Kent McElhattan’s entire business career has been dedicated to the safety of workers.
In 1985, Kent co-founded Industrial Scientific and built a worldwide leader in IOT and predictive analytics for the safety industry. The company climbed to hundreds of millions in revenue and sold to Fortive. After that success, Kent started another company, Discovery Robotics, aimed to bring robotics technology to the field of janitorial services. Their first product is an autonomous floor-cleaning robot. The company’s mission remains to increase human productivity and safety. In this conversation, Kent and Aaron discuss how he ended up focusing on industrial cleaning, the lessons Kent has taken from Industrial Scientific, and the future of work. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. Kent McElhattan’s Challenge; Find something that doesn’t feel like work. Connect with Kent McElhattan Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 297 with Jorgen Pedersen where we discuss saving lives with robots or episode 400 with Austin Webb where we discuss changing agriculture with tech.
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Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify
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Anthony Gadient is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Voci Technologies. Voci uses GPU-accelerated, deep machine learning speech technologies to help companies understand what their team members are saying on the phone.
Their technology helps clients mine actionable insights from their voice data. It can be applied to customer service, sales, and compliance analysis. The company is built with technology spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, Anthony co-founded Neolinear, a semiconductor design automation firm that was acquired. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. Anthony Gadient’s Challenge; Take some time to think about the implications of computers being able to hear you. Connect with Anthony Gadient Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 303 with Luke Skurman the founder of Niche.com and episode 361 with Jason Wolfe where we discuss multiple successful technology startups.
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Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
David Levine founded NuGo Nutrition Bars in 2000 after raising a small sum of capital from friends and family.
NuGo Nutrition uses real dark chocolate to make their protein bars and have been committed to making healthy, high-caliber bars from their inception. The company has developed a variety of SKUs developed for Kosher, gluten-free, organic, vegan, and low sugar diets. David and Aaron discuss the founding of the company, how NuGo has scaled its distribution, and the fake chocolate used by other companies. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. David Levine’s Challenges; 1. Learn the difference between real and fake dark chocolate. 2. When you’re with your family, put the phone away so you can reflect on your day together. Connect with David Levine Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 407 with JD Ewing where we discuss wholesaling, trends in office furniture, and creating a company book club.
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Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
Brian Gaudio is the CEO of Module, a design & technology startup based in Pittsburgh.
Module is developing a pay-as-you-go housing solution that enables homebuilders to provide an affordable and flexible entry point for homeownership. One of their distinctive features is a design that allows a buyer to turn a one-bedroom starter unit into a 3 bedroom house. Brian has previously directed a documentary about the housing crisis in South America, worked as a Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and worked in the Blue Sky Department at Walt Disney Imagineering. In this conversation, you’ll hear Brian and Aaron discuss how home construction and financing are interwoven, why pre-fabricated houses are the future, and the capital-intensive nature of the business. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. 
Brian Gaudio’s Challenge; Take one day during the holidays away from any work-related digital devices.
Connect with Brian Gaudio Website If you liked this interview, check out all our past episodes with Pittsburgh’s business leaders and innovators.
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Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
J.D. Ewing is the President of COE Distributing, the largest furniture-only wholesale office furniture distributor in the United States.
We traveled out to Uniontown, PA to record this interview at the company’s headquarters, which includes a 300,000 square foot warehouse. The company also operated hubs in North Carolina and Texas, which allows it to serve the entire continental United States. Over the last decade, COE has been growing rapidly. He bought the family business back after an acquirer ran into bankruptcy in 2008/09. Now, they are named an Inc. 5000 company and a Top 100 Fastest Growing Business by the Pittsburgh Business Times year-after-year. In this episode, Aaron and J.D. discuss the start of the wholesaling business, when J.D. has been an opportunistic buyer, and trends in office furniture. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. J.D. Ewing’s Challenge; Optimize your life around work you enjoy. Connect with J.D. Ewing Website Office Source Furniture Books Becoming Your Best: The 12 Principles of Highly Successful Leaders by Steve Shallenberger Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty by Patrick Lencioni The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip & Dan Heath If you liked this interview, check out episode 396 with Kristy Knichel where we discuss family business, 3rd party logistics, and customer service.
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Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
Jessica Gibson is CEO and Co-Founder of Ariel Precision Medicine, an integrated genomics and digital health company.
Ariel helps patients with complex chronic diseases by using genetics and health information to model the mechanisms and drivers of disease. This enables clinicians to establish an early diagnosis, long-term prognosis, and targeted management plan. Ariel's PancreasDx® is the most comprehensive genetic test for pancreatic disease and is built off of Dr. David C. Whitcomb’s leading research. Aaron and Jessica discuss the mission behind the company, how commercialization efforts have evolved, and the promise of precision medicine. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. Jessica Gibson’s Challenge; Understand that you can be the change you want to see in the world. Connect with Jessica Gibson Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 405 with Matt Kesinger where we discuss the development and inspiration behind a medical device that helps people suffering strokes.
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Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
Matt Kesinger’s company, Forest Devices, is developing the medical device ALPHASTROKE to help first responders identify stroke and triage patients to the right hospital.
Strokes are the #1 cause of disability worldwide. Lives are changed by how quickly a stroke is diagnosed and treated. Matt was EMT in Boston for two years and learned how hard it can be to diagnose a stroke with just a clinical exam. While attending the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Matt conducted and published research on the difficulties of pre-hospital providers diagnosing stroke. He was part of the team that conducted the largest US study on the identification of large vessel occlusive strokes in the pre-hospital environment. In this conversation, Matt & Aaron discuss how to diagnose a stroke, the testing process for medical devices, and the mission that inspires the team. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. Connect with Matt Kesinger
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Forest Devices Website matt.kesinger@forestdevices.com If you liked this interview, check out these past episodes Former UPMC CIO Rasu Shrestha Highmark VP of Innovation Sarah Ahmad Chef Kevin Sousa Matt Kesinger’s Challenge; Learn the signs of a stroke.
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Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
Lillian Rafson did not plan to start her business Pack Up + Go. But, on a trip to Latvia, she came across an idea that was too good to pass up. Booking surprise travel for vacationers.
She came back to the US, started the business, and hoped to get 50 clients that year. She got 500. She followed the sharp trajectory upwards and remained bootstrapped the whole way. Now she runs a team, does millions in revenue, and is charting expansion plans. In this conversation, Lillian and Aaron discuss the inspiration for the business, how she got initial traction, and the way she has built her team. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. Lillian’s Challenge; Go visit a new neighborhood in your city or town. Connect with Lillian Rafson Website
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Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify
Watson: Thank you so much for coming on, Going Deep with Aaron Watson.
Lillian Rafson: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Watson:I am really curious to have the audience and also myself learn a ton about your business, but to start it off, can you just explain, Pack Up + Go to folks that might not be familiar with surprise tourism or what this kind of concept of your businesses is? Because it is relatively new. Lillian Rafson: Definitely. I am the founder and CEO of Pack Up + Go. We are a travel agency that plans three-day trips around the United States, but the catch is that your destination is a surprise until the day you depart. We are the first travel agency of this type in the US, and we're asking travelers to take a leap of faith by signing up for one of our trips. All of our destinations are in the US so our travelers know that they can use their phone, they know the currency, if there's an emergency, they know what numbers to call. So, there's definitely some safety parameters around it, but it is a new type of concept where you know exactly what to pack, you know, what time your flight departs, but you have no idea where you're going. Watson: So, that could mean number one, I think there's only like 10% of people in the US that have a passport, and some even lower number has actually left the country. So that's a part of the calculus there. And then also you said, you know what to pack. So like, I know that I'm going to a warm climate and should pack my swimsuit versus I'm going to the North and I need a parka or whatever. Lillian Rafson: Exactly. So our travelers fill out a survey. So they tell us they've traveled recently, what trips they have coming up, what they like to do. Then we plan their trip for them. But one week before they depart, we send them an email so they have the weather forecast, packing tips. So you're right, like a bathing suit or hiking boots, depending on their destination, where to go and when. Then we mail them a physical envelope and we encourage everyone to keep that sealed until the day they depart. So you go to the airport at the time that we've told you, open your envelope to reveal your destination, and then you get your boarding pass on your off. So it's a very easy trip to plan and also super exciting. Watson:Yeah, it would definitely be stimulating in a novel experience for folks. This has some interesting roots. Can you take us back to when you were in Latvia? Lillian Rafson:Yeah, my favorite place. I am originally from Pittsburgh, but I was living in New York at a startup there and loved the startup environment, loved the team, but just wasn't super passionate about it. So, I had quit that job to travel and didn't really have a set plan. I was backpacking around, kind of hitchhiking my way through Eastern Europe, through all of these cities that I had never heard of before and hadn't planned on visiting. And I was so pleasantly surprised by all of them, especially Riga, Latvia. And I happened to be Latvian, but I knew literally nothing about this country or the city. I was blown away by it. I was in my hostel and I met two women there who were on a surprise vacation with a European surprise travel agency. And I had just given up my lease in New York and I'd never heard of this concept. I did a quick Google search to see if it existed in the States, and it didn't. And I realized that this was the point of surprise travel, is that the cities that you've never heard of or would never think to visit on your own really might surprise you and you might fall in love with them and they might be your new favorite place to visit. So I thought, alright, awesome how can we bring this back to the States? And then I started to realize I've been to Riga Latvia, but I've never been to Charleston, South Carolina or Austin or all of these cities around the States. So, I kind of brought all of those ideas together and decided to get started in the United States. Watson: Yeah and the other element of that we're in an age where there is a ton of experiential consumerism. Instead of conspicuous consumption in the form of “look at my crazy car or suit or jewelry,” or what have you still happening, there's a lot of like where I went, look at how hard it was to get to this place and the status associated with travel. And that also simultaneously leads to something that as I was doing some research is this concept of over tourism, which was an area that was kind of a tourist destination almost gets overrun and ruined. Can you talk a little bit about that because it's also tied to these explorations of novel places versus tried and true location? Lillian Rafson: Definitely. Over tourism is a major issue in the travel industry. And it's something that we talk about a lot as a team as well. By definition over tourism is the result of too many tourists going to one place, and it has detrimental effects on the local infrastructure and ecosystem and for the well off residents. What a lot of people don't talk about is that tourism is good for local economies up to a point, and a lot of it is also seasonal. So, Chicago is an amazing place to visit, but there are so many tourists there in the summer because it's beautiful. But if you go in the off season, yes, it is definitely cold, I'm not going to discount that, but there are a lot of benefits to it as well. You get much better deals on luxury hotels or the restaurants that normally have a three month lead time for reservations, you can suddenly get a walk in table that night. So there are definitely benefits to distributing the seasonality of tourism. But using a surprise agency or introducing the element of surprise also kind of breaks the mold of where people travel. So Charleston, South Carolina for example, is experiencing over tourism right now, but at Pack Up + Go, we know that Savannah, Georgia, which is two hours down the coast is also an amazing city that has a lot of things in common. So, if we receive a traveler survey and you know, we think that Charleston would be a great fit, Savannah might also be a great fit. So, we have the opportunity to distribute where travelers go in order to offset some of the over tourism effect. Watson: And what's fascinating just to take the spectrum. As a personal example, I went to Greece this summer and we were in San Terreni and we're talking to a couple that ran the hotel that we stayed at and they were talking about how, if you go to the edge of the Island and look at the sun set, you'll just basically be standing there with like 4,000 other people and like elbowing each other and it’ll be an hour and a half to get a ride back to town because everyone is there for that moment and then leaving for that moment, and it's just overcrowding. When you could go to the other side of the Island, that's the highest point, and it's very calm, not a lot of people there and it's a staggering view. That partially came to us because of my girlfriend, Ashley, is savvy in looking for those things, but it is a genuine part of the actual experience to not just be in a crowd of tourists for wherever it is that you're going to feel like you're having something of a unique, personal experience and not just. Moving along in a herd. Lillian Rafson: Totally. I just heard a stat a couple of days ago that blew my mind. It was something like 50% of travelers, for leisure purposes, express disappointment in their trip because of an issue related to over tourism. So, maybe it's somebody who was visiting Santorini and was so excited to see that sunset and really built that up in their mind. And then they showed up and there are 5,000 other people there and they can't get the picture they want, they can't even see the sunset, it takes forever to get a cab home, and so that experience is really, and because of over tourism. We're in this weird place right now, especially with social media, expectations are so high for vacations because you've seen it on other people's Instagrams. You've seen influencers in all of these places and you want to replicate that experience or have the same type of experience for your own vacation, but you're not considering that so do a lot of other people at the same time. And so it can really negatively impact your own vacation. Watson: So, talk through some of the resources you and your team go to in terms of identifying where those opportunities are. Because what I would imagine, the risk of a business like yours is in any way, shape, or form making it too cookie cutter, having it feel deeply unique. However, you're still going to have some tried and true this is just a great time, all of our surveys, every time we send someone to Savannah, Georgia, we get sterling reports back. So, we're going to keep sending people there, because it's working. There's like that weird balance that you have to strike. Lillian Rafson: Yeah. It's definitely a balancing act. And one of my favorite Pack Up + Go facts actually is that the destination that has across the board, our highest reviews, is Philadelphia. And every time I tell people that they're like, “you have to be kidding me.” But I think that Philadelphia is such a good example of what Pack Up + Go can offer to a destination. So, we know that a lot of our travelers will open their envelope, discover that they're going to Philadelphia, and they might feel a little bit of disappointment at first. Watson: So, it helps to manage expectations a little bit. Lillian Rafson: Exactly, but then they arrive and they stay in a hotel right in Rittenhouse square. And it's all of the charming brownstones and everything's really walkable and Philly is pretty similar in layout and in terms of culture and offerings to Boston or DC or parts of New York. And so I think that it exceeds expectations versus a destination like San Diego, for example, where I think expectations are really high when travelers open their envelope, and maybe they don't realize that you have to drive between different neighborhoods and it's not walkable as they might've imagined. So it is definitely a balancing act. We know that oftentimes a lot of travelers have similar interests and we can offer very different regimens stations within a destination, but if you know somebody who has already visited San Francisco, for example, we will always avoid it for your trip because we want to make sure you have very different experiences so it never feels like a rinse and repeat situation. We do have people planning each and every one of our trips, it's not an algorithm spitting out a destination for you. We want to make sure you know that we have considered where you have been, what you're interested in on this vacation and that we have really considered those options for you. Watson: Makes sense. Now you've, you've mentioned walkability here, and as I'm listening to the way you think about this, it's clear that there are things that are drivers of satisfaction for these trips and then maybe other elements or variables that superficially seem important, but actually aren't as significant as people might make them to be when it comes to the success of one of these trips. Can you talk about some of the drivers of walkability, but other elements that really seem to drive customers? Lillian Rafson: The weather. The weather is really hard. It's really hard for us to control. No, we know that it does have a major impact on how you feel about a destination, whether you've planned it yourself or whether someone else planned it for you. We do see a lot of seasonality around that. On the flip side, for over tourism, when it's beautiful weather and a destination, that also means it's more crowded, which can negatively impact your experience there. So, I would say, the variety of food options, in terms of global cuisine, in terms of price points, definitely has a major impact on satisfaction. Walkability, absolutely, and variety of things to do. So we know that Seattle, for example, is one of our top rated destinations as well, because it has such good museums, really cute neighborhoods and shopping you can do, but it also has a lot of outdoor activities. So no matter the weather or the season, there's always a lot to do. You're never in a place where it's mostly just outdoors and if it happens to be raining that weekend, you're kind of stranded. Watson: Yeah. So how do you make the balance then of, you're not necessarily dictating where the person's going to go to dinner or are you Booking activities as well in advance? Are you basically saying, here's the suite? Cause I'd imagine there's also reservations involved in, “Hey, if I want to go on some crazy like rock climbing, adventure,” that kind of has to be planned more than a day in advance. Lillian Rafson: We always guarantee that we cover travel and accommodation and curate itineraries for our travelers. And we always make a dinner reservation for them as well because we know that oftentimes when you land in a new city and you are sorting through a lot of information and you're not sure what to do, it's just nice to have one thing in place that you can take or leave. So we know some people cancel those reservations and go somewhere else and that's totally fine. But when we do have extra room in our travelers budget, we'll book them activities. So if our travelers indicate that they love craft beer, maybe it's a brewery tour, or if they're really interested in fishing, maybe it's a fishing excursion or a concert or a comedy show. So it really depends on their survey, their budget, time of year travel dates, everything. Watson: Right on. So you mentioned budget and part of the kind of initial way that we connected was through understanding that first of all, this was a business based in Pittsburgh, which I was not aware of. And then also just the success that you've seen being so early to this. I had at least heard of it happening in other companies, but certainly not being at it for the period of time that you have. You came back to the States with the idea, can you just talk a little bit about the progress that you've seen with this business? And also importantly, the fact that this is bootstrapped not taking any sort of outside funding? Lillian Rafson: Yeah, it was a crazy start. So after I heard about the concept in Riga Latvia, I had about eight weeks left on that trip, which was perfect because I had this idea and then I was just traveling around, essentially talking to my target demographic. So it was with other travelers and asking what they would want to know on the survey and, and how they would plan their trip and where they would go. And then moved home to Pittsburgh and just basically Googled how to become a travel agent. And it was a lot of research, a lot of Google. I've never worked in the travel industry before, so I had no idea what I was getting into. And I love looking back at my initial projections where for the first year I said, you know, what, if I can plan 50 trips this year, I will be so happy, that would be amazing. And in the first year we planned over 500, it was a really busy year. So I had won a very small local pitch competition here that had a cash prize of $3,000, and that was all the funding that we've raised to date. The cash prize was really nice, mostly it was the validation that other people thought this was a good idea too. And I shared that story on Facebook and a friend of a friend who was a reporter for Business Insider. And so she saw that post on Facebook and wrote an article about Pack Up + Go. At that point I'd planned three practice trips, I had no idea what I was doing. And I was sitting by myself at a desk, in a coworking space and the orders just started coming in. And I just remember sitting there crying because I was so overwhelmed and I just realized, “Oh shit, I have to really do this now.” Like, this is do or die, people have given me their money in exchange for an amazing vacation, and I just got to work. And then we started having repeat travelers and then friends would refer their friends and it just started to grow from there. So we are almost at four years, and we have done over 11,000 trips now to 90 destinations around the country. So that first year we did about 515 trips. And the second year we did over 1,700 trips. So it grew really quickly, really fast. Watson: And it's also fascinating that you just actually addressed another one of the questions I had of like repeat visitors, repeat users, repeat customers. First of all, like the practicality of your business, the cost to acquire a new customer versus getting one to re up is significantly lower. And so that has to speak to not only the experience being novel, but, inherently, whatever cadence someone is on for their vacations. If they're taking it for a year, if they're taking one a year, if they're taking one every four years, there's some degree to which they're making the calculation of. Do I just have the time and the ability and the effort to go plan this myself, and then do I want to, is that something that I enjoy and I feel like adds to the occasion Because I know I referenced Ashley before, like part of the joy of the vacation for her is planning it and like coming up with all the nooks and crannies, but it seems like it's really taken a load off. And then,I guess also I'm wrapping multiple questions together, which is not always easy to answer, but the fact that it is a three day trip that you're usually planning kind of lends itself to more long weekends versus an extended 10 day multi location type of itinerary. Lillian Rafson: Definitely. So we know that the short trip format also makes it more low stakes. So we're not asking our travelers to give up their precious vacation days for a two week vacation that might be the only vacation they take that year. This is just a long weekend. You can take off a Friday or leave after work and have a shorter trip, that's totally fine. A unique problem that we have with our repeat travelers, which I am aware is a wonderful problem to have, is we always want their second or third or fourth trip to live up to the first. And so one thing that we always say in our office is that our travelers come for the surprise and stay for the service. So, we know that oftentimes for our travelers' first trip, they love the element of surprise. They love, you know, the fun and excitement of opening their envelope at the airport, but then they realize “Oh, Hey, when my flight is canceled, it's really nice to have a travel agent on the phone with the airlines, I can just hang out at the airport bar and have a drink until I know what to do”. So there's definitely the benefit of an old school travel agent being there on call to help you. And I think that's really what brings our travelers back time and time again. Yes, it's so fun and exciting to find out where you're going, but you know that you have someone there to help you. We also know that an average trip takes something like 10 to 20 hours to plan on average and to sign up for one of our trips, it's about 10 minutes. So it is a major time-saver and whilst a lot of people love planning, vacations, myself included, I think it's so much fun to research. A lot of people just find it really stressful and overwhelming, or parents of young kids say, “I don't have time to think about this, but I need a vacation so badly” and so this is a really nice value add for them as well. Watson: So you've mentioned talking about it in the office. Now, can you talk a little bit about the composition of your team? Because it seems like there's a lot of planning, planners and customer service experts that you have to have in order to deliver for that. Can you talk a little bit about that? Lillian Rafson: Yeah, that's basically the composition of our team. So we have several shadow planners in house. We have everyone working out of our Pittsburgh office. So we have a number of travel planners, we do have a customer experience team as well, and we do have 24 hour in house customer service in case a flight is canceled, or in case there's an emergency on a trip. So we always have a cell phone, you can call and a human will answer and be able to help you right away, we're not going to transfer you around to a million people. And then we have a marketing team as well. Watson: Wow. Outside of this article that was written for business insider. What other channels have you pursued to market this? Because there is an inherent word of mouth. Like everyone already talks about the trip they took, I used this podcast as an excuse to talk about a trip that I took, but outside of the virality of word of ethic, “Oh my God, you won't believe the weekend that we went away and did whatever,” how else have you gotten the word out about Pack Up + Go. Lillian Rafson: So we basically have a marketing budget of $0 million, because we're bootstrapped, but we are really fortunate that again, it's a very shareable idea. Like you said, people love talking about it and we've actually had several mystery shoppers. We had a mystery shopper from the wall street journal, a mystery shopper from Cosmo, and they came back from their trip and said, “Hey, we had an awesome time. I hope you don't mind if we publish this article about it.” So that was, shocking, crazy. But we've also, we've done a lot of partnerships. So a couple of years ago we partnered with Ford where they wanted to send reporters on a road trip in a new Ford vehicle, but they were looking for a new spin on it. So, they sent in reporters on a Pack Up + Go road trip in a Ford vehicle. So we know we are really looking for cross branded promotions. There is something where both companies have skin in the game. We're sharing the cost of it as well. And it's a more authentic experience. We're not sending an influencer on a trip and paying them to write about us, we want it to feel very organic to that. And I also feel really, really fortunate as a bootstrapped company, and we have a lot of user generated content. So our toddlers come back from their trips and they love sharing their photos with us. And we love posting that on social media because we know that our travelers are not all supermodels traveling to the far corners of the world, they are regular people going to Washington DC or New Orleans, and we love sharing those photos. So we are always projecting a really authentic voice from our actual travelers. Watson: That makes a ton of sense. Now, I've been trying to figure out the graceful way to ask this question and I can't even quite put it together. You started this when you were 23 and you're talking about partnerships with Ford, you're talking about jumping from basically three, outlines of trips to an inbox for trips to be planned, and the build out of this team. You're in New York doing a startup, but where is the entrepreneurial instinct or framework or kind of composition of this business coming from? Because that's, that's no small task. Lillian Rafson: Yeah, that's a really good question. A lot of it was just do or die to be honest. Both of my parents were small business owners and they own their own businesses growing up. And I always joke about the fact that when we were at the beach every summer, the fax machine came too. And so I always grew up knowing that yeah, owning your own business is not glamorous. You are always on, you always have to be working. When I started my company, my sister also started her own business, she works in architecture and design, and our brother also just recently started his own nonprofit. So I think everyone in my family has this attitude of let's do it. Why not? And I remember when I started it and I was 23, I was also working at a bar in the nights because I wasn't paying myself and I just had this mindset of alright, if it doesn't work, then I'll go get another job, and at least I tried. I always remind myself that the stakes are very low. I have to take it seriously and do a really good job, but I'm not here to cure cancer. I am fortunate enough to plan laser three-day getaways with an element of surprise. Yeah. You know, I love that our travelers love it, and I am really proud that we have a team now and that we can employ people. I think it's amazing. Watson: And the fact that you're not Manning the 24 hour phone anymore. Lillian Rafson: Huge. That was huge. That was about two years later that that stopped. But it's true for the first two years, it was honestly nonstop and I was on call 24 seven and I was still working at a bar for the first year and a half of the company. So, I would literally put in a drink order, run downstairs to check someone in for their flight. Run back up and put the drink on the table. I mean, it was nonstop and I did about a year and a half and got really sick. And that was the moment that I realized, when I was working from a hospital bed, I should probably hire someone, this wasn't going to be sustainable, so definitely and glamorous, but the stakes are low. Watson: Yeah. Let me borrow in a little bit more to what you just said, which is basically, two types of characters. And this is once again, just like a mentality, you were very blessed, as an outsider's perspective, to have the kind of mentality and framework that you more or less adopted from osmosis from seeing your parents operate. But another part of the mentality is I'm going to hire or bring people on before the need arises, before I break down and I get sick and whatever's going on, or I'm going to wait until the absolute last minute. And people struggle to kind of thread that needle and find that middle ground. It sounds like maybe you fell a little bit more in that second camp of waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. Okay, I need it. And has that switched, flipped in the other direction for you? Or is that still kind of a part of your mentality? Lillian Rafson: I think I actually switched this past week. So we've one of the mentality: don't hire until you'd need to. And I think that also comes from being a bootstrap business where, you know, we don't have parties with puppies and kegs and pool tables in the office, we run a really lean business. So, hiring people is scary because it's expensive. So, until now I've always been really conscious of that. And, you know, we've held off on hiring until we absolutely needed it and could not manage the workload anymore. But now we're at a place where, you know, just this week, we've been having a lot of strategy meetings internally and thinking about, okay, how can we be proactive? How can we get ahead of this, if we want to scale and take the company to the next level? And so we're actually shuffling our teams around a little bit, and we're going to bring on a few new faces to the team, which is really exciting, but it is a weird mind mindset shift for me to invest in the company, which we need to do, but it's not something that we've done in this way before. Watson: Yeah. But it's also a humility and a practicality too. You were kind of saying the stakes are low, but there's also a rush and no rush, which is we want to grow. There's an opportunity here. Like there's a wave far bigger than your company or this idea, which is like we said, kind of experiential, consumerism, tourism, and these to play, but also recognizing that because it's bootstrapped, you own all the equity in it. You've seen through the lens of your parents. What being a business owner for an extended period of time can do. You recognize that, you know, it's not about the paycheck that you pull out business here at age 27, it's the scope of what can be accomplished 10, 15, 20 years down the road. Lillian Rafson: Yeah. And it's a little bit scary when I think about it that way, because I still, in some ways, think of myself at 23 when I thought, all right, it'd be great to plan 50 trips. And I remember the day that first story broke, and we started getting our first orders. I got an email from Shark Tank, NBC Nightly News, Travel channel, and I remember saying to my sister that night, it feels like I have a newborn baby. That's been alive for three hours and I'm trying to figure out where it's going to go to grad school. And that was such a weird thing for me to think about. And in a lot of ways, I still feel that way, even though I'm almost four years in now. And there are so many directions that the company could go and just trying to figure out what is the best path for growth. What to our travelers want? And I think there's a lot of companies and startups who think they know what their consumers want and dive head first into that direction and then realize that there's not actually a market for that. So, we are now finally building out a customer advisory board and trying to talk to our travelers on a really strategic level and say, what do you want? If we can do these four different things, which do you think is the best fit, which would you be most excited about? Because I always want our growth to be organic and logical. So that's where we're at now. Watson: And it's really interesting where the idea that you basically articulated, I think this is what people want and we're just gonna like go whole hog after it. But. As long as there isn't the actual data, whether that's transactions or sales, or like actual validation of the idea, outside of someone giving you a thumbs up or a fundraiser of some sort you're in something of a delusion. And when it meets at the end, that's a huge deal. But that's also why so many of those types of businesses can fail or even crash well after the point of their forming and coming together. And I think that it's a philosophy that I share. So there's a little bit of like me drinking the Kool Aid along with you, but as long as you're spending your time, validating an idea, an experiment, a premonition that you might have with actual transactions and marrying that to revenue for your business. That's a really good way to basically stay in reality and make. Informed proper decisions where you want to go. Lillian Rafson: Totally agree. And I mean, the good news is that we know that our core product, our three-day getaways are still, you know, bringing a lot of business and our travelers still love them. So, as long as we can experiment and grow without ever compromising our customer service and that core product, I am feeling a little bit less risk averse now, but I want to make sure that, you know, our baby is still safe. Watson: Of course, of course. Well, this has been awesome. I have the standard last two questions I want to ask, but before we do that, anything that I didn't give you a chance to say that you were hoping to share? Lillian Rafson: Nothing off hand, I think you covered a lot of good bases. Wayson: Can you share with us locations in the US that are underrated in addition to Savannah, or is that part of the secret sauce? Lillian Rafson: I mean, I can share some of them. I would actually argue that Pittsburgh is one of them. I don't think many Americans would say that they think of Pittsburgh as a leisure vacation destination. But, if you come and you stay right downtown, you can walk to the Warhol museum and you can go for a run along the river and get amazing food all around. And I think that Pittsburgh surprises and delights a lot of people. And some of my other favorite destinations, I would say are Portland, Maine, which, you know, is very busy in the summer, but in the spring and fall again is so gorgeous, so amazing. Yeah, there are so many. Watson: Seems like another perk of this role is that you get to go do a lot of research for yourself with three day weekend trips as well. I can now. When I was starting, I was so afraid of getting on a plane and not being by the phone. So that's gotten better. Watson: Cool. Well, I am sure that a couple of people listening have to have a niche for a trip now. So I want to make sure that regardless, people just want to learn more about the business they can. So what digital coordinates can we provide people who want to learn more? Lillian Rafson: Our website is packupgo.com, like pack up your bags and gp. We are on all social media, packupgo_travel on Facebook and Instagram and packupgo on Twitter. Watson: Awesome. We're gonna link that all in the show notes, goingdeepwithaaron.com/podcast is the place to find it or in the app you’re probably listening to right now. But as we do at the end of each interview, I want to give you the mic one more time, Lillian, to issue an actionable personal challenge for the audience. Lillian Rafson:I would challenge all of you this weekend or sometime in the next month, the next season, next year to pick a neighborhood in your own city that you've never been to and plan yourself a little afternoon, staycation, and go check out a restaurant or a cafe or a store, or just turn down a corner in a new neighborhood that you've never explored before and interact with people in your own city that you might not meet on your own. Watson: I absolutely love that when we recently bought a condo, we were looking at real estate in all these different neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. It felt like there were eight different neighborhoods that we ended up in. They're like, I've never been here before. This is cool. This is different. And there's so much to explore. And Pittsburgh, relative to some of the other cities that people are listening in, is not particularly big. So, there are certainly nooks and crannies to be explored. Lillian Rafson:Exactly. So get out and explore somewhere new. Watson: Amen. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Lillian Rafson: Thanks so much for having me. Watson: We just went deep with Lillian Rafson, hoping everyone out there has a fantastic day. 403 Trusting your Gut, Firing Clients, and 20 Years Growing an IT Business w/ Michele McGough11/4/2019 
We believe this is one of the best and most valuable podcasts we’ve had the privilege to share.
Michele McGough is the founder and CEO of solutions4networks, a professional services and integration company that provides network engineering and network security consulting as well as associated equipment/software to a select client portfolio. She’s been in IT for more than 30 years and has learned a lot of lesssons along the way. In this episode, you’ll hear her discuss retaining the talented people on her team, how & when to fire a client, and how she got started. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. Michele’s Challenge; Perception is not reailty. Don’t make assumptions about others. Connect with Michele Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 361 with Jason Wolfe another top-notch entrepreneur, operator, and team builder.
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Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
Michelle Walters founded Liberty Closet Systems in 1993. The family-owned and operated business serves up custom closet, cabinetry, and storage solutions in Westmoreland County & surrounding areas.
Over time, operations have been scaled to meet the demands of over one hundred builders in PA, WV, and Maryland. In 23 years LCS, Inc. has grown from a single designer/installer to a full staff of designers, fabricators, and installers specializing in custom closet design & storage systems. In this conversation, Aaron and Michelle discuss starting the business, how to sell a great closet, and working with her family. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. Michelle Walters’s Challenge; Be kind. Not just people that agree with you. Connect with Michelle Walters Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 396 with Kristy Knichel where we discuss 3rd party logistics, woman-owned business, and great customer service.
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
James Haluszczak founded SteelBridge Consulting in 2008. The boutique consultancy exclusively focuses on serving as a strategic advisor to Private Equity and Venture Capital fund managers, investors, and administrators.
He is also a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of SteelBridge Laboratories, which he and his partners founded in 2016 as an investment firm focused on early-stage Fintech companies. James has 20 years of experience in Financial Service operations, finance, and technology roles, and is a seasoned Fintech founder and investor. James has held management roles inside of four currently operating Fintech startup companies, and he and his team have invested in more than 10 Fintech companies since 2016. In this conversation, James and Aaron discuss scaling a consulting firm, finding deal flow for investing, and helping a young company grow. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. James Haluszczak’s Challenge; Use a fintech tool to donate to a cause, like cancer research. Connect with James Haluszczak Website If you liked this interview, check out all of our interviews with the world’s biggest financial leaders and writers.
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
Austin Webb is leading a startup that aims to upend the food system. How? By using robotics and AI to build and operate highly efficient, commercial-scale urban vertical farms.
In late September 2019, his company Fifth Season (originally founded as RoBotany) came out of stealth mode by announcing a $35 million round of funding. With this capital, it plans to build its first commercial-scale indoor vertical farm to be located just outside Pittsburgh, in Braddock. The startup plans to expand into other similarly-sized cities throughout the US. In this episode, Austin and Aaron discuss the seismic impact Austin believes vertical farming can have, how this model reduces labor costs & water usage, and the composition of the team pursuing this goal. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. 
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify
Watson: “Austin, Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.”
Austin Webb: “Thank you so much - it’s a pleasure to be here.” Watson: “You've had a whirlwind of a last couple weeks. The company that renamed itself from Robotany to Fifth Season announced thirty-five million dollars in funding. How long has the farm actually been under construction, or when did the renovations begin for the space in Braddock?” Austin Webb: “So, really June. They were doing earth work in April in May and really started kicking off construction in the June timeframe...” Watson: “Gotcha. But I'd imagine that upon releasing the PR, and the raise, and all the other stuff, there's just a boatload of people coming at you asking questions and different PR requests and stuff like that. What's that kind of whirlwind been like?” Austin Webb: “It...Well, it's super-exciting because obviously we had chosen to be in stealth mode for a number of different strategic reasons, which I wouldn't always normally recommend, but in our case just in a space where there's a lot of noise - a lot of people speaking around about what they're doing, and felt a little premature in a lot of ways, and so in our case, we said - you know what - why don't we just hold off until we can really cut through that noise. We're doing something different anyway and we know that, so once we did come out of stealth mode, if you will (and again it was sort of semi-stealth - it’s not like we went crazy and were trying to be super-quiet and sort of paranoid or something like that), it was just more of we didn't want to consciously come out and speak and do exactly what we're talking about today. So when we did finally come out of stealth mode, it's just a lot. It's really exciting because we had a lot of folks that said you're really building something that big, or I didn't know about this, or for some of the folks that did know, it just became this nice ‘okay I see what you've been doing now,’ and so that was a really nice feeling for us and just a lot of internal momentum and motivation that certainly built up. You know for our team, it's also really exciting for our employees who are working their butts off, so it's a really nice reward internally as well.” Watson: “And there's a couple other founders in town that come to mind where there's a similar philosophy of ...you could almost in one direction take it to humility but also maybe take another direction of confidence of ‘this is gonna work/this is gonna be big/what we're building is something of substance here/ but like let's hold our horses on too much/hype too much excitement/too much talking publicly about this, and just kind of put our heads down, get to work and make the thing. So was that something that you started with... from the earliest age back when it was Robotany before it became Fifth Season? We'll talk about the name change. Was that always the philosophy? Was that advice that you got from a mentor or an early investor? Where did that kind of framework come from because that's not necessarily everyone's instincts?” Austin Webb: “Totally. I think it was a combination. I mean when we first started working, there's a little bit of ‘okay what are you doing,’ and there were a number of questions, and then pretty quickly we started to realize that we should really just keep our heads down - noses to the grindstone, and really walk the walk. Once you walk the walk, then the talk becomes something that people are interested in and can actually care about. There's something tangible to look at, and we did get some of that advice from some of our advisors where there's again, given the space we're in, there was a bit of that where the advice really made sense. It's very applicable in this situation. In some cases, that's not necessarily the case because you can be talking and really trying to do both at the same time, but it's hard. And I can at least say from from this standpoint where you were, you kind of keep the nose to the grindstone and then you come out and pick your head up and say hey here we are, here's what we've been doing...here's what all of our folks have been hard at work doing over the last few years. It's a little bit easier because obviously when you start getting a lot of press it becomes much harder, right? It's that you really want to stick to working on the business, but it's a lot of time... it's a lot of time to to go out and tell your story to be on a number of different publications or different streams of media, so it's something where it becomes a priority and time time management thing. So in our case, it was also kind of nice, because we could really kind of chunk it into two different sequences.” Watson: “Makes sense. Now we've talked - to dance around a little bit - this space: We've said a couple times, it's vertical farming and it is a big idea, and when I say when I say that, to set things up for folks, $35,000,000 (around). Just within the context of Pittsburgh, is a pretty big number for this kind of start-up ecosystem, but anywhere, that is indicative of a big idea and a big vision being painted for potential investors, for early employees, for the intentions of your founding team, and the people around you. So, talk a little bit about what this vision is and then maybe we can tie it to the new name from Robotany to Fifth Season.” Austin Webb: “Well, absolutely, that would be great. That is a great question. So to start, vertical farming is a new age method of growing food indoors, where you can control the environment 24/7/365 where plants are stacked like a bookshelf, and you can control every aspect of the environment. So, you can really maximize quality and ensure freshness, and you can have a fresh salad in the middle of January, for example, because you're able to control the entire environment. Everything's perfect. Food health is maximized as well, and so vertical farming can solve a lot of huge problems, which I'm happy to talk about. But, there's been this industry-wide struggle to make the economics work, in other words, not profitable - not making money - on a per pound basis - selling things at $12 a pound and it costs 17 to 20 bucks. That's something we saw that is sort of how we started our journey three years ago; we really found that labor was a huge issue inside vertical farming alone, and 40-60% of your costs can't be labor, because what's happening is you're having $17-20 as the cost per pound, and you really need to be down at $6.50-8. That's comparative with field grown and produced out in the West, and that's something that we really looked at, and said we should take a blank warehouse - we should design this from seed to harvest to package - and it really is a full system view. It's not about one or two robots, or one or two parts of the process that can say ‘hey let's put a band-aid over this, and voila we saw the problem.’ We looked at vertical farming and realized we need to design the entire system from start-to-finish because this is about total system throughput. We have about 40 different BOTS that all together get integrated into what we look at as our facility is one robotic system, and that's allowed us to take labor to 20% or less. Everything's just the beginning for us right now, so when we're achieving field grown-type costs, what's exciting is it's only going to get better from here, and so it's a big reason why we existed. Just to keep rolling on this point, part of the reason why we also got started is that it wasn't just obviously ‘hey we can solve vertical farming,’ but of course it was ‘well vertical farming can be this wonderful application to solve problems like water shortages right,’ and the impending water crisis that's happening globally and most people don't realize it - top slow degradation past the breaking point on that globally in here in the US as well - runoff pollution is at an all-time worse. Then, of course, food waste is also a major point of concern, and so when we were getting started on Robotany, now Fifth Season, we really looked at and said okay sometimes as a start-up you only get the chance to solve one major problem, and in our case we are solving like six, and so we just couldn't put it down. So to look at an industry that wasn't solving the problems and in a way that we thought made the most sense, un other words, with economic sustainability, we said ‘we can go fix that,’ and we can certainly leverage the amazing tech talent here in Pittsburgh, and that's why I wound up at Carnegie Mellon to go do that. That's sort of that full evolution of how we got started, how we looked at this problem, and then said this can be solved, and then go to do that. That’s what makes us very different today and set a new standard.” Watson: “So, let me try to say a little bit back to you, just to make sure I understand and that the audience does as well. So traditionally, vertical farming up until now has had these high labor costs that are higher relative to when most people think farm/person/the field-probably outside of the city a ways/the labor costs there - you're effectively bringing the labor costs down to the level of that traditional farm. But, where the economics get really interesting is getting back to the name Fifth Season, a traditional farm has its spring, its summer, its fall, and its winter, and there is a pretty unalterable cycle to their growing seasons. Whereas a perpetual growing system, indoor climate-controlled, that you can have with this indoor farm, when married to the traditional labor costs of the regular farm, actually becomes perhaps should every everything work out, even stronger economically than a traditional farm.” Austin Webb: “Absolutely, that's a hundred percent the case. You get so many more turns. We have a perfect environment. There are certain crops that take 21 days to grow outside and we're growing those in 15 or 14. There are certain crops that typically can take 14 days and we're growing them in seven right, so you're able to do that many more times throughout the year, and then as you mentioned, in a way you don't have seasons, or you have this ‘fifth season’ which is when we're able to grow 24/7/365. The other aspect of our name really feeds to the fact that we are a consumer tech company that's creating a new era of fresh foods, and how we're doing that as a tech company right is our technology allows us to attain a season that otherwise is unattainable for anything else without our technology. So there's a dual meaning in terms of the Fifth Season name so it's really exciting.” Watson: “So let's talk a little bit about the composition of the team, because we did another high technology interview here in the last two months with Chetan Richly at Locamation, and there's no expert in autonomous vehicles, there's an expert in computer vision, and there's an expert in sensors and machine learning, and these other elements and you blend them together and they're multifaceted. No one comes into an organization except for maybe just the absolute most exceptional, with the understanding of the biology of the crops, and the expertise of robotic and mechanical engineering, and the composition of the farming industry and the business models in general, so talk us through a little bit of like the composition of a team that you bring together to pursue such a lofty goal.” Austin Webb: “Yeah it's a great question, because we talk all the time at Fifth Season about the breadth and depth that we have to achieve, and and what's exciting about that as well for for all the folks including myself working at Fifth Season, or hopefully those that are interested in working at Fifth Season, is how hard of a challenge that can be, which makes fun right? Every day, there's another problem to solve, and so to get back to your core question around the compilation of the team, there's definitely this engineering, growing, and business at the highest levels and within engineering, we have a number of different pods. You really have to be focused across hardware and software. You're not just doing one or the other, so you've got heavy industrial mechanical engineering, you've got a combination in terms of everything that comes together in robotics form, which is going to be hardware, software, a lot of embedded systems, and firmware. Work all of that together - there's a lot, so you really need to have a number of folks on the team in order to achieve that, and then they need to integrate and collaborate and coordinate with plant scientists and growers. Sometimes they have Masters or PhDs in horticultural and other plant science subjects, so then there's this amazing piece where plant science and engineering, that in many cases in their worlds are completely separate, come and meld together because at the end of the day in a way, if you think of it, as we create a tech product that we give to ourselves to then grow a completely differentiated a new kind of new era of fresh food for consumers to enjoy within 24 hours of having it. In that case we're making two products - one for ourselves, in order to make this differentiated distinguished product to make the world a better place than we found it - so those two really meld together and you have just very interesting synergies. It's really fun to watch incredibly smart people, all of them way smarter than me, to watch them do that, and then of course you do add in the business side of things, where obviously at the end of the day everything has to be economically sustainable and make sense, and get to the consumer in a way that they can understand it -- understand that this is a different product that makes their life better than they did before. It is really fun to put all this together, but you really have to get a lot of different skill sets to come together and you never know - when I didn't think I'd become a modern farmer that's the first thing - but certainly once I did, I didn't realize about how difficult it would be when I'm going out and I'm hiring our plant scientists and grow R&D folks and our grower and plant managers - that that's something I've never hired before.” Watson: “How do you identify the expert from whatever collection of people might be out there to potentially recruit?” Austin Webb: “Oh, yeah...it's hard. I mean you have to basically just get to the point where you've really broken it down into a number of KPIs that you understand, in this case that I understand, and then at that point see how a person's going to fit in terms of meeting and exceeding those, but you know at no point can I ever kind of get in that mindset of ‘hey I'm an expert so I know how to go hire an expert.’ You really have to listen, and you really have to just kind of match it back to some key business objectives that I can understand, and then obviously once we hire them they're the best person for the job, so at no point in time I go and say ‘Cool, I've now hired you so let me tell you how to do your job’ - what would be the point?” So it's fun because then obviously empowerment it is part of my leadership style anyways. It should really be anyone's in today's modern era, and that's just a fun thing to watch someone just just go and do an amazing job.” Watson: “And it's thrilling, like I work with AT here and and at some point I don't even know exactly when he started just coming to me saying ‘like hey I made this new thing,’ and it's like I didn't even have the creativity or the talent to even conceive of something like that but that is it incredibly fulfilling position to be in as a leader.” Austin Webb: “Yeah it really is because you just get to let someone fly, and it's perfect, and like you said they do a better job than you ever would.” Watson: “Amen. So, I feel a little guilty - we may have actually hit listeners with a little pang of terror when you talk about the impending water shortage and you don't know exactly what that means or what that is. We just kind of glossed over it, so I'm gonna come back and hopefully put the people that you set off some alarm bells for at ease. Let's talk a little bit about what the reality of that is, because that's not I think universal knowledge for most people, and then talk a little bit about where the water efficiency comes from from growing within this framework of Fifth Season.” Austin Webb: “So when you look at agriculture, and it uses over 70- 80% of fresh water, and then you look at the runoff pollution and what occurs mostly stemming from agriculture, they're just really big problems that a lot of people don't think about on a daily basis. When you look at watersheds and everything throughout the country, and even globally, it can be a little scary when you hear some of the experts mentioning when they think certain water tables and watersheds are gonna potentially become dry, and so a lot of it just comes down to more efficient water use and it really all feeds into some of the major climate climate change discussions that we really need to to find a way to get on common ground together, because right now I think a lot of folks are in two different places in terms of where they sit on that. We just need to be able to get at least on the same page so we can have a productive discussion. In terms of the second part of the question, which is ‘how do we help in that fashion’: we use over 90-95% less water when we grow our crops, and the biggest reason is because we bring in city water, and we do a three-part filtration. To that, we add our nutrient-rich water which then all that irrigates to the plants. Once certain water that's not used, we don't just drain to waste, we recycle that, and we do treatment to it (UV treatment ozone oxidation) and what that allows us to do is kind of get back to where we can reuse the water again. As a result, we're not just doing a bunch of drain to waste, and so that recirculation loop can be a huge savings, and there's still other parts of the process where we want to improve in terms of water use. If you think about the amount we need to use to clean all of our pieces of equipment, right there is a lot of things over time where obviously once you go from zero to one and you've built the thing and you go into one to end, you can look at these things and start ‘hey you know we can do that better/hey we can do this process better as well,’ and so we're excited to get to that as we keep moving forward. Those are some of the key highlights, and that's how we, from a water perspective, are able to have a really nice impact where we can just do more with less inside of the city environment.” Watson: “From this standpoint, if someone who's just wildly ignorant about farming in general and the production and the growth of plants and horticulture and all this other stuff, it's like there's a couple things that kind of break whatever pre-existing notion you had about how the world works. It's hard for me to really grasp how a plant can grow with so much fewer water - recycling obviously takes a lot of that. It may help to make sense but also the natural light, so you talk about indoors and I've seen a greenhouse but there’s semi-translucent windows, so obviously some sun is getting in. I don't really completely understand how the greenhouse works either, but we're talking about a building with a roof on top of it, and exclusively artificial light facilitating the growth of the plant, so can you talk a little bit at a basic level how that works, how is that possible, and and why you're optimistic about it?” Austin Webb: “Absolutely, and it's a nice segue from the water question, because if you're taking nutrient-rich water and you're taking that directly to the roots and you're not talking a foliar spray on top of the leaves, you're obviously going to have a much more efficient uptake by the plants of the nutrients and the water. The same goes from a spectrum standpoint: the majority of the spectrum coming from the sun is going to waste when it comes to transpiration and growth of the plants, so when you can really dial in spectrum (blue and red) majority is a vegetative state, those spectrums allow you to really pinpoint in the growing process. I do wish a summer plant scientists were here to answer this question because I'd love to see them just start walking you through micromoles and par values and everything to go through it, but in terms of layman's terms, which is the language I typically speak, it's just really nice because you're able to just dial in what spectrums you're using and that just creates this efficiency that otherwise you wouldn't have. You also have a variability with the sun; even greenhouses that use it - a lot of them are now bringing in supplemental LED lighting, because you can't control, especially here in Pittsburgh. We have plenty of cloudy days and you can't really control what the clouds and the sun are going to look like. In our case, we're able to take all that down to - have you ever heard the term ‘precision agriculture’ - well in our case we're able to do precision agriculture within a precise environment that we've created as opposed to trying to do precision AG within an unstructured number of confounding factors and variables that outside of that, you can't control, which is traditional agriculture. In our case, we get to to define exactly what the environment looks like, so then our growers can say ‘hey, this customer wants this product - I want to go in - here's the exact risk grow recipe,’ and tells the system exactly what we want throughout the life of the plant and then let the system take it from there and just do exactly what the grow recipe states.” Watson: “Something that I'm sensing here that we don't necessarily even get into when it comes to this podcast, but I feel like we can go here with it, is that there's all these macro trends at play and once again we talk about a big idea, it has to in some way be involved with the macro trends that we're seeing across the board. What is also interesting about this concept we visited - you'll see some B-Roll in the videos associated with this podcast -- that he is putting together some B-Roll of the facility -- it's not done yet but it's in Braddock, it is not out in the countryside. It is not acres upon acres upon acres of land; it's a big building, but it is a much more limited set of real estate, and in visiting there, and even just driving there, like how long I think I would have to drive to get to a farm. I think I would have to drive to get to Fifth Season’s facility and what is the relationship between growing and real estate. When you look at other macro trends, have more and more people moving into cities, more and more people looking to repurpose land, and you know suburbs that used to be the suburbs turning into places that are less desirable for some people, there's a lot of interesting things from a real estate plan. The transportation of these crops, not across a continent, not across an ocean, not across the country, but across an interstate -- so talk a little bit about when this vision that you and the team have in mind for Fifth Season coming to reality and the type of spaces that get to be repurposed as farms that traditionally we would never think of as being viable for that use case.” Austin Webb: Absolutely. So, I mean when we started Fifth Season, we really looked at the food distribution system and said it's broken and way too complicated, and we should simplify this with simple solutions. A big part of that is growing food where people consume it, and so when you look at 98% of leafy greens and herbs, which is an 11 billion dollar market by the way, and growing at 8%, so eating a lot of it, and it comes from Salinas Valley California, Yuma, Arizona, or outside the country, Mexico and South America. You can look at that right there and say okay, well at a minimum it's usually six or seven days for a crop to get here, and in many cases, it can be eight or more. You put all that together, and you realize there's just a lot of waste there. You've got a lot of food miles; you’ve got a lot of food waste in terms of it going to food spoiling on the way. Then of course, by the time it gets to the shelf, then it's spoiling on the shelf then it gets to your fridge and then spoils on the fridge because it maybe only lasts two or three days. I don't know about you but that always drives me nuts, so in this case we're able to take farms, put them in urban environments, and have produce in people's hands within 24 hours of harvest, and then at that point, you've got over 3x shelf-life (in some cases even three weeks), so three days to three weeks of shelf life in your fridge is a big difference when you think about food waste across the globe and even in just across the country. To get back to part of your question, what that can also mean is you're looking at urban environments, so if you create a perfect environment in a 60,000 square-foot building, so that's just one-and-a-half acres, right, and within that you have we have a 25,000 square foot grow room, so basically half an acre, we're able to convert that into what's the equivalent of well over 130,000 square-feet, so five acres right? Then within that, when we talk about growing for 24/7/365, and then growing plants faster, at the end of the day you just start to get multiples upon multiples of more yield per 2D square-foot, and so then what you can finally do is take that all the way to the end of the line which is where do we want to grow this. In which part of the city do we want to grow it? In our case, a big social mission of ours is to go into communities just like Braddock where you've got this industry of finding legacy that we're able to repeat as an industry of finding company in our space - a hard work ethic which is a big part of our values, and at the end of the day, we all want to be a part of a community and support each other and that's something that we think we can do, where we can really start to to show people, ‘hey this is a new modern way of growing’ and really once again reconnect people to their food. That complicated food distribution has some people disconnected from their food, so we should reconnect them to that and that's part of what we're doing a Fifth Season from a consumer perspective, and bringing a new era of fresh foods and new experiences, but it also is in terms of the training of our of our kids and everything and from an education standpoint. It is about that connection of STEM and education, and this is where our food comes from and this is where our food used to come from and here's where it can come from now. I think that's a really big part of community bonding and community support that food just naturally brings, but also in this case it's that combination of food and tech together, and coming together with the community.” Watson: “Yeah, so back to embarrassing things that Aaron just learned: I was reading about eggs and you know an unwashed egg from a chicken can just sit on your counter at room temperature - it's either for 30 or 45 days without refrigeration. It's still good to eat and you can prepare it, and cook yourself an egg and that is a traditional example of what you were saying - you can have it sit there and if you don't use it for two weeks that's completely okay. Same thing with the vegetables, and all these concerns about a GMO or about too much fertilizer or pesticides or whatever on the food that we're eating and that being really married to it or being divorced. Like if you were sitting in your backyard just watching someone spray chemicals all over the food that you're about to eat for weeks and weeks - I don't know if I should be putting that my body so when it's out of sight, out of mind, you don't really consider it. It does seem like there's also a connection there, and you can correct me if I'm wrong - if it's grown locally and it gets to the store quickly and it gets to your home quickly, then we don't even need some of the chemicals and some of the other elements that were required to just make it edible over that period of time. Minimize the amount of rot or things going bad as possible because of the reduction in transportation...” Austin Webb: “Absolutely. We use no harmful chemicals on our food, and a big part of that is because we're creating this perfect environment. This really takes care of a lot of the pest management you might think of, and we can be very proactive and keep them out as opposed to ‘okay they're here we need to be thinking about pesticides’ and things like that, so that's a really important part of what we do and it really gets back to that connected experience and part of what we're bringing. At this point, you have over 68% of consumers buying local first, and now less than 18% buying organic first, and the reason is exactly what you just talked about which is, for a while, organic was the attribute to which people could turn to and really say ‘hey I think this is being grown without pesticides - I think this is just better for me.’ People have really come to learn that just because it's organic doesn't mean there's no pesticides, and I swear I used to ask that question, and eighth of ten people used to think organic means no pesticides. Now it is four. It's been very interesting over the last three years to watch that change and so for the same reasons why people would buy organic, they're now buying local for the reasons you stated. You start to know it a little bit more. You can go check it out if you'd like. You can literally, in our case, local used to be much larger in some cases they still try to talk about hundreds of thousands of miles, but you can watch people really say ‘well local’s within my state,’ and then you can start to say ‘hey well this is grown in Braddock,’ and people say ‘okay now this is local - I know the exact neighborhood it's in so now you can actually go see it if you'd like.’ All that allows you to get more connected to it, but local isn't enough, particularly because it's an overused word and so what we're doing is this idea of creating a new era of fresh foods and this new idea of a new connected experience, and so with our product you can know where it was grown, literally, the neighborhood, you can know who grew it. We show that and then we can actually see directly out of the farm - this very specific plot of land that your specific package came from. What we're really excited about is in the retail environment, for example, being able to right there - you just scan it - you don't have to pull out your phone but you scan it and then you can see those three things and that's something that really changes your mentality of bringing everything kind of in full focus and you start to say you realize - well I want this for everything that I'm consuming. In our belief, it's really sort of that ‘consumer packaged goods’ is the old, and ‘consumer connected goods’ is the new, and that's...” Watson: “That's a good line.” Austin Webb: “Thanks and thank you. That’s what we're excited about. That's what all of our folks are hard at work doing right now. Everyone’s walking and I'm doing the talking, which is just part of my job. That's what we're doing, and it's super-exciting because that's how all of our food should be, particularly fresh food, which we're obviously consuming more and more of. That's why the fresh perimeter rate, fresh produce, fresh meats are driving retail traffic, and also driving our habits in the restaurant. So we're really excited because in the restaurant, for example, we have a brand name salad on the menu. We're able to have people really start to ask and think more about that and again having that information actually there to talk about. Even more, compared to right now. There's a board in the back corner, and it says here's some local farms, and you kind of never see it. You never think about it. In this case, there's a lot more that you can talk about because that's what we're trying to bring full focus to consumers. It's not just the experience with the food, but it's the experience of how they can access it, cook it, and learn more about it, use it in different ways - all that is part of the connected experience that that Fifth Season is bringing.” Watson: “So part of this is obviously, as you just mentioned, bringing this to restaurants, and whether it's Kevin Sousa, who's also in Braddock, or other top chefs with that specific type of menu that you want. You’re coming there to know what every little detail is of the experience, versus ‘I just want my taco.’ Who are the other parties that need to be sold into on this vision - so you sold some restaurants, you've sold investors obviously on this vision, but are we talking about major grocers like a Walmart, like a Target, like a Giant Eagle? Who else has to buy into this vision in order for the enterprise to reach the scale that you aspire to?” Austin Webb: “Totally. I mean any food business today should be an omni-channel business, and so we look at retail food service, which isn't just restaurants. Obviously, there's multiple categories of food service, including corporate catering and cooking large events, and then also direct-to-consumer, because I don't know about you, but having a salad delivered directly to my door, and I could say let's get three of those, and then I've got three lunches already taken care of as busy as I am and as fresh and healthy as I want to eat, it's really great to have simple solutions without compromise. So we're excited for all three of those. We're talking with a number of retailers, as well as the restaurants, and obviously direct-to-consumers. It makes total sense, and we all want that so that's just a matter of executing and building that out, but yet I mean everyone's really excited about this. Everyone's all in for local clean food, and consumers are really starting to show their evolution toward wanting this experience. When you talk with retailers, they've been excited about vertical farming and the potential for indoor grown produce that's local inside the city for some time, but it's never been at volume and cost that makes sense for them. They need a lot of volume, because obviously we buy as consumers - we buy a lot at the grocery store, so you have to be able to actually give them something that makes a dent in their sourcing, otherwise they've got a little bit, and then it sells out in a day. Then the cost - was it was an issue because you shouldn't have to spend an arm and a leg to get affordable produce, and certainly the retailers don't feel you need to as well, and so it's really exciting to have these conversations where we really change the conversation with them. They are saying okay wait this is different, and in vertical farming it is finally here - it can finally take off with this company for the season because they're solving these volume and cost issues. They have to, because their consumers are demanding this and obviously for them there's also less spoilage there's less transportation. It is just something that makes sense, and so it's one of those - it's really garnered that kind of traction and momentum because everyone across the the chain, whether you're talking to retailers or the consumers, or you and me- it's something we want and so it's super-exciting that we can bring that. It leads to one other piece -- the way we think a lot, which is we can go and do custom grown produce even on the really high end - we can do things.” Watson: “Like as a small batch right? So we're actually almost talking like the 3D printing model, where the fat rapid iteration of a product can happen through that kind of small batch type of production.” Austin Webb: “Yeah that's definitely true, and we can end up connecting with someone like Kevin Sousa right, and we love Kevin. We talked with him multiple times and decided to be joining him in Braddock. We can do something very specific for him that is a much higher premium type product, and at the same time we can go in and so when you just know you want to have a taco and you're like ‘look man I’m just trying to eat on a Tuesday here.mIt's Taco Tuesday for me because I love tacos, but I'm really busy. I don't really have time to go out.’ You're able to just have something that you can really trust and lean on where we sort of done all this hard work. To just say ‘hey just take this cilantro right it's chemical free it's local and if you want to know more about it you totally can.’ So on one day where you're super busy you might just say I just need this, and I know it's the best. You don't have to think about it on that same week on a Saturday where you're going to the store and you're saying you know making a meal, and I'm wanting to do something. You can then start to go down the path to say hey Fifth Season is providing this experience I can go and learn a lot more about it, and I can, for example, say ‘hey I want to use rosemary - I'm not exactly sure I should use it.I'm just used to using it only on Thanksgiving - can I make something and do something different than I had before?’ You can totally do that and you can do all that in the same week, so I think that's what's super exciting, and we can really create affordable produce that you don't have to spend an arm-and-a-leg for, but we can also do the higher premium produce with the same technology. We can dial in different environments and create something that's unique and different for you or for the restaurant you're eating at.” Watson: “What's incredibly exciting is that I'm really excited just to see it continue to grow and can see what you guys produce. Before we ask our standard last two questions, I want to touch on one more thing because it's uncommon to get someone kind-of in the eye of this storm in the way that you are right now. We talked about the fundraising, we talked about the vision of a company like this, and I know and back to the roots of why I do this show -- I know that there's a lot of people like me or people like me a couple years ago where you know you want to do something big - you know you want to go make your dent on the universe - you want to go have the impact - you want the uncommon results and you know the classic trope to get uncommon results. It requires uncommon effort, so not in a braggadocious way to consider this me giving you every license to just be candid about the process of a 35-million-dollar-raise, a vertical farm, a team of all sorts of technologists: what light can you shed on to what it takes to do something like what you're doing from a commitment standpoint, from an effort standpoint, because I think it's it's really gonna help other people who aspire to something similar?” Austin Webb: “It's hard, so that's the first part: accepting that. We have five core values at our company, and unlike at really big company where maybe you kind of look at them and you say oh yeah I remember those and I don't really know if those mean anything, ours are very core and real and true to who we are and we didn't crystallize them until we were already two and a half years old, so only six months ago, did we crystallize these. That is because we wanted these to be born out of how we actually were, where our culture really was, and all of the hard-working folks that we have that kind of created that culture. We wanted to crystallize that later as opposed to something upfront as a bunch of corporate jargon. I'm saying all that because one of our core values is resilience and it's what I say all the time. There's never an easy win - you have to win them all - it's at the moment you accept that, because like I said when it's hard and you accept that, then you can take a loss, and another loss, and a third loss and take those three compounding losses and still go get that next win that then wipes out all the losses you just got. That idea of adapting to ambiguity and completing the mission no matter what, is a big part of who we are, and it has to be a big part of any entrepreneur that's going to do these things. As you mentioned, for the catch phrase to ‘create uncommon results with uncommon effort,’ so it's a great question because it's just so true and you never really know until you're in it and even when I used to work 80-100 hours a week in investment banking, I thought that you know that was one form of its own type of resilience. In this case, it's another because it's not just the hard hours, but it's also the hard thinking and the critical thinking, and because there's never an easy win - the little stuff takes a lot of good effort too. You've got to get a lot of small wins and you got to get a lot of big wins, and you just have to use the losses as its own form of resilience and then use your wins as it's also its own form of a minimum resilience, and just keep looking forward to the next piece. Resilience is a big part of any success, and we have a long way to go, so it's not like we are sitting here saying ‘hey cool we've completed just a small part of our mission - great we're done.’ Obviously we know what's still in front of us and the hard vision and mission that we have, so it takes more and more, and so you know we're at today, like I mentioned, coming out of stealth mode, and how exciting and how much momentum we've gained from that. We just have to use that to keep moving forward because there's a lot of hard work left to do.” Watson: “What's exciting, like I said, is that we're going to be rooting for you, and I know that people are going to want to follow along and learn more and check on all the other exciting announcements that you may have in the future. What digital coordinates can we provide people who want to follow along?” Austin Webb: “It is www.fifthseasonfresh.com . Go check it out we just launched the website. It shows you how we grow, how we're different, and as opposed to being a black box where we're sort of hiding the technology, where we're really showing what we do, because again it's part of that overall connected piece. Then as we move forward, there'll be more and more around that connected experience and that new era of fresh food for consumers where all of us can look and realize we've never actually eaten fresh food before. Fresh is finally here and that will be coming here in a couple months as we really launched the farm and got it operating, but for now you can really go in and see our technology and see what all of our folks are working really hard on back at the office.” Watson: “Very exciting. Well I can't wait to taste some leafy greens, and hope that everyone will check out that link. It will be in the show notes wherever you're listening in this podcast right now should be very easy to find with a quick scroll, but before I let you go and get back to work what I want to give you the mic a final time to issue an actionable personal challenge for the audience.” Austin Webb: “I think the actionable personal challenge that I would do is one that's near and dear to me, which is: no matter how busy you are, try to eat every single meal for one week of fresh food only, so limit as much processed food as you possibly can, and eat fresh food, where you really go and understand where it where it comes from in that mind of connected food. Then see how you feel.” Watson: “Beautiful I hope that everyone will take the challenge. It's national pizza month, so I might need to wait a bit.” Austin Webb: “Well I love pizza. I have to say we all have guilty pleasures, and pizza is my favorite food, so I'm with you on that.Yeah maybe wait till after pizza month, and then...” Watson: “Yeah, and then cycle into the fresh food before the holiday.” Austin Webb: “There we go.” Watson: “Perfect thank you so much for doing this.” Austin Webb: “Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be on the show, and I really enjoyed it.” Watson: “Thank you. We just Went Deep with Austin Webb. I hope everyone out there has a fantastic day.” 
Hayden Cardiff is the co-founder and CEO of Idelic. Idelic is a B2B Saas startup that helps trucking companies track data on their fleet & drivers to improve safety.
Idelic recently announced a Series A financing round of $8M led by Origin Ventures with participation from TDF Ventures, Birchmere Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and SaaS Venture Capital. Hayden, with cofounders Nick Bartel & Andrew Russell, spun Idelic’s software out of Pitt Ohio, a logistics service firm providing less-than-truckload, truckload, supply chain solutions, and ground services in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest United States. In this episode, Hayden and Aaron discuss spinning a company out of a larger business, fundraising millions of dollars, and bringing software to an old, conservative industry. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year.
Hayden Cardiff’s Challenge; Consider and respect the truck drivers you’re sharing the road with.
Connect with Hayden Cardif Idelic Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 396 with Kristy Knichel where we discuss building an $80M 3rd Party Logistics Provider using customer service, hustle, and humility.
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
Denise DeSimone, C-Leveled founder, has started & run 9 different companies. Some have been successes, some have been failures, some have fallen in between.
In 1998, Denise founded and grew one of her greatest successes, Unicorp where she developed the privately-held technology-based business from the ground floor to over $74 million in revenues. In this conversation, Aaron and Denise discuss where to get good mentorship, how she has changed her service offerings, and the importance of company culture. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. 
Denise Desimone’s Challenge; Be kind.
Connect with Denise Desimone
Linkedin
Website ddesimone@c-leveled.com If you liked this interview, check out two other episodes with prolific entrepreneurs Jason Wolfe and Dave Nelsen.
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
Nathan Martin is the founder and CEO of Deeplocal, a Pittsburgh-based marketing agency. The firm is comprised of creative engineers, hired by brands to build interactive experiences.
Since spinning Deeplocal out of an art and technology lab at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, Nathan has become a leader of innovation and invention in advertising, creating custom solutions that are often world's firsts. In the last decade, Nathan has grown Deeplocal’s portfolio to include advertising work for some of the world’s biggest and most celebrated brands — including Google, Netflix, and Nike. Prior to founding Deeplocal, Nathan was an originating member of a hactivist art group and the frontman of Creation is Crucifixion, a grindcore band. In this conversation, you’ll hear Aaron & Nathan discuss how to build a talented team, what it took for Deeplocal to get off the ground, and how he explains the company to others. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year. 
Nathan Martin’s Challenge; Do not look at income and money as the driver of happiness. Evaluate your work on the basis of how you spend your time.
Connect with Nathan Martin Deeplocal Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 340 with Craig Markovitz where we discuss generating more than $300M in shareholder value.
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay 
Transcript
Watson: Thank you so much for doing this, I appreciate it. Nathan Martin: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Watson: One of the things that I thought would be really helpful is for you to give two different explanations of what Deeplocal is and what you do. There's the insider: we're all in marketing, we're on branding, we're on media type of world that I've heard of WPP, and I've heard of this type of environment. And then there's the whole world outside of that that's completely unfamiliar too. So, start things off, how do you explain Deeplocal to people outside of the marketing industry so that they can crock it? Nathan Martin: Yeah. And that's often more of the explanation that I'm giving to that world. So, I think about the world that I generally live in, which are the people around me and people in Pittsburgh and who just asked me what I do, it's always a really strange answer and it changes every time. So I'll try this time and see what I come up with. But I talked to people a lot, that we create interactive experiences, that we build things in the real world that people can touch and feel and blend robotics and engineering along with storytelling. So, I usually just say that we create interactive experiences, things that usually are used for marketing and service of marketing to tell a brand-related story, but we build them tangibly. The difference being they're usually physical and things you can touch and feel. Watson: And you came from outside of the agency world to start this agency, but like any industry there's jargon and vernacular, that is part and parcel for doing business in your field. So how does that explanation change when you're interacting with the folks who are cut from a different cloth? Nathan Martin: I would say it doesn't change significantly. And that's mainly that that's part our brand and our identity is I think we are very much about making things and we're very much about, our company in the agency world, what you kind of discover is that there's this typical model or an agency comes up with a creative concept, answers or brief thinks about how they're going to meet a marketing challenge. And then they would typically hire a production company to bring those things to life. Whether that's through a commercial, or it's something more physical or tangible or experiential. I think we're a strange company, even in that world, and difficult to explain to traditional agencies or not even traditional agencies, digital agencies, because we don't fit in one category is sometimes the work that we do is considered experiential because we're building things that live as experiences. Sometimes it's considered to be like retail because we're building things that might live in our retail environment or for our retail client. Sometimes it might be considered like exhibit design because we're building things that live in like a customer experience center or a museum-style experience. What is united is the output. So I think we have the benefit that most of our clients know our work and then come to us based on the work that they've seen, which gives us a huge benefit because we don't have to have a really in-depth explanation of who we are and what we do. I think that's always been hard for us and it still is. So we would still answer the same question in somewhat the same way. And when we're talking within. To a client of ours, we would say that we build things in the physical world that express the brand. We're building tangible things that you can touch and feel increasingly in a world that's primarily digital. It's become a fairly boring conventional world. So we try to build things that have never been seen before. And I think that's why we're hired is that we tend to build things that have never been seen or experienced just before. Watson: And I think that that's a really interesting framing for selling any type of service or deliverable is when you, you sit in such a kind of distinct hard to define realm, it's simultaneously in the early stages, it had to be difficult to get people to wrap their mind around what this thing is that you can do very much Simultaneously, once it's understood you then get to play in a space where there really aren't the same quantity or caliber of competitors. And I would imagine that's where the kind of recurring business comes to you from is like, we don't even know anyone else who can do this. Nathan Martin: Yeah, you're very right in that assumption. Early on building our company and building our reputation was really difficult mainly because that question of who we are and what we do was much more challenging to answer because we didn't have a portfolio of work and we didn't have the client base that we have now. So, it was difficult because you were kind of convincing people to trust you based on the staff makeup, or based on purely belief in a concept that you have, that this will be amazing to bring to life. Now it's a little bit easier because when you have a reputation and you've kind of built a reputation up, people can look to our past work to get an inclination of what they might get out of Deeplocal. So they have an understanding of the caliber of work that they might expect. And oftentimes you're right, that tends to be technically challenging work. There's definitely a genre of stuff that we do where we're much more competitive, short timelines, highly technically complex things. When those two things come together, we have less and less competitors. When we started, we're 13 years old now, when we started working in advertising was about three years into the company, when we started to do the type of work we do, but in service of marketing. And when we started to do that, we had very few competitors, if any. I watched over the first couple of years of our existence where there'd be a handful of companies, I knew who they all were. In some cases they were friends, or good natured competitors and over the years that's evolved into the hundreds of competitors that we have now. And it's global in how we compete. We're more right for competition than ever before. So I'm never worried about large companies that we compete with. I'm mostly worried about small teams of people, because I remember how nimble you can be as a small company when you have five or 10 people on staff. Those are our strongest competitors companies that are small enough that they can be extremely nimble. And when they're extremely passionate and talented, they can produce amazing things. That's how we stood up to much larger companies when we were small. We used our passion, our energy and our intent and our creativity, too, things that other people would just kind of weed it away. We didn't have the established process. Now we, as a larger business, we do have established processes, a little bit more rigidity in the way in which we work, which means that even though our timelines are still often short and the work is still often very technically challenging what we're capable of as much more than we could do when we were smaller, but we've had to continually every year, just expand our technical capabilities. I think that's how we managed to stay competitive as to just increase the capacity for what we are capable of doing. Imagine that a part of the secret sauce is the chemistry of having worked together. Watson: And another element outside of the processes and the technical capacities. I'd have to imagine some of the sauce is if you have the same collection of electrical, mechanical, computer engineers who have worked on these projects together, and they just have the fluency of, “don't bother Craig at 3:00 PM,” and those other kind of small nuances that help a team to operate more effectively. Nathan Martin: Yeah. And that's something that you evolve into. Anyone that's had a long time collaborator knows how important it is to have chemistry with the people they work alongside. I think it's even more difficult for our business than most because of the differences in backgrounds that people have here. So, you have people coming from so many different backgrounds and kind of spanning design and engineering and since we've kind of collapsed all those disciplines into one business. We really require a lot of open collaboration, communication, it becomes really important. Going through the projects, we do all project based work. So going through the productions that we go through, the timelines, we do them under, I think brings people together rather quickly. For a lot of people it's similar to when they were in college, when you're working on a collaborative project with people that come from different backgrounds. I think those are the environments where you're learning something new together. When you're learning something new together, you're faced with a new challenge together and you overcome it and you find out how to do that through collaboration, it reinforces, just a way of working that we want to constantly reinforce here. So rather than me telling people, this is how you have to work together. They evolve into it. And when you evolve, you learn things so innately that they just become a part of the way in which you behave. Watson: Makes sense. You spoke to a college here, but before college you were traveling nationally and internationally with a band as the singer, as the front man to some degree. Did you learn those lessons from that experience? Was that a shortcoming of that experience? Can you talk a little bit about how that ties into what you're doing now? Nathan Martin:I think I learned a lot. I learned a lot definitely by being in a band. It was in kind of an underground music scene and really started my experience with that kind of started when I was in high school. I was generally like a shy kid and kind of a nerdy kid. When I was starting to get exposed to underground music, I really found an interest in something that as a non-musician was, I had to find a place for myself. So I wanted to be in a band, but I wasn't musically talented. So I had to surround myself with people that were more talented than myself and I had to find a new role and my role became a motivator or instigator or whatever you want to call it, but it was to be the personality. And apart from the personality, it was learning hard work. I don't think I was an exceptionally hard working child. I think the band though did teach me a lot of my work ethic, because I learned that my role had to be about diligence. I had to. All the like logistic parts of running a band and booking a tour and putting out records, all of that stuff, which became kind of design and communication and managing relationships and logistics and even travel, and van repair. All of these kinds of basic things that you take on when you're in a band. To me, it was very similar to having a startup. Deeplocal is my first and only startup, but I feel like being in a band was kind of as close as I would have gotten to having a startup before Deeplocal. So the lessons that I learned from that were great.I think that I learned about how to manage people that come from different backgrounds, how to motivate people to kind of accomplish goals together. These collective goals. I also learned how to capture people's attention, both good and bad. There were a lot of lessons I learned when I was younger, trough failing at controlling people's reactions to things that I was putting into the world. There were a lot of times where I was creating things that were stunts that were things that were designed to be provocative, but had very little point to them. Those are the childish parts of what I did. And=I matured out of that but when you're young and you're kind of finding your way and building your identity. I think I learned that through being in a band and kind of crafting that identity for the band and, similarly to Deeplocal, I always wanted the band to be something that was different or unique or stood out. And so it became the band. I think I always resisted it being just about music and tried to make it more about activism or reclaiming media technology or subversion, but it always had something deeper to me. I always wanted it to be more than a band. And then I think that's carried through, into this business as well. It's had a little bit more a benefit to us as a business, as I think with Deeplocal. Initially I never wanted to be just a company from Pittsburgh. I never wanted to be just a web development shop or design shop. I just didn't want to be like anyone else. I wanted us to create something that was different. And I thought being different was something that we could be proud of. And the secondary benefit was that in being different, it was something that was highly competitive as well. Some of the things I'm most proud of over the years is that this company and all the people here have trusted me every year. Not as much now as we get older and we mature as a business, but definitely when we were defining our brand and building our company and that we would challenge ourselves to do things that were unexpected, that we didn't think were possible, that we didn't think we could do that we didn't think we could accomplish. Most companies would stay away from being themselves as much as we've adapted over the years. We have different periods of what Deeplocal was and how I answered that question of what Deeplocal has probably changed a hundred times over those 13 years. And I think that is something that I'm actually most proud of, that we had the courage to change the business, change what we do, change our output. And we did that because we had clients that would challenge us to do things that maybe were outside of our comfort zone, that we weren't a hundred percent sure we knew how to do, but we thought we could get there. And we had enough knowledge that we knew we could try to figure it out. And we had the right people to figure it out. And that allowed us to just get better and better at what we did. And so it became that ultimately we're a company of problem solvers more than we are any one piece of output that we put into the world. I don't think we ever felt comfortable just being, “Hey, here's the company that makes robotics for advertising” or “here's the company that makes earned media stuff that gets a lot of press.” I think we always wanted to do a little bit of everything. If there was something that was interesting to us, we would try to bring it in house and learn how we can make it a part of our practice. And I think that change and defining who we are based on what we're capable of doing in some ways, it's the easiest possible. There are many competitors who look at the output of what we do and have created brands around the output without, I guess the what's the best way to say that: I value what you put into the world, the best way to sell our company or to talk to a new client is to show them something that we've done, and the proudest moment is to say, we did that ourselves. It's just like anyone in their own life. The most proud moment is when you can share something that you built and designed and created on your own. Because as a company we never really lived in an environment where we always had to hire other people to do, to bring our ideas to life, which just became a part of who we are. We make stuff, and we try to make things that are cool enough that people talk about. And I think that became a little bit of a mantra for us and it's what attracts the talent that we have here. And with that talent, you're able to take on bigger and bigger challenges. And over the years, the talent gets better, the people that stay here get better. Then the talent that's attracted, the company gets better, the clients get better and everything just kind of keeps growing from there. Watson: And that's an underrated aspect of attracting a team. A lot of people will see things through. Almost like a purely economic lens of how much can the compensation be? What are the benefits and the opportunity to attack and work on interesting problems? The presumption that you have to be adaptable and make use of things that's equally, if not more compelling to a significant number of people. Nathan Martin: Yeah. We look at our engineers. Engineering is kind of the easiest one to look at as a discipline because we require the most change from engineers. Most engineers that come to Deeplocal (and I've worked at another product company in the past or even another service company), it takes them about a year to learn how we work. And I think they spend probably a portion of that year questioning what we do, wondering if what we're doing is, is possible, if it's the right way. That's also been a part of our ethos from the start is (and maybe that's a little bit of the punk rock in me) I don't like anyone telling me that this is how something should be done. We faced a lot of that when we were starting Deeplocal. A lot of people did give me feedback on what we should be doing and what we shouldn't be doing. And I struggled most in just trying to fit everyone else's expectations of what we should be as a business, because I knew nothing about what running a business was supposed to be. And when I was able to free myself to concentrate more on just doing cool things that I was proud of the company started to succeed and so I learned that lesson myself by going through it, and the staff all learned that as well. The pride that they have when we put work into the world, they can point to that. Either press talks about, or that they see in the world or the accolades they get from our clients. That's the most rewarding thing that I don't think many jobs provide for their staff. And then to your point about what, what people are looking for in a career, I think more now than ever, when we talk to younger folks kind of coming out of school, or more junior in their careers, what you find is that the, the itch that they have is that they're interested in so many things. And this is something that the internet has changed for people there's exposed to so many different things, so many different interest areas that they have, that they're whole people and most jobs don't satisfy the whole person. Most jobs take one piece of a person's personality, whether it's that they're an engineer or they're a designer and it allows them to try to get better and better and better and refine that single talent. I think we try to honestly exploit the whole individual. We want to use every talent that a person brings to the table and every interest they have, and that allows us to be competitive with other businesses and recruiting, but it also allows us to satisfy these people that have interest in photography and design and animation and video and programming and they're all over the place. And those all over the place, people which are probably used to be the outlier, it used to be people like myself in school, in the late nineties, now I think is the standard. And you're seeing even college curriculums cater to kids coming in from high school that have desires and passions that are all over the place that don't even fit in single disciplines. And the universities are struggling to find ways to appeal to kids that just have a variety of interests. And the companies have not caught up at all. I think we have a competitive advantage and that we are built around those individuals, that kids and people that have more than one interest and want to see their day changed dramatically from one to the next and need that drama. I think we're a pretty drama filled business. Advertising or marketing as a genre allows for that as well, because all we do is project based work. So one challenge the next, and that helps as well. And then we're able to do everything ourselves in our own shop, and our own facility also gives people the ability to kind of get out of one environment and move into another pretty fluidly. So we can sit at a desk and work behind a computer, or we can go down to a shop and watch or participate in machining and welding. And that variety is rare in most companies these days. We play off of everything that we have to offer here in our recruiting, but also in our branding and our marketing. And then transparency just becomes a part of that. The more that we can share and show off what we do and who we are and the makeup of the company and the diversity of staff like that just becomes our marketing. Watson: I love that articulation of the value in the role in the space for the well rounded individual. And that's something that like, frankly, this show is very much about like the previous four proceeding guests are someone developing self-driving semi-trucks, someone running a third party logistics provider for a semi rail, an owner of a small boutique in Lawrenceville, and then someone who is running a small private equity firm, where he buys like little pieces of software that lives like a digital note. So, yeah. What I've struggled with isI have those kinds of diverse senses of a set of interests and knowing that I can not possibly be alone in wanting to kind of bounce from thing to thing. And it's really interesting just as someone who was at the creative mornings, and heard a bit about your background, that you kind of created that space for other people cut from that similar cloth. Nathan Martin: Yeah. I want to be honest, it's not all altruistic. I think I've created that space because it's a good business model. I think I've done that because I attract some of the smartest people in the world to come work alongside me and it's an honor to see that. So it just makes sense that the company is built in a way that appeals to these kinds of smart people that don't just have one interest. I think they're divergent thinkers and we've been able to attract a lot of those divergent thinkers. And we do it, I say it's not altruistic, I think that's ultimately, I've joked about, I used to be an artist and I've joked about how, what am I doing? What I'm doing now is probably like my last and final artwork, which was to create a business, which I never thought I would ever do. And, at the best of times we’re a place where it's inspiring to work at and the staff, you can see the inspiration, and how they inspire one another. At the worst times, it's just a company and we're just doing work for clients. And that happens from time to time. I think that's the drama of our business as we go in waves, emotionally, and it's often dictated by the success or failure of our work. We kind of live with that every day. And people, because of the nature of how they work together, the downside of all of this is that they're all very emotionally intelligent people. And they're impacted by the emotions of those people around them and impacted by my emotions as well. And I'm, I'm a fairly emotional person. And that's the way I manage is to be fairly transparent with my emotions. And that can be difficult because everyone here lives with the emotions of the business when we're, when we're doing great and there's amazing press, and we can all high five each other, then everyone's at the top of their game and doing great work. And when I walk in the office and I'm depressed and it's a hard month and maybe things didn't go the way I wanted them to, or having some challenges, then that becomes the mood of the office. And that's one challenge that we have in the way in which we work, it's very much like a person. We've created this person that goes in waves, just like any individual would. Watson: I think that's really fascinating though. Because I think that there is a school of thought as it pertains to leadership, that that's not the best course of action. It is compartmentalized or however you would disclose or not disclose that to the team, but it's very interesting that you've not adopted that framework. Nathan Martin: Yeah and I probably should. So I'm not saying it's right. I'm just being as brutally honest as I can about my own challenges. I think it's my own challenge of not being, I have no MBA, I have no formal training in leadership. So it's just how I've learned to manage is to be fairly open and honest with how I'm feeling. And in the past that's been a problem, I think in the past, I've let my emotions take more control of me than they should have. I think I've gotten a lot more disciplined as I've gotten older and more mature. I control my emotions much more, but people are still aware of how I'm feeling and what my mood is. And I'm hyper aware of it.I remember someone along the line told me that, “Hey, every time you walk into that door in the morning, even if you're not talking to people, if you're not smiling in your face, like people realize that, and they think about that and that it does impact their day.” So I'm more conscious of that than I've ever been, that my mood can impact people's days. I try to be careful about that, at least controlling the negativity. Positive I don't think it's bad. Watson: Yeah. But at the same time you spoke earlier about how a team or a band or a small group evolves to kind of understand itself and know how to work together. And that's like a way that this place has evolved is to recognize that this is just kind of a core reality of how Nathan is. And, if you were bringing a false version of yourself that would have its own entire other set of negative repercussions. Nathan Martin: And as we've gotten bigger, that impact, that emotional transference, maybe that's what's going on, that happens with managers and with coworkers, as much as it used to happen with me, now we try to understand what the mood of the office is and the tone of the office, because it's helpful for us to understand when moods are low or when someone does need a Pat on the back and a “way to go.” I think that everyone does need that. And we've, we've created some, I hate to say processes because it sounds very stale, but we've created like one thing that we do every month, every Monday, We didn't use to do this several years ago, but we started to just realize that as the company got bigger, there's more and more work that we're engaged in and not everyone knows what's going on and people want to just know what the work is that we're doing and where the business is and what we're pitching on and all of that stuff. People just want to know as much information as they can get. So we started to hold these Monday morning meetings, which are fairly traditional, but just an all hands meeting to update people on where the business is and where the business is going and the significant changes that they need to be aware of. And then we've added to that this kind of process, called stickers. We do these stickers and it's based loosely on the stickers that college football players get on their helmet. I don't even know why they get stickers on their helmets, I'm not a big sports person, but they get them. And we liked that notion of being able to show off an accolade from your peer, not from me, not from your manager, but from your peer. And we realized that if we wanted to reinforce certain behaviors in our culture, we need to recognize those behaviors when they happen. Some feedback that we used to get early on, or I used to get, was that we didn't celebrate our wins enough. We would have so many projects that we would overcome some hurdle, do something significant, and then we'd quickly move on to the next challenge, because there's always something new, something harder around the corner and we wouldn't take the time to kind of celebrate our wins. So, what we do every week is we allow anyone to come up and they can look at our core values. We have several that we kind of care about, that we want to cultivate, like being respectful. So, if I notice that my peer has been respectful in some way, that's kind of above and beyond the call of duty, I can call them out, mention what they did, and give them a sticker. They get a little sticker and they put it on their lap. There's no funding or award or anything else, but every week that I get to see that happen, I can almost use that as a litmus test for the mood of the office. When a week goes by and there are no stickers, I know that maybe the last week wasn't so great for everyone. And then when a week goes by and there's 15 minutes of people recognizing one another, I know I'm extremely proud. And why that makes me so proud is because that has nothing to do with me at all. It's totally a function of the business and the people that are here, they are just recognizing one another for no financial reason at all, it's the most selfless act I think they can do is just recognize their peers. So I think that's one of the most simple things that we've done that allows for that emotional transparency and emotional transference, but allows it to be done in a very positive and thoughtful way. Watson: Beautiful. Are there any particular behaviors that you put on a pedestal as a company? Nathan Martin: Yeah, all the ones that reflect our core values and we've learned by being a business, I think is just like being a person as you grow and mature, you learn so much about who you are and what works and what doesn't. What we’ve learned are that there are certain behaviors that are just good for our business and good for morale. It's kind of difficult to pull things apart because what's so interesting about a business, what I like is, it’s kind of like a band, right? You have all these different personalities, all these different people and they're all different and they're all motivated by different things. And they all have to work together to solve problems semi autonomously. You have to give them challenges that they can tackle because they have to solve things on their own to feel a sense of accomplishment, to be satisfied in their job and to stay working at the company that they're at. They also have to succeed at solving those problems because that's what makes a successful project for our clients. And then we're transparent with all those individuals, like everyone that works at the company can interface with the client. We've built our weaknesses, that we're a small business, into our strengths. We let everyone here to clients because we want them to be able to talk to clients. It makes everyone's job easier if engineers are talking directly to clients, so we do that. And then that becomes a part of our brand and something that our clients then call out and say, I love that I'm talking directly to the people that are making stuff. We've managed to morph everything together. So that's why it's so hard to extract any one piece. If we start getting bad client work or bad client challenges, then staff satisfaction is going to go down because they're not going to be able to take on challenges that they're proud of, which means they're going to leave the company, which means our capability to do good work is going to go down. If our attitude isn't good, then our peer satisfaction is going to go down. So what I really mean is all these things are intertwined. We have to have really good challenges coming in from really top tier clients. So the people are satisfied with the work that they're doing. So that we retain the staff that are necessary to do remarkable work. If you start to suffer in any one of those areas, you don't have great staff, you don't have great challenges, you're not respected by your clients. Then your staff is going to go away as well. So it's kind of a juggling game. I've heard other businesses talk about this as well, but it is difficult. You don't want to lose any one piece of that. The top tier clients or the top tier staff. And when you start to go downhill, I think it's really easy to lose one piece of that to say, I don't need the staff half to take care of this problem, or I don't have the opportunities that are going to challenge the right kind of staff. So that's why we choose to work with some of the most difficult clients in the industry. We worked really well with them and I think, because our model jives pretty well with their model as well, but we want those challenges because we want to go do amazing work with an amazing client. Watson: It's an important acknowledgement too, that there's just literally never a point of stasis, like the kind of positive self reinforcing behaviors or the negative self-reinforcing behaviors. They're always moving in one direction or another and just kind of hoping that the majority of the time it's okay. Nathan Martin: Yeah. Every year we do a little year in review, which is kind of hokey, but actually really valuable because we forget all that we accomplish every year. It's really easy for individuals to do this too, but as a company, we forget the number of kinds of battles and challenges that we've endured and the successes that we've had over the course of a year. Every year, we know that our company is better than it was a year before, but we forget how we got there. I think that's just a byproduct of doing all this project based work, where we might have 10 or 15 projects going on at any given time, we have to figure out how you step back from that, reflect, and acknowledge how you grew. I think that's important for individuals to do as well to realize kind of just take stock and inventory, how you've grown as a person. I think the business is no different, a lot of this is about treating the business as an organism. 33:15 Nathan Martin Sign-Off Watson: Beautiful. Nathan, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you taking the time to be on your podcast. Before we ask our standard last two questions. Is there anything else you were hoping to share today that I can give you the chance to. Nathan Martin: No. I'm just trying to be honest and transparent. Hopefully I'm doing it. Watson: I appreciate it. People are gonna want to learn more about Deeplocal, maybe see some of the work that you guys have done. What digital coronets can we provide for people? Nathan Martin: So it's best to just visit deeplocal.com. We share all of our work there and then through our social media channels, which are all just at Deeplocal, it's the best way to see a selection of what we do. It's definitely not all of what we do, all of the work that we do, but it's where we kind of stick some of our most memorable public work. Watson: Beautiful. We're gonna link that on the show notes, you can find it in the podcast app. You're probably listening to this on right now or goingdeepwithaaron.com/podcast for this and every episode of the show. But as we do at the end of each interview, Nathan, I wanna give you the mic one more time to issue an actionable personal challenge for the audience. Nathan Martin: This is a hard one, but I've been thinking about it. It's something that I used to talk to employees about, I don't anymore, whenever we were recruiting staff to think about ourselves. But when we think about the job we perform I never really worked for other people before. I had a couple of jobs before starting at Deeplocal, but I'm lucky that I was in a position where I was able to start this business and to work for myself for so long. Not everyone has that opportunity, I acknowledge that, but I do think it's important to think about what you do during your day and to honestly question, when I talk about if you feel rewarded, the way I used to talk to staff when we were unable to pay, when we were a true startup. And we learned a lot from being a startup when we really kind of came from nothing as a business, I would always tell staff that would come here, often taking pay cuts to come work with me at Deeplocal, that there's an amount of money that they need before they feel resentful, as a staff person and amount of money that you need to make before you're going to be resentful of the job that you're doing, and it's important to acknowledge that. I had many people earlier on who would say I'll work for free and it's not honest, you have to think about what the honest amount of money is that you need to make before you grow resentful of what you're doing. And then there's an amount of money for which you probably willing to do something that you don't enjoy, or you enjoy very little and in between that is what you're trading away your life, because we spend so much of our time at our jobs and our careers that at range that you've now created is your window to decide how you want to spend the majority of your life. I would not look at money as being the thing that drives happiness. So I don't have a clear directive other than being honest with yourself about what you're doing. And if you have the means to develop what that range is, then developing that range and then reconsidering your career. I'm still amazed, there's a lot of companies that are great in the world, but there's a lot that would be drudgery to work at. I think that many people don't have the options of considering what job they're going to take, many people do. And for those that are able to consider where they're at and what their day is worth, just being honest with yourself and considering what you are trading away those hours for? Because your life, the things you buy, that sort of stuff I speak from my own experience, but your happiness doesn't change dramatically based on the stuff that you can buy, or the vacations you can take, that does not dictate your happiness. So try to figure out like within that window, which is more than half of your life, is that job rewarding? Is that job satisfying that itch. I don't know if that's much of a mandate as much as the introspective question. Watson: I think it's an important reflection though. And to reflect on the value that you do place on your own time, because it is the finite resource, the money. It can come back. You can make a choice five years from now to change your money trajectory if that's where you want to optimize for, but that acknowledgement of time is such a precious asset is a valuable thing. Nathan Martin: Yeah, money's a mess. I wish I could run a business without money and then it would be so much easier, but it complicates everything. Watson: When you figure out how to do that, let me know. Nathan Martin: I know, I know Watson: Nathan, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Nathan Martin: Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Watson: We just went deep with Nathan Martin, hope everyone out there has a fantastic day. 
Kristy Knichel is a second-generation logistics executive and the president of Knichel Logistics. Prior to leading the company, she led the operations team for 10 years.
Kristy has driven a staggering amount of growth for the company. Since its inception, Knichel Logistics has grown from $2 million in revenue to $80 million under Kristy’s leadership. Knichel Logistics is a woman-owned and operated, non asset based third-party logistics provider. In this interview you’ll find out what that means. The company specializes in intermodal, less than truckload, full truckload, and specialty services and has a veteran staff that prioritizes customer service. Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter.
Kristy Knichel’s Challenge; Put yourself out there.
Connect with Kristy Knichel Knichel Logistics Website If you liked this interview, check out the rest of our interviews with the top business people in the city of Pittsburgh.
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Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay 
Çetin Meriçli is the co-founder and CEO of Locomation, a Pittsburgh startup building autonomous trucks. His company is taking a novel approach to the technical challenge by pairing trucks together, instead of building a single truck to stand alone.
Locomation has raised more than $5 million from 13 venture investors, including Pittsburgh VC firm Draper Triangle Ventures. Çetin’s team, including 5 co founders, have been working together for a decade and are aiming to realize the opportunity in the multi-trillion dollar logistics industry. Çetin and Aaron discuss how to sell into the 4 key groups that will determine Locomation’s success: investors, employees, customers, and regulators. You’ll walk away from this episode with a much better understanding of the timeline and challenges associated with autonomous vehicle technology. Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter.
Çetin Meriçli’s Challenge; Find a way to give back.
Connect with Çetin Meriçli Locomation Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 306 with Bryan Salesky (Argo AI) where we discuss self driving cars or episode 297 with Jorgen Pedersen where we discuss robotics and removing humans from harm’s way. 
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A digital agency that provides strategy, delivery, and analysis specializing in a few key service offerings. Vlogging Podcasting Linkedin Video If you aren’t creating or curating content regularly, your clients and customers might forget you’re open for business. YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 
Ryan Kulp is both a marketer and a programmer. This unique skill set allows him to do things that most entrepreneurs only fantasize about.
Ryan constantly builds and ships new products and services on a monthly basis. This gives him the opportunity to experiment and test lots of ideas, seeing which ones stick. He also uses this skill set to buy small technology companies & software products that most private equity firms are forced to overlook. In this uncharted terrain, Ryan uncovers value by applying his skillset to businesses that were previously run by someone lacking the skills or bandwidth to apply the best techniques. Now, Ryan’s companies generate more than $5 million in annual revenue and he travels the globe with the freedom granted by cash flow + operating businesses with no geographic restraints. In this conversation, Aaron and Ryan discuss how to think about entrepreneurship, rules to abide by in business, and the greater “Why” behind Ryan’s work. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart happens once a year.
Ryan Kulp’s Challenge; Work via negativa. Don’t watch Netflix.
Connect with Ryan Kulp Ryanckulp.com Dishonest Marketing Micro Acquisitions Course 3 Books Ryan Mentioned Negotiation Genius by Deepak Malhotra & Max Bazerman Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher & William Ury If you liked this interview, check out: Episode 269 with Brent Beshore where we cover investing for the long term, boring businesses, and starting a career. Episode 216 with Noah Kagan where we discuss Facebook, Mint, and how to be an effective entrepreneur. Episode 383 with Zak Slayback where we discuss how to avoid copycat careers, why job descriptions usually suck, and How to Get Ahead when you’re early in your career. 
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay 
Meredith Meyer Grelli is the co-founder of Wigle Whiskey, the first Pittsburgh distillery since Prohibition. Wigle’s spirits are distributed throughout the country and the distillery has been the most awarded Craft Whiskey Distillery in the US for four straight years.
Meredith and her team have followed up the success of Wigle with Threadbare Cider & Mead. In this conversation, Aaron and Meredith discuss what it takes to build a strong team, why they develop so many different product lines, and the importance of engaging with the community. Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter. 
Meredith’s Challenge; Write a thank you note to someone every morning.
Connect with Meredith Connect with Wigle Whiskey Connect with Threadbare Cider House If you liked this interview, check out episode 382 with Barry Young where we discuss distilling vodka and episode 232 with Christian Simmons where we discuss selling craft spirits.
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A digital agency that provides strategy, delivery, and analysis specializing in a few key service offerings. Vlogging Podcasting Linkedin Video If you aren’t creating or curating content regularly, your clients and customers might forget you’re open for business. YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay 
The best way to prepare to run your own startup is to learn from one of the best. Ajay Kori got to work under Marc Lore and learn from an eCommerce master before launching his own company.
Ajay founded UrbanStems in 2014 to fix a flower delivery industry that was institutionally broken. The company offers same-day, on-demand delivery in New York & DC, while offering nationwide next-day shipping. The company has raised millions of dollars from top VC firms including SWaN & Legend, The Motley Fool, Kevin Plank & Under Armour, and NextGenVentures. In this discussion, you’ll hear Aaron & Ajay discuss the challenges associated with scaling a team, the meta-entrepreneurial skill set that can apply anywhere, and what was broken about the flower business. Ajay’s Challenge; Keep a journal where you write down what you’re grateful for every day. 
Connect with Ajay
UrbanStems Website ajay@urbanstems.com If you liked this interview, check out episode 340 with Craig Markovitz where we discuss building $300M in shareholder value, commercializing technology out of universities, and finding a purpose behind your business. Allen Gannett's Keynote at the Going Deep Summit ??
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay 
How do you catalyze change within a large organization? Sarah Ahmad shares her insights from in the trenches.
Sarah is the senior VP of innovation and transformation strategy for Pittsburgh’s Highmark Health, a national health and wellness organization and America’s second largest integrated delivery and financing system. Sarah Ahmad leads Highmark Health’s effort to transform health care by developing innovative health solutions and value-based, high-quality health experiences for their customers and communities across the U.S. Since joining Highmark Health in 2017, Sarah has evolved the Highmark Health VITAL Innovation Program into a revenue-generating test-and-learn platform that provides health solution companies, health plans and other stakeholders with robust evidence related to patient experience, care outcomes and cost impact. This means solutions can be covered and utilized faster—accelerating both their availability to patients and their adoption in the broader healthcare marketplace. 
Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter.
Connect with Sarah Vital Innovation Website 
If you liked this interview, check out more interviews with leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators in Pittsburgh.
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A digital agency that provides strategy, delivery, and analysis specializing in a few key service offerings. Vlogging Podcasting Linkedin Video If you aren’t creating or curating content regularly, your clients and customers might forget you’re open for business. YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay 
David Passavant is the CEO of Numo, a subsidiary company of PNC Bank. Numo is tasked with funding innovative technologies that can meaningfully move PNC’s business forward.
In this conversation, Aaron interviews David about what life is life running a corporate-backed financial technology incubator in Pittsburgh and how David found his way into the role. David has been the CEO of Numo for 2.5 years and has recently launched its first two products. Great episode for anyone interested in corporate innovation strategies and careers. Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter. 
David’s Challenge; Be an original thinker.
Connect with David Numo.com If you liked this interview, check out episode 356 with Toni Murphy where we discuss negotiating a large enterprise as you build your career. You might also like this interview with Joe Lubin, the co-founder of Ethereum, on the future of cryptocurrency and financial technologies. 
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay 
Lily D is an ASMR YouTuber. What does that mean? Listen to the podcast to find out.
ASMR helps with anxiety and insomnia. Lily started making ASMR videos in 2013 and has racked up over 65 million views of her videos. In this conversation, Aaron and Lily discuss how she got started, the positive & negative messages she receives, and what the future holds for a brand built around an individual. Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter. Lily’s Challenge; Try deleting Instagram (or your most used social network) for a week. 
Connect with Lily Whispers
Linkedin
YouTube Lily's Book Mettle by Lilliana Dee If you liked this interview, check out episode 386 with Jon Shanahan where we discuss men’s fashion, learning from working in a corporate environment, and how he’s built a YouTube following.
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay 
TRANSCRIPT
Watson: Thank you so much for doing this. I'm excited to be speaking with you. Lily Whispers: Thank you for having me. Watson: I want to start with a very specific question that I get a lot. I see a lot of people struggle with, and taking your life back to 19, you first heard, I believe, was Lana Del Rey do an ASMR video. Lily Whispers: It was actually Appreciate ASMR doing a Lana Del Ray makeup tutorial. Watson: At that point, that was a catalyst for you to go start creating your own videos in this very distinct space, but even just to take that and actually take it in the action of making the thing, and then to take the thing that you made and publish it. So many people see that as a significantly daunting, uphill battle. What was that process for you before the first time you press publish? Lily Whispers: That's so funny that you asked that because I remember realizing that if I thought about it too much, I wasn't going to do it. I'm pretty much a perfectionist with most things that I do. I was like, you know what, if I don't jump in, how do you swim? You jump in the deep end. You figure out how to doggy paddle, and God forbid, you know, you just figure out how to swim. I just remember I was to go to work, and I propped my iPhone up on, God, I don't even know where it was propped up on, probably like a cup or or something. I filmed, and my first video is 15 minutes long, and it was so rushed. I was so nervous, and I remember I published it and I was just like, ‘Yolo. Let's see what happens.’ To be honest, I don't know what mentality I was in, but I just realized that if I didn't just do it, I wasn't going to do it. I kind of thought about my channel name, which was officially or before it was Lily Whispers. ASMR, it was Whispers Lily because Lily Whispers was taken. It was Whispers Lily, and I didn't even have any graphics on my channel. I think I just uploaded it, and I was like ‘let's see what happens.’ It did kind of well, and everyone was really supportive and receptive of it. I think the feedback is what kept me going, but it was just kind of like a last minute, ‘okay, I have 15 minutes before I have to leave my house for work, I might as well just do this.’ Watson: Yeah. It's so interesting that you said that there was some of that feedback because the other element is someone creates, someone publishes, and then there's going to be negative feedback. There's gonna be negative critique. Then there's also this untalked about section of like, there was just no feedback. I put it out there. Nothing happened, no one said anything, and there wasn't a reaction, but for you, it seems like there was a response or feedback pretty quickly after putting out there for the first. Lily Whispers: Yeah. This was, God, so long ago. This was when ASMR content was just beginning. So everyone was just absorbing as much as they can. Now, everyone, you know, not everyone, but a lot of people have ASMR channels now. Everyone's thinking about making one and everything. So back when there wasn't a lot of content out there, people were constantly searching for it and finding it. So from an SEO perspective and a video SEO perspective, I kind of was in people's feeds. Because it's such a niche audience, I feel like that first video, I think I got 3000 views on it in the very first couple of months, or whatever it was. I was thrilled. I was like, ‘oh my gosh, this is like the best video I've ever done. This is amazing.’ I had dabbled in YouTube before, so I kind of had an understanding of the platform, but yeah, getting no feedback, which I've had projects where I've gotten no feedback on you're like, ‘oh my God, I'm presenting to a wall.’ It's kind of daunting in that way. I lucked out with getting immediate feedback and immediate good feedback. People were very constructive. Watson: Maybe before the first day of ASMR came out, maybe that's kind of what was happening to some degree with the stuff that you had put out before was like, if it elicited such a response the first time you did that, it kind of speaks to from a comparison standpoint where the stuff was before that, is that accurate? Lily Whispers: Yes, exactly. Watson: So take me through comparing and contrasting then and now. For me, what was absolutely eye opening was to see the Michelo Ultra commercial, where it was completely out of left field. Some people try to ruin the ads beforehand and see what's coming. I had no idea. I was like, did they just do an ASMR ad during the Superbowl? Lily Whispers: So funny, my friend from Florida called me two weeks ago, and he was like, ‘Lily, did you see the Michelo Ultra commercial?’ I'm like, ‘listen, buddy, you're a little late. I've definitely seen that.’ He was like, ‘man, that’s so awesome.’ I was like, ‘yeah.’ Watson: So, the first time you did it, you made it on the phone, but now the gear and just the standard competition has raised. When more people come into the space, it's no longer, you know, maybe, you could get away with it, but the standard for the equipment that you have to use is much, much higher. Lily Whispers: Much higher. When I started, there were no binaural microphones. People were using their iPhone, and people still do that. There is a type of ASMR that has a lot of white noise and we call that Lo-Fi, low frequency, like Lo-Fi music and radio stations. ASMR has a similar thing. I personally love those videos, but then you see these people actually making their own microphones. This guy made this microphone with actually four ears on it. To build that, you think of where technology has grown of, okay, you’re lucky if you had a microphone on either side of the camera to kind of give a binaural effect, but now you have microphones that are mimicking the human ear in four places. That's crazy. Watson: Can you define binaural? Lily Whispers: Yeah. Binaural means on either side. So, when you're listening to music on your headphones, you hear it on the right or the left side. Watson: How have you thought about that for yourself? Now, I'm getting back to just all these kinds of themes of content creation, regardless of vertical, of someone who just pursues having to have the best. I don't quite have the right camera set up, things, or the other thing before I go and make the thing when, you know, that's a part of the equation. That's not really the core of anything that you would ever create. Lily Whispers: No, it's not. You have to think about what you're going to bring to the table that's going to set you apart from everybody else, whether it's what you talk about, whether it's your personality, whatever it is, it can't just be about technology. Anyone can come out and buy the newest, greatest things. Unless you, I kind of have a taste for it, unless you bring something new to the table, it's just going to be like everything else. So, the technology can only get you so far. That's half of it. Watson: Yeah. So, what I'm really curious about as it pertains to the growth, there was an appetite for ASMR. You even alluded to the SEO strength when you were first getting off, and how that video got discovered, but you have a real comprehensive digital marketing skill set. I think the other mistake that an outside observer can make is to say, ‘well, right moment, right time,’ or ‘she's done it consistently and therefore worked,’ but there had to be some strategy behind the growth of what was going on. It's informed by a career that you have now in the digital marketing space. Can you speak a little bit to the elements outside the actual execution of the video that went into the growth of your channel? Lily Whispers: Right. If you think of YouTube as being the second largest search engine in the world, you think about how many searches Google gets, think of YouTube as being just a little shy of that. People are always looking to YouTube for everything. The YouTube analytics platform has grown a lot since I've been on YouTube, but that's really insightful. When I first started my channel, I also had an internship, the following summer in analytics and search engine marketing. That's where I kind of got my feet on the ground. It's funny because my ASMR channel took off that following summer, and I kind of applied those things. I look to see what people were searching for, what related channels we're doing, getting inspiration there, and analytics. It's so fascinating what the numbers can tell you. Of course there's those trendy, faddy type videos of right now, in the ASMR community, everyone's eating edible objects. I know that sounds really weird, but bear with me. So I guess on ETSY, people will sell fondant, the cake stuff, and they'll make makeup out of it. Then, you know, and ASMR would be like, ‘I ate a makeup palette’ and things like that. That's a really trendy right now. If you think about how to grow in that sense of what the wave of what is within the niche or whatever it is. Another thing to say is mukbangs, which are the eating videos as well. Those are very, very popular. Watson: I literally only just found out about, I didn't even know that that was the correct pronunciation of it, because I only had read the title of it. I only found out about that like a week ago. Lily Whispers: Wow. You're really late. That's not even an ASMR thing, Aaron. Watson: I'm sorry. That hurts. Lily Whispers: It's like everywhere. I mean, maybe it's not everywhere, but, it's very, very big in ASMR now, as well. People love a good crunch. Watson: That is part of it though, that there's a never ending, a never ceasing, new thing to be discovered. Regardless of anyone who you may perceive to be on the cutting edge, there's just always, maybe I'm just sounding like an old fart here, not knowing where my phone is, but that is the perpetual role of both the digital marketer and the creator, it’s to continue to uncover those things. Lily Whispers: Right. If you could think about that as being, ‘the sky's the limit,’ that is not only daunting, but it's also exciting, too. You're like, ‘what can I bring to the table that's different?’ I recently saw somebody doing a drunk ASMR, and luckily I'm 25, so I did a drunk ASMR, and I think out of all of my videos I've ever posted in the past three years, that one has done the best in the first 48 hours I've never posted. Watson: As you've connected with other YouTubers of a similar size, whether, you know, necessarily even for a collaboration, but just, that's kind of how the world works. People in similar circles run together. Do you see a similar theme or trend of a successful YouTuber with some sort of a background in another digital marketing role, and that is contributing to the success that we're having? That's what I'm, in a limited scope, seeing from previous interviews, we've done with Brad and with John Shanahan, I'm curious if you've seen something similar. Lily Whispers: GB ASMR is one of the largest ASMR artists in the field. I'm saying field like, it's a digital marketing field, but like on YouTube for ASMR. She has a degree in video creation and production, things like that. She's totally all over like this, and her videos are so wonderfully executed. It's a science, it's a talent, and she's so talented. She has the backing to back it up. Watson: So, as we step back from YouTube for a moment, and look at the career of Lily, and at this unparalleled age of you being able to build a brand around yourself, you being able to be a media company own your own, and having effectively done that, not spoken to it, but effectively done that. It's a really interesting place to sit in terms of, I alluded to the different types of content out there, but even just the directions that you could go. You recently chose to go the direction of publishing a book, but when you have an attention and an audience and a creative bent, it seems like there's a lot of directions that you can go. How have you thought about the subsequent steps of building out the things that you're doing, and are you always prioritizing growth and expansion? Are you pursuing creative expression? Are you pursuing business like top line revenue for the brand? How do you think about balancing those things? Lily Whispers: That's a really good question. I've been writing since I was a kid, and I always wanted to write a book. It didn't really have to do anything with ASMR. I touched upon that in my book, but it was just kind of those iCloud notes, those notes within my phone, that I just had to get out there. I decided to share it with the world because my audience, just to give you context, it's 80% or 85% female this month. It's usually about 79% female. So, I have a very large female audience, and they're always asking me for advice and things like that. I felt that by honing into my own life's experience, what better way to do that than through a book. I try to do that with my videos as well, but sometimes people are looking to escape their problems through ASMR videos because of the sounds of whispers and things like that. So of course, I didn't want to talk about, you know, too many deep things on YouTube. So, the book was kind of that medium for it, but I also have to think of my brand. There's a lot of people that are pushing merch. If you think of clothing as being the second, most popular form of waste, after plastic, that really makes me depressed. I've always come from a very eco-friendly family. We were always very cognizant of recycling and turning off the lights and things like that. The little things that we could do to make up the big picture. I knew that I never wanted to come out with my own clothing line. I didn't want to contribute to consumerism in that way. If there was some way that I could take my words and my wisdom and put it on paper in another way, that's what I did as far as the fueling. I guess the catalyst of what/ how I would like to grow, it really depends on my own self growth. If I would have started YouTube with money in mind, I don't think I would be where I am today. Obviously we're all paying bills and things like that, but I genuinely enjoy making ASMR videos. I never expected to make any money from it. I never expected to land the brand deals that I did. Any time it starts to feel like work, because it's my hobby, I stopped doing it. I've been working on my book for two years, and if it started feeling like work, I stopped doing it. I know that a lot of people are different, and we live in a capitalist society. Making money from the things that I put out there is really gratifying, but what means more to me is the fact that people are like, ‘wow, I can relate to this. This is amazing.’ That's more fulfilling to me than money in my pocket. Watson: So in a similar way, despite what has been built, if ASMR, for whatever reason, you wake up tomorrow, it stops being fulfilling or satisfying or interesting to you. Would you have the capacity to let that go and go in a different direction? Lily Whispers: I would never let it go because of the connections and the relationship that I have with my subscribers. It is so fulfilling beyond any dollar amount. I can't quite describe that because I would just continue to have that relationship with them. If I stopped making money, I would continue doing it, because I have that relationship with my subscribers, and it's a hobby of mine. I genuinely enjoy doing it. Watson: Talk about what that's like. The other side of being a media entity and having these means of distribution that no one ever had before is also that your inbox or DMs or other avenues are open, and a lot is coming into you, probably incomparable for almost anyone else listening to this out there.Talk a little bit through what comes into your inbox, both positive and negative, as you want to. Lily Whispers: Oh my gosh. I get everything from fast fashion brands begging me to send me clothes and post pictures, to really creepy DMs, to like stalkers, to media companies. I've been reached out to by major companies, and I've been featured in the Washington Post, Vogue Australia, a New Yorker, Vice UK. Those are some really big media companies. I think that was brought to me through my presence online. I guess, being a public figure, which I hate calling myself that, but on the internet, I have over 260,000 subscribers. I feel like it's a big amount of people. Watson: That's like half of the humans that are in this entire metropolitan area. That is a lot of people. Lily Whispers: I hate thinking about that. I'm like, ‘crap, that's so much.’ I remember my goal for subscribers was always getting as much to fill Beaver stadium of Penn state. I was like F all you guys because I got bullied the heck out of at school when I was up there. I withdrew from university because I was bullied on my ASMR videos. Watson: That's not cool. Let's go in the positive direction. Let's talk about some of the young people, young women, that you have the opportunity to then be an outlet, to be a voice to. Maybe they're going through something similar, or maybe they just need a different perspective, and you happen to be the person that they reach out to. I'm sure that's also happening. That's the more positive side. Lily Whispers: Yeah. I get so many kind messages and emails and DMS. It makes me so happy cause I make videos based on what I'm experiencing. There wasn't a heartbreak, ASMR video, and people always look for ASMR for anxiety and depression. I'm like, ‘what's another experience that we have as humans that we're always looking to talk about or have someone to relate to.’ It's heartbreak. I personally didn't have an eating disorder, but a lot of girls that watch my content are struggling with body image issues. ‘Can you talk about this on your channel?’ I've done that. I've gotten really great, positive feedback from, ‘oh my gosh, I had my heart broken. Thank you so much for those kind words. They were really uplifting. I feel like I have a friend.’ These are people that are turning to ASMR because they don't have those people in their real life to open up to on the phone or friends like that. Likewise with the body image things, that's a huge issue that I found that in college as well, a lot of my girlfriends struggled with body image issues, and it wasn't a talked about subject on YouTube in the ASMR sphere. I was like, ‘okay, let's talk about some body positivity, things like that.’ Watson: What processes or habits or practices do you have in place to control for some of that? When you can effectively open your DM or whatever the platform is, and all these messages are coming in, you have no idea what the next one would be. There's like a little teaser thing, but there are creepy people out there. There are incredibly kind, heartwarming people out there, and it's a lottery to some degree, like what it's going to be today when you open up app 1,2, or 3. Lily Whispers: Yeah. I could get a dick pic or a fan art. You just never know. Yeah. I've gotten both. Watson: I’m sure. What do you do to get away from it or to reset or to take time from yourself? I know how to do that physically. I know that if I go in the room on the other side of the building and lock the door, I am away. But, you know, we are dealing with apps that have been engineered to keep up on the dopamine drip. Lily Whispers: Yes. I actually just, Michelle Montana was, and I was on their podcast, The Influence, a couple of weeks ago with Alyssa. We were talking about how to break up with your phone. They literally build technology to make us addicted. It's crazy to think about. Unwinding, I'm still working on that. It feels so great to just be able to put down my phone and be in the moment with my friends. I think last summer when I was kind of in a funk and kind of across, I was spending more and more time online trying to seek these connections that I wasn't getting in my relationship or with my friends and things like that. There's nothing like human connection. There's nothing like self-reflection. I personally like to drive. I just like to get on the highway, go shopping and I'll go up 279, and I'll just get in my car and blast music and think, and that's my way of unwinding. I'll take the long way home. Watson: Yeah, for me, sometimes, the email inbox can be more of a trigger than anyone. I'm very lucky to just have a lot of positivity coming to me across the platforms that I'm on. But you know, opening up in my inbox, like after 9:00 PM, I'm trying to just absolutely stop, unequivocally. Lily Whispers: Yeah. That's difficult to do, have you tried doing the do not disturb? Watson: I did, but then I got annoyed. I was fighting myself. Lily Whispers: Because when you’d open your phone after nine, you'd see all the notifications anyway. That's how I struggle with that. I definitely have gotten very good at figuring out if a message is going to be bad or good. It's nice because I can click on it and see it. I don't accept all of them now, I just screenshot and put them on my story because I didn't know that starting out. I was accepting these DMS and saying, ‘oh, thank you for the support.’ Now, not to say that I don't like that, but there are some subscribers that I'm like, ‘okay, they're trying to get to know me a little bit.’ I have to keep that level of separation with my personal and my public life, because if not, who the hell am I? Watson: Yeah, there's a weird thing that happens because you've shared some of your story and it's like, ‘wow, this person just is lacking some degree of EQ or social awareness.’ I mean, there's plenty of people that don't necessarily get it in the real world either, but at least, you know, I can communicate non-verbally, I can communicate tonally, and I can communicate with my words that this needs to change socially. That gets missed when I'm seeing basically an icon, an image of you, and I can then just type out whatever I want and hit send. It's a completely divorced experience relative to what we are actually biologically primed for. Lily Whispers: Yeah. I made that error when I was first starting out. I thought it was so great that I had all these subscribers. I was kind of letting them into every aspect of my life, like on my Snapchat, they were sending me all these messages, and I was just available 24/7. I didn't have any time to just be Lily. That was like crazy. I remember I deleted Snapchat and made a private one. I go through phases every spring where I'm like, ‘I don't want in the public eye. I just want to be.’ Sometimes, when you're just online all the time, and you have all these eyes on you, you just kind of want the opposite of what you have. Watson: So, do you act on that? How does that actually manifest? Lily Whispers: It manifests into a lot of frustration, usually, and I'll go back and forth. What I usually do is do things like a social media cleanse. I delete all the apps and I'll go dark for a week or a week and a half, and then I'll go back on. I know that sounds so pathetic. Like, ‘oh my God, only a week,’ and things like that. Watson: Most people aren't even doing that, even if they don't have the following like that. Lily Whispers: I knew that I was getting to be a problem because I was getting onto these apps, and I was getting anxiety about not responding to these messages about not being available to these people. At the end of day, I don't really owe anyone anything. It's this weird thing about being an internet personality. It's like, you have to be present because that's kind of how you build your following, but then, what do you do to step back. I take a drive, but I need to find other avenues to have time to myself because you can only drive so many places in Pittsburgh. Watson: Yeah. The reason I'm really appreciative of you speaking about it, and I want to continue to have conversations in spaces, it is just fundamentally different than anything that happened before. I'm just thinking of the first old suburbia, but Frank Sinatra or some older celebrity, for as massive and the awareness that they had was insane. The means of distribution that their brand had to the world and to the country and the continent, they had an immense amount of privacy because of just a different era of information technology. To be simultaneously sitting at a point where you are tremendously empowered, but also dealing with challenges and problems that you hear someone like, ‘oh, well the stoic philosopher, like from the Roman empire. They had problems.’ Of course everyone had problems, but these are interesting and nuanced in ways that we haven't really ever seen before. Lily Whispers: Our generation is so connected, it's sick. It is really crazy. Then, you look at the generation that's younger than us, and they're getting cell phones when they're 6, and you're like, ‘oh my God.’ We're just, we're in a different era, and I get it. Everyone has their own problems and things like that. I sound like so far. There are bigger things happening in the world than being on social media, of course. I always feel bad when I need to talk about my first world problems and privacy, but we are so available and so accessible and can get anything. It's creepy. Watson: Yeah. I think it's tremendously important that we try to understand ourselves and understand what is actually happening, because there is no playbook for anything like this before. There are other characters that you can study, who are modern contemporaries, but studying a personality of the past in certain ways might be helpful, but they're not actually operating on a model like you did. Let's take Johnny Carson, for example. Johnny Carson was the voice of a generation, but Johnny Carson didn't really sell anything. He showed up on the TV, he got paid for the TV, and I know he had other business endeavors, but it was a very linear arrangement. He just had to knock it out of the park. In this case, the same way that you chose to go and bring to the market your book. You've made this conscious choice not to go in the direction of clothing. When you have an audience that's bought into what you're doing, when you have a voice and a perspective that people do value and they want to hear from, that is a tremendous amount of power to go in countless directions. There are influencers outside of merch who are launching an alcohol brand or launching a jewelry collection or launching makeup and perfume. Rihanna, a perfect example with Fenty. There are so many options and avenues to go down, it's tremendously interesting to me. It's tremendously fascinating. Lily Whispers: Yeah. I've been contemplating going down the makeup route, but it would have to be on brand with me. It would have to be cruelty free, vegan, recyclable, like all those things. Then, that gets expensive. Watson: Yeah. But it's also the way that you are, and it's deeply authentic, in the same way that it's apparent through the answers related to fashion and makeup. You have your own set of non-negotiables, and whether it's explicit or implicit, that's coming through in the stuff that you're putting out there. Someone's gonna be like, ‘well, Aaron, she did like a drunk ASMR, that has nothing to do with cruelty free makeup.’ But, the way that you are and the consistent values that you carry with you are manifesting themselves, regardless of whether you're consciously putting that out into the world. Lily Whispers: Oh yeah. In my drunk ASMR, I also talked about makeup. I'm always just me. Watson: Yeah, an exciting future. I'm excited to continue to follow along and see what other other moves you make. Is there anything you would like to share today before we do our standard sign off? Lily Whispers: No, I don't think so. I mean, if you're interested in ASMR, you should definitely check out my channel. It's called a Lily Whispers ASMR, L-I-L-Y Whispers, and then ASMR. It stands for autonomous sensory meridian response, if anyone's curious. Watson: Right on, hopefully I remember to do that in the intro so that people aren't like halfway through, ‘what are they talking about?’ We're going to link Lily’s Instagram, Twitter, all her other good links in the show notes. For this episode, you can find it on goingdeepwithaaron.com/podcast for this and every episode of the show. But as we do, Lily, at the end of each interview, I want to give you the mic one more time to issue an actionable personal challenge for the audience. Lily Whispers: Yeah. Try deleting Instagram for a week and see how you do. I found it incredibly insightful. Then, after I went dark for a week, I didn't post as much. Now, I just post memes on my story. I don't know why. It was very cleansing. Even if you can't do a week because it's your business or something like that, try three to five days. Just the weekend. Watson: The world will keep spinning. Lily Whispers: Yeah, exactly. That's the scariest part, but also the most rewarding. Watson: Well, this has been great. We just Went Deep with Lily Whispers. I hope everyone out there has a fantastic day. 388 $70M in Fundraising, $10k Speaking Fees, and Timeless Business Strategies w/ Dave Nelsen7/22/2019 
Dave Nelsen has been a successful CEO in multiple businesses. Two of his startups, CoManage and TalkShoe, raised more than $70 million in angel and venture funding.
He has since moved into a full-time speaking career, traveling to country to share his perspective on Social Media for Business and Technology for Executives. In this conversation, Dave and Aaron discuss how Dave went from a large corporation to a startup, where Dave found the ideas for his companies, and how he launched his speaking career. Valuable listen for any aspiring entrepreneur. Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter.
Dave’s Challenge; Do more listening.
Connect with Dave Website 412-779-2788 If you liked this interview, check out episode 362 with Jason Wolfe where we discuss multiple successful startups, investing, and leadership.
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay 
Matt Stroud is the co-founder & CEO of Postindustrial Media. His new media startup is aiming to change the tenor of journalism in the Midwest.
He’s come a long way since founding a bimonthly magazine, called Deek, out of his basement apartment while enrolled full-time at the University of Pittsburgh. Matt has written short- and long-form journalism for Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Politico, The New York Times, and Reuters, and held staff writer positions with the Associated Press and Bloomberg Businessweek. In this conversation, Matt & Aaron discuss new media, recruiting team members, and Matt’s reporting on policing technologies. Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter. 
Matt’s Challenge; Ignore political campaign polls and pay attention to where government dollars are spent.
Connect with Matt Website Matt’s Book Thin Blue Lie: The Failure of High-Tech Policing by Matt Stroud If you liked this interview, check out our interview with Todd Bishop about running a bootstrapped media business, our interview with Chance Humphrey about Instagram and photography, and our interview with Jon Shanahan about building a men’s fashion YouTube channel.
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay 
Watson: Matt, I am excited to be speaking with you and I think the most logical place for us to start is just with a definition of post-industrial what it means broadly in a sociological comp context and then more specifically what it means to you. Matt Stroud: okay mmm broadly sociological context is the idea is generally that you have it's an urban planning idea and a sociological idea you have regions of the country you know I'm gonna speak like in the American conversation you have regions of the country likePittsburgh that went through incredible growth based around manufacturing and industry with Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee places like that you have cities that really came to their peak in the years of World War II and following where they had their largest populations they were the most economically robust. A lot of people wanted to work here a lot of people wanted to move here from around the world it was really nice place to be and then you started to have gradual decline that developed into pretty significant decline in 70s and 80s parts of the 90s and you know a lot of these places lost half or more of their population and you have little pockets of the country that are that are representative of that trend all over the place typically the way that people think about that area well that idea is through geographic boundaries and the way that we think about it is through geographic boundaries a lot of the cities that exist between Buffalo, New York and Birmingham, Alabama and Baltimore to st. Louis fall into that line and then really little little pockets yeah so that's the geographic region that we think of but I started it with a guy named Carmen genteel international war reporter who came back to Pittsburgh I did I wasn't doing war reporting but came back to Pittsburgh after you know traveling and performing acts of journalism all over the country and so we came back to Pittsburgh and we thought about post-industrial and in a different way a way where a way that represents rebirth and change which is similar to what a lot of these cities are going through right now right so places like Pittsburgh I'm having to rethink the way that they go into the 21st century keep the historical and keep their history in mind keep you know manufacturing in the rearview mirror but also think about where they gonna go in the future and we had much the same decisions to make for ourselves you know. Carmen kind of the the really pivotal moment of his life and the moment of his life that moved him into a new direction as he was reporting in Afghanistan and was shot like was shot with a rocket in the face and had to recover from that survived somehow and came back to Pittsburgh to rethink what kind of reporting he wanted to do in the future and whether or not he wanted to be a war reporter post-industrial as part of that rebirth for him. The same for me I mean I've spent most of my career reporting about prisons and crime and policing. My book is about policing and technology and I came to a point where I realized that there was a lot being done around the reporting that I had done previously in in the Criminal Justice space and that I had a niche that I had carved for myself but I didn't really want to be reporting about prisons and jails and police and murder and death for the rest of my life and so I needed to rethink for myself too. And so we feel like we are going through a post-industrial phase of our lives and that's the way that we think about assigning stories we look for stories of rebirth and change and people rethinking the way that they exist and how they're going to go into the future. Watson: And what's really interesting as I listen to you say that you know not that I think that there's a mistake being made in any of the way that I've been consuming both the the print edition now and the different digital context but there's like a vain - some of the stuff that I saw on the Kickstarter campaigns there's other ways that you'd spoken about that was not negative but just like people are getting it wrong and there's like maybe an implied negativity to that but really what I'm hearing here is optimism there's an there's an optimism about that rebirth you know all those words they have that very positive connotation to them Matt Stroud: I think about Pittsburgh in a very positive light and think about moving forward into the 20th century and my career a very very positive light and Carmen does as well and we came back to Pittsburgh for positive reasons we felt that there was opportunity here and yeah so there is a lot of positivity that goes into the creation of post-industrial and you know part of that positivity is trying to identify what's wrong and a lot of the Kickstarter campaign was built around that and part of the reason for that is that you know we do take politics seriously and we feel like a lot needs to change if we all have if we are all going to have honest discussions about the problems that exist on how we're going to change them Watson: Can you give a few specific examples of that? Matt Stroud: I mean we are in the midst of one of them right now right so I try not to talk about the president very frequently but he has just launched on a new campaign he's just done his official launch for his next campaign and I think it's good that he's doing that it seems to be where his strengths lie and where he as a politician is strongest but he's going right back into where he was calling names and saying things that aren't necessarily true and we are- and I just listened to I just sat in traffic for a half an hour listening to a podcast talking about politics and they're moving in the exact same direction they're covering an exact same way they're covering his campaign rally and talking about you know crooked Hillary Clinton and we're getting into the horse race part of the campaign again. I don't see anything that's changed and so I want to try to implore people through the journalism that we produce to think much more broadly about the issues that are being presented there and what they can actually change. Watson: And what's really fascinating when you look at the media business generally is the discipline required to not fall prey to that because you see, whether it's I think I listened to an interview that was like the president of CNN or something, the year preceding the 2016 election was you know far and away when the best revenue years that we've done in a long long time and for a news business that you know is undergoing a digital revolution and all these kind of forces on it to have it- you're like that- it's very understandable, at least at that level, why someone would fall prey to sensationalism or all the things that are rife issues in the world of media and it's really curious to me that like I understand the sensibility I understand the idealism behind that vision but it's gonna be challenging to have that discipline I would imagine. I imagine there's a lot of forces pushing against that ideal that you have Matt Stroud: Absolutely. If you're running a company like CNN or Viacom or whoever owns CNN right now, if you're running a company like the New York Times even but we're in a position where we're at aplace like Pittsburgh and we have the opportunity because things are relatively inexpensive and there is an appetite for new and interesting media that we can make a we can make decisions in that regar and we can try to produce a media that doesn't fall prey to that and you know I'm not holding the shareholders I can make that decision and I would like it if listeners and readers made similar decisions about the media that they consume and so really I'm not you know when I when I talk about what's wrong with media and how I wish it would change I'm not really talking to people who are beholden to shareholders in at places like CNN or or CNBC or any of the others. Like they can make the decisions that they want to make and good for them I hope they make a lot of money but we have we have the freedom to make different decisions and to pay attention to different things and so I'm really employing imploring readers and and media consumers to think a little bit harder about what they read and what they consume and how they act on that information. Watson: Yeah. And I find that the people who do take that consideration I mean I'm kind of pandering to the audience here as I say this but like the people who make that choice are some of my favorite people. Incredibly thoughtful they're incredibly articulate they have you know interesting perspective on stuff. Matt Stroud: Yeah and they listen to great podcast like this I mean they make they make decisions that are active I mean this part of why I think podcasting is such an interesting direction in media because it you can be so selective about the content that you consume and even the content you create it's so easy to make it on your own yeah that if you see a hole there if there's there's a hobby that you want to talk about. I mean, you can do that and there's a possibility that other people will listen and I'm very curious where it goes in the next 10-15 years certainly. Watson: So, one of the things and this has been a through-line between a bunch of recent episodes that we've done but the basic idea if you've got the passion for journalism or baking or working on cars and you start a business in that realm all of a sudden your world kind of changes you started the business because you love that thing and you just want to do it all the time and then when it becomes a business there's a degree to which that thing that you loved that you got into it for becomes less central and now you're running the business of that thing so I'm really curious as you've launched Postindustrial and then you know try to find the business model and the strategy behind it in addition to this level of journalism that you aspire to how you've gone about the business of media in union with the mission of the media that you wanna produce. Matt Stroud: Well a little bit of background excuse me well I this is not my first magazine that I started. I started a magazine when I was when I was in college dating myself in 2003 I started the magazine called Deek and I was much more interested in the the business of producing a publication and in toying with the idea of what I could do with a magazine at that time- DeakMagazine.com some of the archives are still out there- but that led me into being an editor for different publications and I actually made the decision to strengthen my background as a journalist and understand more about journalism because of that trajectory like I was moving in the direction of being a business person and a publisher and ran into some issues that led me to believe that I need to understand more about journalism. Then basically spent ten years learning how to be a good journalist and when I started PostIndustrial, I was under the impression that I would be able to just focus on the journalism as you as you point to but you're you are totally right when you start a business somebody has to take care of the business of making it work and so that has that has been something that I have adapted to and tried to adapt to I would say that's what has been helpful is during that ten-year period of trying to figure out what I wanted to be as a journalist and how to be a be a journalist it just became so ingrained in my head like the values that you need to bring to journalism and what the difference is between a piece of journalism that is that is sponsored and a piece of journalism then it's this quote- unquote pure and not not beholden to anyone or anything like it. It just it sinks into anything that we do and I know that when we do a piece of sponsored content like it has to be explicitly labeled and people need to know like this is a piece of work that is advertising and on the other side to give journalists the freedom to do the good work that they want to do and then hold those journalists accountable for what they turn in and if they turn something in then is that is not up to our standards to make them go back and do it again and so I think I think being educated in what you want to do allows you to hold the standards that you want to keep and also perform the business duties that you want to do but I don't know enough about business and so a lot of the education going back to going back to actually being a publisher in creating a magazine I've had to learn on the fly how to do that so that's been that's been a challenge. Watson: One of the most potent sales jobs that you've done so far has been the success of the Kickstarter campaign as a launch off point for you know proving that there is an appetite for this type of media proving that people will put their dollars behind it. I'd imagine that calls into tension to some degree a model that is advertiser supported media versus a kind of member you know audience supported piece of media. How have you thought about those two countervailing boards? Matt Stroud: For attention between the two? Watson: Yeah, if there's a direction that's more appealing to you a direction that seems more viable a direction that is just maybe how you think about it Matt Stroud: We're in a the magazine that we create is going to have to be in the models that we have are going to have to be advertiser supported. And there are services and verticals that I think as we do more research and as we get more involved here are going to be more aligned toward a member model and a subscription model and I see that as part of part of where we go like post-industrial is the umbrella above which some interesting verticals are going to emerge and that's where a lot of the subscriber interest is going to be is going to be focused. But the actual idea for the magazine has its models in entities like the Edible Products, Brooklyn, that that group of magazines, and you know the most prominent version of a magazine that does similar things is Texas Monthly yeah. Texas Monthly is a big thick advertiser-supported magazine that is fun to read and that also has great journalism in it and so that's really the direction that we're going into. Watson: Yeah that was. You say there's two regional outlets both in the Kickstarter campaign and we have coffee together and has a model where you kind of study what they're doing and try to find someone for them for that, can you speak to more of what you took away from what they're doing. Matt Stroud: From what they're doing? Watson: Yeah Matt Stroud: Okay so Texas Monthly, what they're doing is a true regional magazine and the way that they're able to do that is that there is some cohesion between the cities in Texas all of those cities think of themselves as part of Texas and can invest in the idea of being part of Texas and I thought when I initially started this project that I would be able to rally different cities and leaders and businesses in the idea that the Rust Belt and post-industrial America was a thing that they could all rally behind. In theory, a lot of the people I've spoken to in different cities have rallied behind that idea but they rally behind it less more with their mind than with their with their dollars and so the way that we've had to kind of pivot and rethink that model is to think about the region as a whole and tell stories that are relevant to the entire region and do that through in-depth reporting that is you know in the feature well of the magazine and then to have different versions of the publication that comes out that is specific to every city that we that we launched out of and so that's why it's a it's a hybrid of these two models so yes we do think about the region as a whole as being representative and then the edible Allegheny model is like we're gonna have specific cities city focused versions of the magazine so the feature well of the magazine is going to be that regional perspective and then each magazine that's produced for you know Pittsburgh or Columbus or Cleveland is going to be specific to that city with a feature Weldon is for the whole region. Watson: Makes sense, and identity is such a tricky thing because to be a Texan “Don't mess with Texas” like that there's very cohesive like how I see myself identity it's for better than that and while, you know, maybe the Midwest like you know I know what the Midwest is young and restless like that's really one of the only phrases from like a broader identity standpoint that can be that unifying at this point in time. Matt Stroud: Yeah. And it's not really a rallying thing like like you said like “Don't mess with Texas” like that is a rallying cry yeah those are fighting words right the the idea I'm from the Midwest it doesn't have the same resonance and normally it's used in a way that's that's negative yeah either negative or like milquetoast and and so there's not much to rally behind there and so you know when I talk about post-industrial when I talk about it is an idea of rebirth and change like that's what people can get behind there is a rallying cry there but there's you know this is a new idea it's not the idea of Texas as a place for fighting and so we need to we need to build it and you know we think we figure out a way to build it but you know we're business people so we'll figure it out as we go. Watson: Yeah, so there's two ways of talking about to you we're talking a little bit about speaking to people in this region about what it is and in this perspective and then there's the other articulation which might not be as as crucial at this point in time but given your background doing journalism in all these different outlets same thing with Carmen and other members of your team for the folks who aren't from this region who don't have those stories and it is a flyover state to them or whatever the the phrase may be what's the what's the narrative or what's the friction when you articulate this vision to people from outside of the region because like I'm in Pittsburgh I interview different tech CEOs every week I'm you know I'm buying I'm completely buying into this story of rebirth is there a skepticism is there a doubt like what it what is what do you see reflected when you articulate that this to people outside the region. Matt Stroud: Well, the conversation always turns to politics and so that's you know it's part of why there's an interest in politics here but it's it's part of why we focused on politics for the Kickstarter because it gets us out of the region it gets us doing into a conversation that people in Silicon Valley are interested in hearing, you know, the one conversation that people are interested in hearing about this region in Silicon Valley seems to be the idea that the duolingo campaign right you can buy a house here yeah the other is that there is apparently a lot of power and it's political power and traded in this part of the country you know elected a president and so talking to people outside of the region about how to harness that power how to think about how to talk to those two folks who live in this powerful area that has resonated to them. Watson: What- how do you provide fluency and legibility in to the mechanisms of power to someone who doesn't necessarily understand that's part of the role of the journalist is to even expose that the Fifth Estate like there's the roots of that how do you think about that through these decade that you've spent honing or your skills as a journalist to make that clear to people who might not even be aware of that power. Matt Stroud: Try that one more time I don't fully get it Watson: So, you’re basically illustrating like, “hey, we elected a president” there might not necessary be a depth of appreciation for how powerful this region is I feel a lot of people it's very clear like Wall Street they have all the money San Francisco they have all the tech in the data. LA, they have their pull of power because they make the pictures and the images that influence culture for the last century when you speak about the power that is I won't even say lying dormant here it is but it might not necessarily be as legible for someone to look at and say like that's the heart of the power of this region how do you what do you point to as being kind of the poles of power in this area. Matt Stroud: I'm not really sure you know the unfortunate thing is that the definition has been built around anger, around the idea that this is an area that was left behind I mean that is that is what Trump took advantage of and I think what what Joe Biden is going to try to take advantage of in 2020 and so the idea is how to harness that and how to get people to think a little bit differently about the what they can do with that power which again presents it as an opportunity for people who are outside like here's some opportunity here's you know Andrew Yang talking about the fourth Industrial Revolution and the the way that work is going to change in the 21st century and thinking about the idea that you're going to have people who are here in this region who are going to be significantly affected by the way that policy directs them, directs businesses to operate as work changes in the future like that is that is a conversation that we can have here and that you know people in Silicon Valley and Wall Street they can participate in that conversation and they can you know talk to people when people are listening because it involves work and it involves you know this area and moving forward. Watson: Beautiful. We spoke with Todd Bishop who is the co-founder of geek wire when they did their HQ to visit here to Pittsburgh and he spoke about being you know the small media entity more or less bootstrap but not having a shareholders or board of directors to necessarily answer to and how that affects the composition of talent that joins his organization has to be very very mindful about every single person that walks in the door and works under his banner because resources are more constrained. How have you thought about building the team around post-industrial? Matt Stroud: I mean we're in the same situation there's extremely limited resources and really where it starts is working with people who I know working with people who have done a lot of this a lot of similar work as I people who have worked alongside me at different media outlets that are here and elsewhere and it's actually created you know a challenge for us like how to get out of the the initial circle of people who I know and have worked with as freelancers like an example right so you mentioned Geekwire one of their competitors as a publication that I used to work for it called the verge and I made a lot of my contacts in media through the verge and with freelancers because the heard the verge hired a lot of freelancers and so I was I was in a position to know a lot of those people so we have we have a list of a hundred or so freelancers that freelance are some of the best publications in the country they're really successful freelance journalists they do really well but like that's a hundred people not all of them are concentrated here some people are in Pittsburgh some people are outside of the region. It's really, it's not a group of people that gets outside of the people who I know and so what were what we're thinking about now what we're having to think a lot more about is how to get out of there and that's a that's a challenge that we're still working on right now and I mean I would love to talk to what's the name of that CEO? Watson: Todd Bishop Matt Stroud: Yeah I'd love to talk to Todd about you know where he went and how he how he made that transition from the people who he knew and like people who were in his comfort zone into you know people who were outside it. Watson: Similarly, Pittsburgh you know the joke is you never more than two degrees of separation from someone and that's probably also why you love the friends or who happen to be in the circles but you know there is a legacy within the media business of seeing things as very zero-sum seeing things it's very competitive and adversarial and what I've noticed in certain instances particularly if you think of like the influencer individual creator type there's a lot of like let's collaborate let's like you know find ways one plus one equals three to use a simple business truism what have you found as you know trying to park your bus on this corner of local journalism regional journalism. Have you found more friction or have you found more kind of openness for collaboration between outlets? Matt Stroud: Between outlets I've seen less interest in collaboration though there is a Point Park initiative going on right now called Bridge Pittsburgh that is trying to change that yeah so it's putting together outlets like public source and Post Gazette and us to work on big projects together. I think that's a really interesting idea it moves in the direction of what you're talking about but you know these are all companies operating in a competitive landscape and so a lot of them are really hesitant to work together with individual content creators I find that they are very interested in collaboration particularly if you can help them achieve a goal that they haven't been able to achieve yet or don't have the time to achieve yet and so really it's a conversation everybody's open podcasters and particularly people in particular people who produce video like they do their own work they need means to help promote it get out to more people and reach a broader audience and collaborate and so that's been really great and trying to put together a media outlet that helps those folks and works along with them has been something that I've really wanted to do for a long time. Watson: Makes sense. Matt it’s been great. Thank you so much for for sharing so much time with us today and for braving all the traffic to get over here. Before we aim towards wrapping up and asking our signature last two questions anything you're hoping to share today that I didn't give you a chance to? Matt Stroud: Oh yeah. So, I just published a book with McMillan and metropolitan books it's called Thin Blue Line Failure of High-Tech Policing and it is a book about technology and policing and the big businesses that have grown out of selling to police departments. We didn't talk about it today, it's not a big part of what I do with post-industrial, but it is something that I spent quite a bit of time on and that is interesting to anybody who knows what a taser is and has ever gotten themselves into a conversation about body cameras or weapons that police use. Like I give you the business history of how a lot of those weapons and tools became big business Watson: Are you against body cameras? Is there an argument against body cameras? Is there an argument that that's not a direction that things should be going for police officers? Matt Stroud: So, we can get into this if you’d like. Watson: Yeah. Matt Stroud: The body cameras, I have been very supportive of body cameras. I think they're a good idea, but what happened the way that body cameras were sold a lot of the selling of body cameras happened in 2014 after Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. Do you know that story? Watson: Yes, of course. Matt Stroud: Part of what happened at that time is you had police leaders and legislators legislators all the way up to the President of the United States making an agreement that body cameras were going to be expensive they were gonna be distributed to police departments there were going to be contracts to sell body cameras to police departments and that part of that deal was that body cameras going to be available the footage would be available too and as time has progressed in the last five or so years what has occurred is that that body camera footage has become harder and harder and harder to get and the reason why is you've had legislatures like the legislature in Pennsylvania putting together laws that make it virtually impossible to get that footage so we are spending millions and millions of dollars on the municipal level to purchase body cameras for police officers and then the footage that is produced by that body camera is you know basically impossible to get in in the state of Pennsylvania in order to get body camera footage you have to know the name of everybody who is in the video footage itself without seeing the fridge you have to know you have to know everybody's first and last name in the footage and you have to make it make a request to get that video within 60 days of the event itself. So, to give you an example, if I'm aware that there was a shooting that is connected to a case that is going on right now and the case that is being tried and I want to see the video that's related to that but the video was recorded like a year ago I have no access to it and Pennsylvania law makes it so it's impossible to get and so you're seeing laws like that being passed around the country. Watson: Wow. Matt Stroud: That just kind of make body cameras basically useless for the public and so that's that's where the problem lies. Watson: I can see the impetus behind the book Matt Stroud: Yeah there's a lot of stuff. There's tons of arguments like that in the book. It's a good read, fast. Check it out. Watson: I will be sure to link that in the show notes for this episode. I also wanna make sure that people can check out Postindustrial. What digital coordinates we provide for people who want to learn more about that. Matt Stroud: Go to postindustrial.com you can gain access to all of the podcasts that we host you can get one-year or two-year subscription to the print publication and you can also read our daily newsletter, The Record, which is one of the most comprehensive daily news analysis newsletters that you will find in any region I think it's made by a great writer and thinker named Adam Shuck who's been doing a newsletter called to eat that read this podcast and we just rebranded is the Pittsburg record you should check it out um so yeah postindustrial.com no space no hyphen, postindustrial.com Watson: Thank you fantastic. We're gonna link in the show notes or find it in the podcast player for this episode. Before we let you go Matt, I want to give you the mic one final time to issue a challenge to the audience . Matt Stroud: So, I have two challenges that's related to things that we talked about the first is I challenge the audience- do I have to give them like a deadline on this? Watson: I like a deadline because it gives you, like, an actual framework for acting on it. Sometimes it goes too broad. It's like “decide what you want to do with your life and then go do it” and that's like a little too open-ended. Matt Stroud: So, we talked a little bit about politics one of them is that any time you see a measurement that shows you the the likelihood that a particular candidate is going to win like it says like you know Donald Trump's chances of winning the presidential election in 2020 is 85% and you find yourself going back to that and like seeing whether it's 87 percent or 75 percent ignore that please like so your deadline on that is November 2020. Please ignore that kind of journalism because I don't think it's helpful and then the second is I mentioned my book. One of the basic premises of the book is that you have police departments and governments that make decisions about technology that are going to spend a lot of money on based on what the technology has promised to do not what they want to actually accomplish and not what the tool has actually been proven to do so the example that comes up in the book quite a bit is the taser like the taser that officers used to subdue people tasers fail about half the time and they kill a lot of people and they are still at this point purchased by police departments in droves for millions and millions. They support a multi-billion dollar company at this point with the premise that they are going to stop shootings from happening that's just not that's just not true it just doesn't happen and so it I make the plea in the book that we need to be more careful about the money that we spend and know more about the weapons in particular that our governments are purchasing and I think that advice leads me to ask your listeners to really pay attention to the money that is being spent by your governments and make it a point to support an outlet like publicsource.org which is a great one that's local that does a lot of work trying to substantiate how government money is spent and what that government money is doing and what your politician what politicians is doing pay attention to publications like that that are really trying to help you make those decisions so that you can be better informed. It's better for communities and it'll be better for you I think as a news consumer. Watson: I love it. It is a large challenge but one that we all need to take steps towards. I appreciate you heeding the call and thank you so much for listening. We just went deep with Matt Stroud. |
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