Unlocking Entrepreneurial Success with Ken Burke

There are a lot of life coaches out there, financial gurus who will tell you how you should get rich, how you should start a business, how you should be entrepreneurial. But when you scratch the surface, so many of them are just observers. They're just students of the craft. They talk to people. Our guest today has actually lived in the trenches. Our guest today is a serial entrepreneur. He is a well sought out speaker and educator and professor at top business schools around the world. He is the founder of Entrepreneur now as well as microcasting. But he's with us today in part to talk about his latest book, which is Five Steps to Thriving in Business. A special warm welcome to Ken Burke. Ken. Ken, thanks for joining us today.

TJ Great to be here. Great to be with you and your audience today.

Well, we're glad you're here. And you know, I like to learn from a lot of different resources. Dale Carnegie, obviously a font of wisdom. The Think and Grow Rich guys have gotten a lot of attention. But you scratch the surface of a lot of these earlier manifestos of how to be successful in business and it turns out they really weren't very successful themselves. You've walked the talk. You founded Market Live and created something that sold billions. That's with a B, billions of product, which, you know, we live in an age where everyone talks about, oh yeah, Mark Zuckerberg this and Steve Jobs that. 99.99% of entrepreneurs don't ever really succeed or they certainly don't get past the first threshold. They don't go public, they don't go to a big acquisition. You got to that level. So it's many, many degrees past where most people who are entrepreneur and entrepreneur can mean a lot of things. Some people start a restaurant, they think of themselves as entrepreneurial. It's great. But it's a little bit different when you're taking something and really scaling it out to the whole world as the modern technology, high tech ecosystem is all about and where you have thrived. Let's talk about your latest book here. Prosper Five Steps to Thrive. And I just pulled it right up here on my page. As you can see, I purchased, I like to purchase books rather than just get people to send me comps because I know I love people when people buy my books. And those of you watching a special hello to our friends on Amazon Live. If you are interested in the book, there is a click right there on the page. It's either your left side, the bottom or the right side. With one click, you can purchase the book. But Ken, tell us what have we learned in this book that's different from all the other books on entrepreneurialism in life?

Yeah, well, you know, I think that what's really interesting, first of all, thank you for buying the book. I appreciate it. And thanks everybody out there if they do buy the book as well. Well, but it's not, it's really a lot about blending together. Life and entrepreneurship is one thing. So the, my focus of the book is that, you know, when we're running a business, when we're being entrepreneurs, a lot of the life skills that you need in order to run that business is from what I discovered over my 25 plus years of running businesses, you need in business and in life. And that's why it's actually called in business and in life. And I want people to be thriving so to really enjoy the journey. And I know a lot of the self help world lives in that space as well. So what I try to do is I try to bring my business perspective, my business perspective acumen on the area of life and life management. It really breaks down into a number of different areas. But first of all, you got to really accept yourself. And I start off the book with that, which might seem a little bit odd from a business perspective, but if you're messed up internally and you're continually question yourself as an entrepreneur and you're fighting with yourself constantly, you don't like yourself, you don't love yourself, but you're still trying to be an entrepreneur, it's going to be really hard to succeed. That's what I found. So that's kind of, kind of number one. I also talk about managing your ego and that's a very self helpy type concept. But I talk about it in perspective of the business because the ego puts up these amazing roadblocks that stop you from your actual success. And I want to blow through all those roadblocks. I talk a lot about the roadblocks and how to blow through them. Then I go into getting clarity. And I was just on the phone yesterday, last night with an entrepreneur who had actually read my book and talked about the thing that stood out most for him, which was the clarity chapter. And he's incredibly defocused. And so one of the things I always teach entrepreneurs is to stay focused, to stay grounded and focus on one thing and be successful. I call it master and move on. So, so you want to master something and then you want to move on. What we as entrepreneurs want to do is we tend to be hyperactive. Like I am A bit. We tend to be a little adhd, you know, and instead of doing that, we need to bring all that energy into one thing first. Instead of saying, well, I'm going to do this and I can go serve this, and then I can go over here and do this and this, you can do a lot of things with your product or your service. Choose one thing and do it really, really well. So the more you focus, the more niche within a niche within a niche you are, the better off you are. Right. And then I talk about something that no other book. I don't know why a lot of books don't take out. I think it's. You nailed it, tj. A lot of the people that write these books actually aren't living in the trenches. And so I wrote a whole section on taking action. How do you. Actually, a lot of people have the idea, but they can't get out of their own way. And I talk one. One little simple thing I tell my entrepreneurs is, you know, action creates momentum. So by taking small little steps to whatever you want to achieve, to get started, all of a sudden the ball starts rolling, you know, even if you're just googling competitors, or let's say you want a chocolate business and you start making chocolate in your kitchen, little, you know, chocolate bars and chocolate candies and things like that. I only use that example because I want to start a chocolate business, and my chocolate book is right underneath my computer right here. So I'm like, oh, that's a great. That's a great. Because my love is making people happy, and chocolate makes people happy. So how do you take action to do that? Well, it might just be starting to. Starting the beginning of the process to get you motivated. That action creates momentum. But I talk a lot about how to break down fear as well, because what stops entrepreneurs is fear. We're constantly questioning ourselves. And then the final section of this book is on gratitude and giving gratitude. Because the most powerful expression of success is that gratitude that you can give. And. And I bring it all back around. And another thing, you know, as I was researching the book and reading tons of books and taking tons of notes just to inspire myself, over 10 or 12 years of writing this book, which is how long it took me to write the book, I found that there were very few books on gratitude as well. And so I incorporated all of these things into this idea. And I believe that as a successful entrepreneur, I'll just end with this as saying that it's all about the three Ps, passion, perseverance and not forgetting the three Ps hold on passion, perseverance, and persistence. And so the idea is that a lot of people, like you said, 99% of the people, don't reach a certain level of success. And I find that either they don't have a burning desire to drive them or they don't have the perseverance to keep them going. I always say, you got to be in the game to win the game. So the more that entrepreneurs stick with whatever they're working with, that doesn't mean that you can't change your idea and maneuver around it and respond to market conditions. But you gotta be in the game to win the game. So that perseverance is the missing component. Too much of the time, entrepreneurs get worried about the fear that comes up and that stops them. They question it or they share their idea with others, and others say, oh, that's not a great idea. I don't want to do that. You're sharing it with the wrong people. Because if you're sharing your idea with the right people and your target market, the people that really would want to buy something, you have to offer, I bet you'd get a completely different perspective than sharing it with somebody that doesn't really understand conventional wisdom.

You can correct me. The conventional wisdom is when you're starting a really great idea for a business, if you don't have people tell you you're crazy, you're probably not in fresh enough territory.

That's very true.

Example, of course, Airbnb.

Yep.

Initial response is being, let strangers in your home.

Yep.

And you're going to tell people where you live. It was considered a profoundly stupid idea by a lot of people, and it ended up being, you know, multi million.

Right. And when they hit that, they. They broke. They broke the mold. And all of a sudden, they proved that it was safe and that it was doable. And then more and more people that. That action created that momentum to create what they created. You know, Airbnb, everybody thinks it's an overnight success. It was not an overnight success. As you just pointed out, it had years before. And that's one of the things that stops people is I talk to younger entrepreneurs at schools like Columbia University, and I find that. And others Northeastern, I teach at as well, or I guess lecture at. And I find sometimes when I'm talking to the younger folks in their early 20s that they expect things to be a success in two or three years. And unfortunately, yeah, you're not going to be a unicorn in two or three years. It's not. Not how it works. Right. It took Airbnb about 15 years before they achieved that status of really success.

I mean, the classic advice you hear from venture capitalists is it takes a good 10 years to go from concept to some kind of meaningful exit. And that's when everything goes well.

You're absolutely. You nailed it. That's exactly what they had, a culture.

Where people, oh, I want to become a crypto billionaire overnight. Oh, I want to do options trading. It's easy. I see all my friends are getting rich, and it's really not that much fun to work every day for 10 years and maybe have no positive feedback for years.

Oh, and you're working. And I'm doing it right now with my latest business. But you're working literally day and night, 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week. And you do question, I question as well, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? And it's not for the money. It's for the passion of creation and growth. For me, anyway, it's about growing something from nothing, taking an idea that didn't exist. And all of a sudden, you go from no customers to a hundred customers, and you're like, wow, this is really cool. You go from one server. I remember when I first started my e commerce business, went from one server. We had thousands of servers by the time I saved it. 10 times, 100 times more powerful than we did when we started. So it's that expression of success when you have one store and all of a sudden you have a thousand stores or a hundred stores, and you see that, you see that, that motivation that motivates you to keep going as well.

Okay. And apologies, I'm getting a note from our producer. So, Ben, is there anything else we can do to get on Amazon? We've somehow had a problem with our Amazon feed, but we are today live with on Facebook.

Oh, great.

Ben's LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Twitch, on YouTube and a handful of other places. Ben, is there anything else we could do to get on Amazon, or is it just a lost possibility for today?

No, there's nothing we can do for now except we end the session and start over again. So the error response is from the link created for the session.

Okay, well, we may try to do that after this.

We'll.

We'll continue to proceed. But thanks, Ben. Thanks for that update. And yes, speaking of the book, though person's name and I forgot until just now, Napoleon Hill. Now, Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich. He wrote a gazillion books that are seen as bibles to a lot of.

Entrepreneurs still to this day.

Yeah, and I've read his books and there is good advice. But if you look at his actual track record, business failure after business failure, arrested con convictions, you know, all sorts of chicanery involved and really a horrible personal business track record if you scratch. And I really, it's going to offend some people because he's seen as a saying you've actually lived through success. What's an example of the sort of insight you're able to deliver in your book that you only got because of being in the trenches there every day for a decade or more? Because you know, any you, you could be a smart 23 year old writing a book and put in, you know, you got to be persistent. You have to think long term. What are, what are some granular things that really seeped into your book because of your experiences?

Yeah, I mean there's so many, but I'm just a couple pop to mind real quick. One is, you know, I watched in business how egos destroyed relationships. My own ego and managing my own ego over the 21 years that I was at my prior company, Market Live, where we were a platform engine that did over $2 billion a year in online sales for our customers. And we were very successful. Sequoia Capital was our first investor. Sequoia Capital is the, the, the VC. Of all VCs, they're the most successful VC in the world and they invested in us. And your ego gets a little bit ahead of you sometimes. I would say that managing your ego through the process is not something you would ever know until you've gone and gotten beaten up a little bit, lost some customers, maybe gotten thrown out as CEO, which I did. And then I came back again, which I did, reminiscent of Steve Jobs. Company was going great. Somebody at Sequoia said, you know what, you know, the board, you know what? This guy, you know, hasn't seen the movie yet, he's a little young, we're going to go ahead and swap him out. And at that time they could do that and, and then the company crashed. And then I came back a couple years later and we had to revive the company, brought it back and then we had a successful exit on it. But that's a really, really hard thing to learn because what happens is as an entrepreneur, your company is a bit of your baby. You get very attached to it and everything that happens emotionally to that company. You win a customer, you feel elated. You lose a customer, you feel devastated. Something doesn't work right, you're devastated. Again, you, you need to separate, or what we call detaching from that so you can still have all that emotion that goes along with the passion that drives your business forward. But if you're, it's almost like an addiction, if you're so involved in the business, in every sway, which way you'll lose your center point. And you would not know that unless you actually live through that experience. And by becoming somewhat detached, I don't mean apathetic to the business, just emotionally detached. And then look at it a little bit from the outside. You don't have to go on the roller coaster ride of every up and every down. You'll be able to enjoy it a lot more and enjoy the journey a lot more. That's just one small piece of advice, but I've got a ton, a ton of examples there.

Our special guest today is Ken Burke. He's a serial entrepreneur, respected professor and lecturer at top business schools around the world, including Columbia Business School. He is also the founder of Microcasting, sort of his latest venture. And Ken and I first connected through Entrepreneur now and we've formed partnerships with my online courses, his online courses with distribution. So he's been a pioneer in the online learning movement. Tell us about microcasting and what unique part of the market it's trying to address.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And you know, I loved, I wanted to, after I sold my company and did some different things, I wanted to jump back in the software game. I absolutely love the software game. And microcasting is kind of that, you know, how can we, how can we bring really good quality curated content to the world and let individual contributors really package value? Not just influencers, not just two or three minute videos on YouTube or Instagram, which by the way is great and wonderful. But how can you then derive value from doing this, number one? And number two, actually derive a revenue stream from it as well and do it in an effective way. And that's one of the things that is unique about our platform and our overall business and our overall solution is bringing people in that have wonderful and amazing content and working with them to get it out of them, number one, right. And then number two, being able to create it in such a way from scratch and that is engaging, that hooks people into the process and having all the tools to actually create a business around it. So that's one of the things that's what we do for smaller, I would say small to medium sized businesses. And then we have a part of the business that engages enterprises to do the same thing, so that enterprises can use learning and education and knowledge and AI all as a means of getting new business and keeping the business that they have. So that's how we work. That's what our platform is called microcasting. And really what it is is microcasting. Right.

So how specifically do you help people make money? Because, you know, I'm an old warrior in the online learning world. I started in 1998 with my first online course way too early, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars for years. It was really about 15 years into the game. I spread a lot of bets, put my courses, made a lot of courses, and put my courses on a hundred platforms, including my own. 99 of them, basically, well, 95 of them made no money, maybe four made a little. And then Udemy is the one that really worked for me. Much more so than selling on my own platform. I come across entrepreneurs, trainers, speakers, subject matter experts all the time who tried online learning. And unless they're as famous as Anthony Robbins or Brendan Bouchard, 99% of them seem like they've made no money. Because the technology of putting content out there is pretty much commoditized. The ability to market and put it all together really isn't. Now, you mentioned curation. One of the raps against Udemy is, oh, there's a lot of crappy courses out there. Well, it's true, they have a hundred thousand courses, but if you were to type in, say, Python, you want to learn how to do Python, you'll see maybe a couple of thousand courses. But if you see the number one ranked course has a 4.8 rating and has 100,000 students and 10,000 great reviews, it's a pretty safe bet, especially considering how inexpensive it is. How do your clients deal with this Udemy essentially being like the Amazon, what Amazon did to online booksellers, right?

Absolutely. Well, yeah, I'm not a big fan of Udemy, which I think you know for a lot of reasons. And that's one of the reasons. While there is this massive database of content, there are some good courses and there are a lot of bad courses out there as well. And that's left up to the individual to go figure out. However, you're right, they have a rating system and you pick one of the better ones, that's fine. I don't even actually see Udemy on my radar and I don't actually see it on our customers radar as well. Our customers already have pre existing businesses. That's number one and they integrate the elearning and customer communication. So. So it's not just about elearning itself. As a raw, I'm going to go sell a course to somebody that I don't know. That is a, that's a potential business, but that's a hard one to do. Right. So the special part about, I think what we, what we do is we integrate it into their actual business and have it be an extension of their business. So it's not necessarily their primary driver of revenue. It is a secondary driver of revenue that then supports the overall business that they already have. That is actually where we're seeing success, number one. Number two, it's not just the on demand world, which is the world that you talked about just a moment ago with Udemy. It's the on demand world integrated with the live world. I know you tried that as well. And we're kind of educating right here. I consider this content for education, whether you're monetizing this in ads or whether you're monetizing you specifically, but you monetize.

I hope it's educational. No offense to you, but we're not as entertaining as Seinfeld. It's not quite as funny.

Well, you're pretty entertaining, tj. I've been around you for a while. You're pretty entertaining. So, but, but it's that engagement, right? What we're doing right here in terms, I call this the interview method. And I help some of our customers structure these into courses. But it's always. Anything that we do with our customers is always integrated with their existing business. So if they're just solopreneurs that say, I've got five courses and I want to put up, yeah, we probably might be able to help you. But that's not our core business. Our core business is helping integrate it in such a way that it's tightly integrated and that you're part of the overall equation. So we very much believe that that live component or that component where you're working either one on one or in group sessions or doing some live sessions within the on demand training. I think if it's just I built a course and I want to put it up, that's going to be a hard road to hoe, as they say out there. And it's purely on demand and it's purely through distribution channels. And we both know that business very well. That's not the business we're in. The business that we're in is highly curated, integrated into your business and controlling the customer experience. And again, we're not just coaches and consultants. We actually work with small, medium and large size businesses as well. And it's that integration into the business to get people stimulated so they understand and can work with your existing products or services and they integrate the two together. That's our claim to fame. And I will say one last thing real quick is that Udemy, with all the things that are going on in the world, all of them are reducing their revenue structures, they're reducing their commission structures. And so if anybody wants to make money in this world going forward, it's not going out to the Udemies of the world because you're not going to be able to get established number one. And they want more of the pie. So if you have any shot at it, you're going to need to market yourself as a personal brand. You're absolutely right. If you're an individual or you're going to have to market yourself like a business because you are a business. That's what we do.

I mean, everything you say resonates with me. I mean, I've had a lot of good luck with you. To me, and I think anyone can if they get in a time machine and go back 10 years.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's unfortunately what it takes. There's a lot of, of incumbency that really benefits and that helps me a lot of times. But there's so much clutter, I think it's almost impossible unless you, you know, if you were a 21 year old and you were really, really good at learning faster than anyone else, the absolute latest new software and, and AI and everything else and you could be first to market and just be churning out horses. Yeah, I, I think Udemy could be a part of what you do. But for anyone else, I think it's, it's, it's a mature marketplace. Let's talk about integration a minute because let's be specific. I mean, I integrate my courses in that if a great Fortune 500 company contacts me about possibly hiring me for weeks of training, I might sweeten the proposal or the first conversation, say, hey, here's access to my course. It's normally $1,000 for my high end one, you can have it for free. Gives them a taste of me, it lets them experience me without it costing any of my time or money. And if that increases the odds of them hiring me at a high daily rate or a speaker fee, then that benefits me. So that's one part of it there is the part of if someone hires me for traditional in person training or Live training on Zoom. I can say your homework is you get access to all these courses, so that sweetens the pot. I can also say, all right, you know, my fee is X and you may say that's 25% more than competitors, but I'm going to give you access to, to bow world's largest media training online course that all of your people will have for the next year. No extra cost for that. So it helps them justify higher fees. So there's a lot of ways I'm integrating it. But I'm sure you have clients who are doing things better than I am. How are you helping them integrate their online, their online content, their online course content with their rest of the business? Because ultimately, if you're a creator, a small business person, what you're looking for is at the end of the year, did I get to keep 1 or 2 or 3 million for myself? You don't really care about being able to say, I have 10 million course sales, right? That's margins. You want the most that you keep for your business for profit. How do you help them do that?

Well, I think you just summarized a lot of the things that actually are the success criteria for the customers that we have where they're either using what we call the hybrid model and where they're integrating, you know, I wouldn't even say necessarily are giving it away for free. I would say that they're integrating it within their business structure and selling it as an overall solution. And it could be perceived as, hey, I'm just going to give you my library here for the, the consulting that I'm going to do, okay? Or what it is, is it becomes a star player in the role, which is you're going to have on demand training and you're going to have live training for me. So instead of me doing 100% of the training, let me give you an example. I have a customer in the area of leadership. I call them the leadership ladies. They are amazing, right? So what they do is they have a five course program along with a five session, live session program. What they do is they teach middle managers. So they go into the executives and they teach executives leadership skills. And then the executives say, well, what about all my middle managers as an example? So they use this program which costs a couple thousand dollars a person, which has both the online component, it has the live component to be able to teach then middle managers what they're teaching the executives. But they can't do one on one or in small group session with, with the executives because that's like $10,000. Right. So they've lowered the price and then widen the target market. That's their use case. I've got a bunch of customers that are doing compliance oriented things. So they're working with the states and federal governments and other things. Those are actually, I have to say, I'm just going to put in a plug for it. Amazing. Because anything that you can do with regards to certification, so you master a particular topic area and then you go. And because it's mandated by the state or it's required by an association or what have you, these are all of a sudden programs that people have to learn, have to get a certificate for. I have to say I have a little niche in that area where people have just discovered these areas that are required. So that's just one little aside as well. There is a lot of ways in which to do this, but you have to also look at it as a business. See what I think what, what the challenge is is that, that people say, hey, I want to build courses and I just want to put them out there and they're just going to sell. That doesn't work. If you actually look at it as a business and say, I'm integrating this into my business. This is a component of my overall business. And possibly I'm using the education to actually sell my products or services more effectively, depending on what you're trying to sell, which could be your consulting services, your coaching services or what have you. Then all of a sudden this becomes a real thing that you have to do as part of it. We call it content marketing to a certain degree. So using this content and pushing it out there, it could be that you're giving away for free, but it's still wildly important to your overall success. And that's a whole different topic area.

Our special guest today is Ken Burke. He is a serial entrepreneur and unlike me, he's a successful entrepreneur. You are too successes. But I've had, I lost count of 100 at how many different ventures I had that have failed at some level or the talk shows or, or websites and things like that. So I've had, I mean we all. You scratch any entrepreneur, you're going to find failures typically. So you've had a number of successes. Your current focus is microcasting. We're going to provide a link to that in the show notes and that would be on our audio podcast or video podcast. And I see we've had a couple of people stop by. Let's see, Junit says hello and Juan says Hello. Thanks for joining us Juan. The topic today is entrepreneurialism. We have Ken Burke who is an author and an expert and a serial serial entrepreneur. He's telling us about microcasting. Tell us who your ideal prospect is and what you typically cover with them in the first conversation you have when you're meeting with them.

Yeah, so you know, our ideal prospect is somebody that has a business already, that has an established business. It can, can be a small business as well. So you know, they might have, you know, have you know, a million dollars in sales, $500,000 in sales. But there's something there, right, that is a business that then by adding this engagement component of knowledge education, AI as well. Because AI is a key component to what we do in order to continue to reinforce and re engage the customer. What you want to do as a business. And again the establish is that you already have an established business of some sort of and that you're using this as a, as a way of enhancing the overall relationship. That's why we call it almost a customer success platform as well as much as an elearning. Elearning is just the mechanism that we use to engage. Sure you can make a lot of, you can make money on it or you can use it as an engagement platform to make money on your core business which is really probably our more primary customer. They have a core business, they want to enhance that core business. They need engagement and knowledge is the key to that engagement. That's what we found anyway. A more knowledgeable buyer is a more profitable buyer. They also are going to stick with you more. I based my entire last business on this. So my business was, my, my last business was Market Live. It was, you know, as we mentioned earlier, Sequoia back $2 billion a year in online sales from our customers. Our customers are Disney, Warner Brothers, Armani, Party City, all these major retailers across the US mainly US based. And we used thought leadership, knowledge education to continue to engage our customers. And I will tell you this, we had customers for 8, 10, 12, 15, 20 years in an industry where people would jump platforms every three or four years. E commerce platform again. I started in 1995 when e commerce had just started. And I rode that wave all the way through 2015 when I sold the company to Vista Equity Partners for a lot of money, which was my successful exit. That's great. But it didn't even mean anything to me. What meant something to me, what we were grew something from nothing to something. And that was what was motivating. That's what I want all of your listeners to do by kind of using, whether myself or others as examples and mentors to that growth. And by doing that, I think that. And what we did in that business was the reason we hung onto our customers so much was because we continually educated them. We, we continually gave them new knowledge and information and made it easy and easy for them to grow their business through our knowledge. If you do the same thing in your business, whether it's free content or paid for content, that's the key to growing your customer base and keeping them there.

Let me, you just touched on something. Let me bring up something that a lot of entrepreneurs don't like to talk about. Michael Lewis has written about this, but it's the issue of simply timing and luck. You started your business in 1995. I'm not suggesting anyone who started a business in 1995 was successful. But if you were going to start an online E commerce business, that was probably a lot better than 2001 or 2017. How much of success as an entrepreneur is based on typing?

That's a great, great question. So I think that the timing is when I talk about trends to my entrepreneurs and teach them about trends and kind of that upswing in trends. Right now we're in the AI trend and nobody knows exactly what AI is yet and what it's going to be. Even the experts don't know really, truly what it's going to manifest itself into. So there's a lot of wild, wild west. And right now we're in that era and there's these points in time, in technology and in the world where you have these pivot points. If you read Malcolm Gladwell's book, of course, I know you have. He talks about the. Yeah, yeah. Outliers. Sorry. Yeah. Outliers is really, really good. I mean, it's an amazing read. And you know, he correlates the time that the tech giant started back in Bill Gates days, back in Michael Dell days. You could do the exact same thing with Zuckerberg and the social media craze. And now we're in it again. We're in the AI craze right now. And I see it because I'm actually in the Silicon Valley, I'm in the San Francisco Bay area. And it is a craze right now. It's the wild wild west and people are trying to figure it out. Now my luck was I started in 95 and I dove right into E commerce. E commerce was really just very nascent. It wasn't really a big deal. And we just became kind of the leader. I mean, I didn't get funded for the first 11 years of the business. I kind of bumbled around and you know, back in the day you could start a business without funding. Today it's a little bit harder to do. And I kind of bumbled around and I just sold and got customers and all of a sudden we had a bunch of customers and people were looking at us as a really cool company and we were one of the survivors of some of the dot bombs and the, and some of the craters over 19, 2001, 2008 and, and beyond. So because we learned how to run a business, we had good customers that paid us. So you need to learn all of that. So I think there's a certain level of luck with timing. I agree. But I will also say I think that you can build a business out of almost anything. There are certain businesses that I probably wouldn't go into right now. Give you an example. I, I don't know that I would become a writer today or a tech writer that, you know, AI has just displaced that and it displaced it about a year and a half ago. I'm not saying that the skill of writing is gone and you know, all these book authors are going what? But a lot of it is that's not going to be a job that's going to pay a lot of money. There are going to be a lot of jobs left in that or it's.

So hard to be better than AI. I mean, just this morning my daughter has a vocabulary test.

Yeah.

And she had like 11 words that does archeology and hunter gatherer things that related to history. And we did it last night, we practiced the words and she knew them and could spell them properly and define them. But this morning I woke up, I thought, am I really making this as interesting and as fun, as memorable for her as possible? So I, I went to my chatgpt dictated and I said, hey Chat gpc make a funny poem that would be goofy and memorable and interesting for an 11 year old that uses the following 11 words and defines these words. And I said the words and boom, 10 seconds later it was saying it. And she was laughing and listening, paying keen attention.

Wow.

And then it also had it by text. She could read it again and that motivated her.

That's great.

To ask ChatGPT to write a poem making fun of an old grandpa who had one hair on his head. But it really engaged her in a way. Could I have written that?

Yeah.

But it would have taken me Two hours.

Yeah. And you have the ability and skills to do that. Most people don't. Right. I mean, you are a communicator and a writer extraordinaire. A lot of people have to rely on that. Yeah.

So, Ken, I want to throw you a curveball here. You are mentor, you are a professor of entrepreneurialism and a lecturer at prominent business schools. I need you to coach a young entrepreneur who is trying to do something new in the world of communications and AI. I'm going to bring him on in just a moment. He's very young. In fact, he's only three months old. And I'm specifically talking about a digital clone. I have created a digital clone. And here's my challenge as an entrepreneur. I, I'm trying to get people to even understand what a digital clone is. It's interactive. It is video based, audio based, tech based. Because when people say clones, unfortunately they think, what they think of is, oh, a chatbot. Oh, Expedia's had that for years and years and a big deal. That's not what I'm talking about. You say clone, they may think, oh, audio, like an AT&T operator, voicemail, hell. Oh, yeah, I don't even like that. That's awful. Or you think a video clone, you think of someone where you have got to write a script or have an AI write a script and then you see a robot, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's not particularly interesting. This is completely different. This is completely interactive, as if you were having a one on one zoom call. So I happen to think this is the biggest communications breakthrough since the Internet, arguably. Since arguably. Excuse me one second. My phone automatically answered and I need to make sure I'm not. I gotta turn it off. Sorry, I didn't answer, but it just sometimes goes on through my phone, through my watch. So I think this is so big. It's, it, it is certainly bigger in my view than the transition from a book or in person training to online video training. And I got in early on that training and that took me 15 years to really get to the point where people understood, understand it. So I want to, I want to pick your brain, get some feedback on if, if I were your student or your client, how would you guide me? How would you advise me on how to make this thing real and understandable? So let's just take a look. It's sort of changing and improving on a daily basis, but let's just call and take a look at it in a moment. And sometimes it's faster than others. And it doesn't always work.

It's okay.

Hey there. How's it going? What can I do for you?

Hi tj I want to know what are the keys of being a successful entrepreneur? What sort of mindset should someone have and what sort of daily habits should they have if they want to be a successful entrepreneur?

To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to cultivate daily habits that build discipline and momentum. Start by setting clear, actionable goals each day. Prioritize tasks that drive your business forward consistently. Seek feedback and adapt quickly. Dedicate time to learning and improving your skills. Network regularly to build valuable relationships. Maintain a healthy work life. Balance.

That I want to get something Even More personal My friend Ken is going on CNBC tomorrow to talk about his new business, microcasting, and how he's going to help small and large businesses create more valuable content to help their clients. What advice do you have for Ken as he goes on CNBC tomorrow to talk about his business? What messages would be good for him? What sound bites would be good for him?

Ken should focus on clear, concise messages that highlight the unique value of microcasting. Here are some 1. Microcasting empowers businesses to create tailored content that directly engages their target audience, driving higher engagement and loyalty. 2. We help companies of all sizes leverage microcasting to deliver personalized experiences that resonate with their clients.

3.

Our innovative approach to content creation ensures that every message is impactful and relevant, maximizing ROI for our clients. What specific aspect of Ken's business do you think will resonate most with the CNBC audience?

Hey, before we get to that, what do you think if I have to go in his place? What do you think I should wear tomorrow in this show? What do you think of what I'm wearing now and what do you see me wearing?

Foreign?

You're wearing a suit, which is a solid choice for a professional setting. However, make sure the suit fits well and is paired with a crisp shirt and tie. For cnbc, stick to classic neutral colors like navy or charcoal. Avoid anything too flashy or distracting. Your goal is to keep the focus on your message, not your attire.

How do you feel about your everything else?

Okay?

Is my shirt okay?

By the way?

What am I doing right now? Because sometimes I get a little nervous and I do this. What happens if I do this during an interview? What am I doing?

If you're getting nervous and start fidgeting or making repetitive gestures, it can distract your audience and undermine your message. Practice Stand still and using what are you doing now?

I just want to See if you can see me.

You're pointing to your face, specifically under your eye. If this is a nervous habit, it's.

Important to be aware. I need you to be quiet until I specifically reference you by name. So, Ken, I need. Whoops, let's bring Ken back in. So, Ken, I need some feedback from you on how this guy can become meaningful to people. Because right now people are coming in, they say, oh, that's cool, but nobody really quite knows what to do with it. I think of it as something that is really taking all the power. I'm going to take him off the screen, but we'll keep him locked. I think of it is just radically transformational, in fact a thousand times better than any of my online courses because this makes it completely personal. One on one coach, that's what people have always gotten the most value for me is if I can spend. Spend a full day with them, whether it's in person or live on Zoom. It's completely about them. You saw, I could personalize it to your own concerns and your messages. It's not giving generic information. It can actually give feedback on what I'm wearing and body language and. But no one's, no one's ever said, hey, let's go out and buy some clone coaching that. That's just too new to people. It took me 15 years to really go from the first online course to making money from it. I need your help now as a business coach to help me save time because, you know, I want to be around in 15 years, but I don't really want to have to wait 15 years. Meaningful and helpful to people. So give me your advice on how, how I can make people understand. Wow, this is, this is a whole new thing. So far I'm giving as an extra for my courses. Oh, you get this. Lesson three. Oh, by the way, there's a clone coach for this. It's seen as kind of a support tool on my website. But I've also got a clone. This one is the life coaching clone. I have one just for communication skills. I have one just to do simulated job interviews for people. Great one for media training as well. So I've got different niches, but I haven't figured out how to monetize it yet. So I want to pick your brain now as an entrepreneur coach. I love it.

I love it. Well, first of all, great concept, great business idea. This is the on. And I think that everybody that's listening right now should put their entrepreneurial hats.

On business or personal development.

It started.

But I think that everybody should put their entrepreneurial hats on, because whatever their idea is, we're going to go through the same kind of process or a similar process to what you're doing. So the first thing that came to mind right away, first of all, great business idea, great business concept. There's something really here. The question is, is how do you monetize it? Right? So that's. That's a. I want to make sure we address that question. The first thing is, is that you have to find the most likely buyers, or what we call your icp, your ideal customer. That would actually. That would actually resonate with this. So not everybody might identify with it. So if you went out, the mistake would be, is, hey, I've got this great technology. I don't know the uses for it. I don't really know how I'm going to use it. I'm just going to kind of put it out there and see what happens. Number one is I would say that you need to identify a very, very narrow target market and get adoption in that target market of people that would actually say, know what? I would rather communicate this way with someone. This is a more preferable way. So it's not applicable to everybody today because what it does is it requires education, knowledge, and all those other things that I talked about earlier. You're going to need to educate a market on this, that this is actually better. This is kind of the Airbnb problem. Although I think that instead of taking five, six, seven years to educate the way that Airbnb did, you can do it in a very short period of time with this product, because the product is fairly simple, but also very complex. People need to be able to trust it in order to know that trust. So what we got to do first is we need to find that target market that would identify, but we need to pair that with the use case. In other words, you need to find a use case that makes us highly relevant and a use case that actually can be monetized. So right now, you've done the most natural thing is, hey, I've added this on almost for free, or maybe there's, you know, it adds value to your overall offering, which I think is great. And. And I can see people buying it because they get this along with tj, everything tj. And that then becomes my own personal coach to being able to reference this material anytime I want, which I think can be very, very valuable. How you monetize that. The question is, how can we do this without TJ as well? How can we Use this and sell this independently of tj.

Well, let me clarify here. I'm not an AI Python genius and I didn't train a model and raise $5 billion what it takes. I'm using a platform called Delphi. So they are essentially, you know, what, what, what thinkific or teachable is for online trainers where they put everything together in one place and make it simple for non techies to upload courses. I'm using a platform that anyone could go, you could go to today, you wouldn't need me, right? You could have that. So I've trained my clone with 14 million words of my ideas from all my, all my online courses, every YouTube video I've ever made, every book I've ever read. It's all built into this brain and then it's mod. So they take 11 labs for my voice and hey gen and other platforms for the video and they use OpenAI to assimilate all the data so that it comes out conversational. So I can't sell the idea of I don't have a platform and the technology.

No, no, understood.

Is the expertise on how to help someone navigate their way through it because it is so new and fresh.

That's the key.

Yeah, so, so I have split up a page saying, you know, consulting practice. I am today starting to make an online course on how to make your own online cloth. So I see different things of, you know, the old, the old idea of, you know, you're selling the picks and shovels. So I've got a whole platform for how to sell the picks and shovels. What I don't have yet is a way of, let me step back. I really want to be the poster boy of using interactive video digital clones in general. I also want people to really use my specific clone to help them in two areas. Help their communication skills, but also personal development skills and to really use it as an ongoing coach. You know, if you're interested in golfing, if you can have Tiger woods with you an hour a day on the links anytime you want, that would probably, you'd probably like that. I'm not a golfer. He's maybe not the best coach, but. But if you could have him instead of paying, you know, he would want $20 million a month if he were to do that for you. If you could have him giving all the same advice for $20 a month, well, that would be instantly attract. You could instantly probably find, you know, a million golfers in the United States who would pay for that.

Well, you just hit on the actual use case. So, first of all, I did understand that it wasn't. You didn't build the technology from scratch necessarily. You're using an assembly of technology, including OpenAI. It's been bundled through this organization, which totally makes sense, and anybody could potentially do this. But you're going back to the same thing, which is just the same thing that authors did 100 years ago, 50 years ago. This same thing that online course creators did as well is that you are the personality that's going to add value to this. So Tony Robbins came out with this, he'd be able to monetize this tomorrow. We know that. Right? What you. So the same, the same things that you need to do in order to raise your profile and, and as you're doing right now in order to increase your platform to be able to utilize this, because it's the TJ Walker digital clone versus the Ken Burke digital clone, who knows nothing. But the TJ Walker clone knows a lot of. And basically what you're doing is you're bringing that out. That's how you're going to monetize it. But what I want to make sure is that, is that if you can, you've already kind of started to build the use case because it's your area of expertise, it's your use case. The more that you can again, target this on a market that is specific, that this knowledge is specific to how they're going to drive value out of it, number one. And the use case that gets associated with how am I going to use this to make my life better? What's the value proposition of using this over live tj? And is it just that it's, it's, it's less price? No, not at all. It's actually a lot more convenient. It's real time. It's on demand. I can't call TJ Walker right now because he's live on YouTube and on Amazon and on LinkedIn. I can't call Ken Burke right now, but I can go to his digital clone and get an answer on something that I need based on his knowledge that was in his head, that he's developed. By the way, anyone can do this. You're absolutely right. But the key to getting it out there, like you said, I want to be the number one coach in this particular area, that it can be the same goal the people that are listening to right now, but it requires the same skill set. Marketing, platform development, content, education, all those things that you have to do for any other part of your business, including books, courses, one Other brief demonstration to.

Give you a sense of this, because you're right, it's not that it's as good as I am. It's actually in many regards, infinitely better.

Right.

Here's an example. And it's, it's a little buggy, but let me just show you this because you can text it, you can call on the phone, you can do it. You can access it on WhatsApp. You can do just text, you can do just audio.

Hi.

You can do it through video and subscribe. So now what I'm going to show you, well, What I was attempting to show you was the language capability. Let me go in through another avenue because it's not perfect yet, but the text version, if you write text in any, virtually any language, my clone will answer back to you in your language.

In that language. Yeah.

So that's, to me, what's, what is ultimately so fascinating because I'm a stupid American. I only speak one language, whereas my own can speak to you in your language.

Hi, I'm TJ's clone.

Speak something else. So I only speak a couple of.

Words.

Of Spanish, but my clone.

Speaks perfect Spanish.

Spanish. So that's, that's what's interesting. Let's do it. We'll just do a little test.

Hi, I'm TJ's clone. How may I help you?

Estoy hola, senor. Mi problemo es no muy confidential. Confidentioso. Poor K. Now, I have no idea if to a native Spanish speaker that is great, pretty good, or complete gibberish. I have no idea. But I know it's a lot better than I could do because I don't speak any Spanish other than.

Exactly. My guess is, My guess is they would, they would believe it's. It's the same, just like in English.

It is my voice. I mean, it's. It sound related.

Your voice? Sure.

It's. It's pulling from the same data. It's not pulling from the Internet. It's not pulling from ChatGPT and Wikipedia. It's only pulling from my data. So that's. What is, to me is so exciting, is now I can instantly be accessible to 8 billion people around the world, minus anyone who doesn't have access to a cell phone language at any time of day or night.

It's absolutely amazing. Absolutely. And just so you know, we actually have this technology built into our engine as well. We don't have the video part of it, but we have the. We're doing the exact same thing. We take our customers courses, we bundle it all together. We call it AI Q&A and, and then we allow people to interact with an engine anytime they want. So this technology is becoming more and more ubiquitous. You've taken it to the next level through this Delphi company to actually make it more real, like I'm talking to somebody. And by the way, what you have today is going to become infinitely better in a year from now and it'll become much more realistic than even it is today. And it's already really amazing. Right.

It's radically better than it was on Friday, which is.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. And you're using your knowledge base in order to train the model. Model, essentially. And it's. They're not even. The Delphi company isn't doing anything that special, I can tell you, because we're not doing anything that special. They've created a language model and essentially it's a private language model that's using OpenAI's AI technology and they're sending that data there and getting responses back based on your content as opposed to the world's content. That's really what's happening. And then it's being translated into either languages, video, audio or what have you. That's all that's happening here. But there's a lot going on and in a year from now, it's going to be infinitely better, as we said.

Yeah.

And so, you know, my primary expertise, as you know, is in communication skills, not techno. I'm trying to fuse those two together. But it's, it's not surprising to me that you're, you're incorporating AI into this. But here's my challenge is people think that, oh, text is enough when in. But in real life, if, if an investor wants to meet with you or you want to meet with investor these days, you either go in person or you do it on zoom. It's not just your walk. You're not, you're not just texting back and forth. No.

1.

Very few people get significant seven figure eight figure checks through a text. We're also typically not doing it just through audio. So the visual, I think is how most important communication takes place. Whether you're in the same room or through Zoom or FaceTime or something like that. Visual is most important. And yet so many people have told themselves, oh, I don't need to do that. Text is good enough or it's too hard. So that's one area where I see an opening for me, which is why I'm doing a course on how to create your own video clone and also using My expertise because just to get the video you saw, I had to go through five different iterations of it.

Right.

Because the problem is when engineers are in charge, no offense to the people at Delphi and Haymark Heygen and others, they're giving an engineer's perspective. So what they're telling people is be perfectly stiff and nothing's distracting and then you'll kind of be like this and you won't have any blur or distortion.

But.

But the problem is you look like a robot. And no one wants to listen to that.

Yep, absolutely.

My first reaction is do what I recommend people do on TV and gesture and do that. The problem with that is when someone is a user, is talking to the clone and they see my hands, my hands moving and not I'm not talking, it looks really weird and strange.

Right, right.

Go through all these different versions to get a little bit of movement. Absolutely not show my hands because I wanted it to seem. I wanted it to feel like it's not creepy.

Yep, yep. Absolutely. Creep.

And I want to say hello to Pat, who stopped by to say hello, and Madden and others. And we'll hope to get some of your questions shortly. But the creepiness factor is frankly something I overestimate or underestimated because. Because the CEO of Delphi went on Fox Business, not the political channel, but Fox Business News with Maria Barnaroma a week and a half ago, did a product demonstration. I thought he did extremely well. Really nothing of controversy was touched on. And I looked. So there's a couple of interesting things. His video clip was then posted on the Fox News Business News YouTube channel. So not Fox News, not foxbusinessnews.com but just their YouTube channel. The average clip is getting about 30,000 views. His clip, not a celebrity, not dealing with controversy, not a well known politician. His clip got 300,000 views in the first few days. He got 3,000 comments. Every one of them was negative. Every one of them. This is the worst thing in the world. This is evil. This is criminal. Anyone associated with this should be put in jail. So it does scare a lot of people.

Yep.

Now, I knew that there would be that at some level because every new technology that involves a human face, a voice, does that. First time people saw movies, they jumped out of their seats because they thought the train was coming. People heard a stereo or, you know, a phonograph. They thought it was possessed by demons. So new technology that involves anything to do with humans always scares people to death. But I'm wondering if the opposition to this is going to be even more entrenched.

So, so what I think what you find with any new adoption process is that first of all, if you, if you're early on, just like a lot of the other very rich, very successful Silicon Valley elites were early on with their ideas and then they just kind of rode the wave and they were not overnight successes. So first piece of advice is that if you're looking for an overnight success, you can already tell you're getting some arrows in the back as you go through this. Perseverance, persistence, passion. Those three P's that I talked about at the beginning, they hold true here that you're going to continue to mold and shape this and maybe even pivot and, and be able to find just that niche that's going to make it work for you. And that means that you're really, really early in this game right now. And you just need. My advice is you stick with it. You find the application, which I think you're honing in on, and brand that application accordingly and start getting early adopters to use it that don't think it's creepy, that don't think it's weird. And then all of a sudden kind of move that ball forward a little bit and continue to innovate as you can innovate. Then you'll be poised and ready for when this thing is widely accepted or there's a shift in the technology. All of a sudden it's like boom. And then it's like everybody wants it. Just like Chat GPT. You know, Chat GPT existed, but before it actually came out In March of 2023, it was Jasper that everybody was going crazy over. They were doing the same thing, probably using the same open AI engine. I don't know if they were using Open Air or another. Another view. And that became, that was kind of part of the craze, but they were early. Now you don't hear a lot about Jasper, but they were the leaders at the time because Chat GPT has taken over and gotten so much better. And by the way, when Chat GPT first came out, it was not very good. You could, you get limited inputs and limited exports. Now I have a subscription to Chat GPT and it has gotten, every month just like you said earlier, it just gets better and better and better and better. So my advice to you is stick with it. Find that unique niched application for this type of technology and own that niche for this type of technology. Because you're not the technology creator, you're the technology enabler. And that owning that Niche and being better than any other communication or life coach because you got in so early and that you've established yourself and get those early adopters starting to promote it. That's what I would do if I were you.

I'm looking for two main niches. One niche is people who want to improve their communication skills. They're, they're paying, you know, sometimes nine bucks on Udemy for a course with me. And I'm giving this away for free. That helps me because I get more minutes on the course, on the course. So I'm getting more, you know, thousands of dollars more revenue already by using my phone. So that's one. But I would love to have, I would much rather than pay me directly just for the clone experience rather than an extra add on. So that's one market where someone's is right now. People typically have two options. They can hire me for a day or some other. If they want really high quality training. I fly to them, they fly to me, or we do it through zoom and that's at least $10,000 a day. That automatically eliminates 99.9% of the world. But when they do that, they get high level, really personal, one on one coaching or small group. They get recorded on camera a dozen times. They leave being great, 100% satisfaction. So that's one model. The second model is they take an online course. I happen to think my online courses are the best in the world. The problem is nobody does the work, nobody does the extensive dozen times of recording and getting instantaneous feedback. So they don't really benefit, they don't really get any better. Hate to say it, but it's true. Okay, so there's these two extremes. What excites me so much about these clones is it can really take the best of what actually works, the interaction. I mean, you just saw my clone critique what I was wearing and it's the best of that. And yet it can be priced really, you know, less than 99% less than what an in person training could be completely scalable, anytime, anywhere, any language. So in my mind it's infinitely better than an online course. It's taken so long to get people.

Excited about online courses because it's actually missing, I think you're missing a key component which is that having this interactive AI experience but without the structure, they don't know where to start, where to go, where to continue. So you need to marry the two worlds that you need to provide me with structure because I like to be guided. I want to, I want you to be prescriptive to me on if I'm doing media training, where to start? Where's the middle, where's the end? How do I go through it? And I want then the AI component to this to be able to personalize that experience. So you need to marry these two world. And maybe you're already doing this, but you need to marry these two worlds because just on its own, I wouldn't know what to ask it teach, you know, tj, teach me media training, you know, and it's like, okay. And it gives me a, you know, a two or three minute answer, which is exactly probably what it does. And then it doesn't teach me anything.

So you're absolutely right. For the short term, I'm trying to solve that problem by marrying it to my existing courses that may have 600 video lectures in a linear way. The other way, short term is when you go into it, you'll see common questions asked that can lead you right near term. The company I'm working with is creating something they call a journey. So you would sign in for a journey and exactly what you're talking about. The clone would come on and sort of talk to you the way you would if you were in the same room and you'd hired me for a day. So that's one market. The other segment of the market I'm looking for is people who want. Who see the value of doing it on video and not just text, and need some hand holding because most people are afraid to speak on camera. And the beauty of these clones is you only need about four minutes of video.

Yeah.

But if you look bad, you'll never push the button to publish to make it go live.

That is true. That is true.

Just a lot of other nuances I've learned because I've been spending 10 hours a day on this for the last three and a half months. So I'm about to repackage that expertise in an online video course and then I'm going to upload those courses into my clone and then I'm going to use my clone to write a book on how to make your own digital clone beautiful.

I love it.

To do the audio version of the book. So there's a lot of sort of meta things going on there. Let me put your teacher's cap on.

Sure.

Using your expertise, I want you to be me trying to pitch you on why every client at Microcasting should have a true interactive video clone and not just the text, which I don't think excites anybody. How would you do that, right?

Sure. Well, yeah. I mean, I think that first of all, I would draw the. And I will do it. I will draw, I would draw out the benefits of that. So I would say something like, as I'm pitching right now, the text version of this, because we're a little bit more on the enterprise side. So when we do that, we're saying we're going to take your 10,000 documents, your 5,000 videos, we're going to build a model around it, and then we put our AI QA engine on it. All of a sudden that is so new and revolutionary. It starts to displace your chatbot, which never works, your knowledge base, which never works, and even some on demand video that never works as well or that may not work for you. Your customers now are able to get the answers to the questions they need instantly. Right? And they're going to get it and it's going to be tailored to them exactly on demand. What they're thinking. Now what we're going to do is we're going to uplevel that one level. Now here comes my pitch. I'm actually going to then take a voice simulation of an expert within your organization. We're also going to take video of experts within your organization. We're going to going to marry that together with this on Demand Real Time AI Q&A system that's going to marry this together so that the customer actually feels that they're experiencing you and your brand. So the brand, brand voice is going to be incorporated. The look and feel, the colors, the way that you speak to your customers, whether it's animated and fast or whether it's slow and methodical based in your target market is all going to be honed in and they're going to have this amazing interactive tool that is going to be based on the data in your database. In other words, the data that we've already provided, those thousands and thousands of documents and those hundreds of thousands, hundreds or thousands of videos that you have. All of your digital assets are going to be then brought into this automatically. And then we're going to be able to basically answer any question that one of your customers is going to have. That's our use case, by the way. So I gave you both the pitch to our use case and, and enhance it with the video that you're doing right now.

Okay, that sounds good.

Just so you know, I have a real use case and we have customers that are so excited about this technology. We are just literally rolling it out now. So excited. It comes up in every sales call in the last two months as I've been as I've been talking about it since now that we can demo it. It comes up in every sales call. It comes up as the center points of point of why I'm better than my competition. Because right now my competition doesn't have this and I do. And that is, that is the excitement around what you're talking about. It just happens that we're working on the same thing and didn't know it or similar thing. I don't have the video yet but we're moving into that world very quickly. But again I'm building the technology like your Delphi company is. So it's an asset to my company versus using a service. So that's a little bit of a difference.

And yeah, maybe I switched to you.

So yeah, who knows? I think you've got a good provider there. And I love the idea by the way of journeys because I think that journey starts to make this more real. And right now the reason that you might say, you know, I haven't quite found my market yet for it, why isn't everybody just wanting the digital tj Digital TJ that puts me on a journey that has a customized course that's going to teach me a very specific thing for 30 minutes, an hour or two hours. That is something I can buy right now. I can't buy this because it's not tangible. The reason that we can sell it is that we're selling it to, we're displacing technologies that exist already. Knowledge bases and chatbots. Right. They don't work. Everybody knows they don't work. Nobody uses them. So we have an advantage of doing that. We're also supplementing that whole customer service, customer success component and alleviating some of that and we call it client self service. And when you can self serve your client which is what you're talking about doing, I'm just doing it at a slightly different level at more of the enterprise level. All of a sudden things open up.

And our our special guest today is Ken Burke. Well known, renowned entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur, professor of business at places like Columbia University and also founder of Microcasting. We'll put a link to that in the in the show notes. It's microcasting.com I've been rude to some of our our audience here. Janice writes in. Glad I could squeeze time for a quick drop in with TJ and entrepreneur leader Ken. Thanks and thanks. Thanks a lot for the kind words. We had a specific question from Mativ what are the characteristics of a good startup according to you? Specifically the role of emotional intelligence in a startup. And if I could layer one on that. There's been so much talk lately that in a number of reviews of Nate Silver's new book that a lot of Silicon Valley venture capitalists actually want someone who seems adhd the, like a Sam Bankman fried, who seems like they're, they're weird and strange because that's the sort of person they think can block out the whole world and, and create something new. So let me give you an opportunity for that and then we'll, we'll switch back to the clone talk in just a moment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a great question. And what I would say to that is, first of all, emotional intelligence is a really important component. It's a difference between, I think, success or failure and an entrepreneur. You've got a young entrepreneur that hasn't been there before, has a lot of passion, doesn't really know where to go, is not really focused, and doesn't have all the skills to kind of put it all together and the emotions to put it together as well. So that you become very reactionary as you mature, as I have. As you mature, you become. And I used to be that, by the way. I used to be the low emotional, intelligent, quotient person that would basically bounce off the walls as we were having. And the more success we had, the more I would bounce off the walls and I would completely create this frenzy within my organization. Go this way. And I'm very, I'm adhd. So again, back to your earlier comment that they look for ADHD people and there's a truth to that. Bottle that, by the way, if you are ADD or ADHD in some regards, bottle that to your benefit. I, I tell people that all the time, actually. But, but, but around the emotional intelligence is that if you can start to mature yourself to start pulling away, like I said earlier, from your ego and, and give really, really good, solid direction as. And leadership. The leadership skills are really the most important thing that I found anyway. And when I got really good, what ended up happening was I became a better leader because I let the people that were working in my organization do the jobs that they were expert at doing. I didn't go around trying to do everybody's job. Sure. I was the fastest brain in the room at the time. When I was in the room, you know, as a CEO and we had 250 employees and I was bouncing over here and bouncing over there and usurping authority and not putting delegating responsibility and not doing some basic leadership things. My company was in chaos when I pulled back from that and I started managing with my executive team and letting people do the level of expertise that they needed. I became a really good leader and the company ran so much smoother and I was less stressed. I could go off on vacations and other types of things. I didn't need to be involved in every detail. I used to. I remember this. I hired a coo and that coo. It was really, really hard for me to let go on any of that. I knew where every penny was in that company. And this was 20, 30, $40 million company. I knew every penny was every day. Right. And you can't do that for so long. So what ends up happening is if you try to control a company like that, you end up limiting its growth. And the only reason that we continue to grow is because I stopped doing that and let other people come in. You cannot do that on your own. You will plateau at some level. A million dollars, $2 million, $3 million, $500,000, whatever it might be. You got to bring other people in and let them grow with you.

Well, Ken Burke, we appreciate all the knowledge you've given to help all of us grow. We wish you growth and success in microcasting. And the website again is microcasting.com continued luck with your book. I want to give you the final word. It's something we do with, with all of our guests here. And I was negligent not letting you do it it before. We're all about communication here. We're about actively, proudly, confidently promoting what you do. So what I like to do is give all of our guests 60 seconds to promote the number one thing they're passionate, whatever the business or book they're most passionate about, to simply promote it without waiting for the right question or the right time or the right context. So let me go ahead and give you some 60 seconds. Now, I actually get off screen and let you pitch the audience directly. We're very much in favor of people pitching overtly here on the show. So pitch away.

Well, you know, what I'm going to talk about is my book, because I think it's not about pitching the book. It's about changing people's lives. So I firmly believe in the five pillars that I put out in my book to date, which I just want to reinforce those as well. Again, I, I think, number one and most important is all about growth and it's all about internal Growth, the growth that you're going to experience. That's what we're here to do. We're here to grow, learn and develop. And all the lessons, all the things that we're experiencing are just lessons in our lives. And there are a lot of bad ones. I've had some bad ones in my life, and I've grown so much from those bad ones. It's bottling that up. And that's what the book is all about. That's what the book is teaching us, that the goal of life, the goal of what we're here to do is, is learn, grow, and develop. And if you can do that through loving yourself, accepting yourself, managing your ego, and understanding the barriers that are stopping you, I think are critically important. If you can get clarity on your life about exactly what you want to do in business and in your life. And the more clarity you have, the more focus you have, the more specific things that you can lay out and say, I'm going to do this, this, this, this, and this. You can actually then be successful in whatever you want to do. You can create something out of nothing. And that's what I love more than anything. That's what the book talks about. And then taking action, you can't just do it. You know, the law of attraction exists out there, and a lot of people talk about, I just need to think it, and then it's there. That's not true. You got to do a lot of hard work in order to get it done as well. And that's what I mean by taking action. And then finally, if you want to truly be happy with your life, your achievements and everything, give gratitude. And when I say that, I mean that you cannot give gratitude and be thankful and, and be unhappy at the exact same time. You can be unhappy five seconds later, but you cannot be unhappy when you're giving gratitude and give gratitude and give credit to all the people that are helping you out there. That's what the book is about. Hey, whether you go get the book or whether you just learn from these words, be an exceptional human, be an exceptional entrepreneur, that's what I have to say today.

Well said. Thanks for sharing that wisdom. And I know a lot of people get, oh, gratitude, like, oh, that's cheesy stuff. That's a bunch of bs. And I, I'll be candid. I used to think that. And then about five years ago, I forgot, you know, where, what, what book I read. Oh, you know, I'll give that a try. And I put that on my morning journal. List of things. So I literally write down in one sentence every single day something I'm feeling gratitude towards. As you mentioned, it's hard to feel sad or depressed or bummed out if you're thinking about how grateful you are for something. So I did that this morning. I do it every morning. Madhav has been waiting patiently, talking about creating something from nothing. Madhav has a specific question for you. Ken. I want to start a startup in tech and the software industry. What is your advice for me? How can I start? And I believe Madav is from Pakistan or India. I believe.

Great. Excellent. So, first thing is I would figure out what my talents and skill sets are and where my passion lies. Because there's a lot in technology that you can do. Like TJ has brought this new level of communication because it's his passion. He found a technology and is exploring that passion. So figure out what your passion is because you can make a business out of almost anything. I believe that very, very wholeheartedly because we can build a business strategy around it. So what is the niche within a niche within a niche within a niche in tech that you want to start? Start with an idea. It could be a big idea. It could be. And I'm a big believer in having a big vision. But then what you want to do is narrow it down. Now, TJ is on the. On the precipice of a huge vision, right? He's already, I mean, he's actually has the huge vision and he's on the precipice of executing it. What I mean, for that, use that as a model. But what he's got to do is he's got to narrow it down, narrow it down, narrow it down to actually make it real for some human to be able to interact with and somebody to derive value out of. So figure out the other part of the tech world is figuring out out or. Or any business figure out how your customer can derive value. So best thing to do there is find a problem. And the bigger the problem, the bigger the pain point. The. The more want or need that has, the more your solution can sell it. Every venture capitalist starts off by looking at your slide deck as an example. The number one slide in the slide deck, the first one is defining your problem. What problem are you solving? So if I was to give you advice on where to start, I would try to figure out what. What problem can I solve with the technology that I'm interested in going after and then apply that to something that you really, really love as well. Don't just go out and start any technology business. Start a technology business that you're passionate about and that you'll spend three months, 10 hours a day like TJ did to master it. That's what I want you to do.

Sage advice. Can very much appreciate your time. Again, if you want more information on what he's up to in his latest venture, go to microcasting.com to learn more there. And his entrepreneur now network is thriving and active as well. So, Ken, thank you so much for our guest, for your time. Being our guest today, I'm TJ Walker. We'll see you next time. Thank you.