This Week in Startups - Decoding Customer Insights, Trust, and the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework with Bob Moesta | E1943

Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm very, very lucky. I've had four kind of amazing mentors. I painted them. So as a dyslexic, I can't read, but I paint every night. Think of me as 18 years old, told to be a baggage handler or a construction worker. These people took an illiterate 18 year old and turned me into an innovation machine. They literally poured their knowledge into me to enable me to work on 3,500 different products and services. I've done eight startups. For all the practical purposes, I should be a baggage handler. I love this all awareness. I was going to be a cop.

Starting point is 00:00:34 And the internet happened. This week in startups is brought to you by HubSpot for podcast networks. Looking to up your marketing game? Check out the podcast Marketing Against the Grain, hosted by HubSpot CMO Kip Bodner and Zapier CMO Kieran Flanagan. They bring you the latest in marketing trends, growth tactics, and innovation. available on all your favorite podcast apps. LinkedIn jobs.

Starting point is 00:01:02 A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com slash Twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. And Zendesk. The best customer experiences are built with Zendesk. Qualifying startups can join their startup program and get Zendesk products free for six months. Visit Zendesk.com slash twist. today to get started. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I am super excited

Starting point is 00:01:32 about our next guest because not a lot of people have studied product and customers to the level of today's guest, Bob Mesta. If you're in the industry, you know him. You know him already. He's the founder and CEO of the Rewired group. And he works with early stage founders to help them get product market fit to understand their customers very deeply. And we're going to have a very deep discussion today about understanding your customers and running your company at the early stages. Yeah. Welcome to the program, Bob. Hey, thanks.

Starting point is 00:02:04 Thanks for having me on. It's my pleasure. I have been following your work and, you know, now and again, my founders, we'll talk about your framework. Jake, Jake was just on, right? Yeah, he mentioned it. And I was like, you know what? When somebody's name gets mentioned 10 times and they haven't been on the pod and they're in the startup world, I'm like, I've been doing the show for 14 freaking years and

Starting point is 00:02:23 we're almost 2,000 episodes in. I apologize for not having you on already. I'm happy to be here, my friend. Thanks for having to be again. Let's start with. And I know you work with Clayton Christensen. I know there's a lot of frameworks out there, but you have a framework that my friends at Intercom,

Starting point is 00:02:40 the guys at 37 signals, a lot of people who I really respect, Des Trainer talks about you, Jason Free from 37 signals, both big friends of the pod. They've both been on three or four times each. Yeah, yeah. Bob, explain your framework as it sits today, and I believe you're 30 years into doing this.

Starting point is 00:02:59 Yeah, I belong. Well, so the first thing to realize is that my mom would tell you I was an engineer out of the womb. I basically started breaking things by the time I was two. I was fixing things by the time I was four. I've been building things since almost eight years old. And so I've loved to build. I've been, I have an electrical engineering undergrad. I have studied both mechanical and chemical masters. I've all about building stuff. And to be honest, it starts with the lie I was told in engineering school, which is build it and they will come. I mean, that is the biggest sin ever told. Isn't it? And it's what they make you feel like you're doing and feel like you're supposed to be doing the whole time.

Starting point is 00:03:39 It's like, oh, I have this great idea. I don't go do it. Well, I learned very, very quickly that I had no idea what people wanted and that I had to actually go out and figure that part out. And the other part is I'm dyslexic. So I have had three close head brain injuries. I can't read and I can't write. And so I had to literally go learn how to interrogate people. You're good at talking and listening.

Starting point is 00:04:01 And listening and listening. The key is listening. Which is a key superpower. I will tell you what people sometimes stop me. They go, what are you listening to? I'm saying, I'm listening for what's not been said. I'm listening to where the energy is in the sentence. And they're like, what are you talking about?

Starting point is 00:04:18 Most people are just listening to the words. You've got to listen to the intent. behind the words. That's the real key. And so I went out and basically started to figure out what causes people to say today's the day they want something new. So I've been studying what causes people to change for the last 30 years on everything from Pokemon mac and cheese to base camp to, you know, I've worked on the Patriot Missiles guidance system. So I've worked on so many different things, but it's all getting back to what's the objective and understand the struggling moment. Steve Jobs and Henry Ford had profound insights into this about, you know, the customer is not always right.

Starting point is 00:05:00 Sometimes they don't know what they want and what they say. And I really want you to explain this from a very first principled way. Why is believing what the customer says not the best modality for understanding what customers want? Because it would seem on its face. If you ask people what they want, they'll tell you. Thank you for waiting 14 years to ask that question, because that's such a great question, right? So there's three real reasons why they don't, right? One is most customers are very problem aware, but they're not solution aware.

Starting point is 00:05:33 So they actually don't know what's even possible. So they only can articulate features or functions or products that they've seen in the past, but it has nothing to do with what could be possible. So what you want to do is ask them about what they would use. and then what can they do that they can't do today and what's the outcome they want? Because if we get the outcome, then I can actually start to understand all the different ways they can do it. But most people talk in outputs, the output they want.

Starting point is 00:06:00 I want an agenda. I want a calendar. I want this to be organized. It's like, but for what purpose? And the more we can actually understand the purpose. So I think we started right before we got on. We talked about losing some weight, right? I lost weight because the only way I get to see my children.

Starting point is 00:06:18 children is to go skiing, right? And so I, but I've designed it that way. Like, I don't want to go see them and their hometown because at some point, like, what do we do is we walk around, we go see museums and then we eat a bunch of food. And it's like, okay, that's a, but we like to get together. And so part of it is getting them home is hard. And so what I do is I pick these places throughout the winter. And then they have icon passes.

Starting point is 00:06:39 And basically I have lots of miles. And so we basically figure out how to come together and see each other. And so I lost 100 pounds, not because I want to lose 100 pounds. I knew I was fat from I was, I'm sorry, I was obese or large. You and I were fat. Let's just call when it's. You can describe yourself. I'll describe myself.

Starting point is 00:06:56 I was a fat bastard. And the thing is, is I was in the Husky section back. Like, I'm at a weight where I had been in this weight since middle school. Got it. Right? But it had nothing to do with me losing weight. It had everything to do with me spending time with my kids and being physically able to do things. And so once I changed it from the output of weight to the outcome of literally skiing with my kids,

Starting point is 00:07:17 everything changed. Everything changed. Now, I just had Charles Duhigg on the program. They wrote a book called Super Communicators and Power of Habit. And this is just such a great bookend for his episode. I'm deep listening to you. And I know, having done my research for this podcast, your modalities and some of your techniques. Yes.

Starting point is 00:07:36 So the technique I'm supposed to do when you're talking and I'm deep listening is to ask you somehow the follow-up question, if this was an actual customer, interview. I as the founder, and if I had some weight loss product or something, yeah, yeah, yeah, you've, the intonation there about, I want to go skiing, I want to spend time with my kids. Right. It can't be fat and ski because you'll get injured. It's just not going to work. And so now I'm thinking, well, why is it important to spend time with their kids? Right. I'm thinking, what is, you know, and then what.

Starting point is 00:08:10 That's exactly right. What question should I be asking here to get you to open up a little bit more? And I, since I love skiing, I'm like, ah, I know, it's not about skiing. It's not, it's about the time. And so then I know that the ski lift for a dad, because I have two eight-year-olds and a 14-year-old, the ski lift is when you capture your kids without their devices, having just had a flow experience with them,

Starting point is 00:08:32 and now you're in the afterglow of flow. Exactly. And this creates memories and joy and connection, which with you and I as dads, covet more than anything. money, sex, power, celebrity, fame, none of it matters as much as connecting with our children. Yes. And so here's the other thing. So all my kids are now out of the house. So I'm totally empty. And so the only time I get to see them. So here's the thing is one of the other things I did is you're going to laugh at this. But I have a, I have what I call it death day. If you see that, it says 1325. So it's December 17th, 2027.

Starting point is 00:09:15 And what I did is I had learned that basically people who had near-death experiences value time so much more than everybody else. And to the point where some of them make them really, really, really wildly successful because they value time because they only know they have so much time. And so I kept trying to figure out how can I do this for myself? How do I figure out how to have a near-death experience without having a near-death experience? And so I have superimposed it. My mother, who was a saint, like, again, raising me as a child was a very difficult task at hand.

Starting point is 00:09:45 And she'd always defer everything to when she was going to retire. She was a school teacher in the city of Detroit. And she basically said, oh, I'll do that when I retire. I'll do that when I retire. She retired at 62 and basically lasted four months and found out she had stage four colon cancer and died within the year. And so I took her birthday and her death day and added it to mine. And so I will be her age exactly on that day. And so my whole thing is to think about it is like if my mom didn't have a choice,

Starting point is 00:10:14 but I do have choices and I can be better reflective about it. How do I spend more time on the right things? So the first thing I did is I literally got rid of the bottom 20% of my clients, just got right out of the hat. You were like, these clients don't appreciate me. No, no, no, it had nothing to do it. You don't get value. Oh, your time.

Starting point is 00:10:33 It had to do with your time. They didn't value my time. And if I don't value the time, then I can spend the time somewhere else. And so it's all about time, right? And so all of a sudden... Your currency is time. That's right. And so then what happened is you start to realize, well, I started this when I was seven years.

Starting point is 00:10:47 And I see my kids once a quarter. So that seven times four is 28. I see my kids 28 more times in my life. Talk about emotional. Yeah. Hey, everybody. If you're passionate about elevating your marketing game, you've got to check out the HubSpot YouTube Network.

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Starting point is 00:12:14 And so that's where I realized 300 pounds is not going to work for me. You and I, you know, it's very interesting. Men of a certain age, at certain life experiences. My friend Tony Shea died three years ago. Tragically, you know, from Zappos. This is one of those triggers, right? You kind of go like triggered my age. I was talking to a friend.

Starting point is 00:12:31 He said, what do you love to do for yourself? You know, your friend died. And you really got to be thinking about things you enjoy. yourself. I said, you know, I invest in companies. I do my podcast. Like, you do that to help other people, right? I'm like, yeah, but I enjoy it. But it's primarily a business for other people. For you. I say, I play cards. You know, my guys get together every Thursday. We've been playing this card game for one time. I was like, that's great. What else? Like, that's it. That's all I do. I do my kids. I do my job. And he said, is there anything else you love? And I said,

Starting point is 00:12:56 you know, I loved going ski. I was the last time we was skiing. I was like, three or years ago. How often you go? I was like, I did three or four days, one trip every two years or something. he's like, why don't you do more? I'm like, I don't know. We should. And I bought a ski house. Oh, did you really? Skied 100 days and three years.

Starting point is 00:13:13 And I just, it changed my whole framing. So now you and I have this very thoughtful discussion. And this is what you do. Yeah. You do a small number of deep discussions, deep discussions, deep discussions, maybe a dozen. And then you would rather do two rounds of interviews with a dozen than get to 24 or 50. You want to do a small number. I don't need the quantitative.

Starting point is 00:13:36 The quantitative stuff is actually easier to get. The qualitative stuff is like, it's the language. So I always talk about the work that I do is about hypothesis building research. Most research is designed to prove hypotheses you have. And as a dyslexic and as a ADHD person, I would always say, I don't have a hypothesis. I'm not smart enough yet. So the work that I'm doing is actually going out and getting the hypotheses from the people that are actually going to use the product, as opposed to me sitting at a conference room

Starting point is 00:14:04 guessing what they're going to want. And this is what we just did in this discussion. If you were running one of our startups, Nutrisense, which does nutrition and... I've been working with them for a while. They're great. You're working with the team of NutriSense. Unbelievable.

Starting point is 00:14:19 They started tech stars. So I know the jobs of NutriSense. I can tell you what they are. The whole positioning is around it. And it's very, very interesting. By the way, that little device has changed my life. Yeah, the glucose monitor, continuous glucose monitor, CGM. So when you and I are talking about this, whether we were running OZempic or Nutrisense, whatever it is,

Starting point is 00:14:41 doesn't matter. This, what we just did right now, this deep heartfelt, deep listening conversation about the outcomes, not like, I want to lose weight. Why do you want to lose weight? You know, with the generic, be healthier. Like, it's almost like they responded would be like, uh, we got to like, yeah, when people answer it that way, like, I had to be healthier. I can say, your chance of success is zero.

Starting point is 00:15:04 Zero, exactly. You're not, it's not a reason, right? This is where people, there's a, so there's a phrase I have, I say, bitch it ain't switching. And there's a lot of people who bitch about things, but they don't necessarily do something about it. The people you have to figure out is the energy required to make the change is way bigger than we all think it is. And so part of it is to understand that there's forces that are at play.

Starting point is 00:15:25 And we need to actually realize that context adds as much value as the product. Right? So think of it as like, do you like steak or do you like pizza? Yes. Yeah, the answer is yes. And so what you do is you start to go, right, but let me take a pizza situation. You're just getting home. The kids are coming home from soccer. And it's like, okay, I'm going to throw pizza on the table, right? Let's take the pizza out and put steak in there. How well does steak fit in that situation?

Starting point is 00:15:49 That's so good. Yeah, it takes a lot of time. Right. And they're going to be hungry and they're probably going to be full by the time you get the steak done. It's just like, and you start to realize like the context actually adds as much value as the product in that moment or it detracts from it. So you start to realize that a product success is engulfed in both the context that it's used and the outcomes they want to achieve. And so that's really, that's really the thing that I've realized is, so I had, I'm very, very lucky. I've had four kind of amazing mentors. I want to show you. So these are my four mentors. I painted them. So as a

Starting point is 00:16:24 dyslexic, I can't read, but I paint every night. And so these are my four mentors, Dr. Deming, Dr. Clayton Christensen, Dr. Gini Tegi Toguchi, and Dr. Willie Moore. Think of me as 18 years old, told to be a baggage handler or a construction worker. These people took an illiterate 18-year-old and turned me into an innovation machine. They literally had poured their knowledge into me to enable me to work on 3,500 different products and services. I've done eight startups. And for all the practical purposes, I should be a baggage handler. I love the self-awareness.

Starting point is 00:17:00 I was going to be a cop. And the internet happened, yeah. But mine was, by the way. No, no, nothing's wrong with being a bagged trailer. But the reality is like at some point in time,

Starting point is 00:17:10 you have to realize that your, your destiny is determined by the people that you know. We get back to people, right? Because I met Deming, Dr. Deming is the father of quality. He's the gentleman who went to Japan and built the Toyota production system. He's the father of lean.

Starting point is 00:17:24 I sat down next to him thinking, it was one of my friend's grandfathers. And I asked them 52 questions in 22 minutes. And he turned to me and said, God, you're one of the most curious kids I've ever met. How'd you like to be my intern for the summer? That's how I got my first internship. Amazing.

Starting point is 00:17:41 I want to get into each of these four and what you learned for them. Put that in your head and put a pin in it. What I want to ask you right now is I want to close the loop on our discussion about weight. Now, if you were Nutrisense, if you were Ozampic, and you had done what we just did, this discovery. process of really deep listening and getting to the context and a deeper reason why people wanted to lose weight. What do I do with that information?

Starting point is 00:18:06 Now, I have you, you're an N of 1, right? I think that's a fancy way saying you're a sample size of 1. What an end of one implies is there's a causation that you can actually understand of why I bought it, why I did something with it, right? And so what we want to do is we want to compare the patterns of how I bought to the competitors of how you bought, how other people bought, and you start to realize there's not one reason, right? But there's not a million reasons either. It turns out that there's four or five different kinds of vectors of directions that people buy. And when we understand those,

Starting point is 00:18:39 then we can actually make choices about how do we serve because, to be honest, their value code is different each path. So some people are going to value it for basis. So let's say Nutrisin. Some people are going to value it because of what they learn out of it. Some people are going to value it because they can show it to their doctor. But the people who show us, to the doctor don't really care about the insights. So you start to realize, like, when they're in a mindset, they actually value it very differently. And so how do we then sell to these different people, these different situations? Well, in modern marketing, because of the internet, because of the duopoly of what Facebook and Google have accomplished, we're able to really hyper-target and understand this.

Starting point is 00:19:17 That's correct. You know, gentlemen who are in their late 50s or 60s, you know, could have kids and grandkids. Yes. You could very much figure out through psychographics and other determinants that they have a weight issue. You could create a landing page. You could create with this persona, this bucket, and say, these are the messages that Nutrisense needs to give this person. That's right. The doctor one, the hero image on that page needs to be the person in a doctor's office talking to their doctor with their spouse, something that evokes for them. That's right. know, that they're like being really thoughtful about it. But the other one could be, you know, this older gentleman with their kids, with their kids

Starting point is 00:20:00 at the ski mountain carrying their skis. That's right. That's right. Or us on the ski lift, the moment you and I, but I would never have thought about that. Just a picture from the ski lift. That's it. That tells you exactly what you. Smiling and looking at each other, three generations.

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Starting point is 00:21:38 Terms and conditions do apply. So here's the big difference. The big difference is this, is most of the time people are trying to find personas. And then they're trying to imply what personas would do. And that's very dangerous because what happens is we can talk about like existing behavior where people can be very predictable because they're habits. But when they change their habit, they're actually not that predictable. And so part of it is like you couldn't tell me when somebody's going to change, but I can tell you if this and this and this happened to them, they will change. And so now we can actually start to understand the moments of when people.

Starting point is 00:22:13 So for example, this is why I have a big problem with Tam. The total addressable market is how many businesses are. there that could use your product. But how many people are out there that actually are struggling with your, with the, with the problem that you solve? It's probably one-tenth of the size of the TAM. And so that's where all of a sudden everything's over, over, you know, overblown because it just doesn't look at kind of the struggling moment.

Starting point is 00:22:35 So think of it as who, when, where, and why. Those are the four things I have to know to be really good at product, and to be really good at startups. And most people might know who and they talk about personas, but then they don't know the the where, when, and why. And that's where the secret sauce is, because in some case, it's more about when, where, and why than it is sometimes about the people. Because I could be, my kids have been grown, but it also could be an uncle who's missing their, their nephews and nieces and watching them grow up. It's the same problem. So many investors missed Airbnb.

Starting point is 00:23:08 Yeah. They couldn't get their heads around it. Brian and Joe, both on the program in the last year. Great guests. Look it up folks. Joe Jebia and Ryan, of course. And they have this famous story, talk to 30, 40 investors. Everybody says, no, nobody gets it. They missed it. Now, if you had talked to the Airbnb early users, how would you have done this Socratic interview, there are a piece session. Maybe we could even role play it here.

Starting point is 00:23:40 But, you know, like, let's get into. So part of this is. I think about decision making. And I'm asking this in a selfish way, Bob. Yep. Yep. I think about my decision making as an investor and how I can be a better decision maker constantly. Yes.

Starting point is 00:23:53 And my blind sides. And I'm looking for weird companies that I don't understand. And this is one that's so weird that I didn't get to hear the pitch, but other people I know who did, you know, obviously missed it. The first thing is, is what is the real struggling moment? Because there's more than enough hotel rooms. Yes. This is not a hotel problem. There's so many hotel rooms.

Starting point is 00:24:13 It's a tyranny. It's a tyranny of choice. But when you go. So I have four kids. So when I would have to go on vacation, I have to get at least three rooms, at least three rooms. So the struggling moment is,

Starting point is 00:24:24 and we don't feel like we're actually at a house. We feel like we're at a hotel, right? And so part of this is actually there's a certain kinds of vacations where you want to spend time and hang. You can't do that at a hotel. Where do you hang in the hotel? A lobby is awkward.

Starting point is 00:24:42 The bar. The bar. The bar. Not with kids. Not in your road. The pool? Maybe. Yeah, people go to the pool.

Starting point is 00:24:48 Maybe. That's nice. But you start to realize, like, at some point in time, when the trip is more about actually spending time together and reminiscing or basically do it, you start to realize there's no place like that and that people will give up places to sleep to have more places to actually interact. So this is about the kitchen. It's about the kitchen. It's about the living room. It's about the shared space. The hot tub.

Starting point is 00:25:13 The bedroom. Yes. The backyard. The bedroom is actually the place. where actually most people spend the least amount of time and they have it because they can work or they can do something out like they can sleep. But the reality is like most people are getting Airbnb

Starting point is 00:25:25 because it's not basically a hotel. So they're not selling, if I pause or something, they're not selling a place to sleep. They're selling a place to hang. That's right. And if you look at their ads, they do it perfectly. A place to spend time together. And to be honest, if I went to visit my kids,

Starting point is 00:25:44 I'd go to a hotel and then we'd end up spending, time in the museum or we spend time at the bar. But like, I want to spend just sitting on the couch talking about like, how's the work going? Yeah, have a cup of tea, shoot the fat. And so part of this is to realize you have to get past what they say to what do they mean. And where are the struggling moments and where are the emotional aspects of everyone in decisions? So this is where most people would think that most decisions are very rational. But what I'll tell you is that in the The bigger world, the fact is there's almost always the irrational decision that gets made. And typically, when you see an irrational decision, it's not their problem. It's your problem.

Starting point is 00:26:25 Meaning the moment I actually understand their context, the irrational becomes rational. And so typically, when I see an irrational behavior, it means I don't know the story yet. I'm missing a big piece of the story because there's no way in hell they would do that for just this. And you start to realize, like, you need to actually understand the whole story. The key, though, is that in these interviews, 10 interviews, not a lot, each element, there's forces, there's pushes, there's a push of the situation, there's a pull of the outcome that they're looking for. There's an anxiety force that creates frictional. There's something that they love about the old thing that actually creates friction. And you start to, like, you piece this together to realize what had to happen for them to say, today's the day, I need to buy this new CRM, or today's the day, I need a new mattress. It's all the same process. And what we do is we do is we, we We frame it and we make trade-offs because there is no ideal solution ever, right? It never perks out. You always either pay more or it's not exactly what you want.

Starting point is 00:27:22 And so ultimately we have what most, so April Dunford and I did a lot of work in sales, right? One of the things we realized that 60% of proposals that go out go unanswered, no choice. And probably, and most of the reason why is because people don't know how to make the decision when you only give them one choice. So I always tell people to give three choices. Because here's the first thing. Do you know the answer? Why you give three?

Starting point is 00:27:48 Well, yeah, usually they can eliminate one or two and then find the one they like. So if you really study it hard, here's what happens. They have A, B, and C. And the first thing you do is you give them confidence by eliminating one of the three. Let's say it's B. And they actually get confidence in it. Like, I don't want that. I know I don't want that.

Starting point is 00:28:08 Right. It's too expensive. it's easier for people to say what they don't want than what they want. Yes. So now they have two left. Then you'd see the rational thing would be, I'm going to compare A and C together each other, but that's not what they do. They actually compare A to B and C to B to say which one's closer,

Starting point is 00:28:23 and then they eliminate the next one. And so they end up saying, well, I'll take, well, the way the phrasing you'll get is I'll take A. What do you mean you'll take A? It's because they eliminated B and C. Yes. That's what's left. Yes, it's a process of elimination. should we all learn this doing multiple choice tax that's right we've learned this in dating we've

Starting point is 00:28:43 learned it in picking a college we've learned it in picking food choices i don't want mexican i don't like spicy food yeah okay i don't like mexican i don't want spicy i take out the indian spice i got kids with me i need so okay now what's left yes exactly that's that's how that's how we make decisions and so this is where in the conference room we feel like everybody's rational but what you realize is in the real world everybody's irrational because we don't know their context And context drives the rationale. It's just so profound when you think about it. When you go into these interviews, customer interviews,

Starting point is 00:29:15 and people who are here on This Weeking Startups, do customer interviews regularly, hopefully. A lot of people have a script. A lot of people have, like, a lot of goals. A lot of people coming with preconceived notions. I think you have a different approach. Yeah. Explain Bob's approach here.

Starting point is 00:29:30 So my approach is basically that I want to have a conversation so I can extract their story. in the wild without my painting of their story. Because them changing from a product A to product B or making some switch, it just didn't happen randomly. And so I don't need a long list. I don't need a long list of questions. All I have to know is, to be honest, is what did you change from and two?

Starting point is 00:29:56 When did you do it? And then I go backwards. And I go back to find like what were happening to them that made them even become aware of the problem. And then when they became aware of the problem, how do they match it to a set of solutions. And then ultimately, when they saw the solutions, how do they decide which one to pick? And then once they decide which one to pick, how well did it actually meet their expectations? And you start to realize, like, now I'm not actually asking people about the future. I'm asking

Starting point is 00:30:21 people about real behavior of stuff they did to basically figure out kind of the elements that have to be present for them to value your product. And then what I do is we then take the looking backwards lens where we create variables. And we say, all right, these are the variables involved that actually make your product more valuable when they're in this situation and they want this outcome. And now we can sell to it. We go find people who are in those situations. We go find people who want those outcomes. And then we help them, no, no, then we help them actually add the missing ingredients to enable them to move. Because most of the time, you don't have all the ingredients. They're missing two or three things.

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Starting point is 00:32:17 Get ready to scale with the best in customer support. Go to Zendesk.com slash twist. That's Zendesk.com slash TWIST. And I just want to say thank you to the Zendesst team. They've been sponsoring this program for a decade. And Zendesk, you know, they're the best. That's the gold standard. Got it. So they want to make this got confi, this incredible dish. They want to make the rigatoni alavacca. They don't have the vodka. Right. And without that ingredient, they can't complete the mission, which means in this case, the mission might be buying your car or your service or your SaaS product. That's right. So the preconditions and the situation where they need you, they need you for an engagement ring and a diamond when they're getting married. Yes. Or when they're celebrating an anniversary.

Starting point is 00:33:02 Then if you were to ask them, you know, like, you know, well, how are you picking a diamond? Yes. You know, and when I went through this and I have a company, Stone Algo, and I had this like very socratic discussion with the marketplace. And the fear of being ripped off. Yep. Yep. Is pronounced because you feel like there's so many variables.

Starting point is 00:33:23 There's so much inventory. There's so many sellers. There's so much at stake. It's such a large, considered purchase. And the person has to love it on. the other side. So then you look at something like Blue Nile and how they've navigated this or Stone Algo, our company, is being able to bring the diamond back guaranteed if the spouse doesn't like it. Yep. Critical. And then all of a sudden the fear goes away. But it's an anxiety

Starting point is 00:33:49 reducer. So we talk about that as something like, oh, you could bring it back. Like, because at some point when they're not buying it for them, they actually don't know what to buy. And so part of it is unique situation, isn't it? Because they don't get to say to the person, which diamond do you like? That's right. By the way, the engagement surprise. By the way, it happens in B2B all the time. The buyer never asked the user what they want. Yeah. Right. Well, this is what I have. I have slack. Would you like slack? I don't need to ask you. I have slack. You need slack. It's like, by the way, that's where job doesn't work where there's no choice. The whole key to it is that it's free will, that you have the choice to choose where you want to go. So like, think of health insurance.

Starting point is 00:34:29 insurance is actually kind of a, it's, it's, you don't actually choose your health insurance. You pick which one your company gives you. Right. So that's why we don't know that. We know more about our car insurance than our health care insurance because we don't pay for our health insurance. We get it. We're not the customer.

Starting point is 00:34:45 We are the customer of the, of the services. But the reality is, is that the moment that the insurance company started to sell the companies versus selling to individuals, it all went away. So we don't have. They're the buyer where the customer, What a unique and like, you know what's interesting. Twisted. It's twisted.

Starting point is 00:35:04 It's broken. And Bob, this is like really interesting when you and I have this conversation because we found two instances of very important purchases in people's lives. The diamond for the engagement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's got a broken dynamic. Yep. I'm not the customer.

Starting point is 00:35:18 She's the customer. But I can't tell her. And she has wants and needs and desires and preferences. I can't get them without ruining the surprise. Weird. That's a weird situation. So what I'm here is. Yeah, but think it's just even weirder.

Starting point is 00:35:31 Well, think about this. One thing you could do is separate it. How do I give you a ring for the surprise? And then how do I give you the accident part to basically go and pick? But you can still do the support. We've actually tried to make it. You have to have the perfect ring and the perfect day to do those things. That's just a ridiculous notion.

Starting point is 00:35:48 Right. What if I gave you a ring that's in the right ballpark that's where it is? That's what most people do. And you end up like realizing like, we're going to plan the event. And then we're going to plan the picking, which is completely different. As opposed to putting all the pressure on the guy to make the decision up front. Why? Why?

Starting point is 00:36:04 Why make it even more anxiety producing? Exactly. So then if you and I were consulting, I was an investor, you were a consultant and we were working with Stone Algo. And we wanted to make a thing for this marketplace where we wanted to require, you know, the, like, what do they call it on an Airbnb? They have certain hosts, super hosts. Yeah. So we wanted to make the equivalent of super hosts. And super hosts have to hit certain notes.

Starting point is 00:36:28 right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, I just got a bad review because I didn't clean the place. I was like, I didn't know I had to clean the place. They're like, it's on the wall. I'm like, okay, whatever. But that was a big complaint that Brian actually addressed. And he's like, he really doesn't want people to have to do chores when they leave their Airbnb. So he's, you can't be a super host if you force people do that.

Starting point is 00:36:45 So let's say we have the super diamond seller. We would advise Stone Algo to say, hey, what about this concept of if you want to be that doing this, you have to have a guaranteed 60 day return policy and or a 30 day return policy and a 60 day exchange policy, boom. What would you, what would your next step be there in terms of, of productizing this discovery we've made? So we made a discovery, you and I, as archaeologists, is Indiana Jones. So my, my bigger thing with diamonds is I would, I'd be looking for where do people

Starting point is 00:37:16 want to get a diamond, but they don't? Where do people want to get a diamond? But they don't. But they don't. Okay, I could tell you, they go to 47th Street. They look in the windows, they get too intimidated to go inside. That's right. So let me think of it this way.

Starting point is 00:37:28 But the stores make of it. It's kind of like buying cars, people walking through that door to buy a car is intimidated as well. But like how many people would buy more diamonds if you could actually figure out how to actually reduce that anxiety? Like this is where, people don't know the answer, but it would be dramatically more, wouldn't it? But this is where if you study cut, clarity, color, and carrot, the industry as a whole rejected it.

Starting point is 00:37:53 They hated it. And the beer is basically forced it upon the market. and it actually 10x the market because it's metrics that now I can actually go learn about. And what happens is there's something called the jeweler effect, which you know is once somebody educates you about it, you can go shop anywhere else you want. But the person who taught you is the person you'll go back to almost 80% of the time because you trust them because they help you understand it all. And that's the emotional part.

Starting point is 00:38:20 Yeah. Trust. Yeah. Trust. Well, how do you cause trust? Because trust is not random. It's caused. what are the elements we have to do to cause trust.

Starting point is 00:38:30 Educate would be one. That sounds like we just established that educating. It's conditional. So for example, I did this with the sales team in the, what do I call it? Telecommunication space, right? And they basically switch from one big telecom to another telecom. And this person said very early on it, like, oh, I just trusted them. I said, whoa, what do you mean you trusted them?

Starting point is 00:38:52 Like, you trusted them like with your kids? Or do you trust them like, kind of like, yeah, I'm willing to listen to more. I'm like, no, no, I trusted them. I'm like, what in the world did they do to cause trust? And they literally laid it out for us. One is, when they showed up, they didn't name drop. They just wanted to know about my business.

Starting point is 00:39:09 When they came back, they actually gave me three options instead of one. And ultimately, the fact is that at some point, the way that I really knew I trusted him, when I asked them for something and they told me no. The moment that we actually implemented that, 22% increase in sales, how do you cause trust? Amazing. Yeah, I think there's something about following through also that causes, when you do, when you do what your say you're going to do, that to me is like a very big trust thing. You said you were going to call me back with the pricing for this carrot at this time. What's interesting is in this scenario, that one of the things they said was, I want them to be responsive, but not too responsive. What do you mean? It's like, well, if they're too responsive, that means they're either sitting around or it's automated. it's not genuine.

Starting point is 00:39:58 Like, oh. Authentic responsiveness. So what we did is we defined the window. The window was like within 24 hours, they got back to me to answer my questions. That's all. Nobody needed it in 10 seconds. And to be honest, they were suspect if you, they got an answer too fast. So these are all the elements that this is the kind of thing of when you start to study

Starting point is 00:40:17 these elements of what causes people to change and then you actually wrap your product and services around it, that's what it's all about. So to your point of when you do. When you do these interviews, they're useful for both marketing and sales. Marketing in terms of positioning and helping people to identify the problem, 90% of the people don't even know they have a problem. So if you can actually make them problem aware and solution unaware, totally fine. But that's marketing's job, not to necessarily make you product aware, but to make you problem

Starting point is 00:40:47 aware. Give me an example of making people problem aware. I understand we don't have to solve their problem. but how do you trigger in people they got a problem? So I work with Casper, right? And so one of the things we actually highlight is like, how many bottles of SQL do you need to buy before you realize you have a mattress problem?

Starting point is 00:41:09 Wow. That's a sniper shot right there to a certain group of people. Not everybody's got sleep problems. Some people sleep like a baby. So my favorite is we actually set it up. So we realized that most people would buy a mattress. We actually run specials from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. because insomnia

Starting point is 00:41:25 people who can't sleep are willing to buy it at 2 a.m. There's your content. Well, there's context and there's timing. Exactly. Both of these things are so critical. The message has to come

Starting point is 00:41:37 at the right time and the right context. Who would ever think that selling Casper mattresses against the psychographic of sleep medicine would be a good idea. But you did? I discovered it by doing the interviews.

Starting point is 00:41:50 They literally were like, I'm taking too much sleep medication. And to be honest, I want to get away from it. and I realized my bed was the reason why I had to take the sleep medication. So I worked on Snickers, right? You're not you when you're hungry. That all came from the customers.

Starting point is 00:42:03 Wait, wait. What is it? What is there insight? So one of the things you realize about Snickers is Snickers is not a candy bar, right? If you really look at it and look at how it's been built and how it's been designed and how it's been positioned, it's actually a fuel bar. It's like you missed the last meal, your stomach's growling, you've got something to do and you're not yourself and you're hangary. And hangary came from them. And you start to realize, and it competes with a red bowl and an apple and a sandwich.

Starting point is 00:42:29 It doesn't compete me up. It's an afternoon pick me up. It's right. It does not compete. It's more than that because it's food. It's got to be food because I got growling my stomach. So we change the layering and we raise the melting temperature of the caramel to make it stickier. So when you bite it, it masticates into a ball and sits in your stomach and absorbs that acid.

Starting point is 00:42:47 So you're not hungry anymore. Wow. It's a satiation device. Exactly right. And so it doesn't compete. It's the largest selling candy bar that is not a candy bar. Wow. Right?

Starting point is 00:42:59 And so this is where you find all this stuff is from the, like, you just ask people, tell about the last time you ate a Snickers bar. I can predict right when it's going to happen. Yeah, you're at a gas station. You're hungry. You went to the movies. You're hungry. Between things, right?

Starting point is 00:43:12 You missed the last meal. You still have a bunch to do. You don't want to spoil the next meal. And I need to get through it and I'm running out of energy. Give me something. And this is where like it competes with Red Bull and coffee and a Snickers are all in the same category. Look at this. I was just looking at some of the Snickers tags on it while you're talking. You're not you when you're hungry. Right. Snickers satisfies. That's the one that

Starting point is 00:43:35 came to mind to me. That's right. Hungry, grab a snickers. So it's not treat yourself. It's not you deserve this or chocolate delicious. It's not packed with peanuts. It's not packed with peanuts. That was this positioning before we started. Like, who cares if it's packed with peanuts? Peanuts are a commodity. You can get peanuts anywhere. Right. And so you start to realize it's an experience. Like, what's in a baby Ruth and what's in a Snickers is almost the same thing, but they're totally different experiences. Awesome. Let me ask you a question about a really big decision people are making at the moment, and there's a lot of discussion around it and how you might go about it. I don't think you

Starting point is 00:44:08 have any direct experience here, but maybe you do. People are making a decision to buy a new car. Yeah. People are loyal to brands because they build trust. They find they like BMW. They love their Toyota. They get their suburban, whatever it is, whatever their jam is, they get locked in. They three. And there are many brands like this. I think BMW is probably like BMW for life kind of situation for some people. And there's a lot going on here. But there is an industry-wide switch from gas to electric. And then there's a little waypoint in between called hybrid. Yep. And we seem to have had all the early adopters, the vanguard, you know, in crossing the chasm. They're all on Tesla's for 10 years. Now you got the lagger, the mass, the

Starting point is 00:44:52 big fat middle. They have adopted and you got some laggards. And the laggards are like, you know what? And I think this is a sign we're in the laggard territory of the bell curve. They're like, not quite ready, but I'll take that hybrid. Because I do want to. And so how would you parse that in interviews and kind of unlock how to get them to not just make the one step, but to make the two step?

Starting point is 00:45:17 And am I correct in thinking this is like the ultimate ABC choice here? Yeah. So to be honest, my specialty is in this because most people try to build the best electric car ever. What they're better off doing is build the best half electric car ever, right? So think of like, so I worked on Quicken. It is literally, you know, if you look at it, it's just an accounting package. And if you look at how it was built, it wasn't built by accountants. It was actually built by small business people to understand how to help me with small business.

Starting point is 00:45:51 And what you'd say is they could go to a full big package of everything in accounting, but most small business people don't want to be accountants. They actually hate Quicken, not because it's. quicken because it's accounting. If you can build the half step that lets people do their accounting so they can actually hire another baker, hire another, so they don't have to hire an accountant, they can hire somebody else to do the work. All of a sudden, they love it. This is the case where a half step is sometimes way better than a whole step, because most people can't make the big step. And so you come in with the hybrid, though my belief is the hybrid were the early

Starting point is 00:46:22 adopters before. My belief is the next round, the hybrid drivers now are now the mass, basically saying I'm going I'm not committing to the electric but I'll I'll have commit to it. Yes. And it's very interesting. If we were to talk to them, their reasons are completely illogical. As a as an EV driver for a decade. Yeah. I watched the supercharger network expand. Yep. I watched the charging experience go from, you know, but 50 miles an hour to 6, 7, 800 miles an hour. I watched a stop, you know, go. from having to stop for an hour and have lunch to just like by the time I get my Starbucks

Starting point is 00:47:02 and use the loo and get back to my car, I topped it off enough to get to my next place. And instead of there being like two stops, I got a wait in line, there's 20 stops. I have my choice of where to stop. I can pick it based on food, not based on the distance.

Starting point is 00:47:15 And I watched the 150 mile range roadster go to 200 in the Model S, go to 325 in my Y. And if I want to be a lunatic, I can get 400 in some of these versions. Yeah, right. There is nobody who drives this amount of mileage in a day with rare exception. But yet we still have a fear of running out.

Starting point is 00:47:38 So how would you advise getting past this issue, the fear, the habit of going to gas stations? So what you start to realize is that people learn things out of routine. So one of the things I would do is I would actually start to think about a rental strategy. because when they're on vacation, they can rent it and know what it's like. So, for example, I recently have switched everything to Apple Pay, but I had to go to Europe and not exchange money

Starting point is 00:48:06 to realize how easy Apple Pay. Literally, I could have done Apple Pay for a long time, but it wasn't until I went to Europe one time and to realize, like, I'm going to try to do this without anything. I'm going to use credit card. I'll use my phone. And I'm realized, like, I can do this everywhere. Like, why am I not using this back home?

Starting point is 00:48:23 And you start to do it. So you start to realize these, these anomaly experiences create the gateway for them to start to actually think about it, because it's really way more anxiety than anything else. It's not about the push and pull. It's not about the, like, people can see it. It's the anxiety forces and the habit forces that are literally holding people back. So it's not about the features.

Starting point is 00:48:45 So a way to get them over this anxiety is exactly what they do in psychology when they decondition somebody who has a fear of. flying or snakes. They start with, here's a picture of an airplane. You have some fear about the airplane. Let's talk about your fear of the airplane. Then they say, here's the picture of the seat. And then they might even take them and have them walk on an airplane and sit on it

Starting point is 00:49:10 when it's on the ground, at a museum or something, and just sit there and laugh it up. And they desensitize them. So what you're proposing in a way is a desensitation to the fear of Apple Pay and not having your credit card with you or the fear of you. or the fear of using a supercharging station. What a brilliant idea. If people take a Tesla or another EV in an Uber or a Lyft, that could, you know, just the riding in it helps them.

Starting point is 00:49:35 But the Uber and the lift, you get it from one side, but there's a different notion about how it feels. There's a guttural and emotional aspect of sitting in that seat and not having gear. Like, you're used to a car. And it has two. any other characteristic that don't make it a car. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 00:49:57 Like the sound. There's no sound, like the sound is one thing. The acceleration is disconcerting. Exactly right. And so you start to realize like there's, there's actually a lot of fear with it as well. So the funniest question you can ask is say,

Starting point is 00:50:10 like I'm just afraid of running out of, out of electricity. I just want my batteries to go dead. I'm like, okay, when's the last time you ran out of gas? And you realize that nobody does that. And so you start to realize like,

Starting point is 00:50:22 and what the, The thing that I can't get over is that the electric vehicles are not advertising. You don't have to stop for gas. Like, the anxiety that people have to literally go, do I get off here so I can actually save some money to be able to get gas here? Or like, this is a bad neighborhood. And the danger of gas stations getting robbed in a gas station, the inconvenience of having to stop with your children on a side road.

Starting point is 00:50:45 You and I could craft an ad for just that. gas stations are dirty, dangerous, not fun, and time consuming. Charging at home is as simple as plugging in your phone. It's right. What is a typical gas station in terms of minutes? Yeah, that's like 12 minutes. So why I think is you get 12 minutes back if you actually get this thing. Like that's what people don't understand.

Starting point is 00:51:08 Like, what are I going to do with 12 minutes? It's like, that's six hours a year. That's exactly right. So all of a sudden it's like, and to be honest, it's the anxiety of do I fill up now or not like you you start to realize like there's a little subroutine in your head of like check the gas gauge how far do i have to go where am i going to go should i get gas in the way should i get gas in the way back like you don't have to think about that anymore no yeah you have a that's the brilliant thing you and i figured it out a full gas tank every morning start the morning on full

Starting point is 00:51:38 by the way that's how i think about my life i literally go to sleep when my tank is empty and i wake up every morning and it's full what an amazing concept the gas tank, the energy tank. Yeah. So yeah, and this is the power. By the way, one of my claims to fame is I worked at Ford. And one of the things we did in 1987 is I worked for it.

Starting point is 00:52:00 And I came up with the team that I worked on. But we worked on it. We came up with a little arrow on the gas gauge that tells you which side. I love the arrow. The arrow is there because of the strongly moment of like pulling in and going like, where is it? I can't remember. Is this my car?

Starting point is 00:52:16 Is this my, you know, my wife's, car, you know, just, and you kind of go like, where, which side is it at? And you just look for the hour by the gas tank gauge. That's right. By the gas gauge. That's what a brilliant concept. Let me ask you a question. Yeah. I love cars. I's like, hmm, I'm, I'm, I'm team Tesla. I own four of them. I've owned every car. And I see the Ford is going to take the Mustang to make an EV. I said, oh, my first car was a Ford 1970, Mustang Grande and gold with a vinyl top. Oh, there you go. 351 Cleveland put a four barrel on that bad boy was incredible I said to you are a car guy thank

Starting point is 00:52:50 you thank you for telling me I like I I'm from Detroit born and raised you can see the smile on my face I love it I mean incredibly for a first car $650 bucks it had a hole in the floor I could see the road when I was driving literally I look at the passenger side it was that's how rested out put it aside they'd say could have come out with electric car I said great here's my idea Do the classic pony car with ABS and all the great brakes and electric. I'll buy two. Yep. Give me the classic pony convertible.

Starting point is 00:53:17 Yeah. And they come out. They're getting there. With a Ford E Mustang. Yeah. That looks like a CV. Yeah, it's not what I, it's not a Mustang. They could have tapped into.

Starting point is 00:53:32 They will. Don't worry. It's going to get there. It's going to get there. Like this is this is where like they have to, they have to appease the stockholders before they appease the enthusiasts. And so they're building the infrastructure. And so part of it is they've had to split the company.

Starting point is 00:53:46 I don't know if you know that. They split the company in half. So there's there's three divisions now. There's the finance. I know that's the biggest part of it. The big part is the gas. So they call it ice. Internal combustion engine group.

Starting point is 00:53:59 There's the electric group. And then there's the infrastructure group in between. So like the chassis. Both need the chassis, but they have different chassis. So you start to realize, like all that kind of stuff goes together. But ultimately they had, I mean,

Starting point is 00:54:10 they had to split that company in half to basically figure out how they're going to actually, because from an investing perspective, it's very different investments, very different. Yeah, because this I thought would be,

Starting point is 00:54:20 like nostalgia is such a weird thing. What is nostalgia? Let's take, let's pause for a second. Let's unpack this. What is nostalgia to you? To me, it's a chance to remember things,

Starting point is 00:54:37 that don't maybe exist today, but that were wonderful memories and moments and milestones and waypoints in my life. Certain movies, Star Wars comes to mind. Yep. Certain foods. Different cars, your Mustang. Some cars come to mind.

Starting point is 00:54:59 So what you start to realize is nostalgia is about recalling a memory or pulling on a memory of what somebody's had in the past. And it can be different from the past, but it can't be too different from the past. And the trick is understanding when is it too different that it's not your Mustang anymore? Which is my experience. I would have bought that e Mustang if it had been the one I wanted. And so my belief is they weren't targeting you for that email. They were not. They were not. They were not. But you know, you do see these like, it's very nostalgic is such a fascinating

Starting point is 00:55:30 thing to me because you have these young people who didn't experience it. And young people, I don't know if you know with this trend. They love buying like old Saabs, Mercedes, and Volvo's from the E. And I don't understand it. But they love the old Mustang convertibles, the Saab convertibles. All this stuff is like really meaningful to them for some reason. It's, it's, I'll say from the work that I've done, I would say this is about them finding uniqueness, their uniqueness.

Starting point is 00:55:59 It's an enumeration of all the things that they want to be. And Saab, if you look at Saab, how it's a lot. Saab came about, like, they can resonate with it. And ultimately, the fact is they don't want to, they're like, they don't want to promote the building of something new. They'd rather rejuvenate something from the past, right? It's all about who they are and what they want to put out there. Fascinating.

Starting point is 00:56:22 You had four heroes of yours. You had your Mount Rushmore over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go through the Mount Rushmore and what you learned. Because, you know, who, you have a tremendous impact on these startups and products and how people build them and then it's always great to go to the source material, you know. Yeah. You, you know, I fell in love with dire straits and I fell in love with Bruce Springsteen and

Starting point is 00:56:42 Billy Joel. And then all of a sudden I start going backwards and all of a sudden it's all Bob Dylan. That's right. That's right. Wait a second. I'm like, I'll all go back to Bob Dylan. That's right. And then you see like Mark Knopfler produced infidels and backup guitar and, you know,

Starting point is 00:56:57 was involved in that and Tom Petty went on tour with him. Like you start to like put the, you put the, you put the, you put the, the story together, right? And it's so wonderful when you can do that, because I find I understand a system, whatever it is, whatever the system is, or the culture, whatever you want to use, when you start figuring out the influences there. So you have influences here. Yeah. So, so my youngest daughter went away to college or went to graduated college and it was time to clean out the house. And I went to, I have over 800 volumes of notebooks that I've been doing since I've been 18 years old and I had them all and I was going to throw them out.

Starting point is 00:57:34 My wife basically said, no, you can't throw them out until you've gone through each one of them. So I went through each one of them. I have them still. But for the most part, out of it came a book called Learning to Build. And it was my appreciation that these four people had poured so much knowledge into me to make me, to enable me to be an innovator. And so I wanted to share it and say, it's called the five bedrock skills of innovators. And it's the things that the four of them taught me over my, course of interacting with them, if you will.

Starting point is 00:58:05 The four mentors are Dr. Deming, who is basically the father of quality. He was 85. I was 18. And because I was dyslexic, I asked a lot. I learned through questions. And so he loved my questions. And then he introduced me to Dr. Taguchi, who is a Japanese engineer who was responsible for basically a lot of the development efforts of how Japan got

Starting point is 00:58:31 such good development capabilities. And so I learned all his methods and tools. And I was learning them and applying them and saving Ford, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars as an intern, solving these problems that most people couldn't solve. And it had nothing to with knowledge. It had everything to do with approach. It's called robust design of experiments.

Starting point is 00:58:52 And then Dr. Willie Moore, who is a PhD in particle physics, she basically was my manager at Ford. and she helped me understand how to see people and how to understand how to navigate the gauntlet of big politics in Ford. And so she helped me see things from an empathetic perspective, if you will. What was her fun name? Dr. Willie Hobbsmore. And she's from Man Arbor.

Starting point is 00:59:16 The five skills that I kind of boiled it down to, one is empathetic perspective that a really good innovator or entrepreneur can see things from multiple people's perspective simultaneously and literally be able to almost play the role of the investor, play the role of the co-founder, play the role of an employee. Like, they can see things through other people's eyes. They're really good at it. That's so powerful.

Starting point is 00:59:40 To be able to hold in your mind at the same time. Yes. Multiple dynamic personalities involved in something that's high stakes concurrently. Yes. I can tell you, you know, I literally had a call with some founders struggling with some board dynamics and you've been there. And I just walked them through each person's perspective.

Starting point is 01:00:04 And I said, listen, this is a private equity group. This is the timeline they're on. This is the return profile they have. I said, I am in early stage venture capitalists. I need to get a, I'm looking for 100x. They're looking for a 3X. We came in before them. They came in after us.

Starting point is 01:00:19 They are about operations. I'm about the spirit, the culture, and building something that's built to last. I stay on the board until you tell me you don't. need me. It doesn't matter if it's 10 years after it goes public or 10 years. I've never been on board, but theoretically, I would stay forever. I'm at the service of the founders. They are on to the next flip, boom, three, four, five years. I said, and then you're the founders. And you need to tell us, one wants to go to the new world. One wants to take the spice route, tried and true. You've got to be Christopher Columbus or Marco Polo. You got to tell us which

Starting point is 01:00:54 you are so that one of us can sell hard shares and move on to the next investment or stay with you until the mission is complete. And, you know, it's, it's so hard today for people to empathize and understand each other's position, something in society where everybody has to be radicalized, polarized, and on both ends, you know, whether it's looking at a war or a startup, a stock, or a presidential candidate. It's so strange. But part of it is just being able to articulate. I think that people have lost their ability to articulate what they know and what they don't know. Like, I think, like, a lot of this work is about the unknowns. And my, I spend most of my time helping people uncover the unknowns they have to answer in order to make progress. And most

Starting point is 01:01:40 people are spending their time answering the knowns they already know and they're trying to prove to others. And that never works to me. Also, if you know it already, why are you spending time? Just do it. Just do it. Yeah, just, okay, I know. I know. have to stop eating bread and sugar to be then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then there's going to be a way to design yourself maybe around it. But like a lot of times you start to realize like, people are like, okay, I want to go run this test. Why?

Starting point is 01:02:04 Because I need to prove this. I'm like, okay, let's pretend we can prove that right now. So they're going to say, this market's bigger than that market. I'm like, okay, let's go out and measure it. Like, let's pretend it comes back bigger. What are you going to do? Let's pretend it comes back smaller. What are you going to do?

Starting point is 01:02:19 Turns out you're going to do the same thing no matter what. So why are we wasting time? Why are we wasting time? A lot of times people want to know because they don't want to be wrong, but the reality is whether it's the place they're going to do the same work. You know, this is, I've had this conversation with a friend of mine. I don't like to bring them up too often because people, you know, think I'm trading on his name or something.

Starting point is 01:02:39 But I'm talking about Elon and I've watched him make a lot of critical decisions in, you know, three decades. We've known each other. As the years go on, I watch him make very quick decisions. And I'll ask him about the decision and we'll have a Socratic, debate, you know, I'll go back and forth about it. And I'll say, well, we can always reverse it if we're wrong. So let's just switch it and go.

Starting point is 01:03:03 And there's a famous moment where he wants to turn up a data center in the Twitter handle. And he said when he was taking over Twitter, he's going to lay off more people and make mistakes. Yeah. And I said, well, what are you going to do? He's hired them back. And literally, I never tell the story, but like the week later and the press is skewering

Starting point is 01:03:20 about the stuff. And he writes, everybody who got laid off. If we've made a mistake, please hit reply and explain to me the mistake we've made in laying you off. Yeah. Let's just pause on how brilliant that is. That's right. That's zero. By the way, that's. And humble. Yeah, it's zero based budgeting. It's the same thing. Let's just start over and say, well, like, why should you be here? And let's make, let's reset what it is. So you don't, so we don't have the wrong expectation. So, like, I respect that, like, the heart part is that people don't understand. You have to go through

Starting point is 01:03:51 that in order to get aligned. That's the pain. Yes. And then most people think their job has to satisfy everything about them. That's a big mistake too. So that's my next book is coming out of November. And I've been studying for the last 10 years. What causes somebody to leave this company to go to that company?

Starting point is 01:04:11 So the job of jobs. Hold on. This is a good guessing game here. Now we've got a good one. What makes a person leave a company? Now, the tried and true answer. I'm not going to say this is my answer, so don't spoil it. Is people don't quit companies, they quit bad managers.

Starting point is 01:04:26 Yes, there's three different aspects of it. One is when I get a new manager and I feel like I'm starting over. Frustration. So another one is when I've been disrespected by my manager. The third one is when I don't trust my manager. Three really different sources about the manager. So it's not just a bad manager. It's three specific things that have to happen for people to say, today's the day I'm out.

Starting point is 01:04:49 Amazing. And you know what? This is in relationships probably as well, where, yeah, they probably people leave a marriage or any kind of partnership for this reason as well. If they don't feel you can trust is a major one. I'm going to show you your next. So here's the thing. If any four of these exist, they're looking for a job. Any four. Okay. Let's do these pushes fly to you when I don't respect or trust the people I work with. That's, yeah, for many of us, if something is morally or ethically wrong, you've got to get out of Dodge. And I tell you, I had this experience with two startups where I had to have them buy back my shares. I had to divest because of this specific issue like ethics, morals, little issues.

Starting point is 01:05:37 I feel like the work I'm doing has little or no impact on the company or world. By the way, in Japan, the way they fire people because they want to say they've never fired anybody is they give them a window seat. they give them no work and they invite them to no meetings until they resign. Yeah. It's literally the technique in Japan. And so people are wondering like, why am I not given any assignments or work? They know that you'll eventually quit.

Starting point is 01:06:00 Yeah. The way I managed is wearing me down. Okay. Yeah. It's, you got a super negative or relenting boss in some way. They don't uplift you. Is that what you're saying there?

Starting point is 01:06:11 Yep. Yep. Like, think of it as being micromanaged. Somebody's just checking out you every day. They're just like, oh my God, please just let me. You're not let me do.

Starting point is 01:06:18 Like, I'm coaching somebody right now where they're like, I want to know where the outcome is I have to get to and I want to know the resources I have. But let me go figure it out. I don't need my manager looking over my shoulder every 10 minutes telling me that I'm doing something wrong. I figured out a way to get my micromanager out of me. You do want to know the details if you're a founder of a, and especially if you're a successful founder, the details matter. I, when we went remote, created the most simple concept, S-O-D-E-O-D-A, start of the day, in the general chat, Slack room, just tell everybody what you intend to get done. A couple of bullet points.

Starting point is 01:06:51 And I said, it should not take more than five minutes. So set a Pomodora time or whatever your jam is. Five minutes, write it. If you feel ashamed, because a couple of people came to me and said, I feel really bad. I don't know what to write. I said, okay, you're feeling shame. Probably means you're just responding to emails and being responsive. Talk to your manager about some meaningful work you could do.

Starting point is 01:07:11 Look at everybody else's start of day and their reply to the end of day and then say, I should do some of that. That's helping the company go forward. And it created massive transparency. And some people did it. Some people refused to do it. The people who refused to do it are no longer at the fund. The people who do it and embrace it are at the fund and thriving.

Starting point is 01:07:31 Start of the day, end of the day. So I've had somebody take this list that you see here and basically say, I'm going to use this as my review process. So they literally sit down and say, do any of these things apply to you today? If they do, let's talk about it. genius. Well, look at this one. Reach a milestone in my career. This is super important for people. And when you're a boss, you don't, you think people are coming to work for money. People can make plus or minus 20% of what they're making at your job in all likelihood, right? It's not why they're coming to a professional white collar job in all likelihood. So yeah, milestones matter for people.

Starting point is 01:08:10 That's why Steve Jobs. There's a personal milestone. I've just turned 30. There's a, there's a, a work milestone of like, I've been here for 10 years, right? And so they're different, again, different sources, though they're both about a milestone. One is the reference point is I've been here. The other one is, you know, it's a personal milestone about me being a certain, like, I just graduated or I just did this or I did that. It's more has nothing to do with the company. And it's another reason why people leave.

Starting point is 01:08:38 Give me which one of these here you think is really the most unique one you discovered that if you correct for can have the biggest impact the other direction because what I see in this list, the brilliance of this list, it is brilliant, is that this is not just a roadmap

Starting point is 01:08:59 for why you should quit. This is a roadmap for how to be a better manager and to get the most out of your people. Now look at these. These are the... These polls apply to... These are the outcomes they're seeking when they're going to find a new place.

Starting point is 01:09:12 Fantastic. Cut me off at the... So have more. time to spend with others in order to carry my weight. Right. So part of this is I need to get a new job because literally I'm working nights and weekends and my family is literally going to divorce me. Have time for me.

Starting point is 01:09:25 Right. I feel like my job is a step forward for me and in the eyes of others. Ah, see, this is very important. Yes. Status matters to us. Or like, I can't tell my dad I'm going to do this. Right. It's got to be in their eyes that this is progress.

Starting point is 01:09:42 You're like, why? It's like, I don't want to have to explain it. It's just, that's just how that is. I'm like, okay. The reason why people like to work for me, some, I dare I say love, is this one. Be challenged, learn and grow. I tell people, I'm going to work you harder than you ever expected. I'm going to throw you in the deep end of the pool with two cinder blocks.

Starting point is 01:10:00 Don't take the job if you don't want to suck in some water. Yep. And my big thing is, my big thing is to say like when you say you're ready, I'll find the best place for you to go. Oh. Oh, I, on top of it. So I actually have a two-year agreement that says, look, we're not talking about price. We're not talking about position. Everybody has the same position.

Starting point is 01:10:18 But at the end of two years, you're going to go work for one of our clients or I'm going to go help you find a new job. And then at the end of two years, we look at it. We go through the big review. And then they say, well, if you want to stay, how do we modify the next two-year arrangement? And so we then modify the arrangement and pull people together. But it's about actually taking into account the pushes and the pulls. And the other part is people change. right? Like somebody who's a really big learner in their first 90 days loves a new job.

Starting point is 01:10:47 But 180 days into the job, if they're doing the same thing they used to, they're going to quit in a heartbeat. This is, you know what? I have some professional managers I work with who say I change things too much. You know, like a change direction, et cetera, or I put people on different projects. I said, no, I want everybody to rotate. If you've worked on the first calls, I want you to work on the companies we've already invested in. if you've worked on the accelerator, I want you to work on the syndicate. I like to move people around so they understand the business to the level I do.

Starting point is 01:11:18 Okay, and this is the clusters you. But see, this is the thing is you now start to think about what pushes and pulls need to come together to enable somebody to really switch their job. Because lots of people talk about it, but these are the four, what happens,

Starting point is 01:11:31 it turns out to be four clusters of what people really do to switch up. There's a whole bunch of people who say they want to switch jobs and they don't. And this is one of the premises of all your theses, I think, which is it's multi-factor. It's always multi-factor, and it's always about real behavior. They made some behavior change, and I'm looking at, say, like, how do they cause it,

Starting point is 01:11:51 so then I can learn how to help other people change their behavior. Right. Okay. Give me the one you think is the most interesting. So what's really interesting to me is that in my life, I've been in all four of these jobs. Do they skew early career later in career? post money I think I think yeah

Starting point is 01:12:10 one really hits pre money and it's like the way it was the grind this was working at Ford this was waking up early this was literally you know playing a lot of politics and to be honest I got fired from Ford because I end up bringing up something

Starting point is 01:12:25 I shouldn't have brought up in front of the right person and it was like again so one of the greatest insights I got for this is getting fired is the most like most people in hindsight, literally love the fact that they got fired. The most educational, and it opens up a new door. In the moment, it literally is the most traumatic thing they could do,

Starting point is 01:12:48 but in hindsight, it's like if I didn't get fired from Ford, I would never head down this path that I'm out now. So you just start to realize that most people, when they get fired, it's horrible. But in hindsight, it literally forced them to find their own way. This is one of the things about layoffs when I'm coaching founders when they have to do layoffs and it's brutal. Yeah. I say, listen, you know, we live in a country of four percent. unemployment, these are the top 10% of employees or 1% depending on where they are in their station in life, they're going to be fine. If this was somebody who worked at like Walmart or a factory, like be worried about them because there may not be a safety net in another place

Starting point is 01:13:23 for them to, you know, but this first one here, when the way I am managed is wearing me down, a micromanager, a jerk, whatever, I can't see a way to grow in this job. So that's the other part. So it's that, here's the thing. It's the combination. of things that make these real. Yes. Right? And so that's the thing is everybody's trying to find the root cause. And what I always say is, Deming would always correct me, it's root causes.

Starting point is 01:13:48 It's always a set of what are the root causes that enable this to happen? I mean, context matters. And then the second part of this context is, help me find a supportive environment so I can be challenged, learn, and grow on the job. So it's like, this job is making me feel bad about myself and I know I'm not growing. And there's, let's just say this person, forget about find. Let's say their friends tells them, you wouldn't believe how great it is to work at Jason's venture firm. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:14:15 He gives people all this incredible, you know, responsibility at a very young age without experience. It's incredible. I'm learning so much and my salary is going up based on my performance and it's a meritocracy. Exactly. Like all of a sudden, now you're, it's back to the comparison, ABC, right? Now you're comparing and the gap gets pretty wide, doesn't it? But the crazy part is most people don't have. think they can move.

Starting point is 01:14:37 They don't know that they can do different things. And so what happens is they feel like, oh, I'm in software. I got to stay in software. Or I'm in, like, I have somebody who's like a nurse right now. And I'm like, you would make an awesome customer success person. You care, you do that. And they look to me like. That's side manner.

Starting point is 01:14:53 I didn't even know that that was a thing. I'm like, you can make twice as much being a customer success person. They're like, really? And all of a sudden it's like. And work from home. And nothing meaning. But nurses work three, uh, uh, what? three 12s. And so nobody's, nobody's figured that part out yet, but my belief is that's coming soon.

Starting point is 01:15:11 I agree with you. I was just talking to a young couple and we were talking about like they had to go back to work soon and they were, you know, being told they're going to do three days a week. I said, I'm just telling you, I'll cut you off the chase where this is all going. It's going to be four days a week, Fridays, fuck off, do what you want. Yeah. Because by the way, when we all worked in office five days a week on Fridays, we fucked off anyways. We all fucked off anyway. We all went to the gym. We did two hour lunch and we skipped out because we had a day. appointment or our bosses let us go at 2.30 or something. So we missed traffic to get wherever we're going to go. And yeah, it's going to wind up at four days a week or be an entrepreneur

Starting point is 01:15:47 looking at the impact of AI. I'll wrap on this. And before we get to my AI question and how work's going to change. I'll just let you start thinking about how work's going to change with AI. I already got this. When people hire the rewired group, what is the stage and what are the ballpark costs of doing this? I can under, I know the cost. for doing this at big companies, big six-figure engagements. When you start talking about, you know, series A companies, startups, they raised a million dollars, they raised three. Is it too early for them to engage in this?

Starting point is 01:16:16 I know you open source some of the documents. You just such a good job here today. Pitch the hell out of the real-lar group. You are in the pitch. Well, so here's the thing is who we help are basically as people start to scale and there's more than five of them or more than 10 of them. And now all of a sudden they have a lot more moving parts. this is a really good thing to build a common language so everybody's singing off the same sheet of music.

Starting point is 01:16:40 So one of the reasons why people come to us is because all of a sudden they start growing and everybody starts to have their own understanding of what the customer wants or what we're doing and we're not aligned and we're spending more time arguing or not building what we should be building. And so they hire us to almost find the customer truth that they can all center around. Another reason why they come away might be alignment, communication. It's alignment and what most people don't realize is we sit down and we'll do an interview for an hour on why somebody bought your product. And then we'll spend another hour debating what we all heard. And you start to realize everybody's hearing it differently.

Starting point is 01:17:17 And so we got to come to turn with it. So each interview actually reinforces what the language means of, look, easy. There's 22 dimensions of easy. Which dimensions are they talking about? Oh, they're talking about these four. Oh, okay. So they're not talking about this. So most people try to abstract up.

Starting point is 01:17:31 we try to drill things down to the very fundamentals. First principles. Very first principles. Foundational truths. Think of it is almost like dominoes that have to fall in their life, that have to be part of their situation for them to value. And so it's searching out those things. And then from there,

Starting point is 01:17:48 we can actually tie that back to both product and marketing and sales and strategy and M&A. Got it. So the reason why this is- Each one of those leads to the next, because if you're building a venture-back startup, it's eventually to be bought, sold by whom, public, whatever, sustainable business. And I'll tell you this, Jason, I'm not really pitching ourselves because, like, to be honest,

Starting point is 01:18:10 I have a lot of work. But here's the thing is this. I'm really looking for some awesome people to work with. I just, like, I just won't do any more hoop jumping through. I won't do any more. That's a, and to be honest, I would much rather work for, for a combination of cash and equity or even performance than I would for cash, but most big companies can't. wrestle with that. And so the small companies actually,

Starting point is 01:18:34 we, that's with Jake and people like that, that's how we work the deal. I think it's wise because you want to talk about creating alignment if they pay a little bit so they're committed, but you have that upside of, hey, you know, it's one of the great things about capitalism and shares. I know people hate it, but shares going up into the right and everybody having a share. That's right. Word is share. That's right. What we're taught in nursery school and can do our share.

Starting point is 01:19:01 When you share and people are all participating at, they feel good. You know what? The United States is so screwed up right now, bomb, is because people don't own equities. They don't have a share in all the great companies that are growing. So you have these one class of people who have equities, capital gains, and another group that doesn't. That's right.

Starting point is 01:19:19 If everybody in America owns some Google and meta and Apple and Tesla, they would feel a lot better about things because they would watch it go up and say, hey, I'm participating in that. I buy an iPhone. I got some upside in it. So one of the insights my mom had, she was a school teacher in Detroit. And I asked her about what's the difference between, you know, the kids when you started teaching and the kids when you ended teaching. And she ended in the 90s teaching.

Starting point is 01:19:47 Right. So she started in the 60s teaching. And she taught first grade. It went from this notion of like, I want to be a doctor. I want to be a dentist. I want to be a fireman. I want to be a policeman. kindergarten,

Starting point is 01:20:00 and first graders coming in with some ambition of what the future look like multiple years out. But what she said is as Detroit

Starting point is 01:20:09 kind of deteriorated more and more, she goes, it got down to most people didn't even know where they were going to sleep

Starting point is 01:20:15 that night. Oh, wow. And so she said the time horizon of how a first grader thinks has been changed so much

Starting point is 01:20:23 that they're not even worried about the next 10 years. They're worried about the next week, the next month. That's all they can see.

Starting point is 01:20:28 I believe that that's what's happening to us at the United States. Like we don't have a direction to go. Like Kennedy at least said, let's go to the moon. Everybody's like, why? Okay, to be honest, we were up for the challenge and we figured it out, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:43 But the fact is nobody's leading us into a place to go. We're just trying to fix the problem. I got a great place for us to go. Everybody owns a home. Yes. And has savings. Yes. And feel safe.

Starting point is 01:20:56 Yeah. That would be like... Yeah. I think feel safe has got to be the first, I think. But I think the thing is, is owning a home, I'm not sure my kids' generation wants to own a home. Well, yeah, they have the opportunity to own one. They don't have to. They're going to be nomads.

Starting point is 01:21:10 No, no, but the notion is that it's just one of those things where we were raised, like I was raised to buy a home. Like, there was no question whether I was going to have one or not. It was more a question of when and where, right? I think that that's a very different model now. Yeah, Bob, you've been an amazing guest. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Can't wait to have you on again.

Starting point is 01:21:30 This is extraordinary. Follow Bob. Look up the rewired group. Thank you so much for sharing so much. I think it's just a great. It was great. Well, it's a great mitzvah that you're doing because, you know, I've read a bunch of your stuff. And I know your philosophy is you've been very successful.

Starting point is 01:21:44 You want to pay it forward. And you're given out of all this knowledge. And you capture about 1% back. It seems 99 to 1 is a pretty menschie thing to do. So Bob, super mench. Okay. I appreciate it, and we'll see you all next time on this week at startups. Okay, everybody, I want to tell you about Founder Fridays.

Starting point is 01:22:02 What are Founder Fridays? This is an opportunity for you, if you're a founder, to get together with a half dozen, a dozen other founders on a Friday, the first Friday of every month. Why is this important? Well, if you meet with other founders, you can talk about the things that are working at your startup and the things you're struggling with, everything else in between. and then you can trade notes and you can make friends. It's really hard to be a founder, isn't it?

Starting point is 01:22:28 You're alone all the time. You've got to solve all these problems. And other founders are having the same experience you're having. It's isolating. It can be scary. It can be thrilling. And people don't understand what you're going through. If you go to a dinner party and there's one founder and seven other people,

Starting point is 01:22:44 you feel like a mutant. You feel like somebody who doesn't belong there. Nobody understands why you're doing your startup, why you're taking this risk, the problems you're facing, right? They're NPCs. This is a non-NPC event. Every first Friday of the month, we do Founder Fridays. We're doing them now in 71 different cities.

Starting point is 01:23:02 And if this sounds appealing to you, well, you're a founder. And you want to hang out with maybe seven other founders around a roundtable. You can have breakfast. You can have lunch. You could have dinner. You can have coffee. You can co-work. Dinner, however you want to do it.

Starting point is 01:23:14 And it's free. We've been doing this for a couple of months now. We've had 71 meetups around the world. And 929 founders have joined. I want you to join. and I want you to come to the next one. It's Friday, May 3rd. Now, if your city's not on the list, what are you going to do? You're going to apply to run your city with two or three other founders. Again, four founders by founders. From the number one podcast for founders this week in startups,

Starting point is 01:23:39 comes founderf Fridays.com. Go to founder Fridays. Tech to sign up, and you're going to meet all these great founders, and we give like a little prompt. And this Founder Friday taking place on May 3rd, we want you to bring two things. with you, your most significant challenge, and one thing you wish you'd learned earlier. We're going to go around the table, and each person is going to do that, and then you'll get feedback from your peers. It's incredible. It's magical, and we don't want this to get big. We want to keep it small. So if you plan on going and you're interested and sounds appealing to you, just go to founder Fridays. Tech, T-E-C-H, right? Great domain name. Founderf Fridays. Tech, and please take pictures

Starting point is 01:24:21 and then share those pictures on Twitter at Mention Us, at TWA startups, at Jason. And it doesn't matter. You can be in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, L.A., Paris, Tokyo, Dubai. These things are happening all over the world. Again, 71 cities. Let's get it to 100 cities. We've got over 900 members.

Starting point is 01:24:39 Let's get it past 1,000. Go ahead and sign up, and you'll be in touch with my team, and we'll see you there. Once again, founder Fridays.Tech.

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