The Creator of Club Penguin - Lane Merrifield @ Wheelhouse Ventures
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Summary
In this episode, we sit down with the CEO of Club Penguin, a company that was founded in the early 2000s and grew to a billion dollar company in a short period of time. We talk about how Club Penguin went from a small startup to a multi-billion dollar company.
Transcript
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You know, I always tell people, like, there's two things you don't mess with.
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You don't mess with someone's kids, and you don't mess with someone's money.
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We're actually sitting in your building, downtown Kelowna.
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the number was close to a billion kind of outcome.
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but not all of it, so it ended up underneath there.
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And I mean, for people that think that's crazy,
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I mean, we bootstrapped it and we'd kept things
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that we ended up profitable after three months.
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and then we ended up within about six months, you know,
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where we didn't have the infrastructure to keep up
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I didn't really wanna have to run around the world
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And it was critical for me because of our mission of taking care of kids and giving them a safe place online.
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We had kids playing globally, but we didn't have the infrastructure to be able to support them all the same.
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We had to put offices in different parts of the world, both from a time zone perspective and a language perspective.
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And so, you know, we were looking for a company that had that infrastructure.
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Was Disney the, I mean, when you think of, like, who would be the absolutely best partner to help deliver on that, you know, in regards to, like, translations and international and just horsepower, were they the only option for you guys or?
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So if it was purely about cash or purely about the exit, we could have done better.
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But it wasn't, when I say it wasn't just about the money.
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It really, it really wasn't about the money for us.
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It really was an infrastructure play more than anything.
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And, and I wanted to see the company reach a billion dollars
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I would have been 20, 19, 20 in taking a programming class
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and he had young kids, and they were playing on Club Penguin.
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And he goes, my kids are, and it was built in Flash, I believe.
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Yeah, like I'm a bit of a nerd, so action script, right?
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And he was just like, they're addicted to this thing.
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He goes, oh yeah, you have to like buy stuff and in-game.
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But, you know, go back, like, because I know then there was Dave,
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which he's the older guy, and then Lance, who I've spent time with.
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because it definitely feels like it was lightning in a bottle.
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Like there was a moment in time where this happened.
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Go to those early days and tell us how that came to be.
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Yeah, so I mean, obviously the people played a key role.
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because we had to be there for some sort of function.
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You know, it was not the like, you know, bro-fest,
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like frat boy, we're gonna go start a company together
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of very different strengths, very different weaknesses,
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within the previous company that we started in,
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so we did website design and development uh video you know video um uh design i my background was
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in design so that's kind of where i came into this um and dave was like hey can you hold down the
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fort i'm going to europe to meet a bunch of our european clients we were working with john deere
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and a bunch of others kind of out of europe and um and uh so so i did and i was kind of i was
00:05:10.620
meeting with all the team i'd only been there a few months at the time i was sitting down with
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lance he started showing me some of these little mini games he was working on he kind of had the
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and a community perspective, which was my passion,
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and he kind of showed some different ideas that he had.
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we literally were ready with our letter of resignation
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but we're like, Dave's been building this company
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with this company, with your company right now.
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And at the end of the pitch, he looked at us and he said,
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I have no idea what you guys are talking about.
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but I've never seen either of you this passionate before.
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that you can generate from this existing company,
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Lance, you can go full-time on Club Penguin right now.
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from your own funds, we'll use to hire a couple of people,
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a couple of artists, and some folks to support Lance.
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No, he basically said, and so, you know, I was almost like moonlighting with Penguin.
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I was working my ass off every day trying to, you know, drum up more business and negotiate contracts and things to try and eke out as much margin as I could from every single job, knowing that that margin could be reinvested back in.
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And then we went, you know, I went down to the bank, took out a line of credit on my house.
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we basically said hey we might move back into an apartment if this all goes to shit
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wow and what was that rocket ship timeline uh well how quick did you get to revenue
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00:07:25.020
yeah so how did it scale up we it was about uh nine to ten months in production
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kind of we had about three or four people that were working on it you know we were paying them
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part-time it was like hourly they were all working harder than what we could afford to pay them they
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They were passionate about it and excited as well.
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And we were literally reaching the point where we were running out of funds.
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Because our money, Lance and I put in equal amounts from our houses.
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The rest of the company was kind of supporting, but not enough to pay all these folks.
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We always knew it was going to be subscription, even from the beginning.
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because one of our core beliefs and core values
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especially when they don't understand the difference
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and we knew we had to somehow pay for this thing.
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that literally said, they were reviewing the site
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you know, on behalf of their kids, because it's really the whole goal was to say, let's try and
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give kids a safe walled environment that was ad free, because that's what we wanted for our own
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kids. Looking back now, those same types of reporters who are mocking us are like, how did
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you know the, you know, the, the trend of subscriptions so early? And it's like, we didn't
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know anything. We just knew we had limited solutions and we, and we wanted to do the right
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thing by the kids and how do you get the word out once you launch because nine months not a long
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time to build i think people wait too long to monetize i mean the fact that you monetize out
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of the gate um how do you get the initial user base going yeah so we um thankfully lance had
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donated uh see again this is where it's like paying it forward doing the right thing karma
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whatever you want to call it yeah lance had donated a few of his mini games that he had made
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over the years uh in flash to this young guy young developer out in the uk who is trying to start a
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collection of flash games like a website dedicated to this stuff and uh and he put up put out the
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call to anyone who he could find on the internet who had made a flash game saying hey i can't pay
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you now but i'll pay you down the road once i start generating revenue would you donate a game
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most people just ignored him obviously you know hey i'm not gonna give this away for free lance
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a hundred bucks for it down the road or something
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And this was like four or five years before this.
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we launched this thing, we're seeing the uptick.
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We did a closed beta of about three or 4,000 kids
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And parents did not spend money on kids back then.
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I mean, this is the thing that people take for granted
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I remember getting a merchant account in early 2000s
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Oh yeah, I probably talked about seven or eight
00:11:02.760
different banks and companies before we could get it sorted.
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Even the authentication, like setting up the accounts,
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and just, you know, and just knocked ourselves out
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eventually the big guys were gonna figure it out.
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in the market and we we thought okay we've got this limited amount of time it's also why we were
00:11:54.780
so secretive about it um so like we had a agreement among the three of us we're not gonna even when we
00:12:00.540
were making money like we we started paying ourselves i remember you telling me this where
00:12:03.660
you you guys agreed i'm nobody's buying a car no one's buying a car no one's buying a house no
00:12:08.300
one's doing anything there's no upgrades to your lifestyle yeah um i ended up having i ended up
00:12:13.020
needing a car anyway and so i got like the entry level lexus the cheapest one i could find because
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because I was like a Toyota or whatever anyway.
00:12:37.820
Because you were scared that somebody's gonna pick up
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from reporters that are hearing word on the street,
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And so, and CommScore wasn't very accurate back then.
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hey, you guys have rocketed up to like top 10 kids sites.
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You know, is this true and how and what's going on here?
00:13:07.560
Yeah, I want to know how did you get that distribution.
00:13:11.620
So in the distribution, fast forward then to Club Penguin,
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We were ready to open up to the public, and we reached out to this friend of Lance's who he'd given these games two years earlier, who now is running Miniclip, which had about 50 million uniques a month of just kids, of our prime audience, going to this thing.
00:13:34.760
So we reached out to him and said, hey, listen, we want to put together, and he'd only ever hosted these tiny little one-off games before.
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And so we went to him and said, hey, we've got something kind of bigger, more complicated.
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We worked out a rev share agreement that was pretty generous for him at the time,
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And we thought, listen, we've got the margin because we kept things so tight.
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We kept our costs so low that we could afford to do it.
00:14:06.920
And he would only open it up to every hundredth user.
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user like you kind of show up on the list like 10 12 and and it was funny because he came to us and
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and talk about this paranoia of time like this moment in time that we didn't want to lose
00:14:20.220
uh he said it usually takes the average game about three to four months to go full audience
00:14:27.100
because we just we we crashed a lot yeah and i said we're gonna do it in a month and he's like
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it's not not happening but good luck yeah and it was like literally i think uh five weeks or
00:14:40.360
something we were like one week past what we wanted to um and we had the full audience on
00:14:44.440
there and and it was going nuts and from that point he wouldn't have taken this conversation
00:14:48.240
had lance not no he definitely wouldn't have featured us the way he did and and uh and and
00:14:53.980
or would have been a more aggressive contract or or or yeah a whole lot you know i mean in the end
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when we were cutting him checks for four or five million dollars he was pretty excited he was
00:15:02.560
pretty happy about it um but um but he but he deserved it i mean you know he took a risk on us
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The risk paid off, and those were checks I was happy to cut.
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I mean, we had a team that was just dedicated to it.
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And we were trying to hack them into these socket servers.
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And a typical socket server will deliver packets of information,
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a 20 second connection while the website's downloading onto your local device um our
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socket server connections were like milliseconds because we couldn't we had to just like deliver it
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and then drop it it was like and so then the penguin would move on the screen to wherever
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they clicked and then they click something else move it and drop it and uh we even brought we
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brought in consultants from ibm one time because we couldn't keep the servers up because even after
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even after we had all of mini clips audience on there that was great but we're also growing
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independently as well um and so we brought in these consultants from ibm they sat down they
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dug through the servers they were going to help us scale and um after like two or three days of
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digging into it they literally said we're going to give you your money back like thanks but they
00:16:18.540
couldn't solve it we can't help you the people that sold you the hardware you guys you guys are
00:16:22.940
using this stuff in ways we've never seen before we don't know frankly how they're standing up as
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as well as they are and you know let us know what you find out and so we're like all right we'll
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just keep figuring it out ourselves and thankfully we we we really had worked hard to build a
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community and to build that community sense it's one of the reasons why club penguin you know just
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last week was trending again on twitter like it still still has that passionate fan base because
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we really cared about them and they really cared about us and as a result they were very patient
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when servers would crash we wouldn't get flooded with angry emails we get flooded with like
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cheering us on like good luck guys we know you're working hard we know you're and and and that's you
00:17:01.060
know nowadays when i consult and try to help other companies about building an online community and
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building their um building building their brand um within a community it's one of things i talk
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about all the time is to not create an adversarial relationship with your community not hold back
00:17:15.860
information not try to hide things from your community be as transparent as vulnerable as
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open as you possibly can and you will endear yourself far more than if you try to sculpt
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the perfect message and hold back and i mean politicians are learning this now i mean everyone
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is but back then companies were i mean we're literally dealing with like aol yeah that would
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like you know try to trick people into not canceling their accounts and those and those
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recordings were going online and we're listening to this stuff going oh god like someone's got to
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do it differently it's one of the reasons why we had actual humans doing customer support you know
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we had 300 people around real people real people doing customer care i mean and now i watch youtube
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and the way that kids have been, frankly, harmed in some ways
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by having content put in front of them that shouldn't be.
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Because, like, listen, I'm as much of a nerd as anyone,
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but there's some of the stuff that just requires human power.
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listen, your comm score numbers are through the roof.
00:18:29.120
And they would assume, yeah, you know, it's not accurate.
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that you wanted to kind of represent the lean and mean team
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in regards to like not disclosing the level of revenue
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You know, we had started this thing for our kids.
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Like literally we had goal sheets that were like,
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as the experience was growing, as the user base was growing,
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I mean, it's kids, dude, it's a different game.
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And our whole world was created around the fact
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So the parents were ultimately the decision makers.
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So the kids could influence, they could champion,
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And as a result, it's one of the reasons why for us,
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even when I talk about things like data and all of that,
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we didn't need the data for advertising reasons.
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the Game Developers Conference in Austin, Texas,
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I'd ask myself, how does this matter to an eight-year-old?
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No eight-year-old's gonna read the press media later.
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I'd rather go talk to a mommy blogger conference
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where I can talk to them about how much we value safety,
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really what it would have come down to is just ego.
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at such a young age, early in your entrepreneurial career
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you know, kind of high on their own supply sometimes
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And then after that, you know, you have this huge success.
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A lot of people decide to maybe go find a, you know,
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And you decided to double down on your community,
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build this incredible building in downtown Cologne,
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essentially your investment vehicle wheelhouse, why?
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And I would say that because I said no to everything.
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Because that happens and you're on everybody's list.
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it was increasingly difficult for me to do my job remotely.
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So even when you're trying to advocate for something
00:23:08.560
But then every time I was there, I wasn't with my kids
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And every, to me, every bedtime was like treasure.
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And I'm sitting in Australia and this reporter's asking me,
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your kids must think you're the coolest dad in the world.
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like out of them i'm just dad i'm just goofy i'm just a nerd i you know kind of but what really
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hit me in that moment was like i haven't actually seen my kids for like two weeks because i was like
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bopping around all over the place and i actually feel like kind of a shitty dad right now and i
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realized that this this website that i'm running around the world talking about building for my
00:24:01.060
kids is actually turning me into a really shitty father and i i didn't want to do that i i'd been
00:24:08.200
saying yes to millions of kids around the world on behalf of them and been saying no to my own two
00:24:13.440
kids for for way too long and um and so that's when i i knew okay i had to i had to be done now
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this had this was about a year and a half before so it took me 18 months i built a succession plan
00:24:22.480
i found my successor we did a proper transition i wanted to make sure that my baby was in good hands
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and um and then i went back to spend some more time with my actual babies and and focus on the
00:24:31.840
community and i and i'd you know this community i truly believe club penguin wouldn't have been
00:24:37.760
to be launched anywhere else, at least not the same way.
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or 100,000 people to build that kind of company here
00:24:56.760
No, no, but if I were to have built it somewhere else,
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it would have been so much easier for us to lose focus
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and keep the values so oriented and so consistent
00:25:15.580
was because we hired people that genuinely cared about kids.
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And so we were hiring people who had been like,
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I mean, first of all, we're hiring jobs that didn't exist.
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It's not like we can go, you know, grab someone,
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we couldn't grab someone from the company down the street
00:25:32.120
who was doing, holding virtual events and parties.
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Literally, Facebook was being worked on by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard the same time that we had launched Club Penguin.
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So it's not even like social networking was a thing, really, at that point.
00:25:47.200
MySpace was kind of starting to come up around the same time, but that was it.
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We just found whatever the parallel was in life.
00:25:55.600
So we needed someone to manage customer support, create great customer service experience.
00:26:00.580
we hired i hired the local manager from my starbucks who i i would drive 10 minutes further
00:26:07.560
than i needed to go there because every time i went the experience was i mean starbucks runs a
00:26:12.780
great shop and they normally are known for their customer care but this guy just ran such an
00:26:17.400
amazing uh shop team and team and and everyone was all trained and and it was so consistent
00:26:23.500
i said that's what i want so i hired him out you know he now uh runs all of customer care for king
00:26:36.220
He was running a bunch of safety stuff for Facebook.
00:26:48.020
he might've had like a certificate or something.
00:26:50.060
But that was Starbucks, so that was customer care.
00:26:56.260
we hired people from summer camps, local summer camps,
00:27:04.560
And we said, come do the same thing you've been doing.
00:27:09.840
and we're gonna have some different tools to work with.
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So you don't think any other city would have allowed you
00:27:24.500
I think, I don't think it would have had the same heart
00:27:28.260
I've traveled the world. I'm a dual citizen. I've lived in a lot of places. I'm not throwing
00:27:32.300
shade at any place that, you know, every place has their own DNA and their own strengths and
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weaknesses. I think one of the things that's unique about, um, unique about this town and
00:27:41.240
unique about the culture that we had here was, was this overwhelming desire to serve others,
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to care about people, to care about others, um, to care about these kids and the empathy to build
00:28:00.220
but it does turn into a bit of a bro-fest sometimes
00:28:02.400
where it's like, hey, we're solving 20-something problems
00:28:06.200
with 20-something solutions and we're going to build,
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you know, and all of a sudden they're growing big companies
00:28:13.580
I want to build a kid's website anywhere in the world,
00:28:23.180
You know, you kind of have to find the right fit.
00:28:27.000
I mean, I know a lot of companies have been spawned.
00:28:29.420
It's almost like the PayPal mafia in the Bay Area,
00:28:33.220
Like there's just literally sprinkled companies
00:28:40.660
but definitely came from the Club Penguin team.
00:28:43.300
When you came back to decide to do the community stuff,
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Number one, I knew the opportunity that Dave and the trust that Dave had put in us was unique, was not normal.
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And so I wanted to do the same for others that Dave had done for us.
00:29:02.020
So I knew I wanted to invest in some other startups, some other companies, not just in tech,
00:29:06.100
but frankly, anywhere that I could find someone who was creative and passionate and wanted to build something great,
00:29:13.200
I was going to provide some seed capital for that.
00:29:19.040
I was in, I also wanted to volunteer some time.
00:29:21.400
And I had a couple of friends who were on the board of Accelerate Okanagan,
00:29:27.640
They were trying to help startups and they were working out of this,
00:29:29.940
you know, no offense, but crappy little space down the block here.
00:29:34.080
And it was like, and I, so I said, listen, I'll serve one term on the board.
00:29:40.800
I'm talking about how I want to give back to the community.
00:29:43.560
This is an area that I can lend some expertise to.
00:29:46.040
That's the other thing, yeah, is I didn't want to go do stuff, again, for my own ego.
00:29:49.620
If I couldn't add value, I didn't want to do it.
00:29:52.480
And this was an area I thought I could add some value.
00:29:54.860
One of the first things that became apparent was the budget, which is government-funded,
00:29:59.540
80% of the budget was going to that space and to help subsidize space for some of these startups to be in.
00:30:05.260
And 20% was going towards programming and creating, you know, helping entrepreneurs learn how to be entrepreneurs.
00:30:11.420
And I'd experienced, you know, the loneliness of entrepreneurship.
00:30:14.200
Lance had experienced the loneliness of entrepreneurship.
00:30:16.040
And we talked all the time about, you know, people, some people thought it was like a rite of passage.
00:30:22.160
Like, well, yeah, entrepreneurship has to be lonely.
00:30:26.680
I just thought, you know, there wasn't necessarily a great space for it.
00:30:33.300
I then had, thankfully, you know, amazing people, Jeff Keene, you know, who you know, amazing people around us.
00:30:41.800
And also enough clout to be able to make some of the phone calls we did.
00:30:44.840
And we ended up getting, you know, the vice chancellor of the university, the president of the college, the mayor, all of our local politicians, everyone around the table one night.
00:30:54.460
And we said, listen, we want to make this a tech hub in Canada.
00:31:02.220
We studied, you know, the Bay Area, obviously, Seattle, all these other tech hubs.
00:31:06.120
We looked at ones that obviously were a little bit smaller.
00:31:07.860
So Boulder was kind of the closest parallel in terms of city size for what we wanted to do.
00:31:11.900
And we said, you know, what did they do 20 years ago?
00:31:14.840
you know, when computers were first coming out,
00:31:29.120
And you know, I can point to that first meeting,
00:31:36.320
And it was truly the, every key leader from this community
00:31:47.060
and people have said, hey, we wanna do the same thing.
00:31:50.500
Listen, it was a lot of work, a lot of ups and downs,
00:31:53.420
a lot of times we thought it wasn't gonna happen.
00:31:57.980
was the fact that we were genuinely cheering each other
00:32:04.320
I mean, we had all three levels of government involved,
00:32:08.480
We handed all of our documentation over to the government
00:32:16.460
Of course, yeah, because I'd love to see a building like this in other places.
00:32:23.260
Give people a sense of the visuals that may not be able to.
00:32:25.940
Yeah, so it's about 120,000, 130,000 square feet.
00:32:28.440
So it's six stories with a rooftop restaurant and big open area.
00:32:35.000
So the goal behind that, again, was to – it was something that I learned at Pixar, frankly.
00:32:40.800
In fact, if you ever get a chance to or just look up Pixar's campus, when Steve Jobs was, because Steve Jobs founded it during his time away from Apple, they've got this incredible atrium in the Emeryville campus.
00:32:55.200
And one of the secrets behind that is that in that atrium, and this is one of Steve Jobs' requirements, so he was kind of instrumental in building out that campus.
00:33:10.100
All the food in the entire campus is only going to be located here.
00:33:13.080
And the only bathrooms at the time in the entire campus are only going to be located here in this atrium.
00:33:18.540
Because it's going to force people to get out of their desks, to leave their computer and interact with one another.
00:33:26.200
Well, a bathroom is going to draw people out and food is going to draw people out.
0.85
00:33:29.240
And so it was a very intentional desire to build that kind of bring that right brain and left brain together.
00:33:34.960
So we have an atrium running through this building
00:33:44.780
But we wouldn't have been authentic to our vision
00:33:51.560
You jump into an elevator, elevator doors close,
00:34:04.260
fifth floor is a guy doing architecture drawings all the time like i don't know but i feel like i
00:34:08.180
know him because i see him do his work all the time it's one of the reasons why almost all of
00:34:11.140
the we actually help subsidize the the the build outs the ti build outs and um and gave increased
00:34:17.220
subsidies for glass because we wanted it to feel open we wanted you to be able to see and interact
00:34:21.220
with people listen the moment we disappear behind our screens and we're experiencing this you know
00:34:25.300
obviously and have uh with covet and and more remote work the moment it's so easy to disappear
00:34:30.020
behind your screen and lose sight of that personal connection and so we wanted to build a space for
00:34:34.020
that that didn't that that could happen naturally and freely um and i also believe the better
00:34:38.900
companies are going to be coming out as a result of it right i mean you you know the age-old story
00:34:43.060
the the invention of the ipod the original ipod that apple came out with which you know arguably
00:34:48.740
was the was the predecessor to the iphone and predecessor the ipad and one of the reasons why
00:34:52.740
apple's you know most valuable company in the world today um that came about from a you know
00:34:59.140
know, two guys coming from different departments, one who had just seen this, you know, this
00:35:03.840
presentation about this new little hard drive that I think Toshiba or Fujitsu or someone
00:35:07.220
had just come out with, meeting up with someone who had just been tasked to build a MP3 player,
00:35:14.100
you know, build a device that could hold a thousand songs, was like, you know, the Steve
00:35:17.660
Jobs requirement or something like that. And they were like, almost kind of complaining
00:35:21.980
to each other, like, oh, I've got this impossible task, where the hell am I ever going to find,
00:35:25.560
And this guy's like, well, I just came up with this wasted presentation because they made this brick that will never fit in a laptop and and we don't need small size for a desktop.
00:35:34.480
So what a waste of a hard drive design, you know, it's like, wait a minute.
00:35:37.780
And but but but but one thing leads to another and the iPod is born.
00:35:41.660
And that came out of a collision that was not in a meeting that was not by design, that was not management led, that was not organized and formulated.
00:35:56.480
and ending up birthing an incredible magic, yeah.
00:36:02.920
because you definitely don't lead a timid life,
00:36:08.480
why or how did you come to the decision to be a dragon?
00:36:20.600
And remember I said, if you weren't Mickey Mouse
00:36:22.560
or one of my kids, you weren't gonna hear from me.
00:36:28.300
like, oh, they reached out, they asked me to be a dragon.
00:36:33.260
And it happens every time that there's a new dragon,
00:36:48.420
but you were asked along with about 50 to a hundred
00:36:52.080
so they had asked me to audition seven years ago,
00:37:05.700
three weeks a year in Toronto straight without my kids
00:37:13.800
And, and, and honestly I'd regretted it a little bit.
00:37:20.740
I was never diagnosed, but I probably have ADHD and-
00:37:30.880
So I was always a little bit bummed about that one.
00:37:33.160
Fast forward, this building had just completed.
00:37:38.160
I was still managing some investments, doing some advising,
00:37:44.800
And they called again, and actually my assistant
00:37:56.280
and you're like, you're not even connected to this thing.
00:37:58.620
Yeah, like sometimes these emails don't even make sense
00:38:14.720
working for me at the time, he's like, wait a minute,
00:38:24.180
So then she dives into it, turns out it was legit.
00:38:29.640
at the time I thought, oh, I was so honored and so excited
00:38:38.360
with four or five people, so I'm like, all right,
00:38:42.340
What I found out later was that that was only one
00:38:44.540
like four auditions they held in vancouver and then they held another like five or six of those
00:38:48.940
sessions in toronto and um yeah so when i learned that even on the day of i'm like hey this was fun
00:38:55.180
i you know popped out to vancouver for the day got to pretend like i was a dragon with five other
00:39:00.780
guys a couple of my new you know ryan holmes and a few folks out there who are great guys
00:39:05.580
uh and so it was fun it was a fun experience you know i get a call back about a week later hey can
00:39:14.720
you know, we did a full like two to three hour pitch session
00:39:23.100
I went out there, didn't have to do the full thing.
00:39:29.640
And I think that it was one of like five or six
00:39:31.680
at that point and got a call a few days later saying,
00:39:40.180
I mean, I know it's probably not a deal flow thing.
00:39:44.160
And it, you know, to be, I am investing my own money
00:40:15.100
I would have been 32, 33 years old when I was leaving,
00:40:34.800
a bunch of the different studios within Disney.
00:40:42.820
And I was the youngest executive vice president
00:40:58.940
But I worked at it and I also made a lot of mistakes
00:41:05.140
So when I'm at a stage in my life where I've got health,
00:41:12.860
to end up in like a fortune, I think at the time,
00:41:20.900
and like fast forwarded through that in five years
00:41:28.880
That was one of the other kind of fun things of this.
00:41:37.060
And I just was like, I had to almost pinch myself going,
00:41:56.480
And from that point on then going to board meetings
00:42:01.420
including Steve jobs and these others. And like having just this mind blowing,
00:42:05.780
like I'm just, all I can say is I was filled with awe, humility, gratitude.
00:42:11.680
Um, and I felt like imposter syndrome all the time as well,
00:42:14.940
all the way through this experience. But you know, with a lot of time,
00:42:20.080
a lot of therapy and a lot of, uh, you know, kind of processing, I realized,
00:42:26.660
how can I now pivot this into an even bigger thing for me? I'm like, listen,
00:42:31.420
Who knows like I'm not against doing other cool things, but
00:42:35.380
But I almost felt a responsibility to say how can I how can I help others experience a journey like this?
00:42:41.340
How can I make it a little bit easier for them to experience a journey like this and
00:42:45.420
And so I you know, we built some infrastructure here in the innovation center a oh by the way
00:42:53.320
Their budget is now inverted so 20% of their budgets going to the operation and the real estate costs and
00:43:01.280
which is one of the reasons why this building is full.
00:43:02.740
Even throughout COVID, it's remained at full capacity
00:43:22.280
to take some of those lessons to an even bigger level
00:43:28.600
entrepreneurship, not just in my hometown, but encourage entrepreneurship nationally and meet
00:43:33.560
people from all around the world or all around, I should say, all around Canada, all across Canada,
00:43:37.400
hear incredible stories, learn from them, share a little bit of what I've learned. Hang out with
00:43:42.560
Jim. Hang out with Jim. Dude, what a stud. I love that guy. He's a stud. Jim is the real deal. I mean,
00:43:47.100
they're all, they're all amazing. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, but Jim's the OG. I told you this,
00:43:51.280
like Jim is the grandfather I wish I would have had because he's just so wise and seasoned.
00:43:57.820
Yeah. Jim is truly one of those guys. Cause I'm guilty of it too. And so many people are guilty
00:44:01.900
of like, you, you manage your time. You know, you're trying to like, I don't want to waste
00:44:06.120
time. You know, sometimes people want to talk and it's like, listen, I got 15 other things I'm
00:44:10.720
late for right now. I got to go. Jim is the guy who will stop and kind of fold his arms. And he's
00:44:15.240
usually towering over people. Cause he's like six, five and he'll just, he'll talk you off.
00:44:19.500
You want to talk hockey? We'll talk hockey. You want to talk business? We'll talk business. You
00:44:32.560
As we wrap up, Lane, I love to ask everybody, you know,
00:44:36.080
looking back, you know, from the 19, 20 year old version
00:44:40.600
of you to the person that sits here today, you know,
00:44:44.600
you mentioned a lot of therapy, a lot of lessons learned.
00:44:52.820
hmm it's a great question um i think first and foremost uh i had to become someone who who
00:45:08.600
i had to become someone who knew it wasn't about me and i see that mistake a lot with entrepreneurs
00:45:16.400
you know they they they're so passionate about their idea they're so excited about their idea
00:45:20.300
they end up kind of just wrapping this idea around them and it might work for a time they
00:45:25.440
might even have some success with it um but then it starts to mess with succession then it starts
00:45:29.900
to mess with um uh with workflow and and and getting in their own way it starts to mess with
00:45:35.960
their heads it starts to mess with their families it starts to mess with their friends um because
00:45:41.080
in success it can be incredibly enticing um and in failure it can be incredibly defeating if it's
00:45:46.380
all about you i think the best thing that i did number one is i had great partners who reminded
00:45:51.440
me daily it wasn't about me and so that was helpful um um people say lance and i used to
00:45:57.000
fight like an old married couple uh um but we always respected each other like we'd always
00:46:01.360
hug it out at the end but but when we were arguing about what the next experience should be for those
00:46:06.460
kids and we were arguing on behalf of those kids we were passionate about it because we were both
00:46:10.340
very creative and we both really wanted to do the best we could for the kids and um and so having
00:46:16.580
that was amazing uh having my own kids at the time reminded me every single night that it wasn't
00:46:21.260
about me that you know uh that that there's more to life than that um and then having great friends
0.81
00:46:27.900
who who also didn't really give a shit you know i mean i had some i lost some friendships of course
0.81
00:46:32.460
when when the deal happened and all of a sudden they like woke up and and i was this other thing
0.96
00:46:36.880
to them. And that was hard. And that's just, that's the nature of it sometimes. And it's,
00:46:41.140
I don't blame them. You know, who knows what, and I don't even know who knows what their
00:46:44.820
experience was with money as kids or their experience with money is now today. I had one
00:46:50.180
who wrote me a letter who literally was like, it's not you, it's me, but I just need to pause
00:46:53.700
on this for about a year. Because it's too hard for me to be around you with the success right
00:47:01.120
now. And I get it. And I, you know, it was almost like the irony was I got the worst grades out of
00:47:05.700
all my siblings. I, my siblings used to joke about whose couch I was going to be sleeping on as,
00:47:10.660
as I got older, cause my grades were so bad and I was so distracted at school and I was so,
00:47:16.200
um, you know, I was, I was focused on art and creativity. So I'm like, I was the last person
00:47:21.240
anyone around me thought this would happen to. Um, and I think that's one of the reasons why
00:47:26.420
it happened, but it's also been a reminder for me that it really wasn't about me. My uncle was an MP
00:47:30.360
for for 12 15 years something like that in alberta member of parliament and he um i asked him i'm
00:47:37.800
like man how do you go from being a farmer one day because he was you know dairy farmer and grew
00:47:43.240
how do you go from being a farmer one day to like flying with the snowbirds or flying in an f18 and
00:47:49.000
cold lake uh in these crazy experiences and being he was a minister of transportation for quite a
00:47:54.440
while as well under harper and i said how do you like how do you make sense of that and he said
00:47:59.640
he said lane i remind myself every single day that the power is with the seat and the chair i'm
00:48:06.600
sitting in the power is not mine i happen to be lucky enough to be sitting there for now someday
00:48:11.800
i won't be i'll be sitting back in a tractor and someone else will be sitting there and as long as
00:48:16.600
i remind myself every day that it's not about me that the power is about the seat and and and not
00:48:21.320
about me when i have to leave eventually uh it won't be so hard and uh and i'll be able to
00:48:31.880
because it was never about me in the first place.
00:48:41.740
For the ones that are listening that want to reach out
00:48:48.000
where's the best way for them to find you online?
00:48:53.980
So you just have to figure out how to spell my name.
00:49:11.520
I wouldn't be here if you didn't build this building.
00:49:15.060
Because this building houses two of my favorite people,
00:49:20.940
And I came out for Brad's 25th wedding anniversary
00:49:25.160
last year with my little boy and I just fell in love
00:49:28.540
with Kelowna and then this year, you know, with my wife
00:49:31.300
we kind of asked ourselves where we wanted to spend time.
00:49:34.220
And so how crazy is that, that when you sat down
00:49:43.540
And I know, you know, MetaBridge has played a big part
00:49:46.280
bringing people here, that that would be the case.
00:49:49.160
So I'm sure if my family was here, they'd say thank you.
00:49:54.080
nothing warms my heart more than to hear that because that was what we set out to do you know
00:49:58.020
we we didn't have to build any of these pieces the pieces were all there they were just scattered
00:50:03.000
across the city so we said well why don't we just concentrate it together and see what happens and
00:50:07.760
um and that i love hearing that man thank you for sharing that and and thanks for coming out here
00:50:11.520
super cool the the city uh when i when i heard that this was uh going to be more than a temporary
00:50:17.260
uh temporary setup man i was so happy and i'm happy for you and your family because i raised
00:50:23.240
my kids here and it's an incredible place to do that um but you know even more than that i'm happy
00:50:27.680
for this community because uh dude you're a rock star man it's an easy place to do life