Failure Is The Price Of Innovation, with Mike Grossman

Your business can be brilliant and still get wiped out by timing, regulation, or a technology shift you saw coming but didn’t act on. Gary Pageau of The Dead Pixels Society sits down with six-time Silicon Valley CEO and author Mike Grossman to talk about the unglamorous reality of entrepreneurship: the wins that arrive late, the pivots that need full commitment, and the failures that happen even when the team does a lot right.

Grossman walks us through early experiences in the tech world, including consulting for Apple in the mid-1980s, then into fintech startups that ran into two classic hazards: adverse selection and legislation that changed the economics overnight. From there, we get tactical about startup survival, including how to read leading indicators like lead quality, pipeline shifts, and revenue direction, plus the mindset shift that saves companies: the business model is not the business. If you cannot adapt, you are not stubborn, you are exposed.

We also zoom out to Silicon Valley culture and today’s AI wave. Grossman explains why failure can be a useful teacher without turning it into a personal brand performance, and we pressure-test AI adoption with a memorable example of hallucinated outputs that look perfect but are totally wrong. The thread running through everything is leadership and people: strong teams, clear focus, and steady decision-making still matter, even in an AI-driven economy where jobs and workflows keep changing.

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Transcript

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Sponsors And Welcome

Erin Manning 0:00

The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Media clip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers. Welcome to The Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Meet Mike Grossman And His Start

Gary Pageau 0:24

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Mike Grossman, who's a six-time Silicon Valley CEO and author. And he's coming to us from Silicon Valley. Hi, Mike. How are you today?

Mike Grossman 0:41

I'm great. Thanks for having me on, Gary.

Gary Pageau 0:44

So we're here to talk about business basics and Silicon Valley trends. You've seen a lot being a six-time CEO. Where did you get your start? Where did you come from? And take us through your journey a little bit.

Mike Grossman 0:58

I got the Silicon Valley for a couple of reasons. One of which is that I grew up with a technologist for a father.

Gary Pageau 1:04

Okay.

Mike Grossman 1:04

Worked at IBM Research for many years. And I always thought it was a really interesting sector to focus on.

Gary Pageau 1:11

What was that time period when you were getting into things? When was that?

Mike Grossman 1:15

I mean, he he worked there in the 70s and the 80s and early 90s. And so when I was, I don't know, starting around the age of 10, I was exposed. Right, I was exposed to a lot of interesting technical things. I personally gravitated more to the business side at a fairly young age. By the time I was a teenager, I concluded I wanted to do entrepreneurial things. And so then the next key step was that when I was in college, I wrote a paper that was focused on the computer industry. And unintentionally, that helped me get a job when I graduated from college as a management consultant out in California. And the client for much of the next year was Apple. Oh, nice. And I was in the mid-80s. And by that point, I was hooked. I thought this is just an exciting place to be. This is where I want to make my career.

Gary Pageau 2:04

So Apple at that time was very different from the Apple of this time. And that's where life, you know, they just had their 50th anniversary book come out, right? I've always been fascinated by the Apple corporate story of, you know, not even necessarily the Steve Jobs stuff, but even just so if he was in the mid-80s, that was like around the time that Macintosh was launched, right?

Mike Grossman 2:27

It was about a year and a half after Mac was launched. It was before anybody realized how terrible a mistake that was.

Gary Pageau 2:34

And the Mac really wasn't a product until you know the laser writer came in and there was desktop publishing. You know, before that, it was kind of a

Fintech Wins And Painful Lessons

Gary Pageau 2:43

very niche product, not for everybody for sure. Awesome. So so from there, you you mentioned earlier before the call, you got into fintech as your first groups of startups. So what were those like in that era? Because right now fintech's hot, right? With all the various apps and things and all that. But back then it was relatively new.

Mike Grossman 3:07

Yeah, the internet was new, and the consequence is that there was a lot of adverse selection. So we the the first business was a small business lending marketplace. You could apply for a small business could apply for a loan and get evaluated in real time by 50 different financial institutions, including some big ones like American Express and Wells Fargo and so on. And then they'd get an answer as to whether or not they qualified for a loan, and they'd get the answer immediately. So it was very cool. It was kind of ahead of its time. But the problem was the problem was that most of the small businesses that were coming to the website were only applying because their corner bank wouldn't give them a loan. So you were getting distressed companies looking for money. So timing is everything, and our timing was wrong. And we ended up having to change the business model completely and move away from that. And the second company was a debit card company, an innovative debit card company. You know, when you have a debit card, it's tied to your bank account. But the concept behind this company was that you could get a debit card issued by somebody else, and then behind the scenes it would connect to your bank account. But the but in this case, the debit cards weren't issued by that bank. And the reason it was interesting for retailers was it was a mechanism for them to reduce costs. And we were doing great, and then all of a sudden, Congress passed a law and the legislative business model out of existence. Price controls were imposed on debit card fees, and all of a sudden that business wasn't viable anymore. Oh, that's too bad. So it's one of the reasons that the book I wrote called I call it Failure Is an Option. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes they go right, sometimes they go wrong, and that's just part of the drill.

Gary Pageau 4:43

So then you got kind of burned in the fintech world a couple of times. So what happened after that?

Mike Grossman 4:50

I ended up instead of starting companies, ended up being somebody who was recruited in by venture capitalists. Typically, the companies were in some level of distress. And so I it was the task was a kind of turnaround task. And I did a series of them, and the idea was to try to fix the companies up and and then ultimately sell them. And then the the sixth uh company was the one where it ended up actually doing really well. And so I had the the the sort of opposite experience where when it looked like things weren't going to go well, then actually things did. And I guess my conclusion out of that is that there's a lot of luck involved in

Warning Signals And Real Pivot Commitment

Mike Grossman 5:25

business. And I guess it's also the law of large numbers. If you the more you do, the more that do well, and the more that do poorly, and that's just life.

Gary Pageau 5:36

So let's talk a little bit about some of those lessons you learned. Because, like having been through some of that myself as an outsider, looking specifically in the photo sharing space and some of the things they're having, timing was everything for a lot of those companies, right? When you look at some of those early companies in digital photo sharing, you know, they're they were actually processing film and uploading them, which was you know crazy. And then of course, when everything went digital, the business model kind of flipped and just went to direct printing, which was a completely different value proposition, and people didn't have to print, right? So the bottom fell kind of fell on that. And there were no legislative issues then, but there's certainly the market talk. What are some of the signals that someone can see, either from a market or a legislative standpoint, that you know their business model might be in trouble?

Mike Grossman 6:29

You start there's two pieces, I would say. One is just you have to stay abreast of technical change because it's it happens and it happens fast. And you know, you often can see hints of it. And really the issue is as you see it emerging, if it comes to fruition, is it gonna completely disrupt your business and the environment? Because all in many spaces and photography being one, the answer is yes. I mean, that's been uh it's been clear for the last 20 years as new technologies arise that it's gonna have a very disruptive impact. Right. And the second is if you have revenue, you can usually get an early warning indicator of, you know, something is going on here because I had a certain number of leads and I had a certain number of opportunities and I had a certain amount of revenue, and it seems to be turning in the wrong direction here very quickly. Right. Usually that means something.

Gary Pageau 7:17

The mindset of a lot of founders and entrepreneurs is almost to dismiss the data, though, in a lot of cases. Don't you see that sometimes where people are like they believe so strongly in either their team or their business model, their technology, they ignore the signals.

Mike Grossman 7:35

One of the things that I often say is the business model is not the business. And I have seen people fall in love with the business model. This is the way I do business, right? And usually those are the companies that go out of business. Right. It's the people who are more willing to adapt and say, okay, well, I want my business to succeed. It's gonna need to, I mean, I need to adjust in some way. Yeah. And those are the ones that sort of bob and weave and pivot and end up doing better in the long run.

Gary Pageau 8:06

Yeah, you use the word pivot, I use the word adaptation for the same idea, right? Because you know, I was reading something the other day about early YouTube. YouTube started as a dating site, right? And then they figured out that people are uploading just videos because they want to take it because it was the only place you could conveniently upload videos, so they pivoted to that, and you know, that they kind of went where their customers went. Go ahead.

Mike Grossman 8:29

I've run six businesses, but we've had 18 different business models. Okay. So I'm I'm I'm a big fan, I'm a big advocate of pivoting.

Gary Pageau 8:37

So when you're in that position of you're seeing those signals that maybe the leads are drying up or your customers are migrating to some else, what are some of the things you can look at when you're looking at pivoting, right? Do you look at your technology? Do you look at your people? Do you look at your funding? I mean, the reality is if your customers are leaving you for whatever reason, maybe it's you're too expensive now, or your technology is a competitive or something, you need to respond in some way. So what are some of the things you would first look at to diagnose a direction in which to go?

Mike Grossman 9:14

I think the things you mentioned are some of the key issues. If it's a technical change, technological change, which is fundamentally affecting the business, the question is whether you can leverage new technology in a way to be at the front end of the change as opposed to the person who gets messed up by it. I think also typically when businesses pivot, they pivot to things that are close to what they do. Right. But it's kind of hard to be a photography business and then all of a sudden say, okay, I'm going to pivot to being a travel, you know, a travel business, or I'm going to pivot to being a sports team. Right. You usually you got to do something which makes sense for your customer base or for the people in the company. Often you need to be fairly bold about it and to be willing to walk away from the business as it was because there's a limited amount of time in the day. And if you try to do your old business while also trying to embrace something new, you usually run out of time.

Gary Pageau 10:05

Interesting. So it's really not a one foot in, one foot out sort of situation. If you once you decide to make the change, you have to make the change. I think so.

Mike Grossman 10:15

I mean, I think that focus is one of the key issues that I've seen in these various entrepreneurial businesses and both ones that I've been involved with directly, but also ones where I've acted as an advisor. And the narrower the focus, usually the better the

Founder Identity And Team-First Leadership

Mike Grossman 10:30

companies do, in my experience. And when you've figured out that you need to pivot, you really need to commit to it.

Gary Pageau 10:36

Yeah.

Mike Grossman 10:37

And I think one of the mistakes people often make is they only do that in a half-hearted way. Look, it's hard when you've built something, right, and you've invested your time and your energy, but your soul in a way, right in that business. When you need to move away from it, it can be emotionally very difficult. Even if objectively, analytically, you say, I know I need to do this, it's a hard thing to do. Absolutely. So, really, the the biggest issue often is not the practical side of it, it's the emotional side.

Gary Pageau 11:05

Because a lot of founders look at their businesses as I mean, maybe not their children, but certainly something they've invested a lot of personal feelings and equity and emotion and everything into. And then to have to A, you have to make a change, you have to admit you either made a mistake or you made a miscalculation, and then you have to stop doing that thing to pivot otherwise.

Mike Grossman 11:29

I think a lot of times people start blurring their identity with the business, and it's just like the business is a piece of them in some uh sense. And I I know what that feels like, yeah. But ultimately that's not very helpful when you're trying to figure out how to do this, and and it really in the end, it's not part of your identity.

Gary Pageau 11:48

I mean, it's a different well that's interesting because I mean, obviously, you had a couple businesses, a specific area, right? The you know, financial services, right? And you could have pigeonholed yourself as the financial services guy, right? I'm a financial services CEO startup guy, and instead you decided that maybe you could you have skills you could apply in other industries.

Mike Grossman 12:15

Well, it was a conscious choice. At the time, I thought I could keep going down this path because a lot of times the world tends to stereotype people and pigeonhole them, and you know, you're you've done this, so that's what you can do. And I've always had a quietly defiant streak as not willing to accept society's definition of what I should be doing. Right, right, right. And that's something that I've ended up leveraging as my career has progressed.

Gary Pageau 12:43

So, what at what point did you realize you had skills independent of the business? And what were those skills?

Mike Grossman 12:50

It's funny, you know, I never actually intended to be a CEO. What I was interested in doing was being an entrepreneur. Right and and more specifically, a serial entrepreneur who started a lot of different businesses. I never actually thought about running the companies. This is when I was younger. I just thought I want to start a lot of stuff. But when I did, I found that the CEO side of it, though, the president side, the leadership side of it, was something that actually fit pretty well. And some of that is I believe that great companies are based on great people. It's the folks you work with. And when you can have put together a group that's collaborative, enjoys working together, and is very values-driven and focused and analytical and so on, you can achieve an awful lot. And I guess what I found was that I was good at assembling those teams and creating an environment where people were excited to work together. And so it ended up becoming a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. And as the years progressed, I ended up focusing more on that part of the of the challenge as opposed to starting new things.

Gary Pageau 13:56

Did you have people that you brought with you to different organizations? Your team that you're that you port up you took with you?

Mike Grossman 14:05

Yes. There's some people I've worked with three or four times in different companies, different industries, different contexts. I've been in a business where often the companies get acquired, and when the companies get acquired, some of the people end up sticking with the company that bought you. And and so they're often not available. So maybe the next company they wouldn't be free, but it was the company after that they would be.

Gary Pageau 14:37

So let's say someone goes through a process where they start a business, it pivots, it may not pivot very well, and they either have to sell or be acquired and whatever, and then they they find themselves adrift, they're between things. Yeah. So you think they should just jump right back in, or what's the what what worked for you in that case?

Mike Grossman 15:03

I think they have to figure out what makes them happiest. I don't think that starting businesses is for everybody, it's kind of an act of lunacy in some regards. And so some people, and I think I'm one of them, are kind of wired in a way where that it's fun, and the pain of doing it, and there's a lot of pain too, yeah. Is not as great as the as the fun. I think there are other people that have sudden so much trauma around riding the emotional roller coaster that maybe it's not the best thing to continue, excuse me, but not the best thing to continue doing. And so I think it depends on the individual. Certainly if they enjoy it, like like I have. Yeah, you want to find the next thing. And even if you're adrift and you be proactive and learn about what's going on, and it is always opportunity. That's one thing I've seen. Entrepreneurial opportunity exists. There's never a moment which is okay, the world is done, everything has been created,

Staying Level Through Highs And Lows

Mike Grossman 16:00

thought of. It does not work that way.

Gary Pageau 16:02

Plus, you know, the other side of it, of course, is the personal toll, right? On family and relationships, which also has to be taken into account.

Mike Grossman 16:10

Yeah, there's no question it can be very difficult, especially when you run into adversity with companies. And I've experienced that. It's tough. And you have lots of ups and lots of downs. And sometimes when it's a down period, you don't sleep at night and you're staring at the ceiling and you're feeling enormous anxiety. And it does have an impact on relationships and your and your life more generally. The biggest thing that I've learned to do is for coping purposes, is not get too high and not get too low. Right. One of the key things I've learned through my kind of crazy career is whenever things are really good, I'm absolutely certain that they're not going to stay that way. They're going to get worse. And conversely, whenever things are really bad, what I've seen is if you just kind of keep working the problem, eventually they end up improving. I try to stay pretty level. And I think I've been lucky in that I was born that way, sort of, if that makes sense. Yeah. But I've also trained myself to do that because of the roller coaster ride is something that can be hard to tolerate at times.

Gary Pageau 17:22

So when an outsider like me like goes to Silicon Valley and meets people over the course of the past 30-some years, you get sort of this impression or feeling that there's almost like they put failure on a pedestal to some degree, right? You know, you see the LinkedIn posts, you see the the 12 things I and it's almost, I don't know. It's I'm gonna say it's insincere, but it seems almost like if you don't have a great failure story you in Silicon Valley, you're not you're

Why Silicon Valley Accepts Failure

Gary Pageau 17:55

you haven't done it right. What is it about that area or that business climate that embraces that so much?

Mike Grossman 18:05

I think there's a recognition that it's possible to do a good job and fail. Sure. And I also think there's a realization that if you have failed, there's a pretty good chance that you'll learn some key lessons from that that make it less likely that you'll fail the next time. And so there's a long-term view on success, whatever that means. Yeah, and everyone's is different, right? In Silicon Valley, often it's I think equated with return on investment and money and so on. I think that very often too much attention is given to that. So even though everybody may have a failure story, right? People don't generally run around the streets shouting to the world, hey, guess what? I failed again.

Gary Pageau 18:51

They want to talk about but but it's almost better from a from a personal branding standpoint to talk about your failures as opposed to your successes because you want to be seen as bragging. That's true.

Mike Grossman 19:04

That is, but I don't know. I guess if you've come through adversity and the measure of success, yeah, it's kind of like a the film script almost. It's uh yeah, the hero's journey, right? That's the horrible thing, right? They think that's right.

Gary Pageau 19:17

You know, in the second act, he's got to get his ass kicked.

Mike Grossman 19:20

So before but I will say what my experience has been, and this is what's different, I think, than at least what I usually see in Silicon Valley, is I've not experienced the hero's journey. When I think about the the this journey in these in these movies, it's somebody starts something with great excitement, everything goes well, then they hit adversity, and then they work through the adversity, and there's a happy grand success at the end. But in real life, what I've seen is something goes well and then it goes poorly, and then it goes well and then well, and then poorly, and then poorly. It's of ups and downs and failures and successes, and it's constant. It's not like you get to a stage where, okay, that was my failure chapter. Now it's the success time. Right. My next company, whatever that is, I can tell you right now, there's a very good chance it will fail. Right. Or I it'll fail on the way to success because that's just the nature of the beast. Sure. I think that it's worth acknowledging that. I just think you know, the entrepreneurial business or business generally is just the microcosm of life. Right. Good things and bad things happen in kind of a random sequence, I think. And I'm ultimately an optimist, but it's never never easy.

Gary Pageau 20:25

Well, yeah, I mean, you have to be an optimist to be a business, right? But you also have to be kind of a realist, right? And that's that's where when I look at some of the things now with like what's happened with AI, right? I'm getting a lot of early internet bubble vibes with what's happening in AI right now, in terms of, you know, oh

AI Hype, Bubbles, And Long-Term Change

Gary Pageau 20:45

my gosh, all this wonderful stuff is gonna happen. And then it's like, you know, it it you know, I remember when you know there were some great internets, puts pets.com was supposed to be the future. I remember. And then it's then it wasn't right, and then other people stepped in. So so when so from the standpoint of like what you're seeing now happening in you know Silicon Valley with all the with all the the obsession with AI, you know, everything having AI being put into it, whether you want it there or not, right? Why do you think that is? Is it because of the investment of environment? Is it because of it's a new technology and people think they want it? I don't understand why I need AI in my task manager, for example.

Mike Grossman 21:56

I mean, every five years or 10 years or so, there's some new exciting technology that all of a sudden gets an enormous amount of attention. Right. And generally speaking, what ends up happening is that thousands of companies are created and most of them fail, and a few of them end up being transformative. Now, AI is seems a little different to me than most of them, and I think the reason is because it's the first time. That you have these software products or platforms where you don't know what answer it's going to give. Right. And that's that's different than before. So it sort of simulates things like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which isn't which has not been the case before. But I'm sure the patterns are going to be the same. Most of the companies aren't going to do very well. Right. Everybody's looking to tell an AI story, even if in fact that's not really what their company is about because they think it'll help evaluation. But having said that, I think that there will be some transformative companies. We're seeing some of it now. Yeah, like anthropic and you know, open AI and so on. And you know, they're not going away anytime soon. And they're gonna begin.

Gary Pageau 23:01

Yeah, I'm not trying to diss it. I'm just saying it's like I said, it's sort of that I just it's sort of like where to ride that wave of because you know, as a user, because I use this stuff in various forms every day, right? For various things, and but it's like, how much do I want to invest in just time learning some of this stuff and then adapting my workflow to it and then have them, you know, I've seen it where they oh, we don't offer that anymore, or we're changing the terms, or you know, or you gotta buy, we're changing the model, and you gotta buy a ton more credits to do this thing. And it's like, well, you know, I just had that happen with one of the a service I subscribe to, right? This, oh no, if you want to use the desktop version, you gotta buy this many credits. And I'm like, Well, I already paid for the annual for the other one. I'm not using you anymore.

Mike Grossman 23:50

I mean, a lot of these companies are trying to figure out what they're doing while they're, you know, yeah. I'm reminded though, I remember when the internet first emerged, Bill Gates said something that I think was pretty profound. He said that at the time, he said people are underestimating what the impact is of the internet will be in the in the short term. Excuse me, overestimating what the value of the internet will be in the short term and underestimating what the impact will be in the long term. So what we're seeing is incredible excitement around AI, but it's sort of similar to his comment, I think in in the short to medium term, it'll probably be less impactful than people realize. But in the long term, it's gonna be an enormous fact.

Gary Pageau 24:25

I mean, you were mentioned to Apple earlier, right? I kind of like what Apple is doing with their strategy with hey, we're just gonna incorporate other people's AI until we perfect ours. And so they're using Google Gemini, but it's almost like they're making an independent of devices, too. It's like they're gonna put it in everything, and and that's where I think it's actually gonna go is you're gonna have different, there's not gonna be one dominant AI. You might have used one for different situations.

Mike Grossman 24:51

Yeah, I think that's likely. It's funny though, I've gotten a chance personally to see some of the limitations of AI and some of the hallucinations, for example.

Gary Pageau 24:59

Oh, sure, absolutely.

Mike Grossman 25:00

I was doing my taxes. My daughter had a hip surgery last year, she's an athlete, and it was related to a sports injury. And I realized, oh, I can deduct a bunch of medical expenses, but I didn't plan ahead. I hadn't actually made the list of all the different expenses yet. And so I thought I came up with what I thought was a good idea. I would upload all my bank statements and credit card statements and ask AI to create a really nice spreadsheet pulling out all the medical expenses. And I pressed the button, and three minutes later, I had a beautiful spreadsheet. That was the good news. The bad news was when I looked at the that the information on the spreadsheet, none of the expenses were mine. I don't know who's I don't know whose they were. And then it sort of begs the question of what happened to my expenses, the problem is somebody else's spreadsheet. I realized, okay, this isn't gonna work. I can't use AI for this. Exactly.

Gary Pageau 25:46

So in an AI-driven business culture, when you're talking about teams, right? Going back to your original idea of having good people, core people, do you think it's gonna be more important, the people side? Or not I would say neither.

Mike Grossman 26:05

I would say it's always incredibly important and will continue incredibly important. I mean, the AI doesn't work by itself, right? I mean, it works in collaboration with people. So if it writes the code, the AI does, but it writes the code based on the prompt that and prompts that are provided by the engineers, and the better the engineer, the better the prompt. And so you need that's a key issue. And this is in every functional area, marketing spells, you name it. People will always remain critically

People, Jobs, And Adaptation In Practice

Mike Grossman 26:37

important. It's just that certain tasks will now be automated that obviously weren't able to be automated. Yeah, I don't think things are gonna change when it comes to companies depending on people and organizations of people and how they interact. I would be very surprised if over the next century.

Gary Pageau 26:54

Yeah, well, I mean, jobs are obviously going to change, but I I was having this discussion with somebody before about you know AI getting rid of jobs. I said, Well, I remember when there were typing pools filled with women usually typing on IBM Selectrics, going back to your dad, IBM Selectrics, and they and then word processors came and eliminated the typing pool. And now those people are doing other jobs, right? There's a probably higher, less routine function for them to do.

Mike Grossman 27:29

I think since the industrial revolution, that's been the story is that technology moves ahead, and when it does, it undoubtedly has a very disruptive effect on the workforce and a lot of people, but then things adjust. Certain types of jobs no longer exist, but new types of jobs exist. I don't have any reason to believe that isn't continuing to happen and will continue to happen going forward. Yeah, people have to adjust. And certainly if you're in a certain line of work which is heavily disrupted by technology, that can be very difficult. Yeah, absolutely. Reinventing oneself is not an easy task. I have, but still, I've been in more or less the same line of work. But it's clearly not easy, and and I know a lot of people in engineering right now out here in Silicon Valley who are struggling with this because they assume that they would have certain types of opportunities, and it's harder to come by certain types of jobs now.

Gary Pageau 28:25

Yeah, I mean, we're certainly seeing it with we're certainly seeing it with you know the recent uh announcements of layoffs amongst you know the big software companies. And for years we've been telling college kids, get into software, it's great, there'll always be software jobs, and now you got vibe coding happening.

Mike Grossman 28:43

Yeah, and there will still be software jobs, but they'll but the industry will look different, and then people will have to adjust in different types of jobs. My son is a basketball coach, and at the time when he made that shift, he was actually in the film industry for four years. When he made the shift into basketball, my wife and I thought this might be really very difficult. And and then now we're realizing, well, you AI is not gonna take over basketball coaching.

Gary Pageau 29:09

Exactly. He's gonna use AI tools, right? He's gonna drop some some the footage of his opponents in an AI and say, analyze this, but he's still gonna be the one to use the results and talk to the kids.

Mike Grossman 29:20

That's right. And there's an example of an industry that's growing internationally very rapidly, and there's gonna be a lot more jobs over the course of the next 20, 30, 40 years. Yeah, my daughter is she's a photographer and videographer, and she is using you know tools all the time. I mean before there was AI, you know, you're using Adobe and so on. But again, there are no robots right now that can they can go to a live sports event like you know, like she does, and and capture the right moments in the right way. That's not that's not gonna happen either. Right. So it really depends on the specific industry, I think. Yeah overall, I think I don't see it as apocalyptic. I I think that some people are being disrupted for sure, and they'll have to be absolutely but in the longer run, I'm not optimistic what impact it'll have.

Gary Pageau 30:10

Yeah, I mean to be in business, you kind of have to be optimistic, right? Because you're looking at growth and ROI and all of these things, and that's you know, that's you always want that to be a net positive, right?

Mike Grossman 30:23

That's right. Now that doesn't by itself mean it that that'll happen, but it's right, exactly. But I but I exactly history is shown. I mean, again, when mobile phones came along, you know, when computers came along and so on, all of that has created a thriving economy around it. Right.

Gary Pageau 30:39

Yeah, and yeah, and things are things are changing. I had this conversation before with somebody who was talking about they were saying complaining, you know, about lack of opportunity. I said 50, 60, 70 years ago, yeah, you didn't have a lot of choices in your career. Now you can make your own career, literally, absolutely if you want to do it. I mean, I mean certain types of no guarantees it's gonna be a success either, but that's a fact.

Mike Grossman 31:07

But certain types of jobs didn't exist as recently as 10 or 15 years ago. Influencers, for example. Right, that's a new not sure.

Gary Pageau 31:14

That's a good thing, though, but that's a whole that's a whole other I mean, just in terms of like when you look at entertainment as a category, for example, a hundred years ago it was tiny, it was a tiny little thing. Movie studios weren't huge, obviously, recorded music was just coming on the scene and everything like that. Now, a hundred years later, you've got pop stars selling billion-dollar tours with all kinds of infrastructure and support around that, a whole economy built around these things where you know, 100 years ago the economy was built around making physical things, right? Which we still need to do, obviously. But you know, the reality is is you know, in another hundred years, who knows what what opportunities will be.

Mike Grossman 32:03

I agree. But I think if you have an entrepreneurial mindset, you're always looking for those opportunities. So from that perspective, disruption can has negative aspects, but it also has positive aspects. That's part of the reason that I pursued this career. I just find it interesting. Innovation leads to ideas, and ideas can often lead to things being provided to people that are different and better than before. And I think that's exciting.

Gary Pageau 32:29

Speaking of excitement, where can people go to re learn more about you and get a copy of Failure is not an option? Reflection value CEO.

Mike Grossman 32:40

Failure is an option. There you go. All right. I have a website which is I wrote the book because I thought that I hadn't read the story of what it really feels

Book, Links, And Closing Thoughts

Mike Grossman 32:52

like to run these types of entrepreneurial, crazy technology companies. And really how interesting and fun, and yet at the same time difficult and challenging it is.

Gary Pageau 33:05

Yeah.

Mike Grossman 33:05

I thought I wanted to describe in a very authentic way what that actually feels like. And I've attempted to capture that in the book.

Gary Pageau 33:14

Well, definitely appreciate it. And I think I've got a copy of it I'm going to read, so thank you so much. And best wishes on your future success and your next startup.

Mike Grossman 33:23

Thanks, Gary. I appreciate it very much.

Erin Manning 33:28

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