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Patrick Hubbard is the Principal Head Geek at SolarWinds, but more importantly, he’s someone who has great lessons in how to communicate in a world where tech teams seem to be on a different page.  This great conversation will be exciting for anyone who’s involved in developer advocacy, ops advocacy, or any cross-team work.  We cover how to communicate, how to create meaningful content, and meaningful relationships through the power of people and technology.   

This chat explores DevOps challenges and also will be a super fun listen for anyone in tech as we talk about the history of how we got here and Patrick’s very broad background that led him to be where he is today.  I’ve long been a student and a fan of Patrick so this was a particular pleasure to share a microphone with him for this episode. 

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Peter Sisson is a product-focused entrepreneur who has started four companies, all of which were acquired. He volunteers his time mentoring startup founders at the European Innovation Academy and StartOut Growth Lab, where during his tenure 24 companies graduated that have raised more than $45M in funding and created more than 200 new jobs.   This dynamic conversation covers everything from the founding of Yaza, the tech behind it that makes it differentiated, but goes into much more around life and startup lessons including:  

  • Culture of tech startups and Silicon Valley
  • When a product is ready and the art of product management and release
  • Challenges in both building and selling a company
  • How being serial entrepreneurial delivered great lessons in practice
  • Why Yaza chose to launch as a Public Benefit Corporation and what that means 

This is definitely a must-listen from end to end and Peter shares business and life lessons that will be eye-opening for many.     As part of the launch of the platform, Peter and the Yaza team are offering free lifetime storage in the app until June 2020 so get signed up and see what the world looks like in HD today!   

Check out Yaza on the web  

Download the app and join for free

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Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win DealsClick here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$


This is a startup and product builder’s dream episode as we speak with John Steele, founder of Series Code.  John shares how his team at Series Code creates what I would almost term a Developers-as-a-Service with a powerful twist on how they operate:  they split the cost to their customers between equity and cash.  Beyond Series Code as a business model, John shares his lessons on product building, being a successful development team leader, how to motivate and build great teams and products.  

Photo by Émile Perron on Unsplash


So John you have got a really, really cool story personally to me. And this is one of these lucky things where

How I got started with the podcast was really around being lucky enough to be out in the industry going to events and talking with really amazing people.

And especially as I got more and more into discovering kind of founder stories and and the startup.

The challenges and and the successes and and really really exploring how people can can do things. Now today, that they couldn’t do you know 10 years ago even and

Obviously the prevalence of can you know cloud software, you know, South software as a service, the fact that you can build something without having a team of developers on staff full time like there’s so many things that you didn’t need to do anymore. It didn’t need your own data center.

Right.

The long story, that brings me to you is, you’ve done exactly what is the most common problem. I think that people don’t realize that they can get past with the help of what series code can do

And being a startup founder yourself right you’re you’re in that neat thing where you you literally found to the startup to help people found start

On startup.

Got that. Right. Yes.

JOHN If you want to give us a quick rundown on who you are, how you got to start and when we’re serious code came from.

So series code provides world class software development at a startup price. And what that means is that we’re focused on startups, because it’s the area that I enjoy being in I’ve been

Entrepreneurial since I was a kid, right. I started my first startup. When I was, you know, 21 years old and it just, it’s the kind of environment. I like to be in. And so that’s what the company that’s what we focus on. But we found that our ability to keep our costs lower

That benefits. It doesn’t really benefit large corporations, the big corporates are willing to pay double double the price so they can have someone sitting in a cubicle down the road that they have a neck during when something goes wrong.

With our remote distributed workforce were able to keep our costs down so that we can give startups, the best price that they can get. And I go to a lot of startup events.

Like these events where founders are pitching their ideas and such.

And you know at these, you hear these stories of folks who scraped together you know 1500 thousand dollars on their home equity line of credit or their credit cards or whatever.

But they couldn’t afford the big shop to write them software. So they went and found whoever it was that they could

And six months down the line. They spent all their money and they have nothing to show for it. And so we’re trying to interrupt that we want to get in before that happens.

With a, you know, world class agencies are we have 28 employees right now, but with a financial package that makes it possible for a startup to actually be able to afford it. So we will take equity.

In exchange for part of the invoice payment so that we can push the cash payment down to what they would have to be paying somebody else or maybe even lower.

And this is the really, really cool approach and i i see more and more people getting into the game of, like, hey, look, I’ve got an idea.

I and I can actually make this happen. And, you know, we call them side hustlers call them whatever you know their, their startups. Now I’ve, you know, I’ve got an idea that I’m

I want to bring to fruition and like you said, it’s this big challenge of the capital outlay to invest in this and has to time and time again. I hear the same story. It’s always like

Oh yeah seconds, you know, I’ve got leans against everything I own and and that’s it is a big leap of faith. It’s not that it isn’t a leap of faith, but you’re now have a leap of faith, where the company has skin in the game, right, that you’re hiring and it’s this is a very

I hate to use quid pro quo God because that’s just way over us in the world right now.

But really,

Like the foundations of behavioral psychology and the fact when you bring in somebody into an organization where they have more skin in the game is proven

To have better outcomes. So you literally are bringing a team that through the fact that you’re using equity share you now your entire team.

Has skin in the game. And that’s a, that’s a huge win. I think for a founder, how, like, how did you figure out that this was a way that you could actually run your side of the world.

Right and skin in the game is really, you know, a great way to describe it and we have

clients who have prefer us over the other ones because they can go to their investors and say, look, these folks are invested, they’re not going to be gone.

You know who wants to go pay some some place to build an app, and then they’re, they’re gone, and you have nobody to fall back on nobody there to, you know,

Keep it moving. But, you know, fix fix the problems that come up, just kind of be there with you to go along for the ride. And so that’s that’s what I realized is is part of how we can make this financial offering to startups.

That’s, that’s part of how we show we’re really a long term partnership, so we don’t there’s, there’s a lot of different shops out there and they do things a lot of different ways.

There’s, you know, kind of something that’s big right now is

You go and you just ask them to build a an app for you. And then they go away right and you pay them however much you’re going to pay and then you, you walk. They walk away.

And I just don’t think that that is the long term partnership that startups need they really need software development. It never ends. As long as you have somebody who wants your product.

There’s always something to be done on it. Now, I tell people, You should budget and kind of like electricity. It’s like a utility

You need to just have it in the budget and be ready to pay for it, ongoing because that’s how software development is it’s just an ongoing thing. And a lot of people who aren’t in

Software Development industry, they don’t quite understand that they think no, I come and pay for it, and then I’ll wait. You know, six months or a year and they’ll come and buy something new.

Like no, it’s it’s ongoing it’s always going to be there. So we want to be a long term partner, instead of just somebody who comes in real quick and leaves.

And the thing is that when you’re doing software development, the thing that is the most valuable is the knowledge in the developers heads.

All of this stuff that they’ve created the understanding that they have. So you don’t want that walking out the door. Anyways, you want. You want to be able to hold on to that long term so that they can continue to improve and improve

You what this is the, the funny thing too is that if you’ve got such an easy if you can relate your idea so easily that it can be just handed off in a

In a short set of requirements and they carve out an application. And then you’re done.

But that’s, that is so counter to a true interactive and formative application development processes. I mean, it’s if you can just carve it off into one time thing.

That’s basically like the affiliate marketing site right apps like it’s just like, I can do this thing and it does one thing and maybe people find it versus like really

How do you possibly think about building, you know, empathy into your development process which is again like such a core foundation we don’t

You don’t think of it necessarily when you’re when you’re doing requirements to, like, make sure this is empathetic to the end consumer like no that’s that’s how a developer things

When they talk with you. They talked with your customers. It’s a better development process involves a continuing relationship between you and your developers, right, yeah.

And if you’re building something that’s kind of just one off could be building and developers can go away. You’re probably not building something that’s some huge you know thing that’s going to happen.

Maybe you’re just trying to get an MVP out the door right some kind of proof of concept or something like that. That might be one one thing but if your app is so simple.

Then, you know, it’s fine. Not a big idea, the big ideas are the ones that it’s something that hasn’t been done before and you really need a lot of technical competence to be there for the whole ride.

Yeah, you want it. You want something that when you present to develop seem they go, ooh.

Versus what

We’re gonna do that, like, yeah, like I said, versus like I’ve got this thing. It’s like it.

It’s the difference between going to fiver and getting someone to do like a thing for you and actually investing in an agency.

And it it’s not unlike marketing, right, like you can go and hey look, I can get someone to whip off a great logo to do a poster for me. I can go to FedEx printing and they’ll do a phenomenal job I can go to move and get amazing business cards done

But that doesn’t actually talk about brand. It doesn’t talk about what you’re trying to emote when you’re creating your imagery

And that’s the difference between going to agency versus going to move calm and just picking a nifty looking template. A may work, but it’s almost accidental or if it does work and then that’s it. The relationship starts and ends with the click of the pay now button.

And that’s where we often, you know, find our customers are at. We usually aren’t getting on board right at the beginning.

Got this brand new idea just just figured it out last week.

And need us to, you know, usually people are going to go out there and they’re going to prototype, they’re going to use these tools that are available. Kind of stuff you talked about at the beginning of

There’s so much you can do right now that you don’t need to be a coder, but those all typically go into a prototype. Like, let’s just prove that there’s something there maybe be able to get first customers.

Show that there’s some kind of value, but where we come in. Usually right after that, in this transition point of okay let’s turn this into a serious software development effort now.

It sounds like a lot of this comes from your own experience and doing some of your own building has how much of it sort of came from the walls that you may have hit yourself as you were doing some of those early ideas into you’re trying to turn them into an actionable thing.

Yeah. And so a lot of how I run series code comes from years and years of. There’s a lot of beating your head against the wall and software development.

And you know, we have a kind of an internal method we call the Denver method of doing things. It’s, you know, I don’t

I don’t dislike agile. In fact, we’re an agile shop, and I believe in the principles of agile, but there’s become this kind of dogma around it.

That says you must do things this way, this way, this way and like that’s not that’s not true. You don’t have to do them those ways. And a lot of those things.

So you down and create generate waste. So I’ve spent lots of time thinking about it and kind of working through my own process to get that down so we can do it a better way more efficient way.

It’s really interesting too because like you said, if you get into the sort of these dogmatic processes and God love him right there, there, especially when you’re managing teams at scale, right, it can be

A really really important part of it, you have to create a certain amount of rigor and process and so that you can be free within that rigor and and I think that’s really

When you’re scaling your shop and you have 200 developers. Yeah, you’re going to need a bit of a difference, you know way of thinking versus

Agile. I always like, I like into that, you know, I worked with a team and they were great love these guys are phenomenal, you know, and

They would say, like, hey, we’re agile and like, No, you just don’t have any idea what you’re doing on Monday. That’s not a job, it’s like not having a plan is not agile.

They’re like, but we’re iterative. I’m like what yeah it or meaning you you just, you have no idea what you did yesterday. So you can start again today it’s

This is great. It’s like Groundhog Day every Monday, which if applied to the other things.

It was more like they were pushing back against the hardened waterfall process that was in the project management office and right. God help you if you work anywhere that as a PM. Oh. Oh. Hi. Good luck and may your God go with you. Right, that’s

Things are not going to go smoothly.

Yeah, you. I mean, you, you hit on it. Right. That is the iterative model which is is the heart of agile.

Not just, you know, hey, you’re back to Monday. What are we working on now, but that you

Figure out small chunks of value that you can deliver and you build that first instead of the whole waterfall, you know, fat delivery of hey, we’re going to go build something for a year and deliver it. And who knows, right. The all the studies show that

You know, most you know it’s like two thirds or more of features and stuff that we think people want. They don’t actually want. They never use

These are professionals in the office right who of course and figuring these things out and the product management groups.

But it’s, it’s much better than an iterative cycle to say, Okay, what’s the most important thing we can build right now. Let’s build that over the next two to four weeks, you know, let’s let’s have a short cycle here.

Get it out there in front of people see what they like and then iterate on that and build either improve it, or build the next thing well in the thing you brought

Up but to like the dog was like just such a perfect description of it like you, you end up with these sort of warring factions of of management styles and development methodologies.

Where people spend more time arguing over the the the attachment to the methodology than they do to the outcomes that they’re trying to create and you end up with

People who are like arguing over who’s more agile than the other. And they’re like, this is not a says not a scale of measurement of success. The success is

Did you bring a feature to to the market, you know, to the customer who’s gonna going to do it. And again, like you said, this is

You probably get a ton of people who are like, alright, so I went to up work and I tried this thing out.

And I’m 300 hours in and I don’t know what I’m I don’t think I’m managing this anymore. I needs, I need help. And this is where

You are such a perfect sort of transition for folks who I think they almost got to fall on their face a little

And and no and they got to find the limitations and and maybe that’s natural right it’s maybe it’s the just have to, I think we all have to trip a bit

Whoo. Okay. Now I know why I want to lean on a professional. Like I said, with this beautiful sort of agency approach and again

Adding this sort of the true skin in the game, the equity bound metric of measurements of how you engage with it. It’s just such a beautiful bi directional relationship.

Now the neat thing and a call on is see you’ve done some development, you’ve built products, you’ve built teams, not your schooling background. Yeah, you have a law degree.

That’s right. That’s right. And that’s isn’t. It’s an interesting part of how I got into serious code because

So software development was my first love. My dad taught me how to code on a commerce 64 when I was seven years old. So I was one of those guys right nice and

You know, I dropped out of high school when I was 1516 years old and so I only went to a year and a half of high school.

And I started community college because I just was bored and I want to do something and

And the same time I got an internship. I knew how to code and I needed a job and I saw one for a programmer. I was like, Wow, that sounds interesting. So I kind of just fell into software development.

It seems like a natural progression. But back then, it felt like just just found this thing.

And you know i i never, you know, I remember going to my computer science classes and, you know, I remember once just getting so frustrated with the professor that they were doing it wrong. I just

blurted out in the middle of the class what the right way to do it. And he looked at before I go yeah that’s that’s right

Hahaha

You know I never did real well. And you might like grade wise because I just was so bored. I just, you know, wasn’t really enjoying the time I was like man I can be having a lot more fun at home or at work, you know, doing some actual coding

But you know, I did it because I, you have to have a degree, you know, it’s just one of those things.

You want to make sure your, your resume gets past the people who are just talking out resumes, because you know they have a whole stack of them, they got to go through. It’s nice to have the degree on there. But the thing is, I, I worked for about 15 years I moved up as high as I could.

Being a hands on contributor. And when I looked at how software development was happening in corporations. I didn’t like what I saw.

I saw developers who weren’t really engaged. They didn’t really like doing the work. It was just a job. They did it and I saw

You know, executives who use things like the dogma of agile. We talked about that. The one of the ones I you know that gets me the most is velocity. Right.

I’m a big believer in measuring, you know, because, because what’s measured improves right but

The velocity is one of those things you can track it. You can see how the team’s doing you can help us to forecast, but it gets

Distorted and now all of a sudden, as well. Why was your velocity lower than this, why wasn’t your velocity higher. What can we do to raise your velocity

And that’s just the wrong way using it as the stick to beat developers with

And I just didn’t like this whole environment. So I said, you know what i’m gonna i’m going to complete switch careers. I don’t want to be in that anymore. I’m going to go be a litigator. I’m going to go to law school in the evenings.

And I did that. And so I continued working full time, I was going to law school in the evenings. And then I started this business halfway through it.

Because thinking that my career was going to be over in software development, I was able to take a few risks of ideas that I’d had that I thought might make software development better

And they actually worked out. And so I got to work with some of the best developers I’ve ever worked with who are, you know, grateful and love what they’re doing.

And I was able to provide them an environment that made them want to be there. We took a the Q 12 survey by Gallup for

Engagement and we ranked in the top 7% of organizations globally for engagement of our, our people.

Which is something I’m really proud of and that it was kind of a complete turnaround from

how I felt when I was going into law school coming out the other side. I was like, Okay, I have to build a business around this, because there’s a lot of people who

A developers who want to work in a shop where they’re appreciated and a lot of people who could use the what we’ve discovered to make something cool.

Sounds like the relationship is an important part that you’ve built into how you, you look at the success of anything is that

How did that, did you discover that, did you you’ve got you’ve actually unpacked a lot of things which some people go to three to four years of advanced behavioral psychology. It sounds like you figured a lot of stuff out and put it into action.

Well, that’s the thing. You know, it always frustrated me the software development shops and you have

The free food that you get in the foosball table and the cafeteria and the dry cleaning on site, they do all these things to want to make you want to work there, but then they beat you down when you’re at your desk right with the

Why are we, why are we a week late on this, even though they were the one that asked you to do these other side projects or

Why is your velocity, not as high as this person’s, what can we do to, you know, all that kind of stuff. It’s like

Well foosball tables aren’t going to make somebody being, you know, feel like they want to be doing the work when they’re being, you know, kicked over here. And so I knew, part of what I needed to do was build a culture that

I mean, it really comes around engagement and you know the studies on engagement show that’s only about one third of workers who are actually engaged, who actually want to be there and want to

You know, further the mission of the company. There’s actually a third on the bottom, who are actively disengaged, they’re actually like trying to hurt the company they work for

And then there’s this middle ground. The third in the middle that just they’re just, you know,

They don’t really care. It’s a job and and they’re doing it like I want people who are all on that top one third, who really want to be there and love what we’re doing.

And so, you know, we put things in place to help make sure that that’s the kind of people that we have, it’s it’s neat that you

You pull that out because if we look at any measurement of statistics and engagement and and health of have a team or an organization.

It’s funny that we say like, you know, 30% are actively engaged and people like who, you know, has needs. And then you say, like, well, there’s 30% who are basically just ambivalent

Like they’re just hanging out there.

And they’re not going away, but they’re not really, you know, at 501 they’re tapping out. God bless them. Right. That’s just what’s going to be

You know there’s going to be that that sort of middle ground, but they we quietly didn’t talk about the fact that there’s people who are like f this place.

I’m stealing code. I’m injecting just garbage into the system like I just, I don’t. Not only do I not care I actively actively don’t care about what’s going on here.

Right, I’m gonna hurt this place. And it’s funny, I was at a restaurant yesterday. And one of the workers is leaving walking out the door and what are they saying as a rockin like I hate this place. I like that is not good.

And you’re just thinking, boy. A boy, I hope that wasn’t the guy that cooked my food.

Within this is I think such a foundation to

What culture. Culture is, you know, many people talk about what what culture means and and I think I often use Ben horowitz’s things as culture is the way that the way that they cultures, the way they act when you’re not looking

And and it’s true, right, really like. So these top down culture initiatives and and these, like, hey, we’re going to team building like hey look, inviting a bunch of people to an axe THROWING THING, BUT THEN treating them terribly

Right. The other three months of the year of the quarter. Like, it’s not going to to do that. So it’s

Culture that so how how do you internally measure what is motivating and keeping your people engaged.

Well, so it sounds really simple.

But it’s basically falling. The golden rule. It’s that simple. And, and many people, I think, think, then they’re like,

Come on, give me more than that. But that’s something we just don’t do right, we don’t think about what I like it. If I was somebody was doing to me what I’m doing to this, this person right here and we have, you know, one example of that, for example, is

I saw him salaried employees right who are expected to do 40 hours a week, but you know when it comes to, you know,

The war room time right there’s something that they got to get down, you know, are expected to work the 5055 60 but it’s just kind of this, they’re

They’re expected to sometimes they’re expected to it all the time, right. It’s just, that’s the way life is.

And there’s no no reward. There’s no compensation. There’s no hey you worked really hard. This time wants to take some time off over here. So, for example, what we do is every hours paid right

And that was part of even though the way we structure our things we have all contractor. So we have to do it that way but

Even for folks who come in who are on a salary. We want to make sure that we aren’t

Taking advantage of people just because of the way that the business relationship works so we make sure that they get paid it for every hour that they work so that they don’t feel like they’re taken advantage of that happens so much

We also do some other things like I don’t believe developers can estimate their tasks better than somebody else like their team captain or project manager and there’s studies that the back that up. And so I feel like that whole game of

Having developers do these estimates and then using it, you know, as its kind of the stick to say, hey, why didn’t this get done last week.

We toss that out. I actually tried to keep estimates away from developers and make sure that the team captain is the one who kind of understands the speed that that they work at

Sure. We’ll ask if once in a while if we need some help getting direction, but we avoid the the deadline thing that’s a huge thing the developers hate

Is you know it’s if we’re doing something new, something creative that hasn’t been done before. How can we really say it’s going to take this long, there’s really should be estimates, but they aren’t used as estimates by

The business side. The other folks right and so will and and there’s also something called Parkinson’s Law right that the work will expand to take the available time

I don’t even want them to have those estimates, because on the off chance that the estimate is actually the high end

The work will expand to take it up and then you’ve just you’ve used up any kind of, you know, spare time, you would have had normally so you know there’s a lot of reasons that

I do it that way. But I found that it makes developers much happier not have constant looming deadlines over their heads.

Well, this is the the neat thing and I. One of the really cool initiatives, I saw that came out of base camp.

So Jason freed and David Hannah Meyer hands and DHHS on Twitter. He’s sort of famous for getting involved in an exciting political debates and and startup debates, then, and they really

They, they use a lot of the stuff that you just talked about is the idea that like estimates and an unrealistic deadlines. You know, when we create these artificial boundaries and then you measure somebody against it and call it velocity

You’re, you’re not actually you’re not actually achieving what you wanted to, which was to build something and and build in a way that’s going to be valuable to the person that uses it and

This is this interesting thing of being empathetic throughout the entirety of the development process, including like you said estimates whenever because otherwise it’s the old gold rat thing, right. Show me how you measure me and I’ll show you how I behave

You want ready velocity, kid.

All right. Oh, you know, you want to measure me in lines of code.

Right, what I’m writing garbage code, right, because they’re versus

Actually saying what do we want it to do. Whether it’s like hey, you know, Mozilla was famous for saying like, whatever we do it has to be under a certain

Amount of delivery time in in milliseconds. Right. So every time we add code. It can’t blow that up.

So that was their measurement of success. You know, so you can set product level metrics in then. But then it becomes a consumer thing. So how much of the the project management on the product management then lives inside series code when you’re engaged with a customer.

Yeah, and and and so, you know, this isn’t an easy thing, right.

It’s actually, you know, it’d be great to just completely get rid of estimates. Right. The no estimates crowd and, you know, I like that. And if I run my own business. I’m building my own product that’s how I would do it.

But the thing is that startups have investors who want to know how far the money is going to go. So there’s still a need for this kind of information.

It’s it really our client base. It really depends. Sometimes we are the project managers right we we sit down with the, you know, CEO or whoever, we’re working with.

And elicit the requirements and document it and put together the timeline and then track towards that to let them know

But then there’s other clients that we have that have a project management department. They do this stuff already.

And so we don’t have to get involved there. But typically, the you know the small company that’s coming to us as a startup, we

Have a project management product management function within there as well. And that’s the whole point, like a lot of these companies when they’re coming to us. They’ve had a CTO who’s been the person doing the work and

For, you know, a year or something like that and and

Usually they’re just tired and ready to go get a job job and you know want somebody else to do it. So we’re coming in. And that’s what the startup is getting is you’re going from one person. So, you know,

One brain on the idea to at least three or four right so we have a team captain. So our basic technical team as a team captain, and then a front end developer and a back end developer

And then you can add into that a project manager to so you’re going from one person to three or four. So right there you have a better better you know brain trust to get problem solved.

This is the, the interesting thing to have with development. This is

This is not a throw more people at it to make it move faster. And in fact, it, it has a is detrimental to suddenly

Toss, you know, unaware resources into this pool of supposedly you know just code monkeys that we, you know, people think it’s like, Oh, it is. You can write code. How many lines of code. Can you write in a day I extrapolate the like that it’s

It’s very much, you know, okay, what it, what are we trying to achieve. What are the, you know, what’s it look like what’s the user story, you know. Okay, cool. What’s the user experience going to be

What you know and and understanding all these things and then actually get into code. Okay, well, how much is existing code, the larger becomes now, the more you have to think about testing and other stuff and

Also, hey, most technical co founders, like you said, are our nose down in code doing stuff and probably aren’t really thinking about the rigor of a scalable code base.

Right, which is including stuff like building you know unit tests and building stuff building thinking about how to do

Continuous deployments and stuff like that versus you your team has a vested interest right in doing that, out of the gate, so that you effectively speed up your ability to get to what matters, right.

And it’s always a balancing act because unit tests and stuff so I believe now 100% when I learned Test Driven Design.

Been a 10 years ago now, you know, I was like, wow, this is a game changer. It’s amazing of the quality that can come out. The problem is, it is more expensive. So it takes more time to get it done.

And sometimes you don’t want to do that on a very first version of something, because especially like a prototype a proof of concept.

Because you don’t know if that’s actually what you’re going to have or how drastically. It’s going to change. But once something is

You know, yep. This is built this is this is the way it’s going to go. It’s going to be our product for years to come, you absolutely want some kind of unit test suite.

We come in and yeah, oftentimes sentence just does not exist. And oftentimes, not on the mind of the non technical co founder, so we have to talk about it and explain why it’s good to have that kind of stuff.

And you know, it’s a balancing act. We can’t just stop everything for three months and build a test suite right there’s

Much nobody’s gonna let you do that.

So you have to figure out how you can kind of work it in as you go so that you know there’s a balance between that and the features that actually make a company money.

Here. What if when they designed the first SpaceX, you know, Falcon rocket. They didn’t start with the seat belts.

They started with the bloody rocket

Like is this thing going to get off the ground. Okay, now let’s work on the seat belts. Like that’s if you can’t build the thing that’s going to do something, then there’s like you said, it’s

There’s sometimes we get a little ahead of ourselves with process. The hard part, like you said, this is the balance. It’s really easy to just forget to go back and and and and retrofit some of that stuff and

In and, you know, forget to go back or just you’re moving so fast, right, because the market is demanding. We need to get this out this out this out.

And if you don’t have the money to you know scale that the team up to have somebody say dedicated to more or more people. I usually don’t like to dedicate somebody just to

The unit test side of things. I like it. For each developer to do the unit test as part of the code that they’re building. But you’re right, if you have some super aggressive timeline. You just can’t don’t have a moment to stop and catch your breath.

Those usually know they need to stop or else they’re going to find a way to stop themselves.

Yes, it’s, it’s very self correcting

Sadly, this is how it works well. The Oh don’t worry. Well, we’ll build in those those gates by accident, they

Do you meant to be there or not.

Right. The when you’re bringing on on people. This is always interesting because you you have to hire a very specific type of developer. That’s probably

Fresh but not too fresh right it’s because they’ve got to be able to think and move quickly but also have enough experience in that they’re going to get, like, hey, look, this is, this is the stuff we don’t want to do. But we do need to get there.

Yeah, you know, I tell people that, when when I have to pick a developer

Usually I’m going to pick somebody who’s more junior has fewer years because we can groom them in the way that we think government should be. And we don’t. There’s not those bad habits that we got to break right

But our model actually helps balance that out we put on a team a team captain who has you know 10 years or more of experience, but it’s somebody that we’ve worked with and see that they get it. They understand how to do this and how to do this well and then we put

More junior developers with them something, you know, in the four to five year range.

But the thing is that we find there’s a four to one ratio between them. We don’t want a team captain running a huge team you know 10 or 15 developers, because they just don’t have the time to

Focus on each person individually. And that’s one of the problems of those larger teams and

Developers are just out there doing their own thing. They feel like they’re, they’re kind of lost in this big see like, what am I supposed to be doing. I have no no guidance here.

We want to make sure that the team captains are guiding each developer. And so that’s really there’s, you know, four to one, there’s a five person team is kind of our optimal team.

And their job as a team captain is to review you know they they assigned tasks they think about technical architecture and direction.

But on the other end, they review every line of code to make sure it meets their standard and if it isn’t there, they kick it back to the developer and show them how to do it again. And that way you have this balancing of

All of the code kind of coming up to the quality that you would expect from somebody who’s been doing this for 10 or more years.

Well, this is the the neat thing to in the patterns of of development.

And we talked about like Conway’s Law as sort of a famous depiction of the idea that we build systems that that that mapped to the communication patterns within our team and and it’s

So this is neat because you effectively can really create

A systemized a system, a systematic view of what every product should look like. And it gets better and better.

Versus an internal development team where you literally have to first figure out how to get people to work together and then from there, get them to actually build a product and then think about scaling. At the same time, this gives them.

As a, as a consumer of series code as a as a partner. They can just say, I can focus 100% on product and then from there I can then start to maybe start bringing my own development teams and start to integrate and start to carry sell that over onto my side of the fence, so to speak. Yeah.

And I liked that you brought up Conway’s Law because

When I was talking about that four to one ratio. That’s one of the other things that helps address is, you know, people wonder why they have these huge development team will huge

But let’s say you know 1520 people and they they wonder why they built a monolith. And it’s because your team is a monolith.

You have you have one leader who can’t manage all of you can’t mentor, all the people here are can give you know 30 minutes a week to each person.

And it’s just this huge monolithic team that all talks to everybody. One of the reasons we like to keep our team small is it, it matches a micro services type of architecture where if you have, you know, instead of, instead of

You know, one big 20% team, let’s have four or five teams and each can be working on their own thing and by design through Conway’s Law.

That they each become their own modules components that they’re building that are more like microservices and less like a monolith.

And so startup usually don’t need to be thinking about that at the stage that we’re starting with them.

But that’s something you know, like I said, we want to be a long term partner. We want to be the software development department for them.

So, you know, a few years down the road after those next funding rounds of come in and they’re really beginning to scale. We can build into that proper model.

But we also know that now. So what we’re building now should be able to easily convert to that and, you know, oftentimes, you have this. We’ve built a monolith up front. And now we need to split it into microservices, a couple years down the road. And that is a real pain to do

Yeah, that’s of the things that you you don’t want to be retrofitting it’s the breakout to microservices. And it’s this is an interesting one. I wanted to explore this with you. So I also did a poll from

DHHS energy fried ism, I would say is that they they very much welcome the monolith, in many cases, because there are times when

Depending on what you’re looking to do with the platform you’re building

You may be over engineering correct by building out this microservices, and they talk about the size of base camp where it has like

It has like 370 controllers and and it’s all one just giant, monolithic code base, but they’ve literally built the entire team around how to do that.

Right, and that’s their choice in the way that this product behaves and it works at a certain speed and it scales with them as they need. So they’ve

They’ve very much set the gates and guardrails

To where they know they need to be, and they understand the limitations. The platform. It also helps that they built the bloody framework you know Ruby on Rails that but go on it there. So it’s when you when you build the machine. It’s easy to understand how to use the machine.

Yeah, as AND IT’S SO TRUE AND SO THERE IS DEFINITELY over engineering of making everything a micro service when it doesn’t really need to be

I like that. And that’s again why I like the team size, the five person team, you know, a person by themselves. You can’t really do enough to

Say, you know, this is the service that this person provides right they’re just not enough time in the day for them to write enough code for it to be large enough

I like five person team size because what they can handle just naturally fits into what might be the right amount the right size for some kind of service.

And then if it gets larger than that. That’s when I like to think about breaking it out. There are lots of places that a monolith might make sense. And a lot of times in your MVP, it’s, it’s there as well, because

It’s cheaper and you can get something done faster. And the idea to keep in mind is is knowing, are we going to need to switch from this or is this what we’re going to keep using moving forward.

Now the interesting thing is, because you’re so tightly intertwined with the end or your customer, I guess, whatever we want to describe your yo yo your client who you’re working with.

And you’ve got your team captains, you’ve got your level of Product Management and project management that are going on.

It’s really interesting because if people don’t really know how to work.

And what are the boundaries of, you know, whether it’s like traditionally sort of the pragmatic model of, like, here’s where product management. Here’s your product marketing is and the

How, how much time do you find yourself spending just working out the handoffs and the relationship in those early phases and also curious how much of it goes as those customers expect it to go before they realize like, oh, wow, there’s, I need to be way more involved or way less than

Right. Yeah, and you know it’s it’s a case by case kind of basis. But, you know, yeah, we have one that we’re working on right now that it’s, you know, it was a month.

It was a couple of weeks type of project, but

When you factor in all the other stuff the handoff from the key. Now it’s your turn. You have to review this you have to go through this process and you have to

Make sure this is what you want, you know, a couple more weeks can get added on. And suddenly a project size can be double of what was expected. Right, so there there is a lot of that. And it really just depends on

The client and the kind of work that you’re you’re doing at that moment, we’re

In this is the challenge of I think product management is one of the more interesting areas that I i love studying great product managers.

Because of they have to have a an ability to work and understand code, but not necessarily the code themselves, right, they have to understand

The customer experience and ultimately what they’re building towards they also have to understand how much it costs. What’s like

They have to know what they have to understand burned down, they have to understand the burn rate of the organization. There’s, it’s such a very interesting. They’re like, they’re like the CEO of the product.

Right. Correct.

But it is a very unique sort of personality that can do that very, very well.

And in a startup that has just a few people usually you don’t have the luxury of having somebody dedicated to that. And so, we find that we’re usually that’s the partnership of

The team captain has to play a bit of a role of that, especially on the side of understanding

You know, like the burn down or the the burn rate, you know what, it’s costing, how many hours are going into something, but then you also need the it typically turns out to be the CEO in a small start up this pre funding.

They have to be there to be able to define requirements and what is it that we want to build and where do we want to go in the to work together to figure out, okay, what is the most you know

The highest ROI basically where really should we be focusing on this and how do we narrow this down to just the stuff that is really going to make the most impact.

Now, how much of your, your legal background. So that was acquired along the way comes into play with your day to day I would I would bet that especially working with startups it, it’s probably pretty important.

It can be, I find myself. A lot of times, talk to the people that I have. I’m not your lawyer, I can’t, I can’t, you know, I’m not advising you on this.

But there’s all kinds of legal things surrounding startups, you know, even from something as simple as the the terms of use in the privacy policies and stuff.

To formation of the contracts. I think my legal background is why series code, the financial package that we offer actually exists. I, you know, towards the end of school. I took

Venture law class which is all about how this works like how a safer kiss works and how the financing rounds work and by taking all that knowledge and figuring it out is how we could offer

The actual will work for equity and what we do there. So most shops that do this kind of thing. They just have a fixed rate. They just say you’re going to give us 5% or 7% or 10% of your company.

Period and then we’ll work at a reduced rate for you. And I don’t think that’s fair to the company because

Software Development is different. Everybody needs a different amount there. I don’t think there is a one size fits all. So what we do instead is

Is, is we have like our standard program is 5050 so you take 50% of your invoice and you pay

At least 50% in cash, and then you can put up to 50% on an equity balance that we carry forward and then each month, you know, they can continue to accumulate that

And then at a series a round or whatever their next round is going to be. We just participate, like we were an investor on and say convertible note.

And this way, it really depends on how much work, they need. That’s what determines our percentage, we could be as small as 1% in the company. We could be as large as

10% we would have had to do millions of dollars of work to get there at least hundreds and hundreds of thousands

But I think it’s more fair and it lets somebody kind of scale grow up or scale back as needed, without worrying about, well, you know, I gave away 10% of my company. I really need to get you know every everything I can out of that.

And it prevents the other side, right, imagine somebody takes 5% and they put in a bunch of work and feel like they should be done like they don’t need to do anymore. They’re kind of going to stop versus US

You need us to work, we work more we can emulate a little bit more towards the bottom line.

Well, this is the very interesting thing of have this dynamic relationship and it really does become bi directional and this is right, like you said,

Too many times people have this kind of fixed thing. And so what you end up with is

If a founder and a founding team, and especially investors once investors are getting involved, they’re going to look and say, like, hey, you’re cutting 5% out towards this.

This entity that who knows, like what we’re actually getting what we want out of them. Right. And most likely, those investors.

Are thinking, well, let me put my development team in there like I’ve got a set that I’ve worked with before, and

In a way, they’re probably already thinking ahead of how to dilute out that 5% to actually make it what it is versus

Being dynamic and variable so that it’s the founders choice. I tell you lock in. And in freedom are

Things that we we think we’re all time we hear all the time like this idea of like cloud locking or product lock in. Right.

Well, we don’t actually move stuff around like no one has, like, hey, if there’s application I built that I can put it anywhere. You’re going to put it on iOS, you’re going to put it on Android, you’re going to put it in the cloud, you’re going to

But you like the feeling that if you had to you lift it up and move it around if needed. Yeah, that’s so true. Yeah, that’s so true.

Now, how does, how did your experiences shape you know in some of the difficult interactions, you’ve had. Because I imagine at some point.

There’s bound to have been even, like, not necessarily. So here was serious code in your clients, but you’ve generally great ideas also come from people learning the hard way. You’re right. Let’s, let’s talk about some of the tough reasons that got you to think about building this platform.

Well, and that’s part of, you know, you said, How does law school, help me on the day to day, but there’s there’s a this larger kind of overarching when I was 21 I started a startup and

I got taken advantage of my client, you know, who didn’t pay their bills for, you know, months and months and months and

You know, the things that they did. And they said, We’re I had no idea because I was a 2122 23 year old kid right

And you know I did get burned on that and as part of coming out of that. It’s like, I don’t know if I ever want to have one of these businesses again because it’s so easy just to lose everything or for somebody not to pay or for somebody to declare bankruptcy. Right.

And going through law school, I realized quite a ton of the things that that client did. They’re not legal like

They wouldn’t have held up in the quarter law right

So having that background. Now, and knowing I mean there’s there’s a huge part of your lawyer. People don’t screw with you. Right. It’s just one of those things, not the not the not the people you want to go around, you know, messing with

And that helps out. But just knowing that the things that people are that happened before they shouldn’t have happened and that knowledge helped me have the faith to move forward in this one and know that you know

The, the world won’t end if we have one of those clients. Usually, you just want to get rid of them, right.

Yes, really. Yeah, some point, you just want to shake them out because you’re like, look, they’re not going to pay this invoice, no matter how much I chased him. I’m going to stop chasing

But knowing that that they shouldn’t be doing the things that they’re doing. And you don’t have to put up with it right is is one of those

I would recommend law school is a big investment, I’d recommend it to anybody even if you’re not going to use it because you learn so much about how the business and legal world can can work and can help you out.

What becomes an interesting problem of legal and enforceable their and their differentiated

In a contract and in terms of any contract employment contract product contract relationship with your cell phone vendor for there’s there’s certain things that they may be written in there, but they’re actually

They’re legal however not enforceable especially state by state as a whole. Yeah.

I remember

I remember going through my classes every single class had at least one of those things. I was like, wait, that’s in like every contract of this type, and they can’t enforce it, but

There’s, there’s a thing people feel like it was in a contract. I read it, I signed my name to it, therefore I’m bound by it and I was like, wow, that’s really not the case, it’s, it’s actually amazing how many times that isn’t the case. And people just don’t know it.

I when I worked for one organization every relationship we would have with a vendor would like that, like, here it is, you know, just here’s, here’s your standard T’s and C’s, they would call it, you know.

And then it would it would come back to them like a grade nine English essay just littered with reading can scratch marks and it would be like know

Here’s our you know indemnification that we’re adding in and all this different stuff.

And I would I would look at the consciousness vendors not gonna let us do this and they’re like trust us. This is they know they’ve got the lawyers that we’ve got. We just. This is the dance. We do. Yeah, yeah.

And that’s the thing after coming out of law school. I don’t know if I’d ever hired a lawyer before then right at the analytical I hired for lawyers.

Because we’re all the different things. Yeah, the business side and the IP side and and that you know that’s

It’s strange. You think you go through law school. Okay. You can be your own lawyer. Well, no. The thing is law is so specific. You really need a lawyer who’s an expert in the field that you need something in

So I, I recommend always it’s expensive right lawyers are expensive, but they they pay off in dividends.

Within each. This is neat thing too, because, I mean, heck, you can get that as a service to

Right. But even that this is an interesting challenge of I actually used to a company called up Council and I think actually got recommended to through

A podcast I was talking with with somebody and they said like, hey, look, I don’t, I don’t need a lawyer full time, I was able to use like up counsel.

And then I got the first ever like, you know, when a when a startup closes their doors. It’s usually like hey we’re we’re

We’re so bummed. You know we did our best. We had a great run, it was great for years.

He thank you very much to all of our customers. We will keep the service live for another 30 days, but unfortunately we we’ve had to close the doors, right, I got the account. So, which was basically like lawyers as a service.

And specifically target at like startup setup and and small business, I guess they just

Were at for whatever reason I didn’t read much more intuitive than, than the really cool email which was

Basically a terms of conditions from them saying, you know, Heather to, and wherefore under like it was a lot of legal ease basically saying, hey, we’re really bummed. And we got to close the door right

Away. A LAWYER SAYS IT

Yeah.

And even I remember going to, it was like a team building event one time and

Are the chief counsel for my company was on my team and because we like mixed and matched people and we’re literally going on a scavenger hunt. It’s. It was the most hilarious thing. So we go on the scavenger hunt.

And it was like, okay, here we’ve got you know john and Eric and Joanne are on the team. And then like they like, oh, just feel this quick little you know like the waiver. You just like check off a side of the back

And literally, like, here’s my chief counsel, she’s going through it going no one sign that no one sign that like it’s

You’re going to be running around the city. And it just was a normal indemnification you know clause, and she’s just like the same thing. She’s like, this is not enforceable based on British Columbia Law. We’re going to rewrite it. I’m like, it’s okay. We’ll just sign it for five

Years are paranoid. They really are. And probably for good reason. Right.

Well, in this. The interesting thing like the greatest contract, written by the greatest lawyer can be then torn down by another great lawyer and it depends.

You never want to be in those situations, but like you said, I think it’s a fundamental lessons, especially for people that are getting into, you know, becoming a startup like just take a quick

Take a quick course on you know like venture law, especially when it comes to like understanding term sheets and doing stuff like that. Like that’s

Boy Boy, there’s just story after story of people who are like, I had no idea what was going on when I even just setting the founders equity right

Yeah, and I think you said it I you know I hadn’t actually thought of that before but I had taken the investor course right so one of those kind of

Boot Camp one day to day kind of things. And then I taken the venture law class and that class taught me so much more. And there’s so much to learn about it.

But anybody who’s starting up and thinks they’re going to take venture capital or

outside investment. It really would make a lot of sense to find a class like that and audit it at least right and just, just go and get that information because there’s a ton. And you really need a guide to take you through it. Well,

And people think that like you know a lot of people like to watch Shark Tank. I know how to start a company. I know.

You, you know how to start a company that just got 51% of its equity taken over by by somebody. And there’s a reason why those numbers.

I’ve become sort of intimately involved in understanding the venture in the lawn and all the startups. So I love watching those things because here like

You can tell the people that have done it before, when they’re there. They’re like, Ah, yeah, it sounds good, like let’s go for it. And the other ones here like I’m Nope, can’t do it.

Like they’re trying to sort of hammer this deal because guess what it’s like poker, the House as it’s always in favor of the house, no matter how many times you when

Somebody else has has lost in order to allow you to win. And generally, when you’re in VCs VCs aren’t in the game of giving away money right that’s

There’s definite terms and conditions that are on, you know, getting that term sheet put over in your hands. Yeah. So john any, any advice to people that you know

They got an idea and they want to think about can I make this into a business. What’s, what’s the litmus test that you lay in front of them.

Well, oftentimes, you know, they’re coming to us farther down right so they’ve already gone through that there’s, you know, there’s all of that stuff.

On starting up a business that is outside of our hands. It’s a completely and there’s figuring out if it’s an idea that’s got legs on it.

Figuring out. This is the path. You want to go down because it’s a tough path, being a founder of, you know, a new product company, it’s going to be years of your life if you’re if you’re married, you better make sure the spouse and kids are are on board.

And it’s going to be, you know, it’s going to be a trial.

Really when when it comes to if you’re non technical founder

You know, you can try to go out there and do it yourself, but you know, I started keeping count for every 40 applications. It takes 40 applications for a developer for us to find the one that we keep we have this long process that we go through it tests and

trial period and the whole thing.

And if you’re gonna if you don’t know code, you don’t know how to do it yourself. You don’t really know what you’re going to manage to

It’s like finding a needle in a haystack there. So that’s where we can help out. If you come to us with the idea, you know it’s it’s not a huge vetting process.

Because who really knows right there’s venture capitalists out there making bets all the time on things that fail. It’s really tough to know which one is going to have legs or not. So we look for what are the ones that we can really get excited about.

You know, what are the ones that we are going to make us want to keep going. During those hard times. And if we’re on the same page there, then we’d love to help out. That’s cool. Yeah.

John it’s I could I could spend all day to stealing lessons from you, and you know, we’ll get together again because I really do you want to talk a bit more about

That vetting process is very interesting and and i think folks would love to hear sort of your thought process again is like when you

Taking this idea and mapping it relative to anecdotal experience market timing. There’s, there’s just so many things where

You know and i would i would imagine you’ve got a lot of hard lessons you know learned and stuff that you you approach it in a systematic way, which is really good.

But before we close up. What, what’s the best way for folks if they want to get hold of you john and get get in touch with series code and then learn more about what you and the team are doing

Yeah, they should head over to series code calm. So it’s just like it sounds series se R is code C O d.com

And there they can get more information about the process that we go through and then there’s an email address right on there that again sent to if they’re interested in finding out more.

And of course, we’ll have stuff on the show notes for folks that that can easily click out

And this is, it’s been a real pleasure john and like i said i’m excited when I saw when I saw what serious code was that really

This is something I’m like I said, I hope one day to be a client, this is, this is something where I really, I believe in the way you’re doing things is really, really good. And also, it’s just such a great give back to founders.

Because this is one of the things that, you know, people can lose the ability to bring an idea to reality right cuz they get stuck.

Doing stuff that’s just out of their wheelhouse. Yeah. And there are there are teams that can do this stuff for you and the equity relationship is just so cool. I’m, I’m excited. I’m excited by what what you’re doing so.

Well, thanks for having me here. Eric, I really do appreciate it.

And yeah, so we’ll then we’ll send folks along and thanks again john and again for folks that we want to make sure you check out serious code.com

Make sure you also rate this podcast. It’s always nice for us to be all speaking of

You know metrics we like to get measured by it’s nice get pushed up to the higher in the ratings list. So if you like this, if you want to hear more great stories like what john and the series code team have going on.

Let’s do that. So, John’s to thank you very much for this has been an absolute pleasure to spend time with you today. Thank you.

Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win DealsClick here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$


Kellen McCarvel is the founder of Joybees Footwear and an entrepreneurial leader with an expansive experience in total business management roles who’s focused on profitable growth and product development.  Kellen shares startup lessons that could easily be the foundation of a great business leadership and business building course. We talk about building products on customer need, the challenges and advantages of entering an existing market, and crowdfunding as a platform to launch with key lessons on what to do right and what to avoid.  

Thanks to Kellan for this great conversation and the open sharing of great learnings for anyone who’s in business or looking to start something themselves.  

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Aditya Nagrath is the founder of Elephant Learning Academy and shares a heartfelt story of how our school system and the math learning programs are not doing what they need to do.  You are hearing the story about how this project is the pinnacle of Aditya’s life’s work as a mathematician, software engineer & technologist, and entrepreneur.

The lessons he shares are amazing and the numbers and statistics that we discuss about the effect of mathematics on the entire future of a child’s learning may be frightening, but the fact that Aditya is doing something to change that is something you will thoroughly enjoy out of a great conversation.  Great lessons on being a founder, and doing good with technology which is something I think we all need to learn from.

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This is a really interesting opportunity and I’m excited about this conversation. I’ve been a

Kind of subscribe to way too much information, sometimes in the world. And one of the reasons I do so as I I kind of look to my myself as being a lifelong learner.

And as a result of a lot of stuff I’ve done around mentoring and teaching and engaging folks in the community in the tech space and in and out of, you know, tech and startups and such.

I’m always excited when I meet other folks who are in the industry who very much see the value of learning and what it means to further, you know,

Your own life in being a teacher, as well as connecting people to something that can really kind of foundational to change what they do in their day to day

And I’m here with Dr. Aditya mcgrath’s I always love the doctor because it reminds me that you are you are literally a lifetime learner. You’ve, you’ve you’ve gone the distance on on a set of learning yourself and I wanted to talk to you a ditty about Let’s quickly talk about you.

how folks can get ahold of you online if they want to. And then we’re going to talk about elephant learning and the story behind it.

Okay, great. I’m looking forward to it. So how do you want me to start

Let’s start with

Your own background so

How

How did you get into the learning space. Obviously. Again, you’re, you’re well educated. So what was your background that actually and whether that actually brought you to where you are today as as being the founder of elephant learning

Perfect, yeah. So I, as you mentioned, got a PhD in math and computer science 2008 so it’s kind of a joint degree, but the focus was mathematics.

And that was kind of longer story. But from there. I actually went into contract software engineering. So while I was getting my degree I had also been working full time part time at different

Contract firms or software development shops and so I started a contract software engineering firm in 2009 called elephant head software and from 2009 to 2016 we put out 35 different product lines and that’s over 50 different applications.

To market and

In 2016 I joined entrepreneur organization. So EO Colorado and basically as I was joining this organization. There was a lot of people talking about triple bottom line companies. So the idea kind of is.

Can you build a company where there’s a measurable environmental impact a measurable social impact and then a miserable. Bottom line, and this idea really interested me so from 2016 after I joined do

I had really been thinking about how can I build a company like that. And that’s when I started talking to one of my ex professors from the University of Denver about particularly this project. And that’s kind of when I came on board with elephant learning that’s really

That’s really interesting. And it’s, it sounds obviously that you started very much in in the sense of you aimed immediately towards doing doing good.

By what you could do in developing your business. And how did that come into play. Do you have kind of a studied background in in

The impact of of what we do. And, you know, sort of environmental and and suicidal or how did that come to be an important aspect of of how you build Ellison learning

Sure, I’m happy to talk about that. So one of the first EO events. I went to

There was a gentleman there, who was the co founder of plastic bank and he told his story and his story was that he was watching the news.

And he saw that there was this piece of plastic out in the Pacific Ocean. That’s the size of Texas. And he said to himself, there’s no way that’s not worth a lot of money. I just kind of got to figure out how to monetize it.

And what he did was he devised a system where people in India would pick up the plastic from the shore and deposit it into the plastic bank for which they would receive

I believe his two cents a pound. And then he would turn around and recycling at nine cents a pound and it just turned out that the amount that he was paying that people to pick up the plastic from the shores.

Was actually more than they were earning in the shops at that time. So he had a measurable impact on the environment in that he he’s measuring exactly how many pounds of plastic. He’s taking out he had a measurable impact on

The society there because he had a measurable financial gain for the people doing this work.

And then on top of that he had his bottom line has profit and this thing grew to $200 million company.

And what I realized was that that was that the rules of the game the way that the business operated right the rules of the game. We’re kind of set up for everyone to win.

And and that’s what it kind of boiled down to was that as long as the rules of the business are sort of set up so that everything is winning you kind of create something that

What a government would typically do right where most people would pass it off and say, well, this is government’s problem, right.

But whereas there’s also a bottom line of profit motivation that then pushes out that good. So becomes an organization that’s not only self sustaining

But also profitable that then doing that, that quote unquote good for the world. So basically when it came to elephant learning. That’s what we had to do as well as we just have to set up the rules of the game so that we can get everyone to win.

In this is it’s really neat because there are so many ways that we can impact the world in a positive way.

We’re and it can be everything like the plastic bank stories, really. I love that one. Actually, it’s, it’s funny. I talked with another fellow column Macintosh founded a company called sheets and giggles. Aside from being one of the funniest

You know, names of the companies that are based in Denver and he is also a member of the CEO.

And he had introduced me to the to that and it was funny, those, those stories kind of carry around and they’re very meaningful.

So, but that it doesn’t literally have to be, you know, physically interacting with a

An Earth, saving you know activity. It can be something that we can do to empower people, and it was

Interesting that you know in the plastic bank story of courses, like you said, what, what seems like a to a North American

Person probably it’s almost like a pittance of a wage, but not realizing that in in that in the other parts of the world $2

A pound to collect something can be an incredible boost and what they can earn relative to the local wages now.

What I’m really excited about what you’re doing is bringing what I feel is such a future focused and profound concept is

Bringing mathematics and and the true, you know, advanced mathematics learning and just common, common mathematics to children.

Which because it feels to me like one of the biggest challenges I’ve found in the in the general school system is that

It’s, it’s just fallen off like there’s been so many incredible advancements in science and mathematics, but the curriculum doesn’t feel like it’s caught up.

In traditional schooling. And so let’s just get into elephant learning. I’d love to hear what was your story and what you’re solving with with your approach to the entire platform.

Okay, well, I’m just going to tell it to you, just the way it happened because it makes more sense that way.

And then, you know, in that you’re going to hear all the stats. So, you know, I was having a conversation with my next professor. As I had mentioned

And really I was trying to move away from the contract software engineering business. I was looking to move into something more of a product

And we were kind of failing with an IoT product. We had an IoT product that was going out there and it just wasn’t working for us. So

My professor had met with me and he had an NSF grant that we were applying for

And NSF grant was to take research done by the National Science Foundation and try to make a company out of it. So,

Immediately, I’m asking me. And so, like, tell me about this company because like, you know, if you’re going to put me in charge of the company.

I’m not the guy who’s just going to do it for the grant money, I’m going to have to take it seriously and he’s trying to pitch me these math games that you that you put into school and I had a lot of problems with that. I said, One, we don’t have any relationships in the school to

I don’t know, like math games, right, like whether kids even really want to play it. So if I’m not going to the school if I’m trying to pitch it to kids. I just don’t know if there’s a real market for it.

And three, I was a TA over at the University of Denver for six or seven years as I got my graduate degree and to be honest with you in math class.

Not many people really wanted to be there. There was there’s only like a handful of kids that actually wanted to be there and the rest were just kind of there because it was a requirement.

And so I said, you know, like I’m having a real hard time with this. And so what he tells me is that four out of five children start kindergarten unprepared for the Guinean kindergarten curriculum now immediately. I’m like, well, Alberto that’s that’s really difficult to believe because

Where does the kindergarten curriculum even start. He says the curriculum starts at counting to 10

I said, so you’re sorry accounting to 20. So I’m saying. So you’re telling me that these students can’t count to 20 says no, they can’t count to 10 because it starts accounting to 20 the prerequisite is that they can count to 10

Say, that’s also extremely difficult to believe, can you can you explain to me why this disparity exists. And he says, well,

For the common parent. If the child says the numbers 12345 through 10

That’s a thumbs up. That’s good to go. But when the kindergarten says counting to 10 what they mean is, can you give me 10 things the child slides over 10 things and stops at 10

So, okay, well, the second one’s definitely much harder than the first. I can see the difference in the first. It could be just saying the numbers. The second one, they actually have to understand what tenants.

And that ends up being the basis for the entire system. It turns out that the preschool math scores predict fifth grade.

Overall scores and that preschool math scores predict third grade reading scores better than preschool reading scores. So all of the metrics that

The education system is using right now as a means of, you know, how is the student doing third grade reading being probably one of the most important seems to stem from the preschool math. Now, if you look at it from the students perspective.

What we’re really saying is that they have a they have a miss comprehension, if you will, a misunderstanding. They don’t understand what the numbers mean but they’re sitting in class and they’re being taught that

A similar situation, where would be me or you went into a third year bio chem class, right. So on average, children about three years behind depending on what neighborhood they come from and what income bracket. They’re in

So if we meet you went to third your bio chem class, we would hear the professor. It sounds like he’s speaking English.

But we wouldn’t understand much of what he was saying, because we missed about three years of jargon.

Well, it just turns out that this jargon of mathematics is so fundamental that is considered vocabulary.

But more than that, mathematics, happens to be very visual very light touch and feel right. So,

It’s kind of like the color red. I can’t teach a very young child, what the color red is unless I show them read things

In the same way, right. I can’t teach them what the numbers mean I can’t teach them what addition or subtraction is I can’t use the multiplication, unless I really show them what’s happening. So

You know, going from fifth grade, eighth grade math scores predict whether you drop out of high school only 75% only 25% of high school students are proficient in high school mathematics that the NAACP stat any ACP and

69% of STEM majors switch to a major with glass map. So we’re, we’re not graduating number of technologies that we could graduate

And now because society is so data driven with computers being everywhere, even businesses. So statistically driven that the defenses are having a hard time reaching the students

And the business students are switching majors to a major plus path. And what that really means is that the majority of our students are going into humanities, which in itself is not a bad thing, except for that the economic impact is that, you know,

A yearly salary is kept in the humanities around 50 $60,000 per year. So when we look at, for example, Elizabeth Warren trying to forgive the student debt.

This is what that’s around. We have an entire generation of children.

That we told you can grow up to be anything you want to be, they tried to become scientists technologists engineers mathematicians, they tried to become business people.

And they ended up in the humanities, which is kind of a devastating story every time I encounter one of these people like I wanted to be a physics major

Because because I didn’t want to be doing math, physics is all differential equations I became an English major, it’s a completely different life. Yeah.

And this isn’t the interesting

Thing that did he is the

This sort of the, the breakdown. As you reach each gate effectively strips off a percentage of potential students who can excel or even participate at that level and

It’s we had this challenge in STEM, STEM is probably, you know, reach the most

Like sort of highly visible state of, you know, being a challenge. Part of the industry because like you you laid out is this idea that

We have, we have first a pipeline problem and the quite the so that’s what we say. People always say like, Oh, it’s a pipeline problem well

That’s great, but what is the pipe. Now let’s break down the pipeline problem and you effectively have done this and

And like you said jargon is incredibly important. Like, I can go and I can listen to

I can, I can listen to Dr. Michio Kaku and and listen to folks like Bryan Callen and talk to these people and learn about things like

You know, differential mathematics little if the point of like understanding what spinners are learning, like what

You get through these incredible things about, you know, reading Hawking and you can read it and it makes sense, while you’re reading it, because I’ve had a level of understanding of the jargon, but

It, you know, an hour and a half later, most of it sort of falls off because it’s not a part of my vernacular is not a part of my continuous learning

And so if I read it every day. If I studied it every day. It ultimately would lead to me knowing more. So here’s the trick, right, you go into the school system. And like you said.

When children struggle. They hear the words and they can maybe pull off enough to kind of get a passing grade to get through that the just enough

To get through it and then we kind of move them through the system and and really don’t go back and kind of revisit how we can make that either is it interactive learning and like you said.

Counting to 10 counting from the other than going through the numerals of one to 10 for, you know, a child can can be done. It’s, it’s done by rote its effect it’s memorization.

But then the abstract concept of finding 10 items and collecting them together. It’s

It seems easy for you and I and people that are listening to this, but it’s like

That’s no different than me asking any one of our listeners right now. Okay. I want you to go and study the idea of you know spinner theory and and how is it different than than than other quantum theories and they’ll just be like,

It doesn’t

It’s so abstract like I have no relationship to that thing that

You just asked me, like, but if I explain it to you, but only

Complete anyone with a three year old honestly should should be able to understand this, right, I have a three and a half year old at home and I mean

He’s using some words, I’m not sure. He knows what they mean. You know, you’re not using them correctly, it’s just they’re learning the language at that age.

I was thinking this morning. I have a four year old son and he says, Daddy, I need you for one second. She has no idea what it means to say that, but he knows it and get me like he knows that that will make me stop and he knows that it

Like he’s he’s in it for the long haul.

It says no, there’s no one second. In his mind.

He’s like

I need you to sit down beside me until I’m done with you.

But he knows to use the words I need you for one second.

So my my three year old can’t understand later on, like, I’ll do that. I’ll do that in a little bit later. And you won’t get it.

Well, and this is

Eating and time.

It’s, it’s

It’s an abstract concepts that are

This is the the really also the tough part when we talk about Sam. We talked about the pipeline problem. We talked about learning and schooling and the change in the sort of what the net.

Effect is of these things when you shade, you know you you shape people’s futures at all these different gates.

And then the problem we’ve got is you go on Twitter and you talk to people in amongst our peer group.

And we generally collect with other peers who are alike. And so that’s a natural, natural thing, it’s, it’s what we do is we grouped together.

In communities of people that are like minded. And so, especially if you go online and you get to the people they’re talking about stuff.

And he realized like, hey, if you’re on Twitter. Number one, you’re probably in 1% of the population of the world.

Because you’re a subset of people, you’re a subset of people that has access to the Internet.

And most likely, is also on a mobile phone so STRIP, STRIP, STRIP down the sub nets and the subsets and you are now in sort of a somewhat elite group of people. And so the tough part is

The peers have these conversations. And then when you try to explain to them like you did. It did. It is okay, well, I’ve got a I need to have a three year old.

Taken that simple abstract concept of counting 10 items and and most kids can’t do it. And it’s just for many people who are listening to this, it’s unfathomable but it’s the truth. And the numbers have been borne out that that’s the case. So now,

You You’ve Got a you you laid a big bet right that you you wanted to be able to now go in and and and affect the situation, how did, how did you suddenly say, I think I can help to close this gap.

That’s a great question. So basically, after, after I received all of this information and understood it, I

I immediately began to think, okay, well, so what you’re telling me there’s a big enough of a problem here that

That that there’s a market and I might not be able to approach the schools, but I can certainly approach the parents with this story. Right. I mean, if this is true, they’re going to have to resonate with the story and so

There’s that the second part of it is, I also realized that there cannot be anything else on the market that was effective.

Because if there was something on the market that was effective. The schools would be using it and we wouldn’t be looking at the statistics we were looking at. I mean, as soon as you are able to digitize something effectively right i mean it’s copy paste after that.

So at that point, I asked Alberto about the game that he had already built and he had built some games for Preschoolers and kindergarteners and

I asked him, Well, how effective are these games like what are we talking about here. And he said, Well, the problem is, is there’s no standards for preschoolers. The kindergarteners so I can’t really say that

And I said, okay, but you’ve already told me today what the average three year old knows what they are his four year old knows what the average five year old knows what the average six year old knows

How like how would you say that progressing and he says we use it in a classroom 10 minutes a day, five days a week.

And they gained a year of math in three months, on average, and that’s when I said, Okay, well if that’s true, then I definitely have something that I can take and and and work with

We ultimately had to rebuild the entire system from scratch. So we, we started all over again. And one of the main things was was we were focusing on math.

So like, whereas most games are trying to make math fun. What we’re trying to do is trying to make math as the fun

So the research that Albert was quoted to me said that many children if they understand the math feel like it’s a puzzle. So it’s like a puzzle game.

Right, and many of the activities that the early age, education, researchers that we’re putting out, which is actually what Oliver was taking to to create these games.

Were were activities that could be game a fight. So we turned into a gamification of a proven curriculum and after stripping away some of the stuff that the game that we felt were less

Valuable to both the child and the parent, we were able to increase the average to one and a half years, over three months and they only use it about 25 minutes a week on average.

And so we said okay if we guarantee that your child will learn one year of math and three months using a 30 minutes per week we’ve increased the amount of time.

That they’re using it by eight minutes a week we’ve increased the amount of usage from 10 weeks to three months.

And we’re guaranteeing a lot less than what averages, so this should be from an actuarial a preset perspective, a bet that easy to win right so

That’s why we now guarantee that your child will learn a year of mass in three months.

We’ve seen children do a lot more than that, especially young children because they haven’t developed the math anxiety. Yet, if you can imagine what’s actually happening in our classrooms is pretty close to torture.

What it is the strategy is here. Add until you understand what edition is or multiply until you understand what multiplication is memorizing stuff. It doesn’t make any sense to them. They’re literally asking out loud when am I going to use this

And worse than that were basically putting their future. We’re saying, hey, you’re not gonna be able to get a job in this you can understand this, you still have to pass the test.

But no one’s going back to help them at the level where they do understand and that’s what our system does so.

Beyond the gamification of the proven curriculum, we have these advanced algorithms that are quickly able to determine what your child understands and doesn’t understand

And then meet them at their level. So if you’ve got a third grader who’s having problems with counting, we will actually meet them accounting and build them up from counting

Back up to multiplication, division, where they should be in the third grade. These children that are catching up in our system.

They’re reporting increased confidence because they can go into the classroom. They can now understand the teacher at the level that the teachers teaching and they can now participate in class.

With this is the the thing that

You’ve really pulled together some of the most fundamental concepts and done it for all of the right reasons. And this is why I was extremely excited when I

Knew that I had a chance to have this discussion with you because

We today have so many apps and games and things that are obviously aimed towards children and their aim towards utilizing the very simplest core functions of behavioral psychology gamification is a nice way but you know people say about keeping people engaged and and

Performing behavioral imprints and and changing behaviors through gamification and rewards.

Now this it can sound either very dark, which is how most of these most applications are built like apps game, you know, aimed towards kids are always around like

Will reach you, to a certain point and then you have to unlock a thing to unlock a thing you have to do another thing. Oh, you could get there faster if you put a couple of dollars.

Towards this right and it’s it’s this unfortunate, you know,

All of these people that learn from the foundations of, like, stuff like what BJ Fogg brought to the world and who BJ Fogg himself is very aggressively going out to sort of

stave off the negative use of behavioral psychology and persuasive computing. So what I love is that you have very much gone and exactly the positive use of behavioral rewards towards something that can vary literally change the path of somebody’s future

It on a daily basis, just by small incremental learning small incremental, you know, behavioral help and and really bringing kids who are something that

You know, let’s put it in the context that matters to them and then the outcomes are are what we get. So I’d love to hear about that. Did he have what

What did your early work and sort of early use of the platform, get you. I’d love to hear some of the stories and what people said when they put their kids into into the platform.

Well, yeah, so

So so early on we we we even started with some pretty heart wrenching stories, but the one that that’s memorable is one of the first stories that came out was there was a child in our system. I think his first thing was Ethan and Ethan

I he was, if I remember correctly, four or five years of age, and he was doing multiplication, division.

Three months in, so he had picked up two or three years with the math. So again, with the young students right because they didn’t develop that anxiety towards math is yet. Well, they, they don’t even know that this is two or three years ahead, they’re just playing the game.

Since then, we’ve we’ve had a lot of stories. Another one that’s really memorable is

I was just reading a scholarship application, the other day, and apparently enrolled in that they have a 12 year old daughter and the daughter.

Was operating at the third grade level. So this is before they even came into the system and basically at the end. She’s like, You have to help me please help me so we we do offer a scholarship program where

Where

If you’re a low income family. You can get it at an extremely discounted rate, even if you’re if you’re having troubles affording it at $35 a month, we can discount the rate. It’s an application process. Though to be honest with you. Many people will receive some funds so

Anyway, so she you know like please help me and I just like this was a marketing exercise we weren’t looking at the data, but I read this thing and I was just

Kind of so heartbroken by what she was writing. I mean, I think she said the father passed away when the child was in first grade. So the child repeated first grade and

Has been lost in the second grade and is operating right now at the third grade level. And I just had to go look. Look, this person up. And what we found was that

Her student did actually catch up to age she got to an elephant age of 12 and a half, which is our, our math age. So that’s all. And yes, those are the

Those are the. Those are the reasons that we we do the things like obviously there are people that you’re probably bringing within a within a band or a range.

But the fact that you can also have those stories that very, you know, very profound effect that you’ve had on that just that child in that family, ultimately, who

You know, and, and also I applaud you for forgiving the, you know, given the opportunity to get people into the platform that may not have had access to it because of the, the, the money impact. It’s this also is

You know, when you talk about the three, the three pillars approach of doing good and sustainability and in creating this platform is you know your

Those kids are going to remember, you know, in one way or another, what got them there. And those parents are probably very much, you know,

They’re, they’re looking to the sky thinking somebody what they should be doing is looking to look into the SAS platforms and thanking you, and the team for for introducing their kids to this. Now, what’s the

What’s the impact for you in how you look at this and scale, you know this because obviously there’s

You know, you can get access to certain pool of kids who are ready to use the system, what are you looking to as the next phases. Did he had to kind of like get this into a broader audience and get more more folks in to help them through this, this process.

Sure. Well, part of it is is doing things like this. So what we what we found out pretty quickly is that Facebook is sort of losing its numbers.

It’s not the party that it used to be in that the audience that they’re telling us that we’re having is not the same as the size of the audience that we end up reaching

That is what it is. I mean, no one can make people use Facebook if they’re not using it so

Really the next step for us is to start to communicate with people that maybe aren’t on Facebook or stop using Facebook or

Anything of that nature. So, you know, the expansion of audience in that manner. We also do have a classroom product that’s currently in beta. It’s being piloting two or three

Classrooms around the country right now very selectively and we’ve piloted before. So this is the second one of the tests and it’s really about can we put a process around

For the teacher to use the tool more effectively, right, because in a classroom setting, they’re really at a disadvantage. The big problem happens to be that you have 30 students there. There’s no way to work with them one on one.

In any realistic fashion big especially you know as classroom size of even getting bigger right 30 to 40 to 50. And so what our system is able to do they able to

Maybe mitigate some of that one on one, one on one work we’re able to then tell the teacher that well this student is in third grade, but they’re operating at the first grade level.

So giving them the typical lecture that you’d give the rest of the third graders.

Probably is not the best thing to do, and ultimately come up with cohorts, you know, so where

75 to 80% of the classrooms behind at least the teacher can know it and then lecture to them and then catch them up. Right. I mean, the system will also help catch them up.

And then catch them up to where they’re supposed to be which honestly happens very quickly then

We’ve seen even catch ups like 234 or five years with the math happened in three or four months. So it’s just a matter of usage and then noticing where

The hiccups may be and then a little bit of coaching, we don’t really want to give students the answer.

Because we don’t want them to revert back to memorization, but we want to give them a hint, where they can get that aha moment that that clicking the head that they get it. And then from there, their, their progress speeds right back up.

The

The unlocking have that capability.

And there they create their own reward system by doing it because like you said, If you created in this in a way that it becomes a puzzle.

We, as humans, just by nature. We door completing puzzles and getting through these sort of discovery.

You know phases as we do a thing and it’s it’s a beautiful feeling that you can create and it’s literally, you know,

lighting up dopamine receptors like it is a neurological effect that you can create ends, then

If you do that, then, like you said, you can get the acceleration and it’s neat that you talk about the classes because that’s it. It’s a very different thing individually association is one thing, but going out into the classroom.

Effectively means that you’ve got a range of capabilities and learning levels and to be able to create a greater cohort of kids that are in the

The same level is is really, really difficult especially you know teachers have math. You know, science, you know English humanities, social sciences like all these different things.

They generally don’t have time to put extra time towards any one single thing because we’re really kind of cramming a lot of stuff into our kids heads that just too and also trying to make them not hate school. So we have to

If there’s a way that you can create

Do things and make learning enjoyable and have them discover the rewards themselves so so cool. Now you have young kids. So this is probably meaningful to you.

I’m curious if you do when you founded this and you decided what you were going to build how how young was your family or did you approach it with the idea like you had a personal story yourself that brought you towards this.

Absolutely, yeah. So actually when I was young.

My mother would actually go to the school every year in the summer and try to get the books for the following year, so they should find my next teacher she’d find out, she go find that teachers say, What books are you going to use

And back then the they would just, you know, they use that card in the book, right, and just put your name on it.

So they just give me my book at the beginning of the summer and my mom would sit down and make us do the math for the following year. And I remember that, you know, like there was there was sometimes, there was tears. I wasn’t always the one crying them. But sometimes there was tears and

I just remember how intense that was and then the impact that had on my life because I mean to get where I am. To understand what I understand, to do what I do at the level that I do it.

To be honest with you, I think math for that. Right. Like, if you look at computer science. It’s the division of mathematics.

Especially in Europe, like if you go to a European university, the math department. There’s the computer science department is within the applied mathematics department within that that housing and it just turns out that like

Through abstraction, you can really get the computer to do more with less. And so I I kind of look back at my history how I got here. How did I build that software firm. How did we put out so many products so quickly.

And so effectively and it was it was the abstraction. It was the skills that I learned through mathematics. So I thank her for that. And now back into the context of, you know, that conversation with my professor

The real context there was my wife was about six months pregnant when when this went down five or six months and and I was sitting there thinking, well, gosh.

What he’s really telling me is that I can’t really depend on the school system to to handle this problem for me right handle the problems education handle the problem of passing on the math that was given to me by my parents and my responsibilities sort of his

His education is my responsibilities, what I was thinking is education part of my responsibility. So how am I going to handle this.

And as soon as I was started talking to me about what the solution was and how these how he got these activities and how he did the same thing with his daughters and what he had to do to go through it.

And say, well, all we really need to do is push that information straight to the parent right at the level that the child is working at

Right, if you just did that. If you could just tell me where my kid was and and and how was the effective method of teaching this concept I would be able to take that I would be able to use that and and

And and do what you did.

Even if the activities in work, but the activities do work. So overall this is a win, right. So, like, even if the child gets stuck. And that’s what our dashboard does is we help you figure out where’s the child stuck. If we detect that there’s some

Some, some failures, some some missing questions we will start to flag it like hey you should take a look at this subject and in there, we give the parent games.

Advice, if you will, game that they can play with their child outside of the system. A good example is board games. If your child is learning to count or, you know, basketball,

If your child is learning to skip count or right even if you’re trying to build fluency with like, you know, speed of addition speed of multiplication.

You could play blackjack, you could play. You can play war with with flashcards, and we just try to give you these tips.

At the right time. So, like, hey, the child can now understand enough to do this. So if you did this, it wouldn’t it wouldn’t be an exercise memorization wouldn’t be scary to them.

They’re totally going to understand what you’re saying. You could totally play this game. And that’s kind of the idea at the end of the day.

We just like with the plastic bank. We tried to build the mission and the game around the mission to just be good. So the mission is empower children map the vision is can we change the way the world teaches mathematics. How do we do that well we power.

attics that the world have to turn and look and say, hey, wait a second. What’s going on over here.

We’re taking children that said they couldn’t do it. And now they’re saying they can do it. And that is a shift.

That is a true impact. And the thing that we also have the problem that you know the parents often don’t have a way in which they feel that they can impact.

The outcomes with their kids because they may not have their own math skills or they don’t know how to move

Back down to the level because once you learn those abstractions. It’s really difficult to separate yourself from the right. So you’re

Trying to teach a four year old or a three year old how to, you know, count 11 read items.

You know, it’s, it just makes complete sense to the parents and so sometimes it’s hard to

Slow down and teach them like, Okay, here’s one. Which ones read, which would like there’s all of these things that we just we already get so it’s hard to detach yourself from what’s already known.

And and this is where where it’s good. And like you said, as you get further on those kids every says, Well, I want my kids to get into

Programming or get into, you know, gaming, whatever or computers is math, like you said, all the way up to the highest level is math is requires computers computers requires math.

You know, any comp side grad has to do a significant amount of statistical analysis and understanding of mathematical concepts and algebraic concepts and

It’s not necessarily that they’re doing, like, you know, high levels of calculus and physics, but there’s there’s got to be a foundation there in order to do the exercise that you’re doing in computers.

And then the reverse is also true. Anybody that’s doing serious, you know, mathematics are doing psychology

Guess what you need to know statistics, you need to learn how to, you know, programming are to do

All of this analysis work on on large data sets and stuff. It’s like you, we cannot detach these things from each other and the fact that we know that we get impacted at the ground floor.

Is I think we all have a responsibility to do it and and I’m glad that you’re you’re doing something. What now let’s talk about the business view. I’m at allow. How did you

How did you choose to approach you know getting getting things rolling and taking your first, your first product to market and and how are you looking at how you’re going to be able to scale this company.

Sure, yeah. So again, right, mainly mainly our attraction is Facebook and it’s difficult because

So many people go to Facebook and they have a hard time there and and there’s so many different

Things out there that are telling you to do XYZ at the end of the day, the place where Facebook’s really good is they have these algorithms.

And because of, you know, my background when they started talking about these algorithms and and how you can juggle the system in order to get it to work that’s ultimately what we did. And the real trick is just, you know,

There’s this debate between, like, do you want to hit more people or do you want to get more qualified people right so like

Immediately what happened when we got three to 500 sales is Facebook brought us in to a call and said, what you want to do is you want to create a 1% look alike audience if you create this 1% look alike audience.

Will get you 2 million people. That looks like the 500 people that purchased. But when I found out soon after creating that 1% audience with that.

Some of my friends who had children that were well beyond what we taught at the time.

We’re getting the ads and they were coming to me like Hey man, we’re seeing Elton learning on Facebook. Congratulations and must be blowing up.

And I’m sitting there thinking the. Why are you even seeing my ads. There’s no potential way for you to even buy. So we went back to Facebook and we narrowed down that 1% audience.

To say, hey, they should be in your 1% audience Facebook but they should also be a parent of a child is between two and 12 it’s standard demographic information that’s that’s in Facebook and that cut our audience by a third. So like we went down to like 500 600,000 people and

It wasn’t advised, but the the ratio of convert went high enough for the algorithms to start tuning in at some point.

The pixel is so trained that we can literally tell Facebook target everyone in the United States and and we’re and we’re making sales that basically the same level. And we target. So at this point, Facebook knows who our customer is and they’re able to bring them to us.

And again, it’s about can we get them the right message, but then after that, it’s about

Can we expand our audience beyond that, right, because again, if the eyeballs have moved to Instagram or Pinterest or detect talk or maybe back to TV right we’re missing the people that could be benefiting from this, but just don’t know because they’re not on Facebook.

If this is the interesting problem that you you brought up and

Using the tuning and tightening of your audience is really challenging because the price to do so, can be vastly more and obviously as they look at said

The more you tighten the audience, the more of the algorithm, you’re leveraging they you know like basically almost an exponential increase in the price to do so. So because they

They, they have to do a lot of work, you know, and there you’re figuring out, you know, the effectiveness of it and it’s it’s always tough to when you

Like you said, Facebook, you know, Google, you name the platforms there there’s bound to be Miss targeted recipients and it’s it’s neat when we actually hear about it because then you can say like I

I, I know that these people shouldn’t be seeing my advertisement what’s what’s going on. And it’s this is probably one of the

You could probably give a class on this alone. I think that’s your that’ll be your next startup identity is like

A effective ad targeting you know platforms and how to actually get the most out of them, because I think this is a problem that a lot of founders are facing is

How do I make sure that I’m effectively targeting to bring new new eyes to my platform. And it’s, it can be inexpensive set of lessons, how

How did you approach like did you use another tool or another you know sort of a coach to learn how to use some of the targeting mechanisms inside Facebook.

Well, so the the targeting mechanisms in Facebook.

They’re, they’re not terribly hard to us, it’s just

There’s a lot of categories was the issue and this is before Cambridge analytica and they they removed the whole ton of categories. So when we got started like you start opening up the categories on on on things and like

I mean, gosh you you can select people that follow a page and how many pages are out on Facebook, right. So, like it’s kind of this big hodgepodge

And ultimately right it does come down to like their pixel. Right. So the first thing is getting your pixel hooked up properly right for us. I think the main mistake I made originally was we we call the purchase.

We called it registration completed because I was like, Oh, that’s a cool thing to call it right registration completed.

But, and you can have these books Elton tuned to anything but the default reports they report how many purchases have been made so

You know, about six months in, I said, You know what, we’re going to have to change this to purchases. We’re going to lose that past data. I mean, we’re not going to lose it lose it, but like this just like now whenever I show it to

To a to a potential vendor whenever I show them my Facebook, they look at and they go, well, it looks like you had zero purchases before this date, and I’m like, no, no.

That was the date that we switched it to purchases. Before that it was it was registration completed and then they’ll go, oh, OK, now you see right so so there’s that problem, but now

You know, like now I can open up the data and I can see it. I think scoreboards are very important. It’s one of the things that we use.

Internally as a team. It’s one of the things that, you know, for example, EOS traction says that you should be using the square the data component

It’s also something we leveraged within elephant learning. It’s why we came up with the elven age. It’s a one number metric that I can put in front of the parent or I can put in front of the child and it becomes a motivator. Because as they play it goes up, so

I think that’s very important. So as long as you have your key numbers in front of you, like, you’re going to start to be successful. Another thing that we ended up using that, I think, like, I mean these guys aren’t paying but they should be about to say.

Mr r.io app, Mr r.io it hooks into my stripe and it gives me a dashboard with almost every single KPI I could think of as important. My Mr are how much I actually collected from that Mr are what the refunds. What’s the number of refunds, what’s our customer churn rate what’s

Our lifetime value. What’s our. I mean, gosh, they have like

Maybe 15 things on there. I can’t remember them all off hand but like

You just go to this page, and all of them are right there. And that’s what it is. Every day I would just, I literally have it open on my phone. I just hit refresh in the morning and I know exactly where I’m at from top level perspective.

And then, of course, from there, right, we have to keep the scorecards for how efficient Facebook’s doing how efficient our websites doing

I mean, we’ve really built up an operation around marketing. From there, but like that’s that’s the key like knowing your numbers.

Being able to affect those numbers and then having some people around you that can help you bringing it back to Facebook yeah i mean it’s it’s

It’s basically a text entry and as you start entering in all the categories drop down and you can just I want to filter. More specifically, or I want to exclude a set of people

So it’s basically you’re and or set dynamics, right. Like, if, if you think of it as set theory. Right. And that’s how I think of it is like what are the set of the people in my target market.

And then what does the sense that I’m able to target using the Facebook demographics and then what’s that overlap and I want that overlap to be as big as possible. Right. I don’t want to have too many people in the set outside of my target market, but also who Facebook’s targeting

And this is the it’s

It’s neat that you highlighted, you know the the Mr folks in it because that is exactly it. It’s like if you’re

If you’re not tracking across the entire lifecycle of your engagement, then it can really, really change the way that you’re doing projections and application development. And so it’s it’s so important.

And I’ve. You just spoke with somebody, he talks about, we call it the smile curve, especially when you get, you know, stuff that has a network effect is that it’s the smile curve is that you get this very strong immediate use and then

It will sort of potentially trail.

And then those people will then re engage with the platform. And then you see them so they

And if when you see that it then becomes the second half of the smile. And in fact, that’s the best user because you’ve got them in

Then they found a reason to reengage and being able to see that measurement and that effect.

Gives you you know that predictability. So you can say, hey, this is how I’m going to scale, my, my underlying platform. If I bring a new feature. This is how I can measure the effectiveness and you’ll know especially with this like

It’s difficult to know how to measure the duration of effectiveness, you know, if you’ve got kids that go in

You can’t measure across five days here is it 30 days. Is it 90 days is 120 days like there are, you have to learn about how your engagement in the platform and

Can create an outcome that is both measurable for the person using it so that they’re getting the benefit and then also that you can say

Alright, so I know as i if i want to get 200 more kids in this platform or 2000 and then 20,000 I know what what my back end scaling needs to look like to support that.

Right yeah I all that’s important. Now,

Your, your background. And so I just

Realized we’re, we’re getting towards the end. And I don’t want to. I don’t want to have you suddenly have to run if you got a couple more moments we can i just want to explore. One more thing, if you don’t mind. Aditya

Oh, I don’t mind.

Perfect. So

This is I’d love to get your advice. You know what, what’s the most challenging thing that you faced in building elephant learning that you could you’d love to share with with new founders who are thinking about, you know, putting a platform into into the marketplace.

Well, for me, it was the marketing. I mean, I think where I’d be able to help other founders is like through advice on technology because that was my background.

But you got to remember, like, I came into this and I had zero marketing. I went from a PhD program where I was a software developer

To now. I’m a software developer for someone else. Now I’m managing people who are software developers to okay now I want to build a product and

Ultimately, like when I started here and just like you said like, Did I have any help. I was consulting with a with a marketer, he wanted to do Google AdWords, we weren’t seeing much traction there either. And

A lot of the people actually that he was bringing in for learning. They were extremely helpful. We had a we had a brand manager come in and and we ultimately ended up paying him to come in and align the team around the brand ideas being effective.

And

We had a customer experience. Gentlemen, Joey Coleman. I mean, he’s been a lot of help as well. And like just at every step of the way, trying to figure out, like, okay, well here’s where we are.

Here’s what we can afford to do to better ourselves or better the platform to the point where we are now, where it’s well

We we we qualify for yield. Again, we’re hiring people we’re going to try to put team in place to solve.

These problems right as a machine, right. Like, can we look at reasons why people cancel. Can we figure out what the underlying problem is and design a solution that’s where I have a lot of experience. I think we can do that right but for example from the marketing side.

Some of these problems people have seen before. I’ve never seen before, and now I’m learning for the first time, how can I overcome this, and the problem is is every time it kind of has been you because the typical marketing.

Advice that might be out there. It just, it just goes away so fast, right. It’s like, for example, at one point it was like, Oh, you guys should be doing webinars. That’s what’s the hot thing these days.

Or then just as soon as everyone’s got a webinar, no one’s watching webinars anymore because no one’s getting information from these webinars. So now that that strategy is different. Yeah. The good news is you you

caught on to the wave. The bad news is you’re caught on to the back end of the wave

Exactly so. So that’s the hard part about marketing is that you always got to be inventing you always got to be creative and

I’ll just be honest for like someone that’s new to it sort of exhausting because it’s like, just as soon as I figured out the problem is solved. Gosh, I got another problem 610 months down the road that I just didn’t know was going to happen.

With this is the think also where folks can leverage other platforms and luckily in this this economy in this day and age, we’ve got access to

You know products that are out there that are services that are SAS that we can get access to

So I think luckily at this phase in in business building. There’s so many good options but like you said, the best thing you can do is find somebody else who’s in your

Ecosystem or or meet new peers who have gone through and and lived, these, these lessons you know they’re not always going to play out the same way for you and your platform necessarily relative to their experience, but

Entrepreneurs organization is a great example of folks that you can literally get in there in this they’ve reached a certain phase of growth.

Because there’s revenue requirements in order to be part of it and membership. So people very much have a vested interest in the outcomes from this and that’s a great

GREAT ORGANIZATION. There’s even, you know, simple as meetups and looking to other mentoring teams, I would, you know, I would encourage people to I’ve got a whole host of

Resources. I’m about to put up on the podcast sites just because

There’s been so many good lessons that have I been able to share through these stories for folks. So, and Aditya you’re going to be on that list.

Of great people that these are our solid lessons and and just, I applaud you again for number one, congratulations on the fact that you’ve, you’ve reached revenue in order to get to eat. Oh.

And and more than anything, just congratulations on building a sustainable business and a platform that can truly change the future for somebody

And and to do so at scale, which is which is pretty cool that so big, big plans 2020 years here.

Have you, have you got. What’s your sort of next big target for for yourself and the team.

Well, that’s a great question. Yes. No for us in the team. It’s actually to to to to try to slow down a little bit. I’ve got an advice from multiple people including some of my

By your network that I’m just moving way too fast. So like, to your point, that of what you just said.

I think right now is probably the best time ever in the history of mankind to be an entrepreneur, because of all the SAS solutions that are out there because of

How much you can leverage computers to help you to get this done without people we’ve managed to make it this far with just very, very small amount of team.

And now what we’re trying to do is put some heads into some roles, because like I can’t

I can’t honestly say that this is a business that was intended them to go out and change the world, so long as it depends on me doing the work. So it’s time to put it in the hands of people and have those people drive the company.

To some degree, I’m so obviously going to you know point the ship in the right direction, but until I’m kind of fully out of operations. This doesn’t fulfill the mission of empowering children with mathematics.

Well, and that’s that’s actually a very difficult thing to to discover and embrace and. And also, again, it’s

It’s so hard as a founder, you just get in such a mode where you’re like,

I gotta be Go go go all the time. And this this sort of like hustle porn, you know, lifestyles that you hear, but like, you know, I

I enjoy listening to some of the incredible motivational people just because it’s funny to me because I know. Look, I’ve lived the life I work in a start up

And like, it’s, it’s always there to be done. Like, if I were to 24 hours a day I’d find a reason to need for more. But if I work eight hours a day.

And 10 hours a day.

And do it effectively, you know, I’ve started to change my patterns of work to be more effective and create things that I can do that are scalable beyond me.

And it took a while. So again, a duty of the fact that you’ve reached this point where number one you’ve created a business that can now be

You know, can be into put into the hands of somebody else to help to keep it driving and growing. And that’s, that’s going to be a great chance for you because you’ve, you’ve got so much to bring to it. And hey, you deserve a break. You’ve done

You’ve done good things take a breather.

Spend some time with with your son. And, you know, so it won’t just be it won’t be apt time that we spend with our kids. It’s the fact that you’ll finally have a break and be able to spend some real family time and it’ll be well deserved so

I did, yeah. I want to thank you very much for for sharing some of these great lessons today and just congratulations again on on your

Growth and I wish you all the success. We’ll catch up again to in the future because I really do want to explore a bit more of like kind of them.

Your experiences. Again, going through EO and some of the mentoring opportunities because I think

I’d love to get folks introduced to you as well who who are are getting started, you sounds like you will be a good match what’s the best way. If folks want to reach you, and and sort of get in contact entity, if they if they do so desire.

Sure. I mean, typically it via email. It’s just my first name in my lap first letter of my person in my last name that elephant head soft calm a monograph that ELEPHANT HAVE SOFT calm. That’s really the best way to get ahold of me and

I really appreciate it. I’m always happy to chat. Again, I mean, this was this was great.

You know, like if I can tell my story and helps people. It makes me feel honored because I mean I got so much listening to other people’s stories over the last three or four years and learning from them.

That’s it. It’s

It’s an amazing thing.

And it’s I’ve always been surprised when I hear you know people and the more that we do this too is we become connectors to other things because

You ultimately will get in front of more podcasters and more audiences and then you’ll have someone to say like, hey,

The way you tell the story reminds me of somebody else who I talked to and you know you find yourself in a pure

You know matchup now to somebody else who was also a podcast guest or hostess, and like that. So it’s, it’s an amazing thing that the network effect is so positive on this stuff, and it’s

I feel like it’s like striver in the idea that it’s all positive thing. No one says like, oh, you know,

Let me introduce you to somebody who’s going to tell you, horror stories like no, no, it’s like we are all here to kind of coach each other through to the next phase.

And sometimes we have a difficult run or a difficult ride, but you’re there’s always someone there to say like, Ah, cool, you know, and just most more than anything.

It’s just good to hear stories of folks that are that are in the in that grind with you and unable to

Reach these neat milestones together and again for folks that want to get hear more great stories like this, please do subscribe to the podcast, you can do so through iTunes also through Stitcher. If you read it. It’s also very advantageous for us.

So I recommend folks.

Go in, give us a rating leave

Leave a review, it’s, it’s always

welcome and appreciated.

With that Aditya. Thank you very much.

I look forward to

Using the platform myself.

And

And really seeing, you know how I can

I can share this with the world, and I’ll

Make sure to evangelize what you’re doing for for kids everywhere.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win DealsClick here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$


Ellie Dailey is founder and CEO of an innovative online recruiting platform— Intro30.com. The platform allows job seekers to record an online video introduction as part of a shareable profile including a resume.  Ellie shares insightful lessons in how to differentiate yourself from the pack during the recruiting process, how empathy in hiring and in tech companies in general is game-changing for growth and retention, plus more. 

This is also an early listen to the very cool initiative called Job Prep Global which is creating coaching and advisory for folks who need help getting into and succeeding at being hired.  Thank you to Ellie for sharing very important lessons and stories that are a must-listen for anyone who’s in tech, recruiting, or in any role in business at all.

Photo by mentatdgt from Pexels

Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win DealsClick here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$


Missy Young is the CIO of Switch, and someone who has proven herself as a leader both in business and in the community.  We discuss the challenges of diversity and inclusion in STEAM, mentoring within the community and at work, and explore how we can all do something for ourselves and others in small ways every day.  Missy truly lives a life to bring good to her community and her team through strong leadership and giving back.  

This is an inspirational discussion and really opens up your eyes as to how great organizations like Opportunity Village and FIRST Robotics are creating opportunities and what we can do to amplify the good they are doing.

Opportunity Village:  https://www.opportunityvillage.org 

FIRST Robotics:  https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc 

Photo by NEXT Academy on Unsplash


So the what I love about what we’ve talked about before, you and I, missy. And what we as an industry are starting to tackle is the

The real neat opportunity where we can we’ve gotten ourselves to a point where we can do stuff that’s more than just getting through our own day

And you’ve been a really, really strong part of the community, both directly and just like it community and really opening people’s eyes to what you and the team are doing

But so much more than that is to really like bring people forward into our industry and even just into anything I found you’ve just got such a beautiful sense of

Opening doors and opening up opportunities in such a good way for people, but I’ll let let’s do you can just do your full sort of intro on on who you are, how you got here and

Talk about, first of all, being the leader, you know, a CIO, a well earned opportunity and what it feels like.

You know, I’m not gonna say you’re, you’re a female, you’re not a woman who became a CIO, or a CEO, because you’re a woman that’s such a that’s part of the problem I think right there. Just the fact that I never know what the right statement is you are an amazing person and amazing CIO

You happen to also be an amazing woman, a mother, all of these things right. How do you approach, just that thing like just being you. How would you describe you

Uh, well, I guess I would describe myself as it’s an interesting thing I was challenged at a workshop one time to describe myself about using my title or my job in any way. And I discovered how much of our identity is usually wrapped up in what do we do for a living. Right.

Yeah, so I am a mother. I am a wife. I am a friend. I am a daughter. I am a sister and I am also a CIO of a tech company called switch that I have been with for

About 15 years and I was one of the original employee number nine. So I’ve been with the company for quite some time, through its most of its history.

And it’s been an incredible journey. And I would say that I grew into the role of CIO over time.

Having worn all the hats and done all the jobs and you know when you’re in start up mode over those years. That’s what you do as a team. Is everyone pitches in and does whatever needs to be done in order to make the company successful

So most of the core team is all still here. So we have this incredible environment that that really functions well with all the individual members helping out

Assignments and acts as a team is not be a bunch of people who work together a team is a group of people who trust each other.

And over the years. That’s what we built here so it’s it’s been a fantastic place to be for me to grow professionally and also to have a mentor, like our CEO and founder rod Roy, who has helped me

Not just, you know, be excellent at my job, but to transform into a CIO, because that’s a that’s an evolution that has to take place within yourself. You have to be willing to do that work.

On the inside to learn what is empathy and how can I wield empathy, to the benefit of my team and how do I, how do I show confidence to my team in order to inspire them, but without it looking like you’re cocky.

You know, how do you, how do you do all these things in a way that helps your team be better because at the end of the day, a good leader is a good servant. You have to put the needs of your team above your own

And this is the it’s a this is what makes you know you’re arriving into this role so appropriate and again so well deserved because

Very a lot of people see this and they said like, Oh, well, anybody who’s been

In a role for so long. It’s kind of these natural progressive things you are you know you are an individual contributor. Then you’re a manager then you’re a director than your maybe a VP or a VP, and you kind of like track your way up.

But it’s, it’s very interesting that there are many levels are many types of roles that are not ladder paths or there they shouldn’t be.

Because there’s not just functional requirements and skills that are needed to do it but empathy.

Is such a powerful part of so many different parts of what we do. But I would say like you described, more so as a CIO, because it’s not just

You know, CIO, said the old joke, right. See, I used to stand for careers over like that back in the 80s, he would say like, Oh yeah, they are. That was like you’re on special projects.

You hear they’re like, what do we do with Pete, I don’t know. Let’s make him the CIO, and that’ll that’ll push them out in 18 months.

Right.

But then it became a transformative part of how companies operate and survive and thrive in this new sort of it oriented and tech driven field. So the change in that transformation becoming a thing means like, how do you transform. If you don’t have empathy.

And I’ll be straight up. I didn’t have it.

we’ve ever taken the the color code testflight. It’s one of the many different versions of personality tests out there, but so red is the color of power and my test came out 77% read

If anybody saw your office that we just described as being dominant we read

Favorite color. And so it’s a color of my office is the color of the inside of my car and so on. But it means that it much more overshadows the other colors of blue, which are which is emotions and yellow, which is fun and white, which is details that kind of thing.

So I had to work on empathy. It’s something I had to learn, you know, there would be times when my CEO would come into who’s my CEO is very gifted with empathy.

And he would come into my office and say, Do you know how you sounded in that meeting. Just know, and I would say home. I mean just completely abuse and clueless as to

The effects that had the way I had delivered my sentences had impacted a certain person in the room.

And just just no clue. And so I had to. I had to read a lot of books and really work hard on that and, you know, our senior team here is also really good at.

You know, I can ping something off of them say, hey, this happened and I i think i want to handle it this way. What do you think, how do you think this is going to be taken and we all help each other because I think

To build a company like this over time, like we have, you have to have a lot of people with red and their personality. To do that, you have to be a strong team.

But the empathy is also super important for all the people that you’re bringing with you along the way, because they look at you and they see your title and there’s a certain amount of intimidation that comes with that whether you mean it to or not.

Whatever my intentions were I didn’t intend to hurt anybody’s feelings, but they got hurt anyway. And so it’s not

Your intentions that matter. It’s your actions that matter because that’s what’s going to create a result that’s what’s going to create an impact.

So I did. I did have to learn empathy and I will happily confess that I’m a work in progress. I don’t know if there’s ever a point where you say, I’ve reached the pinnacle of empathy.

Maybe Mother Teresa could have said that maybe her but she’s like the only person maybe Maya Angelou. She’s another one who’s really good at that.

Um, but yeah. So I have to always say there’s always a another step I can take to be better.

So the great thing that was because I studied it, I worked hard at it and I’m still working hard at it. I can coach other people in the company who also want to be leaders.

And who are on that same journey of self transformation as well to help them take whatever those steps are the so that they can they can achieve that next level of professional excellence and it just helps you in your personal life too.

Yeah, well it’s the one of the books that I recommend most often to people. There’s one called The Four Agreements and it’s

A neat one is sort of a it’s spiritual, but not religious and and The Four Agreements are very simple.

I recommend it to many people. And one of my favorite things in it is one where it’s and the rule is simply don’t take it personally.

And what’s different about this. It’s a very sort of stoic thing that I use out of it. It’s not just don’t take a person like hey, you know, missy. You are amazing. And you’re like,

I’m pretty I feel pretty good about that right now. You’re like,

No, you can’t. So it’s not just like I I’m very disappointed in you and you feel down, obviously. So you’re not. You’re supposed to not take it personally. So we all do that were like oh no you know shut out the bad

Well, we also have to eliminate the good in a way, or it really very strong peaks of where people are heaping praise.

I recommend I just I dread when people keep praise on me because I’m like, No, no, I gotta, like, I gotta get this on to somebody else. I have to share this I have

This is not me. This is not me. This is a thing. Who else deserve to be here in this moment with me to share this and spread it out. So I’m very mindful of. I call it shaving off the edges.

That I want to stay centered so that I don’t feel because the higher you feel the easier it is to feel the trough.

And when you go about go to baseline. If you’ve been told, like you’re amazing. You’ve done. This is the best day I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen a presentation like this.

And then an hour later people like, hey, so the document you did definitely needs a lot of work. You feel like it if you would just come into work and said, hey, so the document you did needs a little work, but let’s work on it together.

But now that you came off this high, you’re at baseline and you feel like shit.

Like you’re here. There’s, like, oh God, because you’ve got this big delta from where you feel so that’s

Sort of the long way to say like when they say don’t take it personally. That means both the the incredible praise and the incredible negativity.

Because you’ve got to sort of shake some of that stuff out and empathy is is definitely something more people need dude. And so if you ever heard of Chris Voss

Oh yeah, I’m actually teaching his book.

Oh, nice. I’ve never seen.

A difference

Oh, yeah.

You should to our sales team and I highly recommend that book. By the way, for anyone in sales, because the techniques that he teaches really work.

My sales team has gone out and implemented these tools as they’ve learned them and they’re experiencing amazing results. Almost immediately, it’s been phenomenal. Yeah. Chris boss was awesome.

Yeah, the yeah i i every time I give 70 the book. Third is, like, wait a second, like high know or you get all your stuff from like

Yes, yes, exactly narratives never split the difference phenomenal and for folks that have got access to master class I masterclass the online and sort of

Tool are really, really neat and Chris does one of the one of the program so it’s it’s effectively a repeat of a lot of the content in the book, but it’s

Neat literally see him, you know, by face. I did the audio book as well. And I was like I was kind of disappointed. It wasn’t him because he’s got just this beautiful delivery.

But tactical empathy is the way that he describes what he does, because it’s very much

You know there’s pure empathy, where somebody falls down on their hurt you want to help them right so your children or have a bad day at school, you want to help them.

Tactical empathy is day to day navigating the the perils of running an organization or negotiating a sale or or whatever it happens to be. That’s, that’s a neat thing. How did you

How did you come about this. It sounds like this is something that you said that you kind of got you, got you found out that you needed a little help. How did it come to to that point where you decided this was it. I’m ready to look around.

I it was it I don’t know if there was a certain one certain point, but there were definitely

A few incidents where you know my my CEO and founder, who’s also my mentor Rob Roy, you know, just brought it to my attention. He’s like, hey, this

You know, if you want to be effective as a leader, you have to change this and I, you know, studied him because he is so good at empathy.

And it helping to build consensus and he never criticizes in public, you know,

He takes you into the room and talks and, you know, how do we, and, you know, it’s very, it’s always very constructive and

Because of that people are just so incredibly loyal to him and want to do their best for him because he’s so good at that. And so I

I said, Okay, that’s a good model for me because I can see in our own team, the effect that he has

On everyone in it and how he helps everyone to be them their best selves. Well, I can’t let that stop with me. I need to

Turn around and do that for everyone else. Also, but because it doesn’t come naturally to me.

I have to, I have to learn it. And so I went and started searching out books on that to learn how to be better at it and but

Transformation doesn’t happen unless you can self actualize meaning. Okay, I’m going to do an honest analysis of myself.

And say, Okay, these are the things that I need to work on and then actually take that into action and and do it in real life. You know, one of the great things about Chris bosses book never split the difference

Is these these conversational techniques like mirroring and labeling. I started using them at home with my husband.

Hahaha

And it works. And so he now thinks I’m like the most attentive best listening wife in the world.

Because I’ve learned how to practice these skills, how to be a better listener and how to make the other person feel like they matter to you and that you’re not just sitting there waiting for your turn to talk.

So these are techniques that anybody can learn, but you have to be number one willing to make the change. And then to actually do the work over and over and over again in order to unseat some of those deep seated habits that you already have.

And it’s like a muscle memory as well. It’s a, it’s a neuro muscular memory that you have to create and it’s it’s so funny because that’s

So much of what I learned in that book and and other things and how I’ve like kind of become used to

talking to strangers. Now a lot of times, and when I’m on a podcast with them a little get introduced to them. And that’s it. We record like 90 minutes of really enjoyable conversational content.

And they were like, how did you, how did you know about my business. I’m like, why I read about, about nine minutes before we got on the call, but

You just did such a great job of telling the story and I just helps to pull you through it. And that’s really what it was is and at home. It’s such a powerful thing because

Like you said, it’s, you can just do the simple things, and you feel bad when you’re learning it because you’re like, Whoa. All right, time for some earring. Time for some labeling

But after a while if you practice it enough. It does, it does start to come natural

And it makes sense, it, it actually legitimately creates a true engagement. It really pulls us you together with the person you’re talking to and gives them a incredible comfort.

To share much more of it and some of the early some of the longer really long form podcasts. I did with one fellow, I said, like he was asked. My question is, what’s the, you know, hardest. What’s the most difficult thing that’s ever happened to you that you’re most thankful for.

Hmm.

You know, and so one of those like weird questions. I think it’s like a Tim Ferriss question, whatever.

And it was neat that instead of having like just a gut reaction to it. There’s just this incredible long pause. And that was another sort of vorticism I’ll say is, like, just let let silence rain and and then after like 40 seconds. He says,

No, it’s good question. You know, the day that I and it was like this incredible thing just happened in front of me, from that moment forward and fights cut them off for like tried to make the conversation flow, it would have totally changed the dynamic

And those are those are so magical when you get those. And that’s why I love. So you go and you’re you’re sharing this as well. You’re mentoring other folks in the industry, you talked about mentoring and Rob being one of your mentors.

What do you do in order to create that mentoring relationship as well with some of either peers or folks in the organization. I’m curious how you make that come into play as part of your day to day

So I don’t think you can force that I don’t think you can sort of declare, hey, I’m going to be your mentor now.

But you can start to show a lot of interest in someone’s work and their day to day activities and call them more and

stop and say, Hey, who you’re rooting for in the Super Bowl. You know, things that don’t necessarily have to do with work build that relationship.

And I always laugh because I have a bit of a snarky sarcastic sense of humor.

But if I haven’t known someone here at the company for at least five years, they don’t get they don’t get to see that side of my personality, because I’m not 100% sure how they’ll take it.

I’m not 100% sure if they would be offended or or feelings hurt or not sure if they think I’m being mean whatever

Now of course the people I’ve been working with for 10 years they all know you know How what how my sense of humor works. And a lot of them are the same way anyway. And so we have a ton of fun with that banter.

But i i sheath that sword when I’m around people that I don’t know how they can handle it. And so I think you have to build that relationship. First, get to know each other and build that trust.

I think it’s, it’s different if you, you know, I’ve done the the mentoring programs where you’re mentoring young college students and so on. And that’s a diff very different dynamic.

They’re coming to you for mentorship, they’re coming to you with questions and they want to know, how do I do this, and how do I do that.

And it’s interesting, a lot of them want to, how do I become CIO, right. They want to know, how do I get to the sea level. And I kind of stopped them. I’m like, Well, I, I never had a plan to get to a sea level position. I never wanted to work in a data center when I was

This

This wasn’t in the plan.

Because it didn’t exist right a job that I have did not exist when I was a kid and a lot of the people who are coming out of high school and college now are going to have jobs in the future that don’t exist yet.

And so my goal every day. I really just wanted to earn a living. My goal when I became a network engineer. Well, you know, I got some certifications and became a network technician to start out

And I just, I wanted to make a decent living. But my the way that I approached work every day was how can I be how can I be excellent today.

How can I be my most amazing self today because I can’t do anything about tomorrow because tomorrow is not here yet.

And so that was really my, my focus as I you know worked all over the years was just be my best self today because it’s the only thing I can control.

And that was a great way to try to keep stress.

Off of my back because I can’t you know a lot of people spend a lot of times, worrying about what are we going to do and

Next month and how is next quarter going to go and this and that. I can’t control any of those things. I can only control what I’m doing today.

And so if I go home at the end of the day and go. Yep. I was excellent today than I did a great job and that will take care of itself. And so I kind of backup these younger kids and say, well, hold on a second.

You know, that’s that path forward, you may, you may lay out some path. Now, I guarantee you, I bet you a million dollars that that path is going to change.

Either you’re going to evolve it or life is going to happen to you or new opportunities are going to come up and you’re going to make different decisions.

I don’t I don’t I think it’s very difficult to set some massive goal out into the future in front of you.

And then have that be your be all end all and then if that doesn’t work out, you’ve experienced this huge disappointment or let down

So I just say, do your best. Today, in order to go into tomorrow, knowing that you can do the same thing again. And if you do experience a setback.

Oh. Well, that’s life. I don’t know if you ever saw. The Incredibles the Mr. Incredible would say, you know, every time I turn around the world is in jeopardy again and we can’t just stay saved.

You know the setbacks will happen. They happen to the best of us. And just, that’s okay. That’s life. It doesn’t mean your life’s over the best part about life is Tomorrow’s a new day and you can try again.

Yeah, there’s a there’s a reboot every night, in a sense, right and and i i like the

I described it often is like sort of local optimization. You know, there’s a certain I’ve got a 24 hour optimization window. There’s certain things I can affect within 24 hours and truthfully. It’s really 16

You know, even if you’re getting a short amount of sleep you’re looking at 20

So what can you effects during that period of time. And like you said if if it, if you have a terrible 20 hours, you have a little bit of a of a nap, you come back you like okay

Let’s kind of reset the clock a bit and reset the baseline. So it’s, it’s a good it’s something I wish we would teach

Earlier, I think that’s the thing. I tried to give with when I speak, especially with kids and students especially like teens.

You know, it’s that whole sense of like it’s going to get better, which is like kind of like the around suicide prevention. There’s a whole big Crux like if you remember when you were

12 years old and I lose a girlfriend like, that’s it. I’m done. I’m never there’s nothing in life that could make me happy ever again.

You know, I knew, like so.

But I say this, jokingly now because I was able to survive some some those moments right in and

And so sometimes when you’re in those periods of your life you have that experience, they can feel like that’s it. This is the cliff that I’ve that I’m not going to get on the other side of

And when you get through people and you get into jobs and you get into more senior roles you find out that it’s much more like Mr. Incredibly, like, all right, what do we need to sort it today. Good stuffs, not on fire.

We’re good till tomorrow and then it’ll burn again but

Yeah, we’ll talk about the kids, I think, you know, with the stress of figuring out their future. I think that there’s a lot of disservice done to kids when people ask them, What do you want to be when you grow up.

Because they it’ll and you and I, being Gen Xers, you know, we definitely experienced this as kids. We were expected

To have our entire future mapped out we were expected to know what we wanted to be to know. We wanted to go to college and

And all those things. But in today’s world, and everything is changing as fast as it is. And these kids are going to have jobs and haven’t even been invented yet.

I’m a huge fan of the technical and vocational fields, you know, if you’re going to be a nurse or a doctor or a lawyer or some other career where

You have to have a college degree, awesome. I get it. Go to college and get that degree and go down that path.

But if you’re not sure the technical certifications or vocational programs are excellent ways to get into the workforce.

And try it out for a while. Right. You know, and see where it takes you because you don’t know where it’s going to take you. I had no idea.

That getting a few tech certifications and starting out as a network technician in the early, mid 90s was going to lead to where I am today.

How would I could never have known that. And I didn’t have a plan.

I just said, Hey, I’m good with computers. Let’s give this a shot. You know, this was in the.com days, and it was it was a thing and

You know, I said well you know I can. I can do this. I know I can, you know, learn the language of computers because that’s really all it is is a language.

And you know, I already was pretty good with languages. And so I figured this sounds like a natural thing for me and it led me where I am, but I would never been able to predict it ever

Now, the other thing that I was talking about the the thing you’ve created, which is, you know, we talk about you know the past the CIO, people think, oh, that’s amazing this wondrous there’s no possible like they just can’t even imagine. Sometimes what it must be like

Another thing that people don’t necessarily know what it must be like is when you you’re exposed to.

People you know especially you know peer to peer level in high up in organizations. It’s a very different sort of interaction you have with other CIOs and CTOs and CEOs.

You’re very prominent in public service and and doing things with charity.

You know, we’ve talked in the past, but some of the folks here on your, you know, I always joked about, you know, sort of like my my dream magician friends near like I good friends with them good friends with them and if

You are

You know, talk about did you know when you were not yet network certified that you would someday be, you know, on a charity board with maybe the folks who are and let’s talk about some of the work that you do in that area.

Sure, and no i i didn’t even envision, you know, this was in Southern California. So I never even thought I would ever live in Las Vegas. That was not on my bucket list. And I don’t know if it’s on anyone’s bucket list but yeah

Well, I’ve lived in Las Vegas now for 15 years and I moved here from Huntington Beach to join switch when it was a very small company. And it was a huge risk to move here.

And I still have a lot of people today going, how could you leave Huntington Beach. Don’t you miss it. And I always say, Well, no, it’s right there. Like, I can go visit it anytime I want from Vegas. It’s super easy.

But I don’t have to pay the taxes. I don’t have to deal with the traffic and the pollution, etc, etc. I love living in Nevada. I think it’s a great place to be.

And Nevada as a state is really a big small town. Everyone knows everybody. And so when you serve on boards here. There’s actually a lot of change. You can affect, which is really a cool thing.

So I serve on the boards of FIRST Robotics, which is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done is to work with FIRST Robotics. It was founded by Dean Cayman

Who invented the segway and whole bunch of other things. I don’t know how many patents. He has now.

BUT FIRST Robotics enables and they have LEGO League for elementary school kids, AND SO FIRST Robotics enables kids to get this kit of parts and they they can create a robot and has specific weight restrictions and

You know, specific limitations that built around to make sure that all the robots are competing in the same arena.

With a theme every year. So this year, Mark Hamill from, you know, Star Wars LAUNCHED THE FIRST Robotics Competition.

And we have our regional competition here in Vegas. And we last year we had teams from Turkey and Brazil and just all over the world.

But so the kids have to learn mechanical engineering and programming and electrical engineering and the kids have to be able to write a business plan.

They have to go and source funding. So they have to go and basically sell this concept of people to get money in order to fund their

Their company or buying the kit of parts and traveling to the competitions. So they essentially have to create a small business around this robot.

So a friend of mine who is an executive at circus Olay kept encouraging encouraging me to come to the FIRST Robotics Competition. He wasn’t selling it very well. He just kept saying the robotics contest.

Oh, okay, fine. You know, so I went down there and they were holding it in the Thomas and Mack arena, which is a pretty big space and I go in there and it was like NASCAR.

It was high energies.

Huge stuff.

Out music and all the teams have like their own machine shops where they have all their parts and they’re working on stuff and the kids.

I’ll have all the teams have created their own theme. So like one of the team was a Harry Potter theme and

And so they’re all running around. But the great thing is not just are not only are they being judged on how the robot.

competes but each team has to compete in collaboration with a couple of other teams and then every single team gets judged on their gracious professionalism.

So they all have to be kind to each other. So these are not mean, nasty, you know, terrible competitions, where the kids are all

fighting it out know if one kids in one teams robot has a problem. Other teams will offer parts to help and that is gracious professionalism.

So they’re also being taught to be kind and to be professional and to be well mannered adults, while competing with this robot is the most fantastic thing I’ve ever seen. So we were talking to a young lady.

At the Vegas competition. A couple years ago, and as a freshman in high school. She envisioned her her life after high school as she was just going to work and fast food.

Because that’s what her parents did and her parents were barely legal in the US and there is no American dream for her. That does not exist in her eyes.

She has a very different upbringing very different life very different experience and very different hopes and dreams that people who

You know, their families are born and raised in this country and have different options.

So she just figured, I’ll just work in fast food because there’s no money for me to go to college or do anything else. And so as a freshman in high school. Another girl encouraged her to join FIRST Robotics.

Because of how much fun. She was having so she said, Why not, and she gave it a try. And she discovered. You know what I’m really good at this.

I can learn the language of the computer because I already know two languages. I know English and Spanish. And so this is just another language to learn

And so she discovered that she was very good at programming. And by the time she graduated high school she had received a full ride scholarship to Cal Poly.

Because of how FIRST Robotics not not only changed her as a student, but opened her eyes to the possibilities that were in front of her.

That if she could just take hold of them that they were real, and they were available.

SO FIRST Robotics is just an absolutely incredible organization and anyone anywhere can start a team and in your kids school

First Robotics makes it very easy for people to start teams. They have all those pathways and programs laid out and training and all that so that I do that I’m on the board of opportunity village which helps to provide jobs for people with physical and intellectual disabilities.

Yeah, this is a really good one. I, I had gotten turned on to opportunity village years ago pen gelatinous I caught on to it because it was one of

The that was actually when he was on the apprentice. I think that was what the his, his charity money went towards and I’d already kind of known about that so so big shout out to opportunity village in particular I’m a fan of

Oh, well, they give back and all that you do for that as well.

Yeah, it’s a pretty neat thing that a lot of city. I think there, it should be implemented in every city across America because of how many people are out there with intellectual disabilities.

And when you turn the day you turn 22 the school bus does not come for you anymore.

And so at that at that moment, you are not too old to partake in any programs that are offered by the public school system for people with intellectual disabilities, meaning autism. Down syndrome. It’s about brain injuries, all those kinds of things. So what happens to them, then

What do they do, what do they do for the rest of their lives. What do their parents do with them.

And so opportunity village has a team of people that goes out and finds work that these folks can do so great example is I came out to opportunity village one day and they had all these huge pallets of cereal boxes.

And so, Costco had been selling a three pack of Rice Krispies. So it was like Cocoa Krispies Rice Krispies and frosted Krispies all in this shrink wrap three pack.

And at the end of the promotion all the boxes that didn’t sell all those shrink wrap packages were sent over to the warehouse that opportunity village.

And the OH VIP. That’s what we call these folks with the intellectual disabilities. Oh, VIP package them and then repackage all the frosted Christmas together all the Cocoa Krispies together and all the rice krispies together for shipment to stores for individual sale.

Oh, wow.

So yeah, but so that’s a job that like you and I will lose our minds doing that over and over again for hours and hours and hours people intellectual disabilities can do that and they can receive private purpose and a paycheck.

For doing this work that needs to be done. So they’re also the, I think the third largest paper shredder for the state of Nevada.

Like Nellis Air Force bases is opportunity village to do all their documents reading because none of the OB IPS can read the documents.

This is the the thing of

Like you said, it’s things that we assume you know you see people especially elementary school programs and even high school programs.

Then that’s it once, once they’re out of that age system they’re aged out of all these programs.

Because, for whatever reason, people think, like, Well, like I said, it’s kind of like, why do people eat so much chicken. The world.

Not because baby chickens are cute because adult chickens aren’t like they’re ugly awful things see very easily. Like, I’m good, I’m good with eating that. But if every, every chicken look like a baby chicken. We would never eat chicken.

And so what do we do with all of these programs as we create these beautiful opportunities and beautiful programs to help people through but at some point we lose sight of the fact that they will age out of those programs.

And not just what happens to them, what happens to their parents, you know, for the parents have someone with an intellectual disability or a brain injury, their job never ends. That is it. It’s another

Responsibility forever. And for that, that parent and they didn’t, you know, and those kids. Nobody signed up for that it happened to them and we need to help them all of them you know and and that’s an incredible way to do it.

I can also tell you one other VIP. She was a normal functioning adult and she was in a terrible car accident terrible brain injury and she forgot everything

Through the accident, how to talk on a walk and cetera but the one thing that she did. Remember that wasn’t damaged from the accident was how to do embroidery.

And

So she now makes him because opportunity village has a whole big Art Center. And so she makes embroidered works of art that patrons in Las Vegas will pay big money for

And then the money goes into an account that opportunity village manages and then at a time that comes where she needs a new wheelchair, whatever it is.

They take money out of this account for her.

To pack to buy the new wheelchair but they don’t give it directly to her because then she would lose Medicaid, she would lose those types of programs and funding that she gets because of her status, but the money is still there and reserve for her.

And so this is just, it’s just the coolest program. And then one of the other ones that I’m involved in is I’m on the board of Nevada School of the Arts.

Which phenomenal program for kids who play the violin sing. They’re an orchestra all the art side of the house. It’s a really fantastic program here.

They, they have great programs for kids who have any kind of musical abilities whatsoever. And they partner with all the schools across the valley to deliver these programs Valley wide.

And I’m a huge fan of keeping the A in steam because them without the arts has no soul.

We have to keep the arts involved in these steam programs, not STEM programs because the arts is what keeps us in touch with our humanity and if we don’t support these arts programs, kids are going to lose out on a very vital part of their development, in my opinion, so

There’s a surprising crossover to have just the, the actual neurological patterns of people that are in creative in all forms, they tend to work together the best pro programmers. I know come from psychology degrees.

More so than coming from com site degrees because they understand how humans interact with systems, not how systems interact with systems.

So they they tend to build differently than a pure program or which is a phenomenal and challenging trade into itself, but it’s like he said, so the creative mind.

extends into pushes into the arts and those arts need to be part of, you know, everything like he said look at the robotics program robots programs, they’re teaching incredible systems thinking but write a business plan.

Teach them how to do marketing teach them how to empathy have empathy for each other you know and and competition with empathy. Good golly,

You know, there’s not an organization on the on this earth that couldn’t use that to come into their, you know, org for a couple of days and get people to think that way between

So true.

Now, how did you, how did you decide that that was an area that you wanted to put your own personal focus to because you

You talked about just two and three there, but there’s there’s many more. I know that you you help to contribute to and you promote

Like did. Was that a calling for you or did it just you saw it happening. And you said, I finally have an opportunity to to create something with these programs and I want to help.

I think that, you know, Uncle Ben and spider man said it best. With great power comes great responsibility.

And I think that if you are lucky and blessed enough to get to a position of power and influence. Then if you are given the chance to help make the world a better place you you have to do it.

You are obligated to do it i mean i am i’m really blessed that I got to achieve this, this level of of a career, but so that means I need to take that influence and help

help make the world better. You know what, what can I do to influence others to help make things

Help their world improve because you know I can’t turn a blind eye to the fact that there are children in their girls in middle school right now who is attention is being diverted away.

From science, technology, engineering, arts and math.

That’s, you know, site. The data shows that, you know, boys and girls have the exact same interest and compassion and capacity for

All of those subjects in elementary school, middle school is where it diverts you know girls seem to lose interest, are they

Is it teachers that are that are steering them away is that their parents. Is it culture. Is it social media is it hormones. Is it just the differences between boys and girls at that age. I don’t know the answer.

But we can’t sit by and let the young girls not feel like they can do with the boys can do in these fields.

And I I’m a huge fan of making sure we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, you know I am.

I am always going to be a proponent of women not being Victims, victims of any kind of abuse, but I also don’t want anybody to think that men are the enemy.

Because I’ve definitely experienced that in my lifetime in my, in my career of, you know, for every one man who was a bit of a stumbling block for me. There were 10 who wanted to help

And so, Mr. Rogers was right when he says look for the helpers, they’re always there. And I found that to be 100% true

In every situation. There’s always people who want to help you if you just open your eyes and look or or open your mouth and ask for the help

That’s a lot of time. I think our pride gets in the way of us taking that next step is admitting that we that we need the help and then asking for the help

From the right person. And so, yeah, I definitely feel very obligated to to work in these in these fields because I i got put into a position where I could do that. And then this state in Nevada.

You can affect change here because everyone knows everyone, which is just one of the coolest things ever

You know, might someone asked me, you know, later on if you retire, will you move away from Nevada. I said, Well, I definitely travel but I’m never going to leave without it, because

I can, I can make things be better in this state. There are things I can do to impact the communities that I live in. And that’s just, that’s awesome. And I love that.

That’s very rare.

There is a rare treat to be able to feel and see the impact and. And I think that’s what I think a lot of people lose faith.

In their ability to affect change because they don’t see the outcomes in the impact directly or even indirectly, they, they lose sight of of what it can do.

So it’s it’s challenging you brought up a really good points and an interesting point about sort of like a 10 to one, like if we if you seek hey if you seek negativity, you’ll find it in spades.

But if you keep positive positivity negativity won’t go away but it becomes less of the focus of what you’re finding and I think

You know, have you been able to bring other people and you know through that mindset change of, like, Hey, I know you’ve had a tough time and you had a bad really difficult experience. But, you know, have you seen people you’ve been able to bring through that turn to that that mindset.

Ah,

There have been people in my private life yes that I absolutely have helped to bring through that mindset at work. It’s an interesting thing, because

I think everyone who has gotten

To work in the tech field has experienced some sort of hardship to get there. And I mean, male or female. I think everybody who works. It’s sort of a non traditional thing, right.

I mean, I know my, my parents still don’t understand what I do. I mean, I don’t know if any of you.

Out there have ever tried to explain cloud to your mom, you know, it’s not it’s not an easy task. And so when I meet people who aren’t in the tech industry. They say, Well, what do you do for living. And they’ll say, Oh, I’m in tech and they go, oh, you know,

Bed.

Please, please, that’s the nice smile that says, Please don’t say

Anymore.

And so I drop it. But if they go, oh, what do you do, and then. Okay, cool. Now I’ve met I’ve met a comrade. Right. Someone who gets it. So then you go into all the details and it’s fun.

But we we work in something that wasn’t really a thing when when we were kids, especially if you’re in the data center industry or if you’re a programmer and all that. And so I think that

Every one of us here has endured some sort of a challenge to get here. So you can either let those challenges become a blockade to you being happy.

Or you can go. Cool. I overcame that. That’s awesome. And I think the majority of the people that I meet are like that. And I will say here at switch. We’re huge fans of positivity.

We always talking about put good in get good back that sort of our mod our logo, the karma wheel. You know what goes around comes around, but that and that’s a sort of more of a negative way to say it, but we like to say put get in, get good back

Yeah, no good effort brings good result, you know, whether it’s inside your heart or on the people around you.

So we we don’t tolerate negativity here, you know, we’re going to try to help you be, you know, focus on the positive and, you know, not, not like it rose colored glasses on. But if you look for the good. You will find it always

I and so we’re not going to let a poison pill. Bring the rest of us down.

I think the society needs a little bit of a boost on on that reminder. Sometimes, especially with just the the advent of social media and the hyper awareness of everything.

It brings the noisiest bits forwards to the top and unfortunately the noisiest bits are usually the more negative bits.

That’s right, when I posted it was a few several weeks back with something about how

I took a photo of the sunrise. Hey beautiful sunrise de Las Vegas. And then one of my friends commented yeah until Trump starts World War three. I was like, Okay, this was

This was a post about his sunrise, not about anything else but that’s that’s a person, and I know this person in real life is definitely always focused on how can I find the negatives in any situation. And that’s just, that’s just not a good way to live in my opinion.

Now the the thing that I’m looking to do better at and you touched on it here. We can only create that opportunity for somebody when they know they need it.

And first of all, is your, your, your own immediate network reaches is x, right, so we’ve got a network reach of

peer network immediate is one and two and you get into the sort of third third you know network. It’s a pretty broad set of people, but when we see people you know in your Twitter timeline, who are negative, and I’ve got lots of friends were like this. And there’s a point where I’m just

You know, just like my

bow my head, I’m like,

Oh no, not again like

You know,

And and sometimes I’ve tried to reach out and said like, Hey, uh, I know things must be must be pretty heavy right now you got a lot going on there’s anything I can do to help you know

And but when that doesn’t get anything like when, when does my empathy. Just need to like when, when am I no longer is it valuable for me to be able to help that person. I’m curious in your thoughts on

That because you’re probably

You probably bumped into that a lot, especially

When

I don’t think that you can win a single battle by arguing on social media. I mean I name one like you’ve ever seen on Facebook or whatever you see two people just going at it.

And each one is just digging their heels and further and further and sniping and being snarky and, you know, back and forth. And, oh, I’m going to get the last word. And I’m going to up you want you know all that stuff. You just go

Okay, this is completely in a non constructive argument. This is complete waste of your time. THIS IS LIKE WATCHING DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES or you know something, you know, they’re just

It and it always devolves into name calling and insulting and it’s so it’s just not worth it. And the interesting thing is when I post up on social media. I know that I have very far right friends and I have very far left friends. These people should never meet.

Ever

But occasionally they might start to converse with each other on one of my posts and so I don’t shut it down, just depending on what it is because

I don’t want to waste my time dealing with that negativity, especially when it’s completely not constructive neither one of them are going to change the others mind.

So I’m not going to entertain it sometimes if somebody post something that you know like the sunrise pick and then they say something about Trump. Well, my post wasn’t about Trump

So I’ll hide the comment or delete it, because I know it’s not worth it to me.

You know, and if you want to go on your page and post about whatever political. I don’t care. But my post was not about that as my page and so

You know, I just kind of look at it that way. But I’m not going to entertain. I’m not going to get drawn in to any battle on social media. It is just not worth that you’re not going to change anyone’s mind not worth it.

Yeah, and I think that, then this translates to how we can do you know better outreach in general is we have to go into the forums where it’s welcomed and known.

And it’s i just i get frustrated when smile, I think, how can I reach people that don’t know they need help. And I guess the real answer is you can’t

Can’t. It’s no different than an addict who hasn’t hit rock, rock bottom, and admitted their need for

Treatment of rehab or whatever, if. And that goes back to my earlier comment about being able to self actualize if you cannot do an honest internal assessment of the work that you need to do on yourself.

And then actually take steps take. Do you know make choices and create actions and activity in your life to make those changes consistently over time, then you can’t you can’t be helped.

I mean, I know several people where I go. Okay. They cannot self actualize they cannot see the impact that their choices that have made on themselves and the people around them. They just think that they’re a victim and everyone else’s fault. And so I go, Okay, I can’t help you.

But there’s a lot of people that I can help. And so I’m going to go focus on them because maybe person hasn’t hit

That, you know, and maybe they never will. Some people just walk through their entire lives without ever thinking that anything they did requires any improvement. Okay.

But there’s a whole lot of people who who can change. And who wants to change and want to be better and want to do that work. Those are the people that I would rather work with

You. I think

Like

We have to we have to direct our activity to where it’s going to have the most benefit. You know, it’s like the Twitter battle, whatever. I’m not going to get into that. I’m going to go and raise millions of dollars for opportunity Village. I’m going to go to that.

Raise money for the Nevada School of the Arts. I’m going to go concentrate on you know getting more people involved in FIRST Robotics. Why would I waste. The next 20 minutes of my life on some Twitter battle. I won’t do it.

Yeah, I watched it just just watching the commercials for anything on like musty Thursdays and NBC there’s like this one show called a million little things.

And I’m like this is a million little horrifying things like it really is just like everybody’s like got 18 brands of cancer and then they got

They got

Their cancer on their cancer and then their cancer got aids and then someone

Cheated On somebody

These are the most horrible, but it’s, you can see why it’s mesmerizing to the psyche, because

People just want to detach into this very surreal world and it will pull you through it’s it’s like any good Shonda Rhimes, you know, drama, it is meant

To really pull you into these stories and these things and but I watch it and it’s, it makes me ill, because I’m like this is not what we should be putting our efforts into watching like there’s like get masterclass all buy it for you don’t want to just

I would much rather read a book then watch TV. These days, I mean, because I don’t think that

I don’t feel like now not I am a huge movie buff, especially sci fi movies, but I am not necessarily wanting to get all wrapped up in the latest next Netflix series or whatever that is, except it’s great. I do love me some ships.

And rightly so, but for the most part, I would much rather read a book and come out a better person on the other side. I mean, this is I just constantly feel like I’m working progress and I feel very deeply the responsibility that

I have 800 employees all looking to me to do the right thing, whatever that is.

I should know what that is. I should be constantly working on myself to try to figure out how do I

How do I do right by them. How do I show them the respect by constantly trying to get better so that I can serve them well because being a good leader means being a servant and

It’s not about having power. It’s not about having control. It’s not about having money if you want to accept the mantle of leadership. You have to get right with the fact that you are now a servant to whoever looks at you as the leader.

You got 100 years on this, on this earth if things go particularly well, many of which are not usable. This is a rare moment.

Of clarity that people need to listen to. I’ve i i door every opportunity we get a chance to talk. Just because you You inspire me to always do more on the other side of every conversation.

What’s, what’s your, what’s your big thing for for this year we’ve officially entered a new decade or depending on how people count. They think it’s a year, but that’s

A different story.

What, what do you feel that you want to get done this year that you didn’t know that you could do last year.

I would say my role as a public speaker has evolved quite a bit for the company so that that’s a little bit of a

More of a another part of my evolution in my career to be on stage, a lot more. So I want to look at how can I help

How can I help women see their influence and see that they are leaders and see, you know, see themselves differently, but then take those steps to involve themselves and to become better leaders and to wield that influence and have more empathy and so on.

And to also to do the same to say you know this, we can have such a divide between the men and the women, you know, yes. Men have had much more advantages and technology and many

Many fields, you know, I watched my mother beating her head against the glass ceiling in the banking industry for years. When I was a kid. So I grew up watching that.

But men are not the enemy. And so how can we all work together to create this awesome future, you know, because, you know, for every one bad apple. There’s a million great ones. And that goes true for men and women, you know, it’s not like all women are super nice. Some of us aren’t

So, you know, let’s, let’s just not forget that. And then how do I help kids who don’t think that they are part of the American dream or kids who

Aren’t cut out for a four year college or kids who came from a broken home kids who

You know, were born in the inner city of of a terrible, you know, in the slums into a drug addicted mother and they’ll never know who their father is how can we show them that they have opportunities and they don’t have to go down that same path.

You know, how do we make sure that the kid who has a talent for playing the violin gets the right training.

You know, how do we reach into those problems and create solutions and actually put them into place so that we can change lives.

You know, those are the things that I want to focus on. And I’m very blessed to work at a company that enables me to go in and do those things, you know, because we have

We have the ability to make change and to spread that change far and wide. So yeah, those are those are all things that are that are on the docket for this year and the years coming

It’s a good year.

It’s a good year, and also the other thing is getting my youngest son. He’s a junior, and so he wants to go to West Point. And so we’re doing all the preparation for that is a lot of work and getting your kids ready for college, good grief.

My older son went the vocational route. And so it was actually much, much simpler. So I have not prepared for all the stuff that we’re going through to help get my younger son ready to go to West Point. So that’s a, that’s an interesting thing.

And not a, not a simple school to just jump into so

As a mom, I would, of course, prefer that my son, not be in some sort of combat. However, it’s been his dream forever. And so I have to support his dream. You know, I have to do everything I can to help him achieve it. Otherwise, you know, I’m talking about one side of my mouth right that’s it.

That’s it.

Well for folks that want to get ahold you Missy and sort of follow along with what you’re doing.

Where’s the best place to reach you online and how would people be able to find out where you’re going to be at heading into this amazing year

Sure. So on social media ON TWITTER, AND INSTAGRAM. I’M AT Missy bite. Am I SS, why be y te by was my avatar name when switch was an earlier when we were a younger company. We had a comic book artist on staff.

Who would draw all of us and create comic books with our characters and action sort of saving the internet. And so because of my

Sense of humor, my superpower was sarcasm. And so that’s where the name bite created for the carrot was created for the character so

All of us who were here in the early days, our license plates are our avatar names and so on. So, but Missy bite is where you find me on social media and anyone is free to email me anytime Missy at switch calm.

And I’m always happy to be contacted

And we will be updating my speaking schedule on our website. As soon as we have things finalized for this year, but yes.

Excellent. I hope to be putting a couple of items on that list. I’ve got some things coming up in the fall, especially at interrupt. We’re in Austin and September, so I’ll reach out to

Boston. So it’s in this is definitely I would, I would be honoured to have your voice there to be able to tell some of these stories and share these experiences because it’s, it’s something that you know we need more. We need more. We need more Missy in the world. So

That’s so kind. I appreciate that.

It’s been an honor to

Be here. Thanks for asking me

Excellent. Well, thank you very much.

My pleasure. Eric, have a great one.

Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win DealsClick here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$


Ed Vincent founder of Festival Pass, the world’s first festival and live events subscription service providing access to music, film, food and wine, and tech and innovation.  We explore how to create positive experiences in both business and life and the benefits of being absolutely focused on customer experience.  Ed shares great insights into how the Festival Pass program was designed, the challenges of past experiences, and great lessons for founders and business builders in our discussion.  

Visit Festival Pass to see the events you can experience yourself and big thanks to Ed for such a deep and interesting conversation that provides strong lessons and learnings for anyone in business. 

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Cody Barbo is the co-founder of Trust and Will.  Cody brings a heartfelt discussion to the podcast about hard lessons learned through difficult early startup experiences that shaped how he build Trust and Will.  The conversation includes a broad set of lessons for every startup founder that shows how to set yourself up for success and building a successful culture as you grow your team.

Bonus code for DiscoPosse Podcast listeners!  When you got to TrustAndWill.com and use the code DISCOPOSSE at checkout then you get a 10% discount on the purchase.  Big thanks to Cody for such a great conversation and make sure that you use the discount code for yourself to let the Trust and Will team know you’re a listener! 

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Happy 100th podcast!!  Rob Hirschfeld is the founder and CEO of RackN.  Rob has been along for many podcasts with Eric and is also a premiere podcaster himself at the L8ist Sh9y Podcast. This show introduces the freshly minted Edge Lab which is finally a way to do bare-metal provisioning for an edge scenario with the magic (and science) of Digital Rebar, K3s, and most importantly, this is a reference build to help you experiment with PxE booting and much more.  

If you want to participate in the Edge Lab but cannot afford to purchase the gear, please reach out on Twitter as we are working on grant programs and discount opportunities to help those folks who are underrepresented in technology and who can benefit from access to these resources. 

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