Disrupting a Traditional Market - The Makings of a Credit Card Revolution | Co-Founder and CEO @ Yonder | Tim Chong

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of the Startup Diaries podcast brought to you by Burns Sheehan, a leading insights driven technology recruitment business located in Manchester and London. In this episode, we have Tim Chong, co founder and CEO of Yonder, the revolutionary lifestyle credit card for young urban explorers, lending rewards for the sleekness of neobanking.

Tim discusses the challenges of building Yonder, from raising capital in a tough economic climate to carefully crafting a team that embodies the company's values and culture. He emphasizes the importance of incremental learning and growth, both personally and within the startup ecosystem. The conversation touches on the philosophy behind the product, overcoming setbacks, the nuanced understanding of success, and maintaining a balance between celebrating achievements and striving for more.

A holistic, refreshing conversation that highlights the most [00:01:00] important factors behind both the business and the audiences, people. We think it's a great episode. We hope you enjoy it.

So welcome Tim. Thanks so much for coming on. It's great to have you here. for our listeners, let's get an overview and an intro to Yonder and the journey that has brought you to be here today. 

Yeah. So I'll introduce you what Yonder is first.

So I'm firstly the co founder and CEO of Yonder. We're building a next generation lifestyle credit card, best described by a customer. Monzo American Express and Secret London had a baby. we're really trying to give young city adventurers an opportunity to get rewarded, be a tourist in their own city, and have access to a beautifully designed credit card experience that you'd expect from the likes of a modern neobank as well.

And instead of powering at the back end of that as well is a way we underwrite where If you don't have a thick credit file, you haven't had a, been in the UK for a long time we use your cash flow data to underwrite you. Okay, [00:02:00] interesting. And talk me through the journey of, how did this come about?

Was this a, you're in the shower, you've had that moment that you thought off of this idea, or was it something that sat with you for years? Talk to me about that. 

Yeah. I wish it came as like one Eureka moment. I always describe this as lots of small moments coming together. So when I was super young, my dad worked at Hillet Packard, which for those who don't remember, was a very cool company.

It was like the Silicon Valley company back in the 70s, So I was surrounded by tech, and when I grew up, I actually grew up with one of the first in my group of friends in primary school to have a computer. I had the internet in 1998, like really early on. So you were ahead. You were down with tech.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. And then I still remember, I think I played like this thing called J Bird and it was like MS DOS computer when I was five or six years old. My mom gave me a touch typing book when I was seven years old and said, you know, they had a touch type. I also have Chinese parents who are sort of like.

You need to achieve results and learn quickly. So I sort of grew up with that and I sort of fast [00:03:00] forward in my early teens, I sort of played around a little like, let's call it the internet, you know, building the MySpace page, building websites and all that. And I was just, I'd say not necessarily surrounded by entrepreneurship, but my dad had a whole bunch of books actually in the bookshelf and they were biographies of the founders of HP, Packard, IBM, Sony, Microsoft, and, For some bizarre reason during school holidays, I tried to just read them.

And I was like, this is kind of cool. And what age were you at that point? I think I was like 13 or 14. I was literally just bored out of my mind. And you know, I don't think I had that much to do. School holidays were super boring. So I kind of just picked up a book and really liked it.

And so I really liked tech. I love the stories of people starting companies. And so it just naturally evolved from your immersiveness in the tech world. What about this credit space? how did you find yourself developing something? Yeah, well, I'd actually say like, I then got a normal job out of university.

What were you doing? 

I just went into management consulting and it was funny because I kind of [00:04:00] joked that entrepreneurship out of uni in Australia was like, Oh, You can't get a real job. You can go be an entrepreneur. So I was like, no, no, I'm going to get a real job. So I did consulting for about six, seven years and got into FinTech quite strangely through a project that I was on in Kenya.

So as part of the consulting firm I was at, they seconded some of the consultants out to do international development work I spent a year in 2016 working in Kenya it was a partnership between a telco company, a fintech ish company, the Kenyan Ministry of Health, the consultancy I was at and also a NGO working in healthcare.

And I was basically looking at how you could use this mobile wallet platform called M Pesa to power healthcare, education, and explore healthcare insurance and healthcare disbursement as well. So I got into fintech through a very weird way in that And Pesa, for those who don't know, is this mobile wallet product running on, old school telco technology.

So, for those of you who don't remember, back in the day you had to get a prepaid SIM, you had to scratch a card and you would, like, type in this, like, 24 digit number to top up your [00:05:00] prepaid. Pesa's built on similar sort of USSD thin SIM technology. And It exploded though where basically the vast majority of the Kenyan economy runs on M Pesa as a primary way of spending and this is digital banking in the early 2000s before digital banking was a thing.

So I saw that and was super inspired and excited by it. The power of, at the time, Evolving tech, And the power of that to drive economic development. if you look at the state of the Kenyan economy, you could definitely argue that MPACE had an important role to play in enabling, like, commerce, e commerce, businesses to be built on top of these rails.

And so, I think that sort of, for me, became the spark of, like, FinTech's a really exciting place to be, and I want to be in it, building something in that space. Arguably, people would say that the credit market hasn't evolved too much over the last years until now. And now it's really booming.

Can you talk to me a little bit about the [00:06:00] strategies that Yonder has taken to disrupt a market that is arguably quite stagnant?

I have a thesis around FinTech coming in waves FinTech 1.

0 was what we saw in the early 2000s. that was really building the plumbing of payments. if you think about PayPal, Stripe, Square, iZettle, a lot of these were all like how do we make payments easier and more frictionless over the internet? Because there were many issues with trying to pay for things on the internet back in the day.

We forget that buying something online was not normal 20 years ago. You couldn't trust it. And then PayPal were like, hey, we'll give you a safer way to pay. We'll put all kinds of protection in there. And, you know, PayPal made taking payments on the internet far easier, instead of companies like Stripe as well.

Yeah. That unlocks is FinTech 2. 0, which is in the last decade, building, basically sort of unlocking a whole set of FinTechs that take, traditional retail banking products. And make them digital first. Monzo is a digital bank. TransferWise or Wise is like a digital Western Union.

And so a [00:07:00] lot of these Sort of FinTech built category leading multi billion dollar businesses sort of taking what was traditionally a brick and mortar experience and putting it on like a mobile life experience on a website. But what I'm really interested in is FinTech 3. 0, which is the next wave of products that starting to build across, not just as a grabbing a, let's grab a bank product and make it online, but kind of going, let's kind of re imagine that around a consumer vertical.

And what I mean by that is like, if you think about it, you don't take the. because you love trains, take it because you love, you want to go explore in your city and you want to go to Paris. so every single financial product is really built around this idea of like, what is it allowing you to do and experience?

And a good example of this is Klano is actually much more shopping products now than a classic fintech. They make huge amounts of revenue now from the shopping sort of platform part of the business. And really, if you look at their marketing, it's a shopping, And we kind of think about that and said, wow, what if you could create that around one of the biggest spending categories of consumers, which is around lifestyle experiences and traveling and eating out, going to theater, [00:08:00] going to fitness experiences.

how do we build something around that idea of like a deeply rich consumer experience? So lifestyle experience. And if you think about it, do you know about the first ever credit card It's diners club. it's no longer that popular but it's in the name.

It was this idea around a club. And at the time we all turned this idea of like dining. so we looked at this and said, what if you could reimagine what that would look like in today's day and age as well. 

Okay, interesting. And what sort of challenges have you faced when considering one, you're trying to reshape an aspect of the credit market, but particularly you're trying to appeal to perhaps a younger demographic. So what challenges did that bring for you or is that still bringing for you? 

I think the difference with sort of our product the likes of a neobank is that you don't want to just willy nilly. Try out credit cards for the sake of it. it's a lot more thoughtful decision process. And so we've had to spend a lot more time investing in our brand.

We also don't want to just build another FinTech. Like for us, we really want to build a [00:09:00] lifestyle brand as well. part of what that means is that we have to be a bit more patient. We have to really hold true to the brand values we have. There could be shortcuts to get growth because, you know, you could just offer a cheap thing here and there, but that's not the kind of product we want to build.

I think the challenge is that growth is turning on and all of a sudden people will come, it's actually being a lot more thoughtful about it. But it means the quality of customers we get is remarkably higher. The level of engagements we get is so much higher and we've thought about our business model and our unit economics from day one rather than as an afterthought 

Amazing. And in the current economic climate, have you seen any shifts or pivots or impacts on your development of this product? 

Yeah, so we're in the, I call it the triple whammy of the macro climate because the three things that are more challenging for us building a consumer fintech is one, the cost of living crisis does impact consumers and obviously impacts the way we underwrite and think about affordability and how we think about just like general customer [00:10:00] affordability.

Secondly, we raise debt capital to fund the credit cards. We're not a bank. We don't have a balance sheet. So we have to raise financing from capital markets. That's gotten a lot more expensive. And also VC money is more difficult to get as well, because as you have all seen a lot of VCs are having big markdowns in their portfolio.

They're deploying capital slower. It is harder, but I think what that means for us is that as we navigate this really tough macro climate, when the market turns, which it always will, and it always has. Historically in the last, you know, thousands of years, we always see cycles. It means that we're really well positioned to capitalize on that when the market turns as well and starts to improve again, which we're starting to see.

I'll say like the end of the tunnel with base rates starting to stabilize. VCs are starting to invest again. it's a good chance to separate, the startup tourists or the VC tourists from the real ones who are in it for the long haul.

How is your funding journey for Yonder? 

My first round of funding was hard. First time founder, I'd never navigated the venture capital [00:11:00] market before. There's a game you have to play and you have to know how to play it. You need to have the network. It's really difficult when you're coming in cold.

So our first round was very difficult. We were lucky to bring on two tier one funds, Local Globe and Seacap, who have backed the likes of, Monzo, Wise, Revolut. they understood what we're building. our most recent rounds were led by North Zone and another fund called RTP as well.

we were very lucky that they were super bullish on the space. our last two rounds have been challenging, but definitely not as challenging as the other ones. part of that is, We really found funds. You just get the space we're building in. And I think what I've learned is that from a fundraising perspective, it's really about trying to find, investor company fit as much as product market fit is important 

And there are some investors who I have a conversation with and I know they immediately understand the opportunity we're building against, understand the proposition and really it's, it's more about getting them over the line on. Are we executing well against it? And are we the right team? Yeah. And some are just like, I don't get [00:12:00] fintech.

I don't get consumer fintech. I don't get this space. In which case you're always on a back foot. And so I generally just don't talk to them anymore. And actually it's really easy for us to now separate those investors from the ones who really get what we're doing. And you mentioned your team there. So talk to me a little bit about building the right team.

As you said, yes, the funding's on one side, but you need to lean on who's. Developing a product with you, your co founders, your team. So talk to me about that. 

So like, I'm not unapologetic, like team is literally the most important thing in my experience. If you look at every successful tech company, they're made up of people.

for me, the core, is how do we hire really well at the start? So, because actually if you think about, if you, when we were three people, the next person we hire would represent 25 percent of the culture. The next person after that would represent what, 1 over 5, the culture. Next person after that would represent 16 percent of the culture.

And so we thought about each person needs to be additive, because not only do they represent a large [00:13:00] percentage of your culture, they will also then go and hire the next 10, people, who will then go and hire the next 100 people, who then hire the next 200. So it's actually like this flywheel effect that if you invest in it the right way, You get a positive flywheel.

The trade off there is you have to be very patient. So the first four months we literally built nothing. We just hired. we took forever to hire. I think we interviewed 150 engineers to get our first two engineers. That's not CV screening. We CV screen probably like three to 400. And we said that.

These engineers will attract other great engineers. So if we hire great engineers, it will be a flywheel. But, how do you attract great engineers when you can't pay very well, when you have not a lot of runway, when you don't have a product yet? It takes a lot of time and patience, and we were very adamant that we wouldn't compromise.

anyone we would hire would be engineers that we would beg for. Same with marketing, design, finance. across our business, Great people hire other great people, so be really patient, and [00:14:00] don't settle. it sounds easy, but the reality is that you have business demands, roles that are unfilled, and you want to fill them, but we said we would rather take the strain of having a role unfilled, than fill it with someone we don't think is good enough.

But it's very hard, and we've spent a lot of time thinking about our interview process, how we train people on how to interview, how we give feedback on how we interview, how we do retros on whether we, when we're mishired, what did we do wrong in the interviewing process, what was right and what was wrong, and so, I think we're quite intentional on it, I read three or four books before we even started doing our first hiring.

So just really immerse myself in what's like, let's call it best practice. I don't know if it's best practice the right way, but how can I learn from the best because we're not the best, we don't know how to hire. how do we get really good at it and how do we really thoughtful and systematic about it?

And you talked about your people become your culture. What do you do within Yonder to, build that culture and encourage your [00:15:00] employees to be a representative of the culture of your business. 

There's a couple of ways we think about it actually. One, we have Yonit principles and I always say that they are pointless unless you literally embed them in every part of your process. the other thing I talk about is just how we work as a team, So Yonit principles, we have four, and the way we interview people is we literally interview them against those four principles.

That is a blind interview to your technical. So you can nail the job experience, but it is a blind interview to your values interview, and if you fail the values, you do not get in. we've had many people who pass the experience, but don't pass the values fit, and they're completely independent, and we spend a lot of time making sure they're really rigorous.

when you join, we then reinforce them. Every quarter we do reflections and we ask you to reflect on how you act in line with our principles. Every week we ask people to call out their team members when they've acted in line with our principles. day to day, we ask them to call each other out when we're acting not in line with our principles as well.

I can tell you one simple example. I was debating with one of the guys who wants product. And then he said to me, but Tim, look at the [00:16:00] mission. That's why we need to do this. And it's this element of like, you're constantly just banging it into the culture. We then also talk about like ways of working 

we have simple rules such as if you're at a meeting, be present, don't multitask. So you can't be on your laptop doing something else. Phone on the desk. And if you need to leave, just leave the meeting halfway. don't sit there and pretend to pay attention if you don't need to be there.

Just walk out. And these are really small, but we realized we had to bang them in day to day to the point where we'll call someone out in the meeting and be like, Hey, do you need to be here? Or, Hey, are you multitasking? Why don't you step outside and do that outside? I always say that they will slip unless you continue to reinforce them.

Every culture slips by default. Because what you're asking people to do is what they're not normally comfortable doing. it is natural to multitask. It is natural to just sit in a meeting and Open up Slack. So you have to fight against it, which means you then have to actively, quite frankly, police it.

But that's everyone's job as well. I'd say it's a combination of language, it's a combination of patterns of like how you run your organization, but then also like, [00:17:00] What we do day to day, like continuously bang it in. And everyone goes to me, Oh, like I noticed this has slipped. I'm like, yeah, it has because it always slips.

You have to keep fighting it. it's about that sort of percentile slip, everyone talks about, you know, be 1 percent better each day, which I love. And that's a great, mindset. But it's like if you aim to be, I'm going to be 90 percent good at those, you know, drumming into our culture.

Well, if you aim for 90, then you'll probably come out about 75 or 80. So you need to try and put the top bar in. And then I guess that area of slipping becomes smaller. Also, I think people are just too nice. It's awkward to say, hey, Why are you multitasking my meeting? Yeah.

It's awkward. Or if someone's on the phone, on a call without a camera on. And the reason why we asked that is really because we're like, if you're in a room, you would be visible. So you should be, there's always exceptions. You let people know if you can't, for whatever reason. But it's awkward. 

And we just want to be nice. And I think we're always very much like, we're not building a nice culture. Yeah. We're building a kind culture. We're not a nice one. 

So bringing that back to [00:18:00] your product and in a sector where credit products need to work flawlessly, how does Yonder maintain high reliability, trust, accuracy within the financial services sector?

Yeah. So it's really, quite frankly, a lot of hard work and grind. I always say payments are easy. Payments are hard when it's down to the 0. 01%. 0. 01 percent doesn't sound like much, but 0. 01 percent when you're doing 10, 15, 20 million passive transactions a month is hard, because that means your card doesn't work at TFL once.

And you're like, well no, but the other 100, 000 time it worked fine, but no, what was the one? And a bit of it is just having this culture of like, the 0. 01 percent matters. It's pretty brutal because it means that like literally we will go down to reconciling our financial ledgers down to the pennies at the end of each month.

We will monitor, if there is any sort of latency on the card working at a certain threshold, it'll wake up a back end engineer at 3am Every back end engineer is on call, one week on, one week [00:19:00] off. since the start of Yandah, mobile engineers are on call one week on one week off and it's relentless.

It means that it's not fun getting a paid duty at 4am saying, there's been some latency issues. Have a quick look at your P99 on this. There's an issue that's not fun, but if you want to build excellence, it's the grind. It's the discipline. It's the constantly pushing for that last 0.

01 percent we had some issues at the time where our card weren't working properly at Tesco automatic fuel dispensers, and no one could figure out why we spoke to MasterCard, we spoke to a card processor, nothing was showing up on the network.

I flew to Gibraltar with one of our partners and they said, Oh, we think we know what's happening. the card's not working at the terminal level, so they need to do something on the terminal itself. So 

I went to LinkedIn and messaged 20 people at Tesco in the payments team until I finally got to someone who was like, Oh, we need to just add your car details to our terminal database. Wow. And that's just like one example of A simple fix, but a really long process to figure out what was going on.

And I mean, everyone at Mastercard were like, well, no, your car's set up [00:20:00] properly, you know, you could have just accepted second best, which is everyone said everything's fine, but customers were saying it's not working. So we've got to find the answer. And so you just keep going until you find it.

that's not fun. But we take a lot of pride in that. we always say that the 0. 01 percent really matters. if it's tough to get there, the reward always feels better at the end. So speaking of listening to your customers and people use your product, rewards programs are often a really critical part of credit card offerings.

So how has yonder approached this aspect differently to complement lifestyles of young professionals that you're trying to target, especially when you're up against lifestyle offerings from American express tell me about that. 

I think the first philosophy we had was don't ask customers what they want because they always ask for paradoxical things.

every time we asked customers, we said, Hey, what would you want? They're like, Oh, I want cash back. But they're like, I like miles. I'm like, what? And they're like, Oh, I want more choice. And then like, Oh, there's too many choices. what you realize is that people are paradoxical.

And I always liked this idea of kind of a consumer products is [00:21:00] almost like treasure hunting. And you're sort of looking for like weird behaviors that don't seem rational, but we love. And a good example of that is. Why do we prefer to get a birthday present versus getting money? Now, this is a top of mind for me because in Chinese culture, you give money, like red packets.

So my mom still wires me money for my birthday, to this day. She sent me like 50 pounds and like she gave me 50 pounds when I was 15. She still gave me 50 pounds to this day. And I love it. it's funny, but obviously it's just like, I don't need the money, mom. I have a job. It's fine. But I always go like, why does it feel so different than when, I don't know, my wife buys me 

a Lego set as a joke it's the same monetary value. I realized that what we think is high utility isn't necessarily what gives us joy. And so we were thought about experiences, which is like, what gives us most joy in our life?

And how do we make sure we really champion those joyous moments? we love discovering new places to go. no one would tell me that in a customer interview, but when you dig into consumer behaviors, everyone has a friend they ask, where should we go for dinner tonight?

How can Yonder be that friend? they're not giving you a [00:22:00] library of 200 choices. They're giving you like, Hey, there's one, two or three places you should check out. Based on where you want to go. We also learned that people hated the coupon experience where you go to your restaurant and be like, I have a 20 percent off dining experience.

We know that the mental model of getting a holiday fully paid for feels very different than getting a discount off your holiday. So we're like, how do we bring some of these moments of joy into our product experience? for example, we have 10 dining experiences a month, not a hundred.

we handpick them stand by them and tell you a story about them. we know that half of what's exciting is not just the place itself, but the story behind the place as well. And we also want to pick places that you wouldn't have discovered without us. And then when you go there and have your dinner for two experience, you don't have a voucher, you pay in your cart.

And it's a dinner for two, covered on yonder. It's not a discount, it's covered on yonder. you don't have to tell the waiter or waitress about this. You just pair your card swipe and we fully cover the meal on yonder. it's not even a cashback. a lot of credit cards are like, pay first and we'll give you cashback.

Imagine you say, let's go out for dinner tonight. [00:23:00] I've got the check. But by the way, can you pay first and I'll wire you the money? It feels different. It's exactly the same financial transaction but it feels different 

Yeah. Same as the present. So even down to the way you redeem your experience, you don't get charged for it. it covers the bill. And so all the way down to these little details, we were thoughtful about how do we make each moment super delightful? How do we think about breaking the rules of what everyone else is doing?

it's funny because the reason why a lot of the bigger companies really struggle, because they'll do a market research study. They'll get a market research agency to do it and say, what do customers want? Oh, they want cashback. They want flexibility. So then they'll load up the product with cashback and flexibility.

And then you go, but what brings moments of joy? It's none of those things. And so we were really thoughtful about how do we flip these moments. And for us, a lot of the inspiration came from non Fintech brands. I use an example of Aesop It's a really popular, you know, let's have a really nice hand wash in your bathroom.

It's kind of unreasonably like, it's hand wash, like, why does it cost 25 pounds? It smells nice. And [00:24:00] yet, it is really nice, really special, and it's something that you want to show off. It's a bottle that you want to show off. And actually I always think about, in my experience, consume out.

Brands, don't look at your industry, look at another one, because you'll learn a lot more from outside. 

That's really good advice. And I know that you said at the beginning of your journey of being a founder, you didn't know anything, you didn't know what you were going into.

What kind of advice would you have wanted to have heard, other than the piece you've just given me? What else ties into that advice piece for you?

I think this is really weird sort of comparison between, you know, VCs will be like when I interview, a founder. I want to see, I just don't want a vision.

Can they be the next Jeff Bezos or could I see them running a public company? The problem with that is you sort of forget that it's taken them 20 years, 30 years to get there. we often look at people as they are now rather than looking at trajectory. we have a philosophy both in terms of how we hire, but also how I think about the world, which is.

You just want to be better [00:25:00] every day. your primary goal is not to solve the problem 10 years away from now is to solve the problem in front of you and to grow and learn from that every single day. even our hiring philosophies, we look at trajectory of learning, not necessarily static performance.

And what that means is that we might forego a big executive hire because even though they might have the experience now, we don't feel like they have the trajectory of learning that we want in our company. And so the best of hours I got was from another founder saying. Just focus on being better to Mo, like be a better Tim to Mo than you were yesterday.

if you just focus on that, you will continue to get incremental improvements every single day that compound. The thing is people say that, but they don't actually practice it and practicing it is literally down to, we have some individuals on our team who literally diary regularly about their learnings.

And that is like a level of reflective learning. Discipline. we ask the team to write a quarterly reflection and I will tell our team to redo it if it's not good enough. Okay. That's not nice, by the way, but literally I'll say, what did you learn? [00:26:00] Yeah. And if it's crap, I'll tell them, do it again.

And we have actually done that to help people in our team if you want to learn, you need to reflect. That is the only way to learn quickly. Therefore, you need to spend time thinking about what you've learned you need to be really thoughtful about that as well.

So that's something that we instill. mistakes are for learning. we will make lots of mistakes and we're big on just learn, don't make the same mistake, pick yourself up. What did we learn? And, you know, I think so far it's worked really well for us.

It's something we want to continue to instill in our culture over the many years ahead as well. Nice. 

And I guess that's what keeps you going, right? From what I've understood from our conversation, you're an avid learner and always have been. What else keeps you going? Because it must be really testing and really tough being that top head of the business, the founder. What keeps you going to do this, to drive Yonder forwards? 

I think about it from like, there's both the internal world and the external world. From an external world perspective, being able to look around and see the product we're building, see the [00:27:00] team I just get joy from that.

if you don't enjoy it, what's the point? And so there's an element of even down to learning. I'm like, I want to enjoy my learning. Otherwise, what's the point? You know, I'm, I'm in my thirties, I don't want to waste my thirties by just grinding through the next ten years of Sure, you want to do well and you might be financially set for life, but what's the point, right?

Like, the point for me is, you want to enjoy the journey. And every fan I've spoken to, who've been, who've, who've, let's go under better commas, made it, have always said, don't forget to enjoy the journey along the way. So I think on the external side of the journey, it's like enjoying the journey. I think like, on the, sort of, on a personal side, I think there's an element of like, what grounds you?

And say. For me, I always tell myself like, why are we doing this? Like, what's the point? Like why, why, why? And so I have like a personal faith and that's a big part of like what anchors me for my like team and management team. I'm always like, we really need to understand what's your why because, and that could change.

I think the key thing is that it's changed for me over time. Yeah. And it can, and it and it's okay if it does. Yes. Yeah. But you have to have that and, and we always ask ourselves like, why are we doing this? [00:28:00] Every quarter or every so often I'll be like, why are we doing this? Like, why am I doing this? And if I can't articulate that to myself, then I kind of go on a journey of like trying to find that UI and.

I spent a lot of weekends like just reflecting on my own personal life journey, because I don't identify Yonder as me. And I think that's one thing that a lot of founders do, which I don't think is necessarily healthy, which is they are the company. The company is them. Yeah. I don't see myself as Yonder as me.

And I am, and I am Yonder, like I am Tim. Yeah. I, Yonder is an important part of my life journey, but there's a life journey that would hopefully be another 50 years ahead. Yonder will be an important part of that, but probably won't be in my entire life. So how does this fit into this wider narrative of, so this life that I want to live and Let's say finish my time on the world and feel like I've run a race that I feel very proud of.

So I always think about it in that lens. And I think that it's really easy to just think about your company as the be all and end all, and I think that's, that's actually healthy or right. I agree. 

That's, that's a really beautiful way of putting that. [00:29:00] I've asked you a lot of advice pieces already, which I really appreciate, so I'm gonna finish our episode on pinpoints.

What would you say was your biggest challenge in your career, or perhaps life? 

It was really random because it's not related to founding a company. I tried to move to Singapore multiple times. Okay. It never worked. Okay. And it was really bizarre. It was to go there to study for jobs. I turned down a job because I had another job I was interviewing for and then I didn't get the other job.

Okay. It just wasn't working out. And I think what that taught me was, it was quite weird because I think leading up to that point, I would say on paper, I was like fairly successful, right? Like I found getting a job at a university relatively easy. Yeah. I was like, I had like top marks in university. I got promoted relatively quickly in consulting.

And so from the outside, people are like, Oh, you're very successful. But I think that I didn't learn failure and I think actually trying to get to Singapore in multiple ways and failing all the way through [00:30:00] actually taught me far more than anything else. And I think actually that's now taken me to the founding journey, which is called lots of setbacks, actually sort of trust that the right door will open at the right time.

But also you need to persist at it as well. So that's sort of been for me, I think it sounds so cliche, like learning how to fail, but I think actually a lot of people who, who are competent and are successful, actually really struggled to deal with these sort of setbacks. And I think life is full of them.

It's inevitable. And for me, it wasn't the founding journey that was the setback story. It was actually something far earlier than that, but that helped me prepare mentally for the journey of, you know, starting yonder and going through the, you know, many no's and many setbacks. So, yeah. 

Amazing. And one last extra question that I'd like to know, you know, success, the markers always move and yonder have clearly been a very successful company and are on a successful journey so far, but, you know, what does success look like for yonder. What's the next steps? 

I guess I know that I will never, ever feel like we're ever be successful. And I know that there's always another, always. I think that's what makes also found and slightly crazy, but really good because they're always debating more. I think there's so much to salivate success today, and there's also so much to do in the future.

So I don't know if I can put a light in the sand saying, oh, this is success, because I think each of them brings new challenges and new opportunities. Like, I don't know, being a public company. That's not a milestone in my, so that's a milestone, but that's not the end goal because running a public company has its own new challenges.

Yeah. Like quarterly earnings, earnings guidance, activist investors, you know, there's a whole set of new challenges that come. So I don't know whether I look at light of the sand saying this is a success and this isn't. I think my philosophy is very much that celebrate each month, each year, each week for what it is and enjoy the journey along the way.

And there's always lots of things to celebrate and there's always lots to do. But I don't, I don't really have a moment of like, this is going to be [00:32:00] success because I feel like we're not successful and I feel like we have a hundred things that I still want us to do and push harder on. And yet people on the outside say you're successful.

And I don't feel like that. And then I realized that actually maybe the right answer is to not think about success as this binary outcome, but to really think about it as a mindset there's always something to celebrate. I'm always going to be thankful for my family. I can always be thankful for my friends.

I can always be thankful for having what I need. I can always be thankful for the team. But I can always demand more and always expect more from us as well and so I think holding these both in tension Yeah, that there was always more to do but there was always much to be thankful for at the same time So okay, very weird sort of philosophical way of thinking about it.

Yeah, but that's generally how I hold on to things It's a great way to look at it And so I don't know I when every time someone goes are you on this so called like like, tech conscious if that or whatever. I actually just don't care. Like, I just genuinely don't care. Cause I go, this is fleeting, because at one moment you could be salivated, the next moment you could be 

And not in a negative way, I just hold this very loosely, being these are moments that we can salivate as a team, but these are not the end goals that we're pushing for. That's not the [00:33:00] end goal. Yeah. Uh, and so. Yeah. I kind of just don't care that much about the publicity and being on a pedestal, because I think that actually doesn't really reflect what the journey is really 

Yeah, it sounds you care an awful lot about the journey being positive for everybody in your business, which is a beautiful thing. Thank you much for coming on to the Startup Diaries. 

Amazing, thank you so much for having me.