Each week, we interview proven leaders from our network, to learn from their experiences, and share their Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience stories with you.

• Our mission is to promote the accomplishments of our guests
• Highlight the companies where they work and the services, and products that they offer
• Share success stories from their experiences and, most importantly
• Provide strategies for job seekers and advice to talent seeking to accelerate their careers.
  

Today’s guest is Bradley Reynolds, successful tech entrepreneur, Artificial Intelligence and Enterprises LLM Consultant. This conversation was so robust that we split it into two parts.  In part 1 of our chat with Brad, he shares:

• his experiences starting, operating, and exiting several internet infrastructure and Martech software businesses
• his involvement in the birth of internet service providers (ISPs)
• the importance of boot-strapping your start-up company, staying capital efficient and it’s impact on valuation and success
• the value of experimenting, failing, and persisting

Summary transcript of our interview below:

[00:00:06] Ron Laneve: Hello, everybody and welcome to Episode 17 of the Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent video series. Today’s guest hails from Cleveland, Ohio. He’s a serial entrepreneur and investor. His successful ventures have ranged from technology, infrastructure, and managed services to MarTech software as a service.

[00:00:24] He’s currently pursuing new leadership opportunities in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning.  I’d like to welcome Bradley Reynolds. Enterprise AI consultant. Brad, thanks for being here. 

[00:00:37] Bradley Reynolds: Thanks, Ron. 

[00:00:39] Ron Laneve: As I ask all my guests can you expand on the brief intro I gave of you and your background?

[00:00:45] Talk about the, all the entrepreneurial opportunities you’ve been involved with, how you’ve got started in them, why you moved on to the next one or how that progression occurred and really talk about lessons learned along the way on how those, you know got you to where you are today 

[00:01:01] Bradley Reynolds: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:01:02] So thanks for having me on this is it’s always fun to go down memory lane but yeah my background has always been technology focused and I just I think it all derived from the fact that my parents refused to buy me a Nintendo Entertainment System When I was eight years old and they bought me a computer instead. And I had to start making my own video games because I didn’t have video games and then I ended up liking it. Like it just it was something that gelled with the way that I thought about the world. I still go over my friend’s house and play their Nintendo system but my particular entertainment was coding. And it was pretty early on so it was like 1988 something like that. And it was still like if you were in high school or junior high school, there’s still a keyboard, like they had a computer lab and a typewriter.

[00:01:55] And that was the kind of change point where personal computers to a general consumer really started to take off and just being nerdy and liking that type of stuff ended up crossing paths with the fact that there was this new network kind of capability, whether it was dialing into things like Case Western Reserve had something called CWRUnet you would dial into it and that was like one of my first accesses to the internet. And you could dial into CWRUnet and talk on message boards teleport yourself over to Taiwan and then go bounce around it. It was amazing for somebody who was like 10 years old to be able to do that. And it was exciting to meet other nerds like you.

[00:02:47] They’re just a lot of folks that were of similar ages exploring, and that asset, that case provided to the community, I still remember the number, it was 368 8888, like you’d dial, take up the phone line at night, and dial in, and your parents would be upset because no calls come into the house.

[00:03:08] You were there exploring, and there were chat boards. They’re called IRC (Internet Relay Chat) that were actually similar to what Slack is now. And you would go and you’d have a nickname and you would hang out with other people who had a nickname. You wouldn’t really know who they were. But you would talk about like stuff that you were interested in. But by the time, 12, 13, 14, you started to understand a lot more about like code and how to get between certain places and where you could find these types of things and information. Which prior, the only way you could obtain interesting information was to go to a library, a physical library. You could check out a book and read about how does Novell networking work, or how does this protocol work. But you literally had to thumb through a college textbook to figure it out.

[00:03:58] You could just talk to people in other parts of the world who are interested in that type of thing and just communicate with them. I thought that was awesome. 

[00:04:05] Ended up going to high school and Mentor and then graduating high school and going to Case and while I was at mentor this is like ’94 ish time period internet service providers started taking off. I had a buddy at high school who was also simpatico in terms of our technology understanding. He knew a lot about linux which at that time you installed with three and a half inch floppy disks.

[00:04:35] Ron Laneve: We’re dating ourselves now Brad 

[00:04:38] Bradley Reynolds: I mean, but that’s what it is. We’re old relatively now. And so we wanted to start an internet service provider. Chatting with folks from your community is great. But what you know, this whole getting access to the broad world and now web pages, which were a novel thing at that point. That’s what people are excited about. That’s what we were excited about. And frankly, it was just a reason .To get ourselves high speed internet access.

[00:05:04] So this was in high school. This is like 94. And so I remember it was me and him and we pulled together our friends and family, which really just our family. Cause at that point we were both like, 14 years old 15 years old couldn’t drive, couldn’t sign a document, we need this many modems and like we know this I think we had a total capital commitment of $500. 

[00:05:34] And I think we needed say $10,000 or something like that and the $10,000 was very shoestring. Like you had to sign the service provider agreement. You had to buy this equipment, but it was like the bare minimum.

[00:05:45] It didn’t work, we were excited about it, and what happened is there were a couple other people with the same ideas that were just older and had financing, like they knew telecom or whatever and we went to go work at the one in Painesville.. 

[00:05:57] So we say, “Hey, I, you might not be able to pay us any money. You just started up, but we’d like to configure the modems and the Cisco routers and server, there’s a couple of mail servers and news use net newsfeeds, all these kinds of things.” And I remember them hiring us . I don’t know if they were even paying us at the beginning, and then after that they started paying us in cash, like some cut rate in cash, and then eventually we started making legitimate money when they started making legitimate money.

[00:06:25] But we just raised our hands and said, we want to do something, we want to be involved, and no one else was raising their hands, and no one knew about Linux and internet connections and Cisco routers.

[00:06:37] So two completely inexperienced, barely high school kids got jobs running a small ISP that maybe was capitalized at 50 grand. And to us that was a million that was a billion dollars That was 100 times more than we could raise. And that was my first real job. And nobody knew what the internet was. Nobody had an email address. And, our parents were like, great, you’re getting paid. And, at least you have good internet access. You’re not tying up our phone line at home. It was, it was a flash in the pan type thing.

[00:07:10] So stopped working there, started going to college and then ended up starting to work part time at, this provider, which was called Harvard communications in Painesville. They bought service from a company called Internet Access Group in Cleveland. And so I started working for Internet Access Group as just a higher level version.

[00:07:33] They had more access, they had, they weren’t really a dial up provider, they were more of a business provider. So they were selling lines to Jones Day, University of Illinois, and Ohio State. Up a significant level in terms of who they service. And they did some dial up. 

[00:07:48] So I started working for there when I started college in ’96 and dropped out of college in late ’97, early ’98 to go work there full time. Which my parents were absolutely furious about. Full ride to Case. Everything’s paid for, great school. But yeah, they’re like, “what are you doing? Like this, you’re giving up something that you can build your career off of for the internet?” 

[00:08:15] That’s the bet that you can make when you’re 18 years old. Because who cares? The worst case what you can go back to college or something like that never needed to really look around at that because that company took off It built in a couple years. Very soon I became the CTO of that company like i’m talking like six months after I started I became the CTO of a reasonably sized company. Literally because no one else could raise their hand and say they were better and not that I was super good. I just read the manuals.

[00:08:52] Now, there’s you could pick a 10,000 people off a tree that could do that type of a job, but back then it was just, an 18, 19 year old kid could raise their hand and legitimately say, I can do these things. And it was a very fun collegial time to be part of the internet because you were collaborating with a lot of folks like you.

[00:09:14] Both of those situations were my tastes of like startup type technology startup companies and I loved it! You know, the pace was cool the fact that you would get rewarded for skill and acumen versus something like longevity and title. 

[00:09:45] And so I just, I got the bug for the entrepreneurial stuff there when seeing it in action. And yeah, so that’s, that was my first foray as a non shareholder, but, relatively highly placed person in a tech scene. 

[00:10:02] Ron Laneve: And at that time, especially in Cleveland, in a manufacturing town, where, to your point, everyone has jobs for 25 years and does the same thing, that, idea or that concept was pretty foreign at the time. You were way ahead of the curve and I could see how you’re building the foundation for what’s to come next. 

[00:10:21] Bradley Reynolds: Yeah and so I ended up went, that company ended up selling to a national conglomerate, so a roll up strategy, and I saw how they ran their company just in terms of what I would consider now normal, but as a gunslinging, small company, cowboy mentality type person, Oh, now this boss is coming in, and then his boss is coming in, all these layers and protocols and all that. I’m like, I want nothing to do with that. So I was like, okay, cool. I got a little bonus when it sold, and then I started doing some consulting, for about a year and a half. I ended up going all over the place. I was in Denmark for a while. And then I went to Silicon Valley. I worked for Apple and Netcom.

[00:11:08] And then ended up that a friend of mine, started working at a telecom company in Boston, doing some unique telecom stuff where instead of calling somebody on the phone by a phone number, you use their email address. 

[00:11:24] Emails are a lot easier to remember, “abc@mac.com” versus phone numbers and the notion that you might have multiple places to reach me. You as the controller of the email address or the relationship, can choose when you want to go to your mobile or your desk phone or whatever. I never need to know any of that. Interesting kind of concept I like the telecom aspects and knew that from the internet provider part now it ended up being in Boston So I was just a dev for this company called E Dial up in Waltham.

[00:11:55] In the old ISP days, there were two dial in pieces of technology. One was called Shiva, and one was called Portmat, Livingston Portmaster. And they had 100 percent of everything you dialed into was one of these two. The founder of this company called E Dial was the founder of Shiva.

[00:12:13] So he had cred, like huge cred made some ungodly amount of money selling to Lucent, like 500 million, and so you’re like, wow, like this is an entrepreneurial company that’s backed by a next level up entrepreneur. So like I, I dealt with the folks in Cleveland and they had a great success. This is somebody that’s done it at an order of magnitude higher. 

[00:12:37] Awesome. i’m gonna go work there and work on the telecom side figuring out how to get all that developed and network so that The programmers can build a service on top of it. I worked there for a year and a half, two years, which when you’re like 20 is forever. Now seems like a rounding error. So it raised maybe $30 million dollars It had the best VCs (venture capitalists), Greylock, Matrix, Accel. All the pedigree was right and it was amazing to me, you know again manufacturing town that company I was at in Cleveland was bootstrapped and I was like wow these real money from real VCs with the main guy. 

[00:13:18] When I left, I think they had $20k a month in revenue, and they had spent $25M or $30M, some gigantic portion of that $30 million bucks. And they were like, times are tough. As soon as I heard times are tough, I’m like, oh I’m going to get out before I get shot. I’m like, wow, like I just invested 10 percent of my life. And I have some great stock options that are worth nothing. I took a cut rate salary for that, and I did, I think, a good job, like for my area, it didn’t matter, because we didn’t sell enough, somehow product markets, all the things that entrepreneurs talk about is like reasons why something didn’t work out, and I’m like, I can’t do that again.

If the ship is gonna sink, I’m going to be responsible for it, and that, that was just a, learning lesson.

[00:14:13] And so I came back to Cleveland. My plan was to try and do something like starting my own business, I didn’t really know what it was. All I knew was internet service providers. And this is like late 2001. And so I call up the guy who ran or owned Internet Access Group, the company that I worked for in Cleveland and said, “Hey, I’ve saved up some money from working and consulting and all that kind of stuff. Do you want to start so can we like maybe buy a small ISP or something?”

[00:14:46] See I like the way that he operated and he was he’s been successful multiple times before in Cleveland., I didn’t have access to capital sources of capital. I didn’t have a network. I didn’t grow up with, the only capital I could raise was $500 when I was 15. There’s nobody in my friends and family group that could write a check of any significance. I know one guy. And so I’m like, it’s essentially a begging operation. It’s what do I have to do to convince you to do this?

[00:15:16] I’m still 20, some 21 years old, maybe. And that’s pretty young, to partner with somebody, to write any type of significant check. And I had some money, but not enough money to buy an ISP. So we ended up coming to an agreement and buying an ISP in Cleveland, a little dial up provider in Mentor that was called Lightstream Communications. So Steve and I bought that, my, Steve Abbey, my partner. And we didn’t really have a plan, I knew that I could operate this business. Or I thought I could operate this business and because it was like I had all the technical acumen, but I didn’t really understand sales or any of that type of stuff.

[00:16:02] This new ISPs dial up, you advertise, people calling and sign up. It was very basic and so we, we bought that company on September 1st, 2001. 

[00:16:16] Ron Laneve: Okay. I know where this is going. 

[00:16:17] Bradley Reynolds: Yeah, so I’m walking out of the banker’s office on September 11th, and like getting a checking account, a signature card, like very basic stuff so we can operate the business under the new name and all that kind of stuff. And I have literally put everything I have, which was not significant, but it was everything I had in buying this business. And I’m like, I don’t know what this means, but I know it can’t be good for business, to see the terrorist attack and everything. And I’m like like what, essentially what did I do? People were thinking existential things, not even businesses, it was a deep thing. And so it’s not an auspicious birth of that company. 

[00:17:02] Ron Laneve: Not to mention the dot com bust right before that as well. When you’re entering the internet business. 

[00:17:09] Bradley Reynolds: Yeah, let’s say all of those signs that should say, don’t go there somehow was just ignorant probably or ignored them or whatever. So yeah, all that stuff happened, Worldcom bankruptcy all these companies, Pets.com there’s just a whole litany of them. And so we’re just looking and figuring out what’s going on with the business.

[00:17:31] My partner had been successful. He was independently wealthy and all that type of stuff. So we were just getting our hands on this one operation and I’m learning how to like. Here’s things I hadn’t done before. Manage people, accounting sales, like I knew the tech stuff really well and I just thought hey, this is a tech world, tech business, I could, that’s all you need, right?

[00:17:56] And it’s not, obviously, as we all know from being business owners. It’s nothing, it’s a small part. It’s important in that business, but a small part. So there was a lot of humbling and learning lessons that were involved at the very early part of that let alone the kind of macroeconomic stuff that was going on. Let’s just put the turtle shell on let’s just make this thing work. You know, and make something good of it even if it doesn’t have this kind of great upscale kind of potential. And it just ended up that the economy In terms of the tech world imploding was a boon to what we were.

Because we were scrappy my partner was bootstrapped all the way, all day type person, he made all of his money bootstrapped had that mentality, which is a very hardcore mentality for a startup.

[00:18:52]

Most people raise money in some way, bank loans, investors or whatever. So to do it on your own capability is the hardest of all. And especially for a product company.

So what ended up happening is as the shoe was dropping. On the macroeconomic perspective of all of these tech companies, there were a bunch of them in our space.

[00:19:15] And these weren’t ISPs like little dial up companies. These were companies that have built giant infrastructures, had data centers, had wireless networks all kinds of things. And his attorney found this deal that was a company called Expedient. When people wanted high speed internet access to 100 MB or something which at that time was a super high speed internet access for a business. Their philosophy was well instead of digging up the ground and putting fiber in We’re going to use point to point radios on top of buildings, and essentially wire these buildings for high speed access, but reach them via wireless.

[00:19:58] One of their markets was Cleveland, and they had gone bankrupt. So they’re actually in Chapter 7 liquidation, which is the worst of them. Which is the assets are getting sold. It’s not a super structured reorganization. And so his attorney knew about that actually being in one of those buildings and getting the notice from the provider that their internet was going to go away. And we took control of that bankruptcy process and flew down to Orlando and horse traded with somebody who wanted one of the markets. And it was an amazing experience.

[00:20:32] Basically the money that we paid for that business, let’s call it $250k, $300k, which he came up with. I didn’t have any more money. We made that money back the first day. Because there were just so many assets that they didn’t know how to dispose of Cisco routers and tape backup systems That we were able to arrange all of the payback when we took control of the company. We had already figured out all of those pieces And so then it was how do we make these markets work and all of that kind of stuff?

[00:21:00] We’ve got Salt Lake City and we’ve got Cleveland and we’ve got Miami and we’ve got Boston and they’re very different markets. We got a website, we got all kinds of marketing swag out of it, and then we took the name. We became expedient. I think we were something very generic like US voice data or something before that. And as those dominoes were falling in the market, we were able to buy a bunch of assets for, not even pennies on the dollar, fractional pennies on the dollar relative to the capitalization of these companies.

[00:21:34] I think all told we acquired the assets of things that were capitalized at $400M for maybe a million dollars? It was completely abandoned. There was nobody at these hearings. And that is an indicator of how much fear there was in the telecom world and how much these assets were hemorrhaging. No, they were so radioactive, no one wanted anything to do with it, and we just didn’t know any better. 

[00:22:02] Ron Laneve: But the beauty of it was, obviously hindsight’s 20/20, but you’re investing in infrastructure, obviously for the internet. You weren’t speculating on some other software product or dot com. Obviously put you in the right position at the right time. 

[00:22:15] Bradley Reynolds: Yeah, I mean there was definitely something tangible there. The difficulty is when you invest in the infrastructure and you’re not generating a huge amount of cash flow you have financing What happens when you need to service that infrastructure. 

[00:22:28] There’s a carry cost to that is directly related to the capitalized cost and you’re like, oh that I didn’t realize that. So there was a lot of shoestringing and we never missed payroll, but there were sweat moments of like how are we going to make this stuff work? And there was no backstop because my partner had never had a backstop in his life. So yeah, he could have backstopped it and the reality is he probably would have at some point. But the notion was it has to make it on its own. And that was a deep discipline that’s never been able to escape me since and it’s a good one. 

[00:23:03] So we ended up probably I think buying maybe eight companies. Some parts of companies or whatever and cobbling that together and then selling that off to a company called Continental Broadband Landmark Communications. 

[00:23:16] They own things like the Weather Channel. They’re a media company, and they were like, Yeah, we have all these newspapers and media assets, but we like internet as a distribution mechanism, we want to have some assets in that spot so we can understand it.

[00:23:29] It ended up becoming the crown jewel of their organization because the last acquisition we did was a company called Stargate out of Pittsburgh. And it was in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And they parceled off their dial up assets to Earthlink, and we bought their business assets. But more importantly than their business assets, Their management team that had built their business was part of it. And those folks are still running expedient to this day. Twenty some years later the company is worth well more than a billion some dollars and That team was the reason that we were successful.

[00:24:08] We stabilized all the integration of these assets, but then taking that from the level that landmark bought us and getting it to that type of valuation is a testament to all of those folks. So we sold that in 2005. And I was like, okay, cool, I’m done, I’m retired, I don’t need to work anymore, all those types of things. And I’m like, yeah, I’m 26, I think, at that point. I’m gonna do the things I think you’re supposed to do. I’ve seen, I’ve heard other people do these things. You have to race cars. All those types of things and it just doesn’t scratch the itch. You know, it’s cool. Like all that stuff was cool good experiences or whatever. But just started playing around with stuff lots of little experiments and stuff going on. 

[00:24:53] And then I ended up combining with a guy named Jeff Tirey here in Cleveland. He had a development team, and the idea was, could we do phone call tracking? I think it actually was him that came to me with the idea, because he had seen a company I think it was called ingenio that had done a partnership with the yellow pages.

[00:25:13] So at that point There were physical yellow pages, but they all realized it was going online. And so they’re like, okay for the online version of the yellow pages We want to charge businesses for those phone calls. If you see the number in there, We’re going to use a special phone number for that. And then we charge them two dollars a call and ingenio keeps a dollar and the yellow page keeps the dollar. That was a little business model.

[00:25:38] But what Jeff saw was Ingenio sells to AT&T for $600 million dollars. He had a development team in India that could do like the webpage and some of the JavaScript type things that needed to happen to, enable the technology to work. So we, we started in 2007, this company called Mongoose Metrics, which was a Martech software company to do, at that point just very basic phone call tracking. We looked at that paper call thing, but it was pretty complicated. We didn’t have the network of people to do it in terms of the people who could buy and sell that type of stuff. 

[00:26:16] So okay, let’s just strip it down and say hey I’m a business that for whatever reason needs to record my phone calls and have a dashboard and have a special business number and it can go to my cell phone, like it’s just a virtual number essentially on my website. And I can use it in marketing campaigns. If I put up a billboard, I can know, ah, that billboard I paid a thousand bucks for, it generated 20 calls this month. I have the recordings and all that kind of stuff so the marketing part of the technology was just attribution of spend and and that was the kind of start point of Mongoose. 

[00:26:55] So we did that as like a home brew operation bootstrap, just taking sign ups. No sales. Doing some Google ads and started generating. Some recurring revenue. Mostly selling folks doing a hundred dollars a year’s one phone number for a hundred dollars a month and sign up with a credit card and all that kind of stuff. And neither of us were particularly good at sales. We were okay at marketing, but we were like, okay, how do we get some leverage out of what we’re doing?

[00:27:26] And we ended up doing a, an integration with Google Analytics, so that, hey, the people that are using our stuff are marketers. The marketers are doing web stuff, they’re doing phone stuff, whatever. But they’re looking at the reports for their web stuff in Google Analytics. Is there a way that we could shoehorn the intelligence that we have about our data? It could be just something as simple as a campaign name like Billboard 271. And get that into Google Analytics so that they could use their same interface they’re using right now and get their attribution across the channels. 

[00:28:04] So I figured out how to do that. And it was novel and it wasn’t super complicated, but it was novel required a little, slight of hand to get it. But the important part is that it got the head of Google Analytics his attention. They as Google Analytics posted about, “Hey, there’s a cool new integration that’s happening that mod whose metrics did, so you can track your phone calls and Google Analytics alongside your web clicks.” Bang!

[00:28:32] There’s no higher authority than Google, in terms of ranking your webpage. Like at that point. Getting high rank webpage and, and form fills was like the way to get business. And then at the early stage of our company, ’07, ’08, ’09, that was our primary kind of inbound lead source. And it worked really well. Email marketing still worked well. We didn’t do too much phone call and then eventually we layered in trade show. The website in terms of productivity went down over time just because people weren’t filling out forms. But we supplemented that with kind of sales and, just indirect channel networking and all that kind of stuff.

[00:29:11] But yeah, that was pretty much how that company launched was that partnership with, it wasn’t a partnership, it literally a blog post. And so we developed some kind of unique technologies that allowed our clients to track phone calls back to like individual keywords that they bidded on. A natural fit was like all these pay per click optimization and search engine marketing agencies, that ended up becoming our bread and butter. So they would deploy us on their client accounts. Pay us our money make their markup. By the time we sold in 2014 Was maybe 95 percent of our business was coming through those folks and our sales reps were managing those relationships. But we sold the companies like 40 employees doing $15 million in annual revenue. We technically raised money cause both Steve, who’s my partner in this one as well.

[00:30:11] We both put in some money at the beginning, but let’s say, I think we put in maybe $300 grand. We drew it down to $200k. So we had $200k in the bank. And then at that point we couldn’t hire fast enough or couldn’t figure out like where would we deploy capital. We went cash positive say in month six or month 10 or something like that. It was just frugal. And and I remember when they purchased us, they couldn’t believe how capital efficient we were because the company that purchased us was a little bit bigger, but had raised a significant amount of money to get to that point. They had 150 employees there in Chicago. It’s just they did things at a higher level than we did. We were just more scrappy Cleveland, very midwest. And so that company sold in ’14 and I definitely knew I didn’t want to go and do that thing again. Additionally, I’m married. I have a child. Those are a whole different set of priorities and, responsibilities.

[00:31:17] Race cars were out. Airplanes and things like that were out. So then just started looking around. And I think an important thing in terms of just the .Entrepreneurial journey is there’s a whole bunch of stuff in between the gaps of these companies that is, don’t really talk about the little things that like started up and you spent $20k trying to figure something out and it just went nowhere.

[00:31:46] Maybe from your own incompetence, maybe because your idea, maybe because you couldn’t find somebody to help out with areas that you weren’t good at. So if, there’s one more success story that I have in terms of companies, but there’s 50 little things that you’ve played around with or invested in, it just didn’t go anywhere. And, maybe if I were smarter, some of those could have been successes.

I just think that you need to experiment and play with a lot of things to find the ones that actually shake out to become successes.

Nobody wants to put them on your resume because you don’t want like things that didn’t work out to be featured because you look like you’re not confident or something like that. But that’s I don’t know that i’ve met anybody who’s done the business like the entrepreneurial stuff serially more than a couple times that doesn’t have a giant wall of failure inside of the businesses that were successes, let alone outside of the businesses that were successes of experiments and just things that never gestated. And it’s fine. You just get beat down so much as an entrepreneur, you just find failing constantly.

[00:32:58] Ron Laneve: I was going to say, and probably learned the most collectively from all of those failures. 

[00:33:04] Bradley Reynolds: Yeah, oh you’re right. It’s just I think it’s like as people talk about career paths because you don’t I mean you could start up companies and then go work corporate at a company, go be a consultant, be a fractional person somewhere, go start up another company. In the startup community entrepreneurial community those are badges of honor and everybody understands that’s how you learn it. Once you go to a Deloitte or somewhere, it’s a horrible thing to have those there. But yeah, It’s invaluable in terms of leveling up. 

[00:33:36] And then after that, I I started a company in, I think it was ’17. It existed for about a year and a half. And it’s called Securable.io and it was a cyber security education company, but it started out as a, we wanted to put an intrusion detection device in your colo so that if hackers are trying to hack your network, something that sends off red alarms and says, Hey, like some hackers trying to get in. And software and stuff that was around that. But the amount of issues that an organization would have been cybersecurity related was like 95 percent related to people clicking on the wrong emails. When you look at the stats of where the breaches are and how they started, a lot of it starts that way. 

[00:34:25] And so we’re like, okay, this is a little bit more of a low tech idea, but what if we just wrote courseware? Licensed some, wrote some of our own and then just sold seat allocation. 5 a year per employee or 10 a year per employee. And here’s a training regimen for that. There might be the executive one. Here’s the super technical one. And here’s the general employee one, like Footlocker. Here’s the one for all of your retail establishments. And here’s the one for your corp office. So they have compliance requirements and all that type of stuff. And a lot of it was related to phishing, not clicking on bad emails. But We found that was where the biggest pain point was. So even though it was making courses, it wasn’t anything super high tech.

[00:35:13] That’s where the value was to be unlocked. And so we pivoted the company after about six months of operation from being a device type interface company to a an educational company ended up selling that to a company called KnowBe4, after about a year and a half. That wasn’t a home run, it was like a decent deal, but it definitely wasn’t like the other two. Could we have made it go longer and maybe capitalize? I’m sure. When it pivoted out of the super high tech stuff, like the intrusion detection system, and it pivoted into something very creative, like educational software and visuals and videos, I was like, I don’t offer a huge amount of value to this, like I get the “businessy” things, but like the core of the product, which I just I’m not the best person to be suited to do that. And the folks that we sold it for, that was their business. They were in that kind of phishing education business or whatever. So it was more of if I were smarter, better, more creative, like all those things, I could have taken it to the next level. And at that point I had the capital to do it. But, man, I just didn’t have the vision for that one. And so that one sold that.

[00:36:26] And then I haven’t had a startup since then been looking at stuff and playing around and I actually went back to work for expedient for a year and a half. Helping them with some of their corp strategy as they were figuring out, you know What kind of next steps and evolutions would be?

[00:36:44] And then I don’t know just got the entrepreneurial bug again and played around with a couple companies that didn’t go anywhere significant and so I had ideas and I had things I was working on in terms of Martech and visions and it didn’t amount to anything. You know a lot of work a couple customers, but like just didn’t have the stickiness that needed to have happen. So that’s what we’re the end of the entrepreneurial journey. 

[00:37:09] Ron Laneve: Gotcha. All right boy, if i’ve gotten to know you over the last several months, and I thought I knew a lot about your background, but that was fascinating. So that was, I appreciate sharing all the details. There’s a lot to unpack there and a lot of lessons learned. So where does that lead you to where you are today? Tell me about the artificial intelligence and machine learning stuff. And how you’re entering that that market now?

September 19, 2023