Inside Outside Innovation

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Esther Gons, CEO and Co-founder of Ground Control and Author of the upcoming book, Innovation Accounting. Esther and Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Cofounder, talk about the ins and outs of innovation accounting, and what companies should be doing to track and measure their innovation initiatives. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. Interview Transcript with Esther Gons, CEO and Co-founder of Ground Control and Author of Innovation AccountingBrian 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 Esther Gons. She is CEO and co-founder of Ground Control, which is a software platform that helps companies measure innovation and co-author of the corporate startup, and upcoming book Innovation Accounting. Welcome Esther to the show. Esther Gons: Thank you, Brian. I'm really happy to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. We've had Dan Toma, your co-author of the Corporate Startup and Tendayi Viki on the show in the past. How did you get involved in this innovation space?Esther Gons: I think for me, it's been a journey of entrepreneurship. So, my background is basically being an entrepreneur, starting startups, helping startups. So, I've always been an entrepreneur. And one of my first things that I did when I still was actually in my studies of Information Science was starting a business.And one of the things that I was asked to do by one of the bigger computer companies was building something completely new around their selling of computers. And I think that was one of the first corporate startups that I did, but it wasn't called that way, way back when. But I build over the course of two years, a platform with personal logins, with all sorts of new technologies and things that you could do just to sell their computers, to be able to be working from home. So, blog posts that weren't called blog posts. That was just content from people saying your employees will be so loyal. If you have them working from home, all these kinds of things. I even had other vendors ramped up with furniture, stuff like that. It was an amazing platform. And after two years and a lot of money when we finally launched nothing really happened.And the computer company didn't understand because there were no sales whatsoever and they just simply pulled the plug. But for me, that was a really important event because I was asking myself what went wrong there? What was the risk involved? Was it too early? How could I have known? And that was a search that put me on the path of pioneering and innovation and understanding how you could deal with that. So obviously that platform that failed was 20 years too early. If we look at the situation right now and we needed a COVID pandemic to get there. But yes, that got me into the puzzle, discovering things like the Lean Startup methodology when Steve Blank wrote about it and then working with other entrepreneurs to get it working. To evolve it. To make sure that startups heard about it. So that was when I started to volunteer for a lot of startup activity in Amsterdam. And got involved in that in the tech scene, since I've always been a tech entrepreneur. Brian Ardinger: Your first book, the Corporate Startup really gave corporations that inside look on what it was like and what it is like, to think and act, and move like startups. And create new business models from scratch. And it was a great opportunity to provide a framework for how corporations think about that. Your new book, Innovation Accounting, I'd love to start there. What is innovation? Accounting, and why is it so important? Esther Gons: A lot of corporates asked for metrics. You're absolutely right. But they usually ask for the one metric to rule everything, right? So how are we doing in terms of innovation? And then they use innovation as a catch-all phrase. We want to know about all of our innovation, right? We want to see everything in our portfolio. So, what we've seen with working with a lot of clients, because we like to be practical about things that we write.We want to know that it works. Is that for that startup kind of innovation, which is different from what you do in terms of innovation in the rest of your company, you could be doing a digital transformation. You could be optimizing your current processes with startups. It's all innovation, but if you truly want to do new business model innovation. Breakthrough in disruptive innovation. Then you actually need something else than the processes and the accounting systems that you have in your current company. And we noticed that if people didn't have that new system in place and they were trying to do Lean Startup and they were trying to build new business models, if they didn't have the whole system, the whole package, then it all turned back into incremental innovation again.So, then we thought, well, we have to let people know that if they truly want to do new business model innovation, this kind of disruptive innovation, they can measure that with the indicators that they have in their current company with that current system. Because then it will always fail or turn back into incremental innovation again.So, let's talk about that word innovation accounting, that Eric Ries, once coined as being the system that teams needed to have to be accountable for the decisions they made based on data. And talk about how that evolved into something else. And then what do you need inside a company? What kind of system do you need, need inside of a company to actually measure that kind of innovation?Brian Ardinger: I think that’s such an important point that corporations really need to define innovation and understand the spectrum of it. You know, everything from, like you said, the stuff close to the core of that optimization of what they're currently doing and how that differs significantly from transformational innovation when you're trying to come up with a brand new business model. Why do you think it's so difficult for companies to understand this distinction and be able to do something about it? Esther Gons: For a company, it's ingrained in their system, that their goal is to optimize and grow their current system. Right? That's what they are there for. The CEO has been appointed by the shareholders to do that specific thing. So that means that their whole existence, their future is based on, on executing on that core thing. And that also means that everything that they have gathered around it, their processes, their culture, their people, are based around that. And it's hard to understand something that isn't there yet. Something that is probably really risky. So, if you can't see it, then it's harder to understand and to act around it. So, I think it's actually a good point that you're making Brian, because what we've seen is that if you do not make it vis...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at the Kellogg School of Management and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas. David and I talk about what keeps ideas from gaining traction and what you can do to avoid friction and resistance to new ideas. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Northwestern University and Coauthor of The Human ElementBrian 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 David Schonthal. He is a Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Northwestern University and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance that Awaits New Ideas. Welcome to the show, David. David Schonthal: Thanks, Brian. Nice to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you here. You have spent a lot of your career thinking about and watching what it takes to make new ideas happen. You've spent time at IDEO. You were co-founder of Matter, which is that 25,000 square foot innovation center in Chicago. Has some venture capital experience and that. And I thought we could start by telling the audience how you got into the innovation space in the first place. David Schonthal: By accident is the answer. It's sort of a long story, but I wound up becoming the COO of a medical device company in San Diego, California based on a radical shift from what I was doing before, which is tax software in London. To make a long story short, one of my former bosses called me up when I was just at my lowest point with tax and the UK, no offense to the UK, but it was winter, and it was like dark 18 hours out of the day. And he called me up and all of a sudden, I just, all I remember is him saying, yada, yada, yada San Diego, yada yada, yada. I was like, oh please.He's like, would you like to know what the business is? I was like, no, not important. So, I wound up going and being the head of operations for an early stage medical device company. And then basically from that point forward was just bit with the bug around bringing new ideas to market either in the startup space, through entrepreneurship or venture capital or in the corporate space through design and innovation.Brian Ardinger: And you've got a new book called the Human Element. I would imagine it packs a lot about the things that you've learned over that career. Since you've spent a lot of time seeing how early ideas get traction or not, what is the most striking problem that you see most people making when it comes to kicking off an idea?David Schonthal: I think maybe the best place to start is by most innovators and entrepreneurs’ instinct that the idea is the thing that needs to be addressed. So, if a new product or service or strategy isn't being adopted by the market, most innovators instincts says well, let's make the product a little better. Let's change the way we talk about it. Let's drop the price. Let's promote it differently. And they make the thing or the strategy or the movement, the center of their attention. And in the course of my career, I've worked on some really amazing, I mean, some terrible, but also some really amazing innovations and products and services. And I was always surprised by how, even though clearly if these things were adopted into the market, they would make the world a better place, no matter how much we tweaked or change the idea that wasn't always the key to success of getting it introduced.And so about four years ago, turned my attention to thinking about what is it that stands in the way of change and partnered up with one of my colleagues at Kellogg, who was a behavioral psychologist named Loran Nordgren. And together we've been studying this problem from both the applied side, as well as the theoretical side.And that was the genesis of the book, which is that our instincts about innovation are too heavily biased on making the thing more appealing and not focused enough on helping the market adopt it by removing the friction that stands in the way. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I love that. You kind of start off the book, this battle between what do you call fuel and friction. The idea that a lot of times, just to make an idea better, all you have to do is add more facts or more features or try to get more folks bought into it. But really, it's a lot about how do you eliminate the frictions around that? So, in the book you talk about four frictions. Let's outline and tell the audience how they can avoid them.David Schonthal: Sure. So, if you think about a new idea, like an airplane leaving the ground or a projectile flying through the air. Fuel, to your point Brian, are all of the things that propel that idea forward. The need that the customer has, features and benefits, promotional strategies, but like an airplane leaving the ground there are also forces that stand in the way, whether it's wind resistance or sheer or gravity. And so, the book is really focused on these forces, these headwinds of innovation and the four that we specify in the book, the four frictions, our number one inertia, which is our desire as human beings to tend to stick with the status quo. Despite the fact that we know the status quo might be imperfect, our habits are surprisingly powerful. And so, recognizing that inertia is a play anytime you're trying to get somebody to change from what they're doing today, to what you'd like them to do tomorrow. Effort is the second one. All of the ambiguity, all of the costliness, all of the exertion required to get somebody to make that change. The third friction is emotion. All of the anxiety and fear that comes along with changing from something that you do today to something you do tomorrow. And you might not think that emotion comes into play for small things, but emotion comes into play when you're buying a pack of gum or when you're putting on a new shirt.And then the fourth is what we call reactants, which is people's aversion to being changed by others. And each of them show up in varying degrees, depending on what you're working on in spotting them appropriately forecasting them ideally, so that they can be muted and mitigated is really the key. Brian Ardinger: And a lot of those frictions, they're almost not necessarily irrational, but they're definitely not something that you can take an economic model and say, well, clearly there's a cost benefit analysis and everybody should end up on this side of it because of the cost benefit analysis. But there's a lot of underlying things. And it seems a lot of this frictions around ambiguity or being comfortable with failure. How can you get folks more comfortable with that environment of ambiguity? David Schonth...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Wayne Li, Professor of Practice of Design and Engineering, School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech and Director of Design Bloc. Wayne and I talk about the growing importance of design and design thinking, and we explore some of the changing trends when it comes to technology, tools, and tactics for building new products and services that matter. Let's get startedInside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.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 Wayne Li. He is Professor of Practice of Design and Engineering, School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech, Director of Design Bloc. Welcome to the show, Wayne.Wayne Li: Hi thanks. Thanks Brian. Thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on, because you have had a long career in this whole world of design and innovation. You were a founding class member at the Stanford d.school. You've worked with great companies like Ford and Pottery Barn and VW. And I think you were a part of the original team that helped develop the original Tesla Roadster. I think I'll start off the conversation with where you're currently at with Design Bloc and how it got has origin. Wayne Li: Design Bloc is a multidisciplinary Design Thinking initiative on Georgia Tech Campus. So, you can think a center. We try to bridge different schools and colleges. Think like a large university, they're separated in different units or colleges. You have a college of engineering and college of design, college of natural sciences.And what Design Bloc tries to do is to teach in a multidisciplinary type of way. And so we partner with professors from all over the Institute to try to offer courses that teach not only Design Thinking, but do it in a way that bridges more than one unit, more than one college. We have things like Bio-inspired Watercolor Painting all the way to Transportation Design.Community Engagement and Service, like a humanitarian design project. And again, you can see that those problems exist. They exist beyond just the sphere of one unit. For example, you're saying, okay, I'm going to address developing countries energy grid. That's not just engineering that requires public policy. It requires cultural engagement and community knowledge. You have structure or architecture there. So, you can see a problem like that is multifaceted. We shouldn't be teaching in a siloed or singled mono disciplinary manner. You know, I learned this really early on, probably back when I was still in college, actually. But I worked at IDEO product development very early on in my career.You know, I think the reason why it came to be like, you mentioned, like, you know, what is it, how did it get started? Was that when I went to undergraduate, I was both a fine arts and engineering major. I kind of saw how the perception of an object, its beauty, its appearance, had a cultural relevance to it.And then you coupled that with how well it was engineered. How well it was built. What it was actually intended to function as and whether or not those mesh together well. And I think that's kind of what got me to my work at IDEO. But I think that was the benefit. And so about almost seven years ago, an alumnus from Georgia Tech, Jim Oliver, went back and visited the Institute and just notice that the College of Engineering and the College of Design really didn't talk to each other that much. Even though he himself had had a similar background. In undergraduate, he also had a mechanical engineering and industrial design background just like me.So, he basically put out a search and said, I want someone. I will donate a certain sum of money. And I want someone to establish this kind of initiative, whose goal it is to teach students in a more well-rounded way. And so, I'm very lucky and very blessed after a nationwide search that I managed to get it. That's kind of how it came to be.So, we started about six, seven years ago with basically one class. With 8 students to 12 students in it. And now we teach about 20 classes a year, with about a thousand to 2000 students. Right? So, it has grown. It's wonderful to see it. I love being the director of it and seeing it grow and getting partners and collaborators who are really psyched about it.And the cool thing is, yeah, you actually see professors who have a PhD in something, so they're very, very intelligent about something. All of a sudden get intrigued, like I never thought of myself as a designer. Well, everyone, little d design. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point because obviously people are beginning to understand that design is a core component of every facet of their life nowadays. But tell me a little bit about like what's the process of Design Bloc and how do you go from an idea to creating something valuable in the market? So, walk me through the whole process of Design Bloc. Wayne Li: Design Bloc, the initiative, right? Is you, like you mentioned, I did my graduate work at Stanford. We were in the class that helped to found the Stanford d.school. So, let's take like the little d design. Don't think like I'm a fashion designer or I'm a software designer or I'm a car designer. Let's take the little d design. So, design, if we just think about design process, right. Stanford has a certain method for their design process. They call it Design Thinking Process. But if we just think of it as a process, when anyone goes through steps or goes through mindsets or phases in order to create something, they go through a design process. Design is a very flexible word. It's like Smurf, it's the only word where you can almost use it like six or seven times and still get the actual understanding.Like I could say, well, I'm designing a design that will design a design to design. So, and you'll be like, what? But that would make sense, right? I'm designing a design; I'm creating a blueprint that will create a robot that will actually learn and make something of use. That's what it is. The idea of course, is that when they build anything. They're going through what we consider a process, a design process. And again, this isn't something that necessarily is taught at an Institute. You know, an Institute will teach physics, or it'll teach mathematics or Latin. They're not actually teaching the process of how you create novel, useful, effective ideas, right, for society. The Design Thinking processes that Stanford created along with the Hasso-Plattner Institute in IDEO. Talks about how can you hone and better your design process regardless of what it is. Regardless of what you're building. So, I think in that sense, Design Bloc is also trying to create courses that allow students to learn about the design process, hone it, and foster good mindsets and behaviors as they go through it.Like for example, with pick something relatively trivial, but let's just for kicks. You get up in the morning and you want to make eggs for your partner or your wife or your spouse. That's a design process, right? You're making something that serves a nee...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Naomi Shah, founder of the venture backed modern media company Meet Cute. Naomi and I talk about some of the innovations and trends in the world of audio and new media formats, as well as her insights for moving from the world of venture capital to becoming a founder. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Naomi Shah, Founder of the venture backed modern media company Meet CuteBrian 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 Naomi Shah. She is the founder of the venture backed modern media company called Meet Cute. Naomi Shah: Thank you. It's so nice to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you here on the show because you've got a hot new startup that we want to talk about. You've got to innovate a company, innovative story. So, what is meat cute? How did you come up with the idea to start a new media company at the age of 24? Naomi Shah: So, Meet Cute, just to start with, with what it is I do every day, is an entertainment brand. We make original scripted, romantic comedies. And these are audio stories that are completely written by a network of over 500 creators. Directed, produced, and voice acted professionally. And we distribute them on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you get your audio. And really what we're trying to do with Meet Cute is show that you can create a lot of scripted content and create trust with an audience because of the consistency of how often you release the stories, the types of stories, and really become the best storytellers in original scripted content. Brian Ardinger: You've got an interesting background to go down that particular path. My understanding is you started out as a macro equities trader at Goldman Sachs. You studied mechanical engineering with a minor in human biology at Stanford. Then you just started working at Union Square Ventures. How did you go about kind of that diverse background to end up where you are at? Naomi Shah: It's a really good question. I actually will start even earlier than graduating from Stanford and that is when I was growing up, I saw both my parents working on a company together. My mom was the president. My dad was the vice president, and it was always part of our family dinners, our family vacations. We always heard about what they were working on. It was this like subliminal informal look into what it's like to run your own thing. To be a founder. And to manage people and to bring people along with the vision that you have. And I never really knew how that was going to play out in my life. But I did know from a young age that was impacting the way that I wanted to go to school, study, and then start my career. And so, at Stanford, I went in wanting to be a surgeon and I left with a mechanical engineering degree. And so that kind of explains why I was a mechanical engineering major with a minor in human biology.And what fascinated me about human biology and why I wanted to be a doctor in the first place is I was really interested in the research process. Like how you ask a question, how you create a research project to answer that question, how you're very analytical and then how you convince people to listen to what you have to say.And so, in high school, and actually in middle school, I ended up going down this path of working on a lot of research. Presenting it at a lot of conferences. So, I did a TED talk when I was 15 and it was my first foray into, wow, you can have an impact on the world, that's a lot bigger than the immediate community around you.Fast forward a few years, to your point, I went into finance. I was really excited about pattern recognition in public markets and how it affected trading decisions. But I really was looking for something a little bit more creative. I always felt like I had this creative side of my brain that I couldn't really exercise day to day at work.And that was because my resume was very technical. It was very based on engineering and data and math, but I loved creative writing and I loved storytelling. And that was something that I felt like was part of my personality that I couldn't bring to work every day. So, in venture capital, it gave me a look at how founders would kind of marry different skill sets together. Make that the foundation of how they run their company. And I was really excited about that whole process, but really hadn't seen myself as an operator just yet. But I spent a lot of time at USV, which is the venture capital firm I was at right after Goldman. Our company was focused on human wellbeing. So, what are things that we do for fun?And one of the things that we do for fun is we consume content. We read books; we listen to podcasts like this one. We go to concerts with our friends. And I realized that there was kind of a gap in the market where there wasn't a lot of original scripted stories being created in a really scalable way. Where venture investors felt comfortable taking that risk and investing in a company that was working on that problem.Instead, it felt like you had Hollywood investors that were used to taking out risk profile and venture investors were like, oh no, we only do software and product. And so, I wanted to find a way to bring those two things together, which I felt like there wasn't really a company working on that out there.And that led me to starting to come up with the business model for Meat Cute. At first, from the investment side of the table, where I was looking for that company to invest in. And eventually I took that leap of faith into founding and said, if we're not seeing this company out there, let's go be the ones to create it.Brian Ardinger: So, as you were in venture, kind of looking at particular companies, did you ever think that you were going to jump to the other side of the table or was it something that came about based on your interactions with founders and that? Naomi Shah: I think it was a little bit of both. I think it kind of goes back to growing up and seeing that that was possible. I did see my mom as a leader, and I knew that at some point I wanted to follow in my parents' footsteps in some capacity. Where it's you have an impact outside of just the immediate people that you touch. And I think that that's really what inspired me with founding is that you can have an impact on millions of millions of people who use your product or listen to your stories.And that was really exciting to me. Another thing that I'll say besides seeing my mom in a leadership position early on is that I'd always seen myself on this path of, okay, I'll go to school, I'll work for a few years and then I'll go back and get my MBA. And what I saw when I was in venture capital, Is that so much of the learning that comes along with founding is just natural.It's baked into the process of struggling with how to figure out HR and ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jonathan Brill, author of the new book Rogue Waves: Future-proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change. Jonathan and I discussed the coming rogue waves of change and how to prepare your company for resilient growth, innovation, and decision making under uncertainty. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Jonathan Brill, Author of Rogue WavesBrian Ardinger: [00:00:30] 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 Jonathan Brill. He is the author of the new book, Rogue Waves: Future-proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change. Welcome to the show Jonathan.Jonathan Brill: [00:00:58] Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. Brian Ardinger: [00:01:00] Well, I'm excited to have you on the show to quite frankly learn about what you've seen over your amazing career, when it comes to innovation. To give the audience some context. You are a senior leader and global futurist at Hewlett Packard. Creative director at Frog Design. You've probably helped create over 300 plus products in the innovation firms that you've worked in. And you've been a contributor to Ted and Singularity University and Forbes and Harvard Business Review. And the list goes on and on. Now you've got a new book coming out. So, I really wanted to dive right into it. The title of the book is called Rogue Waves. So, let's start there. What is a rogue wave and why should companies start preparing for them? Jonathan Brill: [00:01:38] So in the deep ocean, literally out of nowhere at the snap of a finger, 120-foot wave and pop up and sink you know, a 600-foot ship. We used to not think these things were real. We thought they were kind of sailors’ tales, but it turns out that as we're having better tracking and satellites and whatnot, that these things are happening every day in a major storm, that one of these things might pop up about every eight or 10 hours. So, the issue isn't that rogue waves are rare it's that the world is large. And to use that metaphor and in many ways, the same types of mathematics apply. We're moving faster as a society. We're becoming more connected as a society. The reason, and so more freak occurrences will occur, and when they do, you'll see more contagion, you'll see more movement between those occurrences. And so, when you think about business. When you think about something like COVID right, why did COVID happen? And SARS was a pandemic. It didn't scale in the same way. Mers was a pandemic. It didn't scale in the same way. Lots of reasons. But I would argue that the biggest was we've put a population, the size of Los Angeles into the wilderness and outside of WuHan. So, we increased density, but we did that at the scale of literally the population of the United States and China, over the last 20 years or so. Connected them by 16 high-speed rails.Since 2010, we've increased travel out of China by 10 times, making China the largest spender on tourism in the world. Literally coming from out of nowhere and that didn't just happen in China. It happened in India. It happened across Southeast Asia and it's happening in Africa. And so, what was containable, 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, is suddenly not containable today. Not because of the disease, but because of all of the things that surrounded. All of those overlapping trends that surrounded. And when you think about a rogue wave, that's what it is. It's these independently manageable waves of change that overlap to become massive and unmanageable.Brian Ardinger: [00:03:43] It's not the one particular thing that is necessarily the disruptor. It's the blending of emerging technologies and changing demographics, and the data economy, and all of this colliding at once that creates that seismic events so to speak.Jonathan Brill: [00:03:57] Absolutely. And there are something like 10 major trends. And I picked these because they're the 10 sort of highly trackable trends by analysts and whatnot. And they tend to be highly quantifiable trends, that are overlapping over the next 10 years to virtually guarantee that the next decade will be more volatile than the last decade. And so, what that means is that we'll have more risk. Risk is a measurement of volatility change over time. And most people sort of, a lot of traditional risk management looks at that and says, okay, well, how do we push back the future? How do we protect ourselves from it? But the reality is when a rogue wave comes at you, you cannot protect yourself from it. What you can do is position yourself to try and ride it. Be more resilient. And if you're more resilient, take advantage while your competitors are trying to recover from being capsized. That's a radically different way of looking at the future. Looking at the world, then business schools have been teaching us for the last 30 or 40 years. They kind of assume that even though new competitor might disrupt you, and a new technology might disrupt you, that the rules that the playing field, the game board will stay the same. And that's simply not true anymore.Brian Ardinger: [00:05:13] Do you think companies are getting it so to speak? I mean, obviously COVID was a major factor, I think for most individuals and companies alike. Where I think we've been talking about change and disruption, you can see examples throughout the ages about this. But rarely did it hit everybody at the same time. So, are you seeing companies being able to fundamentally grasp that this type of change is here? And are they getting better or worse when it comes to navigating this type of change? Jonathan Brill: [00:05:40] So within that question, there are so many other questions, right? At the board level, is there an awareness that we need to focus on resilience? Yes. The number or percentage of meeting topics on agendas, that are focused on resilience has gone through the roof. The number of topics that have focused on innovation and other things is also dropped through the roof. And so, I don't know that at the investor level, at the board level, we yet understand that resilience and growth are intertwined issues. You can't focus on one without the other. It's a balance because if you don't have that resilience, if you don't know where to position yourself, it doesn't matter that you're better, you're faster. That you have a life jacket, right? Like you're still out at sea. Brian Ardinger: [00:06:30] So tell me about this book. How did it come about? And what's in it for the readers? Jonathan Brill: [00:06:35] I spent the last several years at HP as the Global Futurist. And a lot of our study was looking at long-term change. What could happen? What risks did we think were static risks? Like hundred-year pandemics that were actually dynamic risk. And so, if you are in that community of people who look at these things, pandemics were becoming more and more and more likely over time....

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with New York Times bestselling author and founder of Moves The Needle, Brant Cooper. Brant and I talk about his upcoming book, Disruption Proof, and provide a sneak peek into our upcoming IO Live event on September 20. Let's get startedInside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Brant Cooper, CEO of Moves The NeedleBrian Ardinger: [00:00:30] 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 Brant Cooper. He's the founder of Moves The Needle, New York Times bestselling author of the Lean Entrepreneur, and author of an upcoming book, which I'm so excited to talk about called Disruption Proof: Empower People, Create Value and Drive Change. Welcome Brant. Brant Cooper: [00:01:07] Thanks Brian. Pleasure as always. Brian Ardinger: [00:01:10] I'm excited to have you back. As our audience knows you've been a part of the lean scene for a long time. You had a chance to speak at our IO2020 Summit. And we're going to do a little something different with this podcast episode, because we're having you back on September 29th for a live event. It's part of our IO Live series. Basically, we're going to have an hour to talk about the book and have audience questions and do a little bit more in depth stuff with you. So, I wanted to save this episode more as a preview to get folks excited about the book and excited about some of the things we're going to be talking about. So, with that, you got a new book out called Disruption Proof. Tell us how you got to the point of writing a new book and what's it all about? Brant Cooper: [00:01:50] Yeah. So, I guess it's been in the works for a couple of years, actually. It seems like so pandemic ready, but that was maybe just fortuitous that I was already embarking on it. And then of course the pandemic itself hit and business kind of dried up. So that gave you the opportunity to really crank it out. You know, over the last seven, eight years taking some of that lean stuff into the large enterprise. And it's just, that was an interesting journey in the sense that, you know, all of this lean startup, lean innovation stuff really started in Silicon Valley startups.I mean, honestly it preceeded all of that, but you know, us tech startup people like to feel like we've invented everything. There was a movement. Right. And so, starting in startups and then we bring it into the big companies. And inevitably we start with the innovation groups. As I'm trying to work through the change that is required inside of these companies, I really realized that there's uncertainty everywhere inside the enterprise.There's something happening here, way bigger. And this is perhaps obvious to a lot more people. It takes me awhile. I think really this fundamental shift from the industrial age and management practices and even management organization, that's based around the industrial, really this level of complexity and endless disruption that is in the digital age, leads to this uncertainty.And we continue to try to tackle the uncertainty the way we did in the industrial age. And it just creates more angst, and it creates more doubt and people just really wondering what the heck is going on. Then the pandemic hits. And I think we blame all of that angst and anxiety on the pandemic. And now people are like, ah, man, I can't wait to get back to the old normal. And yet the old normal was still filled with that uncertainty. And so that's really what the book ended up addressing. So again, I didn't start out with writing, you know, sort of this post pandemic book, but because I was writing it right in the middle of all of this, there really ends up being these pandemic…and how do you respond to it? And what does this mean in that bigger picture that ends up being what the book is about? Brian Ardinger: [00:04:05] It's interesting because I think, you and I have I've been talking about disruption forever. And innovation groups have been talking about it and trying to figure out how to do this. And the pandemic really seems to have taken that theory and made it real for most people.I mean, everybody on the planet to some extent has been disrupted by various means of, of what happened during the last 18 months. And it really, I think has brought out the conversation where it's no longer theory we're talking about. It's like, yeah, I get it. But now I really get it. But I still don't know what to do about it.So, you know, I've seen a proof of your book in that you really capture it and talk about the five elements of what you need to be doing to embrace this new world of work. So maybe talk through a little bit about that and some of the things you found out. Brant Cooper: [00:04:48] Yeah. So, to me, the key is to all of this, is that it's not really the technology, even though we're in a digital revolution and we're doing digital transformation and we're working in innovation. It just really isn't about the technology because there's not that much uncertainty around the technology.It's really about the mindset and the way we have to change our thinking and our behavior relative to this massive change in technology. And so, I described the behavior change that we need based upon these five elements. And so, empathy, exploration, which is basically admitting what we don't know. And so going out and learning. Leveraging evidence, so data plus insights to help us inform decisions. We don't want just algorithms and AI deciding for us, but certainly what we go and figure out needs to inform our decision. This concept of equilibrium, which is building a balance between the execution, everything that we know we have to get done, and this exploration work, meaning that we have to go and learn something first. That's a continuum throughout the organization. Even your core business needs to do some amount of exploration. It's not this bifurcation of one side of the house is execution. And one side is exploration. I think that's industrial age innovation thinking. And then the final one is ethics. And with all of the data problems that we have, and with livable wages and all of these other things that have really come to the fore, it's really incumbent upon businesses to figure out how they live up to their own values that they establish and that they broadcast.And again, that ends up being something that we have to drive down into the human behavior. And so rather than some of the big management theories on how you do change, which is very top down. I wanted to describe the behaviors of what people actually have to do day in, day out inside of their jobs. And it really is a ground up initiative.It requires obviously leaders to buy in and go, yes, we're going to change. It's kind of a pincer move, but you have to start with developing that behavior on the ground. And I guess the one other point I would make about it is the reason why I'm somewhat optimistic about that is this behavior already exists, right?The people that are subscribing to your podcast and tha...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation. And we sit down with Jennifer Henderson, CEO and Founder of Tilt, Jennifer and I talk about Tilt's startup journey and helping companies reimagine the HR leave process, as well as the trends, challenges, and opportunities companies are facing in this dynamic new world of work. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneers, and businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Jennifer Henderson, CEO and Founder of TiltBrian 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 Jennifer Henderson. She is the CEO and founder of Tilt. Welcome to the show. Jennifer Henderson: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat today. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show as well. We met through, I think the Rocky Mountain Venture Club and Nebraska Angels and Tilt is an amazing company. I'm very excited to be a part of having this conversation with you. It's in the HR talent tech space. And it's re-imagining leave management to help companies with retention and streamlining their processes, helping with compliance, but to think you called it, bringing the human back to leave.How about you tell us a little bit about the Tilt story. How did you conceive the company and how did it get started? Jennifer Henderson: Yeah, sure. The origin story for Tilt. Not that unique, I'm sure to a lot of the other guests that you have that have founded a company. It was completely born out of personal experience. So, my past life was in corporate America.I worked for 15 years in Fortune 500 companies and I loved it. I absolutely loved my career. I gave everything I had to it. I got very accustomed to promoting every two years and being the go-to person and being in the top of the nine box. Really just got comfortable sitting at that proverbial table, so to speak.And then I got pregnant and overnight everything changed. I wasn't that person anymore. And that was devastating to me and frustrating to say the least. So, at the time stage of my career, I really turned the other cheek and kept moving forward, you know, clamoring my way back up the ladder. And then five years later, different company, different stage of my career I became pregnant with my second. And this time I actually had a promotion rescinded. So that was enough for me to say this isn't right. I don't quite know yet what the solution is, but I do know that I just can't turn the other cheek again. So, I founded Tilt four years ago. Again, not really knowing what the solution would look like at that time, but we've done all your necessary stages of a startup: iterate, MVP, beta tests, listen to users, see what sticks, and here we are. Brian Ardinger: So, moving from that corporate world to the startup space, how did you start adapting to the fact that you were moving from, you know, that exploit stage working in a company that knew its business models were on that certain kind of path. Versus jumping into a startup environment, which is much more in the exploration phase, where pretty much everything is uncertain and unknown. Talk me through how that process went for you. Jennifer Henderson: Very humbling is how that process went. I felt pretty competent in my business acumen, my ability to build a team, my financial acumen, kind of everything that comes with to your point of more put together and structured organization. Turns out that doesn't all translate, and the world of entrepreneurship has been a very, yeah, I just I'll use the word again, but humbling experience to know that it's not a translatable and, you know, this worked here, so it's going to work there, type of a scenario. I actually used to in interviews say, Oh, dealing with ambiguity is one of my towering strengths. I didn't even know what ambiguity was until I entered this world of entrepreneurship. It is a whole different world. The short answer to the question, it was a very, very jarring transition and I was not ready for it. And I've spent four years adjusting and learning and throwing myself into doing work different as an entrepreneur. Brian Ardinger: Are there particular resources or hacks or things that you've learned along the way that you would recommend to those early-stage founders going through the same thing? Jennifer Henderson: Yeah, it's a great question. My road to competence in entrepreneurship was just leaning into every free webinar, resource, book, person, who back in the day that we could sit and have coffee would have coffee and teach me. And I really leaned into one of my early leaders, told me to be a sponge. And I love that advice. And I really truly like embodied that and tried to soak up, who's done this before, what lessons have they learned? And how can I learn from that? I think structurally I'm a big fan of Brad Felds. So, I love really all of his books, course works, podcast interviews, et cetera. I think he speaks in a very accurate and real translatable way to being an entrepreneur. Brian Ardinger: You just went through the Techstars workforce development cohort and congratulations on getting through demo day. What's that journey been like going through Techstars program and more importantly, I think, what do you see the journey is post demo day? Jennifer Henderson: Well, I got into this program with Tilt after four applications. So, we tried four times to get into Techstars. It's been an aspiration of us as a company for quite some time for a lot of reasons. Most notably, it is very high on the brand recognition spectrum in terms of validation of coming out of Techstars as a graduate. And that was something that we wanted quite honestly to have on our resume. So to speak is a Techstars alum. And, you know, hindsight 2020, everything happens for a reason. This was the first cohort of the workforce development track in the Techstars ecosystem. And it was absolutely meant for us. Right. We had 11 other brilliant companies around us that were either selling to the same customers or fighting the same ecosystem battles. And it was just a lot of great synergy going through that program.Everything that we would have hoped for and more in terms of plugging into the Techstars network, having the validation of being an alum, as well as the content, I was very firm in that I wanted our organization to have a strong foundation of all of the components of building a scalable and sustainable startup.And I mean, you really can't look to much more tried and true than Techstars to get that type of a foundational acumen. So that was delivered. And then some. And then to answer your question and where we go from here, we have a lot of great tailwinds, both internally and externally in terms of the problem that we're solving at Tilt. And coming out just this week as a grad of Techstars, we plan to continue that momentum through the network connection...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Josh Linkner, Author of the upcoming book, Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results. Josh gives us a sneak peek of his new book, shares some of his research and stories about how you can take action and be more creative and innovative every day. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Josh Linkner, Author of Big Little BreakthroughsBrian 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 is Josh Linkner. He is a creative troublemaker, jazz guitarist, founder of five tech companies, keynote speaker. I think you've done over a thousand keynotes. And you've written a new book that's coming out called Big Little Breakthroughs. Welcome to the show Josh. Josh Linkner: Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be with you. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm so excited to have you on the show. And I'm excited to have you because you have a brand-new book coming out. You're an author and have written a lot of stuff out there. What made you decide to start in another book and what's it all about? Josh Linkner: Well, so Brian, you and I share the passion and love for human creativity in all its forms. And bringing that to life and in the business sense. And that's really been my whole career again. I started as a jazz guitarist and I built and sold several companies.I've been involved in a launch of about a hundred startups. But what happened is that to me, Innovation, I think is so misunderstood. And even though I've written three other books on the topic, I really said, could we flip it upside down? Now, most often we think of innovation as these massive change the world things.But in that context, that's not for most people. You know, most people aren't wearing a hoodie or a lab coat. And so, I tried to make this like Innovation for the rest of us. It's really focused on helping everyday people become everyday innovators. So, I tried to demystify the creative process, lots of fresh research.I spent over a thousand hours in research and interviews with people all over the world. And what we came up with is this notion of big little breakthroughs, which are small everyday acts of creativity that add up to big stuff. It's sort of like the little baby steps of creativity, but when you think about it, in terms of high velocity, lots of little approaches, it's way less risky.It's way more accessible. It's way more fun. And they can all add up to great things, while we're developing the skills. So I think that most people have Innovation backwards. It's not swinging for the fences. It's actually going after it. One little, teeny idea at a time. Brian Ardinger: Well, and I think that's so important. You know, the work that I do with companies and that. A lot of the times, first thing we have to do is kind of level set of what innovation means. And I think you're right. A lot of people think that innovation has to be, you know, I've got to create the next Uber or the next Facebook or whatever the case may be. And a lot of the real value is created at that iterative approach almost. Where it's like, how do I spot problems in my workplace or in my life? And how do I solve those? And it can be something, you know, fairly simple or small. But those things add up over time and it's good to have that level set of what innovation means. Josh Linkner: By the way real quickly. So new research out of Harvard shows that, you know, we think that our economy is driven by Elon Musk, inventing some new spaceship or whatever, and yes, that grabs the media attention.But a new study from Harvard shows that 72% of our gross domestic product here in the United States is driven not by crazy giant ideas. It's by the little ones. And yet sometimes they show up as incremental. Sometimes there's just little things that don't capture the media attention, but maybe you make a tweak in the way you pitch your product or service, and your sales go up 11%. Or maybe you hit your factory floor. You, you find a new way to be more efficient and those little things are less glamorous, but they're absolutely impactful. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. What holds people back from taking these creative steps and that. You know, is this something that's found in every one of us or what holds people back from creativity?Josh Linkner: Absolutely in every one of us. And the research here and I've been studying human creativity now for 20 plus years is crystal clear. That all human beings have enormous reservoirs of creative capacity. Much of it is dormant, but we all have that capacity. Our hardware's there. Like your brain and Picasso's brain are pretty darn similar.You know, we all can be creative. Now, we don't all develop those skills, which is kind of sad, but we all have the capability to do so. That level set number one. What holds most people back is not natural talent, it's fear. So, fear is that poison of course that robs us of our best thinking. And you know we've all done it.You're in a meeting and you have a crazy cool idea. But instead of sharing that one, you share your safe idea. Because you don't want to look foolish or be embarrassed or whatever. And it's a totally natural thing, but fear and creativity cannot coexist. So, we've developed, and I share in the book a number of systems and processes, and even techniques. Think of them as like idea extraction techniques that are way more fun than brainstorming, way more effective than brainstorming, but they essentially help people cut through the fear to get their best thinking forward.Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about that. Like how do you generate the best ideas and actually take something small that you may think is meaningless at the time, and then create something of value from it?Josh Linkner: Well, I've studied this a lot, you know. If the premise is that we all have dormant creative capacity and by the way, mine's dormant to. I still have, you know, extra capacity, we all do. Then the question is like, how do you extract it? What's the best technique to get it out into the surface and drive the outcomes that matter most to all of us. And so, what I've learned is that brainstorming, which is the technique that most people well use, is just awful. Like it was started in 1958. I mean, a lot of things have changed since 1958. And furthermore, it’s actually a good tool if you want to generate mediocre ideas. Because again, you know, fear creeps in, right. Just not a good technique. So, over the years I've developed a toolkit of like 13 way more effective and way more fun techniques that help people get that creativity really flowing.Just a couple of quick examples. One of them Brian is called role storming. So instead of brainstorming as you, you're brainsto...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Steve Blank. Steve is the author of the Startup Owner's Manual and is also known as father of modern entrepreneurship. Steve and I had a chance to talk about the evolution and changes since the inception of the lean startup movement, as well as some of the coming changes we see in the world of work, education, government, and more. 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. Let's get started. 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 with me we have Steve Blank. Welcome to the show, Steve.Steve Blank: Thanks for having me, Brian. Brian Ardinger: Steve. I'm so excited to have you on board because you have led the way when it comes to lean startup and all the methodologies around that. For the two people in my audience who haven't heard of you, I'm going to give a quick bio. You're a serial entrepreneur turned educator. You're known as the father of modern entrepreneurship. You've helped create the lean startup movement, which has really changed the way startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught, how science is commercialized, how companies and governments are looking at this whole space. You're author of a couple of books called The Four Steps to the Epiphany and the Startup Owner's Manual.Both of which I recommend highly to my clients and startups. You also teach at Stanford and Columbia and the list goes on and on. So, I'm super excited to have you on the show. But I thought we'd start off going back to 2013. You wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review titled why the Lean Startup Changes Everything. And it was one of those quintessential articles that I think kicked off a movement and kicked off a lot of conversation around innovation. What surprised you the most since you wrote that article and what surprised you during that journey? Steve Blank: That's a great question. You know, the lean startup big insight was that the startups weren't the smaller versions of large companies. For the seven years, since the HBR article, we've discovered that companies aren't larger versions of startups. Meaning that corporations started adopting startup methodologies because they were being disrupted by startups and globalization and China, and then new technology and said, Hey, we can run incubators and accelerators and we could just operate just like that.But in fact, what I think we've created in the last seven years is mostly innovation theater, rather than innovation in large companies. And not because anybody is being stupid, but because we're learning, what people have been talking about for 20 years, is that 99% of your company is actually doing execution. That is executing that known business model. And all the processes and procedures and OKR and KPIs are designed for execution. But those things tend to strangle innovation in its crib. And unless you're going to fix all those processes. And that is specifically create what was labeled in the 20th century, the ambidextrous organization, that is one that could innovate and execute. You're going to end up having great posters and coffee cups about innovation, but not much innovation because what'll happen is, you'll create these islands of innovations as innovation activities, but they really won't be connected to the rest of the corporate infrastructure. The output of those incubators will die. And it's again, not due to malice, but due to the fact that you really need to make some more fundamental changes, if you want that to happen. Or you just need to acquire companies rather than try to do it internally. Brian Ardinger: It speaks to an interesting point. So, for years, we've seen major shifts coming on the horizon, whether it's the rise of startups, accelerating technologies. Now we have a pandemic. Why do you think companies are still getting caught flat footed when it comes to disruption and being better able to handle the new next? Steve Blank: If you really think about who runs large companies, if you're great at managing hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people, you're a world-class executer. There are very few companies that are still run by their innovators or by innovators. You know, the ones that are, we see both the good and the bad. The canonical poster child right now is the Elon Musk. Created industries from scratch and as certifiably insane. There's good news about working at Tesla and there's bad news in directly reporting to Elon. And before him, the poster child was Steve Jobs. Created industries from scratch and probably, you know, a horrible human being to work for. Versus working in a stable corporation where there are processes and procedures and things unfold in a regular basis, and you can know what to expect when you show up in the work. That works great when your competitors are operating the same way, and it's a steady state world outside. That's in fact exactly who you need is an executer. Well, when things are chaotic and disruptive or technology has changed or something else, those world-class executor's have a real hard time figuring out what innovation looks like.And in fact, the worst case that I see, and I don't mean it as a dis, but you sometimes will even get the innovation head nod from those leaders. Is that you'll try to describe to them what they need to do inside their corporation, and they'll nod and "Oh yes, you know," in fact, sometimes they'll even say, "Oh, innovation is third pillar of our agency and whatever."And then, okay, well where's the exec staff table. "Oh, it's three layers down in our org." Well, have you changed any of your HR or security or policy or anything else or "no." Or do you have a 10% contingency for unplanned innovation? "Oh no innovation stands in line for next year at the budget table." And then you realize it's gotten nice words, but it's really not baked into the DNA.You know, I'm not a believer that everyone in the company needs to be an innovator. I believe that we need to understand that the people who do world-class innovation and world-class execution come to work for very different reasons. And we can build innovation processes into existing P & Ls in divisions for what McKinsey used to call horizon one and two. We also need horizon three people who are working on disruptive stuff. And as I said, some companies just can't change their culture to do that. So they need a process to acquire innovation, whether it's people or product line, or P & L, etc. But again, as some of those companies run into problems, when they try to integrate those acquisitions, they tend to kill innovation. Google, and all the robotics acquisitions or Google and Nest are great case studies of what happens to innovation companies when they meet execution organizations. Brian Ardinger: So now we're living in this pandemic and I think you've called this a mass extinction event for a lot of comp...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Roger, founder of Felix Gray, the e-commerce eyewear company with proprietary blue light filtering technology. David and I talk about the founder's journey of launching a new category of eyewear and the challenges along the way. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with David Roger, Founder of Felix GrayBrian Ardinger: [00:00:30] 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 David Roger. He is the founder of Felix Gray, an e-commerce eyewear company with proprietary blue light filtering technology. And he's got quite an interesting story. So welcome to the show, David. David Roger: [00:00:57] Thanks so much for having me. Brian Ardinger: [00:00:58] Our paths have not crossed until today, but a lot of our common network have in the past. You started your company, Felix Gray in 2016. Let's go back to the beginning and let's talk about how you got involved in becoming an entrepreneur. David Roger: [00:01:13] In college, I initially thought I wanted to be a lawyer. That's what I went to school for and by sophomore year I realized I did not want to do that. And I kind of loved this idea of starting businesses. And this is the time where TechCrunch was starting to get really popular, and you'd read a lot of different things and different entrepreneurial things. And it was something really exciting. I ended up starting my first business in college, which was a secondary school newspaper. And I had to sell print advertising to local stores and shops and businesses. And if you want to learn how tough selling is, try doing that. And then when I left Cornell, I went and joined Venture for America, which is basically Teach for America, but applied to startups and entrepreneurship. Founded by Andrew Yang, who is running for democratic nominee couple of years ago and is now running actually for Mayor in the New York Mayor race. And so that's kind of how I got into entrepreneurship.Brian Ardinger: [00:02:06] I think you started in Vegas, is that correct? Working with Tony Shay and the Downtown Project. And maybe tell us a little bit about that Vegas Tech Fund and some of the stuff that you've done in there. David Roger: [00:02:17] Through Venture for America, they are in partnership with Tony's Downtown Project. And so that's how I got connected with them. I interviewed out there, really bought into the mission, really thought it was an amazing thing to fill a walkable livable downtown area, which is, Vegas is not known for that. It's basically all suburbs. And then essentially the strip, which is a transient first population.And so, I thought that was an amazing mission. I was part of the biggest tech fund, but my primary job was on their operations team. Basically, when I got there, Tony had put in $350 million of his own money into revitalize the area, and we had no idea if projects that we had going on ranging from a million, to twenty-five million dollars, we're going to make money or lose money. It's kind of the wild west.And they threw me in, and they said, go figure this out. And so, it was really cool. Great job right out of school. I will say it did mean that I was in front of Excel, building financial models, 12 hours a day. That's when my eyes started to absolutely kill me. I was looking around, looking at everyone else, complaining about the same things our eyes being tired at the end of the day, their eyes being dry, headaches, blurry vision. And kind of looked and said, okay, why is this a thing. Everyone I know at work and half the people I know in my friend group that are in different jobs all around the country, why are we all complaining about the same thing? That's when I started talking to Optometrists Ophthalmologists.  Learned around what screens produced, which is blue light and glare and basically that caused a lot of these issues that get categorized as digital eye strain. So, if you get filtered blue light, you can eliminate glare. You create this more comfortable experience. Brian Ardinger: [00:03:50] I love the genesis of that. But not every new idea becomes a company. And so how did you make that jump from, hey, I've got an individual problem from the standpoint of, you know, my eyes are getting strained from all the work I'm doing on screens to, hey, I think there's something here that I can create a company around?David Roger: [00:04:08] So the first thing was really recognizing that problem. Right? So, recognize the problem myself and then recognize that problem in a lot of other people. Whether it was people complaining about it firsthand, or me saying, hey, do your eyes ever get exhausted at the end of the day? You ever deal with a headache?And everyone's saying, yes. You're like, okay, there's something here. So, then I start to understand, okay, what is going on? So that's when I started talking to eye professionals for a better understanding what could be these root causes. And so when I'm talking to ophthalmologists and optometrists they are saying look, screens are a large driver behind this, and particularly what screens produce, light and glare.And so like, look, you can filter blue light, and you can eliminate glare. You can create a more comfortable experience. There are these glasses out there, they're yellow or orange lenses, and basically, they're going to help. So, I look, and they're not only yellow and orange lenses, but they look like hunting goggles.And if you put them on your face you look like one of the X Men. And I'm like, I can't wear that, and we'll show this to plenty of other people like, hey, this will solve your problems. They're like, I'm not wearing that. Right. So basically, the idea was okay, well, how do you create something that is functional, but also can look good. At the flip side, there were a couple other things in the market at the time, and this is still the case today. But these clear lenses, basically the Optometrist, the Ophthalmologist, the real eyecare professional said this stuff is not really filtering real blue light. It's filtering 2 to 3% of blue light where it actually matters, which produces blue light. It is basically placebo. It's not worth buying. So, what I did then was said, okay, well, how can you marry the fashion function?How can you create something that has a beautiful frame, but a really functional lens? And that's when I started working through a lot of networking with, with different lens suppliers and ended up developing a proprietary way of filtering blue light that can still have a clear lens. But be highly effective, right?So, Felix Gray's lens, even today, filters 30% of blue light instead of 2% of blue light at the 455-nanometer range, which is where screens produce blue light. Right. So basically, we filter 15 times more blue light where it's important. And that's why 9 out of 10 people who wear Felix Gray report significant improvement, but that was the genesis.So, it was okay,...