Maury Blackman of Premise Data

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond. A show that explores the evolving landscape in the venture capital world. We'll have candid conversations with today's VCs and entrepreneurs who are shaping those changes. I'm Jim Bier, the managing partner of Bier, Negron, and Troff, and the president of CMEG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies, and ultimately to how they got to where they are today.

Effectively, we're measuring activities. We're basically capturing ground truth in all parts of the globe. It's one of the things that just blew me away when I first saw the capability and what was possible. Every day is just a great day for me because I see all these rich use cases. We recently sat down with Morrie Blackman, the CEO of Premise Data, an innovative AI driven decision engine geared toward collecting data that can help decision makers respond more effectively and more efficiently to real world events.

We discussed their creative approach to collecting data, the global reactions to the pandemic, and how to approach getting people comfortable with reentry into the workforce. Maury Blochman, welcome to the Puck. And as CEO of Premise Data, we welcome you. And, also, can you tell us a little bit about your background before we jump into talking about Premise? Thanks, Jim.

Really appreciate being here today. It's always fun to sit down and do these. So I'm originally a Texan. My dad was a scientist at NASA, so I became obsessed with technology at an early age. I, did a brief stint in the military out of college.

From there, I went into work in tech sales. I started selling financial products, quickly moved into setting up my own business out here in the Bay Area, a company called Exela, which is a permanent licensing platform for state and local governments. The thesis for that business, you know, this is, really interesting to talk about it because we've evolved so much over time, but we wanted people to trust in government more. And the thesis there was that if we could open up the workflow of what goes on behind in government, like when you fill out a lot of paperwork to set up a business, you throw it over to the fence, and the government agencies are a lot of times like, we'll come back to you. And and we want to open that up.

We want to make it so that it was transparent. You know, we didn't know this was a thing, but we wanted government to work like Amazon. Of course, now when we talk about this in the halls of government, they're all very adoptive of it. It's like, yes, we want government to behave like Amazon, but it took us time. So seventeen years later, we sold that business to Berkshire Partners.

I, thought that I would probably hang it up for a little bit. But after sitting on a bench for two days, I decided I'm only 48 years old. I gotta find some more things to do. I started beating the streets and looking for opportunities, and I came across Premise and fell in love with the vision and the technology. At the highest level, what we have is a global network of contributors.

These are ordinary individuals that we find through social media and other means. They download our app. We run it through training exercises. And then at the output of that, they're able to enter into this marketplace where they reserve small data collection jobs on behalf of our clients. These could be go to the local supermarket and tell us how much a gallon of milk is and a carton of eggs.

It could be go walk down Main Street and take a picture of every ATM you see and tell me if it's safe. All these tasks that they do, all this data comes together and rolls up to some decision maker somewhere to give them the ability to make informed decisions about their brands, their programs, their campaigns, their policies, whatever it is that they want to measure. And I'm fascinated by this because in the world that we're in, everyone talks about making data driven decisions. How do you do that? I think Premise has a unique platform because what we're really doing is blending human technology with AI and ML to basically provide decision makers with the data that really helps them drive their business 24 by seven and do it in a very quick and efficient way.

Airbnb is able to go out and advertise to the entire country to find people that have rental properties or properties that they wanna rent. And so they're taking this untapped market instead of just hotels and motels. They've created this incredible market. Are you going out and hiring gig workers all over the country to do this data? And are they part time people?

Or I assume you have part time and full time people, but can you explain to me a little bit about what your business model is with respect to your employees? Well, our contributors is what we call them. They're also could be called data collectors. These are gig workers. Our business model is very similar in that respect to an Uber, a Lyft, or a DoorDash.

You know, we're finding these individuals who want to supplement their income by doing work for premise. Now, of course, we have a full time staff just like Airbnb does. But the heart of this is those contributors and the data that they're able to collect for us on behalf of our clients. Got it. So it gives you the ability if a company comes to you and says, hey.

We're in Omaha, Nebraska for sake of argument, and we really wanna make some pricing decisions based on what consumers are buying and what they're paying. You have the ability to tap into people that want that additional work that can go down to the local supermarket in, for instance, Omaha, Nebraska. That's exactly right. And you think about the traditional way that people would capture this information. They would hire a market research firm or a consulting group to go out and do a study that would normally take six to nine months.

We do things, data collection turnaround in six hours, twenty four hours, forty eight hours, or less. So the dynamic there is that we're able to give our clients the data that they need to make decisions at a much higher velocity than a market research firm or consulting group. So for those of us that don't know what we don't know, can you give me some examples of creative ways that companies are waking up to the fact that you're out there and that you can do this and who might benefit from this in a way that's helpful to people better understand it? I think that anyone who wants to measure virtually anything, measure the effectiveness of my advertising campaign, measure the effectiveness of, you know, my pricing strategy as it relates to other products. I could give you some use cases.

One of the ones that I just captured a few weeks ago that I thought was really interesting is we have a number of hedge funds that work with us, and they wanna collect data early so that they can make their own buying decisions. And, you know, one of the hot products out there today is oatmeal, and specifically the company Oatly. So we had a task where our contributors were supposed to go to grocery stores at a certain time of day and take pictures of the various trucks that are parked out there to see what kind of velocity is happening around oat milk. That's helpful, by the way. So are there other use cases that you can give examples of?

Absolutely. We have mystery shopping. So, you know, we have a very large financial provider that we work with, and they are a franchise. They have these franchisee rules that they have in place. They have 500,000 locations around the world.

And so, how do you monitor and measure and audit those franchises to make sure that they're complying with your policies? Again, you could do it the traditional way by hiring a market research firm or some audit capability to go out and do it for you. Or you could use a solution like Premise, where at scale we can go collect you all this information in a matter of months as opposed to a matter of years. And really give decision makers at the high end of the corporate level, yes, In this region, all the groups that we're working with are in general compliance, whereas in this region, you know, we might have some issues. So we need to send people in to address the problems.

Which is interesting because I remember companies that are worrying about shrinkage, for instance, would have people come in to see if people were ringing them up on cash registers. That's not as sophisticated as looking at whether or not the franchisees are putting everything properly on the menus or whether or not they're advertising properly or cleanliness or whatever. It sounds like it's not just giving you facts and figures, it's also giving you a picture of compliance and other almost like things that a private detective would tell you. Exactly. You know, in a real real world example of the time that we're in today, of course, every business needs to have, you know, the COVID signs in their stores, basically, social distancing, wash your hands, you know, all that fun stuff.

And so how do you measure compliance? How do you do that? And Premise has a unique capability to be able to do it very quickly and at scale. With these rent moratoriums, for instance, both on residential and landlords, if I'm a hedge fund and I'm interested to know whether or not I should be shorting or going long a REIT that owns a bunch of commercial office space, I might wanna know how many people are showing up to work or how many tenants are not paying their rent or other things. I mean, using an example, like, how many tenants in the country are not paying their rent right now, is that the kind of data you could get at?

We do have a a polling and survey capability. So, yes, we could capture that. Those are the types of tasks that people can do sitting on their couch. We have different types of tasks that people can reserve from us. One of them is a survey type task like what you just mentioned, where they're sitting on the couch and they're answering basic questions about policies, programs, have you paid your rent, those types of things, or we can send people out in the world to stores, points of interest, and collect data.

So in terms of where premise is going and where you'd like to be in a couple years in terms of expanding into different markets or where you see the growth opportunities. You said you're working with a lot of hedge funds. Who should be more aware of premise and what creative things you're doing that are not taking advantage of this as much as they could right now? You know, Jim, I'm a big believer in the technology adoption life cycle, and we are early, early innings here at Premise in this capability. If we were to use the baseball analogy, the first guy is still standing at the plate, and he's only got one pitch.

So we've got a long way to go. We got a lot of people that need to understand this capability Right. And what it can do for them. The market for data collection, market research type activities, market intelligence, It's beyond 50,000,000,000 annually. And we feel like that this space is ripe for disruption because the players in the market haven't really changed in the past fifty or sixty years, and they haven't changed their methods.

For heaven's sakes, people are still doing telephone polling. Who answers their phone at 05:00? You know, when I was a kid, you know, when the phone rang, my mom always answered. We never answer the phone. You know, the methods have to change.

A lot of times, you know, look at these presidential polls and other things, you know, people are like, what's wrong with the polling? Well, what's wrong with the polling is the sampling and the way you're doing it isn't entirely outdated with the way that people live their lives today. That makes total sense to me, and we all know with caller ID and with all the crank calls and people having cell phones and everything else, it is harder to get a meaningful sample who's answering their phone. I mean, you and I are not answering our phone at 05:00 in the afternoon when we're getting 20 marketing calls. How does Premise help us solve an issue like that?

What we have is a curated network, Jim. We recruit these individuals. You know, Premise becomes a reflex for them. When people wake up in the morning, they look at their phone, they reserve the jobs or the tasks that they wanna complete, and they do them throughout the day, and they get paid for that. That's happening every day with people.

So hundreds of thousands of people every day are interacting with Premise to basically interact with our data, to collect data, to share their insights with us, whether that's through surveys or going out in the world and exploring. That's a phenomenon that's just only gonna continue to grow over time. When I first started here at Premise, we got excited when we had 5,000 people log on in one day. That happens in the first five minutes. You know, we're very bullish on where we are in the life cycle, the traction that we're seeing today.

Our goal is to continue to push the envelope with our customers about what's possible and continue to get the word out there. I believe in the next eighteen months, we'll be on the downside of that technology adoption life cycle. Whereas today, when we're selling, you know, essentially, we're looking for those first movers who are willing to take a chance on us. And when they do take a chance, we throw a lot of customer success people at them to make sure that we're spoon feeding them on how to use the system. I think in eighteen to twenty four months, we'll be on the backside of that life cycle, and we'll just be taking orders because people will be so excited and informed with how this capability can help them with their decision making.

And is there a typical size company or project that you think is your sweet spot? You know, when I got here at Premise in 2018, you know, one of the challenges was is that basically this is a horizontal play. There's so many different industries and use cases that I think people were overwhelmed. And so what we did is we really focused ourselves on three main areas: U. S.

Government and commercial. In the commercial side, we only focused on Fortune 500 companies because we wanted to work with people who could really move the needle, who could take advantage of a network that was global, not just here in The US. That has been very favorable to us as a company. Now, as the product becomes more rich, more user friendly, we've got better tools in there, we're starting to go down market. We think eventually, in the next eighteen to twenty four months, our entire platform will be self-service, where Jim could be you know, sitting at his desk and saying, hey.

I wonder how long the line is at Starbucks. Push a task out there, and someone says, oh, well, it's 10 people deep, come in an hour type of thing. So it could be not just b to b, but it could be peer to peer or consumer to business. And we see tremendous opportunities to expand as this product becomes more mainstream. Again, if you take what you just said in terms of where the evolution is going, in the same way that if I'm on Facebook and I'm gonna go skiing in Mammoth and I'm like, hey, which friends of mine are up in Mammoth this weekend skiing, using the example you just said about Starbucks, which is not something that would have been intuitive to me, But if I'm interested in what new restaurants have opened up in an area or what's the new hot chef, what restaurants are running specials in a certain thing in an area or, you know, what concerts are being done in a thing.

Instead of just going on Google, it sounds like there's actually people on the street that can, in real time, say, hey. You wanna know what the traffic's like? You don't just have to use Waze. I mean, here is literally what the riot looks like or here's what the fire looks like because you've got reporters, people that are your data nodes all over the world. Right.

So we're essentially using smartphone users as sensors, blending human intelligence with technology. It's a brilliant concept. One of the things that I always tell people is, I love Premise. I love the technology, but it wasn't my idea. It's a brilliant idea.

You know, when I interviewed for this job, I asked all the investors, what about this interested you? Why did you do this? One of the answers I got was quite interesting. The investor said, you know, I love to surf. I go to Maui, and I'm always curious about, well, how are the waves at this beach versus that beach?

And so I'd love to be able to just post, you know, a task out there. Hey. Can somebody tell me what the waves are like at this beach versus that beach and take a picture of it? He said, you know, I'd be willing to pay 10 or $20 for that because it'd save me gas. It's kind of those envisioned use cases that someone has that causes them to write a $20,000,000 check.

It's just fascinating to me. And so, as I think about this business moving forward, I always go back to what the original vision was, and how it's morphed over time, and why people invested in it, and how can we continue to cultivate that vision. Now, do you envision people doing more for you than just taking a picture and reporting back? For instance, could they actually pick something up for somebody or, you know, that's more of a delivery model? In other words, it's information that they're relaying back to you, essentially.

Yeah. That's our model. We're not in the delivery business. Our kind of mantra around here is data for every decision. And so what we wanna do is we wanna be able to provide a CEO, a CFO, a CIO with the data about whatever it is they're interested in, the data that helps them make that decision, that gives them the informed capability.

You know, one of my big problems as a CEO, I think, is I make too many decisions for my gut and not enough on the data side. I think that's one of the reasons that I love premise so much is because it gives me a capability and a vision on how to use data to help drive my own decision making process. So I'm not always just flying blind or making gut based decisions as opposed to something that's based on empirical evidence. In terms of the network, in terms of how many gig workers you can take on all over the world, I'm assuming that there's almost an unlimited number of people in different geographies that you could continue to take on, or do you have caps in terms of what you're looking for? Well, it's a two sided marketplace.

One of the challenges is that, you know, we have to have enough clients asking for tasks in different geographies to keep the contributors paid and engaged and interested. Now, we do supplement that by providing tasks out there of data that we wanna collect that we think that we can resell at a future date. We do see these examples all the time. But for the most part, it's unlimited how many contributors we could have, but it's kinda capped by the size of the market itself. Today, we have roughly 5,000,000 contributors.

I see a day in the next few years where we have a 100,000,000 contributors. I don't see that as a problem at all, but the market has to continue to grow. From my perspective, at least for a new industry, 5,000,000 sounds like a big number to me when you look at how many employees Amazon has. I haven't Googled it recently, but I don't think Amazon's got 5,000,000 employees. You know, and I don't know how many drivers Uber has.

Right. But I think that Airbnb has in the millions of listings. You know, let's keep in mind, these gig workers that we have, they work when they want. We don't schedule them. They have the opportunity to come onto our marketplace and reserve the jobs that they want to do when they want to do them.

So we probably have a handful of contributors who only log in once a month whenever they want extra beer money. But we have a healthy group of people who are logging on every day. I follow this couple down in Tampa that uses Premise, and they make $1,500 a week. It's really, it's based on your organization and your willingness to get out and do these tasks. And it's probably the same, you know, with Uber and DoorDash and all the other gig economy plays.

It's how much do you wanna put into it and making your own schedule, which I I think is extremely powerful. So when we talk about, you know, where the world is going in getting gig workers, we put a lot of money out there, and there's been a lot of talk about people not wanting to go back to work, for instance, because they're getting so much money from the government. Has that impacted your ability to get people motivated and interested in doing gig assignments for you? Keep in mind, Jim, I didn't make this clear, but I would say out of the 5,000,000, 90% of those are not in The US. We have entered The US market just in the back half of this year, so really starting in May, June.

Since I've been here starting in 2018, our focus has been overseas markets. So those individuals' governments aren't printing money like we are and passing it out like drunken sailors. I know I can get in trouble for saying that, but I'm going to say it anyway. Our contributors overseas are motivated. Now, one of the things that's fascinating, you know, one of those unintended consequences of COVID, is that because people can't travel, they can't go visit their businesses overseas, they can't go do price monitoring overseas.

So, they have to rely on companies like Premise who can use workers in those geographies, in those cities to capture that information for them. I think that's very powerful. We are in many ways doing projects in local communities and keeping the money there. Versus hiring a consultant to go to towns in Nigeria and doing a study about vaccine awareness and paying them Western dollars, we're actually using Nigerians to go capture that data for us and paying them in their local currency, which I think has a significant impact. Absolutely.

And, again, it also makes sense when you talk about starting out with Fortune 500 companies that presumably have global operations, and so they're gonna be needing that intelligence in terms of what's going on with China with gaming, and are kids still playing games, or are they gonna all be kicked off the Internet after three hours now going forward? I mean or in terms of if they're trying to enter a new market and sell products, how's it going? If I'm trying to sell Beyond Meat or Impossible Burgers in Germany, what products do they have? And what are the competitors? What are the buying habits of people in those countries?

I can see where it'd be hugely helpful for those on tap markets. I'm gonna sign you up for a salesperson here, Jim. Compliance is huge for Fortune 500 companies. No one wants to be written up in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times for, oh, hey. The suppliers that we're buying from in West Africa are using child labor.

Right. We are deployed in many of these areas to essentially provide ground truth intelligence on what's going on so that they're not surprised if these things pop up. It sounds like your biggest customer should have been the US government so that we weren't so surprised in Afghanistan. Putting aside whether or not we should stay in or stay out and go back, everybody is, I think, united in the fact that we didn't really anticipate it to fall so quickly, and your data could have provided some on the ground real intelligence in terms of what was going on there. Well, we have 70,000 contributors in Afghanistan.

Wow. And there's a lot of really interesting data that's coming out of the country. We do work with the US government in Afghanistan. You know, I'll be straight up with you on that. But it's mainly around understanding people's feelings towards US policy.

The results from my standpoint have been pretty steady, both pre the pullout and post pullout. And what we'll be doing is watching over time how that changes. You take political issues, whether or not people are complying with masks or why people don't wanna be vaccinated in different areas, what strategies are working and trying those out. You guys could be huge in an area like that. Exactly.

And we've done a ton of work around vaccine hesitancy. We've done a lot of work here in The US and in The UK and then globally around the world. We work with Gavi, the vaccine alliance, the Gates Foundation. This is something that we've been at the forefront of for quite a while. In the US government's case, when it came to vaccine hesitancy, you know, I'm kinda sad to say that we were a little bit behind the curve on this.

The UK government worked with us and many others almost the minute the pandemic started anticipating that there would be these issues and really got in front of it. So, what you see is a much higher vaccination rate in The UK versus The US. We found that the majority of the people here in The US that don't wanna be vaccinated, it's not as political as you would see on the news. What we found is that there's a group of people who just don't trust the government. You know, there's a long list of arguments on why they don't trust the government.

You know, when you pull and you start having conversations with them, what you find is that a lot of the information that's come out over the vaccine has been mixed messages. So, it just creates a sense of uncertainty. You know, my own philosophy around this is that I feel like, hey, I get a flu shot every year. I'm just resigned that I'm gonna get a COVID shot every year until I'm dead. And I'm fine with that.

It's not a trusting government issue for me, but for a lot of people, it is. And I understand that, and we need to figure out ways through examining the data to get as many people comfortable with the vaccine as possible. So I know Larry Summers was, I believe, on your board at one point. Is he still on your board? He's a board advisor.

Yes. Got it. When you talk about throwing a lot of money at things in The US where the world is going and trying to understand from a data perspective whether or not inflation is coming back. Is it transitory? What are the danger signs out there?

And I know as a political junkie, for instance, any thoughts how as a country we could be having more substantive discussions on the risks we're taking here with printing all this money? When it comes to the inflation question, one of the original visions with Premise is that we could provide key economic data for the world that was curated and unfiltered. So we do do a lot of studies in a 125 countries that we're in around price monitoring to basically watch a basket of products over time and see what the inflationary impact is. You know, one of the things that we see with the US government and the amount of money that we're spending today, you know, I think that we will know in short order because premise is monitoring these products. You know, it's no secret.

Lumber's gone through the roof. You go to the store, you see it. But if you look at the data on premise, you know it. The price of goods and services, particularly food products, has increased dramatically. I've been listening to a lot of news about this, and they're talking about bottlenecks, and they're talking about the chip shortage.

The fact that there's less used cars because the rental cars weren't buying cars, and so they weren't selling as many cars. We're being told it's transitory. It's transitory. You mentioned food. I had heard that food was one of the areas that wasn't going up dramatically.

So what is the truth from that perspective in terms of inflation? Over time, we're going to capture that truth, and it will be published. And, you know, we'll do a lot of reports. And in fact, I've been talking to Larry specifically about how we can bring this data out to the world. Anytime you give people money without productivity, you're gonna have inflation.

To me, that's just the core of it. And so what we're doing in today's world is we're spending a lot of money, and there's not a lot of productivity. And I understand that in the early days of the pandemic when we didn't understand, is this really a deadly virus? What are the impacts going to be? So, there is a period when we needed to hold back.

To basically provide people with base of substance and some income. But, in my opinion, we're past that now, and we need to be more prudent about the way we spend our money. You know, that becomes a political question, not necessarily an economic one. No. That's true.

But it is interesting because as you said, you're able to gather data, for instance. And so one of the things that people talk about all the time is where the bottlenecks gonna be and one of the reasons we haven't had wage inflation at the lower levels. And these shortages is that when you have $3 labor in most of the world, $3 a day, versus The US wage rate, there's a lot of capacity to manufacture things overseas. Plus automation has created a lot of downward pressure on wages to balance the money. But when you throw money out of a helicopter, it lands somewhere, and one of the questions is how do you track where the money goes?

So from a data perspective, we haven't historically spread it out with MMT all over the place. It's gone to certain places. But from a data perspective, are there more sophisticated manners to determine where that money is going? Why is food going up? Well, there's a shortage of productivity.

Just like there's a shortage of productivity around chipmakers and other hard materials Right. There is an assembly line. There is a supply chain for food. We have been very fortunate that it hasn't been massively disrupted in the pandemic. However, as we're starting to see, prices are inching up.

The cost of a steak is I I saw something somewhere has gone up 30 to 40%. I don't know where I read that, but, you know, I've got my team out starting to monitor the price of beef. I think these are things that are gonna play out over the next year or two. Who knows what the unintended consequences will be? Yeah.

You mentioned the, you know, the cost of labor, and we talked earlier about premise use cases. And I got a use case put in front of me this week, which is fascinating, in that a lot of these AI companies, what they rely on is they rely on models. Yes, this is a car. Yes, this is a truck. Yes, this is an 18 wheeler.

And so, they have to have images and they train their model. You know, there's a whole industry right now around building these models that you can train off of. You know, one of the fascinating examples is, okay, well, so I want to create a database of people doing ordinary things that we can identify. Like, for example, this is an African American walking down Main Street. This is a Vietnamese man walking down Main Street.

This is a European walking down Main Street. This is the same group. Each one of them are throwing a ball. This is, you know, someone standing by a stop sign. And so all these ordinary activities, and they want premise to be able to capture these in video.

And so the fascinating thing to me is I thought in my mind, I'm like, okay, well, where would we best do this? And, you know, the immediate thing that pops into my mind is, well, we want to do it in places where the economies are going to be the best value for us and our partner in this. And those are gonna be places outside of The US, of course. So one of the challenges that you have in setting a platform like what Premise has is that paying US wages, it can be very expensive for both the clients and us as the provider to be able to do business here. We pass that cost on to customers, but when you're doing things like training models and other, you know, more mundane activities, it's very cost effective to do these things overseas where the wage rates are much less than what we have here.

Right. And back to our other point, people are hungrier. With respect to changes that you're seeing in terms of, like, the food disruptions and the fact that prices are going up, any indications, like, again, like on cars, we know that there's a chip shortage. In terms of the disruptions that COVID has caused in industries like food, do you have any idea what those disruptions are? It's all down to the supply chain.

It's about not having enough people on-site to produce the materials that are needed to get these supplies to the various places so that products can be assembled. I know in my case, I'm an avid cyclist. I'm not sure if you've heard about this, but there's a massive bike shortage. I'm an electric power assisted mountain bike guy. Like, I needed a cassette for my rear shifting.

Literally, I was told it was a six month back order. I mean, I got creative and I was able to find one. Now that was because so much of that's manufactured over in China. I was not aware because China's not reporting on their stuff. It's taken me a while to find out that there have been a ton of disruptions in China, a ton of manufacturing companies, facilities shut down, and I was told something pretty scary a while ago in terms of where the puck is going, which is that some of the big retailers are saying, if you wanna do Christmas shopping, you better get started pretty darn quickly because if you think we're gonna be filled with goods, there's gonna be shortages no one's talking about.

Well, I think that if nothing else, people listening to this podcast will walk away with a sense of urgency to start shopping today. There you go. Yeah. Well, that's amazing. Well, so my point on the cycling thing is that midsummer, I ordered a new bike.

And, you know, the attendant looks at me and says, yeah. I think we can get this for you in February. I never heard of such a thing. I was stunned. And so why is that?

I think these are questions that we hope that we can uncover through premise in the coming months. Well, I hope you can uncover them too because I think it does sound like there's a lot of surprises coming down there. The unemployment numbers that were released today and the number of jobless claims really threw people off. People are not going back to work. There's huge shortages in these different industries right now.

It is gonna be really interesting over the next several months how this plays out. It's such a challenging time because we wanna take care of the people who can't work, but we need to get people back to work. So how do you do that? How do you cut the money off and push people out? You know, I'm a huge Bill Clinton fan, loved what he did with welfare reform in the nineties.

Basically saying, okay, it's time to reform, it's time to get people back to work. We need to incentivize people to get off of welfare and get into the workforce. And I feel like we need to go back and study those models and start to implement them today because I think we're struggling with some of the same issues. Even companies like Premise, Google, Facebook, you know, all the big tech companies, it's going to be a struggle to get people back into the office because, you know, they've gotten used to this new world. I hear a lot from employees, Well, I work better from home.

And my response to them is, I know you do, but the company isn't better off with you working from home. Here in Silicon Valley, we've always had very flexible work schedules. I don't know of a single CEO friend of mine who required even before or during or even now their their employees come in eight to five. It's always been flexible. But the challenge now will be, you know, how can we get people in two to three days a week because they've gotten so used to this new world.

You know, for me, it's like working out. If I get in the habit of working out every day, it's a reflex. I truly believe that productivity, getting back to work, all those things are like reflexes, and we're challenged with those in this post pandemic world that we're entering in today. Exactly what you just said, though. There are these intangible things.

I was talking to a investment banker a while ago that was talking about when he came up how spending time with mentors and really being groomed and having that interactive time was invaluable. Walking into somebody's office and saying, oh, that I just thought of something and the thinking things through and the brainstorming. There's so many intangible things that we miss, and I'm even noticing it. For a while, there's certain things that went on without a hitch. Just certain payroll things or things that people would walk into my office to show me, like reports that I would get or take for granted.

All of a sudden a year into it, I'm like, hey, wait a second. When did I stop seeing this? And it was because that was where my office manager would walk into my office and show it to me. So there's a lot of checks and balances and things we took for granted that are gonna slip through the cracks that that I think people are gonna wake up to and realize, hey, wait a second. It sounds great that you can work on a beach in Maui and never come into the office, and I can hire you without you ever coming to the office.

But there's definitely an intangible thing that we're losing there. We're social. We wanna be with other people. We just wanna do it on our terms. I think that's what we'll struggle with going forward.

The pendulum, like, you know, in politics, it's really hard to get it right in the middle. The pendulum's really swung the other way on this, and and it will come back. It definitely will. Yeah. I think that's exactly right.

And there's also a lot of people focusing on virtual reality and augmented reality. And in the same way, I think that Zoom was not a household word a year ago. From looking and talking to people, there's a lot of money and a lot of time being spent on what's the next evolution of creating a more interactive experience and whether or not it's with avatars or it's with CGI. There's definitely people working on creative ways to try to make it more interactive, and it'll be interesting to see where this all plays out. From our standpoint, you know, at Premise, we're highly in tune to where the world is going, and we wanna be able to give decision makers the the data to be able to respond to real world events and understand how they can make the best policies around the business, not just for their employees, but for the products and programs and campaigns that they're running that are really driving their businesses forward.

So as you're expanding more and more into The US, are there particular niches that you think are gonna be for the early adapters that would be of interest in terms of, again, getting people to focus on this? Are there certain trends that you see for what Premise is doing in The US? A lot of audit. My oat milk example is an audit example. Price monitoring, shelf space, you know, you brought up Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.

You know, one of the things that a lot of these suppliers have issues with is making sure that their products are actually on the shelf. And, you know, so they hire companies to go around and say, Yes, okay, there is a shelf full of Impossible Burgers, Or, There's empty spaces. There's no Impossible Burgers there, and let's get the store manager in here to fill these up. And so we have the capability to be able to provide those services at scale across the entire country for Impossible Foods, for Beyond Meat, for Nestle Foods, whomever it is, Hormel, whomever the supplier is, we can help them understand the pricing of their products, the pricing of competitive products, and are they actually on the shelf where they're supposed to be? A lot of these suppliers buy, you know, really fancy marketing campaigns that they put in the stores.

Are they there? Is it in the right place? Is it having an impact? Things like, if I'm going to launch a new product, what parts of The US should I launch them in? You know, what demographic is serving these stores that I wanna put into, and is does this make sense for me to launch my product in these areas?

In an earlier time in my career, I had a buddy that did a lot of diverting where Ralston Purina would sell puppy chow for x dollars in California, but when they wanted to expand market share in Texas, they would ship a bunch of stuff to Texas and sell it at a much lower price because they were trying to build market share, for instance. But exactly what you just said in the retail space, especially when people are trying to figure out, it's one thing to be on the shelf. I shipped a bunch of Impossible Burgers to bonds up in Mammoth. Our sales are terrible in in Yoke County. Is that because when I walk into a Ralph's or I walk into Bishop, my Impossible Burgers are on the bottom shelf stuck in between something.

Exactly. Yeah. 100%. How do you get to the truth? I find a lot of times, you know, in my career, people are constantly speculating about why products or services are having difficulties moving at a velocity that they find acceptable.

Right. So they'll speculate. But what Premise has the capability to do is to get you the truth. The reason your product isn't selling is because it's not on the shelf. It's that simple.

And this is one of the reasons that I love Premise, is that there's so many different use cases when it comes to market research, market intelligence, monitoring that can be done. I'm excited about the infrastructure bill and the potential of services that Premise could provide. When you think about it, how is the U. S. Government, how are local communities going to submit for infrastructure type projects?

Their bridges, their dams, their water lines, their broadband. You know, how are we going to measure these things? Premise has the capability to set up tasks to go take pictures and map out, pine on the condition of every bridge in The US. And we could do it in order of magnitude faster than anyone else. We could measure and monitor the entire US infrastructure capability at scale in ways that I don't think anyone would have anticipated before this bill passed.

That's a great example of where there's gonna be a need to measure things, and I can even see when you're talking about the climate change stuff in California and trying to figure out where these fires are or whether or not we should be clearing things. And we closed down the forest service and people are not supposed to be hiking right now because we're trying to deal with the Tahoe fire. Well, who's got cameras and is anybody in the back country that shouldn't be? I mean, there's a lot of creative things you guys can be doing. We can educate people on what to look for through the phone, and then have them go out and identify those issues.

In Colombia, we had a project with USAID and the Colombian government to help eradicate Zika. We basically had the population going around taking pictures of every potential Zika breeding area, sewer lines, mains, standing water. It's enormously powerful and effective when you see it operating at scale. If you're only relying on the government workers to go out and identify these places and identify these potential areas, you're really handcuffing yourself. If you empower the entire community to get engaged, the amount of data that you're getting back, not only is it very rich, but it's doing it at a velocity that I don't think anyone would have ever expected.

I mean, in a sense, community watch, where people are watching out for their neighbors. You're just doing it in a much more sophisticated global way, where instead of a neighborhood, you can see trends in terms of, again, are there electric bikes being rented in Vail, Colorado? And if they are, why isn't it being done in Aspen? Or a million other things like that. Absolutely.

I really feel like we're doing good in the world because we're providing leadership in government and leadership in multinational organizations with the ability to make decisions that, you know, they're not suffering from Maury Blackman's complex, where I make a lot of decisions based on gut. They're getting the data in front of them so they can make decisions that are based on fact rather than just emotion and gut. Mori, I I love what you just said, which is more of life when using his gut. So I'm gonna ask you, how can you use premise to better determine where you want premise to go? I think that one of the things that, you know, we're hyper focused on is user experience.

So we look at user experience and contributor churn, where we measure the data is per 100 downloads, how many of those result in a contributor doing what we would call a cash out? A cash out is they've done a few tasks, they hit the pay me button, and they get the money. So we feel like there's this whole workflow. You advertise, you get them to download your app. That's one door.

They logged in. That's the second door. They start doing tasks. That's the third door. And then when they do the cash out, you know, we really believe that they're hooked.

We measure the data behind each one of those decisions, and we're looking at the product to try to understand how that we can get more and more people to get to that moment when they do the cash out. I use the product. I go out and I do tasks. And when I do the task and I get it done and I see I've got money in my account, it's a rush. It's like closing a deal.

I mean, you know, anybody who's been in sales, you know, the best part of your day is when you get that signature. You just crush it. And so I get that same rush even doing a $5 task on premise. You know, it's so much fun. And so we feel very strongly that when we can make it easy and we really nail that contributor experience, our cash out rate, the contributor churn will be dramatically impact.

In terms of a role for premise in the area of news gathering, you know, the CNNs of the world, the Fox Newses of the world have reporters all over the place. Is there a role for you in terms of providing pictures or news reporting for any of the outlets? Oh, absolutely. And I think that, you know, one of the fascinating things around news is that a lot of people's news, and even the big networks, what are they relying on? They're relying on social media.

That's an what I would call an uncurated network. So you get all this stuff coming off of social media. You don't know if it's fact or fiction, but one of the things that Premise has done and we can continue to do is we can task off events coming from social media. So, for example, if someone on social media is complaining about a broken water fountain in their local park, we could actually send people out to verify, yes, it is that water fountain is damaged and doesn't work. You know, so the city in that use case example could be using premise to monitor infrastructure in their jurisdiction and understanding how to deploy assets out there before you deploy expensive city workers.

You know, hey, I can pay a mom who just happens to be sitting in that park $5 to go over and check it out. It's a marvelous use case. We rely on people to tell us when, as you said, a fire hydrant is broken or a power line is down. I can see a million areas where people could use that to find out where the world is going and to get ahead of things. Yeah.

We have the capability to essentially survey and uncover issues at a macro level, but we also have the unique capability to go super local, hyper local, down to the plus four on your ZIP code around information gathering, people's attitudes, what's going on in communities, what's going on with pricing, what's going on with inflationary activities. We have that capability, and that's one of the things that I get so excited about for our company. Is there a use case where people can sign up, obviously, long term projects and otherwise? But are there situations where if somebody wants to spend a little money to find out, hey, I'm going to Colorado skiing and I wanna know which resorts have a lot of people otherwise and I'm willing to spend a couple $100 to get that answer. Do you have people that are one time quick in and out consumers, or is that not practical?

Most of our contributors, Jim, they're with us over a period of time. And, yes, we do those things. For example, mid pandemic, we were doing a lot of work on airport traffic and airport condition, cleanliness of bathrooms, cleanliness of all the facilities. A 100%, we could essentially inform users on activities at ski resorts and other vacation spots. And do you feel safe?

Do you feel like the economic value you got from that location was what you were expecting? There's unlimited opportunities to gap capture intelligence and data around a whole host of activities that really all you have to do is use your imagination. It sounds like it. So listen, Mario, thank you so, so much. Thoroughly enjoyed this talk today.

We, look forward to, hearing where you go and following premise. Thank you, Jim.