162 - The Art of Problem Solving and Adaptability: Navigating Entrepreneurship and AI with TradeZing's Jordan Edelson

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes.

So let's get started. Jordan Edelson, you are the CEO and co-founder of Appetizer Mobile, found at appetizermobile.com, and you are the CEO and founder of Tradezing, found at tradezing.com. Thank you so much for joining me.

It's actually the reverse of it. So I'm actually the CEO of and only founder of Appetizer Mobile and then co-founder of TradeZing.

Okay, let's, let's get that again. So you're the— yeah, yeah, we're gonna edit all this out. So the founder, co-founder of Appetizer—

so, so founder of— so I'm CEO and founder of Appetizer Mobile.

Okay.

And then co-founder and CEO of TradeZing. So there's another series of founders.

We don't want it— we don't want to offend you.

I don't want to offend anybody. I'll hear about it, trust me.

So I I believe you will. All right, so we'll do it again.

Yep.

So Jordan Edelson, you are the, the CEO and founder of appetizermobile.com— or appetizer mo— let's do it again. I love editing. Thank you, editors. Um, Jordan Edelson, you are the CEO and co-founder of Appetizer Mobile, founded appetizermobile.com, and you are the CEO and co-founder of Tradezing, founded at tradezing.com. Thank you for joining us We're on Listen with Leaders. We'll go with that.

Great. Yeah, thanks for having me.

So let's get started with some basic questions. Tell us about— you're a serial entrepreneur, extremely successful at a very young age. How do you get there? How did your life get to where you are today?

Yeah, great question. So I started first off as a self-taught programmer, actually, when I was about 13 years old. Taught myself how to code in HTML, uh, and I created a series of different websites and designed, and again, all self-taught from just books and just kind of researching about different technologies at that time. Um, and then I started, uh, a company in the esports space because I was very much into video gaming, and I created a company that, uh, actually created what we call mods for Half-Life. And Half-Life was a very powerful, a big game actually built by Valve. And basically people back then, and myself included, were creating different variations. They're called mods because it was modifications of the different game engines. So we kind of changed around different models and assets and we created a brand new experience for users to try and play. And I was actually working with a team all remote and actually all for free where we all were working over like AIM at that time and IRC. And we all were communicating and we were building this game because of the passion and love. Like we were all kind of this big community and we came together and we built a series of different mods and stuff like that. So we put that together and then some of those games that I built actually got picked up some by some of the bigger publishers, which was pretty cool. And I worked on some big ones like Counter-Strike, which is a huge game now. It's a huge brand within itself. I worked on Day to Feed and a couple other big ones. So that kind of some part of my background. Then I moved on and I created in the world of esports one of the first esports broadcasting companies called Esports TV. And a kind of a parent company to that called Game Broadcasting Live. And basically what we did is what Twitch TV is doing today. We were just doing it almost about 20 years ago and a little too early, but we were basically broadcasting video game tournaments. And originally we started off by broadcasting over Winamp. We were doing something called shoutcast, which was just audio only. And keeping in mind, you know, 20 years ago, technology's infrastructure, your internet speed was a lot different. You know, back then it was like the prize connection was like a T1 line. Most people didn't even have DSL at that point. It was like more like 56K dial-up and stuff like that. So we had to use audio. But then eventually as technology improved, we were the first company that actually pioneered the technology to broadcast esports through video to the web. And we launched that at CES in Vegas, and I was partnered with NVIDIA and a couple other groups, and it was really, really a cool endeavor. And I ran esports TV for about 8 years, and we actually broadcasted some of the biggest tournaments around the world. We partnered with Samsung for the World Cyber Games, which was like the Olympics of video games. So I really was was looking at a brand new, really was responsible for creating a brand new industry, a professional esports, which was super exciting. So that was really fun. And then I ended up exiting that business and I became then the CTO of the first publicly traded hip-hop company, which was called H3 Enterprises. And I worked with Russell Simmons and Dr. Benjamin Chavis and we opened up hip-hop-themed restaurants. We did one in Miami, one in Tampa. And the cool part about that was we actually partnered with Microsoft and Viacom and we integrated Xboxes into the tabletop. So while you waited for your food, you were able to play video games, which was a lot of fun. And it was like a venue that turned into a nightclub, and it was just really kind of a cool, you know, venture. And I was with them for about 3 years. And then at that time, then the iPhone had just came out, and I had a friend that actually worked at the NBA, and he knew I had a software development background, and he's like, hey Jordan, can you build us, you know, can we come up with some idea, some sort of app you know, for the NBA. So I'm like, okay, cool. Let's come up with some concepts. One idea was like a virtual bouncing basketball and stuff like that. I'm like, no, let's not do that. Let's come up with this cool concept called, you know, these virtual bobbleheads. So I ended up working with the NBA and we created their first application, which were these virtual little bobbleheads. So you had 'em on your phone. We did it for about 20 different players and you were able to shake your phone back and forth and the head would move using the accelerometer. So it was really cool. NBA sold a boatload of them. And that was kind of like the first, my entrée into the whole world of esports. That's how, or esports rather, apps. And that's kind of how I created my first app and ultimately what led to building Appetizer Mobile, which has been around in the space for the last 14 years building mobile apps. We built to date over 400 mobile apps. I've worked with the likes of building apps for music labels. I've done apps with Lady Gaga, 50 Cent, Kim Kardashian. The list goes on and on. I've done stuff with like Joe Girardi on the sports end, almost every major industry I've touched in, in terms of applications and technology. And today Appetizer Mobile does design, development, and marketing of mobile applications. And that kind of then segued over to my newest company, which is Tradezing. And Tradezing has been around for the last little over 2, a little over 2 years at this point. And TradeZing is a really powerful brand new platform. We'll go more into it today, but basically it's a new finance, social finance platform that's really powered by community and AI. And we'll do a deeper dive in just a moment.

So what is it that, what is it that you enjoy most about what you do? You're obviously very creative, but what, what if you think about it, when I wake up every day, what really gets my boat floating?

Yeah, for, so for, for me, it's, It's definitely creativity. It's also looking at kind of emerging trends and technologies and being able to kind of combine them or see how I can utilize them in what I'm either doing now or what I could be doing. I think for me, it's, it's my biggest, you know, difficulty is prioritization, trying to figure out like, you know, what should I do and kind of how do I prioritize, you know, where things are going? Because I want to, you know, I want to work on a lot of different things. That's why I've started a number of different companies and I have a lot of really great people that I work with that can help execute in conjunction with me a lot of these ideas. But for me, it's just, you know, looking to see kind of how the world of technology is maturing, where it's going, kind of the evolution of these new technologies, and finding different ways to kind of put all the different puzzle pieces together to make pretty much the right formula for success behind these different new business ideas.

And what do you think it is that's unique that you bring to all of this?

So I bring, you know, I bring the ability to kind of wear multiple hats. And again, not all CEOs can do this, but I can put on the product hat, I can put on the marketing hat, I can put on the biz dev hat. I can even put on the developer coding hat if I have to. And I've always kind of positioned myself, and I knew this very early on. I learned this, you know, probably when I was like 14, 15 years old when I was doing those mods, is you never want to be in a position where you're ever held hostage. You want to be able to at least have an understanding and the know-how that if someone left your team, you can kind of fill in that gap and you could take that on. Uh, and that's been super powerful for me. And I think that's led a lot to my success over the last couple years that again, as people come and go, you know, the only person really, you know, to a degree that wasn't really disposable or dispensable was me. You know, I was kind of— the buck stopped at me. And as long as I knew I would be able to kind of fill those shoes if I had to step up, that, you know, I felt comfortable, you know, kind of going down that path with that type of business idea. If I couldn't figure it out, if I didn't know enough, I'd go teach myself how to do it.

Huh. And have you had to do that on occasion?

All the time. Yeah, all the time.

When you say all the time, what do you mean by that?

Uh, you know, whether in, in whether the position, you know, if it's someone, for example, if it's an employee we hired for, you know, some sort of job, um, and, and it's just not working out or whatnot, like I've had to step up and kind of fill those, those shoes, um, you know, a number of times. And I still do it, you know, today as needed, uh, where needed. Essentially, you know, I consider myself kind of also the firefighter of my company. I'm always constantly putting out fires and jumping in and acting kind of as like almost like the chief problem solver. You know, a lot of the cases, especially for startups. And that's, that's the trick with startups. Startups, you have to play that role if you want to be successful. Eventually, when the company, you know, matures and you can bring on, you know, uh, more, you know, bigger people and more experienced individuals and stuff. Again, I'm not saying they're always perfect, but to a degree, you know, when you have a startup, you really are truly responsible for everything.

Do you, um, these companies have been going for some time now. Do you still think of them as startups? Um, I mean, you're way past Pre-revenue.

Yeah. So, so my Appetizer mobile agency, no, that's not a startup. This Tradezing, you know, 2 years in, this is still, this is still a baby. This is still trying to get its legs. We've had hit some, you know, some big milestones and big accomplishments. We finally got a product to market, which is a big win and big milestone for any company. We're in the fundraising, you know, period right now, raising more capital for the business and trying to plot our trajectory. So yeah, I have a combination of, you know, my startups and then obviously with Appetizer, you know, my my digital agency, which is, I don't wanna call it an autopilot, but it knows what it, you know, where its place is and what it can do and how it can service people. But with that said, it works with such a vast clientele of new, you know, a lot of founders. Every day we kind of go through a lot of those, you know, trials that a lot of startups go through and we help kind of coach them through that process.

Right. So you were, you were, you were mentioned a few minutes ago that you're constantly putting out fires. So how do you do that? How do you manage the messiness when it arises? Which, what's your skillset for that?

I'm good at, if I have to compartmentalize certain things, I can do that. You know, so when things are very chaotic and there's a lot of fires popping up all at once, you have to be able to kind of prioritize and figure out, you know, what fire's connected to the other one. What do those dependencies look like? So you can kind of tackle them. If you try to tackle everything all at once, nothing's gonna get, you know, tackled. You know, and it's gonna take longer to get it done. So I, I find myself kind of in unique positions where I have to kind of strategically put those fires out. And sometimes, you know, sometimes you have to let that fire burn, you know, and, and in order to kind of get past and then kind of reemerge on the other end of it. So again, it, it, there's a lot of, and I would actually, you know, a lot, a lot of my background has gone through this process and have been, being burned before in the past has given me the skill sets to be able to deal with these fires and know which ones I need to let burn. And which ones, you know, I am responsible to put out right away and how best to navigate them.

And then when you talk about putting out fires, what are the kinds of tools that you use for doing that?

I mean, again, it depends the type of issue or fire that it is. I mean, again, if it's like a legal related matter, then obviously I pull in the experts, you know, on that. And a lot of, a lot of times putting out these fires is leaning on experts to help you with that. If there's stuff that I can certainly, you know, do and just for my skillsets, I feel comfortable to a degree, I can handle them. A lot of the times they could be developmental related, you know, issues. They could be issues with servers going down, processing issues. It could be stuff just going down. It's like the App Store rejecting your application for an update. I mean, all these different things. These might be kind of quick fixes. They might be kind of longer, you know, problems. But again, you know, as long as you kind of have the skill sets to deal with it or know the people to pull in to be able to deal with it properly, that, that's where I excel at.

Got it. I wanted to, I wanted to mention before, before I forgot that I learned how to code in 1969. I learned, I learned, I learned beginner's all-purpose symbolic instruction code. Oh, it was invented by John Kemeny, who at that time was the president of Dartmouth College, and I was a freshman at Dartmouth.

Very cool.

And I, I, we coded on, we coded with punch cards. And tape, uh, punch tape. And we were given, uh, 2K of RAM to work with. I mean, 2K, that's it. Okay. And, and we all had to take programming classes because Kemeny saw what was coming and said, you folks need to know about computers. And this is, you know, 20 years before Apple came out. It was pretty amazing. My, my, my Life took a very different trajectory, uh, than that, but I would— the beauty of it was that I've never been afraid of technology.

Sure.

Yep.

And you gain the fundamentals. That's, that's what's important.

Yeah. I thought you'd find that kind of amusing. Very cool.

Very cool.

Um, so this show is called Listening with Leaders because I, I don't know if you know much about my background, um, but I'm a lawyer turned peacemaker, and to me, listening is a critical skill that I, I teach and, and try to advocate for. How important is listening in your success?

Oh, it's very important. You know, even on all-hands meetings, and I do a lot more listening than talking because I have a lot more to gain from it that way. And I like to just sit back and just process what everyone has to say and understand it from different vantage points that I may be so deep in other things or my head might be in, you know, running all these different companies in a lot of different directions. I like to just like listen and also extract and take a lot of notes. You know, and that's important to me, the ability to kind of take notes and extract actions or actionable insights from what I've been listening to is also super important. So I'm always taking notes during all my meetings and any type of, you know, session that we're having.

How do you keep from getting bored when somebody's droning on and on and on and on in meetings?

Well, if I'm the one running the meeting and I'm almost kind of seeing myself as a moderator, I will jump in. I will direct it. I'm also very much about efficiency. And I think that's something now, especially with all the talk with AI and all the different solutions that have popped up, it's becoming easier and easier to kind of lean on some additional tool sets to help you summarize some of these long-winded conversations. So that's super interesting. But beyond that, I try to stay focused the best I can. If I do find myself drifting, I will chime in and kind of redirect the conversation or kind of get it back on path because again, I want to gear it, but I don't want to put words in their mouth. So I can steer the ship steer the conversation just by keeping some guardrails on it a little bit, at least so everyone can be entertained and hopefully interested in what's being said.

Do you have to deal with anger very much? People get upset, frustrated.

With what was that?

I was just wondering how much anger or upset do you have to deal with in your work? Frustrated, they get sideways on you, and how do you deal with that?

Yeah, you know, um, I would say actually listening is a part of the solve for anger. A lot of people, sometimes they just want to be heard. That's it. It's not so much about being right all the time, but it's just like letting people vent and talk, uh, and just, you know, stepping into their shoes perhaps and understanding from their perspective, even if they're wrong. You might know they're wrong, but again, if you're hearing them out, you can kind of de-escalate situations and then also kind of get it back on track. So it's just a matter of figuring how to work with and understand how people operate. And everybody's different, and that's kind of— that also keeps things interesting too, because everyone brings something different and unique to the table. But again, you have to figure out how to communicate with them to extract that properly.

So what does your day look like? You've got 2 companies that you're running. Um, are they, are they in the same location? Are they in different locations? You, you have to move around, or do you have a kind of a Grand Central place where Jordan hangs out to handle everything?

Yeah, you know, so what's nice is that the two offices I have, they're literally one block away from each other, so I can go back and forth as needed, which is great. Obviously a lot of stuff is done hybrid and remote. Even prior to the pandemic, I was with, you know, before Tradesling was built, I was actually working kind of on a hybrid schedule anyway. I found it more efficient for myself and a lot of my employees. But yeah, you know, other than that, try to keep things easy. And I'm also, you know, not just have these two companies, but I'm invested in other companies as well too. And I take a look at what they're doing. I try to provide insights on those businesses. So these take up the majority of my day. But other than that, you know, I have a lot of other founders and people calling me up, you know, asking for advice and guidance and stuff like that. So, but my days are, you know, interesting. My schedule, I try to leave a certain amount of time open on my schedule because a lot of things do pop up. Um, that is my kind of time to deal with, you know, putting out fires, but also just the way I've structured my schedule is more so like the stuff that just has to get done that requires dealing with kind of team members. I do that during the day, the business calls, stuff that I have to do during normal business hours, but time for more critical thought and thinking and creativity. A lot of that happens at night for me. Um, it's more of a night owl. Um, so I, I will do that sometimes, you know, from like midnight. So like sometimes 3 or 4 in the morning.

Wow.

And I'll be back up again by like 9:00, 9:30. I don't get much sleep, you know, but I've managed to deal with that over the years. But I find there's a specific type of block of hours I get where it's just kind of creative, creative time. I'm not being bothered. There's no phone calls, nothing. And that's where I can get a lot more of my creative, you know, critical thinking done.

Huh. So AI, of course, is a big deal. I mean, I think it really, really came into consciousness when ChatGPT came out in November. How do you see AI affecting your businesses?

Well, it's something that we're leveraging quite a bit in Tradesing because we're combining with Tradesing. It's a social, it's a social utility platform. Basically what we're doing with Tradesing is we're aggregating a whole bunch of financial insights out there on the social spectrum. So people that are talking about finance on YouTube or talking about on Reddit or on Twitter or on our own platform, we are on creator platform, which is the application Tradesing. We're gathering all those insights and then we're taking that and those insights and combining that with AI. The issue with AI now is that AI has to have— and you hear about it, everyone's talking about a pause in AI, things like this. There has to be kind of checks on AI. At least the AI that's being used now, LLM, these large language models, it's only as good as the data that it's being trained on. So if it's riddled with issues and problems, those issues and problems are going to bubble up and people are going to think that is truth when it's essentially not true. So those check balances have to kind of be there. So the element of social community balanced with AI, I think, creates really interesting social trading signals that you'll be able to get available only through, um, Tradesync. And that's something really super unique to us. Um, but just in general, AI is going to be super disruptive. I mean, first off, AI has been around even before, you know, it's come out of the buzzword in the last, like, you know, 2 months since a lot of people moved on from, like, metaverse. Um, but again, you know, I think AI has more staying power. Um, it's already being used in a lot of products, and it's more than just taking pictures from the web and putting together, you know, imagery and stuff like that. It has true potential to revolutionize a lot of different industries, change a lot of industries. And I think it's more about people have to learn how to use the tools and kind of bake it into their workflow process if they want to kind of stay ahead and stay competitive. Otherwise, they're going to get passed by this trend and they're going to find themselves being part of kind of that downsized group that gets, you know, either offloaded or, you know, fired from their job.

Right. I think something you said that I think is so important, that the— right now the technology is only as good as the data that it's fed. When, uh, I tested ChatGPT in November, I asked it 3 questions and every answer was dead wrong, which tells you that the information on the internet is mostly wrong on those questions. So you have to be discerning about the questions you ask, and then you have to be even more discerning about What's the answer that I'm getting back? Can I rely on this? And I think that's, that's, that's going to be a real challenge for people to figure out, to figure out what asking the right question and then checking the answers against common sense and what you know to make sure that it's accurate.

Yeah. And the other, you know, to that is, you know, people have certain expectations for what AI should be doing. And again, you know, as you've seen even with like the Ford 4.0 model, you know, you could change the persona, you know, and the perspective of how content and things are being written to be used. So it's almost like if you're looking for a certain type of answer, you can talk to the AI in such a way where you can get that type of answer that you're looking for. So ultimately, it's kind of like, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy element to it, you know, because you can, you know, extract from it what you're looking to extract from it versus being told potentially what's, you know, right or what's actual fact, what is actually considered fact because AI is looking again at these large language models. The data that's been trained on, and it thinks these things are fact. But again, the AI has to be able to fact-check itself. And again, you're going to see a lot of changes to AI, and it's going to be interesting over the next couple of months, the next couple of years, but it's moving super fast, very, very quickly.

So yeah, it's really interesting. All right, we're coming up on 30 minutes. I want to ask you one more question, a little more personal. What is it? What's the one thing that we would not know about you, Jordan, unless you revealed it to us?

Yeah, that's tricky. Well, you know, I'm not— believe it or not, I mean, for— it's actually interesting, even though Tradesing is kind of a social finance community, I'm not a very— I'm not a proponent, I say it myself personally, I spend a lot of time on social media, you know, so it's kind of contradictory to that. I have a social presence. I understand the value. Of social media, but I also can understand kind of the— I don't go on specifically because it's a lot of times it's been kind of a time suck. You get kind of, you know, stuck in these algorithms and stuff like that, and it's been problems. So running kind of a company that's dealing with social media, but on the other end not like a huge, you know, social person in the respect of posting a lot of stuff. I'm more private in that regard. Um, so that's something that, you know, is a little different. People might not, you know, think about that the first thing when they think about me. Yeah.

Well, we've come to the end of the half hour. It kind of flew by. Um, thank you so much for joining us, Jordan. Uh, I really appreciated the conversation.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Doug Noll here.

Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag Listening with Leaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

That's @DougNoll.

Douglass E. Noll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.