Will Bodewes wrote a sticky note to himself on day one of building Phonely: "there are no shortcuts for you, Bodewes." That note sat on his desk every day for 2 years.
We talk about building a category before it exists, keeping customers through a 30% failure rate, the SMB-to-enterprise pivot, the cycling LinkedIn post that landed a $16M Series A, and what building a company actually costs in your 20s.
Chapters
0:00 Intro 1:18 The D1 Athlete Grind 3:18 Melbourne Bet 4:11 Why We Win 10:14 Spoke Sound Dies 12:06 Going All In On AI 13:37 First Customers 15:46 30% Failure Rate 18:13 Learning To Sell 19:27 Y Combinator 21:52 No Shortcuts 23:04 The Cycling Post 24:50 The Real Cost 27:01 Don't Do It Transcript Search or select a timestamp to jump ▾ 0:00 Will Bodewes: There are no shortcuts for you, Bo Davis. 0:03 Thea Ngo: Will wrote that note to himself from day one of building PhoneMe. Before this conversation, I thought I knew what it took to be a really great founder. But now, I'm not sure anymore. 0:13 Will Bodewes: My entire life had been training to make it to the NCAAs. You know, I didn't make it freshman year, didn't make it sophomore, didn't make it junior year. Senior year was my last chance. Nothing in life has ever really been handed to me. 0:23 Thea Ngo: That chip followed him through from elite sports to voice AI, before voice AI was even a term. 0:29 Will Bodewes: 5 in the morning, every morning, I would get a call. from one of our customers, something was up. 0:34 Thea Ngo: He took every call himself and the customers that stuck through. 0:37 Will Bodewes: One of the customers now pays us $78,000 a month. 0:40 Thea Ngo: 2 years in, $100 mil valuation, and I'm so excited to sit down with Will, co-founder and CEO of PhoneMe today. 0:48 Will Bodewes: My name is Will. I'm the co-founder and CEO of PhoneMe, and this is Founders in Motion. 0:53 Thea Ngo: Quick thing before we get started. We have a huge goal this year of hitting 10,000 subscribers. Yes, it's ambitious, but it lets us help more people build really great companies. So if you enjoy the content, learn something new, the best way to support us is by subscribing. Okay, let's get back to the video. Before entering the founder path, you were an ultra endurance cyclist. The shortest race that you've ever finished is 300 miles ridden without sleep, which is actually pretty nuts. And before that, you competed in cross-country skiing at the highest level of US college sports and even qualified for the national championship. So that's an incredible accomplishment, but then the race got canceled. What was that week like before the cross-country skiing cancellation? 1:46 Will Bodewes: My, basically my entire life had been training for, to make it to the NCAAs. And, you know, I didn't make it freshman year, I didn't make it sophomore, didn't make it junior year. Senior year was my last chance to make it. And so I had finally got everything figured out and was able to finally make that, um, that ski race. And I was very excited about it. At the time it was, it was weird. There was like parts of you felt like relieved because it was like a very stressful moment, you know? You're like, oh, you know, like I have a write-off. Um, and I think you feel a little bit like that in the moment because you're like, oh wow, this big stressor is over. But as I kind of look back on it, I think it was, I ended up being pretty bummed because It was, you know, it felt like unfinished business and there was no way, like that was just completely taken from me and there was no way that I could go back and do anything about it. It was just, it was gone. Like I couldn't, there was nothing that I could have done. Um, because at this point, you know, it was too late to do like a 5th year or something like that, nor was I interested in that. 2:42 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 2:42 Will Bodewes: So I think that, that was one of those things where it was just like, it put, like, I think it put a chip on my shoulder. I was like, oh, like I still, still gotta make it. I still got something to prove. And that chip has carried into what we're doing today. 2:55 Thea Ngo: I do think that there is a very strong correlation between kind of professional athlete and founders because a lot of the traits you do bring with you, right? Like ultra endurance, dealing with situations that you might not be able to control and working almost delusionally focused on something, um, your entire life. Eventually you did a complete switch, so you were in the US, You did school in the US and you were, you spent your whole life in the US, but then you landed in Melbourne to do a PhD in machine learning. And that's where you met your co-founder, Nisal, and that's where the idea for PhoneMe started. So before we get too ahead of ourselves, in 2 sentences, could you describe what PhoneMe is? 3:40 Will Bodewes: Very, very simply put, we allow you to answer your phone with AI that talks exactly like a person. So if you have a receptionist or you use a call center, we can automate right now about 80 or 90% of those workflows using artificial intelligence and save you about 70% of what you would be paying, um, for that. Now I can go into the details of what makes us, you know, better and exciting, but I think we'll just stop for there. 4:04 Thea Ngo: No, please, like, please go into all the details of why you guys are fun and exciting. 4:11 Will Bodewes: So we've been in the market in the space a long time. So we started working on this, but like started doing research on this about 2 and a half, 3 years ago, back before voice AI was even a term. Like it wasn't even a term that existed. And so we started doing just research on this because we're like, well, this feels like a problem. And, you know, that was kind of the earliest days of like putting things together. And so when we say we answer the phones with AI, there's a lot of companies out there that like claim And I think that like what makes us different is number one, we've got 2 and a half years of battle scars of just obsessing over one problem. Number two, we have like a PhD background, which has helped us like build and train or optimize our own models. But like really number three, what our customers use us for is they want to optimize and understand the calls at scale. And so they need some one platform where they can build a voice agent and then they can say, well, how do I actually make my AI agent better? If you're booking appointments, You really care if that, that per— you know, that AI or that person, whatever, how well at the job that they do at booking that in. Like, did they book the appointment? Did they not? And what we see on the market today is there's a lot of people that promise AI, they can kind of do everything, but it's really hard to get reliability at scale. And so we're really, really good at getting reliability of voice agents when you have 10, 15, 20, 30,000 calls a day and you want to make sure that every single call gets handled perfectly. That's when businesses choose PhonePe. 5:32 Thea Ngo: I think first and foremost, I think voice AI is super big right now, but we sometimes forget that this is, it only kind of start rising up towards the end of 2023, even 2024 actually. So it's only been around for maybe 1 or 2 years, but the space has rapidly moved since. So you mentioned how your product is completely more robust than others in the market. How do you think about like achieving this on a technical level? 6:02 Will Bodewes: A lot of what technical challenges come down to is doing a lot of small things right. And so it's every detail that is involved in PhoneLy we've paid attention to, whether that is how do we handle interruptions? How do we handle when somebody's done talking? How do we make sure that our latency is low at scale? How do we handle situations where the AI agent gets the email address wrong because the transcription is wrong? Like, All those little details. And so really what it is, is it's a culmination of a lot of really small details put together, and then the ability to be able to optimize and run that at extreme scale. And so a lot of what our customers rely on us for is they can't have their phones be down. And so we make sure that they're up 100% of the time. And so that's a lot of stuff and a lot of the reasons why people pay for us. 6:47 Thea Ngo: But when you think about like those small little details, what were the main things that you you think that you guys solve a lot better than the current market? 6:56 Will Bodewes: Probably we're very opinionated on how voice AI should be. And so most of our competitors out there are saying like, hey, plug this model in, you plug your own model in, you just, you know, GPT-4.1, 5.2, whatever. Um, you, you start with a blank canvas and then you kind of go and figure it out. And with Foamy, what we've done is we've been very opinionated and we've said, hey, this is how voice agents should behave. Um, and we've tried to solve a lot of the downstream problems. that our customers were solving themselves through our other platforms. So it's like our customers don't have to prompt engineer with Foamy. In other platforms, they have to prompt engineer. And so what we do really well is like, we say, hey, this is how you should interact with voice AI. And it's our job to figure out like, this is how to make an AI talk like a person. And you don't need to know the model. You don't need to know the infrastructure. You don't need to adjust the VAP parameters. It just is going to work out of the box. And that's kind of what we believe that the market really cares about. Like they just want their phones answered. They don't care about the latest model and adjusting these little parameters. And so we've really focused in on how do we make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. 8:00 Thea Ngo: That's definitely very true. I'm actually setting up a voice agent right now. And there is a ton of prompt engineering involved, more than people actually think. And how you actually engineer the prompt really affect the output of the agent itself. Great. So we really got a bit ahead of ourselves, but okay, going all the way back to the origin of PhoneLea. So the origin behind PhoneLea, um, how did you land on that problem to obsess about for the next 2 years? 8:30 Will Bodewes: It just felt like a really important one to solve, and it felt like a hard problem to get right. So I think part of it, you know, you end up a little bit lucky with it. where you say, hey, this is going to be a problem with AI, and this is going to be something that is going to be solved. It isn't solved now, so let's work on it. And I think we got lucky at how challenging of a problem it was to solve. And it's always good when you find a hard problem because that means that people will pay a lot of money to get it right. 8:57 Thea Ngo: And so you and your co-founder both came from a research background into startup business world. When you first did the transition, Were there any mindset shifts that you had to make in order to turn from research mode into CEO founder mode? 9:15 Will Bodewes: I had previous startup experience, so I had that kind of mindset out of the gate. I think that there was a little bit of transition period of like understanding how to build products for like the minimum thing that you needed. to get things where, like, it's changed over time, right? Because when you first start, it's like the minimum thing that you need to get a customer validation that they actually want the thing that you solve, right? Um, and I think so many people waste time on like pretty UI and convenient interfaces and stuff. It's like really the minimum stuff that you need to get a paying customer on. And I think that we spent a lot of time, like, you know, the, the most successful things that we did, and it's very cliché, but it's like, listen to your customers and build the features that they ask. And every time that we were like, this is gonna be a great feature that we're gonna add to the, you know, whatever, those features didn't get ended up using, but the ones that our customers asked for, we had one customer ask for it and then like 10 or 15 would use. 10:09 Thea Ngo: Yeah, for sure. Make something people love, right? So that's an incredible segue because, Will, you did have a startup before Phonely. So you built a hardware startup called Spokesound, turning flat surfaces and artwork into high-fidelity speakers. It even attracted Chance the Rapper, had a genuine patent, but then you close it down. So what was the moment that you knew it wasn't going to work out in the long run for you? 10:38 Will Bodewes: Yeah, I think it's one of these things where like it could have worked out and I realized that after I had shut down the startup, but the real big motivation for me to like move on was I was, I was right out of college. I wanted to start something. I didn't know what to start. This is a cool idea, something I've been playing around with. And so I kind of went for it. And I learned a couple really valuable lessons. The first thing is I didn't feel like I was solving a problem. And with my next startup, I said, I want to solve a real problem that like businesses or people have in the world. And so I had, I was creating a nice to have, and I really didn't like that I was creating a nice to have because it didn't feel like a sustainable business model that like I wanted to have going forward. Right. And then that was one really valuable lesson. And then the second valuable lesson that I that I took on that was like, it's important to pick the idea that you, you know, like the idea that you work on is actually really important. And it doesn't, like everyone's like, oh, I have this genius idea. But I think that the learnings from that is you're going to be working on an idea for a really, really long time. So make sure that you either like the problem, like the customers, or like the solution a lot, because if you don't do those things, then it's just not going to work out because best case scenario, you're going to start to see success in like 3 to 5 years. 11:47 Thea Ngo: I think a lot of people love the founder mode and like, obviously you love the founder mode. You're still doing it today. You've done it right after college. Um, so I'm curious, like most people usually after an idea doesn't really work out, they pivot to another idea and build another startup right away. But then you did the whole kind of spent some time building Spokesound and then did your PhD before jumping into Felony. Was there kind of a strategic reasoning behind that? 12:14 Will Bodewes: Started it early in AI and I was watching AI become bigger and bigger and better and better. And I was like, well, I want to get some really concrete experience on this because I feel like there's going to be something in this space. And so I switched into that and that research opportunity was a great way for me to, you know, it was a full ride scholarship, spend a bunch of time just like diving in, understanding the problems, doing real research, but then also just learning a lot about it. And I think that that That credibility and also that experience is what like helped this propel me further, much farther than I, than I would have been just because I had taken the time to spend a year and a half just working on learning AI before it was big, you know, understanding this stuff. It was like a little bit of like lucky timing, a little bit of also just saying, hey, this is, feels like it's going to be a revolution. I want to be a part of the revolution. How am I going to do that? Here's an opportunity right in front of me. Let's go jump into that. 13:03 Thea Ngo: Yeah, beautiful. I'm so jealous of you. I definitely chose the wrong subject to study. Should have been an ML engineer. Okay, so PhoneLeads initially launched to small businesses, so $30 to $100 a month, fast feedback loop, thousands of customers. Then a single call center signed on and paid more than all of them combined. So when that first call center customer signed, did it change your perspective on the direction of the company moving forward? 13:36 Will Bodewes: It definitely did, right? It was one of these things where we started small because that's what we could get and that's what we knew. And honestly, the product wasn't good enough. So having iteration cycles, like I think you mentioned there as well, but just having reps of people testing your product, finding problems was actually the most valuable thing at the time. Um, but then as many businesses go, as many successful larger businesses go. It's like you go upmarket because you realize that there's a lot more money upmarket than there is in the SMB type of a space. And while businesses that get SMB right can be very, very, very successful, it's very hard to get right. And because it just requires a lot of distribution and resources and like the right product. And as we started building out what we were doing, we realized, hey, this model really works well when we have the ability to give customers the support that they need to be able to get up and running with the platform and automate their workflows. And if they don't, you know, we're still, we're still a believer that like with AI, we can augment a lot of that stuff for small and medium businesses, but, but to, to have real success and to get the kind of growth we were looking for, we realized that like upmarket just made more sense for us. 14:44 Thea Ngo: Um, I can only imagine too, um, with upmarket, there are a lot more complications and complexities that actually a platform that's quite opinionated in terms of the model and the abstraction. becomes generally even more helpful because they care about the minute quality of the phone calls. 15:03 Will Bodewes: Yeah, yeah, exactly. 15:05 Thea Ngo: So in the same similar vein, like you've achieved a lot with Phonely. So one of your customers ran $10 million of insurance sales through your AI voice agent in 4 months. When you think about like these results comparative to like other voice, um, agent startups? Uh, I know we've talked a bit about technical architecture and like being very opinionated and caring about small little things. Any other factors that really contributed to your success? 15:35 Will Bodewes: Building good relationships with customers. 15:39 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 15:40 Will Bodewes: I think when every, every startup launches, if they do the right things, they can get some buzz and some press and some early interest and traction. And what we really did in the early days was really build good relationships with customers and we'd have weekly meetings, daily meetings sometimes with these customers, um, to go through like everything that was broken. Because like there was a period there, like a year and a half ago when it was like, like 30% of our calls were just not working. Like it, the agent wasn't responding. 16:05 Thea Ngo: Wow. 16:06 Will Bodewes: There were like, it was, yeah, caught up. And, and these customers, they stuck with us. Like all of 'em stuck with us through that, um, this initial cohort of customers. And now it's like, you know, everything runs smoothly, it works perfectly, whatever. Um, but it was all built on relationships and so it would be like, 5 in the morning, every morning I would get a call from one of our customers and he would be like, something was up, right? He wanted to turn on his agent or whatever. And so you just try to provide really, really good support, try to build a really good product, try to make something that people love. And then I think that commercials and stuff, you can a little bit worry about that later once you have a product that people love and you know that you're solving a real problem. And so one of the, I think one of the big mistakes that I've made and I've seen other people make is like, try to get quick wins, um, for, you know, the right, the right type of customers, right? It's like if a customer can, like, if you, if you believe that you have the right people in the room and that customer can expand to be a big contract and all you have to do is prove your value, then like prove your value with the right people and you'll be successful. 17:11 Thea Ngo: 30% failure rate is quite high. So going through those, periods where the agent wasn't working properly, what were you saying to your champions to let them continue working with you over time? 17:25 Will Bodewes: Just, it was like, hey, we're, you know, we're working on it. Like, here's what we've done. Here's what we think the issue is. We're rolling it back. We're trying to figure it out. Um, just like as much communication as you possibly can. Like, I don't remember specifics of exactly what I said to them, but a lot of it is just trying to be as communicative with them as you can. Um, try to make them realize the reason that they signed on. Um, and then we were just like, we would just be like, hey, look, we're not gonna charge you for it. Like, you know, like we're, we're investing in the long run. We're not gonna make you pay for stuff that's not working. And so I think that, that, that went a long way with them. Um, and it kept these customers on cuz like, you know, one of the customers now pays us like, yeah, like $78,000 a month. And if they would've left at that early time because we weren't like so supportive and so caring of them, we'd, we'd lost a big chunk of our revenue. Um, being a good person, trying your best, being super genuine, um, and trying to communicate as much as you can and working super hard. 18:19 Thea Ngo: Overcommunicating and also just being honest, it really comes around a long way. So you, you did this whole transition from like going to SMB to these gigantic accounts, and obviously at one point the agent wasn't working super perfectly. How did you make the transition of sales from going like SMB to like large large contracts? Like, do you change your approach at all? Like, how do you think about those? 18:44 Will Bodewes: For large contracts, it's just learning the sales process, learning the sales cycle. I mean, this is all net new to me, so I'd never been a salesperson, never done enterprise sales, you know, never done any of this stuff. And I think that what I kind of committed to is just learning and saying, like, I've always kind of just jumped in with both feet, even if I didn't know the right information and said, well, I'll figure it out as I go along. And that was really the case with sales. Well, we found out what was working is just going to conferences, a specific type of LinkedIn outreach, and then inbound as well. So we just try to get in the press, try to generate, attract, you know, hype. Um, we knew that we were solving a problem, and then once we kind of got those things together, then it was pretty easy from there. 19:24 Thea Ngo: Cool. Beautiful. So, okay, so you guys went through Y Combinator, the San Francisco startup school. home to iconic companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, in the summer of 2024. And the Series A didn't come until 2026. So in between, the AI funding market went into a frenzy. Companies raising mega rounds every few months, valuations completely exploding. You guys kept your head down and kept building. What was it like internally during those— 2-year. 20:02 Will Bodewes: Yeah, for sure. So I think probably some clarification on that. So we got into YC summer of '24. We raised a seed round out of that. We didn't announce it just because we were too busy working. Um, so right out of that, so that'd have been October, just October, December of '24. And then we did close our seed round in like December of '25. We just didn't announce it until recently. 20:25 Thea Ngo: looking back in those 2 years, like as someone that is obviously very high achieving and impatient all throughout kind of your professional athlete career and then did startups right out of college, do you ever feel like things were moving too slowly? How do you balance those like internal and external pressures? 20:45 Will Bodewes: Yeah, I mean, obviously like I'm very competitive, right? Like I wanna be that person that is, you know, exceeding it every possible way, right? And then that was hard. There was a lot of times for me where that personal thing of like, we should be better, we should be bigger, we should be blah, blah, blah, was a really like hard question for me to the point in which like, but then like towards the end of it, I was just, I kind of realized that there's a lot of hype out there and then there's like reality. And so when we realistically step back and said like, okay, let's look at where we're at. Like when we raised our Series A, we're still top 5% of YC companies. Our valuation is top 5% of YC companies ever created. You know, like we, we, like we are objectively moving faster than most. Um, and I think that where we're, where I kind of landed was the idea that like comparison is the thief of joy, right? You can always— 21:42 Thea Ngo: 100%. 21:43 Will Bodewes: Like you can always come out there. There's always somebody doing better, somebody bigger, somebody that you knew, like, It's just always going to be the case. But realistically, like when I started the company, I had this little sticky note that I wrote down and put on my desk and it said, there are no shortcuts for you, Beau Davis. And what that meant to me was it meant to me that like, that's not going to be your story, right? Your story is not going to be the one that goes from this to a million. Like you're going to have to earn it. And that's what you wanted anyways. It was not about being the lucky one that, you know, got the easy route to the top. It was about putting in the work and learning and growing and building along the way because that's like, that's the story that I've always figured. Nothing in life has ever really been handed to me. I've always had to work for everything. And I think that that was the right mindset to how you create something like that goes explosive. It just work on it, try to solve the problem. Try to do your best you can and, and don't expect that you're the exception. 22:43 Thea Ngo: Yeah, 100%. I, I can see the athlete, um, mentality coming through. Um, do you still have the sticky note? 22:51 Will Bodewes: I have it somewhere. I don't have it on my desk right now, but yeah, I still do. Mm-hmm. 22:57 Thea Ngo: You have to, you have to make, you have to make a sign of the motto, you know? 23:01 Will Bodewes: Yeah, exactly. 23:02 Thea Ngo: So, okay, so your Series A, story was actually really funny as well. So you, it came from a LinkedIn post about cycling. So Base10's Caroline saw it, reached out, and months later, PhoneMe had $16 million and $100 mil valuation without running a formal raise. Well, first off, congratulations. That is a huge achievement and kind of your 2 worlds marrying each other into one. Um, what are you excited for that the money will unlock? 23:33 Will Bodewes: For me, it's just all about growth, right? Like we're scaling our sales team pretty hard right now. Like we, you know, we'll probably add 3 guys this week. And so it's a big push for us to be able to do that, to say, hey, like we built, like we spent so much time building the product and now it's time to push on the sales and really take this thing to the next level. And I think for us it was figuring out like we, we've learned a lot along the way and we figured out like through all that pain and that suffering of like, okay, this is what actually works in the market. This is how you do it. And then now it's just, hey, let's like push the money button and try to grow as fast as we can. And we couldn't get there. We couldn't get the kind of growth that we wanted to get if we didn't take on external capital. And so we realized that like, hey, money is going to be really important for us. Yeah, we can be successful and, you know, we can, I can have good exit and retire and all that stuff. If I wanted to. Um, but it, for us, it was like, hey, how big can we make this thing? Um, and the money was the fa— is the only way that we could unlock the kind of growth that we were looking for. 24:36 Thea Ngo: 2 years in the trenches. Um, been a long journey. Um, been through a lot. Like, what do you think have been personal costs to running this business? 24:47 Will Bodewes: I spent a lot, a lot, a lot of time working on this. Like, I really have pushed hard. And I think, you know, you hear people be like, oh, you know, I work 18 hours a day, right? But I didn't, and I didn't think, and I heard people say it, I didn't think it was possible until I like did it. And then I did it for years. And the opportunity cost and the loss on that has definitely been something that's like weighed on my mind of saying like, yeah, like I've missed out on like 2 years of my life that I could be hanging out with friends. I could be traveling. I could be, You know, doing, taking life on the easy route. And yeah, that, that like, that's, that's kind of the consequence. But at the end of the day, it's like we put ourselves in a really good position going forward. And kind of the way that I think about, and I, I've justified that, if you will, is say like the path that I'm on gives me a lot of optionality to do whatever I want in the rest of my life. of my life. You know, like, yeah, it's a lot of work now. It's really hard. My 20s are not gonna be awesome, right? But for the rest of my life, I can choose the impact that I wanna make. I can choose the path that I wanna go on. I've learned how to raise capital. I've learned how to build a product. 25:58 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 25:58 Will Bodewes: I've learned how to engineer, you know, scale a sales team. Like, you know, all these learnings, right? And so it gives me so much room to go do different things in the world. And I think that as much as it sucks to miss out on some fun years, I think at the end of the day, life's really long and to have the optionality to spend the rest of it doing what you want is valuable for me. And also, like, at the end of the day, it's like, I really just want to make an impact in the world and make the world a better place. 26:25 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 26:25 Will Bodewes: Phonely is not going to be the only— it's not going to be the last company that I start, but it allows me to give some impact that I can hopefully take on my next venture to make the world a better place and do some of the things that I care about. And while voice AI is a problem to be solved and And I love the problem and I love the team and I love the people. I still feel like there's more out there for me to, to go and really try to make the world a better place. So I'd like to have the opportunity to do that. And PhoneMe feels like the fastest way to get that opportunity. 26:53 Thea Ngo: Beautiful. And you can always have fun in your 30s, 40s, or golden 50s, you know? 26:58 Will Bodewes: So, yeah, we'll see about that. 27:00 Thea Ngo: We'll, we'll see. Um, okay. So throughout this entire journey, what do you think has been the most valuable lesson you've learned as a founder? 27:06 Will Bodewes: Uh, there's like several lessons. Like first off, to anybody out here who's watching it, that is considering being a founder or not being a founder, I recommend that you don't be a founder. And the reason for that is like, it's so hard and there's a lot of luck involved. But even if it works out, it's a very long journey to kind of where you want to go. And there's like, there's really no easy route. Don't be a founder unless you have to be a founder. And there's some people out there that are like, oh, I might want to start a company. Like if you might want to start a company, like your company's probably not going to work. But if you're like, I need to be a founder because I feel something so strongly, so passionately that I have to do this or else, then it's like, okay, well you have no choice. You better go do it. And then you better be prepared to put in a lot of work. To be fair, I'm on a very extreme end of things where I said like, hey, I want to build something massive and I'm going to go out into Silicon Valley and I'm going to You know, there's founders that are like on different scales and different levels. 28:09 Thea Ngo: 100%. 28:10 Will Bodewes: Um, but it's probably also just like, know the game that you're playing in. Like if you're gonna play in the venture capital game, which is the game that I play in, it's like you need to know that you're gonna like hit, go super hard and try to be super big. And it's like a very risky, volatile, crazy kind of space, and you better be ready for that. Um, but if you just wanna like create a business and grow that and have it be a lifestyle thing, There's like a lot of respect to that. People that really win, those are the people that take it super seriously. You have to be really, really passionate. Like you have to really want it for it to, to work out. 28:41 Thea Ngo: I've learned a lot about the 2-year arduous journey, and I feel like after this I need to go compete in some kind of race or competition to like get that competition edge. 28:51 Will Bodewes: There you go. 28:53 Thea Ngo: There you go. 28:54 Will Bodewes: Thanks so much for, uh, inviting me to the, the podcast. Really appreciate it. 28:58 Thea Ngo: That's a wrap. If you like this episode, please hit the like and subscribe button. It helps us bring on more awesome guests, level up production, and bring on new series you'll want to watch. And if you want to hear more early-stage builder stories, check out our other episodes. Okay, see you next time. No transcript lines match that phrase. Try fewer words.
▶
▶
▶