Getting2Alpha
Getting2Alpha
Jeff Veen on deep collaboration and building innovative teams
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Welcome. I'm glad you're here. If you poke around the history of innovative web design, you're going to see Jeff Veen's name pop up again and again.
In his work for Wired, Adaptive Path, Google, Adobe, and now True Ventures, Jeff has been pushing the boundaries of online publishing and web interactivity for decades. He's worked with some of the best and brightest teams in tech, and he has a special talent and passion for group collaboration.
Jeff: I genuinely love collaborating with people that I respect and trust.
And there's this, you know, you've gotta, you've done your research, you understand your business, you see the connection between the research [00:01:00] and the, um, and the needs of the business. You have some ideas for how you want to construct a product that will connect those two things up and then, man, just a few hours in a room with a small number of incredibly smart people just ripping through ideas, brainstorming and trying out everything.
And I get the sensation that I have heard musicians talk about when they're, you know, doing improvisational jazz or something like that, just it's like time evaporates. It is just nothing but flow and ideas and creativity. And it's hard to get those. That scenario correct to get the circumstances such that you can actually have a group of people that have let go of any sort of issues or ego again, or anything like that.
And just feel free to try any possible idea and realize that they're not going to be ridiculed for bad ideas. And so that almost unlocks this whole other level of creativity. Like that to me, that's the whole reason for doing all of this is just wonderful. It's an amazing experience.
Amy: I love getting the [00:02:00] chance to hang out with Jeff and see what's attracting his attention these days.
I know you'll enjoy it too.
Welcome Jeff to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Jeff: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Amy: I'm so excited to talk to you. Now you're really well known in the world of design and tech, but for those who aren't familiar with your background, give us a whirlwind tour. How did you first get started? And what were the pivot points along the way that really led you to where you are now?
Jeff: Oh, it's been, it's been a very long time. So it'd be hard to sum it all up, but, uh, I got, I got started in all of this. I came out of college as a journalist, uh, was working at newspapers and, uh, also just as a hobbyist, totally into computers and technology and very, very, very early into the web and internet and stuff like that.
And somehow I managed to get a job at wired magazine in the nineties and learned a tremendous amount about [00:03:00] design. And explored kind of how the web worked, which was so nascent back then and spent a lot of time sharing what we had uncovered how the web worked and how design was happening on the web.
We did things like, uh, the web monkey website, which I think was kind of pivotal for a lot of people who got started in this industry way back then, which just are sharing like, Hey, this is what JavaScript can do, and this is what web design is like, and, you know, things like that. So I went from there and a few years later started a user experience agency called Adaptive Path in San Francisco and built a lot of kind of early, what we called back then web 2.0 websites.
And dynamic websites and things like that did, did work with like NPR and PBS, but also like Flickr and William's first project blogger, we did some work on and just stuff like that. So really got a good sense of the diversity of websites that were coming out in the early 2000s. And from there, I spent some time at Google, or we sold a product to Google that [00:04:00] became Google Analytics.
So a lot of that design work happened around 2005. Left Google and then started another company called Typekit. And Typekit brought fonts to the web using CSS. And kind of the first time that was, you know, Possible did that, uh, and sold that to Adobe. And I spent a few years at Adobe. Uh, and now I spend my time with true ventures as a design partner, looking at new companies and helping out the companies that we have invested in make better products.
Is that whirlwind enough?
Amy: That was awesome. We could spend a day on each of those. It's fascinating because there's a real thread running through it that goes right back to your first experiences as a journalist.
Jeff: Yeah, for sure.
Amy: You've really explored a lot of what's transformed journalism about the web and you've been at the forefront of innovation for years, really pushing on that edge.
That's fascinating to me. That means that you've got a perspective that very few people have. From your vantage point right now, working in venture [00:05:00] capital, looking back on all those experiences, what do you wish you had known about what leads to successful innovation that you know now? What do you wish you had known 10 or 20 years ago?
Jeff: It's really pretty simple, actually, that is that really none of the technology matters at all. It's all about the team you're working with and the, and the culture you build with that team and the, and the trust that you have with the people that you're collaborating with to build stuff. Yeah. That has been the one thing that has been consistent through all of the stuff that I've worked on has been working with amazing people and working on the relationships with those people and all of us together making great stuff.
The technology just cyclical and it just keeps coming and coming and coming and, you know, having a deep passion for how stuff works. Especially digital stuff. I've always just loved that and can't wait for the news things, but tying that back into how are we all going to do this together is, is the thing that I wish I'd known at the beginning of my career for sure.
Amy: That's a [00:06:00] great lesson. So now as an investor, you see many, many projects and you only choose to invest in a few. What are the signals? And I know investing is very personal in a way. What are the signals that you look for when you're evaluating a team and an idea?
Jeff: Yeah, funny, it's, it's literally the same thing.
There's a few different angles to take a look at. The first thing is to put it in context. What we do at True Ventures is seed stage investing. And for people who are not so familiar with how all of that works, that means literally like the first money in. Sometimes there's a little bit of. Like individual investing beforehand, like angel investing, but we're the first kind of firm, what they call institutional money.
And the only reason I mentioned that is because we are generally talking to companies that are two people big, you know, like they're just, they're brand new, they may or may not have written a little bit of code and have some general prototype of what they're doing. But honestly, it can be as early as just the idea stage.
And in those cases, the risk [00:07:00] around the right product, the right market, the right timing, like all of that stuff is enormously high. It's almost infinite amount of risk involved in all of those things. So really what it comes back to is, do you believe that these people can build something? If not what they're talking about, can they then learn from what they've tried and build something else that will make it how fast can they go?
How dedicated are they? How much passion do they have for all of this stuff so that they can just keep going and going and going until they figure out what is going to work. And that's what we're looking for. Honestly, are people that can figure out what's going to work now? Of course, they're, like I said, there's other factors like they have to be heading towards a market that we believe in, right?
So it's gotta be something that. Could be supported by venture capital because the returns need to be of a certain size. That means you are heading down a path to build a company that's going to be big and needs a market that's going to be able to support it and stuff like that. But, but ultimately.
[00:08:00] Again, comes back to the people.
Amy: That's such a modern way of looking at things. You know, I think a big realization in our industry in the last five or 10 years with Agile and with lean startup coming out and with certain hits rising to the top, is that that early experimental stage is really where great products come out of.
And it's not as much about the particular idea as about knowing how to iterate and experiment toward the right idea.
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. And kind of maintaining the optimism and confidence to keep going as you sort of find things that aren't working. You know, that's really hard for a lot of people.
Amy: That's true.
One of my very favorite quotes is from Linus Pauling, the Nobel winning scientist. And he says, the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Jeff: Right, that's a great way.
Amy: I feel like that's something that as people get more sophisticated in their careers, they understand. And often people that are younger, first out of school or building their first projects are just in love with their [00:09:00] idea.
Jeff: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. It's it's wow. It's like that in any creative pursuit really. Right. I mean, again, going back to starting my career as a writer, I can remember really vividly the first time that I got a story back from an Editor and a professional sent like I turned the story in and it came back just covered in red ink and I was, you know, crushed and she's like, why, why are you crushed?
Just keep making it better. It's got nothing to do with you. Don't you know? So it was really this like arrow through the ego of saying like, there's no chance you're going to get it right the first time. Absolutely no chance you're going to get right. So consider this like your first draft is a series of questions.
That's all it is. Like if I go this way or how about I go this way and we'll help guide you there. So I think that in any other creative pursuit, and certainly in the world of product development and entrepreneurialism, letting go of that ego and stepping back and just saying, okay, I have an idea of what I want to build, but I have absolutely no idea if it's going to work or not.
I think that's gotta be one of the, one of the [00:10:00] fundamentals.
Amy: Going back to the signals that you look for as an investor, what are some of the red flags, the deal breakers, the things that make you kind of lean back and say, Oh, I don't know.
Jeff: Totally being focused on that exit is generally a pretty big red flag.
That is somebody coming in and saying, here's my plan to sell this company for a hundred million dollars. It's a nuance, right? Because that's absolutely what we want. But if that is the reason, if that is the motivation, that seldom works. And, you know, we get into a lot of, I think there's a fair amount of eye rolling in the rest of the world about this idea in Silicon Valley of wanting to change the world.
But I do believe there's some merit to having that. As a, like, as an underlying motivation, and it's not so much like, again, that ego thing. I want to be the one to change the world, but having that kind of optimism that the thing that I could make could have an impact on the broader way that people live their lives.
I think that that gets right to the core of it. And you know what, if you do that and it's [00:11:00] successful and you get very lucky and everything lines up just right, you'll probably get pretty rich. You'll make a bunch of money if, you know, all of the planets align and everything happens correctly.
But if that's the the reason why you're starting is, is to chase that exit. That's just not substantial enough. It just doesn't, it just doesn't get there.
Amy: Jim Scheinman calls that a business worth fighting for.
Jeff: Yeah, that's great. That's a great way to put it.
Amy: And it's really tied into what we were just talking about, about iteration and persistence and ego, because it's so hard to persist through the iterations, unless you've got that larger vision and feel like you're fighting for something much larger than yourself.
Jeff: Right. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I can look back at the work we did on type kit, which was again, this like this new technology in the browsers allows fonts to be used in CSS for the first time. We make this marketplace so that people can have a subscription to a whole collection of web fonts and we would serve them and do all of the technical work in the background.
That's a I thought a solid [00:12:00] idea, but the motivation went back 10 years earlier to when I was doing work on the W3C standards committee for how HTML and CSS would work. This is back in the 90s when I was at Wired and I was always very passionate about a standards based way of kind of developing this entire platform where anybody's going to be able to publish and anybody can share their ideas, their thoughts, their experiences.
That was pretty fundamental and pretty much in line with my values as a journalist beforehand. Right? That's one of the most powerful things that we can do as standards based way makes that accessible to anybody. You don't have to ask permission to be able to publish on the web because we have standards for how you don't have to go to Microsoft or or somebody and say, please, may I have account to be able to publish?
Anybody can just do it. It's great. Furthering that mission of having this, this open platform where anybody can share was at the core of what we were building a type kit. So that was our driving [00:13:00] force was like this actually it advances web design. It allows a further level of expression that we've never been able to do before because typography had always been just so nascent at the time.
And that was incredibly motivating to say we can have some impact like that. We can change the direction of web design if we're successful with this and that. Okay. Helped us think big, like to the size, the scope and the scale of what we would want to build. It helped us. It was very influential. And the people who owned typography to bring that to the web to say, like, we think this is going to be a very big market.
And, and here are the reasons why, and here's our motivation for doing that and helped us raise money. When we sat down with investors said, we think this is, Huge. And here, here are the reasons and here's our motivations. So, um, so yeah, I think, I think having that underlying story that is bigger than just making the product you're making is really, really important.
Amy: So you've had an experience that many people aspire to, which is creating a startup, but And selling it to a very [00:14:00] well known, successful, sexy company, Google and Adobe. A lot of people want that to happen. I'm sure you can tell us there's a lot to that. It's not an easy thing to do. You've done it twice and come out the other side.
Tell us what that's like and kind of what you learned navigating that transition.
Jeff: You're right. It's, it's both very attractive, but it's incredibly difficult. And I honestly, like, I think it's just so much just luck really that, that happened. I mean, I tried to put the things in place to make us as lucky as we could be.
But the way that things lined up, the fact that Adobe needed this and this at this time, because they were doing that and all of those things that happened, uh, were the only reason we were able to like, kind of sneak in as an acquisition. Like when I look back on that, again, that goes back. 10 or 15 years to, well, I was writing for web monkey and there was a product manager at Macro Media who was making a product for web design.
And he wanted to meet with me cause he saw what I had been writing. And so he and I started to, you know, meet up [00:15:00] every month and he was talking about this new product that would be called, it was a code name called Dreamweaver, uh, that eventually became kind of one of the most popular web design packages for many, many years.
And his name was Kevin Lynch. And Kevin Lynch ended up becoming the president of Macromedia over time. And then Adobe bought Macromedia and Kevin became CTO. And 15 years later, I was making Typekit and he and I had lunch again. And I'm like, what's going on over at Adobe? And he's like, tell me about Typekit.
And like that relationship was. Because I had published some articles, that's what I mean about just the piece at all apart, the thread of luck that goes there. But at the same time, I was ambitious back then and writing articles so that I could have a bit more of a name for myself and all of that weaves together.
But that doesn't get to, again, the whole, what we call the MNA process, mergers and acquisitions, and just all of that and the tremendous, just. Legal process that you go through and understanding of finances that you have to develop. And that was all stuff that we were trying to figure out on the, [00:16:00] almost on the fly.
I mean, we, we did as much research as we could, uh, as we were starting, but I think probably the hardest part about that is that Adobe or Google buys multiple companies a year, but an entrepreneur sells. Like selling two is amazing. Like that's, you know, uh, and so you have this, this sort of experience and information asymmetry when you're sitting down at the table, here's this thing I've been working on for years and it's kind of my life's work and my dream and for the person across the table, it's like deal number six this year, so whatever, and that's puts you in a very interesting and strange position.
Amy: That also makes you incredible as an investor to have that insight and empathy for that process.
Jeff: Yeah, I think, you know, operational experience is what they call it in the investment world. You were an operator, which I find the funny, weird term for it. But, um, but yeah, I operated a company. I sold. a company.
I built a couple. I, you know, I've done all of those things. [00:17:00] So I think, and I don't have a lot of judgment around this because I have partners who haven't, but I think that it is incredibly beneficial and helps when I'm sitting with an entrepreneur, listening to their story and helping them decide if I'm the right person to take money from.
And vice versa, if we should be writing them and check or not, but that I think it helps with that relationship. But again, like being an investor that had come straight out of business school and had, you know, has years and years of experience. I think that's incredibly valid as well. And it's all about different context and relationships.
And so, um, either can work, but it has given me, I think, a lot of insight into the process for sure.
Amy: And, you know, there's a lot of different kinds of operators being an operator is a sum total of your experience. We did a startup years ago and one of our investors was an operator and sold himself that way.
And his operational experience consisted of high level management at AOL. [00:18:00] Never sold a company, never run a startup. And so that was, and his advice was looking back, very consistent with that. With his experience. So there's different kinds of operators.
Jeff: Yeah, for sure.
Amy: So as you're talking to teams and seeing all these pitches, what are some of the most common mistakes that you see first time entrepreneurs and designers and product owners making in the early stages of bringing their ideas to life?
Jeff: Well, certainly just from a pitch perspective, having the story, the narrative around what it is that what problem you're trying to solve is something I think people get really confused about. I think they, they believe they have to have like a slide about the total addressable market and the size of the opportunity and their differentiation and all that kind of stuff.
And I'm surprised at how many pitches I hear that don't actually tell me what problem they're trying to solve for people. And that I think is indicative of getting too caught up in the startup ecosystem [00:19:00] when it comes to actually starting and building the product. I just go back to what I've been saying, frankly, my entire career, which is too many people again think they know the answer for what they want to build and don't take the time.
And don't listen carefully to the people who could potentially be their customers and getting out and talking to people and asking the right kind of questions and doing the right kind of analysis on what people say in return when they talk about what it is they're trying to do with their lives. I think that's a really hard skill, and I don't think a lot of people frankly have it.
So it really comes back to what I've always called a user centered design process, but it could be. Applied to anything, but really coming right back to, am I building something that's going to be useful for people in their lives is something that we can never lose sight of, but so many people do.
Amy: So that's a great example of how your background and all your skill and experience as a designer and as a startup entrepreneur come into play.
What are some other ways that you [00:20:00] feel like your perspective as a designer shaped your investment thesis or shapes what you're really able to do and bring to teams?
Jeff: So I think there's been a big shift over the last five, six years in, especially in something like, as I don't know, many people think mundane as enterprise software.
And the reality is that most of the software that people use at work for work. That's provided by their company is really, really bad. The reason that has always been the case is because the person who is paying for the software, the person responsible for buying it for the corporation is not the person who's going to end up using it.
They're just somebody with budget authority and has been tasked with go out and find some good, I don't know, HR benefits software or something like that. And the enterprise software companies historically have known that. And so they make a product that's going to be appealing to the person who's going to buy it with no regard for the person who's going to use it in the last [00:21:00] number of years, people in their day to day lives have gotten much more sophisticated and have much higher standards for how software should interact in their lives and the impact that it has on them.
And that I think primarily has to do with the rise of mobile phones and that we use a computer 100 and 150 times a day as opposed to sitting down at a laptop and doing work. So we have all of this experience. With things like, you know, Twitter and Facebook and Netflix and Amazon, which are very, very well designed and well researched and, uh, products with lots of usability testing that goes on all the time.
So when you have something like that with a broad, like majority of the people out there, they go to work and say, why is this software so crappy? What's what's going on? And a bunch of startups have sort of come up and said like, well, for example, uh, HR benefits. We're going to do something that has user experience that consumers are used to and consumers are just, you know, like people at work or just it's all the same.
So they have been very [00:22:00] competitive and all of this is a big explanation, but all of this gets back to that's, I think, having a background in design and user experience and an understanding of how to improve products through a user centered iterative process. Gets to, Oh, this is going to be a company that wants to take down a company with a bad user experience and be disruptive with their own better design.
Amy: I love the way you put that a user centered iterative experience. Let's talk about design thinking. Is that the same thing or is design thinking some different new thing?
Jeff: No, no, I think that's a, uh, that's a way of packaging up. Uh, I don't know. I think it was probably 10 years ago now that was a business week that put design thinking on the, on the front cover and saying a new thing.
Oh my God, we're going to like designers have this mystical way of thinking this process that makes products better and innovation just like pour out of the Vents in the, in the air conditioning here. Like that's, they were very, very excited about it. And it became this like capital D design, capital T thinking like process.
It's a couple of things. [00:23:00] It is, like I said, this iterative user centered process where you kind of think, make tests, learn, think, make tests, learn, right. You go around and around like that. And the faster you can, and you mentioned the lean startup. I think that was a, that was sort of a crystallization of that.
Process, which is how quickly can we do iterations so that we can learn as much as we can, uh, while we still have money in the bank, hence the startup, but there's other parts. There is the like, let's, let's shift, uh, our, our documents that we're using to use pictures of products to talk about ideas rather than power points with charts and graphs in them.
Right. So this idea of getting to an artifact really quickly, because that's something that people in an organization can respond to emotionally, as well as rationally, I think that's another big factor of this as well. And, and that's something, you know, we spend a lot of time working on at Adobe as we were doing this shift to the creative cloud from their standard business model to a subscription based one.
And there was all of this stuff we had to build and all of these ways of communicating with customers that they had never [00:24:00] done before. And we did it in this process of very. Thank you. Like at the board level, at the, you know, the C level in the organization, showing them screenshots and mock ups of the strategic direction that the company should be heading as a way of saying, you keep talking about subscription.
Do you know what it means? It means we would have a plans page and the plans page would look like this. And somebody would say, is that the right price? Ah, let's go back to the model and figure that out. But, you know, looking at screenshots of the potential user experience that, that helped everybody get their head around how it.
Is we are going to make this transition. So process, so artifacts, uh, and there's just, you know, I think a lot of that has been bound up as this thing that I guess consultants can sell called design thinking that, that sounds like magical and innovative, but in fact, it's just. What we've been doing in our jobs for a couple of decades now.
Amy: That's been my experience too. So it's great to hear you articulate that so beautifully, particularly in gaming. You know, gaming is where I learned [00:25:00] how to bring a product to life from the inside out with a tiny MVP and then you make it bigger, et cetera. But I think that the word crystallize is so perfect.
Lean startup crystallized it. Design thinking crystallized it for people. And then there'll be something else. But user centered iterative design. So going back to the thread that connects all of your experiences, which is innovation, you've been on the forefront, you know, probably better than anybody.
It's really tricky to build something that's innovative and successful. So while you're on the path to doing that, which you've been a number of times, how do you decide among your customers who to listen to and who to tune out when you're building something and showing stuff to people? And then how does that change over time?
Jeff: Yeah, that's a really good, really good question. It is one of the things that I think, especially in tech companies, it's, it's very easy to get wrong [00:26:00] because so there's a lot of understanding about how quantitative metrics, data and the analysis of that can affect it. Product development. So my time at, uh, at Google was completely dominated by this overwhelming amount of data about the design.
Like the milliseconds of every choice we made right in an interface would be measured and analyzed and tracked over time and tried to be improved upon and stuff like that. Every possible user interaction was measured and all of that. That's very, very different from the process of qualitative User research, which is sitting with people with other humans in real time and watching them use a product and looking for their emotional response from that product, right?
Or even before product exists. Getting to an understanding of needs that people have and the ways of talking to people and asking them questions that will help them explain to you [00:27:00] what their needs are, what their problems are without getting them into what the solutions they think should be or what the, uh, what their wants are, what their desires are.
Those are far less interesting than the problems they have and the, and the needs that they are, are encountering every day. And that's a process that goes well back into the, into the sciences of ethnography and, and anthropology. Ways of getting an understanding of what a person is. in their culture is thinking and doing and how what they're saying is an embodiment of all of that kind of stuff.
And I have no formal training in that, but I've worked with a lot of people who have a lot of training in that. It's a science and it's an art and it's a way of getting at truly understanding a sense of empathy for another person and then falling back on your experience and your instincts as a designer to articulate a solution that will match what that emotional response that you hear from somebody.
And that's something I don't think very many people in technology [00:28:00] have ever been exposed to, let alone trained in. And so I think the best possible thing that anybody can do is spend hours, every single person on your team, spending hours, watching people talk about their problems or, uh, try to use the product and just get that level of exposure happening to everybody in the company, because it gives them a kind of a guiding star for them to solve the problems that they're trying to solve.
Amy: Looking back at all the projects you've worked on and what's excited you, what do you feel is your superpower as a creative person, your sweet spot? What really lights you up?
Jeff: My superpower? Well, I'm six foot six. That has a lot to do with it. Um, I'm walking into a room and people like, You know, notice me.
So I think that helps a little bit. Ah, you know, honestly, what it comes down to, it's where we started in this conversation is that I just, I genuinely love collaborating with people that I respect and trust and there's this, you know, you've got a, you've done your [00:29:00] research, you understand your business, you see the connection between the research and the, um, and the needs of the business.
You have some ideas for how you want to construct. A product that will connect those two things up and then, man, just a few hours in a room with a small number of incredibly smart people just ripping through ideas, brainstorming and trying out everything. And I get the sensation that I have heard musicians talk about when they're, you know, doing improvisational jazz or something like that, just it's like time evaporates.
It is just nothing but flow and ideas and creativity. And it's hard to get those. that scenario correct to get the circumstances such that you can actually have a group of people that have let go of any sort of issues or Ego again, or anything like that. And just feel free to try any possible idea and realize that they're not going to be ridiculed for bad ideas.
And so that almost unlocks this whole other level of creativity like that. To me, [00:30:00] that's the whole reason for doing all of this is just wonderful. It's an amazing experience.
Amy: Small group collaboration. That's what playing music is. I'm a musician. So that's actually what got me into gaming.
Jeff: Oh, cool.
Amy: That's how I got the rock band gig.
I did a bunch of social systems design on rock band. And because I was a musician. Um, and because I had been building those kinds of experiences, but I think, uh, collaborations on the rise in gaming, there's a lot more collaboration. A lot of people are getting really excited about it. So, um, and in, uh, you know, in tech as well with Slack.
So what do you see, what are you seeing that's new and exciting in design and tech these days? Which trends are you personally following?
Jeff: Oh, I am looking pretty closely at voice interface right now. I think it's really interesting. I don't think the systems behind it are quite there yet, but they're getting there really quickly.
So, and I mean, everything from, you know, Google now and Siri to Alexa, um, [00:31:00] and things like that, you know, I don't necessarily like to say like voice, that'll be the future because nothing is going to be the future, the future is going to just be combinations of all the stuff we have now, plus the sprinkling of like technology we never, ever imagined.
But I do see. In my own behaviors, shifting to using products that have a voice UI, uh, for very specific tasks, but those tasks are starting to grow slowly. And, and I think that's really interesting. What I like so much about it is, man, it totally combines the, the two things I've done in the past, which is interaction design and writing.
Because the interface is words, it's natural language processing and all of that, and, but it is. Having a conversation, right, which is the core, I think the core of design anyway, we abstract the conversation into a bunch of widgets that we put on a screen, and that's me trying to tell a story to somebody else about the functions of a system they're trying to access.
Well, with a voice interface, it is just this conversation and the language that we start to use in [00:32:00] those interfaces are going to make or break those experiences, and I find that really, really interesting.
Amy: So where's your focus these days? What's coming up on the horizon? Is there anything that you're excited about that you want to tell us about?
Jeff: I am just really getting into this idea of helping a group of companies that we have a financial interest in make better products. And that has been just really, really rewarding. Like I said, I did a, I was part of a consulting company, uh, back 12 years ago. And I loved the diversity of the problems that we were solving.
Uh, I just like, I don't know, you've probably seen this too, right? The client work and the business of it to me was pretty grinding over time. Like I just, I got really tired and, and found it really difficult. Like, uh, I'm going into another company and they're going to, you know, push back and, uh, and all this stuff, it feels like this being a.
Uh, you know, like the, the investor with operating experience gives you an opportunity to condense down all the best parts of being a consultant back in those days [00:33:00] into just the parts that I really like, which is like sitting with people who are starting new companies that haven't been down this path before and try to sort of, you know, turn some lights on and say like, I might go over a little bit this way and think about trying to do some of this and, and kind of walking with them on that journey.
Thanks. I just, I'm finding that super, super rewarding and that's what's kind of getting me up every morning.
Amy: You are a collaborator. That's so awesome. Thank you so much, Jeff, for joining us today and sharing your wisdom and your stories and your perspective. It's, for me, been amazing. Super inspiring.
Jeff: Oh, yeah.
Well, thanks for having me. This is a, this is a lot of fun. I always love talking about this stuff.
Amy: Awesome. Well, we'll talk again soon.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com [00:34:00] for more great resources and podcast episodes.