Founder Journey ft. Mark Jaine

Speaker A: But um, I just want to start with kind of, uh, maybe a simple question, maybe not. But um, entrepreneurship. Why, why did it excite you? Why did technology excite you? Why even start as an intern? Why get involved?

Speaker B: Uh, I mean I wasn't nearly as like smart and ambitious of all as all you guys. Like, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I'm from San Diego and I was, I started at Intellects when I was 21 and prior to that I worked at a dot com company in San Diego and long. I, I, I failed out of university prior to that and I honestly, I was in San Diego and my mom was like, you got to do something with yourself. There's this company that 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon. Um, I knew through my dad who had worked with the founder, who knew the whatever, whatever, and I just applied and I got the job. So I drove my 86 Honda Prelude to Toronto and uh, I got the job. I made $24,000 my first year as an intern. I brought my own, I had to bring my own computer with me. It was an old compact portable. This is 1999, right? So like it was a big ass box like this. Yeah. And it had a, it had a, it had a CD ROM drive, but you put the disc in this like thing and you slid it in and out. And we had an office by the airport and I used to drive that thing back and forth every day to a place in Brampton. I spent, I uh, didn't know where the hell to go in Canada, so I moved to Brampton. Um, and a 21 year old guy from San Diego moved to Brampton. It turns out I had a lot of time on my hands so I used to drive my computer back and forth and I just worked. And the company was dying. I didn't know it when I came up, but the company was $5 million in debt. It basically had three employees. Uh, and I just came and I didn't have anything else to do but work. So I worked and one thing led to another and I saw opportunity and um, I dug deeper in. So, you know, I'm around all of you like, you know, super smart people and stuff. I did it more out of like necessity, survival and then just kind of compounding improvement through the years.

Speaker A: What were those opportunities? Like you're just, you're coming into, I think a sinking ship essentially. So why, why even stay? Like, what were the opportunities you saw?

Speaker B: Uh, I mean the opportunity was the company was left to death for dead. And, but this carcass could be mine if I wanted it. Basically like nobody else cared. Every shareholder had disbanded. The only reason the company was still in existence was the founder fellow by the name of Ted Gruno. Um, had such bullheaded determination with a combination of dementia because he was in his late 70s. And so he kept plowing money to this company and uh, or not plowing money, kept trying to keep it alive and reinvesting. He was, he was president Hewlett Packard Canada in the 70s and started a company called GIAC, which none of you would have heard of, but back in the 70s it was largest software company in Canada. So I had him to kind of learn from, even though he's a bit of a dick. Um, but I learned from him. No one else was paying attention. Literally all the shareholders totally ignored the company until like 10 years later. And so my opportunity was no one else cared. And so I got the job by default.

Speaker C: So, so let's take a step back. For people that don't know what, what, what, what, what was, what was intellects or what is intellects.

Speaker B: So intellects is still, believe it or not. Well, is environmental and saf, um, back in. It was founded in 1992. I bet most of you weren't born in 1990.

Speaker A: I was born in 1992.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I was a, I guess a sophomore freshman in high school in 1992. So. Well before my, Um. It was based on the ISO standards international standard. The International Organization for Standardization had three different standards. The ISO14000 standard, which was an environmental management standard, ISO9000 which is a quality management standard, and uh, the BS7750 standard which is a health and safety standard. Basically. If you're driving by those big warehouses on the 401, you'll notice they have a big banner out there. It basically means they have a standardized approach for managing their internal processes to ensure quality environmental improvement and so on. And so that was just born out of opportunism. Um, the original founder, Ted had another company called Specialty Technical Publishers which was in Vancouver that did well selling loose leaf manuals for environmental compliance. And Ted was like, hey, I'm going to take my GAC experience and make this into a software platform. So we had literally a DOS based application for running local area network, uh, environmental management. So it's like the activities, documents and whatever related to environmental management. When I came, I literally shipped a cd. I'd go through a phone book of companies, I'd try to find an environmental manager. I'd phone somebody and I'd Be like, hey, would you like to see the software? And I'd ship them a disc and then I'd call them and be like, did you get the disc? Yes. Okay, let's walk through installing the disc. And I'd do this all blind and I'd be like, click here and click there and you see this and like that. And then, uh, the product cost 500 bucks. And I'd be like, it would take me a month to even get a customer even remotely interested. So I was like, I'm going to increase the price to a thousand bucks. And I was still able to sell like eight or ten a month. And so I increased it to 2,000 bucks and I was able to sell more. And then I eventually made it 50,000 bucks and I got to keep selling it. But it was an environmental management system. Um, originally a Windows application and then then later on uh, we started a transition, uh, to a web application back ASP application back in the day. And then eventually we did a SaaS conversion.

Speaker C: So hold on. Yeah, I want to still break this down. Let me. You're from San Diego, you go to that, come to nice weather in Toronto or Brampton, you show up, there's like three people in the company. It's bleeding. Money has an interesting founder, a space Which. Imagine a 21 year old. You don't wake up every morning thinking about how I'm going to help people with environmental standards. But you saw this opportunity. So tell us, this transition from where you went from an intern shipping CDs and selling to actually more of a leadership role, was it literally there was a vacuum and you just started doing stuff and how do you know and how did you learn? Like how do you know what to do next?

Speaker B: So literally it was a vacuum. Um, and Ted, I mean always discounted me because I didn't have my university degree and I was just a 21 year old kid and whatever. So like he would hire these random Jabroni dudes to come in and be the manager here and there. But like everyone knew that that dude doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. And I was, I started as basically the sales guy. I think my initial title was junior commission salesperson. Like I got my first card and it's a junior commission salesper. I was very proud of that. Um, and I sold it. But then, ah, once I sold it there was no one to invoice it so I had to invoice it. And once we invoice it and collected the money, there was no one to count the beans. So I started counting the beans too. And then there was no one to implement it. So I started implementing it. And eventually I was getting customer feedback being like, hey, you've got this product that's a local area network product. But the problem is a wide area network problem. Like if you go to, you know, Exxon Mobil, their environmental impact is not isolated to one single location. It's global. And at that time I was like, the Internet was coming up and it was like, I think this was 2001 and I just, I don't know what. So my m, my gift and you guys should all be think of this is I, I didn't know enough to know that I shouldn't be doing what I was doing. I was always just first principles thinking and just kind of invented the path out of nowhere. So I didn't. Had I known, had I had the experience of all of you, I probably wouldn't have done it because I would have been like, that's not what could be done. But at that time I was like, okay, so I'm going to go to. There uh, was an IRAP program and I got uh, I just filled out funding for an IRA program and I got $50,000 from IRAP and then I got Bell Canada to give me $50,000 and I got City of Scottsdale Arizona to give me $50,000 and we built our first web application. And then I got Saskatchewan. Um, uh, Sask Power was my first big client that I closed for 250 grand. And then they basically customer funded development, helped us build a uh, product. And it was funny, I was sitting with SAS Power with their global uh, safety manager and I think I was 23. And she just invested. Her first deal was 250 grand and eventually ended up being about a million bucks. And they went around the table asking, I used to grow goatee then and stuff, try to look old. And they went around the table like oh, how old are you? And I'm like, then, uh, eventually came In, I was 23. And they're like oh shit, what'd we do? But it worked out.

Speaker A: Um, so there's obviously like a large like time gap. We have to go from like now to exit obviously. But when like through, throughout all of this like progress and you're moving up. When did you really start to see things turn around and, and what was it that really started to, to help surge things forward?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. Have that question. So I worked at intellects for 20 years, had that Question every year a thousand times. What was the inflection point? There was no inflection point. Uh, a really important lesson, I think, in life to think about, and you always hear about this in financial terms of compounding interest. Um, well, think of it in life terms of compounding improvement. And intellects was just a process of compounding improvement. Every day getting better, every minute getting better, just grinding at it. Um, I'd mentioned that I didn't know this when I joined the company, but we had $3 million worth of actual debt and $5 million worth of prep debt. Because of all of the money Ted put in. He put price shares. So I didn't know this, but I had an $8 million debt essentially hanging over the company's head. And I didn't know any better, so I was like, okay, well, I'm going to get to work on paying that off. Um, so starting 2001, we got, I mean, the three employees were Ted, his niece and me. So I hired a couple employees moving forward after that. Um, but, uh, we got basically cash flow break even around 2001, 2002. And then not only were we cash flow break even, but over the course of the next eight years, I paid about $1 million a year to, to pay down that debt and then paid off the prep shares and then was paying $1 million a year dividend to the original shareholders, which, by the way, prior forgot about the company completely. But success has a way of bringing people out of the woodwork. So. So eventually I was paying $1 million in, um, in dividends. But at no point through that arc, uh, was there like an inflection point or big change. Obviously the release of a web system helped, but it was, we had 45% year over year growth from 2001 to 2015. So there was no like 300% growth year. You don't, you don't have to double, double, triple or triple triple double or anything like that. Honestly, survival is the key. Like, there were so many companies that got really good funding during that arc that had a two year glorious era. Like all the fanfare, we look like the shitty little company. They looked amazing. They'd run out of Runway, they died. And then we ended up owning the category. We created the category and owned the category.

Speaker C: So talked about how it was like the three of you basically non, uh, effective founder, his niece, or maybe at what point did you actually, did they ever. They turn around and say, hey, you're a CEO.

Speaker B: Did I get anointed?

Speaker C: Yeah. What happened there? Did you get anointed. Did you get, you know, did they say, hey, we can't lose you, give you more equity? Like, you know, it's just sort of like, it's one thing for you to be doing stuff, but eventually imagine like,

Speaker B: you gotta became the executive vice president. I think when I was like 24, like 2004 or something, and that kind of effectively made me the president of the company. Um, and that was a promotion that came out of basically Ted's recognition that, like, all right, you kind of seem to know what you're doing here, things are going well. And to Ted's credit, um, there wasn't universal support for this, but he believed in me and he was like, yeah, okay, you can be the executive vice president. Um, and then he, he went to China because he thought we were going to open up China. And unfortunately he had a stroke while he was in China. And he came back from China and was unable to. If you'd ever known somebody who's had a stroke, their communication gets really poor. But he could talk sales forecast and I could talk sales forecast, so he and I could communicate on that front. And I essentially just continued to run the company. And then a few years, in 2008, I think I became president. In 2009, I became CEO. But a good lesson for any of you here is like, those titles didn't matter at all. I led the company from 2004, 2003, 2004, ish, and really default by default prior to that. Um, so I did the job I wanted prior to giving the title. Um, and during that course of history, I didn't know why I did this, but when I had the opportunity, well, I would trade compensation for equity. So during the course of the growth of the company, I built up a personal equity prior to it even being worth anything.

Speaker C: So what? I'm just going to push a bit on this because titles don't mean anything. While people are ignoring you, all of a sudden, your shareholders are looking around. There's a real company here. There's someone that's now, let's say 27, 28. And they're like, well, like, you know, it's still in Canada. It's conservative. Then they would say, okay, now we have to get a real CEO here. Or like, how do you. How. Because the shareholders now have something to lose. So how'd you deal with that?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, they were kind of beholden to me a little bit. Like, I essentially operated the company and everyone, regardless of if they reported to me directly or reported to me out on a smoke, smoke break. Like, they, they like the hearts and minds of the company. We all work together. And the, um, you know, the board, if you will, was completely disconnected. The board did not meet for seven, eight years. And during this time, you know, we're probably 5 million in revenue, completely bootstrapped before the board got a first letter saying, hey, by the way, we need this signed. Can you respond? And they're like, what? We thought you guys were dead. And the board got reconstituted really quickly, and there was multiple, uh, managers hired that came in to supersede me and so on. And we just kind of kept doing what we were doing. And ultimately the board was like, all right, do your thing. Don't let us get in the way. They were a pain in my ass, though. A massive pain in my ass. And these were aging shareholders. And by aging, I mean, like 82 freaking years old and people who had money back in 1992. So I. Nobody had put any money in since 1992. I arrived at the company 1999. I didn't spend this money, but I owed the money. I had one dude who put in $250,000 in 1992, and he owned 25% of the company. He had to be, uh, he was in a bunch of legal problems, and so he wanted to share, sell his shares. I didn't want him to sell his shares. So I had this constant dance of being like, all right, I will issue you liquidity if you don't try to sell your shares f off. I once had the Russian mafia sitting in my office because he wanted to sell his shares back channel to somebody who would do it without the CEO authorization. It's a whole freaking mess. Um, but you know what, what, what supersedes all of that is generating revenue, making more money than you spend and issuing cash to people. So I issued, like, I don't know, 15 plus million dollars worth of cash to those shareholders before finally, uh, doing a private equity deal in 2015.

Speaker A: At which point do you start hiring people? Like, at which point does the, does the company really start to grow? Because, you know, it goes from being this essentially three, four of you, when does it actually be? Now you're needing actual dedicated teams to be, like, helping with the scaling of this, of this company.

Speaker B: I mean, early stage, it was like, well, we made more money than, than we spent and we need people, so we hired people when we needed them. And now it's kind of going back to the. I was fortunate not to know what I didn't Know, and so, you know, had I been smart people like you, I would have raised money and made a commitment to execute on certain numbers within the next few years, yada, yada. Um, but I didn't know that. So we just made more money, sold more software, hired more people, and we were a cash flow positive, profitable company. Essentially our entire growth trajectory up until 2015, um, and we bootstrapped. In my world, bootstrapped and we, the money was put in prior to my existence, but from 99 to 2015, not a 15 million went out of the company. Roughly those month numbers, nothing came into the company. So. But there was no point when I, there was a point. I had a realization that on the go to market side of things, there were certain leverage points. If I could scale those, I could assume a certain amount of growth. And my primary leverage growth were sales reps. And I knew for every sales rep I hired, I could roughly break even on them on year one, maybe take a slight loss, but come year two, I'd be making basically the numbers where I'd pay a salesperson roughly 80 grand. I'd make maybe 80 grand year one, but year two, I'd make 150, 200, year three, 250, 300, and so on and so on. That realization is like, okay, we're hiring two salespeople a month. We can afford to do that. And that's when we were able to sustain those scaling numbers.

Speaker C: Doing that. So in our previous conversation here, we talked about finding product market fit. So it seemed like you found product market fit relatively early.

Speaker B: No, no. Michael and I are complete opposite. So I don't think I ever found product market fit. I think we were fucking go to market beasts. Like, we were so good at go to market.

Speaker C: So. So you were forcing this on the customers.

Speaker B: Forcing it.

Speaker C: Tell me more.

Speaker B: Is a brute force sales process. And this like, if, if I wasn't calling people, they weren't calling me, that's for damn sure. And there was no, like, the things weren't selling off the shelves.

Speaker C: Like, so why do they buy?

Speaker B: Uh, you know why they bought? Because they had a problem. We had people that knew the problem, were likable and really, really cared about solving it, and they trusted that they had a partner to solve their problem with them. And so we were far from perfect. Um, we learned that, I mean, this is a SaaS enterprise platform and there's like 80 different modules from everything from lockout, tagout to um, incident reporting, so on and so forth. And we kind of learned that, hey, we're never going to design this software to be a solution for everything that everybody wants. So we invested very early on um, wysiwyg, ah, or what you would call no code platform. And so 2005 ish, we released essentially a no code platform before anybody had a no code platform. We never execute on. Really we should have become a no code platform company because that was our skill. Um, and so we would engage with customers and say we've got a phenomenal service engagement. We're going to work with you on what incident reporting process is. You're experts in that? We're experts in the software. We're going to configure our software to work for you. Um, and frankly we sold way ahead of our product, um, maturity cycle. But we, we deliver on every customer. We would never. You never sell anything you can't deliver. But it doesn't need to be on the shelf right now. Like you can sell ahead of, you know, your product roadmap.

Speaker C: Were you pre selling software or just you were doing software plus professional services?

Speaker B: Software plus professional services.

Speaker C: So, so quick question because I think professional services are underrated in today's market. Why do you think that is?

Speaker B: Well, uh, the unit economics of scaling professional services originally was kind of scary to investors. Um, but really if you're like a 30ish percent of your total revenue breakdown of services that'll be overlooked from an investment standpoint and get credit for that as a revenue multiple as if it was recurring. And so earlier days that was less so they would back that out um, on a valuation for the company. But professional services are gold. Like that's so good. You're going to. One thing that a term that if you're an early stage founder I'd want to put in your head is customer funded development. And um, for us basically our entire product roadmap was customers saying hey, we want xyz and us saying oh yeah, we're totally planning on doing XYZ but it's scheduled for three years from now. But if you'd like it to be in the next release, build, you know, pay us 50 grand or whatever. And so we essentially funded our entire development operation and services operation. But nothing was customization. It was all, you know, built into the standard platform. But that, that was like our investment was services revenue. Like instead of taking external investment, we made a lot of services revenue but we were always around 25, 30% um, of the revenue was the services. So it didn't contaminate our valuation. But back then, so my first Term sheet when we were 50 million in revenue. Um. Oh, sorry, we're 30 million in revenue. My first term sheet was three times revenue for 90 million. That was, uh, Derek Smith from OMERS G ME that he gave me that term sheet the morning he was going up to meet Toby at Shopify. I took the. I didn't take the deal. Toby did. And it worked out for him for the best. But that was three times revenue. So if you're looking at, like, I mean, right now, what. I don't know what it is. Five, six times. When we traded intellects, we sold it nine times. Those numbers were crazy. Um, anyway, so the services revenue didn't contaminate that. It was just. You guys are all living in a really frothy world of valuations today. So you win some and lose some VCs with my. My input. Sometimes I'll say good things, sometimes I'll say bad things. But.

Speaker C: Yeah. So first. My first reaction is, I think that deal with Toby worked well for Omers as well. Yeah. You know, um, so you're getting fun. Like, if different customers probably wanted you to fund different things in different development based on their needs, how'd you prioritize when to accept it? As was it. Anyone's willing to pay for it?

Speaker B: We'll.

Speaker C: We'll build it or. Cause imagine you still have constraints in how many human hours. So how do you choose which projects to take?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. It had to be accretive to the overall product, um, or it had to be a very big check. So, you know, SAST Power ended up being roughly isolated in what they did. I mean, a lot of it, we went into the core platform, but they really configured their sort of forms and so on, and so they kind of got alienated, but they spent about a million bucks. And so that was well worth it for the vast majority of it. It would go through a review cycle that we'd say, hey, is this accretive to the platform? Does this make sense? Okay, let's put it in there. And that review cycle was just me talking to the salesperson and being like, yeah, let's do it.

Speaker A: So, uh, we. I mean, we've. We've covered a lot to this point, but I want to start to, like, angle into, like, the exit and like, approaching on. On the exit. So, like, how does that decision come about? Like, what kind of conversations are happening? Like, why. Why was that kind of on the table? I mean, that's that, like, you're clearly profitable, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Oh, yeah.

Speaker B: We were. We were roughly 100 million in revenue. Um, we were growing. There were metrics I knew in the business that not everyone knew. Um, the, the, my, my uh, my metric that I knew that everyone didn't know, um, was that for the five years prior to us exiting the business, our new customer count per year was exactly flat. But we increased essentially price and penetration roughly 40% per year leading up to that. Um, but I could see the tea leaves that all right, this growth trajectory is not sustainable. I can't keep raising the prices 40 some percent per year. This market. And this is a great, you know, the discussion of VC versus private equity and what do you go with and what the. You can't grow faster than a category is going to allow you to. And there's only so many software or companies in the world that want to implement an environmental and safety management system this year. You know there's only so many. Um, and we talked to them all and we got, you know, we had a 47% win rate with them. And for me I could see that that was. We're probably at a peak of market multiples of growth opportunity of uh. There was a dynamic in the marketplace at that specific time of a lot of the big industrial conglomerates were really interested in an IoT strategy but they didn't have anything to put on top of the IoT. And then there's also personal decisions and the dynamics of, of, of the shareholders and at that. In 2015 I did a round with um, two private equity firms. We did $160 million round. It's you know, proper round. You've got proper investors, you've got proper board members and you know, you go from being an owner of the business to essentially renting the business. As soon as you do a deal like that, you know, you know they're not going to want to die on the cap table. You got a limited amount of time and you know we had um, you know we had, we. I knew that basically in that cycle we were going to sell or we needed another four to five year cycle again until we had the opportunity. And a variety of different dynamics made me feel like this was time. But it was a covert personal effort to do um, was only me and one other person in the company that knew that we were running this deal up until the last month of the deal. In the last month of the deal we involved about five or six more people. But it was ah, it was sort of a covert operation.

Speaker A: And what was uh, I guess transition like post, like post exit. Like what? Um. Because I know everyone has a different experience. We talked to someone yesterday that's, like, still actually very much involved in. In the company that acquired them. Yes, yes. Like five years later. Yeah. So, uh, so what.

Speaker C: Which.

Speaker A: Which is, like, never happens, obviously. So just transition for you. Like, you spent, like, two decades obviously, building this. Right. So what was. What was it like?

Speaker B: That. That is so. That's more of a thing in my, like, my. My Intellect's glory years was I exited in November 2019. Um, and so, you know, I try to. I deeply, um, I'm so privileged for that experience. I'm so proud of it. Um, but it's also behind me. And I, as much of anybody, feels like, okay, what have you done for me lately, buddy? Like, good for you. Um, the exit process. I mean, I could talk about this for hours. So it's hard for me to know where to start. But, um, I think all of us, probably the most important thing in life for us is purpose. But you never have to think about that because we all have a purpose by default. And it's survival. It's, how are we going to put food on the table? How are we going to pay our rent? How are we going to do all of those things? Once that goes away, you're left with a lot of existential thinking. You're left with, like, what the hell? I could totally just do nothing. I could do whatever. Um, and that's very unsatisfying after a bit. Um, you know, I like to say to my wife, um, I, uh, didn't work hard to make this money. We made this money because I work hard and I. And I. And just because there was an exit and, you know, there's a big number in the bank account, didn't stop the purpose driven, um, feeling I have. So I took a. I also got. So everyone's life was affected by Covid and, you know, smallest violent in the world because I had a lot of great things going for me and my life has been great. But I exited, uh, intellect in November 2019. I'd literally been in this company 20 years. If you met me in November 2019, I was so steeped in intellects like you would. I was inseparable from the brand, the concept, the company, everything. Intellects was me. I was intellects. My entire identity. I literally started the company when I was 21. Prior to that, you know, I wasn't successful in life. So this is like, you know, this is obviously a big thing to my identity. It's your identity, it's your extended mind I had 500 people that were an extension to me. Like, if I wanted to do X, I could deploy a team of 30 people to do X. And that was all gone. It was all gone. I sold. I sold literally everything. But the terms of a deal are super important. And one of those terms was, I'm out. Like, I'm done. I'm hard out. Um, I agreed to do a one year stay, but with no contractual obligation. I made it like six weeks. And I was like, fuck you guys. You cannot. This is not happening. And so I was out November 2019. I had, like, the best two and a half months. And then fucking Covid hit and I. I, uh, I spent a lot of time in the basement of that basement.

Speaker C: With your thoughts.

Speaker B: Basically my thoughts.

Speaker C: That's very healthy.

Speaker B: I walked 18,000 miles during COVID I didn't have shit to do. Most everyone was sitting on a zoom meeting, right? Like, you just. Your life was kind of the same. You just were doing it at home. You have to keep working, right? I had no work. I had no. No network. No one was get. We weren't getting together anymore. Like, I wasn't seeing people. I was literally cut off. I had. I invest in companies, so I had some of that contact, but I was completely out. I was literally sitting, twiddling my thumbs, and I was like, okay. And I can't go out and do stuff because it was freaking Covid. Um, so I did go out and do stuff. But anyway, so that was. That was a time of deep. That was my walkabout. I, uh, called my walkabout because I did a lot of walking and thinking.

Speaker C: Do you think that helped you separate more from intellects?

Speaker B: Because, like, yeah, it was a bit of a hard. It was a hard break because when Covid started breaking out, I obviously knew intellects. I was still the spiritual leader of intellects. I'd been the leader for the company for so long. And I was like, all right, you guys. We got bought by a company based out of Pittsburgh, um, and a mothership is based out of Seattle. And Covid broke out, and obviously their approach was, we're still going to work. Let's keep going. And I called them up, like, hey, everyone's going home in Toronto. I think it's time to shut it down. And they're like, oh, you don't work here anymore, dude. And I'm like, yeah, those are all my people, though. Let's send them home. It's Covid. And like, uh, well, yeah, well, thank you. We'll take it from here. And that was kind of like a. That was almost. That was my last conversation. And They've since hired three different CEOs, and I've never met any of them. It blows my mind to this day, the audacity that they spent, you know, 783 or $767 million Canadian on this company, and they never asked me, you know, where. Where the. Where the Tupperware is. You know, it was like. They just. They thought they. That one comment to me was like, yeah, you ran this company like a Silicon Valley episode. We'll take it from here. I'm like, all right, good luck with that. And at that time, we were 500 employees, um, and roughly 100 million revenue. I know the company's roughly 200 employees today. They've gone through, like, three different CEOs. And anyway, it breaks my heart, but then it's like, uh, you have to move on.

Speaker C: Second chapter. You buy it back in the Jeep, buy it back in a cheap.

Speaker B: I can't. I'm done.

Speaker C: Well, you can do the terms right now. Let's go.

Speaker B: We'll go.

Speaker C: No,

Speaker B: I could, but I think in life we have three different acts, and that was my second act, but now it's time for the third act.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that's a great transition. Uh, now. So Covid hits. You had a lot of time on your hands, a lot of thinking that you were doing. So beyond that and even what you're doing right now. So you give back a lot, obviously, to Canadian businesses and to the tech community overall. But can you share what you've been up to since, like, you've gotten back into it again? Your third. Your third act, if you will?

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, I feel like. I feel a, ah, deep privilege in, like, my station in life, and I've been in tech since ever. I'm kind of from. You know, I grew up around tech, and I've had a lot of success through tech. I don't think it's going well. Um, I don't really like the trajectory of what our industry has done to this world, and I don't really like the trajectory of the world overall, honestly. Like, um, the promise of tech has not been fulfilled. And so my. My purpose in life is really to right that ship, I guess you could say. Um, and I feel. I feel like it's like my purpose in life to do this now. So basically, it's a long story, but essentially, um, there's multiple different perspectives of looking at this company, but the company we're starting is a Company called center and it's uh, the ultimate. This is a mission based company. It's funny Michael talking about why he started his business and different. Michael's a mercenary. I love you Michael, but you would have happily started a spy company, whatever,

Speaker C: career, whatever, only fans.

Speaker B: You were asked, you were asked why did you start this company? And I want to raise my hand and be like he started this company because he's fucking unemployable. He would never work for another boss. And he had two options, become homeless or start a company. So he started a company and he was so vigorous around product market fit that he made it successful. But he started, he pivoted multiple times and so on. And that's a very virtuous way of building a company, create a lot of opportunity for a lot of people. Um, this is a different company, this is a mission based company and the point of this company is really to. I think social media has contaminated the world. I think none of us are getting truth. I think everyone will take care of their tribes. We just don't know who our tribe is. And I think humanity has lost a lot of the spirit and the soul and tech has uh, concentrated this in uh, a way that is, is really distorting the future of this world. So um, the mission of this company is really multiple fronts but um, one it's to counteract the effects of social media on the world. Um two, it's helped us if you know what the Nash equilibrium is. It's basically the idea that there's a optimal uh, solution or outcome for all of us if we all work together to find that. But if we all work in isolation we'll likely compete and come up with a less optimal outcome. And so combining that with uh, I have a bunch of sort of existential feelings about the subject but essentially the company is intended to help all of us find our purpose in life both collectively and individually by help us allocate our time, resources and priorities towards what's most optimal for ourselves but also the people around us. And as part of that help uh, share what's true. I believe time is our atomic unit in life and how we allocate our time is essentially our identity and the choices we make. And so rather than sharing our thoughts online, let's share and collaborate on how we allocate our time and resources and um, uh through that as well as a major solving the alignment problem with AI essentially the product is going to hold your digital essence of what your um, what your preferences and what you want to accomplish. In life is be your interface with all of your AI agents, um, and help you, uh, allocate your time to most maximize your own personal purpose, but also the purpose of the various stakeholders in your life, your family, your community, and ultimately society. Overall, um, it's hard to describe the platform. So if you think of a, a gaming platform is like a physics engine, this is a metaphysics engine. Um, and so it's to delineate and understand the metaphysical parts of your life, what we call the spheres of your life where social media is incomplete. Social media has completely changed the way we manage our social sphere. But our social sphere is only one aspect of our overall life. There's your health, your career, your prosperity, your family, your, Your uh, community, all of these things. Um, the idea of center is to provide you a way of centering yourself around your priorities in life and help you allocate your time accordingly and being an interface to AI to help you do that.

Speaker C: Cool. And I think we're going to get you refine that and pitch it again to the audience as you get further.

Speaker B: It's like if Zuckerberg was going to sit down, and I'm not comparing myself to Zuckerberg, this company anyway, but if he was going to tell you 15, uh, years ago that I'm going to build a platform that's going to impact global governments and cause, you know, the breakout of authority and governments, um, we'd be all, could we condense that into a better PowerPoint? And center is a bit of that. Um, so I'm hesitant to talk about it much because it's hard to talk about. Um, it's easier to see it, but it's actually pretty cool.

Speaker C: I'm looking forward to it. Um, have a lot more questions, but we're sort of out of time, so I want to open it to two questions so that, that hand seems very, uh, eager.

Speaker B: Oh, is that you, Joella? My girl.

Speaker A: Don't bug me.

Speaker B: Uh, okay.

Speaker A: You know that you know my go to market challenges.

Speaker B: Uh, I'm such a deadbeat investor. Sorry, I'm feeling talking to you on stage here.

Speaker C: I think it's fact your past presentations

Speaker B: is an amazing founder. She is behind her and everyone should meet M. Joella from Medicist. She's just, she's so great. And anyway, sorry, Joella, uh, you're ruining my question mark. Okay. What's up?

Speaker A: Okay. You know that I like the creative marketing, you know that. But you just talked very plainly to all of us that like you got in this company at 21, you upped the price like several times. But you didn't tell us all of the cool go to market things you did. So give me at least three. Three, please.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: Well, we were.

Speaker B: Thank you, Joella, by the way. Joella. And I love this about Joella, her go to market. And this has probably changed since last time I talked to her because I'm a jerk, but she faxes people and it works and I fucking love it. It's great. Um, so we were really early. I was a Google AdWords beta user and so early stages, like 2003 or something, we had a $50 a month budget for Google AdWords and I got eight leads and I was like, booyah, man, 50 bucks, eight leads. I could do more of this. And so we just kept plowing money into Google AdWords. Um, and we were really early on it and we perfected like that skill, whereas towards the end we were like, I don't know, three, four thousand leads a month, um, just through AdWords. So, um, there's different lever points during your go to market process and that was a key lever point for opening the floodgates. Um, so demand gen and it could be faxing and it could be Google AdWords. And I think the world's changed quite a bit today. Um, but then also for us, we were so uh, uh, into the sales process and all of the stages of the sales process to execute on that. So whether or not it's the demo or the proposal or so on, um, so we were a really good sales organization from hammering out demos to doing account based marketing to doing um, uh, just a whole lot of. We were very metrics based, very ops based. And that's by the way with Center. Our initial go to market strategy is to be a B2B Ops management platform where you're essentially understanding your company purpose, the metrics and sort of a plan, do check, act on it, on executing on that. Um, and so we were just really good at ops. Having a, having an ops meeting monthly, running scorecards and talking about the turds and fixing them. Yes, Joel. Oh, three, uh, no cookies. You know what, I'll say the third one is, I've yet to find another sales team or company that cared as passionately about making the company successful as our people did at Intellects. We really had, you know, we just really had it great. The, the, the um, the values and vibes of the company were very consistent around trying to help each other, help our customers and people. We just, our salespeople and our whole company worked harder than Everyone else was nicer than everyone else and just more likable than everyone else. And that goes a long way in go to market.

Speaker C: One last question. Okay, we'll get someone to run a mic to you.

Speaker A: Run the mic.

Speaker C: Run.

Speaker B: Uh, I have question in IoT, uh, area.

Speaker C: Ah.

Speaker B: Um, we developed IoT solution for Internet service providers and we have, uh, SaaS, software, AI and hardware. And we can sell just SaaS without hardware and we can sell SaaS with hardware. If we sell with hardware, it's much more revenue. But many investors don't like hardware. What your advice? Uh, we can sell without hardware. Sell with hardware. Our, uh, or without hardware. I think you answered your own question, didn't you? Like, who cares what the investors think? Do what makes the company successful. Uh, investors is like part of our successful because we need investment. You do. But like, I, uh, think it's far more important to build a sustainable, growing company that has the right metrics. Investors will contort themselves to like your business model if you're being successful. And if you're trying to contort yourself to make yourself sexy to investors, you're probably going to contort yourself out of a healthy business. So I would say execute on the business you feel like is going to be success successful. The investors will come. I mean, I'm not sure what your revenue level is and what your growth rate is, but, you know, if you were, basically, you can sum it all up as rule of 40. If you're close to a rule of 40, company investors are going to like you no matter what you're selling. Um, but if you can't be a rule of 40, then you need to, you need to think about that. And obviously the drag on the rule of 40 with hardware is going to be the overhead cost of all hardware and so on. Um, but I suspect that, you know, the way you ask the question is to suspect you're not worried about it, you're just worried about investors. And I would say let the investors contort themselves to invest in a successful company rather than vice versa. That would be my take. We should have a far longer conversation about that than that small sound bite, but that's my quick take. Thank you.

Speaker A: Uh, thank you so much for your, uh, enthusiasm and also just, uh, the great advice you gave the room full of founders. So can we get a huge round of applause, please for Mark? Thank you.

Speaker B: Uh, thank you. Uh, anybody, feel free to like, I, I've been involved with tech to marketing genius, by the way, guys. Um, uh, I've been involved with tech to for a long time. I was uh, a Pure Scale for a long time. I was actually chairman of Pure scale for like 10 years or something. I've always been, I'm, I invest. I've got like 18 or so angel investment companies that I work with. I'm really off the grid right now as we're working on this company so I feel bad for not but everyone feel free to reach out to me. I'm Markane.com um, I'm on social media but I try not to look at that anymore and uh, you know I always want to help particularly Toronto based but Canadian based and anyone based, um, founders. I think if you're taking this journey it's a great thing. So certainly feel free to reach out and I'll try to help where I can.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. I'll see announcements go to. Okay, uh.