Super Smart Startup Starting | Episode 24

In this episode, Gary and David talk about how to validate your ideas as a growing startup. They also mention the "splitting" of Ford, and their predictions with the most recent Apple event.

Enjoy!

Here are the links to all mentioned articles/videos in this episode:
The Verge - Ford’s ‘radical’ move to split the company won’t come easy
Apple - Apple Event

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David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

Gary: 0:00

My daughter got invited into what is it the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society because she does the dual enrollment with high school. And so we're filling out the form and it's very, and it's like, now just send your $95 for the registration fee. Oh, of course. It was 25 bucks when I was in it

David: 0:26

I've one Welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I am David Baxter. I am joined as always by the illustrious Gary Voight.

Gary: 0:37

Nice. I'm doing good. Thank you for the illustrious I know I complained about not getting the special, like winded but illustrious. That sounds even more polished, more elite. How

David: 0:46

about how about infamous Is that better?

Gary: 0:48

That's cool, too. I'll take them both. And then I'll rub him in one's face.

David: 0:54

illustrious Gary. But

Gary: 0:56

there was an article that I saw on verge that was about Ford, Ford splitting into basically two separate companies, one that's going to handle the production of their electronic vehicles and the other one who's going to maintain the combustion engine vehicles. So

David: 1:15

now they're not actually two companies, right? It's one company with two big old divisions, right.

Gary: 1:19

But they're splitting it in a way that they would be able to profit share between the two, but still act as separate entities. And it made me think of the media company that I used to work for, did exactly this, because they own TV companies, they own print and digital companies. And what they would do is just yet splinter off one division, give it its own name. And then that way, they'd be able to kind of have multiple companies underneath the one umbrella company that they could, you know, move money around for if someone was not doing like the print industry was going downhill fast. So they would have to take funding from their broadcast and digital division to kind of keep it afloat for a little while until things came back. So I think that's basically the move that Ford is taking, seeing that the production of electronic vehicles and the like, that's definitely going to be the future before. But there's no way that they can do both at the same time within the same companies with the same engineers and, and all that and keep their their profits coming in from the combustion, you know, vehicles, which obviously are still making great profits.

David: 2:29

i The article that I saw was talking about the how do you attract talent to the dinosaur? When the new sexy stuff is the electric thing, right? Yeah, that's what's gonna be tough, because over time, right now that if it was a scale, combustion engines would be 90% of the money, if not more, right. But over the next 10 years, that scale is gonna slowly inevitably move away from combustion engines. And why would you look at the combustion side, like, Why do I want to work here? Maybe the answer is well, because the money is good for now. Yeah. But I think it's ballsy. I love the fact that they're saying this is I'm surprised they're the first ones to do that, honestly, because GM made the promise that all of their vehicles would be electric by 2035. That's not that long from now, especially in the cycle of cars, right? Because it's weird. You buy a car for 510 years. So that's one generation of car, right? For the average person to maybe on the high end? Well, I guess, yeah, two, or two or three, I guess, on the high end, you might if you were doing every five years, you might have two cars before you bought an electric. That's just wild to think of that. I think that is generations, right? Because when I bought my car early 2017 And so when I get my next car, you know, in five years, or whatever, I'm like, it'd probably be electric, because I think that's cool. And everybody's gonna have that calculus over the next decade. And, of course, right now, you can't buy an electric car. Except unless you want a Tesla, like all the other ones are basically vapor. I have a friend who bought the ionic five. I think he's still waiting on it.

Gary: 4:15

Yeah, okay. So I was gonna ask you, they just pre ordered it. They didn't actually

David: 4:18

yeah, they ordered it and they are making those technically speaking. But they if you go to Hyundai's website, they will say these were very limited quantities. They're only ship in a very specific states. And odds are you're gonna wait for a really long time. So

Gary: 4:35

yeah, they even had that Hyundai released I guess it's a hybrid version of I think they're Santa Fe or whatever, like the small SUV, but it was more electric than not like it was a hybrid but you can actually fill it. Like you can go to an electric station or whatever and charge a battery that way. But yeah, those were very limited as well. I think it was last year that they they pushed goes out and did a bunch of marketing for them. And then they were just like Sorry, guys, you can't make any more.

David: 5:05

They're all vaporware. To me, I'm stealing that from the verge. I don't want to take credit for that. They call the electric cars the greatest vaporware of our time. Because, like the Silverado, I think I've mentioned this before, they're all promise that they're coming out, but they're not out. Right? They're not. They're just renderings. They're not even real vehicles yet, but there are a lot of promises except for Tesla. You can't the mock he exists, but you can't hardly find it.

Gary: 5:33

That ford f 150. Lightning, there's only a couple that they made. Right?

David: 5:38

They've never sold, but they're still in the in the phase of building and creating, is it a real vehicle? Yes, do a few of them live on the road, maybe they might be owned rivian is the same way. rivian just got in trouble this week, right? raising their prices by 20k. You bought the car or preorder the car for 1000 bucks. And you you SPECT it out, and it was like$60,000 or 70, or whatever it was. And now they're saying that? Oh no, that $70,000 cars now $90,000. And a lot of people are upset. Now, to their credit, they did come back and say My bad. If you said 70 We're gonna keep it at 70. Anyway, so I the electric car stuff is very interesting to me. I know that's the future. But it's going to be a very bumpy ride. Who knows. So what I want to talk about for the meat potatoes is an idea for startups specifically for startups, I really, I had I was reading around the intertubes. I'm not going to take credit for this for this idea, because I'm not the only one who's ever come up with it. So please don't take it for anything novel. But I think it's something that's not talked about very often. And the more I thought about it, the more I noodled on it, the more I loved it. And it really caused me to think a lot. And the idea of it is that when you build a startup, and I we've been doing that a long time. So I have a lot of experience with that. But I will tell you, almost everybody comes to me and says I need an app. And I that's my first step. Right? They don't even have a company yet. They don't have anything. First thing they that I've got an idea. And then I have to build into an app. That's how everyone comes to us. And we turn away people who aren't ready for us. We've talked about that in the past. But one of the things that that struck me was man that's backwards. This is what what I was reading about. The thing that you should figure out first is whether or not your idea is any good, right? Why spend X number of dollars 1000s and 1000s of dollars 10s of 1000s of dollars to build an app that you have no idea of anyone wants, you know, you think it's a great idea. But the question is, is anyone else care? And no one really knows that if I asked any of our clients when they came to us, did you know there was a market for this? No, no, let's go figure that out later. That's how everything is, except for what I one client who did it through YouTube invalidated his market through YouTube. But aside from that, so credit to him

Gary: 8:13

the process of validating that idea first, I think is where you're going?

David: 8:18

Yes. So the idea of this is create an idea, right? Create a simple web page that talks about that idea to very, very high level. Like think of a landing page, that you've been to a million times on a million other things when you clicked on an ad, right? And it's just kind of a one pager? Not not. Now I'm thinking in my head, those super long scrolls that they're the really high intensity internet pushes to sell you will get that's not what I'm talking

Gary: 8:47

about. Yeah, it's not it's not necessarily a marketing web page. No,

David: 8:52

I'm not talking about like some scary thing with a single big video and I'm going to change your life in three steps is watch this video, get my webinar, not that. Not that. I'm saying make a simple landing page that explains your idea at a high level. And all it is on there is sign up for newsletter. Right? It's got to look nice. So that doesn't look like you're a fly by night. But you create this little simple landing page. And then you spent some money, I'd say 1000 $2,000 Maybe, again, compared to building the app, this is dirt cheap. The idea would be you spent a couple$1,000. And you do some research. Now that's That's tricky. You either you hire someone to do this, again, you'll save yourself a lot of money by doing this step first. But you might not be able to have the skill set to do this on your own because this isn't just everyone doesn't know how to deal with Google and all that. But there

Gary: 9:41

are plenty of companies that do tons of companies that will do this.

David: 9:45

We are not one of them. So I'm not even talking about us doing it but at least not yet. But you hired them to create an ad campaign that points to your landing page. You do Google Facebook, whatever you think your audience might be at. You don't know who they are. So you just try a few things. try them and see if anyone clicks. Right? If you find that people are, if it takes three weeks to burn your $1,000, for your idea, hey, that might be there's something there if it takes three, three months to burn that $1,000. Maybe that's not very useful and you just saved when

Gary: 10:17

you say burn that $1,000. You mean how much activity is coming back

David: 10:21

to that site? Correct. Sorry. So yeah, that means are clicking on the ad.

Gary: 10:24

So the landing page is basically you telling the world, this is the idea I have? Do you think you might be interested in this? Is this going to be a value to you, then the ad campaign is saying, Alright, let's find the people that might be interested in this and see if we could validate that this has value for them. And then the clicking on either subscribing to I don't know if you can do a newsletter and just collect names.

David: 10:49

If you're just calling I mean, it's a newsletter. Do you actually have to use this newsletter? No, because I think what it does is a two tier interest, right? So if you let's say $1,000. And let's say that will afford you 300 clicks. I'm just making up numbers. But let's say that works.

Gary: 11:04

If you're doing a pay per click, like ad, yeah, like an ad campaign

David: 11:07

through any of the social media, whatever the The how is not important, right? The second, but let's say 300 clicks. So that's validation one. And if does that 300? Click take three months or three weeks, right? That's a huge tell, right? Yeah. If that if you burn that $1,000 down, because 300 people click on it in an hour. Whoa, hot diggity, you are doing something really cool. There. Someone's really digging this. If it takes a year, then dude, find something else to do. But whatever you're I mean, there's a lot of variables here. But the idea is you get it out there. And then the second level, the second level of validation is did they sign up for the newsletter? Because now it requires I know, it's silly, but given away your email address, a lot of people aren't gonna do that. So now your 300 People click how many people sign up for the newsletter? If that is if you got 50% Holy cow, Whoo, that's good stuff. I would say if you're above 10%, you're probably doing okay. I don't have that spec completely. Yeah,

Gary: 12:07

I was just gonna say between 20 and 30% is definitely enough interest to pursue further.

David: 12:12

So that's and you've spent, you know, maybe you hired the guy to run this campaign for you for a month, or whatever. Maybe it costs $3,000 $5,000. Okay, now, the risk is that your idea is trash and no one cares, but and you just spent $5,000 on an idea that's trash. Okay. Yeah, you could look at it that way. Or you could look at it as you spent $75,000, building an app and then find that your ideas trash. Come on, at least

Gary: 12:45

with the validating your idea, you have room to pivot there where you could say, Okay, well, what if I just adjust this, or maybe, maybe you do end up getting some feedback, if some of these ads placed in social media channels, people are commenting or something like Oh, went to the website. And this looks like something else, or someone else is doing something similar. But if you change it to this, this might be beneficial, you can get all kinds of feedback just from sending out those ads to begin with. And then if you do pivot, and you kind of change that idea slightly, do another campaign that's a little bit different, maybe target an audience a little bit more specifically. And so you do spend another three to $5,000. To your point, that's $10,000. Now, instead of the 55 to 75,000, that you would have spent building the app that does nothing for anybody.

David: 13:34

Correct. And that's where I want to make sure that I mean, these are, these aren't small numbers here. But I think and you can make that number smaller, right? You could say, let's, I got $500 To do this, and I'm going to do the research. And I'm going to learn how to make the ad. Yeah, you could do a lot of this yourself. You can but the risk there is that you're going to make a bad ad. And you think your idea is bad, when in fact, you're targeted the wrong person. Right? That's, you know, let's say for instance, I use one of our clients, you know, he's he does grammar. It's got YouTube videos, and all that stuff, grammar flippers. They're out and they're amazing. They, let's say he's made this great thing. And it's before he built it. Let's say he targeted students. Right, maybe we made some ads for students, and didn't get any clicks. Because kids don't care about grammar. He might think, oh, maybe my idea isn't good when he should have and this is a silly example. But he should have targeted teachers. Right? Yeah. Educators and, and he is, you know, I'm just using him as an example. He did a wonderful job with this. But what I'm saying is, if he had done it himself and targeted it wrong, he might have gotten the wrong conclusion. And that's where it's it probably is worth hiring a pro to do that. But I'm telling you, man, every dollar you spend here, it's like, what does that old adage it's like an ounce of prevention is worth $1 For preventions like $100 for treatment, something like that I'm butchering that horribly. But that concept is what we're talking about here. Because every dollar you spend here, you're going to learn something. Is your idea. Good? Who is your audience? Right? You might be like, Oh, okay, because then you say, let's say, fast forward, and it worked. And now you say, okay, cool. What's the next step? Well, the next step would be to build a small version of your app, not the full enchilada, small version. And we could talk about that more detail later, but you build a small version now. And then you've still got this audience, you still know how to talk to these people. I mean, this is the gift that keeps on giving,

Gary: 15:38

and give it directly to them to test Yeah, you already have a built in audience,

David: 15:42

you've got potential beta testers, you've got you know, you know, if you've got a, you got your hand on the tail of a dragon, all you gotta do is pull on it, and he's gonna, you're gonna get a reaction. And you can put, you know, once you're ready, do you double down and start spending $5,000 instead of 1000. Because you know, this works, right? If you get a 10% return on your investment, that people are signing up this little, small app, I wouldn't call it the MVP yet. But at the partial app, again, I'll go into that more later. But another broadcast, but what you've got the small thing, and potentially could make you some revenue, and that may be that fund your next round of stuff. So you can build your app, the real thing that you need to do it for real. But the more I noodled on this idea when I came across it on the intertubes. It is just brilliant. And I wish I thought of it.

Gary: 16:35

Yeah, no, it seems like once you hear it, and you kind of go through the steps in your head after being in this business for a while, especially for you. It's it's a process where you're like, why haven't we done this from the beginning? Why isn't everybody do this? This makes so much sense. But yeah, a lot of companies will just be like, you want an app, just write me a check, we'll build you ever you will.

David: 16:58

Sure. And we we turn down people, like I said before, but what we what we said is, hey, you have some homework to do. And that's usually I say, hey, go validate your customer, go and do a vision board, you know, that kind of stuff. Which Okay, those are all good advice. But I think adding this and saying, Hey, this is really proof of your customer, not because real a lot of validation. A lot of startups is navel gazing. If you're putting in a really fine, fine tag on it, you are imagining who your client is, you're imagining who your ideal customer is, you're envisioning that they're this person or that person, and that they're going to do this or that. And it's not real. Like that's, that's the thing. It's not real. It's all in your head. And this is like getting it out of your head. This is real actionable intelligence. And that's where I think it's just it's definitely the way to go. So way to start any new idea, I would highly recommend this.

Gary: 17:57

And I think there's, there's follow up procedures that we'll talk about on another app. Yeah,

David: 18:02

I mean, there's, there's, this would be step one, and then I think there's on step two that I hinted at. And then I think step three, finally would be probably the build a real app. But again, what. I did want to talk about a question that was on Reddit.

Gary: 18:22

Really some of the username of the user names on Reddit?

David: 18:25

It is Mr. White Hat One, two.

Gary: 18:29

Okay, that it seemed better.

David: 18:31

There, you know, you get a, you get a six on the name rating. And I'm gonna paraphrase because I've seen a lot of questions like this, which is why usually when I bring them up on the podcast, it's not just this guy's question. His question is, he feels I'm summarizing again, cuz I don't want to it's a long post. He feels like he was cheated by his business partner. And the thing it is, is his business is starting to do well, it's him and his buddy. And his buddy is not doing a great job. And he's doing all the work. We've talked about this a little bit, I think in other podcasts, but what I'm really focusing on is when we talk to this guy, when I was replying to him, come to find out that him and his buddy don't have any paperwork at all, to define the business. Nothing. It was like a, a handshake, and a bunch of assumptions. And that's really it. I see this this kind of question regularly. Where it's usually younger people, which, you know, people starting out,

Gary: 19:32

yeah, and if they're going into business with a friend, the, well let's let's write a contract and divvy up exactly the responsibilities in the ownership and that doesn't ever come into play. But that doesn't come

David: 19:43

into play, because it's like, you're my buddy, and I know that you're not gonna hose me down. And that's true. I don't think this guy was you know, it's not that you're going to get hosed. The problem is, is when you don't do a contract, all you're building the business on his assumptions. He's assuming one thing you're assuming another. And probably you're not assuming the same thing,

Gary: 20:06

right? It's just Yeah, it's like a lack of actual real communication. But real communication, that means the contract of various, you know, intent or anything

David: 20:15

Correct. No one's talking about an affair isn't something that exists, of course, but what I'm saying simply is by doing a contract, you force the conversation. Hey, what do you see your role in this? Hey, how many hours can you do on this? Because I can do 20 hours a week? Oh, you can? I can only do five. Okay, cool. That's fine. But now we're going now we're getting somewhere, right? Maybe shouldn't be 5050, then if I'm doing four times the work, right, it just starts these conversations. And it also becomes the first crucible of which your friendship will be put, you know, pushed against, right, because this is going to be an uncomfortable conversation.

Gary: 20:57

Yeah, it directly makes them look at this in a serious, you know, a serious way of this as a business as a livelihood, this is what we have to do for each other, not just, you know, friends creating something together. So that's going to test that's going to test the phrase

David: 21:15

you've got and you've got to put it what you want to happen honestly, is you have the conversation and it goes sideways, and you learn that right out the gate, or go swimmingly and you know that right out the gate. But what you don't want to do is just wander into this business, put a lot of time into it and get don't think of money on the side, you never get your time back. You put your time and your effort your sweat into this thing, and then you find out the guy is is useless.

Gary: 21:45

And the longer you let it go without having these uncomfortable conversations. He just like any other relationship, the worse he gets

David: 21:52

this right, it gets real ugly, it turns into one of those sitcoms from the 80s, where one person walked by, and they see them touching the hand of another person. Obviously, they're cheating. And they never talked to the other person about it. And it goes on the entire episode. I hated those. By the way, just that trope just drove me to just talk to the man. Just ask them why were you talking anyway, I've digressed. But that that's what you don't want here. You don't want the ad sitcom version of a business. That's what I'm saying. So anyway, so that's that was the Reddit thing is only what I had this week. I thought this was really good. Yeah, I've seen a lot. There's a lot of young people typically. I mean, I don't know they're actually just some of them. They actually, I did say one person. This person was 15 years old girl. She started a candle business and she was wanting to know how to get started. And I'm like, Dude, that is just so obvious. It is awesome, man. 15 years old, I went to CCS and I was useless. This girl was trying to start a business. I love it. I love it.

Gary: 22:46

I worked in the toy department at Target during Christmas. Got yo that nice. A lot of grandparents looking for the the one joker doll and all the Batman action figures because right. Batman came anyway.

David: 22:59

I'll go to see the Batman

Gary: 23:06

Apple's new event coming up next week.

David: 23:09

That's right on March 8, right. That's just next Tuesday. Yeah. Do they so this won't this will have happened before this podcast gets published.

Gary: 23:19

Right. So our predictions have to be spot on spot. Perfect our entire audience of 14 people.

David: 23:26

That's right, all 12 people are going to be really upset at us.

Gary: 23:29

I would say bump this up.

David: 23:32

I would say if I was prognosticating, this is going to be a very boring event. Because nothing major is going to happen. I will say we're going to get spec bumps across several things. The M one pro

Gary: 23:44

m two. No. You know No, I

David: 23:47

don't because just because

Gary: 23:48

of the chip manufacturing situation in the world.

David: 23:50

No verge podcast did this. Explain that very well. Basically, you can't have an M one pro new computer's being made with an M one Pro and another one that's got an

Gary: 24:02

issue. Yeah, it's true. You can't show it

David: 24:05

like the one of the rumors. It's gonna be a new Mac Pro that they're big, beefy, 5000 $10,000 computer which you'll finally use the M ones, your

Gary: 24:14

iMac Pro two, it probably just redid the whole iMac line. So I'm figuring they're probably gonna do it a pro version of that. So my

David: 24:22

guess is they're going to put the MX M 1x Pro and Max and those silly names. They're going to put them into their pro line of computers. That's my guess is what this is. They're not gonna come up with an M two, maybe in the fall maybe in the fall, but I doubt it. I bet it's a whole nother year because they're just they're bringing everybody on board right? They're bringing all their lines on board,

Gary: 24:42

the probably reef refit the older stuff with a higher end webcams now, so at least up to the 10 ADP instead of the 720 for though there

David: 24:52

Yeah, I would say that's gonna be a universal change. I mean, again, these are boring little changes, right? There's nothing sexy here. There's nothing but I mean Now if you're in the market for a Mac Pro, that's huge, right? I mean, if you put 47 of those chips inside of a computer Boy, I bet that thing screams.

Gary: 25:10

Yeah. Maybe a Mac Mini update too, because they came out with the Mac Minis, when the first one came out as kind of like more of a testing device for developers to kind of push things over. But I think they might actually put out like a ready for market Mac Mini that has like an M one Pro, maybe, maybe I don't think the form factor is going to change. But maybe now, like bumps a little bit,

David: 25:33

it'll be spec bumps and nice stuff and pretty things to look at. But I don't predict anything major. I hope I'm wrong. I love being wrong. I want the glasses. But that's not

Gary: 25:44

what maybe there's they're gonna start there, like your cars.

David: 25:49

They've been trying, right? They've been trying for what

Gary: 25:51

they've been trying or has the media been pushing that they've been trying? They have been hiring

David: 25:56

people. That's all that is actually known. They have been hiring people in a car division of some sort. They hired some really high end people. And then some of those high end people leave. It's just kind of a something is going on. But no one knows what I mean. It's kind of reminds me of back in the day when the Apple TV before the Apple TV came out. Everyone thought they were actually going to make a real TV, like a whole screen and everything the

Gary: 26:17

actual television and

David: 26:18

yeah, and that's what everyone assumed what was coming, because they've been working on something called the Apple TV. And everyone's like, yes, they're gonna make it's gonna be gorgeous and amazing and really expensive. And then they came out with the box that no one really cared about, right? So I'm curious if the car is just going to be a gizmo inside of say, a Beemer or something like

Gary: 26:37

CarPlay plus. Yeah,

David: 26:39

I mean, who knows. But I just

Gary: 26:41

want to say that the videos that they've been putting out says they're not doing their events alive. And they're pushing premium, the editing and the transitions and the quality of the way these videos are made. Man, just regardless, what I'm saying those are inspiring. There's so cool, top notch,

David: 26:57

I think this will probably be the last one of these virtual ones that will make that call. I bet next one, which should be in the summer, though it'd be WWDC. Right? Maybe that will be that's in June, maybe that will be live and in person. And that's when they announced the next iOS, which would be 16. Or when 1515.

Unknown: 27:18

Now for 15.

David: 27:27

My secret article, I've been holding it from Gary. So we I get an honest opinion. Yeah,

Gary: 27:31

I have no idea where this is going. It

David: 27:33

is from Fast Company published this morning. That it would this morning would be a march 4. Why it's time for gig workers to rethink organized. Did you see this article? Rising? You know,

Gary: 27:46

I got I have questions. It just based on the headline alone. It's making me think of the past two articles about remote work that we kind of talked about.

David: 27:53

No, it has nothing to do with that. So what this is talking about, and I thought it was interesting, I had never heard this, this take before gig workers

Gary: 28:00

like in the like creative fields kind of?

David: 28:04

Well, they're they're specifically talking about like the massive amounts of Uber drivers delivery workers. But gig work is a huge deal now. And so

Gary: 28:12

gig worker economy overall. Yeah,

David: 28:15

yeah. And so they're trying to. So a lot of those history has shown that they tried to organize and they failed over and over again, some don't want to organize because they don't want to become employees. Right. It's really messy. So Matt spoke says that, instead of trying to do traditional organizing to become a union sort of thing. What they should do is the gig workers should pool their resources of a sort and buy the company stuck. And then force change from within. What do you think of that? That hot take?

Gary: 28:50

That sounds like a very, you know, cushy view from a high level apartment looking down a gig workers who have no options of trying to buy stock into a company, you get a majority share?

David: 29:03

It would be tough, right? So let me back up the merits of the idea, let's say let's say that they could figure it out. What do you think about the idea of activist shareholders making? There will be no, there's lots of companies, Twitter being one of the big ones that had a big activist, shareholder who eventually got what's his face kicked out?

Gary: 29:26

Yeah. In concept. I think it's good in concept, I think any kind of bargaining or collective power that I guess you can say the employees underneath, the executives have to keep it a more balanced and fair, you know, workplace or whatever. I think that's good. But the way my initial reaction when I hear about this is when you mentioned Uber and other gig workers like that. I thought, Okay, well, if they wanted to organize, they would just be like taxi drivers with the taxi company. They might want to be gig workers. because they specifically don't want to be part of an organization like that, which you mentioned,

David: 30:04

yeah, that's where you got the real problem, if they do

Gary: 30:07

try to organize against the company, so huge, like Uber, that literally exists with most of their promises are because of their stocks, right? Like, there's no way. Even if every single Uber driver started trying to buy small amounts of their stock and do it, it would have to be an organized effort, I still don't think they'd even touch

David: 30:31

it. So they were talking about ways that this is how it worked in the past, where a big pension fund would side with the workers, and would require that some board seats were switched, Exxon Mobil just went through a thing where they had a big group of activist shareholders work together to force them to be more climate conscious. And they got two or three board members replaced, which will then direct the company to be more, you know, Chevron, I think, was forced to lower their carbon footprint because of activist stuff, you're seeing this more and more now,

Gary: 31:11

this activist stuff is this employees? No, in

David: 31:15

those cases, those are just very, very wealthy people who buy a bunch of shares and make their will know, there's a few of those, this concept would be, you would act like so all the gig workers would buy a few shares, you pull them all together, and you're like a pension fund, and someone has to step in and be like you're, and they're equating it to like your labor organizer kind of person. And they, the shareholders vote with their shares? I think the idea is interesting, I think practically considering one, I don't think it's fair to say that gig workers speak as a single voice. Some want to be employees, some do not. Right, some will need that flexibility. And that's true for anything. But I just, I think it's the idea because what I found interesting to me was not even the practicality, because I don't think there's any legs there. But the idea that activist investors are going to become the way that corporations change from within is really intriguing to me.

Gary: 32:14

I like that idea. I like that idea a lot. The only thing is, it seems far fetched that a group of employees, and I don't mean to make this sound like employees can't rally together and do this. I just immediately think of the steps and loopholes and all this stuff that the company is going to throw in their way to make sure it doesn't happen.

David: 32:37

Yeah, I think there's so many hurdles. There's such a huge gap

Gary: 32:42

between executive level and worker level that I mean, they just got so much stuff they could throw in the way of this actually becoming a thing.

David: 32:51

Yeah, it comes down to and the reality of it is five very rich people could undo the will of a million normal people exactly when it comes to this, right. Because you have to get you know, I get 5 million shares from 5 million people or from a million people. versus one dude is like, you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna buy 5 million shares. And that's what happened. Carl Icahn has a class 5

Gary: 33:14

million in one share.

David: 33:16

I just think that it's it's it's a really different way to force the companies will and I'm curious how that will go. I don't want to belabor that. I just thought it was really interesting. All right. Thank you guys so much for listening. Please feel free to email us questions. We still are looking for those. We're also posting actively posting finally, our stuff on YouTube. So you can

Unknown: 33:36

listen to us there as well. You can put something in the comments section. Comments, you can put your

David: 33:41

questions there, we will pay attention to those. We're also on Reddit. I am everywhere big pixel NC on Reddit. So you'll see me comment in there if you ever want to say hi. Alright, on that note, we will head out

Gary: 33:55

stay tuned for future episodes as we continue down the whole like startup process that David's been noodling.

David: 34:04

Are y'all thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. See you guys