 Hello, everyone. Welcome to Caffeine Connect. We have a great guest site. There are so many decisions that entrepreneurs have to make when they're finding a new venture and every investment is like a seed really for future success. So technology can make our lives easier, but it can also be costly and it can send us down a path that becomes even more expensive as we go. So today's Caffeine Connect features an all star, a true all star in the tech world, a ground breaker. John Denning is an Army veteran of the Just Cause Desert Storm era. He served in the medical field in the United States Army. He's also a Patriot Boot Camp alumnus and he's worked on some very important major breakthroughs that many people experience every day or at least occasionally projects like MyChart. He's the Chief Technology Officer for Well Advised, which is a health engagement platform that helps people manage their health care and costs. But John is really best known. This is legendary status for a project that sounds more like science fiction than fact. In 2014, he led the first and only team in history to pass the touring test. The touring test was originally called the imitation game and it was designed to evaluate a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent or indistinguishable from that of a human. So it may be possible that we should thank John for the inevitable apocalypse that may come from with future wars with robots. Thanks for that, John. Can you kick off maybe with telling us a little bit about the touring test and your experience there? Oh, sure, Dan. Thanks so much. And I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak with y'all today. So yeah, the touring test was a project that we did as a side project. We started this in 2001 and it was a combination of people in the US, the Ukraine, Russia, Singapore, and Turkey. And we just kept working on it over time. It was friends working on things that we thought was important, but there was no corporate imperative, because there was no market for this at the time. Now, obviously there is. And one of the things I thought was maybe the biggest takeaway with this is it was super decentralized. It was so decentralized that on the day that we passed, I got a note from one of my colleagues asking me, actually telling me that we had passed and I didn't know we had entered the test that year. So it was one of those decentralized autonomous teams. And that's like, Dan, one of the things is that really self-directed. People were leaders of different components of it, but everybody was a leader. It was pretty cool. Well, and today, so you want to talk about tech choices and these are things you've been, this is a road you've been down before. Do you want to just kick off? Absolutely. Absolutely. Let me share my screen real quick. Okay. I love how Zoom always puts the controls right on top of the tech wizard who can't figure out how to get that to minimize. Really? Well, you know, we were talking about that before, because it's, there you go. Yeah, cool. Cool. Hey, so tap dancing stops now. Cool. So first, huge thanks to DAV and also Patriot Boot Camp. My goodness. I appreciate everything you guys do. And it's good to know who's on your team and have such a strong team backing us. The contents is presentation. Today, I'm going to go over something pretty quick, which is there's two really different tech leadership roles in companies. I want to make sure everyone understands that and understands what hats they're wearing at any given time. I'm going to introduce business processes and functions. It's not a detailed, you know, it's not a deep dive on that topic, but it's something you'll want to really get into as you're creating a business because you're probably focusing on either improving one of those or automating it, you know, perhaps better than anyone ever has. That sort of thing. And then I'm going to be going over shortlist. So in my content, the key thing here is buy, not build. I'll tap to use to get startup going. And I just put in some of the categories of things that I think are really important that if you have these things in place, your job is going to be easier. And so will your colleagues. You'll be able to scale more readily. Obviously, there's more to it than just these. And I'll do a recap. And again, there's a lot of opinion in here. So I guess it's, you know, your mileage may vary. Cool. So first to start things off, there's two different really different tech leadership roles in companies. There's the CTO and there's the CIO. There are other ones like VP of engineering and things like that. But if you think about what your role is at any given time, as like the tech leader in a company, you're oftentimes the only one, you'll need to think about, am I the CTO right now or am I the CIO? And the CTO is really someone who's looking outside the company. They're helping build the technology or integrate I guess is probably a better term for customers. They're really in charge of like top line growth. And they're really over the product development and delivery organization. This is in contrast to the CIO. The CIO is obviously inwardly focused. That's the difference here, right? And they're managing relationships with internal users, not customers. And they're overseeing your IT infrastructure. So like your phone system, your email system, that kind of stuff. And they own the corporate IT strategy, which is like the business functions that aren't necessarily the product and service delivery components. And I started off making a Venn diagram and I stopped. So it's just getting ugly. But there's a nice big overlap, right? There's, you know, if each of these were circles, there's a nice big overlap in this. And that's really what's in this presentation today. Because one of the things is that these two roles need to share a goal of not having separate siloed systems delivering the same functionality. Because that basically ends up isolating your product development. I think a lot of you probably have experienced that with like, you know, one team will develop, we'll start using Slack for its communication, but the other team is using something, you know, a Microsoft product. Like, okay, great. That means that nothing is ever going to cross between the two. Maybe you want that in a compartmentalized work, but that's not usually the case in small companies. So really quick, business processes and functions. And this is the sort of thing that, and I worked as an enterprise architect for a while at a couple of large companies. And this is what EA is really focused on. And they're trying to figure out, they're doing functional decompositions. That's the term of all of the processes within the company to try to figure out what they can make microservices out of and configure those in order to be able to deliver these core processes and these support processes. Okay. And this stuff maps into software. And a lot of the time, you can acquire that software as a commercial off the shelf system or product and then integrate that so that you have pretty close to full automation or at least get rid of the fumbles along the way. But keep these sorts of things in mind. You can think over, you know, use your business model canvases and things like that. Think about which ones you need to be really good at and which ones don't really matter. And that's often like a thing with startups. You decide what you're going to be good at. So I made these short lists. And I'm going to show them with you in a moment. And I wanted to go over first the criteria to get on a short list. Okay. First, the product had to work as advertised. There's a lot of trade shows. There's a lot of hype and software where there's a lot of just nonsense, right? I live in San Francisco. And the Bay Area has like a ton of hype about new systems. And sometimes they work as advertised. Sometimes it's a bit of a stretch, right? They're selling what they want, but they will be delivering in a year, but not what they have now is sort of one of the sins of the software industry. So it has to work as advertiser. And these are things I've experienced with, as having had work as it was promoted. There's no particularly awful proprietary lock-in. There's always going to be games that companies play to keep you using their product. So I avoided the ones that didn't allow you to get a clean export of your data, all sorts of funky data models and things like that. And there were things that I also included that are fairly priced with no long-term contracts required. I also included in here at least one free and open source option for each category. So if, you know, those of you who are either a budget strapped and or philosophically just do not wish to pay for software and want things that are open source as well, there's options in here. Perhaps the most important one for me was that the company had to offer excellent support for small customers. Something that one of my criteria is that when I call a company, I really want to work with the people in tech support and things like that and make sure that they're super helpful, like someone that I want to have on my extended team. And all of these companies that I work with regularly have that. I don't dread calling tech support. I actually look forward to it, although oftentimes I'm calling because there's something went wrong. And also no abusive privacy policies. Facebook. So there's, you know, it's one of the sorts of things I think is key and it's actually very important. It's table stakes in my industry and healthcare to not be doing things that where there's data leakage and things like that. So here are the short lists that are covered today. Okay, you can obviously read them yourselves, right? But starts off with project management and ends with integrations. Okay. The reason I start with project management is that's where you can have the list of the things that the steps you need to do to move on to the next, you know, to arrange all this stuff. And the integrations you can actually do within in between each of these, but whatever, right? So the short lists or project management is really these are these products. These are all things. Actually, all these are available web based now accept open project, which would be something you download and install on your computer. Microsoft project is also oftentimes done that way. These products, you can get them for under 50 bucks a month. Sometimes, you know, a good oftentimes these things are free, at least for a while or for a handful of users. But my friends at Microsoft wouldn't want me to tell you this. You can buy licenses to Microsoft project on eBay for like 10 bucks or excess ones. So I'm started giving them like, that's actually real expensive if you want to have the installed version. It's like 800 bucks, like you can get it for 10. Let's see. So on the email and productivity stuff, there's obviously the Google workspace, which was called, you know, Google Docs and all these other things, right? Or G Suite, Microsoft Office 365. These will both come with email systems as well as spreadsheet or processing slides, etc. Right? There's some things that are more point solutions like Slack. Libre Office is a is much like Microsoft Office. Proton offers a few things. And for those of you who know Proton, you know, it's a subsection, right? It's a subset of people who are very security minded and Ignite, which is very useful for secure file storage and sharing. And these tend to run either free or they're about like 15 bucks a month per user. Your mileage may vary. The CRM stuff. This is customer relationship management, which is actually a pretty messy space. This can include sales and also service and support capabilities. The systems can be pretty darn expensive. And one of the things that I've worked in the CRM space for a while, don't pay full price. These are things that as a young company, you can probably get a very steep discount. And I can show you how of, you know, well over 50% off of list. I think 80, 90% off is perfectly reasonable for these sorts of things. But these are the things that you're going to be using in order to be able to communicate with your customers, know what you communicated, track things, plan things, do campaigns and whatnot. Okay. I included something called Founders Suite, which is used oftentimes for fundraising. What's really cool with Founders Suite is it has all the data on the venture funds that you might be interested in. And you can set those up and show where you are in the process with each of the funds that you're approaching for funding. So kind of nice. And I put HubSpot on here in italics as the open source option because they actually have an open source option. And there are a few other ones that are out there, but this is just, again, my short list. Bookkeeping and accounting. I think this is another space that really you're going to need to, you know, get this at least somewhat straightened out pretty fast when you start your company. Pretty much everyone uses QuickBooks. There's also something called FreshBooks, which is good. You'll want to integrate QuickBooks with your bank. Okay. And you're also going to want to integrate that with a bill payment system that's not QuickBooks, probably. One that's very commonly used today is called bill.com. It's not expensive. Integrates with QuickBooks. Also integrates with your bank. Something called Expensify, which is also quite good. This is where you can just take pictures of your receipts for expenses, and you can send them to your company so that you can reimburse yourself. So you're not going to bleed yourself to death, you know, death by a thousand paper cuts by not being able to expense things or having, you know, expecting to spend that magical Saturday catching up on expense reports that will never come along. And something else for bookkeeping and accounting is consider using whatever your bank offers for cheap or for free. And this is a really common thing. And it might even help drive what bank you choose if you're at that point in your company's formation. Because, I mean, what Wells Fargo offers is very different than Bank of America, which is very different from Silicon Valley Bank. And if you want to have that kind of conversation with me on the side as to bank selection and how to go through that process, just ping me. I'll be happy to go over that with you. This is perhaps the most complex shortlist. And it crosses over into something that would be like more technical and technical development. But it doesn't have to be like your marketing people can be using the Atlassian product. Your marketing people would probably end up upstream working with product development using Figma. But software development collaboration gives you the ability as a business, at least we'll use Atlassian as an example of this. The three products that I mentioned here, one's Bitbucket, which is used for version control. It's very similar to GitHub that Microsoft acquired recently. But this is where your engineers will be checking in and out the source code. And making modifications and you can automate your builds and things like that using this. Now that's the technical part of Atlassian. In addition, the other two products are commonly used in startups are Confluence and Jira. So Confluence is used for really doing your product on requirements and doing your product roadmap and things like that. So that way everyone can get on the same page and be collaborating on this stuff together. You could be using some of the project management software to do kind of light versions of this. I know people who use Basecamp and Monday to do this sort of thing. But the fact that the Atlassian stuff is integrated with the code repositories, which is Bitbucket, so you can actually tie a feature that's described directly to the code that's been developed. And what's actually in between those two or orthogonal to them is something called Jira, which is a ticketing system. Now you can use this also to do customer support and things like that. CRM is obviously going to be better for that. But if you look up Kanban boards, K-A-N-B-A-N, Jira is used for Kanban. It's used for really assigning tasks to engineers so you can know what's where. But you can also be doing this if you're making cookies, you could have the tasks in there and figure out who's working on what at any given time. And you know when the cookies are done, that kind of thing. And all of this stuff is fully integrated, same data models, same user models and things like that for access. And the open project is the open source. I wouldn't say necessarily equivalent, but it's in this category. So something else I think is really important, and this is something that I would not have put on a short list a couple of years ago, is integration tools. You can integrate things now. It's very simple to integrate, say, Atlassian's Jira with Google Chat. And that's actually an integration within Google. It's super simple and it's out of the box. But that's the sort of thing that we can you can integrate these things within minutes. And the tools that are commonly used are Zapier, Mule, Soft, and Workado. Zapier is probably the most commonly used. Mule was acquired by Salesforce. Mule is totally industrial-strength stuff. It would scale up to be able to integrate anything at any volume. So you'll find that actually with Zapier, you'll hit kind of a limit on things and the pricing changes and it gets kind of ugly, as things scale up. Mule Soft doesn't really do that. However, Mule Soft has a higher cost overhead right out of the gate. And the open source option to this is something called Mule Soft Community Edition. Mule Soft started off as an open source company. So they've always had a community edition. It just means it's not supported directly by now Salesforce employees. They do have a robust community of developers. Mule Soft is something I probably wouldn't do in a raw startup unless you really like running kind of big things. Zapier is just one of the simple ones. But ultimately, all of these tools, you could set up an account, add your users, and integrate all of this in an afternoon. So for a team, if you're companies like five or 10 people, you could totally have this done in an afternoon. Something I wanted to add to this is contacts to start your cloud evaluations. My guess is that most of you, if you have technical companies, you'll be doing things in the cloud. Most of the products I just described are actually cloud products. And there's really three big clouds, but I had contacts at two of them. I spoke with both of them over the last couple of weeks and said, hey, I'm going to be giving a presentation to people through DBA in the Patriot Boot Camp. Veterans, would you be willing to step up and actually be someone that would be able to be contacted even though they're not the right person in the company, that kind of thing? They said, absolutely. So people in the military, when they join the U.S. military, they step up and sometimes we're not the right people either, but we did step up and we figure out how to make it work. So these are folks that I've worked with and I trust and I think that if you're starting to do things related to cloud emails, really just ping either of them, mention my name, and I think that they will help you. They said they would. Or help you figure out who to speak with. And also just ping me. The one that I didn't put on here was AWS. I wasn't sure who to introduce you to, but if you really want to use AWS, let me know. But there's a bunch of other cloud products too, but those are the majors. So to recap here, when you're sitting down to try to figure this stuff out and you're working with your team, you might be like the one founder, right? Or then you have to take off your CEO hat or your CFO hat and just figure out which one you're wearing. Are you the CIO, CTO, whatever? And act accordingly. And if you implement one of these from each of the lists, I think you're going to have pretty much everything you need to get traction as a business. That's in kind of a general sense, right? But you will be able to, you know, track a deal with a customer. You'll be able to save your proposals. You'll be able to send an invoice. You'll be able to track the invoice. You'll be able to book the revenue. You'll be able to expense your stuff, pay yourself. It's pretty important. And I actually chose to not include things like payroll systems and whatnot because those are decisions that are, those are shortlist, but those are decisions that really they're really personal, but not personal, but like specific based upon your industry and stuff like that. Something else is to integrate and automate your workflows. It is easy. Okay. It used to be a nightmare. So just try it. I think you'll laugh when you see how easy this stuff is. And something else, don't subscribe to anything if you can for the first couple of months or don't sign up for like a recurring thing that's going to hit your credit card. Try one of each, integrate them, see if it works, see if your people will use them, see if they say, no, I really want to use this other thing. It's like, okay, well, if you really want to use this other thing, then you try to integrate that and see if everyone else will use it. And really just have fun. Tinker with this stuff. This is your business. You're going to be using these systems probably a lot more unless you're like an engineer than really anything else. This is your user interface into your company. So that was the presentation. And I want to give a huge thanks again to DAB and Patriot Boot Camp like, wow, you folks are tirelessly awesome. So thanks so much. And Dan, I guess it's time for questions. Yeah, we do have a few questions. One of the questions someone asked already was very valuable information. How can we, is the slide deck going to be available to folks? Could it be made available to them? Absolutely. Absolutely. Hold on. And I meant it about pinging me. Okay, if anyone has questions, I'm opinionated. I'll be happy to share my opinions. Thank you so much. And that's so they can shoot you an email. Email address was listed earlier. It's john.denning at welladvised.com. Sure, or Gmail, either one. Okay, great. One question. An early, you know, a starting founder, you have so many competing priorities and interests. Is there, is there a way that you should calculate or a formula or something to determine how much you should invest in technology early on? That's a good question. It's going to depend a lot on the business. So one of the things, and I've made this mistake myself, of taking things further than I should have before I got funding for it. You know, just because you can build a house on your own doesn't mean you should without getting them, you know, without getting a bank loan, you know, that kind of thing. So really similar in that regard. I think you need to look at what business you're going into. And there's probably a percentage or a ratio for how much things, how much you should be spending on this stuff. And one of the ways that I look at things is how much is it per employee or per person on my team? So it's, it's the sort of thing that, you know, I want to look at like how much is it going to cost me per month per year and per employee. And then I look at like, what am I doing? And one of the businesses that we have, we're automating stuff, we're actually like building something kind of like, like Robo advisors, but it's for Medicare and it's doing a bunch of stuff with that. And we'll spend some money on that automation, for sure. Because the return on it's very high once it's fully automated, right? So, and that kind of bleeds in this stuff versus what your product is, because frankly, a lot of this stuff could be your product. That's that's one of the other things too is don't think you always have to sit down, you know, and develop and develop software. You might be able to integrate some stuff and just have an innovation that way. It's a business model innovation, not a technical one. Thank you so much. Jason from the Patriot Bootcamp community asked, any opinions on Asana for workflow management with a small team? He's the CEO. He has three people working with him on his startup. He had that question and a follow-up question is, do you have an opinion on open phone for a phone system for a small startup team? So, Jason, I guess it's going to depend on your company, right? And what problems you're trying to solve? Asana is cool. It's a good product and they actually have like a real interesting, at least our founder does, big project that they're working on like to, you know, make the world a better place. He's not being like, you know, he's not kidding kind of thing. It can work. It depends on what it is. I mean, ultimately for three people, you probably don't even need a workflow system. You need a tracking system, but that could be a spreadsheet on a shared drive. It could be a shared task list and, you know, just to-do list in Basecamp. So I think the trick is going to be keep it as light as possible with three or four people because what you want to do is be able to reconfigure stuff super easy and not lose the work you've already done when you make, when you change stuff and you're inevitably going to change things. Like we were in one company, we're on our, I guess, third CRM system in four years. And it's not that we made a mistake. We actually went to the right ones at the right time. So you have to move to different things at different times. So thank you. So what kind of business are you in, Jason? Yeah. So hopefully there's not too much background noise, but I started a, that's a company where we just launched a little over a year ago. It's a web-based platform. It features veteran and military spouse real estate agents all over the country. So we just help a military family easily find a veteran or a military spouse agent. And then part of the commission goes back to the family and then part of the commission comes back to the website. That's how we make money basically. That's cool. Yeah. So it is pretty technical too, then. Yeah. So it's scaled. So I used Salesforce with a different job that I worked before doing this. So it was comfortable with Salesforce. We've got that as our CRM that does a ton of automation, a lot of the auto emails, assigning tasks, all that stuff. And then we set up Asana just for, you know, instead we were trying to manage stuff over like email of like, hey, could you do this? Okay. Hey, we need to do this when we integrated Asana to kind of keep track of everything. And then have been looking for a phone system where, you know, we could integrate it into Salesforce and do some automation like, you know, text it like when we have a new lead in the system, instead of just sending an email to the agent, we could also send a text to the agent that says, you know, hey, be sure to check your email, you know, you've got a new lead from veteran PCS and looked into, I don't know, a handful of different ones. It really wasn't, you know, very encouraged. And then, you know, kind of found open phone. I was like, all right, well, let's, you know, just try this, you know, but still kind of playing around with, you know, this stuff. Are you happy? Honestly, I haven't even set up any of the automation yet. Yeah, aside from like, you know, texting people like, hey, we're going to get back to, you know, within 24 hours, you know, or something like that if we're, if it's, you know, past business hours or something. So just some basic stuff, but I don't know if I'll need a open phone, like, you know, I use a Salesforce developer to do all that stuff, you know, and then if it's worthwhile to then have a, you know, almost like the same guy for, for, you know, open phone to be able to integrate that. I'm not sure I'm not a tech guy by any means, but yeah. Is it expensive? How does it expensive for you? Is it okay? Yeah, it's, I thought it was going to be cheaper, honestly, but it was, it was 20 bucks a month per user. So I just have two, originally I was going to have, I thought I could have multiple numbers on my one account. But then they charge me like three, three times or whatever. So I was like, oh crap, okay, get rid of one. I only need to, I've got one admin person and then myself. Yeah. And I just pay it once annually. That's kind of where we're at right now. Yeah. Yeah, something, something we played around with a lot of phone systems. I haven't used open phone. Ring central is, is actually one of, one of my favorites. And that's because people can use it who aren't technical. Okay. And it comes to the whole bunch of other things like a zoom like functionality and stuff like that. It's really easy to integrate as part of kind of the mainstream ecosystem. Another company that is, that has absolutely stunningly awesome products and they're cheap is seven by seven. Seven by seven. No, it's eight by eight, eight by eight. Seven by seven is a San Francisco magazine. Eight by eight is, it's fantastic, but it's got a, it's got kind of a high bar for some people to use. Like you're really non-technical people are just going to be like, I can't get this configured. They're just like, you know, I can't get in. It'll be like a barrier for them. But I think I'd look at those too, especially as your business scales up. Ring central is part of dial pad and there, you could run whole call, whole call, whole call centers off of this stuff. So if you're going to end up having contact centers and stuff in the future, you know, it'll scale. And that company's not going anywhere. They're doing quite, quite well. That's another thing that I should have put on the checklist of like, you know, the criteria, which is the company's, you know, I'm probably not going to implode anytime soon. Like that's, you know, kind of a useful thing, especially in tech, right? But I think the awesome stuff, you might want to try, it's awesome. It can get cost prohibitive as you add users. And that's one of the games that a lot of the vendors play, like it last seems free for the first handful of users, actually different numbers for each product. That's a gotcha. Okay. But then the prices go up quite a lot. Basecamp doesn't play that game. So you might want to try that because if you can do your workflows using that, the last thing will let you do like super complex ones, since you don't have that. So I'll take a look at that. Basecamp might be like a good answer for you. Thanks. That was great. Ryan, and you can step in if you'd like to ask, but Ryan asked from the Patriot Bootcamp community, what about hosting and website building, any preference on a solution that can scale, manage multiple, multiple integrations, and is easy to modify? So that's actually pretty tricky. Okay. Here's me. And anybody who works, any designers on the call who work with WordPress, I apologize, but I can't stand it. That's why I asked. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's a security like quagmire. And every time somebody builds something, nobody else can figure out how to change it. So then they go, the last guy was awful. Now you have to rewrite it. It's like, yeah. Yeah. So if it's a pretty simple approach, Squarespace is great. If it's simple, right? The harder, the more complex your configurations are, like if you're doing stuff with like, if you, if your domain is registered with Google, but you're running this stuff through Azure along the way, right? Then you're probably going to like, bought issues and they're not going to be able to figure it out, but their tech support is kind and they will try to figure it out and it will take a while, perhaps, but they're cool. Something else to consider if you're doing a lot of things with like direct marketing, you're trying to like get metrics on stuff is you might want to look at making landing pages using unbounce. It's one that a lot of people don't think about, but like you want to figure out who's coming to your page based upon what campaigns and whatnot. Right. Yeah. You can build it in there. It's a, well, I'm building a, it's a website for a non-profit. So there's, I have to capture donors as well as membership. And then ideally the next big phase would be to integrate with some web three components. So, you know, that's, instead of having to rebuild, there's one, if there's a solution that I can start with and then integrate, it'll take me through the journey actually. Do you need to do, do you need to have like e-commerce capabilities with the donors? You want to have them be able to type in their credit cards and stuff like that? Yeah. So, you know, receive in credit card PayPal, you know, all those services as well as in crypto. Yeah. Yeah. I would, I think I'd start with Squarespace and use that kind of, it might be a place to start. And then you might outgrow it pretty fast, but that's kind of a cool thing to have done, right? But you won't have to worry about all the e-commerce stuff up front, right? They've done all that because that, you know, you don't want to be holding any card information. And you know, I mean, the crypto stuff's, it's pretty awesome and it's becoming pretty mainstream pretty fast. But you'll, but evaluating what you'd want to use in that space could be kind of a full-time job where you're trying to just build the basic stuff first. So, getting out, getting out of Squarespace is not hard, by the way. Okay, that's good. No, it's not, they're not, it's not hard. It's, it's not hard to get into it either. It's like, you can swivel chairs, you know, alt tab between what you've got built in, say WordPress and Squarespace to just build it. And like, it's, it's like a long evening, you know, but you'll be happy at the end of the night, you'll be able to cut over to production, which is kind of cool. Yeah, all right. And you said the other said unbounce, what was that again? Yeah, check out unbounce. It's really good for building landing pages for campaigns, because you're going to be sending messages to people and trying to figure out what messages lure people to the web and what, you know, to your website and what they're doing. And it's just, it's a really low-cost overhead kind of way to do this. Okay, cool. Nice job. Appreciate it. Oh yeah, anytime. And let me know if there's anything else I can do to help with, okay? Yeah, cool. Someone else mentioned Shopify as another potential solution for folks selling products as well. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Thanks for the feedback. Yeah. It was in the Patriot Bootcamp community there. Now, when we talked earlier, we're talking about startup costs are expensive. And you mentioned that you first worked remotely in 1999. And that's, that was pretty remarkable to hear. Do you have an opinion about technology solutions and or remote working in general? It's a lot easier now than it was then, but it wasn't very hard back then. In 1999, there was Microsoft had a product called NetMeeting, which looks a whole lot like Zoom. And it took a pandemic to cause us to be able to do this. Like one of the orgs that my company works with is UCSF. It's a big medical center in California. And their behavioral health area had pretty much no telemedicine. I mean, people could call and maybe get a refill over the phone or talk to their doctor. But it was kind of the other part is if the doctor took the call was probably on his or her cell phone, and they would forget to like enter the charges. So the university was like, yeah, thanks, you know, like we didn't get paid for this now. Overnight, they went to telemedicine. This is like the laggards of the healthcare industry, which is a laggard industry on adopting tech. They went 100% remote at the drop of a hat when it challenged their complete revenue model when they had to go completely remote. If they can do it, anyone can. And it's not like understating these very talented people, but people go into psychology and psychiatry because they like people and they want to interact with them in person. So they were able to do it overnight. We had a trainer from Facebook asked, she had an idea about training nurses while going to school to train with bedbound patients. His wife is having a really hard time. Do you have any ideas on state to state programs and grants for startups? Geez. In California, yeah, there's tons of opportunities for this stuff. My goodness. And they'll fund ideas at pretty idea stage. I mean, it's like the sky is falling as far as the economy supposedly, but I know venture funding dried up like nonsense. Right now, it's still pretty straightforward to get seed funding. And it's pretty straightforward to get like late stage. It's like the middle ones that are having problems. Like if somebody's a series A trying to go to B or B to C, that kind of thing. So they're going to have to do bridge loans or bridge rounds. But what you could end up doing with this, I mean, you could put together a grant, a grant package, and it ends up becoming boilerplate, right? And you can submit this thing through in California, it's at the county level, the state level. There's a bunch of private foundations like there's the California Healthcare Foundation, which I would imagine they'd probably want to do something like this. My former employer Kaiser Permanente has a very large community benefit program that would they absolutely fund things like this. I think it's share your idea with people. If you share your idea, no one's going to steal it. No one's going to spend all the time necessary to build it out. Right? So you have to worry about the proprietary nature of it, right? At least not at first, right? And people will absolutely be delighted to work with you on that. Thanks. We had obviously a huge WordPress fan earlier speaking, and it seems like that decision to change away for his needs just it made itself. Do you have any advice on how a company should evaluate a big change in like a critical application or what they should consider when they've outgrown something or looking at a major IT infrastructure project? That's a big, that's a really good question and an important one. So there's like a logic trap or fault that people have. And I had it. And when I went to business school, they taught us this. And I first didn't like really, really get it. But over the years I did, the fallacy is about sunk costs. When you need to change off of something, don't think about what it costs you already. Think about what's going to cost you in the future. That money's gone. Okay. Unless you're a large company, you're amortizing it, and you're going to have to write off the whole darn thing at once. Which, okay, that's a thing with some companies, right? I don't think anybody on this calls in that situation. But it's sort of like the same deal like picture like the young soldier who puts new tires on an old crummy car and then says, hey, I've got to keep that car. Now for another three months, because I just spent money on those tires, then the muffler falls off. Okay. Same deal. Same exact deal with this stuff. So you're looking at how much it's going to cost you to keep the darn thing. That's the total cost of ownership. Okay. And there's the switching cost component to whatever's new. So it's not just the cost of license or subscribe to something. It's the cost to convert your data into the new thing and train people, et cetera. So don't understate the cost, the new cost, right? But frankly, like if your vendor doesn't fit, then change it. I mean, and get used to changing your software out. It's probably not your business model is, hey, if we change software out, that's what like, you know, Accenture or somebody does, right? But, you know, that's what I would, that's what I would do. Great. Can you talk a little bit about your Patriot Bootcamp experiences? Oh, sure. Yes. I've gone to Patriot Bootcamp twice, two parts. The first was, the first was it was supposed to be a live one in San Francisco and COVID happened. So that was made virtual. So we had the first virtual Patriot Bootcamp. And it was, it was terrific. It was, you know, a couple of days of just people who want to work together. These are the people that like, when you're in the military, it's like, oh, these are the guys I liked being with, right? The men and women that I liked working with and the spouses, like the awesome spouses. And the people who came in and spoke absolutely spot on. This is like the lectures and topics for as good as anything that you would get in any university, like a graduate school. So it was, it was, it was terrific in that regard. And the second was, I think the first time that Patriot Bootcamp ran like the second course. And it was cool. It picked up where we were before and took it further. Something that I think people need to know about Patriot Bootcamp and DAB is that the network that you guys put together is insanely good. So at the end, at the end of, I think the first day each time, they do this founder match to people based upon the questions that you answer going in. So if you need help with go to market or fundraising or technology or whatever, they hook you up with people who aren't paying lip service to it. They want to mentor you. They want to help hook you up. So if somebody's talking to you about fundraising, they're going to give you their contact info. You'll talk to them a little bit on that call. You know, you see a five minutes. It's like speed dating. And then boom, you know, you're on to the next one, but you contact that person. They're going to help you. This isn't somebody handing you their business card at a trade show. This is what DAV and PVC put together for us, which is just amazing. So take advantage of it. Thank you so much, John. Richard Contreras, did you want to ask your question? Did you want to come on and ask? Go ahead. Yeah, I had a, I had a, well, I don't know if you could see me. That's all right. Go ahead. Well, so I had a, I had an idea for a business and, oh, there it goes. So I kind of, I went to like a Patriot bootcamp and I learned so much from all the founders like about it. I think it was last last fall and it was a good time. And and slowly I've been kind of working on the idea. Currently I'm a like an aircraft mechanic for the Air Force and my dissolution for one of like their bigger problems that I found is kind of based on deep learning. And like my question was what type of like software or infrastructure would you suggest, you know, to kind of get started on something like that? Obviously it's like, yeah. So getting started in like deep learning and stuff like that? Yeah. Yeah. So okay, so here's, here's the gating thing that you're going to have. You're going to, you're going to want to have somebody who's a data scientist to work with you. One of the things I think is hilarious is data science is a new field. Okay. They used to be called a lot of the people in the same functions and stuff were doing database administration a couple of years ago. So the data scientists are in huge demand. The DBAs aren't. So you're, you know, so talk to talk to people who know data. Okay. But the thing is, is a get server credits from Microsoft for Google and from Amazon, because whoever you bring in to do these experiments and really all three platforms have their own ways to do this stuff, but you're going to consume a bunch of server space trying to test your hypotheses. Like a lot of cycles, right? So just get, get credits. Like these companies will give you tens of thousands of dollars worth of credits to do your experiments. That's what they want you to do. And the person that you're going to be partnering with to figure this stuff out, they're going to need to have a place to do their work. So if you have that set up as the, as like the business co-founder, you're the dude, right? Because like, otherwise, like, you're hitting your credit card and you're like being like, hey, could you use that for less? You know, it's like, no, just go, go wild, man. We got X dollars, right? We'll watch the meter, but you know, go. And they also put it on a timeline, a time cap. So like, they'll say like, okay, you've got a year to use this, right? So you'll know, I've got to get somebody and figure this stuff out in that length of time. The system that you might want to use is, instead of like thinking about it in software, is, are you familiar with Six Sigma? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you design it as a Six Sigma experiment, I think you'll know who to bring in and how to scope it, you know? And then the technology is not so hard, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's very, that's very interesting. Okay. Go ahead. Yes. Yeah. Sorry. And so, you know, I've, I, I did like the Patriot boot camp and I kind of been a, I do like Tech Alley with a bunch of like really smart people here in Las Vegas. And we've all, like you mentioned earlier, like people don't really want to steal your idea. But it's a, but you know, they, this has, I've been working on it slowly, like I'm a, I'm just about to finish my, my master's in like business analytics. So that's kind of what kind of gave me the, hey, this is a, there's something that's kind of happening in this field right now. And these are the types of problems they're solving. And I'm trying to solve kind of like a big supply chain problem for the Air Force right now. And that's cool. So, you know, that's kind of, that's kind of where it's going. Yeah. That's cool. So one of the things that's kind of a unique, not kind of, it's a, it's a unique feature of some cities. San Francisco has a huge gift culture in the startup community where people don't, they're not mercenaries about charging each other when it's really just ideation, right? Las Vegas has that too. So like, you know, when you're talking about like Tech Alley, like there's a lot of people who are willing to like do some gambling, right, with their time and gamble on good ideas. Oh, great. It doesn't, you know, typical Vegas. Yeah. Yeah. But if you get, yeah, it's like, literally, if you need anything around, you know, picking like specific, you know, models and stuff to try, let me know. I can introduce you to the people in my org that do that stuff. Okay. That'd be so great. And I think last time when they did a Patriot Bootcamp, they kind of gave us like, like some Amazon credits, like you could kind of like train your team to deal with like Amazon web services or like even a, you know, the Google stuff too. And I think that was pretty awesome. So I'm just kind of trying to make the best of use of those resources. Like I don't have a team yet. So that's kind of where I'm, that's kind of where I'm working at currently. Yeah. So Richard, something else to think about too. If you're going to run and everybody should know this, if you're going to run out of credits from these companies, but your company's not funded, talk to the company, they'll give you more credits. There's no problem that they have tons of server space, you know, that they're not using and they want you to win because if you, if you get it right, you win, they win too, because they're going to have an ongoing customer. Okay. So don't, you know, so if the, you know, if it's getting close to the expiration date or just have a good conversation with them, drop the, you know, Patriot Bootcamp veteran company and they'll just be like, oh yeah, I mean, it's not abusing it. It's actually like a lot of my friends who are veterans too, won't use it. They think it's cheating to say that. And it's like, no, actually, that you earned it. So, so yeah, but so yeah, so go get more credits if you need them or extensions because all it takes in every software company is somebody else to approve it. And it's not like, oh, I need to talk to your manager. It's not one of those conversations. It's like, can you hook me up because like I'm doing good stuff. And if you're fixing a logistics problem for the Air Force, you've got a customer if you figure it out. Great points. Thank you, Richard. Best of luck. Thank you. We got a few minutes left. John, can you just tell us we're so proud of you as a veteran as a Patriot Bootcamp alumnus, can you tell us what you're working on next? So stuff that's next. So we're working to try to really make the Medicare experience better for people for older Americans and people who are aging in to Medicare and their caregivers. That's a big thing. We're using conversational AI for this. And we built on a platform. It speaks about 80 languages. And we're automating out a lot of mistakes that cost people a ton of money and really just harm us all, right? If people aren't getting the care they need, they got their own coverage, they're being ripped off by the bill on the bills, that sort of stuff. It also helps people find the right care. That's the thing with UCS off. It's the same platform that we use for Medicare. But that's actually providing mental health services to young adults and teens online. If you go to the website, don't use the apps. You could use the apps. They need to be updated. The website is gritxgritx.org. Sign in and try it. It's pretty darn cool. It was actually designed as well by another PBC alumnus, Dustin Kieschnick. Dustin is a former Marine counterintelligence officer who is now a licensed psychologist or the doctorate. It's basically every trick and tool that a psychologist would use. It's not great for people that are clinically. They need clinical care, but subclinical folks. Super. And it's free. And it's always going to be free. So that's what we're working on. That's awesome. Thank you so much, John. Thank you everyone who had questions. You can keep them coming on the social networks and we'll forward those along to John. John shared his contact information so you can reach out to him. Also, we are going to have a Patriot Bootcamp event for founders, for new founders, folks who haven't participated before in October. So we're looking forward to that and we'll shoot out more information about that as the opportunity becomes available. But thanks again, John. Great, great having you and thanks everyone for your time. Have a great rest of your day.