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Heini Zachariassen grew up on a little island logged between Iceland and Norway where the total population hovers around 49,000 habitants. While Heini thinks it’s the most beautiful place on earth, the weather is not always great. He stayed there until the age of 22 years old, then moved to Denmark.

From a young age, Heini tinkered with computers and fell fast in love. It was a passion he shared with his father, which never left him. Heini always had a knack for building things and was drawn to the world of entrepreneurship. Serving almost every executive role you can think of from CTO, COO, CEO, Chairman of the Board, Heini has proven one thing, he knows how to build products people love.

In 2010, when Heini and his co-founder Theis launched Vivino, they were the 600th wine App on the market. Within a few short years, they managed to climb to the top with 36 million users, looking up 2 million wines every single day, and organically attracting 600,000 new users each month. To date, Vivino has raised $57 Million in funding and is operational in 16 markets. He shares 5 strategies to break into a crowded market and win. 

Tune in to listen to the rocket ship journey Heini went through with Vivino and his lessons learned along the way

In this episode you will learn about:

• • • Founder experiences
    • Growth hack strategies
    • Product Market Fit
    • Raising capital
    • Runway challenges
    • Differentiation strategies
    • Scaling operations
    • Product development- how to build a product people love
    • Leadership mistakes and lessons

 

Heini Zachariassen’s biography:

Heini Zachariassen is the founder and CEO of Vivino, which provides users with any wine’s rating, review and average price. Vivino is also the world’s largest wine community, claiming more than 15 million users. With more than $37 million in funding, Zachariassen continues to drive Vivino’s global expansion, via users now in 227 countries and on every continent around the world.

Having co-founded several startups, including antivirus software company BullGuard, Zachariassen has a varied background in software development and mobile innovation and a track record for building successful global businesses. He leads the team from Vivino’s headquarters in San Francisco.

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Full Transcription:

Heini:  I think it’s got something to do with my ethnicity where I’m from. It’s a pretty common name, actually.

Tanya:  That’s Heini, founder and chief evangelist of Vivino, the world’s largest wine marketplace that has over 33 million users looking up 2 million wines every single day and organically attracting 600, 000 new users each month. To date, Vivino has raised 57 million in funding and is operational in 13 markets.

Heini:  I’m from a place called the Faroe Islands where I also grew up. Faroe Islands are located between Scotland and Iceland in the middle of North Atlantic. It is the most beautiful place in the world, but the weather is not amazing. Actually, here in California today we have pretty Faroese weather, wet and a little bit cold.

Tanya:  How long did you stay in the Faroe Islands?

Heini:  Yeah, I grew up there. I was born there, and I grew up there. I moved out of there when I was – must’ve been 20 years – no 24, 22 years old. I moved to Denmark. I spent all my childhood there, and back then, it’s 50,000 people. It’s in the middle of the North Atlantic. It is isolated, and the winters are dark. It’s a very special place to grow up, for sure. I think now it’s changed a lot where people are so online and so on. I think I read an article somewhere that Iceland was one of the highest penetration of Facebook in the world, but I’m pretty sure the Faroe Islands would beat that. People are extremely online and well educated and so on, so it’s a very different place now than it was when I grew up.

Tanya:  How would you describe the culture of the Faroe Islands?

Heini:  It’s definitely a small place. It’s something you really think about, at least after – at least, to me, it felt like a uniquely safe place. It also felt like a place where people were very equal in all kinds of ways. I grew up never ever seeing any difference on people, whoever they were. I think it’s something that I brought with me all the way that I think culture and what you grow up in where people over there are like that. Others are like that. Where I grew up, obviously, people were very similar, but it meant my view on people. It was like, hey, there’s no difference between people, wherever you’re from, whatever you do, whatever, so I think that’s been really good for me.

Tanya:  No, that’s a really amazing lesson to learn early on. What were you like as a child?

Heini:  When you look at what I am today or at least I’m seen as a disrupter, as someone who has changed some things here and there, I think I was pretty straight as a child, very well behaved, did well in school, although being super bored all the time. I think I was a pretty regular child, at least I didn’t – I don’t think I felt that special in any way. I had a really good life. There’s no doubt about I wanted to see the world. There was something dragging me saying, hey, there’s a bigger world out there, but apart from that, I think I’ve – people saw me like, yeah, this is a relatively nice, pretty smart kid. 

Tanya:  What were some things you were into when you were young?

Heini:  The funny thing in a small place like that, my father was at the local, very, very small university up there but was obviously a super nerd. Our interest in computers was very, very early on. I’m born in ’72, but I think already in 1980, ‘81, he started dragging these computers home over the weekend that they had at the university. I was exposed to technology and computers extremely early, and I’ve always loved that part. I had two older brothers and then the younger sister. They were obviously much better than me at everything, but I definitely wanted to have my dedicated time in front of the computer, even though I didn’t really know what to do about it. Yeah, I definitely always loved technology and computers, whatever that was back then.

Tanya:  It’s interesting. As you moved into your entrepreneurial journey, you held multiple roles, including CTO, CEOO, CEO, and now board member. How did you move into your entrepreneurial journey and move across all those different roles?

Heini:  When you say the word entrepreneurial, I think that’s the core of it. Whatever I do, it’s about being an entrepreneur, about building something. Going back to where I was, what I was as a kid too is we also loved playing with Legos. Sometimes when I talk to my brothers about this is, when we played with Legos, we loved building stuff, but as soon as we’re done building, we got bored by it, right? That is something that comes back to my life and to my career is that I love building stuff. When it’s done building, I’m less interested in it, so there always has to be something that we’re building. I just love learning new stuff and so on.

Back to my roles, my interest has always been, hey, let’s create something. Is that technology? Is that operating the business? Whatever that is, I just want to build and change things.

Tanya:  No, that’s amazing. How did you start your first venture?

Heini:  Yeah, so very early on, when I just got out of college and a partner – me and a partner, we did this really simple – we did websites and stuff. This is back in, holy crap,’97 or so, and we just started from a college dorm room. Internet was not something that everybody had. We fought hard to even get access to the internet when we started back then. I remember, actually, we had this – it was a few windows down in this dorm room we were, and then, actually, you couldn’t get a fixed line to the internet. That was not something – you would call up the internet. We managed to get some super cheap call in, dialup, which we did. You pay per minute. It got really inexpensive.

At one point, he would call the internet, and there was no real network back then. We had a cable out the window, out of his window into our window, so say from say 7 in the evening, we would be on for three, four hours. Back then, nobody was on the internet for three, four hours. That was just crazy. 

Tanya:  Wow! How did you transition into your first company? That was BullGuard.

Heini:  That company, the first thing we did there, it became a security service and so on. Then one day I got in touch with a person called Morten Lund, who’s really – pretty well-known name in Denmark, a great entrepreneur from Denmark. He said, “Hey, we’re building this company called BullGuard.” I had been on television at some security something, and he said, “Hey, we’d love for you to join us. Help us build this.” I talked to the guys. This was Morten and this was Theis, who later became my co-founder at Vivino. He got in touch, and we started chatting. I really liked these guys. I think they had something really interesting.

The basic idea back then was we’re building a security suite for consumers, not for business. The cool thing about it was that it was a partnership with this product called Kazaa, which you may or may not remember. It was just after Napster. There was Kazaa, which was extremely popular. It was built by the same guys that later – Skype, Janus and Niklas, they built this product for sharing files or whatever you want to call it, piracy. They were looking for some kind of security solution that could be distributed with this product, and Morten got in the deal of doing that. Theis is very much a product guy. I was more the business guy, and we started building the company based on that distribution deal. That was an amazing journey, and I learned so much from that.

Tanya:  What was the biggest two takeaways that you got from that experience?

Heini:  That’s a good question. I think one of the things that maybe surprised me a little bit was that we came in very, very late to the market. We were building this security suite. We were competing with really well-known names such as McAfee and Norton, Symantec and so on so very competitive space. Since we had a good distribution deal, we could actually compete. It was just weird to me that this very, very small company based out of Copenhagen – and we did some stuff in Bucharest, Romania too. We’re actually able to compete with this massively big US company and actually build a product that was probably better than theirs because we focused.

That comes back to one of the things that I think is really important. We had a relentless focus. We said no, no, no. We’re only going to build this product for consumers. Not business to business. Business to business was very attractive and big orders and so on, but we said we want to build the best product for them, for the private user. I really learned one thing. Hey, you can compete globally, and secondly, if you focus really well, you can beat anyone.

Tanya:  Actually, entering a competitive space is not something that you shy away from. You created Vivino, which I was told to tell you by my father that he absolutely loves the app.

Heini:  Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Tanya:  I had to tell you.

Heini:  Thank you.

Tanya:  Can you tell me a little bit about how Vivino came into being what it is today?

Heini:  Vivino came to because I had a personal pain, which was that I really love wine, but I don’t know what’s good and what’s bad. I just couldn’t understand the thing that you have a rating on everything, books, movies, even cab drivers, but wine, you don’t know if it’s good or bad. Somehow there was no rating system. There was no proper database. I just said, hey, that’s got to be – if it’s possible for all these other things, it’s got to be possible for wine, and I knew nothing about wine at all. Like you said, when the apps came out, it’s a very competitive space, and I think we found out later there were around 600 wine apps in the App Store when we launched.

When it comes to competition, one thing I think is super important here is that you don’t have to build a perfect or an insanely amazing product. What you really want to make sure you are is the best product. If it’s a new category, or if product in the category are pretty mediocre, you can build a better product and win. That was really the case for us because we started with no data, no ratings, no nothing, but quickly, with relentless focus, we became the best product. It didn’t really mean that the product was amazing at the time. It was just like, hey, this is the best product out there right now. It might not be a lot better than the others, but that’s what I’m going to use at this point. I think that’s an important realization. If you go for perfection, it’s very, very easy to never release or just release parts of the product. It doesn’t come useful because you just try to build perfection all the time.

Tanya:  Yeah, no, that’s true. Actually, if you build a very small part of your app and test it and see how people interact, based on the user feedback you keep building, which makes a huge difference in the product iteration flow. 

Heini:  Yeah, very much so. That’s really been our philosophy early on is focus what we think is the most important, and listen to the user, and really release very, very quickly.

Tanya:  You led Vivino for eight years as the founder and CEO.

Heini:  Yes.

Tanya:  What were some of the toughest times that you had to charge through with the company or personally?

Heini:  Yeah, I think a couple of things at least I can remember. I think, when you sit in a basement, which was in the early, early days and later Theis and I – and there’s actually really nobody using your product. You got to have really strong faith in that this is going to work. People are always supportive and so on, but that doesn’t generate to an app that’s now out millions of times. You really need to stay the course in those early years, right? It took us a year and a half before we really saw any traction. That’s a year and a half where you have to say we believe in this. We think this is the right approach. We’re going to keep going.

That’s I think where a lot of people just stop and say maybe – I say this took 18 months. Imagine if you stop after 16. That sucks because you’re so close, and very often, there are tipping points. You get to a certain level, and suddenly, you see, holy crap, now it’s growing faster. I don’t believe in silver bullets. I believe in there can still be tipping points because of the 50 things you did over the last few months more than the 1 thing that you changed. That was definitely a long period where you had to stay focused.

Tanya:  Was there ever a moment where you had doubt or your co-founder, Theis?

Heini:  This is also how I’m built is that I will never show doubt. People will never see any doubt in me. I think people think how the hell does he keep going and believing in this? The fact of the matter is that I always have doubts. I always have doubts in the evenings when I go to bed. I always think what the heck am I doing? Then the morning comes, and you’re ready to go. Let’s keep going, and this is going to work, and this has to work. Yeah, so it’s both what you express, what the outside sees in you and what’s inside you. There’s no doubt about it, and I have doubts all the time.

When you start to see things go, you have different kinds of doubts. Yeah, people are definitely using this. It’s amazing. What if they stop using it? There is a certain kind of paranoia I think which drives a lot of entrepreneurs.

Tanya:  Yes, absolutely, and in fact, two people in the same week recommended the book from Andrew Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive.

Heini:  Oh, I have not read that one.

Tanya:  Yeah, actually, it’s right on topic with what you’re saying, and he’s chairman of Intel.

Heini:  Okay, very good.

Tanya:  Yeah, I mean, exactly, it’s like you always have to be on the lookout for any upcoming new technology that is better or gaining quicker traction, so that keeps you up at night.

Heini:  Yeah.

Tanya:  First of all, how many employees does Vivino have today?

Heini:  We’re just over 100 people. I think we’re 110 right now. We have 35 million users all over the world, but we’re commercially active in 13 markets now. Our biggest office is in Copenhagen, Denmark where we have 50 people. Here in San Francisco we have 30, and the rest is spread out in different countries more active commercial.

Tanya:  Now you sit on the board. Do you spend most of your days at Vivino, or what do you do with your time? 

Heini:  Yeah, I still do. I still do spend most of my time with Vivino. It’s a different kind of work now. I spend a lot of time doing what I do right now, evangelist and podcasts and so on. I do go to quite a bit of conferences and speak the gospel of Vivino. On top of that, I have some strategic projects inside Vivino that I help with, projects that I’m passionate about. I have a little bit more room to do some interesting things right now. 

On top of that, I think something that a lot of entrepreneurs have is we have to be obsessed about something. When I step down as CEO, I quickly found out that, hey, there’s definitely a hole there somewhere that needs to be filled. Otherwise, I’m just going to step on the toes of the new CEO, and that’s not going to work. I started doing YouTube. We talked about that before this show that I started doing this show on YouTube called Raw Startup where I try and give a little bit back to the startup community with some advice that – what I’ve learned over the last 25 years.

Tanya:  Yeah, absolutely, what precipitated the step down from you as CEO?

Heini:  It was a combination of many things, and this is something that is tricky for any founder, I think. Do you do it? If so, when do you do it and so on? I think, for me, it’s basically two things. It’s, number one, what do I like to do? What do I think is fun and so on? Secondly, what am I good at, or is there somebody else who’s better at it than you are? 

I think, the first part, there were really parts of my job that I really enjoyed, other parts that I didn’t enjoy as much. On the second part, is there somebody out there that’s better than you are? When you think about what a founder’s job really is, it is coming to work from day one and finding someone who’s better than you to replace you at all – whatever functions you have. That’s really my core belief. If there are ten founders, maybe that’s different, but most founders, there are two or three founders. We’re going to be 360 people that are broad and so on, which means that there should be experts that are better at doing a lot of this work. Those two things, what do I want to do, and secondly, is there somebody else out there who’s better at it than you are?

Tanya:  Yeah, no, absolutely, actually, most founders that I speak to like to lead the company up to a certain headcount, and then the dynamic changes. The role changes significantly, and then they just check out but still very committed to the overall vision and future of the company.

Heini: Exactly.

Tanya:  What were some experiences that you had in leading your team that really caused some insights and growth opportunities as a leader?

Heini:  That is a good question. I’m sure there are a lot of them. This is maybe a little bit overall, but what I really enjoy the most is when you have something you want to get done. You look for people to help you do it, and then you work with them as best you can to say, hey, here’s a job at hand. Here’s how maybe I think it should be done and so on, but then really seeing them do the job much better than you could do it. For me, that is incredibly satisfying. I think some people might – it might hurt their ego. For me, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s like, no, this is exactly what I do.

We hired a, whatever, sales, VP of sales. He came in. We had an idea how this should be done, but he came in and just did it a lot better. That’s something that I really appreciate, and over the years in my career is something that I’ve really learned. That what you need to do is find people that have – especially in leadership positions that have done this before or something similar. Coming back to the CEO change, that’s exactly what we did there is Chris that joined us there had built a marketplace with similarities to Vivino and done that at a much bigger scale than I had ever done. That’s something that’s extremely satisfying.

Tanya:  Yeah, so actually knowing when is the right time to move out of the way and let other people really steer the ship is an important quality that you have to develop, and to your point, not everybody has that ability. In fact, I was just interviewing somebody yesterday who their biggest challenge was to get out of the way. Most founders think I could do this better and quicker, and they go for it. That’s really, really useful.

Heini:  Just to add to that, that’s really hard to scale. If you think that you’re better at everything, that’s hard to scale.

Tanya:  Oh, 100%

Heini:  I mean, you have 24 hours a day, and that’s not going to work.

Tanya:  Yes, and actually, that’s what the founder was saying is that was something that they – luckily, they worked through. He experienced tremendous success, but that really could have gotten in the way of what actually ended up happening, which was a huge exit and a lot of liquidity and a lot of happy shareholders.

Heini:  Very cool.

Tanya:  Yeah, how long have you been working with Theis?

Heini:  Theis and I have worked together for the past – holy shit, it’s not quite 20 years. It’s got to be 18 years something now. I always saw myself as a semi-founder of the BullGuard, but officially, I wasn’t. Theis and Morten started the company, and I came in right after. We worked together ever since, so it’s been a long and amazing journey. Obviously, six years he’s been in Copenhagen, and I’ve been here in San Francisco. I think that’s also something worth mentioning. When you do this shift where I moved to San Francisco, 9 hours’ time difference, 11-hour flight, that’s a – suddenly, there is a long distance between you and the other people, and having that trust and having worked together for so long I think was one of the reasons that was possible. Just something that’s really, really hard to do and having to build trust over many, many years really helped that transition.

Tanya:  This is interesting. Without trust, nothing is possible.

Heini:  No.

Tanya:  Like you said, it happens over time. Really, integrity is a function of trust. If you can count on – and I’m saying his name wrong. It’s Theis.

Heini:  Yeah, Theis, it’s in Danish.

Tanya:  Okay, Theis.

Heini:  It’s a little bit tricky.

Tanya:  Okay, Theis, over 19 years, what is your secret to having a successful work marriage?

Heini:  Yeah, I think you’ve already said a lot of it. It’s trust. It’s integrity. It’s respect and transparency and those things. I mean, it’s very similar to a marriage or something like that, so all those things you need to have. Otherwise, it’s just not going to work. Then there are other things, obviously. That he really respects some of the things that I do, and I respect some of the things that he does, and I know that he’s extremely good at. Then, at the same time, we overlap and challenge each other, right?

We would never let things go – I would never let him do something weird for a long time and say, Theis, what the heck are you doing? We need to talk about this. I know that he wouldn’t let me do that either. Sometimes we joke. I know, in the early days, when I moved out of there that they would have a meeting about the product and so on. He would say, you guys, you know what Heini would say at this point. Then he would say Heini would say you’ve got to do it this way, otherwise – something like that. His voice was always in the room here, and my voice was always in the room over there.

Tanya:  Oh, wow! That’s amazing. How do you guys approach a major disagreement like where you guys completely are at odds with the solution?

Heini:  It’s very rare. We do shout at each other. We do get a little bit pissed once in a while.

Tanya:  Of course. If you didn’t, I’d be shocked.

Heini:  That’d be weird.

Tanya:  Or say you’re lying.

Heini:  Yeah, exactly. It’s really quite rare. In most cases, that’s a – it’s a funny dynamic there, actually, is that we feel each other out. If I can feel that, okay, this is something he feels very strongly about, then I usually back down, or find a way to compromise, or soften it up. When he sees me say, no, no; we got to do this, then he does the same thing, meaning he either backs down, or just we find some good compromise we really like. What often happens is, hey, we’ll deal with this. We’ll do a small compromise now, and then, later, things change. It’s a new situation, and it’s fine. I’ve been the CEO, so it was always like, hey, if you want to do this, you can make the call, and we do this. That did happen once in a while, but again, it was very, very rare. He would always back me if we had to do it like that.

Tanya:  Yeah, no, I mean, you’re very lucky to have that. Actually, so having founded a platform where co-founders meet and having studied a lot about that, 60% of the time organizations fail because of co-founder conflict. It’s hard to achieve what you and Theis have achieved. That’s really amazing. What do you use to really fuel your own growth and awareness on leadership and how to – what do you use to grow?

Heini:  Yeah, I think a lot of that’s just a mindset, honestly. I think a lot of that is being open to learning from other people. I really don’t have a lot of fixed thoughts on these things. Obviously, I read quite a bit. I listen to all kinds of podcasts, and another thing is people talk about having mentors and so on. I always felt like I’ve had a lot of mentors, meaning I just have been privileged of meeting so many incredible people and have just been cherry-picking amazing ideas from them and learning from the people I met down the road. I think it’s a mindset of being open minded and listening to the smart people around you.

Tanya:  It’s interesting you say that. I haven’t heard anybody position it like that, the mindset, and I once heard somebody tell me that you can learn something from anybody regardless of what their background is, who they are, their experience, regardless of anything.

 

Heini:  No, I think that’s incredibly important. I’ve had people that I’ve worked with before that did the opposite in the way they had one person that was smart, and then they loved everything they said. I don’t like that. What I do is every single person – I can see San Quentin from where I’m sitting right now. There’s 700 people on death row there, and it’s a big contrast from where I live right now. Those people there, don’t you think they have learned some hard lessons that I can learn from? They have definitely made some horrible, horrible choices in their lives, but we need to listen. If we cherry-pick the right stuff from every person, we can grow immensely.

Tanya:  Mm-hmm, yeah, I think that that is such a valuable piece of advice and something that we don’t practice enough. It’s almost like we disregard if it doesn’t look and feel the way we think it should feel or come from who we think it should come from so really brilliant. How do you think that the experience that you had at Vivino – so these past eight years, how do you think it has influenced and shape how you view yourself? 

Heini:  Yeah, I think my wife sometimes says to me that – we’re still married, so it’s not necessarily bad. She says to me that I’m not – definitely not the man she married, for good or bad, so I’ve definitely developed in all kinds of way. I think I have a lot more confidence than I had before, but I think I’ve just learned so much from this journey and the people about the industry. At some point, there’s going to be some kind of book where we pour it all down. Yeah, I just feel like I’ve learned so much, and also, another thing that I think is important is that there is some timing and some luck in these things that we’ve done really well. The difference from doing really well like we have to somebody who has done not nearly as well, the difference in effort and so on might not be anything at all, and we have to remember that. There are people out there that are incredibly good at what they do, but they just didn’t hit the luck or the timing and so on. I feel very privileged in that sense that we really hit something and got really fortunate.

Tanya:  Yeah, absolutely, no, it’s very true. You pique my interest. What would you book be called if you put it all down?

Heini:  I think this definitely wouldn’t be the title, but something like this is that I – my father, like I said, was at the university, and he’s a statistician, right? I grew up thinking about things like making smart calls and being careful and so on, and when it comes to what I do now, I really don’t believe in that. I really much more believe in a just do it mentality where you just got to do it. You learn so much from doing things. Obviously, you’re not going to jump from 50 meters down to some concrete and kill yourself, right? You really start learning when you start doing things. I think that’s incredibly important. Knowledge and learning from others is fantastic, but don’t turn everything in – don’t make things complicated. Make the other thing. Make it simple.

I think the art here is really to just do things and keep them simple, which is not easy. They’re really, really, hard. I think there was – I think this was – it might have been Hemingway or some of the big authors that said – in a letter, said, oh, I’m sorry about the long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short letter. People really think of that in the reverse way. It’s going to take a long time to do a long letter, but that’s not true. Really, it’s hard to take that down to half a page and with the right stuff. That’s what’s difficult, so learn from them, but keep it simple. Don’t try and listen to 50 things at the same time. Boil it down to two things that are important and go for that. This is getting a little bit abstract here, but anyway, just do it and keep it simple.

Tanya:  I love it. Maybe even as a book title suggestion we can do something around be careful or be an entrepreneur. No, that sucks.

Heini:  It needs a little bit of work.

Tanya:  Yeah, that needs a little bit of work. I was thinking of – you were saying you really have to be careful, or you were taught to be careful.

Heini:  Yeah, I was taught to be careful. I’m a little bit of the opposite right now. Just do it now, right?

Tanya:  Just do it. Yeah, well, that’s it. I mean, being careful and entrepreneurship is so at odds. To be an entrepreneur, you have to have an incredible risk appetite.

Heini:  You got to take your chances, and just go for it. That’s really something that did take me some time…

Tanya:  To develop.

Heini:  Yeah. 

Tanya:  What happened that allowed you to learn that coming from somebody that was careful?

Heini:  When I started seeing it, I remember some of the early – I don’t want to call them mentors. The people that I met early in my career is they just said, hey, just do more. Just do it. I saw some people that, honestly, were reckless, and I learned from them. From my background and looking at somebody who’s reckless and then finding some middle ground right in between there was very useful. One thing I do remember clearly was – I think this was Richard Branson’s first book where he talks about doing the airline and all those things, and I honestly thought, holy shit, you’re not very smart. You’re not thinking this through. Then I realized, well, actually, he isn’t thinking things through, and he’s being very successful. I actually picked up a lot from that and that mindset. You’re going to make some decisions now. You’re not going to have full knowledge about the outcome here, but you’ve got to go for it 

Tanya:  Trust that you’ll figure it out. If you don’t all figure it out, you can team up with other people to help you figure it out.

Heini:  Yeah, and you’ll problem solve, anyway.

Tanya:  Yeah, oh, that’s great. If you could rewind back ten years and give a piece of advice to your younger self, what would you say?

Heini:  Yeah, ten years, what the hell I’ve…

Tanya:  Do the math?

Heini:  Yes, exactly, where am I at, and where are the kids at and so on? I think this is something I do anyway but just do it even more is really enjoy the journey. I’m not sure it’s an advice as such, but imagine the privilege. Growing up in the middle of nowhere and starting to build this amazing company with these amazing people and having the privilege to move your family to Silicon Valley and the experiences we’ve seen here has really been amazing and a privilege. You really got to enjoy the journey.

Tanya:  No, absolutely, it’s a great reminder. It’s almost like we need to be reminded of that every day, stand and being grateful and just being present, and your entire experience of life changes.

Heini:  Yeah, exactly.

Tanya:  Yeah, well, brilliant. Thank you so much. How do people get in touch with you if they want to say hi?

Heini:  Sure, I’m on all the social media, Twitter and Facebook. Really, I’d love for anyone to check out the Raw Startup on YouTube and maybe get some advice on how to build their startup.

Tanya:  Awesome, well, Heini, thank you so much for being on the Unmessable show today. I really loved your thinking and approach and appreciate your time.

Heini:  It was a pleasure, and thank you very much for having me on.