1
00:00:02,069 --> 00:00:12,272
Welcome to the Parallel Entrepreneur, where our guest today is William Clem, goes by Bill
Clem, and often my friend, Bill.

2
00:00:12,492 --> 00:00:23,936
I am so excited to have you join us today on the Parallel Entrepreneur, where we are
exploring, defining, and trying to distill some of the lessons of what it takes to take

3
00:00:23,936 --> 00:00:29,677
more than one business through the life cycle from start to sale.

4
00:00:29,818 --> 00:00:31,558
What are some of the lessons?

5
00:00:31,666 --> 00:00:36,431
And just for our audience, Bill and I have known each other for 20 years.

6
00:00:36,431 --> 00:00:42,141
He's a fantastic consultative, professional visionary.

7
00:00:42,141 --> 00:00:47,066
I could string a bunch of words together, but Bill, welcome to the show.

8
00:00:47,066 --> 00:00:47,646
show.

9
00:00:47,646 --> 00:00:49,386
Mark, thank you so much for having me.

10
00:00:49,386 --> 00:00:51,846
it's an honor to do stuff with you.

11
00:00:51,846 --> 00:00:56,678
So thanks for the opportunity to share the journey and just have a good time.

12
00:00:57,134 --> 00:00:59,954
Yeah, well, I feel, you know, let's dive right in.

13
00:00:59,954 --> 00:01:04,014
I feel most alive when I'm building something new.

14
00:01:04,014 --> 00:01:06,918
Tell me how that resonates with you.

15
00:01:07,480 --> 00:01:08,330
So it's interesting.

16
00:01:08,330 --> 00:01:18,013
So I've been very blessed in my career to manage a bunch of the various disciplines around
running a business.

17
00:01:18,053 --> 00:01:23,834
So I was trained inside of Ford Motor Company and it was an amazing training.

18
00:01:24,455 --> 00:01:29,736
In one way it's confining, but in other ways, structurally supporting.

19
00:01:31,417 --> 00:01:37,398
when you take a tour of duty through sales, marketing, finance, engineering, operations,

20
00:01:37,452 --> 00:01:41,503
and you have to go literally make all those things go.

21
00:01:41,783 --> 00:01:48,325
You do understand the role that they play in a business or in a business situation.

22
00:01:48,325 --> 00:01:59,159
So you learn, I learned how to apply those disciplines and rigor to an entrepreneurial
environment, which there are no borders, are no rules.

23
00:01:59,159 --> 00:02:02,189
You're just gonna go figure it out.

24
00:02:02,210 --> 00:02:04,090
But for me,

25
00:02:04,152 --> 00:02:09,106
the discipline of learning all these things and not have it be a mystery of what finance
is.

26
00:02:09,106 --> 00:02:09,977
What's a balance sheet?

27
00:02:09,977 --> 00:02:11,548
What's income statement?

28
00:02:11,708 --> 00:02:13,510
What does really cashflow really mean?

29
00:02:13,510 --> 00:02:15,121
What's day sales outstanding?

30
00:02:15,121 --> 00:02:18,033
How does all this stuff stick together into a business?

31
00:02:18,033 --> 00:02:23,658
And why is cashflow the most important thing in a business on a day-to-day basis?

32
00:02:23,658 --> 00:02:32,925
mean, just the things that you learned, that I learned inside of the company taught me how
to do that outside the company and the company was Ford.

33
00:02:34,570 --> 00:02:45,315
I remember, I have these vivid memories of these events in my business life in which
fundamental changes happened.

34
00:02:46,255 --> 00:02:54,819
I remember we were spinning off a $28 billion asset of Ford Motor Company and taking it
public called Vistion.

35
00:02:54,819 --> 00:02:59,911
And I was on the leadership team and we were working like crazy to try and spin this thing
outside of Ford.

36
00:02:59,911 --> 00:03:01,806
And it just was...

37
00:03:01,806 --> 00:03:08,809
It was an entrepreneurial journey inside of a huge company to make a startup company out
of a parts operation.

38
00:03:09,149 --> 00:03:16,852
So being able to watch that all happen and live with that was, it was, it was, it wasn't
invigorating.

39
00:03:16,852 --> 00:03:26,576
mean, incredibly invigorating, but also it was comforting because once you've seen it go
through a journey, you know what the journey looks like.

40
00:03:26,596 --> 00:03:31,064
So you recognize where all these things kind of fit within a system.

41
00:03:31,064 --> 00:03:32,675
to be able to create value.

42
00:03:32,675 --> 00:03:36,579
Anyway, that's kind of the basis of me.

43
00:03:36,579 --> 00:03:46,106
The other thing about me is I have this insatiable desire to just learn and to create
experiences and understandings.

44
00:03:47,368 --> 00:03:54,363
Again, I literally could talk about this all day, but I think that's the beginning about
this.

45
00:03:54,363 --> 00:03:56,125
That's excellent.

46
00:03:56,125 --> 00:03:57,676
So you were inside Ford.

47
00:03:57,676 --> 00:03:59,791
You spun out of parts business.

48
00:03:59,791 --> 00:04:03,962
public, learned some of the mechanics of that.

49
00:04:03,962 --> 00:04:10,374
And then you spun out and you became an entrepreneur and started a journey that I've
known.

50
00:04:10,534 --> 00:04:18,757
I've known you as an inventor, a husband and, and, and shepherd of inventors taking new
stuff to market.

51
00:04:18,757 --> 00:04:20,147
Let's talk about that.

52
00:04:21,005 --> 00:04:21,365
that.

53
00:04:21,365 --> 00:04:22,866
So it's funny.

54
00:04:22,866 --> 00:04:24,967
I talk to my dad.

55
00:04:24,967 --> 00:04:26,557
My dad was a big influence on my life.

56
00:04:26,557 --> 00:04:29,577
And my dad invented the CD-ROM.

57
00:04:29,577 --> 00:04:39,512
So my dad's in the Smithsonian for inventing, being able to take analog information and
digitize it and put it onto a format and store it.

58
00:04:40,113 --> 00:04:42,857
And I remember my dad bringing home the phone.

59
00:04:42,857 --> 00:04:43,038
there.

60
00:04:43,038 --> 00:04:45,241
Do people really, really know what they just heard?

61
00:04:45,241 --> 00:04:47,804
My dad invented the CD-ROM.

62
00:04:48,166 --> 00:04:49,567
You lived.

63
00:04:50,008 --> 00:04:52,362
Yeah, that's like the sage story.

64
00:04:52,362 --> 00:04:54,058
The lessons from dad.

65
00:04:54,058 --> 00:05:00,868
you know, it's when your dad walks into into dinner, because we always had family dinner.

66
00:05:00,868 --> 00:05:11,790
When dad walks into dinner with the first CD-ROM and it's, you know, as big as a, as a
regular 33 record or a, or a, yes, it's a big, it's a full-size record.

67
00:05:11,790 --> 00:05:21,210
and sets it on the table and tells my brother, my sister, my mom and I that you could put
the entire Library of Congress on this.

68
00:05:21,330 --> 00:05:22,970
And it was amazing.

69
00:05:22,970 --> 00:05:25,100
And just that was dinner.

70
00:05:25,100 --> 00:05:27,769
So dinner for me was that.

71
00:05:27,769 --> 00:05:37,190
But imagine as a 10, 13 year old kid and your watch, you don't understand what it means
with a CD-ROM because nobody had ever made them before.

72
00:05:37,190 --> 00:05:39,618
So I had no idea what the impact was going to be.

73
00:05:39,618 --> 00:05:41,339
but I watched my dad do that.

74
00:05:41,339 --> 00:05:55,069
And so I realized that all that aspect, all of that inventing, because it isn't just the
bits and bytes, it's how to make it affordable, how to make a product market fit, how to

75
00:05:55,069 --> 00:05:58,472
take information and think about it at scale.

76
00:05:58,472 --> 00:06:05,597
It's interesting if you can make this one little thing, but if you can make it into a
business and into a business system, how does that all work?

77
00:06:05,597 --> 00:06:07,554
So that was...

78
00:06:07,554 --> 00:06:13,006
That was the, so as a kid, I wasn't afraid of that because I watched my dad do that,
right?

79
00:06:13,006 --> 00:06:14,557
I watched my dad grew up.

80
00:06:14,557 --> 00:06:16,358
So we grew up in Detroit.

81
00:06:16,358 --> 00:06:19,679
I wanted to work for the Ford Motor Company since I was five years old.

82
00:06:19,679 --> 00:06:22,580
My dad hated cars, thought cars were stupid.

83
00:06:22,841 --> 00:06:25,102
Loved technology, loved airplanes.

84
00:06:25,102 --> 00:06:26,262
We had airplanes.

85
00:06:26,262 --> 00:06:28,073
So talk about ridiculous.

86
00:06:28,073 --> 00:06:31,115
Airplanes are not a great investment, but my dad loved airplanes.

87
00:06:31,115 --> 00:06:32,305
So they were cool.

88
00:06:32,305 --> 00:06:33,956
I loved cars and airplanes.

89
00:06:33,956 --> 00:06:34,754
So.

90
00:06:34,754 --> 00:06:36,625
So, but anyway, so that was me as a kid.

91
00:06:36,625 --> 00:06:39,337
Me as a kid was this constant journey.

92
00:06:39,337 --> 00:06:49,533
And then when I learned to apply it in business, you know, I remember, and my dad had
passed away, but I remember sitting in the room with the inventor of the transmission.

93
00:06:49,533 --> 00:06:58,769
And I remember there was a gentleman sitting across the table from me who was a very
high-end engineer and who had been assessing the technology.

94
00:06:59,114 --> 00:07:00,658
And I...

95
00:07:00,658 --> 00:07:05,191
I understood where he was going with the technology, even though I don't have a technical
degree.

96
00:07:05,191 --> 00:07:11,306
I just understood how what was happening physically into the inside the transmission.

97
00:07:11,306 --> 00:07:15,929
So I could immediately see how a business could be created off the back of that.

98
00:07:15,929 --> 00:07:23,273
just thought about the product market fit, you know, how the dynamics of what it was going
to mean to a vehicle system or a system.

99
00:07:23,934 --> 00:07:28,818
And so I said, let's start a business.

100
00:07:28,818 --> 00:07:29,698
So

101
00:07:30,558 --> 00:07:36,720
That was, I was, I was running a very successful dealer services business at the time.

102
00:07:36,940 --> 00:07:39,100
And I quit to start a business.

103
00:07:39,100 --> 00:07:45,862
quit to, I'd never raised capital before in my life ended up raising almost a quarter of a
billion dollars for that company.

104
00:07:45,902 --> 00:07:47,283
I'd never raised capital.

105
00:07:47,283 --> 00:07:49,363
I'd never started a business.

106
00:07:50,363 --> 00:07:58,486
But at 38 years old, I just decided I was going to do it and jump in the pond.

107
00:07:58,486 --> 00:08:00,246
I jumped into the pond.

108
00:08:00,667 --> 00:08:03,629
Courage feels a lot like fear when you're in it.

109
00:08:04,570 --> 00:08:09,633
And at the same time, you've got some wisdom that you're carrying forward.

110
00:08:09,633 --> 00:08:14,607
My grandfather always, I like to refer to wisdom that I picked up from grandfather.

111
00:08:14,607 --> 00:08:22,622
He'd say, you know, Mark, if you want to be successful, you got to leave a little
something on the table for the next guy.

112
00:08:23,002 --> 00:08:27,605
And it sounds like your dad gave you a sense of fearlessness.

113
00:08:28,578 --> 00:08:31,400
Talk about this startup experience.

114
00:08:31,400 --> 00:08:35,273
Now, this is your first entrepreneurial venture and you are a parallel entrepreneur.

115
00:08:35,273 --> 00:08:37,024
So we're going to get to that.

116
00:08:37,525 --> 00:08:40,957
This, this, it was a manufacturing activity.

117
00:08:40,957 --> 00:08:42,929
It was brand new invention.

118
00:08:42,929 --> 00:08:43,521
Yeah.

119
00:08:43,521 --> 00:08:47,415
I mean it was a mechanical device that had never been used or invented before.

120
00:08:47,415 --> 00:08:53,389
There's a guy, he was the founder of Kleiner Perkins and so...

121
00:08:54,474 --> 00:08:56,206
they had made an offer to invest in us.

122
00:08:56,206 --> 00:09:00,419
And so I was up back and forth in Silicon Valley for quite a while.

123
00:09:00,419 --> 00:09:08,086
And John Doerr, very smart man, asked me the best question ever in 35 years of being in
business.

124
00:09:08,086 --> 00:09:10,918
And that was, why did this technology become available today?

125
00:09:10,918 --> 00:09:14,852
And don't tell me it's because somebody invented it, because that's a weak-minded answer.

126
00:09:14,852 --> 00:09:20,296
And I told him, thank God you gave me the out, because that was going to be my answer.

127
00:09:20,296 --> 00:09:22,626
But I went home, I flew home.

128
00:09:22,626 --> 00:09:25,898
And I called him the next day and I said, okay, I changed my answer.

129
00:09:25,898 --> 00:09:27,569
And said, what's the answer?

130
00:09:27,569 --> 00:09:31,231
I said, what this is, is a convergence of technology.

131
00:09:31,231 --> 00:09:38,234
The only reason this technology can be made viable today is because of what's happening in
computing.

132
00:09:38,235 --> 00:09:44,618
So the ability to analyze, to spare pieces of information and turned into predictable
outcomes.

133
00:09:44,678 --> 00:09:51,341
That was just now the ability to take massive amounts of data, process it and get
outcomes.

134
00:09:52,108 --> 00:09:54,740
That was really just starting then.

135
00:09:54,820 --> 00:09:57,483
mean, just starting for the common human.

136
00:09:57,483 --> 00:10:03,007
mean, you could go to the Cray supercomputers and run those calculations, but you couldn't
on your desktop.

137
00:10:03,007 --> 00:10:15,097
And so this technology became viable because of the convergence of additional technology
that created the ability to analyze what was going on inside the device.

138
00:10:15,158 --> 00:10:20,578
So this was a series of ball bearings that

139
00:10:20,578 --> 00:10:24,151
that come together and are put under an enormous amount of pressure.

140
00:10:24,151 --> 00:10:31,506
And there's a fluid that resides in between the two spheres as they're rolling or the two
elements.

141
00:10:31,907 --> 00:10:39,213
And you have to transfer shear force on a viscous solid, which means a fluid that turns
into a solid.

142
00:10:39,213 --> 00:10:41,695
And you had to predict how that was gonna work.

143
00:10:41,715 --> 00:10:49,201
And you had to predict it against these rolling things that are rolling at 40 meters per
second in opposite directions.

144
00:10:49,201 --> 00:10:50,550
It was insane.

145
00:10:50,550 --> 00:10:52,771
as far as the technology goes.

146
00:10:52,771 --> 00:10:56,903
So in that business for me, that was technology risk.

147
00:10:56,903 --> 00:11:02,535
So I had to raise capital to offset technology risk because you had the great unknown.

148
00:11:02,535 --> 00:11:09,358
When you have a brand new mechanical or a brand new device, there's so much design of
experiments that goes into that.

149
00:11:09,358 --> 00:11:11,729
But your design of experiments is not commercial.

150
00:11:11,729 --> 00:11:15,541
Your design of experiments is to get a predictable outcome out of the device.

151
00:11:15,541 --> 00:11:19,122
And so that was the first time I had to do that.

152
00:11:19,702 --> 00:11:21,563
and lead a company to go do that.

153
00:11:21,563 --> 00:11:29,387
I had, so for me, what made sense to me is to reduce the amount of cycle time between
inventions.

154
00:11:29,408 --> 00:11:34,971
So I had to figure out and put a capital structure in place to reduce that cycle time.

155
00:11:34,971 --> 00:11:46,317
So I had full engineering inside, I had full prototype, I had full metrology to make sure
that the prototype met the, you know, met the print.

156
00:11:46,317 --> 00:11:47,608
Then I had full tests.

157
00:11:47,608 --> 00:11:48,216
So,

158
00:11:48,216 --> 00:12:00,676
built 28 test stands or random 24 hours a day, seven days a week to be able to go through
this iteration because I knew as a small company, my competitive advantage was I could

159
00:12:00,676 --> 00:12:02,518
iterate faster than anybody.

160
00:12:02,518 --> 00:12:12,566
The second competitive advantage that I had to leverage was this was a very valuable idea
and very valuable ideas have to have a protection strategy.

161
00:12:12,846 --> 00:12:15,276
And so we built a patent portfolio.

162
00:12:15,276 --> 00:12:18,786
My dad had a bunch of patents, so I was familiar with the word.

163
00:12:18,786 --> 00:12:27,346
I had never built them before, but we put together 800 patents and 16,000 patent claims to
protect that technology.

164
00:12:27,346 --> 00:12:29,946
And so I went all in.

165
00:12:29,946 --> 00:12:34,456
My dream was to build a business from my garage that we sold for a billion dollars.

166
00:12:34,456 --> 00:12:35,986
That was my dream.

167
00:12:36,146 --> 00:12:41,886
Didn't sell for a billion, it sold eventually for 400 and something million dollars.

168
00:12:42,670 --> 00:12:44,330
part of the way there.

169
00:12:44,330 --> 00:12:46,930
And I wasn't there at the sale.

170
00:12:47,110 --> 00:12:58,629
I did incubate and create a business that started in a garage, literally, and sold for a
huge amount of money and pure technology play.

171
00:12:58,629 --> 00:13:06,970
So for me, that entrepreneur journey, I had one set of risks I had to go manage, and that
was technology risk.

172
00:13:07,230 --> 00:13:11,342
Realistically, I had a second set of risks, and that was money risks.

173
00:13:11,342 --> 00:13:17,302
because this animal had to be fed a lot to be able to develop a brand new piece of
technology.

174
00:13:17,302 --> 00:13:21,246
I remember taking the bicycle transmission to a show.

175
00:13:21,642 --> 00:13:31,711
It was an engineering show around advanced hybrid drive trains and there's hundreds,
millions of dollars worth of hardware in this room.

176
00:13:31,971 --> 00:13:36,993
And I wheel a bicycle in and everybody's looking at me like, why does he have a bicycle?

177
00:13:36,993 --> 00:13:38,862
And then I asked this engineer,

178
00:13:38,862 --> 00:13:40,662
Have ever ridden a CVT on a bicycle?

179
00:13:40,662 --> 00:13:42,642
You can't put a CVT on a bicycle.

180
00:13:42,642 --> 00:13:44,302
Go ride one.

181
00:13:44,742 --> 00:13:49,632
By the 20 minutes later, every other display was empty.

182
00:13:49,632 --> 00:13:59,242
And I had a circle around me of mechanical engineers because it was impossible in their
mind to be able to do this, right?

183
00:13:59,242 --> 00:14:00,602
It was impossible.

184
00:14:00,602 --> 00:14:09,109
One of the things I talk about engineers is engineers are frustrated artisans and they're
frustrated by the math and physics

185
00:14:09,112 --> 00:14:16,395
frameworks, so the picture frame that they're put in front of, and the math and the
physics are what they're taught.

186
00:14:16,395 --> 00:14:19,584
So they try, but they're always trying, they're always artists, right?

187
00:14:19,584 --> 00:14:23,889
So they're always trying to color outside the lines and get outside the borders.

188
00:14:23,889 --> 00:14:31,792
And what I loved about that job was I loved the fact that we got to do what everybody said
was impossible.

189
00:14:31,852 --> 00:14:35,073
That's one of the things I loved about that job.

190
00:14:35,073 --> 00:14:35,991
Yes.

191
00:14:36,078 --> 00:14:44,118
You know, when everybody, when all my friends who has, left this very profitable auto
dealer services business and we were crushing it.

192
00:14:44,118 --> 00:14:51,338
I quit my job to a startup and they all thought I was insane by the perspective though,
right?

193
00:14:51,338 --> 00:14:57,738
You were attacking the transmission, the shift gear transmission, the industry standard.

194
00:14:57,738 --> 00:15:04,821
And you were attacking in the cycling industry, gears and sprockets and chains and front
gear.

195
00:15:04,821 --> 00:15:05,952
back gear ratios.

196
00:15:05,952 --> 00:15:11,285
You were essentially dismantling everything that everybody had invested in.

197
00:15:11,306 --> 00:15:13,287
How did you penetrate the market?

198
00:15:13,287 --> 00:15:17,770
Not only was it inventive and the engineers loved it, but you also had to get

199
00:15:17,770 --> 00:15:19,174
get consumers.

200
00:15:20,496 --> 00:15:22,281
That must have been an adventure.

201
00:15:22,914 --> 00:15:23,435
yeah.

202
00:15:23,435 --> 00:15:25,485
Let me tell you the multi-dimensional side of this.

203
00:15:25,485 --> 00:15:28,096
So I had two businesses within the business.

204
00:15:28,096 --> 00:15:39,369
I had a business I made bicycle transmissions because what I wanted to do is I had to
prove to the world that a transmission could be created with this device and it had to go

205
00:15:39,369 --> 00:15:42,280
into the world's most efficient drivetrain.

206
00:15:42,280 --> 00:15:45,981
So the world's most efficient drivetrain is the bicycle.

207
00:15:46,161 --> 00:15:49,832
So one unit of energy at the pedals equals one unit of energy on the ground.

208
00:15:49,950 --> 00:15:51,952
Almost zero losses, right?

209
00:15:51,952 --> 00:15:53,993
So I called a bio-hybrid.

210
00:15:53,993 --> 00:15:55,014
So there's zero losses.

211
00:15:55,014 --> 00:16:00,158
So I wanted to make a transmission that would go in that environment because nobody had
ever done that before.

212
00:16:00,158 --> 00:16:01,319
if I could...

213
00:16:02,240 --> 00:16:08,865
and ours was never light, but it needs to be light enough that, you know, that it's one or
two water bottles.

214
00:16:08,865 --> 00:16:14,470
But to your point, the skeptics were everywhere, right?

215
00:16:14,470 --> 00:16:15,690
Can't be done.

216
00:16:15,700 --> 00:16:17,672
you're going to see all these losses.

217
00:16:17,672 --> 00:16:20,134
All I did, go ride it.

218
00:16:20,686 --> 00:16:22,667
because I could make an experience, right?

219
00:16:22,667 --> 00:16:26,529
Because the technology is never what the technology does.

220
00:16:26,529 --> 00:16:30,290
The technology is, how does it make the consumer feel?

221
00:16:30,290 --> 00:16:33,071
And how do they value that experience?

222
00:16:33,212 --> 00:16:40,875
And what we created was the standard for ridership for what I call city and urban bikes.

223
00:16:40,875 --> 00:16:44,137
created the experiential standard.

224
00:16:44,137 --> 00:16:47,628
And once I had that identified and nailed down,

225
00:16:48,096 --> 00:16:52,996
We just started to click through customers and you watch this thing started to take hold.

226
00:16:52,996 --> 00:16:54,679
We started in Holland.

227
00:16:54,679 --> 00:16:57,876
So the world of the bicycle business, right, is,

228
00:16:57,876 --> 00:17:00,977
center of gravity right there in Amsterdam.

229
00:17:02,943 --> 00:17:07,465
per human revenue on bicycles is the highest in the world.

230
00:17:07,465 --> 00:17:12,688
So what I wanted to do is to go where the market made the most money and that's the Dutch
market.

231
00:17:13,068 --> 00:17:17,630
And then we went to Benelux, which is, know, Belgium, Luxembourg and Northern Germany.

232
00:17:17,630 --> 00:17:19,592
So then we expanded to there.

233
00:17:19,992 --> 00:17:22,634
So when I, it was funny.

234
00:17:22,634 --> 00:17:25,745
was, my wife, current wife and I were dating.

235
00:17:25,745 --> 00:17:31,228
And so she and I, I had to go over to Europe because we're going to launch the
transmission.

236
00:17:31,246 --> 00:17:34,247
So I, but I wanted to go see bike stores.

237
00:17:34,247 --> 00:17:38,039
I had to take the bike with me and I had to talk to the bike shop owners myself.

238
00:17:38,039 --> 00:17:39,930
I was the CEO, chairman.

239
00:17:39,930 --> 00:17:45,732
So I flew a bike over there, went with her and we drove all over Holland to go visit bike
stores.

240
00:17:45,732 --> 00:17:47,763
And that was our first international date.

241
00:17:47,763 --> 00:17:48,743
She's still married to me.

242
00:17:48,743 --> 00:18:00,716
So that's, it obviously worked some well, but, but the experience of doing that and then
bringing the, what the retail as close to the consumer and even consumers.

243
00:18:00,716 --> 00:18:08,628
as close to the consumer as I could get and then bring that feedback back into the system,
it became relatively overwhelming.

244
00:18:08,647 --> 00:18:18,952
Second thing we did was, is that when we were launching the transmission, again, we're in
Holland, I have a launch customer, which is the Dutch National Bicycle Company called

245
00:18:18,952 --> 00:18:20,212
Batavis.

246
00:18:20,332 --> 00:18:27,278
And so the guy who ran it is a very good friend of mine now, Rob Bissett, he was just a
business acquaintance at the time.

247
00:18:27,278 --> 00:18:31,420
So Rob and I agreed, we had to go find out what consumers really liked about this.

248
00:18:31,420 --> 00:18:33,680
We had to go talk to people.

249
00:18:33,681 --> 00:18:38,642
So we sent a team of people, he and I together, into a thousand consumers' homes.

250
00:18:38,663 --> 00:18:44,905
And we asked them, what are the three reasons, or the three drivers, for you buying an
e-bike or a bike?

251
00:18:44,925 --> 00:18:48,327
And it was quality of the seat and the touch points.

252
00:18:48,327 --> 00:18:50,127
It was the quietness of the drive train.

253
00:18:50,127 --> 00:18:52,038
And it was maintenance or lack of maintenance.

254
00:18:52,038 --> 00:18:53,669
Those are the three drivers.

255
00:18:53,669 --> 00:18:56,514
And as I tell people, I can't do much about the seat.

256
00:18:56,514 --> 00:18:59,036
but I got the quietest drive train and no maintenance.

257
00:18:59,036 --> 00:19:01,417
So that became our mantra.

258
00:19:01,417 --> 00:19:06,580
And Mark, that was kind of the beginning of creating that traction.

259
00:19:06,881 --> 00:19:11,144
We started with the consumer and came back up through the manufacturer.

260
00:19:11,144 --> 00:19:18,926
And when they all saw the data and they all saw what consumers liked about it, we just
started picking them off.

261
00:19:18,926 --> 00:19:29,284
So at this time, I'm working with my junior high and high school best friend, Tony
Ellsworth, and we're inventing the ride.

262
00:19:29,284 --> 00:19:38,001
And it's, I believe, the first bicycle manufactured in the United States with a constantly
variable planetary drive.

263
00:19:38,001 --> 00:19:45,026
Smooth, smooth, wonderful engineering, classic Ellsworth, handcrafted bicycle quality.

264
00:19:45,204 --> 00:19:47,396
And I'm beginning this adventure.

265
00:19:47,396 --> 00:19:48,706
I'm going to start SwiftWix.

266
00:19:48,706 --> 00:19:49,857
So here we are.

267
00:19:49,857 --> 00:19:57,923
I'm manufacturing socks in Tennessee, bikes in Vancouver or Washington.

268
00:19:57,923 --> 00:20:00,024
We're on this adventure.

269
00:20:00,905 --> 00:20:07,490
And you're doing a global startup, which is another challenge, I think.

270
00:20:07,490 --> 00:20:13,991
So you take these lessons that you're learning and you wind up

271
00:20:13,991 --> 00:20:25,537
up, see this baby, this idea come to market, you see the adoption in the consumer and
ultimately in the dealer and manufacturing cycles.

272
00:20:25,537 --> 00:20:27,094
So what are some of the lessons?

273
00:20:27,094 --> 00:20:33,001
I'm curious, what's your greatest lesson on what not to do and how did you learn it?

274
00:20:35,323 --> 00:20:38,484
Greatest lesson, boy, there's so many interesting ones.

275
00:20:38,484 --> 00:20:41,386
I would say probably there's,

276
00:20:42,082 --> 00:20:46,023
three super powerful lessons.

277
00:20:46,324 --> 00:20:59,309
One lesson is if you've done the homework and you know you're right, you don't need to
brag and poke people in the eye, but don't be afraid to stand behind your right.

278
00:20:59,649 --> 00:21:07,012
Do the math, do the homework, be ready and defend a position because that's what
leadership does.

279
00:21:07,532 --> 00:21:11,906
There is no powerful company that was started and somebody

280
00:21:11,906 --> 00:21:17,690
didn't stick their face out there to create change and know they were right and make it
happen.

281
00:21:17,690 --> 00:21:21,213
You can't make it happen unless you know you're going to make it happen.

282
00:21:21,213 --> 00:21:22,204
You just can't, right?

283
00:21:22,204 --> 00:21:23,535
That's my experience.

284
00:21:23,535 --> 00:21:24,405
So that's one.

285
00:21:24,405 --> 00:21:26,556
So if you know it, do it.

286
00:21:27,218 --> 00:21:38,125
Second thing is, and this is an enormous experience for me because I've done it right and
I've done it wrong, pick your team wisely.

287
00:21:39,762 --> 00:21:46,606
and make sure that your team is your team and make sure everybody knows what's going on.

288
00:21:46,727 --> 00:21:52,850
And in these environments that are constantly changing and keeping in mind, Mark, as you
know, right?

289
00:21:52,850 --> 00:21:54,922
Day one, you're running, everything's happy.

290
00:21:54,922 --> 00:22:00,775
Day two, you know, things turn not so good and you got to go pull it out of the ditch.

291
00:22:00,775 --> 00:22:02,867
You need everybody on the same page.

292
00:22:02,867 --> 00:22:05,198
So everybody needs to know what's going on.

293
00:22:05,198 --> 00:22:09,882
So transparency as a leader is super important with these small teams.

294
00:22:09,882 --> 00:22:17,488
So having everybody come and lock arms with you and go forward, super, super, super
important.

295
00:22:17,528 --> 00:22:26,355
Number three, when you're going to raise capital, say no if you know the capital's not
right.

296
00:22:28,117 --> 00:22:34,782
Having toxic capital in your equity stack or your debt stack,

297
00:22:35,555 --> 00:22:44,202
that creates enormous amounts of misalignment, which I think is hugely detrimental.

298
00:22:44,202 --> 00:22:48,325
Alignment, like I mentioned earlier on your management team, is hugely important.

299
00:22:48,325 --> 00:22:58,734
But alignment with your investors and making sure that everybody knows what the play is,
and either they're on board or they're gonna let you run the show.

300
00:22:58,734 --> 00:23:04,108
Because a lot of times you get what I call the drive-by guys that come in and they throw.

301
00:23:04,174 --> 00:23:11,544
a helicopter, helicopter parents or drive by advice or whatever, they just come by, throw
things at you and then leave, right?

302
00:23:11,544 --> 00:23:15,794
So they're not invested in your situation and what you've got to pull off.

303
00:23:15,794 --> 00:23:17,614
So making sure that you have alignment.

304
00:23:17,614 --> 00:23:20,313
had 356 investors.

305
00:23:20,313 --> 00:23:23,054
raised $165 million from those.

306
00:23:23,054 --> 00:23:27,334
I raised a couple, you know, 35 or $40 million in debt.

307
00:23:28,114 --> 00:23:31,360
and I knew every single one of them.

308
00:23:31,360 --> 00:23:34,492
I sold every I had never raised money before my life, right?

309
00:23:34,492 --> 00:23:46,518
So I, went from, you know, never doing this to selling my shorts on, you know, literally
selling every day, selling investors selling the marketplace, selling your employees.

310
00:23:46,518 --> 00:23:51,121
So you, you always have to continue to sell and market yourself.

311
00:23:51,121 --> 00:24:01,206
Because if you start to lose the confidence of any one of those branches in the system,
that's when that's when things get difficult is when you're

312
00:24:01,294 --> 00:24:06,542
is when you have misalignment and you start to have these friction points in around the
business.

313
00:24:06,542 --> 00:24:12,931
So if you have to start with it square, otherwise it doesn't go well.

314
00:24:12,992 --> 00:24:17,261
So when you find yourself struggling or things are kind of coming off the rails.

315
00:24:17,261 --> 00:24:20,574
it requires your skill and talent, lots of energy.

316
00:24:21,055 --> 00:24:22,216
How do you recalibrate?

317
00:24:22,216 --> 00:24:26,038
What's your secret for recalibrating when that happens?

318
00:24:27,450 --> 00:24:29,711
One, never be afraid to say no.

319
00:24:30,272 --> 00:24:32,684
Never be afraid to say whatever.

320
00:24:32,684 --> 00:24:35,116
Whatever has to happen, you have to do it.

321
00:24:35,116 --> 00:24:43,441
So you gotta be out front and letting things linger and letting things fester does not
work, right?

322
00:24:43,441 --> 00:24:46,564
You have very fragile systems in these startups.

323
00:24:46,564 --> 00:24:53,449
And so unnecessary friction and unnecessary conflict, it just causes a problem, right?

324
00:24:53,449 --> 00:24:55,680
It's just energy you can't get back.

325
00:24:55,732 --> 00:25:02,104
One of the things I always talk about is time is the only thing that you can't buy more
of.

326
00:25:02,224 --> 00:25:08,502
so time multiplied times the amount of humans you have in and around you and what they're
doing.

327
00:25:08,502 --> 00:25:20,049
So one of the other things I talk about is you have to create an environment that what is
important to you is equally or more important to everybody in your ecosystem.

328
00:25:20,049 --> 00:25:25,090
You have to get disproportionate amount of their mental and physical attention.

329
00:25:25,122 --> 00:25:36,630
to be able to support you and your efforts because that's the way you pull things forward
is if everybody, if everybody, you have everybody's attention and they're all pulling for

330
00:25:36,630 --> 00:25:37,371
you, right?

331
00:25:37,371 --> 00:25:39,002
I talk about this all the time.

332
00:25:39,002 --> 00:25:41,153
In fact, I started this at Ford.

333
00:25:41,514 --> 00:25:49,399
When I used to, when I used to want to call somebody, call somebody, the first thing I
would do is to look on their calendar to see if they were in a meeting.

334
00:25:49,399 --> 00:25:52,211
And then I would call them and leave them a message on their desk.

335
00:25:52,211 --> 00:25:53,858
I see you're in a meeting.

336
00:25:53,858 --> 00:25:57,580
you know, on whatever subject, give me a call when you get out.

337
00:25:57,600 --> 00:26:08,206
You know what, that little technique got me called back 99 % of the time because the
person who took the phone call recognized that I took the time to find out what meeting

338
00:26:08,206 --> 00:26:09,247
they were in.

339
00:26:09,247 --> 00:26:13,129
And I made a connection with them on understanding what their thoughts were.

340
00:26:13,129 --> 00:26:14,890
And so I would get a call back.

341
00:26:14,890 --> 00:26:22,624
So again, I learned all these little tips and I went and I tried to continue to find those
little tips to be able to meet.

342
00:26:22,624 --> 00:26:26,933
Getting a phone call a day a day before somebody else would get a phone call.

343
00:26:26,933 --> 00:26:28,005
That's a day.

344
00:26:28,005 --> 00:26:32,414
These days start to add up as you as you're trying to move this forward.

345
00:26:32,414 --> 00:26:35,168
And Mark, as you know, you can't buy another day.

346
00:26:35,272 --> 00:26:39,093
No, you got to spend time choosing your advisors.

347
00:26:39,093 --> 00:26:46,265
My dad said this, you know, Mark, choose your advisors carefully and then listen to them.

348
00:26:47,326 --> 00:26:53,868
So you had you had a lot of energy going into these relationships.

349
00:26:54,148 --> 00:26:58,409
So time, speed, response, responsiveness is important.

350
00:27:00,810 --> 00:27:01,538
I want to.

351
00:27:01,538 --> 00:27:05,050
Fast forward into your parallel entrepreneurship experience.

352
00:27:05,050 --> 00:27:07,391
Talk about where you are today.

353
00:27:07,391 --> 00:27:17,614
Cause the parallel entrepreneur is a study in the lessons of time management, the lessons
of prioritization, keeping capital happy, keeping teams happy.

354
00:27:17,614 --> 00:27:22,648
And these companies are often at very different stages of their evolution.

355
00:27:22,648 --> 00:27:24,749
One's a startup and a passion project.

356
00:27:24,749 --> 00:27:26,149
The other one is a honeypot.

357
00:27:26,149 --> 00:27:28,330
The other one you're trying to take public.

358
00:27:28,502 --> 00:27:30,549
And I've had the experience of taking

359
00:27:30,549 --> 00:27:30,999
public.

360
00:27:30,999 --> 00:27:40,242
I've had the experience of failure, you know, and the informative lessons of all the
above.

361
00:27:40,242 --> 00:27:50,956
So let's talk, let's bring the audience forward with what you're doing today and describe
the parallel part of your entrepreneurial emergence.

362
00:27:51,046 --> 00:27:56,566
I went from making transmissions for bikes and e-bikes to making bikes and e-bikes.

363
00:27:56,706 --> 00:28:03,146
So 2008, 2010, all the way forward, I always knew e-bikes were going to explode in the US.

364
00:28:03,146 --> 00:28:04,966
It was just a matter of time.

365
00:28:04,966 --> 00:28:11,586
You watch Europe, it's much of the overlapping culture.

366
00:28:11,606 --> 00:28:16,066
South America, even Asia, the biking, e-biking culture was coming here.

367
00:28:16,066 --> 00:28:16,926
It was gonna happen.

368
00:28:16,926 --> 00:28:18,342
It's now happening.

369
00:28:18,360 --> 00:28:23,434
So we started a business making generation three e-bikes.

370
00:28:23,434 --> 00:28:26,377
So we think differently about the product itself.

371
00:28:26,377 --> 00:28:29,519
So the product has to be a no compromises product.

372
00:28:29,519 --> 00:28:34,523
So consumers who are buying these products, they don't care about what mountain bikers
care about.

373
00:28:34,523 --> 00:28:36,775
And that is taking the bike apart and putting it back together.

374
00:28:36,775 --> 00:28:38,346
They don't want to take the bike apart.

375
00:28:38,346 --> 00:28:41,319
They want a bike that they push a button and they ride it, right?

376
00:28:41,319 --> 00:28:43,330
They don't want maintenance.

377
00:28:43,502 --> 00:28:56,199
So design and building maintenance-free e-bike that is intuitive to operate, has a drive
train that feels like the hand of God is pushing you along, and that are attractive and

378
00:28:56,199 --> 00:28:57,110
stylish.

379
00:28:57,110 --> 00:28:59,411
So that's- Can I get an amen?

380
00:28:59,411 --> 00:29:00,572
Can I get an amen?

381
00:29:00,572 --> 00:29:05,094
So yeah, so that was the standard that the guys got.

382
00:29:05,354 --> 00:29:12,598
And what is different about what we're doing is we're developing a channel of distribution
with automotive dealerships.

383
00:29:12,654 --> 00:29:15,803
So that's another different thing that we're doing.

384
00:29:15,803 --> 00:29:17,758
So this is a nugget.

385
00:29:17,758 --> 00:29:19,734
This is something very special.

386
00:29:19,734 --> 00:29:21,345
You're actually using.

387
00:29:21,345 --> 00:29:29,890
automotive distribution infrastructure and teaching dealers that it's not just about four
wheels, it's about mobility.

388
00:29:29,890 --> 00:29:31,970
It's about the mile, right?

389
00:29:31,970 --> 00:29:40,710
It's about the decision consumers are making on what they're going to do for the next mile
they're going to ride or drive or walk, right?

390
00:29:40,710 --> 00:29:43,490
For that mile of mobility.

391
00:29:43,490 --> 00:29:51,050
So in America, a single human being, 119 million times a day gets in a car and drives.

392
00:29:51,110 --> 00:29:52,954
119 million times.

393
00:29:52,954 --> 00:29:56,236
One individual gets into a vehicle and drives it.

394
00:29:56,477 --> 00:29:58,988
A third of those rides are less than one mile.

395
00:29:58,988 --> 00:30:04,062
So 30 million rides a day are less than one mile.

396
00:30:04,062 --> 00:30:09,405
So we identified that as we want to own the one mile ride, the one mile decision.

397
00:30:09,426 --> 00:30:11,557
So this is a decision consumers make.

398
00:30:11,557 --> 00:30:17,952
When I get up in the morning and go to the gym, it's a 1.8 mile trek to the gym for me.

399
00:30:17,952 --> 00:30:21,894
I can either get in my car or I can decide to take my e-bike.

400
00:30:22,040 --> 00:30:22,330
Right?

401
00:30:22,330 --> 00:30:26,052
So me, I'd take my e-bike, but that's a decision.

402
00:30:26,493 --> 00:30:32,597
And then one of the other things I'm a student of is kind of historical things that worked
and didn't work in industries.

403
00:30:32,597 --> 00:30:44,945
And in automotive, in the 1980s, late 70s, 80s, and 90s, Honda, who I respect a ton,
managed something called share of garage.

404
00:30:45,106 --> 00:30:50,249
So what is the vehicles that are in your garage and how many of those are Honda's?

405
00:30:50,249 --> 00:30:51,732
So motorcycles.

406
00:30:51,732 --> 00:30:59,687
Lawnmowers, ATVs, boats, cars, all those things were products that Honda made.

407
00:30:59,687 --> 00:31:01,529
So they went after share of garage.

408
00:31:01,529 --> 00:31:03,160
I'm going after share of miles.

409
00:31:03,160 --> 00:31:04,991
So that's product number one.

410
00:31:04,991 --> 00:31:10,575
The largest distribution system in the world for transportation equipment is the US auto
dealer market.

411
00:31:10,575 --> 00:31:17,840
is the most valuable distribution network in the world for transportation equipment, a
trillion dollars in revenue.

412
00:31:17,840 --> 00:31:20,376
I I can go into all the statistics, but

413
00:31:20,376 --> 00:31:30,189
They're bigger than most of the, the U S auto dealer market is larger than most countries
in the world as far as a G comparing it to GDP.

414
00:31:30,189 --> 00:31:34,330
So that is take this product set and stick it down that channel.

415
00:31:34,330 --> 00:31:35,370
So that's what we're doing.

416
00:31:35,370 --> 00:31:37,971
That's, that's business number one.

417
00:31:38,031 --> 00:31:41,632
We, we piloted, we got our vehicles done.

418
00:31:41,632 --> 00:31:42,633
We got our vehicles ready.

419
00:31:42,633 --> 00:31:43,563
Vehicles are beautiful.

420
00:31:43,563 --> 00:31:44,123
They're amazing.

421
00:31:44,123 --> 00:31:44,763
They don't break.

422
00:31:44,763 --> 00:31:45,994
All that stuff works.

423
00:31:45,994 --> 00:31:47,310
Now we're learning.

424
00:31:47,310 --> 00:31:48,690
how to help dealers sell.

425
00:31:48,690 --> 00:31:56,020
So now the journey has shifted from selling the dealers to being able to help dealers
convert customers to buy.

426
00:31:56,020 --> 00:31:58,310
So that's the current journey of Eblis.

427
00:31:58,310 --> 00:32:01,290
That's what we're doing with Eblis.

428
00:32:01,430 --> 00:32:07,630
18 months ago, I was asked to be on the board of an artificial intelligence company called
Engage.

429
00:32:08,430 --> 00:32:12,850
three guys, super great humans.

430
00:32:12,850 --> 00:32:15,310
That's one of my rules, by the way.

431
00:32:15,310 --> 00:32:16,994
Don't do business with.

432
00:32:16,994 --> 00:32:19,596
blanks and I don't do things I don't want to do.

433
00:32:19,596 --> 00:32:24,280
So both of these things matched these three gentlemen.

434
00:32:25,060 --> 00:32:28,844
Very high-end, sophisticated AI developers.

435
00:32:28,844 --> 00:32:30,505
These guys are amazing.

436
00:32:31,586 --> 00:32:42,576
And they were doing business assessment of business operations on some, excuse me, some
auto body shops.

437
00:32:42,576 --> 00:32:45,898
So they were doing analysis using an AI tool.

438
00:32:46,182 --> 00:32:52,807
And so they asked me to be on the board to think about how to structure the deal with the
company and then what to do.

439
00:32:52,807 --> 00:33:06,116
So as they were running down the road on this analysis, I made note that they were getting
an exhaust coming off of their analysis that was potentially another product.

440
00:33:06,377 --> 00:33:09,759
this is of my favorite terms, exhaust product.

441
00:33:09,759 --> 00:33:10,960
Listen, it's amazing.

442
00:33:10,960 --> 00:33:13,762
And it's even more prevalent today.

443
00:33:13,762 --> 00:33:18,866
because there's so many technology journeys in which the output can be applied to multiple
markets.

444
00:33:18,866 --> 00:33:26,151
There's so many functional things around technology today that you can apply if you think
about it in advance.

445
00:33:26,331 --> 00:33:37,339
And the guys who are in the business would tell you that I pointed out to them day one
about what this opportunity really was for them.

446
00:33:37,339 --> 00:33:40,441
And so I made a deal with the company that

447
00:33:41,642 --> 00:33:51,610
my LLC, second half LLC, is going to be the commercial go-to-market company for their
artificial intelligence products for automotive.

448
00:33:51,610 --> 00:34:04,622
So I have taken that vertical with a business relationship with them, and we have created
a predictive model in which with four pictures and 45 seconds, we can give you a 95 to 97

449
00:34:04,622 --> 00:34:10,716
% accurate assessment on what it's going to take to fix your car after it's been an
accident.

450
00:34:10,766 --> 00:34:19,990
So you take four pictures on the side of the road and upload them in 45 seconds, you get
an answer that's 95 to 97 % accurate.

451
00:34:19,990 --> 00:34:31,845
Because the NLP, the learning modules inside this firm have analyzed hundreds of thousands
of repairs and can look at these car, look at the dimensions of the car and actually can

452
00:34:31,845 --> 00:34:33,196
predict its outcome.

453
00:34:33,196 --> 00:34:37,017
This has been tested by a bunch of independent companies, all great.

454
00:34:37,017 --> 00:34:39,058
So what we decided to do,

455
00:34:39,406 --> 00:34:41,926
I'm already in car dealerships with e-bikes.

456
00:34:41,926 --> 00:34:50,026
What we decided to do was to offer this at a super affordable price tag for all auto
dealers.

457
00:34:50,026 --> 00:34:58,506
So today, auto dealers, they spend between 10 and $15,000 a month to get kind of similar
analysis.

458
00:34:58,506 --> 00:35:00,206
It isn't quite as good.

459
00:35:00,206 --> 00:35:05,986
And so we offered the product to dealerships on what I call an unlimited pull basis.

460
00:35:05,986 --> 00:35:08,610
So you pay 300 bucks, 330 bucks a month.

461
00:35:08,610 --> 00:35:14,133
And you can do run as many cars, as many analysis as you want to run as a car dealer.

462
00:35:14,173 --> 00:35:18,115
And the value proposition for the car dealer is so big.

463
00:35:18,115 --> 00:35:23,929
Think about service customers, taking pictures of them and giving the customer an
independent assessment.

464
00:35:23,929 --> 00:35:26,480
You got dinks and scratches on your car.

465
00:35:27,581 --> 00:35:29,682
And then, so that was one.

466
00:35:29,682 --> 00:35:31,623
Think about used car trade ins.

467
00:35:31,623 --> 00:35:34,925
There's so many different places to use this little tool.

468
00:35:34,925 --> 00:35:37,486
And so we're offering this as a

469
00:35:37,632 --> 00:35:42,625
as an independent tool to car dealers for 330 bucks a month.

470
00:35:42,625 --> 00:35:49,349
I call it affordable advanced technology because nobody else has this kind of technology
at this level.

471
00:35:49,349 --> 00:35:59,014
And we wanted to give it to the dealers at a price tag that was like them buying 10 cases
of pop for their soda machines on a monthly basis.

472
00:35:59,014 --> 00:36:06,368
So we wanted to disintermediate the market by offering this super high value technology.

473
00:36:06,368 --> 00:36:08,185
super inexpensively.

474
00:36:08,564 --> 00:36:10,254
So you know what I'm hearing?

475
00:36:10,254 --> 00:36:12,895
And for me, it's all about connecting the dots.

476
00:36:12,895 --> 00:36:18,727
When you're in one company and then you see opportunities to extend, they don't have to be
in the same industry.

477
00:36:18,727 --> 00:36:20,167
They could be in the same channel.

478
00:36:20,167 --> 00:36:21,298
They could be in the same.

479
00:36:21,298 --> 00:36:23,338
They could both be manufacturing.

480
00:36:23,518 --> 00:36:35,541
Earlier, you said that the reason that your investors were asking you the reason that this
new Vinci constant variable planning, variable drive product was ready for market.

481
00:36:35,922 --> 00:36:37,582
You talked about it being

482
00:36:37,678 --> 00:36:42,401
a convergence of technologies and manufacturing capability.

483
00:36:42,401 --> 00:36:53,047
What you just touched on was another convergence of AI and channel marketing and
disintermediation disruption.

484
00:36:53,227 --> 00:37:04,728
This is another startup and you are completely destroying a function that has been
consuming time creating frustration for consumers.

485
00:37:04,728 --> 00:37:16,513
The second thing I heard earlier was that you went to Holland, you went and got
intentionally close to the customer, the customer feedback, that direct injection of

486
00:37:16,513 --> 00:37:21,745
customer perspective in the leadership and thought process of leadership.

487
00:37:21,745 --> 00:37:27,767
So here you are going directly to the dealers and seeing and making these other
connections.

488
00:37:28,088 --> 00:37:31,789
How do you know when it's time to act?

489
00:37:31,789 --> 00:37:34,370
How do you know when it's time to

490
00:37:34,370 --> 00:37:40,896
make a pass, you know, you see, you must see a lot of connections because of your skill
sets.

491
00:37:41,036 --> 00:37:45,260
Yeah, so I have said no more times than I've said yes, right?

492
00:37:45,260 --> 00:37:56,500
So I had a deal that we were looking at with a very interesting piece of hardware with an
interesting business model to be sold through car dealers and and other and other repair

493
00:37:56,500 --> 00:37:57,411
centers.

494
00:37:57,411 --> 00:38:01,254
But, you know, the deal wasn't right because

495
00:38:01,288 --> 00:38:11,365
the counterparty on the other side didn't have realistic requirements for or realistic
expectations of legal agreements.

496
00:38:11,866 --> 00:38:14,327
They just didn't have realistic expectation.

497
00:38:14,367 --> 00:38:16,348
I'm not going to educate them.

498
00:38:16,589 --> 00:38:19,544
It's not, you know, I'm just going to, it was a great idea.

499
00:38:19,544 --> 00:38:21,365
I loved a lot of things about it.

500
00:38:21,365 --> 00:38:22,813
I love the core technology.

501
00:38:22,813 --> 00:38:27,036
I loved some things, but that aspect wasn't right.

502
00:38:27,298 --> 00:38:28,012
so,

503
00:38:28,012 --> 00:38:32,153
to something that you'd had to say no to or you just, yeah.

504
00:38:32,153 --> 00:38:34,234
know, said, listen, appreciate you very much.

505
00:38:34,234 --> 00:38:36,085
Just, just not going to work.

506
00:38:36,085 --> 00:38:44,099
I think being able to say no quickly and being able to be kind saying no, think is also
important, right?

507
00:38:44,099 --> 00:38:45,710
This isn't, this isn't personal.

508
00:38:45,710 --> 00:38:48,532
It just doesn't fit for me and where I am.

509
00:38:48,532 --> 00:38:50,523
And it doesn't mean it's not the right thing.

510
00:38:50,523 --> 00:38:52,394
It doesn't mean it's not the right market.

511
00:38:52,394 --> 00:38:59,037
It just means for my set of things about what I want to spend time on all that stuff.

512
00:38:59,037 --> 00:39:00,782
That doesn't work for me.

513
00:39:00,782 --> 00:39:08,717
So recognizing that and being brave enough to just walk, that's very important.

514
00:39:08,910 --> 00:39:11,752
So everybody is interested in the impact of AI right now.

515
00:39:11,752 --> 00:39:17,474
I don't think I have any conversations that don't talk about capital and AI and talent.

516
00:39:18,956 --> 00:39:24,358
If I said those are the three most important words in business, I might not be wrong.

517
00:39:24,699 --> 00:39:30,452
What do you think is happening right now amongst us, between us, to us?

518
00:39:30,452 --> 00:39:38,646
What's happening with this convergence of quantum computing and AI and the way that we
look at business?

519
00:39:38,646 --> 00:39:41,789
and disruption and opportunity.

520
00:39:42,104 --> 00:39:46,296
So I say a few things about this.

521
00:39:46,516 --> 00:39:54,037
So artificial intelligence at its core will improve most everything that we live with
today.

522
00:39:54,037 --> 00:39:57,562
I mean, at its core, but has to be applied.

523
00:39:57,622 --> 00:40:05,567
And don't underestimate the effort that it takes to apply these things to extract value
because it's significant, right?

524
00:40:05,567 --> 00:40:12,350
You have embedded systems that are a hundred years old, maybe longer, maybe shorter, but
they're embedded.

525
00:40:12,398 --> 00:40:17,981
So that journey of change, or whatever there's change in customers' mind, there's loss.

526
00:40:17,981 --> 00:40:22,643
So change and loss, those two things go together always.

527
00:40:22,884 --> 00:40:40,693
being able to identify, just, sorry, backing up, AI will, properly deployed, will improve
the efficiency of almost everything that we do as a society.

528
00:40:40,693 --> 00:40:41,998
I mean, it's going to.

529
00:40:41,998 --> 00:40:43,978
There's so many things it touches.

530
00:40:43,978 --> 00:40:55,038
This company Engage, one of the things that captured my imagination with them, is that
they have re-envisioned education, and they've re-envisioned it differently.

531
00:40:55,058 --> 00:41:03,498
So each student inside of one of their schools gets an AI assistant from the time they're
five years old.

532
00:41:03,498 --> 00:41:09,058
And that AI assistant grows with them all the way until they graduate from high school.

533
00:41:09,058 --> 00:41:11,452
So they have an AI tutor.

534
00:41:11,596 --> 00:41:17,429
that learns with them and watches how Mark learns.

535
00:41:17,429 --> 00:41:19,831
How does Mark think about these things?

536
00:41:19,831 --> 00:41:27,935
But then think about the continuum of that AI training, working with a student.

537
00:41:27,935 --> 00:41:32,057
mean, me as a child, if I had that, that would have been transformational for me.

538
00:41:32,057 --> 00:41:35,459
If I would have had an AI, a coach at a young age.

539
00:41:35,459 --> 00:41:41,632
So if you just think about that, just that little nugget that captured my imagination with
Engage.

540
00:41:41,676 --> 00:41:52,115
If I just think about that in and of itself and what that journey that puts kids on and
how we can improve that situation in education, it's amazing to me, right?

541
00:41:52,717 --> 00:41:58,022
And then, now I think about this for the US, Huge impact.

542
00:41:58,022 --> 00:42:07,430
Can you imagine going and taking this to Mexico or taking this to underdeveloped countries
and giving those children the ability...

543
00:42:07,608 --> 00:42:11,339
to do the same thing that happened in China on the cell phone industry, right?

544
00:42:11,339 --> 00:42:14,290
Nobody put wires into all these people's houses, right?

545
00:42:14,290 --> 00:42:17,661
They just handed them a cell phone and said, you're wire free.

546
00:42:18,121 --> 00:42:25,343
So the same thing I believe can happen with AI in education and other places.

547
00:42:25,343 --> 00:42:27,163
I see it happening in medicine.

548
00:42:27,163 --> 00:42:30,044
I see it happening in drug development.

549
00:42:30,044 --> 00:42:33,545
I see it happening like this AI assistant.

550
00:42:33,545 --> 00:42:36,630
I've told the company, I want an AI assistant.

551
00:42:36,630 --> 00:42:37,500
get me one.

552
00:42:37,500 --> 00:42:48,600
mean, you know, did I can that that's going to learn me and understand how, you know, what
I like in meetings and you know, how I like my follow up, all that stuff, all that innate

553
00:42:48,600 --> 00:42:51,542
innate of learning that you can put in there.

554
00:42:51,542 --> 00:42:55,885
That's what captured my imagination about what AI can do.

555
00:42:56,166 --> 00:43:04,523
When I see a kid, right, a child, I've got I've got kids, you know, they don't have kids
yet, but they're working on it.

556
00:43:04,523 --> 00:43:06,614
You just you just realize

557
00:43:06,656 --> 00:43:16,320
how much further we can help our children and our grandchildren evolve personally if they
all had an individualized coach.

558
00:43:16,876 --> 00:43:17,836
I love that idea.

559
00:43:17,836 --> 00:43:28,129
know, coach and coach, like to, I have this experience where I've felt like a coach.

560
00:43:28,129 --> 00:43:29,319
have been coached.

561
00:43:29,319 --> 00:43:31,660
There's always a question, are you coachable?

562
00:43:31,660 --> 00:43:36,811
And now I look at life more as a companion.

563
00:43:37,592 --> 00:43:45,814
I'm moving through the mergers and acquisitions space and taking the lessons from starting
and selling six companies.

564
00:43:46,840 --> 00:43:49,311
helping other entrepreneurs sell their companies.

565
00:43:49,311 --> 00:43:52,883
And I'm curious, you've done this several times.

566
00:43:52,883 --> 00:43:57,995
So talk to me about the role of a mergers and acquisition advisor in your transactions.

567
00:43:57,995 --> 00:44:00,236
Talk to me about some of the lessons.

568
00:44:00,236 --> 00:44:04,608
And when did you have to be the guy that got told no?

569
00:44:07,286 --> 00:44:09,086
Fallbrook story.

570
00:44:09,086 --> 00:44:16,966
So a very large German auto parts manufacturer made an offer to buy us.

571
00:44:17,306 --> 00:44:20,526
And I worked that.

572
00:44:21,066 --> 00:44:25,166
I put every bit of my skill into that deal.

573
00:44:26,546 --> 00:44:33,006
The board decided to hire a name brand &A

574
00:44:33,006 --> 00:44:35,626
advisor, a name brand.

575
00:44:37,106 --> 00:44:40,026
But I knew the deal better than he did.

576
00:44:40,546 --> 00:44:44,806
But yet, at the time, I didn't have the confidence to go push on it.

577
00:44:44,806 --> 00:44:58,306
And if I had to do it all over again, because the deal didn't close, we were off by a
little less than 10 % on the price, and the other party walked.

578
00:44:59,666 --> 00:45:02,876
And again, the

579
00:45:03,852 --> 00:45:06,163
&A advisors are fantastic.

580
00:45:06,614 --> 00:45:09,526
&A advisor partner is important.

581
00:45:09,526 --> 00:45:13,898
And it's important to know the &A advisor is a voice at the table.

582
00:45:13,898 --> 00:45:16,610
The &A advisor is not the voice at the table.

583
00:45:16,610 --> 00:45:18,470
I was chairman and CEO.

584
00:45:18,731 --> 00:45:28,016
If I had the maturity that I think I have now on this particular subject, I would have put
my foot down and said, no, we're not doing that.

585
00:45:28,236 --> 00:45:30,317
I would have put us in another direction.

586
00:45:30,317 --> 00:45:31,858
We would have gotten a sale.

587
00:45:32,174 --> 00:45:33,914
100 % sure of that.

588
00:45:33,914 --> 00:45:38,759
And I've even talked to the company since I've left, I even talked to him and asked him
about it.

589
00:45:38,759 --> 00:45:42,882
And they confirmed that my thinking was right.

590
00:45:42,882 --> 00:45:54,930
So that is another thing about me is that when I do have a learning experience or learning
event, I always keep I always keep learning from it, I try and find, you know, so when I

591
00:45:54,930 --> 00:46:00,314
like I run it, I ran into the CEO of that company, we're still friendly.

592
00:46:00,314 --> 00:46:01,164
And I

593
00:46:01,170 --> 00:46:07,212
asked him flat out over a coffee, you know, tell me about what was happening on your side
of the table.

594
00:46:07,212 --> 00:46:09,596
And this is now going on 10 years ago.

595
00:46:10,278 --> 00:46:14,001
And so it was, I was 100 % right.

596
00:46:14,001 --> 00:46:22,507
The advisor had done an enormous amount of deals, incredibly skilled, I learned a bunch of
things from him.

597
00:46:22,507 --> 00:46:27,712
But one of the things that he didn't learn from me is I knew the deal better than he did.

598
00:46:27,712 --> 00:46:31,190
This was personal for me, this was real for me, I

599
00:46:31,190 --> 00:46:41,035
I curated all these things and he was bringing a generic set of tools in on negotiating
and kind of those negotiating rules.

600
00:46:41,035 --> 00:46:50,460
And so if I had to do all this all over again, I would have put a border there and said,
last time I checked, I'm in charge of this.

601
00:46:50,540 --> 00:46:51,781
It's my call.

602
00:46:51,781 --> 00:46:54,502
And I would have done that and pushed back on the board.

603
00:46:54,523 --> 00:46:58,937
I didn't at the time, I was where I was.

604
00:46:58,937 --> 00:47:01,286
It was a brand new journey for me.

605
00:47:01,358 --> 00:47:08,378
I had tried to stack the deck with the advisors and all the people around me that I
thought were going to be going to add value.

606
00:47:08,718 --> 00:47:10,658
But the advice was bad.

607
00:47:10,658 --> 00:47:13,018
It was a bad call.

608
00:47:13,518 --> 00:47:18,618
But to your point, you get kicked in the teeth a few times.

609
00:47:18,618 --> 00:47:20,498
It'll never happen again.

610
00:47:20,498 --> 00:47:22,618
I have lots of friends who are bankers.

611
00:47:22,618 --> 00:47:25,198
I have lots of friends who are advisors, including you.

612
00:47:25,198 --> 00:47:27,578
And I respect everybody.

613
00:47:27,578 --> 00:47:29,350
But at the end of the day,

614
00:47:29,386 --> 00:47:32,268
I'm the one who started in my garage.

615
00:47:32,369 --> 00:47:34,651
I'm the one this company was betting on.

616
00:47:34,651 --> 00:47:38,554
I'm the one who built the patent portfolio and architected all those things.

617
00:47:38,554 --> 00:47:46,100
Obviously had pan attorney engineers who did the work, but just this whole vision of what
to do with these assets, that was all on me.

618
00:47:46,641 --> 00:47:55,328
so, but I did not, I wasn't mature enough to know at that moment that I should say no.

619
00:47:55,608 --> 00:47:57,920
And that is one of my big lessons.

620
00:47:58,446 --> 00:48:05,150
That's one of the things I respect so much about you, Bill, is that like me, you have an
attitude toward relationships.

621
00:48:05,150 --> 00:48:07,291
It's about lifelong relationships.

622
00:48:07,291 --> 00:48:10,933
It's about, I heard this earlier, lifelong learning.

623
00:48:11,634 --> 00:48:20,639
And we completely, well, we start to deplete ourselves when we stop learning, when we stop
gaining perspective.

624
00:48:21,359 --> 00:48:24,421
I was curious, I like to ask this question.

625
00:48:24,421 --> 00:48:26,422
What is your North Star?

626
00:48:31,119 --> 00:48:33,141
what is my North Star?

627
00:48:33,341 --> 00:48:36,543
So it's, by the way, that's a great question.

628
00:48:37,164 --> 00:48:43,169
My North Star is doing the right thing.

629
00:48:44,270 --> 00:48:51,406
That's kind of, that is one of my really North Stars is just trying to do the right
things.

630
00:48:51,406 --> 00:48:57,031
Just get up every morning, look in the mirror and say, am I making impact?

631
00:48:57,031 --> 00:48:58,638
Am I having influence?

632
00:48:58,638 --> 00:49:01,178
Am I doing the right things for the people around me?

633
00:49:01,178 --> 00:49:05,538
My responsibilities are with my family and my investors.

634
00:49:05,698 --> 00:49:07,998
Am I honoring those?

635
00:49:07,998 --> 00:49:10,578
am I honoring those?

636
00:49:10,578 --> 00:49:14,358
so that's my number one North Star.

637
00:49:14,358 --> 00:49:17,058
And again, I go back to my dad.

638
00:49:17,318 --> 00:49:22,078
That was the lessons learned from father.

639
00:49:25,078 --> 00:49:27,852
So when I was a little, kid,

640
00:49:27,852 --> 00:49:32,944
I started flying airplanes with my dad and I got my post license when I was 15.

641
00:49:32,944 --> 00:49:45,100
And so you realize when you're up by yourself in the air, you better make good choices
because you're up by yourself and there's no, there's, there's, know, there's no ground.

642
00:49:45,100 --> 00:49:46,370
There's no friendlies, right?

643
00:49:46,370 --> 00:49:48,171
You're just up there in the air.

644
00:49:48,171 --> 00:49:50,152
So you got choices to make.

645
00:49:50,152 --> 00:49:51,282
So do the right things.

646
00:49:51,282 --> 00:49:53,614
And I, I, that's just who I am.

647
00:49:53,614 --> 00:49:55,274
That's my North star.

648
00:49:55,722 --> 00:49:56,804
I love it.

649
00:49:56,804 --> 00:49:57,345
love it.

650
00:49:57,345 --> 00:50:03,152
We're about to wrap, but I've got this alarm going on in my ear.

651
00:50:03,153 --> 00:50:07,138
So we're going to pause for a second and see if we can figure that out.

652
00:50:10,040 --> 00:50:11,229
losing battery.

653
00:50:18,456 --> 00:50:20,201
You know, I've got a...

654
00:50:20,514 --> 00:50:22,056
Your phone ringing, buddy?

655
00:50:22,200 --> 00:50:24,961
Now I have just.

656
00:50:27,038 --> 00:50:28,720
Okay, got it.

657
00:50:28,720 --> 00:50:29,680
Okay.

658
00:50:29,741 --> 00:50:35,546
I wasn't able to turn it off and it was just like, hope that didn't come through.

659
00:50:35,546 --> 00:50:36,387
Did you hear it?

660
00:50:36,387 --> 00:50:36,837
Okay.

661
00:50:36,837 --> 00:50:38,028
Yeah, I could hear it.

662
00:50:38,028 --> 00:50:40,050
You could hear it while you were talking.

663
00:50:40,050 --> 00:50:42,311
No, I heard it when you took your phone off.

664
00:50:42,322 --> 00:50:42,562
okay.

665
00:50:42,562 --> 00:50:42,839
Good.

666
00:50:42,839 --> 00:50:43,263
All right.

667
00:50:43,263 --> 00:50:47,477
Well, let's get back into this because we're I do I know that you're about ready to take
off.

668
00:50:47,477 --> 00:50:48,737
still recording.

669
00:50:51,138 --> 00:50:52,610
Great answer on the North Star.

670
00:50:52,610 --> 00:50:53,712
This is so much fun.

671
00:50:53,712 --> 00:50:56,285
This is fun.

672
00:51:02,190 --> 00:51:05,161
I'm going ask you two questions, then I'm going do a rapid fire thing.

673
00:51:07,114 --> 00:51:12,000
So Bill, you've accomplished most of the things you've set out to accomplish.

674
00:51:12,261 --> 00:51:15,084
You're purposeful, you get teams put together.

675
00:51:15,285 --> 00:51:17,408
You've still got more goals, I'm sure.

676
00:51:17,408 --> 00:51:20,611
What is it that you want out of life?

677
00:51:23,115 --> 00:51:25,303
Well, obviously to make impact.

678
00:51:25,303 --> 00:51:27,305
have influence.

679
00:51:27,927 --> 00:51:35,276
So I always think that those of us who have the capability of making an impact on the
planet have responsibility to do so.

680
00:51:35,276 --> 00:51:38,260
So that's always been my mantra.

681
00:51:38,260 --> 00:51:40,192
That's what I want to be able to do.

682
00:51:45,144 --> 00:51:48,920
The next question is rapid fire.

683
00:51:49,723 --> 00:51:53,470
The first thing that comes to mind, what's the last book you read?

684
00:51:53,470 --> 00:51:55,793
read?

685
00:51:55,793 --> 00:51:57,114
Thank you.

686
00:51:57,114 --> 00:51:58,295
Last book I read.

687
00:51:58,295 --> 00:52:01,248
I reread Thank You for Being Late.

688
00:52:02,311 --> 00:52:06,336
Isn't that the guy who wrote The World is Flat?

689
00:52:07,599 --> 00:52:12,616
you're like one of the very few people I've ever met who have read that book.

690
00:52:12,616 --> 00:52:14,589
And I'm just so impressed.

691
00:52:14,589 --> 00:52:16,472
Tell me what you picked out of that.

692
00:52:16,472 --> 00:52:17,630
Why did you reread it?

693
00:52:17,630 --> 00:52:18,280
it?

694
00:52:18,601 --> 00:52:28,227
I reread it because the truisms that are the impact of technology on society, that was
foretelling.

695
00:52:28,627 --> 00:52:30,929
And I just wanted to get a reminder.

696
00:52:30,929 --> 00:52:32,580
So I listen and I read.

697
00:52:32,580 --> 00:52:34,471
So I got both formats going.

698
00:52:34,471 --> 00:52:37,053
So sometimes I listen to one book and then I read a book.

699
00:52:37,053 --> 00:52:40,296
Usually I read a book and then listen to it is, and that was this.

700
00:52:40,296 --> 00:52:42,316
So that's what I did.

701
00:52:42,377 --> 00:52:44,140
So being able to

702
00:52:44,140 --> 00:52:53,494
being able to sit back and relate to how fast technology is evolving, because we've had
this conversation on this call, right?

703
00:52:53,494 --> 00:52:59,196
Technology is changing our world faster than we're accustomed to and faster than we're
comfortable with.

704
00:52:59,197 --> 00:53:04,539
And so being able to do that and understand that, that book really talks about that.

705
00:53:04,539 --> 00:53:08,661
It creates a basis by which you can frame things around that.

706
00:53:08,661 --> 00:53:09,671
And that's what I like.

707
00:53:09,671 --> 00:53:12,312
I've had most every single one of my teams.

708
00:53:12,312 --> 00:53:22,183
since that book came out, read that book, just because I don't agree with everything
Thomas Friedman writes, but in this particular case, on this particular subject, I think

709
00:53:22,183 --> 00:53:23,154
he nailed it.

710
00:53:23,538 --> 00:53:24,771
That's going on the list.

711
00:53:24,771 --> 00:53:26,325
It's one of my favorites, too.

712
00:53:26,325 --> 00:53:28,810
What's the next book that you're going to read?

713
00:53:29,787 --> 00:53:30,478
It's so funny.

714
00:53:30,478 --> 00:53:32,501
So I knew you're gonna ask that question.

715
00:53:32,501 --> 00:53:33,753
I have a book in my queue.

716
00:53:33,753 --> 00:53:35,656
just go screw up the name.

717
00:53:35,656 --> 00:53:37,628
So let me just pull up the name.

718
00:53:37,628 --> 00:53:40,862
Hang on one second.

719
00:53:40,878 --> 00:53:41,279
I love it.

720
00:53:41,279 --> 00:53:43,127
You've got this book in your queue.

721
00:53:43,127 --> 00:53:46,377
I have the same thing for Netflix.

722
00:53:47,438 --> 00:53:48,879
I have that too.

723
00:53:49,180 --> 00:53:50,241
Hang on one second.

724
00:53:50,241 --> 00:53:51,922
Let me find this thing.

725
00:53:53,804 --> 00:53:56,246
yeah, it's called Top 10 Profit Killers.

726
00:53:57,422 --> 00:53:58,062
Mmm.

727
00:53:58,062 --> 00:53:59,722
Top 10 profit killers.

728
00:53:59,842 --> 00:54:03,662
In fact, it's open on my app right now.

729
00:54:04,082 --> 00:54:13,822
So one of the things it talks about is when you start a business, you should think about
starting a business profitably, not starting a business as a loss leader.

730
00:54:13,822 --> 00:54:17,842
So thinking about starting a business and operating a business differently.

731
00:54:17,842 --> 00:54:19,922
So this is one of the things it talks about.

732
00:54:19,922 --> 00:54:26,634
so in this particular evolution of me as a business, that's one of the things I...

733
00:54:26,634 --> 00:54:29,262
I think about and that's what I'm trying to get to.

734
00:54:29,548 --> 00:54:32,351
What's the best gift you've ever received?

735
00:54:40,898 --> 00:54:43,450
best gift I ever received was?

736
00:54:43,450 --> 00:54:47,483
Wow, great question.

737
00:54:49,165 --> 00:54:50,956
I got so many good ones.

738
00:54:53,350 --> 00:55:01,475
My wife buys me cowboy boots for Christmas every year and I have a collection of them.

739
00:55:02,336 --> 00:55:08,811
And it's just this kind of a thing, right?

740
00:55:08,811 --> 00:55:13,514
But I do enjoy cowboy boots and I have since I was a little kid.

741
00:55:13,514 --> 00:55:17,686
So my wife every year finds me very unique cowboy boots.

742
00:55:18,748 --> 00:55:21,929
I have- There's one good reason to come to Nashville.

743
00:55:24,342 --> 00:55:29,245
So yeah, so there's a custom shop here in Austin that my wife gets boots made for me.

744
00:55:29,245 --> 00:55:35,538
So again, I'm very blessed to have amazing friends and amazing family and all that other
stuff.

745
00:55:35,538 --> 00:55:48,534
But I can say that that's a pretty thoughtful thing just because she knows I like them and
she's a very good, and she dresses me well other than when I'm wearing my gym attire.

746
00:55:49,272 --> 00:55:50,049
You're looking good.

747
00:55:50,049 --> 00:55:52,135
What's the best gift you've ever given?

748
00:55:56,214 --> 00:56:00,274
So the best gift I've ever given...

749
00:56:00,274 --> 00:56:03,214
Hmm, that's a really damn good question.

750
00:56:03,214 --> 00:56:05,374
Man, man, Mark, you're good at this.

751
00:56:05,374 --> 00:56:09,574
I know, the best gift I've ever given...

752
00:56:13,678 --> 00:56:26,058
I gave my, we gave my mother-in-law who grew up in very poor rural Southern Korea, still
lives there.

753
00:56:26,718 --> 00:56:33,868
We took her to her favorite, to a place she dreamed about going to in Korea called Jeju
Island.

754
00:56:33,868 --> 00:56:36,078
And we took her for her birthday.

755
00:56:36,998 --> 00:56:42,982
And that was watching a person who grew up

756
00:56:43,106 --> 00:56:56,666
you know, poverty, war torn, but watching her experience her dream of going to this place
that she never thought she would go to and walking on the beach and just enjoying that,

757
00:56:56,666 --> 00:56:59,850
that was, that was a pretty rewarding gift.

758
00:57:00,110 --> 00:57:01,832
Wow, that's wonderful.

759
00:57:03,055 --> 00:57:11,346
If you were going on stage, and I know that you've been on stage many times, what's your
walk-on song?

760
00:57:17,949 --> 00:57:22,951
I for whatever reason, ACDC comes to mind, I'm not really sure.

761
00:57:23,171 --> 00:57:25,086
Back in black, I'm not sure.

762
00:57:25,086 --> 00:57:37,609
I, I, you know, I always, I always think about life and business as you have one chance to
be bold, you have one chance to make impact, you have one chance, right?

763
00:57:37,609 --> 00:57:39,760
It's always about the one chance.

764
00:57:40,741 --> 00:57:43,032
And so I always just think about

765
00:57:43,032 --> 00:57:47,924
being on stage and having that one opportunity to make impact.

766
00:57:49,005 --> 00:58:02,193
I helped with a women's forum one time, it was a women's event, and I helped the leader
come up with a tagline, and it was change one thing.

767
00:58:02,193 --> 00:58:11,788
So it was the inspiration around standing on stage and telling everybody in this thousand
people in front of you, if you just changed one thing in your life.

768
00:58:11,788 --> 00:58:13,960
you fundamentally change one thing.

769
00:58:14,061 --> 00:58:15,564
Everybody did that in this room.

770
00:58:15,564 --> 00:58:18,227
We'd fundamentally change the planet, right?

771
00:58:18,227 --> 00:58:20,951
Get a thousand people to change one thing.

772
00:58:20,951 --> 00:58:28,892
So for me, having that big, bold music going into saying, let's make an impact and change
one thing.

773
00:58:29,006 --> 00:58:29,816
I love it.

774
00:58:29,816 --> 00:58:30,846
love it.

775
00:58:30,846 --> 00:58:37,186
My song, if you turned that around and asked me the question, it would be Remember the
Name by Fort Minor.

776
00:58:37,366 --> 00:58:51,886
know, I just always thought building that chorus, know, it's 10 % luck, 20 % skill, 15 %
concentrated power of will, 50 % pleasure, 50 % pain, and 100 % reason to remember the

777
00:58:51,886 --> 00:58:52,386
name.

778
00:58:52,386 --> 00:58:55,406
I always had fun with that song.

779
00:58:56,726 --> 00:58:58,104
All right.

780
00:58:58,104 --> 00:59:00,351
Three words that define your life.

781
00:59:01,838 --> 00:59:02,618
Uhhhh

782
00:59:12,226 --> 00:59:14,195
make impact sustainably.

783
00:59:18,028 --> 00:59:18,978
like it.

784
00:59:19,240 --> 00:59:24,245
And then the last question on the parallel entrepreneur.

785
00:59:24,306 --> 00:59:25,747
What is the question?

786
00:59:25,747 --> 00:59:29,191
Well, I forgot one.

787
00:59:29,312 --> 00:59:34,998
So if you could talk to your younger self, what's the first thing you would say?

788
00:59:41,898 --> 00:59:45,140
Follow your instincts.

789
00:59:45,181 --> 00:59:46,781
Follow your instincts.

790
00:59:47,562 --> 00:59:48,543
Follow your instincts.

791
00:59:48,543 --> 00:59:50,203
You got great instincts.

792
00:59:51,145 --> 00:59:52,946
Second guessing is fine.

793
00:59:52,946 --> 00:59:54,647
Double checking is fine.

794
00:59:54,647 --> 00:59:56,288
But follow your instincts.

795
00:59:57,069 --> 00:59:59,930
I've been right about markets.

796
00:59:59,930 --> 01:00:01,101
I've been right about product.

797
01:00:01,101 --> 01:00:02,792
I've been right about things.

798
01:00:03,093 --> 01:00:10,017
I do have this ability to be able to see playing fields and understand impact, which is
another reason why I like the book.

799
01:00:10,017 --> 01:00:11,214
Thank you for being late.

800
01:00:11,214 --> 01:00:16,954
because if you can anticipate some of those things, you can bring greater value.

801
01:00:16,954 --> 01:00:20,350
So I think that's what I would say.

802
01:00:20,814 --> 01:00:21,275
Cool.

803
01:00:21,275 --> 01:00:22,877
And the last question.

804
01:00:23,279 --> 01:00:27,776
What is the question that you expected me to ask that I have not?

805
01:00:29,383 --> 01:00:30,243
I don't have it.

806
01:00:30,243 --> 01:00:30,904
don't have it.

807
01:00:30,904 --> 01:00:32,455
Mark, you asked really good questions.

808
01:00:32,455 --> 01:00:33,366
I don't have it.

809
01:00:33,366 --> 01:00:35,067
I don't know that I have one.

810
01:00:37,029 --> 01:00:48,819
I think one, not answering that question because I don't have an answer to that question,
but I would say, Mark, that the questions that you've asked are one familial.

811
01:00:48,819 --> 01:00:56,125
they feel, but they do make you think about what it is you're going to say because they're
deep.

812
01:00:56,125 --> 01:00:57,485
So thank you, Mark.

813
01:00:58,050 --> 01:01:00,207
you actually gave me some things to think about today.

814
01:01:00,207 --> 01:01:01,676
So appreciate that.

815
01:01:01,676 --> 01:01:10,370
When we both, I hope, have given our audience of parallel entrepreneurs, know, people
aspire to be an entrepreneur.

816
01:01:10,370 --> 01:01:23,380
think our society needs to do more to value the bravery, the risk, the the intestinal
fortitude that it takes to power through, to achieve your dream, to trust your gut, to

817
01:01:23,380 --> 01:01:31,393
live with integrity, to have an impact and to to come out the other side as a successful
entrepreneur, whatever that means to you.

818
01:01:31,393 --> 01:01:33,484
you is a great journey.

819
01:01:33,484 --> 01:01:40,782
And then you know that you recognize patterns, you do it again, maybe now you're a serial
entrepreneur or

820
01:01:40,782 --> 01:01:54,707
you're this guy like you, Bill, who recognizes patterns at scale and can put more than one
business together, lead more than one business, capitalize and develop teams in more than

821
01:01:54,707 --> 01:01:57,348
one completely disparate companies.

822
01:01:57,348 --> 01:02:01,610
In this case, it's a pleasure to sit down and talk about

823
01:02:01,891 --> 01:02:07,255
your imagination and your faith and your wisdom, your internal wisdom.

824
01:02:07,255 --> 01:02:08,416
Thanks, buddy.

825
01:02:08,496 --> 01:02:10,907
Thanks for being on the Parallel Online.