The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Good timing makes great products (Interview)

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

Paul Orlando is back to talk about his book titled "Why Now?" You may remember Paul from his last appearance (a fan favorite) talking with Jerod about complex systems & second-order effects. Paul's book, "Why Now?" explores the concept of timing and the importance of understanding the 'why now' in business and product development. We discuss timing examples from the book that were either too early or too late (such as the first video phone and car phones), the need to consider both technological advancements and user demand when assessing timing, the significance of timing in the success of companies like Apple and the launch of the iPhone, Uber and Heroku, and more. Also, join our Slack community for a chance to get a signed copy of Paul's book.

Welcome to the Change Log. This week, we're talking to Paul Orlando about his first book titled Why Now? Paul's last appearance was a fan favorite, talking with Jared about complex systems and second-order effects, specifically unintended consequences that occur when systems operate at scale. Paul's book Why Now? explores the concept of timing and the importance of understanding the why now in business and product development. We discussed timing examples from the book that were either too early or too late, such as the first video phone and car phones, the need to consider both technological advancements and user demand when assessing timing, the significance of timing and the success of companies like Apple and the launch of the iPhone, Uber, Heroku, and so much more. We also encourage Paul to create a podcast. We're biased.

Teach workshops and expand his brand on the YNOW front. Paul has also agreed to give away a few books to our listeners. So head to changelog.com slash community. Join our Slack and we'll share more details in the coming weeks. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.io. That's the home of changelog.com. Launch apps near users too easy. Launch your apps, launch your databases, and launch your AI near users. check them out, fly.io. What's up, friends?

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And make sure you use our code, changelog, and you'll get $100 off the team plan, which is super awesome. Again, use the code changelog, get $100 off the team plan, sentry.io. well we are joined once again by Paul Orlando, who was my guest on one of my favorite episodes all about second-order effects and unintended consequences. A couple of years ago now, but it was just me and you, Paul. We've added Adam to the cast of characters. I'm here. It's me. We can officially do this. Welcome back, man.

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me back. the cast of characters i'm here it's me we can officially do this welcome back man thank you yeah thanks for having me back um yeah i loved that earlier talk and it was kind of an excuse for me to you know geek out on goodhart's law and oh my god related related topics but uh yep yeah good to be back 50 000 listens j listens, Jared, that episode. That was a good conversation. I mean, people dug it. I dug it. I think I put it in my state of the log top five. I had to apologize to Adam because he wasn't there for it.

I kind of rubbed it in. I'm like, dude, you missed one of the best. I just think unintended consequences, I mean, how could that not be entertaining and thoughtful? I mean, you hate it when things happen that you didn't plan to happen. And they always do in software, don't they? Complex systems. Absolutely. It kind of like is that thing I mentioned before, big change brings big change. Jared, isn't kind of like that the same thing in a way?

Like the unintended consequences, like when you do things, things happen that you're not, you have no power over? Sure. Second order effects. You expect this outcome, but you don't expect the result of that outcome changing something else. That's right. And so on and so forth. And so we do well to be weary of decisions and just do it. What's the anecdote, Paul?

Do nothing and enjoy it. Do nothing. Yep. Yep. Never change anything. Paralysis is actually the worst, right? Perfection and paralysis go hand in hand because you feel like you've got to be perfect in your decision, yet that will never happen because of being in a dynamic world. And then you become static and do nothing,

and indecision is the worst. Being in that middle ground of just you can't decide is the worst place to be as an individual, let alone a corporation trying to move innovation forward. That's one of the nice things about software is we get to ship early and often and see the results. Sometimes you don't see the second order effects until it's too late, but a lot of times you do and you say, Oh, I can just quickly

change that. Now, if you're shipping for, for instance, a book, you know, to production, like Paul has a new book out, that is the thing where it's more like, you know, it's off to the printer. You'd better not have a typo on page three or something, right? Because there's no going back. Software is, it's too easy compared to the real world. You know, I think the, on that, you know, the way that you can write now actually has changed. So I kind of stepped into this topic and I'm, I guess I'm changing topics to like the why now topic. Please do. Yeah. But I stepped into it pretty naturally. So, you know, started with a bunch of blog posts a couple of years ago, you know, on this topic. Started basically discussing this timing topic with, you know, a bunch of startup accelerators, a bunch of companies, even some like, you know, Fortune 500, you know, like, you know, your late very late stage companies so yeah hopefully um

i might still have some typos but hopefully at least the thought process is is solid refined thinking as i've heard it called as you write something like that well this topic to me is darn near as good as our previous one the age-old question why why now? Why is this idea or this business or this solution well placed in history? Which is a fascinating question, one that I find very difficult to answer. I think in retrospect, we do a better job of saying, well, the timing was great or well, the timing was off. And you don't get any points for being off in your timing. Well, maybe you get some know, and you don't get any points for being off in your timing, right? You don't, well, maybe you get some points, but you don't get any money. No, that's exactly, yeah.

Like, so people I think do console themselves and it's usually always the same things. Like, wow, I was just too early. I was ahead of my time, you know, like, and I guess I console myself when I'm, you know, crying myself to sleep. That, yeah, it wasn't a complete waste of time. I was just too early. I'm crying myself to sleep. That wasn't a complete waste of time. I was just too early. I was just ahead of the game. But yeah, I got interested in this why now question, this timing topic, because like you said, I heard a lot of people talk about it.

I heard a lot of people say how important it was. And then I never really saw anybody dive into, okay, can we get some clues? Can we like at least try to figure this out? It's never going to be perfect. We're not predicting the future, but can we at least get some clues as to, okay, if I have an option of working on, you know, this or that, I'm going to choose the one that maybe has the timing advantage. So this is my attempt at doing all of that. Like, okay, I'm not saying, yeah, predict the future, but I'm saying you can get some clues and you can follow a generalizable process that at least clues you into, yeah, there might be an advantage in this area that you happen to be focused on. Or if not, then here are some other things that you could do as you reconsider that.

But yeah, so that was literally how I ended up getting interested in this because I heard it so often. And when I even think back to one of the old startups that I was involved in years ago, it was in effect, like when Clubhouse was becoming popular, maybe around the last time we spoke, like a few years ago. Oh, I recall. And then it kind of dropped off. My old startup was kind of like a version, like 0.01 of Clubhouse, but in a, like a 2G world, you know, or maybe a 3G world. So like a lot of what they were able to do later on having like thousands of people simultaneously listening or like speak,

you know, at, uh, you know, an event was what we were trying to do, but with like lots of limitations, you know, like, you know, just like people didn't have wifi, you know, like, you know, like, you know, a lot of people didn't have smartphones, you know, yet. So, yeah, I always think back to that, like example that I had, you know, very directly of being like too early. Yeah, like, and along the way, I've seen people return to this topic, even to the point where there is a regular kind of why now slide in a typical pitch deck. But again, I was trying to, I was trying to help people kind of think through this process

and then figure out, okay, what do I actually go with? This reminds me of the book Eric Ries wrote called The Lean Startup, in a way. Because he systematized thinking about this manufacturing process applied to software development. And not just software software but company and product development uh popularized mvp shipping early being embarrassed by it even and like you know if we don't if they're if the why now slide is in so many decks what book out there represents getting to that answer which it seems like your book is is a is somewhat of a Bible or a system that says, if you think Y now, this is

a book that will help you get through that process, whether you're a product manager, VC, team manager, product lead, whatever it might be. Exactly. That's what I hope I've done. The point is there, too, is that he became famous because of that book. It became the way for – this might be Paul's big break here. This could be the why now. Hey, all right. Yeah, this could be your thing, man.

Did you apply why now to the why now book? You said this book has – this is a good time for it, you know? Yeah, funnily enough, it was really like – this came out of just the passion I had for the topic. So I figured the why now might have existed at any time. So I hope it's the right time for me. But yeah, it would be ironic if I was just a little early on that. Just a little early. People still don't care about the why now, but they might a decade from now, and then your book will be well positioned. All your SEO will be there for you. Hey, all right.

Good time to get into it. So when you set out to answer this question, of course we can look back and we can see products in the past or services that were too early. It's harder, I think, to find the ones that were too late. Maybe they just disappear into the ether, you know, you don't really, you don't really get even kudos for being too late, but too early. Right. The Lisa comes to mind, you know, Apple had a lot of things that were too early. Microsoft has been too early on tons of stuff. And then like a decade later, you. The Lisa comes to mind. You know, Apple had a lot of things that were too early. Microsoft has been too early on tons of stuff. And then like a decade later, you know, here comes everybody else. And Microsoft's like, hey, we were there first and we're back again.

You know, so I think of big tech, of course, taking swings. What are some other famous too early's that were just kind of pushing the ball uphill too much and failed for that reason. I'll give you a famous one that, well, was famous at the time and I think has been forgotten by history. It's the first video phone. Funnily enough, this was made by AT&T and funnily enough, my first real job was at AT&T and I was doing voice over IP stuff back then, like a little before Skype came around. And I had never heard of this video phone that AT&T had made in the 1960s. You think like, I had no idea this was even possible. And they were doing it over the old, like the legacy copper wire into the phone. Yeah. plain old telephone service, yeah. And they... It had to be terrible.

You know, I've seen videos of people using these devices, and it's definitely, you know, it's got that, you know, kind of mid-1900s TV kind of feel to it. It's black and white. But, you know, you could talk real time to another person. You could share a document with them by moving the camera to your piece of paper. But yeah, so they had this, what they call the picture phone. They spent $4 billion in today's dollars developing it. It's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. And I mean, AT&T back then, or the Bell Labs, you know, back then, you know, that was like the gold standard for corporate labs, which we don't really have, you know, to the degree that we had, say, you know, in the 1900s.

But they pushed out this product first at the 1964 World's Fair with a commercial launch in 1970. And it was just crickets. They sold, I want to say, tens of units. Maybe even dozens. Maybe dozens, yes. And so they pretty quickly realized, okay, yeah, that was a $4 billion waste. We're going to shut it down. They tried that, you know, that basically variations of that product again in 1980s, in the 1990s. And it wasn't until, you know, we had solved the installed base problem. So I don't need like, I want to call you by video and you want to, you know, you want to talk to me, like we both need the same make of video phone. Like once we had solved that either through

laptops with a camera, you know, installed or like, or webcam that would like sit on top of your monitor. It wasn't until we had solved that, that people really had commercial video phone or picture phone type service. My dad had a, uh, had a car phone back in early nineties. So his business was popular. Yeah. same day, small package delivery. So he had to be on the phone all the time. And I felt like even as a young kid riding with a dad who had a car phone, I felt like the car phone was too early. It did not have product market fit.

It was way too big. You couldn't unplug it because it would just turn off. It barely ever had a reception wherever he was. It was like the only reason he had it was because his business needed him to have it but even that which i think eventually obviously got gobbled up by mobile phones which got gobbled up by smartphones is like the car phone was not cool you know i doubt it had i mean it never had mass uh adoption for sure because even then like putting a phone in your car was just too early. I think probably because just the mobile networks were just bad. A lot of, you know, dead zones.

Looked cool though. They looked cool. I mean, my friends are all like, your dad has a car phone? I'm like, yeah, he does, you know? But it was lame. Yeah, I mean, mobile phone telephony, like sticking with communications, you know, like mobile phone telephony goes back much farther than people realize. Like there were demos. So like, I believe there were very much demo versions of this, like in the 1910s, 1920s, but more like the kind of thing where you would have to like throw a cable onto a telephone wire as you stopped your car. And like, you would like, you would be able to get a signal

that way. Styrofoam cups on two ends of a wire. Styrofoam cup, yeah, with a string. Yeah, like the famous story. And I've heard this story from people who were there in the room when this happened. But like the famous story also at AT&T in the 1980s was, you know, so they had developed a lot of the, you know, the at least developed a lot of, you know, the, at least the network side of mobile telephony and Motorola had done a lot of the, like the handset stuff. So, you know, the 1980s, early, I think this was like 1983, 84, they hired McKinsey Consulting to do this study for them. How big is the mobile phone market going to be in the US? And it was going to set the direction that the company was going to take.

Everything is fixed line. Are we going to go heavily into mobile telephony? And so McKinsey does this study and they survey thousands of individual consumers, business people. They come back with this big presentation saying, this market is too small. You're not even going to hit a million subscribers by the year 2000. Really? Sell off your network assets. Just get out of the market. It's too small. People don't even want this if it's cheap. So maybe you'll sell this to truck drivers, maybe traveling salespeople, but this is not a big enough market. So get out of it. And AT&T got out of that market only to buy back their old networks and get back into it in the 1990s. And yeah, the numbers were something like, I think McKinsey had

said, you're going to cap out at 900,000 subscribers in the year 2000. And it was actually 109 million subscribers in the U S in the year 2000. So, yeah, so it was a little off. What's funny about that though, is it seems in hindsight, like hindsight obviously is 2020 in almost literally every case. But I mean, don't you think that that was like, didn't that seem obvious that eventually we would be having phones with us? Like that seems like the obvious, but it's not the if, it's the when. So, I mean, back to your why now, entire premise is the when, not the if.

And I think you quoted Marc Andreessen on that within your book early on. I don't know the exact quote, but I'm paraphrasing. Something around the, not the if, but the when, when most startups eventually have success. But to me, I think like mobile phones or something like that, yeah, it's going to happen. Like, how would you not just make it 900 million versus 9 million or whatever the 900,000 or 9 million versus 900,000? It seemed obvious that was going to blow up to me. You know, it's a great point because how long can we wait?

Do we want to like exit now and then enter again later on? And I do claim in some cases you could get a good enough perspective on how long it's going to take something to happen. Like some of the supporting technologies say, you know, to be there. But yeah, like early eighties, those phones were bricks, you know, the battery life was like 30 minutes. All you could do was talk, you know, there's no texting, obviously there's no like, you know, a touch sensitive screen and a lot of dead zones, but it was amazing how quickly, and those ones were expensive, like well into the thousands of dollars and like a few dollars a minute, you know, for talk time. But it was interesting how quickly those problems were solved.

Like the phones of the mid 1990s. So basically like 10, maybe 12 years after that, you know, AT&T McKinsey, you know, kind of example happened. Those phones could fit in your pocket. They were pretty cheap. They had good battery life. And a lot of those things, like I would say, like if you were paying attention to how fast progress is happening or what you might expect if you believe, hey, I think Moore's law is going to continue for the next decade. This is like the 1980s. Like, okay, we're going to see X, Y, and Z happen, or we're going to see this cost decline like this or that.

So I think that you could probably get some clues. But the other piece of that, of course, was the demand side. So McKinsey goes out and they do this huge survey and they say, no, it doesn't matter if it's cheap. People just don't want to talk to people, you know, like when they are like in their truck, you know, or when they're like, you know, riding a bus. And like the quote that summarized that was from like the engineer at Motorola who had developed the first like handheld, you know, mobile phone handset, Marty Cooper. And he said, yeah, what, what they didn't realize was the old landline phones connected places to places. Like this is your house phone. I'm calling another friend at their house, like places to places and mobile phones connect people to people. And wow, now I can use this device really differently.

Like I am talking to like you. I don't, I know who's going to answer the phone. It's not like somebody who is also in the house. It's going to be like you only. Like, oh, maybe there are certain conversations like for kids, like, oh, like I don't want my parents, you know, to know I'm on the phone right now. Or like, oh, of course I want to make this call

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And that is just a few announcements from CloudFlare's Developer Week. Check it all out for yourself at cloudflare.com slash developerweek. Once again, cloudflare.com slash developer week once again cloudflare.com slash developer week The rate of progress is amazing because I think back to my childhood. I think all of us here are relatively same age where we had landlines. You know, you had to fight over who was using the phone. It very much connected place to place. 30-foot cords. Absolutely. And you get all toiled up in them and stuff. And, you know, now

I have my own teenagers and my own tweens and kids, and I'm explaining to them how phones used to work, you know, and it doesn't feel all that long ago. We're talking one generation. It's not that long ago, 15, 20 years. And it's just dramatically different. Like they don't understand the reason why you may not need an area code if you're calling locally versus long distance. And did you realize people used to pay by the minute and all this kind of stuff? And they're like, what? Because it really does.

Isn't it all free? Yeah. I mean, when you zoom out and see the entire forest, the rate of progress of technology is amazing how far it's come, especially in mobile. Yeah, absolutely. As you're talking about this, I'm thinking about a company like Apple. When you think about when, the why now or timing could you

imagine a company like apple given where it's at currently if the why now wasn't then for the iphone they disrupted everything and the entire i mean largely where they're at today is because of the placement of the iphone in history in times history i was i would agree you know 2007 was the year it came out it was the right time for internet speeds you had visual voicemail like that was a whole thing right like you didn't have to call in and listen to the voicemail and like push one to go to the next one like this whole you can literally you know see the voicemail from the person and whatnot it was revolutionary like where would where would they be as a company if it wasn't why now for them and the right timing for the iphone yeah so true and it's also an example

of something that you know it's not like people were clamoring for smartphones you know it wasn't like oh like i have this problem like i can't touch the screen on my phone and there were other smartphones out there too right blackberry you know was out yeah there were like you know a few other like early ones where like i guess you still had to use a stylus you know maybe you know for the screen that kind of stuff palm blackberry and then microsoft mobile next time i don't know. I love Nextel. Yes. There was Nokia phones that had Java games on them.

Snake. But none of these things were lighting the world on fire until the iPhone, which seemed to like really be the right timing. Maybe even arguably slightly a little early.

I think that's kind of how you invent the future is you like provide something that brings us to it because I mean, there was, the internet was really slow on it. The screen size was tiny.

Like the camera was terrible compared to today. But all those things that you could just see, oh, I can see the future suddenly. And this is what it is. Just definitely a revolutionary product. But Apple has had wrong timing as well. I mentioned the Lisa. Timing is hard to get right. So you've done all this deep analysis.

I can only look back at the past and tell you when things were timed right. What about the present looking forward? Like you have a business, you have an idea, and we're going to ask the question, why now? You know, the venture capitalist who I'm trying to convince asked me, why is now the right time for your business idea?

What does that analysis look like? And what did you find is effective or ways that we can get a good sense of now, or maybe put it on the shelf and come back to it later? So I, I think of this in a, like a few high level kind of parts. So the first thing I have people look at is what I call timing drivers. So I track 12 of these in a general sense, like in the book. If you're working on like your own startup, you're probably going to do like a lot notice are changing or, you know, they are in the process of changing and you're going to benefit from them. And maybe other people have noticed this, maybe they haven't. But like you see that there is some convergence that's going to be beneficial to you. So this could be a tech driver.

This could be something on the social behavioral side. It could be like a regulatory change. But yeah, so I go through like these 12 and then like how they work. And then you're in a specific case, you're probably like going into a lot of detail on like what the specific technologies or what the specific regulatory say, you know, changes are that are relevant for you. And that's typically where I saw people drop the topic. You know, if they were thinking about why now, what do you mean? Well, they quit in the sense of like, that's as far as they're thinking, like, Hey, like the timing's good because, because you know, this new capability is out there or there's going to be 5g is the reason,

right? And they stop there. That's what you might drop it. That's what I've typically seen people do. And so I think you need to do this next part, which is you have to understand how that timing driver impacts your business model. So it either has to improve an existing business model or it needs to make a new one possible. And so what I mean is like, even the examples that we just mentioned, you know, like the old, like mobile phone examples, say, or the video phone examples, like you could do the thing, you know, like decades ago, but it was just prohibitively expensive. So like, yeah, like if you wanted to have a video phone in

1964, yeah, you could, it would just cost you $4 billion to get to that point. Or even when it was commercially rolled out, it would cost you well into the thousands of dollars and then I think like $20 a minute talk time. So you could do it, but there's something about the business model. People are not going to get enough value to pay that much for it, for example. So I kind of take the readers through, okay, how do you understand what your business model is? And then how do you understand what those timing drivers do to either improve it or make a new one possible?

And if you don't have that, you don't have an advantage related to timing. Right. So one example you give, which ties back to our iPhone, is not what made the iPhone possible, although there was lots of things there. But when the App Store launched, for instance, this was a technological change. Perhaps you'd call it, that's the timing driver, which all of a sudden put GPS with, you know, customizable software in everyone's pockets. And this made Uber, for instance, suddenly possible

where it just wasn't really, I mean, you could have done it somehow, but it would have been prohibitively slow and expensive and wouldn't have gotten adoption. Whereas that timing driver opened up a new market opportunity for the likes of Uber and Lyft, et cetera. Yeah. Is that a good example? That's a great example. And so like the interesting thing on that Uber example. So I believe it wasn't until I think the third iPhone. So this might've been like 2009 or 10 that, you know, like the phone itself had enough

processing power to do real time directions. So yeah, you had GPS and like the first 2007, you know, iPhone, but would have been difficult having like that be like real time directions when you're driving in a car. But that's that's a great example. Like and so I gave that Uber example is one where even if you think back earlier, when did civilian GPS become legal? It was like May of 2000, you know, I believe. So like after that, you see a lot of these like in-car devices, like your Garmin, TomTom, you know, they're not networked. Like they're relying on like a CD that you've, or like a bunch of CD-ROMs that you've got like in the trunk of your car. You know, it's not going to enable you to pick up passengers. They're not networked, but it took both the installed base of iPhones

and then also just better processing power, like legalization of civilian GPS to enable something like Uber. I remember back in the day, I used to run a whole different podcast. It was called the Web 2.0 Show. And we talked to, I'm not sure what you'd call it, maybe an upstart or a Skunkworks project from the Brickhouse division of Yahoo called FireEagle. And they were a geolocation service. And I recall this is like published June 2008.

Like even then, this is like post iPhone. So it's like a year into the iPhone, basically. It was still kind of weird to talk about like geolocation, you know, like that you would somehow use this geo stuff. It was all, it was a big rage at that time, like 2008, 2009. Foursquare, baby. It was even, I think it was before that even, like it predated Foursquare. It probably was because Foursquare had to, when did the app store launch?

It had to be 2009. 2008. Or thought it was 08 so either way four square definitely doesn't predate that neither does uber but you're saying this yahoo what was it called fire starter it was called fire eagle and the maybe like a labs project called brick house inside of yahoo was doing these things and one of them was called Fire Eagle and there's a artist technical article on it and all that good stuff but it's like a geolocation service and it's it's shut down like later that year I don't know why but I mean like like there they are right timing but kind of right timing like a little bit early maybe just a little premature yeah they could have hung around for a little longer they could have done something good with it. Right.

Well, another one that just comes to mind, and Paul, you may not be as familiar with this story as we are, but the Heroku story, if you go back into our catalog and listen to Adam Wiggins, who tells the story of Heroku, the timing of Heroku is like textbook perfection in terms of the convergence of all the things that came together. I mean, the timing indicators, what do you call them? You call them timing drivers? Timing drivers, yeah. Yeah. There had to be like six timing drivers that all converged. And then Adam Wiggins and

his friends were like standing right in there and was just the right people at the right time. And I don't know if they did the analysis or not. I know in retrospect they did. And he's like, wow, all these things really came together for what was a rocket ship of a company. So what year was that? This is the same timeframe, honestly. This was like post-Ruby on Rails. AWS had become out.

And so they're building on top of open source, on top of Ruby on Rails. Y Combinator was taking off. And so a lot of young startups who needed, who were using Ruby programming language and needed ways to deploy it. And then AWS as this infrastructure layer that Heroku could build upon.

Plus a few other things that I'm forgetting now, just made it a rocket ship. And you can't really plan that, but you can look around and ask yourself, that's it. Is the timing now good or not? You know, and maybe save yourself some effort if it's not right. Yeah, that's it. And that's, that's really what I'm trying to do. Like, I'm not trying to say, okay, you can predict the future, but I am saying, okay, you can look around and observe what is happening. That's probably completely outside of your control.

And then you connect those dots and then you consider, okay, I think we have these timing drivers that are advantageous. It's going to result in a business model that is better or a new one is now capable. It doesn't actually have to be like right today but at least in a realistic time frame for you so like okay a year two years later you know by the time that we are actually ready to hit the market business model is going to you know going to support that so i actually like yesterday i had chat gpt go and like look through your old um transcripts of the other podcasts just like looking i should have done this like months ago, but like just looking for times when people mentioned timing or like why now? And it comes

up quite a bit. Oh, I'm sure it does. And yeah. So like, I was like, I don't think the Heroku example was among those. So, but yeah, it certainly comes up a bit, but always, you know, people like reflecting on the past. Oh, this happened, or we realized this afterwards, that we were there at the right time. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing I'm not trying to do is I'm also not trying to say, hey, this completely removes founder agency. You're just being carried by the wind,, you know, you can't actually control what happens in the world. You know, founders absolutely do change what happens, like,

or you can pull the future forward or you can like, you know, as a result of your work and your creativity, you can make something, you know, happen that was not otherwise going to happen. But instead, I like to think of it as you could do a lot of things with your time. Maybe it's better to choose where you focus based on, hey, there's a potential timing advantage there. And, you know, that's only going to help you. That's going to help you move faster. It's going to help you grow your business bigger.

Yeah. So I like thinking about it in that way. Yeah. I think there's some analogs there with content creators, just because we happen to be podcasters. I kind of think in that lens, you know, there's never been a worse time to start a YouTube channel as today. I mean, the headwinds are there. The competition is there. It's entrenched, right? The algorithm is fickle. All the things. And yet somebody out there is starting a YouTube channel today and they are going to have massive success.

Oh my gosh. Despite all of that. Right. And so the same thing with startups and things, it's like, well, here's just another piece of analysis that you can do when you're thinking about going ahead and pouring yourself into something is, are there timing headwinds or not? And that doesn't mean that you therefore do it or don't. It's just another kind of tool in your toolbox where maybe it's enough where you're like, okay, this feels like a pretty good idea, but now I did this timing analysis

and I went ahead and did the why now session, as you call it. And now I'm really excited about it because I did all this deep analysis and it's actually looking like six months from now is like the perfect time to launch a product into this space. Some of these timing indicators though, are like unpredictable. Like one of them you mentioned is a crisis, you know, and like the folks at zoom couldn't have been better placed for COVID and the pandemic lockdowns than they were,

but they had no idea that they were going to be well, well positioned for that kind of a thing. Yeah, like the crisis driver, I included that there because there's a crisis that's happening somewhere in the world every single day. You know, so like you should think of crisis in a broad sense. But yeah, there are some businesses that benefit, say, from a crisis, like the Zoom example, just because they were already around for years, like before that. And they were just well positioned to take advantage of that. And they made that like their new secondary go to market, like, okay, everything is remote. I need to reach out to all these businesses, universities, like all the places that

previously were bringing people together in person to work together and now i'm going to sell to them you know because like they have no choice but to be remote and yeah so a company like zoom can really benefit from that but you know one of the other ways that you could think of a crisis is so if you are the type of organization that can move really quickly you might see this crisis emerging. And you even might say, I don't know how long this is going to last. Maybe this blows over in six months. People didn't really know with COVID in 2020. Maybe this blows over in six months or so, but I can move really fast. So I can enter this new market that was created because of this crisis. I can make some money. I can benefit from that not going to be able to push out anything in a few months. Better for us to just wait. Or if this is an enduring change in the world, like let's learn from the mistakes that the

early entrants made and maybe we come in later on, but we'll have to take a different approach, you know, because we're just a different organization type. But yeah, you're right. Like all of the, I mean, like the crisis ones, definitely not predictable. Even some things like say related to like the social or behavioral side, these new like social trends kind of come up and you might get some hints by looking at niches where like different communities

or there's different types of behavior, you know, kind of are emerging. So yeah, so they all, they all function a little differently. And that's where I kind of say like, this is influencing your perspective. You know, like you're, you're kind of like learning from these areas where it's, you know, like those 12 timing drivers give you places to look. And then if you're making that decision and you're coupling that with the business model question, you're coupling that with what kind of organization are you, can move really fast, is it better for you to hang back? You put that together and then it gives you some direction. And it might be a different direction than

you would have expected if you hadn't kind of gone through the process. One of the things mentioned in here is the first mover advantage. And that's an interesting one because it seems like there are moments and there are markets where it's huge. And then it also seems like there's times where it's not all that beneficial. We just, we brought up the iPhone again and going back to like early smartphone makers. It's like Apple was not the first mover in that market. Apple's rarely the first mover,

often the second mover. Vision OS, again, not the first mover, but maybe in a weird way. I don't know what's going to shake out with that particular product, but are there ways to know, like, this is a place where first mover advantage is like very advantageous

or isn't going to matter as much because the incumbents can move, can catch up quickly? Or how do you analyze that? Yeah, so that first mover advantage topic. So I actually went and I read the paper that that term comes from, which is called First Mover Advantages. Funnily enough, they use that title.

Very functional title. So it was written in 1988 and it was used in the dot-com era as the support for like funding a lot of those startups from back then. Like, hey, we are the first mover in, you know, like selling, you know, pets.com, yeah, or like, you know, like doing this or that, you know, we're first, you know, first one to do this online. And it was really a misrepresentation of what that paper was about.

I read through it and like high level, the times when it is beneficial to be the first mover are when you can control resources. So a later entrant is not going to get access to some essential resources because you've already controlled them or when you can lock in customers. So like there's some switching costs, you're not going to want to go to like the next product that might be better than you. And so, yeah, I would probably look at, you know, first movers through that lens. Like, are you in a situation where you can do those things? And that's, I would probably look at first movers through that lens. Like, are you in a situation where you can do those things?

And that's, I guess, also why there's so many AI-related products now today. And people are saying, yeah, I think long term, the incumbents are still going to own this market, even though you can't keep up. There's so many thousands of new products, you know, like being launched. And so like, do those new startups have the ability to either lock in those customers or control resources might not be the case. Like, especially since in many cases they're like dependent upon other incumbents just for like some of the infrastructure or,

yeah. So, um, yeah. So it's, it's something that I would consider when you're thinking about, you know, well,

you look at the switching costs as very... We talk about straight up API calls to language models. The switching costs are almost zero, especially as everybody formalizes around OpenAI's API spec. It's like, well, they had to publish an API. It was a pretty good one. And they were first movers in this new era of language models. And so if you actually conform to that API,

just like the S3 compatible things, switching costs are darn near zero. And then maybe you could say, well, resource constraints, if you're talking about GPU purchases and that kind of stuff, but that seems to be short-lived like that's going to be for now the real winner here is nvidia but yeah i can't see much lock-in now network effects seem like a place where you really do have lock-in right like social networks because switching costs are very high you know apple's famous blue bubbles iMessage are just astronomically strong lock-in

because of the social ramifications, which is a very strange thing. I often wonder, was that a decision of whimsy by some engineer, some user experience person? It was like, hey, let's make SMS green and iMessage blue. And they're like, good idea because that way you'll know or that'll be fun. Was that just an inconsequential

decision that had massive second order effects? Who set the color on that? What's that? Who set the color on green versus blue? Whoever was inside of Apple's engineering team or design team that designed the messaging app, right? That is so funny

because so i'm an android user and the only reason i'm an android user is that like 10 years ago i used to like put like cyanogen like a custom mod on like an android phones like for just it was fun back then you wanted to yeah and i've just remained an Android user. And I'm also like, so I don't use an iPhone. I don't use a MacBook. But my wife is an iPhone user. And it's not only the blue versus green, you know, bubbles. It's also, I want to say that a couple percent of the time, like the messages are either like from iPhones to Androids. Like it's a delay or even sometimes like it doesn't show up.

And like I don't have a problem when i'm messaging other android people but i've heard this like enough you know there's something i'm not i'm not saying it is intentional but i think there's you know there's something there that you know like some of the messages just aren't delivered or they're delivered really slowly when you go between you know the android iOS devices. Well, you have a strong marriage if it can conquer that divide. That's amazing. That's the excuse, anyway, I'm using when I didn't see something.

Didn't see it, man. Sorry. You can edit that out of the conversation, I hope. That's staying in. Sorry. That's how it works around here. If you ask for it to be edited out, unless it's literally a secret. I'm just kidding around. I was kidding, too. What's her name? Susan. Oh, that's right. She's in the book. That's right. Yeah. Oh, how about that? That's right. The second page, I think. Yeah. The dedication. Great job. Got to include that. Yeah. You got to do that because she gave

up so much of her life for you to write this book. I'm sure. Isn't that true? I mean, it is true. In any partnership, right? There's give and take. And to write a book, I know, not because I've done it, but because everybody tells me it's a huge undertaking. And surely she suffered, if not as much as you, maybe more, as you wrote this sucker. She's going to love listening to this. What's up, friends? As someone who's always been mindful of what I put in my brain and what I put in my body, I was so excited to get a chance to work with Factor. I've been a fan of Factor for a while and recently had a chance to get them on as a sponsor.

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I mean, I hope I did in the book. If that's what you're asking. Do it here in the audio if you can. Give us just a bullet list of all the drivers. Okay, so the 12 that I list are technological-related ones. So you might be thinking here of Moore's Law kind of examples, or I gave Ed Holmes' Law, other types of network-related, bandwidth-related examples. Social and behavioral changes. So there's some social and behavioral things that stay the same across centuries.

You know, like people love music. I don't think that's going away in the future, you know, no matter how long you wait, right? And there's other just maybe more cultural effects that do change generation to generation. There's regulatory and legal drivers. And some of these function like an on-off switch. It is completely prohibited to do a certain thing where it's mandated, you must do it. Others are more like a dimmer switch. There's some gray area and I give different examples there, like patent protection where it's strongly enforced versus it could be state by state, say like legalization of different products.

Installed base is another one. So when you rely upon the existence of another product that's out there, so like the smartphone or like smartphones with the App Store installed, like Uber did not need to also develop the smartphone, you know, and then hand that out to all of its customers. So you can rely on an installed base that another company invested in. The crisis one, you know, we mentioned the economic driver is, I think, pretty straightforward. So like there are growth times in the economy, times of decline that might drive different behaviors. Networks, you know, we kind of mentioned, but as opposed to the installed base examples, it's about the connections in a network.

So again, going back to the Uber example, you had people navigating with these old TomTom devices in their cars, but those were not networked. So if I want to create a rideshare business, I need whatever that device is, whether it's a smartphone or some other standalone device, I need them to be networked for the communication between the driver and picking up the passenger. Distribution is another one. So different ways that you can reach customers and resources. Capital access is a big one, especially I'll say for the last few years, because we went from an era where the money was kind of flowing, both low interest rates. So you had to look for high yield places to invest. But then also COVID era, the first part when a lot of money was pumped into the economy and startup valuations were going through the roof. And then a year and a half later, that dried up and huge

valuation cuts, startups that were expecting that they were going to be investing heavily in growth, but maybe it was not profitable growth. And then they can't raise the next round and they have to shut down. Organizational drivers. So this is where like the organizations themselves can learn internally and then be more efficient, available talent. So what is your access to people that can actually build the thing? You know, is it that there's just not enough people with, I guess, like the joke is like, I want 20 years of generative AI experience, like on my team, you know, like, you know, just like people don't exist versus like, oh, we are exist versus we are producing these new experts at a good rate. And then lastly, demographic drivers. So you might just look at how populations age or

health needs, things like that. Yeah. So I mean, it's a long list. And I figure that any startup is probably really dipping into one, two, maybe three of those. And then to make that process maybe a little easier to give people some ideas, you know, at the end of the book, I include what I call timing patterns. So, you know, we see combinations of these in different ways and what ends up happening in some of those combinations. So that might give you an idea of if you're in a, you know, like you have a tech driver with a capital access driver and a demographic driver. Like, you know, what are some examples of companies, you know, like say benefiting from that or not? But yeah, I'd say like the approach that I would take,

because you mentioned like Lean Startup, that book, you know, like changed the way people ended up building companies after that came out. Yeah. What I hope people end up doing as a result of reading this Why Now book is they've probably already been thinking about the impact timing has either on themselves or they've seen other startups, other products kind of benefit or suffer because of timing. So they've started thinking about this, but this book will give them a bit of a process to follow that I think is helpful. And then a lot of examples of other companies that either did this really well or poorly. And so, you know, I try to write it in a way that was pretty straightforward. Like, basically, I want people to be different and like to act, you know, in a different

way because they've read this. And yeah, I think a combination of like the methodology and then all the examples, it does that. I love the naming of these timing patterns. So again, the patterns are combination of drivers which you may see right are available and you've you've slapped names on these like the hermit crab yeah the little bit one the unlocked asset the clone the toy i'm imagining these are like constellations in the sky like we got a hermit crab over here guys you

know let's go it's time to attack. That's all good stuff. I love when you slap a name on something and all of a sudden we can identify a phenomenon. What would the one you've been talking about be called, Jared? You mentioned before on a couple of podcasts, I'm trying to recall which one it was, where it was somebody had been out there doing it and they weren't doing it very well anymore or not so well. And there's an opportunity for somebody to come in. How does that one align to these names names that's a good question for paul so paul here's an opportunity where you have a beloved service or product which was then acquired and has dissipated or disappeared and is a shadow of what it once was. And yet the idea, the thing it represents, still beloved.

So perhaps Foursquare would be an example. I use meetup.com as an example. The one that we were specifically talking about was Goodreads, because Nadia Adanaio had noticed that Goodreads was beloved, bought by Amazon, became part of the Borg that is Amazon, and just like people now use it kind of in despise, but they still use it because their stuff is there and their history of reviews. So she started building Storygraph, which is very much like, what if Goodreads was awesome

again, you know, in a nutshell. And I'm like, that seems like a pattern where maybe the timing is, you know, this thing is now in ruins and we can enter. Have you identified anything like that as an opportunity? I didn't list it. I mean, only because you'll have like thousands of patterns if you list every example. But I like that one. So you just need to name it.

Okay. I'll get back to you. I'm going to name that sucker and we'll get it put into some sort of writing somewhere so that, you know, people start to identify that. Maybe it's called like the relic or something, you the the renewed relic it's not bad yeah well we can workshop it yeah renewing the relic sounds like a blog post in the waiting hall you can write that one i don't like to write you apparently like to write what i do just say like you know uh quoted jared santo all right you got it you didn't have to do that part just write it up all good i do

like naming these though because like you said, Jared, it does give you this lexicon to use towards like, well, if you see something, it's like, oh, that's the clone, or that's the hermit crab. You can identify a pattern. Exactly. You're like, ooh, good timing. Naming things that team things is a popular thing.

Once you give it a name, it's easy. It's like Rigby in Silicon Valley. Sorry about that. So, for instance, here's the timing pattern called the clone. And the clone has drivers such as economic, regulatory, social, behavioral, capital access, and demographics. So this is a pretty good pattern. It's got a lot of things going for it. The clone, it says, with some localization, what is already popular in one geographic market can gain popularity in new

place. So this is basically like, here's a formula that works. Right. And here's a, when it's tied to a geography or it's tied to a ecosystem, here's a great iPhone app. I'm going to go make a similar app for Android. Right. That's basically the idea that, or there's a geographic kind of barrier that you're crossing over. Yeah. It worked well in India. Maybe it'll work well in Pakistan. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. Those are often ones that at least American startup people, you know, complain about. Because it's like not innovative. That or it just seems to be like, oh, this is like bad form. Like, I like you. But obviously, like some of these businesses become huge. Or the question is, well, why didn't you do it then? Like you should have deployed to Pakistan instead.

Right. China seems very good at these. You know, there's always like the Chinese version of the American tech company, you know. And some of those, like in the China example, like in some of those cases, like the American companies are just prohibited from entering the China market. So like, yeah, so you just you just created a new market. You know, if you prohibit an external company from coming in, like basically all the social media companies, you know, like we're we're either kicked out or blocked. Yeah. So then you have the domestic Chinese versions that pop up. And based on their population size, they end up eclipsing the original.

Yeah, exactly. It's amazing. That works in a country that's got a huge population. It wouldn't really work well in Bermuda, I guess. Right. Yeah, you got to pick and choose when you do that. Also not as easy to pull off in free markets, right? Where anybody can just enter.

Yeah, exactly. What about bad patterns? That's next. If we're chronologically or in order of operations, let's say timing patterns is one section, then the very next section is bad patterns. So what's the deal here? Hey, Adam, it's pretty easy.

Bad patterns are just, you know, they're patterns, but they're bad. I mean, no. So like on this one, so early in the book, I gave this walkthrough in quite a bit of detail on YouTube and like how everything basically worked out like really well in terms of timing for YouTube. And I go through like this, you know, the whole, like with the Winehouse session with them as a case study. And I use them as a case study, not only because everybody knows that company, but also because the investment memo from Sequoia, which typically is kept private, but that was made public because of a lawsuit. And so we have all of the numbers, all the you know, users, their cost structure, like, you know, all of that we have, you know, as a result. And I quoted some parts of that and like

the Sequoia investor, you know, Rolf Botha, who had recognized there's this time and advantage in YouTube's case in like 2005 or whatever. So he assessed that really well. And then 10 years later, he actually wrote a piece in TechCrunch about why 2016 is VR's breakout year. I think he called back to the YouTube example from 10 years earlier, but he wasn't right that time. It was not a breakout year for VR in 2016. So I kind of tried to assess like why that was the case. And unlike the YouTube example, where YouTube was being carried along by broadband into the home, people now have laptops with computers built in, becoming pretty normal to take video, you know, of yourself or, you know, friends, and then share that, you know, unlike a lot of that, on the VR example, you know, friends and then share that, you know, unlike a lot of that on the VR

example, you know, we had this installed base problem. So it's kind of like goes back to the picture phone example that we were talking about earlier on, like, well, you know, not everybody has a headset yet. Oh, these headsets are still pretty expensive. You know, like this is not yet anyway, the type of thing that people will sit on for hours and hours as they ended up doing with YouTube. So there's some differences there. And I think some differences in the drivers. Definitely, there's differences in the business model that was supporting or what eventually supported YouTube. And then what is still kind of questionable in the VR side.

But yeah, like the bad patterns like, I list a few of them. So, you know, like that one as an example, or, you know, the wrong curve. So you think something's going to be exponential and, you know, it just flattens out, plateaus or vice versa, you know, which again kind of calls back to the AT&T, you know, McKinsey mobile phone, you know, example, you know, one that I think some startup people get wrapped up in or, It kind of calls back to the AT&T, McKinsey Mobile phone example. One that I think some startup people get wrapped up in. Or it even calls back to that Mark Anderson quote that you mentioned. I call this one the illusion of immediacy.

Oh, this new thing is possible. It's going to take over the world immediately. And no, it actually is going to take over the world, but it's going to take 10 years. 10 years. Yeah, and we're out of time by the time that happens. Yeah, we're out of money by the time that happens. Yeah. Paul, can you take all of these patterns,

all of this knowledge, whether they be anti and pro, and can you answer this one simple question? When is the year of the Linux desktop? Gosh. I knew it was going to be something like that. We're waiting. 3,411. Wow.

Oh my goodness. So basically never. Well, he's gone on record here. So for those of you listening to this in the future, because your AGI tapped into it and told us there was a prediction of 3,411. And so all hail Paul Orlando for doing that one right. Thank you. I like questions like that. I won't be around to be held accountable. That's right. They're completely unfulfilling. I like those too. When you write a book like this, though, you have will be able to better devote their time. So they'll still do things that they're passionate about. But if it's a question of,

hey, I've got a lot of options, I'm going to think about timing as a way to make a decision. And then I'm going to do something that I think will benefit from timing. That's just going to help me along the way. I hope so related to that, you know, I hope that our cousins in these large corporate environments where maybe they have an in-house labs or like they've got like 50 different potential products that they are trying to figure out how to put resources behind or what to keep, what to kill. I hope that timing will become another way they filter opportunities and decide where to put resources. Similar things

for startups that are pitching for capital or investors that are evaluating startups. We recognize timing is important. How could I actually step through that with some type of a process that's helpful and then get to a place where if I'm the startup, I either represent what we're doing appropriately. This is why the time is right, you know, in a why now slide or on the investor side, lots of things we can invest in, but we should be in this area. Like, I don't know exactly who's going to win. I'm not predicting which team, if there are 100 different startups doing something similar. But we should have some type of place in this new market. So I hope it's things like that that come out of this.

I would really want people to apply this in what they choose to work on and what they choose to invest in and what they choose to do. But absolutely like founders do influence what happens in the world. So, you know, you can take this, you know, like this book and say, you know, I'm still really passionate about this topic. I'm going to pull the future forward. I'm just going to do it anyway, or I'm willing to wait the 10 years that I think it's going to take for it to have a supportable business model. I'm going to get through that in some other way. But yeah, to your question, I really hope that it's going to change the way people actually build or invest in companies. This reminds me of the SWOT analysis, S-W-O-T, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, is a framework for thinking and a framework for evaluating and obviously deciding.

It also reminds me of the conjoined triangles of success, which is made famous by Jack Barker in the TV show called Silicon Valley. Jack, shouldn't we hire engineers to build the platform before we get people to sell it? No, God, no. The system, Richard. Sales and engineering are the two pillars of the conjoined triangles of success. Engineering and sales must work together to decide what to build. I think you need something like that.

Could you distill this down into a visual? I think that might also be an igniter for this, this book, this idea. Some sort of smaller framework that's visual, like this water analysis, like you do with the drivers. And that's kind of what you do with the YouTube examples. You kind of go through that. Can you take what you did there with that case study and condense it into something that's a little bit more compressed that gives it like here i've i've battle tested this against the you know the why now pattern framework or whatever it might be are you did you draw something are you showing us something i drew it i drew it okay i don't know

if you can see that so so that's that's not exactly what you're talking about but like that graphic that i returned to chaotic yeah it needs to be, I just have too many dots on it. That's why I just removed some of the dots, but yeah. So I represent timing if like time is on the X axis and then successes and failures are on the Y axis. So I returned to this diagram again and again in the book, but it's basically like there's a dangerously early phase. There's a market window opens phase, and then there's a not too late phase. And you can choose like any of those spots to enter even dangerously early. If you say, Hey, yeah, we're, we're willing to just stick it out. We're going to wait. You can choose to enter, you know, not too late, you know, as a niche player.

And then maybe something happens like in your Goodreads example, the incumbent starts to decline and then we can displace them. But I do like the idea of having just a simple graphic of this. And maybe I can actually just think on that a bit more. But I also wanted people to go through and have their own assessment of their own specific process so one of the other big ideas is like it's more dangerous to be too early than it is to be too late and if we like if we just look at this historically back to the youtube example there was a dot-com era startup that was doing user generated video content over dial-up and which i had no idea existed i found an interview with the guy you know like years afterwards was reflecting yeah

like we shut down in 2001 like four years before youtube but we were too early what too early is might not be all that many years in some cases i I don't know. That's my, I guess my comment on diagrams. Yeah. Yeah. Is this something you'd want to teach? Like if somebody said, hey, come help us decide why now and give us a course on this. Help our leaders and executives understand this framework and come help us navigate it. Would you be that kind of person?

Is that what you could do? Yeah. So I, um, I kind of went through figuring this stuff out by doing this as a workshop. So I visited a number of startup accelerators and I ran this as a workshop, you know, I teach at USC. So I've done this also at a few other universities where I like would go and like, you know, talk to one of their classes. I'm now starting to do this with not really the super early stage, but either later stage companies or companies where they have an in-house labs. And so it is kind of that example of we have lots of things that we could be working on or putting resources behind. We need another filter on where to put our attention. Yeah, I kind of got to this

point by doing this a number of times in different environments. But yeah, I like that. So yeah, if anybody wants to talk, I'm happy to do this as a workshop or a talk with your company. I like the idea of that because if somebody can just buy a case of your books, for example, prerequisites is buy a case of my books, pay me $10,000, fly me out there, roll out the carpet, all the good stuff, and you just get to travel the world with your wife and do some fun things and teach people why now, the whole principles of it. And maybe through that experience, you can eventually distill down this graphic we talked about some sort of condensed version of it because you know in a lot of cases what that requires is more thought but sometimes iteration on like you said before as a teacher you know this as a teacher's like you learn as you teach and so you sort of refine how you teach and the tooling and the tactics you use to teach

and so maybe what that might be is, is through iteration getting there. Yeah. Good. Well, I welcome the, uh, the invitations. How can I get ahold of you? What's the best way? Let's get you hired. Yeah. Love it. A couple of ways you could find me, uh, I guess for this easiest way, you know, find me on LinkedIn, just, you know, P Orlando or just search Paul Orlando. You could find me through my site, which is called startupsunplugged.com. Twitter, you know, P. Orlando. So one of those ways will get to me.

Gotcha. Well, we'll make sure that we have your LinkedIn updated on your profile on the episode page so that anybody going to the episode page can link out to at least your LinkedIn. And we'll obviously link up in the show notes all the other things you just mentioned too. But yeah, I mean, like if you can turn this book into like the next big thing and you can ride that wave, why not?

Is now a good time? Now's a good time. Let's do it. Actually, a cool follow-up to why now could be why not? Oh yeah. You could write a book called Why Not? It's got the sequel built in. Yeah.

Then you'd have a series. So the book in paperback, 10 bucks cheap, right? 10 bucks in paperback. Why Not? It's got the sequel built in. Yeah. Then you have a series. So the book in paperback, 10 bucks cheap, right? 10 bucks in paperback. Why now? How good time he makes great products. It's on Amazon. You can get it on Kindle.

Paul, what's the best way to buy the book that puts the most money in your pocket versus perhaps Jeff Bezos pocket? Is it Amazon? Is there a better place? Amazon is, yeah. Amazon would be the place. That's the spot.

That's the spot. All right. Fair enough. Very cool. Thanks for stopping by and sharing with us, man. Good stuff. Yeah. Thanks for having me back.

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