Jason Smith - CEO and Co-Founder of Klue

Today on Founder Journeys, it's the sassification of everything, the power of data, the freedom of data to move between applications using APIs and that oh shit moment when you realize we're just about to raise our series A and everything's shutting.

Down because of COVID 3, 2, 1. Hey everyone.

We're back at it again with another episode of Founder Journeys. Today we've got the man, the myth, the legend, Jason Smith. He is a five time entrepreneur. He's the CEO and founder of Clue, a competitive intelligence platform for the enterprise sales industry. They were recently honored as a Deloitte Fast 50 company to watch. They just raised another big round of investment in a hiring like crazy. But prior to Clue, Jason was president of Vision Critical. Vision Critical is a customer intelligence company that he grew from a tiny startup to over 500 person market leader. He's also vice president of Electronic Arts. So all the gamers in the audience, you know, ea Jason was a VP there for quite a few years. He's also co founder of Columbus Group, 100% web applications pioneer that was acquired by Telus. He recently received Ernst Young's emerging entrepreneur of the year award. Lots of other accolades, but some fun facts about him. He took a gap year and he traveled around the world with his family. He went to Egypt in the middle of the revolution. He's planted over 100 trees or sorry, 100,000 trees. He lost the tip of his baby finger while backpacking in Thailand and he dedicates time every week to helping entrepreneurs. He's a mentor advisor at Launch Academy. He's a mentor advisor for me. He's an amazing human being. Please welcome Jason Smith to our show. Jason, come on. Please tell yourself that I haven't covered and maybe dive into Clue itself. What is Clue? What's the competitive intelligence industry? Give our audience background about the industry that you're dominating here.

Ray, first of all, that's kick ass. Welcome. Thank you. Wow, that's awesome. It's better than my mom would do. Thank you. Yeah, Clue's been a fun journey. It's, you know, like every startup it takes way longer than you think to get to the point where you've got the real traction and some level of success. I think we're on our way there. The round that we just raised was a 50 million US round. So it was a nice big one from a series a standpoint that helps give us the fuel that we want and we actually that's a fun side story raising that in the middle of COVID we literally kicked off on March 16. But the company itself is focused. Yeah. On competitive intelligence. I won't go into a whole sales pitch, but effectively my challenge at Vision Critical was witnessing a sales team that was being corrected by very educated prospects to whom we were pitching Vision Critical for. And they were saying, actually your competitor does do that when we were making claims that the competitor didn't do that. And that becomes a very awkward situation. So I started looking around for something that could basically put what my competitor was doing on a continuous insight dashboard. And there's nothing out there.

You basically scratch your own it. You had a chain in your current corporation and as you moved on you decided, hey, this is something that's worth solving.

That was a big part. And it's, you know what? And that's true of most startups, Ray. I find like it's, you gotta, you gotta have something in your mind that's bothering you of why isn't there a solution to this? And then you go through the process of there must be a solution to this. And then you do your research and you're either kind of emboldened by your vision or you realize that you might be a little late to the game. But that was certainly the case in Clue.

Yeah, that's again, it's part of being an entrepreneur. You want to solve problems, you want to solve challenges. Most first time entrepreneurs tend to focus on B2C business to consumer products or challenges because that's what they know, that's what they're faced with. But you are also an investor. You're somebody that's been around the industry for quite a while. You know that the B2B companies, it's the unsexy businesses that really have the chance of being a big success and are easier to kind of get success metrics off.

Yeah, I think your odds are a lot better. Like if you talk to most VCs finding that right, B2C winner. There haven't been that many huge B2C companies in the past. We know them, Snapchat, TikTok, others. But it's like there's not that many. Whereas in the B2B world there are a lot. You have to find a problem that a business has and you can solve it. And I think that world of point solutions is increasing. Like I think the last number I heard was over 150 SaaS applications on average inside the average business. That's a lot of solutions. Right. And before it was kind of big platform day. And now it's like if you solve something for one particular division or one particular group or one particular title really well, they'll pay you for it.

That's an area that you fall into. So that's a really great point there that within an organization typically there's over 150 other SaaS services that they subscribe to to help them operate their business.

That's it. And like my thesis was, and it's a bit of a counter thesis for some, I think we're not even, we're not, we haven't even gotten started. I think we're going to sassify pretty much everything and there's going to be, you know, greater point solutions. But I think underne all of these is data is transferring between all these point solutions so it can talk in a way that it couldn't before. APIs make that possible. So you're not locked in these data silos. So it's okay to have a bunch of solutions so long as some of that data could move into Salesforce or move into Oracle or move into ERP solutions or into reporting solutions or the data lakes and the snowflakes so that you can actually pull out what a macro lens of all the data would be across all your apps. So my view is, yeah, that continues. And it's all about scratching that itch. If you can solve a problem for somebody that they're doing manually and spending a bunch of time on and then ideally not just the time savings, but back to some kind of revenue gain or an expense saving, then you've got this combination of it saves me time, it's easy to use and it makes the company money or saves the company money.

This is a very, very different landscape today than when you first start your entrepreneurial journey. What is it? What's different today? Like going from your first startup to your fifth, how did you approach things differently? What, what the, what made things easier? What made things harder?

So when I, when I, when I did my first startup, I was your classic straight out of university, I want to start a company. And this is back when like it wasn't cool to start companies. So like I went to Sauder ubc, I graduated with a business degree. My parents were like, okay, you're going to get a job at like American Express or some big boy company. And I was, I'm going to start this company with two of my buddies and they thought I was crazy, wasting my degree on something. Again, it was back when it wasn't cool to do entrepreneurial stuff. So my theory was like, look, I'm young, I've got an idea I was big into. I'd say I was interested in what the web was doing and it was kind of emerging back then. It was like early days. Like I think there were like five people on the Internet in total back when I got started. It was super early and, and we were kind of, I had a very geeky friend and myself and we just thought that people needed back then websites and literally we knocked on the doors, if you can imagine this Ray. We knocked on doors of companies like Telus and Verizon and like telcos like that and going, hey, I think you need this thing called a website and we should build it for you. Like imagine that, that's what we were pitching way back then. So, you know, the web's changed a hell of a lot since then. There's a lot more people online, there's a lot more bandwidth online. Like it was dial up modem days back then. But I think the consistent theme with somebody that thinks about a startup today is just looking at what was going on and you're in the middle of it and going, I think this feels like something that people are going to need. Why don't we build something towards that need and just see. And actually, you know, one of the things that I find different from startup then and say my fifth startup now is, is that I'll call it the youthful naivete. That was helpful to not know how painful some of it would be frankly, because you just go into it, you're like, that seems like a good idea, I've looked around, I'm going to do that. And you just go forward and you don't see all the brick walls. As you get older and you've hit your head against enough brick walls, you start to notice the brick walls a lot more. And so that becomes a bit more of a challenge is to make sure that you still look for the loose brick in those brick walls. Having seen a lot of in the early days, you're kind of like, who knows, let's go do this. And that was what our first company was. It ended up being successful. I think maybe that's the other benefit is if you're successful in your first one, you've got this other naive belief of this is easy, hey, this is your first time, you win. In our case, Telus bought us for double digit millions and we were young, in our 20s and we thought this stuff was easy. And then you realize there's so many other factors that go into it. Like our timing was good, the people that we had attracted were Good. The space that we were in was good. So there were so many other factors that came together for this why now moment to make successful. My next two businesses were not successful at all. You know the one after it, I went to San Francisco, got together with two Harvard MBAs. One of them we convinced to drop out of Harvard to do this startup. And this is like the dot com era. And we thought this huge idea was awesome. Leverage the Harvard mafia to get into all these VCs looking to raise $20 million on the back of a PowerPoint. And it was a total failure compared to the come out of university with two buds, put five grand on a pot buy max and just go and try and see if you could do something. It was a much bigger shoot for the swing, for the fences, but also with these connected Harvard MBAs, compared to what do we know here in Canada and Vancouver, what are we doing? And it turns out that you need a lot of other things to come together, not just the network to make a business succeed.

With experience comes wisdom and you're able to look back and realize, okay, there's a lot of luck involved in all this. But also the. You go back to the naivety of you hit a brick wall, you just want to pound your head through it and force your way through it. Whereas if you are experienced, you're able to sit back, say, I actually see that brick wall coming, how do I avoid it? How can I walk around it? Or how can I get over it as opposed to try to go through it. But the I go back to, it's the big fish small pond syndrome as well. You guys were a big fish in Vancouver. You got acquired by a big telco that's local. Double millions return. Say, okay, hey, we can hit pound for pound for the big boys. Let's go to San Francisco. And then it's a totally other different market out there. So how do you. How did you guys. I guess did you recognize that right away and if so, how did you adapt? Or did you turtle up and decide coming home it's good.

I don't know if it was the turtle up is a good analogy, maybe a good analogy. I don't know. I think, I think what it was is coming straight out of university. I honestly, I just didn't know what, what the level of exceptional was. I didn't know what really good looked like. And again, that was part of the benefit. You could just hop in and just go. And nobody told you that you were doing it wrong. You shouldn't go into business with your friends, you should. You can't do it bootstrapped. You can't do it with trying to go and knock on doors by cold call. Like all the things that we weren't supposed to do, we just did and it ended up working out. And that's what I mean by the naivete. Some of that is a benefit because you just don't see it. You just get in, you solve one problem at a time and you move forward. You know, the San Francisco piece was a well connected Harvard mafia that got us in the doors of a whole bunch of places. I think the difference between the two is I didn't set my sights high enough. Maybe when we were in Vancouver, we're pretty excited about getting like BC Hydro as a client instead of thinking we should get like Vodafone or AT&T or some huge company. And so I think the idea of where the bar was was missing in my first company in Vancouver. In terms of talent level, yeah, you elevate up. You see what really good talent is. But I think there's a lot of people in a lot of small towns, Vancouver included, that could be competing with whoever the best of the best are. It's just actually being aw of what that gap is and then filling the gap.

And that's actually a great segue into building a startup in today's world. I want to dive into the financing that you guys did and how you guys did that.

But.

Are you guys working remote? Like, how are you guys handling the challenges that Covid's brought to all corporations?

Yeah, the COVID period has been interesting for us. So we, you know, from a. I'll just talk from a functional standpoint. It's been seamless. Like we've been slack heavy, Zoom heavy. We gave everybody in the company Zoom tablets when they worked from home if they wanted to zoom into the office. And we had a big TV in the office where everybody could feel like and literally walk by and say, oh, hey Ray, if you were on the screen, that was for some of our remote employees to feel connected to the office and anybody working from home. So when we all went home, it was relatively seamless. And actually I'd say the, the productivity probably went up, not down. And we had to watch people kind of overwork it because the office was just like two steps in your pajamas away. So I think the transition there has been 100% of our sales are online. Right. Like we have not shaken hands with any of our clients. The big clients, even Dell, Cisco, Workday, like we've not even met them in person. So that part was straightforward. The fundraising, like kicking off a fundraise back in March of was the week is the March 16th when we did it and that's when it all got real. Like that was the moment when we.

Went, okay, that's where travel started to shut down and the leagues were shutting down.

That's where everybody went, okay, we can't do this. And literally it was like each day was the equivalent to a month of awareness. It felt like. So when you mentally go back to that stage, it was a moment of terror for me with my startup because we were going to raise money in Q2. So in April I was going to kick off a fundraise because we had done well in Q4, 2019, we're doing even better in Q1 of 2020. And I'm like, well, let's not raise now, let's raise after we've had two really good back to back quarters and show that. And then of course Covid hits and then it gets crazy. And so I sent some emails out on March.

Was it like a, Was it an oh shit moment or was it a, oh wow, there's opportunity here.

So funny enough, both. It was definitely more oh shit. It was a fear moment because we had money that could last through to the end of the year. But my thought was like, this thing's going to last a long time. Like, this is going to hammer the economy. Nothing else has been so instant and so global that this is going to hammer the economy for a long time. So I thought, oh my gosh, nobody is going to give anybody money later on in the year when everybody realizes how bad this thing is.

So at the same time though, when you look at your product competitive analysis, this is a tool that will become indispensable in this uncertain time. You got all these other challenges, but you really need to know what your competitors are doing.

That was a huge benefit for us. The market picked up when 30, 40% of your pipeline, your sales pipeline disappears. You grip the stick really tight with that remaining 60, 70%. So they don't want any tool taking away from their ability to close deals. And then you've got CS people going, well, hold on, there's all these competitors sniffing around our accounts. What do I say and how do I defend? So from a business standpoint, it was actually beneficial for us. But fundraising, like, I sent notes to VCs that I had warmed up that week of March 16th and got the instant no way, no how, nobody's going to Buy sales and marketing tech right now. And by the way, we're just focused on our portfolio companies. Forget it, you're out. And I thought, oh, my gosh. And these are people, like partners that I had warmed up and done all of the things that I was supposed to do, like a year in advance. Multiple meetings got them excited and got the flat, instant denial. And so that week looked pretty grim, but then started reaching out to a couple others, and literally within four weeks, we had three term sheets. It was by far the most accelerated fundraising process that I've ever experienced. And in hindsight, turned out to be an absolute brilliant move because all the VCs suddenly had their travel schedules open up. They weren't at conferences, so they were willing to take meetings. And so then the question was, would any of them invest? And what I found counterintuitive is it was actually more personal than the face to face, because each meeting started with, how are you doing? Like, how is Covid impacting you? There was this human element. And then, like, a lot of the VCs weren't familiar with really using video conferencing and zoom the way that entrepreneurs were. And so there's actually a nice power dynamic that, like, can you hear me? Can you see me? Yes, I can hear you. And I can see you. Yeah, it's good.

And then you have to turn their mic on.

It was a little bit of that. And then there's, you know, sock puppets in the background with their kids and they're like, shh. And so it was just. It was a moment of humanity in a way that I wasn't used to in, you know, shuffling down to the Bay Area to do kind of. Of the One on One and Sandhill Road kind of meetings. And so it was extremely efficient also, because you could go from one meeting to the next. And, like, I was doing eight partners and accelerating to the nos or the yeses extremely efficiently. And so that. That it turned out to be an absolutely wonderful time to raise money.

And did that. Did the mindset of some of the initial partners that you had lined up that said no to you, did they turn around or did you kind of move past them and say, it went.

So fast that I didn't even have time to go back to them. I think I probably should have now, in hindsight, but there was just so much activity, I didn't know if people would invest. And there was this theory at that point that, A, the sky was falling, and then B, the I can't invest in you because I haven't shaken hands with you and that started to go away. The back channel became more important. But just that sense of who you were as a human. It was shocking how connected you could be over a global pandemic and kids in the background and zoom. And it worked. So human connection. I also think there was less competition. Like there weren't. There were very few other stupid CEOs trying to do what I was doing. I was definitely. Every advisor advised me against doing this and I just said I'm going to go anyway, hoping I would catch the tail end of people going, I haven't quite given up yet to and succumb to this long road of pain of economic depression. Stock market being boiling up was also a benefit. The stock market went up. The couple trillion in fiscal stimulus helped.

And we've seen now fast forward into the future. That activity didn't really slow down. There's a lot of initial hesitation, but that that went away. And investors are happy to keep talking to entrepreneurs and exploring ideas that there's less handshaking going on. But definitely attitudes have changed.

I was just gonna say it's kind of a good example, Ray though, of like doing the counter movement to what the herd is doing. So everybody was like not raising done. Forget. I mean it's the same. And just said. And then everybody went, oh, it's opening up again. And by the end of April, I had closed my term sheet done. And that's when people were like, oh, okay, let's start looking at raising again. And so I basically snuck in in this quiet period because I went the opposite direction.

Yeah, I remember when that press release came out, I was like, well, 50 million is not a small chunk of change. And you were able to do that in a short time period in the middle of a pandemic. That was just unreal. Yeah, congrats on you for doing that. And then having the foresight to just keep driving forward.

Thanks. And great investors.

I want to circle back to the realities of having remote work teams and workforce that requires a solid culture. And even prior to Covid, clue, especially in local circles here in Vancouver, we know had a very solid culture. It comes from the top. But you had a lot of great people on your team that was able to drive that forward. Can we talk a little bit about culture and what you did to build that culture to where it is and how that's changed today because of COVID and having remote. I know you guys already had a big remote, but what do you see for other companies or best practices? What they can do.

So there's a couple layers in that. First, I'll start with culture and the importance of culture. It's through five companies. I don't give culture lip service. I dedicate myself to it. It is the flywheel that turns successful businesses and you kind of don't think of that. In my first one, you just did it. You just went in and it was a natural kind of trickle down from who the CEO was and the values kind of trickle down from there. Now I'm much more intentional about it, making sure that we have you relatively crystallized values and finding people. Put the bouncers at the door, at the interview process to make sure the right people come into the club or the right people are on the bus. And those right people need to buy into those values that you've got. If transparency is a difficult thing, if deep honesty is a difficult thing for you, if you're not comfortable getting up on a table and pointing to your moles, that might not be the right company for you. Clue, for instance, transparency is a huge thing for us and so respect needs to happen and support needs to happen within that. So you're looking for people that actually align with those values in a big way. And then when you see that they don't, you have to get them off the bus as quickly as possible. The bouncers need to come in, remove those people, and make sure the club is still thumping and everybody's excited to be there. So culture is absolutely critical and to me, the perfect definition of your value statement. Not as necessary as exemplifying what you mean by those values every day. So showing it. So things like, I was very open with people about our run rate on money. I was very open with people on our board reports. I was explaining to people that this is our first startup job, that we run out of money in three months. That's terrifying for most people. But when you can explain what the background is of, okay, it's three months, but we've got, we've got this option, then this option, then this option. And here's, you know, scenario A through D of what could happen and don't worry, we've got this and this is not abnormal. Then suddenly people can get at ease versus like hearing some whisper that there might not be enough money. And you've kind of. So, you know, for me, that's a, that's a key piece, the cultural side and defining it at a high level and then acting the way that you want others to act.

It's kind of like walk the walk, don't just talk the talk. Like, practice what you preach and lead by example. But that's actually what I want to touch on. Is it top down driven? Is culture all out of Jason Smith's mind and what you want everybody else to do? Or is it bottom up? Or how does culture permeate into a team?

So I think, I think absolutely. I think there's. I think it starts at the top. I think, you know, if it smells, it's the head of the fish. Right. Typically. And it's. From my perspective, people are looking very much at the co founders to see what is acceptable within that work environment. How do you approach each other? Are you constantly fighting? Are you not, Are you placating people? Are you challenging people in a respectful way? They're watching everything. So in some ways it's a bit like seeing friends or parents where you're looking to see what that social vibe is. Do you fit that or not? And there's going to be somebody that's kind of leading that group discussion or your parents in a certain way that will set the tone. And. But I think it starts there and then very quickly it goes to the basis. And I've always thought of culture as like, there's going to be people that are detractors in your culture and there's going to be promoters of your culture. And ultimately you as a CEO cannot maintain all of that. Somebody will take somebody else for a coffee and say, you know, are you feeling like this? Like it's kind of stinky, how the company is doing that? And that's the moment when somebody else needs the defense of the culture of. Huh? I'm not sure I feel that way. And, you know, what's your role in that? And maybe we should bring that to somebody else to see if we could figure it out. Versus yeah, that really sucks. Totally. And going down that path, like, that's where it depends on the people that you've hired, how much they've ingested, internalized that culture, and then frankly, how much of a voice you've given them to vocalize and defend and promote that culture. And so I'm constantly telling folks when they come on board, like, this is what we're aspiring to be. This is how we want to live as a culture and a company. And it's up to you to defend that. And you're going to come in and you're going to augment it and you're going to help kind of expand the culture. And ultimately if you find pride in that, then you're going to be asked to defend it at some point and imbue that on the next hire that comes after you.

And what do you do in scenarios where the environment starts to change and the culture that you had may not resonate with somebody anymore, or like their personal situation change or their view on Black Lives Matter or something else, something pops up. Like, not to say it's at the corporate level, it's at an individual level. How do you address that? So somebody is no longer a fit, or their views and worldviews might be changing, and you see it happening in front of.

And it happens a lot. And so I think it starts with an open discussion, an open and very clear, authentic, genuine discussion about are those values truly misaligned, or is it about a perspective on those values that just needs to be adjusted, whether it's the company or the individual? So I think an open, honest discussion is the heart of most things. Just like everything, it's communication and finding. Is there a degree of compromise that works, or is it now compromising values? In a minute, it's compromising values on either party, the individual or the company. It's time for them to go, and you treat them with respect, and you make sure that you exit that person as respectfully and as best as possible, but you do it quickly once there's a realization that the values are truly misaligned. You cannot risk having value misalignment, particularly in the earliest days of a startup, and have a thriving company like one person that misaligns on those values that you're holding and trying to build up will constantly chip away at it. And it's very difficult to have a tree grow when somebody's stepping on it. And when it's youth, when it's a little sapling all the time, it'll grow up deformed. So, no, you need to protect that, and you need to make sure that you're weeding it and giving it the sunlight it needs. And so somebody stepping on that tree, you got to remove them.

That's a really valuable insight, and you can definitely tell there's some serious wisdom built up there. Jason and I really want to thank you for taking the time to help us with educating our audience about entrepreneurship and your journey. Want to kind of wrap this up with two questions for you. The first one is about an app or a tool or some sort of process that you found extremely valuable for your founder journey that you think our audience might benefit from as well. And it could be something that's mainstream or Even something that's obscure that you know of, that maybe your audience doesn't.

So interestingly enough, I was thinking I was trying to come up with like a clever unknown app that nobody would know, but I'm actually going to go with Google Sheets. And it's a bit of a cop out, I know, but it's about the models that you can build in Google Sheets on everything from the financial piece is one thing, but the sales piece in particular. And so ahead of the CRM that you choose, however, if It's Salesforce or HubSpot or a Pipedrive, in the early days, you want to figure out your flexible model around a sales process. And to me, doing that inside of an Excel or a Google Sheet is an incredible way to figure out how to align it. What stages are at what milestones are each level giving everybody an individual worksheet to talk about, whether the individual accounts that they're moving along the pipeline, figuring out what you need before you lock in a third party big tool that you're going to do custom development on to set up the way that you need it. I love in the earliest days, using very malleable, very flexible tools like G Suite to be able to figure out what you really need before you lock and load it into kind of a set process inside of a tool tool.

Yeah, that's actually a really great one. It's as a bootstrap company, somebody that's trying to get up off the ground. It's something you already have accessible to you. But the other killer feature is that it allows for collaboration in real time, so you can have multiple people on it working on the sheets simultaneously, 100% on the collaboration.

And I think more importantly is there's so many models. Hey, can I see what your Google Sheet looks like for your financial model? Can I see what your Google Sheet looks like for your sales forecast? Can I see what it looks like for your marketing funnel? People have like 50 or 100 of those different templates that you can use to figure out your own. So I talk about the malleability of that. Like there's so many people you could just knock on the door of and ask for or that are in blog posts and hey, download this Excel sheet. Download this metric sheet. Download, begin there. Before you lock and load into SAS.

Software on a bunch of them, a lot of people have already done the heavy lifting. They built models, they've got all the macros and calculations and the formulas in place, right?

So start there, make them your own.

So last question for you Is if you were to take another kick of the can today, starting a new company, what advice would you.

Tell me not.

To give it as advice for somebody new starting something, or even a seasoned entrepreneur starting something new in today's world?

Yeah. So I think for those in your audience that are listening and thinking about starting a company, I always think of it as a step journey, not a linear line going up. It's a step journey because you need to set milestones that are very clear, drop off a cliff or head up the elevator to the next level. And you need those clearly in your head. And that can be as simple as, I've got this idea, I think it's good, I'm going to just keep sleeping on it. And do I keep iterating on it? Is it something that I keep thinking about? Do I keep asking others questions about? Is it something that's sitting with me that I feel like this is something that I kind of want to look into? And that's kind of your first step function. Are you going to go up to the next level, which is now you're going to go outside your own little brain, your own little world, your own trusted world and now talk to 100 smart people. And I always think of it as 100 smart people coffee. So like you go test that idea with 100 smart people and you start every conversation with, I need the cold, hard, ugly truth. I need to know if my haircut's ugly. I need to know if my clothes look ugly. I need you to call the baby ugly now before I spend years of my life and a whole bunch of feedback. And you have to start with that because no one wants to shit on your baby. No one wants to tell you it's ugly. So everybody gives you kind of positive accolades because there's nothing in it for them. So if you start with that, then those hundred smart people will challenge you, cajole you, and you'll either leave those meetings more emboldened or knocked off your perch a little bit on that idea. And so that's kind of your next level. And then you've got to find your co founder. Is it somebody that you can trust? That's a whole nother stage and a whole nother topic of conversation. Trust is everything with your co founder. Complimentary skills is critical. Your co founder, and that's kind of the next level. And then you could look at building enough of a model or traction in order to get funding and there's steps and steps and steps and steps from there. But at each stage if you don't pass those steps, then you fall off the cliff and go back to what you're doing. You've got to believe at the end of each of those stages that it's worth going up the elevator.

That's an awesome way to break it down. We always see at launch talk about getting out of your bubble, getting out of basement to mom and dad's garage and go talk to people. But the way you broke it down is awesome and really actionable for people to go and build something great. Jason, really appreciate you sharing your massive amount of wisdom and insight with our audience today. What can our audience do for you? How can our audience reward you for what you've given them?

So, okay, this is going to be a multi part answer, Ray. It's the easy1 is clue.com jobs. We're always looking for great talent, so I'll ask, I'll do the very basic. We're going to be hiring 50 or 100 people in the next 12 months. So we need great people across the board.

And remote is an option.

Remote is an option, yeah. Anybody listening? Remote is a clear option. There might be a preference for local. We're in Vancouver, Toronto and Amsterdam right now. But remote is clearly an option. Right. Today we're fully embracing of remote, but the other piece is honestly just pay it forward. It's something I didn't start to do till later in my career. I learned stuff and I kept it to myself. And now I make it a point of every week trying to spend something, time with somebody earlier in their career, earlier in their entrepreneurial journey to say, well, here's some potholes that I went through. They might be different for you, but here's some learning that I've had and just pay it forward, give it back. Whether it's on a podcast like this or whether it's a coffee or whether it's responding with an email. Just pay it forward. That's how the startup journey helps everybody succeed.

That's something. Unfortunately, it's unique to the tech industry. I wish it was more prevalent in other industries, but people are willing to give back. People are willing to give you time and have conversation with you. We talked about, talk to a hundred smart people. That's successful, but it doesn't happen without other people giving back. And so if you're rewarded with some interactivity, give it back, pay it forward.

It's my ask.

Awesome advice.

It's my ask. Yep, it's easy not to.

Jason, this has been invaluable. I love talking to you. You're. You're a really smart individual and really down to earth. And the culture and the company that you're building at Clue is definitely something that should be a model for other companies to aspire to. Thank you for taking the time today and keep building a great company like you're doing with Clue.

I appreciate it, Ray. Thanks for having me on.

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