From Beats to Bytes: Devo Harris’ Journey to Reinvent Interactive Media

I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to Gainsight. To give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomenon. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness dot com. The digital copy is on for 99 cents.

I've built multiple multimillion dollar operations from scratch, but that wasn't really appreciated back then. I think now is a little different. But I learned so many things from being a producer selling music. Everyone has hot music like producer wise. But how do you go into a room or to a label or meet with an artist and sell them on that vision and then get them in the room and then actually compel them to produce the right outcome and final product? How do you build teams? How do you price? If you ever seen a Kanye west mixtape that came out of my apartment in the East Village of Manhattan, how do we price that? We would go to wholesalers and from day one establish a price point that was higher than normal and they'd say why are you trying to charge us more for this new artist that no one's ever heard of? We have philosophy around making the best products, including the best music, the best graphics, the best CD cases. It's just better all around and we're going to charge more for it. And it worked. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before like Shopify, Twilio, Asana and many more. Hey Traction fam. Super excited for today's guest. Devo Harris, Grammy winning producer behind Kanye west and John Legend. He's also an accomplished black artist who's moved into tech. Has caught the attention of major brands like Adidas, Nike, Lexus, H and M, Paramount, NASCAR and more. And Devo transitioned from rap and R and B legend to impressive tech exec. His company Adventure leverages AI and patent audio technology to give viewers a choose your own adventure style interaction with commercials, movies and games. So super excited to get right into it. I think you're A Wharton grad as well. Right before you went into music and before you became an entrepreneur. I guess you're always an entrepreneur. So let's dive into your story. From, like, childhood to Wharton to music to then becoming an entrepreneur. What was that journey like?

Long and arduous and fun.

Where did you grow up, by the way?

I'm an army brat, so I grew up everywhere. My mother and father were in the Army. I grew up throughout the south and the Midwest of America. But I actually. A lot of my growing up was in Germany. Oh, wow. So I spent probably six years elementary school, really, in Germany. I used to speak German and all that.

It's a great skill to learn multiple languages. I was born in Kuwait. I was a refugee of the Gulf war in the 90s. You probably remember that time we made our way to Canada, and then after engineering, moved to the US So not familiar with the lives you live, but I've seen the army very closely as they came to rescue us through the camps. So what led you to then eventually Wharton? And how did the whole Kanye West, John Legend thing happen?

As a child? I always saw myself as a businessman. I don't even know what that meant at the time. I just saw myself in a suit and with a briefcase. And I wanted to work in a way so that my intelligence and that my ability to measure risk, I'd be directly compensated based on my intelligence and risk tolerance, whatever that means. And so as I grew up, that felt like business in the widest sense. And so I looked into what's the best business school in the world, found Wharton, which is in Philadelphia. And I have a bunch of family in Philadelphia. So I said, that's where I'll go. I lived in Kansas City at that time. I applied to Wharton, got in. That's the only school I applied to. Went there and had a great time and learned a lot about building businesses and building relationships. It was a big change for me moving to the east coast and being around, like, a lot of smart people and motivated people, so did that. I met lifelong friends when I was younger. I used to sing and I played sports. And then when I went to college, I hadn't sang for a couple years, but I tried out for this acapella group in college. Didn't make the group, but all the friends that I was starting to hang out with, they all were typically involved in some sort of music. They were rappers or singers or guitarists or something. And so I still wanted to be in music. So I said, well, no one in the crew is a dj. So I started to dj, became a DJ at Penn, graduated. And whenever I graduated high school, my grandmother had came to Kansas City and said, hey, let's go meet your cousin. He's graduating in a couple days. Never met my cousin before. But my mom convinced me to go meet this cousin in Chicago. And so traveled up after my graduation, met my cousin, went to his graduation. His name was Kanye West. And so from there, we had a great time, hung out for a few days. I went off to Penn, didn't talk to him for four years after I graduated, and I moved to New York with my college friends. And after a while, one of my aunts had contacted me and said, oh, remember that cousin that you met a few years ago when you graduated? He just moved to New Jersey. You should connect with him. And I enjoyed whenever we had hung out years ago. So I hit him up and I was like, hey, you know, it's your cousin. And you know, if you're going to be in New York, come by my apartment. He came by that day and he was telling me how he's working with the Jay Z and just all these crazy things that to me was like, wow, this is just some whole bizarro world that you're talking about. But I thought he was super talented and he was really working hard, and that's how I started working with Kanye.

What year was this?

Man? This was a while ago. This was probably 2001, I want to say.

Oh, that's a long time ago. So, you know, my wife grew up in New Jersey and then did her residency at Drexel in Philly. And so I was running sales and marketing for Ticket Leap, which is a startup that came out of Wharton there. And John Legend was an advisor. So maybe there's some common connection.

Yes, yes, I remember that company. I remember John being involved with it. And in this early 2000s, I just graduated from Wharton. I had all my fancy friends, like, working at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. John worked at BCG, the Boston Consulting Group. And the Internet bubble burst and There's a recession. September 11th happened. All these things back to back, just like crushing the economy. So a lot of my friends were losing their jobs, getting laid off. I got laid off. I was working at a consulting firm and I was laid off. So everyone was, like, really feeling it. And these are people who. We went through the right steps. We went to ivy League schools, etc. At the same time, my cousin Kanye, he dropped out of college. He was doing all the risky things that you're not supposed to do. He's being an artist. He's not in school anymore. He had gotten evicted from his home. But at that time, he was the only person I knew whose career was skyrocketing. So I was just like, why are me and my friends who did what you're supposed to do? We're all in debt, and we are trying to figure out how to make a move and struggling. And my cousin, who did what you're, quote, unquote, not supposed to do, his dreams are coming true. Maybe there's something in the matrix that what they're telling you to do isn't necessarily the right path for everyone. It's not as clean and safe as you might think. So that really changed a lot of how I operate, sort of seeing him in action.

So then you moved on and started adventure. What led you to that? Or is it adventure?

Adventure just like the regular word. I was working with Kanye and John and lots of artists from for years and eventually wanted to change my career while I was still young enough to do that. So I went to business school at Columbia, but I still had a foot into the music world. And so I made a music video that was interactive, sort of choose your own adventure music video. And what was interesting was that we put out a regular music video for this song, attack of the five foot hipster. It's still on YouTube. And we put out this video and then you see the comments saying, this song sucks. Basically, it was like rock rap combination. And the next week, we put out the exact same video, but this one was interactive. So the first version we put out was just regular traditional video. The second one was the exact same visual content, exact same music, except there was a few points where you could choose which scene you would see next. That version, you see the comments saying, oh, man, this song is awesome. This is going to be a hit. I love this song. It's the exact same song that people said sucked the previous week and they were going to our website and buying the music that second week. They weren't the previous week. So it was like night and day. How that same song was received and how it's sold based on how it was delivered. I thought it was just really fascinating. The next thing you know, all these big companies are coming to me saying, how do we make our content like that? And so this was a good 11 years ago or so. I realized I had a big fascination with media from even working with Kanye. And I realized, oh, in the future, our media will be more dynamic and will Be more interactive and more web native. So I start getting into technology, building tools, and adventure was born out of that.

And then you mentioned before in prior interviews that it took leaving the music industry to gain credibility as an entrepreneur. But you were producing for Kanye and John Legend. You must have had massive clout. Why did it take leaving the music industry to gain credibility as an entrepreneur?

Well, I think it's a few things and this is an interesting question. I think one thing, even when I went to business school, I felt that people were saying basically feeling like, oh, you're in the music business, that's not like real business. That's creative, you guys are having fun, but it's not like real business. And I'm like, this is real business. This space is where technology disrupts first. And if you remember Limewire and Napster and everyone being like, oh, what do you learn from the music business about technology disruption and how do you deal with these new business models? Music is creating culture, creating trends. So from a marketing perspective, what does that look like? I'm in my business school classes taking a marketing course and there's like a 78 year old professor telling me about marketing. And then I leave there to go meet with Kanye and then plan how we're putting out a global takeover album. They're very different strategies. I would argue that the Kanye conversation is a lot more relevant to today's marketing. That's one thing. But I also think that the bigger thing is black music. I remember there was a, another, there's a company that competed with us early on and they were from Israel and the leader of that company was a musician in Israel. And there was some like, I'd go to investor meetings and whatnot. People would be like, oh, this guy, he's a rock star in Israel. Oh my God, this so great. That's one thing that the founder of Patreon is a musician, but they're not black music people. And the lens through which, oh, rap and hip hop is viewed, it's not the same credibility as other artistic formats. So when I go to meet my lawyer, top tech lawyer in New York many years ago, and I'm like, I want to do this. And he's, look, no one's going to invest in you. They're going to want to get a beer with you and hear your cool stories. No one's going to give a dollar to, you're too different, your story's too different, you look too different. It doesn't matter. It doesn't match any of the patterns that People see on the capital side. So I had to literally disassociate from music over years and become a technology person as opposed to a quote unquote music person. I'm just a growth and builder. I don't care if it's music or furniture or technology. But a lot of my counterparts who did not look like me, who did not have the level of success of me, who had never built anything, they were able to receive backing a lot easier.

You had to shed the baggage that comes with being a music exec. But nonetheless, being a producer in that industry probably taught you a few lessons that helped you big time as an entrepreneur, right? What were the top things you learn as an entrepreneur that helps you in your journey to adventure?

I didn't know it was called entrepreneurship when we started. When I started working with Kanye, he didn't have a record deal and we built that whole presence. Eventually he got a record deal and that was great. And then when we built good music that didn't exist. Like I signed John Legend to be our first artist, we built that from nothing. So I built multiple multimillion dollar operations from scratch. But that wasn't really appreciated back then. I think now is a little different. But I learned so many things from being a producer selling music. Everyone has hot music, like producer wise. But how do you go into a room or to a label or meet with an artist and sell them on that vision and then get them in the room and then actually compel them to produce the right outcome and final product? How do you build teams? How do you price? If you ever seen a Kanye west mixtape that came out of my apartment in the East Village of Manhattan, how do we price that? We would go to wholesalers and from day one establish a price point that was higher than normal and they'd say, why are you trying to charge us more for this new artist that no one's ever heard of? But we have philosophy around making the best product, including the best music, the best graphics, the best CD cases is just better all around and we're going to charge more for it. And it worked. So remixing, taking things that exist and updating them for the current market, that's how we made our music. That's how a lot of companies, including tech companies, make their products, whether it's Apple and their designs. If you check out like some of the brawn designs from like the 50s and 60s to Instagram Instagram stories. Remember how when Snapchat came out with the 24 hour content and then Instagram real Quick start adopting it now. Stories is the predominant 24 hour disappearing content.

Content, I think the one with the audience, I guess almost the second mover takes the cheese, right? That's the thing. But that was a great experience for you. You combining your artistic skills, right? Effectively, you're creating. I tell people all the time, whether you play with music or with art or with technology, you're creating. And a mind of a creator is in mind of a creator. So you that experience and then you formalized it in tech and turned it into products at Vimeo. So you had this combined experience. But hacking YouTube to sort of pioneer interactive web in 2010 is one thing, right? Like people can view that as one video, but then turning into a whole company is a range of problems. It's just not, hey, building a product, but it's selling the product, it's raising money. How did you evangelize the first set of customers to believe in this vision? Like, how did that come about?

Well, I certainly leaned on relationships to get my foot in the door, but I really just shared this, the same story I shared with you. And what's interesting thing is that a lot of people have been trying to do this anyways. They're trying to make more fun or dynamic this videos, but there's just not an easy way to do it. Early on I told people the same story and I said, I built this thing, it's super easy. We'll make it very easy for you to experiment with this. And so first couple customers, I helped them make content in this format using some simple tools that I built. And it worked. So these are big companies that were pitting this content out and they could quantifiably measure that it dramatically got more people to go visit their website. It got more people. Sundance Channel was one of our first customers. Sundance Channel was saying more people saw this and wanted to plan to tune in and watch this TV show than people that didn't like. We did a lot of testing. This worked. It changed their ROI on their media. And so then the people that work with Sundance, they start contacting us saying, how do we work with you? This worked and that's how it grew.

Like now you have big brands, right? Like the H&M's, Nespressos, Paramount.

How does the product work?

Give me an example of a use case. Give our audience an example of a use case. How some of these brands leverage adventure and I'm assuming they use the content that comes out of adventure across multiple platforms.

Yeah, it's easier to show folks and you can definitely go to Adventure AI Adventr AI. You can see stuff there. But I'll explain in the meantime how this works. We've matured a lot since that YouTube packing obviously and we've evolved from this sort of choose your own adventures or interactive concept to more what I call now video as an application. So now anyone can make videos that are not only interactive and you can choose what happens in them, but you can also talk to them. You can connect the videos to your software, to your CRM, to external data points so that your videos can take in data, understand data, and then change what each person sees based on data that's relevant for that particular person. So how could that work? For example, 23andMe is one of our customers. So 23andMe has obviously millions of their own customers. Each one of those customers has their own story. They each got an individual product from 23andMe. You may have gotten one and it says that you are part Kuwaiti, part English or whatever that might be. Mine would have a different result in it. So using our software, 23andMe can now send a video to millions of customers, including you and me. But your video will have your name in it. It'll have beautiful images and music from Kuwait and England or wherever. Mine will have music and images from Nigeria or wherever that may be. Our software is communicating to the CRM and customizing the video for you. And from there now you have something shareable and we've quantified you will purchase from 23andMe again sooner with these sorts of more personalized engagements. So that's one example of how a big company uses more intelligent media through our system to improve their outcomes.

I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomenon. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness.com the digital copy is on for 99 cents.

Now.

Your company is leveraging AI, right? AI is all the buzzword today and I can't have a conversation with anyone without AI coming into the discussion. And so how are you leveraging AI more specifically? Right, yeah. You've created gamified and playable media experiences you using your technology. And so give us some specific examples of its impact on say commercials and games and movies. The Name of the game is engagement. We're in the age of micro content where I think even like on social it went from 60 seconds to 30 seconds and now there are 10, 15 seconds. Like people attention spans are going down. You gotta get them in the first couple seconds almost for them to stay hooked.

Yeah. And that what you're describing now is exactly the problem that we help solve in a attention starved economy. When people have content that is personalized or that's actually interactive, that they can touch and personalize it themselves, they watch longer, they remember more, they purchase more, they sign up faster, they this is just a fact similar to when you had a radio, then you had a tv. Like adding that another whole body sense to it totally changes the relationship to that content. So in terms of AI, you know, there's a scene in this movie Minority Report, one of my favorite movies, where Tom Cruise walks into the Gap store and the store they scan his eyes and then a hologram pops up and gives him personalized one to one. Hey, welcome back. How those tank tops work out for you? They knew who he was and they knew what he purchased and they're asking him about his experience. He could have touched it or spoken back and said, oh, those tank tops are too small. That is what we're building. That is literally the vision for what Adventure is media that communicates to the viewer one to one and that viewer can talk to it can touch it. It's media that is truly web enabled. In order for that to happen, we use AI to turn what you are saying to that media into language that the video and our technology can understand. I'm simplifying it, but that's one layer of how we use AI. Obviously, as generative AI continues to get better. In terms of video, the idea is that any video that you're watching will be able to change, respond. You talk to it, they talk back, you talk to people who are deceased. These are what we're building now to connect video that we all love to software. That's what really world adventure is.

And you took a unique approach to marketing, I guess because all of your creative experience. Right. It's all about standing out. You released this short film called Lab Rat earlier this year. Tell us more about this project and how it showcases some of your tech.

Yeah, Lab Rat, which people can check out a little bit over that Lab rat film dot com. It's a really exciting film. We've made some awesome technology. We have patents and like all that fun stuff. And what we realize is that it's not enough just to build these tools and say, hey, we've made some technology. You can talk to videos now. Good luck. That's not going to cut it. We have to show people best uses and how to do it. You can sign up for webinars on our site and learn about it, but we need to also inspire people, not just enable them. So Lab Rat is one of the projects that we're putting out to show people what's possible in this new media future. Lab Rat is a short film, like a 20 minute film, and it's the first multiplayer movie. So it's interactive and everyone watching the film controls the film together. So if you're watching in a theater, I just got back from Portugal, we showed it to over a thousand people in one room, or whether you're online or in your living room watching it with your friends, you take your phone, a QR code pops up, you scan the QR code and then you're in the game. So as the movie plays at different parts, choices come up that the audience interacts with and you can see in the movie what people are voting on when it's really close and there's different surprises, there's puzzles, there's codes, and all these things pop up in your phone and you interact and you can see what everyone else is doing too. So the movie experience to what happens depends totally on who you're watching it with.

So basically every movie, every social media video, every ad turns effectively multiplayer mode, turns into a game.

Yeah. Games are the language of as you probably know and folks listening to this know people expect more agency over their web experience. Games are, is an exploding category. So a game isn't even just a game anymore. A game is like a way of life now, 100% man.

It's the name of the game is interaction. I think we interact so much with our phones and with video content already that this is a natural progression. If the world, if brands want to continue to engage their audience, it's no more like one to many. It's like people to people. It's interaction is the name of the game now enroute to building this company over the last several years. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced and what did you do to overcome them?

We talked about the capital challenge.

You eventually raised 5 million in seed funding for Adventure, which is, you know, pretty good for a New York based startup. How did you overcome that?

I reset sort of that narrative to be more of a video person. I went to Vimeo and worked there. But beyond that I, I actually came with a product that had customers. I think we already had a patent pending. We have some really awesome stuff with a proven value proposition that's becoming more and more relevant. Video is not going anywhere. Videos 100%.

Gary Vaynerchuk called us in, what was it, 2004. He said video. He was like all up on video. He said video is going to explode if you don't jump on it. You're going to regret it. This was 2004 when he was, you know, doing the wine library stuff and the trend played on. Right?

Yeah, yeah. And I'm telling you, the things we're talking about today, video being just more dynamic and being more connected and intelligent. It seems interesting now. Five, ten years from now, this will be standard. Of course, if you think about making one video and then I'm going to send it to millions of people and hope that they like it. Let's hope it works for me. That's kind of crazy on the Internet. And so that's a paradigm that someone is going to shift and why not have a bs?

Yesterday's innovation always becomes tomorrow's commodity, man. You see, we don't say.com anymore, we don't say social company anymore, we don't say cloud, we don't say mobile. And the same thing, you won't say AI anymore.

Right.

I think these things will become embedded and as people try to bake through attention like with 80, you know the similarities with like websites, right? Like people put on multiple versions of websites that a b test what's going to work and what's going to not resonate with the audience with they do the same with ads. And video is just a form of the most engaging content one can interact with because it's become part of our life. If you look at people spend so much time, I think the stat was something like how much video content does one scroll across, like an Insta or Snapchat, TikTok or Schwartz feed. It's like a skyscraper.

Per day, the average American watches over five hours of video a day. That's insane. Over 80% of web traffic, just the web going around you is video. We're on video right now, like YouTube, Netflix. That's what the Internet is, video. But we're still using this sort of data. Yeah, we're just going to make one version. Good luck everybody. Dig into it. We're in a video first world. Every social media platform focuses on video. Every brand uses video. But how do we make it more efficient? How do we make it capture People's attention more and how do we make it so that, you know, if I want to sell you this phone and selling is one thing, but let's just talk about selling something for now. Typically we'll say, hey, we got these great phones. Next time you're thinking about a phone, remember this phone on the Internet, everything should be actionable. You should be able to say, hey, we got these phones. You like it? What color do you like? Oh, red. Oh, you want the red one? Okay, just say I want it and we're going to send it to you right now. That's where we're going to get to. And that requires connectivity and communication and that's all adventure is, is building that pipelines for that automation.

So you know, you had a hard time raising, you went out there and got some customers on the vision and when you went back out to raise, you know, you already had the traction. But how did you fund that first product and getting customers, etc. What came first, the customers or the product? And how did you manage to fund that? And then walk us a little bit through your fundraising process once you had traction. So you know, aspiring entrepreneurs can take some advice from it as they're looking.

I self funded for quite a while and then I raised a bit of money from family and friends, a few hundred thousand there. And, and these are my friends largely from Wharton who, they seen me before, do things that, you know, they said that's kind of, that's crazy. Why would you get into the rap business? And it worked out and so I think people have some confidence from there.

But they naysayed you and then you prove them wrong and they're like, hey listen, we don't want to miss the next thing he does.

And that's really, you know, I tell people all the time that's really one of the real benefits of going to these sorts of colleges. I don't remember much of what I learned at Wharton, but those are some of my best friends and supporters that I didn't get from there even to today. We're texting earlier today. So some of them work in my company. So that's the benefit there. But yeah, self funding friends and family until I got enough momentum to where it could be an interesting story for.

Institutions and then for institutional, your interest, institutional raise, that would have been much easier. Like how did that come about? Was it the network? I firmly believe right, your community is your currency. I hadn't much of a schooler. My wife's a Stanford grad. Stanford now she teaches Medicine at Stanford. And she's the opposite of me. Like, you got to go to school. You got to go to school. And then I finally realized, actually, what school gives you is a network, right? It gives you a community. And I'm everything I am because of that community. My co founder and I were best friends in college and we built a number of companies together, failed together, and then the last one hit it. Well, then I came to terms with it, that it's not what you study there, it's who you meet that comes through later on in life. But nonetheless, how did those doors open for you? Was it the same group of people and was it easier?

Yeah, even, you know, going back to when we started the music stuff, you know, Kanye, I happened to have met one time, and then I brought my college roommate into that mix and he became John Legend. A lot of our early customers, my investors, they're all relationship driven. But then as we got to the institutional conversation, I literally, I was just like, I'm going to be open minded and talk with anyone credible who wants to talk to me. I have a sales call with a gardener. A gardener had called me. Like, they call every business owner and we're like, hey, we can help you do xyz. And I'm like, I'm not. We don't have any money to do any gardener stuff. But they're like, well, I think what you're doing, you know, this guy over here would really like it and maybe he can help fund it. And I said, all right, well, I'll meet with this guy because we definitely need some funding. And that guy said, hey, you should talk to my buddy over here. He finances stuff. I think he'll like this. You know how many times people say, oh, my buddy might like this. So now I talk to his friend, and then his friend is like, oh, you should talk to this VC fund. I think they'll be into this. Like, all right, now they're about to get into the fourth layer of this conversation. Talk to the VC fund. And they're after a couple of meetings, are like, yeah, we like it and we'll get into business with you. I was so jaded by this time with years of rejection that I was just like, yeah, okay, whatever. And I just didn't even pay attention to it. And then the fund contacts me again. They're like, no, serious if we want to fund this. And so that's how it started from being open to conversations with incredible folks. And then at that time, I ended up getting two term sheets within A week after I built up enough credibility and traction.

You took money from both the term sheets or how do you pick? Any advice there on picking the right investment partner?

Yes, at that particular time they were very different valuations, so they were different amounts of money for the same percentage of the company. What I was able to do is to get the smaller firm to basically co invest with the larger firm at the larger firm's larger valuation. And of course with the thinking that this larger firm will ideally be able to help propel us and that should give some confidence to the smaller firms as well. But yeah, we ended up getting both firms on our cap table.

As we close out here for the day, could you share some insights on the future of connected media and how you see sort of the convergence of music, AI and technology shaping this landscape? I mean, we talked about a lot of this through our conversation, but how is adventure adapting and viewing the future? And what do you have that's exciting that's coming out on the horizon?

Yeah, I think you mentioned websites earlier and websites being dynamic and sort of flexible and 100% that's sort of what people expect from their web experience. Whenever websites started, websites were only the domain of like big corporations and you had to hire a developer to make it. It might cost you $100,000 to make a website and people would be like, a person would never need a website or a small business, you would never need that. Pretty quickly we get to where now all of us have websites. Like even if it's a LinkedIn website, we have a dedicated web presence if not many and you can make one for free in minutes. Like you were saying that the innovation becomes a commodity. I would suggest that folks out there learn about this interactive media. I happen to think we have the best sort of body of work and best practices around it. Check out adventure AI. But I will tell you for a fact that the retail places, the media companies stores that you shop at, they are investing in and learning about these interactive formats because they deliver more from an ROI perspective. So I highly suggest that people familiarize themselves with what is going to become normal over the next few years for adventure. Where we sit in that is it's been really exciting to work with. You know these. A lot of the brands that you mentioned, which have been on a sort of transactional basis of like Lexus is going to make this really cool interactive sort of game for the summertime to get people to sign up for this test drive. That is awesome. And they will get more people to sign up by using our tools. The exciting thing that we are working on now is more so let's say that's a marketing relationship. We're excited to start driving product relationships. And so that means where this technology, where there's video, you can interact with video, you can talk to video that knows who you are and is customized for you because of the data that the creator already has that's going to be showing up more into your products. So maybe if you're playing a game on a gaming console, you're going to see something that has your name in it and says, hey Jack, thanks for coming back, or whatever that is, or maybe exercise equipment. There's lots of partnerships sort of in development now that these sort of experiences are going to be built into your, the fabric of your everyday sort of web experience. And so that's what I'm super excited about, is just being more normalized.

Fantastic, man. I truly enjoyed our conversation dating back to, you know, in the early 2000s. I'm an engineer, but my first job was cold calling for a startup. And I worked my journey, like from cold calling to running product and sales and marketing and so on. I still remember everything I learned about marketing was from watching videos on YouTube. Right. I. I wasn't formally educated. One of them was Gary Vaynerchuk was a hugely bullish on the future of video. And that's only played out right from one to many, then too many, and now multiplayer fully interactive, which you guys are pioneering. So super, super excited to see what's coming out of adventure. Where can we find you? Where are you most active on socials?

LinkedIn. I think at Devo Harris we're putting a lot of content there and sort of some of the same sort of conversations around lessons I've learned from music and culture that we put into adventure. But yeah, I'm devo Harris on LinkedIn. You can also adventure on LinkedIn. A D, V E, N T R. Check out our website, Adventr. We couldn't afford the last U in the E as we got started, so. But adventure AI, you can see lots of stuff there. You can talk to videos and learn more about technology there.

That's what I've been playing with. Your website is pretty cool, actually.

Yes. We're revamping it now to be a lot more sort of ROI focused, but it's a lot easier for people to see and play with stuff there. So you can always reach out on LinkedIn or on Instagram. Spring Steezy, my rapper name on Instagram.

Your handle is Spring Steezy.

Yes. Devo Springsteen was my producer name. I won all my gram meetings and you know music stuff was there so we still have fun with that name.

Awesome.

I will follow you there.

I think I followed Devo Harris but I will follow Spring CZ on Instagram. Okay. Awesome. This was a great conversation man. Wishing you huge success in changing the way brands and humans interact with one another. We have video content. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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