You Are Going to Make So Many Mistakes

You Are Going To Make So Many Mistakes 

Todd Elkins

Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey
Podcast for Entrepreneurs

8/17/2020

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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

it's a grind it is just i've read all the books and everyone talks about oh you know zero to one the lean startup started with manual but every day you're gonna learn something new and you're just gonna make so many mistakes and then you're gonna realize oh i did that wrong i gotta redo it or you know other companies didn't have this problem why do we have this problem now you're not the first person to have these problems but it's you and it's your company it's your idea and the climate's different i mean coco decide and all that like life is different now than when a lot of these books were written two or three or four or five or six years ago so things change and it's always kind of this fluid environment hey everyone this is devon miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the uh serial entrepreneur and uh founder and ceo of uh miller ip law where we help startups and trade or startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks and today we have another great guest on today um todd and i'll let him introduce himself a little bit more but to give you a bit of a background he's done graduated construction management got a job right as the market crashed which is probably the worst time but at least in his defense i was about this i i timed it better i was uh graduated and they are after the market just started recovering the legal field because the legal field was their heart of the crash as well but then he did that for a few years decided after doing that for a while he wanted to change and so he went to a more liberal job construction management and uh company and then he decided after that he was going to go do his own thing so that's my brief introduction but welcome to the podcast devin yeah great happy to be here thanks for having me well great to have you on so i'm sure i did i slaughtered your whole introduction but i tried to give the highlights but maybe if you want to uh tell us a little bit more about your journey and kind of what uh where you've been and where what brought you to today excellent yeah sure so right now my current role i'm the ceo of a small startup called m2x.ai uh m2x stands for measure twice so there's an old construction adage uh measure twice cut once um if you're trying to cut a piece of wood and you cut too much off then you're in big trouble so it's always easier to take a little bit back after you cut it off yep yeah you can always you can always take more off you can ever put more on so our construction tool we are a digital construction tool uh focusing to be a planning studio that creates software for the productization of construction and we'll kind of dive a little bit deeper into what that means but we want to bring some productization to what construction is we know that products in general when you buy software you use a tool you buy a car it has a schedule it has a price it has specs um it has a number has a value and kind of builds that way out construction is not like that really at all it tends to still be let's just go do it and then we're done we'll know what we have so we want to bring a little bit more uh scalability repeatability and predictability to the construction design uh engineering process oh cool it's a great intro so now if we were to take that and so that's where you're at today and the inventive journey is obviously as of the name the journey of what you got today so maybe then taking that and saying backing up how did you work your way up to that or where did you start out and let up to where you're at today for sure so i went to michigan state a proud graduate in the construction management program and right out of college i started working at dpr construction which is a very large general contractor like a top 15 top 10 based on revenue in the us and they're a great company uh i've you know moved from san francisco or sorry i moved from michigan to the bay area and had a great experience with about three years with them as a young job site engineer when you're a young engineer on job sites you're doing uh requests for informations you're doing submittals change orders a lot of paperwork a lot of documents and three years was long enough to look at people that were you know five 10 15 years older than me and realized that you know it's a pretty tough gig to be a job site superintendent or product manager and eventually work your way up to a product executive it's a lot of hard work and sometimes it's a lot of travel and it just wasn't exactly what i was in love with and dpr is based in you know the bay area found in redwood city and kind of a forward thinking more liberal if you will when it comes to large general contractors and they said what do you want to do so i kind of poked around the company for a little bit and was fortunate to meet two gentlemen uh dean reed and atul kazoti who had come up with an idea to take what's known as last planner which is a post-it note kind of pull planning system so traditional planning starts on day one and then you just push your way forward which keeps pushing the schedule out a bunch of smart guys and gals at berkeley uh in the 90s and 2000s came up with this idea of pull planning so planning backwards which is what most people do you know naturally anyway like if you have a 7pm flight you got to be to the airport by six you got to be in your car by 5 30. you got to start packing by four you kind of work backwards well they took that concept and applied it to billion dollar construction job sites and in doing that they use these post-it notes and post-it notes they would track them on excel and you'd have to do all this manual work and then it was sharing an excel file to a shared drive and who owned what and someone taking photos of 500 stickies on a wall and um dean and a tool within dpr had an idea to say let's make a software and i was available so i said sure throw me in there the two of them were working there you know 50 hour a week jobs as is so i kind of delve in help them out as much as i could read some startup books and we had some wireframes then we built so i'm gonna i'll jump in for just saying so you're working you you started out and you did the original construction company decided hey looking at the prospects you know how long it's going to take what it'll look like when i even do if i make it and that's going to be a long road so you switch to you know what i call the more liberal construction management better suited better fits your lifestyle and you know or what you're looking for in a company in a company and then you have the the friends you know kind of the last planning you're staking the idea and then planning backwards which i think makes a lot more sense because otherwise you just plan for that you don't know whether you're going to end or what the other way is or when you're going to hit that so that makes good sense but it did so when you when your friend came up and decided hey would like this is the idea want to get you involved i want you to get your feedback did you just jump off from the other company you're at and just say okay i'm all i'll feed in you know did i jump in i'm gonna quit job and go out go chase a dream did you stay with the company and work this is a side gig or how did that transition make yeah so that we actually came up with this internally at dpr so um this was like a little small side project within dpr and we knew in order to make it a real thing we actually had to like break away and become a subsidiary so it was more like an incubation from uh dpr which is interesting because now tons of large general contractors and many fortune 500 companies are doing this left and right now and i'm sure they've been doing it for decades but this was one in the construction space this is what's one of the original tools that a large general contractor a billion dollar company said we have an idea let's break this off as a freestanding company let's give them a couple hundred grand and seed money and then from there it was two of us and then three of us the five of us we grew and hired product managers and a couple sales people and engineers so we were a small incubated company that ended up getting over a couple million dollars in ar sales and actually you know was a freestanding company directly from dpr construction so and that's one hitting on that note i think it's an interesting one so one of the issues sometimes you have with when you have an idea and you say hey you know whether it originates in the company or it's just why you're at the company you know you can either go pitch it to your current employer and see if they are interested and want to invest or want to develop it but sometimes you're saying if i take to my employer and they pick it up then i lose control or i can't do it myself or i can't so you know how do you make the decision of let's do it within the company split it off do i pitch it to my employer do i you know do it on my own there's a side hustle or how did you know at least for you how did you make that decision or transition from starting within there and then moving it out exactly so good question yeah so doing it inside um pretty young at that point i mean 23 24 ish and didn't was in the bay area but didn't know a lot about that startup game i know people like zuckerberg stuff had billion dollar companies by the time they were 24 so not that hard to think i could have left and maybe try and do this on my own but at that time especially two you know still kind of coming out of the recession this is like 2011-ish things aren't that great and it was really baked internally inside the company and you know a lot about law and ip so i do think uh if we had formally left and then tried to found this company and go raise money then word would have got back to them pretty quickly hey we were paying these guys salaries for the last year they were doing all this work on our computers they were testing the product or testing some of these ideas on our job sites before they actually left so i don't think at that time it would have been uh we could have run into some big trouble if we were like hey thanks for all your time energy and effort we're just gonna go try and raise this company and do it on our own um so that was pretty much the predominant reason for uh negan to stay inside of dpr no that makes complete sense and i think that there's even a bit of the honorable thing hey if they really have paid for the salary you've done it on their time and effort and dime they should have you know reasonable reach into it or be at least have the option to pursue it given that they were the one that devoted a lot of the resources and paid the salary during that period so you know but it's a hard one because sometimes you say hey i got this idea i don't want i want to do my own thing i don't want to be within the company but i'm worried that if i go pitch it to them or if they do it then then i'm not going to be able to do it or they're going to take it over i'm going to lose control so i think it's a hard balance i just think it's an interesting one to get so so then you decide okay we started this off in the within the company it reached a point they were saying okay and i think it's what we talked about just a little bit before the podcast of you know kind of got to the point where it wasn't their core company it wasn't their core mission so it made sense to spin off saying hey this isn't what our main focus is of the company we think it's a great idea so let's spin it off invest in it and let somebody else pursue it outside of our normal business arrangement so you did that you set it up and then you know remind me how long ago was that that you originally spun it off and got it going uh so 2012 we became a freestanding company january 2012 we formally left dpr uh construction became a freestanding company ran that for about two and a half years and then were acquired by autodesk in the summer of 2014. so it was about one year inside of dpr baking the idea maybe a little bit more and then we had a gentleman who had a lot of experience in the space and uh you know it was in his 50s and had been there done this a lot and had a lot more tech experience than i did mike davidson came over and became the ceo of our plan um at that time and really took us from this hey we're on dozens of job sites and we're really great internally to hey this is a multi-million dollar business and we can sell this to all sorts of people around the country and our competitors or people in the space so let's go out there and turn this into a true sas product and go sell it so we did that for about two years and after two years we got to the point to where we were doing enough uh sales and had enough revenue that we became an acquisition target we ended up talking to the three or four larger um competitors of autodesk and got into a good little situation with a couple of interest from a couple of folks and then were acquired by autodesk and rolled into autodesk in 2014. so i think if i remember when you then you got acquired by autodesk which is you know that's always you know a bittersweetness and sometimes you're saying oh it's exciting it's a great opportunity and yet you know it's a bit of a given up a bit of the baby or give you know turning the control over but then i think you mentioned that you after that you went and traveled around with europe and it sails for a period of time is that right exactly so in uh um autodesk a couple months to rebrand the product and get it out there they brought it into their bim 360 suite which is all construction technology jobsite tools and the new products called bin360 plan which is cute because it's the planning tool so that makes plenty of sense for them and um it took them a while to rebrand it and when they did they said oh we could use someone in europe to really lead this new effort so at that time i was a subject matter expert in lean the pool planning process i had a lot of consulting experience and you know one of the co-creators co-originators of this idea who better than me to move over to europe to help lead this effort so in europe my main role was in pre-sales helping salespeople understand exactly what we had how to sell this thing over in europe and then me learning a ton too that you know let alone cultures and languages but the germans and the french and the british and the people in the nordics and stuff they all speak and act and behave differently but they all sell differently as well so it was a lot of me going to different offices to say here's what we have and then them going oh okay well the germans are going to want these three or four things and then the french team going well french people like to buy this way so it's a really neat experience to go to i think i went to ten or nine different offices throughout europe over those about two and a half years i lived there um helping lead this sales and consulting effort and that was kind of my main role was helping push that product um shaking a lot of hands doing a lot of meetings going to conferences and now representing the company and helping train other people and you know what exactly is this product and how do we sell it no i think that's insightful so then you do that you do that for enjoy the europe tour and i kind of look at it it's always kind of like you know you typically hear graduating from high school i'm going to go you know backpack throughout europe for a while you sold or got your company acquired and then you went uh did your europe tour for a while but then i think when we talked a little bit before you said you know the pace got to be a bit too slow as far as you're looking for something at the big quicker pace wanted to be able to do something you know that's i think typical with a lot of big companies it's always kind of ironic you know it's a startup for a small business you have to pivot you're nimble and everything else and you're you know more willing to take on a risk because you have to because you're small and then you get big and then you kind of get slower and you're not as nimble and you know it's kind of that hard thing as a company grows and gets bigger to try and keep the culture or keep the way that you want to go about business the same but then you decided okay done autodesk or worked with autodesk did europe for a while want to come back to the u.s and so how did you make that transition for okay i'm going to come back to the u.s and start to find something as my own pace and the pace that i want and and re-engage on a new new idea or new startup yeah definitely so autodesk was a great experience i worked a lot of smart talented people i loved what i learned in that time frame and autodesk is a huge machine the amount of things that happened in a company that large with 10 15 000 employees was amazing and enjoyed that but like you said it can be a little slow so back in the airplane days when there were five or ten of us in a room if we wanted to come up with a new idea we wanted to move a button we would talk about it for a day and somebody would knock something up and then we would test it and we release it you know that same type of conversation could take you know several weeks but then again you're not talking about hundreds or thousands of users you're talking about tens of thousands of users so um you know the stakes were much larger and a little bit slower at autodesk so i didn't know i wanted to get back into the bay area three years in europe was long enough for me to go i enjoy my time here i don't want to live here forever so coming back to the bay i interviewed a bunch of construction tech companies definitely wanted to be early at a company and that's what led me to a company called runvix which is a timekeeping and productivity app company and was there for just over a year um maybe a year and a half in a sales role that was the first time i had a formal sales role joined to be sales vp's right-hand man and had a great experience in learning that um that gentleman josh ended up resigning about i think three months into my tenure so the ceo zach shiel and myself led sales you know zach was still signing all the checks and was the headman as the ceo but i ended up inheriting a large sales team a lot of bdrs a lot of sales people a lot of them had more experience than i did and were older than i did and you know knew that i wasn't a sales management guy through and through i was kind of hoping to be the right hand man there for a year or two you know really uh learn a lot and gain and um just like in any startup that's a pre-series b pre-series a type company with you know 20 30 employees when i left we're about 60 or 70 um a lot going on right you're drinking the fire hose you know you just it's just next next person up whenever an opportunity opens so that was a lot of hard work a lot of fun and i learned more about sales and sales management in you know 14 or 15 months than i ever thought i could but again it was enough for me to go i think i want something you know being the first guy in uh being one of the leaders when my co-founders really owning your future um is a little bit different than being you know number four or five or six i'm a totem pole and i kind of haven't to work with what's around you and restraints and all that so um at time run base was great but it was also the writing was on the wall a little bit that hey you know i don't know if i want to be a sales vp in a year or two and i just don't know if i want to kind of grind through sale startup sales um you know in a full-time capacity going forward so that kind of got me to the point where maybe it's time to uh to look for something else so then you decide okay you're gonna look for something else and then how did you how did you land on where you're at today was it i always had that idea and you just finally had the opportunity to chase it was it you know somebody else came up the idea and approached you and you you know co-founded together or you know started to survey what you know different things you could do or how did you kind of land on the the idea and the now the business you're running today exactly so my technical co-founder brett young um had been a friend of mine that i had met through years of conferences and events and he's a very big bim guy so building information modeling for those that aren't uh you know necessarily in the construction design space which is like us but yeah yeah so um he brett is you know a few years older than me and spent about 10 years in the field and then he pivoted into bim building new information modeling design work consulting and spent a lot of time in there he then spent a couple years really in the gaming space so trying to bring a company called unity so he worked at a company called unity which is one of the largest gaming development platforms in the world and he was looking at construction design tools that he had worked with for 10 years and all these gaming software tools and said like these things are pretty similar why does it take hundreds of hours and training and all this heavy lifting to use construction design tools when you play fortnite or you play world of warcraft you just pick up the remote and a five-year-old can figure it out so you start thinking there's got to be a middle between these two why can't we do a lot of this design construction work in a lot of these unity-based platforms that are much faster easier cheaper to develop there's about 1.5 million developers of unity out there across the world and there are 10 probably hundreds of millions of people that play video games every day versus the tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of people that do construction software tools so he really focused on his basement for a year really got heavy into the coding having that work and then got to a point where he had a product and a couple products that were working on that he kind of poked me with an email and then said like hey i'm thinking about needing a co-founder to come do sales and marketing and all that and i was like hey you're not quite ready here's two or three things i think you need some work on and then a month later he was like hey you know like what do you think about this can you sell this and i would say hey that's really good but i don't know if you have something that you know justifies me quitting my full-time job and then you know not taking a paycheck for the next year because i know how this works um and finally he got to a point where he was like hey i need somebody and this is what i got so i it got to the points where i was like you know i'm ready to jump off the ship so um left remix took about a month off do a little bit of traveling and then now brett is my co-founder technical founder and i'm helping um sales engagement marketing fun cool so now you so you make the jump you find say okay i'm i'm in on the ground floor i'm the founder you know our co-founder we're gonna do this we're gonna do the way we want and it's gonna be fun everything was smooth sailing from there no bumps no everything it was just a hockey stick up to uh success or how did that in reality because that's never the trick it was never the case how did it go as you jumped in and started did the startup and started uh doing or pursuing that one step forward two sets back just every single day it's um it's amazing so at our plan when we were kind of hopefully it's two steps forward one step back otherwise you're going in reverse sometimes it feels like that it really does you know when you've got 10 things to do on your to-do list that week and you get eight of them done but another 10 things got added to your to-do list that week you're like did i move forward this week that i'm getting yeah i'd use the opposite i usually have ten things and i walk in the awesome like okay i can get these things done and then i then i get pulled aside have to and then i still have those ten things but then i have five more things to add on to that but yeah no i completely get that yeah it's um so at our plan we had that you know our seed money was coming from dpr so we didn't i wasn't out fundraising i was not worrying about money i wasn't you know worried about hiring people and like where's these checks going to come from we had a billion dollar corporation behind us so that game and in that world is very difficult to try and push your way through that now right now we're actually um we're bringing a fair amount of money in the door and we're being able to pay our developers we've yet to pay ourselves yet which is part of the part of this game right now we haven't formally raised any outside funds but we're just kind of waiting a little bit you know the more traction we can get the more users we have and obviously the more revenue in the door we have um that will make fundraising a little bit better and right now the climate's a little questionable some people say it's actually a really good time to go because people are being a little tighter with funding and handing money out which means there's just more money out there but then again a lot of people that have been kind of hurting through some of the stocks going down all those angel people um are are questioning some investments and being a little bit tighter as well so we're uh yet to go the process to really hit the ground on the road show really focusing on product and our users we have full customers right now that are all using our products and our tools so they're all paying customers and then you know we have dozens of people logging in we are to an mvp product but it still needs a little bit of handholding on our end from our developers and from ourselves so we do have a consultanting touch the company into new org to really we're still kind of pushing some buttons and doing some magic behind the scenes um but we are planning you know absolutely this calendar year uh maybe q3 to have a full product that is out there actually selling uh and more like a plug-and-play sas type model okay no i think that sounds like things are uh in uncertain times but still moving in a good direction and uh we're moving forward so that's awesome so yeah as so i always have my last question last one more before my last two questions which is so you look at the next six months six to 12 months kind of where do you see things going where what's the direction what's the focus and what are you guys planning on doing yeah so the next couple months we really need more usage um we need more user feedback before we want to launch we do have three products right now on knowing our space and our size and where we want to actually accelerate to we're probably going to need to put all of our chips behind one of those products and really push that going forward there's a lot of there's a lot of room for growth in construction tech in general a lot of what construction tech is is taking paper processes and digitizing them so people are very proud of the idea that um oh we have drawings but now we have them on ipads or oh we had you know paper cards now they're in the cloud or our finances are now in the cloud so but it's taking a lot of paper old-school processes and just digitizing them whereas they don't actually build tools that are you know in the idea of software focus first so the idea of over just digitizing old processes instead of going just because these are how we do it does that mean we need to do it that way so one of our big focuses is kind of going back and saying you know it supports that if you have drawings and blueprints but that's the old way of thinking we really want to like replicate how people actually build buildings and drawings and models are just a byproduct of that digital process so we need to kind of pull plan work backwards and figure out what are the best steps to actually create these buildings and how work is actually built and then create software tools to do that so our main focuses are to really dial in on exactly what we have and to get more usage in there and prove that out and then get to that point to where we have a product where we need people saying if you took this product away from me i don't know what i would do like that's the definition of a great product for me is if i go to my computer and my internet's down i i am screwed like i literally can't do my job so we need our product to be to the point to where someone were to say if our servers just went down i would want a hundred emails flooding my inbox my you know my support people going like what what is happening so we need to get to that point and we're close we're knocking on that door and that's the goal is to get to a point where we have a product and a service that is so in demand that we're going to get more inbounds than we are now and that people like kind of live and die no i think that's that's great so i think that that's a good goal and hopefully as you work towards it you're accomplishing it and you have people down knocking down your door anytime your server's down making sure that they they get it back up so all right so with that we'll we'll jump to the end or jump to the the questions i always ask at the end um so i'll jump or dive into those now so the first question i always ask is um what is the worst business decision you ever made right so um this is a tough one i think the question around like what is i think why is really what the question that's a good question but i think it's more why so like why was that decision made so whenever i made poor decisions in my life professionally or um personally they were usually in moments of despair or haste my back was up against a wall didn't really have a lot of options that's when bad decisions get made when you think you're under pressure so i really like thinking pause and stop and maybe that pause is 30 seconds maybe it's an hour maybe it's a day maybe it's something to kind of sleep on but anytime things are kind of blurry or uncertain if i can just kind of pause step back and really think about it anytime i'm under ace or if business isn't going the way it is you know i really try and do five why's which is like a lean technique that's well documented so asking why five times to truly get to that root cause of that problem so anytime i took in that pause and thoroughly thought out decisions um it's really opened up a lot of opportunities and turned some tough situations into some good ones so that's gonna be my um my main answer there is it's more along the ideas of why so some you know kind of examples of four decisions i made some of them were with you know employees you know tough to having let people go or you know keeping someone on for too long so a lot of this i think is just kind of stretching things out to say well we put so much time into that product like we're just gonna can it or to spend you know i've spent hundreds of hours on decks that literally have been thrown away so that's another good one for startups yeah you know no one's gonna remember your first website no one remembers your first deck unless you become uber and then people pass them around and you know in chats and on twitter and say oh look at their first deck they got a billion dollars out of this um so don't hammer stuff that hard in the beginning um whether it's business plans or marketing or you know your messaging or your vision we spent days on our vision and our slogan putting commas and it's is it it's or it's you know it's like you know in the grand scheme of things that small stuff um you don't need to sweat over but on the bigger decisions i think the final eyes and really understanding you know what's the reason we're doing this is it really going to be the best thing not just today but in the long term no i think that's a great lesson to learn i like the why as well as well you're almost i was almost gonna hammer you tell me you had to give me some examples but then you saved yourself at the end and so i didn't have to hammer you and say you have to give me an example that's probably the attorney in me saying hey i need you to get you answered a great question but do you answer the question i asked but you did a great job so all right second question i always ask is um so somebody that's just wanting to get into startups or just getting into startups so kind of in that phase what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them you um a couple of them are i mean it's a grind it is just i've read all the books and everyone talks about oh you know zero to one the lean startup started with manual but every day you're gonna learn something new and you're just gonna make so many mistakes and then you're gonna realize oh i did that wrong i got to redo it or you know other companies didn't have this problem why do we have this problem now you're not the first person to have these problems but it's you and it's your company it's your idea and the climate's different i mean covet assad and all that like life is different now than when a lot of these books were in two or three or four five six years ago so things change and it's always kind of this fluid environment so you're going to run into a lot of issues and problems um i think making the same mistakes twice is obviously like what a huge problem becomes like making mistakes is fine you know you know you learn more from your losses sometimes than your victories but uh just not making the same mistakes so someone get into startups um it's a real grind there's gonna be a lot more happily dealing with lawyers and dealing with a lot of outside factors that like you just didn't think part of like i'm going to build this product and then before you know it i'm going to be picking out what yacht i'm buying um it's really not there um i think things are much slower to start especially in the beginning a lot of people look at companies and exits and ipos and all that and you got to know that 99 companies will never get there and a lot of companies end up having like a year or two of not much not a lot of growth a lot of difficulties a lot of you know questioning yourselves a lot of founder depression and like is this is this make any sense like my checking account literally keeps hitting zero like so you know you've got to have a lot of faith in yourself so kind of high level ones are um you make a lot of mistakes don't make the same ones twice two i think really be in love with what you're doing going thinking you have an idea because it's going to make you a lot of money or because it's going to be the next great thing uh if it's not something you're passionate about it's not something you lay in bed thinking about you know what am i doing this for you're going to spend more time your life's just going to be involved in this thing and it's going to be your heartbeat so if it's not something you know a lot about or you want to know a lot about or you really care and passionate about um it's probably not really going to work out to be really honest in that regard so make a lot of mistakes don't make them twice and then go into something that you really care and are passionate about and you have some background in and you have some expertise in or you can get some expertise in and something that you really whether this is a billion dollar company or whether after two years we have to shake hands and just kind of walk away that in either of those situations you can walk away going i put my heart and soul into that i did everything i could we were super successful and got a lot of money out of it and changed the world or we were successful in a different way and that it was quite a journey i learned a lot i had an impact on my space and i can take that knowledge and that experience and then go on to the next idea well i think that's great advice for everybody i think that certainly is uh makes a good amount of sense so and i even got you your top two instead of your top one so that's even better so so people want to reach out to you they want to use your product they want to get involved they want to invest they want to know more about it what's the best way to reach out to you yeah so our website is m2x.ai um so that's our main website right now i'm on twitter at t-o-d-d-b-e-l-k-i-n-s and then my email address is todd t-o-d-d at m2x dot ai um so yeah happy to talk to people and whether they're um folks that are interested in what we're doing um in the space investors people out there that want to try out what we're involved in or other founders that are you know going through the same journey um love talking other founders and other people and like you know you put five of us in a room and everybody's got the same problems but they're a little different everyone's got different solutions and i learn more every single day in this space than you know you can learn it years at you know huge companies and just kind of sitting at your desk and just following the path and you know sticking to the manual and doing what the person next to you does when you kind of go out on your own and there's only one or two or five of you in a room that's when you know rubber meets the road and you really start learning a lot about yourself and that's why i think when major growths come which are some of the biggest advantages of being a small startup well awesome i think that's appreciate you sharing that and i think that that's some good thoughts and words of advice as well as a great way for people to reach out to you and just uh that's amazon mary two is in uh the number two x is an x-ray and then ai and um so people want to reach out they'll make sure to reach out to you and strongly encourage people to do so um if we'll appreciate you are coming on and it's been a fun fun to chat with you for those of you that are listeners if you if you have your own journey you want to tell certainly feel free to apply to be a guest on the podcast at inventivejourney.com and if you are listening make sure to subscribe on any of the channels so that you can hear the new episodes and uh for those of you that need any help with patents and trademarks feel free to reach out to us at miller ip law and we'd love to help thanks again for coming on it's been a fun uh fun time to hear your journey taught and to uh see how things are going and look forward to hearing more about your journey and wish you the best journey and going forward thanks again devin pleasure was online [Music] [Music] English (auto-generated) All Recently uploaded