#107 with Chris Bakke - This Serial Entrepreneur is an Idea Machine

Jason Friedman. Yep. Yep. So he, he hired me and, and, and as one of the first business hires and we were all working out of like an awesome house in SoMa when SoMa was slightly less sketchy, I think, than it is right now. And really the goal was, you know, Airbnb was just kind of becoming big. Um, and so that business, 42 Floors, uh, had already raised a bunch of money, um, prior to me coming on. And so it was, it was a pretty— it was a super hot company coming out of Y Combinator. Um, they had raised like back to back, I think, over the course of less than 12 months, uh, close to $20 million. Um, and really my job and a couple other people's job on the growth side and on the biz dev side was how do we make money from this thing? You know, there's huge expectations. The expectations are that, you know, we really want to build kind of an Airbnb or Zillow experience, but for finding office space, for finding retail space, industrial space. And so we started in San Francisco, eventually expanded to New York. We grew the team to about 80 people. And we— but that was all like rapid fire. We went from a team of 8 people to 80 people in like 12 months. We were like, you know, using all this money to go hire great people. Um, and then after about, I think, probably like 60, 70, 80 people, we noticed that, um, we, we started to have problems. You know, every startup has problems, but I think our problem was that, um, we really just were hiring mostly on culture fit. Uh, and so we had hired all of these like people that we just wanted to hang out with. Yeah, cool people, not necessarily, um, I think the right people to build that business. And so it was, it was like the most fun company, you know, I've ever worked at. But there are, you know, ramifications to that, which is that we actually, I think, did an amazing job with the engineering side of the house. And so we hired all these great engineers, we hired some great, you know, QA people and data people. And then on the business side, on the sales and marketing and customer support side, we just had like awesome kind of young, cool people. And I think a lot of startups go through this, right? You get money in the bank, and you just want to, you know, you want to pass the airport test. You want to work with great people. And so around that time in late 2014, early 2015—

Yeah, exactly. Like you get, you know, you get unexpectedly rerouted through Chicago for a 6-hour layover. Do you hate that layover or is it like the best layover of your life? Right? Like, are you, are you like making buddies with like this work colleague or are you just having the worst time? And and just trying to power through it. Gotcha. Um, and so, uh, and so that really, uh, that experience of, uh, hiring some, some amazing engineers, um, hiring a lot of great people, but people who actually weren't great fits at, you know, kind of entry-level sales, entry-level customer support, uh, we started doing, I think, what inevitably a lot of startups start doing, and they read these books about hiring. Uh, and, and so we went out and we bought this book by Laszlo Bock, who was at the time running HR at Google. And I forget the name of the book, but it's, it's an excellent read. And basically his, his take on it was, look, at Google we do take-home tests, we do work samples, we try to get a piece of the work that, you know, this candidate would ultimately be doing if, if he or she got the job. And so we started building these in Google Docs in kind of late 2014, early 2015, uh, and then that ultimately became this idea that we left. Uh, so Jason Friedman, uh, is, is kind of a a pioneer of just like, if you have an idea, like, I will support you, you know, leave the company. And he was like an awesome backer to us. So myself and two others, Darren Nix and Daniel O'Shea, we were all early employees there. We had this idea to take what we were doing in Google Docs, which were basically take-home tests. Like, we were taking actual customer emails from, you know, angry tenants and angry landlords and stuff that we were getting and saying, you know, if you want to apply to this customer service job, Why don't you craft a response that would be kind of indicative of how you would handle this if it was actually your first day here at 42 Floors, right? And so we looked at a bunch of companies, and at the time there were lots of companies like HackerRank and Caliber and all these companies doing this for technical. So for— if you're like hiring for software engineers, if you're hiring for QA, there were like 6 or 8 companies that did this really for like the non-technical type roles. You found these like really old antiquated solutions that were like multiple choice tests. And it was, you know, like testing cognitive ability more so than, you know, how is this person going to perform on the job? Uh, and so in early 2015, we started a company called Interviewed. Um, we, uh, ran that company for 2 and a half years. Um, I, uh, one interesting story is we did founder-led sales. The 3 of us sold the first $2 million in ARR at that company. And we were just going out to big companies saying, hey, do you have this problem? Of failing to hire great customer service reps. And we really started with that kind of vertical. And then eventually we expanded into entry-level sales, entry-level financial analysts. We were working with Fidelity and IBM and some pretty big companies. And Indeed was one of our seed investors. And so after 2.5 years, we sold the business to Indeed for a high 8-figure amount and then stayed at Indeed for 3 years. And the 3 of us all ran different teams. So I ran an enterprise product team at Indeed for 3 years. And then just 3 weeks ago left Indeed and I'm now kind of working on the next thing.

Love it. I love that product, by the way, because that's the way I hire as well, is like, hey, let's do a project together. I have this old kind of phrase I always use. I don't know where I stole it from, but it was like, you know, the only way we're gonna know if we want to work together is to work together. And you know, so what's the mini sample of that we can do now that will tell us, hey, if we should try this for 3 months, and then if it's good for 3 months, great, let's do this for 3 years. And like Uh, that's typically the way we do it. And, um, I have a friend in the e-commerce space who was just the other day bitching about, you know, God, hiring customer service reps is so hard. They send in like kind of resumes. What is your resume gonna tell me? You know, first you're applying for a customer service rep job. And secondly, like, I don't know if you can actually do this. And so he was like manually trying to create this. And it sounds like for you, you guys did the same thing. You were manually creating some workaround to make this process work for you, and then you spun off and said, Let me, let me actually export that as a business. I've always talked about this import-export framework, which is if you're inside of a bigger company, you're going to inevitably build these like kind of internal tools, workaround systems, you know, stuff that solves a problem for you. But guess what? There's thousands of other companies just like you who have that same problem. You know, 100 of them are baking up their own solution and it's a pain and they're not maintaining it. And if you could export your good solution and actually make it work, then there's probably a market for that. And that's kind of the export side. Import is the opposite, where, "God, we run into this problem all the time. I wish somebody just had a solution that would do X." And when you're in a big company, you could see what those problems are that they would import or export a solution for.

I think, I think my— I really try to advocate for this hybrid approach. And I think that that's what we'll ultimately do on our next company. And so that the hybrid approach is, you know, you generally have, you have one camp who historically has said, you know, go get as much money as you can on the best terms possible. And generally these people are like angel investors or they're former VCs or they are VCs. And I think that there's a lot of merit to that. And then you have this other camp, which is, you know, the bootstrap camp or the kind of like services business camp, which is, you know, I want to own 100% of this business or I want to do things my own way. I don't want to have to kind of work for any investors. And I think a lot of, you know, those both have a lot of upside. And so I always try to think about, well, what are the, what are the downsides to each of these camps? And is there kind of a hybrid approach? And so what we did at Interviewed was we raised $2 million total. We got to, you know, a kind of low 7-figure, like $2 or $3 million in ARR with founder-led sales, and then brought on a couple salespeople and ultimately built that into a profitable business by the time that we sold it. And so I think if there's this hybrid approach where I see a lot of my bootstrap friends work for like a year or 2 years or 4 years, and largely these become like consulting businesses because you get, you know, you get starry-eyed when a big customer comes along and says, hey, will you build this custom thing for me? If there's no money in the bank and somebody is waving, you know, $300,000 to you and your team to go build something, in a lot of cases you build it. And so, you know, 2, 3, 4 years out, there's, uh, you, you may be doing well, you may own 100% of a business, but it's generally a much smaller business than if you would have taken some capital. And so there's this like, you know, raise a sane amount of venture capital. I don't think there's very few businesses that need to be going off and raising tens of millions of dollars. And so I like those types of businesses that say, hey, if I can raise a million bucks, if I can raise $2 million, it helps me skip over those years of having to go, you know, be a consultant and kind of do that agency-style work for big customers to put money in the bank. And I think the more times you do businesses like this, obviously the better terms that you get. And so that's, that's really the approach that I think has worked really well for, for myself and for my co-founder, who I've now worked with across, you know, 3 businesses over the last 8 years. And I think that ultimately, I think a lot of it is determined by your market and how big that market is. And so I love, you know, my, my co-founder and I just for fun, like while we were working at Indeed, we would start e-commerce sites on Shopify just to like play around with Shopify. And obviously we're not going to raise capital for that. But also, our expectations are pretty low. Like, if we can ever get that business to the point of making, you know, $1,000 in profit per month, like, we're super stoked about that. And I think that, you know, ultimately, too, I think in our space, in the last business that I was in, candidate assessments, what you saw were these very large companies like HireVue that came out and had raised, you know, I think $90 or $100 million. And the space just wasn't that big. And so if you raise a million, if you raise $2 million, I think very similar to what, you know, you and your team did, you just have a lot of optionality, right? Like $10 million, $25 million, $50 million. These are all like game changer exits for you personally as a founder and for your team. And again, I think you can do this much faster than a, than a, than a bootstrapper would be able to. You can get to that $10 million, $50 million exit A lot of times, you know, I've seen it in, uh, you know, 3 or 4 years versus, you know, kind of a 10-year slog, uh, doing that business and owning 100% of it at the end.

Um, so this, this, this one idea, um, I almost did and, and I have a lot of research on it and I have a lot of thoughts about it. So if anybody wants to do this, feel free to email me. It's chris@ laskie.co. And the idea is, uh, Shopify but for SaaS businesses, right? So I have this, this kind of thesis that Shopify has empowered hundreds of thousands of accidental e-commerce entrepreneurs by providing a framework of here's how to choose a name for a business, here's how to go incorporate that business, here's how to set it up. I think Stripe Atlas and some of these businesses have done similar things with SaaS. But they haven't taken it all the way. And so if you look what Shopify has done as a platform for people who want to sell, you know, gadgets, widgets, candles, whatever it is online, um, I think that there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of small niche SaaS businesses where I think really honestly, like the best-in-class thing today is something like an accelerator, something like an incubator, you know, somebody to take a sizable percentage of your company, and handhold you through that process of this is how to find your first 10 customers. This is how to actually like set these things up. And I think if you, if I think about a lot of these SaaS businesses, you know, your example earlier about import-export, you're only, you know, exporting so many types of business from a company. And so a lot of times, you know, people say, how can we do what we're doing with Excel or how can we do what we're doing with Google Docs and turn that into its own standalone platform? And I think when you think about the components of a, of a, you know, software as a service business, you only have so many components, right? You have like, you know, user registration, you have, you know, admin privileges, you have payment collection, you have analytics and dashboards, and then you have like something else that that business is doing. But a lot of these things are componentized. And so I think if you have a business that has some sort of like low-code way for people who have a SaaS idea to come on and register that business, create it, get it set up, come up with a name, set up the website. All of that stuff is easy and you can go do that on, you know, Squarespace or a million other places. But then actually build and kind of componentize in, in a low-code way the back end. Um, and, and the, the reason that we came up with this idea is when we were doing customer research, we met a guy actually here in Minnesota where I am now, uh, and he was working a full-time job and his job is designing high-end cabinets for these like multimillion-dollar lake homes. And he and a couple friends have created a $1 million a year SaaS company that is like a CRM for high-end cabinet makers. Right. And they've had to do this through an insane process over 6 years where they have hired people on Upwork, they've hired developers, they've like kind of patched all of this together. And, and the main guy, Ryan, he gets on the phone with me and calls me. And ask for advice. And like, it's kind of an insane process, but at the end of the day, like, that, you know, business for, uh, high-end cabinet makers, uh, there's never going to be like, uh, you know, something that would get you venture-backed returns. And I think that if you look at, um, holding companies in a lot of cases, like, you know, Constellation Software in Canada, they're comprised of thousands of very small, you know, addressable market businesses, um, that I think, you know, Shopify similarly, you have a lot of these kind of small t-shirt sellers and candle makers and, you know, gadget makers are selling a couple thousand dollars. And I think if you can do that in a really easy and efficient way, there's a huge market there.

Yeah, so, so my co-founder Daniel O'Shea is a customer of this business that I love. I loved it before and I like it even more in kind of crazy COVID times. So he lives in Austin, Texas, and he has been in his, in his first month off from, from leaving Indeed, he's been trying to improve as a golfer. And so all you do is you, you take, you take your iPhone and there's this guy, I can't think of his name, but it's like professionalgolf.com or something. He has this, this like pretty decent domain, but it's just an individual guy. He works a full-time job and this is his side hustle business. And so what he tells you is for $99 a month, You can upload— there's some parameters. I think it's like a 2 or 5 minute video of you at the driving range. And I think you take like 2 minutes of footage, you know, driving a couple of balls at one angle, and then you move the camera behind you and you do another 2 minutes of it. And so I love this business because all he's doing is he's taking video content and he's talking about something that he loves. So he has some sort of, you know, application or software where he's uploading your video and he's just recording audio over it. Uh, and then in real time, he's marking up your actual golf swing. You know, see here how your left knee, you know, buckled a little bit. See how your hips weren't aligned to the ball. And so it's this like highly tailored solution, uh, super cheap. I think way cheaper than, you know, a golf instructor would be. Um, and then the great thing for him, uh, for my co-founder as a new dad, is like he can go do this whenever he gets a break. He doesn't have to commit to kind of this like, you know, regular sync of meeting a golf pro at the golf shop. And so I, I think that, you know, there's huge advantages for, you know, if you're trying to get better at exercising, if you're trying to get better at a certain sport, you know, meeting somebody in person, I think you're going to get, you know, the best experience. Um, but there's all of these like YouTube, you know, videos that just give like generic, you know, golf advice that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. And so why not monetize this? You know, if you can get, um, you know, 10 people, charge them $100 a month, and you're probably improving your own golf game as you're giving, you know, the user's feedback. I think that this is a great little side hustle.

I've also been thinking a lot about franchises. So I'm kind of obsessed with, you know, how do we create more entrepreneurs? How do we create more founders in America? And I think that I'm all about these like hybrid approaches. And I love your, your framework that you've talked about many times on this podcast, which is, you know, you kind of draw this like 2x2 matrix and you have, you know, old problem, new problem, old solution, new solution. And I think, you know, crossing those and finding these hybrid approaches is something that I'm super passionate about as well. Right. And so actually, I think, you know, many months ago when I think you first talked about that framework, I was thinking at the same time about franchises and about how, you know, throughout the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, there was this hybrid approach to entrepreneurship in America and all over the world, which was, you know, if you, if you don't want to start a company from the ground up, you don't want to have to go set up a bank account and hire people and, you know, come up with an idea and register that business and do all of the hard work to come up with an idea, but you want more upside than working a 9-to-5 at a big company, you could go open a McDonald's early on. Starbucks had franchises. You could go open a Starbucks and you would de-risk yourself as an entrepreneur, but you would still have a lot of the benefits of entrepreneurship around hiring people. And so I think, you know, how has the world shifted over the last 6 months and what kind of new franchise opportunities are available that are more asset light? So I think the big problem with franchise is that almost all franchises are tied to these like very asset-heavy businesses, you know, dry cleaning, You have to rent the equipment, you have to rent the space. You know, obviously fast food and coffee businesses, same thing. You have these huge equipment expenditures, you have high rent. And so I'm really obsessed with like, you know, what in this framework, how can you take this, you know, 70-year-old idea of a franchise business and apply it to, you know, these times where everybody's working from home? And I think that somebody will build like a multibillion-dollar company basically doing like a franchised version of Geek Squad. I think that that's one super interesting example. So at Indeed, um, the, the company that I just left, we had about 12,000 employees, uh, and we would provide like remote kind of help desk support, um, you know, from Indeed's IT team in Austin, Texas to employees who had broken laptops, their internet connection wasn't working, and they couldn't troubleshoot it. And there was all sort of like tech issues when you move a company with tens of thousands of people to go work from home. Uh, and I think that this, you know, something like this has this like regional approach where you could actually sell specific geographies to, you know, founders or entrepreneurs who wanted to run, you know, the Bay Area version of this business. Uh, and it seems like there's huge demand right now. So somebody tweeted out that their dad, uh, as I was thinking about this idea, their dad's company, um, had spent like $50,000. It was a small, uh, I think accounting firm with like 20 people, and they had spent $50,000 through Accenture and Accenture set them up with like Zoom licenses and Dropbox and just like gave them off-the-shelf software and then basically did like a webinar, like, here's how to use it. But I think increasingly, as you have, you know, so many different technologies that you're running from home and that becomes mission critical to actually doing your job, I think that there's like a personal element of having somebody come over and, you know, fix your TV, fix your printer. But there's also this idea of, you know, somebody coming and actually fixing your laptop. And the great thing about this business is that I'm fairly convinced that large companies and small companies would just like pay a monthly fee to just have this problem go away. Uh, and so I think that there's like a direct-to-consumer side, um, and then there's also this like B2B element that I'm super excited about where you could go contract with a large company. And I think that there's actually a lot of these businesses. I think, um, if you look at asset-light franchises, you know, every company when they set up, whether they're a financial services company or an HR tech company or an educational tech company, they all need to do a million integrations. And so, you know, one of the problems with these like integrations companies is that there's all these independent, you know, developers who will like do your integration with SAP or with Oracle or whatever. And I think building a layer of trust, building a simple pricing, you know, uh, page, uh, doing all this thing and then just running this like a startup, uh, makes for this super interesting like franchise kind of hybrid approach that is a lot less cost intensive than spending, you know, a million and a half bucks to to get a McDonald's open.

They're— for those who don't know, Nana is like a— I think they're doing this but in the appliance repair space. So the equivalent of Geek Squad was Sears's— Sears had this huge fleet of appliance repair technicians, and Sears has gone bankrupt, and, you know, that home services business actually was still doing pretty well, but who knows what'll happen to it now. So they had like hundreds of thousands of technicians all around the country that could come fix your dryer, come fix your fridge, come fix your dishwasher. And so what, and then, you know, besides them was just mom and pop, you know, find some guy in your Yellow Pages or Google and find somebody on Craigslist or whatever to come fix your stuff. And so what Nana's doing is, is they're unifying this under one brand that's simple, just Nana. It's on demand, you push a button in your app and somebody will come fix your thing. Like I had my dryer was broken, pushed a button, an hour later a guy showed up and they were basically dispatching local technicians to come fix your stuff. And they were guaranteeing the technicians, hey, you don't need to learn how to market yourself and get customers. Like, I will just send you a message when there's somebody within 5 miles of you that needs something fixed and you either say yes or no. And this guy was making, you know, between $75,000 and $150,000 a year working flexible hours. I was like, this crushes being an Uber driver. And then they created an academy which was like in one month you can go from not knowing how to fix any appliances to one month you can repair one appliance, and in two months you can repair two appliances, and so on and so forth. And so if you're earning powers $30,000 a year, well, here's a pathway for you to, for free, learn how to do this job and then get free customers to, you know, deliver to your phone that you can go and you can now be making $75K more a year. It's like this amazing thing for the economy. So that's why I invest in that company, but that model applies to what you're talking about. In a pretty big way. And I think that the— there's other spaces as well that this applies to. So one that I've been thinking about that I meant to bring up on the podcast, but I wanted to do a bit more research. But fuck it, you know, we're talking about this now. So with no research, are you familiar with Kumon?

Yeah, exactly. So Kumon— I didn't have this growing up, but my wife is from this area in California. And it's like, Everybody knows about Kumon around here, and you live in the same area as I do, so you'll see them at the corners. Every strip mall will have one of these. And so Kumon is like a place you send your kid to get good at math. So it has the stereotype of like, you know, Asian parent, you know, forcing their kid to become like, you know, good at math. But, you know, parents really care about this stuff. And so Kumon was a franchise that you could open up, and they give you the playbook, they give you all the materials. It's kind of like Kaplan or, you know, whatever, like where you can teach people how to pass the SATs. Yeah, so, so Kumon is this for little kids, and they charge, you know, a handful, and parents are willing to pay. So I think that you can create the Airbnb of Kumon, which sounds ridiculous, but what I mean is you don't need a brick-and-mortar shop for this anymore. I think you could arm people and say, hey, do you have like a dining room in your house? Because you can create a little micro school of, you know, 10 kids who are each paying, you know, $100 a month to come learn from, from you. And who are you? You're a college kid, or you're like a 25-year-old, or you're an 18-year-old who knows math. And we give you the brand, we give you the materials to like outfit your room and, um, and make this work. And so Kumon, I think, does billions of dollars a year in revenue. And, um, I think somebody can create the Kumon with the asset-light model, meaning use the sharing economy, use people's garages, use their living rooms, use their extra spare bedrooms, and turn them into little classrooms for the neighborhood and give them, you know, materials and lesson plans that they can teach off of. And I think that that could be a monster, monster business. Like, that's one that I would consider going and building because I think it would transform—

You know, the way education works. There's another variant of this is my sister has this program that she created these childcare centers or kind of like preschools in San Francisco. And initially her model was smart where she would buy a house. So she wanted to own a home. The home had extra space, like a whole bottom floor that was like separate entrance and exit. So she was like, oh, I really want this house, but I can only afford half of it. Oh, what if I created a, you know, a childcare center at the bottom of here, an in-home childcare center, because there's a shortage of childcare centers. So there's permits for in-home, and I can have 12 kids. And in San Francisco, each kid pays $3,000 a month to go to school. So you're You know, you're making $36,000 a month in revenue. Um, and, and you basically pay, you know, 4 teachers, uh, as your salary. And the rest is you're, you're, you're renting your own space. And so she's paying for a, you know, a multimillion dollar home in San Francisco. She's profiting by having, you know, her own little school and she sends her own kids to it too. And so it's like, you know, her own childcare as well is taken care of. And so she built this really good model and then to expand, she was like, you know, I really want my kids to get outdoors more. So she created this thing called Nature Kids. And I think this could also be a franchise model. So what she did was she was like, forget the house, because that has— probably I have to go find a home that has the separate entrance and exit and permitting and all that stuff. There's beautiful parks everywhere. What if there's a half-day program where you send your kids and it's away from technology, it's outdoors, it's in nature, learning about like animals and trees and plants and building things and stuff like that. And I pay zero rent. And, and so she created a whole curriculum for this thing. And it's working, it's taken off because A, COVID, like that helped, but B, parents just want their kids outside. And so I've told her like, hey, instead of thinking about how you can add 10 more kids to Nature Kids, you should be bundling this up as a franchise and every kind of like, you know, enterprising mom or dad who wants to create a local business around childcare, and they want a better option for their own kids, and there's like 2 parks near them, they should be able to buy this business in a box and they can go make 6 figures a year doing something like this with essentially zero risk. What do you think of that idea?

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. It reminds me, so I growing up, I lived in Colorado and in, in Jefferson County, which is a suburb of Denver, in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade, I think parents can opt out of it. But there is basically like a 1-week nature camp that you go to. But these are privately run. Amazing business because you basically build like, you know, 16 log cabins out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in Colorado on like the cheapest plot of land that you can find. And then you teach kids, you know, how to like boil water over a fire and you just do this for an entire week. And it's an amazing, you know, one-week vacation for the parents. So they love it. Like every parent signs their kids up for this. The kids get to go run around in the woods. And I love this, like doing it, doing it without the real estate component, I think is super smart. There's also this business in Manhattan that's taken off. And I think, you know, Inc. or Entrepreneur or something wrote about these two women who they have like a big Suburban and they go around to all these high-end, you know, penthouses around Manhattan. And the pitch is like, your dog hates walking around on Manhattan sidewalks, right? And so we have this plot of land in upstate New York. It's like 90 minutes north of the city. And we load your, you know, your dogs like 12 at a time into the Suburban. And we just let them go, like, dig holes and play with each other and just, like, run around. And it's, I think, in one of the women's backyard in, you know, northern, northern New York. And they get, like, an insane amount of money. I think, like, one day of doing this, there's, like, 12 dogs. It's like $80 per dog. So every day they do this, they're, like, printing $1,000 for real estate they already have, you know, on this, like, 5-acre plot of land that one of the women lives on. Any business like that, you know, getting pets, kids, whatever, out to nature, I think is genius.

Yeah, exactly. I also like, you know, your— for your Geek Squad idea, another framework I like is for business ideas is what do the rich have that the poor would want? And it's not money.. And so like, you know, the rich, rich people had private drivers and now everybody has private drivers through Uber. Um, you know, rich people got like these crazy vacation homes that they could go to. And now Airbnb says, cool, you know, stay in this log cabin in Tahoe. You just don't have to own the place. And, um, it'll make it really easy. They reduced the friction required for you to have the same experience that rich people have. And, um, DoorDash, right? Like, you know, don't cook, get food, you know, get, get restaurant-quality food. You know, you don't have a private chef. Here's like a chef that'll make it and deliver to you in 30 minutes. So similarly with companies, when company— what do big companies have that small companies would want? Because it, you know, they have a whole department that deals with this pain in the ass. We can't afford that department. We can't even afford one IT guy. But what if, you know, we could just subscribe to this Geek Squad thing for, you know, $300 a month and like our IT needs are taken care of? Or whatever, right? Like, I think that's another way to look at this is what's a department inside a big company that small companies don't have, and then spin that department out and turn it into a, you know, a service business or turn it into a product in some way.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think this works really well. I mean, there's any sort of, you know, fractionalized executive is another idea that I love, right? And so I think this is another business where when we were starting Interviewed 5 years ago, you know, day one, if you have 2 people, You don't want or need to hire a CFO. You don't need a head of HR, but you want like somebody to keep you compliant in these areas. And I think that, you know, similar to all of those businesses, these are areas that like require huge levels of trust, right? If you're handing over all of your financials, if you're handing over all of your, you know, human resources files to a person who's working with you and 25 other companies, uh, right, you want to make sure that that person knows what they're doing. And I think, you know, Bench and a lot of other companies are, are trying to get good at this more for like SMB accounting. I think that there's, you know, similar companies, you know, Rippling and Gusto and stuff have come along and chipped away at parts of kind of, you know, payroll automation and, you know, new hire onboarding. But I still think that there's a whole stack of things just in, you know, in like fun cultural things like a fractionalized office manager, right? You know, in accounting, in HR, in any of these departments, IT, that, that would be hugely valuable for a you know, 2-person to— and I think a lot of cases up to like 200 people, you can't afford or you don't want to hire these as full-time roles quite yet. So like, that's like, here's a 95% of businesses.

Here's a bad idea. That's a version of that, right? Um, so, so a good, a good idea that I think just hasn't quite clicked, but my friend Marin started a company called Xirtual and Xirtual got famous because it famously raised a bunch of money, was doing well, and then it blew up overnight and like closed. And like, okay, you know, whatever, that was sort of a financial fiasco of just sort of mismanaging the cash flow and not being able to hit payroll. But the, the idea was really, really solid, which was, again, rich people or executives or big companies have this one benefit, which is that they have EAs, right? So I have an executive assistant. And that's because I'm at a big company. But when I'm at a small company, I'm not going to hire an EA, it's just too expensive. And I don't have that sort of need. And so what they did was a fractional EA. I could have 7 hours a week of this person's time, and she could be serving, servicing, you know, let's say 8 clients at the same time. And so more people got access to the service for a lower price, and then that the service provider is able to fractionally divide their time and end up making twice or 3 times more than they would at any one company. So that's the good idea. The bad idea version of this is like You talked about kind of, you said the word company culture, and every company I've been at, there's been like the kind of the one person who really like keeps track of everyone's birthdays and, you know, oh, somebody's having a baby, let's send them a gift basket. And like, hey, this person's, you know, they came down with something and how do we help them get well? And they're sort of the person that makes everybody like a little bit human in the company. And they, they're thoughtful, they buy gifts, they organize things, they organize parties, they organize like, you know, offsites and things like that. And I feel like there's, you know, for the person who has the skills of a party planner or wedding planner, but it's like, okay, here's like a boring version of that, like corporate, the corporate fun, and how do you provide that to a 30-person company who doesn't have that person? Or today it's your head of marketing who just does it because otherwise no one's gonna do it. And maybe that there's somebody you could have that's just like the thoughtful person in your company, and What a fun job to be doing from home if you're kind of a stay-at-home mom or dad, just to provide that for, for, you know, for companies is you're, you're there like people person and you're cheering everybody up. You're bringing little surprise and delights to everybody in the company and they'll pay you, you know, whatever, $1,000 a month to be doing this.

Yep. Yep. I love that. And I think in a lot of ways that's completely uncharted territory. So one of the, one of the side projects that my co-founder and I and a couple of friends actually created is this company that we're still working on, but it was like a side project called Teamcation, uh, and it was this idea of like, you know, now that every company is a remote company, what all remote companies would do before this, like if you were a cool, you know, 20-person remote company, is you would go, you know, get an Airbnb up in Napa or whatever, once every half year, fly everybody in. Yeah. And, and I, I think in our experience, even if you have that person or those people who are like— and I think you need to make, you know, new hire onboarding like core to your business. That's really hard to outsource all pieces of it, or you will have like a terrible culture. Um, but the, the idea of having like a travel agent that knows these niche spots where you can get 20 or 40 or 60 people into a house, uh, they're actually kind of hard to find. And I think, you know, then you have like all the travel coordination. Okay, maybe for the first time ever, these companies are having to set up, you know, expense policies for, you know, how much per diem you get if you're on the road, if you're driving in versus flying in. Uh, and so just being able to take that, I think and maybe give parameters, you know, hey, we have 15 people, this is our budget, just go book something awesome. We think that there's an interesting business there. If anybody wants to run this site for us, feel free to reach out to me and I'll give somebody a job around it.

We, we, uh, I think, I think it's like a Keith Rabois quote. You always want, you know, like 50% of people to not understand the idea. You want like 25% of people to hate it and you want 25% to love it. And I think we're like pretty equal on that ratio.