Make Sure You Are Capitalized 

John Hallman

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

Podcast for Entrepreneurs

8/25/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

make sure you're capitalized and that sounds really um not very helpful because startups tend to bootstrap and do things like that um there are plenty of mentors out there that you can talk to about things like product market fit and how to build a pitch deck and what are the nine slides you should have when you go in front of a venture capitalist those sorts of things exist and they're easy to find they take time to go through and and they're replete with uh opinion but i think the number one thing is make sure you're capitalized personally to be able to play the long game hey everyone this is devin miller here with another uh episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's also the founder and ceo of miller i p law and uh we have or where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks today we have a great guest on uh john hallman and i will do a short introduction i'm sure i will slaughter and he'll do a much better introduction to himself but john has had a great career he's kind of flip-flop between doing startups and small businesses and startups and small businesses and now he's currently on his uh on the startup phase and so we'll talk a little bit more about that and he is into uh sports and he likes uh or several different types of sports and i think you had uh did something with the mba program as part of your career but maybe i'm messing that up but i'll let you hit on that but uh welcome to the podcast john thank you very much devon i appreciate being here so i did a horrible job of introducing you but i did my best but i'll let you do a much better introduction so why don't you tell us a little bit about your uh your journey and your story sure i'd love to uh so uh when i got out of grad school and got my mbas in 1990 i went and started working for a tech company in the bay area and this at that time startups were uh kind of novel people talked about those wins but it really hadn't developed into something that people went and actually built their careers on but within two years of working at this relatively sizable company i decided i'm gonna take the leap i was only 26 years old at the time thought it was a good time to get into startups and it seemed really really fun and adventurous and i went ahead and did that and it was great learning experience but you started missing the things that that you found in the corporate world benefits packages time off you know a salary a lot of things that just really unnecessary things you don't need any of that well yeah and then they're the things that take the um you know the polish off the apple in the startup world when you start thinking about it so i did the startup and then i went back to a big company and then i got the itch again and went back to a startup and i had this back and forth over time and where though i worked sorry jumping already but so you were out there jumping in over that so what was the you went and started you kind of had the itch to do the startup what was that business or what it was the first startup that you did oh so it was a company called eo e o and they made a tablet long before the ipod or ipad that had a cell phone connection to it it was a physical phone and you would you'd carry this tablet with you and you'd pick up the phone and and that's how you because this was early 90s long before we all had cell phones but it was a cell phone uh attached to a tablet and it did it did fairly well it was kind of innovative at for its time and what it was i take myself back to the 90s what did you do on if you had a cell phone or connected to a tablet i guess you would have had the internet by the end of the internet still would have been very early stages so what did you do with the tablet phone well it would have been it would have been a cellular connection an early stage cellular connection and you would have used it for your business very you know i harkened back to the the days when we had those first tablets you know before the ipad came out before you know surface tabs and stuff like that and you know it was just interesting they were pdas really at the end of the time so you can manage your contacts and do different things like that so i was in the purchasing department of this company i had gone into operations first in my career and was in purchasing departments and i decided you know what this is just brutally difficult to do um it's very challenging i miss the eight to five structure of a more corporate uh style gig so i went back to a corporate gig where that's when i made the transition from being in operations to more of a marketing business development role uh but then left that to go to another startup and so i played this game of going back and forth between different startups i i worked at apple i ran worldwide marketing for digital video uh at apple in the early 2000s um interesting antidote to that i left apple about a week before they announced the ipod i think i think the stock was something like 12 a share or something ridiculous like that um so i do occasionally play that game of looking at my stock options from that time and putting them into present value so i might own a podcast network if that was the case um yeah then then you'd have to be the whole different stratosphere so at apple which you know a lot of people love to work with apple right it's at least it has a cool what people would say is a cool technology you can bait whether it's iphone or the android or whichever one you go with but they certainly have a lot of fun technology they do a lot of things they out with new products and so as and so and you were reasonably high up on the marketing is that what you said so what made you decided that and i get the the general idea of jumping back and forth or flip-flopping and you can't say i like the benefits but i really have the edge i got this idea i want to do entrepreneur but let me you know a lot of people have said oh apple is the place i want to work out so what made you at the time working for apple which has a lot of cool things name recognition technology decide to hey i'm going to go back to the entrepreneur phase again i wanted to move from the bay area down to los angeles and though i was in la every week for apple before my job i couldn't convince them that i could actually work out of the apple offices in santa monica at that time and do that as a full-time as a full-time gig and you know when we think about covid today with everybody being remote and doing things like that that was you know uh 1999 time frame so 20 years ago it was challenging to be a remote employee or not be at the headquarters and have a job um you know at that time apple's slogan was think different and i asked them that i said well why aren't you guys thinking different i'm still going to be in la doing my job so i ended up going to don't think too different don't think too different don't think outside of are different um i loved apple though and i still love apple to this day and i have friends that that are still there from the time i was there and and they're still enjoying the work that they do it was a great company to work for i'm sure there's there's a ton of stories out there of how difficult or how painful it was to work there um there's kind of this adage uh that says apple's a great place to be from but not really a great place to be um and but i i take that as something that uh i think sticks to every large company there are gonna be positive experiences like i had and then there are gonna be the the not so positive ones that people talk about and wave the banner around but i left and went to a startup company called sealed media that was working in the digital rights management space at this time the internet's starting to boom you know we're in the doc dot com bubble and people are worried about the protection of their assets and so a great company out of the uk came and set up shop here in the in the us uh it was my first vice president role uh and really loved it and i still communicate with you know percentage-wise probably 60 percent of the people who worked at that company i still are i'm in contact with it was such a great camaraderie um but unfortunately the dot-com above all burst and you know like many startup companies we went our separate ways if you will and went back to a large company i was at motorola working on cell phones um talking about how to how to you know put digital videos this is a complete aside and i know it's pulling off a journey but it's an interesting question because you've been through it so when you go when you go from startup to small business started this home business kind of the the pattern and when you go back to the startup you know from the startup to the big business how do they view it as going to startups because i think that's always you know somewhat of a fear of hey if i go to a startup it's going to look like i left the corporate world or i didn't like it and nobody will hire me right and so what was your experience when you're you know you go to you did a startup and then you went to apple then you did a startup and you went to motorola did they look favorably when you hired that was it a hurdle that you had to overcome didn't matter at all or how did that work out as far as when you were wanting to go to the bigger the bigger going back to the bigger companies yeah sure i think the the constant theme that was going on through my career was the actual networking with the people that were pierced to you in in companies so kind of after my second job every job that i took came through a personal connection either the hiring manager was somebody i worked with at a former company um they had an opening on their team there was uh something interesting the sealed media i was recruited it was the first time i'd ever been recruited didn't know anybody there but i i've been looking back at my career uh i think building your personal network of trusted uh peer workers and people that you liked working with that's how we find the next gig going on it is not using the job boards and it's not really getting recruited it is talking and building your network um and so the jobs that i took all came from people that i knew i ended up working for people that were my peers i ended up hiring people who were my bosses so it becomes really just a nice network of support and camaraderie there that that i think everybody should have is part of their journey so far to do that so really when you were making the transition and not putting words in your mouth the transition back to big businesses you you had already had that network you'd have those connections and you either reach out to them or you'd already talked with them or you know they'd already been in your network and so it's made a much more seamless transition they you already had that credibility or authority they already liked you they already were comfortable with you so it wasn't kind of hey i'm gonna go cold call the big businesses and kind of start to find a job back in them that have made it very easy is that is that a fair summary yeah absolutely think about it this way one of the questions that we loathe in an interview is what are your strengths and weaknesses great okay and there's there's books written on how to answer that but when you're actually interviewing with somebody who knows you it's not about that it's more talking about cultural fit and everything that the team's looking to do so not that you're pre-hired when you go into those situations but you have a really good leg up then versus say an unknown candidate so i do i i mentor startup companies now and we'll get to that in a moment but i always tell people building your personal network of people you trust is probably the greatest asset you can have in your toolkit for wanting to live out whatever your career aspirations are okay no i think that that's very insightful and i think it's a good way to hey even if you were to start and if you're in a startup you certainly want to have the connections because you're trying to build it and get things going but also keeping the idea of keeping your options open maintaining the connections making new connections so wherever the job and life and that takes you that it makes it easier to kind of have i guess an inside track of those connections that make it easier so all right now that i took you completely off the track okay one one additional piece to that in in that time frame in the late 90s and in the early 2000s people looked at resumes differently than they do today they wanted that loyal person that had been at some place at ibm for 15 years and they thought that's the right person that i want on my team someone who's going to stick around versus that job hopper who does one here one year here two years there three years that is another place and now i've seen it's radically changed that we are looking for that breadth of experience from multiple companies that you look at people's linkedin profiles now and they're i had a two-year stint at facebook then i went to google and then i went to a small startup and then i went and did this and you start to think that person is a fairly well-rounded individual have seen lots of different systems and organizations and they can bring that experience and that knowledge base to my company and so i had friends laughing at me going oh yeah what company are you working at this week and because i was in their mind a job shopper i was constantly working at a new company and i wouldn't talk to him for a while and then come back and i'm at a different company and they were the type of people who stayed there for a very long time and when they finally did transition it was incredibly challenging for them to to speak to anything but that very narrow set of experiences that they had at that company um so i can't say that i forecasted that happening it was just you know how i proceeded through my career to actually go and um try out these different adventures in different companies okay no i think that's certainly interesting and insightful so now bringing it back to your journey so you've went back you did apple then you went to startup and then you went to nokia and then picking up from nokia where where did it take where did you go to next or where did life take connect yeah maybe i might have wished it was nokia but it was actually motorola oh sorry motorola and funny the funny thing about that is uh it was just before the iphone came out and you know there was in in those days in cell phones it was all about these you know can you make something smaller and you know nice little cute flip phone and different things like that what they call the candy bar phone which is you know our our iphones and android devices today weren't really popular people looked at them as kind of a block they were they were too big and then the iphone comes out and i think every cell phone manufacturer thought a few things about apple that they didn't have any experience in building a cell phone that their single form factor was going to be you know a death to that um and they didn't have the talent on their teams the rf engineers the people who actually built their careers in building mobile devices weren't really the the folks that apple now had would they wouldn't say that today but i wouldn't say that today but it was it was classic so you know i find my myself in these really interesting kind of epoch moments and and having to deal with them being responsible for digital video on a mobile device at motorola and the iphone rolls out that's a challenge that's really interesting there's a different way of doing business it was a new operating system so it was very very interesting from that to kind of stay on the journey i went and worked at a company called thx which is a lucas film company and i had a couple stints it was the only job that i actually worked for for three or three or so odd years left and then got rehired which i i've heard of i didn't know too many people had done it but but i did and um i was heading up there their business development strategic partnerships uh really love that company some of it best friends came out of it got me more and more into the technology in the entertainment and media space really just enjoyed my time at that company good company great brand and so let me interject point number two that i'd like to make sure anybody listening to this understands i would rather and i think they'll find this as well i would rather work for a company that has a stellar brand and is trying to come up with a product or service to augment that versus having a stellar product and no brand to support it it is a vastly different set of challenges great brands are you know not dime a dozen there are lots of great products out there but if you don't build your brand correctly uh it really hurts your company so a brand like thx under the lucasfilm umbrella we could affect i could make a phone call to anybody and they would take the call because i was working for that brand and it meant a lot and i remember doing a deal with the super bowl and i heard from the guys at the at the nfl that everybody who does kind of work with them pays for the privilege of doing that work uh i got them to pay us for the use of one of our assets uh during a super bowl uh it wasn't it was a modest amount of money but i was really proud to get the nfl to pay us for something on the super bowl um so from that i went back to a startup company in audio technology called odyssey labs um ran business development for them then i got recruited to go to a company um that went back to ta jax that's when the when i went back was after odyssey and then from thx i got recruited by a company called dts uh somebody i worked with had an opening in business development and asked me to come join dts they're an audio company now owned uh they merged with a company called xberry um who i believe owns the tivo brand um great company really ip laden um strong strong company and delivering great experiences but the dts name didn't resonate with people like a thx brand so it was it was interesting to see both sides of that of that equation but during that time at dts i was asked to be a mentor in a startup program up in toronto in media and entertainment one of their colleges the canadian film center was starting a technology uh incubator and so i was asked to be a mentor so i fly up to toronto which i had never been to and began mentoring startup companies and i really loved it i had a great time sitting on mount olympus throwing lightning bolts down at other businesses and really supporting them and that's a joke obviously but um it was fun to just dive in and see what these founders are going through and see the passion of their ideas uh and it led me to realize that i've never actually started my own company i've never taken that leap i've always joined a passionate founder or passionate team or gone back to the big company and so it was you know really starting to chew in the back of my mind that i should go and start a company and i thought well god you know i probably mentored 100 or 200 companies and been around the startup space for most of my career this should be no problem i should be able to be able to build a nice pitch deck and go do all those things and what i found is this is part three of the things to learn from the talk with john holman is that you might make dog food your whole career but eating the dog food is very different and so when i started level play sports with robert matthew who's our cto today still um we set out to do something that brought our love of sports and athletics together with our technology and and though we're not going to talk a lot about level play the simplest way to think of it is it's linked in for athletes helping them manage their brand and the challenges that we ran into as well we got a great idea but now we got to go build something and that you know you can't just go build a company without capital oh it's it's a much different even if you jump into a startup this you know start establishing they start getting things in place to get in from the ground floor and say now i've got to take the idea and actually build it out it's a it's a much different uh feel to it and i agree with you kind of having gone through it you know you say oh i have to think of all these things i have to do all these things and it's a it's an interesting dynamic that you know being on the c level person that founded it person that started it is a much different feel yeah it's it's strange because you you make the leap you finally jump into the water and you realize it's not that cold but then you also realize that you know maybe you you've got one sock that's actually made of cement that is dragging you under uh little things like there were no more direct deposits going into my bank account from the company the only direct deposits are the ones that you generate the income from but then decide absolutely and you sit and you look at your company you're like oh shoot we're probably three years or four years away from sustainable revenue i've got to survive during that figure out a way to pay for that long enough in order to do it so yeah and we i think you jumped over correct me if i'm wrong so when you started level play sports kind of started almost before that when he did kind of parody takes on what would have been comedy espn and then espn got bought by disney and kind of killed that business and so then you transition over to where level play sports are is that about right or am i yeah that's about right so we um well it was actually in the early 2000s we built a company called sports seller and it was purely meant to be a television show that was going to be a parody of espn's sports center we had to realize that sports comedy actually creates itself every day you just have to watch the highlights and you can see a lot of very interesting things that you can make fun of in fact you know espn and the personalities that that occupied those chairs uh at sports center they were all building their personal brands they you know be it rich eisen or stuart scott just great talent uh working at espn and they built their own characters you know it was it was fun to watch and we wanted to take it to the nth degree and actually poke a lot of fun at the athletes and at the leagues and at fans on shot like a television show a newscast so we had a lot of fun doing that and we got to a place where we had top-level producers and top-level talent involved and yeah it got mixed because there was fear that espn had just been bought by disney that uh there would be a potential lawsuit um we were sure we've been covered by parity law but when you have those sort of things dangling out there in front of the minds of people who are going to pull the trigger for you it can kill a business so you know when for those who have their startups you need to be thinking about those things too what is going to torpedo this idea be it competition lack of capital uh too early to the market things like that i've seen that happen more times than not so so that but that was that kind of a launching board or you know at least got you into the realm of sports doing a lot of these scenes getting you introduced to what you end up doing level play sports did you were able to leverage that or is it completely apples and oranges uh it's apples and oranges to this point but i'll tell people here's an early insight sports seller will come back so we will have that at some point down the road but i think it was more just the the realization that what i was doing with my free time was traveling to go see games following the la kings around and canada and in the us to go watch games and i was doing it with rob matthew so rob and i just looked at each other and said wait a minute we've been in technology our whole lives why can't we find a way to blend our love of sports and technology and do something meaningful to for the athletes that are out there and we're not talking the pro athletes there are a lot of great companies like uninterrupted and others that are really shepherding some really great content from the professional athletes uh players tribune uh great content from folks like that we wanted to actually focus on amateur athletes and we wanted to focus on those sports that people don't really pay attention to um team handball out of europe i had never seen it before and it's a fantastic sport or aussie rules football we all know about it we've seen some pictures of it and it looks pretty brutal but until you dive into it and understand it there's so much more to learn there you think of wrestlers and cheerleaders and and those who are outside of that football basketball baseball bubble um there are a lot of great athletes out there and they play multiple sports so we sat down to try and figure out how we could help all those athletes uh help those sports and those teams elevate their brand youtube's done a great job of doing that for people you can go onto youtube start an account put content up there and maybe you'll become an influencer okay um so we kind of adopted that model of youtube and meets linkedin and created a video driven platform to help athletes manage their brand so the challenges associated with doing that are incredible um we weren't building a database for one sport we were building a database for every sport and then we had to think about what about sports that get invented on the fly and cornhole being a perfect example what the hell is that i mean we've all played that i i haven't looked that close so is cornhole one of the things that's on level play it will be it's not right now um but it is a professional sport i guess i didn't even know it was the only times i've ever really seen it is just more tailgate parties when people will pull them out so that's funny all right well i if you let me know when you put cornhole up because then i'll i'll go and i want to check it out so i want to see how professionals do it well i'll give you a great example one of the guys that we were talking with he said he is a world champion ping pong player and i can't tell you that i would ever go to a ping pong championship buy tickets and go to it and watch it but some of the most some of the most tremendous highlights come out of ping pong it's just amazing to watch those guys 4 15 or 30 seconds i'm not going to go watch the whole match but boy that rally was fantastic and and we thought short form content like that would be really engaging for fans of other sports so you're into basketball and football baseball it makes a lot of sense because it's crammed down our throats via traditional television media and we've loved it ever since we were kids but now we get exposed to all these other sports and we really think that's a great way to elevate this the athlete's alternatives if their career path in or their playing path in their initial uh sport didn't work out for them no it's interesting so now if i were to take and as we kind of get towards the end but interested in level play sports so just do talk it out for a minute or two so you have the idea hey we're going to help you know almost help you know people that are in sports and everything from cornhole to ping pong to more well-known sports but we're going you know manage their brand in the sense that we're going to you know be a bit of youtube and a bit of linkedin and i kind of like how you put those analogies because it makes good sense you know you're going to get the videos but you're also going to make it professional how's going to make it so that if they i would assume you know they're trying to get you know if i'm in minor league baseball i want to get to major league baseball or i want to do i'm in minor league ping-pong player i want to get to the majors or however that works then they can almost have those highlight rails or you can and or people that are looking for talon and go on and find that which is i think what makes good sense on that so you take that you know at the beginning in the beginning of the conversation we had earlier and talking about careers and i was saying building your personal network was really the the linchpin into getting the jobs that i got we see the same thing now that athletes need access to the people who are going to influence and uh help them in their careers be it coaches or recruiters or peer athletes trainers mental health coaches everything out there and so we're building effectively this ecosystem that connects people together very similar to what linkedin did for business or a company like trade hounds who's a startup are doing in the construction uh professional space we're starting to see these niche networks coming out and we think we're just perfectly placed to create one for athletes um worldwide all levels all sports and not just focus on the pros um no i i think that makes perfect sense so now if we're just switching so you have that idea you've been building it now and remind me and i can't remember how long have you been building that or when did you initially start initially start level play sports sure we started it in 2016 uh but really the first year was spent just thinking through the architecture of this problem it was a really big problem it's a large database and and rob being an expert in database uh architecture sat back and and really had to think it through and then start over and then think it through again and start over so we did a lot of that um you know for com for people who want to start a company you've got all of the expenses associated with starting a company the incorporation the bylaws the articles um you know all that stuff takes time and takes up capital to to make happen you got to go raise money from people you've got to put together a pitch deck and when it's just the two of you and one's focused on the the problem of the product you're sometimes left all on your own to deal with the rest of the business and like i said when you don't have that direct deposit and you don't have you know health insurance it's not for the faint of heart to go down and do a startup so now and we have so many more things to be fun to touch on fun to talk about and yet i never have enough time to hit on all those so we'll have to circle back and be able to uh talk again another another point but if i were to reach the end of the podcast we got to that point where i always ask my last two questions at the end of the podcast so we'll jump to that now um first question i always ask is so what was the worst business decision you ever made um you know look back i i might have to go back to that leaving apple at the time um i i did it for the right reasons but oh god yeah from a business standpoint that would that that affected things that is truly a fork in the road in life um as it relates to level play i think that the biggest challenges and the toughest decisions you make are going to be around staff and what you do who you invite into this and how you compensate them when money is not you know the the driving force from your perspective you you can't pay people so i've made some hard decisions for the business some that still don't settle well with me that i wish i could go back and redo and every one of them is around people people are your greatest asset in a company when you can't pay them boy motivating and keeping people on task is a real challenge so i i would say that's probably the area that i wish i could go back and redo and then go back and redo and go back and redo because i don't know if you get it right or you ever feel comfortable about it when you hold on to the belief that people are the most important part of your business no i i i it's interesting as much as i you know talk with a lot of different people a lot of different businesses a lot of fun interesting things and i would say the probably the number one or at least the most consistent everybody has different failures or things that they've learned about is on hiring and it almost seems like you know people can either be your greatest asset or your greatest liability right they can make the the biggest difference in your company and help it take off or they can be the headache that never goes away or you're always having to deal with and so i think that that's one that people can always learn on is it look figure out how to make them your asset and what will make them your asset and take the time to actually you know too often you get into hiring and you're wanting to we got to hire quickly we got to hire quickly because we have this need or we have the staffing problem or we got to grow or whatever and so you hire quickly but you don't always hire smartly you don't always hire the right people and that's when they turn to more of a liability rather than asset and then you have to deal with you know training them up and then having them leave or having them file for unemployment then you have to play unemployment tax or you have to they create a destroy the culture or they do the exact opposite they're there for a while and they build the company they have great ideas they're motivating everybody so i think it's one that's just interesting how often that's one of the failures that people find they can also be a success so now i jump to my second question my last question so somebody that's just wanting to get into startups wanting it into a small business what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them make sure you're capitalized and that sounds really um not very helpful because startups tend to bootstrap and do things like that um there are plenty of mentors out there that you can talk to about things like product market fit and how to build a pitch deck and what are the nine slides you should have when you go in front of a venture capitalist those sorts of things exist and they're easy to find they take time to go through and and they're replete with uh opinion but i think the number one thing is make sure you're capitalized personally to be able to um play the long game because revenue sometimes is a challenging item especially if you're building a tech platform something that requires you know many many man years of engineering time to develop you really have to have a personal financial situation to be able to do that so don't just quit your job because of the lure and the fun of being at a startup make sure that you have the the runway to do that because raising capital is not easy okay no i think those are both things and i agree and sometimes you can get away with bootstrapping it some businesses lend themselves to you don't have to have a lot of capital to get started but i agree that you know sometimes you're saying hey we're building a big platform or we're building a new technology or building something that's going to need a longer runway and a longer track you know track in order to make it to the end of the make it to the end of the runway then i think you need to be cognizant of that and figure out where plan for that as you're getting the startup going yeah you know think of it this way one of the most important jobs that a ceo has is actually managing the expectations of the investors so i spent a lot of time on that and if you are a startup and you go and do an angel round and you have 30 people that are part of your angel round well that's 30 relationships you now have to manage so it's not about having fun being on a stage and you know talking the product or going out and meeting with strategic partners or doing things like that which are great fun parts of the job it's managing the investors and managing the staff that will chew up your time um you're the one who has to write that email when it's both good business or good news or bad news and and writing those emails when it's bad news is is hard um so i that's why i always go to this try and be capitalized so that you can minimize at the early stages how much you have to rely on outside capital and bringing in that that uh management uh task of uh working with your investors and and helping guide their expectations no i think that's great lessons to learn so so as we wrap up people want to get connected with you people want to get engaged if they're in minor league or major league or starting their own ping pong league or whatever or just want to invest whatever it is what's the best way to connect with you so it's simply john levelplaysports.com you can go to levelplaysports.com and take a look at what we're what we're building it's in uh early release we're not actually out there recruiting athletes or coaches to join the platform um we're going to be releasing our mobile apps in the next 90 days and when that happens that's when we're gonna you know take the uh take the ribbon off the uh with the baby here and and kind of let it let it run so we've got a nice go to market plan in place we've got a good staff uh to go make it happen and we're not burned out from the past four years of working on this um we're ready to go do that so that's the best way to contact us we'd love to talk to uh athletes and coaches and those who are just interested in what we're doing all right well i encourage everybody to connect up check it out and also contact them with anything that maybe of uh help or relevance or inquiry so john thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a pleasure to hear about your journey hear about everything that you have going on all the where you've been and i wish you the the best next leg of your journey as i'm sure will be a successful one for those of you that are wanting to be a guest on the inventive journey and tell your journey and your story we'd love to have you on and you can go to apply to be a guest on just go to inventivejourney.com and apply to be a guest for those of you that are listeners make sure to subscribe on the so that you can hear all of the new episodes including john's and uh for uh those of you that need any help with any patents or trademarks feel free to reach out to us we're always here to help thank you again for coming on john it's been a pleasure and wish you the best of luck on the next leg of your journey thanks devin really appreciate your time [Music] thanks English (auto-generated)