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About AlexAlex Su is a lawyer who's currently the Head of Community Development at Ironclad, the #1 contract lifecycle management technology company that's backed by Accel, Sequoia, Y Combinator, and other leading investors. Prior to joining Ironclad, Alex sold cloud software to legal departments and law firms on behalf of early stage startups. Alex maintains an active presence on social media, with over 180,000 followers across Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. Links Referenced: Ironclad: https://ironcladapp.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-su/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/heyitsalexsu Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heyitsalexsu/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@legaltechbro TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I've been off the beaten path from the traditional people building things in cloud by the sweat of their brow and the snark on their Twitters. I'm joined today by Alex Su, who's the Head of Community Development at Ironclad, and also relatively well-renowned on the TikToks, as the kids say. Alex, thank you for joining me.Alex: Thank you so much for having me on the show.Corey: It's always been an interesting experience because I joined TikTok about six months or so ago, due to an escalatingly poor series of life choices that continue to fail me, and I have never felt older in my life. But your videos consistently tend to show up there. You are @legaltechbro, which sounds like wow, I hate all of those things, and yet your content is on fire.How long have you been doing the public dance thing, for lack of a better term? I don't even know what they call it. I know how to talk about Twitter. I know how to talk about LinkedIn—sad. LinkedIn is sad—but TikTok is still something I'm trying to wrap my ancient brain around.Alex: Yeah, I felt out of place when I first made my first TikTok. And by the way, I'm known for making funny skits. I have actually never danced. I've always wanted to, but I don't think I have that… that talent. I started posting TikToks in, I will call it—let's call it the fall of 2020. So, after the pandemic.Before that, I had been posting consistently on LinkedIn for, gosh, ever since 2016, when I got into legal tech. And during the pandemic, I tried a bunch of different things including making funny skits. I'd seen something somewhere online if somebody's making fun of the doctor life. And so, I thought, hey, I could do that for legal too. And so, I made one with iMovie. You know, I recorded it on Zoom.And then people started telling me, “Hey, you should get on this thing called TikTok.” And so, I resisted it for a while because I was like, “This is not for me.” But at some point, I said, “I'll try this out. The editing seems pretty easy.” So, I made a couple of videos poking fun at the life of a law firm lawyer or a lawyer working for a corporate legal department.And on my fourth video, I went massively viral. Like, unexpected went viral, like, millions of—I think two million or so views. And I found myself with a following. So, I thought, “Hey, I guess this is what I'm doing now.” And so, it's been, I don't know, a year-and-a-half since then, and I've been continuously posting these skits.Corey: It's like they say the worst thing can happen when you go into a casino and play for the first time is you win.Alex: [laugh].Corey: You get that dopamine hit, and suddenly, well now, guess what you're doing for the rest of your life? There you go. It sounds like it worked out for you in a lot of fun ways. Your skits about big law of life definitely track. My wife used to work in that space, and we didn't meet till she was leaving that job because who has time to date in those environments?But I distinctly remember one of our early dates, we went out to meet a bunch of her soon-to-be-former coworkers at something like eight or nine o'clock in Los Angeles on a Friday night. And at the end of it, we went back to one of our places, and they went back to work. Because that is the lifestyle, apparently, of being in big law. I don't have the baseline prerequisites to get into law school, to let alone get the JD and then go to work in big law, and looking at that lifestyle, it's, “Yeah, you know, I don't think that's for me.” Of course, I say that, and then three days later, I was doing a middle of the night wake up because the pager went off.Like, “Oh, are you a doctor?” And the pager is like, “Holy shit. This SSL certificate expires in 30 days.” It's, yeah. Again, life has been fun, but it's always been one of those things that was sort of, I guess, held in awe. And you're putting a very human face on it.Alex: Yeah. You know, I never expected to be in big law either, Corey. Like, I was never good at school, but as I got older, I found a way to talk my way into, like, a good school. I hustled my way into a job at a firm that I never imagined I could get a job at. But once I got in, that's when I was like, “Okay, I don't feel like I fit in.”And so, I struggled but I still you know grinded it out. I stayed at the job for a couple of years. And I left because I was like, “This is not right for me.” But I never imagined that all of those experiences in big law ended up being the source material for my content, like, eight years after I'd left. So, I'm very thankful that I had that experience even if it wasn't a good fit for me. [laugh].Corey: And on some level, it feels like, “Where do you get your material from?” It's, “Oh, the terrible things that happened to me. Why do you ask?”Alex: That's basically it. And people ask me, they say, you know, “You haven't worked in that environment for eight years. It's probably different now, right?” Well, no. You know, the legal industry is not like the tech industry. Like, things move very slowly there.The jokes that made people laugh back then, you know, 10 years ago, even 20 years ago, people still laugh at today because it's the same way things have always worked. So, again, I'm very thankful that that's been the case. And, you know, I feel like, the reason why my content is popular is because a lot of people can resonate with it. Things that a lot of people don't really talk about publicly, about the lifestyle, the culture, how things work in a large firm, but I make jokes about it, so people feel comfortable laughing about it, or commenting and sharing.Corey: I want to get into that a little bit because when you start seeing someone pop up again and again and again on TikTok, you're one of those, “Okay, I should stalk this person and figure out what the hell their story is.” And I didn't have to look very far in your case because you're very transparent about it. You're the head of community development at a company called Ironclad, and that one threw me for a little bit of a loop. So, let's start with the easy question, I suppose. What is Ironclad?Alex: We're a digital contracting technology that helps accelerate business contracts. Companies deal with contracts of all types; a lot of times it gets bogged down in legal review. We just help with that process to make that process move faster. And I never expected I'd be in this space. You know, I always thought I was going to be a trial lawyer.But I left that world, you know, maybe six years ago to go into the legal technology space, and I quickly saw that contracts was kind of a growing challenge, contracting, whether it's for sales or for procurement. So, I found myself as a salesperson in legal tech selling, first e-discovery software, and then contracting software. And then I found my way to Ironclad as part of the community team, really to talk about how we can help, but also speaking up about the challenges of the legal profession, of working at a law firm or at a legal department. So, I feel like it's all been the culmination of all my experiences, both in law and technology.Corey: In the world in which I've worked, half of my consulting work has been helping our clients negotiate their large-scale AWS contracts and the other half is architectural nonsense of, “Hey, if you make these small changes, that cuts your bill in half. Maybe consider doing them.” But something that I've learned that is almost an industry-wide and universal truism, is that you want to keep the salespeople and the lawyers relatively separate just due to the absolute polar opposites of incentives. Salespeople are incentivized to sell anything that holds still long enough or they can outrun, whereas lawyers are incentivized to protect the company from risk. No, is the easy answer and everything else is risk that has to be managed. You are one of those very rare folks who has operated successfully and well by blending the two. How the hell did that happen?Alex: I'm not sure to this day how it happened. But I think part of the reason why I left law in the first place was because I don't think I fit in. I think there's a lot of good about having a law degree and being part of the legal profession, but I just wanted to be around people, I wanted to work with people, I didn't want to always worry about things. And so, that led me to technology sales, which took me to the other extreme. And so, you know, I carried a sales quota for five years and that was such an interesting experience to see where—to both sell technology, but also to see where legal fit into that process.And so, I think by having the legal training, but also having been part of a sales team, that's given me appreciation for what both teams do. And I think they're often at tension with one another, but they're both there to serve the greater goals of the company, whether it's to generate revenue or protect against risk.Corey: I think that there's also a certain affinity that you may have—I'm just spitballing wildly—one of the things that sales folks and attorneys tend to have in common is that in the public imagination, as those roles are not, shall we call it, universally beloved. There tend to be a fair number of well, jokes, in which case, both sides of that tend to be on the receiving end. I mean, at some level, all you have to do is become an IRS auditor and you've got the holy trifecta working for you.Alex: [laugh]. I don't know why I gravitated to these professions, but I do think that it's partly because both of these roles hold a significant amount of power. And if you look at just contracting in general, a salesperson at a company, they're really the driver of the sales process. Like, if there's no sale to be made, there's no contract. On the flip side, the law person, the lawyer, knows everything about what's inside of the contract.They understand the legal terms, the jargon, and so they hold an immense amount of power over advising people on what's going to happen. And so, I think sometimes, salespeople and legal people take it too far and either spend too much time reviewing a contract and lording it over the business folks, or maybe the salesperson is too blase about getting a deal done and maybe bypasses legal and doesn't go through the right processes. By the way, Corey, these are jokes that I make in my TikToks all the time and they always go viral because it's so relatable to people. But yeah, that's probably why people always make jokes about lawyers and salespeople. There's probably some element of ridiculing people with a significant amount of power within a company to determine these transactions.Corey: Do you find that you have a better affinity for the folks doing contract work on the seller side or the buyer side? Something they don't tell you when you run companies is, yeah, you're going to spend a lot of time working on contracts, not just when selling things, but also when buying things and going back and forth. Aspects of what you're talking about so far in this conversation have resonated, I guess, with both sides of that for me. What do you have the affinity for?Alex: I think on the sales side, just because of my experience, you know, I think when you go through a transaction and you're trying to convince someone to doing something, and this is probably why I wanted to go to law school in the first place. Like I watched those movies, right? I watched A Few Good Men and I thought I'd be standing up in court convincing a jury of something. Little did I know that that sort of interest [crosstalk 00:10:55]—Corey: Like, Perry Mason breakthrough moment.Alex: That moment where—the gotcha moment, right? I found that in sales. And so, it was really a thrill to be able to, like, talk to someone, listen to them, and then kind of convince them that, based on what challenges they're facing, for them to buy some technology. I love that. And I think that was again, tied to why I went to law school in the first place.I didn't even know sales was a possible profession because I grew up in an immigrant community that was like, you just go to school, and that'll lead to your career. But there's a lot of different careers that are super interesting that don't require formal schooling, or at least the seven years of schooling you need for law. So, I always identify with the sales side. And maybe that's just how I am, but obviously, the folks who deal with the buy side, it's a pretty important job, too.Corey: There's a lot of surprise when I start talking to folks in the engineering world. First, they're in for a rough awakening at times when they learn exactly how much qualified enterprise salespeople can make. But also because being a lawyer without, you know, the appropriate credentials to tie into that, you're going to have a bad time. There are regulatory requirements imposed on lawyers, whereas to be a salesperson, forget the law degree, forget the bachelor's, forget the high school diploma, all you really need to be able to do from an academic credential standpoint is show up.The rest of it is, can you actually sell? Can you have the conversations that convince people to see the outcome that benefits everyone? And I don't know what that it's possible, or advised necessarily, to be able to find a way to teach that in some formalized way. It almost feels like folks either have that spark or they don't. Do you think it's one of those things that can be taught? Do you think it's something that people have to have a pre-existing affinity for?Alex: It's both, right, because part of it is some people will just—they don't have the personality to really sell. It's also like their interest; they don't want to do that. But what I found that's interesting is that what I thought would make a good salesperson didn't end up being true when I looked at the most effective sellers. Like, in my head, I thought, “Oh, this is somebody who's very boisterous, very extroverted,” but I found that in my experience in B2B SaaS that the most effective sellers are very, very much active listeners. They're not the people showing up and talking at you. They are asking you about your day-to-day asking about processes, understanding the context of your situation, before making a small suggestion about what you might want to do.I was very impressed the first time I saw one of these enterprise sellers who was just so good at that. Like, I saw him, and he looked nothing like what I imagined an effective sales guy to look like. And he was really kind and he just, kind of, just talked to me, like, I was a human being, and listened to my answers. So, I do think that there is some element of nature, your talent when it comes to that, but it can also be trained because I think a lot of folks who have sales talent, they don't realize that they could be good at it. They think that they've got to be this extroverted, happy hour, partying, storyteller, where —Corey: The Type A personality that interrupts people as they're having the conversation.Alex: Yeah, yeah.Corey: Yeah.Alex: So anyways, I think that's why it's a mix of both.Corey: The conversations that I've learned the most from when I'm talking to prospects and clients have been when I asked the quote-unquote, dumb question that I already know the answer to, and then I shut up and I listen. And wow, I did not expect that answer. And when you dig a little further, you realize there's nuance that—at least in my case—that I've completely missed to the entire problem space. I think that is really one of the key differentiators to my mind, that separate people who are good at this role from folks who just misunderstand what the role is based upon mass media, or in other cases—same problem with lawyers—the worst examples, in some cases, of the profession. The pushy used car salesperson or the lawyer they see advertising on the back of a bus for personal injury cases. The world is far more nuanced than that.Alex: Absolutely. And I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, you know, you ask those questions and let them talk. Because that's an entire process within the sales process. It's called discovery, and you're really asking questions to understand the person's situation. More broadly, though, I think pitching at people doesn't seem to work as well as understanding the situation.And you know, I've kind of done that with my content, my TikToks because, you know, if you look at LinkedIn, a lot of people in our space, they're always prescribing solutions, giving advice, posting content about teaching people things. I don't do that. As a marketer, what I do is I talk about the problems and create discussions. So, I'll create a funny video—Corey: I think you're teaching a whole generation that maybe law school isn't what they want to be doing, after all there is that.Alex: There is that. There is that. It's a mix of things. But one of the things I think I focus on is talking about the challenges of working with a sales team if you're an in-house lawyer. And I don't prescribe technology, I don't prescribe Ironclad, I don't say this is what you need to do, but by having people talk about it, they realize, right—and I think this is why the videos are popular—as opposed to me coming out and saying, “I think you need technology because of XYZ.” I think, like, facilitating the conversation of the problem space, that leads people to naturally say, “Hey, I might need something. What do you guys do, by the way?”Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: It sounds ridiculous for me to say that, “Oh, here's my entire business strategy: step one, I shitpost on the internet about cloud computing; step two, magic happens here; and step three people reach out to talk about their AWS bills.” But it's also true. Is that the pattern that you go through: step one, shitpost on TikTok; step two, magic happens here; and step three people reach out asking to learn more about what your company does? Or is there more nuance to do it?Alex: I'm still figuring out this whole thing myself, but I will say shitposting is incredibly effective. Because I'm active on Twitter. Twitter is where I start my shitposts. TikTok, I also shitpost, but in video format, I think the number one thing to do is figure out what resonates with people, whether it's the whole contracting thing or if it's frustrations about law school. Once you create something that's compelling, the conversation gets going and you start learning about what people are thinking.And I think that what I'm trying to figure out is how that can lead to a deeper conversation that can lead to a business transaction or lead to a sale. I haven't figured it out, right, but I didn't know that when I started creating content that spoke to people when I was a quota-carrying salesperson, people reached out to me for demo requests, for sales conversations. There is something that is happening in this quote-unquote, “Dark funnel,” that I'm sure you're very familiar with. There's something that's happening that I'm trying to understand, and I'm starting to see.Corey: This is probably a good thing to the zero in on a bit because to most people's understanding of the sales process, it would seem that you going out and making something of a sensation out of yourself on the internet, well what are you doing that for? That's not sales work? How is that sales? That's just basically getting distracted and going to do something fun. Shouldn't you be picking up the phone and cold calling people or mass-emailing folks who don't want to hear from you because you trick them into having a badge scanned somewhere? I don't necessarily think that is accurate. How do you see the interplay of what you do and sales?Alex: When you're selling something like makeup or clothing, it's a pretty transactional process. You create a video; people will buy, right? That's B2C. In B2B, it's a much more complex processes. There's so many touchpoints. The start of a sales conversation and when they actually buy may take six months, 12 months, years. And so, there's got to be a lot of touch points in between.I remember when I was starting out in my content journey, I had this veteran enterprise sales leader, like, your classic, like, CRO. He said to me, “Hey, Alex, your content's very funny, but shouldn't you be making cold calls and emails? Like, why are you spending your time doing this?” And I said, “Hey, listen, do you notice that I'm actually sourcing more outbound sales calls than any other sales rep? Like, have you noticed that?”And he's like, “Actually, yeah, I did notice that. You know, how are you doing it?” And I was like, “Do you not see that these two are tied? These are not people I just started calling. They are people who have seen my content over time. And this is how it works.”And so, I think that the B2B world is starting to wise up to this. I think, for example, Ironclad is leading the way on creating a community team to create those conversations, but plenty of B2B companies are doing the same thing. And so, I think by inserting themselves in a conversation—a two-way conversation—during that process, that's become incredibly effective, far more so than, like, cold-calling a lawyer or a developer who doesn't want to be bothered by some pushy salesperson.Corey: Busy, expensive professionals generally don't want to spend all their time doing that. The cold outreach emails that drive me nuts are, “Hey, can we talk for half an hour?” Yeah, I don't tend to think in terms of billable hours because that's not how I do anything that I do, but there is an internal rate that I used to benchmark and it's what you want me just reach into my pocket and give you how much money for a random opportunity to pitch me on something that you haven't even qualified whether I need or not? It's like, asking people for time is worse, in some ways, than asking for money because they can always make more money, but no one can make more time.Alex: Right, right. That's absolutely right.Corey: It's the lack of awareness of understanding the needs and motivations of your target market. One thing that I found that really aided me back when I was working for other folks was trying to find a company or a management structure that understood and appreciated this. Easy example, when I was setting out as an independent consultant after a few months I'd been doing this and people started to hear about me. But you know, it turns out that there are challenges to running a business that are not recommended for most people. And I debated, do I take a job somewhere else?So, I interviewed at a few places, and I was talking to one company that's active in the cloud costing space at the time and they wanted me to come aboard. But discussions broke down because they thought I was, quote, “More interested in thought leadership than I was and actually fixing the bills themselves.” And looking at this now, four years later or so, yeah, they were right. And amazing how that whole thing played out, but that the lack of vision around, there's an opportunity here, if we can chase it, at least in the places I was at, was relatively hard to come by. Did you luck out in finding a role that works for you in this way or did you basically have to forge it for yourself from the sweat of your brow and the strength of your TikTok account?Alex: It was uphill at first, but eventually, I got lucky. And you know, part of it was engineered luck. And I'll explain what I mean. When I first started out doing this, I didn't expect this to lead to any jobs. I just thought it would support my sales career.Over time, as the content got more popular, I never wanted to do anything else because I was like, I don't want to be a marketer. I'm not a—I don't know anything about demand gen. All I know is how to make funny videos that get people talking. The interesting that happened was that these videos created this awareness, this energy in our space, in the legal space. And it wasn't long before Ironclad found me.And you know, Ironclad has always been big on community, has always done things like—like, our CEO, our founder, he said that he used to host these dinners, never talking about Ironclad, but just kind of talking about law school and law with potential clients. And it would lead to business. Like, it's almost the same concept of, like, not pushing sales on people. And so, Ironclad has always had that in its DNA. And one of our investors, our board members, Jessica Lee from Sequoia, she is a huge believer in community.I mean, she was the CEO of another company that leveraged community, and so there's this community element all throughout the DNA of Ironclad. Now, had I not put myself out there with this content, I may not have been discovered by Ironclad. But they saw me, they found me, and they said, “We don't think about these things like many other companies. We really want to invest in this function.” And so, it's almost like when you put yourself out there, yes, sometimes some people will say, “What are you doing? Like, this makes no sense. Like, stop doing that.” But there's going to be some true believers who come out and seek you out and find you.And that's been my experience here, like, at Ironclad. Like, people were like, “When you go there, are they going to censor you? Is your content going to be less edgy?” No. Like, they pulled me aside multiple times and said, “Keep being yourself. This is what we want.” And I think that is so special and unique. And part of it is very much lucky, but it's also when you put yourself out there kind of in a big way, like-minded people will seek you out as well.Corey: I take the position that part of marketing, part of the core of marketing, is you've got to have an opinion. But as soon as you have an opinion, people are going to disagree with you. They're going to, effectively, forget the human on the other side of it and start taking you for a drag on social media and whatnot. So, the default reaction a lot of people have is oh, I shouldn't venture opinions forward.No. People are always going to dislike you for something and you may as well have it be for who you are and what you want to be doing rather than who you're pretending to be. That's always been my approach. For me, the failure mode was not someone on Twitter is going to get mad about what I wrote. No one's going to read it. That's the failure mode. And the way to avoid that is make it interesting.Alex: That is a hundred percent relatable to me because I think when I was younger, I was scared. I did worry that I would get in trouble for what I posted. But I realized these people I was worried about, they weren't going to help me anyways. These are not people who are going to seek me out and help me but then say, “Oh, I saw your content, so now I can't help you.” They were not going to help me anyways.But by being authentic to myself and putting things out there, I attracted my own tribe of people who have helped me, right? A lot of my early results from content came not because I reached my target customers; it was because somebody resonated with what I put out there and they carried my message and said, “Hey, you should talk to Alex.” Something special happens when you kind of put yourself out there and say an opinion or share a perspective that not everyone agrees with because that tribe you build ends up helping you a lot. And meanwhile, these other people that might not like it, they probably weren't going to help you either.Corey: I maintain that one of the most valuable commodities in the universe is attention. And so, often there's so much information overload that's competing for our attention every minute of every day that trying to blend in with the rest of it feels like the exact wrong approach. I'm not a large company here. I don't have a full marketing department to wind up doing ad buys, and complicated campaigns, and train a team of attacking interns to wind up tackling people to scan their badges at conferences. I've got to work with what I've got.So, the goal I've always had is trigger the Rolodex moment where someone hears about a problem in the AWS billing space—ideally—and, “Oh, my God, you need to talk to Corey about that.” And it worked, for better or worse. And a lot of it was getting lucky, let's be very clear here, and people doing me favors that they had no reason to do and I'll never be able to repay. But being able to be in that space really is what made the difference. Now, the downside, of course, when you start doing that is, how do you go back to what happened before?If you decide okay, well, it's been a fun run for you and Ironclad. And yeah, TikTok. Turns out that is, in fact, for kids; time to go somewhere else. Like, I don't know that you would fit into your old type of job.Alex: Yeah. No, I wouldn't. But very early on, I realized, I said, “If I'm going to find meaningful work, it's okay to be wrong.” And when I went to big law, I realized this is not right for me. That's okay. I'm just not going to get another big law job.And so, when people ask me, “Hey, now that you've put yourself out there, you probably can't get a job at a big firm anymore.” And that's okay to me because I wasn't going to go back anyways. But what I have found, Corey, is that there's this other universe of people, whether it's a entrepreneur, smaller businesses, technology companies, they would be interested in working with me. And so, by being myself, I may have blocked out a certain level of opportunities or a safety net, but now I'm kind of in this other world where I feel very confident that I won't have trouble finding a job. So, I feel very lucky to have that, but that's why I also don't worry about the possibility of not going back.Corey: Yeah, I've never had to think about the idea of, well, what if I go have to get a job again? Because at that point, it means well, it's time to let every one at the company who is depending on the go, and that's the bigger obstacle because, let's be honest, I'm a white guy in tech, and I look like it. My failure mode is basically a board seat and a book deal because of inherent bias in the system.Alex: [laugh]. Oh, my god.Corey: That's the outcome that, for me personally, I will be just fine. It's the other people took a chance on me. I'm terrified of letting them down. So far, knock on wood, I haven't said anything too offensive in public is going to wind up there. That's also not generally my style.But it is the… it is something that has weighed on me that has kept me from I guess, thinking about what would my next job be? I'm convinced this is the last job I'll ever have, if for no other reason that I've made myself utterly unemployable.Alex: [laugh]. Well, I think many of us aspire to find that perfect intersection of what you love doing and what pays the bills. Sounds like you've found it, I really do feel like I found it, too. I never imagined I'd be doing what I do now. Which is also sometimes hard to describe.I'm not making TikToks for a living; I'm just on the community team, doing events—I'm getting to work with people. I'm basically doing the things that I wanted to do that led me to quit that job many years ago, that big law job many years ago. So, I feel very blessed and for anybody who's, like, looking for that type of path, I do think that at some point, you do need to kind of shed the safety nets because if you always hang on to the safety nets, whether it's a big tech job or a big law job, there's going to be elements of that that don't fit in with your personality, and you're never going to be able to find that if you kind of stay there. But if you venture out—and, you know, I admire you for what you've done; it sounds like you're very successful at what you do and get to do what you love every day—I think great things can happen.Corey: Yeah, I get to insult Amazon for a living. It's what I love. It's what I would do if I weren't being paid. So, here we are. Yeah—Alex: [laugh].Corey: I have no sense of self-preservation. It's kind of awesome.Alex: I love it.Corey: But you're right. It's… there's something to be said for finding the thing that winds up resonating with you and what you want to be doing.Alex: It really does. And you know, I think when I first made the move to technology, to sales, there was no career path. I thought I would—maybe I thought I might be a VP of Sales. But the thing is, when you put yourself out there, the opportunities that show up might not be the ones that you had always seen from the beginning. Like if you ask a lawyer, like, “What can I do if I don't practice law?” They're going to give you these generic answers. “Work here. Work there. Work for that company. I've seen a lot of people do this.”But once you put yourself out there in the wilderness, these opportunities arise. And I've been very lucky. I mean, I never imagined I'd be a TikTokker. And by the way, I also make memes on Twitter. Couldn't imagine I'd be doing that either. I learned, like, Mematic, these tools. Like, you know, like, I'm immersed in this internet culture now.Corey: It is bizarre to me and I never saw it coming either. For better or worse, though, here we are, stuck at it.Alex: [laugh].Corey: I really want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about what you're up to and follow along for the laughs, if nothing else, where's the best place for them to find you?Alex: The best way to find me is on LinkedIn; just look up Alex Su. But I'm around and on lots of social media platforms. You can find me on Twitter, on Instagram, and on TikTok, although I might be a little bit embarrassed of what I put on TikTok. I put some crazy gnarly stuff out there. But yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me.Corey: And we will put links to all of it in the show notes, and let people wind up making their own decisions. Thanks so much for your time, Alex. I really appreciate it.Alex: Corey, thank you so much for having me. This was so much fun.Corey: Alex Su, Head of Community Development at Ironclad. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry insipid comment talking about how unprofessional everything we talked about is that you will not be able to post for the next six months because it'll be hung up in legal review.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this episode, I have the opportunity to speak with Alex Hagerup who is solving the problem of using AI to take costs out of your business. Grant Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So today I have someone that I have been admiring by looking at his background, here with me today to talk about some amazing aspects of his journey to solve business problems leveraging technology, specifically AI which is quite cool. Anyway, let me stop right there. And welcome Alex Hager group. Hello, Alex. Alex Hey, Grant. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Grant Thank you. Thanks for being here today and for taking the time. I know you're getting ready to head off trans continental here pretty soon on a trip. So thanks for for jumping on this conversation here today. Alex Absolutely. It's exciting being able to travel again. So I going home to the Motherland for a few weeks is exciting. I haven't been there for more than a few days, for the last three years, actually. So I'm definitely excited. Grant Have have have the COVID situations and those numbers pretty good over there at this point. Alex Yeah, everything is fine. So Norway is completely open again. And it's all good. But But Norway was one of those countries that really looked down hard. And also since the US didn't allow non US residents to actually come back into the country. If you left. It was just a problematic situation to go to Europe in general. Wow. Grant Yeah. What a great opportunity to get home to family. Well, thanks for taking your time here with me today on this. So Vic AI. All right, who is Vic AI? What happened here? How to what are you? What are you solving? What what problem? Are you looking to address with Vic? Ai? Alex Yeah, absolutely. So I'll take a little bit of the background to set that up. So I, I've always been very interested in both accounting, finance and technology. So this is a company that lives in the intersection of those. My mom had her own accounting firm. So I grew up there, which probably influenced my interest for for accounting in general. And I built a couple of companies. But one that I spent three years with just prior to starting, Aki was a cloud ERP system, an accounting and accounting platform that was being used by about 30 40,000 companies back then it's about 80 90,000. Now, and during working there, you know, observe the sort of, let's say, the challenges of accounting and the manual, repetitiveness, the tediousness, all of that from, you know, every day you felt it? Grant Where? I mean, what is the excitement in that? Right? I mean, where's the excitement? Yeah. Did you credit that properly?  Alex Oh, gosh, yeah, exactly. So so we were we were just observing this. And then this was back in 2014 15. Just before we started with AI started having a new, you know, like a new summer or a new renaissance in a way and, and we were thinking like this has to be we can maybe like we can solve this in a better way than how the technology has solved it so far. And after some deliberation, we sort of thought that we could create AI algorithms that would be able to actually do accounting transaction processing better than humans. Grant Because that's a really key point I think you're making. So the way that we've been solving this problem up to this point has been, let me take the tasks that we do and just automate the tasks themselves. Right. In other words, let me take your actual transactional activities that you're working through, and just put some increased processing to that. That's how it's historically been done, right? Alex Yep. Correct. And that's been entirely driven by rules, right? So, you know, transaction, Uber, transportation, as, you know, rules based automation, right? And there are all sorts of problems with that. It's obviously better than doing everything manually, right? So we aren't we're progressing through stages there. If you go back before the spreadsheets, you know, everything was done entirely manually. So we are progressing here, but, but what we're building is not next face that comes off there, you know, what everyone is using today, all over the world. And, you know, AI will solve this in a more scalable and gracious way and more more effectively. So that was all right. Yeah. Grant Yeah. So real quick on that, can you articulate how is that different? Right? Because all of us come from this rules based way of thinking. So what is it that AI is going to do better? How will it do it differently than what we're used to? Alex Yeah, I mean, that's a that's a great question. It's kind of the essence as well. So when you when you look at how it happens today, it's not only rules are not only automation, it's automation, and a lot of human hours involved. So you can always ask yourself, why are all those human hours involved? If it's automation, right? So so it begs the question, right, so what happens in reality is that sort of rules and templates and RPA isn't sufficient, because there's so many edge cases, and there's so much variability in the world of accounting. So you know, rules only takes you so far. And then you have to staff up and have human cognitive reasoning step in and do the rest of it. So where AI comes in is that it can do both of those things. So it does the automation without rules, and it can do the reasoning that humans are there to do today. So I always say that AI is, is great at sort of mimicking that reasoning that humans are doing. So one of the areas that we're in is invoice processing. And when I give an invoice to any human, you know, it will always tell me, oh, that's the vendor, you know, that's the invoice number, lots of total costs. But that's not obvious to a computer. And if you're gonna write rules for every variability in the world, you can just end up writing too many rules. So it's just not a, it's not a great technology for it. And AI is way better. So it's just like in the early stages, so that's next sort of digital transformation, transformation journey that we're all. So as Grant So as you know, when you're working in the AI space, and you're saying, Oh, I'm going to apply AI to a particular problem, you end up building different models with different AI characteristics based on the nature of the problem, some more aggression based some more sort of classification based, as your people as your customers look to use your platform, do they get exposed to any of that? Are they even aware of what elements or aspects of AI are at play? Or? Or do they just jump in and start solving the problems they're used to, and then the right sort of AI model behind the scene is executing on their behalf? Alex Yeah, we've hidden all of that from our customers. So we do try to keep sort of Explainable AI in the way where our user interface is explaining why our AI predicted something. But we've kept all of the complexity, so sort of models and model training. And all of that is in the background, we decided to do like an end to end service where the customer, they don't really need to do anything technical. It's, it's, you know, just another SAS subscription that they're using, that they plug into one of their processes. And then we deal with all of the complexity of the models, both global models and AI models, specifically the same for each customer. So we keep all of that complexity hidden. Grant That's awesome. That way, I'm not touching any of that as the end user. So if I see the name Vic AI, I don't need to shy away and say, Oh, wait, I need to be an AI expert. It's more that this is the enabling technology. And it just turns out that you've made that simple for the people without needing to know that Wait a minute. So that brings a question on my use, you know, one of the challenges around AI is the whole notion around bias. And, and, and with the cognizance that's required for humans up to this point, and still largely today to do you know, counting processes. Therefore, that has the opportunity for some bias that comes in right terms of the way things get handled. How do you deal with that then in terms of applying AI so that that bias doesn't creep through? Alex Yeah, it's a great question. And it's a challenge for everything where we're data sets are involved in training, AI. So one of the ways that so one of The one of the good things with accounting data, if you start with that is that it's ultimately numbers and classifications. And you, you kind of want to have that, right? Because otherwise your your books of your business is wrong. So unless you want them to be wrong, you know, you have a very good incentive to keep this right. SO into SO, you know, I think we generally see kind of less less bias in accounting data, and then some other more like subjective data in a way. And then also we draw on data across 1000s and 1000s of customers. So we have customers in both Europe and the US and many other many other regions as well, but the little fewer and most of the concentration in Europe and US. And in all sorts of industries and all sorts of sizes, we have about 13,000 customers on the platform now. So when you start looking at such a wide data set, you also hopefully reduce some of some of that bias. And then you also have auditing processes that sort of sits at the end of their accounting. And hopefully also they'll you know, annually they'll catch corrections, and also fed in as well to make AI. So those are some of the tactics. Basically, it's all about keeping clean data, so that our predictions are accurate. That's really what we're trying to get to. Grant Yeah, boy, that's that's so critical, especially as you pointed out with the with the need to of course, be accurate for the business for sure. All right, so So let's say that you've got this data, you've cleaned it up, you've done the preparation, you're on the Vic AI platform, the question now in my mind becomes, therefore, what changes in the lives of the people that adopt this right and others, they may change? I'm supposing something about the way they do their daily work, or the way the CFO does certain things, or maybe even impact on regulations and audits. I mean, what's the impact of the organization when when this gets adopted?  Alex Yeah, I'm also in question. And I want to point out also that the beginning of getting getting live with Vicki AI isn't complex for a customer, because we built an automated system to ingest and clean their historical data, which then goes into our system automatically and train our AI algorithms so that when we go live, we have, you know, pretty good knowledge of what's going to be predicted. We know your system, we know your accounting, we know how you do things. So when you start pushing new transactions through our classification, accuracy is high. And there's no complexity for the customer. In that process, it basically happens automatically in the background. Once you are live with Vic AI, some things will will change. But it doesn't sort of change. Like overnight. One of the things with AI is it gets better and better over time. And one of the things we're driving towards is what we call full autonomy. And full autonomy is you know, the AI's version of automation. But it means that it has perceived this not to need human review. And that's when it's fully autonomous. So that's our sort of end goal with the autonomy of transactions is that, you know, the AI system is perfectly confident in the work that it has been doing. So it doesn't even ask a human to review it. So this this increases over time. So when you start with Aki, you, you have a you know, you have a better interface, you have a smoother operation, you have already probably 50% time reduction in the first month of using the system. Grant Let me stop you on that right there. 50%. So, that would be 50% of those that are doing sort of the daily operational activities, or is that of the CFO? Or who who is that, that that percent impacted? Alex Yeah, that's on the accounting team that is doing the processing. So if you're doing you know, if you have five people or if you have 15 people doing invoice processing, whether they are onshore or offshore, you know, just in the beginning, you can drastically reduce that, and then that percentage just increases over time because you're substituting the AI for for for human FTE. So basically, and and what we see is that everyone wants to do something else than just sit and do like data entry and accounting classification, right? You you, you can be more proactive, you can do more value added work than that. And we're sort of at that phase now where the AI can substitute that's partly augments and also fully run things autonomously. So when you put this in place, in the beginning, there is a little bit of effect right away but you know, you got to read the sign some of your some of your processes and some of your routines because you have a platform here now that is doing Most of the work for you, and you're just reviewing and you're reviewing the AI and training the AI to become more autonomous. So you've got a little on my mind shifts, and some sort of routines, you don't need to double and triple check, check in have four people involved in reviewing, you know, one thing because the AI can tell you how confident it is. And if it is very confident, maybe you can have one person review it in the beginning, and then eventually it will be fully autonomous. If it's less confident, then it will also tell you, and you can review it in more detail. So it's pretty, it's pretty, pretty fascinating. Grant It is dang fascinating. And I'm assuming that there are some that have run into this, and they've worried about their jobs, right? They're like, wait a minute, you're taking my tasks away from me? Do you have to help them overcome that fear and say, hey, you know, you're gonna move towards more value added activities within the organization? Have you run into that problem? Alex So it will we see is that it's, everyone is just squeezed on time, right? Everyone's trying to hit the deadline of the month, the clothes and all of that. So it there is no shortage of work to be done in the accounting piece. And, and just having, you know, having faster turnaround time having more accurate data, because AI is more accurate than humans, like it doesn't fat fingers thinks the same way. And when it's uncertain, it asked for a human verification, a human looks at it, and then you get more accurate than then all the way. So we see that, you know, there's no shortage of things to do. Everyone wants to progress their careers. And I don't really perceive that as an actual problem. But it is like a, you know, people think about that as a problem, but I don't think it is in reality. Grant So this has been several years and coming. When did you start this 2 to 3 years ago? Alex Yeah, early 2017, was 5 years. Grant Okay, that's, that's awesome. And you built this ground up, meaning all of AI development AI technology that your organization's created, right? Alex Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's been challenging. That's why it's taken taken quite a few years, as well as because you we started, you know, completely scratch, and we had to figure everything out. So one of the things that sets the KPI apart a little bit as part of our founding story, where we were able to start the company, we had access to a gigantic data sets of accounting transactions, and all corresponding documents to that. So that helped us just spend the first two years we just spent on data analysis, data science and machine learning development, because we had some thesis and theories that this could work, but we didn't know. So it just had to do that in the beginning, for for a couple of years. So when we saw that this actually has promised, like, we were predicting more and more accurately, and you know, we're gonna get to this inflection point where it's better to use PKI, that do not use PKI. And at that point, people will use it, and then, you know, continue growing more and more customers and more and more data and more and more corrections, and better and better predictions. So we realized we would get to that point. And then, you know, then we raised the seed round back in 2017. And, you know, started developing, Grant What a great journey. I love this story. So tell me about impact outcomes. So you talked about a large number of customers that are using the platform now, what is what's been the results that they've seen? Alex Yeah, so we see. So there's a couple of numbers that we that we statistically enroll from the from the customers, we see that customers have about 80% reduction in the overall time spent on the process. And that comes from two things. One is the percent of fully autonomous. So let's say you're 50%, fully autonomous, that means you spent zero time on 50% of your volume. And then that other part, we've drastically reduced the number of minutes in two seconds. For each transaction a human has to review because the AI has done all the upfront work, humans just reviewing it, rather than sort of processing it from scratch. So you're at seconds rather than minutes. This turns into sort of an 80% reduction in in time. You also have things that we do like prevent duplicate payments, and we have some fraud detection in the system. So you also have some of those benefits that can turn into multimillion dollar when you have a large enough cost base. And then we have audit trails in the system, which helps with figuring out you know, making sure that you know, all of the approvals are doing rights. If anyone has changed in amount or something. It's all logged into the system electronically. So you have some some compliance and auditing benefits from it as well. But right now the main, the main effective impact our customers have, and we typically sell to the mid market and enterprise. So these are larger organizations, they can have hundreds of 1000s, or millions even have sort of vendor bills per, per year, and a substantial amount of people and resources involved in dealing with that problem. So they see very significant ROI from it. Grant So to sell into that particular group, then I'm assuming you've got to have a decent amount of integrations into all of their incumbent systems, right, all of their ERP systems and CRM systems, etc. Right? What does that look like? Alex Yeah, that's, that's true. So we build out these connectors as we as we go, it does, for each connector, the first time we build it, it does take a little bit of time. And then once we have that connect, for instance, you know, to NetSuite or intact or Oracle, the, you know, the next customers that we bring on board, we can leverage the same connector. So it is it is some work initially to build out all of the ones that we need. And then you can grow and scale on top of that for the customer. This is no complexity like we're taking not on completely. So the only thing we need is to know what type of system they have. And we develop that connector as part of the offering. Grant So let's talk about looking to the future in terms of when I'm doing FPA, a financial planning and analysis and I'm, I'm looking at my numbers, and I want to leverage a view into the future. How does something like this help an organization with that? Alex Yeah, that's a, that's a beautiful question. And a big passion of mine, actually. So what we're doing now sets us up to solve that specific problem. So if you think of where we are, now we're in accounting. And what you're talking about is more finance, which is what we'll dive into the idea and the vision that we are getting to is that we want to develop an AI that's basically is a real time cost optimization engine that serves predictions and monitors that in real time, we will be able to help you project kind of what your cost base should be, and how you could reduce spend in various categories and with various vendors. That's that's the piece that we're trying to solve as part of that equation of the of the future. So that you always have multiple pieces of the accounting equation, you have the cost side, you have the revenue side, you have adjustments and close process. And we're trying to stay within one of them for now. And make sure we sold provide real true value in that swim lane before we move on from from there. Grant Yes, I think that part's fascinating, as well, I've seen and interacted with organizations that are trying to leverage shift P and A even into capacity and resource planning, and trying to figure out what that looks like, and especially with it what's going on in the world today, right, with certainly high inflation and certainly supply chain challenges. The need for this kind of capability, I think is dire. Right. I think having the ability to provide something like this sooner rather than later is really crucial. Alex Yeah, definitely. And I think the technology has the ability to hold much more context and see data across all of the things that buck forms, like ours can do in in, in a compliant and anonymized ways, you can see data patterns, you know, across different companies. So you can inform yourself, no more than just sitting looking at your own data sitting inside your own office and their own silo. So that I will, you know, in the future greatly help with, you know, capacity planning, or, you know, cost reduction initiatives and so on. So I think that's one of the powers of sort of, like the cloud combined with with AI and big data, if it's leveraged in the in the right way. Grant And so if I go back just one moment on something, so if we take an AI model, and and we take it through a data set, and we were able to get sort of two key views at it, one is sort of more hindsight, right? One sort of looking backwards, right? It's the AI is looking at it saying here were the drivers that that contributed to the certain behavior, right? So it's more analytic Right. But then there's the other style of using it, which is looking forward, which is more predictive. And oh, okay, here's, here's where based on things we've seen, here's what the high predictive sort of correlations are opportunities are things that we expect moving in the future. When you when you look at Vic AI, and everything that you're providing, do you focus more on one side versus the other? Or you're combining both of those views together? Alex Hmm...yeah, we so in the, in the course of the work in the platform we have now, so every thing we do is a prediction on new data. So that means a new so if you sort of break it down into like, there's a new signal or a new transaction, or a new document coming in, that we've never seen before. And, and the platform then predicts what this is, Donald to vary like line item level detail, how to classify it, and so on. So it does predict this based on the algorithmic design, and the historical data that it seen both for this customer and globally. So it sort of is our engines are purely predictive in terms of what they're trying to predict what's going on. And you can extend that to two other parts, like we just discussed on the cost side as well. You can predict how how you should, you know, maybe they'll just classify this cost, but like, how, what your cost base should consist of a new look at categories. And you can sort of predict this based on your own current spend your growth in the company and maybe other comparable companies, so you can start predicting a journey based on the same technologies. Grant Awesome. So quick question for you, as COVID started to hit, obviously, a couple of years ago, and large companies have their AI models, you know, out there deployed, we're running, suddenly that disruption created an impact to the way in which business was typically being done, right. Not all industries were hit. But certainly a lot of industries are hit. And therefore, business operations changed. And the way in which people conducted business altered, which meant then, that those models were making assumptions based on former operational models, right former ways in which people executed, and therefore invalidated some of those predictive characteristics or capabilities of those models, which meant then, as you know that they had to go do some rework, right had to reduce retraining, right and update the data sets and so forth. So to what degree does Vic AI continually learn, right, so as you pointed out, you get a new document you've never seen before. At some point, I'm assuming it pulls it into its corpus, right? And it continues to learn or relearn on that. Can you talk to that? Alex Yeah. And it's a key feature of the platform, which, which is actually pretty enjoyable when you see it working in reality. So we, so for every transaction that goes through our platform, or every invoice or vendor Bill divest process through our platform, that leaves that leaves us with some learnings. So, you know, it's either it's corrected, and we made a prediction and a human chose to change it. Right? That is something that is fed back into our data set, and also our learning database of sort of, why would that ever happen? What did we get wrong in this prediction? And so for every prediction that we do, we learn something because if we predict something, and it's correct, we also learned something. So you know, we have millions of transactions just flowing through the system every month. And for each of them, we learn something so the system then improves basically, for each transaction that goes through the system. The level of, you know, transaction processing we're at isn't really affected by kind of like global changes, like you mentioned, for for COVID. Like, the only thing that could happen is you suddenly have some some new transaction because you need to do something differently, or you may have fewer transaction, which then just you know, is additive to our system. So you know, we will get something maybe we'll have lower confidence on this because this is something new. So you know, you will have a human come in there and tell the system what to do with this. And then that will be additive to the to the data sets and, and all the algorithmic design, if that makes sense. Grant It makes total sense. Absolutely. Yeah. And I loved how you tied the two together which is, well, I'm still gonna have the transaction. Although the world the macro world around me is changing the transaction occurs while may change is the rate of them. or how, or maybe even maybe even the units or the number of units, etc, right things like that will certainly or could change because of disruption. Being able to predict or understand how the organization can respond to, to disruption, I think becomes more and more critical, as we seem to continue to have more disruptions in business. Right? That happens a lot. Alex Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, what happened with with COVID specifically was also a lot of disruption in how people worked. And, you know, they were used to working from home and, you know, we have some, some of our customers, they have millions of invoices a year, which means, like, 1000s of invoices a day and, you know, suddenly you have, your whole workforce is like, not as productive as they were when something like this happens. But you know, you still need or your your system to be updated, you still need to pay your vendors on time. And otherwise, you know, you'll incur fees, and it'll so just like having an AI system in there that doesn't sort of care about those things. It has the same throughput and outputs 24/7 all year around, makes you very resilient for for sort of things like that are like workforce changes. Grant So that's the right word resilient, you want that organizational resilience, and as the point I wanted to drive out, which is, even though there's these disruptions that take place, most of which are outside of our control, getting our companies into a position to handle and respond properly or well, to that, or to pivot is what organizational resilience is about. And my experience has been AI is one of those tools to help us do that. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. Okay, I want to ask you a very forward looking question. Right? You're ready? Yeah, sure. All right. So I'm not going to ask what are you going to do Norway? Or what I'm asking is tell me about blockchain? What does that mean to you in your world and things that you're doing? Alex Yeah, I mean, that's, we've been thinking about that. And, to be, to be honest, we haven't really seen yet the connection between specifically what we do and how to leverage a blockchain effectively, I like the technology of a blockchain is really awesome. And it can unlock a lot of things. But it doesn't mean that you need to use it for everything. One thing that I think could be an interesting exploration is when you start looking at accounting, ERP data, and whether the accounting systems could run and have their data in a blockchain that is verifiable, to prevent all sorts of, you know, fiddling with the data. That could be an interesting application for for blockchain in in our area. And there's clearly things around, you know, like money movement and value movements that blockchain can solve pretty pretty well. So just in the layer where we are, we haven't really found a great application that applies to us with the blockchain. Yes, but I think that technology is super fascinating. And I think that there are many areas where it is a superior technology to sort of like the trust based system that we have now. And it's an epic thing, when you can run that successfully in a resilient way. Grant When you think and that that makes a lot of sense. It's, it's got some, as you pointed out some interesting potential benefits to the industry. But I suppose at some point, it doesn't really matter where the transaction sits for you, right, in terms of the problem that you're solving, right? In other words, whether it's sitting on a blockchain or it's somewhere else and an Oracle ERP or whatever, right to it, at some point, that probably doesn't matter. Right? Alex Yeah, for us, the Store of the the sort of the store of the data ultimately is for us in the ERP system. And we are not an ERP system, we just layer on top of the ERP systems. So that is the ultimate sort of storage of the data. And that's where if, if, if at all the like blockchain technology could be leveraged to, to kind of store data in in a safe and transparent way. But there's also some new or some transparency issues with accounting data as well, that's going to be kept in mind. Grant Yeah, I would imagine that one of the greatest use cases to for what it is you provide is in the area of fraud to fraud detection, right the ability to regardless of where the data sitting, and regardless if it's on a blockchain or in an ERP system, you Your ai i would imagine would help to discover or uncover some of those potential opportunities. Is that accurate? Alex Yeah. And you have this this platform benefit as well is what if one customer sort of reports. So what happens a lot is just invoice fraud, right? You have, you have invoices that are not from the vendor that they appear to be from. And you have different variations of trying to change payment details, and you know, all of that. So when you see when you see data across 1000s of customers, you, you have a way of detecting those things, and at least flagging them for like, Hey, someone should have an extra look at this, because something may be up, if we're all good with it, that's fine. But you know, have an extra Look at this. And for people, you know, when we, as people, when we're doing something for six hours straight, you know, the last few hours, we're just like, you know, we're just clicking enter and trying to get, you know, the day over with, and, and things can easily pass by that shouldn't pass by. So this is this is problematic in two ways. Number one, your accounting data could end up being wrong, like you just have things that are misclassified. And then you can have things that are, you know, paid, or you're paid twice, or you pay the wrong thing, or you pay an extra zero, you have all of these things that are just humans are it's easy for humans to do those mistakes. And you just want to sort of get rid though those with a technology that can help you remove all of those errors. And we know how, you know, a billion dollar cost base? Just you know, half a percent is, you know, quite a lot. Grant A big number. Yeah, it is. Yeah, you'd hate to get false positives on a fraud situation, right, where you might be accusing someone that, that they've conducted fraud, when in fact it was was just a mistake. This is fascinating technology. So, Alex, where do people go to? I mean, where can you point them to, to learn more about you and your organization? Alex Yeah, I mean, the website is, is the safest place to go right now. So just go to Vic.ai. And we have, we have a good bit of marketing collateral and informative collateral blog posts, we try to educate the customers and the finance team. So finance teams are interestingly, you know, they're, they're not buying new things that often because you know, your ERP system, you have it for a very long time, which which you definitely should. So you know, you're not like a high. There's no high velocity necessarily on procuring things for the finance team. And, and we try to do a lot of educational material as well, because AI is new, but it has true effects or the finance team, and they'll find them blog, blog posts and collateral and can happily reach out to us and we'll help guide anyone through the process. Grant Oh, okay. That's, that's awesome. Alex, you've been so generous with your time here today, especially as you're getting ready to jet off into the sunrise just real quick. Any last comments that you want to share? Alex Um, I think this has been this has been a cool chats. It's been it's been really good. I love talking about, of course, AI and our company, but also the technologies in general. So I think this has been been super cool. And I think that it, you know, it's just wanted to say that we've we've spent a long time building the platform, so glad it's not complex for the customers right now, all of the AI performance, which is actually mind blowing, but you have no level of complexity. So, you know, if you if you want to get started with with AI for a function, this is a very specific function within invoice processing, where you can deploy AI, get the effects out of it with no complexities, and we'll deal with all of that for you. Grant That's actually the beauty of this, you know, to be able to get that down to a few points. Now splint clicks on a SaaS solution. They have all that taken care of, I've written my share of AI code, and oh, my goodness, the fact that you've handled that so seamlessly for the business people is huge. Nice job. Really great job on that. Yeah. Thanks. Great. Alex Thank you. Grant Thanks for taking the time today. Again, Alex. My gosh, this is awesome, everyone. Thanks for listening to another episode of ClickAI Radio. And until next time, go check out Vic.ai. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit clickairadio.com Now.  

In this episode, I have the opportunity to speak with Alex Hagerup who is solving the problem of using AI to take costs out of your business. Grant Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So today I have someone that I have been admiring by looking at his background, here with me today to talk about some amazing aspects of his journey to solve business problems leveraging technology, specifically AI which is quite cool. Anyway, let me stop right there. And welcome Alex Hager group. Hello, Alex. Alex Hey, Grant. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Grant Thank you. Thanks for being here today and for taking the time. I know you're getting ready to head off trans continental here pretty soon on a trip. So thanks for for jumping on this conversation here today. Alex Absolutely. It's exciting being able to travel again. So I going home to the Motherland for a few weeks is exciting. I haven't been there for more than a few days, for the last three years, actually. So I'm definitely excited. Grant Have have have the COVID situations and those numbers pretty good over there at this point. Alex Yeah, everything is fine. So Norway is completely open again. And it's all good. But But Norway was one of those countries that really looked down hard. And also since the US didn't allow non US residents to actually come back into the country. If you left. It was just a problematic situation to go to Europe in general. Wow. Grant Yeah. What a great opportunity to get home to family. Well, thanks for taking your time here with me today on this. So Vic AI. All right, who is Vic AI? What happened here? How to what are you? What are you solving? What what problem? Are you looking to address with Vic? Ai? Alex Yeah, absolutely. So I'll take a little bit of the background to set that up. So I, I've always been very interested in both accounting, finance and technology. So this is a company that lives in the intersection of those. My mom had her own accounting firm. So I grew up there, which probably influenced my interest for for accounting in general. And I built a couple of companies. But one that I spent three years with just prior to starting, Aki was a cloud ERP system, an accounting and accounting platform that was being used by about 30 40,000 companies back then it's about 80 90,000. Now, and during working there, you know, observe the sort of, let's say, the challenges of accounting and the manual, repetitiveness, the tediousness, all of that from, you know, every day you felt it? Grant Where? I mean, what is the excitement in that? Right? I mean, where's the excitement? Yeah. Did you credit that properly?  Alex Oh, gosh, yeah, exactly. So so we were we were just observing this. And then this was back in 2014 15. Just before we started with AI started having a new, you know, like a new summer or a new renaissance in a way and, and we were thinking like this has to be we can maybe like we can solve this in a better way than how the technology has solved it so far. And after some deliberation, we sort of thought that we could create AI algorithms that would be able to actually do accounting transaction processing better than humans. Grant Because that's a really key point I think you're making. So the way that we've been solving this problem up to this point has been, let me take the tasks that we do and just automate the tasks themselves. Right. In other words, let me take your actual transactional activities that you're working through, and just put some increased processing to that. That's how it's historically been done, right? Alex Yep. Correct. And that's been entirely driven by rules, right? So, you know, transaction, Uber, transportation, as, you know, rules based automation, right? And there are all sorts of problems with that. It's obviously better than doing everything manually, right? So we aren't we're progressing through stages there. If you go back before the spreadsheets, you know, everything was done entirely manually. So we are progressing here, but, but what we're building is not next face that comes off there, you know, what everyone is using today, all over the world. And, you know, AI will solve this in a more scalable and gracious way and more more effectively. So that was all right. Yeah. Grant Yeah. So real quick on that, can you articulate how is that different? Right? Because all of us come from this rules based way of thinking. So what is it that AI is going to do better? How will it do it differently than what we're used to? Alex Yeah, I mean, that's a that's a great question. It's kind of the essence as well. So when you when you look at how it happens today, it's not only rules are not only automation, it's automation, and a lot of human hours involved. So you can always ask yourself, why are all those human hours involved? If it's automation, right? So so it begs the question, right, so what happens in reality is that sort of rules and templates and RPA isn't sufficient, because there's so many edge cases, and there's so much variability in the world of accounting. So you know, rules only takes you so far. And then you have to staff up and have human cognitive reasoning step in and do the rest of it. So where AI comes in is that it can do both of those things. So it does the automation without rules, and it can do the reasoning that humans are there to do today. So I always say that AI is, is great at sort of mimicking that reasoning that humans are doing. So one of the areas that we're in is invoice processing. And when I give an invoice to any human, you know, it will always tell me, oh, that's the vendor, you know, that's the invoice number, lots of total costs. But that's not obvious to a computer. And if you're gonna write rules for every variability in the world, you can just end up writing too many rules. So it's just not a, it's not a great technology for it. And AI is way better. So it's just like in the early stages, so that's next sort of digital transformation, transformation journey that we're all. So as Grant So as you know, when you're working in the AI space, and you're saying, Oh, I'm going to apply AI to a particular problem, you end up building different models with different AI characteristics based on the nature of the problem, some more aggression based some more sort of classification based, as your people as your customers look to use your platform, do they get exposed to any of that? Are they even aware of what elements or aspects of AI are at play? Or? Or do they just jump in and start solving the problems they're used to, and then the right sort of AI model behind the scene is executing on their behalf? Alex Yeah, we've hidden all of that from our customers. So we do try to keep sort of Explainable AI in the way where our user interface is explaining why our AI predicted something. But we've kept all of the complexity, so sort of models and model training. And all of that is in the background, we decided to do like an end to end service where the customer, they don't really need to do anything technical. It's, it's, you know, just another SAS subscription that they're using, that they plug into one of their processes. And then we deal with all of the complexity of the models, both global models and AI models, specifically the same for each customer. So we keep all of that complexity hidden. Grant That's awesome. That way, I'm not touching any of that as the end user. So if I see the name Vic AI, I don't need to shy away and say, Oh, wait, I need to be an AI expert. It's more that this is the enabling technology. And it just turns out that you've made that simple for the people without needing to know that Wait a minute. So that brings a question on my use, you know, one of the challenges around AI is the whole notion around bias. And, and, and with the cognizance that's required for humans up to this point, and still largely today to do you know, counting processes. Therefore, that has the opportunity for some bias that comes in right terms of the way things get handled. How do you deal with that then in terms of applying AI so that that bias doesn't creep through? Alex Yeah, it's a great question. And it's a challenge for everything where we're data sets are involved in training, AI. So one of the ways that so one of The one of the good things with accounting data, if you start with that is that it's ultimately numbers and classifications. And you, you kind of want to have that, right? Because otherwise your your books of your business is wrong. So unless you want them to be wrong, you know, you have a very good incentive to keep this right. SO into SO, you know, I think we generally see kind of less less bias in accounting data, and then some other more like subjective data in a way. And then also we draw on data across 1000s and 1000s of customers. So we have customers in both Europe and the US and many other many other regions as well, but the little fewer and most of the concentration in Europe and US. And in all sorts of industries and all sorts of sizes, we have about 13,000 customers on the platform now. So when you start looking at such a wide data set, you also hopefully reduce some of some of that bias. And then you also have auditing processes that sort of sits at the end of their accounting. And hopefully also they'll you know, annually they'll catch corrections, and also fed in as well to make AI. So those are some of the tactics. Basically, it's all about keeping clean data, so that our predictions are accurate. That's really what we're trying to get to. Grant Yeah, boy, that's that's so critical, especially as you pointed out with the with the need to of course, be accurate for the business for sure. All right, so So let's say that you've got this data, you've cleaned it up, you've done the preparation, you're on the Vic AI platform, the question now in my mind becomes, therefore, what changes in the lives of the people that adopt this right and others, they may change? I'm supposing something about the way they do their daily work, or the way the CFO does certain things, or maybe even impact on regulations and audits. I mean, what's the impact of the organization when when this gets adopted?  Alex Yeah, I'm also in question. And I want to point out also that the beginning of getting getting live with Vicki AI isn't complex for a customer, because we built an automated system to ingest and clean their historical data, which then goes into our system automatically and train our AI algorithms so that when we go live, we have, you know, pretty good knowledge of what's going to be predicted. We know your system, we know your accounting, we know how you do things. So when you start pushing new transactions through our classification, accuracy is high. And there's no complexity for the customer. In that process, it basically happens automatically in the background. Once you are live with Vic AI, some things will will change. But it doesn't sort of change. Like overnight. One of the things with AI is it gets better and better over time. And one of the things we're driving towards is what we call full autonomy. And full autonomy is you know, the AI's version of automation. But it means that it has perceived this not to need human review. And that's when it's fully autonomous. So that's our sort of end goal with the autonomy of transactions is that, you know, the AI system is perfectly confident in the work that it has been doing. So it doesn't even ask a human to review it. So this this increases over time. So when you start with Aki, you, you have a you know, you have a better interface, you have a smoother operation, you have already probably 50% time reduction in the first month of using the system. Grant Let me stop you on that right there. 50%. So, that would be 50% of those that are doing sort of the daily operational activities, or is that of the CFO? Or who who is that, that that percent impacted? Alex Yeah, that's on the accounting team that is doing the processing. So if you're doing you know, if you have five people or if you have 15 people doing invoice processing, whether they are onshore or offshore, you know, just in the beginning, you can drastically reduce that, and then that percentage just increases over time because you're substituting the AI for for for human FTE. So basically, and and what we see is that everyone wants to do something else than just sit and do like data entry and accounting classification, right? You you, you can be more proactive, you can do more value added work than that. And we're sort of at that phase now where the AI can substitute that's partly augments and also fully run things autonomously. So when you put this in place, in the beginning, there is a little bit of effect right away but you know, you got to read the sign some of your some of your processes and some of your routines because you have a platform here now that is doing Most of the work for you, and you're just reviewing and you're reviewing the AI and training the AI to become more autonomous. So you've got a little on my mind shifts, and some sort of routines, you don't need to double and triple check, check in have four people involved in reviewing, you know, one thing because the AI can tell you how confident it is. And if it is very confident, maybe you can have one person review it in the beginning, and then eventually it will be fully autonomous. If it's less confident, then it will also tell you, and you can review it in more detail. So it's pretty, it's pretty, pretty fascinating. Grant It is dang fascinating. And I'm assuming that there are some that have run into this, and they've worried about their jobs, right? They're like, wait a minute, you're taking my tasks away from me? Do you have to help them overcome that fear and say, hey, you know, you're gonna move towards more value added activities within the organization? Have you run into that problem? Alex So it will we see is that it's, everyone is just squeezed on time, right? Everyone's trying to hit the deadline of the month, the clothes and all of that. So it there is no shortage of work to be done in the accounting piece. And, and just having, you know, having faster turnaround time having more accurate data, because AI is more accurate than humans, like it doesn't fat fingers thinks the same way. And when it's uncertain, it asked for a human verification, a human looks at it, and then you get more accurate than then all the way. So we see that, you know, there's no shortage of things to do. Everyone wants to progress their careers. And I don't really perceive that as an actual problem. But it is like a, you know, people think about that as a problem, but I don't think it is in reality. Grant So this has been several years and coming. When did you start this 2 to 3 years ago? Alex Yeah, early 2017, was 5 years. Grant Okay, that's, that's awesome. And you built this ground up, meaning all of AI development AI technology that your organization's created, right? Alex Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's been challenging. That's why it's taken taken quite a few years, as well as because you we started, you know, completely scratch, and we had to figure everything out. So one of the things that sets the KPI apart a little bit as part of our founding story, where we were able to start the company, we had access to a gigantic data sets of accounting transactions, and all corresponding documents to that. So that helped us just spend the first two years we just spent on data analysis, data science and machine learning development, because we had some thesis and theories that this could work, but we didn't know. So it just had to do that in the beginning, for for a couple of years. So when we saw that this actually has promised, like, we were predicting more and more accurately, and you know, we're gonna get to this inflection point where it's better to use PKI, that do not use PKI. And at that point, people will use it, and then, you know, continue growing more and more customers and more and more data and more and more corrections, and better and better predictions. So we realized we would get to that point. And then, you know, then we raised the seed round back in 2017. And, you know, started developing, Grant What a great journey. I love this story. So tell me about impact outcomes. So you talked about a large number of customers that are using the platform now, what is what's been the results that they've seen? Alex Yeah, so we see. So there's a couple of numbers that we that we statistically enroll from the from the customers, we see that customers have about 80% reduction in the overall time spent on the process. And that comes from two things. One is the percent of fully autonomous. So let's say you're 50%, fully autonomous, that means you spent zero time on 50% of your volume. And then that other part, we've drastically reduced the number of minutes in two seconds. For each transaction a human has to review because the AI has done all the upfront work, humans just reviewing it, rather than sort of processing it from scratch. So you're at seconds rather than minutes. This turns into sort of an 80% reduction in in time. You also have things that we do like prevent duplicate payments, and we have some fraud detection in the system. So you also have some of those benefits that can turn into multimillion dollar when you have a large enough cost base. And then we have audit trails in the system, which helps with figuring out you know, making sure that you know, all of the approvals are doing rights. If anyone has changed in amount or something. It's all logged into the system electronically. So you have some some compliance and auditing benefits from it as well. But right now the main, the main effective impact our customers have, and we typically sell to the mid market and enterprise. So these are larger organizations, they can have hundreds of 1000s, or millions even have sort of vendor bills per, per year, and a substantial amount of people and resources involved in dealing with that problem. So they see very significant ROI from it. Grant So to sell into that particular group, then I'm assuming you've got to have a decent amount of integrations into all of their incumbent systems, right, all of their ERP systems and CRM systems, etc. Right? What does that look like? Alex Yeah, that's, that's true. So we build out these connectors as we as we go, it does, for each connector, the first time we build it, it does take a little bit of time. And then once we have that connect, for instance, you know, to NetSuite or intact or Oracle, the, you know, the next customers that we bring on board, we can leverage the same connector. So it is it is some work initially to build out all of the ones that we need. And then you can grow and scale on top of that for the customer. This is no complexity like we're taking not on completely. So the only thing we need is to know what type of system they have. And we develop that connector as part of the offering. Grant So let's talk about looking to the future in terms of when I'm doing FPA, a financial planning and analysis and I'm, I'm looking at my numbers, and I want to leverage a view into the future. How does something like this help an organization with that? Alex Yeah, that's a, that's a beautiful question. And a big passion of mine, actually. So what we're doing now sets us up to solve that specific problem. So if you think of where we are, now we're in accounting. And what you're talking about is more finance, which is what we'll dive into the idea and the vision that we are getting to is that we want to develop an AI that's basically is a real time cost optimization engine that serves predictions and monitors that in real time, we will be able to help you project kind of what your cost base should be, and how you could reduce spend in various categories and with various vendors. That's that's the piece that we're trying to solve as part of that equation of the of the future. So that you always have multiple pieces of the accounting equation, you have the cost side, you have the revenue side, you have adjustments and close process. And we're trying to stay within one of them for now. And make sure we sold provide real true value in that swim lane before we move on from from there. Grant Yes, I think that part's fascinating, as well, I've seen and interacted with organizations that are trying to leverage shift P and A even into capacity and resource planning, and trying to figure out what that looks like, and especially with it what's going on in the world today, right, with certainly high inflation and certainly supply chain challenges. The need for this kind of capability, I think is dire. Right. I think having the ability to provide something like this sooner rather than later is really crucial. Alex Yeah, definitely. And I think the technology has the ability to hold much more context and see data across all of the things that buck forms, like ours can do in in, in a compliant and anonymized ways, you can see data patterns, you know, across different companies. So you can inform yourself, no more than just sitting looking at your own data sitting inside your own office and their own silo. So that I will, you know, in the future greatly help with, you know, capacity planning, or, you know, cost reduction initiatives and so on. So I think that's one of the powers of sort of, like the cloud combined with with AI and big data, if it's leveraged in the in the right way. Grant And so if I go back just one moment on something, so if we take an AI model, and and we take it through a data set, and we were able to get sort of two key views at it, one is sort of more hindsight, right? One sort of looking backwards, right? It's the AI is looking at it saying here were the drivers that that contributed to the certain behavior, right? So it's more analytic Right. But then there's the other style of using it, which is looking forward, which is more predictive. And oh, okay, here's, here's where based on things we've seen, here's what the high predictive sort of correlations are opportunities are things that we expect moving in the future. When you when you look at Vic AI, and everything that you're providing, do you focus more on one side versus the other? Or you're combining both of those views together? Alex Hmm...yeah, we so in the, in the course of the work in the platform we have now, so every thing we do is a prediction on new data. So that means a new so if you sort of break it down into like, there's a new signal or a new transaction, or a new document coming in, that we've never seen before. And, and the platform then predicts what this is, Donald to vary like line item level detail, how to classify it, and so on. So it does predict this based on the algorithmic design, and the historical data that it seen both for this customer and globally. So it sort of is our engines are purely predictive in terms of what they're trying to predict what's going on. And you can extend that to two other parts, like we just discussed on the cost side as well. You can predict how how you should, you know, maybe they'll just classify this cost, but like, how, what your cost base should consist of a new look at categories. And you can sort of predict this based on your own current spend your growth in the company and maybe other comparable companies, so you can start predicting a journey based on the same technologies. Grant Awesome. So quick question for you, as COVID started to hit, obviously, a couple of years ago, and large companies have their AI models, you know, out there deployed, we're running, suddenly that disruption created an impact to the way in which business was typically being done, right. Not all industries were hit. But certainly a lot of industries are hit. And therefore, business operations changed. And the way in which people conducted business altered, which meant then, that those models were making assumptions based on former operational models, right former ways in which people executed, and therefore invalidated some of those predictive characteristics or capabilities of those models, which meant then, as you know that they had to go do some rework, right had to reduce retraining, right and update the data sets and so forth. So to what degree does Vic AI continually learn, right, so as you pointed out, you get a new document you've never seen before. At some point, I'm assuming it pulls it into its corpus, right? And it continues to learn or relearn on that. Can you talk to that? Alex Yeah. And it's a key feature of the platform, which, which is actually pretty enjoyable when you see it working in reality. So we, so for every transaction that goes through our platform, or every invoice or vendor Bill divest process through our platform, that leaves that leaves us with some learnings. So, you know, it's either it's corrected, and we made a prediction and a human chose to change it. Right? That is something that is fed back into our data set, and also our learning database of sort of, why would that ever happen? What did we get wrong in this prediction? And so for every prediction that we do, we learn something because if we predict something, and it's correct, we also learned something. So you know, we have millions of transactions just flowing through the system every month. And for each of them, we learn something so the system then improves basically, for each transaction that goes through the system. The level of, you know, transaction processing we're at isn't really affected by kind of like global changes, like you mentioned, for for COVID. Like, the only thing that could happen is you suddenly have some some new transaction because you need to do something differently, or you may have fewer transaction, which then just you know, is additive to our system. So you know, we will get something maybe we'll have lower confidence on this because this is something new. So you know, you will have a human come in there and tell the system what to do with this. And then that will be additive to the to the data sets and, and all the algorithmic design, if that makes sense. Grant It makes total sense. Absolutely. Yeah. And I loved how you tied the two together which is, well, I'm still gonna have the transaction. Although the world the macro world around me is changing the transaction occurs while may change is the rate of them. or how, or maybe even maybe even the units or the number of units, etc, right things like that will certainly or could change because of disruption. Being able to predict or understand how the organization can respond to, to disruption, I think becomes more and more critical, as we seem to continue to have more disruptions in business. Right? That happens a lot. Alex Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, what happened with with COVID specifically was also a lot of disruption in how people worked. And, you know, they were used to working from home and, you know, we have some, some of our customers, they have millions of invoices a year, which means, like, 1000s of invoices a day and, you know, suddenly you have, your whole workforce is like, not as productive as they were when something like this happens. But you know, you still need or your your system to be updated, you still need to pay your vendors on time. And otherwise, you know, you'll incur fees, and it'll so just like having an AI system in there that doesn't sort of care about those things. It has the same throughput and outputs 24/7 all year around, makes you very resilient for for sort of things like that are like workforce changes. Grant So that's the right word resilient, you want that organizational resilience, and as the point I wanted to drive out, which is, even though there's these disruptions that take place, most of which are outside of our control, getting our companies into a position to handle and respond properly or well, to that, or to pivot is what organizational resilience is about. And my experience has been AI is one of those tools to help us do that. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. Okay, I want to ask you a very forward looking question. Right? You're ready? Yeah, sure. All right. So I'm not going to ask what are you going to do Norway? Or what I'm asking is tell me about blockchain? What does that mean to you in your world and things that you're doing? Alex Yeah, I mean, that's, we've been thinking about that. And, to be, to be honest, we haven't really seen yet the connection between specifically what we do and how to leverage a blockchain effectively, I like the technology of a blockchain is really awesome. And it can unlock a lot of things. But it doesn't mean that you need to use it for everything. One thing that I think could be an interesting exploration is when you start looking at accounting, ERP data, and whether the accounting systems could run and have their data in a blockchain that is verifiable, to prevent all sorts of, you know, fiddling with the data. That could be an interesting application for for blockchain in in our area. And there's clearly things around, you know, like money movement and value movements that blockchain can solve pretty pretty well. So just in the layer where we are, we haven't really found a great application that applies to us with the blockchain. Yes, but I think that technology is super fascinating. And I think that there are many areas where it is a superior technology to sort of like the trust based system that we have now. And it's an epic thing, when you can run that successfully in a resilient way. Grant When you think and that that makes a lot of sense. It's, it's got some, as you pointed out some interesting potential benefits to the industry. But I suppose at some point, it doesn't really matter where the transaction sits for you, right, in terms of the problem that you're solving, right? In other words, whether it's sitting on a blockchain or it's somewhere else and an Oracle ERP or whatever, right to it, at some point, that probably doesn't matter. Right? Alex Yeah, for us, the Store of the the sort of the store of the data ultimately is for us in the ERP system. And we are not an ERP system, we just layer on top of the ERP systems. So that is the ultimate sort of storage of the data. And that's where if, if, if at all the like blockchain technology could be leveraged to, to kind of store data in in a safe and transparent way. But there's also some new or some transparency issues with accounting data as well, that's going to be kept in mind. Grant Yeah, I would imagine that one of the greatest use cases to for what it is you provide is in the area of fraud to fraud detection, right the ability to regardless of where the data sitting, and regardless if it's on a blockchain or in an ERP system, you Your ai i would imagine would help to discover or uncover some of those potential opportunities. Is that accurate? Alex Yeah. And you have this this platform benefit as well is what if one customer sort of reports. So what happens a lot is just invoice fraud, right? You have, you have invoices that are not from the vendor that they appear to be from. And you have different variations of trying to change payment details, and you know, all of that. So when you see when you see data across 1000s of customers, you, you have a way of detecting those things, and at least flagging them for like, Hey, someone should have an extra look at this, because something may be up, if we're all good with it, that's fine. But you know, have an extra Look at this. And for people, you know, when we, as people, when we're doing something for six hours straight, you know, the last few hours, we're just like, you know, we're just clicking enter and trying to get, you know, the day over with, and, and things can easily pass by that shouldn't pass by. So this is this is problematic in two ways. Number one, your accounting data could end up being wrong, like you just have things that are misclassified. And then you can have things that are, you know, paid, or you're paid twice, or you pay the wrong thing, or you pay an extra zero, you have all of these things that are just humans are it's easy for humans to do those mistakes. And you just want to sort of get rid though those with a technology that can help you remove all of those errors. And we know how, you know, a billion dollar cost base? Just you know, half a percent is, you know, quite a lot. Grant A big number. Yeah, it is. Yeah, you'd hate to get false positives on a fraud situation, right, where you might be accusing someone that, that they've conducted fraud, when in fact it was was just a mistake. This is fascinating technology. So, Alex, where do people go to? I mean, where can you point them to, to learn more about you and your organization? Alex Yeah, I mean, the website is, is the safest place to go right now. So just go to Vic.ai. And we have, we have a good bit of marketing collateral and informative collateral blog posts, we try to educate the customers and the finance team. So finance teams are interestingly, you know, they're, they're not buying new things that often because you know, your ERP system, you have it for a very long time, which which you definitely should. So you know, you're not like a high. There's no high velocity necessarily on procuring things for the finance team. And, and we try to do a lot of educational material as well, because AI is new, but it has true effects or the finance team, and they'll find them blog, blog posts and collateral and can happily reach out to us and we'll help guide anyone through the process. Grant Oh, okay. That's, that's awesome. Alex, you've been so generous with your time here today, especially as you're getting ready to jet off into the sunrise just real quick. Any last comments that you want to share? Alex Um, I think this has been this has been a cool chats. It's been it's been really good. I love talking about, of course, AI and our company, but also the technologies in general. So I think this has been been super cool. And I think that it, you know, it's just wanted to say that we've we've spent a long time building the platform, so glad it's not complex for the customers right now, all of the AI performance, which is actually mind blowing, but you have no level of complexity. So, you know, if you if you want to get started with with AI for a function, this is a very specific function within invoice processing, where you can deploy AI, get the effects out of it with no complexities, and we'll deal with all of that for you. Grant That's actually the beauty of this, you know, to be able to get that down to a few points. Now splint clicks on a SaaS solution. They have all that taken care of, I've written my share of AI code, and oh, my goodness, the fact that you've handled that so seamlessly for the business people is huge. Nice job. Really great job on that. Yeah. Thanks. Great. Alex Thank you. Grant Thanks for taking the time today. Again, Alex. My gosh, this is awesome, everyone. Thanks for listening to another episode of ClickAI Radio. And until next time, go check out Vic.ai. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit clickairadio.com Now.  

About AlexAlex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and has spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he's had the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. Prior to joining the Duckbill Group, Alex spent a few years as a freelance data engineering consultant, helping his clients build, manage and maintain their data infrastructure. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexras/ Personal page: https://alexras.info Old Consulting website with blog: https://bitsondisk.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: The company 0x4447 builds products to increase standardization and security in AWS organizations. They do this with automated pipelines that use well-structured projects to create secure, easy-to-maintain and fail-tolerant solutions, one of which is their VPN product built on top of the popular OpenVPN project which has no license restrictions; you are only limited by the network card in the instance. 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That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm the chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, which people are generally aware of. Today, I'm joined by our most recent principal cloud economist, Alex Rasmussen. Alex, thank you for joining me today, it is a pleasure to talk to you, as if we aren't talking to each other constantly, now that you work here.Alex: Thanks, Corey. It's great being here.Corey: So, I followed a more, I'd say traditional path for a cloud economist, but given that I basically had to invent the job myself, the more common path because imagine that you start building a role from scratch and the people you wind up looking for initially look a lot like you. And that is grumpy sysadmin, historically, turned into something, kind of begrudgingly, that looks like an SRE, which I still maintain are the same thing, but it is imperative people not email me about that. Yes, I know, you work at Google. But instead, what I found during my tenure as a sysadmin, is that I was working with certain things an awful lot, like web servers, and other things almost never, like databases and data warehouses. Because if you screw up a web server, we all have a good laugh, the site's down for a couple of minutes, life goes on, you have a shame trophy on your desk if that's your corporate culture, things continue.Mess up the data severely enough, and you don't have a company anymore. So, I was always told to keep my aura away from the expensive spendy things that power a company. You are sort of the first of a cloud economist subtype that doesn't resemble that. Before you worked here, you were effectively an independent consultant working on data engineering. Before that, you had a couple of jobs, but you had gotten a PhD in computer science, which means, first, you are probably one of the people in this world most qualified to pass some crappy job interview of solving a sorting algorithm on a whiteboard, but how did you get here from where you were?Alex: Great question. So, I like to joke that I kind of went to school until somebody told me that I had to stop. And I took that and went and started—or didn't start, but I was an early engineer at a startup and then was an executive at another early-stage one, and did a little bit of everything. And went freelance, did that for a couple of years, and worked with all kinds of different companies—vast majority of those being startups—helping them with data infrastructure problems. I've done a little bit of everything throughout my career.I've been, you know, IC, manager, manager, manager, IT guy, everything in between. I think on the data side of things, it just sort of happened, to be honest with you, it kind of started with the stuff that I did for my dissertation and parlayed that into a job back when the big data wave was starting to kind of truly crest. And I've been working on data infrastructure, basically my entire career. So, it wasn't necessarily something that was intentional. I've just been kind of taking the opportunity that makes the most sense for me it kind of every juncture. And my career path has been a little bit strange, both by academic and industrial standards. But I like where I'm at and I gained something really valuable from each of those experiences. So.Corey: It's been an interesting area of I won't say weakness here, but it's definitely been a bit of a challenge when we look at an AWS environment and even talking about a typical AWS customer without thinking of any of them in particular, I can already tell you a few things are likely to be true. For example, the number one most expensive line item in their bill is going to be EC2, and compute is the thing that powers it. Now, maybe that is they're running a bunch of instances the old-fashioned way. Maybe they're running Kubernetes but that's how it shows up. There's a lot of things that could be, and we look at what rounds that out.Now, the next item down should almost certainly not be data transfer and if so we should have a conversation, but data in one form or another is very often going to be number two. And that can mean a bunch of different things, historically. It could mean, “Oh, you have a whole bunch of stuff in S3. Let's talk about access patterns. Let's talk about lifecycle policies. Let's talk about making sure the really important stuff is backed up somewhere. Maybe you want to spend more on that particular aspect of it.”If it's on EBS volumes, that's interesting and definitely worth looking into and trying to understand the context of what's going on. Periodically we'll see a whole bunch of additional charges that speak to some of that EC2 charge in the form of EMR, AWS's Elastic MapReduce, which charges a per-hour instance charge, but also charges you for the instances that are running under the hood and under the EC2 line item. So, there's a lot of data lifecycle stuff, there's a lot of data ecosystem stories, that historically we've consulted out with experts in that particular space. And that's great, but we were starting to have to drag those people in on more and more engagements as we saw them. And we realized that was really something we had to build out as a core competency for ourselves.And we started out not intending to hire for someone with that specialty, but the more we talked to you, the more it became clear that this was a very real and very growing need that we and our customers have. How closely it is what you're doing now as far as AWS bill analysis and data pattern deep-dive align with what you were doing as a freelance consultant in the space?Alex: A lot more than you might expect. You know, I think that increasingly, what you're seeing now is that a company's core differentiator is its data, right, how much of it they have, what they do with it. And so, you know, to your point, I think when you look at any company's cloud spend, it's going to be pretty heavy on the data side in terms of, like, where have you put it? What are you doing to process it? Where is it going once it's been processed? And then how is that—Corey: And data transfer is a very important first word in that two-word sequence.Alex: Oh, sure is. And so I think that, like, in a lot of ways, the way that a customer's cloud architecture looks and the way that their bill looks kind of as a consequence of that is kind of a reification in a way of the way that the data flows from one place to another and what's done with it at each step along the way. I think what complicates this is that companies that have been around for a little while have lived through this kind of very amorphous, kind of, polyglot way that we're approaching data. You know, back when I was first getting started in the big data days, it was MapReduce, MapReduce, MapReduce, right? And we quickly [crosstalk 00:07:29]—Corey: Oh, yes. The MapReduce white paper out of Google, a beautiful April Fool's Day prank that the folks at Yahoo fell for hook, line, and sinker. They wrote Hadoop, and now we're all stuck with that pattern. Great gag, they really should have clarified they were kidding. Here we are.Alex: Exactly. So—Corey: I mostly kid.Alex: No, for sure. But I think especially when it comes to data, we tend to over-index on what the large companies do and then quickly realize that we've made a mistake and correct backwards, right? So, there was this big push toward MapReduce for everything until people realize that it was just a pain in the neck to operate and to build. And so then we moved into Spark, so kind of up-leveled a little bit. And then there was this kind of explosion of NoSQL and NewSQL databases that hit the market.And MongoDB inexplicably won that war and now we're kind of in this world where everything is cloud data warehouse, right? And now we're trying to wrestle with, like, is it actually a good idea to put everything in one warehouse and have SQL be the lingua franca on top of it? But it's all changing so rapidly. And when you come into a customer that's been around for 10 or 15 years, and has, you know, been in the cloud for a substantial—Corey: Yeah, one of those ancient customers. That is—Alex: I know, right?Corey: —basically old enough to almost get a driver's license? Oh, yeah.Alex: Right. It's one of those things where it's like, “Ah, yes, in startup years, you're, like, a hundred years old,” right? But still, you know, I think you see this, kind of—I wouldn't call it a graveyard of failed experiments, right, but it's a collection of, like, “Well, we tried this, and it kind of worked and we're keeping it around because the cost of moving this stuff around—the kind of data gravity, so to speak—is high enough that we're not going to bother transitioning it over.” But then you get into this situation where you have to bend over backwards to integrate anything with anything else. And we're still kind of in the early days of fixing that.Corey: And the AWS bill pattern that we see all the time across the board of those experiments were not successful and do not need to exist, but there's no context into that. The person that set them up left five years ago, the jobs are still running on time. What's happening with them? Well, we could stop them and see who screams, but very often, that's not the right answer either.Alex: And I think there's also something to note there, too, which is like, getting rid of data is very scary, right? I mean, if you resize a Kubernetes cluster from 15 nodes to 10, nobody's going to look at you sideways. But if you go, “Hey, we're just going to drop these tables.” The immediate reaction that you get, particularly from your data science team more often than not is, “Oh, God, what if we need that?” And so the conversation never really happens, and that causes this kind of snowball of data debt that persists in some cases for many, many years.Corey: Yeah, in some cases, what I found has been successful on those big unknown questions is don't delete the data, but restrict access to it for a few weeks and see what happens. Look into it a bit and make sure that it's not like, “Oh, cool. We just did for a month, and now we don't need that data. Let's get rid of it.” And then another month goes by it's like, “So, time to report quarterly earnings. Where's the data?”Oh, dear, that's not going to go well, for anyone. And understanding what's happening, the idea of cloning a petabyte of data so you can run an experiment on it. And okay, turns out the experiment wasn't needed. Do we still need to keep all of that?Alex: Yeah.Corey: The underlying platform advancements have been helpful toward this as well, a petabyte of data now in Glacier Deep Archive cost the princely sum of a thousand bucks a month, which is pretty close to the idea of why would I ever delete data ever again? I can get it back within a day if I need it, so let's just put it there instead.Alex: Right. You know, funny story. When I was in graduate school, we were dealing with, you know, 100 terabyte datasets on the regular that we had to generate every time because we only had 200 terabytes of raw storage. [laugh]. And this was before cloud was yet mature enough that we could get the kind of performance numbers that we wanted off of it.And we would end up having to delete the input data to make room for the output data. [laugh]. And thankfully, we don't need to do that anymore. But there are a lot of, kind of, anti-patterns that arise from that too, right? If data is easy to keep around forever, it stays around forever.And if it's easy to, let's say, run a SQL command against your Snowflake instance that scans 20 terabytes of data, you're just going to do it, and the exposure of that to you is so minimal that you can end up causing a whole bunch of problems for yourself by the fact that you don't have to deal with stuff at that low-level of abstraction anymore.Corey: It's always fun watching how this stuff manifests—because I'm dipping a toe into it from time to time—the easy, naive answer that we could give every customer but we don't is, “Huh. So, you have a whole bunch of EMR stuff? Well, you know, if you migrate that into something else, you'll save a whole bunch of money on that.” With no regard for the 500 jobs that run against that EMR cluster on a consistent basis that form is a key part of business process. “Yeah, if you could just do the entire flow of how data is operated with throughout your entire business that would be swell because you can save tens of thousands of dollars a month on that.” Yeah, how about we don't suggest things that are just absolute buffoonery.Alex: Well, and it's like, you know, you hit on a good point. Like, one of my least favorite words in the English language is the word ‘just.' And you know, I spent a few years as a freelance data consultant, and you know, a lot of what I would hear sometimes from customers is, “Well, why don't we ‘just' deprecate X?”Corey: “Why don't we just—” “I'm going to stop you there because there is no ‘just.'”Alex: Exactly.Corey: There's always context that we cannot have as outsiders.Alex: Precisely. Precisely. And digging into that really is—it's the fun part of the job, but it's also the hard part of the job.Corey: Before we created The Duckbill Group, which was really when I took Mike Julian on as business partner and CEO and formed the entity, I had something in common with you; I was freelancing for a couple of years beforehand. Now, I know why I wound up deciding, all right, we're going to turn this into a company, but what was it that I guess made you decide to, you know, freelancing is all well and good, but it's time to get something that looks a lot more like a quote-unquote, “Traditional job.”Alex: So, I think, on one level, I went freelance because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do next. And I knew what I was good at. I knew what I had a lot of experience at, and I thought, “Well, I can just go out and kind of find a bunch of people that are willing to hire me to do what I'm good at doing, and then maybe eventually I'll find one of them that I like enough that I'll go and work for them. Or maybe I'll come up with some kind of a business model that I can repeat enough times that I don't have to worry that I wake up tomorrow and all of my clients are gone and then I have to go live in a van down by the river.”And I think when I heard about the opening at The Duckbill Group, I had been thinking for a little while about well, this has been going fine for a long time, but effectively what I've been doing is I've been you know, a staff-level data engineer for hire. And do I want to do something more than that, you know? Do I want to do something more comp—perhaps more sophisticated or more complex than that? And I rapidly came to the conclusion that in order to do that, I would have to have sales and marketing, and I would have to, you know, spend a lot of my time bringing in business. And that's just not something that I have really any experience in or I'm any good at.And, you know, I also recognize that, you know, I'm a relatively small fish in a relatively large pond, and if I wanted to get the kind of like, large scale people, the like the big, you know, Fortune 1000 company kind of customers, they may not pay attention to somebody like me. And so I think that ultimately, what I saw with The Duckbill Group was, number one, a group of people that were strongly aligned to the way that I wanted to keep doing this sort of work, right? Cultural alignment was really strong, good people, but also, you know, you folks have a thing that you figured out, and that puts you 10 to 15 steps ahead of where I was. And I was kind of staring down the barrel that, I'm like, am I going to have to take six months not doing client work so that I can figure out how to make this business sustain? And, you know, I think that ultimately, like, I just looked at it, and I said, this just makes sense to me, like, as a next step. And so here we all are.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of “Hello, World” demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself, all while gaining the networking, load balancing, and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small-scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free? This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: It's always fun seeing how people perceive what we've done from the outside. Like, “Oh, yeah, you just stumbled right onto the thing that works, and you've just been going, like, gangbusters ever since.” Then you come aboard, it's like, “Here, look at this pile of things that didn't pan out over here.” And it's, you get to see how the sausage is made in a way that we talk about from time to time externally, but surprisingly, most of our marketing efforts aren't really focused on, “And here's this other time we screwed up as well.” And we're honest about it, but it's not sort of the thing that we promote as the core message of what we do and who we are.A question I like to ask people during job interviews, and I definitely asked you this, and I'll ask you now, which is going to probably throw some folks for a loop because who talks to their current employees like this? But what's next for you? When it comes time for you to leave the Duckbill Group, what do you want to do after this job?Alex: That's a great question. So, I mean, as we've mentioned before, you know, my career trajectory has been very weird and circuitous. And, you know, I would be lying to you if I said that I had absolute certainty about what the rest of that looks like. I've learned a few things about myself in the course of my career, such as it is. In my kind of warm, gooey center, I build stuff. Like, that is what gives me joy, it is what makes me excited to wake up in the morning.I love looking at big, complicated things, breaking them down into pieces, and figuring out how to make the pieces work in a way that makes sense. And, you know, I've spent a long time in the data ecosystem. I don't know, necessarily, if that's something that I'm going to do forever. I'm not necessarily pigeonholing myself into that part of the space just yet, but as long as I get to kind of wake up in the morning, and say, “I'm going to go and build things and it's not going to actively make the world any worse,” I'm happy with that. And so that's really—you know, might go back to freelancing, might go and join another group, another company, big small, who knows. I'm kind of leaving that up to the winds of destiny, so to speak.Corey: One thing that I have found incredi—sorry. Let me just address that first. Like that—Alex: Sure.Corey: —is the right way to think about it. My belief has always been that you don't necessarily have, like, the ten-year plan, or the five-year plan or whatever it is because that's where you're going to go so much as it gives you direction and forces you to keep moving so you don't wind up sitting in the same place for five years with one year of experience repeated five times. It helps you remember the bigger picture. Because I've always despised this fiction that we see in job interviews where average tenure in our industry is 18 to 36 months, give or take, but somehow during the interviews, we all talk like this is now your forever job, and after 25 years, you'll retire. And yeah, let's be a little more realistic than that.My question is always what is next and how can we align in a way that helps you get to what's coming? That's the purpose behind the question, and that's—the only way to make that not just a drippingly insincere question is to mean it and to continue to focus on it from time to time of, great. What are you learning what's next? Now, at the time of this recording, you've been here, I believe three weeks if I'm not mistaken?Alex: I've—this is week two for me at time of recording.Corey: Excellent. Yes, my grasp of time is sort of hazy at the best of times. I have a—I do a lot of things.Alex: For sure.Corey: But yeah, it has been an eye-opening experience for me, not because, “Oh, wow, we have an employee.” Yeah, we've done that a few times before. But rather because of your background, you are asking different questions than we typically get during onboarding. I had a blog post go out recently—or will be by the time this airs—about a question that you asked about, “Wow, onboarding into our internal account structure for AWS is way more polished than I've ever seen it before. Is that something you built in-house? What is that?”And great. Oh, terrific, I'd forgotten that this is kind of a novel thing. No. What we're using is AWS's SSO offering, which is such a well-built, polished product that I can only assume that it's under NDA because Amazonians don't talk about it ever. But it's great.It has a couple of annoyances, but beyond that, it's something that I'm a big fan of, but I'd forgotten how transformative that is, compared to the usual approach of all right, here's your username, here's a password you're going to have to change, here are your IAM credentials to store on disk forever. It's the ability to look at what we're doing through the eyes of someone who is clearly deep into the technical weeds, but not as exposed to all of the minutiae of the 300-some-odd AWS services is really a refreshing thing for all of us, just because it helps us realize what it's like to see some of this stuff for the first time, as well as gives me content ideas because if it's new to you, I promise you are not the only person who's seeing it that way. And if you don't really understand something well enough to explain it, I would argue you don't really understand the thing, so it forces me to get more awareness around exactly how different facets work. It's been an absolutely fantastic experience so far, from my perspective.Alex: Thank you. Right back at you. I mean, spending so many years working with startups, my kind of level of expected sophistication is, “I'm going to write your password on the back of a napkin. I have fifteen other things to do. Go figure it out.” And so you know, it's always nice to see—particularly players like AWS that are such 800-pound gorillas—going in and trying to uplevel that experience in a way that feels like—because I mean, like, look, AWS could keep us with the, “Here's a CSV with your username and password. Good luck, have fun.” And you know, they would still make—Corey: And they're going to have to because so much automation is built around that—Alex: Oh yeah—Corey: In so many places.Alex: —so much.Corey: It's always net-additive, they never turn anything off, which is increasingly an operational burden.Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah, it's nice to see them up-level this in a way that feels like they're paying attention to their customers' pain. And that's always nice to see.Corey: So, we met a few years ago—in the before times—at a mixer that we wound up throwing—slash meetup. It was in Southern California for some AWS event or another. You've been aware of who we are and what we do for a while now, so I'm very curious to know—and the joy of having these conversations is that I don't actually know what the answer is going to be, so this may never see the light of day if it goes to weird—Alex: [laugh].Corey: —in the wrong direction, but—no I'm kidding. What has been, I guess, the biggest points of dissonance or surprises based upon your perception of who we are and what we do externally, versus joining and seeing how the sausage is made?Alex: You know, I think the first thing is—um, well, how to put this. I think that a lot of what I was expecting, given how much work you all do and how big—well, ‘you all;' we do—and how big the list of clients is and how it gets bigger every day, I was expecting this to be, like, this very hyper put together, like, every little detail has been figured out kind of engagement where I would have to figure out how you all do this. And coming in and realizing that a lot of it is just having a lot of in-depth knowledge born from experience of a bunch of stuff inside of this ecosystem, and then the rest of it is kind of free jazz, is kind of encouraging. Because as someone that was you know, as a freelancer, right, who do you see, right? You see people who have big public presences or people who are giant firms, right?On the GCP side, SADA Systems is a great example. They're another local company for me here in Los Angeles, and—Corey: Oh, yes. [unintelligible 00:24:48] Miles has been a recurring guest on the show.Alex: Yeah. And he's great. And, like, they have this enormous company that's got, like, all these different specializations and they're basically kind of like the middleman for GCP on a lot of things. And, like, you see that, and then you kind of see the individual people that are like, “Yeah, you know, I'm not really going to tell you that I only have two clients and that if both of them go away, I'm screwed, but, like, I only have two clients, and if both of them go away, I'm screwed.” And so, you know, I think honestly seeing that, like, what you've built so far and what I hope to help you continue to build is, you know, you've got just enough structure around the thing so that it makes sense, and the rest of it, you're kind of admitting that no plan ever survives contact with the client, right, and that everybody's going to be different than that everybody's problems are going to be different.And that you can't just go in and say, “Here's a dashboard, here's a calculator, have fun, give me my money,” right? Because that feels like—in optimization spaces of any kind, be that cloud, or data or whatever, there's this, kind of, push toward, how do I automate myself out of a job, and the realization that you can't for something like this, and that ultimately, like, you're just going to have to go with what you know, is something that I kind of had a suspicion was the case, but this really made it clear to me that, like, oh, this is actually a reasonable way of going about this.Corey: We thought otherwise at one point. We thought that this was something could be easily addressed their software. We launched our DuckTools SaaS platform in beta and two months later, did the—our incredible journey has come to an end, and took it off of a public offering. Because it doesn't lend itself to solving these problems in software in any reasonable way. I am ever more convinced over time that the idea of being able to solve cloud cost optimization with software at VC-scale is a red herring.And yeah, it just isn't going to work because it's one size fits some. Our customers are, by definition, exceptional in many respects, and understanding the context behind why things are the way that they are mean that we can only go so far with process because then it becomes a let's have a conversation and let's be human. Otherwise, we try to overly codify the process, and congratulations, we just now look like really crappy software, but expensive because it's all people doing it. It doesn't work that way. We have tools internally that help smooth over a lot of those edges, but by and large, people who are capable of performing at especially at the principal level for a cloud economics role, inherently are going to find themselves stifled by too much process because they need to have the freedom to dig into the areas that are relevant to the customer.It's why we can't recraft all of our statements of work in ways that tend to shy away from explicitly defined deliverables. Because we deliver an outcome, but it's going to depend entirely, in most cases, up on what we discover along the way. Maybe a full-on report isn't the best way of presenting the data in the way that we see it. Maybe it's a small proof of concept script or something like that. Maybe it's, I don't know, an interpretive dance in front of the company's board.Alex: [laugh]. Right.Corey: I'm open to exploring opportunities. But it comes down to what is right for the customer. There's a reason we only ever charge a fixed fee for these things, and it's because at that point, great, we're giving you the advice that we'd implement ourselves. We have no partnerships with any vendor in the space just to avoid bias or the perception of same. It's important that we are the authoritative source around these things.Honestly, the thing that surprised me the most about all this is how true to that vision we've stayed as we've as we flushed out what works, what doesn't. And we can distantly fail to go out of business every month. I am ecstatic about that. I expected this to wind up cratering into a mountain four months after I went freelance. Not yet.Alex: Well, I mean, I think there's another aspect of this too, right? Because I've spent a lot of my career working inside of venture capital-backed companies. And there's a lot of positive things to be said about having ready access to that kind of cash, but it does something to your business the second you take it. And I've been in a couple of situations where, like, once you actually have that big bucket of money, the incentive is grow, right? Hire more people get more customers, go, go, go, go, go.And sometimes what you'll find is that you'll spend the time and the money on an initiative and it's clearly not working. And you just kind of have to keep doubling down because now you've got customers that are using this thing and now you have to maintain it, and before you know it, you've got this albatross hanging around your neck. And like one of the things that I really respect about the way that Duckbill Group is is handling this by not taking outside cash is, like, it frees you up to make these kinds of bets, and then two months later say, “Well, that didn't work,” and try something else. And you know, that's very difficult to do once you have to go and convince someone with, you know, money flowing out of their ears, that that's the right thing to do.Corey: We have to be intentional about what we're doing. One of the benefits of bringing you aboard is that one, it does improve our capacity for handling more engagements at the same time, but it also improves the quality of the engagements that we are delivering. Instead of basically doing a round-robin assignment policy we can—Alex: Right.Corey: —we consult with each other; we talk about specific areas in which we have specific expertise. You get dragged into a lot of data portions of existing engagements, and the rest of us get pulled into other areas in which you might not be as strong. For example, “What are all of these ridiculous services? I can't make heads or tails have the ridiculous naming side of it.” Surprise, that's not a you problem.It comes down to being able to work collaboratively and let each other shine in a way that doesn't mean we load people up with work. We're very strict about having a 40-hour or less work week, just because we're not rushing for an exit. We want to enjoy our time working, we want to enjoy what we're doing, and then we want to go home and don't think about work until it's time to come back and think about these things. Like, it's a lifestyle company, but that lifestyle doesn't need to be run, run, run, run, run all the time, and it doesn't need to be something that people barely tolerate.Alex: Yeah. And I think that, you know, especially coming from being an army of one in a lot of engagements, it is really refreshing to be able to—see because, you know, I'm fortunate enough, I have friends in the industry that I can go and say like, “I have no idea how to make heads or tails of X.” And you know, I can get help that way, but ultimately, like, the only other outlet that I have here is the customer and they're not bringing me in if they have those answers readily to hand. And so being able to bounce stuff off of other people inside of an organization like this has been really refreshing.Corey: One of the things I've appreciated about your tenure here so far is the questions that you ask are pitched at the perfect level, by which I mean, it is never something you could answer with a three-second visit to Google, but it's also not something that you've spent three days spinning your wheels on trying to understand. You do a bit of digging; it's a little unclear, especially since there are multiple paths to go down, and then you flag it for clarification. And there's really so much to be said for that. Really, when we're looking for markers of seniority in the interview process, it's admitting you don't know something, but then also talking about how you would go about getting the answer. And it's—because no one has all this stuff in their head. I spend a disturbing amount of time looking at search engines and trying to reformulate queries and to get answers that make sense.I don't have the entirety of AWS shoved into my head. Yet. I'm sure there's something at re:Invent that's going to be scary and horrifying that will claim to do it and basically have a poor user interface, but all right. When that comes, we'll reevaluate then because this industry is always changing.Alex: For sure. For sure. And I think it's, it's worth pointing out that, like, one of the things that having done this for a long time gives you is this kind of scaffolding in your head that you can hang things over. We're like, you don't need to have every single AWS service memorized, but if you've got that scaffold in your head going, “Oh, like, this thing sounds like it hangs over this part of the mental scaffold, and I've seen other things that do that, so I wonder if it does this and this and this,” right? And that's a lot of it, honestly.Because especially, like, when I was solely in the data space, there's a new data wareho—or a new, like, data catalog system coming out every other week. You know, there are a thousand different things that claim to do MLOps, right? And whenever, like, someone comes to me and says, “Do you have experience with such and such?” And the answer was usually, “Well if you hum a few bars, I can fake it.” And, you know, that tends to help a great deal.Corey: Yeah. “No, but I'll find out and get back to you,” the right answer. Making it up and being wrong is the best way to get rejected from an environment. That's not just consulting; that's employment, too. If 95% of the time, you give the right answer, but that one time and 20 you're going to just make it up, well, I have to validate the other 19 because I never know when someone's faking it or not. There's that level of earned trust that's important.Alex: Well, yeah. And you're being brought in to be the expert in the room. That doesn't necessarily mean that you are the all-seeing, all-knowing oracle of knowledge but, like, if you say a thing, people are just going to believe you. And so, you know, it's beholden on you—Corey: If not, we have a different problem.Alex: Well, yeah, exactly. Hopefully, right? But yeah, I mean, it's beholden on you to be honest with your customer at a certain point, I think.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to got with me about this. And I would love to have you back on in a couple of months once you're fully up to speed and spinning at the proper RPMs and see what's happened then. I—Alex: Thank you. I'd—Corey: —really appreciate—Alex: —love to.Corey: —your time where's the best place for people to learn more about you if they haven't heard your name before?Alex: Well, let's see. I am @alexras on Twitter, A-L-E-X-R-A-S. My personal website is alexras.info.I've done some writing on data stuff, including a pretty big collection of blog posts on the data side of the AWS ecosystem that are still on my consulting page, bitsondisk.com. Other than that—I mean, yeah, Twitter is probably the best place to find me, so if you want to talk more about any weird, nerd data stuff, then please feel free to reach out there.Corey: And links to that will, of course, be in the [show notes 00:35:57]. Thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.Alex: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.Corey: Alex Rasmussen, principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. I am Corey Quinn, cloud economist to the stars, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that you then submit to three other podcast platforms just to make sure you have a backup copy of that particular piece of data.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

On today's episode of the ACCEL Podcast, Scott, Eric and Alex welcome back ACCEL University Director, Chris (known as Drake in the community) to help explain the in's and out's of multi-chain projects, the importance of arbitrage trading, and why having a functional bridge is a must in the multi-chain space.For more information on ACCEL , please visit www.acceldefi.com or our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/AccelDefiFor educational resources related to ACCEL and Crypto in general, please visit ACCEL University on YouTube using the following link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJDNIqPTp9kjsMPmPo119Zg--------------------------------------------Episode Transcript:[Scott] On today's episode of The ACCEL Podcast, we welcome the return of ACCEL University director Chris, also known as Drake, to help explain the ins and out of multiple chains, the importance of arbitrage trading, and why having a functional bridge is a must in the Multi Chain space. As always, my name is Scott, and I am Eric. I'm Alex. You're listening to the ACCEL Podcast, Defining a decentralized future. One listen at a time. [Alex] Welcome everybody to The ACCEL Podcast. Today, we welcome back Chris, A-K-A. Drake the director of ACCEL University. So, Chris, we brought you on the show today to explain the purpose of multi chain projects. At a first glance, they may seem overwhelming. Can you explain a little bit more about that?  [Drake] Hey, Alex, thanks for having me back on the show. I'm excited to be here. And yeah, absolutely. We can talk a little bit about multi chain projects. So basically, a multi chain project is any project that launches across multiple blockchains. And there's a couple of reasons why someone would do that. But the main idea is to allow the largest community and the largest user base to have easy access to the project. And depending on where you're located or where you might live, different cryptos and different blockchains might be more easily accessible to you. So being able to access those communities across whatever blockchain is easiest for them really opens up doors for your own project.  [Scott] Yes, I think that's one of the misconceptions we kind of see a lot in the DeFi space, Chris, is people don't really understand why people want to do that. But I think one of the main misconceptions is people don't really understand that a lot of people like to stay on one or two chains. They don't really venture out and day trade on multiple chains. Is that something that you really see as you're looking into the analytics of the different chains? Is there not a lot of turnover between BSC traders and Ethereum traders versus even throwing in Matic?  [Drake] Yeah, absolutely, Scott. And I think that's one of the things that we see pretty often is that you tend to stick with the chain that you kind of started with. I think for myself personally, for example, I started with the Ethereum chain. And even now, as someone who lives in New York, BNB and BSC aren't easily accessible here. So I know a lot of my peers and other people who might not have the same accessibility to other blockchains tend to stick to the one that they're familiar with. So definitely while there are some traders and some people who are very well versed across the blockchains and tend to interact with them all, we do find that a majority of traders, majority of the community, tend to stick to the chain that they're most familiar with.  [Scott] Okay, Chris, with that being said, I guess my one little follow up question to that would be, do you kind of see this as a positive then with the different chains allowing people to venture out a little bit, when you have these multi chain projects, it allows them to find that comfort zone in a project they're already in to venture out into a different chain. [Drake] Yeah, absolutely. And that kind of loops back to that idea of providing the most easily accessible way for people to not only be able to participate in a project, but also to do so with a chain that they're familiar with and comfortable with. [Eric] So, Chris, with that all being said, is it possible you could give us a little insight to us and the listeners to the pros and cons between multi chain projects? And which types of projects do you believe are more successful or predicated to each blockchain, if that even exists? [Drake] Well, the one thing I will say is that for the most part, when it comes to multi chain projects, the advantages those pros outweigh any cons that might come up. And again, that comes to access and community and also being able to disperse your liquidity across these chains. You know, generally speaking, those pros outweigh any cons that you might see a couple of cons that tend to exist. And I'm sure this is something that we can touch upon a little bit later on today's podcast is when there might be price discrepancies across different blockchains. Right. And so that tends to lead to arbitrage, for example. But generally speaking, any cons that might exist because you're listed on multiple blockchains are just very small in the grand scheme of theme, in the bigger pictures. And then in terms of the types of projects that tend to be most successful when they are Multi Chain projects, this kind of loops back to the bigger idea of what we're seeing in micro crypto right now. We tend to see this gravitation or this shift towards utility projects. Right? There's a bit of a movement away from meme coins and things of that nature. And people and the community at large are now shifting towards projects and businesses with actual sources of value, actual sources of utility. And that's where we're seeing a lot of investing activity, a lot of volume. A lot of traders are kind of interested in those types of projects right now. And when you pair a utility project with the opportunity for it to be MultiChain, for example, ACCEL itself, you tend to get the best of both worlds. And really, you're opening those doors and also you're able to provide your utility sources across your multiple chains. Right. So now it's not just utility for Ethereum holders only. It's not just a theorem for anybody who trades on BNB side only. This utility can be implemented across the chains. So you're bringing your value to a larger audience. And those are the types of projects right now that we see are really popular at the moment. [Eric] So it seems Chris, from your explanation, there really aren't that many cons when you can level out across different blockchains and give the opportunity to basically a lot of different buyers predicated upon what their purchase power is, whether it be Ethereum, whether it be Matic Polygon, whether it be the BNB, it seems to only have a plus or upside potential, which brings in, like you said, the Arbitrage and the other aspects of trading along all other blockchains, and especially when you brought an ACCEL as an example, dealing with the fact that we have multiple utilities that are coming to market, that it can only be advantageous for ACCEL to trade across multi chains. [Drake] Absolutely. And the one thing I would say on that or the one comment I would have would be, I really think the only time you would see the Multi Chain kind of disbursement really lead to some negative side effects if some type of project were tried to do that without actually taking into consideration the manner in which they did it. Right. So, for example, if you look at ACCEL's rollout across the multi chain, something that is being very carefully considered and calculated, that type of rollout where you're bringing that project to multiple chains is being done the right way. So I would say that the only time you would really see those cons is if someone tried to make their project a multi chain project without actually putting in the footwork or doing the research to make it successful. [Scott] So, Chris, now that we kind of have the basic understanding of how these multi chain projects kind of work, can you give us a little bit of a brief dive into the TA (Technical Analysis) side of it as you see the big benefits in these multi chain projects? [Drake] Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, really, again, when we talk about how multi chain affects a project and what those benefits might be, again, what we're kind of seeing is the opportunity for growth being presented and also the opportunity to not only disperse your project across these chains, create multiple liquidity pools, but you're also seeing the chance to bring in Arbitrage Trading to your project as well. Right. So there's a couple of different aspects at play, but the basic idea behind all of them is that you're spreading your project out, and naturally, in doing so, you're creating a larger foundation for it. So by spreading it out across blockchains. Right. You're creating multiple liquidity pools, for example. And if you remember from our previous conversations on that, we talked about how having multiple liquidity pools actually helps the stability of the project. So that's another advantage that comes to that. It's another benefit to this like, functionality. And then when it comes to Arbitrage, which I think we'll definitely touch a little bit upon, now, that's where you kind of also see the opportunity to grow the project at a much more rapid pace than you would without this functionality. [Eric] So Chris, our listeners could understand a little clearer with the Arbitrage trading and then being able to be in more than one blockchain, which currently run two, and I believe we're going to be moving towards a third and possibly a fourth. Could you give a little more of an explanation to give an understanding for maybe the newer traders out there who really don't get a total grasp of arbitrage, what it actually does to the coin price across these multi chains? [Drake] Absolutely. So Arbitrage, again is trading when there is a price discrepancy in the coin. Right. And so that could be a price discrepancy across a specific exchange. Right. For example, so something that we talked about was maybe the price difference between Xcel on a decentralized exchange versus a centralized exchange, something like that. And being able to take advantage of that price difference where you could buy at maybe the lower price and sell at the higher price. For example, when it comes to arbitrage trading cross chains. Right. Really what we're seeing is the opportunity to welcome HFTs to ACCEL. HFTs high Frequency traders, generally speaking, are either traders with a large amount of capital or traders who take their capital and put it into a bot. And so now a bot or an algorithm has access to a really large capital. And what they can do with this is the bots can go ahead and they can place these high frequency trades, these really large quantity trades and take advantage of those price differences. Price differences across the multiple chains. Right. So one of the things that we might see, for example, and obviously at the time of recording this podcast, Xcel has not officially launched on the BNB side yet. We did just close the presale, but the actual launch itself has not started yet. But once that does, what we could see is if there's a price difference in the ACCEL coin value from each to the BNB side, being able to welcome that volume to our project, welcome those High frequency traders to the project and allow them to take advantage of that price discrepancy of that price spread. Now that might not sound like something that's advantageous to the individual holder. Right. How does someone else profiting from these price differences affect me? But the thing that the holders have to remember in our community as a whole is that the more volume ACCEL has, the more opportunities that our project has as well. Right. And so, for example, one of the things we talked about was how central exchanges, certain central exchanges will only list projects that have, generally speaking a million in volume daily. Right now, obviously, that million in volume might not be made up from holder transactions exclusively. And so when we welcome High frequency Traders into our project, when we welcome that Arbitrage, we give that opportunity. They can add to the volume of the project and increase the overall opportunities that are being presented to us. One of the other things that happens with arbitrage trading is that as this price spread is taken advantage of. Right. As the differences in price are being utilized, what actually will happen is that the prices will tend to gravitate or come closer, that spread between the prices will tighten as more people take advantage of it. And so the unintended effect or really the added benefit is that these people will end up bringing the prices of ACCEL across the different chains closer to the same value. And so having ACCEL at the same value for me as an individual holder, now that's an advantage that I can use because now I can swap maybe from one chain to another, and the prices are going to be very close. Right. They may not be exactly identical, but that spread might get tightened through arbitrage trading. [Scott] Okay. That all makes good sense, Chris. So I guess a follow up question to that and something that you kind of see a lot with some new investors is they get a little scared by this idea of arbitrage trading. They don't really understand that the price is going to move up and down, like you were saying, and that people are going to have the opportunity to make some money on it. They look at it as a negative and there might not be a ton of balance. I know we touched on them a little bit in our last time we had you on. Could you kind of just give us a brief overview again of what these different market making services are and how they work? [Drake] Yeah, absolutely. So again, the idea here is that these different services exist purely to make the experience for the individual holder a little easier. Right. And so one of the things that we touched upon previously was how when there's a price discrepancy between maybe a central exchange liquidity pool for ACCEL and then the decentralized exchange, these market makers can come in and in the same manner as what I just described, be able to tighten the price spread for us, be able to try to bring those prices closer together. And generally speaking, that's just going to create overall an easier experience for any holder in ACCEL. Right. So these market makers will come in and they'll be able to utilize transactions to drive the price a little higher or a little lower to try and match the other prices of ACCEL. Right. And when those prices get closer and closer together, obviously our stability increases. Obviously, the ease of doing transactions across different exchanges increases as well. So really having that functionality is just another benefit to ACCEL holders. And whether it comes directly from the exchange itself through the use of market making or whether it comes from individual bots that are taking advantage of arbitrage trading, either way, neither of those functions or neither of those trading systems are going to be disadvantageous to ACCEL holders. Right. We still get benefits from that experience. [Alex] Thank you so much for breaking that down for us. Why would it be important for ACCEL to have its own bridge? [Drake] Yeah. So ACCEL is building its own in house bridge, right. The ACCEL bridge. And essentially what that's going to do is it's going to, again, make the ability to navigate this multi chain project more accessible. If I have ACCEL on the ETH side and I want to swap it over to the BNB side because that's my personal decision or preference. Being able to do it in house, being able to have an in house cross chain protocol is going to make that transaction so much more easy. And in doing so, again, we start to kind of give our holders the tools needed to navigate all of this without having to worry about, do I need to use an external bridge? How do I get my ACCEL over to BNB? How do I make these swaps? How do I stick in the different pools? All of that stuff kind of goes away, all those questions or concerns when we have an in house bridge that we can kind of fall back on and rely on. And so essentially, that bridge is what's allowing ACCEL to communicate across these chains that it's listed on. And so I can go into the app or however the bridge is actually implemented once it is finally released to the public and make that transition, make that swap in the app and it'll be just the touch of a couple of buttons and I don't have to worry about really anything else. It'll all be 100% automated because again, that's going to be built in house to communicate directly with ACCEL and communicate across its multiple chains. [Alex] Speaking of it being built in house, is there anything that you can give us without going into too much detail that's going to separate ACCEL's bridge from the pack? [Drake] Yeah, absolutely. So, again, the idea here is ease of transaction, right. Making the experience for every ACCEL holder as seamless as possible. And so when you kind of look at the bigger picture for all of ACCEL's products and sources of utility, right. When we look at ACCEL's launchpad for Coin building and things like that, and you realize that there's a bridge built into our platform that allows us to navigate multiple chains in house, then you can kind of start to see that bigger picture, start to see how having that own bridge, and especially a bridge that works so well across these chains, becomes an additional resource to the holders, becomes an additional resource that we can take advantage of and provide not only to the holders, but to people that we might partner with, provide to maybe projects that ACCEL takes on, or when we have mergers and acquisitions in the future, being able to use that bridge to our advantage, however we need, is going to be a huge leg up on the competition because it's built in house, because we have our own protocol, because it's cross chain because it integrates into ACCEL platform. You kind of piece that all together and you're like, wow, this is really convenient and it's also really valuable as well, right? So we don't have to do any of that externally. It's all in house and it's all also available to ACCEL's holders too, [Eric] Chris all great information and with such clarity that really brings it home to our listeners and just so our listeners all know you can get all this information at ACCEL University and also at our YouTube channel and all of our socials thanks again for stopping by. [Alex] Chris we really appreciate you breaking down everything for us about Arbitrage trading was very informative again everyone please check our show notes for our link tree. Please give us a like please give us follow subscribe if you'd like as always sit back and ACCEL.--------------------------------------------The Information presented in this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The Information provided from or through this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.You understand that you are using any and all information from this podcast at your own risk.

On today's episode of the ACCEL Podcast, Scott, Eric and Alex welcome Brian and Matt from the ACCEL Gaming Division. On Part-One of this Two-Part Series, Brain and Matt discuss Blockchain, Play-to-Earn (P2E) Games, NFTs and how their integration with blockchain technology is not only growing, but accelerating to new heights of adoption across multiple chains. For more information on ACCEL , please visit www.acceldefi.com or our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/AccelDefiFor educational resources related to ACCEL and Crypto in general, please visit ACCEL University on YouTube using the following link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJDNIqPTp9kjsMPmPo119Zg Episode Transcript:[Alex] Welcome to the ACCEL Podcast. Today we have very special guests for you, Matt and Brian. They head the gaming division here at ACCEL. [Alex] Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background in gaming, and how you found yourself developing P2E Games in the crypto space? [Brian] Thanks again. As you said, my name is Brian. I've been an avid gamer pretty much my entire life. I've just been working into project management and programming for a few years now, and basically I've just brought everything together when forming this division as it appealed to all of my skills that I've built over the years. And I've been working on building this division from the ground up. So I am very excited to have a couple of people in our team. And honestly, it's been pretty much a dream of mine. I've always wanted to be kind of a project manager programmer for a small indie company. That's kind of something that's always been a dream of mine. So the simple fact that now I finally get to do it is fantastic and I'm looking forward to the future. [Alex] Thank you very much for giving us a little bit of information on your background. Is game development something you went to school for, or were you self taught? [Brian] That's a great question. I was self taught. The only kind of experience I have is some coding classes when I went to University, but I never really used them for gaming. It was just got through the courses and at the time that wasn't something that I planned on using. But now that I'm here, I'm really glad that I decided to stick with it. Those late hours of going through code, it's finally going to pay off. [Alex] Wow, that's fascinating. Hey, Matt, can you also give us a little bit about your background and how you got involved with ACCEL? [Matt] Absolutely. I've been in eSports. I was an eSports pro in my 20s. I actually have been involved in gaming for about 18 years now. Always dream. Just like Brian, we've been friends for ten years. We've gone through a lot. We've discussed a lot of things that we want to do, and this is sort of like making all that happen. I personally come from an engineering background. I am pretty good with numbers and like I set up both developed games simply and I've worked on different games just through the variable aspect. And I've been very involved with technology for the last ten years. So when Brian told me about this opportunity, I thought it was a great time to come in, materialize all the things that we've discussed over the years, just bring them together and make this an amazing environment. [Alex] Thank you very much for giving us that information. [Scott] So I guess that kind of leads us into our next question. I think there's a lot of kind of confusion around gaming in the crypto sphere and kind of how everything ties together. There's a lot of different words thrown around that I think kind of confused people between these console games and these mobile games that you can play on your phone, ones where you can actually earn rewards, ones where you can't can you kind of just give us a little bit more insight on what exactly you guys are going to do in the gaming division, how that ties into crypto? [Brian] Yeah, absolutely. So mobile and console games, they all use a standard protocol, and basically there's going to be a way that we can be able to connect them to the blockchains. As of right now, that's the challenge. But I believe that what we can do is it's definitely coming along. It's faster than you think. Right. People have been playing games for virtual tokens for years, and really the only change now is that they be playing with a stake and earn real world assets. So, you know, you basically instead of farming your own Gill, gold, whatever the ingame currency is, basically. Now what you can do is not only can you throw money in there, but there are also ways to earn the money through various tasks, et cetera. And it's basically a great community effort because you're going to have people that are going to be let's say all I want to do is be a blacksmith. Right. Well, everybody's going to need a sword. So you're going to have those one on one interactions in transactions with people just like you and me. And we'll be able to use centralized token or coin or what have you. And we'll be able to do all kinds of trading. And I think Matt can actually elaborate a little more. [Matt] Absolutely. What basically is happening here is that before, if you went to any game, you'd earn that game's currency, right? You could earn gold, you could earn Gill, you could earn, like, little jewels and Candy Crush, et cetera. And all those things actually allow you to participate or buy items using that in game currency. But those items and those things are only limited to that game, and you could never translate it into something outside of the game. You could be the best player in the world in Candy Crush, but you're still going to get beat up at school if you're a nerd happened to be honestly, it was an experience. And the good thing about these games, the strong thing about these games is they can appeal to both the time and skill that you can put in. And that skill doesn't always have to be related directly to one task. Right. Like, for example, you have people with different careers in the world that do different things. And in the gaming, in the meta verse itself, you can tie all this together that people are going to be very good at. Some people are going to be very good at racing, some people are going to be very good at guessing a number off of a deck. And some people are going to go more into the creative side. You know, they are going to design characters, they're going to build certain items, they're going to build a lot of different things. So there's always going to be a discipline that appeals to anyone. And like, as with horse racing, where one person wins and everyone else loses, you actually have all these opportunities for different people to come together and use the things they are good at, use the things they want to do, and they all have the same possibility to earn something that they can just take back with them after. [Scott] Okay. So I guess my follow up kind of question to that then is these Play-to-Earn games have kind of been around a while. Why do you think you're seeing this trend kind of catching on now? What is kind of that ignition behind it? Do you think it's the blockchain interaction? Is that kind of that big selling point that's really bringing the play to earn games, too? We're seeing them really rise to the top right now. [Matt] Yeah. I think one of the key reasons is exactly what you mentioned. Because for everything that happened before, one of the big elements was that there was always, well, not really in games, but like, if you take it to real world, there's always going to be someone in the middle regulating transactions between players. So, for example, this is a very simple example. If anyone out there has played RuneScape, I'm sorry for you. But Besides that, if anyone out there has played RuneScape, you've gotten like scammed at least once. Like, some person comes in and they want to sell you something and you give them your gold because like, okay, I want the site, I may give you my goal and then the person just disconnects and disappears and you basically got stiffed. Truth be told, it's just a game currency. So it wasn't really that much of a hurt on you because you really feel bad when it happens. And Blockchain Technology just has had its peaks since 2019. If I'm not mistaken, it was first developed around 2009, but it's really seeing the strong adoption today. And the important part of Blockchain Technology is that it can do two things that usually didn't happen before. A it can regulate transactions between two parties without having like a physical third party having to exist. And the second one is that is a trust system so you don't actually have to go and trust the other player to make your transaction. Because it's going to be written in code, it's going to be hashed and there's no way you're getting out of that. No one can really stake a different item in transaction than they originally did. Scams are there like scams happen every day, but it's mostly like 99% of them are mostly due to a human factor. And that's why the fact that you can now actually have people playing against something that they don't need to trust, they know there's no way to go around it and they're going to get the returns of what they're putting in. It's not a scam, it's going to be like written code. The smart context is going to be there. It makes people a lot more confident to stake money or stake different sort of assets in these games. Kind of like when people in the 90s were afraid to put their credit card information anywhere because they all thought like they were going to get cloned and scanned. And now like you'll just go to a Russian site because you wanted to buy that PDF, that one book that you need to print for your son and just put your credit card info in weird Russian site with like not thinking about it twice. [Brian] Also, one thing I'd love to add is I believe now more than ever people actually want to feel like they're a part of something bigger, right? So let's say you've got your avatar, you're going in the Metaverse and you want to buy paranike, whether it's going to be for your avatar, like The Sims where you can dress your avatar, or maybe Nike will have a special NFT for X amount of sales. So either way you've got the people who, I just want to make my avatar look cool, I want to spend it on this, that or the other. And then you've got other people that are, I'm doing this for the money. As far as like, this is a really cool limited edition Nike NFT. I can only imagine we're going to be bringing in some big names very shortly. And one of the cool things is you don't necessarily have to be quote, unquote whale to own a piece of the pie, right? You could have in the Metaverse, you own a piece of land and then that land has the shoe store in there. So someone who comes in and say 1000 people purchase that land, anybody who gets sales from that Nike shoe is going to disperse equally. And so everyone's going to be able to not only say that they've got some connections with brand management, but also just sales get X amount of tokens or whatever. And then you use those for basically whatever you'd like. So it's just really cool. [Eric] So Brian and Matt, you guys have done a diamond explanation of giving us a little bit of your background, how you're now starting to tie into ACCEL. So for our subscribers and maybe a couple more of our more veterans in the ACCEL game–I'll put myself in that category–give me a little more insight if both of you could, or a little more understanding on exactly what P2E Games are, and with that being said, exactly how they are going to now tie into The Blockchain, and I know you started to get into how we pay for it. I know, Matt, you had alluded to your son or your daughter can tie in a credit card, but bring it back a little more to the basics, and just let me know about the P2E Games, how they tie into The Blockchain, and exactly how it's being monetized. [Matt] P2E or like Play to Earn is just basically any game that gives you a reward for playing it. You can even define like, if you loosely define it, you can even call P2E to those little machines in Japan where if you exercise, you do ten squats, you actually get a train ticket. And it's sort of the same principle that comes in there. And people relate this a lot to casinos for that reason, because you basically go in, stake your money, make some bets. Betting is one of the many forms that P2E has. And I think there's a hidden gem that NFCs will bring that still hasn't been tapped into and relates directly with fractal ownership. There's a lot of artists that have talked about this. It's basically sort of selling a part or selling a piece of, for example, the right to your music. Like, if you have a favorite artist, how cool would it be if you could own a small percentage of the rights to their music? [Brian] Right. And NFT's in general, all these tokens would actually make for a strong case in which people can bring their resources together. We can form a pool of 30,000 people, and we can all pool our ETH. And the good thing is no one has to trust anyone else and get that pulled resources and get that pulled money to let's say we're all a big fan of Nike. You want to buy a percentage of Nike and sort of be able to bring the Nike brand into the Metaverse or get some dividends out of the Nike shares and et cetera. That's a strong point of NFTs and I think it's going to be seen a lot more because people are starting to realize there are a lot more uses to this than they thought originally. [Scott] Yeah, I think that's one of the craziest things we're kind of seeing in the blockchain and crypto areas. A lot of people don't really want to jump on this innovation and it's one of the things we're really seeing is everything is tied together and in our next episode we're going to kind of touch on this, but we want to leave you guys on a little bit of a cliffhanger. But in the next episode we're going to kind of explain to you guys how this all ties back together. The Metaverse, the NFTs, the Play-to-Earn, the blockchain and how they're all in one. So we're looking forward to this next episode. Please join us again with Brian Matt. It's going to be awesome. Bye.-----------------------------------------The Information presented in this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The Information provided from or through this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.You understand that you are using any and all information from this podcast at your own risk.

On today's episode of the Accel Defi Podcast, we interview a member of the Accel Defi Team, Keith (known in the community as Wolfgang Regem), as we discuss Keith's cryptocurrency journey, involvement with Accel Defi, and how he overcame his fears of investing in crypto.For more information on Accel Defi, please visit www.acceldefi.com or our Link Tree:https://linktr.ee/AccelDefiFor educational resources related to Accel Defi and Crypto in general, subscribe to Accel Defi University on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJDNIqPTp9kjsMPmPo119Zg  -------------------------------------------[Scott] On today's episode of the ACCEL Podcast, we interview a member of the ACCEL team, Keith, as we discuss Keith's cryptocurrency journey, involvement with ACCEL and how he overcame the fears of investing in crypto. As always, my name is Scott and Hi, I'm Eric. I'm Alex. You're listening to the ACCEL Podcast,  Accelerating Your Crypto Investments, one podcast at a time.[Alex] Welcome, everyone. Today we have a really special guest for you, one of my favorite team members. Everyone, please welcome Keith, aka Wolfgang. [Keith] Hi, Alex. Thank you for having me. [Alex] Thank you for coming on. Can you introduce yourself to listeners? Tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your biggest accomplishments in your career thus far. [Keith] Well, let's see. Probably 60 years old, which basically means we've made it through life pretty well and have been working in crypto since 2017. Been involved with this project since the start. I'm an avid researcher. I'm an avid writer. I'm a film buff… golfer. Those are some of the fun things. And as far as accomplishments go, right now, I only deal in the present, and it's the fact that I've even gotten active in crypto at my age. [Alex] Tell us a little bit of how you got involved with cryptocurrency. [Keith] 2010, one of my friends called up and said there was this coin and started talking about digital currency called Bitcoin. And I ignored the heck out of them. And then in 2017, after things started picking up a little bit, it was actually Christmas of 2016. I bought into three or four different cryptos and then did the smartest thing I'd ever thought about, which was forgot them. Fast forward 2000 and $2400 turned into a little over $50,000. And I thought, wait a minute, I need to learn something here. [Alex] That's awesome. So we all start off very Rocky. What's one thing that you wish you would have known starting out in crypto?[Keith] Don't day trade. Very simply, that three year period, three, four year period that while it was out there, I didn't look at it. I didn't pay attention to it. It did its own thing. Then when I started trying to trade it, I almost gave everything I had made back. So DYOR, do your own research and don't day trade. [Scott] I think that's a big thing that you see nowadays in crypto is a lot of people try to come in and they think that first move should be to try to day trade. And a lot of people come in and like you said, they don't do their research, and it makes it hard on them because then you're kind of just closing your eyes and shooting at a target, and it makes it tough. Crypto is one of those spaces where just like anywhere else, when it's innovative and booming, you have to make sure that you're doing your research or you're going to be one of those guys that get left in the dirt. I think that's a big part of it and I think a lot of people miss that. They just want to hop in and not do their due diligence and think they're going to make a ton of money. So a question for you, Keith, is being in the space, being a little older, what kind of drew you towards ACCEL and what exactly do you do? I know you're kind of a Jack of all trades, working in a whole bunch of different departments for us.[Keith] It's also awkward. Guys, if you want to refer to me as Wolfgang or Wolf or Wolfie because that's, hey, it's Crypto. Everybody has an alternate name and it's actually interesting with ACCEL. Just what I know about the project and the people involved in the project. I don't feel like I need to hide behind an alt name anymore. I'm kind of proud to be able to come out go, hey, look, this is who I am and who I work with and what we do. As far as getting involved with ACCEL, I was really lucky. A few of the team members were already involved with the project and I approached them because I didn't see them where we were before. Just said, hey, Where'd you guys go? You disappeared. And after a little bit of prying because they didn't want to recruit not just me, but anybody from other projects did a little bit of digging, a little bit of prying, saw what it was. And everybody that I liked and got along with was in this project. So I figured I'd jump in. [Eric] Wolf that's dynamite, I'm glad to hear that you were in the project early on. One of the other things in the crypto space, we know there's a lot of common myths and misconceptions and they can all very easily be debunked for you. What do you think the biggest one was? [Keith] Well, two things actually. I mean, in crypto, what you don't know is going to cost you money. And I'm older and being a little bit on the older side, you're hesitant to learn new things, to step into new spaces. And when it involves your money, it really ups the pressure, it amps the pressure like 100 times because you're thinking, oh my God, I'm literally putting my money into outer space or the crypto space or whatever you want to call it. And then overcoming that was just not having a fear of the unknown. And actually I got thinking about stock certificates. Strangely enough, when I was talking to some of my friends, my peer group has a big just hesitancy to get involved. And I asked them about their stockholders. They said, well, that's not throwing your money out to nowhere like you are. We have stock certificates. I said, no, you actually hold them. Well, no, the broker does. Well, to me it's the same thing. They're out there somewhere. You just don't know where it is. [Alex] So touching on what you had just mentioned. How is ACCEL removing some of those barriers for your peer group? [Keith] Without a doubt, Alex, the educational process, that's part of what drew me to this project. Anybody that gets involved in crypto at the very beginning, if you don't do your homework and do your own research, you're going to end up getting rugged in something. And one of the things I admire about ACCEL is that this whole project is about taking away the mystery, so to speak, removing the illusion and actually educating people as to what they need to be doing and what they need to be learning. I remember when I first bought back in 2017 into crypto, the whole process was so confusing. I had to have a flow chart. And that's what I love about this is we literally have how to videos everywhere. So I'm loving the fact that ACCEL is removing those barriers. [Scott] So, Keith, I know we just got to talk about some of the positives of ACCEL DeFi University and how it just kind of creates that environment to allow you to grow as an individual. What are some of the other resources and advice you can kind of give to someone that are looking to join the ACCEL community to really help grow their knowledge and experiences in the space? [Keith] I love that you're the person asking that question. Moon, you're one of my resources and it's really been funny. At 60, you expect to be the elder mentor and you step back and you lecture all the young people on your life lessons. And here you have to kind of put those things aside because you guys are just light years ahead as far as the knowledge base goes. But what's really great is that you guys share this freely. I mean, all you have to do coming on here is asking for help. I mentioned the videos and things before, but the main resource for me has been the people. I mean, you look at Mad or Jovan, you read these guys their CVs and see what they've done and what they do. And you think, okay, I'm not going to ask questions because this is going to be like a foreign language and they're not like that. They simplify it. And I think that's been for me, it's been a great thing because I've been able to come in and just say, hey, I don't understand this part. Can you explain it to me? And they talk. So far, everybody I've interacted with in the community talks to you, not at you. And it's made things so much simpler as far as learning. And if there happens to be something that we haven't covered at the University, then everybody's always quick. They have a resource ready to go. Okay, we'll take a look at this area. Take a look in this area. And I'm cracking up now because you guys talk really fast and I'm trying to talk fast to keep up. [Eric] Wolf, that's all great stuff as you speak about the space and how you've connected to it. And I know as we speak specific about ACCEL. So now that you're on the inside and you have a position within the company and you kind of see the inner workings from your perspective, from your standpoint of all the products and all the utilities and everything that going on that happened in ACCEL to you. And you probably can't just give one specific. But what are the things that excite you most just knowing from your position, from where you stand in your vantage point, what ACCEL can do? [Keith] You know, Eric, it's funny, but my situation there is purely from a selfish aspect. And it's just getting a chance to work and learn with the people that I have a chance to interact with, not only on the team but in the community as well. I think when you get a little bit older, in my case, I was furloughed without pay. They hired somebody else. And this has given me a place to belong and to continue growing. Now the products, of course, my first thing is going to be the education, the University. I just think that is reaching out and giving something back. I'm excited about the UnRekt platform. I'm excited about launchpad. There's so many things. But to me, it all comes back to the education. That's something I hope to work with because I know what I'm experiencing with my friends and my peer group that I don't want to do that. I don't want to try this. I don't want to learn this. I'm afraid I'll lose my money. And it's kind of become a calling for me to say, wait a minute, there's no reason for you to miss out on this. There's no reason for you to step back and oh my God, I can't do this. You can do anything. You set your mind too, especially with the education. And yes, it takes me back to the University. [Alex] Hey, Keith, I just want to take a minute here and switch gears for you, ask you a couple of questions where it's not so much question and answer type interview. One of the things for me was earlier you covered that you had forgot that you had purchased cryptocurrency. You open up your wallet, you opened it up and you had $50,000 from your original investment. What was the first thought that went through your mind there? [Keith] My first thought was, okay, this is a mistake. Because what had happened is I had like a trillion of this token called ETH Lend. And all of a sudden I only had like 50 tokens of something called Ave. And I thought, well, they ripped me off. They took all my tokens. So that's where my research started. I had to go online and track back and find out what had happened, which was in stock terms it was reverse buyback. The company took them over and then did a reverse buyback. And in this, it was just they consolidated the tokens to get the value of. And I think I paid like two cent a token. And at that time they were trading at $400. [Scott] I think there's always that crazy kind of entry point. Everyone kind of comes in at a different time. There are coins like that. A lot of people that came in on SHIBA, it's such a different experience. But I think one thing that me and you have talked about this before is I really do think that 2022 is going to be the year of the utilities. And I think it's something that we're going to see make a move. But being someone that's been around a little bit longer, what do you kind of think? What was your outtake on? We'll go a bit in the past and then talk about the main coins. What was your kind of thought on that? Did you get involved in those? Was it something that you kind of wrote off? I know I was a big Meme coin hater for a long time. [Keith] I was lucky. I had actually stepped into a chance to moderate and become a part of YouTubers community. And he was very good at expressing, look, this doesn't have any application to it. This is just a picture. And people are buying this because it's a cute picture. And I was also lucky enough because I remember being exposed to DOGE way back when. Sounds so funny to say that about 2016, 2017 and remembering the guy that came out that said, hey, we invented this as a joke, but now that it's got something, let's get people to use this. And DOGE was a big education for me because everybody now if you go by what DOGE people talk about it's HODL. And the guy that was the co founder of DOGE in 2016 changed the number of coins from a specified number to unlimited because he hated the fact that people were HODLing this coin. He wanted them to use it and spend it. [Eric] So that's funny that you touch upon that and you use the examples of DOJ in these coins and what started out as Meme coins. So I always try to correlate not so much the age disparity of what goes on now in the crypto space because we know the guys that are on his podcast, they're the younger cats. And then we bring in a guy like you who's a seasoned veteran. For me, Could you explain to me, because I know my steps into the crypto were a little meandered at the beginning and I basically took a beating, unlike you, who went in on the leap of faith and then just didn't look at it and came back and was absolutely startled that 400 times could grow at that tremendous rate. To your peer group, what would be your way to explain to them, hey guys if you're not in this you are absolutely missing out on something that is going to be the future of the way currencies economics money is moved.[Keith] Back to education. When we fear something we don't know or we don't understand it so we fear it. And educating yourself and finding out this is going to be interesting to try to draw a correlation here but people my age tend to feel safer with their money in a bank and they don't realize that the banks are now utilizing the same technology that we are but they just happen to have a physical location that everybody feels secure in. So when I talk with my friends about it it's hilarious to me because they think I've become some kind of genius. It's like no you do your research and you learn and the things that you have questions about or the easy way that I didn't have available to me at the time is to get involved with someone like us at ACCEL because you're actually getting that chance to come in and say, okay, hey I don't know squat, what do I need to do? I was seeing this morning one of the team members spent like 2 hours on a phone working with someone helping them go from I don't know any of this to setting up their wallet to Loading their wallet to purchasing it's just the support that's here but get the education that'll take away the fear. [Eric] So for all our listeners out there as you see and you hear what Wolf tells you speaking about ACCEL you can always go to our YouTube channel or you can follow along at any of our socials. [Alex] Wolf, Thank you so much for providing such great feedback. We appreciate your time everyone. Please feel free to check the show notes for our link tree and as always sit back and ACCEL.-------------------------------------------NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE– The Information presented in this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The Information provided from or through this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.You understand that you are using any and all information from this podcast at your own risk.

What if you could perform beyond the limitations of your own voice? Anne is joined by special guest Alex Serdiuk for a bonus Voice and Ai episode. They discuss Respeecher's speech-to-speech technology, the limitations of your natural voice, and how a synthesized voice is similar to a printing press. The future isn't just on its way - the future is here - and creative possibilities are endless when human voices and technology work together... Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast for another episode of the AI and Voice series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I'm excited to bring you special guest Alex Serdiuk. Alex is the founder and CEO of Respeecher, an AI speech-to-speech based company that creates voice cloning for content creators. Respeecher's technology was the first synthetic speech adopted by big Hollywood productions starting around 2019. And their primary focus is in improving the voice cloning technology in many directions, including the tech democratization to let sound professionals and creators have access to it. And as a voice talent, we love that. So Alex, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure having you. Alex: Hey Anne, everyone. It's so great to be here. Thank you for having me. Anne: Yes. So I have so many questions. You're a relatively young company founded in 2018, correct? Alex: Yes. That's correct, yes. Anne: Yeah. So, but you seem to have come a really long way in a very short amount of time. So if you don't mind, tell us a little bit about your company and how you got started. Alex: Yeah, actually for us, it felt like a very long amount of time, like eternity. But yeah, we started a bit earlier than 2018 with the idea we were playing around for several years. So we actually participated in one hackathon in Kiev, in Ukraine, and everyone were picking this ideas of applying deep learning AI, quite sophisticated machine learning techniques to do something with visuals, to do something with pictures. And we thought that would be cool to try doing something with speech, and that's harder task because we are much picky about the stuff we hear, unlike the stuff we see. And we ended up winning that hackathon with a very simple prototype of voice conversion technology that allowed one voice sound like another voice. Then we started to play around with the technology, started to speak to some folks we thought who could be our first clients, if you start this company. And they told us that it's all about quality. So if you talk about high quality voice cloning, it should be really high. So it should be indistinguishable for listener, whether it's synthesized or not. And given that we are quite picky about the sounds that we spot all the tiny little artifacts in sound the task has been challenging. So we launched the company in 2018 and took us about a year to get to the level where it could actually be of interest to some big sound engineers in Hollywood. And since then we've been improving the technology in several directions, usability, quality of the sound, speed, all that stuff. We try to make better on constant basis. Anne: Got it, got it. So, all right. What might seem like a simple question, because I think a lot of us in the voice industry, we've heard about text-to-speech. And as a matter of fact, we've been doing it for a very long time, you know, TTS projects. But now speech-to-speech is different. And so tell us exactly what is the difference between text-to-speech and speech-to-speech. Alex: Yeah. The differences in input, right? So when you use text-to-speech, you type words, and there is some AI that tries to make those words sound like they were spoken by human. The thing is there are two, in my opinion, holistic problems with text-to-speech. And that's one of the reasons why we do speech-to-speech. The first holistic problem would it text-to-speech be so limited to language models, to vocabularies. So if you want to try something different from what is in the vocabulary, it would fail. So if you try to pronounce some unusual name or street address, text-to-speech doesn't know where to take it from. That's one problem. The second one would be emotional control. And this one is huge. So text-to-speech can offer you few emotions, right? It can sound excited or sad, but that's it. And we humans are best in terms of producing emotions as we use our vocal apparatus. And we are the best in terms of being guided, how to produce emotions. So if you try to imagine very sophisticated text-to-speech that would allow you to have all these triggers our vocal apparatus has from the day we were born, that would be a very comprehensive tool. That would be extremely hard to use. It would be just simpler to say it in the exact way you want to say it. And that's where it's speech-to-speech comes in. So the idea of speech-to-speech is to enable a human speaking. The voice of another human is speaking in another timbre and all the emotions, all the inflections, all this stuff is being taken from source speaker. That means that you act, but you remove this boundary of being attached to the vocal apparatus, you were born with, the voice you have at the particular moment of your life. You can sound very different and that would be natural because emotions, inflections, acting would be yours. The timbre would be different. Anne: So then you require an actor to be a model for whatever voice that gets applied to? Is that correct? Alex: That's correct. We heavily rely on the actors. Anne: So then I would think that it's a different process because what I'm familiar with in terms of synthetic voices is that we record a whole bunch of prompts and then there becomes this voice that's created from that. And your technology basically has a source voice, is that correct, that is the actor? And then you can apply any different voice to that voice model? And so for every script, you would have an actor speaking those words, and then you would be able to apply any voice to that? Alex: Yeah, that's right. So basically our model compares voices. So it compares your voice to another voice you want to sound like, and it understands the difference between your timbre and the timbre you want to sound alike. And then after model learned those differences, you can actually feed their recordings in your voice. And those recordings would be converted into the voice of your desire. Anne: So then let's talk about the target voice, first of all. Is that something that let's say when you have different target voices, if I want it to be a target voice, I would say, how do I create that target voice? Is that similar to how most people create their synthetic voices? Meaning I record a series of prompts, and it becomes part of the data model, and then a voice is created, and then that is how you create your target voices? Alex: Yeah, that's correct. It's similar to text-to-speech. So basically you would need to record your voice in very good condition for some time, though speech-to-speech requirements are all over usually than text-to-speech. You don't need to go in studio and spend like hours. Say on a particular script, we can take existing recordings of your voice. And that would be enough. We just need observations of your voice saying different things in different emotions so model would learn it and then it's good to go. Anne: Interesting. So then it's basically your model, which is the actor, would be any good either audio example that you have of acting, but it doesn't have to be the exact script? Alex: Correct. Anne: Is that correct? Okay. Alex: Yeah. That they can read a lullaby for their baby or whatever. And in many of our projects, in many of our film projects, we had to deal with old recordings because we used to do a lot of de-aging or resurrecting projects. And that's cool about speech-to-speech that we can take existing recordings in quite a small amount. So currently we require like 40 minutes, but in plenty of projects, we had to deal with much less data. Anne: Wow. So then, so this is an additional layer that you do. So not only do you create the target voices in a traditional like text-to-speech kind of way where you're creating the synthetic voice, but you're also creating that speech-to-speech model, which is the acting. And that, again, like you're saying, doesn't necessarily have to be the same script that you want to be repeated. Let's say there's a new movie out, and you want to have a particular target voice on it. Would the actor model have to go in and say all the lines first so that the speech-to-speech target could kind of, I guess, mimic it or reiterate it? Alex: Yeah. So the -- the way how our system works, we would on the first stage, on the training stage, we would need just examples of a target voice, someone we impersonate, and source voice, a voice actor who would be doing impersonation. And we don't care much about what is the content, what are the spoken words? So it could consist of the content that needs to be converted further for the movie, but it could be something different. But then once the model is trained, you can say exact lines in the exact performance that are needed for the movie. And that would be converted into a target voice within minutes. Anne: Got it. That's pretty impressive. What are the applications that you see for your speech-to-speech software? Alex: Yeah, we've been focused on very high quality content because what's special about our technology, it can produce very high quality results, not just because of sound quality itself, quality of the sound files, but also because of the control you would have over emotional content. So you can make it sound exactly as you want it to sound. We've been applying our technology for films, animation, TV series, where we helped content creators get voices they cannot get in any other way. Like we did some work for Mandalorian season two, where we helped with making the voice, synthesizing the voice of young Mark Hamill, young Luke Skywalker -- Anne: Yeah. Alex: -- who appeared in the very last scene. And you cannot get this voice anymore. You have recordings of 40 years old, but the voice of Mark Hamill is drastically different -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- from what he had 40 years ago. Anne: 40 years ago. Alex: That would be one application. We did some resurrection projects. One of them audience might have heard of would be Super Bowl opening where Vince Lombardi came and said some encouraging things about all the challenges our society needs to go through in this quite, quite hard time. Anne: I remember that. Alex: Yeah, that was a powerful piece we did together with NFL Digital Domain, 72 and Sunny. And the idea was to resurrect the voice of this person. We also did one cool project in resurrection where we made quite famous announcer -- not just announcer, but basketball commentator in Puerto Rico, who died 20 years ago, to voiceover the whole game in August, when -- Anne: Wow. Alex: -- Puerto Rico made it to Olympics. Anne: Wow. Alex: And that was huge for us because we were focused on short form content for quite a while. Our technology has been heavy and we required a lot of take. And that might have been one of the first projects when we had like our own health (?) of voiceover in one take that had to be converted overnight for putting on TV the next day. And it worked out. So it sounded good. And recordings for target voice for Manolo were extremely bad. So it was quite, quite complicated, but it turned out to be working, and Telemundo put it on stream. Anne: Wow. So then that's very impressive. Now it's also very scary, not just for me as a voice actor, but I'm thinking for the consumer, right, who's listening to the voice. So what sort of steps are taken to, I guess, notify the listener that maybe, especially if you're resurrecting voices. I would imagine that there's gotta be some sort of a protocol where you're allowing people or letting people know that this voice is resurrected or like, what are your thoughts on that? Alex: Yeah. I mean, we basically build some guiding principles, guiding ethics principles from the very beginning when we started. And the first thing we always ask our prospective clients, when they want to do a project, whether they have permission or going to obtain one from owner of the voice they're going to clone. And in case if that person would be deceased, we would require permission from their relatives or estate or if that's a president, from president library, from company or individual that owns the right. And that would be the very first step. Then we actually need to be sure that the project is not controversial in general, because it might be not wrong to do something with permission. But if it's very attached to politics or were a controversial content, even with permission, we can just say no, because there is a lot of fear to this technology -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- in general and -- Anne: And deep fakes, I'm thinking. Right? Alex: And deep fakes. Yeah. And the thing is, I mean, the technology itself is neither good or bad. It's just an instrument like a Photoshop, like hammer, like printing press. The thing is that we used to be scared of something new. And our goal is to showcase exciting, cool projects, creative opportunities, opportunities for voice actors using this technology without some bad projects to be in the news, because bad news travels so far, right? Everyone's heard about this end Tony Bourdain project that is -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- very controversial. Right? Anne: Yes. Alex: But I guess much less people heard about the amazing work we did for Mandalorian -- Anne: Yeah. Alex: -- even though Mandalorian is the biggest TV series of 2020. Anne: That's very true. That's very true. So then maybe you can answer this question. As a voice actor, what are the opportunities for me, as a voice actor -- number one, I like that you have an ethics statement on your website, and that you say that you are not allowing any deceptive uses of the technology. But number one, how can voice actors use this to let's say enhance our opportunities? And also how are you protecting the voice actor from any type of misuse or deepfakes or ethics? Alex: Yeah, I mean, in terms of protection, we do have quite strict protocols that are required from us when we've work with biggest Hollywood studios, right? So have data security and stuff in place. In terms of opportunities, look, let's think about this technology from the point of view that the technology itself removes limitation you have. You -- you've been attached to your voice, and you're attached to your voice you have in particular moment of your life. So you can act, you can, you can work only with the particular vocal timbre you have been born with, right? The technology allows you to sound very different. So you can sound like 70 years old woman, or like 12 years old kid. And it would sound like 12 years old kid or 70 years old woman in terms of naturalness. The thing is you would, you would act those voices. And that means that, in my opinion, in future, the distribution of load between voice actors could be significantly improved in future. Because when voice actor is being hired, they're hired for two things, their ability to act and their vocal timbre, the unique timbre they have. And now we can remove the timbre part from equation, and voice actors would be hired because their ability to perform. And that's amazing because some voice actors who meet very high demand for their particular vocal timbre can give this timbre, can license this timbre to other voice actors who can use it with their approval. But also the voice actors who cannot get jobs just because their vocal timbre does not match this particular character can actually get these jobs because they can sound like, like a different person. Anne: So then they would buy a license for that target person? Is that correct? How does that work? Alex: Yeah, that's correct. I mean, our company has been focused on like one-off projects for quite a while because the technology has been heavy, but this year we launched what we call a voice marketplace, and that would be a self-serve product. There -- it's been a roller coaster for us to make this heavy technology we used to operate manually the work in self-serve mode. But voice marketplace is out and it works. And it's really cool piece of technology where we try to democratize access to such a fine tool, to smaller creators and to voice actors. And the idea of the voice marketplace that as user of the voice marketplace, you can speak in 40, more than 40 different vocal timbres we created there for you. And we actually hired people. We paid them money. We got their release and consent to use their voice in the voice marketplace. And those voices we have in the voice marketplace so far belong to average people because the most important part is this -- Anne: The timbre. Alex: -- timbre. Yeah. But acting could be done by user -- Anne: Interesting. Alex: -- and that means that you can sound exactly like any of those voices we have in the system and just utilize opportunities in terms of acting and performance, instead of being limited to the vocal timbre you own. So that's one way how -- Anne: Got it. Alex: -- voice actors can benefit from this technology right now. Anne: So then I can have an account in your marketplace, and then I can purchase additional timbres. Is that correct? Alex: Yeah, that's correct. And you can get access to all the voices we have on the voice marketplace, try it out, but that's like a starting point. Anne: Interesting. Alex: We started with some like average voices, but in future, we want to add other voices, professional voices, because I mean, when system has not seen some particular emotions like singing, or crying, or whispering, it performs suboptimal, right? And people who are not professionally trained to be voice actors cannot produce many emotions. And that means for getting very high quality and professional voices in the output, you would want to see in target voices some professional voices. Anne: Yes. Alex: We want to invite voice actors in future as well as we want to get licensing deals with some famous voices and even voices from the past. Anne: Sure. Alex: But the thing is this kind of improvement to the voice marketplace as a product requires us to build two more layers. The first one would be approval layer. So as target voice, when you supply your voice to the system, you should feel secure that your voice is not used for something that you feel is inappropriate. Anne: Sure. Alex: So you need to be able to approve the content that is being created -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- with your voice or approve the user, the company, or the individual who want to use your voice. That's first thing. The second layer would be building compensation model -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- because there should be economics there's built on usage. Anne: Sure. Alex: It shouldn't be just one time licensing deal. Anne: Right. Alex: And those layers, they require some time to be built as well as some attention. And they should work very properly because it should be trusted. Anne: Yes. And I do believe that for a voice talent, if they were a target voice or the source voice, I think they would want to number one, it should be a permission-based model. Or they would want that. Also they would want fair compensation. And I, I agree with you saying that that compensation would be on a per job basis because there is, you know, the way that we determine usage now, if we're doing a McDonald's commercial, right, we have a certain time that we can use that. And we aren't able to use our voice for a competitor. So I think on a per job usage basis is wise, and that is going to be, from what I understand -- I mean, especially for you, because you're doing the AI development, right, and the products. And so now also to have a marketplace, that's a whole other ball game. So kudos to you for wanting to build that marketplace and to do it in a fair and ethical way. So when any of us go onto your website or marketplace, and we are, let's say recording on it or inputting our voice or sending you files, what is your policy in terms of who owns that voice? Alex: Yeah. Voice is owned by the person who, whose voice it is. Right? And there is quite clear legislation around that. So that's your IP and you own it. And without your permission, your voice cannot be used for something you have not authorized. So your recordings as a source speaker belong only to you. Recordings of converted speech, you get them. So you own the recordings of converted speech, if you're, if you use our voice marketplace on paid basis and that's quite clear and fair. Anne: Great. Okay. So how, going back to the ethics where you say that we don't allow any misuse of our technology, how do you actually prevent anybody from misusing your technology? Alex: Yeah. I mean, on example of the voice marketplace, you can not introduce any target voice, right? You cannot just put their voice of Donald Trump and try to say something in his voice because system does not allow it. Anne: Okay. Alex: And we do not have any public API or even non public API that would allow users or our partners to create target voices themselves. In those cases, when you need a particular voice to be cloned, always need to go through us. And we would require permission. And we actually require written permission, or in cases when we've worked with big and legit studios, we can put it on their shoulders. So they would need to get the permission themselves. The second part of protecting our technology from misuse is actually bringing awareness about existence of this technology. And we did plenty of projects that were focused more -- mostly on bringing awareness like Nixon project we did in 2019 with MIT. And the whole idea of the project was to make Richard Nixon say the speech that was written in case if moon landing (?) goes wrong, actually showcase what modern technologies can do to change our understanding of history. And this educational part is extremely important because we all understand that this type of very fine technology could -- would fall in wrong hands in the future -- Anne: Absolutely. Alex: -- and that's in quite foreseeable future. And the thing is we can protect ourselves only being aware that voice can be manipulated. Anne: Yes. Alex: Like if we're aware that something that is typed in the newspaper could not be true. Though. Our grandparents or grand-grandparents used to believe in everything that was typed. So that's, that's about how we treat the information we receive. And that's about awareness. Another thing we work on is to create a watermark, and the idea of watermark -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- the watermark to be able to tell Respeecher generated content from any other content. That's been quite complex and hard task because with our technology, you can generate a very small file and to put there a legit watermark, you will need to have this balance of watermark being not hearable -- Anne: Right. Alex: -- but being not easily removable. Anne: Right. Alex: And keeping this balance in very short chunks is quite hard task, but I hope in next year, we would release the watermark. Another thing we are doing, we are actually working in several communities that are designed with the idea of building detection of synthetic speech algorithms that would detect synthetic speech or synthetic images. And we are providing our samples, we are providing our recordings that sound very indistinguishable in order to improve those algorithms. And the idea is those algorithms should be created and adopted as soon as possible, and big platforms -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- that distribute content like YouTube or Facebook should have this stuff embedded there. So it would just notify people that this recording or this video might have been manipulated. And that's quite important thing to do. Anne: I agree, especially after hearing samples on your webpage, how really good your technology is, because it is encapsulating like the emotion. And I can only imagine for us, it makes us like doubly scared. You know, text-to-speech, synthetic voices is already scary, but this is an extra kind of step where it sounds so real that -- and especially how can you tell? Let's say that, you know, somehow my voice gets out there, or somehow the model of what I said gets out there, and how do I know that I approved that and allowed that to happen or allowed that usage? So I think it's great that yes, you should get those models out there and that watermarking out there as soon as possible on all platforms. Because I also think for us to be able to give the permission and to know where our voice is being used and for the people listening, they need to know that what they're listening to may not be human or may be altered. So good stuff. Alex: Yeah. That's correct. Anne: Yeah. Alex: However, I want to contradict you a bit about letting viewers of the film be obligatorily notified about synthetic speech being part of that. I mean, viewers are not notified about effects, about postproduction that has been made to speech. And you can think about some cases -- Anne: True. Alex: -- when our stuff is more like a postproduction technique, like we de-age some voice. So an actor acts themselves, but they sound younger, right? It's nothing bad with this use case and you don't obligatory need to have like a huge notification -- Anne: Right. Alex: -- on the center of the screen that -- Anne: Right. Alex: -- this audio has been manipulated. Because if you think about dinosaurs in Jurassic park, you don't have -- Anne: Yeah. Alex: -- and you don't expect to have those -- Anne: Sure. Alex: -- notifications that this creature does not exist, or Terminator, or like that's a creative part of things. And in cases, if it used in postproduction or as a creative tool, it shouldn't be there in my opinion. But in cases when it's, it might consist of controversial content, it my consist of alternative history content, when someone like Anthony Bourdain never actually say these lines, even if he wrote it himself, the notification should be in place. Because in such cases, we always encourage our clients and documentary creators to be very straightforward and tell their listeners that voice has been modified. Synthesized. Anne: Excellent point, excellent point. Thank you for that. Wow. So this has just been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for educating us and talking about your product. Respeecher. How can BOSSes get in touch with you if they're interested to find out more, or maybe try it out, or maybe be a voice, how can they get in touch with you? Alex: Yeah, so you just basically go to our website, respeecher.com, and you can hear a lot of examples, read our blog, read our ethics statements, look some projects we finished, and we can actually talk about, because there are plenty of projects that have delayed PR rights for us. And you can easily try voice marketplace. You can try the same core technology that we are using for Hollywood for your needs. And we would really appreciate the feedback because voice marketplace is something quite new for us -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- but we want this to be a very good creative tool and tool that would let voice actors do what they do best, act, without being limited to their timbre, and creators be focused on creative opportunities without being limited to necessity of finding a particular vocal timbre. And sometime it's very hard to find. Anne: Wow. Well, thank you so very much for joining me today. I'm going to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor ipDTL that allowed me to connect with Alex today. You can find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week, and I'll see you next week. Thanks so much, Alex. Alex: Thank you, Anne. Anne: Bye-Bye. Alex: Bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. 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Alexander Pugh is a software engineer at Albertsons. He has worked in Robotic Process Automation and the cognitive services industry for over five years.This episode originally aired on Software Engineering Radio.Related LinksAlexander Pugh's personal siteEnterprise RPA Solutions Automation Anywhere UiPath blueprism Enterprise "Low Code/No Code" API Solutions appian mulesoft Power Automate RPA and the OS Office primary interop assemblies Office Add-ins documentation Task Scheduler for developers The Component Object Model The Document Object Model TranscriptYou can help edit this transcript on GitHub.[00:00:00] Jeremy: Today, I'm talking to Alexander Pugh. He's a solutions architect with over five years of experience working on robotic process automation and cognitive services. Today, we're going to focus on robotic process automation. Alexander welcome to software engineering radio. [00:00:17] Alex: Thank you, Jeremy. It's really good to be here. [00:00:18] Jeremy: So what does robotic process automation actually mean? [00:00:23] Alex: Right. It's a, it's a very broad nebulous term. when we talk about robotic process automation, as a concept, we're talking about automating things that humans do in the way that they do them. So that's the robotic, an automation that is, um, done in the way a human does a thing.Um, and then process is that thing, um, that we're automating. And then automation is just saying, we're turning this into an automation where we're orchestrating this and automating this. and the best way to think about that in any other way is to think of a factory or a car assembly line. So initially when we went in and we, automated a car or factory, automation line, what they did is essentially they replicated the process as a human did it. So one day you had a human that would pick up a door and then put it on the car and bolt it on with their arms. And so the initial automations that we had on those factory lines were a robot arm that would pick up that door from the same place and put it on the car and bolt it on there.Um, so the same can be said for robotic process automation. We're essentially looking at these, processes that humans do, and we're replicating them, with an automation that does it in the same way. Um, and where we're doing that is the operating system. So robotic process automation is essentially going in and automating the operating system to perform tasks the same way a human would do them in an operating system.So that's, that's RPA in a nutshell, Jeremy: So when you say you're replicating something that a human would do, does it mean it has to go through some kind of GUI or some kind of user interface?[00:02:23] Alex: That's exactly right, actually. when we're talking about RPA and we look at a process that we want to automate with RPA, we say, okay. let's watch the human do it. Let's record that. Let's document the human process. And then let's use the RPA tool to replicate that exactly in that way.So go double click on Chrome, launch that click in the URL line and send key in www.cnn.com or what have you, or servicenow hit enter, wait for it to load and then click, you know, where you want to, you know, fill out your ticket for service. Now send key in. So that's exactly how an RPA solution at the most basic can be achieved.Now and any software engineer knows if you sit there and look over someone's shoulder and watch them use an operating system. Uh, you'll say, well, there's a lot of ways we can do this more efficiently without going over here, clicking that, you know, we can, use a lot of services that the operating system provides in a programmatic way to achieve the same ends and RPA solutions can also do that.The real key is making sure that it is still achieving something that the human does and that if the RPA solution goes away, a human can still achieve it. So if you're, trying to replace or replicate a process with RPA, you don't want to change that process so much so that a human can no longer achieve it as well.that's something where if you get a very technical, and very fluent software engineer, they lose sight of that because they say, oh, you know what? There's no reason why we need to go open a browser and go to you know, the service now portal and type this in when I can just directly send information to their backend.which a human could not replicate. Right? So that's kind of where the line gets fuzzy. How efficiently can we make this RPA solution? [00:04:32] Jeremy: I, I think a question that a lot of people are probably having is a lot of applications have APIs now. but what you're saying is that for it to, to be, I suppose, true RPA, it needs to be something that a user can do on their own and not something that the user can do by opening up dev tools or making a post to an end point.[00:04:57] Alex: Yeah. And so this, this is probably really important right now to talk about why RPA, right? Why would you do this when you could put on a server, a a really good, API ingestion point or trigger or a web hook that can do this stuff. So why would we, why would we ever pursue our RPA?There there's a lot of good reasons for it. RPA is very, very enticing to the business. RPA solutions and tools are marketed as a low code, no code solution for the business to utilize, to solve their processes that may not be solved by an enterprise solution and the in-between processes in a way.You have, uh, a big enterprise, finance solution that everyone uses for the finance needs of your business, but there are some things that it doesn't provide for that you have a person that's doing a lot of, and the business says, Okay. well, this thing, this human is doing this is really beneath their capability. We need to get a software solution for it, but our enterprise solution just can't account for it. So let's get a RPA capability in here. We can build it ourselves, and then there we go. So there, there are many reasons to do that. financial, IT might not have, um, the capability or the funding to actually build and solve the solution. Or it it's at a scale that is too small to open up, uh, an IT project to solve for. Um, so, you know, a team of five is just doing this and they're doing it for, you know, 20 hours a week, which is uh large, but in a big enterprise, that's not really. Maybe um, worth building an enterprise solution for it. or, and this is a big one. There are regulatory constraints and security constraints around being able to access this or communicate some data or information in a way that is non-human or programmatic. So that's really where, um, RPA is correctly and best applied and you'll see it most often.So what we're talking about there is in finance, in healthcare or in big companies where they're dealing with a lot of user data or customer data in a way. So when we talk about finance and healthcare, there are a lot of regulatory constraints and security reasons why you would not enable a programmatic solution to operate on your systems. You know, it's just too hard. We we're not going to expose our databases or our data to any other thing. It would, it would take a huge enterprise project to build out that capability, secure that capability and ensure it's going correctly. We just don't have the money the time or the strength honestly, to afford for it.So they say, well, we already have. a user pattern. We already allow users to, to talk to this information and communicate this information. Let's get an RPA tool, which for all intents and purposes will be acting as a user. And then it can just automate that process without us exposing to queries or any other thing, an enterprise solution or programmatic, um, solution.So that's really why RPA, where and why you, you would apply it is there's, there's just no capability at enterprise for one reason or another to solve for it. [00:08:47] Jeremy: as software engineers, when we see this kind of problem, our first thought is, okay, let's, let's build this custom application or workflow. That's going to talk to all these API APIs. And, and what it sounds like is. In a lot of cases there just isn't the time there just isn't the money, to put in the effort to do that.And, it also sounds like this is a way of being able to automate that. and maybe introducing less risk because you're going through the same, security, the same workflow that people are doing currently. So, you know, you're not going to get into things that they're not supposed to be able to get into because all of that's already put in place.[00:09:36] Alex: Correct. And it's an already accepted pattern and it's kind of odd to apply that kind of very IT software engineer term to a human user, but a human user is a pattern in software engineering. We have patterns that do this and that, and, you know, databases and not, and then the user journey or the user permissions and security and all that is a pattern.And that is accepted by default when you're building these enterprise applications okay.What's the user pattern. And so since that's already established and well-known, and all the hopefully, you know, walls are built around that to enable it to correctly do what it needs to do. It's saying, Okay. we've already established that. Let's just use that instead of. You know, building a programmatic solution where we have to go and find, do we already have an appropriate pattern to apply to it? Can we build it in safe way? And then can we support it? You know, all of a sudden we, you know, we have the support teams that, you know, watch our Splunk dashboards and make sure nothing's going down with our big enterprise application.And then you're going to build a, another capability. Okay. WHere's that support going to come from? And now we got to talk about change access boards, user acceptance testing and, uh, you know, UAT dev production environments and all that. So it becomes, untenable, depending on your, your organization to, to do that for things that might fall into a place that is, it doesn't justify the scale that needs to be thrown upon it.But when we talk about something like APIs and API exist, um, for a lot of things, they don't exist for everything. And, a lot of times that's for legacy databases, that's for mainframe capability. And this is really where RPA shines and is correctly applied. And especially in big businesses are highly regulated businesses where they can't upgrade to the newest thing, or they can't throw something to the cloud.They have a, you know, their mainframe systems or they have their database systems that have to exist for one reason or the other until there is the motivation and the money and the time to correctly migrate and, and solve for them. So until that day, and again, there's no, API to, to do anything on a, on a mainframe, in this bank or whatnot, it's like, well, Okay. let's just throw RPA on it.Let's, you know, let's have a RPA do this thing, uh, in the way that a human does it, but it can do it 24 7. and an example, or use cases, you work at a bank and, uh, there's no way that InfoSec is going to let you query against this database with, your users that have this account or your customers that have this no way in any organization at a bank.Is InfoSec going to say, oh yeah. sure. Let me give you an Odata query, you know, driver on, you know, and you can just set up your own SQL queries and do whatever they're gonna say no way. In fact, how did you find out about this database in the first place and who are you.How do we solve it? We, we go and say, Okay. how does the user get in here well they open up a mainframe emulator on their desktop, which shows them the mainframe. And then they go in, they click here and they put this number in there, and then they look up this customer and then they switch this value to that value and they say, save.And it's like, okay. cool. That's that RPA can do. And we can do that quite easily. And we don't need to talk about APIs and we don't need to talk about special access or doing queries that makes, you know, Infosec very scared. you know, a great use case for that is, you know, a bank say they, they acquire, uh, a regional bank and they say, cool, you're now part of our bank, but in your systems that are now going to be a part of our systems, you have users that have this value, whereas in our bank, that value is this value here. So now we have to go and change for 30,000 customers this one field to make it line up with our systems. Traditionally you would get a, you know, extract, transform load tool an ETL tool to kind of do that. But for 30,000 customers that might be below the threshold, and this is banking. So it's very regulated and you have to be very, very. Intentional about how you manipulate and move data around.So what do we have to do? okay. We have to hire 10 contractors for six months, and literally what they're going to do eight hours a day is go into the mainframe through the simulator and customer by customer. They're going to go change this value and hit save. And they're looking at an Excel spreadsheet that tells them what customer to go into.And that's going to cost X amount of money and X, you know, for six months, or what we could do is just build a RPA solution, a bot, essentially that goes, and for each line of that Excel spreadsheet, it repeats this one process, open up mainframe emulator, navigate into the customer profile and then changes value, and then shut down and repeat.And It can do that in one week and, and can be built in two, that's the, the dream use case for RPA and that's really kind of, uh, where it would shine.[00:15:20] Jeremy: It sounds like the. best use case for it is an old system, a mainframe system, in COBOL maybe, uh, doesn't have an API. And so, uh, it makes sense to rather than go, okay, how can we get directly into the database?[00:15:38] Alex: How can we build on top of it? Yeah,[00:15:40] Jeremy: we build on top of it? Let's just go through the, user interface that exists, but just automate that process. And, the, you know, the example you gave, it sounds very, very well-defined you're gonna log in and you're going to put in maybe this ID, here's the fields you want to get back.and you're going to save those and you didn't have to make any real decisions, I suppose, in, in terms of, do I need to click this thing or this thing it's always going to be the same path to, to get there.[00:16:12] Alex: exactly. And that's really, you need to be disciplined about your use cases and what those look like. And you can broadly say a use case that I am going to accept has these features, and one of the best ways to do that is say it has to be a binary decision process, which means there is no, dynamic or interpreted decision that needs to, or information that needs to be made.Exactly like that use case it's very binary either is, or it isn't you go in you journey into there. and you change that one thing and that's it there's no oh, well this information says this, which means, and then I have to go do this. Once you start getting in those if else, uh, processes you're, you're going down a rabbit hole and it could get very shaky and that introduces extreme instability in what you're trying to do.And also really expands your development time cause you have to capture these processes and you have to say, okay. tell me exactly what we need to build this bot to do. And for, binary decision processes, that's easy go in here, do this, but nine times out of 10, as you're trying to address this and solution for it, you'll find those uncertainties.You'll find these things where the business says, oh, well, yeah. that happens, you know, one times out of 10 and this is what we need to do. And it's like, well, that's going to break the bot. It, you know, nine times out of 10, this, this spot is going to fall over. this is now where we start getting into, the machine learning and AI, realm.And why RPA, is classified. Uh, sometimes as a subset of the AI or machine learning field, or is a, a pattern within that field is because now that you have this bot or this software that enables you to do a human process, let's enable that bot to now do decision-making processes where it can interpret something and then do something else.Because while we can just do a big tree to kind of address every capability, you're never going to be able to do that. And also it's, it's just a really heavy, bad way to build things. So instead let's throw in some machine learning capability where it just can understand what to do and that's, you know, that's the next level of RPA application is Okay. we've got it. We've, we've gone throughout our organization. We found every kind of binary thing, that can be replaced with an RPA bot. Okay.Now what are the ones that we said we couldn't do? Because it had some of that decision-making that, required too much of a dynamic, uh, intelligence behind it. And let's see if we can address those now that we have this. And so that's, that's the 2.0, in RPA is addressing those non-binary, paths. I would argue that especially in organizations that are big enough to justify bringing in an RPA solution to solve for their processes. They have enough binary processes, binary decision processes to keep them busy.Some people, kind of get caught up in trying to right out the gate, say, we need to throw some machine learning. We need to make these bots really capable instead of just saying, well, we we've got plenty of work, just changing the binary processes or addressing those. Let's just be disciplined and take that, approach.Uh, I will say towards RPA and bots, the best solution or the only solution. When you talk about building a bot is the one that you eventually turn off. So you can say, I built a bot that will go into our mainframe system and update this value. And, uh, that's successful.I would argue that's not successful. When that bot is successful is when you can turn it off because there's an enterprise solution that addresses it. and, and you don't have to have this RPA bot that lives over here and does it instead, you're enterprise, capability now affords for it. And so that's really, I think a successful bot or a successful RPA solution is you've been able to take away the pain point or that human process until it can be correctly addressed by your systems that everyone uses. [00:21:01] Jeremy: from, the business perspective, you know, what are some of the limitations or long-term problems with, with leaving an RPA solution in place?[00:21:12] Alex: that's a, that's a good question. Uh, from the business there, isn't, it's solved for. leaving it in place is other than just servicing it and supporting it. There's no real issue there, especially if it's an internal system, like a mainframe, you guys own that. If it changes, you'll know it, if it changes it's probably being fixed or addressed.So there's no, problem. However, That's not the only application for RPA. let's talk about another use case here, your organization, uses, a bank and you don't have an internal way to communicate it. Your user literally has to go to the bank's website, log in and see information that the bank is saying, Hey, this is your stuff, right?The bank doesn't have an API for their, that service. because that would be scary for the bank. They say, we don't want to expose this to another service. So the human has to go in there, log in, look at maybe a PDF and download it and say, oh, Okay.So that is happens in a browser. So it's a newer technology.This isn't our mainframe built in 1980. You know, browser based it's in the internet and all that, but that's still a valid RPA application, right? It's a human process. There's no API, there's no easy programmatic way to, to solution for it. It would require the bank and your it team to get together and, you know, hate each other. Think about why this, this is so hard. So let's just throw a bot on it. That's going to go and log in, download this thing from the bank's website and then send it over to someone else. And it's going to do that all day. Every day. That's a valid application. And then tomorrow the bank changes its logo. And now my bot is it's confused.Stuff has shifted on the page. It doesn't know where to click anymore. So you have to go in and update that bot because sure enough, that bank's not going to send out an email to you and saying, Hey, by the way, we're upgrading our website in two weeks. Not going to happen, you'll know after it's happened.So that's where you're going to have to upgrade the bot. and that's the indefinite use of RPA is going to have to keep until someone else decides to upgrade their systems and provide for a programmatic solution that is completely outside the, uh, capability of the organization to change. And so that's where the business would say, we need this indefinitely.It's not up to us. And so that is an indefinite solution that would be valid. Right? You can keep that going for 10 years as long, I would say you probably need to get a bank that maybe meets your business needs a little easier, but it's valid. And that would be a good way for the business to say yes, this needs to keep running forever until it doesn't.[00:24:01] Jeremy: you, you brought up the case of where the webpage changes and the bot doesn't work anymore. specifically, you're, you're giving the example of finance and I feel like it would be basically catastrophic if the bot is moving money to somewhere, it shouldn't be moving because the UI has moved around or the buttons not where it expects it to be.And I'm kind of curious what your experience has been with that sort of thing.[00:24:27] Alex: you need to set organizational thresholds and say, this is this something this impacting or something that could go this wrong. It is not acceptable for us to solve with RPA, even though we could do it, it's just not worth it. Some organizations say that's anything that touches customer data healthcare and banking specialists say, yeah, we have a human process where the human will go and issue refunds to a customer, uh, and that could easily be done via RPA solution, but it's fraught with, what, if it does something wrong, it's literally going to impact.Uh, someone somewhere they're their moneys or their, their security or something like that. So that, that definitely should be part of your evaluation. And, um, as an organization, you should set that up early and stick to it and say, Nope, this is outside our purview. Even we can do it. It has these things.So I guess the answer to that is you should never get to that process, but now we're going to talk about, I guess, the actual nuts and bolts of how RPA solutions work and how they can be made to not action upon stuff when it changes or if it does so RPA software, by and large operates by exposing the operating system or the browsers underlying models and interpreting them.Right. So when we talk about something like a, mainframe emulator, you have your RPA software on Microsoft windows. It's going to use the COM the component operating model, to see what is on the screen, what is on that emulator, and it's gonna expose those objects. to the software and say, you can pick these things and click on that and do that.when we're talking about browser, what the RPA software is looking at is not only the COM the, the component object model there, which is the browser, itself. But then it's also looking at the DOM the document object model that is the webpage that is being served through the browser. And it's exposing that and saying, these are the things that you can touch or, operate on.And so when you're building your bots, what you want to make sure is that the uniqueness of the thing that you're trying to access is something that is truly unique. And if it changes that one thing that the bot is looking for will not change. So we let's, let's go back to the, the banking website, right?We go in and we launch the browser and the bot is sitting there waiting for the operating system to say, this process is running, which is what you wanted to launch. And it is in this state, you know, the bot says, okay. I'm expecting this kind of COM to exist. I see it does exist. It's this process, and it has this kind of name and cool Chrome is running. Okay. Let's go to this website. And after I've typed this in, I'm going to wait and look at the DOM and wait for it to return this expected a webpage name, but they could change their webpage name, the title of it, right. They can say, one day can say, hello, welcome to this bank. And the next day it says bank website, all of a sudden your bot breaks it no longer is finding what it was told to expect.So you want to find something unique that will never change with that conceivably. And so you find that one thing on the DOM on the banking website, it's, you know, this element or this tag said, okay, there's no way they're changing that. And so it says cool the page is loaded. Now click on this field, which is log in.Okay. You want to find something unique on that field that won't change when they upgrade, you know, from bootstrap to this kind of, you know, UI framework. that's all well, and good. That's what we call the happy path. It's doing this perfectly. Now you need to define what it should do when it doesn't find these things, which is not keep going or find similar it's it needs to fail fast and gracefully and pass on that failure to someone and not keep going. And that's kind of how we prevent that scary use case where it's like. okay. it's gone in, it's logged into the bank website now it's transactioning, bad things to bad places that we didn't program it for it, Well you unfortunately did not specify in a detailed enough way what it needs to look for.And if it doesn't find that it needs to break, instead of saying that this is close enough. And so, in all things, software engineering, it's that specificity, it's that detail, that you need to hook onto. And that's also where, when we talk about this being a low-code no-code solutions that sometimes RPA is marketed to the business.It's just so often not the case, because yes. It might provide a very user, business, friendly interface for you to build bots. But the knowledge you need to be able to ensure stability and accuracy, um, to build the bots is, is a familiarity that's probably not going to be had in the business. It's going to be had by a developer who knows what the DOM and COM are and how the operating system exposes services and processes and how.JavaScript, especially when we're talking about single page apps and react where you do have this very reactive DOM, that's going to change. You need to be fluent with that and know, not only how HTML tags work and how CSS will change stuff on you in classes, but also how clicking on something on a single page app is as simple as a username input field will dynamically change that whole DOM and you need to account for it. so, it is it's, traditionally not as easy as saying, oh, the business person can just click, click, click, click, and then we have a bot. You'll have a bot, but it's probably going to be break breaking quite often. It's going to be inaccurate in its execution.this is a business friendly user-friendly non-technical tool. And I launch it and it says, what do you want to do? And it says, let me record what you're going to do. And you say, cool.And then you go about you open up Chrome and you type in the browser, and then you click here, click there, hit send, and then you stop recording. The tool says, cool, this is what you've done. Well, I have yet to see a, a solution that is that isn't able to not need further direction or, or defining on that process, You still should need to go in there and say, okay, yeah.you recorded this correctly, but you know, you're not interpreting correctly or as accurate as you need to that field that I clicked on.And if you know, anybody hits, you know, F12 on their keyboard while they have Chrome open and they see how the DOM is built, especially if this is using kind of any kind of template, Webpage software. It's going to have a lot of cruft in that HTML. So while yes, the recording did correctly see that you clicked on the input box.What it's actually seen is that you actually clicked on the div. That is four levels scoped above it, whereas the parent, and there are other things within that as well. And so the software could be correctly clicking on that later, but other things could be in there and you're going to get some instability.So the human or the business, um, bot builder, the roboticist, I guess, would need to say, okay, listen, we need to pare this down, but it's, it's even beyond that. There are concepts that you can't get around when building bots that are unique to software engineering as a concept. And even though they're very basic, it's still sometimes hard for the business user to, they felt to learn that.And I I'm talking concepts as simple as for loops or loops in general where the business of course has, has knowledge of what we would call a loop, but they wouldn't call it a loop and it's not as accurately defined. So they have to learn that. And it's not as easy as just saying, oh Yeah.do a loop. And the business will say, well, what's a loop.Like I know, you know, conceptually what a loop could be like a loop in my, when I'm tying my shoe. But when you're talking about loop, that's a very specific thing in software and what you can do. And when you shouldn't do it, and that's something that these, no matter how good your low code, no code solution might be, it's going to have to afford for that concept.And so a business user is still going to have to have some lower level capability to apply those concepts. And, and I I've yet to see anybody be able to get around that in their RPA solutions.[00:33:42] Jeremy: So in your experience, even though these vendors may sell it as being a tool that anybody can just sit down and use but then you would want a developer to, to sit with them or, or see the result and, and try and figure out, okay, what do you, what do you really want this, this code to do?Um, not just sort of these broad strokes that you were hoping the tool was gonna take care of for you? Yeah.[00:34:06] Alex: that that's exactly right. And that's how every organization will come to that realization pretty quickly. the head of the game ones have said, okay, we need to have a really good, um, COE structure to this robotic operating model where we can have, a software engineering, developer capability that sits with the business, capability.And they can, marry with each other, other businesses who may take, um, these vendors at their word and say, it's a low code meant for business. It just needs to make sure it's on and accessible. And then our business people are just gonna, uh, go in there and do this. They find out pretty quickly that they need some technical, um, guidance to go in because they're building unstable or inaccurate bots.and whether they come to that sooner or later, they, they always come to that. Um, and they realize that, okay, there there's a technical capability And, this is not just RPA. This is the story of all low-code no-code solutions that have ever existed. It always comes around that, while this is a great interface for doing that, and it's very easy and it makes concepts easy.Every single time, there is a technical capability that needs to be afforded. [00:35:26] Jeremy: For the. The web browser, you mentioned the DOM, which is how we typically interact with applications there. But for native applications, you, you briefly mentioned, COM. And I was wondering when someone is writing, um, you know, a bot, uh, what are the sorts of things they see, or what are the primitives they're working with?Like, is there a name attached to each button, each text, field, [00:35:54] Alex: wouldn't that be a great world to live in, so there's not. And, and, as we build things in the DOM. People get a lot better. We've seen people are getting much better about using uniqueness when they build those things so that they can latch onto when things were built or built for the COM or, you know, a .NET for OS that might, that was not no one no one was like oh yeah, we're going to automate this.Or, you know, we need to make this so that this button here is going to be unique from that button over there on the COM they didn't care, you know, different name. Um, so yeah, that is, that is sometimes a big issue when you're using, uh, an RPA solution, you say, okay. cool. Look at this, your calculator app. And Okay. it's showing me the component object model that this was built. It that's describing what is looking at, but none of these nodes have, have a name. They're all, you know, node one node, 1.1 node two, or, or whatnot, or button is just button and there's no uniqueness around it. And that is, you see a lot of that in legacy older software, um, E legacy is things built in 2005, 2010.Um, you do see that, and that's the difficulty at that point. You can still solve for this, but what you're doing is you're using send keys. So instead of saying, Okay.RPA software, open up this, uh, application and then look for. You know, thing, this object in the COM and click on it, it's going to, you know, it can't, there is no uniqueness.So what you say is just open up the software and then just hit tab three times, and that should get you to this one place that was not unique, but we know if you hit tab three times, it's going to get there now. That's all well and good, but there's so many things that could interfere with that and break it.And the there's no context for the bot to grab onto, to verify, Okay. I am there. So any one thing, you could have a pop-up which essentially hijacks your send key, right? And so the bot yes, absolutely hit tab three times and it should be in that one place. It thinks it is, and it hits in enter, but in between the first and second tab, a pop-up happened and now it's latched onto this other process, hits enter. And all of a sudden outlook's opening bot doesn't know that, but it's still going on and it's going to enter in some financial information into oops, an email that it launched because it thought hitting enter again would do so. Yeah.That's, that's where you get that instability. Um, there are other ways around it or other solutions.and this is where we get into the you're using, um, lower level software engineering solutioning instead of doing it exactly how the user does it. When we're talking about the operating system and windows, there are a ton of interop services and assemblies that a, uh, RPA solution can access.So instead of cracking open Excel, double-clicking on Excel workbook waiting for it to load, and then reading the information and putting information in, you can use the, you know, the office 365 or whatnot that, um, interop service assembly and say, Hey, launch this workbook without the UI, showing it, attach to that process that, you know, it is.And then just send to it, using that assembly send information into it. And the human user can't do that. It can't manipulate stuff like that, but the bot can, and it it's the same end as the human users trying. And it's much more efficient and stable because the UI couldn't afford for that kind of stability.So that would be a valid solution. But at that point, you're really migrating into a software engineering, it developer solution of something that you were trying not to do that for. So when is that? Why, you know, why not just go and solve for it with an enterprise or programmatic solution in the first place?So that's the balance. [00:40:18] Jeremy: earlier you're talking about the RPA needs to be something that, uh, that the person is able to do. And it sounds like in this case, I guess there still is a way for the person to do it. They can open up the, the Excel sheet and right it's just that the way the, the RPA tool is doing it is different. Yeah.[00:40:38] Alex: Right. And more efficient and more stable. Certainly. Uh, especially when we're talking about Excel, you have an Excel with, you know, 200,000 lines, just opening that that's, that's your day, that's going to Excel it, just going to take its time opening and visualizing that information for you. Whereas you, you know, an RPA solution doesn't even need to crack that open.Uh, it can just send data right directly to that workbook and it that's a valid solution. And again, some of these processes, it might be just two people at your organization that are essentially doing it. So it's, you know, you don't really, it's not at a threshold where you need an enterprise solution for it, but they're spending 30 minutes of their day just waiting for that Excel workbook to open and then manipulating the data and saving it.And then, oh, their computer crashed. So you can do an RPA solution. It's going to be, um, to essentially build for a more efficient way of doing it. And that would be using the programmatic solution, but you're right. It is doing it in a way that a human could not achieve it. Um, and that again is. The where the discipline and the organizational, aspect of this comes in where it's saying, is that acceptable?Is it okay to have it do things in this way, that are not human, but achieving the same ends. And if you're not disciplined that creeps, and all of a sudden you have a RPA solution that is doing things in a way that where the whole reason to bring that RPA solution is to not have something that did something like that. And that's usually where the stuff falls apart. IT all of a sudden perks their head up and says, wait, I have a lot of connections coming in from this one computer doing stuff very quickly with a, you know, a SQL query. It's like, what is going on? And so all of a sudden, someone built a bot to essentially do a programmatic connection.And it is like, you should not be who gave you this permissions who did this shut down everything that is RPA here until we figure out what you guys went and did. So that's, that's the dance. [00:42:55] Jeremy: it's almost like there's this hidden API or there's this API that you're not intended to use. but in the process of trying to automate this thing, you, you use it and then if your, IT is not aware of it, then things just kind of spiral out of control.[00:43:10] Alex: Exactly. Right. So let's, you know, a use case of that would be, um, we need to get California tax information on alcohol sales. We need to see what each county taxes for alcohol to apply to something. And so today the human users, they go into the California, you know, tobacco, wildlife, whatever website, and they go look up stuff and okay, let's, that's, that's very arduous.Let's throw a bot on that. Let's have a bot do that. Well, the bot developers, smart person knows their way around Google and they find out, well, California has an API for that. instead of the bot cracking open Chrome, it's just going to send this rest API call and it's going to get information back and that's awesome and accurate and way better than anything. but now all of a sudden IT sees connections going in and out. all of a sudden it's doing very quickly and it's getting information coming into your systems in a way that you did not know was going to be, uh, happening. And so while it was all well and good, it's, it's a good way for, the people whose job it is to protect yourself or know about these things, to get very, um, angry, rightly so that this is happening.that's an organizational challenge, uh, and it's an oversight challenge and it's a, it's a developer challenge because, what you're getting into is the problems with having too technical people build these RPA bots, right? So on one hand we have business people who are told, Hey, just crack this thing open and build it.And it's like, well, they don't have enough technical fluency to actually build a stable bot because they're just taking it at face value. Um, on the other hand, you have software engineers or developers that are very technical that say, oh, this process. Yeah. Okay. I can build a bot for that. But what if I used, you know, these interop services, assemblies that Microsoft gives me and I can access it like that.And then I can send an API call over here. And while I'm at it, I'm going to, you know, I'm just going to spin up a server just on this one computer that can do this. When the bot talks to it. And so you have the opposite problem. Now you have something that is just not at all RPA, it's just using the tool to, uh, you know, manipulate stuff, programmatically.[00:45:35] Jeremy: so, as a part of all this, is using the same credentials as a real user, right. You're you're logging in with a username and password. if the form requires something like two factor authentication or, you know, or something like that, like, how does that work since it's not an actual person?[00:45:55] Alex: Right. So in a perfect world, you're correct. Um, a bot is a user. I know a lot of times you'll hear, say, people will be like, oh, hi, I have 20 RPA bots. What they're usually saying is I have 20 automations that are being run for separate processes, with one user's credentials, uh, on a VDI. So you're right.They, they are using a user's credentials with the same permissions that any user that does that process has, that's why it's easy. but now we have these concepts, like two factor authentication, which every organization is using that should require something that exists outside of that bot users environment. And so how do you afford for that in a perfect world? It would be a service account, not a user account and service accounts are governed a little differently. A lot of times service accounts, um, have much more stringent rules, but also allow for things like password resets, not a thing, um, or two factor authentication is not a thing for those.So that would be the perfect solution, but now you're dragging in IT. Um, so, you know, if you're not structurally set up for that, that's going to be a long slog. Uh, so what would want to do some people actually literally have a, we'll have a business person that has their two factor auth for that bot user on their phone.And then just, you know, they'll just go in and say, yeah.that's me. that's untenable. So, um, sometimes what a lot of these, like Microsoft, for instance, allow you to do is to install a two factor authentication, application, um, on your desktop so that when you go to log in a website and says, Hey, type in your password.Cool. Okay. Give me that code. That's on your two factor auth app. The bot can actually launch that. Copy the code and paste it in there and be on its way. But you're right now, you're having to afford for things that aren't really part of the process you're trying to automate. They are the incidentals that also happen.And so you have to build your bot to afford for those things and interpret, oh, I need to do two factor authentication. And a lot of times, especially if you have an entirely business focused PA um, robotic operating model, they will forget about those things or find ways around them that the bot isn't addressing, like having that authenticator app on their phone.that's, um, stuff that definitely needs to be addressed. And sometimes is only, found at runtime like, oh, it's asking for login. And when I developed it, I didn't need to do that because I had, you know, the cookie that said you're good for 30 days, but now, oh, no. [00:48:47] Jeremy: yeah. You could have two factor. Um, you could have, it asking you to check your email for a code. There could be a fraud warning. There's like all sorts of, you know, failure cases that can happen. [00:48:58] Alex: exactly. And those things are when we talk about, uh, third-party vendors, um, third-party provider vendors, like going back to the banking website, if you don't tell them that you're going to be using a bot to get their information or to interface with that website, you're setting yourself up for a bad time because they're going to see that kind of at runtime behavior that is not possible at scale by user.And so you run into that issue at runtime, but then you're correct. There are other things that you might run into at runtime that are not again, part of the process, the business didn't think that that was part of the process. It's just something they do that actually the bot has to afford for. that's part of the journey, uh, in building these. [00:49:57] Jeremy: when you're, when you're building these, these bots, what are the types of tools that, that you've used in the past? Are these commercial, packages, are these open source? Like what, what does that ecosystem look like?[00:50:11] Alex: Yeah, in this space, we have three big ones, which is, uh, automation anywhere UI path and, blue prism. Those are the RPA juggernauts providing this software to the companies that need it. And then you have smaller ones that are, trying to get in there, or provide stuff in a little different way. and you even have now, big juggernauts that are trying to provide for it, like Microsoft with something like power automate desktop.So all of these, say three years ago, all of these softwares existed or all of these RPA solution softwares existed or operated in the same kind of way, where you would install it on your desktop. And it would provide you a studio to either record or define, uh, originally the process that was going to be automated on that desktop when you pushed play and they all kind of expose or operate in the same way they would interpret the COM or the DOM that the operating system provided. Things like task scheduler have traditionally, uh, exposed, uh, and they all kind of did that in the same way. Their value proposition in their software was the orchestration capability and the management of that.So I build a bot to do this, Jim over there built a bot to do that. Okay. This RPA software, not only enabled you to define those processes, But what their real value was is they enable a place where I can say this needs to run at this time on this computer.And it needs to, you know, I need to be able to monitor it and it needs to return information and all that kind of orchestration capability. Now all of these RPA solutions actually exist in that, like everything else in the browser. So instead of installing, you know, the application and launching it and, and whatnot, and the orchestration capability being installed on another computer that looked at these computers and ran stuff on them.Now it's, it's all in the cloud as it were, and they are in the browser. So I go to. Wherever my RPA solution is in my browser. And then it says, okay, cool. You, you still need to install something on the desktop where you want the spot to run and it deploys it there. But I define and build my process in the provided browser studio.And then we're going to give you a capability to orchestrate, monitor, and, uh, receive information on those things that you have, those bots that you have running, and then what they're now providing as well is the ability to tie in other services to your bot so that it has expanded capability. So I'm using automation anywhere and I built my bot and it's going, and it's doing this or that.And automation anywhere says, Hey, that's cool. Wouldn't you like your bot to be able to do OCR? Well, we don't have our own OCR engine, but you probably as an enterprise do. Just use, you know, use your Kofax OCR engine or Hey, if you're really a high speed, why don't you use your Azure cognitive services capability?We'll tie it right into our software. And so when you're building your bot, instead of just cracking open a PDF and send key control C and key control V to do stuff instead, we'll use your OCR engine that you've already paid for to, to understand stuff. And so that's, how they expand, what they're offering, um, into addressing more and more capabilities.[00:53:57] Alex: But now we're, we're migrating into a territory where it's like, well, things have APIs why even build a bot for them. You know, you can just build a program that uses the API and the user can drive this. And so that's where people kind of get stuck. It's they they're using RPA on a, something that just as easily provides for a programmatic solution as opposed to an RPA solution.but because they're in their RPA mode and they say, we can use a bot for everything, they don't even stop and investigate and say, Hey, wouldn't this be just as easy to generate a react app and let a user use this because it has an API and IT can just as easily monitor and support that because it's in an Azure resource bucket.that's where an organization needs to be. Clear-eyed and say, Okay. at this point RPA is not the actual solution. We can do this just as easy over here and let's pursue that. [00:54:57] Jeremy: the experience of making these RPAs. It sounds like you have this browser-based IDE, there's probably some kind of drag and drop set up, and then you, you, you mentioned JavaScript. So I suppose, does that mean you can kind of dive a little bit deeper and if you want to set up specific rules or loops, you're actually writing that in JavaScript.[00:55:18] Alex: Yeah. So not, not necessarily. So, again, the business does not know what an IDE is. It's a studio. Um,so that's, but you're correct. It's, it's an IDE. Um, each, whether we're talking about blue prism or UiPath or automation anywhere, they all have a different flavor of what that looks like and what they enable.Um, traditionally blue prism gave you, uh, a studio that was more shape based where you are using UML shapes to define or describe your process. And then there you are, whereas automation anywhere traditionally used, uh, essentially lines or descriptors. So I say, Hey, I want to open this file. And your studio would just show a line that said open file.You know, um, although they do now, all of them have a shape based way to define your process. Go here, here. You know, here's a circle which represents this. Uh, let's do that. Um, or a way for you to kind of more, um, creatively define it in a, like a text-based way. When we talk about Java script, um, or anything like that, they provide predefined actions, all of them saying, I want to open a file or execute this that you can do, but all of them as well, at least last time I checked also allow you for a way to say, I want to programmatically run something I want to define.And since they're all in the browser, it is, uh, you know, Javascript that you're going to be saying, Hey, run this, this JavaScript, run this function. Um, previously, uh, things like automation anywhere would, uh, let you write stuff in, in .NET essentially to do that capability. But again, now everything's in the browser.So yeah, they do, They do provide for a capability to introduce more low level capability to your automation. That can get dangerous. Uh, it can be powerful and it can be stabilizing, but it can be a very slippery slope where you have an RPA solution bot that does the thing. But really all it does is it starts up and then executes code that you built.[00:57:39] Alex: Like what, what was the, the point in the first place? [00:57:43] Jeremy: Yeah. And I suppose at that point, then anybody who knows how to use the RPA tool, but isn't familiar with that code you wrote, they're just, they can't maintain it [00:57:54] Alex: you have business continuity and this goes back to our, it has to be replicable or close as close to the human process, as you can make. Because that's going to be the easiest to inherit and support. That's one of the great things about it. Whereas if you're a low level programmer, a dev who says, I can easily do this with a couple of lines of, you know, dot net or, you know, TypeScript or whatever.And so the bot just starts up in executes. Well, unless someone that is just as proficient comes along later and says, this is why it's breaking you now have an unsupportable business, solution. that's bad Juju. [00:58:38] Jeremy: you have the software engineers who they want to write code. then you have the people who are either in business or in IT that go, I don't want to look at your code.I don't want to have to maintain it. Yeah. So it's like you almost, if you're a software engineer coming in, you almost have to fight that urge to, to write anything yourself and figure out, okay, what can I do with the tool set and only go to code if I can't do it any other way.[00:59:07] Alex: That's correct. And that's the, it takes discipline. more often than not, not as fun as writing the code where you're like, I can do this. And this is really where the wheels come off is. You went to the business that is that I have this process, very simple. I need to do this and you say, cool, I can do that.And then you're sitting there writing code and you're like, but you know what? I know what they really want to do. And I can write that now. And so you've changed the process and while it is, and nine times out of 10, the business will be like, oh, that's actually what we wanted. The human process was just as close as we could get nothing else, but you're right.That's, that's exactly what we needed. Thank you nine times out of 10. They'll love you for that. But now you own their process. Now you're the one that defined it. You have to do the business continuity. You have to document it. And when it falls over, you have to pick it back up and you have to retrain.And unless you have an organizational capacity to say, okay, I've gone in and changed your process. I didn't automate it. I changed it. Now I have to go in and tell you how I changed it and how you can do it. And so that, unless you have built your robotic operating model and your, your team to afford for that, your developer could be writing checks bigger than they can cash.Even though this is a better capability. [01:00:30] Jeremy: you, you sort of touched on this before, and I think this is probably the, the last topic we'll cover, but you've been saying how the end goal should be to not have to use the RPAs anymore And I wonder if you have any advice for how to approach that process and, and what are some of the mistakes you've seen people make[01:00:54] Alex: Mm Hmm. I mean the biggest mistake I've seen organizations make, I think is throwing the RPA solution out there, building bots, and they're great bots, and they are creating that value. They're enabling you to save money and also, enabling your employees to go on and do better, more gratifying work. but then they say, that's, it that's as far as we're going to think, instead of taking those savings and saying, this is for replacing this pain point that we had to get a bot in the first place to do so.That's a huge common mistake. Absolutely understandable if I'm a CEO or even, you know, the person in charge of, you know, um, enterprise transformation. Um, it's very easy for me to say, ha victory, here's our money, here's our savings. I justified what we've done. Go have fun. Um, and instead of saying, we need to squirrel this money away and give it to the people that are going to change the system. So that, that's definitely one of the biggest things.The problem with that is that's not realized until years later when they're like, oh, we're still supporting these bots. So it is upfront having a turnoff strategy. When can we turn this bot off? What is that going to look like? Does it have a roadmap that will eventually do that?And that I think is the best way. And that will define what kind of processes you do indeed build bots for is you go to it and say, listen, we've got a lot of these user processes, human processes that are doing this stuff. Is there anything on your roadmap that is going to replace that and they say, oh yeah you know, in three years we're actually going to be standing up our new thing.We're going to be converting. And part of our, uh, analysis of the solution that we will eventually stand up will be, does it do these things? And so yes, in three years, you're good. And you say, cool, those are the processes I'm going to automate and we can shut those off. That's your point of entry for these things not doing that leads to bots running and doing things even after there is a enterprise solution for that. And more often than not, I would say greater than five times out of 10, when we are evaluating a process to build a bot for easily five times out of 10, we say, whoa, no, actually there's, you don't even need to do this.Our enterprise application can do this. you just need retraining, because your process is just old and no one knew you were doing this. And so they didn't come in and tell you, Hey, you need to use this.So that's really a lot of times what, what the issue is. And then after that, we go in and say, Okay.no, there's, there's no solution for this. This is definitely a bot needs to do this. Let's make sure number one, that there isn't a solution on the horizon six months to a year, because otherwise we're just going to waste time, but let's make sure there is, or at least IT, or the people in charge are aware that this is something that needs to be replaced bot or no bot.And so let's have an exit strategy. Let's have a turn-off strategy. When you have applications that are relatively modern, like you have a JIRA, a ServiceNow, you know, they must have some sort of API and it may just be that nobody has come in and told them, you just need to plug these applications together.[01:04:27] Alex: And so kind of what you're hitting on and surfacing is the future of RPA. Whereas everything we're talking about is using a bot to essentially bridge a gap, moving data from here to there that can't be done, programmatically. Accessing something from here to there that can't be done programmatically.So we use a bot to do it. That's only going to exist for so long. Legacy can only be legacy for so long, although you can conceivably because we had that big COBOL thing, um, maybe longer than we we'd all like, but eventually these things will be. upgraded. and so either the RPA market will get smaller because there's less legacy out there.And so RPA as a tool and a solution will become much more targeted towards specific systems or we expand what RPA is and what it can afford for. And so that I think is more likely the case. And that's the future where bots or automations aren't necessary interpreting the COM and the DOM and saying, okay, click here do that.But rather you're able to quickly build bots that utilize APIs that are built in and friendly. And so what we're talking about there is things like Appian or MuleSoft, which are these kind of API integrators are eventually going to be classified as RPA. They're going to be within this realm.And I think, where, where you're seeing that at least surfaced or moving towards is really what Microsoft's offering in that, where they, uh, they have something called power automate, which essentially is it just a very user-friendly way to access API. that they built or other people have built.So I want to go and I need to get information to service now, service now has an API. Yeah. Your, IT can go in and build you a nice little app that does a little restful call to it, or a rest API call to it gets information back, or you can go in and, you know, use Microsoft power automate and say, okay, I want to access service now.And it says, cool. These are the things you can do. And I say, okay, I just want to put information in this ticket and we're not talking about get or patch or put, uh, or anything like that. We're just saying, ah, that's what it's going to do. And that's kind of what Microsoft is, is offering. I think that is the new state of RPA is being able to interface in a user-friendly way with APIs. Cause everything's in the browser to the point. where, you know, Microsoft's enabling add ins for Excel to be written in JavaScript, which is just the new frontier. Um, so that's, that's kind of going to be the future state of this. I believe. [01:07:28] Jeremy: so, so moving from RPAs being this thing, that's gonna click through website, click through, um, a desktop application instead it's maybe more of this high, higher level tool where the user will still get this, I forget the term you used, but this tool to build a workflow, right. A studio. Okay. Um, and instead of saying, oh, I want this to click this button or fill in this form.It'll be, um, I want to get this information from service now. And I want to send a message using that information to slack or to Twilio, or, um, you're basically, talking directly to these different services and just telling it what you want and where it should go.[01:08:14] Alex: That's correct. So, as you said, everything's going to have an API, right? Seemingly everything has an API. And so instead of us, our RPA bots or solutions being UI focused, they're going to be API focused, um, where it doesn't have to use the user interface. It's going to use the other service. And again, the cool thing about APIs in that way is that it's not, directly connecting to your data source.It's the same as your UI for a user. It sits on top of it. It gets the request and it correctly interprets that. And does it the same thing with your UI where I say I click here and you know, wherever it says. okay. yeah. You're allowed to do that. Go ahead. So that's kind of that the benefit to that.Um, but to your point, the, the user experience for whether you're using a UI or API to build up RPA bot, it's going to be the same experience for the user. And then at this point, what we're talking about, well, where's the value offering or what is the value proposition of RPA and that's orchestration and monitoring and data essentially.we'll take care of hosting these for you. we'll take care of where they're going to run, uh, giving you a dashboard, things like that.[01:09:37] Alex: That's a hundred percent correct. It's it's providing a view into that thing and letting the business say, I want to no code this. And I want to be able to just go in and understand and say, oh, I do want to do that. I'm going to put these things together and it's going to automate this business process that I hate, but is vital, and I'm going to save it, the RPA software enables you to say, oh, I saw they did that. And I see it's running and everything's okay in the world and I want to turn it on or off. And so it's that seamless kind of capability that that's what that will provide. And I think that's really where it isn't, but really where it's going. Uh, it'll be interesting to see when the RPA providers switch to that kind of language because currently and traditionally they've gone to business and said, we can build you bots or no, no, your, your users can build bots and that's the value proposition they can go in.And instead of writing an Excel where you had one very, very advanced user. Building macros into Excel with VBA and they're unknown to the, the IT or anybody else instead, you know, build a bot for it. And so that's their business proposition today. Instead, it's going to shift, and I'd be interested to see when it shifts where they say, listen, we can provide you a view into those solutions and you can orchestrate them in, oh, here's the studio that enables people to build them.But really what you want to do is give that to your IT and just say, Hey, we're going to go over here and address business needs and build them. But don't worry. You'll be able to monitor them and at least say, yeah okay. this is, this is going.[01:11:16] Jeremy: Yeah. And that's a, a shift. It sounds like where RPA is currently, you were talking about how, when you're configuring them to click on websites and GUIs, you really do still need someone with the software expertise to know what's going on. but maybe when you move over to communicating with API, Um, maybe that won't be as important maybe, somebody who just knows the business process really can just use that studio and get what they need.[01:11:48] Alex: that's correct. Right. Cause the API only enables you to do what it defined right. So service now, which does have a robust API, it says you can do these things the same as a user can only click a button that's there that you've built and said they can click. And so that is you can't go off the reservation as easy with that stuff, really what's going to become prime or important is as no longer do I actually have an Oracle server physically in my location with a database.Instead I'm using Oracle's cloud capability, which exists on their own thing. That's where I'm getting data from. What becomes important about being able to monitor these is not necessarily like, oh, is it falling over? Is it breaking? It's saying, what information are you sending or getting from these things that are not within our walled garden.And that's really where, it or the P InfoSec is, is going to be maybe the main orchestrator owner of RPA, because they're, they're going to be the ones to say you can't, you can't get that. You're not allowed to get that information. It's not necessarily that you can't do it. Um, and you can't do it in a dangerous way, but it's rather, I don't want you

If you look on Twitter or do a quick Google search, you'll find a ton of chatter about the foolproof DTC playbook. Everyone has ideas about the surefire ways that young DTC brands should be setting themselves up for success. Alex Kubo is here to tell you that those playbooks aren't as written in stone as you might think. Alex is the VP of ecommerce and digital marketing at Burrow, a DTC furniture brand, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he explained how and why the Burrow team threw out the playbook when certain aspects of it fell flat. For example, Alex talks about the lessons they learned about the signals that pricing sends, and why it's critical to put the right price on your product to attract the right customer even if that means pricing higher than the playbook says. Alex also dives into what it means to actually be customer centric and how Burrow stays in constant communication with customers. Plus, we discuss why marketing toward buying events or using a spray and pray strategy across a dozen channels is about as useful as setting your money on fire. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Sending The Right Signals: How you price your product or service is one of the most significant ways you signal to customers who you are as a brand and what value you bring. If you price too low, you risk being lumped in with brands that don't necessarily fit with the type of products or value you bring to the table.More Than Words: Saying you are customer-centric and actually being customer-centric are two very different things. To be truly customer-centric requires regularly talking to and learning from your customers and then building experiences and products based on those conversations. You can't just assume you know what customers want, you have to do the work to find out.A Horse of a Different Color: There are best practices and guidelines that many companies follow to get themselves off the ground. Sometimes those playbooks work, but in other cases, you have to toss out what everyone says is the right strategy and go in a new direction. Whether that's in your social strategy, your pricing, or how you're getting feedback from customers, don't be afraid to buck tradition and do something different.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome to Up Next In Commerce. I'm your host Stephanie Postles, CEO at mission.org. Today on the show, we have Alex Kubo joining us, who currently serves as the VP of E-Commerce and Digital Marketing at Burrow. Alex, welcome.Alex:Thanks, Stephanie. Excited to be here.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm very excited to have you here. It was cool reading a bit about Burrow's background and starting at Y Combinator, and I was thinking it might be fun to start there, back in 2016. What did it look like starting the company, and then we can get into today?Alex:Totally. So, I was fortunate that I actually met the two co-founders of Burrow while were on the same business school program in Philadelphia. And back in the fall of 2015, actually, Kabeer and Stephen, the two co-founders and my classmates were both furnishing their apartments as they moved into Philadelphia for the program, and they had two very distinct but related experiences. Kabeer purchased a sofa from West Elm in Philly, and it wasn't going to arrive for about 12 to 16 weeks, which I think, nowadays, people are pretty used to seeing those timelines, but Originally, it was like, "Whoa, this is not Amazon." And so, Kabeer actually used the cart, the dolly in his apartment building and rolled it to West Elm, and picked up a floor model and brought it home, because the lead time was going to be longer than his first semester, so obviously, that was not going to be a great experience.Alex:Stephen went the classic IKEA route, right, where you don't come in to grad school with a ton of money and need to furnish your space quickly. And so he did that, and then ultimately, it's a waste down the road, right? IKEA furniture, you can't move because of the quality of the materials and that sort of thing.Stephanie:[crosstalk]. Yeah.Alex:Yeah. So, the question ultimately became, why can't you have that higher end quality that you might find at a West Elm, or Pottery Barn, or Crate and Barrel, but the convenience, the modern day conveniences that Amazon has made the default expectation of consumers, so fast, and free shipping, and easy delivery process, and be able to modularize that design so that you can set it up and not have to deal with like the IKEA hex key or any of these really cumbersome assembly processes? And so, that concept was born. And out of that came a series of product innovation that ultimately, Stephen and Kabeer got into Y Combinator with just a pitch deck and no product and used that accelerator to develop the product, to prototype the product, and ship it.Alex:A funny little anecdote is that from the time they incorporated the company to the time they shipped their first product was shorter than the period of time that West Elm quoted Kabeer to ship his first couch.Stephanie:Oh, wow. That's great.Alex:Yeah.Stephanie:And what were you doing when they were going through Y Combinator?Alex:I was actually working on my own concept in the health and fitness space and ended up calling time on it right towards the end of the summer because of a number of challenges that I was having on my end, and joined up with Stephen and Kabeer to help build out the demand side of the business. And I had a relatively intimate knowledge of the business and where they were at because we were in all the same classes working on our own businesses. And I had helped them tangentially with sourcing components during our first year of the program, because I have a background in mechanical engineering and they didn't have any background in physical hardware. And so, there was already the groundwork for relationship. And then I was trying to move my own discipline into more of a consumer facing and ground level marketing and product marketing role, so it actually made a lot of sense.Alex:So, we set it up as a brief relationship to make sure that the working relationship was there, which it turned out very quickly, it was. So, I have been tasked or had been tasked with basically just building demand and ran with it since.Stephanie:So, since then, what does the world look like now compared to when you started and you were building up demand? I mean, I'm sure you guys were trying out Facebook and all the traditional platforms that everyone's like, "Every brand should be on Instagram and Facebook, and if you're not here, where are you?" What did it look like then and now?Alex:So, now it's a much more disciplined and much more properly positioned business than it was in the beginning. Two critical mistakes that were good healthy mistakes to make in the early days were, number one, brand positioning and product positioning. We had this idea in our head that... and sort of the classic Warby Parker pricing story of like, they wanted to price it $45, but their advisors and professors advised them not to do that because it would signal the wrong value to the customer. We had a similar experience where, for some reason in our heads, we had to price our couch under $1,000. And we made that decision because we wanted to be hyper competitive on price and make it the default, obvious solution.Alex:The problem that we failed to acknowledge is that consumers nowadays have very limited time to understand the differences and nuances between products. They're not stupid, they're not lazy, but they do have very limited time. And so, you have to be very clear and explicit with them, and part of that is signaling. And one of the most powerful parts of marketing that I think is most often overlooked is a focus on pricing and what that does from a positioning standpoint.Alex:When a lot of shoppers were seeing our product under $1,000 and the fact that it shipped in boxes, which we were very forward with, because we focus so much on the attributes of the product and less on the experience around it, which is another step in our evolution, that people immediately equated those two things, low price and ships in boxes, with a more expensive version of IKEA. So, then it was us talking to IKEA shoppers, and you're not going to convince an IKEA shopper to spend another 300, $400 on a sofa, right? What you need to do is talk to the West Elm shopper, the Pottery Barn shopper, the Crate and Barrel shopper.Alex:So, we actually, for a number reasons, increased prices in late 2017, about half a year after we launched.Stephanie:How much did you increase them by?Alex:Originally, the sofa was priced at 950. By the way, much different cogs, profile as well, at that point. We increased the price to 1,095 to start. So, it was a pretty meaningful difference on a percentage basis, and especially when you talk about margins.Alex:Interestingly enough, everything you learned in microeconomics about the relationship with the supply and demand curves went out the window, because we increased the price and demand shot through the roof.Stephanie:Wow. Did you get it in front of new people? What else were you doing to get it-Alex:I mean, we were doing a lot of the same things in terms of building full funnel architecture on paid social and paid search and that sort of thing, and again, applying a lot of those early D2C playbook type approaches, which ultimately turned out to not be the best approach for us. But nothing changed substantially from a marketing perspective. We were still reaching a lot of the same people, it's just that we were now signaling to those people that we belonged in the comparison set with a higher quality piece of furniture. That helps also, because a lot of our value props, it's much easier to convince somebody who has shopped at one of these higher end brands and had to wait super long or had to go to a showroom and deal with a frustrating shopping experience with this overbearing sales associate, pay for shipping, and ultimately, have to be home to get a piece of furniture delivered, and either take a day off from work. Again, much different world back then than it was today.Alex:But it's much easier to talk to those kinds of people who've experienced those pain points and tell them, "I'm going to take all of that pain away," than it is to talk to somebody who's never experienced those pain points and doesn't need the higher quality piece of furniture, again, the IKEA shopper, and talk to them about all these future pain points that they've never experienced but that we can help them avoid. That's maybe one of the biggest lessons learned, is that people do not think much about the future. They're often very, very focused on the present. And so, as much as you want to talk about why you should go to the doctor every year, why should you should go to the dentist every six months, it's like, people are not going to react until they have a problem.Alex:So, we've experimented a bunch with what is the leading value prop. So, we talked to consumers, and one of the ones that we talked about very early was this concept of modularity and how, when you move into your next apartment, you can just purchase another seat instead of buying a whole new sofa to accommodate the new space, or rearrange the existing configuration that you have to fit the new space requirements. Problem is, people are not thinking about that. They don't really care. They can't think that far in advance of two to three to four years down the road when moving into the next apartment. And so, we've deprioritized that in terms of communication and lead with other things that are more immediate, like fast and free shipping.Stephanie:Yeah. Got it. So, you're mentioning earlier that the D2C playbook didn't work for you guys, where now, even these days, you can search that and you'll find a bunch of the playbooks and people are still saying like, "This is what you need to do to be successful." What were some other things that you did back then that you completely reversed and you were like, "This doesn't work for us"?Alex:Yeah. So, I think, first, was not acknowledging how complex and lengthy the shopping journey is for a piece of furniture online. Obviously, it's a big investment, it's also mutually exclusive with something else, your home, right? Let alone the high price, you're not going to just buy another couch when you have an existing one in your home, right? You need to think about getting that out or you have to do it right at the right moment with a moving event or something like that.Alex:So, the first thing that we had to realize is that what we can't do is architect our funnel around existing attribution technology or just rely on optimizing towards purchase events in digital channels. What we had to do is to look upstream and find correlations and causation between different upstream, midstream, and bottom stream events to really architect a healthy full funnel. And so, most of our campaigns are not architected towards purchase events, they're architected towards or optimized towards something more upstream.Stephanie:[crosstalk] for a couple examples.Alex:Yeah. I guess one interesting one that we've learned over time is there's a pretty clear correlation between add to cart and purchase, and the cart abandonment rate is relatively steady. We do things over time, obviously, to improve that, but it's not something that fluctuates wildly over time. And so, one of the things we can do is just optimize towards an add to cart versus a purchase.Alex:The other benefit of that is it often can happen in the first session. So, when you see a lot of the privacy restrictions right now and a lot of the issues with cookies going away and that sort of thing, it helps us. We've actually always been architected to bear that burden a little bit better than some of our other D2C peers.Alex:And then the other thing, besides the purchase journey, was also that we were just doing way too many things at once. We had, and we still have today, a very lean team. The difference between now and then is that back then, we thought the best approach was to spray as wide as we possibly could and activate 10 to 15 channels with me managing all of them, by the way, and not doing a good job.Stephanie:It sounds very chaotic and not fun.Alex:Yeah. Not at all, not at all. And only until we really peeled back and just focused on a handful of things and did them really, really well, that's when we actually started churning results, but more importantly, honestly, that's when we started actually learning what was working. Because previously, we were just spending a lot of money, we were generating sales, but we didn't really have a clear idea of where they were coming from, again, because the purchase journey was so complex, right? It wasn't a problem that we could solve by just putting an attribution layer in somewhere. We had to really hyper focus on one or two things and do them really, really well.Alex:The concept of growth in the past has generally been focused on the top line. And what that means, often, for a lot of companies, is to just go into as many different channels and try to tap into as many different demographics as you possibly can and then find out what's working and what's not working. I think the issue is that the broader investment community has wisened up to that, right, and they're holding us more accountable on a unit economics and customer economics level, versus just month over month top line growth, which in reality, it's just a vanity metric, right?Alex:So, it is more favorable to take a more disciplined approach, albeit potentially slower top line growth, to really uncover those median sites that you can actually build a solid foundation on and grow a real, scalable, profitable company on versus just something that's just, scaling wildly at the top one but in reality it's just lighting money on fire.Stephanie:So, for a higher priced product like Burrow and a longer buying cycle, what platforms would you advise other brands to look at and optimize for and which ones would you pull back from?Alex:Yeah. So, I think if you acknowledge that it is, there are a lot of things that people have to learn about the product, a lot of things that people have to get comfortable with and confident in the purchase. You think that a lot of these shorter form mediums, like paid social, paid search, right? It's just a quick second and a half interaction with an ad, they're not going to be as effective for a product like ours, and that's true. What we have indexed up on are things that are more storytelling mediums. So, the earliest insight into this was we partnered with a small podcast in late 2017, and it's sort of one of those micro ones, it's not on a network, and just talks about fantasy football. And we just got introduced to the gentleman that runs it, and did a small test, and the results were incredible.Alex:Part of what we've learned over time from that point, rapidly scaled the podcast program for us is that it's highly dependent on the host, and the reason that it's highly dependent on a host is because the efficacy of that channel comes from the quality of the storytelling. And that is really what benefits our brand, is that if we go and we send a podcast host a product and they have the same amazing experience that our customers have, they can talk about it in a much more authentic way, but also, a much more individual way. We've actually matured to not providing very detailed scripts to a lot of our podcasts hosts and just telling them to talk about what has been most exciting for you, and that really brings out the energy in the advocacy for the brand from the host. So, I'd say it's really about focusing on storytelling mediums. So, I lumped other video, long form video into that as well. A little bit less of authenticity, but also helps communicate a lot of these little value props that add up to the major value proposition.Stephanie:So, the other thing that comes to mind is branded content. I mean, I'm thinking about something like Formula One where now the results are out, everyone knows it worked really well for them. It was very, I would think, pretty organic, didn't feel like it was just a brand push. How are you guys thinking about other kinds of content like this?Alex:I don't know if we're at the stage yet where we can start thinking about that sort of thing. I think that Formula One is a great example of taking two powerhouses and linking them together where the sum is greater than or the whole is greater than the some of the parts. So, we're thinking a little bit less about something like that and creating more on a micro scale, I would say, brand and content.Alex:So, when you talk about something like the influencer arena, I am probably the biggest advocate against using influencers in the context that they are used today. And first of all, just to clarify, a true influencer is not somebody that says, "I'm an influencer" on their Instagram profile description, right? A true influencer is somebody that can speak to a community and elicit a response, and often, within a specific category, right? So, I'm not going to give a beauty "influencer" a furniture product and expect him or her to have an outsized impact on the sales.Stephanie:Stephanie:So, you'd focus on the niche influencer who might only have 1,500 followers or something, which is something I think I talked about early on this show, of going through the comments of Instagrammers and seeing, are the people in there asking, "Where can I buy that? Where did you get that from?" Or are they just like, "That's great. Cool. I love that." What kind of engagement are you getting will show if that person has influential power over their community or not.Alex:Totally, totally. And obviously, it's going to vary by a vertical too. This is sort of an extreme example, right? Again, going back to the very considered purchase, even our ability to measure the impact of that is going to be super limited. So, we've actually leaned into the influencer community for, more so is, partnering with actually photography influencers. One of the bottlenecks and problems with our vertical is that our products are very large and our photo shoots and video shoots require massive studios and massive crews that are very, very expensive. Meanwhile, all of these people out there that can already take great pictures and already have really interesting homes need furniture. And so, we can often partner with them in a much more economically scalable way to get a huge diversity and huge volume of content created that can showcase different styles, different aesthetics, different home types, and different personalities, and just build this library of content instead of having to book homes ourselves and go through the whole production process.Alex:So, we've actually been doing that for a while just purely based on economic reasons. But it's interesting to see that now, I think there's going to be a massive shift towards organic for a number of other reasons. When you talk about a lot of the privacy regulations that are going on right now, over the last 10 years, the control of the voice or the conversation has shifted towards the consumer and towards the user. You see like case examples of this with like GameStop, for example. The retail investor just had a massive impact on the market from such a small player, right? Because the control of the conversation momentum is shifting away from the brands that have the big budgets and towards the customers that have the voice, the authentic following.Stephanie:That's the influencer of the year right there.Alex:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:And Reddit. And that's probably where all the other influencers are, an area that I haven't even thought to go, but we've had guests come on previously where Reddit is how they figured out how to build their business, which I haven't even thought to go there. Alex:Totally, totally. I mean, it makes total sense, right? It's experts that are talking because they're passionate about what they're talking about, right, not because they have a vested interest or they are trying to make money off of it, then that's where you get that authentic content from and the actual truth.Stephanie:So, how do you go about incentivizing that or structuring it so it can come in? Because I'm sure a lot of brands are like, "I want my customers to talk about me and take pictures and do all the things," and then they just sit there and nothing comes in. So, what are you doing behind the scenes to make that happen?Alex:So, it's less about focusing so much effort on trying to elicit that response just by trying to elicit it and more about really focusing on that product innovation and that experience that will naturally have that effect on people, right? You don't want somebody to talk about your product in a positive way because you're paying them to talk about it in a positive way, you want them to really advocate, because that means that not only are they talking on the channel that you want them to talk about it, they're also having side conversations. And when people come over to their homes and they're asking, "Wow, where did you get that beautiful sofa from?" They are talking not just about, "Oh, I got it from Burrow," they're also saying like, "And it happens to have these stain resistant fabrics, and it has all of these great other materials, and it was modular, and it was super easy to get it delivered and get it set up." And that's what you really want to go off of.Alex:So, I would say the biggest focus should be on nailing that product innovation and nailing that customer experience, and that's how you can count on that customer conversation to be generated rather than trying to chase down your customers and get them to talk about it in a less authentic way.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. I think that the days when people on Amazon are like, "I got paid for this review," or something, those will be gone very soon, because I don't know about you, but every time I go through a threat and I see that, I'm like, "Don't trust you, don't trust you." I just want to see the normal person who's reviewing it at their own goodwill, or not, maybe they're mad, but I want that. I don't want someone saying, "I got a free product for this review." That just seems like those days are gone.Alex:Yeah, totally, totally.Stephanie:So, the other thing I want to talk about is product development. I saw that your co-founder and CEO said, "Every single product we've ever launched has exceeded expectations and projections, and that's a testament to our customer-centric research-driven design process," which I want to dive into that and hear. I'm sure many brands are like, "I want every single product of mine to be a success, and I want to expand my skews." So, how do you guys go about designing and crafting new products?Alex:Well, I think one thing that we should clear up is the concept of customer centricity is used so broadly and inauthentically, I think. A lot of brands will claim customer centricity and they'll think that they're being customer centric because that's who their customer is and they just need to make money off of them, and so they'll say that they're thinking about all their needs. The problem is they're not actually talking to the customers, they're assuming on behalf of the customers that they know what that customer needs. Or they're just testing messaging, which is fine. That's been the traditional approach of, "Okay, if I play up this feature or this benefit versus this feature or this benefit, and this one does better, that's what the customer must want," right? But it almost becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there.Alex:We take it to a much deeper level, not just with our customer community but also our lead community, all of our email subscribers that have yet to join and make an actual purchase with us, and actually going to them and asking them very specific and lengthy questions. I remember the first time we sent out a customer survey about one of the next products that we were going to launch and just wanted to get their input on like, "Is this the right product?" Number one, and B, "What are those little things that really bother you about this product?" And did a ton of just open ended response analysis based on that.Alex:The biggest surprise for me from that was the response rate. For a quiz or rather survey that took probably a solid 10 to 15 minutes of someone's time to go through and really complete in depth, which they did, the response rate was astounding. And that opened our eyes to, "Wow, this needs to become a regular occurrence within our work stream."Stephanie:How quickly were you sending this to them? Was it a week after they got their product and are trying to set it up, or what did that look like?Alex:Well, there's a couple different ones. So, what we have is a couple different touch points that are automated or triggered based on somebody actually making their first purchase with us. So, we had, obviously, a post purchase survey right away, which I think is one of the most underappreciated and can be most impactful survey points that people do, or brands do, rather. We also have an NPS survey, which going back to how do you elicit a response from customers and activate customers, NPS is going to be your biggest indicator of how much of that is happening in the background. And that is actually backed up by an element on the post purchase survey where we ask, "Were you were referred by a friend? Does that friend own Burrow furniture, or do they not, or do not know?" And that can also give us a really solid indication of the impact.Alex:So, beyond the triggered survey points, we also do intermittent studies, and it's almost on a monthly cadence now, of either focuses on new categories in general, or we've already identified the category, we've already identified the specific product and we're trying to nail down colors, color combinations, finishes, specific features, doing conjoint analyses on like, what is most important to this set of consumer? I mean, we've really taken it to a super, super deep level.Stephanie:Have there been any products that you launch based off consumer feedback or maybe early launches where it's like, "Oh, they led us astray with that one"? Because I'd be like, "I want a fluorescent pink couch." And then I'd be like, "Oh, I had a little too much wine that night. Sorry about that."Alex:Yeah. Fortunately, we're pretty good at statistics and we can identify outliers and not get swayed by them too much. There actually have not been. And I think it speaks volumes for this concept of authentic customer centricity where... and you can also cross-compare between the customer set and the subscriber set, right? The subscribers are a great audience because they have not purchased anything from you, or at least the subscribers that are not customers, and there's a reason why, right? Versus the customers, they did find something that you offered already and they've already bought into the brand, and they're responding to you because they're still engaged. And so, that's one set of needs that you need to fulfill.Alex:And then there's the other set of needs, and oftentimes, there's a good amount of overlap, which is great for us, and oftentimes, there's not, and that's when we need to make choices around what does that offering look like and who are we really chasing with that?Stephanie:Yep. The other thing I think you mentioned in the past was around how you start thinking about zoning and mapping out what else a person needs in their room, which means like, "Oh, brilliant, okay, if someone got a couch, a little swivel chair, and obviously, they need pillows." And I want to hear, did that method work, and how have you expanded that since you first started trying it I think maybe a year and a half ago or so?Alex:It did, totally. I mean, you take one concrete example of this is with the advent of coffee tables for us. We first launched the sofa and then we launched our first line of coffee tables, and those were specifically designed dimensionally to work best with the sofa styles that were selling the most volumetrically. So, we knew that there was a high rate of match, right, between them. It wasn't like we were designing for something that we were only selling like 5% of our assortment or something like that.Alex:Where that took another level is in 2019, we launched the corner sectional, and then arrangements and configurations started getting a lot more varied and a lot more... opened up actually, additional demographics as well, with more suburban, satellite city homes with larger room spans. And that opened up a new category, and so what we had to do is to figure out, "Okay, well, if you have a five-seat corner sectional, none of our coffee tables really make sense for that. And so, how do we create a coffee table that works perfectly in that configuration for that customer specifically?" So, that's when you saw in late 2020, we released our Kettle and Signal collections, which are more of a round geometry versus a rectangular geometry. And that happens to work really well with things like a Double Chaise Long King Sofa, where the chaise is wrapped nicely around the round coffee table, or the corner sectional, it creates a really nice conversation pit type feeling.Alex:So, it is very much about understanding how our pieces interact. And then the next level that is, what are the types of rooms that people are using it in? What are the actual dimensions of those rooms? And what logically, could somebody need the most, given that room design and size?Stephanie:It seems like a lot of brands are missing that right now, because oftentimes, I mean, whether it's furniture or a lot of other things, I'm like, "Where is that matching dresser set? Or where is the pillow that goes with that?" And it feels like having to go around and look in different places and trying to find it myself, I'm like, "Why am I doing the work? I just want a kit which is like, 'Here's all the five things that match together.'" But why is that so hard? I don't get why can't brands do that?Alex:I think one of the biggest examples of this is that company brand list that skyrocketed, but they were launching things in such unrelated categories that there was no bond between them. And companies nowadays need to think a lot more about lifetime value than they had to necessarily, in the past. Acquisition cost is growing, and they can no longer just rely on first purchase profitability in order to sustainably scale their business, and they need to think about building a relationship with the customer. And that often comes from creating relationship and being the default brand or site to go back to when they may have that next need and finding that perfect accompanying piece, right? Versus just like you buy cleaning detergent from the company, and you come back and, oh, they're offering soccer balls or something.Stephanie:Pillows.Alex:Yeah, it's like, "Okay, well, that doesn't make sense."Stephanie:Yeah. Which makes me think, I mean, it seems like the world is headed towards a more curated world right now. Maybe back in the day, I would go to a Wayfair or something like that and I'd be like, "Cool, I'm fine with scrolling, scrolling," five years later, still scrolling and looking for what I want. It doesn't seem like consumers want that anymore. So, how do you see the consumer journey and preference adjusting now where maybe a couple years ago, that would be totally fine?Alex:Yeah. I think it's almost a byproduct of the ease of standing up a company nowadays. It is exponentially easier to start a company, a direct to consumer company than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. So, because of that, the market has just blown up in terms of the number of companies. And so, the paralysis of choice has shifted from like going to an old school Sears or Macy's and just having like a million different options, or as you put it, like a Wayfair, and just tens of millions of options, to now having to build a relationship with a brand and trust that that brand is making the right decisions. And so, that's why we offer a very select assortment of fabric colors, leg finishes, arm styles. In reality, we can house tens of component skews and offer tens of thousands of combinations to the customer, but what's ultimately the most important thing is that we do it in a way that is still a very simple and clean experience for the customer so that they get that sense of they're creating their own product, but not to the extent of being overwhelmed.Alex:I think of myself on old school furniture sites and staring at the screen from two inches away trying to figure out the difference between this gray and that gray, and I'm like... and then you request swatches from them and they come 10 weeks later.Stephanie:Yeah. I've recently been through that experience. It's not great.Alex:Yeah. No, it's not fun.Stephanie:They arrived and I'm like, "What was I trying to buy, again?" [crosstalk]. I mean, it seems like you guys could also have a very localized approach where, like you mentioned earlier, if someone is looking from a very suburban area, like my hometown in Maryland, where my expectations there would have probably been to have a huge wraparound couch, I've got this big living room, versus being in San Francisco or Austin, where now it's like a little bit more limited space, and what can I fit in these small areas? [crosstalk] think about that?Alex:I mean, the first step there that we're taking, it's more from a content driven approach. So, that goes back or loops back to the way that we're treating influencers and leaning into the photography community and the different styles and aesthetics that they have. Because what we are creating are based products. They are beautiful but they don't belong in an architectural [inaudible] editor's home, right? They're not the one-off piece that you design and custom build for 15 grand or something.Alex:And what's beautiful about that is that they stand up to any environment that you're putting them in, whether it's a very eclectic like Austin ranch style home, or the fourth floor walk up apartment in New York, or a more sprawling home in Houston or another geography like that. And leaning in with more of that stylistic approach than necessarily sub-segmenting, "Oh, we're only going to show love seats to this geography, or we're only going to show these massive sprawling corner sectionals to this other geography," because people still have varying needs, a lot of people have multiple rooms. So, we don't want to limit, necessarily, the assortment, but we are trying to diversify constantly the styles and aesthetics that our products are showcased in.Stephanie:Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. So, for the last big point, I wanted to talk about the industry as a whole, like the D2C industry, commerce, what kind of things are you seeing or preparing for behind the scenes for what's to come?Alex:I mean, we could talk about the elephant in the room, which is-Stephanie:Let's talk about it. Yeah, let's do it. I haven't really talked too much about that, because it's been so up in the air, and when's it going to go through? It's more official now, so let's do it.Alex:Oh, yeah, it's official. This is a tough thing, and I think it's a reckoning for a lot of these companies, again, where it's been so easy to start a company and just go on Facebook, and you'll generate some sales, and go to a VC and you'll show 100% month over month growth, and they'll throw a bunch of cash at you. That's changing, and I'm thankful for it as much as I curse the fact that we don't have this GPS anymore, I'm very thankful that we don't, because it's forcing us to mature as marketers. And we're fortunate also that we've had to embrace this appreciation for marketing 101 and really lean into principles and not just trust what the ad platform are telling us, because it's a whole shopping journey.Alex:So, we've built a very healthy, full funnel approach proactively, even without any of this talk about these privacy regulations. That has helped us create something that can stand up in the face of this. There are a lot of companies that have not done that, they've not invested in really understanding marketing 101 and how to build a healthy full funnel without having that very granular level of insight or having automatic triggers in their campaigns and stuff. So, I think that is the most important thing, is like there is a day of reckoning for marketers everywhere in the D2C space to take a step back and really appreciate the principles of marketing and evaluate your program architecture overall and make sure that it's in a healthy state, and not just because your add to cart rates or your conversion rates are really high from this one campaign in this one ad unit, but really, overall, how is your program operating? Where are the weak points and how can you supplement those?Stephanie:Yeah. So, if you were starting over day one today, what kind of things would you look at? What metrics would you look at? What kind of things would you put in place to start building up that healthy funnel?Alex:Yeah. I think we would look at... I'm trying to think if I didn't have all the information that I have today, but I think what you would look at is the abandonment rate through the funnel, right? Of the people who click through to your site, how many of them end up viewing a product? Of those people, how many of them end up adding it? Of those people, how many of them end up actually proceeding to step one of checkout, step two, step three, step four? And find out what that makeup looks like.Alex:And obviously, you're going to spend a lot of time on conversion rate optimization and trying to improve the outputs of each step of that funnel. But that paints a picture of, okay, how broad do you have to invest at the top of that funnel if your ultimate target at the bottom of the funnel is X? And what does that reach look like? And what are the best mediums to do that to actually elicit a response and get people onto your site or into your store or signing up for whatever service you provide? So, that, I think, is what I would take as step one.Alex:The other one is, I would just consider, for the vertical that you're in and the product that you're trying to sell, how much of a story do you need to tell? And that will help inform how much you will need to invest in more storytelling mediums than more immediate click to buy type mediums. Also, how visual is your product? That will tell you how much you have to be content driven versus leaning into things like search or audio formats or anything like that. And that can really help govern your channel choices.Alex:And then the last thing is just, don't fall into the trap of doing too many things at once. There's always something to be said to acknowledging the resources that you have and trying to build a architecture that is best for that set of resources, not just the one that happens to be doing really well for the other portfolio company that your VC backer is constantly in your ear about, you have to focus on what is going to work for your company, your vertical, your customers specifically.Stephanie:Yep, yeah, I love all that. Is there or are there any tools right now that you're very excited about that are either new or just time tested, you're like, "We're going to keep using these forever because they do wonders for our marketing efforts"?Alex:I think a lot of it is less about tools and more about information sources. So, we've partnered with a number of different companies over time to do things like customer enrichment and really understand our customers to a deeper level, again, going back to that concept of customer centricity, not just talking to them directly, but also learning much, much more about them. And I think one of the biggest traps that a lot of companies fall into is they think of their customer as an average customer, and the problem is they're failing to acknowledge that customers are not one monotonous group, they are a system of clusters and cohorts. And what you really have to do is understand what is unique and important about each of these clusters and then create a messaging architecture, channel architecture, product offering that really speaks to each of those clusters individually.Alex:So, from a tools perspective, it's more about these data enrichment, customer data enrichment type platforms, and then using those to create these clusters and cohorts and really understand those customers. Again, for us, an attribution platform, not super helpful because of the complexity and both mix of offline and online activity that it takes to get to the purchase point. Much more about really understanding the customer and then applying a marketing 101 approach to it.Stephanie:Cool. Yeah, that's great. All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer.Alex:Oh, boy.Stephanie:Ready, Alex?Alex:Sure.Stephanie:Oh, boy. What's one thing you don't understand today that you wish you did?Alex:Shoot. Where do I start? I think I would like to understand more about the global supply chain. I think over the last six months to a year maybe, we've seen, very intimately, the impacts of a broken or strained supply chain, and I think that there's a huge opportunity for D2C companies to innovate on the supply chain side. We focus so much on how do we innovate on the customer side that we focus so much less on the supply side of the business. So, I think that is where... and it will become increasingly important for marketers and supply ops to be speaking and working very much hand in hand to grow a company together. So, I do wish I had more of that background.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. And you guys just raised around, and I think that money, a part of it, was to focus on international supply chain effort, right? Figuring that out better.Alex:Yes, totally.Stephanie:So, you're already right in the right spot, the right time. You'll have to let everyone else know the insight. You have to come back and tell us what you learn next year.Alex:Yes, definitely.Stephanie:What's up next on your reading list or podcast list?Alex:There's actually a couple books I think that I want to reread. I'm one of those weird people that really likes to read technical books, and so there's a couple of conversations we're having right now about pricing in this book called Power Pricing that I love to read. There's also one by a gentleman named Douglas Holt called Cultural Strategy that I think is one of the most foundational and important books, especially for the world today. And again, how the customer controls the conversation, and understanding how to position your company and your messaging around cultural movements and ride momentum versus trying to create that momentum yourself as you have in the past. The last one is Shoe Dog, actually.Stephanie:Yes, such a good book.Alex:Amazing book. This would now be, I think, my third time reading it, but it is a way to, I think... A lot of people have been talking about languishing right now and the fact that we've been in this environment for so long and we're yearning for that personal interaction, and so tired of being in the sedentary and fixed on a digital screen environment. And I think Shoe Dog can help reignite a lot of that passion, right? Because it's like, "Wow, this multi-billion dollar company started at such a microscopic level." And it really helps you understand the power and the capability you have as an individual to create something like that and can help really reignite that passion.Stephanie:Yeah, that's one of my favorite books. Actually, we have a podcast called The Story that tells the unknown backstory of people who change the world, and we highlighted him in one of the episodes because we were like, "The story is too good not to tell, and tell, and tell until everyone hears it, and gets motivated and starts their thing today."Alex:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:That's awesome. I feel like they need a movie out or something. Do they have one?Alex:I'm sure there will be. I'm sure there will be.Stephanie:There has to be one. Too good of a story not to. What's one thing you're secretly curious about? [crosstalk].Alex:TikTok, I think.Stephanie:Are you all on there?Alex:We are not. From a demographic perspective, in the past, I would say a year and a half, it hasn't made sense. The program is continuing to grow, the demographic adoption is continuing to expand, and so I am interested in what it looks like going forward. I think it is also a challenging medium for a lot of brands that are really attached to high production quality content, because what scales the best on that platform is very lo-fi content, very organic and authentic content. And it creates this shift for a lot of companies in the way that they think about creative. So, I'm curious in that we are actively learning about our potential approach to that channel, but also curious about how does that platform and program evolve over time. I've not heard great things about the ad platform that they've built so far, which is partially why we've been hesitant to really go after the channel, but that will evolve. They will crack that code. And what that looks like, I don't know, but I'm certainly curious.Stephanie:Yeah. We've definitely heard 50-50 on TikTok, some brands saying it works wonders, but they're the ones creating their own content, maybe not an ad partner programs. I also think from a consumer standpoint, how it's going to evolve, because at least me personally, I think I got signed out and I couldn't remember my password-Alex:Oh, no.Stephanie:... and I just never signed back in. I'm like, "I'm not sure I really like it then, or maybe I know that just scrolling is not good for me."Alex:Yeah. That was me with Clubhouse, actually.Stephanie:Oh, same.Alex:I loved Clubhouse for the first seven days and was on it constantly and I have not been back on it for [crosstalk].Stephanie:Yeah. I think it got crowded. I mean, now it's just so busy, so many people talking about so many things, it didn't feel curated. I started feeling like that to me too where it was 50-50 of like, "I like these videos, and next nine, I don't like." I think there has to be curation to keep at least us involved, it sounds like.Alex:Yeah, totally. I mean, honestly, that's what happened with the podcast world too, right? It became everybody launched their own podcast, and then there's so much content. The biggest problem with podcasts now is discovery. The only way you learn about what to listen to is through your friends.Stephanie:Yeah.Alex:And so, that concept of discovery is such a challenge for podcasts right now, and I think that's what Clubhouse is going through at 1,000 times faster through the learning cycle.Stephanie:Yeah. I think the next couple of years will be interesting, because I mean, they've been talking about discovery issues back to even when I worked at Google, figuring out Google podcasts, and that was an issue back in 2017. So, why hasn't this been solved yet? It should be so much easier.Alex:Yeah.Stephanie:All right. Well, Alex, it's been awesome having you on the show, such a fun conversation. Where can people find out more about you and Burrow?Alex:Burrow.com would be the easiest place.Stephanie:What about you? Are you on LinkedIn? What if people want to talk to you?Alex:I am. LinkedIn. Alex Kubo. I'm not sure if you can actually search me and find me, but I'm sure you could.Stephanie:I'll find you. Don't worry. All right. Thanks so much, Alex.Alex:Thank you so much, Stephanie.

If you think back to just a few years ago, when someone asked you to name a company that delivered food, you’d probably only be able to name a few pizza joints or the local Chinese food place. But today, the world has shifted and online food delivery is a booming business. Last year alone, Grubhub sold $6 billion worth of food, and the company delivers more than 500,000 meals per day. So how did Grubhub enable this massive shift to digital meal purchasing? On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we welcomed Alex Weinstein, the SVP of Growth at Grubhub, and he explained to us exactly how the company has been able to become a market mover. From the initial education process to then focusing on customer retention, Alex and his team have been deep in the weeds of it all, and they have built a culture of experimentation, data analytics and a focus on ROI to stay ahead of the curve. Alex explains it all here.    3 Takeaways: Measurement and incrementality are important. You have to understand whether or not where you’re putting your dollars is making a difference, and sometimes the answer will surprise you True experimentation is necessary to create new methods of measurement, marketing strategies and growth opportunities. So the question you have to ask as a leader is how can you create incentives to allow people to take risks and learn? The time is now to learn about the newly-online customers that have trickled into your business due to COVID-19. In understanding their needs, you will be able to ensure retention and set yourself up for the new reality we live in For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today, my stomach is rumbling, because we're talking all things Grubhub. Alex, welcome. Alex: Thank you for having me. Stephanie: Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the show. I just pulled up the app earlier to be like, "What should I have for lunch today?" Because it's 12:00, and it's time to order something. Alex: What did you end up ordering? Stephanie: I'm looking at pad Thai right now, we have a really good Thai place down the street. That's usually my go-to, but I started to get influenced by sushi, so if you have any advice, let me know. Alex: I don't know the restaurants in the area, but look for those that are well-rated, and look for deals. We have a ton of deals going on right now. Stephanie: Ooh, nice, that's perfect. You are the SVP of Growth at Grubhub, correct? Alex: That's right. Stephanie: I'd love to hear a little bit about your role there, and what brought you to Grubhub. Alex: Sure, sure, thank you. I've been at Grubhub for a little bit over three years. My responsibility is for the consumer business. That is, how do we get more new customers to try us out for the first time, and how do we get existing ones to order with us a little more often? And hopefully they'll return. Alex: This spans all aspects of marketing. We do a whole bunch of stuff in-house. I'd love to explore that a little bit later. But it also involves a lot of work cross-functionally, across the product. When I say product, I don't just mean our apps, but the totality of the experience that the customer has, from our apps to the delivery, to customer care, if that's ever necessary. Stephanie: Very cool. Previously, were you at, I think I saw Microsoft and eBay, or what did your past life before Grubhub look like? Alex: That's right, that's right. I actually am a very strange Head of Marketing. I'm a software engineer by training. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: I've written a bunch of code. I switched over to product management, and then darkness had me, and I somehow ended up in marketing. I indeed was at eBay before this, also for around about three years. Similar role, maybe a slightly more narrow role, focused on customer retention, marketing technologies. Stephanie: Very cool. I'm sure that was great help working at a marketplace, albeit not maybe a three-sided one, but still maybe a really helpful to transition to Grubhub with as your background? Alex: It very much was. I have to admit, I thought I knew marketplaces after eBay, then when I started Grubhub, I discovered so much complexity. Our business, exactly as you said, is a three side marketplace. Restaurants, food delivery drivers, and consumers. It is a hyper local business. People who live in Palo Alto whole heartedly don't care how many restaurants we have in San Jose, and how good our delivery network is in San Francisco, right? Alex: It has to be block by block, and we have to make sure that we have good restaurant selection there, good demand, and good supply of drivers. Otherwise, if the three sides aren't in alignment, bad things happen. Stephanie: Yeah, that seems like it would be really tricky to keep all that balanced. How have you found success keeping everything balanced? Like you said, it's so hyper local, I'm thinking there could be a driver over in Sunnyvale, and they're definitely not going to go to my local Thai place to pick up the order that I'm looking at. Alex: Yeah, this is where a lot of fun in this business comes from, and a lot of complexity in this business comes from. We have to be really good at predicting things, and predicting demand. And we have to be really good at engaging all sides of our marketplace so that drivers actually want to be online at the time when we want them to be online. Alex: Consumers end up placing additional orders if perhaps we have a little bit too much supply. Restaurateurs want to create deals. Basically, being able to influence three sides of the marketplace in a automated, personalized, hyper local way, is really the only way we can survive, right? This, to me, is super joyful, and super complicated, and where a lot of learning, personally, for me, has come from. Stephanie: Yeah, I'm sure every day it's adjusting a little bit more, and you keep have to kind of changing things up and experimenting a bit. How do I think about where Grubhub is at right now? To me, it seems like it's the market leader. How many meals are being delivered? How much is that in dollar-wise of food that's being sold? How do I think about that? Alex: We're a public company, all of those numbers are public. Quick summary for you. We deliver more than half a million meals a day. Last year, we delivered more than six billion dollars worth of food. Of course, with the arrival of the pandemic, the demand for food delivery has also increased. The expectation of all of our constituents, and of our community, all of us, have risen tremendously. Because, from something that restaurateurs really on for a portion of their revenue, they now rely on delivery as the majority of it. Alex: For consumers, where they would perhaps order delivery occasionally, now is the only way for them to order restaurant food. A lot of expectations on us have increased throughout these past couple of months, even though we already started from being quite a large company with high expectations. Stephanie: Yeah, have you had to adjust quickly with everything going on with COVID-19? What have you seen, other than increasing orders, and how have you had to pivot to meet the customers and meet the drivers in where they're at today? Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Well, most definitely, yes. First and foremost, we began by focusing on safety of all the participants of our marketplace, right? This began with our work on personal protective equipment for our drivers. We distributed hundreds of thousands of PPE sets for free for our drivers. We invested a bunch of work into enabling contactless delivery within our apps. Which, of course, is something that makes the entirety of the marketplace safer. Alex: We basically have to take our product roadmap, and, in many ways, revisit it fully, and focus on things our community demanded of us in that moment. Similarly, we had to do something like that with marketing, as well, because we had a certain strategy. You of course know that a lot of our effort is in making sure that consumers can get the best value on Grubhub. If you spend money on food delivery, your dollars will go the furthest on Grubhub. This really is our brand positioning. Alex: When COVID came, we had to take a pause, because this rewards positioning, or this value positioning, really had to take a step back, because consumer's interest... Sure, they were looking for deals, but they were looking to be safe, first and foremost. Secondly, they were looking to support their community. So we had to reposition a lot of our marketing work to make it so. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. I'm thinking that could be a trend that stays around, even after everything's over, keeping that contactless delivery at least as an option, and thinking about how to actually prove you have the safety measures implemented, and you're tracking that every month. Are you all thinking about how to scale that and keep that for the long term, or is it more just a short term play until the pandemic's over? Alex: Couple thoughts for you. One is, I don't think that we're going to be looking at a pandemic being over and everything coming back to normal. I think we need to get used to the new normal, at least until the vaccine is here. Which means that people's lifestyles, their habits, will be fully adjusted by then. Alex: As such, it's not like we were developing a set of patches for three months, and then after that, we just turned those patches off. But also, there's meaningful, positives coming from this change, right? Like any crisis, it is both a danger and an opportunity. What we've discovered is this contactless delivery, for example, besides making everyone safe, it is actually making our network a tiny bit more efficient. The delivery driver does not need to engage with the consumer in-person. They can just drop it off, take a photo, and keep going, and keep working. Which shaves off a small amount, but in the grand scheme of more than half a million deliveries a day, this starts adding up. It helps our drivers earn more, and it helps our overall network be more efficient, which means food comes to consumers faster. Stephanie: Yep, yeah, that's definitely a good change. There's a lot of food delivery players in the market right now. How do you create an experience that's completely unique to Grubhub? Where people, they're like, "That's where I want to order through." Alex: All of this, in our minds, has to do with differentiation. And you're exactly right, maybe two or three years ago, where consumers didn't really know much about the food delivery category. A lot of what we had to do was to educate them about our existence, which is why a lot of our marketing, a lot of our product, was geared towards a first-time experience of someone who's never gotten anything delivered other than a pizza. Because really, that was the state of the world, right? You would ask an average consumer on the street, "Name a couple companies that deliver food," and they would name pizza brands. Stephanie: That would've been me a couple years ago, too. Alex: Totally. Stephanie: I'd be like, "Domino's." Alex: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Maybe Chinese food, if you've ever tried it. An average consumer didn't know that there's hundreds of restaurants that deliver to them, and that they can find them on Grubhub. So that was the focus of our messaging. Alex: Three months ago, even before COVID, if you asked an average consumer to name food delivery brands, they would name us, and maybe a handful of our competitors. In that environment, I'm prompted, right? This is unaided awareness. Not, "Have you ever heard of Grubhub?" But, "Name a food delivery brand." Alex: Our work switched from creating awareness to driving consideration. Helping consumers understand, what is it that they get if they buy from us versus perhaps one of our competitors? Last year, a lot of our focus has been on stating this extremely clearly and delivering on that experience quite precisely. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, it is all about value for us. Alex: Now that we're entering a bit of a new normal with COVID-19, we're beginning to come back to some of this foundational brand positioning. Talking about rewards and value. We have a TV spot that's actually launching today and tomorrow on national TV. We're one of the biggest spenders on TV in both the category. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: Generally we're one of top 200 brands advertising on U.S. television that talks about rewards and value. You might be scratching your head and wondering, "Why in the hell is a digital first brand spending so much money on TV?" Stephanie: Yes, I was wondering. Tell me. Alex: It actually is kind of counterintuitive. We, maybe about three years back, we started scratching our heads and thinking, "Okay, if an average consumer doesn't really know what food delivery options are out there, how do we create that awareness? And how do we do that in a way that can confidently map the efficacy of our spend?" Because creation of awareness, let's face it, is the most expensive thing a company can do. Stephanie: Yep. Everyone wants it, but then actually implementing it, tracking it, and seeing how it did, seems a little tricky. Alex: It is so very tricky. Most mechanisms for doing this are actually kind of arcane, right? You do media consumption patterns, which, frankly is a large-scale survey that perhaps an agency would run and say, "Okay, New Yorkers, they absolutely do not watch any TV. They spend a bunch of time in the subway, true. And then they're all very much on digital." Alex: So, a brand that's trying to advertise in New York then would say, "Okay, television in New York, totally worthless. And our consumers are probably just like the average consumer in New York." That's kind of how the line of thinking typically goes. We, despite having a general applicability product, right? Everybody wants food delivery, right? Everybody from 18 to my mom, most definitely could benefit from food delivery. Alex: And yet, what we discover, is that the media consumption patterns of an average New Yorker are not the average media consumption patterns of our consumer. Moreover, what we discovered three years back was even though our intuition was that someone who orders food delivery online is most likely an early adopter of technology, and most likely a cord cutter, right? I mean, if you're about to order food online, you of course are ordering your socks from Amazon. You of course are watching shows on Hulu Plus without any commercials, as opposed to on cable TV, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Alex: Of course that intuitively made sense, which is why we've been spending a lot of money through digital video channels. That intuitively made sense. We stumbled upon a set of techniques that allowed us to, with confidence, compare the efficacy of our awareness spent between digital video and the digital awareness darlings of Hulu and YouTube and Facebook for some of the dimensions, here. What we've discovered is that the bull drought of digital first is actually not as efficient, not at all as efficient per dollar spent, comparing to the- Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: ... boring, stodgy, nobody watches it, cable television. Stephanie: Is it because of the audience that's there, where the digital, like you were talking about, advertising to them, they may already know about you and it's an easier conversion, whereas the people who are keeping the TV running in the background all day, maybe actually need the ad right then and there where it can put a little inception on them and they can hear about it a couple times while they have the news on? Alex: Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons. Other reasons are that, just on a per impression basis, your digital video is dramatically more expensive. Even though I'm a nerd of machine learning, and I love personalization, I don't believe that personalization can cover a five X price difference. It can make something 50% better, but not five steps better. Stephanie: So how do you think about creating that culture of experimentation like you're talking about, where most companies right now are probably not focusing on TV campaigns? How do you think about putting a budget behind that and actually empowering a team to do that, where when I think about teams who are running with marketing budgets, or just budgets in general, it's very scary to not show a great ROI, because you either aren't going to get that budget again. It's a use it or lose it type of culture, it seems like every company operates that way. Maybe Grubhub doesn't, but how do you think about creating good incentives and a culture of experimentation to come up with some of those projects? Alex: I think a culture where you ask for confidence in measurement for your spend is a good culture. Where you ask for feedback loops is a helpful culture. Now, you can take this too far, and you can start trying to map everything to revenue or [inaudible 00:16:56], and that doesn't particularly help with upper funnel marketing campaigns. But, the other extreme isn't particularly better. I see a lot of marketing organizations end up in that spot, where we say, "We demand perfect measurement," from what they call performance marketing. Alex: And the brand marketing side, the one where vast majority of dollars actually have to be spent to create awareness, is not working to the same level of rigor, and the same level of intellectual honesty with measurement. To your question about how to actually create those frameworks for the team, a couple things come to mind. Alex: The first one is, trying to pursue incentive alignment. If people on your team genuinely believe that learning and optimality of investment for the entire team is how they get promoted, is what the company actually values, they will pursue exactly that. Let me give you- Stephanie: Let me hear an example. Alex: Yeah, let me give you a counter example. A counter example is what happens if you hire an agency to manage your Facebook spend. Have you ever heard an agency that managers Facebook spend come back to you and say, "Your Facebook spend is terribly inefficient. You should spend less on Facebook." Stephanie: Definitely never. Alex: Right? That's what their incentives are, they get a portion of your Facebook spend. The same exact thing happens for your TV agency. The same exact thing happens for someone who's managing your Google spend, right? If you have a bunch of outsourced agencies, each of which is responsible for one of your channels, their survival, their ability to feed their children, depends on you being able to spend more money on the channel that they're managing for you. Alex: Of course, they don't have an incentive to try to tell you, "Hey, take money from Google and put it into Facebook." They will personally suffer. A setup like this creates a true misalignment of incentives. Let me contrast that with, let's say, an in-source structure, or perhaps a structure where you have a larger performance agency that is able to reallocate dollars between Google and Facebook without personalty suffering. Alex: In a structure where you in-source, which is how we operate, you're able to create a shared destiny, and you're able to say, "Hey, person running Facebook. Your incentives are all about learning." So if you have a current level of performance, which is a certain level of incremental CAC, and a certain level of incremental LTV. Your goal is to improve that by this percentage over the course of next quarter. Alex: Find some way to do so through whatever experiments that you're able to run. One of the potential outcomes is an improvement in efficiency by reduction in spend. They're able to raise their hand and say, "Hey, I actually want to spend your dollars. Take away some of my budget, and reallocate it over to TV, because they can spend it better. I hear they have a way to spend at a lower incremental CAC than I can." Stephanie: Have you seen that in your culture so far, of people actually being like, "Hey, you can have this budget, move it over here"? It seems like a lot of times, people are personally tied to their budgets, and whoever has the bigger budget is the more powerful one, and I haven't often, at least in my previous days at other companies, I haven't seen people say, "Hey, you can have this budget and move it here." Alex: You are exactly right. A lot of our, I guess, legacy from many of our previous jobs, associates the size of the budget with the influence in the organization, most definitely. This is where the job of a leader really is to create the right incentives and to catch people doing something right. Alex: If you hire somebody off of a company that had that culture, of course, their initial inclination will not be to raise their hand and say, "Hey, my area isn't working so hot." You need to indoctrinate them, if that makes any sense, into a world where it's okay to raise their hand and do it. The way you do it is by upholding folks who do this, and pointing at them and saying, "This person is doing it right," and celebrating their successes. And celebrating their experiments, where, perhaps, they didn't see the immediate success, but they learned something. Alex: So, as a leader, I think you have a lot of power to create these incentives. As such, structure what your team actually holds as valuable versus not. If you point to enough examples like this, you'll actually end up transforming the culture, even for someone who comes in from an organization that wasn't like that. Stephanie: Yeah, it seems like it would also allow someone to wear multiple hats, and kind of become a polymath when it's like, "I don't just focus on Facebook ads, or I don't just focus on this kind of marketing." They get to experiment with a bunch of different areas. Have you seen that happen in your organization? Alex: Oh, most definitely. My paid social folks, just like everyone's, they were super focused on Facebook. What we discovered is them raising their hands and being very creative, and being some of the first folks who ever tried TikTok, for example. This was a little while back now, but we were one of the first handful of brands to invest a lot of money into TikTok, and do large scale experimentation with them. What we've discovered is if you're one of the first ones, there's very meaningful... Effectively, arbitrages to be had, where you're able to not only get a great deal, but shape the product to your liking. As such, get a temporary advantage over the rest of the market. Stephanie: That's fun. How did you think about creating your first campaign on TikTok? When your team presented this idea to you, were you like, "Yeah, let's do it," or were you a little hesitant? What was the first campaign you had go out there, versus what does that look like today? Are you still utilizing it? Alex: Oh my God, this is quite a story, to be honest with you. The team came to me and said, "So, we're thinking about doing TikTok." My reaction at the time was, "TikWhat?" They explained this to me and I read up a little bit about it. My immediate reaction is, "Okay, you are attempting to sell a luxury product." Let's face it, ordering delivery, you're still buying food from restaurants. It is a luxury product in many of the cases, right? To, "You're trying to sell that to people who have no disposable income of their own. The average customer of TikTok at the time just could not have their own credit card." Stephanie: Yeah, they have allowances, maybe. Alex: Right? Exactly. "Why in the world could this possibly work, you guys? Our average consumer is fairly affluent, and you're now trying to go into a different demo. How is that even remotely possible?" But, luckily, at that point, I had already observed that my team knows better than me, and that they have much, much better ideas than I do. Essentially, we just did a test. We did a small test, and we experimented in earnest. Surprise, surprise, they came back and they showed me the numbers, and they were meaningfully better than Facebook at the time. Stephanie: Wow. Alex: We ended up investing more. That was genuine, true learning. Not just for the organization, but frankly, for me. There's multiple possible explanations for why it ended up being so efficient, and I can go into some of them, but the thing that matters to me most is that the crew felt inspired to pursue something new. They felt passionate enough about it to structure a test when there was no framework, really, out there. And they were unafraid enough to basically tell me that I'm wrong, and that my intuition is off. Alex: That made me feel like the culture is actually right. The culture is exactly what I want it to be. The opposite of that, where you're going with the highest paid person's opinion, if that makes sense. Stephanie: Doesn't work. Alex: It doesn't work, because all of our intuitions, no matter how successful we've been previously, we are sometimes wrong. Why hire smart people if you don't trust them to try things? Stephanie: I think there's a good mix between trust your gut, but also don't trust it, because you could be wrong. Yeah, go with other people's ideas, as well. How do you think about those efficiencies that you're mentioning when you're exploring new channels like TikTok? Alex: Sure. To me, it's indeed about being open-minded and experimenting with new types of media, and being unafraid to try things that aren't immediately, obviously, going to work. A similar type of experiment happened with Snapchat a little bit earlier, where I also was convinced that this can't possibly work for the same reason. Luckily, I, again, was wrong. Alex: I guess a pattern of learning is what inspired me to basically create this incentive structure for the team, where they're unafraid to raise their hand and say, "Hey, the way we've been doing this before is really off." If you want, I'll tell you a story of a channel that's not really a channel that I guess formed my opinion on that topic. Stephanie: Yeah, let's hear it. Alex: This is a story of a couple marketers that were attempting to turn a specific city around. Alex: As we talked a little bit earlier, we can be doing super well in one city, and not well at all in another city, or in a corner of a city. A lot of what we do has to do with how do we turn a specific city or neighborhood around? This couple folks, their job was to turn a specific city around, and I was expecting them to come to me and say, "Hey, I'm going to take the budget that you've given me, and I'm going to buy some Google ads, and I'm going to buy some billboards, and maybe I'm going to buy some Facebook ads." Alex: What they did instead, these were two marketers. What they did instead was actually really curious. They experienced the product for themselves. They placed a couple of food delivery orders, and they came to me and they said, "Hey, I don't want to buy any ads," they said. "Instead, whenever I was placing the order for food, there really weren't enough food photos. I was ordering from restaurants that I hadn't ordered from before, and I don't really know if their pad thai looks good. I don't really know if their sushi is something that I want to try." Alex: They were in your position. They said, "Screw it, I'm not going to buy any ads. I'm instead going to hire some photographers to come into those restaurants and take the photos. Then after that, I'm going to measure the incremental impact of the added photography, and see if the efficacy of that is actually comparable or high enough, comparing to the efficacy of ad spend." Effectively saying, "I'm going to open a brand new marketing channel, and that marketing channel is going to be photos." Stephanie: Photography. Alex: I'm like, "Okay, let's just do it." Stephanie: A whole brand new, the vision, of Grubhub, just photography. Alex: Exactly, exactly. These two folks get on the phones, start calling photographers, start calling restaurant owners and scheduling appointments to have the photographers come in there. That becomes basically their job for the next two months. Alex: Then they organize a really [inaudible] visitors for these specific menu pages see the photos, and others don't. They do some serious math to try to say, "Hey, here's the incrementality in here, and here's the efficacy of the spend comparing to what Google ads would be, or Facebook ads would be." They discover that those photos are actually a better way to spend marketing dollars, than any actual marketing. Stephanie: Yeah. Alex: I, at that point, am kind of floored. I come to them, I'm like, "Okay, you guys are on fire, this is amazing. Let's take your thing and give it to operations and scale up this thing." They say, "No, no, you don't understand, you don't understand. This whole project sucked. We spent our entire days on the phone with restaurant owners, trying to schedule appointments. We are going to make it better." Alex: I'm like, "Wait, what's going on?" They say, "No, no, instead of scheduling appointments with the restaurant owners to take photos, we are going to rent Airbnbs and photo studios around town, then order food from the restaurants, bring it to those Airbnbs. Our food stylist is going to make it look good, and we're going to take photos." Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Alex: I'm like, "Wait, wait, what? What?" Stephanie: That's another level. Alex: Yeah. My immediate reaction from this is, "Have you ever seen delivered food? It does not look good." They obviously told me to go pound sand, as they should have, and they showed me the first photos from these experiments. Oh my God, those first photos look much better than anything taken in a restaurant, because food stylists are really good at their jobs. If you were able to control the lighting, you're able to take much better pictures. Alex: When they actually tried it, they discovered that instead of doing two photo shoots a day, the photographer, who's the most scarce and expensive part of the whole operation, is able to do 20 photos shoot a day. Stephanie: Wow, that's efficient, that's amazing. Alex: As you can imagine, at that point, my mind was completely blown. We indeed operationalized this with folks whose day job was operations, as opposed to marketing. This was the example of really learning what learning means. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You kind of picked the markets to do that in, or you kind of see a market not doing so well, and those are the ones that you focus on getting the good imagery for, versus allowing that... UGC content to work well in other markets, or how do you think approaching that? Because it seems like something that would be really hard to scale, ordering a bunch of things all the time from every market in the U.S. How do you think about creating those campaigns? Alex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With hundreds of thousands of restaurants on the platform, we indeed have constrained resources to do these photo shoots when we can. We can't do all of them next month. We had to be somewhat thoughtful on prioritizing things. A few things came to mind for being able to select the right restaurants to do this in sort of the right markets. Alex: First is, conversion. If consumers land on the menu, and end up buying stuff anyway. Well, that's cool, I guess they don't need the photos. If on the other hand, conversion isn't amazing, but the number of visitors to the menu page is super high, hey, this might be an opportunity to actually add some photos and improve that conversion. Alex: By digging into the data, and looking at where the majority of the incremental impact can be, we develop this framework for allocating this constrained resource, which ended up effectively being an investment of marketing dollars into a channel that's sort of marketing, but sort of not. Is it product? Is it operations? I have no idea. Stephanie: It's something, all the above. Alex: Right? Stephanie: How do you think about, you mentioned incrementality quite a bit. How do you think about that throughout your organization, when developing these experiments and seeing what works and what doesn't work? Alex: Sure. First, if you don't mind, allow me to define it as- Stephanie: Yes, please. Alex: Because I think that's super important. Incrementality, to me, is what would have happened anyway? If you didn't do your glorious marketing campaign, or this amazing product improvement that you just rolled out. This is a difficult question, because it's really attempting to attribute the entirety of this success, or entirety of what's happening during a campaign, to the campaign. Alex: Let me give you some intuition behind this, right? Let's say you go to, I don't know, gap.com or something like that. You see a banner in there that says, "10% off." Well, obvious, a lot of people are going to click that banner, and a lot of people are going to use that coupon to get 10% off of their transaction. The key question, though, is, what portion of those people would have transacted anyway? Stephanie: Yeah, they went there directly. They probably would have. Alex: Exactly, it's clearly not zero, because before you launched that awesome 10% off coupon, some people were buying jeans yesterday. Being able to, with confidence, judge what that incremental behavior is, and what is the incremental CAC, and incremental LTV, is super important. Simple back of the napkin as to how you judge this is, let's say yesterday, a hundred people bought those jeans. Today, 110 people bought those jeans. It's not a real AB test, obviously. But all 110 people used your 10% off coupon. You can wrongly suggest that all 110 converted because of your coupon, or you can look at the truth in the eye and realized 110 used the coupon, but 10 really only needed it. Stephanie: Do you think a lot of brands are missing this when they offer these discounts, and maybe unintended consequences that could come from it? I could see a lot of consumers, if they get used to you always having discounts, then they just wait. They're like, "I'm going to wait for that next 10% off coupon," then they don't have a buyer at all. Alex: Yeah, it is super dangerous. I do think that in some industries, there's exactly that happening, right? We know of the right times during the year to buy a TV, so we don't buy a TV until then. We know when the right time of the year to buy home improvement equipment, and we don't buy it until then. Exactly what you're describing is a real danger. Alex: It's not just a danger of delaying the purchase, it's a danger of create a permanently less profitable business. Imagine is, every Friday, Grubhub was to, let's say, give all our consumers three or five dollars off. Not only are Thursday orders going to be delayed, because our consumers are going to be like, "Hey, I don't really care when I get takeout. I'll cook one night and I'll get takeout the other night." They'll delay it until Friday, but those Friday orders are going to be less profitable. Alex: So we permanently teach our consumer base, if we take that route, to not only delay their orders, but to make them less profitable. That is a real issue and something you got to be super careful with, which is why you must measure incrementality. Stephanie: Yeah, especially right now. You see so many people discounting everything, it's kind of scary to think. How are you going to come back when your entire, everything on your store online, is 80% off? How do you come back from that? Alex: Most definitely. Now, if you have physical inventory, the opportunity cost is not zero. Right? Let's say if you're selling digital goods, for example, right? Let's say you're selling access to, let's say a song, or a book, right? Your fixed costs in that situation, your cost of an action, is terribly low, right? As opposed to if you have goods in the warehouse, and you aren't able to sell them, there's very meaningful fixed costs for you that you need to deal with. Alex: It might be, actually, quite reasonable to be running these high promotions, but if you are, you better be running it as a real AB test. You better be able to confidently say that this is the true incrementality of this 80% off coupon, and that's the true value that I'm getting out of it from both not needing to keep these products in the warehouse, but also from just sheer revenue from the consumer. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have a good platform or way that you've set up metrics and things like that to measure that incrementality in a way that's not really manual, and then you can just kind of see how the campaigns and what they're doing is performing against each other? Alex: Yeah. In lower funnel channels, it is actually fairly easy to set up a platform for this, and we have. There are tools that you can use for it, right? Google Optimize, for example, or Optimizely, right? We have a combination of in-house and these third party tools to do product experimentation, for example. Alex: For things like CRM, couponing in the apps, or issuing emails with coupons, or push notifications, really good experimentation platforms don't exist off the shelf. We had to do some math ourselves. Some of that math turned out to be fairly fine tuned to Grubhub's needs. Here's what I mean by this. We're an LTV business. It's not just about the immediate transaction, it's about what happens after that transaction. Stephanie: Yep. Alex: For example, if a consumer ends up converting at a higher rate, and then afterwards has a poor experience and doesn't come back, that actually is terrible, terrible, terrible. Your typical, immediate conversion optimization tool, would just look at the first part of this. Oh my God, they converted at a better rate, great, awesome, keep it. Stephanie: Yay. Yep. Alex: We had to build tools specifically designed to capture these long-term effects. We typically look at the results of these long-term activities over the context of a month, right? So we need to see what happens to consumers for a meaningful amount of time to have high confidence that it indeed is net beneficial or not. Alex: Of course, we're able to look at things fairly early, and if something's a terrible idea, we're able to kill it early. But, in order to be able to confidently say what is the impact on the LTVs, we had to build tools. These in-house tools for many CRM things that we do today. Stephanie: Got it. Alex: Even then, it's just for lower funnel. It's just for CRM and product. How do you judge the incrementality of TV versus billboards? That is a whole other, super complicated story. Stephanie: How do you think about the intersection between your CRM and your content management system and your actual commerce platform? How do you create a good environment where they all interact together, and people can see a holistic view of everything that's going on? Alex: Great question. I don't think I have a perfect answer for you, other than enabling as many work streams for experimentation as are possible. That is, allowing the CRM team to run experiments on their own, without involving a bunch of product people, without involving a bunch of finance and analytics people. Similarly, allowing the front end or pricing optimization team to run experiments on their own, and do very specific price optimization experiments just by themselves. Alex: The more work streams like this you have running in parallel, the more you're going to be able to learn, as an organization, per unit of time. Stephanie: That seems like a great answer to me. It also seems like you would get a lot of, you could have a customer with a negative experience, but it would be because of maybe the restaurant. It seems like you guys would have a lot of insights into maybe how to help restaurants improve, where it's like, hey, every time someone orders this thing of sushi, you always forget the wasabi, and man is that making people upset. Do you ever send that data back to restaurants to improve the products as in their food, or the customer experience, or anything like that? Alex: Most definitely, you hit the nail on the head. We are in a really unique position of knowing not just who the people were, or when they placed the orders at your restaurant, but knowing exactly what they ordered. We can see exactly that pattern, right? We can tell you that on Tuesday night, the reviews for people ordering sushi, are actually worse than on any other night. We can help you see that, so that you can train the person that's working on Tuesday night. Stephanie: [crosstalk 00:43:21]. Alex: These kind of insights... Yeah, totally. These kind of insights are exactly what we believe is what is something that we can uniquely provide to our restaurant partners, besides demand. Of course they come to us because they're interested in demand, particularly now. But we can do more, and we've been building a lot of systems specifically about that, that are effectively... you can think of this as recommendation systems in the grand scheme of the word of giving recommendations to the restaurants about how they can lend the totality of their business more efficiently. For example- Stephanie: It seems like that could be a whole different business for you guys to also operate. Alex: It's quite synergistic in our minds, right? If we're able to make our restaurants more successful, it actually makes us more successful, in turn. Because, those consumers who are placing orders and are not getting any wasabi with their sushi, they are ultimately not happy with Grubhub. We want them to have an amazing experience. Alex: Whether the restaurant wins just on Grubhub, or throughout the totality of their experience, because, let's face it, that restaurant might be serving other delivery platforms, and soon enough, hopefully, dine-in, as well. That retraining is going to help the restaurant across the board. We actually very much welcome that. That means that we're able to create the value not just for our platform, but for the restaurant, and increase the chance that this restaurant will, ultimately, be successful. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think that's a really good point, especially as a lot of brands right now are shifting quickly to the world of Ecommerce and trying to figure out how to sell online. There's going to be a lot of new touch points that they maybe aren't anticipating that could actually hurt the consumer experience. If you've got the UPS guy throwing your box over the fence, and it's getting crush, there's a lot of things that actually, you maybe wouldn't even think of, as a brand, of, "That's not my job," when really, everything form start to finish to delivery and afterwards, and the follow-up, all of that's your job. And how do you think about controlling that experience with so many touch points? Alex: You are so right. The totality of this is their job. From the first ads that they see on TV, to what shows up when they look on SEM or on paid social and discover your brand there, too. The first purchase experience to the interaction with the UPS guy, to the interaction with customer service. All of that, in totality, is what the brand relationship really is, what the product really is. Alex: As marketers, we can't just care about that ads. As product people, we can't just care about the bits installed on the phone. They, in their separation, they don't particularly matter. As you saw from my story with the photos, that really was quite profound to me, right? We kept looking for a solve to get more customers and more sales through marketing, and that solve wasn't there at all. The most efficient solve was far outside. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, such a good reminder for all brands to think about that, like you said, totality of the process. Because you have a software engineering background, I feel like I'm allowed to ask you tech questions. I saw on your, you guys have a blog on Medium, or your engineering staff does. They were talking about how they were creating discount codes using crypto. It made me wonder, what other kind of technologies are y'all experimenting with, or seeing success, or how did you think about running the platform that Grubhub's built on now? Alex: Sure. A few things are super important. One is having a scalable platform that can withstand demand, and that can withstand massive spikes in demand. As luck would have it, most people in Chicago, want to get dinner approximately at the same time. Stephanie: Yes, who knew? Alex: Right. What a pain in the butt. We've been trying to convince them to maybe come a different... No. Stephanie: Come on, 3:00's your time, come on. Alex: Exactly, exactly. Your dinner delivery window. Which, of course, creates formidable demand. Not just on the services in the backend of our systems, but a formidable demand on our logistics network. A lot of our work goes into being able to spike in response to customer demand. Let me give you one intuitive example of this. Outside of COVID, before COVID, when rain would start during dinner hours, demand would massively spike. Alex: At that moment, we're supposed to magically materialize a lot of drivers on the road doing deliveries. Being able to do so, technically, and when I say magically materialize, I'm of course referring to creating incentives and creating appropriate communication channels with our drivers so that they actually want to get on the road. A lot of our engineering work has to do with how we were talking about in the beginning, balancing the three sites of the network, and being able to respond to either a massive spike in demand, or response to a set of orders that were placed in the specific part of the city on the logistics side. Alex: Or, respond to an onboarding of an enormous partner, like Shake Shack, or Sweet Green, or Taco Bell, with their own unique needs. Remember, we work with such a variety of restaurants, right? We do point of sale integrations with a variety of our enterprise customers, which of course means that we have to have nimble systems that are able to onboard those same customers. They have to be resilient, as well. So, a lot of our work has to do with both scale and being able to deal with these spikes. Stephanie: Got it. Any favorite pieces of tech that you guys are implementing or trying out right now to help with those large spikes in demand? Or where you guys think the future is headed that you're kind of preparing for? Alex: Favorite pieces of tech. Huh. Huh. I'm going to think marketing tech. Braze has been an outstanding tool for our marketing teams. What we've discovered is it effectively enabled a whole work stream of experimentation for our CRM teams. They're able to run pretty sophisticated experiments completely independently from engineering, which increase our velocity of experimentation. Stephanie: Hmm, that's awesome. I'll have to check that out. Cool. So to zoom out a little bit, 30,000 foot level, what kind of disruptions do you see coming in the world of Ecommerce? What's on your radar right now? It doesn't have to be for Grubhub, it can just be in general. Alex: I think that the disruption is already here, where over these past couple of months, we've seen the portion of online transactions, and portion of consumers who have tried buying things online just catapult through the roof. All of those new consumers, let's face it, my 90 year old grandmother is using Zoom now. All of those consumers are a new opportunity. They have very different expectations. They don't yet know much about your brand. Alex: Being able to understand this newly online wave, and heightened expectations of the consumers that already happen online, but perhaps not as active with your service, right? Those, I think, are super important. This to me takes us back to velocity of experimentation, being more important now than ever. That is, truly learning from your customers. Observing them, creating experiments, measuring, and getting a feedback loop from them, so that you're able to focus and find the one thing that you can improve to make the whole story better. Maybe photos. Maybe it's something else. Stephanie: Yep. Yeah, I love that. It definitely seems like with these new people coming online, you have to have a bunch of different tactics to meet them wherever they are. The ones that have been working for the past year, might only work for a subset of the people because you have 50% more people that you need to market to, or develop a platform for, and it's going to be very different with how you approach those new consumers than what you've been used to. Alex: Exactly. Stephanie: All right, so, we're about to jump into the lightning round. Any higher level thoughts, Alex, that you want to share before we do so? Alex: If you're able to structure your organizational incentives to focus on learning and feedback loops, I think now you're going to see an even bigger reward for it in the form of market share, in the form of growth, in the form of being able to adapt to the world around you and leapfrogging the competition. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. All right, so the lightning round, brought to you by our friends at Sales Force Commerce Cloud. It's a fun and easy, quick round of questions where you have a minute or less to answer. Are you excited and ready, Alex? Alex: Very scared. Stephanie: Dun dun. All right, first one. If you are starting a podcast, what would it be about, and who would be your first guest? Alex: Whoa, what a fascinating question. What a fascinating question. I am obsessed with all things culture, and how do you actually create the right incentives for a technology/marketing organization? I love Simon Sinek. He is outright amazing. I learned a ton from reading him. I would probably to get him and if I can't, I'd get one of my former mentors in there, as a consolation prize. Stephanie: Oh, that sounds good. I would listen. I would be your first listener, and I would give you a five start review. Alex: Oh my gosh, thank you. Stephanie: You got me at least. What's up next on your reading list? Alex: Hmm, next on my reading list? I am reading Russian sci-fi novels these days, as a means of escaping from a tiny, one bedroom apartment. Stephanie: Any good ones that we should check out? Alex: I'm actually reading them in Russian, so I don't know- Stephanie: I was going to say, unless they're in Russian, then I don't know if I'll be able to read Russian quick enough to read it. Alex: Oopsie, oopsie, I do have a few people at my work who've been reading Tolstoy before the whole COVID situation started. I don't know if I'd recommend it now, Tolstoy does darkness extremely well. We have enough darkness around us now. Stephanie: That is true. Yeah, maybe not. Alright, well, what thing do you normally buy at a store that now you're just going to buy online after everything with COVID? Alex: What a great question. Only online now. Hmm. Stephanie: Tricky, tricky. Alex: I used to, actually a lot of my electronics. I used to come to the store and look at them and experiment with them. I have a feeling that I'm never doing that again. I used to come to a Best Buy and just try to look at different mice and monitors and all that. I got a new laptop and a new mouse online. I really like them, and I really like the experience. I was unafraid of returning them. That's it, online I go. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree, especially as a lot of these companies are making the return experience a lot more seamless. Yeah, I could completely see the same thing happening. Buy things, test it out, and send it back if you don't like it. Alex: I was just chatting with a colleague about this exact same thing with returns around fashion. I think there's a lot of innovation to be had with moving the fear in fashion through that. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree, except I could see them having to now to figure out a way to resell those items in a way that proves that they've been quarantined, disinfected, and yeah. I was just thinking about that the other day. Man, that's tricky, especially for second hand market places to try and prove to the customer that these items are clean and good to go, and you can buy them. Alex: I agree. Solvable, I think, but I agree. Stephanie: It is solvable. All right, so the last final question. What's up next for Ecommerce professionals? Alex: I think we're going through a time when from being on the early adopter, early majority demand for most of the brands. We've become the critical source of revenue for every single brand. If you think that your company was going through a digital transformation, and is now trying to make digital just a better channel, hold on to your seats, because it's not the only channel, and the majority channel. So, the demand for expertise in our area is increasing very rapidly, and the demand for learning in our area is also increasing rapidly. I think this is a wonderful time to be in Ecommerce. I think this is a wonderful time to be learning and doubling down on Ecommerce. I'm excited for all of us to be right at the center of this transformation. Stephanie: I love that, love the positivity, and yeah, it's definitely an exciting time to be alive and experiment and try new things. This has been a blast Alex, thanks so much for coming on the show. This is your second appearance on a Mission podcast, so yeah, we're so thankful that you came back and joined us again. Alex: Stephanie, thank you very much for inviting me. Stephanie: All right, talk to you later. Alex: Cheers.  

Act 1 BETHENNY VS JILL IS IN THE PAPER Bethenny sits down with her assistant and reads that there’s an item about her and Jill being frenemies. The article references the Saks dinner that Bethenny wasn’t at.  The way fashion and the ‘press’ as they say played into early rhony seasons is unmatched by any other city. It’s so fascinating that these women were regularly appearing in the papers and we never found it weird. That’s something that’s specific to RHONY that I love.  It’s interesting that this article is about Bethenny pulling away from the rest of the cast, and here we are, with Bethenny having pulled away from the rest of the cast. It’s also interesting that we happen to be recapping season 3 which is Bethenny’s last season, and we only recently found out that this past season was also Bethenny’s last.  Bethenny thinks that Jill is responsible for this because the article favors her so much.  Bethenny is pissed because Perez Hilton reached out to her. He told Bethenny that she should hear what Jill has said about her. This probably happened at the party last episode. I love how all this connects. If you remember Perez Hilton made an appearance on the hills this year.  KELLY FLIRTS WITH A JOURNALIST Kelly immediately starts flirting with the Playboy journalist. It’s really uncomfortable. She’s all smiley but she has a GIANT smile so it’s actually terrifying.  Kelly asks him if he’s seen the shoot. She’s BEGGING for compliments. “Did you see the shoot? What did I look like, I can’t remember!” He asks if she’s reading any books and says he’s reading a new swedish novel called the girl with a dragon tattoo. Kelly’s response: I don’t have any tattoos. Ok that’s not what he asked. In interview Kelly says she needs to brush up on all of her ‘foreign’ literature. Kelly is OrRANGE. Like charred to a crisp.  They go outside and he asks her out and it’s SO uncomfortable. He said should we do this again? Less interview and more conversation? And she immediately is like WHAT?! Super anxious and wanting him to ask her out. He gets her number and they both go in the wrong direction and she goes, “I’m all nervous.” Honestly if this were anyone else I would think it was cute but Kelly is such a phony. It’s just all cringe.  LUANN AND VICTORIA TALK ABOUT LUANN DATING Luann watches Victoria sketch and suggests that she get her a ‘stage’ which is an internship. It’s hard to google if this true because you just get the word stage. I believe that Luann was using the right word. I just don’t know if it was necessary for this situation. Can you imagine the Luann of today using words like stage?! Victoria asks Luann if she’s dating. Luann says no one serious, but she’s ready to start dating seriously. Again, let it breathe Luann! She’s so eager to get back out there and settle down again. Marriage is Luann’s achilles heel.  ACT TWO ALLY ZARIN DOES A PHOTOSHOOT We’re coming off of last episode where Jill, her mom and he sister had a photo shoot for Jill’s book. I don’t know that I’m ready for Jill in another photoshoot situation. Kelly shows up.  Jill keeps telling Ally to shake it. Kelly comes up with what she thinks is a genius theory. By Jill being so over the top, Ally relaxed, so she look beautiful. I don’t think that’s true. If Jill was yelling at me off camera I would probably tense up even more.  Kelly tells Jill about the journalist who asks her out. Jill needs all the details. I have to say, when Jill dips into ‘dating advice mode’ I happen to love it. It’s so old fashioned but comforting. Even though Jill is a monster who blocked me on twitter.  Jill encourages Kelly to go out there and date. Kelly then asks in a very sort of sad and telling moment: Am I ever going to meet a nice guy? Ever? I do feel bad for Kelly because her singleness is the result of her having zero self awareness. I think men see her as beautiful and a prize, but there is nothing there to hold on to long term. Her grip on reality is a bit sketchy and nothing she says really makes sense.  ALEX HAS A MEETING FOR BROOKLYN FASHION WEEKEND THERE’S Alex! Where has she been this entire time?! I really do miss her when she’s not around.  Kelly Ramona and Bethenny help come and select dresses. Alex didn’t invite Jill but she does acknolwedge that we ‘had closure at sax’ Alex’s friend who is a designer is there too. Ramona laughs, “He’s wearing bracelets like a woman!!” Ramona is such a moron.  Bethenny asks how the Saks event was. Kelly hints that Ramona was mean to her.  Bethenny probes more. Ramona insists there was nothing mean about what she said, and that it was factual.  Bethenny in bite says Ramona has to take more accountability for her actions, and that diarrhea of the mouth is not a real ailment. This is hilarious because this is forever Ramona’s problem and will continue to be until present day.  Bethenny apologizes to everyone that they ended up in the news article from the beginning. Alex very earnestly asks, Did you plant it? Bethenny is shocked and says no, it has Jill written all over it. Ramona: Let’s not atack someone when they’re not here.  Ramona is tired of being caught in the middle. She doesn’t think that Jill would stop that low as to plant an article. OMG Ramona OF COURSE SHE WOULD!! Planting articles is the ESSENCE of Jill!  Ramona tries to move on from the subject, and Bethenny wants Ramona to listen to other people’s problems. Ramona accuses Bethenny of being a press monger, so who cares if she is written about?  Kelly doesn’t buy Bethenny’s innocent act and is going to speak up.  ACT THREE Kelly says that Bethenny did the same thing to her, and that Bethenny called her Madonna. That’s not even that mean!! Bethenny says Kelly has said mean things to her as well.  Bethenny is confused that Kelly called a truce and she’s starting in on her again. Alex is trying to mediate but its so sad to watch. Kelly thinks Bethenny is doing the same thing that Jill is doing, so Bethenny is a hypocrite. Ramona: I CAME FROM MY OFFICE IN THE MIDDLE FO TEH DAY TO DO THIS!! Ramona is more annoyed that she’s discussing brooklyn fashion week.  Alex: Today I brought you here to discuss fashion. If you want to help me sit here and pick fashion for the show then lets do that. Are you in or are you out?! CRINNNNNGE. She goes around and asks everyone if they’re in. Kelly and Bethenny said they’re in. Alex: Thank you. Let’s go. Alex thinks she’s such a bad ass and has this so under control. She literally glances up at the camera guy waiting for some sort of applause.  Simon arrives. Ramona shoots up and hugs him; she’s so relieved.  Bethenny wonders what she’s doing here; if she was ever going to pick fashions she didn’t think it would be at brooklyn fashion week. This anti brooklyn thing is such a staple of these early seasons.  The designers show their looks.  Ramona: “Just so you know, you want to do 100% silk for a dress, not poly satin for evening wear.” Interview: Ramona: And that’s the difference between Brooklyn Fashion week and new york fashion week. BURNNN Ramona goes to try on the yellow dress. Kelly moves over to Bethenny. Kelly: “I want to make it clear… I don’t care.” They re-apologize. Ramona and Alex come and interrupt in dresses. They continue their patch up. They hug it out. Kelly: I called a truce. I said the conversation is over. ...you started the fight! You didn’t call a truce!  So for those keeping track, this is their SECOND makeup… and scary island is still around the corner.  RAMONA AND JONI AT FIG AND OLIVE Joni Joni Joni… shit talker of Ramona! She’s so up her ass at the same time.  Ramona talks again about renewing herself. Ramona very awkwardly pivots into wanting to renew her vows. This to me is probably when Mario’s eye started to wander.  Ramona interview: Joanie is a really good friend. Wait til you see episode onnnnne.  Ramona talks about how her father passing away is the reason she wants to renew everything. This again is when Ramona is the most authentic. Ramona says her grandmother used to live in brooklyn and maybe that’s why she doesn’t like going there.  What’s crazy is Ramona says that she saw him over christmas and they finally connected, but then he died two weeks later. And as we know after this season, she wasn’t in the will. That has to be hard!  AT KELLY’S APARTMENT Kelly over her computer pretending she’s so busy.  Kelly talks about the guy she’s going out with. Kelly reflected back on it and realized she doesn’t want to mix business with pleasure. WHATEVERRRRR he probably stood her up. Kelly says Gilles Bensimon was her Mr. Big.  Kelly gets an emil from Jill. “Hey a little birdie told me you were all good with Bethenny. I sadly am not. I thought you really cared. Good luck, you’ll need it with B. -Jill.”  Kelly weirdly has great perspective on this and realizes that Jill is putting her in a bad position.  ACT FOUR PODBUSTER: Mario and Ramona are presenting Tru Faith jewelry to a group of women that are going to represent their line. Ramona is so anxious and talks so quickly. It’s stressful.  LUANN COMES OVER TO JILL’S Luann is staying in Jill’s since she doesn’t have a place in nyc yet.  Jill tells Luann she has to change outfits. She’s so anxious… Luann got Jill a gift. It’s massive chalice that says GO BIG OR GO HOME. It’s hideous. I wonder if Jill gets the memo that everyone thinks she’s over the top and tacky AF.  Bethenny calls Jill. Jill puts her on speaker so Luann can hear. Bethenny asks Jill why she’s on speaker, Jill says she’s doing a hundred things so she needs her hands. IT’s soooo awkward because Bethenny is like who is there? Is it intentional that people are around hearing? Jill is sooo sneaky and shady. I mean she looks so bad.  Bethenny: In light of the disproportionate nature of this argument I think we should sit down and talk about it. Jill: What does disproportionate mean? Bethenny doesn’t understand why Luann has heard about this message. Jill is super cold and doesn’t think it’s important for them to discuss why this argument is so big. Luann is sitting there listening making faces.  Jill wishes Bethenny the best. She brings up Bobby again and how Bethenny never asked about Bobby despite sending flowers. Jill says I will never forget what you said, I could quote it like it was yesterday. Umm you saved the message!!   Bethenny: I reached out to you about Bobby and you ignored me. Jill: You think that might ahve been a sign?! Jill is making NO Sense at this point.  Bethenny brings up again that Jill was running around all summer so she can’t believe Bobby was that sick. That of course is the last straw for Jill because it’s true, so she hangs up, leaving a crying Bethenny on the street.  ACT 5 Post call… Jill is sweating because Bethenny gives her anxiety. Luann is such an obnoxious cheerleader and just wants Jill to stay by her side.  Jill: Where was she just now to say, aside from everything Jill, how is Bobby? It’s soooo fake that Jill is using bobby. Jill truly doesn’t care.  NEXT EPISODE… Brooklyn bridge scene!!! Alex going to Jill and cryptically saying Bethenny’s father is dying and she should check in. Ramona orhcestrates Bethenny and Jill’s conversation. 

In this episode, we discuss: Family law matters can be resolved amicably through mediation The process of divorce does not need to be economically devastating Mediation provides an opportunity to minimize your children’s exposure to the divorce process   Rhonda: Thank you so much for joining us for another episode. I am so excited to be able to introduce you today to Alex Jacobson. She is the founder of Jacobson Mediation Group out of the Greater Chicago area and she's a former divorce lawyer turned divorce mediator. What a mouthful that is. Thank you so much for joining us today. Alex: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Rhonda: Well, let's talk a little bit about what prompted you to move in the direction of building your practice around mediation. Give us a little backstory on what led you to where you're at today. Alex: Certainly, so I was a divorce lawyer for the past 12 years. I practiced at one of the premier divorce firms in Chicago doing all matters related to divorce and matrimonial issues, so that included child custody, property division, child support, spousal support, premarital agreement, postnuptial agreements, all the above. And as my practice grew, it became increasingly apparent that even in the highest complex situation, matters can be resolved outside of the courtroom. And I just found that after practicing at that level, that once you are in the courtroom, you really can't unring that bell. Once people start slinging the mud, it's difficult to go back to co-parenting or to reach an agreement that is reasonable for both parties. And once the judgment is imposed upon you by a judge, it may or may not meet the needs of your family. It may or may not be narrowly tailored to the needs of your family. And so, I just simply found that alternative dispute resolution was just a better way to resolve these types of cases. Rhonda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, talk to us a little bit about, I mean obviously, there's a lot of different ways that mediation can be used throughout the divorce process. Are you, tell us a little bit about what you're seeing as far as trends? Are people moving in the direction of mediation only? Meaning you've got that neutral third party who is facilitating the conversation between the parties? Or are you, and or are you also seeing where people have attorneys and then they're utilizing mediators to be able to close the gap on our particular issue? Alex: So, I'm seeing both, in fact, depending on the issues that are being addressed. So in the first instance, I would, I would say that parenting issues often can be resolved with the parties without their attorneys being present because quite simply they are the key people that know what their children need and how to craft an agreement that meets the needs of their children, their extracurriculars, the extent that their child has a special need. They are the two people and the two people primarily who know what those needs are and who can speak to those issues and in the best way. When it comes to financial issues, they're oftentimes one or both parties who really are not equipped to handle the financial issues on her own and really look to their attorneys to provide them with the guidance that they need. And my role is to facilitate the discussion and help navigate that conversation. Alex: And, and whether attorneys are involved also depends on what phase in the case mediation comes in. So for example, cases may or may not begin sort of with a bang and there are some temporary issues that need to be resolved immediately. So, who's going to pick up Tommy from soccer practice? Who's going to pay for school tuition this month? Who's going pay the mortgage bill? These are immediate issues that the people need a band-aid for immediately while they're working on a more global resolution of all the issues in the case. So those immediate issues may be addressed with just the parties present without attorneys involved. And then once everyone has done their discovery and they're prepared to address all the issues in the divorce case, that is when the attorneys may come in and participate in the process. Rhonda: So I love one of the things that you said, I just want to touch on, because I see this in the women that I'm working with, which is, there are some of those immediate things that do need to be resolved or taken care of the day-to-day stuff. Like you said, who's going to pick up so-and-so from soccer practice and let's talk about who's going to pay the bills, you know, or which bills they're going to pay. So, if somebody is listening today and they're feeling frustrated because they perhaps feel like, you know, people aren't listening to them like, hey well we'll get to that later, we'll get to that later. Cause I mean the divorce process in and of itself, there are certain kind of key milestones and sometimes those things don't get talked about traditionally until later. What are some of the things that women could say, "Hey listen, this is an important concern or issue for me," so they can really get or bend the ear of their attorney and or mediator? Alex: Well, I mean and certainly in Chicago and I believe in many other courts, all parenting issues must be mediated before a judge will provide a hearing or a trial date. And judges also it's permissive for them to send financial matters. So, I would impress upon these women to, or anybody, to seek the opportunity, typically in mediation from the outset. So, they can address the immediate issues without going through the periods of frustration, without having them be resolved. And you know, the uncertainty is really unnerving for all people and quite frankly, that spills over to the children. And so, it's best for everybody involved if you can avoid that uncertainty and sort of assign these tasks as the process is going along. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, let's transition into talking about a couple of key things related to mediation. And the first thing that I know that you wanted to share was around the fact that family matters can be resolved through mediation. So, talk to us a little bit about that. I know we've kind of highlighted that a little, but let's take a little bit deeper. From your experience, and now the good news is you kind of have been on both sides of the litigation side and now you've moved into more of the mediation side. You know, talk to us about how those are, how some of those things are getting resolved. Alex: Certainly. So, I mean, there are very few cases in the family law realm that are so clearly black and white and there are many shades of gray. And it's just a matter of appealing to what's important to the two people who are crafting the agreement. And even people, we're, we're taping this on a Monday. So even people who couldn't agree that today is Monday after working through the issues in their particular case, can ultimately reach an agreement that it's Monday. It's possible and it's possible to do it in an amicable way. It's possible to do it in a way that, through the process or sitting in the same room together or alternatively they're sitting in separate rooms together and the mediator is shuttling between them and, going through all of the terms that need to be addressed in a way that is productive with, avoiding the mudslinging and it's, and it truly is possible. Rhonda: Yeah. So, what role would you say, I mean, so the parties, right? I mean, if they're using mediation as their primary method, need to be organized and come to the table with, completing assignments or conversations or whatever that the mediator’s kind of helping them to kind of work through. Who is kind of identifying the agenda? I mean, so the, for the people that are considering going through mediation, what kinds of things should they doing to make sure that they're as prepared as possible for those mediation meetings? Alex: Certainly, that's a very good point. I mean, the mediation can only be as productive as the party preparation for the process. So, at the outset, I as a mediator find out what issues are being discussed, whether it's only parenting issues, whether it's financial and parenting issues. And in order to make the process most productive, the parties need to complete their financial affidavits. They need to know what their income situations are, what their, what their other spouse's income situations are, what assets exist, what are their expenses, what are their expenses now, and what are their expenses likely to be in the next few years. I mean, the goal is to anticipate as many possible contingencies as you can so you can address them in agreement, in the agreement to avoid litigation down the road. So, I set the agenda, I give the homework and timelines for the homework to be completed in order for the process to be the most productive possible. Rhonda: Yeah, I love that. And I think, just having some clarity right, on you whose role is helpful through this process because people don't know what they don't know. Right? They don't know what they don't know and if they've never been through that course before, and/or if they're considering mediation as an option then I think those are some of the things that are helpful for them to know. Alex: Certainly, and, and knowledge is power, and knowledge is being more informed certainly allows somebody to participate in a more meaningful way in the process. And that's critically important, especially for a spouse who, may not have been well versed in the finances of a family prior to the process beginning. And look, there is no shame in that. I mean, when you're living together and you're married, there's a division of labor in the home and the fact that one parent may not have been responsible for paying the bills or knowing what their savings, where their savings was even located, let alone how much existed. That's, that's a normal arrangement in a, in a family. And that by virtue of a divorce, you know, changes. Everybody needs to be informed. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I have said on many of the previous podcast recordings the formula for having financial confidence is the knowledge plus the experience because you can't have one without the other. Right? And so, if they maybe have the knowledge but don't have the experience, that may impact their confidence. But as they go through this process and ask questions and they take an interest, hey, you know what? You can gain the knowledge; you can gain the experience. Ultimately at the end you're going to come out having more confidence as you step into that role because not only will you be forced to do it, I guess is the bottom line. I mean, whether you want to or not, you're going to have to step up and, and take ownership of the finances. And so, we can use that divorce process as a great way for women to navigate through that and kind of gear up for having to take some of those things over on their own. Alex: Right. Absolutely. And I would also point out that for the most part, mediation is a voluntary process. So, whereas in litigation, you might be in a circumstance where you feel like one party may feel like they're being shielded from obtaining the necessary information to be informed. And in mediation, the documents are being produced voluntarily. The financial information is being exchanged voluntarily so that everybody is armed and prepared to participate in the process. And you avoid that. Ideally, you're avoiding the feeling of being in the dark. Rhonda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, let's move on to talk about, I always say divorce isn't free. So, the question becomes how people want to spend dollars to go through the process. And one of the things that you had mentioned was that divorce does not have to be just economically devastating for people. And so, talk to us a little bit about that. Alex: Certainly. So, I mean, when you're in the courtroom a whole host of things happen. At a minimum, each party is more likely than not represented by counsel. There are court appearances that are meaningful and court appearances that are less meaningful, but nevertheless you're incurring fees for all of them. Court appearances can be delayed, they can be canceled, they can, and every single time your attorneys need to prepare and get up to speed in order to, to be productive in, in the courtroom. In the context of mediation, you are streamlining that process. You may or may not have your attorneys present. Everybody is prepared to proceed on a set day. And ideally because the process is being streamlined, you are avoiding significant fees that would, that are associated with the litigation process. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I know that, you know, depending on what part of the country people are in, the range in which the divorce process on average, the cost on average, the duration on average. Again, we've got some national statistics around that, but each state or region or area may have may differentiate a little bit amongst you know, those areas. But on average, you know, the average cost for divorce is $15,000 and the average duration is a year. So that much we know. Alex: Which is absolutely wild. I mean, I could have a case referred to me, this week have their task list set out for the next two weeks, have mediation session the following week. And when it's all said and done, if we've reached anywhere, but you know, north of $3,500 to $4,000 just for the mediator, I would be shocked. You can wrap it up within. And that doesn't include attorney's fees to the extent that attorneys are being involved. But I mean, you can see that the process can be so slimmed down in a, in a major, major way. Rhonda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Alex: And by the way, you know, there's also a range of mediators’ fees. You know, certainly in Chicago there are former judges that are doing this that can command, you know, a significantly higher rate and they're tending to cases where perhaps their hourly rate doesn't necessarily factor into the analysis. Mediation isn't just, isn't just for wealthy people. And there are plenty of other professionals. I, for example, practiced for 12 years, I have significant experience, but I'm not commanding the hourly rate that a former judge does. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think too, it's for people to look at the different options and ask themselves a couple of questions. So, like as I'm working with clients and coaching them through, ultimately, it's up to them and in working with the attorney or mediator to figure out what process is best. But I can take them through a simple exercise that says, okay, here's pro se, here's mediation, here's litigation, here's collaborative. Let's just talk about the definition of each of those and then what are the pros and cons? What do you see as the pro or con of each of these areas? And what ends up happening is they come out of there and like, okay, I have a little more clarity on what really seems to resonate with me knowing my husband and how he might respond, what seems like the best option. Rhonda: And then they can start kind of exploring that because they have a lot of choices on what they feel like might be best. Now they're also, I think there's value in getting input from the professionals as well. But to be able to take some time and just think through all those options I think is good. And for some people, you know, it isn't as much about the finances. Sometimes it is. I mean it just; each situation is so different. But I think being able to look at, look at the options, I believe that women always make good decisions when they have all the information. Alex: Certainly. Rhonda: And so, there's somewhat I would call kind of pre-divorce work that women can be just kind of thinking through, taking some time to ponder to see if this is a good fit for them or not. You know, so that's why I love doing these types of having these types of conversations specifically around the different options of the process. So, I appreciate your input on that as well. Alex: Certainly. Rhonda: So, the other thing that I want to chat with you about is the fact that mediation can be a good way to minimize children's exposure to the divorce process. So, I find this really fascinating and I look forward to hearing what you have to say about this talking point. Alex: Certainly. So you know, when there is a parenting issue, and I'm obviously speaking from my experience with the, with Cook County in Chicago, but it's almost immediate that if the parties are unable to resolve whatever the parenting issues are in mediation, that a judge will uniformly appoint a child's representative who's an attorney that's going to represent the needs of the child. That child's representative is and will then the children will be involved in the process. He or she will interview them, will observe them with each parent. We'll make recommendations to the court, and his or her interaction with the child may not just be on one occasion. It may be on multiple occasions, depending on what the issues are. Alex: And again, talk about, you can't unring that bell. I mean, once your kids are being interviewed by professionals and, and then by, by the way, if that doesn't result in an agreement, there may be, a child custody evaluation that's performed by a mental health professional and that involves multiple interviews with your child. And I think that, for the most part, what people can agree on is that they don't want their children involved in the process because it's not good for anybody. And in mediation you can avoid all of that. Rhonda: That, that's awesome. And I think obviously, I mean there may be times when people can't agree, and they are going to have to maybe go and utilize some of those other processes that that the court system has in place. But I love, you know, for people to be able to consider mediation for the reason that you just mentioned because I think of all the things that they can agree on, wanting the best for their kids is usually an easy one. Alex: Right. And the, the fact is that people are getting divorced, so they are not necessarily speaking in a kind way to each other. It's not necessarily a productive mode of communication between each other. And oftentimes they just need somebody, a third party to help them navigate the conversation. And that's what the mediator's there for. Rhonda: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that's, that's really great. Well, we have covered a lot of ground in a really short period of time and as we wrap up our time together, I always end with two things. One is a quote and the other is a client success story. So, go ahead and share with us your favorite quote. Alex: So, I recently read this, the quote is, "Focus on divorce as a problem to solve instead of a battle to be won." Rhonda: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Alex: It resonates and in a very significant way for me, I have, once people come down to earth, and realize that they're getting divorced or have accepted it or are ready to move forward with the process in a productive way and, and are not looking to sabotage their spouse or really just want to reach a resolution and focus it, focus on it as a problem to be solved, that's when they're able to reach a, a meaningful agreement, a lasting agreement that will serve the needs of their family going forward. Rhonda: Yeah. Oh my gosh, I love that. Oh, and it takes, I mean, divorce is emotional, right? And I think there's certainly a time to deal with the emotions, but it helps really to just kind of frame what the goal is. Right? And so, that's a great quote. All right, so let's end with the client’s success story. Alex: Certainly. So there's, there's really nothing so magical about it other than the fact that for these two individuals, they had been in the litigation process for over a year and had been engaging in discovery that was not relevant to their case, multiple court appearances that was really just causing more and more of a rift between them rather than bringing them together to reach an agreement. And one of them had been referred to me as a mediator. The other interviewed me and we sat down together at about nine o'clock in the morning and by two o'clock had reached a comprehensive agreement on everything that needed to be addressed in their marital settlement agreement. Alex: When we concluded for the day, the husband looked at the wife and, and said to her, "That is the most productive conversation we've had in over five years." And, it really, I believe, set the tone for how these two individuals are going to be able to move forward in a productive way as divorced parents and co-parents effectively. And, and it was just a very positive way to, to start down with new road for them, for their new normal. Rhonda: I love it. I love it. I think that it also depends too on finding the right mediator, right? Being the mediator is not an easy job. Alex: Definitely not. Rhonda: I've sat in on plenty of mediations. I'm like, okay, they, you know, the mediator's got to be the tough cookie in the room, right? Because you must hold people accountable and encourage them to have those conversations. Think outside the box, get people talking, manage emotions. I mean, there's a lot to it. And so I think that's a fantastic success story. And just again, giving people the opportunity to say it. Listen, there may be times when you get to a point where, yeah, it's time to mediate and get everybody in the same room and make sure you've got the right mediator and hash things out and leave there with a result. Right? Some clarity, some concrete solutions. And I love the fact that, yeah, love the fact, that they were able to leave there feeling a lot more positive. Alex: So yeah, it was great success. Rhonda: Yay. I love it. Well, I want to thank you so much, Alex, for your time today. Alex: Certainly, thank you for having me. Rhonda: And I want to encourage people to check out Alex's contact information in the show notes, as well as the transcribed audio notes, and hopefully as people are listening to this, we've given them some really great things to think about as far as the direction that they may want to go as they're navigating through their divorce process.   QUOTE: “Focus on divorce as a problem to solve instead of a battle to be won.”   CONTACT INFORMATION: Alex Jacobson Founder Jacobson Mediation Group 212 West Superior Street, Suite 203 Chicago, IL 60654 ajacobson@jacobsonmediationgroup.com (312) 877-5092 LinkedIn | Facebook   Visit the Women’s Financial Wellness Center for a full directory listing of experts. Be sure to reach out if you would like to connect personally with the Women’s Financial Wellness Center. You can visit our website or grab a complimentary 30-minute consult.   Leaving a positive podcast review is hugely important: they help the podcast get discovered by new people. 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Alex Charfen is one of the very select few coaches I continually plug into...    I have wanted to get this individual on here for quite some time, and Alex Charfen has been one of the reasons why my stuff is blowing up so much.    I have learned that I need to listen to less people, and I'm very, very picky on those that I choose to dive deeply with…   So for marketing and sales, I've really dove deep with Russell, (obviously) and you all know that.    For systems and business systems, I've dove very deeply with Alex Charfen... he's the other coach that I pay a lot to and listen to as well.    ...and I have other various ones that are very carefully selected... and I don't listen to ANYBODY else!    I'm extremely careful about the content that I consume - so that I can spend most of my time just moving, rather than gathering MORE information…   ... which I don't think many of us need more of.    So anyway, I'm excited for you guys to understand more of why Alex Charfen, for me, has been so key…   So I asked him to come on the show and to teach a little bit more about the systems that all businesses need, regardless of whatever you're in.    A lot of these are the systems that a brand new entrepreneur needs when they finally get that revenue coming in.    ...and then there are systems that he creates for those who have an existing business and are ready to scale.    Alex answers the questions…     How do you know if you should be scaling or not?        What are the five reasons why most companies fail to scale?     If you guys like this interview, please reach out to him, (he did not need to do this) and say “Thank You!”    At the very end, we have a special little thing for you, and so we're excited!    Boom, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, welcome back to Sales Funnel Radio - we're really excited to have you guys here.    I'm with one of my good friends, who's become an amazing friend and definitely a mentor... I would call and consider him a brother as well.    I want to introduce everybody to Alex Charfen.   Before I really bring Alex on, I just want you all to understand, Alex Charfen was one of the guys that helped me understand why I am who I am... and that, it’s okay… and helped me lean into that.    I talk to you a lot about leaning into your obstacles, leaning into those things that have been crappy in your life…    … because they end up becoming your superpower.    You all know my story of going to the first Funnel Hacking Live, Alex Charfen was one of the first speakers, and I took so many notes…    I ran back home, I showed my wife and she goes "That's why you act the way you do?" And I was like "YES, it's because of this guy!”    He had a crazy deep gravelly voice and I loved it. He was the man!" ...and I'm so excited to bring him on the show here:   Guys, please welcome Alex Charfen, “How you doing, man?”   ALEX: Steve, it is so good to be here with you, man. Thank you, and I echo your sentiments completely, and I consider you a brother as well, man.   STEVE: Oh thank you so much, thank you so much.    You know it was like two weeks ago;  me and my wife were chatting about your material and going on through it, and she goes "Oh yeah, I have to remember this is how your brain kind of works."    I was like, "Really naturally, yeah! You should really know that" so we'll go back through your stuff.   You know, I've got that Capitalist Pig shirt that I wear all the time, but I really want one that just says, "Charfen will explain," or something like that, you know what I mean?    That should be the next shirt…   So much of what I do in this world just is NOT explainable without you.   ALEX: Yeah, it's unique, you know, Stephen…    I think when you characterize it that way, so much of what you do is different than what anybody in the world would ever expect... and that's what I've found from the day I met you.    I think I walked up to you and said something like:    "Hey man, I think we should talk. You're a really unique entrepreneur and I don't think you understand just how unique."   STEVE: I remember you said that.   ALEX: Or something like that.   STEVE: Yeah I remember, and I felt like, you know in the Matrix when he's talking to that lady with the spoon bend... I felt like I was talking to her, and I was like:    "What does he see in me? What are you looking at?" You know, and "Please dissect me!"    So anyway, I really am pumped for you to be here and just massive incredible love.    You have to understand, your name; it's NOT just a noun, it’s a verb in my vocabulary.    People are like "How did you do that?” "I just Charfenized it, baby!"    I say ‘Charfenation’ all the time.    I was hanging out with the other ‘Charfenites.’    I'm going over the ‘Charfenation.’    "How did you do that?" “Oh, I ‘Charfenized’ it, baby!”   Anyways, you're very much a verb in my vocabulary, and with my family... so it's really quite an honor to have you on, it really is.   ALEX: Thank you Stephen, it's an honor to be here man, this is awesome.   STEVE: This is really cool. Well hey, I wanna just start right out and just, I wanted to ask…    My audience has heard a lot about you. I've talked about you a lot because there’s so much that ‘veI learned.   Just recently, I was going through some of my old notes, from two years ago, from one of your events, and I was like "Gosh, you're so right, this is so cool!"    It really has created additional leverage for what I'm trying to do.   It works, it's real, and I want everyone to listen to this and listen to what Alex has to say here.   Understand that *this* is how I've been doing what I’m doing.   I learned marketing and a lot of sales from Russell... but how to have a life, systemize, and make my business an asset from Alex Charfen.    So, anyway, could you just tell us how you got into this? 'Cause I know you weren't always…   I mean I call  it entrepreneurial optimization, I mean it's really what you do - it's not just the systems, but like:    I'm wearing glasses now   I'm drinking more water than I ever have in my life    I'm doing all sorts of stuff I never would do, because of you    How did you get into this?   ALEX: - You know Stephen, I think if the question is, "How did I become an entrepreneur?”    I didn't find entrepreneurship, it found me.    This was really the only thing I ever felt comfortable doing in my life.    Ever since I was a little kid, I was always the kid that was different than everybody else, crazy socially awkward, like what you see today…    I don't try to be socially awkward, it's just natural.    I was always different than the other kids   I didn't really get along   I had trouble in school   All the systems in the world told me I was broken.    … and then, when I was eight years old, my family went through kind of a financial downturn; my father lost a company.    He didn't go bankrupt, but he went really close, and to make money for the family we were selling stuff in a swap meet on the weekends.    I remember going to the swap meet for the first time and standing behind a folding card table, and a woman walked up, and I sold her a pen that had an LCD clock in it…    (Like that was big time for 1981 or whatever or '78 or '79, or whatever it was).   Stephen I can remember thinking at that moment, "Holy crap, I'm good at this. This is something I'm NOT terrible at."    … because up until that point, I really hadn't found anything where it was like, "Hey, that was good."  It was always’ "Almost got it, kid. You don't suck as bad as you did yesterday."    I was the kid who consistently got *MOST IMPROVED* all the time, 'cause it's the award you give to ‘the kid who sucked the worst!’   And when that woman walked up, it was like "Hey, this is something I can do over and over again."    And the more that I worked with my Dad, and the more that I experienced business, I loved it.   The world is so random, but when you get into the world of business there are rules.   …. there's an outcome.    People are in it together, and you actually have to work together to accomplish and achieve.   …  if everybody cares about the outcome, it'll happen.    And so *this* is where I feel comfortable.    You know, it's funny, when I was a kid I used to create businesses, create business plans,  write out time cards and all this other stuff, and as an adult, I thought that was like ‘the weirdest thing.’    I would reflect back and think like, "Man, I was such a weird kid."    Now, that's exactly what my daughters do.    My daughter this morning was at the kitchen table for three hours writing out a schematic for a water park she wants to build one day.   STEVE: Wow!   ALEX: And you are who you are, and I think, from the very beginning, this is who I've been.   STEVE: That's amazing, and when did you decide to make a business around this and go actually help other entrepreneurs, like myself, who need these systems?   ALEX: Well, the business that I have today, we started…    So let me give you a little brief history.   So in my twenties, I was a consultant, and you know, a lot of people ask about that.    I did some consulting at a very high level at the Fortune 500 level...    I built a very large business that almost killed me.    And so I can tell the story really good...    I can give you all the highlights and make it sound great:   $250,000,000 company   I've worked with Fuji and TDK and Memorex and Logitech, and all international business.    Or I can tell you the other side of that coin…    I had a $250,000,000 company   I made less than $2,000,000 a year    my margins were razor thin   I had a bleeding ulcer   I was probably over 300 pounds    STEVE: Wow.   ALEX: And so when I got out of that business, I wanted to do something completely different.    So in my early thirties, I got into real estate, and we were taken out by the real estate market in 2007.    Cadey and I introduced our first information product, and that's how we got into this world.   We created a product called the Certified Distressed Property Expert Designation.    In 2007 we were bankrupt, we introduced our product at the end of the year:  In 2008 we did $500,000 in sales   The next year we did $7,000,000   The next year we did $10,000,000   Over the course of the life of that product, we did about $70,000,000    We went from bankruptcy to liquid millionaires in a year.    In 2013, the US Treasury came to our office and did a broadcast with us, where they said that, according to their research…    Our company had pulled forward the foreclosure crisis five to seven years   ….so it was intense.   STEVE: Oh, yeah...   ALEX: Really intense!   And what happened was, right around 2011…    A lot of our clients who were buying our product wanted help growing their business; so I took all of the stuff that I used to use as a consultant; the systems and structure Cadey and I used to run our business, and we started training it.    And so since 2011, we've been training it in classes/ courses.   In 2017, we started the products that we have today. So now we have :   An entry-level coaching program called Billionaire Code Accelerator - for people who are doing over 300k a year   A high-level coaching program called The Billionaire Code Grow and Scale - for people doing over 3,000,000 a year.    STEVE: That's awesome! That's so cool.   ALEX: Yeah it is the most fun I've ever had, Stephen…   It's like every day, I wake up and here's what I get to do:    I get to play in this playground with game-changing entrepreneurs that are starting businesses that are doing things that are just unreal.    ...and our systems, our structures are kind of the backbone for how they're doing things.    So on a daily basis, me and everyone on my team, wake up knowing that we are helping the game-changers change the world, and we recruit people who want to do that…    We recruit for people who are passionate about our mission…   Everyone on my team feels like their life's mission is being fulfilled through being in this business right now.    It's the greatest thing I've ever done.   STEVE: That's incredible, and I can tell everyone else who's listening and watching this now, it's exactly as he says it.    I think I've been to three of your events now, and they have just been life-changing.    I go through and it gives structure to the idea, but then, also, how I behave against the idea. So I can actually go in and breathe; I can live.    I watched my Dad create this awesome company when I was a young boy, but it took him too.   But everyone does that, it's super natural - so you to go in and…    Remove the entrepreneur   Create systems    Create processes and procedures, and people that actually push forward their vision even further.   ... it's incredible.    I know it's not magical, but it feels magical, to me! I'm like "Oh my gosh!"    I've actually had a tab open with your course open for like the last month and I'll just dive into another video, and I'm like "Oh my gosh! Back to the drawing board, that was so good!"    And I go back to it again and again and again... it's just always up, everybody who's listening to me, it's always up.    That's really what's teaching me how to run a company, rather than ‘me’ being the company, and I've loved that.    *Just so powerful*    I wanted to ask you kind of a key question here, and it's a question that I get asked a lot...    People come through my programs, I'll help them make money. They go and make a lot of cash, and it's awesome... but then after that, like what do you do?   What are the first systems that you find that new entrepreneurs with a sizeable amount of cash should actually go create first?    What are those first few moves?   ALEX: You know I think I definitely want to share a couple of systems Stephen, but first, I want to just share a thought process. ..and this is a tough thought process for most entrepreneurs to take on, and it's interesting 'cause I've watched you go through this shift too, right? '   Cause at the beginning, (and I just want everyone to know)...    When I met Stephen Larsen, he was ready to take on the entire world solo!   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: Like all alone, right?    And here's the thought process…    After you start making money, the next thing to ask yourself is:    How do I sustain this?    How do I make it real?    How do I make it last a long time?   How do I make it so that I'm not the only driver here?   when you get to the point where the momentum you're creating on your own isn't enough, and believe me, we all get there...    Like I know that if you're watching me, watching Stephen, you're one of those entrepreneurs... and in the back of your mind, you have this crazy voice that has always told you:    You're meant for more   You're gonna do more   You're gonna change the world   You're gonna make a massive impact   ... and if you've always felt that, then there's a shift you have to make in your thinking.    Because here's the issue for people like us; I call it the Entrepreneurs Dilemma.    For people like us…    We need far more help than the average person to reach our full destination, but any request for help or support that we have to make, leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed.    Stephen, you with me?   STEVE: Yes, yes, yes, yes, 100%!   ALEX: And so here's the shift…   We have to realize that if we're gonna change the world, that is a group activity, and leadership's a contact sport.    So we have to wake up to the fact that when we start to:    Build a team   Create a structure   Pour into the people around us    Invest in those people   Make them important   Build relationships with them   …. we will build the company that we have always wanted.    That's the only way it's ever been done.  The myth of the solopreneur who's changed the world is a myth - it's a joke.   STEVE: So true   ALEX: It's one of the most damaging things out there in the entrepreneurial world today.    Because the fact is…    Show me anyone that looks like they changed the world on their own, and I will show you a massive team behind them.   STEVE: So true!    There's this idea that gets pushed around now, and it's like, “I'm gonna go and be this person that does all this stuff. I'm the gift to the world...”   ...and it's like “Okay….” but you can't do that on your own.    In the last six months, I have begun to experience and feel burn-out.   ALEX: Yeah.   STEVE: I have never in my life experienced that, and it's been hard.  The only way I've been able to create leverage is by listening to what you say and create those teams.   ALEX: Yeah. Well then, Stephen, that's the thing…    Here's the deal I want everybody to understand this:   If you're an entrepreneur, you have a job, and that job is to…    Stay out of burn-out   Lower pressure and noise in your life   Increase the protection and support that you have around you.    Because if you don't work with that equation to constantly lower the noise and increase the support, lower the noise, increase the support…    Here's what ends up happening…     You are in an equation that doesn't work.    … and it's not like anyone can come and argue against me here because this is like gravity.    This is like you know the facts of life, this is like taxes. We're all gonna pay 'em. There's no way to argue against this, you're going to lose.    And so in that situation, as an entrepreneur, you have to be really cautious about doing too much yourself, and about loading yourself up, because here's our instinct…    (You know you have this, I have this, we all have it.)    If there's something to be done, the first thought we have is, “How do I just get it done without telling anyone else,” right? Oh yeah!   STEVE: Yeah   ALEX: And it's like "I'm gonna conquer!"   STEVE: Freedom baby!   ALEX: We forget that humans are tribal animals, man.    We are all terrible at most things. Let's get real…    If you're good at a lot of things then you have a liability because you're not gonna be able to choose what you shouldn't do.    I'm very fortunate, I suck at most everything, and that's like an honest reality.    Anyone on my team will tell you like "Oh man, don't let Alex fill out a form, use the calendar, "send emails. We keep him out of all of our systems."    Seriously my team actually knows when I have a password for a system and they monitor me using it, 'cause I'm so bad at that stuff.    But on that same token, I know what I'm good at.    I'm good at vision    I'm good at where we're gonna go   I'm good at putting the frameworks together    I'm good at assembling a team   … and by doing those things, we can grow a massive organization and have a massive impact.   So for every entrepreneur, the key is to figure out what you're good at and do that to the exception of everything else   ... and it's the hardest thing you'll ever do as an entrepreneur.    Here's why…   The second you start doing that you feel like you're being egotistical. You feel like you're being self-serving.    But here's the fact:    When you drive your business to get easier for you it will grow like crazy.   But driving your business to get easier for you will feel like you're doing the wrong thing.    It happens all the time.   There's a discussion right now on our Facebook group, one of the CEOs in our group made a post, and I'm paraphrasing, but she said something like :   "As I offload and reduce discomfort and get a team around me, I'm feeling less and less significant, am I doing this right?"   And my answer was "Yes! You're absolutely doing this right. That's exactly how it's gonna feel!"    Because we need to attach significance to the total contribution, NOT to your day-to-day activities.   STEVE: Mmmm, that's powerful.    You know it's funny I was It reminds me of …   You know when I first got to ClickFunnels, it was just he and I. There wasn't like a copywriter, a videographer... it was just he and I!    So we did every single role in getting these funnels out, occasionally there was an exception where he'd go "Oh someone's really good at X, Y, and Z,"  but then, by the time I left...   ALEX: - Probably design or something… but everything else was you guys?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right! I knew enough Indesign and Photoshop, I was the one doing it most of the time... and doing first copy rounds, and it like, it was nuts!    But by the time I left, it was funny because he had started implementing these types of things.    I remember watching him during these funnel launches just laying on the floor, bored out of his mind.    I've never seen him like that in my life, and he was almost going to a state of depression. He was like "I'm not needed in my own thing now. Ah no-one needs me anymore."    It's a funny thing to realize, we're just the orchestrators. We don't play all the instruments.   ALEX: We shouldn't, we shouldn't.    And so, you know, back to your question about what systems should an entrepreneur start looking at?   Now, I'm gonna talk high level, and I wanna share...    You and I are really close friends, and I wanna share the most critical content we have for entrepreneurs with your group.   STEVE: I appreciate that.   ALEX: This is what we normally share internally once somebody joins our program…    We share the five things that keep companies from scaling.    The reality is, there are really five things that keep companies that should scale, from scaling.    And here's what I mean ‘companies that should scale…’    You know, if you go talk to most consultants, venture capitalists, investment bankers, accountants, lawyers, whatever, they'll give you this laundry list of why companies don't scale:    They didn't have enough money   They didn't have the right people   They didn't do all of these things   The reality is, if you look at most companies that should scale, there are five clear reasons why they don't…    So let me share them with you, but let me give you this caveat…    Here's what I mean by "should scale..."    If you've got a market    If you're capable of selling   If you could do more    If you know you're leaving money on the table   …. you should be scaling.   If those things aren't there for you right now, go resolve that and then start scaling.  Far too many people try and scale before they actually have all the steps in place.    Then you just build infrastructure that does nothing.   So let me tell you what the five things are...    #1: So number one, first and foremost, absolutely most crucial, is…      Most businesses don't have any type of strategic plan.     So as a result, there's no go-forward strategy, and here's what happens in a business when you don't have a go-forward strategy.    If you don't know where you're going, neither does your team   ... neither does anybody around you   And so you will, by virtue of math, become the biggest bottleneck in the company.    Here's why…    If there's no forward plan where all of us can point at and go get it and help you chase it down, every time we want to know what to do we have to ask you, and we have to go to you... and it's a death of a thousand paper cuts.    You're literally in a place where you're:    Telling people what to do   Checking that it got done   Telling them what to do again.    And if you've ever been in that situation as an entrepreneur, you know that somebody only has to ask you twice before you're ready to flip out and lose it.    Am I right Stephen?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, usually once.   ALEX: Once, right, right, but by the second time you're like "Are you kidding me?"    And so the way we get past that is we create a clear strategic plan, we share it with our entire team…   ... and if the team knows where they're going, here's what happens.    I want you to understand something about the people coming to work for you.  If you're in a small business, you're hiring entrepreneurs.   I know that there's this saying in the market, "You're either an entrepreneur or you work for one."    I call complete and total BS - don't even bring that crap around me.   STEVE: Yeah!   ALEX:    Every person on my team is an incredibly talented, hyper-motivated, world-changing entrepreneur, they just choose to be part of a team.   And so you're gonna hire entrepreneurs, and the way you keep entrepreneurs absolutely and totally focused and excited, is you show them what they're hunting, you give them the kill.    You say:    Here's our plan   This is what we're doing   This is how you win.    And if you hire the right people, they will walk over hot glass to get to that destination for you.   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: But if they don't know where it is, you're gonna demotivate them and completely de-leverage them.    So number one, you have to have a strategic plan.    In my experience, less than 1% of businesses do. Also, less than 1% of businesses ever hit $100,000,000. In fact only 3% ever hit 1,000,000.   STEVE: Jesus. ALEX: So when you look at that, it's not 1% of businesses that hit 100,000,000, 0.01% of businesses ever hit 100,000,000,  and the reason is...    Most businesses don't know where they're going.    And Stephen, by you having the tools to build a strategic plan in your business, hasn't it changed how you approach things?   STEVE: Oh gosh, you guys remember when I tell you those stories of I left my job...    I created 200 grand of revenue really quick but there were no systems   I was the…    Support guy    Fulfillment guy   Sales guy.    I did every role, and I voluntarily, very painfully, had to turn down revenue to go build these structures.    And I want you all to know, it was Alex Charfen's stuff that helped me go in and actually set those systems in place... and so, please understand my affinity for this man and what he does.   About halfway through the year, I was only at like 300 - 400 grand, which is pretty good, but that last huge sprint came in because of the things that Alex Charfen and his team were teaching me.    All those planning things that I use, and all the things that I've just lightly mentioned, they've all come from Alex Charfen, and it helped scale me.   ALEX: That's awesome Stephen... Man, that makes me so proud.   This is so cool! Like there's only one Stephen Larsen in the world, and I told you that the first day I met you…    I'm like, "Dude you are completely and totally unique and I think I can help you build the company you really want."   STEVE: Yeah, you said   ALEX: And for us to be sitting here, and for you to say that, I got chills Stephen, that's so awesome. Thank you, man!   STEVE: Oh man, I'm so jazzed about what we do, but it's because of what you teach I'm like "I can do it... "    The first time I ever saw Stephen at an event, I did not leave the event until I'd cornered him and told him what I needed to tell him... because I knew you were gonna be exactly that type of person.    ...and here's why it's so important to me, Stephen.    I could tell the first time I saw you,  that you were gonna have a massive effect on the world.    But here's what I know about entrepreneurs; you're gonna have the biggest effect on the people closest to you - the people who are most proximal, your team.   And when I see an entrepreneur like you Stephen, I'm like:    "Man, if that guy builds a team he's gonna change hundreds of lives internally in his company. They're gonna change millions of lives externally, and I know those hundreds of people will build your legacy."    And when I see somebody like you, I'm like, “Man! That is the path, let me show you how to do this.”    The fact that it's working, is like, “Ah, it makes me so excited every day.”    This is why I get up out of bed every morning and do what I do.     STEVE: Ah, it's so fun man, feeling's mutual. You walked up, it was from that FHAT event that you were at.   ALEX: Ah ha.   STEVE: And you walked up and said, "There's a huge company in you and I don't think you know it, and I'm gonna help you pull it out of you."    I remember when you said that, I was so scared. I was like, "There's no way that this is real! I know who you are, are you kidding me?"    It freaked me out, and I had to own my own vision for a while. It actually took me a while to practice that.    Anyway, so much has gone on in mental clarity and development from what you've taught, not just these systems and things around, it's really cool.   ALEX: - So let's give the second one, Stephen   STEVE: Yeah, sorry, sorry.    ALEX: oh don't apologize, shit I love this part.    So first you have a strategic plan…    #2: Second, the thing that you need to have is      A system to communicate that plan.        Let me tell you something about us as entrepreneurs…    We think we're good communicators, but we're lying to ourselves.    The fact is, we are haphazard and emotional, and we're pumped one second and we're not the next, and we're all over the place…    Here's what happens…    When we have a team that has to deal with a personality like ours, and there's NOT a system for communication, it's random and haphazard and overwhelming... and it comes from all angles, and they're waiting for word from on high. Here's the fact, if you're the entrepreneur in charge, you're the MOST important person in the building all the time.    You're the most important person on the team, in the tribe, in the group, and they're all waiting to see what you say.    And if they're waiting for days and nothing's happened, they start thinking:    Is something wrong?    Did something go bad?    Did we do something wrong?    So you need a system.   As an example:    My team knows every Monday at 4:00, we're all gonna be on a weekly meeting together.  They also know every day at 9:27 a.m. we're gonna be on a daily huddle, and I'll be there.    They know that once a month we're gonna have a meeting where we show our strategic plan.    They know once a month we're gonna have a meeting where they all get the results.    So they all know when they're gonna communicate with me and how.    From the first day you're on our team there's a system that  controls how you hear from me.    Not just me pumping stuff out there haphazardly.    As a result, my team knows they're gonna hear from me, they trust it and here's what happens.    I set the expectations, I meet the expectations, we create trust. I create trust with my team every time I do that.    And here's the fact:   If your team trusts you, you get way more out of them.   If your team trusts you, they will do more for you.    If your team trusts you, you'll get discretionary effort   ... which means when they're driving, when they're showering, when they're doing something else, they're gonna be thinking about your business.  Why?    ...because it gives them momentum.    So if you have a strategic plan and a system to communicate it, you're ahead of 99% of companies out there.   And Stephen, same thing for you with the system, the structure?    Like…    We all fight structure, but once you put it in place, isn't it incredible?   STEVE: Oh, it's amazing! Stuff's getting done right now, that we set in place once. and then, I'll be like "Oh, podcast episode just launched,!Oh, what day is it? Oh, that's sweet! Everyone just put it out, all right, cool!"   ALEX: Right, I remember when I started getting messages like, "Hey, I love the new podcast!" And I'm like "Oh, we put a podcast out? Nice!"       STEVE: I didn't do that, what are you talking about?   ALEX: So you have  #1: a strategic plan, then #2: a system to communicate.    #3: Here's the third one, now this is BIG, really big, and most business owners just, they don't look at this ever and it's the biggest struggle is, or one of the biggest struggles is;      You have to have a system to consistently document the right processes in your business.     And by documentation, I mean having:    A flowchart   A process document   A checklist   Something that shows you how the important things in your business are done over and over again.    For example:    If you walk into a McDonald's, and you look above the fry cooker, there is a process to cook fries above that fry cooker.    Anything that happens in that McDonald's, there's a process for literally every single thing, including:    Unlocking the door   Turning off the alarm   Sweeping the floor   That's why there's a consistent experience at McDonald's; I'm not saying it's a good experience, I'm saying it's consistent.   In most businesses, in most entrepreneurial businesses, there's no process.    In fact, it's even scarier than that...    The process lives either in the owner's head or in an individual's head - so you lose a person, you lose the company.    You lose a person, you lose a big chunk of what you're doing.   STEVE: Hmm.   ALEX: So you have to have a system in a business to consistently evaluate what processes are in the company, and then on a monthly and weekly basis document the right ones.    The way that I would suggest you start, is you look at your customer experience:    What is the customer experience in your company?   What process documentation do you have to back it up to make sure that is completely consistent?    If you do that, you're gonna beat most people out there...   99% of entrepreneurial companies have little to nothing documented in any type of process.   STEVE: They're just shooting in random spots 24/7.   ALEX: Or they're doing stuff like, "Here's how we do our customer on-boarding…”    I trained Suzy   Suzy trained Annie   Annie trained Bob     John does it now   ...and you're like "Oh, cool! Let's go and see what John's doing?"    Well, John's doing nothing close to what Suzy and Bob and everybody else was originally doing, and so you have these degrading processes in your business.    And here's what happens…    When you look at entrepreneurial businesses, they tend to…    Go up in revenue   Come back down in revenue   Go up in revenue   Come back down.    If you're inside those companies, hundreds of times like I have been, here's what I can tell you…    Revenue goes up as the process is working, and then when it breaks, it comes back down.    *PERIOD*    That's why businesses don't continue to go forward - there are processes breaking in the business.    Whether it's marketing, sales, delivery, whatever it is there's a process breaking.    When you document your proceses, you make them bulletproof.    So in our business, we actually use:    Lucidchart Flowcharts   Sheets in Google Sheets    A new product called Process Street  -  a distributed, automated process document system, which is incredible.    So we have all of our processes in Process Street, and we have a distributed team around the world.   We have somebody in Ireland who can do their part of the process, as soon as they hit the last button it transfers to somebody here in the US who can do their part of the process.   STEVE: That's awesome.   ALEX:    Documenting your processes + Putting them in place = Game-changing   STEVE: Holy cow, okay I wrote that down.    I'm taking tons of notes so everyone knows, I hope they are as well…. And I'm not sharing! ;-) Process.st is the company, and we are so happy with it because... Stephen, here's what I want everyone to know,...   Cadey and I have had five businesses get over $10,000,000 a year, and all five of them ran them with paper checklists.   This is the first time we have automated checklists in Process Street.    The last information products business that we had, we literally had three-ring binders that we would carry around the office and check stuff off.    Having a three-ring binder with a process was so much better than having somebody trying to do it from memory.    Now with Process Street, we can distribute that three-ring binder, and I can get reporting on who's doing what.   STEVE: That's amazing.    Yeah, I've actually seen the three-ring binder and I've thought, "Holy crap, that really is how he's doing it.”    You would teach it and then I watched you actually do it.. 'cause you would record your stand up meeting calls in the morning   ALEX: Yeah.   STEVE: And I was, "Oh my gosh, that's so cool! I'm NOT doing that, interesting."    Then I’d go back and take notes and start it.   ALEX: And then implement.    Well, and you know, there's this phrase in the entrepreneurial world. Ah... I kind of get a little triggered, right!   STEVE: Let it out, baby!   ALEX: You know the thing that people say from stage:   "Here's what I want all of you to know. All you have to do is stop working in your business and start working on your business."    And I'm always like:    "Oh, good, thanks. Thanks for solving it all for us dude, that was awesome. You just solved all my problems with that really cliched BS thing that everybody tells entrepreneurs."     When I was in my twenties, my instant thought was like, "How do I get on stage to punch that guy in the face?"    And my then my second thought was like, "What a load of crap!  If I don't work in the business nobody's answering the phones, sucker."    Like, what's going on here? I don't know how to make that change.    And so the way you make that change is…    Working on the business means documenting processes.    By making it:    Clear   Repeatable   Real   And so you have…    A strategic plan that everyone understands   A communication system everyone knows is gonna happen    A system for documenting processes so everyone can repeat what's going on with your clients   #4: The next step,(and this is BIG), is..    A consistent system for identifying, documenting, and then prioritizing the right project in the business.   STEVE: Ah, this changed my life. *HARDCORE*   ALEX: Whoa, Stephen, you know how game-changing this is because, here's the problem in most businesses…    Projects are selected emotionally.    Period, I can't tell you that they're done any other way - they're emotional.    You go to an event and somebody says "I'm doing this thing," and then, the next day, you're doing that thing.    You listen to a podcast or you hear a webinar, and the person says "Hey, I added this thing to my business," and the next day, you're trying to do that thing.    In our business, if I have a really great idea that I want to implement today…    If I'm like, "Man, this is a really high sense of urgency, we should get this implemented."    It'll probably be somewhere around 45 days, and I'm totally okay with that.    That's the timing it should be in my business.    Now if there's an emergency we're gonna fix it that day, but if I'm like, "Hey, I see an opportunity here with something," it's probably a 45-day event…    Why?    I have a team and a structure, and a plan, and we have a system that's moving forward. We're already hitting our numbers, why would I mess with anything?    I actually protect what's going on in the business   I add things gently   I add things carefully   I make sure my team's into it too    I make sure we have consensus    In just in the last 60 days, we've gone from two million recurring to two point three million recurring,   STEVE: That's awesome!   ALEX: So why would I mess with what we're doing?   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: Yeah, so when somebody's like "Hey Alex, I got this "great idea for your business." I'm like "Awesome, get in line."    And we'll put it into our system to see if we want to actually do this…   Because the fact is…    If you're getting sold as an entrepreneur on what your next project should be, you're probably in the wrong place.    STEVE: Yeah, that's fascinating. I really agree with that.    It was your planning system for figuring out which projects, I still do it.    Top of every three months and it has guided everything we do.    And while I do follow a few rabbits and I'm practicing bringing it back in, we still largely follow the plan as to what the business needs, and that's ‘grow and scale’ rather than this impulse of like:    "Yeah, oh shiny object, shiny object, "that looks good, that looks good!"    And it's been that discipline, that's the other thing that's always up is my waterfall...   ALEX: Yeah, yeah, always! I mean mine's up right now. I mean I could share it right now.   And the reason is I always have my strategic plan pulled up in front of me, I'm looking at it every single day.    I'm asking myself:   Is the team doing what we need to do here?   How do I support people more?    How do I help them do this more?   Because when you look at our strategic plan, here's what it's made up of.    Our one-year outcomes   Our client-centric mission - which is our Superbowl, our hall of fame, the long term   The 90-day projects we're focusing on right now    What we're doing this month to hit those targets . So that waterfall of long term, to one year, to 90 days, to 30 days, I can see it all on one document and it tells me EXACTLY where I should be supporting the team and what we're getting done.    And so here's what happens…   I went to an event a couple of weeks ago, and I had an idea that was like "Oh man, we have to do this."    Then I come back to the office, I look at the waterfall and I'm like "What do I want to kill in order to do this thing over here?"    And you know what the evaluation was? *NOTHING* I'm not going to take anything off this, that would be crazy.   There's no way I'm gonna go to my team and say, "Hey guys, in addition to all the other stuff you're committed to, here's a hot potato."    I just backed down and I waited till the next time we had a planning meeting and I said, "Hey, there's this thing I think we should do."    We evaluated it   It went into the system   It went into the plan    There is very little knee-jerk reaction in our company because we are going so fast in a forward direction, that for me to challenge that in any way it has to be game-changing at a different level - so it rarely even happens.   STEVE: Yeah, black-ops right? Call them black-ops?   ALEX: Black-ops.   STEVE: No black-ops!   ALEX: No black-ops, baby!  If it's NOT on the plan, you don't do it... or it's black-ops.    And usually, the biggest creators of black-ops are guys like Stephen and I.    So my team has an open license to tell me if I'm doing black-ops.    They will actually call me out in a huddle, in a meeting, they'll be like "Ah, this sounds like black-ops," and then we'll make a note, we'll put it in a parking lot and do it later.    STEVE: Oh, that's so cool, okay.   ALEX: Yeah,  that's one of the most important things you can do when you have a team Stephen…    You train your team to criticize you and then you congratulate them when they do.   STEVE: That's really cool, then they have a license to actually flex their brain instead of feeling like they're in a box.   ALEX: Absolutely. You know I heard a story once about Larry Page, who runs Google,   He was in a meeting and he really strongly stated a point. and one of the team members got emotional about it and started yelling at him.    She was like, "I think you're wrong and this is why you're wrong," and Page was smiling…   Afterward, she asked somebody "Hey why was he smiling?"    ‘Cause she backed him down, and he actually said "You know what, I think this deserves more investigation. Let's do this."    She walked out and she was shaking and all adrenalized up, she had just yelled at the CEO of Google, like, “What the heck's gonna happen to me?”   She turned to somebody next to her, and was like "He was smiling, is that because he's gonna come down hard on me?"    And the person was like, "No, he was smiling because you confronted him, he loves it, he wants it.”    He knows that if people aren't confronting him, he's in a bad place.   So I look at it in my team and I'm like, "Hey, if my team's not challenging me a little bit, then we're all just marching behind a duck."    You know, I don't wanna have ducklings behind me. I want people who are saying:    Hey, this might work   This might not work   We might have a better idea   So you give your team license to criticize and license to call you on stuff.   STEVE:  Gosh, I love that.   #5: So here's the fifth one...    So we have:    Strategic plan   Communication system   Selecting and documenting the right processes   Selecting and achieving the right projects,   ….and then, this is *BIG*   Finding the right people     It's NOT just finding the right people, its…    Evaluating the company   Understanding what the company needs right now    What can you offload that is going to create the most momentum, not just for you, but for the team, for everything that you're doing together?    What is the position that you need to put in place next - so that the company moves forward the fastest?    And unfortunately, just like everything else I've named, planning, projects, process, all of those... people also become emotional.    An entrepreneur wakes up one morning and says, "I'm doing too much, I'm gonna hire an assistant."    Then they have the assistant sit next to them for three weeks, and they wonder why this doesn't work out?    It's because you had the thought to get help, (which by the way I congratulate you on), but there was no process there to actually make it work.    And so here's the process you need…   Evaluate what's going on in the company   Understand what the company needs   Turn it into a job description    Then you use it to recruit   You do tons of interviewing   You drive it until you have three people that you can select from    You hire one of them and then you do at least a 90-day onboarding, high-intensity onboarding.    When I'm onboarding an executive team member, I meet with them every day for the first month, three times a week for the second month, and two times a week for the third month.    People tell me, "Hey man, doesn't that "feel like overkill?"    I'm like:    You don't understand what it means to have an executive team. Your job is to build relationships with those people.    You want to know how you build relationships?    There's one commodity that builds relationships. One!    *TIME* - that's it.    And so when I'm onboarding, when I'm bringing somebody on, (whether it's on my executive team or anywhere in the business), somebody is doing that high-intensity onboarding with them…    Up close and personal every single day for the first 30 days making sure we have no drift.    And so, when you have a system to select the right people, bring them on and then onboard them the right way…    Here's what you avoid, (and Stephen this is like, Ah, this statistic drives me crazy)...    In corporate America, I know because I used to be a consultant there.    In corporate America, they would say things like, "Well we just hired so-and-so in that position so they'll probably be productive in four to six months."   The first time I heard that I was like "Did he just say four to six months? Does he mean four to six days, or does he really mean four to six months?"    Because in my business, even way back then), if I had to wait four months for somebody to be productive I would have been, “They're gone”!   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, they're gone!   ALEX: And so in our business, we actually have this experience right now.    We recently brought on somebody else, a new person to help us in marketing, and with our onboarding process, he was actually achieving products within the first five days of his first week.   STEVE: That's so cool!   ALEX: And that's how it should be.    You want somebody to come in, be effective and start contributing and creating momentum.    Because here's what will happen…    As an entrepreneur, if you're wired anything like I am, (and I know Stephen is), if you have somebody on your team that starts to feel like they're not carrying their own weight, you won't sleep.    You won't sleep, it will rip you apart, Stephen am I right?   STEVE: Yeah! ALEX: It will destroy you…    And so here's the question though…   Are they not carrying their own weight because:   They're lazy? They don't want to?   They aren't the right person?    Or is it because it's not clear what they’re doing?   STEVE: They have no idea what they're doing. They don't have confidence...I didn't help them!    ALEX: Right, 'cause here's the thing.    Your team needs three things in order to ultimately be effective and to be the type of team you want.    And here's what I mean by that…    As an entrepreneur here's what you want, you want a team that just does stuff and asks permission later.    You want a team that achieves and lets you know how things worked out.    That's it!  I just know this is how entrepreneurs work.    You want people who make really good decisions.    You want people who move things forward.    You want people who don't stand around waiting for stuff.    And if you want to have a team that actually moves things forward as an entrepreneur…    You gotta spend the time with them and let 'em know what your ethos is, and let 'em know how you make decisions…   That's how you duplicate decision making.   STEVE: Hm, gosh I love that. Okay, so…   Strategic plan   System to communicate   System to document processes that can be shared inside the whole biz    Documenting projects and the ones you're gonna work on   Finding the right people   ...and I actually personally just went through your onboarding training and it's so awesome!    'Cause it goes through and it's like this, you basically create a runway for 'em, right?   And if they don't land, don't worry you've got parachutes and there are jumpy cords all over the place...   - you're doing everything you can to help 'em win fast and lots of small tiny wins that build that confidence, and I was like:    "That is brilliant. 'Cause that is not the way you're taught anywhere else.”   ALEX: So Stephen, check this out, man.    We recently fell out of the lucky tree on recruiting and we hired this guy named Greg Duby and he is, ah, amazing.    He's like, he's just one of the most exciting guys I've ever worked with because he's so solid and so centered, and just so good at what he does.    Greg is a former nuclear propulsion tech in the Navy, so you know what that is, that's the guy who rides the bomb around in the submarine, okay?   STEVE: Yeah, that's amazing!   ALEX: Yeah, you have to have advanced degrees in Physics, advanced degrees in Math.   He's literally a rocket scientist.    So he worked in the Navy, then he worked at NASA, then he worked for some of the larger consulting firms out there…    I mean, he's done incredible stuff in his career.    He's just one of the most solid people I've ever worked with, and within about two or three weeks into our company, in one of our daily huddles, we said, "Who got caught being awesome?"    It's where we call each other out, and he said:    You know, I just wanna call this company out for being awesome.   “ I've been here for three weeks, I've never had an experience like this getting on-boarded anywhere...    I'm up and running, I'm excited. I feel like I'm really part of the team. I feel like I've worked here forever and I'm three weeks in."    And this is somebody who worked at some of the best consulting firms in the world, NASA and the Navy!    And our little tiny company has impressed him so much because we did onboarding because he knew what he was supposed to do.    And as a result, Greg, I think we're about three months in with him, and dude, there are projects that I thought were gonna take a year or two that are getting done this week.   STEVE: That's so cool!   ALEX: It's crazy.   STEVE: It's just a completely different way to do it. One thing I hated in the military, I love the military, but you know, some things that are rough and that is that there are no clear guidelines on how to win ahead of time.   The way you're instructed is by hitting barriers and then you get punished for it, and you're like:    "Just tell me ahead of time and I wouldn't do it! But all right, let's do more push-ups."    Anyway...   ALEX: Something tells me you did a lot of push-ups, Steve!   STEVE: I just want to say thank you so much for being on here.    I asked for 30 minutes and you just completely over-delivered, and I just really want to say thank you to you.    My audience already knows very well of you.    Where can people go to learn more about you but specifically also get your help inside the business?   ALEX: So the best place to learn more about us is to go to our podcast.    I publish a podcast four days a week, which is essentially a one-on-one conversation with an entrepreneur growing a business.    And the way that I create each one of those episodes is when a question or issue comes up in our coaching groups, I create an episode around it, we distribute it to the group.    But then also we distribute it to anybody who's listening, so you can get the same coaching that I'm giving my high-level clients right on our podcast…    It's called Momentum for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type, and you can check it out at momentumpodcast.com.    And then, if you want to understand more about our products, about our coaching groups you can go to our website charfen.com, but better is to just reach out to me or to one of my team members through Facebook.    The easiest thing, is just reach out to me, and I'll connect you with the right person in our company, and we'll go through a process with you to help you understand if we can help you.    You know Stephen, we're pretty neat, we don't sell everybody. We actually get on the phone with a lot of people who we sell later, but we won't sell you unless it's time.    We know exactly what solutions we provide, and if you have those issues and they link up, then we'll work together... but we go through a personal inventory in order to help you do that.    So if anybody's interested in getting on a call with a member of my team, you can also shortcut the entire process by going to billionairecode.com…    Answer a few questions and you can just set up a call link and you'll be on a call with one of my team members and they'll help you qualify and understand where you are.    And just so you know, we don't do sales calls, they are all consulting calls.    When you get on a call with my team, you won't ever feel like you're being sold, you'll feel like you're being helped.   STEVE: Which is exactly what I have felt when I started doing that as well.    Just so you all know he's very serious about that - that's very real.    I always feel like I'm being helped by anyone on his team.    ...and come to find out later, "Oh that was the sales guy!"    ...You know what I mean?    They dare to go in and actually they want to change the world and they're very serious about it.    So thank you so much, appreciate it.    Check out Billionaire Code.    The Momentum podcast is a goldmine, it is one of those gems on the internet that is actually worth all of your time and attention.    Thanks so much for being on here, Alex, I really appreciate you and love you, and thank you for being on here.   ALEX: Stephen, dude, this has been an honor.    I hope to be able to get invited back again, and as a Sales Funnel Radio listener, this is really cool. I appreciate you, man!   STEVE: Thanks, I appreciate it!    Hey, awesome episode right?    Hey, once I figured out the simple patterns and formulas that make this game work, I had a new problem…    Back when I eventually left my job and launched my personal business, I sold about $200,000 of product in around three months-ish…    And while I thought I was King Kong, a new problem started.    I was the business, there weren't any systems...   I was support   I was fulfillment    I was the one in charge of getting the ads around   I was the sales department    I was the marketing department    And I knew I wouldn't survive it alone…    Better yet, I knew I'd never seen a rich solopreneur.    This game takes a team.    Contrast that to now, and my company does tons of stuff that I don't know how to do...    What changed?    His name is Alex Charfen, check him out at charfenrocks.com.     So I usually don't bring tons of people on Sales Funnel Radio, but you should know that his programs, combined with my marketing skills, are why my business is killing it in revenue today, and NOT killing me personally.    Alex Charfen's programs and training have been life-changing for me and my family... and taught me who I really am and what I'm meant to be.    So when you're ready to build an actual business, an actual asset and NOT just make this another job…    When you're ready to keep the role of entrepreneur but learn the role of CEO, go get started with Alex Charfen at charfenrocks.com. That's C-H-A-R-F-E-N rocks.com.

After 10 years it is finally here, times two!! This past weekend we got both the end of The Infinity Saga, with #Marvels #Avengers #Endgame! Also, we got the 'biggest battle' in Game Of Thrones, no, film history with the episode #BattleForWinterfell! Join us as we discuss these and say goodbye to some favorite characters as well as re-discuss #Hellboy! PS, after re watching BFW I have completely changed my opinion on the episode and it's importance to the series and a certain character as a whole. So don't listen to anything I saw in this episode- Alex :) Thank you to all those who support this show through our TeePublic. Where you can not only find our original and curated T-shirts and Hoodies, But they also have mugs, notebooks, and totes all printed with rad designs. It truly means the world to us and allows us to keep this show going. If you would like to take and browse here is a link to our store. www.teepublic.com/stores/the-podca…rgot?ref_id=5873 Also you can write to us and tell us how dumb and wrong we are about everything at podtimeforgot@gmail.com or as always you can find us on Twitter and Instagram @namaste_27 @codysthompson We are dying to hear from you!!!

Spreaker Live Show #178 for Jan 30th, 2019Show Duration: 25 minutes- Host: Rob Greenlee, VP of Podcaster Relations of Voxnest that operates Spreaker. I am a 14+ year podcaster that started out on the radio. This is the official podcast of Spreaker platform. @robgreenlee - rob(at)voxnest(dotcom)- We stream LIVE every Weds at 3pm PST / 6pm EST from SpreakerLiveShow.com- You can now get the show on Google Podcasts App on Android- You can hear this show on Amazon Echo Smart Speakers now via the New Spreaker Skill- If you want to send me an audio promo for your show, I would be happy to play it on the show. - Just create an MP3 and give me a brief description of your show in an email to me at rob@spreaker.com- Spreaker Blog Topics: http://Blog.Spreaker.com- Top Tricks for Promoting Your Podcast With Instagram https://blog.spreaker.com/top-tricks-for-promoting-your-podcast-with-instagram/How to Get Follows Via Your BioHave a distinct content voiceEngage With Your Audience With Instagram StoriesUse Instagram Ads to Target Your FansMake Your Feed Unique! Show Today: - What and Who is A Podcaster?- Top Tricks for Promoting Your Podcast With Instagram- Show Promo - The Wrap Up Show with J Cleveland Payne - http://jclevelandpayne.net- SLS Show Format Change is Coming- http://Podfestexpo- Listener Comments & Questions On the show today:What and Who is A Podcaster?Is a person who cares about connecting, helping and sharing a passion with others. Is willing to put themselves out there and take a risk to find success at some level in the hard yet fun journey of being a content creator, leader, facilitator of others success and communicator that brings people together.- We got a show PROMO this past week and wanted to play them here.Hello Rob (and Alex)Thank you for the work you put into the Spreaker Live Show every week. Since I found out about it about a year ago, I don't think I've missed more than a few episodes, and the information on the Spreaker platform and the industry in general has been great.You have asked for a few promos for shows that use the Spreaker platform, and I have, well, a lot currently. I am attaching a :30 and a :60 promo for my Weekly News & Current Event Review Show, and hope one makes the cut for a shoutout soon.Thanks,J Cleveland Payne | jclevelandpayne.net“The Wrap Up Show with J Cleveland Payne” Show- SLS Show Format Change is Coming - More Interviews of Spreaker Podcasters, External Distribution Platforms, Other Leaders in the Podcasting Industry on topics that you need to know about. - Also we will also focus on New Tools and Opportunities on the Voxnest Spreaker platform - Hopefully connect more with Spreaker Show hosts to offer show audio promos - This all starts Next Week - Feb 6th episode - Alex will still be with us also for the first part of every show and you will have the choice to listen to each of the 2 interview conversations we will have in the last half of the show each week. - Will also go back to doing some episodes from podcasting events again - NABShow and others - PodfestExpo.com in Orlando is Coming Too in March - 7-9thPanel Title: Is Podcasting Headed Towards Crazy Change? Description: We will take a look at why it seems the podcasting market seems a little nuts these days. We will explore why 2019 will be transformational year in podcasting. Panelists will cover every major facet of the podcasting space related to content, platforms, audience, metrics and monetization to decode the wild market ride we are on. Moderator: Rob Greenlee, VP, Podcaster Relations, Voxnest's SpreakerPanelists:Rob Walch, VP, Podcaster Relations, LibsynJordan Harbinger, Host The Jordon Harbinger ShowJessica Kupferman, Host of She PodcastsDave Jackson, Host of The School of PodcastingTodd Cochrane, CEO, Blubrry and PowerPress- Listener Comments:Linda IrwinWe chose a name that we knew no one would have.We had created our web site, Facebook page, Twitter and You Tube accounts two and a half weeks ahead of our first launch date on Spreaker.We started our show based on what we did in television 20 years prior.Spreaker/Voxnest Links:https://Voxnest.comhttp://blog.spreaker.comhttp://SpreakerLiveShow.comhttps://Spreaker.comEmail: rob at voxnest.comSend Questions and Comments to:Twitter: http://twitter.com/spreaker using #SpreakerLiveTwitter: http://twitter.com/VoxNestTwitter: http://twitter.com/robgreenleeTwitter: http://twitter.com/alexeum Tech Support: support at spreaker.com

Spreaker Live Show #178 for Jan 30th, 2019Show Duration: 25 minutes- Host: Rob Greenlee, VP of Podcaster Relations of Voxnest that operates Spreaker. I am a 14+ year podcaster that started out on the radio. This is the official podcast of Spreaker platform. @robgreenlee - rob(at)voxnest(dotcom)- We stream LIVE every Weds at 3pm PST / 6pm EST from SpreakerLiveShow.com- You can now get the show on Google Podcasts App on Android- You can hear this show on Amazon Echo Smart Speakers now via the New Spreaker Skill- If you want to send me an audio promo for your show, I would be happy to play it on the show. - Just create an MP3 and give me a brief description of your show in an email to me at rob@spreaker.com- Spreaker Blog Topics: http://Blog.Spreaker.com- Top Tricks for Promoting Your Podcast With Instagram https://blog.spreaker.com/top-tricks-for-promoting-your-podcast-with-instagram/How to Get Follows Via Your BioHave a distinct content voiceEngage With Your Audience With Instagram StoriesUse Instagram Ads to Target Your FansMake Your Feed Unique! Show Today: - What and Who is A Podcaster?- Top Tricks for Promoting Your Podcast With Instagram- Show Promo - The Wrap Up Show with J Cleveland Payne - http://jclevelandpayne.net- SLS Show Format Change is Coming- http://Podfestexpo- Listener Comments & Questions On the show today:What and Who is A Podcaster?Is a person who cares about connecting, helping and sharing a passion with others. Is willing to put themselves out there and take a risk to find success at some level in the hard yet fun journey of being a content creator, leader, facilitator of others success and communicator that brings people together.- We got a show PROMO this past week and wanted to play them here.Hello Rob (and Alex)Thank you for the work you put into the Spreaker Live Show every week. Since I found out about it about a year ago, I don't think I've missed more than a few episodes, and the information on the Spreaker platform and the industry in general has been great.You have asked for a few promos for shows that use the Spreaker platform, and I have, well, a lot currently. I am attaching a :30 and a :60 promo for my Weekly News & Current Event Review Show, and hope one makes the cut for a shoutout soon.Thanks,J Cleveland Payne | jclevelandpayne.net“The Wrap Up Show with J Cleveland Payne” Show- SLS Show Format Change is Coming - More Interviews of Spreaker Podcasters, External Distribution Platforms, Other Leaders in the Podcasting Industry on topics that you need to know about. - Also we will also focus on New Tools and Opportunities on the Voxnest Spreaker platform - Hopefully connect more with Spreaker Show hosts to offer show audio promos - This all starts Next Week - Feb 6th episode - Alex will still be with us also for the first part of every show and you will have the choice to listen to each of the 2 interview conversations we will have in the last half of the show each week. - Will also go back to doing some episodes from podcasting events again - NABShow and others - PodfestExpo.com in Orlando is Coming Too in March - 7-9thPanel Title: Is Podcasting Headed Towards Crazy Change? Description: We will take a look at why it seems the podcasting market seems a little nuts these days. We will explore why 2019 will be transformational year in podcasting. Panelists will cover every major facet of the podcasting space related to content, platforms, audience, metrics and monetization to decode the wild market ride we are on. Moderator: Rob Greenlee, VP, Podcaster Relations, Voxnest's SpreakerPanelists:Rob Walch, VP, Podcaster Relations, LibsynJordan Harbinger, Host The Jordon Harbinger ShowJessica Kupferman, Host of She PodcastsDave Jackson, Host of The School of PodcastingTodd Cochrane, CEO, Blubrry and PowerPress- Listener Comments:Linda IrwinWe chose a name that we knew no one would have.We had created our web site, Facebook page, Twitter and You Tube accounts two and a half weeks ahead of our first launch date on Spreaker.We started our show based on what we did in television 20 years prior.Spreaker/Voxnest Links:https://Voxnest.comhttp://blog.spreaker.comhttp://SpreakerLiveShow.comhttps://Spreaker.comEmail: rob at voxnest.comSend Questions and Comments to:Twitter: http://twitter.com/spreaker using #SpreakerLiveTwitter: http://twitter.com/VoxNestTwitter: http://twitter.com/robgreenleeTwitter: http://twitter.com/alexeum Tech Support: support at spreaker.com

Alex Lyon from Avask Tax Advisors works with over 2,000 eCommerce and FBA clients. Her role is to help them understand, register for, manage and comply with VAT registrations and payments. Did you know that when selling online in Europe the taxes (VAT) are included in the purchase price? Did you know if you don't increase your list price your margins shrink by the VAT amount? Did you know that if you have a UK company there is a minimum total revenue threshold amount you can reach before you have to collect VAT? Did you know the biggest mistake made by US companies is not registering for VAT, but that you can sell on Amazon prior to having the registration number? If you answered “no” to at least one of the above questions…and plan to expand to Europe, hearing Alex's explanation of the VAT process could be critical to your expansion success.   Episode Highlights: The biggest mistake Alex sees is not registering for VAT, and it is costly! You can sell before being registered, but it'll cost you if you don't increase your prices to account for VAT. You do not have to set up a foreign corporation to sell in Europe, regardless of your overseas location: i.e. US, Singapore, etc. You only collect in countries you are shipping from (there is a caveat). Amazon does not show VAT charges separately in your seller account. The PanEU program makes sense for some, most only register in the UK and Germany. If you don't pay VAT…your Amazon account will be suspended and/or closed (eventually). “Import VAT” is charged on the inventory shipped into the country and paid immediately. “Sales VAT” is charged on the retail price of your goods, and paid quarterly. The UK and Germany are the two largest markets for selling online in the EU. The UK is the easiest to expand to from the US because of language and the challenges of shipping to Germany. Wiring VAT payments can take 4-5 days and a currency account in Europe shortens the wire times. Using an intermediary bank, or currency account, can save 1-3% in exchange rate fees. With Avask, the costs to register for VAT in the UK is about $200 USD, and then about $1200 USD per year. Caveat to costs: “Distance Selling Thresholds”, if met, require more than $1200 per year because VAT is required in countries you do not store inventory in. Transcription: Mark: Good morning Joe. How are you? Joe: I'm good Mark. How are you? Mark: I'm hanging in there. I'm enjoying the weather lately and getting outdoors a little bit not working as hard but we're still recording podcasts. And you recorded one on an interesting topic and something that I think more and more people are having to face that have Amazon businesses and that's some of the tax implications going overseas. Joe: Yes. Actually, anybody who has a physical products business that wants to sell in Europe and it's on value added taxes, oh my God not exciting at all. But did you know real quickly that you know obviously here in the States you buy something and then the tax is added? When you buy something online, or in Europe, UK, Germany, France, Italy, etcetera the price is built into…I'm sorry the taxes are built into the price. So if it's 120$ the item might be 100 but the taxes are 20. And a lot of buyers that ex…by sellers that expand overseas don't quite understand that concept initially and they could immediately start losing margin by not increasing the prices for the value added taxes. A great conversation it was with Alex Lyon from AVASK Tax Advisors they have over 2,000 FBA clients and e-commerce clients throughout the world that sell and need value added tax compliance so really informative stuff. And anybody that's considering expanding overseas should absolutely listen to this because it's not that complicated once you listen to what she says. Mark: What are the consequences if somebody is not taking care of the value added tax? Do you know by any chance? Joe: Yeah absolutely. So they're very-very compliant over there. It's not gray like it is here in the States, its black and white. So the problem is that if you sell in let's say the UK and you're not registered, you're going to be determined. Amazon has to share the information with I think it's the HMRC. They have to by law; they share the details of everybody that sells on Amazon. So the HMRC has access to your sales information and therefore can force you to pay the value added taxes that you should have collected. If you didn't collect it you're going to pay for that out of your pocket simple as that. So you've got two choices: pay for it out of your pocket and lose that 15 to 20% margin and probably make no money at all or walk away and be banned from selling in in Europe on Amazon. Mark: That's significant. I think moving across the ocean to selling in different countries is a huge opportunity for anyone. Buying an e-commerce business that wants to ship overseas that you need to start taking advantage of that opportunity but you also have to go through some of the understanding of what sort of regulations are in play. I think this you know isn't…this is not exactly an exciting topic but you know and I think it's a really important topic for anyone to listen to, to possibly unlock an opportunity that your competitors are not taking advantage of. Joe: Yeah and before we say let's jump into it let me just say this that I've seen explosive growth with people moving and expanding their products to the EEO, explosive growth in particular France. I mean the UK and Germany. And the cost associated with it using someone like AVASK and they're not the only ones who do it, it's not all that expensive. You're looking at maybe 1500 $ to get the ball rolling and get it done right. And you can you can start selling immediately as long as you're registering and then you pay from the date you started selling. It's really not that complicated. There's a lot to it but it's really-really important that if you're going to sell overseas which I think everybody should if they have real growth plans that they listen to the whole podcast. Mark: All right with that I will say let's jump into it. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got to Alex Lyon from AVASK Tax Advisors with me. She's an expert on VAT which I believe is value added tax. Something a lot of folks trying to expand their e-commerce businesses over to the UK and beyond really need some help on. So Alex welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. Alex: Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Hi everyone. Yeah as Joe has mentioned my name is Alex. I am Indirect Tax Client Manager of AVASK. So I've been working here for three years now just helping e-commerce sellers expand over into Europe. So we've got over 2,000 Amazon sellers that we work with. UK companies also companies based all over the world as well. So yeah that's been us. Joe: That's fantastic. Are they all FBA clients (Fulfilled By Amazon) or do they you know sell off FBA as well (off Amazon) with their own e-commerce businesses? Alex: It varies so a high majority of people are FBA sellers just because it's a lot easier to hand everything over to Amazon and kind of let them do fulfillment. But there are quite a large number of Amazon Sellers as well such as shipment from your own country which obviously makes a lot of things easier in terms of the VAT because you don't have to actually declare the sales in Europe because you're not fulfilling from his countries. So yeah it's kind of a majority FBA but we do have MFM sellers as well. Joe: Okay, good. Good. Good. So let's talk about the basics, get things straight here for our listeners because a lot of people here in the states are expanding their Amazon.com accounts beyond Amazon into the European countries and seeing explosive growth. But the big mystery is how to set up the VAT's and how to find an agency like yours to handle it most of the costs associated with it are. So you can start am I getting it right is it Value Added Tax and tell us how it works? Alex: Correct. Yes, it's value added tax. It's the same principle across the European countries but they have different rights and different filing frequencies. The easiest way to explain it would be that it's similar to the sales tax you have in the US. But the main difference would be the way which you include it within the price of your product. So this is kind of the biggest hurdle where people fall over on where they don't actually include the VAT amount within the price of the product which means that you're not actually collecting the VAT from your customer but you still have to pay it to the revenue. So you're essentially paying it out from your pocket if you don't include it. So in the US for someone like myself when I come over I don't realize it works like this when I go to the checkout in sell sites because I didn't know and I'm kind of how…where is this amount coming from. Whereas in the UK you don't know that it's already there in the price of the product so yes its essentially the same as the sales tax but it's more hidden. Joe: So Amazon is collecting that 20% for units built into the purchase price of the product. So if it's 100 $ if the VAT is 20% for instance, 20% is something set aside to pay your VAT…your taxes? Alex: Yes. Joe: Okay. Alex: So you need to list in on Amazon for the straight 120. Amazon won't do that for you. Joe: Okay and do a lot of people make that mistake where they just list their business without bumping it for the value added tax? Alex: Yeah there's a large number of that do. Without getting kind of proper advice on how VAT actually works. So it is…see it's hard enough to in taxes in your own country let alone I'm kind of working out how to do it in a foreign country. So yeah that's a big hurdle where quite a lot of people fall over on. Joe: Okay. So you're located in the UK. AVASK is located in the UK. But I think I saw offices around in different parts of the world, is that right? Alex: Yes that's right. So we've got an office in London and I'm on based on in Winchester which is about an hour south of London. And then we've also got offices in Shenzhen and LA. We try to come over to the US as much as possible as well just because oversea it's kind of US sellers that we've [inaudible 00:08:19.0] work with. So yeah we try and get over to the events as much as possible as well and get that travelling. Joe: So the vast majority of clients as you said are US based clients and they start selling and Amazon.com and then expanded to the European countries? Alex: Yeah, definitely. Amazon is oversea, it's huge in America and it's just kind of been taking off here in Europe as well. So it's a massive market in Europe and I think if you're product is successful and you've been able to make it successive there in the US then there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't also be able to do in Europe. Joe: Okay. So let's say I own an Amazon.com account, I want to reach out to you what…and I want to sell in the European countries, step one two three can you walk us through that? Alex: Yup sure. So step one is to work out where you're going to be shipping your products from. So most people go with the UK or Germany just because they're the biggest markets, UK is obviously a lot easier because you don't have to translate any of your products. So whichever country you decide you're going to fulfill from you then have to get a VAT number in that country and also an EORI number for all of your shipments. So those two numbers you have to have those before you make a shipment. If you make a shipment without those numbers you're going to get charged import VAT and then you won't necessarily be able to reclaim that back whereas you would if you have the numbers. So that's very important. In terms of the registration process, engaging a UK agent is really helpful because you've got someone who can communicate with tax authorities on your behalf. And that also means that we know exactly what documents are needed for each of the registration. We'll process all of that for you. Once the application has been submitted and you're waiting for the numbers to come through at that point you should start getting your listings up. Working out some shipping quotes and kind of working out all the details on actually how you're going to get your product there and what the listings are going to look like. Joe: Okay. And I just had a conversation with someone that is buying an Amazon business and they were confused about when the VAT was going to be applied. Is it to the amount of products being shipped into the country or is it the amount that's sold? Alex: It's both. So if you're doing FBA you're making a box shipment to an Amazon warehouse. That box shipment you're going to have to declare at customs. So any shipment that's out into a warehouse is going to have import VAT at UK customs charged on it that's assuming of course that your shipment has come from outside of Europe, so most people ship from China or from the US. So import VAT is going to be charged on the cost of your goods. When you put together a commercial invoice of that shipment, that's the amount of the import fees then we charge on also with freight charges and things. Joe: And then what time do they pay that import VAT, when it arrives? Alex: Yeah correct so usually depending on what shipping company you'll go for usually they'll pay it for you and invoice it back to you. But they still have to do your kind of clearance number to create a shipment. Joe: And then do they have to…then they collect that VAT when it sells and they keep it or is it a different…are we talking about two different things? The import VAT versus the VAT that's charged to the customer on the Amazon account is that two different things or it's the same? Alex: It's the same tax but it's computed in different ways. So import VAT is non-cost whereas VAT on your sales is on the retail price of your goods. And they're also kind of declared differently so with the VAT when you [inaudible 00:11:35.18] you pay that in your VAT within each quarter. You don't pay that immediately when you make the sale. Whereas the import VAT, you pay it immediately at customs. And the way that those kind of…they tie in together although they're separately you…it's within your VAT return. So you do your VAT filing every quarter. So every three months you declare the amount of sales you made and then obviously you're declaring the VAT that's due on your sales and then any import VAT that you pay you can get that refunded and it's used as a credit within your VAT return. Joe: And how easy is it within the Amazon seller account to see that money that you've collected and have it match up against what you're going to owe? Or is it not as black and white as I think it would be or is it really relatively easy? Alex: It's gotten a lot better, to be honest. And so Amazon have got a specific VAT report that you can now download so you can see the breakdown. But in terms of the actual…when your customer purchases an item they won't be able to see the breakdown of VAT and the amount that's going to the amount that's going to the revenue. Another kind of stumbling block where a few Amazon sellers fall over where they don't get the kind of proper…do the proper research before is that's that although Amazon take their fees from the money you receive in terms of your sales, the VAT is [inaudible 00:12:49.6] on the total sales price. You can't deduct Amazon fees and then the amount that you actually receive from Amazon is what you pay VAT on it's the total amount that you're costumer is paying you pay VAT on. Joe: Why is there any calculation at all that the seller does? Doesn't Amazon calculate it for you it seems like they would since they know the exact sales? Alex: Yes so, unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. You have to include it. You have to price your product you have to do your pricing matrix. If you're expecting to move due your pricing and then Amazon add the VAT on it…that's not going to happen. You have to make sure you're including them. Joe: Well then I was thinking in terms of Amazon that in your pricing you would say this is my price and then this is my VAT amount it's not done that way you just simply mark it up to 120$ if it's a 100$ item. Alex: Yeah, exactly. Mark out straight away. And you can tell Amazon with the VAT calculation service you can let them know if you've got any kind of reduce rated or zero rated items which will reflect on the actual sales report. But it's not going to affect what your actual retail price is on Amazon and what it's listed as. Joe: Okay. Let's talk about volume. Here in the States, there's a lot of question about when should I start collecting sales taxes and [inaudible 00:13:58.6] and all these different [inaudible 00:13:59.8] unfortunately not black and white yet. It's still very-very gray. I had a situation where I listed a business for sale and asked about collecting VAT and he said well I'm not…I haven't hit that threshold yet in the UK. And I think it was a UK corporation as well, can you talk about thresholds and when and if you have to collect. In different [inaudible 00:14:21.4] what if you're a UK corporation or a Hong Kong Corporation if you're someone at the LOC or corporation here in the States? Alex: Okay, so if you have a company that's incorporated anywhere apart from the UK then you have to register for VAT immediately so that's sale number one whether it's going to have 1$, 10$, or 100$ it's straight away so no threshold whatsoever, you have to be registered. If however, you have a UK company there's a threshold of 85,000 Pounds and that's in terms of a turnover over a 12 month loaning period. So if you hit that within three months you have to be registered if you hit that in 11 months you have to be registered but that's just for a UK company. So if you've got an overseas entity you have to register straight to it there's no threshold. Joe: As far as buyers go, when you and I talked about this and have conversations with buyers when they buy an Amazon account that has a European component to it there's always questions about TMI not going to be collecting during a certain period of time, how do we sign up, how do we get that registered, what kind of danger I'm going to be in. I think you said the other day in a call separately in preparation for this that you can start pricing your products right away while you register and you're not going to…you're not going to lose any grounds or sales while you're registering and then paying VAT down the road a bit. Can you talk about that again a little bit so that…and talk about it from a buyer for perspective. If say someone is buying an Amazon account and taking it over and would reach out to you to register how do they ensure that they're collecting from day one of ownership and that they're not going to…not get themselves in a little bit of trouble? Alex: Well, first of all, I want to make sure, well check whether the Amazon account has already previously been charging VAT. So what we've discussed in terms of the pricing, obviously if you're taking over an Amazon account you're buying that account. And if they haven't been including VAT in the prices, you obviously then need to…the first kind of goal is to straight away go ahead and increase everything by that 20%. Joe: Let me just jump in here for a sec. So that's a consideration when someone…this is for the buyers that are listening, correct me here Alex if I'm wrong but when someone's buying an account and the owner has UK corporation, if they're below that annual threshold of 85,000 Pounds in revenue they're not charging VAT. But if I buy it and I'm not a UK corporation I immediately have to increase the prices in order to collect VAT or leave it alone and I'm going to lose 20% of my sales to the VAT. Is that correct? Alex: That's correct. Yes, so you because you're an overseas company you have to charge VAT on your sales even though they haven't been charged previously. Joe: Okay really critical for buyers to understand that when it's a UK corporation. Okay sorry to interrupt please continue. Alex: Okay so once you have then kind of taken over the company you can actually back date a registration. So say I'm talking over…I'm buying an Amazon account under my US company from a UK company we'll stick to that example. From the 1st of May you know going through the whole process it's taken a couple weeks to actually get everything set up. When if it got to the 1st of June and you still hadn't registered you can then back date that to the 1st of May. So as soon as you know that you're going to be buying the Amazon Seller Central, I would make sure that you're charging VAT to your customers because although you may not be registered you can backdate the registration. And it means that you have to pay VAT in all sales you make previous even though at that actual moment in time you weren't registered but you're back dating registration. Joe: Okay just to summarize. Don't change a thing in terms of prices assuming it's a…let's go with back to the it's a non UK entity so that they're a US entity buying a US entity but they have a UK account to it. If they're charging 120$ now and they're collecting VAT you don't have to change prices at all. Alex: Correct. Joe: You're going to register with a firm like yours and then when it's time to pay for the first time you're already collecting those and you'll go back dating and calculate what's due. Alex: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Joe: And how often do you pay? I think you said was it quarterly? Alex: Yes quarterly so every three months yeah. Joe: And is it the same every three months? Is it the beginning of the 15th of the next quarter is when you have to pay the taxes or is it depends upon when you register? Alex: So you got one month and seven days to actually do the filing and make the payment. As you can fall into different stagger groups in VAT quarters so it's not necessarily you are January to March you can be February to April or March to May. So there's three kind of different groups of VAT filings you could fall into. Your VAT advisor should obviously let you know and would be contacting you when everything's due. In terms of the frequency yeah it is quarterly. Joe: Listen, Alex, as you can see I'm an old guy, got some gray hair here. I fell asleep in accounting class in college. I honest to God I did fell asleep, the next class came in and I think I've told the story again so I won't go to much detail. I don't like this stuff. I don't like this level of detail because of what I do for a living it's absolutely critical as an entrepreneur and know how important it is. Do I have to really…if I'm the guy that's buying an FBA business and it's got European components to it, how much do I have to really know or can I just rely on you guys to do the work for me? Alex: You can definitely rely on us to kind of advice you and let you know. But it is…I do think it's good to know kind of the basics of what you're doing. In terms of Amazon, you've got two different programs so European Fulfillment Network or Pan-European Program. Pan-European Program is great you get to move your stock around to seven different countries [inaudible 00:20:03.1] you're stock is close that your costumers time are positive reasons to do that. But if you just kind of turn that on on your Amazon Seller Central and you'd haven't done any prior research, you won't know that you then actually have to get [inaudible 00:20:17.6] registered in seven countries. You have to do filings maybe month in more than half of these countries. So everything that you do in terms of where your stock is located, where your sales are going will have an impact on your VAT registration, your VAT applications within Europe. So yes it's good you should have [inaudible 00:20:36.6] in there. We'd let you know but don't be completely ignorant to what you're doing and where your stock is going. Joe: Hey it sounds like you just touched on being able to shift from seven different countries in a penny you…there's a lot of potential savings in terms of the shipping costs and fulfillment costs that you're closer to the customer. But you talked earlier I think that if you've got your inventory in the UK or Germany in the two biggest centers that you register for VAT in those countries what if your inventory is spread around seven different countries so you're closer to the customers do you then have to register in all of those countries? Alex: You do. Yeah, as soon as your stock is in that country and you can sell in from there you have to be VAT registered in that country. So VAT is basically payable to the country and is being done close at supply. So if your stock is in a Czech Republic warehouse the place of supply VAT sale when it's going from the Czech Republic to the customer in Italy is going to be in Czech Republic. So being VAT registered in the UK is completely useless. Joe: Okay. Alex: So yeah- Joe: Very much like nexus here in the States if there's 15 Amazon centers theory is that if you have 15 different locations of inventory you have nexus in those states and that's where you collect sales taxes. Not as formal as where you are. Tell us about the biggest hurdles and biggest mistakes that you've seen people make…well that you have in been bringing people to the European countries and selling an FBA. What things are really obvious? What mistakes are really common that people can avoid? Alex: So first one is to not get registered at all. So with that threshold, quite a few people get confused that the 85,000 threshold is applicable to them; sounds really appealing and really lovely so they just don't register full stop. And then when you do get registered you just do it from today's date because [inaudible 00:22:27.3] realize but now I know that I'm going to do it from today. There's a huge amount of compliant checks going on with the revenue in the UK. They are hurdling through every single Amazon account and doing tax investigations. You know we've had to help clients where we're going all the way back to 2012 when the legislation came in that they have to register. So that's kind of six years of taxes you're going to have to go back and pay and if you don't your Amazon can get shut down. So the first kind of hurdle is actually getting registered. It's kind of what you'd think is the most simplest part just to do the application. Joe: Six years of VAT taxes you've had people in that situation? Alex: Yeah. Joe: I would think that in some situations people will just throw their hands up in the air, close the account, and walk away, and not pay the taxes. Alex: Yeah. Joe: Is that something where if you're a US resident where you're going to be found and have to pay those taxes in some way shape or form? Alex: Well you spent a nice six years building up your Amazon account. You've got all of your reviews you know you've built up that kind of brand in the UK so to kind of just throw your hands up and walk away is a big thing to do in the first place. Because even if you opened up a new Amazon account you're not going to have all of those reviews and obviously the name of you as a director of that company when you do a VAT application in the UK you have to state that information and you have to kind of give all of those details of yourself anyway and yeah so you'll have- Joe: So if you're going to walk away there walk in away forever. Alex: Yeah. Joe: Unless they cheat and get around the system somewhere. Alex: Exactly and unfortunately like in the US…so as not like in the US there's now amnesty in the UK so if you think that you're going to be negotiating and kind of say that oh I'll make sure to pay everything going forward so I'll pay a percentage you wouldn't get that and you also have to pay mass penalty as well so it do not kind of sound all that great if you haven't done the right thing to start with. Joe: Okay. So I've talked to a lot of Amazon sellers. I've seen their financials. Some people tell me you know I've done the analysis Joe and it's just not worth the effort for me to sell in Germany and Italy in France and in the UK. It's just not worth it. And I think they're completely and utterly wrong because I've seen the explosive growth. You've got 2,000 FBA clients. What country are you seeing people get the most bang for their buck? What's growing rapidly over there and what country should they pay attention to the most? Alex: UK and Germany definitely. They're just the two biggest markets. France is…does follow very closely but yeah 100% they're the biggest. Joe: Okay. And the easiest of those two might be the UK because you don't have to do translation? Alex: Yeah, exactly. And I'm shipping direct into the UK is a lot easier than it is shipping to Germany. Joe: Okay. Okay. There are a lot of concerns about money laundering. I've heard people talk about this and how complicated it is and on the German side and German FBA accounts. Am I just hearing people with sort of the chicken little mentality that the sky is falling and being really paranoid or is there something to that? Alex: I think sales in Germany in terms of my money laundering and everything is all going through Amazon. So amazon are collecting the funds and sending it to you. You don't need for some representation in Germany so payments go directly to the tax authorities whereas in France you've got to pay to your French advisor and then it goes to the tax authorities so yeah I'm not sure of what grounds. Joe: Do you even know who Chicken Little is or what that theory…okay, I see you just- Alex: No sorry. Joe: Okay. It's a cartoon character here in the States disguised- Alex: Okay [crosstalk 00:25:55.9] Joe: I used that terminology when there's so many people online talking about all the horrible things that can happen when you're own an Amazon seller account as opposed to the reality of how many great things are happening and it's changing people's lives. Alex: I think that's like when you go to a restaurant or you go anywhere, you're more likely to leave a bad review if you've had a bad experience whereas if you've had agood review you probably leave any review at all. I do notice that happen. Joe: A hundred percent, you're absolutely right. One of the things that I see often and I know you guys are AVASK tax advisor so I want to talk about that advisory part and the tax part. But one of the things that I see happen is that sometimes when sellers expand overseas they just take the easy route and they'd let Amazon handle making deposits directly to their US bank account. Whereas other people that take a little bit of time, do some research, still use World's First Bank or somebody else to be that intermediary and the money will go there at a lower exchange rate saving them tens in…tens of thousands of dollars annually. Do you find that to be the case, do you would advise folks to do that and if so what world banks do you suggest they use or look at or is that a service that you provide as well? Alex: Yeah, definitely. So if you kind of first of all from a VAT paying perspective there's…most people have to pay via wire transfer. And if you're getting kind of close to the payment deadline it can take for to five working days for that payment to clear with HMRC. They then if any payment is received late they will give you a surcharge with subtentiative liability and that can go up to 15 cents. So if you've got a currency account located here in Europe the time that it takes for the funds to actually clear and consider the payment to be made is a lot quicker. So that is a big benefit of getting a bank account over here even just a currency account. Joe: Can you define what a currency account is and how it differentiates from a bank account, please? Alex: So it has kind of all the benefits of a bank account and they're very similar but I don't think I mean don't 100% take my word for this. Obviously, it's better to speak to a currency account provider. But you can't hold large amounts of funds in that account. It's kind of like an intermediary way. You're basically doing a transfer and a transfer to your local account. You can't also do things like direct debits and buy out checks and things like that. Joe: Okay. And as I understand it just for people listening that currency account I think Amazon, for instance, may charge you if you are a…may charge you 4% currency exchange. Whereas the currency account you may only be charged 2%. And so you might be…and these are ballpark numbers so you're saving 2% on whatever amount of money is flowing through that. And if it's a million dollars, you do the math on that. If it's 10,000 $ you do the math on that. So I see a lot of people do that as well. That's what a currency account is right? Alex: Yeah. And especially with kind of making payments in Europe in terms of VAT you're going to be transferring your money from Amazon to the US and then back so the UK again so you're kind of transferring it a couple of times and to make that payment. So if you want to incorporate a UK company [inaudible 00:29:08.3] you could have get an actual high street UK bank account which is obviously a benefit of that UK company. You could just kind of grow the funds and leave it in a high street bank account in UK. Joe: Well, let's talk about that for a minute. Maybe I should have asked this at the very beginning and listeners I apologize because this is a question I get offset. You know I'm expanding to the UK, I'm expanding to Germany do I have to set up a UK business with a UK address or German company? Do I have to set those up or can I simply be a US based company selling products overseas? Can you explain, you've got 2,000 clients what are they doing? What do you recommend? Alex: You do not have to incorporate a UK company. It's the majority of people use their overseas company just because it is a lot easier and has less administration in terms of the accounts that you are drawing up each year. It's all just falling onto one company. You've got your CPA in the US. He's doing everything for you. You don't have to hire a CPA equivalent in the UK so ask accountants to do your [inaudible 00:30:03.9] paying your kind of all those tax due filings. In terms of what's actually best is really hard for me to say because it is on a case by case basis. It's you know do you want to build a brand, do you want a UK bank account, do you want to take advantage of the VAT threshold, there's so many factors. It's not one, it's one size fits all, unfortunately. Joe: Okay but the simple answer is for anybody listening if you're US based with a US bank account a US corporation, you do not have to set up a European company a UK company or in Germany that's misinformation. You don't have to do that. You can register for VAT and start collecting and paying and still have your one CPA here in the US. Is that correct? Alex: Yes. Joe: Good. Of your 2,000 plus or minus clients, what are their sizes? I mean you have you got people that are doing you know a million, two million dollars a month in revenue and those that are just doing five or 10,000 $ a month? How does it range and how does it flash out [inaudible 00:31:01.5] so we just know more about you guys. Alex: Yeah, exactly that range I don't [inaudible 00:31:05.4] information but- Joe: Maybe I should have said a half a million a month. Alex: Yeah there's a huge range there is. And that's for the UK companies and also overseas companies. You know we've got a lot of Chinese clients as well. We've got kind of a whole Chinese department [inaudible 00:31:20.6]. So yeah the range is massive. We can help you whatever size. Joe: Okay. Let's say that I'm doing a quarter of a million dollars a month here in the States and I decide I want to expand overseas and I'm going to start with UK and Germany. Aside from my inventory costs and getting the product there, what are my costs for someone like you in setting up VAT and getting registered and compliant and all that stuff? Alex: Well it depends which country you're going for. If it's just one if it's selling- Joe: Say I'm gonna start with two. I'm going to start with the UK, actually I'm just gonna go with one. Let's go with UK. Alex: Okay 150 Pound registration one up fee and then 870 Pounds a year annual compliance and that doesn't depend on turnover. So whatever your turnover is it's the same. Joe: That's pretty cheap, if I'm doing a quarter million a month, 150 Euros a couple of hundred bucks tops and then maybe a thousand US dollars a year simple as that. Who calculates what my VAT is owed each month? Is it me and my CPA or is that part of your 870 5,000- Alex: Yeah we do that. We calculate everything. And you can give us limited access to your seller central we'll go in and download all the reports directly. You don't have to be a part of that process. Your sole responsibility is to make the payment. Joe: Can I just have you make the payment for me if you have access to funds or you just tell me what to pay and I pay it? Alex: No we don't do that. We will tell you what to pay and then you have to make the payment yeah. Joe: This is…okay I'm a little [inaudible 00:32:47.2] I haven't talked to anybody about pricing but to me, this is so incredibly fair and reasonable. Are you guys…is this the standard fees? I mean this is normal cost or you're really expensive or really cheap? What's the situation? Alex: I think that's about average. We pride ourselves over the service that we give kind of in comparison to the actual fees to other providers and things. We don't get too hung up on what the actual charges are in terms of that. What I would say though, I don't want to be [inaudible 00:33:16.2] in terms of that 870. Because if your turnover was in the millions you will be breaching distance selling thresholds to all of the European countries. Joe: You'll be what? Say that again. Alex: Breaching distance selling thresholds, we haven't spoken about that so- Joe: Distance selling threshold. Alex: We'll go into that really quickly. So if you've got all of your stock in a UK company…country sorry company the UK country, UK warehouse and is going to customers in Germany. So UK from a warehouse going to a customer in Germany, if their sales go over a certain threshold to Germany you then have to register to VAT in Germany even though you're not fulfilling from that country. Joe: Okay. Alex: Makes sense? Joe: Yeah, all right. This is the part where Joe doesn't love this level of detail but thank you for that. Alex: It's just that I don't want to be misleading in terms of 870 Pounds you know whatever your turnover is because that's all UK fee. If your turnover is massive you will have an obligation to register in other countries as well. Joe: And if the turnover is massive to probably going to be shipping from those countries to save that fulfillment cost anyway. Alex: Yeah, yeah. Joe: And that's something that they would do the math on and you guys may help them with. Alex: Yeah. Joe: Okay we're running out of time. We're about 30 minutes in which is actually a bit long but this is a fascinating subject, a critical one, and I'm sure some people just they fell asleep because it's also not their favorite which is a shame. Because the number one thing people can do to make their business more valuable is get the books right. Get the details like this absolutely correct. It's going to help with the transition of the business as well as well as the value. Alex thank you so much. Any last thoughts that you can share with people listening? Whether they're buying and selling in terms of what they should do and how they should do it other than just do it and do it right. Alex: I honestly I would just say to speak to someone you know we do free consultations [inaudible 00:35:07.0] if you just give us a call then we can just run through everything with you. There's you know all though we've covered a lot in half an hour it's a lot of information, there are still some things that haven't been mentioned so yeah I would just speak so when I mention we've got all the information for before you completely just jump start in. Joe: Okay. Well, we'll make sure that all of your contact information is in the show notes. Alex: All right. Joe: But for those listening that can't see them there it's AVASK tax advisors that's A-V-A-S-K tax advisors and they do free consultations. I think it's really important as a buyer or seller if you're planning on selling over in the UK. Alex thanks so much for your time today I really appreciate it. Alex: Okay thanks. Thanks, everyone. Links: Alexandra Lyon Indirect Tax Client Manager Skype: alex.avask Email: alex@avaskgroup.com T: +1.213.330.4904; +1.213.256.0537 https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandragrant4/ https://www.avaskaccounting.co.uk/   James Shayler International VAT Technical Officer Skype: james.shayler16 Email: james@avasktax.com T: +1.213.330.4904; +1.213.256.053

Join QuantumDigital’s CMO Eric Cosway as he interviews Alex Bruno, owner of RE/MAX 5-Star Realty in Florida. Alex is a top producer who also works with banks, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Alex is HUD-certified, and has a strong network of home buyers and investors.   Eric: Alex, welcome to the podcast.   Alex: Hello. How are you doing?   Eric: So, it sounds like RE/MAX 5-Star has been around since 2016. What led you to want to start the business, or create a franchise for yourself?   Alex: Actually, over the years, I thought it was important based on the experience that I got in real estate. I wanted to have an office with a little bit of a different perspective, and being a buyer’s and listing agent for many years, I understand how difficult it is to be an agent. I wanted to facilitate the tools and the support for the agents the way that I would like to have it myself. I wanted to be able to answer their questions, and at the same time provide the tools that they need. I didn’t want to be the office that was open for 30-40 years. Things change over the years. The real estate market changed. The real estate agent’s needs changed. The buyers changed. Everything is completely different. And more and more the market keeps changing every year. We need to make adjustments constantly.   Eric: Is your primary focus on buyers in Hollywood, Florida? Or do you do both buyers and sellers?   Alex: I work with buyers and sellers, and I work on South Florida, not just only on Hollywood. From Miami Beach to Pompano Beach, we are open to working with different cities.   Eric: Was that area impacted by the hurricane this past summer? Last couple of months?   Alex: Absolutely. Yes. And we’re still seeing the damages around.   Eric: How did that impact you? You’re right there in the center of it. You have a staff. Not only were you affected, but I’m sure the business was impacted as well.   Alex: First of all, it’s something that is out of our control. We need to take it the way it is, and try to make the best of it. So, we need to just continue life because it was definitely a huge impact for real estate, and also properties they were supposed to close. They have to be re-inspected again, and appraised again. Some of the sales fall apart, but we need to continue. When the market crashed in 2007, life continued. And you have to keep going. And there were always buyers. We were a little spoiled, some of the agent. Deals were so easy, then they were no longer that easy. We need to work harder. But everything is possible, and we need to adapt to the times.   Eric: You came into the real estate business in 2007. How was that first year for you as a Realtor?   Alex: It was a little sad. A lot of people were very depressed. It was like the end of the world. It was a commotion—many people taking time off, going away. Other ones struggling to figure out how to react to these major changes. And I personally think it was easier for me because I was not that spoiled. I was new. So, I figured out there are always buyers. People are going to keep buying homes and selling homes. This is not the end of the world. Maybe the end of a good market, but there were always FHA buyers. Much better buyers than before. Real buyers that can afford these houses. Because, after the market crashed, lenders were more conscious about the capability of a buyer to purchase a home. You keep going, and you have to adapt to the situation.   Eric: Is there something specific about a buyer that you’ve learned—the one or two things a buyer always needs that you just know what to do, and just handle a buyer so they’re fully happy and satisfied with all the work you do?   Alex: One of the most important is to listen to them, and try to build in your mind and try to understand what the needs are for they buyer. Try to put time into that buyer to show them that you want to work with them. Because it’s a very competitive market. Here in Florida, a lot of people have real estate licenses. So, everybody knows a friend, or a neighbor, or a coworker that has a real estate license. But, not everyone is dedicated to this career. A lot of people think it’s easy, but it’s not that easy. What you need to do is just listen to the buyer, and try to work on what they are asking. And be available. That is one of the most important things; build a criteria for the buyer, and try to work on finding what they are looking for.   Eric: I read your customer reviews, and I have to tell you, they’re excellent. Here are the common terms when people talked about you. They said you were responsive. Always calls back. Knowledgeable. Trustworthy. Honest. Knows the area extremely well. Is available 24/7. So, does that surprise you, or is that just who you are—your DNA?   Alex: It’s who I try to be all the time for my clients. I think it’s important for all these points to be met—to have a happy client, and to eventually get more referrals and more business. To be dedicated for this job.   Eric: Tell me about the dedication in this job. You have a team of 8 people, is that correct?   Alex: Approximately, yes. With the photographers, yeah.   Eric: Are you active 7 days a week being a team lead, or can you now delegate some of those responsibilities off?   Alex: I delegate, but as a team leader you have to keep pushing to make sure that you keep the standards.   Eric: WHen it’s really tough, what do you tell your team? How do you motivate your team to keep moving?   Alex: There are many sources, and some of the sources we learn from the old school. You have to go back to what used to work before, in order to add what works now. In order to get buyer’s and seller’s business—even in the tough times—you have to do a hundred things. It’s not like one thing is going to give you the business. If you have multiple options, most likely you’re going to have better results. Prospectings, For Sale By Owners, campaigns, expired campaigns… those are the old school. Open Houses—a lot of people don’t believe in open houses. Some people don’t believe in broker’s Open Houses. You have to try everything. And believe me you have more chances, you’re going to succeed with better results.   Eric: Sounds like technology has impacted your business. Has it made things easier for you? Has it given better exposure to your buyers and sellers? How do you leverage technology as a broker?   Alex: Technology makes smarter buyers. The buyers know how to look. And it makes it more risky for the agents, because you get a chance of losing a buyer going directly with a listing agent, or going a different route with another agent. The information is more available. You just Google the address, and you can get all the information regarding that property. It definitely helps us also to be able to locate a property the buyer is asking for immediately through our phones. But at the same time, we need to keep the quality of the work going, to keep that buyer, being more proactive about finding what they’re looking for. Because they buyer will be looking for those properties, too. So, you’re working with a buyer… a smarter buyer.   Eric: Now that there’s so much content available to buyers to be smart buyers, has that forced your game and your agents games up to be even more on top of the market than you might normally be?   Alex: I don’t think so. It’s just that we need to adapt to the changes and grow with the changes.   Eric: Are you a team that adopts new technology? Or are you a tad more service, belly-to-belly, a little more old fashioned in the way you approach your buyers and sellers?   Alex: It’s a bunch of things together, and we have to keep moving forward with technology, and adopting new trends, new programs, new marketing—different types of marketing that probably didn’t exist 10 years ago—and try to be creative for your business. That way, you can stand in the market as an agent.   Eric: You mentioned your referrals. Is that mainly how you drive business today?   Alex: Referrals are very important. And also, if you work for an international company, your exposure is even more. But referrals is one of the things that really helps your business. It’s on the top of the list, definitely.   Eric: There are obviously some benefits being a franchise, but in your market what are the big 2 or 3 benefits of having that RE/MAX brand behind you?   Alex: When I was exploring the possibility of buying a franchise, I met with multiple companies. And the RE/MAX platform was clean and easy for the agent. And at the same time—one of the most important things for me, especially referrals—is seeing how big it is. In 100 countries, plus. And have 110,000 agents around the world. That makes you feel safe. It’s a company that keeps growing, that gives you the tools to be successful. And that is exactly what I was looking for. I was not looking about quantity of agents per square feet. Everybody has different perspectives of somebody who opens a franchise. I think that those were very important points to make a decision to continue being part of RE/MAX.   Eric: Let’s change course a little bit. You have a background in interior design. You’re from Uruguay. Tell us about how interior design informs you, or helps you in your career in real estate.   Alex: I didn’t finish the career on interior design, so I didn’t get a license for it. But, it definitely helped me to help sellers, or give them advice on how to present the home to be sold faster, for more money. Seeing, from a different perspective, the home from the buyer’s side, and being able to tell just the sellers what they should do to accomplish that.   Eric: It sounds like a really complementary skill to what you’re doing day to day.   Alex: Honestly, I love my job. And I definitely put my heart on every transaction. It doesn’t matter how much the sales price is. Every transaction means a lot for me. The important thing is to make it happen, and have a good presentation, a good description of the property. You need to put a little bit of your heart on every property that you list. Going the extra mile for the client.   Eric: Well, you’re definitely passionate about your career. What would be the other things you’re passionate about?   Alex: My family, honestly. It’s the most important thing in my life. And also my country—even though I was born in Uruguay—I have the American dream, and I love this country. I’m proud of being an American citizen. And my career.   Eric: Alex, what a pleasure speaking with you today. I know being a team lead, and being a broker with all the responsibilities, your time is very limited so it’s precious. I want to to thank you for your time. I hope you found it informative. We certainly did.   Alex: Absolutely. And I want to help other agents who don’t see the light sometimes of this business. And a lot of people who feel limited, because maybe they are foreign people, or they feel different… this is a job where you can can shine. And not because you’re pretty, or you drive a nice car. You can shine for talent.   Eric: Congratulations! You’ve done a very nice job. Alex: Thank you!

Alex Matchneer: @machty | FutureProof Retail Show Notes: Charles and Alex Matchneer have a great discussion that centers around routing in Ember.js: what they want to see in a router, what problems it solves, what's wrong with the routing solutions we currently have, and what the ideal future looks like in respect to routing. Resources: Episode 067: ember-concurrency with Alex Matchneer Cordova ember-rideshare react-router Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #86. My name is Charles Lowell, your developer here at the Frontside and podcast host-in-training. I'm flying solo today. It's been a while but that's okay because I've got a really fantastic guest on. Actually, we debated this at the beginning of the show, whether this was the third or the fourth time he's actually been on but no times are too many so hello, Alex Matchneer. Welcome back to the podcast. ALEX: Thank you. It's great to be back. CHARLES: You're still at the same place that you were the last time. ALEX: Yeah. Still working at FutureProof Retail. I'm still working on bunch of mobile ember-cordova apps and that's definitely occupying on my time. CHARLES: Nice. Because FutureProof Retail has a large hardware component and we were doing a series on IoT, we were originally going to have you on the show to actually talk about that experience of what it's like to be a part of a startup and develop software that's going to be running on a bunch of devices and the unique set of problems that poses. But in the pre-show, we decided to scrap that because there's actually a topic that we're both very interested in and you've been heavily involved in lately and might be a really interesting preview as to what's coming in the Ember community and at large. Today we're actually going to go back to talking about the same subject that we talked about in our first podcast, which is routing: what we want to see in a router, what problems does it solve, what's wrong with the routing solutions that we have today. Talk about what that beautiful, ideal future that we want to live in looks like with respect to routing. You've been thinking about this a lot lately. What have you been thinking? ALEX: I'm an Ember core team emeritus and back when I was on it and I'm a lot more active, I did a lot of work on the router, particularly with how it handles asynchronously loading data when you click on links and go to different sections of your app. I spend a lot of time over the last three or four years figuring out the nice patterns for what you actually want to use if you're building out lots of Ember apps. Then kind of around that time, right after landing some cool stuff and some not cool such us query params, which has been a challenging aspect, I start working at this company FutureProof Retail that is like 90% of the Ember work that I do there is in mobile apps. We use Cordova so we're basically running these apps inside a web view, inside either iOS or Android so that we can stay with the technologies we are most familiar with, such as JavaScript and CSS and HTML and build apps using that. We can use Ember to do that. What I found was that I couldn't really apply a lot of the same patterns, all these nice conventions that Ember router gives you. I couldn't really find a way to map that onto what I need to build in mobile apps and there's a few different reasons. I got really busy with the startup, just trying to build these things and kind of went off the happy path where I really just couldn't find a way to make it look like an Ember app. One of the nice things about the whole points of convention over configuration as this sort of Ember and Rails philosophy is that, one of the benefits is that if you know Ember and know Rails, you can drop into someone else's apps as long they're following these basic conventions and immediately know how to be productive and know how it's structured, know how to make a change to it and have it maintain a convention and not just have everybody who's using some framework build these totally different apps from each other that have no shared conventions and whatnot. Everyone is supposed to be able to learn from each other, grow with each other as long as they stay with these conventions. I couldn't really find out how to stay within Ember conventions and build this mobile apps. For a long time, I just didn't really contribute too much to the Ember router at all. I kind of fell out of touch with how most people are using it because most people are building these desktop-centric apps and here I am working on these mobile apps after three years. CHARLES: What are some of the specific use cases that were just impossible to, or not impossible but presented a challenge? ALEX: The first one is which is I think is actually one of the easier problems to solve but still some challenging is that you want something that's called stack routing or stack navigation in a mobile app, which is if you're actually building a native iOS app or an Android app, they both have different names for how they provide you this. But you're thinking of things in terms of stacks. In Android, you might open another activity, which is a full frame of a page in your app and you can push it and then when you press the back button, which is built in in Android phones, it'll pop that off the stack and take you back to where you were. In iOS, they give you a UI navigation controller and let you push and pop view controllers and that is how they want you to think about these applications. That is contrasting to what Ember makes you think about, which is go and define your static hierarchy of all the different places that you can be in an app. But with stack-based navigation, you don't necessarily know upfront all the different orderings of which frames are going to be pushed onto what and you might have situations where you want to be able to dynamically push, say an 'Add a Credit Card' page to where you are and maybe it depends on some data that's been loaded at some lower level in the stack and you can't model that as nested routes in the way that you might think about it in classic Ember apps. It's a different structure -- CHARLES: Now, when you say lower in the stack, I'm curious, if you're entered in aren't you... Oh, you mean... I see, previously in the stack. Okay, so lower in the stack so you're thinking like your current position is at the top of the stack. ALEX: Right, yeah. CHARLES: I see. Now, let me just clarify this in my own head. Your Ember routing structure is ultimately realizes a static tree but at any moment, you are entered into one path through that tree so you do have something resembling a stack. It's just is it the pathways that the ways that you can actually get nodes onto the top of the stack is you're limited because that can't be dynamic. ALEX: Yeah, but even then, it's hard to describe what the difference is but the kind of stack that you're thinking of in terms of the classic Ember router map is more like you're in these different substates than you are different frames that you've pushed onto your -- CHARLES: There's a finite and fully enumerated set of next states. ALEX: Right. To be very concrete, if you have a post route and then a post show route and then a comments route under that and these are all nested in a row, then if you're in the comments route, you are in a kind of hierarchical stack that might have loaded the post that you're looking at and maybe the post call-to-action above that and the comments for that but you're still in one thing. You've just expressed that one thing in terms of these substates so that every other state that's in the parent state can share the same data loading. That's different from saying, "I'm on this page and now, I want to push another page on it and maybe tap some of the data that has been loaded on previous pages." That's more of a navigation stack in a hierarchical substates stack. CHARLES: Is the difference then, the data dependency? Because if you think of the Ember classic where you got the static tree, at least theoretically all of the data in the leaf nodes depends on the data that's above. It's not just being able to dynamically push stuff onto the new stack but it's also saying, you want to be able to push stuff that might have no dependency on the stuff further up and it doesn't need to be re-rendered if stuff further up the stack changes. ALEX: Correct. CHARLES: But sometimes it might. ALEX: Right so there are a lot of corner cases that come out if you try to model this new way that a lot of corner cases have been thought out of if everything matched nicely to this hierarchical substate classic Ember stack but not for navigation. If you want to do something that's stacked routing-based, I've had a few different approaches. At our company, we maintain a suite of different apps that are sort of retailer or grocery-centric and the first one we did, which is more popular flagship one is Mobile Checkout, which is an app that lets you going to stores, scan items with your phone and checkout and skip the cashier line, which is great if there's huge lines and you just want to buy a little handful of things or maybe in your shopping cart. But that is like any other mobile app is really conducive to this step navigation approach. Then we had to make a few apps after that such as like another app that is [inaudible] do a manual check then ordering app and other of handful things that you can imagine is might be used on a grocery store. I took the opportunity to like, "I don't really like how the routing turn out the main mobile checkout shopper apps so let's try different things." If you approaches, at least have their pros and cons without really feeling you're solving the problem and one is to maintain your own in-memory stack of where you were, every link to you, you might recall where you were and then use that logic in addition to what's in a URL to decide what transitions to make, which to use Liquid Fire for that. But already, there's these weird growing questions like, "Why are you even using the URL? Is it helping you at all?" That was the main issue with the main app that we did. The other approach was to try and not even use any of the 'router.map' stuff at all. I use the router.map to basically just create one wildcard route. You can use normal Ember to use it like '*half' and that basically collects the rest of the URL as a param that you can use to do whatever you want with. I was using that to basically pass to another, which is internally used by Ember to do the stack-based parsing like grab a little bit of the URL and then parse the param for that then grab another. Every time you could see your stack in the URL. That has its benefits but the worst part about it is that it's getting further away from Ember so any add on that you might want to use at Internet of Things in terms of which route you're in and has conventions like that you just can't use. I can't think of a good example at the top my head but it's like the further you get away from those norms, the less the Ember system can help you and on your own building your own framework. This is all to say that I think I have enough experience at this point to bring home some of the things to Ember and I'm excited to get back into contributing to Ember with this one particular thing that I'm focusing on now, which is... I don't even know what to call it. It's like -- CHARLES: What does it do? The route stuff? ALEX: It's route stuff. Actually, let me get into the other... That's what is tricky about stack routing and tricky to sort of, if you already have to go through a mental hurdle with thinking of the Ember router and as a stack of states or substates and you train your brain to think that way, it's really hard to take yourself out of it and realize that what you're trying to build with like a classic mobile navigation is almost looks like the same thing but it's really different. The other challenging problem, which is specific to our particular app is that you wouldn't think of it as a very heavily server-driven app but if you're writing an application that at any point can get a message from the server like, "Hey, your status has changed," and that state is heavily coupled to navigation of where you're allowed to be in your apps for the state of some certain model, then you're going to have a really hard time, I'd say in modeling an Ember. I have a really hard time convincing people of this until they've actually tried to do it themselves, which is why I'm going off and just building things showing people. CHARLES: You don't have to convince me because I think one of the biggest problems is the router is like the one non-reactive piece of Ember, which is unfortunate because it's essentially, what is the equivalent of the Redux store in a Redux application, where it's the state that drives literally the entire application and yet, any type of non-hash change driven updates, you have to manually manage. Every time that we've done it, it's been a problem and depends on what data, at that point you have to be very thoughtful because, at least from the highest level, if there's damage to a piece of the tree higher up, you need to realize those effects of that damage or that change all the way down the tree. ALEX: Exactly. That is a great way of putting it. This is maybe a good time to mention this thing called ember-rideshare. I've had a really hard time describing these problems to people so I figured what I would do is write this blog a few months back, a little article called ember-rideshare. It's just a given name to the kind of app that still really hard to write in Ember. It's a mobile app. It involves stack routing but the other part is really difficult about it is this problem of the router being in a silo. It is reactive but it's only reactive to that URL. Other things changes, they need to, like you said come in and patch up something else about the router in case you add some URL that is no longer able to present some model of whose status changed. That's an article on a blog that I can probably link to in show notes or something. When I talk about ember-rideshare, imagine using Ember to build Uber or Lyft and it's got just the slightest bit of the whole thing. The whole point of the app is to coordinate your client-side request of I want to ride with the server going off and doing a bunch of things and finding a nearby driver, displaying you bunch of driver locations and it'll show up. Then finally, find you a driver. It's a constant communication. Throughout that point, you can sort of imagine modeling all the different screens as routes but the routes that are actually allowed to see at any given time are heavily dependent on what is the current state of the user's current ride. But you shouldn't be able to go to a route that says like 'cancel ride request,' if you haven't requested a ride in a million of these other things. If you're an Ember developer and you think that's an easy problem to solve, you're probably thinking, "I would use before model hook when I'm entering that route to check the state of the model," and if it doesn't make sense for the route of entering, I want to transition elsewhere. That's fine. That's good if you're doing an app if the user is the one deciding where to navigate to. But then when you're on a route like that and then the server tells you that your ride is done, you can't still be on that route so you've got to have some kind of validations that is like, "This is no longer a valid route to be in. Is the user still in this route?" CHARLES: "Where am I going?" ALEX: Yeah. Before model doesn't really help you. It's this one-shot discrete event and you just can't capture all the different things. The ember-rideshare describes some of these problems a little bit more detail but that's the main issue with it. Like you said, what is actually missing about the router? Maybe it's reactive but it's only reactive to the URL, what about all these other things that are happening into your app? I think there's a handful of APIs in Ember that they're great but they're kind of siloed off in a way. If you want to make two different kinds of worlds meet, you've got to write a bunch of your own code yourself or you just have to do mentally going back and forth and being like, "I did this, so I can't use this kind of API." I did a lot of work on the Named Blocks RFC, which previously there is silos between if you're passing blocks to a component versus data, you've got to think about them differently and all the ways that you might forward that data to a different internal component, if you want to build these composable, reasonable internals, you got to be kind of split-brain about it. I feel the same way about how the Ember router works. It's only good at dealing with stuff that has to do with the URL and you're on your own, if you needed to react to data changing. That's what I'm trying to fix. Does that correlate with your experience of working on Ember stuff as well? CHARLES: Absolutely. I think that's a great way to put it. I think we've come to a consensus of the problem statement. I am curious to see a big separate query params. I'm going to throw that wildcard out there or maybe we should save it for later. ALEX: Yeah, I definitely going to come back to it. If I say all this cool stuff and I still don't have a solution to that, then what am I talking about? CHARLES: Right. ALEX: Which to be honest, I haven't thought of every single possible thing. I'm doing the thing where I talk about it on a podcast that everyone can guilt me into really finishing it. I actually really think that I'm going to finish it. I'm very confident in stuff I'm working on. I'm very excited to bring it to people but it is not all 100% fleshed out and I definitely appreciate anyone's help to those interested, understands the nature of the problem and wants to help me work on some of this stuff and like that, in Ember community Slack or wherever. CHARLES: Yeah, I'm really excited to hear it and see in what ways we might be able to contribute. ALEX: Basically, the goal is to find some underlying primitives that can model the current behavior without mistake because obviously, we can introduce something that's going to break into Ember apps. Basically, to recognize that the URL is something that goes through multiple passes of transformation, to eventually become the thing that displays stuff on your screen, from the very foundation of it, and this is the actual mini-course of what Ember router does internally because it involves a few different libraries and maybe this is a re-hash from the podcast that I did with you guys but -- CHARLES: Can I just say that there are some things that the Ember router really does right, that are fantastic? One of those things is it baked in to every single piece of data. It doesn't do the stack but in that tree that it models, every single node in that tree abstracts away the asynchrony of that node. I think that's absolutely huge so you get both the dependency enumerated like these are the things that I need to marshal the data to render myself and it's implicit that it might take some time. I might need to draw on a couple of different things to actually assemble this data so the asynchronous nature is modeled up front and it's implicit and it's there every single time, which turns out to be the right thing. The sampling that I've missed has been an excruciating void in all the other routing solutions that I've tried outside of the Ember community is that they just punt over asynchrony to you. You deal with it, not our problem and it's like, "Actually, that is the problem." Anyway... ALEX: That's a great point because if the router doesn't help you with any of this stuff at all, then it basically means that every one of your pages that you might want to render after the fact, probably has to have some loading logic like if data is loading, show us spinner. Otherwise, here's all the data -- CHARLES: Yeah, if something happen wrong. ALEX: Right and sometimes that is actually what you want to do. Sometimes you want to do these skeletal in UIs that looked like the page that's about to display but the date isn't there yet so everything is, regardless going to be wrapped in these 'if' statements, 'else' statements. I worked in ember-concurrency and some people are using that to basically move more of that loading into controllers, that's fine. If that's what you're actually trying to do and that's what you're opting into, that's a perfectly reasonable solution but most of times, chances are you're entering a route and you don't want to have to teach the entire template tree underneath it that has to handle all these different states. There's these nice ideas that work in some cases and I'd like to make them work in more cases than Ember helps with and a whole loading all the promises and the model hooks and absolutely going into the loading state are really cool primitives that Ember is going to do for you. The other frameworks, they don't try to be opinionated. They won't do any of that for you. Sounds like you ran into that with some of your React stuff? CHARLES: Yeah. I definitely did. There's just not much help when you actually want to model asynchrony. You can do it. It's pretty easy. You just implement the right hooks or model a series of actions, either with a Saga or Epic, if you're using redux-observable. But again, you have to assemble it by hand and you have to generate those abstractions by hand and you just want to have them at hand already and not have to worry about that. But the advantage, though is that generally those ones that you do have at hand or that you generate are fully reactive. If new information comes that's germane to that particular leaf in the tree or that particular note in the tree, there's no difference between the initial state and the update state. Whereas, in Ember, you got your first shot and then that data is now at rest. ALEX: Right. I definitely have been looking at React router, in particularly v4. I think it's all contentious for people to see it at first but being able to put things like in your render function, you can say, "If this data is present, something that's going to be past and be a prop or something," then show a loading spinner or otherwise, start matching these subroutes. That's really cool. That's expense that you can't look at essential map of all the states of your router can be in but that's also a real problem and if you can demonstrates that the state world is not in a separate silo than the routing world. CHARLES: With great power comes a lot of bugs. You do run into a lot of things where you have rogue matching. You have random things that are inside your view tree that are matching against the route and they just render and you have to be very careful because it's almost the difference between blacklisting and whitelisting. I see what you're saying. It could be confusing. ALEX: Yeah. I think it's definitely a tradeoff. I think if I had something like a match, I might have been able to maybe arrive at a stack routing solution a little earlier. I'm not sure about that. It's definitely something that could be handled by React router. I think one of things that React and React routers better at in general is that everything is, more or less a component that is more easily swappable or something else here. You're not going to have as many of those silos and I really do think, it went through a lot of churn and maybe, some people had trouble, maybe a lot of people, I don't know had trouble kind of following all the major versions. But I think React router Version 4 is pretty damn cool. I think there's a fullest realization of that kind of modular mindset. CHARLES: I think the biggest problem I have with it, though is it requires the view tree to model your routing structure. That bothers me. I feel like you could do the exact same thing. You could have a way to express your routes, not necessarily with a separate routing file. I supposed you could do it with JSX or something but actually have it be kind of orthogonal to your view tree. The way you can model this dynamically updating thing that can match against anything and maybe, even express it all in one place. Although once you get a big tree, it could be hard to control that. The part that I've come into most conflict and maybe who knows, maybe I just haven't used it enough, we've only got one application that we're using the router V4 on. But the fact that it's actually in the view tree, it bothers me. It's in the state objects. It's hard to adapt to Redux because that state is opaque. It's the routers controlling it and I would it to be not have to pass through React components but just be like, give me the firehose of the router state. ALEX: Right. I love what you're saying. If I'm going to bring this stuff to Ember, I can't suddenly make it work like matching within the view tree. That's not what I'm working at or proposing here. All the stuff is basically to empower that firehose to respond to more things that can drives views and respond to them in a live way, not like a one-shot async validation, only when you enter. CHARLES: Maybe this is what the problem that you're trying to solve and one of the things it's really nice to be able to match against anything inside the view tree is that Ember's rendering process of a route is very opaque. The process, by which an outlet gets connected, that's not something that you really have much visibility into. Is that a good statement of the problem? ALEX: That's definitely part of it. You definitely have to go to the documents. I think it's telling that -- CHARLES: I've never done it. I don't really know how that works and I've written a lot of Ember code. ALEX: How what works? CHARLES: How the route gets rendered, like the mechanics around, which I understand how the route object actually, you makes the decision to render its template and do all that stuff. I know it as a user but I don't know the mechanics and I wouldn't know how to extend it. ALEX: I'm not sure if the stuff I'd work on but it immediately make some of that stuff more clear. One of the goal or constraints is to really try and break down the silos. Whatever I'm about to propose bringing to Ember, I want it also be something that would be useful, possibly at the component or template or controller level, rather than just being this thing that lives only in the router's weird black box of logic that occasionally calls hooks that everyone knows about. CHARLES: Right. In a sense, I'd say that they both suffer from that same problem. I'm curious to hear about the firehose. ALEX: To actually get into what I think you're building here, we can dance around it all day and then we -- CHARLES: Just save it for the last 30 seconds of the podcast. That way there could be no -- ALEX: We're swapping JS for React router V4. Bye! It's basically this. What's happening today is that you have a URL, it's going to be parsed in a way that you've tied it to via the router map file, which every Ember app has the place to go to see all the different places that you can navigate to an Ember app, which is great. You basically taught Ember how to break your long URL string into these usable bits and that's going to give you an array of these things that internally who cares what they're called but they're called handler infos and they basically say, "The first element of this array is named application. Every Ember app has one. It doesn't have any params." The next one, it starts getting into what your URL actually is. Maybe it corresponds to the '/post' portion of the URL so that's going to be named 'post,' and that doesn't have any extra params either. Then there's this thing that is post show or something like that. That has a dynamic param because that's the part of the URL as like the '/123' and that corresponds to the post ID. It's basically, if you like thinking of things in terms of transformations or observables or mapping and functional transformations, that's taking a URL and turning it into an array of these useful POJOs of information. The goal is to keep transforming that into something eventually has enough data to display and templates and whatnot. In this giant black box of the Ember router, it's going through those transformations and then it's going to go through this long series of using these params and this useful array of POJO information, start hitting hooks on people's routes to load data. Hit before model after model, redirect all these things to give tasteful names to all the tons of validations and checks that you might want to do. You do cool things in your before model hooks, check if the current user is actually an admin to prevent them from going into any '/admin' subroute. That's a really cool place to go and it's also a great convention. If you're new in Ember app, you realize you can't go on this route. It should sort of click in your head and that sounds like they've got one of these redirect hooks to ensure that you're not going anywhere you're not supposed to go. All these things are really still to this day, extremely strong, well-designed, it went through many passes of review before it landed. I think they cater to a certain kinds of user-driven clicking around apps but they are extremely strong to this day. I think the only thing that's missing is the smell. That example I gave like checking if the user is an admin, it's a bit of a smell that is not reactive. It's a hook. If it passes, great. You're in the route. It's not going to keep on checking that. What I want to do is basically, either in addition to or as an alternative to specifying these one-off model hooks or these hooks that you, not only really just fire one time, have essentially what is an async computed property or an async validation that is upfront about things it depends on. Ember is going to be smart enough to constantly reevaluate these things as stuff changes. It can depend on not just URLs or URL parameters but it can also depend on data. If you're thinking about ember-rideshare, which again is the imaginary Ember app that it's essentially Lyft or Uber, if you have a current ride model loaded somewhere, maybe by a parent route or maybe it's some sort of service, you should be able to specify it like an async property or validation that says, "I depend on ride.state," and for all these subroutes, you would want to say that, either upon entry or any point in the future, if the state ever changes to something that I don't know how to handle that go to some default route. That would be already, particularly in my app, which is a subset of a different kind of ember-rideshare app, that would be a huge help because the only other alternative is to build a sibling-central coordinator to the router that isn't the router but has to sort of agree with it and then, every one of these frames that you might push onto the navigation stack, they have to do some little chunk of code and then invoke this logic and be like, "Did the state change? Go where you're supposed to go," and they have to do that logic. It would be, I think a great win for conventions as it has if it's a benefit to make people shout out their states in advance to empower them to shout out also their data constraints in advance so that you get things like automatic redirects and things change, I think that would be huge. I know that would immediately benefit off of it and I think it would fall in the same kind of problem solving that they worked on like Ember-related stuff which people don't realize how big a problem is until they see there's a better way of doing stuff. I think with that being there -- CHARLES: As an example, let's say that you're an admin and then all of a sudden, you got fired and there's an event that comes from a server that's this person is no longer an admin and it wipes out the Ember data store and then redirect you outside of the admin route or something like that. ALEX: Yeah, that's a perfect example. To be pedantic, I think a lot of people do hard refreshes between login/sign-off stuff but if you have it all in your Ember app, that would just happen automatically. You'd still want the ability to have more graceful transitions because one of the tricky things about having stuff driven by data is that you have this giant matrix of like, "If I'm in this state and this event happens, how do I handle it? How do I make it look well-designed to the user?" But you're not going to be able to hit every one of those constraints so to just have some basic logic that's just like, "Oops, something happened," you're not an admin so we move you to the sign-in page. For in those cases, we haven't fully filled in all those leaks. I think it would be a huge win and you can just progressively decorate things according to the common flows that people take through your app. CHARLES: You know, I'm just imagining this. Model promise, for example would be some computed property, then how would you enumerate your dependencies? Just do the mechanism that we have now? Or are you imagining something entirely new? ALEX: I don't have a strong opinion on it because the moment I start saying what that specific syntax is, more people will agree on what's missing and what we need to have, regardless and be like, "I don't like it." I'm leaning toward something inspired by a lot of my learnings from observables, which is actually we talked about last time. The whole thing about observables is that there's almost limitless flexibility as to if you're in observable, it can take that event. It has been another observable based on that thing. If a URL changes and you're listening to that via observable description, inside that, you could kick off another observable of Ajax request based on that URL and it doesn't make you enumerate all these things upfront. I think there is going to be a compromise between that. I think when you get into these kinds of problems, you run into stuff like Relay, which is familiar with -- CHARLES: I haven't used Relay. ALEX: Just the idea of dynamically collecting all of your dependencies upfront before hitting the server and asking for specific chunks of data that you need, it's a very promising idea. There's cases of just dynamicism where the data comes back from the server, then you realized that you need this other piece of data and there's no way you could have collected upfront, unless you statically wrote it upfront. I expect to find that with this approach that there's going to be some stuff where you just have to be more upfront about it. But I had a cool little strike the other day on auto-computed properties and I'll also link to that. It's a different way of running computer properties where you don't have to specify your depending keys upfront but your getter function gets passed a getter function itself. CHARLES: It's past the dependencies? ALEX: Not even that. Imagine writing a computer property and the first [inaudible] is a function that you can call to get a property off of this but also track that you've got that property. If it ever changes, it'll invalidate again. That means if you're implementing a [inaudible] in computer property, you don't have to write first name twice, both in your dependent keys and in the actual getter in your function, which I think is kind of cool. I'm trying to make that pattern work for this data loading thing so that you don't have to have this huge verbose thing. You just lift this stuff in one place. I've sensed that the magic will probably break down in some complicated cases but that's what I'm trying to run with because I think it's pretty cool and succinct and sort of the natural evolution of what people think of as computer properties. The other major constraint and this is also what we're talking about because it's one of the best kept secrets about the router or it's one of these things that everyone's benefiting from without realizing it, is that if a transition occurs in the router, everything in the router is going to be a possibly long asynchronous chain of operations that it collects all the data that it needs for the new routes to display. In that time, if something happens, if some hook comes along and has an exception, it can load data from the servers. If something happens then it just says 'transition.abort,' that's going to stop whatever transition is in place and you're going to stay exactly where you were and if you're not stuck in a partial transition state, that's pretty awesome. That's basically database atomic transaction semantics that people have been benefiting from if they've been using Ember for years at this point. But again, it suffers a problem being locked away in the router. That is a cool concept. You should be able to specify like I intend this change of the state this way and if I gave you something that is logically inconsistent or can't be fulfilled, don't leave me in a weird half-assed state that I need to somehow fix and know how to fix all the different places, where I might be kicking off this transaction. I'm trying desperately to preserve those semantics when data comes into it. One of the hardest things to do is and honestly, can be one of the hardest sells for people who are used to thinking about Ember is there's an issue of if you imagine whatever API we're talking about, it's probably going to live on the route. Some kind of hook that might be called resolve or something else, like what is the value of this context object that every function has? Is it a route? It's tempting to want to do that and maybe, that will end up winning but winning out is the best API to get people to use. The thing to realize is that there is no consistent value of this. This implies that there's a state of the world and you're looking at it and currently, these things have these values. But in the transaction phase, there is no stable 'this object' and you can wind up with some weird surprises. I know because, not actually these days but particularly, when a lot of the stuff landed and people started trying to do weird things and these transaction hooks, there's just like, "Why can't I grab the controller? The property isn't what I expected?" Honestly, all the stuff that is gross about query params because of this fundamental violation. You have something that pretends to be a property that is there today but is still driving this asynchronous thing that could fail. CHARLES: I kind of viewed this as playing an off-note in the jazz thing like you only want to reserve using this, unless you're the Miles Davis of JavaScript, don't use this. ALEX: And by Miles Davis, you just mean like the god of concurrency that's incorrect race-condition-y code. CHARLES: Right, so it's just like you've got the right reason and you can spot the one-in-a-million case, where it's appropriate. You can spot it in an instant. ALEX: Exactly. I'm not that person and I don't know too many people who are and that's not the API you want to land. I'm trying to, maybe wean people off on dependency on this because the way we've gotten around it in the past is to use again, is more discrete, get the value functions called 'get model' and 'get params.' These are all very in-depth stuff if you're pretty experience Ember developer but it's a way of getting a value from one of these parent routes when you're inside a transition and the rest the world can't see it but you can because you call this hook at the right time. It's super gross because it's just a method on a route that anyone can call in any given time, whether you're inside this transaction or not. The branching logic of, "Should I look up the data from the transaction object?" because once valid, I should have get the current value of a loaded route. It's really gross to me and it causes real problems that confuse people and causes them to write issues because they've given an API that makes them feel good about treating these things as stable objects. CHARLES: I'm trying to imagine now, just like a spike in my head. I know you don't want to get too into syntax but essentially, modeling the route tree as a set of observables, where essentially, instead of returning a promise from your model, you're just mapping an observable off of some combination of the URL state or what are the other streams of state you want to merge to realize that route. But what I'm not seeing, which I'm sure you also have the answer is the original problem, which was stack routing. What we've been talking about is making the router fully reactive like this fully reactive tree that's always on. But that problem seems almost orthogonal to the stock routing problem. ALEX: It is. It's been very tempting to combine them. Why it is such a hard problem? Because you've got navigation stack, which almost to this route hierarchy stack that [inaudible] about but they're separate so you can't really apply the same lessons. Then you've got stack routing, which is you want the ability for routes to while they're loading, reference data that is dynamically available to them. I don't have a solid answer but I would say, the one thing that I think is going to help is that you have a few options for what you want to stash how you want to represent a URL or where you want to stash your hierarchy. Actually just track it in-memory and if you refresh the page, it'd be like, "I depend on some data that I expected to be there but it's not. It transition elsewhere," which is not a great developer experience. You could want to be able to make changes and refresh the page and continue where you left off. Otherwise, URLs aren't actually used by mobile app users. But the other place that you could possibly put the navigation where event stack is in a query param because that can be fully dynamic and you can just sort of manage every single page. The most current page you've pop is just some top-level route but you're tracking the state on the side. I think if you solve the problem of being able to depend on things that aren't the URL or go through a more complex transition than what the router gives you by default, I think it would be possible to treat that query param or that thing you're stashing in in-memory as another source of data. The other thing that I want to try and make sure that this new API has is really treated dependency injection where you specify all the things that you need and you don't really care from a route's perspective where they come from. I think if you had that, that would solve a lot of problems with stack routing and where it gets data from. To be very specific, today if you were in that post '1, 2, 3' comments route and you needed to access the post model from within the comments route, you would probably do this model for post. Basically you're naming not just the model that you need. You're naming the route that you know provides it upfront, which I think is that. Actually, the real reason it's kind of the smell is that, if you ever need to change the nesting, maybe you need to introduce another level or you want to nest all that under an admin route. Then suddenly, you're asking for the wrong route name. You're not really sure all the different things you need to update if you ever change the nesting of your router. There's solutions like relative URLs that a lot of people thrown around but I think -- CHARLES: To go back in the observable world and specifically, the redux-observable world, it's like a simple map. You're just mapping down off of a global prop, you've got some tree of state and you're just mapping off... What was that like? A model hook and you're just mapping down off of that? Wherever that state lives, you're mapping to it and now you kind of slicing off your little garden hose off of the firehose. But still one huge -- ALEX: I've tried to apply observables to this problem. I don't think I've never seen the observable analogue of is this idea of dependency and injection. To model something as a stream that transforms over time, that's proven to be very useful but to sort of say, "I am an observable that expects these objects given to me," I'm not really sure what that API would look. CHARLES: I would say, just as a straw man perhaps, you have this dependency that it's a well-known location. It's a well-known name. With dependency [inaudible] in classic, it's like, "I depend on the off service. This thing called 'service:off' or whatever. Imagine that you have some pool of state and there's some key called ‘service.off' there and as long as I'm just basically basing my stream, the first thing I do is map off of this and maybe map off of another key and then combined those into a single stream, then I can be sure that I have those things at all times. If they change, my mapping function or my transformation function is going to get evaluated again. Does that make sense? ALEX: Yes, I think we should [inaudible] C without code or something. CHARLES: And maybe I'm thinking about it wrongheadedly but that would be a simple mechanism. ALEX: Could you run by me one more time --? CHARLES: Yeah. Let's say that we've got some authentication service that you want to depend on like you want to inject on it. You want to inject that dependency so why can't you base your stream off of that key? You have observable map, for example. The list of transformations that you would have to do to peel off multiple keys, I'm sure you could write helpers for it. But basically, probably if you're going to be wanting to inject multiple dependencies will -- ALEX: The problem is this. Basically, if you want to write your resolved observable, if this thing based on observables, remember that there is no this in a route because of the transactional reasons of what we've talked about earlier, what are you getting that from? You need to have something passed into you, to be like 'context.get observable blah.' CHARLES: I would just assume that it's implicit. I was thinking a bit basically, the simplest case would just be an observable that was basically taken off of the entire global state or whatever of the router or what have you. The way the redux-observable works is every single epic is what they call them is just a transformation on the global stream. Usually, the first thing that happens is they map down to the local context so the -- ALEX: Like a path? CHARLES: They have a helper like action of type, blah. You only see a subset of the actions that get maps to the Redux store. I think it's redux independent but at least in theory, every single epic is basically going off of the entire global state but the first in reality, what the first thing that happens is you're like, "I am only interested in this subset of the state," so you do a map off of the global state down to your local scope and then you work from there. In fact if you had the convention around that, you could even make that part implicit. It's like I return an observable that it's only seeing the stream of local states. ALEX: That makes sense if there's sort of canonical state of the world but what you're doing when you're transitioning into a route is trying to feel out another state in an asynchronous manner. Redux is the action causes state to change, now the state is this. But the action for type thing, I think that makes sense if you are subscribing to the world global action on this one store when you're constructing this new tentative, may not actually become the store, you're depending on values. What we need in our API is something that depends on values that are from a tentative store. CHARLES: It's similar so in redux-observable, you're mapping actions to actions and you're not necessarily mapping actions here. You want to get state into the equation. ALEX: Yeah and it's so almost observables. It's just this twist of transaction dependency injection. It sounds really over-engineered but the thing is it exists in Ember today and if it exists in a less siloed way, I would certainly benefit on it. I think everyone else would too. CHARLES: Okay. With that hand wave... ALEX: Oh, I didn't mean for that to come as a hand wave. CHARLES: No, no, no. I'm kidding because I think we actually have a lot more to talk about here and we're running out of time. One of the thing that I want to ask is, talking about redux-observable, talking about redux and stuff, have you given any thought as to what this might look as a library that everybody could use? ALEX: I basically have something that's using Ember CLI only because it's so easy to just use it as a sketch pad and get test passing but everything I'm building so far is just ES6 class syntax that can be transpiled in it to whatever. I'm actually realizing, there's a lot of overlap between some of the primitives that are involved and Glimmer so it may or may not have a pass that uses references for tracking when things change until no one to invalidate and refire these async hooks. But either way, I'm going to make sure it lives in the JS usable world and not just Ember's special object model end. CHARLES: Right. Those interfaces are pretty narrow. The things that implement those interfaces are huge and complex but the way, at least I understand it, isn't the reference interfaces themselves -- ALEX: They're really simple, yeah. CHARLES: -- Really simple. It could almost be copied and pasted and not have much maintenance overhead in there. Here's a question and this is probably getting too far into the weeds. Can you not model a transaction as an observable? Essentially, with a flatMap, you would merge in some observable into the chain that was basically a transaction of all the other observables from which it is composed. ALEX: You know, a transaction as it builds up all the new state over time could be part of the main tree and if there is an active transition, then that's future potential state that the world might become and it could be modeled as a leg of the Redux state. I think you could theoretically do that. Definitely worth a try. I don't think I would benefit too much from doing it now and I think this could be a premature optimization but I think there would be just quite a bit of intermediate object collection to express that. I think theoretically it works but how it's going to physically map to Ember in the near future, it would be harder [inaudible] in a way. There's actually a lot of stuff that is very redux-y that again, a lot of Ember people don't maybe know about because it's internal but the way that Ember [inaudible], I think since Edward brought some of his learnings of Liquid Fire back to core Ember, there's this concept of outlet state, which describes -- I'm not an expert on it -- what's rendered where and then each outlet gets a chunk. Like you said, a little piece of the firehose or garden hose, pulled off the main thing so it can just focus on the one piece of state. Those are simple objects that produce this part of this transformation process. That's kind of redux-y in the way that everything just gets a new POJO and stuff changes but it's not strictly redux, obviously and probably won't become that just because it's already good enough on its own. CHARLES: Yeah. I think it's actually good at this point to be hand wavy because the most important thing is to be non-committal about the syntax, like you said because that's when the bikeshedding begins and now it's not the phase. The phase is to come to some agreement about what is that we would love to see. ALEX: Basically, the thing is this. I think people need to realize that Ember won the bet that the URL is an important thing to build apps around and if you have a state that's representable in URL, that state should go in the URL so you can send links around and not break the web and have an app that works that's built on half-assed routing. The only thing I'm proposing is going to make that go away. It's just that there is already this giant world of stuff that's not expressible in Ember today because it is driven by state. If you make that as easy to express and as upfront to express, I think you can have shared conventions versus what everyone is building these apps that I have to do, which is to make a sort of separate router of state-aware stuff and not have to make those two things agree with each other because it's really hard. CHARLES: Right. At that point, you're writing your own framework. Maybe this is the next big thing because I feel like Ember usually has the best stuff way, way, way, way before. Now, we're finally getting to a point where everybody seems to realize that having a CLI is absolutely critical to the developer's experience and most frameworks aren't taken seriously until they've achieved that. It was the same thing with a router back in the day. I'm wondering what that next thing is. ALEX: I don't know. I don't think this is going to be it. I just think it's a good progression. I think a way forward that progress is still a pretty legit central structure to build apps around and just would be welcomed. CHARLES: When are you going to be done? ALEX: About two or three days. I don't know. I think I'm basically going to be continuing to get feedback like the way that a lot of that original router stuff came back or it's just like constantly hit people with real examples, Ember twiddles, things are just like, "Oh, yeah. That thing. That's a cool pattern. That sucks in my app. I didn't realize that until I saw this example." These things that really teach people why this is necessary because that's going to get people's urge to be like, "Well, you could just do..." Oh, you can't because the thing that's hard to explain. It's going to be a lot of that regardless and I hope that will kick off in the next few weeks. CHARLES: And the focus of that is going to be the ember-rideshare application. ALEX: I think that's a good one. This is one that everyone's familiar with. CHARLES: Have you already kind of implemented in it, like this kind of Frankenstein-ish, like this is the kind of histrionics that you have to go through in order to implement the style of routing or the style of application using today's Ember? Or have you started to begin experimentation with these new concepts and try to build out better ways of doing it? ALEX: I'm not strictly extracting it from one app. It's sort of combined. Like I said, the few different apps that we had were an opportunity to be like, "This sporadic stuff is hard." The main route recognizer approach was an example to try different stack routing pattern. But the thing that sort of working on is drawing from three different apps and slightly different takes on it. Basically, I have something that is close to being testable in one of my main apps that will be a great chance to validate if all the stuff is as nice as I think it is going to be. CHARLES: Okay. If the people want to get in touch with you, to help to contribute to the conversation or just publicly guilt you into moving faster towards it, how would they get in touch with you? ALEX: I'm at @Machty on Twitter and GitHub and also, the Ember community Slack. I think I'm going to try to get people to talk about this on channel called Dev Dx Router where it's focused on development stuff all around the router. This is kind of funny because I'm talking about this thing that I've only had maybe, 12 people take a look at and comment on and begins these conversations. I think maybe some people are going to hear this and be like, "What are you talking about?" but if it gets people -- CHARLES: No, no, no. You know, the best conversations seemed to be organized around you, man. I'm just trying to think of some of the best development conversations that I've had in 2017 and you were definitely, I would say the one who fomented them. It starts with 12 people but then, if enough people take interest and be like, "Wow, yeah. Oh, man. I didn't even know that was a problem. This would be a cool way of doing it." They have a tendency to balloon and some fizzle out and some end up with real results. Anyway, I'm looking forward to it. ALEX: I appreciate it and likewise, you're definitely one of the best people to talk about this stuff with. CHARLES: Well, I hope other people will love listening to our conversation. With that, we'll head on out. Thank you everybody if you've made it this far. As always, you can get in touch with us at @TheFrontside on Twitter or just send an email to Contact@Frontside.io. We will talk to you next week.