20VC: Why Great VCs Know The Opportunity In Hardware, Physical Stores Will Not Disappear and The Importance of Consumer Brand with Josh Udashkin @ Raden

Josh Udashkin is the Founder and CEO @ Raden, essentially making the unsexy sexy with a design-forward app-connected piece of luggage that provides a superior end-to-end travel experience. Prior to founding Raden, Udashkin practiced law and did international development for Canadian shoe company, Aldo. To date, Raden have raised funds from our friends @ First Round Capital, Lerer Hippeau, Pritzker Group and many more incredible investors. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Josh came to found Raden and what the a-ha moment was for him? 2.) Why does Josh believe in the benefits of the dual approach to selling both being online and with physical retail stores? 3.) Why have we seen such innovation in the space in the last 30 years? The incumbents have said, they are bad at selling online, what are they doing wrong? What is Josh doing to optimise the process? 4.) Why is Josh bullish on omni-channel retail? What are the benefits? 5.) How are hardware products innovating on the hardware as a service model and integrating physical retail products with superior mobile experiences? 6.) What trends have we seen in investing in hardware products in the last 5 years or so? Why is hardware becoming more attractive an investment field? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode: Josh’s Fave Book: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE Josh’s Fave Blog: Business of Fashion As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC and Harry on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! If you are looking to make your move into the world of VC or improve your investing skills, Venture Capital Unlocked: Secrets of Silicon Valley Investing is a must! It is a 2 week crash course at Stanford run by Stanford Professional Development Centre and 500 Startups. You will learn the mechanics of all things Silicon Valley investing, check it out here. The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa. Lees is like the TOMS Shoes or Warby Parker of the mattress industry. Here are 3 reasons why they are the best place to get your new mattress: Leesa has done away with the awkward mattress showroom experience by allowing a fully online experience, shipping to your doorstep for free. Their 10 inch mattresses come in all sizes and is crafted with 3 unique layers o foam including2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of really cool latex like foam design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are made 100% in the US or UK and they give you a 100 night trial, to make sure the mattress is perfect for you. Go to leesa.com/VC and enter promo code VC75 to get $75 off!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Now it's Friday and that can only mean one thing here at the 20 minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings at H Stebbings on Snapchat. It's time to meet an incredible founder and very rarely do I get immensely excited about a product on first checking it out. But this happened straight away with today's guest, Josh Udashkin, founder at Raden. Now Josh is one of those super interesting people who goes from being a securities lawyer to hedge fund to founding Raden, who are essentially making suitcases sexy and really, really cool. They have phone chargers, they have scales in their bag so you don't exceed the weight allowance, and trackers so you always know where your bag is. Seriously, really, really cool. And if you're in New York, check out their store. Apparently it's unbelievable. I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, being in London,

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  but apparently that's a must if you're in New York. And Raden raised funding from our friends at First Round, Lira Hippo, and the Pritzker Group, just to name a few. However, before we deep dive on sexy suitcases with Josh, did you know that if it takes you less than five minutes to fall asleep, then you're likely sleep deprived? The ideal amount of time is about 10 minutes. So head to your Lisa mattress when this episode is over and see how long it takes you and why the Lisa mattress. Well, they are expertly crafted with three distinct layers, one of memory foam and one of latex light foam designed to keep you cool. They're also completely avoiding the showroom experience, offering an entirely online experience, meaning they have a lower cost structure reflected in their prices, which are really simple and really transparent.

• 1:27Harry Stebbings?

  And once bought online, the mattresses are then shipped to your door if you live in the UK, US and Canada, for free that is. And you get a 100 night trial to ensure that the mattress is perfect for you. So get yours now by heading over to leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 at checkout for an incredible $75 off. Now, if seeing some of the offices of top Silicon Valley VCs through the lens of my camera on Snapchat is not enough for you, then VC Unlocked really is a must. It's a joint program run by Stanford Professional Development Center and 500 startups for anyone looking to make their move into the world of VC or improve their standing in the VC community. You'll learn the tips, tactics and strategies from some of the very best.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  in the industry, including the likes of Dave McClure, Mark Suster and Jason Lemkin, just to name a few. However, there is an expiry date on the application, so all applications must be in by the first of July and you can apply at five hundred dot VC for the chance to make lifelong connections in the investor industry. It really is a must. Enough from me, so it's time to hand over to the main man, Joshie Dashkin, founder at Raden.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:42Harry Stebbings?

  Josh, welcome to the show. It's absolutely fantastic to have you on and I'm so grateful to you for joining us today.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Great to be here.

• 2:49Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I want to start off today with a bit about you and how a very talented securities lawyer at a hedge fund came to be a founder of one of the most cool and exciting brands in in Raden.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  So I was a very, very bad lawyer, Harry. I worked, so I'm actually, I'm Canadian and I graduated from JD MBA in Toronto and then I went to go work at a large hedge fund law firm in New York City, but I spent most of my days actually trolling the stores on Madison and Fifth Avenue in New York and spending a lot of time in retail. And that led to an opportunity working with Aldo Group, the footwear company, where I spent two years travelling almost every single day to different markets, building the Aldo brand and kind of through that experience saw a lot of luggage and travel products in the airports and carousels of the world and kind of came to the, you know, strange feeling, why had nobody, you know, ever looked at this this category, you know, there are very few great brands, there are a couple of luxury products,

• 3:45Speaker 02

  you know, the merchandising seemed all over the place, the pricing seemed all over the place. And it was kind of this aha moment, as strange as it may sound for a then twenty nine year old guy, I'm going to make the world's best suitcase company.

• 3:58Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I've had that many times, don't worry. Okay, so that's a fascinating realisation to come to. I'm really intrigued that in that period you saw a massive change surely in kind of consumer shopping behaviours when you were with Aldo with the rise of kind of mobile and and the rise of online shopping. So how did you see consumer behaviour change in that time?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  I think I saw a change twofold. I think I saw first and foremost a merchandising change. So I think we started to see that we had these power SKUs that really were selling 70% of the assortment. So we would make a couple of products, they would turn into bestsellers, and the bestsellers were really carrying the entire business. And then, you know, when I looked across the landscape in other categories, you started to see this emerge around certain constructions. So I started to look at headphones and Beats and wireless speakers and Sonos and then Fitbit. And you started to see these kind of mono construction industrial design products really kind of winning the day in a lot of categories, even in footwear, which was surprising. And then, of course, as you mentioned, you really

• 5:03Speaker 02

  saw the rise of, you know, the cannibalization of brick and mortar shopping by, you know, online shopping. You know, we said at Aldo that Aldo.com was our number one store by tenfold and very, very efficient store at that. And then, I think, simultaneously started to see these kind of unsexy categories really emerge. You know, the mattress boom of the last two years, and I happen to know some of the founders of those companies, you know, where younger people are kind of reimagining industries that had not been looked at by anybody in 30, 40 years through great e-commerce experiences and also product innovation.

• 5:38Harry Stebbings?

  I'm really intrigued. We talked about their kind of online and physical retail stores. And instead of going for actually one approach, although you do sell brilliantly online, you've also got a very beautifully designed store in New York.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:50Harry Stebbings?

  According to Ryan Bassett, I've been told. Sadly, I haven't been yet.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  It's actually right across the street from Ryan's office, so he gets to see it every day.

• 5:57Harry Stebbings?

  So I'm really intrigued to see how you think of the future of physical retail stores, and then how you came to figure out the design and the layout of yours to make it so enticing to the consumer.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you need both, first of all, or at least even a pop-up version of both. I think it's very hard to build brand, which is, you know, first and foremost what we're up to here, without some type of, you know, physical footprint or place for consumers to interact with you. You being, you know, even your retail associate and how they're trained and then your product and then the way you display your product. So kind of from the first ideation of Raden, I knew that we needed to launch, you know, with some type of physical space. It's very difficult to communicate your brand values and also your product features only online. And so I worked with a guy who designs concert stage sets for people like Jay-Z and other

• 6:47Speaker 02

  artists in conceiving this coliseum of 365 Raden bags that are floating around kind of this central display area. And even that was really meaningful in the sense of showing bags that are so light or cases that are so light that they float, they're so beautiful that we want you to see them from every angle. And then, you know, really showing the round trip, which is really what the circle denotes. And so as far as kind of the way we built the store, we were really thinking that we needed a place as a new brand for people to trust us. And I think that's one of the hardest things for e-commerce companies to do is to get people to place their trust in making a purchase from you if you're a new business.

• 7:28Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm really intrigued, you hit upon the brand there. So I have to hit upon a article that I just read from Ben Lehrer about you. And it says, I'm quoting here, I didn't have a great memory, "His DNA is fundamentally different about the long game and you have a brand building mentality that's all about the product and the customer and telling the story." So I'm really intrigued is how you've gone about that in a way that makes suitcases, you know, traditionally, no offence, very unsexy. And how you've made them actually very attractive and a luxury item. How do you approach that as a producer?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  So I think it's, you know, industrial design first. I was fortunate enough two years ago to have looked far and wide for great designers and had actually worked with some other people before. But I met Kenny Sweet, who had worked on the Beats project for a number of years and we really vibed. And I had this merchandising concept around a single, almost unlined product, you know, that was very stark and looked like many of the products that we've been buying today. And it was something you just didn't see in the luggage business. The luggage business is kind of a Mr. Potato Head business, I call it. The traditional brands, the companies take catalog parts from a number of different factories and then they put them together on some randomly designed cyborg shell and

• 8:43Speaker 02

  then they spit it out to the consumer and they slap a logo right in the middle of the box. And maybe that worked for a while because there really were not any greatly designed products of high quality or anything else. And I think for me, it really started with, what's the icon of design and how do I get consumers to really want to buy something that's as beautiful as it is functional? So that's really kind of where it started as far as brand building. And then you layer onto it all of your digital imagery, your photography, your graphics. We're launching videos in a couple of weeks and then it starts to become this immersive 365 degree thing. I think you see a lot of other hardware companies and if, whenever I talk to people

• 9:24Speaker 02

  starting these things who are so focused only on the product and getting it out the door and whatever it's going to be named, that they forget that in order to build something, you need to communicate your values and it needs to be exciting. I mean, it needs to be sexy to sell.

• 9:38Harry Stebbings?

  And you mentioned the incumbents there. And something that very much amused me when I was doing the research for this interview was the large incumbents actually state in their annual, official annual reports, this is, that they're not good at selling online. So I'm intrigued, what are they doing wrong and what are you doing and what can be done to optimize the online sales process, do you think?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Well, I don't want to give them too many secrets on how to sell great online, but I think one of the things that's interesting for us is because we're going with this monosqueu plan, it's very easy for us to communicate kind of first and foremost our values as a brand and show the imagery, but then even on the product level, right now, we make a single product in multiple sizes and colorways and we'll continue to do that, so we'll be launching some other sizes later in the year. But we have an opportunity to go really deep and I think that's what all the great new digital brands do. And I say for us, we're a digital brand because we don't really consider ourselves direct to consumer. I'm not really a big believer in the whole direct to consumer narrative in every single category. I think on

• 10:42Speaker 02

  omnichannel retail for me is the way to go and for others. But we really have this great opportunity to tell a great story. So that's great. And then go very deep on the product. So really show the functionality, the imagery, the interior, how it's going to work with the customer experience and the pairing moment and everything else. And I think that's the opportunity there is to go so deep into it. You know, by the end of the experience, the friction has been removed as far as the purchase.

• 11:08Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm intrigued, why are you bullish on omnichannel purchasing then? What are the reasons behind this for you?

• 11:14Speaker 02

  You know, first of all, I still really get excited, you know, even to go back to your last question, I really get excited by retail and physical retail. And I think the excitement for me is around building these like FAO shorts or Disney style experiences where it feels exciting again to go into a store. There's been no reason to go into stores because the stores are as banal as it is. Being online is actually more exciting sometimes than going into these marble colosseums or whatever else it is on all the high streets of the world. So I'm bullish on the opportunity to create exciting retail display and retail experiences that are different. Even a couple of weeks ago in our shop in New York, we hosted an event where we actually kept the shop open from sundown to sunrise, simulating a layover in an airport.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  And we had, you know, 30 or 40 actors portraying all the people you might meet on a layover at an airport. And we had lots of people there. And I think there's just an opportunity to make going into stores exciting. And then just from a purely practical standpoint, it's quite expensive, you know, when you're building a marketing funnel, directing, you know, tons of traffic to your single website selling anything, whether it's mattresses or luggage or razors or anything else. And so we really, you know, believe that we can partner up with other great first online retailers and then, you know, brick and mortar in 2017, who can, you know, help spread the word about, you know, our product.

• 12:34Harry Stebbings?

  And I have to ask, running a VC show, I always hear the same thing from VCs and it's, ooh, hardware, it's just so hard. And we spoke about this a little bit before, before the interview. So I'm really intrigued as to how you respond to this and whether you think it's a fair assessment and how you weave your way around it.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Oh, I think it's. Totally fair, you know, you really have to have the stomach for it. Um, I think when you look at a hardware business like Raden and a number of the other ones, you you look at uh, it's multiple companies in one. So you have a luggage firm, you have an electronics firm, you have mobile development, firmware development, then you have all the things around building a brand. Then you're a retailer, you're a distributor, you're a marketer, multiple companies that would have otherwise gotten funding. But for being wrapped up in this entire uh value proposition uh in one experience. And so VCs uh who are great at it definitely know that that there's a huge opportunity there. We've seen some pretty good exits. But the ones who really are, you know, shouldn't be doing it or don't understand

• 13:35Speaker 02

  hardware or building brands, you know, for me personally, I I don't have that experience with working with any of them, but I tend to generally stay away even when I get a request for a meeting, don't really want to be their first foray into investing in a hardware company.

• 13:49Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm intrigued, what's the hardest part of the hardware element? Is it the supply chain management? Is it the prototyping phase? Is it manufacturing? What's been the most challenging for you? And what's been actually the the most easy that you didn't expect?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  So it was very hard when I was on my own with, you know, my own means and everything else. And then I think I I got very lucky, I should say. So I ended up partnering up with some guys who were leaving Quirky about a year ago. And so I actually had an easier time around some of the prototyping, you know, and manufacturing. I also will say that, you know, our factory really is my first VC before I ever had VCs. I I really went there to pitch and my advice to entrepreneurs is, you know, do the sourcing work. And a lot of the the things around VC will come easier because they're really the people that are going to invest in building your prototypes. Um, I would say the difficult thing is coordinating the timing uh around when you're going to release and kind of when to hire and bring on all the various teams because you have

• 14:48Speaker 02

  uh, in my case, a mobile development happening simultaneously with a physical hardware development and then being able to produce, you know, enough units and have the the mobile application, the firmware respond all in the same period of time. Having enough capital at the time in order to be able to launch something that actually works. I'm not the first person to have, you know, extreme challenges with that. We were going to launch our company in November and we just didn't have enough product that was made in time in order to hit holiday. So then you kind of get forced into much post-holiday and you have to have the means to be able to do that. So it's kind of a, it's a balancing act. That's really the hardest thing, I think.

• 15:26Harry Stebbings?

  Because obviously you mentioned the integration of the hardware and the software. So I'd love to discuss how kind of IoT business is now. Hardware as a service that combine the very best of physical products with the superior mobile experiences. So what's your take on this and how you navigate around it?

• 15:43Speaker 02

  I mean, I really think that these are the products of the future. You know, you really end up, when everything works well, you end up with a superior physical product. You know, a superior bag or speaker or headphone or whatever it may be with a very highly engaging mobile experience, which, you know, prompts the user. You know, we call our case a Trojan horse in a way because we see already that the engagement is very high with the app when people are traveling. And then you have this opportunity to continue to delight the customer with your brand and your service and provide all sorts of information in our case about travel or fitness if you're Fitbit or, you know, music recommendations if you're Sonos. You really have this great opportunity to continue to engage long after the purchase,

• 16:26Speaker 02

  which is something that really very few other physical products are able to deliver. And for me, you know, I already see even around customer experience, you know, when you can communicate with your customer at the touch of a button on an application, that's the customer experience of the future. Instead of having to dial 1-888 and get somebody on the line and coordinate some type of return. For us, it's, you know, instant.

• 16:49Harry Stebbings?

  Does Raden have a kind of SaaS play in terms of recurring revenue from the software side of the business? Similar to like a Fitbit has with their premium software? Does Raden employ that as a monetization option?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  I think it could down the road. I think, you know, like any of this, you need to have enough units out in the world and really learn. I think one of the things we're really doing right now is listening. All of this is responsive to what customers want and don't want and how they use the app. And I think that's what we're going to be doing for the next, as long as, you know, I can plan. But it's not hard to see how down the road that may happen.

• 17:22Harry Stebbings?

  And we mentioned VCs there and pitching to factories is actually the first VC. But obviously as a VC show, I have to touch on the fundraising game. And you've recently raised a seed round?

• 17:33Speaker 02

  We actually raised a seed round about a year and change ago. It wasn't announced, and I guess that's where being a lawyer is actually quite convenient. So I didn't file any of the securities regulatory forms. So it never gets picked up by all of the TechCrunch and all of these things. And for me, I view the VCs as great, great partners for me, or especially the ones that I have, and great relationships. But celebrating raising money is not something I'm that into. And so I decided ultimately to stay stealth through our entire development, which is almost two years, and not announce anything until we launched. So the round that was announced actually was over a year old. And so it was led by First Round Capital and Lara.

• 18:13Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And I'm really intrigued then. Brilliant investors, absolutely the top, cream of the crop. So how did you come to meet the investors? And how was the fundraising journey for you then as the entrepreneur?

• 18:23Speaker 02

  So it was actually quite long, and it began long, long before I actually thought I was going to raise any money for this, because it started as a much smaller idea. And I actually was introduced to Ben Lara because I was sitting at a wedding with one of his associates. And I just went in for meetings really to talk about what I was doing, but there was no hard ask. I was still in the prototyping phase. And I would say Ben quite smartly waited until I had a working prototype before taking, you know, the leap. And similar with First Round, I really, you know, spent a lot of time with other hardware entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs in, you know, e-commerce businesses. And then was introduced to First Round that way. And kind of the whole thing came together last

• 19:06Speaker 02

  summer. But it was almost a year, a year in the making of really just talking about the vision. of the company and what the strategy was to get to launch before I even set any type of, you know, ask as far as capital. And I think sometimes founders, especially first time founders like myself, you need to almost raise capital when you're ready to raise capital, which means you really have a plan and a prototype and you understand when you're going to launch. I wasn't ready to do that for almost a year.

• 19:34Harry Stebbings?

  And I mean, there, when you look back, as we said, cream of the crop, B C, sorry. So what do you think you did well? Was it the serendipity of you not actually deliberately going out to raise? Was that was that it that made you do so well? So I'm intrigued. What did you do well? And then what did you do badly in the fundraising process that you'd like to improve on with the A and the B?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I built relationships over, you know, a considerable period of time, and I think I still do. I think sometimes that can be a negative thing because there's maybe no urgency. I think one of the things great fundraisers do is create this sense of urgency around around a raise. I think one of the things that I tend to do well, which is crazy when you think about, you know, the fact that this is a case is I'm super passionate about it. So I really do, like any founder, you know, but I gotten crazy about, you know, suitcases and how beautiful they can be and how useful they can be and how much they can change your travel experience and how having a great product really does lead to a better experience in kind of every sector of consumer. And so and that can be kind of a negative thing sometimes when you're raising money

• 20:39Speaker 02

  because the more emotional you get about things, you know, and people inevitably say no to you, it can it can hurt and, you know, sometimes you can say things you can regret.

• 20:49Harry Stebbings?

  How did you deal with that? You know, getting a no is an obvious part of every fundraising. How did you get that when you're so passionate about the product and the mission behind the company?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  I think the first ones are hard because, you know, you're rolling in what you know, what you think is the most beautiful product. And you say, how do you not see this? Because, you know, the industry in our case is a forty billion dollar a year business globally. So it's not even really about creating, in our case, you know, an opportunity or creating a new Like you'd see in the fitness wearables seven or eight years ago. It's really about diverting demand to something that in your mind is clearly superior. But you just kind of have to step away from it. And one of the great things is there are many great investors in many cities. And eventually, just like dating or anything else, you you find your match.

• 21:39Harry Stebbings?

  And you said there about relationship building with VCs. And we always hear about the warm intro. So would you ever email a VC cold, completely out of the blue? Is that kind of too bullish for you? Or is that something that is well within your your reach?

• 21:54Speaker 02

  No, it's well within my reach. I do it all the time. I I cold email people all the time in kind of all walks of life. People we want to work with creatively, on video, on branding, on photography. And of course, in VC. There are certain VCs who have awesome reputations and who've really been instrumental in businesses like mine. And, you know, just like anything else, if you want something, you go get it. It doesn't necessarily always mean, by the way, that it's about capital. It can be about, you know, getting advice or people who've been in the trenches and know what it's like to build one of these things. But warm intros are great. But sometimes if you if you need to, you have to just do what you have to do. It gets easier, you know, after you've launched because then you're Google-able. Takes away some of the referencing problems. But no, I do both.

• 22:39Harry Stebbings?

  And then I want to finish on one final question on on kind of financing the hardware game itself now. And ask, why was Kickstarter, Indiegogo not in the roadmap for you? And why did you choose VC funding to start with?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Oh, just terrible, you know, customer expectations as a buyer of some of those products. And and very, very empathetically with the founders there because I know how hard it is to actually get get these products out the door. I just feel like it's starting to become, first of all, very, very difficult to build a brand off of those platforms. I think they're they're good at generating a certain level of sales. But then you never actually build, you know, a brand or any type of marketing funnel or really figure out, you know, actually how to ship these these products efficiently to consumers with great customer experience. And then, you know, as a somebody who shops quite often, we're really in an economy, I feel, where People don't want to wait for anything, so you don't want to put something in their mind and then,

• 23:35Speaker 02

  you know, it goes away for, uh, you know, a year and then it comes to the U and your expectation level is very high. And then you inevitably are very disappointed because it doesn't do or look like what you thought it would, because that's all normal in building hardware. So for us, you know, it was really about launching and then being able to ship product. And then you still have problems because we sold out of all the product that we had made, even with venture funding and, and working capital funding and everything else. And so now we're, you know, fifteen day, uh, shipping times when really we're meant to be a same day or, or second day business. So you're kind of always dealing with this, this issue of customer expectations and trying to just delight at every opportunity.

• 24:13Harry Stebbings?

  And I'd love to finish with a quick fire round now. So I say a short statement and ready to go. Perfect. So your favorite book and why?

• 24:21Speaker 02

  It's always the one I'm currently reading, which is Shoe Dog, which is the story of the founder of Nike. It's just super interesting. All the passion and all the, the soap opera dramatics of building one of these great companies. And you kind of live it live when you're trying to do it yourself. And so I like reading about it. At least you don't feel so, uh, alone sometimes.

• 24:39Harry Stebbings?

  And then which consumer brand do you most admire and look up to?

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Uh, Apple, you know, really, really beautiful design, incredible retailing concept and just super useful products, but that don't really sacrifice brand. Maybe Dyson would be, would be a close second.

• 24:55Harry Stebbings?

  And then your favorite blog or newsletter, what are your must reads when they come in?

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Uh, I read business of fashion every day, really have always and even now more so. I'm very, very interested in the intersection of fashion and technology and all these products. And I think for me, even, you know, when I was out raising VC, we have quite a few people who are, uh, great retailers and have great retailing experience. And so I'm very, very interested in kind of that industry, industry and the intersection of both.

• 25:22Harry Stebbings?

  And then if you could go through the process again, what would you do differently?

• 25:25Speaker 02

  What would I do differently? I think I would, that's a, that's a tough one. I think I would probably have travelled to San Francisco more often. I think I spent a lot of time in New York because I was really focused on building a team here. I was spending a lot of time in Asia and I don't think I really got to know many investors at the time outside of New York. And it just so happened that Rob Hayes from First Round happened to have been in New York and that's really how we connected. When I go out to do this again, I'll probably spend more time on the West Coast.

• 25:55Harry Stebbings?

  And then who's been your biggest mentor throughout your career?

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Oh, my dad. No question about it. My father's a multi-time entrepreneur. First call at the beginning of the day and at night. Although he was in the meatpacking business, so nothing to do with making beautiful cases that connect to a mobile device, but in some cases, business is business. Building a team is building a team and making sure that your customers are happy is the same no matter what you're doing.

• 26:21Harry Stebbings?

  And then I want to finish now on the future vision for Raden and the next five-year roadmap. What for you to install?

• 26:27Speaker 02

  I think really for us, it's continuing to build beautiful, high-quality products, but most of our roadmap is really around the mobile experience and really connecting with a travel experience that engages users of our product and provides them with all sorts of other information about where they're going and the airports that they're travelling through and the planes that they're getting on. I think that's really where we're going as a company.

• 26:53Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Josh, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been absolutely fantastic to hear about your incredible journey with Raden and I'm so grateful to you for sharing with us.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Thank you, Harry.

• 27:04Harry Stebbings?

  What a fantastic episode and so incredible to hear Josh's journey in building Raden and such a pleasure to have him on the show. And if you want to stay in the loop with the 20 Minute VC, then you can add me on Snapchat at HDebbings and sign up for newsletter on the20minutavec.com so you never have to miss out on an episode or an update from us. Now, before we leave you and go into the weekend, I have to thank Lisa for making my weekend of sleep that is coming so much more enjoyable. The thing I used to have with mattresses is I didn't know enough, so all the different types merely confused me. But with Lisa, their mattresses are designed to take the guesswork out of buying a mattress. For example, The whole idea of soft, medium and firm mattresses ignores the fact that there's actually a best feel, and Lisa call it universal, and it helps almost everybody sleep better.

• 27:49Harry Stebbings?

  And even better, at Lisa you have a hundred nights to trial the mattress to ensure that it's perfect for you. So take advantage of this and check out leesa.com/vc and enter the promo code VC75 at checkout for a whopping $75 off. That's L-E-E-S-A dot com forward slash V C for $75 off with VC75. And as always, I really can't emphasise enough how much I appreciate all your support and tuning into the show. I always love to hear your feedback, so email me at harry@thetwintiminetc dot com and I'm very forward to seeing you next week.