Every Entrepreneur's Story is Unique: James Lang

This is the Chris Project, where we discuss mental wellness, self-awareness, and mindset with entrepreneurs and experts. Set your perceived ideas and biases aside and let's go on our journey for yourself, for your family, for the world.

Welcome to another episode of The Chris Project. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining me today, James Lang of Overlang Venture Partners. James, welcome to the show.

Christian, thanks for having me. This is really exciting.

Absolutely. I'm glad to have you. Um, so why don't you start by giving the audience your, your brief CV, your, your experience in entrepreneurship?

Gosh, okay, so I feel like every entrepreneur's story is unique, and I feel like I'm not alone in that. So, uh, my background, um, went to college for a year, did the obligatory thing, and dropped out because, you know, I was gonna be an entrepreneur. And of course, you know, the obligatory thing, you build a startup that blows up, and not in a good way. So you learn some things along the way. And so I went from like, I'm gonna build my own company, to freelancing, and of all things, freelance writing, because one of the things that I held at my first startup was a lot of investor communication. And I was like, well, if I'm, if I write gooder, maybe other people will pay me to write gooder for them. So yes, uh, went out on Upwork, which was Elance at the time, and started doing that. And I noticed that like, well, a lot of my content, a lot of the things are asking me to write, um, if it's not going to Forbes or Wall Street Journal or whatever, as a ghostwriting thing, it's going onto these websites that has all these SEO requirements. What's SEO? And so start learning about that. And I've learned to listen to my grandfather who used to say that, you know, the people who know how, or the people who know why, are the people who direct those that know how. So if you're willing to learn the why behind what you're being asked to work on, that's one of the ways to move up the ladder in any environment, whether it's more entrepreneurial, more corporate, whatever the case may be. And for me, learning about digital marketing was a really cool bridge to getting into the agency world, doing a lot of personal injury legal marketing. Um, you know, and then eventually, like, the weird left turn for us, among a few left turns in the story, is, um, the legal marketing company I was working for was acquired by a med tech startup. And it's like, well, how does that happen and why, right? And the founder of the startup was really, really intelligent in the sense that He had built a number of products. He's a serial inventor. And he said, well, if I know that you can— you're good at your job and I pay you to do your job, you're only going to pay attention to me 1/10 of your day. But if I acquire your company and acquire all the skill that you have, then you're going to be fully invested in the products that matter to me. And I have more of a say in how much of your time we get and also find more ways to reward your team. For the work they do. So anyways, that was the philosophy, was like instead of just an annual agreement, it was like, well, come over and help us figure out how to solve this. So over the course of about 6 years, became responsible for about 100,000 and plus some depending on how you do the calculations, guys being able to get erections in the, in the, in the United States, and then internationally that's another number, but You know, it's an interesting space working in the shockwave therapy, which is that, you know, you hear on the radio all the time, come in for wave treatments, blah, blah, blah. This was the first at-home device that was able to be sold direct to consumer and allow people to do this stuff at home privately. So that was interesting.

Hopefully, hopefully it was privately.

I mean, yeah, well, I mean, well, actually, hopefully for some of them it wasn't, right? Like, their goal was for it not to be private. So, you know, we It depends on your perspective on that one, but certainly a unique experience. And so I went from when I joined over there, I was still doing a lot of the content writing. So wrote user manuals, website pages, you know, blog posts, email marketing, all of it. And then, you know, we figured out there was a problem with customer service, you know, so it's like, great, we've built this beautiful funnel, but when people get to the bottom of the funnel, the customer service is like, "Hello, how are you today?" You know, it just doesn't work. It doesn't match, right? You know, that white glove experience that we're going for. So it's like, okay, gotta fix that. And so we fixed that. We built out a customer service team and sales team. And then from there, kind of moved out of the content shop into director of customer experience, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds in that space. And then from there, we had people that suddenly passed away. And so it created this huge shakeup in the company. And so then there was like this investor fight, shareholder fight, all these different things, because it turns out that when you're doing something that's generating over $20 million in revenue, the people who own it and have checks coming to them for mailbox money actually care. So there was a lot of upheaval, but I ended up taking over as Chief Operating Officer at that point of the next iteration of that company under the new management or new shareholders managing partners. And I learned a new appreciation for managing up and down, you know, not just, you know, how do you build your team? How do you maintain your culture? All that stuff. But how do you keep all the drama in the boardroom, so to speak, from spilling out into the frontline and all the people that you need to be comfortable and calm and doing their best work. So it was a really interesting experience.

So, okay, what, what is Overlaying Venture Partners about?

Yeah, so I mentioned a moment ago that, you know, the last year after moving to Denver, I've been dealing with some health challenges. So building out your own company on your own is hard enough, but when you're also dealing with health challenges, that's tricky too. So I've been fortunate in the sense that I've been able to find and work with some amazing people who I've known for over a decade. I know not only what they can do, but that they're trustworthy and that they're, you people that actually care versus people that just care about the paycheck on day one. And the paycheck's important, can't minimize that, but finding people that you can trust, finding people that actually have real knowledge versus theory is incredibly valuable. So what I've done is I've kind of gathered a group of us together. And so we have a VC side, which is something that we haven't really gone public about quite yet. An incubator side, which is something that we're also not as public about, or more front-facing side is in the consulting from an operational standpoint, a technology standpoint, and compliance standpoint for these small businesses. So the idea is how do we take all of the technology, the strategies, the know-how that exists in these Fortune 500 companies, and how do we bring that same information down the mountain, so to speak, to everyone else so that everybody's on a level playing field and has a shot at growing their business. And especially in these uncertain times technologically, we want to give people the ability to kind of ride the wave instead of getting crushed by it.

Yes, yeah, yes, it is a wave for sure, a tsunami. Um, so then who is the ideal prospect or client for you at Overlang?

Yeah, we're, we're in a number of spaces. So I mentioned before the VC and the incubator side, we're not as public about, and the reason for that is we look to be a consultant partner first because we want to understand that number one, do we have a good working relationship? But number two, can we solve problems for you and what are those problems? And to figure that out, to imagine that you're going to meet somebody, understand their business, understand the real problems, not just the ones they tell you about, and do all of that in one step. You know, you need a staged approach. And so what we've been doing, what we've been focused on, is coming into different law firms that are focused on client intake, finding ways to make that process more efficient. In the medical space, it's patient intake. In the 3PL logistics space, we have technology that allows for all of the different data silos that exist to be able to allow customers to self-serve, frontline employees to make better decisions, and then management to access information more quickly. And so everything we're doing right now is around, you know, operational excellence. What are, what are the people, processes, and cultures that got you to where you are today, and how do we enhance those? Because for us, if we can use technology and systems to make the people on your team 10 times more valuable, you're going to want to hire more people. It's not about replacing people with technology. It's about amplifying their value and allowing you to grow as an organization.

Yeah, I think the hype monster for AI is, having lived through both of them, is even worse than the hype monster that existed with the advent of the internet. Yes. And you hear so much talk about jobs going away. And, you know, then you have Elon Musk saying, well, you know, 5 years from now, nobody's going to be working. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. To your point, it is a tool, right? It is. It is a— it is a labor amplifier for sure. And there are going to be some jobs that are going to go away for sure.

I prefer the term change.

Well, yes, I— the idea that there are not going to be jobs is nonsensical. It is going to change the jobs. And just like, you know, the buggy whip manufacturers did eventually— well, I don't know, there might be one or two buggy whip manufacturers still in the world.

And check Etsy.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it— that shift in economics is going to cause disruption. There's no question about that. But it is fascinating that the hype, even the most rational entrepreneurs get sucked into it and think that, you know, they can't really get that perspective of what is actually going on. But okay, so let's go back to you working with these folks as a consultant. What do you see the biggest common thread among the entrepreneurs out there that they're struggling with?

Yeah, so a lot of the people we work with are professionals who are growing their firms. So, they're not your average, you know, I had an idea in high school and here I am to put it together. They're people who have taken their idea to the market, allowed the market to tell them how to adjust their product, or they've gone to school and they have some specialized training, you know, those sorts of things. So the great thing about dealing with people like that is there's a dose of reality, there's a dose of, uh, understanding that, you know, just because you're hearing about something, you know, you have to ask yourself the question, does somebody I know— have they experienced this problem? Because like, what if I were to tell you that everybody's getting hit by buses left and right? Everybody. It's terrible, you know, it's a horrible thing happening. Well, that doesn't mean, you know, my argument would be no, that's not happening. Yes, there are people getting hit by buses, but how many people do you know were hit by a bus? And when you ask that added question of like, okay, kind of audit your circle, audit your personal experience and measure and use that to measure and provide context to what you're being told is coming. You know, that's one way to skin the cat and help kind of take away some of the hyperbole and anxiety and fear and try to bring things back down to earth. But the people who are very forward-thinking, they're— nobody is having the conversation of how do I shrink my team. There's not one entrepreneur out there that I've talked to that says, how do I get rid of my people? Your people are your most valuable asset. What they are saying is, how do I make the time and energy put in by my team more valuable to me as a business owner, and how do I find new ways to reward them because of that? So it's an education process for the team and for the individual. It's a reality check for the owner and the leadership to understand, like, what is actually possible. And also it's an opportunity, you know, one of the things I'm seeing right now is, you know, we joke about, like, flyover states, right? You know, there's— you have all this technology and wealth concentrate around the coasts, but the Midwest of the country, largely, they've either gotten little access to the technology, slow access to the technology, or even worse, taken advantage of by charlatans who come in and tell them, oh yeah, you know, you're way behind the coasts, you gotta catch up, spend a million dollars with me. You know, so this kind of dynamic is kind of what we're really trying to help push back against, is like, how do we, again, give everybody access to the same information and enable us to take what we know and then more importantly figure out what we don't know together in a way that makes sense. And so in that Midwest example, a lot of times we have clients that get ROI right away because we come into their tech stack and we say, look, you're paying for duplicate licenses here, you're paying for a bunch of technology you don't need. And so there's a simpler way to do this. Without having to pay all these fees. And that's another area that, you know, a lot of companies really don't think about is the tech debt. And solving that problem can set you up to free up capital to solve all the other things.

What size companies do you typically engage?

So the smallest ones we work with are generally in the 5 to 15 employees range. If you look at it from a headcount perspective, The largest one has just over 100. So we're not dealing with the Fortune 500s or even the upper end of the medium size. We're looking more at the people who have built something. They just got done working in their company. Now they're finally working on it and they're trying to do it more intelligently. Or they're struggling to get to that point where they can work on it instead of in it and they need help kind of crossing the finish line on that. You know, this— the other piece of it is in the professional services area. Um, you know, we do have— probably the smallest are the law firms, believe it or not. A lot of them are very, you know, 3, 4 partners, and then they have their support staff. And, um, you know, that space is interesting too because you have the challenge of— it's no different than from a medical clinic in the sense that you— if you're the doctor and the owner of the clinic, what are you doing? Are you litigating or are you running your business? Are you treating patients or are you running your clinic? You can't do both at the same time. And so it's making that transition into being a business owner in addition to being a professional.

Yeah, you hit two professions that historically I have found are awful at the business side. Like, yes, lawyers and doctors specifically usually are awful at the business side of a business. And unfortunately, they usually are not real interested in getting better because they perceive themselves as the smartest ones in the room. But that's not— I'm not here to belittle anybody. My question to you is, what is the symptom that they're coming to you to fix? Like, what is not the problem? What are the symptoms?

Yeah, the symptom is that they, they know that there's inefficiencies, there's friction that they can't figure out how to get out. So they feel like they're pouring a bunch of oil into an engine, but— and the engine might be getting quieter, but it's not getting more powerful or more efficient. So, uh, that's really what they're trying to figure out is like, is what I'm doing effective? And how do I, you know, end up with more money at the end of the quarter rather than less? 'cause they just feel like their overhead has exploded and they're starting to drown and they just don't understand the why behind that. So the symptom is financial, time, stress level, all those things, but the actual cause is generally a lack of systems. And my dad's an attorney, so I can definitely speak to the attorney side of it intimately. With the challenges of law firms and partners and any professional corporation, whether it's medical or we're legal, you have a lot of chiefs in the room and sometimes too many Indians as well. But the challenge for doctors more than anything is they do think that they're absolute geniuses because they went to school for so long, they went through a competitive—

They've been told they're geniuses forever.

Like, yeah, well, it's worse if they're specialists. So the minute you start talking to the surgeons and the specialists, they, uh, they have an even higher level of that. And what happens is they end up creating these super complicated business arrangements. Uh, and so that's why what's happening, it seems to be across America right now, is the, the swallowing up of healthcare in these big corporations. And so these big corporations are reaching out and buying all these little practices. It's happening in the dental space, it's happening in the general medical space. So, but there's a lot of providers who don't want to go that direction. They want to maintain their independence, they want to maintain their relationship with their patients, and so we're able to help them, uh, kind of achieve that without having to sell out in order to survive.

So what is the experience that you've lived that you find most helpful in sharing with these owners?

So part of it is scaling a company from, you know, 5, 10 employees to 30, then 60, and then down to 30 once we figured out some operational efficiencies. So it's understanding that so many of the people I talk to have MBAs, who have much better academic resumes than I do. And I respect their experience, but what I hear from them is, well, this is how it's supposed to work, and a whole lot of theory and a lot of like, this is the system that works really well, you know, Six Sigma or whatever. And 9 times out of 10, what they're describing is something designed for Ford or GM, not for your smaller size business. And so there's wisdom in that, but you have to know how to apply it and when to apply it and how to adjust it and form it to to fit the actual situation. So what I'm hearing from a lot of different people and the experience I kind of draw on the most is— well, let me answer it this way. So my experience, you know, that I draw on the most is being the dumbest person in the room. I'm very comfortable with that. And what I mean by that is I want to bring in people that know way more than me. I want to bring them together. I want to get them talking. And then I just want to be the quiet person in the room if I can. And my goal is to ask the right question at the right time. You know, that's, you know, a more personal example that anybody can relate to is my great-aunt Sharon. She was dealing with, you know, end-of-life care. She had bone cancer. And we're trying to figure out, you know, is it time for hospice? And for her, it was a struggle of, am I going to throw in the towel or am I going to keep going? The whole family's gathered around, we're having this conversation, it just goes on and on. The social worker's there, the nurse from the hospice place is there. This is like the meeting where a decision is going to happen. After almost an hour, the conversation shifts to, "Well, maybe we should come together again next week." At that point, I'm just like, "Question for you, Aunt Sharon. If you have the same episode you had last week, do you want to go to the hospital, stay at the hospital for a week, then come back?" Or do you want to be kept comfortable here at home and receive all of your care at home? Which do you prefer? And all of a sudden, all these complicated things just became, oh no, I think I want to stay home. And so now we don't need another meeting. We don't have to keep going around, around circles. Everybody in that room cared, and, you know, cared deeply and had a perspective to offer, but nobody was asking the right question.

Yeah, I think what you're describing is a typical entrepreneurial behavior. And my experience, my lived experiences, is that it's nothing more than hubris and ego. It's trying to be the smartest person in the room. And I think one of the things that you said that was brilliant, that it's figuring out the whos and let them figuring out the hows, you know, Dan Sullivan's book around that. And transitioning from being the person with all the answers to being the person that can find the right person to answer the how most business problems have already been solved. Like, there's no reason to go and figure it out again. That's expensive and time-consuming. But this mindset that we have as entrepreneurs that, well, we've got to figure that out. But do you really need to figure it out? Or is that just, you know, assuaging your ego? Would it be better to bring someone else in and you turn over the reins?

Go back to, are you asking the right question of yourself or the people around you? And sometimes, to speak to the ego side of things, we want to focus on what we know and tailor the discussion to our area of expertise. And sometimes that means you're not asking the right question. And so sometimes asking the right question means that you have to go outside of yourself to get answers. One of my biggest anxiety moments as a freelance writer at working at an agency— so sorry, this is the transition to being in-house, so no longer freelance— but I'm going to work one day and I'm thinking, I don't know anything about garage doors. Like, I know how to push the button and make it open and close, but we had this big client who had, you know, a garage door company in Plano, Texas. And so We're trying to figure out like how to handle their digital marketing, how do we create all these landing pages, all these things. And I'm thinking to myself like, I don't know how I'm going to come up with the answers on all this stuff. I don't know what I don't know even. And then it hit me like as I got closer to the office, I'm going, wait a second, I have Google and I have a brain and I have the ability to write things down and create knowledge around things. So let me just go to Google and ask the right questions. And then get the information and kind of cross-reference, see if I'm right. And in that approach, I was able to create content and create an organic structure that made sense on a topic I knew virtually nothing about. And it's because you're able to go and reference everything. We've never had access as a human society to more information, more shared information, both bad information and good information, but regardless, information. And so it's again about asking the right questions. And sometimes that's a Google search. Sometimes that's a conversation with ChatGPT. But more often than not, it's a conversation with your trusted circle and kind of masterminding it out.

Yeah, having the— yes, asking the question is not nearly as important as asking the right question. And I think you're spot on that most of the time we need outside counsel as to what even the right question to be asking is. But I think that if, you know, I heard this phrase long ago in entrepreneurial circles that your business is specifically engineered and tailored to deliver the outcomes that you're receiving. And, and it's like, if you want a different outcome, you're going to have to change something. Right.

Well, that—

okay, that makes sense on the surface that, yeah, okay. But it's a deeper truth. Like, what— what you're not experiencing the results that you want because you're not doing something, or you're, you're either not doing something that you should be doing or you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing. Like, and, and being in the bottle It's very hard to read the label. You have to have a different perspective in order to even understand what's wrong. And being an entrepreneur, what got you to the point of success was self-reliance, stick-to-itiveness, vision. And when those things run out, you know, you've built something and but it's not giving you the results you want. You have to set your ego aside and say, I need help. But to your point, you know, oftentimes there's people out there that are more than willing to take your money to, you know, scratch that itch. But I think it's having that clarity of what is it that you really want. Because if you don't have clarity on what you want, and you go out and you look for help, you're going to find what you're looking for. You're going to find somebody that will tell you, "Yeah, that's your problem. I can fix it for you." and then you spend money with them and then you're like, well, that didn't work. It's because you don't have any clarity in yourself of what it is that you want. That's my opinion.

Well, I think a parallel to that is, are you even working on the right muscles? Let's say that is a muscle thing and it's something that you can do. Well, do you, A, have that muscle and B, is it toned and strong and able to deliver? And so, you know, an example, that we kind of touched on previously was when I went to take over from going from writing content for our company to running the customer service and customer experience side of the shop. It was because we really didn't have much of— we had a lot of muscle atrophy in the customer service side. So no matter what you did on the marketing, on the writing, on the, you know, user experience side of everything, that didn't translate to great results because the friction that was occurring that wasn't even really measured by the digital funnel, 'cause we're looking at digital tools that tell us, you know, hey, how are all these different tools performing? How are all these different pages performing? A/B testing. But none of those tools were asking, hey, what's your customer service like? You know, what's the bottom of the funnel look like for the stuff that's not on the page? And once we figured out that was one of the big leaky points in our funnel was people talk to our customer service and they're not impressed, Then we fix that and all of a sudden, boom, all these things that we've been fine-tuning and tuning and tuning and optimizing suddenly start to deliver 1,000% better. So yeah, I think it's figuring out if there's a blind spot in your organization that you've been ignoring while focusing on everything else. And a lot of times the thing that you're trying to fix or the thing that you're trying to enhance to solve the problem isn't even where the problem lies. And to your point, you need an outside perspective to see the label on the bottle that you're in.

Yeah, what you're describing, I remember I started my first business, my current business, as it was a franchise model. And I remember going to the first gathering of franchisees and there was a very successful franchisee. And, you know, on the surface it was like, oh, I want to be him. And then I was talking to some other franchisees and I said, oh, well, yeah, that's great. He's number one in the network. And doing all these dollars, but he's got a problem because every single new customer he brings in, he's running it off the back end. In other words, he's just churning to stay in place. And I think a lot of companies that experience growth have that exact problem is running off the back end as fast as you're bringing it on the front end. And I think, like you said, if you're not delivering, if you're not giving the experience that you've promised, you're absolutely not going anywhere. I mean, and if your focus is solely on growth, it's very easy to get to focus on that marketing side, the sales side, and neglect the customer service or client service aspect of it. But you have, it's like the, I heard the founder of Boston Market speak in an event and he had a very thick Italian accent and a thick Boston accent. So it was very hard to understand him. But fortunately, he used small words so I could understand. He said, you know, business is very simple. He said, it's either get the business or do the business. And, you know, I mean, that's it. It's not more— it's— that's not an easy distinction. But the reality is that is all business is, is it's either getting the business or doing the business. And then he followed that up with a gem of 'No business, no problem. More business, more problems.' And I'm like, yeah, that's sage advice. The idea that you're going to get to a point and have a business without any problems is a fantasy that does not exist.

Right. Yeah, I think that you have to manage the demand and also manage the delivery. At the same time. And if you focus too much on one, or you don't have somebody focusing organizationally on the other while you're focusing on one, you're in trouble. You're gonna have to work 10 times harder on one of those rather than 1/10 as hard on both. And kind of a parallel to what you were talking about, during the one year I was up at John Carroll in Cleveland, which is a phenomenal business school, they were smart enough to kick me out, but The one year I was there, the CEO of the Hershey's Company came by, and 'cause his assistant went to John Carroll. And he gave this amazing talk. And John Carroll's a small school to begin with, so then you'd go into like a seminar and it's even smaller, which is great. But in talking with him, this was during the time that Hershey's was acquiring all these different things. So now if you go into the grocery store, a huge percentage of the products you're looking at on certain aisles are all Hershey's, whether you realize it or not. And, you know, Schmucker's and other groups. Anyways, um, forgive me, it was the CEO of Schmucker's. My bad, I meant to say, um, uh, sorry, I was eating Reese's Pieces earlier today. It must be stuck in my head.

But, uh, it's easy to do with chocolate.

You know, I'm a simple person, it's easy to lead me astray. But the, um, the, the amazing thing he said was, as we make all these acquisitions is everyone that's on the bus right now, you know, when they, when they take over the wheel of the bus, everyone that's on there is on there for a reason. And everyone that wants to be there is welcome to stay there. But where they're sitting on the bus might change. And if they can't handle that, if they can't process, they might be getting off at the next stop. But that's not where they start. You know, it's not like they walk on the bus and go, okay, everybody's getting off at the next stop. That's first. Let's figure out how to take what you know and help you find the right position in this new version of the organization, the evolution. And that's where we're at with AI. If people in the organization and the team are not utilizing AI or not competent in it and learning about it, they're gonna find themselves getting off the bus rather than their position evolving into something that uses the latest technology and makes them more valuable. And that's another, not to take the conversation in a totally different direction, but there's this mass exodus happening right now I believe it was last— in the last quarter, more companies have been sold and transferred ownership, or either acquired into large companies or moved down a generation and handed down, uh, than in a long time. And that spike is occurring because this, this technology change, this big wave, is— people are either going to say, yeah, I'm down for another run around the roller coaster, you know, staying on, or they're gonna say, this is where I exit. I've been through the internet, I've been through the dot-com bubble, the 2008 crisis, COVID, I've been through all these things, I'm not ready to go through another one. And so it's a really interesting time in that the people with their hands on the wheel of the bus, it's changing.

Yeah, and I think that it is a tremendous opportunity for those that are willing to stay on the roller coaster. But it is, to our previous conversation, it's easy to get caught up in the hype and get confused by what everybody else is saying. It's a good time, I think, and it's usually a good time to be a contrarian. It's like if the herd is moving one way, you might want to zag instead of zig.

Yeah, our version of that. Or go ahead.

Go ahead. No, go ahead.

Yeah, so I was just gonna say our version of that is, you know, when we started, one of the first things we worked on was like, hey, how do we take these quiz funnels that work really well? You know, they ask you 5 questions, right-size the product, qualify the customer, all that stuff, and kind of educate you along the way too with interstitials. But how do we take that quiz process and add in the ability to have a conversation around the quiz with AI? 'Cause you can't go beyond 5 questions or else you're gonna lose their attention. They're not gonna make it through to the end. But if you allow them to chat and have a conversation around the quiz, the question you just asked 2 seconds ago might actually trigger another question in their head that you're not addressing in this quiz. And so it allows you to make a much more comprehensive profile of your e-commerce consumer. So we started working on this and the problem we thought we were trying to solve was how do we make quiz funnels better? But when we started running the testing on the solution, the first version of this, it cost us $800 in compute. So it's like, okay, what are the off-the-shelf solutions that we can use to kind of, you know, cut down this compute cost? And the end result was we basically went dark for about, you know, 2-3 months, uh, and then kind of started to let the light in a little bit for the next 3 months. So a total of 6 months of just refocusing on, hey, we can't solve this problem with off-the-shelf solutions. So we got to figure this out on our own. And thankfully, we have the technology or the expertise in-house to do that. But, you know, what we ended up doing was we got that $800 cost down to about $4. And so our zig instead of zagging is in being contrarian is like, hey, AI is great for everything. Let's just use more AI. Use AI to solve AI, right? We went the other way. And said, how do we make the AI infrastructure better? And so that's where we started to create our own, what we call our playground on our website. You can go in and see different programs and solutions that we've built for different industries that, you know, are not specific to a company or providing any client data, but providing, you know, a demo experience basically. I mean, that was kind of our zig and zag. It was like, we're gonna go in this direction, there's all this AI out there, And that's like, okay, now instead of focusing on AI on the— at the end, let's focus on the infrastructure you're running the AI on and what data it's using.

Yeah, I recently read a post on LinkedIn from Chris Do, and he's a huge influencer in the creative space. And he was talking about an episode where he was working with one of his colleagues that was a a designer, I think, and they were trying to work on this thing with AI. And, you know, had spent hours trying to get it and it wasn't right. And Chris was like, you know, I think we could use Photoshop to fix this. And like in 15 minutes, they did. They went back to an old technology. But the point was that it was losing the forest for the trees and understanding really what it is that you're trying to solve and where you bring your value. It's not like— yeah, AI can be a huge black hole of time and money if you're trying to use it in all situations. James, I love this conversation. I have to draw it to a close. How do people find out more about Overlang Venture Partners?

Yeah, so it's really easy. You just go to over— O-V-E-R— and then lang— L-A-N-G—.com. You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm James Lang— L-A-N-G— ironically spelled the same way as our company name. So if you go to find me on LinkedIn, go to our website overlang.com. Either way, my goal is anyone that reaches out to me on LinkedIn— we didn't really go into it in this podcast, but I'm kind of in a period of life where I'm trying to give back as much as I can with this time. So, you know, if you reach out to me on LinkedIn and you're like, hey, I'm just, this is a struggle, I can't figure this out, or, you know, I really would love an outside perspective on this thing. I try to respond to every message, not necessarily right away, but I do respond. And I love helping people kind of think about it from a different angle, even if it's not helpful all the time. You know, there's periods where you just find out like, oh no, that was it, you cleared the logjam. If I can be of any help on your own journey, please reach out. Listeners will have those links in the show notes.

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