Business Innovators Radio - Partha Unnava – Forbes 30 Under 30, Owner of 38 Patents, Entrepreneur, Founder & Visionary

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Partha Unnava dropped out of Georgia Tech as a biomedical engineer to create a crutch that was more comfortable for the user. He was subsequently invited to the White House to present his invention to President Obama and went on to found Lasso – an apparel brand specializing in an ankle-supporting sock. Featured as the Men’s Health #1 sock, Lasso’s medical-grade sock mimics ankle taping and is worn by super athletes, Von Miller and Luke Modric, as well as other NFL and NBA stars. Now, Partha is using his experience to impact the next generation of entrepreneurs.Buy Lasso Socks: https://www.lassogear.com/Learn More: https://spventures.io/There’s an old adage that says you should pay your fair share of taxes but not a penny more. We believe that to be true.We help business owners and high-income earners realize their savings by deploying time-tested tax strategies with decades of case law to back it up.Each strategy must pass through our sift of being legal, moral, and ethical.Get your complementary analysis to see how much you overpay on an annual basis. Click the link below to schedule your complimentary analysis.Learn More: https://www.stratnavinc.com/Schedule Call: https://www.navigatesni.com/NAVIGATEhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/navigateSource: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/partha-unnava-forbes-30-under-30-owner-of-38-patents-entrepreneur-founder-visionary

Okay, if I were you and Von Miller and Luca Madricks wore my socks and there was a picture of that, it'd be hard to not ride that and just keep advertising myself as a guy who lead athletes to wear my stuff. It's super cool. You're not hanging on to that. So what's the purpose behind everything that you do and what you want to accomplish going forward now beyond Lassau? Yeah, I just think that part's corny. like it's kind of corny to be like, oh, I'm cool because somebody else used my thing. Like, it's just another person.

You know what I'm saying? Like, am I going to brag because my grandmother used it? You know, like, I don't care. It's people can make their own decisions. But my only role in this world is just to make things that help people and benefit them. Welcome to the Navigate podcast. Brought to you by strategic navigators where we save entrepreneurs 40 to 60% on their income taxes. We're your host, Adam Dirkson.

Now, Mitch Salanti. And normally I don't like reading off a script, but we've got a guy who has a lot of rewards and honors to his name. So, you know, today we have a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, an owner of 38 patents, founder of Better Walk Crutches and Lassow, an apparel brand with socks being worn by NFL and NBA stars, a Columbus native, and just a nice guy who, you know, maybe if you DM him on LinkedIn, he'll buy your lunch. So Partha Nova, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me, bitch. That's nice. Well, I appreciate it, man. Thanks for being on. And why don't you start us off by just telling us a little bit about your backgrounds. You grew up in Columbus. Tell us about how you grew up. Yeah, I grew up in Columbus as a major Ohio State fan. I know there's some friction already with your team on that. It's no, you know, the Midwest is just like an amazing place. I loved how grounded the upbringing was. I love the kind of people I got to spend time around and, I think the blessing of being from the Midwest is like, you know what happiness is. You know what it looks like. It's not material to you because like it's just really not like that out there. So, you know, had that upbringing. I went to college in Atlanta and ended up starting entrepreneurship there about three years into college. I had had this experience where I broke

my ankle playing basketball and I was using crutches and I hated it. I hated how much they were hurting my underarms. And I did some research into it because I was studying biomedical engineering at the time. So medical device design was like part of that. and I saw that a lot of people actually had issues with the pain in the underarms and it caused them to not use their crutch and sometimes put weight on, you know, an injured body part. I was like, obviously this product doesn't work as intended. It's just not really designed that well. So I designed a new version of a crutch that utilized the side of your body and basically just use some physics to displace weight differently. It took weight entirely out of your underarm and made a much better experience for folks. that product gained like a decent following and it also got me like a lot of prestige because at that age

I had raised venture when I was I was 20 when I started and these VCs came in and basically were like, hey, we'll capitalize you initially got going, raise some more money. But really things went crazy about a year in. I was at a point. It's so funny how life works. I was at a point where I was completely out of money. I was just like, okay, I have no idea what I'm going to do. My two co-founders were like, all right, well, you know, I know we said we were dropping out, but we didn't drop out. We got our degrees. Sorry, we're leaving you alone on this one. I was like, great. I'm here and I have you dropped out and they and they stayed in school. 100%. I thought they were dropping out too. And that wasn't, that wasn't the understanding they had it turned out. So, you know, I was just like,

well, well, dang, like I made the biggest sacrifice here like what's going to happen. And kind of like, very fortuitously, I got randomly just invited to, go to the White House. And I got to present my crutch to President Obama. And then, like, for whatever reason, I think because I made a good PR story, they had me, like, present him with, like, these plaques that were on behalf of, like, all the universities in the U.S., basically, all the presidents had signed off. And I was like, I don't know why, like, I'm the guy who's presenting this, but this is a great situation to end up in. Let's see what happens. And so, like, I got to meet him. He was super cool. I got to hang out with him for a little bit. And I got to go into the

White House and being all these like private places and like it was nuts bro like it was like the sickest thing like amazing experience for me and then after that this photo went so viral it got me all this media all this news and that made it like really easy to be able to raise money to be able to pursue entrepreneurship ultimately a few years into that business um I saw that this entire space and healthcare was moving consumer so as a reaction to that I launched lasso and the purpose with Lasso was, can I create a brand that is more consumer that improves this same space, which is like injury recovery, but also like I have a passion for prevention. I think a lot of our healthcare system is Band-Aids, and it's because of the way we train engineers. We train

engineers to be very iterative. We don't really allow for dynamic or innovative thinking, and we don't teach people how to bring innovative thinking into a machine. So everybody within these medical device companies is just conditioned to think a sort of. certain way. And there's a big disconnect between them and the actual people who use the devices, as well as the people who, you know, are impacted by these things. So a lot of, a lot of gaps in that space. And I thought, well, okay, if we're going consumer, we can bridge that and basically give the patient the best outcome. Because the thing that was happening is that the, you know, hierarchy of the hospitals, the purchasing organizations, those variables affected innovation so much

because of the bureaucracy and the healthcare space. And that's what I experienced originally. So made the shift to consumption. So made the shift to consumers. consumer and just fortuitously, Champ Bailey tried the socks within like the first month of me launching this product and then was like, yo, I'm into this and invested and backed me. And the ride just started there and so many other NFL NBA players came on board. And within a few years, men's health name does the number one sock. And the reason is that the technology we made actually mimics what ankle taping does. So this is the first sock that you can literally put it on.

It feels like a regular sock. but even in elite athletes, your balance is improved by 25% just by wearing our socks. The ankle tape, like it's been a while since I had to put any of that on. But I mean, like you said, mobility is just, to me, it just felt like it was down the drain. I was a sprinter and basketball and football. I mean, you couldn't cut or jab or anything with a ring like that. Not at all. Where was this 15 years ago, man?

I'm of the same opinion. And you know what's so crazy? I always tell people, I'm like, the reason I had to start a company is because Nike is stupid, because I went to Nike as an intern and I pitched them at 19. I pitched them a business model. I played Ultimate Frisbee. That was my sport in college. Ultimate has grown into a massive sport now, has a league, a pro league, all that.

And I basically went to them. I said, look, everyone in Ultimate wears your cleats or the Adidas cleats. But the preference is Nike cleats. However, all Nike cleats like the wide receiver cleats. cleats have a toe spike. That's why it's preferable. But a lot of people wear the soccer cleats because of like the profile, the weight, the size of the shoe. So I gave them basically a design. I was like, look, I would love to come on board and spend the summer building you like a perfect cleat that's engineered for the dynamics of ultimate frisbee and the cutting and the

direction changing there. No one's touched this market. You'll own it completely. And their response was, no, we don't let interns decide what they work on. And I was just like, come on, man. So, I mean, the thing is, like, a lot of people think Nike, Adidas, they care about performance, but they're not performance brands anymore. They're lifestyle brands. And that was something I didn't know at the time. I thought their number one goal was to make the best performance product possible. But the reality is that's not the case. They're just trying to make things that athletes want to wear. So it's really more of a style company. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, like I think of the cleats that a lot of NFL guys wear now and they're like the Air Force

one cleats and I look at those and they're so bulky I'm like there's no like they look cool but there's no way that's like the best performing cleat there's just no chance yeah and at that at that you know level where one percent makes the difference you would think that folks would make that decision like you remember Nick young wearing the yeasies on the court and it's like those were the shoes with like no structural support the one that looked like cloth wrapped around us fee. I remember watching that and just thinking like, is this real? Like, is sports really this right now? Like, nobody cares about performance to that degree. But, you know, that's, that's what happens in that ecosystem when it becomes very, very style-oriented. It's like the performance choices just

aren't like designed and engineered in a way that they are sexy. They all look, you know, more or less like pretty ugly. And that's where we were fortunate with the socks is that it looks and feels like a regular sock. And that's why we got the buy-in. But, But if we weren't able to design like that, you know, it'd be tough. It'd be really tough. Yeah, definitely. Partha, I want to take you back to, you know, when you were starting your entrepreneurial journey, you said at one point you ran out of money. And when was the point that really clicked for you that was like, okay, I can make it? And were you questioning yourself at all? Oh, throughout. I mean, I've constantly been like, oh, did I screw this up? Like, should I

have just gotten a job or should I done this or should I done that. I'll tell you, if I were, if I were advising myself at 20 right now, I would have done it differently. Instead of raising for my own venture, I would have found somebody like in a position like where I'm at right now. And I did have a mentor in that position who maybe wasn't in my interest area, but like fit the profile of the kind of person I should have been looking for who was in their early 30s who had gotten there, you know, stuff moving was in a good position. And like what I watched, that person do is make the journey from being worth, say, 10 million to being worth a billion over the last 10 years in his life. And what I would have done in hindsight is just worked

underneath that person and learned what that journey takes and then applied it myself at the age that I'm at. That's probably, I think, the lowest friction path. I took the highest friction path because my goal wasn't like, it wasn't the financial outcome. I think maybe it could have been more. But my goal was like the personal improvement. I was like put me into the fire. I want to learn. I want to grow and I want to make mistakes and I want to have the freedom to like not have a ceiling above like what I can be. Yeah. I mean, you had that ceiling obviously when you're interning at Nike and they said stay in your lane. I didn't even intern there. That was my interview as I brought. Oh, yeah. There you go. What was the moment then that clicked for you that was like, okay, I can make it.

You know, because you're you're battling, you know, you got to overcome all. You got to overcome. all of these hills and all these massive mountains as you're starting your journey and you're still in school at the time, what was the moment that you're like, okay, I'm going to make it. I don't think I ever thought I couldn't do it because it's like, we're all alive, right? It's life. Like, why couldn't you do something? What, like, what is there for anyone that's saying you can't be something, right? Like, there's so many improbable stories we see every day.

Like, I know I come from like, you know, pretty advantage kind of like skill set, background and value set, like, that gives me a huge leg up already. There's no reason I couldn't do something other than myself, you know, I never really felt like outside factors had any influence on whether I could be successful. But the bigger thing was like, for me, the bigger roadblock is my nature is like I would, I would like blame myself when stuff didn't work out. So like, when I learned how to stop doing that and just like take the punches and understand that like life's a journey, it got way, way easier. And it's, it's just like a mental switch up. But I don't think like you can look at anything, you know, that's happened in our world. Like, is it probable

Jake Paul is a highly respected boxer four years ago? No. You know what I mean? Like when he started the influencer boxing, everybody was making fun of him. But he demonstrated with his actions. He put the work in. He stayed focused. He put his head down. And the person he carries himself as today is a significantly improved upon version. A lot of people respect. And that's why they respect his craft too, because he brought seriousness to it. And I think like, it's like that with everything. If you take it seriously, the people who are like really part of that community, like real, recognize real, you know? Yeah. So, I mean, everything you just said in that answer, I think represents a unique mindset that you carry, that you don't really question your, you don't

really operate based on, I mean, I shouldn't say you don't operate based on results, but you're not going to let that pigeon hold you in any way. And you mentioned in a podcast that you were on earlier that there was a book. I think it was like how rich people think something like that that really influenced, you know, kind of how you think. And so talk a little bit about that and how that's kind of shaped your mindset. Yeah. And I was, you know, we were talking about this over lunch, Adam, this book, How Rich People Think. But basically it's like this book where literally every page, the left side is this is how you're trained to think about this if you grew up like in the middle class. And on the right side is like, this is how a millionaire would answer the same

question. And like the fundamental premise is like, you know, trading time versus trading value. It like reinforces that notion pretty strongly. I read this at 20. And so it was like the first time I felt like I was being exposed to these kind of ideas. Because also like growing up in the Midwest, you're not around a lot of people who are like savvy about building wealth or making money. Like there's a couple, but no one really playing on the level that you'll find in New York or London or, you know, L.A. or S.F. or, you know, the major kind of ecosystems. And so there's like a certain type of thinking that it's almost like a deep down I knew existed. I just had been exposed to it yet. So reading that book was the first time I was just like,

oh, there's other people out here who are playing this game differently. And like, maybe the ideas didn't register. But at the very least, it allowed me to question what I knew. Gotcha. Okay. If I were you and VAL VERRU. And Don Miller and Luca Madricks wore my socks, and there was a picture of that. It'd be hard to not just ride that and just keep advertising myself as a guy who lead athletes to wear my stuff. It's super cool. But I don't want to say you don't care.

You definitely care because it's a cool thing. It's a cool accomplishment, but you're not hanging on to that. So what's the purpose behind everything that you do and what you want to accomplish going forward now beyond lasso. Yeah, I just think that part's corny. Like, it's kind of corny to be like, oh, I'm cool because somebody else used my thing. It's just another person. You know what I'm saying? Like, am I going to brag because my grandmother used it? You know, like, I don't care. People can make their own decisions. But my only role in this world is just to make things that help people and benefit them. So it's like, if I can, then I will. And I want to grow it at a

certain pace. And basically, like, I want to optimize to maximize my unique talent of being able to create things that affect people and solve problems and better ways than, you know, have, have been done to date. But me personally, I couldn't care less how they, how, like, how they're received or how much clout comes with it. I do understand the importance of it from like a strategic standpoint. And I've been very good at leveraging, like, the branding side of it with my personal reputation to be able to create like a sense of like aspiration. So people are able to look to me as an aspirational figure. But like I actually gave like a TEDx talk. It's off YouTube and I'm so frustrated as off YouTube because I don't have a copy of it. But I was fully blonde in it,

which is why I want a copy of it. I died my hair one time. But literally like in this talk, I talked about how you can measure your impact in two ways. The first way is the direct impact of the things that you've done. And you might have, you know, X. and impact value that you've created. But if you don't go through the extra step of sharing your story and the things you're struggling with to connect with the other people who would be on your same kind of like, who are aspiring to be you essentially and helping them get a leg up on where you were at that age, there's a whole other layer of impact that can be made through that communication.

So that's how I've always looked at everything. It's like, I'm here on earth for some finite amount of time. I don't know how long. I don't really care how long. But for every day that I am here, how much can I do to help move things forward, advance the agenda of like what it means to be a human or what it means to be alive?

And like with Lassau, like what I always told people is like, I've made this product. Now as a human being, your musculoskeletal health is different. From here on out forever, people don't have to have as many foot injuries. And that's a solved,

I've solved that in a meaningful way where in my belief, and we'll see how the numbers shake out, if everyone wore lasso socks, and the reason I feel this way is because you see the number of comments. It's like, I used to roll my ankle every time I played sports or my son did or my daughter did. Now they don't anymore and all they do is wear the socks. I couldn't walk up the stairs. Now I can.

I couldn't run because I had dropped foot. Now I just won a marathon. Like, we see the craziest stuff. And it's like world records have been set in it. Like a 65-year-old set the bench press world record because they were wearing lasso socks. help with their base and platform and all that. And he credits the socks for the record. And it's like, you hear this and you're like, okay, like I've made a meaningful dent on a huge problem, which is musculoskeletal health, which even according to Bezos is one of the biggest problems in society right now.

So to me, it was always like, it's not that sexy to solve musculoskeletal. So I'm not going to like be on a podium and get awarded for doing that. People want to give me awards for hanging out with athletes. That's fine. I'll do that too. But I, I know that when I do that, what I'm doing is I'm feeding this different thing that's like, I think of it like if I'm a soul born into a body tomorrow or today, can I give you an experience in earth that's better than I had? And how can I do that most meaningfully? I love that. I heard that in your heart when we first met. And we were texting yesterday. I wanted to make sure that we highlighted things on the podcast that were important to you.

and you're in this category of people were interviewing that we identify as thought leaders or industry leaders. And a big part of what we want to get into with people like you is the why behind what they do, which you've obviously dove right into. But very clear. We were texting yesterday. We were texting yesterday. I said, what do you really care about?

What do you want to talk about? And you responded, I care about two things. One, dissolve the idea of who I am. two shine bright as a beacon of light for others. So can you expand on those two? Yeah, for sure. I think the second one I already expanded on in terms of measuring impact. The first one is like really simple.

It's like if you have a sense of identity, you already have limits to the options of what you can do in a current situation because the identity enforces certain behaviors. So by leaving behind any sense of what is me, who is me, and not even having that question and just being the observer in every current moment, it gives you the freedom to be whoever you aren't needed to be in that circumstance. So I believe in life that we are all here to serve and we're all here to serve in each other's

journeys. All the instances that we have, even the negative instances, serve us through contrast because they show us what we're not and what we're striving not to be. And all the positive instances serve us through affirmation because they show us what we are and what we're trying to become. So I always look at life through that lens of like every situation that calls you to act a certain way. Maybe I might have a situation with somebody where it turns out antagonistic. That's unfortunate. Maybe I didn't do anything to cause it to get antagonistic. Maybe the turmoil in that person's heart caused them to lash out at me. I can't do anything about that other than try to be the best

version of myself in that circumstance and try to support them in whatever way I know how. Sometimes that's, you know, harsh truth and honesty when somebody's mistaken and you feel that they're mistaken. Sometimes it's support love and empathy when they just need to be heard, loved, and supported. And it's like, if I have a sense of identity, that comes with pride and that pride can keep you from extending the olive branch. And I think we're seeing that right now in Israel and Gaza right now, because we're seeing two groups who refuse to extend that olive branch. And if you really look at the situation, none of the civilians are fighting.

The only two people fighting are a terrorist group in the government. Everyone else is just affected by that. yeah no absolutely that's a very heavy heavy example but that's real life yeah and i mean i think at the end of the day like if we have these ideas i have to be this person who wins i have to be the victor i have to be the good guy i have to be this those ideals causes to become the bad guy yeah right well adam i've been taking up a lot of a lot of the questions here i want to let you you have a chance to ask as part of some of these things that you have a chance to ask as part of some of these things things that we talked about beforehand. Yeah, I wanted to, I was looking you up before just typical

Google search and LinkedIn and I wanted to learn a lot about you before we had you on the podcast, Partha. I want to learn more about S&P Ventures. And Mitch said that you had a partnership there and how you're transforming startups. Yeah. So one of the things that like stood out to me in like building lasso is that every problem that's in one business is in every business more or less. And like these are problems that are more like, how can you stay with the, times and certain like mechanisms all types of revenue growth like let's not talk about operations because aion makes operations easier every day that's that's like a part of your business that's infinitely going to get more more efficient and there's a lot of brilliant people working on making that happen

so for me it's like okay in a changing area changing content ecosystem and myself as somebody who's like really really passionate about creating content what works what makes people engage what makes people build trust and why and that was kind of the first question I asked because it was something that we ran to a lot with Lassau. We went through so many different marketing agencies that charged so much money, delivered such poor results. We're just like, what is going on? Like, how can nobody do this?

And my suspicion was that nobody was properly sitting down and putting the work in. And that was, you know, what I found out. At near the, you know, near the end of my journey at Lassau, basically I took over the ads myself. And I built the whole thing myself. I taught myself the skill, taught myself how to make the content. And when I did it, we went from underline, a 1x return to an 8x return. And I was like, oh, well, it wasn't that hard. What was hard about

it is that nobody took the time to sit down and do the critical thinking and really understand what was happening with the customer journey. So when I saw that and I saw the power of Facebook's AI, I realized it was only the storytelling narrative and like customer communication that is a variable that affects growth these days digitally. And seeing that, it also reinforced this thesis that the problem only needs to be solved once. It can be applied in every business if you build a framework for it. If you can say every piece of content needs to have this formula to it and we know it works and you can prove it works, then you can apply that formula in the brand language of any business and have success and they're not going to conflict with each other

because you're talking about all different niches, all different types of things, but also you're talking about good content. Good content is good content regardless of what other content is going on. So you're going to build your audience if it's targeted and if it speaks to that person, if it's good, right? Because we're never going to have a world with too much good content. We're going to have a world with a lot of bad content forever. So knowing that there's these kind of problems, like, that's one problem. But knowing that there's these types of problems in business that are more industry and like times based that are heavily, heavily tied to being able to grow a brand for free or for really, really cheap in a very explosive ways, I felt that it would be valuable to

package these things into offerings and build an ecosystem of brands with a fund that could run off of these growth levers where they might have their own independent operations and fulfillment, but you install this type of ad strategy, or you install commission only sales and cold callers, or you install, you know, different types of best practices and influence are best practice that's driven by VAs, that's really cost efficient that I've used in multiple businesses that we've scoped out and set up for other people to use. A lot of these things are just, like notes that we put together as a process. Some of these things, we actually put a team around and we have, we offer it as a service. The bigger vision was as a brand owner myself, when I was

building Lassow, if I had found folks like myself and Sam, my business partner on S&P now, I would have loved to be part of an ecosystem of people that are growing and building where those people were taking on the ownership for revenue growth. Like for us, what we're doing is we are saying, hey, we are going to be responsible for this. We're going to be a partner, your thought partner in building. In that sense, like, I just see such tremendous value in community in that journey because, number one, like a lot of digital algorithms are grown by people supporting each other.

So if you have a big group of people moving the same direction, you can go really far. And like that I've heard this phrase, like, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. It's like that's exactly kind of the thesis with this. It's like, I want to be in a position where I'm able to give every, ounce of knowledge, perspective, problem-solving ability that's unique to me that I have to as many people as possible. So having a structure like this allows me to maximize my impact because I'm able to help solve so many problems. And I know I have a unique talent to solve

problems other people can't solve. So that's why I put myself in a position like that. Sam has the same kind of skill set, but with sales. He's just incredible at making money. So knowing that the two of us have the skill sets we have, we just want to support people. We want to help people grow and we want to make it super cheap, super easy, super systemized and structured. And then basically alongside, we'll be buying, buying up some of those businesses, some minority stakes, some, you know, full ownership, and basically putting those cash flowing businesses into a portfolio and growing, you know, growing our wealth through that also. But the intention of this is quite purely to have a place where every current tactic is documented by experts who are currently executing that and demonstrating

results as opposed to someone who did something two years ago who's still selling that to you to get you to go to their agency. That's so cool, man. The more that you and I talked about that, the more excited I got with all the stories that you were sharing. So with that, give us an example of a client success story that you've had recently. You shared a couple with me off this interview, but let's hear of one or two. Yeah, I mean, the easiest thing is like we just launched paid ad creation in this content

model I was talking about. Every ad that we've done is more than double the quality of performance of the ads that were with these brands previously. Like Roaz just shot up on those things. We're getting like for one of the brands, it's like a $150 average purchase. And the purchases we're seeing on the ads are like between $5 and $10. Like really absurd kind of numbers. So seeing impact like that on the paid side, on the organic side, one of our, one of the folks on our team just grew an account over the last nine months from zero to $750K. with zero ad spend just with making content the right way. That's ridiculous.

Yeah. And just last night, Mitch, like, he literally just posted one post on TikTok and got 7,000 followers from it. And he's doing a breakdown right now and putting it in the slack that you're in to of, like, exactly how he did it, what he learned from it and like how you can apply it to your business. And so it's like, everyone figures out these hacks all the time. But the problem is, like, we figure it out once.

We figure out in a silo. How do you figure it out every single? day in every single aspect of your business. And you don't have to. You just have to be friends with the person who's clever in that lane. Exactly. And you're not just doing this with startups, too. You're doing, you talked about a huge client in Texas. Yeah, 100%. I mean, with us, like a lot of, a lot of what people are seeing. And like, this is a paradigm that I, you know, maybe some of the folks who are in your client base would, would appreciate is that when you're following, like, when you're offering like B to B oriented services or anything where is a super, super high

client value, even if it's direct to consumer, it can be really advantageous to grow that customer base with your personal brand. It's very cheap to grow digitally right now, especially because of the virality that comes from TikTok. And it's very like fair. If you make good content, your content just crushes regardless. So if you know how to make good content for the next 18 months, you can basically do whatever you want. And like, that's kind of how we're viewing it as like we're in that phase and we've had all these different eras. We have the cryptocurrency era. We had the consumer era.

We had SaaS era. This era we're stepping into is individuals building huge communities and monetizing them through service companies and basically like building portfolios around that. I heard you use the term thought partner. The first word that came to mind was mentor. So that's kind of what you're providing for S&P Ventures. right, being a thought partner, being a mentor there. Did you have that when you were going through your early stages?

Or is it something that you didn't have? And you're like, man, I can really help a lot of people. I want to provide this. I had it early, but what I didn't realize was that I needed that in a field more adjacent to me. So I had it like from a life standpoint. I had great mentors that taught me how to be a great person. but from a like specific tactical standpoint. I didn't have it and I didn't know how to look for it either.

I didn't even know I didn't have it. You know what I mean? It's like one of those things you don't know, you don't know. So now it's exactly what you said at. I'm like looking back, I'm like, man, I would have really like had a completely different kind of like revenue ramp and growth if I didn't have to make these mistakes along the way. If I had these tools documented, if I had somebody that was looking out for me, that was just

like, yo, do this, try this, do this, how's it going? And there are folks who, you know, really grow companies like that. But the biggest thing that I realized is that building great businesses has nothing to do with raising capital. And raising capital is typically something you don't need to do. It's better to find success and allow capital to chase you. And like, that only comes from knowing how to create organic growth. And it's like, if you observe, like think about Supreme. Like, Supreme. Like, Supreme attracted so much capital, but they didn't really need to use capital to do that. It wasn't a dollar-driven strategy. It was understanding clout and culture. And me living in LA, like the last

several years, like, I do a lot in the music industry. I've done merch. I've helped artists set up their merch companies. You know, I have good relationships with a lot of producers and artists in the space. And I'm always asking them, even the celebrities, the athletes, the actors, how, how, like, does this work? You know, what makes you famous? Why? What creates you? Why? What creates that pull with the audience. That's been the primary thought that I've had. And it's like, if you can cultivate that for a brand, which we were fortunately able to do with lasso to create a ton of word of mouth, then you have infinite leverage because it's growing itself. It doesn't take money. So now money chases you. And it's like, those are the situations that I'm really attracted to

is situations where you're able to like thread the needle in a certain type of way that's so clever that everybody's chasing you because they want to like be a part of that type of thinking. Organic growth. And you made it very clear that you're not after the money. The money's coming after you. And you're just here to make things better for people. 100%. I think you're a walking, talking, living example of that. That's awesome. This has been a nugget fest. You've dropped in golden nuggets. Every sentence on here. Yeah. Perfect. You're a wealth of wisdom well beyond your years, man. I love any chance I get to talk to you, even though we've just started. started talking in the last couple weeks, got lunch and talked on the phone. So thanks so much

for coming on this podcast. And if there's anything that you could give to wrap, wrap everything up, what would you say to listeners? I would say download the podcast by Spotify app and start your own podcast. Literally, you can record it on your phone while you're driving to and from work. Just literally hit the record button and then you'll have a podcast up. Talk about whatever you want. start building some content, start building a place for your thoughts, because I can guarantee you when you come around and finally decide to do it, it'll be too late. So start now, make it imperfect. But I believe everybody should have a place where they're documenting their thoughts and you really don't need to talk that long. It's off for five minutes, 10 minutes.

You can put down a lot of wisdom really quickly about whatever's on your mind that day, on your drive to work. And people will follow because they want that insight, especially if you're seen as successful in your field. that's well said thanks bartha thanks so much for coming on appreciate you guys thank you partner thanks for listening to navigate if you're interested in learning more about strategic navigators feel free to click on the link in the description