Inside Outside Innovation

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...

Laurel Lau is the founder of the innovation consultancy Six Atlas and author of the book Interplay: How to become a top innovator. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Laurel about her experiences helping manufacturing companies innovate, the impact of the Corona virus on global supply chain, and what might actually happen after disruption going forward.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, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. Today we have Laurel Lau. She is a founder of the innovation consultancy Six Atlas and author of the new book Interplay: How to become a top innovator. Welcome to the show. Laurel Lau: Thanks for having me Brian. Brian Ardinger: Hey. I'm excited to have you on the show. You are living in Lisbon right now. We are taping this March 22nd so Corona virus has locked everybody down. What brought you to Lisbon? What kind of work are you doing in the world of innovation there? Laurel Lau: I am helping a Chinese company with innovation program. They bring international brands into China and help them sell there. They've worked with P & G and Unilever back in the days, but I was helping them with building up the innovation program, so help them to become more systematic in it. Brian Ardinger: I wanted to have you on, because you've got a new book out called Interplay, and you're talk a lot about the culture of innovation and that. Let's start by telling the audience about the book. Laurel Lau: The book is a result of me having experienced startup, working in startup and also doing a lot of coaching for startup founders. As I've gone through my journey, I realized that the way that we approach collaboration, yes we've been taught how to make it into process, and make it a little bit more systematic, but at the same time, there's a huge communication aspect and relationship aspect that's been missing for me to see that people are using these skillsets to be able to develop sustainable solutions.Brian Ardinger: So what are some of the core skills that you think make an innovator more effective than others? Laurel Lau: Let's bring it back to like where we're at right now. Everyone is social distancing. Everyone is quarantining. The whole economy is collapsing at this point. How do we know how often these type of crisis will happen in the world? I think it's being able to have foresight of seeing what kind of dangers our world is heading into and having that larger perspective is really, really important. One aspect that I bring CEO's to be able to understand is to understand the daily nuance problems that people might be having, might be reflecting a larger issue, that if you use a right communication skills to get to the bottom of it, you'll be able to unravel it much easier.Brian Ardinger: Unpack that a little bit. Can you give a story or example about how somebody actually effectively does that?Laurel Lau: A lot of times when I head into a company and do consulting, first I'll do as a reality check and get a lot of interviews done. Read a lot of their reports. Go to a lot of their meetings, show out the factories and understand their product and the services that they provide. What happens during that time when I'm trying to understand more is being able to connect the dots. A lot of times during this part of reality check, people might be revealing half the story, 10% of the story, but as consultants going in asking more questions and seeing what we're seeing, there's a gradual development of a framework that connects the dots of the insights that's been developed. Being able to see that, is there an important, because that helps us see where the leadership and culture has been locked at. And so even though we're implementing new technology, new systems, why are they not working so that we bring it up to a level where we're collaborating at a greater speed and effectiveness. Brian Ardinger: Is it an innovation readiness assessment that you go in and try to determine the organization's adaptability? Laurel Lau: That is definitely part of it. In working and allowing people to fill in this form and give us all the information and go through the interview aspect also, we're are able to collect that information and be able to understand the industry problems as long as have the corporation problems. So many of these organizations on super complex and have complicated way of compensation and motivating their staff and to be able to sift through the noise and be able to hear truly where the next one or two steps organization need to make in the next three to five years is super important to be able to get that information. Because at the end of the day, the employees are collecting a lot of the right information. They are the eyes, ears of the company, and so they should be the ones who are reflecting what they want in a corporation to help the company to be a lot more competitive.Brian Ardinger: Where our company's falling down the most are the particular trends that you see or different activities that corporations do that inhibit innovation Laurel Lau: In every industry, it would be a little bit different. So I'm much more focused in companies that have the factory aspect of manufacturing. What Chinese companies in manufacturing had to adapt to is the digital strategies and also be able to strengthen their supply chain, which is super helpful last year to be able to help them be stronger in facing the crisis of COVID-19 this year. Brian Ardinger: That brings up an interesting point with regard to culture. You're living in Lisbon right now. You've worked with Chinese companies and you work with American companies. What are some of the cultural differences or different ways different companies or cultures approach innovation?Laurel Lau: And I think it's important to understand the local culture and the company culture itself. For one of the clients we had, which is a Chinese company, it's hard for you to change all the different aspects, but you know that the level of culture change that they're willing to make and that's comfortable for them, and that's right for them. So it's important to understand the local culture. And. What's important for their innovation itself. And so there are different types of innovation styles that's right for different innovation strategies. So to be able to understand what proportion of your company's innovation strategies are more radical or just incremental, the different levels of innovation that's required for the organization to succeed. It's important to understand what level it is and also what area they lie in. ...

Thomas Weddle is the author of Innovation As Usual and his new book What's Your Problem? Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Thomas talk about why starting with a problem is so important in innovation, what it means to solve the right problem, and the framework teams can use to make better decisions in the process. 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.Brian 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 Thomas Wedell. He's the author of a couple of different books - Innovation As Usual and a new book coming out called, What's Your Problem: To solve your toughest problems, change the problems you solve. Welcome to the show, Thomas. Thomas Wedell: Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me on. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show because you've been in this innovation space for quite some time, working all around the world with major companies. And you've got a framework that you've outlined in this new book that I think is interesting and can give some insight to our audience for how to tackle this problem of innovation. So, my first question is, let's start by telling the audience about your background, and then we can delve into the book a little bit more. Thomas Wedell: Background wise, I'm originally from Denmark. I've been abroad for maybe 14 years, try to launch a couple of startups that failed gloriously, and then I somehow got sidelined into this whole academic space that I'm in now. And my innovation work really started 10 years ago when I started working with an old professor of mine. And we started going into companies and looking at what actually worked when it came to making innovation happen in practice. And that led to my first book called Innovation As Usual, which came out think it's like seven years ago now with Harvard Business Press. And that was also what led to my current work on the book now. So, it was all quite accidental and getting sidelined into things and suddenly discovering, wait, there's something wrong about the way we do innovation or there's something wrong by the way, we do problem solving. I can't really claim to have a red thread of any kind in my career.Brian Ardinger: Well, I like the book and your framework around focusing on the problem because as I've worked a lot with startups and early stage ideas within corporations and that a lot of people start with the solution. They have an idea, they jump immediately to that solution side, and you're taking a different framework and say, okay, that's fine, but what you're doing is probably the wrong way to approach it. So, let's talk about the book and talk about the focus on the problem and why that's so important. Thomas Wedell: It came out of the realization that we are missing a tool in the area of problem framing. As many of your listeners, I'm sure you're familiar with, there's very often a need to go in for instance, if a client approaches you to go in and say, wait, does the client actually understand the problem they're trying to solve, before we go in and just build the solution we have in mind for them? That goes for startups as well of course, understanding their customer's problem.  And I realized that while this is like a thing that a lot of people, they have a feel for, and if you go to some design agencies or whatever, I mean, they have some remnants of a process. But I was kind of interested in seeing that there's just this, we lacked a general tool and a general framework for understanding and reframing problems.There wasn't really anything out there that I felt was both...did a good job. And also, crucially was capable of being widespread. Because I think some of the methods, we have already around this, they're very complicated.  They kind of require you to be an expert in the topic and you have to host a weeklong workshop to do it and so on. I wanted to fill the gap of creating a tool around this that could really be used by everybody. That's really what led me to write the new book, which is now called, What's Your Problem? We focus of course, on the art of solving the right problems. Brian Ardinger: So, let's give an example. I've seen some of your speeches and read some of your work and one of the examples that you talk about to give the audience an understanding of what you mean by reframing the problem. You talk about the slow elevator problems. Walk us through that particular example. Thomas Wedell: Imagine you are the owner of an office building that people are complaining about the speed of the elevator. Now you have a framed problem in front of you there that the elevator is too slow. And what most people do there is jump straight ahead and say, how do we make it faster? What people with reframing are good at is to go in and say, wait, is there a different way of looking at the problem? Is there another problem to solve? Which might the better for us rather than going out and buying a new elevator. The classic example here of course, is that building managers, what do they do when they hear of elevator complaints? They tend to try something else, namely to put up a mirror in the hallway and just a beautiful and quite memorable example of what reframing is and why it's sometimes important to go in and say, is there a different problem to solve for here than the one that's necessarily, you know, put in front of us to solve.Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I've heard a similar example in the airline industry where people were complaining about baggage claim and how long it took for the baggage to get there. And the airline changed it in such a way so it reframed the problem of how you got the bags and when you got them, the amount of time it took you to walk to get to the bag, so that you weren't standing there waiting as long.Thomas Wedell: Yeah. Beautiful. I saw one of my colleagues in this space, Stephen Shapiro. He has spoken a good deal about that example. That's a beautiful instance of it.  He's, by the way, he's out with a new book as well, called Invisible Solutions, which also looks at reframing, which I can strongly recommend. It's such a big issue, and I'm curious to hear, I mean, you have a ton of experience both with your own work, with innovation and with your client work and so on. What's your observation in this? Am I right? Is there a missing tool around this, or what's your experience through your work? Brian Ardinger: I think we see the same things. A lot of times the first thing I do when I start talking to clients or startups is around that idea of what are we really trying to solve for here? And are there different ways to look at the framework, the mindset almost, and it's almost around trying to figure out is there something more there than what meets the eye? And I find that the ones,  the entrepreneurs or the inside innovators...

Mark W. Johnson is the author of Lead From the Future and cofounder of the consulting firm Innosight.  Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Mark discuss how companies can better prepare for breakthrough growth and how leadership teams can use future back thinking to better understand the opportunities and threats in a world of constant disruption.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 Inside Outside.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 with me is Mark W. Johnson. Mark is the co-founder of Innosight, a growth strategy consulting company, which he co-founded with the late, great Clayton Christensen. Mark is the author of numerous books on innovation, including Reinvent your Business Model, Dual Transformation, and his new, forthcoming book called Lead from the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking into Breakthrough Growth. Welcome to the show, Mark.Mark W. Johnson: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you on the show. You have been one of the forefront thinkers in this whole world of innovation and very prolific in your writing about it. So, I wanted to start there. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to write another book about innovation and what's different and what should people be expecting from it. Mark W. Johnson: Writing this book, I look at it almost as the culmination of the 20 years at this effort to help companies in disruptive innovation and transformation. The reason I felt absolutely critical to get this book out is that we can innovate as companies and you know, we can try to figure out how to innovate for new growth. That's really the definition of what we talk about when companies need to be more innovative. I think their core business is innovating all the time and they're improving. They're making efficiency improvements. They're continuing to do product development and so forth. They're innovating in the marketing function, but they're really striving for breakthrough growth. And what I found was a lot of these breakthrough growth efforts would have good ideas, get the right people behind them, but if you didn't have the right leadership, the strategy behind it, if you didn't have the right enterprise strategy, a long term view that was the basis behind the innovation efforts that in the long run or even in the short run, these more breakthrough innovation efforts just didn't keep the commitment of the individuals that owned the purse strings. Really, the book is an effort to tie vision and strategy to innovation and even further, think about what is it that leadership teams need to do together in the process of developing a vision and converting that to strategy in order to become more successful as in just overall top line growth. But in particular, driving these new and different innovation efforts and the book is an effort to integrate the thinking around leadership strategy and innovation, which I feel is so important, if you're going to create sustainability and success in helping companies innovate for the long term and own their future. Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about how leaders in the organization really need to spend some time in the future, wrestling with the ramifications of what that looks like. I don't know if you can talk about examples of companies you've worked with. I know I've read your work and seen a lot about you, and one of the examples you've shared is around the work you've done with a big car manufacturer and how the process of future-back  thinking got them to realign with what they were doing.Mark W. Johnson: I'll start with that. We worked with the top leadership team of one of the three US-based OEM car manufacturers here in the US. The work there was to look out 10 years into the future and begin to think about what the environment was to be like. This company had been thinking, of course, Hey, we continue to design and develop and produce cars and trucks and other vehicles, but we also have this work around trying to tie into things like connectivity that has become much more of a trend. And how do cars become much more connected in, and of course, that's linked also to autonomous vehicle technology and artificial intelligence and all these kinds of things. And then that's tied also to new business models like Uber and Zipcar and Car To Go, and it's also tied perhaps biggest towards a technological potential disruption and change around electrification. Much more than just around the fringes. But what if electrification just took over and then you'd be talking about a whole rethinking of the industry since its really founded the whole supply chain and the whole structure is around the internal combustion engine.We work to help think about all of these critical trends, but we tied it most importantly to where is the customer going? What's the consumer, and what's going to be most important in the context of the circumstances of the future and begin to think about that environment. What can looking out 5 to 10 years out do? Well in this case, they just had a really strong point of view about battery technology and electrification and thought justifiably at least based on today, and kind of extrapolating forward, that their best path is to be a follower as to how cars and electric is going to work out, because there was just not any evidence that people would pay a premium currently to be in electric cars, regardless of the implications of global warming and so forth.That combined with for the anticipation that regulation would ultimately turn their hand that they would follow that path. But through the course of this discussion and really thinking more closely about technology trends and technology road mapping and what was happening around the world and the implication if they were not just behind but really behind, it completely opened their eyes and it created a whole different view about the future and the implications of electrification. In that, what we would call insight that came from looking out or that change point of view, led to a practicality that there was a complete change in their level of investment and breadth of effort, as it related to putting electric vehicles on the road sooner and not just cars, but trucks and thinking about vans and how that would work in cities and so forth. That was the power of doing this, was to be able to get those aha moments that would not otherwise come again and spend time in the future. Brian Ardinger: I'm curious of how you get management to carve off the time to focus on that transformation and not the traditional optimization stuff that they're doing and think into the future. Is it having them start with a blank slate and imagining things, or what's the process that companies really need to b...

On this week's episode, we sit down with Jeremy Blaylock, CEO and co-founder of Adalo. Adalo is the no-code tool that allows you to build functioning mobile apps. On our discussion, we talk about the whole no-code movement, what it takes to build a startup in St. Louis, and some of the trends that he's seeing in the world of mobile software development.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 coming to us from St. Louis, Missouri is Jeremy Blaylock. Jeremy is the CEO and cofounder of Adalo. Welcome, Jeremy. Jeremy Blalock: Thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: How are you doing? Jeremy Blalock: Hunkering down but got lots of groceries and ready to stay at home for awhile. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Yes. For the audience out there that may not be familiar with you and Adalo, why don't we get them up to speed? As a lot of people know on this podcast, we talk a lot about some of the new innovations that are going on, and Adolfo, I think is one of those innovations in the no code space.  I wanted to bring you on to talk about that. Let's get started by telling us a little bit about what is Adalo. Jeremy Blalock: Adalo is, as we put it, the easiest way to build a mobile app without knowing how to code. You can build mobile and now actually web apps, apps that do things from being social networks or marketplaces, you know a variety of other types of things. Things like, there's an app that a university built that students use to check their grades for the classes. You can build those apps without knowing how to code, generally through our web editor and then publish them to the iOS and Android app stores. Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started in this.Jeremy Blalock: I'm a software engineer by training. I started writing code when I was in middle school, you know, back in the mid two thousands. I built a lot of websites and a couple of mobile apps and just always kind of was interested in building things that you could watch and have people use. And it always fascinated me. Before I started Adalo, I went and worked at a couple of other companies. I started one startup that I was the head of product for, and then after that, I worked at a company called Synack that we've met along the way, and I led one of their engineering teams. And it was kind of through that process, that I saw that there was this whole evolution of prototyping tools, tools like Envision, Sigma, Framer, that let you build these extremely high fi prototypes that he looked and felt like real apps, but lacking any actual functionality. That was my inspiration to actually go and try to build something that felt like a prototyping tool and was still easy to use like that, but then lets you build a real app with real functionality, you could actually publish to real users.And so, I started working on Adalo in 2017. And really just started by, looking at what the prototyping tools were doing and taking those functionalities and then building on top of that. We launched to our first-ever users at the end of 2017. We then open up a beta and had a few more users come in and really walk them through the process, intensely with a lot of input from us. As we kept growing, we opened up signups and some are 2019 and then and in Fall we did our big launch and got a lot more people using the products. Now the numbers are 10 times what they were then, but it's been crazy to see that whole thing grow. Brian Ardinger:  Tell us a little bit about some of the types of projects that have been built on Adalo.Jeremy Blalock: I was looking at a really cool one today. It was a guy who built an app for his son to manage his personal finances. That was like, wow, I never thought this was a thing where he is the bank and his son is the client of the bank. There's a wide variety. Like I mentioned, there's been a couple of schools, universities and high schools. have apps where students can check their grades. That's a big category for some reason. Now there's a lot of two-sided marketplaces, things like the Etsy and eBay type of setups. There are a lot of apps in the personal wellness space. Things from psychological wellness to anything related to that. And then there was a lot of productivity apps within companies, so streamlining various workflows. That's what seems to happen within more of the companies.Brian Ardinger: I've seen some other startups that are using your platform as well Tovala comes to mind. The smart oven out of Chicago who provides meals and stuff through the platform. Let's talk a little bit about this whole no-code movement. What do you think is changing out there? What are the trends that you're seeing in the space? Jeremy Blalock: When I started working on this, there wasn't really the no-code movement there is today. There were definitely people working on this and thinking about these problems, but it really wasn't at the scale that it is now. There were tools like Bubble that had been around for a while, and I think we see as a competitor, but you know, we're friendly with them. We'd like to see everybody succeed. I think that what's really happened is that people started to embrace the idea that you don't need to have a technical cofounder or technical team to build a product and get your first users. And I think that's a big mindset shift that's happened since we started the company. Originally it was trying to convince people and now it's just trying to facilitate that. You know, obviously it's necessary for this to get big over time, is that people really embrace this. But it happened first with websites, with Squarespace and WordPress. They became the de facto way of making your startup's website. Tools like Webflow, FirstStudy and Further, but I think now that's starting to happen also with apps. You don't necessarily need to hire an engineer. You can just do it yourself. And then test and iterate.Brian Ardinger:  You're a developer by trade. There's a lot of controversy in the no-code low code. When do you need developers? When don't you, and that? You're building tools to specifically solve that problem of a nontechnical co-founder, spinning some things up. What are some of the objections or things that you've seen that why you should go no code versus hiring your own development team? What are some of the things that you've seen in that space?Jeremy Blalock: One thing we're really trying to do is make it possible to leverage code when you need to. One thing that we're working on right now, that's the big focus is our component marketplace. So that will let people build, react and react native components that plug into our platform as plugin and ...