Build the Fort — Chris Heivly

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think Doxa Talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to doxatalant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatalent.com Bill G Again, that's doxatalent.com Bill g. One more time. Docsatalant.com Bill G. Check it out today. Build a fort. What do you mean build a fort? Build a fort. What do you learn as a 10 year old that we're going to learn from later? That's the topic of our show today. We're going to what's valuable that we learned very early on that sometimes maybe we've forgotten. Everybody. My name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week with an interview, a conversation with an author, a thought leader, an entrepreneur about something to do with the world of growing your company so and the leadership required to get you there. So our show, you can find it wherever you're getting this one right now, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Spotify, Apple, podcasts, Stitcher, Twitter, even like wherever you get it, like subscribe, turn on your notifications, get it every week. And you can also find all of that and more@scalingcoach.com scalingcoach.com right there on the screen and in the show notes. And so scalingcoach.com is where you'll find our hundreds and hundreds of shows now on everything to do with scaling up and all of the fun thought leaders and that kind of thing that go into it. So we can help you go there. All right, let's get to our guest now. Let me bring on and introduce Chris.

So Chris, heavily or hively, but you know, I get called lots of different things.

With that last name. I should have asked what the pronunciation was before we got started.

You're not the first or the last. We're all good.

Chris joins us from the Raleigh Durham area and he's got a book build the five simple lessons you learned as a 10 year old can help you with your startup success. Of course we're mostly talking about scale ups, but startups you want to get started on the right foot. And those lessons still apply, they still matter here. But you should know that Chris was co founder of MapQuest and MapQuest sold to AOL for over a billion. One billion. Right. And that actually is an indicator of something. And then he's the managing director of the startup factory. He's a sought after public speaker, he's been an investor, he's worked with so many startups and entrepreneurs over the years. And so he's going to share some the thoughts from the book and that can Chris welcome the show.

Thanks, Bill. I'm happy to share with your audience some stories and see where this goes. Yeah.

So let's talk about your story first. Like what did you learn? Well, actually before you get into that, why do you come up with a title for this book? What is the 10 year old of building the Fort? What is that concept even?

Thanks for asking that, Bill, because it's really kind of been a kind of a roadmap for most of my adult life. I don't know about you, but I built a lot of forts as a kid. Mine, mine were outside. Right. But some people built the inside forts, right. With the blanket and the chair upside down on the couch and the rooms.

That's the beginning. I think you start indoors, then you move out to like real construction outside.

Yeah. And so what I'll tell you is I've done a number of startups with a good friend, Marshall Clark. And Marshall and I worked together. He was the original co coder for MapQuest. And when you do this so long with somebody that you're very close with, you almost start to form your own language. Right. Your own way of communicating. And Marshall and I, if people watch this, they would probably not understand half of what was going on. But we've worked so closely and been so good friends over the years that we almost talk in code. And one of the codes that we came up early enough when we're starting with a new idea was it's like building a fort. And it's, it was our metaphor because the next thing we would ask is, okay, well where are we going to steal the wood? Right? What are we going to borrow from our dad's basements? Right? All those kind of things you hack together as kids. Right. Because Amazon.com didn't have your build a fort kit available for mom and dad to buy you.

They probably do today, right though.

They probably do today, exactly. So Bill, like it became a way for us to kind of say, all right, how do we get this thing started? How do we start to hack at this. And so it became more metaphor. And so later on, when I was thinking of writing this and sharing some of my thoughts, I kind of remembered the cliche or the label, if you will. And then I started to kind of peel it back. And so the build the fort mindset also happens to be what I'm good at. I'm good at simplifying very complex issues. I'm good at explaining them to them. I'm good at. I'm good at storytelling, and I'm good at advising about those with that methodology of like, let's get rid of all the noise as adults, right? We. We overanalyze, we overthink. Let's just kind of simplify this. Let's go back to. Let's think about when we're 10 and it's a summer day and we wake up and you're my neighbor and I say, hey, Bill, want to build a fort?

And you say, absolutely, yes, let's build a fort.

Now, did you. Now let's. Bill, let's do the adult version of that. Like, you know, you asked me, hey, Chris, you want to build a fort? And I say, well, I don't know anything about fort building and I don't know where we're going to get the wood. And I've never hammered a nail before. And, you know, do we need screws or nails or. Right, that's the adult version, Right? So now apply that to starting anything startups, you know, whatever it is that you're motivated to be building.

You know what occurs to me right off the bat, what's the difference between the two? Right off the bat? What occurs to me is risk stakes, something to lose, like as a kid or even as adult building a fort. Oh, you know, the risk of loss and failure is pretty low. I, you know, I'm not. I don't need shelter. I'm not worried about rain coming in or that kind of thing. I'm not worried about the expenditure, materials and time. This is all play. We're doing something interesting. And then I think about, okay, let's build a business. I'm like, okay, wait, do I want to get involved with something that's going to be successful? Do I have anything to contribute? Is this playing to my strengths? What will this do to my current income streams? Will this jeopardize any of my existing stuff? Will it put at risk my home or my nest egg? Any way? Like that whole world of. Of risk, like, significantly impacts my freedom to play?

Yeah, sure. And. And, you know, as adults, we do have more to risk, right? We have children and houses and cars and things and maybe even soft things like reputation and ego and intellect and all of these kind of maybe more emotional pieces. And I still think it applies though. I think you can mitigate many of those things. Two things I think you mitigate it by having a better mindset, maybe a simpler mindset, maybe a mindset of discovery. And hey, I'm not betting my entire life and career on this thing. At first I'm just testing things out. I'm going to experiment. I'm going to see if there's something here. We all know this kind of the lean approach, right. That Eric re put out there. But maybe the other side of that, or maybe, maybe I, I also spend a lot of time writing about startup communities, right. And so maybe part of this in the build the for mindset is about, well, maybe you can de risk and mitigate some of that by figuring out how I play in a community so that I can learn the things that I don't know so they're not as scary. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. So let's, let's pause there and then step back to where we often start, which is a little bit your journey. And I, you know, I want to preface with the absolute marvel that we now take for granted. So I like have watching, I have GPS and mapping on my, on my watch today, which is like. But as a pilot and a sailor, I used to think that this thing called Loran was awesome, which is a kind of a radio navigation that gave you a point in place. But the, then you would go transfer that point and where you wanted to go to, to some kind of a paper map and then you would plot your course and that kind of thing. And, and I remember having that both in boats and airplanes and thinking it was really awesome to be able to navigate with, with reduced visibility. And as a pilot you've got things like VOR and like that. So you can do different kinds of radio navigation in the old days. And then I remember the first GPSs came in and I first for sailing I had a handheld gps and for flying we had a panel mounted gps. But again it was plots of points. The first time I took that sailing I had to go to, I had to put in like get a map out and then figure out what the lat lawn was and punch those all as waypoints in if I was going to go cruise in the Mediterranean or somewhere. And then I could bring my handheld GPS and then I went to A CES show, and I got in a car. I forget who the demo was. It was like BMW or somebody. And I saw they'd integrated mapping with GPS positioning and I was like, mind blown. Like, oh my God, this is going to change everything. And I remember how I felt at that time. And now that seems ancient because it's on my phone, it's on my. It's just like everywhere. It's all integrated and it's just unbelievable. So you built a thing called MapQuest. Talk to us through some of what that journey was like and how that. What'd you do, Who'd you build? How'd you. What were you thinking?

Yeah, well, Bill, first of all, you're talking to a guy who has an undergraduate and a master's degree in geography. So already, you know, I'm a. I'm a cartographer, map guy right now I'm also significantly old. By that I mean, when I'm going through college, I actually ended up taking about 12 hours of computer science credit, which was unheard of at the time. So, you know, some of the biggest ideas in the world are when you combine two things together that have never been jammed together before. For me, it was computer and mapping. And so that's what my jam was. Now how that manifested itself is actually a journey of technology or applied technology. So what most people don't know is that MapQuest, by the way, born and. And raised and not me. Mac west in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, obviously the tech capital of South Central tech hub.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Yeah. Home to like 50,000Amish people, right. That still do horse and buggies and, you know, no electricity. So here we are, we're about 50 cartographers. We're a bunch of kind of myself and a couple new age people coming in. So the first thing we do is we look at. Do you remember the triptych from AAA? This was a little 4 inch by 9 inch spiral bound. Your mom and dad went to the AAA office you were going from before.

A trip every time.

Yeah, Poughkeepsie, you know, New York to Disneyland on your summer, you know, or your, you know, your spring break. And mom and dad needed directions, right? And so they printed out these things they called sausage links. And we just looked at that and said, that's really stupid now, by the way. What you don't know or most people don't know is that all those pages were pre printed and what would happen is the routes were actually already configured so you needed to pull page 3, 16, 17, 36, and then they just Put them in this spiral bound. So that's why we thought that was stupid. So we put together a highway and state route database because in car navigation was eventually going to come. We knew how to build geographic databases and we just printed those, we put them on a computer and that time a high speed 40 page per minute laser printer which cost $10,000. And we sold that system to, to every auto club in the nation because Sears and Montgomery Ward and Allstate all had their own auto clubs. And this was a nice little add on. So desktop PC, big time laser printer, printed two colors, black and white. And so the next piece of Evolution, the CD ROM comes out in 93. Now we jam all this stuff on a CD ROM. We're the first product out there now you don't have to go to aaa now you do it in your house, print them out right. Not unlike what we ended up doing a little bit later when the Internet became a thing. And we just took that code, kept shrinking it and ported it to the Internet. And in February 96 we launched MapQuest. And the rest is kind of history. Now a couple things that I think you might.

You know, it's funny, before you move on from technology, prehistoric technology, right. I, I built a SaaS business like an Uber eats back in the day and, but we knew people didn't have mobile devices and in car nav and they didn't have, and they didn't have in the restaurants either. So we built this web interface to do restaurant ordering for takeout and delivery. But the delivery was a particular focus and the, the timeliness of it. So you ordered online, super efficient process. Like faster than picking up the phone and calling. And then we faxed the order in and verified the fax into the restaurant and it came with it not only the order and the, and the payment authorization, but it also came with a little embedded MapQuest route guide from the restaurant to the home so that the driver knew where to go and how to get there. And that kind of thing with all the steps, that kind of thing embedded in the fax and sent out that so that they could follow, right? They've got this fax paper that they're going to get attached to, they could take off and follow. But it's fascinating. Like you know, each step we upgrade the technology and at that moment it feels kind of like magic. And people are like, wow, this is so cool. You built this right into it. Of course now it's like, why do I have a printed thing in my hand?

Well, it's Funny you mentioned that because when I get a chance to talk in front of people and I tell my story and I tell them a quest story, I put up some of the first images that you would receive that you printed out and oh my God, they're so horsey looking, the resolution so bad. And I know there's people in the audience going, how could you ever. And I said, but you're comparing that to today. What I want you to compare it to is having to get in a car, go to a store called aaa, have some kid pull down these pages in a spiral bound. Like by that standard, this was pretty hip, right? Your, your piece of paper had a little map reference for your driver. So yeah, it's just funny how technology.

It just like the next stage is always. Can feel a little bit like magic. We used to go and look for images and if you needed image for a particular thing, you'd say, you know, I'm looking for somebody on a group of people standing on the seashore, having a meeting. And then you might find some, some image out there that you could do. Or you'd have to commission a photographer to go create that image for you or, or an illustrator to go draw it and that kind of thing. And so you're limited by it. And then my son's built some technology for a company that's known around the world today as Mid Journey. And you can just type in your thing and boom, it creates the image for you and it's learned to do it in an instant. So now the skill becomes how well do I use it and can I describe my image in a way that the AI can interpret it and throw it out to me, but like, boom, you know, mind blown.

I'm using Mid Journey as the image for all my blog posts for the last two months.

We thank you.

Yeah, well, not only. I mean, I do it because I want to understand what the next piece of technology is. It's also a hell of a lot quicker than doing it the other way. Right.

And cool. Like there's a new class of artists and photographers and stuff that are using it as an additional tool. Our daughter is a photographer and designer. She uses the Mid Journey tool as well, even though she's in that. But then she'll like layer it, composite it and edit and do some things on top after. Yeah, the magic. Yeah, there's always more magic, always more. So let's talk about some of the examples and share some of the stories and kind of learn what is it about building a fort? Start with Ricky and Written Word Media.

Sure. So, Bill, for the last probably 12 years in Raleigh, Durham, North Carolina, and the last six years as a consultant all over the world, my new jam has been how do I help more entrepreneurs get their success right? I can do that through investing. That's still a handful. I could do my own. That's still one. But the idea of the accelerator, right, the tech stars and the Y combinators of the world, circa, excuse me, 2009, really started to turn me on. Maybe it fueled my add. Now I could dabble in 10 companies instead of one. And so in my now adopted hometown of Raleigh, Durham, circa 10, 12 years ago, I started, I put my own accelerator into play. But more importantly, I wanted to figure out how I could, at scale, help other founders succeed. And you know, today we kind of think of this notion as a startup community or an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Brad Feld of Foundry Group and co owner and you know, founder, past speaker for us. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, got to know Brad and David Kona, tech stars, and then kind of started applying this in Raleigh, Durham. And you know, you and I both love stories and I, and I just a couple of weeks ago I put a new event on. We'll talk about that a little later. But you know, I was, I was talking, talking to Ricky. Now Ricky Wolman was a woman who was a very good marketer and she had been a marketer at Red Hat, I believe, and then she had left to kind of stand up her own kind of, you know, shingle and was consulting and she just had the right mindset. And so I used to bring her into my accelerator and she would do a two or three hour bit with all the, you know, the 10 companies in our program and they kind of, you know, and she would just give freely of her time, which is part of the right mindset, right, for a good startup community. And, and it was funny because they started asking her a bunch of questions and then what she realized is that magic or the technology kept changing. So for instance, Google would change their algorithm for doing advertising. And now all of a sudden her advice and her work was put in question. So what she did is she said, all right, I got to build my own sandbox so I can test these things continually and see how they're working so they can take them back to my clients. And I remember sitting there talking to her. This is probably now, you know, four or five years ago. And here Ricky decides that her sandbox has actually gotten so popular that she's going to launch A company based on it. And her husband, who I knew very well, who was kind of a VP of engineering at one of our hottest startups in the area, eventually quit that and joined her. And, and today they have something called Written Word Media. Now what I tell that story is the community. Like it wasn't a linear kind of thing. Right. So maybe because I helped bring her in and give her exposure to these startups and she's helping all these different startups with all these different problems as opposed to one or two or three clients, maybe that helped her kind of see a broader picture. And then maybe she decided, well, geez, I need help. And I remember sitting down with her and offering my advice on maybe how you start a company. Certainly my advice wasn't any better than anybody else's, but at least she had a community of people that she can now reach to, because I was connecting people. And so this idea, if we kind of kind of layer back a little bit, this idea of what comes first, a founder or the community, and it's really not chicken or egg, they're kind of all together and do great communities like obviously Silicon Valley, but Seattle, Boston, New York, Austin, Texas today, Chicago, up and coming, Raleigh, Durham, Miami. How do these places create this community? And how does, how do they kind of, as an outcome help foster more successful founders, which only kind of waterfalls to everyone. So I love that story. And she's, she's a great friend today and, and she and her husband are running a really cool company.

Yeah, I think, you know, I hear a couple things that one of them is like, it's been said before, well, you're the average of your five closest people and that kind of thing. But, and I, and I know that, like, it makes great financial sense to move into a neighborhood of people that are a lot wealthier, bigger houses than you. Right. But like, and it's also a little humbling because you're like, wow, why am I in the little house? Why do I have the little business? But if you surround yourself with people like that and you can manage your own feelings of inadequacy and be inspired by them to up your game, it's really powerful. And, and the experiences of those people and their perspectives will be really different than, you know, just a guy in a diner kind of a conversation.

Yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself, Bill. And in fact, you know, those people all exist, but in not very mature company or communities, you just don't have easy access. There's friction between those things. And so maybe you're stuck with the guy that was the senior vice president of the bank for 40 years and with no judgment to him. They've never, he's never been a founder. He doesn't know the ups and downs. He's never had to cover payroll out of his 401k. Right. So my, my, my jam today and the reason we told that Ricky Wilma story is how does, how does a community impact one founder on their journey and all different places as they're scaling up? Because we all know the issues get harder and different and thornier and potentially even deadly. Right. If you don't know how to manage your company well, that community's there to kind of help you mitigate and learn, frankly.

So there are a million ways to F up your company, but there's very few ways to make it work. And you really are threading the needle, navigating all the challenges, the challenges of increases, the challenges of decreases, of needing to pivot it so much more. Tell us about Ed Buchholz.

Yeah, so about, maybe we're coming up 2017. Is that five to six years?

Yeah.

I hook up with Brad Feld and, and, and David Cohen and I've run my accelerator in Raleigh, Durham, and I'm thinking about what I do next. And I know that there's about 14 tier 2, tier 3 cities within 4 hours drive of Raleigh, Durham that all have been kind of, hey, how did you do this? Right? Charlotte and Wilmington and Richmond and, you know, you know, Charlottesville and Norfolk, Virginia. How do you guys do this? How do we, how do we kind of create this environment? Right. This is a good thing for our economy, local and global. So I'm out in Boulder and I'm sitting down with Brad and David and we're just shooting the, shooting the crap. And they're like, what do you think of doing? And I share that story. And they said, well, we were thinking about doing it for the world. Do you want to combine forces? And the answer is, heck yeah. I mean, if this wasn't a build the fort moment, right, I don't know what was.

100%.

Yeah. For me, what Techstars has been able to accomplish in all those cities around the world. And Brad, through his books and his podcasts and all the things he gets involved in, is such a thought leader. They have a chance to work with them in order to kind of commercialize these thoughts in order to get them out to people. So that first year we ran the Lean Playbook, I was a, you know, a lone soldier. We didn't hire anybody. We didn't do, you know, marketing and any of that crap. We just started talking to people and I probably talked about 75 people in that first year. And we did five pilots, little three month things. We're kind of trying to build our model about how do we assess and then communicate the gaps and the next steps for those community leaders. And Bill, we did it from Fort Wayne, Indiana to Lima, Peru and then Cleveland, Ohio. And Ed Bulkholtz was in Cleveland, Ohio. And interesting enough, Ed and his company had gone through a techstars program and Ed was probably three years, I'm thinking, into that journey. Yet at the same time he was figuring out how to bring people together in Cleveland to build a better community. I believe Ed went through the Texar's program in Boulder. So he parachuted in and saw this wonderful, well connected, well oiled community machine. And then he goes back to Cleveland and it's not so much, again, no judgment on Cleveland. It just wasn't that mature. And so the Ed story is about how do you play your role as a founder, which has a lot of pressure and you know, it's not like you got a lot of extra time, but at the same time understand that if you invest some of your time in trying to build a community and bring in people together, that it not only helps the community, it may help Ed himself because now he's got access to resources and knowledge and experiences and how does that roll over? And so I worked in Cleveland for three months and you know, again, I consider Ed a friend today. He ended up having to shut down that company. It didn't make it. I guess we would call that a failure. Ed's now working for Facebook and is an awesome coder and, and, and a UI specialist. But you know, he's still back in Cleveland kind of seeing what he can do to stir the pot. And I'm sure he's got another startup in there somewhere.

You know, that's a really, really interesting thing. Like some people are like, oh, let's not talk about that when that company failed. No, let's talk about that. I think our value as entrepreneurs, as coaches, as thought leaders, is as much built in the successes as we've had as the failures. And we don't pay enough attention to that. I can tell you about some great marketing moves I did in different companies in the connecting thread, but I can also tell you about the ways that we tried to them that went really badly. And then what we learned from that and how we carry that forward into Things and both are really important to learn from. Not just the brilliant moves but the failures as well. Because you may not be able to reproduce or use the brilliant thing you did in one place or your coach or your advisor or somebody else did. It might not work for you, but the underlying idea and the approach, the process of both of them that we can learn from. How did I go wrong there? What did I go right there? That nets out to something pretty powerful, doesn't it?

You know, no doubt. And I, and we, you know, you're right. We either don't talk about it or we give it kind of a cute lip service like oh yeah, failure's okay and we have to embrace failure but you know, that's always good for the other guy, right? But here we are, right? I mean this is a crapshoot, right? Like you know, how many companies get started and don't make it a year or two years, right? Using ED as an example. So the question is, you know, how are we going to look at that thing? I still view almost everything I do as an experiment, one long experiment. And experiments fail. In fact failure teaches you something that, all right, don't do that next time, right? So you know, whether they're actually company failures or whether they're campaign failures or whether they're hiring failures, like you know, let's just assume you're going to have a bunch of them and what's your mindset to take care of them? Let's bring it back to a fort, right? We go to build a wall and it's all cattywampus, right? So like do the kids like start crying as a kid, a 10 year old, right? What do you do? You probably tear it down and rebuild it again or bend it to fix it, right? So you know, again back to that 10 year old mentality, maybe let's not take ourselves so seriously. Maybe not worry so much about what failure means. Maybe embrace it that it's a learning that's just an experiment that failed. I don't know, just a few.

Well think about. So you know in, in building the Mercury and Apollo programs at NASA, they blew up some rockets and, and lately SpaceX has been blowing up a whole lot of rockets and in fact in their latest launch, right, they blew up another rocket. And at that before Elon Musk says well you know, maybe 50, 50 and, and he's definitely on the optimistic side.

Of things on a pretty regular basis.

He calls it 50 50. It's maybe got a 20 chance of, of working out correctly but they're like, but, but it's important to launch it. We pr, we, we expect this thing's going to blow up somewhere. It's not going to complete its whole mission. Be awesome if it did, but probably it's going to blow. And then we're going to learn something from that and apply something to that if we, if we related to it. Like, I'm going to try a bunch of different marketing things. Most of them are going to fail, but I'm not going to expend everything I've got. We're going to learn something from it. We're going to find the one that really works and then figure out, like, what's okay. And you need to iterate and tweak and evolve. Fail fast, fail forward. Right. Is the startup lesson.

Yeah. So what's interesting in the latest book I just released was Build the Fort, the Startup Community Builders Field Guide, which riffs off of Brad Feld's latest. One of the latest books on this on topic called the Startup Community Way.

Yeah.

We've uncovered some science and the science is systems theory and the idea in systems theory. And I'm going to do the really short, short, short version, which comes back to rockets, by the way, which is that there's a complicated mindset and a complex mindset. The complicated mindset is like sending a rocket to the moon. Your job is to figure out every variable to make sure that everything's connected, to reverse engineer all the potential problems that could come out of it. And Even then, there's not 100 predictability.

Right.

But there's many people in this world who have mastered the muscles of running in a complicated system. They're typically very hierarchical and very structured. Government, large corporations, colleges and universities.

Right.

I think to be an entrepreneur and to be involved in startup community building, you have to adopt a complex mindset. And the complex mindset starts with the ideas. Stop trying to control everything because you control almost nothing. Right. And once you have that set, then you get to approach everything in terms of iterations. Right. I know we don't know what the specifics are, but you and I both know that Elon and team learned a lot from that last rocket. So increase the chances to 40% next time. Right. And so that's the approach which actually seems to mirror the build a fort idea as well.

Yeah. And that. And, and Right. There's a whole bunch of people working on things in a different, in different aspects, in different ways. And we're trying to coordinate, but we're not trying to control Everything. And we just want to get a little bit better until at some point like we can reuse rockets and land them again and recover them. And now we've actually done something that's truly remarkable.

Right. But it's a journey.

Isn't really is I think about. And I'm, I'm deep in the middle of, of writing a book now that I've been working on for some time. And, and, and one of the things that I, I've spoken about frequently and is in the book is a multimillion dollar mistake that I made. And when I look back at it. Right. I think of like multiple lessons from that. Right. Although I have coaches all the time in that area, in that aspect of that business, I didn't have somebody coaching me. It wasn't an area that I got things. We had new systems, we had new people. We didn't apply. All of the things that I knew to apply weren't being used. There were things I was ignoring. Right. That's really valuable to learn from and to apply. And, and although it, you know, it's a, that's a sting. That's money out of my retirement fund. Right.

Still stings, doesn't it?

But I now use that with everyone that I work with and I've worked with thousands of people over the last 10 years and. Right. So it becomes a gift to all those people. That's an investment in learning that we need to get some return on.

I can't wait to read it.

So talk to us about Laura.

Yeah.

What's Laura's story?

Yeah. So Laura, she's just one of my favorite people in the world and I love her company called Van Robotics. So I'm kind of mostly retired, semi retired. I don't know what the hell that word means. I'm just not building businesses anymore.

But you sound like a retired guy. How's your golf game?

It's still as shitty as it always has. But, you know, I'm up here in North Carolina. We've had, we've done a great job in the Raleigh, Durham area of really kind of helping to form an unbelievable startup ecosystem. But I got talking to a few old friends. I'm an alumni of the University of South Carolina. And a couple friends called about a year and a half ago and said we need help. I know you've helped cities all over the world do this. We're little old Columbia, South Carolina. We're probably pretty behind. Could you come down and help us? So, you know, from my perspective, it's kind of, you Know, the pandemic was kind of coming to its end and. Or at least the version as we know it today. And I didn't have to get on a plane, right. I could drive down there. It's a little over two hours. And so I've been heading down there, you know, almost once a week for a while. Then every two weeks now, about every now three to four weeks. And just helping them to kind of figure out a way to form a little, little, you know, a small to start with, but a small, little flywheel of entrepreneurs that can work together. And so that's where I met Laura. Laura's a. Not. I, I don't. I want to be good to Laura. Laura's. Laurie's been around the block, she's of our age or so, but she's got.

An AI, so fantastic.

Lee, she's right in her zone right now. Right. And so Lars had a company for a number of years called Van Robotics, and she's built Ban Robotics Van and she's built an 18 inch robot, I believe. Geez, I should know this. I think it's called Abdi and it teaches kids reading and maybe some math. And she's adding to that and she goes in and sells that to school districts around the country. Because we all know kids don't learn the same way, right? Some people are, some kids, a lot of kids are introverts. They're afraid to ask questions. But here is this very engaging robot that's a tutor, basically. And so, you know, I've been, you know, working with her.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, we, we helped kind of create or restart a new, an entrepreneurial service organization. I convinced her to join the board of directors because I want to give her more awareness, I want to help her grow her company, but I also want her lessons to kind of waterfall down to the rest of the community. Here's a very nascent community who probably doesn't think that you could start an AI robotics company in Columbia, South Carolina. But here's Laura, right? Not only with Abby, but herself. And not a traditional, you know, look, you know, a woman, an older woman. Right. And that's, to me, what entrepreneurship is about, is that it's equal access for everyone. It's very inclusive. And so she's really been a poster child for us in Colombia.

Yeah, you need a little gumption, a little chutzpah, a little nerve, something to go out, right. And start a business. It's a, it's a, it's a affliction, a mental disease even. It certainly is it's a bad habit to go out and do this. It'd be much easier to work for someone else, I think a lot of time. But there is something about that and, and the cool thing about not being in a Silicon Valley. And it's funny, I, my home is in the bay, San Francisco Bay area. I'm actually up in Seattle now, another kind of a tech hub. And yeah, it didn't get much cheaper here. A tiny bit cheaper, tax is a tiny bit better. But no, I'm about 50ft from Lake Washington out that window there. And you know, look, in these places it's actually kind of, it's expensive to live, it's expensive to hire people, it's expensive to operate. But if you get to some of these other places, South Carolina, North Carolina, Ohio, profoundly different cost of hiring and retaining talent. And now there isn't as many people, right. You want some full stack, blah, blah, blah. You're not going to find as many there, but they're going to be a lot more grateful, a lot more affordable. And some of them, you know, really want to live away from a place that is. So go, go, go. Like San Francisco Bay area.

Yeah. And the pandemic actually exacerbated all this. Right. And the remote working capability. So, you know, I kind of say the last 10 plus years of my life has been trying to democratize entrepreneurship and maybe to some level democratize capital. And you can see, you know, the capital landscape changing still, obviously predominantly in the Valley and New York and Boston and then Seattle and Austin and some other places. Right. But it's moving and right. At least in the startup, through some level of scaling, you can probably do that in any city that has at least half a million to a million people in it. Right. There's enough resources, knowledge, experiences that you can find that could help you hopefully make a few more better decisions than not. And that's what the community's there for. Right. That's why I want this to happen in, you know, Fort Wayne, Indiana and Lima, Peru and Cleveland, Ohio and Raleigh, Durham and on and on and on. Now at some point maybe you got to pick up and go to New York in the Valley. That's, that's fine, right? Yeah, you want to show people that there's an opportunity to be a really good and scaled entrepreneur. And that's, that's my mission right now.

Absolutely. So let me shout out buildthefort.com. you want to find out more, get the book, learn about his work, his community. There it is, right on the screen. It'll be in the show notes as well, but it's easy to remember if you're driving or working out right now. Buildthefort.com Fantastic metaphor for it and a great conversation. So much more that we could have covered but we are pretty much at time so big shout out to my friend and mentor Verne Harnish. Verne Harnish, who wrote the Rockefeller Habits and created the Scaling up framework that we use in our coaching and created is really responsible for everything to do with this show today. And then to one Mitchell, our show producer, getting our guests ready and our show prepared and out the door every week. The folks at Podflight Productions who edit our audio create our show notes and all that kind of thing. Thanks again everyone for watching. For listening. If you want to drop us a note, send email to info scalingcoach.com we love to hear what topics you'd like us to go into, more or less. If if you really dug something, please let us know. We'll give you more of it. If you hated something, that's okay too. Tell us that sucked. Bill, you should stop talking about X, Y or Z. It's totally fine. And if we can help you find a resource in your area. Want to find out more about our workshops, our boot camps or any of that stuff? ScalingCoach.com is where all of that is listed. Thanks again for listening for watching. Like subscribe, give us a review. All that stuff is really cool. Until then, keep scaling up. Talk to you soon. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Aligned. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.