Oscar Jesionek: Austria Digital Nomad to Vietnam Founder, Audio Learning Product-Market Fit & Trust Your Gut - E474

Oscar Jesionek, CEO & Cofounder of Fonos, and Jeremy Au discussed:

1. Austria Digital Nomad to Vietnam Founder: Oscar traces his entrepreneurial path, starting from his academic background in economics in Austria to his diverse professional experiences in headhunting, healthcare, and finance. His early career was a period of self-discovery, where he evaluated various sectors and geographies before narrowing his focus to roles that aligned with his values and desire for social impact. Oscar shares how these experiences, along with a growing dissatisfaction with conventional industries, led him to Vietnam, where he found a deeper sense of purpose through entrepreneurship.

2. Audio Learning Product-Market Fit: Fonos began with a simple goal to provide accessible non-fiction audio content, inspired by Oscar’s spouse’s learning preferences. Recognizing a gap in Vietnam’s market for educational non-fiction, Fonos initially focused on audiobooks, leveraging copyright advantages. As Vietnam’s digital payments evolved and consumer demand for educational content grew, Fonos expanded its offerings to include guided meditations, book summaries, and courses. This pivot transformed the platform from a niche audiobook provider into a comprehensive educational hub tailored to local needs.

3. Trust Your Gut: Oscar shares personal stories of navigating the uncertainties of entrepreneurship, from moving to Asia with limited financial resources to making strategic pivots in response to market demands. His journey underscores the importance of trusting your gut when making key decisions in unfamiliar environments, highlighting the balance between research and intuition in business growth.

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(01:51) Jeremy Au:

Hey, Oscar,

(01:51) Oscar Jesionek:

Hey, Jeremy,

(01:52) Jeremy Au:

Good to have you in the show. Well, we've known each other for quite some time now and wanted to kind of share your journey a little bit. So could you share about yourself?

(02:00) Oscar Jesionek:

Sure thing. I'm originally from Austria and I've been in Vietnam for a little bit over eight years. I'm the CEO and co founder of Fonos. Fonos is Vietnam's leading audio book and self development app. And yeah, that's what I focus on most of the time. Other than that, I'm married. I have a kid on the way, which is exciting. In my free time, I look up golf tips on YouTube, trying to fix my golf swing, which needs a lot of fixing, unfortunately.

(02:27) Jeremy Au:

So you were studying in Vienna as an undergraduate, you're studying economics and business. What were you like as a student?

(02:33) Oscar Jesionek:

That's an interesting question. University in Austria is quite interesting because in a way it's free. Anyone can get into it. And the challenge, I think it's changed now. But back then, the challenge was that, especially when it came to the popular courses like economics, they just had too many people that were accepted into university. So they had to make the first one, two years extremely difficult, and that's how they had to sift through people. So unlike in a lot of places where you get a lot of support when you are at university, you have total freedom at university in Austria. No one cares if you come to class, no one cares if you pass, no one cares if you do one class per semester or zero or ten. Literally, you barely interact with anyone. So it was a bit tough when it came to self discipline, like I really had to learn it over a couple of semesters to get independent and be self motivated to actually get it done. So that was quite interesting. But like a lot of business and economic students, a big reason for why I went for that was because I didn't really know what else to do.

(03:34) Jeremy Au:

So how did you figure out what you wanted to do?

(03:36) Oscar Jesionek:

Oh, it was a long and interesting, but painful process over the years. I think I spent most of my twenties trying to figure that out. I had to work while I was studying at university. I did a bunch of jobs, which was anything ranging from, I worked at a headhunting firm. I worked at a small medical company. I did some sales. I even remember getting my first job, which was, or first real job, because first I did some waitressing on the side, but then my first office job, I remember going to the interview and it was a small company, the CEO asking me, I need someone to create a flyer for me. Do you know how to do that? And I remember saying yes. She said, great, come back tomorrow and show me. And I went home, I Googled how to create flyers and like Photoshop. And I just went through that and, spent almost a whole night up trying to create a flyer. Nowadays with Canva or something, it's quite easy, but back then I still had to, do the design and figured out something, brought it to her the next day and got hired that way.

(04:33) Jeremy Au:

So many times that's happened to me as well. You promise something and you Google it or whatever it is, but I think what's interesting is that, you did a lot of what I call like marketing and project management, your early career and across different geography. So how did that come about?

(04:45) Oscar Jesionek:

So my career is quite unique in a way, because, I initially was planning like many business people to go into consulting or finance. At the end of my studies, I did actually get into like one leg into finance. I started working at some MNA consulting firms. And got my first taste of what, what that world is like. And while there were some interesting aspects, I did that corner office test where I looked at the people who had the corner office and imagined, do I want to be that person in 10 years, 15 years. And for me, it didn't feel right. And there was something missing there. So my next step was going to the Middle East where I worked on a project for refugees.

This was a joint project between the German government and the UN. And I spent some, time living in the Middle East, in Jordan specifically, working with refugees and trying to see if the world of development help, if that was something that would work for me. I had that thought in the past already of working for the UN, something in that direction would be quite interesting.

I had a very multicultural childhood also growing up, going to international schools, so it just felt appealing to me. I spent a couple of months working that. I saw it was a great experience, but I also saw that world was also not for me. So I feel that a lot of my twenties was just step after step, learning what didn't work for me until I came closer to what actually did. And after that, it was that transition to marketing and eventually discovering, especially entrepreneurship and the startup world. That was the part where I felt like, Oh, that really resonated.

(06:21) Jeremy Au:

So does that mean that you are a terrible employee because you didn't know who you were? How does that show up in terms of knowing more about what you want versus realizing there's something that you don't want to do?

(06:32) Oscar Jesionek:

Yes. But not, not right away. I think I was a great employee in for a few months then I, I dropped off my motivation. My enjoyment just kind of dropped off. I have that thing that I, that a lot of founders have where I enjoy new challenges and I enjoy, new problems to solve. But once something's up and running.

It becomes less interesting to me. So as an employee, especially as a junior employee, you don't get that many new challenges thrown at you. You're kind of, here's your task, go do it, keep doing it. And then maybe once every two years, we'll promote you and you get a new task. But that wasn't really the way it would, it worked for me when it came to my motivation and keeping me excited. And especially when it came to doing my best work.

(07:13) Jeremy Au:

So that's interesting. And you basically also during this time also changed geographies as well. So how did that happen?

(07:19) Oscar Jesionek:

Well, the first change was, growing up, I moved from country to country, but mostly across Europe and then also spent some time in Russia. The first real change came with the Middle East. It was a very interesting experience, completely different culture and really getting to experience that was very unique. After that I came to Asia. That was a big move. First, I actually came to KL. So my flight, story is quite interesting where I was in the Middle East and I was trying to decide what to do next, and I had already a little bit caught the entrepreneurship, online marketing by, I saw that, that, that had some, there was something interesting there and I was reading a blog from a guy.

And he just randomly put up a post saying, Hey, I'm looking for someone to work on me on my blog. And I answered that. I said, Hey, I'm looking for something. And we talked for a bit, had a call and he said, great, come to KL. That's where I'm based right now for a few months. Come join me. And I basically canceled my flight back to Europe and jumped on a flight to KL to this guy that I never met before and who just was just writing a blog. That started my adventure in Asia where over the next couple of years, I lived, or I explored a lot of Asia before finally settling down in Vietnam for the past couple of years.

(08:29) Jeremy Au:

Amazing. And how did you decide to stay in Vietnam? Because you were exploring different business ideas in Vietnam for some time. How did that transition and eventually the 4NOS come about?

(08:38) Oscar Jesionek:

Yeah. Initially, I never planned to have a business that was particularly based in Vietnam or focused on Vietnam. Back then I was, working remotely. So this was before COVID. So before it was so widespread, there were digital nomads, but, and we had a community and I was kind of part of that. I was traveling across Southeast Asia. And for some reason, When I arrived in, especially in Saigon and Ho Chi Minh city in the south of Vietnam, when I arrived in that city, I just felt good. I just felt like the energy, the vibe of the people, the coffee culture. It just felt good to me at that point.

And I decided, let me stay a couple of months. I, at that point, I was also tired of switching countries. Initially, when you become a digital nomad, you go through this phase where you think that, Oh, I will do a new country every two months or so. But you do that two or three times, and very quickly you realize this is incredibly tiring, and you just end up redoing the same tasks.

You have to find a place to live, you have to find a place to shop, where do you do your groceries, where do you do your laundry? Now you have to meet some new people, you have to have some friends, and you just, if you switch every two months, you just, start over all over again. I wanted to stay somewhere longer, Vietnam helped.

Just amazing. And what was supposed to be maybe six months turned into over eight years now. And Phonos really came about a couple of years later. So I've been in Vietnam for eight years and we launched Phonos four and a half years ago. So let's say five, five and a half years ago is when we started working on the idea.

(10:02) Jeremy Au:

Could you share about how the idea first came about?

(10:04) Oscar Jesionek:

Sure. So the original idea really came from my co founder. So she is Vietnamese and she was running an F&B business in Vietnam. So she has a chain of banh mi restaurants. They have a couple of locations in Vietnam. Nowadays they have also over 30 locations in Korea, I believe. And she was very busy with that and wanted to read more business books.

But because she was busy, she was looking for audio books, right? It's easy to kind of put in your headphones and listen to something while you're in the grab car or on the way somewhere. And she would look at different apps and there was just nothing good in Vietnam. There was nothing at the standard that she was looking for couple illegal uploads, couple bad apps, but nothing that for her as a potential paying customer was really what she was looking for. So she came to me with that idea and I had spent years, a decade before that really listening to so much audio, right? A ton of podcasts, a ton of, I mean, even meditation apps, audiobook apps.

So I saw that audio itself was a huge and growing trend. And it wasn't a temporary bubble. Because for me, I saw that I was actually listening to more audio than I was watching video. It was a lifestyle thing. It was me being in the gym, me being on the way somewhere, cooking or cleaning, just popping in the headphones and having the high speed internet on your smartphone. That combination suddenly unlocked all the unused time that I had into the potential of being able to listen to something interesting. So when we looked at the idea of audio in Vietnam, I saw that, Oh, audio books are interesting, but so is the whole audio sector in Vietnam. It felt to me that it was really underdeveloped except for music. So in music, there were some people doing that already, but for all of the other types of audio, it felt that there was nothing strong there. And when I did my research, I saw that because me not being Vietnamese I always have to check myself whether I'm just projecting like a Western or European point of view onto Vietnam whenever I have, any idea.

And so I also wanted to check other countries in Asia. I analyzed a little bit the Chinese market. And that's where I saw the same trends happening of audio, absolutely exploding. You had a couple startups there, or for example, Simalaya FM is a very, very famous, huge company. So I saw that this was not like a regional thing. It was a global development and this idea of going into building an audio app for Vietnam. Really became interesting for us.

(12:36) Jeremy Au:

In the early days, I remember we were discussing there was some product market fit challenges or iterations they had to go through. Could you share some of those design elements about photos in the early days?

(12:46) Oscar Jesionek:

Sure. The biggest focus in the early days was on monetization. This is what we did very differently from others. Even before launching. I spent a lot of time on this because as I analyzed audio apps across the world. It was clear that the difficulty was having any barriers to entry. So let's take a meditation app, for example, if I make a meditation app, there's, there's nothing stopping you from making a different one and launching it next month, right?

It's really hard to build something defensible in audio. And then you have things like podcast with an open standard. So how do you build something defensible in audio? That was like a big question back then. If you want to actually build a company that's worth something and not just, maybe you build something that gets a bunch of users, but it's not able to make any money.

So that's where our initial focus became on audio books. Even though we saw podcasts, we saw a lot of other stuff happening, but when I looked at the companies that were actually valuable in the audio space, Audible was a clear one that stood out. As like leader, a really dominant international player in audio books, very monetized and people paying significant amounts of money for it. So we decided to initially just completely focus on audio books, even though we had long term larger ambitions, but audio books as the place to start because if we have that, the thing that makes audio books special is you have copyright. If you get the copyright for certain titles, and especially if you're able to negotiate that you have some exclusive deals or exclusive rights, that's something that is actually defensible.

That's something that can set you apart. If you have the right, such as we do now, to Sapiens, to Rich Dad, Poor Dad, to, Thinking Fast and Slow to The Alchemist or whatever popular title there is. If you have the exclusive rights we do for the Vietnamese audio version, of course, then it's very hard to launch a competitor and then you actually have something unique and valuable. So that was a big part of the early days of focusing on audio books. And then of course came the challenge of how do we get Vietnamese people to pay? So that was a big deal because essentially anyone we talked to in Vietnam would tell us this will not work because Vietnamese people do not pay for content.

And when they told us it was pretty much true, right? Nowadays it's a bit different, but five years ago, they did not pay for a lot of content. That's true. Those were, when I looked around, those were the very early days of Netflix and Spotify in Vietnam. So there were some early adopters starting to pay for the, for for international apps like this.

But there weren't really Vietnamese subscription apps on the market, it didn't really exist. So we had to ask ourselves a difficult question of, is it going to be possible to get Vietnamese people to pay for this kind of content? Or are we just doomed to fail? And that's, it's not going to work.

So the way I approach that is first, I started with a, with the thought of Vietnamese people are not different from the rest of the world. The trends that happen in other places, there's nothing magical about, you know, or that unique about Vietnamese people that they will go the opposite way of the rest of the world. So I looked at China, in Europe and in the West, that part is obvious, I guess. Subscription apps are a big thing. People pay for content, but I looked at Asia and specifically I looked at China from the research I did, I saw that there had been a similar change in attitudes of consumers.

It was 10, 15, 10 years ago, 15 years ago before that, but they had gone through a similar change where in the past people did not pay for anything online, but that changed massively. And then once they started paying. That audience was actually very, nowadays I would say they're actually more used to paying stuff online than people in the West.

So as I looked at Vietnam, I saw, yes, at this moment they're not paying, but I see them paying in the future. And a big factor in that were the payment methods. So for you to be able to pay for digital content, Well, you need to have the ability to do and if we look five, 10 years into the past in, in Vietnam, well, almost no one had a credit card and there were no digital wallets.

So how would you even pay for something, even if you wanted to, right? Let's say you, you want to subscribe to Netflix but you don't have a credit card and you don't have a digital wallet. Well, you can't, you're going to go to the post office or I don't know. You can't build a business on that. So that's when, when I started analyzing the market and I saw that well, we already had massive growth in e wallets at that point. Credit cards were growing quite rapidly and all the early adopters in the big cities were already starting to pay for some form of online products, whether it was Netflix or Spotify, or even just paying for rides.

Ride hailing on their phone or grab, delivery, whatever it was. So that customer behavior was clearly changing. And I saw that the potential there, and we had to make a bet that no, Vietnamese consumers, they're going to go the same way as the rest of the world. When given the right framework, the right tools, right? If they have the same tools to pay online, they will pay online.

I also remember you sharing about how you initially had started out with a book section targeting fiction and then you eventually had to change. So could you share a little bit more about that product market fit discovery?

(17:28) Oscar Jesionek:

Yes, this was massive for us and it ties into my experience going to bookstores. When I go into a bookstore in Austria, I primarily see fiction books and then nonfiction is a little bit on the side. It's very clear that fiction is the main star, but if you enter a bookstore, a physical bookstore in Vietnam, it's the opposite. Nonfiction books everywhere. And then you have a fiction section a little bit on the side somewhere. when we launched Fonos, we did not know what to expect because it was a new market, new product. No one had really done this in Vietnam. So we did not know which books people would want to listen to. Now our longterm vision was to have all of them. So that was good. We didn't have to focus too much but, very quickly within the first few months, we saw that nonfiction was just a massive hit. Users wanted nonfiction. And the the cool thing is that it's not limited to one type of nonfiction.

It's not very popular, of course, is always anything to do with career or money because young Vietnamese are hungry. They want to improve their life. But I've been so massively impressed by the diversity of nonfiction books that Vietnamese audiences go for. Books on health are very big on Fonos. Books on spirituality are some of our best sellers. Psychology. Parenting. So really it's not any specific type, but just general knowledge seeking seems to be that the common thread that Vietnamese audiences want. They really want to learn more about things. They want to keep improving. They want to self develop and our audience, our primary audience is 25 to 35. These are young professionals in the big cities that are already out of school. They have a job. They have some income but they're looking to keep learning, keep developing. Now, we have a broad range of users, right? I've met so many people who told me that their parents are huge Fonos users and listeners and that they set the account up for their parents on their phone. But yeah, that audience, that nonfiction drive is really massive. And it's also influenced the product direction once we took it further than audio books.

(19:33) Jeremy Au:

How have you taken it further than audiobooks based on this insight?

(19:37) Oscar Jesionek:

Well, initially we experimented with other product, with other content types, so nowadays we have other types such as guided meditations. We have book summaries. We have some English audio books, so we have different types of content and we were a big moment for us was when I was trying to figure out the future direction, where we want to go, and we were trying to decide between going into more audio content focused on stories or something in a different direction. What we did was we started talking to our users. We started interviewing them, doing some surveys, trying to really dig deeper into, okay, you have audio books. You come here for that on Fonos. What else can we solve for you? How else can we provide value to you? And to my surprise, I expected it a little bit, but not at that level. 85 to 90 percent of our users specifically said, I use Fonos to learn. So my first reaction was, okay, maybe that's because of the content we already have, all the nonfiction books. But, wouldn't you want some books, some entertainment stories, some ghost stories, some romance stories, something like that, would that be interesting? And they very categorically said, nope, I want more stuff to learn. So that's where we realized like, okay, it wasn't 50-50, it was 90-10. So that was like a massive signal to me that, all right, this is clearly our audience, they want this, we should stay on that track. At that point, I stopped thinking of us as audio first, and I started thinking of us as a knowledge or self development app first, right?

(21:06) Oscar Jesionek:

People use our app to learn and audio is a great way to do that but it doesn't have to be the only way. So we looked at people, what are the downsides of audio books? And what can we give something else to make up for that? Audio books are great. However, they're quite long, right? Six to eight hours, maybe on average. A lot of the audio books are that are popular in Vietnam or just books in general, a lot of them are written by foreign authors, which is great. But, they lack a little bit of local context. So let's take a, famous example like Rich Dad Poor Dad. There's great wisdom there that's applicable anywhere. However, when he talks about real estate, for example, the real estate market in Vietnam and US works very differently. A lot of that knowledge is not one to one applicable. So that's where we realized, okay, that local factor plus the length leave something for us to do. So what we launched next was what we called pod courses. You can think of it a little bit inspired by masterclass, where we approached top experts in Vietnam in different fields and got them to share on these topics from their local experience and sharing directly in Vietnamese in a shorter form, also in video format, you can listen to it or you can watch it.

We launched that early this year and that has been a great success for us and had a very positive reaction from our users and we're super focused on building out that part of the business now because it ties into that user desire of learning, right? They want to learn, they want to know, and the way I shared it with our team and the way we now approach that is. Imagining a person in Vietnam, someone like you, Jeremy, or me, we have a lot of privilege that we can call up some interesting people and ask them for advice, right? Even me, I can send you a message and be like, Hey, Jeremy, I'd like your advice on something. Can we meet up for coffee? Or can we jump on a call? And can you maybe help me with some career advice or business advice or something. But many people in Vietnam don't know anyone successful. They don't know someone in that field or with that experience, and they don't have a way of doing that. So the way I think of our pod courses is imagining as if you had the ability to have coffee with this expert, an expert in sales or an expert in launching a business or, we have, for example, the founder of Pho24 which was a popular pho chain in Vietnam, which he built up and he then later exited.

So we had him make a course on how to run and launch a restaurant or an F&B chain in Vietnam. And in Vietnam, that's a huge topic. A lot of people love launching restaurants or having one. And a lot of people are interested in that. So not everyone can call him up and ask him for advice, but that was the thought behind it but you can watch that course and, for two hours, he will directly share that knowledge.

(23:40) Jeremy Au:

Amazing. I remember us having that conversation at a coffee shop around that direction as well. And I remember you tussling with that question quite a bit at that point of time and we're having that debate. What do you think stopped you or slowed you down in coming to that thinking versus things that help you figure it out faster, which is about a mastery piece?

(23:59) Oscar Jesionek:

I think the key was how I thought of our company. So the logical step on paper, at least for our company was to be the audio super app. So audio first, right? So any type of audio content, Fonos will just have that. And there's some validity to that approach. And it was just like the obvious fit. It sounds good to VCs. The problem was, the more I looked at that as a business, And especially if you're monetizing, which was always important to us, I always wanted to have a business that's actually making money and not completely dependent on, raising that next round from VCs. If you think of it as audio first, you're very limited because you essentially have to go into podcasts next which we also thought about. And that was, I think at the point when we were talking, I was trying to decide, like, do we go into podcasts? Do we go into audio stories? And that was, the key point was for me really switching from looking at us as an audio first app to switching to our users and being user centric first.

So looking at them and what problem are we solving for them? And then maybe it's audio, maybe it's another format, but switching to that, we are an app for Vietnamese people to learn things, right? People who are busy, people who are on the go, but they want to learn stuff. They are hungry for knowledge and not, and then it became more clear. And actually everything fell into place of me being, All right, well, let's just come up with more stuff that helps them learn. Let's remove difficulties from that. Let's get new content that fits with the other content. And suddenly everything became easier once I made that switch.

(25:33) Jeremy Au:

What's interesting is that, when you think about mastery, Vietnam has two aspects of it, one is that it's a hungry country focused on education, a better life for their children. So I think there's one aspect about it. And of course, the second aspect is that Vietnam is still an emerging market, right? So it's very much GDP per capita still around seven to 8,000 per year. So I think those are the two aspects when you see the future of Vietnam, how do you see the education or the professional learning space mature or change.

(26:00) Oscar Jesionek:

From what I'm observing, I think Vietnam culturally in this regard, especially when it comes to education follows China, the same trajectory. Chinese culture has a huge in puts a huge emphasis on education. Parents value it very highly. Parents are willing to spend on it. And it's really a key cultural aspect. I'm seeing that same trend in Vietnam. So Vietnamese people value education a lot. And I think that's also, part of the reason of why nonfiction books, for example, do so well on our app is because in some way, people see it as education. And that's why they're willing to spend money on it. On pure entertainment books, it's a bit harder for them to justify it. But they see nonfiction books as an investment in themselves, which it is. And so Vietnamese people, I see continued huge investment into education. And I also see people really being quite independent with it as well, which is quite encouraging to see.

So it's not just the reliance on schools, the reliance on some centers, but you see people just going to courses, people watching YouTube videos to learn something, people using funnels. So there's quite an independent spirit in just wanting to learn. So it's not just to fulfill some check box of, I need to learn this, I need to learn that, to get some certificate but it's actually people seemingly learning for life because so many of our nonfiction books are, no, you're not going to get an award for reading them. It's not really fulfilling anything except your inner need to learn. So that drive is quite large. And if you combine that with the young population that you have here, I think it's a very, very encouraging long term sign for Vietnam.

(27:36) Jeremy Au:

And on that note, what do you see the future for Fonos is going to be? So is it more depth, more mastery, more expertise? How do you see that changing?

(27:44) Oscar Jesionek:

Yeah, so for now, we want to go deeper into the pod courses, right? We've launched 20 so far. We have a huge pipeline coming up. In the next 12 to 18 months, there's going to be a ton of content that we will launch just going deeper into all types of topics, a very interesting aspect that's happening right now for us is the development, the unexpected development of B2B.

This is something I didn't expect at all when we first launched, but over the last three years or so, every month we would get a couple of inquiries from businesses asking to purchase memberships. And sometimes, it would be you know, a founder of a\ 10, 20 employee company, just saying, Hey, I want my employees to. I read more books, but sometimes these are businesses such as big banks or universities or big tech companies. And especially with our newest product, the pod courses, the interest really picked up even more. So now we're about to launch a separate B2B product with the same content that we're doing B2C, but with some optimizations for our B2B use case with LMS management system with dashboards and so on. So that's quite exciting for us, something we didn't really foresee happening, but just the fact that we already had businesses emailing us that were calling us asking to purchase it. It's kind of like a pretty good early sign of there's something there for us to pursue.

(29:04) Jeremy Au:

Well, well, you've gotten me my brain fizzing with ideas already, but on that note, could you share about a personal time that you've been brave?

(29:11) Oscar Jesionek:

The time that comes to mind is something I mentioned earlier. When I canceled that flight from the Middle East back to Europe, and I got on that flight to KL, at that point, I think I quite literally had 500 euros in my bank account. And looking back, I don't know how I made that decision. There's a line between bravery and stupidity, and I'm not sure in which category to put that decision. I'm very glad I made that decision and I'm happy it worked out, but jumping on a flight and then, being in a landing in KL with 500 euros in my bank account and no real way of getting more, if something didn't work out, That was, let's call it brave, but yeah, I think there's a line there, but I think that qualifies.

(29:53) Jeremy Au:

I'm just curious, 500 euros is not a lot of money, right? So how do you feel? That's like, obviously you did it but you also said that you were worried. So how was the emotions around that?

(30:03) Oscar Jesionek: The excitement was making up for the worry. There was a lot of uncertainty and things had to work out, but I felt at that point in my life, I had the right attitude of also, I will make it work out. So even if plan had, for some reason, if something had gone wrong, would have figured something out, right?

At that point, I was particularly hungry, particularly excited about going into the world and exploring and going into online business and Asia. So I think that's what actually gave me the confidence. It wasn't so much the confidence that, this job will a hundred percent work out but I think it was just like the confidence that, if it doesn't, I'll find something else.

(30:42) Jeremy Au:

Looking back, any advice you would give to that younger version of yourself with 500 euros to cancel that flight?

(30:49) Oscar Jesionek:

I don't know if that advice really applies as much to young people. Like as I'm getting older, I feel that the advice of trust your gut. I feel, more often than not is really true and I really tend to listen to it. My journey made no sense. If you go from MNA to development aid in the Middle East, then some online marketing, and then starting a business in Vietnam, there's no logical thread. But I kind of, every time I made a decision, trusted my gut that, if it didn't feel right, for some reason, MNA didn't feel right, for some reason, development work didn't feel right. And when I did the right thing, it felt right pretty much right away. I felt like, Oh yeah, this is good. This is fun. Just like when I became a founder and started running a startup. I felt like, Oh, this feels great. I'm enjoying this. And not because being a founder is so enjoyable. It's full of pain, full of uncertainty, full of stress and pressure and the unknown, but it still felt right. And somehow, it fits me and I wouldn't change it for something else. So I would say go with your gut.

(31:52) Jeremy Au:

Amazing. On that note, thank you so much for sharing. I'd love to summarize the three big takeaways I got from this conversation. First of all, thanks so much for sharing about your early career time at Austria, figuring out your life and doing economics, but also floating to many different countries and different roles, where you had initial burst of motivation, but there was a pruning process where you had to figure out what you actually did like versus what were the things that you liked less. Making a decision to let go of things in order to pursue new opportunities.

Secondly, thanks for sharing about Fonos. I think it was fascinating to hear about the early product market fit in terms of the decision making needed about why your spouse needed learning and so she wanted to learn something and hear something but more importantly, you testing out that it was non fiction versus fiction or superior, but also figuring out that the future direction of the company really became from a mastery and learning perspective superior to that of being an audio super app.

Lastly, thanks so much for sharing about go with your gut. I thought it was fascinating to hear about that philosophy not just with your intuition to kind of hop on a flight to travel to new country, but also when you decide to stay in Ho Chi Minh City when you decided to build a new company and when you figure out how to pivot your company economy.

So thank you so much for sharing, Oscar.

(33:00) Oscar Jesionek:

Thank you for having me, Jeremy. It was fun sharing.