S3 | E4 - Bowen Pan (Common Room) on launching Facebook Marketplace, spotting hidden opportunities, and mastering the art of product

0:00 David Booth: You're listening to a Day One FM show. New Zealand fundamentally shapes who I am. I identify myself as a Kiwi.

0:09 Bowen Pan: Are you building and iterating slowly as you go? Or are you sort of building and launching a fully fleshed out product?

0:15 David Booth: The risk tolerance for new things is so much lower at larger companies.

0:20 Bowen Pan: What are the skills that you would look for in these people as you hire them to your own team, or even if you back them as founders?

0:26 David Booth: I had just come out of 11-day meditation and then bam, straight into Facebook.

0:34 Speaker C: Welcome back to Diaspora.nz, where we're on a mission to seek out and profile the hidden gems, the best founders, operators, researchers, and emerging leaders of the great Kiwi expat community. And today we're talking with Bowen Pan in an episode that ended up becoming something of a product masterclass, honestly. Bowen is the VP of Product at Commonroom, It's a Series B startup that's raised $52 million from Greylock, Index Ventures, and others to reinvent how companies understand their customers. Bowen cut his teeth back at TradeMe in the old glory days before joining Facebook, where he turned some savvy observations of user behavior into Facebook Marketplace, the product that now serves over 500 million users annually. He went to Stripe, where he built the apps platform, creating the operating system for small businesses worldwide. I try my best to weave together some of the hard-earned insights, comparing and contrasting his journey from tech giants into startups, his talent philosophy of seeking people that are motivated by high-impact and low-visibility projects, and his investment thesis, hunting for founders who have discovered unique secrets that drive them to build. Along the way, we get his perspectives on New Zealand as both a testing ground and training camp for global product builders, and how being a Kiwi generalist shaped his approach to spotting opportunities that others miss. This is Diaspora.nz, and we'll waste no more time and get stuck straight into my conversation with Bowen Pan.

2:00 Bowen Pan: Bowen Pan, it is an absolute pleasure. We've had several false starts trying to get this episode recorded, and I'm so glad we finally made it. Pleasure to be talking. Thank you for joining the Diaspora Pod.

2:12 David Booth: Yeah, likewise. Really glad to be here and have listened to many episodes in the past. A fan of all the guests and your interview, so I'm glad to be here.

2:21 Bowen Pan: I'm curious, as a starting point, you're a VP Product at Commonroom. Tell us about what drew you to that and when was the moment that you realized that might be possible?

2:31 David Booth: Yeah, so I think even going kind of beyond any one particular role and one particular company, what's always driven me in terms of any products, any opportunity, joining any company, has always been this idea of potential and specifically the idea of wasted potential. I've had this itch ever since a child that I just really, really hate the idea that, hey, if someone, something, some opportunity, some idea can be done and it should be done, and if it's not, then you're—

3:12 Bowen Pan: You're wasting it.

3:12 David Booth: Kind of was holding something that should be out there in the world that should be better done and should be better served by a better product or a better company or et cetera, et cetera. And that applies to a lot of the things and a lot of my philosophy, whether it is about joining startups, starting my own companies, disrupting existing industries, you can kind of, that's kind of always been my framing because in a way, Often incumbents have been, because they've been operating in a certain way for so long, often they operate in very inefficient ways to unlock potential of what the value could actually be for customers or for markets. And so I often see that in that I'm always, I have always been in the belief that everything has an arc. And they always have an arc of, initial founding birth hyper, and if you are lucky, you get into this hypergrowth, then you get into this golden period, then you can do stability, then decline, and then you move on to the next thing. I think one of the things that I love about tech as an industry in general is that nothing is guaranteed in terms of you staying in that stable phase in that you have to constantly prove yourself in terms of the value that you bring to your customers and to markets. And if you are, as soon as you get into this phase where you get arrogant or you don't feel like you can just kind of glide in terms of what you're providing, often that's when you start declining.

4:55 Bowen Pan: Mm.

4:56 David Booth: I've always had the belief that, hey, one of the roles I love playing is that I love to accelerate the demise of any decline of companies that should be declined. Or if that's a phrase.

5:06 Bowen Pan: Mm.

5:07 David Booth: That's all part of this idea of potential. And so I think that that works for me, whether it is the largest companies, sometimes very large companies are the best ones to realize the potential of something. Sometimes smaller companies, sometimes medium companies. And in a lot of the work that I've done in my career, I've seen that they are often, it's not always in startups, sometimes it is. And I've had a lot of fun and a lot of joy in kind of bringing out the potential in those opportunities. Sorry, that was a lot of rambling.

5:40 Bowen Pan: No, that's great. I'll connect some threads for you, 'cause I think that's a really good place to start. I see this sort of avoiding, reducing wasted potential, or otherwise put, raising aspirations showing up in a few ways. I mean, Commonroom itself is that in a way. Like, you could say you were motivated to build a product that supports a customer because if you can do so, you'll help those customers identify new opportunities. You'll help them build better businesses, become more worthwhile in their own ways. So there's a very highly leveraged way of doing that. You're also doing some angel investing and some LP investing and things on the side. So you're sort of participating in those. I wasn't going to ask this question to the end, but I'm going to jump straight into it. How do you think about— I feel the same. And sometimes it shows up as like a shiny object syndrome. I want— every time I see wasted potential, I want to go and jump in there and support and help. You've also got a young family. How do you think about, you know, your own life and your own ability to focus and your own ability to execute on the role at hand today?

6:36 David Booth: For sure. I mean, it's just because something is wasted potential doesn't mean it's always— I'm best placed to actually make it happen. Maybe sometimes I can see something, maybe I can help some other people to realize and to to get to a state that is better. But I think that after having been in this space and worked on products, you kind of develop this instinct and you develop this gut sense pretty quickly whether you get a space or not. And I think that whether I decide to work on something myself personally, it's actually a very simple formula. It's if you just look at the 3 axes of, product, market, and people. And I think for the first on the product and market, actually those things should be pretty straightforward in that you should be able to get a very clear sense of whether you are excited about the market and the product. And the thing is you could be wrong. Like maybe you're completely wrong about whether the product and market is exciting or big or not. It doesn't really matter because If you don't think this is exciting, either it could mean that you are in fact the expert or maybe you just don't get it. And that's fine, like, because that means that you're not the right person to really work on that market and product. And then, but I think the most difficult piece has always been people for me, has always been figuring out, and I think that is by far the biggest idiosyncratic risk of, working with any group of individuals is the people side. And I think there I've really learned over time to trust my gut instinct on the type of people that value the things that I know is important to me in terms of how products are built, how teams are built.

8:35 Bowen Pan: Yep.

8:36 David Booth: Because there's many different right ways for building the right product. And I think that's kind of one of the open secrets in building successful companies is that there are infinite number of right ways and there is no particular one style, no particular one kind of strategy that just works. It really, I think the secret here is that you really have to find your people and snap and stay true and unapologetically true to the superpowers that you have and accentuate the superpowers and find people that can surround you, can surround yourself with those kind of people. And so that's been really, really important learning for me as I have progressed in my own career and also have worked on various different products. And so the people side has been really important.

9:28 Bowen Pan: So much more to explore here around the people management, particularly as you go through your journey to, You made a comment earlier about sometimes big companies is the way that you can have the most impact. So you've worked at two very big companies, one, well, several, but in particular to focus on Facebook and founding and launching Facebook Marketplace. To me, that checks two boxes already. That's sort of uncovering otherwise wasted potential, helping people sell things that are sitting around in their homes. And then also you built the apps and experience platform at Stripe. And in those two cases, those are two— Yeah. Companies renowned for having, you know, high talent density, being quite effective while at scale. I'm curious, let's go back to the start of that journey and in Facebook, when you are setting about inside of a large company, building the right team to take on a problem, how do you, this comment you've just made about screening people for the values that they bring, how did you go about, I suppose even, coming into that opportunity within Facebook at the time and then building the team, assembling the A-team to go and tackle a problem like that?

10:37 David Booth: Yeah, I think one really important thing in terms of the talent side, and I'll get to the broader point, I think how I think about starting new initiatives in larger companies and how it differs from startups. I'll get to that point. But to answer your question directly about talent and people, I think it's really, really important to recruit people who are not career builders. So they're not there to necessarily to think about what the next round of their career and how that might help them to advance their career per se. And it's perfectly normal, by the way. There's nothing wrong with wanting to build your career in a large company. But there are certain profile of people who are there to really want to build something meaningful. Yeah. And you can really tell by the level of passion, what they're interested in, and they're just drawn to certain type of opportunities that really allow them to kind of unencumber, to realize something that they think should be there in the world.

11:39 Bowen Pan: Let's get tactical on that. I'm curious, what questions are you asking them or what projects are you giving them as take-home in order to really determine this? You're not a career builder, you're in it for the right reasons.

11:49 David Booth: I always say the best projects in large companies are high impact, low visibility projects. And so when you can position projects that are low visibility, so you're not gonna get the cut type of executive exposure that maybe you would like, but that's actually the type of project that has the highest chance of success because you're unencumbered by a lot of the expectations. In startups, you are basically trying to get to product-market fit and then live long enough with your cash burn to get to the next raise with your investors. With larger companies, you are trying to have your project live long enough for the next review for executive attention.

12:31 Bowen Pan: There's a saying, startups often don't compete against each other, they compete against obscurity. I'd say most startups are the same. It's a high-impact, low-visibility project by definition.

12:41 Speaker C: Right.

12:42 Bowen Pan: And in fact, that would be, I can see the opposite of that advice would be doing something which is relatively low impact, but it gives you an opportunity to get out in front of the executives that matter that might give you the, the leg up for having been seen. And I've heard inside of big tech, this is a problem. It can become quite toxic when people are just jostling to be visible as opposed to be respected for the impact they've had.

13:05 David Booth: And to that point, if you think about like, actually makes a lot of sense when you have low impact, high visibility, because low impact sometimes is also synonymous with low risk, right? Where you can guarantee some outcome, but it's at least seen and you can then use various different ways to window dress kind of what that impact could look like and why you are competent and all that stuff. And that kind of people are, in my opinion, for the type of zero-to-one projects, like building out marketplace, like building out some of the things that I've been with, are just not well suited for that project. And that, you know, and there's a, you can be very, very, very clear and very direct to say, hey, like, you know, this type of work, you're not gonna really, we're not really on the radar for a lot of these whatever reviews. We have, you're gonna be very scrappy. You're not gonna have a ton of resourcing because it doesn't have a lot of visibility.

14:03 Bowen Pan: Yep.

14:04 David Booth: But hey, like, let me describe to you the opportunity. And then you can see kind of that sparkle in their eye. You can see just that glee, that excitement, that it's kind of this shared secret that you just told. Someone and then they wanna be part of that movement. And that's really, really special. I think so. So I think that element, there is that shared commonness with startups.

14:29 Bowen Pan: Yep.

14:30 David Booth: But I think that at a macro level though, big companies starting new initiatives at big companies versus starting doing work at a startup is so drastically different that it's really, really important to know that in my opinion, starting a new project, a new thing at a big company is at a disadvantage against startups in almost every single aspect except for one thing. And because the risk tolerance for new things is so much lower at larger companies.

15:07 Bowen Pan: Mm-hmm.

15:07 David Booth: Even if you were to set up like a separate, incubator, like a, whatever, corporate incubation.

15:15 Bowen Pan: Like Google X.

15:15 David Booth: Yeah, Google X.

15:16 Bowen Pan: Or Meta Reality Labs or something.

15:18 David Booth: Almost every single one of those result in failure because the level of risk appetite is just fundamentally different from venture, right? Like you can't have a corporate incubator that just fails 95% of the time. It just doesn't compute for a lot of the corporate executives.

15:36 Bowen Pan: Unless they get the talent piece right, which you're right, if you find the people who are there for the high-impact, low-visibility projects and you can give them enough independence. And you said they fail to compete on all vectors except for one. What is the one?

15:51 David Booth: And I think the one thing is to look for latent behavior of what your customers are already doing.

15:59 Bowen Pan: Right.

15:59 David Booth: But they are hacking their way in the product. To try to make that happen. And there are so many examples of that across the board that we've seen that eventually turns into something.

16:12 Bowen Pan: So put us in your shoes of probably 2015, '16, you're at Facebook and you're seeing some sort of latent behavior around commerce on the platform. Take us to that moment.

16:22 David Booth: Yeah, so it was 2014 and I had just come out of 11-day meditation and then bam, straight into Facebook as my first day. Fresh out of grad school. And then as part of the Facebook, anyone joining Facebook regardless of your seniority, you spend the first 4 to 6 weeks in what's called bootcamp where you learn about the systems, you learn some basic coding, you learn the data systems, whatever. So one of my projects that I kind of self-anointed that I was really interested in was, as part of DataCamp, was that I really, really wanted to look into the idea of commerce on Facebook. I was just really interested. I think it was partly because of my background. I worked at Trade Me before in New Zealand, and also I founded a startup called UniFriend that was a kind of an early predecessor version of social networking for college kids in New Zealand. Mm-hmm. So I had this natural kind of interest in the idea of commerce in social networks. And so I started looking. So I just started looking to say, well, you know, if commerce was to happen, like where could they happen? And I was searching on the research portal and one of the piece of research that I came across was done by this group of individuals, research team actually, that was sent off to Indonesia, super random, right? And they were sent off to Indonesia because at the time the adoption for Facebook Pages was low in Indonesia. And that was a problem because if you don't adopt Facebook Pages, then you don't do ads and the whole kind of— Yeah. Funnel had issues for ad steam. So they sent a group to Indonesia to figure out, hey, why is Facebook page adoption low? So in all that research, there was a side finding in that research report that said, hey, super weird, but 1 out of 3 people we talked to in Indonesia referred to Facebook as their primary e-commerce site. Super weird, don't really know why it happens, but whatever, shelved it away. 'Cause it wasn't really the primary premise of their research. And I read this and I was just blown away 'cause I was like, well, this is crazy. Like what? What do you mean that the 1/3 of Indonesians he talked to view themselves, view Facebook as a primary e-commerce site? How could this even happen? Then I started looking and really like at the time Facebook is still kind of a pure app. I think I joined right at the time when Facebook acquired WhatsApp. They were still very much like the Facebook and Instagram two app, that they were the main two apps. There weren't kind of a whole family of different things happening. And really there could only be 3 ways that you could try to sell. You could try to hack your Facebook profile, just add everyone as a friend. That was in fact happening somewhat, but then there's a limit. There's a limit to how many friends you can add on Facebook. Just like, because when you stop being like a normal user of Facebook, you can use a Facebook page. That couldn't be happening in Indonesia 'cause no one was using pages.

19:46 Bowen Pan: Mm-hmm.

19:46 David Booth: And then the third, is Facebook groups, which really was the only place where you could be buying and selling stuff, right? And so I had this inkling, I was like, well, you know, could people be just creating Facebook groups to buy and sell? And the thesis here was, hey, it's not because Facebook was some brilliant platform, it's because Facebook, it's because buying and selling was a latent human behavior. And there's a billion people on Facebook, just like the old, you know, I'm gonna date myself, but like the old BBSs of the world, like the old, like the, the early days of the internet where people would use these newsletters and mail servers. Even then there was buying and selling behavior.

20:28 Speaker C: Yeah.

20:28 David Booth: It's very similar in forums and stuff. And so people were just creating these. So like, could people be doing this? So then I ran a query and just literally searched for groups that had the name sale and for sale in the title. I did a brilliant SQL query by translating the word sale and for sale in Google Translate in Asian languages. Languages. Hopefully you get the sarcasm there. But anyway, the, the, the, uh, and, and just, uh, and took that as a pretty basic query and searched it. And wow, a lot of groups came back.

21:04 Bowen Pan: Yeah, so latent behavior in, in Facebook groups showing a lot of buying and selling. You then shift into, well, we'll have to assemble a team. What are the sorts— I suppose in most marketplaces, particularly if you're a startup, you have like a a chicken and egg problem to solve. You have to think about what's the supply demand, what's the different sides of it, because here you already have the behavior, you just have to figure out how to support it.

21:29 David Booth: That's right.

21:30 Bowen Pan: What's the first experiment you run? Are you building and iterating slowly as you go? Or are you sort of building and launching a fully fleshed out product once it's gone? I'm sure inviting some of these people into early user groups.

21:44 David Booth: Yeah, so the first thing that I did was I joined like 50 of these groups myself personally and very quickly saw, hey, like what was going on? Like what kind of behavior was actually happening to try to start to form a framework of, hey, some of these groups were like interest-based. Like they're just really into cars or they're really into, you know, like there's this huge group I remember at the time where they had millions of people where people are just buying and selling marbles. Like, so these niche interest communities, right? And then there were also these local, local for sale groups that was pretty interesting. Like one, particularly these parent groups that was trading a lot of buying and selling stuff was kids' stuff and toys. And so as you, as I joined a lot of these groups, like these kind of intuitions started forming and it started to make sense of like, hey, these are the main use cases. Then the first step, once I joined and realized that this was real was that, hey, we should capture this behavior. We should capture this behavior, and it's important in a few ways. First, it's important because we can prove to the rest of Facebook that there's real commerce happening. It's not just some random groups that's being posted. Second, we help one of the most important stakeholders here because groups is really interesting. Groups is— Facebook. Is kind of an experience where the individuals in the group and the creators of the group don't really feel like Facebook owns that data. They feel like they created the group, right? There's a lot of ownership there. So the second piece here is that building that strong, building some features that really help the Facebook group admins was gonna be really, really helpful and really, really important to— Yeah. And then third is that yes, it improves some of the buying and selling experience in groups. But really that was kind of the starting point. But so then we built this initial experience. It was really simple. Like all it did is that, hey, like in groups where we detected there was predominantly buying and selling behavior in there, and it's not that hard to detect that, we flipped the default of your, what we call the composer, like where you post your text, you know, Facebook would normally say, "Hey, what are you thinking?" And then you just type some text and, so except for that, it would say like, "What are you selling?" And then you click onto what are you selling and it just comes up with a very simple form to say like, "Hey, here's the price, here's the category," whatever, right? And once we were able to do that, then it became really clear there was a huge thriving marketplace that was completely disparate, like that was all in these individual groups. But like the proof was indisputable that there was massive volumes of transaction happening that's across all these different places. And because now that these can be channeled through these structured, like Cell Composer experiences, that provides the basis later on about, you know, 12 months later for us to then aggregate the supply to create a marketplace.

24:58 Bowen Pan: Mm.

24:58 David Booth: Because if you don't have the structured data, then you'll never be able to, you know, like think about how you build the central marketplace. And there were a lot of kind of clever growth hacks that we did later to think about, okay, like how do we respect the privacy within each of these groups, but also appeal to the admins as well as individual sellers on when do we ask you to, hey, also post this somewhere else. And to centralize, to build that critical mass of supply and demand.

25:28 Bowen Pan: So many interesting themes running through this. Marketplaces will always gravitate to the sort of the most liquid part of the market. But you're right to say that that's only possible if you're able to capture enough data about each of the individual things offered up for sale in one corner of the universe versus a buyer in another group or elsewhere on the platform. So there's a really interesting thread there. There's another one I wanted to pull about the moderators or the group owners and the feeling of ownership. And I was seeing this elsewhere recently on the internet where Reddit moderators came into the belief that they had some sort of, you know, ownership over the subreddits that they'd created and, you know, invested a lot of their own time and energy into maintaining. I'm curious about your experiences with super users, or as you think about sort of the difference between an everyday, you know, transactional user versus a super user and any learnings from Like, can that feeling of ownership go too far? Has there ever been a risk of these people being too hard to serve or, you know, needing things that weren't so aligned with your interests as the platform?

26:35 David Booth: Yeah, I think Reddit is a really fascinating use case. And I think it's fascinating because all the content, nearly all the content is public.

26:45 Bowen Pan: Right.

26:46 David Booth: Which is quite different from Facebook groups because most of the content was private. It was actually locked down. And so it had a different kind of feel as a result. I would say that I think this is a very interesting dynamic when it comes to the idea of these kind of individual, let's, I guess the closest word to them would be communities.

27:06 Bowen Pan: Mm-hmm.

27:07 David Booth: And it's one where once a community reaches a certain size, when you actually look at the data, whether there are real moderators doing stuff or not has almost negligible impact on the overall norm of the community. Because it's very important for the admins to set the norm, right?

27:31 Bowen Pan: Yeah.

27:31 David Booth: But then once you have a norm, then it's kind of self-reinforcing over time.

27:35 Bowen Pan: Right.

27:36 David Booth: Right? So then the role that any single admin plays actually becomes quite minimal. In a way, but their presence nonetheless is useful because of the perception.

27:49 Bowen Pan: And a discovery tool as well. I mean, they are the ones who are sensing the zeitgeist of the what would like to be brought and sold and what and where in a way that you might not necessarily be able to. So, you know, by doing that initial work of identifying the what and where that a marketplace should exist and then setting the norms, as you say, They've actually done something incredibly valuable.

28:11 David Booth: Sure.

28:12 Bowen Pan: Which the platform might not have accomplished on its own. So that's a really interesting connection as well. Tell me if this connection is, you know, right or wrong, but the next graduation level up for a moderator doing those things would be a business owner who is sort of building their own business and maybe they're interacting with the Stripe application platform. Because you transitioned out of Facebook, this must have been 2020, over to Stripe. Correct. I was initially going to say, well, they're quite different companies. Facebook's obviously focused on consumers and Stripe's obviously B2B payments infrastructure. But tell me about the connecting thread between them. How did that opportunity come about and what was the unrealized potential that you were seeking in your career that helped you make the leap?

28:56 David Booth: Yeah, I think, um, for me, the unrealized potential that Stripe has promised and I think is continuing to actuate is this idea that there's a lot of friction for SMBs and there's a lot of friction in general for money movement across the internet. And that there has always been this vision that, hey, why should money— money is just bits, right? And so why can't money movement be as free as any other piece of information? Well, there's a lot of reasons for it, obviously, because there's a lot of incentives for bad actors. There's a lot of— Yeah. The cost of mistake is very high, and et cetera, et cetera. But regardless, that friction in money movement is one of the major impediments for commerce and one of the major impediments for the growth of economies and lots of other things.

29:51 Bowen Pan: Right.

29:51 David Booth: So I think the vision for Stripe really starts in that very simple but difficult premise of how do we make money movement as simple as possible. And then from there, build that up as kind of an ecosystem to help small businesses with essentially an operating system of sorts so that you abstract away a lot of the difficulties of how to do business, whether it is filing your taxes, whether it is like revenue recognition, in addition to payments, et cetera, et cetera, to make that really easy for you. And as part of making that work, you can't do that alone. It is impossible to serve every single piece of that ecosystem plus whatever. If you're building an operating system, you can't build every application on top of that operating system.

30:45 Bowen Pan: Yeah.

30:45 David Booth: By definition, not an operating system. And so that's where kind of the main premise of Stripe Apps came in is that, well, we need to provide a core operating system offering so that we allow for the broader developer ecosystem to build applications so to serve small to medium businesses so that there can be this thriving operating system that helps small businesses to do business online.

31:10 Bowen Pan: And as you say, sort of the businesses building on that ecosystem, by enabling them, you're allowing them to seek out about the opportunities that you might not be able to see as Stripe. I'm curious about this connecting thread still between payments and the marketplace in different parts of the world. When you're back and launching in Indonesia, how were the payments being processed for the goods that were being transacted? Was it always off-platform cash or, I mean, Facebook has had a history of sort of trying to get involved in being the wallet to these transactions as well. There was the Libra cryptocurrency, which ultimately didn't work for many reasons, political included. And across Stripe, they've recently acquired stablecoin platform Bridge.

31:53 David Booth: Sure.

31:54 Bowen Pan: Tell me about this connective thread across the two. Have you been following the stablecoin or international payment rails space independent of these two big companies?

32:03 David Booth: Yeah, I think it's really exciting. I think that like, I do think crypto certainly as an upgrade to the current payment rails has always been a really exciting promise. And it's an area that I think you're seeing more and more investment. And there's a lot more that we could be doing there. The fact that if you think about the clearinghouses of the world and how long it takes for them to actually clear out and to validate these payments, why do bank transfers still take so long?

32:35 Bowen Pan: Mm-hmm.

32:35 David Booth: When it's really just a movement of bits. As you actually kind of peel back the curtains of the payment industry, you'll realize just how many legacy systems there still are, how many of these are still reliant on CSV uploads. It's actually pretty crazy. But yes, I think that the on-ramp/off-ramp using crypto as an example of moving forward the payment rails is very, very exciting. And I think a— I think in time, an inevitable part of the change in the infrastructure. Which, sidebarring a little bit, one of the frameworks I really love that I think describes almost everything that's of value to people is almost anything I think can be categorized into the movement of bits or movement of atoms. And I think it's a really interesting kind of mental model. Mm-hmm. There are businesses you can build that facilitates the movement of atoms through the movement of bits. There are businesses that you can purely build to reduce the friction in the movement of bits in itself. And if you think about, for example, advertising, advertising's entire premise is basically charging premium on movement of bits and to— Mm-hmm. Make that more efficient to target the right bits to be moved to the right people.

34:01 Bowen Pan: In order for them to buy something and then move some atoms back to them afterwards.

34:06 David Booth: That's right, that's right, yeah. So anyway, as a sidebar, like that framework has always like fascinated me because it kind of nicely describes a lot of different businesses that we see today.

34:15 Bowen Pan: One thing I've found is you sort of, you establish yourself in a career and you look back on what you've achieved and you're able to, you know, look at the world through a high-level philosophical lens like that. Curious about how this translates back into people earlier in their careers. So I'm sure you do some mentorship advisory work or it's when you're angel investing in younger founders or helping about people who want to start companies or want to join high growth and talent dense companies. How are you thinking about the industry today? And this shifting gears a little bit into the sort of the product masterclass segment. Where do you get started? How do you think about, I wanna solve problems with atoms, solve problems with bits, thus I should do X, Y, Z.

34:57 David Booth: Yeah, I think that for someone starting their careers today, and if you are thinking about joining a company, and if you wanna work in product, I think the difficulty of kind of giving advice about product is that product means so many different things. Depending on which business and the nature of business, whether it's bits and atoms as we just discussed. And now if you define product as purely the kind of the work to figure out what to build and whether there's sufficient value for customers and that iteration and then iterate to then make make that better to then have a feedback loop. Now, if you define that as product, and I think most people think about product either as some kind of a UI or on the computer or some kind of a piece of infrastructure or some piece of hardware. If you define that as product, there's a lot of things that's missing from that actually, right? Like there's a piece of how do you think about revenue? How do you think about your cost basis? How do you think about— Yeah. If a product requires a lot of management of people. When people often say product, they tend to exclude those other things. And there are certain platforms and certain companies that do operate in more of that pure product form. And I think, so the first thing I would say is that it's really important to know or at least be more intentional. If you don't know, that's fine, but be very intentional about picking the type of companies that kind of manifest the way they do business in a way that aligns with the type of product you actually want to build. And depending on the nature of their business, there's different focus as a result, right? Like if you think about, if you take some of the big companies, for example, I would say that often that there are companies that truly are product-driven because they have to be. Like if you take Facebook, for example, in my opinion, Facebook is probably one of the most product-driven companies out there. And it's because they have to be.

37:21 Bowen Pan: At least by your definition, I just love, and I wanna reflect on, was product as the doing the work to identify what people need or doing, what was the line? Give us that one again.

37:32 David Booth: Yeah, just identifying what people actually need, then figure out figure out what to then build to fit those needs, then iterate and get a feedback loop of like, were you right in meeting those needs and then improving that cycle.

37:43 Bowen Pan: And thus follows, well, Facebook is a great company for that because there are so many, so much data, so much activity. There'll be obviously lots of sort of latent user behavior, one of your earlier terms, which as an individual who wants to lead product or whatever product becomes, it is a great place to hone your skills or hone your taste as for the identifying, you know, what people need and then doing the work to prove it.

38:09 David Booth: Right, and then Facebook also lives or dies by users, right? Like literally it needs to be user-led, otherwise it dies as a company because it's completely chained to what people do. Like people say ironically that, hey, you know, like people are chained to the algorithm, but algorithm is chained to the people behavior. Yeah. And the algorithm is a slave to whatever people actually want to do because ultimately it is a pure engagement machine. That is essentially the core of Facebook's business, right?

38:40 Bowen Pan: Does that principle generalize into any company that has a lot of what? A lot of, you know, user behavior, obviously, that seems obvious, but there'd be somewhere about you can better to learn at a consumer company versus an enterprise or where there is more flexibility or scope for consumers to kind of use the product in their own way as opposed to having kind of a rigid job to be done. I'm just curious to see if there's any generalizable threads here.

39:09 David Booth: I think that often large-scale consumer companies, you are able to hone in certain types of like this unadulterated like feedback cycle loop that you're able to develop perhaps—

39:25 Bowen Pan: Yep.

39:26 David Booth: Perhaps more quickly. But I would say that may not be the thing that you may want to optimize for, right? Because in order to build products in B2B, there's a lot of other things that you also have to take into consideration. You care a lot of— so in B2B, for example, that's not, for example, an advertising model, it's really, really important for you to think about like what is the value that you need to deliver because people need to pay for it.

39:52 Bowen Pan: Yeah.

39:52 David Booth: And then what is your cost basis? And so any type of product role in B2B has a blend of a GM role. It's just by design because you have to, you have to think about the value you're delivering, how much it's costing you, what your customer acquisition cost is. And it's starting to look more like a GM role. Almost every PM in a B2B SaaS company needs to, unless you're humongous and you're working on some little cog of a small product, but otherwise, and that could be very, very valuable. And then there are also other companies where it's also really important to look at the DNA of the company. That's kind of, I guess, another input into how product gets done. And I think the other aspect, if you, for example, look at a company like Google, And a company like Google is essentially founded by folks who are really, really smart engineers and has amazing technology.

40:55 Bowen Pan: Mm-hmm.

40:56 David Booth: But at its core, Google cares deeply about having the deepest moat and the best engineering prowess, but then Having that emphasized over say, hey, like what is the actual use case for this technology? And that's why, you know, like Google excelled in search, they excelled in a lot of different areas. So the DNA of the company I think is also really, really interesting to think through like how it may impact your product career.

41:28 Bowen Pan: At the Google scale, any of these companies really to an extent as well, I think there is, obviously there is a vision, the vision to organize the world's information, you know, Stripe to increase the GDP of the internet. Compelling, but they're also quite diluted at the time you get to the scale. Like, how does this individual specific thing increase the GDP of the internet? I'm not sure if that's, in contrast to a startup that comes out and says, I'm going to do this one specific thing really well. And I'm just curious about tracing this back to, well, you know, for people to orientate in their careers, well, you seek out a company which is doing a thing that you, you know, you feel you can have an impact on. You're looking for high impact, low visibility projects. You're approaching it with a mindset of identifying what people actually need, being curious. These sound like fantastic generalizable principles again as well. What are the skills that you would look for in these people as you hire them to your own team, or even if you back them as founders? You mentioned one of your early roads, this is a decade ago now, was writing your own SQL queries to identify user behaviors. What should, could people be playing with? I mean, even— Yeah. Feel free to talk about some of the Common Room tooling, like the AI-powered go-to-market to acquire people to test your assumptions. Again, focusing on what skills are people learning, using in the early stages of their career.

42:47 David Booth: Yeah, I think honestly, like the tactical hard skills, like what tools, what language, like those things come and go and they change. As obviously as we rapidly evolve in this. But I think the universal thing I've seen to be really, really important, and especially so when you're early in a career, is this burning desire to seek the truth. This burning desire to seek the truth and this truth-seeking, being a truth-seeking, almost like a heat-seeking missile for truth, is so incredibly important. Mm-hmm. And so incredibly hard because it is something that you need to be so good at putting aside whatever emotional investment you've made in something, whatever ego you've had about something. You could be right, you could be wrong, it doesn't matter. But just this burning desire to figure out what the ground truth actually is.

43:51 Bowen Pan: Mm.

43:51 David Booth: Is so valuable. That is, I think, one of the core things that makes you a great many things, not just a great product person, but I think many, many things end up being that. But I think especially in product, if you're not true to what the ground truth actually could be, it's very easy to kind of delude yourself.

44:16 Bowen Pan: One of the biggest delusions I think that would be the cause of a lot of hardship around the place would be the desire desire for something to be true, difference from that thing indeed actually being true. And you can say it's drinking your own Kool-Aid, or it's the resources that I've received and I will continue to receive if this thing is true, or the investor that invested in this, you know, initial thesis I had and will only lead the next round of it if it remains to be proven or true. I'm curious if you had any examples of where that was not the case. you know, you've had an initial hypothesis, you've gone out there and done the work to identify if people actually need this and they didn't need it. Or, you know, you decided, no, I'm not going to take additional capital or talent into that direction. What does that, you know, feel like? How have you gone about unwinding projects?

45:09 David Booth: Yeah, I think one example of that would be, so I stayed on the marketplace for 4 years. In the last bit of my time there, I was responsible for launching a in a lot of different verticals. So a lot of them were pretty successful. So there are cars and rentals. And I think Marketplace is actually the second, first or second biggest used car market in a lot of the major markets around the world, which is pretty wild stat. But one of the verticals that we decided to build into is home services. And home services by, on the surface sounds great. You know, it sounds like another area that seems like it's very great for consolidation. There's a lot of different fragmented players. Facebook can generate a lot of demand. A lot of people, in fact, even post on Facebook about their houses needing to be fixed and blah, blah, blah. So you can harness a lot of demand that way. But it turned out, as we dug pretty deeply into it, we ended up launching initially, and then we had to wind back that experience, was that ultimately the supply side of the business was too difficult for Facebook to build as a generalized business. Like you needed to be, like that, the home services business, in the end, my conclusion was that that's better as a verticalized niche marketplace than something that a general marketplace is better served.

46:29 Bowen Pan: Mm-hmm.

46:30 David Booth: And it's because the needs there are extremely specific. The needs for home services is very infrequent. And then trust and stakes are extremely high. And so that results you needing to build some very specific mechanisms for that marketplace that makes it look very different from many other verticals in the business. And if you think about how Facebook thinks of its business, how it builds, it just cannot accommodate for such specificity within one particular vertical, which is also a great thing because it opens up lots of opportunities for other companies.

47:07 Speaker C: Yeah.

47:07 David Booth: To actually go and tackle those, right? And so I think that's one example I can think of.

47:13 Bowen Pan: It'd be one that you need to nurture in the teams you build and manage, I'm sure as well, the sort of the, you know, don't be afraid to bring me bad news type of mentality. But I wanna shift gears a little bit because if we only had say 10 or 15 minutes left, I wanna cast this first right into the future. I mean, you were talking about adopting tools and the tools are always changing, but the principles are the same. How long does that continue? What is the role of product management, the engineering, the design? It feels to me like a lot of these things are sort of merging into one. What should people expect, say, 5 to 10 years from now? What's the role of the PM and even the way that companies are being built? Do you have an opinion? Please share it.

47:56 David Booth: I think that the role of a PM, designer, engineer is is very, very blurry in early-stage startups because I think it really depends on the makeup of the founder. And I think that with the advent of a lot of the tools like GenAI and other ways that we can very quickly get to prototype very, very quickly, that will continue to blur. And I think that's going to be really interesting to see as we fast forward 5 to 10 years. But I do think that for any company that is operating at some level of scale, it doesn't even have to be massive scale, including a Series B scale, let's say. And the fundamental job and how you think about things for an engineer versus a designer versus a PM are just fundamentally different jobs. And it's very, very difficult for a single person to do really well across those three things because you literally have to cleave off your mind. As you think about these different things, right? Because an engineer's role is to think about how to build out something with as little effort as possible, because it's very expensive, and in the most efficient way, and in a way that also, hopefully, you make the right technical trade-offs in terms of long-term debt versus short-term, short-term debt. Mm-hmm. Shortcuts. And that's the role of an engineer, right? A designer's role is really thinking about what is the overall optimal system-level experience that keeps a level of consistency and expectations right for the user so that experiences are intuitive, that it's within user expectations, and that any new things that we build out doesn't go so far that it's so jarring and so difficult for people to grok. And a PM's role ultimately, I think, is to ensure that all of this actually matters to the customer. They're like, who cares if you ship certain pieces of code and have the most beautiful design, but the customer just shrugs, right? Yeah. And making sure the customer actually cares and it's the right set of things being built. And ultimately also that the thing ships, the thing actually ships. And then it ships with the right level of mixture of features and the trade-offs so that you have sufficient learning.

50:31 Bowen Pan: Yeah.

50:32 David Booth: And then you can do this whole cycle again, which as a sidebar to that, David, I always tell my team, across engineering, design, and product, that if you think across execution and strategy, I ask from my team always that everyone must aspire to perfect execution, but we can't aspire to perfect strategy.

50:59 Bowen Pan: Mm.

51:00 David Booth: Because perfect execution means that if you got a bad outcome, that means you had some really, really great learnings because that means your strategy is wrong, right? But if you have really bad execution, then you've wasted everyone's time because you can't— Ambiguate what just happened. Was it because you've executed wrongly or was it because your thesis was wrong? Right. I think that execution piece is also really, really important. And I think the accountability ultimately sits on the PM on that.

51:30 Bowen Pan: If you execute poorly, you don't know if the original strategy was valid, it still might be, and you've got to go and do it again. I think that would be probably the most costly piece. It's almost the, as a founder mentality, thinking about the cost of missed opportunities along the way. And in fact, as you've been speaking, everything you're saying, I'm sort of finding myself nodding along and then thinking, well, that's actually also the role of the founder in most early stage companies. The founder is one who's coordinating engineering design in the ways that they need to be coordinated and ultimately setting the strategy and setting the expectations. Your one take on the future would be that all of the tooling available now, AI, the leverage it gives you, it actually closes the gap between the product leader and the founder, and perhaps it extends the time for which the founder can be the product leader. Um, do you agree with that statement? And, or is there sort of a general rule for when a startup should hire its first PM and hand off some of those responsibilities from the founder to that first product manager, product leader?

52:30 David Booth: I think it really depends on the temperament of the founder and what their superpower actually is. There are some people who are just extremely good at holding the entire product in their head and can marry that with the amazing context that this person as a founder would have had and be able to just see things and very quickly react and they will always be the CPO and the CEO and founder. And it's just like how, um, Zuck will always be the CPO. Like, uh, like Brian Chesky will always be the CPO of Airbnb, right? Like, uh, and it's, and it's, that's the temperament and the, and the nature of the products. And I think it's very intertwined, but man, those people are rare.

53:15 Bowen Pan: Yeah.

53:16 David Booth: And it also means that they decide not to do other things, right? Like, uh, that they, they decide to hire, um, their, You know, for a while in the Valley, people talk about you got to find your Sheryl, right? Like, so you're a CEO to find all the other things that you're not doing as a result. For the longest time, like, Zuck wouldn't spend much time with the ads team because, you know, his belief was that, hey, you build out an engagement engine and then yes, we'll just, we'll build out a great ads team to then monetize that engagement. So, but the core, the bleeding edge is on the engagement side. So I think it really depends on the temperament. And I think it is possible that for some people who ultimately need to scale, like on the product side, that with all these tools that it might take, might be longer, but ultimately in the limit, I think it doesn't change, I think the type of leader who can actually do this in the end, who can actually scale and be that— Mm-hmm. Overall spiritual product leader in a company for the founder. But either way, I think for very early stages, it is, as a general rule, I do think that founders need to be essentially in control of the product because that is the main thing that you are selling. But you know, how far that scales, that really depends.

54:39 Bowen Pan: I've heard folks around Blackbird talking about Melanie Perkins and Canva in a similar way. Even at 200 million users, she's still the one that's got the product in her head. And in fact, it was like you say, it was the, you've got to find your Cheryl in her case. She had Cliff and Cameron were kind of the building the business and executing and driving the, you know, everything so that at least one founder can continue to retain that at scale. That's something, you know, in looking for companies to join, I'd personally be optimizing for as well. Like, is there a founder present who has the vision of the product, you know, in their head? And is that clearly communicated? Is that clearly—

55:16 David Booth: Yeah.

55:17 Bowen Pan: Leading from the front. I'm curious, let's flip and go all the other way back, 'cause you, I mean, we haven't actually spoken about New Zealand once at all. You landed in New Zealand when you were about 9. You were with us all the way through school, through university. You were a trademe for a while, right? A built treatme, I recall, treatme fondly. Do you have any sort of highlight, how would you describe this in hindsight? Do you feel a sense of New Zealand shaped me in this way? You know, part of your mentality or part of your culture comes from key inflection points or lessons from those days. What do you remember most fondly from your days down under?

55:53 David Booth: For sure. I mean, New Zealand is still home for me.

55:59 Bowen Pan: Do you get back often?

56:00 David Booth: We try. It's a little bit harder with a 2 and 4-year-old now on a 13-hour flight, but we do try to come back to New Zealand at least once every year or once every 2 years. And, you know, New Zealand fundamentally shapes who I am. I identify myself as a Kiwi. And I think that one of the things in New Zealand that's pretty special is the fact that we have an advanced economy, but everything operates at a smaller scale.

56:33 Bowen Pan: Mm.

56:33 David Booth: That is a disadvantage in many cases. Like, founders talk extensively about that needing to go global. But I think for folks who are at least starting their careers often, being able to see across many different areas is actually a big advantage. And the experiences that I've had at Trade Me, for example, I think at the time Trade Me had 90% of all domestic traffic in New Zealand, which is like crazy. It was basically—

57:00 Bowen Pan: That's right.

57:01 David Booth: It was basically commerce in New Zealand. And having one corporate entity controlling basically almost all commerce online, I mean, where would you find that in the world? In an advanced economy, it's very difficult. Same. Right? And then having that view of how this works, you know, I remember at the time working on anything from figuring out the pricing strategy for Trade Me general marketplace to figuring out how to, how to design the right listings for real estate agents to like, how do we make sure the landing page for the dating site makes sense? What are the dynamics there? And the wide range of things. I mean, that's an amazing, amazing, I think, training ground for me personally.

57:46 Bowen Pan: Certainly I've seen elsewhere people who, you know, in New Zealand you'll get generalized experience, exposure to so many different things where the equivalence in big markets would just have to be sort of pigeonholed into a specialty far, far early in their career. That'd be an interesting one. And on the geographic bound, it's actually an interesting crossover here, 'cause I think in, not sure if you were personally involved in making these decisions, but at Stripe and at Facebook, both companies have been known to use New Zealand and sometimes Australia as kind of a testing ground. Like you'll roll out a consumer product and you'll sort of observe user behavior here as something of a proxy for development markets. Curious about that. Were you involved in making those decisions and observing that user behavior in this market? And as a startup investor in New Zealand, as somebody who works with New Zealand-based founders very regularly, one of the things that people get tripped up on is kind of extrapolating the user behavior in New Zealand to the rest of the world. You say, because this startup works here and, you know, with this group of users and there is 1,000 times more of those users in this market, great, it works in that market. All I have to do is raise the money and build the product. Often that's not right. So I'm curious about how, sort of looking from the other side of the table, thinking about trialing things in a market like this, how you'll balance and de-risk that sort of cultural nuance and the different considerations around the user behaviors.

59:10 David Booth: Yeah, I think that, so yes, I, at Facebook, for example, where we decide to launch a product is up to the individual product product leads. And so Marketplace was in fact first launched in New Zealand. Brilliant. Thank you.

59:26 Bowen Pan: Love being a guinea pig for the world as well. We get it first.

59:28 David Booth: I do think that perhaps a delineation is between B2C and B2B. I think that consumer behavior, generally speaking, are more applicable. They are more applicable than not compared to New Zealand and the rest of the Western world, at least. And I think B2B, there can be a lot of nuance that's a little bit harder to extrapolate. And especially when you get into industries that are regulation heavy, have very, I mean, in the US, in B2B sometimes it's even different from state to state, given how large the market is. And so I think certainly at Facebook, like on the consumer side, we've seen that, yep, like it's very, it's broadly applicable, like the kind of behaviors that we see that we see on the consumer side is pretty strong. And if I was to extrapolate to think about, okay, how do we think about advertisers on the Facebook side, then that would be pretty different. I would be hard pressed to think about, oh, should we launch a new ad product in New Zealand market? I don't think people would think about it that way. People might think about, let's pick a few advertisers and test with them instead. So really think, I think what's important is think about your sample size and how it then kind of blows out that way. And there's actually a lot of nuances, by the way, kind of a sidebar, but I think hopefully related, David, is a lot of this also relates to like how, if you think about some of the food delivery companies, like which cities he picked first, and then how does that apply to the rest of the, rest of the, places. And I remember that, for example, some of the food delivery companies would often look at San Jose as opposed to San Francisco because San Jose is much more applicable to other US cities in the way that the city is designed.

61:30 Bowen Pan: Mm-hmm.

61:31 David Booth: And winning in that and proving that model out is much better despite the fact a lot, lots Lots of companies like to have a bias to launch in San Francisco 'cause like that is kind of the default mindset.

61:42 Bowen Pan: So— Yeah, this is brilliant. I think there is some principle here that would actually be worth extracting it. It's like at the consumer end, so just to play back some of what you've said, at the consumer end of the spectrum, generally behaviors are consistent. And of course there'll be lots of exceptions to that, maybe dating or maybe some of the ways that, Facebook was being used in Indonesia versus elsewhere in the world. I think that's a perfect example of why that is not always true. And then I wonder if at the other end of the spectrum, will certainly there be a cultural specificity or perhaps sort of local regulatory engagement where you do have a, like B2B businesses will be very different. You know, if you're doing resource consent administration in New Zealand, it's going to be very different in Australia and UK and US. And everywhere around the world, it's very difficult versus if it's generic CRM software. Generic CRM software is probably going to be relatively similar no matter which business is buying it.

62:38 Speaker C: Right.

62:39 Bowen Pan: So perhaps you've got a high to low local specificity versus a large to small customer 2x2.

62:46 David Booth: Yep.

62:46 Bowen Pan: And perhaps in different stages, one thing that might fall out of that would be, can you stay in New Zealand and build your company from New Zealand or should you actually jump jump on a plane and go sit and live in market and look over your customer's shoulders in person. And you've been across both of those. Does that distillation of your principle resonate?

63:10 David Booth: It does resonate. And I think that, yeah, that could be a pretty cool 2x2. But I do think that, you know, from a product perspective, there's not many compelling reasons why New Zealand founders can't build great consumer products from New Zealand. Except for the fact that I think one of the main benefits of being in the Valley is just a collision of talent. I think that that's probably like, well, obviously one that's hard to replicate. And I think with B2B, that really depends, as you mentioned. I think there's a spectrum there. And for some, you just have to go to the market.

63:45 Bowen Pan: Well, let's shift there. I'm conscious we're over time, but if you've got a few more minutes to share about when you are, sitting in Silicon Valley as you are, as an investor, angel investing, LP investing, you've backed some New Zealand companies, you've backed some New Zealand funds, including Blackbird. Thank you very much. What do you look for in startups? Like, who should come and see you and why?

64:06 David Booth: I look for founders who've discovered some sort of a secret that they have been Because of their life experience, their unique set of things that they've done, that they were able to see something from a certain angle that isn't completely obvious to other people, but it makes so much sense to them. And they're just incredulous that it just isn't there, to the point of this realization that, hey, there's some real wasted potential there. And it just needs to happen. Like there's this burning need that it just doesn't, it's driving them crazy that this thing isn't real because it just needs to be. And I see a lot of common threads of great founders that I had the privilege of helping or talking through the ideas, et cetera. That's a pretty common thread. And then everything else I think is then, up to great execution and the constant iteration and the grit and everything else that you hear about great entrepreneurs. But I think the key thing I look for is really that special something that allows you to get that secret of what really just makes sense to exist in the world.

65:25 Bowen Pan: Earned insight, driven by passion, righteous frustration that this thing doesn't exist, coupled with execution capacity. Sounds like a formula I want to invest in as well. That's brilliant. My final question was going to be, what can we direct in your direction? What are your asks of the diaspora? Are you hiring right now at Commonroom? Other than founders with that passion, who should come and see you? What could we help you out with?

65:50 David Booth: Oh, we're hiring. So we're definitely hiring at Commonroom. And I didn't get a chance to talk much about Commonroom, so I can give a quick spiel there too, but—

65:59 Bowen Pan: Let's do it.

66:00 David Booth: We're hiring PMs, we're hiring sales and go-to-market. And it's talking about secrets and talking about something that just should exist in the world. Commonroom, I think, is a product that once you realize and kind of dug deep in the go-to-market, I just get incredulous that something like Commonroom didn't exist before because ultimately most go-to-market software has not been designed with with people in mind as a central concept, which sounds weird, but if you actually think about how most go-to-market software is structured, it's structured as opportunities and accounts and then leads. And there isn't the central idea of a person. And with the advent of so many different touchpoints of where a person might be, whether they could be emailing you from their personal, or they could be signing up with a past work email address. It could be talking about you on social. It's really, really important to have this unified view of a person. And the fact that Commonroom really has discovered the secret that, hey, like you can't have email as just the unique identifier. You need to have— Yeah. Everything about a potential attribute of a person, and then to create that unified profile of the person, then to create a unified view of companies that those people work at as two ground truths that exist in the world. Like that's just, there's only one of you, David, right? Like in the world. And then so you shouldn't exist as 5 different leads in Salesforce. You should be a single person. And by having that, that's how you can actually create this is this fabled Customer 360. I think we've been talking about creating a Customer 360 for the longest time, and it's been really, really difficult to do that because you don't have this canonical source of truth at the most atomic level, which is a person, and then at the company level. And then when you combine these two core truths with signals of what people are, whether they are telling you, whether they are signing up to your product, whether your salespeople have talked to them, whether they are posting about you or about your competitor on social channels, or maybe even like they're part of a company and their company made a job listing, posted a job listing. Mm-hmm. And in the job posting, it mentioned some technology they're using. Those are all different signals. You merge this into this idea of this unified identity, and then you build out this workbench this automation layer for sales and marketing team to actually go and take action, to build plays, to measure what works and what doesn't, that just makes sense.

68:50 Speaker C: Yeah.

68:50 David Booth: And so that's kind of the core of what Common Room is built for. And we have the privilege of serving some really kind of forward-thinking go-to-market teams with the likes of Notion and Zapier, Atlassian, and it's been really, really exciting to do that. So the thing that you all could help me on is we are growing really quickly, and so we're hiring across the board, across product, across sales, marketing. And so any great talent who wants to define the next generation of go-to-market, let me know.

69:27 Bowen Pan: That wasn't meant to be a layup, but you took the ball and slam dunked it. So that was awesome, thank you. Do you use Commonroom for your own investing activities? Because everything you just said sounds like that would be an amazing tool for an investor to track all the companies they might want to invest in. That's a go-to-market function as well.

69:43 David Booth: For sure, for sure. Yeah, it's a very flexible platform, and that's one of the appeal to it, yeah.

69:48 Bowen Pan: Well, maybe we should look into that as well. Bowen, this was a lot of fun. We ran a lot longer than I planned to, but I'm glad we did. Lots of gems. We're going to get them out and broadcast to the world and get all the good talent your way. If you're starting a career in product and you want to figure out all of the tricks that this man has, there's opportunities to do so right in front of you. So let's go do it. Bowen, thank you. We'll see you soon.

70:15 David Booth: Awesome. That was fun. Thanks, David.

70:19 Speaker C: And that's a wrap. Thanks for listening. As a quick reminder, make sure you hit subscribe over on your favorite podcast player so you can keep getting stories like this landing in your feed every Friday. Help power you through those weekend chores. For my day job, I'm an entrepreneur in residence and an investor at Blackbird Ventures. We're backing best Kiwi and Aussie founders no matter where they are in the world, back home with global ambitions or out there building generational companies. My personal sweet spot is pre-seed and seed. I like to say there's no check too early, so drop me a line anytime. As dbooth@blackbird.vc. This episode was produced by Day One, the podcast network for founders, operators, and investors, and is part of the Day One network. Thanks again, look forward to seeing you back next week.