Virtual Reality & 3D Intelligence ft. Physna CEO Paul Powers | Ep 163 | Self-Belief Chief

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I'm doing great. How are you? Excellent.

Very good. Thank you very much, Paul. Thank you for your time. And really, just most importantly, first is how you're doing during this really, really crazy time and during this pandemic. How's it going for you?

I really can't complain. I think a lot of people are harder hit than we are. We've seen an increase, actually, in inbound lead generation. One of the things our company does help is help with supply chain automation and saves people a lot of time in the manufacturing and engineering world. So it's been. I don't want to say it's going to be good for business because obviously, but it's, you know, in that sense, we're lucky.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad to hear. And you're right, it's always a choice of phrasing, isn't it? Because, you know, I have more people coming my way. But it's, you know, through tough times, it's great that you can provide a service for people. I think that's, that's just a fantastic thing. Whenever, whenever the world is in a difficult situation, if you can provide a service that makes lives easier, then that's a fantastic thing. So, Paul, for those of you, for the people who won't be familiar, can you just tell us a little bit more about yourself? I've obviously done, you know, know plenty about you by this point, but for people listening just a bit more about what you do.

Sure. About myself personally or about.

Yeah, please give us a bit of both, if that's all right.

Okay, sure. I'll try to be brief, but brevity is not my strongest suit.

Okay, take your time.

I was born and grew up in the, in the U.S. in Cincinnati, Ohio, on the west side, and was homeschooled from a very early age. And that meant I got to focus on things that I really liked. Means that I also skipped a lot of stuff. So very confused on American history. Every now and then there's literature because I skipped it as a kid, but I got to really focus on science and math and things that I love. So I got to take college chemistry at 12. I got to go to Harvard for astrophysics at 16. It was really cool. I got to really focus on things that I liked focusing on. And my goal from the beginning of my life was just to leave a big positive footprint on the world, you know, the biggest footprint I can leave and point it in the right direction, you know, and human progress. And so for me, doing that was either through science or technology. And you know, around the time that I was really doing a lot of deep diving in this, I realized it's actually, you know, it's a combination of both. Science is the knowledge that empowers technology. We need technology to actually get utilization out of science. So I decided that the best way for me to contribute would be through a really high tech startup that is not just like an app, but something that would create real tangible value for entire industries. And I decided that, you know, I still wanted to get a degree, a college degree, so. But I thought astrophysics didn't necessarily make a lot of sense. So I thought, you know, it would make a lot of sense would be German law. I'm kidding.

I did.

It wasn't that obvious, but I got to go on exchange here. While I was there and over to Switzerland, I learned, well, Swiss German, which is close enough. And then I learned the language well enough and I got into the university over there and went to Heidelberg University in Germany, which is like their equivalent of Harvard. It's really good for law and it's a really cool place. And I decided, look, this would actually be a better training for business and entrepreneurship, I think, than staying in the sciences would. So I decided to go forward with that. I was also tempted by the fact that I was told, and I don't know if this is true, but I was told several times over there that if you actually passed the bar here, you'd be the first, you know, American citizen born, raised in the U.S. you know, to move to Germany and pass this part.

Oh, right, okay.

A very different language and everything. So that was kind of cool. And I thought that might actually give me an edge, I might be able to get a job somewhere. And so I took that. It was probably the either the best or the worst decision I've ever made in my life. I can't decide, but loved every moment of it. I did pass it very well, but man, was it hard. They have a really high fail out rate and there's a reason no one ever did it before or I believe it's really. It might be. It's very foolish decision in some ways because your odds are pretty low. But anyway, so did that and worked at a law firm very briefly I was starting. I funded this whole thing through startups ever since I was 16. I've always had a startup of some sort, self employed and hired other people out there to help me build technology. And after law school, especially considering I focused on IP law, but the closest you get to technology and law, it really, I noticed there was a really big problem which was we could find digital assets of companies like, you know, someone was stealing your logo or you know, a video or music or whatever. But as soon as it was three dimensional, you know, when it came to like patent lawsuits, it was always after the fact, it was never, it was always reactive versus preventative. And so I realized that, you know, there's a lacking technology there. So I looked into three dimensional search capabilities and three dimensional analysis and found a couple things that said that they did it. And we, I moved back to the us started up this company called FSNA which shorted physical DNA. And the very first thing I did, the company didn't have a name, it wasn't even a company yet. But I found my co founder, Glenn Warner, who unfortunately passed away a few years later. But he and I took on this problem. We looked at every software in the industry really wanting to use somebody else's technology to kind of solve more specific problems. We were looking to build something fundamental at the start, but everything just was really inadequate for what we were looking at. You couldn't find parts within parts. If you cut a part in half, it doesn't understand it anymore. The processing speed was terrible, the accuracy was even worse and it was just like nothing was working. So we thought, okay, it's not viable, we either need to build our own technology or give up on this idea. And we thought, I already moved continents so I might as well give it a shot and put everything I had into that. We went into a lot of personal debt for the first time in my life and it took about nine months for a whole team of coders to come up with something that actually worked. And it's based off of actually ironically things. Astrophysics was the inspiration for the. And essentially what FSNA does is it's short for physical DNA like I mentioned and it codifies three dimensional data regardless of the file type, regardless of how, where it comes from, regardless of how it's expressed and its viewer. It normalizes that and it codifies it in a way so that the three dimensional real world that we live in makes sense to the two dimensional world of data and software. And so that really, by bridging the gap between reality and the digital world, it's really cool because so many different use cases and so much technological opportunities. And at the time I didn't realize that. I just thought we were solving an IP law problem. We went to a couple of conferences and we were telling people like, hey, I can, I can catch people who are trying to steal your stuff for you. And they were like, how? And we explained the technology behind it. They were like, well, why do you even care about that? We've got so many other things we can do with that technology. Oh, my God. You could speak, you could like, triple our engineering speed. You could help automate procurement and supply chains. You could help other field workers. You could make, you know, a maintenance expert out of any person because we can show them how exactly these parts go together, different component options. And so we realized there was a lot of different things we could do with the technology. We decided to start building them out and skip forward a couple years, and that's where we are today. We've, you know, we've been validated as best in class. If there have been this in class for this, you know, we're definitely by far the best. We were validated for that by government agencies, by large fortune, you know, top fortune companies, and, you know, time and again against everything else in the industry. And it's really exciting because we, you know, we're heading into a really open field and we've been able to see the impact of our software. Now. It's not just the cool tech. It's actually, you know, saving people's money for sure. Time, definitely, but also in some cases, lives, because they're, they're not making the same mistakes they would make in engineering. They're not making their own. They're not buying the wrong parts, and they're identifying, you know, the crucial alternatives for replacements.

It's incredible. And just, just for people, you know, you've touched on a few sort of, few very specific examples there. But just in terms of just talking even more in terms of how it's transforming the engineering world, can you just give us the people listening, like an idea in terms of scale, in terms of, in terms of like actual speed and any way that we can quantify it in our heads in terms of how radic. A radical difference. This really does make.

A good analogy would be like, think of how long it takes for a Google search to show up, right? It's immediate. And the same is true for a search in 3D. And that's a really big change from what was possible in the past. The other thing about the reason I also like using Google as an analogy is because, well, first of all, everyone understands it. But think about it like this. If you're looking for text, Google is great, right? Because they can find all the texts out there and whatnot. But if you're looking for and 2D images, it does a pretty good job of that too. But when you're talking about three dimensional data, you know, you need, it's a totally different language. You can't analyze it as text, you can't analyze it as 2D. And we can, with machine learning, we can predict the text that makes sense for that. We can predict attributes about it. We can, we can match 2D to 3D, but. And Vice versa. But when it comes to finding 3D data, what people have been doing in the past is they've been saying, okay, I've got a three dimensional model of whatever, an engine, let's say, and they have to type in the word engine. But if somebody over in, you'd say a different country was working that engine too, they'll call it something else, right? And if you acquired another company and their models are called something totally different, in reality, they don't call anything engine. They have these long complex part numbers and no one knows them, right? No one memorizes these part numbers. So what happens is people design the same things over and over and over and over again. Which is a problem for a lot of reasons. One, it's time consuming, expensive for the engineers. They're not innovating, they're just redoing things from scratch. Secondly, it's a problem because all those new parts they're designing, they are having. What happens is in supply chain, people order all those duplicate parts without realizing that they're all the same things. They have different part numbers. And so they're ordering like if you have 500 types of bolts for different things that you need to build, they're ordering 500 individual orders from 500 different vendors versus one giant order from the best price vendor. So that's a huge problem. And then when it comes to maintenance and repair or even just like inventory management, people will actually say, oh, I need to place an emergency order for this bolt that we ran out of because otherwise our machines are shut down or we can't take off the airplane or whatever your use case is. And so things don't happen. You know, entire companies go down for days or weeks or whatever, wait for A part to come in. But in reality, what we're finding is that often they've got 499spares. In this example, they're just called different things. Right, right.

That's the issue.

And it's actually what's fascinating to me is that in terms of numbers that you asked for software engineers, most people, most studies that you read show that software engineers are about five times as productive as mechanical engineers. And it's not because they're five times smarter. It's because they have tools that they take for granted, like copy paste or search or, you know, what's the difference between this code and that code? Or where was this code snippet used? They don't have that in CAD or in any 3D application unless they manually tag it themselves and everybody tags it the exact same way, which doesn't happen. So that all leads to a very significant slowdown. And it's actually, I think a lot a grown number of people think that's one of the reasons why if you watch like Back to the Future and you look at what they predicted the future would look like, they were totally underestimated how far software would come along, but they totally overestimated how far we would make it in physical gadgetry.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah.

And it's harder to innovate a physical good than it is a digital one. And we're trying to make that the same and easier.

Okay, okay. And for something that's such an exceptionally technical product and, you know, heavily dependent on clever programming and machine learning and all of that stuff, you have to have assembled a pretty smart team around you. And it's when I hear that, when I hear this sort of kind of innovation and everything else, you just think of who are the people that involved. And so for many people who are listening, who might be, you know, with their own businesses or leaders or CEOs or found or whatever, assembling the right people around you is so incredibly important. So there's this amazing work that you're doing, and really I'm just curious as to how do you make sure that you get the right people around you? And, you know, how do you know if. How do you know if what they're telling you is right? Because, you know, you've got your expertise, but obviously you are also reliant and co dependent on bringing the best in class to come work with you, to give you insights that maybe you or others can't see as well. So how do you find that right blend? How do you find that Right. Team A.

Man. I wish that I had a really short, simple answer for that. But the truth of the matter is that as CEO, my goal is to eventually become the dumbest person in the company.

Good way to put it. Yeah, I know what you mean.

I'm becoming dumber over time, but because I'm bringing in smarter and smarter people. So my goal is always to find people who are more talented than I do. And you're right, when it comes to highly specialized technical areas, I'm not completely technically illiterate, but absolutely, we get into areas that just don't understand as well as they do. Or if I did, then I'd be doing something wrong on my end. Right. I need to hire smarter people. So what you have to do, and I've learned this the hard way, I did. I've made very bad hiring decisions in the past, not just with them before, you know, I've learned a lot from them. You have to hire someone who, you know, you can validate as being very, very good based on what they've done in the past. Like hire someone who really is best in class. Hire someone who's a world, you know, world renowned or just has an amazing reputation. And someone who's validated their abilities not just over a phone interview or physical interview with you, but based on the references, on their past experiences, the work that they've done so that you can get one solid person you can really, really trust for a given area. So in this case, let's say for machine learning, just technology in general, right. And then rely on them, you know, to be the that person that figures out when other people apply for other roles. Right. Are they telling the truth? Are they, you know, making something up? Are they actually this good? And that's how you grow, right, is by relying on a couple really, really good people and a couple of really good areas that you can independently verify and validate and then trust them, leading on them. You're totally right, though. I would never have been able to build all this on my own. Even if I multiplied myself. I don't have the technical skill set right. To do it. And hiring people is a big challenge. It's something that you have to accept that you'll probably get wrong occasionally because some people are really good at interviewing. They're not that great when they actually get to work. You learn that from. Honestly, I feel like most of what I've learned about hiring people is almost like a psychological level, right? It's I can talk to somebody for half an hour if I'M looking for this information, I can figure out what their motives likely are, if they're likely telling me the truth about something, what they really want out of a job. Are they job motivated, career motivated, calling motivated, you know, how passionate are they about this area? And then, and then I get it. I have another person who has more technical experience than I do. Validate that they have the skill set that's needed. And between those two assessments, you can make some really good hires. We've hired some really amazing people here in just the past two months. You know, even with everything that's going on with Coronavirus, we're still hiring and we've hired really world class talent here just recently. It's amazing.

Okay. And with. In terms of, you know, any business, you're always working on the business today and you're also working on the business of tomorrow or the business of the future. You've got to do both simultaneously just, just to get an understanding of your business. Will the work that you do at some point or maybe it does now transform the lives. Sorry. Transform the world for non engineers like the majority of us, day to day. And I'd love to know what that looks like in your headspace today and going on in the future.

That's a. I'm so glad that you asked that question. That's a really, really good question. And that's something that I really want to touch on. So it's. You're totally right. And if you allow me to do Another analogy, please. 1980, right? And you were to look around 1980 and ask how do people know how to code software? Very, very, very few. And at the same time, how people were accessing and dealing with software? Very few. Or just only in a professional setting.

Right.

You didn't have apps on your phone or anything like that. Skip forward to today and coding is extremely popular. Millions of Americans know how to code and code daily. And you also have so much access to it, it's on your phone. And what precipitated the growth of interest in coding was the exposure to more software. And it wasn't just computer software was apps. Right. Is something that everyone dealt with on a day to day basis, part of their daily lives. And it inspired people to code more. And you can see there's this huge belker, this exponential growth in coders after the iPhone, the smartphone came out. Many more people were interested in coding after that than before. And so what you need is you need sort of like a technological or I guess you could say almost like a market Based driver of interest. And at the same time you need an enabling technology. So there was a driver in interest because of the smartphone. That was the mechanical thing that made people interested in coding. And then there was a driver in interest as a result of that because it was affecting their daily lives. We're going to have the exact same, we are having the exact same thing happen in 3D and it's happening a lot faster than people think. The problem is that to release something in 3D, like AR VR, mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality, 3D printing, these are technologies where it takes a while to get over a certain hurdle and then magically, boom, you hit it. Just like the iPhone. We didn't have a sort of iPhone and then an iPhone. We had Nokia, Nokia, Nokia Brick, Brick, Brick, maybe a flip phone in there. And then bam, you had an iPhone. Right. And so the same thing's happening is happening in the other space too where, you know, we've been struggling for a while. Google Glass tried to come out, it didn't really work. But you know, Apple's working on that now and everyone's working on their own version of that. At some point we will have, whether it's Glass or something else, augmented reality will play a bigger part in our lives. Virtual reality is already playing a bigger part in our lives. And mixed reality is going to become a much bigger thing in the future than it is today. In addition to that, you have 3D printing. And outside of 3D printing, even if you don't like that, if you're not a hobbyist, you don't want to build something like that. At some point in your life, you're going to want something that's different than what happens to be on the market and you don't have to print it at home. In reality, you're not going to probably spend the money you would need to spend on an amazing 3D printing machine to build something at home. But there's another trend that's happening which is advanced manufacturing. It's basically the democratization of manufacturing. So in other words, I'm trying to say the most long winded way possible apparently is that there are economic drivers. Right now there's, they're exposing people to more and more and more 3D and will be in the near future. The big problem has been that understanding 3D has been challenging. Right? If you ever worked in CAD or you've ever worked with any 3D program, you'll understand what I mean. It's not very intuitive. The model doesn't behave the way that you would think at first glance, you have to really learn it. Every system is a little bit different. Most of these programs look like they were built in 1972 and they're all gray boxes and tons of buttons. They're not easy to use, they're not user friendly. And so most people are afraid of touching it. They think it's very complicated. There aren't simple ways of interacting. So what we're trying to do at FSNA is bridge that gap by simplifying it. And the way that we simplify it is give them a great view, let them see the model, let them understand the data behind the model without having to manually go in and get it. So one thing we do is we automate the analysis. So instead of if you're a CAD engineer and you want to know the hole diameter on something, you might open up the file, you figure out how to rotate it. Specifically, you figure out what the hole's supposed to be. You go and you measure it manually with an analysis. That's a nightmare for someone who's not a CAD engineer. So what we do is we automate that and if you want to find the hole diameter, we say, fine, here, look it up. What hole diameter do you want? Anyone? Click on it. Click on a hole, we'll highlight the hole for you and then it will tell you what the diameter is. You know, we'll tell you what all the diameters are, we'll tell you what all these parts are, we'll tell you. Take a picture to find a 3D model, you can describe it without knowing the part number to find a 3D model. One big problem out in the industry right now is that if you go to a website like Thingiverse or graphcat or anything like that where you're trying to find a 3D model for consumer use, as maybe a 3D printer enthusiast or whatever you are, it's try finding something very specific, right? If you type in Rabbit, you'll find 5,000 rabbits, right? If you try to find, if you type in like ice cube maker, you'll find a thousand ice cube makers. So it's really hard to narrow down what you're looking for. And by the way, for the thousand that you found, there are probably 70,000 that you didn't find because different languages would call something different. So we're bridging that gap by simplifying the process. And with Visnu, actually, majority of our users now are non engineers, the people in supply chain, people in maintenance, people who've never had access to a 3D model before, but now it's really simple for them. So only, you know, about a tenth of the users that we're experiencing are actually, you know, professional 3D engineers.

Okay. And so you mentioned, you know, when we started speaking in terms of the non engineering aspects and sort of your desire to talk about how is very, very clear. And so what I'm quite keen to know is for you going forward, what is the thing that excites you the most? What are you looking forward to being able to provide people the most? Just not in terms of your, in terms of the business, but for you personally, what's the thing that really gets you excited?

Specifically, what gets me excited is so there's different types of companies, right? You have startups that are companies in general that I would say there's three types. There's companies that have a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and they typically don't do well. And you've got companies that have a solution to a problem and those are simple. And then you have companies rarely, but occasionally you have companies that have a solution to multiple problems. And those are hard to run because you have to order, you can't go after every opportunity and you have to figure out the sequencing and you don't want to narrow it in too much. But at the same time you can't be too broad. So that's really where we fit. What excites me about what we're doing is that in that third category you have this opportunity to not be just app or not be a specific, you know, one single product, but to actually enable entire field, entire category of technology. And in my mind, and I very strongly believe this, and a lot of research backs this up, that the next giant leap in technology is not going to be some new device, it's not going to be some new app. It's going to be merging digital and physical, right? The merger of the digital and the physical world is amazing. And to give you to put into perspective, if you take a really high resolution 2D picture of something, right, even if it's extremely heavy, 50 megabytes or whatever, that 2D picture contains less than 1 10,000th the data and value that a simple 3D model of that same thing would contain, even if it's only a hundredth of that weight. So there's so much more data you can get out of 3D and we barely scratch the surface in understanding that. So for me enabling that, that is amazing. And what I'm really looking forward to in the future is seeing how people use that technology to open up other applications. There are applications that we don't have the ability to build in house right now. Have the ability to build 500 products. So things like being able to recognize tumors at an earlier stage than is possible with 2D AI, with 3D AI, you could do it much more efficiently, much earlier. So if we can give other companies the technology through an API or what have you to enable that, that excites me. And just also, just seeing people interact with a more. I guess I would describe it like this. The world around us is a combination of natural patterns and human made patterns. Right now you and I are conversing in a human made pattern called English, right? This is our pattern, right? This is how we understand. I can get my thoughts from my brain into your brain, right? But there are natural patterns everywhere too. Fibonacci sequences, for example, they kind of get rid of. If you can start to merge the two, you get into an area of technology that's almost kind of like matrixy in a way. And what it does is democratizes creativity. And I think that people have so much more value that they can unleash than they realize. And what makes us human is our creative ability. And if everybody had the ability on a whim to design something for interaction either in a digital or the physical world, without having to go through years of training on how to use some other stupid software program and how to do it, that would fundamentally change how not only how we perceive the world around us, but how the world around us would look absolutely much faster than we do now.

That's really interesting. And for anyone who exhibits the kind of hunger and drive that you have, where, you know, I could ask you, I could ask you a very cliche question, where did that come from? But what I'd find more interesting is actually when, when you were younger and you first, what you called is, had that sort of first realization that you wanted to leave a footprint, who did you look up to in terms of leaders, in terms of inspiring figures, in terms of someone else going, that's how you leave a footprint. And I want to do something similar. What did that look like to you when you were younger?

To me it looked like back when the History Channel had history on it. I used to watch the documentaries all the time. I loved it. And I, I looked at people like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and you look at not only what they did, but the consequences of it, right? If you go from one person like Galileo or whatever, and you Go forward through the generations. You're like, oh my God. That one person had unimaginable impact on the future. They didn't necessarily live to see all of it, but they really unleashed a whole new. They innovated in a way that didn't create a thing. They created a way that allowed other. They innovated in a way that allowed other people to innovate better and faster. It's basically a multiplying exponential effect that they had on human development. And that to me was like the ultimate, you know, is the ultimate thing to accomplish with your life. I'm like, I got one chance to live my life. I don't want to just consume, you know, I get to live a really comfortable life compared to people in the, you know, in the past and like medieval times. And so because we have great technology now and I'm not going to die from the first cold I get, you know, we're going to live longer, we live healthier, we live happier. And we do that because of technology. And I think it would be kind of selfish to just consume that but not contribute back and give something back to the world. So the people I looked up to, I saw them. Maybe part of the nice thing here was that by being homeschooled and being largely self taught, I wasn't around. I mean, I was around other kids, but not as much. And I think that there might have been a negative effect on that. Maybe that's why I talk a mile a minute and I don't have any sense of brevity. But the positive effect on that for me was I got to think bigger picture and I got to think about like, how do I measure up to these historical figures versus how do I measure up to my classmates and my budgets? I think that a lot of people get stuck in that peer to peer trap. And I think that I was able to kind of get out of that just because I didn't have the opportunity to think that way.

Okay, yeah. And there's always that. Studies of that reference point of view are the sum of the 10 people, you know, you spend your time with. And actually exactly what you said. Maybe you actually, the time you were spending with some of these greats or some of these geniuses. And that's where you were almost the people you were connecting with on a daily basis through word or through paper or through online, that that was the summer that rather than your peers at school, where I think you're right, people get trapped in. They think of the 10 people closest to them at school and maybe they get stuck in. Stuck being, you know, a choice of word. But whatever word you might use, you're right, it might affect someone's outcome in terms of where they might go. And following on from that particular point is, do you think it's easier or harder now to leave a footprint? Either way, it could be. It could be a lot easier in the sense that obviously there's so many more avenues and opportunities and there's, you know, people today, we're starting further and further along than our predecessors started on and some of the examples you gave. But maybe it's. It maybe because there is so much, it's harder to do so than it was for them. And I'm just curious for your point of view, you want to leave a footprint. Do you think it's easier or harder to do now?

It's both. And what I mean by that is so it's fair in the sense that, you know, if you go back far enough in history, the odds of you making it to be five years old are pretty low. Right? There was no written record. There's a lot of you go far enough back and there's no real way to leave a meaningful impact, at least not very long lasting one. But if you go to the modern age, I mean, think about it like the number of people who were alive, you know, a thousand years ago was a tiny fraction of the number of people we have alive today on Earth. And so in that sense it's harder because there are more people. But on the other hand, you have. Everybody has all the tools they need, even people who are living in poverty, maybe not in extreme examples, but at least in the more or less developed world. Even people who are kind of in the poverty level, I certainly didn't grow rich at all. But I think that they have more opportunity than they ever had in the past. That's more democratized in the sense, because if you have access to the Internet and you have a computer, you can change the world. And you don't need to even buy it. You can go to a library and you have that tool to change the world. So virtually everybody has that opportunity now they didn't have in the past. There are more people. But I think that I would say it's easier because if you really have that drive and you really have that ambition and you're really going to put in the effort to deserve to change the world, then you absolutely have the ability to do so. Now in the past, it would have been a lot easier to incidentally change the World.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay. So. And on that, on that route of trying to change the world, no doubt you've, you've obviously, like everyone else, had many a setback along the way. I'm just curious. It's always, you know, it's, it's always a question you can ask someone who gets to, gets to any level, but it's always still interesting to know what the answers are, which is between those setbacks, we don't necessarily need to know what they are unless you want to share them. But actually, at what point and how did you find that courage and that strength and the conviction, aside from the hunger that actually told you, well, you know, despite everything that's in front of me, this is the right direction. People around me might still be telling me this isn't, I should be going this way instead with it now. But you, with your conviction, you thought, no, this is the way I wanted to take it. How did you continue with that conviction? It's always interesting to know people's perspective on that.

That's a really good question. I think that the answer honestly is the hunger. If you're obsessed enough about something, you become stubborn after a while and people say, that's not going to work. It almost starts to fuel you when people say, that's a dumb idea, it's never going to work. I'm like, okay, now it's on. Now I have to, in a sense, one thing that this is almost hypocritical advice because I struggle with this still, but I'm definitely better than I was in the past when, when something doesn't go my way, right? And I experience failure. And failure can be major, it can be minor, right? It can be a sales call not going the way you want it to, right? There are lots of little. You have many, many failures and success throughout the day. Sure, failure can be disheartening, but I even say in retrospect, when I think about it from macro picture, which I think is the most important, important thing to do is keep things in a macro perspective. If you stay in the macro, you won't go off of track.

So.

A couple people have asked me in the past if you can go back in time and tell yourself 10 years ago, five years ago, whatever, you know something, what would you tell yourself? And other than joking about what stocks to invest in, as far as, like, for my own life, the answer is that I frankly wouldn't. I wouldn't go back tell myself anything. And that's because, yeah, there are things that I mistakes that I'VE made there. I failed on many, many, many things. And the funny thing is everybody talks about what they've succeeded and no one talks about what they failed. The only reason I'm not mentioning specifics is because there's so many things I failed in that it would be three years, right? You fail a lot, but you fail up. Right? In a way, if I were to go back in time and tell my younger self, hey, don't do this, don't hire this person, don't, don't go to this place, don't, don't, don't, you know, invest money in this area or whatever, I might have over gotten away from those failure points, sure, but I would have had others and I wouldn't have had the strength. If I got to this point in my life, I never had those failures. I wouldn't have learned what I know now. I wouldn't have. There's some things that you can learn from hearing from somebody else or by reading it. And you should always be in pursuit of that knowledge because that can save you a lot of trouble. But in some cases you have to learn some skills the hard way. And I'm actually honestly, and I don't mean this as a cliche, I'm actually thankful that things didn't go my way. In fact, some of the. I would say most of what attributed to the biggest successes of my life were failures and smaller pursuits. And it's made me rethink my life. I'm like, hey, if that smaller thing I was going after didn't, sure, why don't I go to something bigger? Why don't I have to think so small?

Yeah, well, very interesting to. Well, I always love hearing that sort of stuff. And also I liked your kind of the macro perspective thing I think is, I think that really is spot on because sometimes you get so caught up in the detail, don't you? You get caught up in the intricacies right in front of your face. And actually you've got to do the work in terms of understanding strategy and implementation. Implementation where you take your. Take a step away so you know and can take simpler and smaller actions after a setback. Now, speaking to you, you know, anyone who. Trying to create something or build something or set up their own business, they're very much either kind of the artist as in the person they love to do what they do. Like they love the, the actual action or they, they love the thing or someone who's just great and really understands business. And you get, you get. For example, you'll get the. You'll get the chef who loves cooking. And therefore they decide to set up their own restaurant. And then they realize, oh, shit, this is actually, I've got to do 10 other things running a restaurant. And they realize that actually all they love to do is being the chef. They don't. It's not the management of the restaurant. To me, it sounds like maybe, at least at the beginning, maybe not still now, is that you were kind of the artist, you had this passion for this particular thing. And I always like to understand that transition in terms of, like, you want to be an artist, but you also realize that to do that, to do what you want to do, it's going to require this new business. It's going to require this new venture or whatever that you're going to have to upskill in all of these other areas as well. Maybe the things that you're not super passionate about, but you have to upskill in terms of sales and everything else. Marketing, everything else. So what did that upskilling process look like for you? And how difficult was that as you went through it when you realized, actually, I've got to get. I've now got to get good at this. I've now got to get good at this as well as my passion?

I think that the most important thing is to keep your passion, keep your fuel burning, if you have the right ambition. The skill sets come pretty naturally, and they can come the easy way by learning them. They come the hard way by learning the hard way. Yeah, you're totally right. I mean, I am passionate about business in general, but what we're doing here, I'm very passionate about what we're doing at Fizna from a technical perspective and from a macro perspective. And it's not just the day in, day out of running a business. I love doing that. I do. But it's not the. That's not the only thing that keeps me excited. It's the macro picture. So. But I'm still excited about what I do every day because of the macro pictures. I don't separate between the two. I don't say, well, all I want to do is stay home and dream about how great it'll be when we made all these changes and we've made all this money and the world's totally better. No, because we're never going to get there that way. So I get excited about the minutia because I know that they add up to the. The macro. And I learned how to do the minutia because I know that If I don't learn how to do them, they won't add up to the macro. For me, it's a necessity. But I don't lose passion. I can be very, very passionate about marketing or about sales or about even HR matters. Right. I can be very passionate about these things. Not because I'm passionate about paperwork, but because I'm passionate about the effect that that's going to have on a macro picture.

Yeah, good. Yeah. It's always that difference between, you know, I always say to people or my clients that you don't get what you want, you get what you have to have. And sort of what you're saying there is that actually these things are, as you said, a necessity to what it is that you, you want or that you need, you feel you need to do. So I totally get that. The final thing I wanted to touch on or ask about is you talked about leaving, wanting to leave a footprint. And, and I guess a two part question which is one, do you feel like at this point in time you have left a footprint? And the second part of that question is, can you leave a footprint for the people listening in terms of actually from your experience and everything you've been through that actually, if you could leave a footprint on these people or footsteps for people to follow, what is it that you might say to them? So the first part of the question and then in the second part, that's.

A really, really clever question. I like it a lot. Have I left a footprint yet? Do I feel like I've left one? Not completely. I feel like if I felt like I've already left the biggest footprint that I could leave, I would be done. Right. Yeah. I'm always going to be trying to leave a bigger footprint if I've left a little one already. That's cute. But honestly, I don't really spend much time thinking about where I am. I think more about where I need to go. So I don't really put a whole lot of mental energy into have I, you know, is it a footprint? Is it just. Does it just smell like a footprint? Is just. Is it a very baby footprint? What is this thing? Right. Have I left anything behind? I don't know. I mean, and I probably won't know. If I were to die now, I would die not knowing. And that might be the case later. But I'm going to really pursue a really big footprint so that even if I didn't, if I don't notice that I left home before behind at the time that I die, hopefully I will. I Would like to think that I will. But, you know, at some point in history, that impact will be felt in a much larger way. And I realize that's what. That's what the point of it is. You don't always realize the impact of your work until after you die. So, no, I think we've got a long way to go, and I don't feel satisfied. I'm very much still thirsty for what we're doing. To the second part of your question, if you could. If I could leave a footprint for someone, I would say if I had to narrow down every. I mean, I don't know. I've got a lot of opinions on things, but if I had to leave people with one bit of advice on something that I think is the most impactful and the most important thing to keep in mind, it would really just be this one simple thought. And that is that we're trained, unfortunately, and we have this natural tendency from evolution to think backwards. And that is, what paths do I have available? Which path do I want to go down? Okay, what's the next step? What's the next step? What's the next step? And it's very backwards, and you need to think about the goal first and work your way backwards to the plan. And if that sounds backwards, then let me just point out this. Yeah, that might sound backwards chronologically, but it's the right way to think. Because when you want to go somewhere, if you're traveling right, you don't. And you ask for directions from your GPs or what have you, you don't say, what street looks the prettiest. Okay, I'm gonna go down that street. Well, this street looks nice over there. I'm gonna go down that street. You'll never end up anywhere. You'll just go down a bunch of pretty streets and God knows where. But if you know. You know where you're going, and you. The directions that you take, you don't even really care. You're just like, this is the best way to get here. You don't ask for people's opinions. You don't say what you think about this street. Are you proud of the street that I'm on? You don't care if you're not proud. You don't really care about the street that you're on, and you don't really worry about it. You're not like, oh, I don't really like the street. You don't care because you're so focused on where you're going, where you're actually headed. That the street is irrelevant. And so the right way to think is to start with a big picture, start with a macro goal. What do you want out of life? I think that's the most important question that no one's asking, right? What if I get one shot, one very short, very important shot at life, Right? No matter what your religious beliefs, we all can agree at least that as far as your current consciousness is aware, you have one shot at life. So what do you want out of it? If you're miserable, it's really an opportunity wasted. But if you're in pursuit of what you want, and you know that isn't, it's crystal clear, it doesn't have to be business. It can be anything that's crystal clear to you, then you should. Then obsession becomes a good thing. And every thing that you go through in life will become much easier and much. And you'll be more energy, you'll have more. You'll feel better about things. Failures won't be like. It won't be a big deal because you, if you're. If you're on your way to a store, for instance, and you know that's your destination, you're not really too bothered by a red light or a stop sign because that's just part of going to the store. It's not. You're not upset. You don't say, oh, stop sign. Oh, I'm going home. Because you're so focused on the destination. And so if you can live your life like that, if you can apply the same amount of wisdom to your life that you apply to growing to the grocery store, you'll live a much happier life and you'll be far more successful because you will end up going in the right direction and little failures along the way won't bother you so much. And I think that that's the best advice I can give if it's worth anything.

I think that's a wonderful analogy. And what I've really appreciated, actually on the. This conversation, Paul, is that I just think, you know, even just the word obsession for so many people, or I'd even put it not so many people, too many people seems to have this negative connotation which, for the people who, you know, actually find that obsession, but it's having such a positive impact on people. Obsession can be an incredible thing. And it's actually what's. As he sort of said a few times, it's sort of what is required. Because otherwise, if you don't have that thing that's a burning passion, desire to get obsessed about. I say to a lot of people, I did an interview recent, not so long ago, what would you say to people who want to get into business? I said don't. And I said, I said don't because unless you have that thing, it just, you know, all the directions, all the failures speaking about, it just won't go. It just won't. And so I love your analogy at the end and all I can say to you, Paul, is firstly, I really appreciate your time and secondly, that, you know, I wish you all the best going forward in what is just an unbelievable pursuit really. And it's one of pleasure to have done the, you know, done some research beforehand and to have been introduced to you by a mutual party. But to hear even more of your story and the work you're doing is very inspiring for me and for the people listening. So Paul, I really, really appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for having me and best of you too.

Thank you.