Embark on a journey with us as we peel back the layers of design meetings and holiday workflow intricacies, and yes, we're fashionably late due to those ever-extending product sessions. We zero in on the art of crafting a SaaS platform tailored for the unsung heroes of cleanliness, ensuring every swipe and click aligns perfectly with the user’s intuitive compass. Coupled with the challenge of mentoring teams akin to molding young minds in academia, we delve into the meticulous art of sculpting effective training programs and translating customer desires into tangible, impactful features.
As we navigate the labyrinth of entrepreneurship, Kwame Boler joins us, imparting nuggets of wisdom that resonate with the heartbeat of the BIPOC business community. This episode stitches together the tapestries of our personal entrepreneurial paths, from the alchemy of starting a repair business to the symphony of balancing life's intricate relationships. Reflections dance around our tales, mirroring company ethos with the solemnity of marital vows and recognizing the evolution of leadership roles as critical to the growth saga of any enterprise.
We wrap up our auditory expedition highlighting the vibrant entrepreneurial fabric of Austin, where ideas simmer and connections flourish. Kwame's experiences enrich the conversation, painting a portrait of communal triumphs and the resilience of forging pathways where few have tread. So tune in, as we promise an odyssey filled with lessons, laughter, and a smidgeon of entrepreneurial spirit to ignite your own ventures into the world of business and beyond.
Embark on a journey with us as we peel back the layers of design meetings and holiday workflow intricacies, and yes, we're fashionably late due to those ever-extending product sessions. We zero in on the art of crafting a SaaS platform tailored for the unsung heroes of cleanliness, ensuring every swipe and click aligns perfectly with the user’s intuitive compass. Coupled with the challenge of mentoring teams akin to molding young minds in academia, we delve into the meticulous art of sculpting effective training programs and translating customer desires into tangible, impactful features.
As we navigate the labyrinth of entrepreneurship, Kwame Boler joins us, imparting nuggets of wisdom that resonate with the heartbeat of the BIPOC business community. This episode stitches together the tapestries of our personal entrepreneurial paths, from the alchemy of starting a repair business to the symphony of balancing life's intricate relationships. Reflections dance around our tales, mirroring company ethos with the solemnity of marital vows and recognizing the evolution of leadership roles as critical to the growth saga of any enterprise.
We wrap up our auditory expedition highlighting the vibrant entrepreneurial fabric of Austin, where ideas simmer and connections flourish. Kwame's experiences enrich the conversation, painting a portrait of communal triumphs and the resilience of forging pathways where few have tread. So tune in, as we promise an odyssey filled with lessons, laughter, and a smidgeon of entrepreneurial spirit to ignite your own ventures into the world of business and beyond.
It's length. My sincere apologies for the tardiness. I had a design meeting that went way over.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so.
Speaker 1:I anticipated that I would be able to join at this time and the meeting went over an hour or over, because there are a lot of design yeah, that's what I'm trying to say Like a lot of different design integrations that are happening within our product as it stands and a large portion of people start shutting down for the holidays within the next, either by this Friday if not by the following Friday an anticipation for just those last two weeks. Virtually nothing gets done.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And a good portion of people end up driving for the work to be wake up. They ensure that the work that's being done is more independent, meaning like people want to ensure that we don't have to go into meetings, they can independently operate and that they have like one to two weeks of work to do with clarity so that way, when it comes into the new year, we can hit the ground running. So a lot's kind of happening all at the same time.
Speaker 2:So Kwame, what is a design meeting?
Speaker 1:First of all, let me answer your question. The first question that you asked me is what is the design meeting? In this instance, I'm actually referring to product design.
Speaker 1:By the ability to share screen. I would show you mockups. What's happening is that we're in the process of doing a major product revamp and so we've launched our alpha of our product earlier this year. We got a ton of really got solid feedback back from our customers after utilizing it, and the biggest one was that, guys, you need to make sure that you're improving the flow so that way the user friendliness is much higher and that we have a lot more versatility and robustness with how we can experience using the product. We had a very well-defined linear or waterfall flow, which is a fancy way of saying like you do this and that and that and that, but our customer was like maybe I want two to three ways of doing the exact same thing.
Speaker 1:Maybe I don't want to do all of those things to get to that point in the product Like that's a frustrating experience for me to kind of force me to go that A to B to C, to D to E, instead of going from A to D or A to F or A to C or B to C, like I would like to have the capability of doing more different things without being locked in the one type of way to do it.
Speaker 1:In addition to that the other feedback that we got back from the design is that they also wanted to get. I guess it kind of correlates back to the first point.
Speaker 1:They wanted to be able to get more value and not be forced or have their client forced into a position of adopting our product. More clarity the problem that we solve? The co-founder and the CEO of Spritz. It's a vertical SaaS platform for house cleaners. What that means is that we address a good portion of the back office challenges that come with managing a cleaning company, so that way, a cleaner can focus exclusively on execution.
Speaker 1:We increase product market fit by enabling our customer to focus exclusively on cleaning and letting our software handle everything else, and so the less decisions that they have to make when it comes to managing their business effectively the more they see value within our product because, quite frankly, the vast majority of house cleaners want to be in a meritocracy to where they can just get paid for the value of the work in which they perform, instead of necessarily against all the different components or nuances that go with managing a business overall. And so how does that relate back to your first question? We're now in the phase of doing a major product revamp, and so for the last few months we've been almost overly iterative on certain design components, and we had a major breakthrough earlier today. And going back to how that also happens within the holidays or actually, technically, it happened last week. But why this is also incurring a holiday rush is that, in anticipation of the holidays coming, we have more senior team members that operate independently, and so they have the ability to make their decisions without necessarily having me have to kind of oversee them. They do a lot more or they do a lot more, and so they require much less scrutinization and delegation and they have the ability to like, advocate or articulate why they went with that direction or change.
Speaker 1:But this was a pretty unique, because the change that was being suggested had a very significant downstream impact in multiple areas, and so we were trying to discuss ways in which we can either cauterize some of those changes or ensure that the degree or scope of what changes we need to do can make sense, with all relevant impacts, like how is this is going to impact the engineering team when it comes to actually introducing these mockup designs? Like how does front end think about this in terms of like, why, what is product and, specifically, product management think about this? Does this actually address some of the change requests that have come in from customers in the status quo? Or does it, like actually address some of the things we've identified that need to be addressed in future features? Like or is this a way in which we potentially may want to look at that map?
Speaker 1:It starts as we're already going down the rabbit hole of making this change here that we should potentially rope those other changes in Again. Going back to scope, or is this something to where, like, we can test it from an evaluatory period to see, like, if this is makes, if the juice is worth the squeeze? Like with that? We do, like a focus group, we have some of our customers that are either utilizing the product or have identified that they'd love to utilize the product once it's mature enough, review it in advance of engineering team even taking a crack at it to just give their feedback to make sure that the design is going in the right direction.
Speaker 1:With your second question, which was hey, you know, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm in this space to where it's very difficult for me to figure out how to best navigate the holidays, because it's frustrating or at the very least, it puts me in a position to where I can't turn off because I don't know how to, but I want to figure out ways in which I can not just for myself, but primarily for my team, who are now directly influenced by my inability to turn off or really figure out a pathway to where we can meaningfully delegate work absent of overseeing them.
Speaker 1:I think it just comes back to you defining what's most realistic and also understanding the level of trust that you have with your team, if at all. Like, if your team is primarily made up of contractors or people that are leveraging or working within gig-oriented spaces, it may be very difficult for them for you to be absent of oversight, because you're in a position to where, if you don't, then the quality of the work can suffer or there may be some real consequences that come to it, which is now the question you have to ask yourself. It's like, do I put myself or the business in a position to where failure to see them at this point of time or is realistic? And then, is the juice worth the squeeze for me to issue work during this point of time?
Speaker 1:If you're in a position to where you're dealing with regularly payrolled individuals, it's a completely different advice point. It's like your goal should be leveling them up or introducing decision-making matrices so that way they can make decisions independently of you, so that, like, ultimately you want to have the own links in GPT to where they don't have to talk to you. And again, I say that like as a joke, I don't think that'd be kind of killing an ant with a sledgehammer and introducing your own LLM to have your team members ask questions before asking you. But, like in all reality, I think a simple decision-making matrix of like that give them the ground rules of where they can and should make a decision can be really helpful.
Speaker 1:I learned that a large portion of people with the employee-based mindset or psychology have one deep-rooted fear which is being terminated, and so they have three options. It's either make a decision, do make no decision, or make the wrong decision, and often at times, out of fear of the latter, they choose the one in the middle. It's like I choose to stay and do nothing at all because I'm afraid of making the wrong decision, and I don't want to make any decision because I fear that the wrong decision in sequence can result in a negative consequence. So giving your team the tools that they need to operate independently is mutually beneficial.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, listen, I'm gonna tell you the blessing of you being late to the podcast, because, look, if you hadn't been late, you wouldn't have mentioned the design meeting going over, I wouldn't have asked these questions. And now I'm probably gonna ask you completely different questions because Because there's a rabbit hole that opened up, right, this alternate universe of questions to ask is really interesting to me. And so you talked about decision-making matrices, right, and so I have seen those before. I've had mentors expose me to them. I've not had anybody on my podcast. This is probably gonna be almost like my 100th show or something like that, so I'm at 90-some-odd shows, right.
Speaker 1:Oh nice Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been a journey and I haven't had anybody really break down. How do you mentor or build up your employees once you've gotten to a point where you have them? So, talk about your role as a CEO, but also as a teacher and I'm thinking about this because I'm a university professor. That's my main job, right? So I teach and I do research and I do service, and it seems like to me in your position that you're doing research because you're talking with your customer base, right, but then you're also teaching your employees how to make decisions in the mindset of spritz, right? So how do you do the teaching aspect? And then we'll get into the research after that.
Speaker 1:It's funny that you use the word teach. I guess training is a component of education and so, yes, I could see the parallel between the two when I think of how I'd answer that question. I think historically there have been instances with prior companies. We had SLAs, like service level agreements, as well as best practices, policies introduced that were like, at the very least, very, not just robust, very surface level, kind of all-encompassing, to kind of figure out like what you want done, and then over time they became extremely granular. A lot of instances most people identify what they want by getting what they don't. So you'll notice that there's a behavioral practice to where someone asks for something and then you have a team member that delivers you something that does not meet your expectation and then it forces you to reevaluate what you asked. Were you at fault? Or at least in the best cases it does If it doesn't, then that's another problem.
Speaker 1:But you should be evaluating what was it that you asked the person specifically? Are you susceptible or playing a portion into why this was not delivered correctly? What could be adjusted? What should be introduced, why, as a means of setting that expectation with the team member at least, for moving forward? So that way, this is not something that repeats itself and it's not, I guess, a repetitive issue, but and I think that's actually most training programs usually end up facing some degree of an attempt of wanting to cauterize something and sometimes at and like some, or often over time, in the essence of trying to do that, you sometimes end up trying to get someone to drink from the fire hydrant and especially when you're moving in a fast paced environment, what I mean by that is like they overindex on trying to correct certain issues, to reduce management, and that happens very frequently within small organizations as well.
Speaker 1:The biggest value that exists within a good portion of organizations is the speed of delivery, meaning, like if you want something to get done, how quickly can it be completed, so that way something else can be worked on.
Speaker 1:And the best education models or training models that exist optimize to ensure that that could be as most efficient, both to where the task can be completed very quickly and within a short window of time with also the least amount of resources exhausted.
Speaker 1:And I would at least acknowledge that most companies try their very best to optimize any training or education programs around those two variables, because they're just trying to reduce the amount that they spend or the amount of employees dedicated to completing the task and the speed in which the task is completed. And then they start optimizing it. It's not and again I think the analogy of the juice worth the squeeze is also what makes sense. You have to be capable of implementing something with respect to where you are both in your business and what resources you have available. And if it's one person with one other, if it's one person working with another person. It may not make sense to go so in depth of like, creating this unique training manual of like. Keep going back to this like anytime that you need help. But I think also part of it is just ensuring that the next person can be upskilled correctly.
Speaker 1:It's like the best businesses usually end up building when a pyramid hierarchy that enables the person that's in a position to be able to train the next person coming in, to then ensure that or get them to a point where they can go from beneath to equal or like lateral, to have a stronger foundation and then reduce the impact of what would happen if you had to terminate a person.
Speaker 1:But at the earliest stage it's really hard and so it's really chaotic. I think of always Robert Kiyosaki rich dad's, poor dad's to where he thinks of his cash flow quadrant. He talks about the small business and he uses the S as an analogy for slave, which also comes back to a good portion of small business owners, to where, at the very beginning, when they're understaffed, under resourced and don't have enough at their disposal to ensure that they can make kind of ends meet, they have to rationalize in the side where they will enable things to fall by the wayside. You're kind of like a firefighter that's fighting a forest, firewood and extinguisher. You're not always going to be able to put out the entire flame or save the forest, but you can at least ensure that you can save your pathway and, over time, try to get more people to work with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's talk about the research process. Sure, and I think, I think there's two ways to think about research in tech businesses. Every business almost now is like a tech business, right. There's like the actual tech product, right, that you do research on how do you fix it, how do you build it, how do you make it better. But then there's a research on making sure that you're giving the customer what they want. Can you talk about, as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, the research process for getting the customer what they want? It's really interesting.
Speaker 1:I think it varies depending on your type of user. What I mean by that is there's a lot of different variables that can impact your research process, but almost at the cusp of it all, it heavily involves, or should involve, you having a feedback loop with customers. I think one of the traps that a good portion of businesses get in is they believe that they may know the customer better than the customer knows themselves, which is true or can be, but often very rare. Usually what'll happen is if an entrepreneur kind of has that belief, they'll fall into a trap to where they're designing a product for themselves and not necessarily designing a product for their user. I've often seen instances to where, upon discovery, at least at the first attempt to where they're introducing a product, that they have a degree of bias that's held. I think of the Rumsfeld analogy also when it comes to this as well.
Speaker 1:So there are no knowns, there are known unknowns, there are unknown unknowns, things you don't know, that you don't know, and you usually don't necessarily discover that until you have the product that's available in market. But going back to the research component, you start by I would say, almost first doing a competitive analysis, seeing what's out there, seeing the way in which the problem may be solved in the status quo, see what products exist and how they're doing it, and then talking to people that are utilizing those products to then determine if the problem exists Is this really addressing their needs? What are? Then? The next step would be figuring out some form of competitive differentiation. If you are able to identify that a problem exists Like what? Can you do it cheaper? Can you do it better? Can you do it faster? Are you more convenient? That's your next phase of then trying to decipher and determine if there's a market opportunity that exists.
Speaker 1:And, I guess, going into the market opportunity, how many people find this valuable? Why? Who is the person that finds this the most valuable right now? Why? Who are the people that may find this more valuable? If you were able to introduce more features, like, who is the easiest person for you to solve this problem for and sometimes, interestingly enough, that could also be a loaded question because there's multiple dimensions when you think of, like, ease of a solution. For example, in my instance, two thirds of the industry within residential cleaning are house cleaners who clean by themselves, and so, from a technical standpoint, in a degree of modularity, it would make sense to build a product that has a workflow that's oriented primarily by one person, but the cleaner that cleans by themselves is also the least likely to adopt a technical solution. They're the ones that, when it comes to being able to sell to them, they're the hardest to sell, and so you could be in a position to where kind of adopting one customer may make adopting another customer harder or much more challenging.
Speaker 1:Like, just from that simple psychology of what I explained, you could be in a position to where it may make more sense for you from a sales perspective to solve a slightly harder problem first, or change the scope of what you consider to be your minimum viable product, because otherwise you may not have you may be introducing a different type of problem that you consider much more challenging down the line or more difficult to prove. In our case, we opted to actually work with the cleaner that cleaned by himself, because when weighing those two against each other, we recognized that the modularity component in mailing that user experience was pertinent are much more than trying to go for the more advanced workflows teams working more teams working in high variability and once we nail that user experience we'll go back. And the other component of research outside of competitive is sometimes just developing insights into your customer psychology as a whole. What's really cool is that generative AI has introduced ways for us to scrape information that's already exist. It's just often decentralized and we now have the ability to then centralize that information to take more insights.
Speaker 1:A good example would be one of the things we did was we worked with a generative AI company prior to the building of our product, before that was even a coin term and was able to identify the watering holes, meaning, like where our customer needs and where they discuss what they talk about. Altogether, to analyze and synthesize what their problems were. The meaning like to remove any form of bias from us, ensure that machines were the one that were scraping. How frequently they mentioned certain things, what their top problems were, what their pain points were, but with what? And also their psychological profile. Like meaning how do they think? Why do they think the way that they think to best define a sales strategy, to know how to best sell towards them.
Speaker 1:I think that's really important too, when it comes to, like I said, the sales strategy can ultimately define or dictate the parameters of the product, and especially if you're aiming towards leveraging a product-led growth strategy Versus actually having someone do physical sales or hammering phones.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, we learned a lot of technical things, right, based upon what you just the research. We learned about design meetings, teaching your employees, learning from your customers through research. Now I want to know a little bit more about your story, right, like, what's your? What's your autobiography right? Are you a? Because on your LinkedIn profile it says serial entrepreneur? You know, you hear people say like that. I was born as well. I could never work for anybody else, so are you? Are you a founder by birth or a founder by circumstance, right? Is it something that you feel like was in you from the beginning? Or you were on your journey and something happened and you were like man, I got to go make this happen. So what is it for you?
Speaker 1:I think that's a really interesting question, langston, for multiple reasons and I'll clarify and I'll explain Whether the entrepreneur is born versus the entrepreneur is made has been something that's often subject to the bait. But one thing that I've identified At the root of it is that a significant portion of people that go into the path of entrepreneurship Are those that want to leverage their resources, to invoke change. Like most people think that they're going into it because they are ambitious and want to build wealth opportunities, which is true, like there is a very significant like upside that comes with the success of these projects or these products. But often there's almost a very clear undertone of pain to where they experience something in their life that shaped them, that made them want to kind of invoke a certain level of change, or they just realized, like that they didn't want to necessarily play by the rules altogether. It's like you mentioned, you mentioned earlier that there is this behavior that are at least alluded to, where it's like these are the people that are treading the path that's least followed. They don't necessarily conventionally fit with their most systems. They want to break away from them, they want to be different, they want to do different. But I always, often think back as to the why it's like, what provokes a person to think that way and conditions them that way.
Speaker 1:In my case, with origin, I have their two entrepreneurial parents. One of them recognizes themselves as an entrepreneur my, the other not necessarily, but both of them invoke leadership positions. Both of them neither Never settled with just being complacent with where they were. Both of them were educated and and had access to means, but leverage their resources to get more Forms of income. Both of them were very hard workers and always try to figure out ways or saw value In measure and hard work. Both of them saw value in education as well, and I think that that was probably part of the impetus in the seed that was planted that Might made both myself as well as my brother entrepreneurial.
Speaker 1:I think also the term entrepreneurship it's a blanket term that most people don't necessarily necessarily think about, but all it is is like. In many ways, most entrepreneurs are alchemist, like they're the types of people that can take something and turning it, turn it to something else, like the idea of being able to turn a nickel into a quarter is Really the principled idea of entrepreneurship. You currently have something that is of less inherent value and you believe that you can turn it into something more and be able to make Like more from it as a result. And I think people then come like complicate that and they think of certain nuances that exists within entrepreneurship and often epitomize technical entrepreneurship Because of the vast amount of scale and often because of the press nods that tech entrepreneurs tend to receive.
Speaker 1:But, anyone can be an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:Like you decide to sell Girl Scout cookies, you're an entrepreneur is that you're taking something that was produced and it has a defined value or a cogs cost of goods sold and you're selling it at a higher premium and using that to generate income, like I Think we all have that ability.
Speaker 1:But I think a good portion of the entrepreneurship that you may be thinking about, or at least alluding to, comes as a position of risk, tolerance and privilege, like the vast majority of people that Can build and I mean when I mean build, I mean technical entrepreneurship or, specifically, entrepreneurship that Indicates a way of it to be a primary profession or a way to generate generational wealth requires you to have, often a higher cognitive, higher, be higher cognitively capable, being a position to where you have access or means the more resources or network in comparison to the average or common person, whether that be fiscally, like monetarily or Like, quite frankly, by connection, like in some instances, people are born into people that have a strong relationship with someone else that enables them to get access into more opportunity than someone else, and likewise there's different degrees of, I guess, preferences that exist both socially and against prejudice. Is that also impact the field of vision and success.
Speaker 1:But it's that degree of privilege of being in a position where you have access to means that enable you to take the atypical path that often like acts against the risk tolerance, because there is a degree of risk and off, and when people think of risk, they often they think of the consequences of their behavior was like can I afford to purchase A thousand boxes of Girl Scout cookies to then sell? And if so, if I'm incapable of selling them, what happens Like? It's very different if you're in a position to where I I'm hedging what would be my rent money to purchase these boxes that then sell them and putting me in a position of harm versus oh, I have tens of thousands of dollars liquid within my bank account. Let's try this out, let's see what we can learn. It's the difference of the scarcity and the surplus in terms of mentality. But I guess the finish and kind of talk around my origin story.
Speaker 1:The first time that I remember operating as an entrepreneur was I faced a problem that I Desperately want to solve and I needed to leverage my ingenuity and the resources I had at my disposal to address it. I broke my laptop when I was like 13 years old. It was 13 or 14 years old. I got my very first personal computer when I was in high school. Yeah, no, I was 15.
Speaker 1:I remember it was 14, 15, and I didn't know the value of the machine in which my dad had purchased me, but as a teenager that had access to the internet. Losing that access was highly impactful and smartphones weren't as prevalent as they are today, and so the only way that you would primarily leverage an internet-enabled device was through a personal computer. And after I broke it, my dad took me to the Apple store and they quoted me with a repair cost that exceeded the cost of purchasing a new computer, and I was really angry. I was very frustrated and I was challenged and I tried to coerce. My parents are divorced. My mother and my father just split those costs, but both of them were adamant and refused. They were like, no, we're not going to pay for this.
Speaker 1:So, then, when provoked and forced with a problem, I looked around and started thinking adamantly what can I do to get money?
Speaker 1:And even prior to that, maybe is there a way in which I can fix this myself?
Speaker 1:And eBay and PayPal were still pretty early and a lot of they were way too permissive.
Speaker 1:It was actually really easy as a 15-year-old to get access to create your own eBay account and your own PayPal account without any form of age validation at that time, and so as I discovered eBay, PayPal and YouTube, which is where a good portion of tutorials existed for making repairs, and along with other private forums, I realized that repairing my computer didn't seem that complex. I was like okay, I can buy this $20 set of tools and I can maybe spend a couple hundred dollars on parts, and in doing so, I can actually now repair my machine and I can be in a position to where I can have my computer back. I can even develop a further strategy and realize wait a minute. Some of these repairs are really hard because it's questionable I don't know if I damaged the motherboard and there isn't a way for me to fully test it, or at least I didn't identify. At that point, it may be easier for me to buy another computer that's used, that's broken with a very easy fix and then I could maybe fix it myself.
Speaker 1:I didn't try to take that back to my parents, and both of them still adamantly refused to pay for it.
Speaker 1:So, now that I had a strategy and I realized that my one blocker was money, I was like what can I do to start making money? That is within my element of risk. I went to an inner city school in New York, New Jersey. Most of the kids did not have access to like Costco or BJs or any of the wholesale distributors, because it just wasn't convenient to get to them. My mom lived in the suburbs and we drove by one every time that we went home. While I was there at school, I noticed kids would sell chocolate bars, typically for a cause to, where they had boxes of chocolates that they would sell and a dollar candy bar. I started noticing that the boxes usually had somewhere between like 30 pieces of candy each and I asked them how quickly were they selling the boxes? And I was thinking you know, probably they're going through like one a month.
Speaker 1:They're like no, we're going through like one to two and I'm like oh thinking a month there, like no, every week, and I'm like, and they're not really that actively trying to push chocolate, like they're not thinking about this strategically. And that evolved to like, while we were in Costco doing us like doing the grocery sale, I happen to walk by when my mom and noticed that they were selling the boxes for $15 each. So I'm like, wait a minute, I can buy these boxes for 15 bucks. They have 30 pieces of candy. I can sell them for 30 bucks. I can make $15 per box that's sold. If I'm selling one to two a week, then I'm making 15 to $30 every week, based off of the cost of repairs and less than two months time. I should have enough to be able to have access to a new computer. And that's where I had some allowance that I was paid, that I had saved up and it wasn't much. It's like you know you're thinking kid money it's like 40, 40, 50 bucks.
Speaker 1:And I bought chocolate. I bought, I bought boxes of chocolate and I started selling boxes of chocolate and I was going through two to three boxes a week. Like it got to a point where I got really good at it because I noticed I made sure that I had rules, like I thought about it. Like drugs, never get high off your own supply Right Like so I only bought candy that I didn't eat, just like just to ensure that I would never get it.
Speaker 1:I figured out what teachers' favorite preferences were and would almost always got into a circulatory program and figure out and anticipate sales. It got to a point to where I realized the man was never met. It was so high that people were asking me if I could sell them boxes and I got to a point to where I just didn't enjoy it. So I would sell the $15 boxes that I was getting to kids for 20 bucks. So I'm making $5 off of each box that I'm selling and I'm doing none of the work. And each of them actually at certain points had territories within the school that they were selling at Wait a minute.
Speaker 2:You were like listen, you were like the drug dealer in school, but you were selling candy.
Speaker 1:One of my friends made a joke about it, but there's actually, like I'm sure you've watched the Boondocks and you may have seen an episode called Chocolate Wars with Riley. Yeah, like, yeah, they're like they made a joke about this, but they point to this. Overall, that was my first step into entrepreneurship. I figured out how to move chocolate within my school and I was and like I also got in up, developing another hustle me. Learning how to fix computers early on was something I actually enjoyed and I saw as a much more valued puzzle and I would buy machines from other people that would break them, fix them and then sell them on eBay. And so I had like multiple streams of income as a kid to where I was doing cleaning my home regularly for allowance, selling chocolate and then also making repairs and selling computers also online as well, Like I never I had. I like I didn't have the necessary fiscal responsibility to to financially apply it well, but that was like my first step into entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1:That me taught me at an early age that it's often a function of problem solving. You're in a position that you consider painful in the status quo. You'd like to make an adjustment or change it. You're now trying to exercise what you have, or what you have at your disposal, to uniquely enable you to get access to more money or at least to the change that you desire, and you're just applying what you have and transforming it into something more. You're an alchemist. So that was my origin story with respect to, like entrepreneurship Because at least the story that I find most fun and it's often a moment that I think back to, but I think it's a lot more heavily weighted outside of that Like I started building companies really when I was in college, had no idea what we were doing, and I think the most graduated sense of success took place after I graduated school and started to build businesses that were generating much larger sums of money following those exact same principles.
Speaker 1:And that later evolved into deciding to go for the upper echelon of entrepreneurship, the most complex of the complex, which is venture backed entrepreneurship, which means that you solicit privately funded institutions, primarily venture capital and private equity, as it means to be able to get capital to scale a business past its natural limitations.
Speaker 1:Most businesses scale organically to where they're leveraging money that they have at the disposal to be able to grow or scale in organic can sometimes happens as well to where they can get like a loan from the bank or potentially investment coming in from multiple partners at an early stage to be able to then you know, get it off the ground, but primarily as a seed stage, not really as a significant seller.
Speaker 1:And venture capital based investment are often founded by founders that are looking to build businesses that they believe have the potential to change the world to positively or not positively, shouldn't use that word to disrupt the status quo because they believe that they're building something that has something that can cause a function of evolution and practice alchemy at the highest point, to where they can turn nickels into dollars.
Speaker 2:I want to go back to how I met you, and this was two, three months ago at the Texas summit and you just talked about venture capital and all of that. But I want to talk about being black and entrepreneur who's trying to scale or let's not even say talk about trying to scale just being an innovative black entrepreneur in a city where black folks aren't the majority, right and so how have you been able to find community and tap into being part of an ecosystem?
Speaker 2:Because you were in Seattle, then Austin, and in both cities, I believe, the black population is less than 10%. I'm sure of it.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:How are you like? You're a Newark. I'm from New Jersey too, by the way. You're a Newark, which is a black city.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You wind up in Seattle, you wind up in Austin. How do you do that in Austin? For those of you who don't know, who've never been there, who have maybe heard of it, austin is white people's Atlanta. So, like when I joke around talking to my friends, austin is white Atlanta Right. So the same way, like you think about 2000s, 90s, everybody's like I want to move to Atlanta, that's where it's pop Like, that's where it's happening, that's what Austin is. And so how do you find your place in your community there as a black entrepreneur in Austin, texas?
Speaker 1:I've been very fortunate in saying, and at least within the entrepreneur entrepreneurship ecosystem, it's fairly tight knit. And it's even more tight knit when you're looking at the BIPOC community or any community of color, because we stand out, we're very prevalent. There'll be like a sea of white faces and you can see, like, who else in that room is coming from or identifies ethnically in the same way that you do, and so in both cases and in both cities they're fairly vibrant black tech. Like entrepreneurs who have monthly gatherings Like I would almost plug like Lauren Washington, harold Hughes, like they are, like Lauren Washington runs a monthly happily hour to a significant portion of the black entrepreneurs or those that are building within the tech space come together and just socially meet, just the chill and plug and converse, and I think that there's always those community leaders and advocates that do so. Harold Hughes and Lauren also manage a Telegram group. Harold manages several Telegram groups that specifically try to focus on organizing and creating those safe spaces to where they can gather, find, get resources, help and support one another, which is really, really beneficial and quintessential. So shout outs to both of them. But I think it's also a certain level of intentionality you have to be in a position to where you're looking for that or wanting that and if it's absent, you have to be the change that you want to see. So meaning there have been instances to where I've previously helped organize environments, to where people where I wanted to see potential change and vote and saw a best practice.
Speaker 1:The other thing that's also very convenient is LinkedIn helps a lot, like in being able to have best identify, source or find people that could be a particular or notable interest as well. And when I talk about that level of intentionality in building that network, it's not just about the meet when you're seeing a person, you're meeting them at the event, it's the follow up, like what are you doing to passively maintain that relationship? I add people to our updates to where they can easily just see what I'm up to Make sure they're able to be connected or at least aware of things that are happening, connecting with them on LinkedIn so that way passively they can see for my feed what's happening or even other socials, depending on what you use. That could be really helpful.
Speaker 1:Also physically just meeting up one-on-one. It's like, hey, you seemed interesting. It's loud, it's noisy, it's busy where we are, let's grab coffee. Like let's use this as an opportunity with no intentions behind them or no ulterior motive to connect, like, let me learn more about you, let me learn more about, let me allow you to learn more about myself. And if there were ways we can help each other, great, if not no hard feelings, all cool.
Speaker 2:There's an interesting thing I've seen on your LinkedIn. The first thing on your LinkedIn is his husband. And so there's this. You talked about your parents. It's interesting that your parents kind of maybe planted the seed for your entrepreneurship by telling you no, right. And so, even though I think you said your parents were diverse, there was still a partnership that seemed like with how they were raising you right. It's always yes.
Speaker 1:My parents. I love both of them. I think both of them did the very best with the tools that they had at their disposal to ensure that my brother and I were both raised at the very best of our abilities, and I'm shouting at them I think that they're phenomenal parents, but I say that to also acknowledge that their communication between one another was not as it best could be but there are a few things that they were aligned on, and that was one of them.
Speaker 2:That was one of them, for sure. All right so, but then you have like you have your partner and your wife. You have your partner in business, you have your co-founder. Can you talk about how you balance those relationships? How are you serial entrepreneur, going to events, meeting with other entrepreneurs, being part of an ecosystem, a mainstream ecosystem, an awesome black ecosystem but you have your business partner. That's a very, in some ways, an intimate relationship, but a different type of intimacy than you have with your wife.
Speaker 1:So how do you do the?
Speaker 2:family stuff and the business stuff and manage both of those.
Speaker 1:Well, okay, there's three different questions within that one. First off, I wanna say I wanna take us back to the conversation point, to where I was talking about privilege. Like I am in a very privileged position, in part because of my wife. Like I could not be an entrepreneur if I did not have my wife. Like my wife, as my partner, is not only one of my biggest champions but she's one of our best investors, because she's helped foster an environment that enables me to be an entrepreneur. Like I left gainful employment in six figures to be in a position where I can be readily or dedicated and employed by myself, under the promise and pretense of being able to like, elevate or grow or scale.
Speaker 1:It is a very large exercise risk, but a very high reward. That's only realistic because of her, and so I'm very grateful and eternally thankful to her for having enabled me to be in this position, because without her it would not be possible Like that's first foremost, which is why I think in almost every instance I try to place an order of priority on my like where I publicize or talk about myself, that first, because I think that is my number one priority, which is the maintaining of our marriage.
Speaker 1:There's a couple of things that I've learned over time that I realize is really critical and important in order to ensure that that is, you know, at its best position and especially not taking advantage of or taking for granted.
Speaker 1:First and foremost is, you know, being in a position where it's okay to go to therapy the fact that I actually strongly recommend it, like a good portion of entrepreneurs that are performing at the top level, recognize that this is a marathon and not a sprint, and it's imperative that you develop the social frameworks and systems in play to ensure that things are being readily addressed. Then, going back to that Rumsfeld analogy, like you may not be self-aware of issues that exist unless you have someone that's operating as an intermediary, and if you don't have an environment to where you can safely dialogue about those issues at a point that's convenient, then you're potentially putting the entire relationship at risk, and so I think that's one of the effective tools that I recommend and advocate for. From personal experience, there's also other things that I do conditionally just understanding both my circadian rhythm and patterns.
Speaker 1:I try to make sure that my laptop is closed by eight o'clock, like I have to Because I need to make sure that I can dedicate some time back to my family.
Speaker 1:I have a standing alert on my computer that lets me know at five o'clock that like we're getting close, like, and I really want, like eight o'clock's, my hard time cut off, like an absolute hard time off, where seven is my goal and like at five I get that warning, to get another warning at six, to get the other warning at 6.30, to get the other warning at seven, to get the other warning at 7.30, and the final warning at eight, just to make sure that I'm alerting myself of how much time is taking place and trying to prioritize that, and I track how often I'm violating that and try to see if there are ways in which there can be consequences for that as well.
Speaker 1:Like just most recently, I broke that covenant on Friday to where I completely missed something that had a really significant like deadline that needed to get done and I was worrying then until 8.30 on Friday and I had to have that communication with my partner about the fact that, hey, you know, beautiful, unfortunately, this is what's happened and so I'm likely and I thought I was going to finish by eight, was I am likely to finish by eight, but I may not. I need to focus on this Is are you OK with this Like basically asking for permission instead of always asking for forgiveness, and she was in a position to where she was very accepting and we had the ability to negotiate within our relationship in terms of ways in which this could be like effectively addressed.
Speaker 1:And I think that that level of dialogue and that level of maturity is really important with any relationship in which you possess which now takes me to my co-founder is like it's the integrity of that relationship that is very similar to a marriage. It's like, to your point, there isn't the same degree of intimacy, but there's a lot of kinship, there's a lot of shared experience, there's a lot of and I think the core, foundational component of it has what any relationship is trust. You have to trust that this person is able to perform at the same expectation that you can, and that you can understand the risk and the rewards that these individuals are best exercising in making sure that everyone is on board and creating an environment to where that's best understood.
Speaker 1:Otherwise, then you have two people or three people that are on different pages, then it's only going to create a certain level of distrust, a higher, heightened degree of anxiety, other degrees of fear, and so it's important that you create the safe space to where people can communicate with one another and really set those foundations and understand. Like while we were venture funded, like right now, my co-founder is in Seattle and I am in Austin we fortunately have the ability of seeing each other, usually three times a year, just naturally, just based off of circumstances and events that happen.
Speaker 1:But with our prior business, while we were venture backed, we had quarterly retreats within our organization that were pertinent as big means to build that trust because it doesn't just extend to the co-founders, it also extends to the team.
Speaker 1:I think of a large portion of like the same way that you make the relationship of a co-founder between a marriage, I see the same as certain similarities of relationships that a person has as a parent with their child, as a employer with their employees.
Speaker 1:Like not in the sense to where it's the expectation for you to raise them, but more specifically that it's a certain degree of trust that's being reinforced and stability, with goals that are being oriented and are mutually defined and rules that are being set to where people can understand the nature of the relationship and how it's best engaged, and often at times, the differences in the level of power.
Speaker 1:Like I tell people this all the time it's like if you talk to most people within the C-suite and you really engage with them, they're all people, they all do the same things, they have the same worries, they have the same concerns and they just want to be treated as people.
Speaker 1:It's like they want the ability to be able to make mistakes and do their job to the best of their ability, as they do, just as much as you do. The only difference lies in the fact of this hard reality, which is that one person has a certain level of position, of power and authority than the other, and if you fail to recognize the significance of that within the relationship, it could be very similar to a parent that tries to befriend their child and operate as their friend first over their employer, or rather over their parent. And when you're trying to extend that level of correction, it seems as if it's a violation of the relationship, mainly because of the fact that you're like oh, now you're wanting to parent me, because now I'm in a position to where now you deem what I'm doing out of control. I don't really trust that you're going to really parent me.
Speaker 1:Oh like, and so you'll see instances to where it's a very similar behavior to where an employee or a team member may fall out of the expectation of what you want and you're now incapable of managing them Very, very similar. That was a bit of a tangent, but I did want to kind of take us back into the relationships and how we balance them. A good portion of them are just based on rules. Make sure that there are rules that are covenants that are set between integrity and trust. A vow that a person makes to their partner in their marriage is very similar to a mission statement that a company makes within its team and the founders make within one another.
Speaker 2:That's good. Basically, what I'm hearing you say is you might have had to fire somebody recently because I haven't. I haven't, I won't make you tell that story, no, I haven't had to fire people recently because things got overhand.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking, as you identified. I brought up at the beginning of this and I'm a serial entrepreneur and I've been in this, where I've been building, for now going on close to 15 years. I'm pulling from different experiences from different stages in my life. In the emotions that were tied to some of those moments, there were instances where we built cultures that were akin to family instead of cultures that were akin to performance. I'd say that the best organizations figure out to run them, similar to a sports team. We all want to win and we want the best players in the field and we want the highest performers and a meritocracy to exist to ensure that those that are doing good work have access to the resources they need to thrive for the benefit of the organization.
Speaker 1:But sometimes, when you think of people in a familial relationship, it's a double-edged sword. Yeah, their motivations within the organization may be pure and well-intentioned, but if they're incapable of graduating past a certain point, you're limited from being able to take them past where they are. That could be a very frustrating experience. Sometimes it could result in termination. Sometimes it could also result in you being in it. The same thing could also apply to you.
Speaker 1:Your inability to graduate, to have all passed where you are, to mean that you may not be the person that deserves to be in that QB position. You may not deserve to be the team captain. You have to also be in a position to where you're constantly elevating yourself, so that way that doesn't come into question because it's not about you. It's about what is the very best for the organization. That becomes really mature. You're aware of that when you can learn that sometimes poor decision-making can result in extreme consequences, not just for yourself, but for the organization as a whole.
Speaker 2:Last question is we have origins as a book club. Once a month we do live discussions with an author and an entrepreneur. At least that's the goal. I want to know if you can share with us maybe one or two books that you are currently reading or have read that have inspired or impacted your journey as an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:Currently what's in the queue is I'm reading the Founder. It goes over the story of the PayPal mafia in extreme detail. I actually prefer reading historical. I like reading books that have a historical context, that also write it in a narrative form, because, as an entrepreneur, it enables me to go into their decision-making and really kind of evaluate what we're doing, or even sanity check what we're doing by comparison and going, oh interesting. They thought that was a really good idea then, but then they realized a good analogy was you end up uncovering in the book. When PayPal first existed as a confinity, it existed as a way for people to exclusively send money to one another using palm pilots. Sounds really silly right now, but they later discovered the email as a way to be able to send money to one another as an afterthought. It wasn't even its primary use case. The person that came up with the concept needed to use it as a way to more robustly test email distribution between or ways to send payments and then realize that actually this is the smartest way to start. We should be able to send payments electronically and over email. That's something where you're reading it and you're going huh. They box themselves into this really super hyper niche environment and were misled, based off of what was really super popular at the time, which at that point was the palm pilot, and then later evolved their thinking and adjusted their model to then increasing the amount of reach that could be introduced. I thought that was really interesting and directly comparable feature to what we're discussing In terms of books that I've read that I think are much more beneficial and that I reference.
Speaker 1:Going back, peter Thiele's Zero to One is like the first book that anyone should read. Going into venture backed entrepreneurship. In fact, anytime that I'm starting a new company, I almost read that book again. I've now read it three times. Each time I'm learning something different that I may have missed because contextually I didn't have the reference points. That then understand the impact and go ah, got it. That makes a lot more sense. Eric Ries, the lean startup is also pretty good. It's usually a go the first one to combo that I recommend for anyone that's opting to go into venture backed entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2:All right Kwame I pronounced your last name, bola right.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's correct.
Speaker 2:All right, kwame Bola. Thank you for joining the entrepreneurial appetite. I appreciate you taking the time to share with us the nuggets and the wisdom, and I'm sure I'm going to see you somewhere at some like black entrepreneur event in Austin, because my wife and I try to make a trip down there at least once a month. So at some point I will see you in person again. And one more time, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Alex All right, thank you.