#23 - Disney for Dogs

You guys are doing somewhere on the order of $250 million in revenue annually. $5 million is not enough.

$10 million.

$15 million. $20 million. $100 million.

What's a half a billion?

$850 million. One or two people in a bedroom actually are threats to these, like, giant multi-billion dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose.

Add another zero to that price, buddy. Add two zeros. 2 more zeros. My first million.

Every week we sit down with self-made millionaires and ask them, how did you do it? I didn't start a podcast, I started my own personal business school, and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and businesses that you find today. I wanted to know the real stories with all the details, like how did you get your first 100 customers? What did it feel like when shit hit the fan? I asked them, how do you spend your money now that you're rich? And what would you do if you were starting starting over from scratch again today.

If you're like me and you want to own your own business instead of living a 9-to-5 job, this is the podcast for you. The Hustle presents My First Million. We're here. It's nice to meet you.

Thank you.

I'm excited to talk to you. So let's tell the people what it is that you did and what you've built. So tell us, how did you make your first million?

I made my first million by trying to make a Disney for dogs.

Disney for dogs.

I think that was always kind of like the idea. I met my co-founders and we love our dogs and we wanted to make cool stuff for them. And so that was the premise.

And why Disney? Is that like, are you a massive Disney fan or what do you like about Disney?

Were you a dog person on a scale of 1 to crazy dog person? Like, I have a dog, I'm crazy about my dog. You know, I see people in the dog park who are like, they own 4 dogs, they, you know, eat off the same plate type of thing. Give me a sense of the spectrum. Where are you at just before you started this business? Was that your life passion or—

No, I think the appropriate, you know, Monday morning confession, I think I'm a little bit with you. Like, I love my dog. Like, my dog is my little child and I would do anything for her. I'm not necessarily somebody who like have 100 dogs at home. And so I think in many ways it's the same way that I have with my kid, right? I love my son, but like, it's not that I'm going like, yoo-hoo, there's like 20 babies on the plane. So I think for me, we obviously in the company, company have like a lot of different kind of permutations of crazy dog people. I think the craziness for me is in the kind of togetherness between me and my dog. And before that, you know, I guess like my wife and I was foster parents for a lot of dogs. And so we would help dogs from the South where there's a lot of kill shelters up to New York, and we would then host them for a few weeks until they could find a forever home. So I guess in that way, I probably skew more into somebody who loves dogs than like the average person. But, you know, like I'm not the one who I kind of have like pictures of dogs everywhere and a bone in my keychain, right?

And so, so given that, where did the initial idea come from? Where were you, you know, where were you, what were you doing before this?

I wish you didn't know where I work because that's actually a somewhat kind of embarrassing story.

Let's start with the embarrassing story for sure.

So the headline was that I was— the first time I ever met my founder was waking up in a heart-shaped bed on a cruise ship in my boxers. And that sounds not as appropriate. It's a little bit less inappropriate story as it might sound. So first, we're co-founders, Matt Kali and I. And Matt and I were both kind of working in kind of like in-between type of roles. We had both built startups before and had exited them or kind of like doing our next thing. So Matt was at kind of like an incubator type place called Dogpatch Labs. So he was running that in New York and I had started a kind of halfway home for entrepreneurs called PreHype. And we were on a Summit Series conference. And so many years ago, they had one on a big cruise ship.

Yeah, I remember that.

Summit at Sea, right? Summit at Sea. And so if you were a little bit of a cheapskate, you would pick the cheap ticket, which were like randomly being paired with somebody else. And so Matt and I were randomly paired and I checked into the cabin before he did. And they've taken this heart-shaped bed and they pushed it apart, right? Because it's two random people. I thought it was hilarious to put them back together. So I put them back together and kind of redid the bed. And then I went up to get a drink, I guess. And then I got back pretty late and Matt had gone to bed earlier. And so literally the first time I ever shake this guy's hand, we're like in this kind of awkward under one duvet kind of like Hello, my name is Henrik. In many ways, like, I think it's formed the DNA of the company in the sense of we then just sat and talked for a long time. And then we figure out that while we are very different people, you know, I'm from Copenhagen and he's from Iowa. We shared a lot of the same values and I think had in many ways tried to build like fast-growing venture businesses before and was a little bit fatigued around that. Right. So that's kind of like how the idea came around. We were just sitting and spitballing.

So it was during that first cruise that you guys actually came up with the idea. Or you had the idea?

To be more concrete, like, I think what I tend to do with the stuff I do is I find somebody that I think I want to hang with for a long time. And then we just organized, I think it was Friday Brainstorms. Yep. Anything on the second Friday or just a little bit. Well, I love my dog. At that time I was fostering and Matt has a dog called Hugo that he's obsessed with and like real obsessed as in insane, crazy dog parent obsessed. It's a big Great Dane and it was tough to find good stuff for his dog in New York City. So. We were like, hey, maybe we can make like one of these boxes and do that.

And what was, you know, the inspiration? Was there another subscription box that was doing well? And we should tell people what it is. Let's give the people the sort of 60 seconds. What is the product? High-level overview of the company. And then we'll go back to the story.

So Bark is the company that is trying to make dogs happy, dogs and their people. We have a number of different products and services. The ones that—

I like that you say dogs and their people instead of people and their dogs.

That's good. Well, they come first in our world, right? So the product that we're best known for is either BarkBox or SuperChewer. Those are two boxes. Monthly subscription boxes with treats and toys and shoes that get sent. They're themed, so there's something funny for both the dog and their parents. But we also now do dental products. We have membership subscription parks and all these other things. And so we've kind of like branched out from being kind of like a, a one-product company.

So the only box that really was around at that time was Birchbox. And so it was out in New York, and I knew of Katya and Hailey, who was kind of like in the area and in kind of like the community. And so we were like, hey, maybe there's like a Birchbox-ish kind of thing for dogs, but where instead of getting, you know, where we might kind of like do more thematic fanatic and stuff like that. And so practically, I wanted to be respectful of them. So I cold emailed them and said, hey, I've met them a few times, so it wasn't completely cold. Just saying, hey, we're thinking about doing this thing for dogs. We think it'll be a little thing, but I want to be respectful and come by and tell us what you do. And if we can at all like do something together, as in if you wanted to be advisors to our business, we'd love to have you. And so they were incredibly helpful. Like they didn't take their advisory shares, but like they did kind of help us out with advice on what pickpack and logistic partner we should have. And we were very grateful for for all the help that they provided.

Amazing. Okay, so decide to start this thing. Yeah. And when you were doing this, what was the second best idea that you guys were brainstorming? What was the name of your co-founder?

Matt Meeker and Carly Streif.

So I think it was Matt at the time that you had met in the heart-shaped bed. So what was the second best idea you guys had?

Deliver on this.

So we lured her into kind of like our little 3-people founder team and then she really just ran with it. And so, you know, Carly is this amazing person who are just very efficient of getting everything done. And so I kind of blinked twice and then suddenly there was like boxes appearing in front of us. And so this to start with, we were just packing the boxes ourselves, right? You know, Carly would run down and get some product and, you know, we got the the brown boxes you can buy in the post office. And then we start packing and I'm a dyslexic Dane, so I wrote happy holidays with two L's in like 70 boxes that they were shouting at me. And then we were kind of off, right? You know, it never really was like, let's start a company. It was more like, hey, let's just try to kind of stumble ourselves into this.

Yeah, I was listening to this talk by the guy who started Stripe, Patrick Collison, and he was saying when you're actually out there doing the thing, there's no like cinematic soundtrack happening behind you showing how epic this is that you're doing and that this is the moment and all this stuff. It's like it felt very normal, almost mundane for a long period of time, and it wasn't clear that this was going to be a big thing. It wasn't clear that, you know, these decisions were important and, and all this stuff.

And so what happened to those first 70 customers? Those are friends and friends of friends basically, is that right?

Yeah, like people we randomly meet.

Yeah. And so what were the next, I don't know, 700 people, where did they come from? We started advertising. How did get that next level of traction?

Yeah, next time, again, like very basic. We had no WordPress-based website, and we were fortunate that we kind of got in in the early Facebook days. Yeah, we have a product that is very suited for Facebook, right? Because we can show pictures of dogs, right? So the next 1,000 customers were early Facebook ads and kind of like Instagram kind of stuff. Again, like we were one of the few ones. I think we were one of the very early brands that really kind of leaned into it. I have a background at MTV, and I think in many ways one of the takeaways from there was that when making content or talking to customers, if you can kind of like talk to the lifestyle of what you're doing instead of kind of like the thing, then it's easier for people to associate with it and easy for them to want to share it.

Give us an example. What does that mean? So you're not talking about your product, you're talking about the lifestyle. What is— give me a different example besides your own.

And so you said you were at MTV before. What were you doing at MTV?

So you just hijacked MTV Australia.

I hijacked MTV Australia. And so the boss at the time, which is this wonderful guy called Brent Hanson, New Zealand guy, he basically emailed me and said, Henrik, question mark. And I replied back, I don't know anything about it. And he goes like, dude, don't ever do that again, but I want the show on air. And so I went from being a producer to basically run product development for all channels outside the US. And I did that for 8 years or so and ran MTV Games and a lot of like, you know, SMS to TV and a lot of this stuff kind of outside.

Right. That's pretty cool. I think MTV, especially during that era, was so influential. It was like that was the pulse of pop culture and music and, and sort of that intersection between the two. And so, yeah, I can imagine how that would help, you know, refine your palate in terms of marketing and storytelling and building a brand that most people who sell things online don't have.

So what's an example of one of the off-the-wall things you guys tried that actually did work?

Well, I think celebrity dogs was kind of like a crazy thing. Like, we were—

what celebrity dogs?

And so how does this happen? So there's, you see somebody else posting on their dog's account and you're like, this has potential and you sign them up as an influencer or what happened?

Well, this is back in '12, right? So the influencer thing is not really there yet. And suddenly we see, for example, Tuna Meltz My Heart, which is this wonderful dog that has like a very crazy face. And Courtney, the mom of this dog, kind of like is posting and she has this kind of very sweet story and she's a wonderful person. And so we just reach out and say, hey, can we do something together? And suddenly we start to roll up a lot of these different dogs. And I think we started to get, you know, a lot of followers.

I think we have about 11 million on the brand's page, on the brand page.

And so we start to promote all these dogs and in return they were promoting us. And so it became like this very nice symbiotic kind of relationship between us and celebrity dogs and stuff.

That's amazing. And were you guys able to sort of track, like now that you look back, and I'm sure that at that era it was like probably the golden era of like low cost, high return. How much in sales do you think came from something like that?

Yeah.

So I think we've always done a lot of that. We've done books, we've done 10,000-people Coachella-for-dogs events. We've done—

when was that?

This is like something called Bark Fest. We still do some of them, not as big because we found out that was a little bit too many dogs in one place. But we have stand-up comedy nights, we have movie nights, we We write all these different kinds of— like if you search for dog mom rap, we have hundreds of millions of views of comedians singing their love songs to dogs. And so we've always been kind of like pretty out there in kind of what we tried to do.

Yeah, that's good. I like that. What other companies or brands do you think do a good job of this? When you were talking, I had one that came to mind. So if you can't think of one, I'll share it with you. But is there anybody that you look at that you say, man, they're doing a really good job with this sort of creative marketing, really sort of like understanding the customer and delivering them happiness in all these different ways?

The one that comes to mind, which is kind of odd, is that in New York City there is a home storage kind of thing, or like, and they have these hilarious kind of like, you know, we're into space kind of like funny kind of statements everywhere. And often they change them up so they're kind of topical. Yeah.

And you said something actually at the beginning, you said you guys had both come from a venture-backed startup and this was sort of like a refresher, right? You were like, I'm going to work on a product I love for a customer I love and let's not raise a lot of money. Let's just kind of bootstrap this thing. What was that thing you did before? Is that actually where you made your first million? Like, I think a lot of our listeners really like to know when somebody started this, like, what was their circumstances? Were they, you know, doing okay financially? Did they have a job? What was your track record before this?

I think I started in London. I was part of the founding team of something called Juiced, which was an online video, a kind of portal, like Hulu before Hulu. Um, and we raised a lot of money because my co-founder, guys who started it, had done Skype. And so it was I think it was $50 million seed round kind of thing, right? And Sequoia and Index and everybody else was involved. And I think in many ways, we hired then 200 people in 9 months. I understood, you know, like how that type of game was being played. And Matt had been more successful than I in startup world. He was part of Meetup and was the co-founder of that. Then I went out to join a small team in Brooklyn afterwards called Hot Potato, then ended up selling to Facebook. And Matt ended ended up joining, I think, a few other startups. And so we've just been like in the venture kind of like run startup world for a while. And I think we were like a little bit of like, hey, wouldn't it be nice if you could just build a business that was making more money than it was spending? And so it was, you know, it's just a little bit of like an old school approach.

The classics. Maybe we should try to make some money. And were you, after those first two, were you in a spot where you could just work on whatever you want for as long as you wanted? Or were those like singles and you were searching for a home run? What was your mindset? And where was your life at that time?

I think I've always been pretty frugal, so I've probably been never like had the million. And so it was always really about having enough runway that I didn't have to do stuff I didn't want to do. And so, you know, when I had learned my, convinced my wife to kind of move to New York, it was like, well, let's put like, I think it was $100,000 into kind of our, from taking from our savings. And we were like, okay, if we spend this, then it's game over. Like we're back in Europe. Right. And so luckily we made some money kind of like along the way. It wasn't kind of like I've always always been lucky, I had a good job at MTV, and so I wouldn't say that I was kind of like struggling. I was kind of like, probably wasn't rich, but I wasn't poor either.

Yeah, that's helpful. And it sounds like you had a mindset of you wanted to own sort of your time to work on whatever projects you found interesting. That's kind of what I'm reading from.

Yeah, and I was doing consulting at the same time, right? You know, so in the early days of PreHype, you know, we were really helping big businesses figure out how you could start new businesses. And so that kind of created some cash flow and really gave me kind of like the time to not have to rush, right?

And so what was the last job you had that you hated? For 15, you were, you know, burgers or anything?

Yeah, I was a dishwasher and I was an usher in a movie theater, and before that I was thinking I was like delivery guy for flowers. But I don't know why, I always like loved those things.

Like, I— you liked being a dishwasher? I've washed dishes and I hated it.

You know what, like, I— it was in a restaurant and everybody was really guys. And because it was such hard work, and maybe it was because it was in Denmark, I just felt it was like, I think it was, I got like, I don't know, $8 an hour or $7 an hour, which was like, you know, 20 years ago, like an insane amount of money for like a 15-year-old. And so I just remember like getting that cash. It was just like an ungodly amount of money, right? Now, like then having to go back and wash yourself down in kind of dishwasher soap because you had so much of the grease on you, like was not necessarily, but I don't know, like I've always enjoyed being in environment where there was other people and you had a little bit of a mission. And so, no, I always enjoyed working. I can't think of anything where I was like, oh, that's— I've definitely kind of like been introduced to projects or companies where they're like, hey, you know, you should do this. And I'm like, I'm not sure that would be good for me. But I've always loved my work.

And one thing I liked about— I was doing a little bit of research on you last night when I knew we were going to chat. And I said, what do I find most interesting about this guy? I liked that you took sort of a systems approach to things. So tell me Wait, how did you find your wife?

Um, you did do your research.

You didn't sort of just allow Cupid to shoot his arrow. You, you were intentional about it. Tell me why you were intentional and what you actually did. I think people will find this interesting.

You need to go to your friends' friends, not just your friends.

Exactly right. So I mapped out who I'd met who had these properties that I really, really liked.

What were the 3 properties that you really cared about, for example?

The one was the age range.

That you need that to be that really?

Another one was kind of like, for me, it was like where they kind of like cultural background. Okay. And because the statistical kind of element of that.

So you looked at first your friends who matched that.

Yeah.

And you said, okay, these are my friends that share some of these attributes.

And then basically look like either will they be able to invite me to a dinner with some of their peer group, or do they have siblings that would allow me to do that? And so the second dinner was, I used to grow up with this guy Rasmus on my street, and he's an awesome dude. Unfortunately, he's completely unrelated story. He unfortunately died in a traffic accident. Nonetheless, incredible guy. And I thought, well, he has a kid sister and has all the properties. And so I basically said, hey, you know, I'm in town next week, you know, I'd love to bring some of my single friends and then maybe you can bring some of your single girlfriends in. And I met my wife, and we've been—

so you were, you were hosting like these mixers or dinners or something like that? You would say, hey, I'm hosting a dinner for single people?

It makes me feel like a very kind of like—

I think it's great. I think it's awesome. Well, you feel uncomfortable?

Why do you feel— I don't know, like, it's just, it sounds so non-romantic. But in many ways, I do think that it's such an important thing in your life, right? You know, I hope that I will be with my wife forever, right? So there's very few things that you can do that's as permanent as finding a partner. And so it's a big decision. And I think in many ways, if you're a product developer and you're trying to get new customers and you go on a random site that's nothing to do with it, like you're just less likely to be successful. And so I think this idea that you can just walk out on the street or walk out to a random bar and then kind of put yourself in a position to be lucky is a little bit naive. And So for me, it was a little bit, as you say, like I enjoy thinking about systems or frameworks for how I do stuff. And I did feel that this was like a good way for me to put myself in a position where I could meet somebody. And ironically, I think that she, my wife, Mette, is not somebody I think I would normally walk up to in a bar. Like she doesn't look like what I normally would kind of like go for. And she definitely thought, she would think that was way too annoying if I met her in a bar. So I was grateful for kind of like meeting him there. And yeah, then we met. And I think, you know, I knew pretty quickly, like, I think within 3 months I decided to propose. I didn't have a system, so I waited for a year. But yeah, we've been happily married. We have a little boy now.

Totally right. And I think this idea about being purposeful is important. Like, you know, I now, like with most elements of my life, sit down and try to think about how can I become better of doing that thing, being it from health or being family, relationships, what have you. And so I think a lot of us kind of like we go a little bit headless into the world and then we go like, oh, why doesn't this happen to me? Or why does this always happen to me? And you're kind of, well, you're kind of like you're standing on the side of the road while it's raining. Like chances are that somebody will splash some water on you.

What are your other systems? You said health, you said you have some other frameworks maybe.

Right. And do you actually have like a grid or something? You have a way that you lay this out, these 8 boxes?

Yeah, I have a grid. But I'm sure people Google, they can find it. Yeah. So I put this out and then every week I spend, you know, an hour or so. Actually, I do it more often. I use this as a way to kind of like not being worried that I'm missing something. And then a little bit like a kind of like a growth hacker, I look at these different elements and I think about what experiment can I do next week that could increase the chances of having a positive outcome. So let me take a non-intuitive one. Let's take my kids, for example. Like, so I have a 5-year-old who I'm obsessed with, right? You know, my little boy Anton. One of the times I noticed in weekends, we would play in his playroom and I get a little bit kind of bored. And so I take out my phone and he would call me on it and it kills me.

You're spending time, but it's like, how many times can I build these same blocks?

Exactly.

How many times can I read the same book.

You're not checking your phone now.

Exactly right. And so I think, you know, if it's every Friday date night or if it's, you know, making sure that if you don't like to do exercise in the morning, you try to figure out you can do dance lessons. Like, you know, so really brainstorm different types of experiments that you can apply to all those different boxes. And I think, you know, for me at least, like, that's made me much more purposeful and much more kind of like self-aware of like, how do I try to kind of like become better of the things I'd like to do?

Yeah. Can I tell you my system?

Yeah.

I don't think I've ever told anyone this, so this is good. But I'm similar to you in that I'm weird and want to get better. Like, the phrase I really like is that life is not about what you get. So it's not about the accolades, not about the stuff you accumulate. So life is not about what you get, it's about who you become. And so then I believe that to be true. So I ask myself, Well, who do I want to become? What is, you know, the next version of me? What does Sean 2.0 look like? And then how do I work towards that? And so I wrote out for this year, I wrote out my 4 boxes. So I don't have 8 because I don't think I could juggle that many things, but even 4 I thought was too much. And so the 4 categories that I had was like fitness or health, because after my last startup I got so fat, I basically put on like, I don't know, 30, 40 pounds in 3, 4 years of like just doing this company. And I was like, oh shit, when I looked in the mirror, I was like, who's this guy? I don't I don't like this guy. The second one was building my money machine. So how do I make it so that— cool, we sold our company, I got this cash, you know, inflow. How do I set this up so my money will go work for more money? And I, and I start to automate that because I hadn't really— I hadn't had enough money in the bank to care about that, but now I could literally live off the interest if I set this up properly. So let me set it up properly. The third one was learn. So how do I learn as much as I can this year? And the fourth was be a great dad. So I just had a daughter like 6 weeks ago and I knew that was coming. So I was like, okay, how do I set myself up to be a great— first one, great family man. Yeah, first one. And so decided on my 4 boxes, and I was like, these are the 4 things I care about. Okay, cool. I need to like, you know, sort of score myself. How am I doing in each right now? Let's be honest. And then also, how do I plan to improve all these? And so I was like, well, I need to set up some kind of system that does not require willpower or like remembering to go do some work. And so I just set up this thing that would email me every morning. So I wrote down, I was like, okay, for fitness, what's the most important What's something I could do? Eat clean. Great. And then the second part of that is like exercise. Great. Not rocket science, but I just need to do those two things. And so in my email, I'll get an email and it has, you know, 4 or 5 questions. It says, are you going to eat clean today? I just reply yes or no. Are you going to work out today? And what time? And I say, yeah, I'm going to try to go at 1 PM today. Then the second one is like, what are you going to do for your family today? How are you going to invest in your family today? Another one is, how are you going to invest in others today to contribute? And the last one is like, what are you going to do for your money machine today? How are you going to set yourself up to earn more money? And the last one is around learning. You know, what's something you're going to do to expose yourself to something new where you might learn?

You say you only have 4, but I think you're getting to the 8 that I'm also doing.

That's cool. I use Trello. So all my, the system that I have is that every time I have any idea in my head, it goes into basically a Trello inbox. And so I have an app on my phone that has the only purpose of sending it to that thing, or I made an If This Then That kind of like Alexa or Google Home thing.

So wherever you are, you can quickly input.

Yeah. And so, and then I have those different categories kind of like out in the board system, a basic triage kind of like at the end of the day, all these kind of different things I had in my head, and then I guess put them in there. Yeah. And so, you know, I remember the site, it's called Super Organizers. That's the one that Dan Shipper is doing. And he's basically interviewing people like you and me. And there seem to be more of them. I think Naveen was the last one that kind of have all these systems for trying to optimize their life.

Yeah. Super. I did read that. That's where— that's the thing I read about you. Super Organizers.

Yeah.

Check it out. It's a good interview with you. Naveen, who's the founder of Foursquare, I think he had a good one too. Yeah. Like it's basically what weird systems have you hacked together to try to like improve yourself?

Because I think one of the things that at least like I aspire to be kind of pretty good at a lot of things or like average good at a lot of things instead of like very good at just one, right? I think for me, success doesn't look like necessarily, you know, a million bucks, but if that means that I can't hang with my son, right, or that I can't be a good husband, right? And so in many ways, I think a how can I score as high as possible on all these 8 boxes, right? I don't hear that many people who talk about like being kind of like super average in that way or super above average. Right. But in many ways, like, I would rather do that than work myself to death or—

In one of those categories. Yeah. Yeah. What's the right way to think about that? Some people say work-life balance, right? They want their life to be balanced, but balance is very hard to achieve. And in some ways, like you said, you want to level all those up. It sounds like you don't think that there's like a finite amount of time or energy. You don't feel like restricted. It sounds like you think you can level them up to the point where you want them to be. How do you think about it? And if somebody's out there struggling to say, oh man, it's really hard to balance this and that and this other thing, and oh my God, I heard this guy's doing 8 things. What's the right way to think about balance?

Well, then do all 8 things at the same time, right? So I think obviously first with the disclaimer, like, you know, I have the system, it works for me. Like if there's one thing I learned about entrepreneurship and general life advice is that just because it works for one person doesn't mean that it has to work for everybody else. So take it as inspiration rather than kind of like prescription. A few things. I think you can take these boxes and you can overlap them. And so for me, for example, like I work with people I really, really like, Matt and Kali.

Friends or coworkers, you get two for one.

I like that. All right. So we'll finish out with a couple of my favorite questions to round it out. So if you were 21 years old again today and you couldn't work on the business you're working on now, what do you think you'd be interested in doing? What business, what idea, what space, would draw you in if you were 21 years old today?

I think that innovation is exponential. And so I think a lot of us is kind of like chasing the vision of the products that we've thought about the last 20 years on the internet. And so I think some of the areas that I think just kind of like might just completely turn everything upside down is the stuff that I think everybody's obvious. I think, you know, biome stuff, like microbiome thing, I would like to understand better. It seems that there's a lot of kind of like movement there. So I think I would maybe study some biology or, you know, like, in San Francisco. But I do think there seemed to be a new space age coming. You know, there's talk about Mars. And I think, you know, in a world where everybody is so depressed, there's some nice positivity about like, we can conquer new things, right? It's a very unique American thing. Like in Europe, people are very inspiring. Yeah, because in Europe, we would go like, why would you do that? Here's like, yeah, that sounds incredible. And so, you know, I definitely went through my 20s and 20s and 30s being like super anxious about, you know, everything. And so, you know, running into a calm app, my 5-year-old now, he listened to Headspace to fall asleep. And I think like being able to kind of like become much better of understanding your thoughts, like if you could learn that in your 20s and 30s, I think I would have superpowers, right? Instead of just kind of like randomly sweating, nervous, chasing everything.

Okay, I like it. And if somebody's listening listening to this and they're like, hey, Henrik is great, love what they're doing at Bark, love his philosophy, love his 8+1 framework. What's the best way to follow you, get more of you? Where can they get more of your thoughts, more of your ideas? You have your podcast, so shout out how people should connect with you. And then lastly, who should reach out to you? Who are you looking to get in touch with? Who do you want to hear more from if you're recruiting for companies or deals you want to do or whatever it is?

Well, obviously for Bark, we are always looking for good people. We have a lot of open roles. Roles. If you go into bark.co/jobs, there's a lot of them. So anybody who would like to build the next Disney for dogs would love to hear from. Twitter is @Wirtlin. I check that too much. And so if people want to get connected, that's probably the best time. And obviously I have a podcast called Prehype where I really talk about people who think in systems. And so if people are intrigued of that world, they should check that out.

Great. Awesome. Thank you for doing this, man.

This is good. Of course. Thank you.

Dollar, that's what I need. Hey, hey. Well, I need a dollar, dollar, dollar, that's what I need. Hey, hey. Said I need a dollar, dollar, dollar, that's what I need. And if I share with you my story, would you share your dollar with me?