Start With Your Personality

Start With Your Personality

Anne Gibbon
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
3/16/2021

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 think you should start with your own personality and really understand yourself and your strengths and weaknesses and just what are you drawn to and what do you avoid because in this game when there's only a couple people and you don't have a lot of like structured accountability you can really go off the rails if you don't um pay very close attention to the stuff you know you're going to avoid so it's like driving down the road you know there's going to be potholes why not plan to avoid them like just see them ahead of time instead of bouncing your car through those [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur entrepreneur that's uh grown several businesses and the seven and eight figure uh or several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as a founder and ceo of miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com we're always here to help now today we have another guest a great guest on the podcast anne gibbon and uh just as a quick introduction and so she got started as an entrepreneur after kind of watching her dad be an entrepreneur growing up and do his own small businesses as an example in high school i think he refinanced uh refinanced the property tore it down rebuilt it and she kind of got the idea that the buck stopped here buck stopped with that with him um and then uh dad always also wanted to always go in the military but never quite wasn't able to so anne decided to go into the military then naval academy found out she wasn't as great about taking orders or being told what to do but did stick with it i think for 10 or 10 or so years grateful for what she learned and i think you were also just as a side note a boxer in the military and even won some prizes and we'll touch uh shortly on that but then kind of got to the end of that went to design school for a year enjoyed creativity doing things new i did a whole bunch of design projects i think went to new zealand or was in new zealand for a period of time and then came back to washington and then decided to create her own thing which kind of brings her uh brings her to where she's at today so with that much as a as a introduction welcome on the podcast and thank you so much for having me i'm really excited to be here so completely random question but do people ever get confused between ann or annie because it's a-n-n-e and i'm never quite sure if i was supposed to say ann or abby no anne's perfect and um i i've stopped doing it i guess for a decade or so now but i used to love introducing myself um as and with me like anne of green gables oh my wife would appreciate that that's one of her shows that she loved watching their growing up so that's funny well perfect well i gave a quick introduction to you and a little bit about your journey but now let's go back in time a little bit tell us a little bit about your dad watching him to be an entrepreneur growing up and let's hear about your journey yeah um my dad just kind of fell into it no way his dad was in the navy in pearl harbor um and during world war ii and then the army um for a career and so when he got out my grandfather bought a gas station and my dad was made to work there from the age of 12 like every day after school and every summer so um when he was 23 he bought his own gas station kind of on the same corner and uh so it's almost default like he didn't really think about it um but watching him growing up he you know brought us his kids to meetings like 401k um explaining that and he freaking loved to give advice so he was always telling us about um hey this is what happened with the business and like this is what i did with my employees and my bedroom sleeping in our old house um growing up was next to my parents so i could hear through the walls so when you know somebody from work would call at night like at two in the morning i'd hear it and kind of wake up and hear my parents talk about it um so if there was you know an accident because he had uh some tow drivers too and so if there was an accident or an issue at the store like it wasn't the gas station wasn't in a great part of town so every so often there'd be a break-in or theft or something and um i just got used to seeing somebody manage this weight of like it's all on me and the you don't want to do it your whole life but it takes a specific kind of desire because there's trade-offs right like you're the one like i remember talking about if something happened with the tow trucks and they lost their insurance they'd have to shut down the business and like that's that was it i remember when my dad bought the property from arko and built his own new gas station that if when they were replacing the gas tanks with new ones if they found oil in the ground the last ones had leaked he wouldn't be able to build for years if ever and that would be the end and i just was able to experience as a kid some adults making really hard decisions and taking big risks and deciding this you know for our family it was huge and deciding to swing for the fences and i think it just really lit inside me of fire to want the yolk on my shoulders and want responsibility because i saw the kind of freedom that came with it but also how you could impact people's lives like my dad one time um he had a a gas station service employee who was i think like 19 and going to be a young father and he made sure that he found the local community college or the library class on parenting for dads and they went to it and he pushed him they talked to him about parenting and helped him get excited about it even though this this kid was young and remember he took a trash bag out to his car because it was filled with wrappers and stuff once it was like we're not leaving until this car is cleaned up and he cleaned it up with him and um i just was a great example kind of growing up and i think that's always a cool thing to be able to see a a bit of an entrepreneurial parent or someone that's you know sets that example because it sets it up you know sets up the the kids to follow in the footsteps so now as you did that and you had that example growing up you kind of see what it was like the buck stops here see the example now how did you get into doing going into the navy and doing boxing because that you know that one is a bit of a shift and you mentioned a little bit that was a bit even a little bit of an example with your dad but how did you get into doing that yeah well he was both cheap and when he redid the gas station um he used all of our college money that he'd saved and i was coming up on college quick so he thought fast and realized that um the surface academies west point air force coast guard and navy it's free tuition right it's free to him but he had a mandatory service in five years when you graduate so one um when i was in ninth grade my dad took the family we grew up in washington state and we went to the east coast and his only reservations for a two-week like super cheap vacation were football games at the naval academy and army west point he was super into the marketing of effort then and i just i fell in love with the school and the grounds and the energy there you know we got to like have lunch with some midshipmen or something and i just felt like if i went there i wasn't just going to get an education they'd also teach me leadership and it was something i really wanted to know because i i loved watching my dad and i thought well how much you know better could i be if if i could go somewhere where they teach it so and i didn't want a desk job like i had no clue in the 90s what careers were out there i mean and this is embarrassing when we went to the air force academy i thought the only two options were to be a pilot or a chef no clue why i thought that chef was an option anyway at the air force so i just thought man if i go if i join the navy i'm going to have an adventure and it turned out that way so you joined the navy now how did that how did you get into box or while you're in the nic because i think you did while you're in the navy did boxing right so was that a something that you were interested and grew up doing or was it something you learned while you're in the navy because it just seems like sounds cool and i always thought boxing would be fun i've never done it but i always thought it sounded like it would be a fun sport but how did you how did you kind of get into that as well um i'd always liked contact sports when i was in high school i played basketball and loved it sorry i shouldn't swear i'm a sailor um so i fouled out a lot of games i just really liked contact sports and i kind of liked basketball too but in college i rode for three years because around that time i'm again really lucky timing wise but uh colleges were needing to even out the scholarships they gave women and so there was a lot of schools recruiting women for rowing and i'd done that a couple years as well and my coach um shout out to kathleen walker she was amazing in high school and really kind of nurtured our self-confidence too and so anyway so i wrote three years in college um but my sophomore year uh there's mandatory pe classes the whole way through swimming she could imagine but also uh grappling and judo and boxing so sophomore year i get paired up with another girl my height and um we only have like two one minute rounds as our test and our the boxing coach for the school is our pe teacher at that point and i just freaking loved it and went at it and i think this poor girl was a little afraid and so after that the boxing coach was like you should quit crew and come out and do this and um i was like oh no i'm happy like i like this girl's team but uh so my my one of my biggest failures in my whole life was not deserving to be elected team captain of my crew team and it was the only thing i wanted i quickly got frustrated with the academy and the rules and structure right um previewed in my later life and i thought man if i can just be capturing this crew team like i can show that i came here to lead not to you know be an athlete or something like i came here really intentionally and of course i didn't put in the effort i didn't go to girls rooms after practice and check on them i didn't do i didn't put in the effort i needed to to show that i was worthy of leading them and so i didn't get picked and it was devastating um so then i decided you know screw you guys i'm out so my senior year um the boxing coach had sent a few of his guys to um like recruit me like i'd be doing laundry or something and i'd say coach is telling you to join the team anyway so i joined and i i was the first woman ever to box for navy like on our team um at that point national collegiate boxing the association because it's not i don't think it's even still part of the ncaa um i didn't have women matches so my coach was also an amateur ref out in town and he found me a fight at a union hall in baltimore with red solo cups and dancers holding the round cards and i think we were all one of the only female fights on the card um but i'm i am a big girl i'm a heavyweight boxer but i moved pretty well on my feet and um so my first fight the first fight for women ever at the naval academy i knocked that girl out in the first round and it was incredible i loved it so no that sounds like fun i i said i always thought never got never actually done boxy but it was always one that i thought it looked like it'd be exciting and be fun and so maybe someday i'm you know i'll still maybe someday i'll still get into it but so you know you do the navy you know you you do that for a period of time you kind of find out hey i don't necessarily love to be told what to do and taking orders but you still stuck with it for quite a while and you had a good you know career and did that for a period of time and also gotta do the rowing gotta do boxing and that and then you get to a point where you say hey okay i've decided i'm going to you know leave the navy or kind of move on in the next phase of your career kind of how did you decide what you were going to do next or what was that transition like for you um absolutely terrible so i knew that i wanted to transition out i've been in for 10 years and there's prescribed career paths for people officers in the navy so if you get in as an ensign or whatever like your first year at 22 they can kind of tell you what your 30 years is going to be like like here wickets you go to ships or a plane like squadron or shore or whatever and i just wasn't following the path for my specialty which was on ships so i knew i kind of needed to get out but i'd submitted my papers knew that i was leaving in like july of 2013 and then i broke up with my fiance and then i really had no idea what i was going to do so i got lucky and fell into an opportunity because um you know i just kept asking questions and people were nice and so they said oh if you like this you should try x and that happened to be the stanford d-school program and they um had at that time a professional fellowship so there was 10 of us that year 10 fellows from all different kinds of organizations and i worked on an ag tech project on my first year for six months out of the navy no i think that that's interesting because one of the interesting is you know when you kind of tell people or have people say hey you'd be good at this and how you know hey you have you thought about this it's a lot of times it's helpful in the sense that it helps you to step back kind of a lot of times people see skills that you're naturally good at but not that you wouldn't necessarily think of yourself or that you wouldn't necessarily go down that route so it's interesting that that's kind of how you at least kind of started got into that and started down that road so so now you go to design school for a period of time you know you learn those skills and you're coming out of that you know what did you decide or how did you i think after that you went to new zealand is that right is that the next step yeah um 2014 was the first time that i um met uh mallory so i was um in the d school but just fitting the chain on my fellowship and got a opportunity to help with a one-day workshop so there are several maori business leaders in the field of like food and ag tech and they wanted a design workshop and i i got really excited so i used this concept from marvel movies of transmedia like there's one kind of avengers story world universe but they're able to break it down in these um silos stories like thor and iron man but they exist on their own like you can just watch those you don't need to watch the whole thing but if you do it there's these consistent elements and that was similar to maori tribes ewi where they had really um distinct tribal identities and they wanted to preserve those in the products when they exported but um they also wanted to have an overarching like avengers like ish but like maori brand so that you could have the umbrella and the individual identities and they liked it and came back um several months later so i did some consulting in new zealand for a few weeks in 2015 and then when i was there they asked me if i'd like to move there and uh so i said yes because that's like when you open it let's go yeah so now so you did that you did you know and i think you mentioned you know he did a bunch of different design pro projects for a few different businesses while you were there in new zealand and working with the tribes and that as well now you know after you did that for a period of time what made you decide to kind of leave new zealand and come back to washington and start your own thing um i it was the greatest privilege in my life to be brought into different ewe because they you know let me spend time with their kids we did design workshops for high school kids they showed me their their stories and their history and there's obviously a lot of pain around kind of the colonial legacy for indigenous people but also so much pride there's so many stories and traditions um but especially the thing that got me to move away was that i saw all these leaders in maori culture not just having a job and working their butt off but also spending a lot of time with their community and they just gave so much of themselves because it was their cultural tradition and responsibility to do and it brought so much joy and connection back so this sense of having actually having a relationship and a guardianship role for your environment the place you're from and it's not just kind of there out of your mind but you interact with that stream that river that mountain it's your place and their stories from your ancestors 20 generations back from there um and also the the tapestry of being connected with your community um and being and showing up for people whether it's just you know like at a funeral or it's um kind of a cultural ritual like weekend experience um that you helped put on for for kids and pass the stories down so anyway i saw them invested in this tapestry of their lives and i felt like i was an outsider and then as a consultant like taking money from that and i wanted to go home and try to understand what that connection would be like to the place i grew up and spend more time with my family so so so now you said okay no and i think that that definitely makes sense and i'm a big proponent of family and wanting to be back with family and have that experience he said okay i'm gonna move to erica move back from new zealand come to washington you know learned a lot of great lessons had a lot of great experience in new zealand and you said now i want to be back by family and you know have that experience so you come back to washington and how did you kind of land on doing your own thing and how did that go and what was it worthwhile and kind of what uh how did you get or get into that phase yeah well man if there's uh anybody listening who does not know what they're doing with their life that was me until a couple years ago um i was in my late 30s and trying to piece together like what is this career you know i was on ships and i did these different things in the navy and then i was doing design stuff and then in new zealand like where in the heck does this all lead and like how am i going to have a retirement right and what do i want to do with my life so i had narrowed it down like man i really love emerging technology futures i want to be part of something where we're watching the future and then actually building tools or a service that people use to to bring themselves into that future i realized i i love leadership and i want to be responsible for a team again um and i liked like like small fast teams so it was like okay probably a startup probably tech um and i have a you know thread like of leadership and decision making and from my work in the navy um and then with maori i got exposed to act like the lack of software tools to help people make better decisions and specifically to look at their data and to look at their data with other people and i had met um so i didn't know what i wanted to do but i was like okay i'm gonna look for something in like neuroscience neurotech or decision making or something and um when i got back to the states one of my friends um asked me to come down to san diego because a couple other people were going to meet at his house to do some research and when i was there we were talking and he was like well the timing works out for both of us like why don't we just start a company so um sorry it's my 40th birthday and although i turned my phone off my other computer is my cousin wishing you well having all of your electronics interlinked together is that they never will leave you alone no matter how hard you try no and i just like i want to push this off the thing so um by the way happy birthday that's that's a great milestone so just as a complete sign now but happy birthday thanks it's um it's good to be 40 really good i didn't know when i was 25 how good it would be um so my friend um he had developed this concept for data visualization so that's where we get into the startup finally um but i met him back in 2012 and this is 2018 and i've always been kind of obsessed here that i'm like this is brilliant like it's an open source tool in beta it had been funded by the intel community for like its first iteration um but they'd struggled to gain any kind of traction there wasn't like a company around it they'd gotten a few research contracts and it's it's really hard to use um right now because it's not developed it's not a product yet and somewhat complicated because it allows for dozens of parameters of data to be shown in one scene so um my now co-founder dave was like well let's do something together like you're he used to be enlisted before he got his md and a phd in neuroscience so he's a genius and he likes giving me for being an officer and writing memphis he's like you can write memos you can plan you can be the officer um and i don't have to do that and eventually like we can make money and i can have a research lab and stuff so for the last couple years we've been working on this company together um well that's and that's cool so um so now that you're building the company you're you're you know getting that experience and uh going you know getting here getting that phase of your life that you've always wanted to be an entrepreneur you get the opportunity to get the chance you know how did that go was it exciting and it was a great experience was it tough and difficult was it you know getting all of the above or kind of how did that go for you yeah um it's definitely all of the above i mean it's been a pandemic so i have not like done my makeup maybe more than like five days in the past year um and so those moments you think well i have an ambition to have a multi-billion dollar company and have a huge team and right now it's me and another two people and i'm sitting in sweats in my house for months on end like going really slow uh and so i found that the time that i took not to do something practical to move the company forward but when i took it to reinforce the story in my head of how this would evolve and sometimes that was watching other founders who'd been at it for 10 years and they're like yeah in the beginning it was like it looked like this it looked like this for a long time and then it went you know up um that was really helpful or it was just telling our own story like we know what we want to do and kind of going back to the fundamentals of why we started the business and the the core innovation um but one of the things uh that i regret like probably my worst business decision was um not spending our first funding wisely so we got an r d contract from the military uh in 2019 and we had six months of funding and a couple hundred thousand dollars and my my co-founder was like all right you run with it you're the project manager and i just flubbed how we use the money like we did something in the end but the biggest failure point there was instead of developing our core software i listened to other people um because i didn't i don't really understand technology that well i definitely didn't when we started i got other core skills um so i'm learning so you know two years ago i was kind of intimidated and we had like hired some consultants and developer to help us and they're like oh this software's terrible like nobody's going to use it talking about ours you you okay i get that you're doing 3d objects you need to use blender so we're let's design and blender and i just went with that instead of sticking to my guns of um yes this is early days but the most important thing is product market fit understanding our customer and an mvp not getting uncomfortable with how ugly the baby looks and trying something else so it turned out of course that blender didn't work for what we wanted the development didn't go fast enough so we barely got a little bit of a product done by the end of the research contract but it wasn't what we'd anticipated because we didn't know the development times for that software um so it was it was not embracing like my big takeaway was i didn't embrace the ugly baby and the place that we were at like we just we weren't ready to have a nicer tool we were ready to only stay with the software that we had with the little functionality it had hard as it is to use but to really understand it um and understand potential customers no no but you know it's it's one where you look back and you see you know they're they're mistakes we made but you know it's also one that i think that it's an easy one to make in the sense that you know me figuring out what the product is what that fit is who the customer is what the minimally viable product or what is the first product you can put out all of those are ones you always hear about but when you get into it it's never that easy to navigate but it sounds like after you know for a period of time it was kind of figuring that out working back and forth and that kind of brings us up to where you're at today where you guys are still at it you've you know figured out a bit more of that fit and who the customer is and where that placement is yeah so so now as we and always more things to talk about than time that's our time to talk about it but we're getting towards the end of the podcast so i think that's a good transition talking about your journey to hit on the last couple questions i always ask at the end of each podcast which is the first one i always ask is so along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what did you learn from it yeah um wasting that money was the worst decision because my co-founder and i were like oh my god like can you imagine how much development we could have done on our core product if we had just stuck to our guns um so it feels a lot like a waste but that's it's okay so um because i learned the hard way that there's no standard startup timeline like what you're doing is theoretically unique that's why it's a startup so it's gonna take the time that it takes to get to a point where you feel like oh yeah we've got traction like we've got customers that like this and people understand it or we're moving on so i actually just slowed way down during the pandemic and i learned to code last year myself i learned python and created a bunch of demos and used our tool so um like i didn't really do a ton of customer research at all i just made myself a customer and made visualizations with it so then i knew that i know my tool better than way better than i did a year ago so no and i think that that's a good lesson to learn and certainly good mistake to learn and release of a mistake to learn from so now as we jump to the the second question which is if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them that it's very similar to you know leadership at large but um i think i so i used to i ended up teaching leadership in the naval academy for a few years and i always thought that instead of teaching theory and here are like kind of the great men to look at whether it's in business or the military i think you should start with your own personality and really understand yourself and your strengths and weaknesses and just what are you drawn to and what do you avoid because in this game when there's only a couple people and you don't have a lot of like structured accountability you can really go off the rails if you don't um pay very close attention to the stuff you know you're going to avoid so it's like driving down the road you know there's going to be potholes why not plan to avoid them like just see them ahead of time instead of bouncing your car through those so um for me i really like strategy and foresight thinking but it was the um getting really tactical and just down to the nitty-gritty details with understanding clients and then not even being spread out with that like picking one market and diving in to find one particular use case to start with and that feels like you're leaving so much on the table and that's the startup advice that i hear everywhere and then i think like what's not new like well it's just because everybody finds it challenging to do so um my path into that insight what i needed was pay attention to your personality and plan that your weak weaknesses are gonna derail you if you don't have kind of the if you didn't put in the prep time to watch for the problems ahead no and i think that's definitely great advice and something that people can take to heart as they're doing a startup or small business well as we wrap up and you know for uh just as a reminder for everybody that's listening we are going to do the bonus question where i talk a little bit about intellectual property and your top question there so a reminder for everybody to stay tuned but if they are going to tune out before they do if they want to find out more they want to be a client they want to be a customer they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out or find out more uh so our company is called matri design and um i came up with that name when i got out of the navy my cpa was like just give me something we can change the paperwork later and i was going into a restaurant i just thought i'm sick of the patriarchy let's call it the matriarchy matrix so major redesign is our company so that's on linkedin and website like www.matridesign.com and like then you'll find like twitter and that stuff too but our software is open source so anybody can download it and try it um and that's on github and the software itself is called open ants all right well i definitely encourage everybody to check it out be a supporter be a user and especially open source so they can use it and build on to it and find out more about it well thank you for coming on as we wrap up the normal portion of the episode it's been fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell feel free to go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the podcast we'd love to hear your journey um also if if you're listening make sure to click subscribe so you get in your podcast players so you get notifications as all the new episodes come out and leave us a review so new people can find us last but not least if you ever need help with patents or trademarks or anything else your business feel free to go to strategymeeting.com grab some time to chat with us so now with that as we wrapped up the normal portion of the episode is now the time to we flip it a bit and i always get asked the questions during the normal portion um and so i always get the easier i always say the easier job and now you get to flip the question a bit with the bonus question you get asked so what is your top intellectual property questions i can answer for you so it's around open source we think that we want a business model where the company the main company that gets invested in holds the core ip for the graphics visualization engine and then we imagine um potentially creating other separate corporate entities that would have a license for that and maybe some co-ownership of shares and that other entity would actually build a proprietary function set of functionality and database integrations on top so this um concept of holding core open source ip in one company but have but within like the same group of people separating out the um kind of licensing rights for whether it's geography or markets or something into separate companies do you have any thoughts on managing that complicated space no i think it's a it's a fair question and as a as a side note and i'll certainly get to answer your question where i do i run a few different companies or i'm certainly involved with a few different companies and so what i did is you know we i i created what would be a parent company or almost a holding company within within each one of the companies could be uh owned by that parent company so kind of a lease or lets them be siloed lets them be um separate and manage their own budgets and have their own expenses different taxes and you know all the by the same token i am able to hold my own ownership in each of them such that it doesn't become complicated with too much of an ownership structure so that's kind of maybe a bit of a side note but you know the the question is and i think and i think far to put it is you know you're looking at licensing you're having opportunities to do different different things with different portions of the the company and so whenever you look at licensing and how you're going to do it is it i think that the first step you guys have taken is right in the sense that you can do it a couple ways when you get into licensing and you have different aspects one is you can do it based on intellectual property so generally a patent that you could say okay for each patent we're going to do a different we're going to split up the different technologies for different patents and so we're going to say hey this technologies for this patent is going to go for this and i can license that separately than a different patent so that would be one thing that you could set up if you're just saying hey we have really different areas we want to license we want to keep it all in the same company that would be one avenue the other one is what you guys set up but i think is an interesting and it can be a good structure as we're looking saying hey we really got almost different areas of a company or different things that each or different things that each portion is doing such that we either want to license it and it also lends itself well to if you're ever to do a merger or an acquisition be bought out or otherwise partner up that you're saying hey now we've siloed it out such that yes we are looking to license or merge your acquisition or whatever for this or this avenue in this aspect but we then you don't intermingle everything else so it makes it a clear or an easier conversation so i don't know that i have a ton of feedback other than that other than i think that there's there's good aspects of doing it now the only thing you ever have to watch out for is if you really have one company they're trying to run as three companies it can get a bit complicated as to how you run the budgets how you move the money back and forth how you you know are able to show a unified front to the to the customers or to the individuals while you know running it on the back end with multiple companies so that's a a little bit more on the taxes paid or expenses and also for outward facing things that you always have to figure out or just make sure you account for they can get a bit more complex but it does have a lot of advantages to it yeah that's good all right well with that there's your there's a your top intellectual property question that was a good question and a fun fun to chat about so um with that we'll wrap up the podcast and i want to once again thank you anne for coming on the podcast it's been fun it's been a pleasure and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you so much thanks for having me you