00:41:30 · Ty Morse
[00:41:30] S0: Are you gonna try to do something where you basically take the people that are super well trained from these first few factories that you've spent a lot of time with and kind of forward deploy them almost at the new factories for the first like few months or a year to get that DNA, like similar to what you actually have today?
00:41:46 · Jim Belosic
[00:41:46] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I love the term forward deployed. Although, I think it discounts like, you know, our men and women in the military who are actually forward deployed and seeing some shit. Being forward deployed to Paris, Kentucky is not the same as Afghanistan. But yes, we have that concept. So we're really lucky to have a lot of, young staff. You know, our average age in the machine shop here is like 25.2 years old or something like that. And oftentimes when these opportunities come up, it's like, hey, you wanna go to Texas either permanently or you wanna go there for six weeks and you know, spread the SendCutSend love and teach people stuff. We get a lot of hands in the air. They're like, I wanna go do it. And then there's career paths too. It's like, hey, maybe you think that there's no hire that you can go in this particular building. Well, maybe you can go spin up a new building. You know, maybe you can be a shift lead or in charge of the building or something like that. So it's really cool. They can see that career path now. That's... Which is one of the reasons why I wanna keep opening up buildings too. I I would hate for SendCutSends to hit a plateau where all of a sudden like you have to wait for your boss to die or retire in order to, you know, get a new opportunity. There's there's too many like really cool young people that deserve us do really really cool stuff, and if I can do it under our own roofs, then I'm really happy.
00:43:08 · Ty Morse
[00:43:08] S0: I think one of the biggest issues when companies scale or one of the biggest things that people run into is the thing that made you great is no longer what you're actually doing. So with like Sorin at Neuros, he loved making drones, and he just designed and soldered and all the stuff in his garage and he made these drones. And then when I was talking with him a few months ago, he said, I now realize, like I got into this business because I love making drones, and now I'm not spending my time making drones at all. I'm mostly focusing on how do we scale, how do we, you know, scale the team, all this stuff. How do you kind of think about maintaining your sense of joy? You know, making sure that you're doing the thing that you actually enjoy doing that brings you joy, and you have fun with over time as you scale?
00:43:51 · Jim Belosic
[00:43:51] S1: I've been, full of of joy or, you know, whatever. I've been doing that for eight years. I haven't known any different. This is a huge puzzle for me to solve. Before I started this business, I would get all my problem solving skills out either via software, you know, doing, you know, running the software company or through like cars and hobbies. And, you know, you're trying to stuff way too big of an engine and way too small of a car and, you know, there's challenges and that's that's cool. This company is full of those wild problem solving challenges all the time. So even if it was solving HR or staffing or something, you know, or something mechanical or, you know, a material issue, it's fun problems and challenges. I can tell you though, that I went through hell the last, what, three months or so trying to raise money. It is not fun. I am not good at it. And it does not bring me any joy. It's a huge distraction. It's a completely different skillset than being on the floor, hearing a machine, you're like, oh, that's gonna chatter a little bit, or I bet that bit is dull. Like, I know that kind of stuff. But trying to sell people your company and get them to like love it at the level that you love it, it's exhausting. So that did not bring me a lot of joy. The process was, I heard that our process was actually pretty smooth compared to others, but I'm really excited to get back to doing what I do best, which is build. So when I see a 150,000 square foot empty building or a 300,000 square foot building in another state, I I'm like back in my element. So I have to stay in my element. I thought everything was my element, but not not fundraising.
00:45:32 · Ty Morse
[00:45:32] S0: I think that was a really big decision to to go do it at all. And I know that you're very focused on finding the right partners and making sure that the people that you're working with are in it for the same reasons that you are and are aligned with your vision for where you wanna take the company. So how did you decide which partners made sense with that context?
00:45:50 · Jim Belosic
[00:45:50] S1: You get to pick. Like, you can't really pick your brother-in-law. Like, if you go to get married, the brother in laws just come with it. And I'm lucky to have awesome brother in laws. I have I have three really cool brother in laws. But I've seen some guys who get married and, brother in law's total dick, you know, or you could say mother-in-law, whatever. Right? Everyone complains about their mother-in-law. You don't get to pick that. I see investor partners as like kind of a marriage, but you get to pick. And I was really lucky to have enough, you know, opportunity to talk to a bunch of different people where I got to figure out who's just cool. Like, who do I wanna have a beer with? If we're getting married, like, who do I wanna hang out with? And we could just like be cool. Who can I text at midnight and be like, dude, I can't sleep? Like, what do I do about this thing? I was lucky to find that in, you know, Andrew and Matt and Patrick Collison and they're just they're weapons. And I think we were... I don't know if lucky is the word. I think we were patient enough to wait until we could attract that level of of person. It's not it's not necessarily the firm. I mean, Sequoia and Paradigm, Patrick Carlson are rad for the best of the best, but it's more about the person. Like if you come from Disney company or whatever, but you're a total turd, You know, that sucks. So so focus more on the person. I'd rather have someone from, you know, a really small company that that's just easy to work with. Because we're gonna be doing this for a long time. This is this is not like a race to the exit thing. It's like cool.