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.
00:47:38 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:47:38] S0: Have you already had moments where they were able to come in or one of them was able to come in and kind of unfuck a problem for you or help you think through some next challenge, in a better way? [00:47:48] S1: Yeah. These guys are incredibly good at what they do. And if they're not good at something, they know someone who is. And it's so crazy being connected to this like brand new network. Like we had all these nodes in manufacturing, you know, these hubs and spokes of connections and vendors and electricians like I'm good at that stuff. I know a bunch of different plumbers that can come fix toilets, at any time. I know machine techs that'll jump out of bed and do all this stuff, but then they're like, hey, how do I deal with, you know, money and banks? And how do I do like executive recruiting? How do it, that's where these guys like are worth their weight in gold. And I never put any emphasis on that internally. Because I was like, I don't know. It seems weird. But when someone loves it and they're good at it and it's it's a weapon for you, then it's a perfect match. [00:48:40] S0: I think a lot of the best companies allow certain aspects of the business, just like you were describing, you were okay delaying, you know, making something a priority saying, we're just gonna focus on how do we set up these factories? How do we delight customers? And delay on like perfect accounting and all this stuff. How do you kind of decide which areas to focus on versus which ones you can just basically completely ignore?
00:49:03 · Jim Belosic
[00:49:03] S1: It's easy to focus on the the pain first, right? So it's pain or pleasure, right? It's does the customer have pain or does the... Is the customer getting pleasure? If those are two things that you focus on, just keep throwing money at it or throw effort at it. If the customer doesn't really know, then it always goes to the back burner. So one of the things we always say is, is it our problem or their problem? And so if the customer is like, Hey, I want to upload this thing, but my file doesn't work. I'm getting all these errors. That's our problem. We should totally fix it. If they're like, Hey, I want to upload the recipe for a cake and have you send me a cake. I'm like, Well, that's your problem. I'm not gonna do that right now. So when it comes to like efficiency of the back office and how we do our accounting and how we reconcile our books and you know, all that kind of stuff, the customer doesn't care. It's not their problem. It's it's our problem. We'll we'll deal with it, you know, behind the scenes when we have time. So yeah, we've kind of kicked the can down the road on some of that stuff, and we gotta probably straighten up a little bit in some of those areas. But I think a lot of people starting out, they read books or they get the wrong advice and they try and have everything perfect in their business from day one. They're like, oh, I have to make sure that my accounting is this level of perfect and I need to set up all these SOPs and bylaws and whatever. No, have a good product first. You know, figure it out. I always, people have come to me and said like, hey Jim, will you invest? You know, I wanna do a restaurant or whatever. I was like, go start with a hotdog stand. Go do a hotdog stand really, really well. And then go to a food truck. You know, and then if the food truck is really popular or whatever, then go do a restaurant. But a lot of people like start planning their restaurant first and they haven't even done anything. So worry about the customer experience first. Everything else will kind of fall into place, especially over a longer period of time. Every year that you pay your taxes, every year that you talk to your CPA, you dial in things a little bit better. We just had a huge test with the due diligence. So that's what no one tells you.