Shawn Flynn  0:00 

Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast. Now on this week’s episode, we go back and we revisit some past episodes, where some of our guests gave us some life changing advice. When I first heard this, it moved me when I heard it again, it impacted me even more. Now, some other information for everyone out there, we’re redoing a lot. We’re redoing some of the branding, the website and that for the podcast, and we’re gonna have some big announcements moving forward in this coming month. So stay tuned. But right now, let’s start the episode. All right, enjoy.

Announcer  0:31 

Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host, Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech, learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.

Shawn Flynn  0:49 

And then, while this was going on, why you’re building this company, your kids were also growing up? Can you share some advice on your experience with raising a family at the exact same time as growing this company?

Unknown Speaker  1:03 

Well, I think a lot of people do a really good job of managing that. I am not a person who is an expert on a balanced life style. But here’s the number one answer to that. And I’m surprised that I am saying this, but it’s really true. My kids knew how much how important it was for me to do business. And the right way, is at least what I thought was the right way. I also did a lot of charity work, putting disadvantaged kids through college, and my kids, they love the fact that I loved this so much. And when they were little, or I would never miss a dinner, I mean, I would travel and obviously I wouldn’t be home, then I travel maybe one or two days a week when they were little or I would always I would never come to work, or stay over at work during dinner time. So I always had dinner with my kids when I was not traveling, just naturally wanted to do things with them and did. We took a lot of trips together. But I did I do what felt natural to me. And I knew that I was making a choice of what to do. And it was more important for me to spend time with my kids. And after all these years, my oldest child is 50 years old. And now my youngest is 30. So they’ve all grown up, they have been very kind to me that I was a pretty good father. So that makes me feel really good.

Shawn Flynn  2:33 

So with that many parents shelter their kids from business and business activities, how much knowledge or engagement? Would you recommend that parents encourage their children to have? How much of your business did they know about growing up?

Bob Carr  2:48 

Well, they knew a lot about it, because I was a business from the age of 26. on. So they knew about the business it was you know, my family and my business. That was my life. As my kids got older, and I was my business and my charity, I lead a pretty intense life, I think, to this day, and I feel very fortunate to be in good enough health to do that. My oldest child, Cory, both worked for the company. At one point, we had five employees, they were two of them. I was one of them. And my wife was another one and one salesperson in North Carolina. That was the company for a while. My son, my next oldest child, he never really wanted to work in the business. He was a very dynamic superstar member of his fraternity. To this day, he his fraternity friends are like a second family to him, and he didn’t want to be in the business world. He told me that I don’t want to have to work as hard as you can. And then my other kids really haven’t wanted to work in the business. But they know all about the business because we talk about her all the time. And that when we got to the point where we were pretty successful, I set up trust funds, you know, for them, and now they have the burden of being a trust fund baby, which is a real issue, by the way for the for these kids. I hope that answers that question.

Shawn Flynn  4:20 

Trust Fund children. Just wondering, was there any worries that you had, when newfound wealth suddenly appeared after you sold your company? Was there any concerns about that how people might change?

Bob Carr  4:33 

There were and that’s a really good question. Let me say this in 2001. I sold half of the company to some investors for $40 million. When I did that, I set up funds for my kids and said, I think you’re going to have a lot of money with the company success of this company. My dad is not giving you I’m going to put you through college and here’s money. That’s going in your trust fund in the form of shares of the company. And if we’re successful, you’re not going to ever see another penny from dear old dad is I’m going to give it all to give back Foundation, which is the foundation I set up. And we’re going to put as many disadvantaged kids through college as possible. And that’s what we did. One thing that I did right was, for each one of my kids, they were not able to draw down any money out of their trust fund, until they turned 35 years old. When they were 35, they could take one third of the money out and spend it however they wanted 25, they got the first, third, and 35, they got the next third, and they got the rest of it at age 50. That was worked out perfectly with all six of my kids, then great stewards of their money, and they have not thrown it away. Or you know, they’ve used it very, very well, because they know their dad sold his company for $4.3 billion. They’re approached by people who want to be their friends. And that and I think they’ve handled it very, very well.

Shawn Flynn  6:09 

I got to ask that you’re 70, you’re well off, you can just retire on the beach and sip lemonade for the rest of your days. But instead you decide to start another company. Why

Bob Carr  6:22 

I started this scholarship program back in 2003. To pay back a scholarship that I had received when I graduated from high school scholarship for $250. From the local Women’s Club, my picture was on the front page of the Joliet Herald news, I had no idea why I was chosen. I didn’t apply for anything. But it just made me feel really good. I got to play all this. And when I went off to college, I’m like, you know, I want to pay that money back to them someday. And so it took a long time. But when I sold the half of the company for $40 million, I sent them a check for $5,000. And I said, I know it’s been a long time, but I just wanted to give you this money back to it is money with interest to help other kids in the future. And that was I was done with it. A few weeks later, I get this note card from this woman who says Bob, you don’t remember me. I’m Mrs. Latour. And you were the crossing guard for my three daughters in sixth grade at school. I’m like, oh, my goodness, I can’t believe that. And she said, You’re the first person in 53 years, it’s ever given us money back scholarship recipients. And we would love for you to come to our annual meeting and talk to us. So I went to the annual meeting. And I had just sold. Like I said, I had that big bought a lot of money. They told me that was our 100th anniversary. And I’m like, you’re kidding. I said, Let’s I’ll tell you what, let me make that 5000 100,000. And let’s pick five kids and help them get through college. And so that’s what happened. And we work with a local high school where I went to high school. And we did that. And every year it works. So well. The first year, we did it again, I at this point, we have 1350 kids, either in college, graduated from college, or in high school on our way to college. As we’ve gotten bigger and bigger in the scholarship program, and seeing the impact. It’s amazing the impact that we’ve made on these families, not just these kids, but their families. And I figured out a way that we could we have 30 university partners. And we’ve been able to put kids through college with $20,000 per kid, or years of college. And we do that by taking kids who are very disadvantaged, foster children, children of incarcerated parents, homeless kids, these kids are all eligible for Pell Grants and state grants. So we’ve worked with universities to take those grants, plus our money and put these kids through college. If you can put a kid through college for $20,000 or go drink martinis. I’m just going to help these kids because I it’s better for me. I love doing it. It’s so much appreciated, and we’re doing good stuff. And the people in the company, I started a company why, so we could get make more and more 20,000 hours, put more and more kids through college and I think we have a program as we keep making it better and better. And helping more and more disadvantaged kids. We’re gonna be able to put 10s of 1000s of kids through college with this new company. I mean, just think about that. So that’s why it’s a pretty easy answer for me. By the way, I don’t like martinis, but I do like Bahama mamas. And I do go on vacations.

Shawn Flynn  9:58 

And with that, how should we and think about life, what they do.

Bob Carr  10:03 

I believe you go back to the core principle to me, in all of life, what’s the single most important decision you have to make? It is my way I look at it. You know, at the age of 13, when I was going through confirmation, are the minister at the Congregational Church was very clear. He says, are you going to devote your life to the Bible says, or are you not in if you’re going to, then you need to do it honestly and completely and follow the rules of the Bible. And when I went off to college, I realized, you know, I didn’t believe in an afterlife, and therefore, I’m not going to spend all my time trying to live the way the Bible says I believe in the principles and all that everlasting life by being a math guy. everlasting is a long time. So if you’re going to have everlasting life, why wouldn’t that be the best thing possible for you, for everybody to really have, I just got came to the point where I didn’t believe in it. What’s the next thing, and in ethics, class philosophy 102, at the University of Illinois, I formed the opinion at that time, that that doing the most good for the most people is the highest priority. That’s john Stuart Mill, his way of saying it, Transcendentalism, I think is the name of it, do the most good you can for the most people, Carlos Caston, ADA was another person, take care of yourself. And then if you have extra leftover, take care of your family. And then if you have extra leftover, take care of your extended family. And then wider and wider, help as many people as you can, in the best possible way, it’s really simple, I can’t think of a better thing to do is to take an underprivileged kid, and help them get through college. that’s, to me the best value I can do with my resources in my time. And so that’s the way I look at like, every person in this world is better off than a lot of other people. And you don’t have to be rich, you don’t have to be handling billions of dollars, all of us can do more to help people who need our help, and some of our talents,

Shawn Flynn  12:18 

all these companies that you started, I mean, you had success after success after success. What questions were you asking yourself? Or what brainstorming did you do before finally jumping in and started them?

Axel Schultze  12:31 

Most people have an idea, I believe, also when I talk to startups, and then they kind of rush into making this a reality. We had in the first company, for instance, computer 2000, we had about four months meetings, we call this at meetings or something like this action standing on your own feed, one of my partners said, you know, the idea is, I mean substantial. But if we don’t make it perfect, and we all trained to not go for perfect, but for 8020 rule, but he said we need to break this rule, and we need to make it perfect. And so we called it the debater process, you know, the beers the diamond guys, you know, polishing the idea, did those really perfect, nobody can crack it. And so that’s what we did. And it worked well. And I simply kept to this metaphor of polishing to perfection, before we actually go, I think it was my third company. And I always had sort of not doubts, per se, but respect for what may come? Well, I always worked on it to the point where I said, Okay, if I cannot come up with a problem that is unsolvable, going forward, and will break the company, then I should not start. And but if I have a situation where I cannot even imagine that this is not working, well then go for it. And that’s what I did. I mean, I had tons of ideas, but many were kind of weak or not really well thought out. And it didn’t resonate enough for me to say, yeah, this is what I want to do. For instance, the counter to it is company, I’m we’re just starting I mean, my wife and myself. And when I saw two things, I mean, I’m now you know, much older and I couldn’t come up with a single reason why this is not flying. And I thought, okay, it’s just one of those again, we give it a shot. And I mean, basically one year into it from the first idea, let alone from you know, doing first things totally excited.

Shawn Flynn  14:37 

Now of these companies that you started from my understanding three out of four of them, you co-founded them with your wife, and I mean, I’ve talked to many venture capitalists that maybe not publicly but at least over drinks or dinner will say you know, they don’t want to invest in husband and wife or partner companies, but you broke the norm. Can you tell us about that.

Axel Schultze  15:01 

It was breaking the norm. And Funny enough, it’s even breaking my own norm. I would be very, very cautious investing in a, in a husband and wife kind of startup, because usually, or not usually, but oftentimes, it’s just not working. I mean, there’s too much conflicts and potential for conflicts and so on that in our particular case, I mean, we came both from an entrepreneurial family, we both know that if there’s time, we do the craziest things in the world. And if not, then we simply don’t we work our butt off, you know, whatever it takes. We had sort of the same experience in that regard. We’re also the same type of people. We don’t have the leadership ego, like, Oh, no, no, no, it’s my company nodes. I mean, without me, you could never do that. I mean, all this kind of stuff never happened. And so we know it’s working. On the pro side. I mean, we’re working like 12 hours, 14 hours a day, every day, or 14 hours together. There’s never the moment. Are you coming home? dinner’s ready. You know, the kids are waiting, I mean, all these things. And this makes a huge difference. So if the couple is good, I mean, if it’s a real good relationship, I think it will work. And if not, it will break. I mean, and so we said, okay, let’s give it a shot works brilliantly, I would not even consider doing it without her. Because there’s so many things that I couldn’t do alone. I mean, I have a sparring partner who goes deeper in your mind and your yourself and stuff like that. So. So that’s a good thing.

Shawn Flynn  16:42 

Could I actually ask a little bit deeper that how does that how is the work dynamics when the company is very small? When the bosses are together? How does that dynamic look for the company as a whole? I started off and as it grows,

Axel Schultze  16:58 

An employee is like, okay, is this really good? And you know, who is the real boss? The question that you try to navigate pretty quickly. It’s interesting. I mean, and this is something we experienced, I have to say over almost all the companies, after a while, either the never realized that we were together. But in those cases where they did, they realized, okay, everybody, every of these two guys have a very particular strength and very particular weaknesses, and they seem to augment this of each other. And when additional co-founders come to play, which always happens as well, kind of similar, but they realized very quickly now, this is actually a well done couple. And you know, we don’t argue with each other. I mean, we, we discuss things, I mean, everybody has their opinion, but it’s not like it works after a while. So I think there’s a certain moment in the beginning, where it might be a little bit weird for new employees. But once they get over it, or once they heard, it’s actually cool, no problem at all. And now,

Shawn Flynn  18:07 

After all these companies, you’re really excited about how the human mind works, and how ideation and learning is done. what triggered you to even think about it? And what have you discovered in your research thus far?

Axel Schultze  18:20 

Trigger was really some of my main, these people who asked me, how did you come up with these ideas? And I had no answer. I mean, I had the generic answer, you know, you need to be open minded. You need to think out of the box, grab the stars, and I mean, all these things that we hear more or less every day, and every time, the thing is that somebody wants sort of a recipe. So what do I do physically? To do this? Or that? Then I realized, so if somebody says, how do you hold a very thin glass, I could explain rabbit. But be very careful that you don’t break it, you sense it with your fingers. And I could explain even a difficult process. But I cannot or nobody could or cannot explain in your neurons up there. You know, you tell some of your neurons, you know, you look in the further backside of your cancer these cells, and maybe they can find something, it is very difficult because the brain obviously, is the only organ that the only mechanic that we have it we’re not controlling like anything else. You can control every muscle. I mean, I learned from my son, a single muscle can be trained, which I thought this is crazy in itself. With a brain This is more difficult. I started to learn about neuroscience, and how one branch of the neuroscience is actually working on thinking and learning and not so much about ideation. But I learned that later on ideation learning is almost the same process in our brain, for me was just I mean that fully, completely new fast in dating world, I mean, it’s like no people who never would diving or never skydiving or never in the universe, so to speak. I mean, flying to the moon, I mean, these experiences, for me was like, having the experience with my own mind or learning how this works. The couple of discoveries was number one, which was, I think, fascinating. And I argued for a while. And humans are not actually literally creative. We’re composing ideas from past experiences. So if you see a particular animal, let’s say, a tiger, a frog, you can imagine taking the frog legs to the tiger and you have a tiger with frog legs. So that’s the degree of composition. If you take something else that you have never seen or never experienced, you cannot assemble it, because our mind cannot comprehend the unknown. And that is the best proof that our mind is actually not able to create anything, but compose almost everything possible. And so if we think about composition of our past experience this, the interesting thing was that this was familiar for me Actually, the most stunning discovery, if we have all the ideas that we have, based on previous experiences, and there’s nothing and absolutely nothing coming in randomly or divine or anywhere, then the saying, if you can think it, you can make it is absolutely real. And there is 100% real proof, because everything we think we can pose from past experiences. And so if we have past experiences about whatever, even real, and if you put two real things together, it might be something else. But it’s possible to do that. If we think we could do XYZ and ABC, and if we could become a manager, or we could become an entrepreneur, or a musician or you know, whatever it is, it is actually possible, because our mind would not be able to compose the idea. If it’s not something that that is actually realistic, I realized that what you can think it you can make it is actually no longer just a motivational sentence, you know, give it to me. But it is something possible, because the way our neurons in our brain is structured. And so this drove me, obviously to the max, I have to say, Now, I wanted to find out what stimulates these neurons to have these compositions, when do they have it? How do they have it? What actually communicates in your mind? To make this all work out? We learn for instance, I mean, almost all of us that we have a right brain half and a left brain have. One is the creative part. And one is the logical part. The question for me was okay, but how does this communicate. And you know, there’s a mechanism in our brain is called corpus callosum. These are 200 million neurons, that are fibers or axons that connect one brain half with the other. And that is sort of the negotiation paths for experiences, that allows us to create an idea. Another thing is interesting that the brain is our most energy consuming Oregon, I mean, it’s there’s nothing more energy consuming than the brain, no muscle, no muscle construct nothing. So what it does to protect itself from overheating or over the getting overly excited, boom explodes, it actually shuts down the process when it’s too much. And that means, you know, you cannot sit eight hours brainstorming, I mean, you get fully exhausted here probably fell asleep after five hours. So four hours, you can’t even keep yourself awake. And the brain stopped certain activities, when it’s too much of associations and findings and search and so on. We’re studying things and learning heavily. You know, the word my brain explode is very, very real. I mean, it seems to be exploding and you get simply super tired. I mean, who cannot blow the fuse, so to speak, but because they’re inside, I mean, now for entrepreneurs. Now, we know that there is actually a way to come to deeper ideas. And so one of the things we found was that the classic brainstorming, where we sit together a team usually no longer than an hour, and we come up with our ideas, and everybody else comes up with ideas. About 50% of who’s in this room or meeting actually create new ideas based on the inspiration of others. But since the brain has not the capacity to go very deep immediately, because the brain is trained for the last What is it? Two and a half billion years every day It’s a flirt, sees danger, reacts immediately and reacts to the most obvious solution. And this is what he does still today, it looks for the most obvious solution. And it’s what he does in a brainstorm meeting. So therefore, the brainstorm meeting cannot come up with groundbreaking ideas fundamentally different. It comes up with the most obvious answers. Many of them are new for all the participants. And so everybody gets gung ho and excited say, yeah, this was a great meeting all these great ideas. I think this is wonderful. But it’s not innovative, and definitely not disruptive. So what the brain needs is time. And there’s another interesting discovery, and we checked this with a team. And we asked, so how many did come to new ideas? One or two days after the brainstorm meeting was over? Every group said, Oh, yeah, there’s always a couple. And I said, Yeah, come on. I mean, if we would listen to all these, I mean, we would never be finished, we would never be done. No new idea. So we have selected the idea and go with it. Now the sad part is, these new ideas become because the brain continues to work on the question. And so it gets actually deeper. So these new ideas would actually be more valuable than the previous ones. Now, startups without knowing this, including myself, I mean, we weren’t listening to all these other things. Maybe this is something to polish and we’re back to the Barrow paradigm, we can polish it and even take six months, or three months or two months to polish it to the perfection. And if you don’t do that, your idea will never be really, I mean, mind boggling, it will be still a standard idea. If we now realize that the brain has another functionality, it’s called analogous modeling or analogous thinking. So it looks for analogies, similar things, but from very different areas. We learned this actually in the 19 1900s, around when we begin to look how animals fly. And then we sell it okay, if the birds fly that way, maybe we should build the wings of the airplanes like that. And so we do this more and more often. And we know this is very powerful. But interesting enough, we look for the nature, this was a good pattern. So we all look for nature. But what we did not do till today, I mean, now we do this, we look not only in nature, but actually other ideas, and put analogous ideas together. And this allows the brain to go even deeper. Obviously, it needs more and more ideas, you know, food for thought before. And then there’s a third element be called a column birth, this is the actually the typical sort of Silicon Valley behavior, what would be ideal think about? There is no not, there’s all the money you can take. You have all the resources you want, what would you do with it. And that stimulates, if the brain is already super active on a topic, it comes up with crazy ideas beyond the normal, because you’re all trained to not be a dreamer. Come on, be real. Your Man your dove now, you know, stop playing. I mean, everyday, we heard this until you’re truly adults, and no more dream is real. And so we need to break this a little bit. And we call this Columbus because this is the ultimate negotiation on the corpus callosum between the two brain halves. And even if the idea is almost perfect, now we want to drive it to the basically to the infinite maximum. That discovery basically was for us. I can only tell you this is a major breakthrough. And even in our own mind. I mean, we thought gosh, I mean, you know, we did some of these, but what could we have done even more? previous businesses? If we had no one every of these aspects? So long answer sorry, but it was too fast for me, to not share it.

Shawn Flynn  29:09 

Speaking of problems that founders might run into that first question, we talked about your five companies that three were successful in two wars that had problems. We never really dived into those two that weren’t successful. Can we circle back? And can you go into a little bit more detail about the problems that as a founder or the team might have come across in those startups and what you learned from it?

Sam Wong  29:34 

I think one key lesson was from startup number two, we had a technology platform that allowed two enterprise applications to integrate very easily. It was an early version of what Zapier does today. We were based on web services technology and UD di it was the rage of the day back in the 2000 timeframe, but for whatever reason, we had chosen not to highlight that in fact, we downplayed that, because I think some of the logic was, we didn’t want Microsoft to crush us, because that’s what they were doing. So we went and took this under the radar marketing approach, and it ended up not working out. There was some problems where when we saw one of our competitors make some of the same decisions, we went and said, Hey, they’re doing that we must be on the right path. Problem was both of us were lost. Okay, so they shut down, and we ended up shutting down. And the sad thing was, is this great technology, one of the larger companies in the space B, EA acquired our competitor company named Ross game for $30 million. Unfortunately, cross gained had no shipping product, no customers, and a lawsuit pending with Microsoft because they had tons of Microsoft employees. Ba was local here in the Bay Area, and cross game was in Seattle. So they also had a distance issue in integrating the companies. We were local, we had a shipping product, we had revenue, we had no lawsuit, and we were right down the street. But since we didn’t really highlight that we were in this space, this company didn’t think of us as potential acquisition candidates. So we made a mistake in the marketing approach. I think, in addition, I would say experience matters. There was one startup that had four Harvard grads, including three that were Harvard MBAs, one MIT grad to Stanford folks. But almost everybody, including myself was early in career. These were folks who with a little time, and a lot of seasoning would be phenomenal contributors, and many of them have become that. Many have gone on to be VPS at name brand startups. That was only my second time as a VP, I thought I knew what I was doing. But now looking back as I didn’t, I still had a lot to learn. So the experience matters, because the talent that you have encapsulate that experience, the talent again, matters. And we had a number of startups, not just this one that had some talent problems. We was one startup where we had a techie who go back, there’s a couple situations one was a techie one was a sales guy, and one was the sales executive. For the situation with a techie, he was charged with running the database, and he was still learning his trade. And he just wasn’t a good fit. HR was very hesitant to part ways because there’s the attorney said, hey, there’s tons of risk. Well, we built a case that says, hey, this is not a good fit. It wasn’t very objective. It wasn’t personal. We weren’t mean to the guy, we let the guy down, gently gave him a package took care of them, made sure he had health care coverage for his family. And we parted ways. That was the right thing to do. Because the he just wasn’t a good fit. There was another situation where we had a sales guy who wasn’t passing muster. When we let him go, our sales went up, even though we were down one player. So because everybody was taking time to help this guy out, they weren’t doing their own jobs. And there was another situation where we had a sales executive. That wasn’t a good fit. He had some good talent, but not in a startup space, because he didn’t have startup skills. He had big company skills. The senior team was afraid of letting them go. Because we were in the middle of fundraising. They thought it would look bad if we lost a VP level person while we’re fundraising. I challenge that notion because, yes, we lost a guy. But if any buddy other investors asked, we say, well, we had a person who wasn’t a good fit. And we made the super difficult decision to amicably part ways. Being a CEO is all about being willing to make the hard decisions in life, not run from them. Yes, there would have been some eyebrows raised, some of the investors say, Hey, what happened? The clear and truthful explanation was, he wasn’t a good fit, we decided to amicably part ways, he was the highest paid person in the company. Alright, so that was a drain on resources as well. But when you realize, okay, this isn’t good, I’m going to clean up my own mess. And those are the hard decisions that comes into play. Because ultimately, these people who are playing the roles, their judgment matters. I can’t tell you how many times key decisions were made in various startups or consulting projects that ended up crippling the company. If you make enough crippling decisions, a company will die. If you make enough good decisions, a company has a strong chance of success. And those decisions are made by the people and the judgment that these people have.

Shawn Flynn  34:33 

That’s really interesting, because thinking about the funnel and that when I’ve talked to people in the past, they go, Okay, let’s break down the demographics of this person, what’s their favorite hobby, what’s their book, how long they spend on social media, their age, all this stuff. They don’t really say okay, who have you connected with in the past that has a network that you can reach out to and maybe invite all them out for dinner or online pain in through zoom a shadow To Michael at insperity, who invited me and that was a lot of fun and we all bonded and I’m gonna feel like that guy forever.

Tim Alison  35:07 

On Air today, the day we’re speaking, I was participating in it, Simon I was telling you about. The host was talking to someone named Heather Moyes, who in Canada is a well, she’s a world class athlete, she’s won two gold medals. I mean, he’s just an amazing public speaker. Because I’ve been participating in the summit. I wasn’t on air at that moment. But the other hosts noticed I commented basically having said something about, just ignore the naysayers. So Tim being Tim goes into Facebook and comments, screw the naysayers, because that’s my brand name. And then Cory, the co-host comes on and he says, Heather, I want to tell you, but I just got a comment here. It said, screw the naysayers. You use the word naysayers three times. I don’t have to look at who it is. Because I know it’s Tim Allison and you’ve got to go on his show. I would have a very hard time getting straight to somebody like that she’s in huge demand that charges really big fees. But there she is on air saying Tim hit me up. I can’t wait. And it happens because of the things you’re talking about. You build relationships. Seth Godin came on my show, Episode 100 of screw the naysayers. Seems like a long time ago, it was just a little over a year ago. I know for sure that journey to get set started with my first guest. Because my first guests was a guy named Don electric. And I knew Even then, but Seth had huge respect for the work that Don was doing, and trying to change and radically change the education system for high school kids. And to promote entrepreneurship and coding and building a technology based businesses. It’s not a coincidence that after I earned some other earned the right to make the ass that when I was able to reach back and say, Hey, Dawn, has been I know that you’ve been on dawn show. Dawn’s when I was my first guest, he did me a big solid. These are the way you build networks because it’s crazy. The people I’m talking to from Nova Scotia, and I was thinking about it the other day, Shawn, I’m not lying. I only left my home village for business twice in the last two and a half years. The first time last October, I went to the City of Toronto to accept an award I was a bit of inspiration conference for the work I’ve done with my podcast and advancing women gender equity. And the second time was in November, I went down to Cambridge because I was invited to speak on a stage in Harvard. And I thought I might want to do that, or the other people. Every other relationship that I’ve made I’ve done from the studio I’m looking at right now is nothing but forest and trees and blue sky in a village of about 300 people that has changed in sales, because we can make human connections without always being there in person. If you really look at successful companies, it always comes back to their ability to build their network. The return on relationship I heard the other day I hadn’t heard that phrase before, but ROR or return on relationships. And I thought that’s a pretty interesting way of looking at it because I can trace just about everything good that’s happened in my business back then I know where relationships came from. And Shawn introduced me to so and so introduced me to so and so and those kinds of things.

Announcer  38:10 

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