Inside Outside Innovation

Monica Rozenfeld and Lina Bedi are co-founders of the incubator, Her Product Lab.  Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Monica and Lina about opportunities and barriers for women in the product development space and Her Product Lab's new seven-week incubator program designed to help women launch and grow new product initiatives.  Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, we have two amazing guests today, Monica Rozenfeld and Lina Bedi. They are cofounders of a new project and a new venture called Her Product Lab. Welcome to the show. Monica Rozenfeld: Thank you so much, Brian. We're so excited to be here. Lina Bedi: Very exciting.Brian Ardinger: Monica, you and I met a couple of years ago. I had a chance to come up to Milwaukee for the Fall Xperiment conference last year and do some podcasts there. And I wanted to bring you on the show to talk about this new venture that you spun up. And some of the changes that you've seen over the last several months in spinning up this particular project. I know we actually had this conversation pre COVID, but we wanted to postpone it because a lot of things have changed. So, tell us about what Her Product Lab is, and then we'll go into how it came to be. Monica Rozenfeld: Thank you for that intro. In my day job, I was organizing events for product managers. And I was in the New York office, we have a New York office and a Milwaukee office, and in the New York office there's a lot of conversation about how there really isn't a community for women in product. You see a big presence out on the West coast, Advancing Women in Product. They have done a phenomenal job of really elevating women, their career, getting them into the mid-level and leadership roles out there. And we weren't seeing so much of that even in New York City and looking into other cities like Chicago, DC, Atlanta.Our goal, when we had started out late last year, is let's have these summits. We'll bring women together. We'll have women on the stage talking about their careers. How did they move into the director roles, how to build better products? It was really incredible because only in two or three weeks’ time, after coming up with this concept and connecting with Lina, who's also very interested in this. We had a website, tickets were live. We had something like 20 presenters right off the bat. And it was one of the easiest events I ever put together because there was so much excitement around it. So, the date of our first summit, March 26th, New York City, same week as lock down. I actually did this really somber activity where I walked over to where our venue is. I live not too far from there. And everything's just boarded up, no people on the street in another universe, there would be 200 people in this room, and we'd all be super engaged and talking about product development. So, it was a really crazy experience for us.But I think the other thing that we saw was that nobody was asking for a refund. Everyone wanted to know when the date was going to be changed. We had this really loyal community that wanted to be part of this. And so we were trying to think of, well, how do we keep everyone engaged without being able to have in person events. And so, we started with some of the virtual events and that led us to think of this concept of a virtual incubator, which by the way, I'll just add one thing. We wanted to do an incubator as part of our two-year roadmap. We're thinking like 2022, we'll have an incubator. It will be really cool. And it will be New York based. And now it's just virtual and global, which we're really excited about. Brian Ardinger: It seems that coronavirus has definitely accelerated a lot of the disruption that we were already seeing in the marketplace. And this is just a perfect example of that. So, Lina, maybe can tell us about yourself and how you got involved in this project. Lina Bedi: I was introduced to Monica through a mutual friend, and we were talking about, you know, women supporting other women. And how far women can get when they're lifted. And when we think about product management, we were looking at the overall job market growth and product management and product management was and is booming.So, the overall job market in the past two years increased by around 6% and product management is five times that amount. And then when we dug into the data even more, we see that the majority, of women are in entry level positions. And so, our goal was to really create a network community where we can give women access to senior leaders and help mentor them.You know, these are a lot of the things that help propel my career forward and it’s a way of paying that forward. And, you know, that was the goal. And even though what we're doing now has shifted because of COVID, that goal still remains the same. Those overarching themes of what we're trying to achieve by connecting women to these leadership roles and giving access to training. Those are still the big umbrella that we're operating within. Brian Ardinger: One of the things that's interesting about her product lab, slightly different than a lot of the other incubators or accelerators out there. It seems to be focused, not just on starting a company, so to speak, but it's really about launching a product and maybe that early stage that it turns into a startup. Can you talk about why you decided to start with that emphasis? Monica Rozenfeld: When we have a community of product managers, they're already thinking about product ideas all of the time. And they're not necessarily looking to be entrepreneurs, start a company, hires a team, go through the whole process of all that it takes to actually launch a company. But maybe they have a concept that they either want to turn into a side hustle that they want to even pitch to their current employer. And that's very common if you're working in, for example, I work in FinTech. Maybe you have a concept that you think would be really great in that space and you can sell it to your own leadership even. So, it's a very different model. We've talked to so many women in our community who have an idea, and I'm sure as you know Brian, a lot of people sit on ideas for a very long time and sometimes you just need that nudge of a next step.And so, our goal is really to help connect them with mentors. One-on-one. Bring in coaches each week that can help them in each stage of the process. So, by the end, they have the option of what they want to do next. None of them have to quit their day jobs. We've created this to be around their full-time schedule. And after seven weeks they might say, Hey, I really want to pitch this to a VC and turn this into a startup. I really see the vision for it. A...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jorge Arango. He's an information architect and author of the book, Living in Information. Jorge and Brian Ardinger talk about how Jorge's background and traditional architecture has affected his insights and approach to digital design. They talk about some of the trends in information architecture, and how digital environments are changing the way we work and live.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Jorge Arango. He is the strategic designer and information architect and author of the book called Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places.  Welcome to the show Jorge.Jorge Arango: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show to talk about your book, but more importantly, to talk about this whole world of information architecture. If my research is correct, you started your career in traditional architecture. And so I'd like to maybe start there and talk about how did you go from the world of physical architecture to the world of digital design?Jorge Arango: Yeah, that's right. So, I studied architecture as in the design of buildings and it's been a while now. I'm part of a generation of folks who came into the workforce at a very interesting time in history when the worldwide web was coming into focus. It was becoming a thing. And when I saw the web, I essentially left my career in architecture to start a web design studio, because it seemed to me at the time that this was a new medium that would change the world. We didn't know yet, in what ways it would change the world, but it was pretty clear that it was going to be huge.Brian Ardinger: To give the audience of understanding of what is information architecture and how does that differ then UX design or creative and that? Jorge Arango: Yeah, there is some overlap there in that information, architects help create the experiences that people have when they interact with software. But it's in no ways constrained by the design of software. So, information architecture is focused on helping make information easier to find and understand. So, think of something like an online store where you maybe are offering your customers, a large catalog of goods.There are going to be ways for you to structure that information so that your customers can find what they're looking for. And so that they can do things like compare products to other products or find related products and establishing those relationships, figuring out what distinctions to enable is a big part of what information architects do.A lot of people who are involved with the design of software-based experiences, think of design as concerned with the way that things look and how they function. And that is certainly an important component of it. But information architects are concerned with the underlying structures that inform those things. That includes things like categories, navigation systems, the way that search engine search functionality, and such a system is structured and organized. Those are all within the area of concern for information architects.Brian Ardinger: I can see now where traditional architecture can have a major influence in how you develop digital environments. How do you think you're learning in the physical world has influenced your digital design capabilities? Jorge Arango: That's one of the reasons that I actually jumped on the web back in the mid-nineties. It was pretty clear to me that there was a direct relationship between the stuff that I'd been studying in architecture school and what was needed for this new medium.The main things that I often talk about are a concern for structure. A building is not just a collection of forms and spaces. It is also a series of systems that are structural systems, right? Like, and you can think in traditional architecture terms or building architecture terms, you can think of the columns and beams and other physical structural elements that hold the building up and allow it to resist the forces like gravity.It was pretty clear to me that there were structural aspects to the web experience even fairly early on. And the other one, which I've already touched on, was the fact that these are systems. They're never freestanding elements. And when you're designing the user interface to a software-based product or service, the stuff that you see on the screen, isn't all there is to it. Oftentimes these things form part of and relate to other component. That's very much within the area of concern for building architects as well. You have to be mindful of all of the systems that make up a building when you're designing such a thing. Brian Ardinger: Well, I imagine as you're building out more and more digital products and more and more people are becoming used to that, it was different back when you're just developing a website and that was a place people went typically.  But now digital is involved with virtually everything. Your phone's in your pocket and your hand. Smart technologies, IOT, things along those lines are giving you data and giving you access to things that changed the physical world, as well as the digital world. How do you go about approaching a new project to start mapping out how these systems and structures interact? Jorge Arango: Again, there's a learning there from design of buildings. So, when you're designing a building, one of the first things that you want to do is understand what is called the program. Let's say that you've been hired to work on the design of something like a dance studio. When designing a building to serve the functions of a dance studio, there are going to be certain functions that that environment is going to have to be able to accommodate. And those functions call for different types of spaces. For example, in a dance studio, you're going to want rooms for people's bodies to be able to make a series of movements. And that dictates the form of those spaces. You're also going to want. Other types of rooms that enable people to change in and out of their street clothes so that they can get into clothes that they're more comfortable performing dance moves with. And there's a whole host of other functions that such a building must accommodate. And architects oftentimes start by thinking about the program that a building must accommodate and what types of spaces are going to have to be a part of that and how those spaces relate to each other. And the same is true for people who are designing software-based experiences. I find that one of the things most missing in our disciplines these days is taking a step back from how things will look and function and really thinki...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest, the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Henrik Werdelin. He is an entrepreneur, author, he is best known for co-founding Bark and BarkBox. He also started the venture studio Prehype and he's author of a new book called The Acorn Method: How companies get growing again. Henrik, welcome to the show. Henrik Werdelin: Thank you. Brian Ardinger: Was that not a good enough intro for you? Henrik Werdelin: Perfect. No, no, no. I appreciate it very much. I am just hot in New York. It's a very humid here. And so, I get all aware with you being able to see yourself.Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you, because we could go 30 minutes of your introduction to the things that you've done and that. And. One of the reasons I'm so excited to have you on the show is because you epitomize the insideoutside.io world of both startups and corporate innovation.You're a builder, a maker, a doer, investor. So, we could take this conversation in a lot of different ways and we'll see where it goes. As people come into the live show, feel free to put your questions in the Q and A we'll try to get to that as well. I thought where we could start off is how did your founder journey start? How did you get going as an entrepreneur? And how did that lead you to the path you are at today? And then we'll get into the book and some other things. Henrik Werdelin: I mean, I don't think I've ever seen myself as a founder. I think, you know, it's a relatively new term, this idea of identifying yourself as an entrepreneur. And when I went to primary school, I was the idiot that started the school magazine. I was the one that says, Hey, we should have a radio station and so I've always just found that it was relatively easy to just do things, I guess. Like it started all the way back in the like eight or nine and just stuff like that.I thought I wanted it to be a journalist. And then I ended up working for MTV back in the late nineties. And I was lucky enough to stumble into what later became a product role. I had the fortune / stupidity of bringing into the studio of MTV and transmit an hour live for some show that I thought was good. And luckily the people there thought it was good too. So instead of getting sued or fired, I ended up getting promoted. And so, for a good eight years or so, I got to fly around on MTVs dime and build products, you know, ranging from SpongeBob to Teddy bears to making computer games. And so that is where I always felt where the whole thing started, I guess. Then after that I started a few startups, some that were successful and we sold, and some that was less successful in that we talk less about, but I never kind of like necessarily see myself as a founder of something.  I've always seen myself as somebody who gets intrigued about problems and try to find a way to solve those problems in a scalable way.Brian Ardinger: And that's an interesting point because I think a lot of founders or people who want to be founders, they approach it from the solution side rather than the problem side first. Yeah, I want to be a founder because Bitcoin's hot right now. So, I'm going to start a Bitcoin startup. Something along those lines versus really trying to dig into what's of interest to you, where are the problems that you can solve and then back your way into solutions and that around that.You've got a new book out called The Acorn Method that journeys or chronicles this methodology that you've been using to help corporations and other folks spin up new ventures by themselves. So maybe talk a little bit about Prehype and then talk about how the book came about, and then we'll go from there.Henrik Werdelin: I was fortunate enough to be part of a company that we started that ended up selling into Facebook. And I think after that, I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I think as people who have done entrepreneurial endeavors will sympathize with, you have this interesting kind of point after that you leave your startup for whatever reason.And that is that everybody's pushing you on what do you want to do next? Like, do you want to go to corporate? Do you want to be an investor? Do you want to do a start up again? And I think the reality is often you just don't know, and you're just tired. You probably often don't want to do anything remotely associated what you did before, because you're very tired of that. And so, I kind of felt there was a need for this halfway house for second time founders that didn't really know what to do with their life. And I couldn't really call it that. So I packaged it up as Prehype and that became a network of entrepreneurs and residents that are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives and to not sound like we're in self-realization mode, we package it up a little bit nicer.And so, on the top of that, we've built an Institute where we teach entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurial classes, and we teach at universities like Stanford. And then we have our own incubation units where we managed to build a number of relatively successful startups. Bark being one of them, but Managed by Q and Roman, other companies that come out from our building.And then thirdly, we had a consultant arm that helped corporations build the incubation programs. And those three things allowed all us misfits to figure out where in those kind of buckets we would like to play, but also to generate a little bit of cashflow while we were figuring it out. Brian Ardinger: It sounds like it was scratch your own itch and the scratch the itch were the folks that you had around you that were in the same mode of like, what do we build next? How do we do this? Did you have a methodology or a thought process around how you're going to do this? Or did you just kind of experiment with different things? Threw it out there to see if it would work? Henrik Werdelin: I think both. Right. You know, I think it used two words that I love a lot, which is experimentation and methodology. Right. I do think that we as entrepreneurs. Need to become better at building from scratch in the way that we become better is not necessarily always to kind of like have a higher chance of success. It's also, how can we become better of stopping things that do not work? I take great inspiration in my wife as a scientist who look at experimentation as a problem she's trying to solve. And then she architects a way to try to solve it and experiment. And then either it is viable or is not viable. And if data doesn't suggest her, that is viable, then it is just not like, you can't pitch a great experiment in the scientifi...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside innovation, we sit down with Minnie Ingersoll. She's a partner at TenOneTen Ventures. We talk about her long time Silicon Valley product experience with Google, how she moved over into the startup realm building a company called Shift and is now on the other side of the table as a venture capitalist. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption each week. We'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation.Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. With me in the studio today is Minnie Ingersoll. She is a partner at TenOneTen Ventures, which is a seed stage fund out of LA. She's a long time Silicon Valley product leader and operations executive, work with Google for a number of years. Also had run as a startup founder, as she co-founded the company Shift. So welcome to the show Minnie.Minnie Ingersoll: Thanks so much, Brian.  Good to be here. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you on the show because we could probably spend about five or six episodes going through your career, both from the Google side, all the way to the startup side. And then finally now where you're at here on the corporate venture side. So, I know a lot of your insights will be helpful for our audience. Let's start with how you got into tech. Minnie Ingersoll: Yeah, sure. So, I studied computer science at Stanford, which is like a very classic career path to getting into tech. But I just have always felt that there's a lot of things that aren't going extremely well in our world today. Not just related to our current pandemic, but that innovation is one of the huge, bright spots of our country. And just personally, I've always liked to be, I don't know whether you want to call it like the life of the party or like where things are really happening, and tech was always just that spot where there was a lot of innovation going on.  Studied computer science and then joined Google in 2002 when it was 500 people. And that really got me even more in meshed in everything Silicon Valley. Brian Ardinger: And you stayed there a number of years. What kind of projects did you get to work on? Minnie Ingersoll: Yeah, so I was a product manager, the whole time I was there, and I started when it was 500 people. I left when it was 60,000 people. So it was varied, but a lot of the time that I was there, I was working on access projects. So getting more people online, faster speeds, lower prices. Everything from domestically, looking at Muni WIFI to internationally looking at societies where they're trying to suppressed access to information. Brian Ardinger: Were you ever involved with the Google Fiber stuff in Kansas City? Minnie Ingersoll: Yes. Definitely. Flew out to Kansas City, actually drove a minivan around the Midwest for a while, looking at different places. And interesting when you're deploying Muni WIFI and you come from a tech background, Google fiber was less about signal propagation, but you know, you're thinking about the technical aspects, but you realize it's really about government relationships and navigating the public sphere. A lot of interesting lessons there.Brian Ardinger: I'm sure it was very interesting case study in a lot of different ways. And it changed the forefront of what was going on here in the Midwest. Put a spotlight on some of that new tech that could be done outside of the Valley, too. So, you were at Google for about 12 years or so, and then you decided, Hey, I'm going to jump into the startup scene. Tell us a little bit about that journey and what made you make the jump and tell us what the company you built. Minnie Ingersoll: Google was amazing, but I left in 2013, I was on maternity leave actually. And that sort of helped incubate my startup, which is an online marketplace for used cars. So, if you, I have a car you want to sell, it turns out most people are very bad at selling their car. And we probably could have built a whole business just on pricing used cars. It turns out it's an interesting data challenge because we have all this data about what's selling on Craigslist. What's selling at auction, what dealers are selling for. And yet, you know, you've got something like Kelly Blue Book, which is fundamentally static source of information. And you've got used car dealerships that are not transparent in their pricing. And you might walk into a used car dealership and get different price than I walk in and get for the same car. So, we felt like there was a real interesting opportunity to do something. I mean, you could kind of say it was like, a used car dealership, but Google DNA, right?  Like a lot of the lessons that we learned at Google, I had two co-founders. We all had worked at Google previously, so that's how we knew each other. And we tried to apply a lot of the lessons there to disruptive the used car industry. Brian Ardinger: And through that particular process, I know you grew very fast, so you had to hire a lot of people. And so, tell us a little bit about what it's like to go from nothing to something in a very short amount of time.Minnie Ingersoll: You know, like your pants are on fire constantly. That was kind of the feeling. I then had a tiny baby and we hired 200 people in probably our first 18 months or two years. And I think doing anything well requires a lot of time. Unfortunately, there's no shortcuts to anything. So, you just need to decide. Where you are going to put your time? And I think we decided that we would hire really good people. And so that was probably a third of my time or something. Like I just spent a ton of time on hiring, because that was the only way to really scale.Brian Ardinger: Are there any particular things that you would recommend to founders or in that position to find the best talent? Minnie Ingersoll: The best thing for sourcing is probably being really, really clear on who you want to hire. And so, the more you can come up with what attributes are going to make someone successful and take those attributes of what success looks like, and maybe turn those into certain personas. And then you could say, you know, I think someone who has previously scaled a startup would be successful here, or I'm looking for a CFO and I want them to come out of the FPNA and a direction or out of the accounting background. But being really clear on what those personas are, then allow you to target the right people. And when you meet them, know who the right people are and not have the swirl that comes afterwards. So just putting a lot of time in upfront. Brian Ardinger: So now you're in a totally different world. You've jumped onto the other side of the table, so to speak. You're at TenOneTen Ventures. So, you've moved from the startup side to now investing i...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation.  I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest today. We are recording one of our IO Live sessions with legendary Fernando Garibay. Fernando is a record producer, songwriter, DJ, entrepreneur. He was the official music director for Lady Gaga's Born This Way ball and producer for her Born This Way Album. He's worked with some amazing artists from U2 to Brittany Spears, and now he's working with some amazing corporate giants as the founder of the Garibay Center.  Fernando, welcome to the show. Fernando Garibay: Thank you, Brian. Thank you for having me on your show. I'm a huge fan. You're one of the best interviewers I've come across, so I'm excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: Thanks. Thanks very much. And you and I met about a year ago when I had a chance to come out to your studio and see your process of how you create a hit. And so I wanted to have you on the show for a couple different reasons. One, to start things off, the world has changed dramatically in the last two months. And we're entering what I'm calling the Great Reset. The old models are not working. Old ways of thinking. Status quo are being disrupted. And I wanted to have you on the show to talk about the creative process. And how the business world needs to awaken its creative side and how you're doing that at the Garibay Center. How did you move from producing some of the biggest hits in the world and work with some of the best artists on the planet, to pivoting and working in this corporate innovation environment? Fernando Garibay: So, it's really interesting. It's what the Garibay Center is all about, and why I founded this arena, what I call a New Paradigm. And just to clarify a couple points, one point is I still leverage and create content for the purpose of not only expanding and supporting and showing proof of concept that our model does work, but also to stay active in a creative community and stay creative myself.Second point, what gives me relevancy in this climate and culture of innovation and why I started working with the corporate sector is because I realized none of what we do, as individuals, as human beings is sole dependent. It's not one person, it is community growth. And as I realized, working 20 years in the music industry at the highest tier, I realized that if we become an Island and we only create content with the purpose of expanding brands, so to speak, creating music and books and creating music and not really focusing on diversifying our creative portfolio, we're limited. And what I realized is besides access, right, on all sides, musicians are always creating at the highest level every day. They're in the trenches being creative. Where is another value set that we can use that creativity and apply it to outside businesses, besides entertainment industry. You see, man, it's a projection of myself because I am completely polymathic in my approach. It's all subjects. It's all sectors of business. It's all entertainment. It's all combined because creativity is creativity. Creativity is you find a new path to work every day because you are creative and looking for different novel ways of getting to work. Theoretically. Right. So that's just a very simple anecdotal version of quick creativity is. Having hit records, having the success, it got really empty and vapid for a while because essentially, I was defining my success by the hit records I have, and that's a very common problem. So, what I decided to do is shift the creativity and what I do every day. And all this happened in my career is I've evolved to look at this and adopt this orthogonal perspective. It's all things are related in a theory of emergence and chaos. Everything is related, right? So how can we utilize our skill sets of being creative and apply it to the corporate sector? How can we apply our creative attributes as musicians, as actors, as artists, as entertainers to use those lenses and solve problems?Now, that sounds like a really high, abstract and tangible goal. But the reality is it's possible when you have Elon Musk tapping into the creativity of the Philharmonic New York conductor for his design idea, so to speak. Then you start to see that there are people who are hungry for different lenses. And so, my goal was to educate the entertainment and arts and music industry. Find mentees who are interested in being entrepreneurial minded. So they can not only create music, but learn the Harvard Business MBA course, learn a Wharton MBA course, learn the Oxford Neuroscience Course, which I distill in a way that musicians and artists can understand and apply these frameworks to expanding who they are as individuals, but also expanding their output.Think of the Garibay Center as it brings relevancy to these artists as thought leaders. And it comes from this crucible of thought. Well, if you look at the greatest thinkers of all time from Einstein to Galileo, you start to see a correlation with musicianship. So there were musicians, Einstein was a violin player, and you start to see this correlation...you can make this connection that individuals who are creative, have creative expressions such as an instrument, et cetera, have this ability to look at things differently. All I'm doing is giving them the vocabulary to be able to do this effectively and to have this discourse now and sharing creative ideas. Now, not just making music or photography, et cetera, but also applying those skill sets to design, to helping corporate leaders, to think through their problems in a different way.Aligning academic professors and the academic community to also apply this creativity in a different orthogonal way, so that we bring value to each other. So, think of the Garibay Center as a best in class, academic, corporate, and entertainment industry, working together to solve real problems. Brian Ardinger: Let's get tactical and talk a little bit about how that actually works. One of the things I liked about you and the session I went through, was how you brought the business side into the creative process. So, can you talk about how do you go about creating a hit.  You know you're working with an artist. What do you do? How do you use metrics and analytics on that to craft that and talk us through that process?Fernando Garibay: Okay. In order to do that I have to kind of define a few terms, right? So, what is a hit? And so, we define a hit as when you successfully connect your content to a mass, participating groups. Identifying a target audience and then connecting with them on a genuine, authentic level. You've done that. You have a hit. If you want to go into music, entertainment industry, you look at such metric as billboard or charts, et cetera. They show you... Spotify streaming numbers...they show you who you've connected with successfully with the help of a machine, such as a label and publishing the marketing departments, et cetera, a machine to expand you...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. With us live today, we are doing our IO live series with Jeff Gothelf. He is the coauthor of a number of different books: Sense & Respond, Lean UX. He wrote the book Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking: What You Really Need to Know to Build High-Performing Digital Product Teams. And today we have him on the show to talk about his latest new book coming out called Forever Employable. Jeff, welcome to the show. Jeff Gothelf: Hey Brian. Good to see you again. It's great to be here.Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you back on. I think you've been on the show three times in various forms across the platform [various forms - laughing]. That's probably three or four years ago when you were launching Sense & Respond. You and Josh came on the show to talk about that. More recently back in Episode 156, we talked a little bit about building a culture of innovation and learning, and now the world has changed, and you've written another book Forever Employable. You're known as the Lean UX Agile guy. Why did you decide to write a book about career development?Jeff Gothelf: Yeah. It's super interesting. And everything you're saying, everything you're bringing up is exactly sort of the thought process and concern that I've gone through over the last couple of years. I've considered this project and whether or not it was something I was going to invest in and put out there. But the reality is that as different as it may seem, by comparison to Lean UX, Sense & Respond, Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking. When you read it, what you'll see is that the subject matter is different. Subject matter is you, your career, your professional development, your growth and your safety net. But a lot of the thinking is very, very similar and should be very familiar. If you're familiar with Lean UX, Sense & Response, Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking. And the reason why this project even kicked off in the first place is tongue in cheek to some extent, but not really, was a response to things that I was sensing from the marketplace. For years now, for the last two, three, four years, I've been getting inbound requests on a semi-regular basis to talk about how I built my career and how I built this platform and how I started writing books and giving talks and teaching workshops and that type of thing. People really want to know this kind of stuff. How do you actually make it happen?So I added an item in my backlog that said, you know, write something about this, tell this story, that type of thing. And I just maybe do a Medium piece about it or blog posts or whatever. I've been thinking about doing it, but then never kind of kicked off anything about it? Because again, it really felt outside of everything else that I was doing. And then, about eight months ago or so I had to give a talk for a private community of product leaders primarily. And the talk they wanted me to give was the author's journey. That was what they called it. Again, another request, right? Another inbound piece of feedback from the market that says there's a desire to hear the story.And so, I wrote a 45-minute talk that told me the story. At which point I was like I have a story arc. Now I've got a slide deck, right? This is basically a table of contents for a book. After a conversation, and just a delay, so I dragged my feet a little bit. But after conversation with some folks finally kind of got the kick in the butt to make it happen. So really it was a lot of sensing and responding and eventually just not being able to ignore the inbound evidence.Brian Ardinger: The timing is impeccable in a lot of different ways. Last couple of months, we've been thrown into a pandemic and a lot of people are questioning this whole idea of disruption and it's a little bit more real to folks. And so, I think a lot of people are at that point where they're starting to reevaluate, Hey, what am I doing? And the world of work is changing. I'm changing from a timing perspective. You couldn't be better time to tell people about some of these tricks and tips and ways to go about that. Let's talk about the changing world of work. You talk about how you have to create yourself as an invincible career and this ability to the forever employable. I talk a lot about this idea of having a portfolio career. It used to be you could be a product developer for your entire life, and that was what you did, but now people have different slash jobs. I'm a podcast or I'm a newsletter writer. I'm a director of innovation at a big corporation and whatever it is, it's never one thing. So, let's talk about the world of work. How are you seeing it? Are you seeing this pivot to this career that's never one career? Jeff Gothelf: There's a tremendous amount of volatility and unpredictability in your career. My best friend, his father worked at DuPont Chemicals for 40 years. Can you imagine? No. Right, right, right. Like the concept is so not reality anymore. And I do a lot of work in financial services and banks and that type of thing. And I meet folks who've been at the bank for 20 years, 25 years. Even those numbers to me are unheard of. Right. I think the kind of volatility that we're seeing today, hopefully not to the extent of the pandemic. But nevertheless, it's going to become commonplace, right. This idea of evolving markets, market shifts, competitive shifts, economic shifts, geopolitical shifts. The organization that you work for, it may not be as stable as you think, or as you'd like.And frankly, the loyalty that you might expect from that organization is probably not as stable as you'd like. I mean, right now, good people are getting laid off right now because the pandemic is challenging. These organizations to stay in business, in a way that they've never been challenged before. And so good people are losing their jobs. People who didn't do anything wrong. Who did a great job? Who are not the bottom 10% like the Jack Welch, you know, let's take this as an opportunity to cull the herd. These were good people. Look, I know this. I spent the first decade of my career following in that standard career path. So, applying for jobs, interviewing for jobs, getting my resume in shape. And then doing it again and then doing it again for a slightly better title, a slight bit more money, like just kind of playing that game. And every time there was a layoff, every time there was a seismic event in the market, I would start to panic, and I would see the panic in my colleagues as well. Like, Oh, I got to get my resume in shape. I start applying for jobs. Oh my God. My portfolio is out of date, all this kind of stuff.  And that is a crappy way to live. And I don't believe that you have to live that way. I believe ...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. I'm so excited. Alexander Osterwalder is a Swiss business scientist, entrepreneur, author, and strategy consultant. You probably know him if you've tuned in, based on his work on Business Model Generation. He's written the Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, co-founder of Strategyzer, and author of the new book, The Invincible Company. That's why we wanted to have him on the show. So welcome Alex. Alexander Osterwalder: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you here. You're coming to us all the way from Switzerland, but you've always been a big mentor of mine. And a lot of the folks that you have around your circle, whether it's David Bland or Tendayi Viki and that. We've learned quite a bit about corporate innovation, startup innovation, and I wanted you to have you on the show to talk about your new book and some of the new things that you're seeing in this world. For folks who aren't as familiar with your work, can you give us an arc of how you started with Business Model Generation and how you got into The Invincible Company? Alexander Osterwalder: That's going back pretty far. Right. But years ago, we published a book called Business Model Generation. Actually, published it with my former PhD Supervisor Yves Pigneur. He's an academic. And I went out into the business world and our idea was, you know, bringing a better way to describe and change business models to the world. So, we created the business model canvas, which comes out of my PhD dissertation and the tool and the book took off like crazy.So now there are millions, literally millions of people around the world using the Business Model Canvas, which is this simple tool to sketch out business models. And then the book took off and is now selling over 50 languages. So, it was really fun to see how that took off. But again, it's one tool and one tool doesn't solve everything. Right? I like to make this analogy. If your surgeon walks into the operating theater with a Swiss army knife, you're going to run away. Right. There is no one business tool that does everything, and that was never our intention with the Business Model Canvas. So over time companies we were working with, we were seeing the different challenges that they had when it comes to innovation.So, we expanded the toolbox and, you know, the big, first expansion, it was meeting Steve Blank, the father of the Lean Startup movement, and then putting that tool set together. And then Eric Reese made it popular throughout the world. Right. So that was the next kind of step. And then we just always asked ourselves, okay, what does the world now need based on the problems we see. And we always say, when companies can't innovate, we don't blame them. We blame us. We say, okay, the thinkers and authors and doers and educators are not doing a good job. Consultant's not doing a good job. So I don't like blaming companies and saying, they don't know how to do this. They don't know how to do this because nobody's showing them right. Nobody becomes a surgeon or an innovation surgeon overnight. So that's how we kind of evolve with our books. Second one was Value Proposition Design. Third one was that Testing Business Ideas with where David Bland was the lead author.And then the last one is Invincible Companies where we really realized, Hey, a couple of things missing that we need to bring to the table because we always ask, does the world need another business book? Very rarely yes. The answer, but we arrogantly think every now and then this is a yes. So here it's two topics that we really looked at.What do leaders need to understand in order to build innovative companies? And the second part is the business model topic, we believe is still not fully explored. So we help people design better business models. So, leadership to really innovate constantly. The other one is how to bring better business models to the world to stay ahead of everybody else. Because I think innovation today is stuck in product and technology innovation. Not good enough. It's a game you cannot win. I'm not saying you don't need technology innovation, but you can't stay ahead with that. So, we go a little bit further and show what leaders need to do to build, we call it the invincible company, you could also call it resilient or defensible company. Brian Ardinger:  We are recording this live as part of our Inside Outside Innovation podcast series. But because it is live, we do have a number of people in the audience, and we want to make this as interactive as possible. So, I'll ask some questions and that, but if you have a question for Alexander, you can go to the Q and A bubble at the bottom of your resume there and put it into the Q and A box there. And we will try to get that answered. Please start putting in your Q and A questions as we go along. Why do you think companies need to pursue this systematic reinvention?  What's changed versus years ago when you could keep your business model forever?Alexander Osterwalder: Maybe actually let me draw something here. So, let's see if I can share my screen. Traditionally, every company starts with an idea. You can even take a Nestle, biggest food company of the world, they started with an idea. And then what happens with a startup? Is it tries to become a real company? Right? So, let me just draw this a little building here. Let's call this a $1 billion company. Now, traditionally, people write a business plan or used to write a business plan. It has this wonderful thing going up here, but business plans don't really work because the innovation journey and entrepreneurship journey is a messy one, right. Ups and downs. And then you try something. Customers say they don't like this. They don't want to pay for it. And if you survive this journey, okay, good ideas, good technologies. Rest in peace. You become this real company. Now here's what happens afterwards. Once you've found a business small and you scale it. You don't focus on this search anymore on this exploration, but you focus on scaling and managing, right. You're manage. And we call those two worlds here, Explore, which is the world of entrepreneurship and innovation and Exploit, which is the world of managing a business. So, what actually happened, let's say over the last, you know, 100, 200, 300 years of business. Is that companies got better and better at managing what they have, but because they focus on that, it's almost like they forgot this exploration skill.And that was okay for a long time because the world was moving very fast. You had to do product innovation, but your business small would usually be very stable for a long time. Even in one indu...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of InsideOutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I am your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Chris Shipley. She is the co-author of the new book, The Adaptation Advantage.  Welcome to the show, Chris. Chris Shipley: Thank you very much for inviting me on. I appreciate it. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on for a number of different reasons. You and I go back on number of years, mentoring Pipeline Entrepreneurs, and you were one of the first speakers at one of the first IO Summits that we had few years ago. So, I really appreciate you jumping back into the community to talk about your new book and everything that's going on in the world of technology, coronavirus and everything else it's happening. So, thank you very much for coming on. Chris Shipley: Is there anything else going on in the world, but coronavirus right now?Brian Ardinger: I don't know. Probably not. Chris Shipley: Well, you know, it certainly contextualizes everything. I didn't plan to release a book in the middle of a pandemic, but it's put the writing and the thinking about future of work really in sharp definitions. Oddly, it's a good time. Brian Ardinger: Well, the timing is perfect for this and you and I have been in this space talking about disruption and startups, technology, and all of this. And we've been warning folks for a long time about the coming changes, whether it's new technology like AI or self-driving cars or global climate change, et cetera. And it seems like it's only now hitting folks that, oh yeah, this disruption thing might actually be real. So, I'd like to get your thoughts on that mind shift that a lot of people are going through right now. Like they may have heard about it change and, and talked about this, this rapid pace of change, but only now are beginning to see it. Chris Shipley: I think you hit it exactly right. It was easy before January to think about this future is something that's out there. It might be months or years or decades away, but it's, it's something I can deal with then. And very forward-thinking companies and individuals, of course, were doing strategic planning and doing longterm thinking, but again, it was very easy to focus on the immediate thing in front of you. What's been so important now is to see this acceleration that a lot of the things that we write about in the book, a lot of things that people have been concerned or working on strategic plans or longterm planning, it's just been compressed into a very short period of time where we've started to have to activate a lot of those plans or make plans and activate them very, very quickly. So, this time, whether it's the virus or our reaction to it, has been an accelerant to get to the kinds of transitions that we know we have to make that are really hard to do when you're very comfortable where you are. It's really difficult. If you're on firm ground to take a step onto something that might be a little uncertain. Now everything's uncertain. So, leaping from the one Lily pad to the next, starting to feel like it's not such a bad thing after all.  Brian Ardinger: Well, it's also interesting to see which companies are jumping on that and adapting faster. I'm currently at Nelnet. Now we have 6,500 employees in multiple different states and we basically transitioned 6,000 of those employees to remote work in a matter of 10 days. And that's something that I think if you would've gone into the boardroom two weeks earlier and said, Hey, I think this is what we need to do, we just need to go remote. It would have never happened. Chris Shipley: Yeah. You would have said, Oh, that's an interesting idea. Think about what that could save us in real estate and HR costs and blah, blah, blah, you know, and let's form a committee. And we'll create a strategic plan and let's make that our goal for 2022. Instead, it was like, we gotta do it right now. So, what right now do we have to do? And I've seen a number of companies looking at that from we've got to make sure that every employee has the best possible bandwidth or one company that has been deploying their ergonomics specialist to FaceTime meetings where they say, well, point your camera at your work situation. Why do you have your laptop on a hamper? And you're sitting on a beach chair that really can't be healthy now, can it. Let's set up a pickup station so you can come by campus and get your office chair. I mean, they're doing things that are, we never think about, even in a very deliberate strategic plan they're making happen in matters of days. If not even faster. Brian Ardinger: It's not just the bigger corporations it's you and I both work with smaller startups. And a lot of times they're thought of as nimbler and things along those lines, but they're also struggling with the fact that our business model doesn't work right now, or the business model we are trying to evolve our work on is now totally disrupted for six months. And we don't have six months of runway to figure it out the next step. So, what do we do? Chris Shipley: You're telling the story that I'm living right now. I'm working with the company, tremendous potential, and you know, we've been able to make rudimentary progress over the last 18 months. We've made more progress in the last two weeks than we have in the prior, certainly six months in terms of understanding where we need to go focusing, being laser, you know, in our execution, because we know we've gotta be in a place to either extend the runway we have, or really be an attractive investment vehicle by mid summer. That doesn't give us time to, it was my father would say lollygag around, waiting to hope that something good is going to happen or that people are going to get around to figuring out what our brand strategy should be. Whatever. It had to happen like that. And so that's the positive that comes from this that we have become extraordinarily focused on. What's important, both in work and I would say argue in our personal lives as well. Brian Ardinger: So let's go back to the book. It's called Adaptation Advantage.  Can you give us a little thesis about it. And maybe how you got to write this book. Chris Shipley: On the way back machine a little bit, it was 2015 and I was speaking at a conference in Sydney, Australia, and another speaker, Heather McGowan, who gave a presentation. And afterward I approached, I said, well, you just talked about my life. And it was this presentation about how work is changing, how individual contributors play a different role on the corporation. And, and so we just, I got to talking and discovered that at the time, anyway, we were living about six miles apart, both in the Boston area.and a friendship formed. We spent a lot of time just having conver...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with us on our second IO Live event is James Gill. James is the founder of GoSquared. Welcome to the show, James. James Gill: Hi, thanks for having me, Brian pleasure to be here. Looking forward to chatting. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you back on the show and regular listeners will know that we had a chat probably about a year ago when you were on the show. Talking about some of this no code stuff that was just popping up and that. And so, when we decided to go to a live event, I figured, Oh, I want to get James back in to talk about...a lot has happened in the last year or the last week. Exactly. Why don't you give the audience a little bit of background about your journey as a founder, a long time ago when you started GoSquared as a wee lad, as I like to say, and then we'll go from there.James Gill: Thanks again, Brian, for having me. It’s crazy times. Sure, we've got a lot to dig into. Just as a bit of background on me, I'm one of the founders of a company called GoSquared. We're a software as a service business. We perhaps haven't taken the traditional route of a software business. We started the business, back when I was in school with two of my friends back when we were just wee teenagers.So over 10 years ago, we'd been together running a company. We used to build websites together and stumbled into building software, and we really love it. And fast forward to today. Continue to be a self-sustaining profitable software business. We got thousands of small businesses that use our software all around the world. GoSquared as a platform is all about helping small businesses grow online. So, we help you with that full customer journey from acquiring leads at the top of the funnel through to engaging with them throughout their journey, and ultimately looking after them and keeping them happy as they continue to be customers of our customers.We really love running a business. It's been a wild ride. There's so much to get into, but myself I'm pretty much a self-confessed like product geek. I love design. Obviously, there's a lot we can dig into in terms of software. We use GoSquared, and the lessons we've had since becoming an entirely remote team and trying to keep things running smoothly.  Happy to take whatever questions people have.Brian Ardinger: Let's start there. You're in London right now? Talk a little bit about your team. And did you have an office? Were the people working remotely? How are you hanging in there? James Gill: First of all. Yeah, I think were hanging in there okay. Thanks, Brian. I hope you are too, in terms of how we operate. It's a weird one actually. When we were at school, we used to all work from home. We used to work from our family homes, you know, probably coding away in the early hours of the morning or in the night when we should have been doing homework, building things and working from home. And that was how we started building GoSquared back in the day.And then as time went on, we became more of a proper business and gradually we moved to London and then we sort of centralized there and that's kind of the way we'd been until literally like a month or two ago. And we always had a team in London that was always when we had face to face, lots of benefits of that. But last year, one of the team. Well, he moved up to Scotland with his partner and he really pushed us to think like how do we operate with everyone in one office and one person in Scotland. And so, it started making us rethink quite a few things around how we communicated, how we operated. As 2019 went on we found it was working really well. And then we made our first hire from the outset. There was a remote employee and we brought in someone who is based in Costa Rica of all places. By the end of last year, we already had two people full time, remote employees, and he really taught us a lot about how to communicate, how to make sure people are, hopefully not left out of the loop, how to prioritize sort of asynchronous communication because Costa Rica, you've got a time zone issues too.And so, we've kind of tried a lot of that stuff out and, but the rest of the team remained in the office. And then obviously with this all happening, as soon as things started getting serious, like we insisted on everyone working from home. We didn't want to take any risks. And, you know, all, any of us need really is a laptop to work from home. So as far as I'm concerned, as software businesses and SaaS businesses, like we are in no rush to get back to the office. Like we are very happy to be the last businesses returning to offices. The more we can stay out of public transport and mingling with the rest of the people. Like there's no urgency for us to be back. More than happy to chat more about like some of the stuff we've been doing more recently to make this work.It's been a whole lot of stuff from tooling. Like we use Slack for team chat, but we also obsessively use great a tool called Notion for like internal documentation. We obviously use GoSquared to understand and communicate with our customers. There's been a bunch of lessons from that and also just process things as well like how we engage with the team. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about this no-code movement. You know, one of the things that how I found GoSquared is I'm not a technical cofounder, but I put a lot of stuff together and I cobble and hack together stuff. And I found GoSquared as a really easy way for me to take a lot of the marketing automation and specifically the chat robot. I put that onto my events and that, so I could have real time interactions with customers. So, talk about how you've seen the no-code movement come to bear. And how's that affecting your customer's ability to actually interact and do more stuff with their customers. James Gill:  I think it's an interesting one, I guess, adopting that term "no code" has made it a movement, but from my perspective, I've always viewed it as making stuff easier to do and use. And, and I think just fundamentally, like we're just continuously on this train towards enabling anyone to do what they need to do online and brew software. And so I think a lot of it could be replaced from like from code to no code to just stuff that was hard to do, that's now easy to do. From my perspective, I'm not a coder. I can tinkle around with HTML and CSS, but I'm all about design and how it looks, how it works. Whereas I've always been very fortunate to have co-founders that are now a team that can actually code and engineer and develop real hardcore software. It's always frustrated the hell out of me whenever I hit that block of like, not being able to do it, you know, if you need to write some Java script or whatever, and it makes engineers almost seemed like magi...

Sean Sheppard is the founder of GrowthX. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Sean discuss the impact of COVID on the startup and investment environment, Silicon Valley, and elsewhere, trends we're seeing in the world of no code, and ways that startups can generate revenue and adapt in this challenging environment. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Sean Sheppard. He is the founder of GrowthX. And for long time listeners, you may have heard and met Sean before. He was actually on Episode 14, I believe, back in 2016 so welcome back, Sean. Sean Sheppard: Hey, thanks Brian. I had no idea. I was so early. Brian Ardinger: We're recording this in April, and this is our birthday week for inside Outside, and we're five years into this podcasting scene, so it's been kind of crazy, but it's been fun to do all these shows.Sean Sheppard: Thanks. I can't believe it's been five years since I came there to do that talk and sat in your studio. Right? Brian Ardinger: That's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you back on. Probably a lot has changed with GrowthX and we want to talk about that. Also want to talk about now that we're in the Corona virus disruption, I wanted to get your insights into what's going on in the Valley, what's going on in startups and get some feedback there. Maybe we start by telling the audience more about what GrowthX is and where you are in the scene. Sean Sheppard: We started about seven years ago as a group of serial entrepreneurs turned investors, turned frustrated investors, because our companies weren't succeeding, not because they couldn't build products, but because they didn't know how to build markets. And we set about trying to solve that problem for ourselves, and we built a proprietary framework for helping our companies find product market fit. It was exclusive only to the companies that we invested in, but it became quite successful and very popular. And so we started to share it with the rest of the world.And now we licensed that, and I spend most of my time when I'm not in quarantine, traveling the world, working with governments and companies and countries and incubators and accelerators, on how to incorporate product market fit thinking and programming and execution into their support systems for their startup communities.Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about how the world has changed in the last four, five, six weeks, specifically around what you're seeing in the startup scene. Even what you're seeing from corporate innovators that you work with. What's the general consensus of what's happening? Where the holes that we need to be plugging, that kind of stuff.Sean Sheppard: Obviously, it's an unprecedented and interesting time for anybody who's in our generation and certainly in our lives. I've been through many economic crashes. I go back to 87'. I remember that one. I remember the dot com boom and bust, 9/11 certainly, and then the 2008 crash. This one feels much more like the 9/11 experience.And by that, I mean it certainly does feel much more like war time, you know, we do have this enemy that we're, we're dealing with. Obviously, it's not one we can see, but it's there and I think it's going to change behaviors on a global scale. The degree to which those behaviors will change and the permanence of that change and when that change starts to normalize is yet to be determined.You can watch the news all day long. Watch people predict the future. But like a smart man once told me, if you want to know the relevance of the news, just watch seven-day old news, and you'll find out just how unimportant it is. But the point is that we don't know, but we don't know yet about that. I do believe that there is going to be some measure of behavioral change.Like the way we have security measures post 9/11 that aren't going away, and over time have been relaxed, but they're there to stay. I think we're going to have similar security measures, for our health, that will be here to stay, and then there will be certain things and behaviors that we will all change, whether it's less people shaking hands and hugging, which to me is very sad because I think the need to connect basic human need that we all want, need, and desire. I think just for our own physical and mental and spiritual health. But other things like working from home. The digital transformation that everybody has been talking about that's been coming for years and years and years. I think it's going to be dramatically accelerated. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think you're right. It's not that it wasn't seen or a lot of it wasn't seen disrupting education, disrupting healthcare, disrupting all these industries that we've talked about, but a lot of us, what we talked about in the past, it's focused on like the technology being that core driver. And I think the virus just expediated that conversation and forced a lot of those folks to change faster than they even were going to have to, given the circumstances going around. So, I'm not sure that necessarily we would have been facing these things in the future, just this virus has accelerated the impact. Sean Sheppard: Yeah. So, a big part of GrowthX family of companies is our corporate business, which works on helping corporations commercialize new innovations, bring great startup technology into their environments, invest in the startup community, things like that. And when I'm having conversations with our corporate community, and partners, they're all number one in triage mode right now. Period.  End of story. They're just trying to deal with the current situation.That's number one and number two is those that are starting to actually see some stabilization around that are starting to recognize that there is more productivity than they thought, in their distributed workforce, than they thought would be there. In fact, two of the world's largest banks. I have very good friends and partners in the community that are at the C suite. Have gone through this triage mode, are trying to manage the mindset and mental wellbeing of their workforce, while creating this distributed work from home environment. And they're seeing that productivity isn't waining. So now they're rethinking their whole footprint. Like, why do I need some super expensive tower in Manhattan or San Francisco or Chicago or London when most of the people that I'm talking to are out meeting with customers half the time. They're 50% travel anyway.Do I need all this space? What does that future look like for them? We're already seeing security concerns with Zoom. But they're having those conversations about, all right, now that we've sort of standardized at least sketch a patchwo...