Building In E-Sports, Community And Partnerships

Nikhil Vimal is an AI Consultant, Startup/Product Advisor + Angel, and the Co-Owner of Team Meteor. He's been in the technology/startup space for over 8 years and has been focused on different projects + ventures in the world of open source, conversational ai, customer experience, and more. He is also a frequent speaker at different tech/startup-focused events around the United States, and has been featured on VentureBeat, LinkedIn, and Business Insider. He is also currently an Independent Innovation Consultant for the National Football League.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nikvimal

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilvimal/

Company Website: Chatmode.io

Personal Website: https://nikhilvimal.com/

Team Meteor: https://twitter.com/TeamMeteorGG

Timestamps:

00:51 - Co-owning an e-sports team

04:27 - How do you build an engaging community around e-sports?

06:32 - Leveraging experience gained in e-sports into other areas

09:04 - Building partnerships and being scrappy

11:36 - Operating in a space that’s still developing

13:58 - What’s most challenging about leveling up in e-sports?

16:44 - Do athletes in e-sports have to have personas outside of the sport in order to be marketable?

22:02 - Biggest lever yet to be unlocked in the e-sports space?

24:27 - Value of experimentation 

27:23 - Partnerships and experimentation

32:19 - How to implement experimentation and convert users?

36:25 - Building Chatmode.io

44:28 - Angel investing

46:47 - What is something that you wish more people knew more about?

Music by - https://twitter.com/AdiSoundsGood

Transcript

0:00

So giveaways are like, that's, that's like huge. That's been doing good for us. And we've been trying like some, some minor partnership giveaways, and, and just experimenting with those and how we do them and how often we do them. That's already been incredible. Like, we can track that for sure. Right? How many people enter, how many people join our, our community, but like, we've been. More true fans because of those, because they're joining our, they're joining our discourse, they're getting involved. They're, they're using the, they want those giveaways to give them something, but then they also fall in love with the team, right. They fall in love with the concept. They fall in love with the vision. What's up. What's up. Welcome to another week of the age of information, where we interview guests and then our guests give us answers. I'm excited to talk with our guests to kill the mall. Nickeel thanks. Absolutely happy weekend, everybody. I think a great place to start. This would be if you could speak about team meteorite. So I came across you, you're a co-owner of team meteorite, an e-sports team, so we, you know, how you came into it, what it's all about. Yeah, sure. Happy to start there. You know, it's not even an accident. I won't even call it my like full-time job. Right. This is very much sort of a advisory like board seat type type situation, but yeah, basically you know, so team meteor, I think like, I it's, it sounds like a team, but it really is like, I think franchise is the right way to put it right. Because you have multiple teams for different games and we have content creators. Like we have it's, it's a run of the mill, like e-sports or, but you know, the name of it is. Team meteor to represent that across the board. And so to clarify there, like that's, it's, it's quite a critical thing. Like we're, we're trying to build an empire as, as a hundred thieves, as, you know, TSM and all the other, other big folks out there. We're definitely still in sort of the mid, I call it like the mid tiers. Like we've had some really awesome teams and athletes play for us before that. 12 in the world type thing, like, you know, playing in really big leaks, but we're still working on it. We're still working on trying to get more into more games and finding our ways into more tournaments, especially with COVID ending right now, too. Like there's a lot of new opportunities coming up and innovative players. So yeah, but, but it gives some context there. I've actually known the CEO, like. For quite some time I'd say like, we actually, he comes from tech, he comes from a tech background, but he started seeing meteor out as a community. He actually just started as like a, it was at, at one point or another. It was one of the most like coveted rocket league communities. I think it's still, I think it's still kind of run it like that, but I don't think it's as big as it is. It used to be since other things that came out, but it was, it was pioneering in that time. And what happened was they sort of him and a couple other folks leverage that opportunity to say, Hey, there's this opera. There's this world of e-sports, right. There's ways to take a preexisting audience habit, you know, shield the hell out of it, steal the hell out of some teams and some athletes that you hire and bring on, right. And then you have this opportunity to and that it just one thing led to another and it became like a franchise cause other other games were explored and you know, one thing led to another and it became this. I don't, I don't know what to call it. Right. But it's, it's the leggings. It's the, it's the legs to an empire potentially. And it's something that we're really excited to keep working on. And, and yeah, just because of my connection to it you know, it started out with like basic advisement. I was there when the community started and I was helping them just look whatever. And I was like, Hey, like you could, you could find sponsors for this community. You could find other. And then you know, it's really sort of a grassroots story. Like then it just, one day they approached me and said, Hey, like we actually think we have so much, we're so respectable in the space that we have talent now that we can like turn into athletes that could play on our teams and they could be some of the top players in the world. And one thing led to another and I, you know, bought in a little bit and yeah, now I get to be a co-owner. Incredible people and you know, we're still expanding, still growing. It's still, you know, it's still the wild west for e-sports everyone, everyone runs different organization structures right there. Isn't like, there's an agile methodology to running a new sports team or behind the scenes. But, but it's exciting to keep learning it. It's exciting to talk. We talk to our competitors all the time, right? Like we played against cloud nine one time. I think that was a big moment for us, but I mean, it was, it was all in good spirit. Right? It's all, you know, like we learned from them, they learn from us in this situation you know, this very large team playing and I, and we won a couple of rounds against them. So it was just, it was, it's a humbling moment, but it also makes you realize a lot about how close you can actually be and how much you can learn from each. And yeah, I won't rant about it too long, but it was an incredible opportunity. I invest a lot of time into advising the executives. That's like my main thing. There is executive, you know, involvement or very much at the executive level, but I've also started helping out with like partnerships a lot more too lately. You know, just bringing in some of my network of people who are interested in jumping into the space and you know, hopefully not, hopefully we do have some announcements coming up. It's going to be a busy summer. Let me put it that way. And yeah, it's a fun experience, actually, quite a surprising origin story that you guys just started out as this grassroots community, but honestly, you guys coming from a tech background, that makes a lot of sense, you know, because a thousand truth, that's like a very old startup outage, a thousand true fans, right. You know, 10 million. No, you're not telling him about a thousand true fans are worth much more than, than, than fake. So how did you guys build that community? Did you, did you kind of employ some of the startup tactics? Oh, no. I wouldn't say that. Like, I'd say when I, when I was there at the start of the community, I would say the main priority was just. You know, like Reddit involvement, involvement in all the like online forums that were around rocket league. And just because of the relationship that it's still there, like, I mean, there's still a couple of people from that boundary came in the community, going out executives, the team meteor, and grew with the community and, and use their corporate backgrounds that their startup and tech backgrounds to, you know, make it work. But you know, at that time it was. They were just, you know, big enough hobby gamers that they knew exactly where to go to find people, right. And to enter, build clans and to build tribes. And so it's, it's interesting because probably maybe like, there's some, you know, if we're looking at people are starting communities today and all the, all the talk of greater economy and community economy, things like whatever those buzz words are right now, I'm sure there's a lot of that that was employed, but I actually like I'm impressed. I would even say that at the time I remember looking at it and there wasn't like really a structure yet. It was almost like a subconscious commute. Like it was so appealing and it was so needed in the space to have the central like hub for rocket league that they just like, it was, I mean, I guess we could compare it to first mover advantage in some way. That's not always the most successful way, but it worked for them. Like they were one of the biggest, you know, the scores and they just had the most like. Like professional players who were just involved because they happen to stumble upon this community. And that notoriety led to a network effect of like quality community members. Even if it wasn't the biggest later, it's not some of, you know, some people who are dedicated rocket league people that became like they were, they may have been playing for a professional team at the time, but they were coaching on the side in this committee. Which is insane to think about. Right. You know, take that how you will. I don't, I don't know if I can start, maybe there's ways to piece that together, but I'll say from what I was exposed to at the beginning of that, like there wasn't a lot of that employed and yeah, I didn't, I wasn't day-to-day at all or anything, but I was just sort of like giving them advice on how to turn that into more of a business. And the fact that turned into e-sports is I guess that's the coolest part. I agree that it is really cool. How has this experience given you any kind of knowledge or skills that you apply to start. Ooh. Yeah. It's taught me to be scrappy with partnerships because the way that, I mean, like, I I've been doing partnerships with startups for a while and I've always thought about you know, what it would mean to you know, talk to big players, right. And be a small player, talking to someone big and convincing them to work on projects and, and, and smaller opportunities first. But and I, and with startups and with tech, I feel like there's more formal, like formal structure with that. Like, I think they know what they're getting into, but with, with eSports, I'm learning about. The wild west of it through being a part of it. And that's also, you know, that like, then I compare that to what's going on in crypto, right. And NFTs and all those like very, very cutting edge. But I don't look at VR AR and I look at the way that people are doing partnerships there. Like what does the future of food, like all these, all these school companies that are doing you know, like lab grown meat and all that. Like they even, they like have a hard time securing partnerships without being scrappy. I can tell like, They have to find ways to be creative with that, that find ways to be, you know, to sell the cutting edge. Right. And you know, to, to share some context, like my day job is I run this, you know, boutique consultancy. I haven't bespoke consultancy, maybe the better word that, that focus on AI and automation, particularly in the Microsoft. And with that project too, like we we've been, you know, we're taking a different approach to being a Microsoft partner company. And it's funny because Steve mirrors inspired me to think about, you know, how do we, how do we sell the bleeding edge and how do we make it consistently exciting? Because, you know, I, not that, you know, Microsoft technology is boring per se, but the way that people think about dynamic music, Microsoft dynamics, or office 365 and getting consulting for that is, is that going to be the same as, you know, using. Automation and RPA to you know, to. Workplace tasks and deliver experiences to customers. Right? So, and it was just like, it literally goes hand in hand in my exposure to even, and then started stewards. I do a lot of advisory and stuff. I'm just learning about, you know, like there, there should be structure, there should be formality, but also when you need to be scrappy, like team meter, it keeps me on my feet. It keeps me like constantly hustling, constantly thinking about ways. Yeah. It's a reset from that, like classic, like, okay, we need to have all these documents drafted up. We need to have all these proposals, whatever. It's almost like, let's like, let's move fast. Otherwise, you know, there's another e-sports team waiting for our attention fast and break things. Yeah, it is. It is. And it's, but it's like it's not just like a different scale for sure. So yeah, I wanted to tie it into other things that I'm doing though, because it is, it does come around. It does like work. Right. I really want to know how you got Microsoft in the same room as you guys, like how, you know, you're saying you're scrappy with the partnerships. What does that mean? How do you create good partnerships with these big companies or big entities in the industry? Yeah. Yeah. So, so Microsoft partnership that's where, like my that's for the consulting side of things that I do that's a, that's like a different thing, like to become a partner in the Microsoft ecosystem is it's like, there's not a Facey barrier to entry. You just sort of sign up for their network. You know, pay a fee and things like that, but particularly back with the meter. So we don't, we don't have a partnership with Microsoft yet eventually. Well, but the other partnerships that we have right now with brands that are or that we're talking to, and I, I can't even like share everyone yet. Cause it does have to be formally announced, but we're talking to, you know, energy drink companies, we're talking to hardware providers, things like that. It's it's still, it's still hard. And the thing. One thing that I've learned is hype gets you like 60% of the way there, which isn't bad. Like just being an e-sports team was already exciting enough. Like just the fact that e-sports is so, like, it seems so lucrative and it seems so new and fresh and people are just excited by that alone. Like, I'll admit that does work in our favor, but it's also, it's also competency, right? Like we're coming into these meetings and I have to, like, I do have to pull out the tech card a lot and be like, Hey, like this isn't our first and everyone does all the executives say like this isn't our first rodeo. You know, doing partnership, maybe it is for e-sports, but you know, we know you, we know what it takes to, you know, move fast, break things to, you know, apply. And if there's methodology needed, we know it to apply. It does, it does all come around a little bit. It does all work together. And that, that earns the respect of these people. Right? Because then they realize like, oh shit, we're not just talking to some like newcomers who are, are figuring it out as they go along. We still are, I'll admit that much. And everyone kind of knows like, no one really knows. Well, they're doing, but, but we still have, like, we have a craft to it. Right. We, we know what we're doing. And when I work with the executives of team media directly, and when I help make decisions as a cone or like that, that is all employed right. That we know that they're. Do we know that there stakes and we know that we have to show that we know that like, otherwise, otherwise they're not getting these partnerships. Right. Brand skin trustee as a gamer owning an e-sports team sounds incredibly appealing to me. Is it as sexy as it seems or is it just a lot of like dirty work that doesn't really get talked about? No, I mean, it's, it's both right? Like I'm, I'm consistently excited by the work that I do, but there is, there's always the money. I mean, there's hard decisions, right? I mean e-sports teams have to operate under a different level of, I don't, I don't even know what to call it, but it's like there, like I said, there is no, there's no rule. There's no book like there, there's no guy that you can use to, you know, spin up any sports team and have very direct methodologies. You can look at all what the popular teams are doing, but they all are structured so differently. So that's, that's the part that's like, not as attractive for most part, because of the startups and with tech and a lot of these. There's so many, there's so many rules already written, right? You can get all these certifications, you can get all these different ways. There's different ways to be empowered, to learn things. E-sports, you've got them. You got to make up a little bit of it, right. Or you gotta find ways to take, you know, traditional business concepts and turned it into something special and sort of something that's that's appealing. So it is sexy. It is fun, but you know, like I said, it's for me as a coder for me, like that's right. As of right now, for me, that's. You know part of my, maybe not even like every single day, but it's, it's enough a part of my life. It's, you know, it's something that I'm, you know, consistently helping with and, you know, as, as it grows, maybe I'll get more involved and maybe it'll just vary based on the other projects that I'm working on it at any given moment. But it's, it's worth it. It's incredible. And yeah, I mean, I say it's not for everyone. Like anything. It is, it is a risk. You know, I'm happy to be like like I made an investment to, to get that co-owner ship steak, which isn't even bigger. Like this wasn't just like, whatever, an easy handover. It was years in the making. So, right. This reminds me of this reminds me of like chocolate with the warriors. And if you guys know the story behind you, so tell me. And like the, I think it was like the early 2010s or something he'd just gotten bought out by Facebook. So he'd made like$2 billion and he'd put his money to a whole bunch of risky stuff. And he's like, how do I hedge my investments? And so he got the investment with the warriors and he saw that actually as a hedge against his financial investments and those super interesting. And it sounds like you were like a up and coming child within the e-sports e-sports league. I, I did want to get back to one thing. You said you, you self described the your team as being mid tier. So as you guys sort of scale up and level up and get bigger partnerships and just getting better in general, what is sort of your biggest constraint factor? Is it getting better athletes? Is it getting into better? Tournament's what is stopping you guys from, or what, what is like the biggest challenge you see, getting to that? I like that. I like that question a lot. Talent churn is crazy in some, in some like sport or e-sports people, people are young right. In this, in this space, we, we got 18 year olds making a hundred thousand dollars a year with just playing games all the time. I was like, what? It does sound like Jack. Right? It does. Yeah. And I mean, but they, they get burned out, right? Like, I mean, you can young talent. They're still figuring things out. You know, they there's a lot of experience that they can gain in the field. But if they're not finding that passion right away, if they're jumping around a bunch of teams or they can't like some people just retire from e-sports completely right. At very young, like 18 to 20, they have like a, a couple of golden years, right. Where they, they get, they make some money, they get a lot of cool offers and opportunities and they're like, shit, I wanna go get a PhD at MIT or something. Right. Like they, they we've seen things like that happen. So it's interesting. Churn is, is very real. I mean, th the hardest part is scaling talent. I think. Having, you know, scaling that executive team. It's not rocket science, like we've, we've been doing a pretty good job of setting up people to manage partnerships, social media, you know, community management, audience, man, all the, all that kind of stuff has been pretty straightforward. And you don't need to have like a a hundred person team working on this by any means graphic designers. Like that's been, that's pretty straightforward. The harder part is the athletes. The tournament's, you know, they're not like they're actually pretty accessible. I mean, you have to be like, okay, I'm lying a little bit, like the big, the big, like global ones. Those have like insane. There's an insane gap to get into those, but the ones that are like, just. The ones that are leading up to it. Like those, those are actually pretty accessible. If you have the right talent and then your team has to grow with that talent and with that notoriety, with that cloud. And then that's how you get invited to like the big stuff. And then obviously how much you win. How much you're going through different leaks and stuff, but yeah, there's a lot of like, there's a lot of clout at play. I would say there's a lot. You have to, like, not only can you have the best athletes in top, but you have to be able to show that you're moving pretty fast. You have to be on the cutting edge, your investors, your partnerships have to be desirable. And then that's, that's how you become like, you know, the, the pro the pro e-sports stuff. But, but to be honest, that we have had. You know, we've been invited to some leaks just because of where we are right now and how quickly we've been moving. And, you know, even, even with some athletes during that, we've had, we still have teams that are good enough to sustain the team meteor brand as something that's like an up and comer and we have to constantly work for it. We have to constantly buy for it, but it's, it's not it's not too bad. And I think it's just, it does come down to the type of the, you know, the type of players you have and the way that they're producing content, building momentum. There's a lot of that, a lot of different things. And then, yeah, there's then once you get all those things in a row, then that's where you can start to like really, really clap. The climb to get to the very top is the, that's the hardest part. And that should, that's going to be a work in progress for a while. Yeah. Yeah. You know, on the topic of talent, I think when you look at like professional sports leagues, one of the really fascinating things is they get these great athletes, you know, the NBA or NFL, but then they make characters out of them. They make brands out of them. And that's in part because, you know, OBJ is just like a charismatic person or LeBron is a funny actor and whatnot. When you guys are sourcing talent for e-sports. Important of a factor is that person's personality or their character or their career. You know, e-sports, isn't, in my opinion, isn't even like mature enough to understand that that's actually vital, at least some level of personality or some level, like right now, it's not to say it like some of the best players in the world. Like they're the quietest people. Right. Which is fine. But I think that for the more mid tier and grassroots e-sports teams that are going to come up, or the ones that are just kind of coming from nothing, right. They, they have to value that they have to find the value of that. And I think there are, there are athletes that can bring best of both worlds. There also are. There's also like dedicated content creators, which we have to which are, which are, you know, carrying that load for us a little bit as well. But I think athletes that can represent that that's it's insanely powerful base plan is a great example. They, they have like professional players that are just really damn like they're really, really good. At like, you know, I would say I don't even put it as like three phrases giving a damn about how they're seen and it's, it's a benefit like that. That's building brand value. That's building reasons to do partnerships. If it's just a bunch of really quiet people and they're not, they're good players, but they're not really no. That's going to be a disadvantage in the long run and that but also I feel like for the athletes that becomes kind of un-fun after some point, right? Like it just, if, if you're not building that audience, then you're not getting those brand partnerships, but like we could, we could try to, but brands can pick and choose who they work with when they worked at like, you know, e-sports teams we've discovered that already. So it would just really suck to be like, everyone, all your peers on your team are getting like the school brand deals because they're actually making content and you just stuck in the dark because you don't even have a Twitch account. So, like, I think that it's, it's vital and we're working on and we're trialing different ways to do this and incentivize for it. But it's, it's going to be essential. It's not, it's not yet, but I think it will be because the space is going to get more saturated and you know, there's going to be, it's, it's decentralized sports, right? Like it's very different. And with that, there's more, you know, like things have to be done differently, but they can take a lot of inspiration from traditional sports as well. For sure. And e-sports is ever going to have like a crossover star, like Connor McGregor. Ooh, hard to say maybe where it's actually don't get that. You're saying you're asking about Connor McGregor would ever play, no, I'm saying if you have someone who brings so much personality and so much hype, that the people who are in who are the audience love it. And then that evangelizers to other people. And then this person becomes bigger than the sport. Oh, yeah. I would say, I would say I could see a professional athlete retiring and becoming an e-sports player. I can see that too. Maybe not McGregor McGregor was bald man, but I could see, like, I know that like there's a lot of them. There's obviously basketball players who love playing NBA two K. And there's also a lot of like NFL players that love play Madden. Like they, they like they've streamed it before. I feel like I've seen, you know, things like that, a lot of the rookies and stuff. So I know, I feel like I've heard inkling Stu like they've, they've been approached to be content creators or ambassadors for any sports. But they're like, they're playing for the Seahawks or something like that. So, but I'm saying like, like building up a star and then yeah. Yeah. That's different though. Yeah, for that one. Damn, that's really hard to say. It's it's I don't know. I don't know that. I feel like there's like the content creators could be bigger than the team. I don't know about the athletes. That's a tough one. But I think they're like, I think a hundred thieves that, that e-sports team is showing very much so like their, their conduct creators are larger than life. Like those people are like, people forget that a hundred thieves is even an e-sports team, like a franchise sometimes because some of the people that they've pumped out from their condemnation side are like the biggest, you know, YouTube is right now. Right. And, and are doing like the craziest shit. So in that regard, it's kind of, it. But it's not the athletes yet. I haven't really seen it from an athletes like ninja ninjas, not like an athlete. Right. I mean, he's really good at what he does. And you know, he's tried a little bit, but it's like at the end of the day that it's the content creation thing that makes them larger than Fortnite himself, not the actual like, skill that he has. So we'll we'll I guess Nate Schott who runs a hundred. Like he wasn't bigger than the game, but he was like the, he was like the spokesperson, I guess, for call of duty for some time. So it depends on like what you've see as crossover or as like bigger than the sport itself. But like, I think a lot of them get on the level, but they never really get like bigger, if that makes sense. Unless they, unless like, I think maybe Nate shock could do it now. He's kind of doing it though, because he retired from call of duty and he's, he's running this empire, but I don't know it's there. And I guess he was like, It's a long game, right? Like it's not all of these things are like 10, 12, 15 years in the making. So it's not like it's not one of those crossover things where we can make a star overnight. Like it's, it's all of these different things have to play and they have to build their own empires. And I'm sure it could happen, but we need more time. Let me put it that way. So w what do you think is the biggest lever that's yet to be unlocked in the e-sports space technology? Definitely. There's, there's a certain degree of their startups that are building. Very cool infrastructure products for making e-sports better for making you know, the possibilities of more people getting involved with these sports, like easier and, and, you know, kicking down barriers to entry. There's play BS. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but it's like a high school. So they literally run like the high school. I think, and then I think they're doing like high school to college bridge of e-sports. And they like, they, they self-fund all the high school leagues, so they have investments to do things like that. Or they collaborate with schools and, and find money to literally have, you know, professional teams in, at a bar, whatever varsity, right. Like e-sports and things like that. So but they they're using technology. Right. They're using cool techniques of decentralization and, and coaching platforms and things like that to make it easy. Those, you know, those high schoolers don't feel like they're on their own, right. They have access to a big network and technology is just, it's going to bring things together, crypto, I'm sure it will play a role in this, the way that people I've heard collectibles from e-sports teams, right? That's, that's a way to see funding, I suppose, NFD or something like that. Like, there's, there's a ton of ways that it's going to change the business model and there's a ton of ways that's going to change like the structure or the potential of you know, critical mass. Just the size of what, like e-sports already huge, but the ways that players can engage the where's, that the ways that a new athletes can engage things like that. I think technology will be at the forefront or even for the creators, like more distribution streams so that they can become bigger than tech talkers. Right? Like there's, there's all these, like all these options. I think technology will be behind it and it's not we're scratching the surface, but barely I will. I do like solid. Like I do believe that. I actually really vibe with that. I read a an interview with a, this professor at Harvard. He wrote a book about experimentation and he acts as a consultant for many companies. But what he said is that Booking.com has a culture of experimentation where they, they have this issue of called hippo highest paid, highest paid person's opinion, and that's not a way to make sensations. So instead they said, we are going to constantly constantly run tests, booking.com on tons of hundreds of tests per day. On their users through AB testing and not just informs like before they can even release a product. Part of the proposal is you have to find how are we going to run experiment on this? And I believe in Netflix also has a similar culture. So what are you, what are your feelings towards experimentation? Oh, I love him, man. I, I actually, I'm doing, I'm like I've done workshops and I will be doing more workshops on that. Coming up in the near future. Dedicated and passionate. Cause my background is like I started as a developer. I moved into product over the years and more operational and more like the fridge of business and engineer. And in that, like in that happy place of being, you know, in product and operations, I found a lot of ways to, you know, use like experiments we do in engineering to dictate how we can do sales right. Or vice versa. And it's, it's incredible, right? The way that you're designing the products way that you're selling them the way that you're building them, like experimentation is it's vital. And yes, I guess that is like something that I could bring from tech and startups into the sports world. And I mean, they definitely. I haven't seen as much of it happening, but it totally tat, and I can, I can totally work to the benefit. I think you're just early, right? Like there's just not enough people who are, are thinking that way, but in general, experimentation is vital. I think the future, I think startups, I mean, it has to be coordinated and asked to be smart. Like I, you know, I understand there's a lot of risk and you're playing with investors' money, but there's ways to there's even ways to make that like a central, like, like you were saying, right. With the, with the problem that booking.com was having, like, I feel like. I feel like when startups run into that problem, they can also, like there could be employee churn. There could be a lack of momentum within the company. There could be, you know, founders even can get, you know, lose motivation themselves cause they they're starting to run out of steam on ideas or just kind of, you know, running the same company every day and not really finding new things. So the mindset of experimentation, at least having that mindset, that to me. I do a little bit of angel investing. And I, I want to hear you say that. I want to hear somebody telling me that, Hey, you know, we know what's at stake. We know we're using other people's money, but we can use experimentation because X, Y, Z, and they give me a methodology. They give me reasoning. They give me, they give me a way to scope it. Right. That's essential to me that I think that is like, you know, the way that startups should think. And like I said, and maybe, maybe I'll even advise against it. I'll say, Hey, you guys might not be ready for the experimentation phase. But be in the mindset of it. Right. Think about, you know, think about the pro, make the pros and cons list, keep it. And once you're ready, pass product market fit, like, you know, put these things into action strategically and you will you'll see results. Like I, I really believe that. So all with good time, all with conscious, you know, debate and, and deliberation, but it's vital. And I think, you know being involved in startup worlds and just even for bigger tech companies, Like booking.com and all those companies at that level. It's it's key and yeah, I could talk about it all day. That could be a separate episode. I'm sure. But, but it's yeah, it's, it's super important. And I I encourage everybody to think about the, at least the mindset. Cause I know that, you know, we have to be realistic sometimes, but the mindset, you know, helps it just drive motivation helps drive founders. It keeps, it keeps it exciting. Right? You want to do what you're passionate about? Can we maybe, maybe like to illustrate this point, we could go through it a little thought experiment. So if there was something that you guys were thinking of going through, I don't know, like what's, what's some like potential feature that you guys might employ in your team or, oh, good question. I think the experimentation would come down to ways that we could. The mindset that we live when we do so it's with a brand partnerships in particular, I will say that's probably where the experimentation comes in because we get approached by brands say, Hey, you're not top tier though. We want to work with you, but we can't, we can't value you yet just yet in the way that you might want to be valued, because you mean to see you grow. We need to see bigger opportunities, bigger contemplators whatever. So what we've been doing and you know, where we'll see the success of it as a, as the rolls out is we've been trying to find ways to do, like, we've been trying to innovate on how we can distribute and how we can utilize our community and bridge that with our content creators and bridges out with our athletes and find ways to create, you know, like, I dunno if it's like viral loops, but just ways to. Build, you know, build loyalty to a brand based on like the different touch points that you can hit in a community in, in team meteor as like a franchise. Right? How are you tracking metrics? Yeah. So we're, I would say a lot of that. So giveaways are like, that's, that's like huge. That's been doing good for us. And we we've been trying like some, some minor partnership giveaways, and, and just experimenting with those and how we do them and how often we do them. That's already been incredible. Like, we can track that for sure. Right? How many people enter, how many people join our, our community, but like, we've been. More true fans because of those, because they're joining our, they're joining our discourse, they're getting involved. They're, they're using the, they want those giveaways to give them something, but then they also fall in love with the team, right. They fall in love with the concept. They fall in love with the vision. That's an experiment I would say. And that's like, that's it's happening right now. I can't say if it's going well or not yet. Okay. It, it is because our, our like true fan list is growing, but it's not, you know, it's not directly revenue. But now we have people who are saying, you know, how do I become like a premium member of this community? Right. How do I become a patron of like, or how do I enter more? Right. How can I, how can I sponsor. Something like we have, you know, like we have our main e-sports stuff. Right. But we also like sponsor micro competitions where people can do like prize pools and that's just community engagement. Right. That's like, we're just trying to build that up. And people actually want to put money behind that because they want to have a higher chance of, you know, winning and playing. Like, not that to say we encourage gambling per se, but we, we, you know, we're doing these like cool community events and these giveaways are driving that and that makes people more dedicated. To me as a concept. And then, you know, people are playing it and that leads to more audience leads for eyes wakes are Twitch more popular, so we can track subscribers. We can track views per stream. And then, you know, we can. How our social media is going. And then we can go back to mark brand partners and say, Hey, we built loops, right? We built ways that, you know, all of our, everyone who's involved in our network can know about your brand. And not only that, but they can evangelize it. And also they fall more in love with the team, which means they will see more of your product because they're more involved with the community and we'll put it out there if, you know, if we find a mutually beneficial partnership. So it's sort of. Yeah, it's a, there's, there's a lot of different ways to think about it, but we've been doing that a little bit and, and that all that comes from, like, let's just experiment with doing giveaways more often or with, with more strategic partners, not just in random, you know, organization that we find, like really make it, you know, picking and choosing, and then seeing them. How can we, how can we make it as enticing as possible to make people feel like they're a part of something and not just like, you know, not just entering another random giveaway. Right. So yeah. That's yeah. You know, I love, I actually really loved that idea of giveaways. I mean, Like, I think it was like 20 times or something. I used to listen to a lot of the radios. It relates to like the top 25 radio hits or whatever. And so whenever we drive, I would want to listen to like 90 and 94.9. If you're in the bay, you know, you know, what's up. But I was always curious, like, how does 94.9 know how much engagement they have? Or how did their advertisers know how many people are listening at any given time? Whatever this random radio channel. And I realized it's because of the giveaways and the, you know, they're giving away tickets to concerts. They're giving away tickets to like backstage meetups with Katy Perry, you know, shout out California girls. But I was like, this is, this is such an interesting way to figure out how engaged your users are. If they're willing to pick up the phone and call in and dial in and wait on some wait list to be the 94th person on on some lists and then eventually get to meet like soup dogs. That's pretty impressive. That's like pretty, pretty impressive. So I really like that idea. The other thing that I really wanted to touch on is like, you know, me and for us, we're sort of building our own startups he's a little further ahead than I am, but as I I'm really like sort of the design group, thinking out the idea, flushing it out. And the problem that I'm facing right now is one of experimentation it's to figure out what sort of landing page will convert the most number of users to subscribe to whatever it is that I'm selling. So if you had any advice, you know, somebody that's like, God, the idea done some sort of customer discovery, how do they implement extra mentation to get really, really narrowed down and convert users? Yeah. Great question. And I think that it's. There's a lot of methodologies you can follow. There's a lot of, you know, there's AB testing. There's like all these different principle, like there's too many to name. Right. So I'm just going to I'll, I'll jump to how they're utilized though. So once you find a way, so once you find the way that you want to track, that's like the most important thing. Once you find that, I think it becomes understanding, you know what? You look at the timeline, you look at your roadmap, right? You look at your engineering powers, look at the resources that you have as a company and you figure out, you know, how can you. How can we add something to like, you know, let's say there's, there's a feature that hasn't been as flushed out as you would. But there's other features that are being worked on, right? Like where, where could we shift priorities without like shifting the whole company or having to steer the whole ship around. Right. And experimentation comes from like picking those battles, I think, and understanding, you know, like obviously the metrics, obviously the way to track it, but also understanding like the people behind her. Right? Like how can we, how can we incentivize our engineers to feel like they're building something that could really like, that that's one thing, right. Or how can we empower them? All our sales, marketing, and engineering team to understand that, Hey, we got this feature. It can be better, but we're kind of stuck right now, right on it because we haven't got enough customer discovery. We've done all these interviews, but we're still not sure how it's converting. We need landing pages. Other things that could help us out. And you craft that vision based on, you know, what what's available for startups realistic. You have to be realistic about how you do it. Bigger companies can kind of do it whenever you want, but if you don't have to look at the, you have to look at the grand vision and you have to find the gaps wherever you can, and you don't have to see, you don't have to, you have to make that decision, like, all right, we have some space in the sprint. We have some space in there. In this quarter, right. Just straight up, like how can we do it in, how can we get our team prepared? And then, you know, how can we also go to our team, right? How can we, you know, maybe it starts with the founding team and then you can even go to the actual, like people who are, you know, more on the ground and doing field work. And, you know, you have, you have these discussions internally, right? And you take, you say that, Hey, these customer interviews are not going like, or we want to do more than just that. And we think it's worth this and, and, you know, As a founder, it's a few to make that business case, it's up for you to inspire because I've also seen experimentation go terribly wrong, where that's, where everything becomes an experiment. And suddenly everyone is burnt out, man, everybody's going to get burned. I've I've seen it so many times and it's. I've even seen it. I don't even know if there's a name for it, but it's like the desperate pivot. When you, when you really overanalyze your product market fit or your failure to hit it, that you'd literally just want to try every idea in the book. That's how you lose a whole team then unfortunately like it, it has to be picking battles. It has to be strategic and you have to inspire it. Right. You have to be able to, at least in startups, you have to be able to say, You know, as a leader, I know this experiment is right. I know when it's going to happen, I know how we can prepare for it. And I know that it's, I know that everyone's going to be taking a risk by putting time into it. And, and you know, it, it might not turn up to be exactly what we want, but this is how we can take it. And then that's another thing, right. It's just understanding like, all right. Even if it doesn't get us the exact results that we want, even if it's not showing exactly what we. How can this experiment give us a takeaway that we can still leverage, right? How can we have a plan B like it's giving, it's giving it a lot, especially to get out. That's what it is. It's giving it, meaning it's flushing it out. And it's being able to inspire like core parts of your team, which is a startup that's everybody. Right. You know, it's inspiring them to, to go along for the ride and understand where it fits in your roadmap and why. Why it's happening when it is. And that's even, that could be even selling your co-founders right. That can be just selling your, your first employees, that people at the top equity. Right. You know, investors that these experiments are, are necessary to success. So they have to have methodology that have to be well thought out. And that has to, you know, that's a fall, the tracking, right? Like first you just have to understand, you know, how you're going to convert it and how you're going to know what's going to happen, but you also got to know why it's going to happen. And, and, you know, to what extent in, in, you know, the growth stage. The pivot stage wherever you are. So, yeah, that's that I'd say around like long, long advice for, it's almost, that's like a cycle. What I'm drawing for you is basically right? No, I think that's a, that's incredibly helpful. I also froze if you didn't have anything else on this, I wanted to touch on chat bot this, this company that you, I guess you were once an operations person on and now you're advising. And why are you guys? So how would you describe that? Like what stage are you guys at right now with that? Yeah. It's my nine to five. I don't know if I want to call it, like, like I just do a lot of things. So that, that is like, that is what gets the majority of my time. And I'm still doing operations and sort of retro involves. So T meters like that, it's more of a, that's more of a part-time thing. Cause that's where I'm a board member. That's where I'm more of like a, I come in for the big decisions, but I'm not on the day to day. But you know what I'm doing? Yeah, that, that whole sphere. So I've been doing startups for a little bit as fun as it is, you know, you find a point where you just kind of want to do bigger things or you want to, you want to take, take a step back and find I've had, you know, a failed startup before. I did startup consulting for awhile, which is it's really fun, but it is a lot of risk and it's a lot of, you know, other things. So I wanted to give enterprise a shot. I wanted to give enterprise, I'd call it enterprise grade innovation, right? Great. R and B, I like, I like getting paid for that. Right. I got this. I think it's super cool. You know, to help people, you know, help older companies take legacy technology and make it new, right. Using modern methodology, using agile principles using, you know, what, what all these companies in this case, Microsoft is giving in terms of open source and, and ways that you can really access information. And here's there, you bleed literally bleeding edge technology, but you know, you know that it's safe because it's Microsoft, it's not a startup, that's go under tomorrow. So yeah, th that came from an itch that you know, I've known my co-founder for a little bit. Now, Chad ODA he's I've known him in the space because of my, like, when I was doing more of the product stuff. Like I, I did, I did run a head of product at a startup, a couple of startups. I was also interim had a product go to some startups doing like more of the advising side. And a lot of it ended up in the chat bot and conversational AI space because my first startup was in that space. I've also done stuff in consumer and more like general B2B. But yeah, to like put it simply like we are where we're an AI strategic consulting firm. We do like delivery implementations as well, but we're really focused on bringing new perspectives to the space. Right. And new ways to empower, you know, AI driven leaders with, with modern methodologies, right? Like things that we talk about in tech and startups that, you know, companies that are unfortunate 500. They don't know how to do that. That's it right there. They need people who can help them understand this is how we can push this technology faster. This is how we can make our returns. You know, I'm, I'm one of those people who helps to help craft that vision. And that's what I do a chat mode and it's incredible. And it's also given me a lot of opportunities to even advise like, you know, people who are, are more senior, who might be. You know, they, they might even want to be starting their own startup or they even want to be starting their own. Like they want to start angel investing and I've been able to actually help people, like, make those, some of those decisions, right? Like, oh shit. Like I have all this money to play with. And I, I only invest in stocks, but I could also invest in startups. And, and this is how I can make that decision to invest in AI or, or, you know, cutting edge of automation and the future of workplace, future work type stuff. Yeah, so that that's, you know, hopefully that clarifies a little bit more on what. So tell me if I'm if I'm wrong here, but it seems like a theme for you has been taking these lessons that you've learned from being a guy in tech and being in startups and applying them to areas where they haven't thought like this before, you know, move fast and break things on these boards experimentation, and then go to big companies and take this take this kind of startup, lean, iterate, quickly methodology to them as well. So if first of all, do you agree with that? And second of all, how do you convince them to buy it? That's crazy. I mean, you like, I've never even, like, I didn't think of that until just now, like this whole conversation has been able to paint that picture. And yeah, I think it's totally right. Like, that is what it is. And I love I'm that passionate about doing it and I'm not gonna lie. I think, I think passion is a little bit of a selling point. Like they want it's back to hype, right? Like hype does help sell a little bit. Like everyone wants, you know, their, their workplace to be better. Everyone wants to customers to buy into more, you know, longer term opportunities, feta them more like everyone wants that. And I think there's. To an extent, you have to be able to show like, Hey, you know, we got Delta over here, which has automated their entire check-in process. Right? If other airlines are not jumping on this and they're not using scalable technology, they're going to fail. They're going to go under right. Or they're going to get bought out in a, in a bad deal. Like that's fortune 500 things, more like that, right. Like startups. And that world is one thing. But the other world is like, you know, their, their competition. Like the espionage has got to be crazy. Like, I can't say I'm privy to any of it, but like the amount of, you know, some companies are so far behind, but, and all they're trying to do is compensate with marketing, which is not even like, that's not a great strategy anymore. And they're starting to realize that because they're bleeding like that and COVID exposed a lot of that, unfortunately for the better or for the worst. Like it's sad to see, but some companies just, you know, over indexed on the wrong things. And so when, when price is actually happens, when economies flux, like. They're not ready. And that's, that's like a new motivator now. Right? It's like, if they, if they can't turn the ship fast, everyone doesn't like the executives who are, you know, kinda did a sitting pretty comfortably, like they're going to lose what they got. Right. And the people, the shareholders, like the value of the stock goes down, but these are it's it's real shit. Right. And when they look at companies like. And then they look at companies like Airbnb and all these other like really cool Bumble. I feeling that that's got them stared, right? Like something, something is like really raw. Like these tech companies are doing this, you know, are maturing in such a, like such a fast amount of time and they can just move so fast. They can, they can be. A lot of different stocks and they can, their value just is so different Tesla, right? That's like, got everybody in, in automated, like automotive scare these days, or at least, or it's pushing them to do Eby, which is like, that's good. Right? Like, that's really awesome. But it had to take somebody, right. And now all these other companies want to start employing that innovation first methodology. They want to make sure that R and D can be bounced. So it's helping them find balance. I will say it's not as easy as just, you know, saying like, Hey, Tesla's doing this, let's do this too. It's more of like, At some point, you got to realize that there are hospitality hates Airbnb, right? Like they, or VRVO like there that's pretty scary to them. So they got to find ways to make their experiences more streamlined, more comfortable, more, you know, it's not just the stay it's like, it sucks to pay for hotels. Sometimes there's all these weird deals and prepays and whatever. Like, I wouldn't jump into it too long, but I've had enough experience and exposure to these industries now and how they think. And they like, they won't show. But they have something to be concerned about. And if they're not at least finding ways to balance those investments using current, like also it's about using current technology. I'll mention that too, because we like it. That's why we do the Microsoft stuff is because so many of them use Azure. So many of them use the Microsoft suite, right. There's also a Google and AWS and stuff. Right. But it's using their existing investments to, to be able to find this balance and not having. You know, completely refactored their whole company. Cause that's also, that's not a selling point, right? That's very difficult. And that requires, you know, people getting fired and stuff like no one wants to do that either. So it's balanced, it's helping them find that balance, but also realizing that, Hey, if you don't find that balance soon, you're not going to get ahead at many anytime soon, like you're going to be stuck and it's not favorable to anybody so long answer, but I wanted to share as much as I could because I think it's a topic I'm really passionate about. No dude. I think you're, I think you're spot on because so my background, I'm like a CPA and I love looking at financials and things like that. And I think in, in, in that example, you just gave for hospitality. Airbnb comes into the space. If you look at the predominant amount of money that they spend on their income statement, it goes towards a software engineers or R and D and an R and D is just another word for software engineers. So whatever software engineers are getting paid, we all know that designers and designers. So really hospitality. Imagine if a hotel was spending that much money, not in real estate, but on soft direction. There's no way that's, that's, that's what Nikki was saying. He's saying that the proportion of R and D spent at like the Marriott in relation to their total spend is going to increase year over year in order to compete with Airbnb, because they're going to go innovation first. Versus maintaining market share or whatever else they were doing before. And I think generally that is great for the world as like a net positive because every, everybody wins maybe not Marriott, but whatever everybody else wants. So maybe to wrap things up, Nikela, it's been fantastic. The thing that I wanted to wrap up with is you've mentioned angel investing sort of here and there. I want to get your favorite startup that you have invested in, but that you have not worked for man, I can't share one yet. That's the bummer? There is one side, my age, the dressing is very selected. Like I, because I'm just starting, like I haven't been really doing it for too long. Technically my favorite angel investment is team meteor. That was, that was like really not. That was, that was pretty independent. I have a couple of other minor ones that are sort of bubbling up too. Like these are, it's too new to say. Like I'll, I'll imagine you're investing before. You're, you're sort of on the side of like pre-seed I guess. Yeah. Very, very much. Pre-seed very much like, definitely like stealth mode with type coming out of stuff. No type. So there, there is one there's one coming. But I can't share yet because I'm under, I'm under NDA for it. So, but yes, there, there is like, I will say that. Like there's three of them that I have that are not team meteor and all, all of them get me excited. I mean, they're just, how about you tell us the space they're in the space. One is in carbon reduction, carbon emission reduction, which I, I love that shit. I love, I love social responsibility and the two other are in consumer and one is. Sort of like, I think they're about to pivot into crypto, which is like, they, they started as more of like a collectibles company type thing. Digital collectables metaverse, but I think they're going to, I think they're going to over-index on Bitcoin and the other one is Well, the other one is like, I definitely can't share what it is, but it's, it's very much like local consumer. I'll put it that way. So definitely more focused on like IRS. It's in the money-making space. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the other two, like I can, at least, I think I can surely see their industries and it's, it's exciting, but there that's the thing you're still trying to even figure it out, you know, what, what technologies to really double down on and things like that. So I'm helping them out with that right now. And that's whenever they're ready to go. You'll hear about it and okay. Yes. Wait, wait. I do have any sports one too. I forgot. I almost forgot it's tech. It's kind of for that ones anymore, that wasn't in a very early phase of like the, of my investment, but like that one is, I'm also not going to be working for it, but that one is like, yeah, that one will get my investment coming up soon. There'll be something to share with that one too. That probably it's going to be weird. That one might actually come first. I think that the farthest heading product is just about to go live and I'm going to join them, you know, with that process. So, yeah, a couple of that's fantastic. So I have one final question for you to wrap things up. What is something that you wish more people knew about that you want to highlight? Like one, one thing that I'm really passionate about that I think, like, I think a lot of people are getting really into it. I love the idea of going to, like, I'm not about city elitism too much. Like I understand there's value in Miami. I understand there's value in Austin, New York, Chicago, even Minneapolis is a startup scene now. But my favorite thing is I love jumping around those communities and just immersing myself for like the time that I'm there. I'm going to Seattle next week. And I was there a couple of weeks ago. I just the opportunity to speak to someone like some people out there that I know that are like doing cool shit in tech and seeing how different the vibe is. I I'm going to start like, like I'm not even kidding. Like I want to start hosting like dinners in these cities. I just want to learn and immerse myself and that it's a passion for it, because that inspires me to think about. You know, my, my thesis is an angel investor, my thesis as an operator for, for this, you know, consultancy my inspiration for how I do partnerships. Like all this stuff works together and it inspires me a lot. So I'm not driven by having to move to any of these cities. Right. Maybe that's a hot take, but I love SF too much. I'm not going anywhere, but I love to travel and I love to immerse myself like that. And, and, you know, with conferences coming back to, I think there'll be a lot, but I will say that I've done like a lot of speaking engagements in my time and I love it. And like, I don't even talk about it a lot anymore, cause I've been out of the game for a bit, but I just love the idea of like, you know, talking about something I'm really passionate about and finding people in different places around the country, around the world that I can share that passion with and, and find ways to double down, not and, and build new connections out of that. Even if I don't live there, you know, there's the, world's becoming more online. Like it's, it's been like that for a while. And so what's wrong with that. Right. So yeah, that's something I want to share that I think that, like, you know, I hope a lot of people are going to be finding value of that to us as COVID sort of backs up. And as people start moving around again, as you know, don't like, you don't have to be hung up on a place, just enjoy the people that you're meeting there and find different ways to, to share your passion and, and learn from people. So, yeah. Perfect. Thank you so much for joining us. Nickeel honestly, it's been a wonderful man. I learned a lot learned a ton from this episode. Yeah. Thanks so much. Y'all it's been incredible. I'm honored to be a guest. That's our episode for this week. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure to subscribe to us and rate us on Apple podcasts. We would really appreciate the support. You can also follow me on Twitter at F Z from Cupertino and Busan. The ad next facade. See you guys next week.