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The Tracks Nobody Sees, But Every Marketer Should Hear.
This podcast celebrates the hidden gems of marketing insight found across all professions—both within and beyond traditional marketing roles. Just as B-sides on a single contain brilliant tracks that are treasured by true fans, every profession contains marketing wisdom that isn't obvious at first glance but is incredibly valuable when discovered.
Tom Hootman (00:05)
Hello. Hi, my good friends. Welcome to the Marketing B Sides. I'm your host, Tom Hootman. This is a podcast where we're all marketers. None of us have it figured out, and hopefully I'm the only one with a head cold.
This is a really fascinating episode and I really enjoyed this conversation. Today we're talking to Chris Andrew. Chris Andrew is the founder of Scrunch. They were founded in 2023 for AI search optimization and GEO, scaled it in two years and sold it to Sitecore. fascinating platform, awesome platform.
I know by experience. We talk a lot today about AI search, machine first, web crawlers and how the internet is gonna be built for crawlers as much as it is for people in the future. 91% of marketers have an AI first strategy, but only 41% actually execute and measure impact.
Something I'm passionate about that we also dug into was a bit of the hospitality. pizza in particular. because I'm a restaurant guy. Chris is into making pizzas. I'll let him tell you all about it. But really just a fascinating conversation. Really, really appreciate Chris joining.
I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Thank you for gutting it through this first two minutes of me in a hoodie and a hat very clearly, with some DayQuil that's fading by the moment. So I'm gonna go re-up on my meds and enjoy the show.
Tom Hootman (01:31)
It's a little utopia in southern Indiana, right? It's a
Chris Andrew (01:32)
Yeah. Super cool. Beautiful area.
Tom Hootman (01:35)
It's a wonderful city.
Everyone's always like, Indiana and then they get here and they're like, huge college town.
Chris Andrew (01:39)
Little college towns are fun. I spent a bunch of time in Columbia, Missouri.
Another just awesome college town. Just like a bunch of great people that wanna invest in that local area in a fun downtown environment, great sports, great arts.
Tom Hootman (01:53)
Exactly. I always say to people, I say it keeps me young. It's a Peter Pan City. And every spring when I'm over it, sixty
thousand people leave. And then and
Chris Andrew (02:01)
They all leave and you get a you get a break.
Tom Hootman (02:02)
I get a break. And then I get really bored around this time and then next week sixty thousand people come back and it's exciting again.
Chris Andrew (02:05)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tom Hootman (02:09)
How's acquisition life? Is it crazy? I mean, New York to Utah, like all the moving pieces, the integration. I've been on that side of it as well as on the other side of it now a few times. It's always
interesting.
Chris Andrew (02:19)
Yeah, it has been crazy. I will say I had a good understanding of what we were getting into and it's been better than I would have imagined. Just like you never fully know till you're in and working with the team. But overall I've been really encouraged by the signs of product integrations, team integrations, just like everybody's trying to do the right thing and
adjusting timelines and decisions as we get new data. Right. Actually, maybe these functions shouldn't stay separated. Let's bring them together faster because it makes way more sense for the joint business. So overall it's been a crazy period. There was no like break from the sale. It's like, you sold your company, you should take two weeks off. No, it's like, okay, they need a lot from us and we need a lot from them. And so like let's figure it out together. So it's been fun.
Tom Hootman (03:00)
Yeah,
That's wonderful. It moved fast though. I mean Scrunch was just founded in 2023 right? So did this move faster than you thought it was going to or were you like, yes, let's go.
Chris Andrew (03:08)
Yeah, it moved faster than I thought it was going to. I mean, the acquisition process itself really kind of first conversations in December of last year around a partnership, January, those got more serious. February, Eric Stein, the CEO of Sitecore, was like, we want to buy the company. We weren't looking to sell. We were starting to explore B round at that point, kind of pulling materials together. So it moved pretty quickly from Feb through June.
Pretty extended window of diligence in there of like just all the things you need to work through. But overall the timeline on the company was very much accelerated, compared to other ventures I've been part of.
Tom Hootman (03:45)
Yeah. Well, I mean, you grew really fast at Scrunch, which means you tapped into a nerve that's fantastic, right? Like you see people who have founded a company and it takes them a decade, twenty years sometimes before they finally decide to sell. To see it move so fast. I think what Scrunch does is cool as hell, right? Like we were sold. My team we said in our call, this is exactly what we need from the agency side.
Chris Andrew (04:03)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (04:05)
It certainly wasn't the same company, Scrunch wasn't, that that you set out to build. Like what had to change or how did you adjust your belief? I'm really curious, because AI is moving so fast,
Chris Andrew (04:15)
Mm.
Tom Hootman (04:15)
how do you keep pace with that? And how much did did it change from when you first launched to when the acquisition conversation started?
Chris Andrew (04:23)
Yeah, well, thank you for being a customer and for the kind words as well. I think some of the observations a little over two years ago when I first started exploring in the space have remained the guiding principles with which we've built around, right? My observation was the customer journey's permanently changed. Consumers move towards simplicity. Consumers have outsourced the task of browsing the web. Before people knew what to do with AI.
We didn't even realize that we'd asked AI to browse the web on our behalf. Browsing is inefficient by the definition of the word browse. I don't want to go read 20 websites to compare agencies. I want the model to know me well enough to do the research and present a curated set of options. So that observation led me to believe every company is going to need to understand how they're represented because your company is no longer what you say it is. It's what ChatGPT, Google AI overviews say it is.
That means your website and the content on it is probably needing to be written and thinking as if an AI agent is the primary consumer of it, because it is. AI agents are the primary visitors to websites today, not humans. So those like early, very basic epiphanies, these are no scientific or lab-based breakthroughs. It was just me saying, My behavior's changed. I'm both a B2B buyer and a B2C buyer. It's going to change
all of marketing is gonna change everything we think about from a customer journey perspective. So those things have remained the same. And then you're just keeping pace with the with what the models are doing to your point. They're changing daily, weekly, and you're trying to keep pace to support your customers.
Tom Hootman (05:54)
Yeah. I always used to say that AI, it's coming for all of us, but it came for SEO first, right?
SEO was dead and now SEO is back, right? It's
just like the new version. When people ask me about it, I'm like, I like it because it's fostering authenticity. Like by taking some of that control of your company's no longer what you say it's going to be, It's
creating this need for more authenticity and real conversations. There aren't levers to pull and knobs to turn that can just get us what we want anymore. We have to be authentic
Chris Andrew (06:18)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (06:21)
and real and more real about it, which I think could, I hope, change the internet experience for people for positive in the long run, right?
Chris Andrew (06:29)
Mm-hmm.
I kind of like what you framed there though. Like there's a lot of outrageous headlines of SEO is dead. I actually think the headline is SEO was dead, is what you said. And it's like, yes, everybody had an SEO team. Nobody was really that invested at a CMO or board level in what that team was doing. Like, let's just be really, really honest about that. Like SEO was a necessary thing that you worked on. And when this shift started in the world.
I was really shocked by the resistance in the SEO industry of like dismissing it, battling it, hating on it. I was like, wait a second, you know who's been marketing to machines for the last 20 years? It's the SEO practitioners. You're the only ones that have been marketing to a machine, the Google bot. Now, the primary audience is a machine. It's an AI agent. Everyone's gonna have a personalized AI agent. It's the best opportunity ever. So
it was a little bit comedy to me the way the category of SEO experts resisted it, you know, dismissed it, was angry about it. And then I think they realized that they were gonna get paid for it, they were gonna be influencers and the money started to flow. And it's like, come along here in the shift and acknowledge the behavior change. Yes, there's gonna be snake oil in any new category, but there's some fundamental changes that the SEO experts are well positioned to handle. And I think a lot of them have, you know, aligned against that.
Tom Hootman (07:46)
There's always going to be snake oil. And I
think that's the part that that everyone can mutually agree upon that's exhausting is like with any change there creates a cottage industry initially. And out of that cottage industry you get I call it the hustle bro, like they run into it you just have to filter a lot of messages, there's this element of again back to the authenticity that rises to the top
once the wildfire smoke clears, to use the Park City analogy,
Chris Andrew (08:07)
Yep.
Tom Hootman (08:09)
It's like, okay, this is a new environment for us. And
I agree wholeheartedly, having worked with SEO teams now for years, that there was an element of antagonism and like this pullback, And then once that shift happened and it was like, Wait a minute, we're more important than ever. Ha. Fuck you, we're more important than ever now. And they kind of
Chris Andrew (08:23)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Tom Hootman (08:25)
ran into it and it's
honestly, I think even within the last year and a half, I've seen that change where a lot of even the the foundational 15 year SEOs have kind of crossed the bridge It's almost like it's fun again,
Chris Andrew (08:37)
My favorite folks early in the category were just those that were curious and excited about the change. Like SEO was a bit stagnant and it was a game with Google. Now everything is an AI-generated result, which means everything is going to be machine driven. It's such an interesting time to be building in the Martech space. And, you know, very quickly in the last six months, you've got Google introducing these capabilities, you've got Bing introducing these capabilities into their web console.
You have Cloudflare launching their own AEO product set. We did a partnership with Akamai, whereby Scrunch Products fully power their AI brand presence platform. Like very, very large, sophisticated infrastructure security platforms are acknowledging that the shift in the world is AI is the primary consumer on the web. And to your point, I actually think it's gonna be the best thing ever for the consumer. The web was kind of a mess.
And I think consumers are gonna get incredible personalized digital experiences. And AI agents need to be able to discover the content to create it. That's the shift, like discoverability for AI agents, deeply personal experiences for the humans. And that's gonna make a better web that's more personal for you and more personal for me.
Tom Hootman (09:45)
Yeah. You mentioned previously, I read a couple of interviews, the most critical site visitor is no longer human, but like an AI crawler.
Chris Andrew (09:52)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (09:53)
How do you see the evolution of companies spending so much money to continue to build these big beautiful websites for humans because so much of it was built for humans, all of it. And how does that change in the future, right? Like building a site for a
Chris Andrew (10:04)
Yeah.
Tom Hootman (10:04)
crawler versus a being.
Chris Andrew (10:05)
I think
you're gonna see a couple things. I fundamentally believe, Scrunch for a very long time has been showing its customers what a human sees versus what an AI agent sees. And this is front and center on Cloudflare.com, right? You can go there and see, well, here's the human view, here's the agent view. An agent doesn't necessarily want to browse your website and click through it and watch the video. It needs the material to create
personalized experience for the human. So I think we're gonna move towards a web which is like a non-visual content layer, a CMS layer, a digital asset management layer to deliver content to the models. And then the models are gonna create unbelievably personalized visual digital experiences. Right. There's no reason you should see the same thing that I see when I've clicked through from a GPT result. or a perplexity result.
The model has all the personalization, the memory. So by the time you're clicking through for the website for your product selection or your trip experience, it should be catering to you. We're not there yet, but the timelines of how quickly we are getting to the place that we weren't at is faster than ever. So my belief is you will still build for a human, but it will be composable AI generated experiences. And then you will deliver mass amounts of
quality content to the models to create those experiences. And those two parallel systems are going to exist.
Tom Hootman (11:26)
Yeah, the way you said it was great. This CMS layer, right? Like, I mean, it was no bullshit. Like when Jim took us through the tool, Here's what the agent sees. Here's what a human sees. It's like a light bulb goes off, even though
you know the light bulbs there. And it's like seeing it side by side made it kind of sink in, like, okay, this is what I like about this tool. And this is
honestly what I like about where we're going, you'll still have both layers.
You see this with resumes, right? Where you have to build a resume that an AI crawler can read and parse, right? Which
Chris Andrew (11:52)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (11:52)
means you really can no longer use certain formats. My nephew is like, hey, like, can you help me? I'm just brushing up my resume. I've got it eighty five percent built for AI HR crawlers, but I would love your input, right? Like
already thinking through I have two audiences.
Chris Andrew (12:08)
The resume thing is a great example because humans create their own problems and then solve them, right? Nowadays, if you put a posting online, you're gonna get 500 applications in a matter of hours if you're a highly sought-after company putting a nice rollout. Maybe most of those are AI bots that aren't even humans, just experimenting with spamming the web with fake resumes. Like that's truly a part of it. The others are real resumes here that
Are being reviewed maybe by AI initially. And so to your point, you're writing for a different audience. And to get to that selection where humans actually reviewing it, because they can't review 500 resumes in an hour, who are you writing it for? It reminds me there's a great Harvard Kennedy researcher from the public policy school who was, I can't remember his name, but I read his blog post about the fact that public market CEOs
are changing their language in earning calls because who's the primary listener on an earning call? It's an AI agent. It's a note taker. So if you tell the note taker, here are the three most important things to pay attention to in our quarterly earnings, you can distract them from the bad news and they're gonna reflect the good news to the human who's like, I'm gonna buy that stock. So everyone is thinking about it. And there's gonna be negative consequences to that. There's gonna be really interesting, you know, impacts to that, but we've got to participate.
Is what every marketer and agency is thinking about.
Tom Hootman (13:28)
Mm-hmm. I saw somewhere, it was like research that Scrunch had done or you had done that like 91% of marketers have an AI search strategy. Scares me for the 9% that don't. But that
Chris Andrew (13:37)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (13:37)
aside, 59% of them, can't confidently turn the data into action. I'm
really curious, like what are the 41% actually doing differently that the 59% can't figure out? Because
there is this executive, like practitioner level, like this is important. Okay, well, like what do we want to do with it? Well, we don't know, right? Like they're kind of like
Chris Andrew (13:56)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (13:57)
sitting with this, like they know they need to be doing something, but they don't know what to do. What's that 41
Chris Andrew (14:01)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (14:01)
percent doing?
Chris Andrew (14:02)
First and foremost, they're acting. They're taking action and they're getting data, good or bad. And then they're adjusting and they're improving. There's the percent that is doing nothing, the 9% that you mentioned, and you're gonna get varying numbers. There's the percent that is getting some data but probably isn't acting. And then there's the 41% of that population that are like, let's just try things, right?
A platform like Scrunch is going to give you deep visibility into your current standing so that as you make a shift, you can measure the impact of it. Did my brand presence increase? Did my sentiment change? Did the citation rate shift? Am I getting more referred visitors from AI who we know convert at a higher level? There are so many things you can track very, very concretely. How many agents are visiting the website? How many humans are referred by AI? Use the things that you can track to make better sense.
of the things that are in the gray, right? There's going to be things that you have to model and predict and use some synthetic data to get estimates upon, but there's also very foundational metrics that you can orient around. And so with the 41%, we see them changing their website architecture, delivering content native for AI agents, improving their strategy for earned media or working with third parties to make sure they're present where the crawlers are already active, and then measuring the corresponding impact.
Those are the things we see people doing who are getting off the sideline.
Tom Hootman (15:18)
Yeah.
On the agency side, like we're always looking for tools that help us test and learn faster.
there are like these flags of like anytime you lose a client, one of the flags is always it felt like we started to pull the agents. We had to pull the agency into what's next. And I think the well runs dry. Like it's hard to sit
Chris Andrew (15:32)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (15:35)
and go, What's next? Right. Like
what are we gonna do? And even to the point where my previous agency had this amazing tool that was a repository for all the tests that we were running across the global agency. So you could
Chris Andrew (15:45)
Mm.
Tom Hootman (15:46)
search within it for tests to pattern match against other similar clients because so much of it is writer's block. What do I test next? So I think
Chris Andrew (15:53)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (15:53)
part of that is finding something to take action on, and we're always looking for tools that are like helping us.
It's honestly it's what I love. I always joke, it's like my LinkedIn posts. I don't let GPT write them. I let it write up
like ten really shitty LinkedIn posts. And then I find a nugget in there that I'm like, that's kinda good. I'm gonna write something based on that. And I think that's part
of like we all need something that helps us take action.
Chris Andrew (16:16)
Yeah, we have an area of our product we launched a few weeks ago called Signals, which is just looking for trends, positive or negative. Hey, a competitor is outpacing you in a key topic area, and it appears this new piece of content from them is driving that change. Now you can imagine the kind of while you sleep version of this. The Signals identified. The platform fixes it, fixes the website architecture, generates a new piece of content to address a gap, publishes it, maybe with your approval. Two weeks later.
Shows the gap was closed. I think we're gonna move to a model where we know your brand voice, we know your personas, we know the approved content that exists internally and externally for your brand. So that by the time a problem is identified, the solution is there to address it. The human can approve it, and you're just getting updates on the impact, you know, from the change that you approved.
Tom Hootman (17:02)
That's awesome. I love that. I want to change gears a bit. This is on your site, so I'm sure you get asked about this all the time, Like you're a certified Neapolitan pizza chef. Where did this come from? I'm really curious about this. Like, was this a passion project that's with with recency, or is this something you've always wanted to do? Or
I'd love to hear this story.
Chris Andrew (17:21)
Yeah. You know, I'm a big believer that you've got to do the things you want in life throughout your life because you're not really sure the timeline of your life. And so there's a lot of folks who might be a hundred and fifty percent in on something and maybe that's sustainable for them. Maybe they're gonna run themselves into a dead end at some point. I found that I get so much energy by exposing myself to other
passionate groups of people that impacts the work I do in technology, the work I do in hospitality. And the Neapolitan Pizza Chef was kind of born out of that. When I was living in London for my prior company, I became obsessed with this bakery in East London called E5 Bakehouse. They do everything right. Unbelievable programs to bring people into the workforce, world-class products. And every Sunday they threw a sourdough pizza
party. They'd make a couple hundred sourdough pizzas. It'd be on the menu. They'd sell out once a week. And I've been trying to get a free internship at this bakery while I was working my tech job. I'm working Monday to Friday. I'm showing up on the weekends. I became friendly with the owners, asking if I can just work on the weekends because I wanted to learn about the community they had built even more than the technique. Like sourdough bread's amazing, but I just love what they had built from a team perspective. They kept telling me no, because they're like our internships need
to result in full time bakers. We need people that intern and then go full time, respected it. They had one person running their sourdough pizza program, and I could tell she was exhausted. So I literally went to Italy, got certified in Brick Oven Neapolitan Pizza Making so that I could go back to this team in London and say, hey, I really know what I'm doing with pizzas. I'll work for free alongside the pizza chef, just so I can be part of the team in the community.
So I go, I get certified, I get approved. Unbelievable experience in Naples, kind of a 10 day course. You work in a professional pizza place. You have to make three pizzas at the same time in front of a panel of judges. You have to write an essay. It's like a process to get approved and certified. But I go back to London and I was like, hey, can I help in the pizza program? Like I got a certificate that I know how to do this. And they're like, honestly, you've been bugging us for so long. Sure, go help her. The first day I'm helping her, she's like, like, you know what you're doing.
I'm taking next week off because I haven't had a weekend off in two years. So the next week, I'm running this pizza program making 200 pizzas with like a couple of people helping me because I just put myself in the line of fire to kind of get involved in something that I was excited about. So to me, it's about the people and the team. And I'm kind of obsessed with how team driven the hospitality world is. Maybe the financial reward isn't there, but I love it. And so it led me to
become a certified Neapolitan pizza chef and throw some awesome pizza parties on weekends for my friends.
Tom Hootman (19:55)
I like the way that you you use blunt force basically. I'm gonna do it.
Like it's near and dear to my heart. I come from restaurant and retail. I worked in food service distribution sales with US foods, competing with like the Cisco's of the world after that.
Chris Andrew (20:06)
Mm-hmm. Sure.
Tom Hootman (20:08)
And I always thought I was gonna have a restaurant someday. And the only thing that was eating at me, no pun intended, was that
it's just impossible to make it work. The margins are so slim. It's so tight.
Chris Andrew (20:16)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (20:19)
And this is even before COVID. I
think that that strategy of I'll do it for free. And I already went ahead and got trained. There's no
Chris Andrew (20:26)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (20:27)
restaurant in the world that would say no to you still.
Because that's the one thing they can't find is people who can help.
Chris Andrew (20:33)
Yep, reliable people that can help and that want to be part of it. and the great places retain their talent, right? It's not sustainable to find someone who's gonna work for free. I was in a fortunate position where I had a tech job and I know how blessed that is in that environment. But I was surrounded by people who had worked at that bakery for many, many years and they all stay, they love it, they take care of their folks, and the great restaurants and hospitality companies figure out a way to do it because you can make it work.
the margins are tight, but you can make it work.
Tom Hootman (20:59)
I mean, now that you're obviously not in London anymore, you still the brick oven still get after it? Like is it your weekend thing or are you pizzaed out at this point?
Chris Andrew (21:07)
Yeah, here and there. I've got one of the portable unis. I'm actually a huge fan of the baking steel, like a literally just a slab of steel that you preheat in your oven. It conducts heat better and more evenly than a brick oven. So I like cooking on that. But I found ways to stay involved in the hospitality space through people I really believe in. So I have a winery we've run for
eight years out in the Boulamet Valley, which was a total labor of love. It was neither of us inherited a vineyard or winery, put a little bit of money in it and bootstrapped it to 3,000 cases a year. I just helped open a restaurant in Brooklyn where again, same concept. I completely believe in the chef and I want to be there and help anytime I can, which is very rarely, but I can help them get off the ground and get it running. And so you know, maybe a day a month I'm working in front of house or washing dishes at a restaurant. But I love those communities and finding ways to stay involved.
Tom Hootman (21:54)
That's wonderful. I love that. If you're a restaurant person, you're near and dear to my heart. We're fast friends already.
Chris Andrew (21:58)
Yep. Yep. A hundred percent.
Tom Hootman (22:01)
You're telling all these stories about the winery and the restaurants. This is fascinating to me, but like your career path has had this unique trajectory. And I also
Chris Andrew (22:07)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (22:08)
appreciate that you mentioned how fortunate you are, right? Like
Chris Andrew (22:11)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (22:11)
I'm super transparent, I'm super authentic, and I'll be the first person to say like.
If I'm having a bad day, it's like from Moneyball. These are uptown problems that are not really problems at all, right? There are
much more serious things to worry about in the world. I'm curious though, like what's a belief you had maybe earlier in your career that as your career has taken this curvy, winding path, you start to look back on you think, man, that was a weird bullshit idealism I had about my career when I first started. And what made you change
Chris Andrew (22:36)
Hmm.
Tom Hootman (22:36)
that?
Chris Andrew (22:37)
That's a great question. I think there's a lot of myself included early in my career that thought there were steps you needed to take before you were ready for something. Right? Like you needed to do certain things and then you're ready to go. Whether that's get a college degree and then work for a couple years and then try to run a startup, I think
there's a great quote from Kim Gordon of the Sonic Youth, which is people will pay to see you believe in yourself. And I think when you say that, it's very human. There are so many people that are not able to take the risk or not willing to take the risk. And when they see someone risking it, whether it's gonna work or not, there's a desire to like give them a shot. And when I look back at my career, I wished I'd taken the leap even sooner
to go build my own companies and invest in the people and things that I want to see in the world. And I'm doing that at even more rapidly than I ever have in my life. I don't regret any of the time I put in. I think part of that was a blessing and a curse. I grew up homeschooled, one of six kids. We were homeschooled through high school. It left me with the worldview that I have something to learn from everyone.
Like I know there were gaps in my education. So I know that I have something to learn from Tom. And that there's probably a worldview that maybe I disagree with, but I'm super curious why you believe it. And I'm gonna take something from it. And I hope you get something from me. Knowing that made me like infinitely curious about all the things I didn't know and had to learn. But there's never an end to that. There's never an end to the set of things you can learn. You just gotta go after the things you want to see in the world. So one thing I learned was just like, just start, just go do it.
Like I stayed at my prior startup as an early employee for almost eleven years. It sold. It was amazing. Could I have started my own company sooner? Absolutely. I think what matters the most is just getting alongside people you want to spend your day with, you want to work with, you trust, you believe in, and just giving it a shot. That's that's kind of my view on the professional side.
Tom Hootman (24:28)
Yeah,
I love the Kim Gordon quote. Love Sonic Youth Dirty is like one of the foundational albums of my life, right? There's this belief, and I remember having this belief, I don't regret staying any I didn't stay anywhere too long.
Chris Andrew (24:39)
Yeah.
Tom Hootman (24:39)
I learned, but I think everyone somewhere in them they know when it's probably the right time to make a change. And the thing I mentioned when I left my last role and started Mixtape
Chris Andrew (24:47)
Yeah.
Tom Hootman (24:48)
was
I could stay here and I could be very happy and you're all wonderful people. And
this is an amazing company. But I feel like my story gets boring.
Chris Andrew (24:55)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (24:55)
And whether we pass or fail, flounder
or flourish, this is gonna be a great story, right? Like it's a story I gotta figure out. And I spent so
Chris Andrew (25:01)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (25:04)
many years, and I think the switch flips for everybody at some point. So many years thinking everyone above me or everyone a little bit older than me had something figured out that I didn't know.
Chris Andrew (25:12)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (25:12)
And then if you finally clicks in that like, we're all just faking it. You just gotta believe in yourself to
Chris Andrew (25:14)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (25:18)
watch you believe in yourself.
Chris Andrew (25:19)
To your point of getting not regretting it, but you can get stuck in different modes where you know you need to make a change. Another great quote, I can't remember who said it, but it was the two most addicting things in life are a W2 paycheck and heroin. And it's like
All right, I got this W2, I'm just gonna like one more week of a consistent paycheck. It's gonna hurt too much
Tom Hootman (25:39)
Safety.
Chris Andrew (25:39)
to go away.
Yeah.
Tom Hootman (25:40)
Last question for you, and I asked this question of everyone, and it's a perfect segue with the Sonic Youth reference, by the way. So the company is called Mixtape Digital, right?
Chris Andrew (25:45)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Hootman (25:47)
I always talk about how the most fun I had at work ever, I thought a job I would never leave when I was like 19 was working at Music Land's Sam Goody in the mall. Like I love music. Music is is like a fundamental
Chris Andrew (25:55)
Mm. Cool.
Tom Hootman (25:57)
part of my life.
If your career or your current role or wherever you're at had a two to three song playlist, what songs
Chris Andrew (26:03)
Hm.
Tom Hootman (26:03)
would you include and why?
Chris Andrew (26:05)
Yeah. also a huge fan of of music. I would start with these will be deep
edge songs. When You're Smiling by Joey DiFrancesco and Jimmy Smith. A couple of unbelievable Hammond B3 organ players. I got to see Joey play live a couple times in London. And there's just this like insatiable joy in a jazz musician. You know they're doing what they're supposed to do with their life. And so when you think about career work, when you're smiling, it's probably something to pay attention to.
And I was like, that happens everywhere in the world. And there's a song by Sun House called Grinning in Your Face.
And the song's literally like very, very simple. Don't you mind people grinning in your face. Just like don't mind them Just like move through your life. So there's a smiling relation there. I'll go with those two. They both have smiling and grinning kind of in them, and they're both ones that most people may have not stumbled across yet.
Tom Hootman (26:56)
And and the deep cut is true. Those are fantastic deep cuts. I
love a deep cut because honestly what I do is like if I don't know what someone has mentioned, what I'm gonna do immediately after we're done here is like I'm gonna go to Spotify and check it out. Like
it's this insatiable need to know,
because those songs are so important to me, it's like a window into someone else's soul, like what fuels them for them to mention it. Chris absolutely love the conversation. Thank you for making time for me today. I appreciate it. Congratulations again on the acquisition. I hope the pizza making goes well.
If you're just ordering a pizza from like a just a pizzeria somewhere, what are you gonna get on it?
Chris Andrew (27:26)
Yeah.
Honestly, the first time I'm just going straight cheese pizza. As as sad
Tom Hootman (27:29)
Straight cheese.
Chris Andrew (27:30)
as that is, like I start there. I just wanna know how they're gonna make a classic cheese. And even as a Neapolitan guy, the classic New York cheese slice, near my apartment in New York there's a spot called Baggio's, nineteenth and seventh.
They make an unbelievable slice of cheese pizza. And then they've got a vodka slice, some other slices that are amazing, but I always start with cheese.
Tom Hootman (27:48)
There's beauty in simplicity, my friend. Thanks for making time for me, Chris. I really appreciate it.
Chris Andrew (27:52)
Thank
you, Tom. Appreciate it.