Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology

S3E3 - Aron Gelbard - Co-Founder & CEO @ Bloom & Wild

December 15, 2021 Riding Unicorns Season 3 Episode 3
Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
S3E3 - Aron Gelbard - Co-Founder & CEO @ Bloom & Wild
Show Notes Transcript

Aron Gelbard is the co-founder & CEO of Bloom & Wild, one of the UK’s most-loved online florists. Prior to launching B&W Aron spent time working as a consultant for Bain & Company, who he goes on to credit for giving him the ideal launch pad to pursue his dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. 

James & Hector sat down with Aron to discuss the early struggles he faced when getting the business off the ground, the on-going logistics of delivering flowers and why technology continues to be at the centre of everything the company does. Aron also opens up about his journey as a CEO and the lessons he has learnt from the occasional hiring mis-steps. As the conversation draws to a close Aron goes on to reveal his future ambitions for the company. 

 Make sure to like and subscribe to the Riding Unicorns podcast to never miss an episode. Also don't forget to give Riding Unicorns a follow on Twitter and LinkedIn to keep on top of the latest developments.

[00:00:00] Welcome to riding unicorns, the podcast about growth startups. I'm James Pringle, and I'm a technology entrepreneur and investor and the founder of Pringle Capital. My co-host is Hector Mason from episode one ventures for season three, we are sitting down with some of the most successful founders to better understand what entrepreneurship means to them. The operational processes they have employed on their startup journey and what lessons they've learned along the way.

[00:00:36] Today's episode is with Aaron Gelbard co-founder and CEO at Bloom & Wild.

[00:00:42] And I sat down with the former bank consultant to discuss the early struggles he faced when getting his business off the ground. The ongoing logistics of delivering flowers and why technology continues to be at the center of everything the company does.

[00:00:55] James: Hi, Aaron. Welcome to [00:01:00] riding unicorns.

[00:01:02] Aron: Hi there. Thank you very much for having me, James.

[00:01:04] James: It's all pleasure. So we always like to start by going right back to the start of people's. And then maybe you can take us all the way through to how you found it blew my models.

[00:01:15] Aron: Of course. So if I go right back to the beginning, I studied French and German at university, and that gave me the chance to go and spend a year living overseas in Paris in the middle of my degree, which was awesome for a few reasons, partly because it helped me improve my French.

[00:01:34] And it was also great because it meant that I had the chance to work in technology for the first time. And I had, uh, a very unglamorous job, trying to set up e-procurement for. and industrial gases company, which, at the time, wasn't how I thought I started my career, but it didn't make me at start to learn about technology and the impact that it could have on all sorts of things.

[00:01:54] I then went into management consulting for eight years. I started my career at a firm [00:02:00] called ACNC. And after that, I went to business school in the U S for a couple of years. And when I came back, I moved to Bain and I worked, been in both London and Silicon valley for another three and a half years.

[00:02:14] And. Over my time in consulting, I worked mainly with retail tech and consumer products companies, as a result of that, I started to become interested in, all of the innovation that I saw happening in e-commerce and direct to consumer businesses. And, started to, I guess, explore whether I could start something myself and, one of those spaces.

[00:02:38] So that was. Really my early career and how it led me to blame and wild

[00:02:44] Hector: there's quite a group of you beanies. I think you called yourselves who have gone on to start, consumer businesses. Is there something about Bain, that, puts the entrepreneurship into people or is it a great training ground for entrepreneurs? Do you think

[00:02:57] Aron: it's a great question. I tried a few things. I think [00:03:00] firstly, Bane, does try to attract people who are interested in going into more entrepreneurial direction. So, for example, they often have entrepreneur alumni as part of that. recruiting presentations, which isn't something that I've seen other consulting firms do.

[00:03:18] I think that's interesting. And I guess there are a number of, alumni who've gone on to start, businesses, especially in the consumer space. So this may be a bit of a, sort of virtuous cycle of these folks, attracting other, people that might want to be entrepreneurs one day to go and work at Bain.

[00:03:35] I think the, second thing. About Bain is that they. have a real mantra of taking work seriously, but not taking yourself too seriously. And I think that mantra is a good fit for life in a startup, culturally, and things like that. So that might have something to do with that. And then finally, they were incredibly supportive when I was thinking about, going off and starting a business and they gave me a sabbatical, which was, an [00:04:00] issue for two months, but I extended it.

[00:04:01] two or three times. I ended up being on sabbatical for 18 months before. Telling them that I was going to stick with bloom and wild and not go back and just having that safety net in the early days of starting a business and knowing that I had a job to go back to, if it didn't work out was, something that made me much more confident to give it a go.

[00:04:22] Hector: It's really interesting. what was in it for the bait? is it part of the cultural strategy for them?

[00:04:28] Aron: I think for them, once people are recently trained up, they'd probably rather retain some of the deve. And if they're asked to the business and then go back in, then have to replace somebody at a, it's like got a number of years of experience.

[00:04:43] that person will probably be more effective. And the short term than an externally hired replacements. Cause they, know how things work so they can have a chance of retaining somebody or definitely not retain somebody. And the work is project based anyways. It's not like they need to find an interim [00:05:00] person, to do a specific role because, consultants rotate on and off projects regardless.

[00:05:05] Hector: No, that makes sense. you've led us up to the start of bloom and while I'd love to hear, and I know our listeners would love to hear, what those early days looked like, the bloom and wild and, and how you got it off the ground.

[00:05:17] Aron: Sure. So I guess the only days of blooming world were very unglamorous.

[00:05:22] it was just me and my co-founder Ben to begin. And we used to rent space by the hour, a new COVID card and flower market. We rented space from a wedding florist. It was the winter, so they weren't busy. And we used to spend our time getting around the market and talking to, market traders, learning about the names of different stems, how much they cost their longevity, probably making fools of ourselves for not knowing very much about flowers and trying to start a business.

[00:05:51] And then did all sorts of other unglamorous things like measuring letterboxes to figure out how big our, box should be. getting a prototype packaging made [00:06:00] shipping guide deliveries of flowers, to people from the post office. So lots of early war stories of, literally doing everything with our own hands and, getting a lot of feedback from people about what they liked. And in some cases didn't like about our product. In many cases, didn't like about our product in the early days, because we hadn't made it particularly good to start with. And then from that, we started to learn more about. How to send fast through the face, what a source of packaging we'd need to make sure that flowers traveled well and arrived in good condition and how to source flowers, how to arrange flowers into becayse that people would, enjoy buying. And then over time, we're about technology as well, which we can come on.

[00:06:44] James: Hour. was there a moment where you almost pulled the trigger and went back to Bain

[00:06:49] Aron: one very early worrying moment was when we. Thought that Royal mail's pricing was going to be twice as much as we'd initially [00:07:00] thought. And we were worried that we're basically never going to make a margin if that was the case.

[00:07:06] And so that was a bit of a worrisome moment. And then we found out that, we'd been basically looking at a Royal mails, consumer tariffs, and there were business tariffs, which were cheaper because there were sort of. Bulk discounts, basically, if he sets up a business account, which we hadn't realized at the time and say, we then ourselves registered as a business and find out what these terrorists were.

[00:07:27] And then it was actually okay after all. But, that was, a major initial worry for sure.

[00:07:33] Hector: It's really difficult business logistically, have you innovated a lot with the delivery I think I was being someone a long time ago, who was saying they had previously worked for bloom and wild and had been partly responsible for you guys, switching to, cycling deliveries in London.

[00:07:49] so how do you guys think about kind of improving your margin through, I suppose, operational and logistics efficiency?

[00:07:57] Aron: Yeah, we have been using cycle deliveries, [00:08:00] in London. They represent a big chunk of, uh, London deliveries. We're trying to grow that over time. We were also looking at making, as their, uh, emission deliveries over by.

[00:08:09] Bicycle or electric van, in more areas. And we've been experimenting in a number of other areas. We have been able to, innovate, more generally on logistics. So I guess across a number of, dimensions, one in particular has been doing delivery through the letterbox, which has meant that.

[00:08:31] It's easier for delivery drivers to post our boxes because the vast majority of them can be posted through letterboxes, which isn't the case with a traditional flower company, as a result of that, we've, formed a good relationship with Royal mail because we're, I guess, a pleasure for a postman and the Royal mail more generally to work with.

[00:08:49] and that's been really helpful for us in terms of understanding, How Royal mail think about growing that business and how we can work with them. It's meant that we've become a [00:09:00] trialists for a number of Royal mail initiatives, especially as we've got bigger. So for example, we were an early trellis for Royal mail, Sunday delivery.

[00:09:08] We were also trialists for 11:00 PM cutoff for next day delivery, which again has been really valuable for us from a, Conversion rate perspective, being able to offer delivery that late into the evening.

[00:09:20] James: Yeah, really interesting. So when you become a tech company and did that coincide with you raising your first rounds and who did you raise from and what was that process like?

[00:09:31] Aron: Yes, of course. So we thought of ourselves as a tech company from the beginning, I guess we thought more broadly that there were a number of dimensions on which we would be different from other flower companies.

[00:09:44] One was that we would make bespoke technology that, would be designed with, selling flowers and forecasting, the sales of those flowers, running the operational process in mind. Which was something that, we didn't feel others in our industry were doing. there were a couple of others, it [00:10:00] was innovating a shorter supply chain and having a different supply model, which we can talk about if, of interest.

[00:10:05] And then we thought about differentiating our physical products, our flowers, and our brand and proposition as well. so technology was from the beginning. One of the pillars. On which we sought to differentiate. And therefore, I guess, relatively early on, we started pitching to venture capital tech, VC type investors.

[00:10:25] And the first, venture capital financing that we raised was in the summer of 2015 from a phone called MMC ventures. And we did lots of, early stage investing and tech businesses, including consumer type businesses at the time they'd recently invested in Gusto, which is the business that. Stay close to you over the years and, have looked ahead out of the business that you want to two years ahead of us, on a similar journey and with a similar mission.

[00:10:50] And we've then gone on to raise a number of the venture capital around since then, which I'm happy to talk.

[00:10:57] Hector: Yeah, let's talk about the, later rounds of VC. a [00:11:00] bit later on, cause we do definitely want to touch on them because you guys have raised an awful lot and been really successful in that. but we touched on it a little bit earlier with regards to, the delivery stuff, but I'm super interested in, hearing about how, you know, successful startups and successful companies experiment.

[00:11:15] so I'm a VC episode one, I think when I look at our portfolio, the companies who are really successful, are often the ones who are experimenting really wow.

[00:11:24] And innovate ready. and they take new ideas. They run with them, they double down on the ones that work. They, ditch the ones that don't work. So I'd love to hear about how you guys experiment, how you think about experimentation and innovation and whether you have examples of, some successes and some failures, within the company.

[00:11:44] Aron: Sure. So. we're pretty obsessive with experimentation on everything, I guess, especially on things that are easier to measure, from a more, digital perspective. So, we run several hundred, AB tests [00:12:00] per year, both on our website, our apps, we run backend AB testing on things like pricing and product availability and visibility, for example.

[00:12:10] So. There's quite a lot that goes on there. And obviously some of those succeed and some of those don't and I guess the, cumulative iterative effect of being able to, run so many tests is that we're constantly evolving and improving. Our platform and proposition. So that's been the single biggest area of experimentation.

[00:12:31] We've also, I guess, experimented with a number of non-core propositional elements, some of which have, accelerated more than others. So one that, has been a huge success has been selling mini Christmas trees through the letterbox. So when we started, we were just a flower company and then we wondered whether we could get.

[00:12:49] Many trees as well, and they've gone on to be incredibly popular. So there are examples like that that have, gone really well. On the other end of the spectrum, there [00:13:00] are examples, that have gone less well. So for example, we experimented with doing wedding flowers. This is pre-K that. And we found that actually it was very difficult to, deliver a good service scalably and profitably because.

[00:13:14] Every couple of getting married, wanted something a bit different. often it wasn't what we had off the shelf. So the sourcing and supply chain was quite complicated at relatively small scale compared to what we're used to doing, delivery, you know, something that you couldn't really add source to courier company, which is the way that we've scaled our, primary model.

[00:13:33] So just across a number of dimensions, we started to learn that that was actually quite a different business to the business that we. been ramping up, even though we thought it might be quite similar. And so we've stopped doing that. So there are, are a number of, examples of experiments that they now, go beyond, digital experiments into data science functionality that we run.

[00:13:53] CRM type experiments, where we create flows or sequences of flows for different customers. And [00:14:00] we measure the customer satisfaction with all of our experiments. we measure NPS as one of the, variables. So we don't just look at financial metrics. We also look at customer facing metrics and we want to make sure that we're, achieving, both better, financial performance, but also better customer performance as measured by NPS rather than achieving one at the expense of the other.

[00:14:24] Hector: That's really interesting. And, with building, I suppose, a culture of experimentation. I suppose that at the beginning, it's, you and the early employees and co-founders who are running with these ideas, coming up with them, running with them. How do you build a culture of experimentation?

[00:14:41] how do you manage, which ideas, you run with, which you invest in, how do you kind of decide on who gets autonomy within the company who's allowed to, run with these ideas?

[00:14:52] Aron: I guess the more people that are designing and running experiments the better because, the greater the rates of learning.

[00:14:59] [00:15:00] So we try to have a culture of experimentation all the way through, our business. we have five values, which maybe we'll talk more about, but one of our values is innovation. And so we are. Constantly encouraging people to be innovative and based designed, but then run with, experiments.

[00:15:16] And often there's a bottleneck around our tech and product roadmap because many experiments require tech and product resource. So, while we try to give people autonomy to come up with ideas, if they then need to get them on a road map, then they need to sort of justify them, versus other experiments that we could also put on a roadmap and that we try to be.

[00:15:35] Democratic and how and where we were on these experiments. One of the things that we've been working on is how to store knowledge around past experiments that we've run because obviously people come and go and we didn't want to end up rerunning the same experiments too frequently, where we've already got learnings that will likely still be valid.

[00:15:53] James: So, is that a kind of head of experiments or is that part of your role as CEO to think about [00:16:00] what prioritization should be made and what resources are required and things like that?

[00:16:05] Aron: Yeah, there is no direct head of experimentation. well, there's a chief product officer who oversees our entire.

[00:16:13] Product and data science team and the large number of our experiments take place in that area. but I didn't personally sign off experiments. I normally first find out about them when they appear on our experiments, slack channel, five, gods, you know, significant hesitations about the experiment.

[00:16:29] Then I'll say, say, but I rarely do because I trust the teams. be designing, sensible experiments and have data-driven hypotheses on what experiments to run.

[00:16:40] Hector: That's cool. Cool. telling of the spotlight from the company a little bit towards you personally, really, really keen to hear about your journey, as CEO How you've had to scale, over the years from kind of running about doing everything I assume, to then having to delegate and, scale, I suppose, yourself, to make yourself more [00:17:00] effective. how has your role changed over the years?

[00:17:03] Aron: I guess to begin with my role was, do a. large number of things. because there was just me in a co-founders, I take responsibility for customer delight, marketing, product management of engineers, et cetera. So I played the role of customer delight agent and digital marketing manager and CRM manager, and many of the roles that other people or other teams not doing myself.

[00:17:27] I then went into a phase where I played fewer of those roles, myself, but still played some of them myself. So for example, I carried on playing the role of product manager, engineering manager, and software tester, myself the longer, whereas I played the role of, weekday customer delight agent.

[00:17:45] The last time I was still the evening and weekend customer delight agent for longer. and over time I, ended up, doing none of these roles directly. she, the last one that I let go of was, testing for, uh, websites and apps because, I was, just really obsessive [00:18:00] about attention to detail and ownership of the quality of our digital experience.

[00:18:05] That was the first phase. And alongside that I hired, great people. And so I then became a manager of, lots of people who are responsible for individual things. I think I then started to become a manager of managers, after that. And we started to build out a team and we hired, team got to 30, 40 people.

[00:18:24] We had a number of leadership, team members who had leadership experience in the past, and they took responsibility for building and managing their own teams. And we started to form proper functions with functional priorities or chaos, and started to think about how those, things map together to, to build a successful company.

[00:18:45] So that became the. next phase. And I guess as we've, scaled, I've become less involved in many of these functions because they operate very well. independently, they also [00:19:00] interface with each other very independently and the, functional leaders and other senior team members in each function, have got years of experience of working effectively together.

[00:19:08] So my job now has become. I guess more around. Corporate strategy and how we think about things like expansion funding that M and a, which we can talk about, how we think about, prioritization between functions and, and what we're going to try and achieve over a longer time period. and the impact of that on our customers, our employees, and our other stakeholders.

[00:19:32] And then really I'm spending a lot of my time on our culture. Uh, people, making sure that we're creating a great employee experience and with, uh, recent MNA and integrations that's been, you know, bigger and bigger parts of. That's how I've been spending my time.

[00:19:46] Hector: And have you been one of the, lucky ones? Who's had a, simple, I guess, delegation journey or have things gone wrong? Have you made mistakes, delegating things? You shouldn't have delegated, hiring the wrong people to take those responsibilities off you?

[00:19:59] Aron: I've definitely [00:20:00] made, miss hires over the year and there've been some people where we've realized that the hiring decision wasn't right, and we've parted company quite quickly, I've made those mistakes as have other people that bloom in wild. And so, some people ended up not staying around for long. I think we've made them relatively rarely. And, and actually we've got really good longevity on our team.

[00:20:17] Over half of our leadership team have been with us for three years or more, which is I think a long time. And in startup terms also given how much we scaled the team over that period. we measure quite religiously track, employee net promoter score and make sure that remains high.

[00:20:33] It has remained high, over the last few years and including, during the pandemic where obviously everybody, has worked remotely for almost all of it. And, you know, that's been particularly important for me and, making sure that we're, thinking about hiring and culture and the right way.

[00:20:49] James: You mentioned M and a, so you recently acquired a business. And how has that process been? How did you make that decision? And what's it been like trying [00:21:00] to start the integration process?

[00:21:03] Aron: Yeah. we've acquired two businesses this year. We acquired, a business in the Netherlands called bloom on in April and then another business called burger Martin, France in July. As a result of this, as a group become the market leader in the European online flower market, um, a presence in eight countries. So we've really sort of evolved our scope and now.

[00:21:25] I guess, ability to continue to grow into, a leader beyond just your one day over time, and really think about changing the flour ad buying and receiving experience around the world. So it's been a really significant step forward in, us achieving our mission of making flowers to joy that they should be in terms of, of integration.

[00:21:47] We've, been spending significant amounts of time on both the soft and. sides of that with bloom on, in particular, obviously we close the bloom on acquisition first, so we're further along with the integration of bloom on, than with burger Mott. So we've now got [00:22:00] an affiliate integrated, organization and reporting structure, across everybody at lumen wild and blue Mon.

[00:22:07] We've got a, combined leadership team that we formed with folks, that were previously from both companies and both locations. And. I guess, made progress with a number of, specific projects. For example, we are well on our way towards recap for manga large part of Freeman's technology onto a proprietary bloom world, tech platform with that comes up BI and data science platform, which we think.

[00:22:34] enable stronger performance for the bloom on business going forward. We've also done quite a lot of operational integration. So we've moved a number of operational processes that we were doing at Blumen world warehouses to warehouse in the Netherlands and vice versa. And as a result of that, we're seeing operations, both more efficient, but also.

[00:22:56] customer facing metrics as a result of some of those changes. [00:23:00] So those have been some of the sort of hard integration points, but then there's been a lot of work around soft integration, building relationships with people and creating moments and memories for folks. And lately we've been in the position where finally we've been able to start traveling between countries, which has been brilliant for, some of the relationship building in particular.

[00:23:24] we hope that that's, going to continue to be something that we're able to do. COVID wise. And as a result of that, that we will increasingly feel more and more like a single team. as we get to know each other better.

[00:23:37] Hector: It's great to hear about startups starting to, do M and a, of course, to do that.

[00:23:41] You need fire power, you need cash in the bank. So, we touched on it very briefly earlier, but it'd be great to hear about your fundraising journey and, the various rounds and the trials and tribulations that perhaps you've been through. And,

[00:23:52] Aron: Yeah, of course. So, I mentioned, uh, first, fundraising round, which was with MMC ventures, we have raised [00:24:00] a further for, equity.

[00:24:02] Funding rounds from, institutional investors since then, we've raised 126 million pounds of equity financing in total across our various rounds. And, over the last year we've raised, over a hundred million pounds of that actually. until a year ago, we, hadn't raised a huge amount and we.

[00:24:22] managed to scale up business pretty effectively with very little burn. And I think that was certainly appealing to investors that were on this attractive growth trajectory and, really able to scale, quite effectively. I think what we then started to see was, that there was an opportunity to really stat change our performance and to go from being.

[00:24:43] a UK winner with, a strong, early footprint, internationally to being a pan-European winner and that to do that, we could continue to scale a business organically and other countries in Europe, but it may make more sense to start to scale up business [00:25:00] inorganically, in your, as well, because there were companies that we really respected and admired that were solving similar problems in other countries.

[00:25:07] getting great traction, with, customers in those countries. this is a very local business and customers really do identify with local startup players. So, so that felt important. and also in addition to that, gain other capabilities that would make us a stronger group collectively that we didn't already have.

[00:25:29] I come on to those a bit in the, in the case of the two specific acquisitions. So we set about raising funding from, general catalyst and index was support from, the majority of our existing investors as well, and use that, to be in a position to acquire on and then bug him out and with Lim on, in addition to the geographic presence and Benelux, and the increased presence that they'd give us in Germany, which was already an important market for us.

[00:25:58] We also gained [00:26:00] expertise in subscriptions and new, very different contemporary Pharrell style. And very importantly, a large-scale production facility. a sourcing platform, with links to 200 growers that we hadn't had in the past, which has meant that we've been able to increase our flexibility of products that we offer our customers and, flexibility of, how and where we can pack those to, both make it as efficient as possible, but also to have as good as possible.

[00:26:34] customer quality. So that was the first one. And then we actually planned to do two acquisitions, but we executed them sequentially rather than in parallel. So our second acquisition was of a business called burger mot and We acquired Bogan moat in July ad bag, lots of French based business.

[00:26:55] France had been a challenging market for us. And so with the acquisition of what we've [00:27:00] really scaled up presence in France, and we think we've got a lot of, capacity to, to continue to scale in France and become the market leader as a group there as well by commercial real estate and expert, implants.

[00:27:10] So, a large percentage of their businesses, plants. And so we doubled the scale of our plants business overnight with this acquisition and. I think that we're not really well set to further scale our business and plants, across our group going forward, which is really exciting as well.

[00:27:25] Hector: That's awesome. And what are your ambitions? obviously you're speaking or riding unicorns is the ambition that to become a billion pound business,

[00:27:32] Aron: of course not in and of itself, but our ambition is to build the world's leading and most love death flower company. over a billion flower transactions every year, the industry average net promoter score is around zero.

[00:27:47] And we think that there's an opportunity to, take a large number of those billion, flower transactions that occur every year and convert them from zero NPS moments to. Very high [00:28:00] net promoter score amendments. Our net promoter score is above 80. And if we can do that, then we think that we're making the whole.

[00:28:09] Experience of buying and receiving flowers, which people are doing for emotional reasons. That really should be excellent every time. But isn't at the moment we think that we can make that X event. And if we do that, then, I'm sure our valuation will continue to grow because our scale and with that, our profitability and customer loyalty will continue to grow.

[00:28:29] but, uh, goal isn't to achieve a particular valuation it's to, change our own.

[00:28:34] James: Well, I think that's a great message to end on that. but before we finished, we always like to ask our guests, if they would have three people for dinner, who would they be?

[00:28:44] Aron: Yes. Say, this is a really interesting question.

[00:28:48] And I started writing down names of celebrities and then I'd thought I'd go a different direction and say, I had a wonderful relationship until I was 21, [00:29:00] with my grandmother and my mom's mom he then passed away very suddenly while I was in my final year of university. but I never met my other three grandparents.

[00:29:08] and they were all, inspiring, characters. I've learned a lot about from my parents and my family in very different ways. All three of them were entrepreneur. all three of them had to leave the country where they're born and, leave everything behind them financially and, make a new, life for themselves and their families and other parts of the world.

[00:29:28] And. From what I've learned. I think all of them, persevered through, that adversity and built successful businesses in, much more challenging ways than I've done. And, I think about that a lot and I think it's, really good grounding when, I find that things, uh, uh, difficult or frustrating and, I consider picking one of them, and then adding other people, but actually.

[00:29:50] I think all three of them, achieve different things in different ways. And my grandmother, my dad's, mum, you know, it was very unusual to start a business, as a woman, in [00:30:00] that era, but she did, and it was what, we needed And, I'm really inspired by the fact that she, she did that to the, a time where very few women did say,

[00:30:09] James: Obviously, you've got three points for originality because funnily enough, no one else has said are, and Gail Bard's grandparents. but that's amazing that they will have like an entrepreneurial background and, that, that you've got that to look up to and great stories. And I'm sure, shared around dinner tables about them.

[00:30:28] Aron: Yeah.

[00:30:29] Hector: that was really awesome. Actually love, that onset truly original. and it's been great having you on the show.

[00:30:35] Aron: Thanks very much, Terry, and thanks James as well. And I've enjoyed chatting to you both.

[00:30:39] That's it for this week. I hope you were able to take away many learnings from this episode. Thankfully, we have plenty, more amazing guests and insightful conversations coming your way. Every week, every Wednesday. Be sure to subscribe to riding unicorns on apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Thank you again for listening. If you're interested in [00:31:00] supporting the show.

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