Be Resilient

Be Resilient

Dom Einhorn
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
3/1/2021

The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

i would say before you get jumping head first ask yourself a question do you have the dna of an entrepreneur yes or no um and in most cases the answer is no i would say that to become a successful entrepreneur takes a tremendous amount of grit resilience and ability to take the pain and get back up it will be a very painful journey you gotta know that before you launch yourself if you ask me right right now uh it's not i can't prove it scientifically but by experience just empirically uh how many people actually have what it takes if you are one of those person you have five percent or one out of 20. [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours feel free to go to strategymeeting.com and we're always here to help now today we have another great guest and i say all good guess another great guest because they all really are great and i'm dom is certainly no exception we have dom um einhorn i think and i just learned right before the podcast that einhorn means unicorn in german and so it was a suiting and if you're if you're unicorn company or anything else maybe you should start calling yourself an iron horn instead of a unicorn but anyway quick introduction to dom so uh uh runs he's run sever uh tech focus incubator that has several different projects um has been trying to or it's accomplishing letting uh in entrepreneurs and inventors know that they have a different way it's backing up just a bit so he was actually i think a professional prize fighter for a period of time um did three years of service in or for france i think it was and you fought in chad and you can correct me wherever i'm wrong um then came back um from fighting quit decided to do startups and then did i think a pre internet kind of a billboard for travel um did in 93 did some uh things for yahoo was yahoo search developer built a development car company um did website building uh did that for a period of time and then bringing it up to where he's at today that's kind of morphed into a i'd say tech advantage or tech advantage company for marketing and pr to help companies and businesses with that much is an introduction welcome on to the podcast dom hey thanks a lot for having me evan pleasure being here so i got to say the other thing i learned i like two things about your name because you have einhorn which is unicorn which is really cool and then the other thing is it is completely excited nothing to do with your journey but i'm i'm i'm a car guy so i like fast and the furious and one of the main people in the show you know their name is dom so i like the name on both frets just because i like fast and furious and i think unicorns plays well to businesses thanks as much yeah yeah it's it's funny because when i go to german tech conferences the first thing they ask me is when did you change your last name like no i've always been a unicorn since way before it was fashionable since way before the uh the term was coined exactly well let's now dive a bit into your journey now that i've told you how much i like your name and this it's true as well but tell take us back a little bit in time and i think you said kind of where it starts is you were a prize fighter for a period of time and did that for a while yeah it was in the in the 80s and actually that's what got me on to the the journey of becoming an entrepreneur so in the late 80s i was booking my uh my travel on the on the predecessor ancestor of the internet called the minitel mini tel in france which was a dos based uh you know bulletin board for lack of a better term that allowed you to book travel more efficiently than via a regular travel agency so i was hooked early on uh with technology uh then later on in the early 90s i moved from france to the us spent 25 years there and came back in 2018 to create unicorn so i started early on as a digital manufacturer before we dive in and we'll definitely get to that but one question i got asked so you know as a price so was it boxing i assume with price fighting right kicked off what you know is it it seems like that would be a fun and exciting thing where you get to do it where you were you any good did you know you say prize fighter so i assume you won surprises but give me this out of personal interest it's good i think it sounds cool and exciting how was it to be a prize fighter and was it a fun and exciting career and what made you decide to kind of get out of it well injuries got me out of it uh getting my behind kick got me into it yeah like like a lot of them uh so i learned how to defend yourself you know in the in the in the 70s and early 70s i started very early uh i had some nice little accolades yes uh had a very good record track record fought uh professional for several years including in the in in the us and las vegas which is what early on got me to las vegas my strength coach was from las vegas actually uh and uh one thing leading to another so you know booking my travel four four tournaments four four fives is probably the reason why i ended up getting into tech space because i was intrigued with it i also always knew uh you know there is probably life beyond that unfortunately right uh and i see this today because i happen to also be the largest shareholder of the local rugby team here in france in our town and uh i have seven rugby players professional rugby players that work with me here at unicorn uh and we're trying to actually put together a rugby plus program where they get to perform on the field and also off the field and helping them you know reconvert later on in their careers and actually instead of walking away and being just lost actually having a career waiting for them no and i think that that first of all it's cool that you're you know that they they have that opportunity and i think that they would make great employees and certainly know how to be competitive how to work hard and how to be take you know to get that competitive edge now one thing and then we'll dive into a little bit more you're doing with the business now but you know so after you did bach or price fighting for period time did you go into the military service before you got into startups yeah actually it was pretty much concurrent because the french military school i went to it's in in france is a little different than the us when it comes to actually academics and sports uh it's changed a little bit but in france you have to make an early decision as to whether or not you want to be smart or you want to be an athlete they don't really give you the option to do both unfortunately uh going through ivy league military school was the only exception which one of the reasons why you joined so i did that did a three and a half year stint there uh and uh didn't intend of making that a long term you know play either anyway because i had two older brothers grew up in a middle class family uh my mom and dad were stretched financially you know and that was my way of actually getting education and doing what i love at the same time well that's that's a cool way to to tackle or several different goals of hey first of all i have this skill and ability to do prize fighting second of all i'd like to get an education why not do it all the time and then find a way to be able to afford and to jump into that so now now kind of going to where you were starting so you came out of the military or got out of price fighting wasn't you know and i'm i'm guessing you know i've had we've had a few other professional athletes on the the podcast more so in football and uh basketball but it seems like you know a lot of times you get into hey i love this but either one it's not a lot it's not i'm not going to be able to go professional or i'm not going to be a long-term long-term profession or two i got an injury and so either way i have to pivot out of that and you know and not that you may not already have that inclination anyway so you did that you've been using the travel bulletin board kind of pre-internet and so then i think you talked about and we chatted a bit before that as you were kind of getting into the startup it was if yeah you were doing kind of web development you were one of the first three i think you said that was on yahoo yeah yeah it was 93 but you know back in 93 you probably remember if you're old enough you probably remember the times what we used to call it in the information super highway before calling it the internet you know for about 18 to 24 months that was the term being used and actually yahoo technically speaking was it wasn't even a search engine it was a human curated directory of web weblinks uh before altavist web crawler and lycos came about uh those are predecessors to uh to google today right so certainly i always i always liked not that i think it's even around i think sg was about the same yeah the butler the butler i love the ash jeep now i i don't know how good it was but i i it's been long enough go i just that was my always my go-to because that was i just thought it was a cool one so yeah and then then they became ask they bought the domain name ask.com which took him like three years to acquire because the uh the owner didn't want to sell for a long period of time until the offer was good enough they could afford to pay a nice price tag for it well fair enough so now so you got into web developer basically when the internet was barely a thing or just becoming of age you know how was that was it lucrative was it difficult i mean nowadays you take it for an advantage right in the sense that there's a lot of web developers everybody if you don't have a web page people i wonder what's wrong with your business or they want you know that unless you're in a niche industry almost everybody has alicia webpage some of them are great some of them are horrible i always like to joke that most law firm web pages are terrible but it's one of my favorite pastimes is a completely decide to go find terrible law firm web pages as you're getting in early on and you know starting into that industry how was it as far as was there demand were you having to convince people they needed a web page was it difficult to make a web page or kind of give us an insight there yeah yeah so i i was trying to sell websites before people knew what a website was right so in many ways it was like selling ice to eskimos and i actually was able to coin my own term which is 36 over one and it's pretty much a tale of uh grit and persistence uh 3601 what it means is that i i took close record of how many calls i needed to make to sell a website in 1993 1994 and it took me 36 connects so it took me 35 failures to get to one success i'll get no i got it now just because you gave that i'll give you the other similar analogy which is you know wd-40 right with wd-40 yeah i do yeah you know where the or what wd-40 stands for no no weeds for w i think i'd have to double check on the wd i think it's water dissipa or dissipation or something of that nature but the 40 is what i always find interesting 40 was a number of different mixtures or different configurations he had to try before we got to what it what what works today so similar to what you did 39 failures of hey this doesn't work this doesn't lubricate right it's not or what it is and then when it got to 40 that was the one that we used today and that was one that worked so kind of just an interesting aside of kind of that similar or 35 failures to get to the 36 success that was where wd-40 comes i you americans are a strange breed that's why you also need 33 33 different flavors of ice cream before you like one i guess i guess so so [Laughter] so now going back from the rabbit hole the the side so you're you're doing the internet you're making websites you're having to tell people why they need this when the internet is just barely becoming a thing how did you kind of take that and grow the business and how did that evolve well you know it went actually a lot easier afterwards i mean the initial the initial year or two were very difficult where we just again tried to sell it to eskimos but we did sell some ice semis to eskimos so we just barely survived and it was just pure grit and just make the dials in order to make a living and just survive and stick with it and then i would say after netscape 1.0 came out right 95 95 96 where the internet really became ubiquitous people knew what it was more and more people uh you know started inquiring about what a website was you know what they needed why they needed to have one what is the url why it should be in your catalog right it gives you an additional way after effects facts on demand before that to promote yourself so it was very incremental but we got into a situation between 1997 1999 where because we were early movers literally everybody and their brother called us and wanted to have a website first and then we quickly got into digital marketing as an add-on right now that you have a website you have to promote it how are you going to promote it you know early seo right lead generation before you i got a question and i know i i'm usually i don't have these many questions but apparently your journey is just what the res i i just like have a lot of questions on the web development so i've done a bit of it i think it's interesting and it's fun and i do it some we i i now have a marketing team that helps with a lot when i originally did the law firm website i did it myself i had some i built a few others so it wasn't i started from scratch but that one is at least you know i use shopify and that's a longer reason as to why and there is motivation for why i did it but i gotta imagine back in the day there really wasn't the website building tools and it was a lot more rudimentary and it wasn't like you have all the resources you did today so did you have a background in website building or did you just say it was not at all not not at all so i surrounded myself i was the sales and marketing guy and i i hired web developers what they basically initially they were html coders and that's what they prided themselves off right it was all written by hand there was no tool that would actually make this uh you know this creation process systematic like there is today uh the little anecdote in 1998 my mom i was using 800 times less bandwidth than i'm using today but my monthly bandwidth bill was 8 500 u.s in 1998. in 1999 2000 is when we really got into e-commerce when e-commerce really started to gain gain ground and basically you needed to have a database the only kid in the block was an oracle database one server license cost thirty two thousand dollars u.s right so if you wanted to launch the business at that time unless you raised a half a million to a million bucks you had no point being in business right so i think it's the much different dynamic now you can have 30 bucks go put up a website you can build it yourself not saying that as as optimizers good but you can definitely the costs have come down and and makes it much more competitive 100 so i mean what you've seen is you've have massive democratization massive demonetization of the process over the last 25 years so today you can create a new business instantly right you can if you look at hackathons they basically create businesses within 48 hours over a weekend right but by the by the mere fact that everybody can do that today you also have tremendously increased competition and the playing ground has completely changed how do you stand out from the crowd right so i think for all of you digital marketers out there for all of you creative entrepreneurs i think this is your calling right because it's no longer you no longer differentiate yourself by your ability to code because you if you look at the no code right theme that's that's pretty much permit you know present everywhere today where you can create any application without any any just drag and drop right pieces into one place the real differentiator is not there anymore right the real differentiator is how to be different from anybody else clearly while still solving problems instead of inventing them because as a result of anybody becoming an entrepreneur today very often what we see for example uh people knocking at our door is they sometimes seem to create the problem while offering the solution right that's not a neces necessary good idea not necessarily good business model right there are still plenty of problems out there to solve a lot of friction points across any domain in any industry focus on those right but don't try to invent problems for the sake of ultimately solving them no i think that is a that is a great piece of er a great uh piece of advice and i i do agree that they are those industries where they trying to create the problems just so that they can offer the solution and then you're really just paying them to to fix a problem that they created but now as we go back a bit more to your journey so now you've got you know you started in web development didn't have necessarily that experience but they were able to get into it branched out a bit you're saying okay now we've got web development but we've got to help on the marketing side and how do you kind of early days seo type of thing but get them found get a return on investment and make it worth what in those days was even all the more expensive and then how did that you know so doing those and i think you said that the very first website you built if i remember i was a fertility product for horses that stored that's correct uh the brand is still i'm not sure i think a brand is still around was prob pregnant pregnant mayor so it was it was interesting you know because i remember that day where i had pitched you know you'd sell the first website probably pitch 200 businesses right to get the first one and lo and behold it's something i had no idea about it's a pregnancy product for mares right for for horses uh it was strange because that's what i thought would have been the last one right so i had some very interesting uh little ventures as well because at one point in time i created the first uh website to request physical catalogs online i believe it was 1995 or so and it was called there's a bit of irony now that you created a website to request physical catalogs with for all intents and purposes the internet has now killed physical catalyzed along with most of paper news yeah yeah but you know full circle but think about this how many times back back then you know what we the way away a male or a business which is a term that's hardly even used anymore today but the way a mail order business promoted itself is via classified ads call 1-800 right blah blah blah request a free catalog and then slowly you started seeing urls being inserted into just classified ads right so we thought wow you know when you look at customer acquisition costs the average magazine take a better homes and gardens you know and i was i had a contact there and they were telling me look it's it costs an advertiser roughly 35 37 to generate a free catalog request so we thought look we can do this cheaper online and we created emailman.com emailman was a catalog request form i have no idea what it is today but it's an interesting little anecdote because you're an attorney so i'm going to talk to you as you tell your story about attorneys at one point in time i get a phone call from an attorney says hey you know you have emailman.com that belongs to my client this domain i was like well clearly not because you know i'm running a business on it how does it belong to him you know so we started calling he started fighting etc etc right i said look i mean you can do whatever you want i've been i've been running this website for two years now uh or maybe you know if you have an offer to make you know make an offer so he gets up the phone he talks to his client he comes back and calls me and now he's talking to me like a businessman he's no longer the lawyer he's starting to negotiate and i asked him so well i mean you know i have a business but how badly do you need it let's figure something out maybe we can work together and then he just lets the cat at the back he says well you know my client just printed 850 000 catalogs with the domain on it emailman.com blah blah blah blah blah blah ultimately we settled on the price and i sold it 48 hours later but it was very and those are usually if you're true and if you wanted to leverage up your state i could pay or i could sell this for quite a bit because otherwise their two options are either pay what you're willing or what you're asking for or they have to go reprint a ton of catalogs but think about it this would never happen again today right so but you saw this all the time back 25 20 25 years ago where people would just assume wrongly so that the domain was readily available or go file a trademark not checking whether the domain has actually ever been used right uh didn't even know how to check because i remember sitting with an old client of mine that was 1993 and we were sitting at networksolutions.com and he he made a killing made millions of dollars buying vanity 800 domain names that's 800 numbers sorry and i was sitting there with him at network solutions typing in dollar.com travel.com anything.com they were all available for 70 bucks at that time and you should have bought all of them but you would have made it i was i was broke i was 23 years old i just got into the u.s i didn't have a dollar in my pocket so the consumer one other complete aside just on the pricing now of urls and that so you know we have a couple urls and i'm i'm probably a bit of a url hoarder i just like to have them because they're easier they're easier once you need to have buy them to have them in hand than once or somebody else owns them but if you're to look at patents or patents with an s.com what would your guest be as to what that or what that is selling for right now my question is do you own it i don't i don't own it i would love to own it i don't own it was it going what uh i would say between 750 1.5 million you're you're right on it's one or they want over a million and same thing so my last name is miller miller ip law if i wanted to go and buy miller.com same thing both of those are over a million dollars and just astounds me that i get why they can or why they're selling it's a short name it's easy to do but just shocks me how much urls are some of them go for these days so i mean uh going back to the gentleman i was sitting down with who again was the 800 number hoarder at some point in time one of them that we typed in that's we could we touch base later in the early 2000s because one of them we had typed in that was available was business.com which sky dayton the founder earthlink purchased i believe in 2001 or so for 9 million us that's when he called me up and he told me that was the dumbest thing i've ever done in my life not like not listening to you because we could have bought them all right and actually be billionaires within two hours you know just buy dollar.com just by businessbook.com and a few others and you've only known so that's right now diving back just a bit to your journey because that's a rabbit hole that we could chat out all day but getting back back a bit to your journey so you did that you did web development you expanded in you expanded your services over a period of time did you know a few things now take us up to kind of where you're at today is because i think the same genesis of the start of the same business is still what you're running today but you've morphed it and you've also got into a bit more of investing and leveraging technology and that so maybe tell us a little bit how that's morphed over the period of time and where that breed brings you out today sure so still today i'm uh pure tech right in the incubator and accelerator that's all we incubate and we accelerate i think the core difference is that i've morphed the last eight eight years or so more into an angel investing position and me the reason for that is i think there is a huge gap i call it the expectation gap between startup entrepreneurs who tend to pitch on fm and investors who tend to listen to am and you know they don't communicate very well if i go back to 1993 the first time i was sitting in front of an investor i was very excited about explaining to him my digital marketing startup uh and after 10 15 years his eyes were glazing over and i lost him very very quickly and then i thought well better shut up and let him speak so he spoke in his finance lingo and i was completely lost when he talked about you know are your seat funding precede are you serious a what level are you at i had no idea what that meant at that point in time yes whatever whatever answer we'll get a good point yeah so fast forward 28 years it's a little better but there's still a lot of ground to make up right so the reason the main reason why we created unicorn is actually somewhat fill that gap and i think what you're seeing today is you're seeing more and more former entrepreneurs tech entrepreneurs who actually becoming angel investors who have been there who have done that who understand the intricacies on both sides of the table right and can serve as a liaison right so for example perfect ecosystem because it's driven by supply and demand is you know very much like uber or airbnb if you only have drivers no writers you have a problem right if you have too many writers and not drivers you have a problem as well here it's supply and demand between the startup entrepreneurs and the capital right having 50 startup entrepreneurs with great concepts and promising startups and no capital is no good having only but capital and and no startups is not good either so you have to maintain a balance between the two and you have to make sure that the two understand each other and can communicate properly but that's part of what we do here where some of the concepts obviously uh because tech is so advanced today so if you're getting into ai 5g augmented reality virtual reality the unless you're specialized in the field you get tend to get lost very very quickly so you have to build this ability of dumbing concepts down and making these concepts accessible for an angel investor who is not necessarily well well-versed in in indo in those fields right and then we've built uh our internal filters inside of unicorn where you know if everything checks out everything is you know we look at financial metrics first and foremost that's done by cfa partner not myself uh assuming everything does check out it comes on to me and the first thing i look at is product market fit i look at the team and then last but not least i look at our ability to scale what they currently have very rapidly specifically on the acceleration side and on that node we specialize in certain domains where you know we're just better than others specifically in the mobile space mobile app space uh we currently rank number one in the in the in the app store so 5 000 keywords in 17 different languages uh you know so we have the ability to accelerate certain businesses much faster than others especially if they're mobile first uh and we do this in travel we do it in fintech we do it in the ar vr we do it in sports predictions in some markets where legal sports betting where we're number one for hundreds of keywords focusing with a hard focus on customer acquisition and on scalability no and i think that that's cool i mean i it's interesting and it seems a bit of a common theme is if you're a successful entrepreneur if you've done some good startups if you've you know had a good career then you know at some point you almost become an investor and i you know some people they're taking the cynical approach say well now you just want to go make a whole bunch of money so you become an investor but i think that a lot of times seems like more so the real commonality is hey i've done this a few times i've been successful i've you know ran some great companies now i want to give back and help kind of the next generation to build their you know build those next technologies the next businesses that are going to kind of or help to you know help things to evolve and to grow and even become better so it sounds like kind of on that very much yeah 100 right i think you know the most exciting part for me today is to be able to what i usually tell young entrepreneurs is that look i cannot necessarily tell you what it is that you should be doing but i can tell you with almost certainty what it is that you should not be doing so i think this hands-on approach is somewhat lost uh i think one big thing that's missing is this mentoring in the field and again you know we work with attorneys we work with accountants we have digital marketers in the house we have great graphic designers great developers etc uh for you to come in knowing that you're not on your own because there's nothing worse than the lone wolf entrepreneur right you get depressed you hit a hurdle you don't know how to resolve it you bang your head against the wall for weeks on end as a developer because you hit that hurdle when hey if you're in the right ecosystem you lift your hand there's a helping hand there the guy shows you well here's the line of code that's making it not work fixes it on the fly and you move forward right yeah it allows you and that i just i just i'm nodding my head yes and they're you know agreeing with you because part of why i started this podcast was because especially if you're a solo entrepreneur even if you have one partner it's still much of a loneling journey it's still you can get depressed there's a lot of hours it's a lot of work it's a lot of uncertainty it's a lot of stress it's a lot of juggling lots of hats and dealing with a lot of things you've never dealt with before and so definitely to have that ability to have a group or other people it can be mentors that you can work with that you can have those connections i think is invaluable when you're trying to do a startup or a small business yeah i mean first question asked myself when i before i started unicorn was look what would i build for myself 25 years ago what kind of resources would do i wish i would have had back then that it didn't have and how can i assist some of these same startups by building a virtu you know a virtuous ecosystem that actually helps them on every single level so we would well we could we could dive into a whole lot more a lot of our rabble holes that i would love to discuss and i would have a great time but at but keeping it within the confines of the trying or the the time we have for the podcast i'm going to jump to the two questions i always ask at the end of the podcast so the first question i always ask is so along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what did you learn from it i think the worst business decision i ever made was to go the first investor and what did i learn from it is to never do it again number one and number two to actually make sure that whoever you get in bed with being an investor or a startup because it could go either way uh is is something you're willing to do for the long term because you kind of like married joined at the hip for a little while it's uh you know you want to make sure that it's not just a an emotional decision that you make very very quickly not an impulse buy as an investor and vice versa if you're a startup entrepreneur uh you know make sure that this is an investor that you actually want to have as part of your team because he can hurt you uh in in more ways than one be sure he's a strategic investor that brings more than money to you you know he has a rolodex he can help your business grow but also you know first rule of thumb is you know and i haven't fished in a long time but what i usually ask myself is would i go fishing with that person or would i seclude myself in times of covet or pandemic into a log cabin with that person for an extended period of time if the answer is no regardless of how good it sounds don't do it because sooner rather than later you're gonna get you're gonna get to a point of friction and it can really really threaten what it is you're trying to build no i i think that's that you know you always hear kind of take the smart money and there's other you know well or worn out terms that do that but there is a lot of truth to that in the sense that you're gonna you know when you take on an investor it's it's the same a lot for all in purposes it's the same thing as taking on a partner and i'd say a lot of what you said taking on a business partner has the same feel as to it you're going to spend a lot of time with them you're going to have disagreements you're going to have ups you're going to have downs and it's everybody as much of almost as a marriage in the sense that you're you're with this person for the duration of the business unless you buy them out or unless they leave or other things but you're going to deal with them so don't just take the money if all they have to offer is money if you don't if you're not a good fit or it doesn't make sense you know you wait till you have the ones that are a good fit they can offer more than money not that money doesn't help a business but make sure that it's a good fit so i think that that is definitely an a good lesson or you know something a mistake that can be made because you're wanting the money but definitely a good lesson to learn so as we now jump to the second question which is if you're talking now to a startup or a small business what would be the one if you if they were just getting into it so somebody's just getting into a startup or small business what be the one piece of advice you give them i would say before you get jumping head first ask yourself a question do you have the dna of an entrepreneur yes or no and in most cases the answer is no i would say that to become a successful entrepreneur takes a tremendous amount of grit resilience and ability to take the pain and get back up it will be a very painful journey you got to know that before you launch yourself if you ask me right right now it's not i can't prove it scientifically but by experience just empirically uh how many people actually have what it takes if you are one of those person you're a five percenter you're one out of 20. right so if you're and that's why a lot of times i think businesses don't make it after the first year or two and it's you know there's definitely a lot of businesses you know look at the statistics that they don't last the first year or two and certainly after five years some of it is bad ideas or you can blame it on the economy you can blame out other things but i think to your point a lot of it is just are you have the dna or the or you know when you hit those hard times and every business does do you have the dna to push through and to make it into pivot and to figure it out and to keep going yeah i mean i mean ask yourself some very fundamental questions that actually like i mean there are some testy questions so let's assume you lose all of your money can you live with that and actually pursue continue to push forward yes or no let's assume you ruin a relationship as a result of trying to grow your business can you live with that and push through it which one is more important right it's almost politically incorrect to actually ask those questions but it will happen you're going to be in those situations where you either have to throw in the towel or continue so the only thing you got to ask yourself do i have the grit do i have the resilience to push all the way through okay if the answer is no or if you're doubtful it's the it's a no it's not yes you shouldn't be you shouldn't even start if you're asking yourself and then most people you see it when you're actually talking with the entrepreneurs you see the passion you see the drive right they will say i don't care yes absolutely i'm going to stick through thick and thin right if that's the case if you are that person that type a go for it no and i i definitely agree with you and i think there's a lot of wisdom there and i think that sometimes you it's hard to know until you've done it so that's the other thing that i think sometimes try it get into it and see if you have that dna because sometimes you know it's it's a balance on the one hand if you don't have the dna you're not going to last very long but it's also hey sometimes people don't know when they get it you know they always have this what if or i wish i tried this i wish and done it sometimes you get in you say okay i don't have the dna i don't have the grip for that and then you can live the rest of your life as you're more happy with your career and the other things you're doing and you don't always have that so sometimes the best way to find out if you have that dna try it out see if you can do it and if not then you you know you're not left wondering for the rest of your life yeah i mean if you're if you don't have what it takes it means you're going to fail so it's much cheaper do not even start no no that is an absolutely a fair point well as we wrap up as people want to reach out to you they want to find out more they want to pitch you with an idea they want you to be an investor they want to be an employee they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to connect up or connect up to find out more i probably linkedin dom einhorn d-o-m ironhorn e-i-n-h-o-r-n website is unicorn incubator.com that's unicorn with a queue my direct email is dom at unicorn incubator.com and for those of you who want to meet us personally a good time to do that would be october one two three for the startup super cup startup supercup.com uh which will bring a thousand people together uh 100 plus startups pitching uh and a lot of media coverage awesome well i definitely encourage people to find out any or all of the above reach out to dom whether it's whatever or whatever way is the easiest you definitely do the incubator this uh in the in august um and participate in that and there's a lot of cool things that you guys are doing so definitely a lot of resources there well thank you dom for coming on it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell we always love to share it so feel free to go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the podcast also make sure to click subscribe if you haven't already so you get notifications as all our awesome episodes come out and leave us a review so new people can find out about the podcast last but not least if you ever need help with patents or trademarks or anything else with your business feel free to reach out to us at miller ip law by going to strategymeeting.com thank you again dom it's been a pleasure it's been fun and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks for having me devin