Connected, by mParticle Episode 13: How to develop a world-class MarTech department with Sesi Sijuade

In this episode, we connect with Sesi Sijuade, Head of Product - Marketing Technology at Sky, to learn more about how enterprise organizations can make the most of their MarTech investments. We dive deep into topics such as how to develop a MarTech team, how to navigate build vs buy decisions, and how to tie MarTech programs to business value. With over ten years of experience in the MarTech space, Sesi shares invaluable insights that marketers across industries can apply to their MarTech programs.

If you enjoy this episode, you can visit our Connected by mParticle episode hub and check additional conversations with leaders from companies such NBCUniversal, CKE Restaurants, and Ruby Tuesday.

Abhi Seth: Sesi, can't thank you enough. Monday end of day. I know it's I don't know. Work weeks are always quite chaotic. I'm sure that's no exception for you, but can't thank you enough for hopping on the connected pod today.

Sesi Sijuade: Indeed, it's a hot day here in the uk, right? It's, I think it's almost 30 degrees today, so looking to get outside and enjoy the nice weather.

Abhi: Yeah. Bad you guys. I don't know. It's summer is, is fully in the air here in New York but I know the warm days in, in the UK are really precious, so you know, even more so. Appreciate you making the time to, to jump on. But man, before I get ahead of myself, obviously we've been working together for, for a while now, but would you mind maybe kicking off and introducing yourself and telling the audience a bit about what you do?

Sesi: Yeah, sure. I’m Sesi Sijuade. So sort of based in the uk in London. Just over 10 sort of straight years experience when it comes to digital. I currently work in the marketing technology function as [the head of marketing technology, leading that MarTech strategy and MarTech product capability across our streaming propositions in Europe for Sky. Strong background in digital technology have sort of worked across sky LiveRamp and Unilever. And it's allowed me to have sort of a blend of experience right across b2b, b2b2c, OTT. And I just recognize that that's a lot of acronyms, so I'll simplify for you. So ultimately working on selling MarTech to businesses selling to retailers who then sell on to consumers, and then also using MarTech to sell to consumers. Personally into Formula One, tennis and a bit of gaming when the time permits.

Abhi: Awesome, man. Well yeah, believe me, at the end of the conversation, we're gonna come back to, to tennis and Formula One. But no, I mean, super, super interesting stuff, I think, and, and really timely because I don't know, I, it's this term MarTech, right? It's interesting. I mean, it's, it's old, maybe oldish in tech terms, but it's sort of a relatively new space.

Right. And I think it requires a pretty interesting skillset. So, maybe we can talk a bit about the, the history of this role, of this sort of, of this sort of ecosystem. You know, MarTech for sure is like becoming an in increasingly important function in all organizations, right?

Everyone wants to communicate to their consumers better. There's a ton of different teams that need to be coordinated to do this. Sesi, maybe could you walk us through what a MarTech team, I'm gonna ask a stupid question, what a MarTech team does exactly. And man, how do you guys typically interact with, like, maybe other departments in a, in an organization?

Sesi: Yeah. So I think I'd say the role of like a marketing technology team, like first and foremost, it needs to be about partnering that marketing function within the business, right? I know in the MarTech name, like tech is a key part of ultimately the name. But the main thing that we're all here to do is to meet the commercial objectives of the organization, right.

So that strong interlock with, with the marketing function is super key. it's really just around like understanding what are the opportunities at hand. Like is it we need to address churn, do we need to increase products sold? And then like once you have that clarity on like what the, that opportunity is, what the problems are, it's only then that like the MarTech team should be looking to the tech aspect. Right? And that's where you see like MarTech interfacing with. functions and departments like engineering, Product, once you're into the whole delivery and requirements aspect for like on behalf of marketing. So from my point of view, like the role of that marketing technology team is to partner the marketing function to ensure they are leveraging that leading edge tech in order to solve the sort of commercial objectives.

Abhi: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It sort of implies Sesi that like, and you tell me if I'm way off or wrong, but the reason this sort of organization, this role is really cropped up is because, you know, is it fair to say in the past that those two functions were sort of disjointed,

Like you have. Technology on one end, right? You have the developers and you have folks that you know are buying SaaS applications or building technology internally, but then there's sort of a huge gap between how do you make this sort of technology work in a way that really delivers on what you know has traditionally been a non-technical role

I mean, I think marketing or business maybe are really good at communicating. We have to, you know, lower our customer acquisition cost or increase our retention. But, you know, I think it does take a bit of a unique perspective to be able to take the business thinking and understand the end goal, but then translate that to technology.

From your perspective, when did you really start to see like MarTech come up? Like, is this something we've had for 10 years? Did it really blow up five years ago? Yeah. Walk us a bit through the history, if you don't mind.

Sesi: So I, I would say MarTech has always but it's often been part of someone's role. Like you've always had like a marketing person who is like digitally oriented, right? Who, who is always talking to companies and like bringing capability in. And then having to just like say to the tech team, oh, integrate this person in.

And it's just like, yeah, I spoke to this vendor. Let's integrate them in. Right. And I think as time has gone on and technology's gotten more advanced, you really need to have like, expertise in an area. And that's where sort of the function has been brought out that like these people are your technologists.

They know how things work, they know how to translate certain things into the tech teams. I think that's how the role has sort of evolved time into its own function. Right? And you see that have strong MarTech teams. Achieve their sort of digital objectives in a much faster way, and it's evident through like the campaigns they're able to run and, and all that kind of stuff.

Abhi: To your point about the role sort of always, always existing I couldn't agree more. I think there is just sort of, I mean, if you want to define departments, let’s say, you know, I, I think we all sort of serve the business or departments serve, you know, the business ultimately.

But I think different departments are so fixated on solving the problem through one lens or one angle. And I think particularly with the explosion of technology that we've seen in the last. 5, 10, 15 years. I don't know when we'll sort of plateau on this, but it just, I think it just makes sense, like to be I think to sort of be ahead of the curve or to sort of keep up you know, it's sort of bred this role, I think organically, but Man, hold on.

I'm, I'm going off on a tangent, bringing this back in because I think this is a really key point too. Totallyg et MarTech what its role is in an organization, but, given that it's relatively new, right, and it maybe hasn't been super well defined in the past, I'd imagine like finding like the right skillset or group of folks that can kind of sit between technical and sort of non-technical can be really tough.

Sesi, in your experience, man, like what goes into developing like a great, great MarTech team?

Sesi: So I'll split it into two. Right. So I'll start with finding, hiring,

I'll go into like developing, retaining. Right. So for finding and hiring, like I'll never forget something a leader told me into in the past, like a guy named Saresh, he's now still a CIO Heineken over in India. And it was something along the lines of like, In MarTech, it's okay to be a generalist, but like how much value can you really add if you are not an expert on a topic, right? And ultimately saying sort of there's only so, so far you can go and how much you can unlock when you don't know the ins and outs of a given MarTech area. And if, if you're someone who's led sort of big MarTech projects. You realize that the devil's really in the detail and the integrations, right? So when bringing a team together, I sort of apply the mantra of like, you need to get the experts in the team who are like, I'm a subject matter expert on engagement platforms. I know about sort of analytics data. I know about personalization, right? And obviously, Seniority taken into account?

Like in terms of at what level do you need to know what, so first things first is like ex being an expert and, and having that knowledge so that you can add that granular value. In addition to this, I would say personalities too. Because MarTech sits between the technical and non-technical. It's one of those areas where you have to be okay with being challenged. You have to be okay with being scrutinized. You, you will need to prove the value or the giving capability and provide sufficient data to back up why you think this idea or this technology going to be sort of the best thing for the business. And that's, those soft skills as well are also key.

So, Again, the technical and the soft skills. You vary that based on sort of the level of position you are bringing together within the team. but you need two of those dimensions. And then lastly, culture, right? What kind of culture you trying to create? And making sure within your wider structure that you're trying to create, that you have the right balance of personalities within the team. Like there's this personality testing thing. I, I completely forgot the name of it, but it has like a red, blue. Yellow

Abhi: right? I think it's disc.

Sesi: Yeah, I think it's that I know for example, I'm like ice skew red and yellow. Right?

Abhi: Right.

Sesi: of like in between both depending on the scenario. So when you're building a team, you know that you can't have too many reds, becayse like reds are sort of more dominating. You need to have like the blues, the analytics, the greens. Like you have to build that sort of right, right. Structure. So I would say it's a mixture of. Being an expert, having the right soft skills and fitting, fitting the sort of culture and the soft skills cannot be underestimated because yeah, you, if you are just an expert only and you're not able to convince people, then, you, it is not gonna work.

Abhi: And that is you know, I don't, I mean, that's wisdom not just for building a MarTech team, but I think building a, a great team in general, right? For anyone that's sort of thinking about putting someone together. And a a couple of things that you mentioned there, Sesi, like stood out to me. I think one of them is, this idea that it's would it be fair to say I think that comment about soft skills really comes from the fact that in its nature, like a marketing technologist really has to work with so many different teams in a business.

Sesi: Basically, yeah, you, you, you need to be able to speak the language of multiple teams and understand. Each team's motivations and, challenges so that when you are trying to translate business objectives and and sort of aims, you are able to do so in a way that's contextually relevant to the teams that you're impacting, right? So a lot of the times with MarTech capability, It's capability that you need to integrate into many areas of your tech stack. So you are touching on so many different teams and if you're not able to explain like why it's important you get that SDK integration or why it's important that that data point comes out and goes into reporting, then you're not gonna do very well. And I just realized I didn't, I didn't even speak to the whole retaining aspect Right.

Sesi: I've always had the view that there's only so long you can retain like a star performer, right? And in my view, like people moving on into bigger and better roles, like that's a success story that should be celebrated. But in terms of retaining people, it's really just about like, agreeing what the right growth trajectory for that person is. Like knowing in advance how you can increase their scope, knowing how you can grow their roles, knowing what roles you would put them into sticking to the plan. And that, and that typically helps.

Abhi: Awesome. Switching gears a bit yeah, let's talk about the technology part of it and sort of the yeah, I, I don't know. I always see MarTech as sort of, you know, there's, there's a dizzying number of tools in technologies sort of one can choose from, right?

I mean, sure, you can understand the, the business requirements, but. How to create, I think, the best stack that's gonna serve each business. And again, I'm sure there's, you know, what you would advise maybe a startup in terms of how they'd set up their stack versus, you know a globally recognized, you know, brand with thousands and thousands of employees may be very different.

But Sesi, I, I think the audience would love to hear from you, like, how have you gone about. evaluating and selecting tools for your tech stack, or how can one think about those things?

Sesi: So I think, yeah. So I think in our world there are literally thousands of MarTech companies who sort of claim that they can solve business problems. Like I think there's this thing called like a MarTech 500 or 5,000 or something. I think

Abhi: I think it's 5,000.

Sesi: Yeah. And it's very easy to jump into a solution for a problem you actually don't have. So like before any project or initiative is super important to like really understand like the commercial objectives. What, what are they currently, what are the pain points? What are the known opportunities that you are not pursuing, right? And getting that alignment so that whatever you do bring in, you have the right to sort of benchmark against what you're bringing in. And the main thing. In terms of choosing the right tools is staying on top of like the trends in industry, right? So in the past, CDPs weren't a thing. Now we know with all of the different integrations that you have to have and the real time nature of data, they're now a thing. And it's looking at sort of which tools are on the rise that are actually showing proven results against your actual objectives that you need to hit. And looking at your typical sources like Gartner, Forrester, but. For me, the most important source is actually word of mouth. As a lot of companies are amazing at the keynote, like you go to that keynote, you're like, take my money tomorrow, but poor in execution.

Sesi: And the only way to know how good a company is at execution is to speak to your peer who bought the tool and it didn't work, or bought the tool and found they have this different thing or that different thing. Then once you've done that and you know roughly who you, who you wanna work with, then you get into your standard RFI or POC processes, which sort of vary based on the size and the spend that you are looking to do for, for the given MarTech tool.

Abhi: I think that's such a key point that you made is, you know, well, sure, like you wanna try before you buy, but even if you're thinking about like, how do I narrow from 600 tools that seem to say they do the same thing to maybe the four or five that I really wanna evaluate, I think that word of mouth is really key, right?

It's like talking to your peers and really making sure you have those connections to say, Hey, like here's the objective. Like, I know what I wanna accomplish, like. How has, you know, vendor X or, or, or, you know, technology y kind of done for you now or in the past. And so that's, that's great advice. Okay, let's, let's move.

So, so let's just say we, we get through all of this, we find to the best of our ability, you know, the best tool to do X, Y, or Z. I know the journey just starts there, right? And, you know, I'm, I'm talking more importantly about like, once you purchase a tool, You know, super important to implement it su successfully prove out that business value.

Sesi from the point that you acquire new technology, like what are some of the steps you personally take to maximize like the ROI on your MarTech investments? What kind of goes into really extracting value once you sort of acquired a technology?

Sesi: So I would say the first thing is starting small, right? Some people would say that when you choose a tool and like it doesn't actually meet the need, that it's a complete failure. And I wouldn't disagree, it's a fail, but like, not a failure if you've kept the initial scope small and set out exactly what you want to test from an ROI perspective. So if you've outlined what those tests are and it hasn't met that, then it's actually a success because you've identified that like, this is not the right thing to use and you've given yourself that cutoff point so that you, you're not like into a five year contract on something that didn't meet the, the, the basic games. In terms of maximizing something that actually is working, it's about agreeing what the key levers are to do so. So lot of the time maximizing the ROI involves like getting the right process in place amongst the teams that are using the tool. Having that flex flexibility to integrate that tool like in a more sort of connected way to your sy to your other systems internally. like in the context of mParticle CDP, like it's one thing to have the data in the CDP and like some integrations set up downstream, but it's another thing to be really utilizing the whole tool, all the SDKs integrated so that you have super granular data for granular segmentation and so on. So yeah, it's really about like, sense checking like, are the basic KPIs being met? Like if you do X, does Y happen? then what are the barriers to making the most out of y? Is it deeper integration? Is it better processes? Is it more people? Is it less people? Et cetera, et cetera.

Abhi: No, I mean that. That resonates. And I think the, like even in, in my experience, right, just being on the, on the customer success side of things, sometimes, you a customer that's somewhat that, you know, from the beginning of the sort of evaluation cycle, I think there's like a clear understanding of like, Hey, you know, I'm going out to buy a CDP or buy a marketing activation tool to do X, Y, and Z.

And I think. Somewhere along the lines, right? You have a, oh, but could it do this and could it do this, and could it do this? And by the time you actually get to day one of like, let's actually project plan do things, I feel like we sort of get a bit lost, right? In like, oh man, there's an ocean of things to do.

Where do we start? And you sort of lose sight of it. It really is a brick by prick stepwise process, right? Any technology in and of itself in a silo. Isn't really helpful. I think it really is the, can you define a clear roadmap? Do you know what your priorities are as an organization in terms of what you're trying to deliver?

You know, and are you gonna see it through long enough to actually be able to evaluate, you know, was it successful or not? And I've, I've seen a lot of, organizations really succeed because I think they understood that there's many, many things we always want to do, but there's those two or three critical things that we have to do, and how do we ruthlessly focus on executing that?

And I don't know. I know, I know, I, I hate to boil down to like a trivial thing, but I really preach like crawl, walk, run, right. And it's like, don't talk about the walking and the running, or put too much effort into that until you get the crawl really right. And define that really well.

Sesi: This is it, and that's the approach that you should also take when working with like the technology teams, like you spoke about sort of when you have a business objective and you're trying to translate that into like product development, oftentimes you would submit, a lot of people would just submit the finished requests. Like, I wanna integrate mParticle and I want to have every field capturing data from day one. Otherwise it's not a success. And it's like, hang on. That's the run scenario. Let's start with integrate the sdk. Capture 10% of what's possible to be captured, a, that may be able to be delivered faster. That may validate like certain things like upfront. And then going from there to say, in a run scenario, you've got your media data being captured in a, in a, a walk yeah, in a walk scenario. You've got your media data being captured. In a run scenario you've got every single page, every single click being track.

Do you know? Do you know what I mean? And that's, and sometimes that's more amiable when getting people to agree to doing work for the, for the business.

Abhi: Oh man, I hundred percent agreed. Otherwise, you know, a, a lot of times, You end up taking something, you know, 10% or 20% of the way there and not really investing the time or resources seeing it through.

And then you're in, you're, you're in kind of an awkward situation where like you can't really fully say whether this was a success or not. All you can say is, you know, hey, I, I made a kind of half-hearted attempt and a bit tough to, to analyze exactly where we went wrong. But again, going off on a tangent, man, let, let me bring it back to, another point which is build versus buy, right?

Like we've been talking about buying and acquiring a lot of technology, like obviously. You know, I mean, there's some that say every company is a tech company you know, in the world today. And I, I think there's some, there's some merit and truth to that. You know, certainly there's gonna be certain key parts of every organization that you're gonna, you know, that's gonna have to make that decision.

Hey, do we outsource, our ability to store data, right? Do we outsource our ability to integrate with different tools. You know, there's basically a technology to do every single sort of piece of the you know there's something you can buy that could basically piece together to in theory make everything run for any organization.

But how do you sort of see the build versus buy conversation? And do you have any guidance, Sesi or criteria that you use to sort of decide one way or another?

Sesi: So I would say I'm very definitive on this, right?

Abhi: Okay.

Sesi: I, over the last 10 years, I have really formed up my opinion on this and I think, buy, then adapt. And when I say adapt, it should be working in partnership with who you buy from to drive their product roadmap. Right? And for this, I'll use sort of a, a car analogy, right? So the reason I say that is you want to drive excellence in everything that you do. And if I wanted to buy the best car, I'm gonna go to a bmw, an Audi, a Mercedes. I'm not just gonna go and build one myself as my business is not in the business of building the best car. If I was to do that, I'm just gonna end up with a subpar solution that may be extremely customized to what I want to do, which is good, but there’s considerable tech debt, there's considerable overhead. It isn't leading at all because you don't have the resources to be sort of competing externally and doing the research. So you're supposed to, you, you buy your solution right from BMW and you add your personal touches, like maybe you black wrap the roof, maybe you change the alloys, for example, but you still benefit from that core car and all the upgrades, the R&D, the support and the service that those companies can excel in because the flip side of that sort of is that no single solution does everything out of the box that you want. And each application of the different tools has their own like nuances and internal processes that you need to overcome. But you need to start from a base product that is actually leading and best in class, and then you add your things on top.

Abhi: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I, I love the car analogy and a agreed. I think I'll, I'll yeah, I'll trust German engineering. You know, there's some, I probably missed the boat by yeah, I don't know. A good 70 plus years on on the car making business. But yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't.

Sesi: Tesla, Tesla's doing well, right? America's leading on that, on that at least.

Abhi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. Well, going back to what you said, I agree, like I think a lot of times there's a bit of an identity crisis, right? And this again, I think goes into a bit of a departmental mindsets. I think there's.

When you're really clear on what you want to do and accomplish as a business, and you know, I, I don't care if you're in content building a car a crypto wallet or exchange. I mean, there's just certain things that are in the nature of your business that you should outsource, right? And those are some of the things that you have to sort of treasure.

And again, everyone's got limited amount of resources and time and money. I think you have to maximize those resources towards developing the best product or service that you're in the business of delivering to the world. And once you have that really clear and you realize how to extract the most value there, how do you partner with, you know, the technologies, the services, the agencies To really support all the other things you need to run your business.

Right? And you can use any analogies you want, but if you're in the world, you know, the business of making pizza, right? I wanna make sure I spend every minute perfecting that pizza recipe, not designing the best, you know, recyclable cardboard to deliver it in. Or designing an app to be able to you know, I don't know connect with consumers, right?

Like at the end of the day, those are the things you sort of outsource and partner. But I think that's a key point. It's, it's not only is it, is it, I think it it has to start with identify what it is you are about as a business

Sesi: Mm-hmm.

Abhi: and you gotta, I think, have this singular focus on delivering the maximum value you can there.

And then figure out how to compliment or supplement that with partners.[00:27:00]

Sesi: Exactly. Partners are always key to, to the most thriving businesses. Like you can't do everything yourself.

Abhi: Yep.

Sesi: Like you just can't. So yeah, as I said, build then adapt.

Buy, then Adapt. Sorry. Buy then

Abhi: Yeah. But , well, yes. I, it, well, I, I would be remiss. I, I guess I'll, I'll say the one other thing that we didn't talk about, which is, and again, I'm really biased from where, you know, where I sit, but it's the I think what a lot of people forget about is it's not just building, but it's maintaining.

Right? So, While you can build maybe something that works today, you know, what happens right when the world moves to a different coding language, right? Or Facebook releases a new api, or what is it? Who's on the hook for supporting and main maintaining that? And I think there's a lot of know, I think I've seen a lot of companies in the past try to do too much because they saw, okay, I can immediately do this, or I have a couple sprints where I could fit this in.

But then you have this like enormous tech debt years and years later, which is, I wanna move to the latest, you know, language, or I wanna move to this api, or this thing's being sunset, when can we migrate this over? And yeah, that's a, that's a tough spot to be, listen, I've kept you long enough on a, on a Monday afternoon let's take our, our, you know, our MarTech hat off our professional hat off. Like this is just, you know, Sesi the guy on, you know the guy on the street, the

Sesi: Yeah.

Abhi: consumer I have to ask as a consumer what is your favorite brand or experience and why?

Sesi: Hmm. I'm gonna have to say Apple. And I think primarily because things just work like, and. It's very important that you never like over like underplay just how amazing it is for a company to ship things that just work and have a cohesive integration and like a cohesive support. Like I think back, like if we keep it to phones, right?

In the past I've had all types of operating systems. Like at the moment I have an Apple phone, an Android phone, just like now knowing that like from a phone perspective, that if I buy a phone, It's supported for like multiple years. Right. And also just the user friendliness, right? I you see youngsters nowadays, like really young, like two years old, three years old, four years old, picking up their devices and being able to operate it and.

Abhi: Yeah.

Sesi: That's crazy

Abhi: no instruction manual, right? Like nothing.

Sesi: No instruction. Like there's, think about it. When we, we started, we got tech, it's always you, you open the box of the tech, you read the instructions, and then you use it like, Now you kids can do like passcodes and stuff to just straight, like, there's no manual or nothing. And think they're just really good at that. Just things just working and, and, and really driving adoption of, of what they build. so I, I would say I'm, I'm, I'm a real fan of, of, of them. Yeah, I would say I'm a fan of, of Apple.

Abhi: you, you me both.

Sesi: one right.

Abhi: You had to pick one. Yeah. Yeah. You and me both. And funny enough, you're, you're not the first guest to have, to have to have mentioned Apple and man, even as a personal anecdote, I will say, it's funny. My you know, my dad's retired and you know, the guy's like, ah, I don't like any technology.

Like I don't wanna learn anything. He's very much so like I'm retired and I don't want to think about anything. And I got him an Apple watch and he was sort of upset with me. He's like, oh, I'm never gonna use this. You know, this is totally useless. And the guy from the minute he wakes up until he goes to bed, it's on his wrist these days.

You know, he is always trying to close like the rings on his fitness app and he's like using the the heart defibrillator thing. And this guy's the most. Technology averse person in the, in the world. And so it speaks to, I think, what you just mentioned there, which is software design. I mean, you can have all the features in the world, but but can you just, you know, without using words or, or written, so can you just get it to all work and get people to just

Sesi: Yep.

Abhi: the value prop right away?

There's something powerful about that. Okay. Alright, so the next series of questions, they're rapid fire . And for the audience, like this isn't scripted by the way, like she's never seen this before. So I'm, I'm very interested

Sesi: Nope.

Abhi: Yeah, very interested to see how you're gonna answer.

But yeah, no right or wrong answer. Just, just, you know, giving a little bit giving the audience a little bit about about some of your personal choices. So

Sesi: Mm-hmm.

Abhi: Man, let's, let's just get into it. The first one is you know, pineapple on Pizza.

Sesi: No,

Abhi: Good. Good call.

Sesi: not that I won't eat it,

but it's just not right It's just not, it's just not

Abhi: Yep. Yep. No, I get it. I mean, I think there's like a, maybe there's a place, I feel like this is a very polarizing topic, but like, I know some people go like, there's the Hawaiian pizza, right? With like the pineapple and ham and that's like a very, maybe there's a time and place. I generally agree. Alright.

Winter or summer sports.

Sesi: Summer Sports.

Abhi: Yep. Okay, so I make these generic, but you mentioned tennis and Formula one, so I gotta ask, I I will start with the general question, which is favorite athlete.

Sesi: Lewis Hamilton

Abhi: All right. I knew that that was, I, I felt that coming, but alright. Tennis just cause I'm, I'm a huge, huge tennis fan, but Roger Rapha.

Sesi: Roger

Abhi: Alright, good man. Alright, we can keep talking now. That's absolutely

Sesi: Okay.

Abhi: I'm biased, but that was the right answer. Awesome. Frozen yogurt or ice cream?

Sesi: Ice cream.

Abhi: Yep. Yep. And man, last question for you today. Favorite restaurant? Favorite restaurant in the uk?

Sesi: Hmm. So it's a toss up. It's a toss up for me between There's this restaurant up in Liverpool called Sapporo I dunno if it's still there. I haven't been there in a few years, but it's like a teppanyaki kind of Japanese restaurant where they cook the food in front of you and they just create an amazing experience for you. So that's up there or. Hootang in the Shard. it's sort a Asian restaurant, you have the views of London, so like the whole ambience, like everything is just, I'll probably say Hootang in the Shard.

Abhi: Man, this is this is great. And by the way, next time, I mean, I think we got our restaurant selection next time I'm out in the uk, so you know, we gotta make it happen, man. Thank you so much for this Sesi. This was amazing. I think there's just so many insights you know, wisdom and I think it means so much coming from you, just cuz. the amount that you've seen over your career and the trial and errors you face. I really appreciate you distilling you know, some of the wisdom here, some of the, the kind of stuff that's worked for you and man, yeah, can't, can't thank you enough for for spending some time.

Sesi: And I really appreciate it. Thanks for sort of giving me the opportunity and yeah. Thanks man. I really appreciate it.