 You know, the company had such a significant growth year last year in COVID. Again, no risk, no reward. Most of our peers did furloughs or they cut salaries by 20%. We saw momentum and I felt that it would create a lot of badwill and a cultural problem inside the company. So we didn't do any of that. We actually leaned in and said, listen, we're going to hold on and not cut anybody's salaries and keep people as is for as long as we can. It was scary. I mean, like the company was significantly down in super late March into April and May. And like when you take that block of time of those, I would call it 75 days, we were like by July 15th, if we don't see a rebound, we're going to have to like cut deep into our ranks because we're basically burning cash right now or below profitability. This is Startup to Storefront, the podcast where we inspire entrepreneurship through truth. Today's guest is Harry Kargman, founder of the mobile advertising company Cargo. What started as a mobile platform to sell ringtones quickly shifted to advertising once the ringtone market was gutted. To say you've been in the industry since ringtone sales were popular is a flex that not many mobile advertisers can make. Harry has grown cargo in tandem with the rise and popularity of the mobile phone and has been quick to maneuver his company as trends come and go. His decades of experience have made him an expert in mobile advertising. And our conversation today is full of insight that is sure to make you rethink how you interact with your phone. So listen in to recover everything from why most see data as the holy grail and why they're wrong, how the GoDaddy Super Bowl commercials are proof that marketing works and what the infamous fire festival got right. Now back to the episode. Welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Harry, founder and CEO of Cargo. Thanks for joining. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Tell everyone a little bit about your company. So I started Cargo in really 2003. My first go was 1999, but it didn't work out so well between 1999, which we can get into. It's sort of the entrepreneurial journey where things never go at quite as as you would hope. But the company today is one of the larger mobile advertising. It's actually just digital advertising exchanges focused on high end, high brand, high impact experiences across all of your best publisher places, whether CNN or NBC, Viacom, Scripps, Hearst. And we power that marketplace for big brand advertisers, Procter & Gamble, Target, Walmart, Coca-Cola, so that they can reach their consumers and get just the right product in front of them at the right time. So they think about it when they're going to the supermarket buying that car or thinking about that next thing that they want. Or they didn't even know they needed as they trip across it when they're just reading content on the web. So I think I want to have you on for a couple of reasons. But one of the things that entrepreneurs always think is that they're above marketing or that it doesn't influence them. I see this a lot with founders. It's like because they're aware of it, they think it doesn't affect them. But I wanted to go back before we get into that around what made you want to start the company? Like what was the signals in the market that you said, oh, this could be an interesting play? I think marketing in general, and I'll put that aside for a second, but entrepreneurialism in general is is a random set of coincidences and circumstances as you navigate the larger market, where really it's a survival experience as you try to figure out what is the market need and what can you deliver? I don't really know very many entrepreneurs. There's a few that sort of had a clear vision of exactly what they wanted and didn't have to sort of morph it or change it or pivot a number of times. When I started, really my vision was that the and I started so early that the mobile phone was going to be a critical part of people's lives. And it's and it's obviously come to be that what I've loved to have thought about, you know, you could you could hail cars or or do restaurants. I mean, I did think about those things and I could have started a company in that area where I ended up focusing, at least initially was working with large operators to figure out what are the services that they would want to provide to consumers. So when we started out, we were doing ringtones and images. But more importantly, we were providing access to content. And it was a subscription experience. So you'd go in and if you wanted to read it about celebrity entertainment with us weekly, we were hosting and managing the us weekly mobile site. We would integrate the subscription experience into that. And you would click, you know, on a one click purchase 299. This was back when flip phones were the thing pre iPhone, pre Android. You would pitch this to them as something as a software, as a software. And they were probably like what? And they were like, who are you and what kind of backing do you have? And they get it. So nine thousand. So they 100% knew that the web on the phone was the future. OK. But you're dealing with massive bureaucracies that that are so difficult to navigate. So we did get a couple of licenses going and the company was was doing OK. But I think there was a moment and this goes back to that pivot where we realized that selling software to operators was a two year effort. And if you're not something like a Nokia selling in, you know, towers and infrastructure, you know, it became really difficult to get them to actually buy anything. Ericsson was in that game as well. If you remember Ericsson, now they just sell the equipment and the antennas to large operators. So that the moment, the critical moment, the pivot, when we realized that we could partner with the operators without actually asking for a software license. And we said, listen, we're going to sell value added services to consumers, we're going to charge three bucks a month. You keep 150, I keep 150. And we go on the 150 on our side and we'd go to music labels. We'd go to images artists. We'd go to get images. We would go to major media brands that were hosting sites, whether it was Rolling Stone or Us Weekly or Entertainment Tonight. And we were saying, listen, allow us to build a very specialized at that time, they just had a website for desktop. Allow us to build a very specialized experience for the phone. It will only work on the phone. And to get access to it, we'll put this paywall in front. We'll charge you three bucks a month. And then we keep 150, which will split with you publisher. The operator will keep 150s. And so therefore you could build a big business because the operator would market and promote it. Going back to your question of marketing. They were the marketing engine. They were the billing engine. And we just needed to put the right content and services in front of consumers where they're like, yeah, I want to learn about what's the latest record, you know, if they were going to get that from Rolling Stone or I want to download the 50 cent in the club ringtone. And so that was the driver of that initial business. And of course, that business came to an end when iPhone and Android came out because everything went free. You know, the entire ecosystem of apps ended up being in the phone ecosystem and the operator sort of relinquished all control over that. And so you had to pivot the business because otherwise, if you didn't, you're dead, game over. This being the turn of the century, cell phones just becoming popular. Was there any like any significant competition or were you largely a trailblazer and alone in this field? There's always competition. There's always because if there's a good idea and there's something burgeoning, there's always going to be other companies trying to jump on that bandwagon. You know, if you if you remember, there was a company called Zingy, which you probably don't remember at all. And there was another company and they had that talking frog, you know, ringtone. Do you remember that jumping? No, it was like a phenomenon. Like if you went to Europe, it was on TV every third ad. And it was like, download now, you know, laughing frog or talking. I forget what it was. It was like a frog video. And it was direct consumer. It was TV ads like they would run for like bear, you know, bargain prices. Like it was that true sort of, you know, direct consumer TV ads before anybody else. And you would just text a short code and they would like ding you for like 10 bucks a month to get, you know, laughing frogs or crazy frogs. I can't believe I can't remember the actual name of it. And like that was all over Europe. It came to the US. It was like nonstop on random television networks and cable over the US. And you had companies literally get millions and millions of people paying 10 bucks a month. And they went and sold in the first iteration, they sold for like hundreds of millions of dollars, these ringtone companies that were built in a period of 24 months. And I missed that. I missed that bandwagon. I was around then, but I missed the opportunity. What year did the app store roll out? Like what year? So iPhone came out in 2008. The app store really became a thing. I would say probably 2009, 2010. Yeah. So fun story. We had just graduated college and I moved to Boston and the iPhone was a brand new thing, the app store. And we were looking at me and my buddies were looking at this saying how will people interact? What will an app be? Right. And it was obvious it would be we thought it was obvious it would be games and we thought it was obvious it could be music and news and kind of that's it. But our question was or the hypothesis was how will a brand sell without selling and who's going to do that? And so we ended up looking at the iPhone and it was basically to like three inches. It was very small and the whole concept and at the time it had like a 3.2 megapixel camera. So it was the awful camera quality. And I'm in Barney's and I see a guy taking pictures of ties on his phone. And I asked him, like, what are you? Why are you doing that? And he said, oh, it's cheaper for me to buy new ties than it is for me to buy new shirts. And so I take pictures of the ties again, terrible quality imagery. And then I go home and I put the picture on my shirt at home and I see if the outfit coordinates. And if so, I come back and I buy the tie and I go, OK, we could probably automate that. And so we ended up creating an app that allowed you to. It was called the try before you buy and it was a bow tie app because a bow tie was like the perfect size of like if you put it to your neck, it was you could literally visualize yourself in your shirt. And it was high res, right, because it's not someone taking the photo on 3.2 megapixel quality. It's like we can take a professional photo and just upload it. And we were like, oh, this is it, you know, and we were like in Brides magazine and all these people were like, this is the future of fashion and I was like so excited. And we were like, all right, we have this app company. Let's go talk to Tiffany's and do this for rings and blah, blah, blah. Turned out everybody had already knew it. Like everybody was already on this tip. We were just what I would call maybe like the first to launch. But that was it. And in a very small market, I mean, it wasn't like everyone's downloading a bow tie app. And then all of a sudden we got this press and people literally wanted to buy the bow ties. And so then we ended up becoming a bow tie company in this. But our whole hypothesis was like, let's solve how brands will figure this out, we'll interact with the app store. And I feel like we've missed the boat completely because I was like, we should have just went left. But we weren't either we were too young. We didn't we didn't know tech. We weren't in that game yet. It was later in life. We'd get into that game. But I remember that, you know, that was the time where I was like, this is really cool. We're onto something. And then I felt like we were too late. Something you're too late is that the idea was slightly off. Whatever the implementations might have been the business model might have been your approach to market may have been the partners that you partnered with. I mean, that's what you realize is that the good ideas are. Shitty part is that is a time of dozen. But so much of it is, you know, can you get that momentum behind whatever you're doing where you get the right people, the right formula and you figure out the right model? I mean, and that sort of drives, you know, success. It's and it's you don't see it. It's not obvious before you do it. But then you sort of tinker around with it. And then it starts to work and then you lean into what's working. And so and that's my point about sort of the entrepreneurial journey. It's, you know, you start with an idea and then you figure out where it has product market fit and you got to continue to sort of advance that idea and pivot that idea. So going back to your sort of bow tie and sort of that what you're describing is the first iteration of sort of AR really. You know, augmented reality, it's hey, I take a picture of this and I put it, you know, against this other thing. And then I sort of get some inspiration or knowledge. And then that helps me form a buying decision. You know, fast forward. When was that 2000? This is 2010, literally 2010. So here we're here in 21 and we haven't seen AR truly become something that's going to be used at scale. But that's coming, right? Like the first thing that you saw was that Pokemon game. And that was driving behavior and like that sort of petered off. But like you saw that inception of people interacting with their device and the real world. And it actually drove. I mean, I got to go to the Central Park and I got to like go pick up this crazy Pokemon, you know, that's only going to be there for the next like three minutes. Yeah. Right. Significance was there. Significance was there. And people were changing their data plans. They remember that? But the behavior, the behavior was there. Yeah. And so you know that that exists. A lot of so much of the stuff that's successful has been in some iteration previously, but just not quite at the right time with quite the right experience, consumer experience. And I think that that's the fundamental takeaway. And so you were 2010. If you started that today with the existing cameras in the device, the processing power of the device, and maybe it's not bow ties, it's something more substantial. And you launch that in market. Boom, you have your, you know, your next unicorn startup. And so it's that you think that insight go back, but again, it's it's different. It's the insight of, I think the key is, it's the insight of can you virtualize something that people want to compare or contrast against something in the real world that gives you more insight or wisdom about a decision that you need to make. And that becomes the pivot point to that decision making. Right. If you were, if you're to really put it in the abstract, doesn't need to be bow ties. Can be pretty much anything. And so it's like, okay, maybe bow ties were too niche. In the case of, you know, Jeff Bezos, he decided that it was starting with books, and then that became the universal marketplace. But he knew exactly when to pivot out of books and expand the marketplace. Other people probably tried to do that. You look at it as biggest competitor of Barnes and Nobles. He could, you know, that's a rounding error in his overall bank account, but they Barnes and Nobles was the dominant player. They just didn't realize how to evolve the business and what the true insight was where they were going. So I think that that is the key to success. You know, and then the question is, do you have the resources? Do you have the cash and do you have the people and do you have the execution capability to bring it to market? I'm buying two companies right now. I've never done that before. You know, most companies that people buy, they screw it up. Or better yet, they fuck it up. The data would suggest that that's true. You know, do you have the right, do you have the right formula? Are you buying the right things? And can you integrate it? And can you execute on the larger integrated vision? I don't know if I have those skills, but it feels like at this moment, I have the right moment in time where it's not as big a risk because the core business is doing so well. So I can, if I'm wrong, I can, over a period of years, I can just eat the loss. But if I'm right, you're seeing this catalyst event. To my business that, you know, eventually I could take the thing public. So I'm right at this, this fulcrum, this middle point where, you know, hopefully I have a large public company in a couple of years or, you know, hopefully the core business is doing so well that if I made a mistake, I'll just sort of sweep it under the rug and move on. What is your core business today? So we, we power for, as I said, for large brands, most of the high end, high impact advertising, I don't know about most, but a lot of the high impact advertising that you see across what I call the open internet. So as an example, if you go to CNN or you go to Vice or you go to WebMD and you come across like this high impact, beautiful, visually designed, potentially even has video in it, ad experience with a little lightning bolt in the corner and says ads by cargo, that's the company cargo. And so we believe that we can at scale because it's all controlled in our exchange sitting in our office. We can integrate our code into now we have hundreds of sites. We'll have thousands of sites underneath the umbrella. We see virtually 160 million Americans every month, most people every day. We serve tens of billions of ad impressions on a daily, weekly basis. And the goal ultimately for the brands that we work with is how do they get in front of a consumer at that right time before they're making their target run or before they're buying that next car or the formula that they the baby formula that they select or even how do you drive them down to enter the local lottery because they have more money because nobody's won in the last three weeks? How do you sort of put that right message in front of them that drives the consumer to be aware for the most part? So you guys are collecting a lot of data? Is there AI that's component to this data? I would imagine like we have significant machine learning algorithms, but it's really interesting, you know. And I've gotten to sort of industry debates around sort of data and the and the expiration of data. It's one of those things that I think not people. People don't spend enough time thinking about. Most people see data as like the Holy Grail. Like if you have data, there's the people that have's and the have's nots right of those people that hold data. But I get into these conversations with brands that have this data like you need to go through our seven levels of you know, secure authorization and it needs to be encrypted on both ends. And you know, what is your backup strategy and what happens with the breach and so forth and so on. When we're not talking about even credit card or social securities, we're really talking about like what's your browsing history, which is less important if you have sort of an anonymous ID. The reality is most of that data starts to expire the very moment that you collect it. And if you really think about it in 90 days, 120 days, a year, two years, is the data around who you are as a consumer and your behavior and traits and values, does it stay relevant and valuable or does it start to have a half life where after, you know, a certain amount of time it becomes, you know, less and less valuable to almost relevancy. There was a company I was looking, they were doing a talk. I forget what this was and it was all about how they look at signals specifically as it relates to couples. And so the example would be and this has got to be real time. It can't be to your point old or even it can't be weeks old in their view. And the whole thing was like, let's say my wife and I, I'm Googling a vacuum. And then they got signal, boom, IP address, whatever it might be. And then my wife, same thing. And basically what they were figuring out is if they can just connect these signals, the wife's always going to be the purchaser. But once I'm involved in the signal, it's good. And so at that point, like that's your highest intent moment. And so, but you have to capture that. And they were playing with this idea. I mean, it was beautiful. It was like super well done. And they're like, this is kind of like the future, what they've viewed as the future, I forget what company was, but they, what they viewed as the future of, of advertising. And I think it made a lot of sense. So the bow tie company gave me an idea later, which it was a company I wanted to launch called Max, it was called Max AI. And basically what it would do is it would say, okay, it looks like you purchased bow ties. And this is a very obvious example around the Kentucky Derby. And then because you're like in your twenties, all your friends are getting married in the summertime. And so these are moments for you. Now, at the same time, you use Twitter, you use Instagram. And so if we could just collect all of this data, and we also understand your behavior around when the wedding season is free because we're scrolling your, literally your, your social media, then it becomes really easy for us to send you a tweet. So it's not even like an ad. It can be like a directed tweet being like, Hey, Harry, here's 20% off for your next wedding. And it's like, because we know weddings start in June 20th. And I'm giving you that 20% off three weeks before, whether you purchased or not. I've now made you think, or at least visit the site, because I know you have two or three weddings, maybe five, maybe six. Don't know. But right. And it was the whole of like, how do we create that and automate that at scale? Cause to me, that seems so obvious. It's so obvious. I think I think it's really hard to actually execute against that for all those reasons. So let's just use your example. Is Twitter going to share that data with you? Absolutely not. Is Facebook or Instagram going to share that? Shopify. Absolutely not. Shopify maybe, but I doubt it. Those signals are very important signals. But they're held in these walled gardens that are not going to actually let those signals out. But you don't really need those signals. Cause right, you know, I'm just looking across the table. 20s and 30s, you're in your 30s, maybe early 40s, like all your peers are getting married. It is the summer. You sort of know based upon what your browsing habits are, if you're reading, you know, magazines, you know, about buying your first home, you know, you sort of can age that person because you know exactly when that's going to happen. That's not going to happen in your 50s or 60s. That's not going to happen in your teens or your early 20s. You're not going to have the financial wherewithal. It's going to, the pattern of life is pretty obvious if you, if you unlock it. And so you don't need sort of this overwhelming set of very specific signals. And the example that I always give is people get obsessed with data. And so let's say we take a new couple, the data, the credit card data would tell you from a year ago on you, you know, prior to getting married, prior to you having your first kid, like goes to bars, you know, lots of charges at that bar, lots of charges at that club, lots of charges on the valet, you know, whatever you're doing, lots of charges being single, you know, on vacation, gym membership charges, et cetera. So all those credit card charges, like paint a picture of this person who's single, they're going to earth cafe and sitting there all day and having coffee and then they're going to work and then they're grabbing whatever it is at work and you get this picture of a single person. When that person starts to browse content and says, what's it like being a first time dad or first time mom, you know, looking for homes in the suburbs with like a lawn and garden, looking for a Volvo versus that, you know, souped up, you know, sports car or whatever it is, although I am in LA right now, but putting that aside, those signals around context really do lead you to that life change event where yes, the person's now married and yes, the person's about to have their first kid and then you can put that Huggies ad in front of them being like ready for size one diapers. Now's the time and that's based on what we call a contextual signal. It's based upon what you're reading, browsing, consuming, learning credit card data probably won't pick up on that you've had this life change event, because Walmart is not sharing that data and you like me probably first time you're gonna like stock up on your diapers from Walmart or Target because it's cheaper, right as you prepare. So that data doesn't necessarily get shared with the rest of the ecosystem. And it's only until you walk into that bodega or that local supermarket because you're running out and you need to now get size four or size three because all your size ones and size twos you had plenty of time to stock up on at your local sort of Walmart, whatever which doesn't release that data. What you realize is that by then when the credit card signal goes through the ecosystem and tells you based on a data driven thing that you're your parent looking for diapers, you're already like you've missed two or three cycles of the highest usage for a Huggies. And so we've been so caught up on to your point, how do you take the conglomerate of specialized signals around credit card around retail purchase events and we've lost sight of actually using obvious contextual signals that are all around you. The guy from social dilemma past president of Facebook, Tim Kendall came on the podcast and when I was talking to him, it became very evident to me that in his world, or at least in the social media world, the human condition is known. And from an advertising perspective, it's exactly what you're touching on, right? It's like, even if you're on the long tail of being a 30 year old who maybe is like abstinent, let's call it like, right, that's the complete or even a 24 year old who's waiting until they're 40 to get married. That person doesn't matter in the advertising world. But most 25 year olds, they do to Bacardi and to and to like, vacation spots, and to, you know, BMW and Tesla and whatever about pairing that person with the right, right? That's all it is. It's figuring out where you are on that life cycle, understanding what your need state is under what life cycle I'm at. So interesting. But then when you look at your peers, and you actually look like, okay, how old am I? Now you look at your high school buddies or college buddies, and you sort of know who you gravitate toward. There's like, the fuck ups in high school who are like, they're never getting married, and they're still living with their parents. Then there's like the nomads in life who are like never settling down, and they're going to be like doing random stuff. And there's the work of hollocks that you know that they're not going to get married until they're like 40s. And then there's like the people like you, right? Like you be like, and if you look at them, you know, there's a few that lag behind in terms of getting married, there's probably a few that got married before you, you probably share kids potentially the same age. And then now you're talking about all the same things, right? Where am I going this summer? You're not going to the place that the retirement guys are going because you can't afford it yet, right? And you're not in your golden years. And by the way, getting two, three kids in a car on an airplane is torture. So you basically start to create a world based upon level of effort and resources. And you look at your peers, and you're talking about all going to all the same places. Your Instagram looks pretty similar in terms of where you're taking it, where your shopping looks pretty similar. You're mashing up those bananas that you're getting from the organic thing, or whatever. And it looks pretty similar. And then you're like, Okay, what are you consuming? And now you have some choices we talked about like oat milk versus almond milk versus. And then you're like, Okay, who What's the brand that you want to put in front in those period of choices? And that's when marketing comes in, right? You know, you need something in this space, because you're trying to be healthy or whatever, and you never tried something. And then somebody puts this message, you really got to get off dairy, all these reasons why it's not good for you. And then people are like, Okay, is this a good time to go into the lactate milk, which is lactose free. So that's better for you. Or do you want to go into the almond milk world? Or is it the oat milk, or are you going to I just had pistachio milk? Yeah, actually super tasty. It's a huge plug for pistachio milk. But you have these decision sets. And so I just had a great experience. I'm probably going to tell people, Jesus, if you're looking for like an something alternative, this pistachio milk is great. I will get picked up and resonate. And sooner or later, this little pistachio milk company that's like ahead will be like, Great, I have a great product. It starts marketing. It wraps a couple of coffee trucks like what we talked about with Oatly. And instantaneously, it, you know, grows 10 fold 100 fold, all partially because they're in the right place right time, all partially because there's these movements toward health and lifestyle for a certain age group. And partly because they actually get the right marketing message with the right product right at the right time. And it starts to become sort of this momentum in the market. What's the most important part of what you just said, like for the company? Is it the messaging? Is it? Well, you got to start with a good product or reasonable. Let's think that's baseline. Baseline is they've they've they have an incredible product that is getting natural word of mouth. And so it's been a marketing distribution and figuring out what how much do you put in and how much ROI do you get. And so that's really sort of and then what are your different channels that are actually going to work. So there's obviously you can do TV advertising. Most small brands can't afford that. That works really well. I mean, it's Super Bowl ad. You look at I think the greatest single proof that marketing works is if you remember back to Go Daddy, like it was nowhere. It was nothing. It was an entrepreneur that I think he had sold a couple of companies. So he had some cash and he decided to plunk six million down on Go Daddy and get I think it was Dona, Dona Kirkpatrick. Yeah, put her in a Super Bowl ad with some like NASCAR around it with parts of her body hanging out at just the right time when everybody when the when the URL go online momentum was just starting it was still on the early curve and he sort of met it and instantaneously from that Super Bowl ad where that was 100% of his marketing budget that year. One ad or two ads during the Super Bowl that was it. And he built I think that company is now a multi-billion dollar company from just that one moment in time where they figured out it's the right product. People are looking for URLs and domains. So there is a need decent name. People can remember Go Daddy sits in your memory well. So people say, Oh, I got to do a URL. I got I got to get a domain. You know, some of the other there was like New Star if you remember and Verisign. These are all very technology, very scary names, sounds very tech and everybody wanted to have a URL. So free. It's so easy. It's it's almost free. It's 999 a year and Go Daddy. Yeah. You know, with with Danica Kirkpatrick and Super Bowl ad boom overnight multi-billion dollar business. Well, that's an interesting topic of conversation because I feel like that was another era which has potentially passed us by. So I work in commercials now for that business and absolutely just in terms of TV ads versus strictly online social media ads. My own anecdotal evidence is showing me that we are doing more of the social media ads on vertical platforms, as opposed to the 16 by nine horizontal TV commercial ads, just because people are consuming more ads on their phone versus then watching on TV because streaming services. Is that it or is it data? But you're but you're in the weeds here. You're talking about you're talking about ratios of creative and you're talking about what you're really talking about is where are people spending their time and where are you early where you're breaking new ground in the space that hasn't yet been so overrun that the signals are lost. So in that particular case, if you traditionally Super Bowl ads were Pepsi, Anizor Bush, you know, it hadn't been done before that a startup would take over and add platform experience. They couldn't afford it during the Super Bowl. And it was so jarring and so unique and it created such buzz, if you will, that it had this impact that far outweighed the three million dollars or six million dollars that they spent. Right. Then that became the new norm. They discovered it first. They trailblaze. They found this, I call it open, you know, green fields of opportunity to exploit. And they were there first. They took a lot of risk. Could have totally failed. And then from then on, you saw like in the last Super Bowl, you had like the Oatley, you know, CEO who like basically sang that absurd song. But it stuck in people's heads and it was sort of catchy and that done that did, you know, wonders for the business. But to your point, down visitation and viewership on the Grammys, on the Oscars, even on the Super Bowl. And so TV didn't have the impact. So you're right. Right place, right time. You know, not that we want to use the example of the Fire Festival because it was such a disaster, but same kind of thing. You know, the brilliance of that, the reason that there's three documentaries about it now. And it's a meme. It is a pop cultural meme. When you see a disaster, it's kind of me fire with a Y. Right. Yeah. And the reason for that, if you really look at it, is is not because the festival was such a disaster, which of course it was. But there's lots of things that have failed in time. It was that the founder, I forget what Billy, he figured out that if you get a bunch of supermodels with the idea that you could go party with them, that it was all it was, was a pay to play kind of opportunity. And I think it was the Bahamas, but in the Caribbean, the idea was that he did such a brilliant job with almost no budget, with was a jaw rule. Is that right? And and a bunch of like Victoria's Secret supermodels that you could put together this this concept of, well, I'm an influencer and I'm almost at their level and I just have to pay some money and I can go hang with all of them. That idea of like pay to play with super influencers and celebrities and it's right at your fingertips. That hadn't been, even though it was total fraud, obviously, I don't think they thought it was a fraud at the time because I think they were. They thought they were really going to put on a festival. Yeah, they thought they were going to. Well, and they had no experience to be able to do it. Right. But the point is they figured out with influencer marketing and with the right look in the field, super high production values, drone shots, the allure of this illicit island. What was it? It was the island Al Capone's Island or whatever it was. They basically put together all of the key signals that created desire right at the right time as Burning Man was peaking and you had all these other festivals where people are like, OK, I'm in. I need to be a part of that. And that was the brilliance of what they did. Forget the execution on the festival itself. What they did is a masterful new marketing, opening new doors, new innovation around marketing that worked extraordinarily well. I mean, you could you could say the same thing with what's the Kylie with her makeup brand? Oh, Kylie Jenner. Yeah, Kylie Jenner's makeup brand. I mean, figure out how to get the right people on the platform to sell the idea of beauty to young girls, teenage girls, to use influencer marketing to drive that. She was very early on and built, you know, a massive new marketing platform for probably not that breakthrough. I don't know what the ingredients are, how good it was, but it had more sizzle than competitors. Obviously, that probably had a lot more time and a lot more chemistry in those products. I want to two questions. Well, let's start with the first one. As you're an investor, when you invest based on everything you're saying, what is your investment criteria? Like, do you pay attention to people? So you don't pay attention to things like the name of the company or? Well, I do, but I think people, you know, the question is, can the person get it wrong? Can they afford to get it wrong? Right. That's the first question. And second, how smart are they? Because I never believe that the first company that people come out with, the business plan that you look at, there should be a kernel of something that you think could be really successful. If you don't see success in it. So for example, your bow tie example, probably too niche for me. I wouldn't invest in that. 100% to niche. How many people wear bow ties? And by the way, is society moving toward bow ties or away from bow ties? Yeah. Like probably at the time. We had data to suggest towards, but that doesn't matter. But your intuition, your intuition. I'll tell you why. Unless it's a dandy, unless you're talking about bow ties and like. I'm just giving you an anecdote or not an anecdote. In Williamsburg. The thing was, we had a lot of kids. So what happened, there's, and this doesn't matter at all because I'm not involved with this company at any capacity, I sold it. But basically it's like, if you're a high school kid, your big FU to your school was bow ties. I mean, that's what was happening. It was your only way of differentiating. And so it was like, that was a massive market. And then in college, similar. Some colleges. People wearing bow ties to their high school classes. We're talking about like private high schools where you have a uniform and you wear a tie. Private high schools. Yeah. But even that's too much of a niche. For sure. No, no questions. So like, so, but take your idea. So like if you had told me that you were going to do the same thing, but for wedding rings as an example. Yeah. High ticket price, significant turnover with the beers or with the other sort of, you know, Cartier or with the, you know, and if you could be a leads platform where you get one lead and you get $1,000 for everybody that converts, because you know that the ticket price is five or 10 or 20 or even $100,000. Then I would say, okay, you know, is there enough of a market there where if you get this right and it becomes sort of the platform of choice, like there's just sort of evergreen fields toward, you know, delivering it. Maybe a car is another example. So again, it's about what's the market opportunity? You know, how big is the market opportunity? Who is already in the market? So if there's just too difficult to get startup because there's too many startups there already and then sort of how fast and how large can it scale? What's the top end? And then like if you get it wrong, what's the capacity of the person to be able to pivot it to an adjacent market where it's going to be successful? That's sort of how I've looked at it. And by the way, listen, I haven't been that successful in terms of my, I've had a couple doubles. I haven't had a single home run. The things that, you know, and like as an example, Foursquare was founded out of our offices in New York. And like even Foursquare, if you take a look at it, for a moment, super high gloss, whatever, now they're a data company. They've raised a crazy amount of money. So initial investors totally crammed down. I don't know that anybody's like made a fortune on Foursquare as an example. And then there were other companies that have been more successful, but it's very, very hard to pick early startups and have them end up being billion dollar companies. Well, for your investments versus the two companies that you're in the process of acquiring right now, you said when you're investing in something, you're looking at the person and can they afford to get the problem wrong or whatever. Seed stage investing, yeah. Okay, so is it all similar when you're acquiring companies? Are you, like I'm certain that, you know, at that point, they've gotten whatever they're doing, they've gotten it figured out to a point? Yeah, it's very, for an acquisition, it's very different. So the way that I think about an acquisition is the following. If I take my resources, you know, we have 40, 50 sellers across the United States. We have direct agency, large scale agency partnerships that are where we have some endeavors to try to drive a certain amount of money. And we have all of these CMO level heads of media relationships with the Fortune 1000 company. So amazing opportunities to drive great ideas into our existing customers who are always looking for something new, looking for and looking for value and frankly looking to consolidate their buys with partners that can actually give them more solutions than less, right? It's easier to just deal with one company if you're already working with them, if they can actually solve a bigger part of the overall marketing puzzle. And so when I look at plugins, acquisitions, I'm like, okay, if I take this technology and this team, which is operating at a certain level, but I give them the added resources of my entire sales team, the oversight and availability of my tech team, if I plug in the demand that's already coming through my pipes directly into their product and I was able to accelerate their own roadmap by giving them capital because they can't get themselves fast. When you put those things together, does it look more probable than not, almost obvious, that if you just roll it out with good execution, you're looking at a double, triple home run based upon the products that you're plugging in. And so that's the way I look at it. If the answer's not unequivocally, like as long as we don't really fuck this up, you put this thing, you plug it in here, you have these sellers do this, you create this right incentive plan and you should see their existing revenue model go up three X, four X in a matter of 24 months, probably wouldn't buy them. But if you have the right thesis around that and you can plug that in and have good execution and everybody's aligned, that's a great way to sort of create an acceleration in the business itself. And so that's how I've looked at these two things. One is in a space we're already in, we're just not doing it well, this will open up many new platforms for us around commerce and commerce discovery. Like we really, one of my thesis, and again it goes back to the thesis, my thesis is you see on Instagram that people are discovering new products and then buying directly off the platform. It's much harder for retailers today to figure out how do I get in front of a consumer? Like people aren't walking into stores as much, they're buying more online. And so they go to the staples that they already know, they're already wedded to their tied detergent and their bounty fabric softener or bounty fabric sheets and their downy fabric softener and their huggies diapers, right? But you're trying to introduce new products to them. Maybe you want seventh generation green diapers instead of huggies or whatever it is. Can you get the right commerce experience where people can check out directly out of the ad where it gets the right matching of people that are already in the market for diapers? Maybe they're people that are about to be in the market for diapers and they haven't made up their choice and they haven't become huggies or pampers, followers or, you know, or disciples. There's an open, you know, moment in time where you can use, because they're first time parents, to actually get them wedded to the honest company diapers or seventh generation diapers or some other diaper because it's more green. Can you get that right message in front of them and then drive them to check out and buy? And then instead of getting an ad dollar, can you get a piece of the actual lifetime value of that new customer that goes in and gets on a subscription? So that's like a great example of we already have all the inventory, we already have all the publisher integrations, we already have the AI and machine learning to find the right customers. Can we plug in the right commerce-based ad with the right checkout mechanisms into the Walmart and targets and CVSs and Walgreens and Krogers of the world, which we don't have, but we could acquire through a partnership or through a company that we could sort of create this new product, turn it on and instantaneously you take what is already a successful company. You never want to buy a company that's challenged. Already a successful company that has momentum and can you put lighter fluid on the fire? There's a, I was doing something for a video startup and it was in the advertising space and then what they were trying to figure out was think about it this way. So YouTube is a lot of, it's obviously a platform where a lot of kids spend their time. So whether they're watching cartoons or whatever it is. And so Disney was playing with this concept of it's just like at any episode of Dora the Explorer starts off the same. The difference is at some point you, as the kid gets to dress her. And so you get to start playing with like, what is she wearing? But the whole notion of the story or that episode remains the same. The difference is at the end of it, she's effectively wearing what you've decided. You as the child. At the end of it, there's a checkout. And you could buy that figurine that you created in the story on YouTube and then you just go checkout. Disney, the issue Disney was having was there has to be a parent in that decision making, right? Just like an app, like, oh, your kid, you can set controls where your kids just can't check out and then it's your credit card and then you find out later. But it was really interesting to me that they were trying to make it so native to the experience, so native to the episode. They didn't end up moving forward with it. But to me, that was like pretty really interesting. TaylorMate was playing with another concept, same situation, but it was basically like you bought the R9 or you bought this driver five years ago. It's time to re-up, here's the new one. And it was this automated video that would basically unwrap this in front of you. It was your name, it was super Taylor to you. And then it was even to the point of like, they knew if you hit a draw or a fade and they're like, this is the most, yeah, the latest technology allows you to switch that, whatever it was. And then at the end of it was checkout. And then there was some extra stuff in there. So they put in like maybe a free towel or something like that just to get you to incentivize. But it was for their VIPs only. Effectively, they're the repeat customers. That kind of worked. When you think about things moving into the video space literally, do you see it where at some point it'll just be one and the same? Or will it always be separate? Like will an ad have to pop up? I hate using that word, but do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, of course. So we spent a lot of time thinking about video and video ad experiences as well as integration experiences. As I said, everything that is old is new again. So what you're describing, if you really think about it, it goes back to the Transformers movie where GM basically placed all of their cars as Transformers in the movie. That sort of product placement and organic storytelling, you're just taking that and automating it and using technology around the door thing where it becomes sort of personalization in storytelling in the traditional sort of theater, cinematographic experience. GM just basically putting their GM lineup into the and they become the Transformers and they're like, oh, I want the Bumblebee Camaro. You know, how many Camaros did that sell? But then you've seen it like in the transporter with the Audi, you know, where he was driving the Audi, you know, A8 or S8. So that has been sort of in practice for 30, 50, you know, since sort of the video business, that sort of native placement. In fact, if you go and work with any of the NBC internal studios, like as a brand, you can, like my wife had a show on Bravo and you know, the dirty secret of it is she did have this like choreographed dance event inside of a pharmacy and they had like product placement with like detergent and she had like the two detergents in both hands and she's doing a dance number in the middle of this pharmacy, like a total musical dance number. And you're like, okay, why those two detergents and why is the label still on them? And the answer is it's an organic placement, paid placement in there. So I do think that organic integrations, truly there's like a great value to that. Now the problem of course with organic placements and this would be like a great entrepreneurial thing to overcome is that oftentimes they require many months if not years in advance thinking, you have to sell it in, then they have to go into production, you place it in, what you're really talking about is the digitization, the just in time submission of that personalization integration where the machines can do it, at the point of viewing and you can actually change it up potentially even on a person by person or cohort by cohort basis, cohort is like a group, like a micro group. So that personalization at that macro level I think is super interesting to invest in. In fact, I invested in a company called Veratoc which was one of my bigger investments and still hasn't quite taken off but it's doing pretty well to do exactly that. They control the Nickelodeon birthday club and the idea is with your favorite character using the example of Dora, it exists today in the birthday club, you can put in your child's name, you can put in their favorite activities, you can put in what their sibling's names are, you can put in like how old they're going to be, you can put in their birthday and it will sort of create a very organic birthday voicemail message or call for the kid where you sign up and it's a certain amount every year you subscribe to the birthday club or they give it away for free because they can collect the parents' information to your point about consent and you don't have the COPA problems that you were talking about. That's the child privacy loss and you can basically create a club of tens of millions of parents who, on their kid's birthday when they're four years old they can have Dora give them a call and it says their name and it says how old they're turning and it says the name of their favorite pet and it says, it congratulates them on this momentous change and how much bigger they're gonna be at five and like all the new things that they get to do when they're five years old, the greater responsibility and it's like this thing that brings joy and for Nickelodeon what an amazing way to sort of compile data on their viewership and then to sort of remark it to those same people lunchboxes and backpacks and dolls to your point and everything else so simplicity in what you do and that personalization can absolutely drive success now to the point that we talked about, okay so you have a birthday club or you have like a Santa, a well-wisher how do you take that tech and build something that actually has more market scalability that's the struggle that Veratalk has today and thinking about like what's that next level in terms of applying that personalization to drive consumer behavior change and get them to actually start to consider other products and the products that would naturally come to mind. How do you view podcasts in this whole space? I think podcasts are gonna be extraordinarily successful at scale so this is the challenge if you're the podcast creator it's hard individually to get scale if you're the platform and you can figure out a way to automate and insert personalized kinds of ads at high what we call CPMs cost per thousand high sort of sponsorship rates because it feels so personal directly into the podcast at scale those platforms aggregate that across everybody that's spending the time and effort to produce something so high quality like this but they don't have to spend any time or effort to do that they're the platform that you syndicate to and then they have the scale across everybody that's putting that together and so that and that's the power of the network right you're creating a network of opportunities that at scale the brands can go look at how many people that I can reach at such a scale with an intimate like set of messaging that maybe is you get something that pops up and is like please insert this message or read this message out at scale but they're sending that to thousands of podcasters at once and you get this sort of scaled up personalization for brands and advertisers I think that's super powerful now the question is as an individual podcaster how do you get enough scale into yourself almost like an influencer where you can command almost the network effect on yourself that's the hard part like if you look at the most successful podcasters whether it's the New York Times, the Daily or whatever they have enough scale on their own with the right sort of experience that they can actually scale those direct sponsorships well outside of like the massive shows like the Daily you know that's well I think that's probably like the number one aside from like the Joe Rogan experience but you look at what the trend is for what podcasts and podcasters are doing is they're grouping together so like you might have a production company that hosts 10 podcasts so you may not be the platform but you have 10 shows that you can offer to and that's what happened on like YouTube as well what happened is they created this over the top networks and you know some of those I forget the name of the one that sold to Disney it was Yvonne Crates it was in Santa Monica I went and visited them but you know they sold for a billion dollars why did they aggregated enough scale of content that they controlled that they could start to drive true you know attention and time and it's really that's the that's the commodity that everybody's trading on is like how much time and attention of how many consumers that you can influence and it's just scale so quality of who your followers and listeners are scale across both yourself and a few others and the aggregation of that opportunity where you can prove outcomes where you can drive a certain outcome for a brand if you get enough scale just like you know influencers that have 20 million followers, 2 million followers 200,000 followers and 20,000 followers you know people evaluate them based on you know the affluence and the level of fervor that their community looks at and how much influence a particular influencer has I always say podcasts are similar it's about how engaged the audience is you know how often they come back and listen and whether you can put the right thing in front of them if they're the right type of demographic that it will actually talk about life cycle if you can get them at the right time for the right set of products it can be very very powerful and so you know that's the key is to think about like organically who the audience is how much power you know and how much influence you have on them if it's the right product and then how do you put the right sets of products in front of them where they're like I didn't even know I wanted that but that makes total sense at this point in my life cycle it's an interesting thing so we have like a brand endorsement and they're just figuring it out they're like okay we're trying to move in this direction your podcast seems to align with that direction let's go ahead and work together on this the reason I was asking you is because it seems like people are trying it but they don't know which is what I would call like it's a very much a risk versus oh we have some semblance that this will work or it's very much an opportunity like let's go back to those examples of the Super Bowl with GoDaddy like there are all these new green fields of course the first person that does it is like is this a good use of money time effort am I gonna be successful but if they get the formula right and they do it at scale because nobody else figured it out and they were one of the early adopters or the leaders and they get it right at scale instantaneously they take something that didn't really exist and it becomes a phenomenon overnight it's like the early, early TikTokers they got in early they were good at it and now they have 30 million followers and the platform's legitimate or more 60, 70 million followers and so it's where are you on that curve of adoption and can you actually build momentum think of it as like you're riding that wave you're a surfer if you're good at it and you're there early when the wave is building and you figure out how to put it together and it starts to actually work and you have more experience than others as that wave starts to roll in and everybody jumps on it you're at the crest of it and you know how to ride it better than others and people are like listen I wanna buy into that experience because you know how to do it you've been doing it longer than others so I'm a buyer not a seller We talk about this a lot in the podcast space there's no good platform they don't exist I mean the data you're getting the data we get on our podcast on the audio only side of it is there's no validity to it it doesn't make any sense even if you go to the Apple so obviously we're on Apple podcast if you go to their back end and you see their analytics makes no sense and it was in beta as of like two months ago and so it just gives you a sense of how these even behemoths companies podcasts is just entering yeah very early days I think Huge opportunity Huge opportunity for sure Anchor FM was a free podcast basically you could put whatever you want on it they would do the advertising thing if you got to scale but they own all your content and I think Gary Vaynerchuk bought that company not too long ago but still like there that was it there's like three well he saw the opportunity right Gary's like great Gary and I've known Gary for many many years he's one of those guys that's always tinkering right like he he's got his wine company he has obviously VaynerMedia he has production companies inside VaynerMedia he's doing podcasts inside of VaynerMedia and now he's sort of buying and investing in a bunch of startup companies and then using his relationships and influence to actually go and try to launch those like Shark Tank you know like he and he's trying to even he's trying to build his formula for like how do you sort of angel investor buy and then figure out how to take whatever it is to the next level and sort of use the platform that he has as the and I hate the word platform in an influencer way but like the media platform that he has and the and the followers that he has to actually create a catalyst for adoption of whatever those things that are that he's trying to buy sort of like as I plug it into my technology platform you know it's same kind of do you get a multiplier effect is the goal for you to go public is that what you're working on yeah I mean I think that you know the company had such a significant growth year last year in covid you know we again no risk no reward most of our peers I did furloughs or they they cut salaries by 20% we saw momentum and I I felt that it would create a lot of bad will and a cultural problem inside the company so we didn't do any of that we actually leaned in and said listen we're gonna hold on and not cut anybody's salaries and keep people as is for as long as we can it was scary I mean like the company was significantly down in super late March into April and May and like when you take that block of time of those I would call it 75 days like we were like by July 15th if we don't see a rebound we're gonna have to like cut deep into our ranks because we're basically burning cash right now we're below profitability but by I would say late May the company bounced back June and then by July the thing was flying and then we had the largest Q4 in the history of the company by like an order of magnitude do you think it's because something we noticed on just from companies we spoke to on the podcast was they were experiencing all sorts of supply chain issues and so it forced all of them to go into education it forced them to up their game on social media because at some point they couldn't tell the customer they couldn't show them they couldn't say like buy this product because they didn't have it and so they just all took a laugh and said we're just gonna educate our consumer and why our brand is so important and what our product actually does are you talking about our clients or are you talking about us your clients I think the clients were very worried that the pandemic was gonna create a overall economic crash and so they were waiting wait and see because marketing money is effectively burning if there's no demand because people are batten down in their home and they're not gonna other than like the staples of life you know like I need food I need shelter I need access to medicine and I need clothing like it's like that's why I think big box retailers did so well during that period because it went back to the very basics like every roll of toilet paper was sold out across the country people were buying like water because they were like putting water storing up water in their basement you know you couldn't even find grape nuts because that's like a staple you could eat grape nut I mean if you remember there was a total shortage and Clorox couldn't like they couldn't even keep their factories running to produce enough Clorox wipes and sanitizers and all the rest so there were the sort of the haves and have nots during that pandemic good news is that all of those customers that I said were all it's actually really funny Clorox stopped all their marketing spend because they couldn't keep anything on the shelf so there was just like no point in marketing like we don't even have enough product for the demand or organic demand that was happening and then like all the travel companies all the airlines and hotels immediately stopped advertising and cruise companies because they're like nobody's going to hotels or airlines or cruises so like that whole part of the market so it was like the middle people that where they were like yeah keep it going so it's funny it became concentrated but as the market as we realize that people are not going to just like it's not going to be a mass extinction event that people were going to sort of survive it and that basically marketers are like wow there's just like a different sets of demands and it's moving online they were like we can put some fuel on the fire increase our marketing budget especially digitally outdoor wasn't working there was no new TV production so that's a problem there's radio people are not commuting you know so that's hard so if you think about it and there was like an outdoor event space like in venue and stadium nobody's going to stadiums so there's like no point so you have to reshift all that money somewhere else TV viewing believe it or not was down why because people are watching Netflix, Amazon, Disney so probably TV video was up there's just no ad experience in any of those places that were being consumed so it's like okay now let's just move more digital more online and like we're sort of sitting there in that sweet spot as that happens and all the money turns back and by the way most of these large marketers are on an annual budget basis so if they don't use that money by the end of the year they'll probably lose it in the next budget so they're just like now's the time starting in sort of middle of I would say July, August through the end of the year where they're like and by like November, December they're like we got to use all that money up so like you saw this crazy trajectory that like made up for all of the non spend that was happening in late March, April, May and so the company had, you know the biggest year in the history of the company and this year we're like up 75% from last year and so and these are relatively big numbers we were already in the nine figures last year so, you know we have a pretty good trajectory going forward so I don't know if we can go public in 22 but by 23 with these two acquisitions and we're looking at potentially bringing out a private equity partner we'll see sort of where that plays out but I think fun, you know like the company's growing it's funny it's in COVID is so strange because we've had significant amount of hires we've probably hired maybe a hundred people maybe not that much but since COVID began and like you see them on Zoom but like you see them for the first time in the office I'm out here it's the first time I've been in LA since like COVID began I'm having dinner with the team tomorrow night like there's so many people that I'm gonna meet in person for the first time that would never happen like I would be, you know I'd be in LA four or five times a year I'd be in our Chicago office even New York office like most days it's a ghost town we're getting some people maybe it's 20% back 25% back but there's people and I'm like hi I'm Harry what's your name and she's like, oh like I'm, you know I'm Jen or I'm Jessica and I'm like, so how long have you been at the company? She's like, oh I've been here like nine months. Well in that vein are you planning on adopting a like a flexible remote slash in the office work schedule or are you planning to go all remote or what's your outlook? So we're all remote but starting July 4th so now we're past that you know we're asking, you know working with your managers to come back one day a week you know we wanna leave some flexibility this summer cause I think people made plans you know a lot of people are like COVID I'm gonna like which is really strange instead of like locking themselves down to where they were like I'm gonna move to Tennessee I'm gonna work out of Australia I have one employee that's like I'm living in New York he's now living in France so there's actually funny enough a lot of movement it's a very strange phenomenon where people are like oh Delta variant you know I'm like yeah you know pretty scary Delta variant and you know like yeah I really don't feel comfortable coming back to the office I'm like totally understand and I'm like so what are you up to and they're like yeah I'm going to Mexico next week I'm gonna take the family down to Florida I'm like okay so you have this strange thing where you have the fear in the professional life that somehow doesn't necessarily mirror what people are doing in their private life they get stir crazy and then they just like the back of their brain their medulla whatever it's like I gotta go on vacation you know I'll just wear my two N95 masks when I get on the airplane to go to wherever I'm going so it's funny and I'm like and you can't go to the office one week you know but you're gonna sit on an airplane and live in a hotel and eat at a restaurant on vacation like yeah or go to amusement park so it's a funny disconnect between the two so you're seeing a lot of that but we wanna get flexibility because I think so much of what it is now is almost even less about COVID although COVID obviously is a big part of it but I think that there's a retraining of people on some level people like the flexibility of being at home and not commuting you know when we had a town hall talking about people's openness to come back to the office you know I was like I would love to hear from people you know what I heard is well I've cut out the one hour commute and I'd really rather not go back to it so it's an interesting challenge where it's maybe not a pandemic related anymore it's lifestyle and experience related at this point and so we're at one day a week now going to three days a week after Labor Day but you know what's complicated of course is that like and I see this all my kids are in summer camp my son's in summer camp outside of LA and my daughter was in summer camp in Maine and unlike any other year basically counselors were like I don't want this shit anymore I'm done and they just quit in the middle of summer they pack their shit and walk out and like a lot of these camps overhired but not with this level of attrition and what you're seeing is this is like the summer on some level of resignation and it goes back to I think there's a mentality now especially being locked down in the pandemic they're like I don't need to grit my teeth and get through this like I'm just gonna like pull the eject button I'm out and that attitude about life which is if I don't like it I don't need to sort of suffer through it I'm just gonna like pull a ripcord that's like a brand new thing that didn't exist pre-COVID and I think it's a little scary because I don't know what's gonna happen I think in the overall economy between sort of the unemployment people make more unemployment I think that's come to an end at the end of July but people make more in unemployment than doing the jobs that they were doing previously so they're like I'm not driving a truck I'm gonna collect my unemployment checks so that's the problem and then on top of that people because you have this sort of life and death question and had the time over COVID to ponder it are like I'm not doing anything I don't wanna do but like this whole world if you really think about it or you know there are good times and bad times with any job like most people are like some months are like I fucking hate this right it's like grim out bad weather you know you're overworked because you know you're the person sitting next to you quit you have too much on your plate and you know it's gonna work through but people now are just like I'm out pull the ejection cord and I think that's a little scary I think broadly speaking because so much of the great things in life were built because there was some perseverance and elbow grease where people are just like yeah I'm sick of building this bridge but the bridge is really useless if I don't actually get to the other side and pave it and get cars going over it you know if I quit it you know when it's 10 feet from the other side it might as well not have built it at all I think we'll see people they'll basically tap into their hobbies or they'll try to find that thing that motivates them but there's also another side of it where if they don't find it then they're left with what right it's like you have to go back let's say they find it you think that the hobbies don't have like yeah 20% of it is awesome all the time but like 80% of it is like what am I doing this for it's like it was torture and most people most people after what happens to you? well I try to recognize that in myself so you know I think a lot of people think that I have I don't have I mean tennis is that for me it's 100% I just picked it up like four years ago and for me it's literally like every day is all right here we go mental toughness here we go here we go and then it's like learning how to rate with your left hand if you're righty it's like this is not fun right until it is but most of it you know there's a journey there that stuff to put in the work and the work a lot of work a lot of repetition a lot of just discipline drills who likes drills right I mean I'm super passionate about golf recently do I like going to the range and like hitting you know hundreds of balls so worse fucking thing like and so like the guy that had taking a few lessons from like my club pro is amazing guy Frank who actually made to Kiowa and I'm like dude I gotta get like I gotta drop like five or six shots and he's like so how much time you spend on the range I'm like not enough and I'm like it's not worth it you know and again I even recognize them myself like if I really wanted it that badly yeah I'd go out and I would just repetition repetition repetition but I'm like no no no this is fun for me I like being out on the course but he's like well that's not where you dial in like that short game that's gonna get you that exactly if you've got the goals you need to put in the work and you can you know to be fair you can just continue to go out on the course but then don't be unrealistic in your expectations thinking that you're just gonna get five or six shots better the whole world is about expecting five or six shot better and not putting it in the work I'm going to Wimbledon so I totally understand yeah I wanted to ask you something so sometimes entrepreneur given our listeners effectively they'll always wonder when to turn on the switch for advertising we've had some companies that are super early we've had others that are super late stage at some point there's a brand building moment where they they're like okay we're gonna focus on building a brand now and then that switch goes off from what you've seen is it a money thing so is it basically like okay now we can allocate 50 grand to advertising or is it I think what I've seen is that people should start with organic so word of mouth word of mouth try to get some momentum because time when you're an entrepreneur money is such a tight resource always think that like it's gonna take you more time to get something done than and it's going to cost you more money than you expected so money is the thing that you got to hold on to time so that you have unlimited time but if you're an entrepreneur and you have the grit you'll just work harder or work longer hours so in today's day and age I think getting you know on LinkedIn getting on Instagram getting on Facebook trying to get organic posts trying to barter you know where you can you can barter your time and some of your products for other things where you really only pay if it's successful that's the way to start once you have some momentum and you're seeing some revenue then you can start to allocate and you're like okay I think the company is in a good place and I'm starting to see some momentum that's when you can allocate some money on the side and be like okay how do we start tinkering with Facebook to see if we can get some growth over there how can we get on YouTube how can we go to platforms like Cargo and then do like small incremental tests you got to put some enough money in it 50, 75 grand to basically drive that that makes sense otherwise it won't work tell everyone where they can find you yeah if you're trying to reach me I'm on LinkedIn super easy Harry Cargman love to you know connect there I'm on Twitter just Harry Cargman on Facebook and you can even should be an email harryatcargo.com super easy nice well thank you so much for coming on the show today absolutely loved being here super fun talking about all these things and thanks for having me on I really really appreciate it