Vern Howard of Hallo

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that explores the evolving landscape of the venture capital world. We'll have candid conversations with today's VCs and entrepreneurs who are shaping those changes. I'm Jim Behr, Managing Partner at Behr, Negron, and Troff, and President of CMG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind the decision making strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. I actually told myself this year I'm gonna do way more of these things because if someone younger can see me and say, oh, wow.

I relate to him. Well, I look like him. Well, we have the same background. Or, you know, how do I get to be even at at my stature right now, how do I get to be similar to Verne? Then I inspired somebody.

Today, I have the great pleasure of sitting down with Verne Howard, founder and CEO of Hallow, a digital events platform transforming the job market for today's college graduates. We talked about technology as a tool for inclusion, diversifying the workforce, and the art of modeling unlimited possibilities for the next generation. Welcome today, and tell us a little bit about your background, and let's just jump right in. I'm excited for this interview. Cool.

Same. Thanks for having me. So background, like so I'm from Rochester, New York, which is Upstate. Not cool at all. It's not the cool part of New York.

No good stories. It is like a tech hub, though. I figured out when I was growing up, like, Kodak was there, and Xerox started there too. I graduated high school at 16. I skipped a grade.

I was super gifted in math. I didn't know what I wanted to do after high school, and I played lacrosse all through high school. So my ultimate dream was to figure out how to play lacrosse. Kept telling my mom, like, I don't wanna go to college. She's like, you need to go to college.

You know, parents are usually always right at that age. So anyway, like a year later, I ended up going to college, and then I went to Virginia, of all places. My dad was an engineer at EDS, and then moved over to Capital One at some point too. And I was like, yo, I, you know, I wanna come to school. And he's like, okay.

Check out all these schools in Virginia. You know, all those schools are interesting, but they all reminded me of Hogwarts. I remember I was like, this is kinda, like, too stuffy for me. And I ended up settling on Virginia Commonwealth University, which was like a artsy school. You probably can tell I'm, like, really into art.

I love this school and ended up studying computer science and mathematics concentration and got to the career fair. Capital One pitched me, and they were like, Verne, we'd love to have you on our team. And, you know, our competition is at Morgan Stanley. It's Facebook. And throughout my time at Capital, and I stayed there about three and a half years, I I went from building mobile apps for them and online banking.

I was a hacker for a year and a half there hacking the web apps that I built. And then I started trading my bonus, and they hired me to sit on the trading floor, trading through it with the team. So it was a great experience. And kinda all throughout that time, a ton of alumni in VCU were writing me on LinkedIn, of course, and saying, how did you get here? How did you get here?

How did you get here? And, you know, it's kinda how I got the initial start of building this company out. Well, let's jump to that. Tell us a little bit about the new company and how you're faring in the world of COVID. Yeah.

I think one thing I realized when I was building the company out and what made me start was I was kinda doing a lot of this analog. Right? Most of the stuff in my life, I noticed I was just putting together these webs of channels. Oh, if I wanna work at Google, I need to meet this person, and I need to do this and get this degree or get this certification. And, you know, I was kinda just like, why isn't there a tool online that lets me enter data where I'm at today, and I tell them where I wanna go, and it just builds that map for me.

Like, it kinda recreates the wheel for me to say, like, this is the best path forward. If we did have something like that, I mean, that's the 99 percentile. And we see all these things in the news, the admissions scandal and all these things, and we're like, why are parents paying for their kids to go to these top tier schools? Well, they're paying for it because they know their kid's gonna get a top tier job. Right?

And that's ultimate goal. And I was like, what if I build something that lets everyone collect informational resources on how to get a job at Google and then build that network of talking to the right person? Would that change the trajectory landscape of how people find jobs? I pitched, like, a few people. One was Garrett Kemp, the cofounder of Uber.

Early on, I pitched Steve Case, the founder of AOL, and he didn't end up getting in the deal that early. But later down the line, he did end up investing. Where are you at in your growth cycle? I mean, are you guys raising more money right now? Are you Right.

In different verticals, or is it all in colleges, or is it graduate schools? Tell us a little bit where you are in the trenches right now. Right. Right. So we initially started off with the platform where we were just working with five schools and around 10 companies.

There's only six of us on the team right now. We've scaled to 1,225 universities in over a 100 companies. Today, we just hosted an event for Apple. So we just closed a recent contract with Apple to host over 50 events on the platform. Five of them are coming up over the next six days today.

We hosted one that over 2,000 students showed up in total four. So it's huge now. It's growing really quickly. Our head of engineering, he built LinkedIn. Our number two engineer, she built Vivo.

She's the head of engineering at Vivo. So we have some, like, rock stars on the team, and we raised around $1,900,000 to build out this community with live video and tons of data resources. And now, yeah, we're finishing up another round, which I'm not gonna share a ton about it, but, yeah, we're finishing up another round, which is exciting. You know, VCs are looking at the landscape, and they're saying, wow. These guys have been able to build a ton of resources right now on this platform with essentially no capital.

1,900,000 sounds like a lot, but it it's not a ton to build out what we have so far. And, obviously, the deal with Apple pushed us over the line. Are there big people in this space that you're going head to head with, or is it a new space where there's not a lot of competition? What's the landscape look like? I think it's, adjacent competitors.

I think for some people we don't find competitive, though. I mean, I think Handshake is one of the biggest players in this space, and, you know, they raise a ton of money. You know, we love the company. We think those guys are great. And then there's other adjacent competitors, like, such as the Hopkins, who also raise a good amount of money.

We also don't find them super competitive, what we're trying to do. I think our niche is, like, we don't consider ourselves a recruiting company at all just because recruiting is not our ultimate goal. What we know in this space is that there are recruiters who naturally will fit you to the job once you get in the door. I think the most challenging part about finding a job is just getting in the door, which the only two ways you can actually get in the door is a resource, like someone who works there, or the information to know exactly how to tailor yourself to be Apple ready. Alright?

And that's kinda where we sit in this informational cycle of, like, we'll go to your university and gather a ton of students in certain demographics and say, hey. You should talk to Apple because you might align with their brand, or you should talk to Uber because you might align with their brand. And that's kinda what we choose to play. But, yeah, I mean, tons of people raising money in this space. Hopin just raised a lot of money, same with Handshake and other players.

So for us, we're here and, we're also raising. So it's exciting time. It sounds like there's a technological platform component where if Apple hires you to go round up a bunch of kids at UCLA or wherever so that they can find the cream of the crop Mhmm. Is it automated such that you're giving these people a way where they can put their information and then you somehow sort it and you're screening for Apple, for instance. Is that what you're helping them do?

Yeah. And I think the old method of recruiting, honestly, was like screening people out. Right? Like, oh, you're not a fit. You're not a fit.

You're not a fit. And I think the new method is screening people in. It's allowing more people to get access. One thing we always told teams that work with us is to, like, Verne, do we have to market? Do we have to go find these people?

And we're, like, no. You just have to show up. And to your point, yes. We actually do go to certain schools and interact with communities there and then bring them on our platform, and we can actually cherry pick and weed them out across different Apple events. I think we've scaled over 1,500,000 data points on students at this point, so it's a lot.

And being a black founder, I mean, I've done some reading and heard about certain challenges you've had and Mhmm. Cultural issues and stuff. Do you see it as an advantage right now that in terms of going in there and being able to speak to different groups and dynamics whether or not people of color or otherwise, do you find it as an advantage right now or is it a challenge? In this space that we play in, I think it's a huge advantage. It's funny, as we look in the space, I've talked to other founders that have been in this space for them.

They're like, Verne, how are you getting so many students to engage with the platform so quickly? For me, since I have had to play the game of figuring out who to talk to and what are they looking for and how do I tailor myself properly to present myself in the best light, I actually know how to talk to students that are facing those same problems. Right? Regardless of what race, gender, or demographic they're from, usually students who don't go to top tier universities face this regardless of their race or gender. We actually have to figure out how to get into these larger, more competitive roles and companies.

And so I find it, like, to be a huge advantage. And, honestly, I'm playing in a space where, to my point, most of the people who would be adjacent competitors, they are essentially founders who are white males solving for diversity, which, you know Right. In itself, I do feel like I have a unique advantage there. And that's an interesting question. There are people that are, as you said, white people trying to solve the diversity thing.

But then there are also people that are doing it because they want quality people, and they wanna make sure they're not stereotyped and doing everything else. Having talked to people that are some of these firms that are just dotting their i's, crossing their t's, and their heart's not necessarily in it Yeah. I would actually think you'd even have more success with those companies that are actually enlightened, and they just want good people Mhmm. And they don't wanna get stereotyped. Like, they don't wanna be seen as, you know, we're just going through the motions type thing.

And I agree. What I've noticed in doing this space is a lot of companies, it is like best made plans. Right? They, for sure, want to figure out where diverse candidates are and figure out how to tap into them. But if you think about it, community building is just that.

Right? It's building a community, and that just takes time. A lot of us have thought about technology, and we think it's point and click. I used to laugh. Like, it's not going to the grocery store and picking up some apples.

Right? You actually have to do the work that's, like, build trust with certain communities, whether that's more women or Latinx communities or African American communities. You have to build trust as a company with these communities, and then they'll naturally wanna come work for you. Because if you recruit one minority, African American female, and she loves working at your company, you better believe that when it's holiday season or whatever, she's gonna rave about your company to her peers who also happen to be from that community, and they will naturally, organically wanna come work for you. That's how you do it.

It takes time. Right. It's not a algorithm. Totally makes sense. So you came to LA.

One of the things about the Puck is we're showcasing Southern California, what's unique about Southern California. Yep. Also, where the market is going, where the Puck is going. From your perspective, what attracted you to LA and what do you think differentiates ourselves? Yeah.

So when I initially got funded, I moved to San Francisco, which is a great experience. I was watching a movie about San Francisco literally yesterday, and I'm like, this is one of the most beautiful cities I've ever lived in. It's amazing. The thing that I didn't like about San Francisco was, one, it lacked in diversity, so I didn't actually feel included. No matter how much money I raised, how many groups or people I knew, it's very cliquish, and, also, I just didn't feel a huge amount of diversity.

I didn't see people who look like me, and it was, like, ridiculously expensive. That's the second thing. Like, right before COVID hit, so, like, January 2020, I was coming to LA a ton for VC meetings, and I would find myself coming for a VC meeting and then just wanting to stay the weekend. You know? I was just like, ah, I just wanna stay here.

The weather's better. The food's better. I had friends here. Like, it was just different for me. To one point, I remember, I told my cofounder, I'm like, I'm going to LA again.

And he's like, dude, you just came back from LA, like, two days ago. He's like, yo. Why don't we just go to LA? Why don't we both just work out of LA? Like, I was like, I don't know why we don't just go to LA.

Like, what is stopping us? And literally, I'm not even kidding. We moved to LA in, like, a day. We told all our some of our team, like, let's go fully remote. Everybody can be distributed.

And if you wanna be in LA, you can come to LA because we had an office through one of our investors. And I swear it was maybe two weeks after that COVID hit, and everyone was big on remote. It was, like, that quick. So when you are thinking about your company and where you are today and what you've accomplished, and, obviously, congratulations with Apple. That's huge.

But in terms of new products or new markets or expanding, where do you see the company going in the next few years? Yeah. I think as we slowly roll out of COVID restrictions, I think online events are great. Don't get me wrong. I think that's great, but I think a lot of people are raising a ton of money in this space to build something that I consider a feature.

Right? And I say that in the humblest way possible. I think online events are a mean to get somewhere else. Right? And online events are, for sure, a way to build community and build trust in that community to have people interacting and chatting and talking to each other.

I think this space that we're in right now is, for sure, making those connected dots of what happens for a student who doesn't go to a top tier university to meet, like, a top tier company and how that looks. But, also, I think the skills gap and career readiness is, like, a huge portion of getting someone's foot in the door at a larger company. And I think that's where the space is going right now. I'm, like, a huge fan of, like, the Udemy's and the Guild Education. It's like all these platforms that are, like, teaching people.

I mean, I even signed up for master class. I think a lot of platforms that are teaching people different skills online, I think that's huge, and I think that's where we're going. I think one thing that launched recently was, the Google certification, the Google University, where they're actually allowing high school students to come on and get certified in different aspects of engineering at Google or design at Google. And if you go through these certifications, you can actually skip college. I think that's huge.

And for me, graduating at 16, if I would have had that opportunity, I'm positive I would have taken that and went to work at Google at, like, 18 years old. When you look at what's going on out there, you're talking about the online experience versus in person. There's a lot of VR and AR going on in these kind of virtual worlds, and people are using avatars. And there's all sorts of money Microsoft and Facebook are putting into. There's a company in Britain called Enhance.

Have you given any thought to whether or not there are gonna be these virtual worlds with avatars where people are having virtual meetings and doing funky things in two d or three d? Honestly, that was a thing that was already happening. I I remember it as a kid, people would play, like, The Sims. It's like the Sims blowing up, and, you know, everyone loved those games. Also, if you're a gamer, you are essentially playing in an avatar space.

Right? Whether that's Call of Duty or, you know, other games. The the generation's already doing that. Right? And I think it's just now being widely adopted across different verticals.

Right? So it's like, well, we don't have to go in the office. We're realizing a lot of things during COVID. As much negative impact it had on everyone, the positives are we're all realizing. We actually didn't have to be in the office to get our best work done.

Maybe that coffee meeting could've just been, like, a video FaceTime. We're actually utilizing tools, right, that we already had. And I think, for sure, everyone's gonna start utilizing the avatar feature and going fully remote. Right? Some of the biggest companies have already gone fully remote.

And I think someone like Slack imagine if Slack built an avatar ish space on top of the tool where people are already chatting. It'd probably be gush. Looking at books like Ready Player One, as you said, looking where gamers have been forever, It's hard for me, you know, as an older guy, to understand a world where you've got people going to work as avatars, and mixing, and doing all this stuff. And they got their NFTs, and they're wearing their digital watches, and they got their digital Nikes on, and they're changing their hats, and their glasses, and all this other stuff. But do you think your generation and where people are going is that we could be having this meeting right now, but it would be our avatars?

I mean, is that where you think it's going? In a sense, I think it's gonna be in a use Slack because I think Slack allows you to check-in and check out. Right? There are certain notification tools on Slack that allow you to say I'm here and then say, like, I'm not here. I'm on vacation.

I would think of the avatar in office as the same thing. Whereas, like, if you're working on a Saturday in the office, your avatar would pop up and show, like, hey. Vern's in the office today, and if someone else is in the office, we could actually stop and have a conversation, whether that was through chat or a video would pop up. If it doesn't roll out over the next two years, as Gen z begins to go full time and work their first jobs, it's gonna roll out. Right?

Because Gen z is big on not being in the office, and they're big on, like, being able to live and work wherever they want to. I completely agree. And the way you described it Mhmm. In the office, out of the office, I think that's huge. And so, like, hey, you know, your buddies in the office, you wanna know that.

Yeah. And the question is, like, in a video game, you're looking for a gamer to play or who's there. Is the avatar the way you mark that you're gonna be in the office? Yeah. And then are you watching the movie or having the conversation with the avatar?

Or as you said, do you jump into FaceTime or, like, CGI Tom Cruise playing golf? Is it gonna really be us? Right. It'll be interesting. It's funny.

I feel like there's a movie about this type of stuff. Like, we're gonna go, like, ten years back. For now, it's like a movie already predicting this would happen. Right? It's exciting, though.

We'll see. I'm not even in Gen z, and I think even for me, it's gonna be like, wow. This is a huge shift, but I know the Gen z guys are ready for it. Listen. I think it's a huge shift for all of us.

I mean, I have a friend who's a therapist who lives in New York, and he's gonna spend half his time out of the country now because he's got a worldwide practice. And he literally said, I don't feel bound by physicality anymore. And it frees me up to be somewhere else. That's just cool. It's huge.

Why not? It's a big deal. Yeah. So we've got all this talk now about helping black entrepreneurs and getting more women into the workforce and having this more diverse environment. But in terms of advice to other founders that are struggling to get into the game and do this, what are the obstacles that you still think are out there, and then how do you overcome them?

What's some practical advice? I think one of the biggest obstacles that everyone sees is, you know, you go raise a ton of money, and then you build a company, and it's never like a straight line. And we always see the end of the process regardless, and I think that's a big thing. As a black entrepreneur, one of the things that I faced was that I knew other entrepreneurs in my family, but they weren't in the tech space. And when you start a business in tech, all these little nuances and, like, the vocabulary of, like, how to talk to different people in the spaces, you have to go out and learn all these things.

You're starting essentially behind because folks come into the space. Maybe their dad was a VC or maybe they've learned this in in a top tier university, maybe Stanford, right, where it's openly shared. So you're kinda starting from behind the starting line because you have to do all this research and learn all these things. And I actually learned a ton of this by reading books, so many books. I would actually figure out certain people that I was like, how did he do this?

How did he build this company? And some of these people, I would reach out to. When I was in DC, one of the number one entrepreneurs, he was top tier in DC, and then he ended up leaving after selling this company to Oracle, was Hooman Rapper. And he built AdThis. And, you know, he sold it.

He was in DC. And I was like, yeah. I gotta meet this guy. And I would write him all the time before I figure out who knew him and try to get intros. And then one day, I ended up finally getting the chance to meet him.

I pitched him to raise money the first time he passed. Second time I pitched him, and he introduced me to Garrett, and they funded me and moved me to San Francisco. Yeah. I literally he just tweeted this morning, who's one investor who taught you how to be a great CEO? And I was like, you.

Literally, as a black founder, you gotta kinda align yourself with people who've done it before. And that was, like, one of the challenges for me because they just weren't in my network. On the college campuses, you know, there'll be different clubs. And I know in certain graduate schools, there's organizations that'll try to organize things. Our black entrepreneurs, for instance, organizing in that way and helping Yep.

Create that pathway for people? Because again, as you said, I would know to call my uncle. Right? Or I would call my grandfather. It's kind of a chicken or egg thing.

Right? You don't know what you don't know. Mhmm. So how do you create that community and let people know about it? Exactly.

Especially when you look like a VC or entrepreneur space. Right now, we're seeing a good amount of VCs, especially of color, raising money, which is great. It's huge, but it's still it's way behind the starting line. Right? And, you know, you might see 10 in the ecosystem, and it's like, why at scale, more people might see especially in the minority community, more people might see a LeBron James versus a Robert Smith, who's, like, huge.

VC, private equity, obviously, on a scale of whatever. LeBron's great, but, like, Robert Smith is somebody. I'm like, yeah. That's what I wanna be like. Right?

Again, the awareness of, like, LeBron, he's in your face, that's more tangible. And, of course, in these communities, that's one of the things that are, like, propped up at sports. And that's one of the things I thought about when I was building hollow two is, like, informational access to your point. If you don't know you can get a job at you know, you buy Nikes, but she didn't know you could be a software engineer at Nike. You'd never even look there.

You just wouldn't. And the same thing with VC. Right? If you didn't know there was a job where you can just go, essentially, you're not building companies, but you are because you're investing in them. You get to take this journey with founders building multiple different companies at the same time.

And guess what? If they win, you win. And it's not like a small win. It's like a life changing win. Right?

It's like one of the best jobs. I mean, I had no idea that that even existed as a job, but it is. Right. Who knew VC was a job? And I think as we continue to get more women and minorities in the space of, like, VCs but also CEOs, there needs to be awareness to show younger generations this is possible.

And I'll share with you, like, I'm not a huge fan of doing press, but I actually told myself this year I'm gonna do way more of these things because if someone younger can see me and say, oh, wow. I relate to him. Well, I look like him. We have the same background. Or, you know, how do I get to be even at my stature right now, how do I get to be similar to Verne?

Then I inspired somebody, and I gave them a kinda road map of what's possible. And so that's why I'm, like, really big on getting out there and showing my face more now. That makes sense. If you ever thought of I know you're crazy busy doing what you're doing, but for instance, what about doing a VC fund, for instance? Yeah.

Yeah. No. That's something that I have in my back pocket. It's my ultimate dream, but I would do that later for sure. Right.

I'm super excited about it. I always talk to other VCs in the space now, and I've been doing, like, a bit of scouting just in general because VCs meet me, and they're like, dude, I need you to scout for me. Because I just know a lot of founders from different places. Yeah. That's something that later in life, it's my plan, VC.

With all this infrastructure money they're talking about, and we'll see if it gets passed. Right. And whether or not it's green stuff or it's going into the inner cities or it's Philadelphia or whatever, you would think that somebody that kinda figures out the system and figures out how to fundraise and understand how to bring these communities together. When the government's printing this kind of money I mean, I've been around for a while. There has never been this kind of liquidity before.

Trillions are even hard to imagine, and they're printing trillions of dollars right now. So it's a matter of getting organized, I think, and figuring out how to grab some of that money and then use it to put good people to work. Yeah. Yeah. I'm definitely gonna do that.

It's funny. You're the first person that asked me that, like, hey, would you do a VC fund? And for sure, I would. First time on record, I said that. I didn't mean to put you on the spot about it, but you're obviously a smart entrepreneurial guy.

You're building this company. Yeah. And I'm a VC lawyer, by the way. I mean and I've worked middle market companies. And I'm thinking to myself, guys that know how to build companies, know how to deal with the apples of the world, and know how to deal with the entrepreneurs of the world, and take all this new talent and bring it into the system.

There's gotta be an opportunity. Yeah. It's huge. I'm gonna do it. Okay.

Well, we're here to help in any way we can. I mean, that's amazing. What would be your advice for people right now? We're about to come out of COVID. You're where you're at.

What would your number one advice be to people? Two things. One, I was talking to, one of my friends about a fourth wave, quote unquote, that's what everyone's saying. But my advice to people, honestly, is most people wanna maybe not align to this, but I haven't seen people say this is like, at this stage, for sure, do what matters to you. I think before COVID, you know, we were kinda all just going through the motions with everything.

Maybe it was work, maybe it was whatever. And I think COVID shook so many things up that whether it was relationships or your career change, you actually started to see what really mattered because you just had all this time to sit with yourself or your spouse or your partner, or whatever decision you were making. You actually had to sit there and think about them and see if they were right or wrong, or they were the best for you. And now it's like, as we roll out of COVID, I hope more people actually take the chance to say, like, yo, I'm only gonna do things that make me happy. And I feel like that's what I did.

Everything I was doing during COVID, I'm like, I don't wanna do this. This makes me happy. I'm gonna do this. I wanna do this. I wanna go here.

And I noticed before COVID, I was always bending in certain directions that didn't really serve me and make me happy. And now I only wanna do things that make me happy. That's kind of advice I would give to people as they step out of COVID, and we all get to go out to eat and have fun now. So let me push back a little. I totally get the notion.

I've had billionaire client friends say to me, don't go out trying to make money. Go out doing something you love. Totally get that. Don't waste time doing something that your heart's not in. But there's an expression that says before enlightenment chop wood and carry water, and then after enlightenment chop wood and carry water.

Right. I think there is a certain amount of drudgery, even when you're doing what you love, that I struggle with. You know, I love my life, but Right. Sometimes if I don't pay the attention to details that I should, it bites me, so to speak. What I hear you saying is, yes.

Don't do things if they're not gonna make you happy, kind of in a macro, but on a day to day basis, don't you think you still sometimes have to fold the damn laundry? Oh, yeah. I totally agree. It's funny. I was watching some show about it's got, I think, a ton of stuff that we love, quote, unquote.

It looks great, and it's hidden behind something called hard work to your point. And I watched this guy, I think his name is Dobbins. He's a seal, black seal. He's an African American. Not a lot of them.

I think he was only 36 in the last sixty or seventy years. It's crazy statistic, but he was basically talking about how most of the things we love, we look at this entrepreneur or whatever. We're like, like, oh, I love this. I love this. And, like, really, you're just at that stage, you're just inspired because you don't know how hard it is.

Right? And your body and your mind naturally is just, like, yeah. This is gonna be easy. It's gonna be great. I love it.

I can't wait to do it. And then you get into it, and at 20% capacity, your brain's already, like, just chill out. Just float through. It's gonna be fine to your point. It's a lot of hard work there.

Right? And that next 80% is so hard. But once you get over the 80% to your point, then you actually do realize, I do love it. It was a hard work, but I love the hard work that comes with doing something I love. And I think entrepreneurship is bad.

It's literally running into a wall every day and smiling. Alright. Like, not that bad. I tell my younger brothers now, everything you love is just hard work. Everything.

Yeah. I'm happy to hear you say that because I think it is finding that balance. And I sometimes sound like a broken record. Like, I'm all for infrastructure. I'm all for all the stuff we're doing right now.

But we also have to sacrifice a little, meaning we have to figure out how to pay a little higher taxes. Because, like, your generation, otherwise, it's like, hey, you know, we got all this money, but then who's gonna pay it back? Or where does it end up? So I think that's right. For entrepreneurs, it's like, do what you love, but then you're gonna have to put some elbow grease into it as well.

Yep. You are. What about for you in terms of recruiting people to your own company? Do you feel like you have any trade secrets you wanna share with anybody? Yeah.

I'm super persistent. I'm good at recruiting. I'm not gonna lie to you, man. So anyone I wanna recruit or get on the team, I can get them. It's more so when I sit down and I pitched them.

So one of the guys I really wanna get on our team is our head engineering. His name is Marvin Lee. He's, like, OG LinkedIn. He built a large portion of LinkedIn. The video component we see on LinkedIn, now he built that.

ConMath, Vivo. Hey. And I would bother Marvin all the time. I just write him, hey. What's up?

And he would just ignore me. I remember. He told me one day, like, I would ignore you, Verne. And one day, I, like, pitched him something else, and he was like, okay. I'll get on the phone with you.

And I talked to him on the phone. After that, we were just inseparable. Right? One, I think the mission and my why for building this company does attract a ton of people, and I use those people to attract other people. Right?

It's like a team. You get one great player, and they recruit other great players. And everyone wants to play with great players, and then it self regulates. Even for us as a small team, right, six of us, what we've been able to do, it's insane. I mean, you show certain people and they're just like, how do you even do this?

Because we don't need that many people. We just actually need top performers. It's funny. I'm reading the book Good to Great again. Somebody mentioned it to me and I just pulled it out and they were saying one of the secrets is get the right person in the right job.

It's not that complicated. But if somebody's in the job and they're not the right person, you gotta be willing to make the hard decision to get them out of the job. Yep. That's the hard thing. You really have to be able to say, like, this is not the right person for the right job and move them very quickly.

Because if not, they sit there, you waste a ton of time. One skill that I think the best CEOs do is they know what they don't know. You know, Steve Jobs was amazing. One of his skills was that he knew what he didn't know. Now you might have not known that.

Like, everyone's like, oh, he just feels like he's great at everything. Well, that's an opinion. But I think what he actually knew was he knew what he wasn't good at. So he'd say, oh, I'm not even the best engineer, so I'm gonna get Woz. And I'm gonna get this person to work on marketing.

And I'm gonna get this person, Joni, to come do design. And he would recruit all these amazing people because he knew what he didn't know. He knew that he could go out there and Right. He knew the product that he wanted to build. He could pitch division.

He could pitch division and go out there and, for sure, sell it as soon as it was ready. And he can motivate all these people who might have thought that they only had 70% in the tank. He could motivate them to go to a 150. That was, like, his superpower. Right?

And I think dropping your ego to say, I don't know how to do this the best. I'm not the best in the world at this. So I'm gonna recruit all the other people to do this and be best in class. So that's what I do. Like, I can't code.

Well, I can code, but I'm really bad. Right? I could just hire somebody else to do this. It's better than me. So are there any particular challenges?

Does anything ever keep you up at night in terms of what you're wrestling with? Yeah. I mean, fundraising's hard. Fundraising's always gonna be challenging, I think, for different founders, especially depending on what space you are in. I think that's one thing that's always gonna be in your face as a founder.

I'll say this. One thing that I'm constantly staying up with is I'm a stickler for product and design. So I'm constantly going through the entire product and, like, nitpicking everything. So much so that my engineering team and my designers probably are like I'm like, oh, move this. Why is this this color?

Like, I'm putting eyedroppers down to, like, little pieces of the colors and stuff on the site at this point, and we're about to do a pretty large rebrand, which I'm super excited about. These kind of things keep me up at night. I'm just a stickler for product and how things look, and that's probably just because, one, the investors I've been around, and, two, just me in general. I'm just a stickler for how things look and how they present themselves. So all that keeps me up at night, and I'm constantly on the app.

Like, even in the middle of the night. I think I woke up at, like, 04:00 in the morning last night and was looking at stuff. It sounds like that maybe something you and Steve Jobs had in common. Yeah. I like how stuff looks.

I'm really into different things, so I'm always like, oh, this doesn't look right. From his book and reputationally, he would spend extra money and tear things apart because he wanted it to look a certain way, and it became more like artwork. To this day, I'm talking to my brother about this a couple years ago. Just look at the way the packaging is done for Apple, Apple for God's sakes. And it creates this certain mystique and classiness that is just different than most other Yeah.

Things out there. You know, it takes an artist. It takes, as you said, that vision that you obviously have and passion for that excellence. It makes a difference. People know the difference.

Yeah. You get a new iPhone, you open the box. Even the way that the cover of the box pulls off of the base, that's an experience. It's a religious experience. I mean, it's crazy.

The way they package everything from their headphones to their iPhone. I mean, when you open that box, you feel like you're opening up, you know, a million dollar diamond ring box. Yeah. For me, at least, it's a religious experience. Same.

And no other phone does that. If you think about it, no other phone does that. And no matter how much money you spend on the Apple phone, because, I mean, they're expensive phones. Right? You don't even think about it as soon as you open the box.

And that's the best product. Right? You literally buy it, and you forget about it. It's crazy. It's true.

And it sounds like you're trying to apply that to what you're doing. Sometimes it's subliminal. People don't even necessarily think about it, but they just feel better because I think quality does typically sell like that. Yeah. And as far as selling a quality and premium product, when you throw a price tag in front of someone, if they feel that experience, they don't blink an eye.

As much as we wanna do social good in this business for us, we also wanna make money for our investors and employees and stuff. Let's do both. But where is your office? I mean, I know virtual right now, but do you guys have a physical plant someplace? So we're in West Hollywood.

Our investor, actually, when we got into Expa, you can utilize the office space. It was like a super small community. So it's awesome for us. We love the space. Very design focused.

Very cool. Well, this has been absolutely wonderful. Yeah. And I'm totally excited to see your next chapter and where this all goes. Thanks for having me on the show, man.

It's awesome. Thanks so much, man. Take care.