Reimagining a Disruption Proof Organization with Brant Cooper

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper countins 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 believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SDTechOS with your host Neil Bloom. Startups get the party startups get the.

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 Bloom, 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. This segment is brought to you by Cox Edge. Our longtime partnership with Cox Business has helped their engineering teams develop new tech products for small businesses and startups. Cox is investing in Edge capabilities and working with developers and engineers across the ecosystem to deliver ultra low latency compute solutions, helping customers to improve application performance and to reduce cloud transport and on premise infrastructure costs. Interested in hearing more about Cox Edge? Please visit coxedge.com and mention Neil Bloom or freshbroodtech.com for our partner discount. Welcome back to the Tacos in Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and man, I'm thrilled to have Brant Cooper on Brandt, longtime ecosystem friend, author of Disruption Proof, CEO and founder of Move the Needle. Brandt, thanks for joining the pod.

Hey, thanks for having me, Neal. Good to be here.

It is good to see you. Good to hear you. You've been battling during COVID and you've been in a lot of people's prayers and man, it's good to see you in here right now.

Hey, thanks man. I appreciate that. You know I do. I definitely feel the love from the San Diego startup ecosystem which I'm sure, we're going to get into, but there are some unique aspects to it that we can dive into. And so. Yeah, that's great.

Awesome. Well, you got a book coming out. You want to give us a quick one minute overview of what disruption proof's about?

Yeah, like we were just talking about, you know, I didn't set out to write a book, a Covid book or a pandemic book, but when you're talking about, I don't know, innovation or innovation ecosystems or tech or disruptions or startups, it's hard not to have brought that up. And so fundamentally the book is that we're not in the industrial age anymore, we're in this digital age. And I think disruptions like the pandemic are going to be ongoing. There's always going to be something. There was the ransomware attack that hit Scripps here. There's energy grid collapse, ships stuck in canals that disrupt global supply chain. So this is just ongoing. And so fundamentally, I think that our institutions continue to be structured and managed as if they're an extension of the assembly line in the middle of the industrial age. But we're living in this time of uncertainty, complexity, and we actually need to run our institutions, our organizations, our businesses differently, in my opinion, in order to deal with ongoing uncertainty. And so that's what the book's about.

Awesome. Obviously super timely, but like you said, it's always going to be timely. So we're going to peel back some examples on that. But let's take it back a bit because you have your roots, I know squarely in California, but I don't actually. Are you born and raised in San Diego or where are you from originally?

Yeah, my mom was born in San Diego. My dad was a Navy pilot stationed in Coronado when they met. I have a couple siblings that were born in San Diego. I was happened to be born during the, the year or two that was. My dad was up in the postgraduate school in Monterey. So I was born in Monterey, but San Diego is my hometown. I went to high school down here and my family's mostly from San Diego. So, you know, San Diego is definitely my hometown.

Okay, got it. Doesn't take long to be here also, by the way, to all of a sudden be a local?

Oh no, of course, yeah. Yeah.

But you did some stints up in the Bay Area too, right? Is that kind of where early career was?

Yeah, so I school at UC Davis, what about an hour, hour and a half east of the San Francisco Bay area. So after college I actually lived Back east for a couple years, and then I lived in the bay area for 16, 17 years, was really sort of on a trajectory of, you know, regular businesses, I guess. And then, and then in the late 90s 97, I joined my first startup. And that's really where I understood the difference between, you know, sort of entrepreneurial mindset and what, you know, sort of typical business was done. And then back in those days, you know, very quickly, this is another subject we could go down if we wanted to, but everybody taught startups how to act like a big business as quickly as possible. And after the bust, there were a number of people that were writing about, well, why are we doing that? You know, Steve Blank was maybe the most famous, but there was a lot of things going on. A lot of the digital thinking stuff was just starting then and bringing sort of human centered design practices into tech. And they had a lot of that sort of ethos as well, is that, you know, you can't just go build what your customers say they want. You gotta, you gotta, you know, dig in a little bit. So there was a number of people that were writing about that and talking about it, and, you know, I was sort of part of that movement and ended up writing the first book that talked about lean startup and customer development. I was down here in San Diego at that time and there was nobody that had heard of any of this stuff. The tech scene was not very big down here. We had the economic collapse and the Great Recession in 2000, 2008, the rise of the iPhone. So you had a number of startups that failed down here that were maybe satellites to Qualcomm, that no longer really had a viable business model anymore because of the iPhone. And then the venture capitalists that were around that time all were at the tail end of their funds. And so we just kind of slid into this mode where there was no vc, no seed, and really you didn't even know where the tech scene was. And so it existed, but it was sort of underground. And I think what was also interesting is that, you know, this was, it was sort of the San Diego was a hub for Internet marketers and there were sort of the black and the gray hats and at around that same time they were moving more towards the white hats where they were taking all of their Internet marketing skills and starting to develop real businesses out of it. And that's arguably who sort of led us out of San Diego, out of the. That transition from the Qualcomm style startup to really tech, mobile and software. And that was the beginning is the late, late 2000s. All of those people probably don't feel like that was the beginning. That was my beginning of finding the root, the real tech scene here in San Diego.

Yeah, that's super interesting. And we have a number of startups who started right around 2009, 10, 11, who are still private. Right. The classy Telium Seismic.

Take lessons.

Take lessons. Who just had an acquisition, but they started in 2006. These were companies who've been gutting it out, grinding it for quite a while.

That's right.

And have raised a lot. Some of them have raised a lot.

Of capital and not a lot of capital locally until the later rounds. Right. So. So it was really the Bay Area and even other places, boy, Boston and Austin. I think some of the money came from back in those early days.

Yeah.

So a lot of bets, but the bets weren't really happening here in San Diego.

So you start bringing people together for your events. That was kind of the first grouping and it grew to hundreds of people with demo nights and great speakers. What was that like? And obviously it was filling a huge void.

It's funny, it sort of goes back to my non entrepreneurial roots where I was sitting around between 2007 and 2010 going like, God, where's the real tech scene? Somebody really ought to organize this stuff, you know, and, and coming from the Bay Area, I had lived, you know, some of the good parts of the Silicon Valley culture and the San Francisco cult startup culture. And it was like, you know, that's what we're missing down here is some of that, the collisions and the serendipity and getting the people out in jeans and a T shirt and a beer, sharing their stories together instead of khakis, polos and business cards, which was to me what the San Diego scene was like then. And so finally I said, oh well, you're the one to do it. Right. So I just started organizing San Diego Tech founders and San Diego Tech Coffee and started trying to reach out. Like I went to all of the, the developer meetup groups and I went to all of these different groups, including some of the legacy institutions and said, listen, we need to do this stuff differently. Let's bring these people together in a different way. And started, you know, rallying that around. And they, they were very popular, not because of me, but because jeans, T shirts, great speakers and beer. I mean, and so that was, to me, that was, you know, sort of the beginning of the resurgence of San Diego under the new, you know, new technology, mobile and Internet. The Mentors back then were still asking, what's your IP portfolio? And that was an irrelevant question for the new digital age.

Yeah, I still remember some of the speakers, like Dan Martel, who I still have relationship because you brought him Justin Mares, which is a book. I still buy people, literally 2017 book. And it's still relevant, obviously still buy. We had Dave McClure.

Yeah, Dave McClure, Steve Blank, Eric Reese came. Yeah. Charles Hudson was a Bay Area VC that came down. Yeah. So it was pretty fun times.

And all that momentum kind of led to Startup San Diego's creation. You kind of had a bunch of people who really bought into and believed what you were doing. And by entrepreneur for entrepreneur, the Mel Gordon's and even Otterson and Falon and Austin New Decker came together and put on Startup Week the first year.

Yeah, we launched the San Diego Startup Week. And I guess I do think that, you know, I played a small role in the collisions that and the founding of Startup San Diego. And really it was, the mission was pretty clear back then, is that we needed, and it was inspired a lot by Brad Feld, who was another speaker that I had brought in. And the idea that you needed groups run by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. And to me, you know, the subject of the original rant was that the legacy institutions had sort of lost that they were run by more administrative people for raising sponsorship dollars more than they were about providing, you know, timely services to entrepreneurs. So I mean, just that sentence there will probably get a bunch of people more riled up. But you know, it's the truth. And a lot of the entrepreneurs appreciated that. I maybe went a little bit, a little bit strong, but that's based in my personality. And you kind of got to stick the hornet's nest hard enough for anything to happen. If you just stay polite and they all ignore you anyway.

It's still relevant. No, the Brandt's rant and Bradfeld's book together are still relevant. They kind of need a yearly review to remind the community leaders that what are we doing here? Are we putting the entrepreneur at on the pedestal and are we building around them or are we building for something else?

So that's true. It's a great point. It's a great point.

It's still very relevant. And I think in San Diego, you know, certain pieces of our ecosystem have either consolidated or crumbled. You know, Evo Nexus was the gathering point. It was the density spot right where everything was happening. 2012, 2013. It's where startup Santo kind of physically born came out of you saw Santo Venture Group and Connect combine and join forces because you know, there's only so many corporate resources to go around. Right. And I think everyone's still, and those groups still have a lot to prove that. Are they, are they making the impact for the early entrepreneur?

Yeah, I mean I, I guess I think that the, generally the, the sign is good and certainly if you just look at the activity and the money, I think those are positives. I guess I've been trying to take things a little bit differently in the sense of hey, let's look at small businesses and medium sized businesses generally and not throw everybody into the, hey, scalable startups are the only thing, you know, valid. You know, I've got Kim Folsom in my, in my book who's funding underrepresented founders and really has a different, you know, a non equity approach to funding. And so I think that we need to, we can lead the way in sort of creating again. You know, Neil, you've always been there as the big umbrella guy and we want to make sure that we're including entrepreneurs that it ends up, their businesses aren't scalable and we have ways of funding them. And really that's where employment growth comes from. Are all these businesses not just the ones that go to, from one to tens of thousands, but the ones that go from 1 to 100 employees is all really the backbone of economies. And so again, I think San Diego is sort of the big umbrella and we can have all of those people and they all can get the resources they need to build the businesses they want and create value in the world.

I totally agree. I think something interesting to see over the last two, three years in San Diego is the rise of the venture studio. So instead of these incubators per se, you've got entrepreneurs who had some successful exits who said I want to go take what I've done and do that at cost. Three or four companies at once or maybe even ten. Right. The launch factory is planning to do eight a year eventually. Right. Have you tracked that at all? Have studios been top of mind for you or seen them?

They're not really top of mind. I mean I run across them in my work. I think that there's an interesting corporate angle to those type of venture studios as well. Companies that don't want to build internal startups, which is pretty difficult for them. And maybe even those studios act as competitors to teams that are working inside the corporates. And so you can generate sort of this, you know, it's the multiple prong approach to solving any problem, that's how you're actually going to solve it the best, as opposed to taking one idea and running with it. So I think it's an interesting model. You know, I think back in the day we sort of bemoaned the fact that we couldn't really get a quote unquote real accelerator going. And now you're kind of looking back and going, well, maybe, maybe that wasn't such a bad thing after all. And I tell you, having Ryan Cooter here and now Melanie doing the techstars anywhere, that's been pretty awesome and great for San Diego. So maybe things happen not exactly the way you predicted or wanted it to happen, but maybe in the end it turns out for the better.

Totally. Another example of that, like Kim Folsom, is the Connect all at the Jacobs center accelerator for businesses and underserved communities, actually funded in part by the city of San Diego. Right. Like that's pretty cool to see.

Yeah. Right. And led by Alex. Yeah. Who's done a phenomenal job there. And so, yeah, that's all good, that's all good stuff. And I, you know, I hope, you know, hopefully what this is, again, it kind of gets back to your idea of Startup San Diego and other organizations being willing to go into explore mode and make sure that they stay in learning mode to a certain extent. How are these other ways that San Diego can be a different ecosystem than every other ecosystem and that includes diversity and includes helping out small businesses and underserved founders. And even though tech was in the name of everything that I was doing back then, we very quickly also accepted retail and food and sports and all of these other places. Of course, digital has a big role in everything now. But again, I think that the moment that we went by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, it meant that we were, you know, our mission was to build a big tent because that word means a lot.

Totally. And like the venture backed startups, like 1% of you know that world. Right. Like small and medium businesses are like, especially in San Diego, like 98% are not venture backed. How do we build a good community that we want to live in? Right. Is bring everyone in. So totally agree with you there.

Yeah. Well, and even that last point there, it's sort of getting towards, you know, what happened to downtown. And I think that, you know, I have a lot of opinions, maybe not a lot of knowledge on it, but you know, the, we are essentially competing against other cities in the US and one of the things that's happened in the last 10 years are cities that are willing to actually get into the game of creating startup ecosystems. And the city here, they've, you know, done the Jacobs thing, which is great, but generally they've been hands off. Right. Let the market decide type of thing. And I'm not sure I don't want them funding. But there's, there's, there's urban planning that comes into it and there is space and shining a light on and all of these other ways that cities can play in order to put an ecosystem on the map. And I think San Diego's been behind in that compared to other cities. And they've talked about doing it, but it hasn't got there. They would rather go recruit a big company to move here, which really is just robbing Peter to pay Paul as opposed to building this sustainable job creation engine.

Yep. I think the one area I've seen it is the talent development, putting funds towards it. Now it's not the city per se, but the county and the Workforce Development Partnership and the EDC came together to create advancing San Diego. They're still, I would say in pilot mode what their goal is every year to train 100 developers, 100 marketers, 100 data analysts and put them in, into the workforce coming from non technical backgrounds. Right now obviously we need to scale that way up. Right. It needs to be 100x that of the talent for the open roles. But if they're building the playbook right now and they're figuring out great and what they're using is they're using local vendors, so they're using local boot camps who have very, all very different business models. Actually if you know creating Coding Careers by Mike Roberts, he's doing the Apprentice model where you actually get paid to learn, which I freaking love. So I think that that's something worth watching and saying are we on the right track of taking our homegrown organic talent and upskilling and reskilling them, yeah, that's great.

I think that, I don't know if you follow Victor Huang's right to start, but he's sort of advocating these, you know, getting federal money into these type of programs because it's kind of crazy is that, you know, these federal grants for business development go into all of these regions and by the time it gets down to the county or the city level, most of that money actually goes to bigger companies and you actually have to earmark all of that stuff for entrepreneurial communities. And of course this happens because big companies are, have, you know, more influence. They have the Power they have the, the means of understanding how to apply for grants and getting access to those funds. But again, job growth comes from growing businesses. Big, big companies like Qualcomm, you know, great Qualcomm, they employ a lot of people, but they're not year over year they're not going to add to. So job growth is, you know, has to be its own thing and that comes from small, medium sized businesses that are growing. And so they, they deserve some of those, that money to figure that out.

Totally. We just hosted 150 community leaders from the city of Indianapolis last week actually to come see what's going on in San Diego. Kind of interesting. And their head of the chamber said that all new job creation comes from new company creation. Yeah, I was surprised I didn't know that before. Yeah, it's incredible, right? So we should be working like what we've been doing here in San Diego, working on top of the funnel, helping people take the leap and start their entrepreneurial journey. Whether that's work for an entrepreneur because that's risky to you or start your own company too. What you've traveled the world like tons, talking, speaking, training people. Do you do a lot of like sharing notes in terms of like, hey, here's what I've been building, here's what.

Other people are building.

Like what are some of the learnings that you're seeing in terms of building those ecosystems?

Yeah, I think that, well, I think one of the big things that I learned was to not do it just the way others are doing it. Right. I mean, so the opportunity, the fact that there are now thousands of startup ecosystems, the opportunity is for those ecosystems to run experiments. Now the unfortunate part is that there's not an easy way to share the learnings. And so you kind of wish there was this ecosystem layer where it was the, you know, those people come together and they, and they share their learnings. It's really kind of interesting that actually dovetails with this central philosophy of this book where you have to decentralize decision making because the, the edge of things, the economy, an ecosystem or even your own business. The edge, the, where the consumers are is really where the issues are. That's where the customers or the stakeholders problems are. That's where changes in the, in the world first happen, is out on the edge. If you have a centralized hierarchical decision making process, you're too slow and you don't get that information and you don't, you just don't have any agility and so you decentralize the decision making because that allows people to respond right away. And the same thing happens in these ecosystems. You've got thousands of ecosystems around the world. Those individual ecosystems don't need to copy some centralized model to. They need to take best practices where they exist, but otherwise run experiments and figure out what works locally, where their specific issues arise. Now the trick is you need to build in these, these communications layers so that that information can be shared and distributed. And that's actually the challenge in ecosystems, it's the challenge globally, it's the challenge inside of businesses is because you have to reconstruct that communications channel. It's been top down, one directional for decades and now it's bottoms up and out across. And so people don't actually often stop and think about having to rebuild that communications.

Totally. And techstars really tried to seed like tools into the community with Startup Digest, Startup Weekend, Startup Week. We let local leaders own it. Right. And I don't know how much that's all being used around the world, but it was a crazy. It's a great set of tools.

Yeah. It's funny because the, I think one of the best ways that they kind of have that layer now is through the mentor program and then the, you know, Slack even where you've got all these mentors that can come on and there's an automatic meeting place for them. But yeah, I mean I think that it's again, it's got to be this conscious layer. You know, everybody's so burned out on all of these different tools and everything too. So it's kind of a difficult problem to solve.

Is true. Well, you've done a bunch of experiments, thought little experiments in San Diego. Like the startup Slack was just something you said one day, hey, let's just try this. And now there's like 3,000 plus people who not all active. It's quiet at times, but for me it's a great place to ping people and be like, hey, wanted to ask you something. Saves you a bunch of time.

The communications, when you want to reach somebody, it's actually really good. The Facebook one is ongoing too, which is amazing. And, and somebody just sent me a photo of a tech coffee meeting. So that was pretty amazing that that's still going on.

Tech coffee is back. There's like three locations happening every week. Yeah, it is, it is strong with Rob Rod Hudson and team, that's for sure.

Yeah. Awesome. The way Rod kept that thing running all during the pandemic and all the rest. So that's pretty cool. And that's another. That's another positive, right, Neil? You know, one of the things that's in Brad's book is that people are going to move on and you actually have to have people step up. And so I feel like when I launched my company in 2014 and it just had the book the Lean Entrepreneur, I was traveling every year and a lot and that was me. I was out of the ecosystem suddenly and there was a whole layer that came in afterwards which was just amazing and took San Diego Startup Week and just really blew it up to like it literally is maybe one of the best in the world. You know, it's not a South by yet, but you know, I'm not real hip on the south by one, to be honest. And so just as sort of an organic Startup Week or Startup Month during COVID I think it's one of the best in the world, which is just phenomenal what this group did with it. And. And you know, I think we're probably coming close to another transition time. We've got Alexa Ray now running Startup San Diego. So that's gone through a couple of different directors now, which is all. They're just great examples of, you know, can you successfully pass the leadership on to new leadership? And if you successfully do that, it's again, it kind of like I have a chapter on that in my book. It's what I call the endure phase, is that if all of the leadership is gone and the core principles and the fundamental aspects of the institution remain, then that's, you know, you're set, right? You're good, you know, you need to continue that exploration mode, but it needs to be built into the system itself. And so that's another really super positive aspect I think, of the evolution of San Diego is that, you know, we've gone past a couple generations really of leadership.

Yeah, that's totally true. And the Pandemic put that to a whole new test, especially Startup San Diego. And a lot of community leaders were event driven. Right. It's all about that in person. Random bumping intos Startup Week, you know, turned into Startup Month last year. It was six months later, but it still happened. It still had thousand plus people who joined in online. And it's happening now October 1st through October 29th. So, you know, I think that's a good sign as well, right? The resilience, the finding a new place. Oh, another thing that happened during the Pandemic clubhouse. So for 39 weeks straight now, every Thursday night, 9pm, the startup community has come together and mentors have been there, people have Pitched people have, you know, been new to town, people have asked should I move to San Diego? And people jump up on stage and say, here's why. Right. Like people have found their, their place and now it's a digital place. Right. So I think that's interesting to see. And I think you learned, you obviously from your travels around the world that changed. You started helping companies, I'm guessing virtually as well too. So what are some of the learnings you saw companies do and communities, I guess during the last year?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I guess I haven't, I don't feel like I've stayed up on what ecosystems have done in the last. I think that, you know, part of the problem with the pandemic has been that everybody figured we were only a few months away from it being going away and that's happened like several times. So I actually think there's a lot, I think it's a little bit different for corporations, but I think for a lot of event driven organizations it really has been just listen, we need to just hold it together. And then I think what they'll find is that there needs to be a sort of a multi pronged approach when we come back. And so I think that that's, there is sort of a mentality out among some that hey, you know, just can't wait to get back to normal. And I sort of challenge that idea. You know, I don't know that we're returning to normal. There's, there's certainly a new normal and part of that might be, and I don't know why we wouldn't. The tools are available is to do hybrid based approaches even for, for conferences. I think that I participated in a number of innovation conferences that used to be in person and they're, they're maybe permanently transitioned to virtual with a lot of recordings and membership instead of charging for per event and having a repository of tools and all of those type of things. So that'll be interesting. I'm not sure exactly where it ends up in another six months, say another year.

Yeah, I think we constantly feel like yes, it's temporary so no one's making the, pulling the plug on hey, let's make the switch. It seems like for good, but certainly startups are building tools that are like Hoppin and others like that are and enabling us to do that. But what about corporate innovation? Like when I think of, and this is terrible when I think of corporate innovation, I think a bunch of people with sticky notes looking at a blank wall saying like, let's put our ideas down and organize them.

Yeah, well, you know, I'm sort of. I'm. I'm sort of an anti innovation person now. So my whole thing has been. And it was really. Boy, some organization retweeted this. So in the November of 2019, I spoke at an innovation conference and I said, winter is coming and you all are going to lose all your innovation budgets. And so you're going to have to figure out why you're worth keeping around. And I told them, Again, this is November 2019. And I said, the reason why you are relevant is because it's not about innovation. That's not what companies struggle with. What companies struggle with is how to actually make their current business more relevant and to compete in the crazy world that we live in, filled with uncertainty and globalization and interconnectedness and how fast everything's moving. And that it was their mindset. It was that the innovation mindset needed to be spread to the core business and that that was their biggest challenge. So that was my talk in 2019. Right. Covid hits. So I never saw that winter coming. I just thought a little economic, you know, flattening a little economic downturn. And yeah, there has been no innovation the last couple of years in terms of traditional innovation silo. Let's reinvent the world. You know, what is it going to look like in 10 years? Yeah, no, it was suddenly businesses going, our business is dead in the water. How are we going to recover? What are we going to do today in order to make up for the fact that our customers can't spend money on what we're building today? Right. So it was all of that mindset that suddenly was needed for the core business. And so again, it ended up being fodder for my book. And literally the companies, the organizations have a few good examples in the book that had adopted some of my principles. Again, they're not my principles. They're design thinking and lean startup and all of these other type of innovation frameworks. Those that had spread those throughout the company, not just in an innovation silo for years before COVID suddenly were able to respond, like on the fly. So a company called Gerber Technologies in Connecticut, I think they've been acquired now in New York City. But this is a big company and they make digital fabrication equipment and software for fashion brands. And so in January, February, all of the. Their factories are shutting down in China and they're going like, oh, you know, holy crap, it's going to hit us too. Right? You know, one step away and so within, you know, by the third week of March, they had formed this online community where they were giving out plans and all sorts of 3D tools how to convert their domestic factories or their manufacturing into developing, creating ppe. So they started making gowns and masks instead of T shirts or whatever else they were selling within weeks. It was just incredible. And it ended up building a whole new division for this company as well as getting existing customers back up to speed. So it was really, it was really quite incredible. And they let competitors even put their, their designs up on into this community. So that was like cool. And all of the employees felt super empowered and felt special because they were contributing not only to the company but actually to society. And this was like by the third week of March of 2020. And another example, the city of Hayward, this is a small, not very wealthy community up in the Bay Area, completely surrounded by Silicon Valley. And they had applied these lean innovation techniques for the last four or five years, going out and talking to constituents, running experiments. The people who go to the council meetings are the ones that normally get all the attention, but they would just run experiments based upon what they would say rather than design policies. So after Covid hits the fire chief, comes to the city manager and says, listen, I just have a couple of paramedics who have been exposed. They can't get tested, so they can't come into work. I think I should build a testing site. The city manager goes, okay, go do it. So the guy goes, does research again. Within two or three weeks, they've got the first free government owned testing site up and there are cars lined up. There's like all this video of it, of these cars lined up to go into the city of Hayward's free COVID testing. I mean, just absolutely incredible. And they took all of their event money, was it event money? They took all of their, yeah, small business event money that was geared for all of this stuff that was going to be in person and said, listen, we can't, we can't run these events. And so they created a fund and we're doling out this money to small businesses to keep them afloat. So again, it was just the ability to be aware of what was going on in the world and then dynamically adjust what they're doing in order to respond to that world. And that's what a disruption proof organization is. Again, it gets to decentralized decision making and just the ability to act on needs that when they arise. So it was really quite extraordinary and gratifying and I just Think that this is the new world and startups have to think about this again. I don't know how much has changed since the dot com boom. I think that most investors and advisors still try to get companies to look like big companies as quickly as possible. And I don't think that that's. I think that we need to look at that again and maybe address those ideas differently.

Wow, interesting. I love the civic tech kind of approach to some of that. So I'm looking forward to picking up the book to read that part for sure. Because cities can't, they can't necessarily go away. People need basic services and therefore the talent has to come through or be elected that will keep a community running that you want to live in.

Yeah. I think what's interesting is that the city of Hayward has a strong city manager style of government. And so the mayor is actually weaker and the city manager. And there's some advantages to that. It tends to be. Some cities don't like it because it's maybe less democratic in the sense that you've got a quote unquote bureaucrat that's running the government and so they, they can stay there, administration over administration. Still, the mayor gets to set priorities and all the rest. But the city council and the city manager are there to ensure that you continue to function. And the city manager, the city council just loves the city manager because this woman makes the return on constituent taxpayer money higher. Right. And so it, you know, instead of like the more Trumpian, oh, why don't we just all run, you know, government like a business? It's like there are aspects to well run organizations. And so instead of return on investment, you think about, okay, how do we best provide value to the constituents? So there's an ethos there that can be very similar to customer facing business, but you actually have to take care of everybody in the city. And so, you know, you have to listen to them. And so even post, you know, post Black Lives Matter protests, they sent people out to interview residents around the city to learn more about their relationship with police and their relationship to city services. And so there's an empathy approach that government can take to their constituents rather than just sort of a logger jam and a very confrontational. So there's a lot to learn from human centered design and rapid experimentation that of course, cities can benefit from.

Wow, super cool. And I think like the protests that you've seen, we've actually seen the rise of people caring about their communities again and having a voice in many things. I mean, they're still showing up now on vaccine mandates. Right. And those kinds of things. So that's kind of all interesting to see that, hey, city government, you're, you're, you know, back in the spotlight and got to do right for, for the people that you serve stay relevant. That's for sure too.

Yeah. So government's an interesting balance of having to respond to your constituents, but not always doing what they say again. Right. I mean, so empathy is understanding why people are saying what they're saying, but not necessarily right. You have to look at the broader perspective. You have to look at it from a macro perspective, which means that you're not going to be able to take care of every constituent every time, but you should still understand what the implications of your policies are. And often you can't understand that without doing the empathy work.

That's true. Well, looks like we got some work to do.

Well, that's. It never stops. Right.

We've got plenty of cities here in San Diego and especially north county ones that actually very friendly to what we've been building. And so let's go read the book and go apply that and help them build what we think we want for the next 10, 20 years.

Yeah, yeah. I think that there's, you know, obviously the challenges will always remain. You know, I'm optimistic that the better technology coupled with human empathy, I think that we're still learning how to get those things together. And if we get those things together right, then, you know, there's a role for everybody. There's a role for the startups, there's a role for the big corporates, there's a role for the investors, there's a role for government. And I think that, you know, fundamentally people want the same outcomes. You know, there's a lot of different ways of getting to those desired to get to those outcomes. But fundamentally, you know, we just, if we're rowing in the right direction, then it just comes down to empathy and collaboration and, you know, being willing to be wrong and being willing to admit when one doesn't know and being willing to look at exploring alternatives that that's how you get to solutions that eventually benefit all. And that's what we really want in the end is that we're creating value in the world and it raises the standard of living for everybody and makes boy, a place like San Diego is just, you know, the most amazing place in the world to be. So I think we have to end.

On that, except for we have to end on San Diego being a taco city. We got to know, do you have a favorite taco spot?

You know, it's funny, like, I'm at it. My favorite taco spot is El Taqueria in Oakland, California. But so that's terrible to say. So in San Diego. I'm actually kind of an old school guy. I love Roberto's in Del Mar. What is that Carmel Valley Road? That goes.

Yeah, with the View. Come on. You can't, can't beat that.

Well, and just, you know, I don't know there to me they're, you know, one enchilada, one taco and I'm all like, it's the spot.

Totally. Oh, yeah, that's a great one. All right, we'll end it there then. That's a. Thanks, Brandt, very much for being on Disruption Proof is the book. Brandt, thanks again as always. Love the conversations.

Yeah. Thank you.

Neil from Couch Surfing.

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 this podcast is edited and mixed by Patrick Norton at citizenrecording.com you can find Neil Bloom on Twitter. Neil Bloom and on LinkedIn as well as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

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