Bringing the Classroom to Learning Enthusiasts with Steven Cox

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You want tech and tacos? Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keep accountants counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping Fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach. Tech leaders who who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon. SDTechOS with your host, Neil Bloom.

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, San Diego's tech ambassador, and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

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And welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I am thrilled to have on longtime startup community colleague and friend, Steven Cox, founder and CEO of Takelessons. Stephen, welcome to the show and it.

Is an honor to be with the world renowned Neil Blum.

Hey, you know, we've been at this for a bit. It's been really fun to grow the community together. I think Takelessons might have been one of the very first stops of the startup crawl for Startup week back in 2013.

I think you're right. Yeah. And we were old timers even back then. I think we'd been around for, gosh, three, four, five years back then, back before I had gray hair. I have a couple more strands of gray than I used to. So but yeah, it's been quite a ride. I think back then, gosh, there was just a handful. We were struggling. Okay, who has enough money to buy people beer so they can stop by their office? There's sort of that sort of thing. It wasn't a lot to pick from back then.

Yeah, it was kind of what are the cool offices that we can host things at? It was you. It was digital telepathy and Evo Nexus eventually came around and gave another home, which was another cool spot.

Right, perfect.

So why don't you give us a quick 1, 2 sentence overview of what takelessons is and then we're going to dive deep into it, its founding story later.

Sure. Well, I think if you're like, I think the folks that you here have on the broadcast are similar to you and I in which we consider ourselves learning enthusiasts. We constantly like to learn and love to learn. We think it's not only just cool, but also very important. Just a personal growth or what have you. So that's kind of who we serve and what we help is we help those learning learning enthusiasts connect with very talented instructors to where they can take either in person classes or live stream classes. And with COVID guess which one people are choosing, right? So a lot of livestream going on right now, but it's in subjects arranging and there's about 300 different subjects ranging from things like sign language to guitar to some computer skills and chess as a matter of fact with, you know, with the new Netflix special that's on. So we see all of these sorts of things that people are just kind of learning and wanting to learn and better themselves. Not necessarily from an academic viewpoint, but just because of personal growth.

Wow.

Exciting. Especially right now and I'm excited to hear. Question I always like to hear from you is like, what are you learning on your platform these days? So we'll get to that because I know you're always taking some new ones on. But I want to get to know how you found your way to San Diego. And this is not a old timer answer. Tell me about how long it's been. But how'd you find your way here? How'd you find your way into Texas?

So yeah, I'll certainly tell my age here. So I kind of did a round of the Internet back in the first phase before the market crashed. What was that? 98 or so. So we got involved in the Internet in 96. There was a B2B E commerce software play back then that we'd ship out these disks that users would use to buy things over the Internet. And it was more of a B2B sort of operation. And that company actually took off, did really well and went public. And during that time, my territory in my, I was a sales rep and my sales rep territory area was here in San Diego. And I purposely picked that because way back in the day I had this feeling when I was living in Ohio, you know, trudging through the snow in November and December, that I'd see these like palm trees in Southern California. I'm like, I'm going to live there one day. And so, you know, when I had an opportunity to pick an area, I chose Southern California. And my or one of our clients was SeaWorld. So I got to come down and visit quite a bit and help them install software and just fell in love with the place as soon as I, I remember the very first time I flew into San Diego, you know, if you're coming and you're flying into San Diego, the city is on the left hand side of the plane as you're flying in. And I remember I was in the seat and I just looked over the city as we flew in and the sun was setting, the water was there and I just knew, I said, I need to be here, this is where I want to be. And I just made my way to where after that company did really well, I had an opportunity to move and I chose San Diego and I've been here ever since. And that was in 98. And I've also been in tech since 98 as well, both doing other, either other startups or working for companies like Cisco, et cetera, or doing my own thing.

Wow, sounds like you almost moved without really knowing what the tech ecosystem landscape was in San Diego. And you said, you know, I got to be here and I'll make it work right there.

Probably wasn't much of a tech ecosystem in 96 when we moved in. I remember it's like, this is going to be cool. I'm going to stay downtown. And I tried to stay downtown and there wasn't any hotels. And I was like, oh, well, I guess I should say I think I had ended up staying in Mission Valley or somewhere. But it was a very, a different world back then and we've certainly as a city, I'm very proud to say that we've come a long way.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I know that shortly after, maybe a year or two after you showed up in San Diego, you were part of collegeclub.com, which has kind of got some lure to it to some of the first Internet bubble phase. Can you give us a little bit about some experience of what that was like being a part of it?

Yeah. College Club was one of these under known, understated companies that not a lot of people understood or knew what was going on there. But in a nutshell, what they wanted to do was create community for college students, which is suspiciously what Facebook ended up doing just a couple years later. So I honestly think that they were. It was led by a guy named Mike Posty, who was always a brilliant thinker, ahead of his time and thought. And he had this idea that, you know, we could build this community and people would bond. And so that site went from, I think when I joined it was like 1918 people with a little office in Mission Valley over in cahoots, by the way. And we built that thing to where it turned out to be. I think they ended up raising $110 million or so. It was the 40th or 38th largest site on the Internet back in the day as far as page views and users. And it was this idea that people wanted to connect and people wanted to be around other people. And we had frankly very no way to know how to monetize that at that point back in the day. But we ended up figuring it out. And there's a group of folks that came out of there a couple feet people like Mike Gulitz, who runs a tech company here in town now that does B2B software. Dmitry Shapiro, who was there and he is obviously doing AR VR work and worked for Google for a while and a host of other people who came out of that company with an understanding of just that you can create something, you can create something here. And it was just a, you know, it was an interesting ride. It went kind of straight up and then crashed and went straight back down. I think that's one thing I learned is that we wanted to build something that had staying power and wasn't fully reliant on the next round of VC funding in order to make it work. So that's kind of what I learned and took away from there. But a lot of great people worked there over time. In fact, Eric Berman is still one of my really good friends today. He was there and has a digital agency. So a whole lot of people here in town that are creating jobs for people came out of that business.

Oh, that's cool. That should be one of our next mafia pieces. The College Club Mafia. Do the family tree, right?

Oh, you know who else was there was the guys who Some of the guys that started GoFundMe.

Oh, okay.

Greg and some of those guys. Yeah.

Oh, that's really cool. We should track down that story, too. Interesting. So from there, did you. I mean, did you stay all the way through kind of the company blowing up?

Yeah, we stayed. You know, they needed revenue guys, and I was always. My job was biz dev, so they needed revenue. And so we stayed right to. Pretty much to the very end and kind of saw it all the way, kind of up and down as well. And just, you know, I was still in my gosh. Yes. I think I was still in my 20s at the time, and it was just a great learning experience. Not everything went right. Certainly lots of mistakes along the way. But I think when you're cutting new ground and pioneering new areas, you know, you're bound to make some mistakes, and that's part of the journey and part of what makes specifically Internet entrepreneurship great.

Yeah.

So how did you find your way to your own entrepreneurial journey? Where did you eventually take the leap from?

So I did that gig, and I had done another. Again, another startup, and that actually then went public, paid off. So I was doing some work in consulting and working for Cisco, big giant corporation. And pay was great, but it just didn't feel like I was making a difference. And that's something that I always felt like I needed to do was make a difference in what I'm spending my time on. And. And in addition to that, at nights and on the weekends, I was always heavily involved in music, and I was in bands in high school. I paid my way through college by DJing and joined a rock band, really, for fun. And, you know, I was not that good, frankly, but I was the lead singer of the band. Did pretty good at songwriting, but that's about the extent of it. And we'd go around and we'd play and was doing 40 or 50 shows a year. And my drummer, his name was Enrique, had a master's degree in music. An incredible human being lived up in Encinitas here. And I remember he was just a phenomenal. Not only just person, but also a drummer. And he came to me and he's like, hey, man, I got to quit the band. I'm like, that sucks. You're the only one any good. And he's like, well, I can't help it. But what had happened is he and his wife, they were trying to buy their first house up in Encinitas, and they just found out that they had their first baby that was due, and he's like, listen, I've been doing this music thing for five years since I graduated, and I can't find a way to make money. Like, I'm struggling, and I've got to choose my family over my career here. So I'm going to quit doing music, and I've got a job lined up at Chili's Restaurant in Mission Valley. He didn't want to cook, hated cooking. But, you know, there comes a time in your life when you look at those sorts of things and go, okay, I need to do what I need to do instead of what I want to do. And he felt like he was at that point, and frankly, it kind of pissed me off. I'm like, here's one of my very good friends, incredible human being who couldn't figure out how to take his degree that he had spent thousands and thousands of dollars on and turn it into something that he could live off of. And so I said, well, see if we can help. I said, are you. You know, are you playing gigs? He said, yeah. I said, are you teaching? He said, well, I've got my poster. It's hanging up at the drugstore or on the telephone pole with all those little tabs down at the bottom, you know? And he goes, no one's calling me. And I just can't figure out how to get students. And I said, well, why don't you use the Internet? He's like, I don't know how to do that. I'm just, you know, I'm a musician. I can't figure that out. And so I said, well, I'll help you. And back then, the only way to find someone online was creepy, like, through the. Like through Craigslist. You know, it's like some weird dude's gonna show up at your house to spend time with your kid. And it wasn't like, a great experience, especially with, like, all the, like, Craigslist killers back then, if you remember those days. So we really set out to do something better for consumers than what you could find on Craigslist, and that is buy someone else over the Internet. And then they show up at your house and they're actually cool, or you can show up at their studio and there's a rating system, and you know, what the prices is, what prices are, and it just works. So it was the foundation of what now is known as a Internet marketplace model. And then for. On the instructor side, we found out that there were a lot of people like Enrique, who. They were very good at their craft, but really struggled when it came to Trying to make a better living doing what they love to do. And so our job was to put, put tools in their hands that helped them gain more students that they didn't have to handle. The scheduling, the marketing, the finding of the students and the selling, which they weren't very good at. And we handled that and they could just teach. And we found that there were hundreds of thousands of those teachers out there like that that could use our services. So we just launched it and then everyone came, millions of people, and that's the end of the story. No, that did not happen. So completely self funded out of the gate. I took my winnings from the IPO of our past company, plowed them back into to take lessons and struggled. So kind of the, you know, the typical story, we were in Mission Beach, I didn't take a salary, did any income for two and a half years. I recruited a team and could all pay them 500 bucks a month to come to work for us. And we recruited a great, unbelievable team of talented individuals who believed in the dream that we could help people find a great instructor and help instructors make a better living doing what they love to do. And so it took us From, I think 2006 to 2009 to really get product market fit. And then that was suspect even then on whether we actually had it or not. But things like that, like iteration schedules, product market fit, all these things, they weren't a thing back then. Like no one, you didn't hear those sorts of terms. They just didn't exist. So all we knew is that people weren't buying our stuff enough and we needed to do more. So it took a while to figure out, but we stuck with it and finally was able to move out of my third bedroom into a little office downtown. And we just built from there and raising a little bit of money here locally with again, like what you talked about a little bit earlier about you're putting together those connections between entrepreneurs and new companies. That's kind of how we got funded out of the gate. So I put my money in like my buddy Eric Berman put some money in Steve Martini here locally. He's like a commercial real estate guy. He's like, yeah, throw some money in. And we raised money just from friends and family and people like Jeff Smith and Nadav Wilf, who had businesses here, Internet businesses here in town. And that's how we funded ourselves there. You know, there wasn't any venture money to be found. We probably couldn't get any anyway. So, you know, San Diego really funded that Very first effort for us to get off the ground and we would have never been able to, I don't think even raise money in the Bay Area at that level. So, you know, I'm super appreciative for the opportunity to present and for people to believe in the story way back in the day.

Yeah. And for you to take. I feel like you taking a swing on downtown was a big deal back then too, right. There wasn't a lot going on, I've got to imagine then.

No, there wasn't anything. I mean we, we were looking for office space and we found like a little space above the, the comedy store on 6th Avenue. It was a loft and you know, there were no co working spaces or anything like that. And there was maybe two or three companies downtown that, that were, quote, Internet sort of companies and that was it. That was pretty small.

Wow.

I know. At some point we shared some VC investors. When I was at hired, we had Crosslink Capital who I think came into year round eventually. Were they your first institutional funding?

Yes. So they came in in 2012 or 2013, right around there. But they were the first Bay Area, Sandhill Road sort of institutional investor that came into the business. And so they've been with us every step of the way and we're super happy to have them involved and they're still a wonderful partner for us.

Did you work with Eric Chen?

I did.

Okay.

Yes.

Awesome. Really cool. Sounds like at some point you got past that mvp, you got some traction and you're starting to pour some gas on the fire. Take us kind of fast forward where the business kind of went through up tilt maybe. Let's go right. Tilt Covid before. Because I've got to imagine Covid is a different kind of inflection point.

Right. So you know, again, I'd love to say, you know, things are just like up and to the right and everything's perfect and gosh damn, it's just never been our story. It's always been a, it's always been a struggle to find exactly, you know, where we fit and how we fit and who the competition is and how you compete against technology, other technologies as well as. And competitors. So you know, for us, you know, we, we self funded, got to the. Got to a point where we were running at break even and a profit, started doing some big deals where we had to raise additional capital. That's when our institutional money came in in 2012. And as we all know, the venture sort of game is you take a lot of money and you use that Money for growth and don't worry about profitability, it's just grow, grow, grow. So you know, that's kind of what we did from 2000, say 13 to 20, continued kind of this growth sort of trajectory. And during that time we went from being profitable down to losing 3,4 million bucks a year, which again is fairly typical for those of you who don't know that's kind of the way things progress in the, in the Internet space. But we got to a point where our management team couldn't justify taking more rounds of capital just to pay for Google AdWords and, and acquire customers at a loss. So we had a real heart to heart meeting with our board in 2016, 2017 and we said, listen guys, we can go out raise another big round. Everyone gets diluted and I don't know that we're going to get much further with the cost structure, the way that pricing keeps going up to acquire users. What we would rather do is control our own destiny and get profitable and spend money on profitable growth, not just growth. And we had the battle. So not everyone was on board at the board level. But eventually the board got it and understood and that's exactly what we did. So we chose to reduce the amount of capital that we needed and we went from a $4 million loss, ish, to every year just ticking away at that to where now we run a board, very profitable company that can pay for itself and we don't need a dime of investment at this point. So it's, you know, that's kind of where we wanted to go to is, you know, at some point you either burn out and you sell for 2 or 3 cents on the dollar or you find a way to pay for your own way. And that's where we were. So I'm happy, really proud of the team, proud of what we built that we did find product market fit. We were able to expand profitably, expand and again we're, you know, we're at a point now where, where we're doing, doing well and people like us, I guess, I don't know, we'll see. But so that, that's kind of up to Covid now at Covet and Beyond. What we found that happened was we didn't, you know, everything happened in February, March. No one knew what to expect. And I have lots of friends here in town that are in the restaurant business, that are in the hotel business and they're still and will be seriously struggling for years, probably years to come as they continue now to try to build up their Cash that they had to spend. So we all, as San Diegans, feel for our small businesses. We feel for those restaurants and those hotels that are struggling. And I think we're all supportive. And I try to buy as many to go cocktails as I can these days. For us, what's happened is, you know, people started staying home more and with that, what they wanted to do is they took it up, took up learning, and we were very well positioned to take advantage of the folks, take advantage of the situation of people wanting to learn. We had taken years and invested in a platform that allowed people to learn over the Internet, kind of an education first sort of program that we'd built out over time. And when Covid hit people immediately kind of, I'll give you an example again, we offered in person lessons as well as online lessons. And in person lessons up to Covid made up 60% of our lessons and online made up 40%. And on the trajectory where we were going, we figured it would take another five years for that to reverse.

Right.

And what happened is we went from 60% in person to 4% in person in five weeks.

Wow.

Yes. And so our online business went from 40% ish to 97% in five weeks. And we didn't lose a single customer. So we're super, super just appreciative that, that our tech team and our product team had the foresight to keep investing in where we thought the market was going to be eventually. We just had, we didn't have any idea that it was going to take or happen as quickly. But what Covid did is Covid accelerated what was already on the table. It didn't fundamentally shift to where people were, oh, they weren't doing online before, now they are. It was that they were doing online slower. But now what's happened is the acceptance and the mindset is such to where it's kind of commonplace.

Right.

Think back when, when the iPhone was released, the idea of doing a FaceTime call on your phone was really weird. You're like, I don't know who's going to show up and what if I'm in my pajamas or something?

Right.

And that was just kind of the mindset. But you fast forward a couple years later or three years later, people are like, oh, I'll just FaceTime you. And it wasn't a thing.

Right.

But it became a thing. And I think kind of zoom calls or learning online or, you know, remote working was a thing that was happening anyway. And what Covid did is it accelerated those sorts of Businesses, those business practices, and those businesses who are involved in those sorts of things as well. So we're happy to be kind of in a position where we were able to help both our consumers continue to learn, and more importantly, you know, our instructor base, which relies very heavily on the takelessons platform. And they were able to keep their. Keep their income up and a lot of cases, even expand their income from. From where they were. So we're happy that we've been able to help a lot of people. It's also opened some doors that we didn't expect. For instance, we just signed a deal with the Waldorf Astoria where they're having guests come to the hotel and spend two weeks to a month there because they needed to get away, but they wanted to go to a safe environment. Lucky guests, I guess that's awesome. But they're fearful of their kids falling behind in school. And so they partnered with us to be able to provide in person, tutoring and experiences for their guests while they're at the. While they're at the resort. So we're seeing deals like that happen. We're seeing deals like we have now charter schools that we're helping kind of add as an adjunct. As an adjunct curriculum for what they're already doing. And again, we were already kind of doing it, but Covid accelerated the need for charter schools and even some public schools to utilize our teaching base and to utilize our platform in order to continue to just make ends meet. So we feel pretty fortunate that we're in a position to help.

Wow.

Incredible. What a great wave to ride that you were already kind of cresting on.

And it's interesting, I'll say this, that one of my board members, Dane DeGrof from Triangle Peak, we were looking back at this and he said, you know what? He goes, I've seen this so many times in my career where there's companies and they're just, you know, they're doing their thing and, you know, some of them get frustrated and just end early or sell out too quickly. And then there's others that just kind of stick with it, and then a wave will happen or something will shift. That is a macro sort of environment. But you're there in the game, and when you're there, you're able to take advantage of helping or growing the business based on these macro sorts of trends that are already happening. And so I think that's part of. I think the message that I. And the thing that I learned is that sometimes the race is won by those who just Keep running and just not giving up and finding a way to continue to figure out how to help people and make your customers happy.

Yeah.

That's incredible. I'm curious, whatever happened to Enrique?

Oh, he still teaches for us today. Yeah, so he has two beautiful kids, still lives in Encinitas and teaches with us on the platform when he's not touring. Of course, he didn't do much touring this past year, but he tours with some really big Mexican artists all through South America sometimes as well.

Amazing. So he got to keep playing music. That's so cool.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, you've been known throughout, at least the time that I've known you running take lessons. I mean, he's one of the top CEOs and one of the top places to work in San Diego. And that doesn't happen by accident. Can you take us through a little bit about some print management prints, principles, attracting talent and kind of the culture you've always wanted and set forth.

Well, you're too kind. Thank you. Thank you for that. I guess it's better to be known for that than some of the alternatives. So I appreciate that. When I think about management structure, a couple concepts just generally come to mind. The first one, which is an obvious thing, is I really just try to hire people to run their area who can run circles around me. That's what I do. Like I don't want to be up in their Kool Aid. I don't, I don't. I just. If I have to do that, then I can't do my job. You know what I mean? So I really look for people who are great at what they do and great at hiring other people who are good at what they do. And if you build that sort of culture where it is a kind of a non protective sort of no, no fiefdom sort of environment, people have the ability to flourish. They can, they can do their work. They don't have the micromanagement over top of them. And not only that, but they attract other people like that and it makes greasing the wheel a lot easier. So I think that's kind of the first thing that we focused on is just really a tremendous focus on hiring the right people out of the gate. Second of all, when we get it wrong, we try to remove people as quickly as possible as well. We've been pretty fortunate that we haven't had to do a lot of that. But when it does happen, we're pretty swift to move, but never quick enough. No matter what you do, you know, you always wish that you'd moved a little bit quicker. But I think that's kind of one of the key management principles. Second thing, we have a set of core values that we live by. And we've trained everyone in the company that when they're recruiting and when they're talking and interviewing people, that they're looking for, people who already believe the way we believe versus us having to convince them.

Right.

In other words, one of our core values is an ownership mentality. And what that means is we're not looking for nine to fivers. We're not looking for people who just kind of like punch a clock and never think about their job over the weekend. That doesn't mean that they're like. That they're struggling and can't break away from work. But what it means is that they just really care. You know, they treat the company like it's their own. And it's a mindset because it carries over into anything in life.

Right.

If you treat the company like it's your own, you treat it well. If you borrow a car and you treat it like your own, that's the same sort of mindset again. You see, it's a mindset sort of activity that we're looking for and we've trained our team on how to do that. Now, something else that we've done that early on, we made a mistake. We used to have an office overlooking the ballpark. I don't know if you remember that office where we were. Really nice office. It was looking over the ballpark. And back then it was kind of in the. We just raised another round of capital. And so when we recruited people, our ads kind of ran in this scenario where it was like, hey, if you want free dinner and beer on Friday and to watch the games, you know, for free, come work at takelessons. And what we got were a lot of people who like to watch baseball and drink beer and, you know, maybe some work as well. But what we learned was that our job description was actually attracting someone that didn't actually fit the sort of person that we wanted. What we wanted was someone who was great at what they did, highly respectful of other people and themselves, and was self motivated to get things done. Oh, and if they like drinking beer, that's fine too, right? That's kind of a perk.

But.

But first and foremost is we wanted that sort of person. And so we fundamentally changed all of our job descriptions to scare off people who just wanted to watch baseball.

Right.

And it worked. And it worked very, very well. So I think that's something I can, you know, coach other entrepreneurs is just be very, very careful about what you ask for because you may just get it right. So. So be careful and be thoughtful in the sort of person that you're hiring. Finally, I think the last thing that we do is we have what we call a culture camp and it's a couple day presentation where each new employee is a part of a kind of again, a couple day sort of activity where we walk through our history as a company, we walk through our core values and how we got to where we are and the stories behind why we chose the values that we did. It's like why is respect such an important value for the company? Well, we have very specific stories on why that's the case. Why is an ownership mentality in these sorts of ideas. And so it's a training so they can be brought up to speed as quickly as possible on how we treat other people, how we treat our customers, how we got to where we are and it shows them how they fit.

Right.

It's not just about here's where the company is, it's here's why you were chosen. You chose us and we chose you.

Right.

It's mutual. And the reason you chose us is you probably believe kind of how we believe in treating people right and we kind of believe the way you do. So it's a good fit. And those sorts of activities we have found have helped blend people into our environment and culture. Early to where our turnover is low. I think our average turnover for our, like our engineering department for instance, I think all of our people have now been with us for like six years now and above and it's just really great to see it. A couple folks have left and they've taken jobs with other local companies because they just need to try new things. But they're all really still good friends and they refer people to us so that that's kind of the best that we can hope for and we're just really, really proud of the team.

Absolutely. There's quite their own tech lessons mafia of people who've gone on to do other things. I think of Alan Cole, even Gina Ortega going on to that. Right. And so yeah, I know my own little group of people who have done their tour of duty through take lessons and impacting the community elsewhere.

I just had one of our early folks who was a. I think they interned for us and then they got a job and worked for us for a of years, couple, couple years and now they're one of Tim Cook's assistants, one of his 11 assistants in Austin. Actually, he's one of the main guys in Austin. So it's really cool to see some of those sorts of folks continue to expand their business acumen.

Yeah, absolutely. That's what happens when you're a talent spotter of talent spotters. You're constantly looking out for that. Well, I know you eat your own dog food in your own platform. I know you're always learning new things. What have you been learning lately on takelessons?

Yeah, it's a great question. I have been learning a new software program called Logic Pro X which is a music recording software. Again, we offer a lot of things, languages, academic tutoring, like I said, chess, or all kinds of these hobbies. For me, I've always kind of had a soft spot for music. It's kind of what I love. So Logic is like a massive recording system that you can can use in your home and or use it in professional studios. And so I've been taking classes on my platform on how to use it because it's pretty complicated, but I love it.

That's cool. Awesome. Any other big trends of I know you guys track pretty religiously your analytics. Like any interesting trends you saw during COVID of new skills being acquired or attained?

Yeah, that's a great question. So something that there's a couple things I'll point out that we've done. The first one is there were quite a few people that lost their jobs and we think that that trend might continue or at least folks will be in that situation for a while. And something we started was a program called Take Lessons Live. And the difference is is that instead of just one on one private lessons, now you can get small group live lessons. And while it doesn't sound like a big difference, it's a huge shift in the cost. So instead of private lessons being 150, 200 bucks a month, you can sign up on a subscription basis to take lessons live. And it's all the classes you can take for 20 bucks a month. So it literally cuts the cost down by a large margin and you still get attention, albeit not one on one attention from live instructors who are very well versed in and what they're doing. So we did that specifically. We saw this need for people who would be able to afford a better way of learning at a cheaper price. And so we've certainly seen that trend and that product has taken off, skyrocketed, triple digit growth. And we're happy to see that there have also been a lot of Trends towards like one of the. A couple things that have popped up for us is sign language has just exploded and I'm not sure sure exactly why. Frankly we haven't been able to track it to any sort of anything happening in kind of the, you know, pop culture. But that thing has exploded. It's up 3 or 400% over prior year just this year with people wanting or needing to learn sign language for some of it's been for work, some of it has been for just personal development and personal growth. So that, that's, that's a subject that we've seen and, and from a demographic point of view, this has been by far our highest year of adults, say 30 and above 40 and above who are taking classes. It has continued to trend upwards with more and more adults kind of reinvesting in themselves and taking the time to learn something new. You know, I think that, you know, it also helps with staying out of depression during COVID is if you're, you know, you keep your mind bright and fresh. And I think there's some of that going on as well. So we're happy to see all the adults who've joined take lessons.

That's awesome. It's incredible. I'm forgetting my sign language right now. Otherwise I was going to sign back to you, you know how cool that was. Maybe I need to get back on and take some refresher courses, but that's really cool insights to see what's, what's working. I love the, the recurring revenue model obviously that you guys kind of went to. It sounds a little all a masterclass style of kind of a buy all you can except with live instructors.

Right. I guess the difference is, is that we go a lot more in depth. I think, you know, it's great to get people in kind of like on a pre recorded contact. But I wasn't able to contact Samuel L. Jackson and ask him how to act. No, he wouldn't, he wouldn't take my call even though he's on masterclass. So the difference is, is that sometimes it's great for like that introduction, but when you actually need help or you need someone to actually spot your fingers on a guitar or listen to the linguistics on how you're talking within a certain language, you need that one on one help. And that's why we've continued to invest in live. We believe in it. It's always some, you know, something we've always done. And you see other companies, YouTube Live now, Facebook Live now.

Right.

All of these people are now joining on and we've been here for years, so we're glad to. We're glad to stay here.

Awesome. Well, congrats on everything. Of building a business that is here to stay, that's for sure. And being in the ocean when the wave came, you're in the game. But we got to know you've been in San Diego a long time. You were drawn here by the weather, maybe some of the food. This is the Tacos and Tech podcast. Our listeners look to us for every person's personal preference. Tacos. Talk to me a little about tacos.

Ah, tacos. So I kind of fell in love. There's a place underneath the bridge in Barrio Logan. Again, having offices downtown. I remember we would all pile in a car and truck it down the road to Barrio Logan. I think it's called Salud. And stand in line and order our tacos or burritos. Carne Asada was always the hit of the time and I haven't been there in a while because I'm vegetarian pretty much now. But nonetheless, I'm sure they serve just as good vegetarian tacos as they do meat tacos. So check it out. Salud. Underneath the bridge and Barrio Logan. You're going to love it.

And we'll get you some vegetarian recommendations too. Make sure you still get your fill. For sure. Stephen, it was so great having this conversation. Super insightful. I'm glad to hear you're doing so well. Appreciate it. Thanks for the time and keep rocking on.

Absolutely. Great to see you again.

All right, thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co Working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Blum on Twitter eelbloom as well as Freshman Food Tech and Tacos in Tech Pod on Twitter too.

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