Decoding Customer Insights, Trust, and the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework with Bob Moesta | E1943

I'm very, very lucky. I've had four kind of amazing mentors. I painted them so as a dyslexic I can't read, but I paint every night. Think of me as 18 years old told to be a baggage handler or a construction worker. These people took an illiterate 18 year old and turned me into an innovation machine. They literally poured their knowledge into me to enable me to work on 3,500 different products and services. I've done eight startups. For all practical purposes, I should be a baggage handler.

I love the self awareness. I was going to be a cop and the Internet happened.

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All right everybody, welcome back to this week in Startups. I am super excited about our next guest because not a lot of people have studied product and customers to the level of today's guest. Bob Mesta. If you're in the industry, you know him, you know him already. He's the founder and CEO of the Rewired Group and he works with early stage founders to help them get product market fit to understand their customers very deeply. And we're going to have a very deep, deep discussion today about understanding your customers and running your company at the early stages.

Yeah.

Welcome to the program, Bob.

Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me on.

It's my pleasure. I have been following your work and you know, now and again my founders will talk about your framework.

Jake. Jake was just on, right?

Yeah, he mentioned it and I was like, you know what that you know when. So when somebody's name gets mentioned 10 times and they haven't been on the pod and they're in the startup world, I'm like, I've been doing the show for 14 freaking years and we're almost 2000 episodes in it. I apologize for not having you on on already.

I'm just happy to Be here, my friend. Thanks for having me again.

Let's start with. And I know you work with Clayton Christensen. I know there's a lot of frameworks out there, but you have a framework that my friends at Intercom, the guys at 37signals, a lot of people who I really respect. Des Trainer talks about you. Jason Free from 37signals. Both big friends of the pod. They've both been on three or four times each.

Yeah, yeah.

Bob, explain your framework as it sits today. And I believe you're 30 years into doing this. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah, I have a long. Well, so the first thing to realize is that my mom would tell you I was an engineer out of the womb. I basically started breaking things by the time I was 2. I was fixing things by the time I was 4. I've been building things since almost 8 years old. And so I love to build. I'm a electrical engineering undergrad. I've studied both mechanical chemical masters. I'm all about building stuff. And to be honest, it starts with the lie I was told in engineering school, which is, build it, and they will come.

I mean, that is the biggest sin.

Ever told, isn't it? And it's what they make you feel like you're doing and feel like you're supposed to be doing the whole time. It's like, oh, I have this great idea, and I'll go do it. Well, I learned very, very quickly that I had no idea what people wanted and that I had to actually go out and figure that part out. And the other part is I am dyslexic, so I have had three close head brain injuries. I can't read, and I can't write. And so I had to literally go learn how to interrogate people.

Because you're good at talking and listening.

And listening and listening. The key is.

Is a key superpower.

I will tell you what. People sometimes stop me. They go, what are you listening to? I'm saying I'm listening for what's not been said. I'm listening to where the energy is in the sentence. And they're like, what are you talking about? Most people are just listening to the words. You've got to listen to the intent behind the words. That's the real key. And so I went out and basically started to figure out what causes people to say, today's the day they want something new. So I've been studying what causes people to change for the last 30 years on everything from Pokemon, Mac and Cheese, to Basecamp to I've Worked on the Patriot missiles guidance system. So I've worked on so many different things. But it's all getting back to what's the objective and understand the struggling moment.

Steve Jobs and Henry Ford had profound insights into this.

Yes.

About, you know, the customer is not always right. Sometimes they don't know what they want and what they say. And I really want you to explain this from a very first principles way.

Yeah.

Why is believing what the customer says not the best modality for understanding what customers want? Because it would seem on its face, if you ask people what they want.

They'Ll tell you, thank you for waiting 14 years to ask that question. Because that's such a great question. Right. So there's three real reasons why they don't. Right. One is most customers are very problem aware, but they're not solution aware. So they actually don't know what's even possible. So they only can articulate features or functions or products that they've seen in the past. But it has nothing to do with what could be possible. So what you want to do is ask them about what they would use and then what can they do that they can't do today? And what's the outcome they want? Because if we get the outcome, then I can actually start to understand all the different ways I can do it. But most people talk in outputs the output they want. I want an agenda, I want a calendar, I want this to be organized. It's like. But for what purpose? And the more we can actually understand the purpose of. So I think we started right before we got on. We talked about losing some weight, right? I lost weight because the only way I get to see my children is to go skiing. Right. And so. But I've designed it that way. Like I don't want to go see them in their hometown because it's like what we do is we walk around, we go see museums and then we eat a bunch of food and it's like, okay, that's. But we like to get together. And so part of it is getting them home is hard. And so what I do is I pick these places throughout the winter and then they have icon passes and basically I have lots of miles. And so we basically figure out how to come together and see each other. And So I lost £100. Not because I want to lose £100. I knew I was fat from. I was. I'm sorry, I was obese or large.

No, no, you and I were fat. Let's just call what it is.

That's right.

You can describe Yourself, I'll describe myself as a fat bastard.

And, and, and the thing is, is I was in the husky section back like, like I'm at a weight where I had been this weight since middle school. Got it right. But it had nothing to do with me losing weight. It had everything to do with me spending time with my kids and being physically able to do things. And so once I change output of weight to the outcome of Lily skiing with my kids, everything changed. Everything changed.

Now I just had Charles Duhigg on the program. He wrote a book called Super Communicators and Power of Habit. And this is just such a great bookend for his episode. I'm deep listening to you.

Yes.

And I know, having done my research for this podcast, your modalities and some of your techniques.

Yes.

The technique I'm supposed to do when you're talking and I'm deep listening is to ask you somehow the follow up question if this was an actual customer interview, I as the founder and if I had some weight loss product or something, you've the intonation there about I want to go skiing, I want to spend time with my kids.

Right.

You can't be fat and ski because you'll get injured. It's just not going to work. And so now I'm thinking, well, why is it important to spend time with your kids?

Right.

I'm thinking what is, you know, and.

Then what was exactly right question should.

I be asking here to get you to open up a little bit more? And I, since I love skiing, I'm.

Like, ah, but it's not about skiing. It's not.

It's not. It's about the time. And so then I know that the ski lift for a dad, because I have two 8 year olds and a 14 year old, the ski lift is when you capture your kids without their devices, having just had a flow experience with them and now you're in the afterglow. A flow.

Exactly.

And this creates memories and joy and connection which with you and I as dads.

Yes.

Covet more than anything. Money, sex, our celebrity, fame, none of it matters as much as connecting with our children.

Yes. And so here's the other thing. So all my kids are now out of the house. So I'm totally empty. And so the only time I get to see them. So here's the thing, is this one of the other things I did is. You're gonna laugh at this, but I have what I call a death day. If you see that it says 1325, right? So it's December 17, 20, 27. And what I did is I had learned that basically people who had near death experiences value time so much more than everybody else. And to the point where some of them make them really, really, really wildly successful because they value time value, because they only know they have so much time. And so I kept trying to figure out, how can I do this for myself? How do I figure out how to have a near death experience without having a near death experience? And so I have superimposed it. My mother, who is a saint again, raising me as a child was a very difficult task at hand. And she'd always defer everything to when she was going to retire. She was a schoolteacher in the city of Detroit, and she basically said, oh, I'll do that when I retire. I'll do that when I retire. She retired at 62 and basically lasted four months and found out she had stage four colon cancer and died within the year. And so I took her birthday and her death day and added it to mine. And so I will be her age exactly on that day. And so my whole thing is to think about it is like, if my mom didn't have a choice, but I do have choices and I can be better reflective about it, how do I spend more time on the right things? So the first thing I did is I literally got rid of the bottom 20% of my clients. Just got right out of the hat.

You were like, these clients don't appreciate me. They don't pay on time.

No, it, no, no. It had nothing to do with that. They don't get value.

Oh, your time. It had to do with your time.

I didn't value my time. And I. If I don't value the time, then I gotta. I can spend the time somewhere else. And so it's all about time, right? And so all of a sudden, currency is time. That's right. And so then what happened is you start to realize, well, I started this when I was seven years and I see my kids once a quarter, so that's 7 times 4 is 28. I see my kids 20 more times in my life. Talk about emotional.

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So now you say like, all right, well I gotta fix that. So for example, I bought a sailboat. I bought a sailboat not because I like to sail, it's because I can spend time with my family and we can go out and it's time without the devices. We can go skiing, we go hiking. It's all these different things. And so that's where I realized 300 pounds is not gonna work for me.

You and I, you know, it's very interesting, men of a certain age at certain life experiences. My friend Tony Hsieh died three years ago tragically. You know, from.

This is one of those triggers, right? You kind of go like, triggered me.

I was talking to a friend, he said, what do you love to do for yourself? You know, your friend died and you really gotta be thinking about things. You enjoy yourself. I said, you know, I invest in companies, I do my podcast. Like you do that to other, help other people, right? I'm like, yeah, but I enjoy it. But it's primarily a business for other people. For you. I said, I play cards. You know, my guys got together every Thursday. We've been playing this card game for a long time. He's like, that's great. What else? Like, that's it. That's all I do. I take care of my kids, I do my job. And he said, is there anything else you love? And I said, you know, I loved going skiing. When's the last time you ski? I was like, three or four years ago. How often do you go? I was like, I do three or four days, one trip every two years or something. He's like, why don't you do more? I'm like, I don't know. We should do a ski house. Oh, did you really skied 100 days in three years. And I just, it, it changed my whole framing. So now you and I have this very thoughtfelt discussion and this is what you do.

Yeah.

You do a small number of deep discussions. Deep, deep discussions. Maybe a dozen. And then you'd rather do two rounds of interviews with a dozen than get to 24 or 50. You want to do a small number.

I don't need the quality quantitative. The quantitative stuff is actually easier to get. The qualitative stuff is the. Is like, it's the language. So I always talk about. The work that I do is about hypothesis building, research. Most research is designed to prove hypotheses. You have. And as a dyslexic and as a ADHD person, I would always say I don't have a hypothesis, I'm not smart enough yet. So the work that I'm doing is actually going out and getting the hypotheses from the people that are actually going to use the product, as opposed to me sitting in a conference room guessing what they're going to want.

And this is what we just did in this discussion. If you were running one of our startups, Nutrisense, which does nutrition, and I've.

Been working with them for a while, they're great.

You're working with the team. Unbelievable.

They started techstars. I'm a. I'm a. I'm a. So I know the jobs of Endutrisense. I can tell you what they are. I like the whole positioning is around and it's very, very interesting. It's by the way that that little device has changed my life.

Yeah. The glucose monitor, continuous glucose monitor, cgm. So when you and I are talking about this, whether we were running Ozempic or Nutrisense, whatever it is, doesn't matter. This, what we just did right now, this deep, heartfelt, deep listening conversation about the outcomes. Not like, I want to lose weight. Why do you want to lose weight? You know, with a generic. Be healthier. Like, it's almost like they respond. It would be like, we got to like.

Yeah, when people answer it that way, like to be healthier, I can. So your. Your chance of success is zero. Zero, exactly.

Zero. You're not. It's not a good reason. Right.

This is where people. There's a. So there's a phrase I have. I say bitch, it ain't switching. And there's a lot of people who bitch about things, but they don't necessarily do something about it. The people you have to figure out is the energy required to make the change is way bigger than we all think it is. And so part of it is to Understand that there's forces that are at play. And, and we need to actually realize that context adds as much value as the product. Right. So think of it as like, you like steak or do you like pizza?

Yes.

Yeah. The answer is yes. And so what you do is you start to go, all right, but let me take a pizza situation. You're just getting home, the kids are coming home from soccer, and it's like, okay, I'm going to throw pizza on the table. Right. Let's take the pizza out, put steak in there. How well does steak fit in that situation? That's so good.

Yeah, it takes a lot of time.

Right, right. And they're going to be hungry and they're probably going to be full by the time you get the steak done. It's just like. And you start to realize, like the context actually adds as much value as the product in that moment or it detracts from it. So you start to realize that a product success is engulfed in both the context that it's used and the outcomes they want to achieve. And so that's really, that's really the thing that I've realized is so I had a very, very lucky. I've had four kind of amazing mentors I want to show you. So these are my four mentors I painted as a dyslexic. I can't read, but I paint every night. And so these are my four mentors. Dr. Deming, Dr. Clayton Christianson, Dr. Genichi Taguchi, and Dr. Willie Moore. Think of me as 18 years old, told to be a baggage handler or a construction worker. These people took an illiterate 18 year old and turned me into an innovation machine. They literally had poured their knowledge into me to enable me to work on 3,500 different products and services. I've done eight startups and for all the practical purposes, I should be a baggage handler.

I love the self awareness. I was going to be a cop and the Internet happened.

Yeah, but, but by the way. No, no, no. Nothing's wrong with being a baggage tailor. But the reality is like at some point in time, you have to realize that your, your destiny is determined by the people that, you know, we get back to people, right, Because I met Deming. Dr. Deming is the father of quality. He's the gentleman who went to Japan and built the Toyota production system. He's the father of lean. I sat down next to him thinking it was one of my friend's grandfathers. And I asked him 52 questions in 22 minutes and he turned to Me and said, God, you're one of the most curious kids I've ever met. How'd you like to be my intern for the summer? That's how I got my first internship.

Amazing. I want to get into each of these four and what you learned from them. Put that in your head.

Yeah.

And put a pin in it.

Yeah.

What I want to ask you right now is I want to close the loop on our discussion about weight. Now, if you were Nutrisense, if you were Ozempic and you had done what we just did, this. This discovery process.

Yes.

Of really deep listening and getting to the context and a deeper reason why people wanted to lose weight.

Yeah.

What do I do with that information? Now I have you. You're an n of 1. Right. I think that's a fancy way saying you're a sample size of 1.

But what an n of 1 implies is there's a causation that you can actually understand of why I bought it, why I did something with it. Right, right. And so what we want to do is we want to compare the patterns of how I bought to the comparisons of how you bought, how other people bought. And you start to realize there's not one reason, but there's not a million reasons either. It turns out that there's four or five different kinds of vectors of direction that people buy. And when we understand those, then we can actually make choices about how do we serve. Because to be honest, their value code is different. Each path, some people are going to value it for basically. So let's say Nutrisense. Some people are going to value it because of what they learn out of it. Some people are going to value it because they can show it to their doctor, but the people who show it to their doctor don't really care about the insights. So you start to realize when they're in a mindset, they actually value it very differently. And so how do we then sell to these different people, these different situations?

But in modern marketing, because of the Internet, because of the duopoly of what Facebook and Google have accomplished, we're able to. To really hyper target and understand this. So that's correct. You know, gentlemen who are in their late 50s or 60s, you know, could have kids and grandkids.

Yes.

You could very much figure out through psychographics and other determinants that they have a weight issue. You could create a landing page. You could create with this Persona, this bucket, and say, these are the messages that Nutrisense needs to give this person.

That's right.

The doctor One, the hero image on that page needs to be the person in a doctor's office talking to their doctor with their spouse. Something that evokes for them.

That's right.

Oh, that they're like being really thoughtful about it. But the other one could be, you know, this older gentleman with their kids. With their kids at the ski mountain carrying their skis.

That's right. That's right.

Or. Or us on the ski lift the moment you and I. But I would never have thought about that.

Just a picture from the ski lift. That. That's it. That's it. That tells you exactly this, right?

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So here's the big difference. The big difference is this is most of the time people are trying to find Personas and then they're trying to imply what Personas would do. And that's very dangerous because what happens is we can talk about like existing behavior where people can be very predictable because they're habits, but when they change their habit, they're actually not that predictable. And so part of it is, is that like, you couldn't tell me when somebody's going to change, but I can tell you if this and this and this happened to them, they will change. And so now we can actually start to understand the moments of when people. So, for example, this is why I have a big problem with tam. The total addressable market is how many businesses are out there that could use your product, but how many people are out there that actually are struggling with your, with the, with the problem that you solve. It's probably one tenth of the size of the tam. And so that's where all of a sudden everything's overblown because it just doesn't look at kind of the struggling moment. So think of it as who, when, where and why. Those are the four things I have to know to be really good at product and to be really good at startups. And most people might know who, and they talk about Personas, but then they don't know the where, when and why. And that's where the secret sauce is. Because in some cases more about when, where and why than it is sometimes about the people. Because I could be kids to be grown, but it also could be an uncle who's missing their, their, their nephews and nieces. And watching them grow up, it's the same problem.

So many investors missed Airbnb. Yeah, they couldn't get their heads around it. Brian and Joe both been on the program in the last year. Great guests. Look it up, folks. Joe, Jebbia and Brian, of course, and they have this famous story. Talk to 30, 40 investors. Everybody says, no, nobody gets it. They missed it. Now, if you had talked to the Airbnb early users, how would you have done this? Socratic interview therapy session? Maybe we could even role play it here. But let's get into. I think about decision making, and I'm asking this in a selfish way, Bob. I think about my decision making as an investor and how I can be a better decision maker constantly.

Yes.

And my blind sides. And I'm looking for weird companies that I don't understand. And this is one that's so weird that I didn't get to hear the pitch. But other people I know who did, you know, obviously missed it.

The first thing is, is what is the real struggling moment because there's more than enough hotel rooms.

Yes.

This is not a hotel problem.

There's so many hotel rooms. It's. It's a tyranny. Is a tyranny of choice.

But when you go. So I have a. I have four kids, so when I would have to go on vacation, I have to get at least three rooms. At least three rooms. So the struggling moment is. And we don't feel like we're actually at a house, we feel like we're at a hotel. Right. And so part of this is actually there's a certain kinds of vacations where you want to spend time and hang. You can't do that at a hotel. Where do you hang in a hotel?

A lobby is awkward.

The bar.

Yard. The bar. No, we're not with kids. Not in your robe, maybe. Yeah, people go to the pool. Maybe that's nice.

But maybe you start to realize, like, at some point in time when. When the trip is more about actually spending time together and reminiscing, or basically you start to realize there's no place like that and that people will give up places to sleep to have more places to actually interact.

So this is about.

This is the struggle.

It's about the kitchen. It's about the living room. It's about the shared space.

The bedroom.

Yes.

The bedroom is actually the place where actually most people spend the least amount of time and they have it because they can work or they could do something out, like they can sleep. But the reality is, like, most people are getting Airbnb because it's. It's not basically a hotel. And so think.

They're not selling. If we. If I pause everything, they're not selling a place to sleep, they're selling a place to hang.

That's right. And if you look at their ads, they do it perfectly. A place to spend time together. And to be honest, if I went to visit my kids, I'd go to a hotel, and then we'd end up spending time in the museum, or we'd spend time at the bar. But I want to spend just sitting on the couch talking about, how's the work going?

Yeah, have a cup of tea, chew the fat.

Part of this is to realize you have to get past what they say to what do they mean? And where are the struggling moments? And where are the emotional aspects of everyone in decision? So this is where most people would think that most decisions are very rational. But what I'll tell you is that in the bigger world, the fact is there's almost Always the irrational decision that gets made. And typically when you see an irrational decision, it's not their problem, it's your problem. Meaning the moment I actually understand their context, the irrational becomes rational. And so typically when I see an irrational behavior, it means I don't know the story yet I'm missing a big piece of the story because there's no way in hell they would do that for just this. And you start to realize you need to actually understand the whole story. The key though is that in these interviews, 10 interviews, not a lot, each element, there's forces, there's pushes, there's a push of the situation, there's a pull of the outcome that they're looking for. There's an anxiety force that creates frictional, there's something that they love about the old thing that actually creates friction. And you start to like, you piece this together to realize what had to happen for them to say, today's the day I need to buy this new CRM or today's the day I need a new mattress. It's all the same process. And what we do is we frame it and we make trade offs because there is no ideal solution ever. Right. It never works out. You always be there, paid more or it's not exactly what you want. And so ultimately we have what most though. April Dunford and I did a lot of work in sales, right. One of the things we realized that 60% of, of proposals that go out go unanswered. No choice. It probably and most of the reason why is because people don't know how to make the decision when you only give them one choice. So I always tell people to give three choices because here's, here's the first thing I think. Do you know the answer why you give three?

Well, yeah, usually they can eliminate one or two and then find the one they like.

So if you really study it hard, here's what happens. They have A, B and C. And the first thing you do is you give them confidence by eliminating one of the three, let's say B. And they actually get confidence in it. Like I don't want that. I know I don't want that.

It's too expensive.

It's easier for people to say what they don't want than what they want.

Yes.

So now they have two left. And you'd see the rational thing would be I'm going to compare A and C together each other. But that's not what they do. They actually compare A to, to B and C to B to say which one's Closer. And then they eliminate the next one. And so they end up saying, well, I'll take the way. The phrasing you'll get is I'll take A. What do you mean you'll take A? It's because they eliminated B and C. Yes.

That's what left. Yes. It's a process of elimination. We all learn this doing multiple choice texts.

That's right.

We've learned this in dating. We've learned it in picking a college. We've learned it in picking food choices. I don't want Mexican. I don't like spicy food. Okay. I don't like Mexican. I don't want spicy. I take out the Indian spice. I got kids with me. I need some. Okay, now what's left?

Yes.

Okay.

Exactly. That's how we make decisions. And so this is where in the conference room, we feel like everybody's rational. But what you realize is in the real world, everybody's irrational because we don't know their context. And context drives the rationale.

It's just so profound when you think about it. When you go into these interviews, customer interviews, and people who are here on this Week in Startups do customer interviews regularly. Hopefully a lot of people have a script. A lot of people have, like a lot of goals. A lot of people come in with preconceived notions. I think you have a different approach. Explain Bob's approach here.

So my approach is basically that I want to have a conversation so I can extract their story in the wild without my painting of their story. Because them changing from a product A to product B or making some switch, it just didn't happen randomly. And so I don't need a long list. I don't need a long list of questions. All I have to know is, to be honest is, what did you change from? And to when did you do it? And then I go backwards and I go back to find, like, what were happening to them that made them even become aware of the problem. And then when they became aware of the problem, how do they match it to a set of solutions? And then ultimately, when they saw the solutions, how do they decide which one to pick? And then once they decide which one to pick, how well did it actually meet their expectations? And you start to realize, like now I'm not actually asking people about the future. I'm asking people about real behavior of stuff they did to basically figure out kind of the elements that have to be present for them to value your product. And then what I do is we then take the looking backwards lens where we create variables and we say, all right, these are the variables involved that actually make your product more valuable. When they're in this situation and they want this outcome and now we can sell to it, we go find people who are in those situations, we go find people who want those outcomes and then we help them. No, no, then we help them actually add the missing ingredients to enable them to move. Because most of the time they don't have all the ingredients. They're missing two or three things.

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Right.

And without that ingredient, they can't complete the mission. Which means in this case, the mission might be buying your car or your Service or your SaaS product.

That's right.

So the preconditions and the situation where they need you, they need you for an engagement ring and a diamond when they're getting married.

Yes.

Or when they're celebrating an anniversary, then if you were to ask them, you know, like, you know, well, how are you picking a diamond?

Yes.

You know, and when I went through this and I have a company, Stone Algo, and I had this like very Socratic discussion with the marketplace and the fear of being ripped off.

Yep.

Is pronounced because you feel like there's so many variables. There's so much inventory, there's so many sellers, there's so much at stake. It's such a large considered purchase and the person has to love it on the other side. So then you look at something like Blue Nile and how they've navigated this. Or Stone Algo, our company.

Yep.

This being able to bring the diamond back, guaranteed if you, the spouse doesn't like it.

Yep.

Critical. And then all of a sudden the fear goes away.

But it's an anxiety reducer. So we talk about that as something like, oh, you could bring it back. Like, because at some point when they're not buying it for them, they actually don't know what to buy.

And some part of such a unique situation, isn't it? Because they don't get to say to the person, which diamond do you like?

That's right.

Because the engagement surprise.

By the way, it happens in B2B all the time. The buyer never asked the user what they want.

Yeah.

Right.

So, well, this is what I have. I have slack. Would you like slack? I don't need to ask you. I have slack. You need slack.

It's like, by the way, that's where job doesn't work, where there's no choice. The whole key to it is that it's free will that you have the choice to choose where you want to go. So like think of health insurance. Health insurance is actually kind of a. It's, it's. You don't actually choose your health insurance. You pick which one your, your company gives you.

Right.

So that's why we don't know that we know more about our car insurance than our health care insurance. Because we don't pay for our health insurance.

We get it. We're not the customer.

We are the customer of the, of the services. But the reality is, is that the moment that the. The insurance company started to sell the companies versus selling to individuals. It all went away.

We don't have them. They're the buyer. Where the customer. What a unique. And like, you know what's interesting as.

We have this Twisted.

Twisted. It's broken. And Bob, this is like really interesting when you and I have this conversation because we found two instances of very important purchases in people'. The diamond for the engagement. That's got a broken dynamic.

Yep.

I'm not the customer. She's the customer, but I can't tell her. And she has wants and needs and desires and preferences. I can't get them without ruining the surprise. Weird. That's a weird situation.

So what in healthcare. Yeah, but think it's just even weirder. Well, think about this. One thing you could do is separate it. How do I give you a ring for the surprise and then how do I give you the accident part to basically go and pick? But you can still do the support. We've actually tried to make it. You have to have the perfect ring and the perfect day to do those things. That's just a ridiculous notion.

Right.

What if I gave you a ring that's in the right ballpark? That's where it is. That's what most people do. And you end up realizing like, we're going to plan the event and then we're going to plan the picking, which is completely different, as opposed to putting all the pressure on the guy to make the decision up front. Why?

Why? Why make it even more anxiety producing already? Anxiety producing. So then if you and I were consulting, I was an investor, you were a consultant. And we were working with Stone Algo, and we wanted to make a thing for this marketplace where we wanted to require, you know, the like, what do they call it? An Airbnb? They have certain hosts. Super hosts.

Yeah.

So we wanted to make the equivalent of super hosts. And super hosts have to hit certain notes, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Like, I just got a bad review because I didn't clean the place. I was like, I didn't know I took the place. They're like, it's on the wall. I'm like, okay, whatever. But that was a big complaint that Brian actually addressed. And he's like, he really doesn't want people to have to do chores when they leave their Airbnb. So he's, you can't be a super host if you force people do that. So let's say we have the super diamond seller. We would advise Stone Algo to say, hey, what about this concept of if you want to be that doing this, you have to have a guaranteed 60 day return policy and, or a 30 day return policy and a 60 day exchange policy. Boom. What would you, what would your next step be there in terms of productizing this discovery we've made? We made a discovery, you and I as archaeologists. Indiana Jones.

So my short run, my biggest thing with diamonds is I would be looking for where do people want to get a diamond but they don't.

Where do people want to get a diamond but they don't. But they don't. Okay, I could tell you, they go to 47th street, they look in the windows, they get too intimidated to go inside.

That's right. So let me think of this way. But the stores make them into it. It's kind of like buying cars makes people walking through that door to buy a car is intimidated as well. But like how many people would buy more diamonds if you could actually figure out how to actually reduce that anxiety? Like this is, this is where.

I don't know the answer, but it would be dramatically more, wouldn't it?

But this is where if you, if you study cut, clarity, color and carrot. The industry as a whole rejected it. They hated it. And De Beers basically forced it upon the market. And it actually 10x the market because it's metrics that now I can actually go learn about. And what happens is there's something called the jeweler effect, which you know is once somebody educates you about it, you can go shop anywhere else you want, but the person who taught you is the person you'll go back to almost 80% of the time because you trust them, because they, they help you understand it all.

This is so interesting part. Yeah, trust, yeah.

Well, how do you cause trust? The trust is not random. It's caused. What are the elements we have to do to cause trust?

Educate would be one that sounds like we just established that educating, it's conditional.

So, for example, I did this with a sales team in the, in the, what do you call it, telecommunication space, right? And they basically switch from one big telecom to another telecom. And this person said very early on in the interview, he's like, oh, I just trusted them. I said, whoa, what do you mean you trusted them? Like you trusted them like with your kids? Or do you trust them like, kind of like, yeah, I'm willing to listen to more like, no, no, I trusted them. I'm like, what in the world did they do to cause trust? And they literally laid it out for us. One is when they showed up, they didn't name drop. They just wanted to know about my business. When they came back, they actually gave me three options instead of one. And ultimately, the fact is that at some point, the way that I really knew I trusted them when I asked them for something and they told me no, the moment that we actually implemented that 22% increase in sales. How do you cause trust?

Amazing. Yeah. I think there's something about following through also that causes when you do what you say you're gonna do, that to me is like a very big trust thing. You said you were gonna call me back with the pricing for this carrot at this time.

What's interesting is in this scenario that came up, one of the things they said was, I want them to be responsive, but not too responsive. Say, what do you mean? It's like, well, if they're too responsive, that means they're either sitting around or it's automated. It's not genuine, like, oh, authentic responsiveness.

Authenticity.

So, and what we did is we defined the window. The window was like within 24 hours, they got back to me to answer my questions. That's all. Nobody needed it in 10 seconds. And to be honest, they were suspect if you. They got an answer too fast. So these are all the elements that. This is the kind of thing of when you start to study these elements of what causes people to change, and then you actually wrap your product and services around it. That's what it's all about. So to your point of when you do these interviews, they're useful for both marketing and sales. Marketing in terms of positioning and helping people to identify the problem. 90% of the people don't even know they have a problem. So if you can actually make them problem aware and solution unaware, totally fine. But that's marketing's job. Not to necessarily make you product aware, but to make you problem aware. Right.

Give me an example of making people problem aware. I understand we don't have to solve the problem, but how do you trigger in people they got a problem?

So I work with Casper, right? And so one of the things we actually highlight is like, how many bottles of Seaquil do you need to buy before you realize you have a mattress problem?

Wow, that's a sniper shot right there. To a certain group of people, not everybody's got sleep problems. Some people sleep like a baby.

So my favorite is we actually set it up so we realized that most people would buy a matches. We actually run specials from 2am to 4am because insomniacs, people who can't sleep are willing to buy at 2am.

There'S your content. Well, there's context and there's timing.

Yeah, exactly.

Both of these things are so critical. The message has to come at the right time in the right context. Whoever. Who would ever think that selling Casper mattresses against the psychographic of sleep medicine be a good idea? But you did.

I discovered it by doing the interviews. They literally were like, I'm taking too much sleep medication and to be honest, I want to get away from it. And I realized my bed was the reason why I had to take the sleep medication. Like, so I worked on Snickers. Right. You're not you when you're hungry. That all came from the customers.

Wait, wait, what is it? What is their insight?

So one of the things you realize about Snickers is Snickers is not a candy bar. Right. If you really look at it and look at how it's been built and how it's been designed and how it's been positioned, it's actually a fuel bar. It's like you missed the last meal. Your stomach's growling, you've got something to do and you're not yourself and you're hangry and hangry came from them. And you start to realize. And it competes with a Red Bull and an apple and a sandwich. It doesn't really.

It's a pick me up. It's an afternoon pick me up.

It's right. It does not compete. Now, it's more than that because it's food. It's got to be food because I got growling my stomach. So we change the layering and we raise the melting temperature of the caramel to make it stickier. So when you bite it, it masticates into a ball and sits in your stomach and absorbs that acid so you're not hungry anymore.

Wow. It's a satiation device.

Exactly right. And so it doesn't compete. It's the largest selling candy bar that is not a candy bar.

Wow.

Right. And so this is where you find all this stuff is from the like. So you just ask people what. Tell me about the last time you ate a Snickers bar. I can predict right when it's going to happen.

Yeah. You're at a gas station, you're hungry, you went to the movies, you're hungry between things.

Right. You missed the last meal. You still have a bunch to do. You don't want to spoil the next meal. And I need to get through it. And I'm running out of energy. Give me something. And this is where like it competes With Red Bull and coffee. And the Snickers are all in the same category.

Look at this. I, you know, I was just looking at some of the Snickers tags on while you're talking. You're not you when you're hungry.

Right.

Snickers satisfies. That's the one that came to mind to me.

That's right.

Hungry. Grab a Snickers. So it's not treat yourself. It's not, you deserve this or chocolate delicious.

It's not packed with peanuts. That was this positioning before we started. Like, who cares if it's packed with peanuts?

Peanuts are a commodity. You get peanuts anywhere.

Right. And so you start to realize it's an experience. Like what's in a Baby Ruth and what's in a Snickers is almost the same thing, but they're totally different experiences.

Fascinating. Let me ask you a question about a really big decision people are making at the moment. And there's a lot of discussion around it and how you might go about it. I don't think you have any direct experience here, but maybe you do. People are making a decision to buy a new car.

Yeah.

People are loyal to brands because they build trust. They find they like BMW, they love their Toyota, they get their Suburban, whatever it is, whatever their jam is, they get locked in, they buy three. And there are many brands like this. I think BMW is probably like BMW for life kind of situation for some people. And there's a lot going on here. But there is an industry wide switch from gas to electric and then there's a little waypoint in between called hybrid.

Yep.

And we seem to have had all the early adopters, the vanguard, you know, in crossing the chasm. They're all in Teslas for 10 years now. You got the laggard, the mass, the big fat middle they've adopted and you got some laggards. And the laggards are like, you know what? And I think this is a sign we're in the laggard territory of the bell curve. They're like, not quite ready, but I'll take that hybrid because I do wanna. And so how would you parse that in interviews and kind of unlock how to get them to not just make the one step, but to make the two step? And am I correct in thinking this is like the ultimate ABC choice here?

Yeah. So to be honest, my specialty is in this. Because most people try to build the best electric car ever.

Yeah.

What they're better off doing is build the best half electric car ever. Right. So think of like So I worked on Quicken. It is literally, you know, if you look at it, it's just an accounting package. And if you, if you look at how it was built, it was, wasn't built by accountants. It was actually built by small business people to understand how to help me with small business. And what you'd say is they could go to a full big package of everything in accounting. But most small business people don't give, don't want to be accountants. They actually hate Quicken. Not because it's Quicken, because it's accounting. If you can build the half step that lets people do their accounting, so they can actually hire another baker, hire another, so they don't have to hire an accountant, they can hire somebody else to do the work, all of a sudden, they love it. This is the case where a half step is sometimes way better than a whole step because most people can't make the big step. And so you come in with the hybrid, though. My belief is the hybrid were the early adopters before. My belief is the next round. The hybrid drivers now are now the mass basically saying, I'm not committing to electric, but I'll half commit to it.

Yes. And it's very interesting if we were to talk to them. Their reasons are completely illogical. As a, as an EV driver for a decade, I watched the supercharger network expand. I watched the charging experience go from, you know, but 50 miles an hour to 6, 7, 800 miles an hour. I watched a stop, you know, go from, you know, having to stop for an hour and have lunch to just like, by the time I get my Starbucks and use the loo and get back to my car, I topped it off enough to get to my next place. And instead of there being like two stops, I gotta wait in line. There's 20 stops. I have my choice of where to stop. I can pick it based on food, not based on the, the distance. And I watched the 150 mile range Roadster go to 200 in the Model S, go to 325 in my Y. And if I want to be a lunatic, I can get 400 in the, in some of these versions.

Yeah, right.

There's nobody who drives this amount of mileage in a day. With rare exception, but yet we still have a fear of running out. So how would you advise getting past this issue? The fear, the habit of going to gas stations.

So what you start to realize is that people learn things out of routine. So one of the things I would do is I would actually start to think about A rental strategy, because when they're on vacation, they can rent it and know what it's like. So, for example, I recently have switched everything to Apple Apple Pay. But I had to go to Europe and not exchange money to realize how easy Apple Pay. Literally, I could have done Apple Pay for a long time, but it wasn't until I went to Europe one time. And to realize, like, I'm going to try to do this without anything. I'm going to use credit card, I'll use my phone. And I realized, like, I could do this everywhere. Like, why am I, why, why, why am I not using this back home? And you start to do it. So you start to realize these, these anomaly experiences create the gateway for them to start to actually think about it. Because it's really way more anxiety than anything else. It's not, it's not about the push and pull. It's not about the, like, people can see it. It's the anxiety forces and the habit forces that are literally holding people back. So it's not about the features.

So a way to get them over this anxiety is exactly what they do in psychology when they decondition somebody who has a fear of flying or snakes. They start with, here's a picture of an airplane. You have some fear about the airplane. Let's talk about your fear of the airplane. Then they say, here's the picture of the seat. And then they might even take them and have them walk on an airplane and sit on it.

It.

When it's on the ground at a museum or something and just sit there and laugh it out. And they desensitize them. So what you're proposing in a way is a desensitization to the fear of Apple Pay and not having your credit card with you or the fear of using a supercharging station. What a brilliant idea. If people take a Tesla or another EV in an Uber or a Lyft that could, you know, just the riding in it helps them.

But the Uber and the Lyft, you get it from one side, but there's a different notion about how it feels. There's a, there's, there's a guttural and emotional aspect of sitting in that seat and not having gear. Like, like you're, you're used to a car and it's, it, it has too many other characteristics that don't make it a car. You know what I mean? Like the sound. There's no. Like the sound is one thing.

And the acceleration is disconcerting.

Exactly right. And so you start to realize, like, there's actually a lot of fear with it as well. So the funniest question you can ask is, say, like, I'm just afraid of running out of. Out of electricity. I just want my batteries to go dead. I'm like, okay, when's the last time you ran out of gas? And you realize that nobody does that. And so you start to realize, like, and what the thing that I can't get over is that the electric vehicles are not advertising. You don't have to stop for gas. Like, the anxiety that people have to literally go, do I get off here so I can actually save some money to be able to get gas here? Are like, this is a bad neighborhood.

And the danger of gas stations getting robbed at a gas station, the inconvenience of having to stop with your children on a side road. There's we. You and I could craft an ad for just that. Gas stations are dirty, dangerous, not fun and time consuming. Charging at home is as simple as plugging in your phone.

That's right.

Typical. What is a typical gas station in terms of minutes?

Yeah, that's like 12 minutes. So I think is you get 12 minutes back if you actually get this thing. Like, that's what people don't understand. Like, what do I got to do with 12 minutes?

It's like six hours a year.

That's exactly right. So all of a sudden it's like. And to be honest, it's the anxiety of, do I fill up now or not? Like, you. You start to realize, like, there's a little subroutine in your head of like, check the gas gauge. How far do I have to go? Where am I going to go? Should I get gas on? I get gas on the way back. Like, you don't have to think about that anymore.

No. Yeah. You have a. That's the brilliant thing about you. And I figured out a full gas tank every morning. Start the morning on full, by the way.

That's how I think about my life. I literally go to sleep when my tank is empty and I wake up every morning and it's full. What an amazing concept.

The gas tank. The energy tank.

Yeah.

So, yeah. And this is the power.

So what am I, by the way? One of my claims to fame is I worked at Ford. And one of the things we did in 1987 is I worked for it. And I came up with the team that I worked on. But we worked on it. We came up with a little arrow on the gas gauge that tells you which side the field.

I love the Arrow.

The arrow is there because of the striking moment of pulling in and going, where is it? I can't remember. Is this my car? Is this my wife's car? And you kind of go like, which side is it on? And you just look for the arrow.

By the gas tank gauge. By the gas gauge. What a brilliant concept. Let me ask you a question.

Yeah.

I love cars. I'm, I'm team Tesla. I own four of them. I've owned every car. And I see the Ford is going to take the Mustang and make an ebay. I said, oh, my first car was a Ford 1970 Mustang Grande and gold with a vinyl top. It was 351cleveland. Four barrel on. That bad boy was incredible.

I said to this, you are a car guy. Thank you. Thank you for telling me. I, I like, I, I, I'm from Detroit, born and raised. You can see the smile on my face. I love it.

I mean, incredible for a first car, 650 bucks. It had a hole in the floor. I could see the road when I was driving. Literally, I looked at the passenger side. It was, that's how rusted out it was. Put it aside. They, they said could come out with electric car. I said, great. Here's my idea. Do the classic pony car with ABS and all the great brakes and electric. I'll buy two.

Yep.

Give me the classic pony convertible.

Yep.

And they come out, they're getting there with a Ford E Mustang.

Yeah.

That looks like nothing. Yeah. It's not what I, it's not a Mustang. And they could have tapped into.

They will. Don't worry. It's going to get there. It's going to get there. Like this is, this is where like they have to, they have to appease the stockholders before they appease the enthusiasts. And so building the infrastructure. And so part of it is they've had to split the company. I don't know if you know that. They split the company in half. So there's three divisions now.

There's the finance. I know that's the biggest part of it. Right.

The big part is the gas. So they call it ice. Internal combustion engine group. There's the electric group and then there's the infrastructure group in between. So like the chassis, both need a chassis, but they have different chassis. So you start to realize like all that kind of stuff goes together. But ultimately they had, I mean, they had to split that company in half to basically figure out how they're going to actually, because from an investing perspective, it's very different investments, very different yeah.

Because this I thought would be like, nostalgia is such a weird thing.

What is nostalgia? Let's take. Let's pause for a second. Let's unpack this. What is nostalgia to you?

To me, it's a chance to remember things that don't maybe exist today, but that were wonderful memories and moments and milestones and waypoints in my life. Certain movies, Star wars comes to mind.

Yep.

Certain foods, cars, your Mustang cars come to mind.

So what you start to realize is nostalgia is about recalling a memory or pulling on a memory of what somebody's had in the past. And it can be different from the past, but it can't be too different from the past. And the trick is understanding when is it too different that it's not your Mustang anymore, which is my experience.

I would have bought that E Mustang if it had been the one I wanted.

And so my belief is they weren't targeting you for that.

They were not. They were.

They were not.

They were not. But, you know, you do see these. Like, it's very. Nostalgia, such. Is such a fascinating thing to me because you have these young people who didn't experience it, and young people, I don't know if you know what this trend. They love buying, like, old Saab's Mercedes and volvos from the 80s. And I don't understand it, but they love the old Mustang convertibles, the Saab convertibles. All this stuff is, like, really meaningful to them for some reason.

It's. It's. I'll say from the work that I've done, I would say this is about them finding uniqueness. Their uniqueness. It's a. It's an enumeration of all the things that they want to be. And Saab, if you look at Saab, how Saab came about, like, they can resonate with it. And ultimately the fact is they don't want to. They're like. They don't want to promote the building of something new. They'd rather rejuvenate something from the past. Right. It's all about who they are and what they want to put up out there.

Fascinating. You had four heroes of yours. You had your Mount Rushmore over there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's go through the Mount Rushmore and what you learned because you know who. You have a tremendous impact on these startups and products and how people build them. And then it's always great to go to the source material, you know?

Yeah.

You know, I fell in love with Dire Straits and I fell in love with Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, and then all of a sudden I start going backwards, and all of a sudden it's all Bob Dylan.

That's right. It's all Bob Dylan. You're like, wait a second. Back to Bob Dylan. That's right.

And then you see, like, Mark Knopfler produced Infidels and backup guitar and, you know, was involved in that. And Tom Petty went on tour with him. Like, you start to, like, put the.

You put the story together, right?

And it's so wonderful when you can do that, because I find I understand a system, whatever it is, whatever the system is or the culture, whatever you want to use, when you start figuring out the influences there. So you have influences here? Yeah, They've influenced you. Walk us to the Mount Rushmore.

So my youngest daughter went away to college, or went. Graduated college, and it was time to clean out the house. And I went to. I have over 800 volumes of notebooks that I've been doing since I've been 18 years old. And I had them all. And I was going to throw them out. My wife basically said, no, you can't throw them out until you've gone through each one of them. So I went through each one of them. I have them still, but for the most part, out of it came a book called Learning to Build. And it was my appreciation that these four people had poured so much knowledge into me to make me, to enable me to be an innovator. And so I wanted to share it and say, it's called the Five Bedrock Skills of Innovators. And it's the things that the four of them taught me over my course of interacting with them, if you will. The four mentors are Dr. Deming, who is basically the father of quality. He was 85, I was 18. And because I was dyslexic, I learned through questions. And so he loved my questions. And then he introduced me to Dr. Taguchi, who is a Japanese engineer who was responsible for basically a lot of the development efforts of how Japan got such good development capabilities. And so I learned all his methods and tools, and I was learning them and applying them and saving for hundreds of millions of dollars as an intern, solving these problems that most people couldn't solve. And it had nothing to do with knowledge. It had everything to do with approach. It's called robust design of experiments. And then Dr. Willie Moore, who is PhD in particle physics, she basically was my manager at Ford, and she helped me understand how to see people and how to understand how to navigate the gauntlet of big politics in Ford. And so she Helped me see things from an empathetic perspective, if you will.

What was her full name?

Dr. Willie Hobbs Moore. She's from Ann Arbor. The five skills that I kind of boiled it down to. One is empathetic perspective that a really good innovator or entrepreneur can see things from multiple people's perspectives simultaneously and literally be able to almost play the role of the. Of the investor, play the role of the co founder, play the role of an employee. Like they can see things through other people's eyes. They're really good at it.

That's so powerful to be able to hold in your mind at the same time.

Yes.

Multiple dynamic personalities involved in something that's high stakes concurrently.

Yes.

I can tell you, you know, I literally had a call with some founders struggling with some board dynamics. And you've been there. And I just walked them through each person's perspective and I said, listen, this is a private equity group. This is the timeline they're on. This is the return profile they have. I said, I am an early stage venture capitalist. I need to get a. I'm looking for a hundred X. They're looking for a three x. We came in before them, they came in after us. They are about operations. I'm about the spirit, the culture, and building something that's built to last. I stay on the board until you tell me you don't need me. Doesn't matter if it's 10 years after it goes public or 10 years. I've never been on the board, but theoretically I would stay forever. Just I'm at the service of the founders. They are on to the next flip. Boom, three, four, five years, I said, and then you're the founders and you need to tell us. One wants to go to the new world.

Yep.

One wants to take the spice route. Tried and true. You got to be Christopher Columbus or Marco Polo. You got to tell us which you are so that one of us can sell our shares and move on to the next investment or stay with you until the mission's complete. And you know, it's so hard today for people to empathize and understand each other's position. Something in society where everybody has to be radicalized, polarized, and unless both ends, whether it's looking at a war or a startup stock or a presidential candidate. So strange.

But part of it is just being able to articulate. I think that people have lost their ability to articulate what they know and what they don't know. I think a lot of this work is about the unknowns. And I spend Most of my time helping people uncover the unknowns they have to answer in order to make progress. And most people are spending their time answering the knowns they already know and they're trying to prove to others. And that never works to me.

Also, if you know it already, why are you spending time?

Just do it. Just do it.

Yeah, just. Okay, I know I have to stop eating bread and sugar to be then, okay.

But then there's got to be a way to design yourself maybe around it. But, like, a lot of times you start to realize, like, people are like, okay, I want to go run this test. Why? Because I need to prove this. I'm like, like, okay, let's pretend we can prove that right now. So they're gonna say, this. This market's bigger than that market. I'm like, okay, let's go out and measure it. Like, let's pretend it comes back bigger. What are you gonna do? Let's pretend it comes back smaller. What are you gonna do? Turns out you're gonna do the same thing no matter what.

So why are we wasting time?

Why are we wasting time? So a lot of times people want to know because they don't want to be wrong. But the reality is whether the. Whether it's the place to go now, they're going to do the same work.

You know, this is. I've had this conversation with a friend of mine, and I don't like to bring him up too often because people, you know, think I'm trading on his name or something. But I'm talking about Elon. And I've watched him make a lot of critical decisions in, you know, three decades we've known each other. As the years go on, I watch him make very quick decisions, and I'll ask him about the decision, and we'll have a Socratic debate, you know, go back and forth about it. And I'll say, well, we can always reverse it if we're wrong. Let's just switch it and go. And there's a famous moment where he wants to turn off a data center in the. In the Twitter handle or. And he said, when he was taking over Twitter, he's going to lay off more people and make mistakes.

Yeah.

And I said, well, what are you going to do? He's hired them back, and literally, I never tell the story, but, like, the week later, and the press is skewering about the stuff, and he writes to everybody who got laid off, if we've made a mistake, please hit reply and explain to me the mistake we've made. In laying you off. Yeah, let's just pause on how brilliant that is.

Oh, that's right. That's zero, by the way. That's. Yeah, it's zero based budgeting. It's the same thing. Let's just start over and say, well, like why should you be here? And let's make, let's reset what it is so you don't. So we don't have the wrong expectation. So like I respect that. Like the hard part is that people don't understand. You have to go through that in order to get aligned. That's the pain. And that most people think their job has to satisfy everything about them.

That's a big mistake too.

So that's. My next book is coming out in November and I've been studying for the last 10 years what causes somebody to leave this company to go to that company. So the job of jobs.

Hold on, wait. This is a good guessing game here. Now we got a good one. What makes a person leave a company? Now the tried and true answer. I'm not going to say this is my answer, so don't spoil it yet. Is people don't quit companies, they quit bad managers.

Yes. There's three different aspects of it. One is when I get a new manager and I feel like I'm starting over.

Frustration.

So another one is when I've been disrespected.

Yes.

By my manager. The third one is when I don't trust my manager. Very. Three really different sources about the manager. So it's not just a bad manager. It's three specific things that have to happen for people to say, today's the day I'm out.

Amazing. And you know what? This is in relationships probably as well, where yeah, they probably people leave a marriage or any kind of partnership for this reason as well. If they don't feel you can trust is a major one.

I'm going to show you your next. So here's the thing. If any four of these exist, they're looking for a job. Any four.

Okay, let's do these pushes apply to you. When I don't respect or trust the people I work with. That's. Yeah. First for many of us, if something is morally or ethically wrong, you got to get out of Dodge. And I, I tell you, I had this experience with two startups where I had to have them buy back my shares. I had to divest because of this specific issue like issues. Feel like the work I'm doing has little or no impact on the company or world. By the way, in Japan the way they fire people because they want to say they've never fired anybody is they give them a window seat, they give them no work and they invite them to no meetings until they resign. Yeah, it's literally the technique in Japan. And so people are wondering, like, why am I not given any assignments or work? They know that you'll eventually quit. The way I managed is wearing me down. Okay. Yeah, it's. You got a super negative or relenting boss in some way. They don't uplift you. Is that what you're saying there?

Yep, yep. Like, think of it as being micromanaged. Somebody's just checking on you every day. They're just like, oh, my God, please just let Kenny not let me do, like, I'm coaching somebody right now. Where they're like, I. I want to know where the outcome is I have to get to and I want to know the resources I have, but let me go figure it out. I don't need my manager looking over my shoulder every 10 minutes telling me that I'm doing something wrong.

I figured out a way to get my micromanager out of me. You do want to know the details. If you're a founder of a and you're. Especially if you're a successful founder, the details matter. I, when we went remote, created the most simple concept. S O D E o D Start of the day in the general chat slack room. Just tell everybody what you intend to get done, a couple of bullet points. And I said, it should not take more than five minutes. So set up pomodoro time or whatever your jam is. Five minutes, write it. If you feel ashamed because a couple people came to me and said, I feel really bad. I don't know what to write. I said, okay, you're feeling shame. Probably means you're just responding to emails and being responsive. Talk to your manager about some meaningful work you could do. Look at everybody else's start of day and their reply to the end of day and then say, I should do some of that. Yeah, that's helping the company go forward. And it created massive transparency. And some people did it, some people refused to do it. The people who refuse to do it are no longer at the fund. The people who do it and embrace it are at the fund and thriving. Start of the day, end of the day.

So I've had. I've had somebody take this list that you see here and basically say, I'm going to use this as my review process. So they literally sit down and say, do any of these things apply to you today? If they do, let's talk about it.

Genius. Well, look at this one. Reach a milestone in my career. This is super important for people. And when you're a boss, you don't you think people are coming to work for money. People can make plus or minus 20% of what they're making at your job in all likelihood, right?

Yep.

It's not why they're coming to a professional white collar job in all likelihood. So yeah, milestones matter for people. That's why Steve Jobs used to milestones.

There's a personal milestone. I've just turned 30. There's a, there's a work milestone of like I've been here for 10 years. Right. And so they're different again, different sources though. They're both about a milestone. It's one is the reference point is I've been here. The other one is, is, you know, it's a personal milestone about me being a certain. Like I just graduated or I just did this or I did that. It's more. Has nothing to do with the company and it's another reason why people leave.

Give me which one of these here you think is really the most unique one. You discovered that if you correct for can have the biggest impact the other direction. Because what I see in this list, brilliance of this list, it is brilliant, is that this is not just a roadmap for why you should quit. This is a roadmap for how to be a better manager and to get the most out of your people.

Now look at these, these rules apply to. These are the, these are the outcomes they're seeking when they're going to find a new company.

Like cut me off at the. So how have more time to spend with others in order to carry my weight.

Right. So part of this is I need to get a new job because literally I'm working nights and weekends and my family is literally going to divorce me.

Half time for me.

Right.

Feel like my job is a step forward for me and in the eyes of others. Ah, see, this is very important.

Yes.

Sometimes matters to us.

Or like I can't tell my dad I'm going to do this.

Right.

It's got to be in their eyes that this is progress. You're like, why? It's like, I don't want to have to explain it. It's just, that's just how that is. I'm like, okay.

The reason why people like to work for me some, I dare I say love is this one. Be challenged, learn and grow. I tell people I'm going to work you harder than you ever expected. I'm going to throw you in the deep end of the pool with two cinder blocks. Don't take the job if you don't want to suck in some water.

Yep. And my big thing is, my big thing is, is to say, like, when you say you're ready, I'll find the best place for you to go. Oh, I on top of it. So I actually have a two year agreement that says, look, we're not talking about price, we're not talking about position. Everybody has the same position. But like at the end of two years you're going to go work for one of our clients or I'm going to go help you find a new job. At the end of, and then at the end of two years we look at it, we go through the big review and then they say, all right, well if you want to stay, how do we modify the next two year arrangement? And so we then modify the arrangement and pull people together. But it's about actually taking into account the pushes and the pulls. And the other part is people change, right? Like somebody who's a really big learner in their first 90 days loves a new job, but 180 days into the job, if they're doing the same thing they used to, they're going to quit in a heartbeat.

This is, you know what, I have some professional managers I've worked with who say I change things too much, you know, like a change direction, etc. Or I put people on different projects. I said, no, I want everybody to rotate. If you've worked on the first calls, I want you to work on the companies we've already invested in. If you've worked on the accelerator, I want you to work on the syndicate. I like to move people around so they understand the business to the level I do. Okay, this is the clusters you.

But see, this is, the thing is you now start to think about what pushes and pulls need to come together to enable somebody to really switch their job. Because lots of people talk about it, but these are the four what happens. It turns out to be four clusters of what people really do to switch up. There's a whole bunch of people who say they want to switch jobs and they don't.

And this is one of the premises of all your theses, I think, which.

Is it's multifactor, it's always multi factor and it's always about real behavior. They made some behavior change and I'm looking at to say, like, how do they cause it so Then I can learn how to help other people change their behavior.

Right. Okay, give me. Give me the. Give me the one you think is the most interesting here.

So what's really interesting to me is that in my life, I've been in all four of these jobs.

Do they skew? Early career, later in career, post money, pre money?

I think. I think, yeah. One really hits pre money, and it's like. Like the way it was, the grind. This was working at 4. This was waking up early. This was literally, you know, playing a lot of politics. And to be honest, I got fired from Ford because I ended up bringing up something I shouldn't have brought up in front of the right person. And it was like, again. So one of the greatest insights I got from this is getting fired is the most. Like, most people in hindsight literally love the fact that they got fired.

The most educational, and it opens up.

A new door in the moment. It literally is the most traumatic thing they could do. But in hindsight, it's like, if I didn't get fired from Ford, I would never head down this path that I'm at now. So you just start to realize that most people, when they get fired is horrible, but in hindsight, it literally forced them to find their own way.

This is one of the things about layoffs. When I'm coaching founders, when they have to do layoffs, and it's brutal.

Yeah.

I said, listen, you know, we live in a country of 4% unemployment. These are the top 10% of employees, or 1%, depending on where they are in their station in life, they're going to be fine. Like, if this was somebody who worked at like. Like Walmart or a factory, like, be worried about them because there may not be a safety net and another place for them to, you know, but this first one here, when the way I am managed is wearing me down. A micromanager, a jerk, whatever. I can't see a way to grow in this job.

So that's the other part. So it's that. Here's the thing, it's the combination of things that make these real.

Yes, right.

Absolutely. And so that's. That's the thing, is everybody's tried to find the root cause. And what I always say is, Debbie would always correct me, it's root causes. It's always a set of what are the root causes that enable this to happen.

I mean, context matters. And then the second part of this context is, help me find a supportive environment so I can be challenged, learn and grow on the job. So it's like this job is making me feel bad about myself and I know I'm not growing. And there's, let's just say this person forget about find. Let's say their friend tells them, you wouldn't believe how great it is to work at Jason's venture firm.

Yeah, exactly.

He gives people all this incredible, you know, responsibility at a very young age without experience. It's incredible. I'm learning so much and my salary is going up based on my performance and it's meritocracy.

Exactly.

Like all of a sudden now you're, it's back to the comparison. A, B, C. Right now you're comparing and the gap gets pretty wide, doesn't it?

But the crazy part is most people don't think they can move. They don't know that they can do different things. And so what happens is they feel like, oh, I'm in software, I got to stay in software. Or I'm in, like, I have somebody who's like a nurse right now and I'm like, you would make an awesome customer success person. You care. You do that. And then they looked at me like bedside manner. I didn't even know that that was a thing. I'm like, you can make twice as much being a customer success person. They're like, really? And all of a sudden it's like.

And work from home and nothing cleaning.

But nurses work three, what, three 12s and so they, nobody's, nobody's figured that part out yet. But my belief is that's coming soon.

I agree with you. I was just talking to a young couple and we were talking about like they had to go back to work soon. They were, you know, being told they're going to do three days a week. I said, I'm just telling you, I'll cut you off of the chase where this is all going. It's going to be four days a week, Fridays off. Do what you want.

Yeah.

Because by the way, when we all worked in office five days a week on Fridays, we fucked up anyways.

We all fucked off anyway. That's right.

We all went to the gym, we did two hour lunch and we skipped out because we had a dentist appointment where our bosses let us go at 2:30 or something so we missed traffic to get wherever we're going to go. And yeah, it's going to wind up at four days a week. Or be an entrepreneur looking at the impact of AI. I'll wrap on this.

Yeah, yeah.

And then before we get to my AI question and how work's going to change. I'll just let you start thinking about how work's going to change with AI.

I already got this.

When people hire the rewired group, what is the stage and what are the ballpark costs of doing this? I can under. I know the cost for doing this at big companies.

Yeah.

Big six figure engagements. When you start talking about, you know, series A companies. Yeah. Startups. They raised a million dollars. They raised three. Is it too early for them to engage in this? I know you open source some of the documents. You did such a good job here today. Pitch the hell out of the rewire group. You are in the pitch.

Well, so here's the thing is is who we help are basically as people start to scale and there's more than five of them or more than 10 of them and now all of a sudden they have a lot more moving parts. This is a really good thing to build a common language. So everybody's singing off the same sheet of music. So one of the reasons why people come to us is because all of a sudden they start growing and everybody starts to have their own understanding of what the customer wants or what we're doing and we're not aligned and we're spending more time arguing or not building what we should be building. And so they hire us to almost find the customer truth that they can all center around.

Another reason why they call it might be alignment. Communication.

It's alignment and what most people don't realize. We sit down and we'll do an interview for an hour on why somebody bought your product and then we'll spend another hour debating what we all heard. And you start to realize everybody's hearing it differently. And so we got to come to terms with it. So each interview actually reinforces what the language means of look easy. There's 22 dimensions of easy. Which dimensions are they talking about? Oh, they're talking about these four. Oh, okay. So they're not talking about this. So most people try to abstract up. We try to drill things down to the very fundamentals.

First principles.

Very first principles. Very first principles.

But foundational truths.

Think of it as almost like dominoes that have to fall in their life that have to be part of their situation for them to value. And so it's searching out those things and then from there we can actually tie that back to both product and marketing and sales and strategy and M and A.

Got it.

So the reason why, because each one.

Of those leads to the next. Because if you're building a venture backed startup, it's eventually to be bought, sold by whom? Public, whatever. Sustainable business.

And I'll tell you this, Jason, I'm not really pitching ourselves because like, to be honest, I have a lot of.

Work, more than enough clients.

I know that. But here's the thing is I'm really looking for some awesome people to work with. I just won't do any more hoop jumping through. I won't do any more of that stuff. And to be honest, I would much rather work for a combination of cash and equity or even performance than I would for cash. But most big companies can't that wrestle with that. And so the small companies actually we. That's with Jake and people like that, that's how we work the deal.

I think it's wise because you want to talk about creating alignment. If they pay a little bit, so they're committed. But you have that upside of, hey, you know, if it's one of the great things about capitalism and shares, I know people hate it, but shares going up into the right and everybody having a share.

That's right, it's share. That's right.

What we're taught in nursery school and can do it share. When you share. And people are all participating at the foot. You know why the United States is so screwed up right now, Bob? Is because people don't own equities. They don't have a share in all the great companies that are growing. So you have these one class of people who have equities. Yes, Capital gains. And another group that doesn't.

That's right.

Everybody in America owns some Google and Meta and Apple and Tesla. They would feel a lot better about things because they watch it go up and say, hey, I'm participating in that. I buy an iPhone. I got some upside in it.

So one of the insights my mom had, she was a schoolteacher in Detroit and I asked her about what's the difference between the kids when you started teaching and the kids when you ended teaching. And she ended in the 90s teaching. Right. So she started in the 60s teaching it and she taught first grade. It went from this notion of like, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a dentist, I want to be a fireman, I want to be a policeman. Kindergarten, first grade is coming in with some ambition of what the future looked like multiple years out. But what she said is as Detroit kind of deteriorated more and more, she goes, it got down to most people didn't even know where they were going to sleep that night.

Oh, wow.

And so she said the time horizon of how a first Grader thinks has been changed so much that they're not even worried about the next 10 years. They're worried about the next week, the next month. That's all they can see. I believe that that's what's happening to us at the United States. We don't have a direction to go. Kennedy at least said, let's go to the moon. Everybody's like, why? Okay. To be honest, we were up for the challenge and we figured it out. Right. But the fact is, nobody's leading us into a place to go. We're just trying to fix the problem. Problems.

I got a great place for us to go. Everybody owns a home.

Yes.

And has savings.

Yes.

And feel safe. Yeah. That would be like.

Yeah, I think feel safe has got to be the first, I think. But I think the thing is, is owning a home. I'm not sure my kids generation wants to own a home.

Well, yeah, they have the opportunity to own one. They don't have to. They can be nomads.

No, no. But, but, but the notion is that it's just one of those things where we were raised, like, I was raised to buy a home. Like, like there was no, there was no question whether I was going to have one or not. It was more a question of when and where. Right. I think that that's a very different model now.

Yeah. Bob, you've been an amazing guest.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Can't wait to have you on again. This is extraordinary. Follow Bob. Look up the rewired group. Thank you so much for sharing so much. I think it's just the conversation.

It was great.

Well, it's a great mitzvah that you're doing because, you know, I've read a bunch of your stuff and I know your philosophy is you've been very successful, you want to pay it forward, and you're giving out all this knowledge and you capture about 1% back. Seems 99 to 1 is a pretty menchy thing to do. So, Bob Supermensch, I appreciate it. And we'll see you all next time on this week at Startups. Okay, everybody, I want to tell you about Founder Fridays. What are Founder Fridays? This is an opportunity for you, if you're a founder, to get together with a half dozen, a dozen other founders on a Friday, the first Friday of every month. Why is this important? Well, if you meet with other founders, you can talk about the things that are working at your startup and the things you're struggling with, everything else in between, and then you can trade notes and you can make friends. It's really hard to be a founder, isn't it? You're alone all the time. You've got to solve all these problems. And other founders are having the same experience you're having. It's isolating. It can be scary, it can be thrilling. And people don't understand what you're going through. If you go to a dinner party and there's one founder and seven other people, you feel like a mutant. You feel like somebody who doesn't belong there. Nobody understands why you're doing your startup, why you're taking this risk, the problems you're facing. Right. They're NPCs. This is a non NPC event. Every first Friday of the month, we do Founder Fridays. We're doing them now in 71 different cities. And if this sounds appealing to you, well, you're a founder and you want to hang out with maybe seven other founders around a roundtable. You can have breakfast, you can have lunch, you can have dinner, you can have coffee, you can cowork dinner, however you want to do it. And it's free. We've been doing this for a couple of months now. We've had 71 meetups around the world, and 929 founders have joined. I want you to join and I want you to come to the next one. It's Friday, May 3rd. Now, if your city's not on the list, what are you going to do? You're going to apply to run your city with two or three other founders. Again, four founders by founders. From the number one podcast for founders this week in startups comes Founder Fridays tech. Go to FounderFridays Tech to sign up, and you're gonna meet all these great founders and we give like a little prompt. And this Founder Friday taking place on May 3rd, we want you to bring two things with you. Your most significant challenge, and one thing you wish you'd learned earlier. We're gonna go around the table and each person is gonna do that, and then you'll get feedback from your peers. It's incredible, it's magical. And we don't want this to get big. We want to keep it small. So if you plan on going and you're interested and it sounds appealing to you, just go to Founder Fridays Tech. T E C H. Right. Great domain name, founderfridays Tech. And please take pictures and then share those pictures on Twitter. Entionus, WI Startups, Jason. And it doesn't matter. You could be in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, L.A. paris, Tokyo, Dubai. These things are happening all over the world again. 71 cities. Let's get it to 100 cities. We've got over 900 members. Let's get it past a thousand. Go ahead and sign up and you'll be in touch with my team, and we'll see you there. Once again, founder Fridays Tech.