Off By 6x

Off By 6x

John Bean

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

Podcast for Entrepreneurs

9/5/2020

Or listen using the plugin below:

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

you're optimistic anyway so you tend to be aggressive but then you say okay i'm aggressive so therefore i'm i want to try to be conservative so you you make some estimates and maybe you double it well you're really probably wrong by 6x what i've always found is that things are three times as long and costs three times as much uh as as i tend to think when i go into it and so you have to prepare for that [Music] hey everyone this is devon miller here with another episode of the inventive journey and i am your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several companies to eight or seven and eight figure businesses as well as found in miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with their pads and trademarks and today we have another great guest on that will tell a great uh story of his journey john bean and uh he is the uh founder of uh uh meme or mem i'll go with memcpu.com because i'm the episode from memory but i wanted i originally went to say b but then i'm like that doesn't look right um but john um he also is uh came up with a a few startups along the way and he'll tell you a little bit more um one was for an atm for drugs and he get he'll explain that a bit more another was for a bridge medical and uh uh they're in the medical realm and uh doing uh cardio now and a whole bunch of fun things along the way that led him up to where he's at today so welcome on to the podcast john hey devon thanks so much a pleasure to be here so i gave this a very brief intro to a much more in-depth history and or you've accomplished a whole lot more so maybe let's dive in now and tell us a little bit about your journey and what led you up to mem cpu sure uh yeah so i've been doing startups since uh actually the late 80s i started with a company called pixis in 1989. pixis was the atm for drugs that you talked about it was back in the days when nurses the only way they could access medications was through a locked cabinet and one nurse would have the key and the other nurses would essentially have to search out that nurse when when they needed the medication so pixis uh was essentially a a atm like machine where nurses would then be able to access the medications themselves using their fingerprint actually and that company did really well it's essentially you know the de facto standard around the world for medication storage now and and access i should say in hospitals and uh we were really fortunate with that company we were acquired in 1996 for 960 million dollars so almost a billion dollars and you know 20 uh four years ago that's uh it was quite a feat uh and that led into kind of giving me that startup bug it was a lot of very exciting uh time and i went on to as you mentioned a company called bridge medical so still in the healthcare field still in the hospital field bridge medical was a device for essentially sitting at the patient bedside and validating that the uh through barcode that the right patient was getting the right medication at the right time through the right route uh and things of that nature so a very a very important technology there to cardio now we're jumping in just sorry no by all means um so you take the you know what i'm calling the atm for drugs and what you call the atm for drugs and you make a good exit off right you make a good money a good good exit and you know first of all i think it's always you know a bit deceiving that you don't you don't get a pocket all that money yourself but you just fall into your pocket otherwise it'd be a different story you know you still probably made a good exit but so what was the did you take a break from that did you say hey i made a good build a good business i'm going to take a break or is it right next to the next startup and i have the next idea that's even better than the last i want to build that or how did you kind of make that transition from an exit from your first company to doing your second company so at pixas i was you know a a young engineer and i did well but i i wasn't you know it wasn't a life-changing event necessarily it it helped me buy a house and uh vacation and and do lots of things and and not worry about uh salaries so that i could go on and do more startups and essentially i got that startup bug and was it's like well i want to keep going on and then uh you know become uh you know an executive in the startup world and in fact by the time i left pixas i was a director and went into when i went to bridge medical it was my first position as a vice president uh so that i was my you know first time as an executive within within a startup and it was it's just been a great a great journey all uh along the way and i just uh i really i enjoy working in startups uh in some in some cases i think that there may be something wrong with me mentally that that i enjoy it because it's it's a lot of hard work there's a lot of ups and downs and uh you know it's it's a crazy situation however the people that you work with it's really all about the people that you work with because everybody's in it to win it and you have all type a's or not always all type a's but you have people that they're doing everything to succeed and you don't have people that are just you know going to work and reading the paper and not caring about their job and it's just really uh to me very rewarding to work with people who go into work that you know every day can't wait to get in and to try and make a difference in the world no and if you have you know there's something wrong with you i'm right there with you in the same way you know whatever typically when people ask me what my hobby is i usually say startups and then they say haha i'm like no it really is starts that's usually if i'm if i'm thinking about something or doing something half the time it's on a new idea or chasing a new startup but you know and then i obviously have hobbies beyond that so now as we kind of circle back so you got the startup bug you you know you made a good exit even it wasn't or life-changing you know had a good one and it set you up for the ability to chase in some of the other startups you've done so he did bridge medical and he talked about how to make sure that medication you know at the bedside was done right or medicated properly and then i think that as we talked before he said cardio now was the next one maybe just jump back into the journey of you know what cardio now and where that went to yeah so cardio now so this was in 2000 uh so cardio now we did we went into cardiac cath labs and what they would do the procedures they would film the procedures using movie cameras real you know real film movie cameras and and it's all done through ex they x-rayed the whole process while they're running the cath uh the catheter up through people's veins and into their heart and doing whatever procedure that they're doing well the issue was that to view those films doctors would essentially have to get the film and view it and it's in it's in negative form and it's shaky because it's a film and it's running through a viewer so we actually took a digital board that we would then integrate onto the cameras in the labs and and take splice out the uh the the video as it's being captured in analog and converted to digital we then would save it to computers inside the hospital where we provided very high resolution viewing screens and on gun computers so the uh the high resolution viewers were you know there's many more of them than than the number of uh uh just movie film viewers that they had the doctors could look at it in negative or positive if they wanted to but those the key thing was it wasn't shaky it was easy for them to access as videos would get uh older as movies as the film would get older they would start to move it off off-site so maybe three months six months later so sometimes you have a patient coming in you'd actually have to access uh get somebody to go and get the video the movie from wherever it was and by having it on local storage uh they wouldn't have to go and get it we had much more storage than they had for film canisters uh but then we went one step further and we actually created a cloud and did some of the first streaming of video uh before you know youtube and all these other things and had we known to apply it in different areas maybe we would be uh having a different conversation here as well but we would take uh we took all of those digital images those digital videos they were a lossless compression so no no degradation to the quality of the of the images of the videos offload them to the cloud uh at the time we had just to give you an idea of of cost we had a i think a half terabyte raid and it cost us i think uh three quarters of a million dollars compared to now where you could buy a four terabyte uh raid for 120 or something maybe cheaper uh for that sit on your desktop anyway that was that raid was in iraq um uh so we and then so we uh did it offline for storage but then we provided streaming to [Music] through browsers of course this is time when people still have dial up modem and things and we would compress it based on the connection speed so we would detect the connection speed that somebody had and if they had the cardio now system in the hospital we could actually upload the lossless video to them but if they didn't have it they could still view it via browser so what was important about that was that uh in the cardiac field the the people with cardiac issues tend to be older in nature and may be retired and so there might be an issue where like on the east coast people live up in the north and then they make that in the winter they go to uh florida or warmer places so they could have a cardiac issue in either location and a doctor could see the the past procedures and and uh that had occurred for that patient within you know just by going to a browser so we're really one of the first to do that and actually since you're an ip attorney that was where i got my first uh patent and with pixis and other things it was before we really knew and at the time most of my work was software software and hardware connected but was before you could really get software patents uh until then when the key issue to that patent was that it was related to the system as a whole so it wasn't just on the software is the fact that we did all the uh the compression we had the the servers at the hospitals we had the cloud uh what wasn't called cloud at the time uh our our co-location facility and then could stream and so is that whole process uh was actually the the first patent that that i received that's awesome that's cool i always love patents so you're never gonna you're never gonna go wrong we'll talk about patents awesome but now one or so but then after you did that you did that business built it up and then you moved over to i think i said you know one of the next startups you jumped over to that we talked about was one that actually i've seen or heard of which was ecoatm right well that one was almost uh you can go in put your cell phone in the machine and i think i've seen them at walmart and other places or at least you know some iteration of them where it will tell you okay i'll pay you x amount of dollars for your old cell phone is that right well actually before ecoatm and after after cardio now i did something called the stairs so staris was the first time i had co-founded a company that was with um a ex an old colleague of mine from pixas so and what asterisk was was another atm for drugs but or what asterisk is is an atm for drugs but it's for retail prescriptions versus medications in hospitals so in hospitals you're talking about loose medications or medications they're not really loose but they're individual they're packaged but when it comes to a pharmacy you're talking about medications that are that have been uh put into uh prescription specific packaging so for instance you and i could have the exact same medication the same dosage the same number of pills and everything however you'll have a a pill bottle that has a label on it with your name and your information there'll be a pill bottle with my name on it and my information because of hipaa laws and other things there's no way that we can get those and they also have to be filled by a pharmacist so it's not like you could have a vending machine that just has a bunch of common pills so to speak and then you print a label as people come to it so we actually invented a new machine and the number of mine additional patents are are on this these machines and related machines that we built and designed to be able it's kind of like a random access so no matter what time you show up and in what order people show up we could get your medications from anywhere within the machine and so that was that was a whole new machine as well it wasn't like we were able to use what we had already done at uh at pixas so a stair uh so so that was asterisk and then while i was doing asterisk i got introduced to the people who were doing the ecoatm and what was interesting about that was so my background had been in complex hardware software systems and of course the atm type of kiosks and so that was the idea behind ecoatm which was to have a self-service uh machine that people would walk up to bring their cell phone to and have the people evaluate or have the machine evaluate visually and electronically the cell phone make an offer and what ended up happening was i started to advise them and then got really excited about the technology started uh it was actually pretty crazy where i was i was kind of moonlighting for them where i was working as stairs during the day and then at night i would go and do work for ecoatm and design and and build the software i had a software team that was in india and they were 12 and a half hours different so i kind of work until 6 p.m with a stairs go home have dinner spent a couple hours with my wife and daughter whose daughter was two at the time and then at like 8 30 i'd get on skype with uh with the team in india and beyond that until about 2 a.m go to bed lather rinse repeat but what was even crazier was that at the time at astairis uh we were opening europe and so i was also going to europe like every six weeks for one to two weeks so i'm working full-time essentially at two startups i've got a wife and a two-year-old daughter and uh end up going to europe uh for one or two weeks at the time every six weeks or so it was it was a really great that was a busy time of life yeah it was it was it's amazing that i i survived that but then uh jumping in really quick so one question on that so i mean and we'll get to a little bit more of what led to where you're at today and i know you've got a couple more steps in the journey some of them i can see a common path and yet some of them i can't see you know so the atm for drugs is kind of where you started and it got started in the medical realm and you know that made it almost i can see then you got to the bar codes and even you know cardio now all those are kind of within the medical realm and in solving uh you know solving different device you know different issues within that and even uh you know a terrorist but then when you know so how was it though because eco atm is certainly not in the medical realm and you know it's much different and so you know was it was it the same lessons you learned in the medical realm you know startup lessons or something that are applicable across the board or is it something to where is completely new and you had to almost start over or learn new things or kind of how's that transition to going into a different industry which was less known and you know didn't it wasn't as maybe as comfortable does that make sense well in startups there's nothing that's comfortable uh you know and virtually every single startup i've done i've not only has the product been built from the ground up uh but the market didn't exist at the time the market didn't exist for pixas uh it certainly didn't exist for cardio now or for bridge medical when we first did that the market didn't exist for a steris i mean there was no atm for medications at uh at retail pharmacies and hospitals for retail and and even uh employers and things like that uh and same with uh eco atm they're they're they're they're all they all have a lot of similarities but they all have a lot of differences nothing work you can't take anything uh cookie cutter from one company to the next regardless of whether or not you're in the same industry or not but you take those experiences and so things that may have worked at one company might not work at the next or things that didn't work at the at one company might work at the new one you just it's a hybrid and you just have to figure out how to apply it a lot of it's uh honestly you know instinct but instinct is built on experience and uh your immersion into the new market and and what you observe no and i think that you know i because my experience has been you know there there's i think that you know you do learn some lessons that are across to your point there's always things that you have to learn new and you know startup is always an uncomfortable position because if if it's already been done people have done it then you wouldn't be in a startup position and yet at the same time there's also commonalities between a lot of startups in the sense that you know how to develop an idea how to you know organize a team how to build it how to do marketing plan how to get a business strategy and so i think you know sometimes we get so pigeonholed with hey i've done this and this is my expertise and this is the only thing i'm good at you don't really stop to think hey a lot of the things and the skills and things i've come up with are applicable in other industries or you know i can do it in other areas if you just would kind of overcome sometimes a fear of hey this is something new and uncomfortable and different yeah i'll tell you what always motivated me was what the we're trying to accomplish as as the company so i never really uh i never really considered what we did or didn't know and again everything that we i've always walked into walked into without a market that existed and without a product that existed and it's always from the ground up but did i believe in where that was going and what that could mean uh to you know the the the world or the the markets that they were to serve and it's always one of those things where one of the things that i i look back at and and say is that i'm glad that i didn't get into uh cultish religions because i essentially startups were my cult i if i had gone into some cultist religions i probably would have drank the kool-aid because i in essence drink the kool-aid at every single startup that that i go to and every single one that i'm in uh from the day one i am totally uh engaged totally optimistic feel that it's gonna be the next you know biggest thing in the world uh and it's gonna you know change the world and and they don't always but they uh but but there's you have to you know suspend uh disbelief and just uh you know work every day to try and make that thing become a reality yeah and i think there's you almost have to have a degree of optimism when you and when you're in a start i mean you almost have to be just a little bit delusional that it's going to work out otherwise if you knew all of the you know all the things that would happen along the road you'd probably give up in the forefront because nobody would ever be in for that much punishment and ups and downs and unknowing and stress and everything else so i think that that's a good characteristic that almo you know they almost have to have us to be in a startup realm is a bit of suspend reality or delusion or whatever you want to call it because i think there's a lot of truth to that so so now as we get back to your journey so you did that and you did eco um you worked at the two's jobs kind of side by side um and then from there i think you moved over to uc burke or sorry uc san diego is that right well so from yeah so ecoatm uh i should tell a little bit more about that story just because it's a really interesting one so we uh i moved over uh when we got our the seed round because just working two jobs seemed like it was you know had to make a decision in fact the the ceo at ecoatm at the time had said look john you need to make a decision uh you either need to go back to your other company and dedicate your time there you need to dedicate your time here and uh it was a really hard decision because the asterisk was my baby and loved the people and it's always hard leaving the people but it just seemed like that ecoatm was was off and running and that i could make a real difference there and it was exciting uh and and glad that i made the decision because it so eco atm did really well in 2013 were acquired by outer wall outer wall owned redbox and coinstar so they looked at it as a strategic acquisition and they acquired ecoatm uh for 350 million so fortunately there i was uh a co-founder after coming on board and that honestly was a bit of a life-changing event for me and was i'm glad that uh uh you know you that's that all that hard work continued to pay off or did pay off and uh from that though the yeah what happened was uh uc san diego was so uc san diego gets about 1.3 billion dollars a year in grants the the amount of ip that they have and generate on a regular basis is absolutely insane however their strength isn't commercializing it so in 2016 they decided to create this a group of entrepreneurs and residents that they bring in and they took four of us from various areas with various different experience levels and different areas of experience and brought us in to essentially help them commercialize technology and that is actually where i met the two uh inventors of of mem computing uh fabio traverse and max de ventra they're two phd physicists uh that are just you know big einstein brains and they had come up with this new compute architecture that essentially overcomes the uh limitations of current compute architectures not counting quantum so quantum is a new uh physics-based computer architecture but it's still in its infancy and it seems like it will become the next generation everybody has felt that there's you couldn't meet that those uh those expectations and get that type of performance out of current silicon based technology and that's essentially what what mem computing was showing was um i'm kind of rambling here a little bit but just one more thing to state before i stop for a second is is that these these two phd physicists as physicists they kind of went back and said okay if we're going to design a computer today knowing what we know about physics and looking at how computers have been designed they're both electrical engineering experts as well and they said you know there's physics that was left on the table our designs go all the way back to the 40s and 50s now we've gotten added you know transistors and and and everything but it's still uh the same basic design and they came up with this entirely new architecture that can be realized in not only in silicon but we do realize it in software and we didn't at the time it wasn't known what i meant still in a theoretical piece they had a publication that was about 40 or 60 pages long uh it had a title on it that was you know 20 words long uh all very you know deep science i think in the title i understood three of the words and luckily end and the were two of them so uh but it was it was clear to me what the implications of the technology were um so and i think that's an interest so you you were basically at uc um and i keep wanting to say uc berkeley for some reason i have summer you see san diego and doing all that you ran into some people he said well you know i don't know if i fully understand it or if you know i i i really appreciate it as much as i could but i think you're on to something they said i you know i have enough faith and confidence that i'm going to go in with them or i'm going to go in and kind of build a business around this build a company and make this a success and so now you take that so you you know you've almost gone through it seems like if you you start down the medical realm for a while and you kind of do a lot of medical devices and then you went more to kind of consumer atm type that you don't think of doing that made a good exit that one is a little more life-changing and then you said okay i want to give back and so you went and did a little bit more of uc san diego and how you can monetize a lot of the ip portfolio and i know i had no idea that they had such a large portfolio or such a access to so much capital but then you know along the way he said okay now i'm going to do my thing so he went into mem cpu doing that up until now and so that was what in 2017 2018 that you started 2016 that we formed it so we formed it within a couple of months of being there and actually i should let you know i didn't i didn't want to do this again i didn't want to work that hard uh you know i had a life-changing event i was semi-retired uh was at home my daughter was now like five years old and i was able to spend you know quality time with my wife and daughter uh you know remember this summer before things really got going just the amount of time i spent with her and um and my wife and you know had real vacations and things and in fact when i went to uc san diego i specifically told them that so they wanted us to take a company out and and commercialize technology i specifically told them i don't want to take a company out what i really like to do is maybe i can help you get two or three companies out and maybe i can use my network to help build their executive team and then you know if if i can become a member of their board or get some some options as an advisor or something i'll get some fringe benefit out of it but i i never had the desire i never was a ceo never had the desire to be a ceo but here i am there's two phd physicists who know nothing about business uh while i've always been the technical guy and very deep technically this was beyond that this is deep science uh i i have a bachelor's in math i don't have a p and the science was literally over my head it was one of these things where if anything goes wrong with the technology i can't help it's too it's beyond me however of the three of us i know a lot more about business therefore uh i'm i gotta be the ceo and and uh and and again never had the desire but i've learned so much through being in startups and one of the huge advantages of being in startups is you're exposed to the business where you wouldn't be in a much larger company and so through osmosis i had on the job training enough to get me uh to start uh enough i knew enough to be able to begin as a as a ceo and uh knew enough about raising money had had been involved in that in past uh company was never really responsible for raising the money but was always involved in the in the conversations and had relationships with with venture capital and and things of that nature uh and now just need to go the extra level where not only was i that i need to talk to them i needed to sell them and i need to be responsible for for raising the money as well as as uh running the company so so i'm get as we kind of so now you that almost brings us up to where you're at today so you know one of the hard things with tech you know cursing in a blessing or blessing and a cursing whatever you want to call it is you know technology companies it can take a long time to develop a product get it out in the marketplace you know get it accepted set the standard and whatnot as you know it's supposed to take a you know what would be a consumer level product or a you know some of the other you know or a brand name company or something of that or services company you can get it up and going much more quickly so you know how did you how did or what advice would you give how do you navigate when you're saying hey this is going to be a multi-year project before we even get it out in the marketplace and and get it going how do you you know how do you have the wherewithal or how what advice would you give to people on that well you know it's funny because every single one of my startups has been these extremely complex hardware software systems that take years to to perfect and you know i've always i've always thought you know i wish that i had gone to school for marketing instead of math and computer science because you know maybe i would have come up with a pet rock or something that was all it's the marketing and the branding and everything and uh now that's not necessarily easy either but it's not the same uh you know um mental uh gymnastics that you have to do necessarily actually um so anyway you but it happened to be my skill and i'm always excited about things that and one of the things that we're faced with this company too is that everybody not everybody but in even in academia what these gentlemen had designed uh they were getting a lot of pushback and they thought it was impossible and one of my trigger points is when whenever something is impossible uh i i just can't accept that and in my past startups i'd overcome many things that later experts would tell me that oh that was impossible it's like well i'm glad i didn't know because had i known maybe i wouldn't have tried and so i think you know part of it is you know we talked about optimism earlier you have to be optim uh you have to be very optimistic you have to believe in what the technology is or whatever it is that you're working on and you just uh have to bear down and know that it's not something you're going to be releasing in three months and and being able to demonstrate it to people and and in fact i mean when i first met these guys we thought that we're going to be a fabulous semiconductor company we thought that we're going to have to the first thing we're gonna have to do is build a chip building a chip is something that can take uh you know 30 million dollars in five years to build your first version of a chip it's like raising money for life sciences you have to raise just huge amounts of money and it takes years and years to deliver it's really hard to do but again it was one of these things where this technology is so amazing i thought that if we could if i could do it i could do it for this technology but the key thing was uh in order to evaluate the technology i contacted the san diego supercomputer center and said look we're going to build a prototype for our chip a software emulation of a chip that's what you do when you build the chip normally anyway and then you test that before you you invest in going to the next step of building the hardware so we built the uh the emulation of the chip in software and then delivered it to the supercomputer center to validate it and would it indeed overcome the issues could it show that the chip that the chip could overcome the issues that that we see in current computers and what really blew our minds was that the softer emulation of the chip was already showing that it was orders of magnitude faster than anything else that was out there for instance they were running it on problems where the best methods were taking it was a special set of problems we've taken about 30 minutes to solve our chip sorry our software emulation of the chip was solving the same problems in sub second time and we realized oh my god we can go out there as a kind of crawl walk run uh and actually maybe that's part of the advice too to look for ways that you can crawl walk run develop kind of a minimal viable product uh using some common terms where you can show the capabilities of the system so to us the minimal viable product was building a software as a service model of our um of our software emulation which we've done we released it last year as beta and we're now allowing people to test the technology on their own problems the testing is it's free if you're doing evaluation and test we let you use our system for free and therefore you don't have to take our word for it and and we've got lots of um scientific papers and case studies and things that show the performance that that uh our technology does but it's it's free to use if you know if you're skeptical of this technology as most people are when they first hear about it because it sounds too good to be true you don't have to take our word for it you can go right on our software as a service model you can sign up today use it for free and test it on your own and and see if we can't uh solve your problem faster than you're able to solve it using current methods oh well that's awesome so so now with all that you take that so you've now found the company you're well into it you've been building it people can now test it they can try it out so you know so what i think as we as we now get towards the end of the podcast and you know always more things i ever have time to talk about because there's always plenty of interesting rabbles we could dive down but as you do that we'll jump to kind of the last couple questions i always ask at the end of the podcast sure so the first question i always ask is as you've gone along that whole journey had you done the different businesses what was the worst business decision you ever made well you know i certainly made bad decisions uh and continue to make them every now and again but i i think the key thing is is that you have to uh in a startup environment you have to you have to make decisions you can't wait you have to make decisions on the best information that you have and then later if you found out that just find out that decision was wrong you need to adjust and let me give you an example or an anecdote so at uh pixis which had gotten very big before i had left they brought in a new vp over over my area and uh one time during a review the vp said to me john in the amount of time that i make three decisions you make 12 decisions and get six wrong and he was trying to tell me that i you know didn't deserve a big raise and i said wait a minute okay so the time you take to make three decisions i make 12 and i get six wrong of the six that so i got six right i already got twice as many right as you did of the six that i got wrong three of them were bad and we had to abandon and just fit you know in average right the other three were just uh needed to be changed based on new information and we adjusted and then moved on so in essence i got nine things right maybe three things wrong but you can't build innovation without making mistakes and so i mean in fact the way that i run my company and run all my my groups and everything is i do not uh no one ever gets in trouble for making a mistake we're gonna make mistakes what you get is praise for then fixing the mistakes and then moving on and learning from those but i i i don't care if people make mistakes we're gonna make mistakes we do make mistakes but it's it's how you deal with those mistakes and move forward from them okay no i that that that's a very good lesson learned so now that almost dovetails probably in the second question i always ask but if you're to give to if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business just getting started what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them so the biggest piece of advice is related to your uh estimates on the amount of time you think it's going to take and the amount of money you think it's going to take we're we always when we first start you know with startups and projects and what have you you're you try to be conservative and you you're optimistic anyway so you tend to be aggressive but then you say okay i'm aggressive so therefore i'm i want to try to be conservative so you you make some estimates and maybe you double it well you're really probably wrong by 6x what i've always found is that things are three times as long and costs three times as much uh as as i tend to think when i go into it and you so you have to prepare for that uh you know while when you raise money you really need to consider what what expectations you set and based on where you're going to be when you when you're done with that money so that you have to be careful that you don't set overly aggressive expectations because when you raise that money the valuation then or expectation on the company if you don't meet that your next round is going to be harder and at a lower valuation and on and on and on so you really that's the key thing is you know really step back re-judge what you what your estimates are and just know that even after you do that you're still probably wrong and it's still probably longer and more money so make sure that you can handle that those situations and i all but everybody always seems to the exception no matter how well you plan you're like yeah everybody i always hear that it's gonna take you know two or three x longer than i think it will and more than i think it will and then you're like but we we we're better than that we'll pick we'll and i always think it's you know everybody just needs to understand you're not the exception and even if you are the one in a million that is the exception plan is if you're not because you're going to be a whole lot better you're going to be a whole lot better situation because if you some somehow miraculously arnold you know more time and effort and money than it takes then by all means you're good for it but for the everybody else it puts you in a much better spot so you don't get halfway through only to not make the make it the rest of the way so okay well i you know always more things to talk on fun things to talk on and never have enough time but i appreciate you coming on so that people that want to find out more about you know um mem cpu they want to reach out get there you know with any question they have for you or they otherwise want to get involved or get more information what's the best way to connect with you yeah just go find memcpu.com the company's name is actually mem computing but as a shortcut it's memcpu uh there's contact forms on there there's places where you can register to use the sas for free there's tons of information about the company uh and that's the best way to reach out to us all right well i strongly encourage anybody that's wanting to know a whole bunch about awesome computers that are going to do or change the world certainly reach out and check them out and uh thank you for coming on for those of you that are uh have a an inventive journey that you'd like to tell they'd like to tell a story of your startup your small business we'd love to have you on you can just go to inventivejourneyguest.com to apply and for those of you that are listening in this episode and want to get notified of future episodes make sure to subscribe and of course we're always here to help the startups of small businesses with patents and trademarks john thank you again for coming on it's been fun to have you on and look forward to the ongoing success of you and the team at uh mem cpu or mem computing and thank you again thanks devin it was a pleasure you English (auto-generated) All Sales