Curious about how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics can take a business from good to great? We've got Teasha Cable, CEO and co-founder of C-Model, with us, offering an inside look at how these technologies can provide personalized growth recommendations to businesses. Born in New Orleans, Teasha walks us through her career trajectory from sales operations to revenue operations and finally to the creation of her brainchild, C-Model.
Did you know that C-Model can fuel growth for small businesses, content creators, tech founders, and organizations with revenues ranging from 10 to 100 million? Teasha breaks down how C-Model can be a game-changer for these sectors. We also venture into her dynamic family business as she reveals her unique partnership with her stepdaughter Jasmine, who is also her co-founder. The conversation gets more intriguing as we navigate through the tremendous influence of Singularity University on Teasha's career and her belief in the transformative potential of exponential technology.
As we round off, Teasha candidly shares her enriching experience with Techstars, Build in Tulsa, and the AWS Impact Accelerator. She emphasizes the immense value of community in the entrepreneurial journey, attributing much of her growth to these platforms. Drawing from her experiences, she throws light on how the core principles of AWS have become the bedrock of her startup, C-Model. If you're interested in leveraging technology for business, cultivating a thriving community, and learning from an entrepreneurial journey, this episode is for you.
Curious about how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics can take a business from good to great? We've got Teasha Cable, CEO and co-founder of C-Model, with us, offering an inside look at how these technologies can provide personalized growth recommendations to businesses. Born in New Orleans, Teasha walks us through her career trajectory from sales operations to revenue operations and finally to the creation of her brainchild, C-Model.
Did you know that C-Model can fuel growth for small businesses, content creators, tech founders, and organizations with revenues ranging from 10 to 100 million? Teasha breaks down how C-Model can be a game-changer for these sectors. We also venture into her dynamic family business as she reveals her unique partnership with her stepdaughter Jasmine, who is also her co-founder. The conversation gets more intriguing as we navigate through the tremendous influence of Singularity University on Teasha's career and her belief in the transformative potential of exponential technology.
As we round off, Teasha candidly shares her enriching experience with Techstars, Build in Tulsa, and the AWS Impact Accelerator. She emphasizes the immense value of community in the entrepreneurial journey, attributing much of her growth to these platforms. Drawing from her experiences, she throws light on how the core principles of AWS have become the bedrock of her startup, C-Model. If you're interested in leveraging technology for business, cultivating a thriving community, and learning from an entrepreneurial journey, this episode is for you.
What's good everyone. I'm Langston Clark, founder and organizer of Entrepreneurial Appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting black businesses. In this episode of Entrepreneurial Appetite, we feature a conversation with Tisha Cable, CEO and co-founder of C-Model. With advanced decision intelligence technology, C-Model gives businesses insights into where they've been, where they are now and where they're going next. Today we have Tisha Cable, CEO and co-founder of C-Model, And so, Tisha, thank you for joining me here today.
Speaker 1:I just want to tell you I didn't tell you this in the pre-recording part of the show that I found out about you because I think I'm on the Tulsa algorithm on LinkedIn. So me and my homeboy went to Tulsa in the end of March And so I was there for a writing retreat. I'm working on a book. He's a founder, He's got a black travel magazine. He started Shoutout to Lee Ray Adams, founder of the Buddy Pass travel brand. So he was interviewing a lady there who was investing in real estate but spends half the year in Africa, And so I followed Tulsa Build and Tulsa all that stuff, And I saw your picture come up and I was like yo, I want to start interviewing the people who have been in that Tulsa community of founders to learn about their experiences, And so I thank you for being here and joining me today to share your stories. If we could begin, just tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got to be the CEO and co-founder of C-Model.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think to really talk about who I am, talk about where I come from. So I was born, actually, in New Orleans. I was born and raised there. I lived there till I was in high school And then, when I was in high school, we moved to Oakland, california, and so I spent my time there. I actually grew up on a square block in New Orleans with all my family Moving and leaving.
Speaker 2:At the time that we did was actually like really it was fairly traumatic, but it was a lesson in how to be really self sustainable. How do I find the things that I like to do so that I can bring that anywhere? And it was in that that I discovered that I had a little bit of a creative edge, but I wasn't all the way creative. I like to create things but I like a lot of order. So I actually went back to New Orleans for my first couple of years of college and then came and I had a couple of children. So I have daughters, then my husband, i collectively have six children, five grandchildren. So that's the who I am and how I sort of developed Along my journey.
Speaker 2:I walked into an office one day and they came to me a computer and they were like, hey, we need to know what our pipeline is. And I said, okay, i think I can figure that out. And they said, hey, we also just bought this school called salesforcecom. So that was like my entry into sales operations. That was like my first sales operations job. What I loved is that it gave me the ability to be creative, to take what was naturally in me to be creative, but also take what was very orally about me and use it in a business sense. So after doing that, for God, i actually worked my way through the sales operations ladder that turned into revenue operations. Then I started thinking about some of the problems that we were solving And some of that was really how do you do things more accurately? How do I forecast more accurately? How do we decide more accurately? And that led me out to while operating as both a VP of business operations at one point, at singularity, i was a VP of business development and product strategy And then I was consulting in companies and going out and saying, could I repeat this, if the company has a different revenue model, will this work?
Speaker 2:If the company is in a different industry, will this work? And when I found that there were certain things like how a company is assessed, how to create a common language, how to determine which variables help to predict revenue. When I started to find those repeatable factors, then I decided that I would create C-Model and C-Model would be software and it would do it for folks. Finally, going through the process of creating the company, we discovered decision intelligence as a science. That was created by an academic her name is Dr Laurian Pratt, and we met with her and we go oh, this is really a really good baseline for everything we're talking about. It's like a perfect, perfect match. So let's take this very sort of scientific and academic structure of DI, which combines ML and AI and data, and let's use that as the baseline of the technology that we're building to solve very real, very complex problems for businesses who are trying to grow, and that leads us to where we are today.
Speaker 1:So two quick questions What is ML for people who don't know? And then say again what decision you said is a decision making intelligence or decision intelligence?
Speaker 2:What's the term again, Yeah, so AI, ai, intelligence, ml is machine learning.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, and so AI, artificial intelligence, ml, machine learning and then predictive analytics is really a way of doing analysis on data using automation and algorithms. So to simplify what Cora, our tool, does to make a super simple personalized recommendations around how to grow your business, what Cora actually does is she serves as like an AI powered growth expert, so she's powered by decision intelligence, but she's really a strategic guide of users. So she'll give personalized recommendations, so she tailors those recommendations to the specific business in their profile. Then she gives the data driven insights. So she looks at historical data, she looks at benchmarks, so she goes into her knowledge base and then she'll give like a really holistic view of potential outcomes and impacts on decisions that someone is making.
Speaker 2:And then she does. She has this deep knowledge base and expertise and growth strategy. So how do you retain your talent, how do you do cost out, how do you optimize your revenue? And this way she can offer real actionable recommendations and best practices. And then she'll give the causal chain analysis And this is going to sound more complicated than it is, but really it's the cause of an effect between the few are doing and the things that want to happen. What does that actually look like for decisions that I'm making, and she just puts that at the fingertips of our users.
Speaker 1:I just had to let you explain that because for me it's like I'm not a techie type person, so I appreciate your ability to break that down. I've done a few interviews already for this particular series, where we're highlighting black tech founders, and one of the previous interviews the woman I was interviewing. She was talking about the difference between being the technical founder and the business person, and so can you talk about who are you in this whole process of being the co-founder? Are you the technical person or are you the business person, and how do you all manage those roles and whatnot?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a really great, great, great question. So I am a hybrid, what I would say, because my background is in operations and I've been responsible for technology.
Speaker 2:I understand how to architect technology.
Speaker 2:I am not a coder, though, so since I don't write code, you can't say I can architect what it is, and then it has to be developed by someone else.
Speaker 2:So in our situation, i am the business leader and the architect, and then I collaborate with our CTO, who is responsible for managing and building the technology itself, along with the team that he manages, and then my co-founder, jasmine, is our product designer, and actually she's our designer in chief for pretty much anything that needs to be made beautiful, because that's a special, special skill that she has, which is then to take complex architecture and turn it into very useful experiences for our customers. So that's kind of how we break down on our team, but there is a thing about not being the person who writes code, because I always have to plan for the expense of not writing code. I also have to plan for the time, because it also means, like I've got to translate that architecture. I've got to translate everything that I'm thinking into, things that other people can develop for me, as opposed to me being able to go and develop it completely myself.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you broke down your hybrid in terms of your skills, but you're the business person. You told us what C-Model is. Give us some insights on who can use C-Model. So I told you about my homeboy, leroy. Leroy has the BuddyPass Travel Brands. It's a magazine and a podcast. Can someone with a small business like him, who's content creating, use it? Can someone who's a tech founder use it? Who gets to use C-Model?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the answer to that is yes, leroy can use C-Model, specifically Cora. who could?
Speaker 2:help him build decision models for all of his decisions. We primarily from a go-to-market standpoint. we target companies that are between 10 and 100 million in annual revenues because they're able to pay a willing to pay piece of this. There's also a data component. How much data? What's the quality of the data? How understanding the leadership team will be about these kinds of tools.
Speaker 2:And then also the last one I'll add is how hard, how much is the pain? Right, when we think about the complexity of determining how to grow a company, what path to growth to take. Is this a sustainable growth model I need to build or an exponential one? Are we going really fast or are we going to take our time? Those are things that startups face, that Startups, at a certain stage, start feeling the pain. So when you get to about the survival stage of your company, where now you might have a few paying customers, you might have some revenues, and you're really trying to decide to throw caution to the wind and grow by any means necessary, you know all investment in growth When you make that decision, that has risks associated, right, that has external factors to consider And at that point these decision models become very helpful.
Speaker 2:I think at the earliest stages of a company it might be a little less helpful. There are probably things to think about where decision models can help you, but if the data impact is probably going to be less less so, but she can still help you to determine do I raise capital or not, Do I hire people or not? Those are the kinds of decisions she can help you to model.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we had talked a little bit about you being a technical person and you mentioned your co-founder, jasmine. Now I was on LinkedIn, i was talking to you on LinkedIn, right. So I was like I kind of find your co-founder. Now your co-founder's last name is Cable. it's hyphenated with something else. I can't remember what it was, so I'm assuming you all are related somehow some way. So tell us about your co-founder. How did you find your co-founder? How did you all decide to be co-founders and work to build our seed model and what you're doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Jasmine is my stepdaughter, and the way that we started to work together, though, was I will go in and do these consulting arrangements and Jasmine will come in and do the business analytics as a part of those agreements. So we just started partnering years ago, working together, and we found that our styles were different, but we both added to every experience for customers. So we said how do we continue to expand that? So we've just been aligned on how to solve complex problems in companies from the very beginning, and when we started working together, we just proved that we could do it over and over again, faster and better, and so there was no doubt that, when C-Model started, it wasn't something that we would do together.
Speaker 1:Wow, if there was a piece of advice that you could give to someone who was building a startup with family, what would that be? And I want to add this point and this isn't to dismiss the businesses, the small businesses that black folks typically get into with family, like restaurants. It could be a barbershop, all of those things, but I'm talking about something that's The way I imagine C-Model is like. You all are trying to change the way people do business at scale, so this is a big, big scale business, changing type of business, and so, from that perspective, what is it like? What insights, what advice do you have for someone who's working with family or somebody who's really close to them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, i will say so. I have a lot of key learnings from this process. One is communication is everything, and that is communication in full transparency and honesty and separation. So work is work and family is family, and we're learning now and we're learning how to do this together. We're learning how to be a family and be a company that plans the scale.
Speaker 2:Doing this is very hard. Startups are difficult, technology startups are even harder And technology startups that are going to be big, billion-dollar companies are even harder. So there already is difficulty in what we're doing, but our commitment is to a shared purpose and a shared mission, and so those things are always on the forefront for us, and my key learnings in this is that when we effectively communicate with one another, it's smooth sailing, and this is really in all sort of leadership, of anything, but in the case where it's family members, it's even more. There's even more communication. If you communicate it, you communicate and double. The other thing is to constantly check in that we are still aligned on our mission and our purpose, and that is ultimately the one thing where Jasmine and I constantly go okay, this might have been a hard moment, but guess what?
Speaker 2:We are still aligned on our mission and our purpose, and so we're ready to keep going into the next phase of this. And then we just we celebrate as family members separately And we celebrate as co-founders separate from our family.
Speaker 1:That's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'll give you an example So we're here in Tulsa and together And but we were also. We just went home right for the weekend and we had an opportunity to be in California together And we had a family level celebration And that was fun And we were, and we didn't talk about C-Model at our family celebration. We could talk about our, what we're doing. You know, we have the success to update our family, but we don't talk about C-Model. We're not. We're not having business level conversations other than sharing our successes with our family. And then, secondarily, when we are working right, we're in work mode because they're very elegant things, right to manage in that, in the relationship. So we this is work, and so work is about our continuous feedback loop and being super supportive co-founders, which is different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was. That was really good insight. We talked about finding your co-founder, one of the things that me personally And I'm just the, i'm just the podcast in a community builder, but, man, i'm scared to build a team. I'm so scared to hire a virtual assistant I don't know what it is. I think I'm from being transparent. I'm scared to hire somebody to edit the podcast. I do all on my own. So what was it like for you to start building your team beyond your co-founder?
Speaker 2:Oh, so I have been so, so, so blessed. I have been so blessed, oh my. So our CTO is someone who I worked with for years And so him coming into the team was someone I had experience with working. I've got a chief of staff. She also does our go to market work. She also has been someone I worked with in the past, so that trust around who those people are has been important. I also run a very lean We have a lean machine, partly based on where we are as a company and secondary because I always believe that you can do more with us depending upon what the thing is.
Speaker 2:So right now, at this stage of our company, i try to just keep it as lean as possible. But the trust is very important with hires right, who are these people and what do we know they can do? And so that that's just a critical one. But you cannot have fear of hiring. You need people to help you. If you define what it is that you need done in specific enough terms and then effectively communicate around those things, then what you'll find is that people will do their very best anyway to live up to that set of requirements, and if there is a capacity issue and they can't, then as long as you're paying attention, you'll know that soon enough to make adjustments, and then you just make adjustments fast.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, make adjustments fast.
Speaker 2:But, I would not hold back on hiring because you could keep doing stuff and find yourself in the hole. Have to be able to effectively downgate. That is a skill of a leader is being able to Hey everyone.
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Speaker 2:Is being able to delegate to others. Knowing what and when to delegate is a part of that skill.
Speaker 1:It's probably better for me to start now. At some point when do bad at it? some might as well do bad at it now, learn from it and just get better in the process. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what is doing bad? Like, if you think of startups, as like this whole experiment, right, everything is experimental, like you're trying everything. Nothing is set in stone. You have assumptions, and assumptions can be proven to a false. But we haven't done any of these things before, so every single bit of it is you know, can turn into folly. But as long as there's learnings, as long as there is a way to think in retrospective about what it is that you've done, then you know there's no loss because you've learned something and you gained new insights. So I wouldn't be afraid if I'm with you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that. So I told you before that we used to be we're like a quasi podcast book club, okay, and so there was this book I was reading years ago. I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but the guy who wrote the book was talking about all of these things you need to do to be prepared for what's coming in the future, and one of the examples that he talked about was Singularity University. I was like what is this? I used to live in Austin, texas, so there's a Singularity Austin I always been kind of curious about. Like what happens in Singularity University to me is like the secret society of tech people who are trying to take over the world, peeking in the brain. And so can you talk about what Singularity University is and what being in a community, in a work environment like that, where people are very tech, transform the world, mind it, how that set you up to be, you know, one of the founders of C-Model.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, a matter of fact, i the impact of Singularity University on both my career and my outlook, which turned into C-Model, was humongous. So when I joined Singularity University, i didn't know about exponential technology at the level that I experienced while there. I didn't know that, you know, ai could just literally change the world. All of this stuff seemed like it was foreign, like it was all made up. But then really experiencing watching the companies that came from Singularity University, watching them help people, incubate ideas and turn them into real profitable companies that were doing great things around the world, actually solving either sustainable development goals or what they used to call global grand challenges So you have hunger and poverty. I mean, there's so many elements And then the other part was really having an opportunity to work with and see how we were helping to transform really the economic landscape, because they worked with, you know, large Fortune 100 companies to ensure that they weren't also disrupted by technological advancements, and so, as these companies will come through Singularity, i will go, wow, it's amazing how companies invest in understanding so that they can protect their future.
Speaker 2:And that is the thing that I have taken away. And C-Model is actually born of this idea that every company needs some sort of high performance growth engine, and Cora is exactly that Right. Why wouldn't they need that? in order to get ahead of how they make the most critical of their business decisions around growth, and because, if they don't have the future in mind, if they can't see the things that could potentially impact their success and consider that in their decisions, those are all the kinds of things that Singularity, I thought, brought and really layered into my thinking. Not to mention, we had so many elements of our business model that it made it really, really helpful for me to learn and understand how to help so many different companies, because I was in the space of so many different companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we talk about being in the space of different companies And I mentioned to you before that I visited Tulsa in March of 2023. You mentioned also that you're there right now And there's something about the culture in Tulsa when I got there that was a little bit different. Me and my homeboy were walking on the street because we had like two or three hours before we could get into our Airbnb Man and these black folks would just come up to start talking to us Like this. It was like it was almost like being a deep South pre-integration where everybody would just happy to see everybody. You just talk like these people just come talk to us. And so what is it like being in Tulsa in what I imagine is a community of people who are founders maybe a little different than the culture of Singularity University, but the overall culture of uplift that I experienced there for a week And I'm just writing a book, you know what I'm saying What has that experience been like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, often amazed at how cohesive the Tulsa community is. So I actually met folks from the Tulsa community at Black Tech Week last year And that was the beginning for me. That was the first phase And these are people that kept in touch with me, folks that took every call that I made. And then I ended up in Tulsa last year with Light Shift Boot Camp, with Light Shift Capital, and when I was here I again noticed the same thing. So not only is it being out on the street and having people say hello, but it was actually like being in places where I'm talking about my business and the same Black people and others are now highly interested and supportive and helping in any way that they can possibly help, finding the forums and community events that they often have available to people who are in Tulsa.
Speaker 2:I think when they talk about the sort of spirit of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, they're like standing by their words. And there are a few of the organizations like Build in Tulsa. I think about Ashley Sims and Desiree. I think about Trey with Techstars. I think about Brian Brackin and Candice Brackin of Light Shift and Charlton of Light Shift. These folks are really doing the real, true work, one building something really special, but then also taking what is a southern town that had a very traumatic past, by the way, and making it a welcoming place for tech startups. That's a. It's almost like a crazy thing, a crazy idea, but because of their sort of kindness and sort of access to resources, it seems to be working.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned Techstars, and so this is where we're getting stuff. I have no idea about it. Like I'm familiar with Tulsa, i visited. I had a great experience. I have no clue what Techstars is. What is Techstars and how has that been part of your journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I actually have a double whammy relationship with Techstars. I actually started first as a mentor in Techstars in the DC accelerator. So Techstars is a pre-seed investor. They invest in tech companies that are on the rise. They're very selective and they're, i think, in total in the world only about 3,000 or so companies that ever make it into the Techstars ecosystem, and so my first batch was to be a mentor, and I mentored the Alive Podcast Network introduction, and so Angel Leathis. So I did that, and then after I said, man, i want a, me, i would like to have that sort of support, and so, considering the relationships that I had started to build here in Tulsa and the fact that I wanted to participate in a tech accelerator that was going to offer mentorship, it was a good fit for me to apply. And then we were selected, and what Techstars does is they invest in their companies and then they accelerate you. So over the course of three months, our company is being accelerated, everything from go-to-market strategy and customer acquisition, which includes customer acquisition and fundraising.
Speaker 1:OK, so they basically set you up.
Speaker 2:That's pretty much what they do. They give you a chance. Our company was created to give opportunity, and I feel Techstars is very similar. It's all about giving you a chance. They can't go out and build your product for you, but they can ensure that you are thinking about it the right way. They can't go out and sell your products for you, but they can set you up in an ecosystem full of potential prospects and also give you resources to accelerate development in order for you to go. do that. They can't pitch for you, but they can put you in front of investors in order to help you to give you the opportunity to get that capital.
Speaker 2:So it's really to me the opportunity game with them.
Speaker 1:OK, so we talked about singularity, we talked about Tulsa, we talked about Techstars. I also saw on your profile this AWS Impact Accelerator. So what does that do, and how has it accelerated you as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what's great is we joined the AWS Impact Accelerator last year. It was one of our first outings as a company and it was great. We were able to advance our technology a bit. I met wonderful people. The AWS ecosystem is also very supportive, very helpful, and this particular accelerator was for Black founders and it was their first one And it was great validation because we were selected from over 1600 companies that had applied and there were only 25 of us selected People who are still considered to be my family and some of them are our customers, some of them we are their customers, and so that's another thing that also came out of that experience.
Speaker 2:But AWS is really committed to startups. The idea is to advance your technology quickly. They have so many solutions in the mix. I know that there are others with lots of solutions too. I can only talk about AWS because I was in their program and we've actually built using their framework, but then I would say the thing that I got the most out of AWS, the thing that was the most impressive to me, was they have these core principles that they operate on, and all along the way through the accelerator, they kept demonstrating to us how they use these core principles And I can't tell you how many times in my company we reference those principles.
Speaker 2:We always ask ourselves questions around one and two way doors. We constantly are asking ourselves like how far did we think about this? Have we documented it? Does everyone understand it? So there's a lot of different things that we got from a big company culture that we wouldn't have had to start building the foundational parts of our startup And because they take a more decentralized approach, it's really helpful to take these things that they're using, even though it's a big company in small groups, and then apply them to our small startups. So it was helpful in that way too, and we met fantastic people and they continue to support us.
Speaker 1:So it seems to me like one of the major takeaways from this interview is oftentimes you hear people say entrepreneurship is a lonely endeavor. It's a lonely job. You'll be up all night, it might be you alone or you and your co-founder, but it seems to me like you have found community to be able to give you a sense of support, and even family people you can lean on who are going through similar experiences. So just talk about the importance of finding that in your journey as a founder.
Speaker 2:Man. Here's what I'll tell you Community is everything. Community is everything, no matter what it is that you're doing. We're living in a fallacy if we think that we can achieve the things that we need to achieve by ourselves. And that's in general in life, let alone in a startup, where you're going from nothing an idea, a spec of information on a page into something that's going to be so big that leaders are going to be transformed into outcome focused visionaries. Right, there's no way for me to do that by myself. So the elements have been really important And those communities have purposes. They have and they have legs and arms that help you find other people to help you to do things.
Speaker 2:People in general need to understand and support one another in the things that we do without fear. Fear is often the one thing that gets in the way of how we build community and how we find ourselves showing up in those communities. But once you sort of drop all of that and you know that there's really nothing negative that people can do to you that you don't let happen, then you start to embrace community. You start to go oh, if I talk to such and such and tell them about my idea, maybe they can introduce me to five people who can help me to take the next step with that idea.
Speaker 2:And then maybe, once I've got this idea formulated, instead of being afraid to share that more broadly, maybe what I get instead is a community of people who will try something out that I build, and then those people eventually will turn into people who will pay me for it because they liked it so much. And then, once people are paying me, listening to their feedback, really hearing what they say, actually helps me to broaden that scope. So you see how community can do so many things, and then I can talk to these people about helping me to fund what it is that I'm doing?
Speaker 2:And I can talk to these people for emotional support when this stuff gets hard, because it does, and then, and then, and then, and then, and I can go on and on and on about all the ways that people need people, especially when you're trying to build something for people.
Speaker 1:Man, that was a cool, that was a mic drop right there. So my main job is I'm a university professor And where I work right now I'm the black professor that engages with black students, black male students in particular, but I would say black students in general, right, both male and female. Let's say a student comes in my office and they're like Dr Clark, i want to go work for this port and file. I'm going to go work for Google, okay. Or I want to go work for this startup What? Why should I tell this student to go work for a startup? Now, i have my own insights because my wife worked for a unicorn startup, and so I know the benefits of being there at the beginning of before you sell for a billion dollars or you go live on the stock market or whatever. But how would you have that conversation with a college student? You need to come work for me at C-Model or whatever other startup, because here are the benefits to doing so.
Speaker 2:So the number one benefit is the space to experiment and fall, the place to take chances to fail to leverage your creativity. Startups allow that. Startups actually allow exponential thinking in a way that's much harder in already orderly environments. My advice here, though, is going to be a little bit mixed, because I think there's some value to working in stringent environments when you're learning how to do specific things. So, coming out of college, for example, nothing wrong with going to learn to see how things are done, understand what the world looks like, before you come in and get into a startup environment where you're going to change. That. It really just depends on your perspective, right? Because there's also the why ever work in someone else's company when I can build for myself? I support that.
Speaker 2:That's a view of life that didn't necessarily exist for me. Growing Like, i didn't think that that was the way to go. I always thought like you've got to go get a job. That's the way it works. I just didn't know. Take your own ideas and bring those things to life, no matter what those things are. So I love that the opportunity exists to be that way, but I don't discredit what experience actually does, what knowing and understanding the problems that you want to solve does, and if your problems have anything to do with things that people are already doing in the world. Sometimes you need to get a little more information, learn about those things. Sometimes you got to go work in the mailroom, right, so you understand what's necessary in the mailroom, and then you work your way up Sometimes. Sometimes, like I said, it's just about you get out here, you try and you fail, and then you go and you go and you learn along the way. Really just depends on what you're solving.
Speaker 1:And, as I mentioned at the beginning, we are quasi book club. What books are you reading? Have you read or would you suggest that have provided you some inspiration in your journey as a founder, as someone working in tech, as someone trying to change the world through your business?
Speaker 2:OK, so full transparency here. I have not picked up five books over the past few weeks and have tried to get started and I'm finished, anything All right, because it's been so much of a crunch time. But I will talk about this one book that I read years and years and years ago, called On Becoming a Leader by Warren Benes. This is really a handbook. It's a handbook on leadership, and what I take away that, the thing that was most important to me out of that book, was that you need a handbook so you can't decide to lead anything without having sort of this, some structure to it. Right, there's got to be a plan on how you will handle things. And On Becoming a Leader was just a really great book for me.
Speaker 2:There's a few other books. Levers is one that's been super helpful as we think about the levers to grow, but everything else has been all pretty much articles and research based and not necessarily books. My mom has been begging me to pick up and read her book. She just released a book and she's been asking me to read it, but it's fiction. That's the other thing. I was like, oh it's fiction, mom. You know I want to be supportive, but I just haven't been able to dig in to read, you know, 20 chapters at once.
Speaker 1:What's your mom's book? Is it on Amazon?
Speaker 2:It is. Her name is Alice Wilson Freed, and so she's got three books. She's got a mystery set of mystery novels because a trilogy two of them may be there And then a book called Minnipaw, sister in Tennis. I don't know if you have any interest in that, but but yeah listen that that answer was good.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of times we go to New York Times bestsellers, Amazon bestsellers in business for books, things like that. But if you really dig into some research, you can get the information about how to run your business or what's happening in this industry before it trickles down to regular people and people have access to data but university databases at their public library. So I think that advice was right, on time and needed. Tisha, thank you again for taking the time to speak with me off a LinkedIn message. We don't know each other, but you. You bless me with this interview And I wish the best of luck to you. I don't know if you're going to need it because you're doing the things that you need to do to get things done, And I look forward to hearing about C model as you all go to scale, go to market and become a billion dollar business. So thank you again for taking the time to speak with us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Thank you for having me Go join the wait list. I will tell anyone else to join it to. the more people, the better.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining this edition of entrepreneurial appetite. If you like the episode, you can support the show by becoming one of our founding 55 patrons, which gives you access to our live discussions and bonus materials, Or you can subscribe to the show. give us five stars and leave a comment.