My First Million - #107 with Chris Bakke - This Serial Entrepreneur is an Idea Machine

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) hosts the pod today with guest Chris Bakke (@ChrisJBakke) an early employee at Bank Juice, which sold to Zillow. In today’s episode you’ll hear: Chris gives his background and how he ended up in the Bay Area (1:15), Shaan gives his philosophy on how to hire new people (9:35), Chris explains why he thinks raising capital is a good idea (14:15), Chris has an idea he calls "Shopify for SaaS products" (17:05), Chris and Shaan kick around how to get subject matter expertise out of gurus to build a service business (21:50), Chris has an idea for franchising a service like GeekSquad (27:05), Shaan tells a story of how his friend franchised a service model (31:30), Shaan and Chris explain how at-home camps/schools can generate a lot of money (40:05), Shaan gives a framework of how to give poor people something that rich people have and how that translates to give small businesses something they want that big businesses already have (39:45), Chris gives the elevator pitch for his new company that replaces big consultants with software (52:50). This episode is presented by Tempo! Check them out at tempo.fit and use code "TempoHustle" for $100 off. Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. Okay, well, I would typically introduce you, but I don't even know you. So I only know you from Twitter.

So I'll introduce what I know from Twitter. You're good on Twitter. You have hot takes. don't take yourself too seriously. Like it's like the perfect thing where it's like a nugget of wisdom wrapped in like kind of like a witty slash jab at something. Yeah, exactly. That's what we try to go for. I think you do a good job of it.

And so when Sam was out, I was like, okay, who should I have on? And I tweeted that out. And a couple people said your name. And I was like, oh, good. That's a guy I've been following. And I don't really know. Like I don't know your story. So give me like the two, give me the two minute version.

And then I'll kind of ask you about whatever's. juiciest in there for me. But give me the too many version. Who the heck are you? Your Chris Baki, you said, right? That's the way to say it? Yep. Chris Bokie. And what's your Twitter handle? It is at Chris J. Bakke. So it's at Chris J. B A K-K-E. That's right. Okay, cool. So what's your story, man? Who are you? All right. So I have been in the Bay Area for about 11 years now. So I moved from Los Angeles where I was in college up to the Bay Area to join a startup right out of college. And that startup was in the online real estate space. And so we were helping all of these brokers.

This is like 2009, 2010, 2011. As the market was rebounding in all of these hot cities, Miami, Chicago, New York, we were helping real estate agents basically manage all of their listings and all of the leasing that they were doing. And so joined early and kind of just did sales, partnerships, biz dev at this company called Rent Juice. And after a couple of years, we had raised a seed and Series A. And that business was acquired by Zillow. Did you say it's called Rent Juice? Rent Juice, a very terrible name to try to explain to customers. But yeah, the business was called Rent Juice, not the most fortunate name.

I like the use of juice. You know, we had Greg Eisenberg on and he was talking about naming your startup. and we there's he has all these like this random list of like name like kind of add-ons either at the you know at the beginning or the end of a name so it's like okay we're doing some of the bank space okay but you can be like bank juice or like bank buddy right or bank house or whatever right Greg is a fan of uh of Bueno I believe yeah that's right at the end bank yeah um yeah so it's it's it's a great it's a great catchy name especially for like the kind of stodgy you know stale real estate industry like something with juice at the

end like, all right, we're going to like choose up our listings or something. And so we sold in early 2012 to Zillow, who was just going public in 2012. And we were Zillow's second acquisition. And so I stayed at Zillow for about two years and ran business development at Zillow from 2012 to 2014. And so that was really helping them build out a bunch of new verticals up until 2012 Zillow was really known for this estimate. Like you could go on a map and you could figure out what your home is worth and you could contact the broker who would then list it on Zillow.

So it was a marketplace of homes. And so we were super interested in doing the same thing for rentals, doing the same thing for mortgages, doing the same thing for interior designers and contractors. So fell in love with the online real estate space, fell in love with marketplace businesses, and then went on to a early stage startup that was coming out of Y Combinator,

around that same time called 42 floors. And 42 floors was building Zillow, but for commercial real estate. Right. And so joined as one of the first. Jason Friedman or something? Jason Friedman, yep, yep. So he hired me and as one of the first business hires.

And we were all working out of like an awesome house in Soma, when Soma was slightly less sketchy, I think, than it is right now. And really the goal was, you know, Airbnb was just kind of becoming big. And so that business, 42 floors, had already raised a bunch of money prior to me coming on. And so it was a pretty, it was a super hot company coming out of Y Combinator. They had raised like back to back, I think over the course of less than 12 months, close to $20 million. And really my job and a couple other people's job on the growth side and on the biz dev side was how do we make money from this thing. You know, there's huge expectations.

The expectations are that, you know, we really want to build kind of an Airbnb or, or Zillow experience, but for finding office space, for finding retail space, industrial space. And so we started in San Francisco, eventually expanded to New York. We grew the team to about 80 people. And we, but that was all like rapid fire. We went from a team of eight people to 80 people

in like 12 months. We were like, you know, using all this money to go hire great people. And then after about, I think probably like 60, 70, 80 people, we noticed that, we started to have problems. Every startup has problems. But I think our problem was that we really just were hiring mostly on culture fit.

And so we had hired all of these like people that we just wanted to hang out with. Yeah, cool people. Not necessarily, I think, the right people to build that business. And so it was like the most fun company, you know, I've ever worked at. But there are, you know, ramifications to that, which is that we actually, I think, did an amazing job with the engineering side of the And so we hired all of these great engineers. We hired some great, you know, QA people and data people. And then on the business side, on the sales and marketing and customer support side,

we just had like awesome kind of young, cool people. And I think a lot of startups go through this, right? You get money in the bank and you just want to, you know, you want to pass the airport test. You want to work with great people. And so around that time in late 2014, early 2015. What's the airport test? It's like if you're stuck at the airport, would you want to hang out with this person? Something like that?

Yeah, exactly. Like you get, you know, you get unexpectedly rerouted through Chicago for a six-hour layover. Do you hate that layover or is it like the best layover of your life? Are you like making buddies with like this work colleague or are you just having the worst time and just trying to power through it? Gotcha. And so and so that really, that experience of hiring some amazing engineers, hiring a lot of a lot of great people, but people who actually weren't great fits at, you know, kind of entry-level sales, entry-level customer support. We started doing, I think, what inevitably

a lot of startups start doing, and they read these books about hiring. And so we went out and we bought this book by Laslow Bach, who was at the time running HR at Google. And I forget the name of the book, but it's an excellent read. And basically, his take on it was, look, at Google, we do take-home tests. We do work samples. We try to get a piece of the work. work that, you know, this candidate would ultimately do it if he or she got the job. And so we started building these in Google Docs in kind of late 2014, early 2015. And then that ultimately became this idea that we left. So Jason Friedman is kind of a pioneer of just like, if you have an idea, like, I will support you, you know, leave the company. And he was like an awesome backer to us.

So myself and two others, Darren Nix and Daniel O'Shea, we were all early employees there. we had this idea to take what we were doing in Google Docs, which were basically take-home tests. Like we were taking actual customer emails from, you know, angry tenants and angry landlords and stuff that we were getting and saying, you know, if you want to apply to this customer service job, why don't you craft a response that would be kind of indicative of how you would handle this if it was actually your first day here at 42 floors?

Right. And so we looked at a bunch of companies and at the time, there were lots of companies like Hacker Rank and Calibur and all these companies doing this, for technical. So if you're like hiring for software engineers, if you're hiring for QA, there were like six or eight companies that did this. Really for like the non-technical type roles, you found these like really old antiquated solutions that were like multiple choice tests. And it was, you know, like testing cognitive ability more so than, you know, how is this person going to perform on the job? And so in early 2015, we started a company called interviewed. We ran that company for two and a half

years. One interesting story is we did founder-led sales. The three of us sold the first two million dollars in ARR at that company. And we were just going out to big companies saying, hey, do you have this problem of failing to hire great customer service reps? And we really started with that kind of vertical. And then eventually we expanded into entry-level sales, entry-level financial analysts who were working with Fidelity and IBM and some pretty big companies. And indeed was one of our seed investors. And so after two and a half years, we sold the business to Indeed for a high eight figure amount and then stayed at Indeed for three years. And the three of us all ran different teams. So I ran an enterprise product team at Indeed for three years. And then just three weeks ago left Indeed and I'm now kind of working on the next thing.

Love it. I love that product, by the way, because that's the way I hire as well. is like, hey, let's do a project together. I have this old kind of phrase I always use. I don't know where I stole it from, but it was like, you know, the only way we're going to know if we want to work together is to work together. And, you know, so what's the mini sample of that we can do now that will tell us, hey, if we should try this for three months. And then if it's good for three months, great, let's do this for three years.

And like, that's typically the way we do it. And I have a friend in the e-commerce space who was just the other day bitching about, you know, got hiring customer service reps so hard. they send in like kind of resumes what is your resume going to tell me you know first you're applying for a customer service rep job and secondly like I don't know if you can actually do this and so he was like manually trying to create this and it sounds like for you you guys did the same thing you were manually creating some work around to make this process work for you and then you spun off and said let me let me let me actually export that as a business I've always talked about this import export

framework which is if you're inside of a bigger company you're going to inevitably build these like kind of internal tools, workaround systems, you know, stuff that solves a problem for you. But guess what? There's thousands of other companies just like you who have that same problem. You know, a hundred of them are baking up their own solution and it's a pain and they're not maintaining it. And if you could export your good solution and actually make it work, then there's probably a market for that. That's kind of the export side. Import is the opposite where, God, we run into this problem all the time. I wish somebody just had a solution that would do X. and when you're in a big company, you can see what those problems are that they would import or export a solution for.

Totally. Yep. I love that. And so, okay, so that's who you are. And what are you into? So are you into the whole kind of like VC venture backed go for the billion dollar outcome thing? Because I've seen some of your tweets where you're also interested in like kind of more niche, simple, profitable bootstrap businesses. Like, what's your, you know, business palette now?

What do you like? What flavors do you like? I think my, I really try to advocate for this hybrid approach. And I think that that's what we'll ultimately do on our, on our next company. And so that the hybrid approach is, you know, you generally have, you have one camp who historically has said, you know, go get as much money as you can on the best terms possible. And generally these people are like angel investors or their former VCs or they are VCs.

And I think that there's a lot of merit to that. And then you have this other camp, which is, you know, the bootstrap camp or the kind of like services business camp, which is, you know, I want to own 100% of this business or I want to do things my own way. I don't want to have to kind of work for any investors. And I think a lot of, you know, those both have a lot of upsides. And so I always try to think about, well, what are the, what are the downsides to each of these camps? And is there kind of a hybrid approach? And so what we did at interviewed was we raised $2 million total. We got to, you know, a kind of low seven figure like two or three million dollars in AR with founder led sales and then brought on a

couple salespeople and ultimately built that into a profitable business by the time that we sold it. And so I think if there's this hybrid approach where I see a lot of my bootstrapped friends work for like a year or two years or four years. And largely these become like consulting businesses because you get, you know, you get starry-eyed when a big customer comes along and says, hey, will you build this custom thing for me? If there's no money in the bank and somebody's waiving, you know, $300,000 to you and your team to go build something. In a lot of cases, you build it. And so, you know, two, three, four years out, there's, you may be doing well. You may own 100% of a business, but it's generally a much smaller business than if you would

have taken some capital. And so there's this like, you know, raise a sane amount of venture capital. I don't think there's very few businesses that need to be going off and raising tens of millions of dollars. And so I like those types of businesses that say, hey, if I can raise a million bucks, if I can raise two million bucks, it helps me skip over those years. of having to go, you know, be a consultant and kind of do that agency style work for big customers to put money in the bank. And I think the more times you do businesses like this, obviously, the better terms that you get. And so that's really the approach that I think has worked really well for myself and for my co-founder, who I've now worked with across, you know, three businesses

over the last eight years. And I think that ultimately, I think a lot of it is determined by your market and how big that market is. And so I love, you know, my co-founder and, just for fun, like while we were working out, indeed, we would start e-commerce sites on Shopify, just to play around with Shopify. And obviously, we're not going to raise capital for that, but also our expectations are pretty low. Like, if we can ever get that business to the point of making, you know, $1,000 in profit per month, like we're super stoked about that. And I think that, you know, ultimately, too, I think in our space, in the last business that I was in candidate assessments, what you saw were these very large companies, like Higher View

that came out and had raised, you know, I think 90 or 100 million dollars. And the space just wasn't that big. And so if you raise a million, if you raise $2 million, I think very similar to what, you know, you and your team did, you just have a lot of optionality, right? Like $10 million, $25 million, $50 million. These are all like game changer exits for you personally as a founder and for your team. And again, I think you can do this much faster than a bootstrap would be able to. You can get to that $10 million, $50 million exit a lot.

of times, you know, I've seen it in, you know, three or four years versus, you know, kind of a 10-year slog doing that business and owning 100% of it at the end. Right, right. Okay, that's interesting. And we, before we game on, I was like, you know, are you kind of an idea person, right? Like these podcasts work best when we're brainstorming ideas, right? The reason I get excited to do these is typically I'm either hanging out with Sam, who I already know, and we only talk ideas, or it's somebody new like you who I like to get to know

your story. I think it's interesting. and then I like to shoot the shit after that and say, cool, what's on your mind? What's interesting to you? All right, today's episode is brought to you by Tempo. Tempo.fit is the website. I actually use this.

I've used this for a few months now. And it's this machine that has a touchscreen and this 3D sensor. And what it does is they give you weights, like 115 pounds in weights. And it's for strength training. So what it is is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting. It sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in, your heart rate is. It's pretty amazing. And then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift, how many to lift, what workouts to do, whether you want to do a 20 minute, 10 minute,

50 minute workout. It's pretty amazing. But the best part is the leaderboard. The other stuff, all the features that they have, that's cool. But I'm obsessed with the leaderboard because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class. So it's made me want to work harder, lift more weight or have more endurance. It's just pretty freaking fun. And the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that will make you live longer. And this product, tempo, it checks that box for me. So they're our sponsor today. If you use the code tempo hustle, you'll get $100 off. So tempo.com. Fit is the URL. And tempo hustle, one word, you'll get $100 off. So check it out. I use

it. If you look me up on Twitter, you'll see I'm always filming videos where I'm talking to that company, saying I'm trying to crush their employees on the leaderboard because I actually love this thing and I use it all the time. So check it out. So I'm curious, did you, did you do your homework? Did you bring any ideas or interesting spaces to the table? Yeah, let's run through a few. Okay. Jump in. Jump in. Let's give me one. Um, so this, this one idea, um, I almost did. And I have a lot of research on it and I have a lot of thoughts about it. So if anybody wants to do this, feel free to email me. It's Chris at Laskey, L-A-S-K-I-E dot CO. And the idea is, uh, Shopify, but for SaaS businesses. So I have this kind of thesis that Shopify has empowered hundreds of thousands of

accidental e-commerce entrepreneurs by providing a framework of here's how to choose a name for a business. Here's how to go incorporate that business. Here's how to set it up. I think Stripe Atlas and some of these businesses have done similar things with SaaS, but they haven't taken it all the way. And so if you look what Shopify has done as a platform for people who want to sell, you know, gadgets, candles, whatever it is online, I think that there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of small niche SaaS businesses where I think really honestly like the best in class thing today is something like an accelerator, something like an incubator, you know, somebody to take a sizable percentage of your company and handhold you through that process of this is how to find

your first 10 customers. This is how to actually like set these things up. And I think if you, If I think about a lot of these SaaS businesses, your example earlier about import export, you're only exporting so many types of business from a company. And so a lot of times, you know, people say, how can we do what we're doing with Excel or how can we do what we're doing with Google Docs and turn that into its own standalone platform? And I think when you think about the components of a software as a service business, you only have so many components, right? You have like, you know, user registration, you have admin privileges, you have payment collection, you have analytics and dashboards.

And then you have like something else that that business is doing. But a lot of these things are componentized. And so I think if you have a business that has some sort of like low code way for people who have a SaaS idea to come on and register that business, create it, get it set up, come up with the name, set up the website, all of that stuff is easy. And you can go do that on, you know, square space or a million other places. but then actually build and kind of componentize in a low-code way, the back end. And the reason that we came up with this idea is when we were doing customer research,

we met a guy actually here in Minnesota where I am now, and he was working a full-time job, and his job is designing high-end cabinets for these like multimillion-dollar lake homes. And he and a couple friends have created a $1 million a year SaaS company that is like a CRM for high-end cabinet makers, right? And they've had to do this through an insane process over six years where they have hired people on Upwork, they've hired developers,

they've like kind of patched all of this together. And the main guy, Ryan, he gets on the phone with me and calls me and asks for advice. And like, it's kind of an insane process. But at the end of the day, like that, you know, business for high-end cabinet makers, there's never going to be like, you know,

something that would get you venture back to returns. And I think that if you look at holding companies in a lot of cases like Constellation Software in Canada, they're comprised of thousands of very small, you know, addressable market businesses that I think, you know, Shopify, similarly, you have a lot of these kind of small T-shirt sellers and candle makers and, you know, gadget makers that are selling a couple thousand dollars. And I think if you can do that in a really easy and efficient way, there's a huge market there. That's interesting. So when you first set it, you know, Shopify for anything, I'm like, oh, yeah, maybe.

And then I didn't understand at first what you meant, but now I do, which is that, okay, you're going to build the app that actually solves the customer problem. But then there's the generic set of things to be a SaaS business, such as landing page, user registration, payment collection, having different billing plans. And right now you either build that yourself or you stitch together three or four tools to be able to do the rest of that. and a store builder for SaaS developers is actually kind of an interesting thing because on one hand you'd think, well, people who build SaaS businesses, they're making code anyway. So why wouldn't they want to do this? But it's like they don't want to code the stuff that's non-core to their business.

And what can be sort of outsourced will be outsourced if you make it sort of convenient and simple enough. I actually like that. You said you did research on it. You decided not to pursue it. What do you? I think you said you decided not to pursue it. what is the kind of main challenge or hold up or what got you to sort of say, okay, sounds like

you initially had a hard on for this business and then something kind of cooled you off. What cooled you off? Yeah, I think the challenging thing with this business is really that you have these subject matter experts. Often these people are already running their own successful businesses. So the person who's selling, you know, high-end cabinets, he's probably making collectively with his business over, you know, a million dollars. or else you would just like stop making high-end cabinets and go do the SaaS business first time. And so I think that you have this problem of trying to, you know, glean information from the subject matter experts. What do you

know about, you know, building log cabins or what do you know about like managing trailer parts? What do you know about installing cabinetry? What do you know about, you know, industrial scales that nobody else knows? And gleaning that information from people is really hard. And so I think the thing that I like about this is I think that there's a massive opportunity if you can, you know, go and find those people. I think finding people who are already have, you know, subject matter expertise and are running these successful companies, convincing them to, you know, give you information, give you customers, whatever that is, is hard. I think that there are ways to do this through like revenue shares and stuff like that. But I think really that's the piece that that made us go, you know,

there's probably more exciting opportunities out there that, that, you know, could actually make cash a lot faster than this idea. So I think that this is probably like a good like venture backed business. I think you could go raise a couple million dollars with this framework with this idea and then take what a lot of these, you know, no code tools are doing through the various components and stitch them together. And if you can find that end customer who's wanting to make $1,000 a month, $10,000 a month in kind of incremental SaaS revenue, there seems to be a pretty interesting market there. Right. You tweeted something out the other day that's a different idea that I think your buddy or your business partner, is building. It's like it's an asynchronous golf instructor. So tell people what that is and what you liked about that business. Yeah. So my co-founder, Daniel O'Shea, as a customer of this business that I love. I loved it before and I like it even more in kind of crazy COVID times. So he lives in Austin,

Texas, and he has been in his first month off from leaving Indeed, he's been trying to improve as a golfer. And so all you do is you take, you take your iPhone. And there's this guy. I can't think of his name, but it's like professional golf.com or something. He has this, this like pretty decent domain. But it's just an individual guy. He works a full-time job. And this is his side hustle business. And so what he tells you is for $99 a month, you can upload. There's some parameters. I think it's like a two or five-minute video of you at the driving range. And I think you take like two minutes of footage, you know, driving a couple balls at one angle and then you move the camera behind you and you do another two minutes of it. And so I love this business because all he's

doing is he's taking video content and he's talking about something that he loves. So he has some sort of, you know, application or software where he's uploading your video and he's just recording audio over it. And then in real time, he's marking up your actual golf swing. You know, see here how your left knee, you know, buckle with a little bit. See how your hips weren't aligned to the ball. And so it's this like, highly tailored solution, super cheap, I think way cheaper than, you know, a golf instructor would be. And then the great thing for him, for my co-founder, as a new dad, is like, he can go do this whenever he gets a break. He doesn't have to commit to kind of this, like, you know, regular

sync of meeting a golf pro at the golf shop. And so I think that, you know, there's huge advantages for, you know, if you're trying to get better at exercising, if you're trying to get better at a certain sport, you know, meeting somebody in person, I think you're going to get, you know, the best experience. But there's all of these like YouTube, you know, videos that just give like generic, you know, golf advice that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. And so why not monetize this? You know, if you can get, you know, 10 people charge them $100 a month and you're probably

improving your own golf game as you're giving, you know, the user's feedback. I think that this is a great little side hustle. I like it. I was, I'm wondering how, how this guy's doing. I feel like there's, you know, you'd sort of do the math. Okay, $100 a month. And, you know, could this? person be service because it's a personal thing he's like servicing these you know these customers but uh you know

i think it let's say it might take him 30 minutes per customer uh to do this to take a two minute video annotate give you good feedback and send it right back to you um so you know maybe 30 minutes per customer let's say he wants to work i don't know uh five hours a day so he's going to get uh you know what what is that so 10 um you know 10 customers a day serviced and he's going to do this 20 days a 20 days a month and so you know servicing 200 customers at $100 piece right so you know it sort of adds up where you're like okay this is for something you probably would do for free for fun anyways because you just can't resist because you're you know you're a golf nut you know it's a very conveniently designed business I think that's what's beautiful about this is it's not so much that there's a big market

or he's using some fancy technology it's like off-the-shelf technology generically big market but I like the design of this business because I think it's probably like a passion that can monetize without taking over your life and becoming inconvenient. Totally. Yep. I totally agree. Yeah, it's really interesting. I like that one. All right, what else you got? I've also been thinking a lot about franchises. So I'm kind of obsessed with, you know, how do we create more entrepreneurs? How do we create more founders in, in America? and I think that I'm all about these like hybrid approaches. And I love your your framework that you've talked about many times on this podcast,

which is you know, you kind of draw this like two by two matrix and you have, you know, old problem, new problem, old solution, new solution. And I think, you know, crossing those and finding these hybrid approaches is something that I'm super passionate about as well. Right. And so actually I think, you know, many months ago, when I think you first talked about that framework,

I was thinking at the same time about franchises and about how, you know, throughout the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, there was this hybrid approach to entrepreneurship in America and all over the world, which was, you know, if you don't want to start a company from the ground up, you don't want to have to go set up a bank account and hire people and, you know, come up with an idea and register that business and do all of the hard work to come up with an idea. But you want more upside than working, you know, a nine to five at a big company. You could go open a McDonald's, early on Starbucks had franchises. You could go open to Starbucks and you would de-risk yourself as an entrepreneur, but you would still have a lot of the benefits of entrepreneurship around hiring people. And so I think, you know, how has the world shifted over the last six months and what kind of new franchise opportunities are available that are more asset-like? So I think the big problem with franchise is that almost all franchises are tied to these like very asset-heavy businesses. You know, dry cleaning. You have to rent the equipment. You have to rent the space. obviously fast food and coffee businesses, same thing.

You have these huge equipment expenditures, you have high rent. And so I'm really obsessed with like, you know, what in this framework, how can you take this, you know, 70 year old idea of a franchise business and apply it to, you know, these times where everybody's working from home. And I think that somebody will build like a multi-billion dollar company, basically doing like a franchised version of Geek Squad. I think that that's one super interesting example. So at Indeed.

the company that I just left. We had about 12,000 employees. And we would provide, like, remote kind of help desk support, you know, from Indeed's IT team in Austin, Texas, to employees who had broken laptops. Their internet connection wasn't working and they couldn't troubleshoot it. And there was all sort of like tech issues when you move a company with tens of thousands of people to go work from home. And I think that this, you know, something like this has this, like, regional approach where you could actually sell specific geographies to, you know, founders or entrepreneurs who wanted to run, you know, the Bay Area version of this business. And it seems like there's huge demand right now.

So somebody tweeted out that their dad, as I was thinking about this idea, their dad's company had spent like $50,000. It was a small, I think, accounting firm with like 20 people. And they had spent $50,000 through Accenture. And Accenture set them up with like Zoom licenses and Dropbox and just like, gave them off-the-shelf software and then basically did like a webinar like, here's how to use it. But I think increasingly as you have, you know, so many different technologies that you're running from home,

and that becomes mission critical to actually doing your job. I think that there's like a personal element of having somebody come over and, you know, fix your TV, fix your printer. But there's also this idea of, you know, somebody coming and actually fixing your laptop. And the great thing about this business is that I'm fairly convinced that large companies and small companies would just like pay a monthly fee to just have this problem go away. And so I think that there's like a direct to consumer side. And then there's also this like B2B element that I'm super excited about where you could go contract with a large company. And I think

that there's actually a lot of these businesses. I think if you look at asset light franchises, you know, every company when they set up, whether they're a financial services company or an HR tech company or an educational tech company, they all need to do a million integrations. And so, you know, one of the problems with these like integrations companies is that there's a There's all these independent, you know, developers who will, like, do your integration with SAP or with Oracle or whatever. And I think building a layer of trust, building a simple pricing, you know, page, doing all of this thing and then just running this like a startup makes for the super interesting, like,

franchise kind of hybrid approach that is a lot less cost intensive than spending, you know, a million and a half bucks to get a McDonald's open. Yes. Yes is my answer to this. I love this idea. I have a ton of thoughts. So first, I've personally encountered a couple of friends who did this as their side hustle as like an 18-year-old, 17-18-year-old. So you're in Minnesota.

My friend Tyler Hayes did. He had a business called Tyler the Techie. And basically he was Geek Squad. And he would come fix your shit. And he would like set you up and like tell you why your router sucks and gives you a new router because that's why your Wi-Fi isn't terrible in your house. Like he would just solve little problems like this. And I had a friend in college, this guy named Tofique, who. We would be in college and he would just, he would be the only guy who went to go check his mail.

We were like, why do you care about checking your mail? And the reason why was because he's getting checks in the mail. And we were like, what are you getting checks for? He's like, oh, I started this kind of like, you know, I forgot what it was called like, nerds on wheels or something like that was the name of it. Something like that is, you know, it's Geek Squad. And he's in West Virginia and he was 15 years old, I think, when he started at 1415. And he was like, oh, I know how like technology works. and like, oh my God, my dad doesn't, he started with his dad's like, I think doctor's,

doctor's office. And he's like, oh, they need like networking. And so he would like go set up your internet for any doctor's office, hospital, dentist office, that sort of thing. And this guy basically paid for college. And, you know, I went to Duke as like an expensive-ass school. And he was like, yeah, look, this is a $24,000 check. And he's like, this is just like my cut.

I gave the business to like another kid because he's, you know, I'm gone now. And he can run that. And I just get like a royalty check now a little bit out of it. And so he was making a ton And I was like, wow, this is very interesting. And so I think there's two interesting bits to this. One is, I think, Geek Squad itself. I don't know what the state of that business is,

but I don't think it's doing very well, just given, I think it's part of Best Buy, correct? And so I think that, you know, when the parents dying, you know, the child is going to be in trouble as well. So I think Geeks Squad is probably going to be in trouble. I love that it's mom and pop fragmented everywhere, which means that if you actually had a franchise system where you'd have a local operator

and you could find that 16, 15 year old kid or a group of four who are tech savvy and you could say, look, here's the brand, here's the website, here's the marketing budget playbook. I'm going to give you leads, you go fulfill. And it reminds me of this company I invested in called Nana. So have you ever heard about Nana? Yeah, I love what they're doing.

For those don't know, Nana's like a, I think they're doing this, but in the appliance repair space. So the equivalent of Geeks Squad was Sears's, Sears has had this huge fleet of appliance repair technicians. And Sears has gone bankrupt and, you know, that home services business actually was still doing pretty well, but who knows what will happen to it now.

So they had like hundreds of thousands of technicians all around the country that could come fix your dryer, come fix your fridge, come fix your dishwasher. And so what, and then, you know, besides them was just mom and pop, you know, find some guy in your yellow pages or Google and find somebody on Craigslist or whatever. to come fix your stuff. And so what Nana's doing is, is they're unifying this under one brand. That's simple, just Nana. It's on demand.

You push a button in your app and somebody will come fix your thing. My dryer was broken, pushed a button. An hour later, a guy showed up. And they were basically dispatching local technicians to come fix your stuff. And they were guaranteeing the technicians. Hey, you don't need to learn how to market yourself and get customers. Like, I will just send you a message when there's somebody within five miles of you that need something fixed. And you either say yes or no.

And this guy was making, you know, between 75,000 and 150,000 a year working flexible hours. I was like, this crushes being an Uber driver. And then they created an academy, which was like, in one month, you can go from not knowing how to fix any appliances to one month, you can repair one appliance. And in two months, you can repair two appliances and so on and so forth. And so if you're earning powers 30,000 a year, well, here's a pathway for you to for free, learn how to do this job and then get free customers to, you know, deliver to your phone that you can go and you can now be making. in 75K more a year. It's like this amazing thing for the economy. So that's why I invest in that company, but that model applies to what you're talking about in a pretty big way. And I think that there's other spaces as well that this applies to. So one that I've been thinking about

that I meant to bring up on the podcast, but I wanted to do a bit more research. But fuck it. You know, we're talking about us now. So with no research, are you familiar with Kuman? A little bit. It's like the learning centers, right? Yeah, exactly. So Kuman, I didn't have this growing up, but my wife is from this area in California, and it's like everybody knows about Kuman around here. And you live in the same area as I do. So you'll see them at the corners. And every strip mall will have one of these. And so Kuman is like a place you send your kid to get good at math. So it has a stereotype of like, you know, Asian parent, you know, forcing their kid to become like, you know, good at math. But, you know, parents really care about this stuff. And so Kuman was a franchise that you could. open up and they give you the playbook, they give you all the materials, it's kind of like Kaplan or, you know, whatever, like where you can teach people how to pass the SATs. Yeah. So Qumon is this for little kids and they charge, you know, a handful and parents are willing to pay.

So I think that you can create the Airbnb of Kumon, which sounds ridiculous, but what I mean is you don't need a brick and mortar shop for this anymore. I think you could arm people and say, hey, do you have like a dining room in your house? because you can create a little micro school of, you know, 10 kids who are each paying, you know, $100 a month to come learn from you. And who are you? You're a college kid or you're like, you're like, you know, a 25-year-old or you're an 18-year-old who knows math,

and we give you the brand, we give you the materials to, like, outfit your room and make this work. And so Kuman, I think, does billions of dollars a year in revenue. And I think somebody can create the Kuman with the asset light model, meaning use the sharing economy, use people's garages, use their living rooms, use their extra spare bedrooms, and turn them into little classrooms for the neighborhood and give them, you know, materials and lesson plans that they can teach off of. And I think that that could be a monster, monster business. Like, that's one that I would consider going and building because I think it would

transform the way education works. There's another variant of this is my sister has this program that She created these child care centers or kind of like preschools in San Francisco. And initially her model was smart where she would buy a house. So she wanted to own a home. The home had extra space, like a whole bottom floor that was like separate entrance and exit. So she was like, oh, I really want this house, but I can only afford half of it. Oh, what if I created a child care center at the bottom of here, an in-home child care center? Because there's the shortage of child care centers.

So there's permits for in-home. And I can have 12 kids. and in San Francisco, each kid pays $3,000 a month to go to school. So you're making $36,000 a month in revenue, and you basically pay four teachers as your salary, and the rest is you're renting your own space. And so she's paying for a, you know, a multimillion dollar home in San Francisco. She's profiting by having, you know, her own little school.

And she sends her own kids to it too. And so it's like, you know, her own childcare as well is taking care of. And so she built this really good model. And then to expand, she was like, you know, I really want my kids to get outdoors more. So she created this thing called Nature Kids. And I think this could also be a franchise model. So what she did was she was like, forget the house because that has probably, you know, I have to go find a home that has the separate entrance and exit and permitting and all that stuff.

There's beautiful parks everywhere. What if there's a half day program where you send your kids and it's away from technology? It's outdoors. It's in nature. Learning about like animals and trees and plants and building things and stuff like that. and I pay zero rent. And so she created a whole curriculum for this thing. And it's working.

It's taken off because A, COVID, like that helped. But B, parents just want their kids outside. And so I've told her like, hey, instead of thinking about how you can add 10 more kids to nature kids, you should be bundling this up as a franchise in every kind of like, you know, enterprising mom or dad who wants to create a local business around child care. And they want a better option for their own kids. And there's like two parks near them. they should be able to buy this business in a box. And they can go make six figures a year doing something like this with essentially

zero risk. What do you think of that idea? Yeah. Yeah, I love that. It reminds me. So growing up, I lived in Colorado. And in Jefferson County, which is a suburb of Denver, in fourth, fifth and sixth grade, I think parents can opt out of it.

But there is basically like a one-week nature camp that you go to. But these are privately run amazing business because you basically, basically build like, you know, 16 log cabins out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in Colorado, like the cheapest plot of land that you can find. And then you teach kids, you know, how to like boil water over a fire and you just do this for an entire week. And it's an amazing, you know, one week vacation for the parents. So they love it. Like every parent signs their kids up for this. The kids get to go around in the woods. And I love this like doing it, doing it without the real estate component, I think is super smart. There's also this business in

in Manhattan that's taken off. And I think, you know, ink or entrepreneur or something wrote about these two women who, they have like a big suburban and they go around to all these high end, you know, penthouses around Manhattan. And the pitch is like, your dog hates walking around on Manhattan sidewalks. Right.

And so we have this plot of land in upstate New York. It's like 90 minutes north of the city. And we load your, you know, your dogs like 12 at a time into this suburban. And we just let them go like dig holes and play with each other and just like run around. and it's, I think, in one of the women's backyard in, in, you know, northern, northern New York. And they get, like, an insane amount of money.

I think, like, one day of doing this, there's, like, 12 dogs. It's, like, $80 per dog. So every day they do this, they're, like, printing $1,000 for real estate they already have, you know, on this, like five acre plot of land that one of the women lives on. Any business like that, you know, getting pets, kids, whatever, out to nature, I think it's genius. That's so funny. Even adults out to nature, right?

Like, I did tough mutter. Spartan race and what are these right it's like I can get your you know you're out of shape 30 year old body off of a desk into nature and I'll let you take photos that you can put on Instagram like that's the model right like I hope this doggy thing I hope they're taking I hope they have like you know some drone that flies around and just takes high quality videos and just sends it to the parent you know to the to the dog owners or the parents and it's just like look how much fun your dog is having right now like look how messy they're getting and don't worry I'm going to bathe them and bring them back later. And this $80 a day day count for your dog to like for your dog to have a vacation out of the

city for like boozy people is a hilarious hilariously great business that I'm a fan of. Yeah, I love that. I love the videos and photos. I think that was a big part of like Wags business model, right? They'd come to your house and walk your dog for 30 minutes and they would get a video or a photo and I think it was up to each dog walker. But that was a huge part of their growth, I think was watching your dog have fun is a huge value ad. Right. Yeah, I just think that there's more experiences that should be, like, fun or enrichment, but like doubles as like babysitting. Right. So like, that's another thing with like after school activities is like, great. Take my kid for the hour. Like, thank you. And one reason I like the local Kuman is you don't have to drive so far to do it. Like if there really was one in every neighborhood, which I think realistically, in every single neighborhood, there's some, there's at least five kids who are in high school, who are.

good students, good at math and want to earn 35 bucks an hour to teach little kids, you know, little kids math. And if you give them a playbook, they'll just follow the playbook. And, you know, now that's within walking distance or like a two minute drive away rather than like a, okay, I'll drive for 25 minutes, drop you off. Now I have 45 minutes to kill and then I got to pick you up again. It's not even worth going home. And it's like parents get exhausted by this sort of like, you know, just becoming an Uber driver for your kid. Or so I've heard. I don't know. My kid's tiny. I don't know about all this, but this is what I understand.

You'll find out soon. Exactly. I also like, you know, for your Geeg Squad idea, another framework I like is, business ideas is what do the rich have that the poor would want? And it's not money. And so, like, you know, the rich people had private drivers, and now everybody has private drivers through Uber. You know, rich people got like these crazy vacation homes that they could go to. And now Airbnb says, cool, you know, stay in this log cabin in Tahoe. you just don't have to own the place.

And it'll make it really easy. They reduce the friction required for you to have the same experience that rich people have. And DoorDash, right? Like, you know, don't cook, get food, you know, get restaurant quality food. You know, you don't have to have a private chef. Here's, like, a chef that will make it and deliver to you in 30 minutes. So similarly with companies, what do big companies have that small companies would want? Because, you know, they have the whole department that deals with this pain in the ass.

We can't afford that department. We can't even afford one. one IT guy, but what if, you know, we could just subscribe to this Geek Squad thing for, you know, $300 a month and like our IT needs are taken care of or whatever, right? Like I think that's another way to look at this is what's a department inside a big company that small companies don't have and then spin that department out and turn it into a, you know, a service business or turn it into a product in some way. Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, I think this works really well. I mean, there's any sort of, you know, fractionalized executive is another idea that I love, right? And so I think this is another business where when we were starting interviewed five years ago, you know, day one, if you have two people, you don't want or need to hire a CFO. You don't need a head of HR, but you want like somebody to keep you compliant in these areas. And I think that, you know, similar to all of those businesses, these are areas that like require huge levels of trust, right? If you're handing over all of your financials, if you're handing over all of your, you know, human resources files to a person who's working with you and 25 other companies,

right, you want to make sure that that person knows what they're doing. And I think, you know, Bench and a lot of other companies are trying to get good at this more for like SMB accounting. I think that there's, you know, similar companies, you know, Riffling and Gusto and stuff have come along and chipped away at parts of kind of, you know, payroll automation and, you know, new hire onboarding. But I still think that there's a whole stack of things just in, you know, in like fun cultural things, like a fractionalized office manager, you know, in accounting, in HR, in any. of these departments, IT, that would be hugely valuable for a, you know, two person to, and I think a lot of cases up to like 200 people, you can't afford or you don't want to hire

these as full-time roles quite yet. So that's like, here's a bad idea. That's a bad idea. That's a version of that, right? So a good idea that I think just hasn't quite clicked, but my friend Marin started a company called Zertual. And Zertrtle got famous because it famously raised a bunch of money. It was doing well. And then it blew up overnight and like closed. And like, okay, you know, whatever. That was sort of a financial fiasco of just sort of mismanaging the cash flow and not being able to hit payroll. But the idea was really, really solid, which was, again, rich people or executives or big

companies have this one benefit, which is that they have EA's, right? So I have an executive assistant. And that's because I'm at a big company. But when I'm at a small company, I'm not going to hire an EA. It's just too expensive and I don't have that sort of need. And so what they did was a fractional EA. I could have seven hours a week of this person's time, and she could be servicing, you know, let's say eight clients at the same time.

And so more people got access to the service for a lower price. And then the service provider is able to fractionally divide their time and end up making twice or three times more than they would at any one company. So that's the good idea. The bad idea version of this is like you talked about kind of, you said the word company culture. And every company I've been at, there's been like kind of the one person who really like,

keeps track of everyone's birthdays and, you know, oh, somebody's having a baby. Let's send them a gift basket and like, hey, this person's, you know, they came down with something and how do we help them get well? And there's sort of the person that makes everybody like a little bit human in the company and they're thoughtful. They buy gifts. They organize things. They organize parties. They organize like, you know, off-sides and things like that. And I feel like there's, you know, for the person who has the skills of a party planner or a wedding planner, but it's like, okay, here's like a boring version of that, like corporate, the corporate fun. And how do you provide that to a 30 person company who doesn't have that person? Or today it's your head of marketing who just does it because otherwise no one's going to do it. And maybe that there's somebody you could have that's just like the thoughtful person in your company.

And what a fun job to be doing from home. If you're kind of a stay at home mom or dad just to provide that for, you know, for companies is you're there like people person. And you're cheering everybody up. you're bringing a little surprise and delights to everybody in the company and they'll pay you, you know, whatever, $1,000 a month to be doing this. Yep, yep, I love that. And I think in a lot of ways, that's completely unchartered territory. So one of the side projects that my co-founder and I and a couple friends actually created is this company that we're still working on, but it was like a side project called Teamcation. And it was this idea of like, you know, now that every company is a remote company,

what all remote companies would do before this, like if you were, a cool, you know, 20-person remote company, as you would go, you know, get an Airbnb up in Napa or in Vegas or whatever. Once every half year. Fly everybody in. Yeah. And I think in our experience, even if you have that person or those people who are like, and I think you need to make, you know, new hire onboarding like core to your business, that's really

hard to outsource all pieces of it or you will have like a terrible culture. But the, the idea of having like a travel agent that knows these niche spots where you can get 20 or 40 or 60 people into a house. They're actually kind of hard to find. And I think, you know, then you have like all the travel coordination. Okay. Maybe for the first time ever, these companies are having to set up, you know, expense policies for, you know, how much per diem you get if you're on the road, if you're driving in versus flying in. And so just being able to take that, I think, and maybe give parameters, you know, hey, we have 15 people. This is our budget. Just go book something awesome. We think that there's an interesting business there. If anybody wants to

run this site for us, feel free to reach out to me. I'll give somebody a job around it. You have that domain? That's a good domain too if you have team. We do, yeah. So that's a good domain. Good idea. I would hate to run that business because I'm a terrible logistics person.

Like I'm awful, God awful at it. But I would love that, right? Like for my team of 2030 people who are like, you know, remote, if we could say, if all we had to say was this is our date. We're down to leave on this date, come on this day, and here's our parameters, There's budget and here's, you know, everybody's like location. So, you know, geographically where to send people. And if somebody was like, great, we found you guys the spot.

We've organized the activities. We've booked your travel. We're handing everybody kind of a temporary expense card that we have that, like, we'll just keep track of everything for you guys. And when you get there, you'll have your swag or your goody bag or whatever you're going to get. That would be, I think, something that a lot more, like the market for that has been created now because of COVID and because of the sort of increase the sort of exponential increase in remote work. There's a market for this now that was very different four years ago when only a

handful of companies were doing remote only and then they they built internal systems for this. This is exporting their internal system and making it like a button you push for for team vacations. So I like that idea. I would hate to run it, but I think it'd be interesting if someone did. Same. It's fun to build the website. I have no plans of actually doing the back end of all that work myself. All right. I love it. We should wrap up. We're almost at the hour. This has been fun. You are you're one of us. You are an idea machine who thinks about things and I think a good way where you're looking at what's changing. You're looking at pain points and you're trying to figure out, you know, how do I find that either new solution or old solution to either old pinpoint or new pinpoint?

So where should people find you? So Twitter is the best way to, best place to follow you? Yep. Follow me on Twitter again at Chris J. Fawke, B-A-K-K-E on Twitter. Or feel free to send me an email to Chris at L-A-S-K-I-E.C-O. And are you ready to talk about what your new company is, or do we have to end the recording and then I ask you a bunch of questions about that? So the high level is that we are, we're really in.

love with helping large enterprise businesses find where the problems are in their organization, and then go solve those. And so the high level of this is that I've worked at a couple very large companies that are growing fast. I think that there's this general adversion to things like McKinsey and Bain and BCG and bringing in these high and expensive consultants that big companies like Coca-Cola would go pay all day long. And I think that there's also a way where professional services, a huge part of that job is coming into a company and cracking open a new spreadsheet and then getting down to business, flying people in to start interviewing. And so the core of this business will be effectively building McKinsey 2.0 and helping high

growth companies with some of their biggest business problems. So this would be a service, it would be a consulting business. It's a, so the idea is actually to take what consultants do and turn these into, turn it in software. So at my last company, we took something that was done in a spreadsheet. We built an entire SaaS business around it and then we sold it. So the idea here is to find these pain points, whether that's, you know, what should I price my product?

Historically, you would go Pay McKinsey for a study of that. You know, startups can't afford to do this. And so we are building software to help you, you know, price your product, distribute products. A lot of things around product distribution, but also a lot of things around, you know, hiring and actually building up, you know, building up that company. And so anything that a large company would turn to McKinsey to solve, you know, in the next three to five years, it's our goal to, you know, have pieces of software or partners that we can go, you know, refer these executives and founders to go help some of these critical business problems. Interesting. Okay. I like you a lot,

but I don't know if I like this pitch. I feel like finding one of these and building the software solution to one of these is it itself probably like a big, a big, a big, a big, company worth building and would take time to build. And so I'm not sure I'm not sure I'm on board with or I'm not sure I believe the sort of like we're going to solve a bunch of these. Maybe that's cool. I'm interested to see how that goes. We we I think I think it's like a key through boy quote. You always want you know like 50% of people to not understand the idea. You want like 25% of people to hate it. You want 25% to love it. I think we're like pretty equal on that ratio. Okay. I think to be clear like I think day one we have a very specific pain point.

that we're going to go solve. And a lot of that just starts with research, talking to a ton of founders, talking to a ton of business executives. So if there are any business leaders and team leaders at large companies who want to just talk to us about some problems and we can give you some free advice,

feel free to shoot me out. Nice. All right, cool. Thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate the guest spot. And maybe if people like this, we'll have you back. I think they will.

I think you had some pretty solid, pretty solid ideas. So thank you for coming on. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. Cool.