Episode 23: Omid Scheybani- Scaling Growth Stage Ventures.
About Omid Scheybani:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is Omid Scheybani. Omid is of Iranian origin who was born and bought up in Germany. He kicked-off his career with Google in Dublin, then moved to Google US and was responsible for Google’s LATAM cloud business, landed up heading international expansion for the Chinese bike-sharing unicorn platform Ofo and now he is with Robinhood, Fintech unicorn in the US. Omid's vast experience across different international markets allows him to draw comparisons between regions in ways few can.
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In this conversation, he talks about:
What does scaling a business mean?
What are the various tangible and intangible accepts of scaling a business?
His learning from growing Google's cloud business in LATAM, being the global head of international expansion for Ofo and launching his own eCommerce platform Flamingo in China.
Why has Robinhood been able to disrupt such an established industry in the US?
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Transcript:
*The transcripts are not 100% accurate.
Pritish: Welcome Omid to the 1% project.
Omid: Thanks for this. Great to be on it.
Pritish: Brilliant. So let's start with this that you were born and brought up in Germany. But you had a career starting in Latin in Google, and then you have moved around all over the world. So give us a tour of your career across the different parts of the world.
Omid: Yeah, so my name doesn't reveal it. But I was actually born and raised in Germany. My parents are both from Iran and I actually spent, you know, the first 20 or so years of my life living in Germany, I studied here and in Germany, and ended up also spending part of my studies in Argentina, where I started learning Spanish and really being exposed to Latin American culture. Upon graduating from undergrad, which was a German business school, I ended up joining Google in Dublin. I spent two years in Dublin and Ireland to the European headquarters of Google, but then transitioned with Google to the US, where I spent another four years actually based in San Francisco. But working on the Latin American market, there was a time where I almost spent more time in Latin America than I spent in the US. So sometimes people think I actually lived in Latin America for four years, which I somewhat did, but not really right, because my base was up in the States, upon like, once I finished those six years with Google, I ended up going to business school at Stanford for two years. While I was at Stanford, I developed a very big passion for all things related to Asia and China specifically, at that point in my career, I felt I had done.
I had my middle eastern background, I had my European kind of upbringing and education and work experience, I had done the US and Latin America, but really, Asia was kind of the part of the world that was still very unexplored for me and that's why and when I decided to go spend, like doing time during my business school experience, but also right after my business school experience in Asia. So I ended up working briefly for Mocksville ventures in Singapore, and in Jakarta, the VC investment firm and then after graduating from business school, I ended up moving to China, to Beijing, joining micro-mobility and bike-sharing company awful, spending a year and a half with them, and then spending another year and a half in Shanghai, starting a company in the cross border eCommerce space and then after three years in China, that's kind of when out of both personal professional reasons, I decided to move back to the states where the beginning of 2020, I returned to the Bay Area to San Francisco and joined Robin Hood, which is a stock trading and securities trading platform. So yeah, that's kind of it's a bit of a kind of around the world ticket that I just gave you. But I ended up back in the states for now and I'm physically in Germany right now, by the way for this conversation. So all places are still pretty active for me.
Pritish: You've spent a good amount of your career building and scaling businesses over in China, you have your own eCommerce platform, now with Robin Hood. So what is scaling a new business mean?
Omid: Yeah, I think its great question, but I think the answer depends also on multiple factors. I think scaling a business depends on where you are in your journey as a company, I think when you're ideally you scaling a business after you found product market fit. You don't do it before and I'm saying this with a smile, because of I've been part of the journeys of company journeys where a company would scale its product at a time when the product market fit wasn't there and then when you suddenly don't have the unit economics working for you, when you don't have the fit, scaling can go very wrong. Like you can burn a lot of money and you can end up taking products into markets that don't work and you scaling something that is not operationally replicable. So it's really important as you think about scale to kind of be aware of where you are in the process of finding your product market fit and second, I think the core of like, really what scaling for me is or has always been is okay, we found product market fit, we have something that works. Now, how can we replicate it as quickly as possible, as you know, as numerously as possible, but doing so why we're still learning, like you still want this aspect of like iterating and learning which brought you to that product market fit, you want to maintain that.
But now that you found something that works, you want to do that over and over and over again. So it's really about setting the stage to enable and support growth in your company and having that growth in when you think about it organizationally, like really reducing all the barriers for that growth and that is an exercise of bringing together planning and funding and having the systems and the staffing and the processes Technology, the partners, and so on and so forth. So it's a multiple pieces that really need to fall into place. I think another way to by the way of thinking about scale is, and scale and growth are very often used interchangeably. The difference I see very much is if you think of growth, like almost a dictionary definition is, you add a resource and you get, like more output, like there's almost like a linear relationship between input and output. I think what do you want to achieve with growth with scale is where, like, you can grow faster without necessarily having to linearly increase your input resources, like you actually have an exponential type of growth behind it and I think great example for that is Google. Google itself with like multiple, I think somewhere between seven to 10 business units of products that are being used by over a billion users. But at the same time, the company itself only has like 110,000, 115,000 employees. So having that like that is not just growth, that's actually scale, where your input doesn't necessarily change meaningfully, but your output does and that's often like a an outcome of improving the between the funding that goes in and the headcount that goes in and the output that you have, like all this stuff in between the very much also intangible stuff in between the processes, the culture, the mindset of individuals, and so on and so forth.
Pritish: True, and I think you touched upon a great point, one of my previous guests had mentioned, the assessment of a product market fit is when people are coming to you to get your products, and you're selling off the shelf, you don't have to go to anybody to sell your product or your service. So the way to assess that you have product market fit is when people are coming to you and most I think young founders, first time founders, they probably do the scaling or the growth, Midway product market fit and that becomes quite a challenge and also, I think people don't spend enough time and think that product market fit takes time and sometimes takes years before you actually get to that level. But once you're there, once your product is like just flying off the shelf that is when a growth or a scaling business mindset comes in.
Omid: Yeah. Absolutely, yeah.
Pritish: Is there a framework for scaling a business?
Omid: I think good question. I do believe in frameworks in general, I like to have them I like to fall back on them. I don't think I don't necessarily believe in a framework for scaling. I think you know, VCs are making billion dollar bets on a founders ability to scale a business and if we could all be compressed into a simple framework that's replicable, that can be printed and shared among founders, then, you wouldn't have any funded startup that fails. Because the idea is that you have the funding, you have the framework, just go and run with it and I think the reason why I don't believe in it is because I think scaling a business is a management and leadership activity of the utmost complexity and one that is like heavily influenced by a lot of factors, which can't always be controlled, like the timing, the stage of the company, the competitive landscape, the speed to market, your founder in their skill set company, culture, the resources you have available. I think there's just so many components in a startup story in a startup growth story, scale story, that vary from one company to the next, that vary from one founder to the next. So I’m not a big believer of that I think of frameworks in that space. I don't doubt that lessons can be learned and one scaling journey and then applied to another but putting it into a replicable framework. I have not seen that yet. What I have seen, though, is a good book that was written about kind of growing companies and that's the growth handbook by a lot deal and I think that's it, you know, I read that book, it was, I think Andreessen Horowitz gives it out to any anyone who comes through the door, visiting the company. That's how I got it and it's pretty much like, if you take the most successful founders in Silicon Valley, have the most successful businesses they have come together and really try to, from like, function and chapter like, from resources to leadership, human resources to leadership, and so on and so forth. They've written down some of the thoughts around like, what to do at what point and that is like, yes, there's wisdom, there's guidance, and I think that's why you have this entire industry of like, people sharing their experiences making money off of that, but framework would be tough to have that for scaling.
Pritish: Sure and are there any tangible or intangible aspects of scaling?
Omid: Yeah, I've been thinking a lot little bit about this question of, what's tangible and intangible in a startup scaling journey? I think the two things really that I find tangible, relatively tangible. I think its two and a half things I would say. The two things are both your input and your output and your input is what it's your it's the funding. You can you can argue money is pretty tangible and you have count, by the way, on that note, I say funding and headcount for me because scaling can happen at a startup, it can happen at a corporation but your input is different. Like if you start up your input is pretty much the money you have available to do the things you want to do. In a corporation, it is probably more the headcount that headquarters assigns to unit. So I'm using this a little bit interchangeably. It depends though, on where the company is and what the company does and what stage they're at, in the context record startup versus a corporate, but your input, I find that pretty tangible, and your outputs, this is kind of what you measure.
That's what you justify that input with you go in and say this, and if you give me this money, I give you this output, I give you these metrics, I give you this return and I think that's fairly tangible and measurable. The other half factor that I said, like two and a half things that I find tangible is the product itself and its fairly tangible. You can argue one way or another, you can like if it's a physical product, and it’s tangible. If it's a software product or an experience, then you can still have someone like spend an hour with it, or a week with it and form an opinion about it. But a lot of the things in between, team culture, you build intangible the ability of your staff to overcome barriers and keep innovating, pretty much intangible. Your timing to, you know, intangible, your ability to learn and iterate as you go intangible. You know, there's, I think there's more intangibles than tangibles and I think that's why I come back to my previous answer of like, why is it so hard to build a framework is because it's really hard to capture all these different factors that change from one journey to another and I really believe that if you look at serial founders, like, look at think Stewart Butterfield if I forgot his name, correct. He's the founder. He was founder of what was it was a flicker I think first and then slack. So he built two really big businesses sold them both times to let me think who sold he's I forgot who he sold Flickr to, but I think Yahoo and then now. Yes, back to Sales force and, like, you can look at him and say, well, he did it twice. He has the blueprint, he has the framework. But I'm pretty sure that he would also come and say yes, there were some similarities. But these are very different stories, very different products, and very different people. Very different timing. So I think there's more intangibles and I think that's why scaling is also so important to look at the founder and their ability to perceive to process to guide, to think ahead to look forward, because these are all the things that matter when it comes to intangible things.
Pritish: How important is money?
Omid: I think I said it, I think it's very important. The thing is idea of scaling is actually almost like contrary into money, because the idea here is you do more with less money that is what you're selling, you give me some money, and I give you like five extra returns 10 extra returns. That's scale, but you still need the money and I think there's I think it's a little bit funny about it. That's a little bit funny. But the beauty is that the scalability that and replicability that you show that attracts money, like I don't know any VC who wouldn't like to have this ideal scenario of like a company that has found product market fit and that has shown how every additional dollar that you put into it on that you pour gasoline, yeah, exactly, like propels and ends up with like a multiple of a return. So if you can show how your economics improve with your scale, if you can show how each new unit is going to cost less and increasingly drive the bottom line growth, you know, that attracts money. So that's also by the way, why you really have VCs with growth funds, like the idea of a growth fund is exactly that, we have a company that has proven that unit economics are working, or at least they're close to working, and that with more money we can actually get there. So yeah, it's interesting. So you need money to scale but you also scale attracts the money at the same time.
Pritish: You have been in growth teams led growth teams and built potentially a number of growth plans for different products and services. When you go in as the first and presentation and speak to the team and the founders, how do you convince them that your plan or your ideas or your thoughts of the next steps of scaling are or should be the direction of the steps that the company should be taking?
Omid: Yeah, I think that's a great question because it's, again, there's no recipe for how you generally have to pitch opportunities to leadership team. I think one thing, though, that is always the same is you have to speak their language. You have to frame things and position things and storyteller, what you need in the context of what they care about. I think I'm thinking a backup of a few experiences that I had specifically at Google, let me give you some context on that first, this is this is 2009 versus Google Cloud in 2009. Now, Google Cloud is a really big business, I think it has multiple 1000 employees, it makes multiple billions of revenue for the company and it's one of the big bets that Google has, but at the point, when I joined, we were globally I think, somewhere between like, couple, 100, a few 100 employees, 400 or 500, we were doing millions of revenue, not billions and the idea that in a few years, we could even, like dream about getting to a billion dollar revenue runway was ludicrous at that point. But it was very early stage and we had just started cloud in the US.
We had brought a few products out into the market and we're now looking at replicating them in other markets. We were basically our leadership team in the US came and said, hey, we want to take this to Europe, we want to make this work in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, EMEA. So I was very fortunate at that point to be hired into a team. We were just my manager, and I and one colleague of mine, and the three of us, we had to figure out how do we take these products from the US market into the European market, and show and show exactly what I just talked about, like, here's an opportunity and if you give me that headcount, if you give me that money, here's what I'm going to deliver it to you and that's how it started, like you, it almost sounds like you seeding a team and you making a bet, even in our leadership was not VC, but it's still kind of almost VC thinking, like, I'm going to give them some money, I'm going to see where it goes. So that's how it started and after with that money, we started hiring a few people, we started setting up the processes, we started, kind of calling clients cold first or whatever, we got inbound and we were proving, like, we were showing that hey, like, with this investment.
This is what you can expect as a return with, like one headcount, we can generate, quarterly basis $200,000 of revenue and this is only now, maybe in two or three quarters from now, once we improve this system, once we improve, once we fill this role, once we connect this pipe, where there's leakage in our funnel, we can actually get to $500,000 of revenue per person and that's kind of that's how you want to position things like you have, it's almost like an ROI conversation, like, give me some more money, and this is exactly what I'm gonna do with it and this is the return that you can be expecting and that when you when you ask that, how do you want to position things like, you got to, that's what the team in the US at that point cared about. We want to, we want the team to grow, we want, we want this to be our next successful business, we have some money, we just need to make sure that it's the place to invest it in. Guess what we're doing similar bets in Asia Pacific, and in Latin America and different regions, and they wanted to see, you know, who can return to better return and I think, even in a corporate environment, that that is still the case, like even at any point in time, you have to come and show that whatever you're working on whatever project you're working on, how it compares how it looks next to all these other investment opportunities that the leadership team has and that what you're providing has one of the best ROI that you can make. That's actually the case. That's how I think about some of the work we do it at Robin Hood, like our leadership team can invest its time and resources, and money, which are the limiting factors to a large degree in a number of projects. But what are the ones that actually drive the things that the team cares about, and that might change things that they care about. There's a phase where the team cares about religious growth, other times where it's about reducing costs, other times where it's about revenue and I think that's why you got to be very kind of thoughtful of what matters to the leadership team and in frame your story of your, this is the input I'm requesting and this is the output I'm giving you based on what they care about. I've had experiences where I brought an opportunity to the table to our leadership team, and I just wasn't speaking their language and it took months for them to buy into that until I changed the way I position it.
Like there was a specific partnership deal in Argentina and it was a partner we had about 50,000 clients with this partner. It might not seem a lot, but it was really meaningful. It was really meaningful for the Argentinian market and all the time I would tell our leadership team like hey, we got to help this partner. We got to invest in this partner. We got 50,000 clients, if we don't, they're gonna run to a competitor, which at that point was Microsoft and that didn't resonate. It didn't resonate until I changed the narrative. It wasn't my narrative previously was like, we got to help this partner, we're going to lose this clients. But that's not what my leadership team cared about. They cared about, show us where this part is going to be in three to five years, if we give you that money now, and the conversation changed, I was like, Okay, if we give them the money, now, if you make these investments, if we help these 50,000 clients, here's how, in three years, this partner could be the number one partner in Argentina, could be the number two, or number three partner across Latin America could help us in certain markets against Microsoft, and so on and so forth. Like you really got to, you really got to be very mindful of what leadership team cares about to talk to them and to communicate that growth vision.
Pritish: Now, you've worked across so many continents and regions and countries. What are the nuances of scaling a business in these regions like Latin, Us, Southeast Asia, China?
Omid: Yeah, it's funny, I think. I mean, it's funny, I think every market is different and but I think the differences you see are more cultural leadership differences. Because the scaling, the exercise of scaling is not that different, like you still achieving, like the one you're trying to do is the same if it's in China, or in Europe, or in the United States, you're trying to grow a business and that looks pretty much the idea, the concept is pretty much the same across different markets. But I think what I've seen the differences I've seen, really, it's in the leadership team, and the leadership mindset and the culture, I think, in the US, and with Western, let's kind of categorize it into western and eastern, or like Western Asia, I think that there's like, that's where I see the split, I don't necessarily see as meaning like, there's differences between Europe and the US, but not to the degree that they are between Western and Eastern cultures, I found Western decision making to be much more long term, with much more foresight, three to five years of planning, thinking, when it comes to decision making very thoughtful. I found from my experience, and it might, I might have a very biased experience based on just two three experiences I had in both Southeast Asia and in China. But I found decision making to be much more short term the horizon of leaders of leadership and their decision making. Short term much more like opportunistic, transactional and with that, just all over the place at times, like, I think one thing that really stood out to me in China was that when you look at successful companies, or let's say companies in general, tech companies, founders, always, I felt they always believed they could do anything. Like we had a given example, OFO started out as a bike sharing company and they went through a lot, but you know what they are? You have an idea?
They were born eCommerce business now. They are an eCommerce. Yeah, they pivoted into an eCommerce business and of course, there's like, there's a story behind it and that you I think the story with OFO specifically is you had just a lot of eyeballs on the app and suddenly you don't have the bikes anymore, you cannot find funds, and almost find the hardware either. You cannot fund it and so what do you do you want to sell monetize the eyeballs, they started selling securities and financial products and then moved into eCommerce. But that's an extreme example of a company that had to innovate to survive, or pivot, let's not call it innovate, but pivot. I think there are many other examples of Chinese companies like take Matewan. Matewan started as a food review, like a Yelp of sorts business. At some point, in a market with DD the car sharing ride sharing app was very successful with very high market share of 70% plus. Matewan said, we're gonna get into ride sharing, like, I feel like Chinese and they're doing pretty well now too, but of course, heavily funded heavily subsidized business, to achieve growth. But my point is, there's like, when I said all over the place, I felt like Chinese leadership, doesn't see limits, and then kind of really believes they can do anything, and then jumps into it as well and that's what I meant earlier was like, very opportunistic, very transactional, like, Okay, we got an opportunity, let's do it, like we don't see the limits. Whereas in the western leadership, when it comes about growing a business, it's very thoughtful, like, Okay, well, let's think about it. Let's plan does it fit into how does it compare to that and so on and so forth.
Pritish: So that's a very interesting point, because previously I had another guest and she is the head of kingship, which is Mars Petcare Company. After speaking to her, I realized that Mars biggest businesses actually pet cannot m&m chocolates. What she mentioned is the reason the Chinese founders need to diversify or vertically or horizontally grow is because trying to get or capture consumer in China is expensive and once you have got that consumer, you want to provide them all the services possible, so that they stay within your ecosystem. Because if it because it is very difficult to actually compete with the Alibaba and the Taobao and the WeChat ecosystem already, but you've got this customer who probably is buying dog food from you, and you now want that person to also buy the other products and services. The only reason to do that is survival because if that expensive, consumer goes to another platform, and the competition is so huge, because you may have other guys also doing dog food or pet care, you don't have an option, but to innovate or vertically grow or horizontal grow. So potentially, I think that makes the Chinese entrepreneurs fear less and they potentially don't have an option, because that is the way to survive. But I think that's one way of looking.
Omid: I think that's a great additional perspective and there's definitely some truth to it like China, the Chinese market, Chinese tech market is much more about it's much more of an ecosystem play, if you can afford it as a company, like an ecosystem lock in. I think that's kind of that's really the benchmark that was set with Alipay and with Tencent and WeChat. So it makes sense for a competitor to like, want to pursue a similar approach of, okay, like, how can we actually, once we have someone through the door, how can we actually serve them horizontally with all the other services? I can see that.
Pritish: So tell us about your present gig Robinhood? How has that company been able to scale so fast, as well as become popular all over the world? And as you mentioned, before we started this interview, that it's not outside the US, but people outside the US know about it?
Omid: Yeah, I think Robinhood is a great example of disruptive technology of a disruptive approach to something that was very established. If you look at what Robin Hood did, I think it started out in about 2013 2014. It came in it looked at investment, and trading, buying and selling securities and said, why is this only accessible to a small subset of our population? Why is it so expensive? Why is it so hard to get into? And how can we change that? Like, the world back then was multiple, like, when you thought of investing, like, myself, like, that's how I thought about I thought about it, and I'm sure other people too, was like, you look at you like think of Wall Street have people screaming, you think of multiple monitors and something that takes Sr 24/7 like you constantly like you have to be very consumed by it and, and it was expensive to like, you got commission and fees and whatnot and basically what Robin Hood came? And did was, can we redesign this approach to invest in? Can we make it more accessible? Can we make it accessible by making it mobile first, and, and in removing the fees? And that's really what the company did over the last kind of 5, 6, and 7 years since it launched. I think, what it did really well was it had this approach us waitlist approach, it really is it, and it’s pretty much a case study of how to do wait lists nowadays. So amassing millions of people on for your product even launched, and allowing people to skip the waitlist by bringing in more friends and whatnot and the by the time it launched, you know, was very well received. I remember starting using it and being very surprised how easy I could just buy and sell within a day, which you shouldn't, by the way, but within a day, buy and sell a security, literally with a swipe and, and I think that's really what that that's the appeal, I think of Robin Hood, the accessibility of the fact that something that was out of reach is now accessible to a lot of people and it's really about what I get to say what the company ethos is it's really about democratizing finance for all in tech making the financial system accessible to most people and I think that is something that is not just exclusive to the US. You have people in India, in Europe, in China, in Asia that are not participating in the financial system the way they should and the numbers like I think a very large percentage of like 90, like, I don't know the specific number.
I wish I had handy Robert, a very large percentage of all stocks sit within like with the top 10 or 20% of the population and making that accessible is a good thing now. You have to do it, you have to provide a lot of education, you have to do hand holding, you have to really provide the features that users need to understand your product and understand what they're doing. So it's an ongoing journey, I think the company has been doing really well. It's interesting to see how in other markets competitors have emerged. It's a thankfully, a very regulated business. If it wasn't, literally anyone could come in, like do that. I've been in a business, I've been in mobility and it was very unregulated with bike sharing and next thing, you know, you have 70 players in the market and thankfully, that's not the case with Robin Hood. But it also makes it difficult to grow, you have to be very thoughtful, you have to really obey, and thankfully, so really follow the rules. But nevertheless, I think Robin Hood has had a few very good years, the turmoil at the stock market in 2020, has certainly led a lot of people to look into investing and wanting to be part of both the ups and the downs, right? I think each market movement attracts a certain type of investor and if you can provide the platform for that it does, it does provide a great destination for someone who's interested in it.
Pritish: Absolutely. So before you joined Robin hood and you're transitioning, you're awful. You uilt an e-commerce platform as well? Flamingo. So given so many commerce platforms already there what's the white space. Did you see?
Omid: Yeah, again, I gotta give you a little bit of context. So this is this is me in China at 2017 18. And the thing that was really the, the, the industry that was really booming next to mobility and micro mobility was. Was actually social commerce.
So not just e-commerce, it was really social commerce. And, I was introduced to the former CFO of a shared home shoe, which is a little red book, a very kind of, you know very popular platform, social commerce platform as well as well. He was CFO there. And then he went on to be the CFO at Pandora.
Which is a, at this point, a New York stock exchange-listed company, and doing really, really well in China. And he was leaving his CFO position and thinking about, you know, you know, he was, he had studied in, in the US, and looking at the, kind of the Chinese social commerce market and comparing that with the US we saw a gap.
Like there were basically, there were basically two trends we saw. One was. You have social commerce in China, you don't necessarily have it in the U.S, and the second trend we saw was. Cross-border e-commerce so we saw more and more, and I think this was led by wish.com and AliExpress in, in a bunch of larger players in this space that we're proving that cross-border is a thing.
So if, if you can get consumers to be comfortable with the idea of ordering something from China, at a meaningful reduction of the price, the question then is like, how can you then change parts of the experience to make it more fun, more reliable? In better quality. And that is kind of where we saw social commerce or the social elements of commerce coming in.
Interestingly enough, if you look at the U S. There is a, when you think of commerce, there's clearly one player and that's Amazon. And when you think of social, there's obviously the Facebook ecosystem, but Amazon doesn't, Amazon is a commerce player. Doesn't do social really well. And, and the Facebook ecosystem as a social player doesn't necessarily do commerce really well, even though that is something that they're investing in or have invested in over the last two years.
So we saw that as an opportunity. We came in raised money. Started a company, 50 plus employees, admittedly, it wasn't easy in context of the trade war and everything that happened in 2020 between China and the U S but, company's doing well. I left it myself at some point, to move back to the States, but my co-founding team is running it.
And, I only hear good things. So we are, we still in touch when we talk regularly. So, that's kinda, that's the story behind Flamingo.
Pritish: You have had so many growth gigs. If you had to do any of your previous gigs again, which one it would be and how would you do it differently?
Omid: Yeah, that's, I think about that very frequently, as a matter of fact it's the gig. I would almost say I'm least proud of in terms of. Overall contribution to the world. It was my, it was my stint with alpha and I said, these proud of like, I gotta be, we have to maybe rephrase it. It was a great experience, I just think it was not the best industry and, the best player, in that industry. I think it was a very. Wasteful player in a web-based full approach to mobility and, and, and that's kind of really what bugs me in hindsight. Like, you know, I wish I had all the knowledge and all the kind of insight I have now.
And. I would have applied it more there, you know, I would have pushed back more to leadership. I would have kind of called out some of the things we were doing more frequently and sooner in my, in my experience there. Also there were a few cultural things, you know, that was my first job in China. and I was still navigating the.
Complexities of working in a Chinese company. And that was my first year. And I think, you know, looking back, there's so much, I learned over the three, three or so years that I spent in China. And I wish I had that knowledge earlier, earlier on in my journey. And so that's probably why I would say OFA is kind of the, the one opportunity I would like to relive and do it differently.
Pritish: Now let's get to a rapid fire. One question, one word or one sentence response. The hardest thing about your job?
Omid: Making yourself seen in a company and an environment that is growing so fast. It's a new team, a new function that I'm building and making people see what you do, evangelizing your work. I think that's a, that's a challenge sometimes.
Pritish: One book or a blog that has influenced you the most.
Omid: Yeah, this, hands down, read it multiple times. the monk who sold his Ferrari, forgot the author., But it is a, it's a self-help book. Love. It has been very inspiring.
Pritish: Your most favorite superhero.
Omid: My dad hands down. Many people might say that and it certainly is the case for me. It's the one person I look up to the most.
Pritish: It was a pleasure having you on the website project.
Omid: Thank you, Pritish.