Building a 30,000+ Member E-Commerce Partnership Network with David Perry of Carro (getcarro.com)

David, welcome to the show.

Great, thanks for inviting me. It's great to meet you.

Yes, and I am excited to talk about Caro. We had a little demo before we started recording, which was great to see kind of the inner workings and the progress you've made with Caro. But I always like to start with, you know, for people who aren't familiar, what is Caro? Just kind of overview. I'd love to hear that first.

Well, Caro is really sort of thinking about what happened when COVID hit. If you— there was a lot of brick-and-mortar retailers just literally closed their doors and returned a lot of their stock. And online, you know, you had to really, really light up at that point and work out how you were going to survive and grow. And so, we were looking at the brands that were using our platform at that time, and we had so many. At this point, we have over 30,000 brands that we started to think to ourselves, look, there's a lot of A lot of traffic hitting the edge. If you look at this group of brands as a network, there's a lot of traffic there. Can we help them work together? Is there any way, you know, we came up with this tagline, sell more together. And so, the idea was very simple is, you know, let's say you have a bicycle store and I sell helmets. Well, why aren't you selling helmets? Currently, everyone that buys your bike is probably going to Amazon to buy a helmet. Why don't you have, you really don't want that sale in your cart. We have tons of helmet companies. Let us give you some choices. And of course, they already had a brand that they liked. They can invite them into our network if it's somebody that's not already there. And boom, they've got helmets in their store. So, what we're actually doing is we're taking the data from one company and putting it into another company's store. And so now, you can have almost an infinite amount of products without actually having to make the products and take all of the risk and fill a warehouse and have all the freight charges and everything else goes with it. So the idea was really just to optimize e-commerce based on working together. Our latest tagline is stop selling alone. It is stunning how many people are out there just trying so hard to sell their one product, but the whole business gets more efficient when you actually add some extra things into the cart. So you'll see that that's really the core of what we do.

Absolutely. And I have a background of being in e-commerce for a few years at a company. And, you know, we saw all the challenges that go along with e-commerce and inventory and warehousing and all the different stuff that kind of goes into that, which can be a lot for companies. And there is a need for this. But I'm thinking right away, when you hear, hearing with Kara, what you're doing, when you had this idea, what were you seeing in the market already at the time? And, you know, when you're doing some research around this, or talking to customers, did this thing not exist yet? Or like, what was at the time when you started this? Like, what was there kind of currently available? Or, you know, that you thought you had an in Yeah, so I'm actually from the video game industry.

I was there for like 30 years. Sony PlayStation bought the last company that I was one of the founders at. And I thought I was gonna retire and I got myself like this cool man cave and I built a photo studio and I was taking pictures. And then I realized nobody cares about my pictures. And so then I found that if I took a picture of an influencer from social media, then boom, everyone cared about my pictures. And so, it meant I was spending time with influencers and I started to realize that there's a bit of a breakdown. They never get to seem to work with the brands they want to work with. They're always working with just random brands. They keep trying to tell— people seem to think influencers are billboards, but they're not billboards, they're brands. And so, I sort of realized this and I started getting very interested in it. And I've been helping at that time, students, entrepreneurial students, and as an investor. So I would come in and give them advice as an investor. But I met this entrepreneur, his name's Jason Goldberg, and Jason was in the room helping from the other side. So he was the entrepreneur and I'm the investor, and he's got this idea and he's presenting it and the kids are all involved saying what they would do. And it forced me to really look at what he was doing. And he was building an app at the time to help influencers work with brands. And you can imagine this is very interesting to me. So, we end up having a conversation and he said, look, why don't you become CEO and we'll really do this? So, instead of trying to build it overseas, which is the normal way you would do it, we built a team in the US. And so, that was the path we took was this sort of authentic relationship between influencers and brands. But what we realized quite quickly is if you can get the brands first, Then the influencers really want to work with those people. And so we ended up having to sort of, sort of turn it around a little bit and go the other direction. But, but that's worked really well for us. And obviously, brands are very excited to use that.

That's a perfect segue to what I want to talk about with the brands. Take me through that in terms of how you were approaching which brands you wanted to work with, the types of brands you want to work with. I know you mentioned, like, 30,000 brands are on the platform. It's huge. How did you approach that in the beginning? And how did that kind of evolve over time to, you know, gain that growth in terms of the brand side of things?

Well, what's interesting, it is really hard to get brands to— the shields are up. Like if you go reaching out to them on LinkedIn or something, you'll find the shields are just up. And so it's quite hard to get to those people. But what we did is we would use some tricks. I mean, basically, you know, you say, well, who's the head of e-commerce at a brand? Well, that person's generally a normal human. They're not an influencer. They got 200 friends. They don't get many messages on Instagram. If you send them a message, they can't unread that message. They can't. Now they know. And the response is like, that's possible? I didn't know you could do this.

Yeah.

And boom, suddenly we have a conversation. What happens is it's common that they'll bring brands with them. And so, we see plenty of brands bring in 10, 12, 14 other brands. And so, you start getting that viral growth. What's really kind of crazy is we're at over 30,000 brands and we actually haven't done our first press release yet. We've written it. It's in process. It's getting approvals right now, but it actually hasn't hit. So, we— and our branding, we haven't actually done our final branding yet for our company. Everything you see, we just built internally.

Yeah.

But we have an agency right now working on proper branding. So it's been kind of crazy, but that's the fun part is if you offer them something that they get excited about, then it just starts catching.

Yeah. And one of the things I quickly want to go back to, because I just can't gloss over this point of you going from successful exits of other companies to starting back in the startup game again. For other people thinking about a new project, thinking about a different company to join, any factors that were helpful along the way for that in terms of, you know, joining, starting this new venture, joining with Jason, like anything that was helpful on the way that you were thinking through that was like, yes, let's go through this and start this again, because it's a huge journey to start another company. And especially for people who are starting for the first time, any insights you have on that, David, I'd love to hear.

Yeah, I've had, I've had multiple exits, actually, I've sold multiple companies. I once did The Matrix video games. And that company was acquired by Atari as well. And when you go through these processes, what you sort of learn is you start really respecting the job of investors. It's not, I can't tell you how many people are like, okay, I got like 5 ideas. And it's like, that's not what they want to hear. They want to hear one idea, like you're all in on one idea.

Yep.

And then they're like, yeah, but I can't start until they give me the money. And it's like, well, that's not going to work. Like, that's not what they do. They're looking— it's funny because when you think about what investors actually do, it's their job to protect money and to make money from it. It is not to just give money to ideas or to— I remember once Benchmark Capital invested into my last company and the partner there said to me, we don't invest in education. Like, we're not giving you money to go educate yourself on whether you've got a good idea or not. That's not the business they're in.

Yeah.

And so, you'd be stunned how many entrepreneurs think that that's how this all works. And so, how do you take away the risk? And that's usually what— once you start taking the risk away, like in this case, Jason had already done so much legwork that— and I had spent my time with influencers. And there was this guy at the time, his name was Casey Neistat, who was a big guy on YouTube.

Huge fan of him.

And Casey was once at an airport and someone pointed at Casey and said, that's Casey Neistat. And the airline, it was Emirates Airlines, they upgraded him to first class. And he then shot a video of him flying on this ridiculously expensive flight. He was taking a shower and he ended up with, I think that the total views of the videos he made for Emirates combined was like 190 million views or something like that. And so, you sort of look at the math of that and you go, that's remarkable marketing, right? And what did it take? It took one person to point at him. And so, that was one of the things that made me feel really excited about this was what if we did that at scale? Like what if we did that for every brand? Like we said, this is important. This person's really important. That person, you've got to take care of that person. And that's what we do. And so, we've done that over 7 million times now for brands. Wow! And, and that's why I got very excited about the potential of this and the scale. It's global as well, of course.

Yeah. And I've definitely— yeah, because I'm a big Casey Neistat fan, followed him for a while. I think a lot of people have. Obviously he's massive. And just to see that video, yeah, it blew up right away. It had tens of millions of views pretty quickly across all different platforms with that too. So coming back to then, Carl, you decided to obviously join. Carl, great idea. You love what you guys are doing there. What have been the challenges along the way? So you have a lot of brands you started with, you got on the platform, then you're gonna go brands first, then influencers. But what's been the struggle, the challenge along the way with kind of building Caro so far?

One thing I talk a lot when I, when I give speeches to entrepreneurs is always think about friction. And friction is every single second. And arguably, it's getting to the point where it's every fraction of a second. Now, it's every single click. And I know they know that, but they really need to understand that because they can disrupt anything they choose. There's nothing that you can't make easier, right? Every— I mean, if you think about the iPhone or something, did that sort of improve the relationship with being able to get stuff done on your phones? It was unbelievable. And if you think about it, like buying a car, I still can't believe the pain and suffering to buy a car, all these forms and all this nonsense.

Yeah.

And it's like you could disrupt any of these spaces just by making it easier. And so, that's a core thing. So, what happens is we come along and we say, well, we're going to make this easier. And we do. But you know what? We still haven't made it easy enough. And that's a never-ending— like I actually am now, I kid you not, we start our conversations with what's the zero-click solution, right? Is there a zero-click way to do this? Because I'll tell you, how well did Amazon do when they invented one-click shopping? Right? It fundamentally changed the whole concept of how much pain we were willing to take. YouTube came along, but before YouTube, you had to actually install video drivers. Like you would install video drivers, DivX and things like that on your computer so you could see video. It's insane. And so anytime someone comes along and just fundamentally makes it easier, that can be very disruptive in itself. And so That's something that we're looking at constantly. And what we're finding is that brands, retailers, these people have no spare time. They're literally making decisions at the airport when the flight's about to leave, right? They're still just trying to get the things done they need to get done. And it's so funny how many companies like, well, here's something. Can you please go and research that? And they have no time for that. They're not going to compare 5 different software packages.

Right.

When do they have time to do that? So generally, as long as you understand that in just about every industry, no one has time, you can have a lot of fun. You can really shake things up. And so that's definitely one that if I was younger and I was able to do more businesses over time, that's, I mean, I just would be looking constantly for how can I go in and just cause craziness? The last company was cloud gaming. So the idea was just to get rid of consoles. Sony bought the company and then built it into the PlayStation. And you know, someday you will not need the console. You just know that's coming. But if you start working that direction, usually that puts you in an interesting place that people start paying attention. So that's just the way I usually think about things.

Yeah. And that's, I mean, people, if you don't know, you sold it for a lot of money. $380 million is what it said online. Then $47 million was your other company. So obviously massive exits for those. those ones. Knowing that, so from those experiences, then taking, you know, massive successes there into this company, like, what are your expectations for what you want this to become? What you want Caro to become? You know, how are you going to build this? Anything different that now you know from having had a couple exits? I'm curious about that.

Well, yes, there's this thing that I call the X factor. I remember on our last company, we did a deal with Walmart so that you could stream video games from walmart.com. And then the minute Best Buy saw that running, they're like, we want that. And they signed their contract. So then the X factor to me is, do you think we can get Target if we've already got Walmart and we've already got Best Buy? And investors will go, yep, I believe you can get Target. We didn't get Target, never even talked to Target, but I get the credit for having Target. And that's the way True scaling companies operate is you have to prove a pattern of it works, but you don't actually have to get all those deals done for someone to believe you. You have to prove that it's there, people want it, and then they'll give you the benefit of the scale that can come from that. And if you think about the scale of this, and I mean, I showed you our actual data so you can see all the connections that have formed already.

Yeah.

You know, what I would call pre-marketing is unbelievable. And so I see huge global potential for this. We have a lot of work to do because we have to support all the currencies and all the, you know, all the sort of tax laws globally. But we have some really interesting investors we'll be announcing shortly that are going to help with that. And so, you know, scaling to that sort of massive global size, what is the value of that company? And I, I'll give you an example is Walmart, I heard, has 120,000 suppliers. I think that's the latest data from them. And we can get to that. That's not crazy, right? We can get to 120,000 suppliers. So, what does that mean? Like when you start, what when we have more suppliers than Walmart? And So large competitors of Walmart have invested. So, you know, it's interesting to see the potential of this globally. And that's why I decided to jump in because I think this is a very, very big space. It's e-commerce. It's like a trillion-plus dollar space. It's not, you know, video games are huge. So, you know, but And when you take ecommerce and combine it with social media, because the future is the two merging, that's going to be even more crazy.

With that too, so you mentioned the investor side of it, but just even thinking of that for, you know, your business and seeing the potential, do you see it as like winner-take-all market, you have to raise as much as possible to get to this point of getting to that growth you mentioned? Or how are you just viewing, you know, funding and raising money for your business? Fundamentally, the fundraising side of this with this business after, you know, you started a little while ago, and now you've seen those growth numbers, you've seen the number of people on the platform, how are you thinking through fundraising with Kara?

Well, it's actually quite a— we've raised over $30 million at this point. But in the process, you kind of, you want to take the least amount that you can to execute what you're doing, obviously, so you get the least dilution for you and your investors. But on the other hand, you have to get on with it. Like you can't sit around. People are happy to clone these days and they're gonna do their best. And so your goal is to just get on with it and keep building. We have, like I showed you some of the 3D graphics and things that we have, we have video game engineers on our team as well, which gives us just this different, we just think a little differently than a normal business environment where they would be like, that's impossible. It's not impossible when you bring in people that are used to pushing a lot of data. And so, the future is more actually data-driven. And what that means is you might see a surfboard you like or a snowboard or something that you think is really cool, but we can say to you, hold on a sec, that's the worst-selling snowboard on the entire market right now. Here, this is the best. And so, because we know what's going on on social media as well as knowing what's going on in retail and the the combination to give the highest converting things is very, very valuable. And so this whole, the fact that we came in through social media turns out to be an incredible asset of ours. An example of that is when you're trying to work out how to pair 2 brands together, one of the secrets that we do is we look at the sort of fingerprint of that brand socially and compare it to this one. And these brands have never met before, but it turns out they have really similar influencers, et cetera. And when you put them together, they're like, wow, this brand's really cool. And it's like, yeah, they're just like yours, right? And so you can use data in very innovative ways, especially with machine learning and things like that. So as part of the network, the goal again is just to help the brands grow. The one thing I want to be clear is Caro is not competing with the brand. So Amazon is constantly making private labels. and competing with the brands on their platform. We will not be doing that. So our goal is simply to help them grow, and if they grow, then, you know, all the boats lift together.

What went into that decision of, like, not having competing brands?

We have absolutely no interest at all in making product and, you know, trying to manufacture products, etc. I have no interest in that at all. We're actually more interested in helping the brands ultimately achieve their objectives, which would be acquisition or funding. So, you know, the areas you're gonna see us move into are more helping them get investment and funding because we've helped them grow. So, if we help them grow, we'll vouch for them and say, look, this company's going crazy. They don't even have to type a PowerPoint deck at that point, right? Because they are Literally, it's all in data. This company's killing it. And so we would try to help get them acquired or get investments. So overall, I think that the sort of the health of the network is entirely based on us focusing all our energy on growth. And there's no brand in the world that isn't interested in that. They want 2 things, attention growth, and then Oh, you know, funding or sale is fascinating to them long term.

Yeah, that actually— yeah, a lot of ideas come up with that in terms of you mentioning if you're focusing on that side of things, then you have all the data on all these companies. Like, are you going to make direct investments? So you're going to— I mean, what kind of things are you thinking of that you can share that, you know, I don't know what you can or can't share, but on that side of things, because then imagine then having all those metrics and stuff. Like, I think of just, for instance, I interviewed Austin Allred from Lambda School, and he does a lot of angel investing. And that reason being, he knows exactly who's hiring so many engineers, like who's hiring a lot of engineers, you can invest into those companies. Is that something you guys think about too? Like, how do you think about that?

Same thing. We've already have investors saying to us, do you know which brands are most healthy in any category? And we say, of course we do. And they're like, well, is there any way we could invest? And we just have to create the bridge. And, you know, and some brands are going to be like, that would be amazing. And that, and That's just another killer feature that we can add to our platform.

Yeah, it becomes really interesting. And one of the things that you talked about before I want to double-click on is you mentioned you think differently at Akaro and you have these gaming engineers as well. What other ways are you doing things a little bit differently at Akaro, maybe from other startups or things that you've kind of seen in the past?

I think one of the things to do is always listen to the people you're working with and your employees. We had this thing thing last Friday where we just, we had them all, there's this software called Figma that allows you to sort of, you can have this fig jam thing where everyone's typing together into a sheet. And so we had all these brains pointed the same direction and just to see the amount of ideas that came out of those people as they're actually, you know, they're just thinking about what would be amazing things that we could do for brands. And so, the space itself has an almost unlimited amount of room for movement. I mean, we came up with years' worth of ideas in one call. But if you listen to the brands, they've always got ideas too and things that they're seeking and wanting. And as long as you're listening, then our point is like, this is almost Your development team, when I talk to a brand, I literally say that to them. We have a whole team of engineers. Just if you have an idea of something that you think that would be amazing, then tell us, please don't hold that. I actually say to them, please don't keep it to yourself. We can set engineers on that and off we go. But what I do see is us starting to think about with so many brands, we actually start to get some negotiation power. And that's one that we've been getting asked for quite a bit. Is there any way we can get shipping costs down? And so my answer to that is, well, yes, if we can get more brands in, if I get to 100,000 brands, you can bet I'm going to be knocking on UPS's door and saying, let's talk. Let's see if we can get the cost down for all these people. And so that's another fun future thing is this idea of the network sort of providing its own leverage to help the network. And so, and one last thing that I think would be really cool is just to get more time with the brands helping each other. And so we've been putting a lot of thought into how to do that because there's always people in your network that are really smart that are willing to share. You just got to find a way to allow them to do it. So that's something we're working on as well.

With that too, with these different brands you have in your platform working with everything, you kind of matching them, what is there in terms of community, how you're building community, them engaging with each other, or is there a Is that a factor and an aspect of what you're doing as well?

Yeah, so that's a key piece of the sort of strategy for 2022 is to literally get more face time between brands, influencers, celebrities, and investors, to get them all interacting with each other in interesting ways. It's kind of required because sometimes to work with a brand, it's important that you actually kind of meet them and see their products and touch them and have that conversation. And so you'll be seeing us put quite a lot of energy into making that as seamless as it can be, again, as effortless as it can be as well.

Yeah, I think the community part is really interesting. We thought a lot about community at Vitalyze, so our venture firm, and we launched our angel community, you know, a month or so ago publicly, beta launched it maybe 3 or 4 months ago now. And Knowing how we can have these early-stage investments that are pre-seed, where we have a fund at seed, we can have all these you know angels that are both accredited and non-accredited because we're using leveraging crowdfunding, but then have these early-stage companies that we normally just have to pass off and not do anything with. Then we have this community we can invest in at the earliest stages and then invest in those best companies too. Then in the in the seed round, so you're building a community around this, and then entrepreneurs can get involved earlier with the vitalized brand. It's like I think you're seeing companies all across different spectrums, whether it be venture firms like. Even like Hustle Fund has angel community, First Round Capital has like an angel investing community. And then other brands and like ecommerce or whatever that are trying to do a community because they see the value of that and how you actually know the stakeholders and know the people involved. And that gives you your moat with your company as well moving forward, which I think is really interesting. And so we think about that all the time, hiring, hiring community person now with us at Viralize too, and how we kind of leverage that to grow.

Yeah, important. Another one is Republic. Have you seen Republic?

Yeah.

They've done quite a good job of getting a lot of— they can create quite a groundswell of interest around something new if it's cool. And I have a friend who raised like $11 million on there, so it's a real platform. Like, that's real.

Yeah, it's pretty impressive.

A previous guy that I worked with is the CEO of StartEngine, which is a Los Angeles-based one, and that's another really cool one. Yeah, I enjoy seeing these groups come together. And then exactly as you say, the more that they turn that into a community where they're all helping each other, the more valuable it becomes.

Yeah. And shout out to WeFunder who's helping us along the way. I gotta give that shout out. They're great. Yeah, we've worked with them for this whole process. There's been a lot of back and forth with it to figure it out because we're, you know, to get the crowdfunding side of it so we can allow NanoCredits has been interesting. And one of the things you talked about with this, I know we talked about before the interview started, but you showed me kind of different geographies and locations. You have all these different brands How are you thinking through that in terms of leveraging other countries or certain markets you want to get into with these brands? Or like, how are you thinking through that side of things too with this?

What happens is what I learned from the game industry is if you add 5 languages, you double your sales. And so that's, you know, it's very easy to build just for the United States. It's just so easy to just focus on that. But once you start thinking about the other countries in Europe and building for them, you can double your sales and then Asia is just another whole lift on top of that. So that becomes almost a guarantee. You can't, unless you can't do it for some reason, like it's just not technically possible, then you've got to think globally and that's certainly what we do as you can see by the way we present. It does get complicated when it gets into what we are actually offering, which is if you're an influencer, You could have your own store on Shopify, and yet you could still do a deal with a brand that's obviously not in your store, you might have never dealt with before, but suddenly you're selling their product. But wait a minute, you could be in 2 different countries doing that. So one person is selling in one country and one person is supplying in another country, which means that you have to think about the finances of that and how the money transactions, tax reporting, all of that kind of stuff works. And so, as a company, we're being, again, the way we tend to work is when you get into these complicated things and that you bring in big guns, you don't just sit there and try to solve it with the guys in the room. You're like, who are the big guns that we could bring in that would help with this? And that's how we tend to work. And we love it when they invest because then they're all in.

Yeah.

So, just know that's generally the way we think, but you have to think globally if your company can be global. It's not something you need to do day one, but don't design your company in a way that it's going to be a nightmare to open it up to the world. And if you do, again, that makes it very hard for your competitors that are all just focused on the US because that was easy. And when we were doing cloud gaming, if you think about that, that meant we had to have a ring of servers all around the world. And yeah. That's what we got to do. It's just, we got to solve for that, right?

Yeah.

You know, there's no— there are server racks in Tokyo. You can do it. And so, but you have to accept that that's going to be part of your plan.

David, what is it about entrepreneurship, starting these companies, whatever, that you're addicted to? Because you've had multiple now. It seems like, it seems like you just can't get away. What is it about it that just pulls you in?

The thing that I've found is I have to be in charge in some way because then I can actually feel like I've got some hands on the steering wheel.

Yeah.

If I'm way down and not able to get any control of the steering wheel and have no idea where we're going, that to me just doesn't work. And so I have this analogy that I use where you sort of look down a train track and You've got the way my analogy goes is there's a train on the track and that's your industry and everyone's on the train. So, we're all on the train together going down the train track. There's people who miss the train and they're running down the track trying to get on the train and be part of your industry. But there's also people that are trying to think ahead what's coming next. And so, the task for an entrepreneur for me is how far can you look down a track? If that existed, then what? Don't just say, what's that one additional step? What's the step after that? What's the step after that? What's the step after that? And once you look down that track as far as you possibly can, that's what you actually start working on. Because when you're heading way down there, when other people are just sitting on the train comfortably, you'll be seen as an innovator. And that's something that if you've got great people that can actually start executing that, you'll see people will get excited. Like, that's Elon Musk's every day. That's what that guy does every single day. He's looking way down the track, right?

Yeah.

Thinking, what can I do? And so, I think that's a fun creative exercise for any entrepreneur. It's just sit down and have a think about that. I mean, and then think of a business And then ask yourself, how could you— where— what would be the next step for that? Anything— Netflix, Amazon, anything— and start asking yourself, how would you— what would you do next? Where would that go next? And I think it's a very, very healthy thing to do.

Yeah. And that goes back to the, like, Charlie Munger and people were talking about, you know, mental models and looking at second-order thinking. That's the exact point of like, what is that next thing? Not the first— the first-order thinking, the second-order thinking, where you're thinking beyond that. I think part of that goes back to what you mentioned of just having the time. Spending the time, like literally spending the time to to read, to research, to think about what could be after the next thing or the next thing to get a feel for that. You know, and being on the VC side of things now, you know, we're always thinking about that on the investor side. You're like, well, what does this become next? So what if this happens? What does it become? You know, you're thinking about the potential of these different ideas from the investor side. You're really trying to think of those second order, you know, effects. And we saw that with the pandemic. People were a lot of people were guessing at what that might. Lead to in terms of second-order effects of the pandemic and how that evolves businesses and how that changes industries. When you look at industries like travel that were decimated during it, but then a lot of companies are coming out of that that are interesting because there's different ways of going about that. And we invest in future of work at Vitalyze. So we're thinking about how that evolves with remote work or distributed work or other things like that and trying to see what that next step looks like. And then is it going to be people that want to go back to the office because they just miss that camaraderie in some way? But what does that look like? And it's just fascinating to be in this industry and just talk to people like yourself to See what people are building next.

Well, it's also important that you're interested, right? The fact is you could, I could say NFT to you and you go, oh, it's not interesting to me. Or, you know, cryptocurrency. Oh, that's just stupid. I don't wanna know anything about it. That's terrible. You need to, you need to, you need to be interested. Even, it doesn't mean you have to go into every space. I used to give speeches in the game industry and I would say, who here has played Pokémon? And not all the hands would go up. And I would be like, are you kidding me? Like, you're in the game industry and you've never played Pokémon? This is terrible. And so you kind of have to, I think, well, you don't have to, but it helps if you're interested in what's going on. Why? Because that helps you plan that all out and sort of think about how this, you know, if you're not, if you never interact with influencers in any way, at some point that makes it harder to start working out what that space is and what their needs are and wants are and all the rest of it. So you have to just be interested.

Yeah.

And that's sort of, for me, the story of my life. I'm constantly— I'm literally learning Python right now between 11:00 PM and 12:00 PM at night, just before I go to sleep. Just because you kind of need to know what it does, how it works. I will do machine learning. I will get there because a lot of people are doing that on Python. And it's just one of those things. Do I need to? Absolutely not. But will it make me a little bit more dangerous? Like on a scale, it's like in a video game, you level up, it's plus 1. It's a plus 1. And so the more of those that you do and the more you find interesting, the better. And so I think that's a great DNA for entrepreneurs.

Yeah. There's so much to go into that we could have talked forever, but I know we're almost out of time here basically. So one of the last things I'm curious about is just with that 30 years of gaming experience. We've kind of already talked about a little bit how those past companies have influenced you now. But on the gaming-specific side, like, how do you integrate that? Or are you integrating that in any way, like into Caro, or any other ways you want to talk about that you're, you know, having that 30 years of gaming knowledge into how you're building Caro today as we kind of close things up today?

Yeah, there's this concept of gamification. And gamification is actually— I wrote a book on game design, it's like over 1,000 pages, stupidly big book.

It's huge.

And to save you wasting your time reading this ridiculously long book, it narrows games down to 3 things, which is skill, risk, and strategy. And in general, you start saying to yourself, well, what is an interface? And this is stuff I really want to get into in 2022 in our company, is what is the interface doing to be compelling? So, Are you in a way with the data we're giving you, do you have any controls? Like, can I pull any levers and can I see the outputs? Now, imagine I give you some control in the interface but the output won't be reported for 5 days, right? Is that interactive? Is that fun? You know what? When you run ads on Facebook and Google, it's kind of like that. You put all your stuff in. You hit enter and Nothing really happens. You don't suddenly— like, everything doesn't light up and you're not— you should— if I was designing that stuff, I would not want you to leave your seat. I would want you to literally, like, you put your— you decide what you're going to spend, where you're going to spend it, and it should just be fascinating what you see in real time that makes you not want to leave your seat, but something that's easy enough for normal humans to be able to really feel like they have some control of it. That's really what gamification is about for me. It's about making you feel like you have inputs. You're actually developing a strategy. Imagine the only input you have is one button click, right? There's no strategy to that. So, that's not fun. So, that's not gamification. I don't care what that button is. That's not going to get it done.

Yeah.

But if you can get to a point where you have those 3 components, skill, risk, and strategy, Skill just means you get better at it over time. You don't have to be great day one. Risk, if you take some risk, you get some reward. Welcome to the advertising interfaces of Google and Facebook. And strategy, well, that didn't work, but I think I worked out how I could do it a lot better. And you need to be able to do that in real time and change your strategy and see the results. So that's basically Just a core piece of what gamification is, but there are other things too. But the core stuff is to make it fun, like, is this— and make it interactive. So you can do that in many, many different businesses and software.

It'll be interesting to see how other companies kind of use that as well moving forward. And I know I have a number of friends from like my MBA program who are in gaming at different companies, building different games. And seeing just a little of a glimpse of what they're building is interesting to see how they're Increasing engagement, increasing every metric they're measuring on that to help the game along. And that industry itself is fascinating. It's exploding. It's huge. So we'll see how other companies leverage that as they think about it. And even with community stuff, we go back to again, just talking about how we gamify that, even leaderboards on helping companies, leaderboards on education. There's so many things we could do that's exciting to think about too.

Yeah, there's one that we've talked about internally is A leaderboard's a great example. Is there any way to make it so that the person who's in charge of using your software can take the results of this data and get a pay raise? It's a different way of thinking about what are you giving them. You're giving— at the end of the day, this person is your champion or your hero in the company.

Yeah.

So, what are you doing for them? You're always like, oh, I want this for me and I want this. It's easy to think about what your company desires. But this is your champion. So, what can you do for your champion? How can you get it and make it easy for them to present their success? And they did this. This is the impact they've had on your profit margins. And they did this and there's the evidence. You see how that's a more interesting report for them than just some silly dashboard, right?

Yeah.

So, it's just There's a psychology to this stuff, and I think that that's where I start to really enjoy it. We have the core platform, of course, but the really fun stuff is still to come, which is getting to play with all of those systems.

David, this has been a lot of fun. What's the best way for people to learn more about Karo and potentially connect with you as well if they'd like to?

Yeah, if they're on Shopify, they should definitely at least try it. It costs nothing to try it, and the website is getkaro. So, getcarro.com. And for me, they can find me on LinkedIn. It's, you know, with it, my name is just D. Perry on there. There's a lot of David Perrys in the world for some crazy reason. I once literally, I got invited to a David Perry party once. But if you go on LinkedIn, it's in/D. Perry, and that's me.

Perfect. Well, David, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. Appreciate it.

No, thank you so much. This was fun.