking like an old man. I look back on my career and I embrace the fact that I did a lot of things I enjoyed and believed in, some of them turned out well, some did not, and that's all part of the story. I dare to say it's not really about success, it's about the experience, it's about the journey, it's about the process, and when you really learn to enjoy that, and be forgiving to yourself, understanding it's not about "I'm a superhero, I took all the right decisions, I took a little seed funding and created this global empire that became a huge public company and was sold for billions of dollars." It would be nice if that happened, but for most people it doesn't, and that doesn't mean they failed. Maybe it was successful to some extent, maybe it created some monetary value, some influence on people, some progress for the industry, and if not, an experience, and that's okay too.

34:21 Alongside being an entrepreneur I'm also an investor, I invest in startup companies, and when they don't work, and most of them don't work, I always talk about the ones that did work and show off about how good an investor I am, but the reality is I lose my investment in nine out of ten companies I invest in, and that's okay, because the model is still profitable, it still makes money. I never call up the entrepreneur and say, hey, where's my money. I'm more like, hey, glad you tried, thank you for embarking on this journey, I hope you've learned, I hope you've enjoyed it, and when you start another company give me a call, I may want to invest in it as well, and I think that's the right way to look at it.

Shaul Olmert

My advice to my younger self would be: take it easy, everyone around you is as clueless as you are. I always felt like everyone knows more than I do, I always had this imposter syndrome, like I'm walking into the room and everybody knows their stuff, I'm the only clueless guy around, and I need to pretend somehow, talk the talk, laugh at the right jokes, make sure everybody around me thinks I know what I'm talking about. The reality was that I didn't know what I was talking about, but neither did anyone else. They all felt the market was going where it seemed to be going at the time, and then a year later the market completely flipped on them, and they changed their mind and flowed with it. Nobody has a crystal ball, and yes, some people are sharper and smarter and more able to predict the future, there will always be someone smarter than you in the room.

35:57 I really suffered the anxiety of making sure I was on par with everyone else, and didn't appreciate that everyone in the room had the same anxiety I did, the same imposter syndrome, the same fear. I wish I could just take it easier, enjoy it more, and not feel like I'm under the gun of surveillance and everybody's looking at me.

36:28 Now I feel like an experienced entrepreneur, but I've also had a young career as a novelist. I actually authored and published a fiction novel that tells the story of a startup founder, and was obviously inspired and influenced a lot by my own experience, but it's not an autobiography, it's not a memoir, it has a lot of details that resemble my life and many that are complete fiction, completely made up. Going through this exercise, which I'm going through right now as well, of shopping my newly written novel to publishers and trying to get a contract to publish it, I get a few rejections, a few people questioning it, and sometimes I feel completely again like I felt thirty years ago when I started in this industry: I feel clueless, and everybody else are better writers than me. Then I realize, if your goal is to write the next Pulitzer winner, you're in trouble, because you're setting yourself up for such a big expectation that you may or may not be able to fulfill. But if your goal is, hey, this is what I write, this is what I like doing, and hopefully there's an audience for it, and hopefully it will be published, and some people will like it, maybe a lot of people will like it, but maybe just some, and that's okay too.

37:59 Then it's no longer about me out there trying to get recognition for my value or sense of self-worth, it's more like, this is what I'm doing and I like it, I think my story is cool, maybe if you read it, you'll like it too. I'm just trying to bring down the expectation level, same with a startup: say, hey, I started this new company, maybe it will be worth X, maybe it will be worth ten X, maybe it will be worth a hundred X, and statistically, most likely, it will be worth zero in a few years, because most startups do. That's okay too. I'm giving it the best I've got, I'm trying to get the best result, but I'm not heavily carrying the burden of feeling like I have to make it the most successful company ever, or I'm a complete failure just because some other guy, my best friend, started a company and is doing really well, so if I'm not doing as well as him it means he's better.

39:01 I'm really trying to isolate myself from all of this counterproductive thinking, and I'm not always successful in doing it, I have my moments, but generally speaking, if somebody listening to this podcast right now has this feeling, I hope they'll be reminded of it and relieved of some of the agony.

Shaul Olmert

I think we did touch on the important things, we spoke about not the technical side, how to segment new audiences and make sure you maximize reach, all sorts of marketing techniques, which is a lot of what I'm doing day to day when I come to the office. I don't talk about aspirations and sense of self-worth, I talk about where's the money and how do we get more customers. So I think we touched on the important ones.

40:01 I'll add another one, I'll ask myself a question and answer it: why is what we do important? I want to offer the perspective that most of what we do is not important, it's going to be trashed, and in 50,000 years from now nobody's going to care whether Shaul or Etgar or anyone else, even Mark Zuckerberg, created a company, made a lot of money, had a lot of influence on the world. All the people who used it died many generations ago, and nobody cares. If you're lucky your name might be remembered, they may name a street after you, or a public library founded by donations from the money people inherited, fine, but it doesn't really matter.

40:31 So what I'm saying is, why does it matter? It matters because it matters to you and it matters to some people around you. If I'm creating a product and it helps some people and they enjoy it, and it helps some people make money, which is important to them, and it brings, we create courses and some people take these courses and feel like they learned something and it was a good use of their time, hallelujah, I feel like we've arrived, we've accomplished something. It may or may not be a unicorn, we may not be billionaires, but that's secondary. First of all, do something that has some meaning to you and to the people around you, and I feel like that's the goal, that's the accomplishment. Then if you're also able to make a lot of money from it, good for you, that's a nice bonus.

41:33 Obviously it's easier to say that after you've made some money in life, but nonetheless, if you're always trying to think about how much money you're going to make, you're going to be pretty miserable, and you're less likely to be successful. If you think about why what I'm doing is important to me and to other people, how can it bring value, it doesn't need to be a cure for cancer, it doesn't need to be something that's life-changing, but it brings value. People have enjoyed consuming PlayBuzz's content for the past 12 years since the company started. I feel really proud. Am I as important to humanity as Albert Einstein? Probably not, but I did my little thing and it was okay, and I feel great about it.

42:36 I feel that's what people should aim for, and if they do, on the way they might as well get some monetary value for it as well. Make this the goal, feel that what you're doing is important to you or to someone else, everything else will follow.