--- author: EO date: '2026-04-28' guest: '' layout: post.njk source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlbVneKLyD0 speaker: EO tags: - recruiting-challenges - ai-impact - startup-philosophy - founder-journey - problem-solving title: AI 浪潮下的招聘困境与 Parform 的深耕之道 summary: 本文深度解析了在 AI 时代招聘行业面临的效率挑战、信息过载问题，以及 Parform 创始人 John Kim 如何通过对根本问题的深挖、个人经历的沉淀以及对信任与关系的重视，将一家初创公司打造成招聘领域的创新者。内容涵盖创业初期的迷茫、关键转折点、以及‘深耕’解决问题的核心哲学，同时展现了AI在自动化与人本关怀之间的平衡。 insight: '' draft: true series: '' category: ai-application area: tech-engineering project: [] people: - John Kim companies_orgs: - Parform - Hightouch - Facebook - OpenAI products_models: [] media_books: [] status: evergreen --- ### 招聘的低效困境与 AI 时代的挑战 招聘是领导者和企业最重要的工作之一，但它正变得异常低效。五年前，联系 500-700 名工程师或许能成功招聘一人；两年前，这一数字跃升至 1500 人。而近期的 AI 浪潮，更是将这一数字推至 5000 人，使得招聘过程“噪音”剧增，信息过载，让每一次接触都变得不再“特别”。John Kim 认为，**稀缺性**定义了事物的价值，也包括招聘中的“特别”。因此，他相信在未来，当每次招聘需要发出数千封邮件时，**信任、关系和通路**将变得尤为重要。基于此洞察，Parform 采取了与招聘人员合作而非取代他们的策略，并为此付出了可观的成本。 Parform 的创始人兼 CEO **John Kim** 分享了公司的成就：至今已融资 6500 万美元，并在 2025 年实现了营收 **10 倍增长**。他们服务的客户群体广泛，从早期初创公司到**Palunteer、Rippling、Dakagon** 等上市公司。Parform 的核心定位是成为一个招聘平台，让招聘卓越人才变得如同按下按钮一样简单。
Original English recruiting. It's the most important thing you should be doing as a leader, as a company, yet it's so inefficient. And I heard from a recruiter that well respected in the industry that 5 years ago, if you reach out to 500 to 700 engineers, you could probably make a hire as a recruiter. 2 years ago, that number jumped to 1500 engineers to make one hire, which was already so difficult to manage. With AI recently, it's 5,000. So essentially, AI is actually making hiring a lot more noisier. It's bogging us all down. If you get reached out about thousand opportunities, it's not special anymore. Meaning comes from scarcity. So I think even more in the future, if it takes 5,000 emails to get one engineer hired, trust, relationships, and access, these things become more and more important. So I think that was our deliberate decision to work with recruiters rather than replacing them. Yeah, we paid out 50 million soon to our recruiters. Hey guys, I'm John Kim, one of the founders and CEO of Parform. We uh raised 65 million uh to date and in 2025 we uh 10xed our revenue. We work with customers from early stage startups all the way to public companies uh like Palunteer, Rippling, Dakagon, A Bridge. Parapform is a a hiring platform that makes hiring exceptional talent as easy as pressing a button.
### 成长经历与创业初心：从“ invincible”到“ urgency” John Kim 的童年因父亲工作原因，辗转于新加坡、澳大利亚、洛杉矶和韩国，11-12 岁时便已历经多个文化。在澳大利亚，创业精神并不受鼓励，人们更倾向于“待在自己的轨道上”。尽管外公曾鼓励他学法律，并希望他成为律师，但家庭原因使其走上了不同的道路。 成长的过程中，John Kim 以为律师就是人生的目标，并曾为此努力。然而，18 岁那年的一场重病，彻底改变了他的生命观。在医院检查时，他意外得知自己肺部可能存在严重问题。那一刻，他对生命的看法从“无所不能”转变为对有限时间的反思：“如果只剩下 1 到 3 年，我会做什么？我会如何度过？”这次经历深刻地重塑了他的思维模式，并加速了他对人生目标的追求——**创办自己的公司**。 原以为有 65 年的宽裕时间去实现创业梦想，但在 3 年的紧迫感驱使下，他意识到必须立刻行动。每六个月一次的健康检查，虽然最终被证实是虚惊一场，但那份对未知的“期盼”与“煎熬”，反而成为他认为“**塞翁失马，焉知非福**”的转折点。
Original English Ever since the age of four, I sort of moved around a lot uh because of my dad's job. So yeah, I lived in Singapore, Australia, LA, uh and Korea as well. When I was 11, 12. In Australia, like entrepreneurship and going out on your own is not very celebrated. You're sort of told to stay in your lane, like do what's sort of uh comfortable. My grandpa encouraged me uh to go to law school. He went to law school and he really wanted to be a lawyer but uh he had to sort of take a different path because of uh his family. And so growing up I always thought you know that was the goal and I I did but um there was definitely a moment uh that I remember that I um you know started uh living my life and treating my time and and what I'm going to do very very differently. I think I was 18 back then. I like was very sick for like three months and so um you know I went to like the hospital to get something checked up in Korea. I walked in and uh I was the only uh young person there. I remember a lot of people there were quite old like maybe in their 80s and '9s so it felt very out of place. I obviously didn't really think that anything could go wrong. I just thought like oh I'm young. I'm you know I'm invincible. That type of mindset. And when the results came out, the doctor sort of said like, "Hey, by the way, there's like something in your lungs and um you know, it could be something really bad." And I think when I heard that, everything changed. I started thinking, "Oh, well, in the most extreme sense, if I have only 1 year or 3 years left to live, uh what am I going to do? What am I going to do differently? How am I going to spend time?" And that actually really changed, I think, all of my brain chemistry and what I decide to do. back of my mind, I always knew that I wanted to start and build my own company. When it comes to thinking that it's a big decision to start a company, it's what I always wanted to do, what I wanted to dedicate my life to. I thought that, okay, when I'm like 75, 85 years old, that's like my timeline. So, I had, you know, 65 years to figure something out, right? So, if you think about it in your 65 year timeline, then all of a sudden you push things back, right? If you want to do something, you push it back. If you want to try achieve a goal, you think you have 10 years, 20 years. But um if you think about that 65 years in three-year terms, you are sort of forced to prioritize and then think about what you really want. I think maybe that event made me think, okay, I have 3 years to make that happen, so let's do it now. And I think it added that urgency to start for the next 3 years. Every 6 months, I had to get it checked up to see if it's anything bad. So there was this sort of anticipation every 6 months of like what's going to happen. And turns out it was uh sort of like a false alarm. But I look back to that moment and you know although it felt pretty terrible. Maybe it was actually a blessing in disguise. I was actually on a business trip to New York and that's when I met my co-founder Jeff at Parapform. So I went around asking uh other people around us uh which were mostly founders asking them what is your number one problem right now and how much would you pay us to solve it? Uh and almost all of them said uh hiring and they said they would pay us 40k per hire. So we were like hey maybe if we make five hires each this year you know that's like maybe equivalent of like a salary. So maybe this is a good business to start. So we set out on a journey to make five hires each. So the first thing we did was actually become recruiters ourselves. What we started doing was like we scraped the web. We looked at, you know, your Twitter profile, your GitHub profile, like everything really online about you and we sort of try to combine that with like your professional experience, like your LinkedIn, your resume. And then, um, you know, 3 months, 4 months in, we were not even close to making five hires, let alone one. And so, we were like, okay, like clearly this is like super inefficient. What should we do? While we were exploring the problem space, we realized like it's actually like trust, access, and relationships. I could find a great engineer at Facebook or OpenAI right now, but doesn't mean that person will respond to me or know me or even interested in the opportunity, right? Whereas like maybe if your friend reached out, you might consider the opportunity or someone you respect, right? So the next idea we pivoted to was a referral marketplace, referral platform where essentially our startup customers could post bounties, referral bounties like 5 10k for the engineers they were trying to hire and turn anyone in the world to your recruiter. But there was not much retention. Um I think we overestimated how many people each person knows, how well connected someone is, and um it wasn't like their main profession and job. So they um didn't come back to the platform. You release it to the market and no one wants it. I think that you know it wasn't great. We were sort of hitting a dead end for three four months. Nothing was happening and then um one user group started uh using it a lot. We saw that uh user group growing and these were like independent recruiters, recruiting agencies, head hunters and it made so much sense. They're very well connected compared to most people. Uh it's their job. It's their profession. They're financially incentivized. So they started sort of um coming back and using the platform continuously. And I think that's when we realized, oh, we, you know, built something people want and then it scaled to where Parapform is today. We're really focused on how do we match the right person to the right opportunity. That's done not by giving them a thousand options and telling them to choose, but giving them, you know, three or four that actually really match what they're looking for. When you don't use AI correctly, I think it loses meaning and makes things not special, if you will. I think the word special is basically directly correlated to scarcity and directly correlated to quality over quantity. I think maybe AI can make you know 70 80% of what recruiters do and automate that. But I think it's like the last sort of 20% like the human touch I think is like very very important. Meaning comes from scarcity. So, uh, at the time, um, I was actually in Australia trying to get my visa to come back to the US. The time zone is obviously really difficult. I remember my routine was sort of waking up at 11:00 p.m. and then um, working throughout the night to overlap with San Francisco time and then going to sleep at like maybe lunch or after lunch and then repeat. And we didn't even have an office. So, I used to go to my old uh, college uh, library to work there um, just in a booth. So when people saw me, they probably thought I was just like a student. It was like a weird feeling because it was a school that I dropped out of and I'm like in the library um trying to build my company. And I remember the way we got customers because we had no brand name was just pure hustle like just going door to door uh emailing people one by one. No like email automation tool or anything like that. Just reaching out. And so each customer was very very valuable. Like uh when they said yes, I want to try it out, it meant the world to us. And there was this one customer uh called Hightouch. Uh they're like a AI marketing platform. I remember they were the first sort of uh company that it wasn't our friend or some connection. It was like a company that through our own effort and hustle we got. They were hiring like a director of engineering which is like a very important hire. And we felt very grateful that they trusted us to do such an important job for them. And so we got started. But um I remember like it was like 3:00 am at the library over and over again every day trying to make it work for that customer. One of the recruiters messaged us saying like, "Hey, we haven't been impressed with the quality of candidates uh and the experience. If you guys don't turn this around in the next 10 days, we we can't be a customer anymore." In the middle of that, I heard my visa got rejected. Actually, most people get it approved on the spot, but uh for some reason, mine didn't get approved for the first time. It was definitely mental breakdown, not being productive, all these struggles. So, I couldn't fully focus um, because it's almost like a company killing event. What failing a visa interview actually means is never being able to come back to the US. Maybe for some people it's just like, oh, let's try again. But for me, there was so much at stake. It was everything I built for, all the work I put in sort of going to nothing. And then I had responsibility to my co-founder as well. And uh I couldn't tell him the news because it's hard thing after hard thing after hard thing. I think the two things that kept me going was one like this responsibility this like if I don't do this this company will die you know I have this responsibility to make it work there's no other option than surviving and continuing so that was one the other one was actually a lot of like things were going on in my personal life as well like um friends and family and then I actually realized that oh other people have like pretty difficult problems too in life I then reflected whatever I'm going through right now at the time was something that I inflicted upon myself like I chose to start this company. I could have not done that. I chose to move here to the US and be based here. You know, I chose to apply for this visa. Like, you know, it's all like something that I chose to do. And there were a lot of people in my life who had problems and they didn't choose that. It wasn't within their control. And so, I think that was actually in a weird way encouraging as well. We were just like, oh, like maybe this is actually not that big of a deal. Like, you know, at the end of the day, I I wanted to try this. Um and so that gave me the energy back uh to sort of stand back up and and continue to go. Yeah. You know, it turns out the visa thing was like some process issues, so it's all fine now. We actually ended up making a hire for Hightouch for the director of engineering. Hightouch told us that that hire took like 18 months. That role was open for 18 months. They tried everything out there. They tried recruiting agencies, other tools, job boards, and just nothing worked. And to do that within a month and a half with our product gave us a lot of conviction that this is going to work. And I think our customer actually saw that too. And so they reached out to one of their investor connections and said, "Hey, like what these guys are building, I've tried so many recruiting products in the past. I'm obsessed with this problem and none of it worked. Uh, but this is different. This is special." So he introduced us to uh our seed round investors. I remember my co-founder and I the next morning surprised and um all uh happy sort of like biking to their office and we presented for one hour just like our product. There was no pitch deck. We didn't even prepare for fundraising. We didn't even think we were fundraising. Actually, we just thought we were meeting them and they texted us saying like, "Hey, do you guys want to grab drinks at at 5:00 p.m. tonight?" And we were like, "Okay." And then we went and they just said, "Hey, like we really love what you're doing. I think you guys are doing something special." Uh so they gave us a term sheet and let our seed round uh that same day. I actually my analogy that I would give is uh going deeper and deeper and deeper like you're not going deep enough. You could at the surface just say hiring is very difficult but actually I think we understood the problem at a very high level and then did something to solve that. It's very easy to go hey like doing XYZ is difficult so let's go solve it but actually why is it difficult? Talk to users about it. You know what they do makes the problem inefficient or difficult. And I think that was the mistake we made first round and then like the subsequent attempts we dig deeper and deeper and deeper into the problem until we actually found the the root cause and I think that's when things started clicking. I see a lot of um people when they start a business or a company where they have this one idea they try it out for a little bit and they go ah actually, it's not really working so try something again try something again. It actually takes like a lot more energy than most people think to like keep switching. Instead, what we did was we had a lot of conviction in the problem space. 110% conviction that this is the problem we need to work on. If you think you're going deep, you're probably still not deep enough. And so encouraging them to do that. Yeah. >> If you could go back and sit across from the virgin of you who was in the library at 3:00 a.m. in Australia, what would you tell him? >> I would tell him to keep doing what you're doing. at the time it's hard to imagine everything we've achieved and everything that we will achieve uh in the future have that same conviction and I think that's kind of like what I still tell myself maybe like if I look back 5 years 10 years 20 years from now and look back to this moment maybe that might feel like the 3 a.m. every situation again. So I think keep going uh have conviction. Yeah.
### Parform 的起源：从线下探索到产品-市场契合 John Kim 在一次纽约的商务旅行中遇到了他的联合创始人 **Jeff**。他们通过走访其他创始人，询问他们当前面临的首要问题以及愿意为此支付的费用。调研结果一致指向“招聘”这一痛点，并估值约为每成功招聘一人支付 4 万美元。这让他们看到了创业的潜力，并设定了每人每年完成五次招聘的目标。 最初的尝试是自己成为招聘人员，通过抓取网络信息（Twitter、GitHub、LinkedIn、简历等）来组合人才画像。然而，经过三四个月的努力，他们离目标渺茫。意识到这种方式“效率极其低下”后，他们开始深入探索问题本质，发现**信任、通路和关系**才是招聘中的核心要素。即使能找到顶尖人才，对方也未必愿意回应或考虑机会，除非是朋友或尊敬的人发出邀请。 由此，他们转向了一个**推荐人市场（Referral Marketplace）**平台，允许初创公司发布招聘赏金（如 5k-10k 美元），将任何人变成招聘人员。但这个模式也面临**用户留存率低**的问题，因为大多数人并非全职招聘者，且可能并不认识足够多合适的人选。 然而，他们注意到一个用户群体——**独立招聘人员、招聘机构和猎头**——开始大量使用该平台。这群人本身就拥有广泛的人脉，招聘是他们的职业，并有财务激励，因此他们持续回归平台。这让 John Kim 团队意识到，他们终于“**构建了人们真正需要的东西**”，并以此为基础实现了 Parform 的规模化发展。如今，Parform 专注于精准匹配，提供 3-4 个高质量选项，而非海量选择。他们认为，AI 应自动化 70-80% 的招聘工作，但最后 20% 的**人情味和关键决策**至关重要。
Original English I was actually on a business trip to New York and that's when I met my co-founder Jeff at Parapform. So I went around asking uh other people around us uh which were mostly founders asking them what is your number one problem right now and how much would you pay us to solve it? Uh and almost all of them said uh hiring and they said they would pay us 40k per hire. So we were like hey maybe if we make five hires each this year you know that's like maybe equivalent of like a salary. So maybe this is a good business to start. So we set out on a journey to make five hires each. So the first thing we did was actually become recruiters ourselves. What we started doing was like we scraped the web. We looked at, you know, your Twitter profile, your GitHub profile, like everything really online about you and we sort of try to combine that with like your professional experience, like your LinkedIn, your resume. And then, um, you know, 3 months, 4 months in, we were not even close to making five hires, let alone one. And so, we were like, okay, like clearly this is like super inefficient. What should we do? While we were exploring the problem space, we realized like it's actually like trust, access, and relationships. I could find a great engineer at Facebook or OpenAI right now, but doesn't mean that person will respond to me or know me or even interested in the opportunity, right? Whereas like maybe if your friend reached out, you might consider the opportunity or someone you respect, right? So the next idea we pivoted to was a referral marketplace, referral platform where essentially our startup customers could post bounties, referral bounties like 5 10k for the engineers they were trying to hire and turn anyone in the world to your recruiter. But there was not much retention. Um I think we overestimated how many people each person knows, how well connected someone is, and um it wasn't like their main profession and job. So they um didn't come back to the platform. You release it to the market and no one wants it. I think that you know it wasn't great. We were sort of hitting a dead end for three four months. Nothing was happening and then um one user group started uh using it a lot. We saw that uh user group growing and these were like independent recruiters, recruiting agencies, head hunters and it made so much sense. They're very well connected compared to most people. Uh it's their job. It's their profession. They're financially incentivized. So they started sort of um coming back and using the platform continuously. And I think that's when we realized, oh, we, you know, built something people want and then it scaled to where Parapform is today. We're really focused on how do we match the right person to the right opportunity. That's done not by giving them a thousand options and telling them to choose, but giving them, you know, three or four that actually really match what they're looking for. When you don't use AI correctly, I think it loses meaning and makes things not special, if you will. I think the word special is basically directly correlated to scarcity and directly correlated to quality over quantity. I think maybe AI can make you know 70 80% of what recruiters do and automate that. But I think it's like the last sort of 20% like the human touch I think is like very very important. Meaning comes from scarcity.
### 克服逆境与融资历程：在绝境中寻找力量 在澳大利亚申请签证回美国的艰难时期，John Kim 曾面临时区挑战（凌晨 11 点工作到下午）和在大学图书馆 booth 中工作的经历，外人可能只把他当作一名普通学生。创业初期，他们几乎没有品牌知名度，只能靠“**纯粹的努力**”，逐一发送邮件，一对一地获取客户。每一个客户的认可，对他们而言都意义非凡。 一位名为 **Hightouch** 的 AI 营销平台客户，成为了他们第一个非熟人推荐的客户。然而，不久后，John Kim 却经历了签证被拒的重大打击，这几乎意味着他将无法返回美国，他所建立的一切可能付诸东流。面对双重压力——公司的生死存亡和个人的未来——他几乎精神崩溃。 支撑他走下去的关键有二：一是作为创始人对公司的**责任感**，他知道这是唯一的出路；二是来自朋友和家人的支持，以及他意识到“**别人也有更艰难的困境，而我的很多困境是我自己选择的**”，这种视角转换让他重拾了能量。最终，签证问题被澄清为流程失误，一切得以解决。 更重要的是，Parform 成功地在短短一个半月内为 Hightouch 完成了**招聘总监**这一关键职位，而该职位已空缺 18 个月，耗费了 Hightouch 各种尝试却均告失败。这次成功极大地增强了 Parform 的**信念**，也让 Hightouch 的投资人看到了 Parform 的独特价值，并引荐了他们的种子轮投资人。令人意外的是，这次融资过程非常迅速，他们仅凭产品展示，就获得了当天的**term sheet**，其“特别”之处可见一斑。
Original English So, uh, at the time, um, I was actually in Australia trying to get my visa to come back to the US. The time zone is obviously really difficult. I remember my routine was sort of waking up at 11:00 p.m. and then um, working throughout the night to overlap with San Francisco time and then going to sleep at like maybe lunch or after lunch and then repeat. And we didn't even have an office. So, I used to go to my old uh, college uh, library to work there um, just in a booth. So when people saw me, they probably thought I was just like a student. It was like a weird feeling because it was a school that I dropped out of and I'm like in the library um trying to build my company. And I remember the way we got customers because we had no brand name was just pure hustle like just going door to door uh emailing people one by one. No like email automation tool or anything like that. Just reaching out. And so each customer was very very valuable. Like uh when they said yes, I want to try it out, it meant the world to us. And there was this one customer uh called Hightouch. Uh they're like a AI marketing platform. I remember they were the first sort of uh company that it wasn't our friend or some connection. It was like a company that through our own effort and hustle we got. They were hiring like a director of engineering which is like a very important hire. And we felt very grateful that they trusted us to do such an important job for them. And so we got started. But um I remember like it was like 3:00 am at the library over and over again every day trying to make it work for that customer. One of the recruiters messaged us saying like, "Hey, we haven't been impressed with the quality of candidates uh and the experience. If you guys don't turn this around in the next 10 days, we we can't be a customer anymore." In the middle of that, I heard my visa got rejected. Actually, most people get it approved on the spot, but uh for some reason, mine didn't get approved for the first time. It was definitely mental breakdown, not being productive, all these struggles. So, I couldn't fully focus um because it's almost like a company killing event. What failing a visa interview actually means is never being able to come back to the US. Maybe for some people it's just like, oh, let's try again. But for me, there was so much at stake. It was everything I built for, all the work I put in sort of going to nothing. And then I had responsibility to my co-founder as well. And uh I couldn't tell him the news because it's hard thing after hard thing after hard thing. I think the two things that kept me going was one like this responsibility this like if I don't do this this company will die you know I have this responsibility to make it work there's no other option than surviving and continuing so that was one the other one was actually a lot of like things were going on in my personal life as well like um friends and family and then I actually realized that oh other people have like pretty difficult problems too in life I then reflected whatever I'm going through right now at the time was something that I inflicted upon myself like I chose to start this company. I could have not done that. I chose to move here to the US and be based here. You know, I chose to apply for this visa. Like, you know, it's all like something that I chose to do. And there were a lot of people in my life who had problems and they didn't choose that. It wasn't within their control. And so, I think that was actually in a weird way encouraging as well. We were just like, oh, like maybe this is actually not that big of a deal. Like, you know, at the end of the day, I I wanted to try this. Um and so that gave me the energy back uh to sort of stand back up and and continue to go. Yeah. You know, it turns out the visa thing was like some process issues, so it's all fine now. We actually ended up making a hire for Hightouch for the director of engineering. Hightouch told us that that hire took like 18 months. That role was open for 18 months. They tried everything out there. They tried recruiting agencies, other tools, job boards, and just nothing worked. And to do that within a month and a half with our product gave us a lot of conviction that this is going to work. And I think our customer actually saw that too. And so they reached out to one of their investor connections and said, "Hey, like what these guys are building, I've tried so many recruiting products in the past. I'm obsessed with this problem and none of it worked. Uh, but this is different. This is special." So he introduced us to uh our seed round investors. I remember my co-founder and I the next morning surprised and um all uh happy sort of like biking to their office and we presented for one hour just like our product. There was no pitch deck. We didn't even prepare for fundraising. We didn't even think we were fundraising. Actually, we just thought we were meeting them and they texted us saying like, "Hey, do you guys want to grab drinks at at 5:00 p.m. tonight?" And we were like, "Okay." And then we went and they just said, "Hey, like we really love what you're doing. I think you guys are doing something special." Uh so they gave us a term sheet and let our seed round uh that same day.
### 深度挖掘问题与坚守信念：Parform 的核心哲学 John Kim 强调，解决问题的关键在于“**深入挖掘，而非止于表面**”。他用“越来越深、再深一点”来比喻，指出许多人仅仅停留在“招聘很难”的层面，但并未深入探究“为何难”。他认为，**理解用户行为**，以及它们如何使问题变得低效或困难，才是找到根源的关键。Parform 最初的尝试就犯了“只看表面”的错误，但后续的迭代让他们得以“**深挖再深挖**”，直到触及问题本质。 他观察到，许多创业者在遇到初步困难后，会频繁更换方向。而 Parform 的成功，源于对招聘问题空间的“**110%的信念**”，坚信这是需要解决的核心问题。这种坚定的信念，加上“**如果你认为自己已经挖得很深了，那可能还不够深**”的理念，促使他们不断深化对问题的理解。 当被问及对 30 岁时的自己的建议时，John Kim 表示：“**坚持做你正在做的事情。保持同样的信念。**”他鼓励过去的自己，以及现在的自己，不论面对何种困境（如同当年在澳大利亚 3 点在图书馆的经历），都要继续前进，因为“**持续的信念**”是成功的基石。
Original English I actually my analogy that I would give is uh going deeper and deeper and deeper like you're not going deep enough. You could at the surface just say hiring is very difficult but actually I think we understood the problem at a very high level and then did something to solve that. It's very easy to go hey like doing XYZ is difficult so let's go solve it but actually why is it difficult? Talk to users about it. You know what they do makes the problem inefficient or difficult. And I think that was the mistake we made first round and then like the subsequent attempts we dig deeper and deeper and deeper into the problem until we actually found the the root cause and I think that's when things started clicking. I see a lot of um people when they start a business or a company where they have this one idea they try it out for a little bit and they go ah actually it's not really working so try something again try something again. It actually takes like a lot more energy than most people think to like keep switching. Instead, what we did was we had a lot of conviction in the problem space. 110% conviction that this is the problem we need to work on. If you think you're going deep, you're probably still not deep enough. And so encouraging them to do that. Yeah. >> If you could go back and sit across from the virgin of you who was in the library at 3:00 a.m. in Australia, what would you tell him? >> I would tell him to keep doing what you're doing. at the time it's hard to imagine everything we've achieved and everything that we will achieve uh in the future have that same conviction and I think that's kind of like what I still tell myself maybe like if I look back 5 years 10 years 20 years from now and look back to this moment maybe that might feel like the 3 a.m. every situation again. So I think keep going uh have conviction. Yeah.