[Raised $223 million] Ep.113 - The First 100 with Richard Valtr, the Co-Founder of Mews | Founder-led Sales | Door-to-door sales | Events & Conferences | Content Marketing

Richard Valtr is the founder of Mews — which provides a cloud-based hotel property management platform with tools covering reservations, payments, and more. It has raised $223 million of funding, from notable investors such as Kinnevik, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Revaia, Derive Ventures, Orbit Capital, Battery Ventures, Notion Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Thayer Ventures and henQ, with a potential company a post-money valuation of $865 million.

Mews are streets (for example, in London) full of usually small houses or flats converted from horse stables for bigger houses nearby. Ironically, though, Mews the startup is not that small at all. In the year that travel “came back” post the peak of COVID and the various restrictions imposed on people moving around, Mews saw revenues grow 174%, with gross payment volume in the period up 227% and now standing at $2.3 billion. It has customers in 85 countries, and 5,000 hotels in all.

Where to find Richard Valtr:

• Website: The Hospitality Management System of the Future | Mews PMS
• LinkedIn (12) Richard Valtr | LinkedIn

Where to find Hadi Radwan:

• Newsletter: Principles Friday | Hadi Radwan | Substack
• LinkedIn: Hadi Radwan | LinkedIn

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Transcript

Let's do it. Let's do it Broadcasting from around the world you're listening to the first 100 a podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers Here's your host Hadi Rodman Richard, good to have you on the show. How are you doing today? Very, very good. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for stopping by. I've really enjoyed reading about your company, Muse. Richard Walter is the co-founder of Muse, which is a cloud based hotel property management platform with tools covering reservations, payments and more. And you've raised a huge number. It's 232 million since your inception. Richard, tell us, how did you become a hotelier? That's more of a family thing. So I started out, I guess, as a kind of young teenager, just basically kind of sitting at receptions and my mother was the kind of the entrepreneur of the family. I sound very English, but I'm Czech. So after the wall came down, my mother was an academic and she was invited to go and lecture at the LSE in the UK. She ended up somehow managing to kind of work that into. various kind of interactions with investors who wanted to kind of invest into Eastern Europe and most of those were kind of property developers and hotel investors. And so that's basically how my family was involved in hotels and then my mother would kind of develop a project and they'd always be looking for somebody to kind of work the graveyard shift basically. So a lot of time, so I was born in Prague but from the age of around eight, we would spend a lot of time in the UK. And then my family basically came back and what I would have to do is basically whenever I came back, I would spend my summer holidays essentially kind of doing that graveyard shift and being a night receptionist and a night auditor. That's basically why the system doesn't have a night audit. But it's just one of these things that I've been associated with. Hotels, my father was a programmer, so that's basically where the other side of the family kind of comes from. Actually then he ended up working in insurance, so that's your world. So I know all about that world. I think he would have preferred me to be an actuary than an entrepreneur. But I guess I'm kind of more into my mom's side of the family from that perspective. Did you exhibit any flashes of entrepreneurship early on? Because you know, when you're growing up in an entrepreneurial family, some kids would go the other way completely. Some kids would say, okay, this is what I love. Were there any signs that you were going to be here? I think that I always wanted to be a writer or do something creative or be somehow involved in filmmaking or something like that. I always tended towards more creative industries and creative things. I think that I always joke that I'm practically unemployable. I think even more so since basically starting my own company. I think that that's where those things basically come into. I think entrepreneurship is about... two things for me. One is the willingness to kind of look at things that other people know for certain and look at them a kind of different way and to see if there's a way that you can kind of look to deal with that problem in a completely different way. So that's one thing. And then I think the second is then, you know, having that kind of doggedness to and determination basically to know that you're right somehow inside. And even if everyone is kind of telling you that it's a stupid idea. to basically just like kind of have that itch that you want to scratch basically and the ability to spend like a huge amount of time basically alone or with two or three people just actually going at something and really, really trying to kind of get to the bottom of something when again like a normally minded individual would probably go like there's probably no use in trying to do this. You know, it's a little bit too hard. So fast forward to Muse. Take us back to the founding of our moment. How do you decide to go into that space specifically? So I essentially kind of made it very difficult for myself. Basically, at this point, my mother and my father ended up kind of doing some of these projects together. My father fell ill, so my mother wanted me to kind of come back and help out with the family business. My sister was actually kind of running one or two of the hotels that my mother had kind of built. And so she'd kind of switched to more her projects with investors. She had a fantastic and still has a fantastic business partner as well that she would create new kind of projects with, which were mainly residential and hotels. So I ended up kind of getting into that, helping out with a few projects and then essentially kind of making this one hotel project my own little baby. So I really took on a lot of the things around the design, around like the procurement, the project management, putting in all of these kinds of things together. I really, really enjoyed it and I really, really liked it. One of the things that I really wanted to do was to think about the design of the hotel in the way that I wanted the visitors to this hotel to actually travel through. That also meant that I wanted the staff in the hotel to actually act more like hosts in a kind of Airbnb than in a hotel. I didn't want there to be all of these technological barriers, basically, whether it's a reception desk or whether it's just a... a desk. I wanted that to be a more natural way to actually interact with people. Being entrepreneurial and a little bit naive, I just thought, well, how hard can it be to create a system that can do all of these things? At first, the original idea was to have it as a kind of app that serves both guests and the hotel staff and just plug it in basically to a... PMS property management system that can kind of do all of the boring, you know, accounting work and all of those things. And the more and more that we kind of got into it, the more and more that we started building it and having that kind of prototype and testing it out on various PMSs that we would use. There was basically nothing. There was no PMS that thought that you could plug in a cloud system. There was no APIs at that time. And so, you know, I think that that's basically when me and the team that I'd kind of assembled around myself, we were like, well, how hard could it be to actually kind of build this underlying thing to service all of these different things that we wanted to do. And so stupidly, we started building the PMS as well. Yeah, that was 11 years ago. And that was, you know, I really thought that it would take about a year. But somehow it's kind of it's continued up until now. And like in that time, you know, I was like 29 when I started, you know, I was working mainly with like 22 year old 23 year old programmers alongside me and we just really kind of didn't really know anything about like I didn't really know anything about fundraising. I didn't really know anything about like, you know, scaling and all of these things. So just end up learning, learning. And I think it kind of took us about, I think maybe like five years before we actually kind of got our first BC check. So there was a lot of kind of bootstrapping a lot of really, really just like grinding. in an office that was super, super dingy, basically, and we just didn't really have enough money to do anything. But it's the thing that still makes us a great company and makes us kind of really gritty in that kind of way to really, really determined to make really difficult choices basically, and to kind of know when to pivot. This is great. I see a lot of similarities between what you're mentioning between insurance where I work and the hotel industry, because there's a lot of fragmented small players. big players, there's a lot of legacy systems, there's a lot of manual operation and trying to bring everyone under one solid system is very hard. So when you started early on and you were building the product, you knew there was a pain point. But how did you validate it early on? Did you go out, do customer interviews and then build an MVP or because you were in the hotel industry, you said, let me build a product that solves a pain point. And then Essentially, those features continue to build up and build up until you validated the idea a few years later. Yeah, so I think that there's kind of two aspects. One is that I was a hotelier and I kind of knew the hotelier pain points and I have my sister who was the GM basically. So I could draw on a large community basically of people who kind of really, really understood what the business was about. And so that's, I guess, the first one. The second one is much more, I studied philosophy at university and it also, I guess, added to that type of kind of blue sky thinking that I have. I more thought about like, well, what is this from the first principles? You know, and what is this from? How do I think about this? How do we think about, you know, what, you know, even to the point about the way that we architected the system, we didn't architect it. So traditionally, in hotels and in actually most kind of service industries. people architect it around the inventory because that's kind of how a lot of these systems basically kind of started out. It's essentially like going to a shop and asking a shopkeeper what they have and they have a warehouse and they have all of those kind of like different things and they just need a physical representation of whether they have that thing or not. That's how people basically think about rooms, but we didn't. I think that having the kind of first principles inside. plus the knowledge of the industry, you're able to see that it isn't actually about the beds. What you're doing in hotels is creating some kind of experience. So we think about it from the perspective that when you're in a hotel, that's kind of like the homepage to an experience. And an experience is measured not in services. An experience is basically measured in hours, and it's kind of human hours of experience. So if you think about that, from a perspective of a room or a hotel and what that hotel service actually is, then you start seeing it the way that we see it, which is that actually this is somebody coming in to stay for three nights. They're essentially staying for 72 hours. If you break that down into one day, well, what are they doing? They're probably utilizing an eight-hour experience, which is going to be the experience of sleep. That's kind of third of that. That's the very valuable for people. Basically, they're willing to spend a lot of money. They're willing to spend a lot of money for security, safety, all of these different things. But that's only part of the experience. The experience actually covers the other 16 hours that you've got there. That might be experiences that are actually in and around the city. There might be experiences that you might have at the hotel. So like a limited service, budget hotel that's mainly around those eight hours, give or take a shower. or something else that you're kind of doing. Maybe a three-star hotel will have breakfast there, so that kind of bumps it up to 10 hours of experience. A five-star hotel will have a restaurant, will have a spa and all of these things. So you might be at it at 16 hours and if you're in a resort or let's say a prison, that's like 24 hours of experience. And I think that's kind of like why when you think about those kind of like eight-star experiences, that's really kind of when you think about like, okay, that's more of a 24-hour lived experience. And the people that are actually kind of working at the hotel, rather than thinking of them as kind of people that check you in, check you out, they're kind of managers and facilitators of those different kind of, let's say moments of experience and moments of needs that you have as human beings. So I think from that perspective, that's really the way that we've thought about what it is that we're actually kind of doing. And that's, I think, why we've been so successful, because it's closer to what that industry actually is. rather than the systems that were built basically that kind of had a different mentality. So people thought like, okay, well, it's you're selling a service. What's that service? Oh, it's a room. I'll put it into a kind of warehouse type of system. And that's how I'll think about basically what it is that we're doing. Whereas in fact, it's something completely different than it's actually much more about experience management. If you go back to the early days, your selling point was... the pitch you just mentioned to me, or you went to a small, let's say, hotel and say, how can I help you increase revenue or decrease cost? Because at the end of the day, the adoption rate of the software is the first challenge, right? So what was your selling point and who was your ideal customer at the beginning? Because probably the Holiday Inn will not, if you knock on their doors, they're not gonna answer you. Yeah, they're not even gonna open the door. I think at the beginning it was basically like a lot of these kind of family hotels, like S&B hotels that really, really care about two things. One was basically like, we don't really care and we don't really want the time to be spent with the admin. So that's basically like when I was saying that I was a night receptionist and things like that. Like the real work that you do as a night receptionist, and back then I was kind of like doing these graveyard shifts as like 12-hour shifts basically. You go from 7pm to 7am. What you do is kind of like, if you think about it, like you're doing real work for the first four hours, because you're checking in people that are like arriving late, you're kind of like welcoming people that, you know, have been to a restaurant, you might actually be kind of the start of that shift, you might be still like booking somebody a restaurant, whatever it is. But you know, you're kind of saying hello to them. That's real value added work. But then you know, say from like 11pm, you're just basically a glorified security camera. And the work that you then have to do is this like process of night audit where you get to see the reports that are coming in, you put them all together. I was always like, why can't the computer just do that? Why am I having to run these reports? It's just stupid. You can just basically automate all of that. I think the insight there is that people like me or people that run these hotels or people that own these hotels, they want people doing value added work. You really, really care about the guest experience and you really care about automation. If you can do those two things really, really well, you're going to have a really good service for those types of kind of mum and pop hotels who really hate the admin and really, really care about the guest experience because they care about the ratings that they have online. They care about all of these different things. So that's really kind of what we cared about at the beginning. And then we would find certain kind of niches of hospitality that thought in this kind of way. So, for example, like we ended up being really, really big in, for example, hostels. we ended up being really, really big in kind of certain types of boutique hotels. And then as we got bigger and bigger and bigger, we could actually kind of go after smaller European chains basically. And then now, you know, servicing some of the biggest brands in the world as well. So if you go back to your early days, I believe you were knocking on the doors of each hotel at the beginning, trying to convince them to adopt the technology. Maybe a few of your friends are helping you out because you are in the insurance industry, but that pool dries out eventually and you're doing things that are not scalable, right? You cannot go and knock on every. So what was your strategy after that? The nice thing is that most hotels in the world are pretty much the same. So I was like doing this, you know, the streets of Prague basically going to the same thing. You kind of realize that like, you know, what's nice is that like Czech Republic is a tiny country in a tiny market. So it's one thing if you're starting out in like Germany or France or something like that, where you've got like a nice, homogenized market, basically one language, all of these things. Whereas if you're starting out from Czech Republic, basically, you're kind of like, I'm not going to build a business basically in Czech Republic. So you always have to kind of look out. And so then you start thinking, well, okay, how can I do this without having to build like a huge sales team? Cause I have zero money. Nobody wants to fund this like crappy company from Czech Republic basically. And like, I'm going to people like, and I'm saying like, look, we're going to be Oracle who's the number one kind of provider of these things. And people are just laughing at me. They're like, how can like this kind of crappy company from the middle of Europe, I'd go out and basically compete with somebody like that. So we just had to learn how to do things at scale, how to put in growth marketing, how to be able to actually talk about these things. I think we discovered the power of content marketing really, really early on, making sure that we actually were writing enough articles basically connecting with a lot of hoteliers on LinkedIn, making sure that that... The idea of basically being very outspoken about these things was something that was really, really deep within our DNA. The other thing that we did was this industry still, unfortunately or fortunately, relies a lot on, for example, events and trade shows and things like that. What we would do is just we wanted to stand out from the crowd and be a little bit different so that people would know and remember us basically. With that, we would always have a theme. We would always kind of like dress up in weird costumes and things like that. So once to launch, for example, a marketplace, we dressed up as Formula One drivers so you can imagine this like, you know, huge hall with like tens of thousands of people basically kind of likes all from the hotel industry. They're kind of in their boxy suits and things like that. And there we are with us as kind of Formula One drivers with our name here. So like Muse, but also kind of like having all of these other partnerships. companies basically that were together with us because we created this kind of marketplace. And what we found out was a really, really good growth hack was basically to kind of make sure that you have people who are kind of selling your, seeing your praises and doing all of these things basically when you're not in the room. So making sure that you can kind of like utilize, for example, partners, again, you're doing something really, really cool with the API. And so it's making it easier for them to actually kind of integrate. So you become their kind of growth vertical as well. And they're just as invested in kind of talking about news as you are. Those were the kinds of things. It's like any single time when we could either kind of scale the awareness of what we were doing, scale the target, for example, events where we could, you know, speak to a huge amount of hoteliers, basically all at one go, and then make sure that we followed it up with a kind of online social strategy that would then basically make sure that it kind of encapsulated those people. So even in the slow market. and slow, let's say, as he said, fragmented market and also old style thinking market that doesn't really think technology first. We could always be top of mind for people, even if we were really, really highly annoying with the type of marketing that we did. This is all amazing. Now you're in 85 countries and more than 5,000 hotels working with you. When did you know that? I have now a sales playbook. can go to another country, I can copy paste it and I grow. I mean, we've seen Uber do it, Airbnb do it, Nextdoor, I've interviewed the founder of Nextdoor, they have done it. First, when did you know that there's this tipping point where you've maybe saturated the market in Czech and now it's time to expand? And then what were the challenges that you didn't anticipate? selling price basically was always kind of too low and there was always somebody basically that could like essentially do like pencil and paper. So we always actually kind of from a very, very early point, we kind of made sure that we created these kinds of like these types of events and these types of kind of places where people could come and learn basically from ourselves or from our partners. And I think that that's basically when the kind of we could see that especially in specific areas. if we targeted them well enough, we would kind of get a halo effect. So one of the things that we started doing was we would go basically to these kind of hotel like special kind of places where there was a large concentration of for example, hotels. So, you know, for example, like you could see railway stations or around for example, football stadia and things like that, where, you know, you could see that there were actually a large concentration of independent hotels. And then you basically kind of think, okay, which is the coolest one? Yeah, which is the one that like everyone else basically kind of looks to see you then go some of these kind of lighthouse accounts so that then when you're calling into them or you've got like a BDR basically kind of calling in it's like, what look the greatest hotel like just around the corner is basically kind of like doing it. So why aren't you and I think that kind of created a really, really nice halo effect. I mean, we just do it basically in enough places that had really, really large concentrations of these types of hotels so we could kind of get a power base basically in one area and then. what we'd find is like, you know, that would then have different effects basically everywhere else because the whole industry is like very, very incestuous from that perspective. And that's also like one of the reasons why we kind of go SMB mid market and enterprise as well because in all of these kind of like cities, you're going to get, you know, the coolest hotels sometimes will be some of the branded hotels as well, basically, but we kind of think of them as like, as interlocking things like so receptionist from an independent likely kind of want to go and work at the local branded hotel. Similarly, if you're trying to basically get a GM for an independent hotel, you know, you're probably going to go to some of the brands basically, or some of the other things where they're going to kind of go, okay, like that sales manager is probably really, really good at doing all of these things. Maybe I'll recruit him as a GM for my property. So there's a lot of kind of incestuous kind of things. And if they all love news, and if they all love the system, then they're probably going to actually push for that to be kind of like taken on. So it's really about kind of capturing that mind share, capturing all of those different things that you can actually kind of do together. I mean, you've seen thousands and thousands of hotels you've pitched to them. What was the most effective selling technique for those who would say we have a legacy system. We're happy with it. Yeah. So that's always like, we always say basically that our biggest competitor is inertia. So that's, you know, basically in hotels, there's never really a kind of price to pay for all of these things, because fundamentally, like, it doesn't really kind of matter. Or it doesn't really matter that much if like if your system slow, you know, you're taking like 25 minutes to actually kind of to do the check in your kind of, you know, maybe somebody's like pissed off or whatever, but it's nothing that you see immediately, you know, so it's nothing that you feel that you have to kind of, you know, and it's like, And if you're the GM or you're whoever, you're just like, it's fine. It's probably like, it would just be a little bit too much of a far. I get my reports, the finance team's happy, like all of these things. Nothing's really kind of like wrong. So that's always been like our biggest kind of perspective. I'd say like our biggest help is, you know, on the one side, the increasing digitization of the modern world, the fact that people do want to be connected at all times. So whether that's basically kind of people making reservations. primarily online rather than kind of through offline sources. And you have to know that like you have to have connected systems that can basically kind of deal with that distribution really, really quickly. So you know, if you are full, if you basically need to raise the prices because a lot of things have actually kind of come. So you need a system that's going to be reactive. You also need a system that's like essentially kind of internet first from that perspective. And then add to that also the kind of the changing needs of the customers. So customers, they don't want to call you. They basically just want to text something or message through somewhere and they want an instantaneous response. They don't want to wait like 17 hours basically for the way that you kind of think about your emails and stuff like that. They're just like they're texting you, they expect the service to actually kind of be instantaneous. To be able to do that at scale when you're running you know 100 bedroom hotel or something like that, you need technology and you need that technology either from... a really, really good partner or you need somebody who's actually going to kind of connect to all of those dots. So even if you're buying your kind of your text messaging tool from a third party or your channel manager tool or some kind of distribution thing from then it's all going into one system. And that's essentially what Muse is. It's that central nervous system that basically kind of makes it all work, takes all of that information, makes sure that everyone is kind of on top of things, it distributes it to the right person. that you're actually kind of dealing with all of those things, whether it's a housekeeper or somebody who's kind of like looking at the procurement of the resources that you need and planning those out, or it's actually somebody you know responding to the message from a guest who's kind of asking about you know whether they can check in at 10 p.m. basically the next day. Amazing, thank you for sharing this. So the COVID pandemic grounded the travel and tourism to a halt which impacted the whole value chain. of the hotel industry and for any entrepreneur, this is extremely a hard moment. We saw the founders of Airbnb, they talk about the mentality, the mindset, how they actually tried to pivot and shift to accommodate. Especially in these moments where you have no control on what's happening, it's not like something within the company, it's a macroeconomic thing. Take us back to that moment. What was your mentality like or your mindset when it happened and... How did you stay grounded or how did you manage to change your mindset so that you actually recover? And as we can see now, you've actually doubled your business even. Yeah, like more than double. But at the time it was really, really tough because we just raised a Series B. I just moved to the US. So I kind of like most of my stuff basically came in December 2019. We did our Series B in August. of that year. I just basically arrived with my wife and two kids and my son was one years old basically at the time. He was hugely disruptive and then three months later, the full impact of that. We've really raised the series B as a growth round to really go after not just Europe but really go and attack America. I think I remember it with my business partner you know, for 10 years of the journey, like, I think we were kind of like looking at it, we just thought and we said like, look, this is maybe a time to kind of rethink the business and rethink the way that we're growing and rethink what types of things we're going to kind of have, have different than I, it's interesting because like now we kind of see it in SaaS, and a lot of the different ways that people kind of are reacting. But I think back then, the way that we approached it was, let's rather than thinking about what are we going to kind of cut back and see how long things are, let's actually just like think about what do we think it's actually going to be like? When do we think that there's going to be a vaccine? When do we think that, you know, travel is going to be kind of back to where it was? And let's work backward basically from that. And let's say like, how do we put ourselves into the best place so that we can kind of survive through that to essentially like where we think it's going to go back. And so Super quickly, it was me, him and our CFO made this kind of two year plan, which in the end actually ended up being fairly like the one thing that we didn't really kind of get was the change in the fundraising environment. But to be able to kind of guess within a really, really short period that it was probably going to take about a year and a half to do the vaccine and then another like half a year to for it to actually kind of like really, really start to have an impact on the reopening of the world basically. I think it's like some magic that we managed to kind of like tap into. But from that perspective, we just managed to pivot really, really quickly, make that decision. We said, look, we don't want to do this thing where we cut twice or three times or four times. Let's basically just cut to what we need to do. And let's think about like, what's the world that we're going to be coming out into in those two years? And the way that we thought about that was like, well, in two years, what do we think is going to kind of be the case? So we thought, okay, there's going to be a recession. going to be a lot of hotels basically kind of dying or not having, you know, this was pre a lot of the government support, but we thought like, this is going to be a natural kind of thing. So we're going to see quite a lot of churn, we're going to see quite a lot of these things basically. And what we're going to probably see is a huge amount of consolidation. At that point, we were really mainly kind of focusing on SMB hotels, kind of smaller hotels, that's where the kind of the bulk of hospitality sits. And we thought to ourselves, well, At some point we have to go up market, we have to go to more of these kind of mid-market and enterprise brands. These brands are probably going to get really, really strong as this entire kind of crisis unfolds. So let's switch our resources to doing less and less work basically for these SMBs. Let's cut down on our sales teams. We're probably not going to be like actually kind of selling that much plus customer support and all of these kind of like different supporting things. Let's put all of that money basically that we still have. into R&D. Let's not take out any more cash. Let's not put ourselves in debt or anything like that. Let's really, really think about it, basically. Start building those products, which are essentially for those more scaled businesses. And let's really focus on that. I think that in itself, we took a number of really, really difficult decisions. We started laying off people basically. March 26th basically was my first call with the first team. So I painstakingly put together a US team for growth. We had to cut it down basically to almost nothing. I think we went from 45 to about three people just in the US. Yeah, we just basically kind of said, look, this is what we have to do. And so then we went around all of the different teams, started shutting all of the local offices that we'd painstakingly thought about, changed the structure from very kind of like GM type structure, where we had local representation, local kind of things, to one which was much more kind of functional and simplified, and made those changes. in about 14 days, basically, and then put ourselves, I think, in a really, really good place from which to kind of build on. And I think that also kind of speaks to where we are today and how well we've been able to kind of scale since then and how many of those things have basically kind of worked out well, apart from the fact that we basically said like, let's wait till 2022 to actually raise money and let's not basically raise money in 20 and 21, which turned out to be the stupidest decision. of all of those, but I think that we've done really, really well. We've been able to attract some incredible investors basically, to kind of further our ambition. And I think that we're sitting in probably the healthiest space of anyone basically in our kind of travel tech space today. So it's been a long journey, but I think really kind of like look back on that. It's got a lot to do with some of those kind of decisions that we made in that crucible moment back in 2020. Amazing. Thank you for sharing the story and your leadership as well to keep Muse where it is today. One last question. What's the principle that you live by that has served you well in your journey? I think that it's not really principle. It's more of a kind of outlook. I think that there's two things that believe in innovation and believe that if things don't exist today, they probably will tomorrow. So I think that sometimes you're not going to solve every single thing, but there's probably somebody who's working on something that will help you to solve that particular thing. Even if it doesn't exist or it's not technologically possible today, it's better to basically build for the world that you think will be then to build for the world that is today or the world that you know today. I think that that's one thing that I has always kind of served me really, really well. The other thing as well is, you know, I really, really truly believe that if you optimize for kind of zero-sum outcomes, you'll be smaller by them. So, I really, really believe that you need to always kind of think in every single situation and every single thing, you need to kind of figure out how is your counterparty going to kind of benefit. So, when you're thinking about employees, it's like, how can this employee be better because of Muse? How can they basically kind of like stay with Muse? because they feel growth. And I think that that's the thing. It's like the same with partners. Are you growing them because you're growing? I think that a lot of the times people kind of tend to think that it's a doggy dog world and I think that actually kind of keeps us small. I think that you should be competitive. You should always try and win basically. But I think with anyone that's kind of on that growth journey with you, you've got to be responsible basically for their growth and you've got to kind of make sure that it's collective growth. rather than your own personal or basically like that it's only benefiting you. Those are some of the principles that I think we apply to our business. I think that those are the principles that we apply to what we think of our role in the industry. It's something that we're now basically trying to really bring to hotels because we really truly believe that we can expand the hotels, expand the town of what hotels actually are, of what hospitality actually is. make sure that it's actually a bigger industry than it ever was before, rather than kind of looking at how many hotels basically can we have this month. It's like actually how can we grow the entire pie of hospitality to be much, much bigger. Richard, this was an amazing episode. What's next for Muse and for Richard? What's next is just like more growth, better execution. And yeah, I hope that everyone gets to experience a hotel which has news in it. and that should be a hotel that is running on the kind of the human principles and we do the technology that makes sure that it's kind of silent and you don't actually think that you're interacting with somebody who's using technology and they're looking at you in your eyes and they're not looking at a screen or kind of furiously typing on a keyboard basically. So I think that we believe that the world can be more hospitable and kind of and better connected through Muse and that's what we're going to try and execute on the next couple of years. Amazing. Where can people reach you and are you hiring? We're hiring still like crazy and we need very good people because I'm not very smart and so I just need very, very smart people around me who can actually kind of hopefully get us to where our ambition is trying to kind of get us to. So they can find me on LinkedIn. You can go to www.news.com and EWS and they can find me, Richard at news.com. They want to send me. a note about how much I kind of rabid on. Thank you very much, Richard. We wish you the best of luck. We'll put all of this in the show notes. Again, thank you for stopping by. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much for listening to the first 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or Spotify and share it with a friend starting their entrepreneurship journey. Leave us a five star review. Your support will help spread our podcast to more viewers.