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Learn more about Prometheus at: https://prometheusalts.com/

Find Michael Wang on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelytwang/

JC: Welcome, everyone to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest on the show with me today. If you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following this podcast wherever you’re listening, and be sure to give it five stars, preferably with a comment or two in there, it’s always helps with the algorithms, because that is how other techies like you and I can find podcasts like this. And today I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing Michael Wang, the founder and CEO of Prometheus. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about yourself? And what is Prometheus? Alternative investments do?

 

Michael: Sure, absolutely. So on myself really quickly. I started off as investment banker doing M&A at Citigroup. And most of my career has been on Wall Street. So after city, I joined a large hedge fund called SAC Capital worked for Stevie Cohen. So for those viewers out there, who don’t know what hedge fund is, there is a show called billions on Showtime. That’s actually based on the actual manager and fun I used to work for..

 

JC: The old Axe capital?

 

Michael: The real Axe capital, the fact the logo, I love carbon copy of the original SEC capital. The office is a carbon copy of the actual office that they have in Stamford, Connecticut.

 

JC: Well, now I have to go look online, I gotta find that. I love that show

 

Michael: So I work for CVX code for about five years and help grow one of the larger portfolios there. And then in 2012, I left SAC to join a join a guy named Jason Karpen, launching a hedge fund called turbulent capital is a global long short equity fund group that a couple billion dollars. Now this was on the east coast of New York, I moved from New York to LA, where I’m currently back in 2015, to take over the oldest hedge fund still in existence called Cyprus. So I was running Cyprus for about five years with my partner, Robert De, and who was the founder down in 1969, by the way, and after I was running Cyprus, I decided, you know, I’m gonna leave the fund management industry to pursue this idea that I have for quite some time to essentially democratize access to hedge funds, venture funds, private equity, etc. And that just give people access to a great asset class they’ve never had access to before, but also educate people on essentially financial literacy. So in a nutshell, what Prometheus is, it’s a social marketplace for alternative funds, they break that down really quickly into pieces in the marketplace from it, think of it almost like Robin Hood bed stuff coming here to buy and sell stocks, you’re shopping for hedge funds, venture funds, crypto funds, private equity, etc. And then how the social piece fits into the equation is that it serves as a safe and professional platform for these managers on Wall Street to actually feel comfortable posting content, because most managers on Wall Street, don’t post on Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook, etc. But they’re posting on Prometheus, and they’re posting in Prometheus right now. So it’s the only place that you could go to, to get real time insights and to interact directly with some of the best investors in the world. So they get the social part is Twitter, but with pros on Wall Street.

 

JC: Interesting. So now, does Prometheus offer the ability for you know, smaller investors? And by the way are these are these individual people are these licensed people that are on the app?

 

Michael: Individual people, anybody can join Prometheus, whether you are what’s called a credit investor or not. And so anybody could get access to the social and start learning and engaging directly with some of these professional managers get their real time insights in the markets. However, because of regulations, and very archaic regulatory laws, from warthog on 1933 and 1914, the marketplace right now is only available to accredited investors and above. So what’s the definition of a credit investor, it’s somebody who makes over 200 grand a year if they’re single, for instance, or has million dollar net worth or above so but what we want to do is we want to break down those barriers for folks to build access this product because it makes no sense to us that anybody can go to casino, gamble their money way anybody can lever up and buy whatever, you know, doge coin or whatever coin that they want to, but they can’t invest in a low volatility, uncorrelated hedge fund that consistently generates, you know, low double digit returns makes absolutely no sense for us. So we have to change these laws we’re going to evangelists for breaking down these laws. And but there are other things that we’re working on right now. Which will allow even on a credit investors to be able to participate in our marketplace. So stay tuned.

 

JC: Got it, so you have the social side for the unaccredited. And to be like you said to be an accredited investor, it’s really just about net worth. It’s not a license or anything like that?

 

Michael: There is a few different I guess, thresholds that you could meet on qualify to be an accredited investors. So there’s the income thresholds, that’s to only pay above there’s net worth threshold, which is a million dollars and above. And then most recently, though, and this is why do you think the SEC is sort of headed in the right direction is is that they allow you to be deemed accredited, even if you don’t meet the income, or the net worth threshold. If you’ve passed the series seven, I think the series 63, so you can get licensed and become accredited without meeting any of the income or net worth thresholds. So that’s a relatively new thing.

 

JC: Okay, let’s go backwards for a little second here. And we’ll come back to this because I want to I want to hear specifically later on, if there’s any advantages, or any cool features that licensed individuals can do within your platform, or if that’s coming, but for now, I want to know, why did you start this right? Like, I hear that you don’t like the laws? A lot of people start things because you get frustrated with something right? And you’re like, What sense does this make Why can’t you know you want to get in on this? But you know, what’s, what’s your villain origin story? When it comes to the day, you said, I’m leaving, I’m gonna keep calling it Axe cap. I just love this show so much. I’m leaving x cap. I’m going to LA and um, start this off where like, what what was that moment? Like? Why Why make that move? What what was really that tipping point for you? 

 

Michael: I always viewed myself as a white knight, not a villain, but I’ll take villain for today. So why did I start this thing? It’s a phenomenal question. It’s because I was a manager for 15 years before I started this thing on Wall Street. And there were just a lot of friction points and a lot of problems. A very apparent for me, you know, being an operator in the industry that I wanted to address that nobody else was addressing. So for instance, to give you an instance of how tech archaic our industry is, if you want to invest in a private equity fund, or a venture fund or hedge fund today, you got to fill out 100 Page subscription document structure by hand manually, oh, geez, if you want to, let’s say you want to invest in two separate funds, well, you’re essentially fill out the same information twice. Right? We’re in 2022 here. We have to automate this. So that’s just even a single example of how tech archaic the industry is. And I wanted to modernize the industry. Okay. And at the same point in time, you know, one of the things that was occurring during the pandemic was, Robin Hood became really popular, investing in the public equities markets, investing in general became culturally relevant, that where was the retail population going for their investment insights? They’re going to read it, you know, they’re doing this course they’re going to start with they’re going to Twitter, in which case, what are they doing, they’re sourcing investment advice. From other 19 year old kids who probably have no experience, have no idea what they’re talking about. I found that quite a bit dangerous. And quite frankly, you know, a lot of traders have learned the hard way over the past year, having lost a lot of money, probably trying to trade in these markets by taking insights about investing from people weren’t qualified to give those insights. And so I wanted to build a platform where users can come to, to learn financial literacy to learn the right way how to invest, and how to speculate that how to invest directly from the pros, there ain’t no better way to learn about investing from a practitioner, a professional who’s done this for many, many years, I wanted to give that to people. And then obviously, what I touched upon earlier, as well as giving people access to these great wealth, creating products, that was only previously in the purview of the ultra wealthy and the largest institutions, right. I want to make it available to doctors, lawyers, engineers, you know, these are all there’s a lot of credit people that don’t have access to this asset class.

 

JC: So is is there a b2b aspect to your software? For example, do you have anything in your in your system that you partner with companies with large amounts of employees, for example, where you can bring them on and then they their employees can benefit? Is there? Is there anything you I know you weren’t allowed to direct people but is there any any b2b aspect here that angle?

 

Michael: Absolutely, because our audience is twofold on the demand side, right? So what we were just talking about is certainly the retail community high net worth individuals, doctors, lawyers, etc. But then the other market that we’re actually also tackling on the demand side arm, you know, institutions, particularly RIAs, registered investment advisors, there’s 20,000 RIAs here in the US, and on average, they only have about 3% of their clients assets in alternatives. And it’s not because they don’t want 30, 40, 50% of their clients assets and alternatives. It’s because the average ra running $50 million in Wichita, Kansas has no ability to access the latest hedge fund venture fund etc. Right. So we wanted to build this platform to accommodate For those RAS as well, and maybe family offices, etc, then give them a place where they could discover managers, diligence and managers, one, please get to know them through the content that they’re posting, and finally be able to transact on the platform. In addition to that, on the supply side, so who’s our supply, our supply products or managers or hedge fund managers, private equity managers, venture managers, crypto managers, etc. Well, those are our suppliers with contracts with them, we give them essentially an external investor relations portal, where they can house all their content, all of their documents from marketing materials, investor letters, to their subscription documents, all in one place. Because what’s occurring right now is if you’re a fund manager, most fund managers actually also the investor relations person, you know, and if you meet with a prospective investor, let’s say I’m a fund manager, I met you, what would I do after the meeting, I would send you an email with seven different attachments, my marketing deck, my investor letters, my subscription docs, etc. And after every time I meet with a new investor, when so doing that at Prometheus, we could house all their documents so that the investor that you could just go straight to Prometheus and access all the information in one place. 

 

JC: Okay, now talk to me about so you say alternative investments? Are we talking like meme stocks? Are we talking startups? I mean, what, what is how do you define alternative investments?

 

Michael: Yeah, the way I like to define alternatives is, it’s anything that’s not traditional. So what is traditional, then? It’s stocks, bonds, and cash. Okay, so what’s in the umbrella of alternatives is very vast. It’s everything from hedge funds, venture funds, crypto funds, real estate funds, all the way down to artwork, to collectibles, buying and selling comic books, you know, paintings, you know, cars,

 

JC  

What about NFts? Are NFTs in that somehow?

 

Michael: Yes, they’re also they would also be considered alternative as well. And so what we’re focused on, though, is we are focused on funds. So we’re not the place to go to if you want to invest in somebody’s startup, okay? Or an entrepreneur startup or whatnot, you could go to Angel List, you could go Republic for that type of stuff. You come here, to invest in funds and fund managers that are picking the startups, for instance. And because I believe that most people in the world, they’re not investors, the doctors, lawyers, or engineers, etc. And it’s okay to have your own Robin Hood account, it’s okay to have your angel list account to dabble yourself. But heck, if you’re a lawyer, you know, in the courtroom all day long, you’re best served putting most of your capital with the Treasury manager that you’ve gotten to know and Prometheus.

 

JC: And are they are they categorized? Like I mean, like if I want to find a hedge fund manager that just does you know, green energy, for example, or or someone who just invest in NFTS or things like that, am I able to find those specific types in there?

 

Michael: Absolutely. They are all categorized. In fact, we have tags for each fun on our platform as well, through looking for a low volatility hedge fund that doesn’t correlate with the broader equities markets. Okay, here are the three funds on our platform that do that, oh, you’re looking for somebody who trades in crypto, here’s a fund that does that, you know, you’re looking for a venture fund that focuses on plant-based investing something that’s specific to that which we actually have one mitre ventures on our platform. We have that. So we allow you to build filter and search for funds on our platform,

 

JC: Does it show their success rate? Can you look and see how well they’ve been doing with their font?

 

Michael: Yes. We want what we want to provide any investor and Prometheus is ability to do your full end to end diligence on our platform, which includes everything from performance, which is what you’re alluding to, to their investment process, to the history of each of the managers as well.

 

JC: That’s interesting, because I wonder, you know, do you have when you have an access point like that, like your system, and you have access, like you said, it’s fund managers specify, specifically because people can pick ones that go in certain directions, my brain goes to like city and county funds, where there’s a political aspect, right? You might have a county that has or some governor of a state or a mayor of a city that has said we, you know, we want to we want to go green energy, for example, and approve that, you know, we’re putting our union funds or whatever, into XYZ company, and they could find that manager on your platform, I imagine. Right? So I mean, are you seeing that? Are you seeing either large, like unions or government entity funds, you know, retirement funds, things like that, you know, using your site and your system to find the places not only were to put their money, but also places where maybe they can feel good about putting their money there, for example.

 

Michael: So I’ll address this question a couple ways. Number one, just to be clear, our platform right now, it’s still invite only, in fact, we only launched it invite only about a month and a half ago, you know, but your question is an important one is what am I seeing in the broader sort of investment community for these different funds? And it’s not just municipalities or cities or governments or whatnot. It’s also there’s just a lot of folks that over the last few years have felt the need to okay, hey, is there a way that I could feel good about capitalism? But also, can you have a country positively to the world, right. And so there has been a shift in demand in quite a bit of demand for these ESG funds for an environmentally friendly funds for funds that only invest in you know, like carbon neutral companies like a Tesla or something like that. So there certainly is a drive in the industry, from individuals and corporates and governments alike, to head into this direction. And by the way, we actually have funds on our platform that donate one particular fund donates half of their profits to charity. Wow, you’ll definitely think about a hedge fund manager like Bobby or as being particularly, you know, charitable like that. But you know, that you’re sure to see a lot of that stuff pop up in the old world where these managers they want to get back.

 

JC: Yeah, that’s interesting. And that’s a good thing. Right? It’s great that that’s coming up. All right, well, it wouldn’t be The Future of BizTech, if I didn’t ask the futuristic question here. So let’s start with your company, you’re obviously very new on the market. What do you got coming down the pipeline? You know, what kind of roadmap can the users be? Looking forward to as far as options and things they’re gonna be able to do here in the future on your system? Yes, sure.

 

Michael: We’ll talk about perhaps a couple of different features on our near term roadmap. And I could also talk about, you know, longer term stuff as well. So in the short term, a couple of things. One is we talked about how much friction there is to invest in an alts fund today, having a photo 100 Page subscription document, have completed building the software, and we’re integrating into our platform over the course of the next that’s called a month or two, in ability to basically almost do one click Checkout, to invest in an alts fund. So what we do is this the first time you come on Prometheus to invest in any fund, we make you fill out the Prometheus subscription document, okay, think of that, as a master set up, we say that information and create an investor passport around each user. And then what we do is every future transaction you want to make as an investor on the platform, well, we use, we auto populate every other set back and forth, that all you have to do is Docusign and wire the money, you know, was getting as close to one click Checkout as possible, making it as frictionless as possible, that is coming to our platform over the course of the next month or two. In addition to that, there’s a lot of really cool stuff on a roadmap that we really want to build in. So for instance, groups, the ability for a financial content creator, to start a group chat, for instance, on our platform, and make it a paid group to monetize your audience. So there’s a lot of these 1000s of financial content creators that write newsletters on substack or have podcasts, you know, etc. And they want to monetize their audience in a chat room, they will be able to do that on Prometheus, you know, in charge 15 bucks a month, or 20 bucks a month, whatever it is that they want, you know, so those are a couple..

 

JC: Like a creator subscription content

 

Michael: Exactly in a chat room with, hey, you know, maybe your fund manager or retired fund manager, let’s call it, you know, and you’re still trading with your own capital, you put out a lot of content and you want to monetize your audience. Well, this is where allowing your audience to come to a daily chat room with you where you’re giving them your real time, thoughts on the markets. And, and to be able to, you know, obviously charge a subscription fee for that. So that’s a couple of sort of large items on our roadmap over the near term, but longer term, you know, what is our goal for the company? Well, we want to be that central place, where everybody whether you’re an individual or institution to go to to access all of your alternative investments, you know, simple plain, end of story, right? Be the Amazon essentially of alternatives. And then at some point in time, be that central place where you go to to get insights directly from the pros, credible insights about investing about the markets. First place you go to is Prometheus. Yeah, you don’t go to stock twits or Twitter or any of that stuff. You come at Prometheus. So that’s sort of our longer term goal.

 

JC: But where do you see just your industry going in the next five or 10 years, whether it be, you know, technology wise legislation The wise right, you know, a lot different shifting political winds, culturally, you know, where do you see just you and all your competitors that are doing something similar going to be in the next five to 10 years?

 

Michael: Sure. I think number one, there is a lot of demand from retail and broader retail community to get exposure to alternatives, just to give you a frame of reference, if you’re a billionaire family office, typically you have that’s quite 40% of your assets in alternatives already, you know, because they’ve had access alternatives to the ultra wealthy, etc. The typical doctor, lawyer, retail person has close to 0% of their assets in alternatives. And so I do believe that over the course of the not just the next few years, but over the course of the next three decades, you’re going to see that shift from traditional investments within a retail portfolio to alternatives. And that’s going to grow from 0%, close to 0%. What is today to something above that it’s 10, 15,  20, 30%. And that’s a mix shift of trillions of dollars. And we want to be at the center of that, obviously, you know, but in order for that to also happen in a big way, you do need some changes in the legislation. So that’s one thing that you mentioned there. And I do believe that at least the SEC, given that they allow somebody to be  credit to be able to invest in alternative products, if they passed some of these license tests. I do believe they’re probably headed in the right direction. And I’d like to see more though, like why do we even have this $200,000 threshold? or million dollar net worth threshold? What Why do we even need that there? At the very least take it down to something a lot lower? Right? Or, you know, better yet, just eliminate that standard altogether? And because these laws, just so you know, we’re talking about the Securities Act of 1933. And 1940. I mean, FDR was President, you know, when these laws were enacted, like the biggest invention was scotch tape, things have changed in the last 80 years. 

 

JC: I still use scotch tape, I don’t know.

 

Michael: I’ve nothing againts Scotch tape. And but the point of matter is, is that a lot of things have changed, technology has changed. You know, the reason why these laws were put in place was due to what happened during the Depression. Like, you know, we’re in a different stage. And we’re in a different era right now. So the laws need to change. And from a technological standpoint, I do believe that our industry today, I like to say is equivalent to brick and mortar retail of 20 years ago. You know, if you believe in technology and advancements, then everybody’s got all the funds, all the people they’re going to be in Prometheus, right to build transact frictionless. And, and that’s what we offer, you know, we built the tools to be able to process these transactions frictionless. So I do believe that companies like ours, will do a lot in removing all different frictions, all different barrier points for people to be able to access alternative products.

 

JC: Perfect. I have one question left for you. Completely unrelated, in a way. What did you want to be as a kid? And then and it is this it? And if not, how did it get to this?

 

Michael: Yeah, so what I want to do is get almost like shifted, depending on the age, but certainly in middle school, what was I doing a lot I was doing two things. So I was playing a lot of video games. So particularly a game called Duke Nukem 3d. ,

 

JC: I remember Duke Nukem. 

 

Michael: And actually I used to I used to compete. And you know, and I think at one point, I was ranked like 11th in the world or something.

 

JC: No kidding?

 

Michael: I’m a total nerd obviously. The other thing I used to do a lot with skateboard. And so I either wanted to be a professional , which nowadays, that’s actually respectable profession, you can actually make a lot of money just asking Kinja, you know, back then not very respectable. And certainly my parents did not want me to go in that direction. And then skateboarding, I just love skateboarding. I would skate for like four hours a day, and doing tricks and stairs and railways and all that type of stuff. But listen, I wasn’t good enough, by any means to become a professional at that, you know? So how did I shift from those sort of more personal interests to investing? Well, it’s actually because my parents were immigrants from Taiwan. And when we came to America, we didn’t have much money. And it was actually through investing my parents teaching themselves how to invest in the markets, how to invest in real estate and stuff like that, that they realize the American dream. So I grew up, you know, watching my parents wake up early in the morning to trade stocks, you know, and so I was exposed to a very early age, and maybe in the back of my head, subconsciously, it was alright, ultimately, I’m going to do this. Maybe I’ll be a bit rebellious or trying to do skateboarding or stuff like that beforehand. And so it was always an interest of mine. And you know, in high school, I was trading and I was the president Investment Club and doing all that stuff. So it was, it was probably going to happen, I was always interested in in plus I grew up exposed to investing at a very early age.

 

JC: Very cool. Now you didn’t mention that it’s invite only, right? 

 

Michael: It is invite only right now. However, for listeners of your show, I want to get an access today. So use the code bird B-I-R-D, to get to create a free account, this entire platform is free. And go to Prometheus Altstadt comm to Axios or Google Prometheus in the Apple App Store. And you could do that there too.

 

JC: Awesome. And how can people reach you maybe personally if they need to a way of kind of high level talks or deals?

 

Michael: Sure, you can visit me on my instagram, it’s Mike_Prometheus. And so you can reach me there, you can reach me on LinkedIn as well search for Michael Wayne Prometheus, and you’ll find me there as well. So, and also, we have our own direct message platform on Prometheus. So get on Prometheus, direct message me, I always reply.

 

JC: Very cool. I’m for everyone listening out there. Again, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to this podcast, get a five star rating with some comments behind it. So other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all these amazing and helpful b2b software’s and on the market today. Again, Michael, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. And I am going to check it out. I think it’s really cool. And, and I’m gonna like I said, I’m gonna be doing some research on the old company. And I’m gonna start looking at images on Google to see how it compares to Axe capital and you..

 

Michael: If you want some that was your age. I have those two. We could do that over a beer. So I’m probably..

 

JC: Oh yeah, I’ll take that. I’ll take you up on that. Awesome. Thanks for being on the show. Michael. Have a good one.

Learn more about Eduflow at: www.eduflow.com

Find David Wind on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/utdiscant/

 

JC: Welcome, everyone to another episode of the Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger, and I have another fantastic guest with me on the show today. And listen, if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following this podcast wherever you’re listening. And be sure to give it a five star review, you know something nice with some comments on there. Because that is how other techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this. And today I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing the CEO and co founder of Eduflow. David Wind.  David, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tell the audience a bit about yourself and what it is that Eduflow does.

 

David: Yeah, thanks for having me. Yes, a bit about myself a bit about the company. So myself, I’m a programmer, I guess since I was a kid, I’ve always loved to fiddle with computers and bytecode. So I thought I was going to be a software developer. But during my studies, I switched to math, I did a PhD. So it looked I was coming in like I was coming a researcher. But during my PhD I started teaching, and the course I was teaching got to large basically, for me to handle, I had 150 students submitting work every week that I had to grade. And I don’t know, 40 hours of grading every week didn’t sound like super appealing. So the Mathematician me came out and said, like, Hmm, I wonder if there’s like a scalable solution to this. So I ended up coding up this peer feedback product for myself, essentially, where the students would grade each other’s work. And then I didn’t have to do it. And that sounded pretty good to me. And my supervisor liked it. So he convinced me to sell a license to the department. And that’s how this company started, actually as a different company, back then it was called peer grade. And it was a peer to peer feedback product. Seven years later, it’s it’s now called air to flow. And it’s a learning platform. So there’s a lot of things happening in that time period. But basically, we raised the money, we learned a lot of things about our product and our users, and decided to go for an even bigger opportunity. So Edulfow is a platform to build online courses that are active and collaborative. So where people do something and learn together with others, so a lot of it is stuff we borrowed from the tier grade product, and a lot of it is new things.

 

JC: Did you find a spike in your services with all the COVID stuff over the last couple years? Or has it been more or less relevant and useful, I guess, is my point?

 

David: It’s definitely not been negative for us, right? Like online learning has become a mandatory part of everybody’s life. Students are all at home companies are remote, it’s been winning our backs, I think. So in the big scheme of things has been very positive. And then on the other side, like when a crisis hits, and everybody panics, they have a tendency to go for the established players, right? You don’t experiment in the middle of a pandemic. So I think the big the big players had a lot more wind in their back. But we’ve seen a lot more respect for online learning. And I think now is actually the best time like now people have established new roles and rules and processes. And they’re like, Okay, we’re over the pandemic, but we’re still going to be at home. So let’s try to do do it well now, and not just survive.

 

JC: So what is the main usage of your platform? Like can you visualize it for the audience of like, if they were to log in.. like, who are they who, you know, who’s your main clientele specifically, like actually users that are using it? And then and what is their experience? What are they mostly going on there to do?

 

David: It’s actually a really hard question to answer for me, because our user base is extremely broad, right? So we have everything from middle school teachers using it to teach history to Google and Accenture, doing corporate training. We have sales training, we have onboarding, we have compliance training, we have university courses, we have everything. So it’s hard for me to kind of pinpoint the perfect user in that sense. But if you want to imagine it, I think a lot of people are familiar with course platforms like Coursera, and so on, when you log into a course, in the course, there are some activities you have to go through to complete the course. It’s kind of a flow looks as well. And then basically, the people we cater to are people who teach with more than just videos and quizzes, if your whole course is just 10 videos, put them on YouTube, that’s fine.

 

David: But if your course requires that people do something, ride something, think a little bit deeper talk to each other, then Eduflow’s probably benefit. So I guess a good example would ,be sales training, right? Like the best way to learn to sell is to sell, you have to like actually do the pitch, you can’t just read more and more blog posts about how to do a good pitch, you have to try it. So in at flow, you could record a pitch on like a live video thing. And then other people could give you feedback on that pitch inside Dataflow. So I think sales training is a great example of a good fit for the product.

 

JC: Okay, and then I’m marketing guy, right, but by nature, so I always have to ask the question, what kind of marketing are you doing that’s getting your brand, you know, out there? I mean, you’re on a podcast, right? That’s one. Great. So we’re doing this. So we know PR is part of it. What else are you guys doing on a day to day basis to just tell people about, about Eduflow?

 

David: It’s we actually, I think we’re kind of nonstandard on the marketing side, honestly. So most of our growth is purely word of mouth, which is fine. That’s it’s good. But it’s also hard to control and how to boost, right. So it’s a bit tricky. And we don’t really run any ads, we do a bit of content marketing. So we write blog posts, but but the main thing we’re focusing on right now is actually producing courses as content. So we have a course platform. And we have a profile of who could a buyer of Eduflow. So it could be someone with a title, Instructional Designer, for example. So what we do is we build courses for instructional designers, we let them enroll for free, and then we host a course on Dataflow. So when they take this course, then they get to talk to us, they get to experience the product as a learner. And they get to like, hear a bit about what Eduflow is as part of the course. And then afterwards, they’ve seen it their experience that they know about it, they think we’re good guys that give away free courses. So that’s actually our biggest marketing play right now. We call it 84 Academy.

 

JC: This summer, I know HubSpot is does that whole Academy side, you know, if you’re a SAS having the educational side, too, something that you can help with as a big deal. I know multiple, very successful SaaS companies that do that models, that’s actually pretty smart. And we’ll let you guys do that. And it’s helpful for the people who want it, right. I mean, educate having a free education on there, helps them and then it, you know, helps solidify your brand as well. So that’s very cool.

 

David: Like, I’m tired of this blog post, rarely, I read a blog post, and they’re like, Oh, you want to download this five page PDF, you just have to give us your email to get the PDF. And I’m like, that’s not how PDFs work. I could just download a PDF, you’re putting me on a list, right? That’s fair enough, like, but it doesn’t feel very legitimate. But if I enroll in a free course, on a course platform, I’m like, I probably have to get my email to enroll in this course anyways, right? So it feels higher value, it feels more legitimate to ask for an email. So people are very willing to give away the emails to get a whole free course. And then I guess the extra benefit for us compared to like HubSpot Academy is that our product is actually the cost product, right? So like course is such a good fit for us, because it’s the only thing we want to show them. It’s the actual course it doesn’t matter what the course is about, honestly, it’s just take your course with us and then we’re happy.

 

JC: Yeah, no, that was I’m a marketer. So I get the whole gated content thing, but your version is better. It’s just, you know, it takes a lot more work, right. And I think the reason why you see the name and email for a PDF is that’s far less work than building a whole free course, you know, but you know, for the people who put in the work, they usually get the bigger..

 

David: I actually made a few courses very tricky, because I had like a couple blog posts doing extremely well on SEO, like 1000s of clicks a week. Okay, and again, I was like, What do I do with these blog posts? Like, what do I actually do as a CTA? And I was like, what if I just spent an hour or two, taking the content of that blog post, chopping it up and making it into our calls, like, I did that in like, an hour and a half and then I had a course that’s like, it’s pretty rough. It’s basically just a blog post in, like, we’ve reached off the way with a bit of like investment discussion activity to see like, what did you learn from this, and so on. And here, we have a piece of content that actually had meaningful CTA on the blog post.

 

JC: It’s smarter to me to repurpose old content and modernize it, and then push that out. And again, it’s free. I mean, it’s not like you charge $1,000 for the course, you know, you can give them enough to where they can, if they put in the work, they can do the work themselves, or, you know, they could be part of the software. So again, smart marketing ploy coming from a veteran marketer, I like it, I like to do it. But the podcast being The Future of BizTech, we’re gonna talk about the future for a second here. So two part question. I’ll give you the first part first, where do you see Eduflow going in the next six months to a year? You know, what are some cool features coming down on your roadmap that my listeners can get kind of the first scoop on?

 

David: Yeah. So I think today we categorize ourselves kind of like a learning management system. It’s kind of like an exotic term, right? But but it’s like a place to manage your learning. Most people when they build a learning management system, they start with all the important administrative work, like how to enroll people in courses in the right way and a course library and managing the institution. We build none of that, because  we started with a pure feedback through it kind of came in from the side. So we have a platform today where the course experience is extremely good. Like the learning experience is very good. There’s a little bit of lack on the institutional administration side, like compared to some of the bigger players in the market. So a lot of our roadmap right now is to try and kind of fix that and build all the stuff you need if you have 10,000, or 100,000 people in your organization that you need to manage, that sounds pretty boring.

 

David: But the way we’re approaching it is to try to build a piece of software that’s very, very flexible, and kind of has some of these modern ideas that you know, from Serbia, for example, right. So you have these like no code tools today where you can connect all the tools together, like if this happens in this tool, then do this thing over and that tool, basically one of the things we’re building into it for right now, it’s it’s that part. So instead of building a hundred different features in a flow to do different things, if other things happen, we’re building in like an automation system where you can say, If a participant joins my institution, then enroll them in this course. Or if a person completes this activity in this course, then give them this property and add them to this article. So you can basically set up your own rules and workflows, which is our codename for right now, to set up this whole automated institution that everything just runs on its own. And we have to like build the programming language, basically, that people will build these automations in, which is like a super tricky task. But hopefully, once we do that, then it will just give us 1000 features, we never thought about building because they’ll be able to like, connect the building blocks on their own. It’s called so the way to flow works in general is that it’s all very modular, it’s all very building block style, to where you connect different things and add them on top of each other to get what you want.

 

JC: Very cool. All right, well, then let’s go to part two of the question, which is, where do you see the industry that you’re in going, you know, an online training industry in general, in the next, you know, five years or so, you know, in regards to either technology that’s that’s on the horizon or legislation? I don’t know. Where do you see you and all your competitors going in the next five years?

 

David: It’s good question, right? Online training has been around for a lot of years by Now people always think of this like, oh, it’s totally new. It’s not totally new, right? Like, like 40 years. So what’s happened recently, I guess, is that the internet as a whole, we’ve gotten to a place where content is abundant, right? There’s so much content. So people who teach online, they can’t just have more videos than the next guy, right? It’s not going to be enough to have better content, because YouTube has infinite content, and it’s good. So if you want to sell a call, so you want to attract people to your courses, you need to offer them something more. And people are attacking this problem from different angles, right? Some people are talking about communities, like how to build communities around the causes. Some people are talking about collaborative learning and active learning like we are, a lot of people used to work cohort-based courses these days where you take the course together with others, it’s still the same code. But now there’s like this feeling of, of group doing it together some social motivation. And I think all those ideas, I don’t know if they’re here to stay forever. But right now, they’re here, and they won’t die for now at least. And so I think that’s, that’s a big part of it. And then I think learning technology is, it’s not the fastest moving technology all the time, it’s a little bit old school so much still. So there’s a lot of potential for just making more slick technology solutions, especially when it comes around integrating products with each other. A lot of, if you run a course, today, you probably use a handful, at least of different learning products. And they don’t play together very nicely, unfortunately so I think there’s a lot of potential in integrating and embedding things in in a very neat way. So the user can have a very good experience, but actually be using multiple products as part of the course.

 

JC: I feel like machine learning and some AI can take place too, because like you’re talking about you have your workflows, and you’re setting those, I think I’d be really cool. If one day the system can learn enough about the process where it can decide where to put people, right? Where we can actually start giving insights to the managers as to who is better suited me for certain positions, you know, how long did they do on the testing? How fast did they get through it? You know, things like that, right? I feel like there’s an AI component somewhere in there one day for online training, which I think it’d be really useful. So yeah, I was like thinking about, you know, like, what’s coming down, right. I’m, I geek out on that, that future stuff, right? Go figure, you know, Future of BizTech Podcast. Let me ask you question..

 

David: I did a PhD in machine learning, right? So I think a lot about AI, and how it’s gonna affect us. And it’s funny, right? When I talk to people about online learning, they always expect me to be the Polish guy when it comes to AI. So like, it’s got to take over everything. I think I’m the most kind of conservative guy and whole AI learning group, I think most products probably don’t need AI, they should probably just like forget about it and build a better onboarding experience, because that’s going to make them more rich. But it does sound cool. When the customers asked like, do you have AI? Yeah, we have like super advanced AI. And we don’t hide, it’s just, we just solved the things by reviews, like, and then everything’s happy right? You could call it AI, but it’s just counting and sorting is like, what 90% Of the companies do? I do think there are, there are places where AI will make a massive impact in online learning. But most companies probably just do it to sound cool, unfortunately.

 

JC: Yeah I mean, you know, humans, we spent a lot of time thinking about AI. And I think I think we’re okay, until AI starts spending a lot of time thinking about us, then we’re in trouble, right?

 

David: It’s a matter of time. It’s just a matter of time.

 

JC: Let me ask you, what did you know there’s a personal question here. What, what did you want to do when you grew up? But when you’re a kid, right, like, what was your your dream job or career? And then was it this or didn’t? How did it get here?

 

David: It was definitely not an Ed Sec CEO. I wanted to go. I wanted to make games, right. I like the computers. Because you for our games.

 

JC: Not too far off. Yeah..

 

David: Not too bad, right? So I did start, when I started programming, I started making games. And I think it’s the gateway drug to programming is building your own game, right? Like, oh, I can make my own game. And then I started, I think I even started university, wanting to be like a software / game developer. And I did build games. Right. But then, I don’t know, got ruined, I think I realized I was a good programmer, right in my bachelor’s degree and already programming since I was small kids. So I think I realized that I could take all the programming courses. And I could do well. But I could also take all the math courses instead, which I did not like. And it’s kind of sucked at math, but I’ll still be okay, programming, but then I could learn something new. So I switched to math. And then I think that kind of pulled me into machine learning eventually. So it’s all kind of it’s all accidents after accident, right? And then I ended up going away from the games. And now I don’t know I still kind of miss Mr. Games, but..

 

JC: Maybe like, you know, maybe one day after you exit, you see yourself taking all your your winnings, and going back into games, back to home.

 

David: I have some kids now I hope they’ll grow up and start building their own games. I would love that. That’d be so fun.

 

JC: Are you making a cool game? Like just for your kids? Right? Like, yeah, that’d be pretty special. That’s awesome. Well, listen how can people reach you or, you know, directly if they’ve got maybe higher end deals they want to do? And then how can they reach the company itself?

 

David: Yeah, you can always reach me on any. It’s easy to reach, right? But like David@Eduflow.com is the easiest way. LinkedIn, Twitter, Google my name. It’s fairly uniquely named, I think, which is nice. So I shouldn’t be too hard to find that I put my email everywhere. So like, that’s okay, I get a lot of spam. But..

 

JC: Hey, you know, inbox zero at some point, get an assistant, you know? Well, listen, for everyone out there listening again. If you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to this podcast, give it that five stars we talked about put some cool comments. So other techies like us can enjoy it, and learn all the cool, amazing new helpful b2b software’s that are on the market today. And listen, David, I just want to thank you so much for being on the show. I think it’s cool what you’re doing, you know, that workflow style, you know, online education, training, very, very useful in today’s b2b economy, especially when mostly we’re working from home and they’re not going to have a lot of that as much as that in person training. You know, this is kind of the new normal, you know, we think a lot of people are gonna be staying on a high percentage. So I wish you the best of luck and thanks for coming on the show.

 

David: Yeah, thanks for having me. Awesome.

 

JC: Bye.

Learn more about Remotion at: www.remotion.com

Find Alexander Embiricos on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/embirico/

 

JC: Welcome, everyone to another episode of The Future of Biz Tech. I’m your host, JC Granger and I have another fantastic guest on the show with us today. And listen, if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following this podcast wherever you’re listening, and be sure to give us a five star review preferably with some comments in there that always helps the algos because that is how other techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this. So today I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing Alexander Embiricos, who is Co-Founder and CEO of Remotion.com. Alexander, thank you so much for being on the show. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what it is that you guys do.

 

Alexander: Cool. Thank you so much for having us JC, really appreciate it. So I’m the CEO of a company called Remotion. We’re a b2b SaaS company that helps leaders just like you build closer, more effective teams. and especially engineering teams, the way that we do it is we build something that we call a virtual office that helps teams feel connected and foster those missing casual conversations that you don’t get when you’re working remotely anymore. Quick backstory about me, I came to the states for college, funnily enough, because I wanted to build military aircraft, ended up getting into tech instead, was like a product manager at Dropbox, three years very formative experience. From there started a gaming company—completely failed. And as I was wandering the desert, figure out what I wanted to do, I started working with another Co-Founder, we were working on something else, but he moved to Chicago, this is a little before COVID. And we’re like, Well, we really want to work together. But all the advice says we shouldn’t co found a company remotely. And we don’t like all the advice of how to do it. There’s got to be a problem here. We started looking into it, built Remotion on the side and Remotion ended up becoming the main thing, half a year later, COVID hit. And it’s been a pretty wild journey since then.

 

JC: That is, I mean, lucky, but unfortunate timing, right? You know, nobody wants a pandemic, but it sounds like your software became very relevant in a short amount of time, I imagine. So, you know, what is it about I mean, a lot of people are probably gonna think, Okay, well, what’s the difference between what your software does versus just people getting on, like, Zoom meetings? Like, you know, walk.. paints the picture, I’m curious, you know, what kind of features are expanded into it to allow a better collaboration remotely? 

 

Alexander: Yeah, for sure. I mean, so, there’s a lot of like, really awesome research about this. And I think there’s gonna be even more great research over the coming years. But when you look at what people find hard about working remotely, it’s not actually getting work done. Like a lot of people are getting even more work done than before. The challenges for individual contributors tend to be like, maybe loneliness, especially if you’re younger, like you’re out of school, right? Like you move to a city so that you could like make friends and not feel like you can’t, right, that sucks. Maybe it’s forming new relationships, onboarding, maybe cheap teams changing up? And so when we look at what, what is it about the office that helps that happen, it’s not actually the fact that you’re you’re sitting in the same room or something, it’s the fact that you can have conversations outside of your transactional meetings, right? There’s like maybe 21 bouts of small talk throughout a week for an average person in an office. And that’s what’s missing. When you’re remote. Those conversations lead to trust, trust leads to higher productivity. So as a leader, like you’re trying to build trust in your team, and you have Zoom, zoom is great for getting work done. But it’s not leading to those smaller trust building conversations. And, you know, we’ve seen a bunch of leaders posting like happy hours week after week, and it works well, the first two weeks, and then people stop showing up, right? And it’s sort of a limit to what you can do with like scheduled programming. And that’s why we think, Hey, you used to have an office, and now you need a virtual office. So happy to talk about features.

 

JC: Yeah, well, that’s interesting, because, okay, so and again, correct me if I’m wrong here, because a lot of people have, let’s say, Slack, for example. Right? But those are typically going to be more professional talks. Are you saying that essentially, one of the features is that it allows people that have completely unrelated like, work, you know, personal work, discussions, whatever, you know, in a format, like on their screen where they can just kind of chit chat, like, you know, like water cooler style? Like, is that kind of what you’re saying as well to kind of help create that more personal connection?

 

Alexander: Yeah, basically, our goal as a company is to create the space for conversations of between like two and three people. So like, small amount, the whole company, conversations between two and three people, where you talk about something that wasn’t like pre-planned or transactional, so it could be like, “Hey, how your kids?” could be, “Hey, how’s your dog?” It could also be like, hey, what’s the latest on this project? As well, like, that’s fine. But we view success is when we’ve had those conversations start happening on your team, where they weren’t happening as much before, funnily enough, like, if you look at the statistics, when COVID started, there was like an uptick in the amount of emails that were sent across teams by like, 25%. And that lasted for about three months. And this is across industries, not just tech, we were like, Okay, we’re gonna email more because like, we’re not getting stuff done, right? And that didn’t last it was like super tiring. And then what we ended up with instead, is an increase in video meeting load by like, 20%. Right? No surprise, six months later, Zoom fatigue hits, and everyone’s like, I don’t want any more video calls. Right? And so we still haven’t figured out how to get those, those small group casual conversations going. And that’s, that’s what we enable. I’ll tell you the story. There’s, we’ve spent a lot of time iterating and figuring out how to enable that – fun fact water cooler conversations like those don’t actually work. Everyone’s tried like water cooler stuff. And, you know, this just people just don’t use them. It’s it doesn’t make sense when you’re remote.

 

JC: That’s interesting. So then, does your software also include the ability for the actual professional conversations like I guess, for example, is it a separate software? Like we have slack, right? Okay. So with your software, they’ll be like, Okay, well, you can transfer to this, which is like Slack, you can do all your professional stuff, and you can still operate like real company, but then additionally has these more personal features to it, or is it like, no, it’s a whole separate thing?

 

Alexander: No. So that’s like kind of a great end state that we’re aiming for. But if you think about when slack was first adopted, like, I don’t know, when you folks got on Slack, maybe slack was probably dominant. It’s been dominant for ages. But when teams were first adopting slack, they weren’t thinking hey were gonna, like move our entire, like, I don’t know, Yammer or over to this, right? They were just like, oh, like these other people at my workplace are like laughing about these GIFs that are being sent around. And like, I’m missing out. So I want to download this tool too. So I’m not missing out on the gifts, right? And then over time, they get adoption for that. And then it’s like, well, actually, that’s pretty good tool, let’s do more and more work in here. And then slack slowly took over that way. And now slack is a, like, if you start a new company, what are you gonna do, you’re gonna, like, register your company, or whatever, and you’re gonna, you’re gonna open a Slack, right? So that’s kind of the approach that we’re taking here. Remotion can help your team be more productive. And when the pandemic first hit, that was actually how we were marketing, our tool was like, Hey, this is going to help your team more productive by enabling shorter conversations that are unscheduled, so you can cancel those meetings. But what happened is, as the as teams started figuring out how to work remotely during the pandemic, as all our competition got their act together, and as people resume fatigue, the value proposition of being more productive through more short conversations started to be really bad. It wasn’t even like a neutral value proposition people like actively did not want it. And this is something we kind of expected, although it happened faster than we thought. And now we’re what we’re building is we’re solving for the thing that people know is the hardest problem, which is, hey, how do I connect with my team or as a leader? How do I structure an environment where my team can naturally build relationships? And eventually, when teams adopt Remotion, they start doing all their work in Remotion. But we don’t pitch it that way. At all know, we’re like, Hey, you’re part of your team building diet, like, you know, you’re gonna do a happy hour once a month.

 

JC: ..progresses in that way?

 

Alexander: Totally yeah

 

JC: Got it. Okay, so who’s your perfect type of client? I mean, I know you obviously could something like this could work with any industry, but like, Who do you guys really, really like working with? Or which industry? Do you find gravitate has been gravitating towards this more than others?

 

Alexander: Yeah, for sure. So I mean, it’s actually been kind of interesting making that choice. We have customers from all over the world across a variety of industries from like architecture, even legal firms, and of course, tech firms. But as we’ve been sort of looking at the numbers, and figuring out what works best, it’s pretty clear right now that our focus should be on tech firms or tech, adjacent firms, like, you know, firms, maybe like your firm would still make sense for us, right? Even though you’re not like a pure software play. And then within those, the size that makes the most sense, for us, the moment is somewhere between like 11 and 80 people somewhere that range pretty wide range, but not less than 10 people, and 250 plus, we have some customers, but it’s harder for remote to work there. And then our, you know, it’s a multiplayer product, but the person who we need to champion our product tends to be a leader, someone who’s actually thinking about how the team works and the team culture on a day to day basis. So if I was gonna tell you, my perfect person, find me an engineering co founder at like a 50 person company who thinks about their team’s culture, and I would I would love to talk to that person. 

 

JC: And then what about what about like, sales managers? Right? Because I know that the sales, sales departments sometimes struggle, especially remotely to have those kinds of relationships. And because they’re very active, like, those personalities are very active. And those personalities typically struggle more being remote than most. So what about sales? 

 

Alexander: Totally. the sort of the top three functions that user emotion are say, so engineering first, then sales, and then operations, like, you know, customer support or something. So sales is right up there. Now, hopefully I’m not going to offend anyone on this podcast, and I’m sure you’ll edit me out if this is going to be offensive. But one of the dynamics we’ve observed is that at a 50 person, company or 80 person company, we start in one function, and then the entire companies are Remotion. But how that works depends on who uses Remotion first. So I’m a product manager by training. Let me tell you something, you ask an engineer, if they want to spend more time talking to me, and they don’t?

 

JC: Yeah, that’s what I thought like Engineering talk to people?

 

Alexander: So here’s the thing. And again, this is, you know, we’re having fun with this. But nobody wants to spend more time talking to their PM. And so if you have the pm champion, a communication tool, no one’s down. Yeah, right. But everyone wants to spend more time talking to people who are billing software at a software company, right, the PMs want to talk to them. The designers want to talk to them. The salespeople want to talk to them, too. Right?

 

JC: Yeah true, questions from their prospects – they can answer.

 

Alexander: Totally. So the reason that we like targeting engineering so much is because they are a Nexus from which we can grow. We actually have some really successful sales deployments, yet, even bigger companies, too. But we’ve noticed that those tend to stay more within sales, and they don’t tend to spread to other orgs as much I think, because of these dynamics we just talked about.

 

JC: I bet you didn’t see that happening when you first start the software. Yeah, but that’d be like a really interesting discovery, right?

 

Alexander: No, it was super interesting. And, you know, I, you know, this is my, I guess, my second startup, but the first one failed so badly. I think of it as my first. And you know, for me, it’s been kind of interesting, because at the beginning, I was like, yeah, like Remotion is for anyone who works remotely and I wasn’t thinking about, like, which function should we land at? I wasn’t thinking about what company size made sense. It was just like anyone should use this. And it’s, it’s sort of been an increase in discipline that we’ve been gradually building that helps us distribute the product better, and also build better features.

 

JC: What is that you have your target demographic down? It takes time, right? I mean, I started my agency like 11 years ago. And you know, we started off just like every other agency doing everything for everyone, right? Because they kept asking for more stuff. Like we actually only started off with one service, but we just kept saying, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then eventually, you know, that growth curve kind of starts to peak and you’re like, Alright, now you kind of want to start saying no, no, right? And then you start dialing on exactly like who your your perfect audiences. So I get that I just, I just, I had a feeling that there’s no way you anticipated Engineering, being the department that was gonna end up being the the growth point in an organization, but I follow the logic, right? There’s no way I would have called I would have lost all my money, if I if I had to bet on i, right? I think that’s super interesting. It makes sense. So on that note, then let’s talk… you got your target demographic dining, find you to that point, where you understand who your most your best audiences, obviously, like you said, anyone could use this, right? A lot of big companies could use this and small ones, too. But you figured out who it is. So what are you doing right now? Cuz I’m a marketing guy. I like to hear what people are doing for marketing. What are you doing right now to get the word out- you’re on a podcast, that’s one. Okay. What else? How are you getting a hold of engineers in the tech space?

 

Alexander: Totally. And you know, a lot of this is pretty new to us, like the focusing in on engineering specifically is happening kind of like as we speak. So still early stages here. But the thing that works, the best that we think will continue to work. scalably is content content seems to be working pretty well. For us. We have a unusual point of view on remote work in many ways. For example, blog posts coming out next week about what we call objective based recruiting, happy to talk about if you’re interested, but the content seems to be a good source of acquisition for us. And we’re trying to figure out how to scale that viral loops, also very effective and incredibly challenging for us. So you know, viral loop is basically when you give someone a reason to share, and then you make it easy to share, our product is really effective at spreading within a company. But once we are basically the tool for the company, we don’t spread to the next company unless people get drinks together and talk about it, which doesn’t happen as much during COVID. And so we’re trying to figure out, like, you know, how can we let people take the value that they get within their company promotion and use that across companies? So that’s, you know, viral loops, the second answer there. And the third thing that we’re beginning to test is actually, hey, like, we have this hypothesis around sales, you know, maybe not the number one hypothesis for target audience. But it’s interesting, let’s dig in. But we don’t seem to be acquiring as many teams that are in sales. So we’re actually starting to test like light outbound, more targeted, sort of performance marketing, very, very early experiments, but just so we can test other hypotheses with that.

 

JC: Is there anything you’ve done? That absolutely did not work? Like, you’re like, I tried this marketing, and it completely failed, like nobody can..

 

Alexander: No, I mean, just so we’re learning, right? We’re really learning that. Just to give you an example of how much like we fell flat on our faces so many times. So the way this company, the way we even got started. And so we’ve raised the series A now. We’ve raised $13 million, which still feels pretty…

 

JC: Congratulations!

 

Alexander: Thank you, although I will say like in today’s climate, that’s like, not the same number as it was. But, you know, the way that that happened was, we had this idea, we had this product, COVID hid and we’re like, wow, our products not ready. But we just feel bad not letting people use this because this is useful. So we put it out on a website called Product Hunt, which you probably know, and a bunch of people just signed up, we had no idea what we’re doing, we just put it there, and a bunch of people signed up. And that usage led to our Series A right? But we didn’t earn that usage. When I think about it, we just put our product on a site and like people came, it’s like the engineer screen. And so I remember the first few cycles of goal setting after the product launch, we’re like, cool, we’re just gonna assume the line will keep going up. And it didn’t, because we didn’t do anything. We just assume that it would keep going up because people would talk about it. And so we’ve really had to learn, you know, what are the things that work? What are the things that don’t work and how to create like discipline around getting things done? So I realized you asked, like, what doesn’t work? Well, obviously doing nothing. Yeah.

 

JC: Yeah, sitting there and praying doesn’t work. It turns out.

 

Alexander: Yeah and another example of something that has had a lot less results than we thought was we tried a bunch of campaigns to create shareable content around Remotion. So like, hey, you Remotion. Remotion gives you this dock so you can see your team and who’s around. And like, we try to help people feel like more than just green dots, you can take little selfies and like some teams take it every day, other teams take them less often. The key is like to not be on live video, but to still feel present. And so we tried a bunch of campaigns around getting people to share that content. And we had a limited amount of sharing. And then those limited number of shares led to very few conversions. And at the end of the day, we did the math, and we’re like, yeah, like, we’re still a small company, our customer base is quite small, any sort of one off viral campaign, it’s just not going to yield meaningful results. And so, you know, we, again, we’ve, we’ve just gotten more disciplined around doing the math around like how much we think something can yield. And at this point in time, the biggest thing that we have to figure out is companies how to get more traffic, you know, that’s a bigger problem than like the virality of the product.

 

JC: You know, I’ve always said that, you know, the great thing about starting a software company is that, you know, after you build it, and you’re always there’s always iterations, don’t get me wrong, right. But like, 80% of your equation is marketing for the most part after that, because like, what else? Like what are you doing? There’s no warehouse of overhead, you know, you don’t have shipping departments like, like, mostly it’s like, okay, we built it now. It’s like, well, now it’s all marketing. Well, let’s talk about the future here, right? It’s the Future of Biztech, gotta ask the question, my first question about the future is that, where do you see your industry going? Right. So, you know, a lot of the different software’s that fall into your, you know, realm right out there, where do you see like that five year Future? Right, all things considered with, you know, between you and your competitors? Where do you see things going as a whole? Do you see any, you know, legislation affecting anything? Do you see demographics or politics affecting anything? Do you see technology? Really, you know, like, any kind of AI that’s gonna come in and disrupt? You know, if you had a thought experiment, where do you see your industry going in five years?

 

Alexander: Totally. So I think the the biggest thing, and it’s pretty obvious that will affect our industry, is the change in how many companies are working remotely. And how many companies are working hybrid. So, you know, when we started the company, we assumed this was just going to be a really a long journey of helping more companies become remote. And that’s because you know, I personally care about that, as an immigrant. Like the jobs in America are awesome. That’s why I’m here, I want to move eventually, right? And we thought we’d be kind of helping push the market and COVID hit, and now everyone’s working remotely, who can, of course, who has like a knowledge worker type job. And now as COVID is reopening, you know, omicron permitting, we’re starting to see our customer base shift to, you know, okay, we because remember, our customer bases, people who want a virtual office, so they like the idea of an office and like talking without having a scheduled meeting, we’re seeing that a lot of those people who have people in the same cities are opening co working spaces, or reopening offices, right? And we think that that’s going to be the majority of teams who who can do so they’re going to be teams who like, Hey, we’re gonna hire the best talent that we can, if they’re not in the same city, fine. We’re hiring you anyways. But if you are in the same city, let’s hang out once a week, let’s hang out twice a week. And so we think that the market is going to move to a predominantly hybrid model. And that’s going to be yet another thing to learn, like, teams still haven’t figured out fully how to work remotely. Now up, but there’s gonna be a whole nother thing. Because when you have hybrid, you all of a sudden have a second class citizen problem, like, Hey, we got people in the office, you know, they’re naturally becoming friends eating lunch together, and we’ve got folks who aren’t in the office, how do we give them equal access to information, how to give them equal access to promotion, to relationships. And this is going to be a major problem, because demographically, there are differences in for example, how likely it is that a man or woman want to come into the office when they’re a parenting age, for example. So there’s a lot of big differences that are going to really matter. And so the way that I see our industry evolving is right now we have a bunch of tools. Some of them are, are great for remote work. Some of them are great for hybrid work. And I think that we’re going to kind of see a split, where we’re going to have some of the heavyweight tools out there in the space, we call it the virtual office space, by the way, they’re going to remain for very remote first companies. And I think most people like seeing other people in real life sometimes. So we’re going to have a different set of tools kind of going for that market. And that’s going to be us. Yeah, happy to share more about that. But that’s how..

 

JC: How do you see this? This is a question one, how do you see the you know, web 3 metaverse? You know, playing into this right? I mean, right now you know, you have Facebook coming out with you know, they’re you know, there’s virtual land that virtual land now is gonna turn to virtual office buildings and stuff like where do you see this? And are you are you have any plans, like, we’ll talk about you personally, now your company, but as your company have any plans to take advantage of what is most likely going to be a gold rush into a virtual environment completely? You know, I mean, the right now you got the big clunky, you know, Oculus, you know, headsets right? But eventually that tech will get down to maybe glasses. So you know, where do you see you guys going in the future when it comes to that? Are you going to try to capitalize on that?

 

Alexander: Yeah, I mean, maybe I could summarize my point of view by saying that I’m more interested in augmented reality than virtual reality, fleshing this out a little bit. I might be one of the more crypto-verse that you have on the show. You know, I’m really interested in how crypto is leading to componentization of the financial stack. But as for, you know, myself seeing people spending most of the time in a virtual space, you know, the entire premise of Remotion is that people like seeing other people, and they like seeing them in real life or an unscheduled matters. And I think that’s going to continue to be true. So I personally believe that as, especially as COVID subsides, and people adopt more hybrid strategies, most of the the product experiences that will be successful will be experiences that incorporate physical presence in an office, and your remote teammates in a way that is subtle and elegant. So you’re not like taking a headset off to talk to your neighbor in the office, right? So Remotion right now, I totally wish I could screen share here, but it’s podcast. It’s a very, very lightweight experience, it sort of sits to the side of your screen, kind of like your taskbar in Windows or your dock on macOS.

 

JC: Because I think a lot of people were thinking it would take up their screen.

 

Alexander: No, it’s super light. And the reason we built it that way, even though like maybe it makes it less powerful for a fully remote team, is because we’re thinking ahead to when people are going to be in an office and you’ve got your your colleague, for you know, I was gonna say four meters, let’s say 12 feet away from you. And then you’ve got some remote people, and you want to keep both of those equally present in your mind. And so we started there, because everyone has a laptop already who’s working in this job? When AR technology becomes prevalent we will very likely adopt that. But I don’t see us getting down to the VR metaverse realm.

 

JC: Interesting. Okay, personal question here before we wrap up? Sure. When you were kid, like, what was your dream? Like? What did you want to do when you grew up? So to speak? And then is this it? And if not, how did it like how that path?

 

Alexander: Yeah, it’s crazy. So when I was kid, well, first, I want to be an astronaut. Then I realized I was good at math. And I wanted to build things that flew. And you know, I was pretty typical young boy, I wanted to build fighter jets and missiles. And I thought America had the best ones. And that’s when I decided that I would do my engineering school English, and come to America. And that’s why I came here. And then I remember freshman year, I was, you know, slightly tooting my own horn. But I was an incredibly qualified freshman grad, I’d already like spent the summer building jet engines for the Royal Navy in the UK and everything. I remember going to the career fair, and like talking about and like, Look, I’ve done all this stuff. And I’m like, 18, like, you should hire me. And they’re like, but you’re not American, we can’t give you clearance. We don’t we want to make you know, we’re not going to hire you. And maybe if we do, it’ll be for commercial aircraft. And that’s when I started really questioning my interests, and ended up you know, realizing that what I liked most about engineering was software, programming. And then I realized, okay, I can go down this space. And as I started studying software, I realized I really enjoyed human computer interaction. And ultimately, what I found most fulfilling in my life is two things. First, is like building things and giving them to people. Like I love doing onboarding calls for a product we still do today. And I still do, because hearing someone like this morning, tell me like, wow, this is awesome. That’s gonna help me so much like that really motivates me. And the second thing that I really started to enjoy is, is building teams. When I was in college, I tried to start a few clubs and totally failed. I just don’t know, I didn’t know how to do it. And then as a product manager at Dropbox, I kind of saw a little bit how it could work and got really interested in that as a theme. And so, you know, I’d say this is totally what I’m happy to be doing. But it’s not really it’s not the same as what I thought I’d be doing when I was 14.

 

JC: No, but I mean, I can relate. I thought I was to be a fighter pilot for a long time as I looked into it. Yeah. I went to I went to Embry-Riddle, which was nice. You’re familiar. 

 

Alexander: Yeah. I applied to Embry Riddle.

 

JC: Yeah, it was a tough school. And then I ended up transferring out to CU Boulder, which also had a really good program as well. But yeah, it’s interesting that I got in the market. I was like, I’ve never looked back, right. This is this is my jam.

 

Alexander: Yeah, at some point, I’d love to just I realize I’ve kind of like given snippets of what Remotion is I would love to give a tangible, like explanation of what it is at some point.

 

JC: Let’s give an example real quick. Before we wrap up, for sure. 

 

Alexander: Cool. Okay. So, you know, basically, again, summarizing, as a leader, your goal is to help your team build relationships, the thesis we have is that those are built with small group conversations that are not about like a specific work items or like casual. And so Remotion gives your team space to have those and we’ve tried a thousand things. But the number one thing that you can think about is like the best example for how it works is we create co working rooms for your team. So like in an office, you’d sit around a table, maybe there’d be a stereo playing some music, and so you’re not talking, but the music creates a shared experience. And then it’s super easy to just be like, Oh, hey, so what do you think of the game and Remotion crates, the same thing. So you get Remotion, you get this little dock that shows your team. And in that dock, there are rooms with music playing that’s shared by everyone. And people will hang out on you with their cameras off for hours every day. And then from there, it’s super easy to unmute, and you end up finding your team is just talking way more than they were before. And you can start canceling meetings and they start bonding more. So that’s what our product provides.

 

JC: That’s actually really cool, right? So you can share some music. All right. That’s a great example because I want to check this out. We’ll talk after this. I want to demo some of this here. I have some interest here. This is cool. How can people reach you personally, or the company if they are interested in the product or service or high level deals? I’m trying to talk to you.

 

Alexander: Yeah, sounds good. So our website is Remotion.com and I am alexander@remotion.com. Feel free to email me just mentioned that it’s, you know, from the podcast, super happy to chat about anything, really. And otherwise, I’m @Embirico on Twitter. It’s E-M-B-I-R-I-C-O and I’d love to chat.

 

JC: Awesome. And listen, for everyone else listening out there. Again, if you’d like to hear today, be sure to subscribe to this podcast and give it a five star rating with a little bit of comments behind it. So other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all these amazing and helpful b2b software’s on the market today. Alexander, thank you so much for being on the show. I’m very interested in your software. And I look forward to my own little demo with it.

 

Alexander: Thanks for having me, JC.

 

JC: Bye

 

 

 

Learn more about Kloopify at: www.kloopify.com

Find Daniela Osio on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniela-osio-4a947394/

 

JC: Welcome, everyone to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger, and I have with me another fantastic guest on the show today. And listen, if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following this podcast wherever you’re listening, you know, give it a five star review, put some nice comments on that it really helps the algorithm right? Because that is how other techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this. And today I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing the founder and CEO of Kloopify, Daniela Osio. Daniela, thank you so much for being on the show. Tell the audience a little bit about what you do and the company does. 

 

Daniela: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Hello, everyone in the audience. So my name is Daniela Osio, and I am the founder and CEO of Kloopify. And so Kloopify is a software solution that enables enterprise-sized companies to be able to understand the environmental and ethical impact of all of their purchasing decisions. So I come from a world of supply chain, and so focusing on procurement professionals. And the reason we did that is because 60 to 90% of a company’s environmental footprint comes from their suppliers. So if they want to achieve their sustainability goals, they have to work with their suppliers. Right now in the industry, there’s a lack of tools that are supporting the procurement industry. And that’s how Kloopify was born – to help companies achieve their sustainability goals.

 

JC: So if I’m understanding this, right, you have companies make sure that they’re only sourcing from, you know, the good guys, so to speak, right? The ones that aren’t messing everything up on the planet kind of thing, right? So yeah, give us some examples. So I mean, you say enterprise level, but give us if you can name them, great. If not, that’s okay. But give us some examples. Maybe one or two of clients that you have, and like what their struggle was when they came to you and how you helped them out? Like, I’m curious to see, you know, how does the company get this problem? And then how they fix it?

 

Daniela: Yeah, well, first of all, most of it comes from new regulations that are coming in the industry where companies need to be more transparent about the environmental impact that they have. So they need to start reporting on their scope three emissions, do you know a lot about scope one, two and three emissions?

 

JC: I do not..

 

Daniela: I do a little bit of an overview.

 

JC: And you know what, even if I did, I bet most people wouldn’t anyway, so give us the 30,000 foot view on scope emissions.

 

Daniela: So scope, one, two, and three emissions that makes up the scope one emissions is what your company internally does. So your manufacturing sites, scope two emissions is the energy or electricity that you use to support those manufacturing sites. And your scope three is the rest of your value chain. So everything that you purchase, whether it’s services, or products, materials, anything like that. So when you combine all three, scope, one, two, and three, you get your entire carbon footprint, for example. And so when you’re talking about enterprise sized companies, you’re talking about companies that have 10s of 1000s of suppliers, think fortune 500, and bigger, right? And so to get all of that data to understand really the impact of every single purchasing decisions, there’s a lot of information that needs to go back and forth. So what Kloopify does is we connect buyers who are going out and buying things, the purchasers with the suppliers, who have that data about, you know, where they manufacture what they use, and we give them one portal to connect and gather all that information, and be able to run analytics and report out to shareholders stakeholders, and follow these new regulations that are coming up.

 

JC: This is interesting, because this reminds me of something that just happened recently. So I just took a trip recently. And when I booked my flight, there was this new little line on there that told me the carbon emissions of my flight. So walk me through that I imagine that like an airline could be one of your clients, whether they are or not. But so I’m seeing that that means they have to know the number, which means they must have this whole thing down. And they’re a highly regulated industry as well. So how is what you’re talking about affecting, let’s say, let’s start with airlines. And then what other industries that you know, are people, the average consumer seeing that is having to comply with this?

 

Daniela: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I always say that the future is going to look like the way that we put calories on food, we’re going to put environmental impact on everything that we buy, both as from a consumer perspective as an enterprise business perspective. And so you see in Europe, for example, regulations where they, companies are now forced to publicly disclose their scope, one and two emission. And then there’s new regulations coming where scope three is going to be required as well. And so you’re seeing that companies are realizing that this is going to be either a characteristic where you get to kind of be the leader in the industry, like in this airline example that you gave, where a customer makes a flight decision may say, okay, you know what, I’m going with this carrier versus that because their emissions is lower. And so this, the same thing is happening in the enterprise business world. You’re seeing manufacturers, chemical companies, who we’ve worked with most closely with that are saying, you know, we’re getting this pressure from investors, from regulators And we need to start reporting on all of this. But the problem is we don’t have the tools, we don’t have the understanding the know how, on how to do it. And that’s where we come in, right? First, we do like a current state assessment, where we tell you, Hey, this is your baseline, right? You can do some baseline analysis, with some spend data, for example. But then to get a more accurate representation, you have to really understand what your suppliers are doing. And that’s a lot of data points and a lot of collaboration that needs to be happening from a buyer and supplier perspective. And it wouldn’t be able to do or it would be very difficult to do with like spreadsheets, you’d have a desk by spreadsheets, you think about, you know, my company where I used to work prior to Kloopify, DuPont, you know, 10,000 plus suppliers, and every single one of them sending you, you know, at least 20 spreadsheets under with all of the breakdown of their sites and what they’re using and the materials and their manufacturing processes, are they using chemicals of concern or not, etc, etc. And so it’s just a lot of information. And in the future, it’s going to be demanded, it’s either going to be a carrot, where you get brand recognition, or it’s going to be a stick where you get hit with regulation, it’s one or the other.

 

JC: So how does your software.. so your clients log into your platform? And then what they upload all these spreadsheets, it turns out the information like what does it look like to them? To use Kloopify?

 

Daniela: Yeah, so first, they get a baseline understanding we do that with, we call it the Kloopify secret sauce, where we take some financial information, some scope of work information, and create a really great baseline. And then we identify, let’s say, street,-strategic suppliers, because you don’t want to be capturing all of this data. If you know, procurement, you know, and you have, you’re a buyer and you’re responsible for 100 suppliers, you don’t need to capture it from everybody, maybe you have 1000 strategic suppliers. So we you identify those strategic suppliers, and you work with them on creating a plan for them to provide you that data, they both connect on the same platform. And in the future, we’ll have ATI connections to where we’re pulling the data so they get real time. And so what, as a buyer, you see the environmental impact, and that every single supplier has to your footprint. So I’m responsible for janitorial services or for a raw material that I have to buy, I can now break it down per supplier and understand, okay, Supplier A has this footprint, Supplier B has this footprint, they both give me the same material. In the past, I’ve been giving you know 75% of my purchase order to supplier A but he has a much higher footprint, you know what I’m going to go in and make that change so that we’re transitioning that the majority of our, you know, material comes from supplier B, and you get to see in real time the impact that makes  in your carbon footprint and in your ability to meet your sustainability goals. Because 85% of companies have publicly announced sustainability goals. And so, you know, we have to get closer to that.

 

JC: Who provides this data? So does your system have baseline data already? For the, because I know that your clients, the buyers or those of your clients at the buyers? So they’re like, hey, we need to know this information. You’re like, okay, great. But who’s reporting the numbers from their sellers from the people they’re buying from? Is it just honor system? Or is there some sort of accountability measure where your clients actually know that that really is a somewhat accurate footprint? I know it, there’s obviously, the degree of error because it just the situation. But how do your buyers know that the data they’re looking at is accurate?

 

Daniela: Yeah, so a lot of that comes? Well, first off, you can do it with simple Scope of Work information, the information that you have in your scope of work, whether it’s your, your product breaks down what they’re giving you, and then you’re working with your suppliers in the sense of, they sign off on the data that they’re giving off, right? So that relationship you have, okay, you already know what sites you already know, what locations and what energies used. And then both of you are going back and forth based on the scope of work based on the, and MSDC sheets that they are already providing off of that data, and you’re matching it together. And then you get in the future. You know, when you’ve identified your strategic suppliers, you would actually just have an API connection to their systems and pull directly from with their internally reporting what they’re already using, as their you know, truth source of truth. The both of you are working on that same sort of source of truth.

 

JC: So how do consumers or even your clients know what a higher low level is? So for example, the one thing I didn’t like, about like that information came on the airline ticket was like, here’s the emissions I’m like, okay, cool, compared to what like, I have no idea what this parts per million or whatever data they put there. There’s no like industry average or average, as of you know, last year and this is this much better. Or comparing this other airlines, you know, it’s very new. So I get that maybe, you know, they’re still working through the kinks, but I stare at it. I’m like, well, that’s cool information, but I don’t have any baseline to compare it again. So how do your clients or even just regular consumers even understand what that number even means and if it’s good or bad, because if everyone’s bad, right, if you’re like, oh, that’s better than the other guy. It’s like, Yeah, but they’re all really bad. You know? Yeah. How do you combat that lack of baseline knowledge? 

 

Daniela: So let’s go back to you said, let’s say that every one is that, right? The first step is even identified. If you you know, sustainability in itself is a new Hot Topic, right? We’ve talked about it for a while. But now we’re putting a lot more pressure and knowledge and forcing companies to do the right thing, whether it’s reporting, but I think you start with identifying the ones that you create a baseline, and then you start moving your money towards companies that are doing better than others. So most companies, and let’s say the smart companies don’t have single source suppliers, right? They don’t have only one supplier providing this one material, because you run the risk of business disruptions of supply chain disruptions. And so what you’ll be able to do, at least at the bare minimum is compare to suppliers, and find the one that’s at least better than the other. And then once you started working with that, then you can go out to market with some knowledge of already what the baseline is. And as you’re running RFPs, gather more information. And in the tool, you’ll be able to see this is my current state, these are my goals, this is where I want to be. Either you continue to work with strategic suppliers to get you closer to there, or you go out with already the knowledge that you have and try to find what’s better, right, and you keep moving towards a better world or a better solutions or strategic suppliers that are going to get you closer to where you want to be.

 

JC: So your tool can almost act like a PR tool in a way too. Because the way I envision it, is if I’m using your system, and I’m it’s helping me understand and keep my suppliers accountable, or switch suppliers and whatnot. It’s an accountability tool in itself, right? And then but I could also for myself, I could say, Well, hey, over the last six months or last 12 months, we have we have a dashboard, it shows that we’ve gone down. How I could screenshot that and put that on my social and be like, look, we are ensuring sustainability. We’ve made these changes, and we will continue to do so. You know, buy our stuff, right?

 

Daniela: Exactly! 

 

JC: Okay. Yeah, that’s really interesting. I like that. Very cool. Okay. Well, then let me ask you a question about your business and how you operate. So I’m a marketing guy by trade. So I speak El Marketing. What are you doing to get though you’re on the podcast? That’s one thing. Okay, cool. PR. What else are you doing? What are your main channels for promoting Kloopify?

 

Daniela: Yeah, so mostly, we’re right now building a brand on LinkedIn, on our website. And we are a startup, we were founded in the middle of the pandemic, when we identify that there was a huge need, I worked in procurement before this I worked at at DuPont for various years and in different roles, and I and I spent my time there, trying to learn as much as possible. And while I was there, I also had the privilege of creating a name for myself in the world of supply chain, whether it’s, you know, winning awards, like 30, under 30, from the Institute of Management, or just recently winning a international transform award from the future Insight Network, which is a huge network for supply chain executives. So we’re using that to continue to build our brand and go out there through LinkedIn through those platforms. Right now, what we’re focused on is really executing on the early innovators that we have, we’ve got five Fortune 300, companies that have signed on as early innovators to really drive this platform. And with those, we’re gonna grab use cases, success stories, and really put it out there to the market, and continue to expand our reach and get more of a market share. So that’s our kind of next incoming step.

 

JC: Very cool. So let me ask you, this will kind of go back a little bit. Yeah. What? Like, why did you start the company? You work to Dupont, right? Imagine you were doing poorly there? Right? You know, what was it about either your job or the company or just yourself? Like, what was that moment where you said, I’m going to go on my own? This is what I’m going to make, like, what got you there? 

 

Daniela: Yeah, I have always wanted to start my own company. I have grandfathers were both entrepreneurs. They were immigrants to Venezuela from Spain. And they both started their own companies. And my father was an immigrant to the United States always taking risks for you know, the dream of creating a better life. And during the pandemic, I did what I think a lot of people did, which was I took inventory of my life. And I said, Am I doing the things that I want to be doing? And why not? And the answer was fear. Fear was a big reason on why I wasn’t making that jump because I entered Dupont, with the goal of just doing as many things as possible. I was an asset scheduler at a manufacturing site I led $60 million have been through one of the largest mergers in history when Dow and DuPont merge and split into three and then I created, I did all of this great work. And so I was like, Okay, I learned a lot. I learned what I needed to learn. And then I decided it was time. It was time I, it was time for me to take a risk for me to invest in myself and this maybe sound a little bit morbid, but I thought, if I were on my deathbed, would I be happy with the choices? Would fear be a good enough reason for me not have taken that risk? And the answer was no, the answer was absolutely no. So I made the leap, made the jump. And actually a fun fact is that my father at the time was working in Shanghai, China, he does business development, there has always been in the forefront of business development when it comes to sustainability. But because of the pandemic, he moved back. And so we got to geek out a lot over the pandemic being locked in, you know, we had nothing better to do than to geek out together. And we started to go out and do a lot of customer discovery and start to go out to the market and be like, Hey, what are some of these big issues, what’s coming up, and we knew sustainability was going to continue to gain momentum. And so you know, Kloopify was born. And here we are.

 

JC: That’s awesome. Okay. Well, I have to ask the question, because the title of this podcast being The Future of BizTech, let’s talk about the future. Where do you see the sustainability? Let’s say, you know, software industry going in the next, you know, 5-10 years? You know, you’re one company. I imagine you’re not alone. But you may not have a ton of competition, either. Do you see a lot more companies popping up because of this new trend? Do you see technology or regulations? You know, pushing this forward? You know, where do you see the industry, your industry going in the next five years or so?

 

Daniela: Yeah, I mean, I think the future of climate tech is huge. It’s a new industry. But you’re seeing that there’s a lot of investor money going into clean tech, you see that there’s a huge push. I mean, if you think about like black rocks, recent announcements, all of their investments are going to go towards sustainable companies. And they’re going to move everything that everyone that they invest in, has to have sustainability initiatives, they have to be announced. And they have to show the progress that they’re making, I have the privilege of talking to a lot of CEOs and C suite level people. And they say in every single meeting, sustainability is brought up one, at least one. And that wasn’t like that in the past. So I think that there’s going to be a huge push, and you’re going to see a lot of new tech coming out in the clean tech space, you’re going to see a lot of money going to clean tech solutions. And you’re gonna see a lot of innovation, because there is a huge demand for it. But there’s also just a huge desire for it too. I mean, you see students that are coming out of college, and they get interviewed of what are the most important topics to them, and what do they, you know, value when they’re looking for employers. And sustainability is either the first or the second one that they pick. And that’s just going to give you kind of an insight of how much we’re going to hear about this, it’s going to be a buzzword that everyone’s going to be talking about. And I think in order to differentiate yourself, you need to have data to prove it. And that’s the backbone of Kloopify is giving employee giving purchasers the data and the insights that they need, so that they can make, you know, smarter choices.

 

JC: Very cool. Okay. So let’s do the second part of this question, which is, where’s the future of Kloopify, right? My audience likes inside scoop, some You got any cool on the roadmap, coming up any new features or four capabilities that you don’t have, you know, launched right now?

 

Daniela: Yeah. So we had, we launched an early innovators group, and we had maxed it out at five, and we filled out capacity for that. So we will be launching a beta version of the solution for general market use here in the middle of 2022. So if you are you like what you heard today, if you’re interested, make sure you kind of follow us on LinkedIn, connect with us on our website, we have a blog. So feel free to put in your information there and be on the lookout because I think it is the future clean tech is the future and every company is going to need solutions to support their sustainability initiatives. Whether they do it because they want to because they want to, you know, be get the carrot and be the first in the market or whether they do it because regulations are forcing them. That’s up to them, right? But it’s better but solutions are going to be needed. And if you’re an entrepreneur or you dream of being an entrepreneur, I would say cleantech is a is an amazing industry and amazing space to go into. Because not only is it fulfilling and there’s a lot of opportunities to be successful, but you’re doing something that’s going to ultimately better the earth and be helpful for future generations. And so two birds one stone.

 

JC: Yeah, well, on that note here, let me ask you a question for advice for the audience. Is there a certain book, or documentary or podcast or something that you recommend that’s absolute must watch or must read if they’re interested in this entire topic?

 

Daniela: Oh, in the topic of sustainability, I would say just in the topic of entrepreneurship and mindset, and I would say anti fragility to look up the book anti fragility it is a concept that I very much like, where we benefit from the chaos, we benefit from the stress, we learn how to, not just be resilient or bounce back, but to actually be better. And I think in the future of business, that’s the concept that everybody needs to kind of ingrain into their culture is that, you know, when you have a disruption, whether its supply chain, or whatever it is, don’t try to go back to the normal try to be better than that try to get stronger, faster, smarter, whatever it is, from the chaos. That’s one aspect. And then on the same on the other side of the of the token, there’s a book on self compassion, and I think that it’s super important in today’s day and age to learn how to have conversations with yourself in your mind, and how to also have compassion for yourself, because we have many times compassion for those around us. But those conversations in our mind aren’t always the nicest, and especially if you’re going to go into entrepreneurship, where it is just hard but super rewarding, but super difficult and emotional. And I mean, everything that you can imagine put into one, the ability to have compassion with yourself is what’s ultimately going to enable you to keep going whenever you think that you can’t.

 

JC: Well, I’ll tell you that first book, The anti anti fragile or anti fragility, I forget which one it was, but I have that on my reading list. I literally already bought that one. And I haven’t gotten to yet I’ve got a whole long list, but that one is one that was recommended by someone else as well. And you’re right you know, I always say it was comes entrepreneurship, I always say it’s a trail of tears to the golden kingdom. Right? Like there’s no good story that no one ever said, oh, yeah, so I had this idea. And then I called someone they gave me money, and then we launched it and it worked. Like that’s, like that’s never uttered ever. Right?

 

Daniela: No.

 

JC: Don’t get me wrong, some stories are better than others. But there’s a Trail of Tears leading to that to that. 

 

Daniela: Oh absolutely, absolutely and if you, you listen to other entrepreneurs, they all have the same thing to say they’re like, oh, no, there’s so many times I cried a laugh and did all of that within like, 30 minutes of each other.

 

JC: Yeah, yeah. I like watching the memes where it has shows like the hours in the day and like, the emojis of emotion that goes through it, you know? And I always say it takes a certain level of psychosis to be entrepreneur, like, we’re all a little crazy, right? Like me..

 

Daniela: Absolutely without a doubt.

 

JC: Here’s the thing, either we’re crazy or really bad at math, because why on earth would we attempt something that we know has like a 97% chance of failure, right? Like who says, Yep, I’m gonna put all my chips on that number like, crazy.

 

Daniela: All the time. I was like, I know when I first and when I’m on, you know, I’m on the ups and downs. And when I’m on the down, I always think like, why can’t I be normal? Like Daniella? Why couldn’t you have been normal? Why couldn’t you have stayed in your corporate job and been normal? But like, I can’t, there’s something. There’s something not right. 

 

JC: Our parents were right. And you know what I mean, when I say that, I don’t have to say what they said. We know what they said about us. Yeah. But, but here we are, right? So how can people reach you personally or the website, they need to, you know, some people listening might want to just reach out directly because they got a big deal for you. So what’s some contact info you can give up? 

 

Daniela: Yeah, if you want to reach me, I’m always available via email, feel free to send me an email Daniela@Kloopify.com, my LinkedIn also Daniela Osio. O-S-I-O, please feel free, send me an invite and send me a message. I’m pretty good at responding to everyone who’s kind of reaches out and I love helping others and supporting and sometimes you know, if you’re an entrepreneur and just need someone to vent to I’m, you know, I’m always in here and always, always there to lend a helping hand because there have been plenty of hands that can lend to me. And so I think that if you have the privilege of getting help, it is your responsibility to give help as well.

 

JC: Well, it’s true. It’s like the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a self made millionaire. Everyone had somebody at some point no matter what the helps them out. So that was everyone listening out there. Again, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe this podcast, give it that five star rating and a little bit of writing behind it. So other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning. But all these amazing and helpful b2b software’s on the market today, like Kloopify. Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it and wish you the best of luck with the company. 

 

Daniela: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Learn more about Acquired Insights Inc. at: www.aiinc.cloud

Find Gary Melling on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamelling/

JC: Welcome, everyone to another episode of the future of biz tech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest with us on the show today. And listen, if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following this podcast wherever you’re listening, subscribe, like all that fun stuff. Be sure to give it a five star review, preferably with some nice comments, right, because that is our other techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this. Today I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing the Co-Founder and CEO of AI Inc. Gary Melling. Gary, thank you so much for being on the show. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about yourself? And what is that your company does?

 

Gary : Great. Well, Jason, thank you so much for the invitation. Pleased to be here. Yeah, I’ve been working in technology and ERP systems. I’ve been doing Wall Street consulting for years. I’ve been at it for about 40 years. Currently, I’m Co-Founder and CEO of AI Inc. And because you mentioned I have a partner, Tracy F. in Western Canada, in Saskatchewan. And we do a lot of work in AI and machine learning. And typically trying to package up that technology in a way that creates differentiators in marketing advertising, as well as an enterprise system. So that’s really the genesis of what where we started and what we’re currently doing.

 

JC: Well, that’s because I love AI, I hear AI or machine learning, and my ears perk up, my tail starts wagging. And I was asking more questions about it, right? So Well let’s talk about this then so who is your perfect client? And what exactly like what does it look like when you execute what you guys do? Like? How does it make their business better? Right? Like, who do you go after? And what does that – paint that picture for you exactly what you’d be implementing.

 

Gary: Or thanks, let me give you an example of probably make it a bit easier. We’re working with an auto dealership in the UK, they have about six luxury car dealerships, they know that it’s been a bit hard to get a lot of walk in traffic. So what we’ve done is we’ve used one of our solutions. It’s a cell phone tracker, basically, and it anonymizes, who is in a particular geographical area. So for example, if I was a BMW dealer, and I knew that some of my potential customers were shopping at a Benz or Mercedes Benz dealer, I could geo fence that Benz dealer. And then when that person walks, or any person walks into that geo fenced area, our system would push them a message and say, Oh, I see you’re shopping for a new car, hey, why don’t you come over and you know, to our BMW dealership, we’ve got a special on we’ve got, you know, whatever the plug is for the client. And what this does is it uses location and behavior to interrupt the consumer psychology around what they’re buying, they’re originally gone into a, again, a Mercedes dealership in this example. And what we’re doing is we’re redirecting them, we’re informing them about something, we’re posing a question to them, and we’re offering them an opportunity to go to a different location, we’re going to be expecting that kind of thing. It works really, really well. And we’re finding that first of all, it’s important to note that the data that we don’t really collect data, what we’re doing is we’re working with the SIM card, so we can identify that there is a device, but we have no idea who owns that device, we have no idea of you know, any of the profile information, you know, we’re not using that as a link to try to invade their Facebook profile or anything else. This is pure digital, geo fencing and positioning and using that as a discriminating advantage to redirect customer behavior to another solution. In this case, it would be our client solution, the BMW auto dealers.

 

JC: Alright, so I like this, but I have questions. So first question is, how does it, is it texting them? How does it show up on their phone did an email is it a push notification somehow? So what’s the format?

 

Gary: We typically generate a text but we can use any and all of the above. Obviously, if we were to send a message, we would prefer to use text or something like that, which is much more immediate. If we, for example, we were to send them an email, we run the risk of them not receiving the email until an hour to three later, maybe even next day, and we will have lost some of that psychological momentum. So we prefer more of the real time texting format. Yeah. 

 

JC: Okay. So that’s first question. Second question is, you know, I could see some businesses having a problem like this, right? So what are the laws based like you’re doing the UK? But does that fly here in the US? Because I could see people get really upset that people are getting text message. It’s almost someone could say, well, that’s like poaching. Right, which I mean, hey, all is fair in love and war and businesses war, right. So I’m just curious, like, what have you found as far as kickback on that? Is there any rules or regulations or laws in different countries that define how you’re able to do it? How does that work?

 

Gary: That’s a great question, too, to kind of boil it down. We’ve been through a lot of research and looking at a variety of things with GDPR and we’re just servers are located and how does one comply with can spam act and latest revisions and you know, all that kind of stuff. And you really have to have your finger on the pulse of that stuff to understand if, as a provider of that service, you have any exposure, risk and liability. And is it possible that if there is exposure, risk and liability, that it also transfers to your client? Right. So what we do is we go do everything by the book, we have taken a look at a variety of different things. For example, in North America, if you try to send someone a message by phone, call them call bots, or or some of the automated call services. For example, you cannot call someone after 9pm. In their local timezone, there are a variety of different nuances to how all of this fits together. But suffice it to say, we are in compliance. And the other thing that we do, embedded in every message is an opportunity for the receiver of that text message to opt out. So we can literally, if they don’t like receiving what they’ve received, you know, they can opt out on spot, and then that’s it, there are no more messages that get pushed from the system to them. But we’ve had a very, very, I would say, we’ve anticipated we’d have a good take up, we’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how positive the feedback has been. If you’re in the mood to buy something in this particular case, or luxury automobile, it could be anything, it could be baby clothes in a mall, it could be a new stereo system, or you know, Wi Fi, whatever, you know, you’re looking for a new phone, whatever it is, because we can geo fenced quite tightly. And it’s immediate, it’s literally you walk over the threshold that we have fenced in, through the geo fencing, and now you are a live target for the system. So it really captures an opportunity, it’s a teachable moment in the sense that we can teach the receiver of that message that they may have other options that they want to consider. But it’s also not invasive. These are not long, you know, dictionary style entries, it’s you know, a couple of words, a few sentences at best, with an opportunity to opt out. And obviously, what we’re also doing is including the contact information, perhaps the address, it depends on how the client wants to set it up for the alternative to the location that they’re currently at. Like, for example, instead of being at the Benz dealer, now there, they have a way that they can navigate to and understand where that BMW dealer is that we’re promoting.

 

JC: Okay, so your software, you know, is a marketing tool in itself. So let’s ask, but how are you doing your own marketing? I’m a marketing guy by trade. So I like to hear, you know, what are you guys doing to get the word out? And who is your optimal client? I know, you could, obviously the retail and there’s so many different types of of companies and industries, you could do this with, obviously, but like kind of who your favorites? Who do you find really get the most benefit? Like you talk about auto ship? So that’s one. So how are you guys marketing? And who you marketing to? To buy your services? Or the use of software? I should say?

 

Gary: Again, great question. We approach it from a variety of different perspectives, I don’t think there’s there’s just one tool that you can use, I think you have to be multi dimensional, no, no stranger at all, to marketing from that perspective. For example, one of the things we’ll do to be very specific is I’ve had 30,00 1st level LinkedIn connections for, I don’t know, eight years or something like that. And my business partner, Tracy has also had the same number and through the groups that we belong to. And using LinkedIn as a very dominant tool in our arsenal, we found that we can do direct outreach, not only to individuals targeted individuals, but we can also access people in groups. And we can go beyond first level connections, depending on the technology we use to inform second and third level connections. We do post in groups. And so we get feedback from that as well, sometimes from the moderators and encouraging us to do certain things, which is great. But we also use email campaigns, we have references some of the things we’re doing, of course, on our website as they become more mature, from a perspective of an ideal client, the CTT technology that I just spoke about a moment ago, really, it’s an organization, typically they’re the larger corporations, but they could be the smaller to medium sized businesses, I would say generally speaking, if they’re already spending money on digital ad spend, this is something that they can, they should consider. Now if they’re not spending money on ad spend, then a digital ad spend, then the problem of course, the challenge is to educate them and that requires a lot more information and exchange and handholding upfront, which we’re very happy to do but it just means as you go from a prospect to a client in the conversion it’s much faster if you can already use a lot of those technologies I talked about a bit earlier now from our add cannibal tool add cannibals a very very different beast it’s it’s a way of taking a look at a lot of organizations will spend money in their their digital ad spend but they’re not necessarily working as effectively as they could and I know that’s near and dear to your heart and your business as well. Quick example would be for the ad cannibal, if a client is doing $50,000 A month in digital ad spend, that’s usually the baseline criteria that we would use then to engage them for that product. So some of its product dependent, and others is depending on geography or industry, and it just depends.

 

JC: Okay, so again, with The Future of BizTech, I have to ask the question, what is the future? What’s that kind of five-year plan look like for you guys? You know, and you know, my audience really does like hearing the inside scoop of what’s coming next. So is there any new features or, you know, cool things on our roadmap? They’re gonna be hitting pretty soon. And where do you see your company going in the next five years?

 

Gary: Jason, thanks. Great, great question. Let me just maybe I’ll respond one of two ways. First, I’ll talk briefly about the ad cannibal, because we think that that is the future for larger corporations, many organizations are cannibalizing their own ad spend when it comes to digital ad, if you’re paying to have an advertisement, so that with, with someone searching for something that you have, and you pay for that advertisement, you probably also have advertising that you’re doing that you’re not paying for, whether it’s links to your website, or variety of other backlinks or whatever it is you’re doing. So if you’re paying for a high placement on a search engine, and it turns out that you’re already also running free ads, you should be able to suspend the paid ad, when it’s not called for. So we use artificial intelligence to determine when the paid ad is useful. And when you’re actually paying for the ad, but you’re also cannibalizing that ad spend, because you’ve got your free ads that would be working for you without having to pay for..

 

JC: So if you’re if you’re ranking number one for a search term, but then you’re also putting an ad that’s right above it, you’re wasting money basically, is what you’re saying?

 

Gary: Exactly.

 

JC: That’s pretty cool. I haven’t heard of anyone doing that. I’m not saying no one is, but I haven’t heard of that. And, you know, again, I’m the marketing guy, like the efficiency of it. But you’re right, I’ve seen that I’ve seen where you have the ad, and then the person has their own listing right below. And it’s like, well, what’s the point? Like, why are we running that? The person would have just clicked on your organic right there. And now they’ve clicked on your ad that cost you money, multiply that by 1000s of times, you know, and that could be a problem. That’s really interesting. So is this new? Is this coming out? Is it already out? Do people know about it,

 

Gary: It’s available now. And we’re just beginning to ramp up on the marketing and the notification that this kind of service is available. So..

 

JC: Okay so you haven’t heard about it just yet, then?

 

Gary: No, people haven’t heard about. And the other thing, so this is a scoop for your podcast.

 

JC: I like it, I like it.

 

Gary: Your people get it first. But here’s where it becomes really powerful. Because what we do is we offer the service for free, there’s not a fee to for the service, what we do is we imp for those organizations that qualify, they’re doing the 50 Grand and above a month, and at digital ad spend, we asked them we spend about an hour with them on the phone, we go through some details, we do a little bit of setup, we implement the system. Now for them, it’s newfound money, because they were already cannibalizing their own budget. What we’re doing is we’re reclaiming that ad spend. And then we take a percentage of that ad spend, and so we get a small piece of only the money they save.

 

JC: Wow! Okay. So for example, if I’m spending 50 grand a month, and it turns out, I was wasting five grand a month, you take a percentage that five grand so I still get to save money. Right?. And I only owe you a piece of the difference of what I’ve saved.

 

Gary: That’s right.

 

JC: Okay, that that’s pretty competitive. That’s pretty good.

 

Gary: The reason why I mentioned that, Jason is because you asked a bigger question just a moment ago, and that is where is it going?

 

JC: Yeah. What’s the next three, four or five years look like for you guys? 

 

Gary: Well, I think if we can take a lesson from that cannibal, what we’re seeing is that there’s clearly there has been a desire for a very long time to have performance based marketing solutions. And we all know that there’s a lot of, you know, praying post and all the rest of it, there’s a lot of kind of Neanderthal-ish kind of things going on. And some people, you know, they don’t have access to the resources or they’re not familiar with the resources, or they’ve outsourced it, and they don’t have their finger on the pulse. It’s not what they do. And they rely on their partners and their partners are as good as their partners are. I mean, their whole marketing is going to depend on that partner and partner network. But and there’s there’s some phenomenal agencies out there. And again, I’ve been to your website is a fabulous website and tremendously good services. What I see is that there is more and more a move to performance based marketing. It won’t be sufficient just to send out 1000 emails or 50,000 emails. It’s not going to be sufficient just to basically you know, randomly text people or do robo calls. People consumers generally are getting smarter, and with that they become less patient with these old derelict technologies. So when I talk about Ad cannibal, again, there’s no initial upfront cost, we’re taking a percentage of the money they save. Right? And we’re doing this, we’ve never had a client. And again, we’ve just started with this a couple months ago, we’ve never had a client take advantage of the service and then leave. Because it’s all free money.

 

JC: That’s a hell of a retention rate.

 

Gary: 100%, 100% not bad, right? Yeah. And then on top of that, we get, you know, referrals, that which helps as well. But when we get to the bigger topic of what’s the future hold, I was contacted by a platform in Canada recently, to sit on their technical review committee and directors and so on. And one of the things they have an ambition to do is to try to quantify the ROI of marketing. And again, I know you’ve got a white paper on your site, and you’ve got resources for a lot of the folks that are interested in that they can go and read up on it and understand it better. It’s a learning moment, as well as an opportunity to see well, how might that fit in our current stack of technologies? I believe that, you know, we’ve seen early indications from Google and others like them, Amazon, behavioral data is the way it’s all going. So in the data world, we have structured data, structured data, think of it as data that you would create, when you fill in a form online, there’s a box and there’s an answer. And you can only you know, you can’t mix numbers and characters, it’s a name. So you can only have characters, that kind of thing. That would be structured data. Structured data on the backend, looks like a spreadsheet with rows and columns. You also have unstructured data. So unstructured data would be things like photographs, a handwritten note, a voice recording, a video, you have semi structured, which is a little bit of both. And then you have behavioral and behavioral is what organizations like Amazon and others like them, Spotify, etc, Shopify Apple, they use an element of that behavioral data, because if they understand the patterns that you’ve created in your browsing behavior, and they can translate that into understanding what you’ve actually purchased, they’re doing it from a company by company perspective. So Amazon sees Amazon data, Apple sees Apple data. But if we were to project this into the future, you know, one of the things that we do is we work with some US federal government agencies, R&D organizations and so on, we do artificial intelligence and other areas as well.

 

Gary: And we had a conversation recently with the senior cybersecurity engineer in the Space Force. And we were talking about, what does the technology we’re working on have to do with the future? How can we positively affect the future? And what trends have we seen that might translate into new changes in the near term, and one of the conversations we had is if of course, remember, when the iPhone first came out, it blew everybody’s minds, because it wasn’t just a phone, you can get emails, it was really a computer and a handheld device. So if you now take that same little epiphany we had with smartphones, and you apply it, let’s say to satellites, now Jason would have his own satellite, Gary would have his own satellite. And these would be satellites are constantly in motion, depending on how they’re configured. But it would be not just my potentially my buying habits with Apple, or just with Amazon, or just Google, it would aggregate that information. And so now, just like I have a health record and electronic health record, I would have a record of my behavioral interaction with browsing and purchasing, and so on. So I think that there are organizations that are not really talking about it that much some of these large behemoths. But I believe in my heart of hearts, that in the race to own all of the data in the world ever, that there are organizations that are working very hard to see what they can do at this stage of technology development to carve out or at least to go in that direction, with their own data. And behavioral data is definitely the way that I think the future is going to be defined.

 

JC: Well, that’s pretty cool. So and, you know, there’s always that balance, too, right? Because you talked about privacy, and whatnot. So you know, you’ve got from one side, people are pulling in the privacy card, but I think people also don’t realize that because they don’t understand the technology, there’s wasted there’s metadata, right? There’s also ways to flow people through a process without actually knowing their personal information, right? And, and a lot of people just don’t get that they think that if you’re taking anything, you must, you must be listening my conversations, or you must have my email or cell phone number, and they’re like, Well, how can I get a text if you don’t have my number? And, well, there is an answer to that. It’s just it’s not easy to explain all the time, you know, um, but I do I think there’s about you know, I’m a consumer too. So I do believe in privacy, but I’m a marketer so I believe that hey, you know, if you want, you know, people want to buy stuff. They don’t want to be shown diaper ads, if they’re a single guy, you know, with no kids, right? Like, it doesn’t make any sense. So there’s a usability and consumer experience factor that has to be taken into consideration too. So this whole kind of metadata and hashing and things like that where you know, you can you can use the information without seeing the information that I think is kind of that equal medium. And it sounds like you kind of you guys are utilizing that, which is great. So let’s, let’s do a personal question here. Okay. When you were kid, what did you want to do when you grew up? If it’s this, awesome. And if it’s not like, how did it get here?

 

Gary: Well, first of all, I’m 66. I’ve been doing this for a long time. And I haven’t always done it smartly. And none of us do. You know, we learned along the way.

 

JC: Oh, yeah.

 

Gary: We learned mostly from our..

 

JC: We step in all the landmines.

 

Gary: I was brought up in a military family. And so I spent a lot of time, I think we counted. I was in 17 different schools, lived in Canada, England, and had to travel to France, Germany, the states frequently. So the reason why I mentioned that is with the amount of turmoil and change that I went through in my life, I think it was a natural progression, ultimately to be working on Wall Street in the late 90s, doing ERP implementations for y2k, and leading change management workstreams. Because change is all about, really, when I think of it from a consulting perspective, in its most simple forms, there are two elements of it, there is control, to make sure the project gets delivered on time on budget, you know, etc, etc. But then there’s the comfort, side control and comfort of the two C’s. And the comfort is what we have to be able to portray to communicate to authenticate with those in the organization. So that the buy in is there, not just when things are going well, but when you I’ve seen these projects, I used to call them death marches, you know, where you’ve got people who are working an eight hour a job a day, and by the way, their company’s going through a large ERP implementation, and now they have to put in another eight hours a day to get that job done. They’ve got a family at home, they’re missing birthdays, it just, it’s a downward spiral. So when you have organizational change management in place, you can address a lot of these concerns and make the whole journey more human. Yes, it’s business. And yes, you have deliverables, etc. But it doesn’t have to be sterile, there’s a way to do that in a very positive environment.

 

Gary: So I started off in the military family got involved in organizational change management. But before I was in change management, actually, I graduated from DeVry Institute of Technology, ended up working in marine geophysics and going to all these dangerous places around the world, the Arctic, in the Middle East, and so on, and working with explosives and all kinds of things that were part of the job, cooking systems up to satellites, etc. And then the Navy caught wind of some of the work I was doing, and recruited me to be the program director at combat systems engineering division. So for four years, as a civilian, I worked in a military organization, developing curriculum, and the curriculum we had to develop was curriculum that you develop where you get asked to do it, right. Because what I’m doing now is, I think, a natural progression of that it combines technology, with people. I like to say we’re trilingual, we speak business, you know, technology, and human. You know, if you if you can align those three, you have, it’s a triple constraint model. So if one of those three seems to suffer, it will be at the peril for the overall project. So I’ve been working consistently with military organizations, defense contractors, but I’ve also worked with a lot of organizations in the private sector as well. And I’d like to say it was all by design. But that would be an abject lie.

 

JC: It never is, it never is. Everything, it’s always an accident somehow, right? You know, just how did they end up here?

 

Gary: A lot of times, I ended up being in places because I had actually met and had the opportunity to work with truly fabulous people. And that would, you know, tweak something that would take me in a different direction and in context of what I was doing at the time, that made sense. So it’s a kind of a long, convoluted answer to your question, but but that’s a little bit about.

 

JC: It’s a hell of a path. It’s a hell of a path. So let’s ask this. What a little advice for the audience from you, then let’s pull from some of this experience, right. First question is, if you could pick one must read book, like business related. What would you recommend to the audience? Well, what’s one of the books you read, whether it be in marketing or business that really just kind of blew your hair backing like this one’s evergreen? 

 

Gary: Well, it’s a bit dated now. But you know, the books “Abundance” and “Bold”, I think, for me, were an opportunity to see that someone else had captured a spirit and a language about abundance, not thinking from a mindset of being deprived or a lack or missing something, but approaching something from a sense of abundance and, and really pulling out all the stops in the limit. So those two books “Bold” and “Abundance”. Again, they’re an opportunity to take a look at and being introduced to phrases like a moonshot, you know, and how do you take a look at the 60s of digital transformation, for example, and I marry that, I think, probably a down to a specific book, there was a book written 20 years ago, Geoffrey Moore, and he talks about Crossing the Chasm. And he talks about the technology adoption lifecycle, which is a bell curve. And whether you think of an individual, or whether you think of an organization or whether you think of a national government, I think that that bell curve, that he presents him crossing the chasm, the technology adoption lifecycle is true today, like it was 20 years ago, and it will be true in 10, and 20 years from now. And so if you help that help, if you understand that, you absorb that, and then you take a look at it from a marketing services delivery perspective, if you have a very new and innovative technology, according to how Geoffrey Moore setup the bell curve, you have the innovators that are the top 2%, the early adopters, their next 12%, the next 34% that take you to the peak of the bell curve is what we call the leading mass market. Then there’s the trailing mass market. And then there’s the laggards. Yeah, so because we work in a lot of new really cutting edge technology. Frankly, we don’t spend time chasing laggards or the trailing mass market, we’re interested in that top 14%. So for example, one solution where we’ve just brought to market and and we’re starting to see some returns from those marketing efforts, is a solution in the SAP space. So if your clients are familiar with sa p as a global enterprise solution, traditionally, an organization if they’re going to embark on a digital transformation journey they struggle with, well, what does our current footprint look like? Now these footprints have been developed over decades sometimes. And the people that did the work originally may still not be with the organization they’ve moved on.

 

Gary: The documentation may be shoddy or, or imperfect. So how do you build a new house on an old foundation? That’s the question what we have, traditionally, if you were to find out what your as his baseline is, it takes you one to two years. And it’s facilitated by management consultants. And it costs between one and $7 million. We take that whole process, and we reduce it to less than $50,000. We do it in one day. And we do it as deep as your system is most of the management consulting efforts go down? There are six levels of SAP technology, if you think of it from a work breakdown structure, so there’s a module and then there are processes and activities and tasks and so on. The human facilitated workshops take basically they only go down to level two of six levels, we go right down to the build of your system, you know, we’re looking at everything. When was the last custom code created? How many users? Is it a cybersecurity breach? I mean, so because we’re involved in these innovative technologies, whether it’s ad cannibal for marketing, or the CTT for marketing, or SAP, again, all using artificial intelligence, we’re not going to be spending our resources wisely if we’re chasing the trailing mass market or the laggards like the people in the laggards category would really if they could they still have, you know, if you saw the movie, Napoleon Dynamite with the long telephone and the cord, they still have those, you know, they were available, but when you’re trying to focus on that top 14% You might have a tool that they’re interested in, but a lot of other organizations do too. So it’s like dialing into that radio station, you’ve got to have the right message at the right frequency delivered at the right time. And you know, I’m talking to the to the converted, you know all about.

 

JC: I want me to have the conversation, other people are listening, right, they’re not nicely converted. But listen, I love this information. I love the software, specifically your business model about relearning being compensated with the difference of what’s safe, which is that’s hard to say no, do I like the sales pitch of that- Just in general. It’s hard. It’s hard to say no, I hate that idea. I don’t want to save money, right? How can people reach you Gary? Email? Website? You know how you displayed your name on LinkedIn if they want to reach out?

 

Gary: Great, thank you for that. my LinkedIn profile is Gary GA ROI. middle initial is L period. And the last name is Melling. M-E-L-L-I-N-G. So if you go to my LinkedIn profile, you’ll you’ll see lots of stuff there. We’ve got presentations and so on. Our website is www.aiinc.cloud. And we have a  1-800 number if anyone would like to call us at 1-800-627-4151. And we can also be reached at info@aiinc.cloud

 

JC: Wonderful. Thank you and lesson for everyone out there listening. Again, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe, like the podcast, give it the five stars, preferably some writing behind it so other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all these amazing and helpful b2b software’s on the market today. Gary, thank you so much for being on the show. I want to talk to you after this because I have some questions. For myself. I just I love this software already.

 

Gary: Thank you. The pleasure has been mine. I hope this has both been interesting and useful for your followers and your guests. Thank you.

 

JC: Absolutely. Have a good day sir.

Learn more about TravelBank at: www.travelbank.com

Find Duke Chung on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dukechung/

JC: Welcome, everybody to another episode of The Future of Biz Tech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest with us on the show today. And if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following the podcast and subscribing wherever you’re listening to be sure to give that five star review preferably with some cool comments on there, because that is how other techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this. And today I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing the Co-Founder and CEO of Travel Bank, Duke Chung. Duke, thank you so much for being on the show. Why don’t you tell the audience a little about yourself, and what does TravelBank do?

 

Duke: JC, thank you for having us here. We really appreciate it. And a little bit about myself. I’m a second time founder. My first business, we built a customer service software technology that we sold in 2014, to Microsoft, which has now become part of the Microsoft CRM customer support product line and has carried through its roadmap and reaches millions of businesses around the world today. So we’re very excited about that. That led me to TravelBank. TravelBank is an all in one expense, travel and card platform for businesses from small to medium and some of the larger businesses as well. We started this business in at the end of 2016. We launched in 2017 with expenses, and then built on travel and moved into payments. And today we’re the only provider out there that has all of it together delivered in one platform. And for one subscription price for all of our customers approximately 3000 businesses around the world today are using TravelBank to enable their employees with expenses and travel and with payment solutions.

 

JC: That’s pretty cool. So you’re the only one who brings all three of those aspects. It was travel cards, and then an expense…

 

Duke: Expense management. That’s correct. That’s correct. Yeah. So…

 

JC: Why does no one else add that that third one? I mean, guess what, like, what did you What did you see? Like, what was that issue in the industry? I mean, why didn’t someone just go? Oh, yeah, let’s do all three, because clearly all three are part of that equation, when you’re sending, you know, employees out. So I mean, just how did how did you guys get to be the first one?

 

Duke: Well, it’s it was interesting. So when I moved from the East Coast to Silicon Valley out here in San Francisco, you know, we suddenly had this huge community of startups. And you’re talking about 1000s and 1000s, of startups in 2016, 17. What we realized then was, as we thought about building our suites, you know, where we would start. And we started with expenses, were the only ones in the travel space that started with expenses. And the reason for that was because most of these smaller businesses, as we think about the value proposition you provide for helping to really control spend for companies, the first thing you think about as a small business is going to be controlling spend for all of your employees, not just travel, but across the board, right? It could be office supplies, it could be software products, it could be marketing budget, you’re going to control your spending in one price. So it made sense for us actually, to build an expense technology first, because this way, we could actually help these companies get going. And when the business scales up to a certain point, and begins to mature or go into its growth mode, you’re going to start to hire a lot more people, the company is going to transform into a new stage of business. And then businesses started to think a little bit more about let’s go a little bit more narrow and think about how to control spend for travel. Because travel becomes a big ticket area of spend, it could be as much as 20% of your overall spend as you scale your business. And so that led us to building more functionality around a travel program, including a travel platform, where you can book travel across 400 Airlines, 650,000, hotels, and all the major ground transportation services, and to kind of bring that all together into a travel program as an extension of expenses. So that’s how we led from expenses to travel. And then through the pandemic, I think is really where we pushed on payments a lot. And we’re I think we’re the early evolutions of that because payments is transforming so quickly. And what the pandemic really did was it made everything contactless you know, it actually forced what I would classify as a behavioral change, you know, during the pandemic, if you wanted to go down the street and buy coffee, or buy a sandwich or pay for something you know, suddenly you find yourself using your phone and paying with your mobile wallets. And that was very transformational from when we first started this business you know, we started a business and we’re still using credit cards right more more dominantly now you know we’re finding ourselves using our phones for identity management and also for payments. So bringing payments into this flow was really a nice way to kind of expand our offering and today we’re the only ones that have all three built by ourselves organically the technologies all unified into one experience.

 

JC: So that payments part so I want to dig a little more on that because I think a lot of people totally understand the travel part understand the expense part right you know, expense reports and plane tickets. Okay, we got that but the payment So I want to I want to go deeper here. So is this kind of like, for example, we use American Express right? And so it’s very easy for me to order an employee card and have it sent to them. So that you know, they can put things on that I can view to my dashboard, I can freeze it, I can up its limit down its limit, whatever I want to do. Walk me through, how similar is what you’re doing to that? And then is it agnostic to any given type of like Visa, MasterCard, Discover Amex? Or do you guys partner with one? Or is it just a platform that links into their phone? And they can use anything they want? And it just grabs the data? Like, let? That’s where I’m going with this.

 

Duke: Great question. Great question. So I’ll start I’ll go and reverse. When you’re using our expense system, we link up to 14,000 cards, personal and corporate cards, so your American Express card would work perfect. And the way it would work is you just sync up to your card account. And as you spend money on your American Express card or your employees do imagine every transaction will automatically fill into your expense report. So we basically curate your expense report in the backend. So that the end, depending on how you set up your business, you might have some requirements receipts for compliance, you can set that off as a customized to your own business. And we’ll just help you enforce that. So that when the user submits it fully compliant as far as the expense report, so imagine that experience so that we call sort of generation one, just link it up to a credit card. Generation two what we build with payments kind of takes that concept a step further, you mentioned, you know, American Express, I want to send a new employee a card, you can still do that. But now imagine that in the digital virtual form, so you could go to our application, and you could actually select the employee you want to send it to, and you can send them a virtual card, you can send a virtual card for $5,000, because they’re running an event for you. And you can actually specify specific categories you can spend it on, you can also specify when it expires, so you can only use it up to two weeks. And then other requirements that you can add on there. So it’s very controlled, if you will. And you can send this anytime you want, as many virtual cards as you want. And once these virtual cards are sent to your employee, they’ll have access to use it both online, they’ll will generate, they’ll generate a 1416 digit code for them. They could spend it on Amazon if they need to. But more importantly, it integrates automatically into their mobile wallet. So if they go on travel, they can book all their travel through us, of course, but then let’s say you go to the airport, and you’re going to buy a cup of coffee, or expense your lunch where you can just take your mobile phone out with your wallet, you’ll have the virtual card already built in there, and you go ahead and spend it. Now everything you spent on the virtual card automatically populates into your expense report as well. So in both generation one in generation two, but generation two is all about the digital virtual card. And we think that is very much the future, because what it does is it gives the employers more control into how these cards are issued. So instead of sending an executive, a $30,000, credit limit, and then having to audit all their expenses, you can actually kind of go more granular and send these virtual cards out on a per use case basis. And therefore giving the CFOs much more control around how this money is being distributed and democratize across their employee base.

 

JC: That’s pretty cool. And that I can see how that could be especially like you said, if a company is growing, and being able to to just quickly distribute these…

 

Duke: Exactly.

 

JC: And it doesn’t just have to be for travel like for, you know, I have a marketing agency. So sometimes I have employees that need to pay for certain softwares on their own. I’m like, yeah, go get that software, just put it on your card. Right? So that it automatically hits. So what types of companies are you finding.. you have 3000 companies in your portfolio as far as client base? What size? What industries do you find have the most need and benefit from this? You know, is there is there any kind of method to the madness, is there any groupings of certain industries or size of the company?

 

Duke: We’re seeing.. we’re seeing it all across the board for small businesses, particularly, you know, more nimble businesses or technology startups, right? They are quick to change. So newer technologies like ours, they adopted very quickly, they find it to be more efficient. And they are starting from the beginning, right. So a lot of them are building their credit card program. So this is almost like a new generation on how the approach is working for them. And they intend to continue to start here and expand as we innovate around virtual cards as well. And these are think of startups, you know, very small businesses that gets going, but also long tail could be bakeries. Could these, you know, small businesses here and there. We also serve a lot of mid market businesses, mid market businesses, for us, businesses anywhere between 100 million to, you know, say a billion in that range of revenue, because a good amount of businesses there that we serve today. And they are all fully on travel, they’re fully on expenses, and they’re just beginning their migration from plastic card to this virtual digital card and they may enter this in a hybrid approach, meaning they’re still going to issue some plastic cards, but they’re beginning to, you know, these ancillary use cases that you talked about the starting to use those, especially for employees, they don’t want to give a plastic card to. So this is a really great way for them to kind of expand that use case, then you have larger businesses. And I’ll give me a couple example larger businesses that we serve our businesses like DoorDash, like DoorDash, employees are all on TravelBank, we manage all their travel expenses and or GrubHub, or SoulCycle, these kind of businesses. So at that stage where the revenues over a billion dollars, you’re at full scale, and, you know, for CFOs, and controllers that are using our programs, this is really the holy grail for them, it gives them absolute control, they have visibility into the spend, they have visibility into the controls of the spend before it’s issued. But they have real time visibility into what’s being spent as well, because all of the entire organization is standardized, typically on one or two cards. So all the spend is now being visualized in real time through our dashboards for these controllers. And that’s really transformational because we think about where we came from. Most finance teams don’t have visibility into what you’ve spent until you’ve done your expense report. And now we have a value proposition where if you’re issuing all these virtual cards out there, to employees, and they’re using it on the go every day, for all the different use cases, every single transaction is automatically captured and visualized by the finance teams. So they have visibility into what’s being spent at any given time. So that’s really, really exciting on that side. So we’re definitely pushing the envelope up to the bigger enterprises, but we think really, that this will transcend from small to medium to large. 

 

JC: Okay, and so what’s your, how are you right now trying to go up marketing? You know, I’m a marketing guy. So I always have to ask the marketing questions like, what types of verticals? In marketing? Are you guys using? What did not work in the past? What do you see working pretty well for you guys right now.

 

Duke: So we sell into the back office finance. CFOs are traditionally very conservative groups, they don’t, you know, when it comes to technology changes, it’s, you know, from my experience, from my first business into this business, it’s they’re not early adopters, they don’t need to be they’re risk averse, they frankly, don’t really like to make a lot of changes, if something’s working, they don’t have to use the latest and greatest in your example. You know, being a marketing consultant, you may like the latest and greatest technologies for marketing. The CFOs are very different. CFOs are very different. Rather, they would rather everyone else tested first, and it works. And it doesn’t have to be the Tesla as long as it works. It’s reliable. And it’s good. Right. So I think that, because of that our, our strategy for going upstream or moving upstream really is we’ve grown a lot with early stage companies. When you when I look at DoorDash, you know, we had the opportunity to serve them when they were the hundreds of employees. And now they’re in the 1000s of employees. And it was just a matter of two to three years that they’ve scaled up. And we’ve kind of grown with them over time. But we’re also in Interestingly, some help verticals like healthcare, you know, OSF healthcare is a good example, they run it’s a $3 billion business running hospitals in the Illinois Chicago area, and we manage all the travel expenses for them. West Tennessee health care systems in Tennessee, we manage all the traveling necessary. So these are large organizations, where we’ve come in, and we have replaced older systems, older systems that have poor user experiences aren’t integrated in together don’t have mobile functionality, and certainly don’t have this next generation, virtual card capabilities, they’re just too far behind. And as we know, these a lot of these large institutions, they are hiring younger generation employees coming in, you know, for the future. And the younger generation has grown up with these functionalities, they expect to be able to go to the phone and book your flight in hotel, to see your itinerary, you know, to not have to go through 10 steps to do an expense report. So the nice thing about this is all integrated. It’s all modern, and it’s all really designed for the user experience is particularly for the users, the travelers that are out there. And you know, the pandemic has really changed the way we travel. And I think it’s going to change the future of travel too. What I mean by that is before the pandemic, you had a small number of people who traveled a lot. So this might be the C level team, the marketing teams and sales teams. Now we’re going to set up where you have employees everywhere, all over the US maybe all over the world. So all of a sudden, you have a lot of spend from a lot of infrequent travelers. And that means that companies are now scrambling to figure out how they can gain more control over the spend. Because it’s not just a small group of people spending a lot of money traveling, you’ve got a lot of people now traveling and the reason they’re traveling is because more companies in the remote work world are encouraging off sites and events and conferences as a means to get together now because they may not be asking you to come back to the office, but people are taking the companies are more for wanting to go out to do these off sites and events. And so you’re going to see a lot more travel from every single employee across the company. And that’s a huge transformation in what the pandemic has done. But I think our technologies are in line with the change of the world. And we’re innovating very closely against that. Okay.

 

JC: So you talked about the future. Right? So this being the the Future of Biz Tech, I have a couple future questions for you now. So you are in a somewhat competitive industry, right of what you guys do. Where do you see, and you talked, you touched on this a little bit with the virtual payments and contactless, but in the next 510 years in the industry that you’re in with you plus your competitors? Where do you see things going? Right, notwithstanding, you know, we can dig deeper into the that one you mentioned. But is there anything that could be affected by, you know, AI, or their technology or legislation or anything like that? Where do you see the industry going in the next five to 10 years when it comes to companies like yours?

 

Duke: Yeah, we see a few key trends happening on the AI side, I think we’re in a race to gather data around that. And, you know, in our business, we, you know, we sit on top of 14,000 credit cards, we’re running expense reports and have a lot of compliance data. Of course, we keep everything confidential and private to each of our entities that we serve in the respective users alone. So we we look at the data anonymized, but what the data can do for us is really build a moat, to enable a framework for future AI use cases. And some examples of that may come in for things like personalization. So I could say, hey, JC, you know, when you travel, when you’re heading into the airport, we’re going to tell you, there’s a piece of coffee there. And you’re gonna say, Well, how would you know, I like pizza, we know you like pizza. Because if you look at your expense reports, we see a lot of pizza expenses in there, right. So that’s a very simple example. Right? Another example, when it comes to actually auditing and compliance, having a lot of data mode is really valuable, because when another employee expenses, another coffee, we can check to see if other employees in the business have expense in the similar location for similar amounts, right. And all these benchmarks are actually established in our, our data, our data cloud. And so that serves as an ongoing strategy for us. And our vision over time, frankly, on on expenses is one where we can introduce the world’s first autonomous Expense Report system, one that actually will not only build an expense report for you behind the scenes, but it can auto approve your expense report. And I think we can do it better than what a manager or mid level manager or refinancing we can do. Because we can provide much more structure around the approval processes. At the minimum, we can provide guidance to the users and the managers. But over time, I think as the as we’re seeing in the auto space, right, for autonomous cars, I think those kind of applications can be applied into our use cases here for expenses. So personalization, compliance use cases. And of course, leading data trends with the data that we’re collecting to kind of predict things that we should assemble into our marketplace of other experiences that our users potentially could benefit from. Those are all things that we’re doing around data. And we think data is a really important part of the future on this side. And that’s why we’re also interested in teaming up the banks, because the banks and us together coming together can also provide more synergies around data around payments. But I also think the future will be more about not only expense travel, but actually coming closer with the banking environments, the and we today, we have a partnership with Brex that in through them, we serve 1000s of startups, we also have started a new relationship with US Bank, which is the fifth largest bank in the world. And they are they have 100,000 customers here in North America. And we’re, we’re working with them. And the synergies that we bring together between the finance side, and expensive travel really is about being able to offer more compelling value propositions back to the businesses in a way where we could be more aggressively giving back rebates. For example, imagine if you run travel bank with one of our banking partners, you know, instead of getting 1% back or 2% cashback, you know, you could possibly get 3%, maybe 4% back. And that’s shows you the power of bringing together, you know, all the systems into one place so that there’s more value back for the companies in a way that would be very difficult to do if you had to assemble this yourselves from a company perspective. So we see that coming through.

 

JC: Yeah, I really liked the auto approval part you were talking about. Because what I find interesting about that is that I imagine you could set certain thresholds where it’ll auto approve unless something breaks a certain line, you know, like a manager does not sit there and go through every single expense report, but they could get like an alert that says, hey, this one just looks a little weird, like this one, because the data will tell it that that’s maybe abnormal, right? Especially if you have a whole team of people that went out to the same location, and all their expense reports are here. And there’s one person’s like way up here. I imagine you know, that an algorithm could could point and flag things, right. So I think that’s really cool. And then on the other hand, if it automatically disapproves it, you’d obviously be able to have that the employee to challenge and that could send it to a manager or something like that. So I think that’s really cool.

 

Duke: That’s right. That’s right.

 

JC: There’s a lot of time in that efficiency process, which is really nice. So now let’s talk about Okay, so my audience likes the inside scoop. Alright, so we’re gonna ask about your company, specifically not the industry, I just wonder about TravelBank What is something that’s coming up soon that you guys are gonna be maybe launching maybe feature-wise, you know, what’s the next cool, big thing on the roadmap that everyone here can look forward to? 

 

Duke: Well, there’s a couple areas and expenses, you know, with the extension of payments, we’re looking at broad areas where we take the payment contactless to the next level. And a good example there is imagine now going to the hotel, where you don’t even have to check in at the front desk, you have, we have your mobile wallet, I could say JC here’s your room number 2808. And that will show up right in your itinerary. You go straight to your room. Now take the same idea and say imagine going to the airport. And today the airports are designed to have a check in service in the front, it takes up quite a bit of real estate as you know, right? You’ve got these kiosks you’ve got, you’ve got people there checking bags, but what if I said to you JC, go right to gate 13 and hover your phone over there to check into your flight. And boom, you’re on there. Imagine what that would do to transform the airports today, it would simplify it down very significantly. And then if you go to the car rental, right like now Hertz is purchasing Tesla’s. Everything’s moving digital, you don’t have to go through the Hertz line anymore. You don’t have to wait even for your name to show up on the border. JC you’re going to go straight to your car. And by the way, your car doesn’t have to be the airport, everyone thinks Okay, your cars because in the future of autonomous driving cars, your car can be anywhere.

 

Duke: Yeah it’s just come pick you up, it can pick you up exactly, it can pick you up right at the airport, right and you hop right in, you hover with your phone becomes not only your payments, but it also becomes your identity management. So we think the future of business travel is going to change very fast. And that’s why we’re so interested in this area, because we can help create the future here with bringing these technologies into one place. So that’s one big area of focus for us that we’re looking at that’s really fascinating. And there’s a lot of innovation happening with all the major banks out there on this effort to kind of digitalize your identity and your payments into a way that’s really streamlined. So we’re really, really excited about that. Outside of this, you know, the other areas we’re really looking at are things like ESG, you know, improving the climate and improving putting more awareness around travel. Because as you know, in our generation growing up, we had a lack of awareness around a lot of these things. And we think we’re in a great position now to be able to introduce more awareness in so when you travel, when you spend things that you’re going to expense, we can give you a report and say, JC based on this trip, you’ve created all these carbon emissions, right? For example.

 

JC: Sounds like a guilty report though… I don’t know.

 

Duke: Possibly, possibly, well, it’s a phase one, right. So like I said, it’s more of an awareness thing. You just don’t know what you’ve done, and the ideas is really to force you to make any changes. But I think the initial goal is to make people more aware. And we’re seeing this to be a huge, you know, more important focus for our world. And because we are in the business of booking travel for our constituents, we’re in a great position to display this information, and really, to provide more insights and awareness for our users. And we think that’s really important. Moving forward. So there’s…

 

JC: So it’s like nutrition facts on the McDonald’s menu. Now you’re like, I’m still gonna get the Big Mac, but like, at least I’m aware of what I’m doing to myself, right?

 

Duke: That’s right. 600 calories. Frankly, I don’t know if it will stop you from eating it. But you know, but at least you know, right?

 

JC: Back on how many per week then maybe, right? What you bring up is interesting, though, because if you start showing, again, like nutrition facts, it’s not that it’s going to stop actions on some mass scale, like day one. But being aware helps plant a seed. And then that grows in your mind. And what happens is just historically, from my, from what I’ve seen, is then people start to voice that. So for example, I could see a scenario where in the future, let’s say, what you’re doing is it becomes widely adopted, and there’s a carbon footprint and breaks it down by like, well, you took a Airbus 737, you know, or a, you know, for whatever, 400. And then you took a Boeing, you know, 737. And you see the difference, you know, there could be a scenario where employees start saying, Hey, if you wouldn’t mind, I prefer to be booked on this airline because they use these more conscious planes. And then that forces the airlines to then invest in, in better, more efficient planes, because people are wrestling flights because they’re on, you know, gas hogs…

 

Duke: That’s right, that’s right…

 

JC: So it pushes in that direction, which I think is actually pretty cool. Yeah.

 

Duke: It is cool and the other areas that influence behavior so for example, let’s say you’re going on a multi-city trip, right, you may consider instead of doing a lot of short leg hops, you may consider to go to a place and just stay there a little longer because that will change your behavior as well. Right? So when you think about planning your business trips, you know, you change his behavior based on the carbon emissions footprint, if you’re doing a lot of hops and getting a lot of flights, you know, it’ll kind of give you a bigger report around how many emissions you’re generating. Right? So I think on a behavioral change, it also has an impact. But you’re absolutely right, I think what we’re really excited about is, the awareness is really, maybe not so much about the users as awareness for them. It’s much more about the suppliers, you know, we dream of this day where the planes aren’t fully relying on gas. I mean, you know, if the day that Tesla gets into the electric plane, for example, right, who’s going to build that nobody’s going to build that today. And unless we actually build more awareness, into improving the climate, that’s going to push the suppliers to innovate. But unless that awareness is actually established today, there’s no reason to actually push on that. And so I think where this will impact the world is, is going to force innovation all across the board across the travel industry. And we’re excited about that. We’re excited about being at the forefront, in building that early awareness and adoption, and actually pushing for future innovation to make the world a better place, essentially, so. And that’s our role…

 

JC: I like that. Socially conscious company.

 

Duke: Exactly.

 

JC: So let’s ask personal questions about you. Let’s talk about Duke for a second. So when you were a kid, right, and you were like, 10 years old, and someone’s like, what do you do when you grew up? And you answered? What was that answer? And then, is that what you’re doing now? And if not, how did you you know, how that path, you know, change and get you here?

 

Duke: I when I was growing up, my dream was to be a detective. And so.. and I think maybe has to do with the books you read. But I always loved you know, growing up like all these different books around mysteries and solving crimes, right? I love that I always was really fascinated by.

 

JC: Like Columbo and Murder, she wrote. Man, those my two favorite as a kid Columbo and Murder, she wrote.

 

Duke: There you go, I love them well, I know them all. Well, and so I always dreamed, I mean, for Halloween, I always dressed up as a detective. And you know, and I loved it. I can’t say that’s what I do today. But other than probably the closest similarity might be when you’re, you know, problem solving is probably the best example of what I can extract from what I grew up what I inspire to be growing up, you know, when you’re solving crimes, and, you know, trying to solve a problem. You know, I feel like these this when we’re doing these startups, and frankly, all these, you know, new things that come around, right, they’re sort of new challenges that are set forth in front of us.

 

JC: So it’s like a puzzle, a one big puzzle.

 

Duke: You know, there you go, exactly. It’s a puzzle. And you’ve got to figure out how to solve these puzzles, right? And then once you solve this puzzle, while there’s going to be another puzzle, another puzzle, right? It keeps going. That’s what’s actually sort of exciting. It’s sort of an ongoing series of crime scenes that you’ve got to solve over the time.

 

JC: Here’s I love about what you just said, you basically just equated entrepreneurship to coming across multiple crime scenes, and I could not agree with you more.

 

Duke: Well, that’s yeah, I don’t I never said that on a podcast or anywhere. But now that since you asked the question, JC now I can actually step back and think about it more clearly. But it does feel like that, right? 

 

JC: And They’re all bloody. They’re all like mass murder.

 

Duke: That will say for the second podcast, you know, the more detail but you know, build your business tonight and others out there who have as well, you know, it’s almost what we do every day, right? We were looking at these challenges, but someone say they’re mostly opportunities, right? You kind of look at these challenges that we have today and try to solve in make it better for the future. So that’s fun. That’s actually very fun. I think that’s probably the number one thing keeps us going like we picked an industry to, to to build something in. And then how do we kind of help this industry move forward? So…

 

JC: That’s awesome, you seem like a very educated man, you know, as especially with your puzzle person, you have to be you know, well read. I’m sure you watch documentaries a lot, too. Especially that real crime stuff, you know.

 

Duke: CSI.

 

JC: So let me ask you, yeah, oh, yeah. All of them all the things I like the true crime series personally, you know, it’s funny, I saw a meme the other day that it said, because, you know, Halloween and whatnot. And it said, it was like me watching a scary movie, and there was like, and then it was like, me watching a movie like a real crime. It’s like, oh…

 

Duke: Yeah, the real crime. I have to say JC is a little darker. I think the regular ones, right? The the intense seem like they’re always a little bit darker. Or at least they’re written that way. Yeah. So but I, I know, I hear you loudly on that.

 

JC: That’s funny. Last question and select which piece of this question it is, which is if you had to pick a must-read book or what or documentary, watch documentary or podcast, not No, not this one. But I mean, like, just for business stuff, right? didn’t pick a podcast, a documentary, or a book that someone listening absolutely should engage in, what would it be and why?

 

Duke: I think, you know, I’ll go with a book. I think you know, one of the there are two books really, but I’ll talk about one of them but really He inspired me through my personal journey. entrepreneurship journey it was, Tony Hsieh’s book from Delivering Happiness, I thought that was really well thought out and well written in, it talks a lot about like, the, you know, at the end of the day, we go through these journeys and, you know, what’s the final destination? Right? What are we really all aspiring for, and in what you realize is that, you know, those that are, that are, say, very wealthy today, or those that are kind of very poor today, they all have their own struggles. But actually, the happiest people that I found are really the people that are somewhere in the middle, that have the aspiration to achieve something great. And oftentimes we talk about is the success, the Earned success, call it that is really what is the drivers for the pursuit of happiness, meaning, you know, you go through all these struggles to build these businesses and challenges that we talked about. And ultimately, when he gets to the other side, when you’ve solved the problems, and you do it over and over and over again, and you almost kind of see like a graph that goes up, right, you kind of look back, it’s almost just a series of challenges that you’ve solved over and over, and then you kind of get to the top. And whatever that top is defined for you, you know, along the way. And you look back, that is really what I would classify as a pursuit of happiness. And he talks a lot about that he talks about, you know, what we do every day, why we do it, and what makes us happy. And ultimately, those are the biggest drivers, right? And a lot of people, you know, equate happiness, so to wealth or other visible things, but in reality, you know, I think when we look at what we’re doing, outside of all those things, it’s truly just this sort of graph of earning success, like going through the grief and the stress, if you will, along the way. And in one word, to say maybe that’s really just the cost of success, you know, the cost of commitment over time, you know, without having to go through these difficult periods of times, you can look at the pandemic and all that, you know, if one were to look at that and kind of capitalize on it, you get some tremendous outcomes out of that. And those are the things that ultimately make people happy. And what we do make us more fulfilled over time. So I think that book really changed the way I thought about my own journey for my first visitors and also for TravelBank, and I think for future ones, as well. So that’s when I really would recommend for people to read through the spend time to be inspired by it.

 

JC: Yeah know, I’ve read that book, too. And one, you know, the one inspiration that came to me from that book, years ago was that we got rid of financial goals, my agency, right, so a lot of people say, what’s your goals for 2021, 2022? Whatever, right? And they were talking about revenue goals, and I, I tell them well, we don’t have any like, well, how can I not have any? How do you know like, well, because our only goal is to be remarkable, right? Because when you have a financial goal, and this is just my opinion, what I took away from the book kind of thing just right out inspired me is that you turn your clients into extractions, right? Like your goal, the the mindset is, you’re extracting financial gain out of them for you, when your goal is to be remarkable, you are injecting your expertise and the value that you give for them. And both will lead to this, you’ll still make money, the difference, right? Where’s your mindset? And so that’s what I took from that’s one of the big things that I took in the book that we play. 

 

Duke: That’s awesome. Actually, that’s awesome. 

 

JC: Yeah, we have goals we have, we have taxes, we got to file, we know what we made at the end of the year, but we don’t have like electronics. Like no, we are going to figure out how to be twice as efficient. As we were last year, we’re gonna figure out how to get twice as many leads for our client this year, that and when those become the goals, right, the money will come right. And so that’s, I’m glad you mentioned that book. I thought that was a great book, too.

 

Duke: I think, yeah. When I met, I met Tony a few times he spoke at my conference because I was in the customer service business. So I got a chance to know him. Unfortunately, it’s, it’s, you know, we were so sad to see him leave, ultimately. But when when I visited him in his office, he shared with similar stories of one you shared, which was we took a tour, he used to do these tours, and he would personally do the tour. So you go around his office and all these people would be so happy. And there was a group of people on a corner on a phone kind of isolated. So I asked Tony, I said Who are those people over there? And he said, Oh, those people are service-specific function. And he said, there are certain people, you know, let’s say, have lower income and can qualify for higher credit. So let’s say for example, you have a credit card, and you only have $500 limit on it. Well, sometimes let’s say you bought a pair of white shoes for an upcoming wedding. But it turns out, you actually need black shoes, you’re not actually able to purchase a black shoes, because you know, you don’t have enough credit limit. So what that group was actually doing was saying to the customers, well, we understand your problem, and we’ll go ahead and send you the black pair of shoes first. And when you’re done just when you come back from your wedding, go ahead and send us the white shoes back and they were willing to do that. So from a financial decision, if one were to look at this and run a business from a P&L and say why would you ever do that right? You not only increasing risk, you’re dealing with, you know, lower income earners and you might have certain biases around why this doesn’t make any sense to do at all. But what they learned through this process, and the spirit of Delivering Happiness was that by doing this, they earned the trust and the loyalty of these customers. And not only did they return the shoes back as they said they would, but they came back over and over again to buy more things from them. And that long term sort of lifetime value of that customer was really what they were looking to acquire. Not the short term transaction, right? So that’s…

 

JC: The short term, VS the long tern right, exactly.

 

Duke: Exactly. 

 

JC: So I want to make sure that people know how to get a hold of you, Duke and in the company. So first, for anyone who’s listening who wants to reach out to person maybe they have, maybe they are up market, right? And they like we had to say today, how do they reach you personally? And then how do people find the website.

 

Duke: The best way to find me, you find me on Twitter, Duke Chung, Instagram, Facebook is fine, or you can email me at Duke@travelbank would be perfectly fine as well.

 

JC: That’s awesome. And for everyone out there listening again, if you liked what you heard today, here, if you’d like listening to Duke and myself, be sure to subscribe to this podcast give that five star rating we talked about the beginning, put some writing behind it. So other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all these amazing and helpful b2b software’s on the market today, Duke thank you so much for being on the show and I appreciate it. I’m going to be checking it out because like I said, I like that digital, the digital payment thing they want to control the spending of employees virtually. So thank you so much for showing all of us that.

 

Duke: Thank you, JC thanks for having me here.

 

JC: Buh-bye.

Learn more about Forma at: www.forma.ai

Find Nabeil Alazzam on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nabeilalazzam/

JC: Welcome, everyone to another episode of the Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest with us on the show today. And listen, if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following the podcast wherever you’re listening, be sure to give it a 5 star review, preferably with some nice comments. That always helps, because that is how other techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this. So today I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing the founder and CEO of Forma.ai Nabeil Alazzam. Nabeil, thank you so much for being on the show. Tell the audience a little bit about Forma. You know, what about yourself? And you know, what do you guys do?

 

Nabeil: Absolute pleasure to be here today, JC I’m glad that we have the opportunity to chat. Forma.Ai is a platform that helps large organizations better motivate their reps and manage sales compensation. And the fact that 15 million people in the US are on a variable compensation plan means that this is a big industry, it’s a big problem that needs to be tackled.

 

JC: Well, and I agree, here’s the thing. So I’m a born and bred sales guy. I don’t know if it feels natural, but I end up getting into sales a lot out of college. And I’ll tell you, when I got the opportunity to interview I jumped at it. Because I haven’t interviewed anyone who has a sales compensation SaaS company, this is a really big deal for me, just because I’ve got years and years of pain and struggle with these compensation plans. And so I really want to see how technology has helped not only to organize it, but I’m sure it helps to get even more creative, right? Because you have an organizational platform, you come up with cooler ideas that are tracked, right, I always found that there was always so many errors in payouts, because things were either complicated, and they didn’t have a way to do it right. So let’s hear a little about that. What is it like to use your software? And, you know, is it for giant companies? Is it for small mom and pops everyone in between? Let’s start there.

 

Nabeil: So I mean, you touched on something that’s really, really important. The fact is, if you’re in an organization and you are paid a fixed, fixed salary, maybe an annual bonus, you would never question your pay stub at the end of the day. Yeah. But in sales, there’s kind of, it’s the expectation that you should double check your Commission’s to make sure they’re right. You know, and the fact that we get it wrong is kind of unacceptable. But I would say that’s part of the problem. Like to me, that is table stakes, it’s not acceptable that we are mispaying our employees and some of the key individuals and organizations that are driving the growth. So that’s the table stakes part of the problem. But going back to my background I worked in as an agile consultant that focused on sales and marketing strategy. And we would go into these large enterprise organizations, whether it’s the Pfizer’s the Tebas, are large tech companies across the board, every time you going to do you know, to these organizations, you’re supporting their design process, and you’re helping them optimize the structures of comp as these external consultants, and you do these consulting engagements. And then you have to pass off the ideas to another team internally, that’s going to do the administration. So the real problem is the fact that strategy in the way that we think about analyzing our data to drive strategic decisions is done in completely different tools. It’s done a different by different teams in different people and different vendors, than the execution of comp. And so it’s no surprise that there’s a gap, not only that creates pay issues, and you know, administration issues, but also there’s a gap in how quickly we can react to change. And so I think the real, the real problem is the fact that in every part of our life, incentives drive behavior, using data in a much quicker way. And yet, and sales compensation, you know, we design a comp plan once every two to three years, and then we write it out until starts to fail. And it’s mind boggling.

 

JC: That’s interesting, you know, being AI, is there currently, and maybe there is in the future, if there’s not now but is there currently an AI aspect to your software? And more specifically, you know, does your software, maybe see or learn, like optimizations of comp plans and can spit out different ideas like, you know, what does that look like? Or is it just we come up with it, we throw it in there, and it manages it? Well, for us,

 

Nabeil: That’s the exact premise, it’s that we are leveraging the collective data model. So every customer, and all of the learnings that our platform gets of how incentives are actually driving behavior, are then applied to help optimize every customer’s individual unique needs for compensation.

 

JC: So that’s interesting, because, and correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I see this model then, is that let’s say you’ve got salespeople from organization are entered in right day one, and here’s their comp plan. And then I’m sure it has a calculation of course of how well they’ve done. And you might even be able to put in some costs in there I imagine so you can understand the net benefit to the company. And then it tracks basically how well the salespeople are doing with that comp and then across the whole network, right? So will it does it spit back suggestions like hey, you may want to raise the base or you may want to pull down the permission or you may want to add a tier level like does it give some questions at this point to the user?

 

Nabeil: Exactly, exactly. So the way to think about it is, in today’s world, most comp plans are designed based off of the experience of that sales leader, kind of what they’ve seen work in the past across the different organizations, and they bring it with them to their new organization, they kind of bring their insights they create this comp plan. But the question is, how much of that complaint is driven by data? And whether that tranche should be at the 65% attainment rate or the 75%? What’s the guess? It’s either the guesswork by the sales leader or a finance analyst internally doing a one off ad hoc analysis. We’re saying, if you understand and build the science of how incentives drive behavior and sales, you can actually start to optimize this using proper data and proper science.

 

JC: It’s funny, so far, every question I’ve asked. It’s been as I feel like people think that like, we prepare these we did not. It’s just every question I asked if it does that, it’s because like, this is something that I would have wished that I had, you know, as a part of, you know, when I was at organizations before, so Okay, so so far, what we’re three for three here on my wish list in question format. So okay, what about if a company goes in? What about the onboarding part? Does it already have enough data? Where if I tell it, the type of company I am, does it already say, Hey, these are the optimal compensation plans for like, because then I have a marketing agency, right? So that’s a very different compensation than let’s say, someone who’s doing maybe, you know, warehouse style, you know, in person or physical product sales, because there’s less overhead, or there’s more overhead, less net, so it’s gonna change, obviously, you know, what you want to pay people? So does it already have industry specific wants to kind of get you started? I mean, if you’re just like, I have no idea, you know, how to comp people like, can they start with your software to give them those initial ideas based on industry?

 

Nabeil: So there’s a difference between best practices, versus leveraging a data model like ours, and why I say that is jumping in, you can apply best practices to say, your marketing entity or you’re in the CPG space. And, yes, there are best practices to apply to each. But the thing with compensation is it’s so curated for every business’s needs, right, because even within the same domain, you win deals, because you have a differentiation against your competition. And you win deals in this ICP, when you know, when the requirements for the product look like XY and Z. So your comp plan, even if it’s the same, you know, you’re you’re talking about within a subset of being of an industry, at the most nice level, your Comp plan should look different, because you’re driving a different outcome and a different behavior and a very nuanced business. And so when we’re onboarding our customers, you’re onboarding them into our data, our data model, our approach, and there is some initial insights. Sure, but the insights grow over time, because we’re actually starting to, in fact, again, if you think about any sort of AI platform, the models evolve with the data. And yes, there are learnings that can be applied from the aggregate that can help. But the real benefit comes in when starting to optimize over time within your organization.

 

JC: Alright, so we’ll come back to more features here later for I want to know next, what was your motivation for starting this company? I mean, were you a frustrated salesperson who kept getting, you know, screwed on your, on your commissions, and they’re always wrong? And you’re like, ah, there must be changed, like, you know, what, what’s the origin story here?

 

Nabeil: I guess, you know, to go back, like to go way back, I guess, incentives have always been maybe a part of my life I, when I was in, I was in grade five, I used to be a seven newspaper, and the newspaper at the time came out with a spiff where you got an extra, you know, 15 bucks for signing on new customers. And the first thing I did was I called the newspaper I said, Well, how long do they have to be signed up for? And they said, two weeks. And I knew that it would cost me to $7 to cover the cost of two weeks. And so I literally went door to door just basically saying, you would like to sign up for newspaper, I’ll cover the first two weeks. And if you don’t want it after, I’ll cancel, and I ended up signing up. And of course, most people ended up staying on because you know, for $7, every two weeks, you end up staying on. And so what was interesting to me is this, you know, how quickly, and as such a young kid, like incentives can have a really meaningful impact. And so when I started managed consulting career, and helping large organizations design and, and tailor their incentive structures, there’s two things that stood out to me. One is that most organizations were not really taking a data driven approach, even when they hired consultants, you’re not gonna be able to afford to pay 1000s of analysts to do an individual like rep by rep analysis, you’re not going to do that. So you’re gonna hire a team of maybe 10 external consultants to come in and kind of help you design a one size fits all type sales approach for compliance Yeah, there’s one of these other 10,000 reps. And their plans look the same across the board, whether you’re in the middle of Nebraska, or New York City, or another country, like it doesn’t make sense.

 

Nabeil: And so I saw that, and I understood the limitations, but where we really starting to feel painful was we go in and we make these recommendations. And then I’ve also got the experience the side of being consultant that’s helping implement some of the existing tools in the space. And I implemented these tools and saw the pains of the organizations having to live with them. because they’re so rigid, and they’re so focused on administration, again, you have to do everything in series, you have to do the strategy first, once you come up with the right plan, then you go on to the tool to implement the administration. So now, naturally, organizations are starting to plan design, four to six months before the end of the fiscal year, not great. Two, what’s the plan, most of the times, you didn’t have the ability to actually execute properly on that administration, and then all the inefficiencies and all the pains that the sales team had to go through, and it again, it’s a it’s a human problem. On the internal side, the finance team is scrambling and running as fast as they can to try to support the business because they want to motivate the sales team, they want to drive the behavior. And then on the sales team side, most of the times reps don’t even have a full understanding of what their plan is meant to drive. So how is it supposed to motivate them, and then there’s no confidence in the paving being right, because of all the symptoms, again, this this really disjointed process. And so, coming out of consulting, you know, I had the opportunity where one of the customers I’ve worked with, was really experiencing a lot of pains, and they had reached out to me to come in and support. And this was my opportunity to really share the vision that I had of the future of sales comp, and, and they were, they were a strong believer in the vision as I wasn’t, so that’s where the business kicked off with our first customer.

 

JC: Do you see more companies signing on now, because of COVID. With staff going more remote? Do you see compensation plans changing based on the remote factor of a lot of their employees?

 

Nabeil: There’s an aspect of.. so change is happening in two ways. One is that, you know, naturally, the sales team, especially if they’re inside and inside sales team where there’s kind of a bullpen feel, you naturally now are having to create other ways of incentivizing kind of creating a team atmosphere. And so some organizations have leverage spiffs to kind of drive and change, and to create a kind of a team atmosphere, even though they’re all remote, and they’re working separately. But I think the biggest area where we’re seeing a big changes, you have to now pay for your top talent, because it’s no longer geo-based, right? If you’re an amazing rep and you you, you can help customers problem solve and implement the right solutions, you’re valuable and organizations that are across the globe see that. And so to retain your top talent, you need to make sure you’re designing a comp plan that truly rewards the top performers. And so naturally, you’re seeing organizations really try to button up their process so they can be confident or rewarding.

 

JC: Got it. Okay, now, I’m a marketing guy so I always asked this question. What are you guys doing to get the word out? I mean, I’m on the podcast. Okay, PR check. What else do I mean? You guys do? Do you guys do paid ads? Are you doing email marketing, LinkedIn, like, what are some things you’ve done and have they worked and have they not working a lot of people listening are probably might be in the same spot as you so it could be useful info.

 

Nabeil: So, I think we’ve had a relentless focus on customer execution. And so are, you know, we’re tackling this in a completely different way than anyone else’s. But we’re saying sales compensation is actually a lever for revenue growth. And it’s not just an administrative problem. And it’s not just the strategic problem over here with the consultants, it’s actually a single problem drive of being a very large lever for growth within organization. So the only way to demonstrate that is by actually seeing customers that have leveraged the platform your year to grow their business and improve the outcome of sales comp. And that’s been one of our biggest drivers is focusing on customer execution to the point where, you know, for us, every one of our customers is a satisfied customer that seeing their sales, compensation progress. And so yes, I mean, a lot of channels that you mentioned, are ways that we are, you know, we’re obviously looking to get our company out there to share the successes, we’ve had to help other organizations. But I also feel, you know, our biggest focus area is our customer success.

 

JC: That’s awesome. Okay, and then, let’s talk about your favorite features. Right? So what are some of the favorite features of your software that you think are at least the most popular ones, you know, like that people are like, Oh, wow, I can do that. That’s amazing, like, what are the top two or three?

 

Nabeil: So at the core, automating commission processing, you know, and being able to calculate is a requirement that everyone just immediately sees, it’s a chatter. But I think the the features that really kind of go above and beyond and really wow, is the ability to tailor the communication and the nudges and the dashboards to the individual and the plans that they’re on. And so really, again, driving that behavior, it’s kind of the visualizations and the nudging that the platform does to each individual on on a comp plan. I mean, maybe just to step back, if you think about it, we’re all wearing, you know, whether we wear an Apple Watch, I noticed you’re not wearing one right now. But, you know, we’re all living in a world where we’re constantly getting nudged and driven to be, you know, to get to the next step with individualized data. And I think that’s one year that’s a surprise words, were able to leverage an individualized viewpoint to nudge and drive behaviors,

 

JC: And I imagine that it integrates into the more popular payroll systems are, you know, financial management systems, right? Is it like I like you know, QuickBooks, you know, Gusto, things like that? Does it have those kind of native integrations or API’s? 

 

Nabeil: So, on the input side, yes, of course, if they ingest data from, again, CRMs, ERPs, financial systems, and then on the output, we’re typically connecting into a HR system, we’re, you know, we’re more enterprise focused. So typically, we’re working with, you know, with tools, like a workday or, you know, again, other types of whether it’s ADP, but on both sides is integrations, data ingestion and data outputs.

 

JC: Gotcha. Okay. All right. So, The Future of BizTech, that’s a title, so we got to talk about the future. Alright. So first question is, where do you see the industry? So you and your competitors, right, where do you see this going in that 5 to 10 year span? Do you see, you know, AI hitting into a certain area? Do you see, you know, I don’t know, compliance or legislation affecting it? Like, what’s that five or 10 year vision where you think you and all your competitors might have to deal with or where you’re going? The evolution? I should say?

 

Nabeil: Yeah, so I would say if you look at across processes that impact sales, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s even the product itself, all the way to sales process, the decision time, time to decision has been declining across the board, right? If you think about marketing, 20-30 years ago, how long it took to redesign strategy and execute against strategy, months, not days, or seconds. And now we’re able to leverage data using from a marketing automation perspective, the tailor messages to the individual that’s that we’re targeting. And so, to me, I think sales comp, as a whole needs to reduce its time to decision because it needs to react as quickly as every other part of the sales process. Otherwise, it’s actually the laggard and holding organization back. And so one of the things I think it’s going to be demand from customers going forward is the agility and the speed at which they can execute with the tools that are coming about.

 

JC: Okay, and then second part of the question, then, now, where is Forma going, and let’s talk about the roadmap a little bit here, my audience likes the inside scoop. So give me something juicy, what do you have coming? What’s gonna be the the cool, next thing that you’re really excited to launch, even if it’s not out yet.

 

Nabeil: So you kind of alluded to it a little bit where imagine, you know, coming in, and being able to be a new customer, and enter some key parameters and kind of get an insight as to what a good comp plan would be. And so one of the things that we’ve been working towards, and again, it’s soon is a relative term. So I’m gonna say, I can’t give you an exact timeline. But in effect, being able to take a snapshot of an organization’s data, run it through our data models to kind of give back some quick insights and recommendations based off the collective. Again, it’s not the truly tailored individualized comp plan recommendation, but at a high level, recommending, based off of our collective data, data we’ve had processed so far.

 

JC: There’s a lot of people who just need that, that blank page, first word start, you know what I mean? They’re like, I don’t like, remember, there’s a lot of CEO-led sales, right? Until you get to a certain point where you can really hand it off. And so I know that some companies struggle, even saying, Okay, well, but what do I even offer, right? I don’t even know how to, I don’t even know what to offer to put out on the internet, you know, for a job posting, right? That’s a big deal. Like, what are they responding to? So I think that’s really cool. You have that come in. And as you have to give us an update when it hits. Alright, so next question to be if you had to recommend any book, to the audience, you know, just one of your favorite ones, whether it be a classic or something more niche that either inspired you, that’s a must read for the audience. What would it be for you?

 

Nabeil: Yeah, I mean, as a founder, I feel like “Crossing the Chasm” would be a must read. In my opinion, it kind of set the foundation for me to understand not only the stakeholders that I’d be selling to at the beginning of the business, but as the business scales up and kind of evolves, what that looks like. And for me, it was very clear early on that this, the early the early customers that you take on, especially being an enterprise SAS platform, you’re bringing on individuals that are going to help steer and shape the product as much as you know, as as much as help you grow the business. And so it’s an absolute gravy. But again, one of many, I’m sure, but..

 

JC: Well, that’s a good one. That’s a good one. All right, so last question, then, what’s the best piece of advice, business-wise you’ve ever been given?

 

Nabeil: There’s, this is one that I’ve heard recently, and it kind of stuck with me as being a very, very great piece of advice is leave no catastrophe unutilized I’m not.

 

JC: Oh, what was it? Uh, never let a good like, catastrophe go to waste or something like that?

 

Nabeil: Yeah, exactly.

 

JC: I think that was like Winston Churchill, if I’m not mistaken. It’s a political term. I remember it’s like, never let a good catastrophe or something like that go to waste, right? Like you can always, you can always and it starts with politics, which probably isn’t the best medium for it. But I see what you’re saying though, in that sense of, yeah, like, like if something goes wrong, okay, well learn from it, build a new process or create something that helps everyone with it. Yeah..

 

Nabeil: Exactly. I mean, and again, it’s not like thing have to blow up to the extreme literal term catastrophe. But I think, you know, what stuck with me is the premise of building a business. And solving a complex problem like this is that you are going to make mistakes and how quickly you can react and ultimately, mistakes or worries or areas that normally I can learn from a CEO founder, the company, but everyone in the organization can learn from and so it’s just learning from every single one and carrying that forward.

 

JC: Yeah, now that I do like that, quote, like I said, I’ve heard it before, and took a piece of advice. So how can people reach you personally, or the company if they’re interested in the service or any kind of high level deals with you,

 

Nabeil: I’m always open to dive in and chat sales comp and sales strategies. So LinkedIn is probably the best place to get a hold of me personally, check up Forma.AI or Forma on LinkedIn. And please reach out if you’re interested in talking about sales compensation.

 

JC: Thank you so much for everyone listening out there. Again, if you liked what you heard today, please be sure to subscribe to the podcast, give it that five star rating, you know, get put some cool comments in there that always helps the algorithms. So other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all these amazing and helpful b2b softwares on the market today. Nabeil thank you so much for being on the show. Personally I’m probably gonna talk a little bit after this podcast because I have some more questions additional but because I’m selfish like that, I’m gonna keep some of this to myself. I want to check out some more of the Forma.

 

Nabeil: Well, thank you for having me on, JC. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

 

JC: Alright, sir. Good to talk to you. Bye bye.

Learn more about Bitcoin IRA at: www.bitcoinira.com

Find Chris Kline on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/klinec/

JC: Welcome, everyone to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest with us on the show today. And listen, if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following this podcast wherever you’re listening to it. And be sure to give it a five star review preferably with some cool comments that helps out the algorithms. Because that is how other techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this. And today I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing the Co-Founder and CEO of Bitcoin IRA, Chris Kline. Chris, thank you so much for being on the show. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself in What does Bitcoin Ira do?

 

Chris: Absolutely. Thanks for having me JC. it’s a real pleasure to be here with you and your   audience. My name is Chris Kline, I started the company called Bitcoin IRA. We were the world’s first platform that allowed clients to open fund and trade their retirement accounts with digital assets, first being Bitcoin. Originally from Colorado and I hail from Sherman Oaks, California today. 

 

JC: No kidding, Colorado because I’m in Denver. What part of Colorado are you from?

 

Chris: I grew up in Aurora, Eastern Plains and then went to college in Boulder. I lived downtown by the stadium for a few years. 

 

JC: Wait, wait, wait, are you a Buff? Are you a Buffalo?

 

Chris: Yes, I am a Buff..

 

JC: I am a Buffalo! 

 

Chris: No way! Really? Go Buffs!

 

JC: And it’s Sko Buffs now! I don’t know if you if you’re keeping up with the lingo..

 

Chris: Yeah I heard the kids added an SK to it. I don’t know.

 

JC: It’s like they’re kinda like that they were too lazy to say “let’s go”. So they said SKO. Which is it’s funny. I like it. But it’s weird. You don’t think I’m too old for that. But..

 

Chris: They still take their keys out for third down. You remember that?

 

JC: They do. Yeah, the jingle the keys… Something stay something stay which is good. I used to get little marks on my knuckles. You do it so hard. They end up cutting your fingers. 

 

Chris: Well you know how many lost keys there were every game too?

 

JC: Oh, that’s right. They just come flying up. For the audience. If you know, you know, right? If you went for division one college school, there’s always little traditions. You know, football games, Chris. That’s hilarious. I had no idea. Okay. I guess I’ll get back to the podcast now. So this is fascinating already, though. So when I heard about what you do, I was like, Okay, this is interesting, because people are going to have a lot of opinions on this. Right? Whether they be educated or not, they’re going to have opinions. You know, there’s there’s risk factors that I’m sure that you’ve heard a million times of like, well, you know, Bitcoin goes up and down so much. But let’s get to that part later. Let’s first talk about this. You provide this from employers to allow their employees or themselves to put these IRAs into that digital asset that is for one that’s innovative, and really cool. I like it from that perspective alone. But who is your perfect client? So what kind of companies do you work with? When you are, you know, that you’re partnering with that are using this kind of service from you?

 

Chris: Yeah, I mean, it’s usually FinTech players, forward thinkers. Early on, we’re a lot of the Palo Alto, a lot of groups we worked with to make this a reality, you know, you need to have a wallet, you gotta have an exchange, you have to have a custodian, a bank, all of them right away. Their employees were like, Can we do this, and we found a way to make it possible for them. There’s a lot of options for employers out there that are beyond just you know, what happens most.. I’m an entrepreneur. So the last thing you’re thinking about is, especially when it gets to the breakdown of payroll, you know, the payroll, payroll taxes, the insurances, the California, there’s so many of them, and then the 401k. And usually, when it does, it gets tacked on, it’s Oh, we got you all these healthcare options from from A to B, and for your 401k, it’s Hewitt or ADP, total resource, or OI is another big one. And it’s pretty traditional options. So employers can look at a lot of times their employees just in general will open up a separate account and contribute to that. So that’s one option, just letting them know it’s there. And the second is smaller companies that don’t necessarily have 401, K’s or one an option alternative can look at simple IRAs, you structure one for your employees, they behave in the same way with contributions and things. But our ideal client is such a wide spectrum. And that’s why you know, people call Bitcoin the  revolution. I try to be a little bit less abrasive, and I call it the evolution and there’s it’s such a range of people you know, early on when we started this back in 2015, the first guys were super nerds, I call my engineers, NASA scientists that were retired or were still working IBM guys, the guys that were on the cutting edge of things and AI and machine learning that knew about crypto, but now it’s across the board. We’ve got nurses from Wisconsin, we’ve got my family members all have one, it’s a unique addition to an alternative for your retirement planning that a lot of people are interested in for a lot of different reasons.

 

JC: Well that’s really cool. So let me ask you this then. When you hook up with a I imagine you could you could do this for Fortune 500, you could do this for even kind of small to medium sized businesses correct? It’s really just an option that they could that they could carry for the for their employees right? If so, okay, let’s get to the part that I because I know we’re gonna have to talk about this a lot, right? The risk factor you know, people watch Bitcoin shoot up, crash, shoot up, crash. Now, listen, you only lose money when you sell. Right? So technically do you hold you haven’t lost anything, right? That being said, and that’s what IRAs kind of the entire premise of 401k. 

 

Chris: Exactly. Right?

 

JC: It is the whole. But then the question is, is like, where is what have you seen as the historical benefit? And let’s let’s get rid of any of the, the original people who accidentally bought Bitcoin when it was .01 cents and are trillionaires. Now, let’s get rid of them. And let’s just talk about like the last five years, let’s say in the last five years, if somebody had put in, you know, maybe a third of their IRA over into a digital asset that managed, like you’re saying, what could they have? You know, what have they seen happen? And where do you see, you know, the next couple of years, just from the point of view of just Bitcoin, maybe not the industry, but just Bitcoin.

 

Chris: So we actually have clients from five years ago, right, first one entry price $250, it was actually the director of the US Mint, former director of us, Ed Moy, we worked with him on in past occasions. And so we wanted to be the first and he’s held he did, he just did a small contribution, you can put six to $7,000 a year based on your age to a retirement account. So he did that. And now it’s upwards of 300,000. That’s our beginnings, obviously, not pennies, right, it’s still in the dollars, actually hundreds of dollars moving forward, that obviously, there’s waves of people that come into this because there is a FOMO factor that kicks in. But what most folks are really hyper focused on is the finiteness of Bitcoin, it’s going to do a lot of cool things with with payments across borders, as an alternative to other monetary instruments out there, but it’s one of the only few we have available today that is truly finite, there will only be 21 million Bitcoin ever mined. And in the last year, the Federal Reserve is done, like trillions of US dollars being added to the balance sheet. And folks are looking in that regard. And that’s one of the driving factors that you see.

 

JC: So I mean, right now, as we’re talking Where is Bitcoin roughly? Like, just what’s the value of a Bitcoin?

 

Chris: It’s just about 57,000. So it’s  about 8-9000 off, its all time highs around 65,000, which it was felt said earlier this year around April.

 

JC: And you know, you see these fluctuations in the market in the weeks or months, and they go big swings, right. You know, and something can happen, you know, China making regulations recently where they’re like, Nope, none of that, and it affects the market. Now, those data points will happen. But you zoom out. Yeah, ultimately, and I’m asking the question, but I’m saying it from almost an assumptive point of view, because just from the logic, but tell me if I’m wrong, when you zoom out, and even with these certain data points in there, nobody can technically shut it down. Because it doesn’t belong to any in particular. Right? So that’s the first part. So it’s sustainable in the sense that no one can just turn it off. Right? Okay. That’s the first part. Second part is this, it’s finite. And which means that eventually, there’s a supply and demand issue. So in your opinion, then zooming out, regardless of these day to day or week to week or month month fluctuations, is it safe to assume, is it always just kind of always going up until it runs out until everyone has all the Bitcoin? I mean, how does that work?

 

Chris: That’s a good way, that’s an interesting way to look at it. So, our mantra in Bitcoin and one of the newer ones is when in doubt, zoom out. So you nailed half of it, when in doubt, because you’ll  at the daily aberrations. You’ll see weeks or months where it’s down. September’s are always rough that you if you zoom out, it reminds you Oh, yeah, this thing is, this thing is up a lot over the last five years, it’s beating every instrument availables, S&P all those things, but when you say, when they look at that, what keeps that I guess, intestinal fortitude at play is that there’s a bigger picture happening here. And it’s not when we just run out, it’s actually the most divisible asset as well. So divisibility is huge. With gold, you can only divide it by ounces, right? Or quarter ounces. Maybe there’s a 10th ounce out there a gram. With real estate, it’s houses, right? It’s a full house, usually that you’re looking to investing with Bitcoin, it goes to the 11th decimal point, it’s called a Satoshi. And I know it seems weird because we’re of a generation. We’re all entrepreneurs. We’re a generation of stacking commons, right? We want to get one more comma on our bank account, but think the other way beyond just two decimal points, the 50 cents, the 75 cents that we have with us dollars, but now you’re looking at to the 11th decimal point, a Satoshi could be something you go to get lunch, it could cost us a satoshi someday, and we start worrying you think in that way. And in fact, they’re already doing that not quite to that law, actually, to that level in El Salvador. Last month, it was announced it’s there now their reserve currency, they’re mining Bitcoin with their volcanic power, talk about just disruption. They’ve been taking something that is been a problem for them. And they’re mining Bitcoin using the power of geothermal power of the volcanoes that are there.

 

Chris: That’s a really big scene approach to Bitcoin. Why, you have China that is like banning it, which is China, anything that shows revolution, democracy, People’s Choice, rights, that’s what you’re going to see come out of there, and lack of control as a state controlled economy. And so you’ve got this cool dichotomy happening. which is also happening here in the US, but we’re having a conversation about it right. But hear U.S. wise, there’s new regulation, you got a new SEC chair that actually is crypto-friendly, or at least crypto experienced. But you’ve got a lot of folks eyeballing this space and wondering how are we going to regulate it, the buzzword is how’s it gonna get regulated? Truthfully speaking, Bitcoin has a larger microscope and a tighter microscope on it than almost every other financial class out there. As an entrepreneur running a business, if anybody’s in banking or finance, you know, your KYC AML standards, ours are 10 times as robust, we have to go back, we go back even into the criminal background activity, which no other bank does. And that’s just for the standard of what regulation is where it’s headed. At the end of the day, what’s driving it, a lot of guys are making a lot of money in crypto, and the government wants their piece. That’s really the driving factor. That’s what we’re looking at.

 

JC: Let’s just let’s call it what it is, right?

 

Chris: Yes, spade to spade.

 

JC: And it is. And you know, there’s other sides too, I mean, not to be super, you know, critical of it. Because there are things to consider that if you don’t have regulation, if you don’t have transparency, there are certain types of people in the world that are going to exploit that right. So that there is a good actual more

 

Chris: Oh regulation, we applaud it when just you know, just to clarify, I applied it. It’s we need the guardrails, I was around in 2017, when even Paris Hilton had some type of token that he was offering. It was chaos. It was like.com era, everybody had a website, even companies that didn’t exist had websites. And that’s now behind us. And you see, the process by which people are getting into this space is, is in a much more guardrail type fashion, especially your business.

 

JC: And honestly, it’s for the better industry, because you even nobody has Bitcoin wants it to be so dramatic. They like the highs, but no one’s gonna like the lows, you need something to be stable, right? Stability is really the long term play. So let’s talk about the benefit to businesses specifically. So walk me through, like, why would a small business let’s say, let’s say a business, one to 5 million gross a year, right? Maybe it’s a software company, right? We’d like tech, let’s call it let’s talk software. So software company making, let’s say 2 million a year, and they’ve got, you know, 15 employees, something like that. Okay, what is the benefit for them offering this? Oh, there’s obviously a benefit where it gives options to employees. That’s awesome for that. But is there you know, what other benefits are there is there a way that the employer itself somehow benefits either financially or structurally or tax wise. And then other than just the benefit of being able to offer something cool to people.

 

Chris: I mean, the driving factor is employee satisfaction, which is a big deal these days. I mean, now that we’re remote, the world is flat, especially with software engineers, I’m sure everybody knows, it got a lot more competitive really fast, because you didn’t need to live in Palo Alto to get paid what you wanted to get paid, you could live anywhere. And it opened up a whole new generation, I think of software engineers that are now available across the US map without having to be in a particular place. So it gives you a competitive edge there that you can say that some of these are alternatives that are available with your retirement savings that we match with. Obviously, corporate matching has always been a piece of what companies used as far as their tax strategy. And everybody’s is different. So I try to do but there’s, there’s obviously a reason a good reason why we offer these benefits to our employees. And then beyond that a lot of businesses that we work with, including our own has put Bitcoin onto the balance sheet. So and it’s crazy to think about right, but obviously Elon Musk led the way with like 1.5 billion earlier this year, MicroStrategy has done a series of buys, they’re almost well over a billion dollars on their balance sheet. And even a small company like ourselves, were able to take and have a little piece there. Because even for this year, what we accrued across the year has grown and that means that’s a pay, it helps the bottom line, it’s another strategy to grow your business. Now, obviously, if you’re in startup mode, and I’ve been here where when we actually bought the domain for Bitcoin IRA, I remember having an argument about man, we’ve never paid that much for a domain before it was worth it, obviously. So every now and you’re thinking about something like that, buy the domain. But when you’re sitting and you’re making bills, buy bills either won’t be keeping yourself cashflow, positive months or weeks at a time, probably not the best mood, because you don’t even tell your boys “Hey, we can’t make payroll because Bitcoin went down 20%”. And the third thing is I’ve just started to see this fracture surface is obviously celebrities. You’ve heard of NFL players and other NBA players demanding a portion of their contract with crypto. It’s starting to happen with employees too. There are mechanisms our platform has abilities to plug folks into these things that your employer or employee could say hey, I want 10% of my paycheck to go into Bitcoin or be paid to me as Bitcoin and that’s really cool. If you really..

 

JC: Do you see people doing it because they believe that zoom out that it will okay, it’s kind of like, you know, we grew up that real estate never went down until it did right? But even when it did, then it came back like, if you zoom out even farther out of 09, I mean, granted that was not good for anybody really, except for people already had a ton of money who got good deals on buying stuff up. But if you were to zoom out technically speaking, real estate still does hold, it still does increase in value that is still the number one way..

 

Chris: Capital intensive though now that’s where it’s..

 

JC: But this is what so I’m gonna relate this to the to the Bitcoin question is this.. Is Bitcoin the new Real Estate where because it’s finite, and because if you zoom out big enough, right, if you’re a trader, it’s a whole different story. But if you’re someone who’s doing the long haul investment, in your opinion, is it something that is a smarter bet than putting it into a high yield bond or a savings account? That is traditional for people to put their money aside in? You know, do you recommend that people say, or, you know, and if so, what percentage of their savings? Should they put in there safely? And what should they not? Like? Should they go all in and be like, Okay, we’re not trying to go crazy and go all in, but you should put 10% or whatever, like, what is your advice? Just from your experience of how much should we put into things like this have a concept like an a Bitcoin IRA.

 

Chris: For everybody different, right? We all have our individual lives, that we live in our individual bills and credit worthiness, but you nailed it on the head. As far as is this another alternative to those things because of the prohibition to get in to people, especially younger generations are getting priced out of this market, it’s it’s, it’s almost impossible to to build enough wealth that you can get the down payment, get the financing, get the costs, and then survive the mortgage. And first, basically, you’re gonna have an empty house furnishings things like this is a different way of doing things and looking at, okay, I’ve got I have built up some savings. It’s not enough for x, but it’s enough for y. I mean, as far as our platform, we’re not financial advisors. So we don’t throw out like percentages that are make sense. I can tell you an aggregate-wise, most folks are in the 5 to 20% range, depending upon their risk tolerance. I’ve seen clients that have gone all in one of our early clients left his job at Intel, I kid you not, he found out he had a 401k that was with fidelity. And he found out he couldn’t touch it until he reached 59 and a half or quit his job. And he looked at myself in the mirror and said, Well, it’s a long ways to 59 and a half. But I can quit tomorrow. And I’ve got this and I already wanted, he already wanted to be an entrepreneur, he was like ready at that stage of his career. So he did it. I remember saying this is crazy and we’re still friends today. And now I think he turned 300 into probably 4 to 5 million. And he’s able to help finance over time this development of his small business. So you know, everybody’s got that moment in time where they make a decision on what they’re going to do and but not having getting off zero is the bigger conversation, having a zero exposure to Bitcoin, that’s when you’re going to be kicking yourself a few years down the road.

 

JC: Got it? So let’s talk about this. And let’s talk about the platform itself, your platform? How does a company interact with it? Can they sign themselves up? Is it completely, you know, walk through? Or do you guys as a part service where you have to have someone on your team, get them in their paperwork and stuff? Like just what is that user interaction with your platform?

 

Chris: The first question we always ask folks to look at is how much is your are your employees actually using your 401k? Because you’d be surprised when you actually look at the data of what who’s using it? Why are they using it? And usually they do a survey with their clients, with their employees, like, “Hey, why aren’t you guys using this?”, because that’s usually the standard they’re not using, we’re gonna we have another epidemic or pandemic happening since the way before COVID, which is we have 60% of Americans and recording to a recent survey about two years ago with the auto not not prepared or having started for retirement yet. And even when corporate matches any of them, they’re not making the decision to do it. And some of that lacks just something they’re interested in. And they rather have the money in their bank account to do emergency funds with or other things they’re dealing with in their lives. And so once you do that, then you get it you know, where you stand. If it’s not really popular, then you can encourage employees that aren’t using it, you can all you can get your be one of two ways you can use your 401k. Or you can use just a standard IRA. And that’s where you get a whole bunch of clients, employees, they say great, I’d love to do that we point them in the right direction, we set them up as kind of like a group within our community so that there’s a representative that’s there to help any of the people that need help with their accounts.

 

Chris: And they and they come in as I came from XYZ companies, we all know how they how they operate. The second layer is if you’re small or don’t have anything, or it’s just really not being used, and you think you may want to change it up. SIMPLE IRAs is a strategy they use where the group will create something, they can make contributions as a match, and then each employee has their own. And as long as it’s there for two years, then you can start being moved. So you’re not as locked up as 401K’s. 401 k’s are locked up as either you’re in as an employee, or you reach that age of 59 and a half. And then the third, it’s a little bit more robust. And there’s groups our selves can help you and there’s other groups that are out there. You go to your existing 401k provider and you can create an addendum to your operating agreement of your 401k where you can actually slide in the option to have required for employees to have bridge accounts to other places, self directed bridges is kind of what they’re usually called. So now that that mechanism is in place, any of your employees can say I want to do this money moves from the 401k over to the sub account and through the bridge. And now they log in and they’ve got complete control either through the mobile app or the desktop to to see their funds and then trade between any of the digital currencies that are available on their platform.

 

JC: That’s really cool. I like that. So let’s now let’s talk about how are you getting the word out there? So I’m marketing guy, you know, that we’ve talked about before, I always have to ask a marketing question because it fascinates me. So how is Bitcoin IRA even.. I mean, you’re on a podcast. That’s one. Okay, we know one. Alright, you’re doing PR, great. What other methods are you using that have either been successful or not successful? As far as getting the word out about you guys to the right people?

 

Chris: Yeah absolutely. Obviously, you don’t have a business until you get on at least a couple of stages of a ladder and yell from a megaphone. And it’s that people have to know it’s there. Early on, press was key, you could drop a press release, you’d have 50 to 100 people volume. And then we had these really interesting where we did the right thing, right things come, we started growing our client base and over and people would hear about us that we’re with other investment groups, there’s so many of them out there, you can Google investment information, you see ads out the wazoo have joined our subscriptions, you will some of those guys found us shut and actually open an account and did an LS a dissertation on the experience and what why they did it and what it could mean. And that was crazy. Because an entrepreneur I walked in, like on a Tuesday. And as everybody popped out of their cubes, like we have a problem. And I was like, oh my god, what’s going on their phone hasn’t stopped ringing for like six hours. They’re like 27 people on hold right now. And I was like, Okay, that was a new evolution, just natural growth, natural growth. That happens sometimes when you got a cool product to get lucky, right? We had a cool product, new and innovative. Beyond that, obviously, you got to spend money with the big boys, you got to go over to the things you got to spend money on those things.

 

Chris: And what’s nice is that as you spend enough money, they take care of you. I’ve learned over the years, but you have to reach those thresholds, right? And then outreach like this, I do a lot of educational seminars, just I just go like they invite me I was at a young professionals organization, and I, in Beverly Hills about three weeks ago. And I mean, these are players and I just went out and education, you know, understanding a lot of people don’t even understand the history of money. You know, where did money start? What how has it evolved over the years? And how does Bitcoin fit into that, and they’re having a human being. So almost all the other businesses that are in our sector, they are really heavy tech driven. We came from a background that we understood the paramount of crypto customer service, when it came to people’s retirement monies. They’re saving for the long term, some of them are moving, our average climb moves $65,000 from another 401k or an IRA. So they’re, they’re moving a big sum of money to do this. Having a human being to talk to you is a pivotal difference we’ve made and it helps build our business. Well, I know a lot of businesses will say Oh, half of our our clients come from referrals from other clients. And that’s probably BS, we truly have 30% of our clients are coming every month from other clients that have experienced us had success with this and they share it with..

 

JC: Well I mean, I believe that just because it’s such an innovative idea, you know, I can’t imagine you have a million competitors that are doing Bitcoin IRA account, right? 

 

Chris: We get these waves after holidays. So everybody gets together before the 4th July obviously you get this wave of newbies because just naturally people together talking about things bitcoins in the news, its volatility is what drives it’s a it’s almost a sex appeal to it’s got sizzle. It’s something to chat about. I gets people and then when you do the math and people that got in early,really it’s like it’s sounding cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs four years ago, Bitcoin and IRA, are you nuts? And I remember the banks and the regulator saying, Are you sure? And I was like, Yes, this people want this. And they have we have over 100,000 users now and created our own industry, we made our own competition, because it got big enough, they showed up.

 

JC: Well, that keeps you on that keeps you on your toes. Like it’s like Tesla, you know, there’s the reason why they let some things be public. And I think whether whatever your opinion of Elon Musk is, I thought it was an interesting play. Because really, if your competition can start catching up, it forces you to keep pushing that edge and keep innovating. Otherwise you get complacent, you know, and then somebody will leapfrog you. So I think it’s..

 

Chris: (Inaudible) What are we innovating today?

 

JC: That’s good. I like it.

 

Chris: And it may be something as simple as somebody comes in from the service and says these two things aren’t connecting on the mobile app because of XYZ reason and how are we going to innovate our solution to that? Because we’re on the cutting edge. Nobody’s ever offered 24/7 trading, we were the first dude in 2018. It was crazy. I remember sitting there we did it like just around November 1st, about the five, six year anniversary, the first 24/7 trade on the platform. And I remember sitting there on Christmas and being like please somebody trade, we gave you this tool use it. And I remember my daughter’s opening gifts and all sudden my phone starts buzzing. And I’m like, oh my god, it’s happening. And it was we were waiting. And that’s what you build those things. And then we listen to our clients. Innovation really comes from other people asking for and that’s where mobile apps come from new products, new features. Once you get to a certain level your clients will help drive your roadmap if you listen.

 

JC: That’s actually really inspiring. Let’s talk about let’s talk about roadmaps here. So I have a two part question for you. The Future of BizTech, that’s the title so we got to talk about the future first when asked what the industry you know, would be Bitcoin or specifically software, you know, platforms that deal with it. And even just like you said, you know a retirement account and how that plays? Where do you see the next five or 10 years in your industry based on either regulation, or innovation or technology? You know, just like if you’re having a beer with the buddy like, I swear, man, I swear this is gonna happen. You just wait, you just watch. What is that that you say in that moment?

 

Chris: You know, my big thing right now is watch South America. And that’s in the next two years, you know, we had this whole conversation in the 60s and 50s, about communism and Southeast Asia, right? That’s why we were in Vietnam, was it it was called domino theory. If one state falls, then the next day.. in El Salvador is having amazing success with this, it’s going to take some time for them to prove it. Its viability for its population base, but they’re already using people are buying McDonald’s and Starbucks and paying bills and paying, they’re doing things there. Brazil is next, they’re just about to, and watch how it can spread like wildfire there, it’s important to remember bitcoin is not an American thing. It’s a human thing. This is a way that this these these currencies can be used. In other sectors, Africa is another really interesting place to watch, because it’s so underbanked, they have all these telemed communication towers everywhere, but they have less than a very few banking infrastructure. Another place that you’ll see Europe is already this melting pot, right? European Union, European Central Bank, this whole concept, and they’re very forward thinking. So I would watch, it’d be very, very interesting to see how this thing spreads across the globe. And it spreads across the US the type of people that are looking at it, and the people you’re going to be hearing about it from I always sit back because you know, obviously being the Bitcoin guy for years now everything giving Christmas, it’s always a conversation. So I learned to sit back and watch how people that one time thought it was crazy, or now have their Coinbase account opened up. And they’re trading and they’re learning things and they’re in it’s beyond just an asset that’s worth $1 today that you can sell for $1. Tomorrow, $2 tomorrow.

 

JC: Sure

 

Chris: It’s one of these these tokens doing. The theory of the smart contracts. And what daps are is a revolution to Internet. everybody complains about privacy on the internet, right? We all feel like big brothers listening, we think about buying a couch and all sudden we see seven ads about buying a couch. 

 

JC: Hey I’m marketing, hold on. I’m a marketing guys and I take offense with that..

 

Chris: ..more privacy for us in a new era of what the internet is and how we we ask for our advertisement. We don’t get sped our advertising. We put those things out there based upon smart contracts. And with voting, there’s a lot of cool applications that you’re going to start seeing, okay, Bitcoin is not just money and digital currencies, not just money, but it’s actually just to positively impact our lives and make things that are difficult, a lot easier. We just use the blockchain technology and application that’s out there.

 

JC: Yeah. And it’s funny. So I like we said earlier about El Salvador it is, you know, I think that when they launched it, they didn’t do the best job. I remember reading about a little choppy. Yeah, a little choppy in the beginning. But you know, whatever, you know, again, zoom out, zoom out, right? Like, what’s the long term, but what you said about Africa is what I think is something I’ve been watching how, I feel like Africa is so primed to leapfrog more than anyone. I think South America can make great use of it, and it can, but there’s so many different things happening there. I don’t I think that Africa is where I would watch personally just at standpoint. And they got the population that like, like, here’s the thing, if they can just build the car, they’ve got all the gas in the world, you know what I mean? Right? Like, and so I feel like if that hits there, they figured out you could see Africa leapfrog in ways that nobody probably found even possible and because of not just Bitcoin, but blockchain in general, right. Like you were saying, like there’s, it’s not just what Bitcoin is, it’s what it’s the foundation of how it operates that can be used in so many different ways. So let’s now talk about your company’s future. Okay. So my audience likes to hear some insights scoops. So what do you have? Give us juice man? What do you got for us? What’s what’s coming that no one else knows about?

 

Chris: We did the First Earn Program and Q1. So people are earning in the first light Bitcoin sending advertisements, which is awesome. 6% on casting and news, that’s that one’s done mobile app came out this year was awesome. What we’ve got coming in the next two weeks is, the we right now have about 10 to 15 assets available. And that’s because the industry has been growing slowly. But in a couple of weeks, we’ll be expanding it to 65 to 70 available digital assets to buy and invest with. And that opens up what we’re just talking about all these applications, they’re doing something revolutionary in their own sector, and a piece ability for you to say, hey, you know, kind of want to be a part of that. That’s really cool what they’re doing. And it’s kind of like the next evolution of Kickstarter a lot of ways because that’s what these companies are doing. They’re using tokens and using communities and technology to do something different than it’s been done before. So I’m excited. There’s some really cool ones on there. But yes, we’ll be I guess, 6X-ing the viable assets for investment on our platform. 

 

JC: And when you say asset, you mean like Dogecoin, for example, like..

 

Chris: Yes Doge, there’s Cardano and Link already on there. We just rolled those out kind of quietly a couple of weeks ago, but it’d be all those different types of tokens or cryptocurrencies. There’s 14000 in this space plus, so it’s not all of them, but at least it’s this next generation of players.

 

JC: That’s really cool. So again, it gives employees more options. which makes them happier. And that gives him like, I mean, again, it’s a competitive market right now. It’s hard to find labor in certain industries, you know. So this could be a way that they help entice employees in. So that could be really cool. So let me ask you a personal question now, right? What did you want to do when you were kid? What did you want to be when you grew up? And then and maybe this is it, maybe this is it? But if it’s not, how did it get here? Right? Like, I want it like what a child, Chris Kline..

 

Chris: I want to be a senator. 

 

JC: Really? You still could. You literally still could.

 

Chris: I know I, I think that, honestly, our country is gonna miss out on a lot of great leaders. Because when you think about it from a leadership standpoint, and where you’re at, do you really want to put yourself and your family through what it takes to be in politics thing? It’s not what it was when I was a kid. I mean, I was born under Reagan, but I’ve studied all of them. So yeah, I wanted to be a senator I ran for like every public Office or Office at school, otherwise, I crushed it, I was so good in campaigning, and I worked on a few political campaigns out of college. And that’s where it turned me the other way, because I saw under the belly of that beast, and it wasn’t what I was just kind of. So that’s why I did a little reset in my mid like, early 20s. Obviously, I had a business degree international finance. And I knew I didn’t want to work for corporate America forever. When I was growing up, the average median income in like Denver was 41,000. I was like, Well, I gotta at least make 100 grand so that we get this when we were kids, right? So different. Now. I took a jump at 2625, sold all my worldly possessions, bought a one way ticket to California and packed one suitcase.

 

Chris: I ran in serendipitously to my now partners, other serial entrepreneurs, and just embrace the moment and hey, I got no roots, I’ve got no risk. I mean, worst thing, I always had $200, underneath the mattress at my motel that I lived in for a year that I could take a bus back home, like that was my ticket. And that all worked out. And what where I think I’m headed in the future is interesting because as entrepreneurs, there’s a lot of different styles. And I know some that are very successful, and some just can’t get enough, right, that victory of building something innovating something new, they’ll move on to the next thing, the next thing next thing, I was talking to one of our 11th client last night, we were friends. He calls himself number 11. And he’s like, What do you want to do in the next five years, if if this goes to a place where there’s an exit or an IPO? Who knows what will be, I can’t even.. with Bitcoin, you can’t think that far ahead. It’s just it, you’ll zoom out later. But you don’t zoom out while you’re in it. And so but I kind of want to go be a teacher and like a coach at a high school in like Middle America, I think that was really the later part of life. And because you know, a lot of teachers were involved in me, even though you don’t think about in the moment, you look back and I still have relationships with several of them from high school days, even back into the middle school days, and they have an impact. And that’s another place where you can really build the future. Unfortunately, because I had success in business. I don’t it’d be a different type of teacher and a lot of ways. So maybe instead of being a senator, in my later years, I might just go be a teacher.

 

JC: I think you’d do better for the world than being a senator for at this point. Anyway, with that. I think you’d have a better spot maybe in the afterlife too.

 

Chris: I really liked that question by the way, JC. That’s an awesome question. I bet that one gets all your..

 

JC: I got a few to choose from, I got a few interesting ones I like does that one’s just piques my own curiosity? Well, Chris, let me ask this. How can anyone listen to how can they get to the website? How can they reach you personally, if they need to try like big deals and partnerships.

 

Chris: Yes, you can first place is just download the app honestly so easy, you’re probably on your phone already, you go to the App Store, it’s Bitcoin IRA- download it, it’s got a cool orange egg because it’s your nest egg of retirement and Bitcoin. And once you’re there, you can fill out some information that’ll get you in touch with one of our account executives that can guide you in the right direction. A lot of folks will just start with their own like “Hey, I got to do $7,000 this year” let me just feel what this looks like experience it and then that’s where once you have a relationship we start talking about you bring up your employees and what they’re looking for and then we can kind of dissect what makes the most sense, “Is it worth it you have so many people and so much money sitting at ADP that it’s worth it to build that bridge account go through that those steps, it’s not expensive, it’s just a tenuous process or with a simple make sense or just just educating your employees Hey, we went to Bitcoin IRA, our CEO open an account they’re offering this special for all of our employees that want to open up an account because we’re expanding the the offering for more and more folks looking at it.

 

JC: Can people reach you via email or LinkedIn or anything like that if they need you? 

 

Chris: For me personally, LinkedIn is my jam. That’s usually where folks find me.

 

JC: Alright

 

Chris: And that way you can we get to know a little bit about each other well, I usually I get so many chats I try to keep up with them. So message me there and then we’ll I’ll get you my cell and we can connect and talk more.

 

JC: Awesome. So again, what BitcoinIRA.com or download the app – it has little orange egg like you said, or Chris Klein. Klein with a K on LinkedIn. And..

 

Chris: Kline K-L-I-N-E. There are many ways we can spell Kline I guess..

 

JC: That’s true because there’s like EI or IEN. So for everyone listening out there again, if you like what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to this podcast. Give it the five stars rating put in some cool comments, so other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all the amazing and helpful b2b software’s on the market today, Chris, thank you so much for being on the show. And I actually look forward to talking to you after this, especially since you’re a fellow buff and you piqued my interest, even for our company with what you got to do. So thanks for coming on the show.

 

Chris: Thanks a lot JC for having me. It’s a pleasure.

 

JC: Buh-bye

Learn more about Gocious at: www.gocious.com

Find Maziar Adl on LinkedIn here:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/maziaradl/

JC: Welcome everybody to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger and I have another fantastic guest with me on the show today. And listen, if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following the podcast wherever you’re listening. Be sure to give it that five star review preferably with some nice comments in there that always helps the algorithms because that is how techies like you and me can find cool podcasts like this and today I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing the Co-Founder and CTO of Gocious, Maziar Adl. Maziar, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tell the audience a little about yourself, and what is it that you and Gocious do?

 

Maziar: Thank you for having me. Sure. Well, we are Gocious and our main purpose is to help product managers and product management teams in general. But mostly our focus is in hardware, manufacturing, and industries that produce physical products. I come mainly from a consulting background, I spent many years consulting multiple companies and made from Fortune 500, to smaller companies. And my background started with graduating right out of college from industrial engineering, helping supervise an opening of the plant. And then from there, I finished my graduate studies and then went into consulting. And I’ve been doing Business Information Systems pretty much ever since. And that’s been ages. Now. I think it’s, you know, probably more than a decade that I’ve been doing this, and I love to work. And when this opportunity came to start this startup, it kind of brought a lot of my background together. I’m a very passionate believer of what Gocious is doing at the moment in general.

 

JC: Well, that’s awesome. And I love startups. I really do. But and how long is Gocious been around though?

 

Maziar: So Gocious has been around since 2018. 2018 really, it was just putting the ideas together, it was sketches. First people showed up late in 2018. So we can say, really, the operation started from second half of 2018. And then ever since we’ve been working to build the platform and the product lines for our customers.

 

JC: Okay, well, let’s talk about that. First, let’s talk about who is your perfect kind of, you know, type of customer, whether it be industry or size, or what you know, or what they’re doing, and then also kind of give us, paint us the picture, what is it like to use Gocious, right, like, you know, who are the people using it? And what are they getting out of it?

 

Maziar: So the mission of Gocious in general, is to help companies to put products that customers love in the hands of those customers as soon as possible with high quality, so you’re not essentially cutting corners, you’re giving good quality product to customers, but you’re doing it in a shorter amount of time. And you’re sure that that’s what the customers want. The way our platform works, meaning we provide a SaaS platform for these companies to utilize specifically for the product management and the extended team. And usually extended team is most of the company. So you have to talk to engineering, you know, project management, and so on and so forth. And the key is, for us to sweet soft spot are people who have, you know, a physical product coming to market, they’re basically on the hardware side of things. They’re not just product producers of software, those are sweet spots. And because we enable the tracking of configuration, Rise of the features and sun.. sunsetting the features and working on what configurations and what products and product lines meets best the needs of the market at the time. So from that perspective, from a hardware manufacturing perspective, it’s an ideal situation, or ideal solution price.

 

JC: And what motivated you to to help start the company? I mean, I find that most businesses are born out of frustration. Right? So like, what was not happening in the industry. And you said, Forget this, we have to we have to do something about you know, you and your partners or whatnot, like just what motivated you to even create a platform to help with this?

 

Maziar: That’s a great question, you know, you know, coming out of Industrial Engineering, then consulting with Fortune 500s, a lot of them were manufacturing, you know, companies also, one of the things that you realize in manufacturing is they initially advanced quite a bit from the days of Ford assembly line all the way to the 90s. And they were spearheading pretty much every other industry, including software industry. And then suddenly something happened if you go back and look at the textbooks and the things that they’re teaching and the methods that they’re following. It’s still a little bit frozen in time. In other words, they’re not moving fast enough to kind of improve their processes. Whereas in the case of software things, you know, improved in an exponential way. They implemented agile they got results out of it and they’re continuously that By bringing time to collapsing the time to market building larger scale software at shorter amount of time. So, to me, the question was, hey, how do we solve this problem? It seems like it’s kind of starting to go in a bit of a grind in the manufacturing sector, how do we improve manufacturing, bring some of these agile practices that actually the roots of it was in manufacturing advancements, and put it back into manufacturing, and make the time to market shorter, and make sure the products go to market with more customer centric perspective, how can we make that happen in manufacturing, if you think about it, in say, auto industry, sometimes manufacturing takes five to 10 years to plan a product from concept and finally get it in the hands of the customer. So the question is, how you dead that cycle? How to bring these new practices in place? And can we kind of click it for manufacturing and move it forward? There’s a huge movement in this space, and we’re just one other people in this space.

 

JC: See, that’s really interesting, because you know, this is that perfect example, where software meets hardware, right? You know, a lot of the people I have on the show, it’s software that meets software, right. And that’s great, you know, it gets a task done the software’s that help in a digital world, whereas you have a digital software that helps in a physical world, which I think is interesting. Now, as far as you know, the type of clients and what not, obviously, there’s gonna be bigger manufacturing plants in electronics, maybe things like that, I imagine pretty much anyone who, who builds things on any kind of line, right? I mean, you guys, do? Would you guys work with any other types of I mean, that’s manufacturing. What about shipping? What about supply chain? You know, that’s a big thing right now that we’re having an issue with it in America, in particular, does your software help with any kind of supply chain management by any chance?

 

Maziar: Currently, we don’t have any specific capabilities or features that I can’t put my finger on, that’s certainly on one of our items on our radar. Because if you think about it, when a product manager wants to design the neck, or define the next product that should go into the market or the features, one of the things that they have to have in consideration, is the supply chain, can they even get that feature in time for that product? When will that be available? What’s the volumes that it will be available? And you know, in this case, what kind of negotiations do they need to have with the supply side of things? So definitely, it’s on our radar, we don’t have specifically capability at the moment, our focus right now is to understand or give the product management team a complete view of their products. So usually, product managers work on one product at a time. And we want to give them a space where they can coordinate a complete view and say, “Okay, this is the entire portfolio of our products. And these are the modules that have to go on those products”. And they can visualize, or they can imagine that the interdependencies and then have a release plan. So they say, okay, these are the times that these products and modules are going to be available, do they kind of make sense, if there’s a change in that, or the vision business’s vision or the customer’s needs change in the market, or the competition changes, you know, dynamics, then they kind of see the impact on they can track that in this space, those are the focus at the moment, where we kind of see a day that we start going into, okay, what let’s take a look at the needs and the supply lines and have that as a factor in this, you know, preparation of the business case on the product map.

 

JC: Well, it’s good to know, I mean, it’s always good to have kind of that roadmap of sewing what’s coming, you know, in that future side of things. But that doesn’t make sense. Obviously, it is a consideration when even choosing the product, right? I’m a marketing guy by trade. So I was asking a marketing question, you know, what are you guys doing to get yourselves out there? You’re only about Well, I mean, you’re three years old, but you know, depending how you define COVID being chopped into the equation, what are you guys doing in particular that’s been working, and also maybe things that you tried that didn’t work when it came to getting your name out there?

 

Maziar: Actually two different things or main things, obviously, we kind of have different outlets and different channels to send a message out that A- we exist, that we are a team of, you know, professionals that one way or the other, have background in these industries. And also we have an able team of skilled engineers and marketing sales, you know, company team with Well, good backing from a funding perspective. So that’s to kind of, you know, show that the brand is a good brand, and gained the trust of public we do this through obviously, you know, different layers, the PR firms that we work with the social media, they’re all part of this, you know, building the brand, but putting that in one side, the next angle, the next side of things is just helping not necessarily promote our products per se, but just go to market and explain to hardware manufacturers that we think there’s a better way that there’s opportunities here. And the software industry has tested this Agile methodology. And now hardware manufacturers little by little, are adopting it to kind of expedite that and then broaden the view. So I don’t want to say educate the market, but it’s a little bit education, but it’s kind of like opening their eyes to say, Hey, did you know for example, these guys in hardware are starting to adopt them, they’re starting to get results. And by the way, in the end, here we are, we’re trying to help and be part of this movement, we think this is the right direction. And we think that’s going to shape the future of manufacturing in general. So you know, kind of promote that angle of things and bring some, you know, education or bring some news to the market. And then in the end, of course, we have things like webinars, you know, we explain our product on our website, to kind of explain what specifically we’re doing in this space to help manufacturers.

 

JC: That’s smart. Webinars can be good, especially if you have a little more of a intricate type of offering, right? That takes a little bit more knowledge to even understand how it integrates. So that’s a smart one. That’s good. So let me I’m gonna switch over real quick, I’m gonna ask you a personal question. What did you want to do like when you grew up, like when you were kid, like, what was your dream? And are you doing it now? And if not, like, how did it you know, what path got you here to own it, you know, to being a Co-Founder of a big tech company?

 

Maziar: When I was a kid, I kind of knew what I wanted to do when I was growing up. But also, as I grew up, things changed. So you know, it was kind of like in and out. But there’s one moment and I think it was I can’t put my finger on it. But there was a moment that I kind of fell in love with manufacturing in general and industrial automation. And that was when my extended family you know, I come from Iran. In Iran, they were all industrialists, this is before the revolution. And they had private companies, they had factories, but when I was a kid, I didn’t know any of this, you know, I didn’t really know what they’re doing. Until one time I kind of heard about their factories, and I call saw snippets of what they’re doing. And that got me excited. And then one day I was in high school, I was just seeing a video of Sony’s manufacturing plants. And I don’t know why something clicked on. Like, this is the most amazing human endeavor ever. So I just somehow as a kid, that just, you know, click that I just couldn’t get it out of my head. Then fast forward after a couple of years in Iran, actually, microcomputers got introduced really late, because by then the Revolution had happened, the doors kind of closed, and it was almost impossible for a while to know what’s going on outside of the country, and also to get your hands on a computer. So whereas I think in the West, you know, the computers were in there, like Commodore 64, I don’t know if you know about these early ones.

 

JC: I was an Apple II guy when I first…

 

Maziar: An Apple II there you go.. during those days, it was in the hands of everybody. But you know, we didn’t see any of that stuff for quite some time years, actually. So one day, I was just, you know, one of my classmates came back to Iran from Europe, I think. And he had a computer called Sinclair Spectrum, and he invited me to his house, and I saw this computer. And that was the second shocking moment. And I’m like, why would anybody want to do anything else, but to play with this computer, you know, that was, I felt like my lifestyle became a single angle, you know, our single dimensional life, you know, just stick with the computer. So those two kind of came together. And I always wanted to be in this business, push it forward, unfortunately, Middle East, you know, being in the Middle East, it’s very hard to make a dent at that was made very hard to make a dent at the time, I decided to pursue my higher education here to kind of find and also see the world as part of it. And then when I came here, you just see the opportunities in front of you. I just fell in love with with the country and the opportunities it presents to you. At the time, I wasn’t crazy about you know, creating a company I wanted to make a dent. I wanted to be part of this movement that you know, everybody’s going into microcomputers, automation, you know, then eventually agile techniques, bringing everything online and on the internet. When I was coming here, it was just starting, there was no e-commerce really at the time. So you know, those things just motivated me to stay I felt like I can have my full potential realized here. So and I stayed. I mean, there was another reason I met my wife also that that kind of ended the story but that’s my journey, I guess. And that’s what made me just fell in fall in love with what I’m doing today. 

 

JC: Well, and that’s what America is for. Right? I mean, that land of opportunity. If you see some that you want to be with do that there’s anywhere where you can actually, you know, have a chance at and not having to be, you know, pigeon holed in it. This is it. So I think that’s fantastic that you got over here and did that. You bring in flashbacks to me from when I was a kid on a computer, you know, and sitting here I was that kid, you know, like trying to hack AOL when I was 12 in my dad’s basement like that was me, right? Like, you know, he worked for Sun Microsystems for like, 30 years or something. And so, you know, he would bring me on the campus and when I were running cable, because I was small, so I could fit to the walls, and we’re setting up like the Menlo campus in Palo Alto, or in Mountain View is it was one of those and so yeah, I’m I have a big tech background, and just you know, all these, these flashbacks now you got coming to me from, from your story. So that’s really cool. I like asking about the past, because my next question is about the future. Alright, so The Future of BizTech. Right, that’s us. So let me ask you, it’s a two part question. We’ll start with the first one. What is coming? You talked a lot about how, you know, eventually you guys will add some sort of, you know, component, supply chain thing, but that that sounds like it’s way down the road? What’s coming up soon for Gocious? Right? What’s on that roadmap, my audience likes the inside scoop. So what can you tell us? What can they feed us? Feed us the inside scoop.

 

Maziar: Every day is changing. So don’t hold me on it. But we are currently working in two or three different fronts. As a startup, we can do them all at the same time. So we’re still prioritizing but some of the things that we think are exciting are the first thing is where we are working on competing a space where you can make your business case, this means you can compare your products with the market or competition, you can set your strategy and vision. So what do you want to achieve. And also to kind of compare yourself on price perspective with competition. The other one is we want you to be able to take ideas in, whether it’s ideas for features or new products, to be able to prioritize those ideas on features, and then map a plan and then track the progress from a product perspective. So this is a high level, project management details out every task, if there’s any issues on the budget, or the resources allocated to those tasks, they make adjustments, and their you know, on a day to day looking at how the project is progressing. Product Management doesn’t need to get into those details. But they need to know if the product is going to be finished when the feature is going to be launched. And also to have a saying that they need a feature in a certain time they need a product and a certain time to be launched to meet the business needs and the business objectives. So they need to be in the know of “hey, is anything changing? Because project management is having issues? Or are the dates changing?” And also, can they deliver the things we need delivered in time. So they need to communicate that out to the project management. So I think you know, the important thing for us is to give that space. So right now we’re starting to do sketches on how to take our product to the next level and make sure that we provide the space that you can track the progress of the features, and you can prioritize and decide which ones have to go first and which ones come later from a manufacturing perspective.

 

JC: Well, I really liked that that market comparison tool that that sounds super useful and actually seems like a really good springboard into when you do eventually, you know, start looking at supply chain stuff, because, you know, seeing what it would look like on the market first comparing prices, like you’re saying, or you know, even distribution, like what’s the volume out there, things like that. That’s a huge deal. So that I think that’s a really cool feature coming down on your roadmap. So thank you for that. So second part of the future question is, obviously, like you said, you’re not the only one in the space, you have competitors, just like anyone else does. Where do you see the industry going in that next five to 10 years? Do you see anything cataclysmic, you know, or huge Community Catalyst? Do you see any kind of regulation or technology or something playing a part in where you and your competitors will be going, you know, when helping out, you know, your client base with the software?

 

Maziar: I think, you know, if you look at it, manufacturing, is going through a massive shift in the past that say until the EV movement, and you know, maybe the pioneers like Tesla started their movement, manufacturing in these sophisticated industries, like auto manufacturing was a little bit stagnant. It was always icing on the cake, right? There was not fundamental shift on how they did manufacturing. But with these challenges with these new AV companies coming in, and also the you see the pandemic and all these changes that are happening from globalization perspective, manufacturers are going back and revisiting everything they’re doing from ground up. It’s a very opportune time now in parallel with that, compute- cloud computing and IoT and things like that. Digital Twin is creating in what we call Industry 4.0, and that supports the manufacturers by giving them capabilities they wouldn’t even fathom just 10 years ago. So it’s an amazing moment where the motivation is there, the need is there. Now the technology is also coming together. And I think when they come together, they can give manufacturers higher, you know, speed and giving products to market, different ways of entirely working on a product and shipping it to the hands of the public. And also a way that keeps the quality of the products up, but in the same time allows the products to be changed, not just before production, but even after it gets in your hands. And you’re familiar with this, because when you get a laptop, the laptop that you have, you might have your laptop for two to five years. But that laptop that you bought two years ago is not the laptop you have today, because you know, you put applications on it, you keep changing it, you know, Zoom comes out, you know, the whole life changes. So your laptop is just not the same, your cars are starting to look like that, you know, in Tesla, you’re you wake up now your car drives itself because they downloaded a software on it. And I think the products are starting to get to that mall that design thinking is changing. And there’s a lot of work that is done on screens and in virtual reality, prior to actual physical things being built, and shipped to production. So all this is literally changing the face of the manufacturing, there’s a lot of agile techniques coming in into manufacturing. And if 10 years ago, it was not possible. Now with with the technologies of the day, it’s starting to become very possible.

 

JC: So that’s really fascinating. And I like hearing about that kind of 5-10 year pace. And you know, and sometimes that stuff comes way faster than we think to you know, we talked about a beer in 5-10 years ends up being, you know, two years you like, get these massive leaps, quick question. So you’ve got, you’ve got ton of experience and what you do you have an incredible life story of you and how you got here and what you’re doing. What is probably the best piece of advice that you could give the audience, you know, business wise, right, like, like, if there was one piece of advice, either that you could give or that you were given, you know, what would it be? 

 

Maziar: I mean, I think, you know, the biggest piece of advice I can tell you, at least from my recent experience is you go in with an idea of a solution to a problem. And I think that when you’re in a startup, you have to keep your ears and eyes open, listen to your prospects, because when you’re starting, you potentially might not have any customers, right? So you’re looking for those first customers, and they might come in and have leads that are very different than what you thought your your company’s product is going to be. And I think it’s very important to listen very carefully on the problems they have, test those problems on that, let’s say a customer has in the market to see where if that problem is, you know, widespread, whether your solution is a good solution, you have to be in a constant pursuit. In other words, don’t be afraid of, you know, watching out understanding what the customer really wants. And then when the time happens pivot. The fix though is you have to have that culture on that staff, when you come to your team and say, Guys, you got to stop what we’re doing, we got to turn a 90 degree and then go this way. Because really, the customer is asking for this and we’re building something else, this is not going to have, you know the impact or the value that the customer perceived. Sometimes if the team is in motion, and they’re going fast, that can be discouraging, so you have to kind of be very transparent explained to them, and show them the communication you’re having with your customers and get the team you know, to come along with you. And kind of explain the direction of the company. I think, you know, having that stance and not being discouraged and keep trying and making sure your failures are short, and you just keep correcting. And going forward. And acknowledging your failures is extremely important. The first product that we had in late prototypes we had in 2018. There are some foundations that still exist, but it’s man is just so different what we’re doing today, it’s not even funny. I think it’s because of a great team that we have in Gocious. We really want to listen to our customers and we want to make a difference for them. So it’s not just about our way or the highway kind of thing, or we set the project and we have to just march down a path. This is about, you know, the mission, which is help people you know, improving their speed improving their communication. And so that would be my first advice to people who start a startup be ready for rapid change.

 

JC: It’ll hit you like a ton of bricks, that’s for sure. Listen, I love that you came on the show. How can people reach you personally? And then also how do they get to the website or if they own a company that could use this or they want to partner up?

 

Maziar: So our website is, you know, www.Gocious.com or Gocious.com

 

JC: How do you spell that?

 

Maziar: G-O-C-I-O-U-S.com

 

Maziar: And my email, I’m accessible through my email. So it’s M-A-Z-I-A-R-dot-A-D-L, Maziar.Adl@gocious.com, so I make sure that I respond.

 

JC: That’s good. Responding is good, right?

 

Maziar: And you can always find me on LinkedIn. Also, I am active in LinkedIn. So..

 

JC: I love LinkedIn. I live there. There’s always an open tab for better or worse with LinkedIn for me. Well, for everyone listening out there again, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to this podcast, give a five star rating with some cool writing behind it. So other techies like us can find it enjoy learning about all these amazing and helpful b2b softwares on the market today, Maziar, thank you so much for coming on the show and I really wish you the absolute best in your future endeavors with us.

 

Maziar: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

 

JC: Bye bye.

JC: Welcome, everyone to another episode of the Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest with us today. And if you end up loving this episode again, please show your love and appreciation by following the podcast wherever you’re listening. And be sure to give it a five star review, preferably with some nice comments, of course, because that is how techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this. And today I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing Bruce Dahlgren, the CEO of Metric Stream. Bruce, tell us a little bit about Metric Stream. What do you guys do? And who do you help out?

 

Bruce: Sure, sure. Well, thanks for having me. JC it’s certainly an exciting time. Even with all the challenges out there, I can tell you that things are moving forward. And we’re excited metric stream of what we’re working on. So take a step back. Basically, we are risk management software. And traditionally, the past, risk has always been something in the shadows, things people hope never showed up, you know, and if it did, you know, you panicked and you addressed it, our belief is that risk should be at the forefront, it can be strategic, and if you prepare for it, and you have the data and the reports and the capabilities, then you can make it strategic. So our tagline at metric stream is “thrive on risk”. And we actually believe that leading into this and understanding risk can help your business.

 

JC: Well, that’s awesome. So then what kind of industries typically are like your clients now? I mean, are you in like financial district? Is it like high regulation areas or like vulnerability areas, you know, like legal and, and government, things like that, like who’s really the best fit for you guys across the board?

 

Bruce: Sure. Well, if you look at the issues in the past, you look over the last couple decades, those things that really showed up like the Enron issue, or the Subprime Loan Crash, for example, cyber tech, a lot of that was in the financial services sector. So a big part of our marquee customers are clearly banks in the financial services area. However, with this pandemic, everything has changed. Every company now a lot regulated industries, but every company, every industry, every region around the world, is dealing with the risk. And what do I mean by that? Well think of it, it is a perfect storm, from health issues, to economic challenges, think about work from home now and all of the cyber aspects and then throw in on top of that now, environmental concerns and social concerns. It’s like the perfect storm for risk. And guess what, it’s a good time for Metric Stream because we can help customers navigate those choppy waters.

 

JC: Well, that’s good. Um, well, let me ask you this, then what motivated you to start the company? I mean, were you you know, in some other sector and you guys got hacked, everything went down and one lawsuit drive me like this is crap, I need to fix this. I mean, just what was that moment where you said, I need to start a risk management software company?

 

Bruce: Well, actually, I’m the recipient of the company as it had begun.

 

JC: Oh okay..

 

Bruce: So a while ago, Gunjan Sinha, Gaurav Kapoor, several of those came up with the concept. And in the industry, the acronym is GRC. It stands for governance, risk, and compliance.

 

JC: Ah okay

 

Bruce: But it’s mature. So every one of these issues as these things have come up, the industry is mature. I’ve actually been the CEO at Metric Stream for 15 months. But I’m really proud to be the recipient of all of this great heritage. And what we’ve done over the last 15 months is build out the sales team, build out our technology, add to the whole process of what we do in the industry, and build our customer base. So they’re really an exciting time, but it’s not new. The industry started a couple decades ago, actually.

 

JC: Okay, and then well, then what drew you to metric stream in particular? I mean, obviously, if you’re the CEO there, you had a lot of options. With your experience, you could have gone to a lot of companies, what made you say, all right, that’s where I want to land. That’s the company that I want to go take to the next generation?

 

Bruce: What a great question. You know, we all look at this, and we all manage our careers and everything about this. We’re the right ingredients, in my opinion. So you have a wonderful heritage, there’s a halo around Metric Stream, being the innovator of this market, this integrated risk management software world. But on top of that great talent, marquee customers, great innovation. So you had this great foundation, and then you add into it with the pandemic and all of these other changes. Literally the risk world is changing, right? It’s not anymore where you show up with red, yellow, green, and green, you just don’t look at yellow, you kind of hope, you know, maybe it’ll go away and red, I better worry.

 

JC: Yeah

 

Bruce: And today we quantify risk. And by the way, some of the issues that are green could be your biggest impact for managing the risk and making it strategic. Now I’m not saying you don’t address red, but think about where we’ve taken this now we literally quantify risk, and part of it is the reporting. But a big part of it is the artificial intelligence. And how do you actually start taking this data and turn it into a strategic advantage? 

 

JC: Well, you know said something that caught my attention for a second, you had said that risk management is changing. And I have a question and whether you guys do this or not, or maybe if it’s something you guys are looking at, when the risk manager software, I imagine it works well with, you know, a lot of numbers and things like that, right? So that’s why the financial industry is a big thing for that. But what about culture? What about like, PR crisis, so to speak? So for example, you know, you guys enter a certain industry or work with a certain figure or company, is there any way for your system, either now or maybe in the future, to go to see like, what kind of risks that would be for any kind of canceled culture? For example, right? You mean, right now, whether which side you land on if you like, cancel culture, I think it’s bad isn’t really the point as much as that consumers are holding companies accountable, for better or worse. And so that can be a huge risk, you know, you guys partner with the wrong company, so to speak, or, you know, say the wrong thing on social media, or the CEO or C level somebody gets in some scandal, you know, is there anything about your system now, or in the future that you plan to start talking about the risk management when it comes to community and culture and social media?

 

Bruce: This is a great, very insightful question. Let’s think of it this way, every one of these companies, big, small, medium size, different regions, whatever industry you’re in, you have a ton of data, you have a lot of this information. But it’s used in different ways, operational ways. You know, if you think of the early workflow process improvements, if you think about some of the network capabilities, or customer intimacy, they collected this data, but nobody has ever really took taken that data and said, Let’s use it to help us manage risk. Why couldn’t we bring this together, both internal and external, think of the risk issues around cyber attacks, so much of this comes through third parties. But guess what all that data exists, what we do is we pull all that data, structured data, unstructured data, pull it together, and then put it in a usable form with an effective user interface. So I can start now understanding this, what if we do this? Let me come in about your culture. I couldn’t agree with you more JC I think it’s a wonderful insight. I’ve been around the industry a long time, as I mentioned, right? So in the past, a lot of the new technology drove culture, we got a smartphone. And that helped us communicate or we got an iPod and we we digitized music, and you know, all these different things is cool, right? Today, I believe culture is starting to drive technology. And this is a really fundamental change. Let me give you an example. I had a flight last night and I was looking at my itinerary, do you know on the itinerary, it lists the carbon emissions footprint, but just think of the impact now of people starting to choose an airline or an actual flight based on carbon emissions,

 

JC: It’s like calories on the fast food menus now.

 

Bruce: It is! How many times we go and buy potato chips, and you look at the back, and then you put them away?

 

JC: Oh, crap.

 

Bruce: And I really believe that now what’s happening and in the industry, it’s called ESG. And its environmental, social, and governance. To us, we connect that with the government governance process – GRC, I mentioned this earlier. And what’s happening now is, all of a sudden, this thing around global warming, social diversity impacts are now showing up in risk as well. You know, investors now will look for an ESG score to decide if they want to invest in that company. This is amazing impact that now, so what are customers asking? They’re saying, Okay, first, I now have to worry about the compliance regulations coming out more every week, these government’s coming out of the post pandemic? How am I addressing that? Am I able to report can I be compliant. So our software pulls all of these data elements to give them that compliance, to help them with the audit to work through those requirements. But that’s just the first step, what we do is we go into what we call metric stream intelligence. And it’s our form of AI. And think of it this way, we literally can take that data. And we can combine it from all of these different data sources and start being able to give them some predictability. What will happen in this risk space? And what if I do this? And think of all these companies out there that are wondering about a new marketplace? Or a new product line? Or should I address this? Or what about my diversity? Well we can not only help them with the reporting, but we can start helping them with understanding where this goes, and what things could they do to make risk strategic. So let me say it again, thrive on risk.

 

JC: I like it. I like it. Well, let me ask you a question. And so you know, you said you’ve come into this company here in the last year and a half or so that you know, I’m a marketing guy by trade. So I always have to, I always want to know like, how are you getting the word out? You know, what does your company do to let other companies know that you even exist? I mean, you know, some of the listeners like to hear about different marketing strategies that might be working for different industries. Are you guys doing paid ads? Are you just doing trade shows? Well, maybe now, because last year and a half, you couldn’t right? You know, obviously, you’re on a podcast. So that helps, right? I’m sure you do more of these. But what are the strategies you guys are using to allow companies doesn’t even know that you guys exist are in are out there?

 

Bruce: Sure. Well, I think in the past, if you look at risk, previous to now, and the pandemic and all that there were specific risk officers, and they would go to seminars, let’s say, or they would participate in new technology, and it was kind of isolated. Today, all business executives are interested in risk. They’re all trying to figure out if I launched this product, or if I do this, what’s the impact to my business? Right? And how do I manage this. So we do a lot of direct contact, we obviously feel very good about our marketing. And by the way, we’ve completely rebranded Metric Stream over the last six months and Aquamarine color and a new, fresh, lively, you know, exciting part to metric stream. But we also now are doing a lot of summits. And we’re doing a lot of business events. In fact, we have one coming up in London, in just two weeks, the middle of October, and we it’s called GRC Summit, obviously by Metric Stream. And here’s a chance for business executives and risk executives to come together and share stories and learn. And we do a lot of insight to share with them the new tools and techniques and metric stream intelligence and things now that are available for them. It’s very effective. It’s great. I’m proud of our sales and marketing team.

 

JC: Well, that’s good. I mean, if you have a strong, that’s one of the hardest things to build out, is a good sales and marketing team. You know, I mean, everything about a business is hard. But that seems to be the hardest one that I..

 

Bruce: And think of it this way, too, you know, we think of sales as fear or greed, you know, and what’s what motivates people, you know, risk isn’t necessarily the kind of thing that people raise their hand and say, I’ve got risk concerns come see me.

 

JC: Well, that happens usually, you know, we’re a fix it, not prevent it, kind of society you know..

 

Bruce: Correct

 

JC: You know, but a lot of things have happened, and it’s got, you know, some people going, Oh, crap, maybe I should look at that. Now, you know..

 

Bruce: Let me give you an example around cybersecurity issues, right? So it’s not an if it’s a win now, right? We all know, whether it’s hacking or ransomware, all these things are gonna happen. I want to be clear, our software doesn’t go and protect their enterprise. We’re not a ransomware software. But what we do is we’re able to pull the data together, use the algorithms to give them a sense of what risks they have, and what would the the cost be to that? And how do I quantify the impacts of some of these IT cyber attacks on their company. And this now becomes, think of it as a forecast or an understanding in advance of how as a business, do I want to protect myself? And what do I know the risks could be? And so it’s, it’s really exciting. The ESG that I mentioned, is another great example, right? So companies now are starting to be ranked on their environmental, their carbon footprint on their diversity scores. And they’re sitting back saying, where do I get this data? Well, the reality is they have it, they have it in their HR systems.

 

JC: Yeah it’s all there.

 

Bruce: ..and all their ERP systems, they have all this stuff. So we are able to pull that together, we help them do the reporting. And now from that point, then we start bringing to them the ability to start doing what if scenarios, how can I get ahead?

 

JC: You can also tell them, if you know, what’s worth putting money at now versus later to right? You know, I’ve seen that are things that are immediate, you have to address right now things that are low risk, it’s like, Okay, well start getting on this soon kind of thing. And that helps them with their budgets, so I can see a huge advantage to having a..

 

Bruce: No question. And you know, I think European Union, I think the European basically, climate is a little ahead of this, and some of the regulation aspects. But one of the things that Metric Stream also provides when in this ESG area, is understanding those indexes, what content is going to be required, what are those regulations and those compliant aspects. So if you think about it, a business leader is sitting back saying, I’m running my business, I’ve got all of these things, I’m worried about the risk aspect, and I don’t even know what’s coming next. And so metric stream on top of bringing the software and the analytics and all of that to them. We also are the ones that can connect this whole ecosystem. So we know where the content providers are, we know what those scores are going to be, and what are the requirements, and we can help them understand how to navigate through this.

 

JC: So what’s the future look like? I would be remiss if I didn’t ask the golden question of the future of big tech, which is a two-part question. First, I want to ask about your company because my audience does like to get the inside scoop. So I know you had a launch. I know you had that GRC launch recently, but what’s on the roadmap? What new, cool things are you guys working on what’s in the skunkworks basically, of the company that that will be coming down the road here that you really plan on, you know, hitting hard what’s coming down the pipeline?

 

Bruce: Well, let me take a step back and just brag about metric stream real quick. And then I’ll tell you about the future. But you know, basically the way we think of this as our platform is the foundation. And on that platform is a federated data model. And that is able to bring in all these data elements to make sense. And we have low code capabilities are at all of the user interface, all these aspects, the user experience, then on top of this platform, in our federated data model, our six product lines, right, and these are all of the things that the businesses need to worry about from risk compliance, audit, third party, cyber, and now ESG. Yeah, but here’s the cool thing about metric stream is they all can work together. So if I’m an audit customer for metric stream, and I want to add compliance or risk product, I’m using the same data model, the same data elements, and now I can pull it together. So all of a sudden, if I’m going out, and I’ve now now have to do reporting, and scoring for environmental, our carbon footprint, I don’t have to have that be a one off point solution. And I got to bring this in separate and it doesn’t integrate with anything else. It fits together with all of our product lines on that same platform. So what’s important? Well just think about it. One is we’re going to continue to advance and modernize that platform, new and new user experiences, ways for our user group and our customers to benefit from this capability. But then we will also continue to build out the product lines. So as new requirements come in, as new risk elements come in, it’s very easy for us to go and build those products on that platform. But I would tell you, if you want my personal opinion is maybe more nearer term than longer term. I think the whole aspect of risk quantification is the big advancement. And what I mean by that is, it’s just like I was saying earlier, the red, yellow, green, you know, we tend to sit back and say, Well, I’m in compliance. Okay, that’s good. That’s good. 

 

JC: And how close are you to fail?

 

Bruce: Right? Like, if I’m not, is this like in the millions?

 

JC: But how close are you to fail?

 

Bruce: Correct. Is it brilliant? You know, it’s, it’s a little bit like having your bloodwork done, you know, okay, I’m in a good, I’m in a good zone. But whoops, this could be a bad thing.

 

JC: Yeah and you can’t see your blood pressure isn’t critically low, just because you haven’t passed out yet. You could be two seconds from that. And it’s a you need to do something about it.

 

Bruce: You and I, we’ve covered everything from calories to heart attacks. 

 

JC: Oh yeah, there’s a huge parallel.

 

Bruce: Unfortunately, we specialize in risk. And risk is a is a reality, it’s a reality, and maybe even more now in the pandemic. But we believe risk can be strategic, if you can get out ahead of it, and they have the information, we just need to have it in a usable manner in a way that they can capitalize on that. And then through our metric stream intelligence, we can start predicting and helping them be able to get out ahead of it. It’s really it’s really a cool thing.

 

JC: So it sounds like you have that near future. You have things working better together. Some AI stuff here and quantification that can help with this. That’s really cool. So now let’s talk about the industry. I mean, risk management, you’re not alone in it, of course, right? There’s a big industry out there. Where do you see the industry itself, you and all your competitors? And that next 10 years, like, where do you see the major shifts of either technology? Or what’s happening in the world that’s going to force people to try to go more risk management? Or maybe do you see things getting better because of it? And maybe people start, unfortunately, until they back off, right? Because we’re very reactive of a species. So where do you see that next 10 years for all risk management going?

 

Bruce: Yes, it’s a great question. I would tell you the amount of investment interest in this segment of the industry, this GRC, this governance risk and compliance- it’s intense. People want to invest in this because they realize the impact. And what I would tell you from a company standpoint, I think there will be a lot of consolidation in the industry. And this happens as it matures. Man, let’s go back to ERP systems with workflow. Think of the way that whole segment consolidated and advanced, and then the CRM, the customer intimacy, aspect, and how that the same thing will happen in this GRC and ESG area. And what we’ll see is we’ll see consolidation, what’s the advantage to metric stream, the solid platform Foundation, and one single federated data model. So it’s very easy for us to pull those advancements into a common place versus the point solutions. 

 

Bruce: You understand because every point solution has to do what the CIOs got to standard and justify it. And you know, you’ve got to bring it in and test it. Also, once you’re in on this platform, going from compliance to audit or adding third party, these all become a natural expansion for that customer. And it all comes back to using the same data model coming back to using the same data elements and then starting to expand. So the whole aspect of Unstructured Data now external, let me give you a specific example. In IT Cyber right? The majority of these hacks, the majority of this ransomware actually comes through scenes when you build in third parties, right? So a third party gets evaluated and scored and accepted. And now they’re in. But how many companies go back and really manage that third party. And so what you see is a lot of these hacks, it’s terrible stuff, they come in through third and fourth party relationships, look at the complexity of the supply chain now, in this pandemic world, and all of the changes that are happening, every one of them creates scenes through third parties. Well, wouldn’t it be great to have a solution like Metric Stream that helps you manage those third parties to really understand.

 

JC: Now that’s a big part right there because most people can’t, they can control what they can control, which is themselves? Correct. I have a platform that can also keep checks and balances on your providers. Now that I think is one of the biggest things that you guys do it sounds like from a scalable standpoint, and you know, how important that would be? Do you guys work with government entities at all? Or is it mostly just..

 

Bruce: Oh sure, in fact, a lot of the government entities now are also in a private world with new content providers and content scoring around environmental social, for sure. That’s our strength, is that ecosystem. JC, I’ll give you another example of some new technology because I know your listeners like to hear this. I would tell you, it’s the link of mobility into risk. And why do I say that? Well, think of where the majority of real risk takes place. It takes place at the frontline, whether it’s a teller in a bank, and it could be a mobile application, whether it’s a receive a shipper receiver on a dock in a supply chain, you could go on and on a receptionist in an office building, right? When they see a risk, how do they get that into the system? How do they notify and so the real advancements now are around this mobility and frontline detection of risk and being able real time to say I see something that’s of concern, and it needs to be flagged and visible, and how you bring that real time data analytics in data and analytics into the system. So we’re working on this, we’ve got some really cool things happening. And I think there’s a big future there as well.

 

JC: I love that. And then like I said, I like that second level of checks and balances. And I think that’s a really key part of what you guys do. And I think that’s really from my opinion, the way that I think that’s one of the leading factors of why people would would hire you know, a company like yours. Let me ask you a personal question. You’re more like business personal. So if you could pick one business book, because you seem like a really well read guy, you know, a lot of stuff of one business book that you had to recommend to anyone listening that’s like the it’s a must read, period, whether it be for your industry, or just in general, what would it be? 

 

Bruce: Well, there’s, this is a little dated now. But I think it’s it was very telling us leading digital and there were some books early on, about how the digital society was going to change the human race. And there are a lot of obvious things, right? Social media, etc, etc. But I don’t think anybody predicted, right? So I’ve been around a long time. And I worked at AT&T, NCR, HP, some great companies, a lot of this technology was kind of on the forefront and started to forecast where we would go, right? But nobody ever predicted something as dramatic as a pandemic. I mean, just think of video conferencing. Here we are doing this interview through video conferencing. I remember early days when we were at AT&T, we’re talking about this. And people said, no one will ever want to do this. Now you might get caught in your pajamas, you know where the dog is barking. And think of today’s world, we don’t think..

 

JC: And some people still don’t want to, some people don’t.

 

Bruce: They don’t think twice about the background noise, right? If we hadn’t done those things, and this whole aspect of leading digital – if we hadn’t put those things in place, think of what this world would have gone through the last 12-18 months. Think of how we’ve been able to continue our lives in a relatively productive way because of technology. And I think it’s really cool to be a part of that. 

 

JC: What was the name of the book again, though you said it was?

 

Bruce: I believe it’s “Leading Digital” 

 

JC: Oh “Leading Digital”, got it. Got it. Okay, well, especially if it’s before to see if they were able to predict this so well, that’s really..

 

Bruce: Correct and it was basically a way to start scoring companies as to how they use digital, not just to, to gain retain customers, but also internally how you use the whole digital aspect. To be a thought leader in this. I just think it’s really exciting. And for me personally, to think of the years spent building these systems and data processing and networking and all of this now coming together in this post pandemic world. And we have a program – a marketing campaign we call “Power what’s next” And so basically, now that you have all of this, how do you make risk strategic? How do you thrive on risk? And how does risk become commonplace to the way you manage your business? So before you launch a new product, before you change your supply chain before you enter a new customer segment? Are you really analyzing all that risk? Have you really put forth the assessment of where you stand? That’s not just reporting. That’s a big part of it. But how do you really make risk a strategic and I’m excited about what we’re doing. I can tell you we’re hiring. I would love to have more people come join us. We can’t hire fast enough.

 

JC: So as our last question then, how can people get in touch with you personally, if they’d like if they’re part of a company with that big deal for you? And then how can people reach the company in general? If they’re just trying to inquire?

 

Bruce: Yeah, so obviously, you can catch us on the internet- MetricStream.com that’s the quickest way. I like to think our social media is really up to date, and be a quick way to to see what opportunities we have. You can always reach out to me personally, Bruce@MetricStream.com  that’s an easy way to get to us. But you know, I tell you, look for some of the things that we’re doing. We’re always on LinkedIn, with new programs, new information, we have the summit, as I mentioned, coming up in middle October in London, and we’ve just loved to have people come be a part of this. I’m not just saying this, we’re literally hiring today. And we’re looking for talent that want to be a part of this journey.

 

JC: Why there’s a lot of people looking for really good spots out there. And it sounds like you guys are a great company to work for. And listen for everyone out there listening again. If you liked what you heard today, please be sure to subscribe to this podcast, give it a five star rating, putting some cool notes on there for us. So other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all the amazing and helpful B2B software’s on the market today. Bruce, thank you again so much for coming on the show. If I happen to be in London, October I think I mean like December..

 

Bruce: You have an open invitation from the CEO. JC I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. I think your insight is terrific.

 

JC: I’m gonna hold you to that.

 

Bruce: Come see us.

 

JC: Thanks Bruce.

 

Bruce: All right. Cheers.

 

Learn more about Linear Financial Technologies at: https://www.linearft.com/

Find Brian Geary on LinkedIn here:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-geary-63bb542/

JC: Welcome, everybody to another episode of the Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest on the show with us today. And listen, if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by following this podcast wherever you’re listening, and be sure to give it a five star review and you know, preferably with some nice comments in there, because that is how techies like you and I find cool podcasts like this one. And today I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing the president of Linear Financial Technologies, Brian Geary. Brian, thank you so much for coming on the show, tell the audience a little bit about yourself, and what is it that you do?

 

Brian: Thanks JC, and glad to be here thrilled to be talking about Linear here with you and your audience today. So what do we do, we are a SaaS infrastructure company really focused on the banking space. But there are some feature kind of segments that we’re going to talk about here. But we are providing the infrastructure to digitize and  modernize their small business lending capabilities. So my background, I actually came from, from the banking space. So I, you know, started my career actually, I was in the military to begin with, but post Business School, landed at Citibank, and kind of saw firsthand that, you know, the way that that banks were helping to kind of serve this small business segment was still very kind of paper-based and very kind of friction-filled for both the Small Business customer and for the bank that was trying to process those. So I jumped over to one of the earlier kind of direct lending Fintechs in the space, which was called OnDeck capital. And then basically, kind of this company was kind of born out of that, where we took a lot of the technology that we have built over the years as that direct lender, and are using that to to license that to our clients, again, to really kind of digitize that experience or that end small business customer.

 

JC: That’s really cool. Well, let me ask you a question. So one, thank you for your service. Of course, were you doing something in the military that related to financial I mean, a lot of people think all military is you know, shoo, shoo, shoo, bullet bullet gun, and there’s, like 90% support, you know what I mean? So were you in a financial area that or is it completely unrelated? And if so, you know, what made you want to go into finance and out of the military?

 

Brian: Yeah, no, great question. It was probably not super related to financial services, to be honest with you. So I was in the Navy on the Surface Warfare side. So I was on a ship doing a couple of tours to the Persian Gulf, but actually, it’s one of my last, since in the military, I was working in the Pentagon for essentially, what was the head of kind of strategy for the Navy. So it was just exposed to some pretty interesting kind of thinking in a lot of that kind of just strategy that you’ve learned in business school, you know, kind of after that, but no, I mean, I think coming out of business school, when I was really looking for was a bit of general management focus, but also just really drawn to the financial services industry. Obviously, a lot of innovation has happened there over the last 10 years or so. So it’s been a cool time to be in the space. 

 

JC: Well, that’s awesome. Now I took a preview of your website, and there was a screenshot on there that I really recognized, right? And it was this screenshot, basically, that had it was two squares next to each other. And it was it was like options for someone to click on as far as like, you know, what they’re applying for approval, like a consumer, it seemed like a consumer or business person was going to be you know, they could you know, ask like $50,000, like secured or unsecured, like it was this really user friendly interface. And so when I’ve seen this before, like in SBA stuff, I’ve seen it in like credit line stuff, I’ve seen, I’ve seen it when I click on some ad, you know, when it’s offering like credit cards, or whatever, it’s like real super easy interface. And the back end, I imagine what you guys are providing so and tell me if I’m wrong here, but are you guys essentially that backend that allows it to be so easy for a consumer or business person to you know, apply for a loan? Or to get a credit line? Or you know, things like that is? Are you guys behind that like that? Because we get as consumers? We get this all the time coming our way?

 

Brian: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That is us. In a nutshell, we are behind the scenes, I would say our technology is white labeled. So it’s always the clients kind of name and you know, kind of look and feel that you would see in that digital experience. In many cases, we’re hosting that application that you’re actually interfacing with, it’s still just you know, has the the bank or the clients name on it. And then once you’ve actually kind of go through and submit that application, that’s where really the magic of our SaaS platform kind of takes over. So we have integrated to a ton of data sources. And really what we’re trying to do is automate as much as possible, of that lending experience behind the scenes. And so if I can paint the picture for a second, if you kind of go back in time, five years ago, if you were a small business and wanted to apply maybe 10 years ago, you wanted to apply for a small business loan, you had to go into the branch, they handed you a paper application, you took that home, you filled it out, and you came back to the branch with that, plus, probably, you know, at least five different sets of documents, my tax returns, my financial statements, my resume, and a number of other things, which that banker then took, they gave it to someone else who probably keyed the information in behind the scenes and maybe a week or two later, you might receive a decision. So obviously, you know tons of friction in that process. For kind of everyone involved, that, again, that’s where our platform comes in. So once an application comes in, we have all these automated data sources that we go out and pool, and then it really just trying to surface, if a judgmental decision is required from someone within the bank, then we surface that quickly. So they can either look at a document, or make it a judgment call, so they can kind of quickly get you through to be approved.

 

Brian: For smaller dollar loans, you know, a lot of our clients are using us to automatically approve customers or decline. And then for as you get up into, call it like above $250,000 you know, loans and lines and more complex products, then there will be a human behind the scenes that has to kind of step in, in certain cases, or really trying to make it as like, as easy as possible for them to help kind of make that decision. So you can get that answer back in like a day or two versus having it be, you know, a week or two in the past. 

 

JC: So who is your perfect client? I mean, obviously, I could tell you, you can work for me, I do this for any bank or any financial institution. But is it only banks? Is there a certain size? I mean, again, I’m sure you could take a lot. But like, if you had to, you know, gun to your head, you have to pick one avatar of a client, like who is the best one who gets the most benefit out of hiring you initially?

 

Brian: Yeah, I think our primary customer segment today is Super Regional and regional banks. So I think they get a ton of benefit, because they have a higher volume of small business customers that are coming to them for loans. And they have a number of products that they are helping to serve for them. That’s the number one. So I’ll stop my answer there. But there are some some other kind of segments that we’re going into in the future as well.

 

JC: So tell me how you even became part of the President. So you’re not the co founder  or whatnot. And we talked about in the pre interview that there was a way that you came to be part of linear financials, let’s hear that story you know, where did you start off? And then how did you become the president of Linear?

 

Brian: Yeah, so this kind of ties into almost like the progression of what’s happened in small business lending. So, you know, for a long time, if you wanted a small business loan, you had to go to a bank, call it kind of 10-12 years ago, there was this crop of Fintechs, that popped up, that were direct to the small business in terms of lending in some ways, they were almost trying to, to kind of displace the banks in this kind of small business lending space. So I joined one of those companies coming out of the banking world, which was called On Deck. And so they had a pretty good run over a number of years, and still, you know, are going today in that kind of direct lending model. And so I was an employee there helping them to kind of grow their franchise. And then we really had this idea of, Hey, we are building a lot of great technology. And there’s a segment of the market that as that kind of FinTech lender, we were having a hard time serving, which is really that kind of very prime, bankable customer, because a lot of the fintechs, they had to get capital from other sources. And so it was expensive, and so the loans that they were making to these to the end kind of small business customers are more expensive than what a bank can make, therefore, kind of serving that almost like second tier of kind of a risk down from from what would typically be kind of bankable.

 

Brian: And so we have this idea of like, hey, let’s take the technology that we have have started to build, let’s turn that really into a SaaS platform, so we can have multiple clients on it. And then let’s take that and license it, you know, back to the banking world. We’ll have a much broader reach in being able to serve small business customers, and creating a very valuable company in the process. So that was kind of our path, we actually formed a company called OD X, which was a spin out of On Deck. And then recently about earlier this year, we merged that with a company that was called Fundation to create Linear Financial Technologies. So those two paths of coming together, were actually very similar foundation actually started as a direct lender, it pivoted to this kind of lending technology model, where their clients were also in the banking space. And so we’ve kind of merged together to become the leader in the space, so we have a number of clients again, in this kind of Super Regional regional bank space, and a really the kind of the player in that space to play a beat.

 

JC: That’s awesome. Well, let me ask a question or what is it? So you know, if we have, you know, someone who’s who works for regional bank listening, for example, right? We get a lot of tech people on here, so get us on the tech side. What is it, you know, walk us through what it’s like to actually go on and to use this. Can someone go on and sign up and start playing around with it? Is it something where they have to get a demo first is more enterprise style, because it sounds like a pretty intricate thing, but and then you set them up on your platform? So let’s talk about the platform itself and how does someone –  a regional bank, even just start that process? How do they even get this to help them?

 

Brian: Yeah, listen, from the high level our platform is it’s very you know kinda moderate so it’s AWS hosted, it’s modular, but it typically is, you know, clients, we obviously we have a business development team, but usually they’re in the market and having a conversation with us. Probably I would say more on the enterprise, you’re kind of sales side of your comment will come in, have a conversation, understand what their needs are, give them a demo. And then as they are interested in moving forward, we basically set them up on implementation projects, those typically take, you know, between three to six months, let’s say to get someone live and leveraging the platform, mostly because there’s integration points that we have to build between our platform and, and our client system.

 

JC: A lot of API calls, you know stuff like that..

 

Brian: Exactly. It’s a lot of API calls, you know, primarily for on the front end of the experience, let’s say you are an existing clients, you know, a customer of a bank today, if we want to have like a single sign-on where you can use your credentials, we have all this data on you, we can import that into our platform. That’s one typical integration point. And then the second is on, once you’ve actually gone through the process, you close that loan, or checking accounts that you want to take out will board that back into the bank’s typical kind of like core or servicing platform. So they could take it from there and have it kind of live with the rest of their products that they’re serving the customers with.

 

JC: Very cool. All right. So magic question. Of course, The Future of Biztech, we got to talk about the future, right?

 

Brian: Yeah.

 

JC: I  want to talk about the industry first. You know, the banking, you know, we’ve had multiple financial clients, right? Because I own a marketing agency. That’s my thing. I’m a marketing guy by trade. But I’m also that tech nerd who was, you know, having AOL while when I was 12. In my dad’s basement, that kind of thing. Like I have that story, right? I’m that kid.

 

Brian: Yeah.

 

JC: So let’s talk about where it’s where it’s going. The audience is interested, I’m interested. So as your industry, you have competitors, of course that do similar-ish things, right? Do you see any external factors in the market or legislation because you’re in a regulated industry, in that 5-10 year mark, where you see things, just hockey sticking in one direction or another?

 

Brian: Yeah, this is so if I go back to the comments, I was making the progression of the industry, I’ll get to the future in a second. So we, if you went through, you know, that bank was the original, you had FinTech lenders coming in, we as a technology company, are helping those banks to compete with the fintechs give them the same, like great digital customer experience. And the next wave of lending that we’re seeing already happening today, and I think it’s going to accelerate in the future is you have a lot of these software platforms that are out there today, giving you one example – Shopify, right? Like if you’re an e commerce seller, and you need a place to let someone kind of host your website, you get a Shopify, but Shopify is also giving you payments, and helping you with inventory and a number of other things almost like help you on your business. That’s one example of this kind of vertical software industry that is out there, where they are also starting to add funding or other financial services products as part of their ecosystem. And so we’re seeing a lot of that today, where are  these, you know, typical, like, like very, you know, traditional kind of software platforms that have nothing to do with financial services, but they have a base small business clients data on those clients, they’re really trying to embed financial services, especially kind of lending in our case as an ancillary product, or an add on product to help kind of grow those customers that are on their platform, and to make them kind of sticky with their ecosystem. So we are seeing that happen today, we are involved in a number of those relationships, where we’re helping those software platforms to embed a lending experience into into their platform. And at the end of the day, you know, they may be funding alone, we may bring one of our summer banking clients in to fund the loan, the funding part, we figure out kind of as a secondary, but what they’re looking for is that digital experience in offering lending or financial services as part of their ecosystem, so I think you’re gonna see more and more of that happening, where you’re seeing the kind of mindshare shift of the small business customers it’s happening in consumer as well but definitely in small business is going to gravitating to these kind of software platforms and are starting to embed lending within that as well, which is just kind of just enhancing the overall kind of value prop that they have to customers.

 

JC: What about at the more micro level because you mentioned Shopify right? Does your or even industry –  do you see the industry whether it be your company or not you know if I go and buy you know something expensive on Shopify, now I don’t know if this already exists because it’s probably back end you know, so if I go own a website and I want to buy something expensive I’ve started to see this trend now where all of a sudden I’m being offered payment plans zero interest wants to just like, hey, six payments like Amazon has it built in already that I’ve already gotten? I mean, and sometimes I do sometimes I don’t depending on how much I’m buying. I’m way too addicted Amazon, I can’t even talk about that right now. Like every other day is Christmas on my doorstep. It’s ridiculous. Okay, so but that being said, you know, even they have these offers of like, no payment plans. Does your system work? Or does the industry in general – are you guys the ones responsible for these different websites that are now being able to offer these payment plans, you know, in that are you guys doing that, that that micro level, rather than just the really big bank level?

 

Brian: Yeah, no, absolutely. So, you know, what you’re describing is kind of broadly known as buy now pay later, which is blowing up, you know, in the FinTech industry, obviously, you know, a firm and other companies are..

 

JC: It seems like everybody wins, to be honest like..

 

Brian: I mean it’s in some ways it’s replacing credit card spend. It’s giving customers control over that purchase that they’re making. And when they pay it back, and it’s, you know, if you’re getting 0% interest, it’s sometimes that’s kind of subsidized by the seller, but agreed, it’s a win win proposition. So we are seeing buy now pay later come to the Small Business segment. So the end customer is a small business, we’re starting to see that that trend start to kind of take root there as well. So I think, you know, over the next five years, that there’s going to be massive growth in the buy now pay later small business segment, consumer is already there, and will continue to grow small business, it’s just kind of starting to churn. And we’re gonna, that’s going to be a very, very big offering. And so yes, like that, that is a place where we are playing, where, as I mentioned before, like we’re helping the banks digitize their offering, or we’re helping these software platforms with that almost like embedded finance or buy now pay later type of experience to be able to offer that as well. So that’s an area that we’re playing in for sure. 

 

JC: That’s really cool. See that I like see, I like these real world applications to technologies that people may not understand right away, right? Like I love saying, Okay, well, this is what you’re doing over here. But like, here’s how we actually end up interacting with it, which I think is cool. Okay, so now let’s, that’s the industry, let’s talk about Linear now, I want to know, because my audience does like to have the inside scoop. I promised them that, right? So you got to give me something here, okay. And again, remember, there’s a little bit of delay between when we record and when we drop so. So it what’s on your roadmap, what’s coming out soon, additional to what you’re doing now that you’re really excited about from a technology standpoint, and we’re just service, you know, generally.

 

Brian: So I’ll give you a give you one scoop here that we have not really talked about too publicly.

 

JC: Yes. All right.

 

Brian: Okay, so we, you know, we’ve talked about lending and account opening, which is the kind of core of our business, we also have a terrific analytics team on our side. And so what we’ve been working over the past couple years on, is, you know, fraud, especially in the small business space is not being solved all that well. So there are data providers..

 

JC: Sow what kind of frauds, there are many types of fraud. So you’re talking about, like someone’s stealing someone’s credit card? Or are you talking about, you know, contract breaches? Like, what kind of fraud? Are you specifically talking about?

 

Brian: The fraud that I’m talking about is it’s kind of impersonating. You know, another small business, basically.

 

JC: Like a corporate identity theft..

 

Brian: You’re faking some credentials to apply for a loan?

 

JC: Ohh..

 

Brian: You know, $100,000 comes into your bank account, and then poof, you’re gone. You never make a payment.

 

JC: Oh, wow.

 

Brian: You’re basically faking credentials. There’s lots of ways to do that. So we won’t go into that.

 

JC: We won’t teach anyone on the show how to do it, but it’s happening. Yeah.

 

Brian: All the ways you can do that. But that is a very big problem in the both consumer and small business lending space, where, where you’re using fraudulent techniques to gain access to capital, taking the money and disappearing.

 

JC: Wow, okay.

 

Brian: And so that’s what we so we have actually developed, it’s really an AI-based model that is looking for anomalies in the data. So we can better predict when a customer is coming in, if they’re actually fraudulent. And so it just is a very, very high level of how to think about that. If you’re a small business, you probably have some footprint that we can kind of determine that you exist, you probably have a credit score, you have a LinkedIn page, your business, may have a website, you’ve had reviews, things like that. And so what we’re doing is going out and pulling all this data and bringing it back in. And it’s very obvious if wait, they don’t have a website or LinkedIn or any reviews. There’s some funky data that we’re seeing in the credit report, etc. That kind of you pull all that together, and then you determine like, Hey, we should look into this further to determine if it’s that we’re calling that Linear Defense. And we haven’t launched it kind of formally yet. But that’s something what we’re working on.

 

JC: I got to tell you, Brian, because I love what Linear is doing but that, right there is, in my opinion, single handedly the coolest thing I’ve heard from the finance industry in a very, very long time. Because here’s how you got my tail wagging when you said AI. And so I think it’s fantastic because you’re you’re basically and people think you know, a lot of people get in this mindset that you know, that if a bank gets hit, it’s a victimless crime, right? Because it’s insured and screw them right? Like, you know, bank robbers come in, you know, don’t worry about it, it’s insured and that’s that’s all fine. But what people don’t understand about that equation farther down the line, is that okay, fine. Yes, it’s insured. But these things happen enough, insurance rates have to go up and the businesses can only take so much of that before they even start passing the consumers. So it’s really not, you are actually in a being the victim, whether you like it or not, right? Because these costs are going to come wrapping all around and come right back to you eventually, or they’re gonna come in the form of bigger restrictions, because they got, you know, you know, screwed, so to speak. So now all of a sudden, you’re having to jump through more hoops as a business owner, and you might not get the funding you need when you need it. So there’s a lot of victims in this, and I love that you guys have figured out how to integrate an AI, especially the way you’re doing it, you’re going into real world applications of where business exists, not just in the document, you know, I could go and I could probably sign up on the Secretary of State for Colorado with minimal information.

 

JC: And then most banks, if it’s under a certain amount, it’s like under 50 grand, there’s no credit checks, there’s not many it’s very minimal paperwork, right? And so I can see what you’re talking about, I never considered that people make a living, you know, abusing the system and fraudulent. I’m sure they don’t get away with it forever, that, you know, there’s a lot of paper show with what they’re doing. So but yeah, it’s really cool. It sounds like your software takes a more holistic look at this applicant, and can create red flags for the financial institution. If something’s not adding up, you’re like, Okay, but if you’re really in business, wouldn’t you have this, this and this, and then I click into that, and then if you know, the less people were doing that it actually saves all of us money-  banks, insurance companies, which no one really cares about. But eventually, you know, ergo, it saves me and you, money in our fees, that we’re paying banks, and also in the time in the process, and maybe even things that we need, because it was interesting to hear something else I see and tell me if you agree or disagree, I want to know, if your product really takes off the way I think that absolutely could here, then it sounds like it could actually decrease because if you’re supplementing security with AI, they can look at things and reduce risk, then sometimes they can ask for less formalized things from you to apply for things because they have these other factors that they know are rock solid, I’ve already noticed in the last, you know, three or four years applications that I’ve done have become a lot less work for me, they just don’t need as much. And I never, I wonder why. But I imagine they have other things that they’re cross referencing. And it sounds like yours could really take the market in a direction where it could make applying for a loan not only for businesses, but even personal, you know, a lot more streamlined just because hey, if you’re on the grid, we’re going to take a look at that also, right? If we if we if we see that you’re you’re actually real, then we don’t necessarily need this, this and this, we’re like, okay, it’s cool. I mean, is that, am I right or wrong?

 

Brian: No, that’s exactly what we do. I mean, we’re doing that today, for a normal application where we’re asking for less documents upfront from the customer, because we can go and pull all those things from third party sources. Absolutely. I love that. And I think that the next evolution of that is what we were just talking about, where you actually incorporate an AI model, especially for fraud, where that really kind of gives you this like Confidence Index score of like, do I think this customer is fraudulent or not? So that you can use, there’s lots of applications for that. So that’s.

 

JC: So you know, I’ve been in business 11 years, and it’s like, you know, with that kind of history of good history of being in business, I feel like I should have to prove less things. You know, like, not that I want someone who’s a startup to have to go crazy enough to find a million things. But what I’m saying is, I think, with time and experience and being on the grid, so to speak that long, and having a track record, I think you’ve earned and deserve the path to get easier as you go. And not just state is just as hard every single day, no matter how good you’ve been doing, you know, and showing that you’re a valid, responsible business owner. So I think that’s really cool, that technology is going I love it. So I’m gonna ask you one more question here. You are one of my guests, who have you been through a lot of different aspects of business, right? So you know, you’ve worked in corporate, you did do a weather merger and everything. So I’m going to ask you a question for the audience here. What was either the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given in business? Or the best piece of advice that you could possibly give the audience? Based on everything you’ve been through? What would that be?

 

Brian: Oh, that is a tough question. 

 

JC: See I didn’t give you that but in the end.

 

Brian: Got it. Appreciate it. Yeah, so thinking about what I actually heard, like, early in my career, which is stuck with me, for whatever reason, is that feedback is a gift. And so I use that a lot. Like I’ll say that to folks on my team, you know, if you think about, like sports teams, or things like that, like they’re always being coached, they’re always being kind of, you know, like, given kind of feedback and critiquing and you get better with that over time. If you’re kind of in business, sometimes you’re just kind of on your own, like figuring things out. And so I really do like to, you know, give feedback but always constructive in the fact that we can always be kind of getting, you know, doing better or getting better over time. So…

 

JC: I like that and you know, when I some of the advice I give to our, you know, tech clients, especially SaaS as I say, use surveys a lot if you can. Use questions that pop up, you know, any customers you have, you know, have a little chat box in their dashboard that just pops as a “Hey, how are you liking this one particular feature, right?” And because  you’re in this bubble, when you make something, you’re in this bubble, right? And having that outside perspective, especially when people have used it is a big deal. But I also encourage having outside perspective, people have never used it because there’s two sets of fresh eyes. people only think it’s one and people think oh, that’s what our customers think so yeah, but they’re, they’re like one step into that bubble to now, right? They’re halfway in that bubble. And I find this asking people who have never heard of it just saying listen, here’s my website, you know, you open the website and they have to read it for like 10 seconds and you slam it shut and say okay, what do we do? Right? And if they can’t tell you that your your message isn’t isn’t simple enough, right? And so I think that’s really great advice that you’re giving because feedback is huge. And helps you see what what you’re not seeing right? It makes the blind see again, so.. okay, so let me ask you this here, how can people reach you or the company itself so the company first like website, all that good stuff, if a regional bank or anyone in financial industry are looking to start one is listening right now? Where would they go to kind of check out this technology that they might be able to use?

 

Brian: Yeah, so the website is linearft.com. And you know, if you want to find me, I’m on LinkedIn as well, Brian Geary.

 

JC: Brian with an “I”, right?

 

Brian: With an “I”. Yep.

 

JC: Okay, just making sure right. Awesome. Okay, well, let’s say for everyone listening out there again, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to this podcast, give it a five star rating throw in some cool comments, especially about Brian here. So other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all these amazing and helpful b2b software’s in the market today, Brian Geary, thank you so much for being on the show today. I think it’s awesome what you’re doing and I am so excited to see what happens with the linear defense program. It’s defense, right? Yeah, defense.

 

Brian: Yes exactly.

 

JC: Oh man, I love the name, too. Of course, it’s linear defense coming from a military guy. A Navy guy. I come from an Air Force family and I did a little reserve action here so I see what you did there. Awesome. Thanks, Brian. Have a good one, sir.

 

Brian: All right. Thanks, JC thanks.

 

 

 

Learn more about Losant at: https://losant.com

Find Charlie Key on LinkedIn here:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliekey/

 

JC: Welcome to another episode of the Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have another fantastic guest with me here on the show today. And if you end up loving this episode, please show your love and appreciation by showing this for the podcast, wherever you’re listening to it, and be sure to give it a five star review preferably with a little bit of, you know, comments in there as well, because that is how other techies like you and me find cool podcasts like this. Today, I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing the Co-Founder and CEO of Losant. Charlie Key, thank you so much for being on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what does Losant do?

 

Charlie: Yeah, absolutely. And, thanks for having me, it’s an honor to be here and talk about the fun stuff that’s happening in our world in IoT. Now, I’ve had the opportunity of working with my co-founders at Losant now for close to 19 years. We’ve gone to school together, we’ve started a couple companies together. And in this latest adventure at Losant, we’re focused on enabling enterprises to build IoT products and solutions. So what that really means is that we are providing the software tools to collect data from equipment to process that information to visualize it, and eventually deliver it back to the customers as a full blown application. And our platform enables these companies to do this in a very efficient and fast manner to help them get to market faster, through our low to no code environment. So you know, there’s a lot happening in this space, but it’s great to talk to you.

 

JC: So let’s simplify it a bit. Because you know, half the audience is really super techie, the other half aspires to be. Alright, so Internet of Things, give a quick breakdown of what internet of things really means, just layman’s terms. And then what’s like a really good example of how we might already be seeing this happening in our personal everyday lives that we didn’t really realize was IoT. 

 

Charlie: Yeah,absolutely. So IoT, and everybody’s got their own definition, you know, of IoT in general. So the internet of things in my mind is a combination of collecting data from different devices, you know, and I’ll give some examples here in a second, collecting that data from the devices and using it to solve problems in our lives. You know, if you’re an enterprise, this may be solving a problem around understanding how your building is operating, how your equipment in the field is operating, if you’re a person, maybe it’s understanding your blood pressure, you know, all of these different things fall in kind of the IoT space, I try to focus on what I really think the IoT world is about is solving these problems through connected devices and connected solutions. So a couple of quick examples from our world. Now one that you would never really think of is you’re walking through an airport, you get to the bathroom and the bathroom is squeaky clean for you. Well, in a normal world, what happens is every two hours some maintenance crew and facilities people come by to clean the place and come back two hours later. And the world of IoT what we’re doing is we’re tracking the amount of people who are going in and out of the restroom in order to make sure that it’s clean based on the usage so you now have an understanding of what the condition of the space is going to be based on you know, the throughput in the bathroom. And now we can alert the cleaning crew based on a smart watch to go clean that space based on usage not based on a time interval and so it’s always clean hopefully.

 

JC: That’s cool. So here’s what I like because I travel a lot so I like that analogy and what I think is interesting about it is that in your scenario here, this either saves the company money or it increases user experience because if it’s really busy sometimes it might need to be cleaned more than once in two hours right? You know like a baseball game for somebody that like you know, it’s really packed in there whereas if it doesn’t need to be, then they’re not wasting money having people do it every two hours when it was just literally spotless almost anyway, they’re just you know, tidying up so I like that in the worst case scenario you’re increasing customer experience and then the best case now you’re saving money too. I guess those are both best case scenarios. I think about it. So that’s pretty cool.

 

Charlie: Yeah, absolutely. And so that improved user experience is massive for those spaces, you know, to get to one that almost everybody now has a smartwatch, a Fitbit or some variation of something that’s tracking ourselves on a regular basis. And that’s the easy personal one we all can understand is you know, we have a Fitbit on our wrist, it’s counting the number of steps, it’s counting our heart rate and giving this information back to us in a very, hopefully meaningful way. And, and a useful way. And so that’s the simple, you know, I’m walking around with this IoT device on me all the time.

 

JC: What about things that we program ourselves, for example, I have my Alexa right, which I have unplugged so that she wouldn’t go off just now when I said that, just for this podcast, man that comes up so often you have no idea. So I have my Alexa and I programmed my Alexa app, there’s this feature in Alexa called routines. And I can pick what happens when I say certain things. So for example, when I’m leaving the house, I say, you know, Alexa, I’m leaving, and Alexa turns off all the lights, it starts my Roomba, like I have perpetual, you know, clean floors. Now, because of this, it automatically turns the temperature to a certain temperature in my house, and it turns on the guard, which if it hears sounds that seemed like someone’s either too close or trying to enter, it starts like a dog barking sound in here. Like, it’s pretty cool. I’m a tech nerd. Realize that now, this is absolutely for sure, since my routines are like this. But is that also an example of IoT in a way as well? Or is that kind of..

 

Charlie: Absolutely. I mean, all of the Smart Home stuff that we’re seeing kind of come together the Alexa’s and the Google homes, and all of these different kind of interactions that we’re finding, you know, like you’ve said, you put a routine together to solve a daily challenge, or a daily thing that you want to make more efficient. And so you know, that’s the perfect example of what IoT lives inside of our own lives. You know, if you think about a big business, it’s going to be similar, but maybe a little bit different. Maybe they want to be able to change the temperature in certain parts of their buildings, maybe they want to be able to understand that throughput in conference rooms in order to more efficiently use the spaces. And so it’s the same ideas that these use cases bring up, but give businesses a way to efficiently do them.

 

JC: So let’s talk about then who’s the perfect client? Like, what do you work with? Or do you think are the perfect ones for your platform? You know, so your, your platform, what allows them to go in and connect things? Like do you go in and say, Okay, we’re gonna take all the devices you have, we’re gonna upgrade them, and we’re gonna link into our system, and you can go into a dashboard and do this stuff. Is it a, is it like that? Or is it they go and do it themselves? You know, who is the perfect client? And how do they interact and make use of your platform? 

 

Charlie: Yeah, so we sell a lot to product teams inside of organizations. And that perfect kind of profile for us a lot of times is equipment manufacturers who are creating large pieces of expensive equipment that they’re manufacturing, they’re selling, they’re putting out into the field through their customers. And those customers now have this large piece of equipment running out in the field, they need to know what’s happening with that. They need to understand and how they support it, how they maintain it, how all of these different things, to service that piece of equipment in the most efficient manner. So on the simple side, what they’re going to use our platform to do is gather the data from that piece of equipment, in the case, an industrial piece of equipment, let’s think a compressor, a big engine, kind of running out in a field, you know, whether it’s pumping water from a goldmine, we have a customer in Australia, who manages gold mines, or pumps at gold mines, and they monitor those pumps, can remotely control them, bring that data back in, and do that all from their home office, you know, wherever they’re sitting for all of these different pumps across the country in all of these different sites. And so that product group was the perfect customer for us as they’re trying to figure out how they bring this new remote monitoring condition-based maintenance product to market.

 

Charlie: They’re trying to figure out how they do that in the fastest way possible. So what’s that time to market for them? How do they make it a low cost of ownership in the long term? How do they have that flexibility. And so our product enables them to do that, a lot of the times those customers are going to be integrating that data themselves. So they have a controller or a piece of equipment. And they’re going to use our software to pull the data from that piece of equipment, process it, upload it to the cloud platform, and then use that cloud component to visualize it and deliver it back. And so you know, they’re going to be inside working with that product with our platform. And so a lot of times, there’s some technical folks on their team, you know, and some cases, they’re working with outside third parties who are helping develop the software and the product that’s going to sit on top of our platform. And so, you know, there’s a lot of different ways to interact, but it’s going to be their team that’s helping develop and build this. And over the last couple of years, what we’ve tried to do is make it easier and easier to do this stuff, right? You know, let’s say step one was you had to build all this from scratch. If we didn’t exist, you wrote a lot of software, you had to build this and you, it took a lot of time and money to do. Our platform existed. It takes a lot less time. It’s much lower cost To build this, and then what we’ve tried to do is build templates and components on top of that to make it even easier. So if you’re trying to monitor equipment, we build a template for you to monitor equipment and that now you can get up and running in half the time that you were thinking before, and really get to market as fast as possible. So, and many, many times, it’s their team working directly with the platform.

 

JC: So why did you start the company? I mean, I find that most companies are born out of frustration. Right? So what’s their story here? You know, paint me the picture of why, you know, why do you say wake up one day? And you’re a Co-Founder so obviously, you had a partner? You guys? “Yeah, we gotta do something about this”. What was that?

 

Charlie: Yeah. So I mean, it’s, there’s, there’s a lot of components that go together to make this happen. But you know, a little bit of background, I grew up in Cincinnati here, and I grew up in a manufacturing family. My family has worked in manufacturing for now 35 plus years, you know, they’ve been always in that world, in this heavy industrial manufacturing world. And so fast forward, myself, and the other partner, Brandon, our Chief Product officer here, one of our co founders, him and I had started a company before this, we ended up selling that to progress software, and spent a little bit of time there, while we were at progress, we were seeing IoT pop up more and more, not only in our own world, but with the customers that progress had and understanding and having those conversations. And the conversations were also happening at home, you know, I was having these conversations with my dad about what they were trying to do at their tool and how they were trying to build new parts and integrate their data across machines, and use all of these different ways to automate processes. And, you know, all of those things kind of came together and we looked at and said, Okay, let’s take some time. So we left, the previous company, said, let’s figure out what this looks like. So what do we do? We do what any entrepreneur would do, we start talking to as many people as possible, you know, we go in our backyard, start talking to everybody and anybody about what they’re doing in IoT. And some people, obviously, it’s more than others. People like PNG, who’s right down the street, they’re doing a lot more, you know, some of the small manufacturing folks are doing a lot last, but trying to learn what they were doing and how they were approaching it.

 

Charlie: And what really got us interested and excited about the problem was, you know, we’re software guys by nature, we’ve always been in software, we’ve always been building software platforms and software tools. And so we were super interested in this intersection of this hardware software world, just super interested, and add in a lot of what’s happened from my family in the manufacturing world and seeing where that’s got to go. got very interested. And so, you know, we looked at a lot of what was in the market, very hard to use very costly, takes a lot of time takes a bunch of engineers to kind of get something off the ground. And so we looked at that and said, How do we make it so a company that doesn’t have a two dozen software engineers can actually build something useful and put it in the market? What does that look have to look like? What does the software platform have to look like for you to be able to put something into market without paying a ton of money to a bunch of software people to write you something very custom that is likely going to break in two years, and you’re not going to know how to fix. And so that was really where we got started, and has been our thing. And our mission really all along is how do we continue to make it easy for these companies to do this without having to have, you know, Google’s level of software engineers sitting around to go do something? 

 

JC: Got it. Well, I’m a marketing guy by trade. Yeah, always ask the marketing question. How are you telling companies about that you even exist right now, what kind of verticals and your marketing are you using? What’s worked? What hasn’t? Things like that?

 

Charlie: Yeah, I mean, it’s been a crazy world over the last 16 months, as, as any marketer, I think, could tell you, like, you know, and so that’s always an interesting transition of what we’ve been doing, what we’re currently doing, and what we think is the future and building awareness. And from a marketing perspective, you know, what we spent a lot of time on the road before the pandemic, we spent a lot of time with customers a lot of times at conferences and trade shows, and getting our name out there and as many different ways as possible, because again, going back to that buying profile, and that buying center that we’re selling into, a lot of those people are looking for a relationship and a partner that they can, they can build with over a long period of time. And so, time and time again, it tends to end up and you’re going to have to have some face to face time, you’re going to have to be in the same room to build that and to understand each other in order to go accomplish that. And so that was something that was happening a lot, obviously happened not at all. And we’ll see what the next six to 12 months look like and you know in person events and conferences and stuff. So that’s always been one that we believe is a great way for us to build relationships, not only with new potential leads and opportunities, but also build relationships with our current customers and people in that pipeline. So that’s been one.

 

Charlie: The other couple for us is this goes back to another long story. But we’re big content people, we like to believe that content is not only a way to educate our customers, potential customers, but is a great way to build a significant inbound funnel for our business. You know, back in the day, we used to run our own blog and software, and so has always been very bullish on the idea of building a level of inbound pipeline based off of content and knowledge that we can deliver through that content. And so not only do you hopefully bring yourself off as a thought leader in the space, but we use it also as a way to build SEO for our website and for our inbound channels in that remark. So we try to do that as much as we can, that’s continually been an important part of our channel in our in our funnel coming in, you know, I’d say, to a lesser extent we don’t do what I might drop into some digital demand Gen type of, you know, advertising and couple areas there. We don’t do a ton today. And that’s a combination of reasons not saying that I don’t think it works and couldn’t work for us. But we just don’t do a whole lot there. The last one I’m saying is we work with a lot of partners, you know, the important thing to understand and building a true IoT product and solution is there are partners that have to be involved every step of the way, whether that’s all the way at the hardware to the connectivity. So how are you going to get data from one place to another? Is it going to be cellular? Is it going to be a sig box, it doesn’t matter that you’re gonna have a partner there. And then on the application and delivery side. So you know, we built a great partner with network that we believe is a great way to build inbound referrals. And so you know, there’s a lot of different ways we believe that that our partners are a great channel for us to continue to not only build, but utilize.

 

JC: Yeah, partners are really, really big, especially if you’re paying that enterprise level. And so if you’re a startup or if you’re kind of in that space where you don’t have a marketing budget, you know, having that personal relationships a really big one good partner can bring you a lot a lot of business.

 

Charlie: Absolutely, absolutely.

 

JC: Especially if you do really well and that they feel good and their name looks good by referring right? So, Alright, so Future of BizTech, we’re gonna talk about the future. Let’s talk about you first. Okay, let’s talk about your company. My audience likes getting the inside scoop on things. So what is like what’s like the next cool thing in the roadmap coming from your platform that people can look forward to?

 

Charlie: Yeah, so there’s, there’s really two areas that I think are very interesting and one much closer, and then one a little bit further out. One, we believe that the edge and again, a very nebulous world word, and in the world of tech, but for edge in our world is two levels. So one, let’s call it at the device itself. So at the sensor level, at the piece of equipment itself, and then then, and then you have basically one level up, we kind of call it the gateway level. So you’re going to aggregate data across multiple devices and stuff, we currently have a product offering at the gateway level. So we offer software to gather data from gateways and process data, what we’re working on, and what is going to be coming very soon, is the ability to run our workflow engine at the device level. And we are calling that our embedded edge. And that’s going to be much lower profile from a compute standpoint, from a power standpoint, to all the way to the ability of being able to use it on microcontrollers. And that gives our users our customers and potential customers the ability to do a lot more interesting processing and data gathering at that edge for a very, very low price point on the device and the hardware. And it enables a lot more computational power there. And so that’s big for us. And really, when you think about it, a lot of things have to happen as the future of IoT. And one of those is price from hardware has to continue to come down price of connectivity has to come down. And the ability to use that connectivity in hardware has to increase, right? And so we think what we’re doing at the embedded edge is going to be big for enabling companies to more cost effectively. Use data from their machines use data from their sensors in a very robust way.

 

JC: Okay, so you know, that’s a great segue into my next question, which is, where is the industry of IoT going in the next 5-10 years? And, and specifically, I have a question about, you know, how it works with consumers, like, for example, with cars, right, we see Tesla’s on the road, Ford is going to come out with an electric truck, which I think is gonna get a lot of people on board with electric that probably wouldn’t been on board before, you know. So I envision this future where cars are talking to each other, rather than having to use cameras to prevent accidents, they just know the car is going to be there. So things like that, how does that fall into IoT? Where do you see things going in that next 5 to 10 years? Just from a consumer level? Like, what are we going to see in the big scope of things?

 

Charlie: Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question is you look at the world of Internet of Things, and especially in the consumer space, you know, automobiles is a great topic. We already have, “smart cars”, autonomous cars, you know, whether they’re truly autonomous or not, you know, they’re driving themselves for the most part. But over the next 10 years, we’re going to see is cars talking to cars, they’re going to communicate with each other, they’re going to help tell each other where they’re at, you know, we’re still going to have the dilemma of Who do you choose to injure in a wreck the person on the sidewalk or the person in the car, you’re still gonna have those dilemmas from an artificial intelligence and machine learning standpoint, but cars are going to be communicating with each other. I would even predict that at some point in the future here, we’re going to see a mandate that all cars have to be either built or retrofitted to be able to talk to each other, at least to some extent. Now that is going to make some people unhappy.

 

JC: Good luck! Wait, wait, wait for the signs of the capital that say, my vehicular rights? Yeah. Well, you know, the old shops, the old Mustangs, you know, he’s gonna want to touch those, but no, you’re right, it’s gonna be a fight, it’s gonna be, but just like anything else, like recently is, you know, it’ll save lives, you know, whether people fight it or not. So I can see how that would that would help.

 

Charlie: Yeah, and what we’re going to, and even, maybe even bigger than that is we’re going to see our infrastructure transformed to a smart infrastructure, our roads, our sidewalks, our buildings are all going to become smarter, more intelligent, and understanding what’s happening in the surroundings, being able to use what’s happening, now we’re gonna be able to use our kinetic energy from walking down the sidewalk, to power the streetlights know the streets themselves, you’re going to know where cars are. And if something happened, wreck, backup all of this, and immediately know that based on just what’s happening on the road themselves, and so we’re going to see that over, maybe not the five year closer, the 10 year, and probably the 15 year, it’s the government. So you know, none of that happens quickly, right? But you can imagine, even in the current infrastructure bill that is trying to get through the government, some of that money is set aside for electric charging. It’s for electric cars, you’re gonna see massive infrastructure rebuilt, and repaired. And so we’re gonna see a lot of that kind of action to continue to happen. Now, the pandemic, if anything, has helped accelerate our understanding that we need to be more knowledgeable of what’s happening around us from our equipment from our spaces, and not have to be standing there to record it on a clipboard, just because of all of the challenges that we’ve seen. And so this is only going to accelerate over the next several years.

 

JC: I think that’s the I think it’s cool. I like progression. I like innovation and sounds like it’s going there. So last question for you. What book Have you read, that you think is an absolute must read for the audience? Whether it just be a fun book, or something relating to the future of Internet of Things and things like that? Like, just if you had to give one book recommendation? What would it be?

 

Charlie: Man, the one always pops in my head when I think about mostly entrepreneurship and startups and business in general, is Zero to One. You know, I’m sure it’s been said and..

 

JC: Good one!

 

Charlie: But what is the one thing that you know to be true that the common world believes to be untrue? I mean, that is what makes each one of us different. And you know, when you go to a business, whether it’s from marketing and sales, if you can figure those things out, it changes your course of direction tomorrow.

 

JC: That’s awesome. Well, listen, how can people reach you How can they find your company, and if they want to get a hold of you for anything?

 

Charlie: Absolutely hit me up on LinkedIn. You can find me at Charlie Key, I’m the bald looking guy that is the, you know, CEO of Losant. Find me on LinkedIn, hit us up on our website at Losant.com, you know, we are truly responding to people and anybody that reaches out and happy to happy to talk to just about anything. You don’t have to be coming to look for an IoT solution. Let’s just talk about entrepreneurship and startups and trying to make more business.

 

JC: Well that’s awesome and real quick before we go, you told me something that pre interview that I want to have like a 10 second on..

 

Charlie: Yeah

 

JC: Name of the company, how’d you come up with the name of the company? And what’s the little fun fact that you have to share with everyone?

 

Charlie: Absolutely. So Losant is our homage to our city of Cincinnati. So we started the company here. The fun fact is before the city was Cincinnati for roughly three years it was called Losantiville and that is, we obviously chopped it down and got the .com and you know, that’s all she wrote. But Losantiville is another fun little conglomeration of letters and words the L is for the licking the O is for the Ohio those the two rivers that come together here in Cincinnati. Sant is the Latin word for together. So it’s the licking in the Ohio together and Ville being village of so there you go.

 

JC: That’s so cool, I like that fun fact, that’s awesome. And listen for everyone listening out there. Again, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening to it. Give it five star rating, throw some comments in there on it, so other techies like us can find it and enjoy learning about all the amazing and helpful b2b software’s on the market today, including Losant, Charlie key, thank you so much for being on the show. And I look forward to checking out and seeing where the industry is going.

 

Charlie: Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

 

JC: Have a good one.