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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and I am so excited for today's episode because we are talking about a type of entrepreneurship that is all about imagining something, building it from scratch and then bringing it into the world.
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All new technology, really cool innovation at play before our very eyes, and we're doing it with an incredible entrepreneur that, since I'm from Boston, I think I can safely say this guy is wicked smart.
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When you look at his career, when you look at the things that he's building and putting into the world today, it's incredible to see what he's up to.
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So let me tell you all about today's guest.
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His name is Raymond King.
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Raymond has a PhD in mechanical engineering and robotics from the University of Utah.
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He worked as a researcher and leader for over seven years at Meta's research and development branch when it comes to augmented and virtual reality input devices, focusing on sensor systems.
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That's a spoiler alert.
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You're gonna hear what he's doing with that these days for their input gloves and wristbands.
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After leaving Meta, he started his own company called Applied Sensor Company and has been working on developing and improving smart textile sensors for everyday applications.
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If you're thinking to yourself holy cow, what is this technology that Raymond is bringing to the world?
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What does it do?
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How is he building his business?
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We're all in for a real treat as we hear the behind the scenes of his story and all the things that he's up to.
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So I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Raymond King.
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All right, raymond, I am so very excited to have you here on air with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thank you, thanks for having me Heck.
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Yes, now I've given you that boston certification as wicked smart.
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So you've got to live up to it today, and we'll start with your background.
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Take us beyond the bio.
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Who's raymond?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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yeah, no, I I was thinking for a while of different ways to to to discuss this and I think actually I was hoping I could flip your script on you just a little bit.
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And because I've been watching a bunch of the podcasts, I know we often ask at the end like what's that piece of advice you want to give other entrepreneurs?
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And as there's a theme that I think maybe we can use for most of this talk, uh, that I want to start with, to get into, kind of my background and and that, if that's okay, I want to ask you that, like, can I flip you along the script and start with the advice first?
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Raymond, you can do whatever you want, because I will say it's fun giving a little behind the scenes for listeners.
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You and I have exchanged so many funny emails at this point that you're part of the family, so lay it on to us, man.
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Yeah, okay, cool, I want to make sure no-transcript.
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And I would say I've learned more about myself like in the last two years of being an entrepreneur than I have about myself in the last like 10.
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And so I will actually get into my actual background.
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You know as part of this now but like that's I feel like a theme that hopefully we can kind of riff off for the rest of the time here that you know a lot of this stuff that happens to you as an entrepreneur is also just thinking about like what do you want?
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Uh, and, and you know a lot of that comes from where you came from.
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So so my background I will make it as short as possible.
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So I was super interested in cars and and motorcycles, helped build.
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I was a mechanical person for a really long time.
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Thought I was going to be a mechanic when I was younger, ended up getting into personal training and fitness really hard when I was in my early 20s and teens, tried to combine those two things together and actually did biomechanics as an undergrad and then got into the idea of making prosthetics because I was like, oh, I love human bodies and I love making mechanical stuff.
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So I was going to do prosthetics because I was like, oh, I love human bodies and I love making mechanical stuff, so I was going to do prosthetics and that's why I ended up doing a PhD in robotics and biomechanics and then from there, I somehow got the luckiest combination of things in the world.
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I was able to combine my third thing that I really love so much, which is actually like video games and playing games, so I was able to join Meta, as you mentioned, like working on these VR and so virtual reality, augmented reality input systems, and I get to work on the VR gloves and, yeah, it's public so you can go and look up like Meta VR gloves and I was super excited about working on them, loved working there for the eight years that I was there and then got laid off A lot of your guests.
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You know I listen to a lot of the podcasts I try to get an idea of and a lot of your guests, you know have a similar story, unfortunately, over the last several years, that they got laid off, and I will say attention to anybody who's ever been laid off before, right there, and this will go into that journey and of why I'm on this entrepreneur trip now is like being laid off from a, from a, from a job you like, really love, like a dream job.
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It's kind of like being dumped by a significant other and with, like, an email at like 5 am and there is there's nothing you can do about it, and there is, you know, and, and they just took, they and all your friends have to hang out with them now, and not you, uh, and so you get this invisible barrier between, like you and all the people you spent, you know, your relationships with for the past uh, x amount of time you've been in the company.
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So that, that, though, for me is it was a really big turning point for, like, do I really want to go back to corporate world when something like this could happen and I'll pause here, because otherwise I will talk constantly for the whole time but one thing that I that constantly came back to me was like, no-transcript, and what I really hear is it's kind of this age old misconception that you'm the son of an immigrant mom and so an immigrant mindset is typically.
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You know, we come to the United States so that our kids can have a safe job and a 401k and all these other things that we've been sold as part of the professional career journey.
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And it's interesting, so many amazing entrepreneurs like you you've so correctly called out and observed is that they found out it wasn't safe.
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You did get laid off and your future was in the hands of somebody else, whether it be an HR department or a business leader who just decided, hey, we need to have some cuts.
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And so, with that in mind, I love how much you emphasize the journey of inner growth, because when we become entrepreneurs I totally agree with you I actually think that the more interesting side of entrepreneurship to me is that inner battle, because business is simple.
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Let's face it, raymond, you've got an incredible product and you've brought it into the world and you're going to find the people who want to buy that from you, and then there's just going to be this exchange of money.
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But what's way more difficult is every single day you wake up and you say am I the right person to do this?
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Is anyone going to believe me?
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Am I good at sales?
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Like there's so many inner things.
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So, raymond, I'm just going to piggyback off that and I guess I'm going to pick on you a little bit here today and say talk to us about some of those inner thoughts, because that's the real stuff that you're working through and I know all of our listeners are going to resonate with so much of it.
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And the last thing I'll interject is I don't think we talk about these things enough in the world of entrepreneurship, but it is the real stuff.
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So, raymond, take us there yeah, yeah, absolutely, though I was, uh, I, I think so we'll probably at some point get into what I'm up to to now.
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But, like there are, obviously, from my first time I would say I was an entrepreneur, like for the first year I was laid off, um, cause it's been almost, it's been about two years since I got laid off, and so that first year I would say, I was, you know, reading books, trying to figure out, like, do I really even want this, right?
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Isn't it safer, as we, as you just mentioned, right, to just get another job again?
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And but I kept coming back to this idea that, like it hurt.
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It hurt real bad, it still hurts to get laid off.
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And I said, you know, lose that connection with all the people that you've helped and grown over that time, kind of thing, and I still stay in touch with a lot of them.
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So it's not completely, you know, not a complete cutoff, but it's a big deal.
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But that that journey of, like you know, do I really want this?
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Yeah, can I.
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Of, like you know, do I really want this?
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Yeah, can I do it?
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Um, and then actually more more recently, uh, I, several months ago, because I will get into it.
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But right now I'm making mats and that wasn't my initial plan or idea.
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Um, so I make smart mats and I think to myself, right, like at some point, like what, if?
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What, if the only thing I've ever known for is making smart mats?
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Like, am I okay with being the king of mats?
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Like it's somewhat facetious, like off the cuff, but you know, there are some just weird questions you have to ask yourself and be kind of.
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You don't even have to be okay with it, you just have to, like, let the thought come and go to some capacity and because it's it's very hard to to to know what's going to happen next.
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Right, so, cause I will, as any entrepreneur, hopefully right Like you pivot to what you need to do to survive business wise too.
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Right, you said it's so capacity, like if somebody wants to buy something from you and then a lot of that wants to be sold, then like, you start moving towards that thing.
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That is, um, you know, so you can survive as a business.
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So that almost seems more more straightforward than really asking your question.
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Do I want this?
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Do I want to work on that?
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Do I want?
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Yeah, it's, it's.
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It's a very interesting journey of.
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I'll think of the right way to say it in a few seconds.
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But you've come back, brian.
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You say something.
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Yeah, I want to go here with you.
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It's such an astute observation that you have internally and I'm so grateful for you sharing it here transparently on air together.
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Is that what I'm also hearing as part of this is part identity I guess I could use the phrase part identity crisis, because I've gone through that as well, raymond.
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When I hear you say, do I want to be the smart mat guy Like, is that really what you want?
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It becomes our identity and it's because we pour so much into it.
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I don't think the outside world fully understands how deep entrepreneurship goes and the fact that even when you're not working, raymond, you're thinking about all of these things.
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And it sounds to me and I'd love to hear some of your insights about it it sounds like you've already well-established internally that, hey, I'm shifting my identity and some things you're you're taking on as part of your identity when they're actually not, and it's part of our entrepreneurial growth journey is also to remove ourselves from that.
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But yeah, there's so many of these fun things kicking about in your mind.
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Yeah, it is, and yeah it's.
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I wish you said it very well and I will not stumble through a retort of that, but it is.
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It's a journey and I said a lot more internally than I thought it was going to be Um, yeah, um, take, take me, take me where you want to go next, brian.
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I know exactly where I want to go, raymond, because you are so talented and just having gone through your website and seeing your manufacturing process and what you're putting into the world to me, what really amazes me is that you clearly have so many skills and you've picked those up along the way in your career and also, it sounds like, in your hobbies.
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You're just a passionate person who loves growing and loves building, and I love that side of your entrepreneurial story.
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At the same time, it's really fascinating for me to hear on the air today, together, that you know I didn't want to go into smart mats.
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That's not what I pictured.
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Where, along the way for you, do you navigate those waters and those thoughts of?
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There's so many things I could do.
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Like Raymond, you could probably build things that the rest of us can only imagine or see in a science fiction movie.
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But at the same time, you have to channel all of those possibilities into a thing, and right now it's smart maths, but of course there's going to be other things in the future.
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How do you navigate those thought threads?
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Yeah, so, thank you, brian, that, uh, you had a guest on recently.
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I think her name is Kelly, Um, maybe Kelly Dug.
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That was talking about the fact that, like these winding roads of like your path, you know, in hindsight look like they make a lot of sense but during the time, you know, they don't.
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Maybe they don't feel like they all may come together yet.
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And, yeah, so when I was at Met, I got exposed to so many different types of making things.
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I, when I was at Met, I got exposed to so many different types of making things and I'm still interested in human body and prosthetics and wearables and stuff like that.
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And when, actually, the reason I got into what is smart textiles for me, I specifically work in an area that's called technical embroidery.
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I sometimes cringe when I say the word embroidery because usually a lot of times people immediately think to themselves wait, like you think the thing that my grandma does, like you know, with like adding, like butterflies and like kittens to like handkerchiefs?
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And the answer is yes, but typically we use like conductive threads instead of regular threads and conductive, you know, materials or plastics or like that, things that can get combined together, things that can get combined together.
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And all this is super interesting to me because I'd worked on wearables for so long.
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Putting a hard thing on the body is like it's just not going to work.
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There's so many things that make you want to take off something that's hard or heavy on your body unless it gives you an incredible benefit.
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Right, like hard hats yeah, a hundred percent.
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Right, like body armor is heavy, but if it stops a bullet I survive.
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Right, like there are things that you are willing to put on your body, but like convincing somebody to wear something because it gives them some piece of information about themselves.
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Like you know heart rate or respiratory, or you know how they're moving or whether or not they're walking with a limp or something like that.
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Like, in some of those cases, it's hard to convince people to even wear something that could benefit them if they is not immediate, like I said, stopping a bullet or stopping a hammer from landing on your head.
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And I was always intrigued by all these smart sensors sorry, these soft sensors that we could make, because I was like oh, the application space for this is intense in the sense of how many textiles are you interacting with, right, this second, brian, let alone how many you've encountered with today.
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Right Like, probably on the order of, you know, close to a hundred the carpet, your socks, your shirt, your bed, your curtains.
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Right Like if you could put sensors in any of these places to give you some piece of information about your environment.
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You know, maybe your house could get a little bit smarter.
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Or maybe you would realize that you know my heart rate's been elevated all day today for some strange reason, but you didn't actively think about putting it on.
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It's just there and you don't even notice it because it feels as comfortable.
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And these are the things that drove me to start a company and, of course, I had worked on wearables for a long time and know how hard it is, and I'm a bootstrapped, as we talked briefly before we started.
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I'm a garagestrap, as we talked briefly before we started, right, like I'm a garage entrepreneur kind of thing, and you know, and bootstrap meaning that like I fund myself at the moment and I don't have the runway to make wearables, like because people change their shape and size and there are so many different ways that people can be different to put things on their body that you do have to get to your point right, like how do you narrow down?
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And the fact is I wanted to stay in the space.
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I wanted to learn so much more about how to make soft sensors because I'd love to put them on people, but that's really complicated and hard and takes lots of time and a big team, and I have none of those.
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So I have limited time and I want to stay in the space.
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And so you do kind of start working through this process of like, well, what would benefit from being flexible and durable and easily manufacturable and be able to be made in large areas, kind of thing?
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Uh, these are the benefits of of, you know, making things out of embroidery or textiles, and you know, the floor, um, there it turns out, everybody's got to be on the floor.
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Uh, who would have known?
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So right, the got to be on the floor.
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Who would have known?
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So right, you're on the floor, always, everybody's on the floor, and your pets are on the floor, your packages, if they're not on the table, are on the floor, kind of thing.
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And so the idea of like, okay, like, maybe there is a value and a sensor here that is just collecting information about what's on the floor, us absorb, collecting information about what's on the floor and, um, you know, but that's good to be durable and it's good to be, you know, movable or flexible, right, because floors aren't always hard.
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You can't have hardwoods everywhere or, you know, tile everywhere.
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That's uncomfortable.
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So how do you have a flexible flooring that can give you all that type of information?
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And and so that pairing down of like I, I want to, I want to keep doing this tech, right, but, like I know, I can't do wearables right now because it's just out of the scope.
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Right, knowing your limitations, I'll throw that in as another entrepreneurial tip.
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Right, there is at some point, be realistic with your limitations.
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I know how long it would take me to make those wearables, so it's just not in the cards right now, not unless I went and got a lot of external funding.
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So but paring down to like, what could I make now, that would increase my depth of understanding while also bringing some value, some benefit to people out there right, because for some reason, they want to know that they're in their bed at night, or they want to know that their cat is in their cat corner, you know, and be able to look on their phone and be like yeah, yeah, you know Muffin is in the corner.
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I know because you know my sensor is, it says that she's there kind of thing.
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Right, there's.
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There's so many different ways to to use the floor and get some piece of information out of it that I was like that's still, even that's a big space, even when it pared down to like like I wanted to do so much and I'm so interested in doing so much with it, but but pared down to like what's sellable.
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You know, because you got to survive.
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At the end of the day, we're entrepreneurs because we want to be a business, we want to sell things, we want to improve the life of other people with the things that we make and benefit them somehow.
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And that process, though, in hindsight, makes a lot of sense, but obviously, when you're doing it, so many other ideas are fighting for you.
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So, to even go back to the first conversation of even when I got all the way to this part of I think I'm going to make flooring and mats, and then only after deciding that that was the thing I was going to do, then you had to do that internal journey of like do I want?
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to be the mat guy Like that's the.
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you know it's all connected and in hindsight it all kind of makes a little bit of sense, but it is, it's a ride.
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Yeah, it all kind of makes a little bit of sense, but it's a ride.
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Yeah, it is a ride, Raymond, I want to go here with you, live on the air.
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It's very fun For me.
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I just feel like you and I are chatting today and this is one of those rare episodes where I kind of forget that we're recording, because it gets me so excited hearing the way that you think, because I do think you and I think so differently you have, and I so respect and admire the way that you think, because in many ways it's what I don't have.
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And so hearing you talk about this tech side of the world and hearing you talk about just truly just inventing something out of thin air, like I'm truly blown away by your abilities and the things.
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And when you talk about a smart mat, where my head goes is to the zillions of business ideas and the ways that I would license it and partner with other companies and industries.
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Because one such example and this is why I'm saying it feels like we're doing this in real time instead of on a recording together is in my head.
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I'm thinking well, raymond, let's get those sensors in a mat, we'll put it in a yoga mat, we'll sell it to yoga studios because it can be instructional to yoga studios.
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Because it can be instructional is that you know if you're doing a pose and I don't know why I'm going to yoga, because I don't do yoga.
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So I'm running myself into a dead-end path with regards to the depth of this example, but I would imagine that we could partner with a yoga company to develop an app that says okay, if you're trying to learn this pose, ah, you've got way too much pressure on your right hand.
00:20:45.402 --> 00:20:49.328
You've got to move some of that weight into the your legs, or something like that.
00:20:49.328 --> 00:20:51.632
Where in your mind does this go?
00:20:51.632 --> 00:20:57.377
Because, raymond, just knowing you're a few years into your entrepreneurial journey, are you thinking longer term?
00:20:57.377 --> 00:20:59.163
Are you thinking external industries?
00:20:59.163 --> 00:21:02.930
Are you right now, very much in tech refinement stage?
00:21:02.930 --> 00:21:07.185
Where's your mind go with regards to all the business side of things as well?
00:21:08.548 --> 00:21:10.921
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's definitely so.
00:21:10.921 --> 00:21:17.728
I was going to make a comment to you at some point, right that, like I went through several podcasts.
00:21:17.728 --> 00:21:21.109
You know I've been enjoying a lot of your content.
00:21:21.109 --> 00:21:22.385
It's really, you know, very insightful.
00:21:22.385 --> 00:21:25.568
Your ability to segue, by the way, is incredible.
00:21:25.568 --> 00:21:32.066
I once watched you go from like a discussion about like generalized ai to like personal goals, without not dropping a beat.
00:21:32.066 --> 00:21:35.712
So, like you're, you're what you do is.
00:21:35.712 --> 00:21:37.644
It's also very impressive, by the way.
00:21:38.224 --> 00:21:50.251
So but oh man, I've now I've lost my train of thought I appreciate the compliment being the thing that derailed your train of thought, because it hits me in the feels, raymond.
00:21:50.291 --> 00:22:20.607
But yes, talking about the business side of things, yeah, yeah, so a lot of the guests that you have on, uh, there's I haven't I've yet to find it that many that are hardware, right, a lot of them are like coaching or finance or you know, um, you know some sort of business level, uh, or scaling up or things like this, right, and I've had a lot of good talks, I think, actually in the last month, of like using external, you know, scaling outside of the US kind of thing, which is super cool and interesting to think about, especially for any of us who are trying to grow our business.
00:22:20.607 --> 00:22:35.326
So, but the business itself, I the reason I bring up as a hardware person, right, like, I do love the tech and I love talking about the tech, but I do have to sell something in order to feed, to pay the mortgage and feed myself.
00:22:35.326 --> 00:22:37.483
You know the family likes money.
00:22:37.483 --> 00:22:41.426
That's in order to to have some level of not living in a box.
00:22:41.426 --> 00:23:00.250
So it is, it's always being open, right, and this is, you know of, of of all the the other lots of great guests that you've had on right, talking about, like being willing to pivot, um, when I a good idea comes by, right, like, yeah, like, maybe the yoga thing is, is a.
00:23:00.592 --> 00:23:02.840
It's the greatest idea, but there's also there's a.
00:23:02.840 --> 00:23:06.852
There's a link here, right too, which is having the right connection into the yoga world.
00:23:06.852 --> 00:23:17.509
In that particular case, right that, like I'd have have, I think it would make most sense to partner with somebody who was, you know, a super well-known yoga instructor and actually develop it with them.
00:23:17.589 --> 00:23:36.509
So that way it solves the problems that they see with, you know, beginner yogas, people, people who start yoga and then stop because they don't get enough instruction or they have bad local teachers or something like that but instead could do you know something online with a bigger um, get that feedback from from, uh, you know a really excellent, you know top-notch yoga instructor.
00:23:36.509 --> 00:23:56.862
Um, so it's, it's that keeping an open mind to what problems are out there, uh, that you can solve with a technology like this, because, um, because, um, it's it can go a lot of places and it is a little overwhelming to think about, like, right, which thing, which one do I want to go after?
00:23:56.862 --> 00:24:16.310
And there's the only other piece of advice I I kind of like the yoga one in the sense because, like, I am a fitness person I don't you, I don't do yoga either, but um, I I making applying it to places that that deeply resonate with me personally, um, is is also part of that funnel for myself, right?
00:24:16.310 --> 00:24:20.666
So if somebody said, I don't know, there's so many things I am interested in, to be completely honest.
00:24:20.666 --> 00:24:26.359
So if somebody was like, what about, like, um, conveyor belts in a manufacturing plant or something like that.
00:24:26.359 --> 00:24:29.529
Like that's not very interesting to me, but, but I'd be like, oh, but is it interesting?
00:24:29.529 --> 00:24:31.836
Like what could you figure out if you knew?
00:24:31.836 --> 00:24:35.250
You know how much pressure and for whatever reason, need to be soft instead of hard?
00:24:35.250 --> 00:24:38.220
You know, because I do have rubberized pressure like sensors kind of thing.
00:24:38.319 --> 00:25:00.853
So it's a I know I'm taking a long pause here to get to your point, which is thinking about that business part is obviously critical to make the money, uh, to be a business Uh, but it's also just part of the process of of finding and having the right thing to find.
00:25:00.873 --> 00:25:19.528
You actually, uh, a small tangent myself alpha, I love tangents, right that, like one of my mentors right now is always saying to me, like you might not know what your company does right now, but survive, right, like do what you can to survive, because his point is right.
00:25:19.528 --> 00:25:34.022
If you disappear and you might've been a month or three weeks away from somebody being finally internalizing, finally seeing you 10 times for whatever reason, whatever you've been putting out there, finally hearing about you from somebody being finally internalizing, finally seeing you 10 times for whatever reason, whatever you've been putting out there, finally hearing about you from somebody else and going yeah, I have this problem.
00:25:34.022 --> 00:25:34.644
I've just been.
00:25:34.644 --> 00:25:40.609
It's been a while it's been on my radar to reach out to you, but I just haven't yet because I'm so busy all the time Right.
00:25:40.609 --> 00:25:54.776
And the longer you can survive and stay alive, you know, the more likely that people have the opportunity to find you and then reach out to you with cool opportunities like the yoga mat, or you know my ridiculous one about the conveyor belts.
00:25:57.180 --> 00:26:24.371
Yes, Raymond, it's fun because I think you just exposed two things that you and I very much have in common, one of which is that we, for sure, love tangents, and the second of which is that we're easily excitable, and that's one thing that I hear so much in your personal entrepreneurial journey is that I think it's a huge asset and a huge positive trait in our growth journeys, because, as you know I mean, you've heard in so many of my other episodes is that it's guaranteed that none of our paths are gonna be linear.
00:26:24.371 --> 00:26:35.083
You and I aren't married to any one thing because we're so easily excitable on 50 other things, and I think that that's such an important trait for all of us to embrace on our entrepreneurial journeys.
00:26:35.083 --> 00:26:40.172
I want to ask you this, though, because hearing you talk about the business this is me totally putting you on the spot.
00:26:40.172 --> 00:26:49.213
This is not going to be an easy question to navigate, so I'm sure we're only going to get your raw thoughts, because you didn't know this was coming, but that is when I look at people with your skillset, raymond.
00:26:49.253 --> 00:27:14.582
What I really admire about what you're doing is that you're building a business, and the contrast I'm going to paint there is not just a product, because I've met so many people in your case, raymond that because they've always worked in a corporate career, because they've always worked within departments and on specific projects, they can see themselves launching a product into the world, but they fail to back that with a business.
00:27:14.582 --> 00:27:20.968
And I would argue that a business can go much further, because it can have resources, it can have operations, it can have scalability.
00:27:20.968 --> 00:27:23.778
There's so much more that we can amass along the way.
00:27:23.778 --> 00:27:33.714
Just look at meta, for example, and even if we just stick to their hardware department, there's an entire organization and business that backs their ability to launch these things into the world.
00:27:33.714 --> 00:27:39.032
Where, along the way, did your mind think about a product versus a business?
00:27:42.480 --> 00:27:57.747
Oh man, brian, that's a good one, I think, like okay, my short answer is because it didn't start as a product, I would say, right, like the idea was.
00:27:57.747 --> 00:28:11.304
And it's funny because if you read anybody who reads enough entrepreneur books, we'll know that, like you know, find a problem, fall in love with the problem and then find whatever solution there is to that problem and that's totally right, that makes total sense kind of thing.
00:28:11.304 --> 00:28:31.039
And I did the thing that, like you're less supposed to do most of the time, which is like I fell in love with a technology and thought about so many different ways it could be applied to, and especially with my dream, my long term dreams of, you know, maybe getting back to that wearables kind of thing and just becoming an expert in this space to make wearables with this type of technology.
00:28:31.039 --> 00:28:36.288
As right, I wasn't, I didn't come in with that as you.
00:28:36.288 --> 00:28:39.527
You said that that product mindset of like it has to be this thing.
00:28:39.527 --> 00:28:42.855
I've come up with this really great idea and like it.
00:28:42.855 --> 00:28:44.567
You know I'm gonna push it out to the people.
00:28:44.787 --> 00:28:54.096
Like you had, um, I think you had your cousin-in-law, I think rudy and you and him were talking about the fact that, like he had made like a design for some pants.
00:28:54.096 --> 00:28:57.827
Um, because he's a designer, you know, I can't remember the name of his clothing brand.
00:28:57.827 --> 00:28:58.971
You'll have to, you have to plug him.
00:28:58.971 --> 00:29:05.214
Um, but he had made some pants that he thought sucked he was like this is such a bad design and everybody loved them.
00:29:05.455 --> 00:29:09.753
And he was like, oh shit, I guess I gotta make more of that design.
00:29:09.753 --> 00:29:09.953
That.
00:29:09.953 --> 00:29:11.498
He was like I would never have done that.
00:29:11.498 --> 00:29:17.357
Um, so, really being and, but he's a businessman and he knew that that's what people wanted, kind of thing.
00:29:17.357 --> 00:29:19.231
Right, so, like, he changed his opinion on it.
00:29:19.231 --> 00:29:43.751
He said, fine, I don't like this, but everybody else does, right, so like, being able to, to, to not fall in love necessarily with like a specific, like I'm, I'm working on this product, I'm quite happy with the product as it goes, but, right, like I said, if, said, if somebody turned around and said, well, can it do this, could you make it do this?
00:29:43.771 --> 00:29:45.857
And I asked you know, like, well, what's the opportunity there and you know how much would it help.
00:29:45.857 --> 00:29:51.884
You know, a business, a person, um, you know, I get, and that's for better or worse, it's like the message that's that benefit or not of being an entrepreneur, you get to make those choices.
00:29:51.884 --> 00:29:56.807
Instead of that, as you said, if you're part of a corporate system, right, those choices have already been made for you.
00:29:56.807 --> 00:30:02.471
You don't have to think about those things because somebody up above you has said do these things, or whatever.
