Podcast appearances and mentions of brian what

* Emails and more dragon backgrounds! * Email from K Scott: How about talking about secret societies? * Email from Brian: What about all the great stuff on Panda Gaming Grove? * http://pandagaminggrove.blogspot.com/ * Email from Rasmus: Replica Throalic coins as a stretch goal for a Kickstarter? * Reason for design choice behind Claw Frenzy for Beastmasters? * Email from Tim: Praise for Attitudes and Favors discussion. * Email from Anthony: Questions on thread items and the spontaneous creation or growth of them. * Email from Kogorsi: Catching up on his life so far and commenting on our recent episode topics. * Dragon biographies: Alamaise! * A lot of the most blatant spilling of dragon and immortal elf secrets is in the Alamaise chapter of the dragon sourcebook. * Alamaise is considered one of Barsaive's dragons but has not been involved in their affairs since long before the Scourge. * Josh expresses regret that Alamaise was not referenced more in the Elven Nations manuscript. * According to the Dragons manuscript, Alamaise persuaded Jaspree to plant Oak Heart and developed Wyrm Wood as his lair and domain. * Discussion Alachia and other elf stuff. * Alamaise's temperament and personality; petty and grudge-bearing. * Lofwyr, Alamaise's brother. * Alamaise's description. * Alamaise's involvement in the death of Queen Dallia. * Connections with Wyrm Wood/Blood Wood. * Potential roles of Alamaise in a campaign and his goals. * Josh muses on some possible deep secrets. Email: edsgpodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @EDSGPodcast Josh on Twitter: @LoreMerchant Dan on Twitter: @boice_voice Get product information, developer blogs, and more at www.fasagames.com FASA Games on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fasagamesinc FASA Games Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/uuVwS9u Earthdawn Guild Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/earthdawnguild Earthdawn West Marches: https://discord.gg/hhHDtXW

On this special episode of Chill Filtered, Cole interviews A. Smith Bowman Master Distiller Brian Prewitt while drinking their latest Cask Strength release. They talk Brian's background, A. Smith Bowman Distillery, Buffalo Trace involvement and hazmat status. On "What Whiskey Would You Choose?" Cole asks Brian: What's your favorite A. Smith Bowman release yet? Join us for legit insight into the A. Smith Bowman Distillery and find out what makes their A. Smith Bowman Cask Strength release so special on this fun episode. 

Part 3, of our seven-part interview with Bob Regnerus of Feedstories. Topics covered in this episode How a Meeting at Facebook Headquarters led to the beginning of FeedstoriesThe Power of Your Businesses StoryNavigating through COVID-19How COVID-19 led to an increase in demand for video content https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PStjuHKOykk Transcription Intro Brian: Bob Regnerus of Feedstories, part 3. Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live. Today's part three of our series with Bob Regnerus. I hope you've been watching, if not go back and watch the rest of them. If you'd like to be on this podcast as in a conversation with me, or if you'd like to have me on your podcast or speak at your event, go check out BrianJPombo.com, for all the details. So here is part 3. Brian: What do you think that most businesses can learn from that, in terms of you mentioned having cash on hand. What are the other things that you think that made the biggest difference for you that you think other people could learn from? Bob: Well, for me, it was investing in things that have the ability to be flexible. So team members that are flexible with multiple skill sets technology, like we were perfectly positioned to be remote. In fact, our company's been remote for years, we were on zoom before zoom was cool, we had used it. So essentially, that didn't change. We also had this enthusiasm for what could be, but we also had a sense of what could go wrong? Now, the reason we're able to do that is we're in a mastermind with Perry. And as you know, Perry's my friend, he's a client, we do business together, but I also pay him for mentorship, because he's so wise. And we went through an exercise, January of 2019, which is like, what could go wrong in your business this year? Now, nobody predicted COVID, but we had some scenarios like, okay, you know, if our technology failed, or we went through probably five or six scenarios, it got us thinking. Even then, like, what would happen if? We weren't shocked when COVID happened. We certainly had this sense of dread like everybody else. But we had been exercising our what if muscles and had in mind, like, everything's not going to be rosy. So we're mentally prepared for what happened. And I was really proud of kind of how we just, we didn't panic, we had some really thoughtful consideration of how we're going to move forward. And we positioned ourselves well, we were prepared for some worst case scenarios. I think that's one thing as entrepreneurs, we're always thinking like, the best is going to happen. And I love that part of being an entrepreneur, every project we get involved in, we think this is gonna be great. We haven't unbridled enthusiasm for it, and you have to, but you also have that sense of, okay, what if this doesn't work out? Or what if this idea doesn't pan out? You want to have contingencies, you want to have plans in place. Maybe that comes from my upbringing, maybe it comes from experience, I don't know. But it just seems like the right way to approach things. Or you don't kind of have rosy blinders on and you're oblivious to the fact that we live on an imperfect planet, you know what I mean? Brian: Absolutely. Boy, that's great stuff. You touched briefly your company Feedstories, why don't you tell us more about what that is and how it came about. Bob: So that's interesting, that period between like 2010 and 2013, I was doing a lot of things to kind of find my way again. After you kind of lose an agency, you know, I was just kind of freelancing. I hosted a radio show for a number of years, doing kind of what you and I are doing right now, which is great, got to meet a lot of new people help other people write books. But 2013, I got heavily involved in Facebook. Facebook started to become a media that advertisers could take seriously. I got my first five clients and one of them just we...

Moritz Seibert returns to the show today to discuss the Berkshire Hathaway annual general meeting, the possible raise in interest rates by the Federal Reserve, today's great environment for Trend Following, the unpredictable nature of the markets and future trends, decentralised finance, increasing ESG requirements in the investment industry, the meteoric rise of Lumber prices, new and smaller Bitcoin futures contracts being listed on the CME, thoughts on Ethereum and Ethereum futures, and the possible advantages of being in a Trend Follower in the cryptocurrency space versus the buy & hold speculators. In this episode, we discuss: Berkshire Hathaways's recent annual general meeting The likelihood of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates How to overcome the unpredictable nature of markets Thoughts on De-Fi Increasing sustainability requirements of the investment industry The newer, smaller futures contracts being listed on the CME Trend Following on cryptocurrencies Follow Niels on https://twitter.com/toptraderslive (Twitter), https://www.linkedin.com/in/nielskaastruplarsen (LinkedIn), https://www.youtube.com/user/toptraderslive (YouTube) or via the https://www.toptradersunplugged.com/ (TTU website). Follow Moritz on https://my.captivate.fm/@MoritzSeibert (Twitter). IT's TRUE

Moritz Seibert returns to the show today to discuss the Berkshire Hathaway annual general meeting, the possible raise in interest rates by the Federal Reserve, today’s great environment for Trend Following, the unpredictable nature of the markets and future trends, decentralised finance, increasing ESG requirements in the investment industry, the meteoric rise of Lumber prices, new and smaller Bitcoin futures contracts being listed on the CME, thoughts on Ethereum and Ethereum futures, and the possible advantages of being in a Trend Follower in the cryptocurrency space versus the buy & hold speculators. If you would like to leave us a voicemail to play on the show, you can do so here. Check out our Global Macro series here. Learn more about the Trend Barometer here. IT's TRUE

The LFTS team discusses Breaking Bad’s exemplary pilot episode, including its solid narrative structure, efficient scene work, and how it sets up the stylistic and character elements that made the show one of the greatest TV series ever. "What Am I Watching" Generators (made by Brian): What is Tricia Watching? https://perchance.org/95mnadej8u What is Alex Watching? https://perchance.org/eel631cd2z What is Michael Watching? https://perchance.org/mc0h3emk2h Show Notes Beyond the Screenplay Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/beyondthescreenplay LFTS Merch: https://standard.tv/collections/lfts Find us on Twitter Beyond the Screenplay: https://twitter.com/BTScreenplay Michael Tucker: https://twitter.com/michaeltuckerla Tricia Aurand: https://twitter.com/TriciaJeanA Brian Bitner: https://twitter.com/BrianBitner Alex Calleros: https://twitter.com/Alex_Calleros Produced by Vince Major: https://twitter.com/VinceMajor Edited by Eric Schneider: https://twitter.com/ImEricSchneider Website: http://lessonsfromthescreenplay.com For Inquiries and Booking: Vince@Plusfortyseven.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Brian Phillips is Co-founder and CEO of The Basement, an integrated (technology + creativity + measurement) B2C and B2B marketing agency with its roots in production. Brian dabbled in art and worked in architecture before he took the artistic principles of rendering positive and negative space to marketing. He explains, “The positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works.” He believes marketers can get a lot of understanding out of identifying and analyzing negative space – the things that don't work – and that these, too, can help define the client journey. He believes “Negative space helps define and form the positive space.” His interests today remain diverse. For the past year, he has avidly read scientific books, pursuing ideas related to how genetics might impact buying and selling. The agency manages all media and destinations (the social channels and websites where consumers engage), extracting and analyzing as much data as possible and using multivariate testing. As an example, the agency may “cross-reference data out of Amazon” with data from its analytics platform on the ecommerce side.” The Basement markets its clients through an often complex, multi-touch, multi-channel approach. Larger companies may have as many as 150 datapoints across their consumer journey from “high level impressions down to ecommerce platform conversions.”  Brian has found that insights gained by analyzing data about consumers in the lower funnel can provide information on how the consumer got there and what the consumer will do next. The agency measures its success through outcomes, which, Brain explains, ensures accountability. Brian says his agency's focus has always been on growth, but growth “has to be calculated.” When asked about his agency's culture, he says simply, “Stay fascinated,” and then expands on the thought, adding, “Stay curious, stay ambitious, stay competitive, stay genuine, and stay fascinated.” Brian can be reached on his agency's website at: thebsmnt.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brian Phillips, Co-founder and CEO of The Basement based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast. BRIAN: Thank you. Thanks for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here, Brian. Why don't you start off by telling us about The Basement and where the firm excels? BRIAN: The Basement is an integrated agency, and there's probably some backstory there of how we got to be an integrated agency with roots in a production company. It's sad but true, but one of our greatest strengths is being able to deliver on what we say we can do. I've sat at many tables with brands that are unsatisfied with whoever their partners are, and sometimes it's as simple as just being able to deliver. I think as a production company, at the beginning that was what we prided ourselves on, and over time we've evolved to include that same delivery mentality against the consumer journey and a fully integrated offering of technology and creativity and measurements with the consumer journey in mind. We've had a lot of success with brands. We're not afraid to talk about outcomes. Actually, we prefer talking about outcomes, and we prefer the accountability that comes with that. We've been very fortunate to align with some great brands, and they acknowledge and accept our approach. It's turned out to be very impactful for both their business and mine. ROB: Are those brands typically more consumer-facing, or is there some B2B in there as well? BRIAN: Mostly consumer-facing, but we do have some B2B. Certainly there are major differences there. But we really approach our work systematically and through a proprietary framework that we've developed. Technologies roll in, audiences roll into it, but at the end of the day we're still performing the same services against that framework for B2B and B2C. ROB: Interesting. Tell me a little bit more about that framework. I think you have some brands that are of a pretty big size, and their go-to-market with customers is probably very multi-touch in a way that would often be hard to measure and hard to be accountable for, but that very much seems to be what you've leaned into. BRIAN: Yeah, there's no question. It seems like the majority of our clients are that way with the multi-touch and the omnichannel approach. I think it's important when we start talking with a brand that we're all aligned on accountability, and where we're going to hold ourselves accountable and where the brands are going to be accountable. Throughout that initial phase where we're working on strategy, we have to come to consensus on how we're going to measure success. Measuring that success along the consumer journey is something that we work together on and then we measure against. So that becomes, in my opinion, a lot easier to have dialogue and to have fruitful conversations and collaborations if you're aligning at the beginning. And that approach has been the core of what we do and how we build our integrated offerings. ROB: What sorts of things are you measuring for brands? BRIAN: Oh, man. [laughs] One of our larger brands that we work with that is a consumer brand, we're measuring 150 datapoints across their consumer journey, and that's everything from high level impressions down to conversions through their ecommerce platform and everything in between. At that point we're managing all media, all what we call destinations – places where consumers engage, whether that be social channels, whether that be their enterprise websites. We're going to build that infrastructure inside of that journey so that we can extract as much data as possible. Then we want to analyze it. We want to understand if there's any insights we can gain in the lower funnel that can impact how the consumer's getting there and what the consumer's doing next. And we've got case studies where we've seen and applied insights that were upper funnel, that were on the advertising layer, where we were able to test what type of product mix through display ads – we would run multivariate testing and we noticed that these certain product mixes with color combinations and words were effective. That then translates all the way down to the way we communicate on our website and what products we show on the website, how we're driving conversions through the performance funnel online. That cross-analysis is very important to us. We use and leverage a lot of technology, don't get me wrong; technology is extremely important to our business. But at the end of the day, we want to make sure that our core teams that work with the brand are analyzing that data, and we're looking for those insights and we're trying to figure things out on behalf of the brand. Machine learning is helpful. Obviously, it's a trend and it's going to be here. It already has changed the business and it's going to continue to change the business. But at the end of the day, I think you still need to have humans involved in that analysis, and that's something that we do very diligently with our clients. ROB: It's fascinating because a lot of marketers think about knowing how to track marketing when they can track the individual user all the way around the internet, when they can get a hard link through to conversion, that sort of thing. Certainly, you will have that in cases on the ecommerce side. But it almost sounds like on the broader consumer/general market side – maybe they bought something on Home Depot's website or Costco's website or Amazon or someplace where you can't sink into the data – it sounds like maybe you're still pulling on the stages of the customer journey at a macro level to see what's pushing down the funnel. Is that how you're thinking about it? You know what the stages are, you know what people are doing; even if you can't link each person, you can still see the echoes of what you've done up-funnel. BRIAN: Exactly. That's exactly right. Amazon's a great example where we can get data out of Amazon and we can get data out of our analytics platform on the ecommerce, and we have to cross-reference those. We have to understand why this happened versus something else happened. My background is kind of an interesting background, but it certainly comes from the creative side. I often talk to my team and in general about the importance of the consumer journey and looking at it very similar to figure drawing. The way that I learned figure drawing is you have positive and negative space, and the positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works. But with figure drawing, you need to leverage and use the negative space as templates to help you define and form your positive space. I relate that to marketing and the consumer journey in a way that says sometimes things don't work, but understanding why they don't work and having the measurements in place to understand and help define – that helps us define what's going to work and what didn't work. So we really want to look at the positive and the negative space. I think there's an idea or a wish for marketers and agencies to say, “We just want to find all the positive and that's it. That's what we want to base everything on.” We try to look more holistic than that, because we think we can get a lot of definition and a lot of insights out of the things that don't work. ROB: It's fascinating to hear such a – there's sort of a disciplined line of thinking around the creativity that probably frees you up to be creative in other ways. It's interesting how it echoes right into marketing. It almost sounds like we're talking about planetary physics or something while we're at it. BRIAN: Now you're really going to get me going. [laughs] ROB: Oh, how so? BRIAN: I study science. I don't read many business books; I never did. I mean, I've read marketing and business books, but I've found that the focus on our business and the focus on science, everything from natural order to epigenetics, is something that I've been really focused on over the past year and a half and applying that level of thinking. To your point, you mentioned the word discipline, and I think that's certainly a strength of the agency and it's something that my business partner and I have always strived for. If I were to analyze my career, I think a systematic, more scientific approach to creative is something that I've always done. The parallels of science and creativity are just so fascinating to me. ROB: I think you can't just drop epigenetics into the conversation without actually helping those of us who think we know what that is, but maybe we don't. [laughs] Can you give a definition of what that is and maybe how it ties into, if it does tie into, your work and marketing? BRIAN: Any of the scientists in your audience may say, “He's completely off,” so I'll use the caveat that this is how I've interpreted it. The genes that we have as humans are what I would consider more binary. They do simple on and off. They can't define the entire character of a person. They may define the way you look, they may define other parts of your genetic makeup, but epigenetics is a newer science that is the study of the chemicals that are how the genes are expressed. What's so fascinating to me and what really got me interested in the concept is that these chemicals, these imprints of chemicals can become part of your genetic makeup that you can pass down to your children. There may be a certain way that you move or the way that you stand that wouldn't necessarily be part of a gene. A gene doesn't have that in it, but epigenetics have put that imprint on you because of the way that things have happened through your environment. That is what I find so fascinating about it – that study of behavior and getting all the way down to that science to say these behaviors can actually be explored through genes. Tying that to marketing – I think this is way, way future-focused, but when that data becomes more readily available and people start mapping it, which they are now, how does that bring the science of genetics into the targeting of how people are buying and selling products? That is the stuff that I find fascinating and I read about. ROB: Is this something in the neighborhood of a gene drive or something like that? Is that what we're talking about here? Or am I completely out of the neighborhood? BRIAN: What did you call that? ROB: A gene drive, where they can take certain things and introduce them – like they can introduce sterilization into the mosquito population not by shooting a mosquito into a crisper or anything like that. It's called a gene drive. Basically, they can introduce this trait into the population in this external way. BRIAN: I'm not spending a lot of my time and energy on what they're going to do with that innovation. [laughs] I do think that the future of medicine is going to be more tailored based on the structural variations within people's genes. So I do think that's going to change medicine as a potential outcome. But right now, my fascination and interest has just been the data and what happens when that source, that mapping has been done, what you do with it. It's like Tesla having all the data of people driving their cars. ROB: I see. So, you're able to measure things you've never been able to measure before to get insight you've never been able to draw before, just by how deep you're able to look into the picture. BRIAN: Right. That's what we keep doing as society. We keep finding new ways to extract data, and that is a parallel to the way we look at our framework and the way that we work with our clients. How can we extract meaningful data from the journey? It's just going to get smarter and more robust, and the systems are going to be in place and the first party data is going to be there. It's an interesting time, for sure. ROB: You've alluded a couple of times to your own background and your own origin story. What is the origin story of The Basement? What made you decide to start the firm, and what have been some key inflection points along the way? BRIAN: How far do you want me to go back? I think there's some relevance to the first brush of creativity. For the record, I'm about 6'6” and I come from an athletic family, and I was a basketball player. There was a point in my life where I thought I was going to go play basketball. Certainly not professionally, but in college. And I was always an artist. When I was in high school – this was in the early to mid-'90s – I met a graffiti artist from Chicago. That culture didn't really exist in Indianapolis in a meaningful way. That culture really didn't exist in the common culture of society. Hip-hop culture was in its infancy, really, at that time. I became fascinated by that art form. I think one of the key powers or superpowers, if you will – and for the record, I think superpowers change over time. At that time in my life, one of the things that defined me was defiance, and I think that carried through my career, from graffiti art to wanting to be an animator when I saw the movie Toy Story. That became my goal. My dream was to be a character animator. That's what my career set off into: how can I make animated films or shorts or whatever? I didn't really have a definition. I ended up in architecture, and I spent a number of years in architecture. It was at this period when the internet was becoming relevant. It was getting introduced to businesses. This was pre-broadband. Everyone was on dial-up. We were just at that point in society where the internet and how people engaged online was being defined. Then I became really interested in creating these very rich, high-end experiences that eventually became online, for lack of a better term, engagements. That's how my career started. I was doing that in architecture, and at one point my business partner and I met, and I was frustrated with my career and the ceiling that I saw for myself and the work I wanted to do. I wanted to work at Pixar. I left. I just quit my job. I convinced my business partner to start a business. He was certainly more of a marketing business mind than me at the time. I was very much an artist and a producer. The combination of the two of us has worked out really well. And we left. He left McDonald's Corporation, where he was a very successful regional marketing director, and I was this young, probably cocky kid who was doing 3D animation and interactive 3D online and virtual worlds, and we took off. We ended up becoming one of the first digital agencies in Indiana, and from there we started The Basement because we saw a void with traditional agencies that didn't have an understanding of digital. We saw that as an opportunity and a void in the market and serviced agencies for the first 5 or 6 years of our business as a high-end interactive studio, doing animated TV spots, doing Flash games. We made a number of video games, we made a number of TV spots, we did a number of very high-end, rich websites for consumer brands and national product launches, until we saw an opportunity. We were really good at building the destinations and the engagement points with consumers, and we would always ask the agencies and the people we were working with, “How are we getting people here? What's the narrative? What's that consumer narrative and how do we extend it?” That's where we started to take on more direct clients. We had clients that were at agencies that went to the brand side and wanted to hire us directly. It really started to snowball, and then we built a media business, and now we have a full national internal media business and analytics business, and obviously creative is still there, still a studio. We still produce a lot of work in-house. There's a ton of content that gets produced along with consumer journey. Being able to build that content against a very robust media strategy that's looking at data, looking for data, that's the kind of integration that we've built. In a very, very short, run-on sentence, that's how we got to where we are. ROB: Brian, you mentioned something that I think is very common, which is that a creative firm starts up to work on a particular practice area that other agencies aren't focused on, and you'll either take a referral or you'll get white-labeled under them on the engagement – and then there's this jumping off point that has to come around to grow more. That's that graduation from taking other people's subprojects and leftovers and engaging the clients directly. How did you change the mindset and make that jump in the business? Because a lot of people get stuck there. BRIAN: I really give a lot of that credit to my business partner. We also have one of our vice presidents who took the client services part of the business. We all worked really hard together, and my business partner's background in the agency was account service. He knew that business. He knew it very well. He's very disciplined, and he understands how to build systems, and again, echoing the points that we made, we think systematically. So we built systems that will hold ourselves accountable, and we made sure that we were honest with each other and collaborated. We're transparent. I think that transparency was a very important key for us with our clients throughout. If we can do something, we'll tell you we can do it. If we can't do it at that time, we're going to be honest with you and we'll tell you when we can do it. That formula worked really well for us. I've always been an advocate for hiring people that are better than you, and that is what we did. At that time we had to build a culture, and we built a culture around growth not only for our clients, but for ourselves and for the individuals that are within the company. We fostered the culture, and that culture helped organically make us better. That is I think equal weight in the success of that adoption and being able to change and being able to recognize how something needs to improve. That's, again, been a big part of who we are. We have a tagline, which really is the definition of our culture, and that's “Stay fascinated.” Our culture is defined by stay curious, stay ambitious, stay competitive, stay genuine, and stay fascinated. That idea of staying fascinated is see something bigger than yourself, see something that we can become collectively. When you see something and you strive for something and you strive for growth, things need to change and things get better. That's how we define our culture, and that's how we were able to improve. Because I'll tell you right now, our account service business was not great when we started. It was good. We've made it great. ROB: It sounds like by being honest with yourself and with your clients – both of which takes discipline, which we said before – you were able to avoid getting yourself in the deep end in some areas and say no to the things that were too big while also growing into bigger and bigger capabilities along the way. BRIAN: Yeah. We expanded our services along the way. Again, very, very proud today. We've had tremendous growth over the life of the agency, and we still plan to grow. We are going to continue to grow. Thinking of it from a biological standpoint, organisms grow to the point where they peak and they start to decay. We feel that we're not even close to decaying. Growth has always been a part of our strategy, but it has to be calculated. We've said no to things that we knew we weren't going to be able to deliver against, and that I think is very important and has defined us by saying no to things versus saying yes to everything. That was a really good business lesson that we've learned along the way. And preservation of culture, because you can say yes to things and short term you can grow revenue, you can make more money – but at the peril of what? That was something we've always been very protective of: the culture, the people, the dynamics within the team. Because as we recruit and we want to hire the most talented people, then you have to protect them and you have to make sure that they are in a position to do what they're great at. The point I made about superpowers evolving – as I got further in my career and further into the growth of business, that became part of my role and what I strive to be good at. ROB: It's quite a journey, Brian. Thank you for sharing. I feel like there's a lot more we could pull on; I want to be respectful of everybody's time. Brian, when people want to get in touch with you and with The Basement, how should they connect with you? BRIAN: Certainly the website for The Basement, and that is thebsmnt.com. That's the easiest way to get a hold of us. We love challenges, and we love brands that want to swing above their weight class. We're actively looking for new partnerships. I really appreciate you taking a moment to have me on and talk about this business that we've built out of Indianapolis, which is not typically known for advertising. ROB: If people don't know, there's a lot there. ExactTarget didn't get as long in the sun as people might've wanted it to, but that was a big deal out of Indy, right? BRIAN: Oh my goodness, yes. ExactTarget has been a fantastic story, and Salesforce is there. Yeah, things are changing. There's no doubt. Things have definitely changed and momentum is with our city right now. ROB: Got that Atlanta to Indy connection with Pardot and Salesforce and all that. We appreciated ExactTarget as well. It was good for our ecosystem. BRIAN: Good. ROB: Thanks so much, Brian. Good to have you on. Be well. BRIAN: Likewise. Thank you again. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Welcome to Rapid Power podcast! In this episode, we are joined by two members of Microsoft PowerCAT team and also the two people who have played a crucial role in my Power Platform journey - Brian Dang, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Twitter - Brian Dang (@mrdang) / Twitter Blog - https://8bitclassroom.com/ Sameer Bhangar, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Twitter - Sameer Bhangar (@sameerbhangar) / Twitter Poems - https://medium.com/@sameerbhangar Questions discussed in the show: Power Platform: What is one of the most memorable moments that you recall that was related to Power platform/ PowerAddicts community (Vivek) What would your daily work look like without the Power Platform? (Brian) Who is someone you know (friend, family, acquaintance), that you’d love to see get interested in Power Platform and start creating? And why this person? (Sameer) General: What apps/tools do you use to stay organized? (Vivek) We have seen members of our community have hidden talents outside of tech: music, art, fashion. What is a skill or talent you have that others may not know about? (Brian) What are some questions you’re asking yourself, or questions you might ask, to guide your intentions for 2021? (Sameer) Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. If you liked listening to the podcast, please review us on https://www.podchaser.com/RapidPower For any feedback, leave us an e-mail at vivekbavishi@thatapiguy.tech --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rapidpower/message

Paul and Justin have a lot to say about bad video games. Have you ever heard the tragic tale of Brian? What about the arcade fighting game with only six characters? Laugh and cry as we relive the games that were just too damn hard, glitchy, or incomplete. Get your routine cup of coffee and make sure to do your homework. This podcast is rated TG for terribly good!  Check out Llamapocalypse by Dawson Emerich! Find it on Amazon  Go to our Patreon page to help support the show! https://patreon.com/playingfavorites Check us out on Twitter @PlayFavPodcast  Intro Music (20XX) & Outro Music (Thermal) by Evan King. Check him out here! https://www.youtube.com/user/EvanKingAudio  Download his Music here: https://evankingmusic.com

What do you get when you mix together storytelling and geography? In this episode, I chat with Brian Alonso, Co-Founder at Built Story. I have recently come across BuiltStory a new mobile app that’s doing just that: creating self-guided tours where each stop is, in essence, a chapter of a larger story you’re telling about your town or other places you’re visiting. Not only that, but the app also allows you to sell your tours and getting other people to appreciate the stories behind your favorite places. How cool is that? Some of the questions I asked Brian: – What was the most emotional moment that got you to start BuiltStory? - What is BuiltStory’s business model and market coverage? - How does visual storytelling fit into BuiltStory?   - How do you see brands using tours to create emotional bonds with their audiences?   - How can tour takers see a place through the eyes of tour creators using an image, video, sound, and text? And much more! Watch the video recording of this episode: https://www.visualstorytell.com/blog/when-storytelling-meets-geography This podcast is brought to you by the Visual Storytelling Institute (VSI) from Miami, FL. Learn more at VisualStorytell.com Order Shlomi Ron's new book:  Total Acuity: Tales with Marketing Morals to Help You Create Richer Visual Brand Stories

Jerry Parker rejoins us today to discuss how single stocks behave differently to indexes, knowing when to ignore your backtests, multi-strategy CTAs vs trend following CTAs, how to make 3000% in a month, why CTAs should be considered the ‘perfect portfolio’ rather than ‘crisis alpha’, and how luck plays a part in past returns.  Questions we answer include: What is the shortest timeframe you look at?  What positions are you mainly in at the moment? If you would like to leave us a voicemail to play on the show, you can do so here. Learn more about the Trend Barometer here. IT's TRUE - most CIO's read 50+ books each year - get your copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here. And you can get a free copy of my latest book "The Many Flavors of Trend Following" here. Send your questions to info@toptradersunplugged.com Follow Niels, Jerry, & Moritz on Twitter: @TopTradersLive, @RJparkerjr09, and @MoritzSeibert And please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest rating & review on iTunes so more people can discover the podcast. Episode Summary 0:00 - Intro0:51 - Macro recap from Niels3:13 - Weekly review of returns51:23 - Question 1; Brian: What are the main positions that you are in at the moment?53:56 - Questions 2; Daniel: Does it matter how something has made a breakout?57:50 - Questions 3, 4 & 5; James: What is the shortest timeframe you look at? Can Jerry share how his equity portfolio has faired during the Covid-19 crisis?  How should you space apart chosen look-back periods?1:18:30 - Performance recap Subscribe on:

How rich is Brian? What is the most racist vegetable? What is really happening in Area 51? Can Brian sing the lyrics to one of his favorite songs? Find out the answers to these questions and more during this episode of D&P During the gameplay section the boys discuss the overall D&D campaign up to this point.

Usually we discuss politics here on The Brian Nichols Show, but in a few past episodes, we've focused on some other topics, like how to find happiness (with Tim Preuss) and living "Your Better Life" (with Gary Collins). Today, we're sticking with that theme, only this time, it's my appearance on someone else's show... Today is my appearance on Amazon best-selling author Gary Collin's podcast, the "Your Better Life Podcast"! Listen as I discuss my personal battle with obesity and my ultimately losing 180lbs! Gary's Appearance on The Brian Nichols Show: https://briannichols.fireside.fm/the-simple-life From Your Better Life Podcast (https://www.thesimplelifenow.com/e14/): Brian Nichols host, of The Brian Nichols Show, drops by for a chat. Brain shares how he lost 180 pounds and is now focused on being as healthy as he possibly can be. He has not only changed his health, but most importantly changed his life. Topics Discussed with Brian Nichols: -A bit about Brian -What is the Brian Nichols Show and what is it about -Brian's childhood and how he became obese -Dealing with being overweight and the obstacles he faced -Brian's wake up call that made him take action -Our broken healthcare system -How he lost 180 pounds -His shift in mindset outside of just losing the weight -Why taking charge of your life is the key to happiness -His new lease on life and his new direction -His advice for those fighting being overweight Support The Brian Nichols Show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James:  Hi listeners and audience, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth Through Value-add Real Estate Investing Podcast. Today, we have Brian Hamrick. Brian owns 370 units which 2/3 of it is syndicated, the remaining is owned by him. He's from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He does multifamily, self-storage and also non-performing notes and Brian is also the past president of Rental Properties Owner Association.  Hey, Brian, welcome to the show.  Brian: Hey, James, great to be here. Thanks for having me.  James: I'm really happy to have you here. I mean, you have been podcasting for the past three years. You have a really good audience because I remember after showing up on your podcast, a lot of people did contact me. So I'm sure a lot of people love your podcast as well.  Brian: That's fantastic. I'm glad to hear that.  James: Yes. So can we go a bit more detailed into what is this Rental Properties Owners Association, how do they add value to syndicators or landlords or tenants? Can you describe a bit more on that? Brian: Sure, the Rental Property Owners Association, which I'm a past president of, I'm currently on the executive committee and I sit on a number of different committees, they are a landlord representation organization.  So we also work a lot with Real Estate Investors and provide all kinds of training for both landlords and Real Estate Investors. Every year, we have an annual conference where we have National Speakers come in and talk about all different types of investing asset classes and whatnot. And really I got involved with it because when I moved here to Grand Rapids, 15 years ago, I was looking for a professional organization that I could become part of that would help me network with other professionals in the industry. People who own rental properties and knew how to profit from it and also just an organization that would help teach best practices so I could learn the ropes how to do it and certainly through the Rental Property Owners Association and the people I've met there, I've learned a lot.  We provide a lot of training but probably what I consider most important of all is we have a legislative committee that works with lawmakers, both local and at the state level, to help push through bills that help rental property owners and also help prevent bills from becoming a reality that would hurt us; anything that has to do with like rent control or some of those hot button issues that as landlords and rental property owners would like to avoid.  James: Yeah, very interesting. So like New York and I think, Oregon now is rent control states, if I'm not mistaken, so they probably have similar Association like yours in that city, I guess. Brian: I would hope so. It sounds like they're fighting a losing battle as you and I both know as rental property owners, you know, I believe you invest out of state, out of your area, is that correct?  James: No. No, I'm from Austin. I invest everything in Austin and San Antonio. Brian: Okay. So would you even consider investing in a city or a state that has rent control?  James: No. Of course not.  Brian: Yeah. It's really detrimental to the market and I think it's going to cause a lot of problems. I used to live in Santa Monica, California where they had rent control and you can see the negative results of that. James: Oh, Santa Monica in California, did they have rent control in the past?  Brian: Yeah, a lot of the Los Angeles counties, you know, it's kind of county by county, city by city, area by area, but there is rent control in Los Angeles in certain areas and you can just see how rental property owners, who own buildings in rent control areas, have no incentive to put money back into them. They're not putting the capital expenditures back into their property to keep them in good shape because there's no incentive to do so. They can't raise rents beyond a certain amount each year and you know, so why would you invest $100,000 back into your building if you're not going to get that out in value? James: Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't make sense for a business. So you may not run it as a business, you may be just run it as cash flow, I don't know, it's like a cash flow investment. I guess you don't have to spend any capital on it.  Brian: I can see how if you've owned the property for a long time and you bought it at the right price at the right time, you could probably be doing well with cash flow. But in these markets where you see a lot of rent control, they're expensive markets. So I'm not really sure once rent control is instituted in these markets what's going to incentivize new investors to come in and bring fresh money into the market. James: Interesting interesting. So coming back to your portfolio, can you tell me in terms of your holdings, how much is multifamily, how much is self-storage? How many percents of each one of these and how much is non-performing notes?  Brian: Sure. Sure. So multi-family is my bread and butter. I've been doing that since 2008. I moved to Grand Rapids in 2005 and 2008 the bubble burst, you know, we entered the Great Recession, it was a buyers' market. I bought my first 12 unit, I was using my own money in the beginning, started using other people's money and then started syndicating.  We currently have about 370 units here in the Grand Rapids area, Grand Rapids, Michigan and that's multi-family residential. In 2018 we purchased a self-storage facility, it's about 28,000 square foot, we're currently adding another 15,000 square foot to it and that's been a fantastic investment, I really love self-storage. And then, as you mentioned, I host a podcast - The Rental Property Owner and Real Estate Investor Podcast - and one of my guests over two years ago was a gentleman by the name of Gene Chandler and he was investing in non-performing notes and I really liked his strategy so much that I ended up investing well over 300,000 dollars with them and the results have just been fantastic.  James: So, you now do multifamily and now you're doing two other asset class. So can you tell me what does multifamily did not offer that these two other asset class offers? Brian: Well, I like you, I'm investing in my own backyard for when it comes to multifamily. Even though I've bought and sold over 450 units, in 2015, I stopped buying multifamily altogether because the values had gone to a point where I could no longer justify syndication. I couldn't get the returns that I needed for my investors to be able to to pay the prices that people were asking. The last two deals I found - one was off-market, one was kind of in between market - and I can go into details on that but anything that I saw after that point just, I was so spoiled by the prices I was getting between 2008-2014, that I started looking for other asset classes.  And there were probably about 3 years where I just sat on the fence, waiting to see if the market would change or something else would come along. And at some point, one of the people who I met through the podcast, brought me a self-storage deal that he had found off-market. I looked at it, I like the numbers. His underwriting was very conservative, but the numbers were very compelling and we ended up buying that in 2018. And just in one year of basically bringing the rents up to market value and switching to a virtual online web-based management system, we were able to add over $700,000 in value to that property. So I like the simplicity of managing and owning self-storage more so than multifamily because in multifamily, you have tenants and plumbing issues... James: So it's very Property Management intensive, right? Brian:  It definitely is and the self-storage, it's not. When you have turn-over, you're basically sweeping out a metal shed, you know, so it's a lot easier to manage and own and operate self-storage, especially when you're in a good market and I think we bought in an excellent market. It's just north of Lansing, Michigan. And then with the non-performing notes, I found a strategic partner who handled a lot of the nuts and bolts of that and I was able to invest with him somewhat passively so I enjoyed that aspect of investing there and the returns we were getting were very good.  James: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned in my book, commercial asset classes go in cycles. I mean, I know I'm a multi-family guy and your bread and butter is multifamily but if you find the right operators in other asset classes, you can make a lot more money or equal amount of money as what you're making with multi-family. So, would you think so? Brian: Absolutely. Finding the right strategic partners in other asset classes that's one of the things I set my mind to when I realize I'm just not seeing the returns I want to see in multifamily and apartments in my area where I'm comfortable investing. Now, have you looked at other asset classes? James: I did look at a few asset class. I mean the asset class that I looked at is also like, you know, self-storage or mobile home parks but it's also in demand. I'm surprised to see here that you found something in 2018 because I thought self-storage is a hot asset class as well, I will risk going after that. Brian: Yeah, it was a lucky strike and we've been looking for similar opportunities. But yeah, we're not finding them. What we're doing instead is building ground-up construction in self-storage, finding locations where the demographics are right and the need for more square footage of self-storage space is there and then we go in and fill that need. James: Yeah, but I'm happy that you are looking at multifamily is not like the only asset class throughout the whole real estate cycle. I mean you felt like in 2015, things picked up and you really can't find the prices that you want and you have changed strategy which is how an investor should be. You always want to look at what's available out there, the deal flow because the economy is still doing very well. There's a lot of capital out there and it's just harder to find a great really-making-sense deal. I wouldn't say deals, making sense deals in multi-family, something that makes sense. It's just so hard to find out nowadays. Brian: Absolutely. As an investor, you have to stay nimble and flexible and be open to other opportunities. Now, I know a lot of people in our field, our asset class of multifamily and apartments will find strategic partners outside of their area like in Texas or Georgia or wherever and partner with strategic partners who are able to find better value and better yields in their Investments. But I've had some bad experiences early on with some single-families that I owned out of state so I've always been very hesitant since then to own rental property, residential rental property, out of state. James: So you like to have any property within your own backyard, but you like to diversify within asset classes. Some people have one asset class, but they go across the nation. Like some people like to buy multi-family across the nation, wherever make sense but you are doing it the other way around. Brian: Yeah. Since I've branched out into self-storage and non-performing notes, I'm comfortable switching up asset classes. James: Awesome. So on self-storage, are you the operator, are you the primary guy?  Brian: No, my strategic partner is. He's the one who found the deal off-market, he negotiated it. I basically came in and raised the money; we syndicated that and raise the funds to be able to acquire it. James: Got it. Very interesting. And on the performing notes, you have a strategic partner, I would say, right? Brian: Yeah, I have a strategic partner on that. He's the one who knows that world. He's been doing it for well over six years now and really knows how to negotiate with the lender who we're purchasing a non-performing note from. He works with the homeowners to try to keep them in the home and figure out if that's even possible and then knows who the title company is that he should work with to get the right due diligence done and he's got the different scenarios in his head of how we can profit off of these notes. If we keep the homeowner in the home, what are the strategies there for us to maximize our profit or if we have to go through the foreclosure process. How do we go about that and maximize our returns in those cases as well. James: Interesting. Interesting. So if you get a multi-family deal today, would you still do it? Brian: If I found a deal that made sense and my underwriting shows that I could get the returns to my investors that they're accustomed to, I'd do it in a second, absolutely.  James: Okay. Okay. So let's talk about the market and submarket selection. So why did you move from California to Grand Rapids, Michigan?  Everybody's heading to Texas and Florida from California.  Brian: I'm from Michigan, originally. James: Oh, you're from Michigan? Okay, that makes a lot of sense.  Brian: Yeah, my wife is from here as well. So we met in California but decided okay, if we get married, start a family we didn't want to do it in Los Angeles, it's just too busy there.  James: Makes sense. Yeah, I mean just based on data that 50% of the population move to Texas And I think there's a lot more but Texas and Florida is the favorite destination for people from California. That's why I was asking the question. And how do you select the submarket in Grand Rapids, Michigan? Like how do you select which submarket to really do the deal? Brian:  Well eyes because I live here, I am looking within a half hour to an hour of where I live. Grand Rapids is very strong, has very strong demographics. It's one of the few Midwest cities that really bounce back strong from the Great Recession. A lot of diversified manufacturing industry. Furniture, Amway is here, we've got a lot of different industries and employment based here. So when I look at submarkets, I'm looking more at the neighborhoods, what's the crime rate in that neighborhood? What's the income level in that? What kind of rents can we command and by the way, I'll buy B properties and C properties or you know, C minus properties that we can push into that C plus B minus range. But I will avoid the The D areas and I've seen a lot of opportunities in the D areas. And by D, I mean where you have a lot higher crime rate, where you have a lot more evictions and tenant turnover and problems.  So I'm just very careful about and I work with the property management company that has a good grasp of these areas. So when we look at a property, we can really get a sense of if we buy this, is there an upside value, can we improve it and get higher rents, get better residents in here or is it going to be bound by the neighborhood it's in, that where it is now is what just where it's going to be? James:  Got it. Got it. Interesting. What about underwriting? I mean, when you look at a deal like I mean when you are buying multifamily, right? So how would you select the deal? Let's say a hundred deals been sent to you, do you know how many percents of it you would reject? Brian: Right now 100%. I'm not even looking right now, but what I'll do is I'll do a quick rule of thumb. Okay, what's the net operating income? What's the cap rate that they're asking? Is there upside potential? And of course, if it's listed by a broker, they'll always tell you the market the rents are way under market. you can raise the rent. No problem. That's sometimes true, sometimes not true.  But this area is so strong that any seller right now knows that they can get top dollar and while there's a lot of Institutions and out-of-state investors and even International investors who are willing to pay top dollar, the yields that they are willing to accept are much lower than what I'm willing to pay, which is why I'm not even looking at the moment.  James: Very interesting. Now I see it's happening across the country. I thought it was only happening in Texas and Florida but looks like across the country, that's what's happening. It's just so hard to find deals that used to make sense to us long time ago, right? So it's crazy out there.  Brian: Yeah, and it could just be that I'm spoiled because I was buying during a period when I could buy it at eight nine ten caps. And now, when I see things at five six, six and a half caps, I don't even want to consider them. But had I bought it at those cap rates between 2015 and 2017, I would have made a lot of money. So maybe I'm just a little too stringent in my criteria right now.  James: Yeah. That could be it as well.  Brian: Are you buying right now? James: Well, I mean, well, I'm still buying if I find the right deal. It's just so hard to find the deal that makes sense for my criteria, and I'm sure that's the same thing as your criteria. I'm still buying if I find the right deal but I'm not underwriting a hundred deals, you know, in one month. You know, whatever deal comes to me, I usually know that within the quick look, I know whether it makes sense for me to underwrite or not. And sometimes brokers will call me if they know that a certain deal is something that I would do. That's the only deal that I look at.  Brian: What's your quick back of the napkin way of determining whether or not you want to invest in something? James: If it's an email blast, I probably wouldn't look at it.  Brian: Yeah. Yeah, you kind of eliminate the ones that go out to everybody.  James: Yeah, it's already got everybody on his shop date and coming on an email blast. You know, you have to go on a best and final and best and best and final and then this ultimate best and final offer, which is you're shooting in the dark, right? You're basically bidding against yourself. [20:45 inaudible] I'm not really in a desperate mode to buy deals that go through that kind of process. So when I look for value-add if there's a true value-add deal, I mean, minus the crime rate area, I definitely know the area that has high crime rate, I can check it out quickly Class B and C, but need to have true value-add that we can go and add value. I don't really look at the entry cap rate, but I look for the spread of the cap rate from the time I buy to in the next two years kind of thing without any rent increases.  Brian: I think part of part of my problem, one of the reasons that I've just been on the fence is because we bought a value-add property back in 2015. It was an older building, built in 1920 and it was such an exhaustive process to go in and add value to that property. I was over there like every day. James: It is very tiring to do those value-add deals. To do deep value-adds, I would say.   Brian: Deep, deep value-add. And so my bandwidth for more opportunities was just completely limited because I was so exhausted by working on this one particular project. Now, luckily, we got it to a point where we added tremendous value to it and we're very proud of the work we did but you have to weigh the opportunity cost when you do those value-adds because sometimes they're so intensive that some of the lower hanging fruits, you bypassed that. James: Correct. Yeah. I see some syndicators doing deals every month and they're not doing a deep value-add or they're just doing the lighter value-add. Maybe they're just doing a yield play. [22:30inaudible] they can buy every month. They can claim 5,000 units or 3,000 years versus deep value-add to be like 100 and 200 and 300. It's a really really deep value-add. You probably make a lot more money than the guy who owns 3,000 to 4,000 units, but it's a lot of work.  Brian: It's more than just asset managing. You kind of become a de facto developer. James: Developer, a huge project manager. Yes, so many things but the deep value-add gives you a sense of accomplishment. Brian: It does.  I'm very proud of the work we did on this particular property and more so than any of my other properties because I didn't have to put nearly as much work into them.  James: Yeah, and the deep value-add it becomes a case study, right? Because it truly shows your skills to turn around property.  And people who have done deep value-add it's going to be easier for them to do the lighter [23:30inaudible]   Brian: Yeah, yeah, that's an excellent point.  James: So that's very interesting. So can you name like 2 or 3 secret sauces to your success? Brian: The two or three secret sauces to my success. I'm sorry if you hear that printer going in the background there.  James: It's okay. No worries.  Brian: Hopefully that ends soon. Secret sauces to my success; I think doing the underwriting, running my numbers. I always like to say, I like to see my numbers in bullet time. To see all the Matrix, you know, everything slows down and you can see it coming at you. I want to know what are the real expense is going to be after we've acquired the property. One particular mistake that I see a lot of investors making is they assume that the property tax is going to be the same as what the previous owner was paying and that's just not the case. So right there that's one of the main factors that I look at right away, is what is the property tax going to become once I buy this property and that eliminates 50% of the deals that I would even consider. So number one secret sauce is just really understanding the numbers. Not just where they are today, but where they will be once we acquire the property. Number two is having the right team. I am all about partnering with strategic partners who add value because they understand inside and out the asset class that you're investing in. The reason I was able to expand my multifamily portfolio was that I partnered with someone who owned his own property management company and managed the type of properties that I wanted to acquire. That without his assistance and without his team that really knew how to go in and do the due diligence and help me assess upfront, what are the capital expense costs going to be? What are the true costs going to be when we acquire this property? Without that, I would have made a lot of mistakes. The same with self-storage. I partnered with someone who even though he's young and new, somewhat new to the business, he had really studied it, talked to a lot of professionals, been mentored by people and really understood inside and out how we could add value to that self-storage facility. And everything that he put in his pro forma ended up becoming a reality. With my non-performing note partner, I mean he knows that world inside and out. So when we acquire a note, the first 12 that I bought with him, we only had one that we lost money on and that was about $1,700.  James: Out of how many notes?  Brian: We bought 12 notes to start with because I like to test before I bring other investors in so I bought 12 notes with my partner, I JV with him. Five of the notes our average return was over 80%.  James: Wow. What timeline? Brian: A year and a half.  Well, actually, each note is kind of on its own timeline. So I'll tell you that of the twelve notes that he and I purchased together, five of them are closed and paid off like we've made our profit. Our average return on investment, before we split 50/50, our average return was 81% and that included the one note that we lost $1,700 on. Some of the returns that we're getting are phenomenal. Five of the notes are re-performing, which means that we were able to keep the homeowners in their homes, which is fantastic. That's our number one goal. Our average return on those notes as we collect the monthly income is 30%. And then two of them are in some form of foreclosure. In fact, we're about to sell one. We just listed it today actually, so we should make a decent return on that. We always try to work with the homeowner and keep them in the home. Half the time we're able to do that, half the time it just doesn't work out. But you asked me the timeline so, of those five notes that we closed, our average return was 81%, the average number of days that we were in each of those notes was 163 days so that took less than half a year.   James: I mean, those are good great numbers. I mean, I mentioned in my book, find the right operator in that asset class and partner with them or invest with them for passive investors. So as I said in every asset class, there's always good operators. So the numbers you're telling me in non-performing notes in self-storage are huge, right? I mean, I know multifamily you can make money if the market went up and you have a really good operator that can handle that. On average, not everybody is making what you just told me right now on self-storage. So why is multifamily more popular than other asset classes?   Brian: There are more people teaching it.  James: That's absolutely my point. Brian: Yeah, I mean like there are some excellent instructors out there in multifamily and you and I are both the part of a group with one of them. I mean great top-notch training material. Okay. Yeah, there's just fewer people out there. Whereas you have between 10 to 20 people out there teaching multifamily, you could count on one hand the number of people teaching self-storage and it's even less teaching the non-performing note.  James: I understand. Yeah, it is it is true. There's a lot more people teaching multifamily, a lot more boot camps, a lot more 2 days weekend seminars on multifamily compared to self-storage or non-performing notes. And I think multi-family is also very simple to understand, it's a house. Not many people understand what is non-performing notes.  Brian: Yeah, there's all that educational like just understanding and wrapping your head around the concept. I got into multifamily because I understood the economy of scale and I understood people have to have a place to live. So if you can get them to pay their rent and that rent pays all your expenses plus the mortgage, well, you can make a lot of money that way. And then once I understood the next level of value, which is the income valuation method, how commercial multifamily is valued based on the income method and you can increase your returns exponentially if you understand that. The relationship between cap rate and your net operating income and value that was very compelling to me. And I think that still is very compelling when it comes to investing in commercial real estate whether it be multifamily or self-storage. I think non-performing notes, there's a lot more perceived risk in that because it's not valued based on any  - it's hard to understand how that's valued because there are so many different scenarios in which you can profit from non-performing notes. That you can't just say well we value it this way and if you buy this note, this is what you're going to make, it's kind of a crapshoot. But if you do it right and you partner with someone who knows how to avoid the dogs, you can actually make a lot of money doing it.  James: So what is the most valuable value-add in non-performing notes? Brian: You mean an example of one of our...? James: No, not an example. I'm talking about what is the one thing that if you do the most of the time or the frequency of things that you do in non-performing notes that you get the most value out of? Brian: Well, yeah, it differs note by note. I'll give you two examples. One is a property that was pretty much a teardown property that we bought the note on in Middlebury, Indiana. We paid $5,000 for this note and I asked my partner, I mean it's $5,000, this property is a teardown. How are we going to make money on this? And he said, well, we're not buying this for this property for the house that's on it. We're buying it for the land because it's right next door to a farm and this farm is owned by this Amish family. So he sent a realtor over to the Amish family and they ended up paying $35,000 for that note. So after closing costs and paying the realtor and getting our initial $5,000 investment back, our profit was over $24,000 that represented a 245% return and we did that in less than two months. James: Yeah, but you need to identify that opportunity. I mean, it's not like you can go and buy any deals right now. Okay, very interesting. Brian: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Another quick example of how you can profit on notes and I don't want it to lead you to believe that your best profit is always going to be a few foreclose or take possession of the property because you can still make a lot of money if you can work with the homeowners. We bought a note on a property in northern Michigan, probably about 9 or 10 months ago now. And I believe the numbers were in the line of we paid $20,000 for this note, got the homeowners re-performing, the unpaid balance on this note is $41,000. Once we have them season for 12 months, meaning that they're paying on time for 12 months - we've been working with them with a mortgage loan originator, where they can go and get new financing, permanent financing of FHA or Fannie Mae type loan in place with much better interest rate much better payments. Well, when they go do that, they're going to pay off that unpaid balance. So our $19,000 investment, now that I'm thinking about it was $19,000, our $19,000 investment, we're going to get paid that $41,000 of the unpaid balance on their note, plus the money that they've been paying each year. So our return on that is going to be 100%, it's actually over a hundred percent.   James: Across how many years?  Brian: We'll be out of that in under 15 months. James: Okay, interesting. Brian: Because they're going to refinance and when they refinance, we get paid that unpaid balance. James: Got it. Got it. What about on the multifamily properties that you own before 2015? What do you think is the most valuable value-add that you really like?  Brian: Well, they're all great because just anything I bought between 2008 and 2012, I've achieved an infinite return on those.  James: Okay. So refied it by and you kept it? Brian: Yeah. Yeah, we've refinanced, pulled our initial investment out. We have no money in the properties and we're collecting cash flow every month. So you can't calculate a return on that. Probably one of the best examples is a 37 unit that we purchased. We bought it at a short sale in 2009, was about 600,000 is what we paid for it. We put a $200,000 into it right away to replace roofs, windows. It was a hodgepodge of heating systems. There's electric baseboard heat and hot water boiler heat and then gas forced-air furnace heat. It just depended on which unit you were looking at. So we replaced a lot of the mechanicals, made it as much of a new property as we could, as far as just the mechanicals and the roof and the windows. And we refinanced it once it had over 1.1 million dollar value, pulled all of our initial investment out plus some extra cash flow and then we just refinanced it again, put a tenure fixed loan on it through the Freddie Mac. small apartment loan. So we got great terms on it, 30-year amortization. At that point, it valued over two million dollars. So we've added a lot of value to it and the compression of cap rates didn't hurt either.  James: Yeah. Yeah. Those are the awesome deals, the deep value-adds. That's where you can go and refi and make it infinite written because you pulled out all your cost basis. Brian: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the goal to achieve infinite return. Whenever we can do that, that's what we do.  James: Absolutely. Aren't you worried about the state of the market right now in real estate in general?  Brian: You know, gosh, I was more worried about it two years ago than I am now probably. James: What has changed? Brian: Probably because two years ago, I was thinking, oh, it's going to turn any minute now and then it only got better and better. You and I both know Neil Bala and we talked to him at the last event we were at together and he made a very good case for the continuation of this market. And it basically rests on the fact that the United States, it's one of the few, if not the only places in the world where you can go to get real yield on your investment. We're seeing a lot of international money coming into the United States because in their countries, they're seeing negative yield or 0 yield. Here even if you can still get three or four percent yield on your investment, that's a lot of money. It's bringing a lot of money into this country and that's going to prop up our values for quite a long time. On top of that, I've always fought or believe that interest rates were going to rise and I've been believing that since 2000 and they keep going down. And even now, as we're speaking, they're talking about lowering the rate again by the end of the year. So that interest rate risk, I know we're playing with fire here and eventually, we're going to have to pay the piper but our government seems to keep coming up with ways to prolong this growth and the increase in prices. So am I worried? Not in the short term. No. No. The Economists I listen to are saying, oh, it's going to be a roaring 20s for us. Things are really going to hit the fan and. 2027, 2028, 29. James: Interesting. Yeah, because I think I don't know, maybe my thoughts are similar to yours somehow the Fed has figured out how to do quantitative easing and quantitative tightening. Somehow they're able to contract the economy and bring it down. So they could have found some new mechanism to keep the economy going even though our thought process always has been real estate goes in cycles. But at some point, you will hit an affordability issue, it can't [40:13unintelligible]  go up all the time, right?  Brian: Yes.  James: The prices can go up because the interest rate is coming down because now you can get more cash flow. But at the same time, you can't keep on increasing rent because our wages are not going up so much. I mean, I'm not an economist but at some point, you will hit some roadblock, but I'm not sure where is it and how is going to come.  Brian: Yeah, well, we're seeing a plateauing I think right now in just the rents that we're able to charge, the prices that people are willing to pay but it's still a very strong market. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not going out there and just buying stuff like crazy because I am very conservative and like I said if I can't get the returns that I need to bring investors into my deals, I'm just not even looking at it. I don't anticipate that the market is going to have a huge correction, there might be a bump, I think if you're in a good market, like Grand Rapids, that bump won't be nearly as severe as some other places.  I'm keeping my eye on the market but at the same time, investing conservatively in asset classes that I think will be able to withstand the next correction.  James: Awesome. So let's go back to a personal side of things, right? So is there a proud moment throughout your career in real estate that you will remember for your whole life, one proud moment? Brian: One for a moment to put on my tombstone. James: Yeah, absolutely. That you really think that hard, I'm really proud I did that.  Brian: Yeah. So a couple of answers. I mean any time we're able to go in and improve a property and improving neighborhoods, that always makes me proud, you know, that we're adding value to a neighborhood and community. The older building that I told you about here in Grand Rapids, it was built in 1920. When we bought that it was very tired, kind of poorly managed, it was losing money. We were able to turn that around so I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud of the fact that we also fought very hard and work very closely with the city to be able to put a restaurant in that building. So the fact that when we bought it it was 96 apartment units and about 6,000 square foot of vacant commercial space. Now we had to work with the city to get it rezoned because it had been vacant for so long, it had to be reverted to being zoned residential. So we spent over a year trying to get it rezoned so we could add commercial in there, but we filled up all 6,000 square foot including a restaurant and that took about two or three years to do.  So when I think about what I'm proud of I think I'm definitely proud of that.  James: Awesome. That there is hard work  because you're turning the zoning from residential to mixed use.  Brian: Yeah, mixed-use residential commercial, just dealing with parking, number of parking spots and green space and tree canopies. I mean, it was a massive undertaking.  James: Yeah. It's very interesting that kind of work. I did one that was borderline and we merged it with an apartment and we did so many things. It was a very unique value-add that we recently refinance.  Brian: What was it, a lot of work for you? James: It was a lot of work because you have to go through, you know, buying the deal - you had to buy two deals at the same time. One is the apartment and one is the land and then we have to go to the city to merge these two plots. Then you had to rezone it, then you had to - I mean replot it, rezone it And then after you do a tree survey, you have to do so many different surveys have to do to get that. It's not normal in a residential, you know, where you buy today and increase rent, reduce expense kind of deal. But it's very interesting and people got 80% of our money within 15 months, which is huge, just by doing this creatively.  Brian: That's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, you talk about its zoning and tree, you know.  James: Yeah, zoning and tree and all those. Brian: So it's a whole new world and it definitely is costly and time-consuming because you have to have experts on your team. You got to bring experts like architects.  James: Yeah, we brought in architects, engineers.  Brian: Yeah, engineers who even understand what it is that the city is asking for because if you were trying to do that yourself, you just would be a mess. James: Yeah. I mean the good thing about what you said about what I'm proud of this kind of process and 99% of the syndicators don't have that kind of experience. Brian: Yeah. I didn't have that kind of experience but now I do.  James: Most of the time, you just buy buildings and, you know, look at increasing income and reducing expenses and after that, at some point you sell but you don't do different contracts buying land and doing kind of things. So another question for you, Brian, why do you do what you do?  Brian: I love it. I love what I do. I feel very entrepreneurial about it because I've been an employee up until about five or six years ago. Whatever it was I was doing, whatever job, I always embraced it and did the best I could. But what I love about being an entrepreneur, being a full-time real estate investor, now syndicator/asset manager is that it's all very self-motivated. I'm the one who decides what needs to happen, what I need to pay attention to on a day-by-day basis. I don't have a boss or anyone else telling me, 'Hey, Brian, go do this' when I'm like, 'no, I want to go do this instead.' I get to call the shots. So that's what I love about it. I get to call the shots, I get to take time off if I need to take time off and I get to kind of fill my day with activities that I want to be doing. James: Awesome. Hey Brian, you want to tell our listeners and audience how to get hold of you?  Brian: Sure, James. First of all, you can go to my website, which is higinvestor.com. That's HIG is Hamrick Investment Group. You can also listen to my podcast and James you've been a guest on there so you can definitely listen to me interview James. It's the Rental Property Owner and Real Estate Investor Podcast and it's sponsored by the RPOA, which we begin this conversation talking about. And if you want to get in touch with me, you can also email me Brian@higinvestor.com.   James: Awesome, Brian. Thanks for coming in and adding value to my listeners and audience and to myself as well in the kind of things from our discussion here. I think that's it. Thank you very much.  Brian: All right. Thanks, James. It's been a pleasure. It's a lot of fun. James: Lot of fun, thank you.  

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Fanny: Hey, Brian, what's the most popular sports in Canada?Brian: The most popular sport is definitely ice hockey.Fanny: Ice hockey! So do you play hockey by yourself?Brian: I don't actually. When I was a kid, I wanted to play ice hockey, and I was always like begging my dad and asking him but he always said 'NO'.Fanny: Why?Brian: I think the big reason is that... Well, he told me it was too expensive.Fanny: Is it?Brian: It's not cheap. You know, it costs quite a bit to get all the gear but the big reason I think is the practice was always very early in the morning.Fanny: Oh, I see.Brian: Like five a.m. is when the practice is, and I think he was too lazy to wake up and take me to the practice.Fanny: Oh, I see.Brian: He told me it was too expensive. Deep down I think he was.... he didn't want to drive me.Fanny: So are there many people playing hockey?Brian: There are. It's a great sport. It's very popular with many children, and maybe high schools and universities all have hockey teams.Fanny: Oh, nice. That means you're a lot of rich people in Canada, then.Brian: Or maybe they spend all of their money on hockey gear. Have you ever played hockey?Fanny: No, no, not really. It's not that popular in China.Brian: What kind of sports are more common in China?Fanny: People always play soccer...Brian: Ah, soccer.Fanny: And table tennis. Table tennis is very popular.Brian: You're country is very strong at table tennis I think.Fanny: We always get all the medals in the big, you know, big eventsBrian: Why is table tennis so popular now do you think?Fanny: I think the first reason is that everybody can play it because it's very easy to get the, you know, the... to get ready for the sports. It's not expensive.Brian: No, I guess you just need the ball and the paddle.Fanny: The paddle. The ball and the paddle. Yes, and a partner.Brian: Right. Right. So have you played it then?Fanny: Yeah, I'm quite good at it.Brian: Oh, really.Fanny: Because my mother plays very well and so I always played with my mom, so I got better now.Brian: OK. So she taught you how to play table tennis?Fanny: Actually she didn't teach me but we always played together.Brian: Right.Fanny: Practice makes perfect.Brian: So they sayFanny: Yeah.

It’s episode 122 ! Liz Campbell (Wooden Overcoats, No Space for Heroes) and Zack Fortais-Gomm (The Orphans) join Flixwatcher to review the Monty Python 1979 feature film Life of Brian. Life of Brian is the story of Brian who is accidentally mistaken for Jesus in a series of absurd events and spends the film avoiding his mother and an ever growing group of followers, ending in a musical crucifixion scene.   Considered blasphemous on its release it was unbelievably banned or given an 18 certificate (preventing it from being shown) by 39 local authorities in the UK on its release and outright banned by Ireland and Norway.   Scores [supsystic-tables id=127] As with most Monty Python this a bit hit and miss, there are moments of genius (what did the Romans ever do for us?) and then there’s a scene midway through with aliens. The scores were as equally mixed from guests and Flixwatcher and scores 3.01 overall. What do you guys think? Have you seen Life of Brian? What did you think? Please let us know in the comments below!   Episode #122 Crew Links   Thanks to the Episode #122 Crew of  Liz Campbell @LizxCampbell from Wooden Overcoats @OvercoatsWooden and No Space for Heroes and Zack Fortais-Gomm @zackfg from The Orphans @orphansAudio   Find their websites online at: https://www.woodenovercoats.com/ and  https://www.orphanspod.com/ Please make sure you give them some love     More about Life of Brian   For more info on Life of Brian, you can visit  Life of Brian IMDb page here or  Life of Brian Rotten Tomatoes page here.   Final Plug! Subscribe, Share and Review us on iTunes   If you enjoyed this episode of Flixwatcher Podcast you probably know other people who will like it too! Please share it with your friends and family, review us, and join us across ALL of the Social Media links below.

John Cutler is a Product Evangelist for Amplitude, an analytic platform that helps companies better understand users behavior, helping to grow their businesses. John focuses on user experience and evidence-driven product development by mixing and matching various methodologies to help teams deliver lasting outcomes for their customers. As a former UX researcher at AppFolio, a product manager at Zendesk, Pendo.io, AdKeeper and RichFX, a startup founder, and a product team coach, John has a perspective that spans individual roles, domains, and products. In today’s episode, John and I discuss how productizing storytelling in analytics applications can be a powerful tool for moving analytics beyond vanity metrics. We also covered the importance of understanding customers’ jobs/tasks, involving cross-disciplinary teams when creating a product/service, and: John and Amplitude’s North Star strategy and the (3) measurements they care about when tracking their own customers’ success Why John loves the concept of analytics “notebooks” (also a particular feature of Amplitude’s product) vs. the standard dashboard method Understanding relationships between metrics through “weekly learning users” who share digestible content John’s opinions on involving domain experts and cross-discipline teams to enable products focused on outcomes over features Recognizing whether your product/app is about explanatory or exploratory analytics How Jazz relates to business – how you don’t know what you don’t know yet Resources and Links: Connect with John on LinkedIn Follow John on Twitter Keep up with John on Medium Amplitude Designing for Analytics Quotes from Today’s Episode “It’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. My advice is to fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business.” – John “We definitely ‘dogfood’ our product and we also ‘dogfood’ the advice we give our customers.” – John “You know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. […] there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is, fight for it, because you know that it is important, and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem.” – John “It’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want.” – Brian “We got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked, and it’s so powerful” – Brian “Instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to consider, [I sometimes suggest teams] write in plain English, like in prose format, what would be the value that we could possibly show in the data.’ maybe it can’t even technically be achieved today. But expressing the analytics in words like, ‘you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and here is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.’ This method is highly prescriptive, but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience.” – Brian Transcript Brian: My guest today on Experiencing Data is John Cutler who is a product evangelist at Amplitude Software. I have been really enjoying John’s commentary on Twitter and some of his articles on medium about designing better decisions of work tools. If you’re in this space and you’re trying to figure out, “How do I get into the heads of what our customers need? What types of data is actually important to track?” Especially, if you’re looking at longer term outcomes that you want to be able to measure and provide insight on, I think you’re going to enjoy my conversation with John. Without further ado, here’s my chat with John Cutler. All right, we’re back to Experiencing Data, and today we’ve got the cutlefish as your Twitter handle is known, right is it cute-l-fish or cutlefish? John: We’re going to go with cutlefish, not cute-l. Brian: That’s what I thought. John Cutler is here from Amplitude Software, which is a product analytics company, and I wanted to have John on today, not because he is cute necessarily, but because I’ve really been enjoying what you’re espousing about customer experience, and particularly, product management. Which for some of our listeners that are not working in tech companies necessarily, there’s not really a product management kind of role explicitly by title. But I think some of the, as you will probably account to, the overlap between design, user experience, and product is sometimes a gray area. I think some of the things you’re talking about are in important in the context of building analytics tools. Welcome to the show, fill in, make corrections on what I just said about what you’re doing. You’re a product evangelist at Amplitude, so what does that mean and what are you up to over there? John: Well, we’re still trying to figure out the evangelist part because I don’t necessarily sell or evangelize our product, I think our product is great and I like to say it sort of sells itself. But what I’m really focusing on is helping up level teams, now that could be like our internal teams, our customers, but largely to just prospects and teams that have never even heard of Amplitude. What we’re really looking with this role is to do workshops, provide content, I do these coaching sessions with just random teams, so it’s like one hour coaching sessions. But generally trying to fill in the blanks, I think a lot of times people think, “Well, I’m just going to purchase this analytics tool or this product analytics tool,” and suddenly it’s going to answer all our questions and everything’s going to be fine. But what they don’t quite realize is that you really have to tweak a lot of things about how you work as a product development team to really make use of the great tools that are available. There are amazing tools available. I believe Amplitude is one of them, but there is so many good software as a service products to help product teams. But really at the end of the day, it’s about the team also being aligned and things like that. I really try to take a broad view of what it will take to help people make better products with this role. Brian: Yeah. Can you give an example? I think I know where you’re going with this, but give an example of where someone had to change their expectation? You need to change the way you’re working or let’s figure out what’s important to measure instead of just expecting. I think you’re alluding to like, “Oh, buy our tool, we know what the important analytics and measurement points are that you should care about and we will unveil them.” Instead it’s like, “Well, what’s important to track? Does time on the site matter? Does engagement in the application matter? Does sharing matter? What matters, right?” Can you talk about maybe where there was a learning experience? John: Oh, absolutely. I think maybe a good way to describe this as well is a lot of the learning, a lot of the questions begin way before the team is unwrapping the problem, unraveling the problem. I’m not sure this answers your question exactly but I think we could lead into something more specific. But imagine you’re a team and someone says, “It’s the second half of 2018, what’s going to be on your roadmap?” You think about it and you know what you know and you’ve heard customers tell you things, and the CEO of the company has subtly but not so subtly hinted he’d really like to see X or she’d really like to see X. You put together this roadmap, and at that point once you’ve got people thinking that those solutions are the right solutions, and you force that level of convergence, there’s not a lot of… measurement will not save you at that point, you’ve already committed at that point to deliver those things in that particular setting. One example of a practice that might change to further or amplify the use of measurement would just be not making… committing to missions, committing to move particular metrics that the company believes are associated with mid to long-term growth of the company, and commit to those things instead of committing to build features. An example, a real world example, maybe for someone’s effort, maybe what you’re shooting at before is do they shift from same time on site was important to something else? But for a lot of these teams, it’s shifting from build feature X to something like shortening the time it takes for a team to be able to complete a workflow. That’s the big shift for that. It’s nothing-to-something that makes sense, not necessarily even something-to-something. Brian: One of the things we talk about on the show is designing for outcomes instead of designing outputs. John: Yep. Brian: Because it’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want let alone measure them. Do you run into the problem when you… If you’re coaching someone and getting them into this mindset of designing around an outcome and building your sprint or your next, maybe it’s even a strategy for the next six to 12 months around outcomes? That the important things to measure are not quantifiable in the tool? Do you work yourself out of a customer sometimes because the tool can’t actually measure what’s important? Does that ever happen? John: That’s a great question because I think that I do a fun exercise with people, which is called let’s predict the success of a relationship. We start with this activity and we just we forget about what we think is possible to measure and we just start mapping our beliefs. The team will say something like, “Well, I think that they shouldn’t have arguments.” Then someone will say, “Well, yeah, but it’s not just,” and maybe they’re talking about their own life like, “Well, we argue a lot, but we resolve our arguments pretty, we become stronger once we have the arguments.” Then the team will sit there and go, “Huh, okay.” It’s not just about the number of arguments, it’s ability to resolve your arguments. Brian: Resolve. John: We keep playing this game and we map our beliefs out to predicting these things, and some of these things we have more confidence about and some of these things we don’t have a lot of confidence about. Some of these things we strike and we get this big messy network of nodes and edges on the wall and that’s what we start working with. What’s really, really interesting is that we actually, as a company, there’s almost always some percentage of these things that we can contribute to in terms of what they can instrument in using our product. It’s not like…we would much rather our customers map the universe of things and acknowledge some things that might be difficult to measure or they’re just beliefs at the moment, they haven’t figured out how to measure them. Because really what Amplitude is very powerful at is doing behavioral analytics about these long standing customer journeys through products and those types of… Anyone who’s done a 15-table join and tried to communicate it to other people in your company and then tweak it and have people collaborate with it just knows how painful that is. That’s the type of pain that we solve. But back to the particular question, all the coaching really centers around mapping all the beliefs, and we’re usually confident that there are ways to measure some percentage of those things using our product, and that’s fine by us. Brian: There’s almost like a meta-question, right? John: I like, I’m meta, yeah, I got it. I’m there with you. Brian: You’re like analytics, you’re an analytics product and you talk to your clients about what’s important for them to measure. But then at some point, you have to know what’s important to measure to know that your customers are getting the value. John: Yeah. Brian: Is it directly…are you interested in what they’re setting up to measure and then that becomes your measurement? Do you piggyback off that or do you… How do you justify that the sprint or the epic we worked on last quarter provided business value? How do you…? John: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, we definitely dogfood our product and we also dogfood the advice we give people usually first. To give you an example like in 2018, we had this North Star Metric called “Weekly Querying Users”, WQUs. That seemed about right and we did some analysis and it looked like, “Well, for increasing WQUs, it’s probably going to mean this and this and it’s going to be some early indicator that our monthly recurring revenue is going to keep going up”, etc. But there were obvious problems with that and we saw that. And as 2018 went along, we started to look at it more, and for any SaaS company, there’s a point at which your expansion within existing accounts starts to be really, really important in terms of percentage of revenue that you’re in. We thought, “Well, is that metric, can you hand WQUs to any new team member and say move that or move something that you think moves that,” and then be 100% confident they’re going to make good decisions? It broke down after that. What we did is we shifted to weekly learning users. Now a weekly learning user is not just someone querying, because anyone who uses one of these tools knows you could just sit there and query all day and not get an answer. In fact, querying more might indicate that you are not getting an answer. Not like doing anything with it. A weekly learning user is actually someone who shares some piece of digestible content whether it’s notebook, whether it’s a dashboard, whether it’s a chart, and they share it. We actually have this North Star, which is weekly learning users, we believe these three inputs drive weekly learning users and those are activated accounts. They need to know what they’re doing, they’re broadcasted learnings, which is the ability for the user to attempt to broadcast some number of learnings, and then a metric that is a consumption of learning metric which is the broad consumption across the organization of that particular piece of learning. This is all sounds really heady, why would we go to all these lengths to do this, and Weekly Querying User sounded good. But to us this really encapsulates a strategy. I think that that’s an important thing that a lot of people from pure analytics backgrounds or who are used to sitting with a queue of questions and answering those questions are maybe not used to the idea of moving towards a cohesive strategy as expressed by a number of metrics and the relationships between those metrics. That’s something that we really encourage our customers to do, it’s not data snacking. It’s not like, “Oh, I got this itch today so I’m going to answer this question.” That took a lot of work to come up with that, and we’re confident about those relationships between those things. But more importantly, it helps any new team member like all you need to do is show a skilled product manager or a skilled designer or a developer even and say, “This is our current mental model as described by the relationship between these things. Where do you want to slot in? What do you have in mind?” That’s really, really powerful. I don’t know if that roundabout way of saying we take this really, really seriously. Brian: If I can sum this up, and I’ll need you to repeat part of it, but you have monthly querying users, so what I take that to be is I, the customer, using, paying for the Amplitude software, a querying user means I went in and I looked for content or I literally used a search interface to probably look up an analytic or some stat. You moved away from the number of people doing that and how often they’re doing it as a measurement of your company’s success to this three-stage kind of thing that I heard included sharing some knowledge. But can you repeat what those three grains were? John: Oh, yeah, sure. The North Star is what we call “Weekly Learning Users”, so WLUs. Those are users performing the behavior of interest, which is sharing, distributing some piece of content. Then we believe there are three inputs that explain that metric or three inputs that we really focus on. One is that the accounts are activated, which are meaning that does this account just have a minimum number of people doing that? The next one is broadcasted learnings, which is me, “is the initial attempt to broadcast the learning?” Then consumption is the actual long tail consumption of that particular learning. Let’s say it is a story like I sign up with Amplitude, no one’s really using it all because we haven’t really onboarded and we haven’t really instrumented, we haven’t done any of that stuff. Okay, well, then we get that done, so we get just that we’ve activated, we have at least a certain number of users learning, some amount. I’m in the tool, I’m in a notebook that is really interesting that I’m putting together that tells a story with data, very interesting about the mission that I’m working on. I attempt to invite people to that notebook or get them involved, that’s the broadcast. Then, finally, the consumption of learning would be the accumulated interactions with everyone with a notebook. If that sounds too complex… Brian: Got it. I don’t know, I- John: But the whole idea is for people listening and I think especially folks, designers and other folks is that their experience with analytics might be something very simple like “what percentage of people used feature?” Or something. What they’re not getting is the context, the relationships, and what I’m describing here, there’s amazing belief networks, there’s causal relationship diagrams, there’s just simple stickies and string on the wall, whatever you want to call them. But we’re describing our beliefs as it relates to the data, and I think that, that’s really important. For some background too, I’m not a data scientist, I’ve been a product manager and a UX researcher and that’s been my focus for a long time. It’s not like I’m a pro at this stuff, and even for me, though, it grounds me in what I’m working with and makes my analysis a lot easier. Brian: I imagine you may have some, not resistance, but when you’re working with quote data people or analytics people or data science people in your staff, in Amplitude, are there routine things that you wish they would hear that would sink in or problems that maybe they’re not aware of that you think they should be like, “We need to look at the problem differently.” Maybe you encapsulated that and that’s why you have this three stage thing as a reaction to the data snacking mentality, which is “What data do we provide? Great, they have it, now they can eat it.” Is that their reaction to that or are there other things that… I’m thinking of our listeners, we do have data scientists and analytics type people, and I’m wondering if you were to work with them, it’s like, “Here are the things that I want you to think about here to get our head a little bit out of the tech for a second and into the decision support mentality.” Anything, what would you espouse or advocate? John: That’s a great question. I think I can answer it a little bit with a story. I was the PM for search and relevance at Zendesk, like support software. My background is not in information retrieval or the guts of search but very, very early on working on a team with very, very talented people, data scientists, data engineers really, at the end of the day. One thing that I very much advocated for is we needed to be able to get everyone in the same room, we needed to get the people who were experts in what I would just call the actors, the support agents, or the support managers, or the the person trying to get help on their Uber app. There’s experts in that, there’s domain experts. There’s also people who are experts in the surface area, the surface, like the interface. There’s people who are really, really good at searching or finding information on mobile. There’s people who’s very good at finding information on, in our case, like the support agents view in their web browser. Then you had our people who are really smart and creating data as it related to search and they were great at data engineering, etc. The main thing that I noticed was that there’s just a silo-ing, and the people on my team were just craving, craving to be sitting next to someone who understood these other things really well. I think that for a lot of listeners it’s probably you know that, you know that from a first principles angle, you’re like, “Well, I know that there’s a bigger picture here.” I know that just in our case of searching like we knew that raising the mean reciprocal rank of a search term, we are searching it, where does the person click? Do they click on the second item, the fifth item. In theory, raising that would make a difference but when we look more broadly, it really didn’t relate to deflection of tickets and things like that. Our traditional metrics, the way we were measuring success is locally related to search. If we broadened our horizon to what makes a difference for the human beings out there who need their support tickets resolved or the support agents or things, that perspective was so helpful. What I would say to the folks on listening, it’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think, organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business. Brian: Sure, and you’re echoing sentiment I had a Data Center from the Broad Institute on, he was mentioning how much he’s like, “My work is so much more powerful when I have a great domain expert with me who really knows the space.” We met over music, I’m a musician as well and he was trying to explore creativity in the context of jazz. He’s a enthusiast in terms of music, he’s not a musician, but he’s an enthusiast so he understood some of it but he didn’t have the lingo. It’s just interesting when you look at someone working in that space trying to answer a question about like, “How does creativity work in jazz?” They don’t have all that domain lingo. Being on for a change, being the domain expert, it was fascinating for me to be on the other side because usually I’m the hymn advocate, even though I’m not a data scientist, as a designer and a consultant, we deal with this all the time. It’s like, we got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked and it’s so powerful so I totally agree with you on the need to provide that bigger context sometimes so you don’t just- John: Jazz is just a mistake played more than once, right? Brian: Yeah. Oh, there’s tons of them, there’s no wrong notes, just bad choices. John: It’s very easy for them to create the model for that. You’re just making a mistake and play it more than once. Brian: Exactly. John: Then you go back to the top. Brian: Exactly. Well, even that, like play the head again. Well, what’s a head? Oh, okay. Well, it’s just one form of the tune and they cycle through it and play chorus. Well, what’s a chorus? Okay, shit. But even having that, you can imagine that on the business client, this was like a fun side project he was working on. But you can imagine that in a business context where you don’t even know what you don’t know yet about it yet. I hear this as happening, they’re still in the, especially, in the non-tech company space, the more traditional companies that are, “Oh, we have 100 years of data and let’s go, we need to go buy some data scientists and throw them at this pile of data and then magic will come out the other end.” John: Oh, I think that that happens in tech companies, too, though. I think that that’s the number of data scientist friends who’ve been hired in is like some large effort. Then, one, they’re like, “Yeah, and data engineering was the actual problem.” Okay, we spent our first year there just going around in circles on solving that problem, and then, yeah, the number of friends I have who’ve been frustrated by that dynamic, even in tech companies, I think it’s a pretty common, more common everywhere than we would think. Brian: Tell me a little bit about, so we’ve been talking about the analytical part of all this, the quantifiable parts largely but you have a UX research background as well. We talk, on this show, we talk about empathy, we talk about the needs to go talk to people to ask good questions, to ladder up, get into all that. How does that fit in? When you’re working on an analytics tool, can you fill us in on your approach to qualitative research and more the soft, mushy stuff that UX people deal with? John: Yeah, and it’s interesting. For context, I’m not a UX researcher at Amplitude but I’ve done that in prior environments that required the chops. But in talking to teams and doing it, I think so many of the basics apply in the sense that you’re really… Not to overuse the jobs-to-be-done stuff, you’re really, really trying to understand what decision this person is hoping to make. You’re really trying and then what impact that decision has on the rest of the organization and who is involved in it. I think anyone who’s done this knows that even as a UX researcher, if I do like a co-design activity with customers related to anything analytics oriented, it’s just, “Oh, we’re going to do an Excel mock up or you know.” Anytime you get customers involved with that, it’s so easy. If either side, and I’ve been on both sides of this, it’s so easy to forget what you were trying to do. I think that has a lot to do with the exploratory aspect of data in general that we have a gut instinct that if we just saw this stuff organized like this, then it would somehow be valuable for something we have to do. I think that for, and I don’t know if it answers the question, but I think it requires the same chops but also understanding that people just have a hard time, users have a hard time talking about what they are looking at and what they’re hoping to get out of the data when they’re looking at it over and over and over. I think that really, it really you have to use all the tools in the tool shed. To give you an example, there was… I don’t know if you’ve done these things too, I’ll do these exercises where it’s like, “Okay, we’re revamping the app, it’s just going to be this mobile browser with three numbers on it.” That’s it, that we’re not going to have all these fancy charts, we’re not going to have all this stuff. And three numbers and then one piece of narrative advice, like “Consider this or do this.” I love activities like that from a UX researcher standpoint when I’m working with people because it really, really forces them to just get out of their own head to think about it. That’s like a common trick and you probably have a lot more. But, yeah, I don’t know if I answered the question but it’s a lot of the same tools. But I think also you have to really… It’s a job environment, they’re making decisions, they’re hiring these analytics to do a job. But then with this added layer that I think that people are just incredibly, they find it incredibly difficult to talk about the numbers that they’re looking for. Brian: When you say it’s difficult for them to talk about it, are you talking about their digestion of what’s on the screen or their expression of what’s important to them to actually find out? What do I actually want to learn about? Is it… John: Both really, and that’s the thing that I think just makes it doubly as hard. It means that if you show them something, and I think that we can all relate to it too, like any of us who have been shown some mock or some prototype of information on the screen, you can see your gears turning. You’re having to process it and where did this come from? Can I trust it? What is it? We see that all the time just in Amplitude, it’s people… Our understanding of how people experience some of these querying screens that we have, when you actually ask them to just talk through what they’re thinking about as they move through it, it’s just it’s so complex. Data trust, where is this stuff coming from, data over time, their challenges with certain visualization techniques, even if it’s “the right technique” like, “Well, I just need a radar chart.” Just like no you don’t really. But that’s how they’ve been anchored or whatever. It’s just complex. I don’t have a fancy answer, it’s just complex. Brian: What you just told me reminds me of you had mentioned you do this exercise, and I’m wondering if it’s the same exercise that I’ve done as well with analytics tools, especially, in the context of monitoring applications. There’s some system that’s monitoring stuff and it’s supposed to advise you on what should I do next or what happens with something like this? It’s like “instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to do”, it’s “write in plain English like a prose format what would be the value that we could possibly show”, and maybe we can’t even technically do it today. But it’s “express the analytics and words like you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.” It’s highly prescriptive but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience. How close to that can we get to it, where I don’t have to infer from charts or whatever the date of this format is, how close could we get to something that prescriptive and then try to work backwards from that. We probably can’t get right to that full prose. Is it something like that where you jump to this conclusion, like value conclusion or something like that? John: Yeah, and I do a couple of these like that, one is if I have an Alexa or if I have a tube of crackers or whatever I’m like, “This is the interface now.” You can ask Alexa, that’s your interface. This is a beautiful future world where you just have your smart person, your smart assistant to do these things. Yeah, similar type of, I think, what it does is it creates just enough dissonance to snap people out of just immediately trying to unravel the visualization, which can be I think all of us do that. I think that that’s our instinct whenever we look at something like that. Brian: The default next question is how should we visualize this data that we’ve captured? That’s the itch that we may not be the one to scratch? John: Yeah, but I think that’s also what we can test with, that point, when we’ve got that need to fill, that’s when we can try multiple approaches, I think to see that. That’s my experience, there is that point at which you need to you go back to the drawing board. Although, I would say that depending on the subject, the user in that case or the person you’re working with, some people are really, really good at just the co-design aspect. I don’t know your experience with that, but it seems to have a lot to do with what the people do each day and how they think about visualization and stuff. But I’ve done co-design sessions with people who the next step was, “Well, let’s start thinking about, let’s start drawing, let’s start doing some other things to do it.” I think that depends a lot on the background of the people that you’re working with. Brian: If you were starting over today with Amplitude, is there either a… Not necessarily a feature you would change but is there something that you would approach differently? If someone says, “Hey, we have this JavaScript widget, you paste it in your, all your app or whatever, and we can track almost anything, any activity, whatever. What should we show?” Is there something you would change about maybe how you guys went, the process you went about arriving at the current product that you have? John: That’s interesting. I wish Spencer and Jeffrey were here to answer because they’re the founders of the company. But I think that it’s funny how products have their history about them, so Amplitude, for example, it was a Y Combinator. The founders didn’t go to Y Combinator, they had this fancy voice app or something that they were working on, and this was actually just their effort. They were like, “Well, we kind of had this app,” and they surveyed what was available and then just said, “We really need, there’s a thing, it’s a little different. It’s like an event based measurement thing. We really want to instrument this app and know whether people are using it or not.” That was the founding story, it wasn’t their key thing. A lot of the early customers were folks from Zynga or Facebook or other places that had moved on to other startups and then they wanted something that helped with the 90% of product questions that they had around retention and engagement and complex behavior patterns. Does this behavior predict this or is there a relationship between these things? That’s the founding story, these discerning teams that had a fair amount of autonomy and were tasked with working in these environments and that they wanted a product that they could do that with. When I’m thinking about what I would change as the newcomer to the company, now maybe five years on, was it, yeah, or six years or seven years on, I think it’s what they’re starting to do now, which is interesting. This notebooks feature to me is just so, so, so good and it gets away from a traditional dashboard. But with a notebook, it’s very similar to a data science notebook, you can weave this story and this narrative and you can make the charts live and you can communicate it and you can do those things. As a product manager, that is pure gold to me, and it’s just we’ve started to do those things. I think that the answer would be more of what they’re really digging into now, which is around this learning user concept and how do you create stories with the data to motivate your team and keep everyone aligned and things. I think if it hadn’t existed and I joined a year ago, I would have been like, “Oh, you’re missing this little element like the actual part that integrates it into day to day product development.” But they’ve just started doing that now, so they stole my answer. Brian: Nice, and just for people that don’t know, tell me if I got this right, but the notebooks for people that aren’t data scientist, it’s effectively a collection of both quant data like maybe charts or tables, stats, data collection that you guys have put into some visualized widgets or whatever it may be insights plus qualitative stuff like my commentary on it. Like “Why do we care about this? Well, design is currently tracking these metrics because we’re running a study on dah, dah, dah, and we think we can move this up” and that’s a proxy for this other thing. You can provide all this context in that storytelling mentality so that when someone new comes in, they’re like, “Why do I care about time on site or whatever the metric?” John: Exactly, and that’s the huge thing. One thing that we learned, we’re in this business of teams getting going and it’s like it’s so easy to get to the point where you’ve instrumented your products and any new person joining your company can’t make heads or tails of anything. It’s like you’ve got all these events, are these duplicate events? We’ve invested a lot of time in this taxonomy feature, which helps manage your taxo- It’s way, way, when people try to build this stuff in-house, they just forget about all that stuff. Like, “Oh, it’s just events, it’s semi-structured information, we’re going to put it here and then we’re just going to run queries on it.” But all that’s really, really important, so back to the notebooks thing, one of the biggest use cases we’ve seen in notebooks is people using them to onboard people and orient them with all the available analytics that and metrics and things that are being recorded. That’s actually a really good testament to show that need. Brian: They use it to actually show how they use Amplitude at the- John: Right, it’s pretty meta. Brian: Wow, that’s awesome. John: Yeah, we see them do that or even some of them use it for training like, “Okay, let’s start with this idea that we’ve got this whole universe of users. Well, how would we segment those? Well, here are the key ways that we segment.” Okay, that we’ve gone down one layer, and so I think that that’s kind of cool. But, yeah, for people who don’t know about these data science notebooks, it is a mix of qualitative, quantitative, you can embed charts that are live or you could embed point-in-time charts, you can make comments, and you can do various things. I think for a lot of people who don’t do this for a living, they get intimidated and it’s not, a lot of the stuff is not rocket science, but it’s just annoying to have to go to someone in your company and say, “Hey, can you spend like three or four hours just explaining our information to us.” That’s really hard to do, so these notebooks help with that particular thing. I think that type of stuff is really the future of moving away from just very, very stayed dashboards and things like that. Brian: Right. I don’t know if there’s much in terms of predictive or prescriptive intelligence in the tool, does the tool provide that as well or is it mostly rear view mirror analytics? John: It’s interesting you say that, so we have this new feature called Impact Analysis, and so in Impact Analysis you are able to go from day zero of a particular use of a particular feature and then see the impact that it has on another set of things. We give some statistics and we give some other values in there. So we’re middle of the road moving to more and more complex questions. But one thing that our team realizes that anything… To prevent people from making bad decisions or making poor statements, you need to be so, so, so careful about presenting what you’re actually showing if there’s a correlation between something or even implying that there’s causation without doing the background on it. We’re not completely rear view and we’re in this middle ground, but we’re also going to go on record and say we’re predicting what this value’s going to be in six months. Brian: Right, and the reason, and not just the hype of machine learning, blah, blah, blah, that’s not my main reason for asking was going to lead into my next question, which was do you struggle at all with the expression in the tool of the evidence that backs up any types of conclusions that you’re showing? Do your customers care? Well, how did you guys arrive at this? John: They absolutely care, and so like one of the… We spent a lot of time in the ability, in Amplitude, any data point that you see, usually, if you hover over it, there’s a message it says, “Click to inspect,” or you can create a cohort off of that or you can see the paths to that particular thing. What we really made this effort to do is exactly right, is that people… Working at two analytics companies now, Pendo and now Amplitude, data trust and people being able to unravel what that number means in a way that makes sense to them seems like one of the massive limiters. It’s just that thing that it’s best laid plans start, that’s the entropy that exists with these tools as people use them more and more. There’s just it gets messier, a bunch of hands, a bunch of people are playing around. At least with Amplitude, they try to make a really big effort to like if you want to understand why that number is there and what is behind it, we try to make that really easy. John: But we could always do better because in my mind this is the number one difference between the more data snacking approach like “it kind of looks interesting, that number,” something that you can really pin your business on, which I think is what people… That’s the dream of all this, but then once people start to ask good questions really, it really challenges the tool. Brian: John, this has been fantastic chatting with you, I really appreciate you sharing this with our listeners. Do you have any parting wisdom or anything you’d like to share with people that are maybe working more on the tech side or the data side of the thing and the vents and they’re trying to, “I want to produce more use, whether it’s reports or actually software applications. But we’re trying to provide better stuff, more engaging, more useful…” Any closing advice you might give to someone like that? John: I’m going back to what we were talking about from the UX research angle is that I think that in this area, there’s so much temptation to any one of us who’ve done this is that there’s this constant push and pull between customizability and then this promise of preemptive insights like smart system, it’s intelligent, it’s doing these things. Then so how prescriptive are you? Is what you’re presenting and actually helping someone to do their job. I think that it’s probably reflective of my learning at Amplitude is that really going to human centered design, like really thinking about if the person is able to effectively do their job and really able to answer the questions that they’re answering. I think that what happens is all of us want that, but then we hit this wall and we start to get really some conflating information from users and we start to… Then we’re like, “Well, okay, we’re just going to let them find what they want to find. I think that, that exploratory type of research should be something that’s possible in these tools. In fact, I think that leads to asking some of the best questions when users can do that. But I would really hope that people don’t abandon the idea of being really patient and seeing if before they just throw their hands up in the air and will say, “Well, we’ll just make a query builder and that’s it, that’s it.” Like really seeing if that thing can solve the problem. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think it’s something that’s really been on my mind a lot lately. Brian: Yeah, I talk about sometimes like with clients and people in this space about knowing whether or not you’re producing an explanatory product or an exploratory product. It doesn’t mean you can’t necessarily have some of both but there’s a big difference between the value, like in your case, I’m guessing a lot of these people really want some explanations when they tell us about what we can do to make our software better. They’re not there for fun, but they might run across some things they didn’t know were possible which begins the questioning. But if you put all the effort on them, you’re just shifting the tool effort over to the customer. You’re making it much harder for them to get the value out at which point they may abandon or quit. It’s not just knowing are we explanatory or exploratory or at least there’s this feature or there’s this outcome that this goal that we’re working on, the sprint. But just being aware of that I think is part of the challenge. Like should they be able to walk away with… I should be in the six to 19 apple’s range, whatever that means, like, should I be able to walk away with that level of clarity or not? I don’t know. John: I think that it’s also something like, that’s interesting you said that, because a lot of features that we’re experimenting with, one thing that Amplitude does is anytime you… We built an undo feature, so we try to make it really easy to go really deep and then just back out really gracefully. It’s like infinite, every version of the chart as you work on one is saved. You can back out of it. There’s a lot of features like Save As or you’re built like you could go to someone else’s chart, and if you have some idea of where you want to take it, you could edit it. But you’re not editing their chart, you’re editing a copy and you can think about it. But back to that point is I think that there’s many things that you can do to encourage, that you can juggle those needs concurrently for having definitive things and then also encouraging exploration. We’ve found that with our product as we experiment more. One, I just told you about it, like the ability to telescope into a metric and then do more exploration around it. That didn’t exist before and then we were like, “Oh, well, how about when you hover over any data point and you allow them to inspect that or explore that?” I would say that there are ways to accommodate both at least from our perspective and what we’ve learned. Brian: Right, and I think there’s always some of both of that, and I don’t think most people are going to take everything on its face value. But I hear what you’re saying. One of the things I’ve been recently working on is a UX framework for this called the CED framework, just conclusion, evidence, and data. It’s not necessarily a literal expression of “Where should the screens go? What goes on every screen?” But the concept that when possible, if the tool can provide conclusions with the second tier of being the evidence by which the tool or application arrived at this conclusion. Level three might be really getting into the raw data like, “What are the queries? What was the sequel that actually ran?” Or whatever the heck it may be, there’s times when maybe that data is necessary early on a customer journey. It may just be, “We need to build trust around this stuff.” We can’t be totally black box, but we don’t actually expect people to spend a lot of time at the D-level. We really want them to work in the C level, but it’ll take time and evidence is required sometimes if you’re going… Especially, I got to go to the boss, I can’t just tell him it’s 18, we should be at 18, not 12. It’s like, “Well, how did you arrive at that?” John: We find a lot is the instrumentation rigor is like that’s one of our big problems to solve really is there are these products on the market that do just try to record everything for it. There’s a lot of entropy there and there’s a lot of issues. They’re very fragile, in some ways, so we as a company definitely believe in explicitly instrumenting these events. But at the same time, you’d be amazed how many product teams… There’s this thing called a user story, you write a user story that’s from the user’s perspective, what are you trying to do? Now you would think that like, “Okay, well, we’ll tack on to the acceptance criteria for any story that you’ll use a noun and a verb, and you’ll get these properties and you’ll get these things. Integrating instrumentation on the product level, not necessarily like, “Okay, we’re instrumenting how our servers are working or anything,” but just, “What did the user do?” That’s still relatively new. People who’ve worked in environments that just do that as second nature that, okay, they’re in another thing, but we find that companies even need to change that approach. You’ve mentioned your CED thing like what’s interesting is that extends to the UX of instrumenting. It’s pretty interesting from that, it’s you’re the user trying to draw some conclusion, you’re doing these things. But it’s almost like service design, in some sense, because you need to design the approach to even instrumenting this stuff. It makes your head hurt sometimes. Brian: Yeah, all this stuff makes my head hurt. But that’s why we have conversations, hopefully, we’re knowledge sharing and it’s like giant aspirin conversations or something, I don’t know. But I found this super useful, thanks for coming on the show. Where can people follow you? I know I found you on Twitter. I forget how but what’s your [crosstalk 00:47:23]- John: Twitter is good, I’ve installed a Stay Focused app to prevent more than 20 minutes a day on Twitter. But you will find me eventually there. I write a fair amount on Medium and it’s pretty easy to find me there. Brian: Okay. John: If you just type in “John Cutler product”, I have about 400+ posts on Medium. Some are better than others but- Brian: Awesome. John: … yeah, that’s the best way for right now. Brian: Awesome. Well, I will definitely link both of those, your Medium page and your Twitter up in the show links. Man, John, it has been really fun to chat with you here. Thanks for coming on the show. John: Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, awesome. Brian: Yeah, super. All right, well, cheers. John: Cheers, bye-bye.

My guest today is Carl Hoffman, the CEO of Basis Technology, and a specialist in text analytics. Carl founded Basis Technology in 1995, and in 1999, the company shipped its first products for website internationalization, enabling Lycos and Google to become the first search engines capable of cataloging the web in both Asian and European languages. In 2003, the company shipped its first Arabic analyzer and began development of a comprehensive text analytics platform. Today, Basis Technology is recognized as the leading provider of components for information retrieval, entity extraction, and entity resolution in many languages. Carl has been directly involved with the company’s activities in support of U.S. national security missions and works closely with analysts in the U.S. intelligence community. Many of you work all day in the world of analytics: numbers, charts, metrics, data visualization, etc. But, today we’re going to talk about one of the other ingredients in designing good data products: text! As an amateur polyglot myself (I speak decent Portuguese, Spanish, and am attempting to learn Polish), I really enjoyed this discussion with Carl. If you are interested in languages, text analytics, search interfaces, entity resolution, and are curious to learn what any of this has to do with offline events such as the Boston Marathon Bombing, you’re going to enjoy my chat with Carl. We covered: How text analytics software is used by Border patrol agencies and its limitations. The role of humans in the loop, even with good text analytics in play What actually happened in the case of the Boston Marathon Bombing? Carl’s article“Exact Match” Isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. The 2 lessons Carl has learned regarding working with native tongue source material. Why Carl encourages Unicode Compliance when working with text, why having a global perspective is important, and how Carl actually implements this at his company Carl’s parting words on why hybrid architectures are a core foundation to building better data products involving text analytics Resources and Links: Basis Technology Carl’s article: “Exact Match” isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. Carl Hoffman on LinkedIn Quotes from Today’s Episode “One of the practices that I’ve always liked is actually getting people that aren’t like you, that don’t think like you, in order to intentionally tease out what you don’t know. You know that you’re not going to look at the problem the same way they do…” — Brian O’Neill “Bias is incredibly important in any system that tries to respond to human behavior. We have our own innate cultural biases that we’re sometimes not even aware of. As you [Brian] point out, it’s impossible to separate human language from the underlying culture and, in some cases, geography and the lifestyle of the people who speak that language…” — Carl Hoffman “What I can tell you is that context and nuance are equally important in both spoken and written human communication…Capturing all of the context means that you can do a much better job of the analytics.” — Carl Hoffman “It’s sad when you have these gaps like what happened in this border crossing case where a name spelling is responsible for not flagging down [the right] people. I mean, we put people on the moon and we get something like a name spelling [entity resolution] wrong. It’s shocking in a way.” — Brian O’Neill “We live in a world which is constantly shades of gray and the challenge is getting as close to yes or no as we can.”– Carl Hoffman Episode Transcript Brian: Hey everyone, it’s Brian here and we have a special edition of Experiencing Data today. Today, we are going to be talking to Carl Hoffman who’s the CEO of Basis Technology. Carl is not necessarily a traditional what I would call Data Product Manager or someone working in the field of creating custom decision support tools. He is an expert in text analytics and specifically Basis Technology focuses on entity resolution and resolving entities across different languages. If your product, or service, or your software tool that you’re using is going to be dealing with inputs and outputs or search with multiple languages, I think your going to find my chat with Carl really informative. Without further ado here’s my chat Mr. Carl Hoffman. All right. Welcome back to Experiencing Data. Today, I’m happy to have Carl Hoffman on the line, the CEO of Basis Technology, based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. How’s it going, Carl? Carl: Great. Good to talk to you, Brian. Brian: Yeah, me too. I’m excited. This episode’s a little but different. Basis Tech primarily focuses on providing text analytics more as a service as opposed to a data product. There are obviously some user experience ramifications on the downstream side of companies, software, and services that are leveraging some of your technology. Can you tell people a little bit about the technology of Basis and what you guys do? Carl: There are many companies who are in the business of extracting actionable information from large amounts of dirty, unstructured data and we are one of them. But what makes us unique is our ability to extract what we believe is one of the most difficult forms of big data, which is text in many different languages from a wide range of sources. You mentioned text analytics as a service, which is a big part of our business, but we actually provide text analytics in almost every conceivable form. As a service, as an on-prem cloud offering, as a conventional enterprise software, and also as the data fuel to power your in-house text analytics. There’s another half of our business as well which is focused specifically on one of the most important sources of data, which is what we call digital forensics or cyber forensics. That’s the challenge of getting data off of digital media that maybe either still in use or dead. Brian: Talk to me about dead. Can you go unpack that a little bit? Carl: Yes. Dead basically means powered off or disabled. The primary application there is for corporate investigators or for law enforcement who are investigating captured devices or digital media. Brian: Got it. Just to help people understand some of the use cases that someone would be leveraging some of the capabilities of your platforms, especially the stuff around entity resolution, can you talk a little bit about like my understanding, for example, one use case for your software is obviously border crossings, where your information, your name is going to be looked up to make sure that you should be crossing whatever particular border that you’re at. Can you talk to us a little bit about what’s happening there and what’s going on behind the scenes with your software? Like what is that agent doing and what’s happening behind the scenes? What kind of value are you providing to the government at that instance? Carl: Border crossings or the software used by border control authorities is a very important application of our software. From a data representational challenge, it’s actually not that difficult because for the most part, border authorities work with linear databases of known individuals or partially known individuals and queries. Queries may be the form manually typed by an officer or maybe scan of a passport. The complexity comes in when a match must be scored, where a decision must be rendered as to whether a particular query or a particular passport scan matches any of the names present on a watch list. Those watch list can be in many different formats. They can come from many different sources. Our software excels at performing that match at very high accuracy, regardless of the nature of the query and regardless of the source of the underlying watch list. Brian: I assume those watch lists may vary in the level of detail around for example, aliases, spelling, which alphabet they were being printed in. Part of the value of what your services is doing is helping to say, “At the end of the day, entity number seven on the list is one human being who may have many ways of being represented with words on a page or a screen,” so the goal obviously is to make sure that you have the full story of that one individual. Am I correct that you may get that in various formats and different levels of detail? And part of what your system is doing is actually trying to match up that person or give it what you say a non-binary response but a match score or something that’s more of a gray response that says, “This person may also be this person.” Can you compact that a little bit for us? Carl: Your remarks are exactly correct. First, what you said about gray is very important. These decisions are rarely 100% yes or no. We live in a world which is constantly shades of gray and the challenge is getting us close to yes or no as we can. But the quality of the data in watch lists can vary pretty wildly, based on the prominence and the number of sources. The US border authorities must compile information from many different sources, from UN, from Treasury Department, from National Counterterrorism Center, from various states, and so on. The amount of detail and the degree of our certainty regarding that data can vary from name to name. Brian: We talked about this when we first were chatting about this episode. Am I correct when I think about one of the overall values you’re doing is obviously we’re offloading some of the labor of doing this kind of entity resolution or analysis onto software and then picking up the last mile with human, to say, “Hey, are these recommendations correct? Maybe I’ll go in and do some manual labor.” Is that how you see it, that we do some of the initial grunt work and you present an almost finished story, and then the human comes in and needs to really provide that final decision at the endpoint? Are we doing enough of the help with the software? At what point should we say, “That’s no longer a software job to give you a better score about this person. We think that really requires a human analysis at this point.” Is there a way to evaluate or is that what you think about like, “Hey, we don’t want to go past up that point. We want to stop here because the technology is not good enough or the data coming in will never be accurate enough and we don’t want to go past that point.” I don’t know if that makes sense. Carl: It does makes sense. I can’t speak for all countries but I can say that in the US, the decision to deny an individual entry or certainly the decision to apprehend an individual is always made by a human. We designed our software to assume a human in the loop for the most critical decisions. Our software is designed to maximize the value of the information that is presented to the human so that nothing is overlooked. Really, the two biggest threats to our national security are one, having very valuable information overlooked, which is exactly what happened in the case of the Boston Marathon bombing. We had a great deal of information about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, yet that information was overlooked because the search engines failed to surface it in response to queries by a number of officials. And secondly, detaining or apprehending innocent individuals, which hurts our security as much as allowing dangerous individuals to pass. Brian: This has been in the news somewhat but talk about the “glitch” and what happened in that Boston Marathon bombing in terms of maybe some of these tools and what might have happened or not what might have happened, but what you understand was going on there such that there was a gap in this information. Carl: I am always very suspicious when anyone uses the word ‘glitch’ with regard to any type of digital equipment because if that equipment is executing its algorithm as it has been programmed to do, then you will get identical results for identical inputs. In this case, the software that was in use at the time by US Customs and Border Protection was executing a very naive name-matching algorithm, which failed to match two different variant spellings of the name Tsarnaev. If you look at the two variations for any human, it would seem almost obvious that the two variations are related and are in fact connected to the same name that’s natively written in Cyrillic. What really happened was a failure on the part of the architects of that name mentioning system to innovate by employing the latest technology in name-matching, which is what my company provides. In the aftermath of that disaster, our software was integrated into the border control workflow, first with the goal of redacting false-positives, and then later with the secondary goal of identifying false negatives. We’ve been very successful on both of those challenges. Brian: What were the two variants? Are you talking about the fact that one was spelled in Cyrillic and one was spelled in a Latin alphabet? They didn’t bring back data point A and B because they look like separate individuals? What was it, a transliteration? Carl: They were two different transliterations of the name Tsarnaev. In one instance, the final letters in the names are spelled -naev and the second instance it’s spelled -nayev. The presence or absence of that letter y was the only difference between the two. That’s a relatively simple case but there are many similar stories for more complex names. For instance, the 2009 Christmas bomber who successfully boarded a Northwest Delta flight with a bomb in his underwear, again because of a failure to match two different transliterations of his name. But in his case, his name is Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. There was much more opportunity for divergent transliterations. Brian: On this kind of topic, you wrote an interesting article called “Exact Match” Isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. You’ve talked a little bit about this particular example with the Boston Marathon bombing. You mentioned that they’re thinking globally about building a product out. Can you talk to us a little about what it means to think globally? Carl: Sure. Thinking globally is really a mindset and an architectural philosophy in which systems are built to accommodate multiple languages and cultures. This is an issue not just with the spelling of names but with support for multiple writing systems, different ways of rendering and formatting personal names, different ways of rendering, formatting, and parsing postal addresses, telephone numbers, dates, times, and so on. The format of a questionnaire in Japanese is quite different from the format of a questionnaire in English. If you will get any complex global software product, there’s a great deal of work that must be done to accommodate the needs of a worldwide user base. Brian: Sure and you’re a big fan of Unicode-compliant software, am I correct? Carl: Yes. Building Unicode compliance is equivalent to building a solid stable foundation for an office tower. It only gets you to the ground floor, but without it, the rest of the tower starts to lean like the one that’s happening in San Francisco right now. Brian: I haven’t heard about that. Carl: There’s a whole tower that’s tipping over. You should read it. It’s a great story. Brian: Foundation’s not so solid. Carl: Big lawsuit’s going on right now. Brian: Not the place you want to have a sagging tower either. Carl: Not the place but frankly, it’s really quite comparable because I’ve seen some large systems that will go unnamed, where there’s legacy technology and people are unaware perhaps why it’s so important to move from Python version 2 to Python version 3. One of the key differences is Unicode compliance. So if I hear about a large-scale enterprise system that’s based on Python version 2, I’m immediately suspicious that it’s going to be suitable for a global audience. Brian: I think about, from an experience standpoint, inputs, when you’re providing inputs into forms and understanding what people are typing in. If it’s a query form, obviously giving people back what they wanted and not necessarily what they typed in. We all take for granted things like this spelling correction, and not just the spelling correction, but in Google when you type in something, it sometimes give you something that’s beyond a spelling thing, “Did you mean X, Y, and Z?” I would think that being in the form about what people are typing into your form fields and mining your query logs, this is something I do sometimes with clients when they’re trying to learn something. I actually just read an article today about dell.com and the top query term on dell.com is ‘Google,’ which is a very interesting thing. I would be curious to know why people are typing that in. Is it really like people are actually trying to access Google or are they trying to get some information? But the point is to understand the input side and to try to return some kind of logical output. Whether it’s text analytics that’s providing that or it’s name-matching, it’s being aware of that and it’s sad when you have these gaps like what happened in this border crossing case where a name spelling is responsible for not flagging down these people. I mean, we put people on the moon and we get something like a name spelling wrong. It’s shocking in a way. I guess for those who are working in tech, we can understand how it might happen, but it’s scary that that’s still going on today. You’ve probably seen many other. Are you able to talk about it? Obviously, you have some in the intelligence field and probably government where you can’t talk about some of your clients, but are there other examples of learning that’s happened that, even if it’s not necessarily entity resolution where you’ve put dots together with some of your platform? Carl: I’ll say the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from nearly two decades of working on government applications involving multi-lingual data is the importance of retaining as much of the information in its native form as possible. For example, there is a very large division of the CIA which is focused on collecting open source intelligence in the form of newspapers, magazines, the digital equivalent of those, radio broadcast, TV broadcasts and so one. It’s a unit which used to be known as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, going back to Word War II time, and today it’s called the Open Source Enterprise. They have a very large collection apparatus and they produce some extremely high quality products which are summaries and translations from sources in other languages. In their workflow, previously they would collect information, say in Chinese or in Russian, and then do a translation or summary into English, but then would discard the original or the original would be hidden from their enterprise architecture for query purposes. I believe that is no longer the case, but retaining the pre-translation original, whether it’s open source, closed source, commercial, enterprise information, government-related information, is really very important. That’s one lesson. The other lesson is appreciating the limits of machine translation. We’re increasingly seeing machine translation integrated into all kinds of information systems, but there needs to be a very sober appreciation of what is and what is not achievable and scalable by employing machine translation in your architecture. Brian: Can you talk at all about the translation? We have so much power now with NLP and what’s possible with the technology today. As I understand it, when we talk about translation, we’re talking about documents and things that are in written word that are being translated from one language to another. But in terms of spoken word, and we’re communicating right now, I’m going to ask you two questions. What do you know about NLP and what do you know about NLP? The first one I had a little bit of attitude which assumes that you don’t know too much about it, and the second one, I was treating you as an expert. When this gets translated into text, it loses that context. Where are we with that ability to look at the context, the tone, the sentiment that’s behind that? I would imagine that’s partly why you’re talking about saving the original source. It might provide some context like, “What are the headlines were in the paper?” and, “Which paper wrote it?” and, “Is there a bias with that paper?” whatever, having some context of the full article that that report came from can provide additional context. Humans are probably better at doing some of that initial eyeball analysis or having some idea of historically where this article’s coming from such that they can put it in some context as opposed to just seeing the words in a native language on a computer screen. Can you talk a little bit about that or where we are with that? And am I incorrect that we’re not able to look at that sentiment? I don’t even know how that would translate necessarily unless you had a playing back of a recording of someone saying the words. You have translation on top of the sentiment. Now you’ve got two factors of difficulty right there and getting it accurate. Carl: My knowledge of voice and speech analysis is very naive. I do know there’s an area of huge investment and the technology is progressing very rapidly. I suspect that voice models are already being built that can distinguish between the two different intonations you used in asking that question and are able to match those against knowledge bases separately. What I can tell you is that context and nuance are equally important in both spoken and written human communication. My knowledge is stronger when it comes to its written form. Capturing all of the context means that you can do a much better job of the analytics. That’s why, say, when we’re analyzing a document, we’re looking not only the individual word but the sentence, the paragraph, where does the text appear? Is it in the body? Is it in a heading? Is it in a caption? Is it in a footnote? Or if we’re looking at, say, human-typed input—I think this is where your audience would care if you’re designing forms or search boxes—there’s a lot that can be determined in terms of how the input is typed. Again, especially when you’re thinking globally. We’re familiar with typing English and typing queries or completing forms with the letters A through Z and the numbers 0 through 9, but the fastest-growing new orthography today is emoticons and emoji offer a lot of very valuable information about the mindset of the author. Say that we look at Chinese or Japanese, which are basically written with thousand-year-old emoji, where an individual must type a sequence of keys in order to create each of the Kanji or Hanzu that appears. There’s a great deal of information we can capture. For instance, if I’m typing a form in Japanese, saying I’m filling out my last name, and then my last name is Tanaka. Well, I’m going to type phonetically some characters that represent Tanaka, either in Latin letters or one of the Japanese phonetic writing systems, then I’m going to pick from a menu or the system is going to automatically pick for me the Japanese characters that represent Tanaka. But any really capable input system is going to keep both whatever I typed phonetically and the Kanji that I selected because both of those have value and the association between the two is not always obvious. There are similar ways of capturing context and meaning in other writing systems. For instance, let’s say I’m typing Arabic not in Arabic script but I’m typing with Roman letters. How I translate from those Roman letters into the Arabic alphabet may vary, depending upon if I’m using Gulf Arabic, or Levantine Arabic, or Cairene Arabic, and say the IP address of the person doing the typing may factor into how I do that transformation and how I interpret those letters. There’s examples for many other writing systems other than the Latin alphabet. Brian: I meant to ask you. Do you speak any other languages or do you study any other languages? Carl: I studied Japanese for a few years in high school. That’s really what got me into using computers to facilitate language understanding. I just never had the ability to really quickly memorize all of the Japanese characters, the radical components, and the variant pronunciations. After spending countless hours combing through paper dictionaries, I got very interested in building electronic dictionaries. My interest in electronic dictionaries eventually led to search engines and to lexicons, algorithms powered by lexicons, and then ultimately to machine learning and deep learning. Brian: I’m curious. I assume you need to employ either a linguist or at least people that speak multiple languages. One concern with advanced analytics right now and especially anything with prediction, is bias. I speak a couple of different languages and I think one of the coolest things about learning another language is seeing the world through another context. Right now, I’m learning Polish and there’s the concept of case and it doesn’t just come down to learning the prefixes and suffixes that are added to words. Effectively, that’s what the output is but it’s even understanding the nuance of when you would use that and what you’re trying to convey, and then when you relay it back to your own language, we don’t even have an equivalent between this. We would never divide this verb into two different sentiments. So you start to learn what you don’t even know to think about. I guess what I’m asking here is how do you capture those things? Say, in our case where I assume you’re an American and I am to, so we have our English that we grew up with and our context for that. How do you avoid bias? Do you think about bias? How do you build these systems in terms of approaching it from a single language? Ultimately, this code is probably written in English, I assume. Not to say that the code would be written in a different language but just the approach when you’re thinking about all these systems that have to do with language, where does that come in having integrating other people that speaks other languages? Can you talk about that a little bit? Carl: Bias is incredibly important in any system that tries to respond to human behavior. We have our own innate cultural biases that we’re sometimes not even aware of. As you point out, it’s impossible to separate human language from the underlying culture and, in some cases, geography and the lifestyle of the people who speak that language. Yes, this is something that we think about. I disagree with your remark about code being written in English. The most important pieces of code today are the frameworks for implementing various machine learning and deep learning architectures. These architectures for the most part are language or domain-agnostic. The language bias tends to creep in as an artifact of the data that we collect. If I were to, say, harvest a million pages randomly on the internet, a very large percentage of those pages would be in English, out of proportion to the proportion of the population of the planet who speaks English, just because English is common language for commerce, science, and so on. The bias comes in from the data or it comes in from the mindset of the architect, who may do something as simple-minded as allocating only eight bits per character or deciding that Python version 2 is an acceptable development platform. Brian: Sure. I should say, I wasn’t so much speaking about the script, the code, as much as I was thinking more about the humans behind it, their background, and their language that they speak, or these kinds of choices that you’re talking about because they’re informed by that person’s perspective. But thank you for clarifying. Carl: I agree with that observation as well. You’re certainly right. Brian: Do you have a way? You’re experts in this area and you’re obviously heavily invested in this area. Are there things that you have to do to prevent that bias, in terms of like, “We know what we don’t know about it, or we know enough about it but we don’t know if about, so we have a checklist or we have something that we go through to make sure that we’re checking ourselves to avoid these things”? Or is it more in the data collection phase that you’re worried about more so than the code or whatever that’s actually going to be taking the data and generating the software value at the other end? Is it more on the collection side that you’re thinking about? How do you prevent it? How do you check yourself or tell a client or customer, “Here’s how we’ve tried to make sure that the quality of what we’re giving you is good. We did A, B, C, and D.” Maybe I’m making a bigger issue out of this than it is. I’m not sure. Carl: No, it is a big issue. The best way to minimize that cultural bias is by building global teams. That’s something that we’ve done from the very beginning days of our company. We have a company in which collectively the team speaks over 20 languages, originate from many different countries around the world, and we do business in native countries around the world. That’s just been an absolute necessity because we produce products that are proficient in 40 different human languages. If you’re a large enterprise, more than 500 people, and you’re targeting markets globally, then you need to build a global team. That applies to all the different parts of the organization, including the executive team. It’s rare that you will see individuals who are, say, American culture with no meaningful international experience being successful in any kind of global expansion. Brian: That’s pretty awesome that you have that many languages going in the staff that you have working at the company. That’s cool and I think it does provide a different perspective on it. We talk about it even in the design firm. Sometimes, early managers in the design will want to go hire a lot of people that look like they do. Not necessarily physically but in terms of skill set. One of the practices that I’ve always liked is actually getting people that aren’t like you, that don’t think like you, in order to intentionally tease out what you don’t know, you know that you’re not going to look at the problem the same way they are, and you don’t necessarily know what the output is, but you can learn that there’s other perspectives to have, so too many like-minded individuals doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better. I think that’s cool. Can you talk to me a little bit about one of the fun little nuggets that stuck in my head and I think you’ve attributed to somebody else, but was the word about getting insights from medium data. Can you talk to us about that? Carl: Sure. I should first start by crediting the individual who planted that idea in my head, which is Dr. Catherine Havasi of the MIT Media Lab, who’s also a cofounder of a company called Luminoso, which is a partner of ours. They do common sense understanding. The challenge with building truly capable text analytics from large amounts of unstructured text is obtaining sufficient volume. If you are a company on the scale of Facebook or Google, you have access to truly enormous amount of text. I can’t quantify it in petabytes or exabytes, but it is a scale that is much greater than the typical global enterprise or Fortune 2000 company, who themselves may have very massive data lakes. But still, those data lakes are probably three to five orders of magnitudes smaller than what Google or Facebook may have under their control. That intermediate-sized data, which is sloppily referred to as big data, we think of it as medium data. We think about the challenge of allowing companies with medium data assets to obtain big data quality results, or business intelligence that’s comparable to something that Google or Facebook might be able to obtain. We do that by building models that are hybrid, that combine knowledge graphs or semantic graphs, derived from very large open sources with the information that they can extract from their proprietary data lakes, and using the open sources and the models that we build as amplifiers for their own data. Brian: I believe when we were talking, you have mentioned a couple of companies that are building products on top of you. Difio, I think, was one, and Tamr, and Luminoso. So is that related to what these companies are doing? Carl: Yes, it absolutely is related. Luminoso, in particular, is using this process of synthesizing results from their customers, proprietary data with their own models. The Luminoso team grew out of the team at MIT that built something called Constant Net, which is a very large net of graph in multiple languages. But actually, Difio as well is also using this approach of federating both open and closed source repositories by integrating a large number of connectors into their architecture. They have access to web content. They have access to various social media fire hoses. They have access to proprietary data feeds from financial news providers. But then, they fuse that with internal sources of information that may come from sources like SharePoint, or Dropbox, or Google Drive, or OneDrive, your local file servers, and then give you a single view into all of this data. Brian: Awesome. I don’t want to keep you too long. This has been super informational for me, learning about your space that you’re in. Can you tell us any closing thoughts, advice for product managers, analytics practitioners? We talked a little about obviously thinking globally and some of those areas. Any other closing thoughts about delivering good experiences, leveraging text analytics, other things to watch out for? Any general thoughts? Carl: Sure. I’ll close with a few thoughts. One is repeating what I’ve said before about Unicode compliance. The fact that I again have to state that is somewhat depressing yet it’s still isn’t taken as an absolute requirement, which is today, and yet continues to be overlooked. Secondly, just thinking globally, anything that you’re building, you got to think about a global audience. I’ll share with you an anecdote. My company gives a lot of business to Eventbrite, who I would expect by now would have a fully globalized platform, but it turns out their utility for sending an email to everybody who signed-up for an event doesn’t work in Japanese. I found that out the hard way when I needed to send an email to everybody that was signed up for our conference in Tokyo. That was very disturbing and I’m not afraid to say that live on a podcast. They need to fix it. You really don’t want customers finding out about that during a time of high stress and high pressure, and there’s just no excuse for that. Then my third point with regard to natural language understanding. This is a really incredibly exciting time to be involved with natural language, with human language because the technology is changing so rapidly and the space of what is achievable is expanding so rapidly. My final point of advice is that hybrid architectures have been the best and continue to be the best. There’s a real temptation to say, “Just grow all of my text into a deep neural net and magic is going to happen.” That can be true if you have sufficiently large amounts of data, but most people don’t. Therefore, you’re going to get better results by using hybrids of algorithmic simpler machine learning architectures together with deep neural nets. Brian: That last tip, can you take that down one more notch? I assume you’re talking about a level of quality on the tail-end of the technology implementation, there’s going to be some higher quality output. Can you translate what a hybrid architecture means in terms of a better product at the other end? What would be an example of that? Carl: Sure. It’s hard to do without getting too technical, but I’ll try and I’ll try to use some examples in English. I think the traditional way of approaching deep nets has very much been take a very simple, potentially deep and recursive neural network architecture and just throw data at it, especially images or audio waveforms. I throw my images in and I want to classify which ones were taken outdoors and which ones were taken indoors with no traditional signal processing or image processing added before or after. In the image domain, my understanding is that, that kind of purist approach is delivered the best results and that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t have first-hand information about that. However, when it comes to human language in its written form, there’s a great deal of traditional processing of that text that boosts the effectiveness of the deep learning. That falls into a number of layers that I won’t go into, but to just give you one example, let’s talk about what we called Orthography. The English language is relatively simple and that the orthography is generally quite simple. We’ve got the letters A through Z, an uppercase and lowercase, and that’s about it. But if you look inside, say a PDF of English text, you’ll sometimes encounter things like ligatures, like a lowercase F followed by a lowercase I, or two lowercase Fs together, will be replaced with single glyph to make it look good in that particular typeface. If I think those glyphs and I just throw them in with all the rest of my text, that actually complicates the job of the deep learning. If I take that FI ligature and convert it back to separate F followed by I, or the FF ligature and convert it back to FF, my deep learning doesn’t have to figure out what those ligatures are about. Now that seems pretty obscure in English but in other writing systems, especially Arabic, for instance, in which there’s an enormous number of ligatures, or Korean or languages that have diacritical marks, processing those diacritical marks, those ligatures, those orthographic variations using conventional means will make your deep learning run much faster and give you better results with less data. That’s just one example but there’s a whole range or other text-processing steps using algorithms that have been developed over many years, that simply makes the deep learning work better and that results in what we call a hybrid architecture. Brian: So it sounds like taking, as opposed to throw it all in a pot and stir, there’s the, “Well, maybe I’m going to cut the carrots neatly into the right size and then throw them in the soup.” Carl: Exactly. Brian: You’re kind of helping the system do a better job at its work. Carl: That’s right and it’s really about thinking about your data and understanding something about it before you throw it into the big brain. Brian: Exactly. Cool. Where can people follow you? I’ll put a link up to the Basis in the show notes but are you on Twitter or LinkedIn somewhere? Where can people find you? Carl: LinkedIn tends to be my preferred social network. I just was never really good at summarizing complex thoughts into 140 characters, so that’s the best place to connect with me. Basically, we’ll tell you all about Basis Technology and rosette.com is our text analytics platform, which is free for anybody to explore, and to the best of my knowledge, it is the most capable text analytics platform with the largest number of languages that you will find anywhere on the public internet. Brian: All right, I will definitely put those up in the show notes. This has been fantastic, I’ve learned a ton, and thanks for coming on Experiencing Data. Carl: Great talking with you, Brian. Brian: All right. Cheers. Carl: Cheers.

Vinay Seth Mohta is Managing Director at Manifold, an artificial intelligence engineering services firm with offices in Boston and Silicon Valley. Vinay has helped develop Manifold’s Lean AI process to build useful and accurate machine learning apps for a wide variety of customers. During today’s episode, Vinay and I discuss common misconceptions about machine learning. Some of the other topics we cover are: The 3 buckets of machine learning problems and applications. Differences between traditional product development and developing apps with machine learning from Vinay’s perspective. Vinay’s opinion of what will change as a result of growth in the machine learning industry Maintaining a vision of a product while building it Resources and Links: CRISP-DM Ways to Think About Machine Learning by Benedict Evans The Lean AI process Vinay Seth Mohta on LinkedIn Big Data, Big Dupe: A little book about a big bunch of nonsense by Stephen Few Quotes from Vinay on today’s episode: “We want to try and get them to dial back a little bit on the enthusiasm and the pixie dust aspect of AI and really, start thinking about it, more like a tool, or set of tools, or set of ideas that enable them with some new capabilities.” “We have a process we called Lean AI and what we’ve incorporated into that is this idea of a feedback loop between a business understanding, a data understanding, then doing some engineering – so this is the data engineering, and then doing some modeling and then putting something in front of users.” “Usually, team members who have domain knowledge [also] have pretty good intuition of what the data should show. And that is a good way to normalize everybody’s expectations.” “You can really bring in some of the intuition that [clients] already have around their data and bring that into the conversation and that becomes an almost shared decision about what to do [with the data].” Episode Transcript Brian: We got Vinay Seth Mohta on the show today. I’m excited to have you here. Vinay’s maybe a little outside the normal parameters of who we planned to have as a guest on designing for analytics but not entirely. He has an engineering background but he’s done a lot of stuff in the product management space as an executive. Correct me if I’m wrong. You’ve been at MathWorks before, you worked on search at Endeca Technologies, and you were at Kayak, which is one of my favorite sites, actually, for booking travels. I’m sure everybody listening has probably touched Kayak at some point, and you were a product manager there, correct? Vinay: That’s correct, yup. Brian: Okay, and I know you did some healthcare. You were a CTO at Kyruus, and now, you are a Managing Director of Data Platforms at manifold.ai, which is a services company that works on data science, machine learning projects, and artificial intelligence. Is that correct? Vinay: That’s right, yup. Brian: Tell us a bit about what Manifold’s doing and what you’re doing there. Vinay: Sure thing. Manifold, as an organization, is an AI consulting company, as you mentioned. More importantly, we unpack AI into […] really focusing on data engineering, data platforms, getting your data ready, and then also building machine learning models and getting all of that put together into either an internal-facing or an external-facing product. So, I’m looking forward to talking a lot more about that. As a company, we largely work with Global 500 organizations and also a spectrum of organizations. Sometimes, I actually get down to fairly early stage startups, where they’re looking for very specialized help in a particular area like Computer Vision, for example. We are largely a team of experienced product folks and engineering folks who’ve worked at both large organizations like Google and Fullcom as well as venture-backed startups like some of the companies you’ve mentioned in my background. Brian: What kinds of projects are people coming to you guys with? Obviously, the whole AI machine learning thing is a pretty active space right now. Everyone’s trying to jump on to that and you got to invest in this. What kinds of projects are you guys doing? Vinay: That’s a great question in terms of the different places and the different motivations people have when they come to us. I try to demystify AI right from the first conversation. Particularly, when we’re talking to executives, which we often do, we want to try and get them to dial back a little bit on the enthusiasm and the pixie dust aspect of AI, and really start thinking about it more like a tool, or set of tools, or set of ideas that really enable them with some new capabilities that also can be thought of, and what I at least see as some more traditional product development spectrum. That’s really what I like to use to frame where customers are when they come to us. By the product development spectrum, I mean there is a starting point of what are the right questions to ask and what are the right types of business strategy questions I should think about, go to market-type questions that might be relevant to consider. Some customers that we’ve talked to are starting all the way back there. There are folks who’ve answered that question for themselves, and now, they’re actually starting to think more actively about what are the product-related areas I want to invest in based on my overall business strategy, what are some of the technology approaches I can take. Machine learning is not always the right answer for a pretty business problem and then really getting into more of the actual design and architecture pieces, and then the hands-on keyboard of actually building, and then deploying data engineering, related data pipelines, or machine learning models, for example. We’ve really seen clients come to us at all different phases. The parts we generally like to focus on start from the product strategy, technology strategy-type conversations, going all the way to building and delivering software and machine learning models that are going to get deployed into production. So, that’s really our zone of focus. Brian: If I could take it back for one second, you said pixie dust and I thought that was funny. But I also get what you’re saying in there. Do you think, as consultants and service providers working in the space—I work on the design side, you’re working a lot on the engineering side and the data science side—are we propagating the wrong thing when we say artificial intelligence and in the analytic space, the term big data? Stephen Few just wrote a book, I think last year, they called Big Data, Big Dupe. I tend to agree with it. There’s a lot of marketing hype surrounding the term. No one can really even define what makes it big versus regular. Do you think we have to stop using that as that? Does it matter what we call it? I feel kind of silly every time I say “AI” because it has such a loaded meaning to people that maybe don’t know as much about it. What do you think about that? Vinay: I generally agree with the spirit of your question, which is, it’s just good to use words all of us understand that map to things that we can touch when we type with our keyboards and things like that. So, it’s very helpful to talk about software engineering as oppose to AI for example or a machine learning model. I’ve also come to terms with the fact that there is a massive marketing wave that is much larger than what you or I choose to do and I think that creates the context that someone is coming into a conversation with us. When they enter the conversation, they already have some of that context. So, what is more important for us to focus on, as opposed to the specific choice of words, is really taking where people are starting in a known context and then walking them into either a world where we feel we can have a much more real conversation with the types of things that are grounded and the actual work that we do. A lot of people are uncomfortable with terms they don’t understand but they believe they’re supposed to continue using them and they should understand them, et cetera. I also find the other thing that’s nice about taking in marketing term but then really almost using it as an educational opportunity when you’re unpacking those terms. People start to feel more comfortable that, “Oh, okay. These things can be mapped into things I understand,” and then being able to use some much more effectively. At least, in our conversations with them, we have a shared vocabulary. I often bucket those conversations under recognizing that this is a marketing term. “Let’s talk about what you mean by AI and let me unpack what I mean and make sure we have a shared vocabulary.” I think there’s some nice ways to undo the marketing hype in more intimate settings, but at a larger scale, I had found that anytime I try to fight the marketing, the five-year macro trend marketing term, people mostly say, “Oh, you don’t do anything related to that and you do this after-effect.” And it’s like, “What? No, no, no. That’s not what I meant.” I think we have to pick our battles. The other thing which I always have mixed feelings about but it does feel like—and I’ve seen this with several of the major technology trends over the last two to three decades—is that it does motivate organizations that traditionally wouldn’t look at technology as enabling components of their business strategy. It does force them to at least take a look, revisit new ideas that may have been scary before. But now they feel like, “Oh, well, let’s at least take a look because it seems everybody else is getting some value from it.” It does at least stir up things inside organizations where you get some creativity going and people are willing to at least step out of their day-to-day and take a look. I’m definitely not a hype person in general, but it does seem to serve at least some positive purpose in that sense. Brian: I kind of see it—we’ve joked about this in the past offline—like there’s a new hammer at Home Depot and everyone’s racing out to go buy this tool but not everyone knows what it does. It’s just, “I got to have one like everyone else. It does everything.” On that thought, of the ten people, ten clients that come in, what role would your typical client be? And of ten of those, how many of them have either unrealistic expectations of like, “Hey, we want to do this grand project with AI and machine learning to do X,” versus, “Hey, we want to really optimize this one part of our supply chain,” or, “We want to do…” something very specific that’s been thought of in terms of either products or service offering or an internal analytics thing where they want to actually apply an optimization or something like that. How many had fallen to the “educated versus maybe less educated,” in terms of what they’re asking for from you? Vinay: I would probably say order 20% to 30% of folks are in that bucket of, “I have a very targeted need. I know exactly what I want to get out of this state of pipeline. I have this other data pipeline I’d like you to work with to put the whole thing together,” or, “I need a specialized machine learning model that will help me segment some of my customers into more fine grain way for this very particular use case,” things like that. Those tend to be organizations that already have a software engineering capability. There’s some data for other business problems already and they either need more help than they have in house or they need some kind of specialized help. So maybe, they have largely done more structured data marketing-related use cases and now, they want to do more natural language-related or in a different area. They generally have a fairly good feel of the landscape and they know how our work would plug into their work. There is probably roughly 50% of what we get as more where we get people who are VPs of Technology, VPs of Product. They understand operations in a pretty meaningful way. A line of business leader who has a meaningful business case in mind, so they already have one or more business problems in mind that they think will be compelling. They want to know, is this a good fit for a machine learning or not? What would be required to actually get to even trying out machine learning? I would put those folks in the bucket that they have thought through some of the business strategy related, sort of going back to that spectrum idea of starting from business strategy all the way to shipping something to production. I would say they are more in the product and technology strategy bucket where they want to figure out, “I don’t know what I have in the rest of my organization, but I know we have some software, we have some data based on running a website for the last four years, whatever else, or some other kind of operational system. I’d like to figure out if we could use machine learning in some way to do something predictive, for example to improve how a call center handles inbound calls and prioritizes some of the tasks.” There are cases where people have much more thought through use cases in mind, but they don’t have the expertise on: What is the data pipeline? What data do I actually need from machine learning? Have I actually ever built and deployed a model before? They’ve usually not have done that. There’re a lot of folks in that bucket. And then, the third bucket is the remainder, which is really people are starting more in the business strategy side, where they’re saying, “Oh, we’d really like to have an open-ended conversation. Our CEO has a five or ten-year vision around transforming our core business and how we service our customers.” I’ve talked to folks that are in much more traditionally industrial businesses like paper processing, for example, or staffing, or more instrument manufacturing, or other types of manufacturing. Those kinds of areas, there is really this historical model of hardware or some other service that gets provided as opposed to Software as a Service. I think everybody is interested in some kind of move to a subscription model and also some understanding of what is the relevance of these technologies. But they are not at the stage where they’ve identified a particular business case or a use case. Brian: If I’m a product manager or someone that’s in charge of bringing ROI to data within my company, say I’m not a technology company, should I be looking to make an investment in a place where maybe it’s more of a traditional analytics thing or maybe I have humans doing eyeball analysis, making decisions about insights from the data, and then saying, “Okay, what we’d like to do is actually see if we can automate this existing process. So, it’s like A, B, C, D, E, F. We want to swap out stage D with a machine learning solution to free those people to do other work”? Or is more like, “We have this data we’re sitting on. Hey, we could train it and do something with it. We’re not doing anything with it right now.” Is there a strategy or some thinking around one of those maybe being a more successful project to take on, any thoughts? Vinay: I think that’s a great way to pose the question because one of the things I would think about as with any new effort in an organization, is that you want to be successful as the person who’s bringing in some new technology or new approach, whether it’s process or people or technology. I think really having a lower risk, a smaller bite at the apple in some sense to get your first success on the board, and then starting to build on that nucleus would definitely be the way I would think about get it going. There may be different situations where, as a leader of a large organization, you really have a directive to be more transformative and that can be a different type of conversation. But as I’d think about somebody who’s in a product role at—let’s call it just for the sake of brevity—a non-tech organization, I think starting with a smaller project where you can get people used to the idea that you could do more with data, it’s not that scary, it’s like another tool, it’s like buying another piece of software and doing some training around it and those kinds of things, then it gives you a success that you can build on and people around you start to have some familiarity with it, where you get less resistance the next time you go and do some things. I think of the overall change management challenge would frame the choice of project in some ways than not. One of the other frameworks I would use also, Ben Evans from Andreessen Horowitz, recently wrote a really nice blog post about how people can organize their thinking around applications of machine learning. The core of the framework is, there are three buckets in which you can think of the problems and potential applicability of machine learning. The first one, actually, falls very much into exactly the example you gave where I might have an analyst working with existing data, etcetera. That’s ‘a known data, known questions’ bucket. So, you have a set of data already available. You have a set of questions your analysts ask every day. Maybe they’re eyeballing it. Maybe they’re running a simple linear regression or something. What’s nice about applying machine learning in that case is it’s literally like, “Oh, you have a mallet. Here I have a stainless steel hammer. Let’s see what happens if I apply my stainless steel hammer.” It’s relatively easy to get set up to do it. Our organization who knows roughly what’s already involved with that data, the semantics of the data. It’s clean enough that you could probably start working with it. It gives you a relatively easy pathway into trying out machine learning. Just saying like, “Oh, we got 50-basis point lift just by applying this new tool, without really changing anything else.” That’s one bucket. The other two buckets, I definitely encourage folks to read the article, to put in the show notes or something. The other two buckets are ‘unknown data, new questions,’ and then the last one is ‘new data, new questions.’ Just to give you a placeholder for what the last bucket is, those are opportunities that you might be able to apply computer vision or put new sensors in a particular environment. So, gathering entirely novel data streams, unmasking new questions. There’s a handful of organizing ideas like this. We generally suggest a few different articles and I am definitely happy to offer those for the show notes as well, if [you’re looking for 00:17:27] different ways to organize their thinking around approaching machine learning problems. Brian: Great. Yes, I’ll definitely put those links into the show notes. Thanks for sharing those. Also, a follow up to that. Once you’re into a project, what are some of the challenges around for projects that have user interface or some kind of user experience that’s directly accessed? Are there challenges that you see your clients having with getting the design right? Are there challenges about getting the model and the data science part right or getting it into production? I heard a lot about this at Strata Conference that I was at in London, that they’re talking a lot about you can do all this magic stuff with your data sciences in the PhDs. But if they don’t know how to either help the engineers or themselves get that code into a production environment, it’s just sitting in a closet somewhere and it’s never going to really return value. Can you talk about some of the design and the engineering challenges that you might be seeing? Vinay: I’m assuming most people listening to the podcast are familiar with traditional product development processes, design iteration, and so forth. What I’ll offer here is the difference when you start thinking about data and machine learning. We have a process we call Lean AI and what we’ve incorporated into that is this idea of a feedback loop between a business understanding, a data understanding, then doing some engineering—this is the data engineering—then doing some modeling, and then putting something in front of users. The major part here is that, you may have a particular idea around what the ideal user experience might be. But then as we start to get into the data, as we start trying different modeling techniques, we might either surface additional opportunities that there may be something compelling that the user could do in their workflow using what the model has surfaced. Or it may be that the original experience as envisioned is going to have to change because there is not enough predictive power in the data, or a data source that you thought you’d be able to get your hands on is just not going to be available, or things like that. So, there is an additional component to the [iteration 00:19:46] loop that you have to rely on, which is just what is in the data, how much can I get access to, and then some of the more traditional software engineering constraints. If it’s going to take six months to get that particular piece of data cleaned up enough such that we can actually use it, is there something lighter weight that we could at least get started with at something in front of users first, and then continue to refine and iterate over time? That’s probably the big difference in terms of traditional product development that just involves software engineering in apps versus working with the data and machine learning. There’s a little bit of just this science of what is possible inside of the data given the signal inside [00:20:27] datum. The engineering part is definitely, as you said, something that is talked less about historically and it sounds like, based on some of the things you’ve heard at Strata, that is something that is starting to change. What I’ve seen is that a lot of the tutorials, a lot of the content out there has historically been focused on, “Get your first model going,” or, “Take this particular data set and try out building a model or tweaking this or that.” In that sense, there’re also a lot of tools available for doing data science and data science exploration. It’s great that, exactly like you said, Brian, that somebody’s built a model that’s interesting. But one, if we haven’t built the rest of the product around it and then if we haven’t actually got that model to production; as I like to say, if at the end of the day somebody’s not pushing a button differently because of your model or pulling the leverage differently because of your model, it really doesn’t matter that you built it in the first place. That actually goes back to requiring engineering and product development type expertise as opposed to data science type expertise, which I feel a little bit more like traditional on science type disciplines where you’re doing experimentation. Brian: Do you get to the point where you’re midway through a project and just kind of like, “We’re not sure if we can do this,” or “The predictive power is not there”? I imagine you probably try to prevent getting into a situation where that happens. Is there a client training that has to go on if they’re coming to you too early? Like, “We’re ready to build this thing. We want to put a model to do X,” and you’re like, “Whoa.” How do you take them on like, “Come back to us in two months or when you guys have figured this out”? How do you take them on to make sure that doesn’t happen and they don’t spend all this money on hiring data scientist internally to work with you or on their own, or just you and not getting an ROI? How do you educate on that? Vinay: That’s again what we have incorporated into this Lean AI process where we’ve taken the spirit of Agile and some of the ideas around Lean startup, for example. There’s actually an old framework from the late 90s called CRISP-DM—it’s from the data mining community—and really, the idea in all of these things is tackling your big risks early and surfacing them. We take a similar approach where anybody can do this. But it’s getting an understanding of what is the business problem you want to go after and what is the data you have available. We call it a business understanding phase and a data understanding phase. During that phase of the data understanding, it’s really doing a data audit. Particularly, it’s an issue on large organizations. People think they have access to certain data but it may be that somebody in a different organization owns the data and they’re not going to give it to you. You sort of have the human problems that we’ve always had. Then there’s other parts which are, “Is there a predictive power in the data? Is the data clean?” Generally, the first thing we do is just apply a suite of tools that will characterize the data, profile the data, and help us get an understanding of what do we think is there. Usually, we work with clients, team members who have domain knowledge. They generally have pretty good intuition of what should the data show and that oftentimes is a good way to normalize everybody’s expectations. As an example, we’re working on one with an industrial client last year. In addition to sensor data coming off their devices, they also had field notes that people had entered when they were servicing some of the equipment. As we were working with their experts during the data understanding phase, the experts actually said, “You know what? I wouldn’t trust the field notes. People sometimes put them in and sometimes they don’t. The quality varies a lot across who put those notes in and what they put in there. So, let’s just not use that data source.” You can really bring in some of the intuition that people already have around their data and bring that into the conversation. That becomes an almost shared decision about what do we think we can try and get out of this data, what’s in the data, and do you guys agree that this data actually is saying what you think it should say? Those kinds of things. I would say, tackling big risks early is one of the major themes of what we do. The other part really comes from, again, the engineering approach that a lot of us have taken historically from our past experiences. [It’s probably 00:25:48] the best analogy I can do from their product management days is this idea of just doing mockups and doing paper mocks and those kinds of things before you get to higher fidelity mocks. There’s a similar idea in machine learning where we have this idea like, “Okay, get some basic data through your data pipeline. It doesn’t have to be perfect.” Then we build this thing called the baseline model, which is, “Yes, there are 45 different techniques you can use to build a machine learning model. Let’s take one of the simplest ones. Something like random forest where we know that’s not the best performing model for every use case, but it’s really easy to build. It’s really easy to understand at least out of your first version what the model is doing.” You can get some baseline of performance pretty quickly, which is, does it perform at 60% or does it perform at 80%? From there, you can start to have a discussion about, how much more investment do we want to make? Do we need to get more data in here to clean the existing data and transform it in different ways, explore different modeling techniques? Those kinds of things. I draw the analogy to some of the product development processes that we would follow if we were just doing software engineering project, which is, let’s get something built end-to-end then add more functionality over time, things like that and then take it from there. Brian: Regarding the projects you work on, are your clients , most of the time,the actual end users of this service or the direct beneficiaries, or typically, are they building something internally that will be used by other employees or vendors or their customers? How close to that is the person going to benefit from or use the service that you’re building? Vinay: I’m definitely not aware of all of our projects, but the projects I’m aware of and the ones I’m working on right now, they all have enterprise users. None of them are applications that are going to go out to end users. But nonetheless, the enterprise users are folks who are not technology people or not particularly specialized in data or anything like that. They are more folks who are executing on processes as part of a broader workflow. For example, it might be a health coach that is at a particular company, or it might be a call center employee, or it might be the maintenance and repairs center at an industrials company. It’s more internal users or if it’s external users, it’s still again enterprise users who are using a larger product. Brian: Do you ever get direct access to those when you’re working with your clients or typically, is your client the interface to them? How involved do you get with some of these like a call center rep or something like that? Vinay: It actually depends on the type of expertise that our client has. If they have a product owner and a product manager who’s fairly confident about their ability to interface with the end user, we might. Instead of them being part of the user feedback sections, as some of these models go in front of users, there may be at the beginning of a project, having a few conversations to understand the context in which particular operational data was gathered, or the workflow that might surround the model that we’re building, or the data pipeline that we’re building. We might have a few conversations. But again, if they have a strong product function already, we would probably be more isolated from that. If, on the other hand, there isn’t that much of a product function that is familiar with software engineering and product developments, some of these non-tech organizations, product managers, they are maybe much more hardware-oriented or they may not even have a product to roll, depending on the type of operation. There, we would be much closer to the end users understanding the use cases. We also want to partner with whoever is doing the product design and some of the other UX components as well. I would imagine that there’d generally be another partner of some sort. We’re interested in talking to the end users. But we’re definitely not the experts on product design and so forth. We’d expect somebody else to play that role. Either somebody like you where the client is partnered with another organization or individual, or they have capability internally. Brian: One place we think about lots of data, obviously, is in the traditional analytics space for internal companies or even information like SaaS products and information products. Do you see the capabilities of data science and machine learning that have really been enabled in the last few years? Primarily,what I understand is there’s more data availability. There’s more compute power availability. It’s not so much that the science is new. A lot of the science I hear is quite old. The formulas and algorithms have been around. It hasn’t been as feasible to implement them. Now that it is, do you see that traditional analytics deployments over time will start to leverage more and more like predictive capabilities or prescriptive analytics where there’s less report generation, less eyeball analysis? Say, in the next five years, 20% of traditional analytics capabilities will be replaced by more prescriptive and predictive capabilities because of this? Or is it really just it’s going to take a lot longer to do that? I imagine some of it’s just at the mercy of the data you have available. You can’t solve every problem with this, but do you see an evolution happening in that data? Is that making sense? Vinay: Yeah, absolutely. You’ve hit upon a really important idea. I’ll start my answer though taking a slightly different view, which is what is going to stay constant, and then we can talk about what is going to change. The part I found most exciting about business intelligence, analytics reporting, pick your category name, is when you can get it embedded into a workflow. The folks who are actually on the front lines making, running through a workflow, or going through a customer interaction or whatever, they actually have access to that data and they’re able to drive decision-making as part of their process. What we’ve seen in the last order of 20 years, is this continued increase of this notion of a data-driven organization, that people should have more access to data when they’re in these workflows and decision-making. Everything from things you’ve probably heard about, like insurance companies or telco companies, call center folks being able to offer you something if you’re going to turn, for example. An offer pop ups on their screen and they’ll able to give that to you. That’s a nice example where somebody’s actually using the decision-making as part of their production workflow. We’re just generally seeing more of that. So, no matter what, whether it’s prescriptive or descriptive, whatever else, I broadly see continued adoption of analytics and data in more workflows across a whole range of software products. I’m generally excited about that. I wish it would take less time but at least we’re continuing to make progress on that. I think what you hit upon is what’s going to change. I firmly believe we’re seeing this in name today but we’ll see this more in actual. The nature of the work itself in the future, there’s a lot of people who have the business analyst role today and organizations in their supporting different functions. Largely, I think of them as people who have a fairly deep understanding of the business. They generally live in Excel. They’re complete masters of Excel. They can build what-if models, they can do scenario-solving, they can do VLOOKUPs, and do all of those kinds of things in Excel. I think they’re going to get a whole additional set of tools. I tell people this and I’m going to go on the record here and suggest that, I’m almost imagining Excel 2020 is going to have a button that you can hit and you can say, “Here’s my data. Go try out 50 different models or 500 different models.” Excel will go off, ship your data to Azure, it’ll run a whole bunch of different models and come back and tell you, “Here’s the three that seem to fit your data best.” Really, the skill that you need at the end of the day, which is the skill you need today, is understanding the statistics of the data, having some intuition around the business and what’s going on around you, and then really being able to swap ends and these other statistical methods that we group under machine learning, being able to swap those in once those tools are mature enough for broader use in deployment. Because of that, I think yes, in the five-year timeframe, we’ll see the leading edge of more prescriptive analytics entering product workflows just like we’re now. I’d be curious about your opinion on this but I feel like we’re past the earlier doctrine more now in the mainstream phase of descriptive analytics entering some of the different products. Brian: Yes, maybe it’s fed Microsoft a little tip for how to improve their office lead down a couple of years from now. This has been really informative. Thanks for coming on. Do you have any single message or advice you’d give to data product managers or analytics leaders in businesses in terms of how they can design and/or deploy better data products in their organization or for their customers if they are like a SaaS or information provider? Any general tips you’ve seen or something you can offer them? Vinay: Maybe a handful of things just to run through it with different levels of applicability. One of them is that having a good business case, as the way we talked about earlier and taking on something small is definitely very helpful to build some success. Also, maybe squelch some of the visionary enthusiasm that people might have. In general, trying to feed some of the vision component while you’re trying to get a great concrete success on the board, is something just to keep in mind to get people excited about the potential and the future. That’s one bucket. If you have a vision in mind, one of the things your technology teams and your machine learning teams can do, and is something we definitely ask for when we do our engagements, while you’re solving a specific business case and a specific problem, you can do the work in a way that lays the foundation for longer term leverage on the work. So, if we build the data pipeline, we know that you have a specific two-year vision. We can actually start to lay some of the pieces even as part of that project to make investment towards that vision. While you should execute on smaller opportunities, you should also dream big. I think that’s one general thought. Another thing I’ve been starting to form an opinion around is that, to execute successfully on a product and execute data and machine learning component of a product, you have to have a ‘what’ in mind, like, “What is this product going to do with the data?” You need to have a product direction, product sense, product vision, whatever you want to call it to know what’s going to happen in the context of that product. Longer term, when you start to think about the context for these kinds of capabilities you need to think about organizational vision. For this product it may be that you did it with a couple of folks from another team that sat down the hall just to get something out the door. But then, really having an idea in the 18-month timeframe, do you want to build a software engineering organization? Do you want to build a data engineering capability? Do you want to have a data science team? Do you want to work with the finance team to maybe get a couple of business analysts over to a new team? I think really starting to contextualize your product vision with what’s your organizational vision, is important for the longer term picture and having clarity around that even as you tackle on the shorter term opportunities. Those are probably a couple of things that hopefully people find helpful. Brian: Yes, I definitely did. I was actually going to follow this up but it may be an unnecessary question. But one of the services that I’m often asked to come in with clients is to help them either envision a new product, something that they’re working on, and it’s what I call getting from the nothing to something phase where it’s a Word document of requirements or capabilities, features, what have you and getting to that first visual something. It sounds like you still think that that step, even if you don’t bite off the whole thing from an engineering standpoint, having an idea of your goal post about where a service might go that could incorporate some machine learning or AI technology, still is helpful and deploying a small increment of utility into the organization. Would you agree with that still? Vinay: Yes, absolutely. Even for the folks building their models or building your data pipeline to get the data cleaned up and usable, whether it’s for analytics or for your models, it’s really helpful to have that broader context as opposed to having a very narrow window into, “Oh, I need these three fields to be cleaned up and available.” If you can’t provide that broader context, I feel you end up with a lot of disjointed pieces as opposed to something that feels good when you’re done. I would definitely agree with that. Brian: Well, Vinay, thank you so much for coming on. This has been super educational for me and I’m sure for people listening as well. Where can people learn more about what you’re doing? I’ll definitely put the Ben Evans link and your Lean AI process that you talked about. So, send me those links. But where can people learn more about what you do? Vinay: Our website manifold.ai is definitely the best place to start. We have a few things about the type of work we do and some case studies as well as some background of our team. That would be helpful. In terms of my own time, I actually don’t spend that much time on social media. LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to find me. Generally, I post things there occasionally and definitely participate in some conversations there. It would be great to chat with folks there. Brian: All right, great. Well, thanks again and I hope to talk to you soon. Vinay: Thank you, Brian. I really appreciate it. It’s great conversation.

Today we get a special visit from Brain Moon. He does consulting work around discovering expertise through concept mapping. He’s created a cool tool called SERO that let’s instructors use concept mapping as an assessment tool. It’s an amazing step outside the usual multiple choice assessment that we have all have come to know… and sometimes loathe. The tool is in beta testing but available for you to try out. Who is Brian? What was the trigger for creating SERO? Why Concept mapping works SERO demo

(#SchoolSucksAcrossAmerica - DAY TWENTY-NINE - NOV 12 - LOS ANGELES, CA) If you think you already heard everything on Unregistered, please listen to the intro for this show. The final event of Renegade University and School Sucks Project Present A Weekend With Thaddeus Russell. Attendees grab the mic and question Thad on the following topics: Patrick - What are some topics on which you still need to sort out your beliefs and opinions? Brian - What is the call to action from what we're learning here? Jared - Political Violence Nathan - Property rights Henok - What is the ideal ratio of puritanism to hedonism in society? Matt - What are some examples of groups that have dis-assimilated? View all shows from School Sucks Across America Please Support School Sucks We do cool things! Thanks to your support. School Sucks is one of the longest running liberty-minded podcasts on the web, and the only one completely devoted to the issue of education (versus public school and college). Your support keeps the show going and growing, which keeps us at the top of the options for education podcasts and leads to new people discovering our work. Please help us continue to spread this important message further! Thanks for visiting this page. Before you do anything, please bookmark and use this link for your Amazon shopping: Shop With Us One-Time Donation Options: Paypal/Venmo; Donate DASH Donate ETHEREUM Donate LITECOIN Donate BITCOIN Donate BITCOIN CASH Donate ZCASH Recurring Options: Support Us On PATREON Help incentivize our production! Pledge $1 per content item and access dozens of Patron only audios and videos. Join the A/V Club If you're looking for more School Sucks content, the A/V Club option grants you access to a bonus content section with 400+ hours of exclusive audio and video. If you are a regular consumer of our media, please consider making a monthly commitment by selecting the best option for you... A/V Club - Basic Access - $8.00/Month A/V Club - "Advanced" Access - $12.00/Month Sigma Sigma Pi - "Privileged" Access - $16.00/Month   Crypto Addresses: DASH; XcZfPP6GZGVo9VKViNBVJZja5JVxZDB229 ETHEREUM; 0x3c5504CE3401C028832173506fa30BD4db4b7D35 LITECOIN; LKNp24f5wwvZ2QzeDbvxXgBxyVwi1yXnu2 BITCOIN; 1KhwY836cfSGCK5aaGFv8Q7PHMgghFJn1U BITCOIN CASH 1AmqLVxjw3Lp9KT5ckfvsqfN2Hn3B1hCWS ZCASH; t1by1ZGJ63LoLSjXy27ooJtipf4wMr7qbu4

LT 099 | Dr. Stuart McGill & Brian Carroll - The Gift of Injury Subscribe & Review on : Apple Podcasts | Stitcher This week's podcast features two return guests: Dr. Stuart McGill and Brian Carroll. Dr. Stuart M. McGill is a professor emeritus of the University of Waterloo, where he was a professor for 32 years. His laboratory and experimental research clinic investigated issues related to the causal mechanisms of back pain, how to rehabilitate back-pained people and enhance both injury resilience and performance. Brian Carroll is world class powerlifter with over a decade of elite class lifting under his belt. Coming back from a devastating back injury in 2012 that broke multiple bones and that most experts said he would never recover from, Brian returned to world class form and was able to establish a new world record for the squat at 1185 pounds all after his back injury. This interview tells the story of Brian’s injury and his journey back to health and elite performance with the help of Dr. McGill. Here are 3 things you will learn from this interview: The importance of being an athlete 24/7 What's one piece of advice you both would give to our youth to better prepare them to strength train? The value of assistance work If you are interested in purchasing a copy of Gift of Injury you can find it on Amazon.com, Powerrackstrength.com and BackFitPro.com and I will also include those links in the show notes. Interview Topics and Questions: Brian and Dr. McGill Who came up with the title "The Gift of Injury" and what's the meaning for each of you behind this title? What does being an athlete 24/7 mean? What's one piece of advice you both would give to our youth to better prepare them to strength train? Regardless of sport, why is it important to only compete at competitions a few times a year? What do we need to do to change the mindset of chasing reps and adding weight? This is not a mindset that athletes intuitively possess. Brian What does it mean to "Practice the way we plan to compete." and to "approach every lift with intent and meaning". The value and importance of assistance work. What do you look for when coaching an athlete and how to select the appropriate exercise. Your decision to retire and over the next several years lower your body weight.   Dr. McGill Why "knee to chest" stretches and rolling around | use of a foam roller are not good for the back or performance? How the Big Three provides a stiffening, bracing effect for several hours after performing them reduces micro movements. Bone callousing: quick explanation of theory and how this was a key part of Brian's rehab Show Notes: BackFitPro.com PowerRackStrength.com Gift of Injury McGill Pull Up with Maximal Neural Drive How the Great Ones Hold Onto Their Careers Thoracic Mobility Drill

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Brian and Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative. They are a vibrant, creative studio that delivers purpose-driven design and engaging experiences for businesses who want to stand out and step into the spotlight. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Launch your new site today! Brian and Jennifer love challenges and deadlines, and are brand building, WordPress wielding, Lego playing nerds dedicated to creating beautiful, flexible, and powerful platforms for rapidly growing businesses. In this 38-minute episode Brian Gardner, Jennifer Bourn, and Brian Bourn discuss: The founding of Bourn Creative Using Genesis within a Creative Agency Choosing a business size that fits your lifestyle Tips for maintaining a consistent workflow from home Creating a work/life balance that revolves around family The importance of scheduling and client communication Building a profit margin into your client services Creating partnerships to create recurring revenue streams Evaluating expenses on a consistent basis Listen to StudioPress FM below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes This episode is brought to you by Digital Commerce Summit Follow Bourn Creative on Twitter Follow Brian on Twitter Follow Jennifer on Twitter Visit Bourn Creative on Facebook Inspired Imperfection Visit Inspired Imperfection on Facebook The Transcript How to Sustain a Profitable Creative Agency Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us. Attendee 1: For me, it’s hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for me, is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers — people like you — more easily. Here are a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to? Am I missing something?” Attendee 6: The training and everything — the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connected with both people who are putting it on and then the other attendees. Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. Voicevoer : StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy and building an online platform. Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian talks with Jennifer and Brian Bourn of Bourn Creative on how to sustain a profitable creative agency. Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone, welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner. Unfortunately, I’m on my own today because Lauren is out. It worked out well because today we have two guests: husband and wife, Brian and Jennifer Bourn. Very excited to talk to them as we continue the series with the members of our Genesis community. Today we’re joined by Brian and Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative. They are a vibrant creative studio that delivers purpose-driven design and engaging experiences for businesses who want to stand out and step into the spotlight. Brian and Jennifer love challenges and deadlines, and are brand-building, WordPress-wielding, Lego-playing nerds dedicated to creating beautiful, flexible, powerful platforms for rapidly growing businesses. They are also very good with words, because that was a mouthful and well said. There you go. It’s a huge pleasure to have you guys on the show. Welcome and thank you for being here. Brian Bourn: Thanks for inviting us. Jennifer Bourn: Thanks for having us. Brian Gardner: This will be a fun challenge because I’ve got two of you. Hopefully what I’ll do is address questions to either/or and then we’ll have things open. There’s no process here, so we’ll just do our thing. Brian Bourn: Sounds great. Jennifer Bourn: Sounds great. Using Genesis Within a Creative Agency Brian Gardner: There we go. Let’s talk about WordPress and Genesis, in that very order. Brian, why don’t you talk about how you guys got involved with WordPress? Then, Jen, maybe you can talk about the Genesis side. Brian Bourn: Perfect. Yeah, they’re all intermingled. We’ve been in business now for 11 years. In July we passed our 11th year. Just think, 11 years ago when we first were into web — when Jen was on her own, which she’ll talk about later, the roots of some of our agency — everything was done in static HTML. Then we transferred over to a private label content management system and designed and built custom templates for that. We quickly reached the limitations and then were looking for something more, something better, something more capability-focused. We then made that switch to WordPress. I don’t know the exact year of that, but I do know it was around version 2.7, 2.8, somewhere right in there. It was the upper 2-point-whatever version. Jennifer Bourn: It was the end of 2008, the beginning of 2009. Brian Bourn: Yeah, and as far as WordPress, we started out designing and building completely one-offs, custom themes. I know for a fact that Jennifer bought some [revolution themes inaudible 00:05:16], some of your very early origins, and then migrated. She also bought some themes from StudioPress before Genesis was ever a thing, when the themes used to be standalone. Then when Genesis came out, and the whole child theming concept, and WordPress sites were getting more complex, we were looking for a good starting point that would aid our development and make our product better for our clients. Once we tried Genesis a few times we haven’t looked back and we’ve built every single site on Genesis since. Jennifer Bourn: That pretty much covers that. Brian Gardner: Okay. In that case then, Jen, you get the next question. How about that? Jennifer Bourn: Sure. Brian Gardner: You guys are obviously a husband and wife team. You have your own agency. You’ve managed to do very well for yourselves and probably could grow way bigger than you are now. I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this question, but why the decision to I know you work with a few people outside of yourselves, but why the decision to keep it smaller scale than growing into a huge agency? Choosing a Business Size That Fits Your Lifestyle Jennifer Bourn: We’ve gone back and forth about growth. Do we grow? Do we not grow? I think it’s something that a lot of people wrestle with. We grew and expanded for a while and found that the structure of our business at the time didn’t support that and our freedom at the same time. Our kids are now 10 and 13 and they’re not going to be at home for much longer. Natalie is in eighth grade now. In five years she’s going to be gone. Carter not that much longer after her. We really looked at what we wanted for our life, and we want to do really great work for great clients that we enjoy working with, but at the same time we want to really live life and enjoy the kids while they want to hang out with us, while they want to spend time with us — and they’re fun. We want to be able to have the flexibility and the freedom in our schedule to be able to structure our client work around travel and vacations and family adventures and all of those things. Also, looking at the way that we’ve structured our business, duplicating ourselves is really difficult. The market is highly competitive, and finding the right people to fill in the gaps that you need is tough. We have some subcontractors that we work with who are amazing. They allow us to keep the train moving when we’re traveling and help fill in some of the holes of where we might not be the strongest. For right now, we’re really happy with the size that we’re at, the projects that we’re doing, the clients that we’ve got, and the flexibility to be able to do tons of fun things with the kids all the time. I don’t think I know anybody that takes more vacations than we do. Brian Gardner: I was going to bring that up later. We’ll get to that later, because it’s true. Jennifer Bourn: That’s not to say that we aren’t taking away conversations in the background about growth and looking at what that looks like for us. Brian Gardner: It’s refreshing. We recently spoke with Bill Ericson and he also talked about work-life balance and how important that is for him. I see in my little community and ecosystem — which includes people like you and Bill, and even Rafal and Jason Shuler, who is another one we talked about — people who have probably the chops and the capability of growing bigger than they are, but they refuse to because they want to put so much emphasis on family and spending time. As I mentioned on Bill’s show, it’s so refreshing to be around people who share that sentiment. It is huge, I know. My son is 12 and in seventh grade, and we also have only a few years left. There’s time to go crazy and work harder and grow and get bigger when they’re gone. As they say, the days go by slow, the years go by fast. I don’t want to look back and be like, “I built a great business, but not a great relationship with him or with Shelly” or whatever. It’s so great to hear that from you guys. Jennifer Bourn: That’s the thing. You’re never going to look back and be like, “I’m glad I took that extra meeting,” but you’re going to say, “I’m glad we took that trip.” Brian Gardner: Yeah. Jennifer Bourn: You’re never going to look back and wish that you answered more email or you sat in front of your desk any longer that you did. I think one of the things that’s unique about the WordPress ecosystem is that so many people share what’s going on in their business — challenges and struggles — and you get these sneak peeks into other people’s businesses. From some of the people that we’re friends with we’ve been able to see what happens behind the scenes at some of these larger agencies. Brian and I have both said, “I don’t want that life.” Unless we can do it the way that will fulfill our personal life just as much as our professional life, then we don’t need to go there. I think it’s different for everybody, and I think, too, personal experiences and personal stories drive that too. Brian had gallbladder cancer a few years ago, and facing the mortality of somebody that you love or yourself really puts things in perspective. We didn’t always do this much fun stuff. We worked a lot more and did a lot less fun things. Life experiences put things in perspective for us too. The Founding of Bourn Creative Brian Gardner: Yeah, they always seem to do that. In some fashion we all, I think, have that to some degree. Brian, walk us through the process you guys went through when you started the agency years ago. I know a lot of things have changed on the web — tools, software, trends, that kind of thing. What are some of the early challenges you guys faced when making the decision to go out on your own and to start this as your thing? Brian Bourn: In the early days in the very beginning, Jennifer was on her own. She was an in-house designer at a PR agency and we had our daughter, which was two-years-old. Jennifer found out she was pregnant with my son — I had a different career at the time. It was one of those It was not working for us family-wise. We made the scariest choice that we’ve ever done, but at the same time one of the best decisions we’ve ever made looking back. At the time it was terrifying to do that. We knew that for our own sanity and raising a family that it was the best thing to do for us, and Jen went out on her own. That early challenge was: how do you pay the bills that come due in 30 days the day after your last day? Jennifer Bourn: We had just bought a ridiculously ginormous house and I was pregnant. Brian Bourn: Based on the salary of two full-time employees with benefit packages and all that sort of thing. Then one them decides to We decide to start the company. Jennifer Bourn: Yeah, when I started my business it was, “If you’re not working you’re not getting paid.” I worked all the way up until the day that I had Carter and then was back at work two weeks later. Those first years were tough. Brian Bourn: That was an extreme challenge, having a newborn and a toddler in the very early years of the business. In the very early days, all I did with Jennifer was the admin side of the business. None of the client-facing work that was being output, just the admin while I had my day job. Until I left that job and joined her full-time, the first few years of the company Jennifer was on her own. That was very difficult too, when one person is a freelancer and then the other person has a salaried position with paid vacation and sick leave. It creates very different demands and dynamics in our personal relationships and professional relationships. It was navigating not just that, but navigating us on a personal level. Figuring out, “How do we make this work around raising kids? Around getting client work done? Around trying to take vacations and do things? The human side of it was very challenging in the early days. Brian Gardner: Yeah, I bet. Jennifer Bourn: 2008, 2009, and in 2010 we took almost no vacations and did almost If you look at our stock of all the digital photos by year, there’s the tiniest amount because I worked from 4:00 in the morning to 1:00 at night, seven days a week. It was ridiculous. Now I’m reaping the rewards of that. Brian Gardner: I was going to say, it’s a far cry from what you guys are doing now. Jennifer Bourn: It was tough, but it was one of those things that we looked at as short-term sacrifice, long-term gain. “It’s only going to be a few years to build a brand, build a reputation in the market, and get a solid base of clients. The kids are going to get older.” When we first started the business it was, “Let’s hang on until the kids hit kindergarten. Then we can start looking at growth. Then we can start looking at where do we want to take the business. Then we can really start looking at more than ‘let’s do enough client work to pay all our bills and make sure everything’s good and get the kids to kindergarten.'” Then it was, “Once Carter’s in first grade and they’re both in school full-time, then let’s look at what can we do with the business and where we can go.” Then it was, “When Brian’s parents are both retired and we have tons of babysitting then we can travel and go to WordCamps and we can do stuff together. That’s the next phase.” Now we’ve gone through phases of life, our business has mirrored the phases of life as we’ve grown. Tips for Managing a Consistent Workflow from Home Brian Gardner: It’s definitely something I can see from the outside. Good stuff. Brian, you manage the business. We talked about the team, day-to-day operations, and so forth. What’s a typical day look like for you now that you’re at home and working as part of the business? Brian Bourn: This is something that I definitely have room for improvement, my own personal time management. I found the best thing for me to manage my day, to keep a typical day, is to keep a very regimented regular schedule. I keep certain rules, no calls on Mondays. I never schedule calls on Mondays. If I do have calls, I only ever do no more than two in a single day. Things that interrupt that work flow, I’ve found — especially anyone who does design or development work or anything like that — you can’t get anything done in 30-minute blocks, you need good solid hours of uninterrupted time. I have switched my day-to-day schedule around to where I am ruthless with my schedule and maintain some very large chunks of time, especially in the morning, those early hours from when I This time of year, when I drop the kids off at school until I take my lunch break I don’t open my email, I stay off social media, and I use those key hours in the day to get my work done. Then, as the after lunch time, you start getting distracted. I’ll use that time to do email or work on short tasks. Things like — maybe I’m working on a proposal or clearing out my inbox, back and forth with sales leads, looking at GitHub, seeing what’s going on with the partners that we work with, looking at commits, and reviewing code. Using those small tasks that it’s okay to get interrupted and saving those for the afternoon. Because I am managing the primary sales funnel and a lot of this other business aspects, I’ll go days at a time where I don’t write a single line of code because I’m doing business operations. By keeping a regimented schedule of “these certain days of the week are reserved for these certain things,” it allows those chunks of time which keeps me overall within a semi-normal working schedule, day to day. Brian Gardner: Semi-normal, is that a thing? Brian Bourn: Normal is as defined by the person. Brian Gardner: Yes, for sure. Jen, what about you? You consult on brand, website, and digital strategy. You lead all the design projects — specifically within WordPress, that’s your specialty. Same question I have for you here, what does your typical day look like? I’m sure it’s somewhat similar but also somewhat different than Brian’s. Jennifer Bourn: My typical day is so much better now that Brian does all the business admin. Brian came in and now does all the things I don’t like doing, and it’s amazing. Typically I am the same, I keep email closed, keep social media closed, keep all the distractions — mainly because we want our evenings and weekends free. The more we can cram in that 9:00 to 5:00, the better everything is. We stay highly focused there. I, right now, am lead organizer for WordCamp Sacramento, which is happening in October. I’m really busy with that. We’ve got regular client work and then I’ve got my new blog that I started, Inspired Imperfection, where I’m sharing recipes and our family adventures and things like that. I’m juggling all of it right now. The great thing is we’ve shifted our agency over the last probably 2 years to 18 months from being very heavy in design work to being very heavy in development work. If I get to my desk before 9:00, it’s my own personal stuff. At 9:00 I start client work and I look at, “What’s the big project I have to get done during the day?” I try to only have one big time suck, energy suck comprehensive project per day. A theme design, something that’s going to take a bunch of time. I do that first to get it done and get it out of the way and get that client deadline met. Then I’ll knock out any other small client projects we’ve got, then I’ll pop over and I’ll work on WordCamp stuff or I’ll work on stuff for Inspired Imperfection, things like that. Brian Gardner: Man, you guys have a lot going on. All good stuff, because you’re doing it well. You’re profiting, you’re living the dream with your kids and all that. We talked about the question I was going to ask next which is, aside from running the business you guys are parents and love to travel, that’s very obvious. Anyone who follows you on Facebook or social media clearly can see the things that are important to you. It’s funny how social media works. I love watching you guys go on vacations. You talk about it ahead of time and then I get to follow along day after day. “They’re going here now. Now they’ve gone here.” Whether it’s Instagram or Facebook, it’s fun to watch — not just you guys, but others in the community when they go on vacations. It’s that, “Vicariously live through them and get to experience other places.” Aside from when you guys travel to conferences, your trips are generally what seem to be, a) outdoors, and always with the kids, minus a Grateful Dead concert here or there. I swear, just recently you took them to a concert too, didn’t you? Jennifer Bourn: We took them to three in a row. We did a road trip. We did Portland, then one in Washington at the Gorge, and then the shoreline on the way to San Diego. Creating a Work-Life Balance That Revolves Around Family Brian Gardner: I got you. This all leads to a bigger question I have, which is what we talked about a little bit earlier about work-life balance. How do you guys manage to do it all? Not just do it all, you do it well. Do you work a lot while you travel, or do you not and shut it off and then work a lot before and after you travel? It seems like that would be a slippery slope in some fashion. Jennifer Bourn: Most people don’t believe me when I tell them this. When we first started traveling together there would be this big ramp up before we left of tons of work that had to get done. We’d work like maniacs. We’d go and be exhausted when we’d go on vacation, and then we’d come home to this massive amount of work that was waiting for us. We slowly learned how to manage that to the point now that we don’t have a big ramp up before we go on a trip, we usually can take the day before we go on a trip off so we can pack and we’re not stressed out. When we come home there isn’t a giant stack of work waiting for us, there’s a normal workload waiting for us. We don’t have that stress anymore. The biggest thing that allows us to manage work and travel and balance all of this is a ginormous three-foot by four-foot wall calendar that hangs in my office. A lot of people talk about wanting to do fun things but they never end up doing the fun things because family obligations and life and errands and all of these other things get in the way. It was true for us too for a long time. Brian Bourn: A very long time. Jennifer Bourn: When we started putting this giant wall calendar in my office, what it allowed us to do — part of it was Brian’s previous career where he had to pick every vacation day and holiday in December for the following year. Every day that he got off was picked a year in advance. When he left that career we kept the same tradition going. This year in December we’ll print out our 2017 calendar and at the beginning of December we’ll line out all the days that the kids have no school and then we’ll look at, “Okay, spring break is here, where do we want to go?” We put it on the calendar in a sharpie. It doesn’t come off, and it’s marked on the calendar. Then we’ll look at what business conferences or WordCamps do we already know the dates for that we want to go to and we can work into our schedule. We can say, “Put it all on the calendar,” because then it’s a commitment to get it done. When a concert comes we do the same thing. When a concert pops up on Facebook — this weekend there’s a Saints of Circumstance, they’re a local band that we love, there’s a concert in Mountain Ranch. We said, “We want to go to that.” We put it on the calendar in sharpie, and it’s a commitment and we go. What that allows us to do is when other things come up — even family stuff — we can say, “We’ve already committed that day.” Brian Gardner: Yeah, that sounds a lot like our baseball schedule where we know in advance which weekends we have tournaments. We put them all out on the calendar and when other people or family or travel comes up and they want to “Hey, can we hang out and do something this weekend?” We’ll say, “Nope, that weekend in July we have planned. We’re going to a tournament and we’re playing.” Those types of things take precedence. I think it’s good to keep track of that type of thing, especially when it comes to travel, because you guys travel a lot. Jennifer Bourn: You can’t feel bad about telling people, “Nope, I’m busy.” Even if it’s for fun stuff. At the beginning of the summer we looked at our schedule and we laughed and said, “My god, we’re booked every weekend until October with fun stuff and no obligatory crap stuff. This is amazing.” Then family is like, “Can you do this?” Nope, we’re gone. Can you do this? Nope, we’re gone. You have to be okay with not feeling guilty about that. The Importance of Scheduling and Client Communication Jennifer Bourn: The other thing that that big calendar allows us to do is communicate clearly with clients about our schedule. People are also like, “How are your clients okay with this?” We’ve never ever had an issue with a client that’s not been okay with our travel schedule. A lot of clients we are in Basecamp with, so we put our travel schedule, when we’re going to be out of the office, in the Basecamp calendar, in a shared calendar. We communicate with them up front in advance, “Here’s when we’re going to be gone. Here’s when we’re going to be back. Here’s the status of your projects. Here’s where we’re going to get the project to before we go.” We usually start planning a few weeks before we’re going to be gone to get their project to a point where it’s pushed onto their plate. If we’re in design, we give them the design drafts right before we’re going to go on a trip. If we’re doing copywriting, we’re going to get them the drafts before they go on the trip. If it’s a big development push So that it’s on their plate and it’s their work while we’re gone. They’re moving the project forward while we’re gone. We communicate with them that a subcontractor is going to be working on certain parts of the project so they know exactly where the project’s at, exactly what’s going to be happening while we’re gone, and what we’re going to be tackling when we get back. The other thing too, is when I’m gone, I’m gone. I don’t work at all. I barely check email. Brian checks email every morning and checks in with Basecamp every morning, mainly because it allows him to be more relaxed when he can check all of those things. And he does manage all the sales funnels. The big calendar and communicating with clients far in advance and that active project management so that they know exactly where it’s at allows us to do it with very little impact to our work and our deadlines. Brian Gardner: Okay, you guys take a lot of trips with the family and you also take a lot of trips for business, whether it be WordCamps or conferences like the one that we put on at Authority, which is where we had a chance to meet and sit down and talk. How do you guys stay — this is the question I have with you guys. There’s a couple of other people — like for Jeff and Marla Sarris of SPYR, I have the same question, because it seems like they’re always traveling somewhere. My question is more about how do you guys stay profitable with that much expense? Travel expenses, hotels, flights, driving and stuff like that. How do you get the work done when you’re traveling so much? To deliver that on time and to make sure the clients are satisfied. It seems like every other weekend you guys are going somewhere. How do they afford that? How does that work in their budget? I’m not trying to ask a personal question, more from the business standpoint. How do you justify that? Is there ROI when you go to these conferences such as WordCamps and so forth? Brian Bourn: Sure. The one thing is, if you were to look at a map on Follow our Instagram feed. We are very fortunate to live in northern California, which is an amazing spot in the world and we do tons of — we call them Super Saturdays, where we leave at 7:00 in the morning and we don’t get home until late at night. We ice chest a bunch of food and there are national parks, national forests — literally a lifetime of adventure possibilities all within a two-hour radius of our house. Jennifer Bourn: That are cheap. Building a Profit Margin Into Your Client Services Brian Bourn: That are free. You park and you hike and you go do outdoors. That’s one part of that. As far as conference goes — it talks about what the focus of the whole interview is about: running a profitable agency. Oftentimes when we talk to other freelancers or other small agency owners like ourselves, is the failure to build in a profit margin to your projects. Not only when we estimate a project do we cover all of our time and our cost, but we also build in a margin. Every business has margins. Cars, they don’t sell cars at cost, there’s always a profit margin. The same should be done with client services. We take all of our costs — ongoing software to the hard business costs — add in our salaries that we pay ourselves, and then we add in a profit margin and then divide It’s a little bit of a math worksheet that I did. I know exactly on a regular basis how much we need to charge to cover all of our time expenses and then have that profit margin. That profit margin we use for reinvestment. Things like traveling to Authority or traveling to a WordCamp. It’s paid for out of that margin that we build into the business. We don’t believe there is an immediate ROI to this, but there’s definitely a long-term return that we have focused in on. Some of our greatest personal friends now are ones that we’ve met through the WordCamp community events. People that have influenced the way that I have run our company and the decisions I’ve made because we’ve met at WordCamps or Pressnomics, or some of these other non-WordPress focused events and have become friends have been there to ask questions and have some mentorship roles with me as far as, “Hey, what should I do, I’m in this weird situation?” That has been critical. Through a very long-term way, it has eventually led to referrals for clients and even new clients. But it’s definitely a long game, where the ROI is there but it’s going to be into the future, not immediate. Jennifer Bourn: Let’s also look at the strategic management of travel. The business pays for all of our business travel, but then all of those points and things — it’s leveraging some of those opportunities to make family travel even more affordable and more doable. You can do more of those things if your hotel stays are free or your flights are free. Brian Gardner: Okay, a little bit personal question here, and this is more specifically regarding the efficiency and the profitability of the company and stuff like that. What is, at this point — not everything’s perfect, we don’t run everything 100% the way it should be run — what is the Achilles heel of your company, Brian? What do you feel like there are areas where you can improve on, whether it’s time or delegation or any of that stuff that gets in the way of that profitability or the ability to scale where you want to go and do the things that you guys want to do? Brian Bourn: Sure. Some of that is what I consider our Scaling ourselves and the intrinsic skills that me and Jennifer both bring to the table. As a partnership, we complement each other very well in our skill set. The ability to scale that beyond the amount of hours that we have in a week is our biggest issue to getting bigger. At the same time, we choose not to do that by choice in order to create the personal life that we want right now while the kids are young. Down the road we know that if we do want to expand and bring on more team members, that it will be a very difficult task to find people to replace some of the things that we do internally for the company. We need to be able to turn those specific tasks over to them, whether it’s print design or front-end development, or whatever it may be — or project management. To find that key person that we can say, “All right, this is your thing now. Go forth and do well.” I find, for me, that’s the hardest issue that I see moving forward. Jennifer Bourn: I think that one of the things we’ve gotten way better at — and part of it is time — but I think there’s still room for improvement, is core project management. For a while in the early days when things were hairy and we were doing a ridiculous number of projects a year — at one point in time we were doing a custom Genesis site, one per week — our project management was terrible. It was not active, it was passive. We’ve gotten, over the years, a lot better at being active, borderline aggressive, with our project management. Partly for our own time management and partly so clients are really clear about where we’re at. I always think that, in terms of managing those projects and managing scope change, there’s always room for improvement. I don’t care where you’re at, I think it always could be done better. Brian Gardner: All right, I’m going to go even deeper, because this is fun. We have never had a husband and wife on the show. I’m going to ask Brian first — this is almost like one of those things you see on The Bachelor or something like that. Brian, tell me what is the one thing about Jennifer — this is not about profitability and all that, but I think it helps in the bigger context to understand how these dynamics work — what is the one thing about Jennifer you wish would change about what she brings to the business? I’m going to give her the shot to then do the same thing. This is not throwing each other under the bus, this is more about room for improvement, let’s say. Brian Bourn: As you know — I’m not BS’ing here — Jennifer is an extremely talented person, more so than probably anyone I’ve ever met. The one area, as far as related to an agency, is not telling her boss to screw off so often. No, it’s one of those things I’ve never even thought about it. We’ve been firing on all cylinders now for a while. I definitely would say Jen has a habit of When we go on a trip or something like that she loves to clear her plate and dish everything off, which then tends to mean that half the time it’s kicking onto my plate before we go somewhere. I wish that it would not wait until Not do that. That is the one area I wish would improve, is to manage not just her timeline as good as she does, but to look at it as the company as a whole timeline and what that does to everyone. Brian Gardner: That’s the answer I was trying to get to. Perfectly answered for what I was going for. This would have been a fun question five years ago to ask when things weren’t quite running on all the cylinders that it’s running on now. Jen, your turn to throw Brian under the bus. Jennifer Bourn: I would say where Brian … Brian Bourn: There’s not enough time in the show for all this. Brian Gardner: It’s another episode, a follow-up episode. Jennifer Bourn: No, I would say where Brian could improve is he drastically underestimates his own skills and abilities and talents. Projects will come in that he will turn down and shoo away because he thinks, “I don’t know if we can do that,” or maybe, “that isn’t something I’ve necessarily tackled before.” There are things that I know that he could do with his hands tied behind his back, but sometimes I think we all doubt ourselves. I think that he tends to do that and doesn’t take some projects because of that. Then the other — he would totally agree — is Brian has a hard time shutting down at 5:00. Part of it is because he has to do all the development and all the business stuff too, so his work plate is much fuller than mine. But he has a little bit of a harder time shutting off. Brian Gardner: You guys are brilliant because you ad-libbed answers that were building each other up in the context of talking about … That’s wonderful. I see you guys as totally a type A and B relationship. Shelly and I are the same way. She’s very type A, admin focused, very process-based, and I’m more of the creative. I think you guys are probably a flip flop of that. Do you guys have any final tips and tricks? Things that you would Nuggets of wisdom to pass along. Creating Partnerships to Create Recurring Revenue Streams Brian Bourn: Yeah, the thing that has led to the most growth on effective hourly rate and as far as profitability as a company — which then leads to personal freedoms and the things that we talked about a lot on this call — is, from a client services perspective, looking at your clients not on a per project basis but as a partnership with them. It’s not just thinking, “Okay, I’m going to design and build a WordPress theme and launch it. Here you go, great.” And then going from project to project. Every client we take on now — they are more of a partnership model where, yes, we are going to build a site for you, but we are going to continue working with you at bare minimum ongoing support and maintenance to create recurring revenue stream in the agency. Most of our clients stick with us either on a monthly basis for a retainer for ongoing consulting support, strategy, additional development, and design work. That means being very selective with your clients. This took us a long time to get here, where we work with fewer clients per year than we ever have, but we work with them not just on one project that’s siloed off and then it’s done. We work with them to create and launch the project and then continue working with them on an ongoing basis. As anyone will tell you, it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than a new customer by tenfold. When there is none of that discovery and they already trust you and they’ve already paid you, it’s a simple matter of, “Well, let’s get this done.” “No problem, it will be this much.” You do the work and you get paid. By creating that ongoing partnership with your clients and being a critical role in their business success online, it has led to where we are at today. Brian Gardner: Good stuff. Jen? Evaluating Expenses on a Consistent Basis Jennifer Bourn: I think the other thing to note is that a lot of people talk about wanting to make more money or have more income that they can have available to do whatever it is that they might want to do. The focus on that a lot of times is always, “I need to make more money, which means I need to do more work,” or “I need more clients,” or “I need bigger projects.” One of the things that we have really focused on is not just looking at profits coming from more clients or more projects, but looking at how we’re spending, how we’re using, and how we’re putting the money we’re already making to work for us. It’s looking at regular expenses. For example, we had for years a subscription to Shutterstock, which we used the heck out of because we had certain retainer clients where we were doing print work every single week and we needed access to stock imagery every week. When we were building full custom Genesis sites every week, we used a ridiculous amount of stock photography. Our business has shifted so much that we’re using so much less. It’s looking at where are the expenses that you can trim and what expenses can you scale back? We were able to get rid of that subscription, so we saved $250 a month. We switched from Infusionsoft after we were with them for so many years. We switched from Infusionsoft to Agile CRM and we saved $300 a month. Evaluating where is your money going, where are you spending it, and do you need to spend it there or is there a better solution? You look at those two things — we cut our monthly expenses down by almost $600. That could be less client work that you are under pressure to sell. Brian Gardner: That’s a great set of guidelines for us, even outside of the business world, even in our homes. As you were talking, all I could think of was Joshua Becker talking about that type of thing within our own personal lives. The message that he talks over at Becoming Minimalist. It’s not about making more, it’s about saving and spending and having less, and so on. Jennifer Bourn: Yeah. Brian Gardner: That’s a great segue into the last thing I want to talk about, which is work and life balance. As you say, they aren’t separated into neat little boxes, they are mixed together, integrated, and part of each other. Jennifer, your new personal blog, Inspired Imperfection, which you talked about and we’ll link to in the show notes, encourages everyone to live an inspired life, embracing imperfection and creating the life that nourishes our soul with our kids in tow. I love that. For those listening, if you want to follow them you can follow Brian and Jennifer — their business perspective — at Bourn Creative, also in the show notes. To see how they balance their work life with their kids and go on vacations and all that stuff, you can check out Jen’s personal blog at InspiredImperfection.com. If you like what you heard on today’s show here at Studio Press FM, you can find more episodes of it at, you guessed it, Studiopress.FM. You can also help Lauren and I hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes, that would be helpful, very much appreciated. It is also a great way to never miss an episode. Brian, Jen, on behalf of Lauren and I and everyone in our company and the podcast network, we’re very thankful to have you guys on the show. Brian Bourn: Thanks for having us, it was fun. Jennifer Bourn: Thanks for having us. Brian Gardner: All right, we’ll talk soon I’m sure. Everyone who’s listening, we’ll see you next week.

Find all the messages from this series here: http://www.faithinchandler.com/corinthians/ This past week Rusty was telling me that on their vacation he decided to try body boarding and that he got caught in the wave. I told him I refer to that as the spin cycle. I experienced that in a big way when I was 14 or 15. There was a hurricane that came through the Virginia Beach area and it brought huge waves and surf. I had never been in waves life that… When you’re surfing or body boarding, you’ve got to be going fast enough to “Catch the wave” or it will go right under you, or if you are a little ahead of it, it will crash down on you. One crashed on me and then tumbled me over and over. I lost all perspective of what was up and down. The next thing I knew, I was dumped onto the beach and my board was trying to wash away a little further down. I stood up and said, whoa. That was crazy powerful. Occasionally a passage of scripture will hit me like that- it will be so much more powerful than I was expecting and send me tumbling. This passage has done that to me this week. I hope it hits you hard today, not that you wind up sore, but that you’ll walk away saying, wow that was powerful Read 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 Underline that phrase in verse 23. For the gospel’s sake. Brian- What are you doing? Um, I don’t know… Now Paul has just recently talked to them about Money, Meat offered in pagan temples, Marriage, Sex, and each one of those scenarios Paul has explained the issue, then said, now this is what I do, or this is how I’ve chosen to live my life. Here in this passage he explains WHY For example he said that it’s right that the church would provide financial support to their leaders, then Paul explains that he doesn’t take any financial support because he can go further faster for the gospel. Before that he talked about Marriage- that it was a good thing, that people should get married, that it was especially better than to live in immorality, but then Paul explains that he has chosen to remain single because he believes that he is able to give more of himself to the ministry of the gospel that way. In these instances he doesn’t say that they need to be just like him, but that he has chosen to live this way For the Sake of the Gospel. Here’s the first main truth this morning-  Paul devoted his life to the communication of the gospel. This wasn’t just something that Paul claimed in his letters, it’s what he lived out as recorded by Luke in his history of the early church. What we read about Paul is that he tirelessly went from city to city proclaiming the gospel. He would preach until he was thrown in prison or had planted a church, often he would do both. Then once he was thrown out of a city, he would go to the next city and start sharing the gospel to establish a church there. Paul didn’t just ride in and preach the gospel and ride out, he developed leaders and elders. He set up Bible Studies and Small Groups, he organized a team that would carry on the work once he was gone to the next city. In Acts 17 we read that Paul was establishing the church in Thessalonica and some people got upset and ran him out of town. So he went to a place called Berea and started establishing a church there. The people in Thessalonica heard that Paul was in the next city doing the same thing so they came to Thessalonica and went before the officials of that city and began to stir up crowds, so Paul was run out of Berea but he was separated from the rest of his team, they stayed there to continue the work because they were much less noticeable. Paul is sent to Athens to wait for them. 16Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols.  17So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Paul’s just been run out of two towns and separated from his team. They tell him to wait in Athens and they’ll be there shortly. But Paul can not simply wait. His Spirit Provokes him. He must preach! Do you remember what we read in verse 16 last week. The end of verse 16 Paul says, “Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel!” Paul was so  dedicated  to the communication of the gospel because he was so  passionate  about the gospel. In verse 23 Paul tells us this, he says, I do all of this because of the gospel. I do all of this for the sake of the gospel. There’s the passion. There’s the drive. There’s the why. So you need to understand how Paul came to know the gospel. Paul was a religious leader in the Jewish tradition. He was the type that believed in his God and was willing to compel others to believe as well through violence. When the disciples of Jesus began to share the message of the gospel- that Jesus was not a criminal who had been executed but instead Jesus is the Son of God who died for the purpose of forgiving our sin and offering us new life and now He has risen from the dead demonstrating that He is able to offer forgiveness and restore lives- When the disciples began to preach this and people were believing in Jesus by the thousands, Paul began rounding up anyone they knew to be a Christian. He threw people in prison. He stood by while people were executed. He was a hatchet man. He was an old school terrorist. Then he gets permission to expand his mission, he’s going bigger and better after more Christians in other cities and Jesus appears to Paul. Paul is gripped by the power of God’s grace and this angry, judgmental, cynical, violent man is overwhelmed by the mercy of Jesus- it picks him up and tumbles him over and before he know it, he’s in the dirt of that dirt road asking what he must do to be forgiven of the horrible things that he has done. Paul’s experience was powerful, but no more powerful than the experience people in this room have had when the love and mercy of Jesus knocked them backwards and left them on their knees asking for forgiveness and restoration. Paul’s experience was like mine, when God gripped the heart of an angry, arrogant, rebellious teenager and left me on my knees asking God to forgive me and fix me. Paul’s experience was like that of any sinner who is made a saint by God’s grace. Because it was so powerful, Paul was dedicated to share it with everyone. Now this is crazy- Look at what verse 19 says. Though I am free from all men, I have made myself a servant to all. When Paul met Jesus he was headed to another city because he had gotten permission from his bosses. Paul had been living in a system where he was told what to do. Paul had been living in a system that was full of rules and yet he had never done enough. Paul had not been free. Now he was. He was now free from the rules and the to do lists and even though he was no longer living to please those masters, he felt more at peace than he ever had before… So he was free. But he chose to live as a servant to take the gospel to all people. Not because he had to in order to feel worthy- but because he had been freed from that life he wanted everyone to be free. Paul viewed his God given freedom as an opportunity to free others. So, Paul never made a decision based merely on what he wanted but rather he based his life upon a simple question: What will give me the greatest opportunity to free the sinner with the gospel? So when it came to the question of whether or not to eat meat that had been offered in the temple, Paul was asking what will work best for the spread of the gospel? When it came to the question of whether or not to get married, Paul’s question was which manner of life will best serve the gospel? When it came to the question of offerings, Pau’s question was what will best serve the communication of the gospel? Paul was not as concerned with these issues-  to him they were petty religious and cultural issues. Paul was concerned with reaching people with the gospel! “We are not keepers of the aquarium. We are fishers of men!” -Mountain View Church So that’s the why of what Paul was doing,  let’s talk a minute about how Paul was doing this. There were some Jews in Corinth, but not many. So perhaps in Corinth Paul had done things that would have made it difficult for a Jew to accept as normal behavior, and then when Paul was ministering to Jews he was following their customs and traditions and when this got back to the Corinthians, they were confused. They were wondering why Paul was being a hypocrite. They wondered why he acted one way with them and another way with other people. Paul wasn't being a hypocrite, but he was attempting to respect the culture and traditions of the people that he was trying to reach with the gospel. Paul wasn’t sinning- Paul wasn’t participating in sin just to put people at ease, but when it came to cultural and religious issues, he made the gospel the main issue. Paul never changed the message or faltered in his mission, but he adapted his methods to the culture. by the way, Paul was uniquely qualified to do this. He was a Jew. A Pharisee of the Pharisees he once said of himself. He was an educated Jew so he was familiar with the Old Testament and Jewish customs. Did you notice what we read about him from when he was in Athens? He reasoned daily in the synagogue. He could be a Jew to the Jews. Paul was a Roman Citizen, which many Jews were not. He was a Jew, but he had some exposure to the greek culture and way of life. He knew how to talk with Jews and Romans. He knew where to start with each of them. Paul says, to the Jew I am a Jew. To the weak, I am weak. To the strong, I am strong. I am all things to all men so that by all means I might win some. The Message is sealed in blood. The Mission is engraved in stone. The Methods are sketched in pencil. In Acts 17, when Paul is in Athens and starts sharing with them because his heart is provoked. He shares in the synagogue, which had done before. Then he shares in the marketplace, which he had done before, then he notices all of these idols. They even had an idol to the unknown God. So he called people to this little amphitheater type place to talk to them about the unknown God. Paul had preached in the synagogue before. He had preached to greeks in the marketplace before. He had never preached like this. This was new. To reach people who had never heard the gospel before,  Paul did something he had never done before. So what does this look like for us? Several year ago Jim Collins put together a research team that studied companies that were good companies that became top performing, great companies. They put out a book with their findings. One of the principles that they found in each of the companies that made the leap had a similar characteristic. They found the convergence of 3 attributes. What they were good at- What they were passionate about- What was profitable- Companies that had something they were good at, they were passionate about, and was profitable were incredibly successful. I think that’s just merely a secular illustration of the way God made us. I believe that God has uniquely gifted all of us, given us all a passion, and a mission to share the message of the gospel. I believe that whenever we find the convergence of 3 attributes we are effective as a church- What we are uniquely gifted to do- what we are passionate about- what we are called to do. Let me give you an example. Our church is unique in the fact that we have many young kids. We have like 6 kids that are starting kindergarten this year, for a church our size, that’s pretty crazy. So we’ve got young families. We are passionate for young families and about teaching the Bible to children. And we are called to train the next generation- so we’ve been effective at reaching and impacting other young families. Our church is unique in the fast that we have several people who have been saved from a life of addiction. We are passionate about reaching addicts. We are called to reach addicts… In the convergence of those 3, we’ve found an effective opportunity to reach addicts with the gospel… We are all called. We are all uniquely gifted. But we are not all passionate. Paul wasn’t more gifted or more called than others, Paul was more passionate. Passion beats polish! (Paul devoted his life to the communication of the gospel) Paul devoted his life to the application of the gospel. Quickly lets look at verses 24-27 i think Paul was worried about the Corinthians. If they were not willing to make changes in their lives for the sake of the communication of the gospel, would they willing to make changes in their lives for the sake of the application of the gospel? Would they change when God called them to live differently because it’s what he expected? Paul gives them an illustration. He points to the greek games. He says, look at how disciplined and passionate they are! What if we worked as hard to apply the gospel as they work to train for the games? Paul says, only one of them is going to win and the prize he wins doesn’t even last! Our reward lasts forever. Even their fitness goes away! Paul was passionate about the communication of the gospel because he was still active in the application of the gospel in his own life. When was the last time God restored a broken piece of your heart? When was the last time that the gospel reshaped you and molded you? Paul says here that he isn’t living his life haphazardly or accidentally, but he is intentionally, persistently pursuing the work of God in his own life. Paul says, God forbid that though I’ve preached to others that I myself would become a castaway-. God forbid that I would forget the very truth I proclaim. If you’re not passionate about the gospel touching new hearts, it’s been too long since it touched yours.

Brian: "What are all these boxes doing out in the hall?" Liz: "I decided that it was finally time for me to get organized?" Brian: "You? Organized?" Liz: "I'm not that bad, am I?" Brian: "Well, I don't know anyone else who loses her keys everyday, or her phone, or her bag." Liz: "That's called being normal." Brian: "Well, I don't lose my things everyday." Liz: "That's because you're not normal, ha, ha! I've made a resolution: I will be more organized. I'll use my iPhone calendar. I'll get rid of my junk, and become more efficient." Brian: "Wow! God help us all! An efficient Liz is hard to imagine." Liz: "That's because overly organized people like you lack imagination."   Questions or comments? Email me at acupofenglish@hotmail.com. Feel free to join me on my Facebook page called Anna Fromacupofenglish. You're all welcome.  Please rate my app or buy it by clicking the link. // //   //  

Thank you Sasha Astafiva ( https://www.theconsumervc.com/70-sasha-astafyeva-atomico-growing-a-real-estate-tech-company-in-brazil-series-a-consumer-landscape-in-europe-and-how-she-thinks-about-international-expansion/ ) for the introduction to my guest today, Brian Requarth ( https://twitter.com/brianrequarth ) , co-founder and former CEO of Viva Real ( https://www.vivareal.com.br/venda/ ). Viva Real is the online real estate marketplace in Latin America. He is also the founder of Latitud ( https://latitud.com/ ) , helping build the next generation of iconic tech startups in Latin America. You can follow Brian on Twitter @brianrequarth ( https://twitter.com/brianrequarth ). You can also follow your host @mikegelb ( https://twitter.com/MikeGelb ). A few books that inspired Brian: The Courage to be Disliked ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078MDSV8T?camp=1789&creativeASIN=B078MDSV8T&ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&tag=theconsumervc-20 ) by Ichiro Klshimi The Hard Things About Hard Things ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062273205?camp=1789&creativeASIN=0062273205&ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&tag=theconsumervc-20 ) by Ben Horowitz Venture Deals ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1119594820?camp=1789&creativeASIN=1119594820&ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&tag=theconsumervc-20 ) by Brad Feld Some of the questions I ask Brian - * What was your initial attraction to South America? * What led you to founding Viva Real? * What steps did you take in order to validate your idea? * On this show, we mostly focus on the U.S. landscape, what are some of the differences or things you have to take into account in Brazil that you normally wouldn't in the U.S. when thinking of starting a company? * In the early days - * How did you approach building your team? * How did you approach growth? * How did you think about international expansion into other markets? * When you were thinking of raising money, did you first look for local partners or did you look towards the U.S. / outside of South America? * Tell me a little bit about Latitud and how that came together? * When investing, I know your focus is Latin America. What are some of the challenges when investing in companies that are focused on this geography? * Has it been harder finding conviction in founders since you have to meet with them remote? * What is one thing that you would change in the fundraising process? * What's one piece of advice that you have for founders?