 Parallel parking is haunted teenagers across the world who one day hope to drive without their mom's in the passenger seat. The goal seems easy. Fit your car in between two stationary objects without hitting them. So all you have to do is line your side mirror with his side mirror, or was it your tires with his bumper? No, it was the back of his front tire with your bumper, I think. If only you hadn't fallen asleep in that boring Driver's Ed class. And that's actually what a guy named Blake Garrett thought too. Going completely against the traditional approach to Driver's Ed, he gave birth to an idea called ACIBLE, which is used by hundreds of thousands of people across the country. But for Blake to share his new technology, he has to navigate through an industry filled with corporate cronyism and protectionism. Even worse, he has to deal with that in every single new state he enters. I'm Andrew Heaton, and this is Fee's Mind Your Business. What is ACIBLE? ACIBLE exists because we believe for a lot of people in this country that there's these barriers, these educational barriers between people and their dreams. If you want to drive, you have to get your driver's license. So in order to do that, you have to take some sort of educational requirement that removes that barrier and gets you the freedom of driving. Demolishing these barriers is an opportunity for us to help people fulfill their dreams. How did you get to Driver's Ed as opposed to like a dating app for Bluegrass fans? Well, that was the original. Yeah, okay. There's just not as many Bluegrass fans as I thought. Speaking to the choir man. I was 28 at the time and a bunch of my friends were starting at babies. Very strangely, in a turn of events, I had my first product ever made was a trivia game for dads that were having kids. And I go to dinner with these two guys that are investors. Dinner starts and I start giving this impassioned pitch about how we're going to create a billion-dollar company when we're making literally four dollars a day. And the guy just says, stop. He's like, this is not a good idea. You're not a complete idiot. The idea of using mobile apps for education with game-type mechanics, that makes a lot of sense. Can you just go do it for things people have to learn? And Driver's Ed came to mind. Believe it or not, the idea of the driver's license predates the educational classes for operating automobiles by 30 years. The first license to operate a car was issued by the state of New York in 1903 to work-related drivers. And in the very same year, Missouri and Massachusetts required all drivers to get one. Then in 1932, an engineering professor charmingly named Amos Snyder developed an equally charmingly named class called Sportsman-like Driving, where he taught drivers basic driving skills to avoid the rising number of preventable accidents. People must have thought this was a good idea because similar classes spread to high schools and colleges across the country. States then made the connection to pair the issuing of a license with the completion of an educational class, most of which are now taught through private companies. So I live in New York City. I do not own a car. I have not driven a car regularly in 10 years. Can you show me how this VR technology works and hopefully increase my driving aptitude? Totally. Let's educate me up. All right, so this VR 360 video is going to teach you how to parallel park, Andrew. Okay. Oh, okay. I see. All right. So it's showing me the axles. Yes. You're actually going to see something like the inside of the car, the axles working as you turn the steering wheel. Okay. Oh, okay. Now I'm getting... All right. We're backing into position. That's novel. See, with this point, usually I'm just kind of feeling the bumpers to figure out where I am. That's probably not right. There's a big robot in the street. Oh, okay. This is great. So I can look all the way around. There's a robot... You can see all the way around you. ...where you are. He's out of the car. That's ace. Yeah. He's the robot. Various businesses that you've put in. You've got both 3D and puns. I like that. And I think the car's parked. We do it? Yeah. I think it did it. I'm not sure I don't have any kids in the back. Nope. Good. All right. Cool. So when I did Driver's Ed, they had a non-VR, just kind of angry middle-aged guy explain all this. Yeah. Why VR technology to get through to people? We find that so much of driving is an experience to learn it. So by taking VR, we've been able to create this experiential learning that the driver now... And that doesn't just read about how to parallel park, but instead gets to understand the physics and the movement and the spatial awareness through the simulated environment. Right. Because when I was in there, I'm looking at the steering wheel. I'm seeing how it's shifting. I mean, it's as if I'm in the driver's seat and the car's on autopilot and doing it. I'm ready to try this out in real life. Ready? Let's do it. Having now taken your app, your app course on parallel parking, I was so confident that I was going to hire child actors to pretend to be bumpers. We were going to parallel park between them, but the production company said the insurance would be crazy. So we just took some tools from your office and set them up. All right. You got this. All right. How much instruction do you want? I'm going off of memory from the app. So I'm going to come up parallel to, we're going to call that the other tires, right? All right. All right. All right. Far to the right. When it's this wheel. Ah, okay. It's right to where that stool is. A little bit more, a little bit more. There's so much faith that I'm having in the system right now. You're good. You're good. I got it. It's a rental. I think you got this. Can I get all the way? Just not the beeping. No. The beeping I find heinously irritating. I don't think that helps at all. I think you're in. This is the seven point parallel parking. Yeah. I mean, the important thing is we did it. All right. Thank you. Nailed it. All right. I want to go back to something we were talking about earlier. I think you said that New York does not allow for online or app based driver's ed. Yeah, that's right. In a lot of states, actually, about 37 currently do not allow for online driver's ed. Okay. They require teenagers to either take it in a classroom or don't take it at all. There's probably some kind of drag on the amount of people then taking driver's ed or at least having access to it. And then your business is also impacted because you can't expand into the states, right? Teens and their families. You have to remember that the parents are heavily involved in this process too. Going to a driving school upwards of eight times is a huge nuisance. So it's not only a nuisance, but it's also expensive to take driver's ed in a classroom because they have a lot of costs to cover that we don't necessarily have in a personalized online fashion. So that's definitely a piece of it where, you know, we believe slightly biased, but we believe it's in the best interest of a consumer to allow for online driver's education. We've seen efficacy actually be equal, if not better, from online versus brick and mortar is what we call it, driver's education. I would guess that existing driver's ed classes that are brick and mortar probably aren't real happy about you entering the market as competition, so they could potentially hire lobbyists to try and make laws that are more stringent for entrants like yourself. Yeah, you know, it's kind of fascinating if you look at a state like Massachusetts, for instance. Guess who teaches driver's ed in Massachusetts? The state troopers. It is a very good part-time gig and, you know, I don't necessarily want to change them or take them out of the equation, but one could guess that's going to slow down the change in the regulation a little bit. So if you had any particular states or local regulations that you've experienced problems with, so the state of Florida has a couple of different facets to driver's ed, but one of them in Florida there's this entity called the Florida Virtual School. It's an online high school for residents of the state of Florida, which great, seems innovative, awesome. One of the courses they offer is free online driver's ed. So the state of Florida through the Florida Virtual School will partner with the driver's ed company. Recently it went out to bid, so we along with one of our competitors bid on the contract to offer driver's ed. Well, what ended up happening is we lost the bid to this other company. About six months before this went out to bid, our competitor donated $50,000 to the state of Florida and the Florida Virtual School for an educational conference. So those are some of the potential challenges that we have to overcome when working in regulated environments. One of the best stories I have was from about May 2014, we had just launched the first driver's ed product as our first driver's ed app in the state of Texas and it was this woman named Gretchen who lives in Houston and she was replying to an email I sent out just soliciting customer feedback. And Gretchen goes on to tell me how our app has made her life so much easier because she's a widow. She's the mother of five. And this was the first time when her oldest son was learning how to drive. And we made her life so much easier that she pleaded with me via email to make sure that we never stopped doing what we do in order to be the driver's ed provider for her next four kids. And when you're like, I don't even know if this business is going to last much longer, when you get customer feedback like that, that makes it all worth it and helps you push through the long nights and weekends. If you could go back in time and give pre-app Blake advice, what would you tell him? I mean, it's pretty simple. Just start sooner. You know, for so many years I was that person at the cocktail party or wherever it might be that would talk about this idea and you know, first say like, oh promise don't tell anyone, it's going to get stolen, so just do it sooner. Now that I've brushed up on my crack driving skills, I'm going to take out this whip for a ride, but I am thinking about some things. What happens when we introduce alternate forms of education to fields like driver's ed? Is requiring driver's ed courses the best way to promote public safety? What criteria should we use when introducing new technology? I'll catch you on the flip side.