Podcasts about atdc

E146: David opens with the weekly venture update then interviews John D. Cooper who leads Catalyst by Wellstar, the corporate venture arm of Wellstar Health System. Wellstar is an 11-hospital health system in Georgia with multiple ancillary facilities making them a leading healthcare provider in Georgia. Catalyst is an independent but wholly owned subsidiary of Wellstar, a first-of-its-kind global digital health and innovation center founded in 2021. Through their strategic partnership with ATDC, the largest startup incubator in the South, Catalyst's mission is to pilot new therapies, develop less-invasive procedures and advance technologies to transform healthcare and improve people's lives by harnessing the innovation of startup founders. John explains why Wellstar sponsors ATDC, about their portfolio, what Wellstar offer founders, what Wellstar gets from their sponsorship at ATDC and what he views as some of the greatest problems in Healthcare that need to be solved. (recorded 11/20/24)Follow David on LinkedIn or reach out to David on Twitter/X @DGRollingSouth for comments. Follow Paul on LinkedIn or reach out to Paul on Twitter/X @PalmettoAngel We invite your feedback and suggestions at www.ventureinthesouth.com or email david@ventureinthesouth.com. Learn more about RollingSouth at rollingsouth.vc or email david@rollingsouth.vc.

Send us a Text Message.E130: Startup Incubators are everywhere but none quite like the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech. E85 reviewed ATDC in detail and today ATDC director John Avery updates listeners on what's happening now at ATDC. They offer three active tracts: 1) ATDC Educate, a foundational curriculum and mentorship for early entrepreneurs. 2) ATDC Accelerate, for early-stage companies that have at least one full-time and one part-time employee, have developed a minimal viable product (MVP), and have begun refining product-market fit. 3) ATDC Signature, offers a targeted, growth-centric program for scaling tech and life sciences startups, bridging them with essential coaching, capital, and exclusive access to Georgia Tech vast resources. Currently sporting ~115 startups enrolled in the Accelerate Program and ~40 in the Signature program, ATDC is at the top of the incubator leader board in the South by scale and breadth, comparable to Y Combinator and TechStars. Their funding record to date in 2024 includes 52 enrolled companies that have raised $150M with a median raise of ~$2M and a median post-money valuation of ~$16M. Over their 40+ year history, 48% of the ATDC portfolio have had a successful exit. (recorded 8/2/24)Follow David on LinkedIn or reach out to David on Twitter/X @DGRollingSouth for comments. Follow Paul on LinkedIn or reach out to Paul on Twitter/X @PalmettoAngel We invite your feedback and suggestions at www.ventureinthesouth.com or email david@ventureinthesouth.com. Learn more about RollingSouth at rollingsouth.vc or email david@rollingsouth.vc.

In this episode, Amanda Hsieh talks with Jennifer Singh, the Sustainability Catalyst for Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), where she coaches and connects early-stage companies focused on solving climate and environmental challenges. Jennifer has over 15 years of experience building and scaling innovative businesses at startups and large corporations and is an industry expert, inventor, and author. Listen as Amanda and Jennifer discuss the power of collaboration and how ATDC, a technology incubator, plays a vital role in providing startups with the necessary resources to grow. Jennifer highlights their sustainability vertical, which includes startups in renewable energy, circular economy, and water technology. She also explains how ATDC bridges the gap for startups by connecting them with capital & customers and shares her insights on venture capital investment trends and how to get involved. Unlock the world of sustainability and join the ESG Decoded Podcast community! Make sure to subscribe to be notified of new episodes on your favorite streaming platforms, YouTube, and our social channels (linked below). Prepare for insightful episodes that ignite your passion for positive change. Tune in, engage, and let's decode ESG together! Episode Resource Links Jennifer's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifersingh2/  Amanda's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahsieh1/  ATDC Sustainability Program: https://atdc.org/industry-programs/sustainability/ 

Trust Stamp President Andrew Gowasack joined Steve Darling from Proactive to unveil a significant development in the company's journey. Trust Stamp has officially entered into a Teaming Agreement with ManTech, marking a pivotal step towards the integration of Trust Stamp's cutting-edge AI-Powered, Privacy-First identity authentication technologies into ManTech's extensive portfolio, particularly enhancing ManTech programs like Zero Trust. Gowasack elaborated during the interview that this strategic alliance between Trust Stamp and ManTech had its roots in the Georgia Institute of Technology's Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), a partner of ManTech. Trust Stamp's notable graduation from ATDC as a Signature Portfolio company highlights the transformative potential of their technology. It's a recognition of their ability to facilitate fully-trusted connections across companies, coaches, capital, and customers. ManTech, renowned for its track record of successful government engagements and its capacity to deliver cutting-edge analytics, is poised to synergize effectively with Trust Stamp's technology. Together, they aim to offer a premier trust and identity solution tailored to the specific needs of government customers. This Teaming Agreement symbolizes a fusion of innovative capabilities and domain expertise, a union that holds the promise of revolutionizing identity authentication and trust-building in the government sector. Trust Stamp and ManTech are set to empower organizations with robust tools to navigate the complex landscape of modern data security and privacy, aligning with the principles of Zero Trust. This collaboration is poised to make a profound impact on the world of technology and government services. #proactiveinvestors #truststamp #nasdaq #idai #globalsecure #datasecurity #privacyprotection #ManTech, #GovernmentTechnology, #IdentitySolutions, #BiometricSecurity, #DataPrivacy, #Cybersecurity, #FederalGovernment, #Innovation, #TechAlliance, #ATDC, #GeorgiaTech, #FraudPrevention, #IdentityVerification, #PrivacyFirst, #GovernmentContracts, #TrustworthyTechnology, #DigitalSecurity, #DataProtection, #GovernmentFraud, #Biometrics, #ITSecurity, #GovernmentContracts, #TechnologyPartnership#pertnership#invest #investing #investment #investor #stockmarket #stocks #stock #stockmarketnews

On today's episode, Nathan Stuck sits down with Jennifer Singh, the Sustainability Catalyst at ATDC. Jen has more than 15 years of experience in building and scaling innovative businesses at both startups and large corporations. She brings that experience to ATDC by supporting early-stage companies at the forefront of solving our climate and environmental challenges. Jen and Nathan discuss her role as a Sustainability Catalyst in supporting startups, the importance of meaningful connections, the evolving narrative of sustainability as a business imperative, and the positive impact of climate-conscious practices on both the environment and profitability. Stay tuned as we explore the transformative power of technology and collaboration in shaping a sustainable and environmentally conscious future.   RESOURCES RELATED TO THIS EPISODE Learn more about ATDC's Sustainability Program https://atdc.org/industry-programs/sustainability/ Subscribe to ATDC's Mailing List https://atdcsustainability.substack.com/  Follow Jennifer Singh on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifersingh2/   CREDITS Theme Music

On today's episode, Nathan Stuck sits down with Jennifer Singh, the Sustainability Catalyst at ATDC. Jen has more than 15 years of experience in building and scaling innovative businesses at both startups and large corporations. She brings that experience to ATDC by supporting early-stage companies at the forefront of solving our climate and environmental challenges. Jen and Nathan discuss her role as a Sustainability Catalyst in supporting startups, the importance of meaningful connections, the evolving narrative of sustainability as a business imperative, and the positive impact of climate-conscious practices on both the environment and profitability. Stay tuned as we explore the transformative power of technology and collaboration in shaping a sustainable and environmentally conscious future.   RESOURCES RELATED TO THIS EPISODE Learn more about ATDC's Sustainability Program https://atdc.org/industry-programs/sustainability/ Subscribe to ATDC's Mailing List https://atdcsustainability.substack.com/  Follow Jennifer Singh on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifersingh2/   CREDITS Theme Music

2023 has proven to be more challenging than rewarding for Venture, marked by a series of disappointments amidst its noteworthy events. This show critically examines and discusses the implications of key occurrences in 2023 that will shape Venture's trajectory into 2024. I am joined by three distinguished experts in the field:Paul Clark, my co-host and Principal at VentureSouth.John Avey, the Director of ATDC, the South's largest and most successful incubator/accelerator.Todd Kirschner, a former West Coast VC turned solo professional Angel Investor now based in Charlotte, NC.Together, we delve into their perspectives on the following topics:The major Venture stories of 2023: A decline in funding, a decrease in deal numbers, a rise in shutdowns, and the dominance of AI in headlines.The impact of 'Higher for Longer' interest rates on venture capital.The 'State of Capital' in the South, covering valuations, early-stage capital availability, and the prevailing Exit drought.The existing risks and opportunities for founders and investors as they navigate 2024.Through this comprehensive discussion, we aim to provide insights into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for Venture in 2024.Reach David on Twitter/X @DGRollingSouth for comments and entertaining cartoons on Venture. We invite your feedback and suggestions at ventureinthesouth.com or email david@ventureinthesouth.com. Learn more about RollingSouth at rollingsouth.vc or email david@rollingsouth.vc. Follow Paul on LinkedIn. Download our White Papers and Cheat Sheets HERE. Thanks for listening and remember: Our mission is to MAKE MONEY, HAVE FUN AND DO GOOD.

A Fresh Story, season 3, episode 17 We had the chance to talk to Adam Marx all about networking, human nature, relationships, and so much more! Adam is funny, honest, and we had a fantastic convo about career changes, networking when you don't feel like networking, music, and families. Adam Marx is a networking & branding consultant, speaker, tech founder, startup advisor, journalist, & the founder of The Zero to One Networker. Formerly the founder & CEO of music-tech startup Glipple, Inc., and as a writer appearing in Crunchbase News, Startup Grind, Mattermark, & others, Adam draws on more than a decade of experiences in the music & startup tech industries to teach others how to cultivate powerful relationships using strategies of patience, consistency, authenticity, & value creation. As a networking consultant and speaker, Adam has worked with numerous organizations, including TechStars Atlanta, the Atlanta Tech Village (ATV), ATDC (through Georgia Tech), and Panoramic Ventures, where he's advised & mentored founders on how to develop magnetic dialogues & long-term relationships. In addition to advising & consulting, Adam has given talks at ATV, ATDC, and most recently emceed the 2022 Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) State conference in Burlington, Vermont. Check out more from Adam on his website, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

ATDC is one of the original startup incubators and accelerators in the US. Founded in Atlanta, GA 40 years ago it is supported by the State of Georgia and hosted by Georgia Tech. ATDC Director John Avery walks us through the history and strategic vision of ATDC as Georgia's technology business incubator, assisting entrepreneurs throughout the state. Using a unique blend of coaching, curriculum, community, and connections, and not just to Georgia Tech and its resources, but also to capital and customers. ATDC helps Georgia startups at various stages navigate the choppy waters of taking an idea from concept to product prototype to launch and ultimately to scale. ATDC annually graduates successful portfolio companies with 48% of ATDC companies having a successful exit. ATDC guides  entrepreneurs through 3 stages of development: Educate, Accelerate, and Signature. Educate embraces entrepreneurs at the very beginning of their startup journey with a targeted three step educational curriculum with ATDC Educate Entrepreneurship 101, ATDC Educate Financial Literacy 102, and ATDC Customer Discovery. This curricula prepares founders for advanced classes on  functional areas such as sales, digital marketing, product development, etc., as well as market-specific classes throughout the year in Industry Program verticals: FinTech, Advanced Manufacturing, HealthTech, 5G, Supply Chain/Logistics, Sustainability, and Robotics & Automation. Accelerate is the Launch stage for entrepreneurs who usually have at least a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) or are beta testing their product, are adding initial customers, and refining their business model. Signature is the growth stage for Accelerate graduates who are usually adding customers, hiring more employees, raising venture funding, and learning to scale their business. In this stage, ATDC is providing connections to industry, customers and capital. For 2017, 2018, and 2019, ATDC's portfolio Accelerate and Signature companies collectively raised over $100M each year from investors and cumulatively  have raised over $2.9B in capital since 1980. The ATDC Investor Connect Program connects ATDC portfolio companies to Investors with a dedicated program manager who tracks, monitors, and reports on regional and national investment trends and is available for consultations. In addition, ATDC's coaching staff works with each presenting company to hone and polish their pitch until your pitch and placement materials are perfect. An Angel in Residence is also on-hand to provide experienced guidance. Founders can become members of ATDC for a modest fee and do not give up equity to join the ATDC program.  (recorded 9/7/23)We invite your feedback and suggestions at ventureinthesouth.com or email david@ventureinthesouth.com. If you like the podcast, leave us a review and share with your friends! Follow David and Paul on LinkedIn to stay updated on the newest episodes. To learn more about the RollingSouth Funds, visit rollingsouth.vc or email david@rollingsouth.vc. Thanks for listening and remember: Our mission is to MAKE MONEY, HAVE FUN AND DO GOOD

Listen to Karen's interview of Shachar Oren, of Sound Media Ventures, as he shares his journey from boot strapped startup to successful exit to lead a Media Tech VC firm in Atlanta, GA.  Karen first met Shachar nearly 2 decades ago when he was raising capital for Neurotic Media and wanted to present to her angel group, the Network of Business Angels & Investors.   Shachar's  journey as an entrepreneur gave him keen insights into the concepts of growth hacking, lean start up, boot strapping, raising capital, and getting to a profitable exit.  His experience has provided an unique perspective as an angel investor and venture capitalist sitting on the opposite side of the table.   Shachar also shares his insights as to what he looks for when considering investments in the emerging field of Media Tech.  Enjoy their conversation and learning moments.  Shachar Oren is the Founder & CEO of Sound Media Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in companies at the nexus of media and technology. Prior to starting this fund, Shachar founded Neurotic Media, a high-tech music platform that served global Fortune 500 brands for 18 years. Shachar led the successful exit of Neurotic Media to Peloton Interactive in 2018. For the last decade, Shachar has also offered executive counsel pro bono for incubators, educators, and start-up founders. He currently serves as the President of Georgia Music Partners, and advises startups in technology, media and entertainment through organizations such as TechStars Music, GA Tech's Create-X and College of Creative Design, ATDC, GSU Main Street among others.  He is a member of Atlanta Technology Angels and active in the growing entrepreneur/investor ecosystem in Georgia.   For more information please visit: https://soundmedia.vc/ Karen Rands is the leader of the Compassionate Capitalist Movement™ and author of the best selling investment primer: Inside Secrets to Angel Investing: Step-by-Step Strategies to Leverage Private Equity Investment for Passive Wealth Creation.  She is an authority on creating wealth through investing and building successful businesses that can scale and exit rich.  Karen is an enthusiastic speaker on these topics for corporations, economic development groups, angel investor networks, and professional  business networks.   About Karen https://www.karenrands.co/about-karen-rands/ Visit http://Kugarand.com and click on the Services tab, to learn more about the Compassionate Capitalist Wealth Maximizer System™.  Read about the Due Diligence Services, Investor Relations, Capital Strategies, Capital Access, and Capital Readiness Coaching serviced offered by her firm, Kugarand Capital Holdings.  The Compassionate Capitalist Show™ is a Podcast on YouTube.  Please visit and subscribe and share.  It is great to watch Karen and her guests live, in action.  The whole library of podcasts and interviews since 2020 can be found there by category or chronological. https://bit.ly/CCSyoutubepod   Imagine the feeling of investing in a way that had massive impact and a potential pay you back 10x your money. The time is now to find out if Angel Investing / CrowdFunding Investing is the wealth creation strategy for you.  Take action on Karen's offer to learn how to invest with confidence in entrepreneurs and sign up (FREE FOR NOW) the new Compassionate Capitalist Wealth Maximizing System. http://dothedeal.org  

An insightful chat with Cardlytics' co-founder and former CEO Lynne Laube- now a partner with Valor Ventures- and Fintech Catalyst Robert Daniel of Georgia Tech's ATDC, about September's exciting startup competition including a few pitch tips from insiders. Also, Glen's thoughts on PayPal's new stablecoin and the Premier League's payments connections.    Links related to this episode:   Fintech South: https://www.fintechsouth.com/    Valor Ventures: https://valor.vc/    ATDC: https://atdc.org/    PayPal:  https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/07/business/paypal-crypto-stablecoin/index.html    AstroPay: https://astropay.com/        Follow the Best Innovation Group on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/best-innovation-group/  Follow Glen on Twitter @154Advisors Follow John on Twitter @jbfintech

E66 spotlights Dan Ciprari. who is a serial entrepreneur and met his cofounder, Habib Fathi, while working as an entrepreneur-in-residence at ATDC, the nation's oldest technology incubator. The Pointivo opportunity met his criteria for jumping into a new startup: being truly innovative and differentiating with really strong IP potential, and the perfect cofounder. Pointivo is an industry leader in structural image analysis for Telecom (cell towers), Facility and Property Management (roofing & construction) and the Energy Industry (utilities, oil & gas, renewables). Their drone based AI powered imaging analytics allow them to automatically identify and extract location, measurement and detailed understanding about physical assets and structures, with the highest-level of accuracy. This has brought new industry insights that simplify processes and decisions related to physical assets in unique and powerful ways. We invite your feedback and suggestions at ventureinthesouth.com or email david@ventureinthesouth.com. If you like our show, follow David and Paul on LinkedIn. To learn more about The RollingSouth Funds that we operate, go to rollingsouth.vc or email david@rollingsouth.vc.  Thanks for listening and remember: Our mission is to MAKE MONEY, HAVE FUN AND DO GOOD.David@ventureinthesouth.com The RollingSouth FundVentureCarolina

Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast's most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.  My name is Jon Birdsong and I'm with Atlanta Ventures.  Beta Product of the Week: Circool is the product this week and they are hq'd out of Birmingham filling a specific niche in school safety. Several companies ensure doors are locked and all guests are checked-in. Circool software addresses safety around school events. Some of the functionality around Circool includes providing the ability to create events, invite school parents/guardians and staff, and host events knowing exactly who is attending.  Articles to Highlight: In the Atlanta Ventures offices we always test theories and ideas around what makes a great entrepreneur. What ends up being the reason someone decides to dedicate their life to a specific problem and service? The Generalist has a great article on theories that make successful entrepreneurs: 1. The market misjudges you. I believe this is why so many companies get started in economic downturns. People who enjoyed safe, cushy roles find themselves out of a job and have limited fulfillment or desire to go work for a large corporation, so they take the leap. 2. The folks are an all around generalist and jack of all trades. I agree here as well. There are some people who cannot be boxed into a specific role. They will find ways to create and build. 3. Is around mental health issues. Examples include ADHD, OCD, etc. Lastly number 4 is a childhood trauma or difficult upbringing. Those that have overcome such setbacks early on know they can defy the odds of success in entrepreneurship.   Event of the Week: This is less of a specific event, but this week it was announced through StartupAtlanta that the Atlanta ecosystem calendar is live. This calendar includes every major hub in the city, specifically the ones on last year's tour which range in geography from the Russell Innovation Center to Tech Alpharetta. We put the link in the show notes so you can see all the events held in each location.  Job Change Alert: After going from idea and market to a $2.4B exit in December 2021, Salesloft CEO, Kyle Porter is handing over the next growth phase of the business to David Obrand. The story of Salesloft is as homegrown as one can find. Georgia Tech graduate, worked several years on and around the ATDC. Co-founded the company with David Cummings and Rob Forman. Through fits and starts, Salesloft leads and revolutionizes the SDR movement and role and now their software is used by thousands of companies and their sales reps as the application of record for their sales workflow. A historic changing of the guard from a one room office in the ATDC to a skyscraper in midtown. Proud of you Kyle Porter. A story for the ages. Company Coming Up: This company is called LoadHive and is headquartered out of Charlotte, NC. Their freight-tech software is making logistics and transportation much more efficient. Here is how they do it: once loads that fit the truck size and most convenient location of your driver have been identified, they are auto-assigned and show up in your driver's Loadhive app within seconds after the shipment is published. Your driver can see how much they are making per mile, per month and you nor your drivers ever have to search a load board and scan between multiple tabs. Also, all your contracts and documents will be handled through the software as well. If you work with 15 drivers or more, check out LoadHive today.  Companies Worth Applying To: This week it was announced SingleOps is hiring for several roles including customer success, product marketing, and SDR's. If you remember, SingleOps raised $74M back in July of last year from FTV Capital. They are putting the plan to work with job openings now.    Zinnia is looking for a technical lead. The authentic demand is strong with Zinnia which streamlines and organizes offsites and corporate retreats. CEO, Lauren Marturano and team are looking for their first full time engineer to build out the product. Zinnia, right now, is mainly services but there is a clear roadmap of features needed to reduce the headache and manual efforts to ensure every company who is not in the office 5 days a week yet still wants to build in-person culture, has an effective, productive, and affordable offsite or corporate retreat.  Raise of the Week: Spiffy announced this week they raised $30M led by Edison Partners. We've covered Spiffy several episodes ago. They service 3,000-4,000 cars a day whether it is cleaning, oil change, or more. Congratulations to Scott Wingo and team on the raise and future growth!   Annnnd that is five minutes! Links discussed:   

Robert Daniel received his Bachelor of Science in Management at Georgia Institute of Technology and is an MBA candidate at Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech for the class of 2022. He is a seasoned executive in financial services, management consulting, hedge funds, payment operations, wealth management, and fintech. He's current focus is on […] The post Robert Daniel With ATDC appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

Robert Daniel received his Bachelor of Science in Management at Georgia Institute of Technology and is an MBA candidate at Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech for the class of 2022. He is a seasoned executive in financial services, management consulting, hedge funds, payment operations, wealth management, and fintech. He's current focus is on […]

Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast's most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.  My name is Jon Birdsong and I'm with Atlanta Ventures.  Product of the Week: This week's product of the week is called Proline a communication tool for contractors. This application does everything from sending sales follow ups, providing job updates, creating appointment reminders, to generating invoice nudges. AJ Briley and team have been in the space for over 2 years and evolved their product offerings to this must-have solution for any modern day contractor. There is no-credit card needed free trial then a monthly subscription charge afterwards. When looking at companies who have simple and quick ways to sign on to a free trial then convert those trials into paying customers, you know there is real demand in the market.  Question of the Week: This week's question of the week is around venture debt and how we view it at Atlanta Ventures. The macro economic environment has made this a bit more topical with interest rates increasing and burn multiples now having a larger magnifying glass on it than let's just say the last two years. The way we view venture debt is as a safety net and not part of the burn rate calculations. Focusing your burn rate around the number of months of cash on hand is the smart play and then viewing venture debt as a way to sleep better at night. Venture debt should be used only as a “break the glass in case of an emergency” scenario.    Get Them While You Can: Just this week I met with an all-star candidate in finance. This person has spent 7 years scaling a SaaS company and now the company is just too big. If you are listening to this podcast and looking for a Head of Finance or early stage CFO, email me today, jon dot birdsong at Atlanta Ventures as this person will be scooped up quickly.   Company Coming Up: This company coming up is already up and scaling so we may need a new title headline here but the company is out of Charlotte, NC and it's called DebtBook. They are in the accounting standards compliance space, and make debt and lease management easy. Over 1000 finance teams across the nation use DebtBook to manage debt and lease compliance and streamline reporting so the team is efficient and on the same page. Their customers range from municipalities to universities to non-profits which makes it a sticky solution in a large and wide market. Back in August they raised $7.5M led by Elephant Partners. Keep an eye for this company to be a major job provider and software stalwart in Charlotte.  Raise a Glass:  A few announcements on the fundraising side this past week. First, Jim Stallings of PS27 out of Jacksonville just led the $1.6M seed round of SoHookd which is one of the fastest-growing digital wellness marketplaces. Whether you're an individual consumer or an employer looking to amp up your wellness offerings, SoHookd, led by their CEO B.J. Wiley Williams is making it simple to add the right products to you or company's lifestyle right now. Congrats to Jim and the PS27 team for leading the round.  Another major announcement this week out of Atlanta comes from MessageGears. Talk about a company that has put their nose to the grindstone for years and built a complete and persistent product for a decade – I can remember 11 years ago when they were in the corner office of the ATDC, walking in and seeing the focus and dedication of the team. Well, this week they announced their raise of $62M led by Long Ridge Equity Partners which included participation from Atlanta Ventures as well. MessageGears led by Roger Barnette is used by customers including Expedia, OpenTable, T-Mobile and more to leverage zero- and first-party data to engage with their customers in highly personalized ways across email and SMS. What makes MessageGears unique is how they directly access their customers' data repositories versus relying on the cloud making it faster, more secure, and have greater flexibility. And when we start talking about companies that have direct access to company specific data and workflows, we know that leads to a very sticky product. Well done to Roger and team. We look forward to seeing what you do with that $62M!    Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!

Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast's most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.  My name is Jon Birdsong and I'm with Atlanta Ventures. Beta Product of the Week: If you love to learn about products right before they launch, we have one for you. A new dating app called Hatched is on the cusp of launching to the world next week. Their tagline: “You're more than a picture.” The mechanisms put in place for Hatched require personality, core value, and attitude matches that “hatch” the profile picture of the potential match before you fully connect. MItch Alterman is their CEO and few things are more exciting than the days leading up to a company's product launch. For all the single folks listening go to HatchYourMatch.com and sign up for the email updates and product info today.     Event of the Week: On Wednesday, November 16th, Atlanta Ventures Partner, A.T, Gimbel is hosting the Healthcare Entrepreneurship MeetUp. This wildly popular Meetup highlights entrepreneurs in Atlanta who are building in the healthcare industry. There is a substantial database of past MeetUps and the one for next week will showcase 3 companies building their products in the space. These companies include: Happy Talks, InovCares, and Stridelink. If you want to see live demos of the products of today, and tomorrow, sign up in the show notes link.   Product of the Week: There are two products of the week to pay attention to. First is a sales efficiency product called Managr. CEO, Michael Gorodisher is solving the painful problem of updating your Salesforce. Any sales rep who is listening, we know how laborious the process of recording notes, updating stages within the pipeline, and setting automations and reminders for next steps with leads. Managr integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams to build bridges across platforms so you only have to enter data once – and the big news just this week: there is an individual plan, free, up to three users. For any entrepreneur who's attempted a freemium, bottoms-up model, we all know the strategic commitment required and the confidence in the value prop needed. If you or any of your friends use Salesforce.com try out Managr for free today.   Our next product of the week is PlayerZero out of the ATDC. In a circle of life story, CEO Animesh Koratana is back at the ATDC after growing up watching his dad build his startup in those same hallways. In between time, Animesh studied Comp Sci at Stanford and is now focused on how teams ensure product quality through superior communication with the help of data. 20% of bugs cause 80% of the problems – PlayerZero finds the 20%, shows why they matter, and provides the tools you need to fix them. They just scaled the leaderboard on Product Hunt to #1 last week. Keep an eye out and give PlayerZero a try as the team continues to build data-driven debugging tools for developers. Companies Worth Applying Too: Carpool Logistics is hiring in several areas including sales and engineering. We covered them in episode 9 of Five and Thrive. If you love cars, logistics, and transportation, check out Carpool Logistics as they continue to grow their business in meaningful ways. We linked to their careers page where they are looking for a Director of Sales, Account Executives, and more.   Quiet Giant: This week's quiet giant and true sleeper is called Formulytics. I first heard about them in the SaportaReport. This company is a file management system that helps police and prosecutors coordinate on gang cases. They approach the criminal, not the case, by providing full lifecycle intelligence collaboration of the criminal profile - including the investigation and arrest, to prosecution, incarceration, and release. This company is a decade old and likes to keep a low profile – naturally fitting into this category. Quotes from public officials  We put a link to the SaportaReport article with more details on their origin story and more. Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Beta Product of the Week: Hatched Event of the Week: Atlanta Healthcare MeetUp Product of the Week:  Managr PlayerZero Companies Worth Applying Too: Carpool Logistics  Quiet Giant: Formultyics in SaportaReport

Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast's most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.  My name is Jon Birdsong and I'm with Atlanta Ventures. Y'all what a week! From TechStars to Venture Atlanta, to the cocktail parties, dinners, and happy hours, I can say it was so fun. And it was wonderful to meet so many investors who come to Atlanta once or twice a year and showcase the city and meet in person. Congratulations to Allyson Eman on another amazing Venture Atlanta.   Quiet Giant: I was reminded of this past week's quasi-Quiet Giant out of Durham, North Carolina called Spiffy. Their short tag line is on-demand car wash and detailing service. While that may seem obvious as there are several mom and pop shops willing to meet you in your driveway to give you the detail your car wants and needs, Spiffy has raised over $60M in funding around this fast growing, successful tech enabled service that washes cars for several enterprise fleets. Examples include trucking fleets, rental car services, and much more. And the best part, car wash and detailing services are just the beginning. CEO, Scott Wingo and team have figured out that these fleets need much more than to glean and be cleaned – they also need brakes checked, new tires, oil changes, and disinfectants adhered. The auto maintenance shop is now coming to you. Check out Spiffy and see if they are in your zipcode today and book your next appointment over the phone or through their mobile app.    Beta Product of the Week: I met this entrepreneur last week in a serendipitous lunch at Jack's Deli. He overheard what a friend and I were talking about in another booth, introduced himself and shared the product he's building. The name of the product is called Ambitious App. Their brand promise: Learn in-demand digital skills in 5 minutes a day. He is launching the private beta this week. The CEO, Alim Charaniya, is a technical founder who wants to deliver bit-sized educational content to our generation of short reels and tik toks but package it all up in a productive way so there is a quantified and gamified learning. One of the go-to-market strategies that I already admire and respect from Alim is that he's building community before the product has been launched. For example, if you go to the link in the show notes taking you Ambitious App's website, Alim and his team filter you into a slack channel where you are immediately introduced to other like-minded learners.  In a world that is changing so fast in an industry (education) that has hardly evolved from that traditional classroom setting in a century, this is another innovative angle to learn outside of the classroom rat race.  Product of the Week: We've covered this product before, especially this time of the year and definitely this time of the political season, but the product is a simple website called GeorgiaVotes.com. If you live in Georgia and love early voting analytics, Ryan Anderson (@GTRyan) on Twitter has you covered. Each night, GeorgiaVotes updates the early voting records from the Secretary of the State's website and analyzes who has voted and compared those voters to elections prior. We interviewed Ryan on The Atlanta Story Podcast last year and will make sure to link to that interview in the show notes.   Event of the Week: The ATDC keeps coming with some great programming. This time it is with entrepreneur Tristan Walker. If you remember, Tristan sold his company to Proctor and Gamble in 2018 and moved to Atlanta from California. He is speaking at the P&G alumni event which has joined forces with the ATDC. This will be a fireside chat with Tristan mixed with networking on Tuesday, November 8th – which is also election day!  News of the Week: Shout out to Clint Green and team who just launched Revenue Ready. This is the ecosystem at work as Clint spent seven and a half years at Salesloft and before then Pardot, not only selling and closing deals, but learning the systems and processes to put in place to scale. Now he and his team have packaged up their services to take your company. If you're looking to tighten up the opportunity process and cement your sales playbook check out Revenue Ready as they have been there and done it.    Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Quiet Giant: Get Spiffy Beta Product of the Week: Ambitious App Product of the Week: GeorgiaVotes.com The Atlanta Story - Ryan Anderson Event of the Week:  Fireside Chat with Tristan Walker News of the Week: Revenue Ready

Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast's most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.  My name is Jon Birdsong and I'm with Atlanta Ventures. This week it seems like so many representatives across the country of the investor community come to Atlanta for VentureAtlanta, what better way to start this week's podcast than with Raises of the Week.  Raise a Glass:  First is MileAuto out of the ATDC. CEO Fred Blumer raised $4M from existing investors including Ulu Ventures, Emergent Ventures and Sure Ventures. MileAuto provides auto insurance to low-mileage drivers through the use of computer vision and ML technology. That brings their total funding to $16M. Congrats to Fred and team.  Another announcement in funding is Greenzie with an $8M round that includes the strategic investment of Bobcat. This one is right in Atlanta Ventures' backyard as Founder and CEO, Charles Brian Quinn or CBQ started it out the Atlanta Ventures Studio just over 4 years ago. Today, there are mowers coming off the lot from manufacturers that are air quotes Robotic Ready to be activated by Greenzie's software to make them autonomous. This funding provides Greenzie resources to partner with several more manufacturers so in a not too far distance there will be dozens and then hundreds of mowers coming out of the productions lines ready for Greenzie's software to be turned as simply as Sirius radio, but instead of the Elvis Presley channel, it's autonomous mowing all the time. Congratulations to CBQ and team!  Product of the Week: This product is headquartered out of Birmingham, Alabama and designed to be your digital vault for all the key family documents in your nuclear and extended family. The company is called Prismm and it was founded by Martha Underwood. Think of all the important documents that are either saved on an external hard drive or in the cloud – most likely email or a desk drawer – that should be in a safe and secure location. Prismm is the place that keeps all of these documents organized, safe, and secure. Examples include documents around property & assets, financial accounts, and more. Say good by to the security deposit box and hello to the Prismm. Try the free trial today.    Hot Market of the Week: Last week Hypepotamus highlighted a product doing close to $10k MRR in the content marketing space called SuperCopy. Their CEO, Richard Lee from Georgia Tech has built a technology that takes a large part of the work load off of generating copy through what the industry and market it calling it “AI Content.” SuperCopy combines intent, tone of voice, demographic, and keywords for endless unique content. As that product was plastered across inboxes via Hype last week, just this week Jasper an AI Content software solution raised $125M at a unicorn priced valuation to generate content for blog articles, social media posts, website copy and more. And it was just released via Twitter but Lex.Page which has a waitlist of over 25,000 folks for Nate Baschez's new product. We put a link to his product demo in the show notes. So what is the excitement around content, AI, and marketers? The fight for eyeballs and ears is vivacious and any edge to produce more content in less time while maintaining, or enhancing the quality is going to produce substantial buzz. Check all of them out in the show notes below.  Companies Worth Applying Too: The popular pizza joint, Glide Pizza, started by Rob Birdsong (my older brother) is looking for an Ops Manager. They just opened their second location in Decatur and have plans to continue growth on the West Side and hopefully, eventually Buckhead or Brookhaven. With all that expansion on the horizon, they are looking for someone who makes sure all the trains or dough is tossed on time and nuts and bolts are as tight as possible around the early processes defined. If you're an operationally focused individual who loves physical locations and food, check out Glide Pizza and their growing enterprise.   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode: Raise a Glass: MileAuto Greenzie   Product of the Week: Prismm   Hot Market of the Week: SuperCopy Jasper Lex.Page - Demo Lavender    Companies Worth Applying Too: Glide Pizza

Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast's most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.    My name is Jon Birdsong and I'm with Atlanta Ventures.   Event of the Week: The next two weeks in Atlanta are loaded with dozens of events ranging from Venture Atlanta, TechStars Demo Day, happy hours and more with several investors from all over the country to get a taste of the Atlanta ecosystem. I hope to see several of you out and about. Here's a more tactical event to put on your calendar. On 10/20, the ATDC is hosting their regular Entrepreneur's Night starting at 5 p.m. This month is focused on all things 5G. Leaders from TMoble, Curiosity Lab, and the ATDC will be exchanging knowledge and conversations through a panel format on 5G today and tomorrow – if the 5th Generation for broadband cellular markets is of interest to you, sign up in the link within the show notes. In a state where no more than 21% of our households have high speed internet access and approximately 39% live in an area where there is only 1 internet provider, the opportunity is vast.        Company Coming Up:  This company coming up has stayed under the radar as it started as a side hustle for a few years mixed with a pivot. The name of the company? AdvizorPro (with a Z). This is software that provides a verified and robust broker-dealer, RIA, & insurance database of contacts. If you're looking to sell into the financial services industry, AdvizorPro is a great resource to get email information and direct dial numbers as the market of financial data continues to grow. AdvizorPro is a team of approximately 10 folks and one to keep an eye as they scale and grow against some of the legacy competitors in the market.    Product Launch of the Week: This past week, a company who is innovating in the litigation market publicly announced their product launch. Calloquy's software makes remote legal proceedings safe, secure, and efficient. What spawned out of Covid, Calloquy is now making several aspects of court proceedings including arbitrations, depositions, and mediations as simple as setting up a video conference call. The software is like a very secure Zoom on steroids, where you can upload and annotate documents, structure the actual video conference participants like one would be set up in a courtroom, and have all the proceedings and court reporting documented in a safe and secure location. Calloquy has invested significant resources in building out a product in a market that is tough to build a Minimum Viable Product. Check out their software today and refer it to any law firm who does remote work.     Blog and Podcast of the Week: The blog post of the week comes from Harvard Business School, one of Atlanta Ventures Partner, A.T Gimbel's alma mater. The title is “Why a Failed Startup Might Be Good For Your Career After All.” Regardless of success or failure, there is growing evidence that the market values the experience founders have and rewards them in terms of high seniority, prestigious positions, even though they failed. The article goes into detail about how they are valued and the benefits of a generalist's versatile value to a firm. I personally can't think of one successful entrepreneur who didn't have a failure. We've highlighted several entrepreneurs in our Stories section on the AV website and each one has a failure story. This may be one of the reasons why when we work with entrepreneurs in the Atlanta Ventures Studio, we love to see their previous entrepreneurial efforts, successful or not, but the experience is vital towards their next endeavor.    Lastly, I'm biased for this week's podcast of the week because it highlights someone we interviewed on the The Atlanta Story Podcast – which is another podcast out of Atlanta Ventures. The entrepreneur on this month's Atlanta Story is Cherie Kloss, Founder of SnapNurse. Cherie's story is one of fortitude, reinvention, innovation, and scale. What started out as a list of links to learn how to build a startup from her brother in 2015, led to the formation and generation of a $1.2B revenue business 6 years later. Cherie started out in the healthcare field, transitioned to a producer for A&E for nearly a decade, then started SnapNurse. In the Atlanta Story Podcast, we talk about her amazing story and how she not only reinvented herself time and time again, but also learn where the industry is going in general and more. Check it out as it drops, today!   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes.   Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode:     Event of the Week: Entrepreneur night at ATDC: All Things 5G Company Coming Up: AdvizorPro  Product Launch of the Week: Calloquy  Blog Post of the Week:  Why a Failed Startup Might Be Good For Your Career After All

https://entrearchitect.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/KPReddyHeadshot.png ()Venture Capital in the AEC KP Reddy is the Founder and CEO of Shadow Ventures, a seed-stage technology investment firm. He is a globally recognized authority in AEC environments, AI, robotics, automation, mobile applications, and cloud computing. KP is a Civil Engineer by background (BS, Georgia Institute of Technology) and wrote the textbook on BIM with his book: BIM for Building Owners and Developers. He is a frequent lecturer at Georgia Institute of Technology and is a sought-after subject matter expert, frequently speaking worldwide on BIM and the built environment. KP has exited three technology companies. Cereus Technology Partners which had an IPO on NASDAQ and has since sold to Verso (NASDAQ:VRSO) at a 35x Multiple, RCMS which was sold to ARC (NYSE:ARC), and Ampirix (sold to The Combine). KP formerly ran Enterprise Transformation at Gehry Technologies (started by world renowned architect Frank Gehry) which exited to Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB). He was also the General Manager of ATDC at Georgia Tech, one of the oldest technology incubators in the country. This week at EntreArchitect Podcast, Venture Capital in the AEC with KP Reddy. Connect with KP online at https://shadow.vc/about/ (Shadow Ventures) and http://kpreddy.co/bio/ (KPReddy.co), or find him on https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpreddy (LinkedIn). Please visit Our Platform Sponsors http://ARCAT.com/podcast (Detailed) is an original podcast by ARCAT that features architects, engineers, builders, and manufacturers who share their insight and expertise as they highlight some of the most complex, interesting, and oddest building conditions that they have encountered… and the ingenuity it took to solve them. Listen now at http://ARCAT.com/podcast (ARCAT.com/podcast). http://EntreArchitect.com/Freshbooks (Freshbooks) is the all-in-one bookkeeping software that can save your small architecture firm both time and money by simplifying the hard parts of running your own business. Try Freshbooks for 30 days for FREE at http://EntreArchitect.com/Freshbooks (EntreArchitect.com/Freshbooks). Visit our Platform Sponsors today and thank them for supporting YOU… The EntreArchitect Community of small firm architects. Referenced in this Episode https://www.amazon.com/What-Know-About-Startups-Wrong/dp/1619618796/ref=sr_1_3?crid=KV055K5MBZJS&keywords=kp+reddy&qid=1660236698&sprefix=kp+reddy%2Caps%2C189&sr=8-3 (What You Know About Startups Is Wrong: How to Navigate Entrepreneurial Urban Legends That Threaten Your Relationships, Your Health, Your Finances, and Your Career by KP Reddy) https://shadowsummit.co (Shadow Summit: Building the Future – AEC and CRE Conference) The post https://entrearchitect.com/podcast/entrearch/venture-capital-in-the-aec/ (EA470: KP Reddy – Venture Capital in the AEC) appeared first on https://entrearchitect.com (EntreArchitect // Small Firm Entrepreneur Architects).

ATDC is one of Georgia's critical startup ecosystem drivers and one of the leading accelerators in the nation. Founded in 1980, ATDC has a global reputation for fostering technological entrepreneurship. Forbes named ATDC to its list of “Incubators Changing the World” in 2010 and 2013, alongside Y Combinator and the Palo Alto Research Center. Get to know Director John Avery. We dive into the various stages of membership at the ATDC and which level may be most appropriate for your startup. John shares some of the ways the ATDC has positively impacted the burgeoning Georgia ecosystem and some ways you can help support innovation in our state.

Robert Daniel, Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) TRANSCRIPT Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Georgia World Congress Center for Fintech South 2022. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Brought to you by Atlanta Blockchain Center. Now, here’s your host. Lee Kantor: [00:00:27] Lee Kantor here back at Fintech South 2022. So excited to be talking […] The post Fintech South 2022: Robert Daniel with ATDC appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast's most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes. Company Coming Up:  This company coming up was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in historic Cabbagetown in Atlanta. They have raised $5.3M to date and solve a very real problem in several markets. The company is called BoxLock and they are shaping the future of unattended delivery technology. What does that even mean Birdsong? So thousands of companies in healthcare, construction, transportation and warehousing have serious problems regarding safety, reliability, and efficiency when it comes to assets that are stored or transferred. Think of anything ranging from tools on a construction site to shipping containers to even election boxes. BoxLock's Supply Chain Access Control Platform is used by companies like UPS Healthcare, University of Nebraska Healthcare, LUX Diagnostics (local to Atlanta), just to name a few. This market is massive and I just love finding not only passionate CEO's like Brad Ruffkess who are pioneering this field but then learn they are walking distance to Carroll Street Cafe!  They are hiring right now and trust me when I say this: growing very very fast. Links in the show notes. Beta Product of the Week:   This week's beta product of the week comes from two Auburn engineers and it is called Smart Stall. Nearly everything in the bathroom workflow is automated and touchless. You can get soap, paper towels, water, dry hands and a quick flush without touching any surface, so why are we still latching and unlatching the bathroom stall? Chase and Wynn are the co-founders solving this problem with an early prototype already built. If you are a building owner, tenant rep, or CEO looking to automate your latches, check out SmartStall. Link in the show notes.  Jump to the Front: This is a new format called Jump to the Front. For companies who are offering early access to product launches and customer codes, we deliver them here. I just caught up with Christian Ries, CEO of Zeto. Zeto is the trusted home manager for your house. Through their reliable network of vetted partners, they can easily knock out to-do's, meet vendors on location and respond to emergencies 24/7 all through text. They are humming! Satisfied customers are all over Atlanta as the hassle has now believe relieved from the household. If you're interested in skipping the wait and jumping to the front, put Five and Thrive in the comments section of the wait list form.  Event of the Week: Mark your calendars for the third stop of the ATL Unlocked Tour. This event is held on Thursday July 21st from 5-7 p.m. at the ATDC in midtown. The signup link is in the show notes. The first stop was at the Atlanta Tech Village, the second stop was at the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurship, and this one is right in the heart of midtown on Georgia Tech's campus. It is entrepreneurs night and I know this will have several entrepreneurs mixing and mingling.   I hope everyone had a happy, relaxing, and safe Fourth of July and for everyone who ran the Peachtree Road Race, I hope you're not as sore as I am.   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Company Coming Up: Boxlock Beta Product of the Week: Smart Stallus Jump to the Front: Zeto Event: atdc events  

JT Lidell is the Founder of Promenade, which seamlessly matches and connects military veterans to the resources, people, and organizations that matter to them. Chad talks with JT about being a mission-driven, bootstrapped organization, the problems that he's encountered and hopes that Promenade solves, and aggregating people, tools, resources, and funding to make it happen. Promenade (https://www.promenade.ai/) Follow JT on Twitter (https://twitter.com/promenadeactual) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-zimmerman-35152a22/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel and with me today is JT Liddell, the Founder of Promenade, which seamlessly matches and connects military veterans to the resources, people, and organizations that matter to them. JT, thank you so much for joining me. JT: No, thank you for having me. Excited to talk to you about what we're building over here and having this conversation. So thank you so much for having me on today. CHAD: I love mission-driven organizations, and Promenade falls right into that. How did it come about for you? JT: Yeah, this has been...the inception of it really truly began many, many years ago when I first joined the military straight out of high school. So I went to The Naval Academy, actually, started there then went to the army. Fast forward 7, 8, 9, 10 years, and as I was getting out of the military and trying to join the civilian workforce, the civilian world, that's where a lot of the problems and challenges that I'm trying to solve through Promenade started. And then, working in the technology space in corporate America really allowed me to identify some of the solutions and tools that I'm working with now. But to answer your original question, the beginning of Promenade or the inception of Promenade really began with my entry into the military. CHAD: What were some of the problems that you encountered and that you hope that Promenade solves? JT: Back in 2000...I left the military officially in 2010 but went straight into defense contracting work from there and worked there for a few years. And it was, as I was leaving, I went literally from Afghanistan, and 30 days later, I was sitting in an MBA classroom. And leaving Afghanistan, I thought there was literally no problem, no challenge...after going through three deployments to Afghanistan and being deployed to other parts of the world, I was like, there's nothing that I'm going to come against that I won't be able to tackle. That was the furthest from the truth. So there are a number of issues when it came to relationships, when it came to navigating the workforce, when it came to just understanding how drastically different the civilian world was from being in the military and the defense industry. So those problems are umbrellas, and there are many, many things underneath those that I came up against. CHAD: What are some of the ways that, you know, I speak as someone not having served in the military. What are some of the big ways in which civilian employment is different? JT: It wasn't even necessarily...well, obviously, there are huge differences obviously from the military and civilian employment. But it was really even like, how do you get entry into the civilian workforce just from the very beginning? So, how do you craft a resume? It seems like a minor thing at this point in my life, but it's a huge one. When you leave the military, you have these 9, 10, 11-page resumes. And that's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to put literally every single piece of experience that you have on this resume. But when you come to the civilian world, you have to somehow condense all of that down to one page, and there's a science to doing that, and that was one of the first huge hurdles. Because a resume is just your ticket into the door, it's a ticket to that interview. That's just literally the first step. And that was something that I didn't realize was something I was going to have to hone my skill at. CHAD: Do you think that a lot of companies overlook the value of military service? JT: Yeah, that's a tough one to answer. So it's hard to say overlook when as a military veteran just taking myself, for instance, you know, in a lot of ways, I was not communicating effectively what my experience was in relation to the value I could provide to that organization. So as a recruiter or a headhunter, whoever is doing that initial review, they're simply looking...for a large part, they don't have experience in the military. So they don't understand the jargon and what some of these different jobs really mean with the impact they had on their organization. So there's still a lot of meat in the middle here. So that individual needs to do a better job of communicating the exact value through a corporate sense how that value could contribute to corporate America or whatever type of organization they're trying to join. And organizations need to do a much better job of understanding that there's this untapped value in the military community and teaching and training their organizations or whoever is doing the intake process to look for the value that the military community can bring. So I don't think it's a one-sided thing. I think both sides need to come together and do a better job. CHAD: So I said in the intro that Promenade matches and connects veterans to the resources, people, and organizations that matter to them. What exactly does that look like in terms of the product today and what you're doing? JT: Yeah, absolutely. So this really began as a grassroots operation through my own ecosystem. Many, many years ago, when I was first getting in the military, and I was starting to get traction and understanding how to navigate the civilian world, I started to reach back. People would reach out to me, and I would reach back. And they would ask me, "How did you get here? How did you do that?" And I would just help people, review their resumes for them, get them connected to different jobs and career pathways. And then I started to do that a little bit more officially, if you will. And then, I realized this is not just a problem within my own ecosystem; this is a problem across the military community. So as I was working in technology, as I mentioned before, I started to identify tools, one of them being artificial intelligence, that could help me scale the work that I was doing. So the pathway that I started to set out on was how do I take this grassroots work that I'm doing, and then how do I scale that work to millions of people rather than just dozens of people? So that's the journey that I'm on right now. I don't know if that answered your question or not. CHAD: So if someone is listening and they're a veteran, what is the product going to offer them now? JT: So they'll come on, and they'll onboard to the platform. So essentially, we're just taking the process that we've been doing offline, and we're bringing it online. So they'll come on. They'll fill out some demographic information. They'll answer a few questions about where they are in their current post-military journey. They could even be thinking about getting out. The product will still help them as they're on their way out, thinking about getting out. They could have been out for a month, a year, an entire decade doesn't really matter. We'll help assess where they are in their post-military journey. After they go through that intake process, we'll give them the option to talk to one of our coaches, which can make this experience a little bit more personalized. And that's one of the huge things that I learned as I've been building Promenade is when I first started tackling this, thinking about tackling this issue through technology, I was like, okay, this technology these tools that I've identified and I've researched these are going to be the things that solve this problem. That's what's going to do this. No, that's what's going to fix this. [chuckles] And what I quickly realized is you can't remove that human component from this process. There are just things that technology doesn't understand about the military experience. So having a coach, having an individual or human to talk to at the very beginning of this process, or whatever that individual needs is extremely crucial and hugely beneficial to this process. So we put that coach in front of them. That's completely optional because we do want to allow this to be self-service and self-guided. So if they choose to get in front of that coach, they'll be able to talk one on one and augment this process. If they don't, they'll go straight to our dashboard. And what the dashboard will do is it's going to help that individual identify different areas within their post-military journey where they can improve and get better. And, Chad, we haven't talked about this, but we've got this social impact-driven product that we're building. But the lens that we're really thinking about this is through a healthcare lens. So what that means is there's this term called social determinants of health. And what that means is...the very simple version is a super simple concept. Every part of your life impacts your overall health. The health care system, like when you go to the hospital, only impacts 20%-30% of your overall health. The things that truly impact your health are things like, do you have a job? Have you talked to a therapist in the last six months? Do you have food, you know, the right type of food? Do you have access to the right type of food? Not just food. Are you ordering Burger King every day, McDonald's every day? But are you eating healthy food? And do you have consistent access? Those are the things that affect your overall health. So we look at all of these different factors about the veteran and how they're going through their post-military journey. And we give them a score on all these different verticals. So essentially, through that score, we're helping them identify what those gaps are, and then we're pushing them resources to help fill those gaps. So they'll get a couple of things through our platform. They'll get that dashboard and that score and personally recommended or personalized recommended resources to them, and that's where the artificial intelligence component comes into it. And then they'll have sort of a search field where they can just go and keyword for things just like they would go into Google and search for something. And then the third component to this is the community that we're building, and that won't be rolled out initially. But once we've got critical mass, we've got a community that we're building where they'll get connected to people within our community, maybe people with the same skills and interest, people that they were deployed with, people that they were stationed with, or people that they just came across. And we've got a method to do that. But that's really what it's about is bringing this community together, helping them assess where they are in their post-military journey, and then putting the right resources in front of them at the right time based on who they are. So that's the experience they'll get, to answer your question. CHAD: Awesome. Who pays for Promenade? JT: So it's going to be twofold. So there'll be a freemium model for the military veteran, so all those things that I just mentioned, minus one or two. They'll get free access to the platform. So they'll be able to log on. They'll be able to see where they're at in their journey. And they'll be able to navigate the platform and get those personalized recommendations. On the organizational side, they will also pay to access the platform. And then there's some other work...back when I mentioned a couple of minutes ago that organizations need to do a better job of understanding the military community, we help organizations better understand the military community, attract and retain military veteran talent if that's something that they're in the business of doing. So there are multiple ways to do it. CHAD: And organizations would pay for that. JT: That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. CHAD: Is that a significant or a fundamental part of the business model? JT: Which part? CHAD: The organizations paying. JT: Yeah, it is. So it depends on which part of interacting with the organization that we're talking about. So there are two ways we can do that. There's A, giving them access to the platform so just, for example, on the jobs portion, careers portion, recruiters. We'd give them access to the platform to get access to the talent. But on the let's help this organization think about how they're even reaching out to the veteran community, how they're recruiting them, the process that veterans are going through in order to apply to these organizations, once veterans are in these organizations, how are they supporting the veteran community? And maybe even after they've left, depending on which organization you're talking about, how are you supporting that veteran community once they've left so they can be...you want them to be ambassadors for your organization. How are you supporting the veteran community even after they've left? So that's two completely different ways that we can interact with the organization. The fundamental one would be those organizations getting access to our platform and interacting with the veteran community. That for sure would be fundamental to what we're building. CHAD: So who's funding Promenade right now? JT: [laughs] Yeah, that's a great question. So this is definitely up until maybe a year or so ago; it's definitely been bootstrap built for sure completely out of my pocket. But thanks to some of the visibility we were able to get, in the work we were able to do, organizations were able to get in touch. We've gotten a couple of grants, one huge one from Google for Startups last year. That was $100,000 from Google for Startups. That's been obviously huge for the work and the momentum. And what I always tell people is, you know, Chad, you've been doing this a while. [laughs] You know that $100,000 can get run through pretty quickly in the tech startup space. That was huge, and I don't want to downplay that by any means. But that wasn't even the biggest impact to what we're doing. It's just the visibility that it created for our organization. We've had just the veterans that we work with; we've had so many reach out just because they heard about us but organizations as well that have reached out to us. They want to work with us. They want to support us. That was huge. But to answer your question, it's a combination of grant money, cash awards from different organizations, and bootstrapping it from me JT here. CHAD: Well, thanks for doing that [laughs] and bringing this really important service to life. What are some of the barriers to achieving the success that you want to achieve with Promenade? JT: What we're doing is essentially we're aggregating information. We're aggregating people. We're aggregating tools and resources. We're bringing all this together. I didn't think it would be easy by any means. But it's definitely much harder than I imagined it would be when I set out in this journey a couple of years ago. One of the hardest things about this is you've got all of these different areas that you're trying to assess veterans and getting these tools and resources and organizations in front of them. How do you consistently and with quality put those organizations and tools and resources in front of the veteran? I want all of them to have the same experience. I want them to have an amazing experience. I want them to get connected quickly and with quality to the people and organizations and tools that they need to get connected to. So how do you make that experience consistent and standard across the board? And how do you control as much as possible the quality of that interaction? Building these partnerships has been challenging. It's been difficult. But every time, I get frustrated...just like, every startup goes through those barriers. You get frustrated. I just think back to those moments where I was down on my post-military journey. And I'm like, I never want another veteran to have to go through that. That's what keeps me pushing when those barriers do hit. And I'm like, this is going to be hard. How do I keep that organization, or how do I ensure that organization is doing A, B, and C? How do I ensure I'm keeping this veteran pushing forward and motivated when they get frustrated? Those are some of the barriers. But as I said before, I just look back on when I was going through my journey. And I don't want any veteran to have to go through that experience. So that's what keeps me going. Mid-Roll Ad I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. CHAD: So you officially started Promenade in May of 2020. Is that right? JT: I came up with the idea actually in 2017 sort of the framework for what I'm doing now. And I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, and I don't know how much you know about the tech startup space in Atlanta, Georgia, but it's booming right now for sure. That'd be an understatement. And I have a few different people around me, a number of people around me in my ecosystem that are in the tech startup space. And I watched them going through their own personal journeys and finding success. And I was like, number one, I have all these people around me that are doing it, non-technical founders, technical founders, first-time founders. There's no reason I can't also do this. And then number two, I was like, if I looked on my phone seven years from now and I saw a Promenade built by somebody else, I'd be super pissed. [laughter] I'm going to be so pissed. I remember this quite clearly December 2019; I was like, you have to do something; if you don't, you're going to regret it. So December 2019, I went, and I signed up for this organization here in Atlanta called ATDC. I signed up for my first intro to customer discovery class. And from there, I've been pushing ever since. I think I incorporated the organization around May or March or something like that officially. But the idea, inception in its current form probably 2017 and then really began building in January 2020. CHAD: So, how do you think the pandemic has impacted the ability to start Promenade? JT: Yeah, a number of different ways. But I would say net-net actually in a positive way in not like the actual of what the pandemic means but the environment. It showed me clear as day that there's a huge net need for digital services when it comes to the military veteran community. Because a large resource for the veteran community is Department of Veteran Affairs, you know, doing amazing work doing great work. But just like many other government organizations, many aspects of it were shut down during the pandemic. So let's just talk about mental wellness because that's something that is highly visible in the veteran community as being an issue. The suicide rate increased exponentially during the pandemic within the veteran community. That's because people are isolated. They're already going through issues; maybe people are getting out of the military during the pandemic. It just showed me that there's a huge increased need for digitally online for this veteran community, resources for the veteran community, and just giving them an ecosystem to interact in. And it just pushed me even harder to build what I was building. So the pandemic was obviously a very terrible thing, but in terms of Promenade and the work that I was doing, it just made me go even harder for sure. CHAD: So right now, is it just you? JT: Yeah, so it's me. I've got one personal assistant, and I've got several designers and developers that I work with. CHAD: On a contract basis? JT: Yes, all contractors. But in terms of people who are hands-on building this thing, I probably couldn't even count the number, as I'm sure you know when it comes to developers and designers trying to build these solutions. But in terms of being officially a part of Promenade, it's still just me going at this thing right now. CHAD: And while you're doing this, you have another full-time job, right? JT: I do. I do. CHAD: I think that's a scenario that a lot of people find themselves in is wanting to do something new but not necessarily being able to, you know, you're bootstrapping something on the side. How do you make it work? And what would need to happen for you to take the leap to be able to just work on Promenade? JT: How do I make it work? A lot of Red Bull, a lot of energy drinks, [chuckles] and a lot of late nights. But again, as I mentioned before, that's something I would put in as time as a barrier when it comes to building this thing. I just take it back to the many conversations I have with veterans as they've been going through their own personal journeys. That just keeps me going. As far as what would it take for me to move away to work on Promenade full time, the only true thing I think it would take would really be line of sight and visibility on being able to drive this thing forward in a sustainable manner, just having a line of sight on that, on this thing. Okay, I've got the traction. I can see it. It's tangible. I just need to do A, B, and C to keep pushing this thing forward. I know that's sort of vague, but that's really what it would take. CHAD: Do you think you're going to have to take funding from somewhere, or do you think you can continue to bootstrap and operate on the grants and awards? JT: It depends. That's a good question. That's something I've gone back and forth with. Working in the tech startup space, that's something that's discussed a lot is angel investors and VCs, and you need to do this to attract funders and things like that. That's something that's discussed a lot in this space. But it's something that I've gone back and forth with. It really comes down to what I want this thing to be at the end of the day. This thing could be huge. There's a huge gap in the military veteran space in a multitude of ways. This thing could be a unicorn if that's the direction I really wanted to take it. And I think if I go down that pathway, it's for sure going to take funding from outside sources. But if I want to keep this thing more small scale or maybe even local to that Atlanta, Georgia region where I live and only focus on that one region, that's something I could probably bootstrap until I've got the revenue necessary to work on it full time and just keep it at more of a local level. But I think based on the impact that I'm trying to have throughout the entire veteran community and not just on veterans themselves but the organizations which could help...we've got this concept called train the trainer in the military, which is the experience I had as well. But essentially, it's I can do all the work and have all the impact. But it would be 10X more impactful if I'm working with Fortune 500 companies that are doing the same thing that I'm doing, impact in the veteran community in the same way that I am. So I think that's the direction I'll probably end up going, and that's why I'll have to go look for funding from other sources to build this thing the way I want to build it. So we'll see. We'll see. CHAD: The problem with funding, obviously, is that if it comes from traditional investment sources, then they expect a return, and you have to be able to show that. It might be made up, but you have to have a story that demonstrates that there's a return. And you alluded to one angle at the beginning when you talked about healthcare. Do you see that as a potential angle in terms of what the business model might be and what industry you might actually be part of? JT: That's a great question. So I know that if I go full-fledged down the healthcare route, social determinants of health, tracking health outcomes for the veteran community, then most definitely, this would be something where I would need outside funding, traditional funding to build this thing. And I think that's where when it comes to like, okay, I set out on this journey to impact the veteran community, and I want to have the most impact possible. That's going to be the route I'm going to have to go down. But quite candidly, I do not have at this point enough expertise around the healthcare space to say, okay, let's go down that pathway. Right now, part of the journey that I'm on outside of just trying to build this thing and get this thing launched over the next month, or two is how do I get myself more integrated into the healthcare world to better understand how what I'm building overlaps or integrates into what's going on around social determinants of health in the healthcare space? And how do I insert myself into that? That's something I'm currently assessing. CHAD: Well, and the interesting thing, too, for me is the thought that I wonder if that actually is something that is top of mind for the users, the veterans, or whether they're just thinking I need a job, [chuckles] and they're not necessarily thinking about their health top of mind. I mean, what do you think? JT: They're not today. Absolutely not. Today when they reach out to me, they're like...and it's funny because that just opens another can of worms. But it just opens up this whole nother aspect of what I'm doing. So when they come to me, they're like, "I need a job." They're like, "I'm about to lose my car. I need help with my car payment," or "I'm going to be homeless soon." That's how people reach out to me. But, Chad, that's not truly the issue. As you can imagine, if you're at the point to where you're about to be homeless, there's all this other stuff going on within your life. That's truly the work that we do. It's like people come to me...I have people reach out to me literally every single day. "I need help with this. I need help with that." And I'm like, okay, I have a conversation with them. And then we realize there's like 9, 10, 11 other things going on. So to answer your question, they're not thinking about this healthcare issue. And from a user standpoint, that's not even how I want to approach this, like telling them, "Oh, I'm going to be here to improve your health outcomes." I wouldn't have that conversation with them. My conversation with them would still be around these different pillars. But on the organizational side, that's where I would communicate to them and say, "I've got these group of individuals who are coming to me and saying, 'I need this assistance.'" And what we're doing at the end of the day is improving their health outcomes. And what that means is, healthcare payer, they're not touching your healthcare system, which means you're saving tons of money. And that's the part that I'm currently unpacking to say, okay, not to the user that we're doing this work and healthcare but to these organizations. And there are examples of this already out there. So, how do I do that but stay true to the work that I'm doing with the military veteran? Because one of the things that I know that's not going to change for what I'm building is the focus on the user. There are 40,000 veteran service organizations alone. There's $250 billion that gets poured into the veteran community through the Department of Veteran Affairs. So there's no shortage of organizations working on the veteran community, with the veteran community, and there's no shortage of money out there when it comes to helping bolster the veteran community or improve outcomes within the veteran community. The true challenge that I see or the true issue that I see is there's a lack of focus on the actual veteran themselves and what they're going through. There are no tools out there for them to tap into and go on this journey. That's what I'm laser-focused on is how do I create an amazing experience for the military veteran themselves, not the organizations that are out there doing some of this work, if that makes sense. CHAD: It totally does. And I think it really makes sense for you. I think it's a problem that a lot of startups face is that there's this draw, maybe because of your business model or because of the environment that you have this other piece, but what you really need to do is focus on creating value for your users. And in an ideal world, those two things become aligned over time. You mentioned...a little while ago, you said something over the next few months, we got to get this launched. So there's a sign-up on the website now to become part of the community. But are you not fully launched yet? JT: No. So what we've got right now is a landing page which essentially is building a list for individuals. Once I launch, I reach out and say, "Hey, we're live." What's not publicly facing right now is that user experience that I described. That's what's being built. But let me take a step back because we're still doing that grassroots work to where we're working with veterans one on one. So that's still something that we're heavily doing. But again, the idea here is to how do I replicate this work that we're doing to millions of people? That's what we're going to roll out here. CHAD: I know timelines can be tricky. [laughs] What is your working timeline for doing that? JT: As far as launching it? CHAD: Mm-hmm. JT: [laughs] When people ask me, you know, one or two months. It's funny; when I first started this back when I was doing the customer discovery, I was getting all this great information and learning more intimately about what the veterans community is going through. I've got my own experience. I've got the experience of people within my ecosystem. But I was just astounded by all the myriad of issues that were going on. And I was like, oh man, I'm going to have something built and ready to go in like three months. And this is like January 2020, February 2020. I was like, I'm going to have something by Veterans Day this year. It's going to be like everyone's going to know about it. Obviously, that didn't happen because the realities [laughs] of building a tech startup set in really quickly. But we're fairly close. I'm aiming for no later than two or three months, but I hate to put the actual time on it just yet. CHAD: And I think as a founder, you need to give yourself...pressure is good. But you also need to give yourself permission to not ship until you're ready and proud of what you've done. Now the trick is most people wait too long. [laughs] So the trick is actually forcing yourself to launch something that you're probably not unhappy with but actually is sufficient. JT: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I don't want to wait until it's, quote, unquote, "perfect." But I do want to ensure that the individuals that do come to the front door in the very beginning they're going to get a great experience. And if they don't, then there's that feedback loop that helps us get better because that's what it's about. Whether you're a young tech startup or you're Facebook or whoever, there needs to be that feedback loop built-in in the right way. So that's what we're doing. We're trying to ensure that, okay, we've got the foundation of this thing built correctly. And then we've got these feedback loops at all the right points to make this thing even better going forward. And then separately, as every founder is going through, how do you continue to build this thing or fund this thing, rather, to keep it going forward? And that's through bootstrapping. That's through the revenue model that we've got going. And that's through some of these partnerships that we're trying to put wet ink on right now as well. So a lot of things going on. CHAD: So if someone's listening to this and they're in a position where they say, "I care a lot about this. I want to help. I'm a founder or a leader at a company. And I want to work with Promenade." How do they get in touch with you? Where are the best places for them to do that? JT: Yeah, they can reach out to me at jt@promenade.ai. That's the quickest and easiest way. We've got our Instagram page up and our LinkedIn page up. You can reach out on there. But the quickest way if you're like, I want to contribute, our organization we've been thinking about how do we work with the veteran community more closely? How do we recruit them? I've got veterans in my family that are going through some of the same challenges. I want to get them in touch with you. The quickest way is just email jt@promenade.ai. CHAD: Awesome. And good luck in this final stretch towards launch. And I wish you all the best. JT: I appreciate it. CHAD: And maybe you can come back on the show a few months post-launch and debrief. [laughs] JT: Yeah. I would love to. I would love to. I'm sure I'll have plenty of lessons learned. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah, exactly. Again, that was promenade.ai for the website. And you can subscribe to this show and find notes for this episode along with a complete transcript at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. Thank you, JT, for stopping by. If other folks want to follow along with you, where can they do that? JT: Instagram, we're at promenade.ai, and LinkedIn, you can find us the same way. CHAD: Awesome. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: JT Liddell.

Robin Gregg is the CEO of RoadSync, a digital financial platform that powers business transactions in the logistics industry. Robin combines her strong leadership skills with a keen understanding of scaling startups. Prior to RoadSync, Robin held leadership roles at FleetCor, alternative payment provider Revolution Money (sold to Amex in 2010), and Capital One. Robin currently serves as a mentor for the ATDC, Georgia Tech's technology incubator and has held numerous leadership roles, including Co-President, of the Harvard Business School Club of Atlanta. She is also an active member of the Entrepreneurs' Organization. Robin holds a BA from Washington and Lee and received her MBA from Harvard Business School. Special thanks to our sponsors OTR Capital If you looking for a factoring partner choose OTR Capital learn more at https://otrcapital.com/truck-n-hustle/   TransportCFO https://bit.ly/TruckNHustle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kelly Gay is the chair of OnBoard and immediate past chair of Venture Atlanta. She also serves on the boards of 1105 Media, the Atlanta CEO Council, ATDC, and Acivilate. Kelly has led companies ranging from billion dollar organizations to startups. As CEO, she has led both private and public companies, all of which resulted in […]

Kelly Gay With Arketi Group, is the chair of OnBoard and immediate past chair of Venture Atlanta. She also serves on the boards of 1105 Media, the Atlanta CEO Council, ATDC, and Acivilate. Kelly has led companies ranging from billion dollar organizations to startups. As CEO, she has led both private and public companies, all […] The post Kelly Gay With Arketi Group appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

Do you struggle to overcome adversity as you strive for success?You might believe your humble beginnings mean you'll never be able to achieve anything great…You might believe failure in business is too difficult to overcome or that it's an indication that you're just not cut out for entrepreneurship…If you find yourself struggling with those limiting beliefs, this episode is for you!In this episode, I interview Eric Toz and discuss what he has learned through his entrepreneurial journey, taking what some might consider failure and turning it into lessons that have helped to take him from struggling entrepreneur to multi-million-dollar CEO! In this episode, Eric and I cover:How his childhood influenced his determination for success What timeless principles and skills can be applied to your personal and professional interactions Why what seems like a loss can be an opportunity for future successHow to build stronger relationships with customers and employeesHow seemingly insignificant decisions can create massive change in outcomes If you got value from what you heard here, please be sure to subscribe and rate this podcast! Bonus points for you if you write a review! ;) — SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW — Subscribe to Dan's YouTube ChannelSubscribe to Dan's How To Think YouTube ChannelFollow Dan on FacebookFollow Dan on InstagramFollow Dan on Twitter— TRANSCRIPT — Dan Henry (00:00:09):So welcome everyone to the inaugural episode of the, how to think podcast, the show where we break down the inner workings of the human mind and learn how to think like successful people so that we can achieve anything in business or in life by changing the way we think, Eric, how you doing, man?Eric Toz (00:00:30):So good. I'm so happy to be here. Been waiting for a couple months now for this.Dan Henry (00:00:33):So it'd be honest if it were friends. So if it wasn't you, that was here for the first episode, I'd probably be, you know, pretty nervous right now, because last night I did this Instagram story and I was like, I'm gonna research, like all these world-class like podcasters and interviewers and try to try to be a good podcast or in the next two hours.Eric Toz (00:00:55):I think by the end of it will, you'll be doing good. Dan Henry (00:00:58):Yeah. I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out. But I'm glad I'm, I'm glad I have a good friend on to start out.Eric Toz (00:01:02):Take it easy, slow and steady.Dan Henry (00:01:04):I'm not much for intros, but you built $66 million business. You've done about a hundred million in sales, selling customizable jewelry online, and you started it by sleeping. You were sleeping and you were in Brooklyn, sleeping on a mattress. A whole bunch of crazy stuff went down and, and now you're here. And before we get into that, I just, I just want to say, like how, how would your parents describe what you do?Eric Toz (00:01:32):I think they would describe me as somebody who is always willing to burn all of the ships for me, like, you know, I had a pretty tough childhood. I think a lot of entrepreneurs did that provides an initial chip for them. They're off at whatever their circumstance or their parents, or just something bad happened to their health. And so they have this huge chip and for me, like there was never a plan B, like I was, I felt like I was going to be successful no matter what, if it wasn't like this thing that I'm currently doing, it was going to be something else. And so maybe not even about the money so much, but just such a strong desire to be successful in whateverDan Henry (00:02:16):It was. What gave you that chip? Because I know it gave me the chip that I had. I had a bunch of people who I would, I was delivering pizza and I would be like, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to build a business one day and they'd be like, shut up, like the delivery, you know? I mean, what, what was, what gave you that chip on your shoulder?Eric Toz (00:02:32):Well, a big part of it was my family has been very entrepreneurial. Like my grandfather, he actually, he had a factory in Massachusetts, literally called package machinery. This is like your old school factory, literally making like boxes and like packaging and stuff like that. And he, he sold that business. He was pretty successful. And then my dad growing up, we had a power sports business. So we were a family business. We sold jet-skis, we sold, we sold ATVs, like all these toys we had, like each of us three kids had our own everything. And then we had a few bad winters in a row where there was no snow up in New Hampshire where I'm from. And the business ended up going bankrupt. And so bankruptcy, you know, 30 years ago it was a lot different than now. Yeah, it was a true like seven years to repair your credit.Eric Toz (00:03:22):And so, you know, my dad, he went from being this entrepreneur to being like a Knight Security Watchman. Like I literally remember him coming home with like, you know, eggs and breakfast for us all after he was working all night at like a hotel. So I had no idea what was going on at the time. Had no idea what happened, how old were you? I was like five, like five, six, and all three of us. We were me and my brother, sister. We were like three, four or five, something like that. So yeah, that was really difficult. I was the poor kid at school. I was on free lunch. You know, I remember Christmas, like three Christmases in a row. I got like the same thing, which was this little, like a Hot Wheels set. And I'm like, oh, another Hot Wheels again, but we couldn't like afford anything.Eric Toz (00:04:07):So for me you know, going through puberty in high school at that point, I kind of wanted to latch onto something I could feel good about. And for me, it was sports at the time. So I threw myself into that completely. I would train for football, like during the summers, literally till like two, three in the morning, I'd be doing suicides and doing squats and stuff like that. And I had very good influences at the time. Like I had really, really great mentors. I had my football coach. I still can hear him yelling in my ear to this day saying, you know, stop feeling, sorry for yourself, stuff like that. So those were really good motivators at the beginning. And I had been influenced a number of times by some very important people not just in sports, but like later in business too.Dan Henry (00:04:55):So, so let me ask you this when you, cause I've seen, you've taken me to your warehouse in it's within the St. Petersburg city limits. And you, you took me there and it was super impressive. I mean, it's this gigantic it's like, you wouldn't even know it was there. You would not know it was there. You would not know that this building randomly in this industrial part of town is on a hundred million dollars in fricking e-commerce you know, and so you take me there and you've got these machines, let's see if we can get it, maybe Brandon can get a picture of your, of your thing up. And I can hear myself like a delay in, in my headphones a little bit, Brandon, I don't know if you've got the live stream going or not, but there's a picture of, of your, and how many people do you have working there?Eric Toz (00:05:53):Currently, we have 70 full-time employees. Yeah. Seven zero, I think during, during peak Q4, we'll have about 200 in the US and then we have an Amsterdam factoryDan Henry (00:06:05):Setting up now. So, so this right here is your, this is your warehouse. Okay. And I mean, that's, that's pretty big and it's actually bigger than that. That's just one section of it. And then you have another one where you do media, but I remember being in there, it was just like last week and yeah, zoom in a little bit, Brandon, like, look at that, look at all those people. So I want to understand the business model, because as far as I know it, you, you, you know, you have this company called shine on. Yup. And you, and you got to correct me if I'm wrong. Cause we've, we've been pretty stoned sometimes when we were talking about this, actually funny before I get into this funny story we met at this, this mastermind it was founders mastermind in downtown St. Pete. And we you had this you, you had this little segue thing that you were riding around on all, all through St.Dan Henry (00:07:00):Pete, that little, the one wheel, the one wheel. Yeah. And I remember I think you wrote it over to my penthouse here in downtown, and we got stone and just talk business for like three, four hours. It was amazing my condo. And it was a great conversation. And you told me and I definitely want to talk about this. Cause you, you told me about, you know, a lot of people say, oh, read this book and read that book. And you told me about the book, how to win friends and influence people, which I think a lot of people I think a lot of people say, Hey, read this book and people go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool. I'll read that book, but they don't actually read it. And they don't actually put it into practice. And I re I noticed some things when we were, we were talking like, you would be like, oh, I'm sorry for interrupting. And you, you just said certain things. And I'm like, I really like this guy, like what the, what the, what is going on? You know? And I said to you, I was like, why are you so fricking likable? And you told me, you cheater that you read the book, how to win friends and influence people. And you like went hardcore on it. And you just, you, how much does that help you network and get through business and, and, and just in progress in your career.Eric Toz (00:08:12):Yeah. So I think, I think there are certain things you can learn that are timeless, right? There are certain principles that are timeless. And I think to be a good business person in the 1930s, when that book, how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie was written you know, you couldn't hide behind email, then you couldn't hide behind social media. Like if you, if you wanted to conduct business, you had to like, look people in the eye, you had to shake their hand. You had to like, keep your word. You know, these are like old-school fundamentals. And so I think it actually be really helpful if entrepreneurs more entrepreneurs read that book today because it's really head-slappingly simple. Lee's simple things that he says where you're like, oh my God, I shouldn't have, I should have been doing this my whole, my whole life, like simple stuff. Like the sweetest, the sweetest word to somebody as their first name. So try to use their first name as much as possible because they immediately perk up. Right. You know,Dan Henry (00:09:06):Eric. Yeah. It makes me feel good. It does. And you know, when I read that, but I literally, because when you told me that it, it stuck with me and I've, I've read a little bit of the book, but I actually went out, I bought the book and I read it and I read it all the way through. And then I listened to the whole audiobook all the way through it. And then I downloaded the cheat sheet and I might've had one. I'm not going to lie. It's hard. It is super hard. Like some of this stuff is just hard to remember and hard to implement, and it's sort of like, you have to take. And when you first read it, you really feel like a Dick. At least I did, I read this and I'm like, well, I'm missing a lot of this. Like my first reaction was I must be a total Dick because I'm just reading all these things that we forget on a daily basis, you know, like not interrupting people, using their first names, smiling, you know, just, just, just something as simple as smilingEric Toz (00:09:58):With a pleasant tone. Dan Henry (00:10:01):That's the whole chapter on that, the whole chapter on that. And you dive deep into it. And I think in business and, and not even business, but in life, you, I mean, I'll give you an example. I was downtown. And I ran into somebody who was had actually followed me for some time and bought some of my products and stuff. And he had a friend who's this like high, high level, you know, manages billions of dollars in real estate. And I was just, you know, very nice to them. And I, I mean, anybody could have been any, any one of a thousand ways with their personality. And I was just trying to be very nice. And I noticed that his, his wife was a super, super sweet woman. And I remembered the book where it said, you know, think about what appeals to them, you know, think about w what brings value to them and how to appeal to them.Dan Henry (00:10:50):And I noticed that she wanted to talk about like cooking and making food for people. And that was like really important to her. And so I had a conversation with her about that, and I learned a lot about a lot of food that I didn't know. And then we ended up getting invited to their penthouse, which is actually four penthouses that they bought at the top of I forget which building, but it's, I think it's park shore. And they combined all four penthouses into one mega penthouse. Jesus. Yeah. It was you. And I learned so much about real estate and all that, and that was just, IEric Toz (00:11:23):Think it was from the, you conducted because of the cookingDan Henry (00:11:26):Conversations, because she invited, she invited us over for breakfast. She wanted to cook for us. So, yeah. So like, I mean, we didn't get an invite before that. And then, I mean, or maybe he, he would have invited us anyway, but it doesn't matter. The point is, is that, you know, sometimes I think we, we get wrapped up in all the problems in life. And so we're so focused on those problems and thinking about those problems, that when we go and all these differences in life, our problems are on our mind. And it's not that we're not, not nice people, but we don't take the time to articulate how nice and how genuine we are, because we're just so drowning in our own world of negativity and all the stuff we have to do. And I think that that book just gives it a great reminder to how to bring that to the surface.Eric Toz (00:12:11):Yeah, totally. And there's a whole chapter, literally just on listening. And at the end, he tells a story about how he had like an hour-long conversation with a woman on a couch. And he may be said like five words. And he was just asking questions, maybe like five or six questions. And she was talking the whole time, like, blah, blah, blah. I mean, he was into it. But at, at the end she was like, oh, you're such a good conversationalist. And he was like, I haven't said anything, but he just allowed her to sort of that. And just being there, like just holding space, I think for people can be really beneficial because everybody, especially in our business, our line of business, they just want to talk about what they're doing, like all the time and what they're currently up to.Dan Henry (00:12:58):Right. I, I do notice how did, and how do you think those tactics and that paradigm shift of how to interact with other humans? How do you think that differs between dealing with employees and dealing with just like other entrepreneurs, other, other people in your life that, that you don't pay?Eric Toz (00:13:17):I think the principles are, are the same, right? Like a mentor of mine, he's the co-founder of Zappos. His name is Fred Mossler and he, he treats his vendors the exact same way that he treats his employees and he treats people in the Las Vegas community the same way he treats vendors and, and they'll actually have vendor parties. They'll fly in their vendors once a year and have like a huge mega blowout party and something awesome that he told me was like friends, this concept of friends first. Like literally if you, if you just try to become friends first, all right. You know what they're doing a little bit, maybe not a hundred percent, but just focus on being friends first and really solidifying that. And then the business will come naturally. If, you know, if what they're doing is, is good. But you should be able to kind of know that ahead of time. So you don't have to worry so much about the business. Just kind of relax and see how you connect on different things.Dan Henry (00:14:15):And a lot of people, they try to create opportunities and that that's sort of, I mean, it's cool, but when you're networking and you're trying to make connections, a lot of times you just have to let opportunities come to you. And I think that if you try to create opportunities, you will go into meeting people in a disingenuous way. Cause you always have an agenda going in. I mean, if you meet somebody that is a player, right. Something is at, at some point is going to come of that. Something, at some point you don't know what it is right now, but at someEric Toz (00:14:49):Point and be like an A-player. Yeah. I mean,Dan Henry (00:14:52):I mean, it could be, it could be somebody that becomes an, a player. It could be somebody that's already an a player. It could be somebody that has done something that you respect. It could be a huge person in the industry. It doesn't matter. But the point is is if you try to go into that relationship thinking, what am I going to get out of this from the beginning, it's just going to, it's not going to be genuine. And if you go in and you just become friends and let the opportunity come to you, I think it's a lot better. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:15:16):Yeah. I have a firsthand example of this recently. I think we did a little bit of that also, my friend will, who, you know, who lives downtown here? He's just a really interesting guy. I just like him a lot. He does some cool things in skincare and in like NFTs. Right. And so I knew, I knew when I first started getting to know him, like there immediately there wasn't going to be any way where we do business together. And I was okay with that. Cause I didn't care. I just loved what he was doing on his own stuff. And I just wanted to be friends with them, but you know, over the past week or so, I've had an idea where I was like, holy will, would actually be like the perfect partner on this. And so you can't like expect those things to happen. It's just sort of, you know the way is of the universe sometimes if you have if you established friends first. Yeah,Dan Henry (00:16:05):Absolutely. I, I totally, totally, totally agree. So let me, let me just go back to this mattress that you were sleeping on. And you don't have to go deep on mattress pizza boy. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:16:17):My office is your pizza.Dan Henry (00:16:18):I see, I, you know, I actually I'm a mattress sleeper, every time I move into a new place, doesn't matter what my financial situation is. I always end up sleeping on a mattress for two months. Cause I can't find, I can't pick out what bed I want, you know, but I do like sleeping on a mattress, surrounded by nice walls versus the walls I used to have around, which were crumbling. But you know, let me ask you this. You had some stuff happen, you know, you, you, you took on some venture capital. You don't have, I mean, you can get into as much in this as you want, but you had some, some bad stuff happen and you basically had to sort of start over. Would that beEric Toz (00:17:00):With on yeah. So you know, starting, excuse me one second. Dan Henry (00:17:11):So polite. Is that in the book too?Eric Toz (00:17:15):I'm doing it for the listeners.Dan Henry (00:17:16):That's awesome, man. So, so, so what, what happened? They're like, well, whatever you want do.Eric Toz (00:17:22):Yeah. So I like to say I'm a two-time venture capital refugee. So the, for the first time was when I was at CustomMade.Com. We ended up raising about $25 million. Google was our investor, like all the top Silicon Valley investors. And we were basically you know, we were basically a high-end Etsy average order value, like a thousand bucks. But that it was a great idea. The business, it didn't work. At scale, we were burning a million dollars a month. And so it was just a reallyDan Henry (00:17:56):Burning a million dollars a month, whatever. I mean,Eric Toz (00:17:58):We were losing a million dollars a month just because of our overhead. And when you raise that much money, you're actually encouraged by all of your investors. Like, dude, we gotta, we gotta spend this as fast as possible because they either want it to pop in two to four years or they want you to, they don't want you to be the walking dead indefinitely. They would rather have you die or, or crush it quickly time value of money. But yeah, so I saw, you know, some of the advantages and pitfalls of raising that much money. You know, you lose a lot of control of your company, you have bored. And so when I started Shine On, you know, I didn't have any money either. So when I couldn't even pay myself, really, I actually started it on unemployment, which is honestly, that's the best trick.Eric Toz (00:18:45):If you want to start a company, try to get fired, ask your company, Hey, can you please fire me instead of leaving? Cause then you can get unemployment and you can get it for like nine months. So I was actually like, I went to Germany, I was like doing my unemployment forms from Germany. And the whole time I was taking literally all the money from the unemployment and putting it into shine on at the very beginning. Wow. Then that money ran out. And then I was, I was selling motorcycle rings to motorcycle clubs because I had this jewelry production knowledge. And I was like, how can I sell to a lot of people very quickly? So I made rings for like six or seven motorcycle clubs and that's how I paid my rent after the unemployment money ran out.Dan Henry (00:19:24):Did you have a machine for that or did you see all the machines you have right now, but what did you, what did you have that?Eric Toz (00:19:30):So at that time, so I had a friend who had a massive factory in Thailand in Bangkok. And so the first version of shine on was, you know, we would, us a, a marketer would give us their idea for a piece of jewelry, like a ring or a necklace. We would actually do a 3d render. It looked like an, a photo. It looked realistic. Can you give me an example? Yeah, if you actually just Google scooter ring, like on on Google something I designed it's like, it looks like a Vesper. Okay. So like Vespas scooteringDan Henry (00:20:01):Now. I feel like an idiot, cause I don't know what a VestaEric Toz (00:20:03):Is. Just like a stallion scooter.Dan Henry (00:20:06):Oh, okay. Okay. Actually, do you want, [inaudible] we'll talk about funny scooter story in a few minutes. You reminded me, do you remember what happened to me when I met Maura?Eric Toz (00:20:17):No.Dan Henry (00:20:17):You all, you don't remember that. I'll just tell it real quick. Cause Brandon's going to bring up, Brandon's gonna bring up a picture of this example, but you introduced me to Mara Glazer, who I ended up hiring to do some copywriting for how to think. Oh, okay. Yeah. And I remember I got that segue to go downtown and so I, I Google like how to change, make it go faster. Cause it was only going 15 miles an hour. And I got it to to a different mode where it went 25 miles an hour and right. So, but here's just a crazy thing about how, how, how thoughts can create reality is I'm driving down the road or scooting or whatever. And I think to myself, how bad would this suck if I totally wiped out right now? And five seconds later, I went to scratch my head, which I don't know why I did that. And I went over the top of it, wiped out. My knee was bloody. My hand was all messed up. I was goingEric Toz (00:21:10):25Dan Henry (00:21:11):Fast. Yeah. And I don't even know how I, and so I, I literally like the scooters all bent and I end up scooting down to beach drive and meeting Maura for the first time and right after, and I'm full of blood. And my, my stuff's ripped, like my jeans are ripped up and I sit down and I'm like, instead of saying, hi, how you doing? I'm Dan Henry. I had to explain to her why it looked like I just got to fight.Eric Toz (00:21:34):And she probably liked it like, well, this guy's edgy.Dan Henry (00:21:39):He still showed up, you know? But that just reminded me about how, like when you think of something you can like create the situation to happen. But Brandon, do you have that? Do you have that? There it is. Okay. So, so click on this.Eric Toz (00:21:53):This was the first, the first thing I ever designed for Shine On. So I was the first seller. I was the first, I was the first CS agent website, designer, jewelry designer, marketer. I was packing the jewelry myself like the whole first year. But anyway, what happened was yeah, this is how I kind of got started with it. I would, I would work with a marketer. I would make something custom and then I, they would actually put that on their store that just a render. So there's no inventory. And then we would take all the orders each week and I would put it in an Excel sheet and then I would send it to my friend in Thailand who ran a factory there. He makes all of David Yurmans jewelry. If you've heard of that brand high-quality men's men's jewelry. And so, yeah, that was great.Dan Henry (00:22:39):I'm going to stay silent. So I don't have to admit that I don't know what that is, butEric Toz (00:22:42):There's not a lot of guys do. But yeah, that was the first version of shine on. So I went from this like a motorcycle rings to actually designing some stuff myself. And then what happened was you know, Teespring came out, Teespring is like print on demand t-shirts and it was one of the first things Facebook marketers sold. There, I know a ton of guys who were millionaires a couple of guys, even in this area who made millions selling t-shirts there. And I had this jewelry knowledge. And so I was like, man, I, I love working with these marketers. We could really scale, I could scale this up much more quickly if I started working with Facebook marketers. And so luckily, you know, I had the prior experience from custom made which was, you know, it was still a success. Like it didn't work out, but we still raised a lot of money. We made a lot of noise and there was some trust there just from me being around that environment. And so I raised about a million bucks in venture capital and then immediately after actually hired Teespring's head of sales and Teespring's head of marketing. And that's how the initial Shine On got started. Wow. And they, then they brought all the sellers overDan Henry (00:23:47):Now, did you, I know that you raise capital and then something went wrong, and then did you have to raise capital again?Eric Toz (00:23:55):What happened? Was it wasn't that anything went wrong per se? It's just that we're kept pretty capital intensive business. A million bucks is not that much money if you want to build something large-scale. But what happened was we were it took four to five weeks for these items to be made in Thailand and then sent back to us where we would repackage it and then ship it to the customer. So these items sold super well. And we did over 5,000 various 3d designs and we did about five, 6 million in sales that first year. But what happened was we were getting a lot of chargebacks because of the weight. People didn't want to wait that long. They didn't trust it, even though the quality was super good. But no matter how many did it take, it took like four to five weeks after your purchase. So buyers are, you know, I think their limits around two, three weeks for reordering, they get pissy, they get antsy. So we started getting a lot of chargebacks and because we, we pay the sellers out like next day on their commissions or when it chips we would get these chargebacks after the fact.Dan Henry (00:25:03):So, so Jay, just to get the business model, right, you partner with people who want to sell their own personalized jewelry and you make the jewelry, and you ship. So it's like drop shipping and I believe you also give them the education on how to promote their products and get it out, get it out into the,Eric Toz (00:25:22):Yeah. So fast forward to today. I mean anyway, we, we, there was, we were running out of cash and at one point I said, never again, am I going to not make something myself? Okay. So I was like, I want the, I want to own the entire supply chain. Right, right.Dan Henry (00:25:38):And just so I'm clear, I just want to be sure I'm clear. That was because they were, it took too long. Right.Eric Toz (00:25:42):Just cause it took too long. That was okay. Got it. You literally the only reward to interrupt. And then there's, and then there's another thing about, you know, having more control of your margins, right. Being able to provide better customer service for everybody. But yeah, fast forward to today, I mean, we started in jewelry but we're, you know, we're an on-demand factory that we, we prototype, we develop and we sell ourselves viral gift products. So jewelry, wallets, watches, all personalized. And then what we do is we launched them through what we call an IPO process, initial product offering. So we'll say, Hey sellers, we got this new like wallet. That's personalized. You know, we, we sold like 500 grand in our initial tasks. And then we literally give away the farm. Like, here's exactly how we're doing it. And boom, now it's live in your app and it's free. Just go click, click, click, and you can add it to your store. And now you can sell this product. So we're almost becoming a little product agnostic. We're adding like metal wall art. Like that could go up here. I'll I'll have something for you. Oh,Dan Henry (00:26:44):Oh, okay. Yeah. I can, I could use some more, some more brains around this Personalized man. Yeah, yeah. You might have to, you might have to get me selling some products because I'm going to be honest with you. I'm gonna be honest with you. E-Commerce physical products is super difficult. And I told you this when I was at your, your warehouse, I doEric Toz (00:27:07):Hear like, oh no, I don't know if IDan Henry (00:27:09):Can, I couldn't do it. I could not do it. I mean, I'm looking at all these machines just to break down the thought process here. Right? I'm standing in this warehouse. I know that you guys have hundreds, you know, you've got, you've sold almost a hundred total, almost a hundred million dollars worth of stuff. You have machines that are like, w w what's your most expensive machine?Eric Toz (00:27:30):Ooh. we have we have auto pack machines that are about a quarter-million-dollar.Dan Henry (00:27:36):So $250,000 machines. And in my mind, here's what I'm thinking. What happens when something breaks, you got to call somebody, they got to come out, they got to get a part, and then you got orders. And like all this stuff going on, it's just, I gotta ask you this. How do you deal with the stress of going to bed every night and knowing that at any point, something like that could happen that could massively derail your business. Like, how do you deal with that? And how do you cope with that?Eric Toz (00:28:06):E-Commerce is complex because, you know, not only are you doing the marketing, sometimes you're also doing the training, but you're also if you're doing it right. I mean, you're also doing your own supply chain. You're buying inventory, you're storing it, you're shipping it out. So sometimes what we do because we're moving fast and we actually forget how many potential points of failure there could be, but we'll actually just write out a list. I'm like, you know, what, if, if, if any of these things fail, are we, are we screwed? Like, is this going to ruin the whole thing? And so a lot of times we're like, wow, yeah. If we ran out of X, Y, Z, that would shut down like everything. And so I'm constantly making lists constantly. If there's a new thing, that's a super imperative, making sure there's ownership of it.Dan Henry (00:28:54):But what do you mean by making sureEric Toz (00:28:56):There's ownership that somebody owns that it's like, Hey, if you have one job to do, it's making sure that we never run out of these like 50 different things. You know, we have an inventory manager too. Yeah. a lot of it is automated now. So like all our inventory management's automated their software to do it too. But you had to build, we built, we built our own. Yeah. So we'll kind of get a heads up of something running out, but look, honestly, stuff just happens to like, it's guaranteed, that stuff will happen. Major stuff. Whether it's a flood here or like a hurricane, or like, there's, there's a crazy cargo ship backup right now, like are all around the world. There are like crazy logistics problems. And so the number one thing for your customers is to just be a good communicator with them.Eric Toz (00:29:49):And that's honestly, it's a lot harder said than done. So that's where some of these Dale Carnegie principles come into play, just like thinking about them and their feelings being proactive, saying like, Hey, there's an issue. There's an issue here. You, you probably won't receive this in this time, but then give them some options. Like, I can do this for you. I can do this for you, or I can do this for you and just make them feel like they're the decision-maker next. And usually when you allow them to make decisions on what they want to do with their order, then a lot of the time they're, they're more cooperative and they actually will want to work with you. And sometimes you build stronger bonds with people and with customers when you screw up and then you, you like something detrimental happens. And then yeah, the redemption and you like go through this like thing with them. And they actually like, you have a tighter bond because they're like, then they're like the next time Eric screws up. Like, I know he'll, he'll be in my corner and he'll like, figure it out. So the same thing with employees too.Dan Henry (00:30:51):Do you feel that, cause I don't know if you've ever read the psychology behind likability and being imperfect, like, you know, what a Mary Sue is. So in, in film, Mary Sue is a character that is basically perfect and has no flaws. And so like imagine Superman, but there was no kryptonite. Like he wouldn't be that interesting. You know? And like when, when the star wars movies came out, a lot of people were saying that Ray was like a Mary Sue and that's why people were interested in her. And then so like later in the movies, they reallyEric Toz (00:31:24):Didn't know she had no flaws, she hadDan Henry (00:31:26):No flaws. And so you'll notice it in the second and third movie, they really dived into her like flaws around you know, her parents and things like that. And, and some other things. But, but the concept is that if you have a character in a movie that is perfect and has no flaws, then there's nothing to be interested in. There's nothing to be likable. There's nothing to, to bond with that because you can't relate to somebody. That's perfect. And I think a lot of times people strive to be perfect and they let perfection get in the way of the thing that makes them human. It makes them relate to other humans. And that in, in of itself is having flown.Eric Toz (00:32:03):Yeah, I think you know, we have our seller group on Facebook and so we're always analyzing what's what gets the most engagement and it's, it's usually two things it's posting about success. And then it's posting about like the hard times that you went through or like stories, hard stories, like redemption stories. Like people are so into that because we can all relate. Yeah. We can all relate to that.Dan Henry (00:32:28):Do you feel entrepreneurs have an ex an unrealistic expectation that things won't, that nothing will go wrong, and that if something does go wrong, that means they did something like there they failed or they're a bad person or they were wrong this whole time in their dreams. You know, like I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs really have that expectation going in that everything is going to go right. And they don't know how to mentally deal with it when things go wrong.Eric Toz (00:32:54):Yeah. I think that entrepreneurs understand that things are going to go wrong, but every entrepreneur is different in, in there how much they're willing to deal with. Like a lot of people will throw in the towel on something where somebody else won't. And I have two really good examples from my, from my life about not throwing in the towel. And this is not, I'm not saying I'm right by or right or wrong by throwing in the towel or not throwing in the towel. Right. But I'll give you an example of custom made.com where, you know, we, we raised that, all that money. And then I ended up leaving the CEO ended up leaving, but the sort of the third guy in our gang mentor of mine, Seth Rosen, he said, no, I'm going to stick with it. And so he made a deal with the bank wrote off all of the debt and he just went into this incubation period.Eric Toz (00:33:49):And now custommade.com is like 20 million, $30 million a year business. And he brought it back to life solely because he had a high tolerance for going through that. And he was so obsessed with it that he wanted to continue working on it. And same thing with me, I got to a point where after I burned all this, this seed capital that we raised and at one point I actually had to let go of almost all the company, like 90% of the company had to let go of like 15, 20 people in one day, once 15, 20 people in one day in one day. Yeah. We called it the red wedding. Like fromDan Henry (00:34:28):Game of Thrones, you have to be a game of Thrones nerdEric Toz (00:34:31):Joke, but not in a mean, not in a mean way, but it was just like, no, like, and everybody was like, Eric, give the investors like the rest of the money back. And there was maybe like, like a hundred grand left in the bank account. And I was just like, no, I'm not going to because like, I still have this vision for it. I need more time. And so I literally went from the super high and there's actually, if you Google the entrepreneur's journey, there's a graph of this where there's like this initial excitement. And then there's this period called the trough of sorrow. And then if you keep continuing going through the trough of sorrow, you get to experimentation and pivoting and new ideas. And then eventually you get product-market fit. And then when you get product-market fit, then you can scale.Eric Toz (00:35:21):And so how, how much are you willing to tolerate going through that trough? Because I'm not going to lie. I was, at that point, I cut my salary to like 40 grand a year. And I wouldn't say I was a loser. It's just that I kind of went into like hibernation mode. We're actually had to, my mind was going crazy. And if I didn't turn to meditation to help me calm down and just get refocused, like, all right, how am I going to pull this off? I would tell myself every day, this is going to be a book in a book someday. So yeah, we were down to like 20 grand bank account,Dan Henry (00:35:54):A book someday, dude, that's a roast on that for a second. This is going to be in a book someday. Yeah. That's that is that's deep, man. I mean, if you think about it, like, that's some internal motivation.Eric Toz (00:36:11):Yeah. I mean, I would tell people I'm like, you don't understand like there's no, I'm not going back. There's no plan B like I'm, I'm in this thing, you can't kill me basically. And I don't care if I make $0 for like four years like I'm going to make this work. And so there's, and then I kind of learned that there's always something that you can do. I had another, I hired another mentor who helped me out with some financing and I actually bought the company back from the investors. Cause I believed in it so much. So I was literally taking out like per personally guaranteed loans to buy back the rest of the company. So not only was I going from $0, then I even put myself in debt, like to get the company back because I was like, no, you don't get it.Eric Toz (00:36:56):Like I still see this path forward. I just need time. And so I actually have never raised money again since then. So we went from having 20 grand in the bank account to, we did, we did a hail Mary, we bought one machine and I moved out from Brooklyn to New Jersey and we started tinkering in a 1000 square foot garage with machinery and we built, then we built our first Shopify app in 2017. And we were the first people to do print on demand jewelry. And so then just incrementally building, building, building, building, building, come up with some new products, keep promoting keep doing what you say. You're going to do, build trust with the seller, with your customers. And yeah, now we're doing like 66 million a year in product sales, all bootstrapped. Yeah.Dan Henry (00:37:43):So if you were to like, imagine that on a graph, right. Where how much money did you raise at the, at the height of that?Eric Toz (00:37:50):At the beginning, we raised 1 million and then we ran out of that and we got down to 20 grand and thenDan Henry (00:37:55):Here at 1 million. Right. And imagine the, imagine it's a plane, right. And the plane starts nose-diving and it's heading towards the ground. And it literally goes so close to the ground before it pulls up that hits like 2200 feet off the ground. And it, you know, if you're on the ground, it literally blows your hat off as it scoops up. And then sky rack skyrockets up to, you know, from its original elevation of, of, you know, a million up to 66 million. That's insane. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:38:29):So when I went through the whole range of emotions, like you could possibly imagine like an idea raising money. Oh, other people believe in me, like this feels good. Like everyone thinks I'm smart. I have a great idea. And then reality sets in and just being like a total loser, firing everybody going. I had to learn accounting because I had to fire my accountant. I had to get rid of all the insurances. I'm like, what am I in? What am I protecting here? Something that's like worth nothing. So I was like, it, no insurance, no nothing. And so, but that was like the best lesson I ever learned because I had to learn, I had to learn a little bit about everything in the company, all the operations efficiencies. And so that going through that experience actually is really helpful today when I'm seeing all the pieces from a high level, because I've done all those jobs myself to a certain extent, I know enough about everything.Eric Toz (00:39:23):So I'm very grateful for that experience. But I'm also grateful for capitalism. I'll be honest because it allows you to go through that whole adventure and like that whole journey. And it is you against yourself. You're not really like competing against other people, even though you think you are, it's just like, you have to like, it's you in the mirror. So how can you, how disciplined can you be? Right? Like how disciplined can you be? How can you calm your mind? Can you get over your old? Because a lot of people, they, they bring their old life's experiences into their current business and they'll actually project some times. So if they are very needy, if they're a very needy person, cause you know, someone left them or whatever in the past, then they're just going to be attention-seeking in their business. So these can be, these are bad habits that could kind of take you down. So you really have to quiet your mind and try to get over your old and not project. A lot of people to, you might hire people from outside the company coming in and they're in a position of power and you don't see their bad habits in an interview and you would never know. But then after six months of working there, you're like this person's horrible. Like just like they're projecting because they're in this position of power now,Dan Henry (00:40:41):How did you, did you identify anything about yourself, old baggage that you were starting to bring in to your company and then you, you like identified it, you acknowledge it and you got rid of it. Did you ever go through anything like that?Eric Toz (00:40:59):Hmm.Dan Henry (00:41:04):You couldn't have always been the super nice guy that you are, that you are now. Eric. I refuse to believe that cause it'll make me feel even worse though. I'm just kidding.Eric Toz (00:41:14):Well, I'll be honest. Like when I had to let the whole company go I had somebody that really pushed me into doing that because I was like so nervous to do that. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. But going through that experience made me a very strong person. Right. I think me probably wouldn't have done it and I would've taken, taken it down, and gone down with the ship with everybody, but I got the sort of push from a friend, and he kind of helped me plan letting go of the whole company. And so yes, like the entrepreneurial journey, it helps you grow as a person too in many, in many, many ways. So I'm very grateful.Dan Henry (00:41:56):Do you think the unwillingness to let somebody go or let people go because it's a good business decision. That was a potential thing that was kind of brought in. That was a detriment. And you had to learn how to get over that was that, would that be one of the things that I guess as you called it earlier I think you call it baggage. Would that be something that you think was baggage that you brought in, that you had to, you had to get over? That was like a major thing?Eric Toz (00:42:22):Oh yeah, for sure. Like I think, you know, Inex inexperienced in younger entrepreneurs, they have trouble doing that. Like letting people go, but then I started seeing things through a different lens with running a business. Now I actually see it as we're working, we're here together. We're working on this project for like a finite amount of time. So instead of thinking about like, there's an owner and there's an employee and they're basically like slaves to the company, like they own you. I don't, I don't think that way. I think, and I'm open with my employees, like, Hey, we're, this is a project we're working on for two to three years. So let's go get committed to this thing and let's go crush it and let's see what happens. Right. And then, you know, provide the right incentive for them to, for us to crush it together. So having that sort of, we're working on a project mindset, it's helpful in letting people go because everything is finite and I'm not even going to be there in five, 10 years either. And I tell people that this is a project, so we're not going to be doing this forever. It's not like we're married. So, you know,Dan Henry (00:43:34):Okay. Like Michael Jordan was not always going to play in the Chicago bulls, but while he was there. Yeah. And while his teammates were there, they did the best, they could to win as many championships as they could. But ultimately that entity, that, that concept, that project will live on. Right. Is that how you view it? Yeah.Eric Toz (00:43:54):Actually so the term I use is let's go out and like get this Superbowl ring if we can, if we can go. And that might be we go public or we get acquired or something that experience that all the employees had. They can look at the Subaru warring and be like, yeah, I was part of that. I did that. And then what they can do is parlay that experience and go off and do their own thing and their com and their next company. And then maybe I'll even invest in it or there'll be able to get investment because people are like, wow, they worked at shine on. So that's what I'm trying to do with this whole Shannon thing is employees. If they can get a Superbowl ring sellers, there's a lot of sellers started with selling our product and e-commerce, and now I know two dozen guys that I'm friends with who started selling our product, and now they're doing $10 million a year on their store selling something else. But, you know, we all got, we all got wins like early out of it and that's, what's important is getting wins together.Dan Henry (00:44:49):So if I was going to read between the lines here, I would say that one of the biggest things to keep in mind with everything that you said is before all this, you have to really get clear on what, why you're doing it, where, where you want to end, because, you know, if you were, I'm just giving an example, right? Like Tony Robbins, Tony Robinson's, Tony Robbins, you know what I mean? That's his brand is his name. So, you know, the whole, like maybe the concept of I'll be here, you know, for a temporary amount of time. And then eventually I'll be gone. Maybe that still applies to his company. I'm sure he has an exit or I'm sure he has a death strategy, you know, cause nobody lives for other, I'm sure he's not just going to die in his company. That's it. I'm sure he's going to live. He's going to somehow has a plan of action in there. But you know, I think if you were to say, well, my goal is to exit or my goal is to build something great. Or my goal is to change the world. Or my goal is to, to, to do this. I mean, would you say that you have to get super, super clear on what that is before you can start, as you said, going after the Superbowl rings because you got to know what game you're playing.Eric Toz (00:46:01):Yeah. 100%, a hundred percent like people ask me, how is my vision change? I'm like, no, my vision has literally been the same thing for five years ago. Like where we're at now is where I thought we could eventually be. And so I need to keep going, but wouldDan Henry (00:46:17):You articulate that vision?Eric Toz (00:46:20):So five years ago I said I wanted to be the Teespring of jewelry. So I was just looking at that model and I want to build something just as big as them. And they're at the time they were doing a hundred million a year in sales. And so you're almost there. Yeah. Now we're getting, we're getting close to there. I actually, in two weeks we'll hit a hundred million in sales all time. So yeah, like if you don't have that, if you don't have that vision and you're not committed to it, if you go through hard, like, like I went through, if I didn't have that that level of commitment, then I would have totally thrown in the towel. It might be different though, if you're, if you're making good cash, if you're cash flowing and then suddenly it starts hitting bumps. I could see getting out then because you've made all this cash already. But for me it was kind of like instill like most of my personal like all my assets, like most of my wealth is actually in the business. So I'm thinking like longterm and it's, it's definitely risky. It's, it's a huge risk. And that's my personalityDan Henry (00:47:28):Condo that that's being built right now. Saltaire in downtown. It's a littleEric Toz (00:47:34):Sexy start my podcast there.Dan Henry (00:47:38):You got to invite me over, man. That place looks, looks like it's going to be sick. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:47:42):I think we're going to do some events there, some mastermindsDan Henry (00:47:45):And it's going to be awesome. Let me ask you a question. And I know that you're not your company is a little bit different than say mine where I'm a little bit more like the face of it kind of thing. And you're you're, I mean, you are, but like e-comm, it's about the products and all that and, and you know, so I'm sure a lot of people, as somebody who built this, they have a way they view you probably a lot of different ways. They view you. What would you say is something that people misunderstand about you?Eric Toz (00:48:19):Hmm. That's a good question. Misunderstand. Well,Eric Toz (00:48:34):You know, even when I throw these figures out, like a hundred million, 66 million I try to not make it about me. I try to say, we sold this together. Right? Like we did this together. And so I, people might see me as, I dunno being selfish because maybe on my Instagram, I promote like all this personal stuff. But at the end of the day, like I want, I want everybody to win. Like I truly do. And one thing is if you make other people money, they'll always invest in you and your next thing, they hit,Dan Henry (00:49:14):They stay with you on the ride. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, look at, look how a lot of these funds have been built. Like you got guys that they run a certain type of business. They make people money and then they start like a real estate fund or a, or this, and then they're investing in that so that, you know, that's totally makes sense. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:49:31):Yeah. If you were, if I was your client and you know, I made a lot of money from your trainings right. Or teachings, and then you were like, you said to me, Hey, I'm going to go start this other thing. Do you want to invest in it? I'm like, hell yeah, you made me so much money, dude. Like literally here's like, you know, here's a million bucks or whatever investment, like no brainer. I, I trust you. You made me money here. Let's do it again.Dan Henry (00:49:56):No, I think people underestimate the value of creating a great product. I think there's a lot of people out there that do it for a cash grab and they do it for clout and they do it for a lot of the wrong reasons. And they don't really care or not. It's not that they care, but they don't put the effort into making a great product because at the end of the day, a great product will, you know, it will transcend a lot of mistakes, you know? And that's the thing that you're going to make mistakes you're going. And you know, when it comes to a lot of people in life, not just entrepreneurs, but a lot of people in life, they lack confidence. And I always say that you cannot build confidence. Does anybody tells you, you can build confidence full of. You build competence.Dan Henry (00:50:40):And as a by-product of that competence, you are granted confidence. Let me ask you this. I like that. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I, you know, I want to resist the urge to ask you a classic question. Like what, if you could go back to your 18 year old self and tell them something, what would you tell them? But what I'd like to ask is, you know, how did you in the ups and downs, it's easy to feel confident, have faith and stay the course when things are up. But when things are down, that's where people break and they fall off. What did you do specifically in your brain, in your mind that helped you get through those dips and maintain the course and maintain the faith and keep the confidence. Even when things look bleak, especially when that plane was right, the bottom, you know, 20 grand left in the bank or whatever other challenges you've had. How did you maintain, what did you tell yourself every day to maintain that level of dedication? Mm,Eric Toz (00:51:53):Well, I think, I think that you have to take the pressure off yourself. And so I'm in the process of writing this book. It's going to be called the entrepreneur survival guide, 20 things you can do when you're totally AFT, oh God, I loveDan Henry (00:52:12):That title. I really, oh, that's a great titleEric Toz (00:52:16):Too. So it's kind of like, imagine like how you would equip yourself for the zombie apocalypse. It's like that before, like business for business, I've been through like 20 of these things already. And at some point though, like once you're like, I'm doing this, no matter what you, at some point you have to take the pressure off of yourself in the day to day. So you have to say, all right, like, look, man, I still have to sleep eight hours and I can work like a maximum of 16 hours. And so, you know, you just have to be as efficient with your time, because if you literally do everything like perfect. And when you have no money left in the bank, you have to like, watch literally everything. Like watch every dollar spent every, every hour you have to be doing the right things. I remember literally going to like open certain tabs in Chrome and I'm like, no, like you can't do that. Right. I didn't know what the are you doing? Like, stay focused here. We don't have time for this right now. ItDan Henry (00:53:14):Was, it, was it porn hub you were trying to open or it was just likeEric Toz (00:53:18):It could be anything like ESPN. It could be like news, you know, I've been in, I've been addicted to news before. And so newsDan Henry (00:53:26):Sports. So, so have you ever got addicted to looking at things that you didn't have yet? Houses, cars?Eric Toz (00:53:34):Ooh, that's a good question. Like fantasizing about cars and stuff.Dan Henry (00:53:41):Yeah. Like, like imagine you're sitting there and you're working and you're like, if I just work hard enough, I'll be able to buy X or Y or Z. So then you go and you look up that car, you look at the features, you look at the you know, you look at how much it costs. I mean, I'll be honest. One thing I used to do is I used to put real estate up that I liked and I'd say, okay, this is called a vision board, like a vision board. And I would leave the tab up on my computer and every like two hours or so I would just flip over and I'd look at the house. And I remember I did that with I don't think I knew you then, but when I had that 8,000 square foot house on the water in Gulf port, I was looking at, yeah, I sold it and I bought the penthouse because I just living on the water, man.Dan Henry (00:54:21):It's like, dude, there's always a contractor at your house every single day or something. Well, no, just fixing stuff because the salt water blows with the Florida winds, they blow against the house and I'm in you're right on the water. So stuff, Russ, I had to replace my outdoor fans. Like every three months we would just go get completely rusted, no matter what you did. And just all kinds of crazy stuff that doc, you know, just so much stuff. And I just didn't want, I wanted to focus on all my business and I wanted, I wanted to stop leaving my phone around. And then not finding it for six hours because it was on the, you know, it was on the third floor and this and that. So when I bought the penthouse downtown, I just liked it a lot. It was actually more expensive than the house I owned, but it was smaller and it was just, I don't know, I liked the lifestyle more, but what I did was I would, I would put up a house that was very, very similar to that house.Dan Henry (00:55:18):And I would leave it up in my tabs and every two or three hours, I would just take a break and I would look at it and I'd be like, all right, I got to get to this much money. You know, obviously after taxes that dah, dah, dah. And so I would look and I'd say, okay, I need to sell this many units of my consulting or whatever. And I would, I would basically make that sort of like my, because you know, goals are weird, you know, like what are goals? You know, people have goals, but goals change. I just knew that I wanted to have a really nice house and I wanted to invite my family over and I wanted my family to experience being in a nice place. Cause they didn't really get, get to do that. And so I would leave it up. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:55:57):So my opinion on it is are you familiar with lead and lag measures?Dan Henry (00:56:03):No. I would love you toEric Toz (00:56:04):Explain it to me. Lead and lag measures would be like, so lag measure would be how much revenue your company didn't last month. Okay. But that's lead measures are more activity-based so here are the things I'm measuring each day for things I can control. Cause you can't, you literally can't control somebody else buying your stuff. I mean, you can't take their hand and force them to click and put type in their credit card. But I think you'd get arrested it's to me it sounds fun. It's like, oh, open daddy's wallet,Dan Henry (00:56:36):Dude. We should film. You should film an ad where you like break into somebody's house and make them buy a little customized pendant under their heads that would not get approved.Eric Toz (00:56:46):Yeah. So if you think about lead and lag measures, like a lag measure would be revenue. You can't literally control somebody opening their wallet and buying them. They still have to do that on their own, but something you can control every day is I'm going to go live two times today, I'm going to set 40 appointments. I'm going to try to close X amount of sales. So these are the things that you can control. Like I've always looked at houses and cars and stuff as like a lag measure. It's like I would rather set a goal of like doing X, Y, Z for the things I can control, because if I do everything I can control, most likely I'm going to get, get those other, those, those prizes. So my goal would be like only the things I can control, which would be maybe orders made or on whatever metric, because then my taste might also change. I might also want to drive a car or something later on.Dan Henry (00:57:38):Could I present to you a different way to think about it and maybe mate, this how to think, bro. Yeah. It's how to think. Right. And, and, and get your perspective on it. W so I have this crazy concept that I've really started to delve into recently the idea of not having goals now, before I that's hyper bowl right now. Right? So a lot of people like that, but let's, let's, let's dive into it. So if you have a goal, like, let's say you want to go to the gym. Okay. And you want to get Jack. And the only reason you're going to the gym is because you want to get checked. So you go to the gym and when you get there, you realize you're kind of fat and out of shape, you don't have abs, but you look around the gym and you see all these people with abs big muscles and you say, well, they're jacked and I'm not jacked.Dan Henry (00:58:18):That's why I'm here. So now I feel out of place, I feel like I don't belong. And it gives you this sense of automatically right off the bat, you feel unaccomplished, you feel less, you feel like you don't belong, right? Because you're setting this expectation that there's the reason you're there is for a goal. When instead, if you simply fall in love with the process, you fall in love with working out. You just, it doesn't matter what you look like. You love working out. You're going there because you love working out. And you love that process. It's sorta like when you Jitsu, right? If I like, I love jujitsu, I love it. I don't go to jujitsu class and say, I'm only going, because I want to win worlds. Or I want to win ATDC or I want to be a black belt. I go because I love it. And I noticed that when you love a process and you don't necessarily have a goal, you end up getting, so you end up getting rapidly good at that thing. And you blow past any goals that you could have achieved, or you could have made for yourself by falling in love with the process. I'd love to know your take on that.Eric Toz (00:59:21):So I think, I think more people should set goals around how they want to feel. Right. Because ultimately isn't it all about having a feeling of happiness. So it's like, I envision, I envision a world where I wake up everyday and I feel this way. Right? It's like, that's not something that's tangible. That's a feeling, but it's also inarguable, right? Like if you feel a certain way, there's no metric that can dictate whether that's a success or not, because it's about how you feel. So I think people should focus more on that because they can literally get to that goal, like a lot faster than any other like metric based.Dan Henry (00:59:59):Well, what do you think creates happiness? Do you think happiness is created by feeling like you've made progress, feeling like you've. So I heard a Jordan Peterson talks about this. He was saying that a lot of times we feel happy because we solve problems. Cause if you think about it, right, what is the human mind? It's the computer. What is it? So forget the human mind for a second. W what, what does a computer do? What does it really do on a fundamental level? It solves it crunches numbers, and it solves problems. One after the other that's its purpose. And then one day the motherboard goes out and the computer stops working and it stops solving problems. And it dies. The human brain is basically a computer. And it, I mean, you know what I'm saying? Like, like, like what happens if everything was perfect in your life? You'd almost go crazy.Eric Toz (01:00:43):Well, actually we see this with super rich people and celebrities. They're like super depressed because the mind, even when, even when you saw everything, the mind will look for new things to solve. So it might actually drag you down. It might actually cause chaos in your life so that you can solve them. Like a lot of people, they bring themselves down from from success because their mind is just needs a new problem to create and solve. Oh yeah. I can feel that. And that's another thing. There's this amazing book called the big leap by gay Hendricks. And basically it's like you know, success for a lot of people is foreign and the, their subconscious it's almost scary to be successful because their subconscious is not used to that. So they would rather, almost subconsciously self-sabotage to bring themselves down to what they're used to.Eric Toz (01:01:38):So I've seen it with a lot of people and alcoholics too that runs in my family. Like people will get a certain taste of success and then there'll

835- A self-professed nerd with an MBA, Kate Bagoy is a UX Designer turned Forbes Councils business coach and founder of Six Figure Freelancers, where she helps new freelancers and consultants get started and get to cash, quick. After quitting a corporate dream job in 2008, Kate moved to Silicon Valley to work for a mobile startup, and she's been working with entrepreneurs ever since! She's worked with more than 50 startups as a designer, marketer, product manager, strategist, analyst, and advisor and has coached 1000's of consultants through starting a business and landing consulting clients. Kate is a graduate of the Portland Seed Fund, served as a mentor at the ATDC startup accelerator, and has led projects for Fortune 500 companies Nike, Ricoh, HP, and Microsoft. She holds a BFA in graphic design and an MBA in marketing and international business. Obsessed with travel since a flight to Oregon at six, Kate has been traveling as a digital nomad since 2017 – running her business entirely online from 25 countries – and helps other creatives find their freedom at sixfigurefreelancers.com. Kate's personal mission is to inspire and empower people to lead lives by design, not default. ________ Want your customers to talk about you to their friends and family? That's what we do! We get your customers to talk about you so that you get more referrals with video testimonials. Go to www.BusinessBros.biz to be a guest on the show or to find out more on how we can help you get more customers! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/businessbrospod/support

Melanie Flores and Chris Nedza, Symtrain (North Fulton Business Radio, Episode 394) Facing the twin challenges of training and retaining employees while providing consistent customer service, salon owners and real estate companies now have the technology of Symtrain to rely on. Using Symtrain ensures customer-facing personnel are well-trained and provide outstanding customer service. Melanie Flores, […]

Melanie Flores and Chris Nedza, Symtrain (North Fulton Business Radio, Episode 394) Facing the twin challenges of training and retaining employees while providing consistent customer service, salon owners and real estate companies now have the technology of Symtrain to rely on. Using Symtrain ensures customer-facing personnel are well-trained and provide outstanding customer service. Melanie Flores, […] The post Melanie Flores and Chris Nedza, Symtrain appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

MIW Disruptive Podcast Episode 2021-003: Monique Mills, MBA, PMP, Founder & Chief Strategist, TPM Focus Monique Mills received her undergraduate electrical engineering degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology and her MBA, with a concentration in Management of Technology, from the Georgia Institute of Technology. After many years of corporate industry experience, she took the plunge and stepped out on her own to create and lead the growth of her own technology company as well as a multidisciplinary management consulting company, TPM Focus. TPM Focus provides revenue-focused strategy to startups and small to medium-sized businesses by synchronizing their marketing, sales, technology, and customer success with revenue goals (finances). Monique's earliest entrepreneurial experience began while simultaneously working in her engineering career. As a result of her love of real estate and desire to manage her personal investment transactions, she became a licensed Realtor and launched a real estate sales and consulting business, Focused Realtors, to assist other investors in strategic planning and execution of their real estate ventures. Monique has personal experience and expertise in buying, selling, leasing, and construction management of both residential and commercial properties. She is a Member of the Atlanta Commercial Board of Realtors. The real estate experience combined with constant curiosity and a love of using technology to solve problems, provided the genesis for her first technology company, ThePartyMatch Technology -– a software(SaaS) application designed to match underutilized commercial properties with those seeking to co-locate temporarily or more permanently. In addition, the technology included artificial intelligence components to provide real-time availability, cost information, customer service, and leasing details-– it was ahead of its time. Monique was requested and honored to pitch ThePartyMatch in a private, invitation-only casting for ABC's Shark Tank, a reality television show for cutting edge entrepreneurs, as well as for Steve Case, an American innovator and Founder of AOL, during his Rise of Rest tour around the nation. She's been a staple in the Atlanta tech scene since the resurgence of the startup activity in 2013 and received a nod of acknowledgement from TechCrunch, the most respected online newspaper focused on high tech and startup companies. As a certified PMP (Project Management Professional) with many years of project management experience across several industries and as Principal of TPM Focus, Monique uses a strategic approach based upon PMI Project Management principles, Blue Ocean Strategies, Design Thinking, and Agile and Lean Startup Methodologies to develop innovative ideas into early-stage startup companies and help mature small businesses upgrade and expand their operations with cutting-edge strategies and technologies to remain competitive in the market. Monique is an Advisory Board Member for Stem to Market, an initiative by the Association for Women in Science, that provides entrepreneurial education and support to STEM women with research or technology they want to commercialize. Monique is a Research Faculty member of Georgia Institute of Technology, serving tech entrepreneurs at the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the oldest technology incubator in Georgia. ATDC has an international reputation for fostering technological entrepreneurship by helping tech startups navigate the ambiguous journey of taking an idea from concept, to prototype, launch, and finally, to scale. Participating companies have created hundreds of jobs, millions of tax revenues, and raised over a billion dollars in outside funding from angel investors and venture capitalists. Monique served as an Adjunct Professor at Georgia State University in the College of Business as part of the University's Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute. She taught students how to apply evidence-based entrepreneurship methods to go from an idea to a sustainable business model. Monique served as a Director for Founder Institute, the world's premier idea-stage accelerator based in Silicon Valley, to help establish an Atlanta chapter of their startup launch program. Monique currently serves as a mentor to several tech startup founders as well as for many small business owners in her role as a volunteer for SCORE, a 50 year-old non-profit association supported by the U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) dedicated to helping small businesses get off the ground, grow, and achieve goals through education and mentoring. She received SCORE's Outstanding Mentor Award for 2017.

After successfully building, scaling, and exiting her fintech startup LoadHero, Kristin Slink moved across the country and joined the Advanced Technology Development Center as Fintech Catalyst. Founded in 1980, ATDC has developed a global reputation for fostering technological entrepreneurship. Forbes named ATDC to its list of “Incubators Changing the World” in 2010 and 2013, alongside Y Combinator and the Palo Alto Research Center. Hear Kristin elaborate on the numerous ways the ATDC supports not only Metro Atlanta founders, but founders across the state of Georgia.

John Avery is the Director of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), is a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits. A hands-on innovation and technology leader with broad experience in both large and small companies and part of four startups, John holds six patents and has broad experience in data and wireless voice technologies. Prior to joining ATDC, he was engineering group manager of Panasonic Automotive Systems' Panasonic Innovation Center at the Georgia Tech campus. At Panasonic, John oversaw the innovation center's development projects in next-generation automotive systems including, infotainment, bio-sensing, machine vision, deep learning, and heads-up displays. He was co-founder and chief technology officer of Convergence Corp., a maker of software that connects wireless devices to the Internet. John later joined Amazon as engineering manager after the tech giant acquired Convergence in 1999. In 2001, John became an early employee of Mobliss, a mobile applications and messaging solutions company in the entertainment space. Japan's Index Corp., a developer of mobile phone content and information and other media services such as video on demand, acquired Mobliss in 2004. A proud Yellow Jacket, he is a Georgia Tech graduate with a bachelor's degree in engineering. www.atdc.org Twitter: @atdc IG: @theatdc LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/atdc --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/xeocast/support

This week, Corbett talks to JP James about his entrepreneurial career, his thoughts on cryptocurrency, and how the near future might see some dramatic innovations thanks to breakthroughs in machine learning. This episode was edited and produced by Affogato Media. 

Blake Patton is the VC, and Dan Ciprari is the entrepreneur and CEO. Two different jobs, two different responsibilities, and yet they have one mission. That mission is to build a valuable company for themselves, their employees, and their investors.There are good times and challenging times on the way to building a startup. Most discussions focus on the exit. These two men are looking to exit one day. But that day hasn't come yet. In the meantime, they must find ways to contribute their shared experiences and personalities to make this business go big. I had a chance to interview these two great men on their relationship. We were at the Angel Lounge at the ATDC, and the attendees were all active angel investors. I am publishing this interview because I thought you might want to listen in. Building a business is hard. Relationships are even harder.

Decision Vision Episode 113: Should I Disclose My Mental Illness? – An Interview with Jacqui Chew, iFusion and TEDxAtlanta Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2005, Jacqui Chew seeks to normalize the conversation around mental illness. In a candid and open conversation with host Mike Blake, Jacqui discussed the journey to her diagnosis and how she’s […] The post Decision Vision Episode 113: Should I Disclose My Mental Illness? – An Interview with Jacqui Chew, iFusion and TEDxAtlanta appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

This week, Corbett talks to Brent Herd about the many ways social media has changed the landscape of entrepreneurship and how it might even be introducing new business opportunities that have never existed before!This episode was edited and produced by Affogato Media. 

This week, Corbett talks to Brad Schweizer about investing in the vast landscape of emerging technologies. This episode was edited and produced by Affogato Media. 

Kate Bagoy is the Founder and Business Coach for Six-Figure Freelancers, teaching the secret to earning upwards of $10k a month while working from a beach, a mountain top, or even just from the sofa in your PJs. She’s a Business Coach for the Forbes Coaches Council, an invitation-only organization that selects its members based on their depth and diversity of experience. Kate is also a former startup UX designer, hacker, and is now a self-confessed spiritual junkie who ditched the golden handcuffs of a safe, well-paid job to do it on her own terms from wherever in the world she feels like it. Kate is a graduate of the Portland Seed Fund, served as a mentor at the ATDC startup accelerator, and holds a BFA in graphic design and an MBA in marketing and international business. In today’s episode, Kate joins me to reveal the secrets of her digital nomad success and what inspired her to run her marketing company online while she chased the sun. She discusses burning out in her first corporate job and how this, coupled with the stress of studying and drinking too much, lead her to ask what she really wanted from life. Kate reveals how she initially didn’t feel worthy of her consulting earnings due to finding the work easy and what it took to allocate value to her services. We also discuss the need for resilience when running your business and how this skill and mindset can be trained and strengthened like a muscle so that you can get back up when it gets hard, deal with setbacks or rejection, and remain focused on your destination. “Profit to me is having more money than your expenses and your desired lifestyle” – Kate Bagoy “Just because it’s a natural gift doesn’t mean it’s easy to other people” – Kate Bagoy “We undervalue ourselves. And that’s partly because we don’t know how to talk about what we do” – Kate Bagoy “We always try to find a reason why our businesses fail. Blame it on the economy. Blame it on the market. Blame it on the client. Bad Marketing – fit - whatever. But really RESILIENT founders find a way forward” – Kate Bagoy “A Goal is just a dream with a deadline. If you have a dream of someday starting a business, give it a fricking deadline and make it a goal” – Kate Bagoy This week on Profit For Coaches: Why your natural talent is still worth other peoples’ money Why ‘charge what your worth’ is unhelpful when determining your price How to train yourself to be more resilient How to create new good habits in your work-flow Kate’s No.1 skillset any coach, freelancer, or consultant should have How to address the good and bad triggers in your life The FREE eBook you can access today Resources Mentioned: Book: Mindset   Book: The One Thing Connect with Kate Bagoy: Six-Figure Freelancers Website Kate Bagoy’s Website Kate Bagoy on LinkedIn Kate Bagoy on Instagram Connect with Jos Willard: Profit For Coaches Website Jos Willard on LinkedIn Jos Willard on Twitter Jos Willard on Instagram The Four Must-Haves for a Profitable Coaching Practice I want to make sure that the time you invest here is profitable. And the best way to do that is to make sure you grab a copy of the free eBook The Four Must-Haves for a Profitable Coaching Practice. It’s absolutely free, it’s worth every penny. It outlines the four areas that every profitable coaching practice on the planet has in common.  And thus, they’re the four things that you must have nailed down in your coaching practice if you want it to be consistently profitable. So if you want an easy to understand very specific tool that makes it crystal clear where to be focusing your attention in your practice, and what you can safely ignore to ensure that your practice is consistently profitable and supports the life that you want to be living go to: Profitforcoaches.com and download your copy of The Four Must-Haves for a Profitable Coaching Practice today.

Who is Corbett Gilliam? Corbett Gilliam is the corporate development manager for the world-renowned Advanced Technology Development Center. The ATDC is a science and business incubator that's part of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech. We're so glad to share Corbett's story with you all!

Kristin Slink leads the fintech vertical of the Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center incubator. In this role she helps nurture over 24 fintech early-stage companies. In this episode we learn about Kristin's career in fintech as a founder of Loan Hero and the fintech companies in the ATDC.

I found out I was wrong, again. I believed people knew​ ​​early in life that they were going to create something​ from scratch and do their own thing​. All of the entrepreneurs I talked to over the years confirmed this. Then I met Frank and he proved me wrong. After 25 years of working for others, he became an entrepreneur. Frank became an entrepreneur at the encouragement of his clients and suppliers. This is a great story, filled with lessons, and insights that just might change your life.Frank's BioFrank J. Tighe, Chairman and CEO of Atlanta based, TDH Partners, Inc., has over thirty years experience in executive management, fundraising, sales, marketing and corporate formation in the medical device industry. He has developed and commercialized over 150 medical devices in his career and negotiated license agreements with major universities, physicians, private equity firms and industry competitors that resulted in millions of dollars in funding, sales and royalty income.Mr. Tighe is currently serving as the Lead Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Georgia Tech University's (ATDC) Advanced Technology Design Center, a start-up incubator that helps entrepreneurs launch and grow technology companies in Georgia. ATDC has raised over $3 billion dollars since its inception and was named by Forbes Magazine as one of the "Top 12 Business Incubators Changing the World.” ATDC's 150 graduates have collectively raised more than $2 billion in capital.

You really do get to be a fly on the call as we talk about a potential new company to the ATDC portfolio. We talk about what we like about the company and some of the struggles we might see going forward. As always, the name of the company is not mentioned to protect the innocent :) After that, we talk about the business of a college education in 2020. Is it worth the money? Should you drop out to start a startup? We don't know the answers, but we talk about some of that stuff all the same. For more information on the podcasts: http://aflyonthecall.com/ For more information on the hosts: Monique Mills https://www.linkedin.com/in/moniquemills/ https://twitter.com/MoniqMills Adam Gautsch https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamgautsch/ https://twitter.com/agautsc

Chat Guest For over 25 years, Charlie has been a professional angel investor and entrepreneur. His mission is to help entrepreneurs take the next steps in business and life.   10 facts about Charlie (from Paparelli.com) Professional angel investor and co-founder of 12 startups. Invested in over 35 companies in 25+ years Since 1992 focused on helping entrepreneurs start and build their company. Mentors 10 startup founders and advise many more on a daily basis. Offices at the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA. Founder and director of Angel Lounge in Atlanta. Had five exits that netted a 50% IRR (internal return rate). Continually thinks about helping entrepreneurs build the company of their dreams and great value for investors. A recovering alcoholic who, thanks to the recovery process, entered into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Has a God-given passion for entrepreneurs, to love and serve them.    Charlie has 3 core beliefs... There is a reason God puts each entrepreneur in my life. I need to discover the reason and help with the next steps for the entrepreneur. Every day I must intercede in prayer, asking God to share His mercy, blessing, and protection for every entrepreneur who shares their story with me. My investment and mentoring relationships tie my destiny to God's destiny for the entrepreneur. It is always a wild ride.    Angel investing is a contact sport. It is not about investing in companies. It is all about investing in people and their families. I love it and wouldn't think of doing anything else. God uses me every day in these activities as an angel investor.   Chat Highlights Charlie's passion for entrepreneurs and the belief that you really need to be fully in the entrepreneur's corner is a gift to the community. As a lead investor, he has helped countless entrepreneurs find the money and hit those milestones. He explains the relationship as a “contact sport”? Charlie has over 40 entrepreneur's on regular zoom calls called “Paparelli Zoom Chats” which he launched recently to support entrepreneurs and foster open dialogue around challenges they're facing and serve them with encouragement and thought leadership. We asked Charlie to share his inspiration for the idea. Charlie describes his responsibility to entrepreneurs as being a servant, and we ask him to explain that further. Charlie shares more about the types of conversations they're having in Paparelli Zoom Chats, how the topics are derived, and what his greatest take-a-ways have been. Charlie shares remarkable insight into his belief system and a few powerful ideas as an overall “call to action” for entrepreneurs in closing. You don't want to miss what he says about what he's doing on TikTok.   Get In Touch Learn more about Charlie at www.paparelli.com Charlie is very involved with the Atlanta Technology Development Center (ATDC) and Atlanta Tech Village (ATV). Check out their websites to learn more about Atlanta's thriving entrepreneur community. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Guest: Cortlandt Minnich Show title: Integrating two passions - Pizza and the Big Green Egg! Cortlandt Minnich is the Inventor of the Pizza-Porta. He is a Businessman, Entrepreneur, Inventor and Product Marketer. Cortlandt and his wife Nancy travel around cooking pizzas in a kamado grill like the Big Green Egg or the Kamado Joe using his patented invention The Pizza-Porta. Pizza is like it's own food group. Pizza brings people together. Cortlandt found a way to make pizza more interesting, tastier, and literally the center of the party. Cortlandt shares his story and how he integrated two passions –pizza and the big green egg. The Pizza-Porta - www.pizza-porta.com People are as passionate about pizza as they are about the Big Green Egg (fans are called Egg Heads). Cortlandt travels around to Big Green Egg events cooking pizzas in his patented Pizza-Porta. He states "the test of a passion product is - is there someone with a tattoos of the brand on their body. The Big Green Egg is the Harley Davidson of cooking." Highlights and organizations & resources mentioned: A graduate of Emory (undergrad) and Georgia Tech (grad) Cortlandt consults on Lean Startup and Design Thinking Cortlandt talks about his love for tinkering and how that ultimately led to his invention the Pizza-Porta. Cortlandt discusses people's love for pizza and the massive Big Green Egg following Cortlandt shares high level the patent process and how the ATDC helped guide him. The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) is a startup incubator at Georgia Tech that helps technology entrepreneurs in Georgia launch and build successful companies. Headquartered in Atlanta’s Technology Square, ATDC serves as the hub for technology entrepreneurship in Georgia. Wassi's Meat Market in Melbourne, FL - hosts an Egg festival https://www.wassismeatmarket.com/big-green-egg Big Green Egg Festival - "It's like a rock concert for backyard cooking" Neapolitan Pizza Association - sets the standards for pizza Scott's pizza tour in New York City - https://www.scottspizzatours.com/. Cortlandt raved about Scott and said he learned so much from Scott and his pizza tour. Operation BBQ Relief - www.operationbbqrelief.com - Operation BBQ Relief was founded in May 2011 in response to a need for relief efforts in tornado-stricken Joplin, Missouri, a community of about 50,000 residents. Operation BBQ Relief continues to respond to natural disasters and other situations to help feed displaced residents and emergency personnel. Take Action Follow Pizza-Porta on Facebook For more information www.pizza-porta.com (to purchase the pizza-porta, recipes, blogs, and more on the pizza-porta story) Support Operation BBQ Relief -- www.operationbbqrelief.com Subscribe to Stories Connect People podcast. Available on Apple podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio Listen, Like, Review, Share Engage with me on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter @ Stories Connect People Pinterest - Stories Connect People To potentially be a show guest, share feedback, or make recommendati

China’s approach to agricultural assistance in Africa differs markedly from those of other donors from Japan, Europe and the United States. While other countries frame their development programs under the larger of “aid,” the Chinese instead go out of their way to insist that what they’re doing in the African agricultural space focuses on technology-oriented market-based solutions. In fact, back in 2006 at one of the first Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summits, when former President Hu Jintao unveiled Beijing’s new agricultural initiative in Africa right up front he said it was part of China’s “Eight Non-Aid Measures.”It took a few years after that FOCAC Summit for China’s agriculture programs in Africa to take shape but by 2008-2009 the first Agricultural Technology Demonstration Centers, or ATDCs, started to materialize.Today there are 14 ATDCs across Africa with 11 more in development.Whereas much of Chinese engagement in Africa is state-led, the ATDCs are actually quite different in that respect given that private companies play a very important. This is, in essence, a public- private partnership.The idea here is that the Chinese government provides the financial backing, builds the facilities and manages relations with the host government while Chinese companies engage local stakeholders to deliver training programs, assist with business models and develop partnerships local farmers that hopefully become financially sustainable.That’s the plan. But does it work?Celso Tamele says even though it’s hard to measure, there are a lot of merits to the commercial-focus of China’s agricultural development strategy in Africa. Celso is a Maputo-based Program Director at the international non-profit TechnoServe who helps run the ATDC in Mozambique.He joins Eric and Cobus to discuss his experience at an ATDC and whether China’s approach is more or less effective than those of other donor countries.JOIN THE DISCUSSION:Facebook: www.facebook.com/ChinaAfricaProject Twitter: @eolander | @stadenesqueSUPPORT THIS PODCAST. BECOME A SUBSCRIBER TO THE CHINA AFRICA PROJECT.Your subscription supports independent journalism. Subscribers get the following:1. A daily email newsletter of the top China-Africa news.2. Access to the China-Africa Experts Network3. Unlimited access to the CAP's exclusive analysis content on chinaafricaproject.comSubscribe today and get two-weeks free: www.chinaafricaproject.com/subscribe

Glen speaks with the ATDC's  FinTech Catalyst Kristin Slink about startup trials before and after the pandemic, plus noted futurist Brett King weighs in on how credit unions can best serve members in their time of need. (Warning: Contains geeky references to Star Trek and Regulation D.)

If Toucan can, you can too! Arjun Devarajan and Vishnu Menon, Co-founders at Toucan AI, sit down with Braxton Madison to talk about how to actualize your dream of becoming an entrepreneur. While in undergrad Devarajan and Menon worked on a side project with some friends, creating a chat bot powered by Artificial Intelligence to answer students’ questions when a teacher is unavailable. After graduating from Duke University with degrees in Computer Science in 2018, they took this project to MIT’s summer accelerator, Play Labs, to expand their network and to begin fundraising to turn their project into a successful startup. Now working out of Atlanta’s ATDC Incubator, Toucan AI has found their niche as the sales bot revolutionizing e-commerce. With its instant setup and ease of use, Toucan AI makes the power of artificial intelligence accessible to even the smallest e-commerce businesses. Devarajan and Menon are young, but they bring incredible insights into starting a company, revealing the secrets of the Startup Dorm Room. Here is just the tip of the iceburgh of the fantastic questions they answer for success: Research project turned startup, how to conduct customer discovery? How to pivot based on customer demand? What is AI anyway? How to communicate technical solutions to nontechnical investors? What do investors care about? (the market, the problem, and the impact + KPIs) How to build a high tech solution with two people? What resources does Duke have for Startups? How to prepare yourself to start a company? Does college have more value in a high tech startup? Why network? How to raise funding? Is raising possible as a college student? Why join an accelerator/incubator? Should you keep back up plans or burn the ships and go all in on your startup? How to find the perfect co-founder? Book Recommendation: Startup Myths and Models, the very practical nuts and bolts of starting a company, a how to guide for getting started. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/startupdormroom/support

Today’s guest is Bill Nussey, CEO & Founder at the Freeing Energy Project.Bill Nussey is the founder of the Freeing Energy Project, whose mission is to accelerate the shift to cleaner, cheaper energy. Prior to Freeing Energy, Bill spent most of his career as a tech CEO. His first company, which he co-founded in high school, provided graphics software for early, text-based personal computers. His second company, Da Vinci Systems, was started out of his college dorm room and grew to serve millions of users across 45 countries. Later, he spent several years as a venture capitalist with Greylock. In 1998, he left the firm to run a portfolio company, iXL, which went public and grew to almost $500 million in revenue. After iXL, he joined Silverpop as CEO. Silverpop grew to nearly $100 million and became a global leader in cloud-based marketing. In 2014, IBM acquired the company and made it the foundation of the IBM Marketing Cloud. Shortly after the acquisition, Bill was promoted to VP Corporate Strategy out of IBM’s world headquarters in New York. Bill’s companies have created thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in value.For the last few years, Bill has been conducting research for a 2019 book called Freeing Energy. Supported by 200 interviews across the world, the book’s mission is to help non-industry readers understand how we can accelerate the shift to clean energy. The core ideas focus on decentralized (or local) energy, novel business models, and new approaches to ownership and finance. Much of his early research was shared at Bill’s October 2017 TED talk called Accelerating the Shift to Clean Energy.In 2018, Bill co-founded Solar Inventions. Based at Georgia Tech’s ATDC incubator, the company’s mission is to commercialize a set of scientific breakthroughs for improving silicon photovoltaics.Bill received a degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He holds several patents, has published two books and sits on several commercial and non-profit boards. Bill and his family are involved in a handful of projects providing off-grid, resilient electricity in places like East Africa and Puerto Rico.In today’s episode, we cover:Bill’s history, and what led him to get excited about energyHow Bill went about switching gears to transition into this new field (to him)Bill’s book, why he wrote it, and the process he followed to pull it togetherDigitization of energy opportunityPotential of energy innovation of appealing across both sides of the political aisleRole of venture capital in clean energy innovationLessons from last cleantech bubbleSolar and batteries, and implications when cost becomes less than purchasing electricity from the gridOne policy change that would move the needle more than any otherBill’s thoughts on politics, GND, etc.Importance of looking at carbon equivalents as well, not just carbonInevitability of putting a price on carbonRole of utilities and oil/gas companiesThoughts on upcoming election and the stakesBill’s advice to others trying to find their lane in the climate fightLinks to topics discussed in this episode:Freeing Energy: https://www.freeingenergy.com/Bill Nussey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billnussey/Bubba McDonald: http://www.psc.state.ga.us/pscinfo/bios/mcdonald.aspAmory Lovins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amory_LovinsLoren McDonald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenmcdonald/Solar Inventions: https://www.solarinventions.com/Henry McCance: https://skoll.org/contributor/henry-mccance/Fullstory: https://www.fullstory.com/Arcadia Power: https://www.arcadiapower.com/Drift: https://www.joindrift.com/Form Energy: https://www.formenergy.com/Ethanol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_StatesYou can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.Enjoy the show!

“Innovation Update: What Leading Companies Are Doing” Supply Chain Now Radio, Episode 154 Sponsored by Verusen Learn more: www.Verusen.com This episode features Daryl Lu and Corbett Gilliam. Daryl Lu serves as Director of Solutions at Verusen. Daryl has delivered supply chain transformation strategies for Fortune 500 enterprises as a consultant and solutions provider. He couples his technology and early-stage company experience to help deliver innovative solutions with high return on investment for clients. Daryl has a customer-focused, data-driven approach to solving real-world challenges when designing and delivering solutions. His energy has led him to leading teams throughout a customer engagement from marketing to sales to solutions services and to customer success. Learn more about Verusen: www.Verusen.com Corbett Gilliam serves as Corporate Development Manager at ATDC. Corbett is a visionary leader with expertise in business operations, digital/social strategy execution, brand strategy, and content marketing. He has a proven track record of achieving exceptional results within the FinTech, mobile, livestreaming, and SaaS sectors. Corbett has a history of transforming a company’s core business model and marketing strategy to achieve objectives in revenue growth and profitability. Corbett is a graduate of the University of Georgia where he obtained a bachelor’s degree economics. He also earned his master’s degree in business administration from Mercer University’s Stetson School of Business and Economics. Learn more about ATDC: https://atdc.org/ Upcoming Events & Resources Mentioned in this Episode Help with Hurricane Dorian Relief: www.alanaid.org Connect with Daryl on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryllu/ Check out the Verusen Blog: https://www.verusen.com/blog/ Connect with Corbett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corbett-gilliam-mba-131259/ Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gswhite/ Connect with Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottwindonluton/ 2019 AIAG/SCAC Supply Chain & Quality Conference: https://myscma.com/scac-events/2019-supply-chain-quality/ Georgia Manufacturing Summit on October 9th: https://www.georgiamanufacturingalliance.com/annual-summit eft Logistics CIO Forum in Austin, TX: https://tinyurl.com/y5po7tvw Reverse Logistics Association Conference & Expo: https://rla.org/calendar/1 SCNR to Broadcast Live at MODEX 2020: https://www.modexshow.com/ SCNR on YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/scnr-youtube Check Out News From Our Sponsors The Effective Syndicate: https://www.theeffectivesyndicate.com/blog APICS Atlanta: www.APICSAtlanta.org TalentStream: www.talentstreamstaffing.com Verusen: https://www.verusen.com/ Georgia Manufacturing Alliance: www.georgiamanufacturingalliance.com ProPurchaser.com: https://tinyurl.com/y6l2kh7g Supply Chain Real Estate: https://supplychainrealestate.com/ Vector Global Logistics: http://vectorgl.com/ This episode was hosted by Greg White and Scott Luton. For more information, please visit our dedicated show page at www.supplychainnowradio.com/episode-154.

In this episode of the Profit Minded Business Podcast, Glenn Wasser, one of Jacob's advisers stops by to discuss the importance of customer care as it relates to both sales and marketing.Glenn comes from a management, marketing, and sales background with long established track record of successful product launches and unmatched sales growth for leading brands including Coca-Cola, Comcast Cable, Canada Dry, Stouffer Frozen Foods, and Suntory Water. Now, Glenn is working as an adviser to a few startup companies through ATDC, using his expertise in developing and leading the execution of both national marketing campaigns and powerful, local, grass roots programs. Coming from the corporate world, Glenn has exceptional capacity for understanding consumer behavior, out thinking competitors, and maximizing resources. He is also a passionate leader of inspired, energized, and motivated sales and marketing teams who consistently deliver exceptional revenue, profit and operating results. Podcast Guest:Glenn Wasser - Customer Care Adviserhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/glenn-wasser-61750a27/Podcast Hosts:Corbin Cook - SMB Strategy Consultants & Profit Minded Businesshttps://www.smbstrategyconsultants.comLynn Spencer - Killingsworth Spencer LLChttps://www.killingsworthspencerllc.com/Jacob Andrews - iVue Media & Drones iVuehttps://www.ivue.media

Supply Chain Now Radio, Episode 95 “Live from ATDC: FreightTech and Talent Management Innovations” #SupplyChainCity Series on SCNR Episode 95 of SCNR featured Robin Gregg, Justin Rainer and Evans Rainer. Robin Gregg serves as CEO of RoadSync, who’s on a mission to modernize payments across the entire logistics industry. Prior to this role, Robin served as SVP/GM Direct Fuel Cards with FLEETCOR and SVP of Product Development & Strategy with Revolution Money. From the company’s beginnings in 2015, RoadSync has been on an upward trajectory, quickly becoming the chosen payment solution for some of the largest names in the logistics space. Our team is standing by, ready to help you integrate and manage a simpler, more efficient way to navigate payments. Connect with RoadSync on Twitter and learn more: https://www.roadsync.com/ Justin Rainer serves as the CEO and Co-founder of StaffWRX. Justin co-founded StaffWRX in 2015, bringing more than 10 years of industrial facility operations, program management, mass-media marketing design, business development, and executive management experience. Justin graduated from the University of Alabama in 2004, earning his bachelor’s degree in business administration & marketing. After graduating Justin spent 3 years in Wyoming as a U.S. Merchant Marine Officer piloting ferry boats on the lake system in Teton National Park. Following Justin’s time in Wyoming, Justin joined an energy efficiency and recycling startup, Jaco Environmental, out of Washington state. Justin was charged with business development, program design and program management of appliance recycling programs for electric utilities throughout North America. Justin spent 8 years with Jaco Environmental overseeing operations for 32 appliance recycling facilities. Following the closure of Jaco Environmental, Justin joined Recleim, a startup in Atlanta, GA, to help them capture and run utility related business. In his time outside of work, Justin enjoys spending time with his wife and two children pursuing outdoor activities like fishing, hunting, golfing and skiing. Justin also has a strong love for anything mechanical, spending much of his spare time working on vintage cars and boats. Connect with Justin Rainer on LinkedIn and learn more about StaffWRX here: https://scheduling.staffwrx.com/ EvansheadshotEvans Rainer serves as COO and Co-founder of StaffWRX, which is providing a better way to schedule & engage hourly team members. After graduating from the University of Alabama in 2008, Evans served as a Network Solutions Specialist at CentricsIT prior to co-founding StaffWRX. Connect with Evans Rainer on LinkedIn and learn more about StaffWRX here: https://scheduling.staffwrx.com/ This episode was hosted by Ben Harris and Scott Luton.

We recently traveled to the Georgia Institute of Technology campus, where we spoke with John Avery, the new Director for ATDC Georgia Tech, a start-up accelerator that helps Georgia technology entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies. John provided a detailed look at the initiatives, programs, and resources that ATDC offers. https://www.myasbn.com/small-business/startup/atdc-georgia-tech-everything-need-know-john-avery-director/

In this episode we cover the book that changed how software companies build product, interact with customers and measure success: The Lean Startup. A staple of MBA students, product managers and every startup company trying to build the next big thing. The Lean Startup, has built a new lexicon of terms you must know to work in the high tech industry: MVP, Pivots, Innovation Accounting. Join us as your co-hosts Chuck and Gunnar bring their unique views of Product vs. Engineering, as they cover this book. Also, joining the podcast is guest Jim Flannery, founder of Four Athen's a startup accelerator in Athens, GA, who has also worked as an Startup Catalyst at Atlanta's famous ATDC startup accelerator and currently teaches Entrepreneurship at the University of Georgia. This conversation get's interesting as Jim drops the mic with the question: "Can entrepreneurship be taught?"

Meet Michael Sengbusch Since leaving Influence Health in 2017, Michael Sengbusch joined ATDC as the CTO-in-Residence. ATDC is Georgia's oldest, largest, and most influential startup incubator. At ATDC he mentors and advises over 40 startups in Atlanta. Michael continues to be actively involved in both healthcare and marketing technology. He will be speaking at Healthbox Studio in October on healthcare marketing topics.   More info on ATDC: http://atdc.org ATDC Healthcare Technology Vertical: Georgia Tech to Launch Health Technology Initiative at the Advanced Technology Development Center. Healthbox Studio Healthbox Studio Report Twitter handle: @msengbusch1  On the Get Social Health podcast, Janet interviews Michael Sengbusch about Facebook and marketing for healthcare systems. Give a listen or review the transcript notes below: Janet: 00:00 Podcasting is a fun, yet sometimes time-consuming passion. As some of you may have noticed, I took a little hiatus from podcasting so I could focus on the launch of the Healthcare Marketing Network, a company that brings together healthcare companies with healthcare writers. I'll tell you more about the Healthcare Marketing Network at the end of the podcast. However, in taking my little leave of absence, I had previously recorded a few interviews that hadn't been published. Today's conversation is with Michael Sengbusch, a healthcare technology and marketing expert. In my intro, you'll hear that I mentioned where he was working at the time of the interview, but I've got a little update on Michael's career since we recorded this interview. Janet: 00:42 Michael Sengbusch, left Influence Health in 2017 and joined the advanced technology development center as their CTO in residence. ATDC is Georgia's oldest, largest and most influential startup incubator. Hosted by Georgia Tech at ATDC, Michael mentors and advises over 40 startups in Atlanta. He continues to be actively involved in both healthcare and marketing technology and will be speaking at Healthbox studio in October on healthcare marketing topics. Janet: 01:14 Now let's jump into our conversation, a Facebook, so needed for marketing yet such a challenge to manage for healthcare. Today I'm speaking with healthcare marketing and technology expert, Michael Sengbusch about Facebook tracking and CRM on Get Social Health. Announcer: 01:37 Welcome to Get Social Health, a conversation about social media and how it's being used to help hospitals, social practices, healthcare practitioners and patients connect and engage via social media. Get Social Health, brings you conversations with professionals, actively working in the field and provides real-life examples of healthcare, social media in action. Here is your host, Janet Kennedy on Get Social Health. Janet: 02:05 I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different people in my field, but occasionally I run across someone who we should have crossed paths ages ago. I don't know how I haven't met or talked to Michael Sengbusch. Yes, but the day is my day. I'm really excited about it. Michael is currently serving as the Influence Health senior VP and GM of Consumer Experience. Michael has established credibility through the healthcare industry as a thought leader in digital healthcare marketing and with expertise in leveraging Facebook as a successful patient acquisition channel. I know my listeners are going to be really excited about how that works. Welcome to Get Social Health, Michael. Michael: 02:48 Thanks for having me today. Janet: 02:49 All right. I want to jump right to how does Facebook bring patients in, but I think we need to set a few background stories here to get people up. Speed. So first off, do you mind sharing a little bit about your background and how you got into healthcare and social media? Michael: 03:07 That's actually kind of an interesting story. So my background is in technology and in computer science, so I've been kind of trained and spent the first half of my career as a software developer as an engineer and it kind of took that path and got more into product development and then sales and startups. And then I was at a startup. I was one of the early members of a company called bright whistle and we were doing digital marketing technology and we were exploring different spaces and we kind of stumbled upon a gap in a healthcare marketing technologies, particularly in the provider space with hospitals and so I don't think when we started that we decided to go attack healthcare marketing for healthcare providers, but we did kind of stumble into that based on some connections that we hadn't realized that it was an underserved area. Michael: 03:56 There was a lot of opportunity there and we decided to just go heads down and work on digital marketing for healthcare providers and health systems across the country and that's what was created as Bright Whistle which was acquired about two and a half years ago by Influence Health and I've stuck around here for the last couple of years and helped integrate those platforms together and it's really kind of a grown from there. Janet: 04:20 No, that's exciting. You actually survived an acquisition and ended up coming out on top, so congratulations to you. Tell me a little bit about the award that you won in 2014 at Bright Whistle. Michael: 04:32 One of the early things that we were doing was experimenting with Social Media Marketing and if you go back to 2000, 10, 2011, social media was new and social media marketing was extremely new and in healthcare it was bleeding edge if not unheard of. And so while we were doing a lot of search marketing and social marketing for, for health systems and hospitals, we were bringing that to the table and one of the reasons why we were able to do that kind of so early was we were one of the early companies that was building software and technology on top of the Facebook marketing API and when we worked with Facebook early on, the different marketing partners that they accepted in program all really had to have something unique and different about them. So you know, what were you going to bring to the table? Now some of these companies brought scale. They brought big advertisers, big dollars. We brought healthcare and that was just kind of a weird. It was, it was kind of weird for Facebook at the time. What are you guys doing in healthcare? That seems a little, it seems odd. Michael: 05:34 but that seems interesting because we know it's important. So we didn't represent a huge market share as it relates to marketing. We didn't drive a whole ton of advertising, but we brought a really interesting story to the table. So working really closely with Facebook to do marketing a technology. We participated in the 2014 Facebook innovation competition and that brings all the Facebook marketing partners together. People submit different case studies and applications from all across the globe. So there's thousands of Facebook marketing partners, and we were awarded the winner and in our category and we were able to win that for some of the really interesting marketing group doing it Facebook, but more importantly, not just the marketing, but what we were doing with the data and how we were actually measuring the results of those marketing campaigns. So, we won that by actually using Facebook targeting Facebook marketing and then tying that to a healthcare CRM to figure out attribution and figure out what type of marketing campaigns actually generated results in a clinical setting. Janet: 06:42 So that's really, really exciting. Now, is that still an operation? Is that part of the Influence Health program? Michael: 06:48 Yeah, that was actually the beginning stages of what we would call kind of our next generation CRM solution and CRM and healthcare has been something that's been changing a lot over the last few years and one of the key components to any kind of CRM system is being able to use that not just for the outbound targeting but also that consumer experience which happens after somebody responded to a marketing campaign. So how do I learn more about that person, how do I personalize that information and then how do I use the data that I have in the CRM system, clinical information, claims information, diagnosis information in order to learn more about how that person made the healthcare decision that they made and then which channels can I better communicate to them through that? Michael: 07:34 So that was kind of the early stages of what we call a healthcare CRM and that makes up a big portion of what we do here at Influence Health. Janet: 07:42 Well, I do want to ask you a question about CRM and crossover. So when you talk about CRM, you literally are talking about patient information, not a marketing database or the email lists that's used by the marketing team to send out the newsletter for the hospital. Michael: 08:00 Yeah, I think those start to bleed together. So in a sense, depending on who you're talking about, sometimes it could be two different things and sometimes it is the same thing and that's kind of where I think you've seen marketing bleed into what you would call, you know, either CRM or into data to analytics to population health, customer service, patient satisfaction. All those things start to come together. The more you centralize that data source. Janet: 08:27 Although I am confused or concerned at what point does a patient's HIPAA information become a problem? I know you're obviously not looking at individual patient records and you don't have access at that level, but at what point is it reasonable to assume that if I am a patient of a particular hospital and you have this information about me that you have tied together, the fact that I like your Facebook page and I click on these links, is that what you're saying you're able to do? Michael: 08:59 It's a little bit more decoupled than that. So we do deal with a clinical information and patient records and that makes kind of the bulk of a healthcare CRM. So a healthcare CRM is really a combination of the clinical record combined with demographic and socioeconomic information. We use that information to run analytics, to do outbound campaigns, to pull an email list. Michael: 09:21 That's a very simple example when it comes to the Facebook side of things. What we're using is the native Facebook targeting capabilities and then we are using the conversions that we're getting through a target audience that we maybe have identified inside the Facebook and any conversions that happened through that. Whether it's somebody making a phone call, you know, maybe somebody's talking to a call center, somebody filling out a form or registering for an event. That information does make its way into the healthcare CRM database and that can be used for marketing standpoint, in which case none of the PHI has revealed or it can be used from an analytic standpoint in which case you mind into the clinical data to look at things like procedure codes and diagnosis codes and contribution margins and that type of more detailed clinical information. Janet: 10:10 I didn't even realize that this magical ability to combine social data and patient information actually existed. Janet: 10:20 So for instance, with your tool, you can create an advertising campaign on Facebook and say, I want to target prediabetic diabetes patients and I know I need to be including these kinds of demographics. Or is that an oversimplification? Michael: 10:40 Facebook opens up literally thousands of different demographic and socioeconomic targeting attributes directly in Facebook. So that's probably something that anybody who's new to Facebook marketing probably doesn't understand about how Facebook actually makes money. I think most people think about Facebook marketing to in terms of I'm going to go after my fan base, you know, and targeting your fans is what we would call organic social and you have a relationship with your fans and that's a way in which you can communicate to them, I would say kind of the first generation of Facebook. That's kind of what people did, right? That was kind of the standard way to do any type of marketing. Michael: 11:22 There's a lot of limitations to that. Couple ones are your fan base is limited. I'm your fan base is not necessarily made up of people that you want to market to. Especially with the health system. You'll find that a lot of people who are fans of a health systems Facebook page aren't usually patients. A lot of times their friends and family of people who work there, so it's not really a great targeting pool. So then it opens up the rest of kind of Facebook marketing and what people don't usually understand about how Facebook actually makes money and how they sell ad space to marketers is Facebook is buying, you know, millions upon millions of consumer records. So Facebook will partner with folks like Experian data logics, Axiom, Bluekai, who are the same type of consumer companies that you use to do any type of consumer analysis, right? Wherever you could do direct mail or, or whatever. Facebook buys all that data and then they match it to your record inside of Facebook. they do a cross reference and they make all of those hundreds and hundreds of attributes available back to marketers who are doing marketing. And that's how you get access to things like demographic, socioeconomic, income, education, ethnicity, all those types of targeting parameters become available via Facebook, through their acquisition of third-party consumer data. Janet: 12:43 Okay. I have actually purchased ads on behalf of some healthcare clients and we're doing things generally with demography, but more targeting who likes this page, who likes this association, who has an interest in this, a healthcare organization or this health issue. So, because I'm usually with my clients doing B to b business to business tracking. But what you're saying is the hospital could be actually looking for patient profiles in. Michael: 13:18 Yeah and the best analogy for that is healthcare CRM has existed for healthcare for probably the last seven, eight, nine years. Those types of marketing databases, the same type of queries that you would run on those, you can find good substitutes for those just querying directly into Facebook. So that's a real easy way to open up Facebook audiences to be much bigger than just your fan base. You know, Facebook really about four years ago, five years ago, really turned their ecosystem into a pay for play kind of environment where there was not a lot of free marketing left inside of Facebook. You had to go pay, you had to run ads. It was inserting suggested content in newsfeed posts and sponsored stories directly into the newsfeed, was the way in which to actually reach your audience that you wanted to get to. so from a healthcare standpoint, that opens up a couple things. Michael: 14:12 The first thing that opens up is it's the largest audience that you can reach at any given point in time, online period, end of story, right? So if you had to pick one channel, if you are going to focus your dollars on Facebook's going to be the channel that you're going to want to spend those dollars. It's the largest and most engaged audience that you can find online. Certainly in North America. And you can spend $5. Yeah. And it's very cost effective where if you try to compare that to what you might do in Google, so the Google would be the other primary paid channel. Google is also highly effective and most health systems are very familiar with how to do Google ad words into how to use google to identify and capture demand. The thing with healthcare in Google though is that it can be very expensive because medical related keywords and Google can have a pretty high price tag, so highly effective, but it could be less efficient with your marketing dollars because it can be very expensive. Michael: 15:13 Facebook has a wider reach and a more engaged audience, so that was the first part. Second part is that it also opens up mobile where most of the traffic that you're going to see on Facebook is mobile. If you're going to do a mobile first web strategy, you should have a mobile first marketing strategy and for us we think that that's a Facebook strategy. I think the stat is something like one out of every five minutes spent on a mobile device is spent within Facebook, which is just an insane number. Very embarrassing for me to admit that that's true. I get to say I do this for a living, so I have a reason to keep opening Facebook. Exactly, and it cuts across. You know, if you're, if you're going to go mobile, right? If, if, if that's your strategy. The reason why I think it's effective is I think mobile's the one medium that kind of cuts across demographic and socioeconomic boundaries where you know, mobile, you can reach a urban audience in a rural audience, you can reach an older and a younger population. Michael: 16:11 You can reach a affluent and a middleclass and a poor population. Everybody has a smartphone, and this wasn't true five years ago, six years ago, but now the numbers are astounding about where people choose to use their dollars and that first purchase really from a technology standpoint, is to have a smartphone where that, you know, that technology barrier they used to talk about was, you know, there's homes in households that couldn't afford a computer, you know, and that's still true, but they can afford a smartphone and you really capture everybody in that medium and Facebook is the way to do it. So Facebook's the way you're actually going to have the paid channel to go open up that audience on mobile. So that's the other reason. In addition to the targeting capabilities, which I mentioned earlier, when you talk about doing Facebook marketing and advertising, obviously I assume you you're working with the marketing channel, but do you find the clinical side of the house is interested in this data as well? Michael: 17:10 I think the clinical side of the house is more interested in understanding the data, less about the marketing. What I hear when we talk to marketing departments is the difference between the clinical folks, the marketing folks, the population health financial folks. I think the thing that they all have in common is they all want to see some type of results and they want to see some type of measurement. That's where I really like to focus on the data side of it and that's why the CRM side of things is, is pretty interesting. Social for me starts to become kind of that second pillar of a two pronged kind of paid digital strategy and I think everybody is comfortable with using social as a channel just for engagement but also for acquisition and that wasn't always the case when we were doing this kind of five or six years ago. Michael: 17:55 We got a lot of blank stares around how we were going to use that channel. I'm not just for communication but also for for acquisition. I think everybody's really comfortable with that now to the point where they actually expect it and I think the users have come to expect it as well and health systems have caught up to the point where they're very comfortable working in that medium where it was. That wasn't the case three or four or five years ago. Janet: 18:21 What would you say healthcare is still uncomfortable with? Michael: 18:25 That's a good question. I have this discussion a lot with marketing departments in. It's usually the difference between what I call, you know, HIPAA and PHI versus their privacy policy and I think these two things get conflated quite a bit in the healthcare marketing environment where what is usually a limitation of a privacy policy is kinda confused with legal guidelines and recommendations under HIPAA because they're two totally different things. Michael: 18:55 Right? So how you choose to communicate to a patient or prospective patient is usually covered under a privacy policy and what you see for most health systems and a privacy policy are very old, very antiquated privacy policies that were put together by an overly conservative compliance and legal department and those type of rules and restrictions usually have to deal with. If somebody has given me their information online or through the patient portal or through a form or from an inquiry, what am I limited in doing with that information and that has nothing to do with HIPAA. That has to do with the privacy policy and the website says, if you fill out some information here, we're not going to use it for marketing. Well, plenty of health systems have more liberal policies and their privacy policies, which then gives them the ability to do standard type marketing communication such as send me an email, but respect if I opt out, you can communicate to me in many different channels, but respect if I opt out or tune out that message. Michael: 20:03 Those things are applicable and available depending on the privacy policy. All that says is if a patient is providing information, how do you treat that information? Do you keep it secure, then mitigate risk, how do you choose to use that information based on what they've authorized you to use it for? So it's usually two different things and I talked to kind of compliance departments and marketing teams about understanding the difference and what necessarily is legal versus what is allowed under your own guidelines. Janet: 20:39 Okay. So in the Facebook world, and if I am a small business or even a healthcare organization, I have an email list of marketing email list. I can upload the email addresses only, no other information whatsoever. Facebook will try to match them and they'll say, oh, guess what? We found about a third of your patients or customers we have now matched and we've created this magical file that we have tagged who your customers are. We now are going to destroy your email list. We don't keep it, we don't use it, we promise, we promise, and then you, you, you can use that to build your own custom audience. And then you can tell Facebook, okay, now find people who look like my people but who are not my people. Sounds great. But somewhere along the line, because this is patient information, is there an approval process necessary? Michael: 21:34 Yeah. And that again goes back to your privacy policy. So a couple things on the process that you just walked through which is in line with what we've, what we do with some health systems. If their privacy policy and their compliance officers approve it. So a couple things on that. First thing is you never send an email address to Facebook. So that's kind of a misconception is the email just never gets to Facebook. On our own servers, we do what's called a hash encryption and that information is sent to Facebook, so the email address has never sent and the information that you send to Facebook can never be unhappy, so it's completely like a one-way encryption essentially of that information. So because of that, there's absolutely no way to ever have a breach. Would that information and the HIPAA and privacy guidelines, the intent of them is to mitigate risks, risk to make sure that you don't have some type of inexperience or an Equifax breach and there's absolutely no way in the protocol that's used to send that information to Facebook that you could ever have a breach. Michael: 22:35 So that's the first thing. The second thing is when they do identify those people, they never tell you what people are actually identified. So if you send a thousand people that's been hashed information, Facebook, they matched 700 of them. You never actually know which 700 and neither does Facebook. So it sits in a way in which it's a one-way mapping which can never be downloaded or breached or have any type of intelligence about who that person is. So that scenario, we've worked with many kinds of compliance departments and legal folks at health systems and that's usually sufficient once you walk through that and explain to them how it works, they're cool. In fact, what I find, what happens more often is people use the same email addresses and they're sending them to Mailchimp or constant contact or other far less secure places than sending it to Facebook. Janet: 23:28 Okay. I'm glad you said all of that because that was obviously the one disconnect that I needed to have clarified and that little five minutes is now going to be the piece I share with everyone because I have talked to lawyers about it and they do fall back to the privacy policy, but for most part they're not really aware of the ins and outs of how data a gets to a location b. all right. So I feel really good about that. So I'm going to encourage a lot of people to consider doing that. but tell me about where you want to take all this fascinating data and intelligence. Are you doing anything with data visualization and, and looking at a bigger picture about trends about how people are, are using a Facebook and, and is that actually triggering visits to a healthcare provider? Michael: 24:20 Yeah. So I think as it relates specifically to Facebook, I'm a couple of years ago when I would talk about Facebook, I kind of changed how we frame Facebook. So it used to be kind of framed as hey are you doing social media marketing? And then a couple of years ago I kinda changed our approach and that kind of stopped calling it social media marketing and just lumped it in with digital marketing because it's less about the social side of it and more about this is just the dominant place to reach people online. And the fact that it happens to be social in nature is kind of besides the point now where, you know, Facebook is. I mean it hasn't gone anywhere. It's been around for over 10 years, continues to grow their numbers, look, continue to look strong. Their revenue numbers are strong. Michael: 25:09 Other competition that comes up like an Instagram, they buy Instagram, Snapchat comes up and they just replicate all of Snapchat's features. So they buy Whatsapp, you know, they create messenger so they're kind of here to stay. So it's Kinda like, you know, rather than saying, do, do you do search marketing? It's like it's google, you know, google is kind of like Google one, right? Facebook kind of one this side of it. And when it comes to digital ad spend, there's two dominant players. It's Google and then Facebook and everybody else behind that are niche players at best when it comes to the ad dollars that they consume. So it's really less than it being social because there's lots of cool social things about it. And almost anything you do online today has some type of a social component, right? Is plugged into some type of a social graph. Michael: 26:07 It has some type of engagement or commentary or some network effects in place. So everything's kind of social. So treating Facebook as a social media marketing I think is kind of besides the point, and I think of it as I have a limited number of channels that I can go out to with my limited marketing dollars because we deal with health systems and in the grand scheme of things, health system is still kind of a small business when it comes to the amount of marketing dollars that they spend. You know it's not IBM. It's not Coca-Cola, you know they don't. They don't have a ton of money and so you have to be really careful about what channels you use because your marketing dollars are limited and you want to make sure that they're going to the most efficient channels. And to me, the top two are going to be Google and Facebook and everything else. You have to make a really strong case to want to spend money in those channels after you've saturated Google and Facebook. Janet: 27:02 When you work with clients, you're coming in because you have a lot of answers and capabilities in the digital space and the online space. But the way I hear you're talking, I'm hearing that while there shouldn't be social media marketing or digital marketing, now I'm wondering is, is it all just marketing now and at what point are we going to stop having a digital online budget and a traditional budget and it's all just one budget? Michael: 27:31 That's exactly the way people should be thinking about it. And I think what I've learned from doing this over the last six or seven years is people used to ask, you know, they would say, well, what channel is better or what's better should I use this or that? And what I've learned is, you know, it depends, you know, different service lines have different calls to action, different, goals. And you know, running an orthopedic campaign is a lot different than running a pediatrics campaign or a breast cancer awareness campaign. You know, we're running a bariatric surgery, campaign and all those things have different nuances about who's the audience, how do you want to engage them, where do they respond, what are the costs in the individual channels that you could use? And I think they're all kind of different and you do them enough and you start to figure out that there's a different combination that works and all those combinations of channels and budget levels are really just kind of starting points and then you figure out what's working in that individual market for that specific health system and then you go from there. Michael: 28:34 So I think that's a long way of saying, yeah, it should be treated as all one budget and then you figure out what's my most efficient allocation that are the channels that are going to drive the best results. And then you go from there. I don't think it's one hard fast rule about what you should use or shouldn't use, let alone do I carve out different budgets for your digital versus offline. I think it should all be looked at together and then you make a decision based on what you believe is gonna be the most efficient allocation. Janet: 29:02 Now one of the things I'm hearing from you is really an evangelism for understanding the holistic role of marketing and of digital in the whole. And I understand that in the sense you are a thought leader and you're going out to share this evangelism, you're really on a speaking tour, are hitting a lot of conferences. So where are you going to be going in the next few months to tell people about, these new ideas. Michael: 29:31 Thanks for mentioning that. I try to stay engaged with the healthcare marketing community as best I can. We were at SHSMD a couple of weeks ago and coming up here October 23rd through the 25th is going to be HCIC healthcare Internet conference that's going to be an Austin, Texas and I'll be doing a panel discussion there, which I'm really looking forward to. It's going to be on the role of healthcare CRM and what does that mean moving forward. And like I was saying before, you know, CRM is a big piece of what I've been working on recently and marketing is a huge component to a, to a CRM system. So if anybody is going to be in Austin, Texas, October 23rd to 24th will be at the HCIC, a healthcare Internet conference that center since it's, since we brought it up that they actually, the health care conference I think has always been the best, for the customers and for the industries and the products that I work with lately. Michael: 30:34 I think it's always the right mix of people. It's not too big. It's not too small. Always has a pretty good sense of what is trying to accomplish. The speakers are usually pretty good at the conference is not too long and again, it's not too short. so hci is coming up and then also in 2018 I will be speaking at HIMSS this year and looking forward to that hymns. For anybody who's not aware is enough. That's going to be March fifth through March ninth in Las Vegas and I'll be doing a speaking session there with Christus health. Christus health is a health system in Texas, actually much larger than that, but their headquarters in Texas. And we're going to be talking about how to leverage healthcare CRM beyond marketing and since we're talking primarily about kind of social and social media marketing on this call today on this podcast, I really start to see marketing bleed into a lot of different areas and marketing I think has got a lot of attention over the last five years in healthcare, but I think they're taking on more and more responsibilities and various departments are starting to kind of bleed together. Michael: 31:50 Is it a patient satisfaction? Is it customer service? Is it population health? All of these things start to converge and marketing's, they're converging with it as, as well. with how do you actually manage a patient population? How do I communicate with the community? How do I know more about my healthcare consumers so that I can better not just better market to them, but then how can I better engage with them once they come in to the health system. And that's something that healthcare, particularly the healthcare providers are learning how to do. And as compared to other industries, they're really not very good at it, you know, and they're, they're getting a lot better. Janet: 32:26 Well, let me ask you to put your prognosticators hat on and as you are a little bit on cutting edge here, when we talk about CRM and things happening in the digital space, what you see as big changes coming down the pike, either that we can avoid the, might as well embrace it or that really could be game changers from a standpoint of healthcare marketing and slash or social media. Michael: 32:52 Let me touch on the last point there first. So as it relates to healthcare and social media, first of all, Facebook isn't going anywhere. I think after four years or five years of Facebook, people are like, oh, is this a fad? Is this going to be my space? Or something like that. Nope. Facebook one, it's dominant. It's a platform for the next 15 to 20 years. Easily. Facebook is not going anywhere. Twitter's kind of a dud when it comes to marketing. So I was really positive on Twitter about two or three years ago and have not seen any of the campaigns that we've run in Twitter, provide a meaningful challenge to what we're seeing in Facebook or google. So I think Twitter is kind of missed the boat when it comes to a paid marketing channel. Like I said before, Instagram is part of Facebook and I see a lot of great things in Instagram. Michael: 33:43 So Facebook makes it pretty easy to extend your marketing campaigns into Instagram now. So I think that's big. Snapchat I think is you're kind of number three player in the social space. I dunno if it's great for health systems yet they haven't really figured out how to turn it into a direct response or a conversion channel. It's more for brands, you know. So it's getting big branding dollars from national and international advertisers don't see it being a big channel for, for health systems yet. I'm one of the channels I'm more interested in from a marketing side is actually next door. So I don't know if any of the listeners have used next door. Next door is a neighborhood social network and as far as an ideal audience for health systems, I think next door could be really interesting, so that's something to be on the lookout for. Janet: 34:33 I actually joined my organization that I've been living in my neighborhood for 15 years and next door has been around actually for quite a while, but I finally bit the bullet and joined I know six or eight months ago and I now actually no my neighbors all days. You take cookies next door you'd meet, people know everybody stays inside, but I feel like I know them virtually through next door and the amount of recommendations and or questions for services is amazing. Plus people give away a lot of great free stuff. Michael: 35:06 Yup, Yup. It's highly trusted. They're starting to open up from a marketing standpoint, I think it's to be determined how health systems could use it, but it seems a natural fit for community interaction for a health system, for a physician practice, for an urgent care to be nearby. Highly, highly relevant. I think for healthcare, I don't know if it's going to pay dividends from a marketing standpoint, but I would keep my eye on that. When it comes to kind of new and innovative things to look out for kind of coming up in the kind of the healthcare or the marketing technology space, I've had this question a lot and it's not a really sexy, interesting answer. It's really actually kind of boring if I think it's things like call center. So the front lines of patient communication is who answers the phone when somebody responds to a marketing campaign, it's kind of an overlooked but really critical thing that health systems do really poorly and as they get marketing sorted out, whether it's search or social or digital or offline or email or direct mail, they're getting those things figured out and they have their own problems and that's getting sorted out. But the problem that persists is, hey, that's great. You did a great marketing campaign. What happens when the person signs up for something or when they make a phone call? It's a highly broken process from an operational standpoint, which requires a lot of technology to integrate to things like scheduling a two callbacks to follow-ups and that all connects directly to marketing if you ever want to figure out what's happening. Michael: 36:45 So it's not a very interesting kind of, you know, high tech answer. It's kind of fixed the call center. Janet: 36:50 Well, and that's the challenge, right? Nobody wants to work on the boring everyday stuff. They all work on the sexy new things, but I understand your title is a Senior VP and GM of Consumer Experience. That's unique. Yeah, and I think you're going to see that trend a lot. Even in health marketing. Our marketing teams are moving away from the marketing term and it's kind of becoming more a patient experience. Consumer experience. When I talk and when I do, I'm a collateral or presentations. I tend to downplay words like patient because I think in healthcare now I think patient implies somebody's sick and so much of what we're doing is about wellness and preventative and being involved and taking care of your health and if you're taking care of your health, I don't think you're a patient. Michael: 37:40 Right. And then things when it comes to, you know, terms like acquisition rather than acquisition, things like experience where the health system is now trying to engage with the community to be able to influence the healthcare decisions that they're making. And that crosses a wide gamut of is it preventative, is it wellness, is it child care, is it pediatricians or is what we normally think of kind of acute care, right? I'm hurt, I'm sick, I need to go to the doctor. So I think you're seeing a lot of terminology change there and that's happening because health systems are, are growing in their responsibilities and also that's why you see marketing kind of bleeding into other groups and it's becoming more about consumer healthcare, consumer experience rather than particularly how do we treat or find sick patients? Janet: 38:31 Well, everything you're saying is so exciting because it sounds, if not easy, doable. Speaker 3: 38:38 Yeah. I think a lot of this stuff is pretty like I said, I think marketing's been getting better. it's come light years in the last four or five years. I think now they're struggling with data and making sense of the data because there's a lot of data from a lot of different disparate systems within the health system and then how do I actually close that middle layer? Some of it is kind of basic blocking and tackling and it's kind of the boring stuff sometimes. But you know, a lot of successful companies, a lot of successful people got that way by solving kind of the boring problems, ones that no one else wants to tackle. Janet: 39:14 Exactly. And make them seem fun on the front end because they weren't focused on user experience. Michael: 39:20 If you had asked me 20 years ago if I was going to be doing healthcare marketing and talking about a healthcare call center, I would've told you you're crazy, but there's a lot of stuff that you can do there. And I think it's a hugely kind of overlooked, a niche in the industry and I've been happy to be a part of it over the last six or seven years. Well, that is exciting and I look forward to reading your posts and social and following your talks at coming up events. I think you've got a really great solution and I expect even better things coming from you all in 2018 and forward. Michael: 39:51 Well, thanks again, Janet. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. No problem. Talk to you soon. Announcer: 39:57 And now here's our social media success tip. Jeff Callaway: 40:01 Hi, this is Jeff Callaway. I'm the Senior Content Specialist at Cook Children's Healthcare system based in Fort Worth, Texas. My advice would be to not be too PR, which sounds weird because I work in PR and I know a lot of you listening do as well, but we try very hard to write as journalistic as possible to make the stories interesting and to make what we do appointment viewing and to create a trust with our audience that when they read it, it's going to be real and accurate journalism. Announcer: 40:34 You've been listening to the Get Social Health podcast. The show notes are located@getsocialhealth.com To join our healthcare social media journey, follow at, Get Social Health on Twitter and start a conversation. Janet: 40:50 Thanks for listening to the Get Social Health podcast, a production of the healthcare marketing network, and a proud member of the healthcare podcasters community. Janet: 40:58 I like to take a moment to tell you a bit about the healthcare marketing network. We're a community of freelance healthcare writers. Our Organization can match your company or a healthcare practice with clinically accurate, specialized or general health care and medical content from blogs to white papers to Cmi. The healthcare marketing network has the writers that you need to reach your business audience or patients to find out more, visit healthcare marketing network.com, or contact me via social media, or you can email me, Janet@healthcaremarketingnetwork.com. Thanks again for listening to the Get Social Health podcast.  

Today we revisit the interview of Jacqui Chew of ATDC & iFusion. Narrative Muse is your source for the best books and movies by and about women and non-binary people. ATDC is one of the world's top startup incubators helping entrepreneurs build and launch transformative technology companies. iFusion is a collective of b2b and b2c marketing strategists, creatives and content professionals. Tweet @womenintechshow and @EspreeDevora Link to the full interview here: http://podcast.womenintechshow.com/efdca8ff http://atdc.org/ http://ifusion.co/ http://twitter.com/womenintechshow https://twitter.com/espreedevora

Software is eating the world. While artificial intelligence is making progress, the AI software isn't going to write itself. After all, that’s what software developers do. So what's it like to be a software developer? The role has grown exponentially to cover an array of different functions from Dev Ops to Cyber Security to Web Developer. That's why we’ve assembled ten software developers to connect with job seekers(present and future)to find out what it’s really like to work as a developer in a variety of settings. We recorded this episode during the TechSquareJobFair.com Spring 2018 series as part of the March 6 Mentor Circle. Thank you to our partners at ATDC and ChooseATL for making it all possible. Featuring: Melisa Griffin, Keysight Technologies Vincent Haines, Honeywell Carl Bedingfield, AT&T Foundry Nicolas Palpacuer, AT&T Foundry Kevin Carlson, Florence Healthcare Ben Hirsch, Sideqik Sage Gerard, Evident Kevin Gibby, Keysight Technologies Eric Pate, FIXD Peter Finn, SalesLoft Damian Starosielsky, Evident Jeremy Haile, Sideqik

According to the National Science Foundation, women make up half of the U.S. college-educated workforce, but only 29% of the science and engineering workforce. While many great first computer scientists were women, we still have not closed the gap between genders. The conversations of sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace, and how to solve these large problems, are becoming more of a hot-topic with recent viral articles about companies like Uber. To explore this topic, we brought in Jen Bonnett, Director and General Manager of ATDC, Wei-Chun Tai, partner at Mosely Ventures, and Annie Harrison Elliott, playwright of Empty Rooms, which will be performed in the Garage. Listen to what these women had to say about the challenges and opportunities they face on a daily basis:

Today we are spotlighting Jacqui Chew of ATDC & iFusion. ATDC is one of the world's top startup incubators helping entrepreneurs build and launch transformative technology companies. iFusion is a collective of b2b and b2c marketing strategists, creatives and content professionals.This episode is powered by BetaList, https://betalist.com/womenintech where you can discover tomorrow's startups today. Connect with us at womenintechshow.com. Tweet @womenintechshow and @EspreeDevora http://atdc.org/ http://ifusion.co/ http://twitter.com/womenintechshow https://twitter.com/espreedevora

Our Hump Day Exchange podcast on Harvesting Innovation explored how large corporations, startups, universities, and government cultivate innovative ideas and help them to market. We talked to experts KP Reddy, Co-Founder of The Combine, Debra Lam, Managing Director of smart cities and inclusive innovation for GT's Institute of People and Technology, and Thiago Olson, Entrepreneur in Residence at ATDC. Atlanta is on the rise in terms of startup growth and innovation. Listen to find out what inclusive innovation is, to learn the differences between corporate and startup venture, and discover where the next big markets lie.

Jacqui Chew is a TEDx licensee and startup catalyst at ATDC, Georgia's startup incubator. As CEO at iFusion, a go-to-market consultancy that helps high-growth potential technology companies accelerate growth, Jacqui is a seasoned digital strategist with hands-on experience in Lean marketing and product launches. Well-versed in SaaS, media and IoT business models, Jacqui has a successful track record developing 2D/3D marketing plans to support product and company launches, brand identity development, community building through social channels and b2b lead nurturing programs. Follow Jacqui on Twitter at @jacquichew. She can also be found on LinkedIn, tedxpeachtree.com, and JacquiChew.com.   You'll Learn: How Jacqui transitioned from consumer packaged goods and lifestyle marketing to the start up space. How Jacqui's short time at SilverPop taught her the importance of understanding how business works and how customers think. Why marketers need to take on more strategic activities as chat bots, A.I. and other #MarTech take over the tactical activities. Why Jacqui feels humans have a threshold for noise and at some point they'll become numb to #InfluencerMarketing. Why using algorithmic technologies and A.I. to solve what is fundamentally a human problem is fraught with its dangers because algorithms are written by humans who have inherent biases.   3 Key Points: In marketing it's not about the push, but about the customer and finding that happy medium between a customer's wants and needs and a company's value proposition. Marketers need to be strategic and contextualize #MarTech to produce insight from big data. Humans have a threshold for noise. At some point they'll tune you out.   Resources Mention: ATDC.org http://tedxpeachtree.com/   Killer Resources: Ready to go pro but aren't sure if College is the right choice for you? Get my Ultimate Digital Marketing College Guide. Like the podcast? Then you'll love the book! Grab Beyond Buzzwords on Amazon. In the last three months of the 2016 Presidential election fake news outperformed real news on Facebook. DON'T be taken advantage of. Our Digital Discernment course teaches you how to call B.S. online.   Support this podcast: Like what you hear? Consider becoming a patron at https://www.patreon.com/MarketingDisenchanted.  I'm a small, independent podcaster so your support goes a long way in making sure I have the funds to keep the podcast going. Go to Patreon.com and check out my awesome pledge levels. You're doing a good deed and will be rewarded handsomely for it! Thanks in advance.   Like what you hear? Book me to speak! While podcasting is a personal joy of mine, nothing beats connecting with like-minded people in person. Go to ConsultTemi.com to book me for your next conference, meeting or event.   Let's Connect! Follow me on Twitter Connect on LinkedIn Shoot me an email: Temi at ConsultTemi.com (Sorry, had to break the email link to stymie the bots… damned bots.)

Jacqui Chew/ATDC Jacqui Chew is ATDC’s marketing catalyst where she provides customer and channel strategy as well as investor relations counsel.  She is an award winning digital strategist and principal at iFusion, a go-to-market collective. Jacqui’s experience spans well-known brands and high-growth startups including Cycloramic, eBay, IBM, Stainmaster, PeopleSoft (now Oracle), and Venture Atlanta. As the senior marketing executive at Silverpop, a marketing automation pioneer, she oversaw its debut and supported the Series B round venture capital raise of $30 million. Jacqui has spoken at TED and is a sought after speaker on digital strategy, disruptive business models, and entrepreneurship. She has been featured on FOX 5 Atlanta and quoted in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, USA Today, and Fortune. Jacqui is active in the technology and social innovation communities. She organizes TEDxPeachtree, the largest TEDx event in Georgia and contributes to the TAG Hi-Growth Industry Task Force. Previously, she served on the boards of the Atlanta Press Club, Women in Technology and the Atlanta chapter of the American Marketing Association. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing from the University of Hawaii, Manoa and speaks Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese. http://atdc.org Stefanie Diaz/Mastermind Your Launch Stefanie Diaz has always had a keen ability for developing marketing strategies for entrepreneurs, but it’s her ability to position startups for accelerated momentum through personal branding and content marketing that has become the cornerstone to her professional success. Her background includes being a strategic adviser to CEO’s spanning startup phase to over $100 million in annual revenue. She has led strategic partnerships with global retailers and Fortune 500 companies, as well as facilitated multi-million dollar government contracts. There is something magnetic about the energy of startup founders that draws Stefanie in. They’re hungry, driven, and committed to making positive change for themselves and the greater community. After conducting over 60 interviews to date, Stefanie is excited to bring Mastermind Your Launch to the Business Radio X platform. Learn more at MastermindYourLaunch.com.

041117 Bonnett

Roshawnna:                  Hi, I'm Dr. Roshawnna Novellus, host of Startup Funding and producer of the EnrichHER Initiative. We have another awesome entrepreneur today, Marissa with Toss, and I can't wait to hear all about what she's doing and how she's positively impacting the City of Atlanta. Marissa, can you tell us more about Toss and how the idea came about? Marissa:                  I ended up in a class my last semester of college learning JavaScript and fell in love with the coding life and had the idea. I was going to school at Iowa State University and graduated and knew I needed to be in a bigger city. Two years ago, I moved to Atlanta, just uprooted my life and haven't looked back.                                     I started getting into the entrepreneurial scene and going to meetups and different events, talking to people about the idea. Slowly but surely, people recommended me here and there. A lot of people got excited about it. It's a personal styling application. It uses what you own, based on event type and weather. Who wouldn't love that?                                     Everyone I met was like, "You need to do this. Go do this. Go do that," recommending me for different incubators and spaces to just check out. One female I met, a developer, told me to do a hackathon. I did the Women Who Code hackathon. It was the most incredible experience. It definitely made me feel like I belonged and I fit in in the community of the tech and startup scene. I went through that whole weekend. I was on a team of seven complete strangers. We ended up winning, which was really cool, super validating in the sense of I need to do this. I haven't really looked back. Roshawnna:                  Any advice for working with strangers that could help propel you? Marissa:                  Actually, all of the women that were there, it was their first hackathon, too, that was on the team. We were all in the same boat. The idea was around the social impact issue and helping newcomers, immigrants and refugees coming to the United States. It was an issue that everyone can understand and wanted to help out. We wanted to win so we obviously all got together and didn't have an issue. It was the most seamless and collaborative process you could ever imagine for some of the women, over 48 hours, trying to develop something out of nothing. Roshawnna:                  Right. Marissa:                  It was so cool. It was like have an open mind and respect people's opinions and go from there. Roshawnna:                  Yeah. I wish we could get together and solve all kinds of issues. Marissa:                  All the world's problems. Roshawnna:                  Now your platform is based on AI, right? Marissa:                  Um-hmm (affirmative). Roshawnna:                  Tell me a little bit more about that. Marissa:                  Okay. The idea of the more you interact with the app, the more you swipe through outfits that you like or don't like, the machine learning algorithm behind the scenes learns to not recommend those things for you again. The more you use it, the better it gets and the more it's personalized to you. It lends to the personal styling aspect. Roshawnna:                  What I use is the number of compliments I receive. This outfit, in particular, I was walking around and Fox News said, "Can we interview you for the Fox Fashion?" I was like, "Really?" I'll put that outfit in more rotation. Is there any way to add external feedback into the platform? Marissa:                  I'm working on more of a social aspect, so more catered to your closest friends. If you're friends call you up and say, "What are you wearing tonight," you could post to the event and all your friends can see what you're wearing, comment, and be like, "Okay, well, you're not wearing that cute leather jacket. Can I borrow it?" Roshawnna:                  Right. Marissa:                  "I know you have it." Yeah, some sort of inoperating system and they can go from there. Roshawnna:                  What are the most exciting things that you're working on right now? Marissa:                  We just wrapped up MVP, so we have a clickable prototype, which is really fun to just show people now. I've been talking about it for a couple of years. Now it's like, "This is what I want it to look like." Right now, I'm aggressively pursuing the financial model. Roshawnna:                  Okay. Marissa:                  I'm a member of ATDC. I've been going there. One of the prizes from the Women Who Code hackathon was a year membership. I've been using that and going through customer discovery. I've been taking classes for a while so the next tract is financial literacy. They help you build out your five-year financial model and that's really over my head.                                     I'm actually having a working session with a couple of friends tonight. One is a CPA, a good friend. He's going to help and another is a strategic financial manager for a startup here in Atlanta, both numbers guys from different ends of the spectrum. I'm buying some pizza and beer and we're going to hash some stuff out. Then classes start March 1st. Roshawnna:                  Perfect. I know you just finished your MVP and you're working on your finances so what does success look like after you get all this? Marissa:                  What I want Toss to be is this lifestyle and this brand that people embrace and accept and they share the stories of how the app gave them an outfit. They went into an interview or a date or ran a 5K in this cute workout outfit and they felt awesome. I want to hear those stories. I want to hear the success behind the people that have experienced personal success through the app. That's what success will feel like to me. Roshawnna:                  Right. If people feel awesome, they're more confident and they're able to go after their goals, so it's a whole life upgrade, right? Marissa:                  Um-hmm (affirmative). Roshawnna:                  How is this positively impacting Atlanta? Marissa:                  Through a little bit of what I've been doing and people have been needing, I've seen such uprise of this startup scene in Atlanta, the Silicon Valley of the South. I want to be at the forefront of that. I want to be a contributing player and be a resource that people can come to and be like, "You did this. How did you do it? How can you help me?" That's what I want to bring to Atlanta. Roshawnna:                  Great. What is one thing, or you could say more than one, that the listeners/viewers can do right now to support your success? Marissa:                  Throughout this process, the social impact or I guess equity in terms of the people I've met, I've seen this become the most valuable. The more people I'm introduced to and get to meet and steer me in the right direction to the next right person is really what I'm looking to get out of it in the near future, people that can help me and say, "I know somebody who loves fashion and technology and could connect you with the right people." That's ultimately what I need right now. Roshawnna:                  Great, all about the connections that work and leveraging that. Marissa:                  Yes. Roshawnna:                  One other thing. You said that you've been working on this for a couple of years. Can you talk to how you've been able to persevere and stick with it? Marissa:                  Persevering just by going to different events and meeting some awesome people that are passionate, it really fuels your fire to move forward. The more I talk about it to close friends and family, the more that holds me accountable. Then I have this grander purpose to not disappoint just myself but all these other people that are cheering for me and the other women out there that are starting their own companies and breaking into the tech scene. Roshawnna:                  Right, and ADTC has such a great collaboration system and education system. I know that all of that is helping you on your path to be successful. Well, Marissa, thank you so much for being a part of this episode and I wish you the most luck and success in your business. Marissa:                  Thank you so much.

Episode 4, "Crowds on Fire" probed the intersection of entertainment and activism, tapping into the passion of audiences and fans. Three digital media mavens shared how Crowds on Fire are coming together to make a difference in their local communities, generate attention for social issues, and help gamers and content creators generate revenues to fuel their craft. Guests included Mike Walbert from A3C Festival & Conference, Amelia Davis from General Assembly and #ilooklikeadeveloper, and Roger Lopez from ATDC company Sideqik. What do entrepreneurs and hip hop artists have in common? How can the entertainment industry positively impact the community? And what can we do today to ensure the Atlanta tech community of tomorrow is as diverse as our population? Find answers to these questions and many, many more by listening to the podcast

Episode 3, "Design Driven" highlighted the importance of good design in everything we build, from robots to railway stations. Guests included J Cornelius from Nine Labs, Amanda Rhein from MARTA, and Dave Black from ATDC company Medicare Pathfinder. What does MARTA plan to do with it's 17,000 unused parking spaces? What's the difference between user experience and user interface? And what the heck are psychographics? Find answers to these questions and many, many more by listening to the podcast below.

Hump Day Exchange is one part social gathering of the Tech Square community and one part podcast recording. After some food and drink, we explore the same topic from three perspectives. This month, the topic was "Your Robot Overlords" delving into the intersection of robotics and artificial intelligence. Guests included Barry Clark from SoftWear Automation, Dan McCarley from Gozio, and Keith McGreggor from Georgia Tech. Presented in partnership between Sandbox ATL, ATDC, and GT's Scheller College of Business. Want to be part of the next Hump Day Exchange? Check the SandboxATL.com event calendar for tickets so you can attend the next time it gathers. It's held the second Wednesday from 5-7p in The Garage under Tech Square

Presented in partnership between Sandbox ATL, ATDC and GT's Scheller College of Business, the Hump Day Exchange is one part social gathering of the Tech Square community and one part podcast recording. After enjoying some Doggy Dogg ATL and Bahama Blast Sno Cones, the Tech Square community members soaked in the knowledge dropped during three 5-minute presentations on the same theme (but from different angles). This month, the topic was "Life in the Smart City" and featured talks by these three presenters: Jim Stratigos, Cognosos Topic: How cheap sensors can make cities better Matt Foreman, AT&T Smart Cities - Atlanta Operations Topic: What's happening in Midtown and Georgia Tech Rohit Malhotra, Center for Civic Innovation Topic: How we make it a Smart City for everyone

We opened the show with Nina Sawczuk from Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC). Next up Mary Lynn Miler with SHRM Atlanta was interviewed. And we closed the show with Layne Davlin wirh Einstein HR. A special shout out to our sponsor – the Business Marketing Association – Atlanta Chapter.  Please go to their website to register for their monthly events www.bmaatlanta.com/events Also . . . if you know of a business in Atlanta that we should know about, please email Amy Otto at Amy@ atlantabusinessradio.com and we’ll invite them to appear on the show.

Paul Freet is an entrepreneur - in serial and in parallel. He'll share his thoughts on the strategic marketing decisions entrepreneurs and start-ups must make.

Paul Freet is an entrepreneur - in serial and in parallel. He'll share his thoughts on the strategic marketing decisions entrepreneurs and start-ups must make.

Please click on the POD button to listen to the latest Atlanta Business Radio  show podcast broadcasting live each Wednesday at 10am EDT from Atlanta, GA, USA.   Atlanta Business Radio is sponsored by Fast Pitch! Networking - a one-stop shop for networking and marketing your business online and offline. Please go to their website www.fastpitchnetworking.com. When you sign up, please mention you were referred by Lee Kantor. That will help the show! Thanks.Here's how to listen to the podcast of our show. First click on the title of the show you are interested in. Then there should be a player in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Now just press play and the show you chose should start playing. You can also download the show to listen on your mp3 player. We are now available on iTunes, click this link and you can find all our past shows. Press SUBSCRIBE and you will automatically get the latest show when you sync your iPod to your computer.Remember if you want a pretty comprehensive listing of all kinds of Atlanta Events including Business Networking events please check out www.AtlantaEvent.com.  This morning we learned all about business incubators. First up we had on Cindy Cheatham, the Director of Business Development at the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), a nationally recognized science and technology incubator that helps Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies. ATDC provides strategic business advice and connects its member companies to the people and the resources they need to succeed.  More than 100 companies have come out of the ATDC, including publicly-traded firms such as MindSpring Enteprises - now part of EarthLink. Headquartered at Technology Square on the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta, ATDC has been recognized by both BusinessWeek and Inc. Magazines as among the nation's top nonprofit incubators. Since 1999, ATDC companies have attracted more than a billion dollars in venture capital funding. For more information (including: admission criteria, business templates and application information) please go to their website www.atdc.orgNext up we had on a member the ATDC, Sanjay Bhatia, founder and CEO of Izenda. Izenda was recently honored as one of the top 40 most innovative companies in Georgia and has grown over 300%. Sanjay talked how he knew he had a good concept for a thriving business when he discovered that it would take one company he was working with 5 months to give him the data he needed.That was the eureka moment where Sanjay saw the need for Izenda. He spoke at length of the benefits of working at the ATDC and the resources, contacts and best practices that he has gained since he has been there. Izenda brings the power of data to non-technical employees and lets them access customized information from their systems. For more information including a test drive of their application please go to their website www.izenda.com Also if you know of a business in Atlanta that we should know about please email Amy Otto at Amy @ atlantabusinessradio.com and we will try and get them on the show.