Be Your Own VC: 10 Rules for Bootstrapping Mastery

Hey, welcome to another episode of Making Billions, I'm your host, Ryan Miller and today I have my dear friend James Benham.

James is the tech entrepreneur in the Insurtech space. As a co-founder and CEO of JBKnowledge, he has built an impressive tech company that supports a massive need for carriers today. Not only that, but he has written the manual on bootstrapping your business called, "Be Your Own VC: 10 Bootstrapping Principles to Generate Cash and Keep Control".

So what this means is James understands how to build a company from the ground up and is about to teach you and I the key principles on how to do the same.

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[THE GUEST]: James is the tech entrepreneur in the Insurtech space. As a co-founder and CEO of JBKnowledge, he has built an impressive tech company that supports a massive need for carriers today. Not only that, but he has written the manual on bootstrapping your business called, "Be Your Own VC: 10 Bootstrapping Principles to Generate Cash and Keep Control".

[THE HOST]: Ryan is a Venture Capital & Angel investor

Transcript

Ryan Miller  0:00  

My name is Ryan Miller and for the past 15 years have helped hundreds of people to raise millions of dollars for their funds and for their startups. If you're serious about raising money, launching your business or taking your life to the next level this show will give you the answers, so that you too can enjoy your pursuit of Making Billions. Let's get into it. 

Ryan Miller  0:22  

I found myself reading about bootstrapping more and more. Now I know what you're thinking a VC reading about bootstrapping, yeah guilty. In fact, my knowledge has led me to the man who literally wrote the book on bootstrapping, and he's about to serve up the 10 immutable Laws of bootstrapping, so that you too can enjoy your pursuit of Making Billions. Let's get into it. 

Ryan Miller 0:41  

Hey, welcome to another episode of Making Billions, I'm your host, Ryan Miller and today I have my dear friend James Benham. James is the tech entrepreneur in the Insurtech space. As a co-founder and CEO of JBKnowledge, he has built an impressive tech company that supports a massive need for carriers today. Not only that, but he has written the manual on bootstrapping your business called, "Be Your Own VC: 10 Bootstrapping Principles to Generate Cash and Keep Control". So what this means is James understands how to build a company from the ground up and is about to teach you and I the key principles on how to do the same. So James, welcome to the show, man.

James Benham  1:12  

Thanks, Ryan. Glad to be here. Love the show. Sounds like you've built a really great community here and enjoy listening to it and glad to be on.

Ryan Miller 1:18  

Yeah, thank you. It's an honor. We've hit the top 2% in the world. And it's all because of amazing guests just like you so we're fortunate to have you and I'm excited to get into that. We're gonna get into all the stuff about bootstrapping, but right out of the gates, maybe you can warm us up, who's James, what do you do now and then we can get into some some tasty tips for the beginners. 

James Benham  1:34  

Sure, I'm from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the deep south, did a couple of internships with PricewaterhouseCoopers, decided that wasn't for me to call my dad up, called high school buddy of mine up and said, let's start a company and deliver high quality enterprise software services to the small to medium market and that was 23 years ago. I've really enjoyed building a global business, we've got offices in Argentina and South Africa and Texas and we've got people in some other countries other than that, which is really exciting, 280 teammates now and we serve as some of the largest insurance companies in the world. So the original plan was a service small to medium companies and now we know we've got some monsters as far as the size of company that we work for. We build great software every day, we did bootstrap with a few 1000 bucks in the dorm room to here. I've got amazing co-founders, amazing teammate, it's been a fun ride for the last 44 years.

Ryan Miller  2:20  

Man, I love it,  my man, so you're you're busy guy. So the riches are in the niches and yes I, in a former life I'm still a recovering executive, I was the CFO of an insurance company, so I do have a lot of love for that industry. And folks, it's a very exciting industry, I didn't think so until you get into it and all of a sudden, you're like, oh, this is the insurance industry is humongous. It is fantastic and we're going to chop it up in this way. I was excited to have you in because anybody in high finance or anything in finance really knows their stuff and my friends, James is definitely one of these guys. So you know, let's talk to the beginners in the audience, what would you say in your experience, because you talk a lot about be your own VC bootstrap, these 10 principles? What are those 10 principles and how do they help people when in the early days? 

James Benham  2:59  

Yeah, well, there's a lot of discussion in the business community about putting your pitch deck together and going and raising money and pitching VCs and getting angel investors and friends and family around an angel round and pre seed round and Series A, Series B, Series C and that's a that's a crazy train that you can hop on and look, it does work, sometimes. It does work, sometimes, but you know, I really pause that there, there's a different way of building a business that really wasn't talked about well, in college, you know, degree in accounting, Masters in Business, we just didn't talk about bootstrapping. You know, they talked a lot about leverage and debt and fundraising, but they don't talk about building what you have to build, so you can build what you want to build and maintaining control and building a business for a lifetime and, you know, there's a lot of really great things about bootstrapping. There's a lot of horrifying things about bootstrapping, as well. 

James Benham  3:43  

But when I got through with selling SmartBid, which was one of our subsidiaries, I said, you know, I get asked for business advice a lot. I mentor students at Texas A&M, still, because I'm only a few miles from campus. I really enjoy talking about it, but I needed to write all this down and put in a book and just say, hey, look, read this, and then call me and then we'll talk after you've read this because this encapsulates most of my advice, and most of the advice that my father who's really close friend of mine has given me. And you know, obviously business partner to co-founder and same thing with Sebastian Costa, my Chief Operating Officer, right hand man, great friend and business partner. You know, all the advice that they gave me and the stuff I learned along the way, and I just tried to boil it down to 10 really important points I think are important to remember for people and then back that up with a lot of stories. 

James Benham  3:43  

And so we definitely talk about cash being king because I've seen so many companies go out of business, you know, they grow their way out of business because they they're ignoring the cash flow, and ignoring cash reserves, and when COVID hit we saw a lot of companies get caught short on cash because they weren't thinking about having cash reserves and really paying attention to that cash flow statement. Paying attention to generating cash and collecting cash and stockpiling it, how important it is.  

James Benham  4:44  

We talk about you know, rule number two getting out of and staying out of debt, I mean, that's super important. I'm a huge Dave Ramsey fan, and I'm a really big opponent of leverage unless you absolutely need for equipment or facilities. I have a really big problem with heavily levering up and you know also talking about a lot about my kind of like my main central premise of bootstrapping is that you have to have an incredible amount of patience and be willing to wait and wait and wait and wait and you have to build a cash machine first. And then you can use that cash to build what you really want to do. So I say, you have to build what you have to, so you can build what you want to that's next rule, because that, you wait, that's what we had to do, we had to build a cash generating machine in our service business, so that we could take that cash and fund our product business, which is the business we really wanted to invest in. 

James Benham  5:21  

Then you also talk about the number one rule of business which is survive, you know, life will kind of forget that the main thing you're supposed to do as a CEO is manage risk, mitigate risk and help the business survive difficult times, like COVID, like economic collapse is like 911, which happened right after I started this business. Like the .com bust would happen right before I started this business, like the Great Recession in 2008, which decimated so many companies, you've gotta learn how to survive. 

James Benham  5:43  

Fifth rule is to choose your partners as carefully as you choose your spouse, I mean, you'll be really careful your partners, and you got to you got to pick them really carefully and cautiously I see a lot people hand out equity way too fast to people that don't end up being in the business later and so you got to be really cautious with that. And so we talked about those and then you know, the next one is get out and sell, I talked with the CEO being the chief evangelizing officer, I see I mean, a lot of CEOs, especially bootstrap CEOs that think they can just hire a salesperson to go do the pitching for them and the reality is, in a bootstrap business, you the top dogs got to go sell, you've got to go close deals, and you'll be willing to get out and sell and do it yourself. I still do demos every week, I still call on prospects every week, I still travel on calling prospects every week, I've got to interview people, and I am still heavily involved in account management sales. 

James Benham  6:24  

And then we talked about being willing to rewrite your rules, but not your values, and a whole, whole set of stories around, moving to Argentina, maintaining our values, changing our business rules. So our business would work in Argentina, the same as South Africa, you know, you have to be willing to say, hey, look, we have our we have our six core values for us, I'll talk about this later, we've got our six core values, we're not going to compromise our core values, but we are going to modify some of our rules so we can work better in certain markets. 

James Benham  6:44  

You know, the last three of my 10 in this book, where to make innovation, a habit and a process that you actually have to really put money and resources and people in innovation, it's, it just doesn't happen in the spare time. Rule number nine is that you always get paid last, you know, as a founder or co-founder and executive, whether you're the CEO, CFO, CEO, you got to recognize that the staff needs have to come first and that your needs come last. And then lastly, to say we have this thing that really came out of, out of flock flying and piloting for so many years that you have to establish and communicate your personal minimums are something we do in flying, we set personal minimums, what we will and won't do and what we will and won't fly in. And you have to really do that in business too, you've got to establish these, these core set of personal minimums so that you've got your values, you've got your ideas of what you will and won't do. And especially when it comes to selling a business, you've got to have these really clear before you step into the sales process. And so anyway, that's  what the, you know, in a nutshell, the 10 big rules are for me on being your own VC and bootstrapping a business. 

Ryan Miller  7:39  

Man, that's brilliant, so those 10 rules on bootstrapping your business. Those are 10 different ways, you think about that. I asked him for one, he gives us 10. He's a good guy, appreciate that generosity. So there's 10 ways in the early days, folks, that you can win according to the gospel of James. So how do you not lose? Because it's not right, you can get points on the board. Sure. That's great. We need to do that. However, sometimes, you can get spanked a little bit and sometimes bad, and it can tank you. What are some advice? What is some advice you can give to beginners on how not to lose in the early days? 

James Benham  8:09  

Well, the big thing on not losing is to make your mistakes small. When you're in any business, like this applies to a VC funded business, a friends and family funded business, an angel funded business are a self funded bootstrap business, you've got to make mistakes small. And where you really see businesses tend to, tend to have to shut down after a few years, is they proceed with this core premise, they come to this inevitable intersection, where they realize that many of their core assumptions they began the business with were not correct and they have to pivot the product. Because they're seeking the most important thing and that's product market fit, right. They're seeking that fit between the product and the market, so that people see your stuff and they say the most important things have to have that. Right. So that's the challenge is they're seeking product market fit and they get to that pivot point, and they burn so much capital that they can't afford to pivot and to go out of business, happens all the time. That reality brings me back to that, that, you know, main advice is is make mistakes, small, experiment, but don't blow all of your cash. Build the product, but build the MVP, the minimum viable product, don't build the Cadillac, build the Chevy, build anything that gets down the road so you can get in front of customers and you can find out if, what they said they were interested that they actually will give you a credit card to pay money.

Ryan Miller  9:15  

Yeah. 

James Benham  9:15  

There's a huge difference between a prospect saying, Man, if you all built that I would totally buy it and then you go back to them and you say, okay, give me a credit card. That's when that's when the rubber hits the road, because a lot of them back out at that point in time because everybody will tell you what they think you want to hear. And so it just all comes down to making your mistakes small. You focus on the MVP, then you experiment, see if there's a market for it and move on. modify that until you get the first few customers then you obsess over your first few customers, make sure they're super happy, so they'll be a reference client for you and then you work on making the system work really well for them. You respond very quickly and then as soon as you get them calm down and settled in regular operations, then you can really start going after the market with things that you, that you've decided to do in a product. Really tough but if you make those mistakes real big in the early days, you won't survive the pivot.

Ryan Miller  9:15  

Man, so developing product market fit and also just make your mistakes early, which is equivalent of small. 

James Benham  10:01  

Small. 

Ryan Miller  10:01  

Yeah, so those are some very, very good pieces of wisdom for people to just not screw up and not lose in the early days. 

James Benham  10:08  

And part of that Ryan is finding a niche to you know, like, if you can, if you can really find something narrow that you can be really good at, it's a lot easier to identify your competitors to compete in the market, to find the right trade shows and associations. If you're, if you're really broad an early days, especially at the bootstrap business, it's just too expensive to go by the market. 

Ryan Miller  10:25  

Agreed. So yeah, so it doesn't I 100% agree, my man, James, the riches are in the niches. Go, first, you go deep, then you go wide, not the other way around. Too often, I've seen entrepreneurs who end up not being very successful, is they go wide too soon. It's better to be 100 miles deep and two inches wide than it is to be the opposite, right, so that being said... 

Ryan Miller  10:48  

Thank you for watching, if you've made it this far, we must be friends. So don't forget to like, subscribe and click that notification button. Now, let's get back to the show. 

Ryan Miller  10:57  

I'm just curious about the market. Now I know you service a lot of the insurance market, but this is reflective of different startups. So I'd love to just, go speak about going deep. Let's go deep on your product and see what lessons we can pull out of that, but where do you see as far as the insurance market or any other market you want to talk about? Where's it at? And then we can talk about where you think it's going? 

James Benham  11:13  

Yeah, I mean, insurance and insure tech, so and we have to define what the heck insure tech is. 

Ryan Miller  11:18  

Please.

James Benham  11:18  

Because there have been software companies in insurance for decades now. One of the challenges the insurance market has is that it was an early adopter to mainframe systems and so you have a lot of legacy AS400, COBOL, Java, old Java systems that are running the industry and by running I mean, the policy administration systems, the claims handling systems, the data aggregation, reporting, exchange, EDI systems, they're built on some really old legacy tech. And it's really hard to migrate, so they really have like a first mover's burden, you know, where they adopted early with digital solutions, because they really needed to, to manage the data and the money. The end result is now they're left with a pretty large legacy burden. Whereas the prev, one of the, you know, the other industries SmartBid, that company we sold in 2018 was in the construction space, they were still largely on Microsoft Excel, I mean, 67% industry was Excel, so that was a little bit of an easier migration. Whereas insurance, you have to deal with these really big old tech legacy systems and what to do with them and how to get the data out in the data is super messy and so it's, that's really a huge challenge. It's a very automated industry, I mean, it really is very automated, in some regards and very not automated, and others and there's still a lot of Excel spreadsheets that drive really crit, mission critical tasks in insurance, there's a lot of Excel. In fact, you can underwrite, and issue and renew policies on Excel, and word all day long, without even using core system and some of the largest insurance carriers do that for new lines of business. 

James Benham  12:35  

So I'd say that's a, InsurTech is a company that's leveraging modern tech, IOT, mobile, connected API's, people used to say blockchain, and now they've kind of given up talking about blockchain. And of course, now they're talking a lot about AI, and leveraging that combination and big data to a big extent, big data is a really hot thing, and InsurTech. And leveraging it to really transform the speed at which you can get a quote, and you can bind the policy and you can pay and the speed at which you can resolve and settle a claim. And then the accuracy with which you set rates for the insurance policy, and the accuracy with which you recommend how much and what should be paid out on claims. So that's really kind of InsurTech as a whole, but the the main line, right, you know, old players, big multibillion dollar players and the insurance carrier and TPAs base have invested so heavily in technology, that it's kind of hard to even distinguish companies that identify as InsurTech and companies that identify as traditional carriers. Because they, a lot of them have identical parallel efforts on IOT, on big data, on connectivity, on API's. And so it's really, it's really a fascinating time where the rubber is starting to hit the road and as reflected by the biggest trade show and InsurTech, it's called InsurTech Connect, in Vegas. There's 10s of 1000s of people, there's a huge massive show and you know, you see the shake up, you know, of the exciting tech that didn't deliver a lot of value to the, to the main players. 

James Benham  13:49  

And there was also a pretty big push among the insurer tech community several years ago to raise a lot of money. And then disintermediate brokers, cut them out of the middle, and sell direct to the consumer or direct to the business. and that hasn't worked out really well for a lot of them. And if you look at what one of the biggest examples that was a high flying public stock at one point, there's really two of them, Lemonade and Hippo, both are 80 to 95% down from their market highs, their five year highs. Like 80 to 95% down from their peak market value, which is really appalling how much equity value they've lost over the last 30 years.

Ryan Miller  14:21  

So I'm gonna chime in on that, so I'm curious, why do you think that is? Because it's folks, we're not just talking about insurance, even though we are talking about insurance, we're talking about general startups. There's market forces, there's internal forces, there's a lot of things going on. There is impressions, say, hey, this new thing, this new distribution, it's gonna take over the market, we're all going in this direction, everybody line up, fall in line and go this way. We've had a few people do it, it's not working out for him.  Why do you think that is, financially it's not working out for them, your right. So, I'm curious what you think, what happened? 

James Benham  14:48  

Yeah, we have this thing called a loss ratio and insurance, that's the basic loss ratio is like the amount of premium you collect versus the amount of claims you pay out and then the difference there is what you have to run the company out of and then hopefully have a profit left. And the loss ratios on these high flying InsurTechs have been absolutely terrible, really bad. They've been bleeding a lot of cash and so their core premise and raising so much capital and having such a high valuation, their core premise was that they were going to be able to set rates more accurately, pay claims more accurately, more rapidly. That they were going to be able to acquire business faster to go direct to the consumer and the reality is they're getting eaten alive by their marketing expenses, their loss ratios are way too high, they're paying out too much on claims and so a lot of these assumptions have not yielded actual financial results. And, you know, profitability is like gravity, it applies whether you want it to or not, you've got to generate a profit in the business or it's not worth anything. Despite the fact that I may have IPO'd for billions of dollars, you know, the fact is that the public markets are brutal. If you don't make money and deliver value back to the shareholders, you get shellacked on your equity value as you should.

Ryan Miller  15:47  

Yes. 

James Benham  15:47  

And you know, the growth at all costs, VC funded mindset, leads founders to believe that if they just keep growing top line, that they'll continue to be rewarded and that's just not how it works when you go to the public market. 

Ryan Miller  15:57  

There it is. Yeah, so top line growth, so this is a lesson that we've learned here, top line growth, right? It's great, right? We, I build financial, I've done the whole thing. So we tech, technically, we will, a lot of the times just they'll teach ya, you build a financial model, you grow your revenue, and then everything is linked to that. But this is one of the things that we learned in number two, so top line growth is important, but it's not everything. That's number one. You keep me honest, James, number two, what I think I'm hearing is this, this is something that I always understand. I'll give you folks a little little trick that I do as a VC, so when I meet a founder, and if they're obsessed with building a great product, well, yeah, you got to do that. But when I meet an experienced founder, meaning someone who really knows the industry, someone like James, for example, they also focus on distribution. And so what you're talking about is these guys have these direct to consumer models, and all these different things happen, but where it went sideways was distribution. And so it's not enough to have top line growth, that is important, it's not enough to just have a great product, that is important. But it is also equally important, just my opinion, James, he did not say that this is just me from the other side, the vulture capital in me, tells me that you also really need to pay attention to distribution. It does, you know, good to build the world's best product that no one's ever heard of. So distribution matters, I would argue just as much as a quality product, and just as much as top line revenue growth. Would you agree?

James Benham  17:16  

Yeah, absolutely. Marketing is generating demand for a product and sales is converting that demand into revenue, right? That's just in general, some people conflate sales and marketing into like one term and like these are very different. This is disciplines, distribution, and distribution is a phrase we use a lot in insurance, we really understand what it means because it's a very well defined term. When we say distribution in the tech industry, they don't always exactly understand you're talking about. 

Ryan Miller  17:36  

That's fair, yeah. 

James Benham  17:37  

It, just in general, is kind of weird thing, weird anomaly, I love the insurance definition of distribution and that is how you distribute your product from the source originator of the paper to the people that are buying the paper. And it you know, and generally, and this is continuing to happen, you know, that carriers generally distribute through brokers, because it turns out despite all the arguments about brokers being, well, needing to be disintermediated. The reality is that people need a trusted adviser to shepherd them through what they need to buy, what lines need to buy, and from whom, and going on websites just doesn't really do it for a whole lot of people. And so distribution is crazy important. But distributions are important in every industry, not just insurance, super important in technology, like we've got to figure out how do we get this product market? Are we gonna have resellers, are we going to have value added resellers? Are we going to go out and have a referral program? Are we going to go direct and we're going to just have to build a large sales force and sell direct? What are we going to do here to get our product in people's hands? And how much is it going to cost? 

James Benham  18:28  

Now my general experience has been that you take whatever you spent building the product, and you double it and that's what you'll spend distributing it right, like that's that, well that's what you'll spend total. So, whatever you spend developing, will be about what you spend on selling it. And people really underestimate how much it costs to buy the ad, to hire salespeople and hire marketing people and then craft the language and then seek all the different channels. You know, if you're in a tech company, there might be, your Omni channel marketing strategy, may be 10 channels: organic search, paid search, organic social, paid social. Recommendation websites that you pay per lead for. And then you get into, you know, traditional trade shows, you know, cold calling, email, text message campaigns, traditional print ads, online ads, display ads, video Network ads. You just keep going right, there's a lot of different ways to try and reach people. 

James Benham  19:07  

Now the really screwed up part right now, Ryan, and it really got hosed by COVID, in my opinion, it has been distribution right now. Because back in the day, which was a Wednesday, you could get on the phone and call people and they would answer the phone, they don't do that anymore. During COVID we couldn't see people in person and so everyone went hard on investing in digital distribution for their products, right? They went hard on Google ads, they went hard on email marketing, they were hard on text message marking, went hard on cold calling because they couldn't attend a trade show or meet people in person. So it just filled all those channels up and now people get bombarded. I counted before this show because I knew this question was gonna come up. I counted 11 Spam calls I got today. So I just ignore calls now that aren't recognized number four, because I don't have time to deal with because it's never it's never a client or a prospect. And then I probably get 200 spam emails a day and probably 15 spam attacks in a given day and so I like so many other people just ignore it now. And because whenever I answer, I look at it. It's never a client or prospect I always recognize those numbers and so that's been a problem with distribution is that distribution also shifts and changes in ebbs and flows and depending on what's working and what's not working. And so, you know, right now, we're going kind of old school again, you know, I'm hitting the road and doing trade shows and pressing the flash working on referral strategy. So it's a bit of a different distribution model right now, for me, I'm still buying Google ads on some products, but not others now and that was never the case in the past.

Ryan Miller  20:25  

Man, I love it. So focus on distribution, that's important product quality, top line revenue growth, the hard to pick the most important one. But we'll call those the holy trinity of bootstrapping, I don't know, I just made that up, that could be total crap we'll see. But ah... 

James Benham  20:39  

Sounds good. 

Ryan Miller  20:39  

Yeah,  for sure and so as we ran through base, you have a breadth of knowledge  my man, I'm wondering if you have maybe, like you've already given 10 in the beginning, but I'm wondering if we can get maybe two or three more things from you, just speak to the entrepreneurs that are out there. And, folks, if you're launching a fund, that's an entrepreneur, if you're launching a business software, just if you are literally building something, and you hope that the market, and will back you up and give you that top line growth, this is for you. So what are two or three things that you could speak to someone in that position? And just give them that knowledge? Who are really looking to just maybe be like you one day. 

James Benham  21:11  

Sure, I'd say other than the 10 rules that I laid out, that really sum up so much in this. Number one, I'm a limited partner in a few VC funds, so I should fully disclose that while I strongly encourage people to bootstrap their business, it is definitely not the only path or even it's not always the best path. Sometimes you have something, it's so time sensitive, you need to go raise money. So one thing that we talk about a lot, I think is chapter eight in the book, we talk about having a bootstrapping mindset and applying bootstrapping principles to innovation departments at large companies as well as bootstrapping principles being applied to even VC funded businesses. And you'll and you've seen it in the last year and a half a huge recalibration because, you know, we've had a lot of flat to mark down valuation territory for a lot of VC funds lately. And you've seen a lot of people not being able to raise their B rounds or C rounds and so there's been a very renewed focus on least reaching cash neutral and so even in a VC funded business, you have to understand the bootstrapping is a mindset. It's a mindset that can bring fiscal discipline and sustainability, financial sustainability, we're not talking about trees, right? We're talking about money, the other green, the green that drives the business and so financial sustainability is critical and cash flow is critical and reaching neutral to positive cash flow is critical in all kinds of business. Of course, it can make your run at your runway infinity runway, and a bootstrap, in a VC funded business. So I'd say the first one is a bootstrapping mindset and it forces founders to focus on the absolute most important things at all times and it makes you super resourceful. So I've encouraged all of my general partners, all the GPS, the VC funds to really focus on bootstrapping principles, to force fiscal discipline, make people resourceful to do a lot with a little and to really focus on prioritization rather than trying to tackle 10 things, do one really well. 

James Benham  22:52  

The second thing I would say, that's a really, really important takeaway is that there's no individual piece of technology that has a sustainable competitive advantage, because eventually other people aquire it to. What is truly sustainable in a business is a culture of innovation, and the process you use to manifest that culture. You know, because I look, when I started this thing in 2001, we built with ASP, and SQL 97, then we moved to ASP and SQL 2000, if I remember correctly. I'm maybe misquoting some numbers, and then .net 1.0 came out and so we continually had technology that became obsolete, obsolete, obsolete, then we picked Silverlight and then Microsoft shuttered Silverlight, a year and a half later. We had to rewrite all the Silverlight that we had built you, there's no individual piece of technology that makes you sustainably competitive. What does make you stand up and competitive is like that process of innovating and prioritizing and creating things, a culture of engineering culture of innovation, driving, listening to customers, but not becoming just a custom dev shop for those customers that are product customers. You know, like actually saying your opinion as well, so there's so much to remember that, but you just gotta acknowledge and recognize that a thing that you might have started the business for that was a great innovation in 2004 is no longer the thing. You got to find a new thing and that process of finding that new thing is, that's the core secret sauce to your business.

Ryan Miller  23:58  

You know, I love that and on that second point that you said, it just reminded me of a very time honored CEO, controversial guy, but effective nonetheless, Peter Drucker once said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? So that's number one, back in my product Dev Days, very often, we would have to consult the executives who said, I want it and I want it now, right? If, maybe some of you are dealing with that right now in your careers or listening where you got this executive and you're managing up. And we would have to tell them, to say technology is not a strategy and it is not a solution, it's not meant to, that it is just a tool. And if you implement that tool, and, into the wrong strategy, or a horrible process, that will magnify your losses and so what James is talking about is absolutely vital. It is important to understand that no tech is a sustainable competitive advantage for long, but your culture and your processes definitely can be. Would you say that's a fair summary on that?

James Benham  24:49  

Absolutely. 100%, yes.

Ryan Miller  24:51  

What about say, do you have a third one that you'd like to share that would just really help to light up these entrepreneurs?

James Benham  24:56  

Well, I'd say if there's a another takeaway from this, you walk away from, is that you've got, and this is, this is our sixth core value at JBKnowledge, six, six core values, you know, do the right thing when no one's looking, be self motivated and resourceful. Show respect, have each other's backs, you know, think lean, it, there's all these great values that we focus on, right? But number six, is enjoy the ride and geek out, and, and enjoy the writing geek out is really about having something that you're super passionate about, in addition to work, like you should be really excited to go into the office and if you're not, you got to find it fast. You've got to find that motivation, but you also should have something outside of work that you're motivated about, whether it's your kids or your hobbies, and I have two kids. I'm super passionate about them, and trying to help them trying to launch them. They're both teenagers now, and you know, it's exciting. But I also have a lot of passions of my own, you know, I still play piano and guitar and  I sing, and I'm in a dance group and, you know, I like to fly whenever I can. And I think it's really important to have passions and to enjoy the ride and geek out. We talk about that a lot in our company, I asked people like, hey, what do you, what are you passionate about what you geeking out on right now. And you know, for a lot of men, you know, some people would be barbecuing, I have one really key leader in my company that's into making chocolate, like she does it every weekend, man. She's a chocolatier, so cool. So I think it's just really important to not, and you've got to you've got to work to live not not live the work, if you want to do this for a long time. 

James Benham  25:39  

Now, if you want to, if you want to be, you know, five years and exit, and then go to the beach for two years, and then recycle and that's the cycle you want to be in, okay, I guess. But if you're interested in some longevity, and really riding a train for a long time, you've got to come to some kind of balance point where you can really enjoy your life and you can enjoy work too and you can be motivated to go to the office every day. So I think that's a really important one. 

Ryan Miller  26:33  

Man, I love it. So as we wrap things up, James, is there anything else that you'd like our fans to know? Any ways to reach out to, any anything at all?

James Benham  26:40  

Yeah, absolutely. First off, I record I recorded an audio book along with the book, so I've been a podcaster for a very long time, eight, eight years now, I think and the original podcast I had, I handed it over to my co host, the one I run right now for the last three and a half years. It's called the InsureTech Geek Podcast, you can find out more about that in the book, Be Your Own VC, which I recorded my own audiobook for as well on Audible. So that's on Amazon on Audible, you can also just go to my personal website, jamesbenham.com, and it has links to my newsletter, you can sign up for my newsletter, you can sign up for the podcast and subscribe to it and you can also get a copy of the book or get a copy of the audiobook. All of that is there. 

James Benham  27:16  

My company is JBKnowledge and that's our service business and we've got two great products called SmartCompliance and Terra. One of which is a certificate tracking platform, the other one is a policy and claims software core system that's worker comp first. So we built on it's really good for comp, as well as some other lines and so that's really what you can do to find out more information, but jamesbenham.com has links to just about everything. and you can go check that out and subscribe to my podcast and check the book out and get the audio book and get on the newsletter and all that stuff.

Ryan Miller  27:41  

I love it. So just to summarize everything, folks, bootstrapping. It's a mindset, so make sure it focuses you on what's important. Number two, the second thing that James told us was no tech is a sustainable competitive advantage. Just remember, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So get your culture right, get your processes right, and you just might be able to develop a strategic advantage to ward off a lot of competition. And number three, it's important to enjoy the ride and geek out. You do these things and you too will be well on your way in your pursuit of Making Billions.

Ryan Miller  28:16  

Wow, what a show, I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Now if you haven't done so already, be sure to leave a comment and review on new ideas and guests you want me to bring on for future episodes. Plus, why don't you head over to YouTube and see extra takes while you get to know our guest even better. And make sure to come back for our next episode where we dive even deeper into the people, the process and the perspectives of both investors and founders. Until then, my friends stay hungry, focus on your goals and keep grinding towards your dream of Making Billions.