Changing State Laws with Patrick @ Notarize.com - Escape Velocity Show #27
Episode Stats
Words per minute
192.55774
Harmful content
Misogyny
4
sentences flagged
Toxicity
3
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, I sit down with my good friend and former co-founder of Notarize, Patrick Wojtowicz, to talk about how he built a notarizing company from the ground up, and why he thinks it s going to blow up in the next 100 years.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I think oftentimes something that'll get someone to sell is if you say, hey, you know, why don't you let us pay you a fixed price for, say, five or 10 years use.
00:00:09.060
At the end of that time period, we do a balloon payment if we want to keep it.
00:00:14.880
So I generally find that that's an easier structure than a lease agreement.
00:00:19.260
So like, hey, we'll pay you $50,000 to use this thing.
00:00:21.880
And if you think this is going to be worth $5 million in 100 years, like, cool.
00:00:42.380
Your company sold, I literally screamed at my lawyer one day.
00:00:45.800
I was doing a real estate deal, and he said I had to notarize some paper.
00:00:49.780
San Francisco down, I think it was on Valencia, I found a notarer.
00:00:52.700
Like the shadiest, I mean, it was this convenience store,
00:01:12.200
If you think about living in a really small town of like 50
00:01:14.720
people, and there was Fred, and everyone trusted Fred,
00:01:18.980
the system made sense that you would go and sign in front of him.
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But in today's world, it certainly was outdated.
00:01:26.680
I think I saw 2018 something happen where you're like,
00:01:40.880
So when I sold my last company, actually, to Twitter,
00:01:43.060
I had to get a document notarized, went in, got it done,
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sent it off, and it turns out there was an error.
00:01:54.640
And I found in Virginia, actually, they had passed a law in 2012
00:01:57.580
that allowed for the presence in a notarization to be established by video call.
00:02:05.840
Cool, you can do this by, you know, sort of like telemedicine, but for notaries.
00:02:11.080
And then, of course, the question was, could you do a national service?
00:02:16.420
And then in the early days, you had three big clients that came on,
00:02:22.840
which is not normal, I guess, in the early days of a startup.
00:02:33.540
So I did not appreciate the impact of the company when I started it,
00:02:37.260
Okay, because I feel like it was an ambitious, early, just,
00:02:47.120
it sounds like you nailed them right out of the gate.
00:03:10.980
was that, just like you, I didn't want to have to go
00:03:16.560
And it was a fun project, it was cool technology,
00:03:20.260
solved interesting problems, so that was sort of my initial,
00:03:23.260
someone's gonna do this, it might as well be me.
00:03:28.380
and immediately the people who called us was just wild.
00:03:37.240
You know, if you name a bank or private wealth firm,
00:03:43.940
And it was the same thing almost every time, which is if you think it sucks to get something notarized, imagine managing that 100,000 times a year or a million times a year and having sort of your business depend on that.
00:03:55.220
So we sort of heard the same thing over and over and over again.
00:03:58.080
And then we sort of ran into a brick wall of cool concept, but could people actually accept it?
00:04:04.300
And if you think about it like Uber, when they started as a company, you could get in whatever car you want and take it to the airport.
00:04:11.860
Imagine you showed up and United Airlines was like, no, that doesn't count.
00:04:18.380
These companies would get it and they'd say, what the hell is this?
00:04:27.240
And so almost at the same time, the National Association of Secretaries of State, which is notaries report up into the state, secretary of state.
00:04:36.180
So it's their association came out and they launched a task force that they were going to look into this.
00:04:45.440
And so my co-founder and I said, look, we're going to go travel the country.
00:04:52.200
And it's been a two-and-a-half, three-year process.
00:04:54.760
So they're now on board, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac's on board, these others, everybody.
00:05:00.880
Was there a risk that it wouldn't be legally allowed?
00:05:20.140
There was like, hey, we think it's going to go there.
00:05:23.160
But still, there's some work to be done on the market.
00:05:29.620
As a company, we've testified, I think, in 40 state legislatures.
00:05:34.660
we've had to build the product, improve the model, and then go convince the market.
00:05:40.500
I think in terms of the customers, so Lenar, the country's largest home builder,
00:05:44.980
is an investor and customer. Realogy, largest real estate company, they're an investor and
00:05:48.860
customer. And then we've got two top 10 lenders and a bunch of others. And I think for them,
00:05:55.060
most of them came to us inbound. And what they really all said was similarly,
00:05:59.940
you know it sucks to manage this process but really you know they've had multi efforts to
00:06:04.320
digitize their entire company and the way they serve their clients and the notarization is what's
00:06:09.060
forced them to paper and so they've seen us as really being that key to solve that problem for
00:06:13.280
them and and so we're sort of we've been we've been rolled into this digital transformation
00:06:17.660
movement that's sort of happening in every sector and how is how do people in the space of like
00:06:22.900
signature signage like was there a worry that they might add this to their product or how do you
00:06:29.600
how do you compete? How do you position? Has that happened?
00:06:33.480
There's no one doing it yet. We've partnered with some of them.
00:06:38.880
Yep. And the gist is most of those companies are pure software businesses, right? And for us,
00:06:44.180
we run a service. And so we have the software and then we also staff the notaries. And some of them
00:06:49.420
are part-time, some of them are full-time. And so if you're a consumer or if you're a business,
00:06:54.300
we've got 24-7 coverage, average connection time in less than 30 seconds.
00:07:06.620
trying to figure out how to make it look like SaaS
00:07:12.340
And then the legal, the compliance work, all these things.
00:07:16.060
We now have a system that understands in these states,
00:07:18.960
you've got to do this, you've got to do something else elsewhere.
00:07:26.800
Kind of like the, I know in a lot of the marketplace businesses, there's the identity
00:07:30.980
providers, the ones that verify identity, you know, Airbnbs, they all have to, yeah.
00:07:35.600
So you guys can play and provide a critical component for a lot of these other companies
00:07:40.400
without, you know, they just may not want to enter that and that's fine.
00:07:44.620
And then how do you guys think about like product strategy and roadmap and like, how
00:07:52.680
Yeah, we just had our offsite yesterday, so it's good.
00:07:56.220
I think as a company, one of our challenges, we've had to race to the enterprise much faster than a company normally would.
00:08:06.320
And then furthermore, for us to serve our customers, there are other organizations that approve.
00:08:14.040
And so for us to serve a title company, the insurance underwriter has a say in it.
00:08:18.880
For us to serve a lender, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others in the secondary market have a say in it.
00:08:24.040
And you have to be an approved vendor and go through this process.
00:08:26.780
So before we had actually won a single customer, we went through a SOC 2 audit.
00:08:31.620
You know, we did all this sort of enterprise work.
00:08:36.020
And so, you know, the prize has got to be big enough to justify doing that.
00:08:41.740
And so what's then interesting is we've sort of worked back then and gone out and, you know, focused on winning and serving the market and, you know, making money.
00:08:50.480
But so our product roadmap has sort of oscillated from prove the thing works, right, prove that you can serve the enterprise, to now trying to do much more customer-driven development and talking to our customers.
00:09:04.860
And what we find today, the single biggest challenge we have is people just don't understand how it works.
00:09:19.540
Right. So most of the time people search for I need a notary and they come across our site and suddenly it's like video based.
00:09:27.400
That's sort of the first challenge to get over.
00:09:29.760
Yeah. And then we've invented all these terms and concepts for the real estate industry.
00:09:36.800
Right. And it turns out we call our customers and they don't know what that means.
00:09:40.100
Right. And so we're really now focused on, you know, just usability, frankly, making it dead simple for people to sign up, understand the concept, try, buy.
00:09:49.540
commit. Is there a custom workflow? Do you see a custom workflow per industry based on the
00:09:54.520
lexicon so that for them it makes sense? Like real estate is going to have a certain flow that...
00:09:59.340
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'd say we've done a really good job and we've been intentional over the
00:10:03.680
history of the company. We've got one core product and then based on sort of the customer,
00:10:08.520
the geography, it morphs to serve that transaction. So a real estate transaction,
00:10:13.720
different tools, we call them meetings. You connect in a video meeting, different tools
00:10:18.480
present themselves to both the signer and the notary.
00:10:30.060
for what they need accomplished during that session.
00:10:36.400
They're just these real high-value, complicated transactions.
00:10:45.720
So it's a different use case using the same infrastructure.
00:10:48.480
So you guys have raised a total of $43 million.
00:11:04.800
was a seed before the A. A was eight or something.
00:11:20.100
into our own legal research and compliance work.
00:11:23.800
And then it's been a lot of educating the market.
00:11:26.080
So for us, we've put a lot of effort into marketing.
00:11:29.880
But that's not necessarily customer acquisition focus.
00:11:40.760
I mean, we've had a team of more than 40 writing software.
00:11:46.340
Has the product shifted from the first solution to, like, today?
00:11:50.860
Was there anything core, some assumptions that you made that were just not?
00:11:56.280
Or was it, for the most part, the way it works is how it's worked?
00:12:01.140
I think for us, a decision we struggle with today is how much do we care about our business users?
00:12:09.020
So ultimately, the person we interact with is largely the signer.
00:12:17.500
So how much do we care about them using our product
00:12:19.660
versus integrating into the tools that they already use?
00:12:23.280
And I think we're learning it's segment or industry specific.
00:12:27.940
In the real estate market, we've recently partnered with ResWare.
00:12:31.660
And so they're the largest software system for title agents.
00:12:35.280
We can just be a button that they click, right?
00:12:40.020
but we feel in other instances we can provide a richer experience
00:12:44.620
Yeah. Or even we let people join the video session. So if you're a title agent and you want to connect with the notary and your customer, you can do so. So they need to be in our product experience to do that. And I think that's something we're constantly grappling with is how to get the distribution from partnering with folks, make it easier to train their teams and whatnot, but then also provide an amazing product experience.
00:13:09.680
Was there ever a time where a marketplace solution to this was kind of like an idea, like instead of having the notaries work for you, I'm assuming?
00:13:21.200
And so we've already shared with the market that we're going to do that, both independent notaries and then our customers themselves and be more of a platform as a service model.
00:13:32.340
The challenge there is that there's a lot of compliance work that's required.
00:13:52.020
Some of our customers, though, it's their delivery model
00:14:01.100
But we want to be sure that the product is nailed
00:14:18.380
Any other, just one other that you're willing to share?
00:14:25.080
How long have you been fascinated with domains?
00:14:28.360
Oh, I've loved domains for a long period of time.
00:14:30.760
I mean, I bought a bunch of domains in college, which then I let expire.
00:14:37.600
I could have bought my last name, .com, and I ended up with the .org because I just didn't pull the trigger.
00:14:44.960
Interestingly, I've got a different take on sort of the strategy, which I've shared before.
00:14:50.400
And I think, you know, number one issue trying to buy domains is that the seller's not serious or they're not – don't have realistic price expectations.
00:15:04.700
there's people who have massive domain catalogs.
00:15:16.540
Because they want to know that you're a real buyer.
00:15:18.900
And I want to know if they're a real seller, frankly.
00:15:30.040
And then we provide a search experience and ultimately timelines, right?
00:15:33.300
And so I explained the general, you know, concept that we were focused on.
00:15:37.660
And I said, is there anything in your portfolio that you think might fit the bill?
00:15:44.580
I got responses from all five with proposals and prices.
00:16:05.160
And Garrett Camp has since bought a lot of these domains.
00:16:17.280
And then for Notarize, similarly, I reached out.
00:16:20.120
It was actually a private equity firm that owned it.
00:16:30.480
No, the crazy thing about Notarize is actually I get the domain.
00:16:34.580
I got the Twitter account through a connection.
00:16:37.040
And then I go to the app store, and it was totally unclaimed.
00:16:42.900
Yeah, so it goes to show people weren't thinking about online notarization.
00:16:49.260
What else do you – because, I mean, sometimes it's just like you've got to get lucky.
00:17:04.400
if someone owns a domain and they're not sophisticated enough
00:17:13.620
I think Dropbox did this when they get Dropbox.
00:17:15.880
And that guy I heard was running affiliate offers
00:17:24.880
creative ways that you've heard or you've done to acquire a domain without a large cash output?
00:17:31.340
Yeah. So other companies I've been associated with. So you can do a lease agreement that
00:17:38.380
Yeah. Lease to own. I'm generally not a fan of those. I think oftentimes something that'll get
00:17:42.740
someone to sell is if you say, hey, why don't you let us pay you a fixed price for, say,
00:17:48.180
five or 10 years use. At the end of that time period, we do a balloon payment if we want to
00:17:55.940
So I generally find that that's an easier structure than a lease
00:18:00.520
So like, hey, we'll pay you $50,000 to use this thing.
00:18:02.920
And if you think this is going to be worth $5 million
00:18:09.840
And I think that generally gets the conversation started,
00:18:17.220
They're in market now, and then it's like, OK, let's talk terms.
00:18:21.080
And it's easy to say they'd want $200,000 in five years.
00:18:27.260
to agree to their price indirectly as a proxy by the terms.
00:18:30.380
And then you can kind of bring them back down to,
00:18:34.200
You mentioned that you did your offsite just yesterday
00:18:37.800
How do you run, because a lot of founders that watch this
00:18:40.040
are at that scale where they're trying to figure out
00:18:44.020
how do they build the business that builds a business.
00:18:47.180
What's your thoughts on, because I know you sit on a few boards.
00:19:00.140
We've brought in some great leadership this year,
00:19:07.700
So she's out of Wayfair and HubSpot and Comcast and other companies.
00:19:15.680
I think she's predominantly setting the cadence for the business these days.
00:19:22.220
She came in in January, maybe late January, and just immediately like, hey, we're going to have a staff meeting or leads meeting every week.
00:19:34.060
But for me, you know, between fundraising or customer development.
00:19:39.060
And I think, you know, that we're going to publish an agenda before the meeting and we're going to walk through it.
00:19:43.800
And just it seems obvious, but it takes real discipline to do those things and to think about sort of the meeting structure and cadence of the company.
00:19:51.780
And so for me, you know, I for a pretty big chunk of time tried to change myself and then sort of came to realization that know thyself, know thyself, which, you know, I'm still working on.
00:20:04.360
And so I've tried to then focus on what I think I'm good at, which is more sort of the forward-looking product development, engaging with some of our key partners.
00:20:17.760
And I think we've got certain parts of the company that are doing a much better job than others.
00:20:26.380
You know, I also, you know, prior to her joining, you know, I went down the OKR's path, right?
00:20:33.400
And I've heard this from a lot of founders that you start to build a team, you read some books, OKRs, yay.
00:20:41.600
And then you start out and you don't want to give up control, so you're very prescriptive.
00:20:45.220
So initially, OKRs was me just trying to find a way to tell people what to do.
00:20:51.220
And then we flipped, and then it became me much more focused on the goal that the team set the KPIs, but then really like.
00:21:01.120
Yeah, but it didn't really work either because there wasn't necessarily the team.
00:21:09.640
And now what we've really focused, at least in the product org, is on trying to identify problems to solve.
00:21:15.600
We've got the team organized lines of business, so sort of general.
00:21:22.120
We've got consumer, we've got B2B, and then we've got real estate.
00:21:27.360
And so we've really tried to say we can't have more than three.
00:21:29.700
We're going to try to pick three problems for a quarter that have the most impact, get buy-in on those,
00:21:34.820
and let the team have more ownership over the projects that might solve the problems.
00:21:42.040
And then in regards to KPIs in the early days versus now, is there anything unique that you guys have done?
00:21:49.420
Well, the initial KPI was simply, could we do this?
00:21:51.980
And, you know, there was a very real chance up until 18 months ago that after all the investment and all the product work that the answer was going to be no.
00:22:07.720
You know, I think for us these days what we're focused on is really activation.
00:22:17.480
And I think something that we didn't fully appreciate,
00:22:22.980
It's a total change in business practice for our customers.
00:22:28.820
and you typically have had people coming into the office to perform closings
00:22:34.580
we've got to get over these humps where people trust the process.
00:22:41.680
Because they don't get paid if they don't close a deal.
00:22:48.880
I don't know if I want to try this fancy digital thing.
00:22:51.780
And then in some segments are more accepting of failure, frankly.
00:22:58.040
So if a small business lender, if we can get 95% of people through, that's a massive win for them.
00:23:04.840
It's huge efficiencies and better customer experience.
00:23:07.020
And they've got these few, they're still going the paper route.
00:23:10.920
In real estate, like, loan has to close on a Thursday.
00:23:15.600
So for us, we've gotten into some of these customers.
00:23:21.820
And what's interesting is that goes bad, we're finding, isn't even necessarily a fixed concept.
00:23:27.900
So we have instances where the person doesn't complete the meeting, we call it, and everyone gets all up in arms.
00:23:35.700
And then we go and we watch the video, and really what happened is the customer said,
00:23:39.160
hey, my doorbell rang, I kind of run downstairs
00:23:43.480
And we built our product to support that, right?
00:23:59.800
And how do you manage the time between venture partner
00:24:06.660
Because I wasn't even sure if you were still doing the venture
00:24:08.440
just because, like, I can't imagine $40-some million in capital.
00:24:16.420
No, so I've sat on the boards of two companies,
00:24:18.980
Law about in California and Drizzly here in Boston.
00:24:22.620
And then I'm still part of the investment committee at Polaris.
00:24:27.080
You know, I think what's interesting and not a lot of,
00:24:28.860
I certainly didn't appreciate is, you know, being on a board,
00:24:34.100
And so people talk about, like, being an attorney
00:24:46.820
And I think that's the biggest challenge for me
00:24:48.440
is just not being able to control that timeline.
00:25:05.500
And so how they're dealing with either stock compensation or a key executive that's leaving, and I get to see that play out, and that helps.
00:25:12.600
Did you think you were going to just do venture and just you couldn't get this idea out of your head?
00:25:19.880
Actually, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a venture capitalist, which is really weird.
00:25:24.600
How did you even know what a venture capitalist was back then?
00:25:36.920
was Bob Cagle, Benchmark, Don Wood, Draper Fisher.
00:25:40.620
So for me, I just saw my dad's friends who were cool guys.
00:25:47.880
And then I think the industry went through a phase
00:25:58.200
And so I've heard a very long time, I was like, that's dead.
00:26:05.740
And the industry has seen a shift where it's gone now back to people who,
00:26:14.660
There's more diversity in terms of people's background or skill set.
00:26:17.380
So for me, I started my career at Microsoft, built some products there,
00:26:28.820
Polaris offered me the opportunity to join as an EIR.
00:26:31.260
And so I thought I was going to start another company.
00:26:34.020
I did a bunch of work, explored a bunch of ideas.
00:26:36.860
It's a horrible construct, I think, to start a company just because you can.
00:26:43.320
And then I found Lob out in California, and I said to the firm,
00:26:50.500
And they sort of said, well, why don't you look at it?
00:26:54.180
Because you were in EIR, and you're saying, hey, this is a cool company,
00:26:56.440
and they're like, go double-click on that and see what's there.
00:27:01.220
Yeah, I mean, at that point, even, it was just explore the company,
00:27:05.460
And so I joined as a venture partner, invested in Lobb, and then in Drizzly.
00:27:21.300
So after joining the firm, Twitter went public.
00:27:29.660
I then went skiing in Idaho with my family and broke my leg.
00:27:32.860
and I spent two and a half months on a couch and had a lot of free time.
00:27:46.880
But is it because, I mean, what's interesting to me is, like,
00:27:51.960
Even if it took Notarize away, like, you're going to build.
00:28:01.660
Like, cause I mean, it wasn't obvious in the early days.
00:28:04.040
Like I think a lot of founders that do YC and stuff,
00:28:06.960
they don't realize how like not hard, like worse.
00:28:12.180
they're just going to get a job making, you know,
00:28:17.340
Um, but like, you're going to go start something that like may not,
00:28:22.800
Is that why that, that idea was the one to follow more than something else or?
00:28:30.240
So I, you know, having the experiences as a VC, it really, I spent a lot of time thinking about what made a good business, right?
00:28:40.680
And what would I want to pursue either to invest in or to start?
00:28:46.760
And I think ultimately, for me, they're the same decision, right?
00:28:50.300
which is if it's not something that I would spend my time on personally
00:28:55.820
because it's exciting enough or because I can't contribute in some way,
00:29:05.820
and my father-in-law who's successful in technology,
00:29:10.780
was we solved a very difficult technology problem,
00:29:13.920
which is how to build a better social search engine.
00:29:18.960
But then suddenly it was like, well, how do you productize it so someone could use it?
00:29:24.820
Yeah, and then how do you turn that into a business?
00:29:26.860
And so we had to sort of still climb through all of those hurdles.
00:29:31.200
And we put 95% of the money into solving the technology problem and then had kind of no resources to go to market.
00:29:41.180
And at the time, I was looking at the Ubers and other products that came out.
00:29:47.740
That was a feature that they could validate very quickly, determine if there was demand.
00:29:54.840
And they've since become complicated technology problems.
00:29:58.280
And so I was like, if I'm going to start a company, I want to play at that end of the spectrum.
00:30:06.360
And so when this came along, it met that criteria.
00:30:09.080
I'm like, people are either going to notarize documents on the internet or not.
00:30:24.660
It wasn't until I started getting the phone calls
00:30:26.480
from big enterprise customers saying that,
0.96
00:30:30.340
holy shit, you've stumbled into this incredible opportunity
0.99
00:30:37.560
And looking back, just with the amount of lobbying you've done,
00:30:45.380
I know, but it's interesting because it's only after
00:30:48.920
when it's actually written about that they cannot not
00:30:51.220
write about you because you were involved in that.
00:30:54.600
Yeah, I've said this to the team, which I don't know
00:30:57.500
if it was motivating or not, which is that we may fail,
00:31:01.040
but we will be the company that has made it possible
00:31:34.500
First, I give companies like DocuSign and others
00:31:40.280
If you watch, there's a video on YouTube of the founder of DocuSign talking about this
00:31:46.060
and the four or five years and sort of the hell that he had to climb through
00:31:55.400
In hindsight, Fannie Mae and the CFPB and others did a pilot and a study
00:32:01.400
about digital mortgage before we even started this company.
00:32:06.180
And what they found is the impediments to a digital real estate transaction was the legal acceptance and lack of clarity for digital notarization and then getting things notarized.
00:32:20.560
So had I been going deep in that sector, I may have concluded that this was the thing to do.
00:32:26.060
We just sort of lucked into it from the other direction.
00:32:33.400
What have you learned about being a father and an entrepreneur?
00:32:39.760
and I'm always fascinated when I meet other folks
00:32:43.640
doing both the family and the entrepreneurial thing.
00:32:48.660
I've been very fortunate because I get to pick where the office is and whatnot.
00:32:57.280
and then my kids go to school one block from there.
00:33:03.400
Um, and you know, I think especially it's tough on my wife.
00:33:07.520
We've got these, you know, I've got two boys, six and three years old in there.
00:33:14.380
I'm a horrible, I sleep probably four hours a night.
00:33:18.380
Um, and so I'm, I try to get home every day, five, five 30, you know, sometimes six, um,
00:33:24.200
when I'm in town, put the kids to bed and then I get back online and then in the mornings
00:33:28.380
I largely take them to school and, but it's really tough.
00:33:31.620
I think, you know, the hardest part is then also my older son is very aware of when I'm gone.
00:33:39.940
And it's, you know, you get questions from them and they're tough.
00:33:49.520
And you're like, oh, I still got a few more days.
00:33:51.680
Over the last few years, you know, really your whole career, if you look back,
00:33:55.420
who did you need to become as an entrepreneur to be the person that continues to lead this forward?
00:34:01.620
what are the the mindset beliefs that had to kind of shift that's a good question so i like to ask
00:34:08.160
it yeah i um i'm still struggling with becoming more disciplined and i think i've learned that
00:34:17.400
the way that i run my own life is not conducive to a really healthy well-functioning organization
00:34:24.700
and i'm someone who you know liz in her first week on the job she told me she did your pressure
0.86
00:34:30.000
prompted so i'm the person who pressure prompted pressure prompted never heard that yeah so i'm
00:34:35.620
the person who has a big presentation i've got to give or whatnot and the night before
00:34:39.640
that's when it gets done that's when it gets done but when you have an off-site and the team needs
00:34:45.660
to be aware of what's happening and you gotta get the agenda out two weeks in advance and whatnot
00:34:48.860
you know so that's been the biggest i think that's the high level statement for me and there's a lot
00:34:54.120
of you know sort of sub sub points underneath that that i'm still working on i think you know
00:35:00.020
i think what i've been good at is is maintaining a long-term sort of vision and set of goals like
00:35:06.520
i'm the keeper of what we're trying to accomplish for the company and it's very clear for us what
00:35:11.220
we need to go do sometimes i can get i can get ahead of where we should be you know we now have
00:35:16.960
this great opportunity because we've digitized either the real estate transaction or you know
00:35:22.180
in a different vertical to do all this other cool stuff, right?
00:35:35.040
And so it's how do you set sort of the organizational discipline
00:35:37.880
and the KPIs to just make that great and earn the opportunity
00:35:55.360
I don't know that I figured it out, to be frank.
00:35:58.500
I think for me, I love everything about startups.
00:36:04.600
In addition to some of my dad's friends, our neighbor was the first or second employee, his son.
00:36:09.740
I've got friends that have started successful companies.
00:36:15.880
And so it's a constant topic of conversation for me.
00:36:25.620
and I think that that elicits more honest conversation with other people.
00:36:29.700
You're vulnerable about, here are my challenges.
00:36:32.080
Yeah, and I think that that's a good way to learn a lot.
00:36:45.640
and who's been able to help draw on good folks.
00:36:50.540
He's got sort of the enterprise vital services experience.
00:36:52.960
Larry D'Angelo had a log man on the go-to-market side.
00:36:58.300
what's made me realize that I need to change in some ways
00:37:01.680
is you, you know, what's the definition of insanity, right?
00:37:06.240
So I've tried the same thing a number of times.
00:37:11.060
you've got to look at the man in the mirror, right?
00:37:17.880
Thanks for watching this episode of Escape Velocity.
00:37:21.440
Be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment
00:37:24.320
with your biggest insight from our conversation.