Julien Smith, Breather // Learn To Detect Patterns & Building A Venture Scale Startup
Julien Smith is the co-founder & CEO of Breather. They provide an on-demand network of private meeting rooms designed for work, meetings and focus. They’ve raised over $80m to date and are on a strong trajectory of growth. Before that, Julien was a best selling author, speaker & podcaster. In this conversation, Julien and Bilal discuss how he thinks about pattern detection, how he used these frameworks to develop the idea for Breather & how you can apply this to your own work. Full show notes & timestamps: https://www.creatorlab.fm/julien-smith-breather-detecting-patterns/ Time Stamps: 1:52 - Who are you/what do you do 2:30 - Detecting patterns. Is that that what you’re good at? 4:10 - Scale & growth of Breather, how did Julien get there 6:43 - When Julien started Breather, how many units did he start with & how do they keep them secure? 8:09 - What does Breather's customer base look like? What are their customer segments? 8:58 - How big is this market? How do you estimate market size? 9:50 - Thinking about security for a physical space - digital vs analog locks. 11:30 - Growing up in Canada & what did Julien want to be when he grew up? 13:20 - Learning what you’re good at and 360 reviews 17:10 - How Julien thinks about detecting patterns? Is this something we can learn to become better at? 20:25 - Is detecting patterns a skill or luck? 24:10 - Detecting patterns: is it a learned behavior? Discussing Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet. 28:30 - the value of the expert generalist 30:00 - What sources of information do you follow? Books, podcasts, people, etc? 33:30 - What can people do to accelerate the process of growing and connecting with people they can learn from? 36:00 - Jeff Bezos story of the regret minimization framework 39:30 - What were some of the macro trends he identified to help start Breather? Are there certain macro trends that he sees right now? 42:20 - Cities + network effects + timing 46:02 - Bilal discusses idea for supper clubs platform 47:50 - Omnifocus app he uses for tasks 48:10 - Developing healthy habits? Streaks app 51:40 - What is Julien’s routine and a typical day? Morning pages. The creative habit. 55:05 - What is motivating Julien right now? 56:30 - What does success mean to you?