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Jake Thomas is an expert at writing YouTube video titles. He has parlayed his experience writing more than 4,000 titles into his company, Creator Hooks.
Prior to founding Creator Hooks, Jake helped build a channel from 70 to 200k subscribers After leaving to start his firm, he landed clients that include Hubspot cofounder Dharmesh Shah's personal channel and The Infographics Show. In this episode, Jake and Aaron discuss his framework for writing a title, how to create more curiosity, and the power of owning a niche. Jake Thomas’ Challenge; Develop your Model 100. Create a spreadsheet of the hundred channels with a similar style to yours. Connect with Jake Thomas
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Adam Haritan is the founder of Learn Your Land, as well as a wild food enthusiast, researcher, and forager. He is launching a new course, Trees in All Seasons.
He learned the value of wild food foraging while studying nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh, where he discovered just how beneficial wild foods could be in optimizing human health. Wild plants, on average, are more nutritious than their cultivated counterparts (i.e. wild blueberries vs. domesticated blueberries, wild lettuce vs. iceberg lettuce). The wild food diet is the diet that we, as Homo sapiens, have been consuming for the majority of our time on this planet, and it is the diet that we are most adapted to consume. Today, very few Americans consume any wild foods, and instead subsist on nutrient-deficient products that scarcely resemble anything real or natural. It’s no wonder that degenerative diseases like cancer, diabetes, and chronic inflammation are so prevalent. We have abandoned our natural diet and are suffering as a result. In this episode, Adam and Aaron discuss trees, his new course, and commitment to quality. Adam Haritan’s Challenge; Find a tree growing close to your home and identify it. Connect with Adam Haritan
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Youtube Website If you liked this interview, check out when Adam visited Piper Creative to talk about business strategy.
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Matt Blocki is the founder and CEO of Equilibrium Wealth Advisors. Matt is also a co-founder of Wealth Advisor Training, which was founded in 2022 to help provide resources to the top wealth advisors around the country. Wealth Advisor Training gives advisors a comprehensive education platform to give better proactive advice and develop systems to scale their business.
Matt regularly speaks in the financial planning industry, including to top firms Thrivent and Mass Mutual. In this interview, Matt and Aaron discuss Matt’s career trajectory, how to attract great clients, and their plans for WealthAdvisorTraining.com. Matt Blocki’s Challenge; Rate all facets of your life and do the requisite work to improve the lowest rated pieces. Connect with Matt Blocki
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WAT Website If you liked this interview, check out our conversation with Brent Johnson where we discuss Dollar Milkshake Theory and his early career at Credit Suisse.
Mark Nelson is the managing director of the Radiant Energy Fund, which advises governments, nonprofits, and industry about nuclear energy.
Mark works tirelessly to prevent early closures of nuclear plants around the world and has attended the UN climate conference in Glasgow as a delegate from the American Nuclear Society. His efforts span the globe, working to save nuclear plants from Germany to California. Mark holds an MPhil in Nuclear Engineering from Cambridge University and degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Russian Language and Literature from Oklahoma State University. In this episode, Mark and Aaron discuss the differences between France & Germany, the complexity of the US electric grid, and reasons for hope. Mark Nelson’s Challenge; Find out where you get your power from, what nuclear plants are nearby, and communicate to politicians that you don’t want them shut down. Connect with Mark Nelson
Eric Jorgenson is the author of the Almanac of Naval Ravikant, a GP in the seed investment-focused Rolling Fun, and the creator of the course Building a Mountain of Levers.
Eric also has a podcast called Jorgenson’s Soundbox and was part of the founding team of Zaarly, proximity-based, real-time, buyer-powered market platform. Eric has condensed the wisdom of Naval, a prolific entrepreneur and investor, into a concise and poignant book. That book has opened doors for him and represents a clever method of accelerating one’s career. In this conversation, Eric and Aaron discuss Naval’s advice for creating wealth, how to build the skill of being happy, and how to get started creating leverage for yourself. Eric Jorgenson’s Challenge; Find and implement one new automation to create more leverage in your life. Connect with Eric Jorgenson
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Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 46 with Taylor Pearson where we discuss writing the End of Jobs and creating better career opportunities.
Christopher Nguyen is the CEO and cofounder of Aitomatic, where he aims to redefine how companies approach AI in the context of life-critical, industrial applications.
As a multiple-time tech founder, Christopher has played key roles across a wide range of technology startups. He has also operated in large corporations where he has built the first flash memory transistors at Intel and spearheaded the development of Google Apps as its first Engineering Director. Today, he’s become an outspoken proponent of the emerging field of “AI Engineering” and a thought leader in the space of ethical, human-centric AI. In this episode, Christopher and Aaron discuss AI’s shortcomings, the mission of Aitomatic, and how diverse experiences keep life engaging. Christopher Nguyen’s Challenge; Separate the what and the why when problem solving. Connect with Christopher Nguyen
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Aitomatic Website If you liked this interview, check out our interview with Tom Galluzzo where we discuss GPT-3, robotics, and entrepreneurship. 
Brandon Grbach is the CEO and cofounder of Steel City. Steel City is a family-owned boutique offering Pittsburgh-inspired, vintage tees, sweatshirts & accessories.
Grbach started designing t-shirts for his friend’s skate shop, but when the shop shut down, he continued on his own. Now, he and his wife own a thriving business with over 20 employees, a distinct brand, and a habit of growing ~50% every year. In this interview, Brandon and Aaron discuss how he has learned to drive towards simplicity for customers, opening a second location, and how the brand got big in Japan. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Brandon Grbach’s Challenge; Ask, “what's one decision you're putting off?” Then, stop putting it off Connect with Brandon Grbach
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Website If you liked this interview, check out our interview with TJ Fairchild where we discuss how to scale a coffee shop, designing soulful spaces, and how a philosophy degree prepares you for business. Book Recommendation Raving Fans : Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service by Ken Blanchard
Rob Walling is an investor, writer, podcaster, and serial entrepreneur. His last startup, Drip, was an email marketing software company that was bought by Leadpages for millions in 2016.
He also has been helping bootstrapped startup founders since 2005 and now runs the first startup accelerator for SaaS bootstrappers, TinySeed. Rob also hosts the podcast “Startups for the Rest of Us”, which has over 10 million downloads Rob and Aaron discuss how to level up in entrepreneurship, the personal growth required to take bigger swings, and the balancing act of parenthood & entrepreneurship in this interview. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Rob Walling’s Challenge; Consume your audiobooks and podcasts at over 1x speed. Add the video speed controller to your browser. Connect with Rob Walling
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Personal Website TinySeed MicroConf If you liked this interview, check out our interview with Andrew Gazdecki about MicroAcquire, building Saas companies, and the fun of business.
Sam Parr founded The Hustle, which he eventually sold to Hubspot for tens of millions of dollars.
The Hustle was born from a conference he started, called Hustle Con, that showcased non-technical startup founders and their strategies for success. The Hustle ended up garnering an audience of millions of subscribers and was able to operate profitably as a new media startup that was not overburdened by outside capital In this interview, Sam and Aaron discuss the early stages of Sam’s career, his tips for selling, and finding meaning after selling your company. Sam Parr’s Challenge; Monday night, make a list of 50 people who you wish you could get in a room with and develop a strategy for reaching out to them consistently. Connect with Sam Parr
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The Hustle If you liked this interview, check out this video we made about the Morning Brew.
Doomberg is the anonymous publishing arm of a bespoke consulting firm. Their firm provides advisory services to family offices and c-suite executives
The firm’s principals apply decades of experience across heavy industry, private equity, and finance to deliver innovative thinking and clarity to complex problems. They maintain their anonymity to ensure the privacy of their clients, the sovereignty of their personal lives, and the In this episode, Doomberg and Aaron discuss the idea that energy is life, forthcoming instability in major nations, and the optimism required to make a difference. They also cover the principles of prepping your home for calamity. Doomberg’s Challenges;
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Substack If you liked this interview, check out our interview with Tucker Max where we discuss Doomer Optimism and our interview with Mike Green where we discuss Bitcoin.
Richard Aulenbach founded RPA Engineering in 1989. He has run the firm for over 30 years and expanded to a team of over 70 people.
RPA Engineering serves a wide variety of markets including pharmaceuticals, power, and government. Richard has had extensive experience in landing large deals, recruiting technical talent, and surviving bad business partners. In this interview, Richard and Aaron discuss lessons from 30 years in business, how to win bigger deals, and the challenges that come from growing team size. Richard Aulenbach's Challenge: Move forward with humility and integrity. Connect with Richard Aulenbach
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RPA Engineering If you liked this interview, check out our interview with Steve Muck where we discuss acquiring a construction company, negotiating with labor, and differentiating your construction company.
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Jennifer Smith is the cofounder and CEO of Scribe, a modern software solution for documenting and teaching company processes.
After graduating from Harvard Business School, Jennifer joined McKinsey where she helped the largest companies on the planet implement better processes. With an appetite for efficiency, she searched far and wide for a solution that reduced the friction between finding a better process and sharing it across an organization. When she realized that the market was not producing a sufficient product, she decided to take matters into her own hands and found Scribe. In this interview, Jennifer and Aaron discuss how her obsession led to a great product, the perspective of a former venture capitalist as a founder, and the challenges of being a parent & executive. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Jennifer’s Challenge: Drop the things you don't want to do from your calendar. Connect with Jennifer Smith
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Scribe If you liked this interview, check out episode 492 with Joe Percoco where we discuss the step-by-step process of building a fintech startup.
Abhi Godara is the founder of Rytr, a content marketing startup that helps marketers to generate more leads and sales with their content. He has been working in the digital marketing industry since 2006 as a writer, content strategist and SEO professional.
Previously, he worked as an operator VC at TLabs, India's biggest early-stage startup accelerator, where he recruited and assessed 1000+ transactions and oversaw portfolio investments. Because of his knowledge when it comes to sourcing, he worked with over 40 businesses and 150+ founders on product, design, growth, business development, funding, and strategy. He is also an avid blogger and writes for Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, LinkedIn Influencers and Forbes India. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Abhi Godara’s Challenge; Come up with a business idea and launch a website where you write content about it. Connect with Abhi Godara
Eric Satz is the founder and CEO of Alto, a platform for investors to use their retirement accounts for investing in alternative assets, such as private companies, real estate, cryptocurrency, equity crowdfunding, and marketplace loans.
The firm enables investors to better diversify their IRA and 401(K) accounts into higher-return, long-term alternative investment opportunities. For a long time, IRAs have been dominated by Fidelity, Charles Schwab, eTrade, and Vanguard. However, digitization and the fintech revolution have opened the door for a wave of new upstarts. In this episode, Eric and Aaron discuss why alternative investments are on the rise, how his company raised a $40m Series B, and the field of competitors. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Eric Satz’s Challenge; Do some homework and diligence on your first alternative asset. Connect with Eric Satz
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AltoIra.com Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 492 with Joe Percoco where we discuss the fundamental pieces of a fintech startup and the future of retirement investing. Underwritten by Piper Creative Piper Creative makes creating podcasts, vlogs, and videos easy. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify
Watson: Alrighty, Eric, thanks for coming on the podcast, man. I'm excited to be taught.
Satz: Aaron. Thanks for having me, buddy. I, I, I've been looking forward to this. I'm ready. You know, hopefully I'm ready to go Watson: here. Oh, I'm sure you are. I think that the most helpful place to start folks, I want to really, you know, get a precipitous stair climb up into the nuances of what you're doing with Alto, but to start things off if people aren't super into investing, they may have heard of something like a 60, 40. Traditional equity bond portfolio. That's kind of been the tried and true, safe, right down the middle fat pitch of portfolio theory for decades and for a number of reasons that is less appealing to people. So. In the context of that, being a very kind of conventional style of setting some money aside for retirement or whatever your financial goals may be, what is also doing to kind of serve as a different pole, so to speak of, of funds and, and kind of ways to think about your. Satz: Well, if I knew we were going to play softball, I would have brought a bigger bat. I appreciate that opening question. So let me start with what all the does, and, and also it makes it easy for individual investors to access their retirement savings for purposes of investing in alternative assets. Now we define alternative assets as private equity venture capital real estate. Private credit product, securitize artwork, or collectibles like automobiles or watches or babe Ruth baseball cards or Michael Jordan sneakers. And, and crypto as. So so said another way, maybe a little bit going around the barn backwards here is that these are assets that are not publicly traded. They're not registered securities. And for the most part, places like fidelity and Schwab, which is where an individual in the past may have engaged in the. Conventional wisdom of a 60, 40 portfolio, those places aren't going to allow you to invest in these types of assets. And so we serve two functions in this process we serve, but that. The connective tissue and the platform by which you access and transact with other investment platforms or even your own investment opportunities in order to execute these transactions with your retirement accounts. And we serve as the custodian, which is a regulated entity and, and required by the IRS for people who want to invest with their retirement safe. And so I think the thing about 60 40 is that it's old conventional wisdom, and I think it served its purpose, but I think you have to go back to a, to a time a couple of decades ago. When the number of public companies was growing rapidly, where we would end up with almost 9,000 public companies today, we've got less than 4,000 public companies and of the 4,000 that exists today, only 400 matter in terms of returns. So if you combine that dynamic with the explosive growth in the mutual fund industry and the ETF. Right where everyone said, you know what? You can't beat the market. Don't try to pick stocks. You can't be an active investor. You should be passive about this. Just buy mutual funds. Everybody did. Everybody did that in their 401k. Everybody did that in their IRA. Everyone who employs a financial advisor, all the financial advisors. Be passive by this mutual fund because, well, that's really easy for them anyway. So in, in today's world where people have this, you know, portfolio of mutual funds, they actually don't have any portfolio diversification. And that's because every mutual fund or ETF is comprised of some subsegment of the same 400 company. So it's impossible to outperform the market. It's impossible to get any excess returns. And so what we do is we say, you know what? You need portfolio diversification. You can't find it in the public markets. Let us make these other asset classes available to you. We're not telling you what to invest in. We're saying. Take advantage of this single greatest tool at your disposal, which is diversification in order to reduce your portfolio volatility and increase the potential for returns. Right? And so I think in an ideal world, you might have 10% of your assets in 10 different asset categories. I think that's sort of out of reach for most, most people and. And it's out of reach today because of who has that kind of time. So really get to know 10 different ESSA categories. But how about five asset categories? How about putting 20% of your investible assets in, in five different categories? And by the way, we're not anti. We're just saying it shouldn't be 60, 40 public. And so maybe of 20% in equities, maybe a 20% in bonds. I'm, you know, I'm just picking up, but then maybe have 20% in private companies of various stages, 20% in credit product and maybe a 20%. Right. And so what we do is enable that true construction of portfolio diversification. And, and, and that's what we're about. We're not about saying invest in this one thing, and we're certainly not about saying invest all of it in this one thing. Watson: And it's part of the nature of the digital age that people have more access, more option to things across the board, outside of finance media you know, the ability to in a globalized world world buy something that was produced on the other side of the planet and have a travel all the way around to you with a, you know, two day expected delivery or whatever the thing may be. But very specifically. When you think you're talking about diversification and part of the goal of you know, diversifying where your investments are, is trying to get something beyond market returns. If everyone owns an S and P 500 index, then you're going to get exactly what everyone else is getting, but the other, but the other side of it is also a full. Of risk management. And you mentioned crypto, some of the other options are investing in private companies and artwork, but the farmland piece in terms of a potential alternative asset to be in was a really interesting one because I remember listening to an interview with an institutional investor and they were basically explaining, you know, I don't know if it was the Harvard endowment or Yale or whatever, but like, you know, the average person can't go by. Multiple hundred acres of forest lands that will be logged and we'll have a nice return over 25 year period, but there's no real sense of liquidity in the market for hundreds of acres of forest lands. But I, as the head of this endowment, whatever can totally conceivable. That's really the difference here is partially there's a, there's a, a legibility and a Lego blue building block nature to some of these investible assets that just weren't an option in the paper and pencil. You know, when TD Ameritrade was getting built, it was paper and pencil and they were calling stuff in as opposed to being able to digitize everything. Satz: Yeah. So you're referring to the fractionalization of ownership. When I, when I'm feeling particularly. Particularly poetic. I call it the fractionalization of securitization. My mom taught me how to rhyme when I was little kid. So you know, it's, it's this ability, eh, actually let's, let's stick with farmland, right? Like, you know, do you have $500,000 or a million dollars or $5 million to go buy all this farm land? Ignore the due diligence side of that of a first, second he's like, dude, do you have the wampum to do it? Most of us, no, don't right. But farmland as an asset class and certainly as portfolio diversification and something to use to reduce volatility. So I'm not totally dependent upon how my equities do or how my crypto does is a huge asset to have in the portfolio. Specifically, we work with partners like acre trader and farm together who enable you to participate in their in their investment opportunities for, I, you know, probably as low as $2,500. Right. And you get to review the diligence material that professionals have put together. And they can help educate you. You of course need to do the homework and, and everyone should go educate themselves with respect to how they invest in and where they invest. But that they no pun intended. They literally break it down into bite size pieces, you know, so you can invest in farm land, whereas, you know, five years ago that couldn't happen. And you can take that same fractionalization of ownership thesis, and you can apply it across all these asset classes. Right? So in, in venture capital or private equity, it may be with Angeles or Republic, or we fonder in private credit it's, you know, with companies like cadence and real estate someone like diversify. In artwork, it's masterworks it, you know, so the lady in collectibles you'll see at least knock on wood, I'm hoping, you'll see pretty soon getting added to our, to our partner portfolio, rally and Otis. And, and that would be great. Right? So, This ability to build a portfolio and to build diversification within each asset class, no matter how much you have at your disposal, really. Right. And that's, that to me is exciting about where we're headed in this business. It's also exciting with respect to what I think is going to be key. You mentioned liquid. Right. I think, and this is not happening tomorrow. It's a, it's a slightly longer window or a timeframe if you will. But the, the digit the, the digitization of securitization and specifically the blockchain uses that, that are now sort of on the doorstep of our disposal and how that will enable. To trade and get liquid embarrassing is pretty exciting to think about. Watson: So. One of the other kind of big pieces of news and probably reasons that you're excited is that a $40 million series B was just announced for Alto. And another thing that we've covered in many past episodes is the kind of, if you think about different stages, seed series, a series B onwards and upwards. Each of those come with these different actual risks that need to be removed. Yes. You went positive, you know, stratosphere at hockey stick numbers, but in maybe the earliest stages, what you're trying to prove is this technically feasible. Is there any sort of interest in something like this, does the team make any sense? And then a series that you're looking for some form of evidence that, you know, we figured out how to grow this thing. And a lot of those risks risks are there. $40 million round, at least in my mind looks very much like a growth round. It's like, Hey, we have a formula now of getting more types of assets being available on the platform and getting people to use our platform. Can you talk about specific to a series B what risks you had to prove were off the table or, or demonstrate we're likely off the table to your investors and how did you do that? Satz: Yeah. Regardless of what name you give a particular round of financing, you know, you typically start at the beginning of of any company with kind of team risk product market fit, and then execution. Right. And, and I think as you go through the various fundraising stages, you've got to eliminate. Parts of each of those risks. And as you eliminate the sort of big question marks and, and there's not any one thing within team, there's not any one thing within product market fit. And there's certainly not any one thing within execution. You know, each one has variables living underneath. And so. You have to begin to eliminate a bunch of those variables and that, and at the beginning, at the very beginning, I honestly it's about storytelling, right? It's here's how big the market opportunity is. We can attract the people to help build us the company that's going to take advantage of that, that market opportunity. And by the way, here's why people want that solution to this. As you go to to series a, as you're building a series, a your, your, you know, the product is out in the wild. You're no longer selling the story. You're hopefully demonstrating that you have product market fit, that, that people want this thing that you are selling. And, and that kind of gets you to the series. A and we did the series a. For us anyway back in March, April of, well, of last year of, of, of 2020. And the idea was that we could show that with the product market fit that we had demonstrated and with the team we had built up until that point that we could begin to accelerate. And, Watson: Let me pause you real quick. You said last year you said March, April, 2020. Did you mean. Satz: I meant 20, 21. Yes. Okay. Watson: You say, if you raised in the middle of like the world seemingly coming down, that would have been one of the most, like we would stop everything else and just be like, tell me about that story, but 20, 21, got it. Satz: Yeah. 20, 21. But what I will tell you is I raised immediately before the world coming down and, and this is like that. And I'm going to come back to the soreness. Second. I think. I'm older than a lot of entrepreneurs. I think I'm, you know, I'm 52 years old. I, I have seen more cycles than a lot of, you know, on entrepreneurs and sort of at the end of 2019 going, going into 20 You know, I had this uneasy feeling about things. I certainly wasn't predicting a pandemic by the way. You know, my crystal balls first of all is not made a crystal and certainly not clear like that, but so we ended up raising right before right before the pandemic. And as a result, we were able to continue to accelerate growth. Through 2020. Whereas other people were thinking about, okay, who are we going to cut back? How do we spend less all this stuff? Like we, we were doing more, not less. And you know, so a little bit more than a year later in March at 21, when, when we raised the series a we demonstrated that not only have we built something that people wanted. They were paying us for it. Right. And so basically from the year 2021 had 15 X revenue growth, which you could S you could say you're still starting from the, from the law of small numbers. But I don't care. 15 X, 15 X, 15 X is, is a big, it wasn't that small that we were starting with fit, you know, fit 15 X is, it is a big number. And so that was the train that we were on. And that's what led to our series B because, because it was saying, look we feel like we've established ourselves as the leaders in the category. This is what our vision roadmap for the future looks like with more money, we can, you know, not just step on the gas put, but put the pedal to the floor and, and we think we can go another, you know, call it five to seven X from 21 to 22. And that's, that's what we're trying to do now. And that, that's why we raised the $40 million. Watson: And so. So, what I was struggling with going into this interview was understanding the proper categorization. Cause if you've looked at, if you've watched startup deck, like people do their pitches, one of the slides of every single deck is here's like the five competitors and we have this box and like all these different things, like, look our box, we have everything. Check mark. And then all of our competitors are missing at least one check mark in some way, shape or form. And we've referenced, we've referenced, you know, TD Ameritrade, fidelity Schwab, some of these kind of conventions. Enormous platforms, billions and billions and billions and AUM that are helping people to kind of wrap up their equity and bond, investing into these IRA type of rappers. Is that who you point to as the competition for a platform like this, there, you kind of foresee that they eventually have to move in this direction and you have that first mover, nimble start-up type of advantage, or do you conceive of the chess board in a different. I Satz: think, I, I think about it somewhat differently. First of all I think we all owe a lot to fidelity Schwab, TD. E-Trade all those folks. I mean, they, they moved I I'm going to say they, they took the investment landscape and they shifted it. Up into the right, so significantly over the last couple of decades to everyone's benefit. And, and those are, those are incredible combination. I think we're doing something very different from what they do. I, I, I consider them to be. One, one of two things either potential partners because they, they decide that w what we built is a value, and they want to partner with us in order to enable access to their client base, or eventually potential competitive. But I don't think that's happening tomorrow. And if, if you asked me what my goal is with, with Alto, it's to displace fidelity as the leading retirement investment platform. And, and, and if you don't have goals like that now all companies are different, but we're a company that's raising venture capital. We have institutional investors. So, you know, I think it's only appropriate that we have goals to do display Sutton, display someone like fidelity. Th the, the other thing that I want to point out, and I think this is a somewhat relevant an important comparison. Actually it has to do with Charles Schwab the man, not the business, but the business followed, which is if you roll back a few decades, The brokerage industry commercials were dominated by F Hutton. And, and you may not even be old enough to it, to, I've seen an EF Hutton commercial. Yeah. Right. So it was sheriffs and Lehman Hutton. Is what bef I mean, there's so many mix ups in the, in the brokerage industry and investment banking industry, but the F Hutton commercial, when something like when, when, if Hutton talks people listen, and, and there was this commercial where EFA. To the extent he was a guy would start speaking and everybody else around would sorta turn and cut their ear and, and try to listen to this stage, you know, investment advice. But really the, the scene in which this took place was a country club or a yacht club or a golf course, or pick some setting where you had, you know, You know, wealthy white guys. Right. And, and it was like this commercial was really only speaking to that demographic and, and a broker wasn't going to talk to you unless you had a certain amount of money. And I think one of the, the, the Justin incredibly genuine and brilliant things that Charles Schwab did was to say, you know, what. We're not giving the average investor, the average American enough credit here. Everybody can and should do this. And by the way, the discount brokerage that Schwab introduce, like in the early seventies, it was like 49 99 a trade. Can you imagine? For Robin hood zero Schwab 49 99. Like that was, that was discount brokerage trading. But what they did was they said, Hey, we're going to put a store on every corner of Maine. We're going to invite people in, we're going to help them. We're going to educate, we're going to tell them why they need to do this. And he was just way ahead of his time there, I think. And it was just absolutely brilliant. And so to, to, to a certain degree, what I like to think that we're doing. Is what Charles Schwab did without the, you know, stores on the corner of main and main, which is like, you know what? Everyone deserves the ability to, to potentially achieve some outsized returns. It's not without risk, but we want to help you understand those risks. We want to help you do your homework. We help you diligence opportunities. And then of course we want to make it so that you can execute an affordable way. So just trying to follow that model, hopefully we'll have a quarter of the success he did. Watson: Yeah. I mean, that would still be an absolutely epic company because it, those companies are, if you're in finance, you have an appreciation for the scale and the, the, the amount of just kind of market moving impact that they have. But if you're not there. You know, I don't wanna say hidden in the background cause they're probably every other, like a NFL Sunday running some sort of commercial in some way, shape or form, but it's easy to miss the, the scale there. So I'm going to talk really quickly about just another important nuance, not speaking over people's heads because there's there's finance people. They're gonna be just nodding along and then there's gonna be folks that might miss the nuance here is because that these are IRAs. There are potentially tax advantage. Statuses associated with making these investments so that it's already possible to, you know, because of reg CF and some of these crowdfunding platforms that you referenced masterworks, you can go direct to all of these platforms and do that type of investing. I just got an email the other day that was like solicited via angel list to be a part of the seed round of a startups round of fundraising. The important element here that takes. Doing it through also to another level is the potentially tax advantage status that comes with being in the IRA rapper. So I thought maybe you could use the story that got all sorts of people in a tizzy about Peter teal and his investment in Facebook. As an advantage as an example of that, or if you wanna use a different one. I totally understand. Satz: No. So I wouldn't do, I want to build on what you just said first then that, and then I'll talk about Peter too. So you know what, whether it's in your fidelity IRA or in your auto IRA you don't pay taxes on capital gains. You're you only. So, you know, to extent you have gains, you get to re-invest them without pay, without paying taxes and you get the benefit of compounding returns. And I'm probably gonna butcher this, but I think on sign referred to compounding at the time it was compounding interest. So I'll call it compounding returns is like the eighth wonder of the world. And you can do some quick math or pull out a Google sheet or Excel or your spreadsheet. And, and you could just see how much bigger your returns are over a lifetime of investing. Call it 20 or 30 years, depending on how old you are. If you're not paying those, you know, let's just call it a 20% tax rate every time you get returns. But instead you get to reinvest that 20% each time that before you know it, that's a big number. The the, the second piece, which is the Peter Tio question, the issue actually didn't live with his investment in Facebook. I don't think anyone in any way questions, the validity. His having invested in, by the way, what's important here is that he invested out of his Roth IRA. So he did an alternative IRA investment, like an also IRA investment out of his Roth IRA. And you know, for those who don't know, when you invest, when you put money in a Roth, you pay the taxes upfront and then all your returns, including when you take your distributions out at retirement are all texts. And so he made he famously made a $500,000 I think it was a $500,000 investment in a very early Facebook. Which turned out to be worth a billion dollars. And well, we call that a good investment. So and, and the thing about also that, that I like to point out is that you don't have to have $500,000 to do what Peter to. You can have $500 or 5,000 or 50,000, you can still achieve the same return through our Roth account. Right. You know, the absolute dollars may be slightly different. But the IRR is the same. The, the piece that I'm not saying is that when you invest out of an IRA, there are certain, although highly limited restrictions. Which has to do with what is called a prohibited transaction. And so for all the entrepreneurs out there, as well as the CEOs who are on boards of companies, you cannot use your own IRA to invest in your own company. And. So all the, all the hubbub around what teal did actually goes back to his investment in PayPal and whether or not that was inappropriate investment. Now, I don't know the details around it, but I suspect whether it, whether it was legal or not knowing in the IRS notice, you know, until some point beyond the statute of limitations is what I suspect. So, yeah. Watson: It makes sense. I just think that you know, the, the very easy thing for all the platforms to sell you on. And, and it's very understandable is pay less in fees, pay less in fees. Everyone has to pay less in fees, but it's really important to also recognize that, you know, if your, your fee is being reduced from say 1% to 0.1% or 0.1% to 0.05%, that versus. Avoiding a 15%, you know, tax or whatever the, the effective capital gains tax would be on that trade. You're talking about completely different levels of you know, potential savings when you use that vehicle. So I just, I think it's important to recognize that because someone's gonna say, well, I've already bought a piece of art on masterworks. I've already bought my, you know, swanky set of shoes or whatever on rally. And I, I, I don't necessarily need this. It's like, that's partially what you're trying to also help people do Satz: know that that's right. The savings are of a far different scale. I think it's also important to note that you can't use your IRA to buy from yourself and assets that you already own. Just, just so people. So, so people don't take you know, I don't want some to have the takeaway like, oh, you know, I bought something on rally. I want to now sell it to my IRA. That's one of those prohibited transactions. Watson: Right. So Eric, this has been fantastic. I, I hit most of the questions that I had today. But before I kind of aim towards wrapping up with the final, last two, was there anything else you were hoping to share about business building, building about Alto in general, that I didn't give you a chance to Satz: look at it it's every, every overnight success is like some long time in the making, right. It, you know I was interviewed about the series B round LA last week. And unfortunately it didn't make it into the article, but for those who, who are listening at, at home, what didn't make it into the article. As I said, you know, all these articles get written about the founders and the CEOs And what while founders and CEOs certainly deserve some level of credit. It is my strong belief that it really has to do with the team you surround yourself with as well as catching catching, a couple of breaks, getting lucky here and there. Oh, what I like to say about luck is that it's where hard work opportunity and awareness intersect. It's like that ability to recognize that something is about to go your way and to, and to take advantage of it. But look, we, we, I raised the first money for Alto in 2016, right. It's 2022. You, you really gotta want to do whatever it is. That thing is that that you're doing is not always up until the right. Watson: Yeah. Take your lumps along the way. It's a par for the course. So Eric has been fantastic. I'm really excited. Like I, one of my favorite things when I do these interviews is when I come across something that I know that I will inevitably. Refer or, you know, advise a friend to check out in the future and unambiguously this falls into that category. Cause I got a lot of friends that, you know, try to try to do angel investing or probably need a more tax advantaged way to Yolo their crypto investments or whatever the thing may be. So for folks that want to learn more about auto checkout, all the things you guys are doing, what digital coordinates can we provide for people? Yeah. So Satz: also ira.com is. The easiest, a L T O ira.com. Right. That's, that's pretty straightforward. We're on Twitter, I think also under auto IRA. Maybe there's a underscore in there somewhere. We're on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn. I go by real names. So I'm just Eric's I know it's boring, but I'm just Eric sets of both. So you know, you can pay attention there. Or you can just look up my sweatshirt if you're watching this on video, my hoodie right on. Watson: I feel like your, your name is right on that barometer where it's distinct enough. Like I've never heard of like another Eric SATs before, but it's simple enough that like, someone's not going to struggle to spell it or look it up. Most likely maybe you've had different experiences, but I feel like you kind of are right in that Goldilocks zone. Yeah. Satz: It's funny. It's funny you say that. So, you know, most people, I think that a fault for most people with Eric is a city. And, and that's what I am, so that works to my advantage. So you'd be, you'd be surprised when I say SATs, like sentence, some of the, you know, w when I'm on the phone with an operator, I'm like S as in Sam, a as in apple, T as in Tom, Z as in zebra, and they're like, oh, sets. I'm like, yeah, that's what I said, but. Sasha runs with cats, but I don't know if I get all, I get all kinds of stuff. It's crazy. Ask my kids. Watson: Yeah, I'm right on the other end where there's a, a famous country singer. Who's also named Aaron Watson. Who's like Matt order of magnitude more famous than I am. So I'm, I'm dealing with that, like, like Joe Smith. I can't even imagine what his world must be like, but anyways we're going to link all those links in the show notes. To this episode, you can find it in the podcast app. You're probably listening to this or@goingdeepwithaaron.com slash podcast for every single episode of the show. But before I let you go, Eric, I would like to give you the mic one final time to issue an actionable personal challenge to the audience. Satz: It's a great question. So it's probably not going to be the, the answer most people might be thinking. I give it, I mean, crypto is so top of mind right now and we have a crypto IRA product. Coinbase is our partner. And I highly recommend that if people are going to make long-term investments in crypto, that they use an Alto crypto IRA to do it. But that's my, that's not my, my one thing, because I think people are kind of already looking to try to figure out how to do that instead of. What I would challenge you to do is to open your standard also IRA account move some money from wherever you have it, whether it's fidelity, Schwab, wherever to, oh, over to Alto and, and do some homework and diligence on your, on your first alternative asset, like non crypto alternative asset. Whether it, whether it's a. A startup company on Republic we fonder or AngelList, or buying an interest in a piece of art on masterworks, or we've got 70 plus different investment platform partners that you can begin to to diligence. My, my challenge to everyone out there is make your first alternative asset investment and See what that's like, see how that feels challenge yourself, get out of your comfort zone. Watson: And I think that one of the other important elements of taking an approach that isn't just throw it in the index and forget it is also, it requires you to do more thinking, like, you're not saying go for it. You're saying diligence, it find it. And that's a very different than. Literally set it and forget it. Which, you know, we probably spent another hour on like the philosophy of actually approaching your life that way, which we don't necessarily have the time to, but I am, I am in agreement with you on that front. Well, Satz: excellent. And so let's see if we can get some people to do that for themselves for the first time. Watson: Amen. Eric has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Aaron. Satz: Thanks for having me, buddy. Watson: We just went deep with Eric SATs. Who've run out there has a fantastic day. Hey, thanks for watching to the end of my conversation with Eric. If you enjoyed it, I would encourage you to check out our past conversation with Mike Green. He is a high level investment manager. We talk about Bitcoin. We talk about index funds and all sorts of other risks that investors of all shapes and sizes need to consider. Satz: Check it out.
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Tucker started as a blogger on his website, tuckermax.com and has built out a substantial string of entrepreneurial wins, including some angel investments. In this episode, Aaron and Tucker discuss moving out to a ranch, Doomer Optimism, and how to take an antifragile posture and improve your life. Mentioned: Tucker Max on Doomer Optimism The Century of the Self: Edward Bernays Tucker Max’s Challenge; Read two books about Doomer Optimism, Prairie Fire by Clay Martin and How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It by James Wesley Rawles. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Connect with Tucker Max
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Dr. Rita Baranwal served as the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Dr. Baranwal led the office’s efforts to promote research and development on existing and advanced nuclear technologies that sustain the existing U.S. fleet of nuclear reactors, enable the deployment of advanced nuclear energy systems, and enhance the U.S.A.'s global commercial nuclear energy competitiveness. Dr. Baranwal previously directed the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) initiative at Idaho National Laboratory and served as Chief Nuclear Officer at ESRI. She is currently the CTO at Westinghouse. In this episode, Aaron and Rita discuss how a nuclear reactor works, how nuclear energy is part of an energy solution, and why she dedicated her life to this technology. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Connect with Rita Baranwal
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Watson: We need to start at the really kind of ground floor level and work our way up so we can get into some interesting conversations here but the starting point is the basics of how a nuclear power plant works. I think that, you know, people turn their lights on, and it's often not necessarily powered by nuclear energy, but they take for granted whether it's coal or natural gas or solar or renewables or whatever. The thing may be powering that if a nuclear power plant is behind that what's going on. What's happening.
Baranwal: Okay. So the way a nuclear power plant works in a nutshell is you have uranium fuel that fissions and creates heat. That heat is used to create steam. So the way a nuclear power plant works is in a nutshell, you have uranium fuel and it creates a fission reaction. And that vision reaction creates heat. That heat in turn is used to heat up water. That water is heated to steam and that steam in turn turns, turbine blades, and that turbine blade activity then is converted to electricity. So really nuclear power is a heat source. That's used to create steam. That's used to create electricity Watson: And in general power across the board is that idea that we need to heat something up so that a turbine can be turned. And that's where the power is generated the differences. Where is that heat coming from and what are the costs that we pay for that heat? So very conventionally you know, you're consuming media in some way, shape or form you think about burning coal. You think about some of these other ways we do it. There's this carbon that's emitted into the atmosphere and we've all sorts of expectations about the potential ramifications of that. No carbon basically whatsoever when nuclear is being burned. Baranwal: Exactly. Nuclear energy has always been a clean energy source. It has not been a carbon emitting source and really it's very important as states in the us and countries around the world. Move forward to. Achieving their decarbonisation targets and their clean energy targets to include nuclear energy as one of those facets in that portfolio, because it's always been a clean energy source Watson: And the basic, you know, the other side, the risk factor that people perceive it. And there's one of the elements is people, you know, from an environmentalist standpoint, they see something like Chernobyl and they say, wow, there's like a whole part of the environment that's somewhat unlivable or has like lasting damage to it. There seems to be this gap between we don't want to emit carbon in the environment. So therefore solar, so therefore wind and nuclear sometimes doesn't necessarily get allocated into that same realm. Is it really attributable to its kind of history being used as a weapon that, that causes that? Or what's your perception as someone who's been in the field of nuclear for such a long time? Baranwal: I think that that perception is changing. So, so that's a good thing, but I think some of the perhaps preconceived notions are based on what folks are familiar with. So I'm really appreciative to have this chance to chat with you and talk about what the benefits are. And we can go into more detail on what those are, but. Since those accidents. Let's talk about Chernobyl. Let's talk about Fukushima and three mile island. Yep. Many, many lessons have been learned. Technology has been substantially improved and regulations have been strengthened and tightened. So. In today's technology, today's commercial operating power plants. Some of those accidents could never even occur. So while yes, those, those accidents were tragic. Some were due to technology. Others were due to human error and. Those lessons have been learned internalized and technology has been, Watson: Can you give some examples of that? Cause one of the things is I was doing my research was the concept of a nuclear reactor being walkaway safe, which means everyone walks off the job tomorrow. headed down this dangerous route of catastrophe, but basically for lack of a better analogy in my mind, it's like a very small campfire on the ground with a few embers and more likely than not. It's just going to kind of fizzle out because there's no ready fuel to kind of continue to perpetuate Baranwal: So technology that is walk away safe is designed with passive safety features in mind. In the very unlikely event that something like that happens, you, you can walk away. And some of these designs are, for example, they have a 72 hour window where within 72 hours, everything will be shut down. In PR per the design, right? No human interaction, no human intervention and intervention is needed. No operator intervention is needed. And so those are some of the lessons that have been applied. The technology advances that have been applied to existing power plants and new reactor designs. Watson: Got it. Can you just talk about where the current state of things is like, like w you know, in the us or internationally, wherever your kind of purview is.You talked about it being something here in Western Pennsylvania, where people getting it, where people know where close to getting it. And what are the trajectories in terms of more reactors are coming online versus summer being shut down and taken offline. Baranwal: Ok, let's talk about the U S in the United States, nuclear power is responsible for 55% of this country is clean energy. But it's only responsible for generating 20% of its electricity. So you're getting a lot of clean energy bang for the buck, right? We are holding steady in the U S at about 20% of our electricity coming from nuclear. We have two new plants that are being constructed, almost ready to come online. Those are Vogel 3 and 4 in the state of Georgia. Around the world, the construction of new power plants, it has experienced such an uptick that the US frankly is probably falling behind with respect to construction of new power. The interest from countries around the world in a constructing new nuclear is that they do appreciate that it's a clean energy source that they do need to decarbonize their electricity portfolio.And many of them are looking to the other benefits that can be offered from nuclear power plants, such as generating clean hydrogen, such as desalinating water, such as providing high that. To the transportation sector to help decarbonize that very, very currently pretty carbon, carbon heavy industry that should also be department. Watson: And in terms of the business model of a nuclear plant, my understanding is that it's very expensive to build relative to other power plants of other kind of energy types, but on the back end, the long tail of a nuclear power facility. It doesn't need to have the same types of costs because of just a different input ratio. So can you kind of talk through that, maybe contextualize that versus other types of plants? Baranwal: Sure. So let's kind of frame it as we're talking about larger 1000 megawatt size plants, right? That's that's generally the average size of an existing power plant these days. They are expensive to build, but they last, some are licensed for 40 years, but they can easily get there license extended for 20 years and an additional 20 years. So in the United States, there are some plants that are going for a second license extension to allow their plants to safely operate for 80 total years. That's a pretty good investment when you, when you look at what needs to be put in upfront, and then you have this, this power generation source for, for 80 years. So there's that piece of it. The cheapest way to decarbonize any society is to keep existing power plants online. Those are already sunk costs. They're already generating clean electricity, clean energy, and. W we'll probably get to it, but you will see some plants around the world. And even in the U S shutting down in the U S the Mo most of the recent shutdowns have been for economic and political reasons, not technological reasons. Watson: So there are some of those political reasons that maybe this is like a, just very cynical, jaded take, if I'm in say oil and gas or I'm in some of the other renewables, I would love to have more of the grid be my energy source that I'm economically tired. Versus another, is it, is it that reductive or are there other factors at play when it comes to the political headwinds against nuclear? Baranwal: There’s a little bit of that just as you described. And then, there's this also push from certain pockets of constituencies, right? They want more renewables and, and our decision-makers will certainly listen to their constituents. And so that's why it is important for us to have these types of conversations to say nuclear doesn't have to, it's not, I'm not saying it has to be a hundred percent of the solution, but it needs to be. A sliver of that solution. And the reason is that there have been studies after studies that have shown, even if we were to take fossil off the table, which I don't think is realistic in the short term. Or you have carbon capture, for example, let's leave all of that on the table. You set up. The rest of that with as much renewables as you can, there's still about a 20% slice that's left. That needs to be fulfilled, that can be filled with nuclear and it should be Watson: And even in that world of ex exclusive renewables, you need a lot of batteries in order. Happened just to store it through, you know, with sunlight, sunlight's only up for a portion of the day. Wind is intermittent. And if you're going to be able to continue to power things and you batteries, which are not exactly the most carbon neutral. Baranwal: Commodity out there, they're definitely not carbon neutral. They're definitely not inexpensive. And we can. A bit more about you know, what it takes to develop those batteries, how expensive it is. The mining operations that go into the critical minerals that are going to be needed to fabricate those, those said batteries, but let's also talk about the footprint, right? The physical. Print that is needed for a nuclear power plant is much smaller than that. That's required for a wind farm or for solar. So for example, wind farm requires 360 times the landmass, the land area, sorry, the land area to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear power plant and solar photo take plants require 75 times more space. Land is at a premium in most parts of the world. So that also needs to be considered while, while. The hearts and minds of folks might be, yes, we want to push renewables. You also have to consider the value of the real estate that's going to be needed in the impact of the communities around, around the solar farms and wind farms, et cetera. Gotcha. Watson: So we've talked a little bit about these kind of like big almost like regional powering type of plants, but another thing that. 99% over my head, but I've heard the buzzword for it. These mini nuclear reactors, can you talk about the differences, like what, what that entails and then what that could potentially unlock that other forms of energy generation wouldn't necessarily be able to do? Baranwal: Sure. So let me categorize it first. So we've got the micro reactors, which are generally speaking about 20 megawatts or something. Okay, then you have small modular reactors, which are 300 megawatts or smaller. And then we have the traditional larger 1000 megawatts or so sized reactors. So the micro reactors are the smallest of the ones that we're talking about right now. The niche markets that these smaller reactors, the micro reactors can serve, include portability. So then you start to think about, oh, well, can the military use them in terms of helping support operating basis? Watson: And they have with nuclear submarines for decades too, right? Baranwal: Absolutely. So I started my career at Bettis atomic power laboratory here in Pittsburgh and nuclear power has been used in our U S Navy's aircraft carriers and submarines for decades Watson: Without like any sort of major knock on wood here, but like any sort of major issue in any Baranwal: way, shape or form, correct. Safely powering tens of thousands of miles of. US Navy activity. Watson: Got it. But there's other forms of transportation. So what are just some of the implications of, okay. You know, we could think of large ships medium sized ships, cruise ships, I guess, in different forms. What are some of the other applications of something like that for Micro? Baranwal: So for micro reactors the, the, some of the. More near-term applications include helping power island and communities or remote communities. So in the U S let's think about Alaska. Diesel is very expensive to truck in and out, right? If you have a micro reactor, that's powering the community costs costs for for the fuel that's needed for electricity generation goes down. Let's talk about Puerto Rico, where you you want a reliable energy source that can withstand. Climate events and nuclear can do that. Nuclear power is resilient. It's reliable. It's always on, it can be tapered back. If you want to supplement you know, your portfolio with solar with wind, with hydro. It plays well with others as a kind of reductive framework Watson:. So once again, I'm like coming at it from this kind of very newbie mind, but I think a lot about allocations of a portfolio in a, in a finance context. So, you know, you want some bonds, you want some equities I'd argue on some crypto. You want some real estate, you want some other entities in there. And to me, the notion of we've got this one specific play that like you said, has. Hi, upfront cost, very low long-term costs and very basically no kind of carbon release seems like an absolute no-brainer in the context of a larger portfolio, but that's a very kind of reductive view. You have literally dedicated your life to this technology. And just like in past conversations, when I, when I meet someone who's in those shoes, I'm really curious about the origin stories of that one. When did the light bulb come on? When, when did you decide, man, this is really something that you know, years and years of work would be worthy of setting a goal for. Baranwal: Okay. So it starts back when I was looking for my first job out of graduate school. All of my degrees are in material science and engineering. I am not a nuclear engineer by degree. But my first. Opportunity was at Bedus Tomich power laboratory. And what really enamored me was the high-tech laboratory equipment that I would be able to use if I went to work there. So it was really the innovation aspect of the field. And once I was there really got to work on exciting work and develop new technology for the U S Navy's aircraft carriers and submarines. But what sort of was my aha moment, if you will, was when I got to take a van full of summer interns down to Newport news shipyard to watch ships being built, aircraft carriers, being built, separate submarines, being built. And that year we had the opportunity to stand inside the Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, as it was being constructed. And I stood inside where the nuclear reactor was going to go. So the reactor compartment area, and I looked up several floors and I realized that thing that I'm working on back in this little lab in Pittsburgh, the little thing that I'm working on, the fuel powers, this behemoth of to help defend our country. Yeah. So the energy density of uranium that is leveraged to create nuclear power was, was turning point. number one for me, Watson: Can you, could just contextualize that real quick, just like, you know, I don't know if it's cubic feed or how you would quantify that versus say like the tank of a, you know, an oil rig or something like that. Baranwal: Oh my goodness. Fuel in commercial reactors is the size of a like a pencil eraser on a pencil, right? So it stacked up into, into rods. And then those rods are put into an assembly and you have several assemblies, a few hundred assemblies in a nuclear power plant. So every about 18, one-third of the fuel assemblies are removed re repositioned to optimize the heat output and eventually taken out and considered as, as useful. And we can go down that road in a moment. So, so turning point number one was, was when I visited the, the shipyard. What has kept me in this field is the fact that nuclear power is a clean energy source. I'm a mother of two teenagers, and I sincerely want them to inherit a world that is cleaner than what we have today. And I know that my work and my career in the nuclear industry will help them inherit a world that is cleaner than it is. Watson: And so contextualize that from a global view, we talked about the U S here a bit are there specific, you know, countries, geographies that do nuclear relatively well, because like you said, we could fix this all. I know that there's these international kind of climate agreements, but we could fix this all say in one country, but then if on the other side of the country of the globe, they're just spouting out coal that's. Not even canceled itself out, that's still going to be a huge problem. So, so what does that look like? Like an international field. Baranwal: Yeah. Internationally, there are countries that have existing nuclear that are continuing to build out and increase their nuclear portfolio. Unfortunately we also have countries like Germany that have. Decided that they, they want no nuclear in their portfolio and they're shutting down plants. So at the end of last month new Germany shut down three of their nuclear power plants. Watson: Prematurely, is that all political from your constituency is saying that that's not something that we're interested Baranwal: In Germany I believe it was. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So Watson: I know. So, so unfortunately one of the other things that's in the news is that kind of a political unrest in Kazakhstan, and that is a major location for uranium mining. Is there a kind of a connection there where, you know, I would imagine not that the Kazaks have a particularly out-sized role in terms of effecting international kind of energy policies, but I have to. In areas where uranium would be mined, there would be a kind of connection to optimism or kind of the proliferation of nuclear power as a specific source. Is there, is that, is that seeing the board correctly or not so much? Baranwal: It's there, there's definitely a uranium source, so well done on doing your homework. And there is some tension right now in terms of what's going on there and what's going to happen with the uranium market, but the beauty of nuclear power in terms of the commercial aspects of it is that you can store your fuel. And you can have that supply at the ready. And so we are not at the whims of the immediate turn of tides of, of politics or, you know, unrest in countries. So that's one aspect of it. The other, is that just because you have a. Country in this case, that is a critical, crucial source in the nuclear supply chain does not necessarily mean that they are also a user of said critic critical or crucial resource. Russia and China are both. Big players in the nuclear power plant arena. They are the two countries that are developing and constructing new plants as well. Certainly leaving the U S in their, in their dust. India is another player. There are many countries around the world that are, like I said, continuing to expand their nuclear portfolio. But to me what's really, really exciting is the countries that are now exploring, deploying new nuclear. They're new to nuclear. They've never had it, but they realize the benefits of it. And they want to have nuclear power as part of their electricity portfolio. And then you've you expand to. Yeah, desalinating water. And possibly even de-carbonizing the transportation sector to helping those areas as well. Watson: So one of the other points there is if you build up a nuclear power industry and you're able to provide not just cleaner power to the grid, but potentially more at an effective cost, what we're really talking about is more energy per person being able to be used. And that's kind of an underrated part of the just macro. Energy store, I'm sorry. The macro economic story of emerging from poverty, it takes power to cook your food. It takes power to heat your home. It takes power for all these things that, you know, when people in a developed world probably take for granted. But that's really part of the appeal, as you're saying in, in these places that are maybe new to nuclear, but even just the proliferation of like you're saying remote areas, whether that be in a desert or some of these other areas that would struggle to have. A consistent connection to the grid in some way, shape or form. Baranwal: Right. You may not have the ability to even extend the power out to a remote area or to develop a robust grid in a certain area. So what you're touching on is a little bit of what energy justice starts to talk about and address it. It is very, very, I think, important to our industry to make sure that we consider elevating communities to a quality of life that we all deserved. And you're right. That us in a developed country can very much take that for granted. And we will bemoan if our lights went out for even 30 minutes, right. There are. Communities and, and parts of countries that go four days without power on a regular basis. And so nuclear power is just one reliable source that could be deployed. And especially if we went back to that micro reactor conversation or an SMR where you can start to positively impact a community that may not have that access to reliable 24 7 Watson: So an example like this interview, I would say is like me doing a very, very, very small part to contribute to that type of move and in a general way, but getting back to you and your kind of career arc and the commitment to this technology. One of the expressions of that was working as the assistant secretary in the office of nuclear energy at the U S department of energy. That is a mouthful. I did practice that before the interview. But from, from sitting at. Position in particular, so that in one seat, you're the engineer actually, you know, constructing and iterating upon the design for its implementation. And then I have to imagine something there it's much more playing political games, understanding, you know, regulatory policy, making decisions that enable this to be unlocked. What did you learn from sitting in that position about what the. Roadblocks are to this being implemented more widely. Baranwal: There is a lot of policy decision-making that goes on. I would say limited voices in the room. So it is really important to make our voices heard. So not only as a policy maker, but more importantly, I would say, as a constituent the squeaky wheel really does get the grease. And so if there is a group of folks that go and talk to their Congressman or Congresswoman wanting X, Y, or Z, Sometimes that's what it takes for a change to come to fruition. And really, what was most surprising to me was oftentimes when a nuclear energy decision was being made, I was the only. Voice in the room with that technical depth to contribute to that conversation. So being present, being represented is really, really important. And so, you know, my challenge to the audience would be make your voices known, make your opinions known now more than ever today, more than ever. It is so easy to do so you don't have to go and walk into a staffer's office on Capitol hill. You can tweet it. You, you can text it whatever way you would like, but interacting with those folks with your representatives really, really does make a difference. In my role, I was able to, to interact with representatives and Senate and senators that were on the decision-making committee. And tell them what our priorities were for my office, for the office of nuclear energy. But then there, I also had to help represent all of the, for example, the technology developers in the United States or the commercial entities in the United States that work in the nuclear industry. And we, we did achieve a lot of really good things during my time there. Watson: What are some of the ones you're most? Baranwal: So the one I'll focus on one, the one that I'm most excited about is the launching of what's called the advanced reactor development program. It's a very large funding program where in we, we challenged developers to apply for funding, using a concept that they could deploy in five to seven years, a new reactor concept that they could deploy in five to seven years. And. So pleasantly surprising to me was we had numerous applications from numerous different technology sizes. We talked about the different sizes, but also technology classes. So we have, I talked about how the fission reaction heats water. Steam to generate the turbine. There are other technologies where the fission reaction actually heats liquid sodium liquid led it can heat molten salt, or can heat a gas. So there's different technologies. Each of them has their own benefit. Some of them, for example, are that you don't have a pressurized system, like you might in, in many of today's existing technologies. So it makes it even safer than today's technologies. And today's technology is today's technology is very safe. So to be able to launch that advanced reactor development program. To challenge our community, our nuclear industry community, to act with a sense of urgency, to be able to deploy new nuclear in variety of sizes for RD of technology classes, to help suit a community, a state, a country's needs is, is one of my most exciting achievements, five to seven years. Watson: Just to contextualize that versus what was because like you're saying that like, man, that's really fast, but for many outsiders, they don't necessarily know. It was in terms of shortening the window for these types of approvals and implementations. Baranwal: Right. It's it can be decades long. Yeah. So we are really challenging, not only the developers, but arm-in-arm were, we are also asking the regulatory authority. So in this case, in the U S it's the nuclear regulatory commission, we're also putting the challenge out to them saying you will be. Accepting you'll or you'll be seeing new designs that are going to be at requesting you and RC to review and hopefully approve these designs in a much shorter timeframe because their deployment plan is also much shorter. Now I want to be clear the NRCS first and foremost mission is to ensure the safety of the public. So they will never. Accelerate anything just for the sake of accelerating. Watson: It’s an inherently conservative organization, because it's all about risk mitigation, risk management, just any organization, whether you're an insurance company or a regulatory body, when you're about risk reduction, you're always gonna have. Move in that type of way, right? Baranwal: It is a very, it's a, I say we're a stodgy industry, but yes, we a very conservative industry and the regulatory bodies first and foremost objective, their mission is to protect the safety of the public that said we have in the U S the regulatory authority that is also looking to modernize. They understand that everything has to evolve. And what worked for the NRC 30 years. It's different than what would work today. Yeah. Watson: Back to the context of the United States, you referenced two nuclear power plants that were coming online in Georgia. We talked about one, that's located here in Pennsylvania. I've got an uncle in upstate New York who works in a nuclear power facility. And. One of the kind of premises of the Federalist system is that you have state by state experimentation. We've covered that in the past here in the context of autonomous vehicles and the streets of Pittsburgh, you know, hosting Uber and Argo, AI and Aurora and all them. What is, so where's the delineation there? Cause you're talking a lot about federal kind of policy and regulatory bodies, but also like, are there states that have kind of. Tried to tend them the direction of being those zones for nuclear friendly regulatory subsidy type of bodies, Baranwal: With respect to, to nuclear the regulatory Framework is federal. Okay. And so what applies to a plant in Illinois applies to a plant in Pennsylvania and they actually have site inspectors that are considered resident site inspectors. So they reside at each of the power plants in the United States. So you really can't the rules, the same rules apply to all of the plants in the United States. Let's put it that way. Where things differ has to do with how the markets are handled. So there's a deregulated market and there's a regulated market. The regulated markets, the, the rate payers will take on the burden of the costs, whatever they might be, they're distributed and I'm not privy and, or well-versed on how that works, but it's. It's a less taxing environment for the utilities in a, in a regulated environment, in a deregulated environment, it is very much a capitalistic. And those are the markets where we're seeing some plants shut down prematurely or, or claim to be. Beyond the bubble tip for premature shutdown, just because of financial considerations. One of the cost of natural gas was so low. It, it, on paper, it looked like nuclear was not cost competitive. Watson: Got it. And maybe this is me kind of being too pie in the sky, but from a geopolitical standpoint, you've referenced Russia and you've referenced China, which are in the great global game competitors with the United States. And so I have to imagine that in the. Spectrum of what you would want a competitor to either be doing or not doing to me, like my view is it would behoove a competitor for us to fall behind in something like nuclear. When they're saying we have this capacity for. Highly portable. Very low carbon, maybe carbons, not so much in like the competitive sense, but you know, very long-term cost efficient sources of capital to all sorts of remote applications. Does that track with you, like in terms of the, that the nuclear competition game at a geopolitical level? Baranwal: It does and, and part of why we're seeing. So when I'm talking about, when I was at DIA, we, we would see interest from other countries in us. Technology was because they understood the geopolitical. Ties that might come with non U S technology. Let's put it that way. I'm not going to call anyone out. Right. But they appreciated the trustworthiness, the transparency and the technology that these us technology developers could provide to them. And that's why they were being considered. And we have the technology here. Watson: That's also part of the gap that. Is w you know, we're falling behind some of these other entities in terms of the implementation of nuclear, but in terms of like, what's coming out of an academic institution I'm going to butcher these, but like you mentioned, like liquid led, led, you know, molten, salt, some of these other entities that could be heat up to spin the turbine. Like we're at the cutting edge in terms of developing those things. It's about actually getting it from the research paper, from the kind of concept into practical. Baranwal: Right. The technologies, those, those advanced, what we're calling advanced technologies are not advanced. They were invented decades ago. The reason why the time is right to deploy them now in new nuclear technology and new nuclear plants is. All the ancillary ancillary advances that have come about. So you've got remote sensing, you've got modeling and simulation tools. You have advances in materials that are now not going to corrode. Like they might have 30, 40 years ago. You have all of the wireless technology that can be implemented in a plant. You have. Digital digitization that can be implemented in a plant as well. So all of those ancillary advances, which I don't want to minimize because they are very, very important are really, what's helping propel the heart of these advanced reactor technologies and is, is making it right for them to be deployed in this time. Watson: Got it. So as we aim towards wrapping up the conversation here, Rita, I want to kind of come back to that kind of career arc story. And just as you're thinking about applying leverage to this problem, there's a, there's a nice kind of reality that as you establish yourself, your options and your kind of choices become less about like, what is like the, you know, the job that gets me my foot in the door, but now you have a reputation. You have a standing within the field of nuclear and I can go. Maximize that impact. How are you thinking about the high leverage places to push similar to the policies that you rolled out when you at DOE Baranwal: My focus is on moving with the sense of urgency. We are, you, you touched on it. We're conservative industry. We are slow to embrace change. And we are a very risk averse industry. All of that can still be true. But when you look at what is happening worldwide, you look at all of the devastating climate events that have happened just in the past year, right? Past 12 months, you look at what decarbonization targets are out there for, for countries that are, are whose populations are suffering. We as an industry need to move with a sense of urgency. And that's where my focus is, is to push this community, which the, the nuclear industry really isn't that big. So it pushed this small community to move faster and to do so certainly in a conservative manner, but also to take calculated risks. And all along the way, every step of the way where we're the only sector of the energy industry, that's fully regulated from cradle to grave. And so it's no corners will be cut in this push, but it's to get folks out of their comfort zone a bit and just say, well, just because it took you five years last time doesn't mean it can't take you. Let's let's shoot for two and a half years this time. And that was the goal behind the advanced reactor development program. And that's really where my focus is going forward to beautiful. Watson: I want to aim towards wrapping up before I ask the standard last questions. Anything else that you were hoping to share today that I just didn't give you a chance to? Baranwal: We, we talked a little bit about use fuel. One thing I wanted to share was that fuel in a commercial. Come in a commercial power plant once it's considered used has actually only been used 5%. Wow. And so it still has 95% of its utility left in it essentially. And so, you know, I want folks to, to appreciate that we're really talking about. Almost new and box kind of fuel when it is actually considered used and is put into storage in the U S at the moment, it's put into dry storage casks for storage on site at the moment. And it's safely stored and has been for many, many years and can continue to be stored onsite safely for the entire life of the plant. Even if that life of plant goes out to 80 years. Watson: Gotcha. Is there the potential for this rod with 95% of its capacity left in it? Is that the potential in like some sort of reduced capacity to also be reutilized or is that not necessarily optimal? Baranwal: Oh, it absolutely could be reutilized it could be recycled. And in other parts of the world fuel like that is recycled and in the United States at the moment, it's just not a position or, or a policy to, to recycle. Watson: Interesting. Well, that sounds like it needs to change. Awesome. Well, this has been fantastic. I want to make sure that people can follow along with your career and the stuff that you're up to. What digital coordinates can we provide people if they want to. LinkedIn, sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't prep you on this. Usually, usually this is usually, this is where we like promote the like company websites, stuff like that, but we're not gonna do that. So I would just say, if you want to share your LinkedIn, if you want to share any other kind of like relevant, just digital links where someone could Baranwal: Just like my Twitter handle. Watson: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. Okay. All right. What digital coordinates can we provide for people that want to learn more? Baranwal: My Twitter handle is @RitaB66, and I I'm also on LinkedIn. So you can connect with me there. Watson: Awesome. We're gonna link that in the show notes, going deeper there and.com/podcast is the place to find it for every single episode of the show or in the app. We are probably listening to this right now, but before I let you go, Rita, I would like you to, it sounds like reiterate your personal challenge for the audience. Baranwal: So a challenge would be to. Make sure that you are talking with your representatives in the United States and your I guess, political leaders around the world to ensure that they understand that you want nuclear power to be part of your energy portfolio. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Watson: I love it. Something from all my understanding that I am certainly in favor of. I have not done the requisite research to, to match yours, but it does seem like a, it holds an immense amount of promise in both the energy independence conversation and in the decarbonization conversation as well, which, you know, from the political spectrum, it really feels like those are like different ends of the spectrum in terms of people's kind of talking points and positions. The fact that you can thread a needle between those two is always something that kind of perks my ears. Rita, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Baranwal: Thanks for having me, Aaron. Watson: We just went deep with Rita Barnwell over there has a fantastic day.
Jason Yanowitz is the cofounder of Blockworks, a digital media company launched in 2018 focused on the intersection of cryptocurrency and finance.
They have experienced explosive growth as they have scaled to eight figures in annual revenue, dozens of podcasts, and a rapidly growing audience hungry to make sense of crypto. Jason and the Blockworks team have scaled while bootstrapping (not raising any venture capital) and stair stepped from events to podcasts to a full news site and email newsletter platform. In this episode, Jason and Aaron discuss the origins of Blockworks, the best strategy for bootstrapping a media business, and what 2022 holds for crypto. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Jason Yanowitz’s Challenge; Play the game. Don’t spend all your time reading. Connect with Jason Yanowitz
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Jason Yanowitz (1)
Yanowitz:] Crypto is now big enough that there is something for everyone, right? If you're an artist or a creator, go launch your own NFT, go launch. If you're a musician, go create a music NFT. Uh, if you are a trader jump into one of the trading firms, if you are a builder or an engineer, come build something. Watson: Hey, you're going to love this interview with Jason Yanowitz. The co-founder of block works in this interview, we talk about bootstrapping your way to an eight figure annual revenue, media business, the challenge of recruiting podcasting talent. And we wrap up with Jason's perspective on the 2022 crypto market. Enjoy. Alrighty, Jason, welcome to the podcast, man. I'm excited to be talking with ya. Yanowitz: Thanks, sir. Excited to be here. Watson: Sometimes I try to grab the reins and explain the guests business on their behalf as a kind of jumping off point. But I know that there's kind of been some redefinition of the business over the last couple of years as is kind of par for the course for bootstrapped media businesses. So I actually thought it'd make more sense to start with kind of in chapters, how you and your business partner and Mike have had to redefine the business as you were getting it off the ground. Yanowitz: Yeah, I think that's a good place. I mean, I think it might be helpful. We can start right now. So right now block works is the go-to financial media brand, uh, for investors. To understand digital assets and crypto, right? So we have the largest network of investors traditionally from the, like the kind of traditional capital markets world who are under, uh, trying to kind of either dip their toes into crypto, or they've already started allocating to crypto and they're looking to stay up to date with. Uh, with the industry, right? So we have a large news team. We have the largest podcast network in the entire industry with 15 different shows. We have one of the largest newsletters. We have a big webinar business, uh, we own and operate some of the largest conferences in crypto. So that's today. Right today we have nearly 40 employees, we've, you know, eight figures in revenue really kind of booming crypto media business. But yeah, I mean kind of like you mentioned, it was not always that way. So I I'm, I'm happy to get into the early days, the early story stories, the several pivots, the revenue falling during COVID but you, you got me here. Watson: Yeah. So I just think it's helpful to kind of visualize what the stair-step is because one of the toughest things for outsiders to really comprehend with any business, whether it's, you know, a wholesaler or a technology company, whatever it is, you know, there's the concept of the minimum viable product. And there's the concept of, wow, this established, like you're saying Eight figure business here. And what it's kind of full formation is. So my comprehension is that this started as the idea of potentially a consultancy, but in reality and events business, that was your initial on-ramp of revenue, then the podcast, and then this kind of like fully fledged news platform with video and some of these other elements. And I don't know if we need to necessarily like go overly deep on each of those kinds of Lily pads. But really is, is that the optimal way to bootstrap a media company in this day and age is one of the few people that's actually done it. Yanowitz: Yeah. I mean, I think though, so the early story is, um, I, you know, it was 2017. I was fall, and I'd kind of gone down the crypto rabbit hole. And, um, I was living with a couple of guys that at that time in New York city, I became convinced that the business that we needed, uh, that we needed to start was a consultancy to help enterprises understand crypto. By the way, wildly wrong, horrible business for a, like, wrong on both fronts. A, enterprise blockchain, not that real of a thing, and B consulting businesses are really, really tough businesses. It's just a grind. Um, but we got one thing, right, Which was the industry. And so linked up with. Uh, now co-founder Mike. Um, and we said, you know, let's go start this consulting firm. Mike said, great, I'm a consultant. Now here's the one problem nobody's going to trust us? Why would anyone ever hire us? I said, okay, valid point. What should we do then? He said, let's go host an event. Um, and so that's what we did. Uh, we. I think it was like Walmart or something, or so we bought the white board for 11 bucks and basically we had one goal, which was to just bring the institutional crowd to an event right. At that time, all of the information and crypto was very retail focused. You had like crypto Bobby on Twitter. You had like crypto Panda on Reddit. And like, I dunno, I, I was at the time working at this venture capital firm or. Uh, that I was working at a venture capital firm. And like, you tried to get these old, older, gray haired fund managers to talk about crypto and you kind of got laughed off, honestly, because you'd send them Twitter threads and Reddit links. And so our goal was basically to just build the best place for the institutional crowd to understand crypto. We did that in one way. So the only way we knew how to do it, which was just by hosting events. Um, so yeah, I mean, block works started as an events business. Once we got that off the ground. Uh, we launched the podcast network with this guy, Anthony Papaliano. in August, 2018. Um, that really took off for those who probably know Papa on Twitter. That was a big success. Um, and since then we've launched probably 25 different shows about 15 of the 25 have worked. Um, and we did that for like two years. Honestly, it was good business. We had a big podcast network and big events business. And it wasn't until COVID when things really took a turn. So flashback to March of 2020 business was booming. We had just had our biggest two months ever. Revenue skyrocketing team growing COVID hits. And to summarize a long story, revenue fell 80% month over month. Right Things were tough, right. It was like really, really a grind. A lot of our revenue came from events at that point. Um, but we kind of did what anyone does during a tough time is we just went back to our customers and to our audience, I think we set up I want to say dozens, but I think it was really over a hundred calls with our customers to figure out what they needed. So we spoke with financial advisors, family offices, family offices, high net worth individuals, hedge funds, RAs venture firms, professional traders, and kind of just learned one thing, which is there still, wasn't a great source of information for investors looking at digital assets rght. And so we looked at every piece of content in the industry. We looked at, uh, you know, podcast, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, uh, research firms, other crypto media sites, mainstream media. And yeah, we really just couldn't find one single source of information that spoke directly to the investment community about crypto. And so, uh, I dunno, maybe eight months to figure this out. We designed a completely new website. We built a completely new website, uh, and on January 12th of 2021 last year, we launched it to the world and it's been a big success since. Watson: And so, as you think about like just on a, on a per unit cost. I'm sure that website build was, um, uh, you, you were going as, as kinda down to the bone as possible, but it was still a consequential cost for the business to get that built out. As you kind of look at, you know, something like, uh, like an event there's maybe. Uh, there's a, there's a rental fee potentially. Or if you, you know, can shake the right hands and make the right deal, you can get people in there at a relatively low cost. Someone who is trying to get it off the ground outside of the concept of you were dead, right. You decided to make this investment in the real winter for crypto post 2017, kind of spike. You you, you planted the seed in the right field, but in terms of a strategy for bootstrapping, that thing off the ground is in hindsight, you say, well, I guess it worked so it was valid or there really is, you know, on a, on a per cost basis or a minimum viable, viable product basis, the right entree versus potentially starting with the website first and then eventually getting to events. Yanowitz: I mean, I think there's two conversations there, right? And we can, we can get into both of them. One is bootstrapping, right. Should I bootstrap or should I not bootstrap? Um, and we can talk about that. And then the second one is what is the right way to build a media company in 2022. Right. And even though we launched this a couple of years ago, we can talk about today. I think there's still a massive opportunity to go build a bunch of, uh, media businesses. Uh, as specifically niche media businesses, B2B media businesses, that will be quite successful. So just touching on the first one first, I think the, uh, the VC verse bootstrapping argument has gotten way too caught up in like good versus evil. Right. Good versus bad to bootstrap. Um, it really just comes down to two things, right? Like what are the business goals and what am I optimizing for? Uh, and, and what should we optimizing? Uh, what should we optimize for? Right. And once you answer those, you can determine what you should do. So like, let's, let's take media, for example, when you look at media companies that have raised venture capital more often than not, they fail because media is just a collection of communities who are interested in one specific topic and like to engage with your, with that topic in a variety of ways. And the media company is the thing, the brand that provides the, the places for the community to engage. So. When you take media, when you take venture as a media company, if you just think about the way that a venture capital firm works, where they have, let's say 10 portfolio companies, eight of the 10 are going to fail. One might break even, and one is going to return the fund. That's a shit business model for the media company that takes venture because now the venture firm is pushing you to, uh, to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger beyond what you probably should do. And. The most successful media companies stay niche for as long as possible. But when you raise venture money, you get pushed to again, go bigger and bigger, which means you have to, you're forced to expand outside of your niche pretty early on. So with block works, if we had ever raised venture money, uh, we would have, you know, I'm sure our VCs would have pushed us to go into FinTech. Right. And then they would have pushed us to go into traditional equities. And then when like GameStop and Robin hood stuff was happening, they would have pushed us to go cover that and getting, get into meme stocks. That's not- And that would have, that would have destroyed the business. Right. Because then we're competing against CNBC and Wall street journal and things like that. So if we were building a software company, go raise a hundred million bucks right out of the gate. Right. But that's a software business for us. We, as a media company, like our goal was to get to profitability within 90 days. And so that's what we did. Right. We started selling ads and sponsorships and tickets to our events. So. That, that was kind of the media conversation. I don't know if you want to pause there and talk about that. Watson: Well, to kind of build off of that, one of my favorite books is called Hitmakers by Derek Thompson and he has this really good framework of what makes for a hit. And you could say. late, late 2017, early 2018 to now the success to get all the way to an eight figure business bootstrapped would qualify you guys as a hit, um, uh, amongst another, uh, a number of reasons. And my interpretation of that is he says, you know, you to be a hit, you have to have this blending of the novel and the convention. When you even hear that, that with like pop music, where, where they'll sample some past hit, that's familiar. So there's this element of familiarity blended with the new face, the new voice, the new take, whatever the new, the new beat is tied to that. And so with you guys, um, I don't know if this is intentional, but the branding isn't drastically different from Bloomberg. Um, just in, you know, seeing the ticker, the aesthetic, the big B, not to say that you guys are exactly the same, but there's an element of familiarity there to a financial audience. But then it's so locked in on the crypto niche in a way that, you know, maybe some, a CNBC or some of these characters at most could dip a toe in at most could kind of a partial off a little corner of their enterprise. You get to sit in that community, sit in that very specific arena and craft this very kind of effective counter positioning to the other forces out there while being easy to digest for people that come from the outside world. That's my interpretation. Let me, let me see what you think of that. Yanowitz: Yeah, I think that's a good interpretation. I mean, you mentioned that. Oh, you mentioned the book, right? Uh, hit makers. I think there's this concept in there called Maya, right? It's like the most, uh, the most advanced yet acceptable. And like, basically what that means is you have to kind of hit the bulls-eye between familiarity and, and futuristic where, and so for us, it was like, we're talking about these for us design was a way to feel comfortable. So you mentioned our website, like our website. Uh, we, we got a lot of inspiration from the Wall street journal and from Bloomberg. And the reason is like, when you think about our target audience, we are talking about some, some weird stuff, right? Like sushi swap versus a unit swap and liquidity provider like automated market-makers. And now we're talking about NFTs and let's metaverse stuff. And like, Um, it goes over most people's head, right. And that's our job to break that down and make sure it doesn't the easiest way to make it feel comfortable for folks is not pushing the boundaries on everything. Right? So we push the boundaries on content with the industry that we cover. So that means we need to make sure that the design language and like how things feel is very, very comfortable, right. If we were covering traditional equities, It would be the, it would be flipped right? Because we'd be covering something that's very, very comfortable for folks. Uh, there's a lot of people who cover equities, we would really have to push the boundaries on what block works was and what it looked like. And we'd go launch it down and all this futuristic stuff so that it could differentiate itself. So I think you have to pick, pick one or the other when it comes to yeah. To what you do there. Watson: Yeah, you exactly hit the nail on the head. Cause I was thinking, you know, there's plenty of people that would want to cover crypto, but then they'd also want to structure the company as a Dow and have, you know, a community token and all these other things. And it just becomes inaccessible with, with not enough familiarity for people to latch onto it. Yanowitz: Yeah. I mean, I think one thing for us that helped us be successful is like we, we picked one target. Um, and we, and we picked really one thing to focus on kind of one thing to focus on every, like, I'd call it six to 12 months. Right. So, whereas a lot of people, there were a lot of media companies that were launched in 2017. I think we're only, we're one of the only ones still left, uh, from, from our industry, at least. And everybody tried to do a lot of things, right. They launched a daily newsletter. They launched a media site with, you know, with, with a news team. Uh, they launched an events, businesses, a business, they launched two different podcasts and they ended up failing because they stretched themselves too thin for us. It was like right out of the gate, build the best events. And you know, I've never really publicly shared this, but like we had one target, right. It was, it was CoinDesk consensus about. When we launched the business, we officially launched may of 2018 May 10th, We hosted our event. It was like 150 person happy. A day later, CoinDesk hosted their 7,000 person consensus event. So we said target on their back. Let's build a better event than consensus. It's taken us a couple of years, but now it's, I mean, I don't, I'm not even sure anyone attends consensus anymore. Right. And we taken a couple of years and now we have the best events in crypto. Uh, and, and then we did that again with podcasts, right? There's a bunch of different crypto podcasts out there. Now we have the biggest crypto podcast network. And I think for us, How do you just stay as focused as humanly possible while you're in an industry that's moving. So, so, so quickly. And so for us, it was like focused on events, focused on podcasts. Don't try to cover too much. Just don't try to talk to too many people. Don't talk to the developers at the start. Don't talk to the retail audience, just talk to capital markets. And so that, yeah, I think that was a big key. Watson: So let's talk about bootstrapping, uh, uh, podcast network. Obviously Pompe was a really big early get for you guys, and he's just had an explosive on of success as a podcaster. Um, but really, you know, you, you fall in this similar category or genre, at least in my mind of these modern digital brands that really lean into the individual voices that make up their ecosystem. So if I think about shows like, you know, the journal, which is the podcast that a wall street journal puts out. I would struggle despite listening regularly to tell you who the host's name is. And yet every single bar stool show, every single, you know, character from the morning brew, every single one of these kinds of digitally native brands has the muscle built to put a ton of trust into the voice that there is that they're highlighting and attaching the kind of macro banner brand to that. Um, and that allows for all sorts of things, whether you're launching new characters or signing new talent, uh, but just take me through how you've thought about that and what your recruit, how that recruitment has happened in order to bring all that talent under the block works banner. Yanowitz: Yeah. I mean, so I think first off, everyone's really excited about the creator side of things, and everyone's really excited about the creator economy and things like that. Uh, and I think people oftentimes in media, I always hear people point to the Barstool model where everyone always points to the Barstool model. It's like Barstool is the first desk. Barstool is not the first to do this right there. This goes back since the beginning of media, since there were three different channels on your television right. And like, if you look at, um, so we just look at how media works. Um, and you look at, I don't know if your audience is like a CNN or a Fox credible, like CNN it's like Wolf Blitzer and like Jake Tapper. And then on the Fox side, you've got like Gretchen Carlson and like all these big Sean Hannity. Right. These are, these are creators, right? It means- Watson: going back and still O'Reilly was like the guy. Yanowitz:Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I think what we just said is like, how can we give them a platform? Uh, if you are, so we've done. Uh, you know, we did, we worked with, with Pompe for a couple of years. We're not working with Pompe anymore on the podcast. Um, but we're working, you know, there's a bunch of different, big podcast hosts out there. They want to create content. They're really good at marketing and creating content, what they don't want to do, they don't want to send invoices. They don't want to get on sponsorship and advertising sales calls. They don't want to go create a media kit. They don't want to go transcribe their podcasts. They don't want to go find guests. So we take care of all of that. At the beginning of block works, you know, we kind of called it a podcast in a box. Right. And we worked with folks like Ryan soukous melt them to mirrors, Joe Carlson, Scott milker, Charlie Shrem, and built podcasts with and around all of these people. And for them, it was amazing because they could sit in front of a mic and make a half a million a year. For us. It was also amazing because it allowed us to never take venture capital money, the podcast business spit off this cashflow that allowed us to bootstrap the business. The counter to everything I'm saying is it's not an amazing business model. It's not an amazing business model because sometimes you don't own the IP and you don't actually own the content. So the biggest focus for us moving forward, uh, we launched three shows last year. In-house podcasts. Our first in-house podcasts that are owned 100% by block works. They're operated by block works employees, uh, and they are, and that's the big focus over the next couple of years is, is bringing talent In-house continuing to provide a platform for these, uh, creators and influencers, uh, but, but kind of aligning incentives better for block works and the creators. Watson: and really, you know, that, that brings me to two examples to mind. Um, the first is, is more abstract, which is Danny Meyer and the union square group, and all the way down to owning shake shack. And there's this beautiful blog post about how he's created this massive vertical ladder for someone that wants to be in food, but maybe starts off as a fry cook in shake shack and can literally work their way up. Not quickly, but all the way up to working in a Michelin star restaurant as an executive chef, if they're willing to kind of put in the hours because he's stratified from, you know, the, the kind of broadest low end solution, all the way up to the kind of high-end creme de la creme and, uh, giving real legibility into your ability to climb through that ladder. And then the media space, you've got the ringer where they have the ringer NFL show, the ringer NBA show, but if a talent and individual talent. Builds enough kind of credibility within that ecosystem. Then they get to spin out something where they probably have more economic upside and because the ringer as a platform is what was involved in the launch. There's still that kind of upwards trajectory. Whereas in the early days, you guys need to kind of draft off of these other brands to get some momentum, but now you have the platform to be able to deliver that. Yanowitz: Exactly. I mean, you're you hit the nail on the head. Like we leveraged other people's platforms to build our brand when nobody knew block works. Right. When we got into crypto is like, uh, there were two media companies, it was CoinDesk and Coin Telegraph. Uh, you had like two scrappy, young twenties people who were like telling other people that there's this third media brand block works that they should care about. Who were they to listen to right. But now that we leverage, when you leverage other influencers, it really helps. I think one of the keys though, with working with outside, like creators and influencers, if you're a media company kind of doing this is, um, what we've learned is that there's not one model, right? And so you have to, it's, it's kind of tough to scale, but I think you, when you hear on Twitter, it's like you have to give the creator 100% of the power you give the influencer a hundred percent of the power. And oftentimes what we've learned is they don’t actually want that right. They don't want to sometimes run their own business. They don't want to run their finances and their operations. And so as a media company, there's a lot of room to run if you actually just give them a platform and you're quite flexible there. And so we have, we've had shows that have been running for two, three years because of just our flexibility there. Watson: Right on. So I want to switch it up here. Um, one of my favorite recent threads that you've posted, um, was how to find a job in crypto. And as many as there's, you know, we have listeners who are entrepreneurial and thinking of the next thing that they're going to start. There's a whole lot of people that want to be in startups. They want to be in the kind of macro upward trend. Um, and maybe don't necessarily know how to do that. I actually have a couple of people close to me that are literally in the middle. I've sent them the thread because they're in the middle of some sort of career change trying to strategize that. So what are some of the big themes that you're seeing as someone who has connections to all sorts of companies across the crypto ecosystem, um, that would make someone, you know, more appealing or just help them get their foot in the door? Yanowitz: Yeah. I, I think I'd preface this by saying. Uh, the big thing to understand is every, every crypto company is doing phenomenally well right now, right? The amount of capital that's been raised in, in this industry over the last 12 months is completely bonkers. It's like upwards of 20, 30 billion, I think is the. Uh, and because of this, every single company is hiring. So you, if you ask any founder, like what is your main challenge? Go ask 10 founders in crypto. What's your main challenge, including block works a 10 out of 10, again, including myself will tell you that it's finding talented people to join us. I think one of the problems with crypto is there are a lot of people who care about it, uh, because. I have like a thousand bucks in Bitcoin that doesn't necessarily mean they're talented. So one of our problems we get, we get literally hundreds of inbounds every single day. The problem for us becomes how do you filter the noise from the signal? And so I think if you aren't getting. When everyone is hiring, like here, here are a couple of kind of tangible reasons. One is, uh, like sloppy outreach. I'm honestly surprised Aaron, how many people just like spell her name wrong, or have typos in their emails. And that I think we can discredit like 50% of the people just from that. So you have to make your first impression sharp. Uh, the second one is kind of like rambling outreach, right? Again, we receive hundreds of inbounds for every role, write five sentences total on your background. Why you'd be perfect for the role, experience with crypto, that's it like we get so many, seven paragraph emails. Nobody's reading that. Uh, the third is lack of crypto experience and I think people kind of misunderstand what this means. You don't need to have worked in crypto. You do need to demonstrate your crypto knowledge, right? You don't need to have worked in crypto, but if you don't, if you haven't worked in crypto, you probably should have used unit swap or like I don't know, staked on Lido or deposited assets on all their compound right. Just to demonstrate your crypto knowledge. Um, and then I think the fourth is just like a lack of tactical experience. Um, I think there are a lot of people who want to work in crypto. Maybe they're coming from like a non Like SAS or software or tech job, maybe they're a college grad or they're a chef or a sports coach or a teacher. Um, and for that, I'd really recommend two things. Like one is just get involved in a Dow, like any Dow, just start contributing and building a brand. And the second is like, get on Twitter. Uh, there's this great post. I don't know if by another podcast host Patrick O'Shaughnessy. He said there's still a need for more great writing and podcasts. Right. He said, I never run out of TV to watch. Uh, because we've reached saturation there, but I always run out of great detailed writing and worthwhile podcasts. If you're early in your career, uh, it's smart to outlearn and then out teach everyone in a niche. And right now, hands down, the number one way to get a job in crypto is by learning and teaching people in public. So that's, I don't that's take, take it for what it is, but like, I think that's a little bit of a feedback for folks who are looking to get a job in this place. Watson: So literally last episode, we interviewed Wes Kao of Maven and, uh, of the top 10 cohort-based courses that they ran on their platform last year. I think three of them were like crypto or Web3, um, adjacent. So I think that that's also like, there's plenty of people listening, who right now, even when you said joining a Dow or, or some of those other like strategy. That just seemed daunting and I know that there's Googling and Reddit threads to go down, but some people kind of want the kind of more curated tour. I think that, you know, being willing to make an investment like that, and I know that's not possible for a hundred percent of people is one of the gateways to do that. Um, what do you think of that? What do think about the, about those online courses? Yanowitz: I mean, I liked them. I just think, um, I'm trying to think of the like least, uh, prohibitive methods. And so here, here's the number one way that I would get if I was 22 or maybe later in my career, but like doing a big career transition, I wanted to work in crypto. Here's the, here's what I do. I would go, I'd pick a hyper niche thing within crypto. Like I would pick gaming guilds. I picked gaming guilds. For example, within gaming guilds, I would find that top 50 people who write about gaming guilds, right? I'd go look at like yield Guild games and wide GG, And I'd go look at Axie Infinity, and there's all these different gaming Guilds. The content is really, really all over the place. So it's on media, it's on Twitter. Uh, it's in like, uh, like newsletters and things like that become an aggregator of that information. So every single day, post one tweet that highlights the best or a thread that highlights the best information about gaming guilds. Do this for 30 days in a row, right. As you're doing this, start reaching out to people who run or work in Gaming Guilds. Start meeting them, start getting acquainted with them, use their info, and then use their info in your, in your threads or on your Twitter posts. And again, I think Twitter is the best way because the entire industry lives on Twitter. Then start writing your own, right? You've now worked on gaming guilds for 30 days in a row, aggregating all this information, write your own media posts, go write it on mirror, right? Like a crypto native medium. Uh, and honestly, I think that's the best way. So we, I mean, there are dozens of people like that who we've hired and our competitors have hired. They have no resume. They're not on LinkedIn. They just have some, a couple of solid Twitter threads and that's they're in for an interview. And then they interview well, Watson: Yeah, check out a Nat Eliason and crypto Raiders. If you're trying to source the, that first initial 50 lists too. He's the man. Yanowitz: Nat was great. Watson: So, uh, let's kinda transition here towards the back half your view. So, you, you sit at a really interesting intersection of information, being able to digest lots of news about the industry, generally access to a whole lot of thinkers. And I would actually actually, before we get into that, just a fun one. How do you manage listening to podcasts? If you have that big of a podcast network that you're responsible for, how do you actually manage your attention and not offend the people in the network that you have listen to their show, right? Yanowitz: I actually did really offend someone, uh, about six months ago. Cause like I told you, I had tossed into their show in a, in a couple of months and they weren't too happy about it, but, um, I actually don't listen to as many podcasts as I should. Um, I got kind of burned out from listening to some podcasts from, I used to listen to like three podcasts a day, uh, on like 1.8 X speed. And like, you know, I'd go on these walks and I'd do it. Listen to podcasts while I was doing other things, while cooking dinner, I got really burned out from podcasts. I've actually been listening to a lot of audio books. I will say though, that there are just podcasts. Um, I've been, instead of doing like, uh, subscribing to specific shows, I've been subscribing to different guests. So, what I mean by this is like, there were a couple of different guests who I just, I want to listen to every single piece of content that they ever put out. Right. So like one, so like, I don't know. Um, if you're trying to like launch a fund or something, you're trying to launch a fund and like build a billion dollar fund, like instead of going and listening to a show about building funds, you should go listen to all 10 podcasts that, uh, Like, I dunno, Henry Kravis from a, from KKR has been on, right. Or, uh, that like a fund manager that you love has been on. So I'm, I'm trying to right now to subscribe to different guests instead of subscribing to podcasts, that being said, Aaron, can I give a shout out to the empire podcast and tell people to go subscribe Watson: 110% It is a good show. I was just listening to, uh, the recent episode that you had with multi-coin about that kind of prediction for the year, which leads into really how I kind of wanted to wrap this, uh, interview, which is just you sitting at the intersection of so much information, these podcast hosts, and it's still, you know, I think that there's a couple things out there that you can maybe pick up or kind of disagree with. One of them is that, you know, it's just a four year cycle. Every Bitcoin having that happens every four years, it's going to just kind of follow more or less the same arc and don't overthink it. Um, you've got all these characters saying, you know, this L1, uh, I guess listeners might not necessarily know what L1 is. Ethereum's dead go to Solana. Uh, you know, Bitcoin's dead go to etehrium. Um, these type of very tribal arguments. Um, what are some of the things that you're seeing from your vantage point? Yanowitz: Um, I think there were a couple of like narratives and trends to look at first. Like one is. Uh, just a multi chain future. There's a lot of talk about, uh, so actually I think to kind of zoom out a little bit, like what happened last year is, or what happened in 2020 is DeFi took off, right? Defi took off with compound and unit swap and defy summer. And there were some days that this decentralized exchange called unit swap with 20 employees had more volume than Coinbase with 2000 employees. Uh, and so 2020 was the year of DeFI, 2020, 2021. A lot of the attention shifted. Uh, and then narrative shifted from DeFi to NFTs and metaverse and gaming. Right? You had things like Facebook rebranding to meta. You had things like, um, you know, an NFT artists, people sold his art for 69 billion, a million dollars. Excuse me. Uh, and just all of these, you know, and NFT art, an open seat just raised at a $13.3 billion valuation. It just went completely crazy. I think behind the scenes, what was actually happening in crypto is a lot of the builders and kind of investors are understanding that we're moving to a multi-channel world, thanks to kind of innovations in UI UX and bridging technology. And so there are a lot of these like. For folks, not in crypto, you can think of them like ehterium of competitors that are now starting to, uh, have entire ecosystems pop up around them. So for those who are around in 2017, you had etherium competitors. You'd like Cordato and other eith competitors not even worth mentioning what never happened is they, they never built ecosystems. So there's never like Game's built on top of the ecosystems. There was never Defi built on top of the ecosystems. And now you have all these other ecosystems like Solana and Terra and Avalanche and Near in Cosmos and Phantom that have big DeFi ecosystems around them. Once you get a defined ecosystem, it opens up a lot of the NFTs and gaming and things like that. So that's one big thing I'm looking at is like L1, staying hot. Dow infrastructure is a really interesting thing. Uh, like Dow tool. Dow's had a really massive year last year, but there are still a lot of core problems that need to be addressed before they go mainstream. So I think Dow infrastructure, Dow infrastructure is a big area for investment. I think the financialization of NFTs will be interesting. Um, I think gaming's going to get quite big, uh, this year as well. And then I think the last thing is just that a lot of like the smart money investors are talking about that hasn't reached. Uh, the public narrative yet is just how important composability is. So let's take, um, let's take like gambling, for example. Um, if you want to, uh, if you're, if you're in slack or something, or let's say you're in discord or telegram, or like a text message with a bunch of your friends, and you're talking about betting on the Patriots game, you can't do it within the app because they kind of run on different rails. Like the app might run on. It's just like th they're very siloed applications, right? So like you're, you're texting with your friends about betting on the Patriots game. You want to bet on it. You then have to leave and go to. I don't know, I'm not a big, better, but like DraftKings or something, you go to a different app with when everything's built on crypto rails, the composability becomes seamless. So now you have the ability to let's, let's say you had like a discord channel and you want to bet on the Patriots game with your friends, you can, that betting application can be completely embedded inside of the inside. Uh, the discord channel or like I use notion a lot to take notes and keep things organized. I let's say I wanted to vote on, on chain governance for, for a Dow instead of leaving notion to, or the slack channel to go vote on snapshot, which is how people vote in the, on chain stuff. Uh, on governance, you could actually vote inside of the slack channel for an on chain thing because slack and notion are getting rebuilt on, on, uh, on chain. So, I dunno, I could blabber on for a while about what I think is coming this year, but that's kind of a highlight. Watson: So what about the effects of centralization? Because if you are one of the crypto OGs, the whole argument, particularly with Bitcoin is the notion of decentralization. We don't have some central authority that's going to, um, for political reasons or what have you make Uh, monetary policy decisions that are not behaving that the general public and the users of that money and what I see, whether it be something like Solana that just doesn't have the same kind of fundamental de-centralized nature is making that trade off for speed, or just the fact that most users are interfacing with this technology via OpenSea via Coinbase base via some of these centralizing forces. Um, what is your perception of that? Yanowitz: There is a long conversation we had around that, or there's a really, there's a two-sentence thing. And I I'll give you the two sentence thing. Um, right now we're at a, a middle ground, right? Where there's a lot of decentralized things that are getting almost traded on centralized things. And this is like this is called like CFI, right? There's like define then there C5. And then there's a, these are like terminology in the, in the, in the industry. It's like DeFy is like all the JP Morgan's of the world. There's defy, which is these like completely decentralized applications. And what's ended up happening is that CFI, centralized finance is getting built out and booming, right? Like open sea and Coinbase. And these kinds of. There's one reason for it and it's block space. Uh, so in, and you can kind of think of a, you can make the comparison to Netflix because I feel like this is a story that a lot of people know, in order to make everything decentralized and have all of these things run on DC, like on decentralized protocols, you need to open up the block space a lot. You need, you almost need, like, you can think of it like bandwidth, right? And so the comparison to Netflix is in 2000 Netflix, Was a DVD business. Uh, their CEO Reed Hastings knew that streaming was the future. There's a really well-known story here. He knew that streaming was the future in the late nineties. Uh, but he also just knew that bandwidth was limited. So every year he would kind of wait, wait, wait. And then finally he pulled the trigger and said, okay, bandwidth is here. Let's move to streaming and get rid of the DVD business in, you know, 20 years later, a lot of these web 3 entities. I like partially centralized I'd call it. They're partially decentralized and partially centralized. Everybody knows in crypto knows that decentralization is the future. Everybody's working towards that goal. But the block space is limited in the same way that in 1998, uh, the bandwidth was limited. So, I mean, I think it's the goal of a lot of these founders, but at a certain point you need the technology to improve in the same way that you needed bandwidth to improve. Watson: Got it. Yeah. It was just an interesting, interesting theme. And I think it makes sense that, uh, you can't jump all the way across the cavern in one go, you got to build a bridge to be able to get to the other side. Um, Jason, this has been fantastic. I want to aim towards asking my standard last questions. Uh, but before I do that, anything you were hoping to share today that I didn't give you a chance. Yanowitz: Uh, I think the main thing is just like tying it back to that, that hiring thread, like there is something in crypto. Crypto is now big enough that there is something for everyone, right? If you're an artist or a creator, go launch your own NFT gold launch. If you're a musician, go create a music NFT. Uh, if you are a trader jump into one of the trading firms, if you are a builder or an engineer, come build something. Uh, there, the space is really big enough that A, everyone can find a path. Whether it's NFTs or metaverse or gaming or trading or finance or entrepreneurship or building companies. Uh, and then B uh, there's a job for everyone. So whether you're a sales guy or I'm a marketer or an engineer, or a designer or a video producer, right. There's really something for everyone. So I think that's, that's my last thought tutors to. We definitely need some good recruiters to come in. Watson: Yeah. Um, awesome. So if folks want to learn more about block works and everything that you're up to Jason, where can we point people in the digital world to learn more. Yanowitz: Um, if, I mean, if people want to get in touch with me, I'm pretty open. My DMS are open on Twitter at Jason Janowitz. Um, our website is block works, dot co. We have a newsletter. Um, if you subscribe to the newsletter and reply to it, I will see it and I will respond to you as well. So subscribe to the newsletter block works dot C O a and I'm on Twitter too. So hit me up. Watson: Beautiful. We're going to link that into a podcast Yanowitz: I also have a podcast that I want to plug, which is empire podcast.Sorry for coming on and plugging. Watson: No, you're all good. That is literally the whole point of that question is to plug away and allow people to find other cool stuff. Empire is a good one. I am subscribed. Uh, we're going to link all that in the show notes it's available in the app. We're probably listening to this right now, or it's going deep within and.com/podcast for every single episode of the show. But before I let you go, Jason, I would like to give you the mic one final time to issue an actionable personal challenge to the audience. Yanowitz: Uh, my thought here as the world moves too quickly by to learn by through reading Right. The world moves far too quickly to learn by reading the key is to play the game. So go trade on unit swap, take a loan out on eBay. Buy an NFT. Hell it doesn't even have to be crypto. Right. Go play a game on Roblox. Uh, go attend to Fortnite concert, make a video on Tik TOK. Um, I think just for the, the pessimists out there, right? The trend is your friend, your friend. Stop fighting it. Watson: Getting in the game. I love it. Uh, this was awesome, man. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yanowitz: Thank you, Aaron. Enjoyed it. Watson:We just went deep with Jason Janowitz. Hope it out. There has a fantastic day. Hey, thanks for watching to the end of my conversation with Jason. If you enjoyed it and are looking for more crypto blockchain centric content, check out our interview with the co-founder of Odyssey slash library, Jeremy coffin. We talked about the future of decentralized media, his business model, and a whole lot more.
Wes Kao is the cofounder of Maven, the world’s first digital platform for cohort-based courses. In just one year, the Maven team launched over 100 cohorts, saw dozens of instructors make $10K, multiple made $250K+, and raised a $20m Series A from Andreesen Horowitz.
Their course creators include Anthony Pompliano, Li Jin, Sahil Lavingia, Shaan Puri, and Sahil Bloom. Prior to starting Maven she was the co-founder of the altMBA, which launched the modern cohort-based education movement with Seth Godin. She’s led over 150 launches for Fortune 500 brands and startups, and is recognized as a leading expert in B2C marketing. In this episode, Wes and Aaron discuss how to go from being and outside to an insider, why MOOCs fail, and how Wes got a job with Seth Godin. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Wes Kao’s Challenge; Figure out how you can turn bugs into features. Connect with Wes Kao
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Wes on Twitter Maven on Twitter Maven.com WesKao.com If you liked this interview, check out episode 422 with Pomp.
Aye Moah is the co-founder and CEO of Boomerang, the most popular extension for Gmail and Outlook which enables millions of people to email more effectively with artificial intelligence.
Aye has over a decade of experience in bringing category-creating products to market. She is an innovator with multiple patents and has scaled revenue with a consumer freemium model and a bottoms-up B2B SaaS motion. In her experience as a Chief Product Officer, Moah has grown her product lines’ revenue from 0 to $8M profitably, on $400k total investment. In this episode, Moah and Aaron discuss how she helps her team improve productivity, the product development challenges of a Gmail extension, and how they have defended their patents. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Aye Moah’s Challenge; Evaluate how much of your day is “I have to” vs “I get to”. Connect with Aye Moah
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Boomerang App Website Mentioned Mohinga Catfish chowder Tea leaf salad Coconut curry noodle
Jesse Pujji currently serves as Founder & CEO of Gateway X and as Executive Chairman of Ampush and MySubscriptionAddiction.com.
Prior to GX, Jesse co-founded and was CEO of Ampush. He grew Ampush to over 100 Ampushers, managed over $1BN of digital media spend, and partnered with brands such as Dollar Shave Club, Uber, Birchbox and Hulu. Prior to Ampush, Jesse started his career with short stints at both Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Gateway X is a holding company that builds, buys and invests in market-leading direct to consumer companies. In this podcast, Jesse and Aaron discuss experimenting with TikTok ads, lessons from joining the Red Ventures portfolio, and the DTC companies Jesse has launched. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Jesse Pujji’s Challenge; Remove the bottom 5 things on your to do list. Connect with Jesse Pujji
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Website Links TikTok Ads Happiest Baby on the Block Jesse's Baby Sleep thread If you liked this interview, check out our interview with Marshall Haas about building a holding company of a profitable businesses.
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Piper Creative makes creating podcasts, vlogs, and videos easy. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify Watson: Jessie, It's nice to be talking to you. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Pujji: Thanks for having me on air and I appreciate it. Watson: So I thought an interesting place to start would be the fact that you got your start by being one of the early users, your early folks running Facebook ads. And that was really one of the things that kind of broke your business and push today. Maybe you can quit say you don't buy this premise. Tik Tok ads might potentially represent a similar type of opportunity and that it's a nascent platform not taken seriously by everyone, but there's a ton of users' attention on platform like that through the lens of how you first came to Facebook and learn how to do it efficaciously. What advice would you give to someone in your shoes? Just getting started in marketing performance marketing to potentially approach a platform like Tiktok. Pujji: Yeah, it's a great question. And a funny one, because at Gateway X right now, we have a huge effort going to figure out Tik Tok. So it, you know, I actually do believe that it's very much the second coming or it's certainly up there, you know, it's, it's hard to know how big any of these things ever will get. But yeah, I think the, the biggest, best piece of advice I can give someone similar to Twitter is just, just do it, get engaged into it. Stop worrying about whether you're doing it right. Stop asking people for, you know, the perfect advice that, that, you know, not to say you shouldn't ask for advice, get out and ask people. But a lot of people use that as a way to just not try it and do it, and like start making Tik Toks, start posting things on onto the page, and really get to know and get to understand the platform. And, and I would light up a marketing campaign as fast as you possibly can for anything. It could be for your local, you know, your favorite local restaurant or a non-profit you like, like there's anything you can do to get, to start to trying it and doing it because like anything, every iteration you're going to get 10 X better, especially in the beginning. And, and, you know, that would be kind of the approach. I think the other thing I would do is like, build a lot of relationships in and around the platform. That was a big thing for us, including with the platform itself. So people who work at Tik Tok, you know, Tik Tok, the employees and the culture is it's a pretty hungry culture and it's a much more commercial culture than Facebook was. You know, when we work with Facebook channel 11 years ago, we used to joke that it was like a nonprofit. Like they really didn't in the early, early days pre pre going public. Facebook does not care about being about making money. It was just not a priority for them. That changed obviously, but so I would, I would get to know people in and around, you know, the ecosystem of, of a company like Tik Tok, and then obviously specific to Tik Tok, just more tactically, like the creative and the format of video is so different than anything else that's out there right now. That part of just doing it as you're going to really learn what it takes to create and make something like that. And the scale required to do that, which is you know, I think there's going to be a whole ecosystem of companies built around Tik Tok. When we, Gateway X as a venture studios that we're incubating and thinking of ideas all the time and in the last month is getting to know Tik Tok. We've had like five specific ideas. Like there should be a, a non Royal non-licensed not royalty free music marketplace. You know, I'm sure there is something like this, but like it's made for Tik Tok it's various, the sounds are very specific to Tik Tok sounds, but it's like super easy to use. And just makes it really easy to produce a bunch of these Tik Toks. Like there's gonna be so many ideas ecosystem wise around just like that have been around Facebook in the last 10 years. Watson: And one thing I've heard you talk about before is this opportunity with Gateway, which is kind of a new endeavor for you is really a chance to kind of get back to your roots. Building new companies focused on the direct to consumer space, leveraging all of your past experiences in running this performance marketing campaigns. Can you just kinda give us a 360 view of the entity that you're building right now? Pujji: Yeah yeah. Sure. So, you know, Gateway X is sort of a venture studio, a unique spin on a venture studio, you know, and there's kind of a few different, the threads of fabric that tie together, you know, one is the 10 years I spent building and scaling Ampush where I worked with, you know, tons of direct to consumer brands, tons of entrepreneurs, really helping them grow and scale customer acquisition. And the other one is like really a ton of personal work. I've done inner work, I'd say around what I truly love and what sort of, you know, what my purpose is, what I want to build, where I get my, my energy from. And kind of putting, bringing them together. You know, it's like, I love, I love coaching, teaching, helping other people learn and grow. And that's the thing where I can put my, when I put my energy towards that, I tend to be at my best. And it turns out entrepreneurship is like a great canvas for personal development and growth. You know, you started a business, you know that, you know that the lessons you're learning, how much you're changing and evolving as a person. And so I was kind of like, we're going to, what kind of, what would a business look like? Where that's how I help people learn and grow by a building businesses. You know, and I also got to do all the fun, strategic work of building and scaling businesses. Let me also leverage the knowledge I have from Ampush and customer acquisition. And that's kind of what the Genesis of Gateway X was or is, and, and what we're doing. That's, you know, it's, so it's a venture studio we're launching both, direct to consumer brands, which sort of leverages my knowledge of that and customer acquisition. Then we're also launching. What I'll call broadly as like, direct to consumer enablement companies. So both SAS and services. So either software or services that sell to the brands themselves. So that's kind of a, the mandate. We're looking for ideas that are sort of between the mom and pop and that you know, the venture scale. So part of what we believe is there's a ton of ideas and a ton of room to build. Profitable five, 10, $20 million EBITDA type businesses, but you can do that over a five or 10 year horizon. You don't have to be a billion dollar unicorn in three years, or you're a failure sort of mindset. And then over time we can kind of amass a portfolio of those that we build and, and those that we scale. And so this year, you know, by the end of this year, we'll have launched four companies, two on the brand side and then two on the enablement side. So the brand, the two brands one's called “Poo Phoria”. And “Poo Phoria” is that fun feeling, you get after you take a number two. We built that tried to scale it. I can go into the details. Ultimately it's sort of on maintenance mode now for like, a variety of reasons. And we're launching a V2, literally next week called Unbloat, which is a much better product, more of a pill, less of a powder. And it's really targeted towards a specific demo of like 40 to 60 year old women. And we found like a very underserved category there. The word bloating is searched as often as the word hair loss. And yet there's like very few products on the market for bloating and a ton as we all know for related to hair loss. So we're really excited about that. It launches next week. It's the URLs unbloat.me. And then we have two other businesses. One is called Growth Assistant and Growth Assistant is a really, you know, kind of a fun idea. It's, it's basically, a place where entrepreneurs can get a trained, you know, support type growth marketer. So someone who can you know, help you set up your campaigns or run the emails or look at you or your URL codes or format creative. They're not a strategy person and they're in the Philippines and they're $2,500 a month. So it's kind of that entry-level junior marketing person, but offshore, and that business has been growing like gangbusters. And then the fourth one is a software business called Kahani and Kahani means story in Hindi. And we're basically building a software where your e-commerce store will have its own stories, the way Instagram has stories, and you can tap on them and you can interact with them. And, and they're gonna, you know, they're driving up conversion and engagement, very meaningfully, for the swords we're testing on right now. And we're, I'm like really, really excited, And like I think, starting an e-commerce, but I think every website could have our product on it and stories, you know, can be everywhere on the mobile experience. Watson: Right on. So we've covered a couple entrepreneurs like yours, which is partially a story of having some success and having that compound, but really being in this space where you can not be completely like spread thin to the point that you can't really give the best of yourself to anything, but really travel a couple paths and kind of leverage the expertise and skill that you've developed to the max and Marshall Haas to, we, we just had on the show, like literally also has a company called Support Shepherd. That is a similar premise of leveraging international talent in order to, you know, be able to kind of fulfill some of these needs. I'm really curious] if you could articulate what you've learned, since launching Gateway, which is once again, a relatively new endeavor about managing energy, managing focus because despite your experience and the ability to, you know, hopefully leverages us against us as many business entities as possible, there's still, you know, skills of delegation, skills of just understanding your own mind so that your not just kind of jumping from thing to thing, but really putting all your weight behind that which you're focusing on. Pujji: Yeah. Yeah. It's such a great question. I mean, you know, the context switching is hard. You know, and it's like, when I, you know, I remember as through the Ambush experience, helping people level up and someone who would go from a individual contributor to kind of a half manager to then a full-time executive over five, six years and the executive switch, everyone would go, wow, the context switching! You know, and even within a company, an executive has to go from motivating their team one minute to fighting with a bill, maybe with a client the next minute to then selling the company in a recruiting meetings or even the normal job for a single company, CEO. My context switching is challenging and, and, you know, in the world I'm living in it's, it's hard. So I don't want to make it sound easy nor do I want to make it sound like I don't, this might not work, right? Like, I, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing for say, like, I don't have a master grand master plan, that I know exactly what's going to happen and what's going to work. But, but I think some of the things I try, that have helped me, you know, one is like really knowing where my strengths are and, and where I bring the, you know, bring the value and where I don’t. And so, you know, I bring value in some of the like marketing ideas and creativity around that. I bring, bring value in problem solving in a resourceful fashion. So if we can't figure out how to get something done, helping think through how we may get that thing done, I bring value with my network and being able to help solve problems that way. I bring value, by being, you know, helping make decisions when people are stuck. But I'm not like, you know, I'm not a great product manager. You know, I'm not good at inventory logistics. I'm not great at necessarily even keeping trains running on time, like, you know, in an operations context. And so those are some of the, you know, hiring great people around me and being very conscious of those things as, as created a lot of made, it made a lot of value right? And, and, and so I try to only spend my time on the things that I think I'm going to add a lot of value and typically the things that are going to give me energy back that I enjoy doing. Because those are kind of where I'm at my best. So that's one big one, you know, there's a ton of tactical stuff. Like I meditate every day or almost every day. I also, like when I when I go into meetings, I usually spend the first minute or two with the team getting present in some way. Okay. Let's just close our eyes guys. And like, I'm sorry, like, you may not need this, but I need four breaths. Like, I need to kind of like, forget what I was just doing, and I need to come here and remember, okay, this is, was just talking about how we're going to run ads on Tik Toks for this brand. And now we're going to talk about this bug that's in our software that we're trying to ship and it's like, holy shit, these are, they couldn't be more different. And even the tool belt I need to pull out. So getting present is a really big one for me. And I, sometimes it's breathing sometimes it's like, let's do some jumping jacks, like whatever it is just to kinda create some switch between the two things that I'm doing. You know, I'm really good at email, you know, it's like, it's, that sounds so stupid, but it's such a big thing. Like my inbox ends at zero every single day and that's just like, it helps me triage everything, you know, what's going on, how's it going on? Where, what needs my attention, what doesn't need my attention and knowing kind of, you know, again, I don't think I'm great. I think I'm like probably C plus or B minus at it still, but better than a lot of people, which is like knowing when to get deep, and when to kind of pull back and let things kind of unfold a little bit and like, just getting good at that. Watson: Are you superhuman, do you batch, like what, what's your strategy? Pujji: I use superhuman. I love superhuman. But I was, I've been doing this many, many years prior to superhuman existing. Like there's a, if you Google, there's like some 2013 article that has, like, I had like seven softwares that were all doing pieces of what superhuman does today. And I had like mixed them all up together. Watson: So you were like squarely there early days target demo. Pujji: You know, because I, I never wanted to be the bottleneck for someone to get something done. And I also didn't want to, like, you know, I always tell early again, new leaders, like, man, there's money in your inbox. You know, like it's so the idea that you haven't seen the email yet. And I think part of the, part of my method and my approach is I want to see everything. Once I've seen everything, then I can triage and manage how I want to do it. It doesn't mean I do everything in that moment, but I want to see everything. So I, you know, probably two or three times a day, I triaged down to zero. Watson: Well, there's a book called frenemies. That was about some of the like biggest agencies in the entire world. And I'm blanking on which specific character it was. But just an anecdote that always stuck with me was that the, the head of it was notorious for always replying. Like people would email him at eight and like, they'd hear back promptly, that you know, or whatever the thing may be. And, you know, one, one interpretation of that, which is completely valid is I don't want to live like that, that ain't for me. But the other, you know, notion of like how plugged in someone who built one of the biggest agencies in the world had to be in order to reach that level. I'm sure he found all sorts of money in his inbox, super promptly before other people. And you know, you kind of have that, that similar background and I also want to push back, you know, I appreciate the humility. I don't know if the, you know, this Gateway X thing is going to work yet. But the, you have a framework, or at least I would say probably some mentors and other kinds of models that you could pull from, which is, the, your past company Ampush that you built, sold to a company called Red Ventures, which is another kind of holding company that's figured out how to, you know, do the culture and the spin-out and the acquisition thing really effectively. And, and there are company that, you know, most, most people have actually probably come into contact with without knowing it, right. Seeing that and the points guy and lonely planet and all these other entities that they own. So can you just talk a little bit about what you've taken from them, particularly as a holding company that can accomplish such growth and scale, kinda behind the scenes. Pujji: Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you asked about that. You know, they they bought a minority interest in Ampush actually. They didn't acquire the whole company. They're amazing partners. And part of the reason I think I've gotten more humble is meeting them. Like I, you know, I like when I was 30 years old and Ampush was all, I had only grown and scaled, I was like, yeah, I'm going to like eight out of 10, nine out of 10 entrepreneur. And then I met these guys and Rick in particular, their founder and CEO is a dear friend and mentor to me. And I was like, holy shit. I'm like a 4 out of 10. Like this guy, this guy is playing six dimensional chess in, in five minutes. And it's only the two would take me a day, you know? Like, and so that's kind of important, right? It's like constantly seeing that there's levels to it. Not, not just like yourself out or to make yourself feel less than, but to actually just like, keep, keep yourself humble and also keep learning. And so, yeah, like, man, there's so many things I could tell you about how amazing there is, but I think the, Some of the things, you know, they have a very singular culture. And, and, you know, all the great companies do McKinsey, does Facebook does. And, and what that means is not, you know, it's not a certain type of person. There's all kinds of different people there, but there are certain things that really come to the top in their business right? So, you know, in their case, they're, they're very action oriented. They're very focused on the bottom line, not the top line. They're really strong, like quantitatively rigorous and oriented around numbers. Everything's oriented around numbers and they're really nimble with how they move people around and and they move anything around. Like they have, Rick has one of his, one of his many beliefs is everything's written in pencil, you know? And it's like, anything could be erased, anything can be changed. And, you know, there's one thing to say that he lives that. I mean, they, they would acquire businesses and, and re–, you know, restaff a hundred people from one project going on in their company overnight to another, to another business. And, you know, if any, if you were me tried to do that, it would not work because, because you have to have people and a culture and an orientation that has that level of nimbleness in them. And so they've really just built that as a, as a, you know, very they're very decisive, at every level. And you know, they, they also, they're really big on this. I think there's companies like Disney and others who were really big, like their executives do not manage people or like, you know, not to say that they're, they're very compassionate and about people and culture. And that sense, but they don't manage people. They don't like, if you think about the traditional executive, it's like, I'm the VP of this group. I have my five directors and each director does X, Y, and Z. They're at, from top to bottom from Rick all the way to the most junior person. Everybody manages the business. And what I mean by that is the metrics, the numbers, what drives, outcome, what's going to make it grow and scale. And so if you talk to a very senior executive at Red Ventures, they would know the click-through rates of their business. They would know how much the one click through rate needs to improve for, you know, their Facebook channel or something like that for X, Y, and Z to happen. They'd probably know the top creatives in a campaign and there, they might be running a nine figure EBITDA business, right? So there's huge businesses and that's how dialed in from top to bottom. Everybody is in the business. And that's a really unique, so it's not that they, you know, they're not always operating there, but they can go down to the bone whenever they need to go to the bone and remind me of like, I can give you a specific anecdote, not unrelated. I met the president of Disney plus a couple of years ago. No, its Michael Paul and, and you know, the guy who manages 1300 people, this huge operations a few years ago. And, and he liked had a very in-depth toe to toe conversation with me about Facebook attributes shit. And I was pretty blown away. Right. Because here I am, I'm like, this is like, I spent a lot of time talking to you about this. This is like one tiny part of this huge business, but it was just showed the level of depth that he was able to operate at when he needed to. Watson: That's awesome. So one of my things I always love with podcasts or I is a pet peeve that we're not going to fall for here is when someone says, oh, I could go on and on and on with that since you did a great job there, but I want to just push a little bit more on, on the lessons from red ventures and you watch the show succession. So I think part of the reason people like a show like that is because they feel like they're getting a little bit of the taste of the quote-unquote six dimensional chess, that one plays at those high-level executive levels. You don't have to refer it to succession necessarily, but when you say that, you know, this executive completely gets it in five minutes, would take you a data. Understand, like, can you, can you just make that a little bit more legible for people who might aspire to be able to process things that way, but don't necessarily have a, a tangible example outside of a show like that on HBL. Pujji: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know exactly how he does it because if he, if I did, I would do it too, and I'm not there yet. I, you know, I'll give you an example of, of a common, I'll give you a really cool example, actually. So at red ventures, somewhat organically, there's this thing they they're, they're pretty famous for called business reviews and every company does business reviews, but theirs are a little bit different. They're no longer than 15 minutes. There are less than three slides. So you bring in more than three slides. Someone's going to talk to you. And, and they will sit down for a day and they will have 16 business reviews or no, not even more than that 20 business reviews. So you walk in and it started by obviously just meeting with Rick and the management team, and then maybe a VP level or director level comment. Hey, here's what I'm planning on doing. Here's what I think we can grow. And then Rick had this idea. He said, you know what, Like, why don't we show the whole company, how we make decisions. So then he just made this a completely public meeting. And so now it's like, it's like a 500 person meeting. It happens once every, you know, four to six months, depending on the cadence of their business. And. You know, you, you, you come in and you basically in within 15 minutes, you'll bring your top problems. What's going to generate the most incremental dollars in terms of EBITDA profit. And you'll, you'll square off, you know, and to have a conversation with Rick about it and, and really Rick and the team. And, and Hey, I don't think this is a good idea. Like, I think you're missing something. I think you need, like, give that CEO a call and really talk through these different issues with them or the pricing model that you're leveraging on Healthline.com. I think you're missing that we could be charging more based on lifetime value, not based on CPA. And that's the, I mean, they're, they're really deep. And, but they're very fast and very decisive and they walk away with clear decision-making. So that's like an artifact. Now I saw that, you know, and I'm a young, eager CEO. This was maybe when they first invested four or five years ago. And I go, we're going to do business reviews also, of course right? Like, and it turns out you can't microwave that kinda thing, like I tried it, I said, okay, three months, guys. I want you all to walk in and you have 15 minutes. And, and you know, my team gave an amazing effort, but you know, they didn't know what issues, matter. And I realized, I didn't know certain things about the, about their, their different client situations or different parts of the business that what was driving, what, and it ended up becoming kind of like a dog and pony sort of like, we didn't actually make any real decisions in the meeting because I like, I wasn't up to speed enough or they, they, they brought up three issues. I go, this is just I'll you the important ones. What about the fact that the client, you know, the new CMO in, in place? And so it, you know, we, and we tried it probably for two years straight. And eventually we, you know, it still exists, but we pared it down pretty dramatically and we focused a little bit more on learning, but it just wasn't, this is a great example of something that man, you see that that's culture. Like we tried to, we literally, I got to attend them at red ventures. I was there. Like so I got full access to them. I got to see what they were like. And I tried to replicate them my own organization and I wasn't successful. So that's like that's culture, right? That's something you can't just microwave from someone. But it's a really cool example of, of the dynamicism that exists there. Watson: Absolutely. And it seems like that would just be such a powerful tool for you know, Almost implicitly, like training up your team, because if they're watching all these different pitches and they're getting, like, I always think about it, my mental reps, right. You know, when, when I'm on the field near, I used to play ultimate Frisbee when I'm on the field with like the very best throwers who just see the field differently. You start to see the field in a different way. And you know, maybe not every person in their 4,500 person organization can, you know, make every single decision, obviously not, but they start to at least kind of comprehend the bigger picture outside of their maybe small domain that they're working in. Pujji: Yeah Totally. And, and like, Rick has a, you know, one of his, again, many beliefs, like, you know, he, he wants everything that he is going to underwrite or take on to be a three four. Right. And so it's like, and one of the, you know, the behind that is like a common business mistake is like “Well, we can either go for a profit or growth” and, and he's very wise and he goes, well, wait, why is it an either, or why don't I only, I only have a certain amount of time in the day. So why don't I only do the things that are going to be both be profitable and help me grow, because I only have time for three initiatives at any given moment anyway, but then his three, four thing is a double is even more of that, which is anything that he takes on. He wants it to have like three, three sort of value adds, right? So in this case, it's like he learns more about his own business units and what's going on. He gets like you know, to make decisions with those executives and a very fast, and then people get to learn and see how the whole group thinks about things and how they think about business. So that's like a, it's a cool example of a three for those businesses profusely. The going deep podcast is underwritten by Piper creative. Shooting, editing and publishing quality content is overwhelming. We make it easy. So you can save time, build your brand and grow faster. Say hello at pipercreative.co. Watson: Well, you said earlier in that, that, you know, you, you were humbled, you were 30 years old or so thinking you're pretty hot stuff because of the success that you would accomplish. And, when I was prepping for this interview, I was talking with my wife about how around 2015, 2016, you guys managed $350 million worth of ad spend, which I can understand why one would think that they were pretty hot stuff after, you know, building a business to that, to be a scale. And working with companies like Dollar shave club, Peloton, Uber, Hulu, Birchbox, what have you, Can you tell me, I think our actual exact words were I'm sweating. Just thinking about that. So, so tell, tell me about the process of, you know, when you were sweating that stuff and then what it took to not necessarily be sweating when you saw that amount of number running through your business. Pujji: Yeah. I mean, you know, honestly, that, that it's a good question. Like I was definitely, it was probably more than 350, by the way, but I was, I was, I was like definitely the frog in boiling water. So I didn't, I don't ever remember waking. I do remember there was a couple of moments I remember with my co-founder Nick. We'd look at, we looked at when payroll and at one point payroll hit a million and a half dollars and we said, holy shit, that's a lot of money to be paying in payroll right? Like, so I do remember there were certain moments like that, that were the kind of sweaty moments, but in general, the spend, it never, you know, it started at zero. Obviously we had two or three clients, those clients grew to 10 million in spend and, and then we added more and then, you know, I'll tell you like, I’ll tell you what I think, where I think we got lucky. And obviously I'll tell you like, I’ll tell you where I think what we did really well, you know, where, where we got lucky was like, Hey, well, what we did well was we put ourselves in the game and that's really important for every entrepreneur got to get in the game. Right. Because I was working at Goldman Sachs and I remember very specifically telling my, my co-founders. We're never going to come up with the next great idea. Sitting, working on our desks here. We're just too far from what's happening. So let's go get in the game. So we got in the game, we were not doing Facebook marketing to start. We were doing random affiliate search marketing stuff that we had no idea what we were doing. And we were in the right place. Therefore, because of that decision, what, where we got lucky was Facebook, it launched and we were like, they're ready to pounce on it. Right. And that was kind of a lucky stroke. And then kind of the second or third lucky thing was. You know, we, the fact that Uber did business with us or dollar shave club did business or Supercell was not because we were anything special. It was because there was like four companies who knew how to do Facebook ads. We were one of them. And so they talked to us, right? And, and we, you know, we sold them and all that stuff. What we did really well was we were really good at hiring bright people and investing in training. And, and so, so what happened was once we were, did start working with us to go, wow, these people. We would like to hire these people. They're really smart people and they're doing a great job at campaign management and communication. And so we actually got just really good at scaling by hiring people who had no background in marketing or advertising and training them in how to do that. That was the thing that we did really well that allowed us to continue with these Mega companies and help them scale and grow their customer acquisition. Watson: And, and from a decision-making framework from the standpoint of these clients, I think that something, someone who's in a kind of more novice position would say to themselves, well, Uber raised all that money or Peloton saw their, you know, market cap skyrocket. So they can, you know, issue all sorts of equity grants to potential people that they could bring in house. What is it that as a, as a service provider, Keeps you relevant? Is it as simple as like, Hey, when they spend money with us, they end up making more money or like, are there other elements that you've learned from like, from being a client service provider that keeps you relevant to these companies as they go from, you know, seedling series A to some of the Goliath of our modern economy? Pujji: Yeah. I mean, well, but some of it is, is honestly like Ampush has gotten really good at particularly supporting the S curve and then oftentimes. When they do exit or they're gonna to exit, they'll take it in house or they'll change the way they're approaching it. So it's not that, you know, I, I think we fought that for a long time and we did come up with a bunch of ways that have worked many of them to making us stickier and better. But a lot of it was also just realizing that, you know, there are, there's a natural cadence of some of those things that, that you have to sort of be okay with and be prepared for. I think the biggest thing, you know, by far is performance. You know, and, and relate to that as growth, like good, good, good economics and growth. And it's like, if you can keep delivering more and more results, like anything, no one’s gonna, no one's gonna press on that or push on that, right? I think the second one is, you know, relationships, which is like, if you know the right, like, Uber's a great example where, you know, we scaled all of Uber's driver acquisition in North America, and then they go, okay, you know, we've worked for you guys for three years. We're going to take that in house. Like that's a natural part of our evolution. And they said, but we're going to give you guys international, and international is three times of US, right? And it was like, well, we have relationships, right? Like, and, and we, like, that was a way we could actually scale the business because even though all literally North America was going in house, like we were getting international and that was plenty for us to eat and spend time building. And I think the third one that that's probably the most interesting for a service provider is data and insights. You know, that's the one thing we do have that, that no individual client will ever have, which is we can share what's happening across the board. What are different areas that are popping up? Why, why are we seeing closer to the problems than they are? Innovating new channels, like Tik Tok, just to because we have that market knowledge and Intel, that's a really powerful thing. Watson: Right on. All right. I've got five relatively quick hits here. And then we'll aim towards asking our standard last questions. These are probably the most selfish ones. I'm the whole thing selfish, because I get to talk to smart people. Same thing. Like you said, you like being around other people that are operating at a higher level. Poo-phoria and the pivot to unbloat. Can you just take us through. Cause you know, it's always, Hey, we accomplish this, we knocked this out of the park, whatever. You were very candid already with one of the failures in terms of getting that, like 15 minute presentation thing implemented in your company, but the original idea wasn't quite landing. Can you just take us through like the, Hey, you know, you just need to stick it out versus we kinda need to pivot. We can need to let you know, release that tight grip on the idea that we had so that we can go grab a better idea. Pujji: Yeah. Yeah. It was a tough one. You know, it, the, what was, what went well about it? Was it, again, it got me in the game and it, I had never built a brand. So I wanted to do the things that I wanted to get a Shopify site up and I wanted to get inventory and I wanted to get a three PL obviously I know the growth part really well, but I didn't know all those other pieces of it. And that, and that sense was super helpful. It sort of taught me the limits of performance marketing because I was literally like, man, With a good, you know, funny brand name and some click clicky ads, you know? We're going to charge a premium to these relatively commoditized supplements. And like, it didn't work. Our conversion rate almost never got beyond one and a half percent. And so, you know, I think the decision was, was a few fold. You know, we learned a lot about our customers through the process of launching Poo-phoria and, and we realized that the brand name and the brand was not appealing to them. It was like me being silly and, and thinking that could be funny, but it turns out 75% of our customers were women and women were the most interested in things that help their digestive track. Men were not all that interested. And so it was like, well, this name just didn't appeal to women, even though a lot of women would come to it. And that was kind of the customer thing. So that was a good learning. One of the skews we had was a fiber product and it was expensive to ship. It was like our margins were lower and retention and returns are horrendous. Like 10% return rate retention would fall off after three or four months. And, and meanwhile, when people bought just our probiotic, which is like our afterthought product, pretension was amazing. Nobody ever complained about it and the economics were better. So we were like, oh, that's interesting. And then I think the third one was like, we got really specific about a customer and a pain point in a way that Poo-Phoria was just like everyone poops, everyone could do better. Like, it just, it was very soft when it came to. Whereas what we heard this code word from women. Which is like, I don't like the word poop. Like I, well, how do I think about what bloated? I don't like being bloating. I don't like, you know, that's like not a happy feeling and that there's a lot of emotional and sort of physical things tied to that, that feeling. And it was funny cause this really came bottom up from, from running in and then we validated top-down by going wait, tons of people are searching this term. That seems like a, you know, there's one third of women have it, like there's, there's something to this. And then we realized that there was an opportunity with our, you know, our, our manufacture. To build a product that nobody else out on the market and, and our product specifically was like a probiotic, but it included special all the like special digestive enzymes. Like, you know, you have lactose intolerance, but you'll have other intolerances, a bunch of natural stuff, magnesium. So we were able to put together a product that wasn't there. And so I think it was a bunch of it, it was the economics was the marketing, the brand name was who we went after specifically. And then it was like improving the product. And so I think it was all those things kind of. So I think when there was enough things wrong that let us quit versus keep going. Kind of answer your bottom line, your, your answer, right? Like we, we push, we pushed for like four or five months. We tried a lot of different Hail Mary's a lot of big swings. We could not move the conversion rate despite everything I know. And I've seen, I've doubled in triple conversion rates for clients. I've seen a lot of that. And at some point you got to go, it's something very fundamental to this. It's the brand, it's the product, some, you know, combination thereof. And if we're going to iterate the product, let's say the brand's not that hard to iterate. Let's just iterate the whole brand. Watson: Well, that's, I'm sure it wasn't cheap, but that is a really helpful kind of framework for how to troubleshoot something like that. The, the next thing I wanted to ask about was you've really, started hitting, hitting the Twitter threads hard. And I think it's, it's been working for you. So just in terms of what you've learned in terms of writing Twitter threads with consistency, getting them to be, you know, shared engagement, whatever. I've seen the pomp Leon owes bro, blow up with him and you seem to be in a similar type of a trajectory. Pujji: Yeah. I just copied what they did, honestly. No, yeah, I think, I think a couple learnings on Twitter, I'd say the first one is I would not start by writing threads. That's like one of the first things I tell people, it's a little bit of the tree falling in the forest thing. You know, like if you have 200 followers or even a thousand followers and you start writing threads, It's just a, there's no one there to hear, you know, the tree falls sort of thing. And so I advise people, you know, really build up yourself to probably two to 3000 by. You know, engaging with the community, like you see a cool thread and you see someone saying something about something, you know, about like, this is how I started. I was like, well, like here's a, here's an example of a data point. We found that it's contrary to what you're saying. Or here's something that we also learned that I would add to this, like open up DMS, start DM-ing people like really get to be part of that community. So that there's a bunch of people who, who, Who are following you because they've, they seen, you seen, seen you say smart things and like what you're talking about, then I would try a couple of single tweet type things just to say, like my idea stick. And then I would probably start writing threads and I would obviously, you know, the way I did it was most of my threads to start were all just very personal. Here's a story about Ampush almost failed in the beginning. Here's the story of an M and a situation we were in. And I, you know, I, I, in order to do that, I sort of followed. What I saw other people's formats and what they were doing. Like I didn't reinvent the wheel there. Obviously there some art to writing something that's kind of gets, gets people emotional and gets the curiosity. And that's a, a real art. Watson: But those principles of copywriting were probably also what you were using with some of these Facebook ads, right? Like it's not that in terms of stimulating actions, stimulating interest. Pujji: Yeah. I get attention generate curiosity, you know, there's the influence principles, social proof feel that like, there, there there's some, and maybe it's so innate. I don't even realize what it's like. Yeah. Why is the, one of the first threads I wrote was like. Setting up the situation for the beginning of Ampush and we almost fail or we had failed, we thought we were over it and everyone goes, oh my God, I want to read this. Right. And they want to get into it. Or like, you know, one of the other first ones was like the biggest mistake I see people make is X. I'm going to unpack it now. And you're, you know, people are getting curious about it. So I think those things matter. And then, you know, the, the thing I do every week now is I write a bootstrap giant. And it's probably one of the more fun things, because I love learning about these stories. Like I love, You know, we've got one coming out tomorrow. That's like such a cool story. It's so inspiring for me. It's so energizing for me. And, and then, you know, when I write it, people love them and, and it was, everyone goes, oh, that's such a good idea. And I was like, Did you like, where'd you come up with that? And it's so funny. Cause I'm like, I knew I liked those stories. Like I love how I built this. I particularly love when it's bootstrap, because I feel like there's just, it's kind of a certain richness texture to it. But the first one I started, I was like, I love these stories. Let me just write one and see what happened. And the first one I wrote, it was insane. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna try another one. Like, and that I did not have a master plan of like starting to write those. It just sort of, it came through me now. Watson: Well that perfectly leads into my third of, of the last five here, which is in my opinion, the most intriguing of the threads that you've written, because I have a four month old daughter and I am not getting enough sleep. So for the good people listening and selfishly for me, can you talk about teaching children to sleep when they're very young? Pujji: Have you read the thread? Watson: I have. Pujji: Okay. I'm not think to tell you anything new. I mean, so, so I've had this conversation a lot, you know, when you talk to new parents and, and what I observed in the world when I talked to parents was how has being a parent and the degree to which they said most amazing thing in my life versus whoo. You know, no parents says it sucks, but they’ll say this is really tough. Of course it's worth it, but it's tough. And I'm not really, you know, and I miss my old life and like, there's this big variance in people's response. And there were basically three variables. I, I noted that. I thought correlated strongly with that. The first one was baby. Does your, does your kids sleep? Which means do you sleep is the most important one I think? The second one was, do you have some sense, some form of, of ample childcare, your parents live nearby. If a babysitter I'll pair, whatever. And the third one was like alignment with your spouse. You know, what do you do when X happens? How in sync are you two working together? So I want to talk about number two, number three, but number one was like, everyone's like, well, no, there's two ways to make a baby sleep. One way is, is you wait until they're five or six months old or four months old. You leave them at all night to cry and they'll learn. And I said, oh my gosh. I mean, people do that. I can never do that. You know, my wife could never do that. So that was not going to work for us. The other one I heard was you coddle them because eventually they'll grow up and you'll sleep on their own. And, you know, we were both like, ah, that's also like not cuddle, meaning they sleep in your bed. If they need anything, you grab them so on and so forth. And so me being an entrepreneur and somewhat defiant, I thought that can't be true. Like I don't believe it. I just don't believe that's true. And so I went on this whole journey. Trying to disprove that those are the only two ways. Then it turns out there is a third way and I'm not the inventor of it. Or like I just, I read a bunch of books and discovered in sort of synthesized what the, I think the major parts of it are. So what those parts are the first one that's the most non-intuitive is this concept of awake time. And so I'll have parents, like you have a form of goal to go, Jessie, my kid's not sleeping. And my wife and I will immediately start asking them about their nap schedule. Why asked me what to ask you? How do you want me, baby? Don't see him and go, oh, the first thing you have to pay attention to is How long has your newborn awake, and in between their sleep periods and, and the reason that's important is, and, and the heuristic by the way, is 60 minutes of, of awake time when you're born and it grows by 15 minutes for every month they're alive. So your baby shouldn't be awake for more than two hours. That's the bookends at any given moment. And the reason is because, you know, whenever you've done an all nightter. You've done all nighters. I assume I've done all nighters. Like, there's that like 2:00 AM second wind you got. And you're like, you were tired and all of a sudden you're like, nah, I'm ready. Let's go another few hours. Right. And that's actually your body. Your body's like, oh my God, this person's still awake. They shouldn't be awake. They must be in a fight or flight situation. Let me give them adrenaline. So your body just releases adrenaline to your body. That happens to a newborn at like 65 minutes of awake. And so a baby will be awake and they'll build, look sleepy for a second. And then they'll like, look, all giddy and happy. And it turns, it turns out, they're getting adrenaline in their body, which makes them harder to put to sleep, which means they sleep less. And that compounds in a really negative way. And so the best advice is like, it's like, like we would be super anal about it as like 45 minutes, put the kid back to sleep. And I, my parents thought I was nuts until they were like, oh my God, you're six months old. You know, we went on a cross, cross worlds flight to Australia and my son slept through the whole flight and my parents were like, What kind of food do you know, are you guys doing, and so, that's a wait time is by far the number one, the second one is like all the five asses, which I'm sure, you know, just like there's this whole book called Happiest Baby on the Block. The biggest of the 5s there. My kids are six and four. Now they're like a swing, stock, which is the pacifier, shush, which is the most important one. What's the blanket thing called. Swaddle, thank you. And then something else I can't remember, but the shushing, like it apparently in the womb, it's the sound of a vacuum cleaner. That's how loud it is in the womb for the baby. So they're like any kind of like hairdryer noise or rain sound. The hairdryer noise is the best for a newborn really loud. And then there's a bunch of other things like routines getting them into like, it's funny by the way. Cause I have friends. Who didn't follow any of this. And they have five-year-olds and they're still having trouble getting their five-year-olds to go to bed at night and to stay at about at night. And my wife, like, we look our kids even to this day at 8 to 8:30 they're in bed, and they're ready to go. That's just the routine that they're used to. So I could go on forever and ever, but there, there's a bunch of other pieces to the baby sleep stuff. Watson: We'll link happiest baby on the block and that list there. But I can tell you that that has been shared between me and my wife and we are in the earliest stages of, of trying to implement that successfully, because you said in the first couple of months, there's not a ton you can do. It’s chaos. Pujji: First couple of months or whatever, but I think once net, where you guys are at now is a good time to like, get the dream feed, maybe cut the night, feed out, see how the baby responds. If, if he or she is sleeping more than two or three hours stretches. The other thing I'll mention about that, just on that as like there's another like non-intuitive thing, which is nobody sleeps through the night. So like even adults, we wake up every 90 minutes, babies wake up every 45 minutes. And so you're not actually teaching them to sleep all night. You're teaching them to go back to sleep once they've woken up. And once they prove they can do that, even for two hours, three hours, because they wake up every 45 minutes. Then you can, if you remove some of the feeds and stuff, you can usually get them to sleep through the night. Watson: One of the things that's interesting is that the REM cycle is different. The adults have like a four stage REM cycle. And when we're in like REM, which is when the hardcore stuff, that's when we're completely still, and for babies, it's the opposite. They move during REM and they're kind of still during the other part. And so when we were Novices. We didn't know what we were doing. We'd see the baby move. It's like, oh, she must need us. And It's actually no, no, no, no. That is the time to like, let her kind of work it through. So, great, great thread. Another question here. I’m, I'm certain running out of time. So I'm just going to ask one more last and one then we'll, we'll aim our, our, our ask our final questions. I came across you by hearing you on the invest, like the best podcast with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, it is the only, and I've listened to every single episode of that show is the only episode that I've listened to more than twice, just because of the density of information there. So we're going to link that as well for people that want even more insights from Jesse. But now that you guys are in business together, you're building a joint Colossus and doing these business breakdowns as another fantastic show, that I'm sure a lot of our listeners would enjoy. What have you learned from working with Patrick about he, how he approaches the world, his approach to business building and finance and investing and all that? Pujji: Yeah. Yeah. I mean a ton of stuff. Patrick is a great guy. I mean, I think that's in and of itself an interesting learning. He's a, he's a very kind person. He's calm. He's thoughtful. He's just not. In my opinion, he's not the typical like bro tech entrepreneur who is like, oh, you know, in a pound three red bull, like that, he's the opposite of that. And I, you know, I love that about him. You know, there's a few things like he, he's, he's really big on a very open calendar and open kind of exploration. And I think I tended to be, you know, I've gotten better at it by tended to be a pretty calendar person. And I'm not, I'm not a super organized person, but I like, I tend to just use my calendar and he's really good at like leaving day's open. And I thought that's like a really, you know, interesting thing. He's really good at asking questions. And again, I, I'd say my default prior to that was being more of the, you know, I was like, nationals and debate and public Isiah. I'm used to talking and saying things and it was really cool to learn kind of the art of being a listener and asking questions. And I still am really working on that. He is really, you know, I think, again, a person I look up to in terms of he's, he's figured out how to spread himself across a few things and do a great job of that. And show up for the things that he's able to show up for and bring a lot of value to. So that's really another thing I've learned from him. Yeah. Watson: Right on. I mean, it's literally, it'd be always asked me what my favorite show is and invest like the best now business breakdowns has kind of joined that category, but it's just unfair that like that's now free and every other previous generation had like, I don't even know if you'd get that at an MBA. It's like even surpass that in my opinion. Well, this has been fantastic, Jesse. I know that we've taken a lot of your time here. I want to ask the standard last two questions. Let's start off with where people can find you in the digital world. If they want to learn more about Gateway, follow you on Twitter, where can we point them? Pujji: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Twitter J S Pucci P like Peter UJI, and then gateway.xyz as the website for Gateway X. Watson: Perfect. We're gonna link that in the show notes. We're also going to link, all the other accounts that might be relevant and some of the books and stuff that we referenced in the show notes. For this episode, you can find it at goingdeepwithaaron.com slash podcast or in the app where you're probably listening to this right now. But before I let you go, Jesse, I would like to give you the mic one final time to issue an actionable personal challenge to the audience. Pujji: Yeah, sure. I could go a lot of different directions to this, but, I think, what I would challenge everyone to do is just remove the bottom five items on your to-do list. Like whatever's on your shoes right now, pull it out. And just like, I'm not going to do these this week or next week. And instead I'm going to, I'm not going to guilt myself. I'm going to focus on these top three or five that I actually have to focus on, and I'm going to do a better job of that. Watson: I, I am definitely guilty of failing to do that, but it's funny how, when you remove the kind of BS, like seven out of 10 tasks, you get a whole lot better at the top ones. Pujji: Totally, Amen. Watson: Awesome, Jesse, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show. Pujji: Great job. Great having, great being here with you. Watson: We just went deep with Jesse Pooja. Whoever out there has a fantastic day. Thank you so much for listening to the end of my conversation with Jesse Pooja. Just two months ago, we interviewed Marshall Haas who is also developing his own holding company. I think that this is, pretty much the ideal of what most entrepreneurs are aspiring to all sorts of different outlets for their creativity, diversified revenue, income, and profits, and a ton of fun to continue building stuff. So we're going to continue to look for entrepreneurs like these two gentlemen, if you haven't heard the Marshall interview, go check that out and hit subscribe because we'll be talking to more soon. Thanks for listening. Connect with Aaron on Twitter and Instagram @Aaron Watson59. 508 Is BioDiesel the Key to Saving the Environment? w/ Colin Huwyler (Optimus Technologies)12/27/2021 
Colin Huwyler is the CEO of Optimus Technologies, a firm that designs and builds EPA compliant biodiesel conversion systems (“Vector Systems”) with integrated telematics to allow medium and heavy-duty diesel engines to operate on up to 100% biodiesel in temperatures to -20F.
Colin founded the company in 2010 after previously founding Fossil Free Fuel, a renewable fuel company. Optimus Technologies’ Vector System seamlessly integrates with existing engines or as a ship-through option on new commercial vehicle purchases. They focus on the highest efficacy solutions to carbon emissions by focusing on diesel (and biodiesel) over other forms of renewable energy. In this conversation, Colin and Aaron discuss misconceptions about renewable energy, the Optimus Technologies business model, and how Colin retrofitted his old Volkswagen to run on vegetable oil. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Colin Huwyler’s Challenge; Take five minutes and assess your personal energy balance. Connect with Colin Huwyler
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Optimus Technologies Website If you liked this interview, check out our interview w/ Cetin Mericli about self-driving trucks.
Ricky Stanzi is a professor and coach within the GOATA (Greatest Of All Time Athletes) system. GOATA’s goal is to hone in the most effective transfers of energy in the body and make those muscle movements second nature.
Ricky was formerly a football quarterback in the NFL, CFL, and Big Ten. He was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs in the fifth round of the 2011 NFL Draft and played college football at the University of Iowa. Ricky and the GOATA team have studied slow motion video of crawling babies, indigenous tribes, super athletes that avoided non contact injuries, and the 55-60 year old marathon runner who still runs at a high level pain free to develop their system. Now, they’ve built a business helping normal people recode their movements, certifying coaches to use their system, and coaching top athletes pursuing a professional career. In this episode, Ricky and Aaron discuss the origins of the GOATA system, which athletes are the best to study, and quick wins that anyone can implement to improve their movement. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Ricky Stanzi’s Challenge; 1) Get your feet straight, fist width apart, Inside Ankle Bone High. 2) Watch 100 non-contact ACL tear videos on YouTube. Connect with Ricky Stanzi
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Coach Gil GLS_training Load the Bow Youtube GOATAmovement.com Website GOATAcoaches.com Recode225.com GoataShop.com If you liked this interview, check out our interview w/ Dr. Timothy Wong where we discuss seeing patients without insurance, for just $35.
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Stanzi: And so it's people coming together United around the concept of, Hey, I believe in these global laws, like I believe that we were being taught wrong and I believe that there is a right way. And I believe that what I'm seeing on tape watching nature is the truth. So we need a hive of people that are going to make honey.
Watson: What's up everyone. Welcome back to going deeper there in Watson, I am particularly excited about today's episode. I'm excited to drop every new episode you guys, but today's interview with Ricky Stanzi is one of my favorites in a very long time. The former quarterback for the university of Iowa football team is now a trainer and coach focused on movement and physicality. He's part of the GOTA movement, which has rewired and reoriented. A lot of my beliefs about how the body works has already helped me change part of the way I move throughout the day. I think that this will be a substantially mind-expanding episode four. At the end, we talk about some of the Instagram accounts where the go-to guys break down these concepts. I'm going to encourage you to already open up Instagram and go look up G O a T a greatest of all time actions as Ricky will define later in this episode, but just know you're about to catch some absolute fire from my guest. Ricky Stanzi. Watson: Alrighty, Ricky, welcome to the podcast and excited to be talking with you. Thanks for having me man. So I am a son of a Penn state football fan. And so I've been paying attention to the big 10 for, uh, quite a while. So when I first came across GOTA, which is this kind of training philosophy. I first came to it through that lens. And then I realized that I can remember candidly rooting against you guys when you were playing Penn state and the big 10 back in the day. Um, so let's kick things off and try to just play a little bit of connect the dots between being a quarterback at the university of Iowa and now being kind of the, the forefather or leading the thought around a very specific style of training. Stanzi: Yeah. So, you know, 2010, 2011, right around that time is when I'm going into the NFL draft and, and I'm, um, I'm looking to make some changes to my movement patterns, right? Make some changes to my throws. I was kind of starting to tail at the end of 2010 and I, and I knew I needed to make some changes. Physically to compete at that next level NFL level. So I started to kind of look at movement with a little more scrutiny, you know, a little finer tooth comb, try to understand things a little bit more, went to some, some throwing gurus. I actually worked with, um, Tom Martinez, who was Tom Brady's throwing coach since he was a young kid. And, and, you know, I, I bounced around. Different methods really from 2011, all the way until 2018 when I was done and I had just finished, uh, you know, up in Canada and I got cut from, from their team in Calgary at the end of camp for that time period, there was really me like objectively looking at. And trying to figure out it for my own standpoint, just to try to stay on a team because I was struggling. I wasn't playing fast enough. I was having these non-contact, uh, sort of chronic pain injuries and for somebody that's, I was QB three, you know, you're third on the depth chart. So I'm just sitting there not taking a bunch of reps and my body was still falling apart. So. I had a lot of questions about why I wasn't moving the way I wanted to. Why when I try to throw that 10 yard out, I know where I want to go with the ball, but it doesn't seem to take place like it used to what's going on. So I looked at the Pilates, the yoga is I had already been doing Olympic lifting and in that style for my whole. And I started looking into Eastern medicine, Eastern arts, uh, look a little bit closer at Shaolins. I look a little bit closer at martial arts in general, and just trying to get a well-rounded view of, of, of how the body was supposed to move. Like I'm, I'm thinking I'm like, there's got to be a right here. It's gotta be a right and there's gotta be a wrong. And I just kept using that sort of objective lens to stay on a field, to just kind of navigate and comb through these, these modalities. And Nothing works. You know, I can not honestly say I tried all these different methods, all these different concepts and nothing worked and it wasn't until I was cut home, hanging out, knew I wanted to train people because I had just grown to love human movement and just in everything about it and trying to learn about it. But I still wasn't. I didn't have. Map. I didn't have a blueprint to work off of, you know, I'm somebody who is still having back spasms that I've had since eighth grade, when I started to do deadlifts working with the world of trainers. And I'm still having those at age 33. And so I can't fix myself, but I'm supposed to go into a high school and work on people. I'm supposed to go and work with, you know, an aunt or an uncle or somebody that's 50. So there was a lot of questions I had and it finally started to make sense when I got to talk with coach Gilley, Jose Bosch, and in Gary Shuffler. Uh, you know, those, both those guys were on Instagram and that's where I was looking at. Or should I say looking for a couple of key concepts that I'd come across in books? You know, the spinal engine theory, uh, muscles and meridians was a book that talked about resting on the ground. So a lot of things pointing back to how things naturally happen out in nature, closest to the source. And then Gilly was speaking directly to that. He's like we got the slow-motion video. Of the indigenous and they're moving a certain way and we've got the slow-motion video of the crawling baby. We got the slow-motion video of the Michael Jordan, ed Reed, Randy Moss, Simone Biles, Jackie Robinson. We got the slow-motion video of the Ida killings and the hurricane Hawkins. We've also got the video of the. Oh, the non contacts of the people that have chronic pain. And now we're looking at the movement with these new super computers. This is what Gilly did. Was he looked at these supercomputers. I'm kind of segwaying into what GOTA is here and Gilly looked at. The, the movement of those closest to nature and said, what are they doing that we're not? And what he noticed was those four super tribes that I just mentioned, the crawling baby, the indigenous, the decade plus super freak athlete in the 70 plus age groupers, they've got a commonality to them, right? They got an anti-fragile state that they are in because they move a certain way. Conversely, those that are injured, the, the load is the worst of all time actions. They have a pattern that is common to all of them. And it is a fragile pattern. It is a pattern that continually breaks down over and over again. And it looks the same. So the goat has looked the same. The wold is looked the same and Gilly came to this through the sort of the same lens that I came to movement through a lot of. People that we work with from a coaching standpoint, come to it where they're searching. Cause they are hurt. Their body is not working for them and they need answers. Gilly had blown out three levels in his lumbar. So he had blown the disks at three spots and his next step was they were going to try to put a cage in this man. He had gone here like eight or nine doctors, the best in the world, everybody looking at it, they can't fix it. He finally gets his big break when he meets Peter Goss. Phew. And he starts to learn about column building and he starts to get out of pain and he gets decompressed long story short, though, he wants to get back to the things that he loves. He wants to get back to the triathlons. He wants to get back to, you know, golfing every single day. And so there was a movement component that he was missing and until he was able to take that iPad, that's supercomputer and. Take a look at those new Atlanta's videos on YouTube. Take a look at all the ACL shreds, take a look at Michael Jordan walking, watch ed Reed coming out of the title are out of the tunnel. All those pieces together gave really Gilly that, that breakthrough moment where he's like, oh my gosh, there is a right and a wrong, there's a certain way that the body moves and all these concepts that we've come to know through the training world of straight lines. Linear is really the big picture, linear concepts and lifting concepts. They actually speak to encode. The load of behavior. So, you know, long story short, I started in 2010, looking for the truth. Another guy was doing the same thing well before me, and then just kind of through the luck of just trying to objectively find the truth here and knowing that the only objective reality is. I started to follow that path. And that led me to Gilly, which, which led me to go to, I was ready for, and like I tell these guys, my cup was empty. I was ready to see the truth. I'd been a quarterback, my whole life. I love watching slow motion video. So this was a perfect blend for me. And then I just took off running and right after that. Watson: So before we get any further, I want to make sure that we have really tight definitions for people that have never come across GOTA before. So you referenced WOTA, which is kind of the foil to GOTA give us the kind of. Stanzi: So go to greatest of all time actions. WOTA worst of all time actions. So if I'm going to talk about these actions, what I'm really speaking on, and we post this on IgG quite a bit, just to keep it out there in circulation is a global laws of GOTA. So, what we're saying is there are global laws that are across culture all over the world, uh, because we all have the same stuff you got to flood. I got to Flint, we got ankles. We got hips. These are fractals of nature. They work, they just keep populating out. Uh, into the globe land, air and sea hips and spines are everywhere. So, there's a certain way that this body is built to move forward through space. What we're saying is that the default human OS, the way it's designed is to move forward through space. So, the global laws are such that we've got to have straight feet at the base of the column, the column being the sides of the body. So, you have two columns at the base is your foundation. So, this is what we call the pivot point. So, in nature, on the universe, there's these pivot point energy systems like a toroidal tourist, where there's a point and then energy is going to move around that corner. There's a point. And then energy moves around that corner. Like a hurricane, like a tornado, like a swell in the ocean. That same concept is playing out on your side of the body. So, on one side of the body. So, picture just my right side here, as we're were looking at it as I are as left side, as you look at it, as I land that foot is the. So, it's going to anchor and it's going to set up that strong arch that allows the ankle, which is the shin, the thigh, which is the, the hip, the spine and the bicep and the forearm to all open and then close around the top outside corner of the foot. So the first two global laws are, I got to have column building with straight feet, meaning at the base of that column, the foot is straight and the inner ankle bone. Is high. So, if this is my foot and here's my second toe, and this is the inner part of the ankle, we want the inner ankle to be high. We do not want the inside ankle bone to be low, because like I said, there is a pivot point to the system so we can work off the outside corner of the foot, the four-toe crease. If you think about your second toe to your pinky, or we could work off the inside corner of the foot as the pivot point. Now the goal. The global laws of GOTA as seen through the four tribes that they work off the outside corner of the foot. So, their second toe is straight. Their inside ankle bone is high. They're got the pressure here that way, this ankle that is your shin can open in a spiral and then close in a spiral, and then you can reset and do it all over again. And you never create this harmony in the. The load on the other hand has collapsed this arch, whether it be from a bad shoe that closed the toe box from too much sitting that pushed the hips in the front chain or from too many lifting or linear concepts that have now changed the pivot point to the inside of the foot, because much like we have a drive gear on the outside corner of the foot. We also have a reverse gear on the inside corner of the foot and that's for us. So, we have the ability to go into reverse much like a car does, but at the same idea here is that you're not going to drive that car. 80 miles an hour in reverse on the highway, right? You're going to dominate most of your driving with the forward gear with the drive year. So the body is much like that. We want to dominate off the outside corner, not the inside quarter. So what the WOTA is doing different from the GOTA, as they've now collapsed that arch they've now taken the foot and they've opened it and they've split it like this, and they're going to work off the big toe crease. So now that ankle that was sitting up here like this, and it was spiraling out to end it's now. Down in here and it's inside ankle bone low, and it's going to go in to out so calm building, straight foot inside ankle, bone high. And then the next piece here is we gotta be back chain dominant. So I go up to the hip level. We want the hip to play behind the ribs as we move forward through space. Right. So I throw something out the back to move me forward, hip drives back to drive the chest forward. So the haunches are loading and they're, they're securing the spine as I move forward through space. The opposite of that for the Wodo would be front chain dominance. So now they push their hips forward, right? Their chest goes up and back as they try to move forward through space, that hip pushing forward, the chest going up and back. That's your deadlift, that's your lifting and in the neck, your reverse gear. That's your tug of war. That's your you're rowing the boat. You're going backwards. So, you have this, these three basic global laws to start it column building with straight feet inside ankle bone high. I gotta be back chain. And then now I need to create this energy wave. So, I've kind of already touched on this. I'm inside ankle bone. Hi, here's my ankle. So now when I create the energy wave, what I'm saying is that when I put the foot down, when I put the pivot point in the ground, I'm going to load up that column. So I'm going to load up the right side of my body as you're looking at it. And when I do that, the. Pass the open. So as, as the low, so above, so now is the shins opening, the thighs opening, the spines opening, the bicep is opening, and now we have head control. Meaning that, that tracking system, that is my visual engine right here. This, this, these vertebrae right here is going to sit over the. That I've loaded. And then it's going to go ahead and I'm going to release that energy, and then I'm going to start the same process over on the other side. So, the global laws are speaking to this cycle of forward movement. That is our walk run, throw, swing, strike. I love. I leave. I release and I reset. I land, I leave, I release, and I reset. The goal does have a straight foot. The inside ankle bone is high they're in the back chain, the hips behind the rib, the ankle opens in a spiral. The ankle closes in a spiral and the arch never drops throughout the whole process.The WOTA. On the other hand lands inside ankle bone low, they start the shin in, on a spiral and then they spiral it out. The heel releases in the hip thrusts forward, the chest goes up and back. And so they're using that pattern to move them forward through space. Now that WOTA pattern that I just showed you or spoke about, that is the ACL shred. That is the Achilles shred. That is the back spasm. That is the, uh, you know, patellar tendonitis. That is the shin splints. Uh, that is the, you know, the burning pain in your hip. So these symptoms that we've given names to are actually just sort of collateral damage from a faulty pattern. Off of the base blue print that is forward movement that we've observed in those four super tribes, the crawlers, right? The newborn baby, we've got video of babies, fresh out the womb doing these same global laws, the indigenous tribes down in the Western basin of the Amazon, the, the butt-naked barefoot tribes of the Yanomami is in the Karoo bows all move the same way from birth all the way through to the adulthood, these decade plus super freaks that are able to put a lot of this stuff to, to, to, to bed. Start to show the WOTA in their career. And then the 70 plus age groupers, they're all displaying something. That's going to, the people that are injured are displaying something that's WOTA. So the go to is a celebration of the global laws. The WOTA is violating those global laws and that's going to lead to injury. Watson: There's so much, I love about what you, you, you put down just now. I want to make sure that we try to touch on all of it. Um, and I, I want to end with that kind of question on the feet here, but in terms of that pathway, I just want to point out that, you know, we talk very often all sorts of different businesses where there's two ways to approach it. There's, you know, Uh, not necessarily like what's, you know, the, the, the good word from some sort of higher power, but just, you know, someone who is a purported expert kind of telling you like it is, and you just go through the motions without actually really critically evaluating it versus building up from first principles. Like you're saying, you're seeing patterns and connective tissue through all of these basically like aspirational arenas, because all of these characters have low rates of injury, high rates of flexibility, all sorts of good stuff like that. Which I think is a kind of universal principle, but to come back to the feet, um, another, and I don't know if this is you or someone else in the kind of GOTA posting, explain something. And once you see like a, like a really simple meme it's so. Like clarifying. It's like, there's all this kind of chaos and all of a sudden it kind of clicks into place. You're like, oh, I just, why have I never even been told that? Right. Yeah. But, but someone that, there was a post that basically said, uh, you were talking about like the two sides of your foot, the inside and the outside. And it said the front outside of your foot is for propulsion. The front inside of your foot is for balance. And your heel is for resting and that's, you know, an oversimplification, but you just never, unless you had the right coach. You either maintain that because no one coached it out of you as a, as an infant, or you have to relearn how to use your foot. Like this thing that's attached to you 24/7 that you probably never think about but is an engineering Marvel. Stanzi: Yeah. And, and so the concept here is that, so let me start with this. The nervous system is a servant to the enemy. Right. So this is why Chinese foot binding works. Right. It's something that we can do. Should we do it? Probably not. Is it designed to do that? No, but can it sure. So the nervous system's gonna, it's going to obey whatever inputs you're giving it. So when people start to wake up to the GOTA, to the GOTA concepts, they're like, oh shoot. You know, they're probably 25, 30 years old, maybe older, and they're looking down at their feet and they're like, dude, how long have I been walking like this decades? Right. So now I do have to teach my nervous system, the right pattern, because I've let it go into the wrong pattern for long. Whether it be from, like I said, somebody could wear a bad shoe when they're seven years old and spent a summer in it and it can start to change the way that they're using their foot. Just because of the toe box being too tight. Somebody could spend an off-season doing deadlifts and change the outside corner of their foot to the inside corner, the foot, because the nervous system has two. It's environment. That's good news and bad news. Right? It's good news. Because now I can go ahead the other way and I can fix it. It's bad news that you're not aware. You could easily fall into the WOTA trap and you can easily start to get decoded. Um, because you're not aware of these simple concepts or you're getting faulty information, like people telling you to land into your heel. People telling you to push off the big toe. These concepts are out there. They teach you, they call it yield. Hit the heel strike and then toe off the big toe. Well, what that does is it changes the pivot point. So let's say you spend a week at our summer learning from a sprint coach that wants you to heel toe. You're going to put the nervous system into that environment. And it's going to start to change at, GOTA, we just bring you into our environment. That map is off the four tribes and we speak to that. And then people are like, man, the pain's gone. Well. It's like, yeah, you're paying homage to the design. You know, you're not letting your arch collapsed anymore. Arches aren't built. To collapse. It's common sense. Right? So you have that same concept at the base of your foot. Of course, I've got to lift the inside ankle, bone, high, everything slopes to the outside edge. If you work off the inside edge, it's like a cliff, the ankle gets stuck. It's a no bueno situation. Watson: So let's talk to what I would guess is the majority of listeners, which are not necessarily. Pursuing some sort of athletic goal, primarily these, you know, they're, they're running a business. They want to not breakdown. They want to have the energy for the day. They don't want to be in pain, like you're saying, but they're not necessarily pursuing, you know, maybe they want to, you know, get their handicap down from a golf standpoint, but it's not the kind of all-consuming goal. They want to, you know, 80-20 at what are some of the things I can be doing, like wearing the right shoes that will put me in a position. Feel less pain to start to, you know, improve my body and not have a WOTA physique. Stanzi: Yeah. So, and we, we take the same concept for our athletes. So we tell our athletes that the, you know, I would say tier one is what you just said, somebody that's just trying to go through life, work their nine to five, enjoy their family, enjoy their friends, but just never get a knee replacement. Never get a new hip. Never had that foot plantar fasciitis never have a back that keeps spasming. And then there's tier two and tier three, which is your tier twos, probably your weekend warrior. They like the intermurals. They want to go after it's still tier three is you're getting, you're getting paid to play. Even if you're at that top pay to play. I still tell those people up there. Listen, 10% is your training 90% is your lifestyle. Now for this first group that you just mentioned a hundred percent of what they do is inside of that lifestyle. Right? What shoes are you wearing? Pick up a shoe and you go to put it on, is your toe box super tight and clenched. Cause if it is, that's going to change the way that your foot is working. So right off the bat, I would say, give yourself a chance, right? Give yourself a shoe that at least let your foot widen out a little bit. There's some wiggle room with arch or no arch. You shouldn't whether the arch support is there or not. You shouldn't be using it because your foot should be doing that. Actively your foot should be doing the work, not sitting there on a, on a sofa that is an arch support in your shoe. Um, and then, you know, heel elevation can start to play a problem with the tight toolbox, but just making, uh, a good shoe choice is a good start. Outside of that even bigger picture is let's change the way that you move your body. Right? So just putting on a good shoe, isn't enough. You can't just put on a minimalist shoe and start to move GOTA. It's not going to make you stronger. In fact, it'll actually just make your WOTA show itself even quicker. So, what you want to do is you want to start to walk and let's start to talk about these global laws and how can I apply them in my daily life? Well, first off, get your feet underneath. So, we sell people, get, get your feet of fists with distance apart. That means if you're at work, you're standing around the water cooler, you're standing in line at target, whatever you're doing, you're doing dishes. Keep your feet of this with distance apart. Keep your second toe straight. Imagine that your second toe is a laser pointer, and that light is shining to infinity. That light should be shining straight ahead. If that light's deviated like this, you're going to start to. The collapse, you're going to start to invite compression in the system. So just by getting your feet underneath you underneath your hips, because your hips are only sitting like three inches off the midline, they're not far out here. Like people think they're very tight to the spine. Get your feet closer, get your feet straight, second toe. And then that inner ankle bone. Okay. So, it's the inner ankle bone that you can touch and see, you want to lift that thing. Up high, so that now the pressure is working off the outside corner of the foot. Conversely, to inside ankle bone high would be this inside ankle bone low that we talk about. So just by getting your feet closer and straightening them out, you're already kind of on your way to inside ankle bone high, but there's still some work that needs to be done to make sure that this doesn't happen. As you're standing. As you're walking as you're jogging as you're hanging out. And so this inside ankle and high at the base of the column is the first thing that we want people to work on. Now it's more complicated than that, but at least getting the process started can really just, it, we tell people this all the time and people come back that didn't get a Recode or didn't buy it and was like, yeah, I just started walking with straight feet. Closer. And I feel a lot better because if you just think about an extrapolated, take your feet outside really far, and then turn your toes out. Guess where all the pressure funnels down in it. So now if you build this nice half dome with the foot where you kind of. Play the floor is lava with the ankles. Don't let the ankles go down and in, keep them up in high, away from the inside right then. And there you're already aiding in this concept of being decompressed. So you can see compression as a root of all evil for movement problems. So whether you're a professional athlete or you're just Jane DOE and you're working through the nine to five, if you're sitting in a desk for nine and a half hours, you're in a compressed state. So piggybacking off of standing better. Straight foot, another good visual for them as if you're working, let's say you're working at a desk, you're doing the dishes, something in front of you, and you're leaning your hips against the counter or the desk. People do this all the time. Pull your hips off the counter. That's back chain dominance. That's the starting of back chain dominance. So you can even do this little drill at your house. Get in front of the sink, uh, get in front of something with a, a counter. Get your feet underneath you. Get your second toe straight and then notice your hip against the counter. Pull that hip away from the counter. Fill your hip, go back through your spine, lengthen out. That's where you're kind of in this security system. And now you want to stay inside this security system as much as you can throughout the day. So when you're waiting or when you're, you're standing and getting ready to go, you're you're, you're in it. When you start to walk, keep the. Keep the inside ankle bones high, keep the narrow columns as you go about walking. Now, if you're somebody that's working a nine to five and you can't control your desk sitting, it is what it is. But the final piece of that is I would try to urge people to get back to the ground, to rest sitting. Isn't the problem. It's where we're sitting. We need to be sitting on the ground in these shapes that are across culture all over the world. Criss cross applesauce. Seiza where you're sitting on your sheet. Cowboy posture, where you got one leg in a squat, one leg in a, in a Seiza or even just the, the, the classic, um, double resting or the double bowl resting squat that you see in the, in the, in the babies and the indigenous. So, we're built to rest on the ground. We're built to walk straight foot inside ankle high. So pretty much everybody, whether you're on tier one, two or three pro, or just hanging out, being a Joe, you need those basic principles to be installed in your day to day. Now there's a little asterisk next to the. For sitting, I would not urge people just to immediately go to the floor and throw themselves into the most con you know, the, the most, the furthest expressed ranges of these shapes because your body isn't ready for them yet because it's been in a chair. So there is a sort of slow feeding process to these things. And, and, and if you're following us on Instagram, or if you start following us on Instagram, you'll see these shapes. We have. Tools at our disposal at our disposal through go-to shop, that kind of bridges the gap. When you're starting to sit in these, in these ancient postures on the ground to help sort of ease yourself, but the big picture concept for people, the lifestyle start to stand with the columns. Now. Second toe straight inside ankle bone high, get your hips off the counter. Keep that same feeling when you walk and then try to get back to the ground and and reach out to somebody that's in the go to camp about these floor resting postures so that you don't overcook or push your nervous system, sort of waterboard your nervous system. As we would say, uh, too much too soon, you have to pay home. The fact that you've been a loader for awhile, we've got to slowly spoon-feed the nervous system back to go to, but it really does start with the day-to-day the walking in the rest. Watson: And it's another lesson I, once again, I think this is just kind of a lifetime universal lesson, not just in the Boundaries have kind of movement and how your body functions. Most of the stuff has already been figured out. Most of the stuff is actually relatively simple. If you just kind of re-orient what you're focusing on. So food can be a very similar way in the sense of like all this brand new, new-fangled, super processed. Probably not as good for you as a good apple, a good steak, a good egg. Some of these just kinds of timeless things that people have been eating through time and memoriam. And it's just kind of applying that in another domain where for whatever reasons modern life has kind of. Um, blurred our vision to the reality. Stanzi: The going deep podcast is underwritten by Piper creative shooting, editing and publishing quality content is overwhelming. We make it easy so you can save time, build your brand and grow faster. Say hello@pipercreative.co. Yeah I could say there’s a GOTA or a WOTA, For everything. It's just a saying, it's us saying right. And wrong. Like, look, you got all these other systems in the body, you got a cardiovascular system, you know, you've got the musculoskeletal system, which is what we work on. You got the lymphatic system I can go on and name alone. Well, we know that there's a right and a wrong for those systems. Right. There's a, there's a yin and yang there and there's a good and a bad, so there's a good and a bad for your movement system too. Like, you know, that. Aren't good for you, right? We, we, we know this now we know what, what is a good choice from a nutrition standpoint and what is a poor choice from a nutrition standpoint. So we know there's a good input to what I'm eating. Just like there's a bad input to what I'm eating. So the same concept goes on for your heart. Your lungs, same concept goes on for your musculoskeletal system and your connected tissue and your joints. There's a good input, a go to input and there's a bad input, a loaded input. Watson: So now I'm going to talk about this, this training business in particular. So you've given us a ton of good stuff away for free. And like you said, one of the things you guys do are these recodes you sell online courses; you have a facility down in new Orleans where people will actually go into the train. If there may be at that higher tier kind of athlete, pursuing some really big stuff, can you kind of give us an opposite of what go to the businesses? Cause another part that's. Um, different than a majority of the businesses out there is you guys, at least from my management, really see this as a movement. It's a, you're kind of buying into this new way of thinking about things. And so in a movement, if you almost think about it more politically, I'm not trying to go like left or right. Or anything like that here, but you think about a political movement. And part of the nature of it is that other people can adopt it, feel ownership of it, move into it. Which is like a great thing from a brand standpoint, but probably a challenging thing from like a business model standpoint. So tell me how you guys are thinking about that and what some of the applications are of actually turning this into a sustainable business. Stanzi: Yeah. So I think right at the beginning of it to keep it simple, cause it does branch and it gets bigger and there's a lot to it. Um, if you're an athlete or if you're a regular jolt or anybody on that tier one, two or three, no matter what you want to be doing, um, we offer recodes. So we have coaches, uh, that are starting to, you know, we're getting more and more coaches, uh, each year and they're on go to coaches.com, but reaching out to somebody to get a Recode is kind of the first piece of that, right? Of training someone, assessing them, taking them through a Ricoh regimen, sort of that daily routine, the same way that you wash your hair and brush your teeth for, for hygiene maintenance, we consider that movement maintenance. Um, it's, it's a low threshold, not a lot of weight. All you need is a ground and a wall, maybe a staircase. Um, and we can give people nice daily Recode regimen. So to, to clean up their, their movement issues. Now, from a coaching standpoint, people are coming to us to get certified, to learn about these global laws. And we've got some changes that are actually being made as we speak to, to how we're going to roll that out. But the big idea right at right off the bat is if you're an athlete or a regular Joe, you, you you'd want to get into the Recode part of it. And then if you're a coach you'd want to start to learn how to see this and know what right and wrong is, and kind of, you know, discern the information slightly. Um, and that would be getting the coaching certification. Now, the other piece of this, like you said, is that it's Instagram. So Instagram has got a lot of different talents and there's a lot of different content and there's a bunch of different photos and stuff like that. So. When we, when we, we do what we do at GOTA, you know, as it starts to branch out the, the, the message can sometimes be blurred a little bit. And we have had that problem. But like you said, what we're teaching is. A new blueprint. Like what we're saying is guys the old blueprint, the way that they told us about movement, all those linear concepts, that's wrong. Like that's the bad, that's the bad map. Here's a new map. So now everybody can take the new map. Everybody can, can work off of the new map. So it it's an open concept. It's not just. The, the pro athlete. It's it's the 60-year-old lady. That's just trying to put off the knee, the knee replacement. So it's, it's, it's all different types of people. Um, learning that man, we are connected like where everybody is connected back to nature. There isn't a Nate way, right? There is a right way. There's a macro view to this whole thing. So from the, the challenging points from a business standpoint are keeping that. Super simple disturbingly, simple concept, all the global laws in front of the train and letting everybody know that, listen, we are saying no to the old blueprint. Now people want to fool around with the old blueprint. They want to try to mix it. We want nothing to do with that. Right? The true Gota is people that are sticking to the global laws. They're doing the global laws and the global laws only in their training. I use this analogy as some people will go to his top shelf, whiskey it's as good as it gets. It ain't getting any better. You drink it. From a beautiful glass. It's got your name etched in it. Well, what we got going on is she got people taking this whiskey and they're putting it into one of those little wax cups with the cone at the bottom that you get at the dentist's office, and then they're pouring Pepsi, wanted it, and it's just, the presentation is bad. It's diluted. So that is the challenge. That's the challenge quite literally is. You have a Wota low to that's been created from this exercise science, cadaver science concepts, and we're stopping that and drawing a line, a firm line saying, no we're going in this direction. So it does have those, those challenges where we've had to kind of make some adjustments. And we've had to kind of put our foot down a little bit and say, no, if it, if it's a violation of the global. We want nothing to do with that. If it's a celebration of the global laws, that's what we're, that's what we're all about. And so the, the, as we move forward through this, you know, our business is really keen on keeping the, the blueprint simple because our whole message is saving the world's connected tissue. Those violations don't save the world's connected tissue. I'm not interested in letting people waste their time. Um, I'm not interested in people wasting their money. Right. You know, I come from a, from a family where my dad took me to all my workouts. He worked very hard to make sure I could get to do the, all those things. And, you know, only to come to find out that I was training like a Wota and I was actually be paying to take away from my athleticism. So now that we've, we know this people like me, people like Gary shuffle, Were we created the GLS performance team to kind of give this back to the world in a really clean and simple way. And that starts with the global laws of Gota. So I think our, our challenge in the future is, is upholding those global laws and letting that run the train. And then we have to let everything kind of, to, to sort of work itself or Tetris itself in on the backs of that. Watson: And it is an interesting kind of dynamic where. Uh, the classic thing is coaches. When a coach like coaches get their fulfillment from seeing the improvement of their pupil, seeing them start to master it, seeing, you know, that kind of progression and that's a whole kind of arena of impact. But then there's like the structure itself, which is like, did the certification go through, did the website stay up? Did those, these other elements and just a very interesting problem, particularly. For, uh, a career like coaching in which, you know, it's like, it's like, you're losing something. If you guys back when you were at Iowa, if you were preparing for a game, if you're a head coach had to worry about the logistics of getting the team to the hotel and to the stadium, they're not going to be able to do the same quality of job right? Stanzi: Absolutely. You know, and, and that's why we need a team. Like, we, we, we, we need a hive, you know, when you, we call it the hive of coaches, right? And so it's people coming together United, not a social club United around the concept of, Hey, I believe in these global laws, like, I believe that we were being taught wrong and I believe that there is a right way. And I believe that what I'm seeing on tape watching nature is the truth. So we need a hive of people that are going through. Make honey. Right. But if you're now in a process where you're not making honey, or like you said, you're, you're now having to do a bunch of other things in the high that you weren't built to do. You're not the worker bee anymore, then it can get, it can get challenging. But I think as this thing has grown, you know, it really started, it was, it was, as we started picking up, it was me Gilly, Cody and Gary. And it was, it was us for talking and trying to build a certain build of curriculum. And it's. Itself since then. And it started to branch out and it's getting bigger and we are looking for young talent people that, that understand, and that, that, that, uh, Are are fearless and they're, they're, they're, they're not gonna bend the knee to man-made science. They're not going to bend the knee to anything other than the objective reality, uh, which is nature. So that is the challenge as we move forward, is everybody kind of finding their spots and what they're good at. Um, and then letting them do that, that skill set, like, you know, I can't, I not good at shooting video. I'm not good at putting that stuff together, but we got to go. Go to bam. And, uh, you know, he does a bam line. Heart is his name, and he does an amazing job at what he does. Like, bam is super invaluable to what we do. Like he's, he's he, you know, you can't put a price tag on that. Uh, we got a guy RJ Archibald, and he works with me and Gary in the GLS performance team. And, and, and he's got a mind, he's a chemist. So he's got a different set of eyes on this thing. And he kind of checks our math. He checks our work, he tidy everything up. So everybody's got these roles and everybody. Is is doing something or showcasing their skill a little differently, but it's all centered around. We got this blueprint. We know how to make honey. Now let's go feed the world. Let's go help people. Watson: Right on, well, I'm fired up about it. I, uh, not maybe not to the same extremist that you experienced, but I had a hip surgery when I was 21. I've had my fair share of injuries that, you know, in hindsight, candidly start basically came with the onset of me kind of hitting the weight room more consistently with those types of linear movements. So, it's something that I've, I've started to implement. I'm going to continue to find ways to do so personally, obviously, everyone listening, make your own decisions as it pertains to your health. This is resonant. Go and do your own research, but I, Ricky, I really appreciate you taking some time to talk with me today and coming on the show before we ask the standard last two questions. Is there anything else you were hoping to share today that I just didn't give you a chance to? Stanzi: Uh, no. I mean, that was pretty good. I mean, I think the big piece, I would say. Challenge people to do is, is to look for themselves. You don't empty your cup. Just take a look objectively, look at what's in front of you. Um, and let your give yourself time to, to, to pour over these concepts, right? Like. And I, I tell people if it's happening, whether you like it or not, it's like the movie inception where I plant the idea deep in your brain, and then it comes back six months. That's what Instagram is to me. I'm dropping a photo of the tiger and it's got no captioning. Is this guy talking about, that's going to make sense to you in four months. You just don't know it yet. So let the images work their way into your brain. Pay attention to the pages. Look at it, look at it from afar. Do whatever you want. You look at it, you know, if I thought like you're doing for your own self, go look at it, go, go challenge it in your own way. Right. Try to prove it wrong. Cause it's nature. It's a ducted reality. Um, so that's what I always put back on people is just go look for yourself because that's all we ever did. And, and, and that's why we are where we're out. We are right now with this thing, Watson: we've referenced Instagram. Let's make sure that if people want to follow you guys, uh, they have the digital coordinates with which to do so where can they find you? Stanzi: So my Instagram handle is at red pill. You can look up Ricky Stanzi you'll find me there. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram. My, my business part of that I'm closest with is, is, is Gary Scheffler. He is at GLS underscore training, me and him in, in RJ at load. The bow are working on the GLS performance team. So you can look up GLS performance team. If you want to see the main guy. The dude that, that first uncovered this, that is Jose Bosch, coach Gillie, as we call him. And he is at GOTA underscore Loco. So I would say, start with those accounts on Instagram. If you go into my Instagram bio and you click the link tree, that will take you to really all the other places that you want to go. We've got, we've got, we've got YouTube pages, we've got YouTube channels. Um, those links are in the bio. We've got a. Or if you were looking for equipment, gota shop.com. We've got a coaching website for people that may be in your area that are teaching the math. So go to coaches.com, gota movement.com is a place where you can buy some courses. You can learn a little bit about the system, kind of what I talked about with the four super tribes. And then there's a subscription training website that Gary puts together called Rico two to five. Dot com once again, all this stuff is easily accessible through the link tree and the bio, if you're at my page or if you're at Gary's page, if you're at RJs page. Um, so I would start on Instagram. That's where the majority of the content is, but we're starting to branch off into YouTube. And then me and Gary are actually doing some stuff with no filter.net. And you can find all that once again, in that link tree. Right on Watson: before we go to the personal challenge and wrap it up. Ricky, we referenced the store a couple of times. I just want to point out like, people are used to, Hey, I'm selling fitness equipment and it's like, Hey, I've got like my two pound dumbbells that are like my color or something very kind of simplistic. That's not what this is. Just give people like, you know, the briefest overview of what it is that you guys are selling in the, in the shop. Stanzi: The gota shop.com. So go to shop.com. The biggest pieces you'll see that are kind of speaking to coding a moot, the movement back that the movement math, the global laws are the, the chucks and, um, the boards. So the chucks are like a mini board. I had one somewhere. Um, but it's like a little mini slant board that you kind of, it's like a Jenga block, right? It's just there to kind of give you an idea of where your foot should be. And it kind of helps code the foot that I kept talking about in the podcast. The slant board is a similar idea, uh, used for more of the landmine stuff or some of the bigger heavier movements that you may get into in the gym. The, the, the boards in the, in the, the chucks are sold on the website. We also have gear on the website. We've got yoga mats, our go to mats on the website for the groundwork. So there's all sorts of different stuff that we can use there. The beautiful part of GOTA is that you can do it with nothing. All you need is a ground in the wall. The mat makes it easier. Cause we've got a little diagram on there for people to follow, to kind of help them stay in the math. And then the chucks in the, uh, in the, uh, the boards kind of act like a training. Funnel you into that, uh, better positioning the, the, the golden movement. So that's the main stuff that you'll find on the GOTA shop. Watson: beautiful, uh, me and the team. We're gonna do our best to link all of that in the show notes. For this episode, you can find it in the app or by listening to this, um, or going deeper there and.com/podcast for every single episode of the show. But before I let you go, Ricky, I want to give you the mic one final time to issue an actionable personal challenge to the audience. Stanzi: Okay. So I, I got to 40 and like guy had already said one, but that first one is, get your feet straight. Get your second toe straight. Get your feet underneath you. Get you inside and come on high. Start with those first two to three global laws. Get your feet underneath you fist with this and second toe straight inside ankle bone high. Get your hips off the counter. That's a movement challenge, a lifestyle challenge I can give you. I'll give you a virtual challenge to go scrape video. Right screen record. Everybody's got that. If you're really into this and you really want to take a look for yourself, go on YouTube type in ACL tear. Non-contact ACL tear. Non-contact Achilles tear. Go watch those tears. I always challenge people to watch a hundred. Go watch a hundred non-contact shreds frame by frame in slow motion. That will start your journey. That's the challenge that Gilly gave me. And that's the challenge that I will give to everybody else. So start to walk the straight feet, get your hips off the counter and then go watch the shreds. Watson: Right on. Well, um, I, I'm not good with injuries. I usually walk, walk the look away when it's like going on during one of the games, but I'm going to, I'm going to take it. I don't know about a hundred. I'm going to take the challenge for sure. I hope everyone else out there as well. Yeah. Ricky, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Stanzi: Thanks for having me here. And I really appreciate it. Watson: We just went deep with Ricky Stanzi out. There has a fantastic day. Hey, thank you so much for listening to the end of my conversation with Ricky. If you enjoyed this interview than I am confident that you would also enjoy our interview with Dr. Timothy Wong, he is also focused on people's health, but he is coming at it from the vantage point of a medical doctor who became disenchanted with the existing system. And now. Patients for just $35 with no insurance copay, Dr. Wong breaks down all sorts of interesting ideas. And if you pair it with this episode, I'm confident it will change the trajectory of your life. Let me know what you think of both episodes over on Twitter at Aaron Watson, 59, and I will catch you in the next. Thanks for listening connect with Aaron on Twitter and Instagram at Aaron Watson, 59.
Sara Mauskopf is the CEO and co-founder of Winnie, a marketplace for child care built on powerful data systems and backed by a trusted community of parents and providers.
Parents use Winnie to research and uncover high-quality daycares and preschools in their geography with detailed information about licensing, tuition, and photos. Sara started Winnie in early 2016 after she experienced the frustration of researching daycares first-hand as a new mom. She has called upon her experience in product management at Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Postmates to catapult Winnie to success. In this episode, Sara and Aaron discuss the origins of the company, the evolving market for daycare, and the business model behind the platform. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Sara Mauskopf’s Challenge; If you have children in childcare, talk to the care provider/teacher about how you can help. Connect with Sara Mauskopf
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Winnie Website If you liked this interview, check out our interview w/ Luke Skurman where we discuss building a platform for researching schools & neighborhoods.
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Piper Creative makes creating podcasts, vlogs, and videos easy. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify Maruskopf: It is hard to run a profitable childcare center. Like the margins are small and you really need to build a strong business to run this profitably. And so, you know, there's just a lot of high kind of fixed costs. You need a space, you need staff. Watson: What's up everyone. Welcome back to going deep with Aaron Watson. My interview today is with Sarah Maruskopf. She is the CEO and co-founder of Winnie, a platform marketplace focused on helping parents find childcare. This is a very big problem. That takes a very large percentage of parents' spend. And Sarah felt the pain intimately and translated that pain into her very own startup. In today's interview, we discussed the origins of the company, how she iterated on finding product market fit. And general trends in daycare and childcare that her company is at the cutting edge of this is a really good interview and she is a master of her domain. So I won't waste any more time. Here is Sarah Maruskopf. Voiceover: You're listening to going deep with Aaron Watson, Watson: Sarah, welcome to go deep with Aaron Watson I'm excited to talking with you. Maruskopf: I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Watson: So I want to start off– I actually messed up the words. I was trying to write out how I was going to introduce Winnie, and I just wrote a child marketplace as opposed to a childcare marketplace. And that is definitely not what business you guys are in. Uh, so maybe you can. Take the reins from my hands and explain your business and the value that you're providing to parents across the country. Maruskopf: Yeah. You're going to get us in trouble and like remove from the app store or something. So we are a childcare and education marketplace. We really got our start helping parents find daycare and preschool. So really focused on group childcare, licensed group child care across the United States. Parents come to us searching for daycare, preschool, and now all other forms of Karen education. We're starting to broaden and expand to things like camps and classes. And then they can search and filter by the criteria that matters to them, whether it's the age of their kids or price or kind of program. So we're trying to make it really easy for parents to find the care and education that meets their needs, and then connect with those providers through our platform who are kind of the other end of the marketplace. They come on Winnie. They claim their page and then they use Winnie to get business, to fill their open spaces. Watson: So this reminds me a lot of another company that we've covered on the show, niche.com, which is focused on, like universities and neighborhoods that one would potentially move into and kind of, you know, helping with that basic internet research that we all do, trying to get legibility into one of these platforms. So we'll link that for folks that want to kind of understand just another version of this business model, but as you explain it via analogy via metaphor. I know that in the early days you're thinking of this as like a Yelp for parents, but these platforms we see in so many different domains, Zillow, Glassdoor, like what's the analogy that you find is the most apt. Maruskopf: Yeah. I mean, that's the kind of crazy thing is, we started Winnie and we were like, how does this not exist because this exists for literally everything else we do in our life. Whether it's finding a restaurant on Yelp or finding a job or finding a house, and these marketplaces are really life-changing. They make the search that before, you know, you had to drive around and look for open house signs in your neighborhood. They make that search really easy, allow you to compare prices, and that did not exist for. What is for parents, like one of the most important and considered purchases, they make the care and education of their children. And so we almost couldn't believe that this was still a white space. But we, it was, and there's tons of analogies. Like you point out because it really exists for almost everything else in your life. Watson: And, can you talk a little bit about how you got to this product in its current form? I know that using a net promoter score assessment was a big part of that. Can you just talk a little bit about the life cycle from the early days to now? Maruskopf: Yeah, so it's we're coming up on our six year anniversary of working on Winnie and it was a bit of a windy path. We really started. Not sure what we were going to build. We knew we wanted to build something for parents. We were new parents ourselves at the time and just really struggling being, working mothers, my co-founder and I both had young kids and it took a while to figure out that childcare was really the big need for parents. And that there was this white space when it came to. Your group childcare, your daycare, your preschool, or your camps. And that parents really were kind of doing things the old fashioned way, but it took a lot of building and tinkering with other ideas. And we use this, you know, very common tool and in product building, which is the net promoter score where you basically see like, are people promoters of your product? Do they like it enough that they're going to recommend it to their friends? And what we found was that like, for all these other ideas, we were tinkering with. Like people were using it and downloading it and we could kind of drive growth, but they weren't promoters. And it wasn't until we built what, when he is today, this childcare marketplace that we were really like changing people's lives in such a dramatic way that they remembered. And when a friend was doing their childcare search, they were recommending Winnie. Now that was really the big. I would say the big difference between like having product market fit and not having product market fit. And we didn't really realize that until we started to measure, you know the net promoters. Watson: And when it starts to work and when you have that product market fit, is it really those referrals that people are making that is the kind of key metric or the key thing that has been, that you've attributed your growth to? Is it SEO? Cause this also seems like an SEO thing where I'm Googling best daycare, Northern Pittsburgh, I'm hopefully landing upon Winnie versus alternative sources. Maruskopf: Yeah, we get a lot of our traffic are parents that find us. And also our providers that find us through literally just typing into Google daycare near me or preschool near me or on the provider side. Like they may want to see what other providers in their area charge for their programs so they can set competitive prices. So it is a lot of our businesses driven by SEO, but we still continue today to measure the net promoter score, both for parents and for our providers, the daycares and preschools on our platform, to understand like, are we really adding value and how much value? And so I think it's important that we don't just build a website that gets a lot of traffic, but that people really find it useful and come back, especially on the provider side, like these are businesses that constantly need new families as kids age out of their program. And so it's really important that when we establish them as customers, we retain them and can be a lasting influence on their business. Watson: Yeah, it'd be fascinating to know what the LTV is for one of these childcare centers. Maruskopf: Yeah. I mean the one of the big issues with the industry and, you know, challenges that we're trying to help with is like, it is hard to run a profitable childcare center. Like the margins are small and you really need to build a strong business to run this profitably. And so, you know, there's just a lot of high kind of fixed costs. You need a space, you need staff, you need to pay that. And so, it is important that, you know, they run really efficient good businesses. And that's not, you know, always easier trivial to do. And so, you know, part of what we want to help with is that you know, making sure they're not leaving spaces unfilled, because that's the number one thing that makes these businesses not as profitable as they could be. Watson: And it's clear that a platform like yours aggregating demand, but also just making the entire market more legible to a new parent like myself who's just trying to get a lay of the land or what are my options? What are my price ranges is a huge service to that. What have you learned about, and I'm sure you pass this along to the providers that are on the platform. What have you learned about the decision-making process that parents go through? For this type of purchase price seems like one of the obvious ones, but dont-- Maruskopf: Yeah, I mean, it's a very considered purchase for parents, you know, there's like the other end of the spectrum is like, you know, your Uber driver, like you don't really care that much who picks you up. You're just trying to get a car and get to where you're going. And childcare's very different. You really care about who your provider is, and there's a big difference for you from one provider to the other. And the kind of big learning for us is that all parents care about different things for summer, really price sensitive, actually a lot are very price sensitive. But other factors can matter a lot too, like the location and the hours, you know, if the provider is in your price range and a great location, but they don't have the right hours for when you work. They're basically completely worthless to you. So all of these factors really matter. And then, you know, there's all these kinds of secondary factors on top of that. Like, You know, do they do Spanish immersion? I'm really interested in my kid learning Spanish or is it a Montessori program? And so really there's lots of information that parents need in this purchase. One of the things we're finding, that's kind of a new trend is the decision-making process is getting condensed. So, whereas before you might've gone in toward many different programs over a multi-week period, submitted an application and then enrolled for six months in the future. Now, you know, parents are finding programs entirely online. They may never set foot in a center before they send their kid there due to COVID. And so it's really condensing the search period, which I think is actually a good thing for everyone, for the industry. And for parents, if it can just be a shorter, faster, easier process. And if more of it can be moved online, there's really no reason you have to visit a center in person to find out you can't afford it, which was kind of the status quo beforehand. So we're just trying to make it much easier to get kind of the basics out of the way online, save you time. And then, you know, maybe you can tour the one or two places you really think you might actually enrolling. Watson: That's a fantastic point because even just the time saved by management for the daycare, walking everyone through individually, versus if you, even if they did one, you know, not that it's perfect for everyone, but a video tour record at one time, get it up and make that digestible to someone in a digital format makes perfect sense. Maruskopf: And the daycares were really reluctant to do this, like before COVID they wanted to tour everyone with any possible interest before they gave basic information out like schedules and prices. And then COVID, they were kind of forced to change their ways and they realize like, oh, actually this is a lot more efficient. I don't want to tour someone who can't afford my program. It's a waste of time for everyone. So I think we are making a lot of progress on that front, kind of quickly, which is good. Watson: Well, I mean, I think that that's the general theme, at least from my vantage point as an eternal optimist from COVID is yes, a lot of tragedy associated with it. And all sorts of different forms, but a lot of kind of bad habits got shaken out and just cannot be able to persist after such a kind of significant cultural shift like that. I'm curious just in general. What else you saw come out of it? Because one of the things that we saw, we did a breakdown of the KinderCare IPO that recently occurred and – Maruskopf: watch that breakdown. I did my own breakdown. So– Watson: –we saw, you know, them have just challenges with revenue in 2020, because a lot of people took their kids out of daycare, took their kids, not necessarily willingly like out of school because of safety concerns. And that also causes this stress on an industry that really, I don't know how it compares to say airlines and hotels, but it's kind of an occupancy factor. That's really determining profitability or not profitability on a month to month basis. What other things are you seeing? Because anecdotally, as someone who just did the whole shopping around thing, it's hard to get in anywhere. I was looking at your map on Winnie actually before this, and it's like everything within five to 10 miles of my house is not. They're not openings. And then all the other openings are like 20 miles away. So what's up? What's going on? Maruskopf: Right now the industry is facing a particular challenge, which is with staffing. So this was always kind of a problem in childcare, but it's gotten a lot worse, as a result of the pandemic. So, you know, overall, like we're hearing hiring troubles for a lot of lower wage jobs and childcare has been really notoriously underpaid and undervalued. And so these centers are having trouble hiring and retaining their staff who could go, you know, be a delivery driver for Amazon and possibly make more money. And so we're finding some are responding by increasing wages, which is a good thing. Hopefully more we'll be doing that in the future, especially as more money gets put into the industry, hopefully from the government or from employers or some of these other sources. But we also are starting to help with us at Winnie. So we actually just built and launched a feature for providers where they can not only use their Winnie page, which is kind of their presence on the internet to recruit families, but also to recruit staff, to hire teachers, to hire other staff, to run their programs. And we think this is actually great. Like Winnie is a great place to do this because we do have such a large audience of parents and providers who can be great candidates for these positions, especially parents. They're kind of an under utilized audience. But you know, many of these programs offer free or reduced tuition. If you work there, for your child. So you get to work the same hours that your kid is in childcare. You get to be near your child. And you can build your career in early education. So we actually think there's a nice fit here. So we're starting to help providers with that because it's a real problem. And it's the reason that the centers that would otherwise have more spots available, kind of have to close classrooms or not take as many kids because they can't meet the ratios that they're legally required to meet. They can't hire enough staff. Watson: And I cannot think of, a better baptism by fire, so to speak and learning childcare skills than actually having, becoming a parent and having a kid. Maruskopf: Yeah. I mean, the other challenge with, you know, some of these states and a lot of the kind of teaching positions to be the head teacher, you do need certain early education credentials. And so there's, you know, an expense associated with becoming a preschool teacher. If we're not compensating these teachers enough, like who is going to go into this field. And so we really do have to increase wages, and these businesses have to run more efficiently and more profitably to be able to do that. Watson: So right before COVID, was the last fundraise for you guys at $9 million series a in late 2019. And I have to imagine that a part of that was– I know that a part of the fundraising process is talking about the Tam, the total addressable market and what this opportunity represents. And we've alluded to it earlier in this conversation that this is a non-trivial spend. Basically, like for me and my wife, it's our mortgage and childcare and our daycare costs are like the two biggest line items. So I'm sure that was a part of the pitch, but what other parts, just in terms of the market opportunity here got you so excited in addition to the obvious need for parents to kind of have this legibility? Maruskopf: Yeah. I mean, I got excited to build this like out of my own need, but what I was able to get Besters excited about was the opportunity. And so like we started Winnie, you know, as I was saying, kind of like not sure what we were going to build. And we tried a bunch of things that not only didn't have product market fit, but weren't good businesses. And so it's important to find the intersection of like solving a real problem, but also a problem people will pay money for. Childcare and education for your kids under 18. So this doesn't include anything to do with college is $212 billion in the U S alone every year. So it's massive. So this is, not only your daycare and preschool, which I think is around 65 billion of it, but you know, things like camps, classes, you know, even tutoring and aftercare for older kids. That's the 212 billion. So it's massive. It's a huge Tam. And then of course there's places outside of the United States to expand to one day to, to make that Tam even larger. And so I think that is really the kind of what made this such a ripe area for us to work on, was like the combination of solving a real need for parents and providers, but also a really huge market. And now, you know, I think some of the challenges have been like making. opening investors' eyes to that opportunity, you know, as they kind of look for the new shiny thing. And I think COVID also helped with that. Like it kind of brought childcare to the forefront, education to the forefront. And I already see things really changing investor appetite, increasing to invest in childcare and education, which is great. Watson: And it's also in that arena of somewhat illegible markets that might actually be expanded by, you know, bringing a more legible service to them. So you referenced Uber before and not necessarily came who the driver was. I can remember before Uber, a night out when I was much younger. And there would be, you know, just someone that kind of pulled up in a car that was trolling the streets late at night to potentially drive you back home to your apartment. And that was something that eventually became, Hey, we know we're calling the Uber and we're walking out and we know, you know, at least who the driver is, where they're going so on and so forth. And the original kind of like black car for hire option, which seem tiny expanded into this much larger idea, childcare in a similar way. There are all sorts of, you know, inter neighborhood relationships where, you know, parents are passing the kids off house to house down the street. There's other characters who might not necessarily be licensed or regulated in the way that is important. So what else have you learned or seen from that vantage point as it pertains to this daycare market? Maruskopf: Yeah. I mean the amazing thing with childcare is a lot of these centers are not operating at full capacity. Even when they are full, they have spots every single day that are going unfilled. That might be an afternoon spot from 12 to five. It might be because some kid is sick. In class that day, and those spots just go unfilled. And that's because there's not really a good way to offer that spot. If someone calls in sick, like how do you flag to your neighborhood that you now have a spot available? And we see, marketplace is really the first step to start to enable that. So, you know, just a simple example is one of the kind of really big searches on Winnie is actually for drop-in care. We see tons of parents come to us looking for not their full-time daycare preschool, but maybe an opportunity just for a week when they're in between options or maybe because, you know, they need to go to a doctor's appointment and they don't, they may be a stay at home parent and lots of providers actually offer it smaller home-based daycare is tend to love to offer this service, but they don't have a good platform to do so. So that's just like one way that we can kind of open up a new form of care which by the way we think the world is kind of moving in that direction anyway. Watson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's really like a liquidity thing almost in like the adjacent rooms or spare rooms of a house for Airbnb. Maruskopf: Yeah. It's kind of crazy that this, again, doesn't exist because there's kind of, we don't have to create new supply. We don't have to invent new spots from somewhere, which is kind of the thing that investors always love. Like, where's the kind of latent supply? It's like, it's here, it's already operating every day and they're just not full to capacity. Because the way we think about capacity is this really stringent view of a full-time nine to five space, which isn't how the world actually works. And isn't what parents are looking for. The going deep podcast is underwritten by Piper, creative shooting, editing and publishing quality content is overwhelming. We make it easy so you can save time, build your brand and grow faster. Say hello@pipercreative.com. Watson: So classic question associated with marketplaces is getting something like this bootstrapped off the ground. It's relatively self-evident that, you know, this information super valuable to parents and what, where the users would come from necessarily. But in terms of populating your actual website with this valuable information, what did it look like in the early days and how has that process evolved over the years of running Winnie? Maruskopf: Yeah, so in the early days, it was a lot of integrating with the state licensing. Authorities pulling in information from the state, which is public, are really hard for parents to find themselves on all the licensed childcare providers. But increasingly most of our data comes from the providers themselves. And so there was like this time when we really had to bootstrap by getting a lot of the data ourselves and that the data we could get was really limited because a lot of this was not on the internet, and having a model where it starts to be the case that providers the supply provides more and more of the data. I think that was a really important dynamic. We needed to see working. And when we saw starting to work in certain markets, like we knew, okay, this is kind of a sustainable thing where we can start by integrating with the state licensing database. We can get the information on licensed daycares and preschools, but we really need the providers to come on board and claim their page on Winnie. Update with stuff like their prices and whether they have openings, which is information that is constantly changing and really only they know. So it was important to kind of see that switch from the majority of the data provided by us to the majority provided by the supply. Watson: Makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about the business model? We've talked about Zillow before a lot of their business leads for real estate agents, niche.com who reference at the beginning leads for the universities in the form of the students. How's that work? Maruskopf: Yeah. So our business model is our customers are the providers, the daycares and preschools and camps and classes. Parents use our product entirely for free. No way for parents to pay in this process. They're paying for childcare, which is hard and expensive enough, and we don't need to charge them anything on top of it. And the daycares and preschools are the ones that are growing their revenue as a result of using Winnie. So it just naturally fell into place that they're the ones that are willing to pay for our services. So right now, the number one service that when he provides is regeneration, like it is the reason providers typically come to us and start paying us. But increasingly, we are trying to provide them with other tools and services like their page, which by the way, now for most providers gets more traffic than their own website. These tools and services are very important for them to run an efficient, profitable business. So, you know, the other example of the feature to help them get staffing needs, we want to not just be, you know, kind of lead gen for them, but also start to help them in other ways. And we think, you know, we can we’re a kind of product and engineering driven company. And so there's lots of other things we can build and do that would help them run their business better. Watson: What also seems like, and I’m truly have other avenues to getting insights like this, but as the platform gets more and more traffic, more and more queries within your search engine for daycare, daycare near me, Spanish immersion, like you referenced before that you would be able to offer an information product that would inform future if it's a franchise model or if it's an expansion model for, Hey, you know, this geography, this neighborhood, this whatever really, you know, it's underserved in the daycare market, in the whatever market. And that would basically inform development opportunities. Maruskopf: Yeah. Yeah. Right now we kind of do that for free for customers. And we actually, we do a lot for free. And I think this is, you know, what we're starting to realize is like you're providing a lot of value and I think marketplaces need to do this to grow. They give away a lot of value. They don't capture all that value. But yeah, this is, you know, some of the stuff we're starting to think about, is like, how do we package a lot of the stuff that we're doing for our customers and start to think about it as like a value add service. And you know, as we think about things, that way we would, you know, naturally be incentivized to do a better and better job at it because it's you know, something they're actually paying for rather than just like a thing we do when they ask for it. Watson: So as we aim towards wrapping up here, Sarah, um, I want to talk a little bit about your background before starting Winnie, and really, you know, you've been at Postmates, Twitter, YouTube, Google. These really kind of successful and blue chip technology companies and a common kind of query that we get from listeners, from people that had our events is, you know, I'm in corporation, ABC startup XYZ. I kind of want to go. Do my own thing. I'm not sure, you know, do I need more seasoning? Are there more lessons that I can export from this big established business, into my new one? So in whatever order with whatever kind of specificity you want to, from those past experiences, what have you taken from roles like being head of product into starting your own thing that you found really valuable? Maruskopf: Yeah. So first of all, I do recommend that young people who are starting out like do join a larger company or at least one where they feel like there's really people that they can learn from and grow from. Because I think that is a huge value added of working at some of these larger companies is you see, you know, experts amazing people in the roles doing these jobs and you can really learn and, and know how it should be done. I think the other really like, thing I didn't value until later was, you know, the people you meet and the connections you make at a larger company are super valuable. Like these are really talented individuals who will go on and do amazing things in their careers. And so you're now connected with this network of amazing people. But not to shoot myself in the foot at Winnie because we are hiring, we would love newer grads. In addition to really experience folks is there's also like. Watson: What kind of roles? Maruskopf: We're always hiring for engineering and product. We're now also, you know, trying to staff up on the sales side. So some interesting positions there and marketing, I mean, we are trying to also be opportunistic. So like for talented people kind of have like a general apply for whatever thing on our website. You know, we want to hire the best. So anyone in the U S because now we are remote first, so, we still have an office, but we can work from anywhere. But yeah, the benefit of a smaller company and like Postmates was a pretty small company. When I joined, even Twitter was relatively small. It was a couple hundred people, the hats you can wear, you're not so specific in your role. You can try lots of things and branch out and typically move around in the organization and up in the organization faster, which can be a great experience for them starting your own business, where you have to wear all the hats and do all the things. And I think for me, it would have been really jarring to go from like Google to starting my own company. And it was good to have experience at smaller companies. At least at the time they were smaller, to see, you know, what does it look like when you have to do some of these things yourself? How do you think about, you know, hiring for these areas? When do you know when it's time to hire, how do you, you know, present to investors or your board. Those are experiences you really only get at a smaller company earlier on in your career. Watson: Right on. Any specific hats that were challenging to put on for the first time upon starting Winnie. Maruskopf: Yeah. I mean, I thought when I started a company, I would get to be the product owner. My background is product management. I was just excited. I teamed up with an amazing product thinker and Halsall who is now our chief product officer. And I was like, we're just going to get to like, build great product together. It's going to be wonderful. Like, so much fun. And it was for the first, you know, year, we were just like, we were writing code. We were coming up with product ideas. But quickly it became clear that like for the company to grow, I needed to do things that weren't product and actually I couldn't spend any of my time on product and engineering. Uh, so things like raising money and hiring, and press, and things that like the CEO is really only positioned to do. That was a little bit in people management, you know, managing the team, and the talent. That was a little sad initially to come to terms with. Like it, wasn't going to be just like all fun and games tinkering around. I needed to build an actual company, but I've come to terms with that and embrace my new role. And also now I'm proud to be like the worst product person and definitely the worst engineer at Winnie. And so happy to see that to all the folks who are better at it anyway. Watson: Well, that's actually such an architectural story that we've covered in the past year with a person that gets into, you know, starting a bakery because they love to bake. And then they build a successful bakery and they hire bakers. And now they're kind of managing bakers as opposed to being that baker in a similar way. So a lot of familiar threads. Maruskopf: Yeah. I mean, just the other day I wrote like a launch announcement that we were going to send out. And then I, you know, I kind of drafted up an idea I had in my head and then I sent it, sent it to our marketing, woman, to you know, get it ready. And like, she just made it, like 500 times better. Like it was like, not even, it was so embarrassing what I had initially written compared to her take on it. And I just realized like, yeah, this is building a company. Like you hire people that are 500 times better at the role than you are. And my job and my super power is like, can I find those people? Can I retain those people? Can I put them in the right roles to shine? Can I, you know, challenge them with the next set of challenges and experiences, and it's not going to be writing. Amazing launch announcement because I'm gonna, I'm going to always be worth it. Watson: Right on self-awareness. But if you want to go far, go together, just mess it up. You want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together is always the best way. Maruskopf: But she also did it faster than me. Watson: Awesome. Sarah, this has been fantastic. I want to aim for asking the last couple of questions, but I've got a rule. If I ever am interviewing someone and they're doing something that I have never seen someone else to do before I have to ask them about it. Cause when else will I get the opportunity? So on your Twitter page, you have a linked out to an OpenSea collection for folks that are not familiar with what OpenSea is. It is a marketplace for NFTs, which is amongst other applications, a way for selling artwork in a way, you know, without going through some sort of a middleman, it's a kind of open marketplace concept OpenSea has absolutely blown up over the last year. The application or the route that you've taken, is having when your kids actually produce artwork there on OpenSea, so just, you know, in whatever terms, make sense. Tell me about the decision to do that. I think it's super creative and interesting. I was like, wow, that's so cool, the moment I saw it. But just take us through the thought process there from a parenting. Maruskopf: Yeah. I mean, I'm really interested in, like crypto and web three and NFTs, but I also, you know, have a company and a full-time job. And so, you know, one of the things we pride ourselves on Winnie, is like, just the ability for folks to develop professionally, we have a professional development budget where people can apply that towards anything they want to learn or do every year. It doesn't have to be related to their job function. And so, you know, similarly I think it is important like as the CEO, when there's new technologies out there that are gaining a lot of momentum that I like have some understanding of what's going on. And so it was important for me to kind of like, learn about what is going on with Crypto and NFTs. But because I don't have any talent myself. I, again, like had to tap someone who was a much better artist than me. So I took my six-year-olds artwork and she is on board with this. She is doing it with me. I have her permission. In fact there are a number of pieces she does not let me put on OpenSea. But we created this persona crypto Brynn. Her name is Brynn, and so crypto Brynn has a collection on OpenSea and it's been fun to just see how it all works. I feel like the best way for me at least to learn something is just by jumping right in and doing it. So I've just been having fun with that. And it's also a nice, a nice way to bond with my daughter because she now gets really excited when one of her crypto Brynn pieces sell, and is really proud of that. So it's also a good way to share one of my interests with her. Watson: Right on. Well, tell her I like the Fox drawing amongst the others. And we will link that in all the other good stuff in the show notes for this episode. Sarah, before I ask the standard, last two questions. Anything else that you were hoping to share today that I just didn't give you the chance? Maruskopf: No, this was great. I feel like we covered a lot if you know, folks are looking for childcare, check out Winnie, winnie.com. And if folks are looking for a job, check out winnie.com/jobs, because we are hiring. Watson: Right on. We're going to link that in the show notes for this episode, goingdeepwithAaron.com/podcast for every episode of the show or in the app, we are probably listening to this right now. I'm also going to link Sarah's Twitter as well, which is a good follow. You had a nice zinger on, what's the guy from my first million. I can't think of it. You roasted him pretty good here a couple of weeks ago. Maruskopf: Yeah, probably. Big on a dunking on people in Twitter. Watson: I love it. So before we let you go, Sarah, I'd like to give you the mic one final time to issue an actionable personal challenge to the audience. Maruskopf: Yeah. So my personal challenge is for those of you that have children in childcare in daycare or preschool or in school. Is to talk to your childcare provider, or your teacher and ask them, you know, one way you could help. I think. We just take these educators for granted. And you know, we've all seen over the pandemic, how essential they are and they are, you know, in need of our help right now. It's also a great thing to do around the holidays. Ask, you know, there's a way you could get involved or help in the new year. Whether it's a small way or big way. And if you were not a parent, or you don't know any childcare provider educator you can ask to help. I would say, ask to help a parent and they also, many of us are struggling and challenge. Still it's the case that we are still very much in the thick of it for us, with young children who are not yet vaccinated, the under five set. And so, you know, if you have the capacity or the ability to do anything, to help a parent, you know, I'm sure they would appreciate it. Watson: Amen to that. And one of the underrated qualities of things that are people remember as being kind, cause, you know, hopefully we're always kind to our family, our friends, people that are close to us. But when someone does something for you that wasn't required, it wasn't expected. It wasn't out of any sort of obligation. Even a small act can really resonate with someone as an act of kindness. So I think that your challenge is perfectly in line with that. Sarah, thank you for sharing it with us and for coming on the podcast. Maruskopf: Awesome. Thank you for having me. Watson: We just went deep with Sarah Maruskopf, who we're not there has a fantastic day. Hey, thank you so much for listening to my interview with Sara. If you enjoyed it, then I would encourage you to also check out our past interview with Luke scurman. As I referenced in the interview, his platform. It's a very similar business and business model. And if you pair these two together, you will have a much more coherent picture about the challenges and opportunities associated with building a marketplace. It's linked in the show notes. Also hit subscribe because we have another great episode coming next week. Maruskopf: Thanks for listening. Connect with Aaron on Twitter and Instagram at Aaron Watson, 59.
Matt Dayton is the cofounder of Pure Air Nation, a company that focuses on mold remediation and air quality around the greater Pittsburgh area.
In just two years in business, Matt and his cofounder Jake have raced to serious business success with a full calendar and loads of 5 star reviews. Beyond mold remediation, they also offer air quality testing, duct cleaning, and preventative care. In this episode, Matt and Aaron discuss how he got started in the business, why the demand for mold remediation is growing, and the challenges in hiring blue collar talent. Sign up for a Weekly Email that will Expand Your Mind. Matt Dayton’s Challenge; Grow yourself personally and give back to your community. Connect with Matt Dayton |