Life Profits

Episode 5 Life profits Dimitris
Geoff Roberts: [00:00:00] This is the life profits podcast, where we celebrate people who are using entrepreneurship to lead amazing lives. This week, I have a very special guest, Dimitri Georgiakopoulos. Dimitri was my first boss and gave me my start in the tech industry, and he's now my co founder at Outsetup. Over 15 years, I watched him build a business from a startup to a 580 million exit, and all the while he worked in a way that was very calm without making huge sacrifices in his personal life.
We see today hustle culture so often celebrated, but Demetri is a proof point that consistency can help you build something big. He's a friend of mine and he's taught me as much about this topic of life profitability as anybody out there. So I'm excited to share his thoughts with you. All right, so Dimitri, the primary topic I wanted to ask you about today is this sort of ever growing divide as I see it in the tech world between lifestyle businesses and, [00:01:00] and hustle culture.
So if you care about this topic of life profitability that we talked about on this podcast, you're sort of immediately labeled as a lifestyle business founder. You're not serious trying to build something big. And on the other side, there's this notion of the, you know, the Y Combinator founder who's working a hundred hour weeks for years on end, raising tons of funding and trying to build something big that changes the world.
Having worked with you, I saw you work on something very calmly and steadily over the course of 15 years. And it resulted in a pretty big 580 million exit. So my question for you is that at some point you must have realized you were onto something. There must have been sort of some pressure to take advantage of the size of the opportunity.
How did you think about the pace at which you were going to work on this company throughout?
Dimitris: Yeah, we, me and my co founder, Michael, were always very deliberate about we're going to [00:02:00] put in X amount of work. We're not going to jeopardize our family and friends or health or anything else. For a specific argument.
And I think we made this decision because we were fairly certain that we could get to where we wanted to go in terms of our goals without having to make any, any sacrifices, obviously building ended up being a bigger, a success that we expected. When, when we started out, we, we had set out for pretty modest goal.
We, we felt like we can build a business, a 10 million business. We ended up building a. A 50 million business, but over the years, we, we didn't really change on some of the fundamental values that we had from the beginning around balance and having fun along the way. And we didn't, we didn't feel that we needed to, yes, we have competitors, they, they at times they were moving faster.
We really didn't feel like we needed to change the pace. We were very [00:03:00] productive and focused when we were at work, we weren't goofing around, we weren't, you know, browsing the internet. We were, we were there, you know, typically. 96 with an hour of big bone break in the middle, but while we were at work, we were, we were very productive and we didn't feel like we needed to put any more, more time on that.
And there were other things that we also wanted to get out of life along the way, halfway through the building experience. We both had our first kid and I'm just. You say that, you know, I was home most night for, for
Geoff Roberts: dinner. That's certainly, as an employee, reflective of, of what I saw. I mean, we went out to lunch and went on walks during the day.
You were out of your office having a beer with me at 5 o'clock. We played ping pong. You know, I saw you go to Greece every summer to visit family in your hometown and whatnot. So, The reason I, I wanted to talk to you, it's aside from, from being my co founder at Outset, I just thought you're a great proof point that this, [00:04:00] there is this middle ground that, that nobody talks to.
And certainly it sounds a bit idyllic, if you will. And I think you admit, you know, there were some circumstances or things that had to be true in order for you to build something that big at that pace. What, what do you think those things are true? What do you think the conditions were that sort of enabled that type of success still living your life with some balance?
Dimitris: And one other thing I want to say on that, on the previous question, What I've seen happen is people get caught up, they are operating from a maximization framework where, you know, they, they, they're like, okay, we're doing well, but we can do better. And we just need to put in more work to succeed. But I think that's the, that's a trap.
And we didn't really fall that trap.
Adii Pinar: I mean, Dimitri is thinking about like, I hear you about the maximization, right? So like, if If the decision is very intentional up front and saying, I want [00:05:00] a certain type of outcome, and this is the input that I'm willing to commit to doing that and accepting that that kind of outcome would not be maximized, but it would still be great, like, that's fine.
But how do you, like, if you start there, how do you use that and start countering some of the widely held beliefs? In the market in business that things like market forces, for example, requires you to do things in a specific way, i. e. like work harder, you know, increase your output, et cetera, or maybe there's a concept of can be run runway or burn involved, where it is, you know, constantly this existential threats before one gets to some kind of your default live your state, how do you counter that, especially when you can't counter it with Saying like, well, building workout, 15 years later, we sold for, you know, more than half a billion dollars.
Right. Like I think most people just say like, well, that's, that's one story. That's not indicative of how it works for 99 percent [00:06:00] of companies.
Dimitris: Yeah. You have to be very careful. You have to be very careful. First of all, not to put, not to set arbitrary deadlines. Right. I think that's, we, I don't think for the longest time we, we never said, all right, we're going to have to do this by this date and then, you know, we're Try to pull all nighters to get it done by date.
I mean, we recognize that product development is far more hard than science. And you really can't know for sure how long something will take. And we didn't do that. That's number one. And number two is we were operating from a place of enough, like, yes, as the company grew, there were a ton of opportunities that presented ourselves.
And, you know, we could have spent a lot more time on that for trying to pursue more so that we could go after more, but we were successful enough that the company was growing at a decent pace. Didn't need to go after a, a bigger pie, I guess we were, we're just content to growing it up at that pace without having to [00:07:00] lay everything on the line for that work.
Adii Pinar: Do you think you had to compromise in your own ambition to adopt that?
Dimitris: No, I, I didn't because I sent the beginning are my, our ambition was to have a successful company that, that, you know, that we got 10 million in revenue. We, we kind of accomplished that at the year, I think 10 or eight, I didn't start out, we didn't start out building a billion dollar business we could have.
That was not, that was not our ambition.
Geoff Roberts: So let, let's talk about the, the pace of that growth. And there, there were some strategic changes that came in. So you said it took eight or 10 years to get to 10 million a year in revenue. The number that I have in my head for whatever reason is the company was bootstrapped to about 7 million a year in revenue.
Does that five, five. Okay. But eventually you did make the decision to raise funding [00:08:00] and. You sort of raised a small, medium, and then large rounds. The first one was 3 million. The second one was 15 million and the third one was 65 million. So pretty. Substantial round of funding. What changed after bootstrapping the company for so long, having quite a bit of financial success as a bootstrap business, why did you decide to raise those subsequent rounds of funding?
Dimitris: Yeah, each round had, had a different, had a different reason. The first one was, was around having something to show for eight, nine years worth of work, having, taking some chips off the table and, and having something So for, and at the same time, they bring our, ourselves a little bit into what it, what it is, what it feels like to be part of like a portfolio company in a, in a small at the time, what it was a small fund and, you know, maybe starting to interact with some of the other portfolio founders and trying to get some best practices.
It was just at the cost, but [00:09:00] was. Going from maybe 25 employees to 50. So we were starting to feel some, we're starting to feel like up until now, we're kind of figuring things out on, on our own and we're doing what makes sense for us. But maybe it's time to start looking around in terms of like, what are others doing to solve similar problems, we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Well, that's kind of number one. The second round was us actually feeling that we picked a good investor. We, we had good chemistry. We had been, we had been working with that investor for two years and, and they were looking to add to their position and we were comfortable taking some more tips off the table without a larger valuation, having a bit more money on the balance sheet to try out a couple of, uh, larger programs around marketing and also do our first small acquisition.
And at the same time, still have control of the company, even with that second round, we still maintain the, me and my co [00:10:00] founder maintain the majority. And at the end of the day, we felt like we were still working for ourselves, even though we had a large investor on the cap table. But the third round, we were going to lose majority of the company and, and they would no longer feel like it was our, our company.
And, and that was more strategic. It was more their realization that, all right, we've gone down this path. We, we, we are now a PE backed company. And probably in, in the next 10 years, we'll probably have the. Better outcome for everyone. If we align ourselves with, uh, with a player that knows how to take a company that's 25 million, uh, and take it to a hundred, uh, and work side by side.
Uh, so it was, it was kind of like an evolution, evolutionary step based on the previous decisions we, we had made. Uh, incidentally, when that third round happened, I decided that. It was time for me to step back a little bit [00:11:00] and, and still stay involved, but stay involved in a, in a limited capacity, working on very specific projects that I, I thought were, were, uh, were gonna be the most t-shirt projects, so I can be a, I can make a, a big difference.
Things that were really interesting to me and, and stay away from more of the operational. Side of things of growing a company and getting an executive place and all the other stuff that you have to do when you're running. A company with 300 people
Geoff Roberts: makes sense. So this is, this is 2016 when this third round of funding hits and you kind of step back, this coincides with the founding of Outsetta, you had more, you had more time and you were able to kind of start another SAS business with a clean slate.
I want to talk about the things that were important to you when you sort of had the opportunity to, to start over again. And a lot of those things have permeated how we've built Outsetta and the culture we have at [00:12:00] Outsetta and those sorts of things. What was top of mind for you at that point?
Dimitris: Yeah, I was reminiscing of the, of the earlier days, and I was thinking it would be great to go back and maybe continue on the path we were on.
We were without raising money, without maintaining a pretty flat structure when it comes to how we run the company, keep it small, focus on, on, on our values and, and, and keep the. Sort of like any sort of like managerial overhead to a minimum, pick a problem that resonates so we can dig our heels and kind of work on it for, for a decade.
Geoff Roberts: Awesome. One thing you, you said to me on the, the topic of funding is you said, it's harder to make decisions and you can get into trouble faster once you raise money. Can you expand on those two thoughts? Yeah, well,
Dimitris: up until we raised money, we were operating with certain constraints, the constraint. Was that we had a certain amount [00:13:00] of growth this month, a certain amount of extra money that we had available to either hire somebody or get raises or keep bonuses or put money on the marketing program.
And, and because of that constraint, we're, we were very, very careful how that money was spent. And I actually enjoyed running that company that way without constraint. We've debated on decisions a lot more. So when you have a few million dollars in the bank, you don't really have to debate. You can actually do things, you can do more things at once.
And I, what I noticed was there was some money that was, was definitely wasted. Which I didn't feel that way before, but there were fires that we did a little faster because we needed them. There were programs that we were willing to. To try that we wouldn't try it before. And then the other, well, the other problem is because we didn't have that constraint, actually, it was much harder to, to figure out, all right, how much should we spend, should we try to run the balance down?
So [00:14:00] we, so we try to have a 24 months runway, like, Hey, It becomes harder to run the business without that constraint.
Geoff Roberts: And were the, were the investors generally always pushing you to spend money faster? How was that? No,
Dimitris: no, they weren't. They definitely argued for more sales and more customer success. But they want us to be stewards of that money and be careful how we use them.
Adii Pinar: I mean, just listening to you there, the part that resonates is I know, and I can admit that across my various businesses, when I self funded it and bootstrapped it. I was definitely like more intentional and thoughtful about how we spend money, right? Because every dollar we spend was a dollar that was not going to, to me or another shelter, right?
Ultimately, right? So that resonates. Whereas when I ran a business that was venture funded, I was not as frugal. I was not, [00:15:00] Uh, spending silly amounts of money, but like that same thought process didn't kind of your show up there, right? And conversations around like how to invest and how to spend money. So that resonates.
I wonder though, if we put aside like how that in itself shapes a business, right? If I just go back to kind of the personal experience and I say, Well, you know, it's fun having, you know, cash in the bank because that's generally less stressful, right? Whereas if you're stressed about not making payroll or not being able to pay yourself, or if you're stressed that you're starting a new company and like you've given yourself a kind of personal, you know, six month runway from savings to do this and you're self funding it in that way, like that's stressful as well, right?
Which is partly why. You outsource that stress to external investor that's happy to take on that stress for the upside of money to gain. Like, do you think that's still true? And is that a valid argument to think through how to capitalize a business?
Dimitris: I don't think so. No, you don't have stress. If the [00:16:00] business is sustainable, not if you have money.
In the bank, if you're burning a lot of money, whether you raise the money or whether you put someone from your savings, it's still stressful. We really didn't feel that stress because starting from 2009, we got to the place where the business was sustainable. It could pay its salaries. We weren't worried about, it was a, it was a SaaS product, which we knew that had recurring revenue.
So we knew what was coming in. It's modeling our expenses. So from that point on, I felt more stress. After we raised money, when we had more money in the bank than I felt before, where we, we knew what was coming in, we knew how much extra money we had to spend each month than when we actually raised money, because then the, the stakes were much higher.
There was a lot more expected of us.
Adii Pinar: I mean, that resonates as well. I think that kind of the only part there that's probably still true is up until that point where you get to that. Your first state of some kind of sustainability, some predictability, [00:17:00] right? Like, that's the stressful part, right? That's where, you know, people, I said, either say self funded or they have to do side hustles, meaning they work 40 hour weeks, they have to build a life outside of that, and then they have to find a few hours on a weekly or daily basis.
To build this thing to ultimately have the kind of professional life that they want to build. Right. And they like, I haven't chatted to many founders and entrepreneurs, like that's the stressful part, right? Which is why they, they look at it and they're like, well, I'll just go raise money and I can not have that stress.
Dimitris: Yeah.
Adii Pinar: Yeah. I
Dimitris: would for, for us, we, the first two years were kind of like that. We were working part time on the startup and part time or on some side consulting to pay the bills. But it wasn't all a week, we had like a couple of days that were dedicated for building and a couple of days of consulting. It wasn't like a hundred percent, the consulting did not come on top of, and when we realized we wanted to do full time, we were lucky, we had very, very [00:18:00] low lifestyle expenses.
We had both spouses that were bringing in money and salary that could actually pay the bills, even if we didn't contribute. And we didn't have, we didn't have kids then, so the expenses were minimal. So we could, we could sustain that for a few years, and that's what we did. Because of those circumstances, I didn't, I didn't feel that stress, and I don't think Michael did either.
Had we had kids, and one of us had to stay home and not have that, that second income, that probably would have, It's distress. Yes.
Geoff Roberts: We did the same thing with Outsetta. We all started working on it part time. I Consulted and whatnot, but our timetable was substantially longer than building them in terms of when the business became sustainable.
And I did have kids at a point when the business was not sustainable. I'll tell you, it was very stressful. And one of the biggest milestones for me was the day that outside of was [00:19:00] able to pay me enough of a salary that I did not have to do other consulting work. So I think your point is right. Early stages where a lot of that.
Financial stress does build up, but I do think it is generally wise to work on early stage businesses and a part time capacity fulfilling your financial obligations by some other means. Prior to just jumping in and saying, okay, we're, we're putting all of our eggs in this basket with limited runway. All right.
I want to move on from the funding point. I think it's almost like a meme at this point, every venture backed founder on their next business wants to bootstrap. So I think a lot of people have felt sort of that, that sentiment that you expressed Dimitri. The other point that you mentioned around when we started out set and sort of having a clean slate.
Was you wanted to keep the company flatter, and this is something we've talked a lot about in the context of outset. Oh, we don't have hierarchy in the [00:20:00] business. We have this weird organizational structure and whatnot. I don't want to get too far into that. But generally speaking, um, When you tell people you're building a flat organization, you get a lot of pushback and there's a lot of questions and a lot of, you know, people have tried this a million times over.
It doesn't work. Where did the desire to be flatter become attractive to you? What? What were the things that
Dimitris: I was noticing, I mean, I was noticing that there was a lot of inefficiencies with hierarchies. I was noticing local executive hires that we brought in, taking a long time to acclimate to the values or never activating to the values or, or being really good at maybe selling themselves. But when it came down to actually doing the job that they were fighting, they were not what we thought.
And I guess [00:21:00] for certain products and certain businesses, where it's basically around this, what we were trying to build around as fast product. It just made sense to me. I had witnessed that a free experience, people working together, aligned. They don't need to be, they don't need to be managed and they don't need to manage other people.
They could work and be contributors and everyone can be a contributor. You don't have to have this do awfully.
Geoff Roberts: So there's a little bit of power is not assigned by the hierarchy. If you flatten things out, the quality of your contributions or the quality of your contributions and your, A step closer to a meritocracy sounds like,
Dimitris: you know, there's, uh, examples of companies that I've been following all along, like base camp, but also has followed this model and it's worked really well for them and they've been able to grow the company to hundreds of millions with just 50 employees in a, in a flat [00:22:00] structure.
And then, you know, I, like a year, a couple of years ago, I, I was reading how Facebook removed like three layers of management. From there, the hierarchy, there's a recognition that, um, too much management slow things down.
Adii Pinar: I probably imagine that, you know, most people aren't born managers, right? Like it's not the thing that's where we say this individual is just born to purely manage, right?
I think I suspect for many or most of us, if not all the process of actually creating and doing things is much more energizing, much more valuable. And I think often. For, you know, for founders, entrepreneurs, leaders, and companies, as a company grows, like we all move away from the thing we did initially to take on more of this kind of supposed overhead of building a company, building a business and management and the people management, whereas I think what it sounds like to me is that, you know, part of this [00:23:00] flat structure.
Prevents you from having to do all of that, right? Like it makes that a shared responsibility for the whole team, because they're empowered to actually build the business in their own right without having a manager being the sole custodian of, of doing those functions at least for outcomes. That's right.
Geoff Roberts: So I want to transition a little bit into what came next after Buildium. But before we, we do that, we've talked about the three, the three fundraisers that, that Buildium had. And you, you took some chips off the table in each. Then in 2019, the big acquisition occurs that 580 million acquisition occurs your financial situation.
You've already triple dipped. Now you've quadruple dipped. That's a good trick, by the way, if you can teach me that one. But you know, your financial situation changes pretty dramatically. And you're at the point where you can decide. To do whatever you want to do next. You sort of let the dust settle and have to figure out what the next chapter of your [00:24:00] life looks like.
At this point, you do move away from Boston. You move back to your hometown of Athens, Greece. But talk to me about how you figured out. What would come next and what you would spend the rest of your professional career doing? Yeah,
Dimitris: the difference between the third and the fourth round, the third was a pretty significant round and, and there were, there was a significant amount of people at the table.
But I think the way I describe it is that the third round, I could have just worked on anything I wanted. There was enough money to support decent lifestyle. There was not enough resources for me to actually invest and build something. investment in a new company or invest in philanthropy. That was the difference between the third and the fourth round.
The fourth round, they were extra resources for me to invest in and to also get into some philanthropy. And it was an easy decision to come back to Greece. I had been thinking about it in those years [00:25:00] prior in that I could be more useful in Greece. Greece needed me more than the US. Greece needed more examples like me here.
There was less people like me in Greece than there were in the U. S. And I felt like I could be more useful and have a bigger impact.
Geoff Roberts: So how, how did you start making that impact? I mean, from the way that I would summarize it is you, you ran towards sort of two causes or initiatives. One is generally climate related investing.
The other is more Velentropic type work within Greece and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Greece in general. How did you land on those things? What were you looking for as you figured out how to invest going forward?
Dimitris: I had started already in those years prior to 2019. I had started dipping into impact investing, and I had been attracted by the Notes Thinking that your investment dollars can [00:26:00] actually make a difference in the companies that you support and the ideas that you support can, can make a difference in solving some, some problems in the world.
And I had created a couple of themes that I wanted to, I wanted to define. Companies in Greece that were working to reduce either emissions or waste and, and support those, because those two problems were problems that I felt like we had created and our generation created, and those were problems that were worth a while to solve, or at least attempt to solve for, and so that we can leave the planet in a better shape than we found it for.
So it was, it was very easy. I didn't feel like by investing in those themes, I would have a lower return. I actually felt like there's a possibility that I'm going to have a bigger return, but it gave me a lot more energy and enthusiasm to know that I'm putting my investment dollars in [00:27:00] areas. I would solve problems that were real, tangible to me and made the investment more fun.
So that's the investment side. The philanthropic was something that was more iterative. I didn't really know what, where, when I'll just knew that I would start the process and I would figure things out along the way and started small starts by meeting some of the, the, the teams and the organizations in green star were.
Operating in a number of different tropic areas. And, and I started to see some patterns emerge, like what were the teams that I was attracted to, there were some themes that were developing. I was a lot more attracted to teams, not for profit teams that were being entrepreneurial, like they were trying to find ways to, to support their operations and, and also have access to support their mission.
Through some sort of like a commercial activity and I think it recurring. [00:28:00] And eventually I realized that that's actually what I want to do with a big portion of the resources of the foundation. Try to support as many organizations that are trying to operate in, in this way. There's actually a name for this, which is called steward ownership.
I wanted to bring this concept to Greece and also show what we can do. Uh, examples of what it was like to operate with that
Geoff Roberts: framework. So, so just to unpack that a little bit, I think like the stereotype of philanthropic giving is if you're someone in your situation and you have money to give all of a sudden you go out and find these charities or nonprofits and donate some money to them and you never sort of know how effectively that that capital is put to use and.
It's, it's probably not put to use all that well in a lot of instances. So the key theme here is these are sort of nonprofit causes, but they are run as businesses that generate revenue that they then invest into the [00:29:00] cause. And you gave me an example of a, a German company called Ecosia that works this way.
Can you talk about what they do and how the model works in their
Dimitris: case? Of course, it's a search engine. They, they integrate with Bing on the backend and they generate profits by doing what other search engines do. A lot of their users appreciate that when they're using this product, any excess money actually goes to reforestation.
So this entity exists to reforest, to plant as many trees as possible. And they've been very successful with this, with this strategy. And over the course of the last few years have planted millions and millions of trees all around the world. So they've been able to have a massive impact because of this commercial side of things, had they tried to.
Raise this money through common ways that the not for profits are funded, they, they would have never been able to achieve [00:30:00] the scale and impact that they were able to achieve because they were operating with this commercial. That, that's what made it so attractive to try to create more and more of these, these companies, because that's where you can truly scale.
And truly solve, or at least take a big bite off from the, these
Geoff Roberts: problems that are out there. We'll, we'll throw it in the show notes, but Ecosia, E C O S I A. org. If you want to check out the website and Patagonia is kind of another company that is now operating this way, although they didn't start out that way.
That that's kind of the model. I think everybody. Familiar with Patagonia understands it was sort of a for for profit business. That's now donating primarily to to climate initiatives. Just from like a legal perspective, I imagine it differs depending on where the company is located, but are these set up as nonprofits?
Are these B corps? It's like, what is the actual [00:31:00] structure of these businesses
Dimitris: in different ways? Like in Greece, you actually set, set them up as a non for profit on then the not for profit owns a for profit business. So it owns a hundred percent in the for profit business. So it's very clear that the for profit business exists.
The shareholder of the for profit business is not external. It's actually a not for profit. It aligns the goals. In other countries, it's set up differently. A B Corp can also operate in this way if certain additional provisions get put in the shareholder agreement so that, you know, it never gets sold or you have to just have the right provisions in there so that it, uh, People that own shares in the B Corp, they only hold voting, they don't hold economic interest.
Adii Pinar: Dimitri, you're infusing too much of my own bias here, but do you think that, you know, any [00:32:00] business or org that's not Exclusively profit driven. Do you think that there is some kind of superpower or advantage to doing that? Or do you think it's just, well, you go down that path and you're essentially saying I'm passionate about this thing and I will compromise on the financial reward that I get from this.
Dimitris: You're saying why would somebody that has an option to make it a for profit work this way
Adii Pinar: because it seems very idealistic might like on the surface. It seems very idealistic, right? Like, even in Patagonia is, you know, case like the early years is it's not an obvious path to get to where they are today, right?
If it were, there would be. 20, 50, a hundred other companies that operate like Patagonia, but there isn't right there, they're relatively unique, especially at their scale for, for doing so.
Dimitris: Yeah. It's not for every, every individual. It's for individuals that their first ambition is to solve a problem that they see around in the world.
And once they recognize that they can solve [00:33:00] this problem and at the same time, they're not going to get super rich, but they can actually maintain a really good lifestyle. I like that. The people at Ecosia or all the people work at Paragonia or some of the other organizations that are operating this way, they're paying themselves a decent salary.
They're also paying themselves a bonus when they are doing what the business is doing while they're growing. They're not going to have a massive exits there, but but they are okay with us. They recognize that they don't need that. I guess they it's for people that don't have that ambition. They're they're not looking for that massive.
They're not looking to take the money and do something else. They're like, okay. I want to solve this specific problem that I see around the world. I want to devote the next, you know, 30 years of my life building this company that solves this problem that has a commercial entity, but this is not going to be sold.
It's going to continue because we're going to create a structure, a governance structure that's going to be sort of like that run in perpetuity and will, Uh, we'll continue to, to solve for [00:34:00] that. And along the way, I'm going to have a good lifestyle. I'm going to make a decent amount of money. I'm not going to, I'm not going to be super rich doing this.
And that there's a, there's a lot of people that understand this and are totally fine, and I hope more people operate this way. And, and, and that's kind of like why I'd like to have more examples of this. Because I feel in some way in our society, we, we don't have those Good, good examples. And a lot of people end up getting in this, this flywheel and go after something.
And once they get it, they still feel like, okay, I actually wasn't all worth it.
Adii Pinar: Yeah, there's, there's something you said there that sounds like when you're clear about the work that you love doing and you can see yourself doing that for long term, then find a way to keep doing that. I think when people sell their businesses.
They, for whatever reason, they start a new one, right? And then the question should always be, if you take out the financial component [00:35:00] thereof, they're not just stuck with the business they had. Right. And I suspect that there's something about, you know, doing work. That you really love with people that you love working with that supports a lifestyle that you value that is significantly more important than purely the financial considerations around kind of exiting or growing a business to, you know, a certain level of profit.
Geoff Roberts: Exactly. We can wrap things up here. I have one final question for you, Dimitri. In general, one of my motivations with this podcast is. I want to see more people thinking about this concept of life profitability as they're building startups, as they're building businesses. And Not compromising their, their life or their personal lives, at least while they've built something successful, bringing it back to the beginning of the conversation, you're, you're someone that's proven that that can be true.
What is your advice to a young startup founder? Who's, you know, got their business off the ground to, to some [00:36:00] extent and is wrestling with, you know, do I need to put in a hundred hour weeks? Can I go on that two week vacation? What, whatever it might be, what would you say to that person?
Dimitris: Well, I would say that be careful, that you don't have to do that.
Find ways to not get in and not shot. There's a ton of examples out there where people have been Successful without, without having to make those kinds
Geoff Roberts: of problems. Awesome. Thanks for joining us for this chat. This was fun. Thank you. Something I learned from Dimitri was that consistent sustained effort over a long period of time typically leads to greater success than working with high intensity for shorter periods.
But beyond that, it also gives you more room to live the rest of your life. So I want to leave you with a simple question today. What things can you commit to doing with consistency? Answer that question, and you might just change your life.