104. Entrepreneurship, Consulting, and the Mindset of a Founder ft. Tom Myers

All right, welcome back everybody to episode 105 of the True Talks podcast. Today, I'm Jalen, I'm drawing my co-host. Darian. And we have a very special guest, Tom Myers. Darian, how do you know Tom Myers? Yeah, so over the summer, I was looking for different startups to internet just to get more product experience and actually pivot away from finance. And I came across this wonderful sheet and one of the startups, Pro Nexus, was actually on there. And I guess Tom could say from his side, the whole like process of going through interviews and how I created a PowerPoint and pitched what I would contribute as the go-to-market strategy. So been working with him over the summer just to develop more of what the core product would actually look like. And I'm glad that you guys were able to meet each other and I'm glad that we're able to get you on the pod. Is there anything that Darian missed himself with the introduction? Would you like to say anything about yourself before we get started? No, I want to emphasize that Darian was great over the course of the summer. He kind of helps spearhead some of the response. So one of the big things that is important to our business is overall response rates. So he kind of was able to take a deep dive into that and provide a lot of value there. So I can share more on how that relates to the broader picture of what we're building through subsequent questions then. Thanks Tom, I'll tell you after. But for some people that might not know, Pro Nexus is an expert's automation platform. But I think you can explain it best. So what is Pro Nexus in a nutshell? Yeah. In that shell, our one liner is verified expert sourcing 10 times faster. So that's kind of a little bit of buzz wordy. But basically what we do at a very high level is we help connect investment professionals that are doing some form of due diligence or market research with subject matter experts that understand a market really well. So thinking about like a PE firm, they might want to gain more confidence about a particular thesis that they have before purchasing an asset. So they'll typically want to talk with a bunch of market leaders or a bunch of people that have used that software, competitors in that market. And basically what we do is we help connect them with the right individuals. How we go about that now is a little bit different than what our end vision is. But basically we're a matchmaker at the end of the day. That's great. I feel like it's going behind the scenes. And for a bit of context, you started as a strategy consultant beforehand. So I was wondering is there an aha moment sort of a revelation when you realize that the corporate ladder was a for you? Great question. I would say it was, so I've always had, we'll say entrepreneurial thoughts throughout my high school college. In college my first entrepreneurial endeavor was a power washing business over the course of the summer. And I didn't know anything about power washing. And basically what I did are there, watched a bunch of YouTube videos. We'd go door to door and put like flyers on and like try to cold sell people. It was pretty bad. It was pretty bad. I got a lot of nose. A lot of doors slammed in my face. But I would get like a bunch of clients or a bunch of people on one day. And then I would actually rent the pressure washer and then use that as the mean. So it was a really low cost way of making a really decent amount of money. I was a lifeguard before that and I realized I could make whatever the minimum wage was like $8 an hour doing that. Or I could go do pressure washing which was the market rate was near $100 per hour. And like to me it was like so clear that this is like the right path. It kind of opened my eyes and the vision for what the entrepreneurial life could become. And I think I got the itch there. I got forward joined as a consultant after undergrad kind of fell into the more typical route that a lot of the business students go into. And basically chose consulting because I didn't really know what I want to do in life. But realized that that kind of kicked the can down the road where I could continue to learn continue to cultivate different skills. If a flash forward a little bit further was always interested in the expert network space. There's a couple of different reasons. But and basically what expert networks are is they do what I initially said is they connect those investment professionals with those subject matter experts. And that whole process is just super painful. There's a lot of manual steps involved. It was either myself or an associate beneath me having to copy and paste information from an email and to an Excel spreadsheet. It was just like a ton of manual workflows. And I worked as a product manager on some tooling to try to build and solve this problem. The TLDR there is it didn't end up doing too well for a whole host of reasons. But that was kind of the jumping off point where I realized I saw first hand the firm try to solve this problem. They couldn't and I thought I could do a better job. So at that point I left full blast here to go figure things out. Yeah, I love that you were able to adjust the problem that you know wasn't being able to get resolved and actually bring your own input at it and try to resolve it yourself. But your whole entire upbringing that you were just talking about I could really really relate to that as well. That's really funny because I actually did door to door sales this summer for Verizon actually is some of Verizon products and I could you know I hear the same things all the nose I get. It's just like I like to say it's like a mental stuff in the face which is really really painful mentally. And then I also did lifeguarding as well and then I saw that trade off between like you know making that low that low like hourly income versus like being able to put in as much work as I want and basically however much work I put in is kind of like what I get in terms like money. So it's really funny how we kind of have that same upbringing. But I wanted to ask you was you know now that you're a founder and you've kind of had that founder experience when you're younger doing that power washing business. But was there ever a time where somebody assumed something like really crazy about your life as a founder? It might have been Darian over the course of the summer where I think he asked me about a if I did cold plunges every day or something along those lines. I'm a fan of cold plunges but I don't think this is like a thing that founders do on like a daily basis. Yeah I don't think I think maybe something else is that a lot of people think founders have everything figured out and that they're just kind of this all-knowing oracle of like grinding and knowing the right answers of the stuff. It's like I don't know but smarter people have said it better. It's like jumping off an airplane and like building a parachute on the way down or building an airplane on the way down. That's kind of like what it feels like is I don't have a lot of the answers. It's just being in the environment figuring things out and yeah I think that's how a lot of the other founders. I'm in an accelerator program through NYU and yeah I would say the rest of the founders there's nothing super unique about them. Maybe their determination and their motivation to get stuff done but yeah they're not like geniuses with IQs of over 200 or anything crazy like that. I like that kind of insider look and I appreciate the raw honesty there because I feel like a lot of people have the preconception that in order to be a founder you have to be having some revelational idea or you have to be super smart to begin with that you excelled in all your classes. But at the end of the day what it sounds like it's these regular people that had a really big risk appetite and were able to just swing big. They were able to just work hard and sustainably take those big risks throughout the course in order to eventually find success. It's kind of like sales how I think like the more doors you knock on the more likely you are to find a bank client and with every single day that you are a founder you're going to have one day where you'll reach that level of success but like every day is a day closer to it. Yeah. Wow. I was really well said. I was there. That was well put there. One thing I do want to highlight is I think a lot of people think that founders are super risky and like even from my career standpoint like leaving the corporate world that is consulting to go do this. There is an element of risk but I try to do risk it as much as possible and I think that's taking the calculated risks is what's really important. I'm not an advocate for most people to just go leave their job blindly. Ideally you build it as much as you can while you're still employed and still collecting that salary to then build the conviction that this is something that I want to go do full time. I like that. Sort of going on the consultant terms, if you were to do a due diligence on your life and the decision to leave corporate, how did you build enough convictions to begin with to know that this isn't for me? Like I think I want to take the steps to be a founder. Yeah, that's a good question. I would say it was too full. The framework was getting a sense check or a gut check from the firm that I was at, from partners and managers that I was close to, but then also making sure and validating that this wasn't just a problem that this specific firm had. This was a broader challenge that the McKinsey Bains, other consulting firms also encountered. So it was too full in the sense of talking to close managers and partners about kind of the problem space. I was still like towing around with like what the right vision is or how I wanted to solve it, but making sure that this was like a problem we're solving both internally from people I trusted, but also more broader just to like ensure that the market size isn't just this one company, which for some people like that's fine. It's a big enough company and you sell them a million widgets each year and you're making a dollar off one. Yeah, that's not a bad business, but for the business that I'm trying to build, I just wanted to validate that there's like a broader problem. So I did that was just fortunate enough to, the thing about consulting is most people leave after a couple of years and they usually jump to like another consulting firm or whatnot. So your neck work becomes pretty diverse pretty quick. So I was fortunate enough to have some friends, other consulting firms and just like called them up and was like, hey, how do you guys do this? But also to do a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. I'm a big fan of LinkedIn outreach setting up some good sequences in regards to that. I've had some backfire in my phase two where it was just like a botched sequence. So it's very careful with those because those can burn some relationships. But aside from that, very, very bullish on LinkedIn outreach and was able to help give me conviction around the problem space. Yeah, I think it's really important to stay connected with your whole network. And as something Daryen said to me in the past, your network is your network and I think that really shows in your story. It's just really important to stay always looking for connections on LinkedIn. How would you say, you know, went to I guess maintain some connections that you've made on LinkedIn or one you should just back up on other connections? Yeah, I would say it depends on what you're looking for. So if it's just like you're reaching out to maintain a loose connection with someone, yeah, you know, I haven't perfected that science yet of maintaining those like loose ties that you have with people that you might have met at a one-off happy hour or maybe you just see their profile and they're doing something that is interesting that you eventually want to do. Yeah, it's certainly a fine line there. I don't think I send any more than like free follow-ups to people. So I would say that that's like the cut off. Because you also don't want to make them, you don't want to make them too mad where they then write a post about you and makes you look a little, well, desperate. But I think I've done that when I was looking for jobs, maybe after undergrad and I was like sending some things to like consulting firms or other places that I was looking at. So I think just really depends on what your goal is or who you're trying to connect with and connect. That can determine how aggressive you want to be with it all. 100% agree. It's sort of putting in the reps and then filtering out the ones once you have that quantity more so in-sequity. And remember with one of our calls that we had early in the morning, when I was working at Pro Nexus, we were asking like, what was the like dumbest mistake that you made when networking? And then we each had our own little story. And I think it's important to keep in mind that mistakes are okay. Tom, do you have an example of a mistake that you've made maybe early on as being a founder or even recruiting as a consultant? Oh, man. Yeah, there's a lot. I got to really figure out the best one to stay here. To my point earlier, it's like, yeah, I've made a lot of mistakes throughout this journey. I definitely thought it was going to be a lot easier, a lot smoother of a ride. So going back to interviews for consulting, I think to be candid there, I struggled with some of those interviews early on. I didn't case too well. My quick math on some things is like not great where I'm fine if you just give me a piece of paper and I'm in the corner of a room. Like I can do whatever. But as soon as I'm on the spot and there's like three people looking at me, like asking you what the square root of a huge number is, like my brain just like auto shuts out. So I've had instances during interviews where I'm just like completely blanked and probably bombed them pretty thoroughly. So I think the way to get past that or that helped me was just putting yourself in more of those situations, more of those environments to desensitize yourself. So kind of back to the knocking on doors in a neighborhood, you know, like yeah, the first couple hurt, but by the 100th one, it's just like you're just less faced through that. So that's always my advice for people that want to go into consulting. I was not the best case or I became a better case or at the end of it just by throwing myself in the deep end and in those environments where I had to sharpen up. Yeah. I think it's great that you're able to have such a big journey from going on struggling in those interviews towards, you know, like being very confident in yourself and being able to, you know, found your own company and lead a whole team. I think that goes to show your growth over the years. But in terms like besides money, what is one like non-monetary way that you measure your success? Another good question. I think I'm definitely, this is a little bit more of a fluffy metric, but I am trying to optimize for stronger personal relationships. I think as a lot of time with founders is you kind of get in that grind set mode and this was me for many months where I don't know. I've had a lot of friends with it. I want to reach out to or I want to catch up with, but I'm just like in this mode where it's just hard to do that. So I don't have a great means of, this is something I'm figuring out real time, is like how can I do both? I know that this is going to be a marathon. So yeah, I might be able to eke out a little bit more productivity by not falling up with friends or I have a lot of unread messages to on my phone that I need to respond back to. So yeah, it's something along the lines of maintaining those personal relationships along this journey. I think it's just you got to be intentional about that because it's very easy to just get fully engrossed in the work, fully engrossed in the startup that you forget things exist outside of that. And I don't know, it can be very lonely and it's definitely something that I'm figuring out. I empathize with that a lot because I feel like it's a bit paradoxical how people view startups as this means to achieve freedom so that you're always in the Bahamas with friends and like you're always going out and you're always having a good time. But the reality of it looks like a lot of days where you're just building a load, you're coding at night and marketing during the day. And with that point of like your network being your net worth, sort of how like you pilot out quality instead of quantity is more important within relationships. And sort of on the note with people like you as a consultant, you've been able to work with so many different people in so many different industries. What do you think is one thing that's true about people everywhere, no matter the business? Man, you guys are you guys are hit me with some tough questions here. Well, I want to say what is true about people. I'm a big believer in incentives. I think that I don't know who said this. This might have been Warren Buffett. It was like you show me the incentives. I'll show you the outcome or something along those lines. And I think this is like something that I've encountered my entire life of consulting, founder, just like motivating team members, motivating co-founders, seeing how how to get particular customers or prospective clients to respond to quality emails. At the end of the day, I think it's really understanding the incentive structure that people have and what would make it interesting to them. I think no matter the context, no matter the business, no matter what you're doing in a business, understanding that concept will get you very far. Have I actually never heard that one before? It's shown me that incentive and then I'll show you that outcome. Can you elaborate a little bit more on what that means? - Yeah, I could be busher in this quote too. I think it was warm about that, but I could be way off with that. But it's like the idea that I'm trying to think of a good tangible example here. Think about how this just worked recently. I had a little bit of a longer day today and my brain is not operating that full capacity. I was hoping to get like a break between this session and unfortunately I came for another Zoom call at a little bit before. Yeah, I don't have a great example, but it's along the lines of, I mean, here's one is, so something that I was a little bit on the fence of when I first partnered with my co-founder was, I felt like because I came up with the idea, I had the roadmap, I basically developed a lot of the first MVP of what exactly things look like and whatnot. It almost felt like I felt like I was entitled to a higher percentage of equity as a result. But I think taking the longer term approach there and realizing that when you have that more equal split, they're incentive to work harder and knowing that you're in it as equals, you're both in the trenches. It just goes so much further. Like yeah, I might be able to, I could have negotiated it a little bit more, but at the end of the day, the equity is gonna be worth nothing if this business doesn't succeed. So understanding like what's gonna motivate other team members, co-founders, employees, et cetera. I think it's just super important to kind of getting to the goal or getting to where you wanna be. That's a great revelation. I feel like a lot of people that start off don't have that long term thinking because they think no matter what they do versus, like even though the equity is the same, they're gonna end up at the same spot. So they get a little bit. There is a similar YC video that explained that you should get as close to equal equity with your co-founder as possible. Whether any other revelations that maybe you had now that you're a little further into your start of journey that looking back you didn't realize before. - Yeah, I think something that I alluded to earlier was just the sheer importance of technical talent and making sure that there's folks on your team that deeply understand the tech. Like we're not doing anything too crazy. We're not like competing with Anthropic or OpenAI with anything. We're using them as the models for everything but making sure that you, I guess when I first went into this, I thought, okay, Chad G.P.T. OpenAI is incredible. It can basically turn anyone into a senior software engineer. Like we don't really need anyone on our team that's experienced in scale and whatnot. I've realized that that's actually not the case at all and that you really do need team members. It's great as the code that these, that cursor and quad code are outputting. You just really need someone that understands and nuts and bolts about it. So that's been probably my most recent learning. I'm gonna say in the past month or two, I was like super bullish on all the AI coding and then have realized that it's, if I had coded and only gets you so far and you need some folks that understand things pretty deeply. - Yeah, I'm glad to hear that as a computer science major right now, I'm glad that my job is fully gone in the future. Not at all. Yeah, but I really think that it's important that somebody really does understand. Just in case AI does mess up one day. And I heard from somebody that I talked to recently that it's just really important. AI isn't really gonna replace anybody in the near future. It's more so the people that know how to use AI and the people that are resourceful are gonna be taking over the jobs of the people that don't know how to use AI and that don't know how to use it resources properly. - Yeah. But I would definitely echo that and I would say that's what we're trying, that's how we're positioning ProNexes too, is we're not eliminating consultants. We're probably not even reducing the number of them. I think the value prop is it allows them to focus on other more value add activities. So instead of being in the trenches, doing just like manual work of copy and paste and things from one spot to the next, you're taking a look at things and basically operating as a manager. So I would say that we enable the consultants to work one level higher, to do some of that thinking, do some of the stuff that I don't think AI is gonna replace in the near term here, that I just think humans are better positioned to figure things out. So yeah, definitely echo that statement. - Definitely. I feel like we talk a lot about good advice and this echoing, but I think the flip side is equally as important because you talk to a lot of people, you get a lot of feedback. Is there ever a piece of advice where you've gone like, that is the worst piece of advice I've ever heard. It has not helped you. - Yeah, let me think about that. Like bad advice to a founder. - Yeah, bad advice to a founder. That might be common for people to say. - Yeah. I mean, I think something that I mentioned earlier is that if you truly believe in the idea, quit your job and go into it with both feet, I think that's actually pretty bad advice generally. I think people should de-risk it as much as possible, whether that's moonlighting it nights and weekends, figuring out how to build conviction on the idea without being full-time. And only once you have that conviction taking the jump to do that. I think that's my big thing that I would say and it would stress to any potential entrepreneurs out there is that you don't need to be in it full-time to develop that conviction. You might have to sacrifice your social life for a period of time, but if you're serious about it, then you're gonna make that work. And you're gonna be up late during the week, whether you got school or work or whatnot. And then your weekends might be also taken up by it. But yeah, I think it's just a much more rational approach. I think a lot of people think founders are these super-risk loving individuals. And yeah, I'll say that maybe on average, I'll take a little bit more risk, but I don't know. I think my friends would say I'm pretty risk averse and this was a pretty calculated move. So definitely would recommend that to anyone that's looking to make that jump is to build that conviction first. - I've been hearing, I've seen a lot of people saying to take risks, to be bold and to take those risks like right now, as soon as you can, because later on the stakes are just gonna be much higher. So it is interesting hearing your advice on like, you know, making sure that the risk is calculated so that the consequences won't be as bad if things don't turn out as good. But like looking back on your life and like where you started, would you say there's anything that you regretted like, throughout your journey, that you would do differently? - I really don't have a, I don't think I have a great answer here. I've been very fortunate. Something that's unique is, so in high school, I was not the best student overall. I think I took school semi-seriously, but I think I was preoccupied with the sports and I just like, it was never my main focus. So what I ended up going to a state school that was nearby for my first two years of college. And I think at that point, things started to click for me. And I started taking school more seriously. I realized, oh, this isn't actually that bad. This is actually super interesting to me. Really good. gravitated towards so, overall business stuff, I got into the listening to more podcasts, started that pressure washing business during that summer. And at that point, I then started applying to different universities and was fortunate enough to get into Cornell. So part of me would have liked to spend, so I only spent two years at Cornell. I think there's a lot of opportunities, a lot of value of being there on campus that I wish I would have had some additional time with, that I might have been able to, if I took high school more seriously, or if I was a better student there, but to become really candid, I'm very fortunate with how everything turned out. And yeah, I can't really say that I regret it too much there. - I love that mindset. I think gratitude's such a huge thing, because even for the people that might have accolades that other people desire, they still subconsciously might not be content with their own situation, just because they lack gratitude. So that's definitely like a point that's important to emphasize. But I feel like even at a state school, there's so much to be grateful for. And kind of want to pivot that into a, more of like a fun question, like say you just woke up and no money to your name, no connections, non-target school, you're in a cardboard box outside in the streets. What would the first things be to rebuild to where you are now? - Yeah, I think my priority would be to get some of the form of money as soon as possible. I would say it was a summer of my freshman year where I got into this whole pressure washing thing. I don't want to say I was broke, but I didn't really have a lot of money. And I think that, again, I had that decision note of do I continue lifeguarding or I don't even know how I got into pressure washing, I even knew that this was a business. But it was fortunate enough to learn about that. And I think if I woke up in that cardboard box again, I would do something very similar to, I think the blue collar trades, you know, you can make some decent money, especially the way that I structured things where I would get the clients first on a particular day, tell them, "Hey, can I clean your house on Saturday?" Then I would arrange like five people on that day and then just rent everything. And there's really no risk. I didn't have to take any risk of investing in a pressure washer or all these crazy machinery. You just kind of use leverage of validating the demand first, logistically making it simple and then just renting something in order to complement things. So yeah, I think you can get savvy with something along those lines. And ideally, I would do that for some period of time to where I could then maybe hire a couple of folks, maybe off Craigslist, so you I can find. And then from there, kind of scale things up to where I, I would want to do something more in AI as cool as pressure washing is. It's definitely not where I would want to stay, but I think it would be a good mechanism to kind of accrue some dollars to then get some stability in a foundation to explore further. - I'll say, yeah, I love how Dary and just through like a really crazy hypothetical scenario at you. And you're still able to really overcome that. And you already have something planned, which is what differentiates you and many other founders from like, you know, some of the almost people that we've gone on the streets. - No comment on them. But yeah, I think mindset is very important. And I would like to think if I lost a lot of what I had, I think it's that ability to like just figure things out. I think this was something that probably the biggest thing I took away from consulting is that I wasn't someone that would ask a lot of what, I wasn't someone that would ask for a lot of help. And I think that was a double-edged sword, but it helped me a lot when I don't have a manager anymore of, okay, Tom, you don't know what to do today. All right, how do you figure out from the entire world of possibilities, how do you figure, what are the five activities that you should actually be doing? And yeah, I've developed a bit of a framework for that, but yeah, it's something that I'm still refining though. - Yeah, I love that. Just another follow-up question. I got another hypothetical scenario for you. Maybe not as crazy as Darian's question, but something I think that might be a little bit more relatable on the inside and some families. Let's say in that same scenario, right, you're, you know, power washing, but your parents really want you to go down that corporate route and they really want you to stick in that route. They don't want you taking that risk. They don't want you self-managing yourself and becoming a founder because that is just too risky and they spent a large amount of, a large ton of their money on your education. What would you say to them if you really wanted to pursue your business, but they didn't allow you to? - That's hard, especially if they paid for a large portion of your education. I don't know, that would, I think the way that I would approach that is, I would probably still get that corporate job and then try to moonlight things to build the conviction and to show them, hey, hey, mom and dad, I'm following what you guys think is best, but I've also been working on this thing on the side. It is now at a point where I think this can be much bigger than what my corporate job is doing. I'm gonna go leave and try to explore this path, but like, again, it comes back to my point on de-risking it as much as possible and I think you, it's amazing the amount that you can do to validate something even in a part-time standpoint. So yeah, I think my approach there would be to go down that probably more corporate if that's what they're leading me towards and they paid for my education. I would feel a little bit in debt to like, at least explore that world and honestly, you never know what problems or what opportunities might come through that experience. For me, for example, I would never have landed on expert network or expert sourcing if I didn't already have that corporate experience. So I don't know. I think for a lot of people that they want to be eventual entrepreneurs, I don't think it's bad to go into corporate life for a period of time and like, I think I've learned a lot of the lessons of how to communicate with stakeholders. Again, being able to figure things out and big US problems. So there's been a ton of value that I've gotten from the corporate world and I don't know if I would advocate to every student out there that you should just go into your business right after graduating. I think sometimes it's good to learn what that life is like and just be mindful of the golden handcuffs. I think you, I see time and time again, people get those around and you gotta be careful. But if you're truly motivated and you see a problem, then I think you can make it happen. - 1,000%. I feel like there's so many new skills that you can acquire as being an operator that you might not see until you're working the actual job. And that's clearly proven in case because you wouldn't have found out the problem of expert networks if you never went to corporate route. And we're the best like startups tends to come from. And on that theme of different skills, do you think there's like a hidden founder skill that nobody expects but actually really helps you? - I don't know if it's a skill, but I think it goes back to the mindset and being able to just figure stuff out. Again, there's so many times in a day where I am questioning, like am I working on the right thing and am I doing the right thing that actually matters? Because again, you don't have a manager that you can validate. This is what you're supposed to be doing. Once you finish that, then you know, okay, you're on track for the promo or the raise or that you're gonna be, you're doing your job well. So it's a lot of testing and trial and error. I would say the framework that I use in order to boil down. So typically what I'll do is maybe in the morning, make a list of all the things that I think I should be doing over the course of the day. And if that list is too long, then typically what I'll do is I'll map each one of those activities to one of two things. One, the first being product, so like it could be improving the UI, it could be some code to make something functional, whatnot, and then the other bucket is sales. So customer relationships, meetings, things like that. A lot of people think, "Oh, startups are super complex. There's just so many things that you have to do." But that framework helps boil things down to the only two things that matter in a startup, which is making money and building a good product that users love. As long as every activity that you're doing maps to one of those two things, ideally, there's less jumps that you have to do. Then I think you can figure things out and make progress and know that you're not crazy. You're not spinning your wheels on things that don't matter. Yeah, I think it's especially important to basically figure out your priorities throughout the day, otherwise you get a little lost in the process. I think that's very important. But throughout your day of hitting these priorities each day, do you find yourself becoming distracted or is there an app that you secretly spend the most of your time on instead of working on the startup? Yeah, I would say the two thoughts there. One, the answer is YouTube. I go down these YouTube rabbit holes all the time. Mostly on my Mac, on my computer, the algorithm knows me too well. As soon as I'm done with whatever random niche video that they've thrown my way, then the shorts start showing up and I'm like, okay, this is good. I gotta keep going. On my phone itself, though, I have a good friend who has set up some screen time limitations on my phone. It's screen time compared with parental controls, so that once I reach a certain number of time across all my social media apps or things that I'm spending too much time on, then I have to enter a passcode. And only my friend knows that passcode. So it's kind of like a good fail safe where honestly, this is a good tidbit of advice. Again, a lot of people think founders are super disciplined and they have things figured out and that they're doing cold plunges all the time. Sorry, Darian, that's not true. But it's structuring your environment in a way of eliminating those distractions so that you don't have that decision of not opening TikTok, not opening Facebook, not opening Instagram. Like the decision's already been made for me. I've already spent my time on there. I already spent my 20 minutes a day on it. I don't have to use more willpower to stay away from it. The decision's done. Definitely. Still waiting for you to do your cold plunge and go to stay in the life of a founder video. Yeah, maybe if I make it up to Ithaca, you can work out something. I feel like staying up in Ithaca itself is already like living in a cold plunge. Yeah, especially during the winter. You'd be like a cold plunge in BB Lake. That would be the ultimate morning routine. That would just separate like the good founders from the great founders. But as we're wrapping up here, I think we should jump into our very exciting lightning round. So this is where we tend to ask just quicker questions, just to promise you order responses and ask some questions that maybe we didn't get to earlier on. And it's good just range from just more habit/personality, some more crazy TikTok type questions. I guess we'll jump right in. This first one I got for you is if your company had a mascot that perfectly represents your culture, what would it be? We'll see a cockroach. I wouldn't put this in my company branding or anything like that. But a lot of times people say at some point you got to become a cockroach. You just can't be killed. And I want to say that that's what will make us survive. And as we figure out that the right product market fit here is just not being killed in the process. A cockroach is definitely a very interesting choice that you got going on over there. But I got another question for you. This is kind of crazy because you're building something that you really love and something that you're more passionate about and something that you're putting in effort every single day to achieve. But this question is a little more shame. But on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you hate your own products? With Ken being a ton or like 10, yeah, being like you extremely hated products. I hate my product. Oh man. I mean, if you would have asked me this maybe six months ago. So we've done a couple of rewrites throughout this process which I thought was a little bit unique from the start of lens. But apparently this happens more often than not. Our first product was written all in flutter. And man, I hated that thing too. And 11 will say. But I would say in its current state, pretty, it's nice and pretty. We'll put it in like the two to three range. That's good. That's quite the contrast. Like let it drops after we got those tweaks figured out. Yeah. You eyes important. Definitely. Not diving into more so again about like the culture of what is like to be a founder and the work itself. Do you have a role that you set within your own firm? Say like maybe like no phones or like screen time just for every person working. Or you're not a believer in that. No, I think I don't want to become too overbearing of a manager. I think at the end of the day, our ethos is if the work gets done, then it doesn't matter how you go about doing that. So I'll embrace a pretty remote style. If you work well, be non-tick-tock after day. And things are what your meeting expectations for the work output. I'm okay with that. I mean, it's very there's a very high correlation that if you are on tick-tock for that duration, then it's likely the code that you're pushing is a little bit buggy. But yeah, I didn't get the end of the day. I don't want to become a micromanager and really just care about output and optimizing for that. Yeah. Everybody works in their own different way. So if it works for them, yeah. Then I just stick with it. Right. Yeah. My next question to you is, I guess something I just about you. But I would say like, what's personality trait of yours? Do you think costs you the most amount of money? Cost me the most amount of money? Yeah. That's a good question. I would say I'm not very compulsive, which is good. Like I don't like to do impulse buying or I'm not big into that. I think that I am pretty big into one of those personality trait, but just general wellness and longevity type of stuff. So I spend nearly all of my money on food or workout classes or working out things. So yeah, I would say it costs me the most, but I think there's a pretty good ROI of they say health as wealth. And that's the other important thing is I don't want to emerge at the end of this. Let's say I have a great exit and I'm 250 pounds. I'm miserable. I'm my cholesterol through the roof. Like, you know, like I believe that's not the case. And I want to maintain in order to be sharp around the business though, I also believe that the mind and the body is very much so connected. So I think investing in those things actually pays dividend into the business as well. 100% agree with that. At the end of the day, like the most important thing is your health. Which kind of surprises me. Why haven't done it in a cold plunge yet? I got to do one now, there. You're now giving me some foam on. I got to check this box off. Yeah, I'm like being a cockroach to you about cold fungles. Like it's never done away. That's good. But sort of on the theme of wellness. And you mentioned at one point where like struggles were at an 11 move. Which part of startup life makes you want to just throw your whole laptop out the window? Oh man, a lot of stuff related to we had a period of time where we were just getting a lot of bugs in the code. And we were doing a lot of manual checks on certain things. And oh man, I had a lot of like 5am nights, just like manually checking stuff information. And it drove me nuts. I think there was a lot of, probably reached my breaking point a couple times where you just kind of needed like reset after, after periods like that. But I don't know. Again, I have a strong conviction in the vision, really trying to embody this cockroach mentality. And I think that just really helps get you through some of those tough sticking points there. Yeah, I'm glad that you didn't have to mention too many times where you felt like they're only a laptop out of the window. Yeah, one initial time. Yeah, definitely good. Definitely the goal of life. But would you say if like if you had to outsource like a part of your brain and then I guess have that working on the side. What part would that be? It doesn't regard to the business or personal life. Like I guess you working on your business. Like I guess your own brain. My own brain. Eligate. Yeah, like a specific activity of like having that that focus. It could be like eating. Yeah, interesting. I actually don't know if I have a good answer there. I might have to pass on that one. I don't know. I don't know if there's anything that's striking me right there. Okay, okay, perfectly valid. I don't even know what I would choose. Like maybe like and if you weren't to feel an emotion like outsourcing that part of your brain. So like so you don't get anxious. You don't get nervous. Oh, I had to do a coffee chat. Like mate, I would say that. But I also think it's good to have a bit of conscious about like maybe your palms are sweaty in your life just because it makes the reward that much more rewarding. That's my take. Yeah, I think if I could outsource something in my life, it would be it would be something in regards to dating. If I could maintain some relationships with people and not have to spend a lot of mental capacity on that. The thing that would be it that would be pretty nice. That would be nice. That's not pretty bad. I hope the person I'm talking to doesn't hear this. You never know. Well, just as we wrap things up, have one more question for you. And I remember during our early conversations, we talked about some of the ideas that you had before pro nexus. So what is the craziest idea that you came up with before starting pro nexus? I've had some crazy ideas. The one that was right before that I actually spend some time and resources on was called Carrot. And what Carrot did was it was like a crowdfunding investment platform for small businesses like restaurants. And I really struggled with connecting with that restaurant group. And actually something pretty funny that I did was so the name was Carrot. And there was this convention that was coming to New York that I wanted to be a part of. So I bought a ticket for like ten bucks. And I bought a Carrot suit off of Amazon for like 30 bucks. And I wore it to this convention. And I had the most social anxiety from this. But I got more leads in that span of time than I did months of like cold outreach, cold prospecting. Just because everyone approached me, I didn't have to approach anyone. Like they all came up to me and was like, Hey, why are you dressing the carrot? And it was just an incredible marketing in the like stood out. People wanted to have a conversation. And yeah, it was horribly terrifying, but it was super effective. And yeah, probably one of the silliest things that I've done, the whole business didn't end up going too well. I still believe in the idea, but unfortunately is not with us anymore. That is a pretty crazy idea to do. And I think you just got to be bold. And it really goes to show that when you're bold and you did take that risk actually by wearing that whole carrot suit. If you get the rewards, you get the leads. So I guess maybe taking risks in life is good. Maybe you don't have to calculate so much, I guess, in that example. But yeah, to tie it to tie everything up, do you have any like last words that you would like to share with the audience? And also where can our audience find some of your stuff, your work, or just working to find you? Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm trying to write a little bit more on there. My name's Tom Myers. Yeah, aside from that, yeah, trying to share more thoughts there, but that's probably the best and most direct means to connect. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Tom. We really appreciate your time. And it was really enjoyable to see you. Oh, yeah, appreciate the questions, guys. This was a fun little journey and I think back to some of these things, so appreciate it. Absolutely. I will thank you. That concludes episode 105 of True Talks. Peace out.