I

would say to be honest, all the above. Sometimes we just like have an itch. We want to make something new. Sometimes we have an idea that we can't get rid of. Sometimes there's something we want that we don't have. We have a luxury position right now, given the fact we've been in business for a long time to have some fun and explore some stuff. And I think business should be fun. Sometimes it's not, and that's going to be natural, but it better be fun sometimes. And part of that sometimes is kicking off some new idea and seeing where it's going to go. For example, Hey, originally we were building a new version of Highrise, which was an old CRM tool we built. And it turned into Hey, which was an email tool. We didn't know that. We wouldn't have set out to build an email tool initially. Actually, we didn't. I remember the conversation I had with David. I'm like, Hey, David, I want to show you something. I know we've been working on high rise too. But like, I think there's something here with this email thing. And sometimes you just have to set off and see where you go. Like working on this couple new things right now. And one of them, just last week, I just had this feeling like I something's not right with this. Something's not right with this. I know we can get it right. but something's not right with this. And so let's just like try something else in the middle while we're working on it. And now I'm quite happy with what we're about to share with the rest of the team. It's the same product, but there's something that wasn't right. I actually like being in those positions where like there's something here and it's not right. And you get to sort of explore some more. So look, there's business reasons, there's entertainment reasons, there's explorer reasons. You go out and explore because you don't know what you're going to find. But you have a sense that there's something out there. There's all these reasons. Now, again, we are in a place where we can have more of those explorations and go out and see what lands are unconquered in a sense and see what islands we can find, that sort of thing. If you're brand new, you better know what the hell you're doing the first time you're doing it. You better know why. And I would say you better need that thing desperately. That would be my advice. But as you get into it and you have some room and some cushion, you can play some more. And I think that's a very important thing. If you want to stay in business for a long time and enjoy being in business for a long time, you've got to have some fun as well. And that's part of it. It's

like you have to keep innovating to keep yourself interested in it. At least that's what I find. Yeah.

And the thing is, that's exciting to me, at least with one of these right now and the other one soon, but not quite yet is we're actively using this tool that we're building. And I find that to be like a big part of the fun as well. It's not theoretical. We're building this thing. And actually it makes me a little bit more inspired to make it even better and better and better to make it irresistible in a sense where like, I want to get to the place where we're using this, where we feel like, what was it like before that? And that's sort of where I want to get this to. And it's not quite there yet, but I know we can get there. And that's a fun challenge to not know how to do that yet, but to be in the middle of it. But yeah, again, we have some cushion and you should use some of that to have fun and explore things. Is

it so hard to talk about the products without talking about the new products?

It is. And I'm sort of dancing around a bunch of stuff here, but the feeling to me is like, sometimes you've done well and you can afford to buy something that you maybe don't need in a sense, but you find that you're really happy that you did do that. And there should be a sense of that, in my opinion, in on the business side of things as well. And sometimes that's making something you don't desperately need at the moment. But as you get into it, like, yeah, actually, there's really something here, here, but I don't quite know what it is. And we get to squeeze it and find out what it is. You can't do that. everything is a desperate necessity, but you need to start there to get going, I think. David,

anything to add? Yeah,

for me, it's just as much about stretching my talent, encountering novel problems in novel domains that require me to develop skills I did not quite have, or at least stretch the skills I already have. If we're constantly just doing everything that I already know exactly how to do for the oomph time, that just doesn't get me fired up. That does not get me out of bed in the morning. I need some uncertainty. I need some fuzziness. need some, I'm not sure how to solve this kind of problem. Now, occasionally in the world of technology, that becomes pathological. And this is what leads a lot of clever people to devise some overly complicated, convoluted, technical monstrosities when all they needed was the tiny little simple thing. Now, thankfully, for whatever reason, what I'm addicted to is conceptual compression, simplifying ideas, simplifying the complex into something that's really easy such that I can use it without even thinking about it the next time. But that process requires novel situations. It requires novel problem domains to be able to explore the techniques that we have and improve them in such a way that they really can conceptually compress. So that's what gets me fired up about these ideas. of some of the ideas, you know what? I don't need to implement, say, a to-do list for the, I probably implemented 17 different to-do lists over the course of my career. We have other people on the team that could do that. But there are in these products, as there always is in any novel, interesting product, there's facets of it where I go like, ooh, ooh, ooh, there's something there. That's really interesting. We're going to push the envelope here. And I think this is what's also important is that you have to accept that just as much as whatever we're building needs to have a business idea. It's not just a hobby here. We're trying to cover some salaries and we're trying to turn a profit and we're trying to stay in business. That pillar absolutely needs to be there. Then there needs to be the pillar of, am I solving a problem I even care about? Do I have any relation to the customers that we're going to have for this thing? That should really be there too. And that was actually the reason why Jason and I ultimately decided not to do high rise too. That we did not quite have the connection to the problem domain itself. We weren't doing enough CRMing. We were not doing enough customer relation, management, email tracking, all the things. So we had grown further apart from the prospective customer base, even if we sort of knew how to do it. And even if we could find some technically novel, that part was missing. Then it needs to be fun. As Jason said, it just needs to be entertaining to be part of it. I need to be excited about it. And for me, and that really is perhaps the pillar that counts more and more as we get older and older, and we've been doing this for longer and longer, is I want to feel like when I'm done with this project, I damn well better be better at some stuff. I damn well better know more about some things, because otherwise it's going to feel, there's going to be a little bit of groundhog day in it. There's going to be a little bit of like, I just did a thing I already knew how to do. I didn't stretch at all. And now we have the thing. Great. But am I any better? Am I any better for the journey that we went on? I don't want to spend another two years of my life not getting better. That to me is the fundamental satisfaction of still being in it, still liking working with the web. I'm not done with the web. The web keeps throwing up new things and making it interesting. We're not done with the product, but it has to all come together. I'm trying to think, what is it? Karigi, karugi? Now I'm totally butchering it. There's this Japanese idea of these overlapping Ben circles. It's gotta be useful for society. It's got to take advantage of your skills. It's got, that's what we're talking about here. It's not just about one thing. It's not just about making the maximum amount of money possible. It's not just about having a laugh every single day, just like, ah, this is so much fun. And like, it's nothing else. It's not just about like, ooh, can I come up with the most convoluted thing that stretches my talents in a way that's totally disproportionate to the problem we're trying to solve it's all the things all at once that's where the magic is let

me add something to that too which is because i was thinking about this as you were talking about a lot of companies this is just called r&d right where they go off and explore new technologies, new ideas, whatever.