How to Launch a Tech Startup With No Money

00:00:37 Welcome back to the Venture room the number one platform for aspiring entrepreneurs my name is Jamal and my name is Kareem and today we've got a very special guest one of the I'd say heavyweights in the fintech space I'll give you that um he's raised over 100 million 50 million but 50 million I'll take 100 why not you raise over 50 million and he's launched multiple seven-figure fintech startups so yeah I'll let him do his intro wonderful well thanks guys for having me um you know just bumping you on the street got to interview me and my daughter um so my name's Neil St. Clair um I have been an entrepreneur now such

00:01:05 as that's defined for it's 15 years I don't know I'm getting a little long in the tooth um but I launched a variety of businesses both fintechs media businesses in the past peer-to-peer marketplaces which I'll never do again lots of fun but difficult um and I think if nothing else as my old boss would say I'm you know here to share my confusion I'm still figuring it out as I go along so yeah hopefully I can offer a few Pearls of Wisdom but if nothing else feel free to do the exact opposite of what I say I mean it's quite

00:01:34 interesting how we bumped into you I don't know if you want to like dive into bit of that yes so um for those of you who haven't seen we were doing Street interviews in Battersea power station and um I happen to notice Neil's jumper and his Blazer so I was like let me go speak to that guy and then um he ended up doing an interview with us and uh decided to comment on podcast so it was really good to have you yeah yeah thank you and it's quite interesting like when you put yourself out there who you can

00:01:59 bump into so yeah quite quite lucky um so what I wanted to start with is kind of your background before business so like when you were growing up um what was like do you have any struggles when you're younger what was your childhood like yeah I know happy to talk about that so um I'm one of the lucky ones I had two awesome parents still do still alive still married their 50th wedding anniversary and they weren't entrepreneurs my mom uh was a teacher in an era where you know I think you know in another life and another time my mom

00:02:28 probably would have been like a real badass lawyer yeah um Dad was a pharmaceutical executive and they just gave me a really great path a really great start to life um you know gave me the the structure that I needed you know education as an emphasis and and I realize now um having worked with you know and known thousands of people how rare that frankly is um so I was lucky in that regard um and I think we were talking about a little bit earlier before the camera started rolling this for whatever reason

00:02:55 there was always the spark of ambition right whether that comes from a place of fear where it's like well I have to do this because I'm competitive and I want to beat these other people and just be at the top of the pyramid or just because it's like it's fun and if not me me then who I can't quite say but I've always had these little businesses and side hustles my mom likes to tell the story of how I pretended when I was like when I'm 10 years old that I was a lawyer and would represent people when

00:03:18 they were getting detention and then charge them and then oh my God I did have to give that money back but no there's nothing else in school well you're a lawyer that's a pretty easy um but yeah so that you know I had a nice start to life uh in New Jersey from America obviously originally in here now um and then just you know I think lucky to have a bit of maybe natural intelligence that allowed me to go on to University and um you know find my way into this world yeah yeah did you have any like

00:03:46 particular because I feel like sometimes successful people have like a struggle when they were younger was there any like hardships that you had when you were younger or was it pretty yeah you know so I think my biggest hardship if it is to be called a hardship um and I'd recognize that I've had a pretty privileged life was I was the guy that always lived in Two Worlds yeah so I was the the athlete that also took sort of the what we would call America advanced placement courses right okay and I never quite fit into either space

00:04:11 because I'd be sitting on the bus with my my football buddies and we'd be all playing you know bro or whatever and but the reality is here I was also you know reading Shakespeare right in my AP lip class and then I'd be in the AP Lit class and I'm the only guy there that you know has ever even knows what about Bible press is yeah yeah and so I lived between these two worlds and I felt like an outcast in some ways even though I had friends right but I definitely didn't quite fit into one box and it

00:04:36 took me a while maybe kind of around University College days to find that there were people like me out there yeah right and to find that community that tribe um and that was exceedingly important I think in many ways accelerated my career and I would just say to anybody out there that's feeling that way right now or like me is what we call a poly math right it has lots of interests maybe doesn't feel like oh they have one single path you know there's a great Ted Talk and I'm blanking on the woman's name that did it

00:05:03 about being a polymath yeah and I'll tell you it was only a few years ago that I saw it yeah and I actually cried when I saw it because for many many years I was like I said what's wrong with me like I don't want to just do one thing and I see all my friends they're just a lawyer they're just a doctor and I'm like I'm an entrepreneur but like I want to do these other things too I want to write a book I want to go do this right and I said well something must be wrong I must be off right um I'm Gonna Leave a pitick that's her

00:05:26 name okay um and I saw this Ted Talk and I said wow so there are other people out there like me and it's okay you know maybe I do have a little add or whatever but it but that's actually a benefit that's an upside and I should indulge in that and if I could put a little structure around it yeah maybe it's a good differentiator so that that's you know sort of the struggle that I felt cognitively but you know for anybody out there that is facing that yeah there's another side to the mountain and just a little time and

00:05:53 patience you'll get there and that's things that make you weird when you're young are the things that make you awesome and successful when you're older yeah that's absolutely right I was a bit the same to be fair because I was in like the swim team so I was a national swimmer um which wasn't too cool when we were younger um but then I was also like um playing football and rugby and like I was so good at different things I never really focused that one and it's like it's quite hard when you're good at everything like to just

00:06:16 pick a lane really and to know what your path is I think it is and I think you know there is a benefit to having an expertise right and it depends a little bit on your path in life if you're going to go to the Corporal and no not to anyone that does that obviously I've chosen the entrepreneurial route you do have to be a mile deep right for the most part because when I'm hiring right and I'm somebody that hires a lot of people it's great if you have lots of interest but if I'm hiring a director of

00:06:42 marketing it's gonna be damn good at marketing right you better know everything about it and I don't care what your other interests are you better be in that space right so develop your expertise and even if you are going to be sort of a polymathic person like myself and have lots of Interest there's still that one point of emphasis right I knew pretty early on yeah I wasn't going to be a physicist right like math is not my strong yeah right now you also have to know your weaknesses and it's really

00:07:04 important that you spend time studying those weaknesses because you are only as strong as your weakest link and it's so fascinating how you can pull and extract Knowledge from things that you didn't know about or don't have a skill set in and now cross apply that to areas where you do have a skill so I read a lot of books by like in the physics realm yeah you know I don't understand half of it because like oh that's a fascinating idea yeah they conceived it in one way but maybe I can pull that into my life

00:07:28 yeah the reality is pick your lane in your emphasis but it's totally okay to have those varied interests because when if you want to go say the entrepreneurial route if you don't have the ability to be a marketer to be a leader and a manager to understand the sales cycle to be able to do a budget like again I'm not a math guy but yeah I I've had to do more budgets and more sort of analyzes of business metrics than you can possibly imagine you have to have that ability or at least that desire and willingness to

00:07:57 learn yeah um and so it's perfectly okay to have those interests but you got to find that lane that allows those interests to be you know your superpower yeah because I feel like a lot of young people struggle I definitely did this picking a lane like because I always chase the money really yeah I thought okay let's make the most money literally so I always wanted to be like an investment broker so I started doing that with uni and hated it and I was pretty lost for like a good five years and I thought you know

00:08:21 what let me think about what am I interested in what really like what could I do with money aside basically not included and I basically picked up off and thought you know what I really like speaking to successful people and finding them talking about businesses and Entrepreneurship and when you find your lane I feel like you're way more dedicated yeah it's it's true and I will say listen we I'm an art and capitalist we still live in a capitalist structured Society get some money right um Mark Cuban is

00:08:47 actually my cousin uh my third cousin and he talks a lot about like the fallacy of following your passion right because the reality is that's you got to make some money and then you can follow your passion right there are a lot of people out there that are really good at making little knickknacks or something but not gonna maybe be able to make a living out of that maybe you will right and if you're if you have a nice privileged background and you can sit there and take some time Mom and Dad can

00:09:10 support you great maybe you can build that up but the reality is most of us have to go out there and hustle a little bit Yeah and build these things so I would say at the end of the day yes find a passion maybe do it as a side hustle and then build it up into something that then can become your main thing but your story is one that I've heard a lot where people like they chase the money they become the investment broker it's miserable but you know what it's good experience because I Define My Life by

00:09:32 the negative what do I mean by that I look at the things that I've done and I know probably more prescriptively what I don't want the things I don't want to repeat the things I don't want to do the necessarily what I do want to do yeah as I'm getting a little older now you know I'm starting to concretize around the idea of knowing a little bit more about what I want to do yeah but especially in your youth it's more important life is just like it's always like dating I'll guarantee most of your audience could

00:09:57 say right now the bad dating experience that they've had because maybe they're you know they're not married so they know what they don't want right but that doesn't necessarily mean you know what you do want right because you may not even know that that person is out there with red hair and freckles that you'd be attracted to because you never even experience that right so there's all sorts of variations that of what you could want but you darn well know what you don't want because you've experienced that and have gone on the

00:10:21 other side and I will say one last point which is I'm now you know 36. money's nice yeah it's nice to have but there comes a certain point and it's not being a billionaire right it's even maybe being a a low level millionaire making a couple hundred thousand a year where you're like your needs are provided for that incremental additional amount of wealth yeah it doesn't really matter yeah it doesn't make you that much happier yeah it really doesn't and so if anybody out there was starting a business or thinking of selling a

00:10:49 business yeah and you're like well I could get five million dollars today right or if I hold on to the business maybe I get 500 million dollars a month well yeah there's a difference between five and five million dollars you know the difference is few more houses yeah right does that really make you that much happier like so at a certain point like and there's always a bigger house isn't it yeah it's always more and more and it's like you have to be that person but the reality is money isn't what

00:11:12 makes you happy if you're miserable in what you're doing step out and go do something else yeah right like like money's nice don't get me wrong yeah there are many many many other things out there that will lead you to a path to happiness and self-actualization and a lot of people will be sitting there saying I don't believe it experience enough life and you will eventually yeah it's true so I want to take it back through um your journey basically after college so I know you went into journalism can you talk us through like

00:11:40 the path you walked straight after college yeah so I did my undergraduate work at Boston University um I actually went to Oxford for a hotbed here as part of a study abroad program and then my graduate work at Yale immediately after Boston University and I went to school to become the next great TV journalist next great TV presenter um they have an amazing School of Journalism and communication there and that's exactly what I did um so I turned down some of the investment banking job offers um and I even turned down a production

00:12:07 offer uh from Bloomberg uh to go and work in the news business but basically was told your chances of getting on camera good luck like you'd be in your 30s before you even get on camera why is that just because it's the way that they typically had things structured and this is in an era before sort of like personality driven news it was more like you just you got to earn your stripes you've got to really they didn't want somebody on there that hadn't had 10 15 years experience working the floor and

00:12:31 really knew it before they throw you on camera and I respected that I still do but you know and it was a nice offer to be in New York it's like almost a six-figure salary right out of college I was last amazing all right when you're that young it was like a million dollars listen I had no debt I had no responsibilities my apartment was probably a couple of thousand dollars whatever I was like man I could live high on the hog here but I knew what I wanted to do and so you know what I did I went took a job for twenty three

00:12:53 thousand dollars a year in Upstate New York which is not New York City let's put it that way about two and a half three hours outside of that a little town called Binghamton yeah and I got to go on camera and it was the most amazing experience of my life we had more time I would tell you the story the first time I ever went live in full but I'll give you the reduced version which is first live shot I ever had right you know little light comes on and you know there's no screwing up well you know

00:13:15 this at the beginning of course your nervous because you've never done it before bottom line is a huge story and it kept escalating so you have in your ear what's called an ifb yeah and every 30 seconds leading into the two minutes before it was about to go live I would kept getting a new producer from New Market so started with Binghamton than Syracuse then Albany which is the capital of New York so now we're talking a million five two million people total then New York City and finally last thing I hear before I go live is oh

00:13:43 we're going to kick you over to Atlanta and it's like Atlanta Atlanta Station there CNN okay and the very last thing that I hear from the anchor who was Rick Sanchez at the time is yeah uh not only we're gonna take you live on CNN but we're also going live on CNN International and the BBC is going to reciprocate um and so I ended up going live for the first time ever to potentially if everybody had been watching I think like a half a billion people oh my God yeah I don't even I don't even remember

00:14:11 it but you know just you kind of go into like just training mode and just you know just get laser focused and it worked out but so it started my career as a TV journalist you know telling stories um did that for about three years between Binghamton and then I was just gonna say just on the back of that the first time we've I filmed I was super nervous as well but we can actually edit so it's not live yes when you're live there's no there's no editing there's no takes you drop an F-bomb on camera Diana

00:14:35 knows FCC fine um it was an amazing experience wouldn't trade it for anything I'm so glad that I did it wasn't making any money had to get a little family support to just pay my bills in a town that wasn't particularly expensive but um I'm glad I did it because it was my passion if I hadn't done it I would regret it and the reality is again I live my life also by analogies and so life is storytelling it's making arguments and so the skills that I gained the ability to tell a story or and also to listen to somebody else's

00:15:04 stories and to formulate a structure around that story um are the skill sets that I gleaned from journalism and also you kind of created pretty good [ __ ] detector to be perfectly honest right um so I did that for a while but there's a quote from Churchill that I quite like that says at a certain point one must stop taking the news and start making it to be an actor and not a Critic and that was banging around my head and one day um there was a family uh in New York I was covering Staten Island at the time

00:15:32 and they lost three sons in a drunk driving accident they weren't driving was another driver that barreled into the car and killed all three of their sons and my job was to go knock on that door I was what's called a one-man band so I was the cameraman and on camera yeah and stick a camera in their face and document their pain to who's better you know and and I started to feel the emotional toll of it a little bit as well even though we as journalists often become very cynical you know what I did instead of actually

00:16:01 filming them right away I mean I had to get the story yeah I put my camera down and I prayed with them yeah yeah it's hurting like what can I do what could I do right other than that um and I walked back in and the combination of that emotional toll plus the idea that I wanted to stop telling other people's stories and start to write one of my own yeah that's what eventually led me to getting out of Journalism and it's not to nocturnalism it's a it's an amazing thing that journalists do especially at a local

00:16:26 level yeah um we talked a little earlier you know media and journalism has changed a lot yeah but there are still great journalists out there doing great work but It ultimately wasn't me I was like I want to be the guy on the other side of the camera that's being interviewed yeah somebody and I'm not going to do that just being a journalist today and that you know you have to be aware of yourself and that's a little ego right that's a little arrogance and I said all right I'm going to set myself

00:16:50 on that path and see what I can do and yeah here I am beginning to read about you guys are yeah just before you know getting to that stage what were you like in your younger years like as a kid where you always that outgoing outspoken person with that confidence or I'd say yes you probably have to ask my parents and they would remember better than I do but you know from what I can see and what I've heard yeah I've always been that guy that you know Not only was kind of outspoken and very comfortable in

00:17:15 crowds and talking to others but just also had a lot of crazy ideas and yeah I said how can I make that idea a reality right and I wasn't scared I didn't become tired at the thought of starting something and doing it and seeing it you know through so and that's that's a pretty big differentiator I guarantee a lot of your audience right now they have an idea yeah yeah ideas are a dime a dozen right it's all about execution and how do we know that yeah because just look at there's a there's a synchronicity to ideas like all of a

00:17:47 sudden a bunch of people that's find the clock back to sort of the early days of like social media with Facebook like a lot of people had the same idea at the same time right because a lot of tumblers in life have aligned that an idea of a social media Network made sense you had your Friendster or you had your Myspace at your Facebook whatever right all kind of coming together at the same time so ideas are a dime a dozen a lot of people with the same idea but friendster's not around anymore Myspace I don't know kind of limped to

00:18:12 the Finish Line Facebook's still there but experiencing maybe some challenges right now like the reality is it's all about execution and then after a while then it's all about sort of ongoing Innovation that's a whole other topic but to get to that point if you have an idea do it it's better to fail yeah add something and say at least I tried right first of all right yeah I'm a Jewish person and yeah the way that we Orient our life is not to maximize outcome but to minimize regret right and that's a

00:18:40 very just little twist in the way that you live your life but at the end of the day saying hey you know I made the most money because I was a great investment banker yeah but I didn't do these five other things yeah or maybe I didn't make as much money but I tried everything which life would you rather live right a life where you tried everything even if it didn't work out or the life where it was successful but sort of yeah minimal in some ways right I don't know I mean that's a question you have to ask

00:19:05 yourself but if you have an idea do it even if you're going to fail because you're going to learn so much from it and then beyond that just focus on that execution because having the idea and sticking it in the back of your mental closet it's just going to collect dust and somebody else is going to outpace you and have that same idea um I think a lot of people just like you know they take comfort yeah and the idea yeah and like oh well someday yeah I'll do my job and I'll go do this thing yeah yeah no you won't all right and so that

00:19:34 I think maybe was part of the differentiator was just I always said hey I have this idea I'm gonna go try it yeah right certainly failed more times than I succeeded but it set me on that path now also understanding how to do risk assessment and take the right idea yeah right yeah you know not a great idea is a good idea too it has to be clear right at a certain point you can't just test everything but yeah I think uh I think even just speaking to loads of different people what I've come to learn is

00:20:00 everyone wants to be successful everyone has an idea the difference is whether you execute on that idea or not even the homeless man at Tesco probably wants to be rich probably has an idea but hasn't got the heart or the belief that they can do it and they don't execute so at the end of the day you're not going to get anywhere are you execution is so key and Steve Jobs had a great quote on this and I'll paraphrase the tunic sandwiches you've got to say no to 10 1 billion dollar ideas to say yes to 110 billion

00:20:27 dollar idea the outcome May hypothetically be the same if you could say do 10 1 billion dollar ideas right same amount of money but the one 10 billion dollar idea has capacity because of that Focus to an extent on that idea to scale even beyond that and has a much higher likelihood of actually having success and so you may have lots of ideas find the one you want where you have a little bit of expertise a little bit of passion and also has a product Market fit most importantly and just roll with that and focus on execution

00:20:57 execution execution and don't fall into what I call shiny Bobble syndrome yeah and entrepreneurs have that because it's going to be talked earlier like you're polymathic by your nature right you're somebody that probably does have a lot of ideas and interests but once you decide to go on that idea there does have to be that level of focus because if not you'll find that bias playing into the way that you operate the business and I can tell you this from my first company I had that where I was like what about this idea and that idea

00:21:20 and that idea and the reality is like just as a simple example when you're creating a product roadmap there's so much you can jam into a product yeah yeah half of it's not even providing utility to the audience that you're selling it to right but it's so it's just it's just ego throwing it in there right just because you have the idea and the best products that I've ever rolled out I've had three things that have gone into that product that were actual operational ideas and I've had a list of probably 300 things that I wanted to get

00:21:44 to that were now Triad for a later time so that I could be focused on getting to product execution marketing and selling the hell out of it and then at some point really listening to the feedback loop of my audience and saying here's my 300 ideas what's my audience wanting and then maybe what's the one thing that maybe they don't even know that they know that they want but they would use it once I've got it but the reality is yeah if you overstuff the turkey yeah from day one you're gonna put the Frankenstein

00:22:11 product you're probably gonna run out of money for marketing and sales yeah we talked about this a bit earlier and at the end of the day with entrepreneurship once you make that move into it and pick that idea it is all about focus and not listening to the last person that you talk to and say oh I want to radically change my idea because this person had that thing reality is not everybody's gonna agree with you and everyone's gonna like what you do yeah so the last voice you listen to should not be the

00:22:35 the most controlling voice right unless they really do have a good idea and the same time strip things down to their bare minimum and focus on Focus yeah um because otherwise you're just gonna put so much crap into something and it's gonna serve no purpose for you or your audience I want to kind of talk about your your launch story for the is it on by that was the first company that's the very first one yeah I want to hear the wrong story about and how you felt making that jump yeah jumping again

00:23:02 not too long 15 years ago somewhere between 10 and 15 years I don't remember um so started on buy that originally uh with my my then girlfriend then fiance now wife still my wife um and so we were co-founders in that brought a team around us and I actually started when I was in uh graduate school um so I was at Yale at the time and had this idea sort of on a drive I think you reminded me that was uh to Philadelphia over a weekend pitch it to my then girlfriend she's like great idea let's do it now I will tell you the

00:23:33 fundamental mistake I made I'll just give you the quick back when I don't buy that which was was a peer-to-peer Marketplace for buying and reselling uh hotel rooms yeah uh so nice idea big idea um you know basically took advantage of economic upside downside where I lost mini.com kind of kind of sort of but peer-to-peer so like you'd have a hotel room that now you couldn't use either because you were locked into it and they're like well if you cancel we're still charging you a thousand bucks so

00:23:58 sell it to me for 800 take a smaller loss I get the utility of the hotel room the hotel gets my business because now I'm probably gonna buy stuff at the you know at the bar or whatever and you minimize your loss or flip it yeah so in the US like let's look at the Super Bowl if you've got a hotel room a year before the Super Bowl or 500 a night how much could you sell that for two days before the Super Bowl right and if that Marketplace didn't exist neither you nor that person nor the hotel could

00:24:23 experience upside cool idea big idea yeah so many problems with it because first of all I didn't know crap about the hotel industry right I know how it worked I didn't even know how to do systems integrate like it just it was it was I was like oh I've stayed in a hotel therefore I'm clearly an expert right no not at all right and that's a fallacy that a lot of young entrepreneurs fall into is they're like well I'm a consumer of this thing therefore I'm an expert and no you're not right there's a whole

00:24:47 other operational side that you don't know and so I strongly encourage most young entrepreneurs to try to avoid doing say like marketplaces or consumer products unless you have a real it's a creative expertise and like you're the world's best T-shirt designer where you really fundamentally understand the operational side of the business yeah because hotels are much more complex because they really do want to know their customers they didn't like the idea when we pitched them on this of me selling the room to you and all of a

00:25:13 sudden they don't have the right name in the system they don't have the right loyalty point they don't know who you are they don't know how to upsell you on these other things they were quite resistant to the idea and also the thing that I didn't really understand was cancellation of hotels it's a very minimal kind of thing it actually wasn't a big as big a market as I thought I got I got sort of my eyes wide about what's called The Tam the total addressable Market I'm like wow hundreds of billions

00:25:35 of dollars no tests what if we can just capture one percent well reality is my actual Market was only one percent of that multiple billion and I could only capture one percent of that yeah like 0.001 Hotel Market not enough to make a business out of right ultimately and that was one thing that I hadn't done the proper research on so there was a lot there were a lot of early learnings that I wish I had known going in but to tell you the launch story of the first business even though it ultimately

00:25:58 didn't work out and I often say first companies are like first loves they always hold a special place in your heart but you're probably not going to get married to them right um so love the business uh love doing it learn so so much but uh the launch story so we went up to uh Kennebunk uh in Maine it's a nice little sort of coastal town in yeah yeah and uh has a hotel trade that's mostly sort of like B and B's bed and breakfasts um which typically have a pretty tight cancellation policy like once you're

00:26:27 booked like if you cancel you still have to pay because they can't afford and absorb a cancellation like a Marriott or a Hilton Camp right yeah so they'd have to be much less flexible so like can we go up there and kind of pitch this idea to these holiday makers up there during something called was a Christmas promenaders and they have a big Christmas event where thousands of people Descent of the town it was a silly story so basically myself and my entire staff we all dressed up in like Santa Claus and like elf costumes

00:26:53 and the way that this thing was set up was there was um the main bit you couldn't Park in the downtown so you had a park or quite far away and either like wait for a shuttle or or walk quite a bit and Maine in December is is cold as hell and so we brought our car up and we were like we're gonna shuttle people and we said we'll give you a free ride but the cost of your ride is listening to our pitch right that's small and so we just it was four or five of us um one of the guys was was local to there and kind of knew the landscape and

00:27:23 we did that for pretty much two days straight signed up you know 500 a thousand people as the initial early adopters it was a good way to prove product Market fit and then we also went around and pitched all the local businesses on it and froze our asses off embarrassed ourselves a little bit but you know what it was a great experience brought the team together in a lot of ways got us going got our first initial customers and more when we went then to go and Pitch VCS I was being incubated or the company was being incubated at

00:27:50 the time was then called the Yale entrepreneurial Institute yeah so I was in grad school and between my first and second year and I applied to this thing which is now called the Yale size Center size city center for entrepreneurship and um it's a hugely competitive program I just was lucky that they let me in as sort of the representative of the company and the company and as an idea and while I was there it's actually when I decided to you know maybe step back from from grad school and then focus on

00:28:15 this whole time it's going to focus was everything yeah um and it was a just an incredible incredible experience well you're not a bit scared of the unknown just diving in what I will guarantee you right now yeah because the three of us walked into I don't know name a bank and just Chase JPMorgan whatever and just sat down and like talked to half their Investment Bank stuff they'd all say God I'd love to go start this company I've had this idea for 10 years but I'm just not willing to leave the six seven figure

00:28:43 job right now and the comfort of that if only I could and and you know because it'll take two years before that business really could be an idea there are so many people right now experiencing that both at the low end where they can't raise the money because of whatever circumstance and at the high end where they get too damn comfortable yeah so the answer to your question in the long way away is of course I had that fear right I had a little bit of backing where I didn't have to have as much fear as maybe other people but a

00:29:07 certain point this guy's like [ __ ] you just gotta do it yeah right you just gotta jump in and you have to be comfortable this is one of the most important things you have to be comfortable losing everything right and I will tell you as someone that's now a little bit on the other side of that mountain I've been down to my last five dollars my family said hey no more we're not supporting you anymore and I was on my own I've been down my last five dollars more than once it sucks it's really hard to be

00:29:32 like I literally don't know if I can afford my rent if I can afford dinner tonight I certainly can't you know take a girl out or whatever like yeah it's that's a tough reality um but it's a real one and if you're not ready to do that right and it's not by the way it's not just the businesses money right that gets down to those last five dollars right because worst thing that happens in a business goes out of businesses goes bankrupt and finance piece of paper right get some pissed off people might

00:29:58 face a lawsuit but whatever like that's you can come back from that when you're personally out of money right and that's one thing I look a lot with young entrepreneurs is like what is your personal Runway because if you're the CEO of this company that I'm investing in or partnering with and here you are down to your last five bucks yeah you're not going to be caring about what the business is doing you're caring about how to survive exactly right I want to pick a part to dive into the launch phase the Practical steps so

00:30:24 I had a business idea when I was at Uni for like a bill splitting app this is way before covert and um so I wasn't technical had no money and what I did is I pitched to all the restaurants in the area and they all said yeah we love the idea we'd love to get it going but for me finding an engineer with no money to build a product for you was nearly impossible and I couldn't get over that initial hurdle so what would you say I should have done in terms of I've got no money or limited funds and I haven't got

00:30:49 any technical expertise how do I get a product yeah it's a great question so a couple of answers to that when did you always try to find an accelerator or or some type of structured setup where they're like hey it's a great idea we don't really need to see the direction we believe in the idea we can provide you the infrastructure and universities will often have that a lot of big banks have that because a lot of Corporations what's called CVC corporate Venture Capital now are looking for young entrepreneurs and bringing in Innovation

00:31:13 it's cheap for them right really because they'll take a large stake in it it's a lot of venture Studios out there that's a nice way to do it because coding the technical side of a digital Tech startup has become much more commodified back in the day when I started this you know 10 15 years ago you had to have a technical co-founder right or you had a substantial amount of money to go out and have enough technical skill yourself to now talk to an external coding firm and I'll tell you it's one of the things

00:31:36 that I did is I sat with our original CTO my first business and I said I don't know anything about I don't even know what I'm asking you like I don't know how to ask if you don't even know what you don't know I was like I know what I want to know the outcome but like I don't know if that's realistic or the time frame that you're quoting me is realistic right so I said I'm going to sit with you for the next one or the cost right I want to sit with you next six months and I want to understand now

00:31:56 I'm not a coder it's not how my mind works I've taken many false steps towards that because I thought oh well what if I could be a coder and I could just like pop out a startup like every week but it's just not how my that's just not how I am and the reality is that coders and business side people we need each other right there's there's a reason why those are just two different kind of minds and they need to come together right it is much easier if you have a technical skill set and a little bit of a business mind to just go out

00:32:21 and code something out over the weekend and pop it up and oftentimes these billionaires you see at Google or Facebook or whatever they had that initial skill set to just pop out an MVP right a minimally viable product that is an upside that is a benefit but if you're not that person if you don't have that technical skill if you're just the Hustler in the business person do you look for that corporate venture capital and those accelerator programs that can be very helpful your Universe you can do that oftentimes your local

00:32:44 sort of council may have a program as well often in America we see that there's a program within your state or city that'll support that not a lot of money but it's enough to maybe get started you can of course try to find a technical co-founder right or somebody that's willing to come on for Sweat Equity there are people out there like that but but I will tell you they know their value a lot more so now right than even 10 15 years ago they know that and they have their opportunity cost so working with you for maybe 10 equity in

00:33:10 your company on a sweat basis or I can go do this other job for fifty thousand dollars today right they're running those same calculations they're going to really believe in you but the other point is if you go get a little initial traction sometimes you can go back to your own customers and say Hey you like this idea you clearly see the benefit of it why don't you invest even just a couple thousand dollars or something right I'll give you interpret activity free usage of the product should it get

00:33:35 off the ground but why don't you take a little bit of a stake in this um so you know assuming you don't have access to early capital or friends and family and they're by the way there are some free seed funds that are like they call themselves first idea funds yeah you come in with an idea on the back of a napkin they're like I just like that idea I want to get in super early how they extract their pound of Flesh don't get me wrong right they might write you a check for fifty thousand you know pounds it doesn't sound like a lot but

00:33:58 some of it'll sound like about the reality is that goes super fast right you can't even code anything off of 50 Grand but don't write that check but they're you know they're going to take a big chunk of your company for taking that super early stage risk so there's always trade-offs when you're doing sort of risk pricing like this so the simple answer is those are some Pathways but there is no absolute yeah answer at the end of the day now with AI and some of the things that are coming out there are

00:34:22 a lot of no code platforms now where you can go out and find a pre-packaged basis for what you want to build and you can build on top of that infrastructure you are going to have to have some minor technical skills in order to do that and you can teach yourself that as tutorials out there and find forums you can do a lot more yourself it's not building things from scratch anymore where you have to just go in and create sort of a full code base and repository yeah it's a little easier and it will get in you

00:34:50 know exponentially easier over the next decade to the point where digital coding skill sets are going to be highly I think commodified in two of the sort of idea of AI don't be wrong you're still going to need somebody that knows how to work that and is going to know how to do some manual fixes on that so we'll get easier but for now those are those are the best Pathways yeah yeah yeah so in terms of the steps then you kind of solidify your idea you pitch it to as many people as possible and ask them

00:35:18 for the help that you need basically yeah absolutely and sometimes you'll find an unexpected Champion you know the guy that owns your local pizza parlor you know he might have just lived a really Frugal life he might be sitting on a lot more cash than you realize and I've had investors that you like you would think you just why am I taking this mean is you know guy or gal showing up they look a little sloppy or whatever like what's going on you'd be surprised you have some money out there right whether it's through

00:35:41 their own savings they've just lived a Frugal life and I want to invest or they've got some family money or a business that you didn't even realize and I've walked out of meetings with half a million dollar checks from people I was like it's not going to clear I don't know I'm like yeah like you know there's some very interesting take every meeting you can yeah I guess at the end of the day worst case is if it's not them they're gonna know the person then maybe to introduce you to to set you on that path

00:36:04 so say you haven't got any family members that have any wealth um how would you go about networking from scratch then if you have no contacts how would you start to network to speak to people I mean you have to be bold right if you're going to be an entrepreneur like it's just you know I mean you guys just plucked me off the street right like you know and here we are having a chat so it's emailing it's messaging it's you know social media dming whoever you can I mean you know my cousin Mark Cuban is

00:36:29 very well known like if you like send him a DM he will get back to you like more often than not and if it's a good idea he may say hey I'll do it later on today everyone's going to start spamming check it out he's very open about it I think he used to be responding to all of them I think now he's a little more now he's doing more uh but the simple reality is you just you get for me let's see let me run the quick ratio I think my co-founder and I probably took 500 conversations to get you know the to get

00:36:59 our initial investment and we certainly don't have 500 investors right and we're two relatively successful guys um with track record right and your hit rate is going to be you know five ten percent success yeah right simple reality so and when you're young entrepreneur just starting out the other reality is your success rate is going to be one to five percent right so you might have to take a thousand conversations now go out talk to people pick the people that you think have an expertise an interest don't waste their

00:37:27 time Visa sing to be brief get in front of them take those risks you know you know tap your business plan into the bottom of a pizza box and send you a free pizza like to get creative right yeah yeah um you know and also of course go out go to networking events though yeah so like here in the UK there's something called like the fintech circle there's it's UK fintech week actually right now like go to these events they're often free sometimes there's a costume but go out and meet these folks and you'll meet

00:37:50 that expert and then like I said even if it's not the person it's exactly what you need maybe they're they know the person that is oh yeah because they've been doing it for 20 years right so if you meet me and I'm like hey I don't really know about this part of fintech I probably know the guy Argyle that does that right I can point you in the right direction it's always trade groups for this and of course chat rooms and other things like that um but I would say overall at a certain point it's also about taking your

00:38:13 destiny into your own hands yeah create an event yourself right it's not about being passive and going to somebody else's event like be proactive be proactive say like hey I'm gonna I'm gonna throw a little cocktail party and invite the people that I want to this I'm gonna go set up a little thing on the street and just pull you know pull some random people and like you never know like if you're waiting for things to happen yeah you're waiting a long wait yes right so as much productivity as you can um as much networking as you

00:38:42 can I I my little private memberships aside and have been doing it now for a decade well before I could properly afford it where I just invite interesting people doing interesting things yeah to come have dinner with me um and I have have had dinner with people who have no business being around right who are like Nobel Prize winners Academy award-winning actors like it's it's insane um and it was all about now I have probably 3 000 people in my network from whom I've collected a lifetime of favors

00:39:07 that I've ever called them but if I needed to right everything from getting you know extracted out of a war zone to raising a million dollars in investment Capital you know I've got that I've got that knock on the door and so and start early yeah and not don't always just look at the person that has 20 years experience look at your peer group right there are people within your peer group that you know maybe do have that family money that are looking to invest or maybe just know a guy or gal or maybe it

00:39:32 could be your co-founder right like talk to your peer group as well they're they're maybe competitors but they're they are also your peers and they can be really really helpful so I saw you a video about um Intrigue marketing uh sure yeah just come and I thought it was amazing actually really good um so in terms of like finding clients you're talking about humanizing that initial connection so you were saying the death of outbound basically so yeah to connect on someone on a human level before you sell them

00:39:57 so talk to us a bit about the marketing strategy and how you can use that as like as new founder starting a business yeah so you know it doesn't apply to all businesses because that Intrigue marketing is much better for B2B businesses where you do need to go out and establish relationship or where you're selling to a consumer that acts like a business where does that happen mostly when you're trying to sell to say like high net worth individuals yeah right um and going out and building a relationship first I would say Intrigue

00:40:21 marketing is actually much more appropriate as I've sort of matured on the idea around the idea of networking right there are a lot of extractive people in this world and the reality is like if you approach me and you're not either providing value to me from something interesting that you're doing or you're just trying to take I'm not interested anymore right so rather than hit me and be like hey like I got this great idea do you want to invest I'm like I don't know you like no right like I mean I'm happy to take a

00:40:50 look it's like hey um I happen to be hosting this little event this goes back to this idea this little private member Society everyone my first Outreach was always hey I don't know you're you're a billionaire but I want nothing from you I'm gonna ask you to pay I'm picking up the bill you know ask no intention just come hang out with me and a couple of other people that I think you'll find as peers that's all I'm going to tell you I'm not gonna tell you who's on the guest list not gonna even tell you where

00:41:12 it's held until the day before just show up and let's see if you find Value in that and if you don't you can leave it anytime yeah and while you're there now that I provided you that value you and I can not start to establish a personal relationship and maybe I start to understand like these are the books you like to read these are the struggles that you're facing and maybe I have a solution and at some point now after that personal relationship is established I can flip that switch and come to you and say hey you know I have

00:41:36 this idea is this something we could talk about right I've now it's a slightly longer cycle right but it has exponentially increased my personal fundraising success and partnership success by building those relationships sometimes years in advance of needing them you might not even knowing if I would ever need them yeah but now being able as we did to say this last fundraising around with my current company to be able to call upon some of these people that I invited to a dinner three or four years ago that remember me

00:42:02 and the small value that I provided and say Hey Joe so so great to get to know you um you know we talked about this a long time I remember you had a real interest in fintech you know how's the kids how's everything yeah what if I can get half an hour to just chat with you about this and not even ask about money yeah just to be like hey do you have 30 minutes just I'm just a little confused on this idea I'd love your advice everybody wants to give advice yeah right you know and then you know what's

00:42:25 funny is and this this is as true as when I was told that 15 years ago is this day ask for advice and get an investment ask for an investment you'll get advice all right when you come at somebody hard and you're asking for money there's just certain cognitive processes that shut down and you go into defense mode but if somebody comes to you and just says hey can I say I don't know what I don't know here you're a real expert on this can I just like lean on your knowledge for 30 minutes and as you're talking to the idea and the

00:42:50 person like you know those kids really got something yeah yeah because the number of conversations I've had like that where somebody that all of a sudden says you guys guys take on investors yeah like yeah we are yeah you know and even if you're coming in with that intention right like it's fine like there's a little bit of a sort of a dance like these are emotional relationships yeah building with your investors some are very practical they're cut and dried and some just want to cut to the chase of course right it

00:43:14 was a little different I don't mean to say this is everybody but half the time like you know you get to know somebody first and as a human being they'll appreciate it I can say that now as a Founder as an investor like yeah yeah like the number of emails and Linkedin messages that I get hey I I thanks for connecting uh you want to invest 50 Grand of this crazy idea sure man the number of times that I've taken that seriously that I've actually been like yeah it's like really good ideas like one out of like probably

00:43:44 in the tens of thousands or like I actually looked at and I said like that's actually a really smart idea um and yeah I didn't end up investing because it just there wasn't the right operational team in there but it's like one out of ten thousand I even responded to right I mean all this stuff is Spam these days so yeah moving on now I wanted to ask you what light opportunities do you see or like business opportunities do you see like in the near future in your space yeah so the answer is unfortunately aren't going

00:44:09 to be as perhaps uh as creative as in other spaces so so fintech right now it AI is going to be a massive disruption it's absolutely massive will it be massive in terms of creating new businesses can't say I think it's actually going to be more massive in terms of thinning out cost structure on the back end because now people that are performing manual processes like you know customer service or you know better underwriting algorithms if you're if you're issuing credit AI is going to be taking over a lot of those processes

00:44:35 um and that already has to an extent and so what that's going to lead to is less people being hired less cost structure and necessity on the back end fintechs are very expensive to get off the ground because they are in a regulated industry there are a lot of processes a lot of people that are required but with AI you won't be able to just go over the regulatory hurdles those will still remain but you'll be able to automate a lot of processes that'll lean out cost structure and that's cross-all fintech

00:44:58 um and lower sort of the cost itself right because with credit when you have to write off bad loans because your underwriting I'll go is off um you're gonna have a cost associated with that as well so I do see that I see a lot more with embedded Finance um so simple reality and again I come from a very American perspective obviously for the last 40 years inflation-adjusted real wages have gone up four percent so in in most developed economies that's sort of generally true and Consumer Price which is like things

00:45:28 like your cup of coffee your the books that you're reading your TV I've gone up 400 so you have a hundred X increase yeah on inflation-adjusted wage pricing all right that is absolutely mental insane right so the simple reality is most folks right now are exceedingly debt burdened and then in most developed economies and later on top of that now your student loan cost they're on top of that buying a car laying on top of that buying a house if you can even have savings to go and buy a house right

00:46:02 struggle is real really is right and the middle class barely even exists anymore right there's just this bifurcation either really poor you're really rich and set aside wealth gapping and things like that simple reality is more than ever in history if you're born into poverty you're more likely to die in poverty I wouldn't say ever in history say in more sort of recent history there used to be a lot more social mobility and while there certainly is still social Mobility built in it has also created some really

00:46:30 just some patterns that where you're born is where you're going to die yeah it's because of this massive wealth Gap right so we have to solve that it's a little bit of a philosophical side why do I bring that up one of the biggest opportunities right now because of this structural economic issue is going to be an embedded Finance because the reality is almost all of us are going to need to finance a large portion of Our Lives going forward so you know I live in sort of the buy now pay later World broadly that idea is I

00:46:55 think going to take a very strong foothold continuing so I want to go buy something that maybe costs a few hundred pounds but I'm going to finance it maybe not even on an interest rate basis or a minimal interest rate basis or a business is going to say I'm willing to pay a lending third party what's called a merchant discount rate and maybe take a 10 haircut to allow you to now buy the TV because 40 years ago I've just paid cash for it right you should have bought it right maybe put it on a credit card

00:47:22 if you needed to but the reality is now you can't just pay cash words you don't have it right and we're seeing this play out not only in developed economies but also in developing economies as well life is going to be heavily heavily financed and so this idea of embedded Finance in almost everywhere you go you're gonna have this idea of you know something something pay later yeah right yeah just in order to facilitate the transaction yeah because the idea of plopping down a thousand dollars to go and buy something

00:47:48 today is just not going to be practical anymore I think that's being exacerbated with this wealth Gap so that's one thing I'm actually speaking at a conference in a few weeks uh on this very topic um I see that becoming more and more prominent um that's my area of fintech that's kind of where I see it um so I really like myself be generous that your current company yeah I really like the concept so it's a social impact company right and from what I understood is basically you help donors buy non-pay

00:48:14 latest in terms of donations that's exactly right so it allows charts organizations to get financed a lot easier and also people don't have to pay up front absolutely yeah we're gonna try to I'll Supply that idea here in the UK and the European Union as well right now it's just in the U.S that's the Company's base just to kind of get started um but yeah it's it's buy now pay later for for philanthropic and charitable giving what we call donate now pay later yeah um and our ability to go out there

00:48:38 and um facilitate a charitable transaction that either wouldn't have happened at all or might have happened but at a smaller amount right because I can give a hundred dollars a day but now if I can pay it off over nine months I might give 500 charity gets all the money up front right that's a small fee that we charge our Merchant discount rate and the donor still maintains the convenience of paying over time and just to give you sort of the the real world uh outcome of this the average online donation which

00:49:05 is the space that we play in is around 125 in the US which donates around 500 billion dollars a year almost 200 million people uh give a donation in the US every year it's a little different in the UK because in the US there's very heavy tax benefits and tax incentives baked into charitable uh charitable giving yeah so the average online donation is 125 bucks our average donation which is also an online donation is around 500 wow four and a half times larger is it interest-free as well right it's interesting and be free

00:49:32 to the donor small Merchant discount rate charge to the nonprofit now the donor has an option to cover the fee about 80 of them do so the nonprofit actually pays a very de minimis charge to get a four and a half times Delta on a typical charitable transaction um so we have some amazing clients Peta heifer International some you know really big organizations that have signed on that you know now at the end of the day they do the hard work we don't do it but there's some real upside because you know how many cats and dogs

00:49:59 are being saved now by the fact that there's a four and a half increase in donations to that organization how many more kids are getting an education how many you know fewer veterans are homeless and hungry tonight like there's some real knock on implications um you know allows me to put my head on the pillow at night and a little easier in terms of like where you're at at the moment how much have you made kind of so far from the businesses or can you give like a ballpark figure yeah I think the

00:50:21 numbers are more comfortable talking about or more so the numbers we've raised historically yeah so I've raised a little more than I think probably 50 million dollars across different businesses um So currently with be generous we've raised uh just about 11 million dollars right now uh most of that on Equity uh you know a little bit of a working capital line of credit which we've not drawn against um it's the most that I've Ever Raised for a single business so you've been on both sides haven't you so is there any

00:50:45 like investment opportunities that you might have missed that you'd regret now I'll tell two quick stories um first one is I missed an opportunity to invest in Uber uh and it's it's like sort of C I guess a seed or series a stage so um my wife and I at the time were going out and pitching uh my first company uh buy that they're on sandhole road which is sort of the famous Silicon Valley Road yeah where a lot of VCS are I mean we're meeting I think he was with Bill Gurley I think um who's one of the lead principals at

00:51:15 Benchmark Capital kind of a famous investor and we're out there and and pitching the idea to him and his team and he just wasn't feeling it wasn't wasn't a good fit for their portfolio gave me a lot of really good advice they said hey like I understand you you do a little bit of investing we have this open round right now and I want to show you a company that we've invested and maybe give you some ideas if you wanted to bring an idea back to us what we look for and also if you'd be interested on getting

00:51:35 involved we have a little bit of syndication I was like all right let me see and so he and he brings this idea for this this company that was doing at the time uh just I believe was in the San Francisco Wharf area uh black Cars on Demand right so like Town Cars you know to go to the airport or out to dinner or whatever yeah yeah and I was like okay like interesting ideas like I'm I was a New Yorker at the time and I was like I was like I can go on hail a cab yeah it seems cheaper it seems easier if I want a black car for the

00:52:02 night I can you know call it was a service called Carmel back then everybody call and take me to the airport when I was like all right interesting idea and they were just opening in New York um at that point um I think they have just raised their series a and so I'm walking out and I kind of looked at my wife and I was like oh the dumbest idea ever right I was like just like gut reaction and you know ended up the company ended up being Uber obviously and you know I was thinking sort of very practically I

00:52:27 was like oh well the regulatory issues like in New York you have to have like a taxi Medallion and like specific uh tlnc licenses I was like I was like they're never gonna how are they gonna do that like it's like they're not gonna be able to expand and you know what did I know so it leads me to a story from from Jamie dimon actually as fortunate enough as I mentioned to go uh to Yale from my graduate school and my degree was in global Affairs but I was sitting there um taking a class in the School of

00:52:54 Management and the class was taught by two really interesting guys one's named Stephen roach he's the former Chief Economist for Morgan Stanley the other guy is Jeffrey Garden um it was the dean of the school and I think he was either like early at Black Rock or Blackstone his wife was Ina Garden the Barefoot Contessa was a very famous TV personality great guys and they're teaching this class called Wall Street in Washington it's a very small class maybe 20 of us and the entire class you had to apply to

00:53:16 get into it is going to New York and to Washington DC and meeting with their friends these are two relatively well-known guys their friends are chairman of the Federal Reserve the CEO of this Fortune 500 company I mean like pretty Heavy Hitters that you know I had no business being around one of their friends was Jamie Diamond and this is 2010 I think so two years after the financial crisis and JP Morgan had actually gone off relatively unscathed and a little bit of burn but not much and it actually acquired a few

00:53:44 companies out of that I always read it was Lehman or bear that they they acquired out of the bankruptcy and so I'm in Jamie Diamond's you know office uh at JPMorgan it's me and like 15 people let's CEO of this company largest bank in the world and he at that time had just become a billionaire CEO of JP Morgan yeah wow so this is Jamie time right all right yeah so he had just become a billionaire yeah um largest bank in the world a couple trillion in assets something along those lines and here we are we got two hours with him

00:54:13 seven launch and he's a fascinating guy curse is like a sailor right this guy like all the right boarding schools and everything like you think he's like a refined gentleman every other word I was after stuff yeah I loved him he's like just let his hair down with us a little bit and he's sitting there and I and he's like any questions I raise my hand so I'm really you know fascinated by your life work and so I just I want to understand like how did you avoid uh the issues uh that so many other Banks fell

00:54:36 into and I'd also recently just met with dick fold who's the CEO of Lehman um who is you know just the store as The Story Goes and was just so arrogant like just like took a private car in took his own separate elevator never talked to his employees we all know what happened yeah yeah so how did you avoid that and he looked at me and he says I'll never forget he said I was smart enough to know when I was stupid so what do you mean by that he said I'm a very well educated guy I think Harvard MBA you know all the right

00:55:03 pedigree uh you know billionaire like he's like what would I do every day call in all my division heads like what are you working on today tell me about it and you'd walk the floor and he'd talk to the employees and he would just take the temperature and he just knew what was going on and so one day he calls up the head of his complex derivatives organization he's like so what are you working on guys telling all about you know these asset-backed Securities and things like that it just really complex derivative

00:55:30 you know exotic stuff right all the stuff that caused the financial crisis and he's like pretty smart guy I don't really understand this he's like come up to my office in an hour I want to sit down and like he said explain it to me like I'm 12. so the guy attempted to do that but I don't think you can explain these complex derivatives to like someone like that and James was like I don't get it he said I want you to start unwinding our positions and this is like months before the financial crisis yeah and so

00:55:57 as the famous Story Goes they start basically calling Deutsche Bank and like start dumping their crap on them and elsewhere and mostly got out of the business and everyone thought these guys are stupid yeah yeah these are high yielding assets no one knows what's going on yeah we'll buy all your stuff and then base one to zero right and again this is a guy well-educated billionaire who stepped outside of the sort of normal ego and arrogance that might come with that position in life all the experience that

00:56:26 he had and said I don't understand I don't know explain it to me and when he didn't understand it he moved away from it yeah right yeah and that to me is the Hallmark of an amazing leader an amazing CEO to be like yes I am the leader and I should have maybe a little more intelligence inside or whatever yeah that's why I'm here yeah but if I don't understand something I'm not going to be like maybe like a dick fold he's like I don't care he's making money right I'm not gonna unpack I'm not going to look a

00:56:56 little bit deeper yeah and here is a Jamie Diamond that was doing exactly that wow um I just I admired the hell of putting that forward you know it's an impressive thing and so for your audience yeah always ask what's going on and constantly be learning and don't have that mantle of arrogance on you take that moment and and you're no better than Jamie Diamond I'm sure yeah it is only a few guys like that in the world to be able to really try to understand your business and the things that are going on because if you don't

00:57:23 do that you're gonna end up on the other side which is going to be a pretty negative outcome wow we don't know something just ask don't be afraid to kind of look stupid don't be afraid to ask yeah don't I think that's it right don't be afraid to look a little stupid a little silly because take the small maybe reputational hit with that head of this division he's like how does this guy not know what's going on to now unpack and resolve a really big problem yeah wow crazy um so just to wrap it up where if

00:57:50 someone wants any tips for advice where can they reach you to on like email or yeah best place to reach me is is probably gonna be via email um you know we'll put it in the link below yeah I have an Instagram but I don't really check it out I'm not on Tech talk I think my daughter created an account for me but I do not we're going to get you on ticket yeah yeah um so best place to get me right now is is my first name Neil and e-i-l at beginnerous.com that's the letter B generous.com yeah um feel free to hit me

00:58:16 up I I love mentoring um I love you know providing advice uh to early stage entrepreneurs and businesses so I'll try to be as responsive as I can I said take my advice don't ask me to invest if you haven't met me yet right like take a minute provide you know some value tell me a funny story do something that's taking a date first hey whatever right let's dance before we date right yeah before we marry right so let's let's you know do that in Normal progress of human relationship and show that you paid attention right to the

00:58:44 things that we've talked about here um but I'm very happy to you know be as generous with my time as I can and um you know be helpful to your audience and wherever they'd see fit perfect it's amazing appreciate you coming on the podcast and my pleasure it's good um thanks for watching guys um really great episode I think um you know insights are really high level entrepreneurs actually doing it um yeah so if you want any tips or advice make sure you reach out to nil also follow us on the Venture room on

00:59:10 Tick Tock The Venture room on YouTube and Venture underscore room on Instagram and we'll see you in the next one peace [Music]