20VC: Hims & Hers: $4.3BN Market Cap on $2.3BN of Revenue: The Comeback | Why Being Public is 10x Better | The Death of the "Strategy" Hire | Why Performance Marketing is Worse than Brand Marketing with Andrew Dudum

**Andrew Dudum** (0:00)
One of the things I learned earliest in my career is if you can't hire people that are smarter than you, you will fail. You know, I think what you gain confidence in with brand marketing over time is that consistency is required. Yeah, the whole thing is totally fucked, right? If you look at the existing system in the US.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:16)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I am so excited for the show today. We have Andrew Dudum, founder and CEO of Hims, on the show. Hims are reinventing healthcare, but wow, it's been a tough six months. They are down 66%. They've got a market cap of 4.35 billion as of today, but they do over 2.3 billion in revenue. It's nuts. I'm so excited to sit down with Andrew today where we discuss this and so much more. This was so much fun to do. But before we dive into the show today, you're in back-to-back meetings all day. You're trying to stay present, but you're also worried you'll forget the decision, the action item, the important next step. That's where Granola comes in. Granola is an AI-powered notepad for meetings. You jot down rough notes like you always do, and in the background, Granola transcribes and turns them into really clear, useful notes when the meeting ends. No bots joining your call, no distractions, just a clean notepad that helps you focus. During or after the call, you can chat with your notes, ask Granola to pull out action items, help you negotiate, write a follow-up email even, or coach you using recipes which are pre-made prompts. It's actually the same technology we used to create our podcast notes. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's really hard to go back. Head to granola.ai/20vc, that's granola.ai/20vc, and get three months free with the code 20VC, that's 20VC. Once Granola turns the conversation into clear notes, Finn turns that clarity into better customer support. If you're looking for a way to transform your customer service, let me introduce you to Finn, baby. Finn is the number one AI agent for customer service, resolving up to 93% of customer queries automatically. There is no other agent that can do that. Not 93% of customer queries, okay? No other agent can do that. So why choose Finn? Finn is the best performing AI agent for CS. Finn doesn't just answer questions, it takes actions. It automates the most complex customer queries like refunds, transaction disputes, technical troubleshooting with speed and reliability. I wish my team was speedy and reliable, beats every competitor in every head-to-head bake-off, completely configurable and code optional setup. My word, I mean, the benefits just go on and on. It's easy and efficient implementation. It works on any help desk with no tedious migration needs. It's trusted by over 6,000 customer service leaders, including top AI companies like Anthropic, Lovable, Synthesia, Clay, Vanta. So if you're ready to transform your customer service team, scale your support and give team members time to focus on the really high-level strategic work, learn more about Finn at finn.ai/20vc.
You have now arrived at your destination. Andrew, it's been like six, seven years. I was young and fresh when we last spoke.

**Andrew Dudum** (3:12)
Sorry, I was a lot younger. We looked a lot better back then, but I'd say we're pretty good now.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:18)
I think life's been pretty kind to both of us. Can I start with a super weird one? And you might be like, dude, I thought we were buddies. But I speak to so many public company CEOs today and I can't find a happy one.

**Andrew Dudum** (3:31)
I might be the only person that believes this, but I think running the company in the public markets is more fun than being private.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:38)
Why? You get shit on every day. Dude, I see it. And I'm like, oh, poor Andrew. And I so remember our dinner with your lovely wife. And I'm like, oh, I like you so nice. And I see the shit on Twitter.

**Andrew Dudum** (3:50)
I love it for a few reasons. One, if you're a highly competitive person, you get to put out high benchmarks every 90 days and see if you can actually deliver on it. And you can build a high performance team to say, hey, we put this out and it's a big stretch. Let's go kick ass and figure it out. When you're private, it's so easy to get cozy. You know, the worst case scenario, if you got some VCs that call you and they're stressed out about something, but in the public markets, it's like it's bootcamp. It's like you got to be, you have to deliver. So I love that from a competitive standpoint. I also love the ability to hire talent like in the public markets because they can see the vision and you're forced to not only talk about where you're going to go 10 years from now, but if you're going to actually like make steps quarter to quarter to prove it. So as a competitive person, I think it's a lot of fun. Also when you step back, like, you know, we went public really early. We went public after like 36 months of launching, which was a little bit crazy. When you look at the biggest companies in the world, they went public within a first few years of launching. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, all of them. Like they didn't stay private for 10, 20 years. You know, the founder was forced to figure it out in the public markets, how we're going to grow, how we're going to get efficient, and how we're going to tell a big vision. And I think that's a lot of fun.