From mushroom-picking in Belarus to $200M/year. How he built Flo Health into a $1B health app. | Dmitry Gurski, Founder of Flo Health

This is one of the wildest founder journeys you’ll ever hear. Dmitry Gurski went from growing potatoes and picking mushrooms on a farm in Belarus to building Flo—a billion-dollar company with 75M monthly users that dominates the health and fitness category worldwide. He started Flo in a market already controlled by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin’s startup, which had $30M in funding from a16z. Today, Flo is 100x bigger than its once-dominant rival.

Dmitry shares raw, unfiltered startup truths—like why he got rejected by 200+ VCs, why 90% of startup failures are team-related, and why most founders are delusional about product-market fit. He breaks down how simplicity beats complexity in product, why retention is everything, and how deleting features can actually boost revenue.

If you’re a founder, this episode will fundamentally change how you think about perseverance, pivots, and building something that lasts. Listen now—you’ll be referencing this one for years.

Why you should listen:

• Why big market beats niche – How Flo won because it targeted all women’s health while competitors focused only on fertility.
• How Retention is the real test – A product with natural recurring use cases (like periods) has built-in retention, unlike fitness or productivity apps.
• Why simple wins – The first version of Flo was less complex than competitors but had far better predictions—accuracy mattered more than features.
• Fundraising is brutal – Flo got 300+ investor rejections before raising $300M. Many VCs just didn’t “get” the space.

Keywords
startup, entrepreneurship, product design, user retention, Flow app, health and fitness, early stage founders, product market fit, simplicity, user engagement, retention, user case, app development, entrepreneurship, product market fit, mobile apps, business strategy, team dynamics, failure, success, risk, uncertainty, decision making, market demand, competition, product-market fit, fundraising, entrepreneurship, startup success, female health

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:09:10) Why you Need to Keep it Simple
(00:13:10) Why B2C is All About Retention
(00:19:05) Why you Need to Delete Features
(00:24:14) PMF is about the Shape of the Curve
(00:39:17) When to Persevere, When to Pivot, and When to Quit
(00:42:22) More attempts = more success
(00:51:34) The Idea for Flo
(00:59:05) Finding Product Market Fit
(01:02:07) Advice for An Early Stage Founder
(01:10:22) A Potato Story

Chapters

• 9:10 Why you Need to Keep it Simple
• 13:10 Why B2C is All About Retention
• 19:05 Why you Need to Delete Features
• 24:14 PMF is about the Shape of the Curve
• 39:17 When to Persevere, When to Pivot, and When to Quit
• 42:22 More attempts = more success
• 51:34 The Idea for Flo
• 59:05 Finding Product Market Fit
• 1:02:07 Advice for An Early Stage Founder
• 1:10:22 A Potato Story

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00):
So I spoke with Dmitry, the founder of Flo, for about two hours, and we've cut it back, obviously, and really put forth the best 50% of that discussion. And I'll tell you something, Dmitry is truly unique, exceptional. Just an absolute monster. I mean, this guy started in Belarus in a potato farm. He was growing mushrooms when he was 15. And somehow he goes from there to running a period tracker app that is doing $200 million in top-line revenue. That's worth $1 billion. That has 35% market share and is competing for the number one spot in the health and fitness category globally. Imagine this. When Dmitry started Flo in 2015, there were hundreds of period trackers on the App Store. One of them was this company called Glow, started by Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of PayPal. That company was already in market for three years. They'd already raised $30 million by A16. Today, Flo is a hundred times bigger than Glow. Here's a story of how that happened.


Previous Guests (01:04):
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit. Listen, if you don't want the show to move up the rankings, you don't want it to get better guests, totally get it. You know what? Don't leave a review. Just don't do it. Why would you? But if you want to help out, if you want better and better guests, if you want to help the show move up the rankings, then take literally five seconds and hit five stars. Thank you.


Dmitry Gurski (01:33):
My main advice for early-stage founders, run away, run away.


Pablo Srugo (01:40):
See, you know, Dmitry, the problem is like when you say that as someone who's succeeded as much as you have, it's just like, what's the point?


Dmitry Gurski (01:47):
I'm quite sure that if I have known how difficult it would be, I would never have energy to stop that.


Pablo Srugo (01:58):
You think so? Just random tangent, but if you knew that you would get to as big and successful as you have become, but you had to go and eat all the shit that I'm sure you ate throughout, would you do it? Or would you actually really maybe choose something else?


Dmitry Gurski (02:14):
I'm not sure. Because it was really difficult and really painful from 10 years of our existence, 8 years of misery and calamities. I'm not sure that I would agree for any success or any volume of money.


Pablo Srugo (02:34):
For me, the first question, honestly, because as I was thinking of, again, many of the other guests we've had, typically it's, frankly, Americans who went to maybe Stanford or Harvard or investment banking, turned founders. And you started on a potato farm in Belarus, and then you ended up building a billion-dollar period tracker that then became a lot more other things. But It's just such a crazy journey when you describe it that way. Take us back to that. How does all of this start?


Dmitry Gurski (03:08):
And maybe even before I will share my miserable beginning, and I'm quite ironic about that. Really, I do participate in Stanford Business School, but I was five years back, Stanford Executive Program, and it means that I have this big box of Stanford in my CV.


Pablo Srugo (03:34):
But you also have Potato Farmer, which most people don't have.


Dmitry Gurski (03:37):
Yeah, but what was my main learning from Stanford? I was in Stanford's executive program and it's a very, very selective program just for executives, CEOs. It's much more selective than MBA, much more selective. It's like just 200 places once per year.


Pablo Srugo (03:53):
Because this is when you were already in Flo, like you're already running Flo, right?


Dmitry Gurski (03:56):
Yeah, it's a very selective program for mature executives and CEOs. And what was my main learning from this program? I didn't meet geniuses at this program, and I have never met any geniuses in my life. I know dozens of billionaires, I know hundreds of founders, maybe thousands already. I have never seen any geniuses. But what was very evident about these people, especially in comparison with my university. They were really disciplined and really committed. And I believe that discipline is much more significant than anything else. Discipline and stubbornness in pursuing of your goals and vision, but discipline is the first. I would say that coming back to my story, yes, it's right that I had a very humble beginning in Belarus when the Soviet Union reigned and we were growing our own potatoes, our own food. What I definitely got from this experience is discipline and the ability not to anticipate fast, immediate results. Because when you work in farming, Like when you're like growing potato, you just, you can't fake your job the same way as you may fake your job in the corporation. Because if you fake your job, then you will be hungry because they're like... 


Pablo Srugo (05:34):
And this is when, by the way, like how young are you when you're working at the potato farm?


Dmitry Gurski (05:37):
It's like our small family farm, and most of the people in Belarus at that time had it because shops were empty, no money, no jobs, and people had to grow food by themselves. It was not something unique for that time. What was really significant is to learn this disciplined approach that, yeah, you should make your job, you should put it to the ground, then you should wait. And nothing is guaranteed because sometimes there's hail, sometimes there's frost, sometimes like potato may be spoiled. But what is really mandatory, what's really the single element in you must put your seeds to the ground. And the same with companies, with startups. Like nothing is guaranteed. And everything may happen, but you must start. And knowing all these hundreds of founders, dozens of billionaires, I see just one common trait among them. For any reason, at some moment they started. And then the rest is the history. But it's really significant to start, and then usually it's much longer than people anticipate. Most of the stories in startups are really stories about David's and Goliath's. Because logically, you should anticipate innovations from Goliath's, from big corporations, or at least from people with resources, or well-connected people, or people with previous experience. But really, it's much more complicated. And our story was also pretty complicated if you're unpredictable. Because, like, let's imagine, like, 2015, and you're a seed investor. And you have opportunity to invest to two startups in the field of female health. One startup. Founder is Max Levchin.


Pablo Srugo (07:46):
Sold. I'm sold already.


Dmitry Gurski (07:49):
Already received from almost from the very beginning 30 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund. Started three years before like the second startup in Silicon Valley. Got all possible attention from press and another startup started three years after in Belarus by a bunch of weird guys like me with terrible accent. At that time, probably even more terrible. Without significant resources, almost bootstrapping, and who had never been at that moment in the United States or even for a longer time in any Western countries, like maybe just a tourist, who would win this market? What company should be invested? And it's an evident answer that the first company should have been investable, and then the company should not be invested. But now, like 10 years after, it's a story about Flo and Glow. And now Flo is, I don't know, 100 times bigger than Glow, maybe so. And I have like my theory why, but it's always this, theories is kind of inside rationalization.


Pablo Srugo (09:03):
It's all hindsight, but still, how do you explain it? That's the burning question. It's just like, how does that end up happening?


Dmitry Gurski (09:09):
I think, ultimately, it was about several good product decisions. I think a big mistake of Glow, of Max Levchin, was to focus too much on a narrow segment of trying to conceive, rather than to have a focus on a wide audience. And also, I think the product was not simple enough. And if I have learned something from 15 years of building apps, it's that simplicity just trumps everything. For consumer-facing products, not like number of features, Nothing, just simplicity. If you anticipate that your users would be proactive and do something you anticipate them to do, no. It must be very simple. And we had several significant decisions at that moment. It's like to focus on a wider audience but to make product really simple. But I think like the biggest decision which determined success of Flo was a unique product strategy. And all our competitors, they had the approach that they were building like small apps for, like one app for one user case, like one app for pregnancy, one app for drinking, one app for trying to conceive. And our approach was very different. First, our big idea was that it should not be just a period tracker. Period Tracker is a very unique, good product because most of women use period trackers and they use them for a very long time and retention is high and acquisition is simple. But then it's just like a tiny product which can't bring enough engagement and value to be maintainable. But this product brings what is very unique is a huge total addressable market and very long retention. And our way of thinking was quite similar to the way of thinking of Google when Google was trying to somehow monetize Gmail, Gmail or Google. And they also had many attempts, like they had advertising, they had subscriptions, everything failed because people, they just don't accept the idea that email may be paid. And because all emails are free and you understand what is worth to pay or not based on your experience. Nobody is ready to pay for email, but all people use emails religiously. It's useful too and it's a huge time. And then the solution was to surround and to connect this Gmail email function with adjusting features like documents. They acquired a company to have a document. Like with chats, with calls, like to create this ecosystem. And this ecosystem, and this way, Google One was born. And now, like I said, they're getting billions from that, not even from corporations, but from people. People are paying relatively. But if you consider just Gmail, it would not work this way. It's like Gmail is a driver of engagement, driver of acquisition, but it's impossible to monetize it.


Pablo Srugo (12:30):
Was that then, like, that was the period tracker for you?


Dmitry Gurski (12:33):
Yeah, yeah. And for us, period tracker was kind of Gmail and this, like, Google Plus ecosystem. And then our idea was to create, like, a kind of, like, to surround period tracker by different features, like, and content, like medical articles, patterns, chatbots, like everything you may see in modern Flo. But this idea was 10 years back. And it was a really crucial idea because of that Flo became monetizable and it's still the single really monetizable app at the market because it's the single app which is heavy enough to be monetizable.


Pablo Srugo (13:12):
It's very uncommon because this was when, I don't remember exactly when Messenger split out of Facebook, but this was the movement. It was like you want these, and it's ironic because you mentioned simplicity being so important. From my recollection the whole philosophy was in order to keep things simple you want these hyper-specific apps like Snapchat you open you take a picture messenger you open you text a friend facebook you open you've got a whole other world you don't want to do these like you know in china they were doing these kind of super apps but in America in the west the idea was like keep things siloed and simple but in your case somehow like it's the opposite that worked.


Dmitry Gurski (13:48):
Yeah, and it works well, really well. For example, we have pregnancy mode and now this pregnancy mode is used by like 20% maybe more already of all American pregnant women. But we are not acquiring users altogether, like maybe 2%. The rest is just switches, switches from trying to conceive mode or like a track mode, they're just switching from other modes. But because they're doing that at scale, we're achieving what we wanted and also it's a prolong our retention. And retention of Flo is very, very, very high. It's like why we got to 75 million monthly users, because of retention. And if we didn't have this special mode, we would have holes.


Pablo Srugo (14:44):
What is, like, when you mentioned retention being long, like, what's the kind of average, let's say, lifespan of a user?


Dmitry Gurski (14:49):
I would say that if a user didn't churn in the first month, this user would stay for years. Like, now we have, like, more than half of our MAU, like, users who have used Flo more than one year. And I'm not calculating people who came back, who were reinstalled. If you look on retention directly. And we should also consider that traffic is growing. Last year we got like 70, 80 million installs, maybe more, 90 million installs, and 30% more than in 2023. It means even with that, still a very significant part, half of our users, users from old cohorts and they stay for years. And we just launched the Perimenopause mode. And because of this mode, we hope that we will add additional 10 years of usage.


Pablo Srugo (15:48):
And one thing you mentioned I want to dive deeper on is you mentioned the concept of kind of keeping things simple. That's been one of your big learnings on product. Do you have any examples of that? I mean, maybe compared to that other startup you mentioned or maybe not, but just like things that you did in your app because it's such a generic it's you know, it's been overplayed like keep it simple, keep it simple. Everybody kind of knows that at a base level. But I'm curious, like, what sort of product decisions you made that you looked at and you're like, hey, that really simplified the product for our users?


Dmitry Gurski (16:23):
Really, it's happened not because we planned it so consciously, like, so, like, thoughtfully as I described. When we started Flo, we started two different apps. And in our initial vision, like, we passed, like, ideas that we would have, like, a more sophisticated calendar users who would need that like for more engaged users but also like a very simple version of it like even who need just to track a cycle it is a simple version was born like just like because of simplification of this more complicated version And our initial bet was that a complicated version would be the main product, and it would be just a kind of traffic generator. But then something that we didn't expect happened, that a simple version became popular and this sophisticated version not. And one year after, we killed the sophisticated version and started to iterate around the simple version.


Pablo Srugo (17:26):
Or like when you say sophisticated and simple, like maybe describe a little bit like what was the sophisticated one like and what did the simple one do.


Dmitry Gurski (17:34):
It kind of like had many like symptoms, many buttons, many like feels like to put like how do you feel, like something like that and like some like a content maybe and this like simple calendar response just kind of like a circle like you track your cycle at the beginning then the circle shows like when you will be next period and big button with plot like electric when it starts on something like that like really just like a several elements. I started to feel that Flo may become not as simple as I would want. But at least we always protect one element, not to be overcrowded. It's the first screen and specifically the upper part of the first screen. Because in any case, 90% of engagement, 90% of time people spend, they spend on this part of a product. And maybe like everything else is objectively crowded and we need to make some simplification probably of it. But this part is still protected and this part is still simple. And because of that, probably, maybe because of that, we didn't see any decline in retention. Pretty much the same as it was initially for free users. Talking about simplification, it's interesting. Recently, we had several interesting experiments. We were just deleting features.


Pablo Srugo (19:04):
Really?


Dmitry Gurski (19:05):
Yeah. And features or elements. And what's interesting, all these features initially showed like in A/B test, like a good improvement of revenue or conversions, like anything. But then when we just deleted them, metrics improved, including like this metrics we initially used as justification for these features. And it sounds like a paradox, but it's not a paradox. I would call it like a phenomenon paradox of combine. Let's imagine that you have a big company and you start to add features. When you add a feature, you add this feature to the app, which is still simpler than it will be in one year. And because of that, competition with features is lower. And at that moment, it shows like a good impact. But then your team works really hard and creates like 20 more features. And the competition and cannibalization between features intensifies. And because of that, like this feature, which was useful one year back, in this like a new big combine, is becoming like additional complexity, additional destruction. And now you have like better features, but it just distract users from your better features. And that moment is necessary to make this clean up and delete such features. But I have seen many companies, but I would say it's very rare to see that companies are deleting old features. 

Pablo Srugo (20:45):
100 percent


Dmitry Gurski (20:46): 
It's very rare. It's really painful. It's like almost like to kill my darlings. It's like to kill like my, like for product person, believe me, like to kill old feature is almost as to bring your old dog to a vet. You know that like, ah, my old dog. 


Pablo Srugo (21:02):
It's time, but you don't want to do it. That's tough. 


Dmitry Gurski (21:04):
My dog like to a vet for last visit. It's painful for my dog. It's painful for me, but I just can't bring my old dog to a vet and the same for product person to kill old fish is the same pain.


Pablo Srugo (21:17):
First of all, I totally agree. I mean, like the natural cycle is you just add, you just keep adding and adding. And, you know, it reminds me this whole, the paradox that you mentioned. There's, you know, here in Canada, the biggest tech startup is, I shouldn't even call it startup tech company, is Shopify. And Toby, the CEO, has this thing that he does every so often. I remember because I had a friend who worked at Shopify told me this happened in one day where he will just click a button and delete everybody's meetings. And his kind of idea is, you know, at first, you add a meeting because it is a good idea. Then maybe you make it recurring because it kind of makes sense. But you never think to just kind of clean slate it all. And so he just forcefully does it. And he kind of says, listen, if you have an important meeting, I'm sure you'll remember it. And I'm sure you're going to set it again. But the ones that you don't remember used to exist, like now they're gone. They're gone for good. And it's it really has to be this top down effort with features. You know, it's kind of the same idea. You have to go in and almost say like, OK, you know, every X time or whenever you notice that things are getting clunky, like, let's just let's go into this delete mode and see what happens and if users aren't begging for it back then maybe it wasn't supposed to be there in the first place.


Dmitry Gurski (22:32):
But also it's really necessary to distinguish vocal minority and the real sadness of your user base, because, for example, we had the feature of basal temperature and because it was this feature, basal temperature is maybe used to predict fertility, but it's very cumbersome process, necessary to measure temperature each morning and track in the app and usually really maybe 0.1% of users used it. And using our approach to clean up we decided to do it. And then it was a huge outrage in reviews and in email of our support and if we hadn't known that it's just 0.1% of users who use it, you should conclude that it's huge. But really, it was just 0.1% of users. But when you have dozens of millions of them, then 0.1% when they start complaining, it may be huge. But really, it's necessary to ignore that because you should necessarily focus on making good features for like your mass audience, not like for some niche. But you have like a title of your podcast, Product Market Fit. And I would want maybe to come back to the beginning of the story and to talk about- 


Pablo Srugo (24:07):
I was just going to say, yeah, we've got until you're 15 at the potato farm that we jumped to Stanford, but there's a whole middle. 


Dmitry Gurski (24:14):
So it was a good experience like nothing is difficult after that. But talking about product market fit, and the question like when I understood that we have a product market fit and that this product may become big. And I would say almost immediately. And I have my way, how I measure product market fit, and it's rather in case of consumer-facing products. I always look on retention, but we're often, especially investors, they're making mistakes as they're trying to see like absolute number of retention, like 15% in one month or one year, I don't know, like 40, 50%. By my opinion, at the beginning, it's not adequate. It really doesn't matter. Is it 10%, 15%, 50% after one month? What's really significant is the shape of the curve. And I'm always not trying to analyze absolute numbers because it's irrelevant at the early stage. What's relevant is the shape of the curve, and specifically, I'm trying to see if the water is like a plateau, or if it's just falling down. Because if it's just falling down to zero, it means that there is no product market fit. There are no people who would, even a small cohort of people, who would use it repeatedly. But if there is like a plateau, and this plateau is evident, maybe it's even like 5%, maybe even 3%, but there is a plateau, then there is a promise, because then it's possible to start analyzing who are these people, why they use a product repeatedly, and then you double down on that. And sometimes you may find that they use your product not even because of a reason you created this product, maybe even something like a side feature, or it may be a very different audience. And in the case of Flo, the signal was really evident. The signal was something like a retention of 40-50% after several months of install. And it was a very nice fluttering with maybe 1-2% of churn month to month. I still have never seen so good retention curve, so nice shape among health and fitness products. It was something much more similar to social networks, Netflix, products of very different kind. And in most of cases, health and fitness products, they have very bad retention. It's just nature of people. It's like that. Once I got this information that a popular United States chain of gyms, they sell approximately 100 times more memberships than they have capacity. And they sell annual memberships. And why are they doing that? Because they know that approximately 1% of people will use it.


Pablo Srugo (27:18):
That's why, you know, you go to the gym right now in January and February, and it's a terrible experience. By March, April, you know, all the ones that were going to churn basically have churned, and, you know, the gyms are like 30% capacity.


Dmitry Gurski (27:30):
But the gyms are all smart, and because of that, they sell membership using annual commitment, but rather cheap monthly price. Most of them. I'm not talking about Equinox or so. And it's a very smart strategy because we also see this paradox in case of many health and fitness products when retention of subscription is much higher than retention of usage. It's quite phenomenal. And it's not just because people forget to stop subscription, especially nowadays when all people are so familiar with subscription mechanics. The reason is that people hope that in the future they will be better. And for them, it's almost kind of like a cross-out future. I'm just desperate. No chance. I will never be fit if I delete this app or if I stop my membership. But tomorrow, I will definitely start my diet or I will definitely start running. And because of that, retention of subscription in case of many health and fitness products may be good or very good. But retention of usage is usually terrible in most of cases. But Flo was an exceptional case, and probably like us, most of period trackers. And the reason is that women, they have a period naturally, and it's inevitable, and the period has tremendous impact on health and life, and then it's necessary to organize life around the period. And then it's not the same as to make your choice that I would go to gym or not. Of course, like you always have reasons why not to go to gym. And they always may just delay that for tomorrow and it's like recurring tomorrow. Tomorrow means tomorrow, tomorrow means tomorrow, tomorrow will never come. But you can't do that with period. And because of that, retention is much higher.


Pablo Srugo (29:29):
It's probably more comparable, I would think, to like a standard calendar or even email, like in terms of retention, like from a retention perspective.


Dmitry Gurski (29:37):
Yeah. Maybe I would even say, I would maybe even more comparable would be to say like it's like a gym and school. Like you have much better attendance of school because you must. 


Pablo Srugo (29:57):
Right.


Dmitry Gurski (29:59):
And gym, it's like you make this choice and you don't visit. But it's an interesting conclusion from that, that in case of most companies, retention is pretty much a function of user case rather than product. It means that you may create a perfect product with all whistles and all engagement features and all unifications better than Duolingo, but if you apply this product to user case without natural retention, you will not achieve it. Maybe you will increase this from 1% to 3%, but it's impossible to move it from 1% to 50%. Retention is a user case. And to build a big business is necessary to build this business based on naturally repeating cases, which happens at mass, is a huge time. And it was our approach to Flo. There are other examples about that. People were often trying for years to improve retention, and almost they're trying to find new electricity shock to zombie, and the zombie makes like a shake a bit.


Pablo Srugo (31:19):
But it's similar. I mean, it's similar to usage, right? Like if you have a messaging app, you know, you can expect daily usage. If you have even like Flo, I don't know if it's daily or more weekly or let's say monthly usage patterns that you can expect. Like you can only do so much and other sort of things. Maybe they use it every quarter. Like You know, you do have to map to what is the use case. It's not just the digital product. It's actually, you know, everything that's behind it that's equally important to how often are people going to use it. And, you know, at the other point, how long will people stay? Like if you sell to SMB, you know, some will go out of business. Whereas if you sell to enterprise, most won't and you'll get expansion revenue. So it's true. There's so many things outside. There's probably more things outside the product than in the product that drive things like usage and retention. So take us back, because we haven't actually talked much about this, before Flo. I'm curious why you decided to start a period tracker when you did. But maybe before that, you spent a decade outside of tech before you got into tech, right? What did you do then? What did you do from kind of 18 to 30 sort of thing?


Dmitry Gurski (32:24):
15, 16. We got kind of a small business. We were gathering mushrooms and selling mushrooms. And we were quite intense in this job. We were spending all day long in the forest. 


Pablo Srugo (32:45):
Was this normal? This is in Belarus? Was this normal back then?


Dmitry Gurski (32:48):
Yeah, it was in Belarus and at that time it was pretty standard for all kids to eat money or buy a gathering of mushrooms or buy berries. And maybe into summers, you did have enough money to buy a computer. And the time internet emerged and we started making like simple jobs in internet.


Pablo Srugo (33:07):
This is what, like the early 90s sort of thing? 


Dmitry Gurski (33:10):
Like 2000, 1999. 


Pablo Srugo (33:11):
2000s, Okay.


Dmitry Gurski (33:12):
And then it was like one interesting case. It's a very interesting lesson for life. One day, we were writing and publishing articles about computers. At that time, it was very popular because people in the region were learning how to work with computers professionally and just casually. And one day we received a letter from publishing house, which was proposing to write a book.


Pablo Srugo (33:43):
And so this is like, just to be clear, like, so you were kind of like blogging at that point and they saw something you'd written and asked you?


Dmitry Gurski(33:48): 
It's also like blogging, like articles at that time, at least in that region, like we had many printed magazines and even newspapers about computers or even like more journalistic media which were writing about computers because it was so popular at that moment. And it was mostly like writing articles for them.


Pablo Srugo (34:09):
And a book on what? Also on that same topic, like how to use computers or something about the internet, these sort of things.


Dmitry Gurski (34:14):
Also over internet programming, like my biggest book was about ActionScript. It was like a programming language of Macromedia Flash. And I was at the time quite intense, stubborn, and because I was 20 years old, I stopped just when this book reached 1,100 pages. I was writing this book almost for one year, like sleeping daily, and then at night, I was writing this book for one year. And it was quite a good book. And this book had a significant influence on my life. And not just because of books. I will share this story later. But it was a huge learning for all my life. Sometimes opportunities are much bigger if you're kind of naive and stupid enough to assume that you can't do that.


Pablo Srugo (35:05):
The publishing house was a Belarus company or was it a Russian company?


Dmitry Gurski (35:10):
It was working for a Russian speaking audience, a bigger market. And we left our publishing house and we started two companies in parallel. One was making apps, like health and fitness apps. And one was making books because, like, we hedged our risks. And book publishing still exists. And we have published maybe 2,000 of educational books.


Pablo Srugo (35:35):
Wow.


Dmitry Gurski (35:36):
And I consider that as a big part of my heritage.


Pablo Srugo (35:40):
So you jumped, like, I mean, you got into the app world. Like, you saw the iPhone come out and you kind of started developing apps almost right away, right? Like, the App Store opens in, what, 2009, something like that?


Dmitry Gurski (35:50):
And it was for a strategic decision because. We concluded that it's almost like us now, like all people jump into AI. At that time, it was pretty evident that it's something new and big and it's time to jump. And probably it was like really right.


Pablo Srugo (36:08):
And did you personally, like I know you wrote the books about it, but were you a developer or was it your brother who was actually building like coding?


Dmitry Gurski (36:14):
At that time, we had developers, but initially, in the early days, we were able to make projects mostly for the internet. But at that time, it was also simpler, because at that time, all this internet stack was rather simple. But at that time, we had developers, but it was very small, almost a bit of a trap. But at the time now I'm analyzing that probably it was like a mistake to sell this company to Ely because this company was acquired mostly because we had mobile engineers and many corporations they needed to, transition products to mobile platforms at that time, and it was a huge scarcity of mobile engineers. And it was pretty much a quick hire at that stage, at least this part of business. But now I think that it was quite a mistake because all our competitors at that stage, they had approximately the same popularity for their apps. They exited several years later by getting hundreds of millions. MyFitnessPal, for example, 450 million. Runtastic got maybe 200 million. And this deal was much, much more modest.


Pablo Srugo (37:41):
What were some of your more popular apps that were within that company?


Dmitry Gurski (37:46):
It was like a gym app, running apps. It's pretty much the same setup of apps as you see now in the travel of the world. 


Pablo Srugo (38:00):
Crazy


Dmitry Gurski (38:01):
At that time, my brother was much more engaged to this business. He was running this business and I was much more engaged to book publishing. But after this exit, I had shares. I was involved, but not operationally, to this business. And I'm personally a divided kind of business when we exited our publishing house. But I personally switched to mobile apps in 2012, and we started making apps based on content.


Pablo Srugo (38:32):
Like you're saying, you started 10 different apps or 10 different companies.


Dmitry Gurski (38:37):
10 different companies. And we got five exits. From these investments and from these ventures and our own projects, we had exit to Facebook, exit to Google, exit to Farfetch. And now in our portfolio, it's not just Flo. For example, we have a simple app with more than 100 million in revenue.


Pablo Srugo (38:59):
We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You want to be part of the group. You want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button. Most people don't start one successful app. You know, they try, try, and then none of them really break out. You had many. What do you attribute that success to?


Dmitry Gurski (39:17):
But also we failed many times because I think very significant was to close unsuccessful attempts fast enough to save time, like to kill zombies. I think the biggest mistake people are doing. The most difficult question in business is when to persevere, when to pivot, and when to close. It's the most difficult question in business because you may find many stories when people are crazy pivot, like in the case of Slack, and it became a multi-billion dollar company. You may find stories when people persisted for years and then it became a multi-billion dollar company. But in most of cases, in 99% of cases, if you can't find product market fit, let's say in two years, then it's quite low chance that you would find it. 


Pablo Srugo (40:12):
What about marketing? Did you spend a lot on that or was it really product focused?


Dmitry Gurski (40:14):
We never tried to create a market. It means that we didn't try to find some very small niche and grow from this niche or to say something like this product doesn't exist because usually, it means that nobody needs it. Our approach was always to take a big segment of market, like really big. And then to create a product which would be better because of our better product strategy or very often better tech. For example, most of our exits happen because of implementation, very small implementation or development of machine learning.


Pablo Srugo (40:57):
In order to have this realization, or at least test it out, do you just go out and build or do you and especially with this because one of the questions that I'm sure you get all the time is, you know, you think about a period tracker, you assume it's going to be a woman, frankly, that started it because like everybody talks about solve your own problems, these sort of things. I understand now, given that you were just building apps for, you know, spaces that had traction, why you would enter here. But as you think through and you write that 700 kind of page document, are you having a lot of conversations with women directly to try to understand, you know, kind of how they use these apps or how they have experienced this problem? And does that help you understand the super app or kind of like not really?


Dmitry Gurski (41:38):
Yeah, of course. And we're still doing that. We have, I don't know, maybe 15 user experience researchers in our company. And we're discussing with users about all our features. It's not just a design or analysis of metrics. It's also many conversations and discussions. With users and I think it was for us also quite an advantage that we were so uneducated in this topic and because of that we were either just didn't have like our own opinion and we were quite objective about that and tried to understand the users and talk with users and not just to talk but to read reviews and to make these decisions very objectively. And I still believe that it's very significant not to be overconfident in your expertise and ability to predict what would work. Honestly, even after 15 years of experience with many companies, I don't feel that I may predict what would work or not. And in Flo, it's always about experimentation and about communication with use and analysis of data. But we have many experiments in Flo. Now we are doing in Flo. Now we simultaneously have 200 running experiments, 200 simultaneously. And it's a huge advantage for a big audience and a big traffic that you may run so many experiments. What I think we really did differently than what made our kind of rate of success higher than you would expect in general. Like one element was to focus on bigger markets rather than niches, then to be really thoughtful around competitive advantages and strategy around those competitive advantages. But also it was when I tried to recall our failures like 10% of them were about wrong product strategy or wrong market, and 90% were about people. It was just like a wrong team. And some people were just burned out too fast, not enough stamina for this long run. Conflict in the team, not enough skills, different reasons. I don't remember too many failures when it's like a kind of good fail, like all the hypothesis are good, like everything is done properly, then it just didn't work. It was mostly about people and then about wrong hypothesis or wrong approach.


Pablo Srugo (44:26):
You mentioned something earlier, which I totally agree with, like this kind of concept of persevere, pivot, or quit, which is such a hard decision. Do you think, and I'm just trying to put a few things together because frankly, a lot of what you did was unconventional or certainly like the opposite of what people suggest. One of those being most people would say, if you want to start a startup, go all in, like figure out what you want to do and then put 100% of your mind to it. You had a bunch of different companies, apps happening at the same time. Did that end up helping? And I say that because, you know, if you have one thing, you really want it to work. And if it's not working, you might just be tempted to push and push and push and find a way to get it to work, just kind of persevere through it. When you have a bunch of things going on, you know, did that help you evaluate the ones that actually were working? Like you said, kill the zombies, kill the ones that weren't working faster, and then as a result have more success?


Dmitry Gurski (45:21):
I'm quite sure that ultimately success is a function of number of attempts. I'm quite sure in that. And so why investors have a portfolio? Why investors just don't put all money to a single company? But it's much more difficult for founders to have a portfolio. But it's possible. And it's possible if you just understand really well, when you should stop. Because in most of cases, if your failure happens fast, it's good, because you're free. And you may make another attempt. The biggest problem when you're getting in the state of a zombie. What's a zombie? It's like a… like, products, like, bring some traction, bring some money, like, slowly growing, like, years, like, seven years after, like, still, like, one million per year or five million per year and, like, maybe work, maybe not, but kind of, and people, they always, like. They're lying to themselves that this is our plan and we will change something and just like one new feature and we will get traction. Almost never. It's almost never. It's just almost never works. And at that moment, it's better just, sometimes it's better to fail faster, to be free to try something new rather than to be like a founder of zombie when you have this case. Like this kind of this is like a situation like it's like I'm too invested to this company to close it and it's bringing some money maybe and all I have this investors but then you're just a slave for this situation for 5 years for 10 years and then we're just too old and too tired to start something new and maybe sometimes like fast failure is better than like this zombie state because you're just open for new opportunity and you're much more experienced and then like I haven't seen like not so many people who became successful from the first attempt but I have never seen any founder who would not become successful from five attempts. I believe they exist but usually like if you have enough time and if your attempt is better than previous one.


Pablo Srugo (47:45):
It's become my definition of perseverance. It's less like about persevering on one product or even one business, but persevering at just attempts, obviously going on like working hard at each one, but kind of having this mindset of if this one doesn't work, I'll try a new product. And if that doesn't work, maybe I'll try a new space. But if you keep doing that, you know, you have enough at bats. Like you said, at some point you should hopefully see some real success.


Dmitry Gurski (48:08):
And sometimes you just don't know what's failure, what's not failure. Sometimes learning from failure is really significant for the next step. And even in my managerial philosophy, like how I'm running Flo, sometimes I just don't know what's right, but I prefer to make a step, to make a decision, because I know that even if I'm not right and we are implementing this feature and it fails, then we will know that this is the wrong step and we will come back.


Pablo Srugo (48:41):
Well, sometimes you want to overthink your way to that certainty, right? And then the reality is just make a decision.


Dmitry Gurski (48:47):
But no more certainty, because if certainty exists, like a very simple case. You're an investor. Let's hire McKinsey, take your money, hire McKinsey, make business plan, then hire engineers and build unicorns. What's the problem with this logic? Money.


Pablo Srugo (49:05):
Perfect. Flawless. 


Dmitry Gurski (49:06):
Why it never happens? It happens because this is not predictable. It's not predictable for McKinsey, it's not predictable for investors, it's not predictable for Sequoia, and ultimately you just don't know. And if you just don't know, then it's better to accept that if you just don't know, you just must move forward. It's very similar. What's the right strategy to reach the top of a mountain? For example, you see a mountain at the horizon and no map, and what is necessary to reach the top of the mountain? The most significant to understand that there is a top of the mountain is like a vision. And also you need to start moving. But then who would reach top of the mountain and who would not? People who would try to create like exact plan how they would move to the mountain, they would stuck very fast because they would see like a river and they didn't know that they would like some like a predators and they would see some bad weather situations etc but and they do and uh it's like McKinsey case McKinsey would not like make for you like a like a perfect road to the mountain what's the right approach. It's just to move forward and be flexible. Like, you see a river, and you're making a bridge. You see a stone, you're walking around. And if you're stubborn and flexible, then, like, and you understand direction, you see the strategy, one day you will be at the top of this mountain. But if you're, like, overthinking, if you're making, like, plans too much, if you think that by analyzing everything you may have built a perfect plan, no, no. We had many companies, and all the time, like, our vision initially, and what happened then, all the time different. Even like planning doesn't work even for one year in such companies, never. Like maybe for six months. For one year, like almost everything corrected on the way, in the middle of the year. For three years, never. Five years, never. It will be something very different.


Pablo Srugo (51:17):
One thing, just in the back of my mind, I just want to get straight. You mentioned that competing startup that had raised like $30 million when you were just starting Flo. Was that actually one of the reasons to start Flo? Was that a sign of demand or was that something you realized after you started building this app?


Dmitry Gurski (51:34):
No, it was much simpler. When we started Flo, there were like dozens, maybe hundreds of popular period trackers and in top 10 of health and fitness category, 5 steps were period trackers. And it was the main motivation. But also the motivation was our observation that these products were very simplistic. We called them pink calendars. And our idea was that if we built like a deeper product, product which would create more value, it would be like very competitive at this market, which was populated by pink calendars. And it was like a right approach. But if you ask me, did we see that time that Flo would become so huge? No. In my first deck for our first round, which happened in 2016, our dream was, and of course, we were overestimating because we're always overestimating when you're talking with investors. Like our dream was in five years, we will have like three, four million months active users, like several million in a row.


Pablo Srugo (52:37):
Crazy.


Dmitry Gurski (52:38):
And the valuation may be $20 million. Really, it was dozens of times bigger by any measurement. And why? We were not stupid, and we were quite experienced at that moment, but we didn't expect one, like, two elements of story, really. One element of story is that at that time, it was impossible to have subscription business model for apps in App Store in 2015. This opportunity was opened by Apple much later. In 2017-18 and really it became a kind of mainstream maybe in 2019. And based on existing at that moment ways of monetization, like chipping apps or advertising or e-commerce, It just would be impossible to build like a business with hundreds of millions in revenue. Just business models would not support such scale. And at that time, touch apps didn't exist. At that time, we didn't see apps with hundreds of millions in revenue, like maybe like maybe Tinder or something like that, but not like a normal apps and health and fitness category. When subscription business model was allowed for apps, it changed everything and it became a very powerful source of our growth. And Second, probably we didn't expect that we would get so significant market share. 


Pablo Srugo (54:07):
What kind of share do you have in that space today? 


Dmitry Gurski (54:11):
If you look at the market narrowly, like the market of period trackers, maybe 35% or so, but the market is huge. But at that time, the market had hundreds of period trackers, and it was very fragmented, and it was difficult to expect that we would get such significant market share. But we got it because the product is so much better and our growth was always mostly organic. Maybe now we started to spend significant money for paid acquisition, but at that time it was organic growth, like just a word of mouth growth and maybe some optimization in App store. Just quality of product. But again, your success is a function of your competition in most cases. And I'm joking about competition. The best joke about competition is that when a lion is harassing you and your friends, you should not be faster than the lion. You should be faster than your friends. That's right. The same with competition. Sometimes if your friends are not fast enough, then it may be not as good. 


Pablo Srugo (55:15):
You're safe. So, you know what, that's maybe my actual burning question. You have these pink calendars. You'd mentioned before you had the sophisticated version that didn't really get much traction and this simple version that got traction. How did that simple version compare to these other simple pink calendars that were, you know, top five at that time?


Dmitry Gurski (55:32):
I think it was pretty much the same, maybe even simpler, but some of them were as simple as this product. But what I think was also significant was that we were very focused on quality of predictions and it was not just that it was simple, but it was also much more accurate.


Pablo Srugo (55:53):
It was accurate. Oh, I see. Because you're predicting the next period, like that's one of the big values right?


Dmitry Gurski (55:57):
Yeah, because we still ask our users, what's the most significant for you in product? And still, simplicity is the most significant, but second point is accuracy of predictions. And that time we were the first period tracker which used machine learning. Just emerged, it was 2015, 2016. It was just beginning of modern machine learning and we were among innovators.


Pablo Srugo (56:25):
Did the competitors even have predictions, but were inaccurate or they didn't even predict at all?


Dmitry Gurski (56:29):
They had predictions, but they used very simple logic, like take a date at 28 days, something like that, and they used much more. And the cycle is not so regular.


Pablo Srugo (56:41):
How quickly do you hit a million active MAUs or whatever? How quick is that ramp early on?


Dmitry Gurski (56:48):
A million probably in one year. Last year, Flo added to active audience more users than all our competitors, all our standalone competitors have, but one. Just one single app at our market has as big an audience as Flo added last year. Just in one year. Because last year we added 17 or 18 million monthly active users.


Pablo Srugo (57:11):
Incredible. And when did you decide, because at this point you're doing many different things, when do you decide to go all in on Flo and why?


Dmitry Gurski (57:18):
It was in 2018. It was quite a bit in then.


Pablo Srugo (57:23):
You'd raised a couple rounds already.


Dmitry Gurski (57:25):
Yeah, but I didn't have a title of CEO. We didn't have CEO and I'm not sure that early stage startups really need CEOs in a business sense. It should be like CEO/CTO, CEO/CPO. And this decision was done because I understood that this company may become really great. You usually have one shot in your life of this size, because coming back to the statistics of unicorns If you're successful enough in starting a unicorn or a company which may become a unicorn, then you should very safely assume that it's your single and last chance and then double down. It's really rare when you as a founder may have this luck twice because this luck is. It's just 10% about your skills and your strategies. 90% is just luck. 99% is just luck. And at that moment, I understood that it's kind of the biggest shot I got in my life. And because it's the biggest shot I got in my life, I must double down and I must be absolutely focused on that because I'm safely assumed that you'll never have the chance of this size. And because of that, I should be, continue building this company.


Pablo Srugo (58:51):
Well, Dmitry, let's stop it there and I'll ask the two questions that we always end on. First one, you kind of touched on it a little bit, but when it comes to Flo, when did you personally feel like you had found true product-market fit?


Dmitry Gurski (59:05):
Product-market fit is a rather vague concept. And if you ask 100 people what's product-market fit, you would get 100% different definitions. For me, like a product market fit means that it's a combination of two elements, like two variables. Users use product and users are happy to use product. I would say that like a because sometimes, like, for example, I use, in our company, for example, we had a system to organize travel. Because you have the office, it was like SAP Concord. It's the worst system in the world. It's just impossible. But because, like, in corporate environment, you just must use it. Because, like, bosses decide for it, like, 30 years here. Yeah, we're just like, you hate it, but you use it. It's just like the product market hit. I don't know because, like, it's... 


Pablo Srugo (60:07):
It's cheating. 


Dmitry Gurski (60:09):
And, yeah, it's a combination of usage and happiness, and happiness may be measured by polls, like, by different mythologists, like NPRs. But you may understand that from usage and happiness of users that you really have this product in your feed. But the most significant is the word of mouth. The best is when people start really advertising your product and you get a ton of growth because of that. It's the best sign of a real product market fit, in my opinion. 


Pablo Srugo (60:45):
What kind of word of mouth does Flo get? Like, do you have a measure for that? 


Dmitry Gurski (60:49):
Oh, yeah, yeah. We measure that directly by putting questions on onboarding. We understand exactly. Now, most of our organic traffic is because of word of mouth. We have maybe 60% of organic traffic still. And most of them is because word of mouth, like my friends advised me. And it's the best sign that you have a real product market fit that people use, people are happy, and when they're happy, they advertise it. And you may conclude that, ah, yeah.


Pablo Srugo (61:18):
And I'm curious, did that percent grow over time or has it been like consistently 60% of organic traffic?


Dmitry Gurski (61:24):
Initially, it was 100% like now. We got significant acquisition just maybe two or three years back and initially it was 100% or close to that for many years. And it was just organic growth. And what's the second question?


Pablo Srugo (61:42):
And the second question is taking everything you've learned, especially running, like trying so many different, you know, startups that many of them became successful. And of course, the story of Flo, like what would be some of the top advice you would give an early stage founder today?


Dmitry Gurski (62:00):
It's difficult.


Pablo Srugo (62:02):
I know you've mentioned in other podcasts that the general advice is kind of bullshit. So that, I mean, that's fair too.


Dmitry Gurski (62:09):
I will answer this question differently. And it's like, what's the biggest mistake I have seen from early stage founders? The biggest mistake to be delusional. Delusional means to be so, to love your idea and your thoughts and your strategy so much that they just ignore all objective information, all objective signals. And, and then, and probably then it's like at some moment when fundraising is useful because fundraising, it's like, it's extremely painful experience, extremely painful experience at early stage. It's always painful, but early stage is... 


Pablo Srugo (62:48):
How was it? We didn't touch on that. How was it for Flo, especially in those first few rounds, like the seed stage?


Dmitry Gurski (62:52):
My experience was very unpleasant. Extremely unpleasant in most cases. Because it's always unpleasant to get hundreds of no’s. And I believe that I raised a lot of money, we raised a lot of money. As for Flo, more than $300 million. But I believe that I received maybe 300 no's from at least 200 different firms, including the best ones.


Pablo Srugo (63:20):
I assume those were mainly in the early days.


Dmitri Gurski (63:24):
And why 200 firms and 300 no's? Because some of these, they got no's in different stages. They got no's at A round, at B round. 


Pablo Srugo (63:34):
Wow, wow, wow, wow. 


Dmitry Gurski (63:36): 
Yeah. It's difficult and painful, especially at this moment when you make a roadshow and then you are sitting on your computer and each day and each moment you're getting more and more and more no's and then you put this mark in your spreadsheet with the firms you met and your chances are getting lower, lower, lower and you become desperate. It's like nobody would… stay in this list is quite painful. But in our case, it was even more difficult, partially because of my background, like Eastern European background, accent and everything, but partially because of our segment. And it's the investors, they don't understand this segment, and because of the absence of successful stories, they just don't have something to use as a benchmark to believe in this story. But it's a vicious cycle, pretty much. Usually, it's happening almost in the same way. A company like Flo comes to a big firm. Not big, but any firm. And initially, after some kind of, some analyst might take a look, or something interesting, then they would send this prospect to a partner. The partner, of course, is a man. He would say, ah, I understand nothing. I will send that to our female. But the problem is that in reality, there are not so many influential female partners in venture capital firms. There are several influential women, but not so many, especially among big firms. And those men in these firms, they're not especially open-minded, maybe because of the absence of success. For them, it's almost kind of like for the previous generation, it was shameful to go and buy for a wife a tampon. And the same for the new generation of venture capitalists, you really consider deeply such projects. And then this poor woman is trying to bring this project to the investment committee, just a man in this investment committee. Of course, it's not approved, and the story ends. And it's not just a problem of the floor, it's a problem of the whole industry of female and I think Flo played extremely significant role for the market because we showed example of success and we showed example that it's possible to raise significant capital. And the last round, our last round from General Atlantic to $130 million, it was the biggest investment to digital health in 2024. It's uh now you like all other companies smaller companies startups they may say like oh look like we will be as successful as floor and probably investors with account probably it's possible like now we have now we see benchmarks and when we started we didn't have opportunity to show something like floor would be like like this one like this company, and it made this fundraising even more difficult. But we managed to raise capital and initially, we just used our own money and at some moment it was even difficult because in 2015 we had a crisis in other businesses and we stretched all our reserves extremely to save floor at that moment. It was a moment when the law would have died easily just because we didn't have enough money to support it.


Pablo Srugo (67:38):
What year was this?


Dmitry Gurski (67:40):
2015. But then what was very supporting was that in 2016, MSQRD, a company my brother invested in as an angel investor, was sold to Facebook. And it was quite a good deal. And we got money and it supported Flo immensely at that moment. Without the exit of MSQRD, I'm not even sure that Flo would survive 2016 even with traction, because it was so difficult to get external money to this project. But the story of MSQRD? It was acquired because of virtual masks, because of competition with Snapchat. It was very interesting story itself. But I promised to connect this story with my books. And it's very interesting story to finish our conversation because this story is about that sometimes you just don't know what's significant and what's not significant and what like a small small element in your current life would play an immense role in the future, what's the bifurcation point? And this story is about my book about ActionScript. It's the language of Macromedia Flash. I wrote this book in 2004. This book had 1,100 pages. It was published in 2004. And at that moment, this book was gifted to a teenage boy. He was maybe 12 years old at that time. His name was Sergey. And his brother gifted this book to him, and he said that if you would learn programming with this book, you would become a successful man in the future. And he did that, and he started to make outsourcing as a flasher at that time. He was gaining experience. And then, like, 12 years after, he became, like, a co-founder of MSQRD. And we met at this point again. And then, like, MSQRD was sold. It supported Flo. And I got my single shot in this life. And I became Unicorn's founder. But you may easily mention that if at that time I was less stubborn and would not, like, spend, like, one year writing this book, and I get not so much from this book, really, then probably he would not have learned programming. Then, like, Maskerdiv would not have started. And then, like, Flo would have not gotten, like, any money. Probably Flo would have died in 2016. And then I will not be like a unicorn founder, like a podcast's won't want to talk. But between these two points, I'm writing these books at night. And this moment when you want to talk with me as a unicorn founder is 20 years. And it's like 20 years, but without these small points, probably the rest of the story would not happen very easily. And sometimes you just don't know what your small step now would play an immense role 20 years after. And it means that sometimes, again, it's better not to overthink and just act, put points on your map, move forward, be patient, remember about the potato story. Your potato is just… seed it in the ground you should wait for all to get your harvest back not you should not eat it tomorrow one day like you if you have like 90 percent of luck you will be successful.


Pablo Srugo (71:23):
Dmitry, that was a perfect, I think, story to end this on. I know this episode is going to be very inspirational to so many people. And I know Flo's... 


Dmitry Gurski (71:33):
And my accent. I will share with you, like, maybe not, like, even for record. We may use on record, but it's a funny story about my accent. Like, recently I had, like, a podcast with 20VC podcast. You watched it. And after that, I got a letter from one company, which is making learning courses. And this company asked me for my allowance to use my interview as a course. And the idea was that they wanted to show to students that even having such a terrible accent, you may become a successful person. And for that, I was thinking that my mission in this life is to improve health of hundreds of million women. And now I understand that I have additional mission is to empower people with terrible accent.


Pablo Srugo (72:27):
Talk about impact. Well, you know, on the woman piece, I can tell you definitely you're impacting our lives, my wife's life. And I know, you know, many, many millions, like you said, hundreds of millions of women. And I think Flo's already made a dent, like you said, in terms of venture investing for many, many health startups, especially those tied to female health. And I know that when you become the next stock ticker, like a Duolingo, you're only going to have much, much more impact. So I'm patiently waiting for that day. But thanks so much for sharing your story.
It's been absolutely incredible.


Dmitry Gurski (73:01):
Thank you much for the opportunity.


Pablo Srugo (73:04):
You remember like the first person who told you about Bitcoin? The first person who told you about Uber? You want to be that person because being first is cool. So be a cool person and tell your founder friends. Send it to them on WhatsApp. Put it in a WhatsApp group. Put it on a Slack channel. Let people know about the show. Let people know about this episode. Don't let somebody else beat you to the punch and share it with your founder friends first. Remember what Ricky Bobby said, if you ain't first, you're last.