 here at the five o'clock block on a given Thursday. Our last live show of the week, although we do broadcast overnight and we will always do that. And we have Dave Douglas here on, I guess you call it Think Tech Tech Talks and we're talking about Silicon Valley because we discovered in the course of a show on cafe, cafe restaurants a few, I guess last week, was it? Yeah, I think it was last week, yeah. Found that not only is he a restaurateur but he is a former member of the community of technology people in Silicon Valley. And we said, oh God, we gotta talk to him, we gotta peep through the keyhole and see through Dave what Silicon Valley was and is about. So welcome to the show, Dave. Thank you, Jay. I hope it's not a distorted view that I give you. But yeah, I was there kind of in the early days or at least what I called the early days and pretty amazing. I didn't even know what I was involved in at first but yeah, it was pretty cool. As time rolled on, it was pretty neat and I realized that I was really in the middle of something that was gonna change the world. Ah, change the world, nothing less. This is why I was telling you, I enjoy so much halt and catch fire. Oh, exactly. Which is a serial on, I guess, Netflix and you have seen it too and just I surrendered to that serial and it was so interesting because it plugged you into what happened in around 1980, 82, 83 about the development of hardware and software, the PC essentially and all the clones that came out and how the world changed and how Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley to develop things, as you say, that changed the world. So why did you go there? What did you do there? What kind of experience did you have? It was kind of, for me, Silicon Valley was like falling off a log. I didn't even really know what I was doing. So when I was in high school, I was one of those kids who scored really well on the aptitude test and did grade on my SATs, ACTs but my grades were horrible. So I could get in and I grew up in Oklahoma to make matters even worse. So I could get into an Oklahoma University because I pretty much knew how to spell my name correctly but I wasn't gonna get into anything like even Michigan or I just, I wasn't gonna get into a university that I thought I'd really like to go to. So in my infinite wisdom, I joined the Marine Corps which again, don't ask me why, but I joined the Marine Corps and in that I actually started working on satellites and radar, which was very cool. And so before I got out, about six months, seven months before I got out, there was this, these recruiters from Silicon Valley came down basically from Lockheed and Journal of Dynamics and those folks and they came down and offered me a job. So I was like, okay, I guess I'm gonna move up to Silicon Valley when I get out. And I worked in the defense industry for about six months and realized it just wasn't what, I didn't wanna do that. I would see the same, these old guys, like really old guys, like 37. And they had a coffee and I was like, man, you're just like Garney Hatfield, I would just be like, this is the Marine Corps, but no saluting and no rifles and camouflage, but it was the same thing. And I just didn't want that. I knew I just didn't wanna do 30 years or 20 years of that. So I ended up stumbling into a small startup company called Daisy Systems that no one even really knows about today, but they were like the pioneer of electronic design automation. And some of the most brilliant people that I've ever met, folks that I looked up to and we'll never meet again. I'll never meet these folks again, especially when they were young, like Vinod Kosla, who was one of the founders of Daisy Systems and he and Arya Feingold, I'll just put it politely. They got into a difference of opinion. And Vinod was like, I'm gonna go start my own company and Arya was like, oh, good luck, I wish you luck. And so Vinod went off and started this little company called Sun Microsystems. Oh no, oh gosh. So I mean, and these, I say guys, men and women, they were just stellar. And I looked up to them and this was 1982. So what was weird about, and again, that was a command. Halton catch fire, yeah. Yeah, when you said Halton catch fire, I said, what'd you just say? Because that wasn't actually a command. It was a computer command. And in the intro of every episode, it kind of shows this chip burning up. And it was more facetious, kind of like a military phrase, like snafu, situation normal, all what, or foobar. It was kind of Halton catch fire was very much kind of a play on, the bus really isn't gonna catch fire. The chip isn't gonna run so hot that it just explodes. But that's pretty much what it meant. It just said, take it to acceleration and get that chip to be in a situation where you're not gonna be able to recover from that. And so when you said that, I was like, what? And I mean, when I first heard the name of the title, I was like, what? And but then I heard, oh, it's a AMC show. And I was like, I don't really wanna watch it. It's just gonna be another one of the Silicon Valley and I'm not gonna like it because I was there. I lived it, I was there. And I just don't wanna, I don't wanna watch it. So I pushed it off for quite a while. And a few of my friends were like, dude, you gotta watch this. Like they're talking about Comdex. I'm like, they're talking about Comdex. And so I started watching it and I just got hooked. I got hooked and it was just really cool because, and I'll tell you, in that show, so you remember a character by the name of Joe? This guy was kind of, he was kind of a cross between Steve Jobs and a million other people, but he had a lot of jobs in him. But there was one episode, I don't remember which one it was, but it was later in the season. And Joe was all excited about this new thing called the World Wide Web. And he said, I went to CERN and I talked to Tim Berners-Lee and there's this thing. And I got, I'm getting goosebumps right now. I got goosebumps because they took that situation and applied it to the character named Joe. That situation happened to a guy I worked for, the president of Pantheon Interactive. His name was Kip Parent. If you look in the digerati, he's listed as the webmaster in the digerati. And Kip worked for Silicon Graphics at the time and he went to CERN and he talked to Tim Berners-Lee and he came back. So they took a piece of history from someone that really happened and applied it to a person in the show. And man, I was like, oh my God, I identified with Joe. And I actually identified with every single character at one point or another throughout my career. Even Cameron, who was the really awesome S-Hot, you used to say the word S-Hot, Expliative Hot. And that meant you're a great programmer, like you're a great engineer, you're an S-Hot engineer. And in the show, she was an S-Hot engineer. And I identified with her because when I was younger I kind of thought I was too. I wasn't now that I look back, but I thought I was. But the show was very interesting because it really did track Silicon Valley from about 1982 until, I don't know, when the early nineties maybe. And some of the timelines did skew a little bit, but for the most part, it was just a brilliant show and amazing characters. And they did pull from history. They pulled from real life, you know, like Mark Andreis and I remember meeting Mark Andreis in a Netscape. And then when Yahoo got in on the bar and all the other browsers were dead. It was like, oh, that's it. Or not browsers, but the search engines. It's like, well, over. And then later, Google comes along and just knocked Yahoo out of the water. So just a very interesting wild ride all the way around. Yeah, you know what? When I watched it, I was on the outside looking in, but I remember a lot of these developments and the markers of the cereal. Just as you say, these may not have been real people, but these are real personalities. And they were real efforts, real companies, real entrepreneurial activities. And although the timeframe may be a little bit off, I saw that as a very good study of how probably the most important innovative experience the country has ever seen took place. What an amazing place to be and to enjoy for all those episodes. I thought it was neat. And not to be elitist or weird or anything, but we actually thought Comdex was like, eh, that's the consumer show. When I was with Daisy Systems, we were in this industry, if you will, or this segment called Electronic Design Automation. And you had Daisy Systems and Mentor Graphics and Valid Logic. And it was called the DMV sector, if you will. And we were total pioneers. So Daisy, engineers from Intel came to Daisy. And Daisy was funded by Fred Adler. I don't know if you've ever heard that name, but like a pioneer, again, in venture capital. And later I was with the company that got funded by Draper Fisher-Jorgetson. And yeah, so I mean, all these names, I would kind of hear them throughout the series. But Daisy had some amazing folks that came out of Daisy and amazing companies that were sprung from Daisy. So Sun Microsystems, Synoptics, Cadence, all these amazing companies at Xilinx, these companies that came from there. And then you had Silicon Valley, who are now like Silicon Valley icons. And you may or may not know or recognize some of these names, but like Harvey Jones and again, Vinod and just these folks that made a huge impact. And they all came from just this tiny little pioneering company called Daisy. And it was just a way cool time. And again, Comdex was really very much more for the consumer, but there was this other confidence called DAC or DAC. And DAC was man, if you went to DAC and it was an IEEE conference, the Electronic Engineering Conference, man, you are cool. Like you were at DAC and you were changing the world and you're building these computers that were just like allowing the technology sector to just explode. And what we did, Daisy Systems, it actually kind of helped automate the creating PCB boards, it sounds really boring, but you could use this layout and it would get things so close and be able to tell like what the heuristics were like in terms of chips that would be made. And Daisy also would allow time to market to be shortened by not having to go to the foundry and get these wafer chips. So you'd try and create a wafer which would have a ton of chips on it and then you'd have like 80% failure rate or 60 or and Daisy Systems by doing this logic that we would apply just to be through the computer we would do this analysis and it would bypass a lot of having to go to foundry. And so all of a sudden after this industry got created Intel and AMD and all these companies were just exploding these new chips that did things that were crazy chips you would never imagine but they could program them and be able to design them and test them and simulate how they're gonna work and just time to market just got cut to a fraction. So it was pretty cool. It was really a neat industry. Well, it sounds like if you're in that industry you really can you have contact, you're rubbing elbows with a lot of people you're tracking on the arcs of their careers and their successes and failures. You're tracking on the moves of these little companies merging, consolidating, failing, whatever it might be. And it was a community, I say was because maybe it still is a community of individuals who were all like connected and watching each other across the street and trying to learn and sometimes doing dastardly things in order to succeed. Dastardly, there was tons of competition. And like it was loose lips, sink ships like do not ever share an idea. And if you do it's gonna be on a little napkin and you're just writing it out and you wad it up and throw it away. Like you really kept your ideas very much to yourself because you would, and I mean with your tight little group the thing that I think is kind of interesting though is at the time I didn't know who these people were going to become. So like when I knew Guy Kawasaki who was the first evangelist, the main evangelist coming out of Apple, I didn't really, I mean Guy was Guy. You know, he was a cool guy and smart as heck. And I remember seeing him at a conference like 25 years later and we were, I got a photo with him. I was like, dude, I got to get a photo. It's because we, before there was a photo at a conference and we were a lot thinner and I think a lot prettier. But it was neat because I had no idea who Guy was going to become. And so just rubbing elbows and meeting people and later on seeing kind of where they ended up and what they did. And I think I told you in a prior conversation I'd met Steve Jobs twice over the course of about 15 years and his reputation did precede him and he was very kind of obnoxious is probably what I was going to say. Maybe, maybe, you know, and that certainly is the Joe McMillan character in. Yeah, it was really funny because Joe McMillan, he was like kind of obviously one of the main characters. And I think he was one of the more developed characters because I did see in Silicon Valley, I saw folks that I knew, venture capital people, engineers, I saw them and I maybe myself too if I look back, go through a certain level of metamorphosis, kind of a change. And you start getting older and you start getting wiser and you realize maybe you're not quite, you know, the world doesn't revolve around you and your idea. And so then collaboration starts becoming an important component of moving forward. But when we were young, it was just, you know, stay up all night, eat pizza and just code, code, code, code, code and work, work, work, work, work. And many a time I pulled all nighters just to get something out the door. Was that the arc of your career? And I suppose you're a success in Silicon Valley. Were you a coder? Were you working on projects? Well, my start out in the technical side as an engineer and I actually was in electronic engineering. So I was analog and everyone was digital. Most people were digital. So I was pretty unique and there's only a few of us that had a really strong analog background. And one of the first things we worked on that I was really proud to be, just even have my hands on it, even if it was a support situation was this thing called color burst. And it was the first in that industry, the first color display graphics board that displayed color because it used to be green on a black screen. Well, I remember, yeah. Wow, like this is so amazing. So that was pretty cool. So what kind of traits did it take to succeed? It seems like you have to work hard. You have to have ideas. You have to have a lot of ideas. That was clear in the series. You have to have an idea every day and have to be a remarkable idea. And as things get more complex, as the companies get more ambitious and larger, I suppose, and better funded, just one, as you said, one individual with one idea wasn't enough. You had to form teams. You had to collaborate. And maybe sometimes you had to move to another group that was a better collaboration for you. I mean, it sounds pretty fluid as a matter of fact. Yeah, it was. I mean, it was interesting because I think there were folks who, kind of the idea makers, and then there were the builders, the folks who would kind of make it happen. And I kind of straddled the fence a little bit. In the early days, I really just wanted to put my head down and make things work. But then later, I found that I had a talent for seeing and kind of into the future. I had talent for being able to see technologies as it stood that day and where it could get to in a few months or six months or a year and being able to look at markets that we might be able to reach. It's pretty easy to come up with cool ideas, but if the technology is not there to support it or if you're too ahead of the wave, then it's just not going to work. So I'm lucky to have my name on a few patents. So that's kind of cool. And I was in a lot of different industries with regard to technology. But I think starting out in the electronic design automation, like that gave a lot of credibility. It's like, oh, wow, you were there. So the Compact folks, if we go back to the show, is basically the show in the very first season was about Compact. If you know Compact computers, it was basically that was the company. They never really said it, but the Compact was coming out with this lunchbox or toolbox looking computer, which was just the coolest thing in the world. I mean, my gosh, to have a computer that was the size of a toolbox or a tackle box and be able to literally pick it up and walk it somewhere and plug it in was unbelievably cool. And so the show is really about Compact and what they were doing out of Texas. And then it ended up migrating to, what I call the proper Silicon Valley. But it was interesting because these folks would have ideas and they would be cutting edge. But if you couldn't get it to market, then all was lost. And so what I realized was my talent really lied in being able to see a market and be able to see it and take whatever technology we have and be able to tweak it and turn it and twist it and modify it a little bit and get it into that market. And that's really kind of how I ended up. I was a strategy guy. I'd been CEO a few times and was with a couple of companies that went public and sold a few companies myself that I had started. But the last real job I had was as I was head of global strategy for a development company and we worked with the likes of British Airways and American Airlines and General Electric and Johnson and Johnson and all these huge companies. But it was very much from a strategy perspective. How did they take their, and a little bit of change management but how do they take their existing operations and integrate those into a connected world? So yeah, so that's kind of where it went. But I'm glad I had that engineering background because if I was either selling something, an idea or even a product, I would be able to speak with conviction and credibility and there was no BS involved. And I would sometimes even tell folks, we just can't do what you need. You may wanna go talk to this other company and they would be our big competitor. And but what I would do, it would seem like I'm just saying, God, I'm sorry, so I think I've topped over you. No, that's okay. I'm just following you so carefully because this is like confirming my expectations about how things went there. And it sounds like, yes, you could not have done all that stuff if you hadn't started with hands-on engineering. And then you learn about the business, the business grows around you, you meet others, you understand marketing and development, you understand personnel, you understand your capital, you understand management. And before you know it, you're a global strategy guy. What an incredible art that is. What strikes me that what you haven't mentioned is the importance of being able to articulate exactly what the technology is, exactly what the mission is, exactly what the global strategy is. And also, you know, human relations, personal relations, you have to have that too. And whether you have it at the beginning or you develop it along the way, you really have to have it over time to succeed in Silicon Valley, right? I think so, and I'll tell you just a short story. And again, I know I'm talking a lot, so I apologize, I'm kind of carrying too much in this conversation. But this was early on at Daisy's Systems, I was about 23. And one of the folks over in marketing who I really looked up to, I mean, I just looked up to this guy and he said, Dave, have you ever considered getting into sales and marketing? I said, no, I don't like those people. And then I realized he was like a VP and I said, but I like you, I don't mean that, I don't mean I don't like you. But I really didn't, I just did not, I had an aversion to the marketing folks and the sales folks because they didn't really know what they were done and they weren't really engineers. But later I realized that you can have a great product and great engineering and if you can't market it, you're gonna die. You can have a quasi-okay product and if you market the hell out of it, you're gonna be super successful. So I started realizing that it really does come down to being able to get that product to market. But they had asked if I wanted to go to Japan and speak about a product that we had just developed called the Logician. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is gonna be so cool. We're gonna go to Tokyo. So I'm on a plane and get over there and I'm speaking not to a huge group, but about 150 people. And I want to, I'm thinking that I really wanna fit in, you know, I really wanna, so I practice how to say, good morning, my name is Dave Douglas and so-and-so is going to translate for me. And so I worked on it and worked on it and worked on it. Basically what I said when I threw it out there was, hello, my name is Dave Douglas and I'm gonna go do a Nagi with this chick. And it was like, eat sushi and I completely blew it. And after that I was like, okay, I'm never gonna try this again. But being a young dumb idiot, I thought I'd try another one. And this was with a group of about 15 or 18 engineers from Seiko. Now, Seiko's a watch company, right? You wouldn't think they'd be selling really high in quarter million dollar, you know, types of systems, but in Japan you need to have a distributor. Back then you really needed a distributor to get into those markets. And Seiko was an amazing company. They did all sorts of stuff. They didn't just make watches. So anyway, they were our distributor. We have about 18 engineers and I was gonna be talking about the product and what it did. And it just so happened that back then, when you flip on a switch, especially of a really heavy duty computing system, it goes through its post and it does this and it checks the memory and it checks the drive. And so you hear all these tests going on before anything fires up on the screen. And you'd hear, you'd hear all these different sounds. And so I told the same translator who I messed up with in the larger discussion that I had earlier the day before. I said, okay, so we're basically just translate everything I say right when I say it. And so she's like, okay, Mr. Dagosan. So I was like, okay, great. So the engineers are there and I flipped the switch. Now I know how many seconds it's gonna take for it to complete post. It's gonna be about 30 or 40 seconds, something like that. So I said, hello, my name is Dave Douglas. And then I look at her and she goes, da, da, da, da, da. And then I said, I'd like to introduce you to R2-D2. Now, Star Wars was huge back then. Star Wars was like really cool. What it come out in 78, J, I can't remember, but 77 somewhere. So where everybody knew, everyone around the world knew Star Wars and everybody thought R2-D2 was like the coolest little robot in the world. And the logician happened to be kind of rounded. So I said, I'd like to introduce you to R2-D2. And then she looks at me and I said, R2-D2. Again, yeah, I just kind of smiled at her and she goes, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, R2-D2. And after she said that, the logician, like on cue, just went, da, da, da, da, da, da, and started making these noises. And the engineers thought it was magic. They were talking to each other and just battling back and forth. So it was pretty cool. Yeah, just kind of silliness, but yeah. Just as easily though it could have failed, I suppose. Well, yeah, but see, that's one of the problems too. I think I always swung for the fence and I never really hit a homerun, but I always swung for the fence. And I got to say Silicon Valley, for me at the time, was just a great, it was a great situation because it allowed me to swing for the fence. Well, that goes to a question I wanted to ask you, which we touched on actually in the Café, Café, restaurant show a couple of days ago. And that is, Silicon Valley has changed. And I wanted to ask you about the change. I mean, you described pretty much what's in Halton Catch Fire. You described this incredible adventure experience and you could get in there and if you were quick-witted and you were willing to work hard, my God, the world was your oyster. You were the most exciting industry, sector, location in the country, in the world. Now it's different, isn't it? What's the change? I think it is different. I think what happened was Silicon Valley became mainstream to be perfectly frank. There was a time when a lot of people didn't really know of Silicon Valley, didn't even know where it was, what it was. And it had the ability to operate under a cloak of secrecy. The skunkworks could easily be going on that no one would even know about. Now it's like, I think some of the changes is people may come up with an app or they may come up with some different things. But for the most part, most of the exits are, it'll be acquired by one of the big guys. And so I think what's happened is that we've got these ubiquitous, these companies that have product that's just ubiquitous across the landscape. And so they kind of control the narrative in terms of product and development and applications and how far they go. I also think, and this isn't to beat Google up at all, that Google is an amazing company, has been an amazing company. But I can remember when the mantra for Google was, don't be evil, don't be evil. Well, funny enough, a lot of people kind of think Google's like, ah, they've got their hands in everything and they know when I'm going to eat a Big Mac. And so some people feel like Google's really kind of moved beyond and has their finger in the pie. But one of the things that I noticed early on, and I really didn't like it that much about Google, was that they never completed a product. They would develop a product and they would get it out the door and their system of being able to get something out the door and iterate, get feedback and make modifications and then improve it and improve it and improve it. They didn't really have any customer service. They didn't really, they used the customers to debug product, but they gave it away for free. So what it did was it kind of, and this is my own version of the story. I could be so far off and so wrong. And if anyone disagrees with me, I would agree that they should probably disagree with me. But it seems like we created this generation of folks who were perfectly happy with stuff that didn't really work that well because it was free. And that disappointed me because I remember back when I was a kid, we would build product that had, it was focused, it was targeted, the usability was taken care of, and it was really something that like I say, changed the world, it would really be amazing. Like the iPhone really did change the world and it was an amazing product, I mean amazing. And did it have some shortcomings? Yes, but at the end of the day, and I think that was kind of the end of the glory years in terms of product going out the door. And now we see a lot of product that's kind of thrown together and they got to get it out really fast. And so I think a lot of things have changed in terms of culture and just the ability to create product, create new technologies and be able to have as a small company go public and stay that small company, you just can't hardly do that anymore. Yeah, so your experience, the experience you had, you could not have that now, am I right? I don't think so, I think it's different, but you know, I'm sure it's great. I'm sure it's great for the folks who are there because I told, I was talking to someone a few months back and I said that, I have this theory that it doesn't matter if you're working for Jiffy Lube or if you're working for Google, the years between 18 and 24 or 25 are probably some of the most amazing years of your entire life because everything's new. You're either going to college or you're going to work or you're in the military or, but it's just life is new and you're an adult and every single thing you do is amazing. So I'm sure that the folks who are in Silicon Valley right now would argue with me and that's great, that they should. They should say, hey, you're just an old guy, it's all over for you that those times are over and I would just smile back and say, yeah, maybe they're over, but I lived them and they were pretty amazing. Yeah, and made some history. So, but there's a whole thing about a career path and ultimately you kind of graduate somehow. I'm sure a lot of the successful entrepreneurs, engineers in Silicon Valley got to be venture capitalists with their own experience, their own money and so forth. Yeah, they did, like Harvey Jones is a great example. He was one of the founders of Daisy and he started his own firm and there's a lot of folks that became angel investors where they would take a project and just put in their own personal money. Others actually, Vinod actually started his own fund. So yeah, so it's pretty cool to see kind of where things go in terms of the old guard moving in and kind of helping the young guard, the new folks come in and start up new companies. Some of them graduate into restaurants in Maui. This was supposed to be a retirement. I don't think I've ever worked as hard as I have run in this coffee shop. I thought I was gonna sit outside and drink a espresso and talk to people and yeah, it's a little bit different than that. But again, I tend to be passionate about whatever I do and I love it. I love being at the cafe. It's a lot of fun. We've really put a lot of love into it and we now have this amazing local community following that we enjoy every single day. So I- I think you'll ever do tech again. What's that? Will you ever do tech again? Oh my gosh, probably not. And if I did it would just be from a consulting perspective. I tried to leave when I was 40, 39, 40. I tried to kind of walk away. I said, you know what? I'm done. I don't really need to keep doing, I just think I'm gonna take some time off. Maybe when Joe, the character back in the show, maybe when he was starting to get some scruples and I went through a little bit of that and I was with a company as a senior vice president. It was a 4,000 person company and I reported to the CEO and there was a merger that took place and I was gonna lose about half of my reports and I had a few VPs underneath me and I just didn't wanna go through that and they wanted me to move to New York and I just didn't wanna go through that process. So I had a six month severance in place and I said, you know guys, I thank you very much but I think I'm gonna take my six month severance. So I was just turning 40 at the time and I thought, I'm gonna go see the highest mountain in the world. So I went to REI and bought a backpack and a bunch of things and got on an airplane and landed in Kathmandu and I was like, okay, where's Everest? And it was great. It was just exciting and what was supposed to only be a couple of months turned out to me traveling literally around the world for two and a half years, just traveled all over the world. No rhyme or reason, it wasn't like I went to Nepal then went to Bhutan and then went over to India and then maybe work my way down to Thailand and Thailand to Cambodia. I didn't do that. I went to Nepal, then to Thailand, then to Spain, then to London, then down to Cambodia, then over to Argentina and it was just, it was awesome. And then I'd go back home and see the family for Christmas but it was two and a half years of travel and I just wanted to- I don't want to clear your head. It did, but I just wanted to go until I got tired until I just didn't want to travel anymore and it did take about two and a half years and one of the greatest times in my life. But then when I went back, I was doing some consulting and I was just gonna kind of put my, dip my toe into it. But next thing I knew, I was full tilt and I think I was in Hamburg or somewhere and I was like, oh my God, I'm back in, I'm back, you know, going full tilt, my hair's on fire and I'm just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And so I kind of came to the conclusion I was gonna move to the middle of the Pacific and so they can't get me here. So I moved to Hawaii and bought a coffee shop. But yeah, but it's all repeating. I'm now the vice president of the Malay Coffee Association and I'm on the board of the Lahainatown Action Committee and I just, I don't know what my problem is. I just can't, I can't just take it easy and sit down and have that little espresso and talk with people. I have to keep. Oh, it's swinging from the fence. I just keep swinging for the fans. Yeah, well, I'm really delighted that you could talk about this with me. It's a great conversation. I'm just tickled pink. It was fun. You took me down memory lane. Yeah, well, there's a lot there. Let me ask you one last question, Dave. Since John Burns, the governor who was early in the, I guess the 60s after statehood, and every governor thereafter, there's always been this aspiration to diversify the economy away from tourism and restaurants I might have. And diversification is another word, a euphemistic word for technology, right? So it's always been the case. And as we see agriculture go down, go down decline, it's really quite declined now. People look longingly at the possibilities they never took advantage of and we never did establish a tech sector. So my question to you is given all that experience and given what you learned there and what you thought about while you're traveling around looking back at the heyday of your application, do you think that Hawaii has a chance, even a remote chance of establishing a kind of junior Silicon Valley? It's interesting you ask that. Say no if you want. It's interesting you ask that. I believe that if Hawaii chooses to accept the baton, Hawaii has a destiny in technology. But it's up to Hawaii. It's up to Hawaii and the people of Hawaii because the silver lining around COVID is that you know what? We can work remotely. Now, one of the challenges that a lot of companies would have, let's just go back 10 years. We don't even have to go back seven or eight months but 10 years ago, the challenge would be like, well, you're gonna be in Hawaii and you're just gonna be goofing off and going to the beach every day and you're not gonna get anything done. But now what they've realized through COVID is that people can work from home. They can hit deadlines. They can do a lot of things. And I think that right now, right now today is the time for Hawaii to really jump on the bandwagon and say live in paradise and still be able to work remotely. And technology is a great, I mean, it just lends itself to being able to do that. So the answer is an emphatic yes, but it really comes down to Hawaii and it comes down to the leadership and it comes down to the politicians and the local folks, is this something they want? But if it is, and I personally think they should aggressively go after it, it's ripe right now. And right now is I think the time who wouldn't wanna live on Maui or on Oahu or Kauai, who would not want to live and still get their work done. But at the end of the day, and the great thing about out here is that you can get your work done on the workdays over, you can go grab your board and hit the water. So this is actually a really amazing place. And I think it lends itself to a technology. It could be like another Silicon Valley or a technology Mecca where you have amazingly talented people that are living in paradise and still working jobs that are contributing to the GDP. Well, I hope we can talk to you about this again. You're a valuable resource, even just a schmooze with. And let me remind you also that Joe McMillan in San Francisco, working in Silicon Valley, surfed every day, you remember that? Well, again, I used to go out to Fort Point where he was surfing. It was at Fort Point right underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. And I've taken that left-handed break many, many times. Thank you, Dave Douglas. What a great discussion. Thank you so much. It was really great. Talk to you again soon. Take care. Thank you. Aloha. Bye-bye.