Shoveling $H!T - Kass & Mike Lazerow - Buddy Media - Episode #49

Time is such a great thing, and if you don't do the right things and you're just kind of wasting time, you don't get that benefit of compounding the time and growth.

Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host, David Pilidas. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, the ups and downs, the. The lessons learned, and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys. Awesome. Thank you all for coming. This is amazing. You know, when. When I started the podcast a year ago, I did not expect to be doing this at that point. I was in Noah's room in the corner when he left for school, set up a bunch of boxes, and now we're doing this. It's almost 50 episodes, tens of thousands of followers across all the different platforms. So it's amazing to be here. This is the first of many events that we're going to be doing. We've got a dinner coming up. We've got a poker night coming up. So this is really the beginning of Not Another CEO in a much bigger way than honestly I ever imagined, really. Since Nick and I started working on this together, we. A couple months ago, we've really picked up the speed. We're going much bigger in terms of, you know, what we're. What we're doing with the. With the company, with the brand. And today is a big day to be able to be here and with all of you and be able to interview Cas and Mike, who I've looked up to for a long time. This is a big deal. So with that, I want to say thank you to the sponsors. We wouldn't be able to do this without sponsors. First to cibc, Ben Shepard. I met Ben last year. There's Ben. So I met Ben last year and he told me, you know, anything you want to do related to founders in New York, we want to support you. And he actually took me down to this space and said, this is like, you can have this space whenever you want for any event. And now six months later, nine months later, we're making that happen, which is amazing. We have Gunderson. Ryan is here, I think, or he was here, but Ryan from Gunderson, you know, Gunderson Detmer was our law firm at BetterCloud, and they really helped us take the business really from the early days all the way through to the acquisition. And they were much more than lawyers for us. They were really partners and advisors through the whole process. And they've really been instrumental, actually have been pushing us to do A lot more with not another CEO and supporting us, which is great. And then workbench. Workbench. If you don't know Workbench, John and Jess are here from workbench. And John and Jess, they started workbench at almost the same time. About the same time we started Better Cloud and really there was no enterprise tech in New York. And they really put the flag down and said, we're going to build the first seed fund dedicated to enterprise tech in New York. And now it's many years later, fourth fund was just announced. Amazing. You know, I work with them. I'm, I'm CEO in residence there. I'm at their office every week. And it's just an amazing, amazing culture. So thank you for, for the support from them. And then, you know, I need, I do need to say thank you to the boys. No. And Sammy, when we started promoting this event and I said, you know, let me show you what we're doing on LinkedIn. And I showed them the LinkedIn post and they said to me, we can do better actually than what you're doing. And they did a canva. They created a canva video in like, you know, an hour. I posted it. So far it's been the best performing thing that I did for this, for this event. So anyway, without further ado, I want to introduce Cass and Mike again. This is a big deal for me. I'm really excited everyone got a chance to, you know, you have your hands on the book. Honestly, when I was reading this other, I read it, you know, cover to cover in a day and I literally thought to myself, I emailed them, I said, I feel like this book, like I may have written some of this, like, and so this, this is really exciting. So I, I made sure to write this down so I didn't get anything wrong. Today's guests are true power couple in the world of entrepreneurship and technology. They founded several companies together including Uire, Golf.com and most notably, Buddy Media. Buddy Media was the world's leading social media marketing platform. They launched it in 2007 and sold it to Salesforce for 745 million in 2012. Buddy Media was one of the original New York tech success stories. One that really put New York B2B tech on the map. They've also become prolific investors, backing companies like Liquid Death, Scopely and Braze, among many others. Most recently, they published a deeply personal and honest book about their journey called Shoveling Shit, A Love Story about entrepreneurs Messy path to Success. So with that, please welcome entrepreneurs, authors, investors Husband and wife, Cass and Mike Lazzaro. Okay. All right, we're going to get started with the first question I ask every guest. What is the one thing you did at Buddy Media, big or small, that had the biggest impact? And you do again if you start another company in the future. Cass, we'll start with you.

I'm going to say I created a cult, like culture. So the first four letters of culture is cult, and we need to do it in a positive way. And so I made intentional choices, and every single touch point with employees along the way was important. And the glue that kept it together was radical transparency. It was bonding events. I know everyone's going to say it's hard with remote workforce. It's not. You just have to make the effort and then figuring out a cause that's bigger than yourself. So we had cycle for survival, and that really brought a lot of unity to us.

When you were hiring the first set of people at Buddy Media, what were you looking for in that first?

Utility players? So the first five to eight players that you have on the team are going to be utility. They have to do multiple things at once. And when you figure out your first, like, let's just call it first product market fit, I don't really think. I think it's like an oxymoron. There is no, like, first. It's going to be like, the last product market fit. You then start to hire people with specialties, but the first 10 probably have to wear a lot of different hats, and you're going to be moving them around quite a bit.

And when you were interviewing, like, how many people did you. You know, I've interviewed a bunch of CEOs who've said, I interviewed the first 400 people we hired, you know, all by myself. And, you know, I was involved in every interview process. Did you do that in the interview?

No.

I think that's an absolute bottleneck. I think it's, like, totally the wrong way to do it. I think your job is to find someone that can mimic the morals and values and mission of what you want and then delegate that. And their job is to find someone that's almost like a better fit than they are, a better fit in terms of skill set. And we were able to do that. I think we had one year. We grew about 120 employees in, like, seven months. It was crazy. And our head of recruiting was Pam Schloss, and she hit it out of the park. It was. It was incredible.

Did you. Did you. Do you think that was based on having the values defined very clear.

You have to have your. What you stand for, what's important, that mission, values, all of it has to be repeated constantly. You can't just say it once and then say it like in the onboarding day. You have to say it over and over and over again as well as what your goals are. You know, you have to focus too.

Hmm. Mike, how about you? What's that one thing you would do again?

I just think it's all about focus. And, you know, companies that really hyper focus don't try to do everything. And we're in an exciting time of AI and you could do this and that and this and that, but what are you trying to do as a company? And then what are the first three to five things that you need to do to accomplish that? So we always said focus. But then, you know, we worked with about. We've made about 100 investments. We could never really define what that means. Right, Focus. Okay, okay, I'll focus. But what it means is really define your future state. What do you want to be? Right, so Marc Benioff launched Salesforce number one, you know, CRM. And then, okay, if that's what we want to be, what do we need to do to get there? And that's how you wake up in the morning and you basically know what to do, right? A lot of founders, I don't know everyone here, but a lot of founders wake up and they're just overwhelmed because there's a lot of shit to shovel, right? A lot of stuff going on. And I always liked having one piece of paper that had everything I was focused on.

And there's a lot of distractions.

It was product sales, customer success, whatever it was at that time, and you could push it forward. And pretty much most of the time for me, focus was sales and selling, not only to new logos, new customers, but a big part of our growth. So in three years, we went from 0 to 50 million of ARR. Big part of our growth was upselling. So get that customer. And it was a land and expand business, a little different than some businesses today. But that business was like, okay, we have Unilever, but they have another hundred brands. Let's go. Right?

And when you were doing that, I mean, I think one of the challenges for founders in general, I will speak for myself in this, is that you want to do so much right, and you see all the opportunity that's in front of you. How do you focus? Like, how do you. How do you temper that even for your. Your own ambitions?

It's hard. It's hard for me. I'm not very focused by, you know, my natural state is unfocused. I'm more creative than Cass. She's much more of the operator. Cass thinks in spreadsheets, I think in kind of, you know, screenplays. You know, her love language is spreadsheets. And for those of us who have, let's say, a more distracted mind, you need something to hold onto that reminds you otherwise you're down rabbit holes. And it's some of those rabbit holes, we're, okay, it let us get to the future faster. But organizations, the problem is, as a leader, if you're not focused and you can't explain to your team what are your three most important things, your team isn't focused. And if your team's not focused, you're just paddling in different directions and spinning around, right? And it gets even more important as you have a bigger staff, because you're just burning cash, right? Like, you're trying to go from a startup to a company, so losing money to profitable. And if you're not focused while you're losing money, you're just, you know, shooting.

Yourself in the foot in a very tactical way. How. How often would you define those three priorities?

So we did it every quarter, even though we had kind of an annual budget. And the reason why we did it every quarter is because there's a. We're growing so fast. We had new employees and new team members. We had a quarterly meeting, which we treated like a board meeting. We presented to our team as if they were the board financials and all. So we basically, hey, we trust you. We want you to be empowered with information. We firmly believe that surprises are much harder to digest than bad news. We didn't have much, a ton of bad news. But we lost customers. We lost the competition. We had quarters that weren't great, and we would basically say, hey, as a leader, you have to say, get the elephant in the room. This isn't working. Take responsibility and have a plan to fix it. And so we did that pretty much every. And the other thing is, we realized that our roadmap had to change often because we're so sales focused. So it was a software company, and typical discussion was the head of sales. We need this for this customer. If we don't get it, don't forget, we're not gonna land.

You don't wait. You do. You would walk.

I'm not gonna talk about that. And then the product team would be like, okay, you need that. But I have this other hundred things. And then I would. So I grew as a leader, really, with Cass's help. But I was getting in the way because I'd walked. Like, I love engineers. Always have, always will. Builders are. I just love. And I would walk into the engineering pit and just shoot the shit, right? And I'd be like, oh, yeah, that.

Would be so cool right here. So.

Well, I didn't know as a founder, as a CEO, you don't know your impact all the time. And so we did just have a conversation. I'd be like, yeah, that would be cool. And before you knew it, that engineer had changed the roadmap, which then pisses off my head at technology, who then comes into my office like, what the fuck? And so we just constantly had to align everyone because we now were growing fast. We quickly had offices in London, Singapore, and all these places. And we'd never done this before.

One of the things. I know, Cass, we've talked. You really talk about transparency a lot, and Mike just mentioned it. Was it hard for you to be transparent? Not you.

Have you ever met her?

I was like, I mean, but from day one, you were like, we're gonna say, good, bad, ugly. Yeah.

I mean, I don't hide. I don't hide things very well. Like, I have zero poker face. So I. You know, if big investors came into our office, there's a good chance people knew that we were probably raising money. And so when they would come out, they'd be like, oh, my God, like, we. What's happening? And I'm like, oh, we're talking to investors, just like we always do. And they're like, why? Is everything okay? I'm like, everything's great. We're just gonna constantly and talk to investors because you're always raising money. And I had no problems just telling them the truth because Mike said it like, transparency is glue, right? And nobody cares about. Well, I should say it this way. When you have bad news and you have pivots and failures, which you're gonna have, you want people to stick around and not jump ship. And they do that if you constantly tell them the truth and you're not hiding anything from them.

One of the things, obviously, that's unique here is your husband, wife, you know, co founders. Can you talk about that decision and that journey to do that?

And so I don't think it's probably the best idea that you start a company when you're dating. I don't think anyone's going there saying, oh, this is great. But when I was Working at an agency. I was working for the interactive arm of Leo Burnett in Chicago and Mike was finishing up his stint at UWire that was just acquired and they were going public with Student Advantage. I would come back and complain about very big visionary product ideas. Right. Like this wasn't working. I understand sales. And for some reason they put me as director of business development and marketing and pr, which made no sense to me. The marketing pr, fine. So I would tell him that and then he would come back to me with very operational questions. So we were each other's kind of confidant in terms of work. And what it became clear is we had very different lanes. And that's what you want as co founders. If you're going to have more than one co founder, you want very different lanes and you want that implicit trust and absolute respect in each other's skill sets.

One of the quotes I wrote this down, it was one of my favorite one says it's not that marriage or having a co founder is inherently bad. Rather, the culprit is insufficient work done up front before saying I do and signing the legally binding paperwork. It takes effort, tons of communication and care to make both continue to work.

Right?

Yeah. I mean, it's not that dissimilar. Like who here has a co founder in their business? And you're married to your co founder, right? Like you guys talk first thing in the morning, last thing before you go to bed. You're in sync when done, right? Right. Like you want to kind of over communicate and just the flow of the relationship is similar. You have this honeymoon phase, right. With a co founder, you're so excited, you haven't done anything. It's like the world is your oyster, you dreaming big. There's passion, right? And then you launch something and it's like, oh, shit, that didn't work. Right. And you have to have some tough.

Conversations, get resentful, and that's like pointing fingers.

That's like kids, right? You have kids and you're like, oh. And so what's key to both is shared values, shared work ethic, and all of these conversations that you should have up front, which is basically like, what's your vision? How hard do you want to work? Is this something that you'll do for 10 years? Are you doing it exclusively or are you doing it on the same side? And when you don't have those conversations, it ends in a divorce. Worst divorce. And we've seen it again and again because it's hard for two co founders. There's a lot of ego involved, there's identity involved, there's just like personal mishigas involved. It's hard for people to change, you know, once they start going.

It's a, it's a real, I mean, I, the number of co founders that I see break up, it's, and, and, and in many cases you say, oh, but you guys decide to start this together and they're like, yeah, they were like a friend of mine through a friend and we both had thought it was a good idea, jumped in, signed all the docs. Like how, like when you see the best co founder relationships, not even just your own, but the ones that you've invested and everything, how much time do people spend? Are we talking about, like, they've definitely.

Had serious conversations because when I do the due diligence for our investments, I am literally asking one of the co founders about the other co founder. So I'm kind of dividing and kind of doing probably good cop, bad cop stuff on them. But it's interesting because I want to see one. Do they know what they don't know? Do they believe that the other co founder is a big solution to their gap of skill set and do they respect what that person says? So if they can answer those three questions, I'm usually super psyched, like, we'll never get a deal. Where Mike says, okay, I love this business model, but I don't know about the people. He knows that he thinks the people are going to be good, but he needs me to go deep on them.

I like all entrepreneurs. That's how we've done 100 deals because we've looked at many more. Like thousands. Yeah, and I just think entrepreneurs are the best. I mean they're, you know, they're optimistic, they, you know, great energy. Country's been built on entrepreneurs. And so there's just, it's the national pastime, you know, business. And so I get very excited about ideas and then I throw them over to Cass and she kind of does the real work.

Let me, let me ask about fundraising because you, you raised a good amount of money pretty relatively quickly. And I think, Mike, you kind of led a lot of that. We just published actually on the substack, the Feeding the baby excerpt. So can you, can you maybe talk about that process and really more. You know, I think that for a lot of first time founders, when they go out to fundraise, you know, they, they think they're the only ones that have any problems with fundraising. They say, dave, I talked to 10 people, they all said no. So I Can't raise money. I'm like, well, it's going to take a lot more than that. It's going to take a lot more than that.

That's so cute.

Thank you.

That's a Tuesday.

Can you talk a little and also maybe talk about that also?

Yeah, let's, let's, you know, and I even do this today. Like, you're always raising money. You're always kind of out there networking, talking to people with money. And we, we have a venture firm, right, that we've raised money. We don't raise money for private equity. Like we buy companies as well. Dina runs one of our businesses is here. And I don't look at it as I'm asking them for a favor. I look at it as a relationship built over time. And our best investor relationships, we provided value or built the relationship years in advance. And I'm think of people like Jules Maltz, who was an associate at ivp, who then became a partner, then became so rich he retired. They've done incredibly well. You know, Jeff Richards at GGV and a lot of investors never invested. But I'm still friends with them, right? Like Jeff at Flybridge and, you know, David at Venrock and people who I. We became friends because we helped out. And so look at it as relationships. Look at it as, how can I help you? No matter how much money the investor has, they got issues, right? They have portfolio companies that need help. If you know AI, maybe you can help them think through how AI is going to impact their firm. If you have tickets to the Knicks, invite one, right? That you met at an event. If you have tickets to the Knicks, you probably don't need to raise money because they're so fucking expensive. But it's where I see it and what happened. And it's a mentality, it's a founder's mentality that you're not asking for money. You're giving them the greatest opportunity to multiply their money, right? You gotta believe in your product so much that like every meeting you go into, you have to think that they're crazy not to do it. They still won't do it, most of them, but you have to believe in it so much. And if you don't, you just have to rethink the business.

But you're forgetting one of the biggest things that you did.

I'm forgetting a lot.

He would write these epic board letters before every board meeting. And we were very intentional about board meetings. And he used to say that these board letters were really for him to Think through the business, right. It wasn't like he wanted to have like a 10 page letter to the board, but it was his way of like organizing information every quarter. Right. So every month when we did it. And he would then strip out anything that was confidential and then he would send it to all the people that we hadn't raised money with yet or hadn't, or said no. And then he would send that out, just say like, hey, I just want to keep in touch and you know, give you an insight into what's happening. And so those relationships were built like when he's saying he built them over time, that's how he built them. And he would take them out to lunch, stop, you know, I'm in the city, I'm stopping by. Or he's going there to say hi because he's building it so that there's excitement or there's least like brand awareness of who you are when you're going to raise.

And I think part of the benefit of doing that probably also is you're building the credibility, you know, with the found with the investors that they see that you're operating, you're executing, you're an operator. Like you, you know what to care what you, what the right things to care about are.

Yeah. And it's like no one, like no one's a known quantity until you are. So like now it's relatively easy to raise money after you like return all this capital to investors. Right. But I'm really talking about when we were. I'm from the suburbs of D.C. i knew no investors, went to Northwestern journalism school, met no investors. So all these people we met over the years and we got very lucky through our networking. Golf.com, we sold and then bought back. But we needed to get it funded. And so we hit the road and happened to meet a lawyer who loved to play golf, who set up a lunch with his friends at a country called Medina, which I never heard of, but they hosted the US Open like right after. And literally in a lunch, like this baby Jesus lawyer found their money. I was like, man, right? And that was so like we would have, if that company went under, we were both in. She would have had to go back to the agency world. I guess I would have tried to be a journalist. I don't know, maybe I would have started something else.

Maybe sales, maybe sales.

But you get really, if you just keep going, your luck will happen. And it's not. You have to be patient. Like it's been 30 years and we're still Building and hustling and everything. But every day, every week, every month, you have to do the right things. And that's really what the book's about. It's about these two things of, like, shoveling shit is, like, miserable. Like, being a founder. There's no worse way to spend your day. And it's awesome, right? Like, it's like, oh, yeah, I'm miserable. Hey, you want to do anything else? No, I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. Right. Most other things that are miserable, you don't want. Like, I don't like sharks. So if I'm in the water with sharks, I don't really want to be there. But for some reason, we are able, as entrepreneurs are alive here. We fall in love with this suffering.

Yeah.

In. In a really weird way, it's true.

I think one of the things that you said in the book, you talked about replying to emails, and I think just in general, like, when we talk about fundraising, a lot of people give me the advice. When we were fundraising, it's like, don't. Don't respond to the analyst. You know, don't respond to the principal. Don't respond to the. Only. Only have the call with the partner only. And actually, most of our. Most of the money we raised came through a principal who called or a vp, and I responded to every email.

Yeah, no, I treat everyone. I mean, Jules is a great.

I mean, he's.

He came to an event we had in 2008, I think.

Yeah.

Launch event at Hill Country Barbecue here in New York. We didn't have a budget, so I asked Gary Vaynerchuk to speak, who had a little social media following. He came to that event, and then I started sending him these letters. I'd visit him on the west coast, and he, you know, they put in 20 million at a $80 million valuation two years in. And that was, like, the key money that let us accelerate because at the time, software was, like, expensive to build. Now it's like, you go to lovable, and it's like, hey, build me a social media management system. Okay? And it's done. But at the times, like, unfortunately, things were expensive, and if you want, like, eight players, you're going to have to overpay for them. Still.

I actually want to take that. You said that about building software. It's a good transition because you could probably vibe code, you know, buddy media today, you know, with like.

And a better version. Yeah, yeah.

Like in a weekend.

Yeah.

And. But I think that one of the things you did very well. And when I would see you speak when early days at Greycroft events in the Hamptons and everything, one of the things that was always amazing is what you did with the brand. And I feel like today, in today's world, that actually is what separates. It's not really. Did you build the best software? Because anyone can build it now. It's really, what do you do with the brand? And can you maybe talk? I mean, there's some really good stories.

Yeah, I think so. I was a basketball player, tennis player and golfer, right? That's how I grew up. I actually love basketball more than anything, but I wasn't as good. And clearly I didn't get the height jeans. But my dad always was like, he taught me so much about marketing, even though he was a lawyer, and just this concept of like boxing people out and you can change people's perception. And that's what marketing is. You just change someone's perception about anything. And with Buddy Media, I knew we were in this space. It was crowded. We had almost like 40 competitors when we started in 2007. Like, that's how like, it was a new market. Like, it was just like took off and had 40 competitors, like, really good competitors. And how was I going to punch up? How was I going to box people out, right? So one is just change their perception, make us look like we're bigger. So we didn't have a marketing budget in the first year, but I would get Mike on the stage as a thought leader and then we'd have, you know, I could get like, bags for the hotel doors, right? And that was, you know, dollar each. And we would just use our money, whatever we could, and then we'd own all the coffee cups, right? So we had one event that we would own and own all of it. So we knew everyone was going to show up for that meal that was being provided. We were going to own every cup that they were going to walk around with, and Mike was going to speak. So that was like a trick that we learned, like, don't spread it thin. Go heavy into one thing. And then by the time we got our traction, especially with being the software, the social media marketing software, the platform, I convinced the board, and this was just crazy. I convinced the board that as a social media company, that we needed to do print ads, which is just stupid in a lot of ways, but that we had to be different because everyone else was just running paid advertising. So they were doing paid, owned, earned, whatever they could do to get their market share. And I Said, okay, let's go and be like. At the time, it was like Accenture and IBM and all these other big things, and they were at airports, so let's own all the airport apps.

I love this story.

And we did it. And I said, you know, we can't do it for a year. And this is where they got really mad at me. They're like, okay, so this is for a year, this million dollars. I'm like, no, it's from Thanksgiving through January. And they're like, two months. Like, what are you talking about? I'm like, just trust me. Everybody will travel. So we put people in front of anywhere you went. Any big hub where you would connect, you'd go across the country. They were everywhere. We owned charging stations, which were new for an airport. We owned. When you went down the track.

The campaign was power your connections, which made the charging stations.

And then we did the print ads as well. So then we Ad week and Ad Age. So it was just everywhere. And then it was almost like overnight. By January, we had. There were two things that happened. One, it was like we were bumped up into, like, so far out the leader that nobody else was there. And, like, everyone was way behind me. And number two, the amount of pride that employees had. It was such a boost of. I made the right choice to work here.

And one of the things I. I love is just the. Can we talk about the billboards?

Yeah.

And, like, kind of how they. How they kind of lived.

Well, the best part was, is, you know, back then, because when. When did the markets change? Was it 2006 or eight markets when the great financial crisis?

Seven. Eight.

Yeah, seven, eight. So nobody was spending, but. But we had. And nobody else was replacing those billboard ads everywhere.

So we had them up, and they were analog.

They were analog. They're print. They're like, print. And. And nobody was replacing them. So we had half of our market. So think of, like, the top 15 airports, probably eight of them. Had them up for over a year.

I think Seattle's still up. Seattle is up there, like, forever.

Yeah.

Is my favorite.

And these were, like, as big as this. Like, in Chicago, you'd go down the escalator to go from, like, C to B, if anyone knows, like, United and, like, you go down that, and it's like, buddy, media, power, your connections. And, like, we're a tiny little company. At the time, Cast made us look so much. But a lot of this stuff wasn't paid. It was like, everyone can do thought leadership. Figure out what your lane is. And I Found different channels. Like, Scott Galloway had a company called L2. I don't know if you remember L2 Luxury Marketing Consortium, where he would do all these events. They all needed to know about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube marketing. And so I'm like, hey, I'll come in. And, like, every event, it was like shooting fish in the barrel, right? I got to ces, all the marketers were there, and I would go into, like, their marketing meetings and tell Coca Cola, here's your company on social, right? This is what social means for your global brand. And every company can do that. I mean, we have to figure out where they are.

A South by Southwest one year. And granted, we also own the stairs, right? They came down or came up in that airport, but it was raining. And that's, like, unheard of, right? In Austin, like, at that time of year. So cold and cold. It was freezing. So we somehow. I don't know how the marketing team and I figured this out. We got golf carts, and we had coffee, and we just drove up and down the streets, and we were powering your connection, right? Like, your vibe, your everything. And we were keeping people, like, warm. It was fantastic.

Do you think on the thought leadership front, were you comfortable, like, doing that day one? Like, was that.

Not at first.

Because a lot of founders that I talk to are not at first.

Really?

Yeah, not at first.

That's so not true. You love talking.

You heckling me. I'm saying, like, when we started, I got very nervous. I would, like, sweat. I wouldn't eat beforehand. I remember this, like, I could. Because I'd never done this level public speaking to, like. Yeah, I remember going. One of the first one was at P and GS, like, marketing event, which they fly all their marketers in, and it was like, a thousand people, like, because it's like, big company, like, they own.

Were you wearing a suit?

I was, yeah. And it was, you know, it's stressful, but, like, one of the things we've learned in the process with the book and reading the book is you have to lean into your pain as entrepreneurs. It's like the pain you're experiencing, that's a problem you could solve with a business. And what you don't like doing is often what you have to do. Because we're all instant gratifications. Not soon enough. We all are addicted to comfort, right? Like the dopamine hit and distraction. And distraction. Being able to focus on stuff, that's really important, but uncomfortable, I think, is a superpower for entrepreneurs. That, you know, I didn't like asking a thousand people to buy the book personally. Right. Last. Last weekend, two weekends ago, I basically texted everyone on my phone, like, I somehow met you at some point. I would love.

He did. It was like. It was like seven hours.

Like, I didn't want to do that, but got to do it. Right. Like, if not now, when. Like, it's our life story. Like, I kind of believe in the product we went into. You know, people were very surprised that we set up a table in Central park and we put out a sign, free entrepreneur advice to sell our book. Right. And people were like, why are you. Like, was that staged? Were those your kids in the. No, we just went in. Because if you're not willing to. To go into your local park and sell your product, like, what's it. Why, like, if you. If you don't believe in your product so much that you will kind of ask for the deal, that you're in the wrong business.

I think one of the things that I actually did not know until I read the book was around the pivots. I didn't realize, actually, that there were any pivots in the business.

That's great. I did a job. Yeah.

Can we talk a little bit about that? Because I went through, let's say, a reimagination of what better Cloud was at one point. And I think when you have a team and you have people, it's hard to do that. And people have their livelihood and their careers and everything. Can maybe talk a little bit.

Yeah. I will let Mike take you through all the amazing ideas he had. And I will say, though, that leading a company through a pivot is enormously challenging. And again, I will go back to. If you are radically transparent, then they will jump alongside you. Right. Even though they're afraid. They're afraid that all of a sudden you're turning the ship around or funding didn't happen, or you're going with this client versus this one. So you gotta be very transparent. Let's talk about our first idea. I mean. I'm sorry, your first idea?

Yeah. So, I mean, every company really pivots in some way. Some are really big if you're trying to do something new, some aren't. Like you launch a pizza place and, like, you have certain types of pizza that you didn't know were going to be so popular, some that no one order. Right. And so as a leader, there are three things you can do when you get punched in the face or no one shows up. Right. You could keep Doing what's not working. That seems silly. You could shut down your business or you could pivot. And Eric Reiss, who kind of coined that term, it's basically like pivot is not just an evolution. It's kind of a complete change of what you're doing for Buddy Media. The company got started because Mark Zuckerberg got up on stage on May 24, 2008, and invited developers to build on top of the Facebook platform. And why that was important is up to that time, the Internet was a one player experience. All of a sudden, your friends were there, right? The social graph, this virtual representation of real life relationships, let you build Zynga, play games with friends. It let you build apps that were inherently social. I thought that was the future of the Internet.

What day did you think that it was?

The day she was birthing our third kid, C§ally. And I was in the waiting room on my BlackBerry and I was just blown away. And so I didn't know what we were going to do, but I knew we were going to do it. She got wheeled in with Viv. Our daughters about to graduate high school next week, so we'll be empty nesters in the fall. Yay. And I said, well, I got it. I got the next business idea. She said, you're a fucking asshole. Like, I just had kid. I said, don't worry, we'll figure it out. There are kids here. Oh, sorry. I mean, it's called shoplord Shit. You knew that when you. And basically, I didn't have a business model. I had a market that was small, but I thought it would be bigger. And so we launched with something called Ace Bucks, which was not a good idea.

Was anyone around for Ace Bucks? Please say no.

It was not great. It was massive inflation. We have some fans. We. Massive inflation in the currency and no purpose. And then we did a raffle product that was horrible. Basically. Illegal gambling.

Yes. Horrible.

Yeah.

I was not for that one.

You didn't tell it for the.

No, no, I did everything accounting. You.

You just went, now we're changing history.

No, that's not true.

It's easy to play, you know, whatever. Just keep operating.

Oh, b.

And then we went to custom apps, which worked really well. We sold so many of these, it was like the FedEx send a package.

The Hollywood Hair.

The Hollywood Hair makeover app where you could put Jennifer Aniston's hair on your head and, like, send it to your friends. Hey, should I get this haircut? Right. The problem with that is we couldn't hire. We're selling a lot of them. But we couldn't hire enough developers. And we went. They always wanted something and they always wanted. So we went into a board meeting. We're like, this is a service business. We came up with the software idea, which we productize, send. All of this functionality became saplets, social applets which you could, like, drag and drop together. And then that was two years in. So it was two years of pivoting, basically. And then the next three years, we got to 50 million on the back of that. We went from 20 employees to a lot. I forget how many we had when we sold. And I love pivots and I love, you know, ripping the band aid off and I love kind of looking at the data and making decisions. We're talking about books. And the problem with the book industry is, you don't know. Like, I've been doing all this work and Amazon doesn't give you data. Like, good luck.

Are we really going into this?

Good luck with, like, Barnes and Noble? But, like, it's kind of frustrating in a business. You should be able to have your dashboard in a real business book books that are not really a business, but.

Tell everybody how fast you would pivot.

So the only way. I've always believed that the only way to pivot is, like, radical pivot. You can't have one foot in the old business and one in the new. So we stopped doing custom apps and cast had a huge fight.

No, no, I did not have the fight. He had the fight with me, our.

Head of sales, who's one of our best friends, Jeff Ragavan. We, you know, officiated his wedding. It was a one fight where, because he was making money, right? He's a sales guy selling all these things.

He's about to close two and a half million dollars in custom apps. And that's a big.

And he wanted to do both. And we're like, no. Like, this is the business.

Cut it off and tell him no. That was. It was a drag out.

You know, salespeople will take the. The easiest way to make money. So if you give them options and they could sell this, which is easy, versus this. This is hard. You're never selling this.

But tell them, answer the question about how fast, like, you went into a boardroom.

Guiding me through these answers. This is like assisted living.

This is what you have to look forward to.

Wait, where am I again? And so basically, I got up. I think it was the Wall Street Journal. I was doing it. Facebook had an event. They launched some new APIs. And in the Journal, I announced that we have the first ever Facebook page management system to manage your Facebook pages. This was news to our head of technology.

This was news to everybody.

And so the company was like, wait, what? We have any.

So he announces that Wall Street Journal.

And I wouldn't recommend this. Why am I talking like, I wouldn't recommend this as a leadership thing, Meaning.

Like, yes, not a good leadership move. And it turned out that quickly. He does things.

But what it did is it got everyone to focus on, oh, that we have to deliver. And we sold it before we had it. We kind of, you know, it wasn't fake it before we make it, but we were building it as we're flying this airplane. And every time a company that we work with hesitates about a pivot, they're wasting time, they're wasting energy. And the money involved is a lot of the people that you post pivot. You don't. The people you have, you don't need all of them. So you have to lay people off. And what's interesting is I was talking to a founder the other night. Founders will not lay someone off because of fear, and they don't want to have a conversation. It's like, $150,000 a year to keep this, like, you know, slacker on board, and they won't even buy lunch for the company. Right. So the amount of money that entrepreneurs waste is egregious. Like, I look at everything. It's like, oh, how much is this person costing? And is it. And, like, we never hired salespeople until everyone else was, like, totally overwhelmed. And, you know, pivots, like, everything are scary, but once you do them, they feel great.

Everybody's happy.

Like, it's just, like, you feel lighter and happier, and you're not full of, like, uncertainty and doubt until, like, you launch the new thing, and that doesn't work, and you're like, oh, yeah, do it again. So you get tiring.

I want to transition a little bit. Cast to. There's a chapter. I think it's called imbalanced Life. And there was a mention here of you having your third child. And in the middle of all this mayhem, can you talk a little bit about kind of how you balanced building a company and building a family?

Well, we didn't. So Mike and I actually had, I think, one uncomfortable conversation. I mean, it wasn't that uncomfortable.

You should tell them about that part. What? I'm joking.

Okay, well, uncomfortable conversation about saying, like, all right, if we do this company, and we know how big it could potentially get. There's gonna be sacrifices, and that's gonna be the three kids, right? I'm not. And he's not gonna be able to be 100% at home and 100% there for the kids. And so we had this kind of calculation, and people are always like, I can't believe you talk about this. But, like, we had a calculation. I said, look, big kids, big problems. If we can get back when middle school happens, when people are mean, when, you know, all the big issues that start to happen, that will be better for us. And so we went all in. And so it didn't mean that I was at zero with my kids. And that's the difference is that I was probably at 80%, right? In terms of how present I was and how. How much I had to offer, which 80% now my kids are 23. Our kids are 23, 21, and 18. And they don't see, like, we weren't there at all. They have no memory of this, which is kind of awesome. But there is no balance. As an entrepreneur, if you want to do something well, whatever that is, you can only do one thing well at a time. That's my philosophy. And for any of the moments, entrepreneurs out there gotta give yourself some grace, because 80% is usually from a mom, is like a thousand percent for most people. There.

There was actually a quote that I pulled that said an entrepreneur's personal life inevitably conflicts with the endless stream of work. There is no off switch, no quiet quitting, no balance. There's only an effort to manage the imbalance as effectively as you can.

Yeah, you. Like, we didn't have a lot of friends outside the company. We didn't. You know when everybody's, like, at preschool and they're all meeting and having play dates, I was like, oh, my God, I have no idea who these people are. Right. That was just not what I was doing. And when people went away on vacations together or had picnics in Central park, which I never did either. Like, I had no idea. There's a part in the book where we were in due diligence. It was three months with Salesforce and due diligence. That was super fun. And two of the three kids started a new school. And we got there, and it was lower school. And the principal comes out and says, like, okay, this is great. Now you'll see your teacher with a flagpole for your classroom, and just take your kid over, introduce yourselves, and drop them off. And I look at him, and he's looking at me, and he's like, wait, you don't know? And I'm like, you don't know either. Like, we had no idea who the teacher's kids were.0. And so we kind of just like shopped them around like Lazaro's, and eventually they pulled us over. Yeah.

I'm getting to the last couple questions, but we're going to take questions from the audience in a second. So, knowing. We'll start with you, Mike, knowing everything that you know today and all the experience you've had and all the companies that you've seen and everything, what is the one piece of advice you would go back and give yourself at the very beginning of your career?

I mean, really good question. B. I wasted a lot of time and the focus thing is really hard. And I think we could have worked faster, better accomplished more early on if we really knew how to focus an organization. Like, it's the number one thing. And I don't. I talked about it earlier. It is the difference between survival and not. It's the difference between being a billion dollar company versus $100 million company. A lot of companies succeed, but they don't even really know why. Right. Like product market fit is this, like, nebulous thing. When you really focus, a lot of good things happen. And the best thing that happens is you actually, by working smarter, you're able to open up time for other things in your life. Not a lot, but I somehow have gone fish.

Yeah.

Yeah. Some have gone to like over 200 fish shows.

228. But.

But like, you know, you can work smart and it doesn't have to be as miserable. Maybe we made it. And ask yourself, are you focused on the right things today? Because being successful is doing the right thing every day and turning into a good week, a good month, a good quarter, a good year, and in many cases, like decades.

Many years. Yeah.

Like, if you do the same thing for many years, you will succeed. Like, time is such a great thing. And if you don't do the right things and you're just kind of wasting time, you don't get that benefit of compounding the time and growth.

Yeah, I think, I think that's amazing.

That's number one from. There are many others, but that's definitely number one.

Well, and I think again, as entrepreneurs, as founders, it's hard to focus because of all the shiny objects that we see every day. But I think especially if the team gets bigger, you. Your lack of focus just cascades into the rest of the org, like you said before, and then it Just derails everything.

And the other thing which comes close is, you know, Cass hired a executive coach. I don't know if, you know, Tammy Jersey. And her first thing, she did a 1,360review, and she talked to all my direct reports. And, like, if you read that now, you'd be like, this is the worst leader I've ever met. I was distracted. I was distracting. I was getting in the way. I wasn't listening. I was going to meetings and trying just to get my ideas through versus listening. And people who disagree, they weren't just agreeing with me, but the idea. I couldn't separate the two. And so I would have gotten that coach earlier, and I would encourage everyone to basically build infrastructure that will, like, punch your ego in the face and be really like, it's hard. It was hard for Cass. I don't think it. I don't think Cass. She's delivered some hard news over the years, but that would have been difficult, I think.

I think she would have listened to it as well.

Yeah. So she, like, manufactured this woman. I guess I wouldn't found her. So I would do that. And that was one of the most important gifts I ever got, because I think I became a better listener. I became a more empathetic leader. And part of the book is. Oh, yeah, part of the book is not just the cheat codes to build a business that transcends kind of your wildest dreams in your life, but a life that really transcends any expectations that you had. Right. Because as an entrepreneur, there is no difference between your work in your life. Like, your identity is that you're basically inviting people to watch you fail in public. I mean, once you say, oh, yeah, I got this company, it's like, okay, what happened to your company? We went out of business or ends up in the news. Right? And so, you know, it's a. This is the biggest gift I was given, being able to be independent and do this. And that's where we find, like, the passion and purpose of our life.

Cass, how about you?

I would say two things. I would say I was one of those kids that got out of college with an economics major, you know, like, that did nothing and had no idea what I was supposed to do. Right. And I took the advice of my dad. He said, you have strengths, focus on your strengths, and then apply them to as many different jobs until you find one that makes you move a little bit further. And so I think if I just. I took it, but I didn't. I kept having anxiety about that, and so that's why I go around talking to kids all the time, college kids, just to say, like, follow your talent, follow your strengths, and then just try on different jobs. That's the first thing. The second thing is kids are going to be okay. It is totally okay to be super passionate and driven as a mom. And they will be okay because now I have three kids who are super passionate, hardworking, and driven.

Maybe they were better because we weren't around.

Probably.

As I think about it, that was a feature, not a bug.

All right, we're going to open up to questions. Nick, you have the mic. Okay. Where do you want to start?

Anyone?

Casey? Hello.

Thank you.

Hi.

What were your favorite cult activities?

Good question.

Do you need the cult activities that I would do today or from the past when everybody showed up to an office?

Yes.

That passed.

Yes.

Okay.

And present.

Okay, I'll give you all of them. So I think you have to like any activity that has your thought and your ingredients of your mission and values and like, your moral compass in it is helpful. So, like, we did kickball game. And, you know, it's kind of an equalizing sport. Probably I'd change it to pickleball now, but most people can kick. I mean, mine didn't go very far, but every quarter we did some kind of equalizing thing. But the big part was we always had a charitable act after. So we made like, when we were 150 people, we made 10,000 sandwiches. And I didn't just have people come pick them up. I made everybody. I had to really push for this because they were worried it wasn't sanitized. Push to walk them over by hand. Right. So making people feel things, right? What you want to feel like, what that. Like, think about in your childhood. What were some of the team environments? It could be with your family, or it could be a group of friends or a club or sorority. Fraternity. And were there moments that you felt just. It just was. Everything was in sync and you loved it. That's how you have to make your cult. That's how you have to put the ingredients in remote world.

I would but talk about specifics. So, like, we celebrated with cupcakes. Everyone likes cupcakes.

Are you taking my thumb?

Yeah. They want, like.

No, no, no.

She filled up an office with balloons. Like, literally, you'd walk out and it was like balloons.

Every anniversary, effort matters. From the small thing, the founders effort. Every time there was a birthday, I didn't care. We got 370. Like, we wrote handwritten notes. It wasn't Somebody else writing them handwritten notes. Happy birthday. Here's a Starbucks gift card. Right. So there's a lot of intention, and I hear so many founders saying, I don't have time for it. It's not going to matter. Handwritten touches absolutely matter. The bobbleheads, well, that's a different story, though. But basically, I would hire and fire people within 30 to 45 days. I just knew whether they were going to be able to pivot to a different role or we hired them in the wrong role, or if they could actually keep up the pace. So if you made it through a year, I gave you a big presentation, like something that was uber expensive because you made it. You were a deal maker. Right. So we had custom bobbleheads that look like you. And these were just. I still have my massive badges of honor and goofy stuff like that in the remote world where we are. And I tell every portfolio company this, where is your budget as founders and leadership team? To travel to see everybody. If you can't come all in. Right. Twice a year at least. If not four times a year, you should be going to the hubs and doing these things. They don't take much. Right. I mean, these zoom happy hours and the games you're playing, that does nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Part of, like, you know, part of a cult is, like, symbols and stories and traditions. And so doing the quarterly meetings, everyone knew they had to be there, and.

They couldn't miss them.

Seeing a bobblehead became almost a religious artifact.

Yeah.

You know, like, cupcakes became, like, a thing. That's why I also, you know, wasn't very healthy at the time because I was eating with clients and not working.

And also we. The other thing is about, like, the positive cult. And I think founders forget this. And almost we sometimes forget it. You have to celebrate the wins. It's really easy to forget to do that and just push to the next goal and be like, awesome, we did it. Let's go. And you have to stop and celebrate the wins with the team and make it intentional. And maybe that's free food or maybe that's, I don't know, a spa day for whomever did the thing. And we did spot bonuses a lot. We thought that was really helpful. I also really called people out.

That's only people like money, though.

Yeah, of course. But, like, I called people out a lot in meetings for little things, like, hey, you know, I was over here and I saw this happen, and that was awesome.

You had a question? Yeah. There's the mic.

Hey there, Anthony. Masuchi.

So, shoveling shit. How much did you debate the title? How long did it take to settle on it? And were you worried about the curse word and Amazon and the whole world pushing against it?

We had thought first it would be entrepreneur, but it was taken. And there was a company in London that was suing. I don't know how they could sue across, but they were suing companies in the US that was using any alternate word with entrepreneur in it. So it was a really big bummer for me because I thought that was really good. And Mike had kind of come up with that a long time ago, at least in the US and then we kept, like, debating, and then we just, like, we couldn't think of anything else. Cause this is all you do. I mean, it could have been, like, punched in the face every day, but I didn't think that was like.

But we did debate, like, shit, do we want to go there?

Like, it won't hurt us.

Yeah, we won't get the lists because of it.

And we can't get ads.

You know, we can't run ads on Amazon. We're doing podcasts where they're. I don't think, like, I don't even think they're looking at it before they have us on board. And then they're like, oh, shoveling leap. But at the end of the day, we. We felt that it was an honor, like, we were honoring entrepreneurs, not, like, shining the turd, sugar coating it. A big part of the book, like, one of the lessons is don't shine the turd, right? And once we figured out the title, we went all in. There's like, you know, poo poo on the poo poo on the COVID Well, we got kids here, but, like, you know, you see the COVID it's like, first we're like, well, do we want it on people's tables?

No. And I was like, no, this is.

Now we're, like, all in.

It's gonna be epic.

You're gonna put it even. Like, the poo from your hand gets on the COVID Well, like. And then Cass planned an amazing event at the New York Sake Exchange, which was for those who were there. And I see some of our community here. It felt like a buddy media event. It was warm and personable, and everyone felt recognized. And she had giant covers, like book covers with holes that you had to throw toy plastic poo poo through to get prizes, right? So once we went there, we went all.

Every entrepreneur got a gift because we wanted to celebrate them. So goes back to Culture, gifts matter. So first of all, thank you for that. It all resonates so much. I'm also just started my second start with my spouse, so it hits home. A quick question about the hiring and firing fast. Yeah. How do you know to differentiate between a situation when an employee doesn't perform well, but maybe it's time to coach them, mentor them, versus it's really time to. So how many employees do you have now? So currently, because we're early stage, it's just us three co founders. Previously I had 20 employees. It's going to be in the beginning, like from 0 to 25ish employees. You don't have time to coach. You just don't have time. So you've got one shot. You can move them to another position or you have to get rid of them. You cannot spend your time. That would be like at 500 people interviewing everybody, you do not have time. So you need someone who's going to hit the ground running, wear multiple hats if you feel like something's not working. First of all, you probably hired the wrong person and put them in the wrong position. Right. You do not have time to do that. When you have managers, then you have time to actually sit and coach and mentor for a bit. But again, you gotta get to profitability.

There's also this concept that one of our founder CEOs shared, who happened to win seven Super Bowls, that the best teammates are ones you don't worry about. And with 20 employees, you're basically a team, right? Like, you're traveling together, you're like tight. And the best teammates in sports, like, you know, they're practicing, you know, they know the plays. You don't worry about them. Like you, he's a quarterback and he just knew that Gronkowski was like going to be in the right spot. Other teammates, he was always worried, oh, he's going to screw up the play, he's not going to know it. And so like, that's the problem. Early. You're like, you're in a meeting, hey, I need you to do this. Or he, he or she agrees to do it, and then you come back and it's not done and you're like.

In the beginning, they're out.

It just like takes down the whole organization early.

Hello.

Hi.

Can't wait to read the book. Sounds really good. I'm also working with my wife for 10 years.

This is awesome, love.

Recently we started.

I started a startup, but I realized after bad experience with another co founder.

That my wife is my Venus and.

She'S probably the best co founder, but we have concerns because we're raising three kids.

The fourth is on the way. Congrats.

Thank you.

You're concerned about what you don't do.

Whether you absolutely, absolutely don't do. When it comes to personal relations in front of other people in the company.

What you don't do, meaning, like, do. Are we. Are we sharing everything with, like, how.

You prevent fighting in front of others?

I mean, honestly, like, we didn't.

I mean, look, it's all out there. I mean, Dina works with us. Like, we're very aggressive.

I'm. I will say, like, I think you're.

I'm comfortable to start, but it's just how we are.

Like, I don't. We don't. Like, we learned a language of just radical honesty. And so we just. Look, I mean, maybe the kids at work got nervous, but they saw us coming back over and over again. I think you have to be exactly who you are at all times and decrease the space between you and a team. I think that's the only way to move forward. And you have a unique opportunity to show a superpower of how you both get along and have this amazing family on the side. Right. And you can lead a team through things as well, and you can use those skills and kind of exchange them. So I wouldn't try to be different Personas. If you fight, I mean, I would say that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. And it also gives people the permission to also be honest, which is what you also want. Does that help? Okay.

And I love.

Yes, we do. We would. Yes.

What I love about couples working together is there's no option to fail. You're in it together. Right. There's no, like, someone has a high paying job, and this is another one's just trying to make it work. You have a shared life that you can change your future generations by, like, succeeding. Right. By working smart, by creating wealth.

And you also have the best support system in each other because you know exactly what's happening and you don't have to make excuses about why you didn't show up for X, Y and Z.

Hi, I'm known as Coach kj. Sorry, no. I have another couple of questions, so you might be onto something. I was just wondering, how is it difficult to navigate just the personal relationship with the business, just having somebody that.

Your business partners with?

Well, Mike had this thing when we started all of our companies together that we went on date nights on Wednesdays and Saturdays as soon as we could Afford a babysitter even if we didn't go out. So it was like time for us and we made it. Like, we didn't miss it. We've missed a couple times because I think of book events, but we just didn't miss it. And yes, we talked about work some of the time, but we then also talked about our family and things we were looking forward to. But the other thing that we did is we had things that we did together that wasn't work. And so for the people who don't have their spouse as their co founder, you have things you do together. Well, we did too, and we still do. So we really focus on that, if that helps. Yeah.

Last one, last one for Sammy.

Sammy, what would you consider success in, like, a company? Really, really good question. So I think you can define it for me. I had a very different look of success than I think Mike, and Mike was really focused on numbers, right? Revenue and profitability. But for me, I was looking at how many people could belly laugh in a day and show up the next day and do it again. So I was tracking, like, just, were people authentic? And could we, could we make fun of ourselves? Could we, could we have a good environment? That was success for me if I could create a team that could laugh together and show up for each other.

I think at the end of the day, the best companies solve a real problem for their customers. So you could take everything from Apple, right? They help us communicate to. What's your favorite company?

I don't know.

Are you a Nintendo player? Are you Minecraft PS5? Yeah. So, like, life is. So what's that problem? Right? Life can get boring. That solves boredom. It's fun, right?

It's entertainment.

And so if you could create something that impacts one person's life in a positive way, there are probably more people like that, whether you're a restaurant, right? Like, I like pizza. So, like, there have been a lot of pizza places that have impacted my life positively and negatively. And that at the end of the day, businesses have to be in service to their customers. And if you're not, you're not going to be around.

And that's why we pivoted, you know, three times.

Yeah, we change because we. No one cared what we did until they did. Until they did.

Good question.

There's no one better than your pops at this, right? Like, the cloud space was really like companies trying to manage all these apps and it wasn't until better cloud that they could actually do it from a centralized area. So that was a real pain point.

Thank you, cast Mike. Thank you. Really, this was amazing. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming. All right, we're done.

Is that a wrap?

Thanks, buddy.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week.